by Steve Bonta, The New American:
Twenty-five years ago today, I was a brand-new employee at The New American magazine, on the job less than two weeks. The very first order of the day on September 11, 2001, was a quick planning meeting with our editor, Gary Benoit (a quarter century later, he is still our editor, and occupies the very same office!). It was just past 8:00 a.m. Central Time when Gary’s wife called him to say that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. We both assumed that some kind of small private plane was meant, and finished our brief meeting before going downstairs to have a look at the television. We were transfixed by the sight of what was unfolding almost 800 miles to the east. Not one, but two gigantic aircraft had just slammed into the Twin Towers in what was obviously a deliberate, carefully planned attack.
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With the technology of the day, we began recording everything as it appeared on CNN, which, we felt, would probably represent the most establishmentarian version of what was happening. I watched in real time as first one and then the other tower collapsed in a hellish conflagration of dust and fire that enveloped most of Lower Manhattan and snuffed out thousands of lives in an instant. I saw the shock as news came in of a plane hitting the Pentagon, of another going down in a field in western Pennsylvania (not far from where I grew up), and even of a car bomb targeting the State Department. This last report turned out to be false, like much of the frantic reporting and feverish narrative that characterized that awful event.
Within hours, the skies over Appleton, Wisconsin, usually busy with regional air traffic, fell silent. Normal activities ground to a halt as millions of pairs of eyes were transfixed by the apocalyptic scenes unfolding in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Official Washington shut down, and government leaders scurried into hiding, unsure of what else might be coming. By evening, I had watched members of Congress break into an impromptu rendition of “God Bless America,” as the enormity of the event became apparent. I had seen Henry Kissinger opine that the response to the attacks would need to be “integrated” (meaning, “coordinated by global authorities”). I had witnessed the late collapse of 7 World Trade Center. And I had seen President Bush vow revenge on the perpetrators of the attacks and those who supported them.
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