Recent Appearances...

Hello !
Recent Appearances...

Home Front: WoT

Never Forget, 2009 edition

2009-09-11

Here is the 2009 edition of the "Never Forget" archive. This collection has been assembled over the years, with much input from other Rantburgers. 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 Red Bandanna 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.

Ann Althouse, " At dawn on September 11, 2007, the fog hides the absence of the Twin Towers" (digital photography).

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, "Lets 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 its like to swallow your terror and act is beyond the imagination of most ordinary folks - but the point is, they were ordinary folks. Were 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. Its a heartening sight."
the week of 9/17-21/01 -- "Im 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 -- "Were going to win. We dont 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. Im 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."
"Lessons in War" National Review -- "Bin Ladens killers tore off a great scab on September 11; at once they exposed to billions the evil of radical Islam and with it the Western worlds shock, fright, and difficulty in confronting it and defeating it. That uncertainty ultimately does not arise from our enemies, but from within ourselves this strange disease of thinking we fight back too much when we often do too little."

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).

"Instapundit's" archive for 9/11/01

MEMRI, The Arab and Iranian Reation to 9/11 (documentary film).

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.

Link

Home Front: Culture Wars

Liberal Hollywood uses censorship as a useful tool to stifle dissent.

2008-09-16

The sad fact is that actual artistic oppression - book banning in its many modern forms - is a matter of course in the entertainment industry, especially when the underlying product is declared politically incorrect or runs contrary to the interests of Hollywood's political altar, the Democratic Party.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations runs rings around Hollywood's pious First Amendment absolutists.

"I hope you will be reassured that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs," director Phil Alden Robinson wrote after changing the script from Muslim terrorists to Austrian neo-Nazis in the Tom Clancy thriller, "The Sum of all Fears." "And I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination."

While Mr. Clancy put up an admirable fight, actor Ben Affleck acquiesced, cashed his multimillion-dollar check and fought the dreaded Austrians, whose flagging Teutonic self-confidence again took a hit. Thanks to Hollywood artistic appeasement, Arab youth in totalitarian Muslim countries indoctrinated in anti-Western thought dodged another esteem bullet.

Perhaps Mr. Affleck would still have a career as a leading man if the highly anticipated "The Sum of All Fears" added up to the realistic "war on terror" headlines that dominated news cycles as it came out in 2002 - or, God forbid, matched up to its authors' chosen words, characters and ideas. Now Mr. Affleck sits near the craft service table watching his wife, Jennifer Garner, fight the bad guys.

The silence of the celebrity political class was heartbreaking when Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic radical in retaliation for making "Submission," a critically acclaimed film that portrayed horrific female oppression within the practice of Islam.

Yet Hollywood - quick to find martyrs near to its heart (Valerie Plame, et al) - ignored its fallen Dutch comrade and refused to celebrate the film and its maker, fulfilling his murderer's greatest desire.

"It's like a really bad Disney movie," Mr. Damon said of Mrs. Palin's political rise.

Yet it was a really good Disney movie that stands as a lasting symbol that censorship is alive and well in liberal Hollywood. In 2006, ABC and its parent company poured $40 million into a five-hour, commercial-free miniseries called "The Path to 9/11." Built to play every year on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the docu-drama chronicles how the al Qaeda menace grew under the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Night 1 focused on the Clinton years; Night 2 looked into the eight months leading up to the attacks under President Bush. ABC considered the two-day movie experience a gift to the country, and over the two-night airing an astounding 28 million viewers tuned in.

Less about politics, "The Path to 9/11" focused on the emergence of radical Islamic terror as a clear and present American threat. Neither administration was cast as the villain; the Islamic terrorists were. Both administrations were rightfully portrayed as underestimating the threat.

Yet politicians and government employees tied to Bill and Hillary Clinton, all who admittedly hadn't seen the film, took to the airwaves to demand it not be aired or be radically edited, with only days to go before its premiere.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Rep. Louise M. Slaughter and even former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who was convicted of destroying top-secret national security documents, demanded that Disney cut the movie to their liking or pull it from the air, within days of its anticipated airing.

Political hacks gleefully declared victory over free speech. Hollywood stood silent as the political class demanded blatant censorship.

