Taking over the world by doing nothing, brought to you live from the Command Bunker at the Lightning Man World Propaganda Network....Of all the blogs you've ever read, this one is the most recent.
No one likes to hear a snarky snide "I told you so" from anyone, be it your spouse, your parent, your sibling, your child, your co-worker, or some smartass blogger. However......I kinda did tell y'all so.
Back in March when Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 went AWOL, I immediately hypothesized that the plane was stolen for later use by terrorists. Missed it? Read all about it. I then gave you my hypothetical list of targets based upon my humble professional estimation.
Now we get word recently that when Islamist scumbag ne'er do wells took over the Tripoli Airport as Libya circles the drain into an ISIS-like abyss, in addition to destroying a large number of planes on the ground, eleven or twelve jetliners from two Libya are missing. Yeah, missing. As in, nobody knows where the Farouk they are. We're talking about some of the most widely-used and ubiquitous airliners worldwide, the type that BLEND IN and don't get noticed until they HIT THINGS AND EXPLODE.
A lot of planes on the ground were destroyed because Islam can't have nice things.
Doing the Happy Dance on top of a captured Libyan Airlines jet. They look stable and peaceful...
The state-owned Libyan Airlines fleet included up 20 jets, including eight Airbus 320s, two Airbus 330s and eight Bombardier CJR-900s. Also state-owned, the Afriqiyah Airways fleet includes three Airbus 319s, seven Airbus 320s, two Airbus 330s, and one Airbus 340. The 319/320's and CJR-900's are relatively shorter-range jets but the 330's and the 4-engine 340 are definitely larger long-haul planes capable of trans-Atlantic flights. That's bothersome, since Thursday is the anniversary of 9/11.
Seriously. Think about it. Don't roll your eyes and call me a Tinfoil Hat whack-job. ISIS likes to behead people on TV. You don't think they'd like to do something major to us this week?
And you may also recall that in July I warned everyone that this stream of underage Third-World disease vectors flooding across our borders like a plague of locusts with the express permission of the White House could be very bad ju-ju. And today we get word that, SURPRISE!!!!!, hundreds of children across America have been sickened in recent weeks by what health officials suspect is a rare respiratory virus.
The CDC believes that Human Enterovirus 68, part of the virus family that includes polio and the common cold rhinovirus, is at the root of the epidemic, though testing of samples has not produced a definitive answer. Normally a bowel affliction, the virus is now affecting the respiratory system.
The Denver Post reported that officials at Children's Hospital Colorado have treated more than 900 children for severe respiratory illnesses since August 18, with 86 admitted to the hospital.At Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children, doctors put five children on ventilators this week, including a 13-year-old boy whose condition deteriorated from a mild cold to a life-threatening illness overnight.
In Kansas City, one hospital said 15 percent of the affected pediatric patients have been hospitalized.
The CDC said that similar suspected outbreaks have been reported in Colorado, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Georgia. The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch reported that Nationwide Children's Hospital reported seeing an average of 73 patients with respiratory complaints per day between August 31 and September 2.
What a coincidence that this rare virus has an outbreak just before 9/11, after tens of thousands of illegals pour into our population centers, and just as school starts back up.
Call me a Conspiracy Theorist Headcase if you want, but coincidences aren't always mere simple coincidences. Often times there are more nefarious machinations afoot. Don't get caught unprepared.
I wasn't sure I was even going to get a chance to write this article this year, as I am currently serving on a jury in a criminal trial locally and my time is limited at the moment. But I also consider it my duty and obligation to honor those who have fallen, much the same as it is my duty to serve the justice system that is one of the pillars of American society.
In addition to being the 12th anniversary of the single greatest terrorist attack our nation has ever seen, it is also the one year anniversary of the incident at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Terrorist forces attacked the consulate and in the ensuing fighting four Americans, including the Ambassador, were murdered while our government sat back and DID NOTHING. Today we stand at the brink of attacking Syria without enough reasonable evidence and without Congressional approval or the approval of the American people, and yet NOTHING has been done about Benghazi. In fact the White House refuses to talk about it other than to have Shrillary Clinton say "What difference does it make?".
