MetaFilter posts tagged with 9-11

"I would call this a blatant case of misjudgment fueled by an unfortunate milieu of assumption."

miss lynnster — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:29:53 -0800

How Charlie Sheen spent his 20 minutes with Barack Obama

Controversial WWF September 11 Advertisment Causes Outrage, Goes Viral

Effigy2000 — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:20:49 -0800

Brazil-based agency DDB BRASIL, contracted by the WWF to make an ad which would drive a "Respect the Planet" theme home, thought that making a 9/11 themed ad would be a good idea. After the video somehow makes it to the internet (some say it was leaked by the agency itself to win an award at Cannes), outrage predictably ensues. DDB Brasil insists the commercial was nothing but a rough draft and the WWF has not endorsed the ad made in their name, although evidence exists suggesting WWF Brazil endorsed a similar print ad a while back. Stupid, bad ad and a comedy of errors? Or the latest viral ad strategy?

Operation Find Don

Sweetie Darling — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:42:35 -0800

Operation Find Don Sarah Bunting, founder of Television Without Pity and Tomato Nation (previously mentioned) renews her quest to find Don, her companion and guardian angel through Lower Manhattan on 9/11. Her essay, "For Thou Art With Us," describes their ordeal. Why should you care? "Because it's a mystery, a puzzle, a story that needs an end. Because Don is everything good and friendly about the world. Because I owe him my thanks, and possibly a cold beer. Because it's his birthday."

Querying the noosphere

Baby_Balrog — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 09:18:24 -0800

According to a recent international survey, there remains no global consensus regarding who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. "On average, 46 percent of those surveyed said al Qaeda was responsible, 15 percent said the U.S. government, 7 percent said Israel and 7 percent said some other perpetrator... The U.S. government was to blame, according to 23 percent of Germans and 15 percent of Italians." The poll was collected by World Public Opinion, a neat website filled with various polls about interesting topics.

The Chain of Command in Coercive Interrogations

digaman — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 07:53:05 -0800

“You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas." A Vanity Fair reporter investigates the chain of command that tossed out the Geneva Conventions and instituted coercive interrogation techniques -- some might call them torture or even war crimes -- in Bush's Global War on Terror. UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo's now-obsolete 81-page memo to the Pentagon in 2003 [available as PDFs here and here] was crucial, offering a broad range of legal justifications and deniability for disregarding international law in the name of "self-defense." Others say that Yoo was just making "a clear point about the limits of Congress to intrude on the executive branch in its exercise of duties as Commander in Chief." [previously here and here.]

The Saddam Sessions

kliuless — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 22:33:50 -0800

Saddam's Confessions - Given Saddam Hussein's central place in the American Consciousness over the last couple decades and particularly in recent years, I found 60 minutes' interview with FBI interrogator George Piro pretty fascinating.

"Attacking that battle station is not my idea of courage. It's more like, suicide"

elgilito — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 05:53:17 -0800

September 11, 2001. It's 10:15 am and the South Tower just went down. Millions of French people are watching the live coverage of the events on TF1, France's major TV channel, with star anchorman Poivre d'Arvor doing a running commentary. Then, for a split second, a character from a famous movie happily tells us (in French subtitles) that he "did it" (18 s in the video) (Dailymotion video). This is definitely not a hoax. Some people reported seing something strange (though they weren't sure of what they had seen), but, of course, the incident got lost in the flow and never got mentioned again until recently, when people converted their VHS tapes and uploaded the clips to online services. As far as I know, TF1 never explained what happened. Who hijacked the coverage, how and why it was hijacked remain a mystery.

...GE had long done business with the bin Ladens. In a misguided attempt at corporate synergy, I called GE headquarters...

amberglow — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 13:31:03 -0800

"You Don't Understand Our Audience" --what John Hockenberry (formerly of NBC, now at MIT Media Lab) learned about network news--good guys and bad guys, the "emotional center", synergy, facts, and why fewer and fewer watch nowadays.

