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| Never Forget: recommended readings for 9/11 |
| 2006-09-11 |
| HereÂ’s a collection (assembled over the years, with much input from other Rantburgers) of some of the best information on 9/11 available online today. Feel free to add to the list in the comments section. Eyewitness accounts & actualities Daniel Henninger, "I saw it all. Then I saw nothing." Wall Street Journal September 12, 2001 John Labriola, First-person account & accompanying photo essay Jeff Jarvis, First-person account & audio narrative. "Tilly" (LGF commenter), First-person account Little Green Footballs "9/11 Stories" (discussion thread) "The Voices Project" A Small Victory (collection of first-person accounts) Chuck Simmins, "No Ordinary Day" (collection of weblog postings) New York Times, Collection of audio recordings from the FDNY radio circuit Michael Powell & Michelle Garcia, "New tapes give voice to WTC chaos" Washington Post Audio recordings collected here Kevin Cosgrove, 911 call from 105th floor of WTC2 (Flash animation) Gedeon & Jules Naudet, 9/11 (documentary film). Evan Coyne Maloney, "Crystal Morning" (Video). Immediate reactions John Derbyshire, "Steel and Fire and Stone" National Review Online -- written within two hours of the first attack. James Lileks, "The Daily Bleat" 9/12/01 Peggy Noonan, "What I saw at the devastation" Wall Street Journal. Leonard Pitts, "We'll go forward from this moment" The Ornerey American "Sgt. Mom" (Sgt. Celia D. Hayes, USAF, Ret.), "I am all right - just in another country" (personal letter) World Trade Center Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton, Kevin Flynn, James Glanz and Ford Fessenden. "Fighting to Live as the Towers Died" New York Times (LRR) -- an incredibly detailed reconstruction of the 102 minutes between the first attack and the final collapse. Editorial, "Common Valor" Wall Street Journal -- ". . . in the midst of tragedy we do well to recognize that these firefighters did not lose their lives. They gave them." Peggy Noonan, "Courage Under Fire" Wall Street Journal -- "Three hundred firemen. This is the part that reorders your mind when you think of it. For most of the 5,000 dead were there--they just happened to be there, in the buildings, at their desks or selling coffee or returning e-mail. But the 300 didn't happen to be there, they went there. In the now-famous phrase, they ran into the burning building and not out of the burning building. They ran up the stairs, not down, they went into it and not out of it. They didn't flee, they charged. " "Mysterious Â’Red BandannaÂ’ Man Is 9/11 Hero" WNBC-TV -- The story of Wells Crowther, an equities trader and volunteer firefighter who worked in 2 WTC, and was as much a hero as anyone that day. Mudville Gazette (weblog), "9/11 Remembered: Rick Rescorla was a Soldier" Andrew Duffy, "Last Man Standing" Saskatoon Star-Phoenix Tom Junod, "The Falling Man" Esquire Steve Fishman, "The Miracle Survivors" New York Magazine Vincent Druding, "Ground Zero: a Journal" First Things -- account of an early volunteer in the recovery effort Rod Dreher, "The Hole in the Skyline" National Review Online -- "Every morning when I open the door to go to work, there is a hole in the sky where the World Trade Center used to be, a memento mori, a reminder of death. Not just the death of the 2,800, but of death itself, and the impermanence of all things human. That hole is the first thing I see in the morning when I leave my house, and the last thing I see at night before I come inside for my supper." Blue Men Group, Exhibit 13 (Flash animation). World Trade Center (motion picture). Bruce Springsteen, "The Rising" -- About a firefighter at the WTC. I can't forgive Springsteen his later embrace of moonbattery, but he's a talented songwriter, and this is one time he got it exactly right. Flight 93 Dennis B. Roddy, et al., "Flight 93: forty lives, one destiny" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Karen Breslau, "The Final Moments of United Flight 93" MSNBC Matthew L. Wald, "Details Emerge on Flight 93" New York Times (LRR) Dave Berry, "On Hallowed Ground." Syndicated column Steven Den Beste, "The First Anniversary" -- "In America we remember. We remember people who made choices. We remember an unforgivable attack. We remember people who refused to submit, and chose to die well, defiant to the end. We remember two words: Let's roll." United 93 (motion picture) Neil Young, "LetÂ’s Roll" Other Commentary James Lileks, "The Daily Bleat" 9/13/01 -- "The men on the plane decided to attack the hijackers. They learned what had happened in New York with the other hijacked planes; they figured their lives were lost already. They fought back. What itÂ’s like to swallow your terror and act is beyond the imagination of most ordinary folks - but the point is, they were ordinary folks. WeÂ’re all on that plane now." 9/14/01 -- "The planes are landing again. I saw them fly over the house tonight and I wanted to, and did, cheer. Waved them past. Gnat waved hello as well. ItÂ’s a heartening sight." the week of 9/17-21/01 -- "IÂ’m tired of people who can watch 5,000 people from 62 nations burned alive and crushed to death, and think: well, you know you had this coming." 9/11/02 -- "WeÂ’re going to win. We donÂ’t have any choice." 