“9/11: Inside The President’s War Room”: the official version | BBC documentary on the attack on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers

9/11: inside the president’s war room 6 points

United States, 2021.

Direction and screenplay: Adam Wishart.

Duration: 90 minutes.

Testimonials by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

First on the Apple TV + platform

It’s not another week in terms of documentaries. Major cable channels and streaming platforms echo the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with various productions that approach these events from different angles. Of all, the most interesting is 9/11: inside the president’s war room, available on Apple TV +. An interest that comes from the high journalistic value involved in the concentration in an hour and a half of dozens of exclusive testimonies to the principal authorities of the United States during these dark hours, of the president George bush until the then national security adviser Condoleezza rice and the secretary of state Colin Powell, through various White House officials and senior executives from all security agencies.

Produced by the platform in collaboration with the BBC, Inside the President’s War Room It chronologically describes how September 11 was experienced from the very center of power. It all starts shortly after 6 a.m., with Bush’s daily trot with his security guards, before the first meeting to receive the daily CIA report. “No news,” they told him. They were wrong. Hours later, as Bush visited an elementary school in Florida and read the story “The Pet Goat” to second-graders, the first reports of a plane crashing into the Twin Towers arrived. An airplane that was assumed to be small, when the first theory was that of an accident, as Bush himself admits. Until the second crashed, then things changed. The famous scene takes place of an assistant approaching the President’s ear to tell him the bad news. “With the second, it was already an attack; with the third, a declaration of war, ”explains the Texan, very comfortable in the role of retired cowboy entrusted to him by documentary filmmaker Adam Wishart. In fact, all are very calm in their answers, knowing the tone of the “official version” of Inside the President’s War Room.

Let no one expect revelations with historical perspective or contextual analysis, because Wishart is interested in a sort of retrospective present, a retraction to the dynamics of government in the face of a series of events that everyone agrees to qualify as unexpected. By alternating these direct interviews with archive news footage, Inside the President’s War Room constructs a choral story of an indisputable narrative tension crossed by perplexity and surprise in the face of the unprecedented. Once on board the presidential plane, which took off so quickly that some passengers could not even tighten their seat belts, an information bubble occurred, which was only passable when they were flying over a city: Internet was not possible at an altitude of 10,000 meters.

Almost in passing, they learn of the fall of the third plane on the Pentagon and that of the fourth in an uninhabited area of ​​Pennsylvania. The fate of those around him is uncertain for long hours for the simple reason that no one knew where or when a new attack might take place. Until they ended up in a bunker several meters underground. There were so many people that at one point oxygen started to run out, forcing the second-tier officials to leave. Many heard there for the first time the name of Osama bin Laden, which would give rise to the so-called “war on terrorism”. But this, for In the president’s war room, is another story.