IC2S has kind of evolved into a media impressions blog over the past several years, but I still view it as a general interest blog – I write about whatever I feel like writing about (which just so happens to be video games as of late). Consider this a throwback to pre-2018 IC2S, before writing about politics and current events became utterly depressing.
I was eleven when 9/11 happened.
I was at school at the time. It was a normal day for the most part. I’m Canadian; we are far removed from the events that were unfolding at the time, and our teachers didn’t interrupt the normal, daily schedule to tell us, so we had no idea what was going on. I do recall overhearing some conversations on the bus home where people were talking about a bomb going off, but I didn’t really pay it much heed.
My brothers and I would have gotten home around 3:30pm EST, at which point we saw our mother watching the news and crying in front of the TV. This would have been after all the major events of the day had already transpired, but that meant that we spent most of our evening watching footage of the plane colliding with the World Trace Center buildings and the towers going down over and over again. Anyone who was alive at the time will tell you that it’s imagery that you never forget.
The next day, we were at school again and our teacher told our class something that has always stuck with me: “You are going to be the last generation old enough to remember living through what happened yesterday.” I’m 35 now. Every passing September, I’m reminded that there are more and more people out there who don’t remember what the world was like before 9/11.
I’ve always been fascinated by disasters. As a kid, I’d spend evenings pouring through Reader’s Digest’s Great Disasters*, learning as much as I could about the various catastrophes that have befallen mankind throughout the ages. This fascination informed my childhood interest in Left Behind: after all, it’s basically a series of spectacular, cataclysmic disasters, with each book featuring the deaths of millions of people at a time. However, as I’ve gotten older (and especially since I have had kids of my own), I find these disasters to be far more emotionally-charged than they were when I was younger. Where I used to have a morbid fixation on mass casualty events, now I can’t help but think about the lives cut short, the hopes and dreams they had, and the people who are going to miss them. I still find these disasters endlessly fascinating, but they aren’t fun and excitement now: they’re heavy experiences.
All of this is to say: despite my obsession with disasters, I’ve never really looked back on 9/11. I lived through it, and it was a topic I was not keen to revisit. That’s how my feelings remained, until a couple years ago. The September 11th anniversary was rolling around once more and I suddenly felt the urge to watch compilations of the news footage from that day. I’m not entirely sure what changed in me, but the way that 9/11 has shaped the course of human history for the past twenty-four years was weighing on me. I wanted to understand it better; I had to feel what people felt that day, seeing it through their eyes and hearing what they heard.
9/11 happened at just the right point in history for the entire event to be captured from start to finish from multiple different perspectives. While much of the world experienced 9/11 through the news networks’ live feeds, there were dozens of people on the ground recording the unfolding disaster, giving us completely new perspectives on the day’s events. Between the news footage, the home video recordings, recorded radio conversations, and air traffic records, you can basically piece the day’s events together to create a collage of perspectives and experiences.
This brought me to The 9/11 Chronology by Michael Smith, a seventeen hour-long, commentary-free compilation of recordings from the disaster, laid out minute-by-minute. The series only goes until shortly after the collapse of the north tower, the last of the day’s “major”, dramatic events. Despite being somewhat incomplete, it was a gut-wrenching experience to relive the chaos and fear of that day, and it left me with thoughts that I just need to get out there (hence why I’m writing this article). If you have any interest in remembering (or understanding) what that day was like, I strongly recommend taking the time to watch the entire 9/11 Chronology or a comparable resource: it is a powerful experience and I promise you it will leave you feeling changed.
*Fun fact: this book got destroyed in a flood. Years later, I was with my wife at a thrift store and found a copy of Great Disasters in their used book section. It’s on my book shelf now… alongside Titanic: An Illustrated History from my childhood and my natural disasters textbook from university. It’s a monument to a lifetime of morbid curiosity.
They Had 20 Minutes Warning
If your only experience of 9/11 was watching the day’s events unfold on the news, you don’t really get a perspective of how the day’s events got underway, or whether anything could have been done to prevent them from happening. From our perspective, 9/11 didn’t start until the first plane hit the north tower, but the truth is that there were some key steps leading up to that point.
