‘Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror’ inspects the 9/11 attacks and its consequences
Even after 20 years of the 9/11 attacks, the world is still affected by it and this docuseries has attempted to tell stories of the lived experiences
Andrew Card: I whispered into the president's ear, "America is under attack."
In the flashback it shows then-US president George W Bush listening as chief of staff Andrew Card tells him a second plane has hit the World Trade Center. Bush was reading with a group of children at the Emma E Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, at the time of the attack on 11 September 2001.
This is a scene from the Netflix docuseries 'Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror', which takes a deeper look into the event that changed the world in many ways 20 years ago.
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Directed by Brian Knappenberger, the series documents the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US, from the perspective of Al-Qaeda's roots in the 1980s to America's forceful response - both at home and abroad.
The series features five episodes and each episode features a wide range of interviews with survivors of the attack - US officials, former CIA members and veterans, as well as soldiers in the Afghanistan National Army, Taliban commanders and Afghan officials, warlords and civilians.
However, what the show fails to portray is how the people who lost their loved ones during the attack are still suffering, what the soldiers are going through or what social reform the US was actually able to do in Afghanistan.
In many scenes, the interviews felt dramatised rather than being authentic. Episode 5, 'Graveyard of Empires', raises some sincere questions on collateral damage, US drone strikes and the killing of innocent people.
Hina Rabbani Khan, a member of Parliament of Pakistan took a strong position against the drone strikes and in the documentary, she said, "The drone strikes had collateral damage that ran into thousands. Okay, what do you consider to be a legitimate target? And you know, eventually, if you take out all the fluff of it, it was any male who was over a certain age, and under a certain age, was a good target."
The docuseries portrays explicitly violent scenes of fighting, wounded individuals and war that only highlights the horrors of what the war did to Afghanistan. But it only shows the tip of the iceberg.
The film ends with an important question on finding peace and what it costs to human lives.
This is an average docuseries to recall the distressing memory of the 9/11 attacks and how it changed the world while upholding its relevance even during the recent times in international politics.
