Category: 9-11

I feel like I should say something about the fifth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks.

Flipping through the TV, skimming through the radio, leafing through the paper … there’s so much being said, some too tragic to listen to, some to blatently manipulative to bear.

The one thing I heard that brought it all home — was, ironically, a replay of the coverage.

This morning, after I got up, I had the TV on — and MSNBC was rerunning their coverage of that morning. And, as I watched, just off-camera, the second plane plowed into the WTC …

The fear, the uncertainty, the violence of that morning — authentic in a way that five years later cannot be recalled.

It’s difficult to think of what to say to the British people mourning their own analog of 9-11 today.  Words of encouragement seem trite, words of fellow mourning seem maudlin, words of camaraderie seem facile.

Even comparing it to 9-11 feels wrong. 

Perhaps it is a sign of how polarized things have become, that there’s not only the burden of coming up with dealing with others’ grief, but the concern that, no matter what one says, someone will jump on it as a political statement in favor of/opposition to something or another.

Maybe it’s just enough to acknowledge it happened, and let them carry on.

While I’m sure it will not satisfy the various 9-11 conspiracy theorists out there, the Defense Dept. has released a video of Flight 77 striking the Pentagon. The government had previously refused to release the video, and it was obtained under a Freedom of Information Act petition by Judicial Watch.

Judicial Watch filed the freedom of information request in 2004, but the Pentagon refused to release the video because it was part of the investigation involving al-Qaeda plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, the group said.

This February the group sued the government over its refusal, saying there was “no legal basis” for it.

Washington agreed to release the video after a court sentenced Moussaoui to life in jail for his role in 9/11 earlier this month, a Judicial Watch spokeswoman told the BBC.

It’s actually not a very good video (“Fake! Clumsy fake!” I can already hear the cries), since it’s from a slow security camera near the site.

A summary of the current state of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and their theories, drawing parallels to the JFK assassination (though further enabled, crack-like, by the Internet).

For Tarpley and others, this was a slam dunk: September 11 was a holocaust-as-ordered by the neocon cabal Project for the New American Century, which, like its Svengali, Leo Strauss, recognized the U.S. masses to be meth-addled, postliterate, post-logical lard-asses, a race of “sheeple” that would never rise to inherit the mantle of post–Cold War world-dominators without “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” In other words, a new Pearl Harbor like the old Pearl Harbor, which Roosevelt was supposed to have known about and used as an excuse to get us into World War II.

Pearl Harbor, the Reichstag fire, take your pick. What mattered was that 3,000 human beings were dead, freeing Manchurian Candidate Bush to decree his fraudulent War on Terror, a Social Darwinian/Hobbesian/with-us-or-against-us struggle to corner the planet’s dwindling bounty—a global conflict without end in which only the strong, the white, and the Republican would survive.

Of course, there’s dissent within the “9/11 Truth” movement. Many of them don’t like talking about the Pentagon, since some theorists deny the attack there was by plane, while others, citing eye-witnesses, think such denial discredits the cause. Allowing, of course, for the possibility that the deniers are not, themselves dupes, patsies, or agents provocateurs for the conspirators themselves.

Deeper into late-night-talk-radio, Da Vinci Code territory are numerous incarnations of the New World Order MIHOP [“Made It Happen On Purpose”], defined by Nick Levis as the work of “a global ruling elite seeking greater control of the world Zeitgeist.” Ever elastic, NWO MIHOPs often date back to secret societies like the Knights Templar, founded in 1118 during the First Crusade. (Bush’s alleged slip of calling the terror war a “crusade” was a key hint to the real, if surreal, agenda.) The continuity is clear to any student of the hidden history. The Templars begat the Freemasons (look at the pyramid-meeting-the-eye on every dollar in your pocket, fool!), from whom emerged the nefarious Illuminati, and onward to current standard-bearers like Yale’s Skull and Bones society (both Bushes are Bonesmen; John Kerry, too), the Council on Foreign Relations, and the blue-helmeted armies of the United Nations.

Of course, however crazy the conspiracy theories sound, they do have one element that keeps folks, if not convinced, at least open to the suggestion

As 9/11 Truth advocates know well, the veracity they seek is unlikely to meet the ontological standards of Saint Anselm. They’ve got people on their side like the “WebFairy,” who runs a site “proving” the towers were not hit by planes but holograms, or “ghost planes.” Still, the truth movement wields one irrefutably puissant weapon in its struggle. As Nick Levis says, “Would you believe anything George W. Bush told you?”

Interesting article from PM debunking sixteen “popular” conspiracy theories regarding 9/11.

Healthy skepticism, it seems, has curdled into paranoia. Wild conspiracy tales are peddled daily on the Internet, talk radio and in other media. Blurry photos, quotes taken out of context and sketchy eyewitness accounts have inspired a slew of elaborate theories: The Pentagon was struck by a missile; the World Trade Center was razed by demolition-style bombs; Flight 93 was shot down by a mysterious white jet. As outlandish as these claims may sound, they are increasingly accepted abroad and among extremists here in the United States.

