The Hole In The Ground

Following another day of the same sanctimonious and empty gestures from our Fearless Leader, Keith Olbermann did it again. He's been on fire lately this season as the anti-Democrat/pro-fear rhetoric has ratcheted up yet again, and this is quite possibly the best special commentary he has done since his classic post-Katrina piece excoriating the government's clueless response to that epic disaster.

The full transcript of his words follows this paragraph, but I highly reccommend watching the video of this seething commentary (posted here) to get the full effect.

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul -- two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.

Five years later this country's wound is still open.

Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial -- barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field -- Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won't.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they're doing instead of doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President -- and those around him -- did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."

They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is "lying by implication."

The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced -- possibly financed by -- the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you -- or those around you -- ever "spin" 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded -- are still succeeding -- as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.

So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.

And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."

When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

Moving Ahead, Guardedly

(the following is reprinted sans permission from latimes.com)

MOVING AHEAD, GUARDEDLY
9/11 Has Changed Few Lives
Surprisingly, the mind-sets of most Americans haven't been greatly altered.
By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer
September 11, 2006

Airport trash cans overflow with toothpaste and deodorant.

Thousands of college students bend their heads over Arabic texts.

In Minneapolis, networks of sensors continually sample air for anthrax, smallpox and bubonic plague. In Nebraska, Gov. Dave Heineman is alerted when cars with out-of-state license plates are spotted cruising cattle feedlots.

On a gravel road in rural Indiana, the Amish Country Popcorn factory makes the federal list of potential terrorist targets — a list of 77,069.

Five years after Sept. 11, this is the new normal.

Nearly 3,000 Americans died when terrorists hijacked four planes, crashing two into the World Trade Center's twin towers, one into the Pentagon and another into a field in Pennsylvania.

Documentary filmmaker Ric Burns calls the attack "as seismic as an event can be …. Rarely does the future announce itself so vividly and horrifyingly."

Residents of New York and Washington remain edgy. And those who lost loved ones, or have relatives or friends serving in the military abroad, can't help but be reminded all too often of Sept. 11.

Remarkably, though, the day-to-day lives of most Americans have changed very little. We have found it easy, perhaps startlingly easy, to stick to routines and habits and mind-sets forged before we could have conceived of planes as missiles. Last month, the Pew Research Center polled about 1,500 adults across the country. More than 40% said the terrorist attacks had not changed their personal lives at all. And 36% said their lives had been altered "only a little bit."

Sept. 11 is often compared to another day of infamy, Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Historians, however, see no comparison. World War II demanded personal sacrifice from every American family. The global war on terrorism has touched only a few directly, even as the threat level bounces from orange to yellow to orange to red.

"Many of the predictions made five years ago by cultural pundits about positive long-term changes on our behavior, on our attitudes, even on the art we make, have proved largely untrue," says novelist Julia Glass, who won a National Book Award for Three Junes.

She finds the lack of transformation depressing, a moment missed. "You could say it's because human beings are so good at adapting," Glass suggests. "Or because we tend toward a certain set point of selfishness and complacency."

That capacity for moving on, for getting back to normal, infuriated Army Staff Sgt. Jay White when he was home last summer between tours of duty in Iraq. "It used to drive him nuts when we were standing in line and somebody was complaining about their Frappuccino," recalls his wife, Jessica.

Jessica feels that same frustration at the high school in Cromwell, Conn., where she teaches history.

"It's a feeling of isolation and loneliness and confusion," she says. Her husband left on his most recent deployment less than three weeks after their wedding. "You hear about the dramas of the 16-year-old girls all the time, and I want to go: 'You don't even know what people are going through. What your own teacher's going through,' " she says.

Though most Americans have seen little change in their lives, many do recognize the effect Sept. 11 had on their neighbors and on society as a whole. In the Pew poll, 51% said their country had changed "in a major way."

Those changes are not exactly what the pundits predicted in the days after Sept. 11.

Back then, President Bush publicly wrapped the top Democrat in the Senate, Tom Daschle, in a bear hug; unity in the face of adversity seemed the only possible course. But fighting terrorism proved a sharply partisan issue — and all too susceptible to fear-mongering.

"National security has become just another political weapon to beat each other up with," says Leon E. Panetta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton.

It has also become a top priority for many voters, a noted change from decades past.

"Generally speaking, you could almost [always] gauge the outcome of elections by the economy," says Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. "Now that issue has been trumped by the war on terror … and understandably. We received a national shock on 9/11."

Immediately after the terrorist strikes, 64% of Americans said they trusted their government to do the right thing all or most of the time. By the summer of 2002, the figure had dropped to 39%.

These days, the paradigm has shifted so dramatically that 36% of Americans say it's at least somewhat likely the federal government was complicit in the attacks, according to a recent Scripps-Howard poll.

