There's no getting away from it. Various media people are in NYC. There seems to be an item on the news all the time, either interviewing someone who survived or the widow of, say, one of the brave firefighters.

How the world has changed since then. Growing up in the late70s/80s, I was acutely aware of the destructive power of a nuclear or atomic bomb, fuelled by dramas such as "Threads" or the animated "When the Wind Blows". According to my folks, if the bomb dropped, we would know little about it. Just be incinerated alive within a matter of seconds.

Then came 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall. Uprising in Romania. Nearly all of the communist regimes fell. The once mighty USSR disintegrated. The Iron Curtain lifted and an end to the Cold war. Yes, there was the Bosnian conflict but by the mid to late 90s, things were, on the whole, looking up. About this time, a couple of US Embassies were bombed in Africa. This was when Clinton was in power, but to be honest, this hadn't caused many eyebrows to be lifted.

Then the fateful day. I was at work and someone shouted over " a plabe has crashed into a building in New York". Never forget that. I replied "that's bad, any idea where". "Erm, the World Trade Centre" came the reply. I had been up the WTC in 97 and the person who mentioned the name of the building probably had no idea of the sheer scale involved. No-one had access to the internet at work in those days but the boss kept us informed. I subsequently found out another plane had hit the other tower and both towers had horrifcally collapsed . What next ? WW3 ? I remember the eerie scene outside Dixons - loads of people, 2 or 3 deep, stairing in disbelelief at the TV's in the shop window, trying to come to terms with what had happened. Then we learned more. How the Pentagon was targted. How the passengers bravely brought down a fourth plane.

The American people were angry. Bush kneejerked and invaded Iraq. Britain went along with it. The unfortunate "sexed up" dossier. Saddam was a tyrant to his own, the Kurds and had fought the Iranians, but no WMDs were ever found. He had nothing to do with Al Queda. This caused resentment in the Arab countries. The Taliban came to the fore in Afghanistan, brutally seizing power in a very tribal nation which the Colonial British Empire and the Russians in the 80s had not conquered. Cue invasion number two and it's a great stalemate. The war is costly in terms of finances and bodies for the Western powers. Al Queda has spread into Yemen and the Sudan has worrying split into two. The Islamic fundamentalists control Somalia.

Compared to 10 years ago now, I am extremely wary of Islamic extremism and view this with suspicion. I am also extremely wary of the continued interference of USA and Britain abroad. The Crusades happened in the 10th and 11th century but it's all brewing up again. Muslim v Christian. In the 21st Century. God help us if Iran develops a nuclear bomb - it seems close - becuase Ahmendinejad will fire at whoever, Israel most likely. Since then we've also had the dreadful Madrid and London bombings.

I worry about Ahmendinejad and having Tony Blair as middle east peace envoy - who decided that ! I only hope that Barrack Obama can make the World a better place. He's the man (hopefully)

RIP to all the deceased.

How many people actually died? RIP one and all (with obvious exceptions).

I'd been up the WTC the Xmas before, saw all the lights below as it was dark. Damn camera stopped working....

Was on holiday in Turkey on 9/11. Knew nothing about it until walking into town and saw footage on a TV in a restaurant and wondered what the hell was going on. Didn't seem real then and hard to grasp still that it actually was.

Strangely seems longer than 10 years ago...

Doesn't seem 10 years ago and the war on terror has been a huge failure. I remember being at work and a friend phoning to say a plane had crashed into the WTC. I remember watching news (on the BBC website I think) when they said another plane had crashed into tower 2. At that point it was clear it was a terrorist attack.

Did anyone watch the programme the other night, "9/11 ten years on" on ITV they were looking back on the tragedy, and the wife of a senator said on tv that "she had front row seats to watch it and it was really quite exciting"!

She even had a gllint in her eye when she said it!

Strange stuff. Talk about glamourising it!

and does anyone else think the following link is in exceptionally bad taste?

Showing the actual photo, but leading with a picture of the guy who took the shot. Again, glamourising the situation!

