07 June 2004

Dear Staff:

on my sixteenth birthday when he first announced something called Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI – which later became called “Star Wars” technology in vernacular media

 

my father and I were disgusted at his gall and agreed Reagan was an idiot.

 

we sought in vain the names of those for whom he was a useful idiot.

 

I was always disgusted by him and his people. Their every action was unctuous and covered in a slick, plastic veneer,

 

bloated, arrogant, dumb, pushy, hyper-powerful, wasteful, “let me tell ya this” and “well, let me just say this about that” and the fucking bullshit sports metaphors and the asinine posturing all the while arming this whole world to the teeth – granting massive contracts to these companies here in Cullyfornia.

 

Feigning loss of memory … “honestly, I don’t remember,”

smiling, shaking his head – bobbling really – like one of those dashboard dolls making a mockery of us all for his wealthy cabal.

 

refusing for his entire first term to utter the word “AIDS” or “HIV” and letting half a decade of deaths just happen without funding for research because of his bigotry against gays.

 

the arrogant cowboy shit

 

arming Osama bin Laden to the teeth and giving him sacks of cash.

 

raiding Granada to look tough-guy

 

Libya!

de-humanizing other world leaders

making Qaddafi a model for GHWBush to stretch to Noriega and Saddam Hussein

 The US Central-American policy of Reagan years extending Nixon/Kissingers squashing of democratically-elected Marxist and Socialist governments in the hemisphere.

 

 Iran-Contra

 Nancy. “Just Say No.” What fucking hypocrisy.

 

Reagan died years ago I say – and his family just kept drawing the check.

My novel, Karna’s Conflict, in which a disgruntled socialist blows up the Empire State Building with a thermonuclear device, remained online for a year (1999) and statistics showed the site was visited numerous times by users in Langley, Virginia and other D.C. suburbs. We assumed the content had attracted the vaunted Pentagon intelligence goons who would fail so completely the following year, only to remain in power and indeed, to receive promotions.

I was not surprised then on September 11, 2001, when I saw the towers burning from a Williamsburg rooftop. I clearly understood why someone would do it and I, like many others, had expected the like enough to have predicted it in near-exacting detail.

Having been among those who witnessed the controlled implosion of the Williamsburg water tanks a couple of months before the attacks, I even wondered aloud to M. Weber at the Booklyn Tuesday night meeting# whether any of the Italian families in our infamous neighborhood had anything to do with it. Occam’s Razor … it just fit. Or, as those same neighbors in my old ‘hood might put it: “If it smells like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck … shoot it – it’s a duck.”

New York City was bloated then. It had been waiting to pop for years. One could feel it. That’s why what I felt, as that Tuesday unfolded and it became clear – by noon – that everything was over; what I felt more than any other emotion under a brilliant blue sky empty of the machines of grounded men; was relief.  Relief that the damage wasn’t worse.

That summer, undercover agents were everywhere in New York. I have said to many friends, in sober terms, that as a dark-skinned, bearded Asian I felt their presence, often. I can also honestly say I witnessed them – both making arrests and getting loaded in the bars. I played pool once with a gun-toting federal agent who was so loaded he challenged me to play a game because he didn’t like the way I looked. It was scary. My friends told me not to do it, but this was before I had my son. I beat him by two balls and he showed me the gun and told me I was lucky I’d won fair. That was late 1998.

In June of 2001, I left town and went to Taiwan for two weeks. I returned to New York City on the 23rd of June and wrote:

Rent in Williamsburg has risen to the point where a small, clean, $700-a-month, one-bedroom apartment is impossible to find, requests for roomshares are on the rise and complaints about the cost-of-living are played out.  Next door on this very block, “loft building” banners have gone up across construction sites in two empty warehouses. The owners advertise cookie-cutter, 750-1200 square-foot apartments for $2000 – $4000 a month with amenities like all new appliances, double height ceilings, gas heat and hot water; on flyers at the local deli where, yesterday, a woman picked up a flyer, stared at it and seriously muttered, “there goes the neighborhood.”

