Bush releases April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate

In response to mounting criticism over a classified National Intelligence Estimate from April 2006, President Bush ordered the document released today.

"Iraq a 'cause celebre' for extremists" [MSNBC]
PDF: Declassified Key Judgments of "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" dated April 2006 [dni.gov]

Rieckhoff on why Article 3 matters

Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, explains why Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions is crucial to American military success.

"Do Unto Your Enemy" [New York Times]

Bush reaches deal with Graham, McCain, Warner

The White House has reached a compromise with the three Republican Senators who have led the opposition to the administration's attempts to limit the scope of the Geneva Conventions in regards to counterrorism operations. The Senators - Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John McCain of Arizona, and John Warner of Virginia - have objected to several aspects of the administration's proposed anti-terror bill, including a rule that accused terrorists on trial in military tribunals would not be able to use classified information in their legal defenses, and an attempt to redefine the Geneva Conventions' "humiliating treatment and outrages upon personal dignity." As of now, the full terms of the compromise agreement are not known. [CNN]

The Bush administration has framed its proposal to redefine the language of the Geneva Conventions as an attempt to clarify language that it suggests is overly vague. The problem with that argument is that the military's legal establishment doesn't consider the language vague, and neither do the rest of the co-signatories to the treaty - in fact, the administration's lawyers seem to be the only ones who find it so confusing. If the American people are lucky, the compromise bill involves more compromise on the adminstration's part than on the part of the Senators.

"GOP, White House snap terror bill deadlock" [CNN]
"Cooler Heads: The difference between the President's lawyers and the military's" [Slate]
Letter from Colin Powell to Senator McCain regarding the proposed bill [Findlaw]

UPDATED 9/21/06:

According to CNN, the compromise:

-- Requires that a defendant being tried by military commission have access to any evidence given to a jury.

-- Drops a section of the administration's previous proposal that stated an existing ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment satisfies the nation's obligations under the Geneva Conventions.

-- Prohibits "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. Defines grave breaches as acts such as torture, rape, biological experiments and cruel and inhuman treatment.

-- Notes the president has the authority to interpret "the meaning and application" of the Geneva Conventions.

-- Allows hearsay evidence.

-- Allows coerced testimony if the statement was acquired before a 2005 ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and a judge finds it to be reliable. Bans coerced statements taken after the 2005 ban went into effect if it violates constitutional definitions of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

-- Bars individuals from protesting violations of Geneva Conventions standards in court.

"This is the morgue": observations from 9/14/01

This is the fourth and final part in a series of posts about my personal experiences during, and after, the 9/11 attacks. For the previous installments, see "Totally terrorized": observations from 9/11/01, "We kept our masks on": observations from 9/12/01, and "Missing" signs: observations from 9/13/01.

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Email to family and friends, 9/15/01, 7:20 PM: (continued)

10:00 A.M., Friday, 9/14/01:

The L train had taken 35 minutes to get to my stop (it usually takes 4 during rush hour). Then the trains in Manhattan were even more messed up than they'd been the day before. None of the trains that went near Ground Zero were running at all now, even that parts of the lines that were far from the site. They feared any vibrations in the tunnels could shake the buildings in the Ground Zero area. When I finally got to Grand Central Station, and got out of the train, there were cops everywhere. They nervously told us to be calm, and pointed us to the nearest exit. The building was being evacuated. They didn't say it was due to a bomb threat, but that was obviously why. As we walked across the wide tunnel towards the exit, some people started running, and the cops yelled "Don't run!" Everyone was on the verge of panicking. The bomb threat turned out to be nothing.

Friday afternoon, 9/14/01:

After another worthless day at work, we headed down towards the Armory, this time with the SUV. Today they told volunteers to get out their ID, and sent us into the Armory. As I walked up the steps, I thought about a documentary I had recently seen about Auschwitz. I remembered the German filmmaker saying in his thick accent that "If you could make a map of terror, a geography of evil, this would be in the very center of it."

From the hallway, where the volunteer sign-up table was, I peered into the huge main room of the building. I didn't know if they were identifying the bodies in there or what. I thought I saw the white sheets of hospital beds. There were guards everywhere, and signs saying "NO CAMERAS ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT." They said that didn't need volunteers, but we gave them our cell phone numbers again. As we left and walked down the stairs, two guys were each carrying at least a dozen hot pizzas up the stairs, and the guards said "all the way into the back" meaning the back of the main room. For a minute, I thought I was going to be carrying pizzas right into where they were identifying victims - I had no idea what we were going to see in there. It turned out this was the room where family members were filling out the 7-page surveys that were used for identification - what I had thought were beds were just big white tables.

