9/11: Tenth Anniversary

[Eamonnca1]

I once dismissed Bush's "they hate our freedom" line as propaganda as well.  But there is actually a bit of truth in it, it's just that the brain-dead wannabe redneck who said it didn't really get it.  It was one of two occasions in a day when a stopped clock was right.

In the western world women have the freedom to pursue careers, have sex with whoever they want, marry whoever they want, play a bit of sport, and expose a bit of skin now and then. People have the freedom to choose whatever religious belief system they want (at least those who haven't been successfully indoctrinated from an early enough age, but that's another matter) and are not obliged to follow laws of the state that are dictated by religious doctrine. It's not illegal to be born as a homosexual and it's certainly not punishable by death as it is in Iran. The people can determine what is right and wrong without having religious texts enforced as the law of the land. That kind of thing drives Islamic fundamentalists crazy, and it is one of the things that motivates them to hate the west.  Sure there's genuine grievances, like propping up corrupt Middle-Eastern dictatorships (which are thankfully starting to crumble now) but the cultural hostility makes it all the more personal.

I'm no fan of America's military industrial complex, its corrupt political system, or its half-baked foreign policy that is too quick to use brute force at times.  But I wouldn't allow that to blind me to the very real threat posed by this poisonous religiously-fueled hatred of western civilisation and its values.  Make no mistake, Islamic fundamentalism in the nuclear age is something that has to be kept an eye on.  We've come a long way from the days of bows, arrows and swords when you needed the resources of an entire state to cause large scale loss of life.  in 2001 it only took 17 boys with stanley knives to kill thousands.  It wouldn't take a lot of people to get their hands on a nuclear weapon or at least make a dirty bomb out of it.

The vigilance can't end.

[Hardy]

We've come a long way from the days of bows, arrows and swords. Now it only takes one lunatic with a set of nuclear codes to wipe out humanity. 

The vigilance can't end.

[boojangles]

There have been an awful lot of shows on about the terrible events of 9/11 but not one of them has asked or answered a very important set of questions. Who were the people on those planes? What was their history? Why did they do what they did? What were they hoping to achieve?  I think 10 years is long enough for people to be mature enough to ask these questions and try and understand what makes people murder 1000's of innocent people. Its is not just as simple as the brainless bush line of "they hate our freedom".

Or how two of the largest steel structures in the world at the time can crumble like a house of cards within minutes of impact? Now I'm no engineer but something never added up quite right about that day. But I guess we'll never know the truth.

[seafoid]

I once dismissed Bush's "they hate our freedom" line as propaganda as well.  But there is actually a bit of truth in it, it's just that the brain-dead wannabe redneck who said it didn't really get it.  It was one of two occasions in a day when a stopped clock was right.

In the western world women have the freedom to pursue careers, have sex with whoever they want, marry whoever they want, play a bit of sport, and expose a bit of skin now and then. People have the freedom to choose whatever religious belief system they want (at least those who haven't been successfully indoctrinated from an early enough age, but that's another matter) and are not obliged to follow laws of the state that are dictated by religious doctrine. It's not illegal to be born as a homosexual and it's certainly not punishable by death as it is in Iran. The people can determine what is right and wrong without having religious texts enforced as the law of the land. That kind of thing drives Islamic fundamentalists crazy, and it is one of the things that motivates them to hate the west.  Sure there's genuine grievances, like propping up corrupt Middle-Eastern dictatorships (which are thankfully starting to crumble now) but the cultural hostility makes it all the more personal.

I'm no fan of America's military industrial complex, its corrupt political system, or its half-baked foreign policy that is too quick to use brute force at times.  But I wouldn't allow that to blind me to the very real threat posed by this poisonous religiously-fueled hatred of western civilisation and its values.  Make no mistake, Islamic fundamentalism in the nuclear age is something that has to be kept an eye on.  We've come a long way from the days of bows, arrows and swords when you needed the resources of an entire state to cause large scale loss of life.  in 2001 it only took 17 boys with stanley knives to kill thousands.  It wouldn't take a lot of people to get their hands on a nuclear weapon or at least make a dirty bomb out of it.

The vigilance can't end.

Eamonn

You look like you could do with learning more about homosexuality in the Middle East 

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/05/the-kingdom-in-the-closet/5774/

And religious fundamentalism is also very American

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c5lDszsw68&NR=1

[muppet]

The Onion's take -

Responsible Cable News Outlets To Devote Sensible Amount Of Airtime To 10th Anniversary Of 9/11


NEW YORK—Promising to cover the event responsibly and with the kind of delicate restraint it deserves, the nation's cable news outlets announced Monday that while they would be devoting some airtime to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, they "certainly wouldn't be going overboard with it."


