World Trade Centre Towers thing (1 Viewer)

[pete]

"Officials in southwestern Pennsylvania said they have identified and cordoned off a second debris site about 2 to 6 miles away from the crash site of United Flight 93, the fourth hijacked plane in Tuesday's terror attack. Cell phone calls from passengers aboard the plane indicated the hijackers may have had a bomb and also that they were planning to try to retake the plane from the terrorists."

 

[billygannon]

Just to clarify something here....it's unlikely that a Sufi brotherhood were behind this. However, Al-Qaeda have come from a background where Sufi brotherhoods are a significant part of daily life. The network that could be involved may have features similar to that of a Sufi brotherhood.

What I was getting at is that Western society is facing an opposition that it has never known. We have always looked at the world through our own terms. We need to understand other ways of life and other cultures....the question of Why? is by far the most important.

However, I do think it is save to say that the vast majority of people around the world are deeply shocked by what happened on Tuesday.

 

[pete]

Even if you don't fancy reading all of this, just read the PS

Somewhere in the Land of Enchantment

9/15/01

Dear Friends,

Our second day on the road back to New York City...

I am awakened by the sounds of the "Star Spangled Banner" coming from the lobby of the hotel where we have spent the night in Flagstaff. The memorial
service has begun at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and it is on the TV in the lobby. I go down to check it out.

A group of older black women are standing there watching it, tears in their eyes. I am reminded by a sign we saw on the way into town on a Hopi Indian
store: "America Land of the Free Home of the Brave." You probably can't find two groups more denied the American Dream than these two and yet they
grieve like everyone else over the attack in New York.

Passing through the Indian reservations of Arizona and New Mexico you are struck by the abject poverty of these places, and reminded of the 500 years
of state-sponsored terrorism against these people, a virtual genocide. How many millions were killed by the American settlers and soldiers? I can't remember now. But the living results are brutally evident in the shacks and trailers along old Route 66.

My wife and I make our way into town and find a Catholic church, San Francisco de Asis, where a service is being held to honor the dead. The
church itself is remarkable for its matriarchal images, with a large mural of Mary and her mother and her family above the altar, and then a statue of
her in place of the usual crucified Jesus.

We stand, as there is no room to sit. Minutes go by and the service does not begin. The priest comes and takes a seat in the 7th row pew as if he
were just another mourner. After a long while, someone gets up from her pew and reads from the bible -- but the reading is not the one about vengeance
and bloodshed. Rather, it's about beating our swords into plowshares. Oops, off message!

We leave the church and both of us are filled with an overwhelming despair. We still have not heard from friends in Manhattan or from our friend Barbara who works at the Pentagon. We pass by a store -- "Guns and Groceries," the sign proclaims. On the way out of town, the cell phone rings. It is Barbara and her husband Sam calling from outside the Pentagon.
She tells me she is OK and that there is a large airplane wheel sticking out of the side of the building where she works as a clerical. The morning of the crash she was late for work because she was taking Sam to the
airport. I start to cry again. She says thanks and "Don't worry I'm OK," and I hear Sam cracking in the background "That's debatable" and they both
laugh.

I pull off the road in Winslow, Arizona, and tell Kathleen I want to get a picture of her on a corner. She doesn't know why and, knowing her intense dislike of The Eagles, I tell her it's a song by Jackson Browne (which is technically true; he co-wrote it). She obliges, but when she reads this I'll be in big trouble.

I continue to be amazed at the large number of people -- both on the radio and those we run into -- who are completely opposed to some half-cocked military response to what has happened. No matter what the media tells you or shows you, I am convinced there is a majority of Americans who, though they want justice and want to be protected from further attacks, do not
want George W. Bush to start sounding like Dr. Strangelove.

Speaking of Strangelove, this past week began with one of the most powerful pieces on "60 Minutes" in a long time. They laid it all out: How the United
States -- and specifically Henry Kissinger -- plotted to overthrow the democratically-elected president of Chile in the early 1970s. The plot succeeded, President Allende was assassinated, and thousands of other
Chileans were brutally tortured and murdered. Today, many within the new government of Chile would like to put Kissinger on trial for these acts of terrorism. Do you think the United States will give him up?

