Film Review: 9/11: Inside the President's War Room. More propaganda. Tell the children the truth.

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9/11: Tell the Children the Truth

by John Kendall Hawkins

Well, here we go again. Another trip down memory lane -- for most of us; and fewer and fewer of us left at the same time. Memory versus history -- one of my favorite topics, and, as it turns out, a recent Atlantic piece discusses the difference (which I'll get to), vis-a-vis teaching the events of 9/11 as history to students who grew up after that rueful day. For them, 9/11 will always be history, and, as we discovered long ago, history is told by the victor. And Howard Zinn.

There are fewer and fewer of us old geezers (I'm 64) around to remember where they were the day JFK was shot. For most people, what happened on November 22. 1963, is part of history now. (But *wink* read the People's version; it has more links to corroborate.) The JFK assassination turned a generation of Americans into 'conspiracy theorists.' Everybody knew where they were when they heard. Everybody weighed in on what happened. The Warren Commission's Gerald Ford said, lone gunman, no magic bullet, 3/5 of the Commission weren't convinced of their own Report. Years later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations said, Nuh-uh, Gerry, it was a conspiracy. We all threw up our hands, and then clapped, when Gerald Ford, the only unelected President we've ever had, fell down a flight of stairslike he'd been shot by a lone gunman, and Chevy Chase made a career out of mocking Ford's clumsiness. To many of us 'theorists', it felt like payback for his lies and unearned ascension.

And I feel certain that my stepfather felt that distance between his memory and my understanding of derived history when he used to get that Navy look in his eyes, us tossing back a few Hi Neighbor 'Gansetts at the kitchen table, and talking Raymond Carver-style, about the Pearl Harbor attack that forced America into WW2. I knew next to nothing about Pearl Harbor, other than the surprise kamikaze ('divine wind') suicide bombings. I could picture that diving, although, of course, not the hari-kari I-get-to-go-to-heaven-and-have-geishas-serve-me vibe.

So here we are again. The 20th anniversary of the events of 9/11 are upon us. And, in the days ahead, the MSM will be framing that history, much of it leaving out what we remember -- those of us who lived it. They will pretend to be authorities on the subject, a pretension born of BAs in communication technique, their projected confidence in the information they deliver amplified in ratio to the privilege-ranking of their alma maters, but remember, as you watch (and I'd advise that you read instead), none of the talking heads was there for the JFK, and some were just kids for 9/11, and none of them are authorities on the subject of what happened before, on, or after 9/11. They just seem to be. One day, AIs will do their work. Yes, that's commentary.

On 9/11, 2001, I was living in England with my pregnant wife and two kids under five years old. We were off on a Chunnel jaunt; taking the car to the Continent and driving through France, through windmill country, and then to Dunkirk Beach. It was said to be an "important" beach for Allied forces during WW2, and the site of a "miracle" escape from the forces of evil known as Nazis, a "turning point" in the war. But that was before my time. On the way home to England, at the border in Calais, in line to board the Chunnel train back, a French guard enthusiastically (too, I thought) told me my country (American passport) was under attack, towers down. That, I'll never forget. And my young kids, strapped in the back seat, don't remember.

Back in Tadworth, Surrey, in front of Sky TV, we watched some of the saturation coverage of the events in New York, the early questions, the lame responses by people -- journalists, politicians -- who didn't know. No one knew where the president was. You could tell it was all confusion. We all had to settle for the mega-headline: AMERICA AT WAR. With whom, we hadn't yet been told. Eventually, we said, f*ck it, let's go for the whole inshallalah. Make it a limited Crusade against Islam -- Shi'ites (the Sunnis -- minus 15 -- are our friends). At least, that's what I heard between the limns of GW Bush's lips when he spoke on TV and told us he'd be "smokin' 'em out." Check it out:

I was thinking of all this stuff and more, as I watched the newly released documentary, 9/11: Inside the President's War Room, co-produced by Apple and the BBC. A soundtrack starts up that says, to me, feel ominous unease, which was like trying and trying to start up an old lawnmower, your shoulder popping out, then the disembodied voice of an air traffic controller tells us there's a hijacked plane on its way to New York, and then a narrator says: "On September 11, 2001, America came under attack." That voice. Who was it? I'd heard it 1000 times before. Jeff Daniels! I'd watched Dumb and Dumber so many times -- I'd always thought he was straightmanning to me (I saw myself as the Jim Carrey character, although, strangely, from a different movie, The Truman Show). Wow, I thought, he does docos, too -- right-leaning ones?

