It's Never 10 Years.

[Arch-Mage Solberg]

Tomorrow we observe the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks. It's kind of hard to believe that it's been 10 years. So much has happened.

 

I remember that day vividly. I was six months in the Navy and stationed in Norfolk, VA on my last days there before I took a plane to Groton, CT.

I was on barracks cleaning detail and I was outside smoking a cigarrete. All of the sudden the First Sergeant (I can't remember his name) came out and told me and two other guys smoking to come in to the REC room. When I asked him why he told me that a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. I and the two other guys went to the room and found it packed with other guys watching the news.

We were watching and discussing what we were seeing. I was about to leave the room and use the payphones outside the door (to call my parents to see if they were watching the news) when one of the guys hollered out "Is that another plane?". I turned back towards the TV in time to see the plane make its final turn into the other tower and hit it. That's when pandemonium hit the room big time. Earlier we were discussing accidents of planes hitting buildings, but what we (and everyone else watching) saw was a deliberate turning to hit the tower. Now we were discussing terrorism. Oddly enough, the first name to pop up was Osama Bin Laden. He had killed 17 sailors on the USS Cole not even a year earlier.

I then made my call to my parents. They had been watching the news and saw everything that I did. I told them that I loved them and that I would talk to them later. When I got back in the room, the newscasters were just then talking about another plane hitting the Pentagon. A few of us started discussing other possible targets that the planes might hit. They seemed to hit tall buildings and important military centers. We mentioned places like the White House, Sears Tower, Statue of Liberty, the San Francisco Bridge, and a few others. Luckily, none of those or any other buildings were hit. Later, they mentioned another plane that the passengers struggled with the hijackers. The plane crashed somewhere in southern PA.

I (like many other people) was glued to the TV for the next few days.

 

HONOR THE FALLEN 3,056!

 

Post #608

[Cairo Jim]

Yeah I can remember the day too. I was only 12 at the time, and about 2 minutes before heading to school, there was a big "America under attack" headline, and both me and mum were wondering what was going on. The majority of the school day was spent listening to the radio to try and find out what was going on.

[Callie]

I was in fourth grade when it happened. I had to be up at around 5:30 AM Pacific for the bus, but we never watched the news in the morning. When I got to school our teacher explained what happened. She didn't explain it very well though, and at first I thought it was a mere accident involving a small plane. It wasn't until frantic parents came to pick their kids up that I fully understood the situation. Looking back, it feels odd thinking that was probably the most significant event to occur in my lifetime.

 

I remember those flags they circulated in the papers, and people put them in their windows. I would imagine they'll be worth money someday.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Excalibur

I remember those flags they circulated in the papers, and people put them in their windows. I would imagine they'll be worth money someday.

I remember those too. I was in 9th grade sitting in health class when I first heard the news. A teacher came in and briefly spoke to the health teacher who then made the announcement that the towers and the Pentagon had been hit. For the next few periods, there was rampant speculation about what happened. The last couple periods were spent watching the news reports. When I got off school, I walked over to my father's law office where I had an after school job. The secretary had the conference room TV moved out into the reception area, and we sat and watched the reports. That was when I first heard about the plan that went down in western PA. I was concerned because my sister was attending college at IUP, and the first reports just said "western PA." I remember that the nonstop news coverage continued for days, and that Dan Rather and Peter Jennings were looking extremely tired after a while.

[Trenton.]

I was 3 back then, I didnt remember a single detail about it. Thank heavens too. I wouldn't want to see something as horrible as that. All those people killed...

[Harehunter]

I was at work when it happened. Our internet bandwidth was saturated with people watching on the internet. No one could get any work done, but how could anyone work with this going on. I never forget the tears on the face of our resident yankee from New Jersey.

 

And then to be reminded of the earlier attack by Al Qaeda when Clinton was in office.

[A less presumptuous name.]

I was in second grade. My teacher was the only in the school not to turn on the news, so I didn't find out until my mom was walking me home. I don't think I fully grasped what happened until I saw video some time later.

 

It's scary to think that both of my sisters younger than 9/11.

[Trenton.]

