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Bush states he saw the first plane crash into the WTC?

The World Trade Center Demolition and the So-Called War on Terrorism

This link raises serious questions about the towers coming down from the plane crashes alone.  The authors argue that it was a  Controlled Demolition ; they lay out The Plot ; The Perpetrators ; and raise additional questions about The "War on Terrorism" What is to be Done? ; The Corruption of the Republic http://serendipity.magnet.ch/wtc.html 
.... BernieW, 12/2/01

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GUILTY FOR 9-11: BUSH, RUMSFELD, MYERS?

by Illarion Bykov and Jared Israel

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Was Flight 93 Shot Down Over Pennsylvania By F-16's?

God Gave U.S. 'What We Deserve,' Falwell Says

By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 14, 2001; Page C03

Television evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, two of the most prominent voices of the religious right, said liberal civil liberties groups, feminists, homosexuals and abortion rights supporters bear partial responsibility for Tuesday's terrorist attacks because their actions have turned God's anger against America.

"God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve," said Falwell, appearing yesterday on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club," hosted by Robertson.

"Jerry, that's my feeling," Robertson responded. "I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population."

Falwell said the American Civil Liberties Union has "got to take a lot of blame for this," again winning Robertson's agreement: "Well, yes."

Then Falwell broadened his blast to include the federal courts and others who he said were "throwing God out of the public square." He added: "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' "

People for the American Way transcribed the broadcast and denounced the comments as running directly counter to President Bush's call for national unity. Ralph G. Neas, the liberal group's president, called the remarks "absolutely inappropriate and irresponsible."

Robertson and others on the religious right gave critical backing to Bush last year when he was battling for the GOP presidential nomination. A White House official called the remarks "inappropriate" and added, "The president does not share those views."

Falwell was unrepentant, saying in an interview that he was "making a theological statement, not a legal statement."

"I put all the blame legally and morally on the actions of the terrorist," he said. But he said America's "secular and anti-Christian environment left us open to our Lord's [decision] not to protect. When a nation deserts God and expels God from the culture . . . the result is not good."

Robertson was not available for comment, a spokeswoman said. But she released a statement echoing the remarks he made on his show. An ACLU spokeswoman said the group "will not dignify the Falwell-Robertson remarks with a comment."

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BLACK TUESDAY: THE VIEW FROM ISLAMABAD 
by Pervez Hoodbhoy


Samuel Huntington's evil desire for a clash between civilizations may well come true after Tuesday's terror attacks. The crack that divided Muslims everywhere from the rest of the world is no longer a crack. It is a gulf, that if not bridged, will surely destroy both.


For much of the world, it was the indescribable savagery of seeing jet-loads of innocent human beings piloted into buildings filled with other innocent human beings. It was the sheer horror of watching people jump from the 80th floor of the collapsing World Trade Centre rather than be consumed by the inferno inside. Yes, it is true that many Muslims also saw it exactly this way, and felt the searing agony no less sharply. The heads of states of Muslim countries, Saddam Hussein excepted, condemned the attacks. Leaders of Muslim communities in the US, Canada, Britain, Europe, and Australia have made impassioned denunciations and pleaded for the need to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and extremists.


But the pretence that reality goes no further must be abandoned because this merely obfuscates facts and slows down the search for solutions. One would like to dismiss televised images showing Palestinian expressions of joy as unrepresentative, reflective only of the crass political immaturity of a handful. But this may be wishful thinking. Similarly, Pakistan Television, operating under strict control of the government, is attempting to portray a nation united in condemnation of the attack. Here too, the truth lies elsewhere, as I learn from students at my university here in Islamabad, from conversations with people in the streets, and from the Urdu press. A friend tells me that crowds gathered around public TV sets at Islamabad airport had cheered as the WTC came crashing down. It makes one feel sick from inside.


A bizarre new world awaits us, where old rules of social and political behavior have broken down and new ones are yet to defined. Catapulted into a situation of darkness and horror by the extraordinary force of events, as rational human beings we must urgently formulate a response that is moral, and not based upon considerations of power and practicality. This requires beginning with a clearly defined moral supposition - the fundamental equality of all human beings. It also requires that we must proceed according to a definite sequence of steps, the order of which is not interchangeable.