Then they come, one after the other, the cavalcade of liars who lit the fuse to decades of war and misery (and didn't help the climate much) premised on their lies brazenly proffered up to the United Nations and the rest of us, a year or so after 9/11. First up, Dick Cheney, the president pro tem during the critical hours of 9/11 tells us, "Killing thousands of Americans, more than we lost at Pearl Harbor, this was an act of war." Then we get GW's national security advisor, Candi Rice, sweetly telling us, "I felt very much that we had indeed seen the face of evil." Then GW comes on, looking smokingly handsome in his dotage, and he says, "This was a well-organized attack that severely damaged our country."

A plane crashes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Cue the pedestrian screams and oh-gods. Jeff Daniel's voice returns, tormenting me, "It was a defining 24 hours that shaped a presidency, the country and the world." Then back to Cheney, then Powell. And later, toons Turd Blossom, Andy "the" Card, Mike "a" Morrell, and Bush's mealy-mouthed media spokesperson "Aryan Flusher" (who Tarantino is said to have dropped as an Inglorious Basterd at the last minute, as he couldn't find a way to make the tongue lasher follow Donny Donowitz's Louisville Slugger routine: Don't f*ck with the IDF rogues known as the Muscle Toughs.) Shaped us alright, like a fucked up circumcision. And while we're on the subject, and before moving on, riddle me this: Why are the Jews shaping it into a German helmet anyway, or even more worrisome maybe: Why did the Nazis adopt the Jewish dick shape as a protector of headstones? That's the question that keeps me up at night goosestepping and masterracebaiting. Thousand year reich, here I come.

I'm trying real hard to take them seriously, grim and wizened, rehearsed clenches of speech, them knowing that they must have got away with it if GW's buddying up to Ellen Degeneres at a Dallas Cowboys football game, folks on the internet trashing that idea, with quips this typical:

One sarcastic Twitter user said, "So quirky and fun to see George Bush out with Ellen at a Cowboys game after his terrible foreign policy decisions killed thousands of innocent people."

Wild and vicious Rumors then circulated - like hijacked planes -- that Portia walked out on her marriage with Ellen, citing an arrested development in their relationship. Girls can be mean. Let's hope they never join al Qaeda. If California started out as a Amazonian caliphate, why not the world?

I could smell the mean grass growing; the pull and pull at my old heart strings growing. Vroom. Grrr. The Guardian's Jack Seale had called the doco "astonishing and petrifying," and gave the thing 5 stars. I wondered for a moment if we had watched the same program. I even looked under the bed, where problematic ghosts used to hide in my childhood, and found nada nada nada -- it was a clean, well-lighted place down there (you know, because of the flashlight). There was new footage never seen before, but rather than shock and awe, the prequel, it was ho hum, and I checked the chastity belt on my bum. Still there. No ruefulness. No sense that 20 years of war against that unruly abstract noun, Terror, had been in the service of the institution of surveillance state they'll need when the Singularity makes us thit our collective drawers. Nothing new.

Maybe this was no surprise, as six months after declaring that he'd smoke them out wherever they were (except Saudi Arabia), he was already showing sings that his commitment to capturing the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was already AWOL. Check it out:

Then I was disappointed that Jeff Daniels had taken on the project. I recalled another film Jeff was in (and out), a Woody Allen film, Purple Rose of Cairo, where Jeff's character literally jumps out of a movie within the movie and sweeps Mia Farrow off her feet. Their exchange of words:

Jeff: Who are you?

