#260 — The Second Plane
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138.16277
Summary
Anyone over 40 probably has very vivid memories of September 11th, 2001. I certainly do. I can remember how angry I was in those first few days, or months, really. I was angry over the event itself, and for the loss of life, and the sheer disorder that had been unleashed in our world. But as the days and weeks and months wore on, I became especially angry over how confused, otherwise sane and well-educated people were about the threat we now faced. What I saw all around me was a kind of implosion of moral intelligence. In my experience, the only people in the U.S. who could be counted upon to understand what we faced were fundamentalist Christians, which gave me very little basis for hope that we would play our cards right. As many will remember, the sky on the east coast on 9/11 was unusually beautiful. It was a condition that's apparently described as severe clear by pilots. Most of us had never heard that phrase until after it was used on 9-11 to describe the unlimited visibility of that morning. And that doesn't actually surprise me. There were 17 minutes between Flight 11 hitting the north tower and Flight 175 hitting the south. So there was 17 minutes to live with the illusion that we were witnessing a tragic accident, and its horrible aftermath. And in those 17 minutes, it is hard to think clearly. no question, no one could have known this at the time, but I don't actually remember what I was thinking at the moment, and that doesn t actually happened. I remember the difference between the first plane hitting the North Tower and the second one hitting the South Tower. I don t actually remember that at all. But in the moment that day, it was possible to imagine that what had happened at the north Tower. And that s a very apt phrase to describe how I felt on that morning, and really ever since, more or less from that moment forward, I have been unusually alert to the power of bad ideas and the horrible aftermath of that day. Sam Harris the moment I was able to live up to what I felt that day a day that I remember what happened that day as a day, and how I think about it, and how I feel about it now, and what it was like to be a witness to it why it was a day like that, and why it s so important to be alert to it, and how it really happened.
Transcript
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Anyone over 40 probably has very vivid memories of September 11th, 2001.
00:00:56.420
I can remember how angry I was in those first few days, or months, really.
00:01:05.540
I was angry over the event itself, of course, and for the loss of life, and for the sheer
00:01:15.780
But as the days and weeks and months wore on, I became especially angry over how confused
00:01:24.760
otherwise sane and well-educated people were about the threat we now faced.
00:01:31.460
What I saw all around me was a kind of implosion of moral intelligence.
00:01:36.700
In my experience, the only people in the U.S. who could be counted upon to understand what
00:01:49.980
we faced were fundamentalist Christians, which gave me very little basis for hope that we
00:01:57.040
As many will remember, the sky on the east coast on 9-11 was unusually beautiful.
00:02:06.420
It was a condition that's apparently described as severe clear by pilots.
00:02:12.240
Most of us had never heard that phrase until after it was used on 9-11 to describe the unlimited
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It strikes me as a very apt phrase to describe how I felt on that day, and really ever since,
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more or less from the moment that the second plane, United Flight 175, crashed into the south
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From that moment forward, I have been unusually alert to the power of bad ideas.
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Up until the moment that the second plane hit, it was possible to imagine that what had happened
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I don't actually remember what I was thinking at the time.
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In fact, I'm not entirely sure what time I started watching the news coverage that morning,
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But I remember the difference between understanding that one plane had crashed into the World Trade
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With the first plane, more or less everyone thought that they were witnessing a tragedy.
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And whether it was some kind of horrific navigation error or mechanical malfunction,
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Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security advisor, had been briefed that July about an impending
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al-Qaeda attack, even one that might involve the use of hijacked aircraft.
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But upon learning that a plane had hit the north tower, even she reports thinking,
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There's no question that 9-11 represents a massive failure of intelligence.
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And this is something that's well documented in Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower.
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But in the moment, in the presence of the unthinkable, it is hard to think clearly.
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There were 17 minutes between Flight 11 hitting the north tower and Flight 175 hitting the south.
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So there were 17 minutes to live with the illusion that we were witnessing a tragic accident and
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Flight 11 had hit the north tower between the 93rd and 99th floors.
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No one outside the building could have known this at the time, but it had destroyed all the
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stairwells, trapping over 1,000 people above the point of impact.
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So I believe it's true to say that no one who was above the 92nd floor in the north tower
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And in those 17 minutes, many things happened that are very hard to think about, and some
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First, in the south tower, many people saw no need to evacuate.
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In fact, people who did begin evacuating were told to return to their desks.
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Even in the north tower, many people who were below the zone of impact felt no urgency to
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They thought the fire department would just put out the fire.
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And many thought they were being responsible in leaving the stairways clear for the fire crews
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And it's just an amazing detail, given what was about to happen.
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It seems almost no one had an inkling that a fire of that sort could lead to a structural
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failure, and that the whole tower could collapse.
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We have testimony from people in the south tower who gathered at the north-facing windows
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and watched as papers came billowing out of the north tower and rained down on lower
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And then suddenly came the recognition that some of the objects that were falling were
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An estimated 50 to 200 people jumped or fell out of the towers before they collapsed.
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There's the famous falling man image that appeared on September 12th in newspapers all
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And I believe some news organizations briefly ran videos of people jumping.
