September 11, 2014

Twitter/NYPost
h/t: JMG

*

Captured Moment: Obama Learned of Sandy Hook Shootings

The President reacts as John Brennan briefs him on the details of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The President later said during a TV interview that this was the worst day of his Presidency.  He looks as if he's been punched in the stomach and more is to come.

Compare his body language to that of G. W. Bush as he was briefed about the unfolding events of 9/11. The deer-in-the-headlights expression speaks volumes about his character, or lack thereof.

 

And so it goes.

*

Eleventh Anniversary - New Birth

Time-lapse video commemorating the 11th Anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy and bringing to life the birth of the new towers. Quite beautiful and awe-inspiring, at least to me.

And so it goes.
*

9/11 Ten Years. Let it Go!

I want no pictures, images of any kind of the towers, pentagon, open field.  There are enough in my memories to last 2 lifetimes. I want no communion with others. I am grateful to work Sundays, but today, especially today. All preaching will be on this single subject with the phrase "Never Again" ringing in our ears. I thought I would share this post by my friend, Elizabeth retelling her experiences.

It's titled "9/11 Cheeseburgers of Hope" and you'll understand why when you read the whole thing at her place.

I saw an announcement recently for a Taize Service at an Episcopal Church. It promised, "No towers. No testimonies. Just candles, chanting, prayers and silence."

Sounds good to me.

It's been pretty overwhelming to watch the media race to have the first, the most profound, the most visually graphic images of 9/11.

I've seen several really good videos produced by various organizations, some of which are reflections by people who were there. Others are about the 9/11 Memorial which opens this Sunday and the Museum which is scheduled to open next year.

And, I've read some powerful essays about the presence of Evil and how some have learned to confront it as well as reflections on what we have or haven't or still need to learn, 10 years later.

I think I'm done.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's important to mark events in time such as these. It's important to reflect and learn from history. It's very important to move on to hope and change which is hard to do unless you mark and reflect and learn.

I get that.

It's just that I have a few images of my own about those events and that place which is alternately called "The Pit" or "Ground Zero".

Things I saw with my own two eyes.

Things I heard with my own two ears.

Moments I experienced which are so profound they continue to pull at the corners of my heart all these many years later.

It's the dust that gets to me. It always is.

I remember the moment when one of the Fire Chiefs came into the Seamen's Church Institute where I had gone to volunteer after discovering that there were no bodies to tend to at St. Vincent's Hospital where I had originally gone.

He came into the front door asking where the boots were. It was the fourth pair he had changed that day. I looked down at his boots and saw that most of the rubber had melted right on his feet. One can only wonder how hot the ground was at "The Pit".

"C'mon in," I said, "We'll get you fixed right up. Have you had anything to eat? There's a 70 pound meatloaf upstairs and some killer mashed potatoes. Hungry?"

"Oh, hi, sister," he said, obviously thinking that I was a nun. A gentleman, he took off his helmut as a sign of respect. The nuns of his Irish Roman Catholic youth had taught him well.

When he moved his helmet, ashes flew everywhere. He looked at himself and started to slap the arms and legs of his fireman's suit, muttering apologetically, "There are ashes everywhere . . ."

And then, it hit him. He stopped mid-slap and sucked in his breath. "Ashes....," he said. "Everywhere....." He looked at me, his eyes filling with tears and said, "Ashes. . . .".

It took me a few seconds for my brain to register what he was saying, but I saw it in his tears.

"Ashes".

Not just pulverized concrete and cinder and metal. These were also the ashes of people - perhaps some of the very people he was searching to find.

Read 9/11 Cheeseburgers of Hope.

I want no dire warnings or fear-mongering from pundits and politicians.
I want only to be alone with a single candle, memories, and a few silent prayers.


And so it goes.
*

JMG: "That Day"

From Joe My God:

(This story makes its fifth and final annual appearance on JMG. I just wanted to run it once under a president other than Dubya.)

Manhattan, September 11th, 2001

That day, I got to my office on 42nd Street at about 8:55am. About ten minutes later, I got a call from Thomas in Orlando. "Honey, you should look out your window because a plane just hit the World Trade Center!"