On my way out, I asked another cop if there was anywhere else to volunteer, and he said to go to nearby Bellevue hospital. We went over there and asked around, and finally were sent to an area where there were a bunch of trucks and tents. We asked a cop if there was any need for non-medical volunteers, and the guy paused and said "Uh, not around here. This is the morgue." The refrigerator trucks right behind him were not full of food today - that's where they were putting the bodies.

We decided to give up on trying to volunteer for the night, and went and bought some medical supplies at the drugstore and dropped them off at the Armory. There were huge candlelight vigils at the Armory and at Union Square. The latter could be characterized as an uneasy mix of patriotism and pacifism - thousands of flags and chants of "U. S. A.!" alongside signs saying that the U.S. shouldn't retaliate from violence. One group was chanting an anti-war chant over a complex drum circle beat, and another sang "Kumbaya." Yet another crowd sang "American Pie" by Don McLean, and the chorus, "this'll by the day that I die," seemed a lot scarier than it usually does.

Thad Anderson

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See also "Totally terrorized": observations from 9/11/01, "We kept our masks on": observations from 9/12/01, and "Missing" signs: observations from 9/13/01.

"Missing" signs: observations from 9/13/01

This is the third part in a series of posts about my personal experiences during, and after, the 9/11 attacks. For the previous installments, see "Totally terrorized": observations from 9/11/01, and "We kept our masks on": observations from 9/12/01.

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Email to family and friends, 9/15/01, 7:20 PM:

12:30 A.M., technically Thursday morning, 9/13/01:

After walking all over Manhattan all day Wednesday, I got home and went up on the roof of our building to see what I could see "down there." "Ground Zero" was becoming the most commonly used name for the site of the WTC disaster, but if you said "down there" people understood what you meant, too. I stood on the roof looking over at the cloud of dust and smoke from Ground Zero, which was now lit up from the huge baseball stadium lights they had brought to the scene to keep the rescue going all night. I still couldn't decide exactly where the towers had stood in the view from here, though I could guess based on where the smoke was coming from.

To the right in my view was the huge dark presence of the Domino Sugar Refinery, which sits one block away, right on the East River. As the oldest industrial plant that's still in use in New York City, the 108-year-old building had been there since before "skyscraper" was even a word. You can imagine, with each major skyscraper that went up, a group of workers looking out across the river, saying things like: "What are the building now?" and "I heard it's going to be the tallest building in the world" and "How can they build something that tall without it falling over?"

A Japanese girl came up on the roof. She was staying in our building with a friend of hers, uncomfortable staying at home alone in her apartment a few blocks away. We had the same conversation everyone had had with everyone they had talked to - it turns out she had been at home sleeping when it all happened, and her mother had called from Japan to tell her what was going on. After about 10 or 15 minutes of talking about it, with the glowing cloud of smoke right across the river from us, she apologized and said she had to leave, and suddenly went downstairs - she was sick at her stomach, and was going to throw up. This didn't come as a surprise to me at all - everyone's stomach was just a huge knot.

Just after she went downstairs, I noticed a helicopter flying near the Williamsburg Bridge. It pointed a bright spotlight onto the bridge's roadway, and flew parallel down the length of it. I don't know anything about helicopters, but I could sense a hyper, almost reckless energy in the way it was moving - it was going faster than any helicopter I'd ever seen, and the front of the rotors' diameter was tipped down about 30 degrees lower than the front. It not only shined the spotlight on the road part of the bridge, but paused to point it up and down the bridge's trestles. It went back and forth like this for 7-8 minutes, and at one point as the helicopter circled around, the light hit my spot of the roof, blinding me for a second. Other people joined me on the roof, having seen the search light. Then a cop car pulled up onto the bridge, turned its lights on, and stopped on the part right even with us. Could this be an escaping suspect? A suspicious van or rental truck? We kept watching, but after a few minutes the helicopter and police car left. We'll never know what was going on - I guess this kind of stuff was happening all over the city.

9:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M., Thursday, 9/13/01:

There was no "Don't come to work" message on my voicemail this morning, so I headed into Manhattan. The trains were not running south of 14th Street, which is right where the L Train, the one I take to get to work, comes into Manhattan (it used to be called the "14th Street Line"). The L was running, though, and there were trains going up to Midtown, where I work, though my usual train wasn't running.