Well, that story was forgotten, 48 hours later, as quickly as it had been forgotten 30 years ago.

A few of you have written me to say, Please, Mike, don't talk about this stuff, at least not right now. We need to bury the dead.

I agree. And I apologize to any who have taken offense. No one wants to talk about politics right now -- except our installed leaders in Washington. Trust me, they are talking politics night and day, and those
discussions involve sending our kids off to fight some invisible enemy and to indiscriminately bomb Afghans or whoever they think will make us Americans feel good.

I feel I have a responsibility as one of those Americans who doesn't feel good right now to speak out and say what needs to be said: That we, the United States of America, are culpable in committing so many acts of terror and bloodshed that we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants. I know it's a hard thing to hear
right now, but if I and others don't say it, I fear we will soon be in a war that will do NOTHING to protect us from the next terrorist attack.

I have received more emails this week than ever before -- about a thousand every four hours. Ninety percent of them are from people who also refuse to
be drawn into some form of senseless bloodletting, and who agree that we need to find the right way to bring those to justice who committed these acts.

I have been touched by many of your comments and am so sorry I cannot respond to them while I am on the road. But I am sharing your feelings with those I meet (and, I have to say again, it is a Godsend to have an
invention like the Internet where I can travel across the country like this and be connected to so many thousands of other Americans .and to so many
foreigners who grieve for us and fear for what our leaders may do).

We pass over the Continental Divide and Rush Limbaugh babbles on about whom we must bomb. He signs off, and I am sure he is on his way down to the nearest recruiting station to sign up -- for surely he would not expect your son or daughter to risk their lives for freedom while he just sits back and enjoys his new half-billion dollar contract.

Coming into Albuquerque, Kathleen is leafing through the Frommer's travel guide for a place to spend the night. She finds what seems like a nice spot near the White Sands national park, but then reads this passage:

"Occasionally the road to the hotel is closed for nearby missile tests."

Yes, welcome to New Mexico, the "Land of Enchantment," just one big testing ground brought to you by the originators of every single weapon of mass
destruction known to man. We opt for the downtown Hyatt.

The hotel is like a ghost town. "Every convention cancelled," the lady at the counter tells us. I ask the bellman how many people are actually here tonight.

"9.9 percent occupancy," he tells me. Hmmm. Why not just say 10%?

I guess that would be asking for too much optimism on a night like this...

I will write again when we get to our next stop, Oklahoma City.

Yours,
Michael Moore
[email protected]
www.michaelmoore.com

PS. Three days ago, I learned from someone at ABC News that ABC had videotape -- an angle of the second plane crashing into the tower -- that
showed an F-16 fighter jet trailing the plane at a distance.

I have not shared this with you as I had not personally witnessed that tape myself and did not want to contribute to all the unsubstantiated rumors. It
just came across on the TV that the government admitted they did dispatch fighter jets when they knew the planes were off course.

From this point, I will pass on any censored information to those of you in the mainstream media who are being blocked from reporting.

Is it becoming more clear now that the plane that went down in Pennsylvania was shot down to prevent it from attacking its destination?

The truth is harrowing, unbearable -- but it must be told to us. A free people cannot make an informed decision if they are kept in the dark. Let's
hear ALL the truth NOW.

 

[egg_]

Scared by all the shit that's happened over the last week? Try reading this:

The Belly to do what needs to be done
By Tamim Ansary

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the
Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would
mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this
atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What
else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether
we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am
from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've
never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who
will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no
doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in
New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the
government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics
who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal
with a plan. When you think Taliban,think Nazis. When you think Bin
Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan"
think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the
Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first
victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in
there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international
thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The
answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A
few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000
disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food.
There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these
widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the
farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons
why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone
Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their
houses?Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate
their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from
medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at
least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the
Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away
and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they
don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over
Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the
criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making
common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've
been raping all this time.

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with
true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there
with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what
needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill
as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about
killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's
actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some
Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin
Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any
troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let
us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will
other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're
flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he
wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's
all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might
seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam
and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a
holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to
lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably
wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the
war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but
ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

(the above, by the way, is a 'commentary' from znet (www.zmag.org) - you pay $10 a month and get enlightening shit like this in your mail every morning)

 

[Bonzo]

George Bush is a dumbass for want of a better word. He will strike blindly just to satisfy the apparent public feeling on this. Its a shocking thing to happen(WTC bombing), but as the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, it is his responsibility to go after those responsible in a controlled and thoughtful way instead of bombing the shit out of the Afghani citizens and making them suffer even more.

