(Image source.)I guess I thought they were all gone, those types of monsters, stranded on reels of black and white film.—Cara Ellison (blog no longer available), in a 2007 post about 9/11/01.
Bookworm: “My life is divided into two parts: Before September 11, 2001 and after September 11, 2001.”
Simply evil: Christopher Hitchens suggests that sometimes the simple and obvious explanation for an event is more accurate than an explanation which relies on an elaborate structure of “nuance”
An attack, not a disaster or a tragedy. George Savage explains why the persistent use of terms like “tragedy” by the media acts to obfuscate the true nature of the 9/11 attacks. Much more on this from Mark Steyn
Claire Berlinski was in Paris on 9/11. Shortly thereafter she wrote this piece for City Journal
Marc Sasseville and Heather Penney were F-16 pilots with an Air National Guard squadron. Their order was to bring down Flight 93 before the terrorists in control of it could create another disaster on the scale of the World Trade Center…but their aircraft were configured for training, with no live ammunition and no missiles. A video interview with Major Penney here
Joseph Fouché writes about how the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, and the murder of Ahmed Shah Masood on September 9 of that year, prefigured the 9/11 attacks.
The Diplomad posts a speech he gave on 9/14/01, when he was charge d’affaires at a U.S. embassy. You will not hear speeches like that being given by diplomats under the administration of Barack Obama.
On September 11, 2005, Rare Kate didn’t go to church. Follow the link to find out why. In my original post linking this, I said “What if American and British religious leaders had responded the depradations of Naziism in the spirit of this liturgy? Actually, some of them did. The impact on preparedness was certainly malign, and the people who took such positions certainly bear a share of moral resposibility for the deaths and devastation that took place. Ditto for those who are behaving in a similar way today.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an important leader of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany (executed in 1945), wrote the following:
Today there are once more saints and villains. Instead of the uniform grayness of the rainy day, we have the black storm cloud and the brilliant lightning flash. Outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Shakespeare’s characters walk among us. The villain and the saint emerge from primeval depths and by their appearannce they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had never dreamed.
The refusal on the part of many individuals to face the seriousness of the radical Islamist threat to out civilization stems in significant part, I feel certain, from a desire to avoid the uncomfortable and even dangerous kind of clarity that Bonhoeffer was talking about.
In previous posts I’ve introduced the metaphor of the attrition mill–a machine in which two steel disks, rotating at high speed in opposite directions, crush between them the grain or other substance to be milled. Our society is caught in a gigantic attrition mill, with one disk being the Islamic terrorist enemy and the other being the “progressive” Left within our own societies–some of whom are wishful thinkers who deny uncomfortable realities, an alarming number of whom forthrightly despise their own societies and the majority of their fellow citizens. Without the existence of the second disk, the terrorist threat would be serious, inconvenient, and dangerous, but would not be an existential threat to Western civilization. But it is the interaction of the two disks, despite the differences in their stated philosophies of life, that increases the societal threat by orders of magnitude.
Many more links at my 9/11/2010 post
This year, we must remember not only the atrocity that took place on 9/11/01–and the many acts of heroism that followed in its wake–but also the murders that took place in Benghazi on 9/11/12, and the actions of weakness, incompetence, dishonesty, and malice that have surrounded them. Specifically, we should remember that the responsible executive, Hillary Clinton, failed to provide adequate security for the embassy, and then denied responsibility on grounds that she had not personally seen the cables that had been sent by embassy staff and the responses that had been sent out in her name. We should remember that the Obama administration–including, specifically, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice–systematically denied that the attack had anything to do with pre-planned terrorism and instead to blame it on an American citizen who had been exercising–however tackily–his free speech rights. We should remember that the Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama, failed to provide effective leadership in sending assistance to the embassy staff under attack. We should be aware that the Obama administration continues to stonewall on providing comprehensive information to Congress about the events of that day, and that it has attempted to intimidate officials who have shown a willingness to share information with the people’s elected representatives.
The Benghazi debacle reminds me of something in the memoirs of General Edward Spears, who was Churchill’s emissary to France in 1940. There was a disturbing amount of defeatism, and in some cases actual sympathy with the Nazi enemy, among certain government officials and other French elites. Weygand’s friend Henri de Kerillis, a Deputy and newpaper editor, had been consistently pressing Prime Minister Daladier to investigate some sinister behavior by members of the extreme Right.
“Il faut de’brider l’abces,” he had said time and time again to the Premier. He had done so again lately and received this strange answer: I have done exactly what you urged, I have opened the abscess, but it was so deep the scalpel disappeared down it, and had I gone on, my arm would have followed.” This was really very frightening, and I said so. “You cannot be more frightened than I am,” said Kerillis.
I feel sure that we are going to find that the abscess revealed by the Obama administration’s behavior re Benghazi goes very deep indeed.
Monica Crowley digs up an article written on September 19, 2001, by an Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama…and analyzes what it tells us about this man’s worldview and lack of intellectual depth.
Enid and Geraint…a poem written by Grim on 9/11/2001
Three Days in September, by Sarah Hoyt
A time bomb from the Middle Ages. Roger Simon explains how 9/11 altered his worldview and many of his relationships
Thanks, David.