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/photographer-b ... steps.html

I don't think it is glamourising it.
It is showing what happened that day to those reporting and showing what was happenin. They may have wanted to walk away but they had to record the events.

Ok, maybe glamourising it is the wrong word. But I still think it looks like they are making more of the photographer than the poor bloke falling to his death.

I'm glad this thread was started, as I was planning on doing the same.

I've watched the 10 years on programme, the one about the Firemen & the one from the political perspective (PS - not just a senator's wife - she was the Vice President's wife!). I've got many thoughts on events since which I may well lay down later this week. Some of the documentary material this week has been grim: the first fireman to die did so when he was caught a glancing blow by a "jumper". And another fireman describing what it was like seeing the aftermath of a jumper meeting the ground. Harrowing stuff.

Anyway, I remember very vividly where I was: sat at work in my financial firm. Flash headlines came up about a plane crash into the WTC, followed by someone from another team wandering over to say stock markets were falling in response. A short time later I rang a friend at Citigroup in London who was watching it on the TV and was sure it was no accident. I don't remember exactly when the 2nd plane hit, I think either just before or when I was on the phone.

Anyway, I realised immediately this was some terrible terrorist attack and told the rest of my team I was off to the pub to watch it - where I knew my boss and another colleague still were from lunchtime. (Bit strange, suffice to say when I started this job the organisation was a bit lax about a couple of people disappearing to the pub at lunch and not coming back until 3pm, if at all. Seeing as my boss was one of those people and my mentor was another, I ended up doing much the same!)

So I got to the pub just after the second plane hit, and proceeded to spend several hours standing watching the terrible events unfold, with a couple more of the team also joining as the newswires grasped what was happening. The most surreal memory of the day was the fact that we had 5 of us plus a couple of bar staff watching events in shock and disbelief - and 15 feet away was the Swedish barmaid, sat at a table reading a book and paying no attention to the coverage. whatsoever. World-changing events were happening before our eyes and it was as if she didn't care. Perhaps she didn't.

MOre people have died from after effects (cancer respirotory illness etc) of 911 that the day itself.

He's threatened the destruction of Israel for sure. Israel is a reasonably small 'place', surely a nuclear weapon will/could wipe out as many if not more Muslims than Jews?

I could be trying to convince myself it wont happen without much success tbh. Chiefly because Iran is a reasonable distance from any fall out (not that I know what would be a safe distance) & most of the Muslims that could perish will be Suni's?

Iran must know that Israel will retaliate any nuclear strike with interest.

Is he that much of a nutter? Possibly

i actually somehow found myself doing something i would usually never do cause i hate the program but i watched jeremy kyles special program on 9/11 and i was in tears...i dont mind admitting i can be a wuss...ha ha

it was such a senseless horrible evil act to commit on innocent people i just cant understand what drives anyone to commit such evil and i will never understand it either....

still makes me cry to this day

What is incredible (for lack of a more appropriate word) is that watching videos on Youtube of the events as they happened, it is still just as shocking. It is very hard to believe that 9/11 actually happened, much in the same way that it is still almost impossible to grasp the reality that the Holocaust actually happened, the fact that such events can take place goes against everything we know and value of humanity.

Can't wait for Pouzar to show up here and claim it's all been a Mossad/CIA plot to justify going to war in Iraq and take over the oil fields.

Believe it folks, these terrorist acts happen in some parts of the world on daily basis.
Some people, ie nations, learn to live with them as a normal part of daily life.
Every morning you just hope, the security forces have done their job properly and prevented the next terror act before it happened.
May all those who fight in the name of religion, seek martyrdom through suicide terror acts or pray daily for the death of their neighbours and teach their children to hate, be rendered powerless, exposed and punished.

At this most appropriate date allow me to quote from Isaiah chp.2 : "...and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

BBC3 have a documentary starting at 9.

Guys - this isn't the place for heated personal arguments to spill over into - there's umpteen other pages and threads for that.

