Wargames

There’s a very interesting site that I found via Atrios that, among other things, has a very comprehensive look at the events of Sept. 11^th^ in this timeline. They seem to have done a good job of piecing together the various news reports about the events of that day, comparing them and questioning the many inconsistencies that exist.

From there, I started browsing through the rest of the source site, the Center for Cooperative Research. Looking at another page on the site, a more straightforward timeline of Sept. 11^th^, imagine my surprise when I saw a picture captioned ‘NORAD’s war room in Cheyenne, Wyoming,’ that, rather than being a picture of the Norad control room, is actually a screen shot from the 1983 adventure/suspense film Wargames!

As important as I think it is that we continue to investigate the events of Sept. 11^th^, and the events surrounding it, when a site does something like this — no matter how good their overall intentions may be — it only serves to damage their credibility. The webmaster of the Center for Cooperative Research should either replace that photo with a real photo of NORAD (if such a photo exists in the private sector), or simply remove the Wargames photo. Leaving it there can only damage how seriously people take their site, no matter how much effort they’ve put into their research.

Update: I e-mailed my concerns about the picture to the webmaster, and they’ve replaced the former photo with one from Discover magazine. While I’ve never been in NORAD, and therefore can’t assert to the photo’s accuracy firsthand, it does look far more likely to be the real thing (more realistic graphics on the monitors, more realistic computer terminals, less flashy overall — and I don’t recognize it from a movie!).