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Fark.com's live thread during the Sept. 11 attacks

136 points by mbustamanter 4y ago

Grimburger 4y ago
> Someone is going to get nuked. Quite a few more died in the end than a nuke could manage. This website is quite interesting with footage from major tv networks on the day: https://911realtime.org/ https://911realtime.org/
- sylens 4y ago
  That real-time site is an incredible thing to look at. Brings back a lot of memories of the confusion and uncertainty of that day.
  - Grimburger 4y ago
    It's a great site. Even down to the design and historical after-the-fact notes in the timeline.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  - jjulius 4y ago
  - shlant 4y ago
    that's a very specific thing to declare missing. Is there a reason you seem to be looking for that specifically?
    - jasonvorhe 4y ago
      Because Salomon Brothers/Building 7 is the first and only steel building to completely collapse due to some uncontrolled fires and because the BBC reported about its collapse before it even happened because it's clearly visible behind her while she reports about it: https://youtu.be/TONMGGiKI7s https://youtu.be/TONMGGiKI7s
      - aliqot 4y ago
        I remember that being reported on while the video was still seen standing in the live feed playing behind the reporter, and thought it was so curious because it hadn't, and then it falling. I also recall there being a third or fourth plane that was diverted by a terrorist and perhaps two more crashes. At the time, on the live newscast, there was another plane headed toward the pentagon and one more headed somewhere else. One crashed in a field, one crashed into the pentagon and left a small hole in the wall. There are so many details from the news broadcasts that day that don't line up and don't get spoken about. Partly the reason why there are so many theories out there about what happened that day is the amount of conjecture in the reporting never got rehashed, there was never an examination after the fact of who said what and why it was or was not the case.
      - colmmacc 4y ago
        There was almost three and a half hours between the first signs (2PM) of collapse and the final total collapse (5:20PM). It began with bulges and inward collapse on upper floors and then the fire service evacuating and abandoning the building in anticipation of structural failure. It's easy to understand news services listening in to the radio traffic in the heat of the moment misunderstanding.
      - CommieBobDole 4y ago
        I've always wondered what people think that this is supposed to mean - are they suggesting that there was a conspiracy to demolish WTC7 for whatever reason, and the BBC was somehow brought into the conspiracy for some inexplicable reason and were supposed to announce that it had collapsed at some planned time for some inexplicable reason and they either got the time wrong or the collapse was delayed and they reported it anyway for some inexplicable reason even though it was visibly still there? As opposed to the much more likely scenario wherein it was a chaotic situation, and the firefighters had decided to stop fighting the fire in WTC7 because they thought it was going to collapse, and either somebody had misheard over a scanner or the anchor misunderstood what they were being told and said the wrong thing? Because if so, that sounds like a failure of critical thinking, not evidence of a conspiracy. And that's my problem with nearly all of the 9/11 conspiracy stuff - most of it is things where you say, "hmm, that seems a little strange" and then it falls apart completely when you really look into and/or think about it. Like, if you say to me, "The CIA was behind 9/11, they posed as a radical Islamic fundamentalist organization and found some guys who wanted to attack the WTC and bankrolled them and helped them plan and gave them advice on exploiting known problems with US security, and did some stuff to make sure that any investigation would be diverted, and they were successful and flew planes into buildings which burned for hours and then collapsed, killing thousands of people and justifying foreign wars", that's plausible. Could have happened. The CIA has probably done more evil things. Burden of proof is on you, of course, but it could be a thing. But no, it's always "the towers were brought down by explosives", or "the planes were really missiles", or "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" or "the planes were flown by remote control and all the supposed passengers were just crisis actors" or, "they let random idiot x into the conspiracy for no discernible reason and he spilled the beans" or any one of a hundred improbable, unsupported-by-the-available-facts failures of critical thinking. I mean, I understand the tendency of the human mind, when faced with a chaotic situation with an unsatisfying outcome, to latch onto little odd things about the official explanation and expand them into a whole tale that wraps up the whole thing neatly, but man, this is just exhausting
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > Quite a few more died in the end than a nuke could manage. Are you including the ensuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq? Even then, I think you're seriously underestimating the number of casualties a relatively low yield nuke (in the context of modern strategic weapons) would produce if it hit a city like New York.
  - Grimburger 4y ago
    Yes that was the implication. Depends who you ask and talking about it at the time was full of controversy, but I have seen half a million excess deaths in the end for Iraq and maybe half that for Afghanistan?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ouid 4y ago
      I think you mightbe underestimating either the population density of a major city or the kill everything radius of a thermonuclear weapon.
      - solveit 4y ago
        And the aftermath of a nuclear war. If they're going to count the people who died after the war proper, they should count them in both scenarios.
    - macksd 4y ago
      Would a nuke not have also led to wars like that?
- macksd 4y ago
  How do you figure that? Are you comparing long-term effects and military fall-out from 9/11 but only the immediate death toll of a nuke?
tommica 4y ago
A really interesting thread - thanks for sharing
ImHereToVote 4y ago
I love that the first instinct is that some country has to be attacked now. Then someone says that they will probably attack some wrong country. Prophetic.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > I love that the first instinct is that some country has to be attacked now Also somehow end up blaming Palestine and praise Israel out of nowhere > how much you wanna bet hammas is behind this > Now I know how Israelis feel when they're bombed by lame suicide Palestines terriost. > I also got 10 to 1 that the Palestinians are involved somehow. > Yes, the Palestinians are all cuddly, and the Israelis are the bad guys. The NY Times and the rest of the media better get their heads out of their asses.
  - anonu 4y ago
    Bin Laden did invoke Palestine when he explained his reasons for orchestrating this.
    - avgcorrection 4y ago
      So?
      - anonu 4y ago
        I am providing additional context to the comment I replied to above. The comment points out that in the hours after the event there was discussion on the fark forum regarding Palestine. I'm merely stating a fact. No need for downvotes.
        avgcorrection 4y ago
        As a reply to a post about intent (quoting that Palestine did this), your additional context is about as relevant as the price of tea in China.
    - 4y ago
lm28469 4y ago
> At least the terrorists dont seem to know too much about physics. Had they hit the buildings down lower to the ground, they could have structurally weakened them to the point where they wouldnt be able to bear the weight of the rest of the building. So far both buildings seem to be holding up. Probably one of the comments that aged the worse in the entire internet
- cm2187 4y ago
  Though it's the fire, not the shock that made the buildings collapse.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    I wonder sometimes why it didn't fall the first time a plane smacked into it and it burned for days, before 9/11.
    - cm2187 4y ago