 

[old]

Robert Fisk of the Independent, 16/9:

Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have learnt that the rule of law comes above revenge, President Bush appears to be heading for the very disaster that Osama bin Laden has laid down for him. Let us have no doubts about what happened in New York and Washington last week. It was a crime against humanity. We cannot understand America's need to retaliate unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was perpetrated – it becomes ever clearer – to provoke the United States into just the blind, arrogant punch that the US military is preparing.

Mr bin Laden – every day his culpability becomes more apparent – has described to me how he wishes to overthrow the pro-American regime of the Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia and moving on to Egypt, Jordan and the other Gulf states. In an Arab world sunk in corruption and dictatorships – most of them supported by the West – the only act that might bring Muslims to strike at their own leaders would be a brutal, indiscriminate assault by the United States. Mr bin Laden is unsophisticated in foreign affairs, but a close student of the art and horror of war. He knew how to fight the Russians who stayed on in Afghanistan, a Russian monster that revenged itself upon its ill-educated, courageous antagonists until, faced with war without end, the entire Soviet Union began to fall apart.

The Chechens learnt this lesson. And the man responsible for so much of the bloodbath in Chechnya – the career KGB man whose army is raping and murdering the insurgent Sunni Muslim population of Chechnya – is now being signed up by Mr Bush for his "war against people''. Vladimir Putin must surely have a sense of humour to appreciate the cruel ironies that have now come to pass, though I doubt if he will let Mr Bush know what happens when you start a war of retaliation; your army – like the Russian forces in Chechnya – becomes locked into battle with an enemy that appears ever more ruthless, ever more evil.

But the Americans need look no further than Ariel Sharon's futile war with the Palestinians to understand the folly of retaliation. In Lebanon, it was always the same. A Hizbollah guerrilla would kill an Israeli occupation soldier, and the Israelis would fire back in retaliation at a village in which a civilian would die. The Hizbollah would retaliate with a Katyusha missile attack over the Israeli border, and the Israelis would retaliate again with a bombardment of southern Lebanon. In the end, the Hizbollah – the "centre of world terror'' according to Mr Sharon – drove the Israelis out of Lebanon.

In Israel/Palestine, it is the same story. An Israeli soldier shoots a Palestinian stone-thrower. The Palestinians retaliate by killing a settler. The Israelis then retaliate by sending a murder squad to kill a Palestinian gunman. The Palestinians retaliate by sending a suicide bomber into a pizzeria. The Israelis then retaliate by sending F-16s to bomb a Palestinian police station. Retaliation leads to retaliation and more retaliation. War without end.

And while Mr Bush – and perhaps Mr Blair – prepare their forces, they explain so meretriciously that this is a war for "democracy and liberty'', that it is about men who are "attacking civilisation''. "America was targeted for attack,'' Mr Bush informed us on Friday, "because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.'' But this is not why America was attacked. If this was an Arab-Muslim apocalypse, then it is intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with America's stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather like some of that democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr Bush has been telling them about. Instead, they get a president who wins 98 per cent in the elections (Washington's friend, Mr Mubarak) or a Palestinian police force, trained by the CIA, that tortures and sometimes kills its people in prison. The Syrians would also like a little of that democracy. So would the Saudis. But their effete princes are all friends of America – in many cases, educated at US universities.

I will always remember how President Clinton announced that Saddam Hussein – another of our grotesque inventions – must be overthrown so that the people of Iraq could choose their own leaders. But if that happened, it would be the first time in Middle Eastern history that Arabs have been permitted to do so. No, it is "our'' democracy and "our'' liberty and freedom that Mr Bush and Mr Blair are talking about, our Western sanctuary that is under attack, not the vast place of terror and injustice that the Middle East has become.

