September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time | Hacker News Reader

September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

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788 pointssmohnot445 comments

9/11 was my birthday, and I was just outside of NYC in school that day.

I was in math class. The phone in the classroom rang and my teacher turned on the radio (1010 WINS) immediately. After hearing what had happened she broke down in tears because her husband worked in WTC. My parents worked in NYC (as did most of my classmates' parents) and was very concerned.

The school district evacuated the elementary schools to the gym at the middle school because our town had a major dam and there were concerns that could be attacked too, which would've flooded the low-lying areas where the elementary schools are. Eventually, school was dismissed and I ended up at my neighbor's house. Her husband was a FDNY Captain.

So many people I know died or were permanently harmed (physically or mentally) that day.

While nearly every second of that day is permanently etched into my brain, there's one day that's even more vivid. My FDNY Captain neighbor took me to ground zero in early November 2001. I'll never, ever forget the smell of burning flesh and the hundreds of firefighters using rakes looking for human remains. He told me to never forget, and I never will.

Oh yeah I forgot about all the confusion on what else would be attacked!

People should talk about that more. Every single piece of infrastructure in the whole country was on people’s minds and locked down!

Is there a documentary about that? There is so much possibility for an “isolation thriller” where people’s concerns in their small towns are more the focus than the outcome of what happened by the time the dust settled.

You get a sense of that feeling, from watching the various tv stations on this thread. I had the radio on too, and you get a real sense of the total confusion of that day.

I recall a big anthrax scare in the weeks following. Lots of people were sending white powder to official addresses.

> Lots of people were sending white powder to official addresses.

It turned out that anthrax came from a government lab, and was supposedly sent by a single rogue employee... though doubts linger.

There were some hoaxes and bogus scares too though of course. One of my classmates almost got suspended for having foot powder in his gym bag.. thankfully cooler heads prevailed when school officials realized the kid had athletes foot and thought to doubt how a teenage boy could have plausibly procured weaponized anthrax spores in the first place. But yes, the hysteria was palpable.

and the DC Sniper! if you were in that area

Man that time period must have been so much harder for adults than the teenagers at the time

Even outside the US - there was some of this.

I was in Brighton Conference Centre (Uk) where Tony Blair was due to give a very heavily trailed speech.

After Tower one got hit we all went out of the main auditorium - I then realized I had stupidly left my bag unattended and had to go back and retrieve it.

After tower two got hit a lot of us started to think what if they have a plane targeting Tony and this building - though its a grim thing to say the RAF QRA where armed

Thanks for writing this. It is good to hear the experience of someone that was close by. I live clear on the other side of the country (and did on 9/11 too). I didn’t know anyone that died that day, and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never met anyone who lost someone that day either. So it is good for those of you who did experience it to write about it since it is so easy for people like me to be no more affected by it than any other historic event that is far removed.

It's weird. I lived in LA at the time and I was in my early 20s. I remember my gf waking me up at 6:30am to go look at the TV. It doesn't feel like an historical or far-away event to me. It seems like the most pivotal moment of my life, when this country changed and everything changed. We were worried about LA being attacked, worried about bio/chem attacks. Suddenly there were no-fly lists, and things called TSA and Homeland Security. Domestic mass surveillance really started then ... it's when all the methods from the drug wars were brought onto American soil. Suddenly there were truther conspiracy theories on a fairly new site called YouTube. Suddenly psychopaths on local Texas radio made their way into the national conversation. And a year or so later I found myself kettled by cops at a protest against our invasion of Iraq. I posted a novel on my website that got a lot of hits from military IP addresses in Virginia and Iraq. A neighbor told me the police were going through my trash while I was at work. My apartment got broken into and only a laptop and my papers stolen. I left the US and lived abroad for 10 years.

When I think of Americans who were alive then and younger, or who weren't born, looking at it as a historical event, it boggles my mind. Everything about this country has been deformed and twisted, every aspect of the society you live in from security theater at the airport to the militarization of local police, all that hardware, to the way the giant internet sites function now (or don't), to all the conspiracy-fueled madness that led to 1/6/21, which is the only other day that began to feel like 9/11. All of it started that day, it's the moment when we entered the wrong alternate universe.

> to all the conspiracy-fueled madness that led to 1/6/21, which is the only other day that began to feel like 9/11.

THAT is an interesting, and wildly speculative, take.

I don't know what the other trajectory would have been, i.e. had 9/11 been foiled. But I do think it served as the ultimate excuse to curtail rights and freedoms. The long wars it led to both warped our society at home and led to two generations of militarization of kids. For instance, I remember how disgusted and shocked I was at the explosion of military displays at baseball and football games. This was all basically fascism using the attack on our free society to embed xenophobic militarism into every aspect of daily life.

It's speculative, yea. But without 9/11 I don't think we'd have a culture of giant military style pickup trucks rolling coal and waving flags (American or Confederate). I think the militia movement of the 90s would have stayed much more contained and minor without something to justify their claims of conspiracy and NWO takeover. And I think we wouldn't have developed the sense that we were all living in a disaster movie, and become so callous and inured to what we see on the news. I don't think I can or should summarize all this in a post, but maybe the best way to put it would be that it ended the American Century, and bent the arc of our civilization towards decay and self destruction. It exposed a crack in the foundation of the country that has grown, and keeps growing. I suppose that could have happened any number of ways.

The Daily from the NYT had an episode a few days ago precisely on this idea. Very interesting.

So not totally far fetched I'd say.

[1] https://pca.st/episode/6deccd04-ca45-404b-8537-c4bbe73fedb9

Interesting. I have to check this out. The description clocks to me as making perfect sense. I usually find that podcast insultingly reductive, hypersensitive and whiny, but put me in a room with anyone who remembers the Bush administration and I guess I'm still a liberal yet. The premise at least is solidly grounded in the effect I've witnessed. Thanks.

PBS Frontline had documentary outlining this exact path. Would recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5iBxva_pm8

>He told me to never forget, and I never will.

Genuinely curious: How do you think these experiences have influenced you and your outlook on world?

When reviewing 9/11 attacks (likely the biggest and most disastrous intelligence failure in U.S. history, give or take Pearl Harbor), it's worth remembering that it could have been much worse. If the first plane had hit Indian Point nuclear reactor what, 30 miles from NYC and upwind? It's likely a Chernobyl/Fukushima disaster would have resulted with an exclusion zone well into NYC. That was reportedly part of the plan but as I recall they wanted a more media-friendly target.

Additionally, the fact that members of the Saudi government aided and assisted the hijackers, and that they were tracked and monitored by both the FBI and the CIA, yet no action was taken to stop them, not even a simple warning to airlines to increase security after that Aug 6th Presidential Daily Briefing? What a debacle.

We should have left Iraq and Afghanistan alone and done the regime change op in Saudi Arabia, except that Wall Street likes its petrodollars so Washington props up the House of Saud and its theocratic dictatorship. And that's still going on.

Too many coincidences. Also we couldn't mobilize any fighter jets at all when a plane goes off course?

Not quite an answer to your question, but in the 60s and 70s hijackings were quite common (86 hijackings in 1969) and weren’t seen in the way they are now. The common understanding was that the hijackers wanted to re-route the plane somewhere else, and that everyone would end up alive but inconvenienced.

It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t widely understood or considered until the planes hit the twin towers. Fighter jets were not even under consideration to be mobilized until United 93.

I thought I remembered the plot to the 1996 film “executive decision” as being a debate whether to shoot the passenger jet out of the sky because the plane was going to be used as a missile, but i just read the plot again and they were going to detonate a nerve agent bomb on board the plane while over a us city, so, similar but not quite a prediction of the predicament.

(Spoilers)

The end of Tom Clancy's 1994 book "Debt of Honor" featured a 747 being crashed into the Capital, which is about as close as fiction gets.

A bit closer is the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen, where a March 2001 episode featured a plot to crash an airliner into the world trade center and blame it on terrorists to justify a new war.

Obviously 9/11 wasn't some government conspiracy to purposely spark new wars, but the other details are eerily similar.

A plot one of the stages of which included potentially crashing an airplane into WTC[0], among other targets, was uncovered (mostly, it appears, by accident) and thwarted in the mid-nineties. The Lone Gunmen plot coincidence is less curious considering that plot could have served as an inspiration, although the means of hijacking were very different in the series.

The sad thing is that uncovering that plot didn’t help prevent the actual attack based on it a few years later…

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot#Phase_III:_CIA_pl...

I just started watching the historical footage from CNN; it's interesting to hear the commentary in between when the first and second planes hit the tower.

"Was the plane having any difficulty flying?" "Yes, it seemed to be rocking back and forth" "Was this a navigational error?"

An announcement in the South Tower immediately after the crash instructed people to stay in their offices.

Even after the second tower was hit, the immediate reaction was that it was a second explosion in the North Tower caused by the fuselage of the plane.

4 minutes after the second plane hit, when it was clear that two planes were involved: "was it possible a navigational error directed two planes into the World Trade Center?"

It's incredible to think just how much our attitude and perspectives changed after realizing what exactly had happened.

That depends on the channel though. On one labeled "NEWSW" they said "I think we have a terrorist act of proportions that we cannot begin to imagine at this juncture. " immediately after second hit.

It must be so difficult to do command and control in a situation like that. So many different agencies with diffetent expertise and patchy data.

Maybe large buildings should have cameras pointed at them with IR modes. Feed it to a national control centre that has experts on staff and links to other agencies. And make those kind of judgements thats will seem obvious in hindsight.

> It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t widely understood or considered until the planes hit the twin towers. Fighter jets were not even under consideration to be mobilized until United 93.

Sadly this is mostly a myth. It is a little known fact that there were five separate U.S. military war games being run simultaneously with 9/11 and three of them involved airliner hijacking scenarios, including flying airplanes into buildings. Worse, these war games involved simulated inputs into NORAD and FAA radar systems, resulting in mass confusion. There is an excellent documentary that covers these war games, including actual NORAD, FAA and EADS audio [0].

[0]: https://www.corbettreport.com/911wargames/

Wow 86 hijackings and nobody in intelligence could ever conceive of how that could go horribly wrong

Most people survived them though so there wasn't a huge reason to do anything particularly drastic, using planes as a suicide missile was basically entirely new. Even on the day of there was speculation about why the planes 'messed up' and flew into the WTC buildings which shows just how unusual it was. Most hijackings were essentially mass kidnappings for ransom to get money, release prisoners or get promises of policy changes and ended with a negotiation or storming the plane.

You can listen to real-time audio of FAA and NORAD track planes and scramble fighters [0]. This is not an easy task considering nobody knows what is happening and literally every plane in the country is being redirected and landed simultaneously.

[0] skip to about 20min https://youtu.be/DYBhgEm3j7A

This is covered in the 9/11 commission report. Quoted below:

The protocols did not contemplate an intercept. They assumed the fighter escort would be discreet, “vectored to a position five miles directly behind the hijacked aircraft,” where it could perform its mission to monitor the flight path of the aircraft.

In sum, the protocols in place on 9/11 for the FAA and NORAD to respond to a hijacking presumed that:

(1) the hijacked aircraft would be readily identifiable and would not attempt to disappear;

(2) there would be time to address the problem through the appropriate FAA and NORAD chains of command; and

(3) the hijacking would take the traditional form, not a suicide hijacking designed to convert the aircraft into a guided missile.

On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen. What ensued was the hurried attempt to create an improvised defense by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced.

Yeah, I don’t think 3 can be overstated.

Prior to 911, hijacked planes were not an unknown thing. I don’t know numbers, but remember periodic events in the news of x plane that was hijacked landing at y airport with local officials needing to meet hijacker demands for it to return to its flight.

Was weird when it happened, but we also didn’t have the hour of processing through security we do now.

In 1999 there was a professional golfer named Payne Stewart who died on a Learjet flight along with five others after it depressurized mid-flight. The plane continued flying on auto pilot and the FAA scrambled three separate fighter jet interceptions, involving five F-16s, the first one making visual contact with the Learjet approximately 20-30 minutes after the Learjet pilots became unresponsive. There was speculation at the time that the FAA was prepared to shoot the flight down if it was at risk of crashing in a populated area. The Pentagon later denied this, however, the Canadian government said this was their policy should the flight enter their airspace. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_cras...

We did mobilize fighter jets (albeit without missiles, so essentially if the pilots intercepted it’d likely be a suicide mission). Also after 9/11 people straying in to no fly zones over DC would be escorted out by fighters.

IIRC the fighters that were mobilized planned to ram since they took off without time to load missiles onboard, but all of our fighter keys have ejection seats. I assume the plan was to eject.

To ensure the fighters crippled the passenger plane, at least one of the scrambled National Guard pilots ruled out ejecting.

The other hoped to eject before impact.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44459345

Few people would want to make a call to shoot down two full passenger jets over a city. With hindsight it would have been the right option, but at the time it's unlikely it would have happened even if there had been fighters with missiles available.

Hijackings also weren't usually suicide missions before then either so it would have been a big leap to decide to shoot them down when you'd normally expect demands and a chance to take it out on the ground rather than just killing everyone on board.

Al-Qaeda actually gamed out this aspect of the American response and concluded (apparently correctly) that the US was ill-prepared for a multi-hijacking scenario. This wasn't rocket science... They basically looked at all available information on threat modeling the US had done, and noticed that we had constrained ourselves to a single hijacking event. They correctly surmised that intelligence infrastructure (including NORAD) would be off of their playbook if they hijacked multiple planes at once.

This led to disruption of the response. When flight 77 (Pentagon plane) was reported as having dropped off of the transponder radios, by the time NORAD was notified the information had become garbled in a game of telephone and they thought they were receiving reports on flight 11, which is one of the two that struck the Trade Center towers. They scrambled jets to New Jersey instead of onto any predicted flight path for flight 77.

We could have done regime change in Saudi Arabia and still had petrodollars

Sometimes its useful to think inside the box

But yeah current Saudi Arabia is a good deal for the US, hard to get others so heavily intertwined financially. Might as well not touch it.

