9/11 ten years later – a retrospective

In the interests of preserving history, I’ve compiled some content from back in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th 2001 attacks. Consisting of two opinion columns and two articles I wrote, and two PDFs we (the Kitchener-Waterloo Independent Media Centre) put out, they offer a different perspective to the main messages in the media at that time.

• Columns: September 14 and September 21 – the first was written on the 11th or 12th, I can’t remember which (but I can remember seeing an ‘editorial graphic’ in the Globe and Mail on the 12th with a big fist hitting a map of Iraq, so that was the context in which I was writing), and then the next week’s column was responding to the initial response after the attacks. I got some good feedback from people at the time, including someone who told me her household had posted one of them up on the wall in their washroom.

• Articles: Interview on the subject of terrorism with Peace and Conflict Studies director Lowell Ewert, and an article examining the possibility of conspiracy. The interview about terrorism was a week after the attacks, and gave voice to some different ideas about hwo to deal with terrorism, including the importance of actually defining what we mean by it. The conspiracy article examined some questions that have since been explored in more depth with the ‘9/11 Truth’ movement, and really I think the best advice I’ve read about how to think about what happened on September 11th, 2001, is to treat it as something we don’t fully understand.

• Blind Spot PDFs: Sept 2001 two-page edition that brought some alternative messages to the fore in a media environment swamped with hatred and revenge – and – Sept 2002 one-page edition featuring the writing of pseudynm ‘Malcontent X’ asking the unanswered questions and demanding a legitimate public inquiry. Blind Spot was a small monthly/bi-monthly paper we put out in K-W from 2000-2003, which featured ‘special editions’ on occasion.