Lloyd / Lloyde England at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001

An open letter to Mary Agee,President and CEO of Northern Virginia Family Service’s Survivors’ Fund Project a not-for-profit charity providing long-term support for the victims and families affected by the terrorist attack at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Dear Ms. Agee: As a member of the 9-11 skeptics community, I was gratified to learn through your website, the identity of Lloyd A. England, the 69-year-old, African-American cab driver who was witness to the crash of a 757-jetliner—-American Airlines Flight 77-—into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Although, well known in certain circles through photographs taken of him in the first minutes after the attack, standing alongside his taxi on Washington Blvd., to my knowledge, Mr. England was not publicly identified until your 2003 report. Your organization did a service in bringing him forward-—a piece to the puzzle, which 9-11 truth-seekers aim to solve.

However, some details in your narrative of his experience are at odds with the official version of events. His story of hardship and fortitude—an obvious intent when focusing an appealing “survivor’s spotlight,” (and, speaking generally, the raison d’être of your organization---is also directly contradicted by evidence contained in photographs taken of him that day.

I submit Lloyd England was the star of a short entre-acte, titled, The Taxi Driver and the Downed Lamp Poles, part of a larger epic-—in which the poles starred, not Mr. England—-called The Rumsfeld Conspiracies, where these downed lamp posts serve as a corps de ballet, tangible “proofs” of a 757-jetliner’s trajectory and altitude. Other entre-actes were produced that day, en suite, like the miraculous staging of The Priest at the Medical Triage a human interest story meant to provide verisimilitude, but which instead got panned as mere bathos, melodramatic grist for the Grand Jury.

These were photographed by Mark D. Faram, Journalist 1^st Class in the U.S. Navy, who was, (in his words) “a senior writer with Navy Times newspaper. It is an independent weekly that is owned by the Gannett Corporation (same owners as USA Today,) and published worldwide.”

It would be sad to think Americans had become so somnambulant that we would accept such second-rate fare as served up at the Pentagon on September 11—an aesthetic more Archie Bunker than West Wing, with production values more Judge Judy than Law and Order—-but to analyze it any deeper might bring dread, as we realize this clumsy charade was made so dreadful on purpose, eventually to be found out, perhaps by plan.

I’ll try to keep the sarcastic and accusatory tone out of my criticism of your organization, Ms. Agee. I don’t know what you are aware of, or the timeline of any learning curve. The fact so many obvious inconsistencies exist between your report of benevolence to Mr. England, as compared with the commonly understood evidence from September 11 that it is best explained by indifference, not guile or cunning. But adding the gloss of fake charity as public relations cover for what is, in my opinion, a clandestine false-flag operation by shadow components of government, which has led to the brutality and savagery of two unjust wars to date, tempts me mightily. From your September 2003 Community Report

He had driven his taxicab past the Pentagon a million times before, but September 11 was different from any other day. On that day, Lloyde A. England had just dropped off a passenger and was driving home as American Airlines Flight #77 flew directly overhead, sending a light pole crashing through his windshield. In that brief moment, his car was totaled and his livelihood threatened.

When other agencies did not help, the Survivors’ Fund and NVFS case manager Sarah Carter stepped in and arranged for funds for his mortgage and groceries until he could buy another cab. Perhaps as valuable as those financial contributions were the talks he had with his case manager, who validated the trauma he had experienced that day.

“It’s good to know there are people out there who are willing to help working people,” says England. “It’s not that I couldn’t work. I was just set back.”

However, other than a broken windshield, his cab appears spotless in this photo, not “totaled,” and rather than having “his livelihood threatened,” he might be calling Geico for an estimate.

  http://www.pentagonresearch.com/images/016-large.jpg
A Google search of Lloyd England’s name in the variant spellings you use, returns three relevant references—-two to your group. The third was an interview from April of this year with a local D.C. television affiliate, NBC4, which provides these details:

"The plane was so low it hit the light pole," England said. "And when it hit the pole it knocked the light part off and nothing came through the car but the pole itself." The light pole shaft speared its way through England's cab, pushing the front passenger seat backwards into the rear of the car. If it had fallen a few feet to the right, England said he would have been crushed.

"I had to wrestle with the car to stop it and when I did stop the car there was no noise," England said.

In your Survivors’ Fund web posting, “Lloyd,” no last name, the spelling changing to “Lloyde” in the third paragraph, provides some additional information:

Simultaneously, the plane struck a light pole and the pole came crashing down onto the front of Lloyd’s taxicab, destroying the windshield in front of his eyes. Glass was everywhere as he tried to stop the car. Another car stopped, and the driver helped move the heavy pole off Lloyd’s car. As they were moving the pole, they heard a big boom and turned to see an explosion. The light pole fell on Lloyd and he struggled to get up from underneath, wondering what had happened.

The mental and physical toil these struggles must have taken on Mr. England, combined with damage to the cab’s interior, must have brought your fund and Mr. England together, however some have speculated the intent is more public relations spin, meant to create a public record for an undocumented participant to a historically important event.

But the details are beginning to now not add up. “Another car stopped"...“as he tried to stop the car.” Both of these statements imply the cars were going at some rate of speed. However, there is unanimity in the eyewitness accounts that traffic was at a standstill, or at best crawling, in both directions, on Rt27/Washington Blvd. and in both directions on I-395. Penny Elgas's “Personal Experience At The Pentagon on September 11, 2001,” statement, part of her Smithsonian Museum donation

“I found myself stuck in late morning rush hour traffic-—almost in front of the Pentagon. Traffic was at a standstill.”

Father Stephen McGraw, the Catholic priest whose photograph was published worldwide:

"The traffic was very slow moving, and at one point just about at a standstill," "The plane clipped the top of a light pole just before it got to us, injuring a taxi driver, whose taxi was just a few feet away from my car.

Afework Hagos, a computer programmer, was on his way to work but stuck in a traffic jam near the Pentagon when the plane flew over.

"There was a huge screaming noise and I got out of the car as the plane came over. Everybody was running away in different directions. It was tilting its wings up and down like it was trying to balance. It hit some lampposts on the way in."

(Two very good witness lists can be found at Killtown’s and at Eric Bart’s web site.) Research tells us, that without the lamps, the light poles were 30 feet high and weighed 190lbs. It is difficult to imagine even two strong men extracting such an awkward spear without also scratching or denting the hood.

Mr. England describes two sequential events: a plane flying over that clipped the light poles, followed several moments later by an explosion, as he and another driver attempted to remove the pole from the windshield. Although Mr. England may have meant to reference a secondary explosion, of which apparently there were several, conveniently, as exposed diesel and propane tanks exploded, they were by comparison all minor, which in the absence of first mentioning a primary explosion, doesn’t seem the intent of the story.

Moreover, his recollections of a dual event supports any number of theory variants, such as a fly-by, or fly-over with a 757, or a similar jet liner, followed by a Cruise missile, or drone attack—are all possible given the wide range of conflicting testimony.

But there are more reasons to doubt Mr. England’s story. You report, “Police started to arrive on the scene and forced Lloyde to move. They urged the bystanders to leave the area in case there was another explosion. Lloyde was forced to abandon his car in the middle of the street to begin the long walk home.”

I should think the police or F.B.I. would have done just the exact opposite and forced Lloyde to stay and be debriefed as an eyewitness to a horrific crime. In one photo, Lloyde and his taxi are left all alone on the highway, which seems to imply some sort of special status for him.

The F.B.I. was quick to take control of the “crime scene,” even putting journalists in handcuffs in their effort to control access, but strangely, interviews with eyewitnesses is a detail lacking in almost every published account, which strains credulity.

If England isn't being a stooge here, (and he is much too central-casting for me to believe he’s not,) but instead truly was the innocent passerby, caught up like Zelig or Forrest Gump in grand events, then the precision of his new recall of a dual event is very, very useful. As the paradigm shifts, more witnesses will recover disparate memories that weren’t reconcilable with previous versions of “reality.” Of course, one must leave open the possibility any new or changed disclosures are made out of sheer unmitigated stupidity, or even a cunning reverse-psychology misinformation ploy.

I think the lamp poles were rigged to fail in tandem with a fly-over, fly-by, or fly-in, since their evidential job of “proving” the wingspan and the directional path of a 757, was too important to leave up to chance. As is common with lethargic employees good enough for government work, the recounting of the detail of downed lampposts by scores of witnesses, can only be called heavy-handed.

The following two photos cannot be reconciled to my way of thinking. Either Lloyde's taxi was on the bridge with its stone parapets, or it was further along, with open metal guard rails alongside of him.

