WTC-filter: September 2001

Living in the War Zone

My current subway reading is Haruki Murakami's Underground, a collection of testimonies by survivors of the gas attack by members of the Aum Shinriko cult in the Tokyo subway in March 1995.

It's eerily evocative of the current wave of paranoia about the possibility of a bioterrorist attack in the wake of the WTC attack. Sales of gas masks in New York and even the UK have gone through the roof since US government statements about the danger of biochemical weapons and the FBI's grounding of crop-duster aircraft, fuelling speculation about the likelihood and consequences of biological warfare.

One wonders what Murakami must make of all this. Are all these people buying gas masks really planning to lug them around in their bags all the time, along with their mace, personal alarms, stun guns, and automatic weapons? While this may seem unlikely and the panic buying can be read as being about a need for psychological reassurance, it seems clear that we're moving towards the increasing militarization of everyday life.

The BBC site has a useful background article on the history of biological and chemical weapon use over the past century.

Short film essay on the WTC attack. Text by Howard Zinn (Flash required).

Archive of Documents analyzing the World Trade Center / Pentagon attack, set up by Grover Furr, a faculty member in the English Dept. of Montclair State University. Numerous useful articles here, including a collection of Robert Fisk's articles in The Independent. Also added to links > weblogs.

Thanks to Hugh Gusterson, Science Technology Society Program, MIT.

The Global Rumour-Mill (5)

I'm beginning to wonder whether I should just turn over the whole of this weblog to the media virus that is the CNN Palestinian footage. Here's the latest: Felicity Barringer's piece in yesterday's Times.

Note: above link is a screen capture only - links won't work. The original article is here if you prefer, although the URL will likely change and as mentioned before, you have to go through a free registration procedure if you haven't already.

Meanwhile, Reuters has now joined CNN in issuing its own official disclaimer. (NF.)

Anthony Vidler, "A City Transformed: Designing 'Defensible Space'," New York Times 23 Sept 2001, section 4: 6. (Warning: the ever-annoying Times website will probably make you register to see this.)

Brilliant article on twentieth-century urban planning and its relationship to war by the top architectural historian in the country.

The Global Rumour-Mill (4)

Andrew Clarno, "Pictures That Lie," OutLookIndia.com 18 Sept. 2001. (Naresh Fernandes).

Author is a US citizen living in Gaza. Article is on how the CNN/BBC footage has given a grossly distorted picture of the Palestinian response to the WTC attack. Also emphasizes the ideological nature of the concept of "terrorism" itself and its relevance to the Israeli-Palistinian conflict.

For a useful overview of rumours about the WTC attack circulating on the web, see Amy Harmon, "The Search for Intelligent Life on the Internet," New York Times 23 Sept 2001, section 4: 2. (Warning: the ever-annoying Times website will probably make you register to see this.)

CNN's official disclaimer on the Palestinian footage (20 Sept 2001).

Unsurprising, no doubt, but an indication of how media accountability has changed since the Gulf War.

David Aaranovitch, "How to Make Myths and Legends," The Independent 19 Sept 2001.

A couple of articles which have been circulated extensively via mailing-lists, in case you missed them:

Tamim Ansary, "Do You Have the Belly for War?," San Jose Mercury News 17 Sept 2001. With thanks to Nina Olff.
Noam Chomsky's interview with Svetlana Vukovic and Svetlana Lukic for the independent radio station B92 in Belgrade.

The Global Rumour-Mill (3)

Rumors of War. On rumours relating to the WTC attack which have been circulating over the past week, including the still developing controversy around CNN's Palestinian footage (see posts of 19, 20 Sept below).

With thanks to Naresh Fernandes.

Fallout

Environmental Protection Agency update (Sept 18) on air and water contamination in lower Manhattan. For a less encouraging view, see Eric Moeller's analysis WTC: Danger of Asbestos Fallout on Indymedia.

Dominic Kennedy and Damian Whitworth, "Weekend Alert as FBI Warns of New Attack," The Times, Thur 20 Sept.

Andrew Gumbel, "US jets were just eight minutes away from shooting down hijacked plane," The Independent 20 Sept 2001. Adds some weight to the theory that US flight 93 was shot down in Pennsylvania. The counter-narrative of heroic passenger resistance, unusually wide debris field, and continuing lack of info on CFV and FDR data, are consistent with such a view.

The Global Rumour-Mill (2)

The plot thickens: Israel Stages Anti-US Demonstration," Jerusalem Post 14 Sept 2001. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.

This article is itself based on an article by Meron Benvenisti in Ha'aretz which I'm trying to track down.

With thanks to Mark Crispin Miller, NYU Dept. of Culture & Communication

The Global Rumour-Mill (1)

Soon after the WTC attack last week, a story began circulating on the internet that footage shown of Palestinians celebrating was actually shot in 1991.

The source of the story was someone called Marcio Carvalho, a student at the State University of Campinhas, Brazil, who on Thur 13 Sept had posted a message to a mailing-list claiming that a teacher of his had videotapes of the same footage and was sending emails to CNN, Globo, and other newspapers, "denouncing what I myself classify as a crime against the public opinion."

Carvalho retracted the story as long ago as last Saturday (15 Sept), but it has since become an instant urban legend on mailing-lists and informal networks. Here's one version of the story, from Indymedia's newswire page (Wed 18 Sept), accompanied by corrections.

Thanks to everyone who's been passing articles along to me. Here are some that I've received, along with the name of the person who sent it:

* On the backlash against Sikhs in the UK, from a Sept. 18 Times of India report (Naresh Fernandes).
* Naomi Klein's article "Game Over" in the current issue of The Nation (Gianfranco Norelli).
* Reflections of British avant-gardist Momus (aka Nick Currie) on Life During Wartime, from the Enlightenment to the Talking Heads (Tim Quigley).

The Maginot Line

Reading discussions of the current crisis, I've come across several references to the Maginot line. Christopher Hitchens refers to the new security measures adopted since Tuesday as a "Maginot line of the mind," while Jonathan Schell's current article in The Nation refers to "that other Maginot line, the proposed system of national missile defense."

Although some think that the Maginot line wasn't quite the strategic blunder it's usually made out to be, it's clearly become a metaphor for such blunders today. Here's some background info on the original Maginot line.

Ignacio Ramonet, "The Pakistan threat," Le Monde Diplomatique November 1999.

Article from 1999 but useful background for current events.

"Bin Laden family condemns terror attacks," Gulf News Online, 16 Sept 2001.

This article suggests that Bin Laden may have already fled Afghanistan.

Munir Ahmed, "Bin Laden Moved After Attack," Washington Post 13 Sept 2001.

Terrorism research links:

Terrorism Research Center
International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism
Centre de Recherche sur le Terrorism International (French)

Interesting thread on the Professional Pilots Rumor Network about whether commercial desktop flight simulators could have been sufficient to learn how to fly the jets into the twin towers. (The consensus is: no.)

A question which isn't addressed is about the role of those flightsims simply in imagining what happened on Tuesday. About ten years ago I remember playing with an early flight simulator program and flying over a graphic representation of New York. We spent a lot of time trying to fly under the Brooklyn Bridge and between the twin towers.

Fly the virtual US flag.

Steve Dunleavy, "Simply Kill These Bastards," New York Post 12 September 2001.

The rhetoric of this extraordinary article, while perhaps understandable in such appalling circumstances, is chillingly reminiscent of Kurz's famous phrase, "Exterminate the brutes!" in Conrad's Heart of Darkness and more recently, Coppola's Apocalypse Now.