I don’t really understand what US/allies get from maintaining a theocracy in SA, chevron and british petroleum predate the modern kingdom, right? why is it good business sense to let the royal family siphon cash like there’s no tomorrow?

seems to me a political explanation is more likely, probably related to the holy war with Iran. In that case I never really understood why we took an anti-theocratic stance there.

taking over places is more expensive than letting people have their own self determination. distributes the load, still gets the resources and influence. greater levels of animosity avoided, sometimes completely.

Saudi Arabia broadly respects western wishes, they let the western companies make billions of dollars off their oil while the monarchy also makes billions of dollars. The West worries that if they rock the boat, a situation like Venezuela or Iran will happen, where the state tries to cut out the western companies from getting a cut.

Iran provides the perfect example of why we tolerate Saudi Arabia. From 1901 to 1951, Iran's oil was controlled primarily by the British. In 1951, a democratic movement lead to the nationalization of the oil industry, which quickly led to a CIA backed coup. For the next ~30 years, a Western backed dictatorship ruled and their violent rule lead to the 1979 revolution being overtly hostile to the West.

The West fears any other Saudi government would end up hostile to the West, given their decades of support for the monarchy.

The devil you know...

If you hold an election after toppling a non-democratic government, you never know if that's going to be the last election or not. Also, you just can't trust that the people will elect your "guy". If you're already "controlling" the current leadership, no need to turn over the apple cart.

My relatively uneducated impression: it seems like the current leaders of Saudi Arabia are the most liberal (in the classical sense) option. Other candidates for leadership are even more hardline religious conservatives (and when people think of the 9/11 hijackers coming from SA, it's from these groups). Pushing against the current leadership is unlikely to result in an overall improvement in the situation.

>We could have done regime change in Saudi Arabia and still had petrodollars

Very unlikely. Any military involvement anywhere near Mecca and Medina is off the table barring being invited or some utterly insane scenario.

"...barring being invited or some utterly insane scenario."

I think you're being redundant there. US troops anywhere in Saudi Arabia is kind of a big deal.

Re: Indian Point - containment buildings are pretty armoured by design. The Indian point containment vessel walls are several feet of high-grade steel reinforced concrete. You might be thinking of the skinny, low quality rebar used in common construction at this point - this isn’t that, the rebar here is 2.25 inches thick, made of good-quality steel, and spaced every fifteen inches or so. The containment building is also smaller than a 747, so you can’t transfer the entire plane’s energy to it like you could with a larger target like the towers.

The Indian Point engineers assert that theirs reactors and all other structures contains radioactive material could survive a 9/11 style impact.

http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20130108221220/http://www.nei....

> The containment building is also smaller than a 747, so you can’t transfer the entire plane’s energy to it like you could with a larger target like the towers.

I know very little about physics and found this to be an unexpected point I’d like to understand more. Could you explain?

The plane isn’t perfectly rigid, so it would only be able to impart as much energy to the structure as contained in the part of the plane that gets sheared off while colliding with the containment building.

As a layman there are probably few theories behind this statement: 1. The plane is not an energy monolith, any part of the plane larger than the building (eg wings) would have its own inertia which continues to rip off and around the building rather than drive all energy/mass attached to plane to the point of impact. 2. A smaller building may act like a plow if circular or hit on a corner, diverting energy as in 1. 3. If you simplify the side of a building to a supported plane, a larger plane may deform to failure more than a small plane due to the distance between supports ( other walls of building)

I’m no expert at physics but the towers were more “collapsible” so they would absorb more of the momentum from the planes.

My read is that the sensitive area of the reactor is a lot smaller than the plane, so only part of the energy of the plane would hit it, the rest would go into the ground around it or whatever else the plane hits.

You'd be more likely to damage enough of the cooling and control systems to cause an issue but it most likely wouldn't lead to a meltdown since Indian Point was a PWR reactor and those use the liquid water as a moderator so if it starts to overheat it naturally lowers it's own reactivity.

Of course it's a little more complicated than that, because decay heat is the concern in a loss of cooling scenario. Having said that, I can't speak to the Indian Point design at all.

Yeah it will but at least that's also a negative feedback too as the fuel heats up the neutrons appear to be moving faster on the average.

When the towers were first built, one of the design questions was whether or not they could survive being hit by a 747 — on accident, presumably. So, that issue was taken into consideration.

At the time of the attack, more modern aircraft were used, which had much thinner skins and were much more lightly constructed. Which means that they got much more shredded by the building construction as they passed through, and which also helped take off a lot more of the fire insulation from the trusses in the building.

The 747s simulated were also near-empty and flying slow, as the assumption was an accidental collision from an airplane lost in fog trying to land. They never simulated one nearly full of fuel running full-tilt.

And they sere simulations.

Reality bites

Interesting. Do you have a reference by chance? I had no idea such simulations were run but in curious to learn more about it.

https://youtu.be/4eE8d94qGPo?t=222

The two towers were designed to sustain an accidental hit by a 707 on a descent trajectory.

They were instead purposely hit by much larger 747s and at a much higher cruising speed. This meant that the kinetic energy transfer was approximately 8x larger than expected. The 747s at the time of impact also held significantly more fuel (at least 100% more) than those utilised in the 707 attack model.

they were not hit by 747s

The twin tower planes were: 767-200 767-223ER

Correct. Sorry, I had originally typed 767 and then in an edit swapped as everyone else said 747 and I thought perhaps I was having some sort of Mandela Effect going on. The size and speed differential holds true - a cruising speed extended-range 767 is much faster and larger than the equivalent, landing-approach 707 the building was “rated” for.

>When the towers were first built, one of the design questions was whether or not they could survive being hit by a 747

no, it was a 707 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eE8d94qGPo&t=232s

My dad told me that when he studied construction engineering in the late 70s at TU Munich one of their assignments was to calculate if the Isar nuclear reactors are built strong enough to hold off a Mach 2.2 impact of a Phantom II. If I recall correctly the correct answer was that they were quite a bit stronger than necessary for that.

However, I always wondered if a large civilian plane like a 747 with a speed close to Mach 1 creates more or less impact. The 747 is ~12 times heavier, but it's also less than half the speed and spreads the impact across a much larger area.

This video shows an F-4 Phantom being slammed into a concrete wall using a rocket sled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4wDqSnBJ-k

At about 2 minutes in they show the aftermath. The plane is just gone, while the wall is a bit discolored...

Unconvinced.

That concrete block was not ridged. It moved when the plane hit it.

So the strongest aspect of concrete, compression, was tested. But the weakest, flexion, was untested.

What fun though.

To test it as you suggest, you'd have to build the full containment building, which are built as domes. That dome structure should lend itself to exploiting concrete's compressive strength and minimize tensile forces. They are also specifically reinforced to increase their tensile strength, since they are primarily designed to contain explosions from within. I have little doubt that one of those domes could shrug off a Phantom crashing into them.

More generally, in order to be successful a traditional armor piercing projectile needs two traits in particular: it needs to be harder than the target, and the projectile needs to be robust enough to not disintegrate on impact. Airplanes are neither of these; they're built out of soft aluminum and are built light to maximize payload, not to be robust. Consequently I would not expect an airplane striking a reinforced concrete building to ever behave as an armor penetrating projectile would.

The part that I'm a bit skeptical of is the suggestion that shrugging off a Phantom is equivalent to shrugging off a 747, which is more than an order of magnitude heavier. Throwing an airplane at a concrete building is like throwing a wet ball of modeling clay at a glass window. Likely to splat, like that phantom did, but if your ball of clay is big enough it might go through. A large enough plane might even knock the building off its foundation, rather than penetrate the concrete.

I can imagine the reactor shell itself surviving intact, but as with Fukushima, loss of the secondary cooling system (and its power supply) could well have resulted in a runaway reactor situation followed by a hydrogen explosion blowing the cap off, again as with Fukushima.

It might not have impacted NYC though, I just checked and the exclusion zones would likely have been well outside NYC city limits, but still, an epic disaster would have been the likely outcome.

Nuclear reactor security has been increased since then, but they're a major target today.

> Additionally, the fact that members of the Saudi government aided and assisted the hijackers...

Details? My understanding is a huge fraction of the Saudi population have jobs that amount to government sinecures (while immigrants do most of the real work). Are we talking about high-level members with real leadership positions, or some minor member of the royal family working in some ministry doing nothing and going off on his own?

A court affidavit filed on 3 February 2015 claims that Zacarias Moussaoui was a courier between Osama bin Laden and Turki bin Faisal Al Saud in the late 1990s, and that Turki introduced Moussaoui to Bandar.[76] Zacarias Moussaoui stated on oath and wrote to Judge George B. Daniels that Saudi royal family members, including Prince Bandar, donated to Al-Qaeda and helped finance the 11 September attacks.[77] The Saudi government continues to deny any involvement in the 9/11 plot, and claims there is no evidence to support Moussaoui's allegations in spite of numerous previous intense investigations, noting that Moussaoui's own lawyers presented evidence of his mental incompetence during his trial.[76] Leaked information from the redacted portion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that two of the 9/11 hijackers received $US130,000 in payment from Bandar's bank account.[78]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud

Bush's close friend, known arms dealer... you guys still haven't figured this one out yet? HN is always the last to know.

Saudi politics and personal relationships are a mess. It is true that Bin Laden is a member of a very powerful family in Saudi and so obviously has a lot of personal connections there as do his close associates. He is however estranged from that family and has been for a very long time, but may have some in Saudi who have grievances against the house of Saud and are sympathetic to the jihadis.

Al Qaeda and many other jihadi outfits procure a lot of their funding from Islamic charities and schools (Madrassas) with complex and very opaque financial dealings. Also the Saudi government and individual Saudis donate to many Islamic charities, so its highly likely some of that money ends up with the jihadi's including Al Qaeda.

So yes there's almost certainly some truth to the allegations. Some powerful Saudis may secretly support them, some donate to charities and the money ends up with them, but no this is not official Saudi state sponsorship of Al Qaeda. In fact Al Qaeda consider the Saudi royal family and all of their associates to be apostates (essentially heretics) who can be killed summarily and they advocate for regime change and the establishment of a Caliphate.

Like I said, it's a real mess of family loyalties, rivalries, swinging political fortunes and opaque dealings. Game of Thrones has nothing on these people. Just look at what happened to Jamal Khashoggi.

> Bin Laden is a member ... He is however estranged

That's a curious way to phrase it, given that he died in 2011.

Saying "he died" is kind of a curious way to frame things, too. "Died" offers a completely different connotation than "killed."

One might frame it that he "died of a lead injection". Semantics.

Being killed is a type of dying, it's not different to dying.

> sinecure

Wow this is a great word. Hadn't heard it before. Thanks for sharing.

Details are on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud):

Are these in dispute?

Never forget: the CIA, at the highest levels, knew that two of the 9/11 hijackers had multiple-entry visas to the US and were living in the country in the year before the attacks. They knew they were al-Qaeda, and they knew they were important enough to have been at a big AQ powwow in Kuala Lumpur in 2000.

CIA management prevented this information from being disseminated by FBI agents posted inside "Alec Station", the CIA's Bin Laden group, several times, and they later lied about doing so. All this according to, among other extremely mainstream sources (in addition to the documentary record), Richard Clarke, who would know -- he was the Federal "Terrorism Czar" on 9/11 and has been fuming pissed about this since he found [1][2]. You don't need to be a whack job, a conspiracist, to be angry and mystified by this.

In many instances like this one, cursory investigation into claims of intelligence community "mistakes" or "incompetence" in these matters gives the lie to claims that these institutions somehow "dropped the ball" or "got it wrong" on 9/11, and are thus not to blame (either partly or fully) for the attacks. It's impossible to square such claims with a lot of the official paper trail. One can reasonably conclude that some of this stuff was not accidental. We hire these people to lie - why should we ever assume they're not?

(The best part? Many of the people involved in the events I describe were promoted in the years post-9/11!)

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/International/28-pages-questions-alle...

[2] https://www.doubleasteriskmedia.com/rich-blee-podcast

Bill Binney (Tech Director/NSA) wasn't promoted. He quit just after 9/11 after He leaked that we had all of the intel to discover and piece together 9/11 in our systems, but the administration was prioritizing bulk collecting data over actually analyzing it.

> In September 2002, he, along with J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, asked the U.S. Defense Department Inspector General (DoD IG) to investigate the NSA for allegedly wasting "millions and millions of dollars" on Trailblazer, a system intended to analyze mass collection of data carried on communications networks such as the Internet. Binney had been one of the inventors of an alternative system, ThinThread, which was shelved when Trailblazer was chosen instead. Binney has also been publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, saying of its expanded surveillance after the September 11, 2001 attacks that "it's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had"[11] as well as noting Trailblazer's ineffectiveness and unjustified high cost compared to the far less intrusive ThinThread.[12] He was furious that the NSA hadn't uncovered the 9/11 plot and stated that intercepts it had collected but not analyzed likely would have garnered timely attention with his leaner more focused system.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...

Here's a really good interview with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs

Thanks for posting this. Binney is really an unknown who deserves more recognition than we could probably give him -- at least as much as Snowden, if not more.

I'm slightly more inclined to believe that the NSA's pre-9/11 behavior was actually "negligence" (as opposed to something else) than the CIA's, but it's still terrifying that these people missed what they missed. I've been pulled over by the cops on less than the hijackers had during their many, many months in the US.

You're welcome. I'd highly recommend watching the interview I posted, as well as any interview you can find with him or Thomas Drake, who Binney mentions. Both of their handlings have been cited by Snowden as one of the main reasons why he leaked his info to the press vs "officially" going up the chain of command. I wouldn't want to be taking a shower in my house and have them pull the curtain open with a gun pointed to my head, either.

> CIA management prevented this information from being disseminated by FBI agents

This was at least partly due to the Freeh / Reno policy of limiting info sharing between the agencies.

I mean, yes and no.

In the article I linked to, Clarke cites that information sharing in the IC was widespread, and you see in other sources that the idea of warring bureaucratic fiefdoms was in some cases very true (Freeh / Reno being great examples, as you say) and in other cases not true whatsoever. To me this means that it's tougher to generalize from a trend to any one case.