I have a fabulous view of the Chrysler Building from my office, but to see the World Trade Center I had to go downstairs and walk over to Fifth Avenue. There was already a crowd on every corner, shielding their eyes against the morning sun. All we could see was a plume of smoke. Just as I got back into my office, the word spread that a second plane had struck.

A few minutes later someone reported that the subways had stopped running and it only took about another 15 minutes before office decorum began to dissolve. Davita, our normally stoic sales manager, began sobbing, worrying about getting home to her daughter in Brooklyn. Some of our staffers nervously took post at our windows overlooking Grand Central Terminal, watching the sky over the Chrysler Building one block away. We all tried calling our families but got nothing but busy signals.

Our CEO called us into the conference room at 10am and announced, "It appears that the United States is under attack. I'm suggesting that we all try to make our way to our homes at once. Please call the office tomorrow before you come in, to see what our situation is." His voice was overloud, his nerves overcoming his normally lilting Liverpool accent.

A moment later someone with a radio announced, "One of the towers just collapsed." That sent the office scrambling for the door. A few minutes later I was on the street. I headed towards my apartment on 22nd Street in Chelsea and had just turned south onto Sixth Avenue when the second tower collapsed. I watched the top half of the building slide from view. Everybody stopped walking and stood in silent horror. From our distance there was no noise.

As I continued walking I began to pass people in varying states of distress. Lines began to form in front of payphones as cellphones were now useless.

*Image from the web.

The rest is HERE. Including some powerful images.

More later.
*

Stupid News: Tea Baggin' and a Bow

CNN and Fox Noise are all over the really important issues facing the American people. Of course, you know what these stories are, don’t you?

Why it’s all about “tea bagging” or President Obama’s bow to the Saudi King while in London.

Yes folks, the likes of Wolf Blitzer (who should be taken behind the barn and bitch-slapped) and practically all the morons at Fox are obsessed with this bow thingy. Continuous coverage of that incident (playing the bit of tape over and over and over and over…and how Obama has demeaned this country. They're saying this with a straight face after 8 years of GWB?

Really? Let’s see…hm, what happened when, following the 9/11 attacks, George Bush (G*d, I hate typing that name) flew the entire bin Laden family out of the country while the American public remained grounded. Nothing! Absolutely NOTHING!!! No coverage of that little incident until the details appeared in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 did the so-called liberal mainstream media reluctantly begin investigating. Something that ought to have been exposed immediately after the attacks; not two years later.

No one was even curious that a single government approved jet was making stops in various states, much like an international Greyhound bus service picking up the clan, then spiriting them out of harm’s way. No one reported on the coordinated effort to execute the plan quietly and quickly.

And let’s not forget that GW kissed and held hands with prince Bandar Bush whenever he visited. No outrage there, either. WTF?

Now, the conservatives with their tea parties are going to tea bag the White House and many members of Congress. Well, it's clear that Larry (wide stance) Craig and David (diapers) Vitter are already drooling. However, one has to ask the hard question here: Does the ultra wingnut crowd even know what “tea bagging” is? After all, how can the White House be tea bagged when it ain’t got no testicles. I’m just askin’ is all.

Oh, and if you don't know the difference between tea-bagging a man and a woman, just leave a comment and I will explain - with graphics.

The stoopid, it burns!

More later? Maybe.

*

9/11 Responders Rally in DC

But can anyone tell me why I had to read this in a New Zealand Paper???

WASHINGTON DC - 02.21.08 - Over 200 9/11 First Responders, family members and supporters will be rallying on Capitol Hill this Tuesday, February 26th.

From 10:00am to 12:00pm, First Responders will rally on the West Lawn of Capitol Hill.

Scheduled speakers include Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (NY), Congressman Jerry Nadler (NY), Congressman Tim Bishop (NY) Congressman Dennis Kucinich (OH) and other Congressional leaders. Advocates of several 9/11 health organizations as well as family members and first responders from September 11, 2001 will also be discussing the health issues they currently face.

The rally is aimed to address the following issues:

* The federal government just cut 9/11 Health Care funding by 77%. A paltry $25 million was designated for fiscal year 2009, down from $108 million in 2008. This means every program in existence (including Mt. Sinai) will be operating on a severely reduced budget.