USAF photo by Staff Sgt. Gary Coppage 030204-O-9999J-007

My final point isn’t so much about Mr. England, as it is about the effect given off by the writing in your reports—-an effect I label Lost In Space.

For instance:

“Perhaps as valuable as those financial contributions were the talks he had with his case manager, who validated the trauma he had experienced that day

Trauma, from the Greek, “to pierce,” doesn’t need validating. To validate, means to confirm, to legalize, to support or corroborate on a sound and authoritative basis; to recognize, establish or illustrate the legitimacy of.

And that does seem to be the intent of your organization, albeit, unwittingly.

Trauma needs healing. Those who thought they were rehearsing simulated drills, playing the closed-mouth cogs within that most hierarchical of environments, a military exercise of mock plane attacks, then wrote the breathless (read: lifeless) prose in the after-action reports. They can be picked out from the planners, those who had actual foreknowledge of the events of that day. Were the bus loads of F.B.I. agents mustered on to the scene within half-an-hour the same ones who couldn’t stop a lame B-movie high-jacking plot before it reached its target? Everybody ran through their chain-of-command training, pitching in, helping out, doing what they were supposed to do, setting up shade tents, seeing to the beverage supply, ordering port-o-potties, all as the fires spread and burned.

Multiple, moving, mobile triage care centers were staffed with hundreds of care providers; litter bearers, and vehicle operators went into gear, all for the benefit of the approximately 58 wounded causalities taken to hospitals, which included the seven serious burn victims to come out of the Pentagon after the attack.

Rowan Scarborough, writing in the conservative Washington Times afterward, struck the right skeptical tone December 26, 2003

“In fact, in a catastrophe that appeared as if it would produce mass numbers of wounded, just seven inside the Pentagon, including Mr. Shaeffer, were critically burned.”

The Targeted Ones
Lastly, lies need to be rigorous and technically perfect. Who wrote this bit of nonsense?

Lloyd still keeps a torn dollar bill signed by a stranger and dated September 11, 2001. It marks a day he has struggled to survive for two years. As he made his way on foot up Route 395 he met a man who had been working at the Pentagon. Walking side by side they found a dollar bill lying in the road. They picked it up, tore it in half, each signed one half and traded with each other. Parting ways each took half of a torn dollar with a stranger’s name on it. Lloyde still keeps this tangible reminder of his experience on 9/11.

Listen, it would make a great deal more sense if the dollar bill came out of one of their wallets, it was supposedly raining oxygen canisters that day, not money. It would be all there was in lieu of scratch paper, to write down the contact information of the new friend, together bonded by trauma, but whose name happens to escape me at the moment.

Lloyde says the hardest part of his journey since 9/11 has been trying to survive without money. He realized once he got home the morning of September 11 that he would not be able to work without his car—it is his livelihood. He was without a vehicle for two months until he purchased a used car with the help of American Red Cross funds. They were the only people to come to his aid in the beginning until his daughter came across the Survivors’ Fund. With the help of his case manager and financial support from the Fund, he has been able to afford his monthly expenses, something he struggled with after 9/11. “I’m not accustomed to people helping me,” he says. “I’m amazed that there are people there just to do that.”

Lloyde tends to keep his feelings to himself. He is quiet, respectful and humble when speaking of his experiences. When asked if it helps him to talk about September 11^th, he says, “I don’t know. There are things I’d like to forget.” The remnants of September 11, the reminders are all over for him but he concludes, “surviving hasn’t been easy, but it can be done.”

(Not to worry--other survivor stories, like that of Lt. Comdr. David Tarantino, Jerry Henson, and Capt. David Thomas, are equally inane and pointless. A core series of about a dozen high-resolution photographs taken within the first 30 minutes of the Pentagon attack, before a section of the building fell, are archived on a conservative website.

I notice that you haven't run any more survivor stories since 2003--you haven't even updated your web page for almost a year. Maybe that signals your 25 employees on the payroll have spent down the $20 million given you and you'll be moving on. You don't want to be left all alone in the middle of the road, do you? Skeptics of the official story of 9-11 have been busy in the interim, they even interviewed Lloyde. The Loose Change Forum has a thread on him, which is starting to unravel, bit by bit, inch by inch. I highly recommend it!

You're Either With Us, Or You Are With the Terrorists: Because I Said So!

Does George W. have no shame?

(From the official White House web page:)

After holding a press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, President George W. Bush poses with fellow birthday celebrants in the East Room Thursday, July 6, 2006. The President celebrates his 60th birthday today. Pictured with him are, from left. Todd Mizis of the U.S. State Department; Raghubir Goyal of the India Globe and Asia Today; and Richard Benedetto of USA Today. White House photo by Kimberlee Hewitt

Everybody else in the room celebrating birthdays that day, were invited up by the president to share the spotlight with the Canadian Prime Minister and to have formal pictures taken and released.

Raghubir Goyal, in his question to the president, mentioned the coincidence of their birthdays being the same day. The spontaneous dialog went like this:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Welcome. Thank you for your birthday gift.

Q: Mr. President, happy birthday.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Thank you, very much. Yes.

Q: It's also my birthday.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Today's your birthday, too?

Q: Yes, sir.

PRESIDENT BUSH: It is? Come on up. Come up, come up, come up. (Laughter.) Come on.Get up here. Anybody else have their birthday today? (Laughter.) It's your birthday? Yes, sure. It is your birthday? Come on. (Laughter.) It's amazing everybody's birthday.

(The press sings "Happy Birthday.")

PRESIDENT BUSH: Dear Richard---he just told me he's 30 years old. (Laughter.) Happy birthday. Happy birthday.

END 12:34 P.M. EDT

The State Department's Todd Mizis is wearing clothes that don't fit--and that ends his story right there. Raghubir Goyal, of the India Globe, is looked upon as probably one of the biggest jokes in the White House press corps--he's not as obviously corrupt as Jeff Gannon was in lobbing softballs but he can always be counted on to turn the talk at a pivotal moment to third-world cow sanctions, and the like.

Benedetto was a White House reporter for USAToday during George H.W. Bush's presidency, and he obviously made some connections with the higher ups.

Richard Benedetto also just happens to be one of the scores of USAToday and other Gannett media employees who were eyewitnesses to a 757 Jet, American Airlines Flight 77, striking the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001. Benedetto's account was also prominently featured on CNN, in addition to many writeups.

Gannett's Vision Statement, reads "Consumers will choose Gannett media for their news and information needs, anytime, anywhere, in any form, (I might add--or else!)

Here is Benedetto's first-person account: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/11/washscene.htm

“Richard Benedetto, a USA TODAY reporter, saw the plane slam into the Pentagon. "It sounded like an artillery shell. It hit on the west side of the building, near the helipad."

IT. It, he says!

The only question left: Is he a dope, a stooge, a pawn….

These sort of "eyewitness" accounts are being debunked one by one. My favorite is conservative ideologue James S. Robbins, who gives us equal measures of snark and b.s writing in the National Review, "I was looking directly at it when the aircraft struck. The sight of the 757 diving in at an unrecoverable angle is frozen in my memory."

Ummm... seemed like rather a level approach to most people. At least his leading with a Voltaire quote, "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous," is suitable. Like the case for going to war in Iraq, only the flimsiest evidence supports the official story. Its two main legs to stands on are the eyewitness reports, and the supposed bodies recovered, which only the F.B.I. and Army pathologists ever saw, constitutes the entirety of the evidential record that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

Gary Bauer Sees AA Flight 77 Hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001

Gary Bauer's eyewitness account that he saw “the plane,” or “the jet,” fly “right into the Pentagon,” on the morning of September the 11^th, 2001, should be disbelieved in its entirety—it is a total fabrication, a deceitful, outright lie, in my humble opinion.

Bauer gave two in-depth interviews on his 9-11 experience---to The Charlotte World, a World Newspaper Publishing outfit specializing in Evangelical points of view, and MassNews, a free daily, which describes itself as the voice “for inquisitive moderates, liberals, conservatives and libertarians everywhere, with a special emphasis on news.…in Massachusetts,” but one with a clear conservative tone to it’s coverage.^*

* For instance, its founder, attorney J. Edward Pawlick, wrote a 2003 book called “Libel by the New York Times,” and in a brief “About Me” page online, he says,

“There was no way of knowing that the family which owned the Boston Globe and The New York Times Company had just installed a new Chairman, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., who had had a terrible childhood and was out to get even with his family by promoting gay marriage across the entire country, beginning with the state where they absolutely dominated the media. All his ancestors were "homophobes," Sulzberger said and there was some truth to that statement."

Both reports repeat essentially the same details in nearly exact language.

