9/11/2001

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I was working on a renovation for a travel agent at the time. My wife called me to tell me to change to the radio.

Fwiw, that particular project ended up downsizing a bit.
 
I was in Northern Virginia. I was getting ready to go to work and turned the TV on and the first plane had already hit.

The following is my memory but I am not 100% sure if this part is a false memory. As I was watching the TV I saw what appeared to be a secondary explosion and the camera angle made it unclear whether it was the original building or not. I had to turn the TV off and head to work. I turned on Howard Stern and that is where I heard about the second plane. I suspect what I saw on TV was the second plane hit - or I fabricated that part in my mind.

When the Pentagon got hit it became a more immediate issue. I remember looking out the window of our building for planes after that. I was not close to the Pentagon but in the DC area. Internet was really slow so we were getting info from a radio someone had in the office. We went to lunch to see what was going on on the TV then our boss sent us home. Like others I remember looking up at the sky seeing no planes/contrails for the next day.

It all seems like a couple of years ago to me. Such events are so burned into your brain that they will always seem very immediate.


A few of other points that stand out.

A couple of months before 9/11 I flew through NYC on my way from Rhode Island to Virginia. I remember it was a small prop type plane out of NYC and I saw the WTC with my own eyes for the first and last time.

Just a couple of weeks before 9/11 I flew out of Dulles to visit my sister in San Diego. I always wonder what if the hijackers would have chosen a date a couple of weeks earlier.

My mom was in NYC just a couple of days before 9/11 and she did go to the top of the WTC.
 
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donbosco said:
So that shot through my mind but was quickly slid to the back as the news pointed more and more conclusively to the Middle East. Just the same I can’t say that I didn’t also reflect on 1995 and Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City. He had proven to anyone that was open to the broadest range of thinking that we had citizens and citizen movements within the nation who were capable and sufficiently motivated to murder wantonly to bring down our own Republic in the name of their deranged rightist worldview. But it turned out, as we all know, that a different brand of conservative thinking lay behind 9/11, this one rooted in a zealous, fundamentalist misinterpretation of a different sacred text, ‘The Koran.’
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That event had an impact on the immediate coverage of 9/11. When the OKC bombing first happened, most attention was directed towards Islamists. The media had to backtrack quickly and I imagine that was a bit of an embarrassment.

So on 9/11, there was a hesitation to point towards the middle east. That of course was brought up as a possibility but there was a bit more hesitation to make too many assumptions.
 
doctor_octopus said:
Many of us, me included, first heard of the attack on the ZZL.
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I wish more websites would have archived those conversations. You can find some real time conversations online but most has been lost.

I believe it was a Georgia football board who archived a lot of their conversations on 9/11 for years but that is no longer around either.


I have wondered when a conspiracy theory that the WTC attack never happened will gain legs. I have no doubt that in the future some people will begin to believe that the entire thing - including the existence of the WTC itself - was a creation of Hollywood after the fact. Old movies were modified to add in the WTC, etc. As those of us who lived through 9/11 get older and die, I suspect such a conspiracy theory will be born. (There is just no limit on what conspiracy theorists will believe.)
 
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It was my first year of law school. I had been there just under a month at that point. I was leaving my first class of the day to go to the library and prepare for my second class of the day, which was taught by an old school law professor so you always wanted to be prepared in case he called on you and attempted to embarrass you.

The dean of students was in the hallway standing outside of the assembly hall telling people walking by that there had been a plane crash and it may be terrorism, and letting us know the TV was on in the assembly hall in case we wanted to see what was going on. The description of what was happening did not provide full context and my initial thought was, “That sounds awful, but I should prepare for the next class.” Then somebody looking into the assembly room said, “Oh my god, is that the Pentagon?” I then took a look at the TV and saw smoke coming out of the Pentagon. I then realized that this was a lot bigger than I first thought from the way it was initially described to me. Then the news switched to an image of the WTC with both buildings up in smoke, and it all hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized this was a devastating, large scale terrorist attack with multiple targets. For the rest of the day, I— and many others— wondered about the extent of this attack and if there would be any more targets. How far would it go? It was very unsettling.

At the time, we were not far removed from the OKC bombing and domestic terrorism was seen as a real threat. In conversations with people soon after the attacks, we wondered if it could be domestic terrorism.
 
Don't believe I ever heard to words by any one person change world opinion so much. Literally everybody was on our side until this except the most fanatical of the Islamists. Wtf was he thinking?

President Bush vowed on Sunday to "rid the world of evil-doers," then cautioned: "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while."
 
UNCMSinLS said:
Yep. We should never forget that using events like 9/11 for nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan is NEVER a good idea.
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Or using events like 9/11 to completely overreact with airline security (TSA) and intrusive programs like NSA's PRISM program.
 
ZenMode said:
Or using events like 9/11 to completely overreact with airline security (TSA) and intrusive programs like NSA's PRISM program.
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Personally I am happy that 20 year old evangenical nut job MAGA boys on my plane had to be sceened
 
mpaer said:
Personally I am happy that 20 year old evangenical nut job MAGA boys on my plane had to be sceened
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Airports had screening prior to the TSA coming into existence. It was just privately run, which means it was probably 1/3 of the price for the same quality.
 
ZenMode said:
Airports had screening prior to the TSA coming into existence. It was just privately run, which means it was probably 1/3 of the price for the same quality.
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It seems pretty apparent the screening prior to 9-11 did not work-worth a shit
 
I was in middle school. Living on a military base. Things got interesting very quickly. I remember all flights were shut down but I saw a pair of F-16s take off that night into an empty sky.
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
That event had an impact on the immediate coverage of 9/11. When the OKC bombing first happened, most attention was directed towards Islamists. The media had to backtrack quickly and I imagine that was a bit of an embarrassment.

So on 9/11, there was a hesitation to point towards the middle east. That of course was brought up as a possibility but there was a bit more hesitation to make too many assumptions.
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Edward Said (Palestinian-American scholar, passed away in 2003) speaks about the rush to pin the OKC bombing on Islamists in this video. I have tagged it to start at that section. The entire documentary (approx. 40 minutes) is excellent overall.

 
mpaer said:
It seems pretty apparent the screening prior to 9-11 did not work-worth a shit
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That's really blaming the wrong people. No, the screeners didn't catch them but you have to consider the volume they dealt with. I'll bet their criteria didn't allow the time, detail, intrusiveness or authority to do much , if any, better. The breakdown was months prior including ignoring the direct warnings about Bin Laden from the previous administration and ignoring some suspicious behavior they were alerted to. In fairness, I suspect those agencies also had a deluge of things they were alerted to.
 
rodoheel said:
But zero accountability and consistency. Cost efficiency is not the end-all, be-all.
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Keep in mind that terrorists didn't bring explosives, guns, etc onto the plane. They brought box cutters. I'm very skeptical, prior to 9/11, that a TSA-type of government airport security program would have disallowed box cutters.

Were there ever any US airline incidents prior to 9/11? I don't recall hearing about explosives or guns being used on airplanes when private airport security was used.
 
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