|
How many here were on the HJ site when 9/11 was unfolding? I can still remember the thread that must have been the fastest moving on the site up to then as events unfolded, and the feeling of disbelief from everyone posting. It probably marked the point where HJ turned from a pure motoring site into an online community.
|
Don't you mean ELEVEN years ago?
|
|
Ten, eleven years ago who cares.Lots of people got killed and why I wonder.
|
I was.
Sat in my office in Rio watching it unfold on television, with some Americans.
I still find it a truly shocking event. I cannot help but put myself in the shoes of the trapped with no hope, but as yet uninjured.
All my nightmares in one.
In particular the WTC used to be somewhere I went a lot; including socially since we used to use a bar up at the top.
I felt it shocking then, and shocking everytime it comes up now.
|
I think I was; certainly read it even if not actually registered. I was living / working in Japan at the time, so the events happened while I was asleep.
Unbelievable at the time and, having spent a few years early in my working life at American Airlines it hit very close to home in terms of friends and old haunts.
It also spooked a lot of my local colleagues in Japan. I worked for a US software company at the time; we had meetings in Europe followed by a trip to the West Coast later that September, and without exception the Japanese contingent insisted on flying only on a Japanese airline. That meant they flew from Tokyo to LHR, back to Tokyo then out to the US, adding around 20 hours IIRC (including transit time at NRT) to my One World routing of NRT-LHR-SFO. I sort of understood their reluctance to fly United or American, but I couldn't convince them that BA would be as safe as JAL. I did fly American back from SJC to NRT - it was one of the quieter flight I've been on...
|
I remember it well.
I was working at the time and my boss was travelling. He contacted me to ask if I could find out what was going on as everyone was receiving texts.
I could only get limited on-line news reports as it seemed the whole network was jammed.
|
I was in Wooler, Northumberland in an architectural salvage yard. We had the caravans at Goswick Sands and our friends were looking for stuff for their cottage in Cumbria.
They, together with SWM, were in the yard looking at something and I was in the barn.
There was a radio quietly playing on one of the piles of stuff and I became aware, slowly, of what was unfolding. I called the others and the yard owner and we turned the volume up and listened without a word being said.
Some of those images, later seen, still haunt me. The rescue teams going in to meet their fates, the people facing the choice.....jump or burn. It sends shivers up my spine and the thing is, something similar could happen to any one of us at any time. RIP.
Ted
|
|
My daughters first day at primary school. Neighbour mentioned that a plane had crashed into the WTC. Light aircraft accident thought I. How wrong.
Last edited by: Fullchat on Tue 11 Sep 12 at 23:34
|
>>the people facing the choice.....jump or burn
I have wondered about that many times since. Funnily enough it occurred to me when someone recently posted about what you would do when threatened.
What would you do? Just how bad does the situation have to be before you think jumping 80+ floors is a viable option? I'd like to think that I would come over all Bruce-Willisy and save myself and those around me, but realistically I'd have no more options than they had.
There was a witness statment at the time, which I haven't seen since, that said people's hands were coming up to shield their face just before they hit the floor.
Indescribably sad.
|
I was in the office and someone heard something from radio or whatever. We started to realise there was something happening of significance. I phoned home and TV was turned on etc.
The Internet today would cope better than it did back then but it struggled. I found a website that day that I used for news for years afterwards because it was low bandwidth..... someone took it over and no longer a website.
Rest in peace all that were impacted on 9th Sept 2001.
|
|
I had just finished work on ill-health issues, and had just found the New (at that time) Hostess a "nice little earner" that would enable her to help keep me in the lifestyle to that which I had become accustomed! - Unfortunately, she was a "bright" Girl, and soon Twigged my cunning plan! That is why I now refer to her as the "Hovel" Hostess! ;-(
|
Looking back it was, in communication terms, an event from another age.
At time I was working in a small team on an outsourcing project. Inner corner of a twenties office block looking into a tiled light well; no street view to give any clue of unusual people movement. Desktops were relatively new and only internet was a dial up connection from a standalone in another room.