Bauer was driving into the District of Columbia on the morning of September 11^th*

*In something of a coincidence, he was on his way to a press conference being held in opposition to the radical Muslim government of Sudan’s persecution of Christians.

when his office calls with news of the strike to the second tower, the message carrying an immediate awareness of terrorism. Mr. Bauer realizes he’s in a “massive” traffic jam, stuck on I-395 for twenty minutes, and it has positioned him the nearest possible point of public access to the Pentagon. He realizes he’s in danger, when “all of a sudden,” he “heard the roar of a jet engine…coming up behind us on that major highway. And it veered to the right into the Pentagon. The blast literally rocked all of our cars. It was an incredible moment.” Elsewhere in the reporting Bauer calls “it,” the plane, and, the jet.^*

* Timing isn’t everything in life—you also need a good choreographer and a good scriptwriter.

With such a divine synergy to the “religious” Bauer’s first-person testimony, and given the overwhelming context of emotional catharsis generated by the New York attacks, it is no wonder Americans blithely accepted the chutzpah of Bauer’s claim, which along with other, equally suspect, eyewitness accounts, became one of the foundation proofs that a regularly scheduled American Airlines commercial 757 jet airplane melted into the Pentagon.

Did no one remember Bauer was the only Evangelical Christian leader who signed the Statement of Principles, for the Project for a New American Century, in June of 1997? Some of the other 24 co-signers include Dan Quayle, Lewis Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, and the trifecta of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz.

Although Bauer himself didn’t contribute to the famous September 2000 document REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, where the cataclysmic events of 9-11 were predicted as necessary to galvanize Americans into endless war through a “new Pearl Harbor,” it can certainly be said he laid the philosophical and moral ground work for Ground Zero.

That Bauer foresaw good fortune that morning there is little doubt in my mind. Along with other leaders of the religious right like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and pro Zionist neoconservatives like William Kristol, Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and David Wurmser, they all, in my opinion, shared privileged foreknowledge of the events of 9-11 and contributed accordingly—-at minimum co-conspiring the aftermath to what Bush Family/C.I.A. nabobs knew about, nursed along, ultimately even navigated and “nuked”^*

* read “pancaked.”

the “Al Qaeda” plane attacks that struck America on 9-11. Although each held a different focus to their agenda, all anticipated manipulating an increase in power stemming from the drastic curtailing of American civil-rights during times of war.

Some theorist’s hypothesis hold that had 9-11 unfolded as fully planned^*

*the fourth plane was 45 minutes late in taking off

and the Capital and the House of Representatives were struck as intended, with a major loss of life down the chain of command, then an immediate martial law would have been declared in the United States.^*

*as it already secretly had been declared a few days prior by Governor Jeb Bush in the state of Florida.

Had that happened, the last five years of the Bush regime would seem like a pale shadow of the Fascism envisioned.^*

*Is it much of a leap for those who think the Constitution is being misused in justification of a “right” to murder unborn babies, then it could also be used to not justify certain rights, like first-amendment rights championed by the ACLU? Likewise, suicide bombers blow up on your city buses, understandably unsettling, but where does the feeling of powerlessness lead?

Bauer became the co-founder in 2002 of The American Alliance of Jews and Christians (AAJC), which unites American Jews with Christians in a stated goal “on behalf of traditional values,” but in practical terms the alliance is a trade-off—with Christians giving an unprecedented Messianic level of support for Israel^*

*with the freshly minted theological justification as necessary to fulfill Biblical prophecy leading to the second coming of Christ, which is now upon us. Pat Robertson thinks He’s coming in this lifetime. Pat Robertson is an old man.

in exchange for covert Jewish support for a move toward a militaristic American Judeo-Christian theocracy, one that, admittedly, gives them second-class status as “Christians-in-waiting.”

When a morally vacuous, incompetent, and drifting Bush 2000 political campaign came shopping, this alliance bought.

In a just-released working paper, THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, by John J. Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, this alliance is called “The Lobby,” and it “includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives. They believe Israel’s rebirth is part of Biblical prophecy, support its expansionist agenda, and think pressuring Israel is contrary to God’s will.”

The AAJC's Board of Advisers also includes Dr. James Dobson, Charles Colson, Pastor Rick Scarborough, as well as Rabbi Barry Freundel, Rabbi David Novak, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Michael Medved, John Uhlmann.

Strange bedfellows sometimes resort to strange rhetoric, like when the chronically foot-in-mouth diseased Pat Robertson acts more Zionist than any Jew, most recently when he claimed God visited a stroke on Ariel Sharon in response to his "giving away" Holy land.

Jews must have to be sanguine about the motivation behind this Christian support, recognizing a dynamic which once was described as being, “a three-act play with the Jews disappearing in the second act.”^*

*Oy.

Bauer has stated as much. He has had problems with scandal, both sexual and financial; in a financial one from 1996 he took a six-figure fee plus expenses from the Cult leader Sun Myung Moon to speak before the "Family Federation for World Peace," alongside Moon and his fourth wife. Bauer defended his speech by saying.

"I don't see why Christians should censor themselves out of any forum in which our perspectives can be heard. I disagree with the theology of many groups that I address; Jews, for example, who do not accept Jesus, or atheists,”

Bauer’s part in the wide-ranging conspiracy which manifested on September the 11^th, which gave the pretext for U.S wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, lays responsibility for the unfolding moral horror directly at his feet. The Old Testament Bible says, we know a man by his fruits.

This so-called “pro-life” activist, Bauer, is either morally neutral on war, or he actually likes it. Although God is no longer on America’s side anymore, if we are to judge the outcomes of war, it hasn’t stopped Bauer’s reflexive defense of even the most heinous crimes committed in His name, like Abu Gharib.

A piece Bauer penned for www.beliefnet.com, a broadly ecumenical web site which offers a Belief-O-Matic™ quiz that can tell you what religion you should be practicing, is titled simply, “FRENZY,” with the pull-quote: “Some people are willing to believe anything America’s enemies say while believing our own leaders are liars.”

In it, Bauer writes about “the apparent prisoner abuse at Abu Gharib,” chides Senator Kennedy for his criticisms by bringing up Chappaquiddick, bemoans those “who adamantly opposed the U.S. liberating Iraq to begin with,” and castigates a Kerry campaign for the gall that “used the scandal to fund raise over the weekend. How disgusting can you get?” Nowhere does Bauer use a term like “disgust” to describe the actual abuse of the Iraqi “murderers and thugs” who are having “a bad time of it in prison,” going only so far as to say “such abuses violate our own values,” and “appropriate” steps should be taken in response to “the mistakes of a few U.S. soldiers.” He fails to mention that only a small fraction of photos have been released, the others depicting scenes of abuse deemed too troubling for public viewing.

Bauer ends with a fearsome flourish, saying, “bin Laden and the other murderers plotting right now to kill thousands of us and our allies…continue on their mission to bring us to our knees using whatever tactic or weapon they can find. The odds of us being hit before the November election grow by the hour…”

An article at www.counterpunch.org published April 8, 2003, by Akiva Eldar, who also writes for Ha'aretz, is titled, Gary Bauer and Likud: An Unholy Alliance with the Christian Right. In it, Eldar writes,

“On the first day of the AIPAC convention, a man named Gary Bauer took the podium. He reminded the cheering thousands that God gave the Land of Israel to the Jewish people and, therefore, there is an absolute ban on giving it to another people. Bauer is not a member of the National Religious Party, nor of the Likud central committee. He's not even Jewish. He is a leading preacher from the Christian right in America, one of those who believe the Jews are The Chosen People and one day will even choose the right messiah. Bauer is a leading spokesman for arch-conservative policies, including a total ban on all abortions and favoring government funding for religious schools.

"These are the people generating the spiritual energy fueling George Bush's war on global terrorism. Evangelist Christians from South Carolina paid for the huge billboard on the Ayalon Highway declaring "There's no land for peace." TV evangelist Pat Robertson last week reprimanded Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, saying "Who do you think you are, handing Jerusalem over to Arafat?"

“With Christian friends like these close to the president's ear, the right-wing government in Israel does not need Jewish friends to rebuff political initiatives like the road map. But the Jewish activists are not giving up. The religious sources of the values that drive the Christian right are not preventing some Jewish organizations from turning them into a natural ally. Among those organizations are some that only a decade ago were thriving by exposing the anti-Semitic sloganeering in the sermons of some of their new-found friends.

Although Bauer is a lawyer and a civil servant and not a preacher, it is easy to make the mistake and call him a leader of the Christian right. He is a central nexus figure between politics and a religious political activism that has lost its soul.