This is not the same country that was attacked on 9-11 of 2001. We are weaker in many regards although as a people we are stronger and more resolved. We are divided in so many respects yet we steadfastly remain the United States of America. More so than being attacked from without we are being attacked from within and the enemy is us. Not us as in Conservatives, true believers in America, the Patriots I stand with, but the us that is our fellow Americans who are ignorant and brainwashed and think Hope and Change will save us all as it erodes away at the very foundations of liberty.
Our anti-American government in Washington DC granted a permit for a Million Muslim March on the National Mall and denied a permit for a counter protest by American bikers to remember those who died on 9-11 and in fighting for freedom since. In flagrant disregard of this, the Million Biker March is converging on our nation's capital in support of freedom.
Photo posted to Twitter of bikers gathered in Maine to ride on Washington
For all his faults, no one could say that George W. Bush hated this nation the way King Obeezy Hussen does.
President Bush: Thank you all. I want you all to know -- it [bullhorn] can't go any louder -- I want you all to know that America today, America today is on bended knee, in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. The nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens
Rescue Worker: I can't hear you!
President Bush: I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people -- and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!
This nation was founded under the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. These same foundations of our nation are daily being assaulted by the Administration.
1. The First Amendment is constantly being twisted and manipulated. Freedom of Speech gets called racism and hate speech if you disagree with the Left. Freedom of Religion unless your religion is against abortion or contraception. Freedom to assemble unless you're a biker protesting Islamists. Freedom to petition the government for redress unless you're a Conservative; then you're a terrorist.
2. The Second Amendment is always under attack. Cities and states that deny citizens the right to defend themselves are crime-ridden ghetto wastelands ruled by The Left.
3. The Third Amendment protects against the quartering of troops...but who needs to house soldiers in your house when the NSA and Homeland Security already listens to your phone calls and reads your emails. Which leads me to the Fourth Amendment.
4. Unreasonable search & seizure? The government does warrantless wiretaps, reads your emails, listens to your calls, and spies on everyone even remotely associated with the Tea Party.
5. In order to circumvent the Fifth Amendment's rights to due process and protection against imprisonment without a fair trial, Obama's cronies adopted the National Defense Authorization Act to designate American citizens as terrorists and indefinitely detain them without recourse to courts or due process of law and without specific charge. Or just bomb them with drones.
6. The Sixth Amendment and the right to speedy trial by an impartial jury as well as facing your accusers was thrown out the window when we used a drone to kill terrorist Anwar Al-Awlaki, and another strike killed his 16-year old son two weeks later. Sure, they were terrorists for Al Qaeda and needed to be taken out, but if the Administration is willing to drone strike American citizens in another country who's to say they wouldn't label you or me terrorists and kill us too?
7. The Seventh Amendment guarantee of a jury trial in a Federal case will most certainly be trampled upon if they can ever get hold of Edward Snowden. They want that boy's balls on a plate.
8. It could be argued that by pinning the cause of the Benghazi affair on a badly-made anti-Muslim video by Nakoula Basseley, an Egyptian-born Copt living in America, guaranteed him a death sentence at the hands of Jihadis and violates the 8th Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishments.
And finally, the White House likes to trample upon the 9th and 10th Amendments and the protections of rights not specifically enumerated by the Constitution reserved to the people or to the States, such as striking down voter ID laws or border control and immigration laws to keep illegals out.
So our nation suffers more greatly from attacks by our own government against the people and our rights than by terrorists.
But we are not beaten.
We will prevail. We will recover. We will prevail.
And we will steadfastly remain true patriots, sons and daughters of Liberty, and we will save our nation from tyranny so that the sacrifices of those who died in New York, at the Pentagon, in Shanksville, in Benghazi, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, shall not have been in vain.
If you've missed my previous six years worth of 9/11 articles, feel free to peruse them. 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012
Every year for the past five years I've done a commemorative article post about 9-11.
In 2007, I covered the aspect of "Where Were You on 9-11?". Read it here.
In 2008, I railed against the media not showing pictures of what really happened. Read it here.
In 2009, I talked about how years later, the events still affect us deep down. Read it here.
In 2010, I wanted to know where the memorial was. Read it here.
Last year I looked at how divided we've become as a nation. Read it here.
This year, rather than dwell on the past I want to give some hope for the future. A friend of mine, Joe Steinerman, lives in the Alphabet City area of the Lower East Side and he watched 9-11 unfold from a rooftop on 25th & 5th Avenue. Over the past few months Joe has been sharing in photographs the progress being made on the new Freedom Tower going up at the old WTC site.
