‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’
politico.com
politico.com
If an emergency is a circumstance in which ongoing realities are emergent and aren't predictable based on previous experience or world-models, this is a phenomenal example of those dynamics.
Commander Anthony Barnes: That first hour was mass confusion because there was so much erroneous information. It was hard to tell what was fact and what wasn’t. We couldn’t confirm much of this stuff, so we had to take it on face value until proven otherwise.
I've long maintained that the first signs of a disaster tend to be:
- Information doesn't add up.
- Communications are completely severed.
- Old models of understanding don't apply.
- Old filters or sources of information don't apply, and information overload is experienced because it's not clear what to ignore or what to trust.
Our world models give us the means to process and parse information, but also, critically, let us discard extraneous information at little or no cost. When we're placed in unfamiliar or extraordinary circumstances, "foreign territory" as Col. Bob Maar put it, old models do not hold.
Very powerful reading.
I like this characterization somewhat, though I think there needs to be a [perceived danger] variable not accounted for.
Perhaps:
An emergency is a circumstance in which realities are perceived as existentially dangerous and aren't predictable based on previous experience or world-models
Especially acute is the widespread confusion part. That fits well with my personal (more than I'd like) experiences with true existential emergencies.
I've been collecting / compiling / commenting on similar veins for a while.
There's Robert Ewashuck's paging philosophy (Google SRE):
Pages [alerts] should be urgent, important, actionable, and real. They should represent either ongoing or imminent problems with your service. Err on the side of removing noisy alerts – over-monitoring is a harder problem to solve than under-monitoring....
(The list continues.)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/199PqyG3UsyXlwieHaqbGiWVa...
I've come up with a hierarchy of failures (or alternatively: success kill chain) in problem resolution, starting with "being aware there's a problem":
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarc...
There's the Japanese awareness and response following the bombing of Hiroshima. Short version: the first indication of the 9:15 am attack was a cessation of all communications. Military command wasn't aware of the scope of damage until an overflight was arranged, in early afternoon, and didn't know the actual cause until told by the US the next day.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf9yc/on_disa...
The missile strike on the HMS Sheffield during the Falklands War played out similarly:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2ab25z/on_disa...
In many large-scale natural disasters, an ominous sign is no reports, especially from outlying areas.
Initial responses to disasters often follow early stages of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief model: obliviousness, denial, sometimes anger. My sense is that grief is another form of major world-model collapse: that some reality that has been internalised and is often a sense of identity is shown to be wrong or inoperative.
Again: it's not that catastrophes and disasters are similar to grief, it's that grief responses are a response to catastrophes and disasters.
And finally, a quote from a ... modern Cupertino ... mystic, Adyashanti:
Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.
Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=IZ5LECwss0AC&pg=PT126&dq="...
There's a lot of meat in that, I think.
HAMs are typically well prepared for being back in the air first thing and are a very useful source of information from regions that have just suffered a disaster of some sorts.
Terrifying thought in todays terms, imagine we simply stopped receiving news out of Hong Kong and spreading out from there. People on WhatsApp/Instagram there would stop responding. News agencies would wait for their updates and receive none...
Now I want to read that book.
Burning Man is managed as an ongoing emergency, and has a 24/7 multi-disciplinary team responding to and triaging incidents as they arise.
Essentially Burning Man is a disaster that's been intentionally paused just before a tragedy. It's kept at that point by some very coordinated and talented people.
Jokes aside, I like this characterization. Makes me think of other cases where a system is designed to be unstable and is then being carefully balanced at the edge of failure; see e.g. modern fighter jets.
I was immediately terrified. What if my sister had been hurt, dropped her phone, and it was now in the hands of an opportunistic lowlife? But no. That wasn't it at all. It was instead, that the overloaded cell network, instead of just failing to connect my call, instead, misconnected it.
That was a failure mode I had not predicted. In the end, all my people were fine. But I was shaken. And of course, many other people were not fine.
On Strowger electro-mechanical exchanges one of the nice features is that a random piece of the exchange handles each dialed call. This means the human intuitive approach of "Huh, that didn't work, I'll hang up and try again" actually had a pretty good chance of success if the problem is an electrical fault or something rather than you wrote the number down incorrectly.
I did have a morning once where every call I received was for a business in a Welsh village (I live in England) and the callers were as confused as I was that they'd reached a personal mobile phone instead. The problem resolved itself before it made me annoyed rather than confused.
