Never Forget 9 11 Essay

Mark Lennihan | AP photo
Begun by Silverstein Properties in April 2006 and taken over by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, construction has accelerated in the last year. One WTC will incorporate advanced life-safety systems that exceed New York City building code requirements. From structural redundancy to dense fireproofing to biochemical filters, it will create a new standard for high-rise buildings.

NEVER FORGET

http://napoleonlive.info/what-i-think/arab-spring-they-hate-us/

‘The whole building just came apart’

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2035099/The-building-just-came-apart-Newly-released-9-11-tapes-aviation-industrys-response-towers-fell.html

It took 10 seconds for each person to fall…

Pasquale Buzzelli fell 15 stories from the 22nd floor to the 7th floor

Pasquale Buzzelli, 34, was on the 22nd floor when the North Tower collapsed after an American Airlines plane was flown into it

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2198838/9-11-Survivors-Pasquale-Buzzelli-survived-surfing-wave-falling-debris-speaks-miracle.html

“Disbelief.” “Speechless.” “Glued to the TV for a week.”

Like all Americans, I was shocked, stunned, and horrified by the Islamic attack on New York City, but not surprized. The sight of the jumpers remains the most horrible image I’ve ever seen; it still makes me sad. Jump or burn — give your soul to God.

In the late summer of 1980, I read a mystical prophetic account about “rescue” in the city of hollow mountains. That’s all I can remember; the source is forgotten. From that day forward, I concluded that New York City would be attacked by a nuclear bomb. The jets that crashed into the World Trade Center were de facto tactical nukes. Gray ash that covered first-responders, survivors, and the streets resembled the aftermath of nuclear winter.

Individuals representing eighty nationalities were killed. The last survivor to be pulled from the rubble was Genelle Guzman-McMillan, a native of Trinidad. On the 64th floor of the North Tower when Flight 11 slammed into it, she was rescued from the rubble after 27 hours. Fires below the ruins burned for ninety-nine days.

In June 2001, I read Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington. I concluded: they hate US. Shortly after finishing this book, I watched a story on cable about the madrassas in Pakistan that teach the Koran, hatred of the West and nothing else. Based upon my knowledge of history (1453; 1571; 1683), I realized that the ancient enemy of the West was awake.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2201387/9-11-anniversary-Series-2001-briefings-warned-attack-Bin-Laden.html

9/11: ‘Jumpers’ from the World Trade Center still provoke impassioned debate
The images of those who fell from the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, still shock us today 10 years after the attacks on America.

By Melissa Whitworth
7:30AM BST 03 Sep 2011

From 110 storeys, a distance of over 1,300ft, it was impossible at first to see what it was that was falling. One witness said it looked like confetti.

Perhaps it was debris: in a desperate attempt to escape as the World Trade Center towers burned around them, workers were hurling chairs or tables through the windows to reach fresh air before they were rescued. In those early minutes, a rescue operation seemed plausible.

Then two women on the ground, staring up at the gaping hole left in the North Tower by American Airlines Flight 11, clutched at each other and started screaming. It was people that were falling from the towers. Trapped above the point of impact, many witnesses concluded that they were jumping. “The Jumpers”, as they became known, were one of the most graphic and controversial elements of 9/11.

Thomas Dallal, a photojournalist at the time, was on the ground near the North Tower. He photographed the two women crying, put a long lens on his camera and turned back to the tower snapping away at the uppermost floors. One of his photographs, to be named “Impending Death”, has become an iconic image from that day. It shows around 50 figures leaning out of the broken windows of the North Tower shortly before it collapsed.

News organisations decided not to use footage of the people falling to their deaths. No one wanted to talk about the jumpers. Many still refuse to accept that they jumped, rather that they fell or were forced out by flames and explosions. However, as the years have passed, these images capture what, for many, are acts of heroism. Some fell holding hands. Others appeared to have made makeshift parachutes from clothing knotted together.

Richard Griffiths, the senior editorial director at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, was in the newsroom that day. “There was a robust discussion, and we did include those images that night in a special report – a four-second shot of someone jumping – but you didn’t see them hit the ground,” he says.

“You got a clear sense of the awfulness of the attack. It’s that intimacy of seeing someone die; it is a very invasive thing to witness a death.