The Midhar and Hamzi visa and known entry into the US stuff doesn't look at all like simple tit-for-tat or institutional possessiveness, mainly because the FBI agents posted to the CIA precisely to "phone home" about AQ and Bin Laden had been doing so regularly for 18 months and had yet to be overruled on something they were going to share with the FBI. So why was that specific piece of info ordered not shared and then lied about?

There were numerous grounds for investigation beforehand. Example, had we not been so careful not to offend, Atta's attempt to get a $650k loan to make a crop duster might have aroused wider suspiction. When denied the loan ..

>He asked me what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat, and making off with the millions of dollars of cash in that safe. And, I told him that, well I kind of laughed. I mean I didn't laugh at him. But I chuckled a little bit about it.

https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130304&page=1

Also good read: https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/i-team-investi...

Atta rapping about being an assassin.

I'm with you on being outraged, but organizational dysfunction is the norm and not reigning it in is one way of "dropping the ball".

There wasn't, like, one single person who had all this information and he was personally stopped by the head of the CIA from telling the executive branch. It was a SNAFU of competing interests and stupid bureaucracy.

The fact that these people were promoted afterwards, however.. yeah, my blood boils.

> It was a SNAFU of competing interests and stupid bureaucracy.

I hear where you're coming from, but after 20 years, there are several parts of the story for which I can no longer believe this was the case, or use this explanation to give the benefit of the doubt. (There are many other parts for which it does make sense.) I'll save myself looking like an internet crank and just suggest you give the podcast I linked to in [2] above an earnest listen. If you do, you may, like me, wonder from how high up the order came to personally stop the FBI man in question, Mark Rossini, from telling his superiors at the Bureau. It's at least George Tenet's former assistant, sent down to run Alec in '99.

I'm not sure what "all this information" refers to - no one knows exactly how much the institutions in question knew beforehand - but it's there in Chapter 6 of the 9/11 Commission Report (albeit buried in a footnote) that 40-50 people at Langley knew enough to stop the resulting plot had they wanted to, that senior CIA employees prevented the FBI from knowing about 2 Al Qaeda terrorists coming to and living in the US, and that specific upper management (whose names are now publicly known) told lower-level personnel that the FBI had been told when it's known that they hadn't. This is corroborated by serious, non-crank public servants who were there in the room when this stuff went down.

The result, for me, is that my default position on issues of war, terror, and other bloodshed has moved from "organizational dysfunction is the norm" to "I may never truly know, but these people are likely acting maliciously (to some degree) and/or lying about it (to some degree)". It's like, these people have jobs, and they do stuff. They're serious people, like many of us on HN, and they're competent a lot of the time. To the extent that we even know their track record, they have a track record: Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Congo, Iran again (Stuxnet), etc., etc.

So it's reversed the Sagan standard for me, in other words: if "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", the idea that the professionals to whom we give vast sums to be excellent at lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and betrayal - spies, in other words - should be given a sort of "Mister Magoo" benefit of the doubt when lots of people die -- that's, for me these days, the more extraordinary claim.

> the idea that the professionals to whom we give vast sums to be excellent at lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and betrayal - spies, in other words - should be given a sort of "Mister Magoo" benefit of the doubt when lots of people die -- that's, for me these days, the more extraordinary claim.

That's where we differ. They're Mr. Magoo with money in my opinion. How many brilliant exploits have they ever had? Even their wins are, like, "we sponsored some death squads who killed the opposition and eventually the anti-communist guy won due to having overwhelming resources".

The CIA is called 'the company' in DC and it's apparently a super-corporate environment. I've worked in corporate. It's stupid. A big part of the stupid is the local ideology, which is a multiplier effect on the general 'none of us is as dumb as all of us' effect, and I could probably go a long ways with you critiquing the CIA's default and unspoken ideology. But I still think 'organizational stupid' is such an absolute..

Yeah, a lot of this comes down to your epistemic position. Agree to disagree then. Thanks for sharing your perspective!

Cheers!

I guess most people think that they are doing the right thing. But organisational politics and human weakness can just mangle that into something that is actively counte productive. Do you think that is the case here? Or is there a deeper psychological force at work in people that pushed them towards this? Given the craziness of some of the neocon foreign policy types this certainly seems possible.

And perhaps most disquieting, the rectification for the SNAFUs was to consolidate these organizations, breaking down the walls that traditionally separated domestic policing from international espionage.

And I can't even say they were wrong. I don't have better answers. The threat model is a porous-border threat.

> done the regime change op in Saudi Arabia,

how about "stop fucking with other countries", instead?

maybe bring Kissinger to the international court?

From a naive bystander view it looks like a majority of war's and suffering in the world in my lifetime is just there because the US does not stop to enforce their crippled idea of democracy on other countries (and US oil interests).

Could be biased, could be propaganda, but I am for sure not alone thinking this.

Then how Israel will stand when Muslims get their shit together?

> Iraq

Regarding WMDs, intelligence couldn't be released because it was supposedly sensitive.

What if they were required to release an md5sum of a tarball of the intelligence, perhaps with associated metadata to make it infeasible to fabricate/game. This process is overseen by a judge or independent body. Then 5-15 years later they release it in full when that intelligence is no longer sensitive?

This is a way to get around the excuse of sensitivity. Sort of like a time-shifted FOIA request. It'd be a great way to strengthen our democratic institutions, deter lying and corruption and manufactured consent, neuter conspiracy theories of a deep state, improve everyone's confidence in institutions, and for accountability and transparency.

Perhaps this isn't feasibile in practice, though, if the intelligence involves spies/assets that are still operational, or if it would involve revealing secrets around capabilities and methods. However, if that's the case, then they could release say 100 md5sums corresponding to the 100 documents, and only release the subset of which is no longer sensitive, with a judge appointed to determine the legitimacy of the claim of sensitivity, and forcing the release of the subset of documents not deemed to be sufficiently sensitive.

Interesting idea!

> We should have left Iraq and Afghanistan alone and done the regime change op in Saudi Arabia

I'm reminded of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOdULpV810

TL;DW It had nothing to do with the regime in Saudi Arabia. Bin laden and supporters were a fringe group.

Pearl Harbor was unforeseeable. We knew the range of their planes and did not remotely expect that they would come anyways, when a return trip would be impossible. 9/11 on the other hand, was deemed a real threat during Clinton's administration.

This sounds like old information. Things have been declassified since then.

Don't tease information and then not provide a source or explanation

(See sibling reply)

Actually Pearl Harbour WAS forseeable; it was attacked/chosen because the Japanese saw the US dismiss the results of two war game tests on the exact site. The Japanese also waited for similar conditions to those used in the war games tests for maximum effectiveness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075

> *It's likely a Chernobyl/Fukushima disaster would have resulted with an exclusion zone well into NYC*

I'm quite sure I saw an interview with Osama Bin Laden where he talked about that idea. They did consider it, but he said they didn't want to go for a nuclear reactor because they didn't want "things to get out of hand".

I don't remember if it was confirmed by the hosts/interviewer, or if it was my interpretation, but I took that to mean he didn't want the US to use nuclear weapons in retaliation, which he thought they would(might?).

It was in the pdb for August.

I was in the Navy and had been at my first command at a nuke base in the PNW. I walked to the galley for breakfast and they had some TVs you could watch while eating. I watched the second plane hit. I walked to work which was a telecommunications station. We processed messages for different regional commands and would call them directly whenever they had an emergency action message (EAM). I walked in to a completely chaotic watch floor. Every message was an EAM that day. Every phone was ringing or in use, every computer that could alarm was alarming, our dial up modems were constantly busy. All my coworkers were shouting and running here and there. I had never seen it like that and as a young Sailor it was very worrying. Everyone we called to inform them of their EAMs would ask if we knew what was going on or knew if someone was mobilizing but we were just as much in the dark as everyone else.

I remember at one point our Leading Chief Petty Officer (LPCO) yelled for everyone to stop what they were doing and told us to call our parents and loved ones to let them know we were safe. That was the longest day I’d ever worked at that command and no one left that day, even those from the previous night shift. The fact that no one, even our CO, had any idea what was going on…that the military was in the dark, was such an unnerving feeling.

Your LCPO is a good person.

I was in USMC boot camp on 9/11/2001. You don't get much chance to consume media during training, and they put us on lock down and gave us only limited information. We knew kind of serious attack had happened, but not exactly what.

By the time I got out of training, the news cycle had moved on so it wasn't until the first anniversary of 9/11 that I saw the news footage of the event for the first time.

Coincidentally I ended up stationed in Washington, D.C. and from my barracks I could see the construction cranes working on the damage to the Pentagon.

So it's this weird combination of feeling connected since I was in the military when it happened and then lived near one of the sites, but I also missed a lot. This site could help me see some of the experience I missed.

> By the time I got out of training, the news cycle had moved on so it wasn't until the first anniversary of 9/11 that I saw the news footage of the event for the first time.

This might seem strange to some younger readers, but remember in 01-02 internet video (and, indeed, internet faster than dial-up) was not ubiquitous. My family has a VHS tape recording of the news that day because that was how the average person preserved TV broadcasts.

> This might seem strange to some younger readers, but remember in 01-02 internet video (and, indeed, internet faster than dial-up) was not ubiquitous.

And even if you used internet video (or, heck, even read news online), none of the sources (origins sites and Google and other portals) had the capacity to deal well with the major surge of associated with a event like 9/11. Everything online was spotty or broken under load. 9/11 broke the internet before “breaking the internet” was a thing, and more literally than almost anything since.

I don't remember which news site, but one of the major ones had to go to a basic text-only format for several hours.

It was CNN. Around 9:45 am it was slow, by 11 am it was down / text only.

i think it was CNN that did that.

i have a memory of trying to find out what was really happening sitting in one of my college's library's after an early morning class and trying to get anything to even respond, much less load. for some reason i remember 'relief' when i finally saw the CNN logo.

All of the majors stripped down to the basics, IIRC. At least the ones I visited.

Fark and Metafilter held up, but they were text to begin with.

Internet video was interesting that day. Couldn't get any from the major sites because they were hammered. But I remember links would get passed along to some Quicktime clips on personal sites. No cell phone cameras, but small camcorders + Macs with firewire were popular enough that personal footage appeared quickly.

I remember getting dismissed from school early and going to a friends house and trying to find news. The only site we could find that was actually responding was Slashdot, which went to text-only for the day and a few days following.

Edit: the metafilter thread gives a horrific moment-by-moment update stream if that's something you want to read: https://www.metafilter.com/10034/Plane-crashes-in-to-the-wor...

All news sites were down, I remember thinking it was before dawn for Australians, so I tried one of their news sites, and it worked...

Wow. thanks for sharing.

"This is going to be a big turning point in the history and character of this country, I think." posted by Doug at 6:51 AM on September 11, 2001

Doug was more right than he could have known.

Sarah Kendzior (and most likely other journalists from that time) mentions this in her book Hiding in Plain Sight: 9/11 changed the news, it shifted from print to the web because the web could update faster. Newspapers websites were no longer outdated copies of the print.

Of course that brought about a whole lot of other consequences.

I recall that even slashdot got slashdotted, which was itself incredible. The admins there at least had the sense to put up a static page with info about the attacks, which is where I first got some details about it after a fellow student in my theory of computation class first notified me (I think he had a pocket radio he was listening to in class).

For those too young to know, being slashdotted was a term for your website going offline due to too much traffic, named for (and primarily used on) the site slashdot.com. Slashdot was the preeminent popular tech/nerd discussion forum of the time, and being linked from a story on slashdot would often direct more attention to your server than it could handle.

> For those too young to know, being slashdotted was a term for your website going offline due to too much traffic, named for (and primarily used on) the site slashdot.com

A current term for the same thing is the “HN hug of death”, as HN can drive the kind of effect slashdot used to (in part because it has become the new center of gravity for some of the kinds of discussions that used to drive traffic from Slashdot.)

We were using robots.cnn.com to get any news. Our work didn’t think it was worth stopping to go home or grieve or anything. Tech jobs.

> This might seem strange to some younger readers, but remember in 01-02 internet video (and, indeed, internet faster than dial-up) was not ubiquitous. My family has a VHS tape recording of the news that day because that was how the average person preserved TV broadcasts.

TiVo was also pretty common, but as I recall I just watched on our TV.

Using the Internet for video in 2001 wasn't something anyone would even momentarily consider as realistic.

I've been watching some broadcasts with RealPlayer, while following the events on IRC. Our national TV did not wake up to the events until maybe 5 hours later.

Heh, funny how fast things changed. In a 2001 episode of South Park, they mock Token for bringing a movie on DVD, assuming their family was rich enough to have a DVD player [1].

But I watched the episode on DVD in 2006, when everyone had one, and so it aged like milk.

[1] https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Here_Comes_the_Neighborhoo...

You may find that watching the retrospective footage will make you want to sign up for the Marines.

I had a similar experience. I was in the Army and had just completed a 24 hour duty at about the same time the first tower was hit. I was finally about to get some sleep when there was a pounding on my barracks room door. I spent the next 24 hours on guard duty. Quite a long day. Consequently I completely missed all the live coverage and have only ever seen news blips.

Prior to 9/11, one could freely drive on and off of Fort Benning. There were no security checkpoints whatsoever, which is unimaginable these days on a major military installation.

On 9/11 we first had to secure our unit's compound and then eventually fanned out to lock down the roads on and off of post. We had rotating duty manning makeshift entry control points in the weeks and months that followed until permanent ones could be built and a (civilian) force could be stood up to take over the duty. Thousands of soldiers and civilians commuted daily between work on post and local off-post residential areas. It was quite a mess with extensive traffic and delays in the early post 9/11 days.

I hitchhiked and walked to New York 20 years ago today.

I had my firefighter and medic credentials faxed to FEMA and then went into ground zero for ~24 hours to dig.

I wrote about all of this, later, in what became cDc t-file #396.[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20041208005336/http://www.cultde...

That was an incredibly powerful read. Thank you for your effort.

A wonderful read. It was interesting to hear all the ways in which you were put to work. I hadn’t expected reaching NYC to be such an adventure, but have forgotten the zeitgeist of suspicion and uncertainty immediately after the attacks.

In regards to your closing lines, tragedies are uniquely able to harness people towards joint concentrated efforts. I have only ever volunteered for hurricane relief efforts, typically weeks after impact, but the power of a large group assembled to help is intense. If the need is acute enough, we rediscover how important community is and willingly sacrifice our individual selves to its survival.