      Hum, which event are your referring to? I think there were fires and bombings on the WTC before 9/11 but no event where a jetliner dropped tons of jetfuel for a fire to be intense enough to melt the steel structure.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  They could have waited till 3pm and hit lower to kill a lot more people. The typical occupancy of the buildings was 50k workers and another few tens of thousands were going through it as visitors/tourists [0]. At the time of the attack there were only ~15K inside the buildings. Of those ~2k were killed. [0] I had a picture of me on the roof two days before the attack.
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    > I had a picture of me on the roof two days before the attack. I almost visited them the week before, but we were running late and didn't have time on that trip. My Sept 11 experience was not actually realizing anything was really wrong until the afternoon. I had classes all morning that semester; there were snippets of conversation, a "did you hear" buzz, but nothing really penetrated until I got back to the dorm and found my roommate glued to the TV.
drawfloat 4y ago
None tops the all time greatest online response – "WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR"
geenat 4y ago
PHP sites never die.
- mutt2016 4y ago
  I prefer them to modern electron and SPA frameworks. The web really has become quite shitty
  - queuebert 4y ago
    I'd say advertising based on intrusive surveillance, rather than particular frameworks, have ruined the web. These new frameworks merely make it easier to trick you into staying on a page longer. PHP sucked and was notoriously bad for security. And of course there was Flash. The web has had some dark times before.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    It's for this reason I strongly prefer asp.net razor pages to MVC. queue morpheus voice What if I told you back in my day you could generally find the code by looking at the URL structure before this routing stuff became such a big deal? imo razor pages hits the right balance. Generally speaking it's auto-routed based upon the URL, but you CAN hook into the routing in the razor page itself for fanciness for those few occasions where you need it. Everyone always takes a good idea and runs too far with it, but I feel like the routing for razor pages pulls back to reasonableness.
smcl 4y ago
The SomethingAwful 9/11 thread is also pretty wild: http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/ http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/ In case you don't wanna have to keep clicking back/forth to go to the next page (the links aren't adjusted to point to the archived pages) there's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHwF5NNAu5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHwF5NNAu5w
- tanepiper 4y ago
  I remember this, I was on SA back in these days and the first posts were webcams from people near by.
curiousgal 4y ago
Oh, it's that day of the year. Never forget..that first responders got fucked.
- mtgentry 4y ago
  My wife went to NYU and they had a fire drill early that morning. Some firefighters were there. Who knows how many of those guys died later that day.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    Impossible to know which ladder/engine/squad was conducting it but there’s a few near NYU. Engines 33 and 24, Ladders 20, 9, and 5 and Squad 18. All of them suffered losses (mostly heavy losses) except Ladder 24 which had no losses. Ladders 5 and 20 had devastating losses as did Squad 18. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emergency_workers_killed_in_the_September_11_attacks#Rank,_name,_age https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emergency_workers_ki...
hunter-gatherer 4y ago
In case there are people here who are really to young to remember this, consider the context: Although 2001 doesn't seem too long ago, most people didn't have cell phones still, and those that did were signor feature phones. Social media didn't really exist yet, at least not as we understand it today. Many people had internet speeds that would be unusable today, so most information still came through the TV.
- samwillis 4y ago
  I was 15, everyone at school (in the uk) had phones. I remember waiting to be collected from school and reading the latest updates from the BBC WAP website on my Trium Mars phone - that’s a technology that’s long dead.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - zahllos 4y ago
    At your school perhaps. I was slightly younger than you when this happened. I was home from school early for reasons I don't remember, and watched everything unfold on TV (I do remember that part). I don't remember if I got my first phone before or after this - I think maybe after, but I am honestly very unsure. I can tell you it was a 2nd hand 3310. Not everyone in school had one, because not everyone could afford it. Some people's parents didn't have them; most people's grandparents didn't. Landlines reigned supreme, and MSN whenever that arrived (still had a few friends without internet then, I was on dialup, a few people got broadband the year after). I don't remember anyone using WAP really ever^. I don't really remember when mobile internet actually took off seriously but I remember a friend posting to facebook and getting updates via SMS in 2008/2009. Cool that you did use WAP, but you were likely a minority and that's nothing compared to the ubiquity of LTE connections of today. ^One of my friend's Dads worked for Vodafone at the time. Their HQ was commutable from where we lived. I discussed C++ with him a lot. I still don't remember anyone using WAP and they had staff discount, so your 12p/10p SMS was 2p for them. I only knew what WAP was because I read about it in PC Pro.
I_am_tiberius 4y ago
Do I understand correctly that Europeans weren't able to access most US websites? "OK, you guys are now my sole source for info on this - all European traffic goes through mae east and now I can't get squat out of the US.. "
- wanderingstan 4y ago
  A lot of websites went down under the extreme load of everyone clicking “refresh” over and over. I was at the office and people would call out when they got a news site to load. I clearly recall that cnn.com went to being text-only.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    I was in Europe, and I knew it was middle of the night in Australia, the Australian news websites were loading, it was a static picture of the 2 towers with smoke billowing out of them...
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  News sites maybe? I remember spending most of that day online.
- cachvico 4y ago
  Bear in mind that all news channels were broadcasting constantly at least - would still be pretty rare at the time to find a household without a single TV.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  This doesn’t match my memory. I was in the UK, at work, and I don’t remember any connectivity issues at all
- xeromal 4y ago
  Everything was DDOSed and nothing was really built to scale in those days besides the big guys like google.
- soneil 4y ago
green-salt 4y ago
The only site I remember checking at the time was cnn.com, and it was in some kind of super-low bandwidth mode and was minimal static content.
- Angostura 4y ago
  Slashdot was notable for being able to stay up - with people posting live updates and info on finding missing people. ISTR usenet coming into its own, too
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    IRC was the source there for a couple weeks. Slashnet's channel was pretty good. You could see the fingerprints of the "unofficial releases" when the same story (often verbatim) hit all 4 IRC networks at the same time; then the news within the day. The "Let's Roll" story was conspicuously seeded. Major media was sending out copyright takedowns within hours, often for photos they had no rights to in the first place. Our photo page got "we own this you can't show it" letters from multiple publishers, often on the same photo, several times for photos given to us (as public domain) by the people who took them.
  - JimDabell 4y ago
    Yep, I remember all the news sites like the BBC and CNN were failing to load and Slashdot was one of the best ways to stay up to date in the first three or four hours or so.
  - devilbunny 4y ago
    Slashdot was sufficiently lightweight and special-interest to stay usable. My hero of the day - because I did not have cable, and the major networks were not too wonderful on reporting - was someone at CNN who hacked together a system that spat out the closed captions onto a moderated IRC channel. You could at least stay up with what was happening, scrolling back up to catch more info. Read a lot of European newspapers as well.
