It’s been six thousand five hundred and seventy-four days since a billion people around the world watched almost three thousand of our number perish in gruesome and horrible ways. And every year on September 11 I think to myself, “This will be the year it doesn’t matter anymore. This will be the year it’s finally all right.”
But it never is.
George W. Bush deserves pride of place on this date. He betrayed the American people twice. First by not heeding the alarm bells going off everywhere about the impending attack…
Why? Because he and Cheney—Fuck you, Dick Cheney—were so fixated on some new military toy—Star Wars or Brilliant Pebbles or some such nonsense—that was so much more worthy of their time than the safety of America.
Remember how it was like pulling teeth to get Condoleezza Rice to admit delivering the headline to Bush, “Al Qaeda still determined to strike in US?”
Fuck you, Condoleezza Rice.
Bush betrayed us again, using our grief to fund his stupid war in Iraq—the single greatest foreign policy blunder in American history—instead of finishing the necessary war in Afghanistan.
It gets worse
Worse was to come. Osama bin Laden with within the grasp of our military just three months after the attack when the US military commander ordered them to stand down.
Quisling General Tommy Franks refused to insert a few hundred special forces troops to block the passes into Pakistan that were Osama bin Laden’s only escape from the cliffs of Tora Bora.
He said the snow was too deep.
Go ahead. Look it up. Justice for our dead had already given way—just three months later! — to plans for the war in Iraq.
Fuck you Tommy Franks.
When he died, I hope there was a special 21-gun “Welcome to the Mouth of Hell” reception for ‘ol Tommy ranks.
Every election day, somebody needs to be designated—because obviously no weakass Democrat will do it—to remind us that the biggest attack in American history happened on a Republican President’s watch.
The horror. The horror.
We didn’t see half of the horror that followed. One eyewitness to that morning in New York City called it “The meeting place of Hell and Earth.”
Like everything else to do with the 9.11 attack, the truth of the last searing moments of those three thousand souls was redacted by our own government.
We saw some. A charred body sitting upright inside a wrecked office with barely discernible facial features, a small torso covered with ash on a blue stretcher. The audio was worse.
“It’s very, very, very hot,” a panicked woman trapped above the flames told a 911 operator. “All I see is smoke. I’m going to die, aren’t I? I’m going to die; I know I’m going to die.”
Ever wonder what kind of vertigo was felt by the hundreds still perched atop a 100-story building when it crumbled beneath their feet?
“There are three of us in here. Three of us. Two broken windows,” a man explains, just as the Tower imploded. Oh God. Oh–.”
“I’m not dead yet.”
One incident has haunted me since I learned of it in the best book I read about the 9.11 attack: “September 11: An Oral History” (Doubleday 2001).
It wasn’t written by some clueless “9.11 Truther” funded by Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, saying ‘No plane hit the Pentagon. or “It was all a hologram,” or –my personal favorite— “There were termites in the World Trade Center!”
It was by reporter Dean Murphy of the New York Times, a real reporter at a real (if flawed) newspaper. He did what reporters do: he interviewed eyewitnesses.
Fuck you Donald Trump.
If you’ve got the stomach for it (it’s not for the squeamish), here’s one story he heard from a first responder.
Fuck you Moscow Mitch, for making these heroes beg for medical care.
“Call my daugher. I’m not dead.”
Ernest Armistead was an emergency medical specialist, an EMT, with the New York City Fire Department. He drove one of the first ambulances to reach the Twin Towers right up onto the plaza.
Here’s what he saw.
“I had arrived at the North Tower only a few minutes before we met. This lady was among a half-dozen people I saw who probably fell a thousand feet or so when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center. I am not sure how she got on the plaza. Maybe she was on her way to Los Angeles and was ejected from the jet by the force of the collision.”
“Or maybe she was an office worker in the tower sitting near one of the windows and was swept away when the building caved around her. Or maybe she was trapped and jumped to escape the flames, though I don’t think so, since I happened upon her before most of those people were seen jumping.”
“She was an elegant lady. I could tell that she had her hair done up very nicely. Brunette. She had on tasteful earrings. She was wearing pretty makeup. In my profession you notice clothes because you often must cut them off to save lives. That was the first thing that came to mind: This lady is well dressed.”
