Are some people still stuck in the 9/11 world? Over at Nobody's Business, I explain why there's no room for them here in the future.

I've written a few posts about 9/11 over the years. My wife used to work for Aon, which lost over 170 people on 9/11, and she'd met at least one of them, a nice guy named Jim Berger. And a few years ago, I stumbled across the memoral for U.S. Navy Commander Dan F. Shanower in Naperville. Then last year, I wrote about my discomfort over the 9/11 memorial in Manhattan, and I explained why I had nothing more to say about 9/11.

As it turns out, I have a few more thoughts about 9/11 bouncing around in my brain after all, and this is as good a time as any to ramble on about them.

First of all, remember that the number of Americans who died on 9/11 is much larger than the three thousand people who died in the World Trade Center, in the Pentagon, and on the hijacked airplanes. I don't have an exact figure, but the true death toll for September 11, 2001, is much closer to ten thousand people.

That's not some conspiracy theory, it's mortality statistics. There are about 300 million people in the United States, and a small percentage of them die every day. If 9/11 was otherwise a typical day, it means that in addition to the 3000 deaths from terrorism, another 7000 Americans passed away for other reasons.

I can't get it out of my head that the families of some of those people have got to feel a bit...cheated, maybe? Imagine, for example, the wife of some liquor store clerk who was shot to death in a robbery on the night of September 10th, 2001. She wakes up the next morning for one of the worst days of her life, only to discover that nobody seems to care.

I don't want to be all holier-than-thou about this, but just this once, when we think of the people who died on 9/11, let's try to think of all the people who died on 9/11.

On another matter, I'm bothered by how often we we make the mistake of judging people's actions by the results, rather than by the expected probability distribution when they acted. Consider a guy who buys a lottery ticket and wins a million bucks. Was he smart to buy that lottery ticket? If you say yes, because he won all that money, you're part of the problem.

At the time he made the decision and acted by purchasing a ticket, he didn't know he was going to win. All he knew is that there was a very small chance he would win, and a much larger chance he would lose. A typical state lottery probably only gives away half the money as prizes, which means that, speaking in terms of probability (and simplifying a lot), he could expect to lose half of what he spent on the ticket. Financially speaking, buying that ticket was a bad move. It's only pure luck that prevented him from paying the price.

I bring this up in connection with 9/11 because the exact same argument applies to the firefighters, police officers, and EMTs who responded to the World Trade Center and died in the collapse. We call them heroes, and indeed they are. But they didn't know they were going to die when they made the decision to respond to the scene and enter the towers. All they knew was that there was a risk --  a non-zero probability of death -- and they went ahead and did it anyway. They are heroes not because they died, but because they risked death.

I think that's an important distinction because there are plenty of other people -- other firefighters and police and EMTs and anyone else who helped -- who took the same risk that day, and happened by chance to survive. That they didn't die does not in any way diminish their heroism. So remember the dead heroes, but also remember the heroes who still walk among us.

In an effort to keep you up-to-date, Windypundit has sent its spy satellite (WindySat) to check out the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan to see if we could spot the downed Black Hawk helicopter. Sure enough! There it is. That black "X" shaped object to the left of the building.

I know this is very, very wrong, but...

(Hat tip: Matt Welch)

For almost a decade we have had heavy-handed rights abuses all in the name of keeping people safe from threats which kill far fewer people than traffic accidents do each year. We allow the files on your laptop to be perused with no cause. We take for granted that people can be detained indefinitely without being tried or even accused of a crime. The United States now condones tortuous acts, which we ourselves once prosecuted others for, as normal. We think it's OK to listen in on private conversations of anyone without any judicial review at all. The American public accepts all this, and more, in the name of safety.

So it's 9/11 again...

Actually, it isn't. When we talk about "9/11" we mean September 11, 2001. Today, however, is September 11, 2010. This 9/11 isn't really The 9/11. The only relationship between today and the 9/11 that happened 3277 days ago is due to our calendar, which is related to the Earth's position in its orbit around the Sun, which we only really care about because the Earth's inclination causes seasons that affect our lives. In other words, it's all in our heads.

I gather Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have some sort of rally going on today. Beck claims the date is a coincidence, just like his rally at the Lincoln memorial on the annivarsary of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech was a coincidence. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one, since 8/28 isn't as well-known a date as 9/11, but now that he's used the same excuse twice, I have to assume he was lying both times.