The Arab guys who work the city's thousands of coffee/donut carts weren't out there today. I should explain that if you ride in a taxi or by a coffee on the corner in New York, it's an Arab guy 90% of the time. The Arab guy who works the one inside the lobby was there, though. He asked if I'd heard about the guys the FBI had caught in Boston and on the Amtrak, who were supposedly linked to the attack. "THEY SHOULD HAVE SHOT THE MOTHERF***ERS RIGHT THEN AND THERE," he added. I felt lucky that I didn't have to constantly prove what side I was on. Not surprisingly, every yellow cab in the city was now adorned with an American flag.

Going to work was worthless. How were we supposed to care about what rating "Everybody Loves Raymond" gets in Minneapolis when the bloodiest scene in America since the Civil War was taking place 3 miles away? We all had gone into work trying to go along with what Giuliani had said about going back to work to prove they couldn't stop our city - going to work actually felt like a tough, defiant act for a while. But then, as my assistant put it, "we could only fake it for a few hours." The constant sirens passing by on Third Avenue didn't help. Neither did the bomb threats that caused nearby Grand Central Station and a rival advertising agency down the street to be evacuated. We watched the news and checked the internet all day.

5:00 P.M. - 8:00 P.M., Thursday, 9/13/01:

No trains were heading towards downtown now, or at least that was the latest report. So I walked down Lexington Avenue. Though I had heard about it, I had forgotten that the Armory on Lexington between 25th and 26th Streets was now set up as the place for people with missing family members to come try to identify them. "The mayor's office is asking family members to bring dental records to the Armory," the newscaster had said, not needing to explain why. As I got near the Armory, I started to see the "missing" signs. I put "missing" in quotes because after seeing thousands of the photocopied sheets, it hit me that the whole thing was delusional. These people weren't missing. Everyone knew exactly where they were. On one local news channel, a newscaster had been talking about the number feared to be dead, and another quickly corrected her, "we should say, those believed to be MISSING."

The signs looked like the signs you put up when you're missing your dog, but with pictures of people: women posing in wedding dresses; overweight guys smiling, beer in hand, at a 4th of July barbecue; photos from work functions with two guys' heads circled saying "both feared missing from WTC." There were Thompsons and there were Kristnamurthys. Guys who were security guards at the World Trade Center and guys who were CEO's. Near the Armory, the walls, posts, phone booths, and mailboxes started to be covered with the signs. Family members were walking around with missing signs taped to their shirts, and some were handing out the signs to everyone passing by. On a normal day in New York, you look away when people try to hand you something on the street - it's probably an ad for a clothing sale or a menu for a new restaurant. Today, you couldn't look away.

As I got to one intersection, I saw a huge crowd that was blocking the street. Someone said that Bill Clinton was over there. Sure enough I saw that unique head of white hair sticking up from the crowd. There were some guards there, but they let a crowd surround him, and get right up to him. Family members were going up to him and crying, showing him their missing signs. I don't know what you say when a sobbing woman comes up to you with a picture of her husband and says he's one of the 4,763. I thought to myself that was probably the first time Bill Clinton had absolutely nothing he could say to a beautiful young woman. But the crowd loved seeing him - it meant a lot to them. Everybody started chanting, "U. S. A., U. S. A." As I passed the cop who was responsible for directing traffic in the intersection, he shouted towards the crowd "Enough already!" He had a point - vehicles needed to get to the Armory.

The Armory had names of Civil War battlefields engraved into the stone walls - Bull Run, Gettysburg, Antietam. Antietam, I thought, wasn't that the bloodiest? 22,000 men in one day or something like that? The street outside the Armory was packed with family members, police, and military personnel. I asked where you volunteered, and they said they didn't need any more help today, but that if I gave them my number, they'd call me.

They said they need people with cars to move supplies, so I told them I probably could have access to an SUV tomorrow, and left a voicemail for a friend who had one. It was frustrating trying to volunteer to do something, but being unable to do anything at all. You couldn't even give blood - there hadn't really been any need for it yet. The big news of the day was that they'd rescued 5 firefighters. It was good news, obviously, but also bad news. A whole day of work, with thousands of people digging through the rubble, and only five people out of the 4,763?