The major networks confirmed their coverage would "of course" be tasteful and brief.

According to the news providers, they only intend to devote 15 minutes of coverage to the anniversary, tops, saying it is their obligation as professional journalists to do justice to the victims' memories as opposed to using the occasion for their own ratings gain.

In addition, network representatives admitted it would be lazy news reporting to use the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks as an excuse to fill up hundreds of hours of programming with repetitive video packages and anchors repeatedly asking their guests, "How did 9/11 change America?"

"We're planning to send one reporter to Ground Zero, have him tape a couple of two-minute segments, nothing too crazy, and that should pretty much do it," said CNN's senior vice president of programming Katherine Green, adding that the 24-hour news channel would not be making 9/11 the focus of every single program on the network because, according to Green, "What more is there to say, really?" "We'll also briefly check in with Anderson Cooper at the Pentagon, and that will be the only time we hear from him during the entirety of our coverage."

"Then our plan is to do what other American cable news providers presumably will be doing," she added. "We'll go back to reporting that never panders to viewers, but instead challenges them and forces them to step outside their own bubble by making them aware of all the truly newsworthy events happening in the world."

Along with Green, representatives from MSNBC, CNBC, HLN, and Fox News immediately ruled out doing an entire week of pre-anniversary coverage, calling it a waste of time, resources, and potentially exploitative to family members who lost a loved one on 9/11.

The networks also said they would not be designing an "America Remembers" graphic to be constantly plastered across the bottom third of the television screen; wouldn't even think about conducting "trite, unoriginal, and what basically amounts to filler" man-on-the-street interviews that ask citizens where they were on 9/11; and, calling it "sensationalism just for the sake of sensationalism," wouldn't repeatedly show archived footage of airplanes colliding into the Twin Towers and New Yorkers running away from the collapsed buildings.

Sources at Fox News confirmed that at no time during their coverage would they use the anniversary as an excuse to paint the Obama administration as weak on terrorism.

"I would imagine some might think that because it's the 10th anniversary, we would latch on to the whole '10th' aspect and blow it completely out of proportion," MSNBC national news director Derrick Lipton said. "But we're smarter than that. Our viewers are smarter than that. If anything, we'll maybe cut back to Ground Zero when Presidents Obama and Bush leave the memorial service. And then maybe we'll have Tom Brokaw on to talk about what it was like covering the event 10 years ago. If we do that, we'll probably do commercial bumpers where we show images of the two beams of blue light shining up into the night sky, footage of Bush with his bullhorn saying, "Well, I can hear you," and maybe something that represents the human side of the tragedy, like people tacking up pictures of their loved ones. That's it. But then I suppose we could also have [former mayor Rudy] Giuliani on because, well, I don't know why. He won't say anything he hasn't said before, but it just feels like we should have him on, especially if Fox has him on. We could probably fill a bunch of time with the whole anthrax thing that came afterward, maybe do an entire terrorism retrospective that would look big and flashy but add no new information whatsoever, and just rerun that over and over and over again. Maybe throw in some of that mosque stuff. And then, oh, this would be perfect, we do profiles on the families who lost their loved ones on the Pennsylvania plane. We'll act as if we're shining a light on something that's been ignored, but really it hasn't been ignored, because over the past 10 years there have been 4,000 similar segments done about the circumstances surrounding that flight."

"But that's not what we're all about," he added. "We're better than that."

I was over there at the time. The TV coverage understandably started off behind the reality (e.g. you could see the people jumping long before the presenters realised it) but then it went on a horrible tear jerking tangent for days. They tried to outdo each other with, for example, the kids no one came to pick up after school stories. The networks were competing with each on the tragedy.

Initially in the first few hours there were a few critics of the Bush regime but that was quickly suppressed and all balance disappeared.

[mylestheslasher]

I once dismissed Bush's "they hate our freedom" line as propaganda as well.  But there is actually a bit of truth in it, it's just that the brain-dead wannabe redneck who said it didn't really get it.  It was one of two occasions in a day when a stopped clock was right.

