Thoughts on 9/11

We were in Oregon on the 5th anniversary of September 11, 2001, without ready access to a computer. So these observations will be a little late.

Impressions:

On Sunday, the night before the anniversary, CBS ran an 'accidental' documentary about the event. (It was broadcast before, but I hadn't seen it.) In July 2001, two French brothers and a NY firefighter had started making a documentary about an NYFD rookie. As it happened, the firehouse he was assigned to was in lower Manhattan, and his house was one of the first to respond. That turned out to be a blessing, because the men from that house went into the first tower to be hit--which was the second to collapse. Remarkably, all of the firefighters from the house came back alive that day. But even without the pathos of death for one of those that the camera had followed, this was powerful television (other footage, such as of the towers falling, was cut into the tape shot by the French brothers, helping both context and drama). What was most remarkable, to me, was the calmness and determination of the people dealing with the disaster inside the towers. Most, given the subject of the documentary and the nature of what had happened, were firefighters, but there were also police and I remember especially the Port Authority employee who was called on the intercom to each of the 98 elevators in the tower (yes, 98), asking if there was anyone inside. In the five years since the first 9/11, it has become easy to talk about the courage of the responders without sensing what was really about. This brought it back. (You can see the documentary here.)

On Monday, I saw both Tom Brokaw and Rudy Giuliani twice--once on the Today show, once on the evening news. Brokaw, projecting a bit more avuncularity than when he was the anchor, made the point that the passengers on Flight 93 who resisted the highjackers and brought the plane down had established a new model--that now we can expect that kind of behavior for passengers in any flight that's taken over. If he's right, and I suspect that he is (at least as a model, if not in reality), it strikes me that that might be at least as great a deterrent to another 9/11 as all of the official airline security measures that we've spent billions on. Given the near-impossibility of taking serious weapons aboard--for that, we must credit the government--potential highjackers must realize that the chances of taking over an airplane long enough to fly it into a selected target are small. Maybe that's the real reason why 9/11 hasn't been repeated.

I was surprised by Giuliani's frankness and honesty. Both Matt Lauer and Brian Williams asked if there was something he would have done differently, and he readily admitted to faults in the planning. On the evening news, he noted that 9/11 was three times bigger than what had been planned for, that the planning had expanded since then, but he noted that al Qaeda might be planning something five times as large. I'm not ready to sign on to the Rudy for President bandwagon, but it was refreshing to hear such talk, especially from a Republican. He spoke the way McCain is said to.

On Tuesday, as we prepared to fly back to the East, I was selected to go through a "puffer" at Portland International Airport--that's the machine that puffs air at you then reads it for explosive residue. The whole process takes 30 to 60 seconds, so it can't yet be used on all or even most passengers. And the machine obviously has flaws--it didn't pick up my incendiary rhetoric, for instance.