Burns, a bicycle mechanic and bassist, and Dr. Tracer, an instructor at a local community college, live on a four-year-old lease and pay $1000 a month for perhaps 700 sq. ft. – the back space of which Burns has converted into his bedroom. Ten days ago I took the world’s longest nonstop flight from Hong Kong to Newark. I’ve been sleeping here in Burns’s room when he leaves for gigs or work and writing with his laptop on the nightshift.

I rose from my daysleep just after midnight to find Dr. Tracer awake and talkative. We began walking through Williamsburg at 2:30 in the morning, past the swinging doors of a bar. Partied-out, Friday-night boozers stumbled into the street looking for taxi or subway or deli or restaurant doors, their eyes blearily seeking something recognizable, the stench of smoke and alcohol wafting off them.  Music drifted faintly out the open doors.

We stopped at a deli, where a broad swath of bottletops had been crushed into the asphalt in a dense, rectangular splay of circles – a speckled count of the beers drunk at the cornershop on hot summer days, when tossing a bottlecap out onto the street meant it got stuck in black, melted goo. A girl was hanging around the pay phone, Brooklyn summer night; couples fell into each other, lazy eyes smiled, engines fired up, a black sedan pulled away from the curb.

We had a coffee and made our way to a bar off McCarren Park. I drank a couple of martinis, Tracer had cold white wine.  We conversed until 4:30, discussing broad philosophical topics casually. We were specific on the matters of death, writing and deafness.  At one point Tracer and I agreed that when we were children, we were surrounded by others who did not understand how to communicate with us, whose methods were sympathetic but crude. This we agreed, drove us to write.

Two women, a redhead and a brunette, walked in and seduced two men.  The women sent one man home alone and, as he stumbled out, but before the door had fully closed, the brunette said coldly to the redhead:    “T-G- H-G!”-  in time with his steps, with the door swinging closed and with the click shut, she mock-laughed as she fell forward on her stool, elucidating: “Thank. God. He’s. Gone.” as she turned back to the man who remained.  At last call, they walked home with the second man, the brunette told him they wanted to teach him something. We were the last customers and left shortly after this.

A few blocks away, we ran into Tracer’s former roommate, a German who shared his apartment for the three years before Burns moved in. The German’s wife and child were out of town and he was up at 5:00 in the a.m. strolling neatly out of a bar, wide-eyed, looking for a place to do cocaine, asking if we had any – we did not.  The sun rose quickly, early on one of the longest days of the year. Dr. Tracer and I returned to the apartment, rolled a smoke and continued talking.  The smoke was affirmative. We decided to travel.

We had a coffee, then took the G and the F trains to the ends of their lines, arriving at Coney Island just past 8:00 a.m. It was a rainy morning and thick, grey clouds masked the sun. The light was a cold-white glow behind them.  The beach was a neat, empty, expanse of sierra-colored loam, darkened by wetness in neat lines by tractors pulling wide metal rakes. The sand was made soft by the thin, white line of foam that the edge of each wave drew as a loose parallel to the horizon, a black straight-edge between the gray sky and the grey sea.

We began walking from the boardwalk to the beach silently, occasionally signing as we walked. We passed an elderly, disheveled woman, who was entirely wrapped in a blanket lying on the beach. After we passed this lump of cloth and human flesh, I saw peripherally that she rose from her reclined position. I then clearly heard her say, “who knows … maybe they like walking on the beach.”

It could have been a woman on a phone call talking to someone else about something else, but her physical movements implied awareness of us. It could have been a crazed, semi-lucid homeless person babbling incoherently to herself, afraid of people approaching and passing her encampment on the beach or, it could have been an agent of some U.S. policing department observing us as we visited the beach. More engagements with seemingly random others on our trip would increase my feeling that we were being closely observed.

Dr. Tracer and I sat by the ocean, waded, ate a bag of chips on the lifeguard’s chair at Coney Island Beach for forty minutes and decried the lack of sunshine. I tape-recorded the sound of the waves and the seagulls to listen to back in the city.

I hoped, pathetically, that the sun would emerge until Tracer pointed out that the storm off the coast was headed inland, toward Manhattan.  We left the beach before the rain started.  As we left the boardwalk, vendors were opening for business.  We had a coffee.  The first drops of rain struck us as we crossed the street to the subway. We decided to go to Chinatown.

