TURNING POINT: 9/11 AND THE WAR ON TERROR (2021). REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
DIRECTED BY BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER.
A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
I binge-watched this five-part Netflix series yesterday, in honour of the day that was in it: the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, probably the biggest assault on America since Pearl Harbour.
For much of it, I was aware that I was practically holding my breath, it was so tense, especially the bits dealing with the lead-up to the attacks on the morning of Tuesday, the eleventh of September, 2001.
Lower Manhattan was going about its business as usual on what has been described as a ‘beautiful Fall morning.’ Shortly before nine am, an ordinary commercial passenger plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre building, one of the legendary Twin Towers that formed such a familiar part of the skyline in New York. The building immediately caught fire.
What was going on? Had the poor pilot had a heart attack at the controls, or what? A tragedy and a terrible accident, of course, but nothing sinister. When, shortly afterwards, a second passenger plane crashed into the South Tower, the second tower, it became clear that the crashes were part of a wider plan, a wider design. America was under attack…
We hear from the man who whispered those exact four words into the ear of the then President, George Bush Jr., as he sat in a classroom with a group of schoolchildren and their teachers, chatting to them about the importance of reading.
This was presumably the first of Bush's Presidential engagements of the day. We see the footage, and get to watch the precise moment that he hears the news about the Twin Towers. His expression stays neutral for the sake of the children, but God knows what was going through his mind just then.
Later in the morning, a third hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of America’s military, in Virginia, and a fourth plane, also hijacked, was brought down in a field in Pennsylvania after the brave, brave passengers banded together to prevent the hijackers from crashing the plane into their proposed target, thought to have been the Whitehouse or the US Capitol. By sacrificing themselves, they probably saved the lives of countless others.
The footage of people running from the collapse of the Twin Towers and the subsequent destruction of the other structures of the World Trade Centre is horrific and very sad.
The pictures of people in the Towers jumping from the windows of the ruined buildings rather than be burned alive became immediately iconic, instant symbols of the chilling effects of terrorism.
The images of people looking upwards, with expressions of utter shock and horror on their faces, will already have been branded into the American psyche for two full decades now. Covered in the dirt and grit of the enormous dust-cloud that pursues them for block after block, they flee for their lives.
We hear from a military woman who helped as many people as was humanly possible to escape the attack on the Pentagon, in the pitch dark and while the floors were burning like molten lava. Even though she was brave above and beyond the call of duty, she still regrets not having gotten more people out.
I don’t think we can imagine the fear unless we were there. The terrible fear of Americans who, realising that their country was literally under attack by a then-unknown quantity, began to wonder if there were going to be even more attacks than the four devastating ones that had already happened.
And, if more, then when and where would they happen? The not-knowing must have been soul-destroying. Important buildings deemed to be possible terror targets were quickly evacuated just in case.
Roughly three thousand people died in the attacks, including the hijackers themselves, the innocent passengers on all four of the hijacked planes and four or five hundred firefighters and police officers. Some people went out to work that morning and simply never came home.
Some of the bodies were never identified and some people, known to have been in the vicinity of the World Trade Centre or in the Towers themselves, were never found. It was chaos, a catastrophe on an almost hitherto unknown scale.
Suspicion quickly fell on Al-Qaeda, a terrorist group founded in 1988 by Osama Bin Laden during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Names were bandied about in the media.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for one, thought to be the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was later captured and detained in Guantanamo Bay, of which more later.
Mohamed Atta for another was the Cairo architecture student who flew the first plane of the attack into the North Tower. I remember seeing his face, cold, thin-lipped and dark, being splashed across the newspapers of the day with headlines like ‘The Face of Evil.’
Seeing his face again yesterday brought it all back. He was one of the hijackers given flight training, and the rest of the terrorists were what is called ‘muscle hijackers,’ which is, I guess, self-explanatory.
Atta's luggage, some of which had not been aboard the plane on which he died, was later found elsewhere and contained his last Will and Testament, written in Arabic, and the names of many of his associates.
The George Bush administration immediately launched ‘the War on Terror,’ which involved invading Afghanistan to depose its leaders, the Taliban, who were sympathetic to Al-Qaeda.
We hear from the lone dissenting voice in the administration, a female voice, advocating cool heads and caution before passing the law allowing the use of major force against people like terrorists.
It was a case of ‘The perpetrators of terrorism only understand the use of force’ versus ‘Unlimited power without constraint only leads to abuse.’ There are Americans featured in the film saying things like, yeah, bomb the terrorist fuckers out of it, a view that George Bush obviously shared. So, force was used, and, as we know, America only recently withdrew its troops from a war-ravaged Afghanistan, so it’s been a long twenty years.
The gathering of information against terrorists seems to have over-stepped the mark and strayed into the whole area of spying on and wire-tapping the private conversations of ordinary American citizens, which some people speak out against in the film. It was a bridge too far, in the eyes of some concerned officials.
So was Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, the notorious prison that has over the course of two decades become the ghastly symbol of American human rights abuses.
Terror suspects were ‘detained’ here for years, often without being charged with any offence and often subject to torture, or ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ a euphemism for torture.
America maintained that ‘detainees’ were different to ‘prisoners,’ who have rights. The rules of the Geneva Convention bestow human rights on prisoners, but ‘detainees’ weren’t entitled to jack-shit, seemingly.
Waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning which sounds utterly gruesome, was a favoured ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ used at Guantanamo. The physical effects of waterboarding can last for months and the psychological ones for years.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the 9/11 attacks, has been in Guantanamo Bay for twenty years and, according to reports, he has been waterboarded a whopping one hundred and eighty-three times.
The prison with the dodgiest rep since Alcatraz has been open for ‘terror detainees’ throughout four presidencies now, and talks about how to close it down, especially since US troops have completely withdrawn from Afghanistan, are apparently ongoing.
We also hear from the man with genuinely good intentions who was denied permission to build a Muslim community centre at Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Centre attacks, because, according to some people, building a ‘mosque’ at Ground Zero would be akin to ‘building a memorial to Hitler’ at Auschwitz…’
The film spends about five minutes on the execution of Osama Bin Laden by American Navy SEALS in 2011, in the compound in Pakistan. It happened under the Obama administration.
I remember the pictures in the paper at the time of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other administration officials huddled tensely together around the monitor on which they were watching ‘Operation Geronimo’ play out before them in real time.
I would have liked to hear more about this operation, but it was dispatched with pretty briskly in the film. I do remember some people at the time doubting the veracity of the reports. Was it really Bin Laden they’d killed? Apparently, his face was destroyed by gunshot wounds so they had to identify him by his ears.
But of course it was Osama Bin Laden. It has to have been. Why would the Obama administration lie about it, anyway? Beats me. And the American people celebrated this welcome news as if it was true, so I guess it must be true.
The documentary comprises five hour-long episodes, entitled The System Was Blinking Red, A Place Of Danger, The Dark Side, The Good War and Graveyard Of Empires respectively. You get the story of what happened on the day of 9/11, what happened in the aftermath of 9/11 and what the long-term effects are to this very year. It's bang up to date.
I personally learned more about the evolution of Islamic terrorism than I’d ever known before, and I’m grateful for that. I’d always found it so complicated, complex and hard to understand, but this film certainly helped me to clarify some stuff, such as why were the Americans in Afghanistan in the first place and what’s the difference between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban?
I obviously won’t tell you to ‘enjoy’ the documentary, but, if you’d like to know more about the day that literally shook the world’s leading nation to its foundations, then ‘TURNING POINT: 9/11 AND THE WAR ON TERROR’ is the film to watch.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, 'THIRTEEN
STOPS,' is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is
out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1781994234
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