Speed Levitch's The Cruise

Ambrosia Voyeur — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:43:43 -0800

The Cruise, director Bennett Miller's timeless portrait of New York City, free thinking and the 1990s as lived by Timothy "Speed" Levitch. In eleven beats on youtube: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Liar liar pants on fire.

Eekacat — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:40:02 -0800

Lies. Tania Head told a bunch of lies about 9/11. As a fiction editor for the NY Writers Coalition, she apparently knew her fiction. I guess it's nice to feel important.

9/11: I Hear America Singing

jonp72 — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 16:32:23 -0800

Back in 2001, amateur musicians seeking exposure on my.mp3.com responded spontaneously to the 9/11 attacks by posting their own heartfelt musical tributes to the event, which included the Wings cover Taliban on the Run, the anti-abortion ambient synth rock of Unborn Baby of Tower One, and the Christian numerology of Wayne and Liz's 9-11 Warning. More recent tributes can be found on YouTube and elsewhere, including the pro-Bush emo of 9 11 Vision of You, What Does Nine 11 Mean 2 U from "blog 'n' roller" Dr. B.L.T., and the Moby-ish The 9/11 Memorial Song. Meanwhile, YouTube has inspired somebody to ponder if you can make 9/11 look more "funny" by adding the Benny Hill theme song.

It's Tuesday

chuckdarwin — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:15:38 -0800

Martin Amis on 9/11 and the cult of death:

"Let us briefly trundle through the argument for moral equivalence, and let us begin with a trio of ascertainable truths. First, the years 1947 and 1948 saw two imperialistic decisions that guaranteed an increase in hostility between Muslim and nonMuslim: the partition of India along religious lines, and the establishment of the state of Israel. (These decisions also led to, but did not invent, murderous hostility between Muslim and Muslim – in East Pakistan, in Gaza). Second, throughout the 1970s the Arab regimes sponsored by the US started to head off political dissent by guiding the opposition towards Islamic fundamentalism. And, third, in the 1980s the US backed the Mujahidin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and also helped to fund the Pakistani madrassas, whose graduates (all of them unemployable zealots) increased from 30,000 in 1987 to well over half a million by 2001. Thereafter, or so the equivalence argument goes, the Islamist vanguard, having wearied of seeing the battles fought exclusively on its own soil, visited a taste of this destruction on the West. Which turns out to suit the neocons and Christian Zionists, who can now place the US under military rule while they prepare their push for Islamic oil and for Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The goals of the so-called “terrorists” (who are merely responding in kind to state terrorism from the US and its clients) are not delusive or messianic but solemnly political. So it has always been: the oppressed struggle against the oppressor; the wrongs of the past rise up to avenge themselves on the present."

How Dangerous is this Guy?

zzazazz — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 07:03:13 -0800

Giuliani promises a bigger longer war than we got right now with W. This from a guy that used his command center in NYC as a love nest. Of course, the Onion sums it up best.

CGI 9/11 Erotica

PostIronyIsNotaMyth — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 23:48:29 -0800

Rule 34 is alive and well. Latest example: 9/11 Terror Porn. [NSFW, requires login and as always via]

Zeitgeist - Hegel would NOT be proud.

Baldons — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 11:16:39 -0800

Zeitgeist, the movie [Google Video link embedded] - An interesthing, if bizarre, mix of buffed-up comparative mythology, 9/11 conspiracy theories and New world order rambling about banks, loans, debts and war. Is paranoia the spirit of our times?