Let me illustrate what I mean. Nineteen years ago today, the greatest act of terrorism – using Israel's own definition of that much misused word – in modern Middle Eastern history began. Does anyone remember the anniversary in the West? How many readers of this article will remember it? I will take a tiny risk and say that no other British newspaper – certainly no American newspaper – will today recall the fact that on 16 September 1982, Israel's Phalangist militia allies started their three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila that cost 1,800 lives. It followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon – designed to drive the PLO out of the country and given the green light by the then US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig – which cost the lives of 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all of them civilians. That's probably three times the death toll in the World Trade Centre. Yet I do not remember any vigils or memorial services or candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of Lebanon; I don't recall any stirring speeches about democracy or liberty. In fact, my memory is that the United States spent most of the bloody months of July and August 1982 calling for "restraint".

No, Israel is not to blame for what happened last week. The culprits were Arabs, not Israelis. But America's failure to act with honour in the Middle East, its promiscuous sale of missiles to those who use them against civilians, its blithe disregard for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under sanctions of which Washington is the principal supporter – all these are intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who plunged America into an apocalypse of fire last week.

 

[old]

Fisk, part 2:

America's name is literally stamped on to the missiles fired by Israel into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. Only four weeks ago, I identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in – of all places – Florida, the state where some of the suiciders trained to fly.

It was fired from an Apache helicopter (made in America, of course) during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when hundreds of cluster bombs were dropped in civilian areas of Beruit by the Israelis in contravention of undertakings given to the United States. Most of the bombs had US Naval markings and America then suspended a shipment of fighter bombers to Israel – for less than two months.

The same type of missile – this time an AGM 114-C made inGeorgia – was fired by the Israelis into the back of an ambulance near the Lebanese village of Mansori, killing two women and four children. I collected the pieces of the missile, including its computer coding plate, flew to Georgia and presented them to the manufacturers at the Boeing factory. And what did the developer of the missile say to me when I showed him photographs of the children his missile had killed? "Whatever you do," he told me, "don't quote me as saying anything critical of the policies of Israel."

I'm sure the father of those children, who was driving the ambulance, will have been appalled by last week's events, but I don't suppose, given the fate of his own wife – one of the women killed – that he was in a mood to send condolences to anyone. All these facts, of course, must be forgotten now.

Every effort will be made in the coming days to switch off the "why'' question and concentrate on the who, what and how. CNN and most of the world's media have already obeyed this essential new war rule. I've already seen what happens when this rule is broken. When The Independent published my article on the connection between Middle Eastern injustice and the New York holocaust, the BBC's 24-hour news channel produced an American commentator who remarked that "Robert Fisk has won the prize for bad taste''. When I raised the same point on an Irish radio talk show, the other guest, a Harvard lawyer, denounced me as a bigot, a liar, a "dangerous man'' and – of course – potentially anti-Semitic. The Irish pulled the plug on him.

No wonder we have to refer to the terrorists as "mindless''. For if we did not, we would have to explain what went on in those minds. But this attempt to censor the realities of the war that has already begun must not be permitted to continue. Look at the logic. Secretary of State Colin Powell was insisting on Friday that his message to the Taliban is simple: they have to take responsibility for sheltering Mr bin Laden. "You cannot separate your activities from the activities of the perpetrators,'' he warned. But the Americans absolutely refuse to associate their own response to their predicament with their activities in the Middle East. We are supposed to hold our tongues, even when Ariel Sharon – a man whose name will always be associated with the massacre at Sabra and Shatila – announces that Israel also wishes to join the battle against "world terror''.

No wonder the Palestinians are fearful. In the past four days, 23 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza, an astonishing figure that would have been front-page news had America not been blitzed. If Israel signs up for the new conflict, then the Palestinians – by fighting the Israelis – will, by extension, become part of the "world terror'' against which Mr Bush is supposedly going to war. Not for nothing did Mr Sharon claim that Yasser Arafat had connections with Osama bin Laden.

I repeat: what happened in New York was a crime against humanity. And that means policemen, arrests, justice, a whole new international court at The Hague if necessary. Not cruise missiles and "precision'' bombs and Muslim lives lost in revenge for Western lives. But the trap has been sprung. Mr Bush – perhaps we, too – are now walking into it.

 

[pete]

Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk were guests on Today FM's the Last Word this evening.

