Saturday, September 11, 2004
I took some time yesterday to view a few of the Friday, September 10th "rememberance" stories on various networks. PBS, HBO, and earlier this week a History Channel episode about September 11th. I must be missing something.
The PBS documentary was mostly a review of the September 11th Commission report...a minute by minute discussion of the "mistakes" our country made in responding to the crisis as it happened.
The HBO program was a little better - mostly a collection of amateur video and AP/Network photography at the moment of attack in New York. It was rather moving and made no notice of the political ramifications of the attack.
The History Channel (I think on Wednesday) had a very long documentary about the September 11th Commission report, including computer animation of the paths of the planes, the confusion of officials, etc. I watched most of it, but lost interest after about 1am.
It seems to me that most of the programs we're likely to see about the attack will be nothing more than an examination of what went wrong...and I believe that nothing went wrong. According to the press and the "experts", September 11th is now supposed to be remembered as a collection of our own failures. I'm actually kind of enraged about that. It's almost as if these were nothing more than mechanical/communication failures that led to multiple plane crashes...sort of like what we're treated to when an average airline reports a plane down...and we're going to analyze every detail of why it happened.
Readers - this is nothing more than an attempt to get you to believe differently about that day...to erase the anger you felt, the thoughts of vengence, the emotion...to deny all of the thoughts and feelings you had when you heard/saw the events happening and think more along the lines of a clinical examination of who screwed up...namely, anyone in the Bush Administration we can put on camera.
If you don't believe me, ask yourself a couple of questions:
- What do you suppose we should have done differently that would have made the difference?
- Why do you believe we should be blaming the victims (us) for what lunatics did?
- What was your pre-September 11th understanding of what a hi-jacking of an airplane was?
There are several areas of the documentary stories that bothered me...
President Bush took an extra 7-minutes to continue reading to children in that 8-th grade classroom instead of jumping up and screaming "We're under attack!!!" and running out of the room - signaling we're all in for it and we're doomed: "...go into the bomb shelters you now use as a wine cellar."
We lost the planes on radar. We don't USE radar for general air traffic control, folks...we use a transponder system. When the transponder is switched off, the plane stops sending a signal to air traffic controllers and they lose track of it...it's only then that we try and search for the plane with radar...and that can take a long time, especially under the conditions we were in at the time. We had hi-jackings (see question #3 above), and nobody considered they would be flown into buildings. Technology is amazing, but it can't do everything you read in books.
We couldn't shoot them down. Who would have thought? We should send pilots in F15's to shoot down American airplanes? Remember the old Soviet Union mutual assured destruction films of the 1980's? Remember how a good plot-line in most of those movies revolved around a soldier in a bunker who refuses to "turn the key" and loose the nukes? Crimson Tide, most recently...was about one such soldier who refused to give up his key on a submarine because he thought the captain was nuts when he wanted to launch the missles. Do you honestly believe our members of the Air Force are just a bunch of robots who would have no second thoughts about shooting down a plane full of Americans?
Here's the bottom line, friends. We got snookered...but THEY attacked us. It can't be prevented in the future, and we better resolve ourselves of that fact. No President or policy, or law, or Commission, or plan will be able to fully protect us from something like September 11th. The only thing that will make the difference is in our attitudes.
Remember the anger, the pain, the emotions, the resolve...and stand up with those who will take the fight to them - instead of waiting to respond to the next attack.
And if you really believe that we screwed up, and like to review technical failures that lead to these kinds of things...here's another list of reports you probably would like to read as well.
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