boredemployee 4y ago
it's crazy to think that until the 2nd plane hit, everyone was thinking about _just_ a bad tragedy, and then came the 2nd explosion and the world changed completely.
- pfarrell 4y ago
  That’s exactly what it was like. I was at work and had a big project due for client delivery that day that I was finishing up. When the first plane hit, it was definitely “oh man, what a weird thing to happen; what a tragedy.” When the second one hit, it was, “oh shit. Wait what??? That can’t be an accident??” I would compare the “oh shit, what does this mean” feeling to how I felt to March 11, 2020, when the NBA announced it was cancelling their season That’s when it became definite to me that the pandemic was real and unavoidable. In the same way, the future of war for America started to seem unavoidable as one realized the planes were an act of war. Especially when the Pentagon was hit and then later that week when people were getting Anthrax in their mail. That’s something I never hear people talk about, but was just as scary and only added to the chaotic feeling of “wtf is going on?”
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks The truths of that one are buried under so much official horseshit. Easier to ask now, "who benefited?" and check their subsequent records to see what else they were involved in.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    The anhtrax stuff that followed is now some obscure story but it was weird and strange at the time.
    - pfarrell 4y ago
      Exactly. I don’t know much about it, but when thinking back to that time, I remembered it was just part of the crazy moment.
  - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bloopernova 4y ago
I remember being told by a friend of my now-ex-wife that "hundreds" of planes had been "taken over" and would be crashed into state legislatures across the USA. It's very difficult to keep a cool head during an overwhelming crisis, and the world trade centre attack drives home how easy it is to get lost in rumour and fantasy. That time period following the attacks was surreal. People were very scared of any plane noises, and a brown-skinned terrorist was imagined lurking around every corner. Then the anthrax attacks happened, and the DC sniper attacks too. It felt like the USA was paralyzed by fear, so I can at least appreciate the atmosphere that led to the "patriot" act and other rights-eroding laws. COVID-19 felt like a natural disaster to me, with effects that are bad but not from malicious intent (ignoring the actions of various groups, I mean). The WTC attack and subsequent terrorism felt different, as they were caused by humans to inflict fear and chaos on us. It's amazing to me how different those 2 events felt.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  That wasn't anywhere near my experience, are you sure you're not just a generally anxious person or live around those who are?
  - macksd 4y ago
    I too recall seeing hysterical news cycles around that time. The reactions to the anthrax scares as mentioned: tons of people at Home Depot buying plastic sheeting and duct tape, etc. And the day of 9/11, I remember multiple people living in other states messaging me about a military target near me being a likely nuke target. Maybe I'm also around anxious people, but it really seemed to me that a certain level of hysterics was pretty widespread around this.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      There was a lot of shock and anger, but not fear the way it's being described here.
- xeromal 4y ago
avidphantasm 4y ago
I found out about the first plane hitting when my mother called me at work, on a land line I believe, just after I arrived. I fresh out of my BS and worked as a software developer at CMU at the time. I went into my boss’s office and told him, and I remember he thought it was a small plane. We had a test server room near our office that had a TV and original XBox. A few of us went into the server room to watch the coverage. Soon after, the second plane hit. I remember asking one of our senior managers if this was bigger than Pearl Harbor. He just looked at me dumbfounded. A while later the towers fell. I had a friend who lived in NYC and commuted to Jersey City via the PATH train, so I called him to make sure he was okay. He was. At the time, I didn’t understand that the towers had completely collapsed; I thought they were half standing. My friend from NYC told me I was wrong—-“they’re gone man.” We continued watching the coverage together for a couple of hours until the University announced that it was closing for the day (I think it closed the rest of the week, but can’t remember). Then we all just shambled home, stunned. I remember being surprised and a little heartened that the US waited a month the strike back at Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. By the time we invaded Iraq, I was no longer heartened, but completely disillusioned about the USA as a force for “good” in the world.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  Xbox came out in November, how did you have one in September?
  - foxhill 4y ago
    it likely had a different console at the time, and changed to an xbox at a later date. also perhaps it’s not worth nitpicking minutiae over someone’s account of a tragedy.
    - candiddevmike 4y ago
      I thought OP was a game developer and had a test unit. Not nitpicking, genuinely curious.
      - 4y ago
josu 4y ago
The fact that the CNN link still works is really impressive. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1537000/1537469.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_15370...
- agsnu 4y ago
  That's BBC
- josu 4y ago
  *BBC
nirvgorilla 4y ago
This looks like an edited thread. I remember on IRC it was nothing but towel wrapping/turbin winder / sand nggr / islam insults after the second one hit.
hollywood_court 4y ago
I think a big part of “growing up” is realizing that we’re (the US) not the good guys. 9/11 also happens to be the anniversary of the coup in Chile which was instigated by the CIA.
- chrischen 4y ago
  Yea but the "lesser of two evils" justification is how we get away with it morally.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Then you realize there aren’t good guys or bad guys, there’s just a world of immense trade offs, and that on balance the US is a far preferable superpower than the other probable options.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    Indeed. Some people never grow up (Kissinger is 99 years old, after all).
  - hollywood_court 4y ago
    All things are relative by both comparison and perspective. Most of South America would likely disagree with calling us the preferable superpower.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      That was my thought while reading the post you responded to. A US Citizen thinks the US is the best superpower? color me shocked (I'm also a US Citizen).
      - ethanbond 4y ago
        Other recent contenders: Japan, Germany, USSR, and China? A US citizen thinks any of those even has a chance of being preferable to the US? Color me shocked!
chris_wot 4y ago
I woke up the next day (I'm in Australia) and saw the footage. I remember listening to Sydney's Triple M radio network and callers were being comforted by Andrew Denton and Amanda Keller. Blue color workers were crying on the line. One of the worst days I've experienced.
tssva 4y ago
At the time I worked for an ISP which was the primary ISP for most of the major media companies and for the largest consumer internet provider. It was a crazy day trying to keep things flowing under the demand. A lot of traffic engineering and rapidly bringing up additional bandwidth. All this was done without access to the internet ourselves because early in the day my employer decided to pull the plug on our access. When they pulled the plug many employees went to the cafeteria to watch the TVs there. The company sent security guards to turn off the TVs and confiscate the remotes.
- victor9000 4y ago
  What was the reasoning? Did they not want people to be aware of the news? I'm imagining an exec glued to their TV thinking he has to keep his employees from doing the same thing.
  - Doxin 4y ago
    Presumably they needed people to keep working, instead of being glued to the news. Harsh but in the case of an ISP makes some sense.