You were very courageous. I can only imagine how such experience at such young age can impact your worldview.

I sometimes forget how surreal that day was. Was in high school at the time and sort of at “that age” where the world was still pretty small and revolved around me.

Mom waking me up to say “you need to watch this,” with the TV on and both towers are on fire. The morning variety newscasters breaking their household familiarity speaking in a frightening shock that was so out of character.

Still went to school that day and there was a big assembly and then we sort of carried on as normal through motions. I remember every week on Tuesday we had to turn in an analysis of a world event for one of our classes and mine suddenly felt so insignificant compared to the attacks (kinda wish I remember what I had written).

I think the pandemic has far more historical significance but nothing for me will feel more visceral than 9/11. I appreciate this is likely a very American -centric perspective but it’s how I feel.

There are very few days in history where so much changes in a single day. There's a very clear "before and after".

In my opinion, the 1990s began on Nov 9 1989 and ended on Sep 11 2001.

Yes. I remember very well President Bush saying these attacks will not change America. I wish I could find a quote.

One of the things it changed dramatically was air travel. Remember meeting family/friends at their arrival gate as they walked off the plane? Remember getting through "security" in a few minutes because the lines moved so fast?

In the 1980s and early 1990s, my father routinely disassembled pistols and put them in his checked luggage so he could target shoot at his destinations. Imagine doing that today.

You can still check firearms for air travel. It's actually a great way to ensure your bag doesn't get lost.

You have to go to the ticket agent, and say I need to check a firearm. There's a little red ticket form you fill out and place on your bag. Then you take it to a special drop off. It has to be in a locked hard case that only you can open.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote that the 19th century didn't end until the cataclysm of 1914, and that the 20th finished early with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. I think 1990-2001 was an innocent decade and the 21st century started on 9/11.

Similarly "the long 19th century" is 1789 -- 1914 (Ilya Ehrenberg and Hobsbawm).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_nineteenth_century

> I think the pandemic has far more historical significance

I’m not sure about that. Without 9/11, there would be no wars, perhaps no Obama, etc. It altered the arc of history in a profound way.

The recent Frontline episode “America after 9/11”[0] draws a through-line from 9/11 to the events of Jan 6 at the U.S. Capitol.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/america-after-9-11/

It's a little disingenuous to use 20 years of history to say it's a more significant event and then using the follow on results. In another 18.5 years, people could be talking about how the pandemic triggered the second US Civil War, or led to a complete reimagination of US race relations, or ushered in a communist takeover or something.

How are you supposed to figure out if an event is significant or not without looking at its historical significance on the years to come?

I think this was exactly the point, you can't say one event was large due to the aftershock if the second event isn't even over (and therefore has its history yet to be written).

If you want to compare the relative historical significance of two events, you should probably limit yourself to the same timeframe. Look at how little had changed in the first 1.7 years after 9/11 and compare it to how much has changed in the pandemic.

I think it could be argued that if it wasn't for 9/11 the world would be at a very different place right now and even if the pandemic had hit just the same, the reaction of the US and its allies might have been very different.

The War on Terror took its toll on much of the world. I don't think the pandemic would have played out exactly the same way in a world without 9/11.

However I think it's worth pointing out that to much of the world "9/11" is not just about the terror attacks but also the immediate aftermath and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It's more of a period of time than a specific moment. Some of those things happened on the day itself, some in the days immediately after, some only months later.

Are you sure about that? because dick cheney has Iran and Iraq in his mind before 9/11.

I’m not sure at all the pandemic is going to be more significant historically. The 9/11 attacks did what Al-Qaeda intended them to - got the USA mired in an expensive, unwinnable war, which ultimately broke the US will to fight and seems to have resulted in a major reconfiguration of US foreign policy.

Let's wait a while. The long term effects of the pandemic are yet to set in.

There’s the joke that you can say the same thing about the French Revolution (“too early to tell”).

I see your point, but I have a hard time imagining how, 20 years down the line, we could point to the SARS-COV2 pandemic as a principal cause of historic change the way the 9/11 attacks were. Contributing factor? Sure, I'm sure it'll have all kinds of downstream effects.

Imagine masks, distancing restrictions, etc becoming the knee jerk response every year there’s a bad flu scare or something like the Ebola cases in 2014 happens. This pandemic will be remembered not for the virus but for the massive and permanent social changes it brought to the west.

Also: Home office, redistribution of wealth, climate impact and not to forget the financial impact. Plus possible long covid problems in a large share of people. There's a lot we will 'enjoy' for a long time.

If people, post-pandemic, would (voluntarily) mask up and distance when they're not feeling well, I think it would reduce flu and common-cold transmission quite a lot throughout the year. This sort of thing is already common in some places and I'd be thrilled if it became a thing in the US.

(But agree that knee-jerk mandatory restrictions would be a terrible outcome.)

But at what cost -- is the question I have, and too few are asking.

The young, healthy working aged adults are the "front line" against many dangerous viruses and bacteria. What happens when you remove the natural herd immunity? (Wasn't it something like 40-45% of the US was already naturally immune against COVID when the lockdowns first started happening?)

My guess is if we switch to pure defense, when the next big novel virus comes along, it will wipe out a whole lot more of us.

Look at east and southeast Asia. They mask up all the time when they're not feeling well. Are common colds and other things much worse there? I don't think so.

Your worry here seems to be hypothetical and not based on any reasonable epidemiological theory.

My worry is based on the concerns of the top professors of epidemiology at Oxford, and Stanford School of medicine.

> Are common colds and other things much worse there? I don't think so.

I would love to investigate this further, considering the latest 3 deadly strains of H1N1, and SARS have come from here. But given that we don't have any reliable data (data we can trust), it's hard to tell what actually is going on there. We are only told what we want to be told by an authoritarian regime.

Just imagine what a whole generation of kids will grow up to be like as a result of the social changes that have played out directly due to the pandemic. Definitely a large inflection point. Maybe the changes will be subtler but I would be shocked if we didn’t have noticeable, analyzable changes to the course of history based off that alone.

This.

Al qaeda won. They destroyed the way of American life before 9-11. We are a different country now. So much government control over the last 20 years because of the 9-11 like TSA, Patriot act, massive government surveillance all in the name of “Homeland Security”.

Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers exist precisely because of 9-11. The distrust from all of the secret government acts is only part of the equation.

The trillions funneled into the military complex has starved the education system. We have literally produced idiots across the US because of a horrible educational system. They can’t think critically because they don’t have to. So 20 years of this, and you have a large percentage of the population that are literally stupid and can’t think critically. They would rather die than take a vaccine or wear a mask. This is what happens when you spend money on the military and illegal wars than the education of your population.

The pandemic is terrible. But 9-11 destroyed the US and put us on a horrible path that we may never recover from.

I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. What you’re saying is accurate. I don’t think the terrorists had the foresight to predict this kind of fallout from 9/11, but it has certainly happened none the less.

Bin-laden directly stated Al-Qaeda's goal was to bankrupt the USA. [1] Now that's not what literally happened obviously, but adjusting for propaganda hyperbole and considering he went on to elaborate that they intend to do to the USA what they did to the Soviets - make the war too costly to be worth fighting - it seems their strategy panned out pretty well.

Of course, I don't know that they could have predicted the US invasion of Iraq, for example. On the one hand, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but OTOH Al-Qaeda might have foreseen that the US leadership would not let a good crisis go to waste.

Maybe the main plan was just to fight in Afghanistan, where they know they can carry out guerilla warfare indefinitely, and whatever else shakes out is probably going to play into Al-Qaeda's pocket anyway.

Really the main victory Al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups have won is being able to frame the discourse around their atrocities as Islamic terror. It creates tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims, which leads to oppression of Muslims, which increases recruitment. In this dynamic, the worse the terror groups are, the more adherents they gain.

1: https://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/11/01/binladen.tape...

Your first paragraph laments the expansion of government control and surveillance triggered by 9/11 (which I agree with), but in your next, you use pejoratives to identify people who choose not to get a vaccine or engage in hygiene theater. How would you classify the bully tactics being used by the current administration to coerce citizens into getting a vaccine? This is yet another example of government control and overreach. In this case, gov't is violating personal health (rather than privacy), and the justification is "public health" instead of "homeland security".

> Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers exist precisely because of 9-11.

This statement is non-sense. I'm old enough to remember 9/11. I lived closed enough to watch the smoke rising from the towers. I assure you, my choice to not get the C19 vaccine (and refusal to wear a mask) have nothing to do with the events of 9/11.

The term "anti-vaxxer" is derogatory, and is being used as a demeaning caricature. I don't fit your stereotype. I am not getting the C19 vaccine. That does not mean I am against all vaccinations. A person can believe in the effectiveness of vaccines, and decide against getting THIS vaccine (imagine that). Terms like "anti-vaxxer" are used to demonize those (such as myself) who have decided not to get the C19 vaccine. I guess classifying people as "anti-vaxxer" helps people like you justify calling them "literally stupid."

> We have literally produced idiots across the US because of a horrible educational system. They can’t think critically because they don’t have to. So 20 years of this, and you have a large percentage of the population that are literally stupid and can’t think critically.

I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. The irony is that, based on your comments, you'd consider me "literally stupid", and I would say your critical thinking are severely lacking.

> They would rather die than take a vaccine or wear a mask.

I can assure you that if contracting COVID-19 meant certain death, the government would not have to spend millions on propaganda to convince people to get the C19 vaccine. Contracting C19 does not imply certain death: I know this first-hand, anecdotally, and it is backed by statistics published by the CDC (for whatever those are worth these days). In other words, for the overwhelming majority of the population C19 is no worse than the flu. For those with pre-existing health conditions, the risks are greater and the vaccine is a godsend. I won't address the mask fallacy. If you want to wear a mask, by all means. I am not one to pull a binky out of a child's mouth -- whatever it takes to get people to get out and live their lives.

The fact that you jump to the conclusion that "everyone who does not get vaccinated or wear a mask is stupid" does not reflect well on your critical thinking skills. As I've explained above, there are legitimate reasons for not getting the vaccine. Maybe a better approach is to give others the benefit of the doubt, and attempt to engage in meaningful conversation? We likely won't agree on everything, but maybe I'd convince you that people who decide against the C19 are not all "literally stupid".

Anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, government mistrust are hardly unique to the last 20 years.

What destroyed American life were Americans, being scared, thoughtless and not talking to each other, in the name of money, absolute security, patriotism and tribalism.

A lot of these 'idiots' that you're talking about were educated prior to 9-11, so it's not obvious to me that 9-11 had the particular causal relevance that you're suggesting (at least insofar as educational quality).

Al Qaeda won the first time they made me take my shoes off at the airport.

We were told the vaccine was the end all be all solution that stopped the virus. Many have opted to forego it and accept the risk. What’s so wrong with that? Now it turns out the vaccine isn’t as effective as originally thought, and the folks who decided to not get the jab are now somehow devoid of critical thinking skills? Explain what I’m missing. Or is it really not about death, but the bottom line?

Given that the vast majority of COVID hospitalizations and deaths are among the unvaccinated, yes, I would say that people who refuse the vaccine are devoid of critical thinking skills.

Given that they have chosen that destiny willingly for themselves, what's wrong with that? I personally feel it's a bit more nuanced of a decision then you're allowing. What do the vaccinated care? Why does this unvaxxed life matter to them all of a sudden when they've had plenty of opportunities to care about life before but haven't?

And no, I'm not talking about abortion, but everything else on Earth that is considered a preventable death; like car accidents (Ban cars!) and wars that we conveniently forget when about the pendulum swings to our favored political party so we can safely and costlessly say that we've learned and grown and now we're better despite the hundreds of thousands of lives we've cost over the years because we just trusted the "thinking heads" and academics and the corporate elite and government officials in bed with them.

I don't particularly care about the health of the people who refuse to take common-sense actions to protect themselves. But their decision isn't made in isolation.

The more the virus bounces around in people, and for longer, the higher the chance it is that it mutates into something the vaccines won't be effective against.

There are people who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. They should not be put at higher risk of having the virus transmitted to them by an unvaccinated person.

There are still enough unvaccinated people floating around to necessitate mask and distancing mandates and other restrictions. Getting everyone vaccinated will likely allow us to return to some semblance of normal sooner.

And finally we have a world full of overworked, exhausted health care workers who still have to admit these foolish unvaccinated people into their hospitals when they get sick. They have to watch some of them die, begging for the vaccine even though it's too late. Why are unvaccinated people inflicting this harm on our doctors and nurses?

The thing that gets me about all this is the whole "they've chosen this destiny for themselves" bit, as if their decisions don't impact anyone else. They do. And it's selfish to ignore that.

I personally don’t care. In fact I think we should pay people who don’t want to get the vaccine to engage in monitoring so that we can understand the disease better. I also believe we should pay covid-hoaxers 100k so that we can infect them and then study why the virus is so dangerous for some people and benign for others. I think it’s a win-win for both.

I believe a lot of the phenomena we see today, rampant conspiracies, misinformation, distrust in govt, political divisiveness, willingness to support a demagogue, rise in nationalism and domestic terrorism, can all be linked back to 9/11.

The goal of the attack was to strike fear into the hearts of Americans on a level that we simply couldn't comprehend, a lasting fear that fundamentally changes our society, a fear that individuals in the war-torn middle east had already lived with for decades up to that point. And I think it's clear that they accomplished their goal. Unfortunately, I also think it's clear we haven't seen the end of it.

All those things you write in the 1st paragraph, I wonder if it's 9/11 or the continued spread of Internet access. Previously if you thought the earth was flat, your friends in school or work would laugh at you. Nowadays you can google anything and find a community totally into that idea, and they are indeed communities because they'll quickly indoctrinate that the rest of society/big government/the secret elite cabal are prosecuting them for their beliefs, so they'd have to support each other..

Oh yes, definitely the internet plays a huge roll in the world we have today, probably a bigger roll than 9/11. Humanity has seen and adapted to large scale tragedies before, but this is the first time we've had the internet. But of all the variables, 9/11 is a big one in the US. It also showed the media and advertisers how much more money there was to be made from these events. Ever since 9/11 the news media has been hard at work developing new ways to milk sensationalism junkies the same way that mobile companies milk gaming addiction whales.

