Some Thoughts on 9/11
0 views
Skip to first unread message
Bill Totten
Sep 12, 2021, 10:59:13 PM9/12/21
to Totten Bill Weblog@Google
Some Thoughts on 9/11
by b
https://www.moonofalabama.org (September 11 2021)
Twenty years ago I was chief technology officer for a major news website. It was after lunch and I was testing new productivity tools for the newsroom. Someone came into my office and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York City. I walked into the newsroom where several TV screens were filled with pictures of a smoking tower.
The news folks were busy writing their first takes. Some of it was speculation. I mentioned that this was not the first plane to hit a skyscraper in New York City and called it an accident. That made it into one of the first take stories.
Still - even as an accident it was spectacular news and the page views per minute on the website went towards our capacity limits. Then the second plane hit and it was immediately clear to everyone that these were no accidents. The web traffic went through the roof.
We had had ample capacity to cover news peaks but this was way too much traffic for our normal site to handle. I told the server administrator to take down all side processes on the web-server machines we were using. We then started to minimize the content of the site. Everything that was generated dynamically was switched off. We minimized the number of pictures. We stopped all advertisement delivery. Other major news sites I tested were already dead - overwhelmed by the enormous amount of traffic. We were still up - but even loading the much cleaned up front page took more than 30 seconds.
I phoned up a number of IT guys I knew who administered public websites for other purposes. I asked them to mirror our site through a side-channel we had opened for that purpose. We then fiddled with the domain name servers to reroute a part of our traffic to those mirror sites. With those finally up and running, we barely made it through the evening traffic peak without crashing everything.
The traffic stayed above our nominal capacity for over a week. I stopped my newsroom productivity project and set down to design a new content delivery system which allowed for a dynamic addition of capacity. The design was quite expensive but three months later we implemented it.
9/11 touched a bit on my job but I was lucky to avoid its other deadly consequences.
Before working for that news site I had long worked with Americans on a daily basis. I had been to the US over a dozen times during the previous years. It was immediately clear to me that its people would want revenge. They would not care much against whom it would be waged. That private prediction turned out to be right.
Little has changed since. The catharsis that 9/11 should have brought never happened. Most people still don't care about the wars of terror and who gets killed in them. I blame the media for that.
Today The New York Times and The Washington Post both report on the recent 'righteous' drone strike in Kabul:
Times Investigation:
In US Drone Strike, Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb
US officials said a Reaper drone followed a car for hours and then fired based on evidence it was carrying explosives. But in-depth video analysis and interviews at the site cast doubt on that account.{1}
Examining a 'righteous' strike
Expert analysis of deadly US drone strike's aftermath in Kabul suggests no evidence of explosives in targeted vehicle. {2}
Ten innocent persons, including 7 children, were killed in that strike.
I applaud those reports. But there have been some 15,000 other drone strikes since 2007. Most of those have hit innocent people but there was little reporting about them.
Three days before the drone strike happened a much bigger massacre took place.
A suicide bomber hit at the gate of Kabul airport. The bomb killed several dozen people including US soldiers. But what happened immediately after the bomb went off made the incident much deadlier. Those who guarded the airport opened fire on the large crowd that had hoped to be let in to catch a flight to somewhere. In total more than 170 people died, some of them were British citizens, others were Taliban guards, most were Afghan civilians.
Local Afghan news {3}, a BBC report on Twitter {4}, Russian public TV {5} (at about 3 minutes, German translation) {6}, China's major news agency {7} and other reporters {8} all spoke to eye witnesses who all confirmed the story: "Most of those dead were killed by bullets".
But 'western' media have buried that story {9}. The sole mention of it I could find is deep down in a long New York Times report about the evacuations from Kabul:
For the first time, Pentagon officials publicly acknowledged the possibility that some people killed outside the airport on Thursday might have been shot by American service members after the suicide bombing.
Investigators are looking into whether the gunfire came from Americans at the gate, or from the Islamic State. {10}
'Officials publicly acknowledged the possibility ...' Do they call THAT 'reporting'?
There were quite obviously no ISIS shooters at the gate.