David, you might appreciate this – The mathematics of vengeance.
A great book on 9/11 from ATC’s perspective is Touching History by Lynn Spencer – it is chilling and you get the idea that but for the quick thinking of some UAL pilots in Newark there would have been another plane in the air.
http://www.amazon.com/Touching-History-Untold-Unfolded-America/dp/1416559264
“The refusal on the part of many individuals to face the seriousness of the radical Islamist threat….”
hmmmm.
The refusal on the part of many individuals to face the seriousness of the Islamist threat.
tifify.
No qualifiers. Islam is Islam.
Your masters did 9/11 for reasons which are now obvious. WTC 7 pretty well proves the plot as buildings don’t just collapse.
The aftermath allowed control only dreamed of before. Iraq was always a goal and you went there. Pretty well all the crap since is echos of that event. You are by far the biggest cause of human misery on the planet.
Yup, most everyone hates you and wants you gone. Surprised by this?
Apparently, “everyone” also hates Britain. “Everyone” also hates France. “Everyone” also hates Spain. “Everyone” also hates India. “Everyone” also hates Kenya. Need I go on?
If by “everyone” you mean you, we already knew that. 9/11 trutherism? Say no more.
And thanks for spewing out your hate on 9/11. Classy.
“most everyone hates you and wants you gone”
You do, we know. I wonder if terminal envy is also your motivation. This is a rather inappropriate day to express your nastiness here.
My friends in Britain did not recall the significance of the day. This is the weekend of the Goodwood “revival” classic car races. They have other house guests besides us but we leave for Belgium tomorrow. Lovely small city here of Chichester. The Revival is a few miles from the city at the Goodwood estate. Huge traffic jams today. There are about 25,000 who attend, One of the house guests is an artist who does etchings of classic cars and sells them at the event. We had a long discussion of how to make etchings last evening at supper.
Lovely day today but it looks like we may get rain tonight.
Same country, same people.
New heroes over last 14 years.
Let’s consider earning it by keeping it, and we’ll have to do it the hard way just like they did.
Buildings 7 burned all day because firefighting efforts were understandably interrupted when the main towers fell. Unfortunately, some buildings do fall when they burn all day and have debris from taller adjacent buildings rain down on them. The World Trade Center buildings were built with the framed tube system, innovative for its day with the floors supported by their steel exoskeleton instead of the core, but their “lighter, roomier, less expensive construction” turned out to be not so sturdy under attack.
Bluntly, we are losing the war on terror.
One tiny example- years ago the TV show South Park casually used Mohamed as a character in one of their episodes. A few seasons later, the network forbid them from doing, fearing attacks by you-know.
This is what defeat looks like, folks. We have expended trillions of dollars and thousands of lives supposedly fighting the war on terror, yet we are no safer and have much less freedom than we did before the attack. Muslims considering terrorism have been sent no signal that that terrorism will not succeed, nor do they risk having their families killed or their nations destroyed as a consequence.
We are not so lucky. Every American- from unborn babies to elderly pensioners- is at risk of death by terrorism, either from home-grown members of the religion of peace(tm), members who walk across the open border, or simply by attack from Muslim nations.
When those attacks occur, which they often do, the reaction from the ruling class of essentially every Western nation is to fervently condemn those who notice the connection between the religion and the terrorism. Not only that, the people of the West are being forced, thanks to the welfare state, to support the Muslims who are bit by bit ethnically cleansing them out of their own countries.
This isn’t go to end well, as the saying goes, but it will end, one way or another.
(Direct copy-and-paste of a comment I made at ricochet.com, but it seems relevant here too.)
“Your masters did 9/11 for reasons which are now obvious. WTC 7 pretty well proves the plot as buildings don’t just collapse.
The aftermath allowed control only dreamed of before. Iraq was always a goal and you went there. Pretty well all the crap since is echos of that event. You are by far the biggest cause of human misery on the planet.
Yup, most everyone hates you and wants you gone. Surprised by this?”
My God.
Thankfully, I’m still not Pengun.
Hey Pengun?
I’d try to engage you in a battle of wits, but it would be pointless, since you are witless.
So here’s a shorter response. Fuck you.
At the risk of “wasting my time and annoying the pig”, I do think the appallingly stupid and blinkered ignorance of the likes of Pengun needs to be confronted, because the failure to confront such loathsome enemies of civilization is a big reason we stand at the precipice that we all recognize for what it is.
So could list the litany of scientific debunks of the conspiracy crap; the detailed analysis by Controlled Demolition, Inc of Maryland, the global leader in large-scale building demolition; the fact that if you watch the videos themselves, you can see certain floors of the WTC stand out, “lines” on the building, if you will, and you can see those lines remain entirely static until the collapse gets to them….. meaning that any explosions that were “set off” had to be located exactly where the planes hit, and nowhere else (of course, those perfectly placed charges and triggers remained entirely unaffected by the crash of an airliner directly into their location, sure…) Ah yes, on and on.
But I’ll just point out that the brilliant structural engineer and architect Ms. Rosie O’Donnell helplfully told us that “fire cannot melt steel”, much as our friend Pengun here does. This on ‘The View’ in Spring of 2007.
