Newly published 9/11 footage [video](youtube.com) |
Newly published 9/11 footage [video](youtube.com) |
But it’s also just really weird to hear people talking so clearly the moment after it happens. It’s preserved a slightly surreal moment of shock quite well.
However, I can also see there being an element of trauma and just not wanting to revisit the footage on purpose. I know I have some pictures I never want to look at again, although nothing on this scale.
People who weren't alive or were otherwise busy that morning don't remember the uncertainty after the first plane. Everyone thought it was an accident.
No one could conceive it was a deliberate strike. Everyone knew terrorists hijacked airplanes to fly to third world countries, not to commit suicide into buildings.
That cognitive dissonance all collapsed in a single instant as the second plane hit. And that's a lot to process all at once. I still can't watch video footage without crying.
If I'd been the videographer, you'd better believe I'd have locked this in my attic and forgotten about it.
* There was nothing beautiful about the attack, obviously, but the day itself was a perfect late summer New York day with a totally cloudless sky. So you'd look in one direction and see smoke and devastation, you'd face the other direction and see nothing but pure crystalline blue skies. It was quite surreal.
It’s also surprisingly good quality too. I really was surprised at the zoom and focus on early into it. Gives me a distinct impression it was shot on what was probably quite a good portable video camera for the period.
Plenty of children and sibling’s children around to find this and convince to post it
Much like photos the U.S. soldiers took in Europe while liberating the death camps. Most of them just went into their attics until they died and their kids were cleaning out their stuff.
Whereas you all got yanked into this different awful reality that happens out of nowhere watching this extreme insane next level thing happen on live TV, it’s quite a different thing to growing up with a low level sense that it is normal that someone might want to do something bad to you purely because you live in a particular place in a particular country. I think thats what I was getting at; that my life experience would have meant that when the second one hit it was a feeling of resignation and deep sadness, because I was used to the idea that terror attacks happen. But coming literally out of the blue for you guys it must have been a different emotion, truly shocking especially given how extreme these attacks were and how they played out in full view of everyone instead of in grimy tunnels and smokey pubs like all the stuff that happened when I was a child. Because it was such a shock for Americans I was pretty scared about how you were going to react, I remember seriously discussing with friends wether we thought you would use nukes or if we were all going to end up conscripted to fight with you in some huge war to exact revenge on whoever had done it seems far fetched now but there have definitely been serious global consequences.
This whole Ukraine thing has really reminded me of the nuclear war nightmares I used to have in the 80’s as well. I feel an impending sense of doom about this also. I hope I’m wrong.
Yeah, it feels similar to reading the first Usenet threads about Chernobyl, AIDS, etc.: http://www.eightyeightynine.com/culture/80susenet.html
Caveat: some of the channel's owners seem to be conspiratorial, but the majority of the videos are unedited. You'll be surprised how specific some of the footage is.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFlhobtX9IHvXM0h1LcqaA/fea...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdfqEYITTm8
[2] https://www.youtube.com/c/WTCFOIAVideos
[3] https://www.youtube.com/c/MrKoenig1985/videos
[4] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEpgWCL0UfhN1gwxAWpAo5A/vid...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinTowersInPhotos/
The Internet Archive also has an extensive collection of televised news footage from ‑‑09‑11 and the following weeks; I'm often reminded by its prominent placement in the 'Video' section of their navbar. Ironically, both their original 9/11 web collection (assembled by the Library of Congress shortly after the event) and the related Pew reports on internet use following 9/11 are lost to time; remnants can only be found in the Wayback Machine [0]. For whatever reason, it was replaced with one apparently curated by the September 11 Museum around 2008 [1].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20011014012316/http://september1...
[1] https://www.archive-it.org/collections/1029
[a] an aside: I find the archived sites of schools (of all kinds) from the time particularly captivating. Perhaps the abridgement of time enhances their liminal nature. Or maybe it's the feeling of sincerity in guestbook messages and the personal homepages of students and staff.
The word "terrorism" has been in constant use in the media since the 1970s.
Second plane
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-structural-e...
> The four sides of each building formed a tube with window slots This tube was designed to carry the weight of the building and its contents directly downward to the foundations. The walls acted as vertical beams, wide and tall as the buildings, that bent to the side to absorb wind loads.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/wor...
> Prior to the construction of the Twin Towers, skyscrapers were designed to support themselves through large internal columns spaced about 30 feet (9 meters) apart, which interrupted the flow of interior space. For this project however, the engineers came up with a different solution -- the exterior walls themselves would support the bulk of the structure, and they would get a boost from one single column of beams in the center.
