| -Land of the Free |
| The Legacy of Mark Bingham Lingers 19 Years after His Heroic Death on 9/11 |
| 2020-09-11 |
| [MetroSource] Entrepreneur, rugby player, gay man: Mark Bingham was known to friends, family and co-workers as a lot of things in his short life. Today, he’s remembered across the globe as a gay hero of 9/11. Bingham was one of those who decided to put their lives on the line to prevent hijacked United Flight 93 from colliding with its intended target, which many believe was either the Capitol Building or the White House in Washington, D.C. The 31-year-old Bingham and fellow passengers Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett and Jeremy Glick assessed the situation and decided to storm the cockpit of the plane, where they hoped to retake control of the flight or at least prevent it from being used as a missile. The world now knows that because they took action, the plane roared from the sky into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where ceremonies were held today to commemorate their loss and once again pay tribute to their courage. Mark Bingham is remembered with particular fondness by the gay community, not only because of his selfless act of bravery in the face of odds that were at best dire. He exemplifies the gay man so many aspire to be: compassionate, wise, clever, and imposing enough to make a difference in a physical altercation. Having broken bones as a high school soccer player, he was no stranger to pain. Later, he’d push through an endless string of injuries to help take the University of California Berkeley to two national championships. Those who knew him well readily tell the curious that Mark was an intense fellow who actually relished strategies for plowing through a field of adversaries — although during a match, he was just as likely to pick someone up, pat him on the back and tell him he’s doing a great job. By the end of the ’90s, Bingham was partnered and had opened his own high-tech PR agency, the Bingham Group. It was not a life someone would have been happy to walk away from. He could have done nothing and hoped for the best. What he did do was call his Mom once United Airlines 93 was hijacked. "Hi Mom, this is Mark Bingham," he said with atypical formality. "I just wanted to say I love you. I am on a flight from Newark to San Francisco, and there are three guys on board who’ve taken over the plane and they say they have a bomb." What we don’t know is what Mark, Todd, Tom and Jeremy did that saved hundreds of lives, only that the hijackers died without success, taking the passengers and crew of Flight 93 along with them. A year after his death, a biennial international rugby union competition predominantly for gay and bisexual men, was established in his memory. The Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament has since become known worldwide simply as The Bingham Cup. |
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| Steyn : Call me crazy. I blame terrorists. |
| 2006-09-17 |
| How can 36 per cent of people polled think U.S. officials knew of or participated in 9/11? MARK STEYN Who is A. K. Dewdney? He's an adjunct professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario, and he has pieced together the truth about what happened on 9/11. You may be familiar with the official version: "To account for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush White House has produced a scenario involving Arab hijackers flying large aircraft into American landmarks," writes the eminent Ontario academic. "We, like millions of other 9/11 skeptics, have found this explanation to be inconsistent with the facts of the matter." Instead, he argues, a mid-air plane switch took place on three of the jets. "The passengers of one of the flights died in an aerial explosion over Shanksville, Pa.," he writes, "and the remaining passengers (and aircraft) were disposed of in the Atlantic Ocean." Most of us swallowed "the Bush-Cheney scenario" because we were unaware that, when two planes are less than half a kilometre apart, they appear as a single blip on the radar screen. Thus, the covert switch. Instead of crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the flights were diverted by FBI agents on board to Harrisburg, Pa., where the passengers from all three planes were herded onto UA Flight 175 and flown on to Cleveland Hopkins and their deaths. By then, unmanned Predator drones had been substituted for the passenger jets and directed into their high-profile targets. The original planes and their passengers were finished off over the Atlantic. But what about all those phone calls, especially from Flight 93? Ha, scoffs Dewdney. "Cellphone calls made by passengers were highly unlikely to impossible. Flight UA93 was not in the air when most of the alleged calls were made. The calls themselves were all faked." Michel Chossudovsky, of Quebec's Centre for Research on Globalization, agrees: "It was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft travelling at high speed above 8,000 feet." So all the "Let's roll" stuff was cooked up by the government spooks. So, presumably, were the calls from the other planes. Flight 175 passenger Peter Hanson to his father: "Passengers are throwing up and getting sick. The plane is making