What exactly is commemorated in this moment? Apparently it’s iconic enough to merit a stamp. NYC firefighters raise a flag amid the ruins of the WTC, meaning what exactly?
 
The photographer recounted recognizing this Iwo Jima moment in the making. Does it give you a lump in your throat as well? The Marines at Iwo Jima had just captured the island after suffering some of the heaviest casualties in the Pacific Theater.

Read more »

Neocon winged monkey Michelle Malkin has made a video encouraging her sortasyllabic fans to boycott advertisers of Rosie O’Donnell’s TV show The View.
 
From the video you get an idea just how idiotic Malkin expects her audience to be. She wants them to boycott products they’ve already purchased.

Read more »

Hiroshima Japan, Aug 6, 1945. Ground Zero.

Read more »

In defense of ABC’s docudrama The Path to 9/11. Near the beginning, when the terrorists were taking responsibility for the 1993 WTC bombing, “Ramzi Youssef – Palestinian Terrorist” explained why they had done it: because of America’s military and economic support of Israel.

Read more »

At a precinct meeting to suggest planks for the Democratic Party platform, a friend of mine was stuck on 9-11 truth telling. He’d like to write it on a blimp. I agreed but argued, first things first.
 
Anti-war first I said, then a Democratic majority in Congresss, then time to re-investigate 9-11. What condescension. I told him that I thought a truthful account of 9-11 would be too hard to swallow.
 
Since the party convention, and since this summer’s 9-11 breast-beating, I am absolutely certain that I was wrong. Ninety nine percent of Americans don’t work in skyscrapers, nor do they cross the Atlantic on airliners, yet the fall of the WTC threatened their sense of security. The myth of their insecurity has got to fall.
 
9-11 is still the GOP rallying cry. We must take it from them because we will not win an election without decrying their lie.
 
It’s our 9-11 crackpot theory versus their 9-11 crackpot fable. If the simple folk cannot swallow this, do we think they will buy black box voting or our American tradition of malevolent multinational corporate imperialism?

WORLD TRADE CENTER, Oliver Stone’s sentimental take on 9/11 heroism comes out this summer. I have nothing against a story which describes the travails of two New York City cops and their families caught up in the World Trade Center collapse. But Stone’s timing with the release of this movie is unfortunate. With the upcoming elections, the only rallying cry the Republicans have anymore is 9/11. What a time for Stone to wax patriotic. And I think the absence of his usual political curiosity offers a silent aquiescence to the official line. Too bad.
 
For anyone who feels they absolutely need a jolt of 9/11 heroism, might I suggest the documentary 9/11 aired on CBS and made by the Naudet brothers, the French filmmakers who inadvertantly captured the first tower being hit. Talk about harrowing viewing. They went inside the WTC to witness the second strike and were still inside when the opposite tower collapsed. (That’s why the video of the first plane was so late to emerge. Filmmaker and film were nearly destroyed in the rubble.)

Read more »

Try this on for size: the war on terror is being used to justify all forms of restrictive government controls, from surveillance to union-busting to torture. Lacking any terrorist acts of late, how do we know there are even terrorists? Except that our government keeps scooping them up, putting them in Guantanamo, but it won’t let us see them.

Read more »

In 1933 someone set fire to the Reichstag, the historic German Parliament Building. Hitler seized on the occasion to incite in the German population a fear of terrorists and foreign agents, and trumped up his case for the preemptive invasion of Eastern Europe.
 
To prevent further acts of terrorism, Hitler curtailed civil rights and created the first concentration camp at Dachau. Predating the extermination camps by a half dozen years, Dachau began as an internment camp for political foes and other “enemies of the state.” Many Germans felt that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi deception, set deliberately to further Nazi goals.

Read more »

Call me a crackpot, but I have to say it. I believe 9-11 was a setup.
 
There’s no denying that a band of Saudi gentlemen flew those planes into the World Trade Center. There’s no denying that the Saudi Muslims were upset about US military bases in their holy land. There’s no denying that the third world has cause to attack the first world. For all intents and purposes that is what happened, or should have happened even.
 
It is nearly irrelevant to suggest otherwise. Except to suggest that it needn’t have happened, or certainly needn’t have succeeded.

Read more »

A box. Sunken in the earth. Like the foundation of an unfinished house.

Borrowing from Maya Lin’s Vietnam Wall obviously, this memorial foundation would be at the base of a hill. Preferably in te shadow of a hill. Looking up at the north slope with the sun beyond the hill.

Read more »

If I remember something from highschool, you’re not allowed to set off the fire alarm. Doesn’t that rule apply to adults?

Read more »

What’s going on that the networks are foregoing ad revenues? ABC has yet to have ad spots, at least on the overnight… And yet they’re telling us so little.

Read more »