The Talking Torso
“Triage is the first thing done at a disaster like this. Dividing the injured into categories so backup medical teams can move quickly and give treatment to those who need it most.”
“The categories are indicated by colored tags that are hung around the injured person’s neck. Green is the least serious. Yellow more so. Red indicates critical injuries: And black means the person is dead or close to it. When you’re engaged in triage, you have one thing in the back of your mind all the time, “My backup is coming. My backup is coming.”
“That’s the reason you can tag people who obviously need help and not stop and give it to them right then. You know you need to get everyone tagged, and you know someone with a medical bag is coming right behind you. That certainly was what I was thinking when I met the lady in the plaza, the big open space between the two towers that had a fountain and a round sculpture in the middle, and saw something that was so horrific that I am glad I missed it the first time around.”
“When the plane hit, an incredible amount of debris from the collision rained down on the plaza. Most of it was chunks of airplane and building that had little meaning to me. But amid the destruction lay a half dozen people.”
“There was virtually nothing left of him”
“There was a man having a seizure and his eyes were rolling into the back of his head. He had struck the pavement so hard that there was virtually nothing else left of him. And then there was the lady with the nice hairdo and earrings.”
“When I got to her, what impressed me and scared me was that she was alert and was watching what I was doing. I ripped out a black tag and put it around her neck.”
“And she looked at me and said, “I am not dead. Call my daughter. I am not dead.”
I was speechless. Then I stammered, “Ma’am, don’t worry about it. We will be right back to you.”
That was a lie. She couldn’t see what I could see. Somehow, I guess it was an air draft or something, her fall had been cushioned enough so that she didn’t splatter like the others. Still her body was so twisted and torn apart that I could only ask myself, why is this lady still alive and talking to me? How can this be? Her right lung, shoulder and head were intact, but from the diaphragm down she was gone.”
“Yet she was lucid enough that she continued to argue with me. “I am not dead,” she insisted again. I am convinced she had some medical training because she knew I had given her the black mark of death. And she resented it.”
Black tag with a tiny white cross
“I knew I had to keep going, but she had so deeply shaken me that I lingered for a second or two. Then I stepped over her and put a black tag on the man having the seizure.”
“Another wave of casualties arrived in the lobby from upstairs, so I needed to return. As I headed back, I stepped over the lady one more time. And as eerie and unsettling as our first encounter had been, the second was worse.”
She started yelling at me.” I am not dead! I am not dead!”
“They’re coming, they’re coming,” I replied without stopping.
“I am not dead! I am not dead!”
“Today I think of her as the living dead. I talked to the living dead. And I lied to the living dead. I told her to hang on, that help was coming. But I pronounced her dead in my mind. And she knew that. I put a black tag with a small white cross around her neck. And as best she could, she gave me hell for it.”
“The psychiatrists and those from the post-trauma team say it is good for me to talk about her and the rest of that day. They say it is the only way I will come to terms with what happened and finally free my mind of her.”
“So here I am talking to you,” he told reporter Dean Murphy.
And now I’m telling you.
the author does. and he reads nothing from russia-funded global reseaach.
This reads like the author actually believes OBL was responsible for the attacks….
Did OBL set the explosives for WTC7 from his Pakistan hospital bed, to come down @ free fall acceleration… or was that someone else?
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-911-reader-the-september-11-2001-terror-attacks/5303012
What a war zone; reminds me of fire bombings in Dresden, Japan, and England. Especially Dresden. 80 years and it’s trivial. Concern diminishes with personalization of the issue. I’m at a loss for the future. They’re bailing the banks out again, until october 10th; 75 billion a day at least, they say.
When reasonable logical and NECESSARY questions are NOT answered by authorities, it IS a coverup, which means the official version is nothing more than a pack of doodoo! The American government wants Americans to DENY THE OBVIOUS and ACCEPT THE IMPOSSIBLE/IMPROBABE!
Its been a difficult 18 years for all of us. Kudos as ever to to Daniel getting down there to Florida and hunting down the ATTA no-one was supposed see in his midnight Transam rides. These dirty bastards have in one foul day corralled our generation’s consciousness, or more rightly, the consciousness of all generations since; to run it down an animal race of perversion (s) management into the next holding paddock of the apocalypse. In the years since, not a day goes by without consideration and reading and furthering the swim into this cesspit of conspiracy delivered to us that fateful day. Not one . So fuck them all. Fuck ODIGO and PTECH and BARAK and CHERTOF and ZAKHIEM and RICE and RUMSFELD and MUELLER the ancient dog wagging his fecund tail; Fuck em all for what they enabled, conspired to achieve and have stolen from us.