Make a big hole in the primary support structure and things go badly.
(And before parroting the "jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams" thing as a follow-up, watch this excellent and short video from a blacksmith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA)
The attack? No
So I'll say this: if you believe AI is advanced, then in 2022 it's not possible to take this video for granted and you have to take into account that all evidence surfacing from now may be deepfakes. I'm not saying they are: I'm saying you have to keep that in mind.
I was in seventh grade when all this went down. It was around the time that they first started putting TVs in classrooms. The teacher flipped the channel to the news when it was announced that an accident occurred and a plane flew into the WTC. Then they kept coming live on TV. In subsequent days I listened to final phone calls between people and their families. The internet was so congested I could barely use it, and a huge part of that was because of services provided out of the WTC.
It is well documented through declassified documents that were written two decades ago that these were Saudi nationals who had moved to America under the guise of learning to fly. They were aided by Al Qaeda and "happenstance" Saudi officials. Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi national, the leader, and one of the founding members of Al Qaeda.
These are barebone facts. Please do not encourage further mythology around 9/11 - the kind of Loose Change-esque rhetoric that is obviously designed more for entertainment than actual productivity. 9/11 happened, everyone saw it, and a new angle isn't anything groundbreaking, therefore there's zero reason to fake it. It won't change our relationship with the Saudis, it won't bring us back into war, etc
FYI, I attended an elementary school that had TVs in all the classrooms back in 1970.
So, given all that and most of those millions of people probably never seeing anything more detailed than Loose Change they have lost all trust in government. This is one of the core elements of our modern day populist uprising.
I had not even been aware of some of the sound explanations I have heard in this thread today. I watched the towers fall live, I watched the hideous war drumming and lying to start the Iraq war, live. In those days (I was 25) as someone who meticulously kept up with all open source material on world events previous, during, and after, I lost any and all faith in government.
Since then, the opioid epidemic has been exposed and was something I lived through as well...all of it. I lost my dad, brother, closest uncle, and my cousin (brother-cuz) to that fucking nightmare.
I know my experience is the tip of the ice berg. I'm smart and I can feel my way through misinformation but it is still tuff to do. I think people greatly misunderstand the impact of these events and how they are still lighting fires to this very day.
It ain't over.
Terrorism wasn't a new experience to us New Yorkers - we had experienced the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.[1] That truck bomb under the building didn't succeed in taking down the towers, but it caused major damage and disruption, killed six people and injured over a thousand.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...
I really don't see how it could have been a hoax. Computer art and animation was my thing at the time, and I'm pretty sure I would have noticed a fake. 20 years ago, computer animation was pretty good, but it was a rare few who could make truly realistic renders and composit them into recorded video. Not that guy, for sure.
I took the "again" to mean they've seen it atleast once.
One of the things I also remember from this time period was about why 9/11 happened even though some individual agencies had bits of information. It was discovered these agencies didn't share information so as to protect it. FISA and The Dept of Homeland Security are direct reflections of their own internal criticism.
I was raised never to trust the government. I served in Afghanistan under two different presidents and I definitely get what it's like to witness lies and misinformation spewed across TV stations while your reality on the ground is very different. These days I have a healthy distrust for government still, however, I expect to see reports and trajectories change when those institutions mess things up. This is what composes "trust" for me now. That's the best I feel that I can expect from any large bureaucratic organization government or otherwise.
Those schematics of the WMD-factory-trucks that I remember seeing on TV and the assertion that saddam had a bunch of them churning out WMDs sure seem a hell of a lot like lies. Maybe someone can explain to me how they weren't.
> I was raised never to trust the government. I served in Afghanistan under two different presidents
These two statements would seem to contradict each other.
Those pictures come from somewhere and I believe the Wikipedia article touches on it. The Intel community testified that while this intelligence was provided, it wasn't necessarily an indicator that they were being produced.
> I was raised never to trust the government. I served in Afghanistan under two different presidents
2008/9 was an economic crisis and I lost the job that allowed me to pay for college. I did what paid the bills and what allowed me to live a life with credit defaults.
If the intel community didn't say that saddam had those trucks, then Colin Powell must have lied when he presented those schematics to the UN as something that saddam totally had... right?
> I did what paid the bills and what allowed me to live a life with credit defaults.
Makes sense, I understand and apologise for my snark. That must have sucked :)
Is this a “critical infrastructure” thing?
Watching it happen live with the immediate knowledge that it was obviously a deliberate act was, like you said, a huge amount to process all at once.
