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September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

911realtime.org

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Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#391

Post by doctor_eval »

Tenoke wrote: post #36

I was 9 and angry that they interupted my tv show to show news (adult stuff) from the other side of the world. 20 years later and I have a better understanding of the situation but in a lot of ways I think everyone reacted and keeps reacting just how the terrorists wanted. It's tragic but if this wasn't in America I likely wouldnt have even heard about the event nor would it be influencing my life this much later due…

I don’t think it’s disrespectful to say that, but the reason America is important is because the US, uniquely, has the ability to unilaterally retaliate, and drive the world into 20 years of continuous war. Which is what happened.

The many people killed in the WTC was surely a tragedy, but the number of people subsequently killed as a consequence of this day was far higher, and this is no less a tragedy.

I think this is why it made headlines around the world. The bear had been kicked and we were all afraid of what it might do.

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#392

Post by kelnos »

tommymachine wrote: post #114
polytely wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heart disease and cancer aren't contagious, so your actions on that front will only improve your own life, while being a bit more careful with covid will potentially prevent sickness in a lot of people.

So heart disease and cancer don't take up ICU beds?

Keeping yourself out of an ICU bed by avoiding a heart attack or getting cancer is likely a lot harder than getting a COVID vaccine.

If we assume that the biggest cause of heart disease is obesity and poor general health-keeping, the solution there is to completely change your lifestyle: new diet, new exercise regimen, etc. While I think people who are at risk should probably do that, that's a much heavier lift than getting a COVID vaccine.

But given that we mostly don't know how to avoid all forms of cancer (aside from things like "don't smoke and you probably won't get lung cancer"), I don't see what point you're trying to make there. I mean, ok, yes, we should all get vaccinated against COVID in order to make it vanishingly unlikely we'll have to take an ICU bed away from a cancer patient (who got cancer through no fault of their own) who might need it.

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#393

Post by rexpop »

systemvoltage wrote: post #333
ISL wrote: post #44

If watching this footage makes you want to stand up and do something, remember that Covid-19 is killing as many people in the US every two days as died in these attacks. Take small steps to make the world a better place, helping your neighbors, and you can take a stand against entropy.

> If watching this footage makes you want to stand up and do something, remember that Covid-19 is killing as many people in the US every two days as died in these attacks. Please. This is just going to create more toxic conversation and politics. Can we just focus on 9/11 victims and mourne peacefully? Rest of the top level comments here are sharing stories about their personal experience. I know you mean well but it…

No. 9/11 has been mourned to death. Its importance has been cynically inflated by political PR mercenaries. It's impossible, after all the bad-faith grandiosity, to observe this day in any way approaching respect for the dead. It's far too late for that. Or else, it's too soon. Maybe some day we can mourn the society we could have been that wouldn't have wrung all humanity from this event by exploiting it to the point of ludicrousness. No, we cannot focus on the victims, and we cannot mourn peacefully. That has been shown. That is not something of which we are capable, sorry.

Meanwhile, there are other, real issues facing real, living human beings that we still have a chance to save, and whose lives have not been propagandized beyond farce. If we came to our senses today, we could focus on COVID victims, and mourn peacefully. They, we, still have a chance at that.

9/11 is best left alone, frankly. It's not the national tragedy it's been made out to be.

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#394

Post by bamboozled »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #294
koboll wrote: post #133

Cool site, but the News Ticker is absolutely infested with debunked 9/11 truther "evidence". (Go to the point where the first plane hits and the point where each tower collapses, and you'll see what I mean.) The whole thing kinda seems like a sly attempt by a truther to indoctrinate schoolkids. A little distasteful.

A lot of the "truther" nonsense came from the day of the attack when nobody really had any idea what the hell was happening. It wasn't immediately clear that a plane hit the first tower to cause the damage, it wasn't clear it was an attack and not an accident until the second plane hit, and it wasn't clear the planes alone caused the collapse for days at least. Hell, for like an hour the Pentagon attack was considere…

It's funny because when I watch that footage back now, it feels almost scripted, like the day progressed so quickly, it went from the attacks themselves, to clearly identifying the enemy and discussions about retaliatory action within hours.

I am not saying that its the truth, but I cannot help feeling like it was all a little bit scripted.

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#395

Post by maybelsyrup »

refenestrator wrote: post #380
maybelsyrup wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never forget: the CIA, at the highest levels, knew that two of the 9/11 hijackers had multiple-entry visas to the US and were living in the country in the year before the attacks. They knew they were al-Qaeda, and they knew they were important enough to have been at a big AQ powwow in Kuala Lumpur in 2000. CIA management prevented this information from being disseminated by FBI agents posted inside "Alec Station", th…

I'm with you on being outraged, but organizational dysfunction is the norm and not reigning it in is one way of "dropping the ball". There wasn't, like, one single person who had all this information and he was personally stopped by the head of the CIA from telling the executive branch. It was a SNAFU of competing interests and stupid bureaucracy. The fact that these people were promoted afterwards, however.. yeah, m…

> It was a SNAFU of competing interests and stupid bureaucracy.

I hear where you're coming from, but after 20 years, there are several parts of the story for which I can no longer believe this was the case, or use this explanation to give the benefit of the doubt. (There are many other parts for which it does make sense.) I'll save myself looking like an internet crank and just suggest you give the podcast I linked to in [2] above an earnest listen. If you do, you may, like me, wonder from how high up the order came to personally stop the FBI man in question, Mark Rossini, from telling his superiors at the Bureau. It's at least George Tenet's former assistant, sent down to run Alec in '99.

