Movie about 9/11

I saw a good movie tonight, “On Native Soil.” It is a documentary that presents the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report and tells the story of the families of the 9/11 dead who pushed for a Commission, and whose unswerving moral passion finally persuaded a reluctant White House to support it. Of course, many things about the 9/11 Commission were dreadful, mainly the intellectual mediocrity and partisanship of the Commissioners themselves, as I wrote at the time. However, the Commission staff did excellent work and produced a worthwhile report.

In retrospect, it is astonishing that after such an event as the September 11 attack the government did not instantly order a study of it, but instead had to be cajoled into it by the families who insisted on getting at the truth of how this disaster had happened. And the Commission did get at a lot of the truth. The truth they found, however, is what I would call “first order truth,” namely the truth about the laxness, laziness, and complacency that were seen, for example, in the way that 15 of the 19 hijackers were permitted into America with flawed visa applications that would have stopped them if even ordinary procedures had been followed; in the way the government bureaucracy ignored the memo from the FBI agent in Phoenix who said that suspect Muslims in the U.S. were were taking flying lessons; in the way Clinton’s National Security Council under Sandy Berger was less than fully serious about killing bin Laden, and on one occasion even helped him escape when they had a clear shot at him; and let us not forget the insufferable smugness of Bush National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice who refused to take any responsibility for having ignored the danger signs and who frankly should have had her head handed to her on a platter after her despicable performance before the 9/11 Commission in Spring 2004. The truth about these and many other aspects of the 9/11 attack has been brought out. Yet the Commission Report, and the truth-seeking families, have not remotely touched on the “second order of truth” that lies behind the first order of truth, namely, WHY America was so lax and loathe to take action to protect itself from Muslim terrorists. In liberal society, even brave truth seekers like the 9/11 survivors will not seek the truth about liberalism itself.

The movie also focuses on the stories of a few families of the dead, and on a few miraculously lucky survivors, such as Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath, who saved each other’s lives in the South Tower. Brian saved Stanley’s life by entering the 81st floor and pulling him from debris where he was trapped, and Stanley saved Brian’s life because Brian, in the act of hearing Stanley’s cries for help and entering the 81st floor from the stairway to look for him, did not follow his fellow employees who at that moment turned around and headed back up the stairs to death instead of continuing down the stairs to life—thus in responding to Stanley’s cries and saving his life, Brian literally saved his own. It’s a story I can never hear enough of. (Below, see excerpt from Brian Clark’s account.) Then there is the story of David Lim, a Port Authority officer who was in a stairway on the fifth floor of the North Tower leading a group of people to safety when the building fell. Lim thought he was dead then he realized he was not dead. The stairwell in which he and his companions were located had miraculously remained intact and they found themselves standing on top of the wreckage of the collapsed 110-story building as though they were inside a “straw on top of a pancake.” There is also the story of the father and mother whose son and daughter-in-law were on Flight 175, and the son was talking to the father on his cell phone and then said, “Oh my God, oh my God,” and at that moment the father and mother saw Flight 175 crash into the South Tower.

Finally, “On Native Soil” establishes something I had previously misunderstood (and I looked it up in the Commission Report afterward to make sure of it), that there were no fighter planes scrambled to intercept Flight 93, nor Flight 175, nor Flight 77. Flight 93 is the one that really matters here. Though Flight 93 was hijacked at 9:28 a.m., 25 minutes after the second building was hit, meaning that everyone knew at that point what the hijacking was intended to accomplish, in the 35 minutes between its being hijacked and its crashing in Pennsylvania, the FAA did not inform the military about the plane, which at the time it crashed was only 20 minutes from Washington D.C. The only fighters in the air over Washington had been ordered up to intercept a non-existent plane, namely Flight 11, which FAA did not realize had crashed into the North Tower but instead thought was heading toward Washington. There was no order from Vice President Cheney to shoot down 93. There was no fallback position. The only thing defending our nation’s capital from a devastating blow was the Flight 93 passengers themselves. Had they not banded together and attacked the cockpit as they did, fighting for six minutes to force their way into the cockpit where the fiends were piloting the plane, and continuing to smash the cockpit door even as the fiends desperately tipped the plane left and right and up and down to knock the passengers off their feet, until finally the fiends, realizing they were about to be overwhelmed, crashed the plane into the earth, the Capitol building (or perhaps the White House) would have been destroyed, and 9/11 would have been a vastly more wounding event to our nation than it actually was.

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Here is part of Brian Clark’s more detailed account of his 9/11 experience at the PBS website, in which he makes it clear that Stanley saved his life just as he saved Stanley’s:

Across the road you could see some people standing in doorways protecting themselves from anything that might have been falling. We ran across the street, past the fire hall, which is on the corner, and up another block and caught our breath. There was a deli owner there. I said, “Have you got any water?” He went in and just handed us this water in bottles and said, “Here you go.” I said, “Thank you.” He said, “In fact, here is a breakfast platter. I don’t think anybody is going to be picking that up.” And he gave me this great tray with some fresh fruit on it and some sweet rolls. He was a very generous fellow at the time considering the conditions.

I carried this with me another block to the west side of Trinity Church, where we met a couple of ministers. That’s when Stanley broke down. He cried to these ministers, “This man saved my life.” He completely broke down. I was overcome with emotion as well, and I said, “You know, Stanley, you may think I saved your life but I think you saved my life, too. You got me out of that argument as to whether I should go up or go down. I’m here, and I’m fine, and it’s because of your voice in the darkness that I made it.” We embraced, and the ministers had a quick prayer, and one of them said, “You know, the church is open if you would like to go in there.”