jerky movements." This at a time when, according to professor Dewdney, Flight 175 was preparing to land smoothly at Harrisburg. Or Flight 11 stewardess Madeline Sweeney: "We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low. Oh my God, we are way too low." Two minutes later, Flight 11 supposedly crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center -- though, as professor Dewdney has demonstrated, by then the plane wasn't even in the state. These so-called "calls" all used state-of-the art voice modification technology to make family members believe they were talking to loved ones rather than vocally disguised government agents. In the case of Todd Beamer's "Let's roll!" the spooks had gone to the trouble of researching and identifying individual passengers' distinctive conversational expressions. In the end, says Dewdney, Flight 93 was shot down by a "military-looking all-white aircraft." It was an A-10 Thunderbolt cunningly repainted to . . . well, the professor doesn't provide a rationale for why you'd go to the trouble to paint a military aircraft. But the point is, several eyewitnesses reported seeing a white jet in the vicinity of the Flight 93 Pennsylvania crash site, so naturally conspiracy theorists regard that as supporting evidence that the plane was brought down by the U.S. military rather than after a heroic passenger uprising against their jihadist hijackers. "It was taken out by the North Dakota Air Guard," announced retired army Col. Donn de Grand Pre. "I know the pilot who fired those two missiles to take down 93." It was Maj. Rick Gibney, who destroyed the aircraft with a pair of Sidewinders at precisely 9:58 a.m. Ooooo-kay. We now turn to a brand-new book edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan called Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts. Brad Reagan? There's a name for conspiracy theorists to ponder, notwithstanding his cover as a "contributing editor" for Popular Mechanics. First things first: Maj. Rick Gibney is a lieutenant-colonel. At 9:58 a.m. he wasn't in Shanksville, Pa., but in Fargo, N.D. At 10:45, he took off for Bozeman, Mont., where he picked up Edward Jacoby, Jr., director of the New York State Emergency Management Office, and flew him back to Albany, N.Y., in a two-seat F-16B, unarmed -- i.e., no Sidewinders. The white plane was not an attractively painted A-10 Thunderbolt but a Dassault Falcon 20 corporate jet belonging to the company that owns Wrangler, North Face and other clothing lines. It was coming into Johnstown, near Shanksville, when Flight 93 disappeared and the FAA radioed to ask them if they could look around. "The plane circled the crash site twice," write Dunbar and Reagan, "and then flew directly over it to mark the exact latitude and longitude on the plane's navigation system." Just for the record, I believe that a cell of Islamist terrorists led by Mohammed Atta carried out the 9/11 attacks. But that puts me in a fast-shrinking minority. In the fall of 2001, a coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams found all but two insistent that there was no Muslim involvement in 9/11. Oh, well. It was just after 9/11, everyone was still in shock. Five years later, a poll in the United Kingdom found that only 17 per cent of British Muslims believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11. Ah, but it's a sensitive issue over there, what with Tony Blair being so close to Bush and all. Professor Dewdney's plane-swap theory? Come on, if you already live in Canada, it's not such a leap to live in an alternative universe. But what are we to make of the Scripps Howard poll taken this month in which 36 per cent of those surveyed thought it "somewhat likely" or "very likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks or had knowledge of them beforehand? Debunking 9/11 Myths does a grand job of explaining such popular conspiracy-website mainstays as how a 125-foot-wide plane leaves a 16-foot hole in the Pentagon. Answer: it didn't. The 16-foot hole in the Pentagon's Ring C was made by the plane's landing gear. But the problem isn't scientific, it's psychological: if you're prepared to believe that government agents went to the trouble of researching, say, gay rugby player Mark Bingham's family background and vocal characteristics so they could fake cellphone calls back to his mom, then clearly you're not going to be deterred by mere facts. As James B. Meigs, the editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, remarks toward the end of this book, the overwhelming nature of the evidence is, to the conspiratorially inclined, only further evidence of a cover-up: "One forum posting that has multiplied across the Internet includes a long list of the physical evidence linking the 19 hijackers to the crime: the rental car left behind at Boston's Logan airport, Mohammed Atta's suitcase, passports recovered at the crash sites, and so on. 'HOW CONVENIENT!' the author notes after each citation. In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic of conspiracism, there is no piece of information that cannot be incorporated into one's pet theory." When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that's one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point: "I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don't think I could still live here. I'm not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?" Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes. The sad reality is that never before has an enemy hidden in such plain sight. Osama bin Laden declared a jihad against America in 1998. Iran's nuclear president vows to wipe Israel off the map. A year before the tube bombings, radical Brit imam Omar Bakri announced that a group of London Islamists are "ready to launch a big operation" on British soil. "We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents," he added, clarifying the ground rules. "Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value." Our enemies hang their shingles on Main Street, and a University of Western Ontario professor puts it down to a carefully planned substitution of transponder codes. To comment, email letters@macleans.ca |
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| 911 Families in film furor |
| 2006-02-13 |
| Angry about WTC pix in sleaze flick Families of 9/11 victims reacted with anger and outrage yesterday over the revelation that the city Department of Design & Construction failed to secure control of photos and video of Ground Zero that ended up in a documentary with topless women and naked men. "To me, it sounds like the DDC made a colossal blunder," said Lee Ielpi, a member of the September 11th Families Association, whose son died in the terrorist attacks. "My concern is how do you copyright a tragedy? To me, nobody should copyright 9/11." The Daily News reported yesterday that photographer Gregg Brown, who was paid about $300,000, refused to sign an agreement that would have given the city ownership of 30,000 photos and countless hours of videos - all captured while he was in an NYPD helicopter. Instead, Brown registered the material with the U.S. Copyright Office for himself, then used some of the video in a documentary, "Words," The News reported. Some of his photos are being sold through a major photo agency. Ielpi was especially critical that the general public is being denied unfettered access to the material, paid for with taxpayer dollars by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It's forever lost - and it's his whim what he does with it," Ielpi said. "What a shame." Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son Christian died doing his job that day, said Brown's juxtaposition of footage of a still-smoldering Ground Zero with scenes of topless women talking about their breasts and naked New Yorkers participating in a Native American sweat lodge ceremony "is certainly sacrilegious." "It's really denigrating what happened that day - and the lives of the rescue workers and the innocent victims," she said. "This is history that the DDC lost and this man is using on his Web site. This belongs to the City of New York and the federal government." Mike Burke, who lost a brother, FDNY Capt. William Burke, saw Brown's use of the material as further proof that "everybody uses this for their own purposes." He pointed to Brown's claim that his experiences of flying over the ruins somehow allowed him to "know" what Sept. 11 families were going through. "What did he say, that this affected him as much as anybody? The narcissism of that." And Alice Hoglan of California, whose son Mark Bingham was one of the heroic passengers of Flight 93, said she was "horrified" that Brown would "take such an egregious advantage of a tragic situation. ... I'm really sorry that he's chosen to use his gripping photographs for commercial gain. It really disgusts me that someone would use this material in this manner." Meanwhile, for much of yesterday, a Web site promoting "Words" was unreachable because too many people were trying to access it. A link to Brown's site had been included in the online version of The News story about his movie. |
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| Steyn: FLIGHT 93, RE-HIJACKED |
| 2005-09-14 |
| sans my comments - I couldn't add anything better At 9.58am Eastern time, Tuesday September 11th 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Why? As UPIâs Jim Bennett wrote, âThe Era of Osama lasted about an hour and a half or so, from the time the first plane hit the tower to the moment the General Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty.â Exactly right. Six decades earlier, the American people had to wait four months between Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid. But September 11th was Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid wrapped up in 90 minutes. Flight 93 was supposed to be the fourth of Osamaâs flying bombs, its destination either the White House or the Capitol. Had it reached its target, the following morningâs headlines would have included âThe Vice-President is still among the missing, presumed deadâ. Had Flight 93 sheared the top off the White House, that would have been the dayâs âmoney shotâ, as it was in the alien-invasion flick Independence Day - the shattered façade, smoke billowing, the seat of American power reduced to rubble. But the dopey hijackers assigned to Flight 93 were halfway across the continent before they made their move and started meandering back east. And, by the time the passengers began calling home on their cellphones, their families knew what had happened in New York. Todd Beamer couldnât get through to his wife, so the last conversation of his life was with the GTE telephone operator, who stayed on the line with him and overheard his final words: âAre you ready, guys? Letâs roll!â And then a brave group of passengers jumped their hijackers and, at the cost of their own lives, prevented that dayâs grim toll rising even higher. At a terrible moment for America, their heroism was the only victory of the day. Four years on, plans for the Flight 93 National Memorial have now been revealed. The winning design, chosen from 1,011 entries, will be built in that pasture in Pennsylvania where those heroes died. The memorial is called âThe Crescent of Embraceâ. That sounds like a fabulous winning entry - in a competition to create a note-perfect parody of effete multicultural responses to terrorism. Indeed, if anything, itâs too perfect a parody: the âembraceâ is just the usual huggy-weepy reconciliatory boilerplate, but the âcrescentâ transforms its generic cultural abasement into something truly spectacular. In the design plans, âThe Crescent of Embraceâ looks more like the embrace of the Crescent â ie, Islam. After all, what better way to demonstrate your willingness to âembraceâ your enemies than by erecting a giant Islamic crescent at the site of the dayâs most unambiguous episode of American heroism? Okay, letâs get all the âof coursesâ out of the way â of course, the overwhelmingly majority of Muslims arenât terrorists; of course, we all know âIslamâ means âpeaceâ and âjihadâ means âhealthy-lifestyle lo-carb granola barâ; etc, etc. Nevertheless, the men who hijacked Flight 93 did it in the name of Islam and their last words as they hit the Pennsylvania sod were no doubt âAllahu Akhbarâ. One would be unlikely even today to come across an Allied D-Day memorial so misconceived in its spirit of reconciliation as to be called the Swastika of Embrace. Yet Paul Murdoch, the architect, has somehow managed to produce a design whose two most obvious interpretations are a) a big nothing or b) a splendid memorial to the hijackers rather than their victims. Four years ago, most of us understood instinctively the courage of Flight 93. They were honoured not just by chickenhawks and neocons and Zionists and the usual suspects but even by celebrities. The leathery old rocker Neil Young wrote a dark driving anthem called âLetâs Rollâ that began with cellphones ringing. Then: I know I said I love you I know you know itâs true I got to put the phone down And do what we gotta do Oneâs standing in the aisle way Two more at the door We got to get inside there Before they kill some more⊠Granted, even then, there were a lot of folks eager to âembraceâ their enemies. The day after September 11th, Robert Daubenspeck of White River Junction, Vermont wrote to my local newspaper advising against retaliation: âSomeone, someday, must have the courage not to hit back but to look them in the eye and say, âI love youâ.â Thatâs not as easy as it sounds. If you try to look Richard Reid the shoebomber in the eye as heâs bending down to light the fuse sticking out of his sock, you could easily put your back out. But each to his own. If Mr Murdoch sincerely believes in a âcrescent of embraceâ, let him build one â at the headquarters of a âmoderateâ Islamic lobby group, or in the parking lot of your wackier colleges. To impose it on Flight 93 â to, in effect, hijack those passengers a second time â is an abomination. Flight 93 is about what happens when you understand that some things canât be embraced. Perhaps Mr Beamer and his comrades did indeed âlook them in the eyeâ and saw there was nothing to negotiate, nothing to âembraceâ. So they acted â and, faced with a novel and unprecedented form of terror, they stopped it cold in little more than an hour. Todd Beamer asked that telephone operator to join him in reciting the 23rd Psalm: âYea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of deathâŠâ He knew there would be no happy ending that day, but in their resourcefulness and sacrifice he and his fellow passengers gave their country the next best thing: a hopeful ending. Thatâs what the Flight 93 Memorial should be honouring. Instead, in its feeble cultural cringe, the Crescent of Embrace hands the terrorists of Flight 93 the victory they were denied on September 11th. And it profoundly dishonours Todd Beamer, Thomas Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and other forgotten heroes of that flight. Most of us are all but resigned to losing New Yorkâs Ground Zero memorial to a pile of non-judgmental if not explicitly anti-American pap: The minute you involve big-city politicians and foundations and funding bodies and âartistsâ youâre on an express chute to the default mode of the cultural elite. But surely itâs not too much to hope that in Pennsylvania the very precise, specific, individual, human scale of one great act of American heroism need not be buried under another soggy dollop of generic prettified passivity. A culture that goes to such perverse lengths to disdain its heroes cannot survive and doesnât deserve to. Four years ago, Todd Beamerâs rallying cry was quoted by Presidents and rock stars alike. Thatâs all thatâs needed in that field: the kind of simple dignified memorial you see on small-town commons saluting Civil war veterans, a granite block with the names of the passengers and the words âLETâS ROLL.â The âcrescent of embraceâ, in its desperation to see no enemies and stand for nothing, represents the precise opposite of Beamer, Glick, Burnett and co: Are you ready, guys? Letâs roll over. Originally at The Irish Times, September 12th 2005 |