Not unusual…????? Perhaps you would be so kind as to direct me to another source or three which purport that demolition charges are in any way common as a conponnent of new construction of public acommodation buildings. SOUNDS FARFETCHED TO ME…!!!!!!!!!!!!
As someone who has studied physics at a university level, I trust the laws of physics. Bongo1’s above-presentation of the collapse of building 7 in the WTC complex is competent report on the great work that has been done by Professor Hulsey and others. In early 2002, I helped produce the video “The Greatest lie Ever Sold.” I was responsible for both the title and for the inclusion of video showing WTC, Building 7 dropping in its own footprint. It was as clear to me then as it is now, that Building 7 came down by means of a controlled demolition. Larry Silverstein, the owner of the WTC 7, told the fire department to “pull the building.” That was the signal to demolish the building. The explosives were most likely already incorporated into the structure of the WTC, building 7 as it was being built. Incorporating explosives into a large building is not an unusual occurrence.
Sounds to me like some of our friends cannot accept the only logical conclusion one can make, after all the information is known. All those exercises, one at least that sent the fighters to Canada’s North. The destruction of the tapes made by the controllers who were talking with the jets that hit by an unidentified as of yet “FAA quality control officer” in Rome NY. He took the reel and broke it, pulled the tape out, cut it up with scissors and put it in multible waste baskets around the FAA facility. Bush just sitting there after being told a second plane had struck. And Bldg. 7’s mystery dive….. WTF, What more does anyone else need find source of this horror?
On Sep 3rd 2019, the head of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) presented a draft report on his findings after a 4 year investigation into the collapse of the third skyscraper to fall on 9/11. I am referring to the 47 story, 610ft high WTC Building 7 (sometimes referred to as the Salomon Brothers Building) which was calculated from videos of the event to have collapsed in 7 seconds and reached absolute free-fall acceleration in the fall. This collapse occurred at 5:20pm on the afternoon of 9/11/2001.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) had been assigned the responsibility of investigating this extraordinary collapse (along with the collapses of twin towers WTC 1 & 2) and after a prolonged investigation announced the result of its investigation in 2007. NIST claimed that some office fires seen burning in WTC 7 during the course of that day had caused metal beams to expand and push a main structural girder off the seat where it was attached to a vertical column in the North East corner of the building. This they said started a chain reaction of further structural failures and a “new type of progressive collapse” such that the whole building finally came down, symmetrically, pretty much into its own footprint, in absolute free fall for 2.5 seconds of the 7 second collapse (timed from when the roof line started moving downwards).
UAF’s Professor Hulsey (who is also recognized as an expert in forensic engineering) claims the NIST investigation and computer simulation they used to backup their analysis contains egregious errors and significant omissions which make the NIST report on the WTC 7 collapse and the fire induced collapse scenario invalid and worthless.
Husley says after he and a team of two PhD engineering students had spent four years on their own investigation at UAF, that he could state with confidence that WTC 7 did NOT experience a progressive collapse, and fires did NOT cause the collapse of WTC 7 . Furthermore the only way that his team found they could in computer simulation models duplicate the collapse seen in the videos of the WTC 7 coming down was to withdraw support from every structural column in the building for a height of 8 stories in a “near simultaneous” failure event.
Now as I see it, if the WTC 7 collapse investigation was thoroughly botched by NIST, it must call into question their competence to investigate the collapses of WTC 1 & 2 and consequently the conclusion they reached as to the failures that brought about those collapses as well.
Professor Hulsey’s draft report of his finding along with a speech he made on Sep 3rd in a UAF auditorium outlining the errors he found in the NIST WTC 7 report and the outcome of his own investigation are available for viewing on the internet and can easily be found by anyone wanting more details. He is making all the data behind his report available on the internet and giving an 8 week period for public comment by any interested parties, before writing his final report which he hopes to have completed by the end of the year.
my ownself, as thy say in texas.