Worth noting: most of us belong to several such communities, but we tend not to realize or consider it, as flat earthers do not realize what they do.

> The 9/11 attacks did what Al-Qaeda intended them to - got the USA mired in an expensive, unwinnable war, which ultimately broke the US will to fight

Citation very much needed.

Al Qaeda is a religious fundamentalist group that wants to bring about the Islamic caliphate under theocratic rule. As I understand it, their plans with the US were primarily to get rid of the US and US influences. Destroying the US was more of an indirect long-term goal as a consequences of establishing a global Islamic hegemony.

I also don't think you can talk about "breaking the US will to fight". Post-9/11 saw the transition from US soldiers to military contractors and drone strikes but also no reduction in US military bases. The influence of the US is led by its economy but reinforced by its military. If anything, the wars increased the US population's aversion to "boots on the ground" but arguably that was already on the way out ever since the traumatizing defeat in Vietnam.

The US continues to be interventionalist and it continues to engage in military operations outside formal declarations of war. It also continues to maintain a massive global network of military bases and an oversized arsenal of nuclear weapons. None of that has changed.

I think there's an observation to be made how the short-lived grief on 9/11 rapidly developed into a thirst for revenge and retaliation, and how computer games influenced the initial coverage of the wars (I distinctly remember the spinning 3D renderings of the missiles used in the initial attacks on Iraq) or how the US military at first embraced embedded reporting and then reporting became increasingly abstract as the wars dragged on and journalists were prohibited from showing the coffins of fallen soldiers.

Twenty years later it now seems that what remained is mostly the dehumanization. I distinctly recall US politicians demanding the assassination of "traitors" like Snowden or Assange during the Obama years but even today the illegal act of war of assassinating an Iranian military official in Iraq hardly raised any eyebrows (except for people worrying about whether this would be followed up by an invasion of Iran or Iran retaliating by attacking someone else like Skinner's pigeon impotently hacking at its cell mate after an electric shock).

The US hasn't lost its will to fight, but it has lost all pretense of its moral high ground. The US government being the hero in Hollywood movies was a bit quaint in the 90s but after 9/11 it's become increasingly uncomfortable to watch for non-Americans.

Yeah, either your world view is pretty closed or you’re trolling. I hope it’s the latter.

The world trade centre attacks caused about 3000 deaths, and ongoing military action impacting a few countries around the world. The US makes up roughly 5% of the worlds population.

The pandemic has so far killed over 4 million people. It has created lockdowns in thousands of cities you’ve never heard of and forced the scientific community of the world to work together on common problems. It has affected every government and billions of people around the world, rather than the few hundred million in the US.

The pandemic is orders of magnitude more significant than the singular terrorist attack the US experienced 20 years ago.

For billions of people in the world, the US and it’s foreign policies have little to no significance.

> I think the pandemic has far more historical significance but nothing for me will feel more visceral than 9/11

It’s an interesting comparison, and one I make a lot. 9/11 was in your face, and a bunch of pre planned events were canceled. But that lasted about a week or a month (depending on the kind of event), and people could still gather in public and support each other.

The pandemic was a much slower burn, but also denied us even the ability to gather and required much bigger changes to daily life.

The pandemic hasn't denied "us" anything... governments have mandated it, in many cases without scientific evidence, or in many others, in direct contradiction to it. Things cancelled in the wake of 9/11 were done organically, by the organizers, mostly out of respect, not because the government twisted their arm.

A great deal of events have also been canceled voluntarily by organizers in this pandemic. Plenty of event organizers believe they have a responsibility to their attendees and the surrounding community and have not planned events even when local governments would have allowed them. Others knew they wouldn’t sell enough tickets without large changes to the events and canceled them due to their understanding of their customers.

I also imagine that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 large events would have had a hard time getting necessary approvals if they had decided to go forward.

The commercial reality was that people didn’t have a desire to attend large celebratory events immediately after 9/11. Disrespectful organizers did not have much of a choice if they lacked respect for the loss of life - their customers had already decided.

> I think the pandemic has far more historical significance but nothing for me will feel more visceral than 9/11. I appreciate this is likely a very American -centric perspective but it’s how I feel.

It's not as American-centric as you might think; I'm not from the US but after 9/11 and for several years, I had recurring nightmares about trying to escape from a building that got hit by a plane.

I can't imagine what it was like for people closer to it.

I remember I was a freshman in high school at a new school having just moved from Texas to Montana and was shocked at the cavalier comments regarding it all from my classmates. Very oddly in the afternoon we heard an extremely loud/large airplane flying extremely low over our school which really freaked a lot of us out.

I had to stop watching this when it caught up to the part I saw live. I live on the west coast, so I was sleeping when the first plane hit. My mom for some reason was still up from the night before and saw it on the news, so she called me and told me to turn on the TV.

I watched the second plane hit live on CNN. I then spent the rest of the day on my couch watching CNN. My girlfriend was sent home from work around noon and came to join me.

I remember the confusion as to what happened and no one knew if anything else would blow up.

But the other day I remember just as clearly was September 14th, 2001, because I flew on an airplane that day.

The Jewish Holidays were starting on Monday, and my dad and I were flying home together from the Bay Area to LA, and had a flight from Oakland to Burbank. We were told to get there four hours before our flight due to enhanced security, so we did.

The airport was empty. Every airline was offering full refunds to anyone who was scared to fly, and most people took them up on it. My dad and I figured a one hour flight within California probably wasn't going to be a target and decided to risk it.

There were national guardsmen all over the airport open-carrying rifles and handguns. After the metal detectors we had to do a full pat-down and have all of our carry on luggage fully inspected. But since the airport was nearly empty, we were through all of the security in about 10 minutes.

So we walked up to the airline counter to check in for our flight (back when you still had to check in in-person at the counter) and asked them if we could take an earlier flight. There happen to be one leaving in 15 minutes, and the lady thanked us for flying that day and put us on the flight. It was so empty we each had a row to ourselves.

Sept 14th, 2001. The best airport/flying experience I've ever had in my life.

I'm old enough to have pretty vivid memories of watching a lot of this live. I don't really want to relive it. Keep the memories alive? Certainly. But rewatching? Too much.

Also, while we can't change the past, we're facing a massive challenge that is devouring thousands of people on a daily basis; let's commit to doing everything we can to defeat that particular monster. That is something we can all help with, in our own way.

somehow this makes me feel old...

Heck yeah! What are you doing to help? I'm pretty exhausted at this point, hard to focus.

Nothing exciting or noteworthy: staying home, avoiding crowds, wearing a mask, have my shots. Trying to be extra kind and friendly with people in places like supermarkets, or teachers. Supporting our school board that takes it seriously and is implementing science-based precautions.

  > But rewatching? Too much.

I remember seeing the SRB trails of OV-099 in the sky. Twenty years later it was possible to rewatch that on Youtube, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

But by now, I've watch that video and a few documentaries. I had no personal loss on January 26 1986, but it still took some time for me to be able to digest it. And I'm glad that I did.

Came in to my 5th grade elementary school class and found my teacher crying. She'd made it through several rounds of the selection process to be on board the Challenger.

I don't like to watch that either, but... at least it was far fewer people, who had also signed up to take a risk, and it was a case of negligence rather than malice.

  > at least it was far fewer people

The human loss was never the issue. The issue is the symbolism. The loss of a spacecraft that was designed - or at least promoted - as our pickup truck to space took away the notion that we could conquer the heavens. We went from sending up tin cans to sending up pickup trucks, but if those pickup trucks were going to lose cargo and crew then maybe we as a species are not ready to leave those tin cans or even Earth.

Likewise, the destruction of the Twin Towers and a large portion of the Pentagon was a huge symbolic loss for the west in general and the US in particular. That's why the terms 9/11 and "Twin Towers" are almost synonymous yet the crash at the DoD is hardly ever mentioned. The US can suffer the loss of its symbol of the capitalistic market, the Twin Towers. But the bruise to the ego of the DoD is much more sensitive. Today there are full articles that purport to report on the events of 9/11, which do not even mention the Pentagon.

Just ask the guy sitting next to you what happened on 9/11. Any mention of the Pentagon?

Well, some of us never saw it in the first place.

I'm with you, I remember watching these when I left my very first physics lecture as a freshman. I have no trouble remembering it, so I assume this is mostly for people who have never seen it.

It doesn't have to be too old actually. I was just 13 when everything happened. And I do remember that day very clear. Somehow a lot of small details are still in my head. Like the couch I was sitting on or how I was just watching live news all day long or the buildings pictures on TV.

I was based in Moscow, Russia. And I was politically brainwashed fairly good (thx, Dad). Means USA was some kind of world villain center for the small me. Even though it was crystal clear for me, that 9/11 is something which should never happen to anyone. Moreover recent terrorist attacks [0] in Russia were still very fresh in my memory. Well, it was just a couple of months after I finally stopped thinking in before-sleep time whether I will survive the night or not. 9/11 helped to revive that fear.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings

I saw it live on TV when I was 17, in the southern US. I'd never been to NYC before or anywhere near it. The way events were unfolding, and then the cut to the Pentagon on fire, I genuinely thought the entire country might be under attack, maybe even my own city eventually.

I was excited to watch this again, mostly because I had zero understandng of the world at that time. It was interesting to see the reactions of the anchors with my older eyes, seeing them display genuine empathy and shock at what they were seeing.

I remember whichever channel I was watching at the time, the anchor continued to question exactly what was going on, but with this site I was able to see other anchors! After the second plane hit, the one I wasn't watching live said it was an obvious terrorist attack, which is a shock to me. I kinda assumed everyone was as confused as I was.

Another shock: I got to feel again the genuine fear I felt then. In all the years that have passed and my anger at all the adults in my life for becoming bloodthirsty and cheering on Bush and the Iraq war, 9/11 had morphed into a vague meme. A symbol of so many of the terrible things I'd eventually learn about the US government.

I'd forgotten just how scary everything was on that particular day.

I was 9 and angry that they interupted my tv show to show news (adult stuff) from the other side of the world. 20 years later and I have a better understanding of the situation but in a lot of ways I think everyone reacted and keeps reacting just how the terrorists wanted.

It's tragic but if this wasn't in America I likely wouldnt have even heard about the event nor would it be influencing my life this much later due to the ways others have reacted to it. I hope this doesn't read as disrespectful.

> It's tragic but if this wasn't in America I likely wouldnt have even heard about the event nor would it be influencing my life this much later due to the ways others have reacted to it. I hope this doesn't read as disrespectful.

I definitely agree to an extent with the sentiment of this - there are numerous attacks in recent times across the world that have killed hundreds of people each and they generally receive very little coverage. However, I also think it perhaps downplays the significance of the WTC attack. 9/11 is still the deadliest terrorist attack in history by quite a significant margin according to [0]. I'd be surprised if a similar event in another country was not covered by world news outlets.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_and_other_viol...

>I'd be surprised if a similar event in another country was not covered by world news outlets.

Well, I haven't really heard of the 2nd and 3rd one (though hard to compare) on the list and I doubt they've gotten even 1% of the coverage.

Especially considering that the 3rd one happened in November 2020. It's not like this was years ago and might be forgotten; we all were around then.

This is not unlike comparisons of 9/11 to the pandemic. The buildings (and NYC skyline) aren't as important as the lives that were lost, but it causes a different and more prolonged response. And it isn't just "look what those terrorists did", it's "I can't believe those buildings are gone".

Saying they're gone reminds me of Mark Pilgrim's 410 Gone incident. It's analogous to me.

I was 10. My classroom “job” was to take the attendance to the office. No one was in the main office, I could hear them in the back room so I wandered back. I got there right as the first tower came down. The way all the adults were screaming, was clear it wasn’t a movie. I stayed for a few minutes listening to the news anchor going over the events of the day before being sent back to class and told not to tell anyone.

My fifth grade teacher, who I’m still friends with today, said she’d never seen a kid with that look. She eventually got me to tell her what happened. I guess I said something like “Americas being bombed. The big building in New York is on fire and the other one fell over and the pentagon blew up.”

I don’t remember saying that, but I do remember how furious she was at me saying that was a horrible story to make up. We had TV’s in each class, she was going to turn on the news to show me it wasn’t true, begged her not to. She called the front office, couldn’t get through (assuming they were still watching TV).

She went on her computer, started crying. Composed herself, dropped whatever we were learning that day and she put on The Princess Bride - still can’t enjoy that movie.

She let me sit behind her desk and we’d attempt to refresh websites to get updates on what was happening, both of us occasionally crying.

They didn’t send us home for a few hours, but it’s always been a weird feeling knowing that of all the 600+ kids in that school, I was the only one that knew what was happening, and only a handful of adults did, the rest going about their day without just sitting there knowing what was happening.

Her and I are still friends to this day, that experience really bonded us. She’d suspected I was on the autism spectrum, my parents wouldn’t get me evaluated, and school was pretty rough for me. I’d have been held back in multiple grades, possibly not even graduate if she hadn’t gone to bat for me with every “problem” teacher I had at various schools in my district year after year, getting me put in “good” teachers for various subjects, getting me into advance classes even though my grades hadn’t previously warranted it, etc.

No idea where I’d be in life had I not wandered into the back office, and her and I had that experience.

I don’t think it’s disrespectful to say that, but the reason America is important is because the US, uniquely, has the ability to unilaterally retaliate, and drive the world into 20 years of continuous war. Which is what happened.

The many people killed in the WTC was surely a tragedy, but the number of people subsequently killed as a consequence of this day was far higher, and this is no less a tragedy.

I think this is why it made headlines around the world. The bear had been kicked and we were all afraid of what it might do.

This site is interesting, but I was surprised to see some 9/11 conspiracy theory elements in the News Ticker.

Specifically, the "Janitor Hears Explosion from WTC Basement" in the news ticker includes claims that an explosion occurred in the basement 40 seconds before the first plane impact. Some quick Googling shows that this janitor and another associate went on to try to build a careers on top of these conspiracy theories. One of them even tried to sue President Bush and 155 others over 9/11 with a rambling lawsuit that alleges everything from controlled demolition of the towers to sex trafficking by the defendents.