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But then everyone seems to have decided that that was just too much.
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However, even in some of the more benign videos that just show the towers burning at some distance,
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you can still hear the crash of people hitting the ground.
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There's something especially heartbreaking about these jumpers.
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So just imagine what it was like to be in the south tower, witnessing this horror unfold.
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It was just an impossible moment that would seem to admit of no further possibility of
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And then comes the roar of the engines of Flight 175, traveling at nearly 600 miles an hour.
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There are several videos of this, and they never cease to be astounding.
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And the imagery aside, even the sound is astounding.
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We never hear the sound of a large commercial airliner flying at full speed, up close.
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That roar of the engine alone told us that something was profoundly wrong with the world.
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And therefore it established its ideological origins.
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In fact, it established the truth of what was happening as fully as it would have if you
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could have heard the hijackers shrieking, Allahu Akbar, from the cockpit of the plane.
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With one plane, the same behavior could have been the result of mental illness, right?
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The severely mentally ill don't organize in this way.
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So in that moment, everyone was asking the question, what force on earth could get people
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And those of us who knew something about the differences among the world's religions didn't
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have to spend very long searching for an answer.
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I don't remember how long it took to implicate al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
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As I recall, bin Laden said something celebratory but somewhat ambiguous soon thereafter, but didn't
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take clear credit for 9-11 until around 2005 or 2006.
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But very soon, I think within 24 hours or 48 hours at most, the fact that we were dealing with Islamic extremists
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And then the experience for me was something like a feeling of limitless clarity on a few
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points, along with an ability to spot the moral confusion of others at what seemed like a very
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Of course, this will sound utterly tendentious and even delusional to those of you who disagree
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with me about the connection between extremist Islam and Islam, or those who imagine
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that America has no standing to even complain about the events of September 11th, because
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we've always been the world's worst terrorist state.
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The moral relativists and the people who think there's no real connection between any religious
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The anthropologists and sociologists who have convinced themselves that religion is always
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a pretext for economics, or social status, or politics, or some other terrestrial variable.
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There are seemingly unlimited numbers of over-educated people who imagine that nobody really believes
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And I spent more than a decade arguing with these people.
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And I'm honestly not sure what the result of all of that has been.
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But I know that I don't have anything new to say on the topic.
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It's such a simple point, and I am always mystified that people don't see it, or refuse to see it.
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Some political scientist will emphasize the territorial claims of certain jihadists, or their sense of
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But when we look at the claims themselves, when we hear what these people say, both in their
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public and private conversations, in many cases we know what they say in private, it always
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Yes, Osama bin Laden objected to the presence of foreign troops on the Arabian Peninsula.
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So that sounds like a quasi-rational political grievance, right?
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But American troops were there at the request of the Saudi government.
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We had saved them from a likely invasion by Saddam Hussein.
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It was, in his view, a sacrilege to have infidels in the Holy Land.
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Muhammad himself had said there should be no two religions there.
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And bin Laden was rich enough to do anything he wanted with his life.
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There is no economic explanation for what he chose to do.
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And the religious explanation is perfectly explicit and perfectly rational, given the requisite
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I mean, if after all we've witnessed in the intervening years, having seen privileged people living
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in the West join the ranks of the Islamic State by the thousands, dropping out of medical school
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in London to join the caliphate, if you think it's all just politics and economics and social bonding
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that gets people to behave this way, well, then I think there really is no reaching you.
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And in that case, you are as far from the reality of what happened on 9-11 as the 9-11 truth conspiracy
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These people who took what was probably the most witnessed event in human history and turned
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At one point, 16% of Americans claimed to believe that 9-11 was an inside job, that we did it to ourselves
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to motivate a war in Iraq, to steal their oil, right?
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Rather than just purchase the oil, we decided to fly planes into our own buildings and murder ourselves
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and start a couple of wars because that would have been, what, less expensive?
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Of course, this prefigured all the madness that was to come.
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Can you imagine what 9-11 would have been like if we were all on Twitter?
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There were people, there probably still are, who believed that the planes weren't planes,
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that the Pentagon had been hit by a missile, not American Flight 77.
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It didn't matter that some people had spoken to their loved ones on that flight, up until
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It didn't matter that others had seen the plane crash into the Pentagon with their own eyes.
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It didn't matter that there were plane parts on the ground, right?
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No, it was a missile, proving the involvement of our own military.
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In fact, some people believe that the planes that hit the Twin Towers weren't planes either.
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However, they were holograms, and they believe that the voicemail messages from the doomed
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And they believe that all the people who were supposed to have been on those planes were
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And they believe that the towers collapsed not because these buildings weren't designed
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to absorb the impact of fully-fueled passenger jets.
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For months, an army of psychopaths had smuggled explosives into these buildings in the dead
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Now, you can take a few of those preposterous assertions a la carte, or you can take the
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That's what millions of our neighbors claimed to believe about 9-11, before the advent of social
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Anyway, back in the real world, we launched a war on terrorism, which was always a misnomer.
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