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| 9-11-01 |
| 2002-09-11 |
| 318 years before, on September 11, 1683, the conquering armies of Islam were repulsed from the gates of Vienna. In our day, no one thinks about such things when they get up in the morning. It was important to the Europeans then, and for a hundred years or so afterward it was a date they remembered. September 11, 2001 started out as a pretty day. There was sunshine with just enough hint of impending autumn in the air to make it almost perfect. I was running a little late, but my wife, Gloria, and I were having a cup of coffee before I left for work. Lots of days, thatâs the only time we see each other before we go to bed at night. If I could get out the door at 9:00, and the traffic was good, I would be at work at 9:30. We were watching Steve, E.D., and Brian on Fox and Friends. Weâre both news junkies, so Fox is usually whatâs on the box. Somewhere between one cup of coffee and another the image on the TV screen switched to the 110-story World Trade Center in New York. A plane, American Airlines flight 11, out of Bostonâs Logan Airport with 92 people on board, had just crashed into it. Fox and Friends was aghast. So were we. We saw a gaping hole in the side of the building, a lot of smoke and flame and falling debris. Casualties? Who had any idea? Certainly a planeload of people was dead. Certainly most, if not all, of the people â on how many floors? â were dead or seriously injured. Someone reported 70,000 people worked in the twin towers. The toll must be horrific. How were rescuers going to get up there? It was an incredible, sickening tragedy. âHow the hell does a pilot make a mistake like that?â I asked. It had to be an intentional act â but who would be crazy enough to do that? We didnât know then that the air-traffic controller handling the plane in Nashua, N.H., had heard a conversation in the cockpit and realized a hijacking was under way. John Ogonowski, 50, the captain, had thumbed the mike button to alert controllers. A few minutes later â 15 minutes, to be precise â the second tower was hit, the same way, by United Flight 175, also out of Boston. We actually saw the second plane fly into the building, live. We saw a second planeload, 65 living, breathing human beings, die. There was no uncertainty about what had happened this time. By some stretch of the imagination the first could possibly have been an accident, however unlikely. There was no way the second could be. New York was under attack. âItâs Pearl Harbor,â I told Gloria. âWeâre at war now.â The thought of going to work went onto the back burner for awhile as we watched, stunned and fascinated, along with everyone else in the country who had access to a television. Somehow I got out the door. I listened to the car radio, WTOP, the Washington all-news channel, all the way down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. The attack on the Pentagon â American Flight 77, out of Washingtonâs Dulles Airport, with 64 people aboard â an hour after the first tower was hit, didnât come as a surprise after the World Trade Center. All we would do was curse the people who had done it. And wait for the next attacks, wherever they were going to happen. The crash destroyed four of the five rings that encircle the world's largest office building. A Pentagon spokesman called the casualties "extensive," although they were clearly not as extensive as New York's. These casualties were also more personal to me, as a retired military man. Reports kept coming, but they were were confused and confusing. There was a story that a car bomb had gone off outside the State Department. There was a report of smoke coming from a location near the White House. There was a rumor that a plane had crashed in western Pennsylvania, another had supposedly crashed in Kentucky, and a rumor of another headed toward the White House from Dulles Airport. We didnât know which were true; we assumed they all were until they were disproved or retracted. People were already leaving work to bring their kids home from school. Would whoever did this attack schools, too? I didnât think so, but I could understand the feelings, the uncertainty. I wasnât altogether sure that someone wasnât going to strafe the traffic on the parkway â i.e., me. It would have been easy enough. The south tower collapsed and it was still only 9:50 a.m. The area was evacuated. There was no immediate report on casualties. We were to learn not much later that many police and firefighters didnât make it out. President Bush spoke to the nation from Sarasota, Florida, where he had been visiting an elementary school. He tried to sound reassuring, but it was obvious he wasnât sure what was going on. No one was. There simply werenât enough facts available yet. Even before I reached