Tens of thousands of people have viewed an online film that asserts the government plotted to bring down the twin towers and blow up the Pentagon — and then pin the blame on Arab hijackers as a pretext to invade the Middle East. In the weeks after the attacks, when American flags seemed to fly from nearly every home, when nearly every marquee proclaimed "God Bless America," it would have been impossible to imagine such a dark conspiracy theory gaining such traction.

In those days, many pundits predicted Americans would turn to God in their moment of stress, and, for a time, church attendance shot up. Polls showed Americans grappling with big questions about God and salvation.

The revival lasted three months.

By January, church attendance was back to normal. The Barna Group, a polling firm for religious groups, found no movement in standard measures of faith, such as Bible reading. "Spiritually speaking, it's as if nothing significant ever happened," says David Kinnaman, a Barna vice president.

So what, then, has changed since Sept. 11?

The American Civil Liberties Union has devoted vast amounts to fighting Bush administration policies such as eavesdropping without a warrant on certain phone calls and imprisoning American citizens indefinitely without charges or access to a lawyer. Those efforts have clearly resonated: ACLU membership has grown more than 80%, revenue has jumped 34%, and the group has nearly doubled the size of its national staff.

Other civil liberties groups have been equally charged. At New York's Center for Constitutional Rights, Legal Director Bill Goodman has handled cases brought by terrorist suspects imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay and by U.S. soldiers forced to serve beyond their terms of enlistment. He has sued on behalf of immigrants detained after Sept. 11 and foreigners who allege they were tortured by American agents.

The center's caseload has "been taken over by post-9/11 litigation," Goodman says.

The government, too, has been consumed by its new focus on terrorism. The FBI's budget has doubled. Federal spending on air security has quadrupled. The Department of Homeland Security has checked 2.7 million truckers against a terrorist watch list.

In Los Angeles, Edina Lekovic, a Muslim, senses Sept. 11 fallout when she leaves the house in her head scarf. Strangers stop her in the supermarket to ask if her father forces her to cover her hair. They wonder aloud if she's oppressed. Then they grill her about jihad.

"Life has gotten a lot more complicated," says Lekovic, communications director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a national policy group. "To be a Muslim in this day and age is to be in a pressure cooker, 24/7. You have to constantly explain your faith…. [We] went from private citizens to public ambassadors."

For Chris Simcox, the new normal means a new vigilance — and long nights pacing the Mexican border with a gun. Long disturbed by illegal immigration, Simcox says he had an epiphany after Sept. 11: "The next terrorists are not going to come in on visas." So he moved to Phoenix and founded the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps to help guard his country.

Simcox says he has signed up 8,000 volunteer Minutemen. His themes are also seeping into election-year politics. Randy Graf, an Arizona Republican running for a U.S. House seat, explains his call for a crackdown on illegal immigration this way: "We all remember what happened on Sept. 11."

"I tell you," Simcox says, triumphant, "the sleeping giant has awakened."

The fallout from Sept. 11 has affected the world of culture as well.

Musicians have channeled sorrow, rage and fear into anthems to that indelible day. Classical composer John Adams gave us a haunting elegy with "On the Transmigration of Souls." Country singer Toby Keith served up a lusty cry for vengeance with "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)." And Bruce Springsteen poured out his empathy for terrorism's victims — and its perpetrators — in his 2002 album, The Rising.

With his novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, Ken Kalfus brought black comedy to the age of terror. He sets his satire about a divorcing couple in Manhattan in 2001; at one point, husband and wife each think the other has died in the World Trade Center — and each is secretly delighted. It's a deliberate effort, Kalfus says, to disprove what "we were told after 9/11, that irony was dead."

For her part, New York writer Martha McPhee, a former National Book Award finalist, had one of the main characters in her cross-cultural love story, L'America, die in the collapse of the north tower.

"It's not surprising that novelists want to try" to take on Sept. 11, McPhee says, "because what a novel tries to do is make sense out of something that makes no sense."

That's what Americans have tried to do as well these last five years: make sense of the senseless. Shock waves from Sept. 11 reverberate still, but carrying on with the familiar humdrum of our lives lets us feel stable, even as radiation detectors are installed at the Super Bowl and security guards at the airport order us to toss our bottled water.

"Probably no American life is totally unaffected by 9/11, but very few people are immobilized or totally preoccupied with it," says Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.

Lifton studies the psychology of survival, and he says we as a nation have not fully come to terms with the fear, the anger — or the humiliation — 9/11 evoked. We have learned to live with the new normal, yes. But that doesn't mean we've moved past that bright September day of unthinkable horror.