As you'd expect, the usual opposition are accusing Beck and Palin of "sucking the blood from the World Trade Center dead, or otherwise trying to cash-in on the date. I'm pretty sure that's more or less what they have in mind, but I don't care. 9/11 was nine years ago. Today is a whole new day.

I felt the same about the claim that Beck was trying to "take over" the Martin Luther King dream speech. The "dream" speech was 47 years ago. Beck and his rally can't lay a hand on it. Besides, Glenn Beck is an insignificant insect compared to Doctor King. He has no chance of taking anything over.

I'm not exacly sure what point I'm trying to make here. I guess the main one is that, for me, 9/11 is now just history. The anniversary doesn't feel significant anymore. I no longer experience that mental shock when I see the twin towers in an old movie. I can think about the events of that day without reliving the searing emotions. I'm really only writing about it because everybody else is.

I'm over it.

I realize that not everybody is so lucky. I wasn't there. I didn't lose anybody. Some people took it a lot harder than I did. Some people lost loved ones, or worked in the destroyed buildings, and have had their lives changed forever. Other people were just, for one reason or another, closer to it than I was, and it's still a living reality for them. Some people, for no particular reason, just aren't past it yet.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course. I hope they find the peace they need.

But I resent the accusation -- usually implied but sometimes explicit, and often offered by pundits and demagogues -- that there's something wrong with people who feel like I do. I haven't forgotten 9/11, but there's a difference between remembering 9/11 and wallowing in the glorious pain.

When the towers were burning, it got so bad for the people trapped above the fire floors that some of them were forced to jump to their deaths. The media had pictures of this, and they showed a bunch of them for a while. But within a day or two, perhaps deciding it was a little too exploitive, they stopped showing the jumpers.

This outraged some people in the blogosphere. Apparently, they weren't satisfied with all the news stations showing us over and over again how the planes hit the towers and exploded into angry fireballs of burning jet fuel. And they weren't satisfied with all the footage of the towers collapsing into giant dust clouds.

No, they wanted to see as much death as possible. And they accused the news media of trying to whitewash 9/11, of trying to hide from the American people the full horror of What They Did To Us.

I don't know why us humans experience fear and anger -- I suspect we evolved them because they help us to focus our attention and rally our personal resources -- but here's one thing I do know: People who try to make you feel fear or anger are trying to manipulate you.

Almost every provision of the Patriot Act had been proposed months or years before by some government agency and shot down by Congress as unwise. But after 9/11, politicians were afraid to say no to anything that might be justified as making us safer. It was a huge power grab by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Shortly thereafter, the passenger screening function at airports was taken over from private companies by the Transportation Security Agency. They immediately hired all the same people to do the job, but now they are government employees, more intrusive, and less accountable. Now instead of looking for threats to air travel, they're conducting warrantless searches for drugs and stolen checks, and they're retaliating with heavier searches against people who complain.

Even today, we've got Beck and Palin trying to rally people around 9/11, and there are demagogues trying to stir up fear and outrage over land use issues in lower Manhattan.

I'm sure there are plenty of people of good will who have stronger feelings about 9/11 than I do, and I'm sure some of them are genuinely mystified that I'm not as angry as they are. All I can say to them is that I have moved on. But if they will refrain from accusing me of forgetting 9/11, I'll refrain from accusing them of being manipulative fearmongers.

As for the actual demagogues who want us all to be angrier so we'll support their agenda, here's my anger: Go fuck yourselves.

Exactly why terrorists attacked the United States nine years ago is still debated. One fact that is clear, however, is that the United States is a special and unique place in the world.

AP writer Meghan Barr has an article about dead letter handling for zipcode 10048:

It is the kind of holiday mail that might have been tossed aside, discarded like any other piece of junk mail: a special gift offer for a facial at a local spa.

Only the address on the letter no longer exists.

And the woman the letter is addressed to died more than five years ago in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Hundreds of pieces of mail destined for the former World Trade Center still arrive every day at a post office facing ground zero — the relics of the unfinished lives of the victims of Sept. 11, 2001.

Telephone bills, insurance statements, wine club announcements, college alumni newsletters, even government checks populate the bundles of mail. Each one bears the postal code once reserved exclusively for the twin towers: 10048.

...

The fact that the Postal Service is even forwarding mail from a nonexistent address five years later is rare. "Normally we'd only forward mail for a year," [U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman Pat] McGovern said. "But we're making an exception here."