Me, my friend and other friends of his called both companies to report the error multiple times. All we received was scorn and disbelief. We were told, repeatedly, that it simply couldn't happen. But it did, consistently.
It felt really silly when it got to the stage where I'd call my friend, someone else picked up and I'd go "Oh, hi, it's me again". One day, it just stopped happening.
This was circa 2006
Sadly I couldn't enjoy it, as I was running late for work and mistimed my jump onto a bus, breaking my ankle ...
What precipitated the mis-routing is an interesting question. Perhaps multiple devices switching in/out of a particular cell or node faster than the routing system could accommodate?
I can't remember exact details, because it's not my area of expertise, but I vaguely remember my father (who's a telecommunications network engineer) talking about it years ago.
I know you’re not a network engineer, but it just doesn’t look right.
So many people were calling this number that the system would start hanging up on people at random, so you'd just call back over and over hoping that you'd get connected when the phones went live.
Finally, someone on the other end said "Hello?" and I said "Hi, I'd like to book a room for next summer" and he said "Me too" and I said "good luck!" and hung up.
There is an interesting tension between 'assimilating' information (taking in information that easily fits into your schema) and the need for 'accommodation' (acquiring new information that requires completely re-arranging your schema).
There is a high cost to assimilation, which explains why people will often dig in when faced with facts that require accommodation.
Different disciplines tend to have different words for similar things.
Schemas, worldviews, frames, models, maps. All largely refer to the same thing.
And 'schemas' aren't just theoretical concepts, they have been validated with reaction time studies that strongly suggest they are a real organizing principle in the brain.
I.e.: It takes longer to react to a task that requires accommodation than to react when a task requires only assimilation.
For me, native New Yorker, the skyscrapers are like our heart. Someone cut our heart out. I thought nothing would ever be the same. Months later I felt so panicky on subways, thinking something awful was bound to happen again. The way things snapped back to near normalcy just a few years later was something I never anticipated. Neither did I foresee the way this event would be used to justify an illegal invasion if Iraq just a few years later. I felt and still feel disgusted by how this tragedy has been exploited. But I guess that’s politics.
And nothing ever was. Plenty of stupid political decisions today, and untold billions of wasted money some of which is spent today are a direct consequence of 9/11.
The mantra 'never leave a crisis unused' is enough to explain everything else that followed. Getting the United States out of the middle East was never going to happen as a result of this, rather the opposite and that too would have the effect of driving more people in to the hands of the extremists.
https://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2004/11/200849163336457223...
"Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.
...
All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat."
Yes, but what was the end goal? He wasn't doing it just for shits and giggles.
Sure the whole debacle did cost US a lot of money, lives and perhaps prestige. But that does not mean al-Qaeda achieved their goals. The US is for better or worse even more entrenched in the ME, with bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Israel and the Saudis are still there.
Some tend to think that anything which is bad for the US means the terrorist are winning, because "they just wants to hurt us". But it doesn't work like that. Terrorism is a tactic employed by certain groups to achieve certain goals. It is possible that both parties are weakened by a conflict.
I remember people bingeing CNN for days, feeling like the next attack could come at any moment. Every attack scenario you could dream up seemed like a real possibility.
And you weren't wrong!
> I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off. If we did it right, this would be it.
- Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney
That leaves me just speechless and chilled. I'd like to think I have that kind of bravery in me but I hope I never have to find out.
This meme is unhealthy, and disrepectful to the fallen.
Both the passengers and the fighter pilots were willing to do whatever it took to prevent the plane being used to kill a lot more people on the ground. The passengers' phone calls in the article suggest they knew they were likely to die whether acting or not, and as it happened they acted before the fighters could intercept. The article includes conversation of the hijackers in the cockpit deciding to take the plane down before the passengers could get control back.
considering all the passengers are dead, you can't make that claim. We'd all love to believe the passengers were selfless, and it definitely made for a great movie, but pretending like we knew what their intentions were is disingenuous at best.
I don't think there's anything disingenuous or speculative in what I'm saying. I'm being very general and going by the article's phone call information (I haven't seen that movie).
>a group of civilian passengers made more or less the same decision
What decision was this? The decision to sacrifice their own lives, as the fighter pilots were prepared to sacrifice theirs? Because that makes no sense. The passengers were trying to regain control of the aircraft to prevent it from crashing. Likely the hijackers downed the plane rather than relinquish control; the other possibility is that there was a struggle in the cockpit, and the plane crashed accidentally. What almost certainly did not happen was a passenger obtained full control of the aircraft, and intentionally flew it into the ground.