Somebody said *someone in power,like the mayor of newyork* said that they couldn't help anyone above the fire. People below it they could, but the people above the impact were waving white stuff like flags in a "HELP US!" sort of way.

 

Im watching a show right now. The horror, Atleast 200 people jumped out of the buildings, you could hear the SPLAT when they came down. They wanted a painless death instead of burning to death.

[Dantius]

I, for one, never bought into the whole 9/11 mania. It's the best example in recent history of how irrational fear triumphed over logic and rationality, and it resulted in an incredibly disproportionate response that caused more damage and created a greater potential for harm to America than the event itself ever could.

 

One of the best skeptical essays ever was written about that on the first anniversary of the attack, and it deserves to be read again on the 10th.

[Aoslare]

Also, this.

[Sudanna]

I don't remember it at all, having been seven at the time. Never cared about it very much.

[ĐªгŦĦ Єяŋϊε]

well i was 18 and it was a frightening time, being that my father worked in manhatten and unreachable for a while.

turns out he was completely safe the whole time but the phone circuits were overloaded and he couldn't call out

[Callie]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

I, for one, never bought into the whole 9/11 mania. It's the best example in recent history of how irrational fear triumphed over logic and rationality, and it resulted in an incredibly disproportionate response that caused more damage and created a greater potential for harm to America than the event itself ever could.

What can you say, Americans are gullible.

To be fair to myself, I was eight years old, so exploding skyscrapers seemed like the worst thing you think of.

[Student of Trinity]

I was at a university with really fast internet at the time, so I watched online. Not continuously. The towers burned for quite some time before they fell, and there was nothing much to see for most of that time. So after the initial news flash, and a few loops of the impact films, we mostly went back to work, and just kept an ear cocked for news from the couple of guys who stayed watching.

 

I was 34 in 2001, but I had read about the 'Twin Towers' when I was eight or so, in a Reader's Digest story about the guy who shot a tightrope between them and walked across it. After that I never thought much about the WTC towers, of course, but insofar as I ever did, I liked them and thought they were cool.

 

I remember a strong feeling of dismay and disbelief when someone shouted out that one of the towers had actually collapsed. I really didn't think that could happen, and I really didn't want it to be true. I hadn't yet focused on the fact that this meant that a lot more people had died. It was just the eight-year-old in me, unwilling to accept that my cool building was gone.

 

(Unfortunately, it is not superfluous to add that I do not now doubt that the towers collapsed due to damage from the airliner impacts and the fires they started. My belief that this couldn't have happened was eight-year-old thinking, not expertise.)

[Alorael at Large]

And there was a cost beyond lives immediately lost and damage done.

 

—Alorael, who had family in the WTC on 9/11. He couldn't reach anyone for a day, and then when he did they were still missing. And then in the coverage he saw a picture of his uncle stumbling out of the rubble. Only afterwards was his uncle reunited with his family and able to say that he wasn't dead.

[nikki.]

I was 13, almost 14, and I was doing a puzzle and helping prepare for a party for my brother's birthday. There was cake.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

I was 15, going to high school in northern Virginia, several miles from the Pentagon. It was a pretty jarring experience; I didn't hear the initial plane crash, but I heard the sound of fighter planes later on, and saw the smoke from the Pentagon for most of my drive home. I didn't have any friends and family in the WTC or the Pentagon, but many people at my school did.

 

I'm basically in agreement with Dantius on this: even by the most conservative estimates, the body count* from the Iraq War dwarfs that of 9/11, and that's not considering Afghanistan, or the subtler tolls, like the Patriot Act's various suspensions of civil liberties. Whether or not it was the result of deliberate malice, America's foreign policy following the 9/11 attacks did a tremendous, untenable amount of harm. At the same time, I think I can see why many people reacted the way they did. I considered and consider myself pretty liberal, but I was still eating from Bush's hand pretty much until it became apparent that he was going to use 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq (so...probably early 2002). Even the faculty at my school, who were almost all center- to far-left, and adults rather than teens, were pretty much taken in. This doesn't excuse our country's actions, but I have a lot of sympathy for those whose fear led them to write Bush et al a blank check on the matter.