Betty Ong, a flight attendant on-board American Airlines Flight 11, courageously reported the hijacking to the FAA more than twenty minutes before the terrorists flew the plane into the north tower. The FAA then proceeded to faff about with little urgency, squandering any chance of mitigating the disaster with their delayed response. Most people assumed that the hit on the north tower was an accident, but if the FAA had gotten word out that it was actually a confirmed terrorist attack, then people in the south tower may have had a few minutes in which to begin evacuating.
Amazingly, there was also advanced warning for American Airlines 11 and United 93, where you can hear the hijackings occurring in real-time via publicly-available air traffic controller radio recordings. These too were signs misinterpreted by the controllers, further squandering any potential mitigation efforts.
That said… once the terrorists got on those planes, there was just no realistic way that 9/11 could have been prevented. Hijackings just weren’t taken seriously going into the 2000s. The mindset at the time was that terrorists would hijack planes to ransom them, not use them as suicide missiles. Even when authorities started to realize what was happening, you can hear from the air traffic radio recordings that the hijacked planes would constantly disappear off radar – they were having a hell of a time keeping track of them. Even when they know with certainty exactly which planes have been hijacked, they are unable to monitor their locations without asking local flights to provide a visual confirmation. Hell, they were claiming that United 93 was still heading towards Washington DC half an hour after it had crashed, because they just couldn’t keep track of the aircraft. As a result, there was no realistic way for authorities to guess that these flights were on a collision course with the World Trade Center and Pentagon in order to stop them in time.
Post-script: since publishing this article, I’ve done a lot more research into the events of 9/11 so I want to clarify some things. All my thoughts in this article are based off of the fresh experience of watching and listening to the raw recordings from September 11th, 2001. Based on these recordings, it seems like the FAA, air traffic controllers and NORAD failed to act due to confusion and a mess of bureaucracy. Having done more research since this was published, the official narrative is that air traffic controllers and the FAA did hear the hijackers’ transmissions on American Airlines 11 and United 93 and immediately understood what they meant. Their “confused” responses in the recordings were actually them trying to sound normal and open a line of communication with the hijackers, but the hijackers did not respond. In addition, the chain of escalation from the FAA to NORAD was confusing and had not been designed with this sort of commercial airliner suicide attack in mind. Like I said, there was realistically nothing that could be done from the ground to mitigate this disaster once the hijackers had control of the aircraft.
Howard Stern is a Tool
I’ve never heard anything from/about Howard Stern in my life before watching The 9/11 Chronology, so I am not sure what he’s like on a normal day. That said, you come to hate this fucking guy whenever he shows up in the recordings.
Begrudging credit to Howard up-front: he kept a fairly level head considering the circumstances. While he and his guests were being flippant after the first tower was hit, when the second strike happened, he immediately realized that this wasn’t a freak accident and he got everyone serious real quick. He had the wherewithal to realize that his show could be a means for people to process the trauma of what was happening, and stayed on-air for six hours as the disaster unfolded. Also, he told off a caller who advocated hate crimes against Arab-Americans, so good on him for that…
…that said, HOLY FUCK, Howard!!!
Moments after the second tower is hit, Howard Stern is calling for the government to immediately nuke the entire Middle East, blaming Palestine, Iran, Libya, and Iraq for the attacks with zero evidence, and absolutely raging about France having some responsibility for this for being too liberal. And, yeah, he said to not go beat up Arab-Americans, but what the hell do you think advocating carpet bombing every Arab nation is going to incite in people?! Not only was this ridiculously irresponsible and inflammatory, but history has shown that it was absolutely the wrong approach: it turns out that the US can’t just bomb terrorism off the face of the earth, we do not know where the terrorists are located, the US can’t just enforce its will on the world unilaterally, and it turns out that deposing Saddam Hussein would destabilize the entire region after all and lead to even more violent extremists! Whoops!
All this stands in stark contrast with the actual news reports that are trying to be careful about what they say, because they know the dangers of reporting events prematurely. It’s depressing to think that, in the twenty-four years since 9/11 occurred, the news media has only gotten weaker and more sensationalized, while social media chucklefucks who react like Howard Stern did have become our sources for breaking news (and that’s not even taking into account grifters and propagandists… I’ll give Howard credit for this as well, at least he was 100% sincere with everything he said).