> They were attempting to save themselves.
Yes, and also the other innocent lives on the plane, maybe even on the ground.
Training exercises, surprising number of red flags ignored.
According to a quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleen_Rowley
>During the early aftermath of September 11th, when I happened to be recounting the pre–September 11th events concerning the Moussaoui investigation to other FBI personnel in other divisions or in FBIHQ, almost everyone's first question was "Why?—Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case? (I know I shouldn't be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBI HQ personnel had to be spies or moles like Robert Hanssen who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis's effort.)
It is called “The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland” and it tells the story of how after the US air space has been shut down the wonderful people of Newfoundland managed to host 7000 people that were forced to land in there, in a town of 10000.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_from_Away
http://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/...
I immediately went in and started checking the web. It gave me a little more information. Fifteen minutes later when my developer showed up you couldn't bring up any news site on the web.
Guy from across the hall had a TV and he invited all of us in the building to watch. We watched the TV for around an hour and at that point we all made the decision to call it a day.
Got home and think I watched TV for the next 14 hours or so. After a while there was no new information, they just kept repeating themselves on every news channel. I can remember just feeling numb. It was just so unexpected to see the US attacked.
My father said it was worse than Pearl Harbor. People at that time expected war was coming. Most American's at the time had never even heard of Pearl Harbor, much less Hawaii. This was in our living rooms and it was New York and Washington. Now I measure everything in pre-9-11 and post 9-11 because things changed that dramatically.
NPR refers to 9/11 as the event which made clear that the network needed to have full capabilities to broadcast from a secondary location, and began planning for its west-coast hub (in Los Angeles) shortly after. Its flagship news programmes are now co-anchored from both Washington and Los Angeles.
Slashdot (smaller audience) and Google stayed up. All the major (US) news sites were down.
https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towe...
I'd been due to travel to a client site, and called. I'd only heard that a plane had struck the tower, the client added that it was two planes, and the towers were down. "This is war" was my immediate response.
Then I headed to Slashdot to find out WTF was going on, as fighter jets sortied overhead.
Surreal times.
I also remember trying to load the WTC website, and it not responding. IIRC, it was hosted in the basement of one of the WTC towers.
I have a faint recollection of Dick Cheney and who he was. I find it easy to believe that the reason he did not hesitate was because his own person was in mortal danger from the airliner in question.
I think a leader responsible for the lives of people on the air and on the ground both, would find it very hard to make a decision to condemn one group to save the other, even if one group was condemned already. I mean, it's not for nothing that the Trolley Problem and Sophie's choice, etc are such well-known ethical conundrum examples.
But when it comes to saving one's own bacon- the decision is much simpler.
Is this comment too cynical?
> he did not hesitate was because his own person was in mortal danger
Trolley Problem aside, there's a clear "right" answer in terms of damage to the country which is ostensibly what he's trying to optimize for. 40 people dead in a field is a lot better than hundreds dead and a national symbol (White House? Congress?) destroyed.
Refer to https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/were-the-onl...
Quote:
Karl Rove: Andy and I are there with the president. The president gets this call from Cheney—we didn’t know who it was at the time, we just knew the phone rang. He said “yes,” then there was a pause as he listened. Then another “yes.” You had an unreal sense of time that whole day. I don’t know whether it was 10 seconds or two minutes. Then he said, “You have my authorization.” Then he listens for a while longer. He closes off the conversation. He turns to us and says that he’s just authorized the shoot-down of hijacked airliners.
First, the white house bunker is supposed to survive nuclear weapons. Was his life even on the line?
Second, do you imagine the air force base commander was the first person to ask 'are you sure'? I'd imagine between Bush, Rice, the aides in the room and the pentagon he'd probably have been asked that at least twice by other people already.
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/5964-d-101-islamic-resp...
"killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion. These actions are our offerings to God."
They really tried hard to be very clean about their motives there.
Covered by
NYT 2009: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/us/10gitmo.html
The Guardian 2009: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/10/guantanamo-det...
The document is also on the Smoking Gun: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/terrorists-bone
"America is the number one, and the largest country in the world, in spreading military might and terrorism. Also, America is the principle and greatest supplier to the occupying terrorist state of Israel in Palestine. Also, America supports and finances the terrorist regimes that govern the countries ofthe Arab world, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan."
