Since 9/11 is my birthday, two friends gave me the above gift last year. It’s a lighted box they found in the International District, a scrolling view of New York City’s sights.

While writing this piece about the shakeout since 9/11 in my military family, I soaked my brain in all kinds of World Trade Center-related movies, none of which ended up in the piece. I watched Oliver Stone’s very boring World Trade Center (Nicolas Cage mutters to himself while trapped under rubble for two hours), I rewatched the never boring Working Girl (did you realize Melanie Griffith works in the World Trade Center?), I rewatched Man on Wire…

But the video that really stood out—and will make you sickest to your stomach—is the History Channel’s documentary about the World Trade Center filmed in early 2001, nine months before the attacks.

It’s all about how neat the World Trade Center is: how the buildings are cooled by water pumped in from the Hudson River, how the complex contains 71 escalators and 254 elevators, how its subway station was the first subway station to be air conditioned in the United States, how the architect Minoru Yamasaki was afraid of heights.

Nauseatingly, since the documentary was made while the buildings were still standing but aired on TV after the towers were gone, in the upper corner of the screen during interviews are two superimposed dates: The date of the interview and the date the interviewee has been missing since. One of the interviews is with Frank A. De Martini, a construction manager, who talks excitedly about the exterior skeleton on the buildings. There were no columns in the middle of the building; the exterior walls carried all vertical loads.

A smiling De Martini tells the camera that because of the way the buildings were designed, you could fly airplanes into them and they’d still stand. “I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door—this intense grid. And the jetplane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.” Up in the corner of the screen while he’s talking, it says, “Recorded 1/25/01, Missing since 9/11/01.”

Both he and his wife were in his office when the first plane hit. He sent her downstairs and out to safety while he stayed back to help others. He hasn’t been seen since.

Christopher Frizzelle was The Stranger's print editor, and first joined the staff in 2003. He was the editor-in-chief from 2007 to 2016, and edited the story by Eli Sanders that won a 2012 Pulitzer...

110 replies on “A Video of a Plane Passing Safely in Front of the World Trade Center, and a Video of the World Trade Center that Will Make You Sick”

  8. With all due respect, I don’t know if picking at this scab is so healthy.

    I don’t mean you, Christopher. I mean Americans in general. If you weren’t directly touched by it, if you have the option of not mourning… then please find some joy on Sept. 11, or just make it an ordinary day. Stop terrorizing yourselves with these awful reminiscences.

  10. I’m pretty fed up with hearing about 9/11 now. Is this really what we will have to put up with for the rest of our lives??? Think about that… the rest of our lives!

    Ugh.

  11. @7, doom is unavailable today – he’s at a secret location (Tacoma) for a special intensive workshop for Illuminati/Trilateral Commission/Rothschilds/Nineleveners. He or she will be back on the twelfth to tell us how naive we are about, oh, everything.

  12. @7, @9, @11 —

    Dealing with documented facts really sucks sometimes. Does it hurt to be so close to reality yet unwilling to grasp it? Well don’t read this or you’ll go blind:

    http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis…

    Larry Silverstein is on tape making his “pull it” statement; nobody forced him to say it. Thermite (an explosive used in building demolitions) was found in the wreckage of buildings 1, 2, and 7. Building 7 fell down all by itself! The wreckage of 1, 2, and 7, — the evidence of the largest crime in US history — was quickly shipped to a steel mill in Bangladesh where it was melted-down and sold worldwide on the open market.

    One day you’ll stop believing everything government tells you to believe and start thinking for yourself. Your first thoughts will be that you have only token freedoms and funny money in your government-approved megabank account. You’ll conclude that thinking for yourself is too hard and painful, so you’ll stop.

  19. @12: Sweet. Now excuse me while I go for a walk on that giant soundstage they used to fake the moon landings for a while.

    I’ll say hello to Elvis for you. He’s usually there at about this time of day.

  20. @12, you are a moron. You are laughably wrong on the facts. The “pull” comment meant “pull out your men, it’s coming down”. It had nothing whatever to do with pulling the building down, which you can’t do on a building anywhere near that size.

    The suggestion that the steel was magically, “quickly” transported to Bangladesh is equally dimwitted. Every gram of rubble at the site was transported, slowly, in a convoy of many thousands of dump trucks over many months to the site in Staten Island where it was meticulously combed for evidence and human remains. This process was extensively covered in the media.

    You are full of shit. You are entirely made of shit.

    On one point, Christopher, you, or the guy in the film, are wrong — the skin did not bear most of the gravity load of the buildings. It shared this load with a central column, which also contained elevators, utilities, stairs, and whatnot. The main function of the skin was supporting lateral loads, wind, earthquakes, etc.

