Podcast Corner: Shows that dig deep on the 9/11 attacks
The attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001.
Saturday marks 20 years since ‘9/11’, when the world changed forever on September 11, 2001. “How did 9/11 the day become 9/11 the idea?” posits Dan Taberski (Missing Richard Simmons) on new series 9/12.
Taberski has had a busy year, with this series coming only a few months after The Line, about a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes in Iraq (a related Apple TV+ series is due soon), which we wrote about here in April.
Taberski says 9/11 the idea shaped the following 20 years, becoming a call to arms. In the series, he tackles topics like how satirical publication The Onion covered the attack (‘US vows to defeat whoever it is we’re at war with’), conspiracy theories, and how 9/11 should be memorialised.
All seven episodes of 9/12 are available on Amazon Music (PSA: Free with a Prime membership) and will arrive weekly on other podcast platforms from Wednesday.
Of course there are myriad shows and series that have sought to cover 9/11 over the past two decades. This American Life, whose archive stretches back to 1995, has numerous episodes on the subject, including from September 2001.
An anniversary episode, Ten Years In, is a particular standout as host Ira Glass talks to people who had appeared on the show over the previous decade. They include Hyder Akbar, an Afghan-American teen who moved to Afghanistan in 2002 after his father was tapped to become governor of Kunar province, and who subsequently fled when the Taliban came to power.
His interview becomes increasingly chilling, as he says “knowing that the use of force is something that's respected here, if you want to be relevant in there, you need to have the resources to be relevant”.
Our City. Our Story, from the 9/11 Memorial Museum, does what Taberski jokes about at the outset of 9/12 - it tells New Yorkers’ stories of that day. The short episodes, over two series, begin with Robert De Niro, who had to check his TV to believe what he was seeing with his own eyes.
Rudy Guiliani, though disgraced now, was dubbed America’s Mayor, in the aftermath of the attack, and in his 2016 interview, you can still hear the defiance in his voice. Activists, artists, and journalists are among the other voices heard on the podcast.