Read the whole thing.

2,996

By one estimate, that's how many people died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

It's also the number of people being memorialzed today in the blogosphere. Each person is being memorialized by at least one blogger.

The official list is here:

http://www.dcroe.com/2996/?page_id=2

That page is down right now because their hosting service has cut them off, presumably because of all the traffic. What kind of moronic hosting service cuts you off because of a brief spike in traffic? Click the link to find out.

Not to worry. I resurrected an old version of the list from the Google cache and posted it here:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/static.windypundit.com/cache/2996-List.html

That's an Amazon Web Services page, so it should take a billion hits or so without any trouble. However, it's going to cost me real money, so please hit the "Make a Donation" tip jar on the left if you feel so inclined.

Reason magazine has an open comment thread for 9/11 thoughts. Here's mine:

I remember watching the towers burn in real time as it was happening, and I remember wrestling with the fact that it was too late. No matter how rich and powerful and capable we are, we could never bring back all the people who were murdered by the crashing planes, by the roaring fireballs, and by the smoke filling the towers.

That must be what it's like to make a mistake with some fast-moving machinery and see half your hand fall to the floor: There's the pain, and there's the realization that it's irreversible and you can't undo it no matter how hard you try.

I did manage to find a little good news, though. Ramzi Yusef's boastful quest to bring the towers down had failed again. The towers may have been burning, and thousands may have been dead, but the towers still stood. That glimmer of hope lasted about 45 minutes, until I saw a huge dust cloud envelop one of the towers from top to bottom, and I figured out what had to have caused it.

Some people are amazing.

Sally Goodrich, whose son died in the Sept. 11 attacks, kept a grip on her grief as she surveyed the foundations of the Afghan school being built with money she raised in the United States.

...

Goodrich, a native of Bennington, Vt., and an administrator for schools in nearby North Adams, Mass., has helped raise about $180,000 for the new girl's school in Surkh Abat, about 30 miles south of Kabul, in Logar province.

I can't imagine a better way to help the Afghan people while simultaneously striking a blow against Islamic extremism than to educate a bunch of young girls.

In one my September 11th anniversary postings I mentioned my initial back-of-the-envelope calculations on the World Trade Center death toll. My first thought had been that the World Trade Center holds 50,000 people and I might have just seen them all die. My brain eventually started working and I realized that people must have been streaming down the emergency stairs the whole time, even if the video didn't show them. My new figure of 20,000 dead was still pretty scary. Below, I mentioned how relieved I was that the death toll was so much smaller, and I didn't care why.

It turns out I cared enough to look it up after all. Here's my original calculation: I guessed that south tower had stood about an hour and the north for 90 minutes. I had read somewhere that here in Chicago fire stairs are supposed to permit 45 people per minute to exit. I had no idea how many stairwells the towers had, but I guessed four in each tower. Multiply that out and 45*60*4=10800 escaped from the south tower and 45*90*4=16200 escaped from the north tower, totaling 10800+16200=27000 escapees, leaving 50000-27000=23000 still in the towers.

I was wrong on every count. The bad news was that the towers only had three stairwells each. The good news was that the population figure for the World Trade Center, which turned out to be 58000, was for the entire complex of buildings. The towers only hold about 10000 people each and at 8:46 in the morning, many of those desks were empty, leaving each tower with an estimated population of no more than 7000 people. An added bonus is that that the towers lasted 73 and 103 minutes. Do the math again, and 45*73*3=9855 could have escaped from the south tower and 45*103*3=16200 could have escaped from the north tower.

In other words, everyone was able to escape except for those killed by the plane crashes or trapped above the crash floors. In the south tower, many people above the crash floor got out because they started leaving when the other tower was hit. A handful managed to escape from above the crash site. In the north tower, the 91st floor was the dividing line. Everyone on it and most of those below escaped and survived. No one above it survived.

The evacuation from the twin towers is one of the biggest success stories of 9/11. When the World Trade Center was first attacked by terrorists in 1993, it took four hours to evacuate the towers. This was judged unacceptable, and the buildings were given $90 million worth of safety improvements. A backup generator was installed, along with emergency stairwell lighting and better exit marking signs. Disabled workers were provided with special chairs that could be carried down the stairs by two volunteers. Fire wardens were appointed on each floor and regular escape drills were conducted. The terrorists who attacked the towers in 1993 probably spurred improvements that saved thousands of lives.

