He continually jumpcuts from one scene to another and then doesn’t identify who he’s talking about for a few sentences so it’s like a series of unneceHe continually jumpcuts from one scene to another and then doesn’t identify who he’s talking about for a few sentences so it’s like a series of unnecessary and annoying puzzles figuring out who this is, who is that; so that was tiring. And although I think that the glazed, not-quite-making-sense feel to the numbed characters in their stunned cloud of post 9/11 horror was probably appropriate (and all due respect to DD for having the nerve to write a 9/11 novel in the first place), the cumulative effect was tentative, almost too respectful of the aftermath of the ghastliness, too elliptical, too considered, too polite. A room temperature novel about 9/11 seems wrong.
This is the story of everyone being overwhelmed, there was no coping with it at all, massive attacks on massive buildings, nothing remotely like it beThis is the story of everyone being overwhelmed, there was no coping with it at all, massive attacks on massive buildings, nothing remotely like it before or since. And the reader can get overwhelmed too. The story of the day is so dramatic, so relentlessly riveting, even now, after its million retellings. Mr Zuckoff decided to tell it in a way he believes humanizes the awfulness. I could see why he would do it this way. I hate to criticize this book.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT
This book is not in the conspiracy debunking business – those clowns get a passing mention:
I have not included unfounded allegations or pseudoscience from the cottage industry of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Facts are stubborn and powerful : this is a true story.
But less pleasingly, this book is not in the why business – for any insight into the hijackers’ motivations you have to look elsewhere. This means that 9/11 is presented without context. But everything has a context. Even God has a context. Yes, the planes literally and metaphorically came out of a clear blue sky. But the hijackers and their political enablers didn’t. These were not random events. There was a chain of causation stretching back decades. Mr Zuckoff can be forgiven for drawing a line and refusing to get into the geopoliticoreligious complexities of the thing – it would have make his book 500 pages longer. But 9/11 presented without any context at all is dangerous. It encourages oversimplification : "They hate us for our freedom" and that kind of thing.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS
Out of such a vortex of horror and misery the author plucks many stories of heroism, self-sacrifice and stubborn ingrained kindness that he hopes will keep the reader from lapsing into numbed despair, in the same way that the story of the fourth plane, United 93, was seized upon. But there is a price to pay for doing it this way. He follows in detail the stories of about 40 people. These are real people, real stories. Alas that Mr Zuckoff writes about them as if they belong in a bad romance novel :
Fifty years old, six feet tall and country boy handsome… his smile etched deep crinkles in the ruddy skin around his blue eyes.
Jerry was a few months shy of sixty-five, but he looked a decade younger : square-jawed and graying at the temples, trim enough to fit into the commander’s uniform he’d hung up more than two decades earlier.
Forty-seven years old, with kind eyes and three grown sons, Linda loved the smell of clothes freshly dried by the crisp Allegheny mountain air.
Everyone gets this treatment. So that’s one thing. And then, there are horrible lurches of tone. I’m still not sure if this is a deliberate effect. But for example, on page 256 we read
Other firefighters stepped over piles of debris in the lobby that they only later realized were human remains.
A few lines later, on the same page :
When Gerry wasn’t saving lives in New York City, he raised pigs, goats and chickens with his wife and two young sons on a small farm
The clash of horror and banality is just… disorientating, peculiar…jarring. I don’t like it. And it keeps coming up. Here’s another example :
Port Authority Police Officer David Lim… turned to his bomb-sniffing dog, a yellow Labrador called Sirius that Dave considered the smartest dog he’d ever known. “Maybe they got one by us, Sirius,” Dave told his partner, who moonlighted as the pet of Dave, his wife and their two children. [Dave runs towards the North Tower].. On the way he spotted a body next to a bandstand… As he radioed a report to dispatch, another person landed fifty feet from him on the plaza’s pink granite. On impact, the body disintegrated into a puddle of flesh, bone and blood.
The coziness of Sirius who “moonlights” as the family pet jammed right next to the unrecognisable human remains… I don’t know.
I’ve read a few 9/11 books by now and they all have problems. I hoped this one would be The Great One but for me it isn’t. What it does do very well is fill in a lot of detail I wasn’t aware of, especially regarding the Pentagon crash and United 93. And he frequently throws in some stunning facts :
At 9.11 AM, twenty-five minutes after American Flight 11 hit the North Tower, eight minutes after United Flight 175 hit the South Tower, some Port Authority Police dispatchers inexplicably continued to tell worried callers not to evacuate.