9/11/03 -- "Two years in; the rest of our lives to go." 9/8/06 -- "Just so you know: 9/11 reset the clock for me. All hands went to midnight. IÂ’m interested in what people did after that date, and if the movie [The Path to 9/11] shows that before the attack one side lacked feck and the other was feck-deficient, I don't worry about it. It's like revisiting Congressional debates about Hawaiian harbor security in November 1941. Y'all get a pass. The Etch-A-Sketch's turned over. Now: what have you said lately?" John Derbyshire, "Two years on" National Review -- a tribute to "small teams of inconceivably brave men and women, working in strange places, unknown and unacknowledged" Larry Miller, "Two Years" Weekly Standard -- "That's the choice: Stop, or keep going; keep our promises, or forget we made them; be responsible, or irresponsible; face facts, or ignore them. It's easier to stop, you know. Beating these folks will take a very long time. Decades, probably, and that's if we do everything right." Steven Green, "Terrorized? Hell No!" VodkaPundit (blog posting) -- "Remember, too, our just vengeance. Our president told us, 'I hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.' And they do hear us, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. They hear us, not because we used our weapons to murder their civilians, but to bring down their tyrants. From our loss, we gave them hope. The loss felt in Baghdad and Kabul is that of Sisyphus without his stone. The sound they hear is the ring of freedom. And they hear us, even if only a whisper, in Syria, in Iran, and - yes - they hear us in Saudi Arabia, too." Deroy Murdock, "'Did you find her yet?'" National Review Peggy Noonan, "A Heart, a Cross, a Flag" Wall Street Journal -- "On Sept. 10, 2001 we were, a lot of us, immersed in a national culture--a big, vivid, full-network, broadband, opens-soon-at-a-theater-near-you culture--that allowed us to live knee deep in distraction. . . . And then Sept. 11 came." "I Just Called to Say I Love You," Wall Street Journal -- "This is what I get from the last messages. People are often stronger than they know, bigger, more gallant than they'd guess. And this: We're all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won't make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed. I think the sound of the last messages, of what was said, will live as long in human history, and contain within it as much of human history, as any old metallic roar." Jonah Goldberg, "What's So Funny About Peace, Love & Understanding" National Review -- ". . . in a sense, 9/11 didn't expunge cynicism (as we use the word today), it redirected it to where it belongs." Victor Davis Hanson, "The Great Divide" National Review -- "It will require an economist, politician, historian, philosopher, and artist to make sense of the world turned upside down after September 11, which unlike Y2K really did prove to be the abyss between the millennia." Digital Archives The September 11 Digital archive September 11 news.com The September 11 Web Archive The Black Day National Review 9/11 Archive "We Remember" (Rantburg open thread 9/11/05). The Last Word George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People September 20, 2001 -- "The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." Never forgive, never forget, never excuse. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #11 As if there weren't enought great links here, I'll add another fairly short but righteous rant from Michael Ledeen: 9/11. |
| Posted by: xbalanke 2006-09-11 13:37 |
| #10 Middle East Media Research Institute, The Arab and Iranian Reaction to 9/11 (documentary film). |
| Posted by: Mike 2006-09-11 10:10 |
| #9 See TW? That's pink, not to be confused with salmon :-) |
| Posted by: Steve White 2006-09-11 10:03 |
| #8 "Wretchard" (pseudonym), "The Shadow of Our Hand" Belmont Club (blog posting). |
| Posted by: Mike 2006-09-11 09:40 |
| #7 Great job, Mike. No need to worry about me forgetting. Or forgiving. Or excusing. |
| Posted by: Matt 2006-09-11 08:57 |
| #6 Thank you, Mike. Thank you, ed. Scooter, what a lovely shade of Pepto Bismol pink you are on my screen, to be sure! |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-09-11 07:49 |
| #5 Don't stay up all night, Flyover; bookmark the page! |
| Posted by: Bobby 2006-09-11 06:59 |
| #4 WOW! This will keep me up all night, LOL. THANKS! |
| Posted by: flyover 2006-09-11 03:07 |
| #3 Rantburg 9-11-2005 thread 9-11-2004 thread Rantburg 9-11-2003 thread 9-11-2002 thread another 9-11-2002 thread Fred, thanks for all you do and for preserving our experiences from the memory hole.
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| Posted by: ed 2006-09-11 01:04 |
| #2 There's a great deal of information about 9/11 available, much of it not well-known by most of the public. I'm surprised someone hasn't made a movie about the lesser-known or discussed actions by ordinary people that day. The huge armada of private boats that evacuated so many people from lower Manhattan would make a good part of a movie by itself, and it wouldn't help the hated Bush Administration at all, which ought to please Hollyweird. People just responded - with no direction from any government agency - when they saw they were needed. That's America. Of course, it's possible Hollyweird doesn't want people to be reminded of that, or even that Hollyweird wouldn't recognize the real America if it bit them in the ass. Another story I read in a follow-up news report not long after 9/11 was of a couple of fighter pilots who were scrambled when the government realized they were missing several planes that morning and something was terribly wrong. The pilots - who I believe were Air National Guard, but don't hold me to that - had no missles and quickly figured out that they had no way to actually shoot down an airliner if they needed to. (Their jets probably had guns - don't remember if they had live ammo, or not, but if they did they knew it wasn't enough to be able to shoot down a 747.) So they agreed that if they found they needed to bring down one of the airliners, they would have to ram it and die. They didn't get the chance, obviously, but even making that decision was heroic. That, plus the story of the thousands of boats, would make a fantastic movie if done right. Indie producers/directors/writers - are you listening? Everyone knows the famous stories - tell the lesser-known but equally important ones. You'll make a bundle. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2006-09-11 01:02 |
| #1 Excellent. "The Falling Man" was made into a documentary. What's missing? In only one of the twin towers was there an escape route from the roof. Eleven people escaped from above the burning floors. Once the way out was discovered a couple of escapees risked secondary explosions and returned to the roof to inform others. After some discussion, most decided to await a helicopter rescue. That story should be told. |
| Posted by: Snease Shaiting3550 2006-09-11 00:42 |