* This past December 2007, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Michael Leavitt canceled plans for the World Trade Center Business Process Center. This center was designed to provide treatment for the 10,000-plus First Responders who reside outside the New York metropolitan area, many of whom are seriously ill.

* The 9/11 Health & Compensation Act (aka the James Zadroga bill) has still not been passed. This very important piece of legislation that would help all 9/11 families has been ignored within Congress up until now--it is time to speak up to to get it passed!

After the event, 9/11 health leaders have several scheduled meetings, including with the offices of Congressmembers Eliot Engel, Jim Moran, Chris Smith, Albio Sires, John Conyers, Kristen Gillibrand, Gary Ackerman, Chris Murphy, Joe Donnelly, Lois Capps, David Drier, Duncan Hunter, John Murtha, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Gregory Meeks, Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, John Hall and Chris Shays and meetings with the offices of Senators John McCain, Judd Gregg, Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Dole, Chuck Schumer and John Warner.

The event is being organized and hosted by John Feal and the Fealgood Foundation (www.fealgoodfoundation.com)

And so it goes with our "liberal" media. Nothing to see here, move along.

*

9/11 Lies Ruin Life of Pilot

Items like this should really call into question the charges against many still detained at Guantanamo. From the London Times:

Six years of fighting for justice left Lotfi Raissi an emotional and physical wreck and his marriage close to ruin. But yesterday, the Algerian pilot falsely accused of training the September 11 terrorists heard, finally, that he was “completely exonerated” of any part in the attacks on the twin towers.

As Mr Raissi pored over the Court of Appeal’s densely worded judgment, the lengths to which the authorities had bent the rules to detain him in the febrile days after September 11 became clear.

Three of Britain’s most senior judges condemned the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service for abusing the court process, presenting false allegations and not disclosing evidence.

But it was not until page 44, paragraph 154, line 17 that Mr Raissi’s eyes settled upon the words he had been praying for. The judges ruled that the charge that he was a terrorist and had trained the September 11 hijackers was one of which he should be “completely exonerated”. His only “crime” was to learn his skills at the same Florida flying school as two of the hijackers.

**************************************

In Phoneix, Arizona, they came across a flight school called Sawyer Aviation where Hani Hanjour — who crashed an airliner into the Pentagon — had trained. The school was popular with Middle Eastern trainees and one of those at Sawyer at the same time as Hanjour was Mr Raissi.

He had, checks quickly established, left the US and was now living in Britain. On September 17, a letter from the legal attaché at the US Embassy in London was delivered to Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch.

“The FBI request that this matter be handled as expeditiously and discreetly as possible,” the letter said. The words “expeditiously” and “discreetly” were typed in bold.

Ten days later Scotland Yard executed its response to the American request. Armed officers smashed down the door of Mr Raissi’s flat in Colnbrook, Berkshire, not far from Heathrow, and arrested him and his wife at gunpoint. The media hailed the arrest in Britain of the first suspects in the global hunt for the men who planned the worst terrorist attacks ever seen. An extradition warrant was issued for Mr Raissi on a “holding charge” that he had failed to disclose a theft conviction on his US immigration application. But in the courts, British lawyers representing the US Government made much more serious allegations.

Mr Raissi, they said, was the “lead instructor” for the hijackers. The courts were told there was evidence that he falsified flight logs to hide the fact he trained Hanjour. Videotape had been found of Hanjour and Mr Raissi together. A notebook said to belong to Abu Doha, a major terrorist suspect, that had been found in London contained Mr Raissi’s phone number.

One by one, over the course of ten court hearings, Mr Raissi’s solicitor proved that the allegations and the evidence to support them were false, if not fabricated.

False? Fabricated? Are they referring to the Bush Administration? Nah!

The long article is HERE.

And so it goes.

*

USA on Warning List of Torturers

And this is from our neighbor to the north. Jeez!

Foreign Affairs suspects U.S. tortures prisoners
Mike Blanchfield, Ottawa Citizen
Published: Thursday, January 17, 2008
OTTAWA - A Foreign Affairs document has identified the United States and Israel as countries it suspects of practicing torture.
The document also defines such U.S. interrogation techniques as blindfolding and forced nudity as torture.
The emergence of the document - a PowerPoint presentation meant to instruct Canadian diplomats on how to recognize torture cases abroad - is bound to strain relations with the two countries that Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has sought to strengthen during his two years in power.