I Understand the Fascination With Jumpers Now
I’ve been aware for a while that there are people out there who are weirdly interested in 9/11 jumpers (that is, people who jumped from the towers to escape the smoke and flames). It always seemed like a particularly morbid and distasteful fascination to me. However, after watching this chronology and seeing several people choosing to jump from the towers… I kind of get it now.
Everyone in the north tower above the impact point was doomed the moment the plane hit. The impact was dead-center of the building, destroying every possible means of escape. For ~1355 people inside the building there was no way out, trapped as the smoke and flames licked at them until it was unbearable. Then you were left with a choice – die an agonizing death by the flames, or end it quickly on your own terms. For nearly two hundred people, approximately 14% of the people trapped in the inferno, they chose the fall. The sheer terror and mania that would have to be present to make a choice like that… it’s unimaginable. It’s probably the one aspect of 9/11 that we can never come close to understanding. The fact that two hundred people were faced with this reality and chose to jump is difficult to come to terms with. Especially so in the cases where you have multiple people jumping all at once. I can’t comprehend it and I pray I never do.
The other thing that struck me about seeing the jumpers? They fall fast. For some reason, I have it in my head that if you fall from a building as large as the World Trade Center, it would take you long enough to fall that you could process it. I don’t think that’s really the case though – you could go from the top of the tower to the ground in only a few seconds, which is just chilling to consider. It also makes reviewing footage of the burning towers particularly queasy, because you can tell when you’re seeing falling debris and when you’re seeing a person. Much of the debris which fell from the towers prior to their collapse were light objects that could flutter to the ground. That’s not the case with jumpers – they plummet straight down.
Also, on a somewhat related note, I’ve got to mention Kevin Cosgrove. He wasn’t a jumper, but was on the line with emergency services when the south tower collapsed around him and you can hear his screams of terror before the phone line is severed… it’s blood-curdling, easily one of the most stomach-churning moments in the entire 9/11 Chronology, and provides a terrifying window into the abyss.
The Pentagon Situation Is… Weird
I don’t subscribe to any 9/11 conspiracy theories, but the Pentagon hit is… weird, and I can see why it has spawned a lot of discourse. First of all, there’s basically zero footage of the plane prior to impact, and the only footage made publicly available is those garbage-tier parking lot security cameras which don’t clarify anything. A lot of the early eye-witness testimony is also from people who didn’t see the plane or impact, only the aftermath, so there was a lot of speculation going on. The weirdest part in The 9/11 Chronology though is that there is an eye-witness interview with a military officer who claims that he saw a helicopter taking off before the building exploded seconds later in its vicinity, implying that a bomb or a missile was fired at the Pentagon. This was reported right before the consensus grew that a plane had hit the building, so that begs the question: what did this guy even see? Is he somehow completely mistaken, or is there legitimately more going on here?
All that said… I think he was just wrong, plain and simple. Let’s assume that there was a conspiracy and that the government was behind this: we know for a fact that the other three planes were hijacked and turned into improvised missiles. If we assume something fishy is up with the Pentagon, why would the government legitimately steal three planes and then pretend to steal a fourth one to cover up that they fired a missile/planted a bomb at the Pentagon…? You’re telling me that all the flight logs, passenger calls, and corroborating eye-witnesses were made up in this one particular instance…? It makes no sense, especially given that there’s plenty of witnesses on the ground who would be able to attest that it wasn’t a plane. Put that way, cherry-picking this one guy who said he saw a helicopter and believing him to the exclusion of all others is fucking stupid.
Also worth bearing in mind: the Pentagon is a much more difficult target than the twin towers. It’s quite low to the ground and they would have gunned the engines right before impact to maximize damage. The impact zone is also just off of a freeway, so the plane would have to come in at an extremely low angle and just kind of hope that it hits its target as intended. I don’t think that there’s any way they could be aware which part of the building they were going to hit, so that also makes the conspiracy talk about the fact that it hit a newly renovated and largely unoccupied area not make a lot of sense. United Airlines 175 almost missed the south tower of the World Trade Center (due to their speed, rapid rate of descent, and Marwan al-Shehhi’s shit piloting), and that was a much easier target than one particular corner of the Pentagon.
