Posted on 09/10/2014 6:28:18 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Upon request, I have collected links to many of the earliest threads from September 11, 2001 below. I reviewed threads from the very first FR report (http://www.freeRepublic.com/focus/fr/520255/posts)through thread number 520326. Feel free to add other significant threads, including photo archives. Bumping this thread periodically instead of the original threads will also avoid scaring people with the headlines.
Bookmark this thread, and bump it from time to time when the nation and the press seems to forget why we need resolve in the face of evil. Forgive some of the early misinformation and broken photo links, and recall the horror and fury.
(Excerpt) Read more at freerepublic.com ...
I was fortunate. I had been on FR for a while. The first thing I did was turn off the radio and sign onto FR. There were freepers in NYC and DC who gave hair raising accounts of what they were seeing.
It was interesting that some of the events they spoke of never made it into the news. I still wonder about the explosions near the state department (verified by a family friend who was near there) and the smoke markers heading toward the Capitol.
BTW not only should Bush have retaliated immediately, he should have slammed our southern border SHUT immediately.
Our conference was cancelled because the Oregon folks couldn’t get on a plane in Portland, and the California contingent was at their emergency stations. One of the Washington state group lost friends at the World Trade Center.
We were lucky we decided to make this trip by train because the skies were locked down for two weeks. It was eerie not hearing jet planes overhead, except for military fighters. But the passenger train network did its job. Unfortunately, few people knew we had trains, and most people who were stranded were renting cars or trying to find intercity buses.
Going back, the Coast Starlight was three hours late into San Jose – which was actually normal. But on the way north, we lost every dispatching window on the Union Pacific and continually lost ground. We were parked on a siding in the California mountains for five hours because of a terrorism scare in Utah, which turned out to be an Amtrak engineer simply running a red block signal.
By the time we left Portland, we were on the tracks of the BNSF, and you could feel the difference. Their dispatchers in Forth Worth were moving us from track to track to get around slow freights, and we made excellent time into Seattle’s King Street Station.
Being 13 hours late into Seattle, we thought we might find the station empty or closed, but Amtrak had a team to help us. I managed to get home in one piece.
I like your thinking, but would we have known who or where to nuke?
Mecca? Right or wrong that would have gotten a whole lot of people's attention. Makes me wonder what the world would be like today if we had. I don't see how it would have been less safe and maybe we wouldn't have a mooselimb for president.
I was getting ready for work listening to the news as usual. I stopped getting ready and focused on the news....then I “saw” the second plane hit.
By then it was pretty apparent this was an outright attack on our country. I called my associate who was also watching....we both said it was Ben-Ladin.
Like many, for hours and days later we all watched as things developed....the heroics, the losses, and the day Bush announced at ground Zero....”They’ll be hearing from us very soon”....which for me was the second defining moment. I needed to hear that!
My family and I also agreed that Bush was the man for the hour, as were all those in his administration. We never doubted their ability to “think and determine” what to do regardless how it played out we knew they loved our country.
...I cannot say that to day for the leadership we have...and for that many doubts and fears of all our safety ‘every day’ this Obama administration gives me good reason to be so.
It was a morning I’ll not soon forget. I live in the NW Chicago burbs and my wife was commuting daily to her gig at a building less than a block from the Sears Tower. I was enjoying my regular morning FReep, albeit slowly on DSL, when word came of the first plane crashing into WTC. I had FNC going on the kitchen TV, and when the web became too slow to follow the FR thread I moved to the kitchen ... just in time to see the second plane crash.
I finally got through to my wife on the phone ... she and her co-workers were just getting bits and pieces of the news. There was speculation that Sears Tower was another likely target. She said building management had come by and issued orders to close all the window blinds to prevent injuries from flying glass should the windows be blown out.
I told her to get the hell out of Dodge immediately no matter what her bosses said. I said to leave the building and get on the first train she can find, no matter there it’s going, and that I’d be there to pick her up. She and a small handful of friends made it out to the burbs safely and I delivered them all to their homes.
I’d been a Freeper for sometime, dating back to the pre-impeachment days of Clinton, and privileged to meet some prominent veteran Freepers (Basil, for one - other names escape me for moment...) at the Salute to the House Managers in D.C. With my much-older sister, mombonn...
On 9/11, I was at my desk in the bowels of Ford’s Product Development Center in Dearborn, MI., now frequently referred to as “Dearbornistan”.
As one of the few in my department to have outside internet privileges, I spent a lot of time on FR, which was even back then my browser home page.
Hasn’t changed...
I was having morning coffee in my office and trying desperately to make sense of the crazy stuff I was hearing on the radio. Within a minute or two I realized that we had sustained a major attack.
I had my wife get on the phone to our employees and customers to tell them that we were closing shop for the day.
The rest is a blur, but we were glued to the TV screen til far into that night.
.....”the ability of freepers to gather, process
and distribute information was so far ahead of the
main stream news that I knew we had entered a different
age”.......
Thank you for penning that...9/11 was what ultimately brought me to FR. and I lurked here daily for the very reason you’ve posted. I was often frustrated with the pundits and how they were delivering the war which would follow....it seemed the media had lost all sense of what war is and about and you go to war to win. I was sickened by Diane Sawyer and others who should have known better.
Thank God for FR then...they told the truth and they were unapologetic about understanding what war is and what it’s for. .....
Thank you for this video of 9/11..didn’t take but a few moments for the tears to well up....which I don’t do easily....just goes to show how this happening changed us all and still does to this day.
http://www.frugalsites.net/911/attack/
Oh my God,I couldn’t even finish it. Will try again later.
Enya’s music is perfect also.
I had 2 in harm’s way that day and it took about 3 hours to confirm they were both okay.(They were not together)
.
Yes Mecca.
We would be living in a far different, far more peaceful world than we are today.