9-11 The Smithsonian Museum Collects September 11: Flight 77 Hits the Pentagon

Airplane fragment in patriotic box

Description: Penny Elgas built a patriotic box to preserve this piece of American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/images/large/28_182.
Donation of airplane fragment: G। Penny Elgas presents her airplane fragment and the box she made for it to National Museum of American History curator William Yeingst.

Subtitle: Can this Gal Craft, or What?

Of all the eyewitness accounts that attest to actually seeing an American Airlines 757 hit the Pentagon, Penny Elgas’s 2767-word report is by far the longest and most detailed. It also has to be the screwiest—reading like a novel conceived by Linda Tripp on acid, it helps support a dozen theory-variants as it aims wobbly at the official version.

She’s grounded in digital reality 1927 words into her epic, when she confesses she phoned in her morning’s first-hand experience to radio station WMAL, going on air with announcer Chris Core, to offer a “somewhat incoherent” testimony that led Mr. Core to reply rhetorically on air afterward, “How weird was that?”

Her still unsettled written account combines a mixture of manic off-topic minutia with holes big enough to fly airplanes into. Although she let’s herself go in a free-fall of free association, she never actually uses words to describe the central facts of her case, but a thoughtful curatorial comment provides the salient details:

Context: Driving on a highway adjacent to the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, Penny Elgas stopped as she saw a passenger jet descend, clip a light pole near her, and then crash into the Pentagon. Arriving home, Elgas found this plane fragment in the back seat of her car (she theorizes that it dropped through the open sunroof). Feeling that it was her patriotic duty to preserve the fragment as a relic, she crafted a special box and lined it with red, white, and blue material.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/images/large/28_315.

Source: Gift of G. Penny Elgas and American Airlines (Tax deduction: priceless.)

“Her” airplane fragment? Like catching a fly ball at Shea? Isn’t it essential lawful evidence of a heinous crime committed? “Feeling” her patriotic duty was to preserve the fragment as a relic?” How about “feeling” her way to the F.B.I. crime lab? All of these people are on the public payroll?

Thank God this lightweight fragment fell into the open sunroof of a car belonging to an experienced American craft hobbyist, one who instantly recognized it as a 20” piece of tail from a Boeing 757 airplane, and as such worthy of archival preservation if cleaned first of any fingerprints and dust. So Mrs. Elgas carefully washed the fragment in rare unguents and dried it with her hair, making it lustrous and desirable, coordinating it with her choice of patriotic chintz, and then making a neat solander box, which she has decorated with a bumper sticker message.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/images/large/28_54.jpg
Detail of airplane fragment:
This piece of a Boeing-757, American Airlines Flight 77, was torn from the plane as it clipped a light pole on approach to the Pentagon. All fifty-three airplane passengers, six crew members, and five hijackers were killed in the crash.



15 cars, tree blocking the shot
http://criticalthrash.com/terror/P1010013.JPG
Best link, with a close-up zoom, very clear focus

Shocked passers-by, witnesses to the gravest penetration of American military might since December 7, 1941, exit their cars to stand in mute, solitary horror in the first seconds after American Airlines Flight 77 disappears into the limestone façade of an empty wing of the Pentagon office building undergoing renovation in Arlington, Virginia. Some turn away, unable to bear the full magnitude of what they see, while we almost hear over the gulf of space and time, the sounds of a repeating refrain, “Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?” Others stand manfully, with hands defiantly on their hips, or thrust casually into their pockets, exemplars of the American way of facing disaster. Mrs. Elgas’s adrenaline-fueled observations are surely taking place just outside the picture frame, in one of the controlled, traffic lanes in the foreground, keeping company with the damaged taxi cab, and the abandoned vehicle of the Catholic priest who jumped into action, where all the debris is strewn. All apparently await instructions from the hazmat drill captain for their sector, someone who possessed the necessary authority to shout out, “Everybody back into your cars!” and then, “Go, Go, Go!” so as to empty the roadway for the emergency first responders and set the scene for subsequent images, which will constitute our visual memory bank for that fateful day, September 11, 2001, the day war without end began.



http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/record.asp?ID=28

Bearing Witness to History

Statement from Penny Elgas
Personal Experience At The Pentagon on September 11, 2001
By Penny Elgas

I had an early appointment on September 11th, so I drove to work later than usual. I work at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation near the White House. I headed north on 1-395 to DC from my home in Springfield, Virginia and I entered the highway a little after 9am so that I could take the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) express lane. As usual, traffic was very heavy and after I exited I-95, I found myself stuck in late morning rush hour traffic -- almost in front of the Pentagon. For most of my drive I had been totally focused on my radio and was extremely aware of the events that were unfolding in New York. Even though the radio reporters were cautious, I was already convinced from the first strike that it was not just an unfortunate pilot error. However, I felt that New York was under attack and I couldn't have imagined what would unfold in front of me.

Traffic was at a standstill. I heard a rumble, looked out my driver's side window and realized that I was looking at the nose of an airplane coming straight at us from over the road (Columbia Pike) that runs perpendicular to the road I was on. The plane just appeared there- very low in the air, to the side of (and not much above) the CITGO gas station that I never knew was there. My first thought was “Oh My God, this must be World War III!”

In that split second, my brain flooded with adrenaline and I watched everything play out in ultra slow motion, I saw the plane coming in slow motion toward my car and then it banked in the slightest turn in front of me, toward the heliport. In the nano-second that the plane was directly over the cars in front of my car, the plane seemed to be not more than 80 feet off the ground and about 4-5 car lengths in front of me. It was far enough in front of me that I saw the end of the wing closest to me and the underside of the other wing as that other wing rocked slightly toward the ground. I remember recognizing it as an American Airlines plane -- I could see the windows and the color stripes. And I remember thinking that it was just like planes in which I had flown many times but at that point it never occurred to me that this might be a plane with passengers.

In my adrenaline-filled state of mind, I was overcome by my visual senses. The day had started out beautiful and sunny and I had driven to work with my car's sunroof open. I believe that I may have also had one or more car windows open because the traffic wasn't moving anyway. At the second that I saw the plane, my visual senses took over completely and I did not hear or feel anything -- not the roar of the plane, or wind force, or impact sounds.

The plane seemed to be floating as if it were a paper glider and I watched in horror as it gently rocked and slowly glided straight into the Pentagon. At the point where the fuselage hit the wall, it seemed to simply melt into the building. I saw a smoke ring surround the fuselage as it made contact with the wall. It appeared as a smoke ring that encircled the fuselage at the point of contact and it seemed to be several feet thick. I later realized that it was probably the rubble of churning bits of the plane and concrete. The churning smoke ring started at the top of the fuselage and simultaneously wrapped down both the right and left sides of the fuselage to the underside, where the coiling rings crossed over each other and then coiled back up to the top. Then it started over again -- only this next time, I also saw fire, glowing fire in the smoke ring. At that point, the wings disappeared into the Pentagon. And then I saw an explosion and watched the tail of the plane slip into the building. It was here that I closed my eyes for a moment and when I looked back, the entire area was awash in thick black smoke.

I was not sure what to do next. Everyone started to emerge from their cars and, with looks of horror and disbelief, many began to beg for cell phones to call 911, to call family, or to call the story in to their newspapers. I continued to listen to the radio and everything was still about the events in New York. I was absolutely convinced that another plane was headed our way because there had been two planes at the World Trade Center and I felt that we were all sitting ducks on that road. I wanted the traffic to turn around. I didn't know what else to do so I got out of my car and ran back toward the highway yelling "Go Back! They just hit the Pentagon!" But of course, no one could move in any direction because traffic was at a standstill. A young woman in her 20's from the car in front of me was standing in front of my car and was visibly distraught and said she didn't know what to do. I told her that she was could come sit with me in my car for awhile and then I went to my car and started throwing everything from the front seat into the back seat to make room for her. I remember momentarily thinking that something was odd about the stuff as I tossed it back, but I didn't focus on it. Just then, a rather large man (from the regular traffic lanes) in a light tan military uniform bellowed to everyone within earshot. "Get Back In Your Car!!" So we did.

Then I became aware of people streaming out of the back side of the Pentagon and congregating on the sidewalks. It appears it was only a minute or two after the impact because they weren't yet looking at the crash site and seemed perplexed as to why they were outside. Perhaps only a few minutes lapsed from the actual time of impact to the time when someone was yelling at the traffic to "Go! Go! Go!" But it seemed like an eternity. As I began to drive, I heard a crunching sound (like driving on gravel) and I saw a piece of metal on the road about the size of a softball (it looked like a small conveyer belt-like roller with pins.) I remember thinking that I could puncture my tires - but in that same thought, I vowed to keep driving, even if I had to ride home on the tire rims. As the car moved slowly forward in traffic, I realized that I was still headed toward my office and I absolutely did not want to go there - my office is on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few doors down from the White House.