The Chomsky bit will be repeated on Today FM at 10am on Saturday morning.

(Listeners comment read out by Dunphy later in the show: "Tell that Robert Fisk to go fuck himself.")

 

[silo]

is there a transcript or realaudio of these interviews anywhere?

 

[Unclealo]

I've heard that the footage used by CNN showing Palestinians celebrating the Word Trade Towers attacks was infact Archive footage from the Gulf War showing Palestinians celebrating the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Apparently this has been confirmed by a BBC Archivist.

CNN the dirty war-mongering bastards!

 

[silo]

apparently, this isn't true, and originates from a (now quite distorted) chain email which originated in Brazil. the follow-up email saying, in effect, 'no, i got it wrong' hasn't had quite the same popularity. CNN used real footage which was only a few hours old.

the first casualty of war...

 

[Dan]

I was pretty pissed lastnight when I was watching Bush address the nation, so maybe I misinterpretted something. Did he claim that the fourth plane in pennsylvania was crashed purposely by the passengers to save other peoples lives? May I burn in hell if this is actually true - but I think that has to be the greatest load of bull I've heard. 100 or so people in a state of panic are not going to agree to sacrifice themselves to save others based on a mobile phone call. I'm sorry maybe I don't have much faith in my fellow humans, but I reckon that is bullshit. That plane was shot down without a doubt.

As far as the rest of his address was concerned..well what exactly did he say? I've never heard something so compicated put in such black and white terms. "You're either with us or you're with terrorism"

And as for being a world leader that is supposed to be leading us in the fight against terror - I've never seen someone look so scared. He addressed the world like a deer in headlights. He was so obviously scared it was just unbelievable.

 

[Pantone247]

its true he did look scared, or confused... a bit of both.

Did you see him get his tounge up Tomy Blairs ass!!, they gave Tony about 3 standing ovations for simply being there. (Actually almost everything Bush said got a standing ovation,,,,,).

Tony and Bush.......
Bush and Tony......*shudder*

 

[Bonzo]

[
I've heard that the footage used by CNN showing Palestinians celebrating the Word Trade Towers attacks was infact Archive footage from the Gulf War showing Palestinians celebrating the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Apparently this has been confirmed by a BBC Archivist.



This wouldn't have been the first time CNN doctored the news, so one could be forgiven for thinking the above is true. Go to www.whatreallyhappened.com to entertain your paranoid illusions. (i do)

 

[pete]

Tears Down the West Side Highway

9/22/01

Dear Friends,

The drive across New Jersey has been the longest portion of this trip across America. It is only 60 miles to New York City and I am having trouble keeping my eyes open. I had just pulled off the road in Allentown, PA, to throw some cold water in my face. Kathleen and I have grown very silent. It is the dread of what is ahead.

As we cross the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, the plume of smoke from the lower part of the island hovers, bright blasting searchlights attempting to crash through it. The college radio station from Fordham is playing Dylan's "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall."

Instead of making the turn south to go home down the West Side Highway, I go north and head toward the town where our daughter goes to college. It is one in the morning, and when we arrive on campus we note that every single light in the dorms is on (when do these kids sleep?).

We call Natalie and tell her we have made it home. She directs us to the nearest gate where she is with some other young women who are working on the school paper. We pull up, she comes out... and this is, as it always has been, the happiest moment of our lives. We hug her, and hug her again.

She is happy to see us, and she generously, good-naturedly, tolerates our weepy parental doting. She is, after all, the only reason we have made this drive. Nothing else matters at this point.

We eventually leave her to her own life and head toward New York City. It is now deep in the middle of the night and the radio plays "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson ("Here come the planes - - they're American planes!... hold me in your arms... your military arms...") and then the DJ says that he is going to play a song that they have never let him play before on the station. What an odd thing to announce, I think, considering we live in a free country where you can play whatever music you damn well please.

I recall the email I received the night before from a radio station manager in Michigan. He passed on to me a confidential memo from the radio conglomerate that owns his station: Clear Channel, the company that has bought up 1,200 stations altogether -- 247 of them in the nation's 250 largest radio markets -- and that not only dominates the Top 40 format, but controls 60% of all rock-radio listening.

The company has ordered its stations not to play a list of 150 songs during this "national emergency." The list, incredibly, includes "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "Peace Train," and John Lennon's "Imagine." Rah-rah war songs, though, are OK.

And then there was this troubling instruction: "No songs by Rage Against the Machine should be aired." The entire works of a band are banned? Is this the freedom we fight for? Or does this sound like one of those repressive dictatorships we are told is our new enemy?

The song the college DJ goes ahead and plays is, "Hey, War Pig," by Katrina and the Waves, and he dedicates it to the "all the war mongers out there." Yes, there is hope, the kids are all right.

We arrive at our apartment building and I am too tired to drop the vehicle off at the rental car place, so we unload, head upstairs, and hit the sack.

I awake at noon. A horrible stench has filled the apartment. I did not notice it a few hours earlier, but the winds have shifted. It is the odor others had warned me about. It is a smell I have never smelled. I am told by someone in the building that it is a combination of chemicals, rubber, sheetrock, and... he pauses. He does not want to list the final ingredient, and I do not want him to.

 

[pete]

(contd.)
I thank him and go back upstairs and close all the windows. I look at the cereal box I had left half-opened before our trip to L.A. I stare at this box for a long time. Nine days of ash has descended on the city. It is everywhere, microscopic, invisible, non-discriminatory in where it has landed. No part of the city is untouched, and all are treated equally to the smoke and stench, regardless of station in life. There is no way to turn away and ignore it.

I take the rental car back. As I park it, I look across the street and see our neighborhood firehouse consumed in flowers and candles. "They lost nine firemen," the rental woman tells me. "It's a pretty sad place."

There's a firehouse every few blocks in New York. Back in Michigan, I grew up across the street from a fire station and I have always loved the sound of that screeching siren. The (mostly) men who work down the street from us now in New York are our neighbors in the truest sense of the word.

They are quintessential New Yorkers, right to the bone, and when they are called to do their job (for which they are grossly underpaid), they never stop for a moment to think of themselves. I always enjoy shooting the breeze with these guys, and when possible, I've put them on my show, as they are natural-born comedians and wiseguys. I have never once complained about the wail of their fire trucks as they barrel down my street.

I walk across the street to pay my respects. A lone fireman spots me coming and approaches me, arms outstretched. He grabs me and hugs me. He says,
"Mike, thanks, thanks for everything you do for the..." I am stunned and embarrassed by this, and I cut him off. "Stop," I say, "I haven't done shit. I am here to thank you and to tell you how horribly sorry I am..." He cuts me off. "Shutupwillya! Lemme say what I need to say..."

He continues to thank me, I can't take this -- I HAVE DONE NOTHING BUT RETURN A DAMN RENTAL CAR -- and I break down in tears. "Oh, don't go gettin' mushy on me, Mike -- c'mon, we're Irish!" He laughs, I laugh, I grab him and hold him and these two big Irish lugs and crybabies make for quite a sight in the middle of a Manhattan street. Kathleen and I sign their book and we take down the name of the fund for the nine families of our neighbors. "Don't forget," our fireman friend says as we leave, "We need your prayers more than we need the donations."

I cannot go to work. But I have a film to finish. Our editor has been unable to make it in from New Jersey, but he is there now waiting for some word on what to do. I can't even think about this movie. I don't WANT to think about it because if I think about it I will have to face an ugly truth that has been gnawing through my head...

This started out as a documentary on gun violence in America, but the largest mass murder in our history was just committed -- without the use of a single gun! Not a single bullet fired! No bomb was set off, no missile was fired, no weapon (i.e., a device that was solely and specifically manufactured to kill humans) was used. A boxcutter! -- I can't stop thinking about this. A thousand gun control laws would not have prevented this massacre. What am I doing?

My wife does not want to go down to the memorial to the victims that has spontaneously taken over Union Square in the Village -- she is still in too much shock having returned to this sullen city -- but she encourages me to go, and I do.

The Square is filled with hundreds of people. But, more importantly, the walls and fences around Union Square are covered in a blizzard of "MISSING" posters of loved ones. Thousands of handbills, flyers, photos, notes -- all pleading to contact them should anyone know the whereabouts of their mother, father, son, daughter, infant.

Yet, all of us who stare at these faces, we know their "whereabouts." And the smoke, the ash, the odor is much thicker down here, just 20 blocks from The Site. The faces of the victims, culled from wedding photos, birthday party home videos, vacation snapshots, are striking in their diversity. Easily, the majority are African-American, Arabic, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish.

Their jobs at the World Trade Center are listed. They were clerks, secretaries, janitors, security guards, assistants, dishwashers, waitresses, receptionists -- all the people who HAVE to be at work first thing in the morning, the lower wage workers. The wall is also filled with the faces of brokers, lawyers, managers, accountants, insurance agents -- it is endless, it is everyone, it is America.

I am told that there may be over 500 "illegals" -- those less-than-minimum wage workers that the commerce of America depends on -- who are also among the dead, but there are no photos of them. Citizens from over 80 countries are victims of this attack and, remarkably, the country that seems to have the most people who were killed is the Muslim country of Pakistan.

For two hours I walk through Union Square, listening to the debates that rage in various small circles, between hippies and Army guys, Israelis and Palestinians, those for war and those against. They are heated, passionate -- but never do I sense the threat of violence between them. No police are in sight. "We are self-policed," one kid tells me. Others are singing or rapping, many are quietly crying.

I leave and go down to Canal Street. It is as far as they will allow civilians to go. The odor is now nearly unbearable. I tell the officer I would like to volunteer, to do anything that is needed -- carry buckets, lift, haul, relieve, whatever. He tells me that no more volunteers are needed. He says that, right now, they do not expect to find anyone alive.

The job they are doing is one of recovery of the dead and the removal of all the steel and concrete, and they have left these jobs to the professionals. I can't help but think they could still use an extra pair of hands -- surely, at least ONE person could still be alive! I remain upset and appalled that Wall Street has ordered its employees back to work -- to trade stocks! -- next-door to a mass, open graveyard of yet unburied
bodies. How cruel is this to the workers who must walk by, or to the dead who are treated to this sacrilege? And, in my mind, what IF someone was still down there alive? How can you be running around a stock market floor when you should be on your hands and knees digging out the possible survivors? I just don't get it...

 

[pete]

(contd.)
As I sit here in the early morning hours of Saturday, September 22, 2001, I cannot untangle much of the past 24 hours. I am exhausted from the trip, from all that has hit me upon returning to New York. I have to unpack eventually. What was it exactly I had packed all these bags for in the first place? Oh, yeah, The Emmys in L.A! Big friggin' deal now, eh? I tick off the list of everything that no longer matters.

I watch Bush speak in front of Congress, but I cannot answer him right now, I am tired. The mayor has drastically upped the death toll. My phone rings off the ... whatever phones ring off of these days. Calls from the BBC, CBC, Canal+, ABC (Australia), Swedish TV, Dutch TV -- all want me to appear live on their national primetime newscasts. Not a single American network has called.

Frankly, I don't want to be on anybody's TV show no matter where they are from, but I cannot help but feel this sinking feeling in my gut that the rest of the world wants to hear what I have to say, yet in my own country, I am to have no voice in the media (other than through these letters on the Web). This is MY country. I love MY country. Every channel and it's the same damn repetitive drumbeat WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR...

And yet, I have just driven 2,944 miles, a drive that began on the corner of Wilshire and the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, California. I have heard the voices of the scores of fellow Americans I met, the average Joes and Janes, who are NOT screaming WAR WAR WAR! Why can't their voices be heard?

Forget about me, I can barely utter a sentence anyway; I don't wanna go on no TV. But where is Noam Chomsky, or Howard Zinn, or the editors of "The Nation" or "Tikkun" or "The Progressive" or the thousands of college kids who protested at noon on Thursday on 148 American campuses? Don't they count? Is this still the America we believe in, the one we are being asked to defend?

Coming home tonight, I noticed a strange sound in the city. I did not hear a single car horn being honked! I have never heard that sound in New York City. No one was yelling, it was quiet and peaceful.

I called my dad on my cell phone. He tells me of things getting even worse back home in Flint, the city now bankrupt, the state preparing to take it over. The fire department has had to lay off over 50% of its firefighters. Fires now are just allowed to burn because they have neither the trucks nor the people left to fight them.