In the western world women have the freedom to pursue careers, have sex with whoever they want, marry whoever they want, play a bit of sport, and expose a bit of skin now and then. People have the freedom to choose whatever religious belief system they want (at least those who haven't been successfully indoctrinated from an early enough age, but that's another matter) and are not obliged to follow laws of the state that are dictated by religious doctrine. It's not illegal to be born as a homosexual and it's certainly not punishable by death as it is in Iran. The people can determine what is right and wrong without having religious texts enforced as the law of the land. That kind of thing drives Islamic fundamentalists crazy, and it is one of the things that motivates them to hate the west.  Sure there's genuine grievances, like propping up corrupt Middle-Eastern dictatorships (which are thankfully starting to crumble now) but the cultural hostility makes it all the more personal.

I'm no fan of America's military industrial complex, its corrupt political system, or its half-baked foreign policy that is too quick to use brute force at times.  But I wouldn't allow that to blind me to the very real threat posed by this poisonous religiously-fueled hatred of western civilisation and its values.  Make no mistake, Islamic fundamentalism in the nuclear age is something that has to be kept an eye on.  We've come a long way from the days of bows, arrows and swords when you needed the resources of an entire state to cause large scale loss of life.  in 2001 it only took 17 boys with stanley knives to kill thousands.  It wouldn't take a lot of people to get their hands on a nuclear weapon or at least make a dirty bomb out of it.

The vigilance can't end.

Come on Eamonn. Someone grows up in Saudi, 1000's of miles away from the US and decides "I hate their freedom" and dedicates their lives to killing US civilians. First of all there are plenty of democratic countries a lot closer to Saudi than the USA, the whole of Europe for example. Why is it that Ireland is not at high risk of attack? If they hate "freedom" so much why not attack small unprotected countries in Europe. After all, they have a lot less security and imo are a lot more democratic than the USA. These guys had a hatred of the USA alright but maybe we need to understand why instead of accepting the simplistic Bush theory.

[nrico2006]

There have been an awful lot of shows on about the terrible events of 9/11 but not one of them has asked or answered a very important set of questions. Who were the people on those planes? What was their history? Why did they do what they did? What were they hoping to achieve?  I think 10 years is long enough for people to be mature enough to ask these questions and try and understand what makes people murder 1000's of innocent people. Its is not just as simple as the brainless bush line of "they hate our freedom".

Or how two of the largest steel structures in the world at the time can crumble like a house of cards within minutes of impact? Now I'm no engineer but something never added up quite right about that day. But I guess we'll never know the truth.

There has been explanations on why/how they fell.  I am all for the conspiracy theories and would love to know the answer to alot of the questions but I doubt that anyone has a baldies regarding what should happen when two huge passenger planes crashe into two skyscrapers at around 1368 foot in height, unless they can replicate the event to prove what actually happened is any different than what did happen.

[thejuice]

RE: Eamonnca1

I would disagree. The only freedom we have in the West that they don't have, is to be wilfully ignorant of the world around us. They have a much starker view point of the world, from the shadowy underside of the world we live in of neon signs, coca-cola and fast cars. While we can consume and not care about where it all really comes from and who benefits or suffers.

In the middle east they aren't able to block out what they can see. The hypocrisy of those who want to export democracy who propped up dictators and Israel. I would say the majority of those in the middle-east could care less about what the sarah-jane smiths of the world get up to at the weekend, what they wear or who they sleep with. (while yes they have some barbaric traditions in some regions and I would oppose Sharia law vehemently in any European country but so do many muslims living here too) What  galls them more is that they live closer to the word of god and yet they are being exploited and manipulated by the leaders of a *decadent society(*as they see it, not completely untrue from my point of view either). 

The clash of civilisation is not a question of liberal vs fundamentalism, but rather capitalisms (at its highest stage ;-P  ) desire for resources butting up against a non-progressive society which has the resources. The middle east is more than likely a victim of its own lack of "progress" much the way the Africans were when the Europeans came looking for free labour. The middle east countries are realising the bounty beneath their feet all too late and it's no longer theirs. The society which may allow them to benefit from it is unlikely to develop when they are ruled by dictators armed and put in place by the west.

September 11th was a wakeup call that we can no longer be wilfully ignorant of the world around us and the effect we have on it. If the USA was such a benign presence in the world that the Bush administration at the time would have liked us to think, there would have been no need to go war after the attacks. They would have had plenty of allies and a simple change of tack in helping countries develop their own resources would have been enough. However Washingtons long time foreign policy of resource grabbing that has to continue had buried them so deep into controlling the middle east that war was the only option.