"It's a powerful event which has not been fully absorbed," Lifton says, "and in many ways floats in and out of our psyches."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
stephanie.simon@latimes.com

Times staff writers Richard Fausset, Janet Hook, Jenny Jarvie, Lynn Marshall, Scott Martelle, Charles McNulty, Ann Powers, Maria Russo, Mark Swed, David L. Ulin, Henry Weinstein and Robert W. Welkos contributed to this report.

Disillusion

As perhaps the most widely-covered news event in four decades, September 11, 2001 was looked at endlessly and from nearly every conceivable angle as round-the-clock news coverage at all major networks literally stretched onwards for days. Once that 4-5 day period of nonstop coverage ended, I remember watching the news wrap-ups on CNN every night and listening to NPR in the car and in the computer room at home for a month or so afterwards as the political and cultural fallout of that day continued to drop from the skies (I should note here that this was also the last time to the present day that I have listened to the radio on anything approaching a regular basis).

With so many books, DVDs, and TV programming aimed at re-living or re-experiencing the event through one thematic lens or another, everyone remembers or observes September 11 differently. For me, this reflection has already changed considerably over the last four years. Initially, as I'm sure was (and still is) the case with many others, I remembered the surreal horror of the day, watching videos that re-created that disorienting sense of freefall and exponentially-rising anger that I felt watching the World Trade Center disintegrate and the Pentagon burn, then the intense sorrow at the stories of senseless loss and despair from the multitudes affected by it all.

Over time, though, my thoughts of September 11 began to focus instead on the weeks after instead of that day itself. It feels extremely weird to say it now, but I look back on that fearful, paranoid, shaken, uncertain span of months with a sense of bitter nostalgia for the way things were. No, I'm not talking about everyone being utterly freaked out and seeing Al Qaeda operatives everywhere they looked, but rather I find myself pining for the short time after September 11 when this country was not divided into two screaming halves, each one trying to force a sock in the mouth of the other once and for all. This was the last time, for better or worse, that we really were a nation united behind anything or anyone.

I realize that I tend to speak in sweeping numbers when talking about this subject, but there was a palpable change in individual people as well. Yes, there was outrage and sorrow in nearly every face, and the crackpots had (and continue to have) a field day with all of the grandiose conspiratorial opportunities offered up by the scale of these attacks, but there was also a new tendency at the store of people suddenly looking each other in the eyes when they spoke, with a note of warmth or concern that felt weirdly alien and yet unmistakably comforting. Without us ever having discussed doing so, Greg and I replaced the ubiquitous "have a good day" farewell with a more personalized "take care" and it seemed like everyone was more polite and considerate and kind to each other all at once. Hell, even MTV found itself a voice of compassion and care for one day, setting aside the mindless anomie and bling-bling in lieu of music of compassion and hope. Yes, all of this happened for all the wrong reasons, but it was a beautiful thing while it lasted.

So, what happened to this wonderful time when we actually all got along? In effect, we blew it. Or someone blew it, depending on your outlook ...

There is no denying whatsoever that the events of September 11 were anything less than an act of war: this was a conclusion that no one disagreed with. Despite being pandered to with one of the lamest, most stilted, most uncomforting speeches from our leadership later that evening, the nation rallied around the President to an extent unseen since at least the Gulf War in 1991, and probably even as far back as World War II. It helped immensely that after this faltering start, dear old W. set about earning his leadership stripes. Finally drawing up the kind of gravitas and stone-faced resolve the country sorely needed, W. pulled off the impossible and started to talk and act like "my President." It didn't hurt that he had a Cabinet full of veterans of previous administrations (read: the Gulf War), which certainly made me feel at the time like we were headed down the correct course.

Not knowing what was going to happen next, but grateful that someone had stepped in to take the steering wheel, America gave the President a political blank check: in effect, allowing him to do whatever he had to do, and we waited to be asked for whatever sacrifice was needed to accomplish the new goals of our new War On Terror ... and what's heartbreaking to remember is that at the time, we would have gladly made it. There was a lot of bloodlust and a shared thirst for revenge, to be certain, but on the other hand there was also a real desire to help out, as evidenced by the enormous amount of volunteers and monies collected for whatever relief fund asked for them. This time, to me, was the golden opportunity for the United States to really move forward together and take on this problem by the horns (neverminding that it was just about as useful a war as that against drugs or crime or whatever intangible Enemy Of Goodness you wish to insert here), look into alternate ways of obtaining energy, and show the world how strong and resolute we could be when the time came ... but that time never arrived.

Instead of being asked to do anything that involved any kind of shared sacrifice or effort whatsoever, we were told to shop and spend. I realize that no politician anywhere wants to be the one to say "hey, you need to cut back on your gasoline consumption, America. How about it?" but this was the one unprecedented chance W. would have had to do exactly that and not face a firestorm of scorn or cries for his head on a platter. But, I suppose, this was never going to happen in a country utterly beholden to gargantuan "special interests" and lobbies.

