9/11 tragedy pager intercepts
From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (US east coast time), WikiLeaks released half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.
The messages were broadcast “live” to the global community — synchronized to the time of day they were sent. The first message was from 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, and the last, 24 hours later.
Text pagers are usually carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center.
The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. Wikileaks hopes that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.
All files are available at 911.wikileaks.org
As the World Trade Center and Pentagon were ablaze on September 11, 2001, the U.S. Secret Service’s presidential protective detail was informed that a “Korean airliner has been hijacked” en route to San Francisco, prompting already-skittish agents to worry about another wave of terrorist attacks.
That morning and afternoon, Secret Service agents assigned to protect the president and his family found their pagers constantly buzzing with alerts both true and false. There was a false alarm about a car bomb in downtown Washington, D.C., a report of “two Arab males detained” after asking for directions to the presidential retreat at Camp David, and reassurances that “Twinkle and Turq” — code names for the Bush daughters — were safe and accounted for.
This unusual glimpse into the events of 9/11 comes from messages sent to alphanumeric pagers that were anonymously published on the Internet on Wednesday. The pager transcripts, which total about 573,000 lines and 6.4 million words, include numeric and text messages also sent to private sector and unclassified military pagers.
We will follow up on this story as it develops. Stay tuned.
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