Watching 9/11

I’ve been on a thematic binge recently, watching and reading content related to 9/11. (For those aged under 30 or so, it might be necessary to specify that I’m talking about the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.) I undertake these subject-specific binges quite regularly, and they are almost always compulsive rather than planned: something catches my eye, and I think ‘that sounds interesting’, and then around eight weeks later I’ll look up and realise I’ve spent about 50 hours and £50 – neither of which I can particularly spare – down a happy little rabbit hole. (I realise it’s tasteless to use the word ‘happy’ in this context: we’ll get onto that later.)

This particular side-mission was occasioned by a conversation on Bluesky about US intelligence failures ahead of 9/11. That was the catnip. I love stories about intelligence foul-ups; they make me feel better about my own. It turns out that among the cognoscenti, the CIA in the 1990s had much the same reputation as MI6 in the 1950s – which is to say, it is thought to have been full of sub-par posh boys who got the job because their daddy rowed crew with the boss at university:

‘Valentine Vivian, the deputy head of MI6, who had known [Kim] Philby’s father when they were both colonial officials in India, was prepared to vouch personally for the new recruit: “I was asked about him, and said I knew his people.”’ – Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends

I’d heard about the famous incident of a flight school flagging that one of their pupils didn’t seem to want to learn how to land a plane, but other than that I hadn’t previously known quite how bad the pre-9/11 intelligence failure was. The conversation on Bluesky pointed me towards Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower, a hair-raising account of politically expedient non-decisions and catastrophic inter-agency squabbling. It also contains an interesting primer in Al Qaeda’s intellectual trajectory, beginning with the life and writings of Sayyid Qutb, an early twentieth-century Egyptian radical raised on Sherlock Holmes and educated in British colonial schools. Qutb believed that the West had made a practice of inflicting violence and humiliation on Muslim societies, and that the answer was to bring this violence to the West’s doorstep. This belief was enthusiastically adopted by bin Laden and his associates.

I’ve been interested for a while in the fact that the footage of the planes striking the Twin Towers has largely disappeared from view. If you were an adult on 9/11 you probably watched that footage hundreds of times on the day of the attacks and in the days and weeks afterwards: from different angles, at different speeds, accompanied by the screams and gasps and ‘fuuuuuuuck’s of passers-by. When I went to bed that night I saw planes flying into buildings when I closed my eyes. I remember thinking that it might not have been necessary, or even fundamentally decent, to have watched it so many times.

This was the Blair Witch era, just before video cameras became miniaturised and omnipresent and thus far less glamorous. Video reportage was a hipster undertaking, all sexy and meaningful and loose-limbed, like Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub. We were all filming everything, all the time. The first, entirely unanticipated plane strike was captured three times, most famously by French-American video-journalist Jules Naudet in a swinging, shaky shot. (Alerted by the roar of engines overhead, he broke away from filming the New York Fire Department checking for a gas leak in a nearby street. The men he was with would be among the first firefighters to go into the towers.) The second strike, though, was filmed by thousands of Zapruders on the streets of New York. Some of them, like Zapruder himself, were surely subsequently traumatised and guilt-ridden. His family have said that after accidentally capturing Kennedy’s assassination, Zapruder never looked through a camera lens again. (With its themes of guilt and meddling, of fucking around and finding out, of playing at creativity with distancing mediums and getting far more than you’d bargained for, The Blair Witch Project – released two years before 9/11 – looks remarkably prescient. As Heather says at the end: ‘I am so sorry. It was never my intention to hurt anyone and I hope that's clear. I am so scared.’)

At some point in the weeks and months that followed, the footage of the planes striking and the towers collapsing was reframed. The attacks themselves continued to be a gigantic news event, but the videos and images were conceptually recategorised as the depiction of mass murder, the moral property of the victims and their loved ones. Whether you’re religious or not, there’s something sacrosanct about the moment of death. Most of us believe that it should be fundamentally private, witnessed only by those who are emotionally intimate or professionally compelled.

A consensus emerged that the footage of the plane strikes and of the tower collapsing should no longer be shown unless there was a strong editorial justification. In the intervening two-and-a-bit decades I have seen pieces of this footage only once or twice. It was shocking to see it again in the National Geographic documentary series One Day in America (paywalled on Disney+), an extraordinarily comprehensive collection of contemporary professional and amateur video footage (along with filmed interviews with survivors).