 

*Somewhere in the range of 200,000 to 1.5 million, depending on the group reporting.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: dead wiring

And there was a cost beyond lives immediately lost and damage done.

incidentally, if you value a human life at ten million US dollars (which is about the standard valuation in cost-benefit analyses), this means that the overall financial cost was about 100 times worse than the immediate cost in lives

[Aoslare]

Keep in mind that many of the foreign policy shifts that occured after 9/11 were spearheaded by people who clearly wanted to see those things happen before 9/11, even if their stated reasons were different. (i.e., mostly neocons)

[Goldengirl]

I remember that I was eating breakfast before school had started, when my father got off the phone and flipped on the news. I saw the first tower smoking, and thought, "Oh my god, what a terrible accident."

 

Then the second tower got hit, and it clicked for everyone that this wasn't an accident, it was an orchestrated attack. After some deliberation, my father sent me to school, where everyone was bristling to talk about it. However, the administration didn't let anyone watch the news or discuss what was happening, presumably to avoid stirring a panic, so our conversations were left to whispers and scrawled notes.

 

It's been a long ten years.

[Harehunter]

Originally Posted By: New and Old Media

And there was a cost beyond lives immediately lost and damage done.

—Alorael, who had family in the WTC on 9/11. He couldn't reach anyone for a day, and then when he did they were still missing. And then in the coverage he saw a picture of his uncle stumbling out of the rubble. Only afterwards was his uncle reunited with his family and able to say that he wasn't dead.

Interesting article. In a sense, the terrorists have already won. The resources spent on preventing a future attack, both at home and abroad, could have been put to much better use. But when an ideological band of thugs declares war on a nation, it becomes sadly unavoidable. It is a shame too that it has fomented distrust of a religious sect that has been hijacked by a miniscule segment of that religion. Fundamentalism, regardless of its origin, is an illegitimate subversion of that religion, and needs to be stamped out.
I also agree with the last part of that article. There was no need to go into Iraq, and even less need to depose Gaddafi. It was shown very clearly that containment was more than sufficient. The cost of regime change is far too high. George H.W. Bush realized this in the first Gulf War. His son should have paid attention to that wisdom.

[Karoka]

Hold on, how did the WTC fall? Wasn't it built to withstand hits like that or something?

[keira]

I'm given to understand that the fire from the jet fuel and whatnot literally caught the iron support structures on fire.

[Trenton.]

Yes it was, but it was nothing compared to what happened on 9/11. It was designed to stand even when It looks like it was about to fall. However, the passenger planes hit just above the heart of each of these towers. Its not every day a plane crashes into a building like that, and You have to take it into consideration that a passenger plane is like 3 houses long. The power it put into the tower. Plus while the flames did major damage, the planes took down the tower internally from the inside. The major supports inside the buildings were recked, therefore allowing it to fall.

 

EDIT: one-sentence sniped by PDN

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

Fundamentalism, regardless of its origin, is an illegitimate subversion of that religion, and needs to be stamped out.

How do you define fundamentalism?

Regardless this makes it sounds like you only support freedom of religion to a certain degree. Am I hearing you right?

[keira]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

Regardless this makes it sounds like you only support freedom of religion to a certain degree.

Freedom of religion is all good and nice, but when these little 'sects' (?) go and start killing people, a line has been crossed. You can't use your rights to infringe upon other people's rights.

[Trenton.]

Thats what the Al Qaeda did.

[Callie]

The Twin Towers were structurally sound buildings, but you usually don't take impacts from aircraft into consideration when designing a building.

 

Or maybe I'm overlooking something...

[Sullust]

Originally Posted By: Sylae

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

Regardless this makes it sounds like you only support freedom of religion to a certain degree.

Freedom of religion is all good and nice, but when these little 'sects' (?) go and start killing people, a line has been crossed. You can't use your rights to infringe upon other people's rights.

I only want to touch upon this to make a point; but maybe that's how they feel about abortions. Please lets not turn this into a pro-choice, pro-life debate though.

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Sylae

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

Regardless this makes it sounds like you only support freedom of religion to a certain degree.

Freedom of religion is all good and nice, but when these little 'sects' (?) go and start killing people, a line has been crossed. You can't use your rights to infringe upon other people's rights.