Thursday night, 9/13/01:

This catastrophe brought out the patriotism in everybody. On the subway, a normal-looking 30-something black man wearing a baseball cap stood in the middle of the car, leaning against a pole. He had a 4 foot by 6 foot American flag tied around his neck, hanging down behind him like a cape. He was reading a Superman comic book, with Superman posing in his cape right on the front cover.

I got back to Brooklyn and went to some friends' place. We played Trivial Pursuit to try to get our minds off the craziness. One of the questions I got was "What is the largest office building in the world?" "The World Trade Center," I guessed, cringing. "No, the Pentagon."

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See also "Totally terrorized": observations from 9/11/01, "We kept our masks on": observations from 9/12/01, and "This is the morgue": observations from 9/14/01.

"We kept our masks on": observations from 9/12/01

This is the second part in a series of posts about my personal experiences during, and after, the 9/11 attacks. For the post on the events of September 11, go to "Totally terrorized": observations from 9/11/01.

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Email to family and friends, 9/12/01, 11:04 PM:

Hey y'all - here's a summary of what today was like. Luckily, I haven't had a dramatic near-death experience like some of the people you've heard about on TV (and like I've heard about from a friend of mine - though everyone I know is okay).

Today we woke up and turned on the news to find that there wasn't really much news at all. Last night's story about the van full of explosives trying to blow up the George Washington Bridge (which goes from NJ to N. Manhattan) turned out to be completely false. There weren't many more people rescued than there had been the night before. There just wasn't anything new to make the news - but yesterday had been so bizarre that we all had to wake up and watch a couple hours of the news just to confirm that this all had really happened. Every single time I've seen the buildings collapse on that video, it's been shocking. Every time it reminds me (and everyone else here?) that it actually happened, and wasn't some bizarre dream like the kind of nightmares where you wake up thinking someone you know has died.

I called my work voicemail again just to make sure the message I had heard the night before was still there - it said something like "due to the catastrophic event that happened yesterday, GREY New York will not be opened on Sept. 12 . . ." I went to use the bathroom, and upon coming back to my bedroom, I heard jet noises outside, and realized they must be from the F-16's providing air cover for New York City, because no other planes were allowed to fly over the area (and perhaps even in the whole U.S.?).

We (we: my friend Dan from work, who stayed on the couch because he couldn't get home to Long Island, and me) decided we had to go over to Manhattan and see if we could help. One of Dan's friends works in the WTC, and Monday had been his first day of starting the late (4-midnight) shift. There's thousands of lucky stories like this. We'll never hear the unlucky stories, of course.

We knew we'd at least be able to give blood. On the way to the train station, we could smell a terrible smell - it smelled like burning plastic, but somehow worse. The air was thick with this smell, and with particles in the air, and I remembered seeing the way the smoke seemed to be blowing over to Brooklyn when I was watching TV the night before. We took a train over the Williamsburg Bridge, which goes into Chinatown, which is about 20-25 blocks north of the WTC. As we got out onto the bridge, everyone looked out, and upon seeing the pillar of smoke where the Twin Towers used to be, everyone kind of realized they didn't even know where the Towers usually were. That sounds crazy, but if you listened to the conversations, everyone was pointing and saying things like "was it next to that building with the point on top?" The Trade Center was always the reference point by which you judged where things were in comparison to the south part of Manhattan. Without it, you were really visually confused.

Getting out of the train station in Chinatown was bizarre - it's usually the most crowded part of Manhattan (and perhaps the U.S.?), an insane, annoyingly crowded place packed with cars (many coming over from the nearby Williamsburg Bridge) and people. There was an eerie quiet over the whole area - instead of waiting for hundreds of cars to pass, and then hurriedly running across the street when the WALK light came on, we casually walked diagonally across what is normally one of the most heavily trafficed [sic] intersections in Manhattan. It was like a ghost town. I took a picture of the streets, that's how strange it seemed for them to be so devoid of traffic.

We kept walking SW towards the (former) World Trade Center - going by our understanding of the geography and by the huge cloud of smoke billowing out of the WTC. When I say cloud, understand that we were truly confused at one point, and even had a short disagreement over whether the smoke was actually the smoke, or just a cloud. That's how huge, and high in the sky, this cloud of smoke appeared to be.

