Newly published 9/11 footage [video] (opens in new tab)

I remember it like it was yesterday. I lived in northern Virginia and was working at AOL as a sysadmin. I was young and a little flaky back then. I overslept that morning and when I woke up to take the dog out, it was a beautiful, crisp fall morning. I called a coworker to tell him that I would be late for the team meeting (this being pre-Zoom and before the "standup" became a thing). He said, "no worries, dude. Turn your TV on, the WTC is on fire and we are watching it." I turned my TV on and a minute or two later, the second plane hit. Instantly, I knew that this was going to be a big deal and since we helped run CNN.com, I quickly dressed and hauled ass to work to help with the inevitable web traffic surge. My buddy called me and said, "don't bother coming in, they are evacuating the buildings". There was a rumor that a hijacked plane was circling DC and AOL was right near IAD. I went back home, only to be called in an hour later. We were taken to the AOL leadership bunker, which I didn't even know existed. A large conference room deep underground below a small data center on the campus. We spent the next two days nursing CNN. for lunch on

Exactly! I remember getting dressed for work while listening to MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) about an airplane hitting the WTC and I figured it was just a small Cessna 172 or something so I turned on my TV just in time to see the second impact live.

Watching it happen live with the immediate knowledge that it was obviously a deliberate act was, like you said, a huge amount to process all at once.

I actually think that having a goal like "get dressed and go to work" probably was a great benefit to my mental state.

Cognitive dissonance even for people who missed it. At the time I was in my early twenties, started my day late, and usually didn't check news until after getting a little bit of work done. When I got to work, nobody else was there, which was weird. There was a TV on an AV cart in the middle of a hallway, also a bit weird. There was a note from the CEO saying that everyone was going home to be with their families. That also seemed a bit weird, but I shrugged it off. Our CEO was a family values guy, very Christian, and I had heard he used to lead prayers in the office when the company was smaller. (It didn't occur to me that it was a Tuesday and everybody's families should be at school or work.) So I sat down with my coffee and started working. After a while, at a time that I guess would have been close to noon in New York, I went to cnn.com, which came up as a primitive-looking site without any media, so I chuckled internally and took a screenshot, thinking CNN had been hacked. How could CNN let themselves get hacked! I skimmed over the headlines thinking that the hackers would have put in something political or humorous, but I didn't see anything like that, and started to think, okay, this is CNN's real content, so their web site got hacked or otherwise impacted by something, so they put up the text site while they recover. I starting thinking about what could have affected their site like that, and then it dawned on me that the top headline might have something to do with it.

I know others have been downvoted for saying this, but for me the shocking nature of it took a while to sink in. I had not had a chance to travel much yet at that point. I had been to New York City once, just like I had been to Europe once and seen London and Paris and Rome. I came from a small town in Texas and had a habit of thinking of all of those places as the "real world" where big real things happened, places that had diplomats and stock exchanges and famous universities and celebrities and, well, terrorist attacks. The 9/11 attacks didn't violate that sense of order. On a gut, emotional level, it was just a real world type thing happening in a real world type place. It took me a while to understand why people were reacting so differently.

Indeed. I was in high school watching CNN live at the time the second plane struck. There was tremendous uncertainty about what had happened. I thought for sure it had been egregious pilot error.

We watched as the second plane ran right into the tower. At that moment we started realizing that it was intentional. But even then, the uncertainty about who would do that to us and why, was really worse than before.

This event really changed my entire life. Prior to this I had plans to finish my automotive tech trade school program. Within the next few days watching the footage of people leaping to their deaths in preference to burning alive, and as more and more information trickled in about who was responsible for the attack, I decided I needed to join the military to help ensure that nothing like this ever happened again. My life would have played out a whole lot differently if not for this.

I second this. I was a child in Elementary school at the time and had just woken up and walked into the living room with the television on after the first plane attack. The reporter (forgot the network, I’d seen the same footage repeatedly all day that day and never wanted to look again) was still talking about the possibility of it being an accident right up until the second plane attacked. Even in my eyes at the time, one might be an accident but two was an attack.

9/11 blue is such a distinct color, and it's seared into my brain. It's so intwined with the day, it's part of the permanent collection at the museum: https://www.911memorial.org/connect/blog/trying-remember-col...

I had a very similar video camera at the time. It was a surreal blast from the past, especially the slow frame by frame section.

> Whereas you all got yanked into this different awful reality that happens out of nowhere watching this extreme insane next level thing happen on live TV, it’s quite a different thing to growing up with a low level sense that it is normal that someone might want to do something bad to you purely because you live in a particular place in a particular country.

