MSNBC is running the NBC 9/11 original coverage this morning, presumably uncut.
The thing that strikes me as most unusual is the way all of the journalists almost completely manage to cover their emotion. Katie Couric actually caught herself about to say “What the hell–” and changed it to “What the heck is going on here.” Their Pentagon correspondent was there when the plane hit, and is calmly and rationally explaining every tiny detail of what he felt when the “bomb” went off (in actuality, the plane hitting the building).
The closest we’ve gotten to emotion is the Pentagon correspondent pausing for a moment and saying, “Thank goodness that’s a helicopter going by. For a moment, I thought it was another plane.”
I didn’t see a lot of the early coverage, as I was at work that day. But the TV sets came out fairly quickly, especially after the major news sites on the internet were crushed under the weight of people at work (and around the world) looking for information.
I do remember hearing the wild rumors, such as that the Pentagon was bombed and that there were two or four more planes unaccounted for and heading for various sites. I had forgotten that a Palestinian terrorist group originally claimed credit for the attacks.
I also remember seeing the towers burning, and the fact that one tower was missing absolutely not registering in my mind. The enormity of it was unbelievable. The anchors saw the first tower fall, and have yet to understand what they saw. It took them about 20 minutes to understand that the building had collapsed.
When the second tower collapsed, Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw, and Matt Lauer were utterly calm, and the only blip of emotion comes from their correspondent at the site, who can’t find his coworker after the second tower collapses and can be heard shouting for him/her over the phone, not hearing the anchors asking him for news. Later, he apologized for sounding melodramatic as he described the aftermath of the attack and the towers’ collapse.
I am so glad I was never interested in becoming a television journalist. I could never do what they do.
Once again, I recall my cousin’s husband driving up to the WTC in the morning in time to see the first plane hit, turning around and going straight back home. My upstairs neighbor never got to work that day in the WTC, on one of the floors where none survived, because of his habit of never getting up for work on time.
I found myself unable to work beyond noon. I left. After stopping at a supermarket to buy food (I was obsessed with the idea that everything would shut down the next day and decided to stock up just in case), I headed towards Eagle Rock Park. Eagle Rock has a stunning view of Manhattan. I wanted to see with my own eyes what I’d seen on TV. But thousands of other people had the same idea, and the police detoured me around the park, so I went home.
My upstairs neighbor and many of my other neighbors were sitting on the porch steps of our apartments. We stayed outside together for a long, long time. I kept the television on most of the rest of the day, and scoured the internet for information. That’s how I discovered Charles Johnson, and Glenn Reynolds.
People have forgotten, really, what happened that day. I never believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, and I don’t believe the Bush Administration tried to sell it that way, either. But the war that started before 9/11 has not ended, and Iraq is only one of its fronts. Israel is another, and six years later, the world still refuses to acknowledge that role.
Never forget. Al Qaeda is still trying to hurt us, and Iran is working with them to harm us in any way possible. And Iran is getting closer to nuclear weapons.
We should be running this footage on all of our stations today, during prime time. People have forgotten what it was like six years ago.
I haven’t.
It took me a long time to get up the nerve to look at the changed skyline.
The war started in the 70’s. The Shah of Iran warned us about the radical clerics and their followers. He wanted to use secret police and other totalitarian techniques to arrests and kill the movement then. Jimmy Carter decided that the US could never support a person who would do that, and cut off support. This led directly to Khomeini’s takeover of the Iranian government, and the taking of the US embassy – about which Carter did absolutely nothing.
This was the first shot fired in the war of radical Islam vs. everybody else. It wasn’t until 9/11 (about 25 years later) that they scored a hit bad enough to convince the US population that maybe we should consider shooting back for a change.
Unfortunately, the attitude wore off real fast. Thanks to the DNC and a media that would rather see the US fall than say a single good word about a Republican, the public has returned to its classic mentality of “we’ll be fine if we surrender now.”, often accompanied by belief that 9/11 was all staged by Bush as part of a master plan to take over the world. (Amazing how a guy who is supposed to be dumber than a bag of hair can simultaneously be a tyrannical mastermind, isn’t it?)
Beautifully said. Thank you for eloquently describing how I and so many others feel but can’t adequately put into words. I will be passing this along today.