Then we came upon a late-30's-something woman wearing an NYPD jacket. We asked her where the police line was (local TV stations had varying information about what part of Manhattan had been closed off - just before leaving, we had heard everything south of 14th Street was closed, which was obviously not true, since we were already about 20 blocks south of there). When we asked the lady cop where the cut-off line was, she asked us why we wanted to go down there. She had been on the site since before the buildings collapsed, with almost no rest, and had witnessed the buildings falling, and several friends and co-workers were still missing. We talked to her for several minutes. She was utterly shaken by what she had seen at the WTC site:

"I've been on the force 20 years this coming January. This is by far the worst I've ever seen. I should've just been a prostitute or a waitress or something - anything would be better than having to see what I've seen in the last 24 hours."

An Asian woman with her kids walked up seconds after the cop had made this shocking statement. The Asian woman wanted to know where she could get a hamburger (which was already kind of an odd request to get from an Asian person in Chinatown), and I guess she thought the policewoman would know. We tried to help her by pointing out a Chinese place we'd passed.

"No, we want a hamburger," she said. A hamburger just seemed like such an absurdly unimportant thing to have, when just 10 or 15 blocks away, there were thousands of people who were dead or dying. I told her that there was a Wendy's open up near the Williamsburg Bridge.

Despite the policeman's warning, we decided we had to keep going SW towards the site. There was something really disturbing about sitting on the couch watching this stuff, with absolutely no power to help, and knowing that it's happening less than a mile away from Brooklyn. That's why we had left, really, and at this point we kind of realized that we had to try to get as close to the WTC site as possible. As we got closer to the site, we saw the police barricade. The dust started to get bad - we'd take sips out of our Poland Springs bottle and spit out the dust that had gotten into our mouths. We pulled our shirts up over our faces - the dust was getting bad. At each barricade, which went all the way across the island on Canal St. (the main street in Chinatown), we asked if they could use any non-medical volunteers. They didn't - but they referred us to several other sites that needed them.

It's hard to explain how crazy the scene was. It looked like something you'd see happening in the Gaza Strip or something. First, these usually-busy streets were empty of cars and people, except for cops, firefighters, other rescue workers, and folks like us who wanted to get near the action and provide help if we could. We saw dozens of cop cars, military convoys, buses, dump trucks full of removed debris (who knows where they took it), and supply trucks - all coming into Lower Manhattan. At one point, we saw Humvees with machine guns mounted on top passing through. The stoplights were meaningless - military men in fatigues were directing traffic. Most of the cops were wearing air filter masks, and by the time we'd worked our way over to the West Side, some cops had offered us masks.

By the time we had gotten to the West Side, with our air filters over our faces, we could see what we thought must be the remains of the Twin Towers. We looked up and saw a skeleton of a steel frame, with smoke obscuring our view. There were signs up on the street corners - "Volunteers - go to corner W. Greenwich and Moore to sign up" "RESCUE WORKERS - FREE FOOD AND WATER AT D'ANGELINO'S PIZZERIA, CORNER OF BROOME AND BROADWAY."

We moved along the edge of the police line, and when we got to the West Side Highway (at the far west side of Manhattan) - there was a big crowd cheering for any new rescue trucks coming in. It was exciting, and a few seconds worth of seeing that cancelled out all the crap you've ever heard about New Yorker being selfish assholes. We decided we had to get up to the volunteer headquarters, which was at the huge convention center 50 blocks or so away. We hitched-hiked a ride up to the Javits Convention Center. The driver, a son-of-a-UN official who sounded like some kind of international playboy ("yah, that's like when there was a bomb threat when I was coming back to New York after going to Ibiza and then L.A. . . ."). He said his sister was a doctor who had told him to leave New York due to the "CRITICAL" asbestos level. Dan and I looked at each other and put our air filters back on over our faces.

At the convention center we signed up to volunteer, but it seemed like they had enough non-medical volunteers. They said they'd call us if they needed us. So we asked where we could give blood. My type, O+, turned out to be in high demand.

We went over to the East Side, taking the crosstown bus - to try to give blood at one of the hospitals that needed blood. As we passed the big shopping areas along 34th Street, it became apparent that many New Yorkers were trying to go on with their lives - getting onto the bus with big Macy's or Foot Locker bags the way you do any other day of the year. We tried to give blood at both the NYU and Bellevue Hospitals on the East Side, but even my in-demand type wasn't in demand, at least for a couple of days. They were all full. It seemed like the dust/smoke from downtown had started to drift up towards Midtown, where we were. Like many of the people near the makeshift rescue centers and hospitals, we kept our air filter masks on when we were on the street. We went into a diner across the street from Bellevue Hospital and ate burgers and fries. Upon leaving, we noticed block after block of city buses lined up and down First Avenue, and we asked a cop again if they needed help with anything at all. The cop cryptically said "Nope, we're just setting up."