    - tssva 4y ago
      The thought process was to keep people working. The reality was that about 40 out of hundreds of employees there were involved in keeping things flowing that day. The ISP was located in Northern Virginia near Dulles airport where the flight which crashed into the Pentagon took off from and a large percentage there knew someone that worked at the Pentagon including in many cases family members.
runlevel1 4y ago
The 9/11 text pager data archive is similarly interesting: https://911.wikileaks.org/ https://911.wikileaks.org/
causality0 4y ago
As someon who was a child at the time, I remember September 11th in the context of fear and the sense of unity it created shortly thereafter. It's interesting to me to go back and look at the way adults reacted, which was mostly anger. It's surprising how calmly the US government reacted compared to normal people. When Afghanistan refused to extradite Bin Laden most of the people I knew wanted to start nuking Afghan cities one by one until they changed their mind.
- fellellor 4y ago
  Someone might have then asked “what Afghan cities?”
  - curiousgal 4y ago
    This. The fact that some people believe U.S. soliders were "defending" their country severely overestimate their "enemy".
skeeter2020 4y ago
I found out while on a plane that had just left Hawaii headed for Sydney. I couldn't understand why the flight attendants were walking around with manifests, then talking at length with select passengers. Turns out they had identified those traveling through NYC and wanted to ID those with family there. In the airport 10 hours later saw what I thought were incredibly bad-taste tabloid newspapers headlines. Add in jet lag and it was probably 2 days before I understood what had happened.
stevenfoster 4y ago
Veni. Vidi. Venti.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Is that a Starbucks pun?
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    I'm just not seeing what this was supposed to be. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/venti#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/venti#Latin
    - tsol 4y ago
      I came I saw I blew?
    - stevenfoster 4y ago
      I used the modern Italian for the final word hoping it would resonate more with the modern reader.
  - stevenfoster 4y ago
    Came and saw for 20 years but never conquered.
belter 4y ago
Slashdot.org thread Sep 11 2001: https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towers-and-pentagon-attacked https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towe...
- Damogran6 4y ago
  Slashdot was one of the few sites to witstand the onslaught. I was using an iPaq with an IR connection to my Nokia phone while sitting in the luggage claim at Denver International…we were supposed to fly out to Seattle that day. Didn’t obviously happen. Watching the night sky to the West and seeing NO air traffic was surreal.
xnx 4y ago
Also worth remembering that 9/11 was the 2nd attempt by terrorists to bring down the towers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...
BrotherBisquick 4y ago
Where were you when Barnacle Jim (phub) screamed "watch bush start a fucking war"
- quickthrowman 4y ago
  I was viewing an 800x640000 pixel image of Jim’s long ass face (rest in rip) in MSpaint when the 2nd plane hit the tower. It took me four minutes to scroll to the bottom of the picture.
xeromal 4y ago
What I find interesting is the random comment in the second page that just says "Osama". Did we know that early? I can't remember.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Al-Qaeda had already bombed US embassies and the USS Cole, and affiliates were responsible for the WTC bombing. It's the first group you'd look to blame.
- devin 4y ago
  The WTC was attacked in ‘93 by people affiliated with Bin Laden and there were numerous attacks on US interests leading up to 2001. In 2000, the USS Cole was attacked, for example, with a string of embassy bombings throughout the 90s.
- fineIllregister 4y ago
  I don't think we knew, but it wasn't hard to guess. Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996. He, and Al-Qaeda, had been connected to multiple terrorist attacks throughout the late 90s. The people who had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 were trained by Al-Qaeda.
- soneil 4y ago
  It's not a wild reach - OBL was behind the 1998 embassy bombings (Kenya, Tanzania) and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, making him pretty much the "badguy de jour" by 2001.
- InvaderFizz 4y ago
  It's not a leap, considering his group had already been tied to the 1993 WTC bombing by 1996[0]. This reminds me, I've always been curious that in the year leading up to the attacks, the Taliban was a frequent feature on ABC News. Mostly for their defacing ancient historical sites from what I fuzzily remember. 0: https://www.state.gov/1993-world-trade-center-bombing/ https://www.state.gov/1993-world-trade-center-bombing/
- philistine 4y ago
pmarreck 4y ago
Fark was pretty popular at that point as I recall, but I had no idea they were livethreading this at the time, so this is a neat discovery for me, although I'm already shuddering (I lived near NYC at the time)
- xeromal 4y ago
  Fark was my reddit from the early aughts to about 2010. It really kind of functioned as the frontpage of the internet until reddit took over.
lightedman 4y ago
I remember that day very vividly, I was going to court against my father that day. Waiting to get called into the court room for the start of the day when suddenly a bunch of police pop up and say "Everyone must evacuate the building immediately, court is dismissed for the day." Get in the car, turn on the radio, and right about then news of the second plane dropped. I knew that was going to be a change across the country right then and there. Never actually got back to that court case. I think literally every case got an emergency dismissal outright due to that event, as neither myself nor my father ever walked back into the courtroom after that event.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zwaps 4y ago
I remember the somethingawful.com thread with the iconic post "Watch Bush start a fucking war"
spanktheuser 4y ago
One of my friends and colleagues had just finished a large, years-long IT consulting project with Marsh. Not long after the towers fell he received a request to join a group of people who had worked closely with some of their IT staff killed in the attack. The task: come up with a dictionary of possible passwords the deceased may have used based on everyone's recollection of their private lives and habits around passwords they may have shared (character substitution habits, etc.) It was grim and my friend was shaken by the experience for some time.
slim 4y ago
I remember not being able to reach disinfo.com. I remember some arabic satellite channels being used as a covert channel for transmitting informations probably to terrorists (one of them had the logo blinking in a pattern that looked like morse). I remember strange people at airports asking you if you can please take a letter with you to your destination where someone would collect it.
jasonm23 4y ago
It's amazing that by 9:24am the general public had been told that Bin Laden planned this... with no evidence, and yet, here we are. Court of public opinion is deadly. We also managed to make the very idea of conspiracies, false flags and non-government approved opinions... "sketchy" So cool.
Eleison23 4y ago
So on that day, I was homeless and I woke up on a park bench with the dawn. I went to Mass in the morning where they had the custom of allowing anyone pray for any intention, and so someone mentioned an explosion or bombing in NYC and I didn't think much of it, considering the backdrop of regular terrorist bombings and such. Then I made my way up to the library and logged onto a public computer in the lab. There was a volunteer at the front desk making many phone calls in an attempt to organize an emergency blood drive, which I thought was notable, but by this time (late morning in Arizona) I didn't really grasp the magnitude of what was going on, until I logged on to a news site or a chat room with my friends and then it all became clear. That afternoon I went to the student lounge at church where the TV was just nonstop replaying footage of the aircraft smashing into buildings. That continuous replay was profoundly traumatic for me and doubtless other people; I do not know why we persisted in viewing it.