So I made my way across the lanes of traffic and instead, I exited into the Pentagon's parking lot. I circled around to the right and came out under the road that I had just been on -- headed toward I-66 West. It was then that I realized that my car seemed to be shaking and I thought that perhaps I had punctured a tire. It also seemed that my car was moving extremely slow and that I might be stuck in 2nd gear. I looked down at the gearshift and confirmed that it was in "Drive". Then I looked up at my speedometer - and I was flabbergasted to find that I was traveling at over 80 mph and it felt as if I was not moving at all. My car tires were okay, but my little Dodge Neon was shaking because I never pushed it that fast before. I realized that I was still feeling the effects of the adrenaline rush and I forced myself to slow down.

As I drove, I remember being frustrated and thinking that everyone else on the road looked too normal and too unaware of the atrocity that had just unfolded in front of me. I turned off I-66 and when I reached the corner of Glebe Rd and Columbia Pike, I hear a terrible explosive noise (which I later was told was the sonic boom of our fighter jets). I thought it was evidence of another attack. Traffic stopped and people poured out of stores and cars and homes to look up to the sky. I turned on the radio to find out what happened, and heard that a WTC tower had collapsed. So I pulled over to the side of the road to catch my breath and sobbed for all the lives lost and for what seemed to me at that time like the beginning of the end. I turned south onto Columbia Pike and headed home - stopping once to attempt to use a pay phone, but all lines were busy. As I drove farther from the crash sight, emergency vehicles continued to zoom past me toward Arlington, Virginia and the Pentagon.

A Second Shock...

When I arrived home, I turned on every radio and TV in the house -- I'm not sure whether I was trying to drown out my thoughts or whether I was just hungry for news. I made a cup of tea to calm my nerves and called my husband to let him know that I was okay. I told him that there was a piece of the plane in my car, but for some reason, I couldn't deal with it just yet. I also called my son at college to reassure him that I was okay. Apparently, I made several cups of tea that I don't remember making because later that day I found four sopping teabags lined up on my kitchen counter. I believe now, that I was operating on “auto-pilot” and was probably in shock for much of that day. At some point I opted for quiet and turned off all the noise except the radio in my kitchen. Then I went to my car and faced that piece of the plane that was in the back seat. It appeared to be a piece of the tail. There was no metal on it and it was very lightweight -- all plastic and fiberglass. It was 22" long and 15" wide. I have no idea how it got into my car because I do not remember seeing any rubble flying around while I was at the crash site. I assume that it dropped in through the sunroof or flipped in through a window. The plane piece consisted of a layer of white paint, and layers of yellow and gray fiberglass as well as a thin brown corrugated material.

I gingerly picked up the piece and carried it into the house. As I entered the kitchen, I heard the radio announcer on WMAL state that it was an American Airlines flight and I thought to myself, "I knew that." But then the announcer said that is was Flight number 77 and he stated the number of passengers and crew and it hit me hard that the planes had been full of innocent victims. The radio announcer said that they were taking calls from people who had a personal experience to share. I dialed the station. I remember that I told them that I was "Penny from Springfield" and that I had a piece of the plane. The next thing I knew, I was on the air and Chris Core said "Penny from Springfield, What did you see?" I don't remember any of the rest of our conversation and coworkers who heard it said it was somewhat incoherent. The only thing that I remember is that at the end, Chris Core said, "How weird is that?" And I remember thinking that his comment didn't make me feel any better.

As you could imagine, I was in no shape to work the next day so I stayed home with my husband. All day on September 12th, I sat glued to the television and overdosed on horrible replays from New York and DC/Arlington. At one point, I unconsciously barricaded myself in a mound of sofa cushions and that's when I realized that I needed to find some mental relief. I talked to several coworkers and to a counselor from our Corporation's counseling program, as well as to family and friends. I wasn't too keen about returning to work, but I had a major project to roll out and I just kept telling myself that I would not let the terrorists succeed in terrorizing me further. I returned to the office on September 13th with several rolls of red, white and blue ribbon and a supply of pins. I began to make multi-colored ribbon loops and pinned them to the bulletin board outside my office with a note that they were available for anyone that wanted to wear one. On that day and the next, I posted over 160 ribbons and it was helpful to me to see them worn by so many.

On the One-Month Anniversary, October 11, 2001, my co-workers and I were still felt traumatized by the events of one month ago. I invited them to come to my office to watch the commemorative ceremony in New York via CNN on my computer. It was then that we learned of the Pentagon Memorial service planned for later that morning. A co-worker, Victoria Hebert, and I decided that we must attend it. We knew that it would be a heavily guarded event, and we didn't think that we would be able to crash it, but we felt compelled to try and get as close to it as possible. We left the office around 10:00 am for the 11:00 am service. We took the Metro to the Pentagon station and surfaced right up into the Pentagon Parking Lot. The event was held on the side of the building opposite the damaged side. We followed a few people that were in the parking lot and we were stopped at several checkpoints by armed military personnel but were always allowed to proceed toward the River Parade Area.

It was both unsettling and reassuring to see all the military personnel in their battle fatigues with guns drawn and machine guns strapped to their backs, standing atop HumVees and other military vehicles. The most unnerving view was later during the services, when we saw FBI personnel patrolling the riverside behind the bleachers -- with large guns drawn. One of FBI agents was dressed in black from head-to-toe with a tight black hood pulled over his head that showed only two white circles for his eyes.

There, we headed to the seating area reserved for ticketed guests. We passed through the metal detectors, but we were turned away when we couldn't produce a ticket. Fortunately, they directed us to seating that was set aside for the public in the grassy area just below. There were chairs, bleachers, large-projection screens and an excellent sound system. We chose seats at the top of the bleachers and from that vantage point we could see the roofline of the Pentagon with its large flag draped down from the top (and armed snipers walking along the roof).

We visited the "wall" of American Heroes which was a three-panel board containing the names of each of the dead from the Pentagon disaster and an obituary for each. It was at this wall that Milegro Arcega of the local NBC news interviewed us. Mr. Arcega and his cameraman were extremely respectful. The interview was not aired, but it was another opportunity for us to express our anguish and to heal.

The Pentagon memorial service was very moving and personally very helpful. My co-worker and I were so glad that we were able to be a part of it. After the service, we made our way to the other side of the building, through the parking lot and up onto the grassy embankment not far from where my car had been on the morning of September 11th. Victoria and I climbed up the embankment with reverence, but I was unprepared for the overwhelming anguish that I would experience when I turned around and viewed the gashed building again in the sunlight, for the first time since September 11th. God Bless America!

May her story survive the eons of time and serve to awaken those who slumber yet.

"By his fruits we shall know him." sung to the tune of Lady of Spain

Sen. Lindsey Graham did a despicable thing back on February 6, 2006, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing held to discuss "Wartime Executive Power and the NSA’s Surveillance Authority" and it’s taken me this long to gather up the courage to address it.

In a soliloquy delivered to a smirking Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the South Carolina Republican enthused, “The administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column movements. I stand by this President’s ability, inherent to being Commander in Chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don’t think you need a warrant to do that,” Graham added.

The descriptor “fifth column” grew out of a battle for control of Madrid in 1936, when, as four rebel columns were advancing on the city, a group within the city comprised of secret sympathizers and supporters of the rebels was identified as engaging in espionage and sabotage. So, a fifth columnist is someone working covertly or clandestinely within his or her own sovereign national borders in opposition to the stated agenda, which sounds like the C.I.A to me. Fifth columnism, could describe a collective experience, or a shared ideology, but it is unlikely a word like that would ever come up outside a tenured venue, which is good, because I don't think George could get it out.

There can be no such thing as a fifth column movement; it is a self-contradicting term. Movement, in this case, defines the march of expressed public opinion: shoe leather, soap boxes, that sort of thing; column being only a statistical category or grouping. The defining characteristic of a fifth column being an absence of, or manipulation in, its public expression. They are havens for the self-identified non-reality-based, who organize those with secretive and duplicitous natures into links, where by the chains of command they can indulge in conspiratorial intrigue that leads to essentially, sabotage, or self-sabotage, depending on your point of view. It is a silly game, but everybody puts up with it as reality.