We caught the N and sneaked a smoke in an empty car during the long stretch between the end of the line and 50th. Then we switched to the operator’s car to watch people.  On the way back, I glared out the windows at the grey sky defiantly until we went underground. Dr. Tracer finally joked, “when we get out on the other side the sun will be shining down on you … vindictively!”

A black, 40-plus-year-old man, clean shaven and slightly balding, got on and sat beside me carrying a rustly collection of objects in two plastic bags; an unmarked black plastic bag, covering a white plastic bag inside. He had a small band-aid strip stuck on his head exposed below his high hairline. The rectangular band-aid strip was set perpendicular across a straight, red line of blood above the temple – the wound was obviously fake, staged. The man fumbled with his possessions, continuously muttering to himself. He could as easily have been a semi-crazed denizen of New York as an undercover NYPD detective.

Once we moved from the empty car in the back to the operator’s car, many people who got on the subway on their way to Manhattan seemed like characters, with staged aspects, or too-perfect appointments. I wore headphones, listening to a CD of sarangi and hearing the outside world leak in. Two women with children sat beside us, a young boy in a stroller, his mother holding his infant sibling. They were northeastern Asians, maybe
Korean. Their grandmother was gently inspiring the children to be friendly.  The son, cool, observant and thoughtful, seemed worried; the baby was still at the age of wondering at the world.

This was the operator’s car on the N, Saturday morning at 10 o’clock from south Brooklyn to Manhattan on a rainy day in June and I report with the impunity of a witness: public space in New York is undeniably equally peppered with lonesome egos, expressers of unimaginable histories, and potentially dangerous operatives for larger interests, both governmental and mafioso.

Another example: Agent 99, who subsequently led us to Canal street, starts with a pair of plain, white leather sneakers with silver dots evenly-spaced along the edge of the sole – thumbtacks – and a short, hot, controlled blaze of red, orange and yellow flames painted on the outer skin of each shoe, burning up, licking at the clean white leather shoetops toward the short, white, rolled columns – socks – that lead to a pale leg elegantly colored with intricate flowers of reds and blues – tattoos – into a sea of limpid green: an opaque, green silk skirt with a lime-orange border. She wore a plain blouse and her hair was colored with straight, serene blonde streaks. She was reading a hardback with a romance cover and flowery letters that read, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”  The glance of anyone on her side of the train who bent over to set something down, pick something up or tie a shoe was met with that leg, rocking up-and-down, regular as a pendulum, leading to a carefully put-together young woman on her way to Mallhattan.

We emerged from the subway to the rainstorm we’d seen hovering dark over the ocean. The upper two thirds of the World Trade Center Towers had fully disappeared into thick, coal-colored clouds. The curved disks of shoppers umbrellas, most were black, bobbed and floated through space.  The storm had traveled overhead as we traveled underground and now a broad dark cloud covered Canal street.

The huge, warm, tropical drops, falling down, on and around street signs and ads with Chinese and English text, reminded me of Taipei where I’d been two weeks before during the see-bei-oo rainy season. We stood under the awnings of the Asian marketplace as rain poured down. Oblique, glowing flashes of white light flooded the clouds internally, leaked out the edges.  Thunder rolled.  Rain fell and we passed through it, mindless, walking between the drops.

We crossed between corners and in front of the slow-moving traffic. Many people shopped. Two tall women, one with a necklace that spelled, “dirty south,” in cursive, solid gold letters, awaited a man, shorter, rounder, balding, mustachioed, who was buying a souvenir.  Young southern Europeans, women, were shopping.  An elder, African-American man bought a pair of scarves. Il pleut.

We stopped at a Vietnamese cafe, had hot tea, then pho, rolls and beer.  We returned to Brooklyn on the J. It was past noon. Burns had gone to gig a wedding.  His cats, Percy and Mingus wandered around the house, mewling for food.  We fed them.  We rolled another smoke.  We’d spent 27.00 on food, 25.00 on liquor, 4.50 on transportation and 3.00 for three coffees each, USD 59.50, total.