Mia: Cecilia, but"

A Woman (standing): I'll go get the manager.

Jeff: Let's get out of here and go somewhere where we can talk. (pulls her from her comfort zone)

Mia: But you're in a movie.

Jeff: Wrong, Cecelia I'm free. After 2000 performances of the same...I'm free.

Damn. The Jeff Daniels of 9/11: Inside sure wasn't the confidante stealing Mia from Danny Aiello, still sore that Spike Lee burned his fuckin pizza parlor down later on in Do the Right Thing. This was more like Jeff had wooed Mia and she'd given birth to that glowy-eyed baby, and argotron people were standing around cooing at little baby's ram-like horns. It was like Jeff did hard time for jumping from that movie to freedom. But I ain't drinking no milkshake, mofo. I've already done my share of acid. I don't need no Turd Blossom dream. And this Jeff Daniels works for Mr. Satan.

There is nothing new in 9/11: Inside; nothing that hasn't been covered by hundreds of articles, dozens of other films -- from conspiracy theorists to debunkers and lots of sober twattage in between -- and books and books and books, so many books, for a moment you long for Fahrenheit 451. Burn, baby, burn, and toss in the Victoria's Secret bras, while you're at, feminism is dead, and I ain't getting any more again, I told my naked, full-breasted Muse. 9/11: Inside is a pathetic and lame film that tries to put the finishing touches on the lies that were later told about invading Iraq. But they go together. Bush recalls, "The lesson of a crisis, besides projecting calm, is to say something. I mean, people all across the country in disbelief ...shock and horror." I heard 'shock and awe-awe.'

Ostensibly, the film is about the harrowing first 12 hours of the Event, when we get a deep inside glimpse of GW Bush so thoughtful about events you feel like crying (I hired a proxy who called himself Onion). It's so important that we burnish GW's legacy by believing him when he goes on and on about the need for leadership at a time of crisis, and how not every president is saddled with a war to deal with during their time in office, but alas... Listening to the AWOL Alfred E. Neuman f*cker go on, I was beside myself by then, and gave myself such a severe look that mirrors would quake at the exchanged eye beams involved. And I asked myself: what president wasn't dealing with war in my lifetime? The only one I could come up with was Russian emigre Lee Harvey Oswald's mail order rifle target. So much for peace on the prairie.

You could start a criticism of the film with the title. 9/11 [that part's true]: Inside the President's War Room. This is what's supposed to be different about the film: What the missing president was up to on that day, while Dick Sheeny, under emergency powers granted by the Continuity of Government thingy (the MSM doesn't really talk about it much), ran things from Washington. Kinda. Bush had started the day out reading The Pet Goat with children at a primary school in Sarasota, Florida. He kept reading, even after the second plane hit the South Tower and he "knew then" that America was "under attack." There's lots of tame footage of the elementary school doings throughout the film with voice over. Chantal, a now grown-up student during Bush's visit, says something about how all the disadvantaged kids had to perform the Pledge of Allegiance and puts her hand over her pretty little heart, now grown up. The film blatantly tries to rehabilitate the look on GW's self-conscious face (he had the look of a face that is looked at, as TS Eliot might have said) as he sits there, widely seen afterward as one of scared poopypants turned by time and charlatans to magical machinations of a deep and penetrating mind at work. Turns out that the book, The Pet Goat, was about a scapegoat. Now that's some harsh je ne sais quoi. (I wrote about this phenomenon last year , along the discovery of new Pet Goat stories. )

After the reading, the president boarded Air Force 1 and was out of the picture for the rest of day -- AF1's communications suddenly broke down, Andy "the" Card wouldn't let GW go back to DC. We get the impression that Alfred E. was about to coldcock Card, but, no, they're still good buds. "Too dangerous." (Like Nam, GW.) Earlier he explained that the school visit was supposed to be the beginning of "an easy day." Nuh-uh. The film tells us AF1 got only "intermittent" TV coverage of the NYC and DC events. Cheney tells us he made the decision to shoot down Flight 93 over Penn's Woods, but conceded that Bush had given the final authority. It was a tough decision, but someone had to make it.