So a fifth columnist more accurately describes America’s covert intelligence communities, who have either failed miserably at pursuing our Constitutional agenda, or perhaps succeeded at one of their own. Whatever generated the harm of 9-11, followed by the pointless, debilitating, and amoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it cannot be extracted out from the utter failure of these officials to perform their oath-sworn, Constitutionally mandated responsibilities, and since accountability is impossible in a clandestine context, it leaves America dangerously vulnerable to threats from within. We cannot unring this bell.

Although not named by Sen. Graham, the American citizens he meant, in using remarks like “pursue” and “neutralize,” are doubtlessly those whose voices are raised in opposition to President Bush and his policies, voices which offer no support for militant fundamentalist terrorists of any religious stripe. This public expression of dissent has coalesced almost exclusively on the internet’s blogosphere. Mainstream media has begun only recently to report on the phenomena of this dissent, paying little attention yet to its content. Is this the split between "the elites" and "the masses?"

The Bush administration will go down in history not for what it knew, but for what it couldn’t imagine. Like, “No one ever thought they would fly airplanes into buildings,” or “No one anticipated the levees bursting.”
To oppose secret police, secret rendition, secret prisons, secret wiretaps, secret torture, and secret assassination does not aid an enemy like Al Qa’ida, or the Taliban—-the Moslem extremists and jihadists known collectively as “the terrorists.” When I oppose secret things, I think of those "terrorists” only in passing and always in sorrow, but rarely in sympathy.

I hope to redirect the resolve of President Bush. Many Americans have identified a problem within our nation’s command structure, a flaw that starts at the top and trickles down. For instance,

What penitential, pedagogical, or public relations value does the dissemination by our government of these photographs serve, to the coalition of the willing?




Or is it meant to serve the hounds of hell? These images frighten me, as they were meant to, and I identify the source as stemming from an obvious attempt by the present administration to intimidate me into silence and inaction. I am being terrorized by a United States government that has radically altered. To express my patriotism and loyalty to the ideals in our Constitution, I oppose President Bush and his policies in every non-violent kick-ass way possible. If he doesn’t like it, tough shit. This is my expression of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America!

The idealized patriotism and secure pride in my country that I felt as a youth was instilled early in an Iowa grade school, then abutted by corn fields. My American identity as a grown-up, is personified by Norman Rockwell’s painting Freedom of Speech,



http://www.artchive.com/artchive/r/rockwell/rockwell_speech.jpg
Rockwell created the series, "Freedom of Speech," "Freedom from Want," "Freedom of Worship" and "Freedom from Fear," after hearing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1943 radio speech addressing these four fundamental freedoms of all Americans. The power of these paintings galvanized a nation to action back then, and the message still resonates in this altered time. Maybe it can work again. God, as I understand Him, prompted Roosevelt’s words, gave him his tone of voice, nuanced the effect, which all combined together to inspire in Rockwell the spirit to create painted images that expressed His will, that the idea of a glorious nation was good, and the result galvanized us to overcome evil and malicious obstacles.

When God speaks to you President Bush, does it sound like this?
Is this what you hear? Are you clear about this Mr. Bush?

Or did He tell you to create this?

http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraq213.jpg

Your insistence on secrecy has been obscene. Now it is understandable
Are you Satan President Bush? Who are Falwell, Robertson, Bauer and the rest? Why didn’t they say something Are they devils too?

http://www.robert-fisk.com/hub2303.jpg

Nothing else matters now, not earning a living or vacuuming my floors, two things you know nothing about, Mr. Bush.

http://www.robert-fisk.com/mohamed_4_jr_cluster.jpg

God sends me messages too. He uses good spelling.

http://www.robert-fisk.com/1_152305_1_6.jpg

Good Bye, Mr. Bush!

George "The Assassin" Bush: Another Article of Impeachment

Bush Was Set on Path to War,
Memo by British Adviser Says
Published: March 27, 2006 New York Times

“A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.”

“The following document is an instructional guide on assassination found among the CIA's training files for "Operation PB Success" -- the agency's covert 1954 operation that overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in June 1954. The CIA released it to the public on May 23, 1997, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

“Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations. It should be assumed that it will never be ordered or authorized by any U.S. Headquarters, though the latter may in rare instances agree to its execution by members of an associated foreign service. This reticence is partly due to the necessity for committing communications to paper. No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made, but usually the act will be properly covered by normal news services, whose output is available to all concerned.”

The Institute for Counter-Terrorism at The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel, is affiliated with the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy. They post a list of Al Qa'ida Attacks from 1988 to the present (actually it runs from 1994 to 2002) Among 15 citations two are questionable.
http://www.ict.org.il/inter_ter/orgattack.cfm?orgid=74 Two days before September 11, 2001, on September 9, Ahmed Shah Massood, the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, was fatally injured by two men posing as reporters. The I.T.C. attributes the assassination to Al-Qa'ida, saying, There has been speculation that the timing of the assassination--two days before the catastrophic terror attacks in New York and Washington--was no accident. Shah's death considerably weakened the Northern Alliance at a time when the Taliban was facing the prospect of American retaliatory strikes. The assassination of the Alliance's best military mind thus helped to "level the playing field" between the two sides.

Other then yes, the surface fact is a playing field was leveled by this act, the synopsis makes no sense in attributing motive or benefit—the “no accident” part. The Taliban had been warring with Massood for years, so “anytime,” is the “right” time to off your enemy’s #1 leader. You don’t wait until company’s coming to redo the bathroom, do you?. Working under an assumption that the only ones who know a major event will soon unfold is Al Qa'ida, does the I.T.C. logic seem to imply that 9-11 was undertaken as prospecting for retaliatory strikes? Which, I submit is true, but in reverse.

I’d like to offer up a suggestion that the CIA assassinated Massood with a definite agenda in mind, but you’ll also have to go along for a moment with the hypothesis that the Bush Administration aided and abetted the hijackers as silent co-conspirators, to co-opt, and "Pearl Harborize," a legitimate, but lame, Al Qa'ida terrorist plot, one which would have fizzled without a stand down, and the interjection of American IED's. Together and separately, Bush and bin Laden created the most transcendent piece of performance art in the history of mankind, which simultaneously altered consciousnesses in nearly all six billion of us; a result due primarily, it must be said, to the radiant glory that comes from preplanting explosives throughout the Twin Towers, as well as in Building 7, in the days before 9-11, allowing for a computer-orchestrated demolition culminating in dual mushroom clouds that chased people down the streets.

"There is no end to what men can accomplish, if they're willing to give others the credit."

Who could have ever thunk it?

The following from “The Assassination of Ahmad Shah Massood,” by Paul Wolf, 9/14/03

Used Without Explicit Permission

“At the time of Massood’s death, the Taliban were being supported by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence service (ISI), an instrument of American influence since the campaign against the Soviets in the 1980s. (The ISI has often been described as a free-wheeling, rogue agency, yet it has maintained a close relationship with American intelligence and Pakistan has remained a close American ally -- before, during and after President Musharraf's military coup.)

“Although Massood had cast his lot with Russia and Iran, he was no stranger to the US State Department. According to United Front veterans I interviewed,[6] Massood met on several occasions with Robin Rafael, the American Deputy Foreign Minister for the East, between 1996 and 1998. Apparently, Commander Massood was extremely angry after his final meeting with Rafael, who'd suggested in the meeting that his best option might be to surrender to the Taliban. At the time, Massood’s forces had retreated into the rugged Panjshir valley, and the Taliban controlled some 95% of Afghanistan. According to the story, Massood threw his pakul -- a distinctive Afghan hat -- onto the table and pointed at it, announcing that as long as he controlled a territory that big, he would never surrender. Considered arrogant by his enemies, supporters describe Massood as an independent Afghan nationalist incapable of taking orders from foreigners. Massood would never have allowed foreign bases on Afghan soil, according to them [Emphasis Mine]

“Bob Woodward, in his insider account of White House deliberations following September 11th, writes that on September 13th, 2001, CIA Director George Tenet advised the President and the National Security Council that Massood’s assassination had severely fractured the United Front, "but with the CIA [paramilitary] teams and tons of money, the Alliance could be brought together into a cohesive fighting force." "All right," the President said. "Let's go. That's war. That's what we're here to win." 7

"Tenet was right: by the time the US invaded in October, most of Massood’s former commanders and allies were on the CIA payroll. Massood and the SCO “What makes all of this so interesting is that it provides an undeniable motive for the United States to have launched its own "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan: to establish military dominance in the region in the face of an embryonic Sino-Russian military alliance.

“The United Front veterans I met were certain that Ahmad Shah Massood attended at least one of the early "Shanghai Five" meetings, held in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in June of 2000. He might have attended others, they said, but were certain he attended that meeting at least. Whatever Commander Massood said in the meeting is not known -- the meetings were held behind closed doors -- but his attendance speaks for itself.