And this gave me a jolt – talking about the crash of United 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania – when the firefighters arrived at the crash site they found
No matter how big it [the plane] was, they had only small fires to fight and no one to rescue.
What a chilling statement.
MORE 9/11
Film :
Avoid the awful movie World Trade Center and instead watch Paul Greengrass’s excellent United 93
The essential documentary 102 Minutes that Changed America is on youtube
Books :
Perfect Soldiers : The 9/11 Hijackers – Who Were They, Why They Did It by Terry McDermott
The Looming Tower : Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
- Yes, I wanted political context and in these two books I got too much of it – too much overwhelming detail, I couldn’t see the wood for the trees
The best book so far that I’ve come across is
The Eleventh Day by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan - This is great for demolishing the Truthers and generally excellent all round...more
Reeling and aghast from the suicide bomb in Manchester on the 22 May at the Ariana Grande concert I try to make some moral sense of it all but it’s noReeling and aghast from the suicide bomb in Manchester on the 22 May at the Ariana Grande concert I try to make some moral sense of it all but it’s not easy. A 23 year old Libyan British guy blows up himself and kills 22 people outright, mostly fans who were just leaving the concert. The youngest was 8. Most of the others were teenage girls. There were a few parents in there too, waiting outside to meet their kids. I imagine the bomber had no particular hatred of Ariana Grande fans. Any large number of British people would do. It could have been a football match, but it was a pop concert.
It took days for some of the names to be released as the police could only make identifications of some of them with DNA. Dozens of other people ended up in hospital with pieces missing. I see that Ariana visited some of those today, that was nice.
[image]
And there’s a huge concert arranged for victim support featuring Ariana, Coldplay, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and who knows who else for tomorrow.
I see that at least one Muslim doctor (Naveed Yasim) spent 48 hours operating on Manchester victims, and on the way back to hospital after a brief rest at home was racially abused by a white guy.
I also see that on 31 May a giant car bomb exploded in Kabul which killed around 90 and injured over 400 people. The Taliban have denied responsibility and no else has volunteered any information on who did it. So far there has been no announcement of any star-studded concert to raise funds for those victims.
I also see that NBC News reported on 25 May that a Pentagon investigation of a US air strike on a building in Mosul, Iraq in March this year killed 105 civilians in error.
"Our condolences go out to all those that were affected," said Maj. Gen. Joe Martin, commander of ground forces for the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS. "The Coalition takes every feasible measure to protect civilians from harm.”
Most (but not all) of this current apparently unstoppable coming-soon-to-your-neighborhood mayhem is either perpetrated by Isis or by Isis wannabes or by the US fighting Isis. As we know, Isis is a monster which was unleashed by the destruction of Iraq as a functioning state, which is something they did not do to themselves, it was done to them, beginning with the famous Shock and Awe campaign.
At the time I remember feeling fairly complacent about getting rid of Saddam Hussain. Sounded like a reasonable idea, even though he had nothing to do with the Taliban or al Qaeda, in fact he hated them, and he didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction. But he was dreadful, so why not. If they couldn’t get rid of their own dictator, why not liberate the whole damn country. Do ‘em a favour. They’ll love us for it, right?
There’s a terrible line of causation here – the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were directly inspired by 9/11.
A little over 20 years ago we visited New York and naturally we zoomed up to the top of the World Trade Centre – I remember the guy operating the elevator bragging that the elevator accelerated to a speed of 70 mph so it only took three minutes to get to the top - and we marveled at the views and got scared when we stood on the glass-floored bit and looked down. We took lots of pix which look like this
[image]
I still have them, they’re better than that one but I don’t know how to paste them onto GR.
We had just found out that Helen was pregnant so it’s true to say that Georgia (now aged 20) was with us that day on the top of the World Trade Centre. She was five when they were destroyed. And last week I was real glad she isn’t an Ariana Grande fan or she might have been at that concert in Manchester.
The chain of causation stretches further back from 9/11 and that is what I wanted this book to tell me about. Unlike the planes on that unbelievable day, the concept of destroying the towers did not come from a clear blue sky.
But what Terry McDermott does is drown the poor Western reader in a dust storm of dauntingly dubious detail. He informs us laboriously of so many Muslim jihadi guys, all of whom have a real name, a street name and a jihadi name, and all of whom either know each other or know guys who know other guys. The narrative, if you can call it that, leaps from Baluchistan to the Philippines to Kuwait to Colorado. It’s hard to know why we need to know at least two thirds of the stuff in the book.