Why ain't US media all over a story during which the US side killed more than 100 innocent people? Is it hyping the drone attack, which killed 10, to cover for the more embarrassing act during which troops under US control massacred many more than that? Because those troops were the CIA's Afghan death squads who may soon be your neighbors? {11}
Before 9/11 US intelligence knew of Al-Qaeda sleeper cells {12} and of plans for new attacks. Then came 9/11. I am by now one of those who thinks that they let it happen on purpose {13}. That is because all the wars that followed had long been prepared for {14}.
Following 9/11 the US wars of terror displaced 37 million people {15} and killed at least a million foreigners {15}. The US wars of terror are still going on today in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere.
Shouldn't 20 years be long enough to end those wars? To find some closure? To suppress the urge for revenge? To change the rather aggressive general US mentality?
Unfortunately the answer to all those questions seems to be "No".
Links:
{1} https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-drone-kabul-afghanistan-isis.html
{2} https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/kabul-drone-strike-questions/
{3} https://twitter.com/paykhar/status/1431572890521120770
{4} https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/08/the-never-ending-lies-about-the-war-on-afghanistan.html
{5} https://vesti7.ru/video/2331858/episode/29-08-2021/
{6} https://www.anti-spiegel.ru/2021/ein-russischer-korrespondentenbericht-ueber-die-lage-in-kabul-nach-den-bombenanschlaegen/
{7} http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/31/c_1310158086.htm
{8} https://twitter.com/MuradGazdiev/status/1432290521528029189
{9} https://consortiumnews.com/2021/08/29/media-bury-story-us-may-have-fired-on-crowd-at-airport/
{10} https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/28/world/asia/afghanistan-evacuations.html
{11} https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/08/how-the-cia-used-isis-k-to-stay-in-its-afghanistan-business.html
{12} https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/cia-trained-afghan-forces-who-helped-americans-and-others-evacuate-now-await-resettlement-in-the-us/ar-AAOjiWq
{13} https://www.rt.com/op-ed/534505-report-alqaeda-sleeper-us/
{14} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
{15} https://twitter.com/soapbox_soapbox/status/1108795079014211584
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/09/some-thoughts-on-911.html
TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
the appropriate link at the top or bottom of https://billtotten.wpcomstaging.com/2021/09/13/some-thoughts-on-9-11/
by b
https://www.moonofalabama.org (September 11 2021)
Twenty years ago I was chief technology officer for a major news website. It was after lunch and I was testing new productivity tools for the newsroom. Someone came into my office and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York City. I walked into the newsroom where several TV screens were filled with pictures of a smoking tower.
The news folks were busy writing their first takes. Some of it was speculation. I mentioned that this was not the first plane to hit a skyscraper in New York City and called it an accident. That made it into one of the first take stories.
Still - even as an accident it was spectacular news and the page views per minute on the website went towards our capacity limits. Then the second plane hit and it was immediately clear to everyone that these were no accidents. The web traffic went through the roof.
We had had ample capacity to cover news peaks but this was way too much traffic for our normal site to handle. I told the server administrator to take down all side processes on the web-server machines we were using. We then started to minimize the content of the site. Everything that was generated dynamically was switched off. We minimized the number of pictures. We stopped all advertisement delivery. Other major news sites I tested were already dead - overwhelmed by the enormous amount of traffic. We were still up - but even loading the much cleaned up front page took more than 30 seconds.
I phoned up a number of IT guys I knew who administered public websites for other purposes. I asked them to mirror our site through a side-channel we had opened for that purpose. We then fiddled with the domain name servers to reroute a part of our traffic to those mirror sites. With those finally up and running, we barely made it through the evening traffic peak without crashing everything.
The traffic stayed above our nominal capacity for over a week. I stopped my newsroom productivity project and set down to design a new content delivery system which allowed for a dynamic addition of capacity. The design was quite expensive but three months later we implemented it.
9/11 touched a bit on my job but I was lucky to avoid its other deadly consequences.
Before working for that news site I had long worked with Americans on a daily basis. I had been to the US over a dozen times during the previous years. It was immediately clear to me that its people would want revenge. They would not care much against whom it would be waged. That private prediction turned out to be right.
Little has changed since. The catharsis that 9/11 should have brought never happened. Most people still don't care about the wars of terror and who gets killed in them. I blame the media for that.