I actually think that having a goal like "get dressed and go to work" probably was a great benefit to my mental state.
I turned on the TV to see what was going on, which I usually don’t do. After a couple minutes of “oh my that’s a tragic accident” the second plane hit an I immediately knew it was no accident.
I worked downtown Mpls at the time and no way I was going to work that day. Thankfully my boss told everyone to stay home.
Seeing all of it live is a memory burned into my brain the same as watching the Challenger blow up live in middle school.
I still think back to that day and have some guilt about our initial reaction to the first flight. Given how instantly news propagates today I assumed that back then we knew the details already and just made light of the suffering. I moved to NYC right after college and recall those early years in the city where everyone knew every little detail of the day. Your recollection assuages some of the guilt I harbor from that day.
I know others have been downvoted for saying this, but for me the shocking nature of it took a while to sink in. I had not had a chance to travel much yet at that point. I had been to New York City once, just like I had been to Europe once and seen London and Paris and Rome. I came from a small town in Texas and had a habit of thinking of all of those places as the "real world" where big real things happened, places that had diplomats and stock exchanges and famous universities and celebrities and, well, terrorist attacks. The 9/11 attacks didn't violate that sense of order. On a gut, emotional level, it was just a real world type thing happening in a real world type place. It took me a while to understand why people were reacting so differently.
We watched as the second plane ran right into the tower. At that moment we started realizing that it was intentional. But even then, the uncertainty about who would do that to us and why, was really worse than before.
This event really changed my entire life. Prior to this I had plans to finish my automotive tech trade school program. Within the next few days watching the footage of people leaping to their deaths in preference to burning alive, and as more and more information trickled in about who was responsible for the attack, I decided I needed to join the military to help ensure that nothing like this ever happened again. My life would have played out a whole lot differently if not for this.
Though people were far less concerned about it than now, it's not fair to say it wasn't on their radar at all. The WTC had already been attacked once, and Timothy McVeigh was executed for the Oklahoma City Bombing only a few months before 9/11.
Even on the day, in that twenty minute window between crashes the general narrative was it might be an attack, just no reason to think it is yet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon#11_September_2001...
https://www.archives.gov/files/isoo/training/training-reason...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
I was there (at the time, in front of my TV I mean) and I clearly remember the first witnesses being interviewed by reporters: as soon as a witness would say something not fitting the official narrative, it would never be aired again. For example regarding the pentagon one eye-witness said he saw something like a big missile on which wings had been strapped. I saw that on TV. I clearly remember it. Now I'm not saying it's not a Boeing that hit the Pentagon: what I'm saying is that it's very weird that all these ramblings from these drunkards mistaking, say, a Boeing with a "missile with wings strapped on it" were basically aired once then erased. I'm pretty sure that guy was both drunk and of course because the plane was going fast, the mistake was made in honest faith (you, too, would certainly mistake a Boeing for a missile with wings strapped on it).
Same thing with people saying they heard explosions in the WTC: as soon as they'd mention that, they'd be cut off by reporters and these people would never be interviewed again and their account never aired again (FWIW I don't believe in a controlled demolition but I do believe in narrative manipulation).
After these oddities of course we all know totally normal things then happened: for example IIRC one the rare flight that was allowed to happen when no plane were flying in the US was a flight evacuating members of the Bin Laden family.
And then the wars that followed. Made perfect sense. No fabricated evidence. Guantanamo and the like: all perfectly cromulent.
When you take all this, honestly that we don't have any footage of that impact just seems on par for the course.
I don't know what Bin Laden flights, Guantanamo, or the following wars have to do with the pentagon on 9/11 or footage of it. Honestly, I don't know what point you're trying to make.
It's more of a case of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
There are plenty of places on the internet where wild claims without a shred of evidence are tolerated and even encouraged. HN is not one of those.
However I really hope people move toward skepticism (even of the official narratives) because I fear the effects of censorship more than I do the disinformation. Conspiracy crap has been around a long time and most of those people were considered crackpots, but since the major ramp up in effort that started about 6 years ago, the conspiracy stuff has exploded and is absolutely everywhere now. I think it's because the censorship (in some cases for clearly political reasons) actually makes the conspiracy theories seem more credible, because if they were wrong why would anybody waste effort trying to fight it? (I'm not arguing that's solid reasoning, only that it seems a reasonable argument to most people). Once you can't trust that most people operate in good faith, you have to question everybody's motives with extreme skepticism. Combine that with human nature to look for patterns/explanations in everything and you get a mess.