The History Channel has assembled a truly excellent “History Specials” episode regarding the World Trade Center portion of the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks. What’s remarkable about this documentary is that it’s the stringing together of raw footage from a variety of sources — mostly amateur, some professional — with no narration added, save for the backdrop offered by audio clips of emergency calls, NYFD radio communications, and the like. The sequence of events as seen and experienced by observers in various parts of New York City are left to speak for themselves.
“102 Minutes that Changed America” is available on iTunes here. It’s well worth watching if you can possibly stomach it. As I’ve said before, I think it’s vital that we remember and understand what happened on that day.
The episode description:
A new historical record is emerging of the sights and sounds of the attack on the World Trade Center. This two-hour special will distinguish itself from other 9/11 documentaries by using only unique and rarely seen and heard archive to document the 102 minutes between the first attack on the World Trade Center and the collapse of the second tower. This will be a lasting document whose unique material comes from a range of non-traditional sources, including amateur photography, video, and film; FDNY, NYPD, Port Authority and emergency dispatch radio recordings, photography and video; recorded voicemails; audio/video diaries; footage and stills broadcast or published outside the United States; electronic messages; surveillance camera footage; and “outtakes” culled from raw network footage.
I’m going to hold off a bit longer on posting my own 9/11 recollections, as otherwise promised yesterday. I’m not quite satisfied with what I’ve got yet, and it’s important to me to get this right.
Meanwhile, some highlights of the best stuff I encountered during this year’s trip through the news sites and blogosphere:
Via PowerLine, Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot of American Flight 77 that was crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, warns us not to “misremember”
There is a disturbing phenomenon creeping into the public debate about all things 9/11. Increasingly, Sept. 11 is compared to hurricanes, bridge collapses and other mechanical disasters or criminal acts that result in loss of life, with “body count” being the primary factor that keeps it in the top spot of “worst in the nation’s history.”
Misremembering is as dangerous as forgetting. If we must know one thing, it is that the Sept. 11 attacks were neither a natural disaster, nor the unfortunate result of human error. 9/11 wasn’t the catastrophic equivalent of a 3,000-car pileup.
The attacks were not a random act of violence or insanity. They were a deliberate and brutal act of war committed by religious fanatics engaged in Islamic jihad against the United States, all non-Muslim people and any Muslim who wishes to live in a secular society. Worse, the people who perpetrated the attacks have explicitly told us that they are not done.
Read the whole thing.
Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch:
[T]here has still never been a full and comprehensive discussion of the jihad threat in the American public square.
So seven years after the Towers went down and the Pentagon was wounded, the jihadists have every reason to smell victory — not in Iraq, where they are indeed on the run, but in their efforts to cow and intimidate the West into giving up all resistance to Islamization. It’s happening, but no one notices or cares, because it is happening in small steps.
More here: “Islamic terrorism is a myth”
Gateway Pundit asks: Why the relative silence from al-Qaeda on this seventh anniversary of 9/11?
New York-based Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs has pictures of this year’s 9/11 observances (and no small amount of accompanying lunacy) at Ground Zero.
(Update 9/14: Pam has video from her Ground Zero visit too: 911 “Truthers”, Bagpipes, and Great Americans)
Lahawk has a roundup of Ground Zero rebuilding news.
Neo-neocon re-posted an apropos piece from 2006, that touches, among other matters, on the foresight we wish we’d had in anticipating and guarding against the attacks:
But the clearest foreshadowing of the event that would henceforth be known only by those numbers, “9/11″—as though words were somehow inadequate to describe it—was its most direct predecessor, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. That earlier attack distinguished itself in audaciousness by being the only large-scale Islamist totalitarian terrorist attack within the boundaries of the United States prior to 9/11.
And it was every bit as serious in intent. The only reason it wasn’t taken as seriously as it should have been was the seemingly Keystone Cops-like incompetence of its perpetrators. They would learn from their errors, and quickly. It would take us longer to learn what we needed to know.
Rick Moran: 9/11 Still Affects Our Political Life:
If there is one thing we should have learned since 9/11 its that absolutism is deadly. Its stultifying effects on debate precludes any kind of rational response to the serious threat of Islamic terrorism.
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It is not the trivial things that separate us. It is nothing less than losing trust in the intentions and motivations of the other side. And 9/11 took a nation already split along cultural and ideological lines and added fear to the mix. Now each side sees the other not just as wrongheaded but truly evil, and opposing them becomes a matter of saving the country.
Michele Catalano:
In that small space between three hijacked planes and color-coded terror alerts, between a small field in Pennsylvania and conspiracy theories, there was a brief, lit-up moment when we felt like one. I remember thinking that this tragedy would fix us instead of break us. I want so much to feel again that hope and unity that existed in the days after the attack. There was proof, ever so briefly, that we could come together as a nation to help and comfort each other, when we were all just human beings on common ground instead of left or right, Democrat or Republican.
Never forget, indeed. Never forget that out of the rubble of tragedy arose a moment when we put everything aside to be one whole nation. It is so easy at a time like now to forget that, to draw lines in the sand and become us and them. In so many ways, 9/11 ended up furthering any divisions we had instead of closing them. We chose up sides and backed away from each other as if we were our own enemies — as if the enemies we had, those who steered planes into buildings, weren’t enough.