A good description of the evacuation is in Dennis Cauchon's "For many on Sept. 11, survival was no accident" in USA Today. A detailed engineering description can be found in the House Committee on Science's World Trade Center Building Performance Study. The Executive Summary is a worthwhile overview. Chapter 1 gives a good overview of the events of the day at the World Trade Center in engineering terms. Chapter 2 discusses the engineering and collapse of the twin towers. Other chapters discuss the other damaged buildings at the site, including buildings 5 and 7, which suffered collapses apparently due to fires, something which had never before happened to protected steel frame buildings anywhere in the world. Finally, chapter 8 contains a list of conclusions and recommendations. Nothing like this has ever happened before, so this is the first chance engineers have had to study these kinds of events outside of computer models. Many of the recommendations are for additional studies of still poorly understood events on that day.

I'm writing today about a few things I would have written about last year if I'd had somewhere to write.

When last year's attacks started, President Bush was down in Florida. He broke off what he was doing and immediately boarded Air Force One. Instead of flying back to Washington, he flew to an Air Force base in Louisiana where he taped a message for broadcast to the American people. He then flew to Offutt Air Force Base, before finally flying home to Washington. Several commentators gave him hell for that, saying that he should have stood up to the Secret Service and insisted on returning to Washington.

I strongly disagree. In those first few hours, no one knew what else might happen. Were the four planes the only attack, or were there others? Was it over, or was this the first move in a larger campaign? Were there trucks filled with explosives in Washington, ready to crash the Whitehouse gates? Chemical weapons? Could there be terrorists with smuggled anti-aircraft missiles ready to shoot down Air Force One when it predictably arrived at Andrews? Could we even rule out a nuclear bomb?

It's easy to look back now and see that it was only a bunch of guys with box-cutters, but no one knew that then. There were certainly plenty of troubling things happening that day. A plane was reportedly stuck on the ground and surrounded by SWAT teams. There were rumors of more planes and helicopters on the way. Commercial jets were still flying, including many arriving from overseas. There was a report of a car bomb outside the State department. There were credible threats against Air Force One. It's true that all these things seemed pretty unlikely, but so did suicide attacks using hijacked commercial passenger jets.

Military entities have plans for dealing with dangerous situations. Some of them are specific plans for specific problems, but there's always a plan for unknown problems. On a naval vessel, the plan is called general quarters. It's a controlled freak-out in which the ship prepares for combat action. No matter where they are, everyone goes to their assigned stations. The command centers are staffed, the weapons are loaded, the damage control teams are positioned. They are prepared for whatever the situation throws at them.

That's a general reaction for our military in many situations: When something unexpected happens, sound the alarm and prepare for the worst. Some of the United State's enemies have nuclear weapons, so preparing for the worst involves awesome national-level plans for action when something unexpected and frightening happens. These plans include protecting the President so our enemies can't slow down our decision making by killing him early in the attack.

With Air Force One in flight and escorted by fighters over American-controlled airspace, the President was as near to invulnerable as anyone ever was. I suppose he could have stood up to the Secret Service and the military and insisted on flying to Washington, but I think it was time to listen to the advice of his experts, who had been preparing for attacks for decades. Some people thought he should have been making appearances and looking like a leader. I think he did the right thing by flying to Offutt Air Force Base, home of Strategic Air Command, from which he could command all the conventional and nuclear forces of the United States. That worked for me.

I'm writing today about a few things I would have written about last year if I'd had somewhere to write.

In the wake of 9/11, the question arose of how to tell the difference between war and terrorism. In particular, a lot of people tried to come up with a definition that made the attacks of 9/11 terrorism but not our response. How can it be that hijacked airplanes crashing into defenseless Americans in buildings are acts of terrorism, but glide bombs smashing into defenseless Afghans in buildings are a acts of war? It wouldn't do to say that American attacks aren't terrorism, but foreign attacks are. We need a definition that makes sense without being arbitrary.

Could it be that the 9/11 dead are civilians and the Enduring Freedom dead are soldiers? No, because some of the 9/11 victims were soldiers in the Pentagon, and most of the Afghan dead were civilians because Afghanistan didn't have a formal army. So that's not quite right. We can fix part of the problem by saying that the Afghan dead were combatants, and the 9/11 dead were non-combatants, thus avoiding the legalistic meaning of civilian in favor of a more practical description of behavior and activity. Anybody acting in support of a war is a combatant, which is how we justified our attacks on railroads and factories during World War II.