work he was airborne, in Air Force One, headed for Louisiana and from there to Nebraska. Vice President Cheney was in Washington. The Capital and the west wing of the White House were being evacuated. The FAA shut down takeoffs and flights in the air were told to land in Canada. At my office someone had brought in a television and nothing got done. We watched a snowy picture from Washingtonâs Channel 4. There were more rumors, delivered in authoritative tones, cunningly disguised as reports. Then there was the confirmation on the story about the airliner down in a field in Pennsylvania. It was United Airlines Flight 93, carrying 45 people, out of Newark, N.J. There was speculation that it had been headed toward either Washington â the White House? The Capitol? â or perhaps Camp David. It crashed 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Had it been shot down? Had the passengers crashed it? It seemed unlikely the hijackers had. An empty field didnât make much of a target. Goddard Space Flight Center, a couple blocks from where I work, was locked down. I wondered what the terrorists would blow up there â the souvenir shop? Cubicles filled with engineers? The finance office? It didnât make sense, but I still found myself trying to calculate what the blast range would be for a nuclear device set off in downtown Washington. I wasnât happy with the results. Dan Rather came on the box and his head talked. There was nothing memorable, only the uncertainty. He didnât know much more than we knew. Maybe not even as much. At 10:30 the north tower collapsed. There had been an hour available for evacuations; how many people could evacuate from what had been 110 stories in an hour? How many stairwells were there? How many people could walk abreast? There would be losses from smoke inhalation. Many people would have been horribly burned but still ambulatory. There were blind and otherwise disabled people who worked in the building. How to get a wheelchair down, say, 80 flights of stairs? Much later we would learn that as many as 18,000 people evacuated the two towers. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani publicly urged New Yorkers to stay calm and stay put -- unless they were below Canal Street in lower Manhattan. "If you're south of Canal Street, get out," he warned. "Just walk north." He didnât add not to stop, but New Yorkers guessed that part. Things started to clear up a little as the day wore on. Government buildings around the US were evacuated and facilities â Goddard among them, which meant my office, too â closed down. The UN closed down. US financial markets closed down. Mayor Giuliani called for the evacuation of lower Manhattan. Vice President Cheney and first lady Laura Bush were whisked away to undisclosed locations in the morning, while the Secret Service hustled and worried. Some Congressional leaders, such as Speaker Dennis Hastert, were taken to Andrews Air Force Base. Others, like House Majority Whip Tom DeLay and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, as well as some Senate leaders where taken to police headquarters just blocks from the Capitol. All leaders were eventually moved by helicopter and limo to hideouts in West Virginia and Virginia, like Mt. Weather, an underground communications center near Round Hill, Va., some 75 miles from Washington. President Bush, speaking again, this time from Barksdale AFB, Louisiana, told us that US armed forces were on maximum alert. He vowed to "hunt down and punish" those responsible. We all hoped that was true; Bill Clinton had used almost the same words in the wake of the bombings of our embassies in Africa. The nation was still waiting for results. The Drudge Report had some information. Foxâs web site had some, as did CNN, MSNBC, and others. Gradually some of the rumor was sorted out from the scanty fact. There was a traffic jam on the way home. Bush touched down at Offutt AFB in Nebraska, and was soon back in the air, on his way to Washington. A network of Navy warships was deployed along both coasts for air defense. Landmark buildings and sites were shut down, from the Space Needle in Seattle to the Sears Tower in Chicago to Walt Disney World in Orlando. The borders with Canada and Mexico were sealed. New York's mayoral primary was postponed. So was Major League Baseball's schedule, followed quickly by professional football. Nobody cared at the moment, except maybe the players and not all of them. The military command center in Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain, responsible for U.S. air defenses, received word just 10 minutes before the first aircraft struck the World Trade Center that an American plane had been hijacked. The notification came too late for fighter jets to take action. The TV was on as I walked in the door, with Gloria glued to it. We watched the scenes of the attacks over and over as each new bit of news was added to what Fox â and MSNBC and CNN â had to say. We saw the tapes of the towers collapsing. We heard about the people who jumped, rather than be burned alive; the Spanish-language stations ran footage of some of them. One pair, a man and a woman, held hands. It was sickening, horrible. It was beyond mere words. At 5:30 structurally weakened Seven World Trade Center collapsed. The news channels showed us the images of smashed fire trucks, covered in gray dust and ash. There were first estimates of how many had died, still just guesses. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas was informed that the casualty figures would likely range between 15,000 and 25,000. There were fears that other nearby buildings were structurally damaged and that they would collapse as well. There were still fears of further attacks, on the Empire State Building, on the Sears Tower. Amtrak train and Greyhound bus operations were halted in the Northeast. The bridges leading into and out of New York were locked down. By evening the fires were still burning amid the rubble of the World Trade Center. Pools of highly flammable jet fuel continued to hinder rescue teams who were still searching through the rubble, despite their losses. Our country had been attacked and the realization was stunning. For the first time since 1814 the USAâs soil had been subject to naked, vicious aggression by a foreign power. The attacks had been aimed at symbols of American power, as though to destroy them would be to destroy what they represented. The thought that had gone into selecting them was from one point of view effective â strikes against âsymbols of oppression and greed.â From a practical point of view, the point of view that would have been taken by a professional military planner, they were ineffectual because they were totemistic. The US military is no more the Pentagon than US economic power was confined to the World Trade Center. So Clue Number One was in that sense reassuring: the enemy, whoever he was, was not a competent general. He was a tactician but not a strategist. Symbolic attacks donât win wars; destruction of the enemyâs command structure does. When thatâs gone, the enemy forces can be rolled up practically at leisure. Congress â both Republicans and Democrats - declared its support for Bush in finding and punishing those responsible. "We are outraged at this cowardly attack on the people of the United States," Congress said in a bipartisan statement. "Our heartfelt prayers are with the victims and their families, and we stand strongly united behind the President as our commander-in-chief." Members concluded their session by singing "God Bless America" on the steps of the Capitol. In the course of that day, President Bush spoke to the nation three times. The first was the quick talk I had heard on the radio, from Florida before leaving for Louisiana. The second, nearly as brief, was from Offutt. That evening he spoke again, at a little more length, and we listened: These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong."We will make no distinction," Bush warned, "between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." Despite the fears of further attacks, there was a national growl of defiance, a national thirst for vengeance. If the terrorists had expected to throw the nation into confusion they had succeeded. If they had expected us to collapse in fear they had failed. They had aroused a national fury unseen since Pearl Harbor. Sen. Hutchison spoke for us all when she said that we should determine with a moral certainty who did it; issue an ultimatum to whatever country was involved to give the person up; and if not, "We should go in, attack them, and wipe them off the face of the earth." The nation accepted the concept of being at war â we werenât quite sure with whom, not yet â with no hesitation. Libertarian writer and weblogger Virginia Postrel passed on the story of a man who worked as a prosecutor in Galveston. He cut through the minimum security wing of the jail on an errand. All the prisoners were gathered around the televisions, wearing their orange jumpsuits, following the story with their jailers and with the same reactions. Even Bad hates Evil. There were three attacks. The plane that went down in Pennsylvania was supposed to have been the fourth. Minutes before United Airlines Flight 93 crashed outside Pittsburgh, passenger Jeremy Glick used his cell phone to call his wife in New Jersey. He told her that he and several other people on board were going to resist the hijackers. Knowing the chances were good that he would die, Glick told his wife, Lyzbeth, that he hoped she would have a good life, and to take care of their 3-month old baby girl. Alice Hoglan of California also got to say goodbye to her son, Mark Bingham. He also spoke of a plan to tackle the hijackers in a last-minute cell phone call. One of the other people on Flight 93, Tom Burnett, the vice president of a northern California medical devices company, also managed to call his wife from the plane before going to his death. And Todd Beamer also talked to his wife. The last words she heard him say were the words he used to fire up his kids: âLetâs roll!â We had forgotten what it was like to have heroes. Beamer, Glick, Bingham, Burnett and those who went with them rushed the hijackers. They fought them hard, the flight recorder would later attest just how hard. And rather than giving control of the aircraft back to the Americans, the fanatics smashed the plane into the Pennsylvania countryside. The men and women who resisted them went down fighting to the last. US Solicitor General Ted Olsen was lucky enough to talk to his wife, Barbara, on American Flight 77, via cell phone before her plane smashed into the Pentagon. Barbara Olsen was brilliant and witty, a ferocious political partisan who had written Hell to Pay, an exposÚ on then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. She was a fixture on political talk shows, had another book coming out on the sordid last days of the Clinton administration and she was on her way to Los Angeles. âWhat should I tell the pilot to do?â she asked her husband. Whatever she told the pilot, Barbara Olsen died trying. Charles Burlingame, the pilot of American Flight 77, was bludgeoned to death before the plane hit the Pentagon. He died trying, too. We were to learn later, after flight recorders had been recovered, that the pilot of Flight 11, which had hit the World Trade Center, had also fought the hijackers. On all of the four planes, Americans had died trying. By the next day we were busy with the long process of fitting the pieces together and putting together a response. |
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| Home Front |
| Jeremy Glick, RIP |
| 2001-09-12 |
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| Blogging as addictive behavior |
| 2002-04-08 |
I'd keep writing this shit even if no one was reading it. I do this first and foremost for my own benefit, and if anyone else gets anything out of it, then it's icing on the cake. This blog thing has been cathartic as all get out, and I find myself feeling better as I purge the toxins of frustration from my system by writing everything out here. When I first started out, no one was reading this and it didn't matter one whit.I can sympathize only too well. I've been stuck in the seemingly endless loop of compiling Rantburg since 9-11. It's like reading a book you can't put down, only I'm writing it. One of these days there are going to be a lot of books covering the War on Terror, but for now we don't know how it's going to turn out. Hell, it's possible we could even lose. The books might be in Arabic and not read a thing like what we've been watching. But I'm betting we'll win in the end. Talk about a cast of thousands. Try millions. We have an International Criminal Mastermind with more than a few overtones of the Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu. We have venal dictators and crafty Oriental Potentates and shadowy international arms merchants. Raymond Chandler suggested that when you don't know what should happen next, have a man with a gun step through the door. We have gunnies, snuffies, even giggling psychopaths. There are sniveling cowards looking frantically for someone, anyone, to surrender to, and Internationally Renowned Perfessors demanding to be on the other side, even though the other side's plans for the likes of them include walls and blindfolds. There are spittle-spraying, eye-rolling beturbaned religious fanatics, whipping up the masses for Holy War. There's the plain-talkin' Texas president, underestimated by friend and foe alike (see Destry Rides Again), opposing a shadowy Council of Boskone. We have Chamberlains, Quislings, and more than a few Duces and Fuehrers and generalissimos, riots in the streets, plucky reporters and reporterettes, in fact all the elements necessary for either something by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or maybe an excruciatingly bad 1930s novel. Or maybe both, with elements of Wagner. And Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming. "There are no heroes," the nay-sayers said in their querelous post-modernist, Peace Studies voices. Don't they look stupid now? We have our heroes to go with our villains, every bit as magnificent in their bravery and goodness as the other side is mired in Evil. Just think of the matter-of-fact heroism of NYPD and FDNY, going in because there was a chance the buildings wouldn't fall down. We have Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham, and Barbara Olson, resisting to the last. Mike Spann and Daniel Pearl, just doing their jobs, with danger and treachery all around them. Soldiers who are by God Heroic in their dedication and bravery, and even some allies who are true blue. And we have men and women who either don't get in the papers at all or who're mentioned once, like those who clobbered Shoe Boy. I'll keep compiling Rantburg because I've got to know what happens next. And I'll keep reading because, IMHO, your site is still the best place to pull all the threads together. Thanks for continuing! Thanks, y'old grouch. I'll be here. I can't stop... |
| Link |
| Home Front |
| He was a hero, but don't tell anybody he was gay |
| 2001-10-10 |
CENSORING HEROISM: The Houston Chronicle strikes a blow for p.c. censorship. In running a piece from the San Jose Mercury News about Mark Bingham's life and death, the Chronicle took pains to remove any references to Bingham's sexual orientation. Bingham, a gay Republican rugby player, was one of those who almost certainly wrestled the plane destined for Washington to the ground in Pennsylvania. Gay people as American heroes? Too much information for the Chronicle's squeamish editors. I guess they're just following the policies of the Air Force. |
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