Then we walked down the East Side to the East Village, stopping to drink a pint and watch the news at a bar. Police, firemen, doctors, nurses, and other rescue workers streamed past the bar on First Avenue toward Bellevue Hospital, and the TV station said that Bellevue had become the new morgue for the whole disaster site. It was disturbing to think that we'd just eaten right across the street from there. A fireman who had obviously been downtown came into the bar, just as CNN talked about how yet another building downtown had just collapsed and all the firemen had been forced to leave the area. "A lot of my friends and family are missing," he said, and took a shot of Vodka and put back a Heineken. We thanked this guy for working so hard, but he left quickly to go back and join the crowds of workers moving north towards the new morgue at Bellevue.

When we left the bar, we put back on our air filter masks that we'd been wearing all day. Everyone was staring at us. Cute NYU girls wearing Diesel jeans and talking on cell phones would look at us, and seem to say something about how weird it was that we were wearing the masks, even though the smell of the dust (possibly asbestos) was still in the air. It was hard to believe that something that was almost necessary just to breathe a few hours ago (and only a few dozen blocks away) was now being looked at as a strange abnormality. We kept our masks on.

I got back on the subway at 14th Street and got on the train to Brooklyn. As soon as I hit send, I'll walk back into the living room and watch the buildings collapse again, just to make sure this all has really happened. Then I'll go up on the roof and look for the Twin Towers again, just to make sure I'm not crazy or something.

Thad

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See also: "Totally terrorized": observations from 9/11/01, "Missing" signs: observations from 9/13/01, and "This is the morgue": observations from 9/14/01.

"Totally terrorized": observations from 9/11/01

I was living in New York City during 9/11, and in the days that followed the tragedy, I sent out a series of emails to friends and family, reporting what I had seen. Over the next day or two, I will be posting these emails, as well as voicemails I left my parents (thanks again for writing them down, Mom). In addition, I am adding my present recollections of the week's events to provide context.

I am extremely fortunate, in that my 9/11 story is much less dramatic than many people's - and my goal in posting it is simply to provide a normal NYC resident's recollections of the catastrophe and its aftermath.

September 11, 2001

The first I heard of the 9/11 attacks was a couple of guys talking about a plane crash on the uptown 4 express train. I had taken the L train into work from my apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and switched to the 4 at Union Square to get up to my job at a large advertising agency in Midtown Manhattan. The guys on the train didn't seem too worried about the plane crash they were talking about; I assumed they were talking about TWA Flight 800, which had crashed off of Long Island in 1996. The mysterious crash was still the subject of intense debate and speculation in 2001, and it was not uncommon to overhear people around town talking about the crash or the endless investigations.

I got out of the subway at Grand Central Station around ten minutes after nine, and walked to my office, six or seven blocks northeast of the massive transit hub. Until I got to work, I was completely unaware that there was anything unusual going on, even though the first plane had hit the World Trade Center more than twenty minutes earlier. This was probably due in part to the fact that I was hurriedly walking in the opposite direction of the WTC, and in part to the fact that I always listen to my mp3 player to drown out the noise of the city.

When I got to 777 Corporate Plaza, three of the girls I worked with were standing outside, crying, and pointing down Third Avenue towards Lower Manhattan. They told me that two planes had hit the Twin Towers, and as I turned and saw the smoke in the distance, the first thing I said was that there was no way this could be an accident.

We rushed into our building and took the elevator up to the 27th Floor, where everyone was crowded around the flat-screen TV in the lobby watching CNN. After twenty or thirty minutes, people starting heading back to their cubicles to try to contact friends and family. A lot of the folks I worked with had a close friend or family member, or an acquaintance of some sort, who worked at the WTC. The consensus among us was that the only people who were in real danger were those who were on the floors in close proximity to where the planes had hit, or the floors above them. No one had even considered the possibility that the buildings would fall down.

I'll never forget running from the lobby into the room where my cubicle was, and shouting "Guys . . . the south tower just fell down!" The collapse of the south tower, at 10:05 AM, represented something of a turning point. Before the south tower fell, we knew we were in the midst of something crazy. After it fell, we knew we were in the midst of something catastrophic.