I think investigative journalism, like this, is great except when it loses track of what it’s supposed to be doing, which is answering the questions on the front cover : who they were, why they did it. I think Terry McDermott got lost in the chain of causation just like I do. I get lost out of ignorance, whilst he got lost because he knew so much he ended up no longer knowing what he knew.
But I do know now that there’s a link between the 22 dead pop fans in Manchester and the 1953 Iranian coup which was promoted by Eisenhower. That part of it now seems pretty clear to me. How many other bitter links there will be on this chain of death is not at this time clear at all....more
The conspiracy theories are no longer fringe, they've become mainstream. In 200
What I wanted to know about 9/11
1. All about the conspiracy theories.
The conspiracy theories are no longer fringe, they've become mainstream. In 2006, one third of the American population thought that Bush was somehow responsible for 9/11. Most of this third was under 30. I was very pleased to see that after recounting te events of 9/11, this book immediately confronts the Truthers.
What do The Truthers say?
1. The Towers collapsed because they were deliberately blown up by explosives already planted in them. The planes did not cause the collapses. (Building 7 collapsed and was not hit by a plane).
2. The Pentagon was not hit by a plane, it was a missile.
3. The whole reason was to provide a pretext for war with Afghanistan and Iraq, and the reason war was desired was because the military-industrial complex needed a new enemy to maintain its own power base & source of wealth, now that the USSR had gone.
I liked the way that this book discovered Truther Zero (the first person to post a conspiracy theory) in the same way that "And the Band Played On", a brilliant account of the Aids epidemic, named a Patient Zero. I noted the inevitability by which misgivings about the authorities' explanations of the events morphed into credulity about the alternative theories. I enjoyed the proposal by David Rostcheck of what he calls America 1 and America 2 – the first America accepts what the government says, and isn't on the internet, more or less, and the second America lives on the internet and believes the complete opposite. Each thinks the other is crazy.
Such terrifying, vast events create a great desire to believe in appropriately vast causes. The idea that 19 guys with box cutters did all of that strikes many as silly and offensive. So begins the search for a greater, more awesome conspiratorial explanation. But that, of course, is a fallacy.
In a strange way the conspiracists are like the defence in a court case. The prosecution presents the case – how the crime was committed, how it was the defendants who did it, motive, means, opportunity – and the defence, in this case the truthers, pick large or small holes in the prosecution's credibility. Like by hiring experts who give opposite views about the forensic evidence. The defence does not have to present a credible alternative theory. They don't have to tell you who they think really did the crime. They just have to demonstrate that the prosecution's presentation cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Okay, mostly I would disagree with the truthers about the meaning of the word reasonable.
I should be clear here, it behoves me - I think it really was OBL. But yes, the Bush regime really were gagging for a Reichstag Fire and they seized on 9/11 as no tragedy has been seized on before.
AN ASIDE : CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND THE PEOPLE
There is, too, a general reluctance everywhere, in democracies and non-democracies alike, to believe those in power. It was ever thus. Mountebanks and snake oil salesmen slide through this credibility gap. In Britain one single doctor published an article full of unjustified claims about the MMR (mumps measles rubella) vaccine in 1998. The article made a connection between this vaccine and the rise of autism in British children. This one article caused the number of kids being vaccinated to plummet to levels where the three diseases began to flourish again. The point is, this one article acted like the match which started the forest fire. But the forest was already bone dry, waiting for the flame. There was an immediate acceptance of an unproved surmise. People were gagging to believe it.
TWO REAL CONSPIRACIES
There were TWO actual genuine cover-ups regarding 9/11 however
a) the incompetence of the initial response to the crisis by the military and civil aviation authorities was covered up.
b) the total failure of the security services, all of them but, you know, probably the CIA most, to discover the plot was covered up or obfuscated and not admitted. I mean, that's what they're there for, right? To nip things in the bud? Not to give you precise chapter and verse about who done it after they done it. Yes, they did beat the drum about al Qaeda to the Bush administration, but there were no specifics because they had no idea of the 9/11 plot. No one ever admitted any failure.
I learned something on page 325 – this is a wow.