Around 15:00 my boss's wife rang having heard news on daytime TV. Like Fullchat my thought was a lightish plane and little real effect like the one that hit the Empire State building years ago. Only when I got out at 17:30 and saw the crowd round Berry's shop in Kingsway and anywhere else with TV on did the magnitude strike.
By 7/7 we all had desktop internet access and that was our main source of info. BBC News 24 runs continiously on a screen in the foyer and in some people's working areas as well. Even in a room of four or five somebody's usually got a site up with a news ticker and even small news like death of a 'personality' or latest revelation at Leveson is very quickly announced to all and sundry.
|
|
At a residential conference at Loughborough university, conference interrupted we watched the second plane hit on the big cinema type screen. Went home assuming bush was going to nuke someone.
|
I remember it well, I was at college in the morning just started a new module in web design. We finished early and I was at home by 12:30. And from the moment the first plane struck I remember watching it all on the news. Watching that second plane strike was one of the most memorable and shocking days of my life. It just wasn't expected.
|
I was in a Holiday Inn in New Orleans. It was 0800, an hour ahead of NY. My brother and I went on holiday to stay with a mate (as we were both sad and single at the time) and he lived in Houston, Texas. He had business to do there so we joined him.
I'd gone with my mate to a fantastic blues club the night before in the French Quarter, so had a hang over. My brother hadn't, so he put the t.v. on early and woke me up to watch it.
The early live footage showed the jumpers....then they edited it out. Couldn't believe it.
Was glad we took our hired Mustang from Houston to New Orleans, rather than fly like my mate did, because obviously all flights were cancelled. Next door to the hotel was a vehicle hire place. The queues were unbelievable. Some folk hired lorries/vans, just to get home.
As an aside, I think the US was absolutely right to kick the ass of Al Qaeda and the Taliban etc. Dubya gets my vote.
|
>> I was in a Holiday Inn in New Orleans. It was 0800, an hour ahead
>> of NY. My brother and I went on holiday to stay with a mate (as
>> we were both sad and single at the time) and he lived in Houston, Texas.
>> He had business to do there so we joined him.
>>
>> I'd gone with my mate to a fantastic blues club the night before in the
>> French Quarter, so had a hang over. My brother hadn't, so he put the t.v.
>> on early and woke me up to watch it.
>>
>> The early live footage showed the jumpers....then they edited it out. Couldn't believe it.
>>
>> Was glad we took our hired Mustang from Houston to New Orleans, rather than fly
>> like my mate did, because obviously all flights were cancelled. Next door to the hotel
>> was a vehicle hire place. The queues were unbelievable. Some folk hired lorries/vans, just to
>> get home.
>>
>> As an aside, I think the US was absolutely right to kick the ass of
>> Al Qaeda and the Taliban etc.
But they didnt and they havent. Ok they got the head honcho in the end, but nothing has changed, not one teeny weeny iota. The yanks just got a load of body bags, cripples they are ashamed off, and a shed load of global instability.
>>Dubya gets my vote.
Dubya was a richard head.
Last edited by: Zero on Wed 12 Sep 12 at 20:24
|
>> But they didnt and they havent. Ok they got the head honcho in the end,
>> but nothing has changed, not one teeny weeny iota. The yanks just got a load
>> of body bags, cripples they are ashamed off, and a shed load of global instability.
>>
>>
>>
>> >>Dubya gets my vote.
>>
>> Dubya was a richard head.
I find myself in the odd position of agreeing with Z. Should I go and lie down?
|
The terrorists' greatest achievement from 2001 is that we're still talking about it now, and playing elaborate security games, removing shoes and declaring our spare contact lenses, just to travel. No extremism has been eliminated by the efforts of Bush and Blair, and their 'war on terror' has left us more fearful than ever.
Consider for a moment the 300+ people who died in a factory fire in Karachi, some of them, in a grisly echo of 2001, jumping from high windows because there was no other way out. A tenth of the scale of 9/11, yes, but I wonder if anywhere near a tenth of the effort will go towards the achievable goal of making such places safer, as went into the unachievable one of hitting the world's Muslims until they learn to love the West.
|
|
I agree with Archbishop Tutu's stance.
|
Dubya doesn't get my vote either.