Some People Get Fired.

inoculatedcities — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:45:16 -0800

Ward Churchill fired. The Colorado Board of Regents made a point to say that he was not fired for the infamous essay in which he called financial workers killed in the World Trade Center attack to "little Eichmanns" for their role in facilitating US corporate financial interests. They insist that he was fired for "serious, repeated and deliberate research misconduct that falls below the minimum standard of professional integrity, including fabrication, falsification, improper citation and plagiarism," allegations made against Churchill even before his controversial post-9/11 remarks. While others warned that the firing signaled a breach of academic freedom and assault on the idea of tenure itself, Churchill announced he is suing the university. (previously)

Sinner or Saint?

hadjiboy — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 07:03:02 -0800

Reintroducing Yvonne Ridley…

"50% of all Saudi fighters in Iraq come here as suicide bombers"

amberglow — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:50:29 -0800

The "same people who attacked us on 9/11"? It may be the very latest talking point from the Administration, but it's actually true--altho it's not Al Qaeda in Iraq, but Saudis. Although Bush administration officials have frequently lashed out at Syria and Iran, accusing it of helping insurgents and militias here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third neighbor, Saudi Arabia ... A historical note: 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis.

Charlie Wilson's War

zarq — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 08:04:55 -0800

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip ends tonight, and Aaron Sorkin will be leaving television production for a while. His current project is Charlie Wilson's War, a movie starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, based on the late George Crile's excellent, funny nonfic book of the same name. The movie will trace "party animal" Congressman Charles "Good Time Charlie" Wilson's (D, TX) rise from a scandal (he was caught in "a hot tub tryst with two cocaine-sniffing showgirls in Las Vegas",) to his role in the 1980's covertly funding Afghanistan guerrillas so they could expand their war with the Soviet Union. Wilson's actions would eventually help collapse the Afghan PDPA government, a power vacuum which would be filled by the Taliban. Who would have thought ending the Cold War would be so easy?

Everything reduced to a mathematical representation

DreamerFi — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 04:50:56 -0800

Simulated jet colliding with the World Trade Center: Researchers at Purdue University have created a simulation to study in detail what likely happened when a commercial airliner crashed into the World Trade Center's North Tower on Sept. 11, 2001. Youtube link.

Who took the Ground Zero flag?

allkindsoftime — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 07:12:35 -0800

Remember this picture? Arguably the most famous flag raised since this one was, and apparently its now gone missing. And now the three firefighters who didn't know they were being photographed won't talk to the press about a flag appraised to be worth over $500K.

David Brin's worried ....

hank — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:37:21 -0800

David Brin -- hoping to rescue modernity Quote: -- "... I have spoken before of the blatant -- and yet never-reported -- pattern shown by more than a hundred members of the United States Congress, appointing young cadets to the US Military Academies according to one criterion above all others -- their depth of religious zealotry. This infusion of young officers who believe in a coming apocalypse is discreetly worrisome at West Point and Annapolis, but it has already had newsworthy effects at the Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. A town that is also now known as a main locus and training center for fanatics bent on dominating American civilization. (see) This coincidence... one of many that simply cannot be coincidence... should be tallied and noted. See also this in recent -- 11/26 -- news "... Among the steps already taken by the Pentagon that enhanced its domestic capabilities was the establishment after 9/11 of Northern Command, or Northcom, in Colorado Springs, to provide military forces to help in reacting to terrorist threats in the continental United States. Today, Northcom's intelligence centers in Colorado and Texas fuse reports from CIFA, the FBI and other U.S. agencies, and are staffed by 290 intelligence analysts. That is more than the roughly 200 analysts working for the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and far more than those at the Department of Homeland Security...."

9/11 Report Cites Many Warnings About Hijackings

Postroad — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 07:41:04 -0800

9/11 Report Cites Many Warnings About Hijackings Rice claimed we were totally surprised by 9/11...not so! "In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations, according to a previously undisclosed report from the 9/11 commission....

Ten Years After

timsteil — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 14:12:57 -0800

A Picture of the Future, You're not in It An address to the John F. Kennedy School of Government...September 11th, 2011

How could they DO this to us? We trusted them!!

Balisong — Mon, 27 Dec 2004 16:50:34 -0800

Let's Roll !!! Does Donald Rumsfield contradicting the official US record harm America?