In my opinion, it's a more aesthetically appealing design than the boxy original towers, and it's coming along nicely.
Taken in September of 2011
Taken in April of 2012
Taken in June of 2012
Taken in early August 2012
While we will never, EVER, forget what happened or those who were lost, it's also good to heal and look to a brighter future.
"But, in a larger
sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow
this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have
consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world
will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never
forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have
thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to
the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full
measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall
not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new
birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for
the people, shall not perish from the earth."---Abraham Lincoln, excerpted from the Gettysburg Address
I also want to take a moment to mention that not everyone who died connected to 9-11 passed on that day. Another friend of mine in NYC, Dave Hawkins, lost his brother six years later. NYPD Detective Kevin G. Hawkins, aged 42, died of kidney cancer, which he contracted after
inhaling toxic chemicals and materials while working hundreds of hours
at Ground Zero. Detective Hawkins had served with the New York City Police Department
for 20 years and was assigned to Mayor Bloomberg's Security Detail.
Detective Hawkins had served with the department for 20 years, and had
previously served with the United States Marine Corps. He is survived by
his wife and three children. Rest in peace, Kevin.
It's hard to believe that ten years have already passed now since our nation was changed forever....
Oddly, and bothersome to me actually, is that I really don't have anything new to add that hasn't already been said.
In 2007, I covered the aspect of "Where Were You on 9-11?". Read it here.
In 2008, I railed against the media not showing pictures of what really happened. Read it here.
In 2009, I talked about how years later, the events still affect us deep down. Read it here.
In 2010, I wanted to know where the memorial was. Read it here.
For a brief time, we actually came together as a nation. Now I think we're as divided as we've ever been since the 1860's, only it's the Left vs. the Right instead of the North vs. the South. For months after 9-11, everybody flew American flags, most notably on their cars. Now, the Left stands with uncaring bastards who won't let people fly the flag for fear it might offend someone. Tough shit; this is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and if an AMERICAN wants to fly an AMERICAN FLAG and if it offends you then either shut your pie hole or leave.
Our nation was founded by Christians with Christian values & ideals. You are free to worship any which way you want here in AMERICA but if you happen to be a Christian then you're now a second-class citizen while AMERICAN laws are being usurped by Islamic Sharia laws and the Leftist bastion of Michigan has been turned into a Caliphate. For damn near a decade a giant crater marked the site where thousands were murdered by radical Islamists, and the Left said the Right was insensitive when a mosque was slated to be built right next door to Ground Zero.
On 9-11 the people of New York were led out of the ashes by a Republican who'd cleaned up the Big Apple and they then replaced him with a filthy rich Leftist who thinks the mosque is a great idea and built himself a giant 54-story skyscraper for his business instead of a memorial to the citizens of his city who were murdered.
Our borders are porous and absorb illegals like a thirsty sponge, and the Left just sees it as a source for voters. The Dear Leader seems to have a never-ending supply of relatives living here illegally and sponging welfare. Great leadership....
Millions of AMERICANS are out of work and the Left sees it as a victory for social welfare programs while sending our jobs and money overseas.
It's terrible that it takes a tragedy to bring us together as a nation and more terrible that we just as quickly become divided again by folks who forget or scoff at what this nation is all about, how & why we were founded and by whom.
Each year I write a commemorative 9/11 article. This year my tone is just a little more angry and less introspective than in previous years...so be it.
For last year's article go here. For 2008, go here. And for 2007, go here.
"At Ground Zero there is the most eloquent statement about America in the early 21st century, and that is a seven-story hole. 9/11 was something that America's enemies did to us. The hole in the ground a decade later is something we did to ourselves. It is a mark of shame that that hole is still there in 2010." –Mark Steyn
The 55-story, 1200 foot tall, $1Billion Bank of America Tower.
The 1,046 foot tall, 52-story New York Times Building.
The nearly completed, 76-floor Beekman Tower in Manhattan, due to finish this year.
The 54-story , 806-foot Bloomberg Tower, housing the company owned by the mayor.
The $1.1 Billion twin towers of the Time Warner Center, each 55 floors and 750-feet tall.
The 749-foot tall, 44-floor Goldman Sachs Building at 200 West.
The 740-foot, 52-floor rebuilt 7 World Trade Center building.