As for shogun's comment - I guess that's not surprising when you see the scale of the dust cloud again - made up largely of concrete, glass and asbestos. Not what you want to be inhaling.

There are some real basket cases on the BBC3 prog.

The dumb girl with the curlyish hair.
What a thicko

They have all the cuckoo ideas going, and not really followed up where the Intelligence went wrong, where it came from..... and the "other" building....

The girl Charlotte needs to be slapped and told to go home.

Nutters.

That was a waste of everything.

Cruise Missiles

Sept 11 is always a somber day because of the horrific events that occurred and the thousands of innocent people who were killed in 2001. It is well to remember that Sept 11 is also a day of sorrow and remembrance for another country, Chile. On Sept 11, 1973, with American support, there was a coup that murdered their democratically elected President, Salvador Allende, for the crime of being socialist, and replaced him with right wing General Pinochet, leading to the torture and murder of many innocent Chileans over many years. It is their day too and thinking of the two in combination leaves one with a clearer picture of the world we live in.

For a more balanced view of Salvador Allende:

Chile's Salvador Allende died in a United States-backed coup on 11 September 1973 - three years earlier he had become Latin America's first democratically-elected Marxist president.

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda described him as an "immortal corpse", while one of the foreign musicians who travelled to Santiago for a concert commemorating the 30th anniversary of his death titled a performance "Salvador Allende, Son of God".

But Mr Allende has his critics.

Economists say the 1970-1973 Allende experiment - which saw the nationalisation of the banking and copper industry - was nothing short of a disaster.

Strikes held by shop keepers, students and professionals in protest at the forced redistribution of wealth to workers and peasants, meant Allende was under siege from even his own supporters.

Fourth attempt

Salvador Allende was born in 1908 in the central port town of Valparaiso - his father was a lawyer.

Expelled from university for political activities, Allende later returned and graduated in medicine in 1932.

A year later he helped found the Chilean Socialist Party.

Supporters of deceased socialist President Salvador Allende take part in a commemorative demonstration of his 1970 election victory
Allende supporters have marked his 1970 victory
He was appointed Minister of Health in 1939 during which time he introduced accident and health insurance cover and benefits for working women.

In 1970 he became president on his fourth attempt.

Pursuing a leftist agenda, Allende established diplomatic relations with Cuba and moved closer to China, North Korea and North Vietnam.

Suicide claim

But as inflation spiralled out of control the chasm between the left and right in Chile widened.

In 1973, the army led by Augusto Pinochet attacked the presidential palace.

When soldiers reached Allende he was already dead.

His doctor believed he committed suicide and his family have never disputed it.

His body lay in an unmarked grave until 1990 when he was formally buried in a ceremony at which there were calls for national reconciliation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3089846.stm

Close.

Anti-American in a different way.

Has anyone else seen the movie United 93? (The plane that crashed in PA, was targeted for DC.)

No Murf, not close. No conspiracy theories about the US or the Israelis being behind the attacks but also a recognition, which I encourage you or Ironfist to challenge factually if you can, that 9-11 didn't happen in a vacuum.

Those people on the planes and in the WTC did not deserve what they got and they should be respectfully and solemnly remembered, just like the innocent victims of the tube attacks in London and Madrid and the heroic fire fighters and policemen who risked their lives and future health to rescue the fallen. The attack on the Pentagon is more complicated because it was an act of war against a country that many Muslims understandably felt had declared war on them and done irreparable harm to them. Of course the innocent people in that plane did not deserve their fate so at the end of the day I think it is also indefensible.

The USA does not have a monopoly on the date September 11th however. Their sponsorship of a very bloody coup in Chile on that date in 1973 and the torture, murder and repression that followed was every bit as wrong and ruthless and illegal as what Al Qaeda did exactly 28 years later. In fact you can make a strong argument that it was even more despicable because the Chilean people had done nothing to the United States to provide any imaginable justification for what was done to them.

