Sorry in advance for continuing the non-AJ content :
Perhaps read this for an interesting perspective on these despicable
events: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,550359,00.html
Also -
"The Awful Truth"'s Michael Moore's take on these events here below :
Dear friends,
I was supposed to fly today on the 4:30 PM American Airlines flight
from LAX to JFK. But tonight I find
myself stuck in L.A. with an incredible range of emotions over what
has happened on the island where I
work and live in New York City.
My wife and I spent the first hours of the day -- after being
awakened by phone calls from our parents
at 6:40am PT -- trying to contact our daughter at school in New York
and our friend JoAnn who works
near the World Trade Center.
I called JoAnn at her office. As someone picked up, the first tower
imploded, and the person answering
the phone screamed and ran out, leaving me no clue as to whether or
not she or JoAnn would live.
It was a sick, horrible, frightening day.
On December 27, 1985 I found myself caught in the middle of a
terrorist incident at the Vienna airport
-- which left 30 people dead, both there and at the Rome airport.
(The machine-gunning of passengers in
each city was timed to occur at the same moment.)
I do not feel like discussing that event tonight because it still
brings up too much despair and
confusion as to how and why I got to live… a fluke, a mistake, a few
feet on the tarmac, and I am still
here, there but for the grace of…
Safe. Secure. I'm an American, living in America. I like my
illusions. I walk through a metal detector,
I put my carry-ons through an x-ray machine, and I know all will be well.
Here's a short list of my experiences lately with airport security:
* At the Newark Airport, the plane is late at boarding everyone. The
counter can't find my seat. So I
am told to just "go ahead and get on" -- without a ticket!
* At Detroit Metro Airport, I don't want to put the lunch I just
bought at the deli through the x-ray
machine so, as I pass through the metal detector, I hand the sack to
the guard through the space
between the detector and the x-ray machine. I tell him "It's just a
sandwich." He believes me and
doesn't bother to check. The sack has gone through neither security device.
* At LaGuardia in New York, I check a piece of luggage, but decide to
catch a later plane. The first
plane leaves without me, but with my bag -- no one knowing what is in it.
* Back in Detroit, I take my time getting off the commuter plane. By
the time I have come down its
stairs, the bus that takes the passengers to the terminal has left --
without me. I am alone on the
tarmac, free to wander wherever I want. So I do. Eventually, I flag
down a pick-up truck and an
airplane mechanic gives me a ride the rest of the way to the terminal.
* I have brought knives, razors; and once, my traveling companion
brought a hammer and chisel. No one
stopped us.
Of course, I have gotten away with all of this because the airlines
consider my safety SO important,
they pay rent-a-cops $5.75 an hour to make sure the bad guys don't
get on my plane. That is what my
life is worth -- less than the cost of an oil change.
Too harsh, you say? Well, chew on this: a first-year pilot on
American Eagle (the commuter arm of
American Airlines) receives around $15,000 a year in annual pay.
That's right -- $15,000 for the person who has your life in his
hands. Until recently, Continental
Express paid a little over $13,000 a year. There was one guy, an
American Eagle pilot, who had four
kids so he went down to the welfare office and applied for food
stamps -- and he was eligible!
Someone on welfare is flying my plane? Is this for real? Yes, it is.
So spare me the talk about all the precautions the airlines and the
FAA is taking. They, like all
businesses, are concerned about one thing -- the bottom line and the
profit margin.
Four teams of 3-5 people were all able to penetrate airport security
on the same morning at 3 different
airports and pull off this heinous act? My only response is -- that's all?
Well, the pundits are in full diarrhea mode, gushing on about the
"terrorist threat" and today's
scariest dude on planet earth -- Osama bin Laden. Hey, who knows,
maybe he did it. But, something just
doesn't add up.
Am I being asked to believe that this guy who sleeps in a tent in a
desert has been training pilots to
fly our most modern, sophisticated jumbo jets with such pinpoint
accuracy that they are able to hit
these three targets without anyone wondering why these planes were so
far off path?
Or am I being asked to believe that there were four
religious/political fanatics who JUST HAPPENED to
be skilled airline pilots who JUST HAPPENED to want to kill themselves today?
Maybe you can find one jumbo jet pilot willing to die for the cause
-- but FOUR? Ok, maybe you can -- I
don't know.
What I do know is that all day long I have heard everything about
this bin Laden guy except this one
fact -- WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden!
Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!
Don't take my word for it -- I saw a piece on MSNBC last year that
laid it all out. When the Soviet
Union occupied Afghanistan, the CIA trained him and his buddies in
how to commits acts of terrorism
against the Soviet forces. It worked! The Soviets turned and ran. Bin
Laden was grateful for what we
taught him and thought it might be fun to use those same techniques against us.
We abhor terrorism -- unless we're the ones doing the terrorizing.
We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in
the 1980s who killed over 30,000
civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. Thirty thousand murdered
civilians and who the hell even
remembers!
We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of
innocent people, and we never let the
human suffering THAT causes to interrupt our day one single bit.
We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the
world, with our taxpayer-funded
terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador) that I suppose
we shouldn't be too surprised
when those orphans grow up and are a little whacked in the head from
the horror we have helped cause.
Yet, our recent domestic terrorism bombings have not been conducted
by a guy from the desert but rather
by our own citizens: a couple of ex-military guys who hated the
federal government.
From the first minutes of today's events, I never heard that
possibility suggested. Why is that?
Maybe it's because the A-rabs are much better foils. A key ingredient
in getting Americans whipped into
a frenzy against a new enemy is the all-important race card. It's
much easier to get us to hate when
the object of our hatred doesn't look like us.
Congressmen and Senators spent the day calling for more money for the
military; one Senator on CNN even
said he didn't want to hear any more talk about more money for
education or health care -- we should
have only one priority: our self-defense.
Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure
when the rest of the world isn't
living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes?
In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again.
He withdraws from the Kyoto
agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists
on restarting the arms race -- you
name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all.
The Senators and Congressmen tonight broke out in a spontaneous
version of "God Bless America." They're
not a bad group of singers!
Yes, God, please do bless us.
Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right.
They did not deserve to die. If
someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing
thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE
for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of
California -- these were places that
voted AGAINST Bush!
Why kill them? Why kill anyone? Such insanity…
Let's mourn, let's grieve, and when it's appropriate let's examine
our contribution to the unsafe world
we live in.
It doesn't have to be like this…
Yours,
Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
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