Today The New York Times and The Washington Post both report on the recent 'righteous' drone strike in Kabul:
Times Investigation:
In US Drone Strike, Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb
US officials said a Reaper drone followed a car for hours and then fired based on evidence it was carrying explosives. But in-depth video analysis and interviews at the site cast doubt on that account.{1}
Examining a 'righteous' strike
Expert analysis of deadly US drone strike's aftermath in Kabul suggests no evidence of explosives in targeted vehicle. {2}
Ten innocent persons, including 7 children, were killed in that strike.
I applaud those reports. But there have been some 15,000 other drone strikes since 2007. Most of those have hit innocent people but there was little reporting about them.
Three days before the drone strike happened a much bigger massacre took place.
A suicide bomber hit at the gate of Kabul airport. The bomb killed several dozen people including US soldiers. But what happened immediately after the bomb went off made the incident much deadlier. Those who guarded the airport opened fire on the large crowd that had hoped to be let in to catch a flight to somewhere. In total more than 170 people died, some of them were British citizens, others were Taliban guards, most were Afghan civilians.
Local Afghan news {3}, a BBC report on Twitter {4}, Russian public TV {5} (at about 3 minutes, German translation) {6}, China's major news agency {7} and other reporters {8} all spoke to eye witnesses who all confirmed the story: "Most of those dead were killed by bullets".
But 'western' media have buried that story {9}. The sole mention of it I could find is deep down in a long New York Times report about the evacuations from Kabul:
For the first time, Pentagon officials publicly acknowledged the possibility that some people killed outside the airport on Thursday might have been shot by American service members after the suicide bombing.
Investigators are looking into whether the gunfire came from Americans at the gate, or from the Islamic State. {10}
'Officials publicly acknowledged the possibility ...' Do they call THAT 'reporting'?
There were quite obviously no ISIS shooters at the gate.
Why ain't US media all over a story during which the US side killed more than 100 innocent people? Is it hyping the drone attack, which killed 10, to cover for the more embarrassing act during which troops under US control massacred many more than that? Because those troops were the CIA's Afghan death squads who may soon be your neighbors? {11}
Before 9/11 US intelligence knew of Al-Qaeda sleeper cells {12} and of plans for new attacks. Then came 9/11. I am by now one of those who thinks that they let it happen on purpose {13}. That is because all the wars that followed had long been prepared for {14}.
Following 9/11 the US wars of terror displaced 37 million people {15} and killed at least a million foreigners {15}. The US wars of terror are still going on today in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere.
Shouldn't 20 years be long enough to end those wars? To find some closure? To suppress the urge for revenge? To change the rather aggressive general US mentality?
Unfortunately the answer to all those questions seems to be "No".
Links:
{1} https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-drone-kabul-afghanistan-isis.html
{2} https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/kabul-drone-strike-questions/
{3} https://twitter.com/paykhar/status/1431572890521120770
{4} https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/08/the-never-ending-lies-about-the-war-on-afghanistan.html
{5} https://vesti7.ru/video/2331858/episode/29-08-2021/
{6} https://www.anti-spiegel.ru/2021/ein-russischer-korrespondentenbericht-ueber-die-lage-in-kabul-nach-den-bombenanschlaegen/
{7} http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/31/c_1310158086.htm
{8} https://twitter.com/MuradGazdiev/status/1432290521528029189
{9} https://consortiumnews.com/2021/08/29/media-bury-story-us-may-have-fired-on-crowd-at-airport/
{10} https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/28/world/asia/afghanistan-evacuations.html
{11} https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/08/how-the-cia-used-isis-k-to-stay-in-its-afghanistan-business.html
{12} https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/cia-trained-afghan-forces-who-helped-americans-and-others-evacuate-now-await-resettlement-in-the-us/ar-AAOjiWq
{13} https://www.rt.com/op-ed/534505-report-alqaeda-sleeper-us/
{14} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
{15} https://twitter.com/soapbox_soapbox/status/1108795079014211584
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/09/some-thoughts-on-911.html
TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
the appropriate link at the top or bottom of https://billtotten.wpcomstaging.com/2021/09/13/some-thoughts-on-9-11/
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages