September 11; A Day of Infamy
I was in Seattle for a wedding, staying with my sister. My nephew and I were up early, and he called to me, “Come see something! This is so weird. A plane just flew into the World Trade Center!”
I didn’t believe him, but I went to his room across the hall to see. As we watched, the second plane flew into the second tower.
“That wasn’t an accident,” I said. “It’s not that easy to fly straight into a building.”
But mostly, I was thinking “Will I ever see my husband again?”
We were living in Germany. The phone lines were blocked. I couldn’t hear his voice.
My sister got a call, and she left for work. My nephew left for work. I had a coffee date with one of my former professors; she never showed up. She called me later to say she was stuck in the ferry line; the ferries weren’t operating, and neither was her phone until now.
So I hit the quilt shop. I knew I would spend the rest of the day rivited to the television screen, trying to learn what had just happened. We had seen it, we kept seeing it, over and over, but none of us could understand what we were seeing.
The New Yorker cover, above, captures it perfectly – we were all in the dark.
I was scared, and I felt angry. I wanted to DO something. I wanted to have something positive to come out of this horror. I designed a quilt. I cut out the pieces. I hand stitched all the pieces. It got me through.
Maybe late that night, AdventureMan was able to call me. We still didn’t know exactly what was going on or if the planes would ever fly again. I held my breath in the coming days, as my flight reservation day approached.
I was on one of the first planes out. I remember the pilot coming on as we were departing, and telling us to introduce ourselves to each other, to be neighbors on our flight, that we would help one another if anything went wrong. It was greatly moving, unexpectedly emotional.
September 11 is one of those days when everyone knows where he or she was when the planes hit. Everyone has a story. On our first safari to Botswana, we met a New Yorker who had been working in downtown New York and who had to walk miles to get home and somehow ended up barefoot. She said the walk was the best part, being alive was the best part, and that the streets, on that day of horror, were filled with people who were kind and helpful to one another.
BBC 9-11 Third Tower
I am not much on conspiracy theories. This is on today’s BBC – a slow Saturday, I don’t imagine it will get a lot of attention.
9/11 third tower mystery ‘solved’ |
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The final mystery of 9/11 will soon be solved, according to US experts investigating the collapse of the third tower at the World Trade Center.
The 47-storey third tower, known as Tower Seven, collapsed seven hours after the twin towers.
Investigators are expected to say ordinary fires on several different floors caused the collapse.
Conspiracy theorists have argued that the third tower was brought down in a controlled demolition.
Unlike the twin towers, Tower Seven was not hit by a plane.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, based near Washington DC, is expected to conclude in its long-awaited report this month that ordinary fires caused the building to collapse.
That would make it the first and only steel skyscraper in the world to collapse because of fire.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s lead investigator, Dr Shyam Sunder, spoke to BBC Two’s “The Conspiracy Files”:
“Our working hypothesis now actually suggests that it was normal building fires that were growing and spreading throughout the multiple floors that may have caused the ultimate collapse of the buildings.”
‘Smoking gun’
However, a group of architects, engineers and scientists say the official explanation that fires caused the collapse is impossible. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth argue there must have been a controlled demolition.
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The founder of the group, Richard Gage, says the collapse of the third tower is an obvious example of a controlled demolition using explosives.
“Building Seven is the smoking gun of 9/11… A sixth grader can look at this building falling at virtually freefall speed, symmetrically and smoothly, and see that it is not a natural process.
“Buildings that fall in natural processes fall to the path of least resistance”, says Gage, “they don’t go straight down through themselves.”
Conspiracy theories
There are a number of facts that have encouraged conspiracy theories about Tower Seven.
- Although its collapse potentially made architectural history, all of the thousands of tonnes of steel from the skyscraper were taken away to be melted down.
- The third tower was occupied by the Secret Service, the CIA, the Department of Defence and the Office of Emergency Management, which would co-ordinate any response to a disaster or a terrorist attack.
- The destruction of the third tower was never mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. The first official inquiry into Tower Seven by the Federal Emergency Management Agency was unable to be definitive about what caused its collapse.
- In May 2002 FEMA concluded that the building collapsed because intense fires had burned for hours, fed by thousands of gallons of diesel stored in the building. But it said this had “only a low probability of occurrence” and more work was needed.
But now nearly seven years after 9/11 the definitive official explanation of what happened to Tower Seven is finally about to be published in America.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has spent more than two years investigating Tower Seven but lead investigator Dr Shyam Sunder rejects criticism that it has been slow.
My comment:
If you go to the BBC News Link (this if filed under Conspiracies) you can watch a video of the third tower going down. It looks pretty controlled to me, too.
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