[ross matt]

I once dismissed Bush's "they hate our freedom" line as propaganda as well.  But there is actually a bit of truth in it, it's just that the brain-dead wannabe redneck who said it didn't really get it.  It was one of two occasions in a day when a stopped clock was right.

In the western world women have the freedom to pursue careers, have sex with whoever they want, marry whoever they want, play a bit of sport, and expose a bit of skin now and then. People have the freedom to choose whatever religious belief system they want (at least those who haven't been successfully indoctrinated from an early enough age, but that's another matter) and are not obliged to follow laws of the state that are dictated by religious doctrine. It's not illegal to be born as a homosexual and it's certainly not punishable by death as it is in Iran. The people can determine what is right and wrong without having religious texts enforced as the law of the land. That kind of thing drives Islamic fundamentalists crazy, and it is one of the things that motivates them to hate the west.  Sure there's genuine grievances, like propping up corrupt Middle-Eastern dictatorships (which are thankfully starting to crumble now) but the cultural hostility makes it all the more personal.

I'm no fan of America's military industrial complex, its corrupt political system, or its half-baked foreign policy that is too quick to use brute force at times.  But I wouldn't allow that to blind me to the very real threat posed by this poisonous religiously-fueled hatred of western civilisation and its values.  Make no mistake, Islamic fundamentalism in the nuclear age is something that has to be kept an eye on.  We've come a long way from the days of bows, arrows and swords when you needed the resources of an entire state to cause large scale loss of life.  in 2001 it only took 17 boys with stanley knives to kill thousands.  It wouldn't take a lot of people to get their hands on a nuclear weapon or at least make a dirty bomb out of it.

The vigilance can't end.

+ 1000 Eamonn. Long live our freedom to choose warts and all.

[ross matt]

The Onion's take -

Responsible Cable News Outlets To Devote Sensible Amount Of Airtime To 10th Anniversary Of 9/11


NEW YORK—Promising to cover the event responsibly and with the kind of delicate restraint it deserves, the nation's cable news outlets announced Monday that while they would be devoting some airtime to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, they "certainly wouldn't be going overboard with it."


The major networks confirmed their coverage would "of course" be tasteful and brief.

According to the news providers, they only intend to devote 15 minutes of coverage to the anniversary, tops, saying it is their obligation as professional journalists to do justice to the victims' memories as opposed to using the occasion for their own ratings gain.

In addition, network representatives admitted it would be lazy news reporting to use the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks as an excuse to fill up hundreds of hours of programming with repetitive video packages and anchors repeatedly asking their guests, "How did 9/11 change America?"

"We're planning to send one reporter to Ground Zero, have him tape a couple of two-minute segments, nothing too crazy, and that should pretty much do it," said CNN's senior vice president of programming Katherine Green, adding that the 24-hour news channel would not be making 9/11 the focus of every single program on the network because, according to Green, "What more is there to say, really?" "We'll also briefly check in with Anderson Cooper at the Pentagon, and that will be the only time we hear from him during the entirety of our coverage."

"Then our plan is to do what other American cable news providers presumably will be doing," she added. "We'll go back to reporting that never panders to viewers, but instead challenges them and forces them to step outside their own bubble by making them aware of all the truly newsworthy events happening in the world."

Along with Green, representatives from MSNBC, CNBC, HLN, and Fox News immediately ruled out doing an entire week of pre-anniversary coverage, calling it a waste of time, resources, and potentially exploitative to family members who lost a loved one on 9/11.

The networks also said they would not be designing an "America Remembers" graphic to be constantly plastered across the bottom third of the television screen; wouldn't even think about conducting "trite, unoriginal, and what basically amounts to filler" man-on-the-street interviews that ask citizens where they were on 9/11; and, calling it "sensationalism just for the sake of sensationalism," wouldn't repeatedly show archived footage of airplanes colliding into the Twin Towers and New Yorkers running away from the collapsed buildings.

Sources at Fox News confirmed that at no time during their coverage would they use the anniversary as an excuse to paint the Obama administration as weak on terrorism.

