![]() President Bush and senior staff in the holding room at Emma E Booker School, Sarasota, Florida, shortly after the second tower had been hit. “Prayer can be very comforting,” he says here. Bush also called for those around him to stop and pray, more than once, while still in the eye of a storm of unknown lethality and proportion. At first, we see his notorious folksy simplicity, apparent in his eerily counterintuitive decision to ignore, for several long minutes, the news about the second tower being hit, for fear of being impolite to a class of Florida seven-year-olds having a presidential visit. I was petrified” – and the deputy communications director, who got flustered when Bush’s doctor handed out anti-anthrax pills and took his whole week’s ration in one hit.Ĭhiefly, though, this is an insight into the mind of the star interviewee: George W Bush. ![]() ![]() We hear from the situation room captain, who recalls having to brace herself against the president’s desk as Air Force One made a steep emergency takeoff – “I went partially weightless. But as every relevant government official shares their recollections on camera, the vivid pictures are outstripped by personal anecdotes. The film’s archive footage has plenty of Adam Curtis moments, such as Bush killing a fly on the Oval Office desk, seconds before giving the gravest speech of his life, to underline that every moment of 11 September had something odd or terrifying in it. Here, it is a horrifyingly tragic but also propulsive story, with twin narratives following the president’s movements and the developing carnage on the ground, minute by minute. That day has often been described as a disaster movie no screenwriter would dare imagine. Nevertheless, 9/11: Inside the President’s War Room (BBC One) gives the sensation of being in the room in a way that few documentaries ever have. President George W Bush and his advisers, afraid for their own safety and constantly searching for information, were on the move all day and had to conduct their business in airbase bunkers, the back room of a school and aboard the president’s jet, Air Force One. But on 11 September 2001, when planes hijacked by al-Qaida terrorists destroyed the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and took the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans, the chaos was such that there was no single “room”. T here is a particular kind of political documentary that tries to put us “in the room”, to tell us how historic decisions were made and how the fallible humans who made them felt.
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