Because the Clinton political family didn't like one scene in one movie - one that accurately portrayed that the Clinton administration had chances to take out Osama bin Laden - ABC and Disney folded to the pressure and, as a result, the film will likely never be seen on network television again, nor will it ever make its way to the lucrative DVD market - the modern equivalent of taking it off the library shelf.

Even $2 million movies make their way to the marketplace - let alone $40 million controversial ones that already have been seen by millions.

"It's censorship in the most blatant way," left-wing filmmaker Oliver Stone said. "I'm not vouching for its accuracy - it's a dramatization - but it's an important work and needs to be seen."

"Blocking the Path to 9/11" is a devastating documentary directed by former talk-show host John Ziegler that shows exactly how censorship works in America. As long as it is supported by Democratic politicians and by liberal Hollywood players, censorship is a useful tool to stifle dissent.

Mr. Ziegler's documentary is a cautionary tale on how the mainstream media play a crucial role in supporting Democratic causes and how liberal blogs bolster the media and Hollywood's leftward attack. No film better illuminates how censorship is operative in modern America and is utilized by the very people who demand absolute creative freedom.

If you can't find "The Path to 9/11" or the documentary that spells out the crime of its suppression, perhaps you should look out for Matt Damon's latest project, "The People Speak," featuring "dramatic live readings" from America-bashing usual suspects Danny Glover and Eddie Vedder, and honoring Howard Zinn, the celebrity left's favorite revisionist historian and the Marxist professor who inspired the Robin William's character in "Good Will Hunting."

Maybe Sarah Palin can give it a look on the campaign trail and understand why a beautiful and accomplished woman from Alaska poses such a threat to Hollywood and the Democratic Party - and why so many people in heartland America are rooting for her to win.

Link

Home Front: WoT

Never Forget, 2008

2008-09-11

Here is the 2008 edition of the "Never Forget" archive. This collection has been assembled over the years, with much input from other Rantburgers. Feel free to add to the list in the comments section.

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 Red Bandanna 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.

Ann Althouse, " At dawn on September 11, 2007, the fog hides the absence of the Twin Towers" (digital photography).

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, "Lets 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 its like to swallow your terror and act is beyond the imagination of most ordinary folks - but the point is, they were ordinary folks. Were 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. Its a heartening sight."
the week of 9/17-21/01 -- "Im 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 -- "Were going to win. We dont 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. Im 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?"

James Lileks, "Buzz.mn" 9/11/07 -- "For my birthday my daughter gave me a deck of cards: Go Ask Dad. Each card has a question about what I liked when I was a kid, what I wanted to be, what music I liked. Every night we read a few cards. Last night's question: what was the most important event that had taken place in my lifetime? I couldn't answer that one. Not yet. She's only seven."

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."
"Lessons in War" National Review -- "Bin Ladens killers tore off a great scab on September 11; at once they exposed to billions the evil of radical Islam and with it the Western worlds shock, fright, and difficulty in confronting it and defeating it. That uncertainty ultimately does not arise from our enemies, but from within ourselves this strange disease of thinking we fight back too much when we often do too little."

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).

"Instapundit's" archive for 9/11/01

MEMRI, The Arab and Iranian Reation to 9/11 (documentary film).

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.

Link

-Short Attention Span Theater-

Never Forget, 2007 Edition

2007-09-11

Here is the 2007 edition of the "Never Forget" archive. This collection has been assembled over the years, with much input from other Rantburgers. 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 &0151; 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) &0151; an incredibly detailed reconstruction of the 102 minutes between the first attack and the final collapse.

Editorial, "Common Valor" Wall Street Journal &0151; ". . . 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 &0151; "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&0151;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 Red Bandanna Man Is 9/11 Hero" WNBC-TV &0151; 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 &0151; account of an early volunteer in the recovery effort

Rod Dreher, "The Hole in the Skyline" National Review Online &0151; "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" &0151; 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.

Ann Althouse, "At dawn on September 11, 2007, the fog hides the absence of the Twin Towers" (digital photography).