I'm not sure what "all this information" refers to - no one knows exactly how much the institutions in question knew beforehand - but it's there in Chapter 6 of the 9/11 Commission Report (albeit buried in a footnote) that 40-50 people at Langley knew enough to stop the resulting plot had they wanted to, that senior CIA employees prevented the FBI from knowing about 2 Al Qaeda terrorists coming to and living in the US, and that specific upper management (whose names are now publicly known) told lower-level personnel that the FBI had been told when it's known that they hadn't. This is corroborated by serious, non-crank public servants who were there in the room when this stuff went down.

The result, for me, is that my default position on issues of war, terror, and other bloodshed has moved from "organizational dysfunction is the norm" to "I may never truly know, but these people are likely acting maliciously (to some degree) and/or lying about it (to some degree)". It's like, these people have jobs, and they do stuff. They're serious people, like many of us on HN, and they're competent a lot of the time. To the extent that we even know their track record, they have a track record: Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Congo, Iran again (Stuxnet), etc., etc.

So it's reversed the Sagan standard for me, in other words: if "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", the idea that the professionals to whom we give vast sums to be excellent at lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and betrayal - spies, in other words - should be given a sort of "Mister Magoo" benefit of the doubt when lots of people die -- that's, for me these days, the more extraordinary claim.

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#396

Post by sumedh »

ISL wrote: post #44

If watching this footage makes you want to stand up and do something, remember that Covid-19 is killing as many people in the US every two days as died in these attacks. Take small steps to make the world a better place, helping your neighbors, and you can take a stand against entropy.

> helping your neighbors

How can you help the people who dont want vaccines? Are you going to force them to have it?

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#397

Post by kelnos »

ls612 wrote: post #211
rebuilder wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, but I have a hard time imagining how, 20 years down the line, we could point to the SARS-COV2 pandemic as a principal cause of historic change the way the 9/11 attacks were. Contributing factor? Sure, I'm sure it'll have all kinds of downstream effects.

Imagine masks, distancing restrictions, etc becoming the knee jerk response every year there’s a bad flu scare or something like the Ebola cases in 2014 happens. This pandemic will be remembered not for the virus but for the massive and permanent social changes it brought to the west.

If people, post-pandemic, would (voluntarily) mask up and distance when they're not feeling well, I think it would reduce flu and common-cold transmission quite a lot throughout the year. This sort of thing is already common in some places and I'd be thrilled if it became a thing in the US.

(But agree that knee-jerk mandatory restrictions would be a terrible outcome.)

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#398

Post by kelnos »

burgerzzz wrote: post #351
farmerstan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Al qaeda won. They destroyed the way of American life before 9-11. We are a different country now. So much government control over the last 20 years because of the 9-11 like TSA, Patriot act, massive government surveillance all in the name of “Homeland Security”. Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers exist precisely because of 9-11. The distrust from all of the secret government acts is only part of the equation. The t…

We were told the vaccine was the end all be all solution that stopped the virus. Many have opted to forego it and accept the risk. What’s so wrong with that? Now it turns out the vaccine isn’t as effective as originally thought, and the folks who decided to not get the jab are now somehow devoid of critical thinking skills? Explain what I’m missing. Or is it really not about death, but the bottom line?

Given that the vast majority of COVID hospitalizations and deaths are among the unvaccinated, yes, I would say that people who refuse the vaccine are devoid of critical thinking skills.

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#399

Post by refenestrator »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #395
refenestrator wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on being outraged, but organizational dysfunction is the norm and not reigning it in is one way of "dropping the ball". There wasn't, like, one single person who had all this information and he was personally stopped by the head of the CIA from telling the executive branch. It was a SNAFU of competing interests and stupid bureaucracy. The fact that these people were promoted afterwards, however.. yeah, m…

> It was a SNAFU of competing interests and stupid bureaucracy. I hear where you're coming from, but after 20 years, there are several parts of the story for which I can no longer believe this was the case, or use this explanation to give the benefit of the doubt. (There are many other parts for which it does make sense.) I'll save myself looking like an internet crank and just suggest you give the podcast I linked t…

> the idea that the professionals to whom we give vast sums to be excellent at lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and betrayal - spies, in other words - should be given a sort of "Mister Magoo" benefit of the doubt when lots of people die -- that's, for me these days, the more extraordinary claim.

That's where we differ. They're Mr. Magoo with money in my opinion. How many brilliant exploits have they ever had? Even their wins are, like, "we sponsored some death squads who killed the opposition and eventually the anti-communist guy won due to having overwhelming resources".

The CIA is called 'the company' in DC and it's apparently a super-corporate environment. I've worked in corporate. It's stupid. A big part of the stupid is the local ideology, which is a multiplier effect on the general 'none of us is as dumb as all of us' effect, and I could probably go a long ways with you critiquing the CIA's default and unspoken ideology. But I still think 'organizational stupid' is such an absolute..

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#400

Post by generj »

ykl wrote: post #287
jdavis703 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did mobilize fighter jets (albeit without missiles, so essentially if the pilots intercepted it’d likely be a suicide mission). Also after 9/11 people straying in to no fly zones over DC would be escorted out by fighters.

IIRC the fighters that were mobilized planned to ram since they took off without time to load missiles onboard, but all of our fighter keys have ejection seats. I assume the plan was to eject.

To ensure the fighters crippled the passenger plane, at least one of the scrambled National Guard pilots ruled out ejecting.

The other hoped to eject before impact.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44459345

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