If you look at what I was quoting, you'll see that Harehunter was advocating the "stamping out" of all fundamentalism. That's not the same thing as advocating the stamping out of religions that incite violence.

[Harehunter]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

Fundamentalism, regardless of its origin, is an illegitimate subversion of that religion, and needs to be stamped out.

How do you define fundamentalism?

Regardless this makes it sounds like you only support freedom of religion to a certain degree. Am I hearing you right?

Fundamentalism, as least as I mean in this context, is the ideology that holds that if you don't believe as they do, then it justifies to them to cause you harm in some way, physically, financially, or by denying you liberty.

Yes I do condemn fundamentalism regardless of its stripe.

My freedom of religion ends where it threatens your life or limb. My display of a religious symbol neither threatens that nor does it compel you to convert to my religion. You continue to retain your right to believe, or not, as you choose.

Just as we all have the freedom of speech, we also have the right to ignore such speech. Does it offend me to see people burning the flag of my nation? Then it is my right to walk away and not observe such things.

Does the content on today's TV shows offend you? Change the channel. There is no compulsion to watch it.

But when my speech could reasonably cause you harm, such as the proverbial crying out "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, there my freedom ends and yours begins.

The limit of any freedom is where it violates the freedom of another.

[Trenton.]

Im telling you Exalibur, the building was too damaged on the inside. The structure supports were weakend and they finnaly fell

[ĐªгŦĦ Єяŋϊε]

the good old....

"your right to swing your fist ends when it connects with my nose"

[Karoka]

Originally Posted By: Sylae

I'm given to understand that the fire from the jet fuel and whatnot literally caught the iron support structures on fire.

I find that a little absurd. Doesn't jet fuel burn up to like 600 degrees or something? I thought iron's melting point is way higher than that. And then it would have to cool down because the windows are "open", and a perfect amount of oxygen is questionable.

Originally Posted By: Trenton

Its not every day a plane crashes into a building like that, and You have to take it into consideration that a passenger plane is like 3 houses long. The power it put into the tower

According to a WTC architect manager guy,

[Ceiling Durkheim]

I think the issue here was with the wording "needs to be stamped out." While I agree that members of terrorist groups that murder people ought to be imprisoned or killed, not all fundamentalists (of any religion) are terrorists. The great majority are peaceful, if not necessarily all that friendly. And while I agree that fundamentalist religions have a greater propensity to produce extremism and religious violence, persecuting or "stamping out" a group purely on the basis of its propensity for producing extremists seems to me a pretty dangerous precedent.

 

The line I draw is between actually committing violent acts (or demonstrably planning to do so), and merely having antisocial ideas.

[Sullust]

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

The limit of any freedom is where it violates the freedom of another.

It seems to me that there's quite a bit of grey area there.

Related to the other discussion going on here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_World_Trade_Center#Collapse_initiation

[Trenton.]

Then you tell me how it fell if my explinations no good, Karoka. The insides were torn up, yes it wouldnt have fallen on other circumstances, but this wasnt one of them

[Karoka]

Well, maybe it wasn't a commercial airliner. I mean, a certain person I know showed me the footage of the plane, and I can tell you it does not look like any plane for carrying people.

[Harehunter]

There groups out there who may be considered as fundmentalist, who have no intention of causing harm, the Mennonites for example. They do not fall within my interpretation of fundmentalism. They do no harm, nor do they hold to the belief that all Christians should believe as they do. If one of their own decides to leave the church, they are free to do so. They become shunned, but that is the extent of the damage they suffer.

 

There is one sect of the Mormon church that believes it is God's will that a girl of 15 should be married and the marriage consummated. In this country that is defined as statutory rape, which is a crime. I agree that the law is valid.