The 726-foot, 47 story Times Square Tower.
The 684-foot, 52-floor Random House Tower.
The673-foot, 56-floor Barclay Tower.
The 653-foot, 60 story twin buildings of the Silver Towers.
The 618-foot , 55-floor building at 425 Fifth Avenue.
The 615-foot, 58-floor building known as The Epic.
The 603-foot, 58-floor building known as The Orion.
Besides being on the list of New York City’s list of 100 Tallest Buildings, these structures are also on another list. Other buildings on that list include:
The $1.6 Billion new stadium at The Meadowlands for the New York Jets and New York Giants football teams, with seating for 82,566 fans, including 10,005 club seats and approximately 218 luxury suites.
The $2.3 Billion new Yankee Stadium (including $1.2 Billion in taxpayer subsidies), with room for 52,325 (including standing room), with 13,751 club seats and 68 luxury suites.
The $375 Million Prudential Center across the river in beautiful downtown Newark, NJ, home of the New Jersey Devils hockey team, and home of the New Jersey Nets basketball team until the Barclays Center opens for them to continue losing in. And speaking of the Barclays Center, that’s gonna be $800 Million over in Brooklynas part of a $4.9 Billion sports, business, and residential complex.
These buildings, worth billions upon billions, are all on the same list. All of them are projects that either finished or completed, or started and mostly completed, SINCE 9/11. Yeah, all that steel and brick and glass and concrete was built since 9/11 right there in New York City or just outside of it.
I guess we can also add into this list the rebuilt/repaired buildings of the World Financial Center complex. ONE , at 577 feet and 40 stories; TWO, at 645 feet and 44 stories; THREE, at 739 feet and 51 stories; FOUR, at 500 feet and 34 stories; the 45,000 square foot, 10-story vaulted glass atrium of The Winter Garden; and the 16-story NYMEX Building, home of the New York Mercantile Exchange and NewYork Board of Trade.
So riddle me this: why is it that they can build all of this in proximity to that giant hole where the World Trade Center stood, and no one can seemingly put together a decent memorial for the thousands who perished in the attack?
Seemingly, gone are the days when we erected large memorials and monuments to those who came before us or who gave their lives. The Marine Corps War Memorial, most often called the Iwo Jima Monument, was one of the last large monuments built, I think. The troops themselves are 32 feet tall and the flagpole is 60 feet long. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is much less ostentatious, tapering downwards from a center height of just 10.1 feet. The accompanying monument The Three Soldiers shows the men pretty much life size, as are the three statues comprising the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. The walls of the Korean War Veterans Memorial seem even shorter, but the 19 service members depicted in the memorial’s statues range in height from 7’3” to 7’6”, a bit larger than life. Thankfully, the National World War Two Memorial is big, on a grand scale that befits the nature of the memorial and what it represents.
To my knowledge there is no dedicated national memorial for the troops of Operation Desert Storm, nor am I expecting anything any time soon for those who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But as for the victims of the Islamic terrorist actions on 9/11….well, at the Pentagon there’s a small indoor memorial and construction continues on an outdoor memorial with benches, a pond, and maple trees. In Shanksville, Pennsylvania there is also a memorial of benches, for those who perished on Flight 93. The largest terrorist attack on our country’s history, and 9 years later all we have are some benches, trees, a couple plaques, and a seven-story deep crater.
By the time Flight 93 went down, those people on the plane knew what was going on. They made a conscious effort to stop the attack and gave their all. And here's their grave marker-sized memorial in Shanksville. We all say we'll never forget, but where are the larger than life memorials to these larger than life sacrifices? Fictional boxer Rocky Balboa has a statue in Philadelphia. There's a big statue of Michael Jordan in front of the United Center in Chicago. They made a giant statue of Michael Jackson to float on a barge down the Thames. Milwaukee boasts a life-sized bronze Fonz. Oddly enough, various towns in Serbia of all places are erecting statues to memorialize Tarzan, Rocky (again?) and Bruce Lee. Metropolis, Illinois boasts a 15-foot tall Superman and the University of Maryland has a statue of Jim Henson on a bench chatting with Kermit the Frog. A fictional muppet gets a statue, and American terror victims get trees and benches. A comic book character and a pop star made of plastic get giant statues, and America seems to want to forget to memorialize those she claims she'll "never forget."