Not a credible source, to say the least. I have no idea why this site thought to include his claims, but I suspect they're trying to seed doubt about the official timelines.

Cool site, but take some of the editorialized content with a huge grain of salt.

Other conspiracy theory stuff in the ticker: thermite conspiracy & something about ELTs going off before explosions. Surprised the creator didn't cram a remote control box mention in the ticker.

I hadn't seen the ELT stuff before, and a quick and lazy google didn't turn up a good debunking. Anyone have anything about ELTs being picked up @ 8:44 AM and ~8:59 AM?

I don't buy any of the conspiracies, just curious. The site is really awesome, regardless.

> I hadn't seen the ELT stuff before, and a quick and lazy google didn't turn up a good debunking. Anyone have anything about ELTs being picked up @ 8:44 AM and ~8:59 AM?

I only did a quick search. Found this transcript where someone mentions they saw a brief ELT blip on 121.5MHz: http://web.archive.org/web/20210718083443/https://www.nytime...

A quick read of the ELT description ( https://www.aopa.org/advocacy/aircraft/aircraft-operations/e... ) shows that the 121.5MHz ELTs are associated with a high number of false triggers:

> In 2009, the international COSPAS-SARSAT satellite system discontinued satellite-based monitoring of the 121.5/243 MHz frequencies, in part because of a high number of false signals attributed with these frequencies.

Apparently the earliest 121.5MHz ELTs had a ridiculously high false trigger rate of 97 percent, which explains why they were deprecated:

> Historically, these ELT’s have experienced an activation rate of less than 25 percent in actual crashes and a 97 percent false-alarm rate.

So if false triggers were a known issue and the ELT signal was only seen extremely briefly, it's more likely someone taking a common occurrence out of context.

An ELT signal was detected a couple of minutes before the first impact and another was detected a couple of minutes before the second impact. Both were detected from Lower Manhattan. Furthermore, nothing was detected from either plane at the moment of impact. This is a bit too much coincidence for me. I have no idea what could have caused this, but you have to blatantly ignore a number of red flags to swallow the official explanation.

Acoustics are weird. Memory is weird. It's possible he heard something of the explosion up top, mistook a reflected sound for something closer, then had it change on him as he retold it to himself and others until it was 40 seconds before and obviously close to the basement.

There were definitely a few curious anomolies that day. I wouldn't say it's a conspiracy, because I'm not sure I undertand the motive.

But certainly the Israeli nationals that were caught celebrating as the first planes hit [1] is very, very strange. Especially considering that at least two of them had ties back to Israeli intelligence [2].

I try to be charitable, but the logic is all screwy.

• So there's a Mossad operation, as Israel claimed when sprung by NYPD/FBI, looking for terror cells in greater NYC at the time? Fine.

• This Mossad operation took the form of setting up removalist companies that were a front? Okay, weird, but sure.

• On the morning of the attacks, these removalists/agents are positioned on top of a building in Jersey to see the first plane hit and are witnessed celebrating, taking footage of it. Right.

• The agents are busted with passports and plane tickets leaving the country that day. The guy running the company 'Urban Moving Systems', ditches flees the country back to Israel [3].

Draw your own conclusions. This is the aspect of this tragedy that always seemed under-reported and also hints that there was likely a far larger narrative at play.

[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/409691150/FOIA-Release-of-9-...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20030413184526/http://www.forwar...

[3] https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/08/321316.html

If anyone is confused about the BBC not syncing up with the other news coverage, it seems like the creators did not take the time difference into account. You will need to get to 13:59 GMT.

On a personal note, that's the channel I was watching on that day 20 years ago. Watching the exact same coverage again is just ... unsettling.

Thanks. Yes, as European this was my source as well. I believe I witnessed at least the collapse of the first tower live on BBC World.

I was confused for a second. BBC was talking about the "migrant crisis" when the second plane hit.

Really fascinating project. It sent a chill down my spine as I suddenly recalled being in school, both because of the videos as well as the OS (we used Macs in art/design class). This was before streaming and smartphones were around so the only way we could see what was happening was by going into classrooms with TV's hooked up. I don't think we had access to CNN but we probably watched some American channel. I felt like the world was going to enter a third World War, what with the immediate connection to Pearl Harbor. It was impossible to continue doing school work that day.

Watching the footage on this site reminds me of how I watched the events unfold on 9/11. I was at work at Apple in IL2 (Building 2 of the Infinite Loop campus.) People started getting calls on their desk phones and co-workers coming in started to share the news. An email came from Steve Jobs which I can't remember the exact contents of. One thing the email did have, was a link that was a live video news stream of the events unfolding.

The campus entered a type of lock-down. The gates to the parking garages were closed, the front-doors to the building were locked and security blocked the entrances to the campus with their vehicles. At the time, work was sort of my family so I didn't consider that some people probably wanted to leave right away to be with their loved ones. I assume they were able to do so with some effort.

Things obviously changed in the world that day. At Apple, the underground gates to the garages were always closed and you had to badge in. Security personnel were posted in the lobbies and badging in and "tailgating" were taken very seriously. The doors to the inner campus were now locked and you had to badge in and out. These were all really minor things, but it made you realize that things were no longer going to be the same as before.

How much of Apple’s current security measures were a result of 9/11? The parking garage, tailgating, and badging everywhere i always thought were due to Apple’s culture of secrecy.

Apple's culture of secrecy used to be to just not talk about what you were working on and don't talk about vapor projects. There was a big thrill to keep things secret for MacWorld, WWDC, whatever. Things changed, social media and various websites created motivation for people to get whatever small satisfaction you get when you leak.

There was a big change after 9/11 of the overall security posture. Internal security measures kept ramping up year after year as people started leaking. You used to be able to walk pretty much unhindered through all the buildings. Some lab areas would be locked, but things were open in general.

I never understood the leakers. They were usually caught and fired.

> I was at work at Apple in IL2 (Building 2 of the Infinite Loop campus.)

You were at work at 6-7AM?

Yes, I was that day. And I had probably been there since 6:00 am the previous day. Pulling multiple all-nighters on various "super important" projects was typical for me and others. In retrospect, my advice is not to do such things, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The email and all the security events happened right after the second plane hit, which seemed like it was closer to normal start of day hours.

Fair, 2001 was a pivot point for Apple's history too.

Cool site, but the News Ticker is absolutely infested with debunked 9/11 truther "evidence". (Go to the point where the first plane hits and the point where each tower collapses, and you'll see what I mean.)

The whole thing kinda seems like a sly attempt by a truther to indoctrinate schoolkids. A little distasteful.

A lot of the "truther" nonsense came from the day of the attack when nobody really had any idea what the hell was happening. It wasn't immediately clear that a plane hit the first tower to cause the damage, it wasn't clear it was an attack and not an accident until the second plane hit, and it wasn't clear the planes alone caused the collapse for days at least. Hell, for like an hour the Pentagon attack was considered either a potentially unrelated fire or a missile attack.

It's unfortunate that this at the moment reporting can reinforce conspiracy theories, but maintaining the uncertainty felt during the day provides a benefit. Much of the day was filled with shock and confusion, with everybody watching the news to try and figure out what was happening.

After the Pentagon was hit, I recall looking at early images of the wall supposedly struck by a Boing 757 (Fl 77) going hundreds of miles an hour. The size of the hole didn't look jet-sized. There were no visible wing or engine marks on the nearby walls. No videos emerged to show what struck the wall or knocked down the light standards.

Physically, to this day, that whole scenario is confusing, and there's been little evidence to clarify it.

Images of the wall came hours if not days later, at first basically all the coverage had was one nearby road camera moved to show smoke.

There has been ample evidence of what happened. Though there is little video footage, only a few frames from low quality security cams, there are many pictures of the wreckage showing debris from a plane.

At 10 AM on 9/11 it was unclear what happened. Now it's very clear.

I really wish people would stop with this “no airplane parts” narrative. Do you know what happens to airplane parts when the hit a concrete wall at over 500 mph? You clearly don’t, so let me clarify: complete obliteration. They found parts of the airplane, but nothing big enough that you would recognized it as an airplane part unless you were an expert on the matter.

It's funny because when I watch that footage back now, it feels almost scripted, like the day progressed so quickly, it went from the attacks themselves, to clearly identifying the enemy and discussions about retaliatory action within hours.

I am not saying that its the truth, but I cannot help feeling like it was all a little bit scripted.

My life partner died on 9/11. Not that 9/11. Two years ago. Because of a brain tumor.

That personal 9/11 will always overshadow for me the one that this site is about. The one that from my point of view was a kind of natural disaster caused by fifth elemental force, the force of human stupidity. The one that triggered secondary wave of human stupidity that toppled any illusion that USA is a righteous and effective country that anyone could still have. Terrorists really did hurt USA on 9/11 but 99% of the ultimate damage was self inflicted.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if in the future there are entire planets where life is simulated virtually. "Live through the 90s" planet.

Would be interesting to have an entire website like this where you can tune to any day and hear the news. And eventually more than just media.

Sounds like you should read Hyperion! Such a good series...

> Would be interesting to have an entire website like this where you can tune to any day and hear the news. And eventually more than just media.

When you mix archive.org Wayback Machine and the back footage of many of the news networks have with their giant software platforms, I'm sure that most news editing rooms are already like this. Probably just a matter of time/infrastructure until we all get a chance to access such things, assuming we don't fall to entropic decay.

I think you'd have to solve the "unified theory" physics equation before you could predict where all particles were in the past, though. So like rewinding and seeing where I am right now and what is happening in my life (or yours). That one I personally am not entirely sure can be accomplished.

There is a Babylon 5 episode about this, though, in season 5. Takes place millions of years in the future.

Something really fascinating here is how each of the different news agencies handle the event.

CNN seems incredibly clinical, if a bit gore-wanting (asking about what's falling from the towers, if the plane is inside still, over and over again)

Fox News was instantly talking terrorism.

CBS was panic and raw emotion, followed by aggressive tracking of facts to try and figure out what they saw.

At least from the 9:02:57 timestamp (second plane hit), as I click through them.

BBC was listing random terrorist organisations that maybe might have been responsible - obviously before they knew anything at all. It was utterly irresponsible.

This needs to be archived but I have no interest in rewatching it. That day, I was a 14 year old kid across the ocean. I had just gotten home from school and was watching my favorite youth program when the guy said there has been a plane crash in NYC. I switched to CNN (or maybe Euronews?) and saw the first tower burning. Then, on live TV, on the other side of Atlantic, I watched as the second plane crashed into the second tower and later how the towers came down. Writing this brings tears into my eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/c/WTCFOIAVideos

^ since the commenter didn’t explain what this is:

Upscaled versions of dozens of angles of 9/11 footage that were FOIA’d out of the NIST investigation into the buildings’ collapse.

A while ago I went on a binge and watched all of them. If you’ve only seen footage from news, mainstream documentaries, even at the 9/11 museum in NYC, there’s things you haven’t seen, awful terrible things, in a level of video quality that leaves no ambiguity for what you’re seeing.

Horrifying stuff, I don’t recommend it if you don’t want the images to stick in your brain forever.

> Horrifying stuff, I don’t recommend it if you don’t want the images to stick in your brain forever.

Except with all the 9/11 truthers, its helpful to have those images memorized.

The way the towers fall, how the planes hit, everything. The "truthers" will suggest alternative-truths, but if you remember the images perfectly, you'll quickly find holes in their arguments.

I'm actually seeing events I missed in real time - I was up overnight working. I worked for Sabre HR at the time, and kept going up to the office to run a massive PDF generation process for our performance reviews. (It was a terribly leaky VB process). I didn't wake up until after it happened, so I was hearing about it on the drive into the office. We all went home before noon. Within days the software we were writing for bonuses etc was for naught, as our stock price was crushed (Sabre came out of American Airlines, focusing primarily on travel agency software and Travelocity). Within a month I was let go (I was a contractor)

Were you in the Trophy Club offices then?

No, this was before the move to Southlake.

To fix the broken timestamp in the upper right, open your JS console and set timeZone.diff equal to your negative UTC offset.

I'm in US Pacific Time, so I ran

  timeZone.diff = 8

I was a quarter of a mile away, saw the buildings fall and I knew people who died.

I hate the reminders of 9/11 every anniversary. I know "never forget" is a slogan, but I really am trying to forget. It impacted me deeply. I left NYC and never came back.

I lived just outside of NYC when this happened. I'll leave it to others to explain what that was like.

What stuck with me was the eeriness of the serene skies after it happened. There are several international airports in the vicinity. There wasn't a plane in the sky afterwards, and the usual contrails were absent.

I didn't see something like that happen again for about another 20 years until the first wave of COVID hit and essentially shutdown air transport.

Almost everyone remembers what they were doing when the events happened, a Flashbulb Memory.

There's actually research on the specific memories of 9/11 : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2925254/

Anyone remember what they were doing the next day at the same time?

I actually remember three things about 9/12:

* I remember being the first one up to check if we had school that day (we did not).

* I remember counting the number of stories in the paper that day that did not involve the attacks.

* We had some Canadians staying with us that week, so we spent a large part of the next day comparing the events from an American versus a Canadian perspective. I distinctly remember one of the Canadians being salty about the international flights being diverted to Canada instead of the US.

[ Note: said Canadians had been planning to visit the National Mall on 9/11... needless to say, that visit did not end up happening. ]

They should include C-SPAN coverage.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?165916-101

https://www.c-span.org/video/?165959-2

The second link is a particularly disheartening time capsule of political discourse that morning.

The resulting war took many more human lives [1] including children who couldn't handle the White phosphorus munitions the US military targeted them with. 1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

I was in elementary school at the time 11 miles away, just across the river, in NJ. They really didn't want us to see the news so they took all of us into the main auditorium and had us just sit. A few of the parents of the other children worked in the city. They made it an early release day.

One of my parents worked close by my school and my cousin lived close too. Her house had a clear line of sight to the towers with some binoculars. I remember seeing little black dots fall out of buildings and I remember wondering if they were chairs. I am older now and understand it was people. I missed the collapse of the first tower but saw the second fall through the binoculars.