Aryan Flusher tells us, "Typically, at a time of hot breaking news, the press has access to a lot of things that the government doesn't. Because there's cameras everywhere." Apparently, in Tarantino film he would have gone round with clanking a toilet bowl and sticking Nazi heads in while he blatherscheissened on -- in a puffy white Samuel L. Jackson-like shtick that saw Nazis reach their hand up and flush their own head down the toilet. Aryan could drive anyone to a bunker mentality.

Lots of shots of radar screens showing hijacked planes on their blippy way to targets. And Candi Rice tells us of the skies, "Every plane had become a missile." Yeah, mushroom clouds everywhere. Turd Blossom describes a "proverbial Hell" and later tearys up over the loss of a colleague's wife on board one of the hijacked planes. The now infamously super-blurry duckrabbit missile-plane that hit the Pentagon warms the cockles of our despair, as Candi provides the play-by-play. Smoke pouring out everywhere.

What we don't get in this film is any alternative response to what might have happened that day. Just a box of Forrest Gump chocolates served up to dumb shits who thank them. Despite the film's title, 9/11: Inside itself depicts a president entirely sidelined. What War Room? He made no key decisions during the attacks, except the nod to Cheney to down Flight 93. The tension GW feels is from advisors telling him he mustn't go back to Washington, where the president 'longs' to be, because, he keeps telling us, he's a leader and must project leadership qualities. Like an el blotto Rohrschach that keeps stepping in your way.

The producers of the film must have known how lame this all sounds, dramatically speaking, so they feed us how worried everybody was when GW couldn't be reached by the MSM ("WE need to hear from him"), and a The President's Plane Is Missing vibe was created. But then we're told that communications in the White House, where Cheney was holding court, and deciding world fateful stuff, was also experiencing inexplicable communications problems (causes not updated in the film), and oxygen in the bunker war room started dropping "dangerously"and, we're told by a staffer,

Everybody started dozing off and we're like something is wrong here. We had exhausted our oxygen and everybody's breathing their own CO2...We were, like, poisoning ourselves.

Hmph, and all these years we've been told it was not a failure of intelligence but of imagination. Now it was just oxygen. We'll probably all fall asleep as climate change reduces the oxygen little by little. The Amazon's already putting out more CO2 than it's taking in.

Still sensing lameness, the producers offer up terror: "Then a call came through," we're told, with someone using the codeword for AF1, Angel, with a message: "Angel is next," translated, by the president's retinue, that someone was onboard the plane who was going to kill GW by taking the plane down. Sweet Cheeses, no! I thought. The pilot had a guard posted to prevent access to the cockpit. Shoot to kill. In an airplane. Then Arayan Flusher is trotted out to explain the grim situation:

Think about that. Inner sanctum of the inner sanctum, and the pilot is worried that someone in the president's circle could try to conduct an inside job and take down Air Force 1.

Yikes. Snakes on the plane! My asp in your fez. Anyone see the remote?

But the process of elimination kicks in: There were 32 people on board (according to a graph they show us), including Colonel Tillman, the pilot. Let's assume the pilot wasn't part of the plot (despite being willing to discharge a firearm on board a plane), nor AWOL George, who probably coulda taken over in a pinch, that National Air Guard training coming in handy. Of the remaining 30, 13 of them were reporters; like Oscar Wilde once said, these types kill with words, so the mouths are eliminated. That leaves 17 suspects. Card kept telling Bush he couldn't go back to DC yet. Hmm. Was he a card up the sleeve? Tough call. Personally, I'm cutting to the chase and fingering Turd Blossom. He likes to f*ck with reality. But then we're told it was all a communications gaffe, no inside killers aboard, and everybody stands down. The Inner Sanctum lives and is still sacrosanctimonious. Aye, aye, aye.