What I don’t quite get is why the Flight 93 Memorial’s original design was in the shape of a red crescent that looks, either by accident or intentionally by design, remarkably like an Islamic crescent. I shit you not. Furthermore, it almost seemed to be on an azimuth pointing towards…..Mecca? That's peculiar....After much vociferous protest, the design has been changed. Yeah, the last thing we needed was all of Islam laughing each fall as a crescent red with autumnal maple leaves embraced the site where a planeload of people died to keep the plane from hitting another target.
Yeah, seriously...the original Flight 93 Memorial was in a crescent shape...
Next year , though, we’ll be close to the opening of an even bigger affront from The Religion of Peace if plans go ahead of building what’s become known as the Ground Zero Mosque. For all of you who cling bitterly to this notion that it’s just a coincidence that they want to build a 13-story mosque and “community center “ (Islamo-speak for “Terrorist Recruiting Office”), I ask this:what the hell is wrong with you? Are you really that bloody naïve? Given the long history of mosque-building following Muslim military victories, the building of the mosque on Ground Zero will be seen in the same light as the Muslim conquests of Mecca, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Constantinople.
They’re calling this little piece if Islam the Cordoba House Project…unfamiliar with Cordoba? It was once called Qurtaba in Arabic. It’s a city in Andalusia in northern Spain. An Iberian and Roman city in ancient times, in the Middle Ages it was capital of an Islamic caliphate. When the Muslim Umayyad Moors conquered the city, they opted in 784 AD to wipe away the Visigothic Christian cathedral, there since 600 AD, and replace it with their own Great Mosque of Cordoba. In its long history of conquest, Islam has habitually converted the sacred shrines of its enemies into mosques. A look at the world's most famous mosques lays bare the fact that many were former houses of worships of defeated enemies.
The sacred shrine of Islam in Mecca? Former pagan house of worship that predated Islam by hundreds of years. Mohammed himself, after his army's conquest of Mecca in 630, destroyed hundreds of idols, proclaiming the truth of his new religion. Since then it has become the site of the annual Muslim pilgrimage, the hajj, and the core pillar of Islam. Following the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem, the Ummayad Caliphate proceeded to build the Dome of the Rock, the Masjid Qubat al-Sakhra, on top of the Jewish Temple Mount in 689. Yeah, that Temple Mount…you know, where Jesus gave His sermon? Having defeated their Christian enemies, the Umayyads built a grand mosque on top of Judaism's most sacred site that contained a clear declaration of Muslim supremacy over their brother Abrahamic religions.
We come in peace...so peacefully embrace Allah or we shall kill you all...
The Grand Mosque of Damascus, also known as the Umayyad Mosque, was converted from a church dedicated to John the Baptist in 705. The world-renown Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, now a museum, was a thousand year-old Christian church before being transformed into a mosque following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Over the long history of Muslim territorial advance, thousands of mosques, from Spain to India, were built on sites of important religious or political value to their defeated foes. Inmdia, you say? Yeah, don’t forget the millions in India who became Muslims, later breaking away from the mother country to form the nations of Bangladesh and Pakistan. Indeed, the very first mosque known to have been built in India was built using stone from a Jain temple. (Jainism is an ancient religion that prescribes a path of non-violence towards all living beings. This explains why the mosque was built on ruins; they didn't fight back.) In Indonesia, what started as traders who brought Islam with them turned into fortified trading outposts and then forced conversions. How many Buddhist structures remain in Indonesia? Where are all the Hindu and Buddhist temples that once could be found everywhere in the East Indies, for they were Hindu and Buddhist enclaves until the forces of Islam conquered. Where did they all go?
Whenever the marauding Arabs (bringing Islam with them) conquered lands, they found established communities of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and, in Persia, Zoroastrians. These people did not disappear; they were not converted in large numbers overnight. It took centuries of having to endure Muslim rule, and the status of being reduced to tolerated dhimmis, that is, a status of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity, that led inexorably to more and more people converting to Islam, to join the group of permanent overlords and masters. The pace of such conversion quickened as those who had remained steadfast saw so many others convert, thereby changing their status and at once improving their treatment from being the slaves of Islam's practitioners to being slaves of Islam itself.