A lot of my classmates didn't show up for a few days. I didn't understand the gravity of what had happened until was quite a bit older.

I've never seen this site before, but I noticed that it appears to be questioning the official timeline and story at various points. For example, it indicates that a janitor heard an explosion first from the basement, not from above. I noticed a few other elements like this as well.

@dang, can we get the obvious spam crap removed somehow? Maybe instantly hide or at least minimize dead content?

Or maybe restrict discussion to people who get at least some karma?

The default is to hide dead content... i.e.: showdead: NO... you must have changed the settings along the way

Oh, thanks!

At the risk of diluting the discussion here, do we know where they got the "TV Tuner" footage? I've been tuned to a channel with "WJLA" at the upper left (I think, aka "ABC 7"---I don't know I'm not American) for some time now; it started with a clip that is related to the 9/11 attacks but after heaps of ads I'm now watching relatively mundane news (traffic and weather updates, anyone?).

On one hand it's just impressive to me that they have this footage and it made my curiosity itch. On the other hand, a project like this can only gain from having verifiable sources. So do we know how/where they got all these footage?

on this day several years ago, one of my mom's friends was on her way home when a random white asshole rolled down his windshield and screamed "Iranian bitch" at her. She was terrified and came to our house. My sister was convinced that they were going to start rounding us up. My dad put up a patriotic flag, not out fo patriotism, but out of fear of retaliation by people who didn't think we were patriotic enough. None of us are Iranian or middle eastern but given the climate, everyone that even looked like they could be from that region were terrified.

Fun times, I think its a reason I generally like to stay outside the united states these days.

Unfortunately these types of people are everywhere. My Grandma grew up on an island of 100 and half were farmers, half were fishers. She was on the fishing side and wasn’t supposed to even dare talk to the lower cast farmers…

I remember sitting on the other side of Boston Harbour on the eve of September 11th, watching planes start and land while drinking a beer. I have often thought: please, god, take me back to that evening, let me call the police and tell them what will happen the next day. Then I think: they wouldn't have believed me anyway and arrested me instead.

I will never forget the days of chaos that ensued. Boston is close to NYC. We knew back then that things would be very different from then on. For at least a year I would open news pages and except something terrible terrible until that fear faded slowly over time.

Is there a good way to download the video streams from this? I would really like to keep an offline copy for myself.

The Internet Archive has a lot of this material for download: https://archive.org/details/911 & https://archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive.

Many other materials are on other archives: https://www.archives.gov/research/9-11 + http://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/...

I had to change my OS timezone to UTC-6 (Central US) to get the timestamps in the web app to match up.

Thank you! I appear to be an hour out of sync and my OS is on Mountain Time

The BBC World feed seems completley out of sync as well, as if they used the BST times as if they were US east coast time, so it's like 5 hours behind everything else?

Mine is completely weird, it says it's after 3PM but the videos is about all sorts of random stuff.

It was the first or second week of the school year and I was 15 when this happened. My dad was on a business trip and was scheduled to fly back that day. I recall every period we'd be shuffled to the library to pick up our textbooks for the year, where I'd catch glimpses of the live news broadcast they had on the old TVs set up there. My teachers would take us back to class where they attempted to get us engaged in whatever subject-related lecture was on the schedule. Not my world history teacher though. I remember walking into class and he had hooked up his classroom computer to the television (I don't recall the tech involved) and we spent the entire hour watching the news in silence.

When I got home my mom told me my dad's plane had been diverted to Salt Lake City and that he'd be driving back to California where we lived. Dad's best friend was a high ranking US Army officer at the Pentagon. My mom spent all day on the phone with the helpline trying to find out if he was all right. Fortunately she was able to talk to someone there who mentioned they had seen him that day and that he hadn't been in the building.

To me this still feels recent. I don't know that it ever won't.

Wayback machine for some web news of the day:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010911230123/http://www.nytime...

http://web.archive.org/web/20010911204733/http://www2.cnn.co...

I lost the link, and couldn’t easily find it from Wayback, but radio talk show host Neal Boortz would post his program notes at like 7am eastern, and he had already posted by then that “the big news of the day is Michael Jordan’s announcement of returning to the NBA”.

Naturally, he made a ton of updates to the page after the attack, but left that bit and it was kind of funny to see that over the 9/11 news.

It is incredible reliving this experience, knowing what was to come in the two decades after.

Yes. But also, it was pretty obvious to me at the time what was going to happen, modulo some details.

What I did not predict was that I would end up living in many different cities in many different countries, including Los Angeles and New York City. And by far, Americans are the most kind-hearted, generous and polite people I've found anywhere. Even the beggars in Manhatten would be more interested in how I am going and cheering me up than in actually getting any money out of me.

We all knew that we were going to respond unfailingly to counter those responsible. What we didn't know was who it was, where they were, what the ripple-effects might be, or how it might end.

On the latter-two points, we don't yet know the entire story.

For anyone who doesn't consider themselves a conspiracy theorist, but who still wonders how the hell 9/11 could've possibly happened, I'd highly recommend the 2011 podcast episode "Who Is Rich Blee?" [1] and the documentary "9/11: Press for Truth" [2], both by Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy. They're both critical (as in thinking) without being unhinged -- no inside job shit, no controlled demolition stuff, no "plane was fake". Just a close look at the years and months leading up to 9/11, with some terrific interviews with major players (Richard Clarke, Bush's Counter-Terrorism "Czar"; Mark Rossini, the FBI agent assigned to the CIA's Bin Laden Issue Station who was prevented by the CIA from notifying the FBI that 2 of the 9/11 hijackers had multiple entry visas to the US and were planning to travel there).

The documentary's particularly interesting, as it follows the efforts of four New Jersey women who lost their husbands in the World Trade Center as they struggle to figure out what happened that day. I hadn't realized that a "9/11 Commission" hadn't been planned or even wanted by people in Washington, and that the victims' families had to make a stink to get one created.

[1] https://www.doubleasteriskmedia.com/rich-blee-podcast [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KhQXKJCJ5Q

[2] https://youtu.be/9KhQXKJCJ5Q

This website is a really good resource. The thing I remember from that day, I was 18, was that every channel on cable tv cut over to news: MTV, VH1, History Channel, every channel. cnn.com wouldn't load because it was being ddosed by all of the requests.

> cnn.com wouldn't load because it was being ddosed by all of the requests

Slashdot was one of the few sites that was able to stay up during that time, and it was struggling. Later in the day, CNN ripped out all their HTML, and put up a super simple design to optimize for staying up

Google quite quickly put up links to manually cached pages from e.g. CNN directly on the google.com start page.

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/89...

i remember all the news websites switched to simple plain html pages for a while, as their sites couldn’t handle the traffic. i still have a memory of a picture that i couldn’t find again: there was a never ending line of ambulances waiting, one behind another.

Why does 9/11 matter so much but not the many far more horrible atrocities that the US regularly supports or commits (and that 9/11 was partly a response to). Clearly some lives are considered worth far more than others.

I think it's because the USA was an incredibly safe country, attacked seemingly out of nowhere (as far as the public was concerned, at least) with ramifications that impacted every country in the world.

Covid does about a 9/11 every two days, but covid isn't intentional. Bombs go off and kill innocent people all over the world, but none of them kill this many people in a country perceived safe.

The overreaction that followed the attack on the towers helped shape the mess in the middle east. It impacted public perception on NATO. It started more government conspiracies theories than any other event I can think of.

If you're living somewhere outside the West or the Middle East, then 9/11 probably has very little significance in your daily life. Still, its impact on worldwide politics have shaped the world we live in today.

It's the same reason we still see the Tiananmen Square massacre in the news. 3000 people died, but even though they were people in a remote, (then) poor country that barely anyone outside China had any personal reason to care about, the event changed people's views all around the world.

Welcome to the no-fly list, even on a throwaway.

They put "About" in the Help menu?!

Jokes aside this is an incredibly well executed visual, and the throwback to the MacOS 8 era of my high school (where I was when this was happening) adds meaningfully to the impact.

The ad on CNN that started with "would you like to lower your mortgage payments" before it got cut to the first live footage of the towers has to be the worst television timing in history

I went to Stuyvesant high school, and graduated in 2000. Stuy was a few blocks from the trade center, and I had friends who were still in high school that day. I knew people who saw the first plane fly in.

Was a bad day. There was a part of me that felt a weird guilt for not being there. Like, as a lifelong New Yorker, the trauma was part of my birthright somehow, and being away for school made me feel strangely removed when I felt like I should be feeling it in my bones.

My mother had PTSD for a good while afterward, and she lived way uptown from the trade center.

Was a bad day.

News multiplex on Youtube, 6 channels in one video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACUnXM5swn0

Besides the whole 9/11 thing, if you have 'showdead' set, you see the spam 'bot' in this thread. I always wonder if it's really a bot or someone with a lot of time to waste but let's assume it's someone real... do you know what their end game is? It can't be propaganda because it's clearly a spam and no one read those. Also, not many people respond to spam so I don't think 'dopamine hit' is a part of it.

Confusing

Can you link what you are describing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28493723

It's crazy how influential this event would be on years to come. It has this huge cascade of other events directly affected by it, and it caused America to dump >1 trillion dollars on a compete wasteland of a country. The US had this urge to do something about it, but not sure what exactly. There were a lot of seemingly irrational policies following 9/11.

I still can't believe Bin Laden has not been named the Times Person of the Year at the end of 2001.

Is there a way to download or mirror some, or all of this?

A couple of months ago I listened to the Air Traffic Control recordings of the morning of the attacks, really puts in perspective the confusion and chaos in the air that day.

It's really haunting, includes calls from inside one of the planes (I think the one who crashed?) so be warned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYBhgEm3j7A

Man, seeing this thing sorta took me back to that day. I was in high school and remember my buddy coming in late and telling me about the event and I was incredulous about what he was saying. Went home early for lunch to watch the news and sure enough, all the shit he was saying was happening .... was happening.

Also, WTF BBC? You guys never covered this event in the first couple of hours!

The site doesn't account for differences in time zones, the BBC footage is not synced.

It's interesting how little the broadcasts of other nations changed whereas American news just replayed 9/11 footage time and time again. The CCTV played a soap opera and BBC was focused on mad cow's disease. It also appears that NHK was much more focused on a typhoon in Hokkaido.

The creators of this website unfortunately did not consider that BBC broadcasts in British time. You have to jump to 1:59 PM (= 8:59 AM NYC time) for the beginning of the BBC coverage.

I personally vividly remember watching the news on BBC World and saw at least one of the towers collapse on live TV. You don't really forget something like that.

Was in a Beijing hotel and not sleepy so I turned on the TV. I could not believe what I was seeing and first thought it was a movie. After flipping through a few channels I realized it was real. I woke up my wife and told her that we were at war. We were stuck in China until flights resumed.

I was in my room, studying for some school test. My parents used to let me study, while they watched TV after dinner. That night they called me and showed the news to me. I recall it was CNN they were tuned into, and the second plane hit the tower right in front of my eyes.

Do not open on mobile

I opened it in Firefox Android and it crashed whatever the android equivalent of the window manager process. Quite impressive.

Opened in Firefox on iPhone 12 and it seemed to open a f-ton of videos simultaneously when I pushed a wrong button. Glitched out and had to close FF then kill the tab to get back to working.

For a second I thought this might be an emulated machine like http://oldweb.today has but it's clearly just a neat interface. Nicely done.

This is a really cool and useful project. For some reason, the TV tuner shows static on all channels for me. Is it supposed to show coverage from those stations for those times?

Nice idea. I personally can't go back to that day via something like this but I appreciate the historical necessity for such things in the age of the internet and information.

Whatever happened, it happened.

I'm not american, but just wanted to say I'm sorry for the good people you lost there guys.

Let's hope for better days ahead, more peaceful for all of us.

This is really poignant because flipping channels is how most of us experienced it. One of those days that gets burnt into your mind.

All I can think of is the people in Afghanistan when asked about 9/11 had never heard of it. We were attacked and then went after the wrong people.

While that is certainly one of the narratives the deep state loves to be touted, it's simply not true. One of Bushes first actions as POTUS was to request a plan to attack the Taliban. The plan was written in June and was on his desk on Sep 4.

We went after who the oligarchs who control our country wanted us to go after. The idea that it was a response to the attack was merely for keeping the public sedated and military/mercs fired up.

Solving 9/11 solves the war on terror. (most people don't have the stomach for ugly truths though)

Ask yourself, who trained the Mujaheddin in the first place? What foreign dignitary was allowed full access and use of Charlie Wilson's office?

Is it just me or are all the channels broken with just old-school TV static? Maybe the server is overloaded with the HN & reddit hug of death.

Probably overloaded. One of the channels had signal for a few seconds for me.

Are you at the right time? The time settings are strange - something going on with timezones perhaps.

I can't believe how calm and unpartisan CNN was back then. Reporting on boring stories like capitol building stuff and science.

To get a sense of how our nation felt in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the mail column Jerry Pournelle (R.I.P.) had at the time gives a very good perspective: https://jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail170.h...

“yes, we are at war. This is our generation's Pearl Harbor.”

Being old enough to remember this very vividly.

Sitting in an office in Denmark - the world did change.

All the political acts around terrorim that followed has been a sad experience.

I never truly believed in these Arabs was clever enough to pull of this stunt, and the amount of missing evidence from that date is to much.

Sad day to remember but even more sad that people still don't demand answers

I agree. I believe these were similar operations with psyops incorporated like the CIAs mkultra, interventions and assassinations in Spanish countries where it instilled dictators to encourage democracy, and even the covid psyops it is participating in today.

Examples: https://listverse.com/2013/05/25/10-dirty-secret-cia-operati...

Related to what’s likely going on with COVID today:

Operation Mockingbird was a bit of a two-pronged approach to dealing with the media: on the one hand, journalists were routinely employed by the CIA to develop intelligence and gather information, or to report on certain events in a way that portrayed the US favorably. On the other, there were actual plants within the media—paid off with bribes or even directly employed by the CIA—to feed propaganda to the American public

The page is terrible on iOS safari. Videos keep popping up and can’t close the thing.