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Message on my parents' voicemail, Raleigh, NC, 9/11/01, 10:05 AM:

Hey Mom, this is Thad. Just wanted to tell you that I'm all right. The bottom part of Manhattan has been totally terrorized. It's crazy - you'll see it on TV. I just wanted to say that I'm all right. OK. Bye.

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At some point between 10:00 and 11:00, Colin Powell was quoted on the news saying that the US government believed Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda was probably responsible. The initial reaction of some of my co-workers was to ask how they could already know who had carried out the attacks - a reasonable question. I thought Powell was probably right, and I filled them in to the extent that I could, based on a couple of articles I had read about bin Laden and al Qaeda prior to September 11th.

I remembered that, after reading one particularly disturbing article in the Times during spring of 2001, I had excitedly called my Dad to tell him about this international network of terrorists who called themselves "The Base." Everyone kept asking "why haven't we heard about these people?" That question struck me as a profound one - and still does. What if everyone who had read that article about al Qaeda had told all of their friends about it? I certainly hadn't done anything to help the situation.

But there were more pressing issues. The Pentagon had been hit by now, and there were reports that up to 8, 10, maybe even 12 planes had been hijacked. It sounds crazy now, but the only rational thing to do at the time was to discuss whether any of the landmarks near our office were potential targets for the next plane. Would these guys want to hit the UN? The Trump Tower? What about Rockefeller Center?

Around 12:30 PM, the agency sent out an email telling all employees to go home for the day. A few minutes later, I emailed my supervisor, who worked on another floor, to tell her that my assistant and I were leaving for the day. Her one-word response was mind-blowing: "Why?" Now, understand that she was well aware of the attacks, and had been cc'd on the email from the CEO's. I guess she just didn't see how the largest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, taking place a few miles from where she was sitting, affected her life.

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Message on my parents' voicemail, Raleigh, NC, 9/11/01, 1:15 PM:

Hey Mom, it's Thad calling. It's about 1:15. We're all safe. I walked somewhere in Midtown Manhattan, actually. It's pretty crazy here. Just wanted to call and tell you guys I'm safe. Alright. Bye.

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I didn't know what to do. The subways were out of service, and I didn't want to walk down to the Williamsburg Bridge, which is only a few neighborhoods away from Wall Street, to get home to Brooklyn. My friend Dan from work said he was going over to another co-worker's apartment in Midtown, so I figured I would tag along.

Third Avenue, like all of the other avenues, was filled with people streaming northward. It was like something out of a Godzilla movie. We started to wonder what the next couple of days were going to be like. Were grocery stores and delis going to be open? I remember thinking that food shortages, and even looting, were distinct possibilities. We decided stopped into a crowded deli to buy supplies. Our purchase consisted of several large bottles of water, two huge cans of tuna fish, a couple loaves of bread, a six-pack of Budweiser, and a pack of Camel Lights (and neither of us were even regular smokers - cigarettes just seemed like a good thing to have in case the city descended into some kind of Mad Max squalor).

As we walked over to our co-worker's apartment, in the upper-50's, we passed fancy restaurants where patrons were seated calmly, and even a salon where ladies were getting their nails done. After we got to the apartment, we spent the afternoon watching the news and trying to call friends and family. All of the phone lines were jammed, but occasionally you could get through. I was relieved when I got in touch with my old friend Matt, and he told me that his girlfriend Judy, another good friend of mine, had made it home safely from her office a few blocks from the WTC.

Late in the afternoon, Dan and I decided to walk we would walk over the nearby Queensboro Bridge (or "59th Street Bridge") to Long Island City, Queens, and then make our way from there down to my place in northern Brooklyn. There was no way Dan was getting home to Long Island, so I offered him my couch. As we walked over the bridge, the sun began to set, and we looked out at the huge plume of white smoke blowing east towards Brooklyn, framed by a swath of bright pink sky.

Once we got to Long Island City, we caught a bus down to Williamsburg, where we met up with some friends of mine from Raleigh. One of them, who had been working a few blocks from the towers, had walked over to look up at the damage from the planes. He told us that when the south tower fell, debris and dust flooded into the street he was standing on, and everyone was running into parked cars, street signs, and each other. Finally, he came to the corner of a building and took a quick left around it, and the dust continued to blow down main street, but not the side street, a scene he described as being like something out of a cartoon. He had already showered twice by the time we spoke, and still couldn't get out the horrible taste and smell of the dust.

See also: "We kept our masks on": observations from 9/12/01, "Missing" signs: observations from 9/13/01, and "This is the morgue": observations from 9/14/01.

Graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report

Reading the graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report makes a great way to commemorate the anniversary of the tragedy. The graphic adaptation, which presents the report in comic-book format, looks great, and makes the report a little easier to follow. The illustrators have allowed Slate to put the book online, and the hard-copy version went on sale recently. The events of September 11, 2001 are depicted in Chapter 9: "Heroism and Horror."

"The 9/11 Commission Report" [Slate.com]

Check back later for my personal recollections of September 11 and the days that followed.

Even more evidence that the alleged Saddam-al Qaeda link was merely a conspiracy theory

A Senate report which was released today provides even more evidence that the Bush administration deceived the American people about the alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. The document discloses a previously classified October 2005 CIA assessment which found that, before the invasion of Iraq, Saddam's regime "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates."

"Report: No Saddam-al Qaeda relationship before war" [CNN]
PDF: "Postwar Findings about Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How they Compare with Prewar Assessments" [intelligence.senate.gov]
PDF: "The Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress" [intelligence.senate.gov]

UPDATED 9/8/06:

The more I think about, the more appropriate it seems to label the Bush administration's claims that there was an Iraq-al Qaeda link as a conspiracy theory.

Answers.com defines "conspiracy theory" as: "A theory seeking to explain a disputed case or matter as a plot by a secret group or alliance rather than an individual or isolated act."

Replace Rumsfeld with Lindsey Graham

The Democratic Party is planning to target Rumsfeld in its fall election push, calling for a congressional vote of no confidence in the Defense Secretary. [Washington Post] This is a great strategy, and more importantly, it is the right thing to do. But if the Democrats in Congress really want to send a message, they should recommend a bulletproof candidate to replace Rumsfeld.

What if, instead of just complaining about Rumsfeld, Harry Reid & Co. called on Bush to replace Rumsfeld with someone specific, like Lindsey Graham? Graham's a conservative Republican from South Carolina, he's a former military judge, and he's been a consistent supporter of the war in Iraq. But unlike Rumsfeld, Graham believes in the Geneva Conventions, he isn't a neocon, and he doesn't go around comparing his critics to Nazi appeasers.

As part of New York Magazine's recent "What If 9/11 Never Happened?" issue, Andrew Sullivan imagined Gore winning in 2004 and naming Graham as Defense Secretary as part of a coalition cabinet. [New York] If the Democrats in Congress forced their Republican counterparts to imagine how much better off we would be if Graham had been in charge of the Department of Defense for the last 6 years, they might actually be able to force Rumsfeld out.

"Democrats Target Rumsfeld" [Washington Post]
"What If 9/11 Never Happened?" [New York]
"Swing Conservative" [Washington Monthly]

UPDATED 9/6/06:

Andrew Sullivan discussed this post yesterday, and then Matthew Yglesias responded, arguing that putting the blame on Rumsfeld is missing the larger point:

This Rumsfeld-obsession plays a genuinely pernicious role in our national discourse. The basic reality of the matter is that between September 2001 and Spring 2003 the bulk of the American political and media establishments endorsed the key elements of the Bush foreign policy. Over the subsequent 18 months or so, it became obvious to the bulk of this establishment that the Bush foreign policy was a moral and practical disaster. Rather than conclude that they were operating from mistaken premises and that they should come up with some new, authentically different ideas, the predominant impulse has simply been to say "we could have gotten away with it to if it wasn't for that meddling Rumsfeld!"

Well, no. Rumsfeld's ideas were bad ones. But the bad ideas -- the policies, Bush's policies, The Washington Post's policies, Andrew Sullivan's policies, etc. -- are the issue here, not Rumsfeld personally.

Yglesias makes a great point when he says that it is the policies that matter. But I would counter that the way organizations usually admit that they have made a mistake is to fire the person who is most responsible for the mistake. That's how you admit to making a mistake in the business world, in the sports world, and, at least historically, in Washington, D.C.

I was against the Iraq War from day one (which, based on the notes I got under FOIA earlier this year, was at least as early as September 11, 2001). That said, I still think there is a huge difference between planning, fradulently selling, and supervising a poorly thought out $300 billion ground war in the middle of the desert, like Rumsfeld did, and mistakenly believing that it was a good idea, as much of the American media and political establishments did.

Throw in the fact that Rumsfeld and his aides are largely responsible for many of violations of the Geneva Conventions that took place in American military prisons during the last six years, and it is nothing short of inconceivable that this man is still holding office in a democratic country.