And before you say this was all stuff that happened a thousand years ago, I point out that Muammar Khaddafi, the dictator of Libya, converted 78 synagogues into mosques in the 1970’s. In 1975, the Great Synagogue of Oran was confiscated by the Algerian government and similarly transformed into a mosque. Need more modern reminders? Just look at the Islamic takeover in England….
And in Islam it’s a grave insult to show someone the bottom of your feet, as the foot walks through all sorts of unclean things like dirt, camel turds, and car-bomb residue, which is why they throw shows at people or were seen beating the toppled statues of Saddam Hussein with their shoes, and if you place a mosque 600 feet from Ground Zero, you know have the symbolic victory was hundreds of Muslims walking across Ground Zero and the areas where people died at the hands of Islamo-terrorists to get to their Victory Mosque, thinking all the while that they are trampling upon their enemies.
Is it the right of American citizens to build what they want on their own private property providing it falls legally within proper zoning? Yes. Is it the right of American citizens to freely worship as they wish? Yes. But when your wishes are prejudicial to the public good and to the keeping of otrder, then maybe you should reconsider? The same can be said for that Jed Clampett-looking preacher in Gainesville who wants to burn Korans when he’s not running a possible cult compound…is it his right to burn Korans? Yes. Should he? I doubt it.
On the same token, I don’t recommend excercising your freedom of speech to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. That’s prejudicial to good order and public safety and will likely get people hurt. I also don’t recommend burning American flags in protest around me. While it’s your right and I defend your right to do it, I’m also likely to stomp you in the genitals.
There’s also something not right about the funding of this mosque either. I mean, it’s fishier than Rosie O’Donnell’s boxer shorts. You’ve got a mosque foundation that’s got non-profit tax protections and has a bank account of barely $18,000 trying to put up a $100 Million building?Several people have tried to buy the property for outrageous sums to keep the mosque from being built, including a huge offer from media whore Donald Trump trying to get his name in the press, but somehow this little mosque project without a pot to piss in can buy it? Well, their Imam Rauf just got back from a massive fundraising tour paid for by American tax dollars under the thinly veiled bullshit disguise of more Muslim outreach for President B. Hussein Obama (Blessed Be His Name). Uncle Rauf is raking in millions from various nefarious sources in Saudi Arabia, a nation that is our ally until we turn our backs, supplying people to crash planes into buildings and millions in support to spread Wahhabism and Sharia Islam.
They want to open this mosque on September 11, 2011. I shit you not. They want to open their doors on the tenth anniversary of the attack. That takes enormous balls. And those without balls, spineless jellybacks like Bloomberg and Obama, are okay with this. There will be a 9-11 Ground Zero Victory Mosque long before we see a proper memorial at Ground Zero for the victims who were murdered there. Sixty years ago, with more primitive equipment, the Pentagon (still the world’s largest office building in floor space) was built in 18 months. So far, there is no memorial to those who were murdered at the World Trade Center. I’m sorry, but you have a seven-story deep hole as a memorial.
I have to send special thanks out there to a fellow named Andy Sullivan who called The Rush Limbaugh Show on Thursday, September 2, and made me realize all those projects were done since 9/11, and to Gabriel Scheinmann at Hudson and Hugh at Jihadwatch for some information contained herein.
The building I currently work in lies along the approach path to Charleston International Airport. Whenever I step outside the freezer to thaw out a bit, it only takes a matter of minutes before I have some sort of aircraft scoot past. The airport shares common runways with the Air Force base, so in addition to civilian traffic I get to see an awful lot of C-17s, and the occasional C-130, F-16, F/A-18, or even a stray E-2, P-3, or KC-135.
But most of the time when I hear the whine of turbines it’s either an Airbus 310 or that most ubiquitous of airliners, a Boeing 737. And as I look up into a bright blue Charleston sky and see it in a gentle turn, wheels already down, it often takes me back to another bright blue sky one September morning 8 years ago.
It was across town at another place of employment, and my co-workers and I had spent the better part of the morning gathered around the TV set that we used for watching training videos, stunned and horrified as we watched the coverage of the unfolding situations in New York City, Washington, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. One employee was so shaken that she had to leave. She drove to her kid’s school, signed the child out, and went home. Back at work, gone was the usual grab-ass, tomfoolery, and light-hearted banter that were the stock and trade of the staff when no one was looking. No one really knew what to say, and we all just sort of numbly sat there collecting our own thoughts.