"All of the above is meant to explain why the United States attacked Afghanistan. Was oil a motive? Probably so, there's no debating the importance of oil in the region. But I would argue that the larger issue was the possibility of Sino-Russian control over it. What about the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on the USS Cole? Also reasons to attack bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan, no doubt. But none of this is really related to the attacks in New York and Washington used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan. As far as I know, there is no evidence linking bin Laden or the Taliban to those attacks. The Taliban were disliked for other reasons, including their repression of Afghan women.

“The "Sino-Russian" alliance, barely mentioned in the western press, must have been taken seriously by the US government, though. To me it seems to have been, and still is, the most serious threat to American influence in Central Asia since the fall of the Soviets. Enough to justify our taking the initiative and launching a pre-emptive war on terrorism ourselves? No doubt. Enough to assassinate the legendary mujajadeen leader."

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/ASMassoud.html#fn6

The painful conclusion I come to is Massood’s was a CIA-sponsored assassination of a charismatic national leader, necessarily linked to a planned covert black hijacking of a “hijacking," which mandated an enhanced “Shock and Awe” outcome far beyond the dreams of its instigators.

A little bit of proof is contained in, what is in my opinion the single piece of legitimate evidence ever offered to America by President Bush--even though it has been stupidly doctored by Karen Hughes--what Bush calls “the smoking gun;” the bin Laden tape released by the Pentagon on December 13, 2001, where bin Laden says he anticipated only the tops of the towers to come down.

To me this tape shouts out truth with the sound of a clarion trumpet making all the other fabricated bin Laden materials look sophomoric. It does implicate Bin Laden with plotting 9-11, in just the way Tom Clancy plots out a spy thriller. He is guilty of conspiracy, even if he had been put out to pasture as an eminence grise long before. He says he was “notified” the event would unfold five days earlier, and the translation puts me in mind of carrier pigeons.

Another piece of corroborating evidence for my theory is also on the tape. It is a reference the unnamed sheik makes about Mohammad Atta, describing him as very devout. It was at this point I could imagine the final double-cross taking place. Atta had become a double agent working for the C.I.A. months before, and he was stringing the conspirators along. He spent his last nights out carousing in stripper bars, drinking alcohol and eating pork, imagining he would be undergoing a hangover the next morning, not martyrdom.

He had been spoiled and corrupted the American way: with an 8-ball of cocaine and a $1000 hooker, the flip side to the sexual humiliation of Abu Ghraib. But the double-agent got double-crossed. If scheduled flights were flown into the twin towers on September 11, and that’s the simplest scenario, they were flown there on auto-pilot. I was always curious about a reference someone in the administration made early on after 9-11, denying that all of the hi-jackers knew it was a suicide mission. At the time, I took it as a way of discrediting a startling group commitment, and the 12-11-01 tape references that everybody knew it was a "martyrdom operation." Everybody but Atta, that is.

In a September 13, 2001 CNN interview, Dr. Raven Farhadi, the Northern Alliance permanent ambassador to the United Nations, replied “we have grave doubts,” when he was asked to judge the credibility of promises of aid and support for the United States made by Pakistan’s military ruler, President General Pervez Musharraf. Farhadi said that the military intelligence—not the government of Musharraf—controls the policy of Pakistan toward Afghanistan.

I note that if such power is vested in covert-intelligence operatives in shadow-government cells, co-existing within a military dictatorship, I imagine the reins of power aren’t any more tightly held in our constitutional democracy, and our foreign policy must be similarly driven by ungovernable impulses.

Weren’t we just beginning a new debate about reinstating the C.I.A.’s “right” to use the “tool” of assassination? Isn’t blithely discussing the assassination of the leader of a sovereign nation with a different leader, a possible article of impeachment? Which leads to still larger, yet even more painful conclusions…

Father Stephen McGraw & Mark Faram: The Ties That Bind--At The Pentagon

A key to unraveling the mysteries of omission and commission behind which hide the real perpetrators responsible for the “attacks” of 9-11, can be found in the collection of photographs and videos taken at the Pentagon that day. Attempting to deconstruct the military-manufactured visual hagiography will pay as quick a dividend as rushed shipments of recycled steel overseas paid out.

We can use as our reference point images taken at Ground Zero in New York that same morning. Viewed side-by-side, the Pentagon “attack” in truth is seen as Ground Nothing, for no truth at all is captured in these images, only common American greed, cupidity, and imperialist lust for wealth. When our eyes open and the truth of US government effort comes into focus, the entire span of imagery looks as fake, artificial and stylized as a Kabuki actor would look in a Method acting class.

Some definite truth was experienced in New York on 9-11, but the whole truth only begins to be glimmered when first you bear witness to a simple fact: that World Trade Center Building Number Seven was demolished with pre-planted explosives—but those implications are for another day and blog.

One photograph in particular stands out in my mind as worthy of status as the iconic Pentagon image, not because it’s so good--although some effort was expended on it, clearly—-but there's no competition; in terms of credibility, impartiality or transparency. This photo was taken by a reporter, Mark Faram, who was working at the time as a writer for the Navy Times newspaper, an independent weekly owned by the Gannett Corporation, which also owns USA Today, in addition to other magazines targeting the uniformed services. A number of employees of the Gannett organization, quite coincidentally I’m sure, provided eyewitness accounts attesting to a 757 crashing into the Pentagon, which makes them all liars in my book.

Before I began researching, I was sure this evocative image had been published in major media outlets, perhaps as a Newsweek cover, or in big-city spreads, but my web search found it to be published in lesser outlets, but better than most of the photos taken that day, which were produced “in-house” and published in government organs similar to Navy Times, like the United States Army Military District of Washington (MDW) News Service, the NFPA Journal, MilitaryCity.com, dcmilitary.com, Leatherneck Magazine of the Marines, GovExec.com, Stars & Strips, and The New American.



Our central image of Pentagon mayhem and martyrdom, sacrifice and valor, is as complex a composition as a pointillist Sunday in the Park with George. In the foreground a medical triage vignette is depicted. We see not one, but two Pentagon workers, one a suspendered civilian, the other an officer in a beret, helping out, gallantly holding aloft IV drips, and this is our first clue. Why is the Federal government so insecure about the work habits of those who suck at the public teat, that it resorts to overkill, showing employees “pitching in” and “lending a hand,” Me thinks thou doth assist too much, dear Federal workers, not that anyone is ever doing a productive thing in the images taken September 11.

In the middle-distance are personal clumped in twos and threes, with first-responder types scattered about, but their posture and focus is all wrong. They stand here and there, looking at this or that, some breaking at the hip, which gives a studied crease to cashmere slacks, by the way, making it all look rather more like a garden party. (This would be a good occasion to mention how universally fresh everybody looks in all the Pentagon images—collars and cuffs remain crisp and clean, with nary a sweaty armpit or untucked shirt in sight. Is that called military bearing and demeanor? Well, it doesn't work here.)

In the background the Pentagon smokes its two-packs-a-day habit, with thick black smoke alternating with foggy white, but always there to obscure any pesky little detail that threatens to emerge into the picture plane. (Another aside: how rare it is to find in the entire corpus of images any that contain both fire and hoses squirting water at it. We see endless, pointless shots of one, then the other, but rarely do they combine to depict the proper purpose of firefighting.)

The central emotional element around which the composition pivots is the kneeling figure of Father Stephen McGraw, a comely celibate secular Opus Die parochial vicar of only three-months standing on 9-11-01. Previously a lawyer with the Justice Department, Father McGraw is shown in prayer beside what we are told is a badly wounded man on a stretcher, although the spatial relationship between the two men seems distant and odd to me. Perhaps Father McGraw flung the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick onto the victim's chest, or maybe he sidled up later for a dousing.

Father McGraw was also an eyewitness to the 757 attack, having taken a wrong turn on his way to a funeral at Arlington Cemetery, he got stuck in traffic outside the Pentagon. In an interview with the Military District of Washington News Service, he put it this way: “The traffic was very slow moving, and at one point just about at a standstill. I was in the left hand lane with my windows closed. I did not hear anything at all until the plane was just right above our cars. The plane clipped the top of a light pole just before it got to us, injuring a taxi driver, whose taxi was just a few feet away from my car.













"I saw it crash into the building. My only memories really were that it looked like a plane coming in for a landing. I mean in the sense that it was controlled and sort of straight. That was my impression. I hadn’t heard about the World Trade Center at that point, and so I was thinking this was an accident. I figured it was just an accident.