The most ominous warning, had it been heeded, reached the State Department from a source uniquely well placed to get wind of what Bin Laden was hatching. The Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Muttawakil, had sent an emissary across the border into Pakistan to seek out a US official to whom he could pass information. …in the third week of July this Taliban emissary met at a safe house with David Katz, principal officer of the US consulate, in the border town of Peshawar.
This guy gives a major warning to Katz that a huge attack on America is being prepared. The indication that this warning might be a serious one is that the people telling it to the US consulate is the Taliban. They can see retaliation coming their way and they're trying to avoid it by giving their enemy priceless information. However, one unnamed diplomatic source later commented on why this warning was not passed along :
We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff. When people keep saying the sky's about to fall in and it doesn't, a kind of fatigue sets in.
2. How did they know it was al Qaeda & Bin Laden so quickly?
The hijackers made no attempts to cover their identities and laid electronic trails of phone calls and money which led immediately to al Qaeda/bin laden associates.
3. Why did the Bush regime then target Iraq?
(Given that the ultra-religious bin Laden hated Saddam as a brutal atheist & that al-Qaeda had no presence in Iraq.)
Richard Clarke talked about the first meeting of Bush's war council after the attacks. He quotes Donald Rumsfeld as saying that there was a need to "do Iraq". He continues
Everyone looked at him. At least, I looked at him and Powell looked at him, like, "What the hell are you talking about?" And he said – I'll never forget this – "There just aren't enough targets in Afghanistan, We need to bomb something else to prove that we're, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks".
4. Why Saudi Arabia?
I.e. why, since Saudi Arabia and the American government have been spooning and billing and cooing since the days of FDR, were young Saudis eager to volunteer for this suicide mission?
Well – Saudi Arabia is well known to be enforcing a very extreme form of Sunni Islam – no music, women not allowed to drive, all of that. But many Saudis think their royal family is corrupt – especially after the First Gulf War when the King made the fateful decision to allow US troops in to help in the liberation of kuwait from Saddam Hussain. And especially since a number of US troops stayed on in Saudi after that war ended.
Now, how interesting that during the war council which swiftly followed after 9/11, when it was decided to go after the countries who "harboured" the hijackers, Saudi Arabia was not mentioned once.
WERE MY QUESTIONS ANSWERED
Yes, 98%. But this book does also include page after page of suppositions, possibilities, false trails, unanswered questions of its own, and the whole enervating tedium of acronymic boredom and who didn't say what about which splinter group and the money went there and the plan was not made here and they all went to hell in a little red boat. I skipped a whole lot of that stuff. It's for spy geeks. But it's true, you can't tell the story of 9/11 without all that smoke & mirrors. It's a stone cold drag.
My World Trade Centre memory is that we stood on the observation deck of the North Tower with all of lower Manhattan spread like a fantasy below us – we still have the photos in our album. My daughter Georgia was with us on that day too, although she didn't know it, she was minus six months old at the time. So that means she was nearly five years old on 9/11, just coming up to 16 now. ...more
You can be nerdy and geeky and boring about all manner of things, railway timetables, cricket, fine wine, Marvel comics, Beatles flipsides, the confecYou can be nerdy and geeky and boring about all manner of things, railway timetables, cricket, fine wine, Marvel comics, Beatles flipsides, the confectionary you used to scoff when you were little (ah the nostalgic sweetmeats of childhood, how much of a lump in your throat were they then and still are now), campy 70s sitcoms, Jean-Marie Straub movies, the best places to go backpacking in Andalucia, bootlegs of the Velvet Underground, and so on boringly and tediously.
Turns out you can be geeky and tedious about 9/11 too. But perhaps not too surprising, as 90% of this book is about that shadowy alphabet world of espionage, counter-espionage, counter-counter-espionage and lots of sweaty men trying to pluck the one shiny needle of truth from the haystack of rancid "intelligence" that the world of spy vs spy vs spy showers like golden rain bountifully, munificently, all over the place in this information-soaked fun-packed palace of stupefied over-eaters we call the western world. Three blind counter-terrorist agencies - see how they run - they all ran after the farmer's wife - which was a grave error as she knew very little about al-Qaeda, as it turned out, after some strenuous waterboarding.
Anyway, I couldn't hack it, it made me feel slightly ill. Too much stuff about two giant boys towns, one better dressed than the other one, but only slightly.
Dispiriting is not the word.
Disgusting may be.
This has been another bad-tempered rant from your friend Paul Bryant of Nottingham. He ought to know better, but he doesn't.
Loading...