Don't worry about this problem, W. said with a pat on our collective noggins, we're taking care of it. It is not of your concern. Go back to your lives. Take an airplane flight. Go shopping. Go to sleep. Let me sign this Patriot Act to protect you from this ever happening again. Oh, and God bless America.

Right from the instant the above became the default war plan as far as the American Public was concerned, little alarm bells started to ring in my head. I knew that, in a sense, W. was absolutely right to beseech everyone to not to stop the American economy on a dime (domestic consumer spending powers a surprisingly large portion of this country's growth), but this compounded with the idea that life as we know it was going to keep on chugging along as if nothing at all had happened somehow felt all wrong. This new war was going to be background noise while we pressed on with our existence, and it was going to go on for months, years, decades, depending on you talked to about it. I won't even mention what book this instantly reminded me of, but I know I wasn't the only one wondering months later if the new creepily-monikered
"Homeland Security Department" shouldn't have instead been called the "Ministry Of Peace."

I had forgiven W. for that godawful speech on the evening of the 11th, (since Rudolph Giuliani was doing a far better job of playing Head Cheese that day), but being told in effect that it was my patriotic duty to whip out my credit card and get a plasma TV or an SUV and who knows what else felt perverse and insultingly condescending (I won't even get into the additional tax cuts offered shortly afterward as well). It also, I believe, began to dissipate that aura of "we're all in this together," though the true political/ideological battle lines wouldn't begin to show up until a year later when the saber rattling and preparations for the invasion of Iraq (under the disguise of waiting for diplomacy) began in earnest. By that point, we had come full circle again, not only with each other in this country, but with the rest of the world as well. That sense of loss, almost moreso than the loss of life on that awful day, has become for me the most haunting aspect of September 11.

As hopelessly simplistic, childish, and dramatic as it sounds, I want my old country back.

That Morning

Being the habitual late riser that I am, I was utterly dead to the world until I heard the news. I would have slept right on into the early afternoon and awakened to one hell of a surprise since I'd never have heard the phone ringing down the hall in the old apartment. However, Sarah had just come back from classes sometime around 10 A.M. and tried to rouse me from my slumber by telling me with great understatement: "hey....you might want to wake up. Some really weird things are happening."

That didn't exactly get me going. I barely moved, and mumbled a toneless "uhhh like what" out of the corner of my mouth.

"Well...someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center."

Groggily, all I could muster was a noncommittal reply. "Huh. That sucks."

"Well...a few minutes later, another plane crashed into the other tower."

I didn't see that one coming. I opened my eyes and squinted at her in the bright light of morning. "What?"

Sarah then told me of the (erroneous, as it turned out) rumor of a car bombing at the State Department, then hit me with the haymaker punch: "And then, someone crashed another plane into the Pentagon."

That news did the trick, affecting me like someone had just dumped a bucket of ice cold water onto the bed. We'd just gone from "terrorism" to out-and-out war. I sat up fast and aimed an unbelieving, incredulous stare at her. "WHAT?"

A bleary-eyed hustle down the hall from the bedroom to the living room followed, and I flipped around from CBS to NBC to ABC to Fox and to CNN ... all of them showing the twin towers steaming blackly away like giant steel chimneys, alternating with views of the stoved-in side of the Pentagon. It struck me at that instant that the Pentagon looked to be in far worse shape than the Trade Center, which I think was due to my having been in close proximity to the place during a weekend trip to Washington D.C. in 1994. In contrast, I haven't been in New York City since I was a kid, and I have very few memories of the place, and thus I had no real sense of scale to apply to what I was looking at in those pictures. My initial thought was that the Trade Center towers had been broadsided by a Cessna packed with C-4.

A few minutes later, whatever network I was watching at the time flipped to a rerun of the second plane going into the tower. I don't think my eyes bugged that wide or my jaw went that slack since the morning of the Challenger explosion. It wasn't the spectacular fireball that made my stomach feel like it had just dropped into my lap, but instead it was seeing the object that caused the explosion -- certainly not a Cessna or a Lear Jet.

"Holy shit..."

A couple of minutes later, the first tower went down right in front of my eyes. Like so many others, it was at first impossible to grasp that what I was seeing something happening in the Real World and not some summer action movie -- the scale of this just completely poleaxed me.

I think it was at some point in the utter fucking pandemonium after the first tower had come down that my brain suddenly kicked on again and began to process what I had just seen, and I heard myself splutter out: "Jesus Christ! Were there passengers on those planes?!"

As it turns out ... yes, there were.