Appalling Republican 9/11 "Tribute" Video Looks like Terrorist Recruitment Tape

I worked for three years in a newsroom after 9/11. I can tell you a hard and fast rule of thumb when it comes to video from 9/11. You can show the towers on fire, before they fall. You can show the rubble after the fall. You can not show the plane hitting the tower, the plane exploding into the tower, or the towers actually falling. Why? For some people the terror and the horror of that day are still real and still painful. If you were going to show the video, you had to have an explicit warning that what the person was about to see was painful.

I guess the Republicans are tired of that rule. In a 9/11 “tribute” video aired tonight at the convention, and shown to millions of Americans watching television, they showed the tower exploding, the tower falling and the blood of Americans. They also showed the Iran hostage crisis, the bombing of the barracks in Beirut and several shots of random pissed off Muslims. Nowhere in there did I see anything amounting to a “tribute.” Instead, what it consisted of was the type of scare tactics you would expect to see from a terrorist trying to recruit people to take on the United States. It gives me the heebie-jeebies to watch it. You can watch it, and you can watch the moving Olbermann response to the video which is the REAL tribute to the victims.

WARNING – CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES NOT SUITABLE FOR POLITICAL CONVENTIONS