I was watching Russia Today news a few minutes ago, always a bracing experience. They had a chap explaining from London that El Qaeda was the tool of CIA and MI6 policy.
Could this be true, or more than partly true? Certainly these bodies and their masters use EQ in a scarecrow role to keep us honest as voters and consumers. But these crazed extreme puritans don't seem to be our sort of chaps really any more than their Christian equivalents.
|
|
By the way: on the actual day, I had the same experience as Fullchat. Someone told me an aircraft had flown into a skyscraper in New York, and I thought Cessna, Empire State, not many dead. How wrong can you be.
|
>>
>> As an aside, I think the US was absolutely right to kick the ass of
>> Al Qaeda and the Taliban etc.
>>
And now they are belatedly beginning to realise that they will have to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and exploit the incipient rift between them and Al Qaeda.
The US will have to learn humble pie and word-eating just like we had to.
It's the old story - terrorist >> freedom fighter>>president >> revered elder statesman.
Kenyatta, Makarios, Ho Chi Minh, de Valera, Gerry Adams ?
|
|
Didn't you miss off Mandela?
|
|
I was having lunch in a Pub with a mate when a guy we knew burst in and told the tale. We rushed out, across the road and watched it unfold on a TV in the window of an electrical shop. It took ages to sink in.
|
|
And Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Shamir, Menachem Begin, plus many other zionists.
|
Yes, I forgot all those, and Mandela of course.
So we need to be careful flinging around accusations and getting very self-righteous about acts of terrorism, hounding the guilty men down to the last hiding place on earth, etc.
In a few years time we may be courting them, selling them arms, giving them aid, even inviting them to a Buck House garden party.
Occasionally it works the other way round. America wasn't so keen on searching out the perpetrators of the Katyn massacre, it now emerges. They needed uncle Joe on-side then. It's only later they remembered the Soviet Union was an Axis of Evil.
Last edited by: Cliff Pope on Thu 13 Sep 12 at 10:36
|
Indeed, I've read about the killing of over 20,000 Polish people by the Soviet secret police before:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_Massacre
|
I think it's been well acknowledged for some time that Stalin was responsible. But the new revelation appears to link Roosevelt personally to the decision at the time to pretend that the Germans did it
It suited the "war on Nazism".
|
I remember the day well. I had a long chat about it with a dignitary who was visiting my area of the Highlands. I told him that I was struck by the sheer brilliance of the attacks - (somewhat to his surprise).
My point was that so many terrorist attacks are puny and ineffective by comparison, but these guys managed to pull off a beautifully executed act of mass murder which briefly paralysed the most powerful nation on earth. I should add that terrorism is something that has always been there in the background in my life, since I spent most of my formative years in the Middle East, and also lived for a few years in a very Republican town in the North of Ireland during the troubles. I was struck by the fact that the PLO, PFLP, IRA, UVF, etc of my childhood were rank amateurs compared to the 9/11 brigade.
Bush's reaction, while politically smart enough, was actually, in the long run, downright stupid in my humble opinion. I liked Bush, but I had grave doubts when he spoke about "a new kind of war - a war against terrorism" - because the UK had tried that in the 1970s and 1980s.
What actually has happened since has been well enough summed up by Zero. The Americans got the satisfaction of going into Afghanistan and Iran and teaching them a lesson (not that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, of course). But other than that warm feeling of satisfaction that one gets from killing foreigners, the Americans have not got much out of it.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the wake of Libyan attack. Obama has said "Make no mistake. Justice will be done" - which is what he has to say, I suppose. But I rather suspect that the less that the American government does, the better it will be for Americans.
And if it is true that the one of the main motivations for the Libyan attack was the killing by drone attack of Abu Yahya al-Libi, it will raise interesting questions. Because Abu Yahya al-Libi was not killed while a combatant in a battle, and nor was he executed after being found guilty in a court of law. He was killed simply because the US administration decided that he was dangerous and authorised his assassination. And that, in my opinion, is profoundly worrying.
(At this point Tyro gets off soap box before being dragged off it.)
Last edited by: tyro on Thu 13 Sep 12 at 12:46
|
Ten Years ago today - swiss tony