<unsnip>

And a hundred days later they were gone.
CONTROLLED DEMOLITION?

The official explanation for the collapse of the towers as first proposed by FEMA and subsequently supported by the 9/11 Commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Popular Science magazine, is that the collisions and ensuing explosions and burning fuel from the aircraft that struck the towers weakened the infrastructure, created increases in temperatures such that steel melted and concrete was pulverized in less than an hour and, by a random natural accident, collapsed each tower into its own footprint – the first time this ever happened in the well-documented history of skyscrapers.

And this happened not once, nor twice but three times that day, including to a 47-story steel building that was never struck by any plane.

This is an unprecedented shock, as per Loose Change, the DVD, which is excellent on this topic:
1945, a B-52 Bomber lost in fog crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. 14 people died, and the building endured 1 million dollars in damages, but it stands to this day.

1975, a three-alarm fire broke out between 9th and 14th floors of North Tower. The fire led to the decision to install sprinklers in the Towers.

1988, a 62-story Los Angeles skyscraper experiences a fire spread over four floors that burns for 3 hours, but the building remains intact.

1991, a 38-story skyscraper in Philadelphia, built in 1973, burned for over 19 hours, spread over 8 floors. It did not collapse.

2004, a 56-story skyscraper in Venezuela, built in 1976, burned for over 17 hours spread across 26 floors, eventually reaching the roof. It did not collapse.

2005, the Windsor building in Madrid, Spain, a 32-story tower framed in steel-reinforced concrete, burned for almost 24 hours, completely destroying the top ten stories of the building, but the building itself did not collapse.

Yet on September 11, 2001, two 110-story skyscrapers, completed in 1973, burning for 56 and 103 minutes, respectively, on four floors in each building, collapsed entirely to the ground; and a third, with minimal damage, the same.

And the official explanation has other major problems.

In fact, there is no photographic or physical evidence of temperatures described in the official explanation of the collapse. There is, however, much documented evidence of firefighters and evacuees making their way to and through these regions of allegedly molten steel.

Melting steel demands steady endurance of 2,000-3,000 degree temperatures, but the fires in these towers lasted hardly an hour. Indeed, the North Tower, was struck at an angle by the airliner-turned-missile, which resulted in most of the jet’s fuel burning outside the building in a huge fireball. The fire inside, meanwhile, looked like it was going out:

“Battalion Seven Chief: “Battalion Seven … Ladder 15, we’ve got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines. Radio that, 78th floor numerous 10-45 Code Ones.”

Firefighters had radioed that they felt they could control it. They were there, present – in hallways that were supposedly aflame in 2,000 degree temperatures and they were reporting that it seemed they had the fire contained. And then, suddenly, the North Tower collapsed.

The building in which fire burned for the shortest amount of time, in which it seemed to be contained, weakened and collapsed first.

The 911 Truth community is very convincing on this: the collapses weren’t random or accidental. Investigations reveal evidence suggesting it was accomplished with explosive charges placed at strategic points in the buildings, a controlled demolition. The most recent research, finds evidence of thermite, a sulfur-reactant used in controlled demolitions in melted WTC steel.

There are numerous reports by eyewitnesses describing multiple explosions in the buildings, far from the site of the initial crashes – the downstairs lobby looked like it had been bombed out when the firefighters and the French filmmaking Naudet brothers arrive with their camera.

The amount of testimonial evidence is stunning and can be found online in many places: http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org and
Mike Rivero’s What Really Happened? at: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/911_wtc_videos.html The evidence was also presented as far back as 2002 by Eric Hufschmid in his book Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack, and the accompanying DVD Painful Deceptions and very well deliberated in the Loose Change DVD, previously cited. There are flashes and puffs of cement in all the videographic evidence that look very much like controlled explosions designed to allow for freefall and secure implosion of the structures.

There has been much focus by the 911 truth community on the late afternoon collapse of WTC7 that day, a 47-story, steel-framed skyscraper that collapsed upon itself in six seconds, though it was not struck by an aircraft. WTC7 contained sensitive data, including 3-4,000 files belonging to the Securities and Exchanges Commission related to numerous Wall Street investigations and was revealed to have housed the Department of Defense, the Internal Revenue Service, secret CIA operations staff on three floors and Rudolph Giuliani’s emergency bunker. There was no reason for this building to collapse and documentation and reports of the event overwhelmingly support the conjecture that it was intentionally destroyed.

The building’s owner, Larry Silverstein, said as much when, in an interview for the PBS documentary, “America Rebuilds,” he reveals:

“I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse,”

implying that he and others authorized the controlled demolition of WTC7. (It has been reported that Silverstein later recanted this taped statement, saying he meant to say “pull them” meaning the firefighters, out of harm’s way, which smacks of nonsense).
“Maybe the smartest thing to do is just pull it,” he says, “and they made that decision – to pull – and we watched the building collapse.” This immediately brings up questions:
1. Why did you make this decision?
2. When exactly were the explosives set?
3. Who set them?

The timing of the collapses is another giveaway. The 110-story structures fall within ten seconds each – straight down into their own footprint. There is no tilting or listing and the material from one floor to the next meets with no resistance. The tempo of the collapses never even slows. WTC7 falls in less than seven seconds! The Loose Change DVD makes an excellent case for “free-fall,” by including a simple calculation of gravitational collapse superimposed over images of the collapses shown set to timecode.

But currently, the leading conjecture on controlled demolition of the towers is that the towers were demolished with pre-planted explosives that likely included thermate, a sulfur explosive/reactant that melts steel and which is commonly used in controlled demolitions.

Physical evidence was swiftly removed and destroyed after September 11, but recently, evidence of the presence of thermate on WTC steel was discovered by BYU professor Dr. Steven Jones, physicist and co-founder of “Scholars for 911 Truth,” an organization of professional academics seeking to investigate the polarizing events more thoroughly – from their website:

“Scholars for 911 Truth is a non-partisan association of faculty, students, and scholars, in fields as diverse as history, science, military affairs, psychology, and philosophy, dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealing truths behind 9/11.”

Dr. Jones has published a paper on the collapse of the towers, in which he calls for an investigation based on hard evidence that he has gathered and experiments he has conducted.

It has also been documented that there was a 30 – 36 hour window of time when power was down in both WTC towers the weekend before the events of that Tuesday. The power was out for long stretches from September 6th to the 9th. Cameras and security systems from the 36th floor up to the roofs of the buildings were off.

Facing the data brings one swiftly to the conjecture that explosives were likely planted in the buildings at this time. ZIM Corporation’s sudden exodus from the North Tower’s 17th floor just one week before 9/11 is suspect – the company forfeited a $50,000 deposit in suddenly breaking the lease. Details are at http://www.911missinglinks.com.

Further, for several weeks prior to the attacks, due to threats, security had been increased at the Towers, but there was a sudden stand-down from a heightened security position, just before the attacks, on September 6th and, bomb-sniffing dogs which had been present for several weeks, were removed from the Towers. Additional support for the theory that explosions at the bases of the towers assisted the collapses, comes from data collected at Colombia University’s Seismic Research Center in nearby Palisades, New York. Which show two IMMENSE spikes just before each collapse! Experts have said the spikes resemble those registered by underground bomb blasts.

Let’s say no U.S. American is ever found guilty of being on the inside of the attacks – because of a lack of interest, or because of political will or by oppression – at least the fundamental laws of physics, gravity and science shouldn’t suffer. We ought to address the collapse of the buildings in order to hold universally understood ideas that are visible over basic real-time media like television broadcasts, to be true. People should be able to immediately comprehend that 110 stories collapsing in less than ten seconds is “free-fall” which necessarily implies a controlled set of explosions, timed to allow material to collapse.

It just cannot have happened by accident. It simply cannot have happened as described in the FEMA report, the 9/11 Commission Report and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report. It’s physically impossible.

When I first saw the collapses, live, on television, there was no doubt in my mind that it was a controlled demolition. I have an understanding of gravity and basic physics – I know and understand what free-fall is. I immediately knew the WTC buildings were brought down with pre-planning and the detonation of controlled explosives. I guess I assumed it would be a part of the plot revealed – the bombs in the buildings that allowed the feat.

This first instinct, which was substantiated by a lifetime of experience and education, gave way to a myth that defied logic as I listened to the government tell me that the collapse was an accident caused by burning jet fuel melting steel. I doubted my knowledge in favor of the official story – or at least doubted myself enough not to voice my feelings against the official story.

I have been trying to understand how this could have happened. I think I am the victim of calculated mass hypnosis. It could be that I was terrified by the scale of what it meant that this controlled demolition was going to be covered-up and replaced with a myth, and thus, boggled with fear, I succumbed to an immense, corporate-media-propagated lie that defies all science.

Perhaps because it was reiterated so often by so many agencies of “truth” – government, press and academy – and accepted by so many U.S. Americans immediately, I shelved rejecting the explanation. It took me five years of steady investigation into this matter to shake off the veil that was cast over me then and to return my mind with confidence to what I originally believed when faced with this extraordinary event: the towers, free-falling in less than ten seconds into their own imprint cannot have been achieved without controlled demolition tactics and neither collapse had anything to do with the plane crashes.

Allowing insiders to accomplish the demolition of the World Trade Center buildings live, in real-time for the sake of a larger political end implies a level of “National Security” far beyond the imaginings of any sane democrat. It is, however, a stated tactic of the Leo Strauss-inspired neoconservatives: generating public myths because allowing the truth to be understood would be a threat to national security, is a primary tactical aggression of these thinkers, who have told us they will “lie” to us for our security and who have authorized never before seen powers of spying and intelligence gathering on our own citizens. It all just seems to fit together to say … “9/11 was an Inside Job.”

In fact, there were a lot of people who had suggested it could happen, who had reasoned it out as a logical and perhaps even likely target.

I shot 8mm video of planes in the air over the city in the summer of 2000; from my Williamsburg rooftop, including quick pans to the WTC towers and the rest of the buildings of the Manhattan skyline. The low-flying commercial jets are all landing at La Guardia in my footage and so they are very near the ground. You can see the sunlight glistening off their huge shiny underbellies just before the camera whips around to a close-up of the Towers – or the Empire State Building.

And that is why The Report of the so-called 9/11 Commission is so completely and utterly offensive to me. As a witness, as a New Yorker then, I am incensed and disgusted by the pathetic collection of whitewashing and ass-covering rationalizations produced in the 9/11 Report by the cronies in the U.S. American government.

It’s a massive hole of omissions. As a totally unplugged person I knew and know more about certain factual events of that day than the commission even elected to discuss. How can this be? Worse, there are key events – including the wargames that were held that day, false flag operations – that have been omitted by the Commission, which effectively means these were covered-up by their so-called Investigation.

No, I did not feel surprised on 9-eleven. My surprise was only at how clearly and closely I was allowed to observe this seminal event in the history of our species.  The enormous burning triangular gash, the purposeful, last-second upward angling of the second plane as it screamed into the building, the neat and even collapse of each tower. The collapse of world trade center 7. I was presented all of this. Live. And then from many angles; what happened just a few thousand feet away from my nose. [Had they fallen toward me, how far from my feet would they have lain?]

By evening, I had a swollen rock in my gut. I had the feeling that the experience was a staged event, a New York spectacle that had been planned to occur at a precise moment.  I met at least fifty people who felt this within hours; a woman I was with that morning, a Scandinavian from Copenhagen said, “This was a well-planned act. It was meant to happen when it did. If it had been at noon, the death toll would be 50,000.” A recently immigrated Italian, an artist, designer I knew said bluntly, “It feels scripted.”

That there were many people who knew it was going to happen; that it was being presented to me by people who knew more before it happened than I still know about what happened … this thought haunts me. The fact, not theory, that there are people who could have stopped this from happening and didn’t sickens me. That there may be specific people who let it happen, so they could begin an all-out campaign for more war has depressed me for years.