Before all else, Black Tuesday's mass murder must be condemned in the harshest possible terms without qualification or condition, without seeking causes or reasons that may even remotely be used to justify it, and without regard for the national identity of the victims or the perpetrators. The demented, suicidical, fury of the attackers led to heinous acts of indiscriminate and wholesale murder that have changed the world for the worse. A moral position must begin with unequivocal condemnation, the absence of which could eliminate even the language by which people can communicate.


Analysis comes second, but it is just as essential. No "terrorist" gene is known to exist or is likely to be found. Therefore, surely the attackers, and their supporters, who were all presumably born normal, were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened, fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that?


Tragically, CNN and the US media have so far made little attempt to understand this affliction. The cost for this omission, if it is to stay this way, cannot be anything but terrible. What we have seen is probably the first of similar tragedies that may come to define the 21st century as the century of terror. There is much claptrap about "fighting terrorism" and billions are likely to be poured into surveillance, fortifications, and emergency plans, not to mention the ridiculous idea of missile defence systems. But, as a handful of suicide bombers armed with no more than knives and box-cutters have shown with such devastating effectiveness, all this means precisely nothing. Modern nations are far too vulnerable to be protected - a suitcase nuclear device could flatten not just a building or two, but all of Manhattan. Therefore, the simple logic of survival says that the chances of survival are best if one goes to the roots of terror.


Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidical terrorist can be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere. Instead, their breeding grounds are in refugee camps and in other rubbish dumps of humanity, abandoned by civilization and left to rot. A global superpower, indifferent to their plight, and manifestly on the side of their tormentors, has bred boundless hatred for its policies. In supreme arrogance, indifferent to world opinion, the US openly sanctions daily dispossession and torture of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. The deafening silence over the massacres in Qana, Sabra, and Shatila refugee camps, and the video-gamed slaughter by the Pentagon of 70,000 people in Iraq, has brought out the worst that humans are capable of. In the words of Robert Fisk, "those who claim to represent a crushed, humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and awesome cruelty of a doomed people".


It is stupid and cruel to derive satisfaction from such revenge, or from the indisputable fact that Osama and his kind are the blowback of the CIAs misadventures in Afghanistan. Instead, the real question is: where do we, the inhabitants of this planet, go from here? What is the lesson to be learnt from the still smouldering ruins of the World Trade Centre?


If the lesson is that America needs to assert its military might, then the future will be as grim as can be. Indeed, Secretary Colin Powell, has promised "more than a single reprisal raid". But against whom? And to what end? No one doubts that it is ridiculously easy for the US to unleash carnage. But the bodies of a few thousand dead Afghans will not bring peace, or reduce by one bit the chances of a still worse terrorist attack.


This not an argument for inaction: Osama and his gang, as well as other such gangs, if they can be found, must be brought to justice. But indiscriminate slaughter can do nothing except add fuel to existing hatreds. Today, the US is the victim but the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan will cause it to squander the huge swell of sympathy in its favour the world over. Instead, it will create nothing but revulsion and promote never-ending tit-for-tat killings.


Ultimately, the security of the United States lies in its re-engaging with the people of the world, especially with those that it has grieviously harmed. As a great country, possessing an admirable constitution that protects the life and liberty of its citizens, it must extend its definition of humanity to cover all peoples of the world. It must respect international treaties such as those on greenhouse gases and biological weapons, stop trying to force a new Cold War by pushing through NMD, pay its UN dues, and cease the aggrandizement of wealth in the name of globalization.


But it is not only the US that needs to learn new modes of behaviour. There are important lessons for Muslims too, particularly those living in the US, Canada, and Europe. Last year I heard the arch-conservative head of Pakistan's Jamat-i-Islami, Qazi Husain Ahmad, begin his lecture before an American audience in Washington with high praise for a "pluralist society where I can wear the clothes I like, pray at a mosque, and preach my religion". Certainly, such freedoms do not exist for religious minorities in Pakistan, or in most Muslim countries. One hopes that the misplaced anger against innocent Muslims dissipates soon and such freedoms are not curtailed significantly. Nevertheless, there is a serious question as to whether this pluralism can persist forever, and if it does not, whose responsibility it will be.