136 points by mbustamanter 4y ago

> Someone is going to get nuked. Quite a few more died in the end than a nuke could manage. This website is quite interesting with footage from major tv networks on the day: https://911realtime.org/ https://911realtime.org/

sylens 4y ago
That real-time site is an incredible thing to look at. Brings back a lot of memories of the confusion and uncertainty of that day.
- Grimburger 4y ago
  It's a great site. Even down to the design and historical after-the-fact notes in the timeline.
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
- jjulius 4y ago
- shlant 4y ago
  that's a very specific thing to declare missing. Is there a reason you seem to be looking for that specifically?
  - jasonvorhe 4y ago
    Because Salomon Brothers/Building 7 is the first and only steel building to completely collapse due to some uncontrolled fires and because the BBC reported about its collapse before it even happened because it's clearly visible behind her while she reports about it: https://youtu.be/TONMGGiKI7s https://youtu.be/TONMGGiKI7s
    - aliqot 4y ago
      I remember that being reported on while the video was still seen standing in the live feed playing behind the reporter, and thought it was so curious because it hadn't, and then it falling. I also recall there being a third or fourth plane that was diverted by a terrorist and perhaps two more crashes. At the time, on the live newscast, there was another plane headed toward the pentagon and one more headed somewhere else. One crashed in a field, one crashed into the pentagon and left a small hole in the wall. There are so many details from the news broadcasts that day that don't line up and don't get spoken about. Partly the reason why there are so many theories out there about what happened that day is the amount of conjecture in the reporting never got rehashed, there was never an examination after the fact of who said what and why it was or was not the case.
    - colmmacc 4y ago
      There was almost three and a half hours between the first signs (2PM) of collapse and the final total collapse (5:20PM). It began with bulges and inward collapse on upper floors and then the fire service evacuating and abandoning the building in anticipation of structural failure. It's easy to understand news services listening in to the radio traffic in the heat of the moment misunderstanding.
    - CommieBobDole 4y ago
      I've always wondered what people think that this is supposed to mean - are they suggesting that there was a conspiracy to demolish WTC7 for whatever reason, and the BBC was somehow brought into the conspiracy for some inexplicable reason and were supposed to announce that it had collapsed at some planned time for some inexplicable reason and they either got the time wrong or the collapse was delayed and they reported it anyway for some inexplicable reason even though it was visibly still there? As opposed to the much more likely scenario wherein it was a chaotic situation, and the firefighters had decided to stop fighting the fire in WTC7 because they thought it was going to collapse, and either somebody had misheard over a scanner or the anchor misunderstood what they were being told and said the wrong thing? Because if so, that sounds like a failure of critical thinking, not evidence of a conspiracy. And that's my problem with nearly all of the 9/11 conspiracy stuff - most of it is things where you say, "hmm, that seems a little strange" and then it falls apart completely when you really look into and/or think about it. Like, if you say to me, "The CIA was behind 9/11, they posed as a radical Islamic fundamentalist organization and found some guys who wanted to attack the WTC and bankrolled them and helped them plan and gave them advice on exploiting known problems with US security, and did some stuff to make sure that any investigation would be diverted, and they were successful and flew planes into buildings which burned for hours and then collapsed, killing thousands of people and justifying foreign wars", that's plausible. Could have happened. The CIA has probably done more evil things. Burden of proof is on you, of course, but it could be a thing. But no, it's always "the towers were brought down by explosives", or "the planes were really missiles", or "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" or "the planes were flown by remote control and all the supposed passengers were just crisis actors" or, "they let random idiot x into the conspiracy for no discernible reason and he spilled the beans" or any one of a hundred improbable, unsupported-by-the-available-facts failures of critical thinking. I mean, I understand the tendency of the human mind, when faced with a chaotic situation with an unsatisfying outcome, to latch onto little odd things about the official explanation and expand them into a whole tale that wraps up the whole thing neatly, but man, this is just exhausting
nordsieck 4y ago
> Quite a few more died in the end than a nuke could manage. Are you including the ensuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq? Even then, I think you're seriously underestimating the number of casualties a relatively low yield nuke (in the context of modern strategic weapons) would produce if it hit a city like New York.
- Grimburger 4y ago
  Yes that was the implication. Depends who you ask and talking about it at the time was full of controversy, but I have seen half a million excess deaths in the end for Iraq and maybe half that for Afghanistan?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ouid 4y ago
    I think you mightbe underestimating either the population density of a major city or the kill everything radius of a thermonuclear weapon.
    - solveit 4y ago
      And the aftermath of a nuclear war. If they're going to count the people who died after the war proper, they should count them in both scenarios.
  - macksd 4y ago
    Would a nuke not have also led to wars like that?
macksd 4y ago
How do you figure that? Are you comparing long-term effects and military fall-out from 9/11 but only the immediate death toll of a nuke?

tommica 4y ago

A really interesting thread - thanks for sharing

ImHereToVote 4y ago

I love that the first instinct is that some country has to be attacked now. Then someone says that they will probably attack some wrong country. Prophetic.

lm28469 4y ago
> I love that the first instinct is that some country has to be attacked now Also somehow end up blaming Palestine and praise Israel out of nowhere > how much you wanna bet hammas is behind this > Now I know how Israelis feel when they're bombed by lame suicide Palestines terriost. > I also got 10 to 1 that the Palestinians are involved somehow. > Yes, the Palestinians are all cuddly, and the Israelis are the bad guys. The NY Times and the rest of the media better get their heads out of their asses.
- anonu 4y ago
  Bin Laden did invoke Palestine when he explained his reasons for orchestrating this.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    So?
    - anonu 4y ago
      I am providing additional context to the comment I replied to above. The comment points out that in the hours after the event there was discussion on the fark forum regarding Palestine. I'm merely stating a fact. No need for downvotes.
      - avgcorrection 4y ago
        As a reply to a post about intent (quoting that Palestine did this), your additional context is about as relevant as the price of tea in China.
  - 4y ago

lm28469 4y ago

> At least the terrorists dont seem to know too much about physics. Had they hit the buildings down lower to the ground, they could have structurally weakened them to the point where they wouldnt be able to bear the weight of the rest of the building. So far both buildings seem to be holding up. Probably one of the comments that aged the worse in the entire internet

cm2187 4y ago
Though it's the fire, not the shock that made the buildings collapse.
- aliqot 4y ago
  I wonder sometimes why it didn't fall the first time a plane smacked into it and it burned for days, before 9/11.
  - cm2187 4y ago
    Hum, which event are your referring to? I think there were fires and bombings on the WTC before 9/11 but no event where a jetliner dropped tons of jetfuel for a fire to be intense enough to melt the steel structure.
thrown_22 4y ago
They could have waited till 3pm and hit lower to kill a lot more people. The typical occupancy of the buildings was 50k workers and another few tens of thousands were going through it as visitors/tourists [0]. At the time of the attack there were only ~15K inside the buildings. Of those ~2k were killed. [0] I had a picture of me on the roof two days before the attack.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  > I had a picture of me on the roof two days before the attack. I almost visited them the week before, but we were running late and didn't have time on that trip. My Sept 11 experience was not actually realizing anything was really wrong until the afternoon. I had classes all morning that semester; there were snippets of conversation, a "did you hear" buzz, but nothing really penetrated until I got back to the dorm and found my roommate glued to the TV.