In the days immediately after the attacks, I watched all news reports with a suspect eye. I watched anyone who was not in New York that day and who spoke of the attacks on the Towers – including George Bush – very, very closely. Many people recast what I had witnessed. There were numerous mis-statements, false statements and melodramas – sensationalist, yellow journalism inflamed emotions instead of becalming them. “Tens of thousands dead!” came down to 2800. Osama bin Laden was named as the culprit within fifteen minutes of the first plane striking its target – a classic disinformation technique of the US CIA, confirmed as such when six days later bin Laden denied involvement to the world’s papers that would listen, a denial buried in World Trade Center steel.

Dick Cheney disappeared for five days and then reappeared on Meet the Press with Tim Russert from Camp David for a special one hour program with only one commercial interrupt, during which time he legitimized the unelected military dictator Parvez Musharraf of Pakistan as a staunch ally of republicanism and US American liberty, defined and blamed an organized, multinational secret agency he called Al Qaeda – “which means “the base” in Arabic” – and declared it headed by Osama bin Laden. Cheney told blatant lies about the U.S. military protocol for shooting down aircraft in emergencies and demanded the right to function with a National Security agenda that overcame the Constitution, to murder bin Laden or others without trial, to be allowed to hire unsavory elements to go after “the ones that did this,” and to impose never before seen restrictions on US American freedoms.

Donald Rumsfeld then followed Cheney’s performance appearing first outside, in front of the glass doors of the ABC building in DC for an impromptu question and answer period in which he first dropped his, “Sometimes the best defense is a good offense,” as though we hadn’t just been blindsided in a huge failure of defense, and then subsequently went indoors to make a national announcement to regulate plane tickets on ABC’s This Week, trying to make it sound off-handed: “Well, Sam, I’d say about the price of a ticket from DC to Los Angeles, maybe 800 dollars.”  Rumsfeld the voice of reason in a wild, emotional time: Cokie Roberts shouting, “Congressional reaction is real, it’s not just for the cameras!” After Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft popped up on MSNBC for a 2-minute press conference to quickly and internationally demand, by executive order, greater and wider wiretapping capability than ever before in U.S. history.

I videotaped and observed for four days. Coverage by mass media felt obviously and intensely scripted – heavy state propaganda permeated every sector of media, well-known independent media. It was shocking to watch – respected companies, publishers, editors-in-chief, editors, anchors and even well-respected reporters and journalists lined up to declare war in response to the acts of 9/11, a vengeful desire to lash out at “those who did this” that completely ignored the lack of evidence and the fact that the executors of the act were all dead, had died with the bystanders they had murdered. Many declared a violent reaction as being as requisite as caring for the wounded and/or seeking out the bodies of the dead. This was in direct contradiction to the compassion and care I had witnessed in the streets of New York.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two unknown villages until Truman decided to incinerate the people living peacefully there, not to defeat the Japanese, but because Truman was directed to communicate to the Soviets and the rest of the world that the US is willing to do what everyone feared Hitler would do: use nuclear weapons to display its dominance. In Iraq and Afghanistan, they are doing it still.

Agents of the US have been responsible for the deaths of millions in their homelands around the world, by crass and brutal methods: carpet bombings from aircraft, ground invasions, covert operations, land mines, assassinations, tortures – the CIA has been actively doing these things – pitting tribes against one another, committing bribery and extortion, distributing weapons and drugs, spying, murdering, raping and beheading – I’m talking about tax-payer funded agents of the U.S. government, taught the doctrine of the School of the Americas, committing atrocities.

China 1945, Italy 1947, Greece 1947, Philippines 1940’s, Soviet Union 1940’s–60’s, Eastern Europe 1948, Korea 1945, Albania 1949, Iran 1953,
Guatemala 1954, Costa Rica 1954, 1970-71, Syria 1956, West Asia 1957-58, Indonesia 1957, Vietnam 1950-73, Laos 1957–73, Haiti 1959-63, Guatemala 1960, 1962-80’s, Congo 1960-64, Ecuador 1960-63, France/Algeria 1960’s, Peru 1960-65, Brazil 1961-64, Dominican Republic 1960–66, Cuba1959 – 1980’s, 2001, Ghana 1966, Uruguay 1964-70, Chile 1964-73, Greece 1964-73, Bolivia 1964-75, Iraq 1972-75, 1989-present day, Australia 1973-75, Angola 1975-80’s, Zaire 1975-78, Seychelles 1979-81, Grenada 1979-84, Morocco 1983, Suriname, 1982-84, Nicaragua 1981-86, Panama 1989, Bulgaria 1990, Iraq and Afghanistan 2001 to the present.#