Flowers at Ground Zero
November 23, 2007
I had hoped to take the day off work tomorrow, so as to spend it online exploring (and perhaps, through a bit of my own writing, participating in) the distributed “memorial service of sorts” that has given me both solace and food for thought in previous years. Unfortunately there is too much that needs doing this week, so I will have to catch up with my blog-reading and link- and comment-posting later.
I am right now putting what I hope will be the final finishing touches on a retelling of my own [largely peripheral, but deeply transformative] experience of September 11th, 2001 and bits of the period that immediately followed — a project that I’ve been meaning to get to for a long while. If I still like what I’ve written well enough in the morning, I’ll post it. It’s far from the entire story I want to tell, but it’s a start.
My posts from previous years are still pretty reflective of my current thinking:
This 9/11 memorial video (backup site here) still puts a lump in my throat and moves me to tears. Never forget that day.
Remember the Falling Man, and the many others like him who were forced to make the same terrible choice.
UPDATE 9/12: I’ve posted more here.
At the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, a very illuminating, must-read piece by Bruce Bawer regarding the West’s crippling reluctance to name and confront its Jihadist enemy. Others have written on this topic, but I don’t think I’ve yet seen a more comprehensive view of the problem and its many facets articulated so clearly, with reference to the many awful events of recent memory that underscore Bawer’s point.
Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war — holy war, jihad — to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.
What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Khomeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.
The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular — the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed — have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology — which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive — people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis — infidels living in Muslim societies.
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After each major terrorist act since 9/11, the press has dutifully published stories about Western Muslims fearing an “anti-Muslim backlash” — thus neatly shifting the focus from Islamists’ real acts of violence to non-Muslims’ imaginary ones.
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So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are “moderate” (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are “Islamophobes.”
By all means, do read the whole thing. Thanks to Instapundit for providing the link that brought Bawer’s article to my attention.
At Instapundit:
“A PROVOCATIVE MASKED BALL SET IN THE RUINS OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER:” They do this because they know we won’t behead them. Such is the bravery of artists.
I declare the Marshall Plan a failure. Bring our troops home from Europe now!
I’ve found myself reading and bookmarking a number of noteworthy articles this past week. Lots of interesting stuff to comment on here, but for fear I might not find the time to do so at any length very soon, I’m going to catch up by posting some quick quotes and links…
First up: Writer/director/producer David Mamet wrote an exceptional article in the Village Voice, in which he explains his shift away from the left. Interestingly, he attributes his own change in thinking to an inability to reconcile long-held beliefs with the more favorable evidence offered by his everyday experiences.
I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances — that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired — in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
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And I began to question my hatred for “the Corporations” — the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.
And I began to question my distrust of the “Bad, Bad Military” of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations — they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not “Is everything perfect?” but “How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?” Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.
It sounds to me like he’s simply become more pragmatic. Brings to mind neo-neocon’s excellent and insighful “A Mind is a Difficult Thing to Change” series.
Elsewhere in the article, Mamet included a mention of NPR that I found amusing and relevant, as my own wife is an NPR fan of many years but I’ve come to find the station’s reporting biases frustrating. Mamet begins:
We were riding along and listening to NPR.
(Typical scene for me and my wife too, during our morning commute.)
I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been — rather charmingly, I thought — referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.”
Funny, I’ve come to refer to it in my own mind with a chuckle as “Nationalized People’s Radio” … Mamet and I must be thinking on similar wavelengths…
(Update 3/19: “National Progressive Radio” is another variant I’ve since caught myself using)
In other news: George McGovern seems to get it more than either of our current Democratic presidential candidates when it comes to economic freedom, as Glenn Reynolds noted at Instapundit. Why, as Glenn rightly asked, isn’t he running for president?
The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.
The last remaining staircase at the World Trade Center site was moved on Monday. Fittingly, it sounds like it’s going to be preserved as part of the World Trade Center 9/11 memorial.
Charlie Martin puts his finger on something that’s been troubling me about the healthcare debate for a long while: What many people think of as health “insurance” isn’t actually insurance.
IraqPundit genuinely wonders what Obama thinks about U.S. involvement in Iraq, and provides an instructive recap of Obama’s position statements over time. Therein lay some interesting surprises for me, including this quote from a Boston Globe report:
In July of 2004, the day after his speech at the Democratic convention catapulted him into the national spotlight, Barack Obama told a group of reporters in Boston that the United States had an ‘absolute obligation’ to remain in Iraq long enough to make it a success.
‘The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster,’ he said at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, according to an audiotape of the session. ‘It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died… . It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective.’
He might actually have had a chance at my vote, had he continued with this kind of talk. But lately he seems disinterested in talking about anything but his 2002 advocacy against the Iraq invasion, and in discussing any Iraq policy or strategy short of an immediate withdrawal — an act of retreat and defeat that our enemies would not soon forget, and that would surely come back to haunt us in future conflicts.
Also, at Hot Air: Does the media’s anti-war rhetoric embolden Iraqi insurgents? (Thanks again Instapundit.)
At the Wall Street Journal: What is it about Democrats and Chávez?
And at phi beta cons: Is “postmodern belief in the futility of life” helping drive some to become campus killers? (Hat tip: Instapundit)