The Towers’ Collapse Totally Makes Sense
One of the big talking points in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was the belief that there must have been bombs in the World Trade Centers for them to collapse the way that they did. “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” quickly became a meme and there were all sorts of theories about explosives being snuck into the building in the weeks prior to the attacks.
However… rewatching the footage of the attacks, the footage of the buildings collapsing, and the moments leading up to the collapses, the official report makes total sense. The south tower was hit at a relatively low point of the building and at such an angle that the support structures for half of the building were clearly destroyed. You can also see ground-level footage of the insulation having been blown off of the building on impact, and there are multiple videos of molten metal pouring out of the south tower minutes before it collapsed, further weakening the structure. Considering the intensity of the fires and the damages sustained in both impacts, it totally makes sense that progressive floor failures pancaking on top of each other would create too much weight, to the point where they led to a catastrophic failure where they separated from the superstructure and cascaded down upon each other. It kind of resembles a controlled demolition… because that’s how controlled demolitions work. They exploit the weaknesses in the structure so that it collapses in on itself. IF these were controlled demolitions, then they did a shit job, because huge chunks of the building’s structure peeled off and cascaded down, destroying several buildings in the vicinity.
Also, let’s just assume that they did rig the buildings with explosives… why…? We know with absolute certainty that both towers were hit by planes. In both cases, you can see with your eyes that the structural failure points were in the locations of the plane impacts and then cascaded down. Are you telling me that they had bombs planted in the exact locations the planes impacted and then they survived forty-to-ninety minutes in intense fires before detonating…?
Guys… 9/11 conspiracies don’t make any fucking sense.
The safety and order of the world we live in is a fragile artifice. We assume that everything is under control and somebody’s keeping things running properly. Skyscrapers are well-engineered structures that hold up to regular life and general wear-and-tear. That said, they are subject to the laws of physics, and you can only engineer them to handle so much before they inevitably collapse in on themselves. It’s easier to assume that these are immoveable monoliths, that there’s more danger of the entire tower tipping over in one intact piece than there is of it falling in on itself, and that something spectacular and nefarious must have been involved… but there isn’t. You need to accept that. Is terrorists flying passenger airliners into the towers not spectacular and nefarious enough…?
Fuck me, I’m not looking forward to moderating the comments section on this article…
Eye Witness Testimony is Worthless Without Consensus
I already alluded to this in the section about the Pentagon, but when you’re reliving the events of 9/11, you really come to realize how worthless individual eye-witness testimony is in an unfolding crisis.
- First of all, no one can agree on the size of the planes that struck the north and south towers – you’ve got people saying that they’re small, single-seat planes, to small commercial airliners, to full-sized commercial jets.
- When the south tower collapsed, a lot of people started saying that this happened because a third plane had hit the building, a speculation which got picked up by news stations and reported nation-wide before what actually happened became clear. Now, I get why this happened. I used to work at Tim Horton’s for years, and there was a false rumour that they put nicotine in their coffee. You can understand the logic behind that rumour: “this coffee’s addictive, they must put the same stuff in it that they put into cigarettes, ha ha!”, but then enough idiots repeat it that some of them actually believe it. Same thing here: “we’ve already had two planes hit the buildings, now one of them has fallen, it must have been another plane!” However, by this point we’ve got news cameras capturing the scene from every angle and they would have seen if there was another plane approaching; it’s insane to me that they’re just taking ground-level speculation at face value by this point in the disaster and creating even more panic.
- Things just got worse and worse as the day went by, with every bit of speculation being reported as fact. You’ve got multiple news networks claiming that there was a second explosion at the Pentagon and that there was an explosion at the Capitol Building, sustaining panic as people assumed that there were more attacks occurring (in both cases, these were actually sonic booms from patrolling fighter jets).
- Perhaps the most insane case of this is that the Associated Press reported that a car bomb had gone off at the State Department… which just straight-up did not happen, and I don’t know why they didn’t have any cameras in the vicinity that could corroborate this very obvious fact. I can only assume that people were on edge and heard another one of these sonic booms, but legitimately who even knows how this rumour started? Reports of fire at the National Mall were also completely fabricated.
- Funnily enough, there actually was some legitimate reporting going on about reports of another plane heading towards Washington… however, by the time this was being reported, United 93 had already crashed thirty minutes prior and the FAA had been made aware of this fact. This should give you an idea of how long it takes for information to filter through to the authorities and media though.
