Floor 106, you ARE the weakest link. Goodbye!

Okay, so I'm insensitive. It must be because I'm jealous of the US way of life or something. Let's get this out of the way:

THE MONEY SHOT

cue ridiculous music

Where were you, when the towers came down?

I was sleeping. I'd stayed up late playing Red Alert 2 online, and I wasn't working. I also didn't have a tv or radio - by choice. When I woke up, I went to the computer as usual and popped up my browser to do my usual morning surfing routine. Back then I had yahoo.com as my homepage, and in place of the usual various news stories were a bunch of near-identical headlines about a plane or two hitting the World Trade Center towers. I refreshed a couple of times, and then went on to read my usual web comics and forums.

After all of that, I went back to the active news headlines on Yahoo. And they were still talking about planes hitting the WTC. So I called up my brother to tell him that some hacker had switched all the headlines on Yahoo and (whatever other headline site I used to go to back then - I can't remember which). I was amused.

My brother had a tv. He informed me that it was real, that he'd seen it on the tube. Cleverly calculating that it would indeed be quite a hacking feat to hack the tv (Captain Midnight, where are you?), I concluded that it must be true.

So, inbetween games of RA2 I trolled the newsfeeds to figure out what the hell was actually going on. And I learned lots of interesting stuff.

That it was an accident, that it was a hijacking. That there were as many as a dozen planes over the continental US that were currently on course for collisions, that the US Air Force had shot down at least one jetliner.

I heard the death toll was over 10000 at one point. That's ten thousand.

The names and pictures of the hijackers appeared suspiciously quickly, especially considering that they'd used false names. The name Osama or Usama bin Laden got bandied around, along with a series of pictures of bearded men.

A bunch of firefighters died. Police too. A cloud of asbestos and other garbage rolled over New York City.

Unlucky.

Flights were grounded, everywhere. People scurried about like ants. I know people in Calgary who were security guards that got assigned to gatehouses at fuel processing plants because "the terrorists could hit here".

"Anthrax" starting going through the mail. Or rather, a whole lot of white powder was being mailed in envelopes. Not exactly the best delivery method for anthrax, especially when it turns out to be corn starch, dishwashing soap, and other harmless semi-inert material.

People became afraid to open envelopes.

The news (mostly US news, really) kept this going, telling people that the WTC impacts were just the beginning, that it was going to happen everywhere. That terrorists were going to hit population centres with dirty bombs (which are explosive bombs containing radioactive material as their payload - the bomb explodes and scatters the radiologicals so that people get sick over time. It's not a nuclear weapon with a highly explosive yield) and biological (usually anthrax) agents.

People began to duct tape polyurethane sheets over their windows. Some even laid in supplies of paper dust masks.

A whole lot of people changed the way they lived day to day, even if it was just being nervous when they heard a plane overhead. Or avoiding public places like city centres or shopping malls.

The US federal goverment uses the WTC incident as a pretext to crack down on civil liberties in the form of the PATRIOT Act, along with other policies which continue to this day.

A few things I want to comment on at this point:

The US had done nothing to deserve being attacked!

This is a stretch for anybody, even a diehard "patriot" with an IQ not to exceed the current outdoor temperature.

The US keeps active military all over the world. There are armed warplanes flying over countries that never agreed to allow them, there are carrier groups that consider anything withing their range to be essentially US territory, and there are US troops telling citizens where they can and can't go in their own countries.

US business interests, especially in resource exportation, is horrific. Usually a country, or at least the people in the immediate area, end up in a worse state when an outside country (not just the US, but the US is everywhere) starts pumping oil, or finds some element or compound worth taking. Environmental concerns and human rights fall by the wayside. Pick a country that you would consider to be third world (although since the fall of the Soviet Union, who uses that term anymore?) and google it with an eye for "foreign business". You'll get the gist.

Even down to the world's perception of US tourists, the stereotype of which is "dumb, fat, and disrespectful of local customs".

There's a lot of hatred amongst the victims of US hubris. And a lot of it is perfectly understandable.

And if you live in a place where a US warplane had dropped munitions, you have some fairly reasonable justification to be pissed off. If Argentina flew over your town and blew up the supermarket on double coupon day, you might nurse a bit of a grudge yourself.

Fine, but hijacking planes and flying them into the World Trade Center towers wasn't revenge against the military - it was the murder of innocent civilians!