But aren't we killing innocent non-combatant Afghans? Yes. We're even killing Afghans who are on our side. This is a nearly inevitable consequence of warfare, especially warfare that uses modern long-distance weapons. In fact, if we could avoid all harm to innocents, it wouldn't even be war. It would be law enforcement. Contemporary liberal justice systems strive to punish only the guilty while harming none of the innocent. War is what happens when justice is not possible. If Afghanistan had a working liberal democratic government, then the responsible parties would have been hunted down, arrested, and punished by the Afghan justice system. The killing of innocents as a side effect of war doesn't make the war into terrorism. Intent matters.

Perhaps we should define terrorism as the intentional killing of non-combatants. That's not quite strong enough. We know American war efforts will kill non-combatants with statistical near-certainty. We can't very well claim not to intend to kill non-combatants when we know they're going to die. An arsonist who sets fire to an inhabited building can't claim he didn't intend to kill the people inside. What's happening is that we're trying to stop combatants, and killing non-combatants is an unfortunate and unavoidable side effect. Purpose matters.

We're almost there: Terrorism is any act committed with the purpose and intent of killing non-combatants. By this definition, our attacks against Al Queda are not terrorism. Likewise, the attacks against the World Trade Center and the passengers of all four planes are terrorism. What about the attack on the Pentagon? The people in the Pentagon were acting in support of our military, and were therefore clearly combatants, right?

Maybe. Not that it matters. Even if we classify all the attacks of 9/11 as warfare instead of terrorism, it doesn't change the nature of our response. Terrorist acts between nations are acts of war.

I would argue that the people in the Pentagon were not combatants in this case, because they were not acting in support of a war. Yes, many of them were warriors, but there was no war, so the attacks did not further anyone's war goals. In this, the attacks of 9/11 differed from the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were trying to suppress U.S. naval activity in the Pacific to advance their goals of conquest. Attacking the Pentagon did not further the aims of any war. It was done just to cause fear and death.

While looking up information to write another post, I stumbled across this old Charles Murtaugh posting:

So here's my first blog rant of Spring. The papers have been full of detailed scientific stories about the physical circumstances that led to the collapse of the World Trade Center. I.e., did the physical impact of the hijacked planes make a difference, or was the fire sufficient to cause the collapse, were the fire suppression systems in the towers inadequate, was there something wrong with the fireproofing insulation, blah blah blah. And now apparently a two-year, $16 million federal study is underway to consider changes to building codes and standards, to help prevent this happening again.

Excuse me, but this is just so September 10th. Asking these questions is like asking why Daniel Pearl died, and concluding that he died because of lack of oxygen to the brain. Well, yes, that's because his throat was slit by a fucking terrorist! And the World Trade Center collapsed because planes were hijacked and flown into it! Any response to prevent it happening again that is not based on this first cause, rather than on the inconsequential and contingent secondary causes, is pathetic and misguided. And, unfortunately, depressingly, predictably, very American.

I don't know what programs Murtaugh saw, but I agree that plane-proofing is a very American response, and I think it's a great idea.

First of all, these reports were fascinating to anyone with even a passing interest in engineering. The way the towers collapsed surprised a lot of people, engineers included, and most surprising phenomena are worth further investigation.

Second, while a good offense may be the best defense, the second best defense is defense in depth. In fact, a good offense is part of a deep defense.

A single line of defense is brittle: If it fails, you're doomed. With multiple lines of defense, you have a fallback against failure of one of your defenses.

You also force your enemies to go through a lot more work to win. If your house has a locked door, it forces an intruder to break it down or pick it before he can harm you. If you have an alarm, it forces him to move fast before the police arrive. If you have a dog, it forces him to fight the dog. If you have a gun, it forces him to fight you. However, if you have a locked door, a dog, an alarm, and a gun, it forces him to break down the door while fighting both you and your dog simultaneously, all before the police arrive. It's a lot harder.

Currently, our country is planning extensive deep defenses to defend against another 9/11-style attack: We're increasing airport security, encouraging passengers to fight back, stiffening passenger resistance with sky marshals, strengthening the cockpit doors, arming the pilots, patrolling the skies with F16's, and protecting targets with anti-aircraft missiles. Adding yet another layer of defense by hardening the targets is not a foolish idea.