I tend to notice when things are out of their normal routine. Call it situational awareness if you want, but I noticed a few things rather quickly; the phones weren’t ringing, we had no customers in the store, and when I stepped outside I saw that there was virtually no traffic on Dorchester Road, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the Charleston area. Folks had ceased going about their normal business of the day, because there was definitely nothing normal about that day. There’s nothing normal about people crashing hijacked airliners into buildings. There’s nothing normal about people jumping to their deaths rather than be incinerated. There’s nothing normal about watching two 110-story buildings crumble. There’s nothing at all normal about watching the fabric of sanity torn asunder.
One of the things that really spooked me though was how quiet it had become. And then it hit me; there was no more air traffic. No air force, no civilians, no nothing. I correctly deduced that they’d grounded all air traffic. And maybe 30 minutes later, I heard a jet.
I felt a momentary dread, wondering if some hijacked plane was headed towards a local target. And I looked up into that bright blue Carolina sky and saw that lonely 737, the last flight left airborne inbound to Charleston. And after it passed, the sky was dead silent again for a few days…
Here we are 8 years later, and it affects me still. I was hundreds of miles away, and I didn’t personally know anyone who perished that day. But when I look up and see a 737, it takes me back to that moment. I can’t even begin to think of what it’s like for the people who were there, and for the people who lost loved ones, friends, co-workers. I know that at least three of my regular readers are New Yorkers (Angel, DD2, and A Guy From Brooklyn), and my heart really goes out to you guys tonight.
I want to include a video that shows the World Trade Center as we all like to remember it, standing proudly in the New York skyline. It’s a clip for my favorite song in the world, Depeche Mode’s 1990 classic “Enjoy the Silence”. It was shot for American release, but was shelved in favor of a more artistic and surreal video by Anton Corbijn. In fact, it was probably only 3 or 4 years ago that I found out it even existed. It’s not even a really great video, with obvious lip-syncing and the mimed keyboard parts not quite matching the various parts of the song, but it was such a bright blue New York City sky when they filmed it on top of one of the towers, and like I said, it’s my favorite song.
And this is why we shouldn't close Gitmo. This is why you don't negotiate with terrorists. This is why you don't let convicted terrorists go free. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Don't repeat this...
Today, of course, is the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The television will be filled with images of memorial services and stories about how big a hassle it is to get through airports these days because of the attacks and subsequent events. We’ll see politicians looking for the perfect sound byte moments with photo ops at Ground Zero or the Pentagon or Shanksville, or all three as the case may be. We’ll see what the attack scenes look like today, from the memorials in Shanksville and at the Pentagon, or in “the pit” at Ground Zero. We’ll see bagpipers and firemen and cops and American flags.
What won’t we see? Actual footage of the attacks.
There exists a policy, not talked about publicly, among the various broadcast news networks, to not show footage of the actual attacks themselves, to not show the airliner impacts or the towers collapsing, because it might upset people.
Excuse me? It might ……upset…people?
Good. It should upset people. They’re upsetting images. But to not show people these upsetting images is to deny a glimpse of history. These events happened. It’s an undeniable fact that they happened, yet no one will show you that it happened. I guess upset people turn off the TV and then ad revenue plummets with the ratings.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was tragic and upsetting, yet we’ve all seen images of what was left of USS Arizona. We’ve all seen the horrific images of liberated prisoners at Nazi concentration camps, and those images are sure as hell upsetting. We’ve all seen the Zapruder film showing President Kennedy’s head explode, followed shortly thereafter by Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot on live TV at dinnertime. I don’t know about you, but I find televised murders somewhat upsetting. However, they are part of history and therefore must be seen in order to learn and educate so that hopefully we can evolve and not repeat the past.
To not allow that footage to be shown on the anniversary of the event is irresponsible and just downright namby-pamby censorship.
“We will never forget” is something I see a lot in conjunction with 9/11. However, it’s hard to remember when the media wants you to forget instead, unless it’s all pre-packaged and sanitized for your protection. These events happenned.