drawfloat 4y ago

None tops the all time greatest online response – "WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR"

geenat 4y ago

PHP sites never die.

mutt2016 4y ago
I prefer them to modern electron and SPA frameworks. The web really has become quite shitty
- queuebert 4y ago
  I'd say advertising based on intrusive surveillance, rather than particular frameworks, have ruined the web. These new frameworks merely make it easier to trick you into staying on a page longer. PHP sucked and was notoriously bad for security. And of course there was Flash. The web has had some dark times before.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  It's for this reason I strongly prefer asp.net razor pages to MVC. queue morpheus voice What if I told you back in my day you could generally find the code by looking at the URL structure before this routing stuff became such a big deal? imo razor pages hits the right balance. Generally speaking it's auto-routed based upon the URL, but you CAN hook into the routing in the razor page itself for fanciness for those few occasions where you need it. Everyone always takes a good idea and runs too far with it, but I feel like the routing for razor pages pulls back to reasonableness.

smcl 4y ago

The SomethingAwful 9/11 thread is also pretty wild: http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/ http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/ In case you don't wanna have to keep clicking back/forth to go to the next page (the links aren't adjusted to point to the archived pages) there's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHwF5NNAu5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHwF5NNAu5w

tanepiper 4y ago
I remember this, I was on SA back in these days and the first posts were webcams from people near by.

curiousgal 4y ago

Oh, it's that day of the year. Never forget..that first responders got fucked.

mtgentry 4y ago
My wife went to NYU and they had a fire drill early that morning. Some firefighters were there. Who knows how many of those guys died later that day.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Impossible to know which ladder/engine/squad was conducting it but there’s a few near NYU. Engines 33 and 24, Ladders 20, 9, and 5 and Squad 18. All of them suffered losses (mostly heavy losses) except Ladder 24 which had no losses. Ladders 5 and 20 had devastating losses as did Squad 18. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emergency_workers_killed_in_the_September_11_attacks#Rank,_name,_age https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emergency_workers_ki...

hunter-gatherer 4y ago

In case there are people here who are really to young to remember this, consider the context: Although 2001 doesn't seem too long ago, most people didn't have cell phones still, and those that did were signor feature phones. Social media didn't really exist yet, at least not as we understand it today. Many people had internet speeds that would be unusable today, so most information still came through the TV.

samwillis 4y ago
I was 15, everyone at school (in the uk) had phones. I remember waiting to be collected from school and reading the latest updates from the BBC WAP website on my Trium Mars phone - that’s a technology that’s long dead.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- zahllos 4y ago
  At your school perhaps. I was slightly younger than you when this happened. I was home from school early for reasons I don't remember, and watched everything unfold on TV (I do remember that part). I don't remember if I got my first phone before or after this - I think maybe after, but I am honestly very unsure. I can tell you it was a 2nd hand 3310. Not everyone in school had one, because not everyone could afford it. Some people's parents didn't have them; most people's grandparents didn't. Landlines reigned supreme, and MSN whenever that arrived (still had a few friends without internet then, I was on dialup, a few people got broadband the year after). I don't remember anyone using WAP really ever^. I don't really remember when mobile internet actually took off seriously but I remember a friend posting to facebook and getting updates via SMS in 2008/2009. Cool that you did use WAP, but you were likely a minority and that's nothing compared to the ubiquity of LTE connections of today. ^One of my friend's Dads worked for Vodafone at the time. Their HQ was commutable from where we lived. I discussed C++ with him a lot. I still don't remember anyone using WAP and they had staff discount, so your 12p/10p SMS was 2p for them. I only knew what WAP was because I read about it in PC Pro.

I_am_tiberius 4y ago

Do I understand correctly that Europeans weren't able to access most US websites? "OK, you guys are now my sole source for info on this - all European traffic goes through mae east and now I can't get squat out of the US.. "

wanderingstan 4y ago
A lot of websites went down under the extreme load of everyone clicking “refresh” over and over. I was at the office and people would call out when they got a news site to load. I clearly recall that cnn.com went to being text-only.
- netsharc 4y ago
  I was in Europe, and I knew it was middle of the night in Australia, the Australian news websites were loading, it was a static picture of the 2 towers with smoke billowing out of them...
marginalia_nu 4y ago
News sites maybe? I remember spending most of that day online.
cachvico 4y ago
Bear in mind that all news channels were broadcasting constantly at least - would still be pretty rare at the time to find a household without a single TV.
petesergeant 4y ago
This doesn’t match my memory. I was in the UK, at work, and I don’t remember any connectivity issues at all
xeromal 4y ago
Everything was DDOSed and nothing was really built to scale in those days besides the big guys like google.
soneil 4y ago

green-salt 4y ago

The only site I remember checking at the time was cnn.com, and it was in some kind of super-low bandwidth mode and was minimal static content.

Angostura 4y ago
Slashdot was notable for being able to stay up - with people posting live updates and info on finding missing people. ISTR usenet coming into its own, too
- h2odragon 4y ago
  IRC was the source there for a couple weeks. Slashnet's channel was pretty good. You could see the fingerprints of the "unofficial releases" when the same story (often verbatim) hit all 4 IRC networks at the same time; then the news within the day. The "Let's Roll" story was conspicuously seeded. Major media was sending out copyright takedowns within hours, often for photos they had no rights to in the first place. Our photo page got "we own this you can't show it" letters from multiple publishers, often on the same photo, several times for photos given to us (as public domain) by the people who took them.
- JimDabell 4y ago
  Yep, I remember all the news sites like the BBC and CNN were failing to load and Slashdot was one of the best ways to stay up to date in the first three or four hours or so.
- devilbunny 4y ago
  Slashdot was sufficiently lightweight and special-interest to stay usable. My hero of the day - because I did not have cable, and the major networks were not too wonderful on reporting - was someone at CNN who hacked together a system that spat out the closed captions onto a moderated IRC channel. You could at least stay up with what was happening, scrolling back up to catch more info. Read a lot of European newspapers as well.