I'm writing today about a few things I would have written about last year if I'd had somewhere to write.

Shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center, several people, including President Bush, called the perpetrators "cowards." A mini-debate erupted over whether that term was appropriate. It's a pointless argument. Naturally, I have an opinion.

Several folks to disagreed on the grounds that the hijackers clearly put their lives at risk (sacrificing them, in fact) to accomplish their goal. Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher got himself in a lot of trouble for saying "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly." There's a hint of a good point here: If the terrorists were cowards for attacking people who can't fight back, then so are we when we use our advanced weaponry. But that's not right at all. In wartime, attacking your enemy in such a way that they can't attack you isn't cowardice, it's good tactics. Clearly, "attacking people who can't fight back" is a poor definition of cowardice.

President Bush's definition of cowardice might be different, based on what he said here:

Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. Make no mistake: the U.S. will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.

Here, Bush seems to be calling the person who planned the attack, now known to be Osama bin Laden, a coward. Perhaps this is because he remains "faceless," too scared to take responsibility for his acts. This a much better definition of cowardice, and might well apply. Of course, when you attack a superpower, not taking responsibility may also be a sign of wisdom.

A few years ago in Yemen, a couple of men linked to Al Queda piloted a small boat up to the USS Cole and set off a bomb, blowing a hole in the hull and killing 17 sailors. It wasn't long before people, including President Clinton, called them "cowards." I thought this was stupid and dangerous. These guys didn't blow up some bar in a naval port, they attacked an armed and deployed American warship. That's not a cowardly act. These guys were bold, and they were dedicated, and they were our enemies. There were more of them out there, and calling them cowards was just a way to stick our heads in the sand. It was a dangerous delusion.

For whatever it's worth, I've always thought of cowardice as a personal failing. I once read an account by a cop describing an entry into an apartment during a criminal investigation. One of the occupants became belligerent and attacked him, at which point his partner ran away. Other cops arriving on the scene saw him running, but assumed he was chasing someone. That's a coward. It's not that he ran, it's that he let down his partner. This definition doesn't really tell us a lot about the terrorists of 9/11. That's kind of my point: Whether the terrorists were cowardly is not important.

So, does this mean I think some of the terrorists have been brave? Yes, but so what? I don't think our policy toward them should depend on their personal virtues or lack thereof. The German military during World War II was filled with bold and dedicated people, and we fought them to a total victory. That some of our enemy are courageous doesn't make them any less our enemy. That some murderers are bold doesn't make them any less murders.

I'm going to write today about a few things I would have written about last year if I'd had somewhere to write it. WindyPundit is not a diary blog, but I figured that on this anniversary of a very sad day I could indulge myself in a little bit of memory. I hope you'll understand and bear with me.

First Word.

I had lost my job on Friday the 7th, and I was determined not to get lazy while I was laid off. On Monday the 10th, I got up, went out for some exercise, did some laundry and cleaning, and signed up for unemployment compensation. The date is my wife's birthday, so we must have celebrated, but I can't remember it at all. On Tuesday the 11th, I planned to exercise and then go to the bank to start setting up a business account for a one-man consulting company.

I was still lying in bed when my wife called to tell me that she'd heard on the radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. As I got up, I wondered if it was an accident or deliberate. It seemed unlikely that it would be deliberate, yet what were the chances of hitting one of the towers amid all the other buildings in New York? By the time I got up and flipped on CNN, I had my answer: both towers were burning from being hit by two planes. That had to be deliberate.

Passenger Jets.

I watched the replay as the second plane flew in from the right and passed behind the towers. I was wondering what we'd see when it hit. After all, the towers were still standing, so how hard could it have hit? A few seconds later an angry red fireball erupted from the side of the tower, spewing an enormous cloud of smoke and debris. I had never really understood how the word "angry" applied to fire before, but now I understood. The fire seemed almost malevolent. I knew that hundreds must have died, and I remember feeling the heat from a rush of adrenaline.

When I first saw the plane hit, I could see that it was big, but I didn't think it was a passenger plane. There hadn't been a hijacking in many years, so it seemed unlikely that someone had smuggled weapons onto two different planes and hijacked both of them. I figured maybe someone stole a few cargo planes from some airfield. That seemed a lot easier because the security for a cargo plane wouldn't be as tight as for a passenger plane. I realized I was wrong when there was a report that several passenger planes had left their flight plans. Somebody had used planes full of people as weapons.