The problem is that immigrant Muslim communities have, by and large, chosen isolation over integration. In the long run this is a fundamentally unhealthy situation because it creates suspicion and friction, and makes living together ever so much harder. It also raises serious ethical questions about drawing upon the resources of what is perceived to be another society, for which one has hostile feelings. This is not an argument for doing away with one's Muslim identity. But, without closer interaction with the mainstream, pluralism will be threatened. Above all, survival of the community depends upon strongly emphasizing the difference between extremists and ordinary Muslims, and on purging from within jihadist elements committed to violence. Any member of the Muslim community who thinks that ordinary people in the US are fair game because of bad US government policies has no business being there.


To echo George W. Bush, "let there be no mistake". But here the mistake will be to let the heart rule the head in the aftermath of utter horror, to bomb a helpless Afghan people into an even earlier period of the Stone Age, or to take similar actions that originate from the spine. Instead, in deference to a billion years of patient evolution, we need to hand over charge to the cerebellum. Else, survival of this particular species is far from guaranteed. 


The author is professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. 

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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? 

... from an Afghan citizen, Tamim Ansary which gives at least some voice to a people and views that have been virtually invisible in the U.S., thus far. 
(Commentary courtesy of the Z-Net Sustainer Program)

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A SPIRITED DEBATE ABOUT HOW TO BEST PROTECT OUR NATION, OUR FAMILIES AND OURSELVES: IT IS OUR PATRIOTIC DUTY

Reflections on the Violence

Text of a flyer that was distributed in Asheville, NC.:

Flyer showed three pictures across the top with a caption under each:

#1: picture of bandaged Iraqi child and info from UNICEF:
"During the past 10 years the US bombed Iraq an average of 8 times per month. In addition, 1.7 million people have died as a direct result of the UN/US imposed sanctions, including the deaths of 5-6,000 children each month."

#2: picture of burning row houses in Philadelphia:
"Philadelphia, 1985. The city of Philadelphia bombed the MOVE house, a group of community activists, in a racist attack. 11 people were killed, including 5 children, and 61 houses in the neighborhood were burned down."

#3: picture of 2nd plane approaching just before impact at World Trade Center:
"The World Trade Building and the Pentagon were bombed by an unknown group, September 11, 2001."

The text:
"Each attack shown above was a terrorist attack. (...More)

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Pearl Harbor or Reichstag?

While the Pearl Harbor analogy has become firmly established in coverage of Tuesday's attacks, US citizens ought to bear in mind another WWII analogy, that of the 1933 torching of the Reichstag in Berlin (see http://www.prop1.org/park/reichsta.htm). The event, officially blamed on Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe, provided the sole justification Hitler needed to suspend all civil and democratic rights and consolidate power, even though the National Socialists were the minority party in the German Parliament... (More from IndyMedia)

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Black September Revisited
12 Sept. 01

The recent attack on the U.S. World Trade Center and the United States Pentagon has refreshed our memory, almost to the day, of the hijackings of three jets by the PFLP in 1970 from which the Black September organization was born.

On 6 September 1970 the PFLP carried out one of the most memorable hijackings in history. They began with the simultaneous diversion to Jordan of a Swissair DC-8 and a TWA Boeing 707, which was followed six days later by the hijacking of a BOAC VC-10.

The aircraft were forced to land at Dawson Field, 30 miles from Amman, which was quickly renamed Revolutionary Airport. Meanwhile another PFLP hijack team which had failed to board an El Al plane managed to hijack a Pan American Boeing 747 to Cairo and blow it up.

The Black September organization was born following this attack. The day after the destruction of the hijacked planes King Hussein declared martial law. Fighting began the following day, with a Jordanian artillery barrage against the PLO stronghold of Zarqa. Eventually the PLO was ejected from Jordan to Lebanon.