“We ask to be near to God, we fight you and destroy you and terrorize you. The Jihad in god's cause is a great duty in our religion. We have news for you, the news is: You will be greatly defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq and that America will fall, politically, militarily, and economically. Your end is very near and your fall will be just as the fall of the towers on the blessed 9/11 day. We will raise from the ruins, God willing. We will leave this imprisonment with our noses raised high in dignity, as the lion emerges from his den. We shall pass over the blades of the sword into the gates of heaven.”
It’s worth reading in full to understand how they think and what their beliefs are.
What I thought had happened was a large aircraft accidentally ran into the Empire State building again like had happened many years ago.
At first we thought it was a freak accident... and then we saw the second plane hit.
"Shaken" is the word. It was all anyone could think about for the rest of the day.
Best essay I've read that captures the experience of the few days right after in the parts of America that weren't especially close to where it happened is DFW's "The View from Mrs. Thompson's" in the collection Consider the Lobster.
Looks like Rolling Stone's got it available:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/david-fost...
Those who've grown up after 9/11 may not appreciate how many fewer US flags (or representations of same) one used to see on a given day, even in Red State America. I mean they were around, of course, just not quite as everywhere.
In school, on radio in car, at home.
I was supposed to go through downtown Chicago that day to turn in a project at my college campus, but I politely emailed my instructor, telling him in no uncertain terms that there was no way in hell I was getting anywhere near downtown that day. I emailed him my project and told him I'd turn in the physical copy when things were safe. At the time, I was living near Ohare. It was eerie how quite it was without all of the jets taking off and landing. When you did see planes, it was a pair of either F-15s or F-16s running combat air patrols. Very surreal experience.
Throughout the day, more and more people had their names called on the intercom by the school office and left early. I kept seeing teachers, out in the hallway, whispering to each other. Hearing people crying in the distance. I still was totally oblivious, even though nearly half the class was missing by the end of the day.
Somehow, I didn't grasp that something really was wrong right until the moment the bus pulled up in front of my house. My dad was standing at the mailbox waiting, which I never saw him do before. Even weirder, he was supposed to be flying out of town that day - we were supposed to go to the neighbors house until Mom could get us. I don't think he knew what to say. I asked him why he was still home, and he just said I needed to come inside and watch the news. So I watched it with him. I watched it a long time. I remember feeling anger mostly - maybe exclusively. I didn't even know what the WTC was before then, but I knew whoever did that was evil. I wanted desperately to fight back then, though I admittedly had no idea of who to fight or how.
Every year after that, whenever the intercom called someone to leave early from school, I had to suppress a bit of worry I couldnt control. Part of me is always wondering, "Is it happening again?"
- In retrospect, I can't imagine how hard it must have been on the adults in my life on that day. Those poor teachers, many who were just out a few years out of college themselves, just trying to get us kids through the day without breaking down themselves. It didn't make sense to anybody when it happened. How were they supposed to explain something that insane to a 10 year old?
I remember reading about the death of Massoud, but that was a memory from the day before. The next day we all knew where Afghanistan was.
That day school ended and parents had to come pick us up since they didn't want anyone walking back to an empty house and learning daddy wasn't going to make it back that night.
The next month my brother had funeral after funeral of his friends parents to attend. The towers were like a missing tooth, a gap you knew wasn't always there.
Eventually got a text message saying the London underground was under attack and was I ok. It was only then I asked for the tv to be put on.
The 00s were an eventful time. There’s now more time passed since the London attacks and the ita bombing campaigns in Warrington and Manchester. Still not long before the GFA is cancelled and we return to those days.
This one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_Norton,_Worcestershire#Th...
Being 8 I didn't really have an idea what that meant, but when they started sending us all home not a half hour after arriving at school we all knew something bad was happening, they were following the same procedure as when they had advanced warning of dangerous weather (Illinois). My dad had just got home from long business trip the night before and was taking the day off and my mom was a stay at home mom. Both were sleeping in and were blissfully ignorant of the whole thing until I got back. We watched the news for hours after that, and it may have been one of the first times I'd heard about 'War.'
Same but a year behind, right down to our math teacher being the only one who insisted on teaching class as usual (trig, for me, though she'd teach my calc class the next year).