Thank Christ the production was mercifully short. It never once veered toward conspiracy theory 'nonsense' about hijacker passports found at ground zero as pristine as the magic bullet; no mention of WTC7's freefall, the hysteric's smoking gun of an inner sanctum job; no mention of what happened to the alternate camera angles of the Pentagon that never surfaced in the media; no mention of thermite; no mysterious uncollected stock market moves; no one bringing up how we unloaded all that mangled steel to the Chinese; no one asked why the military was conducting war drills that day that kept them from responding to the crisis -- at all; nobody asked why the only people flying after air traffic, including GW's parents, was grounded, were the collected bin Laden family anxious to ixnay from the USA; why we never invaded Saudi Arabia, home of world oil and 15 of the hijackers, never comes up. Even the parallel to the ignored warning of an attack on Pearl Harbor by the US ambassador in Japan at the time to the seemingly willful ignorance leading up to 9/11 is bypassed.

It's a tight, careful production, without any self-insight whatsoever. When Candi talks the smoke of 9/11, everybody remembering how much of it there was that day, we get what she was up to when the case made for invading Iraq and she was talking "mushroom clouds," echoing Colin Powell, who sold the lemon of Iraq's "many smoking guns." Let's face it: Bush was AWOL on 9/11. Cheney was already getting his pals at Halliburton ready for the take-down and rebuild in Iraq. (Curiously, Donald Rumsfeld plays virtually no part in this film, getting just a mention from Condi, wwho says nobody knew where he was, although it's been reported that he was out at the Pentagon crash site "helping with victims.") There is no mention of how the NSA tried to get Britain's equivalent GCHQ to find kompromat on members of the UN security council to strong-arm them into voting for a war against Iraq, the subject of the whistleblower film, Official Secrets. The UN said No; America warred anyway. This is the kind of thing that Ed Snowden warns about in his memoir, Permanent Record. All in all, 9/11: Inside is bosh. They lie again. And the Guardian is helping them do it by praising this bolderdash.

This returns us to what I raised earlier in this article -- the struggle between memory and history, long an important subject of mine. Atlantic has a recent piece on it in their August 30 edition, "None of My Students Remember 9/11." An instructor explains how she goes about doing so with college-aged students. She emphasizes the complexity of understanding such an event:

In one exercise, I divided the class into CIA analysts and policy makers. They all read the same declassified intelligence report-the now-infamous August 6, 2001, edition of the President's Daily Brief, which highlighted Osama bin Laden's ambitions but also included outdated and wrong intelligence, omitted vital clues that the CIA and FBI had about the 9/11 plot but never put together, and gave the impression that the FBI had everything under control.

Was this a warning that wasn't sufficiently heeded, or a warning that wasn't sufficiently warning? And why? Each group of students had to make the strongest case for its view. Walking in the shoes of others, I hoped, would help them understand that reality is much more complicated than we think. Each group tended to see the same document very differently. That report wasn't a smoking gun. It was a Rorschach test.

But what we must guard against are Rorschach tests that have been re-touched, the bats out of hell that are there -- subtly ink-deepened to draw our attention to their plight. Here's mud in your eye.

If you're looking for insight, and want to dance at the same time, you might try listening to Bob Marley's "Babylon System," which emphasizes the vampiric nature of the MIC that President Eisenhower warned us all against, before our time, and just before JFK was killed. We all have a stake in democracy: Maybe it's time to drive home that point.

In the meantime, Marley tells us, Tell the children the truth:

Babylon system is the vampire, yea! (vampire)

Suckin' the children day by day, yeah!

Me say: de Babylon system is the vampire, falling empire,

Suckin' the blood of the sufferers, yea-ea-ea-ea-e-ah!

Building church and university, wo-o-ooh, yeah! -

Deceiving the people continually, yea-ea!

Me say them graduatin' thieves and murderers;

Look out now: they suckin' the blood of the sufferers (sufferers).

Yea-ea-ea! (sufferers)

(Article changed on Sep 03, 2021 at 10:21 PM EDT)

Authors Website: https://tantricdispositionmatrix.substack.com/

Authors Bio:

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.