Five decades of this has divided human society, pluralized the diversity and spread of horrific, US-made death machines and maintained the cruel human failing of war in the face of all our philosophy and science. In this regard – in the matter of military intelligence and covert foreign policy – Truman equals Eisenhower equals Kennedy equals Johnson equals Nixon equals Ford equals Carter equals Reagan equals Bush equals Clinton equals Bush. All worked to make the US military the most diverse and complex arms seller in the world. Now only Carter repents.

The U.S. American military has infested itself upon every nation’s economy, including its own. It sucks away finances that rightfully belong to U.S. laborers, thinkers, families and children.

We push, sit upon and ride the half-ass, trickety jalopy we call the Internet at the dawn of international communication in real-time, awaiting a sensibility to take hold of the U.S. government that isn’t fundamentalist Christian and radically right-wing or from Texas with a hardline agenda or wearing an elephant-shaped tiepin colored like the flag of the United States of America.

It is apparent to everyone now that the United States of America is occupied by a political force that must be called a faction.

This faction has changed governments using force and intimidation around the world single-handedly to create axes and allies for its own imperial ambitions, in the guise of self-defense – a ludicrous argument – controls the world’s global communications media with near-absolute restriction of anti-US content; controls agencies that monitor, manage and distribute the collective funds of the largest bank account in the world; and controls the military to which it granted more than 400 Billion dollars last year – the best funded, most powerful war machine on earth. All are under the control of the so-called neo-conservative doctrine – an elitist doctrine of corporate protectionism that serves minority interests.

Among the fools in this faction there are elderly bigots who are given swan-songs of attention. There are hyper-militarily minded protocol hounds who have seized and cemented language they themselves wrote as radical outsiders only two and a half decades ago. The faction owned Tony Blair.

All were transported by soldier mentality and blood-lust – that is the stage play CNN, NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, HBO, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and every major news outlet in the United States was meant to project.

but word on the streets around the world is that what happened is this: The free-est economy in the world puffed itself up for eight years – wrapped itself into a Y2knot by getting dumbed into bad speculative investment  in the 90’s – and then had to be “system re-booted.”

Thus, 9/11, the moment when all intranet debts were erased by a tsunami of media, all pumping the same scary story (a well-known – not obscure – mafia move). Rumsfeld’s announcement od trillions of dollars just missing from the Pentagon’s budget . lost in asbestos and pulverized cement. And then the birth of a terror fiction buoyed by the drunk, high, parasitic hangers-on of the 20th century, clinging to the largest multi-media assault on international humanity ever attempted by any country, any peoples. You didn’t even have to love America … just keep your mouth shut and keep shopping so Bush “justice” could be served.

This neo-conservative faction of Bush Americans is at least guilty of producing, staging and titling “9-eleven” post-facto, to salvage the failing economy and stimulate younger generations of participants into their System of Society, which the world knows brought them the attacks. It might seem natural to react to being hit in such a spectacular way, but they do this with a fanatical pride which now seems disingenuous to many – even in the United States.

We witnessed these people drop megatons of death from the sky upon the heads of others, elsewhere – anywhere in the world they wished to assist corporations pirate resources. Yet these Bush-Americans have said aloud – and continue to say it – they believe they are doing God’s work: murder, manipulation of masses, demagoguery, espionage, political deceit, covert operations, corporate protectionism over truth and the environment – a deaf-ear to the most pressing threats to the planet.

How does one approach an enraged fundamentalist in order to seek common human spirit for tranquility? How do we tell them that the Global Peace Movement is God asking the United States to stand down?

The only way to regain control of the U.S. American government is to actively promote transparent investigation of every single corner that Bush/Cheney has labeled “National Security.” Demand Congress open all of these to Members, if not publicly.

HIGH TIME THE U.S. STAND DOWN

eh?

2002

an ode