 

The establishment clause of the First Amendment also prohibits the establishment of a state church, where it is required of all citizens to belong that state church and foreswear any other religious dogma. I swore an oath to protect the peoples right to believe, or not, as they choose.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend

Originally Posted By: Trenton

Its not every day a plane crashes into a building like that, and You have to take it into consideration that a passenger plane is like 3 houses long. The power it put into the tower

According to a WTC architect manager guy,

The WTC were built slightly differently than most other high-rises were. Instead of distributing the load-bearing columns in a normal rectangular array like this:

Code:

--------------------|                  ||  *   *   *   *   ||                  ||  *   *   *   *   ||                  ||  *   *   *   *   ||                  ||  *   *   *   *   ||__________________|

, they were sort of clustered around the central elevators like this:

Code:

--------------------|                  ||                  ||      ******      ||      *    *      ||      *    *      ||      ******      ||                  ||                  ||__________________|

. While that made for lovely open-plan office spaces and was perfectly fine under the usual stresses and strains experienced by such buildings, like wind loads and such, it's also more vulnerable to collapse when a plane takes out the entire central support structure for the building. While a "normal" high rise may or may not (depending on the case) be able to resist the planes taking out a quarter to a third of the support structures for long enough to safely evacuate, when most if not all of the load-bearing supports of the building are removed, it's pretty much a goner.

There were pretty intense discussion on this at work following the event on the precise mechanics and whether or not the towers would have stood if they had a more traditional design, but it was widely agreed that thee was nothing unusual or suspicious about the collapse and it could have easily been caused by a massive objected filled with explosive crashing into it at incredible velocity, and most structural engineers (hint: these are the people you should be listening to, not architects) would find nothing controversial about that statement, at all.

[Trenton.]

We were told that they Were loaded with passengers. There were 4 plains in totalone:crashed into world trade center numb.1 2:crashed into the second world trade center. 3:into the pentagon. 4:crashed somewhere, its destination was to the white house, but the passengers found the currage to take out the terrorists. In the struggle the plane crashed. There were no survivors.

[Aoslare]

"As the length of a thread increases, the probability of someone using Comic Sans approaches 1."

 

Just kidding. Thankfully, it doesn't.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

"As the length of a thread increases, the probability of someone using Comic Sans approaches 1."

Just kidding. Thankfully, it doesn't.

FYT.

[Karoka]

But I'm telling you, that was no commercial plane.

 

Click to reveal..

You can obviously see a missile right there.

A plane crash wouldn't have made a giant crater like it did unless it had some "help" (as in a certain something being shot at the tower first). I'm the kind of person that likes to question things that are just accepted by the average person. The real question is if those planes didn't have the people for those four flights, what happened to them?

[Sullust]

I think you are approaching a different topic entirely. I'm not sure you're going to be able to back up your argument with random pictures...

[Alorael at Large]

A plane crash could make a giant pile of rubble like it did by bringing buildings down. Like it did. You've taken one low-resolution image and shown some reflection of light off the underside of the wing. I'm not an aeronautical engineer, but that doesn't look like a missile to me. It looks like part wing attachment and part photo artifact.

 

Also, it looks exactly like a commercial airliner.

 

—Alorael, who is also mystified by your question about the passengers. They're gone and some of their remains were identified in the rubble. Presumably they died on the airplanes they were supposed to be on. Even if there was a conspiracy, the best way to make it look good would be sticking close to the truth and crashing those passengers, right?

[Karoka]

I've never seen a gray, windowless commercial airliner before.

[keira]

Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend

But I'm telling you, that was no commercial plane.

Click to reveal..

You can obviously see a missile right there.

A plane crash wouldn't have made a giant crater like it did unless it had some "help" (as in a certain something being shot at the tower first). I'm the kind of person that likes to question things that are just accepted by the average person. The real question is if those planes didn't have the people for those four flights, what happened to them?

You aren't one of those crazyfolk who think we didn't land on the moon and that Obama is japanese are you?

[Karoka]

Originally Posted By: Sylae

Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend

But I'm telling you, that was no commercial plane.

Click to reveal..

You can obviously see a missile right there.

A plane crash wouldn't have made a giant crater like it did unless it had some "help" (as in a certain something being shot at the tower first). I'm the kind of person that likes to question things that are just accepted by the average person. The real question is if those planes didn't have the people for those four flights, what happened to them?

You aren't one of those crazyfolk who think we didn't land on the moon and that Obama is japanese are you?

Umm, no....

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Sylae

You aren't one of those crazyfolk who think... that Obama is japanese are you?

I've never heard that one before.