boredemployee 4y ago

it's crazy to think that until the 2nd plane hit, everyone was thinking about _just_ a bad tragedy, and then came the 2nd explosion and the world changed completely.

pfarrell 4y ago
That’s exactly what it was like. I was at work and had a big project due for client delivery that day that I was finishing up. When the first plane hit, it was definitely “oh man, what a weird thing to happen; what a tragedy.” When the second one hit, it was, “oh shit. Wait what??? That can’t be an accident??” I would compare the “oh shit, what does this mean” feeling to how I felt to March 11, 2020, when the NBA announced it was cancelling their season That’s when it became definite to me that the pandemic was real and unavoidable. In the same way, the future of war for America started to seem unavoidable as one realized the planes were an act of war. Especially when the Pentagon was hit and then later that week when people were getting Anthrax in their mail. That’s something I never hear people talk about, but was just as scary and only added to the chaotic feeling of “wtf is going on?”
- h2odragon 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks The truths of that one are buried under so much official horseshit. Easier to ask now, "who benefited?" and check their subsequent records to see what else they were involved in.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  The anhtrax stuff that followed is now some obscure story but it was weird and strange at the time.
  - pfarrell 4y ago
    Exactly. I don’t know much about it, but when thinking back to that time, I remembered it was just part of the crazy moment.
- 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bloopernova 4y ago

I remember being told by a friend of my now-ex-wife that "hundreds" of planes had been "taken over" and would be crashed into state legislatures across the USA. It's very difficult to keep a cool head during an overwhelming crisis, and the world trade centre attack drives home how easy it is to get lost in rumour and fantasy. That time period following the attacks was surreal. People were very scared of any plane noises, and a brown-skinned terrorist was imagined lurking around every corner. Then the anthrax attacks happened, and the DC sniper attacks too. It felt like the USA was paralyzed by fear, so I can at least appreciate the atmosphere that led to the "patriot" act and other rights-eroding laws. COVID-19 felt like a natural disaster to me, with effects that are bad but not from malicious intent (ignoring the actions of various groups, I mean). The WTC attack and subsequent terrorism felt different, as they were caused by humans to inflict fear and chaos on us. It's amazing to me how different those 2 events felt.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
That wasn't anywhere near my experience, are you sure you're not just a generally anxious person or live around those who are?
- macksd 4y ago
  I too recall seeing hysterical news cycles around that time. The reactions to the anthrax scares as mentioned: tons of people at Home Depot buying plastic sheeting and duct tape, etc. And the day of 9/11, I remember multiple people living in other states messaging me about a military target near me being a likely nuke target. Maybe I'm also around anxious people, but it really seemed to me that a certain level of hysterics was pretty widespread around this.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    There was a lot of shock and anger, but not fear the way it's being described here.
xeromal 4y ago

avidphantasm 4y ago

I found out about the first plane hitting when my mother called me at work, on a land line I believe, just after I arrived. I fresh out of my BS and worked as a software developer at CMU at the time. I went into my boss’s office and told him, and I remember he thought it was a small plane. We had a test server room near our office that had a TV and original XBox. A few of us went into the server room to watch the coverage. Soon after, the second plane hit. I remember asking one of our senior managers if this was bigger than Pearl Harbor. He just looked at me dumbfounded. A while later the towers fell. I had a friend who lived in NYC and commuted to Jersey City via the PATH train, so I called him to make sure he was okay. He was. At the time, I didn’t understand that the towers had completely collapsed; I thought they were half standing. My friend from NYC told me I was wrong—-“they’re gone man.” We continued watching the coverage together for a couple of hours until the University announced that it was closing for the day (I think it closed the rest of the week, but can’t remember). Then we all just shambled home, stunned. I remember being surprised and a little heartened that the US waited a month the strike back at Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. By the time we invaded Iraq, I was no longer heartened, but completely disillusioned about the USA as a force for “good” in the world.

candiddevmike 4y ago
Xbox came out in November, how did you have one in September?
- foxhill 4y ago
  it likely had a different console at the time, and changed to an xbox at a later date. also perhaps it’s not worth nitpicking minutiae over someone’s account of a tragedy.
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    I thought OP was a game developer and had a test unit. Not nitpicking, genuinely curious.
    - 4y ago

josu 4y ago

The fact that the CNN link still works is really impressive. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1537000/1537469.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_15370...

agsnu 4y ago
That's BBC
josu 4y ago
*BBC

nirvgorilla 4y ago

This looks like an edited thread. I remember on IRC it was nothing but towel wrapping/turbin winder / sand nggr / islam insults after the second one hit.

hollywood_court 4y ago

I think a big part of “growing up” is realizing that we’re (the US) not the good guys. 9/11 also happens to be the anniversary of the coup in Chile which was instigated by the CIA.

chrischen 4y ago
Yea but the "lesser of two evils" justification is how we get away with it morally.
ethanbond 4y ago
Then you realize there aren’t good guys or bad guys, there’s just a world of immense trade offs, and that on balance the US is a far preferable superpower than the other probable options.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Indeed. Some people never grow up (Kissinger is 99 years old, after all).
- hollywood_court 4y ago
  All things are relative by both comparison and perspective. Most of South America would likely disagree with calling us the preferable superpower.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    That was my thought while reading the post you responded to. A US Citizen thinks the US is the best superpower? color me shocked (I'm also a US Citizen).
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      Other recent contenders: Japan, Germany, USSR, and China? A US citizen thinks any of those even has a chance of being preferable to the US? Color me shocked!

chris_wot 4y ago

I woke up the next day (I'm in Australia) and saw the footage. I remember listening to Sydney's Triple M radio network and callers were being comforted by Andrew Denton and Amanda Keller. Blue color workers were crying on the line. One of the worst days I've experienced.

tssva 4y ago

At the time I worked for an ISP which was the primary ISP for most of the major media companies and for the largest consumer internet provider. It was a crazy day trying to keep things flowing under the demand. A lot of traffic engineering and rapidly bringing up additional bandwidth. All this was done without access to the internet ourselves because early in the day my employer decided to pull the plug on our access. When they pulled the plug many employees went to the cafeteria to watch the TVs there. The company sent security guards to turn off the TVs and confiscate the remotes.

victor9000 4y ago
What was the reasoning? Did they not want people to be aware of the news? I'm imagining an exec glued to their TV thinking he has to keep his employees from doing the same thing.
- Doxin 4y ago
  Presumably they needed people to keep working, instead of being glued to the news. Harsh but in the case of an ISP makes some sense.
  - tssva 4y ago
    The thought process was to keep people working. The reality was that about 40 out of hundreds of employees there were involved in keeping things flowing that day. The ISP was located in Northern Virginia near Dulles airport where the flight which crashed into the Pentagon took off from and a large percentage there knew someone that worked at the Pentagon including in many cases family members.

