I clicked through from the BBC News article “US remembers 9/11 five years on” to the ‘Have Your Say’ page and, in response to the published questions How has the world changed since the 9/11 attacks? Five years on, what has been the impact of the terror attacks in the US?, posted an innocuous but pertinent answer. Since I did not make a copy of it, I sadly cannot reproduce it here. I do recall, however, ending it with a quote from Benjamin Franklin: “There never was a good war or bad peace”.

Noting in the side bar that “This Have Your Say is FULLY MODERATED”, I was unsurprised to find some hours later that my posting had not been published. ‘Comments’ that had been published were (and here I quote verbatim from the beginning of each) of the kind:

“I was in work and in the cafe next door was showing the damage after the first plane hit the first tower …”

“I was working for a US investment bank in the City of London at the time the actual attacks happened …”

“We were in Florida and turned on the TV in our hotel room to the news …”

“I was at our offices in lower Manhattan, and I heard the first boom …”

“I was visiting friends in Australia at the time of the attacks …”

“I had just got home from work after the first plane hit …”

“I was standing at my secretarys desk with my air tickets to New York for the following day and we watched it happen on her PC …”

“I was sat feeding my newborn daughter at home when the attack took place …”

“I was working in Las Vegas and had just celebrated my birthday when I woke up to the news of the 9/11 attacks …”

“I was working at an investment brokers in St James, London & had just returned from lunch. The tv was on in the main floor & the first plane had already struck it’s building …”

“I remember 9/11 very well, I was on holiday in San Fransico and the morning of 9/11 we were leaving for Napa Valley …”

Oh, dear, I thought to myself, we’re slipping into that tired old party game of “I remember where I was the day that Kennedy was assassinated”. When I then read among the comments:

“It seems that people posting on this forum have forgotten its purpose – where were you on 11th September 2001?”

and

“PLEASE stop taking over this HYS with political diatribe and perhaps try and answer the question given for a change?”

I started to wonder whether it had been I who had got my wires crossed. So I scrolled back up to the top of the page, and sure enough I there read once again:

“How has the world changed since the 9/11 attacks? Five years on, what has been the impact of the terror attacks in the US?”

Uhm … is it just me?

To be brutally frank, not only could I not give a damn about where you were and what you were doing in your dismal life when the towers fell, I also do not feel that your telling me about it will greatly enhance my understanding of the events on that day.

POSTSCRIPT: “I saw it with my own eyes”

Looking later under the ‘READERS RECOMMENDED’ tab of the ‘Have Your Say’ forum, I note that comments (at least on the evidence of the date stamp — 5 September) have been posted for some days already.

What I find particularly interesting about (with 338 votes) the most frequently recommended comment, left, is the invoking of personal observation–”I saw the towers fall. I saw the smoke. Firsthand”–as though the simple fact of being an eye-witness to the event added weight to the overall argument of the piece. The invocation of a personal experience is, of course, a common rhetorical device in substantiation of an otherwise possibly contentious claim: “I saw it with my own eyes, therefore it must be true”. In the present instance, however, the fact of the towers falling is not in dispute, hence the personal witness statement would seem to serve no purpose. Yet the context of the statement suggests an alternative explanation: in order that “I saw the towers fall. I saw the smoke. Firsthand. We owe an apology to no one” be read cohesively as text and coherently as discourse the reader is required to supply the implied logical connectives: “Because I saw the towers fall [...] firsthand, we therefore owe an apology to no one”. What is happening in this text, it seems to me, is a sequence of interesting substitutions and inversions of causal chains. Taking as pivotal the following implied rhetorical schema (and with the “=>” loosely understood as something like “it follows that” or “therefore”):

I witnessed the attack on the WTC ["I saw the towers fall ..."] => the attack on the WTC happened (as reported)

the writer dismisses as “laughable if they weren’t so scary” some previously posted comments:

["Some of the claims and posts made here" predict as inevitable an event such as the attack on the WTC as a consequence of] US foreign policy => the attack on the WTC happened

An inversion of this (foreign policy => attack to attack => foreign policy) then gives us:

the attack on the WTC happened => [we do not need to apologise for] our foreign policy (i.e., “our foreign policy [which] may not be popular to some” is vindicated)

Finally, substituting (from the initial schema) the eye-witness statement for the statement of the event, we get:

I witnessed the attack on the WTC => we do not need to apologise for our foreign policy (i.e., “our foreign policy [which] may not be popular to some” is vindicated)

The key transformation in this sequence is the inversion. The consequence is that US foreign policy is now seen retrospectively to be justified by the subsequent attack on the WTC: “Our foreign policy may not be popular to some, but is that a reason to kill 3,000 innocent civilians?”

Explication of the final sentence of the comment (“How many of his own did Saddam kill PURPOSELY?”) I leave to you as an exercise.

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