"I would imagine some might think that because it's the 10th anniversary, we would latch on to the whole '10th' aspect and blow it completely out of proportion," MSNBC national news director Derrick Lipton said. "But we're smarter than that. Our viewers are smarter than that. If anything, we'll maybe cut back to Ground Zero when Presidents Obama and Bush leave the memorial service. And then maybe we'll have Tom Brokaw on to talk about what it was like covering the event 10 years ago. If we do that, we'll probably do commercial bumpers where we show images of the two beams of blue light shining up into the night sky, footage of Bush with his bullhorn saying, "Well, I can hear you," and maybe something that represents the human side of the tragedy, like people tacking up pictures of their loved ones. That's it. But then I suppose we could also have [former mayor Rudy] Giuliani on because, well, I don't know why. He won't say anything he hasn't said before, but it just feels like we should have him on, especially if Fox has him on. We could probably fill a bunch of time with the whole anthrax thing that came afterward, maybe do an entire terrorism retrospective that would look big and flashy but add no new information whatsoever, and just rerun that over and over and over again. Maybe throw in some of that mosque stuff. And then, oh, this would be perfect, we do profiles on the families who lost their loved ones on the Pennsylvania plane. We'll act as if we're shining a light on something that's been ignored, but really it hasn't been ignored, because over the past 10 years there have been 4,000 similar segments done about the circumstances surrounding that flight."

"But that's not what we're all about," he added. "We're better than that."

I was over there at the time. The TV coverage understandably started off behind the reality (e.g. you could see the people jumping long before the presenters realised it) but then it went on a horrible tear jerking tangent for days. They tried to outdo each other with, for example, the kids no one came to pick up after school stories. The networks were competing with each on the tragedy.

Initially in the first few hours there were a few critics of the Bush regime but that was quickly suppressed and all balance disappeared.

I was there at the time too. I was heartbroken for the kids who's parents didnt come home and all the other victims. As a  father of 3 small girls myself I often think of the little girl from Cork and her Mother who were killed on the 2nd plane that hit the towers.

I've plenty of relatives who worked hard and did well in the states including some who were cops and firemen. As far as I'm concerned it was an attack on our western way of life and all we stand for.

In fact had I not accidentally changed flight times a few days before hand Myself, my wife, one of my daughters and my parents would have been on a Newark to SF flight on the 11th as we headed to a family wedding. Not sure it would have been the one that the passengers took down nor do I want to know for sure but it certainly still leaves me with a "there for the grace of God go I" shudder down my spine a decade later.

[seafoid]

The war on terror has been more damaging to the US than Vietnam .
Look at where it is today. Downgraded by S&P . Can't even guarantee social welfare to its people.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCRIuq56Pss


http://www.lyrics007.com/J-live%20Lyrics/Satisfied%20Lyrics.html

I know a older guy that lost twelve close peeps on 9-1-1
While you kickin' up punchlines and puns
Man f**k that shit, this is serious biz
By the time Bush is done, you won't know what time it is
If it's war time or jail time, time for promises
And time to figure out where the enemy is
The same devils that you used to love to hate
They got you so gassed and shook now, you scared to debate
The same ones that traded books for guns
Smuggled drugs for funds
And had fun lettin' off forty-one
But now it's all about NYPD caps
And Pentagon bumper stickers
But yo, you still a nigga
It ain't right them cops and them firemen died
The shit is real tragic, but it damn sure ain't magic
It won't make the brutality disappear
It won't pull equality from behind your ear
It won't make a difference in a two-party country
If the president cheats, to win another four years
Now don't get me wrong, there's no place I'd rather be
The grass ain't greener on the other genocide
But tell Huey Freeman don't forget to cut the lawn
And uproot the weeds
Cuz I'm not satisfied

[BennyCake]

9th of November?  What happened? 

In all seriousness, yanks did it themselves - look at how they have benefited since.   Cnuts

Exactly.

Those who still think that Saudi terrorists are responsbile for 9/11, you need your head examined.

[J70]

9th of November?  What happened? 

In all seriousness, yanks did it themselves - look at how they have benefited since.   Cnuts

Exactly.

Those who still think that Saudi terrorists are responsbile for 9/11, you need your head examined.

If you say so. 

[Agent Orange]

0.82

[tyssam5]

Today the Homeland Security Secretary released this quote:

"We are moving toward an intelligence and risk-based approach to how we screen," Napolitano said at an event sponsored by Politico.

"I think one of the first things you will see over time is the ability to keep your shoes on. One of the last things you will [see] is the reduction or limitation on liquids."

The policies are based on demonstrated threats, current intelligence and the science of how much explosive material it takes to bring down an aircraft.

About bloody time. Sounds like they've been talking to the Israelis who know how to keep planes safe without building a colossal system of security theatre that does nothing to keep anyone safe and just creates the illusion of security.

Have you ever flown out of Israel? Security is pretty colossal! But at the least the security chicks are usually decent looking, which makes you a bit embarrassed when they go through 2 weeks worth or dirty underwear.