Thinking about September 11th

[womzilla]

Nothing profound this year, although I did allow myself to get more actively sad than I have in the last few. In part, I think this is because this is the first year in which I was aware that my sorrow and anger about the attacks was not going to help feed the warmongering of the idiot president who allowed the attacks to occur. (I'm not thrilled by the idea of eternal war in Afghanistan, but I have some hope that within the next couple of years the US will be out of Iraq and NATO presence in Afghanistan will be tremendously scaled back. We'll see.)

Anyway, as I was looking up something else, I came across a passing reference to one of the small things that has nagged at the back of my mind since that day. Here's something that, it seems, most people have forgotten about how the events unfolded:

"The day didn't just end at [the Pennsylvania crash of United Airlines Flight] 93," said Army Brig. Gen. W. Montague Winfield, who was at the Pentagon that day. "We were responding to possible hijackings. & We had a car bomb reported at the State Department."

"It ran on the crawler on the TV that a car bomb had exploded outside the State Department," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said. "I went out and looked with diplomatic security and didn't see anything, called my colleagues around town and, on the video conference screen, told them there was nothing to it."

This rumor of a car bomb explosion at Foggy Bottom was reported for at least a couple of hours on several networks, including NPR (then and still my main traditional source for news), starting very early in the day. It was, as noted, completely baseless. How did it arise? Why did it linger? Couldn't someone at NPR have called the State Department spokesperson and gotten confirmation of this, or were phones in DC so overwhelmed that there was no way to call? (I've never heard that land lines were swamped during the early parts of the attack.) In short, why were the networks so willing to report something so drastic, with so little basis, precisely at the moment when accuracy was most important?

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't remember hearing about that bomb rumor at the time. What I do remember is a befuddlement that lasted in the news media almost the whole day as to which hijacked plane went where. How could the authorities possibly have been confused over this, and if they weren't, why were the media?

[jimhenley.livejournal.com]

I do remember the State-Department bomb report. I guarantee you, though, that land-lines in DC absolutely were swamped that morning.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I'm weird -- I want them to rerun the reading of the names of those who died, only this time without anyone commenting that it's taking hours longer than expected or otherwise interrupting.

[crowleycrow.livejournal.com]

During the first days of the Iraq invasion, NPR reported breahtlessly -- a reporter actually in Iraq -- that a cache of Scud missiles had been discovered, with tips for the delivery of bacterial (or nerve gas) weapons. I believe that the germ/nerve weapons were described as present. Teams were gathering to study the weaponry. No mention ever after of this report. I heard it, and waited. Nothing.