"We're the Only Plane in the Sky"
"Where was the president in the eight hours after the Sept. 11 attacks? The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by the people who were on board."
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/were-the-onl...
It's interesting that the story from 2016 has the link to the new amazon book at the top.
A week after, when it finally got clear that those were indeed Saudis, I though for myself "there is no way Saudis will be coming out of that now."
Few years later, still in my yearly teens, I kept catching myself in disbelief of American logic. Not only did Americans spare the Saudis, but Washington went out of its way and did every thing possible to extricate Riyadh from the backlash.
Not only they came dry out of the water, but they got out of that better off than before. US took down Saddam for them, and took upon the Ikhwan ul Muslimin — the only thing in the world Saudis feared. Not to say they got much higher diplomatic standing, and near free defence contracts as a result. Anything like that would've been unthinkable before.
In 2004, I was reading a newspaper, and saw a big photo of Bush and some Saudi prince enthusiastically shaking hands together, I was not able to contain my laughter.
At the time of attack, he was a fugitive from the Kingdom for nearly a decade.
I think this was the first thing Saudi court told the Americans. Whomever those guys were, they were integral to Saudi polity.
> It was precisely the alliance of Riyadh with the States that motivated his jihad.
Which did not preclude his affiliates from receiving money from "private" officials in his "exile" well into mid-naughties. His close relatives were continuing their life of minor socialites in the kingdom unimpeded up until the point US started demeaning the head of his son and few brothers during Obama.
The Bin Ladin clan is more than just alive and well in the kingdom. They were the biggest bankrollers of the Saudi Royal Family, and still are.
One of the hijackers was Egyptian, can't remember ever hearing calls for severing (substantial) American ties with Egypt off that. As reprehensible Saudi regime was (and is, under the rule of bonesaw prince), saying that the USA supports Saudi despite 911 is factually exactly backwards.
Thank you for your service.
What are you up to now? I hear the job market for people with clearance that you likely have is pretty lucrative.
That said, the most dangerous thing is what society does to itself as a response to terrorism fears. Terrorism needs to be kept in perspective, as it's far from the biggest danger facing us.
I was 15 years old at that time, and I remember precisely what I did. I was born, raised, and still live in Western Europe.
The chapter addressing the President, then in Florida, has been posted elsewhere in this thread, it's here:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/were-the-onl...
Where do you blog nowadays? Haven't followed you since G+ went down and you dropped Reddit too. You don't seem overly active on Mastodon either?
https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius
There's a new blog coming ... eventually. On Gitlab.
This will go down in history as the most unbelievable screwup of three letter US agencies ever. It came out recently that Russian intelligence took the extraordinary step of warning the US a few days before 9/11 that shit was about to go down. Putin literally called Dubya and told him. He was ignored.
Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=bo5xDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT32&dq=%2...
So what about the Holocaust? Well the Nazis believed that the world's was under attack from Jewish and socialist aggression. They believed that it was a massive and imminent existential threat. And that their actions were defending their country and humanity from evil. From this twisted perspective the Nazis actions were logical. They saw themselves as the good guys. The basis for all this evil are a few insanely stupid beliefs.
Alternatively, 9/11 did happen due to pure incompetence, and they were opportunistic about 9/11 and the emotions afterward, using that to go on a war spree to accomplish the Pentagon's agenda.
Four star general Wesley Clark [1] provides the setup (speech on YouTube below). Their post 9/11 plan was to destroy the governments of seven countries in five years, based on a plan that existed all the way back to 1991 as explained to Clark (then a one star general) by Paul Wolfowitz (stating that they only had 5-10 years to clean up old Soviet regimes in the Middle East before the next great superpower - China - comes online to challenge the US position; 10 years post 1991 = 2001; China joins the WTO in 2001). Keep in mind the very considerable stature of the military commander that is saying this openly. He flat out says it was a policy coup, that took over the US Government, and was spearheaded by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Clark says they could hardly wait to finish off Iraq so they could move the focus on to Syria, which we later did of course (this speech by Clark is from 2007), demolishing the country.
- permanent mass surveillance of global communications
- total governmental control and visibility into fiat money financial transactions
- endless U.S. participation in or support for military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria, and the concomitant trillions spent on military hardware and services
- increasingly lawless privacy intrusions at U.S. border crossings
- a huge cottage industry of corrupt dealings as detailed in the WikiLeaks dumps
It's not even necessary to believe any conspiracy theories to recognize that the events of 9/11 lent direct support to a multitude of imperialist and corporatist agendas.