One month later (approx) —
A heavily traveled section of freeway that funnels traffic off the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed early Sunday after a gasoline tanker truck overturned and erupted into flames, authorities said.
Flames shot 200 feet in the air and the heat was intense enough to melt part of the freeway and cause the collapse, but the truck’s driver walked away from the scene with second-degree burns. No other injuries were reported.
The tanker carrying 8,600 gallons of gasoline ignited around 3:45 a.m. after crashing into a pylon on the interchange, which connects westbound lanes of Interstate 80 to southbound I-880, on the edge of downtown Oakland about half a mile from the Bay Bridge’s toll plaza.
The fire melted a second interchange from eastbound I-80 to eastbound I-580 located above the first interchange, causing a 250-yard section of the roadway to collapse onto the roadway below, according to the highway patrol.
Witnesses reported flames from the blaze reached up to 200 feet high.
Super geniuses all. We are all SO impressed.
Comments by the lead structural engineer of the World Trade Center. Excerpts:
“The events of September 11 ended the lives of almost 2,900 people, many of them snuffed out by the collapse of structures designed by me. The damage created by the impact of the aircraft was followed by raging fires, which were enormously enhanced by the fuel aboard the aircraft. The temperatures above the impact zones must have been unimaginable; none of us will ever forget the sight of those who took destiny into their own hands by leaping into space.”
and
“Thoughts of the thousands who lost their lives as my structures crashed down upon them come to me at night, rousing me from sleep, and interrupting my thoughts at unexpected times throughout the day. Those who were trapped above the impact floors, those who endured the intense heat only to be crushed by falling structure, are merged with those who chose to take control of their own destinies by leaping from the towers.”
https://www.nae.edu/Publications/Bridge/EngineeringandHomelandSecurity/ReflectionsontheWorldTradeCenter.aspx
David – Thanks much for putting up this post today. I particularly like the Crowley column, which I don’t recall seeing before. And now I suppose I will have to see if I can find a copy of that entire Obama column.
(I just recycled a post showing a 9/11 “jumper”, one of those pictures taht our newspapers don’t like to show us any more.)
Off to bed in Chichester after a scintillating dinner conversation with a number f people who are experts in various fields. My dinner companion’s grandfather was chief of aeronautical engineering at MIT (he is half American) whose sign was the first airplane to cross the Atlantic in 1919. It was the NC -4, built by Glenn Curtiss.
His grandfather’s name was Hunsaker and he is married to our host’s sister.
The conversation went from airplanes and war to psychiatry with a well known British psychiatrist whose book is about marijuana in medical use.
Off to Belgium tomorrow. I have no interest in considering anything that Pengun has to say.
Many of the 9/11 jumpers hit, not the street, but the plastic canopy outside the WTC lobby. The movie that was being made by the French cameraman showed many hitting the canopy and the loud crash the bodies made,
Mike – I had heard somewhere that the priest who was killed was hit by a falling body
David – when the WTC was built the use of asbestos was outlawed – it was suggested that this was a primary factor for the collapse
I actually read the 9/11 Commission Report. It was good, I recommend it. The number of dropped leads is astounding.
Official One World Trade Center Time-Lapse 2004-2013: https://youtu.be/Nn11DWH_LEA
World Trade Center elevator video: https://youtu.be/cKTPaqbXrAY
One World Observatory at One World Trade Center: https://youtu.be/I_4lqF6j058
>>I have no interest in considering anything that Pengun has to say.
:-P I skip over his comments. I can’t believe anybody even engages that vile idiot. I don’t even think he’s sane.
Thanks so much for this. And the Crowley piece was especially interesting. I know that listening to the phone-ins to NPR (I don’t remember if it was that day or a following day) made me not want to listen to NPR again. Their viewers had Obama’s take – and eight years later they became Obama’s voters. The mill is a sad but helpful image – but if they are going in different ways (one perhaps toward the pre-historical and the other into post-modernism) they share a lack of respect for the human and a real choice of death.
The Mongols had the right idea when they destroyed the Assassins. Someday the other sects of Islam will be treated the same.
The event itself had a profound effect on me, as I was in visual range of it, and saw many of the shocked survivors afterward. Later, I saw a amateur video shot by an acquaintance who lived nearby. (Nothing like the “official” videos) It all terrified me, as it should any sane person. But, what really got to me, and has had a lasting effect, was the almost instantaneous cries of ‘we had it coming”, “blowback” etc. The sheer callousness and indifference was/is astounding. I began to (and continue)to reflect about who I was and where I had been. It still stuns me to hear these things, and is a reminder of what we are dealing with.
“Iraq was always a goal and you went there.”
Indeed, enforcing Iraq’s compliance with the UNSCR 660-series resolutions was a principal US policy since 1990-91. Unfortunately, Saddam steadfastly refused to comply, which triggered the Gulf War, then Operation Desert Fox, then Operation Iraqi Freedom. The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was made when Iraq failed Saddam’s “final opportunity to comply” (UNSCR 1441).
See explanation of the law and policy, fact basis for Operation Iraqi Freedom.