It’s often been written that the Civil War would have been over with in under a year if the Dems hadn’t undermined Lincoln and his Generals by holding hearings and investigations, even to the point of calling General Officers from the Battlefield to answer trumped up charges.
It’s often been speculated that if the Left hadn’t delayed the Allied response to WW2, the Holocaust would never have happened, if on the Nazis had been contained before taking over all of Europe.
It’s fairly obvious in the light of history that 10 million people died in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, brought about by American Liberals’ unwillingness to see what was obvious to everyone else – that the dominoe theory was correct. Even today, Democrats deny the “ethnic cleansings” and mass murder of anyone disagreeing with the Communists, or simply for the crime of being educated…
For Liberals, history began yesterday. For the rest of us, history repeats…
Robert
Six years ago today, I watched several friends die. Some were casual friends from college and grad school. Some were family friends. Two were in my wedding party.
Six years ago today, my wife and I were sudden babysitters of several children whose parents could not get out of their Manhattan workplaces.
Six years ago today, my mother – a Kindertransportee and a survivor of the London airblitz – explained to my panicky wife that everyone has to develop “an everyday sort of courage.”
Six years ago today, my world changed. I changed. I developed a quiet anger. And I’m still angry.
chsw
Very moving recollection from Meryl.
I’m not sure what she meant by this: “But the war that started before 9/11 has not ended, and Iraq is only one of its fronts. Israel is another, and six years later, the world still refuses to acknowledge that role.” I think she’s describing the war against violent Islamists, but it’s not clear.
And her statement that Iran is working with al-Qaeda to harm America “in any way possible” strikes me as simply false. There’s some evidence that Iran collaborted with al-Qaeda on the Khobar Towers attack and some hints that Iran turned a blind eye to al-Qaida members in Iran before and after 9/11, but that’s a far cry from being a major sponsor.
Iran sheltered Al Qaeda after they fled Afghanistan, and is still protecting them within Iran’s borders. That’s not turning a blind eye. That’s aiding and abetting.
And yes, I did mean that Israel is another front in the war against Islamists.
Oddly enough, my wife and I flew to Spain from Chicago the morning of Sept. 11 for vacation. We didn’t hear about it until we got to the hotel and the clerk asked us if we’d heard the news. He described it to us and frankly we just didn’t believe it. We thought he must have been watching a movie or something. When we got to the room we turned on the BBC and were totally stunned. “What do we do now?” we asked. Try to get home? Finally we decided to just continue with our travel plans.
A couple of days later, on an intercity bus in southern Spain, we observed a group of young Arab men looking at a newspaper article about the attacks. When they got to a particularly gruesome photo of the wreckage, they all smiled and high-fived each other. I just lost it. I stood up and started yelling at them in broken Spanish, calling them pig, dog, why don’t they try to attack me right now, etc. But apparently none of them spoke Spanish, so they just stared at me blankly.
My wife made me sit down. After a while spent trying to think of ways I could whale on these guys without going to jail, I realized I couldn’t, so I tried to calm down. We reported the incident to the police at our destination, but they acted like we were nuts.
Before we left two weeks later, opinion there was already starting to turn against us as it was obvious we weren’t just going to sit here without reacting.
The most recent comprehensive article on al-Qaeda and Iraq I’ve found is this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/09/AR2007020902294.html
The situation is murky, but it’s possible that Iran is holding some high profile al-Qaeda people under house arrest and using them as bargaining chips. Iran made what probably was a serious offer to cough them up in exchange for America turning over MEK terrorists. Yet there’s considerable confusion as to “how effectively the Iranians are controlling al-Qaeda members and whether the Tehran government is aware of the extent of al-Qaeda movements through the country.” That makes it sound like the situation in Pakistan, where the government is unwilling or unable to eliminate al-Qaida.
In any event, it’s a far cry from aiding and abetting al-Qaeda in the way that the Taliban aided and abetted al-Qaeda or the way Iran aids and abets Hizbullah. Israel really faces in Iran what Bush mistakenly thought we faced in Iraq: a hostile government with WMDs sponsoring a terrorist group. But American is not in the same boat as Israel, though that could change.