But its another thing to understand the tragedy that has been standard fare for hundreds of thousands of people around the world, every day, as Americas illegal wars continue.
One bomb dropped every twenty minutes for the last twenty years, is the context we need to understand - mostly on innocent people.
Americans cannot ask for sympathy while ignoring their own aggression. It is high time for the war criminals that put us in this position to feel justice. That means Cheney, it means Bush, and it means Rice. America has become a criminal thug nation, and its people callously ignore the victims of America's illegal wars while demanding justice for the blowback suffered by the entire country on 9/11.
If 9/11 upsets you, consider Mosul. Consider All Raqqah and Aleppo and Baghdad. These places have suffered 100x worse than any New Yorker ever did. And the reason it continues is because the American people don't have the courage to face the truth: America has illegally invaded, and utterly destroyed, civilization around the world.
Truly the Wisdom of Crowds.
Important name in this event in Ali Soufan.
The amount of conspiracy theories here are surprising.
My dad witnessed the snowbirds crash at an airshow over lake Ontario.
They give boats a cordon that they are supposed to stay out of, but enforcement had become lax, so people would bring their boats in close for a better view.
When the crash happened one of the pilots, whose plane was damaged beyond control, flew it straight into the lake instead of ejecting to avoid hitting the boats.
See: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/09/04/Crash-witnesses-Vali...
No, this was an emergency that everyone was unprepared for, so they winged it. And they did alright, even though it was utter chaos. If the President has been at the WH, or in good enough communication with the WH, I'm pretty sure the VP would not have been anything like "in command", though the President might have delegated some authority to him. As it was, POTUS had to get to AF1 first, then in the air, and probably a lot of work had to be done to get connectivity back to the WH makeshift situation room.
You have to go back to Reagan getting shot for something just slightly closer to a coup attempt, when the Secretary State ran around saying he was in charge (but no one gave him the time of day). That must have looked rather strange to a lot of people, but since no one took him seriously, and since it wasn't that long after the JFK assassination, which meant everyone remembered the basic chain of succession, the fact that no one took Alexander seriously was exactly as it should have been. Alexander, however, really had no clue, and showed he was not capable in a crisis.
False: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/911-memory-accura...
You know on movies where they show the world ending, or devastation or even the atomic bomb’s aftermath, etc. It was that kind of “I can’t stop watching,” going on, where you know the likelihood it will affect your life directly in a negative way is pretty low, but you want to know more, see what happens next, or if it will affect you too.
It’s maybe a bit different now — we’re overwhelmed with so many information sources that... it’s possible the modern day equivalent is all being on the same Reddit thread or Twitter feed or live stream of an event.
Generally classrooms are meant to be a mixture of real events and things you can learn from them. If I recall correctly, this was an art class, or maybe an English class, but a humanities class of some kind, and so part of the activity was actually meant for conversation afterward. But... it unfolded in a much more dramatic way, and ... I think had there been more evidence that it was a criminal act from the start, we might not have—-ah, well, the use of airplanes as weapons was entirely new. What can I say, it sounds like any other event now, and somehow less shocking than people using IEDs, vehicular homicide, mass shootings or unjust violence, but... it unfolding live in the largest city in the world, the centre of finance, it... was still a horrendous act. The tragedy was only made worse by what followed in “revenge” and the changes to laws that we still live under today. I remember thinking a year previously that there’s no way 1984 could happen as I’d read it, and then I re-read it around a decade later and discovered it had already happened, partly thanks to Prism and other intelligence agency sharing agreements we’d been living under for years. The biggest shame is that folks knew about it in advance and yet we didn’t even have safely locked cockpit doors at the time. Who would have thought that hijackers wouldn’t simply want to send the plane somewhere else but to...
In recalling where they were when they learned of the attack, people were 89 percent accurate at survey two and 83 percent accurate at survey three.
So the statement nearly every American remembers where they were is TRUE.
The survey shows that more minute details get lost over time, such as who they were with/ how they learned about it. But I'm pretty sure thats the case with human memory in general.
I thought to myself, "WTF? That must be what they meant and they misspelled it."
Then I turned on the TV and saw the rest.
Where were you?
I was told "some boys flew a plane into the twin towers"
I imagined American teens in a 2 seater Cessna. The truth was unimaginable.