What Questions Remain About 9/11?

[TomSea]

What Questions Remain About 9/11?
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 3 September 2018



In less than a week, it will be the seventeenth anniversary of al-Qaeda’s “Plane’s Operation”, the assault on the United States. It is a vertiginous enough reflection that many of us have been alive more years since 11 September 2001 than before it, and positively alarming that many of those who will soon move into the government, media, and other leading societal institutions will have been born after an event that still shapes so much of the international scene. As Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan put it in The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 (2011), we are left with “the brief name ‘9/11’,” the context and meaning stripped away all this time later. The book is a useful overview of an event that should always be to some degree fresh in mind, though it is not without its problems in its analytical sections.

The first quarter of the book is a retelling of what happened during the attacks. There is the way the hijacking teams coordinated and took over the planes. The smashing of planes full of civilians into buildings full of civilians, both towers of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The details—the telephone calls from those trapped in the towers, those who chose to jump to their deaths rather than burn or suffocate, the fireman struck by falling bodies, the official at the Pentagon “engulfed by fire” with “[m]ost of his body scorched” (p. 45)—remain haunting even at this distance. To revisit the events on United Airlines Flight 93, brought down by a passenger revolt as it headed for the Capitol or the White House, is to be reminded of people—Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham, Todd Beamer, Sandra Bradshaw—who chose as their last act to spare their country and countrymen worse grief.

Read more at: https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/what-questions-remain-about-9-11/

A book review to wade through.