(Special thanks to Paul Scharff for his photo. www.PaulScharffPhotography.com)
Thankfully it’s not very often when something so horrific and earth-shattering happens that in coming years people will ask “Where were you when such & such happened?” For years the benchmark was the Kennedy assassination. That was six years before I was born, so I can’t give an answer to that one. I was home sick from school in 1981 when Reagan was shot. I was in 4th period study hall when the space shuttle Challenger blew up. I was sitting at home on a Saturday morning having coffee over the morning paper when Columbia blew up. I was on Mount Desert Island servicing an advertising account in April 1999 when Columbine happened. I was at work at the Walterboro dairy branch when Virginia Tech happened. When the Gulf War kicked off in 1991, I was standing in the TV room in my barracks at Fort Riley, Kansas. But I think the defining “where were you” moment of my generation will forever be September 11, 2001.
I’m sure every single one of you remembers where you were and what you were doing. I was standing in front of the TV in a towel on my way from the shower to get dressed for work that Tuesday morning, looking at footage of a fire at the WTC North Tower. They said a plane had hit the building, and all I could think of was a small Cessna, until they said it was a “passenger plane”, and even then I was thinking a small puddle-jumper, not a Boeing 767. Then, as I watched, a second plane struck the South Tower, and right then I knew this was no coincidence. I quickly finished getting dressed and headed to work with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and as soon as I got to work I heard that another aircraft had hit the Pentagon. That convinced me that there were coordinated terrorist attacks taking place and my mind started racing in CT Mode, thinking back to any & all counter-terror training I received as an MP in the Army. My workplace wasn’t all that far from Charleston Air Force Base and Charleston International Airport, and I started scanning the skies for Bad Things.
At work, everyone was tweeked about what was going on, and I volunteered to run the 5 minutes back to my house for a set of rabbit ears to attach to the TV we had at work to watch training videos. On the way back to work, Howard Stern had stopped all his usual shenanigans and made the command decision to cut his show short and turn the airwaves over to the news people at his New York studios. I remember thinking that was a very professional move on his part, and that you knew things in NYC were bad when Stern got serious. Once back at work we set up the TV, and no one could say a word as we watched the footage. After the first tower collapsed we were all in a sort of shocked daze.
Right about that time the reporters stated that all flights in the nation were being grounded immediately and it occurred to me that I wasn’t hearing the usual jet traffic that was common overhead. And car traffic was a lot less out on super-busy Dorchester Road than was normal. In due course the second tower collapsed and then news about the plane crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania was broadcast. And somewhere in that span, I heard a jet overhead and ran outside to see what was going on. It was a Boeing 737 that looked to be painted orange and yellow, and it was making a wide circle around Charleston on approach to the airport. Turns out that it was an Air Jamaica flight that was one of the last flights still in the air on the east coast, and they were told to land at the far side of the airport away from the Air Forces hangars until their status could be verified.
I was scheduled off work the next day, and at about 10:30 AM I pulled into the parking lot of the old Red Cross donor center in West Ashley. I felt compelled to do something, anything, to lend a hand. The place was already packed, with a line stretched around the back of the strip mall where the center was located. Not long after we arrived an official told us from that where we were, it could be as much as an 8-hour wait. A few people left, disheartened, but the rest of us stalwarts stayed there in line for what ended up being 10 hours to the time I left the donor center minus a pint of prime AB+. The poor lady in line in front of me found out that after waiting over 9 & a half hours that her blood lacked enough iron to donate, and she was sent home dejected.
A couple weeks after 9/11, I got to thinking that since I’d never actually been in New York City proper, I’d never been in either tower nor had I ever really seen the WTC up close. A memory came to mind at that moment, from October 13, 2000. That was the day I moved back to SC after 7 years in Maine, and as I was coming off the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson River, I looked over real quick towards the city and even from that distance I could faintly see the WTC towers. Little did I know that would be the last time I’d ever see them standing and that less than a year later they’d be gone.
As an Army veteran, I grieved the loss of my fellow comrades-in-arms at the Pentagon. As a former member of the law-enforcement community, I keenly felt the loss of so many firefighters and police officers. As a hockey fan, I mourned the loss of Los Angeles Kings scouts Garnet "Ace" Bailey and Mark Bavis (also a former South Carolina Stingray) on United 175, and as an American and just as a human being, I felt an emptiness at the loss of all the rest. Between the two towers, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, some 3000 people lost their lives, victims and rescuers alike. On this sixth sad anniversary, I salute you all. You are not forgotten. The terrorists did not win, nor will they ever. America will not be diminished, and united we shall stand evermore.