  22. @12: thermite is finely ground metal and metal oxide using such materials as iron or aluminum. The statement “thermite was found in the wreckage” means absolutely nothing when thermite is literally fine flakes of metal and rust. I’d be surprised if you didn’t find those two things. Let me know when you find some RDX.

    The more you read shit on the internet, the more convinced you are that it was an inside job. The more you know about reality, the more convinced you are of the official story.

  23. I’ve always thought that the collapse of WTC # 7 really did look like a controlled implosion. But, shit, all the truther theories as to WHY, and bringing in the twin towers as proof of WHY, are so painfully contorted and ridiculous that there’s no point in even thinking about it. Just the epitome of absurdity.

  24. My father was an aeronautical engineer with a working knowledge of jet fuel.

    According to him, the building might have withstood earlier planes, but with the amount of jet fuel being carried on those planes and the heat at which that jet fuel burned would buckle steel. As simple as that.

    I was an English lit major, so I may not have replicated his explanation with complete accuracy, but I find my father’s commonsense more likely than conspiracy theories.

  26. I have vowed to not turn the TV on or look at any news online this Sunday. One of the worst days of my life, and I have no need to relive it thank you very much. Ask me again on the 50th anniversary.

  28. Between September 6 and 7, the Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines, but only 396 call options. Assuming that 4,000 of the options were bought by people with advance knowledge of the imminent attacks, these “insiders” would have profited by almost $5 million.

    On September 10, 4,516 put options on American Airlines were bought on the Chicago exchange, compared to only 748 calls. Again, there was no news at that point to justify this imbalance; Again, assuming that 4,000 of these options trades represent “insiders,” they would represent a gain of about $4 million.

    Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., which occupied 22 floors of the World Trade Center, saw 2,157 of its October $45 put options bought in the three trading days before Black Tuesday.

    Merrill Lynch & Co., with headquarters near the Twin Towers, saw 12,215 October $45 put options bought in the four trading days before the attacks; the previous average volume in those shares had been 252 contracts per day [a 1200% increase].

    In the case of at least one of these trades — which has left a $2.5 million prize unclaimed — the firm used to place the “put options” on United Airlines stock was, until 1998, managed by the man who was the number three Executive Director position at the Central Intelligence Agency Buzzy” Krongard.
    Follow the money.

    A surprisingly strongly-worded report from ABC News about the nature and significance of the 9/11 insider trades.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYBwp_nEZ…

    All of the entries on Insider Trading from the indispensable 9/11 Timeline.
    http://www.historycommons.org/searchResu…

    A 2006 scholarly article concluding that the unusual put option activity in the run-up to 9/11 is consistent with inside trading based on foreknowledge of the attacks.
    http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/5036…

    An excellent overview of the insider trading story and its significance.
    http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011…

  31. There’s an interesting article at the Chicago Reader about the WTC. Reiterated that it was the fire, not the impact, that brought the towers down. And that the reason as many people survived as they did is because the towers stood for a whole hour after the impact. An engineer interviewed compared WTC to the Sears Tower, which likely would’ve been sliced in half and the collapse would’ve immediately followed, making the theoretical death toll even higher than WTC.

    http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/arc…

  32. @28 I am sure there were people with foreknowledge of the attacks as they were planned for years. That is not terribly remarkable. But really a few millions in gains? That is chump change.

    My favorite 9/11 tradition is getting a chuckle out of the fact that 10 years later and the troofers are still going strong undeterred by evidence and data.

  35. I like how the truthers constantly call us reality-based folks “sheep” and attack our credulity, when the amount of credulity needed to sustain belief in the ever-shifting sands of conspiracy is just unbelievable. The stories you hear, like the ones about WTC 7, don’t even pass the sniff test, and have all been debunked many times, yet still they persevere. Belief is a funny thing.

    The real story is of course that I myself brought down the WTC with my enormous whooziwhatsit. Plap plap plap and down she went. Just like your mom.

  39. The Trufers all coming out of their holes and having a tinfoil-hat parade is the thing I am looking forward to the least about this coming weekend.

    My mom’s birthday is the thing I am looking forward to the most.

  40. What you really have to do is figure out who benefited from the 9/11 attacks. Who is had the most to gain? Just look at DC. Who is in power? Who rose from obscurity to the highest office in the land in just ten years?

    So clearly, the hijackings were all just a distraction, and the real target was WTC 7, which was packed with thermite to destroy all evidence of Obama’s Kenyan birth.

  42. @27 – Outercow, I read that article and it’s bullshit.

    They cite “a single frame of ABC video” but they don’t show the frame, cite the exact source, provide a timecode or anything. It exists in your mind because they suggest it does.