Read the whole piece HERE.

I don't know about you, but I am so over the current state of the country at this point that if I hear anyone even remotely suggest that this president did a good job at anything, I'll lose my lunch.

And so it goes.

*

Wear Orange Friday to Protest Gitmo

The ACLU is organizing a nationwide protest this Friday, January 11, to protest the ongoing shame that is Guantanamo Bay. It's a rather innovative idea, wearing orange that day (though I'm not sure I own any orange, I'm a winter). Seriously, it's a novel idea for a protest and a worthy cause. Find out more via the ACLU's Web site here.

More later.

*

Falwell – Fare(not so)well!

I have remained silent on the death of our pasty, porcine pastor for a self-selected proper length of time. Sort of like sitting Shiva with a tambourine. (And wouldn't the very idea of Shiva drive him batshit crazy?) When I read that he was found dead not long after gorging himself on a breakfast of all kinds of pork flesh, well I thought, if his bloated "vessel" made it across the river Styx, Lucifer probably planned a pig roast and party in hell that day. Oh, maybe even all week.

No longer in mourning black and back in my festive purple, here is offered a few of his many hits:

From the Carpetbagger Report

March 1980: Falwell tells an Anchorage rally about a conversation with President Carter at the White House. Commenting on a January breakfast meeting, Falwell claimed to have asked Carter why he had “practicing homosexuals” on the senior staff at the White House. According to Falwell, Carter replied, “Well, I am president of all the American people, and I believe I should represent everyone.” When others who attended the White House event insisted that the exchange never happened, Falwell responded that his account “was not intended to be a verbatim report,” but rather an “honest portrayal” of Carter’s position.

August 1980: After Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith tells a Dallas Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” Falwell gives a similar view. “I do not believe,” he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.” After a meeting with an American Jewish Committee rabbi, he changed course, telling an interviewer on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “God hears the prayers of all persons…. God hears everything.”

July 1984: Falwell is forced to pay gay activist Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle. During a TV debate in Sacramento, Falwell denied calling the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches “brute beasts” and “a vile and Satanic system” that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” When Sloan insisted he had a tape, Falwell promised $5,000 if he could produce it. Sloan did so, Falwell refused to pay and Sloan successfully sued. Falwell appealed, with his attorney charging that the Jewish judge in the case was prejudiced. He lost again and was forced to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.

October 1987: The Federal Election Commission fines Falwell for transferring $6.7 million in funds intended for his ministry to political committees.

February 1988: The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a $200,000 jury award to Falwell for “emotional distress” he suffered because of a Hustler magazine parody. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, usually a Falwell favorite, wrote the unanimous opinion in Hustler v. Falwell, ruling that the First Amendment protects free speech.

February 1993: The Internal Revenue Service determines that funds from Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour program were illegally funneled to a political action committee. The IRS forced Falwell to pay $50,000 and retroactively revoked the Old Time Gospel Hour’s tax-exempt status for 1986-87.

March 1993: Despite his promise to Jewish groups to stop referring to America as a “Christian nation,” Falwell gives a sermon saying, “We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”

1994-1995: Falwell is criticized for using his “Old Time Gospel Hour” to hawk a scurrilous video called “The Clinton Chronicles” that makes a number of unsubstantiated charges against President Bill Clinton — among them that he is a drug addict and that he arranged the murders of political enemies in Arkansas. Despite claims he had no ties to the project, evidence surfaced that Falwell helped bankroll the venture with $200,000 paid to a group called Citizens for Honest Government (CHG). CHG’s Pat Matrisciana later admitted that Falwell and he staged an infomercial interview promoting the video in which a silhouetted reporter said his life was in danger for investigating Clinton. (Matrisciana himself posed as the reporter.) “That was Jerry’s idea to do that,” Matrisciana recalled. “He thought that would be dramatic.”

November 1997: Falwell accepts $3.5 million from a front group representing controversial Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to ease Liberty University’s financial woes.