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" &0151; "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, "Lets Roll"

Other Commentary

James Lileks, "The Daily Bleat"
9/13/01 &0151; "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 its like to swallow your terror and act is beyond the imagination of most ordinary folks - but the point is, they were ordinary folks. Were all on that plane now."
9/14/01 &0151; "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. Its a heartening sight."
the week of 9/17-21/01 &0151; "Im 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 &0151; "Were going to win. We dont have any choice."
9/11/03 &0151; "Two years in; the rest of our lives to go."
9/8/06 &0151; "Just so you know: 9/11 reset the clock for me. All hands went to midnight. Im 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 &0151; a tribute to "small teams of inconceivably brave men and women, working in strange places, unknown and unacknowledged"

"Wretchard" (Richard Fernandez), "The Shadow of Our Hand" (blog posting)

Larry Miller, "Two Years" Weekly Standard &0151; "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) &0151; "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 &0151; "On Sept. 10, 2001 we were, a lot of us, immersed in a national culture&0151;a big, vivid, full-network, broadband, opens-soon-at-a-theater-near-you culture&0151;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 &0151; "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 &0151; ". . . 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 &0151; "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."
"Lessons in War" National Review &0151; "Bin Ladens killers tore off a great scab on September 11; at once they exposed to billions the evil of radical Islam and with it the Western worlds shock, fright, and difficulty in confronting it and defeating it. That uncertainty ultimately does not arise from our enemies, but from within ourselves this strange disease of thinking we fight back too much when we often do too little."

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).

"Instapundit" archive for 9/11/01

Middle East Media Research Institute, The Arab and Iranian Reation to 9/11 (documentary film).

The Last Word

George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People September 20, 2001 &0151; "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.

Link

Home Front: Politix

NYT: Donk's Newest Suicide Strategy - Bash Fox

2006-10-01

Original title, which is effectively disproven by the article:
In Taking On Fox, Democrats See Reward in the Risk
The Fox News Channel doesnt officially turn 10 until this week, but the Democrats have already begun doing their best to spoil the celebrations.

The party crashing began last Sunday, when former President Bill Clinton transformed an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday into a finger-pointing tirade against what he called a conservative hit job. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, quickly released a statement applauding Mr. Clinton for standing up to what he described as a right-wing, bullying propaganda machine.

In separate appearances on Fox News over the next two days, Lanny J. Davis, a former special counsel to Mr. Clinton, and Barbara Boxer, the Democratic senator from California, mocked the news channels trademarked motto of being fair and balanced.

And on Wednesday Paul Begala and James Carville, Democratic commentators for CNN, engaged in more than five minutes of high-decibel debate on Fox with Bill OReilly about Mr. Clintons appearance, daring Mr. OReilly to come out of the closet and admit Fox News is a right-leaning, anti-Clinton network.

The attacks represent a new twist on the Democrats complicated dance with the cable news channel. Though Fox News maintains that its reporting is down the middle, Democrats have long complained that the news channel operates like a public relations outpost of the Bush White House. But never before has that anger built into a mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-any-more moment, and spilled over in such naked and sustained fashion onto Fox News itself.

The Republicans are using Fox News to gin up their base, and now for the first time the Democrats are doing it, too, said Steve McMahon, a Democratic strategist with McMahon, Squier & Associates who handled Mr. Deans presidential campaign.

Engaging Fox News in such an aggressive manner, however, may not be the smartest strategy. If theres a base that needs energizing for these midterm elections, it belongs to the Republicans, and a Clinton-led attack may only revivify them. And so far, there is just one clear beneficiary: Fox News. The news channel has highlighted the contretemps on many of its programs, boosting the ratings in the process.

Democrats do not view Chris Wallace as a partisan gunslinger, as they do some other Fox News personalities. But his questions about whether Mr. Clinton did enough to destroy Al Qaeda ignited simmering Democratic and Clintonian anger.

Democrats had been furious with White House attempts over the last few months to to portray Democrats as weaker on national security than Republicans. And defenders of the Clinton administration were furious about The Path to 9/11, the ABC docudrama that they claimed depicted the administration in an unfair light. All this fed into last weeks reaction, Democratic officials and strategists say. I think its important for us to call it what it is, said Karen Finney, communications director for the Democratic National Committee, speaking about the recent incidents. We cant let conservatives and Republicans get away with painting us in a corner and mischaracterizing who we are and what we stand for.