The West doesn’t understand or appreciate the degree to which the entire religion is predicated on the belief that the shrine at Mecca is inviolate.
It can’t be destroyed, invaded, or defiled. It is a metaphysical impossibility that such a thing would occur.
Were it to happen, it would be faith shattering.
Sitting on the beach in Panama City. Mother called, said to go turn on the TV... Five minutes after I started watching the first tower fell. I knew we were at war. Within a week I knew it would be a 100 year war.
Getting ready to start a job at a newspaper where I spent the next several years. I thought for a fleeting moment that the sheer insanity that leftism had wrought on America would once and for all be crushed in a tidal wave of reality.
How foolish I was. Over the next several weeks I watched the long forgotten and newly rejuvenated patriotism and love of what it meant to be “America” fall by the wayside and the self blame and liberal excuses surge to greater heights than ever.
Based on worship of a moon rock.
That’s interesting.
I haven’t, nor had I ever, heard there were folks on the ground providing directional smoke for the hijackers, or that there were the other elements YOU WOULD EXPECT would accompany such a bold and ingenious air assault.
There should have been ground attacks of all kinds happening everywhere.
I think we may have, must have, known more about the other elements of the op.
My husband worked for Dean Witter/MorganStanley, who office in one of the Towers (don't remember which one right now) and some of the people from the Kansas City office were there doing some training.
While on the phone telling him about the "accident," I watched with horror as a second plane dove into the second Tower! I gasped telling my husband that this was no accident but something far, far worse.
Husband wasn't there but had friends there and thankfully they did make it out, thanks to Rick Rescorla (Cyril Richard Rescora.
For those of you who've seen the Mel Gibson movie, "We Were Soldiers...And Young," his story is featured in the book by the same name by Lt. Col. Hal Moore, who described Rick as the "best platoon leader he ever saw!" His photo is featured on the jacket of the book!
Rick was hired in 1985 to head up security and after 1993 bombing of the Trade Center, planned escape plans for saving the lives of Dean Witter employees.
Thanks to Rick, all of the folks from the Kansas City offices made it out and most everyone did make it out alive, unfortunately he did not!
As that day went on, I never left home but spent being glued to TV, getting updates as much as possible, as to the condition of everyone in New York. They did finally make it back home to KC but it took a long time as they wound up getting transportation to areas outside NY to rent cars for the trip home.
Later during the night, after learning some of the nature of the attacks, the state of our country, I lay wide awake and listened for the occasional sound of an airplane as the military made passes over America all night to keep us safe from the harm that had befallen our country.
May God bless all of those families left behind, all of the first responders, all of the young people who signed up to serve to "protect and defend," everyone in our military and government who swore to defend us and to "bring justice to the perpetrators and may the same God condemn those in and out of government who went almost immediately to make political hay out of the way President Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield went to go out after those that they knew harbored the Islamic terrorists. I remember President Bush telling everyone that this war would go on for decades and not to expect the enemy to stop just because we became "war weary." Hitler never gave up, neither did Hirohito. They had to be completely vanquished and we have had military stationed there even still. Japan was as different from the West as one could imagine, believing their Emperor was a god so we had to completely remake their society.
Did everything go as planned for the U.S., no but I also know my history and remember reading of how many people America lost in the planning of the Battle of the Bulge.
War is Hell and the enemy sets the rules, not the innocent, unsuspecting citizenry. When one does go to war, the only thing one should plan on is to win, not "sign a cease fire!"
I like your story. Mine is somewhat similar.
I grew up in the SF Bay Area and was also on my way to work when I heard the first reports that a plane had hit a WTC tower.
I remember my first, initial feeling and thoughts and they haven’t changed. My first reaction was anger, not at the attackers as much as our lack of intelligence to be taken by such complete surprise. I simmered to a slow boil when I thought about how eight years of Clinton hand-wringing, double-minded inaction, and partial dismantling of our intelligence capabilities emboldened and enabled these attackers and killers of the innocent.
I, too, was turned off by the first Leftist comment I heard at work, a complaint that this would be an excuse for getting us in a war (as though that attack wasn’t itself a declaration of war).
I have also moved away from California and now live in temperate, mountainous northern Arizona where I feel much more at home spiritually, politically, and culturally. I also love Texas, but couldn’t find a place to live that wasn’t either humid or windy.
I was on my way to work in the SF Bay Area and when I heard the first reports that a plane had hit a WTC tower.
I remember my first, initial feeling and thoughts and they haven’t changed. My first reaction was anger, not at the attackers as much as our lack of intelligence to be taken by such complete surprise. I simmered to a slow boil when I thought about how eight years of Clinton hand-wringing, double-minded inaction, and partial dismantling of our intelligence capabilities emboldened and enabled these attackers and killers of the innocent.
I was turned off by the first Leftist comment I heard at work, a complaint that this would be an excuse for getting us in a war (as though that attack wasn’t itself a declaration of war).
I have since moved away from California and now live in temperate, mountainous northern Arizona where I feel much more at home spiritually, politically, and culturally. I also love Texas, but couldn’t find a place to live that wasn’t either humid or windy.
Thanks again for posting this KC_Lion. I hope and pray we can turn our memories into productive, positive attitudes and action, and let all bitterness go. The enemy wins when we harbor bitterness.
AZ, or at least the North/North west of it, seems to be one of the last bastions of actual conservatism. Granted, we have our share of liberals here along the Colorado too, but overall, there is still some old school American ideals/people to be found in quantity.
At the top, it contains links to many of the original threads posted by myself and others on that horrible, unspeakable day.
The national appeasement since then has made the ghosts of Chamberlain, Quisling, and Vichy feel right at home.
My hatred of the evil barbaric bastards and their mongrel 'religion', far from being tempered by time, has only grown.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.