Terrorism wasn't a new experience to us New Yorkers - we had experienced the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.[1] That truck bomb under the building didn't succeed in taking down the towers, but it caused major damage and disruption, killed six people and injured over a thousand.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...

I personally don't know if there ever was a video of the impact other than that of the security camera [0]. I think of two reasons: the Pentagon is not NY, which is a highly populated area in a developed country, it's natural that so many people were filming. Even more so, the Twin Towers were cultural icons. I don't know if many people were around the Pentagon, but I have read about witnesses of the crash in DC. The other reason would be that they don't want to release it and it's understandable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon#11_September_2001...

The road patterns were different back then (they changed them specifically because of 9/11), but if you've ever been near the Pentagon, it's pretty obvious: it's a low building, nestled in a bowl-like land formation, there aren't many good places to sit and "observe" it, and it's surrounded by highways. Most of the time, if you are looking at the Pentagon, you are probably also driving.

It seems perfectly plausible to me that releasing video of the Pentagon being struck by terrorists would only serve to glorify the events that day. At the end of the day those agencies did their job and secured any footage. This gave the government the opportunity to decide what is released to the public and I think they made the right choice considering the promotional value of it to the terrorists.

Some 3 letters agency (FBI?) immediately raided all the nearby places that could have had cams and seized everything. I'm pretty sure that it's documented: IIRC footage from a petrol station nearby was confiscated.

I was there (at the time, in front of my TV I mean) and I clearly remember the first witnesses being interviewed by reporters: as soon as a witness would say something not fitting the official narrative, it would never be aired again. For example regarding the pentagon one eye-witness said he saw something like a big missile on which wings had been strapped. I saw that on TV. I clearly remember it. Now I'm not saying it's not a Boeing that hit the Pentagon: what I'm saying is that it's very weird that all these ramblings from these drunkards mistaking, say, a Boeing with a "missile with wings strapped on it" were basically aired once then erased. I'm pretty sure that guy was both drunk and of course because the plane was going fast, the mistake was made in honest faith (you, too, would certainly mistake a Boeing for a missile with wings strapped on it).

Same thing with people saying they heard explosions in the WTC: as soon as they'd mention that, they'd be cut off by reporters and these people would never be interviewed again and their account never aired again (FWIW I don't believe in a controlled demolition but I do believe in narrative manipulation).

After these oddities of course we all know totally normal things then happened: for example IIRC one the rare flight that was allowed to happen when no plane were flying in the US was a flight evacuating members of the Bin Laden family.

And then the wars that followed. Made perfect sense. No fabricated evidence. Guantanamo and the like: all perfectly cromulent.

When you take all this, honestly that we don't have any footage of that impact just seems on par for the course.

Is there any video of the first NYC plane? If there was a second Pentagon plane, I'm sure we'd have that.

There is helicopter footage that shows an object apparently accelerating outward from the highway. This video regularly gets taken down and is often posted mirrored to defeat automatic screening.

https://imgur.com/gallery/VMe3tqF/

https://youtu.be/Qz9OdOs6La4?t=241

The video may be fake. Jeremijenko, the "artist", withholds it to avoid detailed examination.

Natalie Jeremijenko hosted the seminar, but was not the artist who played the video. Yes, I saw the video. IIRC, it showed the plane passing low over the Potomac seconds before it hit the Pentagon, just out of frame. I don't see how that could have been a hoax.

Have they? It isn’t clear to me if they’ve seen it or just heard that it exists

You're definitely repeating some of the misinformation in the form of reductionism. The situation with WMDs in Iraq was definitely wrong, but doesn't rise to lies. Two different countries were saying that they suspected these weapons were in Iraq, where Al Qaeda was heavily present, and often protected. The cherry on top was that in the 1980s Saddam had not only manufactured chemical weapons but he used them as well. Saddam refused to allow UN investigators in, and thus we had the Iraq war. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_des...

One of the things I also remember from this time period was about why 9/11 happened even though some individual agencies had bits of information. It was discovered these agencies didn't share information so as to protect it. FISA and The Dept of Homeland Security are direct reflections of their own internal criticism.

I was raised never to trust the government. I served in Afghanistan under two different presidents and I definitely get what it's like to witness lies and misinformation spewed across TV stations while your reality on the ground is very different. These days I have a healthy distrust for government still, however, I expect to see reports and trajectories change when those institutions mess things up. This is what composes "trust" for me now. That's the best I feel that I can expect from any large bureaucratic organization government or otherwise.