The incendiary interview appeared on the same day the pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was leaked. And the two events provided an opportune moment to strike, Ms. Finney said.

Soon after the Fox News Sunday telecast, Mr. Dean mentioned both items in a combative statement. And the Democratic National Committee followed up Mr. Deans statement with an e-mail fundraising appeal, complete with a YouTube link to the interview.

I think youre seeing the beginning of an alternative Democratic approach, a desire to strike back hard, said Mr. Begala, a former Clinton adviser.

Clinton tapped into something in the Democratic zeitgeist, Mr. Begala said. Were really tired of being bullied, particularly by Fox.

Democrats have believed, nearly from the moment Fox News began in October of 1996, that the news channel was institutionally biased against them. Fox News officials have disputed such charges, saying the network is merely a corrective to what they contend is a pervasive liberal bias in the news media.

Nonetheless, most Democrats have believed the network could not be ignored. If no one appeared on their shows, who would make the Democratic case? The cable news channel, despite a fall-off in ratings over the past year, still towers over its competitors. And although the viewers who regularly watch Fox News are more likely to be Republican, Democrats and independents still turn up in significant numbers 20 percent and 17 percent, respectively, compared with 34 percent who are Republicans according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Swing voters are important in some states, particularly the Northeast. How they react to the Democrats more confrontational approach could help determine how far the Democrats get in their efforts to gain control of the House and Senate.

Some Democrats said they believe that a more muscular approach in taking on the Republicans could help them grab onto an issue that has been an Achilles heel for the Democrats in recent elections: national security.

And that couldnt make some Republicans happier. I think it puts national security front and center and reminds people that this administration is taking the fight to the terrorists and recognizes the threat America faces, something the Democrats do not, said Danny Diaz, Republican National Committee spokesman.

The Republican National Committee is doing its bit to spread that point of view. After the Clinton interview, it sent talking points to its grassroots membership and to the news media, and ramped up efforts to book people on TV and radio programs to comment on the debate.

And Fox News executives have not seemed to mind furnishing screen time to Democrats so they can bash the network. (Roger Ailes, the chairman and chief executive of Fox News and Fox Television Stations, was unavailable to comment for this article.)

After all, the ratings dont lie.

The first three days of the week saw primetime and daily increases of 20 percent and 13 percent, respectively, compared with the average over the previous four weeks. And Fox News Sunday got its best ratings in three years.
And thus the now-infamous "hit job" is, in fact, suicide. Brilliant. More, please.

Link

Home Front: WoT

Roger Ailes Blasts Bill Clinton's 'Assault'

2006-09-28

Fox News chief Roger Ailes says former President Clinton's response to Chris Wallace's question about going after Osama bin Laden represents "an assault on all journalists."

Ailes said Clinton had a "wild overreaction" in the interview, broadcast on "Fox News Sunday." Hundreds of thousands of people subsequently watched clips over the Internet, with Fox foes rallying behind Clinton.

"If you can't sit there and answer a question from a professional, mild-mannered, respectful reporter like Chris Wallace, then the hatred for journalists is showing," Ailes said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday. "All journalists need to raise their eyebrows and say, `hold on a second.'"

Wallace has said he asked Clinton about bin Laden partly because of ABC's recent docudrama "The Path to 9/11," widely criticized as full of falsehoods by former Clinton administration officials for depicting a bungling effort at going after the terrorist leader.

Wallace asked: "I understand that hindsight is always 20/20, but the question is, why didn't you connect the dots and put him out of business?"

Clinton said his administration did more than President Bush to go after bin Laden before the terrorist attacks. While Clinton said Wallace's question was legitimate, he called it a "conservative hit job" and accused Fox of not being similarly tough on Bush.

Clinton aides later said they considered the question an attack.

"They're out there saying (Wallace) was savage, he sandbagged (Clinton), he was taking orders on the question," Ailes said. "Chris Wallace has never taken orders on questions in his life. There's never been a discussion of that. I frankly think the assault on Chris Wallace is an assault on all journalists."

Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio and Television News Directors Association, said she worked with Wallace at NBC's "Meet the Press," where she was once executive producer. Wallace, who left ABC News to become "Fox News Sunday" host in 2003, was always a professional who asked tough questions and was not partisan, she said.

But Cochran said she would not comment on the larger question of what this meant for all journalists.

The liberal media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which has repeatedly criticized Fox News Channel for favoring Republican and conservative points of view, said it could see why Clinton got frustrated. Steve Rendell, FAIR senior media analyst, said it appeared Wallace was trying to cut off Clinton's answer.

"I would dismiss Roger Ailes' complaint as simply whining in an attempt to make Fox News appear the victim in this fight," Rendell said.

Link

Home Front: Politix

Slick Willie: "Neocons engineered my outburst"

2006-09-26

ScrappleFace

(2006-09-26) The morning after Fox News aired reporter Chris Wallaces interview with a feisty Bill Clinton, the former president today said, Right-wing, neocon conspiracy theorists are out to get me.

Mr. Clinton dismissed allegations that he appeared paranoid on TV, saying, people who call me paranoid are the exact same right-wingers, who worked behind the scenes with Chris Wallace to engineer my emotional outburst. Its what they call a wag the finger strategy to distract attention from the Bush administrations foreign policy failures.

The remark follows Mr. Clintons vigorous defense of his administrations virtual assassination of al Qaeda leader Usama Bin Laden. Indeed, a spokesman for Mr. Bin Laden confirmed that during the Clinton administration, the al Qaeda leader felt nearly threatened.

The recent ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, a new book called The Looming Tower, and Mr. Wallaces smirking during the interview provide more evidence, he said, of the conservative hit job orchestrated by White House adviser Karl Rove.

Experts agreed that the most important question raised by the Wallace-Clinton interview is whether the former presidents frequent references to a book on 9/11 by former counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke can push its sales past the Noam Chomsky book recommended last week by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the United Nations.

Link

Home Front: Politix

VDH opines things aren't all that bad AND the Dems will lose again

2006-09-23

Despite their dreams of recapturing one or both houses of Congress this November, the Democrats seem determined to reprise their poor showings in 2002 and 2004. Now, as then, they are dozing in the campaign's homestretch, like Aesop's hare, lulled by rosy predictions and the premature applause of Hollywood and the mainstream press. Soon, however, they may awake to discover that while they snoozed before the finish line, George W. Bush hunkered down in his tough shell, kept his slow legs moving, and inched them out.

The president has had a rough year since his re-election. But the furor is now subsiding, and once again, turtlelike, his poll numbers are creeping forward. The economy continues growing. Interest rates, unemployment and inflation remain manageable. Gas may fall to $2 a gallon. It matters little whether the president is as responsible for the price decline as he was for its rise -- the public feels better all the same.

In hindsight, Hurricane Katrina is increasingly seen as the singular natural disaster it was -- made worse by lapses in government at all levels. And too much federal largess, rather than too little, is the new worry.

The line between the supposedly good "multilateral" war in Afghanistan to remove the Taliban and the bad "unilateral" one that ousted Saddam is blurring. Suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices are the terrorism of choice in both theaters. In some weeks, more are killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq. And al Qaeda, unlike the U.S. media, sees both as integrated jihadist struggles against the infidel.

When the smoke cleared in Lebanon, Israel had not lost to Hezbollah -- but gained even more support from the American people, according to most recent polls. Nor did the elected Lebanese government collapse. Indeed, rumor has it that Syria, Iran and Hezbollah are much less pleased with the result of the war than Western journalists had supposed. And Iran appears to be backing down somewhat from its nuclear agenda.
He is more sanguine than I throughout this paragraph, but I can hope it's because he has better perspective.
America has not been hit again since September 11, 2001. And, perhaps preferring to err on the side of safety, most Americans continue to back interrogations and detentions at Guantanamo. For now, most still believe it is jihadists -- not their own president -- who pose the real threat to their way of life.

Europeans no longer smugly believe the Islamists are incited only by the cowboy George Bush. They are weary and increasingly angry over the Danish cartoon hysteria, Dutch murders, French riots, London and Madrid bombings, foiled plots in Britain and Germany, and the most recent threats to the pope. Terrorist communiques allege anger over Iraq -- but also Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Gaza, Kashmir, Kosovo, Lebanon, the Philippines, the West Bank, and on and on.

Despite their troubles, the Republicans remain more unified and pragmatic than their opponents.
In the end it's the differential that matters, right?
The party establishment stood behind the often anti-Bush Sen. Lincoln Chafee in a tough but successful re-election fight in Rhode Island. In contrast, the Democratic establishment watched in horror as the party's activist wing drummed out their own moderate, Sen. Joe Lieberman, as a turncoat.

In the past, leftist shrillness -- whether it was Michael Moore calling Iraqi terrorists "Minutemen" or Cindy Sheehan pronouncing an American president "the world's greatest terrorist" -- hurt the Democrats, who came across as amused by the noise of these supportive public megaphones.

Once again such rhetorical craziness is turning off moderates. A film has just been released imagining the assassination of a sitting American president. On the Democratic side, only Sen. Hillary Clinton has denounced such creepiness; other Clintonites were far more worried only about looking bad in the recent docudrama "The Path to 9/11."

Democrats denounce the conduct of the war against terror. All well and good -- but they also must explain how they would snatch Osama bin Laden from his friendly tribes in Islamic and nuclear Pakistan. They rail against the Iraq war, but they cannot agree on when -- not to mention whether -- to depart. They lament appeasement of Iran but offer no military or political alternative to the ongoing multiparty negotiations.

The Democrats claim Mr. Bush is not protecting us at home and is battling the wrong enemies abroad. But even of those sympathetic to such a message, how many believe Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy are better suited to fight a war against terror? And where the president is vulnerable -- illegal immigration, continual energy dependence, spiraling debt and profligate federal spending -- the Democrats' solutions are even more at odds with public opinion.

The result is that Mr. Bush, tucked into his shell, keeps lumbering forward, grimfaced -- resisting withdrawal from Iraq and warning against Islamic fascism. And the more the Democratic hares yawn and snore -- the more this unfazed turtle keeps moving toward the November elections.

Link

Home Front: WoT

The Path to Hysteria

2006-09-18

My sin was to write a screenplay accurately depicting Bill Clinton's record on terrorism

by Cyrus Nowrasteh, Wall Street Journal

I am neither an activist, politician or partisan, nor an ideologue of any stripe. What I am is a writer who takes his job very seriously, as do most of my colleagues: Also, one who recently took on the most distressing and important story it will ever fall to me to tell. I considered it a privilege when asked to write the script for "The Path to 9/11." I felt duty-bound from the outset to focus on a single goal--to represent our recent pre-9/11 history as the evidence revealed it to be. The American people deserve to know that history: They have paid for it in blood. Like all Americans, I wish it were not so. I wish there were no terrorists. I wish there had been no 9/11. I wish we could squabble among ourselves in assured security. But wishes avail nothing.

My Iranian parents fled tyranny and oppression. I know and appreciate deeply the sanctuary America has offered. Only in this country could a person such as I have had the life, liberty and opportunity that I have had. No one needs to remind me of this--I know it every single day. I know, too, as does everyone involved in the production, that we kept uppermost in our minds the need for due diligence in the delivery of this history. Fact-checkers and lawyers scrutinized every detail, every line, every scene. There were hundreds of pages of annotations. We were informed by multiple advisers and interviews with people involved in the events--and books, including in a most important way the 9/11 Commission Report.

It would have been good to be able to report due diligence on the part of those who judged the film, the ones who held forth on it before watching a moment of it. Instead, in the rush to judgment, and the effort to portray the series as the work of a right-wing zealot, much was made of my "friendship" with Rush Limbaugh (a connection limited to two social encounters), but nothing of any acquaintance with well-known names on the other side of the political spectrum. . . .

In July a reporter asked if I had ever been ethnically profiled. I happily replied, "No." I can no longer say that. The L.A. Times, for one, characterized me by race, religion, ethnicity, country-of-origin and political leanings--wrongly on four of five counts. To them I was an Iranian-American politically conservative Muslim. It is perhaps irrelevant in our brave new world of journalism that I was born in Boulder, Colo. I am not a Muslim or practitioner of any religion, nor am I a political conservative. What am I? I am, most devoutly, an American. I asked the reporter if this kind of labeling was a new policy for the paper. He had no response.

The hysteria engendered by the series found more than one target. In addition to the death threats and hate mail directed at me, and my grotesque portrayal as a maddened right-winger, there developed an impassioned search for incriminating evidence on everyone else connected to the film. And in director David Cunningham, the searchers found paydirt! His father had founded a Christian youth outreach mission. The whiff of the younger Mr. Cunningham's possible connection to this enterprise was enough to set the hounds of suspicion baying. A religious mission! A New York Times reporter wrote, without irony or explanation, that an issue that raised questions about the director was his involvement in his father's outreach work. In the era of McCarthyism, the merest hint of a connection to communism sufficed to inspire dark accusations, the certainty that the accused was part of a malign conspiracy. Today, apparently, you can get something of that effect by charging a connection with a Christian mission. . . .

Mr. Nowrasteh wrote the screenplay for "The Path to 9/11."

Link

Home Front: WoT

"Shallow, self-centered" leftist marks 9/11 anniversary

2006-09-11

by James Taranto, "Best of the Web," Wall Street Journal
(Boldface emphasis added.)

Gerald Ensley, a writer for the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat, has an Andy Rooney-esque essay titled "Yes, It Changed the World. But 9/11 Makes Me Angry." Fittingly, it appeared on the fifth anniversary of Sept. 10, 2001:

Soon, I hated 9/11. And as we observe tomorrow's fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, I still hate it. Just thinking about it makes me angry.

Not the kind of chest-puffing, red-white-and-blue anger about "How dare someone attack my country!" But more of a sullen, frustrated, impotent anger about "Why did someone have to ruin my country?"

I get angry that 9/11 spurred the passage of the Patriot Act. . . . I get angry about 9/11 because it led to overweening security measures at our airports and public buildings. . . . I get angry because 9/11 led us to a war in Iraq. . . . I get angry because 9/11 emboldened and expanded Islamic extremism. . . . I get angry with 9/11 because it hurt our economy. . . . I get angry with 9/11 because it feeds the shallow, self-centered side of me.

Look on the bright side; at least the man is self-aware!

You know what makes us angry? We live on the sixth floor, and the elevator in our apartment building has been broken for two weeks! Granted, that has nothing to do with 9/11, but if Ensley can be shallow and self-centered, so can we.

It was often said at the time that 9/11 changed everything. That turns out to have been an exaggeration. One thing it did not change is elite liberal opinion--as represented by the press, academia and the Democratic Party--which has fallen back on the adversarial attitudes it developed in the late Cold War era, which is to say the era of Vietnam, Watergate and their aftermath.

Partly, we suppose, this is a matter of intellectual laziness. But partly it is because of an illusory similarity between the Cold War and the war on terror. If you assume 9/11 was a one-off, then the terrorist threat is a distant, abstract one, easy to move to the back of your mind while arguing about such trivia as the infringement of terrorists' civil liberties.

Thus Los Angeles Times TV critic Samantha Bonar can sneer, in reviewing ABC's flawed Miniseries "The Path to 9/11," that "according to 'The Path,' the Clinton administration was too concerned with such trifles as respecting international laws and treaties, protecting civil liberties, following diplomatic protocol, displaying cultural sensitivity and pursuing larger goals (like Mideast peace) to bring down the bad guys." Which is an entirely accurate description of the Clinton administration, even if the picture takes liberties with the facts.

The italicized clause in the paragraph before the preceding one is what the experts call "a big if." Our enemies, of course, did not intend 9/11 to be a one-off; if it is, it is only because the government--that is to say, the Bush administration--has thus far succeeded in preventing another attack on U.S. soil. Liberals' blasé approach to the terror threat will be wholly unsustainable in the event of another attack. Thus, paradoxically, opposition to the antiterror effort remains alive only because of that effort's success.

Link

Home Front: WoT

Editing Changes to Path to 9/11

2006-09-11

By DAVID BAUDER
The Associated Press
Monday, September 11, 2006; 5:00 AM

NEW YORK -- ABC made several editing changes to the first part of its miniseries "The Path to 9/11" following furious protests by Clinton administration officials that it fabricated scenes about their actions prior to the terrorist attacks.

But the network resisted calls to cancel the $40 million miniseries, airing commercial-free over two nights. Part two is scheduled for Monday, with an interruption for President Bush's address to the nation.

Several scenes were cut or changed from the movie that aired Sunday and finished 20 minutes shy of its three-hour time slot. ABC has called it a dramatization, not a documentary.

One scene, in a copy of the movie given to television critics a few weeks ago, indicated President Clinton's preoccupation with his potential impeachment may have hurt the effort to go after Osama bin Laden.

In the original scene, an actor portraying White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke shares a limousine ride with FBI agent John O'Neill and tells him: "The Republicans are going all-out for impeachment. I just don't see in that climate the president's going to take chances" and give the order to kill bin Laden.

But in the film aired Sunday, Clarke says to O'Neill: "The president has assured me this ... won't affect his decision-making."

O'Neill replies: "So it's OK if somebody kills bin Laden, as long as he didn't give the order. It's pathetic."

Another scene in the critics' cut pictured O'Neill asking Clarke on the telephone: "What's Clinton going to do (about bin Laden)?"

Clarke replies, "I don't know. The Lewinsky thing is a noose around his neck."

This was cut entirely from the film that aired Sunday.

Another scene in the movie that depicted a team of CIA operatives poised outside of bin Laden's fortess in Afghanistan, ready to attack, was substantially shortened from the original. Pictures of the waiting Afghanistan operatives are interspersed with those of officials in Washington, who had to approve the mission.

The original version depicted national security adviser Samuel R. Berger hanging up on CIA chief George Tenet as Tenet sought permission to attack bin Laden. The movie aired Sunday did not include Berger hanging up.

The affect of the editing in that scene is to deflect specific blame. It ends with actor Donnie Wahlberg, head of the CIA team in Afghanistan, saying, "Are there no men in Washington, or are they all cowards?"

In the critics' version, Wahlberg's statement is followed directly by archival footage of Clinton's video testimony about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Sunday, that footage was not included.

Twice, the network de-emphasized the role of the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks in its film.

The critics' version contained a note in the opening credits that the film is "based on the 9/11 commission report." That was omitted from the film aired Sunday.

In a separate disclaimer that ran three times Sunday, ABC says that the material is "drawn from a variety of sources including the 9/11 commission report and other published materials and from personal interviews." That differs from a note in the critics' version that said the dramatization "is based on the 9/11 commission report and other published sources and personal interviews."

The disclaimer that ABC aired three times emphasized that the movie was not a documentary.

"For dramatic and narrative purposes the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression," the note said.

Clinton spokesman Jay Carson said in a statement Sunday night that ABC and its parent, The Walt Disney Co., "chose fiction over fact and entertainment over education in airing their TV show."

Critics, such as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., said it was "disingenuous and dangerous" not to include accurate historical accounts in the movie.

Thomas Kean, head of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks and a backer of the film, said on ABC's "This Week" Sunday that he hadn't seen the final cut of the movie but urged Americans to watch it.

"If people blame Bill Clinton after seeing this, then the miniseries has failed," said Kean, the former Republican New Jersey governor. "That's wrong and it shouldn't happen."

John Lehman, another Republican commission members, said on the ABC News show that he's told the film is equally harsh on the administrations of President Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush.

"And if you don't like the hits to the Clinton administration, well, welcome to the club," Lehman said. "The Republicans have lived with Michael Moore and Oliver Stone and most of Hollywood as a fact of life."

Link

Home Front: WoT

Never Forget: recommended readings for 9/11

2006-09-11

Heres 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 Red Bandanna 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, "Lets 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 its like to swallow your terror and act is beyond the imagination of most ordinary folks - but the point is, they were ordinary folks. Were 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. Its a heartening sight."
the week of 9/17-21/01 -- "Im 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 -- "Were going to win. We dont 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. Im 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.

Link

-12 More