    Then they say there were PRESSURIZED diesel tanks in WTC7! There were diesel tanks in WTC7, but you can’t pressurize a liquid (liquids can be UNDER pressure, but not pressurized) and there would be absolutely no reason for thousands of gallons of diesel to be stored under pressure since diesel fuel is only needed to be under pressure at the fuel injectors. Less than a liter/quart of diesel is under pressure on a 10- or 12-cylinder generator.

    That article was written by uninformed “fictioneers” who don’t understand simple physical science.

  43. Oh boo fucking hoo 9.11. I’ll go cry now because a fucking video shows a plan FLYING IN FRONT OF A ARTISTIC REPRESENTATION OF THE WTC. Get over it.

  46. “So there!” What are you, 6? Did you stick out your tongue as well?

    Well 9/11 is our Pearl Harbor so it’s hard to dismiss it. It did change the way we think about safety in this country.

    If you grew up in the ’70s/’80s, hijacking a plane was for other purposes (some benign – to get home to Cuba, others for terrorism). 9/11 took hijacking a plane to a whole new place.

    That top leadership in this country at the time KNEW this was a possibility and did nothing is criminal.

    But while you shouldn’t forget about it (and really how can we) yes, find some happiness on that day. We’re alive and our country still exists.

    One last thing – I understand, to some degree, why 9/11 families felt they should be given money by the government for their loss. What I fail to understand is why we did not do that for the families at Oklahoma City. I guess foreign terrorism is different from home-grown terrorism.

  47. @45, you have posted here numerous gross errors of fact and even more gross errors of understanding. Everything you’ve said here is laughably untrue; a lot of it is now repudiated even by truthers, after the exposure of their idiocies become too great to ignore, even for them. What’s your threshold?

    “You can’t pressurize a liquid” is one of the inadvertently funniest things I’ve ever read.

  48. @45: I think, at the end of the day, that’s what’s so annoying about you and your ilk. You have consumed enough of this garbage that you will be able to spit out facts and figures all day long, in much greater detail than non-truthers (after all, we have no reason to care about the minutiae of 9/11). What you won’t be able to do, ever, is apply basic logic and reasonableness to the situation. If one of us gets close to pinning you down on one of your absurd claims, you will blithely move to the next one. (For instance, there’s this claim that “pull it” must be a reference to explosives. But so, is Silverstein supposed to be a moron or something? Why would he add a detail like that to a public interview if it is inculpatory? Basic logic. But once someone makes this point, then it’s on to the thermite or the options trading or whatever, and so on. By the way, while we’re at it, there’s no law that says that long options need to balance short options, and since people are generically long stocks, put options are the more natural hedge to be buying. I would need to see evidence of unique short interest in the cited stocks before I even considered engaging with the idea of “insider trading.”)

    And so this is what truthers have done, they have devoted vast energy to a project that accomplishes nothing but riling people up. So yes, congratulations, you have mastered more trivia about 9/11 than anyone who will care to debate you on the Slog comment threads. You could have been learning Chinese or planting a garden or just taking a walk, but no. (And so could I, so you win again.)

    You are basically taking advantage of the fact that time is scarce to “win” arguments with whatever commenters get pissed off enough to engage with your rants. And the fact that humans do that to themselves, the creationists and birthers and truthers and Larouchies, is a strange and disgusting pathology that makes me feel a little dirty and depressed.

    But I think the thing is that everyone recognizes this dynamic. No one is impressed that you know what thermite is (even if you started out calling it an “explosive” and now say that it melts metal without causing much of an explosion). No one is impressed that you can regurgitate crap from some website. We are probably hardwired to think that abundant evidence is an indicator of truth, but we are also adults who can see how this “evidence” was assembled and twisted into your fevered logic. We aren’t confused by the fact that your argument takes the same form as a real, persuasive argument, because the substance is so obviously empty.

    I guess the one consolation is that the most you can achieve is to irritate the mourners, like the Westboro Baptist Church. The really dangerous ones are the climate change deniers and the creationists. But anyway, still plenty obnoxious.

  49. @ 47 — You can not pressurize a liquid. A liquid can be UNDER PRESSURE (such as from the gravity head of a water tower, an actively running pump, or a hydraulic accumulator), but that is not the same as a “pressurized liquid”, which does not exist. No fair substituting the word “fluid” for “liquid”, because gasses, which can be pressurized, are also technically fluids (anything not a solid is a fluid, but not all fluids are liquids).

    Go ask your 7th grade science teacher.

  50. @46 — I was responding to @44 on equal terms to ridicule his/her/its lack of supporting evidence.

    Please pay attention if you’re going to play; otherwise, you’re just getting in the way and making a fool of yourself.

    So there! <— you earned it.

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