To investigate 16 of the most prevalent claims made by conspiracy theorists, POPULAR MECHANICS assembled a team of nine researchers and reporters who, together with PM editors, consulted more than 70 professionals in fields that form the core content of this magazine, including aviation, engineering and the military.

For example:

CLAIM: Photographs and video footage shot just before United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) show an object underneath the fuselage at the base of the right wing. The film “911 In Plane Site” and the Web site LetsRoll911.org claim that no such object is found on a stock Boeing 767. They speculate that this “military pod” is a missile, a bomb or a piece of equipment on an air-refueling tanker. LetsRoll911.org points to this as evidence that the attacks were an “inside job” sanctioned by “President George Bush, who planned and engineered 9/11.”

FACT: One of the clearest, most widely seen pictures of the doomed jet’s undercarriage was taken by photographer Rob Howard and published in New York magazine and elsewhere (opening page and at right). PM sent a digital scan of the original photo to Ronald Greeley, director of the Space Photography Laboratory at Arizona State University. Greeley is an expert at analyzing images to determine the shape and features of geological formations based on shadow and light effects. After studying the high-resolution image and comparing it to photos of a Boeing 767-200ER’s undercarriage, Greeley dismissed the notion that the Howard photo reveals a “pod.” In fact, the photo reveals only the Boeing’s right fairing, a pronounced bulge that contains the landing gear. He concludes that sunlight glinting off the fairing gave it an exaggerated look. “Such a glint causes a blossoming (enlargement) on film,” he writes in an e-mail to PM, “which tends to be amplified in digital versions of images–the pixels are saturated and tend to ‘spill over’ to adjacent pixels.” When asked about pods attached to civilian aircraft, Fred E. Culick, professor of aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, gave a blunter response: “That’s bull. They’re really stretching.”

Good stuff. Not that it’s likely to have much effect on the folk who’ve already bought into their particular paranoia.

(via GeekPress)

I think that’ll do it for today.

One of the recurring J’accuse rumors related to 9-11 is the idea that the White House secretly shuttled out of the US high-ranking Saudis, especially members of the bin Laden family — as part of some secret deal with the devil. It’s supposed to be part of the charges that Michael Moore dallies with in his new Fahrenheit 911 flick.

But now it seems the mystery who gave the okay for all this has been solved, without implicating the Bush or his political operatives. And it’s been solved by someone who’s been very much in the slam-the-president news of late.

Richard Clarke, who served as President Bush’s chief of counterterrorism, has claimed sole responsibility for approving flights of Saudi Arabian citizens, including members of Osama bin Laden’s family, from the United States immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In an interview with The Hill yesterday, Clarke said, “I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again.”
Most of the 26 passengers aboard one flight, which departed from the United States on Sept. 20, 2001, were relatives of Osama bin Laden, whom intelligence officials blamed for the attacks almost immediately after they happened.
[…] “It didn’t get any higher than me,” he said. “On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn’t get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI.”
[…] Clarke said yesterday that the furor over the flights of Saudi citizens is much ado about nothing. “This is a tempest in a teapot,” he said, adding that, since the attacks, the FBI has never said that any of the passengers aboard the flight shouldn’t have been allowed to leave or were wanted for further investigation.
He said that many members of the bin Laden family had been subjects of FBI surveillance for years before the attacks and were well-known to law-enforcement officials. “It’s very funny that people on the Hill are now trying to second-guess the FBI investigation.”
The Sept. 11 commission released a statement last month declaring that six chartered flights that evacuated close to 140 Saudi citizens were handled properly by the Bush administration.

I still expect to see this one pop up on the conspiracy theory boards, though.

(via Roger L. Simon)

The PDB of 6 August 2001.

News flash: Osama Bin Ladin wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US! Well … duh.

Well, despite my ranting regarding keeping a day of silence on 9/11, I actually did pretty much that thing, after that initial post. I didn’t stay offline — I ended up checking most of my regular haunts. But most folks, too, had little to say, aside from an initial commentary.

Actually, all things considered, at most of the places I visited it was a day curiously without rancor. 9/11 not only revealed that we in the US had been living in something of a fairyland of childish ignorance, but the reaction to it revealed some serious fissures in American self-image, vision, and political philosophy. For all the venom that has been spewed (from all sides) over the last two years, yesterday was remarkably calm.

What I did avoid was listening much to the radio. I listened to music, instead, courtesy of the van’s CD player.

Rather than write up something long and tediously maudlin, I’ll simply point you at my 9/11 category, which has my previous posts on the topic, starting on The Day.

I will add this:

It is not time to “put it all behind us.” It is not time to “get over it.”

Where I “dwell” on 9/11, it is not to wallow in self-pity as a victim, or to wallow in recriminations as to what we did to bring this upon us, or to obsess on killing everyone who looks at us crosswise. It is to remember what happened, remember that there are people who would do such things, and to try and figure out how to keep it from happening again.

I don’t have the answers. I think most of the steps we have taken since then have been the correct ones, though not all of them (and not even the correct ones have been executed as well as they should).

I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t have the five year view, let alone the fifty.

But I will remember.