“Usually the experience we have of someone dying is through a parent, or a close relative; you are holding their hand and it is an intensely personal moment. There are thousands of people for whom that person jumping could have been their relative; and they will never know because so many of the bodies were not recovered.”

These were some of the most chilling images of the day. “The Falling Man”, taken by Richard Drew at the Associated Press, sparked a still-contested investigation into the identity of the man. He was pictured perfectly bisecting the towers, upside down, one knee bent, like an arrow in free-fall in a white jacket and orange T-shirt. The photograph became the subject of a documentary in 2006.

“Nobody is ever really going to know what happened, but I don’t think they were jumping,” says Dallal. “I think they were falling after being overwhelmed by smoke and heat. I think some were forced out by explosions inside. When you could see what was going on up there, it was calamitous.”

Dallal, 47, had been a photojournalist for 14 years covering war zones across the world. “When you cover a conflict as a journalist you go somewhere prepared psychologically. You are well aware that you are taking risks. But this happened in a part of town that was as familiar to me as my own front yard. It felt like I was watching people I ride the subway with every day going through a living hell. Did I understand that I was shooting something incredible? I wasn’t even thinking about it. I was on autopilot and I was frightened by what I was seeing.”

People jumped or fell from all four sides of both towers. USA Today estimated that around 200 people died in this way. The New York Times ran a more conservative estimate of 50.

It took 10 seconds for each person to fall, it was calculated, as they accelerated at 32ft per second achieving a speed of 150mph. Some who witnessed the jumpers see only desperation. Others see freedom: choosing how to die as a final act of defiance.

Dallal had been working at his home in downtown Manhattan when his then wife called to say a plane had hit the North Tower. She was at a photo-shoot at a loft on Mercer Street which runs due north from the World Trade Centre up through Soho.

“The first plane flew in low and fast over that loft,” says Dallal. “It shook the windows and the dogs started barking, then there was a huge explosion. I had heard the explosion where I lived in Chinatown. I knew it wasn’t fireworks – if you have ever been around real explosions, like bombs and mortar shells, not only is it loud, it has a ‘woomph’ to it: you feel it.”

With several cameras slung around his neck, he walked the 15 minutes from his apartment to the World Trade Centre. He saw a smouldering piece of metal, part of a plane engine or the landing gear, he thought. There was the sound of breaking glass and debris in the air. “I got spooked and I thought, ‘I don’t think I should be here,’ ” he says.

After “Impending Death” ran as a small image in the New York Times at the end of 2001, Dallal received a call from a woman who had lost both her sons in the North Tower. She wanted a copy of the picture enlarged, to see if she could identify her boys. Another woman who had lost her fiancé contacted Dallal with the same request.

“People were looking for closure,” he says. “I would have done anything in my power to help anyone who had lost a relative. But I didn’t want to compound their anguish. I felt responsible to be very careful with these people; they had already endured more than anyone would want to endure.”

Dallal invited the woman who had lost both sons to his house. “After a long conversation I asked her: ‘Are you sure want to see the pictures in high resolution?’ ” She did.

Through Dallal’s images and from pictures taken from another angle by a Reuters photographer, the woman thought she was able to make a positive identification of her two sons together at the top of the tower.

“I have got to say that was one of the most moving, difficult experiences as a photo journalist,” says Dallal. He has since given up journalism, went to law school and is now an attorney for the UN agency UNRWA, based in Jerusalem. “I am still traumatised,” he says. “It’s such an unpleasant image I don’t like to look at it. It’s grisly. It’s a bad memory.”

In the 2003 Esquire magazine essay about Richard Drew’s “The Falling Man”, Tom Junod, the award-winning American journalist, wrote: “Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else… There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end.”

Richard Drew, 64, who was one of four press reporters present when Robert F Kennedy was assassinated, says he “started to think about The Falling Man like The Unknown Soldier, representing all the people who met the same fate that day.”

If Drew hears the sound of a plane over the city it’s still “a trigger”, he says. “It was like watching a train wreck: people were staring up at the buildings, you turn away and yet you look back.”

But it has never been the photographer’s job to analyse or romanticise the images taken in war zones, or of catastrophes such as 9/11, says Dallal. “Ten years later, recalling that image and so many scenes that day, I see only innocent victims.”