I remember wondering how the planes were flown. There's no way a pilot would do that, no matter how much he was threatened. He'd have nothing to lose by fighting back, and pilots are generally pretty brave folks. Even if the terrorists somehow found the only pilot in commercial aviation so cowardly he would rather crash into an inhabited skyscraper than face a gun, there's no way they could find two of them. The terrorists must have known how to fly a plane. Having seen too many movies, I pictured some disturbed and angry former pilot from some Middle Eastern air force.

While I was watching the coverage, word came from a correspondent at the Pentagon that they'd just heard an explosion. A few minutes later it was confirmed that the Pentagon had been attacked somehow, possibly another airplane. Then my wife called me. I could hear how frightened she was. She asked me if I thought this could happen here in Chicago, and I told her I thought it was possible. She worked far from the downtown area, so I figured (correctly) that she was safe.

Collapse.

As bad as things were, I was still mentally O.K. because the way I thought of it, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center had failed. I had seen a movie called Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing, about the first attack on the towers. The bombers had been almost laughably inept. The bomb was a hodge-podge of different explosives like some kid might make. The terrorists all talked about bringing down the towers, but in the end all did was kill six people who were standing next to the bomb when it went off. At the end of the movie, terrorist mastermind Ramzi Yousef looks at the towers and boasts that next time they will bring both of them down.

Well, it hadn't worked. Oh, it was bad, there were hundreds dead on the planes, and probably hundreds more dead on the floors that had been hit. It seemed likely to me that many people above the impact floors would be trapped and might also die. Still, the towers had survived the impact. It was another fuck-up. They hadn't won. Somehow that made it survivable. There wasn't any noticeable flame, so I figured all the jet fuel had burned up in the initial fireballs. The towers would smolder for a while until the fire department got enough men and hoses to the fire floors to put them out, or until the fire ran out of stuff to burn. I wasn't thinking clearly, and didn't realize that a jet fueled for thousands of miles of flight would have created a much bigger fireball if all the fuel had burned. The smoke from the fire was much heavier than it looked to me. The fires were much larger than I thought.

I had been talking to some friends on the phone when I glanced back at the television and noticed that there was a large dust cloud where the top of the second tower should be. It was growing and moving as I watched. I realized that I had to be seeing the collapse of one of the towers. How far down would it go? Well, there was dust everywhere all up and down where the tower had been, so it must have collapsed all the way, the top part collapsing on the bottom. Jesus. What I had just seen must have killed hundreds rescue workers in the street below...and many more in the tower itself.

So what had happened? It could be that the airplane damaged it almost, but not quite, to the point of collapse, and that little pieces of it had been failing since the collision. A popped-rivet here, a cracked beam there, until finally something crucial gave way and the whole structure collapsed. The problem with that theory is that it seemed like the plane had to hit it just right. Even slightly harder, and the tower would have collapsed on impact; even slightly weaker, and the tower would stand for months. How unlikely is that? Far more likely that the impact had triggered a slow but progressive failure mode. A raging fire seemed like the obvious explanation. Eventually the fire burned or melted or weakened the structure to the point of collapse. This was bad news. If the collapsed tower had been hit just right by luck, it was unlikely that the other tower had also been hit the same way. But if the problem was fire, as I suspected, the same process was probably happening in the other tower. Sure enough, the other tower collapsed a little later.

I remember watching the crowds of rescue workers come pouring out of the smoke clouds. They all drifted to a stop and just stood there for a while. Then they gathered their gear and marched slowly back toward ground zero.

Thoughts.

I thought about whether I or my family were at any particular risk in case this was only the opening move in a campaign of terrorism. The worst-case for us would probably be someone setting off a small nuclear weapon in downtown Chicago. It would probably go off at ground level, and I live about 10 miles away, so I'd be safe from any immediate blast or flash effects. My parents are equally far from downtown, and my wife worked far away in the north suburbs. On some level I knew this was just a case of having seen too many movies. Only in fiction do terrorists begin with a small attack and then wait before launching the big one to give the authorities time to catch them. In real life, they hit with everything they've got all at once. Normally, I don't think of Chicago as a high-risk target, at least not while Washington D.C. is still standing.

