Warped memories of 9-11

[hedgehog]

I was in a class discussing how fragile oral history is. WE were asked to recall the events of 9-11. One woman remembered children killed at a day care center in the towers. I think she was thinking of Oklahoma city. Another remembered pictures of Iraqi children laughing and applauding at the news. I remember film of celebrations by the Palestinians, but not of Iraqis. Can anyone confirm that these are false memories?

[Stop_the_War]

1. The Palestinian "celebration" was a fake one, akin to the

Saddam statue toppling "celebration".

[Warpy]

2. They are.

There was no day care center within the WTC complex. There was no footage of celebrating Iraqis.

I'm sure these people are having false memories reinforced every day by propagandists on AM radio and even online.

[PassingFair]

6. I distinctly remember that first, we found out they weren't Iraqis...

then we found out that the footage was years old.
Disgusting propaganda by the MSM.

[fujiyama]

15. It turned out

the footage was real.

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/cnn.htm

Nevertheless it wasn't Iraqis that were celebrating and no Palestinians were involved in 9/11 either.

[Bluebear]

3. Your recollections are correct

Your two colleagues are totally wrong.

[Stop_the_War]

4. Saddam Hussein openly condemned the 9/11 attacks n/t

[rzemanfl]

8. Lot of good it did him. I remember seeing something about a

taxi driver having a collision or near collision with the plane that hit the Pentagon. Assuming for the sake of discussion that it was a plane, does anyone else remember this?

[Stop_the_War]

11. Hmmm

A plane colliding into a taxi? Not sure I remember that. Is the taxi driver okay? :P

[rzemanfl]

12. Something like the landing gear hit his windshield. I am going

to nose around the net on this.

[rzemanfl]

13. Found a picture of the taxi with the windshield all smashed, but

I don't know how to post it. Do you?

[rzemanfl]

20. Wish I had never looked. There was indeed a taxi driver and

his windshield was indeed smashed. Beyond that, there is so much stuff out there and some of it is so bizarre and misspelled it makes my head hurt. Eberle (sp?) says he was a witness, along with many others.

Here's what I am going to choose to believe. Al Gore won Florida in 2000 and I have been in a coma ever since and having really bad nightmares. Several Arab flight school students were deported during the Summer of 2001. The economy is booming, gas is 95 cents a gallon, Republicans don't control the House or the Senate and I am missing it all because of this damn coma. George W. Bush is living in Crawford, Texas and writing his memoirs with a crayola on legal pads James Baker gave him-whenever he is sober.

[amazona]

24. I remember that he donated blood

Is that a false memory? I seem to remember Saddam Hussein giving blood as well as several other world leaders doing the same.

The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists
and other subversives. We intend to clean them out,
even if it means rounding up every birdwatcher in the country.
--John Mitchell, US Attorney General 1969-72

[Frederik]

25. Arafat did.

He donated blood. I remember it well. Not sure about Saddam.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

5. She is confused.

The children died in OK City.

Any moment now, however, Joe Scarbourough and Bill O'Reilly will be talking about the dead children of 911, however...:eyes:

[mcscajun]

16. No children died in the WTC, but eight children died on the planes

that day.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/memorial/lists/by-age/

[HysteryDiagnosis]

7. I distinctly remember Saddam

flying one of the planes into the towers.... tell me I'm wrong... I watch Faux Snooze so I know from where I speak :)

[despairing optimist]

9. I remember a president promising to do something and doing the wrong thing

[XemaSab]

14. Wow!

I have the same memory!

I also remember the president spending 7 hours flying out to BFE, and Cheney immediately taking cover in a secure undisclosed location and not coming out for 6 months like Puxatawney Pete the Groundhog.

Then I remember the president saying he would capture the people responsible, and thinking "the people responsible are all DEAD, you dumbass!!!!!!!"

Funny how false memories can germinate like that, huh?

[mcscajun]

17. I had the same thought.

What a moron -- the responsible parties were IN the planes!

"False memories" do abound, though, beyond the BushCo propaganda; it's just a common phenomenon.

[despairing optimist]

18. Yes, it's so funny that amid all these memories I forget to laugh

I would laugh if I could wake up realizing it was all a bad dream. Right now it's feeling like Part 2 of Gone With the Wind, only without Part 1.

[rzemanfl]

22. Remember what the jerk said, "We're going to get the folks that

did this." "Folks," like they'd keyed a car in the parking lot. Then, as I recall, he ran and hid some more.

[hedgehog]

10. I think this is an excellent illustration of how memory can

play us false. A lot of people connect Iraq to 9-11 because they heard it over and over again. Regardless of the authenticity of the footage of celebrating Palestinians, isn't it interesting that they are now remembered as Iraqis?

[eternalburn]

19. I was taping that day......

.....

I was watching and taping X-Men. My husbands sister called screaming about America being attacked and to turn on the news. We did so but forgot to stop recording.

We have a tape now that flips between BBC/CNN/MSNBC/CLTV (Chicago) for about 5 hours of the day of 9-11.

Children evacuated from a child care located near WTC. No Iraqis cheering. Just one clip of a Palestinian woman dressed in black doing the turkey tongue trilling and clapping in a street that has children running around in the background.. That same clip is shown several times.

[rzemanfl]

21. You should put that tape on a DVD and save it for your

grandchildren. Your account is pretty much how I remember the news that day.

[mrfrapp]

27. TV Footage

A lot of the "underground" films discussing the 9/11 incident include the live news reels from that day. It's fascinating to see footage, photos and opinions that have since been erased from the common memory; metaphorically thrown into the memory hole.

Despite the "conspiracy theory" nature of these films that may put a lot of people off, they are worth having copies of none-the-less. The ABC footage of the outer wall of the Pentagon collapsing, included in "9/11 In Plane Sight" is particularly interesting. I would like an explanation of that if anyone can offer one.

[amazona]

23. yes they're false memories but don't be too hard on them

Memory is the most perishable of possessions, which is why DNA is proving that eyewitness testimony is so often without merit. We all remember stuff that isn't so. Whenever I work on something fact-based, even if it's just for my diary, I go back and double-check my facts, because memory mutates.

For instance, I was researching some material on extortion of the airlines, a popular crime in the early 1970s. I "remembered" that in 1972 some guys in Memphis hijacked a Southwest Airlines jet and threatened to fly it into a nuclear reactor in Oak Ridge. When I looked it up, I found out the guys were from Alabama and it was "Southern Airways" jet, an airline that I suppose doesn't exist any more. The airline had to pay $2 million dollars back when that was real money to keep them from flying the plane into Oak Ridge. So the general idea was real, but the little details I remembered were wrong and had to be corrected.

The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists
and other subversives. We intend to clean them out,
even if it means rounding up every birdwatcher in the country.
--John Mitchell, US Attorney General 1969-72

[Lisa]

26. even something relatively simple, like trying to recall ...

... when we first saw the footage of the FIRST plane hitting the towers, is more difficult than it appears! Good point, hedgehog! I remember that a year or two after, there was a thread here on DU about when that footage was first shown. Several people were certain that they'd seen it prior to mid-afternoon (Eastern time) that same day, but it was later proven that it simply hadn't been available for broadcast then. The fact that, when the networks did get the clip, it was replayed dozens of times, mixed up a lot of people's mental timelines.

Even George W. himself might have fallen prey to this. One interpretation of his comments about "seeing the first plane hit" (aside from poor use of syntax, when "I saw that the first plane had hit" would have been more appropriate) -- is that he too was conflating his memories of that day. (The fact he hasn't bothered to issue a correction is consistent with his dislike of facts and details.)