Super small feedback: there's a typo on the landing page.

synchronized instead of syncrhonized

Hi. Sorry to hear that. Thank you for sharing. I wish have a good day!

I was in middle school in Russia back then. I remember our teacher dedicated a whole hour to watching and discussing the news. It resonated because Russia was also experiencing acts of terror by Muslim fundamentalists. It was way before USA and Russia became enemies again. Two months later Putin would visit Bush's ranch.

Well this comment thread seals the deal for HN for me. Enjoy the hatred and bigotry of your new progressive religion.

Metafilter was around back then, I wont link to it but its pretty easy to find the metafilter thread from that day, its a way of sensing the confusion that I remember from that day as events unfolded. Reading through it I was suprised to see that the US was sending cruise missiles into Afghanistan within about 9 hours.

https://www.metafilter.com/10034/Plane-crashes-in-to-the-wor...

Just to save people time and Metafilter's servers possible wear-and-tear.

the BBC feed is definitely not synced.

In 2001 websites worked better than that.

If watching this footage makes you want to stand up and do something, remember that Covid-19 is killing as many people in the US every two days as died in these attacks.

Take small steps to make the world a better place, helping your neighbors, and you can take a stand against entropy.

And maybe do not forget the >360 000 dead civilians the war on terror has cost so far. Innocent bystanders, whose relatives now might feel a urge to join the real terrorists as the only means for them to get revenge, too. Endless cycle.

"War on terror" is just a ugly concept and not one that seem to work.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/911-civili...

Oh and something that does not get too much attention, either:

the taliban back then only refused to hand over Bin Laden without evidence presented, that he indeed was responsible, which at that time was not at all clear. And even till date, there never was a proper criminal investigation and court ruling about it all. Probably because of the Saudi connections.

>do not forget the >360 000 dead civilians the war on terror has cost so far.

Most of them killed by the same people the US targeted. Funny how all responsibility is always given to the West even when the people doing the killing are their enemies.

>the taliban back then only refused to hand over Bin Laden without evidence presented

Also after he publicly confessed, not to mention his previous crimes. Their refusal had nothing to do with 'evidence'.

> Funny how all responsibility is always given to the West even when the people doing the killing are their enemies.

It's barely ever given to the west, and never in major media. And when someone in an anonymous internet comment dares suggest we might be morally accountable for vast amounts of innocent deaths - a trifle of a blip of a nothing in the discourse - we can count on certain people getting their feewings hurt and becoming overly defensive. "I'm always being accused!" cried Tony Soprano.

> No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the 2003 United States invasion. However, we know that between 184,382 and 207,156 civilians have died from direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through October 2019. [1]

[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/ir...

>It's barely ever given to the west, and never in major media

You must be kidding, or never ever read any major Western media.

> And when someone in an anonymous internet comment dares

Oh no. Someone disagreed with you on the internet. It's horrible even thinking about this. Nobody should ever be victimized like this.

Not sure what you mean with western media. But ours (Swiss) usually blames the NATO and US for their war crimes and not a generalized 'west'

A trifle blip? Hardly. It was exhaustively covered by the largest media outlets in the US for more than a decade.

It was a 24/7 talking point by everyone on the left politically from the day the US invaded Iraq until the day Bush left office. Across all forums, anywhere a comment could be posted.

Google: "nytimes iraq death count" or "nytimes bush iraq civilian deaths"; or any number of dozens of variations on that same premise.

You must have missed the endless media parade about the Bush death count, and deaths from drone strikes. The headlines and discussion were everywhere across social media, mainstream media, on blogs.

"Also after he publicly confessed, not to mention his previous crimes. Their refusal had nothing to do with 'evidence'. "

Source?

Bin Laden initially declined responsibility, saying his hosts the taliban, would not allow such a operation.

(surely not out of being nice, but because of wanting to keep the power)

And later (after he confessed) the US was on full war with the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden not with them anymore.

>And later (after he confessed) the US was on full war with the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden not with them anymore.

I'm referring to that, not to his preinasvion evasion.

The Taliban didn't even cut relations with him or his associates after he confessed, and they were not without influence in AfPak.

Surely the Taliban should have been very upset with their 'guests' for getting them involved in Al-Qaeda's war, right? Unless the Taliban knew from the start... Obviously they did, since this wasn't Al-Qaeda's first attack against America.

As I wrote, there's little reason to give any credence to their not knowing, and even if we did, there were plenty of other things they should have given up Bin Laden for.

"Surely the Taliban should have been very upset with their 'guests' for getting them involved in Al-Qaeda's war, right? "

I am pretty sure, they were upset and maybe there were actual heads rolling behind the scenes. But on the outside, they had the US as common enemy. An enemy that hit them both as hard as he could, without making any difference.

So of course at that time, talking about extradiction was over.

But the Taliban while at power did made the civic offer to extradict Bin Laden, if presented with evidence.

So of course, it is not sure, if they actually would have done it. Maybe they would have ended in a civic war by themself over it.

But we never knew, because the US choose to go the brutal way. No evidence. No extradiction. Just war.

Now 20 years later with the Taliban back in power and stronger than ever, I can just say, awesome outcome with this approach.

>I am pretty sure, they were upset and maybe there were actual heads rolling behind the scenes.

No evidence of it, and I find this entire debate odd.

Again, the Taliban hosted a terrorist group which had publicly declared war against America, and launched known attacks - all this well known before 9-11. What did anyone expect this public antagonist group to do? Play volleyball?

If someone hosted a group called "Death to X" and the group predictably attacked X, that someone shouldn't get to claim innocence. Especially not after the nth attack!

>Now 20 years later with the Taliban back in power and stronger than ever

A completely predictable result of the ideological way the retreat was done.

The assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Massoud#Assassinati...

>Most of them killed by the same people the US targeted.

That just sounds crazy given that our first retaliation for 9/11 was Iraq. Which had nothing to do with 9/11, and further...no "WMDs".

This doesn't remove responsibility from Al-Q's Iraqi associate - Al-Zarqawi - and his insane anti-everybody-who-isn't-Sunni-Muslim war which directly bred ISIS.

> That just sounds crazy given that our first retaliation for 9/11 was Iraq.

The first retaliation for 9/11 was not Iraq. That's a really bizarrely inaccurate claim.

The US invaded Afghanistan and removed the Taliban from control of the country by the end of 2001. Operation Enduring Freedom launched in October 2001.

The Iraq invasion was 2003.

The US initially sent its special forces into Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 to work with the Northern Alliance to route the Taliban and pursue bin Laden, and then invaded.

Yes, sorry, not the first. Too late to edit, unfortunately.

Given the ridiculously uncertain nature of war it seems reasonable to expect that we take responsibility for the unintended consequences of our actions. Our good intentions at the start are irrelevant.

War introduces a lot of entropy into nations. It is the ultimate dice roll in terms of outcomes. You are taking a gamble. And history would suggest that civilians suffer hugely whatever the political outcome. If we know that then how can we shut our eyes to that effect?

> If watching this footage makes you want to stand up and do something, remember that Covid-19 is killing as many people in the US every two days as died in these attacks.

Please. This is just going to create more toxic conversation and politics. Can we just focus on 9/11 victims and mourne peacefully? Rest of the top level comments here are sharing stories about their personal experience. I know you mean well but its the wrong place to bring this up.

Comparing an intentional attack on our nation to a global pandemic is insulting.

At least this time it really was an inside job, hundreds of thousands could still be alive.

Do you really think it is insulting considering the pandemic response has been really bad. The extent to which the whole event is politicized which directly caused deaths of thousands of people every day is just mind baffling. The misinformation spread deliberately by the top leaders and their follower just to strengthen their power can hardly be called as "unintentional".

Just imagine the US had declared a "War on Covid" and initiated a global mass vaccination campaign, rallying its allies to either be "with us or against us" in the fight against the pandemic, using the emergency powers to shift national production towards vaccines and PPE and distributing them throughout the nation and globally to developing countries and disparaging allies who were unwilling to follow suit. Heck, we might have even avoided Delta, let alone whatever the new one is called.

Instead all we got was 60 words in 2001 followed by that lousy PATRIOT Act, two decades of drone strikes, several case studies in failed nation building, and then for Covid a president pushing ineffective treatments and ridiculing medical experts.

Yes, it's insulting. But not because it's untrue but because it's hurtful.

“9/11 wasn’t a big deal because so many people die of natural causes anyway”

> Take small steps to make the world a better place, helping your neighbors, and you can take a stand against entropy.

A different way to think about it: what if individuals independently taking small steps in only sufficient to maintain the status quo? What if the true state of reality is that something larger is needed, and is possible, but will never come to be because we never even tried to find it?

Sure but building solidarity locally is the first step unless you have billions of dollars at your disposal.

In times of crisis, it's the local network that will support you, not the federal government. As much as we've been told to embrace individualism over the past century, we're still a cooperative species and will default to cooperation when things turn bad.

If you want to see how well top-down nation building works out, ask the Afghans. The reason the new government never took hold was that there was no political will to address corruption so the old system still endured in local bonds and power structures. You can't have structural reforms without addressing root causes.

> Sure but building solidarity locally is the first step unless you have billions of dollars at your disposal.

Only for a given subset of implementations (ones that require billions of dollars). Also: there are many billions of dollars looking for a place to be deployed, so it's not even a hard stop either, only a major difficulty.

I suspect there are other barriers in the mix that are a bit harder to see though (for some, at least), and may also have very powerful active defence measures that are maintained and improved on an ongoing basis.

> In times of crisis, it's the local network that will support you, not the federal government. As much as we've been told to embrace individualism over the past century, we're still a cooperative species and will default to cooperation when things turn bad.

I very much agree, and this is only one of many ~base-capabilities that ship as defaults from the factory. Perhaps one could make use of these services if one could reverse engineer their behavior, and discover the various API's that must be called.

> If you want to see how well top-down nation building works out, ask the Afghans.

This is but one example (therefore, not scientific thinking - the best kind of thinking...or so "they" say).

> The reason the new government never took hold was that there was no political will to address corruption so the old system still endured in local bonds and power structures. You can't have structural reforms without addressing root causes.

110% agree. So if one was to dig down into the infinitely complex causality, deeper and deeper, what plausibly most important root cause(s) might one find at the very lowest levels?

> helping your neighbors

How can you help the people who dont want vaccines? Are you going to force them to have it?

By still wearing a mask in enclosed places for example. We still have to work together, whatever anyone's opinion on vaxing is right now

Why do you need to wear a mask when you are vaccinated?

Because you don't want to spread a potentially deadly sickness to other people who might not have the choice (for whatever mental or health reason) to Vax?

If it were for me super markets should be mask only anyway. I hate old people and kids running around coughing at everything I maybe would have wanted to eat. Even before covid

> potentially deadly sickness to other people who might not have the choice

Wait, so have you been wearing masks before Covid to protect other people who cannot be vaccinated for flu and other respiratory diseases?

If not then you are a hypocrite.

Not as often as I will now, mostly because of the strange looks. And usually not only because of others.

But yeah since I catched a bad case of regional flu in the Airport of Kuala Lumpur about 8 years ago I do wear masks in some situations. Especially when I feel sick but have to go out.

> Especially when I feel sick but have to go out.

So you dont follow your own advice by not wearing a mask when you are not sick and yet you expect others to do what you say. What is that saying "do as i say not as i do"

You asked me about the past. I got smarter too

Really cool resource. Small nit: the time in the upper right hand corner being off by an hour is killing me (not literally).

Wow, such a big event in US and world history. Zero top level comment reflects the historical missteps and lessons learned during these 20 years.

Guys, wake up. The world is changed and there is a reason. One who cannot understand the momentum behind history, is destined to repeat them.

This is not the first comment to make such a remark.

History does not editorialize. Especially primary sources: simply portraying them is enough. People will come to their own conclusions. People must think critically, and for themselves.

I'm impressed at how to little the States achieved since 9/11. A lot of war expenses with little results and now an even stronger Taliban, parading with US army war machines.

I remember a joke from 20 years ago: It's 2021, a son and a father are walking in front of Ground Zero and the father says "... and here the World Trade Center was standing, before it was destroyed on 9/11 by Arab terrorists" "But dad, who are the Arabs?"

I guess 10 year old me didn't know how incompetent and/or corrupted by oil money our leaders are

What is the rationale for this kind of thing? What motivates a person to construct such a strange relic to 9/11 like this?

And how come, after doing so, did the creator fail to make any sort of reasonable points about the event?

This feels like some sort of opportunistic resume-building kind of project, made from the very real deaths of thousands of innocent people.

And not one mention was made about the US's horrific foreign policy that led to 9/11 in the first place. Such a wasted opportunity.

Did you not get the intro pop-up explaining this is intended for use as part of a history class lesson plan for students born after 9/11?

No, I didn't notice that.

And if that's the intended use for this stupid website, then it's a terrible lesson plan they've made. It doesn't actually address any meaningful aspect to 9/11 besides make it appear to be from the "beforetimes."

Nothing wrong with aggregating records of a historical event and presenting them in real time without commentary. Put together the records and let them speak for the event.

Your verbiage indicates the mere portrayal of what happened is deeply at odds with your opinions about it. Care to elaborate?

> This feels like some sort of opportunistic resume-building kind of project, made from the very real deaths of thousands of innocent people.

They dislike the current state of the tech industry and cannot stop thinking about it no matter what the topic.

It isn't a lesson plan. It is raw archival material intended for teachers to use with whatever lesson plan they create.

primary source documents are one of the most powerful ways to understand an event and the impact it had.

I'm almost in my 30s and I barely remember 9/11. Most kids today, live in a world (for Americans at least) that was profoundly changed by 9/11. They deserve to be able to understand that moment.

The first time I went to an airport, there were (National Guard, I think) soldiers standing around with heavy duty guns. Later, it was removing shoes and all the rest of the nonsense security theater we still put up with. A few years later, the fabled pornoscan.

People deserve to be able to learn about the history of their world. It is deeply offensive to me that you would suggest people can't handle primary sources and need someone to make 'reasonable points' and do people's thinking for them.

I think it is public service to show historical events from a different perspective.

Reading about something is one thing, being able to experience as it happened, the same way most people experienced -- from media, is another.

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