"There was an explosion and a loud noise and I felt the impact. I remember seeing a fireball come out of two windows. I saw an explosion of fire billowing through those two windows. I remember hearing a gasp or scream from one of the other cars near me. Almost a collective gasp it seemed. I just knew right away what I needed to do.” Mark Faram, who witnessed Father McGraw in the first moments after the crash, was reported in the same article as saying, “He literally had the stole in one hand and a prayer book in the other and in one fluid motion crossed the guardrail.” The article goes on, “Within 45 seconds, McGraw was on the lawn of the Pentagon to provide spiritual comfort to the injured."

However, in an email reply to Dick Eastman, who led a forum on Yahoo discussing Pentagon conspiracy theories, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/frameup/message/1254 (The discussion was about another infamous image of Faram's, showing the one shiny, unburnt bread-box-sized piece of fuselage painted in American Airlines livery, posed lying on the verdant green lawn.)






Faram wrote Eastman: “I hate to disappoint anyone, but here is the story behind the photograph…..I was at the Navy Annex, up the hill from the Pentagon when I heard the explosion. I always keep a digital camera in my backpack briefcase just as a matter of habit. When the explosion happened I ran down the hill to the site and arrived there approximately 10 minutes after the explosion…..I also photographed a triage area where medical personnel were tending to a seriously burned man. A priest knelt in the middle of the area and started to pray. I took that image and left immediately…..I was out of the immediate area photographing other things within 20 minutes of the crash….My photos were on the wire by noon.”
Mark Faram’s “stole and prayer book/fluid motion over the guardrail” quote is just too colorful to pass off as the reporter's fancy, even though the author, Paul Haring, is identified as a “staff photographer for the Fort Myer Military Community’s Pentagram newspaper,” so, in typically convoluted military fashion, the reporter is taking the pictures and the photographer is doing the writing.
With the plane flying just a few feet off the ground at 450-miles-per-hour as it knocked down light poles--the wind turbulence alone should have flipped McGraw's car over if true, yet he could hear the still small voices of “a collective gasp” issuing from passengers in closed cars nearby. Must be spiritual ears he's using, I’d hazard.
http://www.militarycity.com/sept11/0001.jpg.html

The Group Pose Photo.

Contrast the image of Father McGraw, with these images holding some truth, that came out of New York:
http://gulnarasamoilova.com
Priest attending to a gentleman in pink shirt.

http://gulnarasamoilova.com/wtc22.jpg

Father Raymond Nobiletti covered in dust like everyone else.

This is prayer, Father:

http://www.september11news.com/Sept27RescWorkersPriestPrayRemains.jpg

Father Raymond Nobiletti from the Church of the Transfiguration



When I first saw a picture of Father Stephen McGraw I thought, “Yum, what a dish—definitely clandestine-services material.” Not high-level I'd expect, but the American CIA/FBI Spook’s Club fancies itself as being dashing and debonair, and it prefers to recruit matinée-idol good-lookers, if at all possible—it feeds their buff, self-reverential James-Bondish identities. Which is all fine and dandy, as long as the secret-keeping charisma combines with a modicum of brains, even on a mission as simple as this one. It is hard to judge McGraw on the single example of his writing Google turned up, but if his first-person account of his Pentagon experience, published in the Arlington Catholic Herald on September 5, 2002, and titled, Jesus Is With You, is any indication, then he’s just a dreamy dolt. (His mug shot is posted here--go see for yourselves.)
And, of course, he is a liar.



It is no fun saying that, in my opinion, Father McGraw's account is a total fabrication, from patsy soup to stooge nuts.He seems sociopathic, like President Bush, when he writes in the third-person, "I believe that God, by a loving design of His providence, arraigned for a priest to be present at the Pentagon crash, not only for the sake of the injured victims to whom I ministered, but also for the sake of the dying, whom He Himself attended with great mercy. I think too of the priest who was on the second plane that crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, and the priest, Father Mychal Judge, who was killed in the subsequent rescue efforts."

McGraw fails to realize that a separate reality exists, like the one in which Father Judge died as he administered last rights to a firefighter killed by a person falling on him. Judge was a sober alcoholic who altruistically helped others to recover. He was an openly gay Catholic priest with a dream day job, and he was loved by all those blue-collar palukas. McGraw’s dissociation from any sincere and honest human emotive quality is chilling. It is even more chilling to realize that thousands of his fellow spooks, spies and well-behaved politicos talk themselves into believing that these lies are good for the United States, or Iraq for that matter.

Gary Bauer, the religious right-wing ideologue, also gave an eye-witness account of seeing a 757 plane fly into the Pentagon, and his account is also a total lie, in my humble opinion. The little details thrown in along the way for verisimilitude give it a different flavor however, tasting both nauseating and noxious, like dry thistles mixed with viper's venom, to mangle Pinter's phrase.

Ted Olson is a big bald-faced liar, in my opinion. Cell phones didn't work from airliners in flight in 2001. There is only one other supposed phone call from the flight, from a stewardess calling on an Airphone, to serve up as collaboration. Teddy's testimony is too tidy for my tastes. Lies, all lies, I say. An optimistic view, maybe, is Mrs. Olson underwent extreme rendition to a secret sunny clime, and awaits his retirement.

When I saw Lisa Jefferson’s final interview on CNN I knew every word out of her mouth was a lie, but I understood her motive and forgave her. She’s the Verizon supervisor who took Todd Beamer's last 13-minute phone call, but didn’t even try to patch him through to his wife Lisa for a final goodbye. Ms. Jefferson wasn’t lying for the usual reasons--money, money and more money. In a spiritual surmise, I saw a likely scenario: local politicos/law-enforcement agents had gotten damning evidence to charge someone she dearly loves, and who was facing heavy prison time, hypothetically speaking. However, she could make it all go away, with just some simple cooperation, and a passable performance. It was perfect leverage for a true Christian woman, and she kept her end of the bargain; however, the God-force inside of her just couldn’t be silenced, and I heard the truth He spoke out of her.

Once you begin to really see these sorts of things, you'd go insane if you didn't get some fun out of it. In my opinion, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson obviously had advanced knowledge of this US government conspiracy to commit acts of murder against its own citizens on 9-11, viewing the deaths as "collateral damage," thus maximizing the potential of a “New Pearl Harbor,” the terms used by the Neo-Cons writing a few years earlier. The universal catharsis the world underwent together altered us deeply as we responded to the loss—unless of course, it wasn’t such a shock to your system because you already knew, and you just had to act mournful, and be all terrorized.

On the CCN television program, The 700 Club, aired on September 13, 2001, Robertson welcomes Falwell to the show with, "Jerry, it's a delight to have you join us this morning on the show!" Delight? Shouldn't that line have some words like "sorrowful bereavement," or "compassionate presence," or almost anything, but not "delight," that is if they were truly one of us, altered post-9-11 beings.

The message the pair unleashed on the show that morning, blaming 9-11 on gays and lesbians, abortionists and pagan ACLU secularists, was so coolly calculated, it unfolded with such singularly graceful coordination that it had to have been planned and orchestrated well in advance, in my opinion. That it was universally condemned and reviled by every sane person is further proof of the pair's culpability and inequity. Like Bush&Co.'s comeuppance in Iraq, “By their fruits, we shall know them."

Father McGraw apparently left his position at St. Anthony of Padua Church in Falls Church, Virginia. This past February he delivered seven apologetical presentations at St. Francis de Sales Church in Purcellville. Apologetics is a formulaic defense of the teachings of faith. What he should do, in my humble opinion, is confess and seek redemption with a more personal sort of apology. Together we are standing at a threshold; either into the lie of the Apocalypse, or as I hope and prefer, the possibility for a new way of seeing collective truth for homo sapiens, whorling around on planet Earth, and I said whorling. The old way, the Bush/Kerry, Skull and Bones, balance of corruption--not balance of power--two-party system, is no longer an option for me to live quietly under, period. Exclamation point!

Once the scales have fallen from your eyes you can’t put them back. I live in the hope that a bright-light day is dawning, but for now, it's casting this immense evil shadow that presently darkens the world, as personified by an evil and vapid George Walker Bush.

But I also accept the remote possibility that somehow I got it all wrong. Then, I must accept a growing likelihood of my dying painfully at the torturer's hands in some secret prison far away. Each is a possibility.

In the photographic record of the attack on September 11, 2001 at the Pentagon it is exceedingly rare to find any cross references. Personages are seen in the roles they were intended to play and then never seen again. In fact, I know of only two such references in the entire corpus, and here's one--of a Father McGraw looking a bit distracted at a moment of supreme drama. Oh well, best not to judge.