Along with this shift in conceptual framing, news editors also had a parallel realisation that the images – and their effects on viewers – were exactly what the terrorists had hoped for. An old episode of The Rest is History on the attacks provides a clue to this. Dominic Sandbrook describes the events as terrifying, horrifying, tragic; and then Tom Holland – always the more intellectually muscular of this pairing – says: ‘Yes. But it was also exciting.’ He apologises for this thought even as he delivers it, but he’s not being irksomely provocative. The images were electrifying, and that was the intent. US economist and columnist Tyler Cowen calls this ‘terrorism as theatre’:

the production of terrorism resembles the production of culture, especially television… [it] is a spectacle produced for viewers, many of whom live apart from the violent staged events.

It is this distance from horrifying events – the sense that the West rained terror on Muslims from a comfortable distance – that Al Qaeda sought to overcome. It noted our habit of treating disaster and misery as ephemeral entertainment, and used it to deliver images we would never forget. As well as bringing death and fear to the streets of the world’s capital, 9/11 had a more insidious moral half-life; the experience of having watched it on TV produced a measure of self-disgust in the viewer. It is extraordinarily difficult not to watch the videos of the planes hitting the towers, even while you’re revolted by your own impulses. If you interrogate this enough, you begin to wonder exactly which bits of our culture and society are worth defending.

Just like documentaries about serial killers (which I don’t find compelling, and thus can be sniffy about at no cost to myself), for most of us the 9/11 footage provokes only sensation: a jump scare, and then the warm dumb thrill of relief that it happened to someone else. Any thinking person is then confronted by their own complicity, our common ability to treat death as entertainment; our proclivity for watching – and even enjoying – the portrayal of other people in extremis, especially when they are people ‘like us’, people who live in the same places, use the same modes of transport, work in the same kinds of offices. To recognise this is to experience a cognitive discomfort that is the twin of Sayyid Qutb’s conception of the West as degenerate and sinful, a machine whose outputs – indolence and sensation – are divorced from any moral framework.

As you might expect from the presumably very sober folk at National Geographic, the editorial team behind One Day in America seem to have noted the potential for a documentary like this to become a titillating collection of snuff footage. They aim to defeat this tendency through sheer detail and length; the series is nearly five unbroken hours long. A couple of hours into the running time there are two spoken accounts (no images) of scenarios so harrowing and visceral that they bring you up short. After the second of these – and no, I’m not going to repeat them – I became so thoroughly repulsed by my own voyeurism that I finally turned the damn thing off.

I have no moral problem at all with the fact of One Day in America’s existence: it’s important to collect people’s accounts while memories are still clear, not least so that we have a record of concrete experience to offset the developing legend. (I was struck, among all the stories of heroism and kindness, by the inclusion of a couple of accounts of selfishness and cowardice, of people who were desperate to save themselves or to simply turn away from the horror. These responses are entirely human and must surely have been fairly common.)

I also have no problem with the gentle suppression of the images of the plane strikes and the falling towers; frankly, I suspect that people with a stronger moral framework than mine have saved me from further degeneracy. What’s notable, though, is that this consensus was reached without a broader public conversation, or even an acknowledgement that these editorial decisions had been taken. As I said above, I was dimly aware that the footage had largely disappeared from view, but it was only in researching this article that I discovered evidence of the conversations to that effect in news rooms and editorial offices. To have this discussion in public would have required the general public to confront our own sensationalism, the ease with which we divorce ourselves from material outcomes and ethical horrors experienced by other people.

There is a thread of moral and intellectual flaccidity here, related to our common unwillingness to really believe in anything – such as the sanctity of human life and its equal value across borders – and to screw that position to the sticking post, to fight it out and take all the consequences. We conceive of our free-floating ethics – our pick’n’mix approach to life and death and meaning – as an indicator of subtlety and sophistication; we are masters of realpolitik, of trimming and ducking. But when it comes to existential battles, those who believe in things and are prepared to take huge risks for them don’t half have an edge.

‘Philby maintained that his dual existence emerged from an unwavering belief in a set of political principles that he discovered at the age of eighteen and never abandoned.’ Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends

With respect to journalists and news editors – who think about these things far more deeply than most of us do – if it is not justifiable to watch Westerners jumping out of windows on 9/11, why is it justifiable to watch footage of dead babies in Gaza, bloodied bodies from the October 7 massacre, or starving people queuing for food aid in Somalia? The argument is that we are shown these things because they are news; because we don’t yet fully understand that they are happening, and once we do, we will do something about it. But violence in Israel/Palestine and famines and conflict in the Horn of Africa have been more or less continuous for decades. If we were going to do anything about it, we would surely have done so by now. Most of us simply don’t care very much. We just think we’re entitled to experience a vicarious pulse of horror. Much as Qutb and his intellectual descendants are repulsive in both their analysis and their actions, there is some substance to the accusation that we just want to sit back and enjoy the spectacle from a comfortable distance.

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For more on the Blair Witch Project: