Made my way downtown to pay my respects to the heroic dead that were murdered in Islam's war against the west. As soon as I came up from the subway I was surrounded by 9/11 truthers and America Haters and insane conspiracy theorists.
Ina Castro, center, and her son Jonathan Rivera, right, are cry during a
ceremony to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Jose Raymond Castro, Ms. Castro's
brother, was a waiter at Windows on the World restaurant at the top of
the World Trade Center and died in the attack
How far we've come ......."Seven years after 9/11 come Thursday, I don't think we really know what we, as a people, are all about. Are we still fighting "terrorism"? Are we still exporting democracy? What principles have we chucked over these years? What principles have held fast?" (Diana West here)
The following are a selection of MEMRI TV clips about 9/11
from this year:
MEMRI
TV Clip No. 1847 - Egyptian Researcher Muhammad Al-Said Idris: The American
Response to 9/11 Proves that the Official Version of Events Is False
MEMRI
TV Clip No. 1808 - Lebanese Sunni cleric Maher Hamoud: I Admire Bin Laden, But
Would Not Have Sanctioned 9/11 Attacks - Except for Pentagon, CIA Headquarters,
and White House
MEMRI
TV Clip No. 1585 - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Repeats Proposal for a
"Zionist State" in Canada or Alaska and Suggests an International Committee of
"Truth-Seekers" to Examine the Holocaust and 9/11
MEMRI
TV Clip No. 1573 - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: I wanted to Visit
Ground Zero to Prevent 9/11 from Becoming Another "False Idol" Like the
Holocaust
If you haven't seen the Naudet documentary, I BEG YOU to watch. The Nadet brothers happened to be filming a documentary on NY firefighters. The rest is history ...... 9/11 BY THE NAUDET BROTHERS PART 1 OF 6
Narrated by Robert DeNiro
It is unfortunate that the Academy Awards failed to nominate the documentary “911"
for Best Documentary in 2002. Made by Gedeon and Jules Naudet it is
arguably the greatest documentary ever filmed. Two French brothers who
look dissimilar arrived in New York City circa 1989. Was greatness
predicted in both at an early age?
As many people know, the
Naudets were actually filming a documentary about a rookie firefighter
when the World Trade Center was attacked. Their skill level with the
pre-9/11/01 footage is obvious; somehow the Naudets were turning a
group of firefighters into skilled actors. All of the firefighters from
Engine 7 that we see in the production appear to be completely at ease
with being filmed candidly. One singular example of the willingness of
this cast to perform is seen when skinny, tall, amiable Jules is
preparing food. A firefighter moving behind Jules expertly cracks that
if Jules continues to cook they’ll all be able to wear his shirts. It
is difficult imagining this gag was accomplished with a single take,
leading one to wonder how much of the rest of it was recorded this way.
‘911’ is a curious blend of documentary and historical drama. A
number of the montages we see appear impossible. For example, to
represent the morning of 9/11/01 we see breakfast on the firehouse
griddle, a smiling Chief enjoying a quiet moment and firemen putting on
their protective gear and exiting the firehouse. Were these images all
acquired on 9/11/01? If so, the Naudets must have jumped out of their
beds shooting video. If not, then technically this sequence is fiction.
It is unclear where the fictional elements end and the documentary work
begins.
Want to screw something up badly? Have the government handle it. I hated the Freedom Tower the day they unveiled that unmitigated disaster. It's a bloody nightmare. I signed the Twin Towers alliance petition back in April 2006 (here) and coaxed readers to sign it time and time again. I wrung my hands and wrote this back in 2005 here:
There is no telling how long we will be staring into the abyss of
Ground Zero. I do not believe in 'decision by commitee'. Too many cooks
spoil the broth. Collective design is an oxymoron. The eventual
selection was be a pastiche of personal agendas. Thus the final design
of the World Trade Center was underwhelming and beneath the potential
of our greatness. Subsequently, it has become mired in red tape and
infighting.
Maybe that's a blessing. Maybe we can rethink the design, a visual we will live with for decades to come (G-d willing).
Well here we are three years after I wrote that right back in Centerville (Twilight Zone reference). Again I ask you to sign the petition. Today, there was plea to our NY "elders" to reconsider the mess they
have created and to do the right thing. Kudos to Gelinas (please read
it all):
New Twin Towers? Nicole Gelinas, City Journal hat tip Van
It may not be too late.
Since al-Qaida demolished the World Trade Center nearly seven years
ago, New York's naked emperors—Governors George Pataki and Eliot
Spitzer and architect Daniel Libeskind—have viewed an historic
rebuilding challenge as an opportunity to invent a square wheel and
then deny for years that it can't roll. This week, the Port Authority,
which runs the site, released a report admitting that little progress
had been made there—still more evidence that the government has
responded to an external attack with a self-inflicted disaster. But
all the dillydallying may provide an unlikely opportunity for Governor
David Paterson and World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein, who
should examine an entirely different approach: building new twin
towers at Ground Zero.
It may sound crazy to say that we should consider throwing away
years’ worth of planning. But we’ve barely moved toward completion
since 2002; in fact, last week’s report threw out cost estimates or
timetables for rebuilding. “The schedule and cost for each of the
public projects on the site face significant delays and cost overruns,”
wrote Chris Ward, the new director of the Port Authority, to Paterson
last Monday. Further, “at least 15 fundamental issues critical to the
overall project” are “not yet . . . resolved.”
Indeed: all New York has to show for its hoping and waiting is a
partial support structure for the Freedom Tower—which, when it’s built,
will be a sad white elephant. And all that the state promises today is
more waiting: waiting for officials to figure out how a poorly
designed, half-billion-dollar memorial can withstand the weight of the
trees that are supposed to go on top of it; waiting for them to figure
out a workable plan for the fancy, multibillion-dollar,
Calatrava-designed transit hub, where inevitable changes will mean more
changes and delays to everything else on the site. Can anyone be
confident that the eventual results won’t be physical evidence of
unimaginable folly?
On 9/11, al-Qaida murdered 2,974 people and destroyed two iconic
office towers that dominated New York’s skyline, another lone office
tower nearby, and some smaller support buildings. We can’t recover
stolen lives. But what would it take to make New York physically whole
again, while paying tribute to 9/11’s history and victims? One obvious
answer is to build two iconic office towers that dominate New York’s
skyline once again, surrounded by some smaller buildings. Notice that
the one project that has achieved completion after 9/11—Silverstein’s
Seven World Trade Center, the lone office tower near the main site—did
so partly because Silverstein realized that al-Qaida’s attack wasn’t a
mandate to reinvent the obvious. He simply built a more elegant tower
to succeed what al-Qaida had destroyed, modernized for the twenty-first
century in terms of safety and aesthetics and placed in a superior
setting.
New York could take a similar approach with the rest of the site.
New twin towers wouldn’t be the old ones; nobody can pretend that 9/11
never happened. They’d offer modern, sleek designs, as Seven World
Trade Center does, and they’d be built to private-sector
specifications. They’d need twenty-first-century, post-9/11 safety
upgrades. The site would also need an appropriate memorial and
well-designed public spaces.
It may not be too late to take this commonsense approach to
rebuilding, which was never the puzzle the world’s great architects
have made it out to be. For a truly breathtaking example of what New
York could achieve at Ground Zero, take a look
at what the late Herb Belton, an architect who worked on the original
twin towers, and structural engineer Ken Gardner have proposed.
Gardner, working first with Belton and then on his own since Belton
died in 2005, has come up with twin towers that do far more than
recreate the originals. “Using the original blueprints, [we’ve]
re-engineered the design to recapture the Towers’ greatness, while
diligently addressing their flaws,” Gardner says. “As a result, the
design incorporates robust security, construction economy, and the
greenest technology. The retail space is inviting, the commercial space
is exceptional, and the outdoor spaces are a pedestrian-friendly
oasis.” Gardner, always flexible, surely wouldn’t mind tweaks to his
proposed towers so that they pay homage to the old ones without coming
too close to replicating them. He also proposes that state officials
allow residential condos in one of the new towers, as in the successful
Time Warner Center, another set of twin towers uptown.
This is a wonderful, brilliant plan. I thank Gelinas for proposing this clear, brilliant solution. Now how do we make it happen?
On the website of Andy Wilcoxson, the only American to cover the
Milosevic trial (which was billed as the “Second Nuremberg” and
prosecuting supposedly the “biggest atrocity since World War II”), we
have a report from a predominantly Muslim Sarajevo TV station.
Bosnian TV alleges Muslim official linked to 9/11 attacks
BBC Monitoring European. London: May 9, 2008.
Excerpt from report by Bosnia-Hercegovina Federation public TV, on 5 May
When the passengers and crew of flight 93 smashed their murderers to nothing on
an open expanse of western Pennsylvania coal country, two towering sentinels
stood silent witness to the heroic tragedy.
“Up on Skyline Rd.,” the
news shot around Shanksville and Somerset, “up by the drag lines”
It is hard to imagine a more fitting marker than these twin colossi. Before the
hijackers could send Flight 93 into the White House or the Capitol building, a
random draw of forty of our fellow countrymen massed a towering determination to
fight back. Their effort to save their own lives ended beneath those artifacts
of Pennsylvania's own native grit and ingenuity, but their success in defending
their country will live forever.
Those silent sentinels could and should
have endured as well, and they would have, if not for one man who was determined
to see them go: architect Paul Murdoch, the designer of the terrorist
memorializing Crescent of Embrace design. As the press reported
at the unveiling of the crescent design:
The Flight 93 temporary memorial, the draglines and Skyline Drive
will be removed to leave the landscape as natural as possible, Murdoch wrote in
a narrative that accompanied the design.
This jury verdict is incomprehensible. The five judge ruling is incredulous. We have become, it seems, unable to think. The jihadis must be roiling in laughter. Theodore Frank writes, "We have gotten to the point where five judges can shrug their shoulders
at this jury verdict and rationalize it with citation to precedent and
say that the Port Authority had public parking, and was therefore
asking for it. In this case, taxpayers were victimized once by
terrorists and a second time by trial lawyers and a court system run
amok."
Engineer Ben L, made this salient point (tangential but essential), "I know it's going to sound weird, but I credit the first World Trade Center bombing with saving thousands of lives on 9-11.
When I saw those buildings fall, I was certain there was no way they were more than two-thirds evacuated, based on size, number of people, and the inevitable chaos that accompanies such things.
A lot of disaster officials were of similar opinion. Guliani requested, I recall, over 10,000 body bags. (No one understood yet that the majority of the bodies would be simply vaporized).
But the reality was, we all learned, the buildings had been about 90% evacuated.
The only reason that could occur is the planning done by the building engineers and the FDNY after the first bombing, when the evacuation took much longer (three hours) . Had the first bombing and the first evacuation never happened, no one would have planned for the second."
On February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists exploded a
1,500-pound bomb in the garage of the World Trade Center,
killing six and injuring more than a thousand. This was, a jury decided in 2006,
68% the responsibility of the Port
Authority of New York and New Jersey, a bit more than twice the
responsibility of the men who actually engaged in the bomber.
The Port Authority, potentially liable for billions because of the decision,
including 100% of the “pain and suffering” claims, appealed, noting that the
result was “bizarre.” This week, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division of
State
Supreme Court in Manhattan unanimously upheld the jury verdict.
The injustice is the culmination of decades of increasingly ludicrous — and
expensive — litigation. The judges can, and did, say they just were being
consistent with previous bizarre precedents of New York courts, such as one
holding the New York
City Transit Authority liable for failing to stop a train in time to avoid
hitting a victim intentionally pushed into the train’s path.
The Alice-in-Wonderland logic, complete with a farcically precise
adjudication of apples and oranges that the Port Authority was not 42%, not 67%,
but
68% responsible for the consequences of an intentional terrorist bombing,
indicts the civil justice system as a whole. It has become less a search for the
truth than a search for the money.
Contingent-fee attorneys rarely have the incentive to go after the most
culpable party, who all too often does not have the financial assets to account
for the damage he has done. It is far more profitable to manufacture a storyline
that makes the deep-pocketed bystander look responsible.
In the pending litigation over the September 11, 2001, attack, attorneys
didn’t sue the kitchen sink, but managed to name just about everyone else as
defendants: airlines (including 11 airlines other than the two who lost planes),
airports, architects, banks, Boeing, Motorola, and New York
City, among others.
That search for a story has its own distortions and costs. The legal
“discovery” process requires defendants to spend millions of dollars digging
through their files for documents that might be relevant, an expense that has
grown astronomically in the age of effortless e-mail. Trial lawyers look at
those documents with 20/20 hindsight for the stray remark that can be turned
into the smoking gun in the screenplay of the trial.
So we get results like the Port Authority trial. To construct their
billion-dollar storyline where the victim is the bad guy, trial lawyers found a
1985 report with dozens of recommendations, one of which was to close 400 of the
2,000 parking spaces in case terrorists used the public parking for a car bomb.
The Port Authority chose not to close the public parking. Terrorists bombed the
public parking. QED: the authority foresaw the risk and failed to act, and must
be responsible.
Is this another story the media herd will pretend not to see. Every indication of what lurks in the heart and soul of Obama is dangerous. This Pastor is a mentor, a guru (he seems to need a lot of those) to Obama. This man is a hater of everything we hold dear. Obama does not repudiate this man, does not repudiate Farrakhan. America is like the 18 year old virgin who has fallen for the boulevardier. The outcome won't be pretty. America, snap out of it.
Obama's Pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Has a History of What Even Obama's Campaign Aides Say Is 'Inflammatory Rhetoric'
By BRIAN ROSS and REHAB EL-BURI
Sen. Barack Obama's pastor says blacks should not sing "God Bless America" but "God damn America."
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's south side, has a long history of what even Obama's campaign aides concede is "inflammatory rhetoric,"including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own "terrorism."
In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama said, "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." He said Rev. Wright "is like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with," telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family.
Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, "The Audacity of Hope."
An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright's sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.
"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
The African American has the highest standard of living in America than anywhere else in the world. But why split hairs?
In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism.
"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.
"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.
Sen. Obama told the New York Times he was not at the church on the day of Rev. Wright's 9/11 sermon. "The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification," Obama said in a recent interview. "It sounds like he was trying to be provocative," Obama told the paper.
Rev. Wright, who announced his retirement last month, has built a large and loyal following at his church with his mesmerizing sermons, mixing traditional spiritual content and his views on contemporary issues.
"I wouldn't call it radical. I call it being black in America," said one congregation member outside the church last Sunday.
[..]
Sen. Obama declined to comment on Rev. Wright's denunciations of the United States, but a campaign religious adviser, Shaun Casey, appearing on "Good Morning America" Thursday, said Obama "had repudiated" those comments.
UPDATE 11:39 am: from Ed Lasky: : Fox News has just posted a substantial story
on Pastor Wright along with some video of Wright in action.
The worst case scenario is that Obama secretly supports these remarks and feels it will fuel the racial divide in this country. What if Obama thinks African Americans will like this message and drive further votes to his candidacy. If that's the case he will distance himself from the remarks in a typical smarmy way but he will not renounce Wright.
Lasky opines:
Fox News-ask liberals how they can support someoone whose closeness to his man makes one wonder how he can just overlook this bigotry.
Given things Obama himself has said, given things Michelle has said, given that their bonds are way beyond a mere assocation but are so close that it calls into question Obama's judgment and true values. My closest friends-people I would describe as my sounding boards, mentor, etc over the years-are people who are not racist, who are not anti-Israel, and who share my values and prinicples.
This is not easily dismissed as "guilt by association". I have researched thsi term wich came into use during the Mccarthy era to refer to peripheral relationships. This does not fit that category.
Sure does feel like we're plunging into the abyss tonight.
Fox just posted a big Jeremiah Wright story,
and the video is pretty gripping, and deeply racially
confrontational. He begins by describing the Romans, who crucified Jesus, as
Italians, and thus white, and more or less goes from there.
“Barack knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is
controlled by rich white people,” Wright says.
"Hillary ain't never been called a nigger," he says at the climax.
Michael Savage deserves a fookin medal. While big, ginormous media talking heads like Bill O'Reilly and CNN et al continue to give CAIR respect and a platform to spout their treasonous garbage in attempt to spread the death cult of Islam, Savage is fighting the enemy in our midst and revealing them to be what they truly are - he Islamic enemy within.
And I don;t care if you like Savage or not, on this we are one and must all get behind it. He is righteous in this and deserves our full support.
CAIR uses the legal system to beat truth tellers into submission. We must respond in kind. Let's use the discovery phase to get to the bottom of CAIR's nefarious dealings. This is an opportunity.It time we lifted up the rock ....SAVAGE! Contribute to his legal fund.
Now the radio talk star is going for the legal jugular in his battle with the
group that bills itself as a Muslim civil rights organization.
The San Francisco-based talker has amended his lawsuit against CAIR for
misusing audio clips of his show as part of a boycott campaign against his
three-hour daily program to include charges the group "has consistently sought
to silence opponents of violent terror through economic blackmail, frivolous but
costly lawsuits, threats of lawsuits and abuses of the legal system."
The amended lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Northern California,
also charges CAIR with using extortion, threats, abuse of the court system, and
obtaining money via interstate commerce under false and fraudulent circumstances
– calling it a "political vehicle of international terrorism" and even linking
the group with support of al-Qaida.
The federal government recently named CAIR, based in Washington, D.C., as an
unindicted co-conspirator in an alleged scheme to funnel $12 million to the
terrorist group Hamas.
If there was a seminal moment illustrating the powerful impact of a leftist traitorous media and the failure of our public education system to teach students history, geography and critical thinking.
November 24, 2007 -- Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found.
And that's not the only conspiracy theory with a huge number of true believers in the United States.
The poll found that more than one out of three Americans believe Washington is concealing the truth about UFOs and the Kennedy assassination - and most everyone is sure the rise in gas prices is one vast oil-industry conspiracy.
Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