After 9-11, Donald Rumsfeld ordered an in-depth study into why Al Qaeda was attacking the US, the ''Why do they hate us?'' question. The conclusion was that it was a response to American foreign policy, obviously because of the USA's continued callous and damaging interference in the Muslim world. Think of the US coup against the democratically elected and secular PM of Iran in 1953, the financing, arming and general protection of thugs like Mubarak and Saddam followed by 21 Years and counting of Hell unleashed on the people of Iraq. I could go on. I won't.

None of that justifies the Al Qaeda attack on innocent Americans as nothing really could, but it does raise the question of how essentially powerless people can defend themselves against predation by a merciless military giant. It is well to also remember on Sunday that nothing could justify what the US did in Chile or in many instances in the Middle East for its strategic and financial advantage at the expense of innocent Muslims, whose lives matter every bit as much as American ones. To ignore the full picture is to embrace ignorance and I will not be intimidated by thuggish blowhards like Ironfist because I insist on pointing out uncomfortable facts that are inconsistent with their selfish and simplistic narratives.

Sorry, I was under the impression that this thread was commemorating a single, huge event.

That conspiracy theorists documentary on BBC 3 last night was possibly the "thinnest" thing I have ever seen.

One of the people based their belief that 9-11 was a US led attack on the fact that they did not believe that mobile phones would work on a plane.

It was embarrassingly poor I am amazed the programme actually went out - it the case of one maybe 2 of the theorists I would actually substitute "consipracy theorists" with the words "mentally ill". One of them grinning like a cheshire cat shaking her head when the pentagon guy was recounting finding parts of stewardess bodies at the site.

I think Andrew Maxwell lost heart half the way through too and the bit with the mother being interviewed about the call was just odd - they seemed to set her up as a conspiracy therorist at the start which she was not at all.

Murf - You and some other posters are commemorating a specific event. I am giving that event a context without which it has limited meaning. If I posted about the undeniable suffering of the Iraqi people during the US invasion of 1990 in Desert Storm without bothering to mention that it was a response to the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait I am sure some posters would rightly add some context. In both cases that still leaves a lot of room for discussion, disagreement and sympathy for innocent victims, and it takes the discourse to a higher plane.
Think of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979. The United States and its allies raged and fumed over the audacity of the Iranian students taking about 90 (I don't know the exact number) American embassy officials as hostages for approximately a year. I saw not a single news report that pointed out the American sponsored coup that took down Mohammad Mossadeg (sp?) , the popular Iranian PM in 1953 and installed the ruthless and despicable Shah and trained the SAVAK, his notorious secret agency in the dark arts of torture and the repression of dissent. What the Iranian people suffered over the next 26 years is unimaginable and unforgivable and the US did everything in their power to arm and prop up the Shah as he raped his own people and turned his country into a UK and US gas station. Mossadeg's 'crime' by the way was to nationalize the oil industry after the British forerunner of BP simply refused to change the colonially established agreement allowing them to take virtually all the profits out of their lucrative Iranian operation, a precedent both the UK and US did not want established for obvious reasons. Without that context people condemned the Iranians as animals. With it one can feel sympathy for many of the American embassy officials while realizing that US foreign policy was 99.9 per cent responsible for their ordeal and that the hostage incident was trivial by comparison to what they had done to the Iranian people. FWIW Obama belatedly apologized to the Iranian people in his 2009 speech in Cairo, admitting America's sponsorship of the coup. On top of that the coup changed a secular Iranian government into a radical Islamic one, which the US constantly whinges about without accepting their own responsibility for it. The fact that they don't teach this in US and UK schools makes it all the more important to point it out.

Yes watched this a couple of months ago ....incredible film, feels authentic and utterly terrifying in its real time depiction of what it would have been like on one of those hijacked jets as well as the mayhem that ensued in the control centres.

it also highlights that if those brave people had not intervened on that flight it would most likely have hit the White House before fighter jets had arrived.

Everyone should watch this film.