Stanley and I looked at each other, and we nodded and said, “All right, let’s do that.” So we walked to the south side of Trinity Church, which is a street that slopes up. As we walked up it we got higher and higher, and with the wall in relation to us going lower, we could now turn around and see the World Trade Center. We grabbed onto the fence railing of the cemetery and looked through the grate up at the Trade Center, and Stanley said to me, “You know, I think those buildings could go down.” I said, “There is no way. Those are steel structures. That’s furniture and paper and carpeting and draperies and things like that that are burning.” But I didn’t finish the sentence when Tower Two started to slide down.

I would say that we’d been out of the building maybe five minutes when the building collapsed. It disappeared into its own dust. What I thought had happened at that instant was only the top third or quarter of the building down to the fire line had collapsed. It was a horrible feeling. I mean, our whole escape was horrible when it was happening, but you at least thought people had a chance—until that moment. Then I knew that certainly in the top quarter of the tower there was no chance. We just stared at it in awe, not realizing what was happening completely.

We stared, watching, with nobody running or anything initially. But then this great tsunami of dust came over the church. Everybody looked up, and, as in a disaster movie, everybody started running in fear of the debris and dust that might be in there. But I knew there was nothing solid that was going to harm me, that the building hadn’t fallen over. I knew that. But you didn’t want to breathe the junk that was in there, so we ran down Broadway to 42 Broadway. We went into that building as the dust and smoke was catching up to our backsides. We got into that lobby with many other people, strangers doing the same thing. The air was clean in there, and people were milling around.

- end of initial entry -

Mark J. writes:

God Bless the flight 93 passengers and their heroism.

You point out that if they had not stopped the plane from getting to its destination in Washington, D.C., “9/11 would have been a vastly more wounding event to our nation than it otherwise was.”

I wonder: if the terrorists had successfully crashed the plane into, say, the Capitol building, collapsing the dome and providing an indelible image of disaster even stronger than that of the twin towers falling, would we have become as complacent 6 years later as we have? Would the sight of a collapsed and then slowly rebuilt Capitol dome have made it more difficult for liberals who felt a flush of patriotism after 9/11 to revert back to type as they have?

Thank God the passengers stopped the terrorists, but in the long view might it have been better if the shock had been even more profound?

Vincent Chiarello writes:

Lorenzo,

For a riveting written account of the role of Bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attack, including the mind-boggling incompetence of the U.S. bureaucracies, I’d recommend Lawrence Wright’s, THE LOOMING TOWER (2006). The title of the book is taken from the fourth sutra of the Koran:

Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower.

Wright’s research and interviews meld together to move the scene of the action from Bin Laden’s father’s rise to fame and wealth to the son’s early and later efforts to destroy the U.S. through a terrorist network. Wright also writes that Bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri sought to re-interpret the Koran, so that the murder of innocent women and children was now permissible. Some Islamic scholars, Andrew Bostom foremost amongst them, would question Wright’s accuracy in this matter, but what cannot be disputed is Wright’s contention, amply demonstrated, that sheer bureaucratic incompetence and failure by the CIA & FBI to coordinate was a major factor in allowing 9/11 to proceed. “The saddest words of tongue and pen are simple these: it might have been.”

Wright does not, however, connect the dots about any future impact of Islamic immigration on U.S. security; still, his account does present a scenario of further terrorist attacks on these shores, and the recent “gut feeling” by “Jaws,” as Mr. Chertoff is known, that such bloodshed is likely, only indicates that the threat level is still very high.

LA replies:

I would only add that it’s not just non-Muslim scholars such as Bostom who would disagree with the statement that the mandate to kill innocent women and children comes from a re-interpretation of the Koran by Osama bin Laden. Leading Muslim scholars would also disagree. See, for example, my quotation of Sayyid Qutb’s explanation of how aggressive war against non-Muslims is commanded in the Koran and the Hadiths. Qutb died in 1966, when Osama bin Laden was nine years old. And in 1469 the leading clerical authority in the Ottoman empire enunciated the same interpretation of the Koran as did Sayyid Qutb half a millennium later.

Andrew E. writes:

God bless the passengers of Flight 93 indeed. In all honesty though, I cannot conceive of a world—and wouldn’t want to—where these passengers sat idly by and allowed the terrorists to fly the plane into the Capitol. I wish mightily that the passengers had succeeded in retaking the plane so that they could return to their families and friends, but their act of heroism has served as a source of spiritual rejuvenation for me for the last six years. It is a source of hope that a burning Capitol could never be. Flight 93 is a metaphor for our times, a group of people identifying their commonalities and uniting around them and then choosing to create their own fate in an attempt to stave off their extinction. Indeed, Flight 93 can be seen as a metaphor for America, a country that traditionally has chosen to create new circumstances in the face of adversity in order to create something higher and greater. Remember, Flight 93 was the first plane where the passengers could reasonably be expected to grasp the true intentions of the Muslim terrorists. They were the first who could have concluded that they needed to act and they did. Amazingly, they seemed to make this conclusion before our own government because, as pointed out in the original entry, there were no fighter planes scrambled to shoot down Flight 93. In the coming years, when a true leader finally emerges he will use the example of Flight 93 alongside the many others in American history as fuel for the revolution in thought we’ll need to return America from the brink.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 26, 2007 01:35 AM | Send