Anyway, somehow determining that I and my loved ones were safe from fictional nuclear terrorists seemed to calm me down. With both towers down, and all four planes crashed, there was nothing more for me to see. I went to the bank, and later I went for my walk in the park. It's a stupid cliche, but I wanted to finish the things I had planned, so the terrorists wouldn't win. I remember that the walk in the park was disturbingly quiet. I live right under the flight patterns for Chicago's O'Hare airport, but there wasn't a plane in the sky. Every once in a while, I'd hear a little noise from a jet engine, but I couldn't see a thing. I guess it was a military flight, perhaps an F16 flying a patrol over the city.

Sometime during the day, I remember hearing about the crash of flight 93. It was kind of shocking how the crash of a commercial jet could be only a sidebar to the main story.

I had just read a novel in which a terrorist killed everyone on a plane filled with passengers, which seemed pretty terrible at the time. But now terrorists had done that four times in a single day, and the passenger fatalities weren't even the worst thing that had happened that day. Reality had become more shocking than fiction.

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many people could have escaped the towers. It looked pretty bad. In the movie The Siege, a building gets bombed and 600 people die. I knew the World Trade Center held 50,000 people. This was worse than any movie I'd seen. We would thank God if only 600 people died. I knew the timeline, and I could guess that New York fire codes probably require fire stairs to handle 45 people per minute, so the biggest variable was the number of stairwells, which I didn't know. My best guess was that there were 20,000 people still inside the buildings when they fell. It eventually turned out my guess was high by a factor of ten. I don't know what I figured wrong, and I don't care.

It was beginning to sink in that this wasn't just another terrorist incident. We were at war.

As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I'm pointing out some classic articles. I previously recommended Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts' column from the 12th predicting the American response and Afghan-American Tamin Ansary's widely-circulated article in Salon which reminded us that the Afghan people are also the Taliban's victims.

For my last choice, I present Juan Gato's answer to the question of why they hate us. People had for months explained that they hate us because we are free, or something to that effect, and I never really understood how that could be until I read this explanation. A couple of excerpts:

So why do they hate us? They hate us for the same reason Homer Simpson hates Ned Flanders. Now, now, I know a lot of people would be upset to be told that the United States is Ned Flanders and not Homer, but just bear with me here. The individual American may be Homer Simpson, but the country's actions toward the Middle East have always had a bit more of a Ned Flanders feel to them.

Think about it. Ned Flanders, especially in the early episodes, was shown as a man who, because of his honesty and work ethic, always managed to have a nicer house, an easy to manage family, a wife with a higher butt, washboard abs, and generally a better overall life than Homer. Ned was always willing to help Homer at any instance, whether that be some cash, the loan of a power sander, or the invite to a BBQ.

Much the same right now. We, the West, are much more prosperous than the Middle East because of our ethos (property, secular rule of law, tolerance, blah blah blah), and they see it and are envious. But like Homer, they make no effort to reflect on themselves, choosing instead to seethe at the success of another and suspect that such success comes at a cost to them. Yet there we are, giving them aid in the Carl Sagan ranges, always willing to offer them a free beer from the keg even if it sometimes is mostly foam. Like Homer, given the chance, they would invite us into their homes on the odd chance they could get away with killing us.

There's stuff I'm leaving out. Read the whole thing.

As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I'm looking for interesting articles from that time. I previously recommended Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts' column from the 12th.

Another good one is Afghan-American Tamin Ansary's widely-circulated article in Salon a few days later:

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide.

Which was a pretty good point. It's exactly what they did do.

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops.

Which is exactly what we did. (Yes, we also dropped bombs, but this was in support of ground troops, not the sort of indiscriminate "kill them all" bombing that some overly-emotional people were talking about in the days after the attack.)

Ansary was wrong about a few things, but not in a bad way:

Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely.

Here's my favorite part, from near the beginning of the piece:

...It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats' nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Yeah, I'd say that was exultation we saw when Kabul fell.

Leonard Pitts predicted that our response would be determined and decisive. Ansary asked us all to make sure we focused on the true enemy. America came through. In response to a monstrous terrorist act, we liberated millions.

The Miami Herald has reposted Leonard Pitts' columns about the events of September 11. The very first one, written on the 11th and published the next day, is the best thing ever written about the attack.

They pay me to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul. But in this moment of airless shock when hot tears sting disbelieving eyes, the only thing I can find to say, the only words that seem to fit, must be addressed to the unknown author of this suffering.

You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard.

It keeps getting better. Read the whole thing.

Update:

His October 20th column on the subject of handling your fear is pretty good too.