April 1998: Confronted on national television with a controversial quote from America Can Be Saved!, a published collection of his sermons, Falwell denies having written the book or had anything to do with it. In the 1979 work, Falwell wrote, “I hope to live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!” Despite Falwell’s denial, Sword of the Lord Publishing, which produced the book, confirms that Falwell wrote it.

January 1999: Falwell tells a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., that the Antichrist prophesied in the Bible is alive today and “of course he’ll be Jewish.”

February 1999: Falwell becomes the object of nationwide ridicule after his National Liberty Journal newspaper issues a “parents alert” warning that Tinky Winky, a character on the popular PBS children’s show “Teletubbies,” might be gay.

September 2001: Falwell blames Americans for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

November 2005: Falwell spearheads campaign to resist “war on Christmas.”

February 2007: Falwell describes global warming as a conspiracy orchestrated by Satan, liberals, and The Weather Channel.

More later.

*

September 11 Messenger's Bag: Fascinating!

This amazing piece is from Esquire Magazine and is written by the owner of the bag. Just amazing how the Bushies politicized even the air quality to get what they wanted.

Thomas Cahill squirms in his swivel chair. He's wearing a green-and-red wool sweater covered with pills, eyeing the white garbage bag on the battered metal desk. FedEx delivered the bag last week. Cahill is impatient as the photographer documents everything: the bag, the dust-collection machine, Cahill himself. Staring at the bag with a glint, the broad, six-foot former high school tackle looks like a kid who can't wait for his parents to stop snapping pictures of him near the tree on Christmas morning.

For Cahill--for a lot of people, actually, although they don't know it yet--this bag holds a lot of answers. It has been sealed shut for more than five years, and you should have heard the excitement in Cahill's voice when he found out it existed.

Man, five years. That long?

"Are we ready yet?"

He is sixty-nine years old. In the four decades he has taught physics and conducted air-quality research here at the University of California at Davis, Cahill has seen a lot. Five years ago, he stood near the burning, pissing rubble at ground zero for weeks, taking samples, testing, telling people the air wasn't as safe as the government said it was. To the Environmental Protection Agency, and even to the president, he became a pest, a role of which he is proud.

Today, though, today is different. "This is so exciting," he says to me, actually rubbing his hands together. "We have no other samples from September 11 except your backpack. It will give us a snapshot of what people were actually breathing, which will help the doctors enormously in knowing what to treat." He told me this over the phone, before I arrived from New York to witness the opening. Now, even with me standing there, one of the people who breathed in whatever he's about to discover, he repeats it. Exuberantly. "I'm sorry for you," he says, and he means it. "But I'm also delighted!"

My black messenger bag, which is inside the white plastic blob on the metal table, is Cahill's holy grail. When Esquire called, told him I had kept it in my closet for the last five years, and asked him to test it for toxins, Cahill was stunned. Thousands of tons of debris blew through downtown Manhattan as each of the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11, but no one--not the city, not a lab at nearby NYU, not the EPA--seems to have any primary evidence from inside the plume itself. A heavy rainstorm on September 14 rinsed much of the floating debris from the air, and the city was already hastily sweeping the streets and scrubbing the buildings in a mad scramble for normalcy. Scientists hadn't even arrived on the scene. (Before the bag, the closest Cahill had ever come to finding a primary source was an air filter on an office desk, but the debris had fused to the filter and was too difficult to measure.) What the rains didn't clear was quickly contaminated by the stinky diesel trucks rolling in and out of ground zero and the chemical fire raging a few stories below the street. By the time the EPA began telling people the downtown air was safe, three days after September 11, any chance of isolating exactly what happened in the initial moments of the disaster--what was in the clouds that engulfed more than five thousand people, including me, in a matter of seconds--was presumed lost.

Why did I preserve my bag that day? I can't say. I had just seen a building that took six years and eight months to build aerate in twelve seconds. I wasn't really thinking, just doing. I had walked the twenty blocks to my apartment among the cavalcade of refugees heading uptown, all of us looking like pale, disentombed corpses spreading out among the living. Once home, I stripped, then showered, but my skin still itched, as if someone had switched my cotton towels with pink fiberglass insulation. I threw my khakis and sneakers away--no way the lady at the wash-and-fold was going to touch those. But not my Manhattan Portage messenger bag.

GO! Read the whole piece HERE. This is important information.

More later.
*