Then he said, "Mike, that guy you call 'The Boss' -- he's singing right now on TV!" The nationwide telethon for the September 11th victims has started. I could hear Bruce Springsteen singing in the background. My father (bless him and his Big Band soul at the age of 80!) knows how much I love Bruce and says, "let me hold the phone up close to the set so you can hear him," and he does, and I hear Springsteen sing these haunting words: "My city is in ruins, my city is in ruins... c'mon, rise up!"

I love my dad and my mom, my sisters, my wife and my daughter, and I am grateful for this life and for the privilege I've been given to live it with all of them. I come upstairs and Kathleen and I watch the rest of the telethon. Neil Young appears at one point, alone at the piano, and he does not sing one of his own songs. Rather, he sings the banned "Imagine." The Walrus had to have loved that one from where he was watching!

My wife looks over at me. The tears won't leave my eyes. I tell her what I was told today.

"Woody (our assistant editor) saw a rescue truck going down the West Side Highway to help in the relief effort," I tell her.

"On the side of the truck, it read 'FFD.'"

The Flint Fire Department.

All the way from our home.

To our home.

It was more than either of us could bear.

Yours,

Michael Moore
[email protected]
www.michaelmoore.com

Online (and better-formatted) edition of this letter:
http://MichaelMoore.com/2001_0922.html

 

[yojimbo]

without wanting to encourage the Nosferatu-boosters, I think I'm going to have to contribute to the growing stack of conspiracy theories about what happened in america. The one hijacked plane that didn't crash into a building was Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, and it crashed near Pittsburgh at 10.10 am, according to the Associated Press.

Several passengers had made phone calls from the plane after the hijacking was revealed but before the crash. One of them, Todd Beamer, spoke with a telephone operator and told her that he and two other passengers were going to 'try and do something' about the situation, apparently intent on trying to overpower the hijackers. He then put downt the phone and the operator reports hearing him say "Let's roll".

In recent days, it's become accepted in America that Beamer did in fact help bring down the plane, and his name has been invoked by, amongst others, President Bush.

But there's two facts which complicate the picture and which are no longer being reported. Firstly, again according to AP, Beamer made his call at 9:45 am, a full 25 minutes before the plane crashed. Was there a 25 minute struggle, before the passengers won out and overpowered the men at the controls? It seems unlikely any fight on a plane would last that long.

Secondly, there was another important call made from that flight before it crashed. An unnamed passenger had locked himself in one of the plane's bathrooms. He called an emergency dispatcher in Pennsylvania 'minutes' before the crash (again according to AP, though this report from the day of the attacks puts the time of the crash as '10am'. Since the first source cited is a precise timeline of events constructed a week later, i'd be inclined to trust that more), ie later than Beamer's call. He didn't mention any struggles on board (but he was in the toilet so he probably wouldn't have heard them).

But here's the important bit, from the report (Cramer is the dispatcher):

The man told dispatchers the plane "was going down. He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane and we lost contact with him,'' Cramer said.

So it seems the plane had some sort of explosion while in the air. Now, you can't draw any conclusions from this, but would this not fit the story -widely circulated, mostly by rumour, on the day- that the plane was shot down? After all, it did crash well over an hour after the first plane went into the WTC in new york, almost an hour after all airports were ordered to be shut down, and over 20 mins after the strike on the Pentagon. More than enough time to get military jets in the air to search for 'rogue' planes.

As I say, it's hard to draw a cast-iron conclusion. But even if the plane wasn't shot down, the way that even discussion of that possibility has been barred from the press and tv in america is suspicious: the most recent including the second passenger's quotes I can find on Yahoo! date from Sept 13th. Here's one of them, which discussed the possibilities in a bit of detail.

Anyway. Whatever happened, it was pretty horrible for all involved. And it doesn't make what Todd Beamer did any less impressive.

 

[yojimbo]

Nosferatu??? I meant to say Nostradamus. Doofus.
I've never even met a 'Nosferatu-booster'.

 

[billygannon]

Think of all those illegal Irish students now caught out there in the States...no documents to prove who they are, or showing that they are allowed to be there.
And is that you Jim, the Nosferatu-buster....wasn't that the silent-movie version of Buffy?