Bottom-line: people say stupid shit and the truth does not come out until you get some overlapping, independent consensus, or you get some good video footage to back you up. One person reporting something is NOT the basis for action. This is a lesson well-worth remembering in the social media age.
The Incomprehensible Depths of Evil
As you relive the events of 9/11, hear the panic and terror in peoples’ voices, and witness the events unfold once again, it really sinks in how incomprehensibly evil the perpetrators’ actions were. I cannot understand the level of hate and radicalization that would be required to train yourself for years to commit suicide and mass murder, let alone for all involved actually follow-through with it on the day of the attacks. America deserves a lot of criticism for its foreign policy, but nothing excuses or justifies this kind of action. The amount of suffering that was directly and indirectly caused by these people is devastating and infuriating to try to fathom. I do not believe in hell, but if there is one, these bastards are most assuredly there reaping their just reward.
Post-script: My bewilderment about the level of radicalization to pull this sort of thing off is especially true in the case of the pilot-hijacker of United 93, Zaid Jarrah. Suicide operatives tend to have nothing else to live for, but Jarrah had a girlfriend back home in Germany who he was in regular contact with! I can only assume he believed he was ushering in a better world for her and his family, but… yeah, how did that work out? I kind of like how United 93 used this to show hesitation on Jarrah’s part to explain why the hijackers took so much longer to storm the cockpit on that flight than the other three planes that day, a hesitation which ultimately allowed the passengers to find out what had been going on and fight back.
9/11 Will Be Our “Titanic” Someday Soon
Given my fascination with disasters, it’s probably not surprising to hear that I am obsessed with the Titanic and have been since before the James Cameron film even released. I’m far from the only one, as Titanic still occupies a prominent space within popular culture to this day. I think that a major reason why Titanic is still remembered and obsessed about today was due to the multiple government inquiries that occurred in the wake of the disaster which documented the events of the sinking in minute detail. From these inquiries, the drama of the sinking was made clear and people were able to piece together the events for posterity. Then lots of world events happened, so Titanic began to slip from peoples’ memories… until Walter Lord, born well after the ship had sunk, became fascinated with the story and wrote A Night to Remember, compiling the events of the sinking into one comprehensive, dramatic narrative. Between the book and subsequent film adaptation, A Night to Remember reignited interest in the sinking, which would eventually cascade into the search for and discovery of the wreck, the making and release of the highest-grossing film of all-time, and the OceanGate disaster.
All this to say… I think we’re getting pretty close to the “A Night to Remember” for 9/11. There have been shockingly few films released in the past twenty-four years depicting the events of the day, with most being prestige Oscar-bait released within a decade of the attacks. I can only assume that we haven’t gotten more films due to concerns about sensitivity and a general belief that people don’t want to relieve the pain and terror of that day. However, it’s been twenty-four years now. Approximately 50% of the world’s population are too young to remember 9/11 as it unfolded, and that number is only going to grow over time. At some point, those concerns about sensitivity are going to tip over and a plethora of people will discover the 9/11 for the first time and uncover the plethora of documentation of that day’s events.
The way that 9/11 unfolded is absolutely poised to fascinate those unfamiliar with the day’s events. It’s an incredibly dramatic and well-documented disaster. If you are watching it unfold in real-time, each major event is paced about twenty minutes apart, so it just keeps escalating and getting worse with little downtime. An A Night to Remember-style feature film about the entire day’s events would be gripping, but footage compilations like The 9/11 Chronology are already dramatic enough recreations that are just waiting for a sudden, mass revival of cultural interest. Public interest in the events of 9/11 has become very muted over the past decade or so, but I would be shocked if there isn’t a cultural resurgence within the next ten years. I can only hope that, by that point, we’ll have finally learned some of the hard lessons taught that day, get a better understanding of the gravity of those events, and treat them with the respect that they reserve.
Or, y’know, the conspiracy theorists will dominate the narrative and once again make a mockery of the entire event, kinda like you see now with Titanic truthers… fuck me, I hate that, if there is a resurgence in interest in 9/11, this is probably the most likely outcome…
Until then, I’ll continue to stare into the abyss and keep the memory of that day alive.
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