Immediately after their ejection from northern Jordan and before their move to Lebanon, in August and September 1971, the PLO had met in Damascus. The recollections of a member of the PFLP command who participated in the meetings, and the length of time it took to reach a decision, attest to the lack of agreement on what was needed to keep the flame of resistance alive. Moderate Khalid Al Hassan, who had acted as de facto foreign affairs spokesman for the PLO, was firmly opposed to the use of terror tactics. Arguing against him were Abu Iyad, Abu Jihad, Kamal Adwan, Mi Hassan Salameh (Abu Hassan), George Habbash of the PFLP and the DFLP representatives. Arafat straddled the fence but was dead set against any such acts taking place under the name of the PLO and in fact, Arafat suggested the use of a new name but the final decision to create the Black September Movement it is reported that Arafat did not vote.

Black September thus came into being. It was a coalition of the leading Palestinian resistance groups and internationalists.

Subsequently, the Black September Organization would commit numerous attacks including, 5 September 1972, the Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes during the Olympic Games. And the 28 Nov. 1971 assasination of the Jordanian Prime Minister, Wash Tel, as he returned to Cairo’s Sheraton Hotel from an Arab League meeting. The assassination itself was followed by a gruesome ritual as one of the killers knelt down, lapped up and drank some of Tel’s flowing blood and shouted several times that he and his accomplices belonged to Black September.

Black September never had any single leader and appears to have been formed ad hoc for each operation from a coalition of Marxist-Leninists and Maoists including the Japanese Red Army. Leila Khaled of the PFLP and Ramiez Sanchez aka "Carlos" were among the original membership of the Black September Organization.

Black September was believed to be a dead organization, but we find, prehaps, a clue here to understanding the WTC-Pentagon attack. An attack not by one organization, but by many. An attack, perhaps, by an organization that doesn't in fact exist until it acts.

Source: IndyMediaCenter

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MR. BUSH, WHEN THE CRISIS IS OVER, PLEASE REMEMBER THE COMMON MAN

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Indigenous thoughts RE 9/11/2001

Fellow earthling:

In this time of tragedy it is not easy to voice thoughts that may not be in uniformity with many others based on anger and need to avenge the pain caused by our monumental losses. But I chose to run the risk, the potential for change is worth it and is something I must do. Thank you in advance for letting me share my thoughts and my feelings with you.

I too was and still am in shock in the aftermath of the attack. In addition, I pray for us to use this tremendous opportunity to reflect inward in order to reach for compassion for others around the world or in our neighborhoods who might have experienced the same feelings of helplessness and despair in the aftermath of violence perpetrated against them now that we too are experiencing it. We must see how some of that violence unfortunately comes from us. We all, many times unknowingly and non-intentionally, participate in violating others, starting with our children, our friends, our neighbors. Can we change our ways to minimize that violence and the misery that follows? Yes, I am convinced that we can!

One of many examples of on-going violence we perpetrate hurts me deeply in my heart. Every time I use any oil products (gasoline and others) I cause misery to the people I have met and come to love. We probably do not think about it, but by using oil products we raise demand for oil that, in turn, makes various oil companies extend their efforts to search for oil and to expand existing exploitation. My friends Rafael, Lucille, Bolivar and their families and friends in the Amazon daily experience misery caused by the actions of those oil companies and others (logging and mining companies, to name a few). (Please see http://www.unii.net/ or http://www.unii.net/sanvirgilio.html ) My friends are being physically decimated, their culture erased, their whole life and those of their descendants, if they choose to have any, so terribly ripped out of them. Every time I see a plastic grocery bag needlessly wasted, I hurt, because I know how it affects my friends in the Amazon.

With my friends gone, both literally and figuratively, I am forever deprived of their beauty, their love and richness they offer me, just as we are forever deprived of the beauty and richness of those who so terribly perished in the Sept 11, 2001 tragedy.

Please let us use our feelings stemming from this tragedy to find out how we contribute to the misery of others around us and how we might lessen that misery. Let us reach for our capacity to love and let love be our inspiration and guide. Let us break this vicious and self-feeding cycle of violence, it must be broken somewhere. Revenge is not the answer, love is! You and I can do it.

I cannot tell you what specifically you should do, the answers are within you, reach deep inside of your soul and I know you will find them. I trust your capacity to love and know that many of you are using it already for my benefit for which I thank you - you make my life more meaningful and more beautiful.

Thank you and I love you!
... dubravko, 9/14/01

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Bush Finally Speaks, But Leaves us Disappointed