What one man thought initially was debris that looked like confetti became one of the most horrific images of the terrorist attacks. “Perhaps they were jumping,” says Dallal. “I don’t know, and never will, nor will anyone. There is nothing even remotely romantic about that to my mind.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/september-11-attacks/8737671/911-Jumpers-from-the-World-Trade-Center-still-provoke-impassioned-debate.html

NEVER FORGET

NEVER FORGET

Memorials: Mobile phones and other communication devices found in the rubble from the September 11 attacks in 2011 on the World Trade Center are displayed as part of a new exhibit in Washington D.C.

Living with 9/11

www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/living-with-9-11

Sept. 11, the day that never ends

Now it is 10 years later, and the war is not over. We fight still in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars now without purpose or, in the case of Iraq, reason. Like those students, we got high on war fever and marched off led by men — a president and his vice president — at least as incompetent as the German kaiser or, on the other side, that gaggle of statesmen and field marshals who allowed Europe to be convulsed by a war whose effects are still being felt.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sept-11-the-day-that-never-ends/2011/09/05/gIQAsJdA5J_story.html

There is still time to remind ourselves WMDs were not the principal reason for going to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; they were the pretext. And that’s why irrefutable evidence was not the standard. Axis of evil regime change was the lodestar.

At no time in history have so many Muslims lived in the West, or so many been trying to migrate here. In Muslim countries, Western clothes, languages, films, sports – even McDonald’s and Starbucks – are visibly popular. Across the Middle East, demands are being made, and blood shed, for Western freedoms. Yet polls repeatedly show that, 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, there is still widespread hatred in those same countries towards America and Britain.

It was that hatred, fed by a narrative of perennial battle between Islam and the “Jews and Crusaders”, that led a small number of Arab men to attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre. Yet remarkably, 75 per cent of Egyptians – to pick one example – do not think their co-religionists were behind the atrocities. This denial has ugly consequences: a lack of the social and religious responsibility that would rein in the rhetoric that fosters terrorism; a failure to grasp its dangers; and a subsequent lack of co-operation with counter-terrorism efforts.

danielfg
22 hours ago
It is well known that Muslims have no loyalty to any country, only to other Muslims worlwide. Which is why British born Muslims executed their fellow Britons on 7/7. And why Pakistani soldiers are reluctant to fight the Taliban because they are their “brothers”. And presumably why the Pakistani government allowed the Taliban to take over vast tracts of their country, until America forced them to do something about it.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/september-11-attacks/8750414/It-is-Western-Muslims-who-will-beat-al-Qaeda.html

Most Afghans do not even know about 9/11, according to disturbing poll

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2035160/Most-Afghans-know-9-11-according-disturbing-poll.html

Former FBI employee ‘saw angels guarding Flight 93 site after deadly crash on 9/11′

‘Vision’: Lillie Leonardi, a former FBI employee who liaised between authorities and families of the victims of Flight 93, claims she saw angels guarding the crash site on September 11, 2001

Eerie: Leonardi said she could not see any bodies when she arrived three hours after the crash

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2168337/Lillie-Leonardi-Former-FBI-employee-saw-angels-guarding-Flight-93-site-deadly-crash-9-11.html

NEVER FORGET We are better than they are. Muhammad created a monotheistic religion based upon the Old Testament for his backward tribes in the 7th century; they’re still backward. That’s why most of them would rather live here than there.

‘Allah has answered our prayers; the sword of vengeance has reached America and will strike again and again’

www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/513.htm

Never Forget: the Arabs supported the Nazis.

One conversation John [Lindauer] had with his sister in the summer of 2001 stuck in his mind for a different reason. ”So she goes, ‘Listen, the gulf war isn’t over,”’ he told me over dinner at a sushi place on the Sunset Strip. ”’There are plans in effect right now. They will be raining down on us from the skies.”’ His sister told him that Lower Manhattan would be destroyed. ”And I was like, Yeah, whatever,” he continued. When he woke up six weeks later to the news that two planes had crashed into the twin towers, and watched as ash settled on the window ledge of his sublet in Brooklyn, he had a dislocating sense of having his reality replaced by Susan’s strange world — an experience he would have again when he learned that his sister had been arrested by the F.B.I.

www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/magazine/susan-lindauer-s-mission-to-baghdad.html

Never Forget 9 11 Essay