runlevel1 4y ago

The 9/11 text pager data archive is similarly interesting: https://911.wikileaks.org/ https://911.wikileaks.org/

causality0 4y ago

As someon who was a child at the time, I remember September 11th in the context of fear and the sense of unity it created shortly thereafter. It's interesting to me to go back and look at the way adults reacted, which was mostly anger. It's surprising how calmly the US government reacted compared to normal people. When Afghanistan refused to extradite Bin Laden most of the people I knew wanted to start nuking Afghan cities one by one until they changed their mind.

fellellor 4y ago
Someone might have then asked “what Afghan cities?”
- curiousgal 4y ago
  This. The fact that some people believe U.S. soliders were "defending" their country severely overestimate their "enemy".

skeeter2020 4y ago

I found out while on a plane that had just left Hawaii headed for Sydney. I couldn't understand why the flight attendants were walking around with manifests, then talking at length with select passengers. Turns out they had identified those traveling through NYC and wanted to ID those with family there. In the airport 10 hours later saw what I thought were incredibly bad-taste tabloid newspapers headlines. Add in jet lag and it was probably 2 days before I understood what had happened.

stevenfoster 4y ago

Veni. Vidi. Venti.

dehrmann 4y ago
Is that a Starbucks pun?
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I'm just not seeing what this was supposed to be. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/venti#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/venti#Latin
  - tsol 4y ago
    I came I saw I blew?
  - stevenfoster 4y ago
    I used the modern Italian for the final word hoping it would resonate more with the modern reader.
- stevenfoster 4y ago
  Came and saw for 20 years but never conquered.

belter 4y ago

Slashdot.org thread Sep 11 2001: https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towers-and-pentagon-attacked https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towe...

Damogran6 4y ago
Slashdot was one of the few sites to witstand the onslaught. I was using an iPaq with an IR connection to my Nokia phone while sitting in the luggage claim at Denver International…we were supposed to fly out to Seattle that day. Didn’t obviously happen. Watching the night sky to the West and seeing NO air traffic was surreal.

xnx 4y ago

Also worth remembering that 9/11 was the 2nd attempt by terrorists to bring down the towers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...

BrotherBisquick 4y ago

Where were you when Barnacle Jim (phub) screamed "watch bush start a fucking war"

quickthrowman 4y ago
I was viewing an 800x640000 pixel image of Jim’s long ass face (rest in rip) in MSpaint when the 2nd plane hit the tower. It took me four minutes to scroll to the bottom of the picture.

xeromal 4y ago

What I find interesting is the random comment in the second page that just says "Osama". Did we know that early? I can't remember.

dehrmann 4y ago
Al-Qaeda had already bombed US embassies and the USS Cole, and affiliates were responsible for the WTC bombing. It's the first group you'd look to blame.
devin 4y ago
The WTC was attacked in ‘93 by people affiliated with Bin Laden and there were numerous attacks on US interests leading up to 2001. In 2000, the USS Cole was attacked, for example, with a string of embassy bombings throughout the 90s.
fineIllregister 4y ago
I don't think we knew, but it wasn't hard to guess. Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996. He, and Al-Qaeda, had been connected to multiple terrorist attacks throughout the late 90s. The people who had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 were trained by Al-Qaeda.
soneil 4y ago
It's not a wild reach - OBL was behind the 1998 embassy bombings (Kenya, Tanzania) and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, making him pretty much the "badguy de jour" by 2001.
InvaderFizz 4y ago
It's not a leap, considering his group had already been tied to the 1993 WTC bombing by 1996[0]. This reminds me, I've always been curious that in the year leading up to the attacks, the Taliban was a frequent feature on ABC News. Mostly for their defacing ancient historical sites from what I fuzzily remember. 0: https://www.state.gov/1993-world-trade-center-bombing/ https://www.state.gov/1993-world-trade-center-bombing/
philistine 4y ago

pmarreck 4y ago

Fark was pretty popular at that point as I recall, but I had no idea they were livethreading this at the time, so this is a neat discovery for me, although I'm already shuddering (I lived near NYC at the time)

xeromal 4y ago
Fark was my reddit from the early aughts to about 2010. It really kind of functioned as the frontpage of the internet until reddit took over.

lightedman 4y ago

I remember that day very vividly, I was going to court against my father that day. Waiting to get called into the court room for the start of the day when suddenly a bunch of police pop up and say "Everyone must evacuate the building immediately, court is dismissed for the day." Get in the car, turn on the radio, and right about then news of the second plane dropped. I knew that was going to be a change across the country right then and there. Never actually got back to that court case. I think literally every case got an emergency dismissal outright due to that event, as neither myself nor my father ever walked back into the courtroom after that event.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

zwaps 4y ago

I remember the somethingawful.com thread with the iconic post "Watch Bush start a fucking war"

spanktheuser 4y ago

One of my friends and colleagues had just finished a large, years-long IT consulting project with Marsh. Not long after the towers fell he received a request to join a group of people who had worked closely with some of their IT staff killed in the attack. The task: come up with a dictionary of possible passwords the deceased may have used based on everyone's recollection of their private lives and habits around passwords they may have shared (character substitution habits, etc.) It was grim and my friend was shaken by the experience for some time.

slim 4y ago

I remember not being able to reach disinfo.com. I remember some arabic satellite channels being used as a covert channel for transmitting informations probably to terrorists (one of them had the logo blinking in a pattern that looked like morse). I remember strange people at airports asking you if you can please take a letter with you to your destination where someone would collect it.

jasonm23 4y ago

It's amazing that by 9:24am the general public had been told that Bin Laden planned this... with no evidence, and yet, here we are. Court of public opinion is deadly. We also managed to make the very idea of conspiracies, false flags and non-government approved opinions... "sketchy" So cool.

Eleison23 4y ago

So on that day, I was homeless and I woke up on a park bench with the dawn. I went to Mass in the morning where they had the custom of allowing anyone pray for any intention, and so someone mentioned an explosion or bombing in NYC and I didn't think much of it, considering the backdrop of regular terrorist bombings and such. Then I made my way up to the library and logged onto a public computer in the lab. There was a volunteer at the front desk making many phone calls in an attempt to organize an emergency blood drive, which I thought was notable, but by this time (late morning in Arizona) I didn't really grasp the magnitude of what was going on, until I logged on to a news site or a chat room with my friends and then it all became clear. That afternoon I went to the student lounge at church where the TV was just nonstop replaying footage of the aircraft smashing into buildings. That continuous replay was profoundly traumatic for me and doubtless other people; I do not know why we persisted in viewing it.