Internet Archive Digital Library | 11 September

The Internet Archive is an organization that collects audio, moving images, and Web images for historical purposes.

The Archive recently announced the launch of Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive of coverage of the attacks, without any filters, by national and international broadcasteers.

The Archive serves as a resource for scholars, journalists, and the public and features one week of broadcasts (3,000 hours from 20 channels over seven days.) Besides audio and video, the site also provides a chronology of events. Click here for longer clips, program guides, and an extended event chronology.

Tuesday 11 September 2001

8:48 a.m.
First news reports that American Airlines Flight 11 has crashed into One World Trade Center (north tower).
9:03 a.m.
United Airlines Flight 175 crashes into Two World Trade Center (south tower).
9:17 a.m.
FAA closes NYC area airports.
9:21 a.m.
NYC Port Authority closes all bridges and tunnels in NYC.
9:24 a.m.
President Bush calls crashes "an apparent attack on our country".
9:32 a.m.
New York Stock Exchange closed.
9:40 a.m.
FAA orders all commercial flights grounded.
9:43 a.m.
American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon.
9:45 a.m.
White House evacuated.
9:59 a.m.
Two World Trade Center (south tower) collapses.
10:00 a.m.
United Airlines Flight 93 crashes in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
10:10 a.m.
Portion of the Pentagon collapses.
10:13 a.m.
United Nations building evacuates.
10:22 a.m.
State and Justice Departments, and World Bank, evacuated in Washington DC.
10:24 a.m.
FAA reroutes inbound transatlantic flights to land in Canada.
10:28 a.m.
One World Trade Center (north tower) collapses.
10:45 a.m.
All federal office buildings in Washington DC evacuated.
10:48 a.m.
Police confirm Pennsylvania plane crash.
10:53 a.m.
New York's primary elections postponed.
10:54 a.m.
Israel evacuates diplomatic missions.
10:57 a.m.
NY Gov. Pataki announces closure of all state government offices.
11:02 a.m.
Mayor Giuliani urges New Yorkers to stay at home and orders an evacuation of the area south of Canal Street.

Noam Chomsky | My Reaction To Osama Bin Laden's Death

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

©2011 Noam Chomsky | Guernica Magazine | Counter Currents

Noam Chomsky, is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and social activist. He is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident and an anarchist, referring to himself as a libertarian socialist. Chomsky is the author of more than 150 books and has received worldwide attention for his views. [Wikipedia]

Unreliability Of U.S. Electric Grid May Offer Protection From Terrorist Attack

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The US government worries that terrorists could take down the country's electrical grid just by hitting a small node in the system. But a new study reveals the grid is too unreliable for that kind of attack.

Last year, network theorists published some papers suggesting that terrorists could take down the entire US electrical grid by attacking a small, remote power station. But new research shows that network theory models, which great for analyzing many complex systems, don't work for patchwork systems like the US electrical grid. Basically, the grid was set up so haphazardly that you'd have to take out a major node before you'd affect the entire thing. The researchers based their conclusions on real-world data from the power grid in the eastern U.S.

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Read the scientific paper at Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science