I'll give you that, it was murder. But... the US calls itself a democracy, or rather a federal republic, but still a democracy. Which means that the government is "of the people, for the people". Which means that citizens are responsible for their government, and its actions.

Using this view, there aren't any "innocent civilians", especially from the outlook of someone not from such a society.

And beyond that, it's the US money-making machine (economy) that drives all this nonsense foreign policy, and in many ways that centered on... the WTC. It was stuffed with government organizations and groups you'd associate mentally with Wall Street.

And they were big towers. If you've only got one non-comprehensive attack planned, going for a symbolic target makes sense. And hitting the church of the US's god, money, is fitting.

Not that I agree with all of that, just that it makes a certain amount of sense.

Things I find interesting:

There were apparently a whole lot of stock transfers (unusual ones, and great volumes) just before the towers were hit. Does this imply that large stockholders had some foreknowledge?

By all accounts, actively flying a large passenger jet is difficult, especially doing high speed maneuvers. And yet apparently all of the people alleged to have piloted those planes into their targets were non-flyers before taking a few months-long course.

The calls from people on the planes. I remember this bothered me right from the start. Because cell phones lock on to microwave towers and each cell phone has a short range, usually what happens when you're driving along is that you get passed from tower to tower.

But in a fast-moving low-flying aircraft, you'd be switching towers really fast. Like, too fast for the system to keep up. With some altitude, I could see it. But at less than 2000 feet? Unlikely.

How in the hell did a plane, even one filled to the brim with fuel, take down one of those buildings? By all accounts, it shouldn't have worked, impact and subsequent fire be damned.

And not to be a conspiracy nut, although I do tend to think that there are always motives and influences we don't see, but with good quality video you can see floor-wide flashes in the buildings, at various spaced levels, both after and before the planes impact. Preset explosives?

Where's the debris from the Pentagon impact? There was a perfectly round hole, in an area that was under renovation, and had no critical offices in it, with no sign of wings or tail. The damage and lack of debris is consistant with a missile strike, people other than myself have noted, and I agree. Where's the video showing the damned plane? There's a three frame clip that was released a year or two after the event showing a scene, followed by a blurred shadow (too small for a jetliner), and then an explosion. Bah.

Why was all the video footage from everything around the area confiscated by the government? Why were radio and radar logs taken?

Sigh. Beats the piss out of me.

Meanwhile, CIA-trained and armed Osama bin Laden was the pretext for going to war in Afghanistan. A supposed link between him and Saddam Hussein (also US-trained and armed) was the justification for going to war in Iraq, along with (disputed by those whose job it was to know) "proof" of weapons of mass destruction.

So, the death count for the US military during these operations has exceeded the death count of people in the WTC. The death count of people in those named countries is far higher, possibly because of the "blow up the fruit market to kill one guy, who we think might be in there" tactics of the US.

The world is an even more unstable place, with new grievances created to fuel the next several generations of violence. Civil liberties in the US and abroad are stripped.

I wouldn't compare the US to Nazi Germany, but there's definitely more than a whiff of totalitarianism wafting from the direction. And as a nextdoor neighbour, that's bad news for me.

So in conclusion, if you want to remember the people that died on 2001-09-11, more power to you. If you use it as a rallying point or justification for anything, you're a twit.

I didn't want to make this an analysis of all the events and people involved, mostly because I'm incredibly lazy, but I will leave you with this article, which I'll reproduce in full in case you are afraid that if you click, the terrorists will get you. Don't worry, it has absolutely nothing to do with what happened in the US on September 11, 2001.

U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba

Book: U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War With Cuba

By David Ruppe
abc News

N E W Y O R K, May 1, 2001 In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.
America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

Details of the plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford about the history of America's largest spy agency, the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected to the agency, he notes.

The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

"These were Joint Chiefs of Staff documents. The reason these were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because they were so embarrassing," Bamford told ABCNEWS.com.

"The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants."

Gunning for War

The documents show "the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government," writes Bamford.

The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show.

Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof … that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba [sic]."

The plans were motivated by an intense desire among senior military leaders to depose Castro, who seized power in 1959 to become the first communist leader in the Western Hemisphere — only 90 miles from U.S. shores.

The earlier CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles had been a disastrous failure, in which the military was not allowed to provide firepower.The military leaders now wanted a shot at it.

"The whole thing was so bizarre," says Bamford, noting public and international support would be needed for an invasion, but apparently neither the American public, nor the Cuban public, wanted to see U.S. troops deployed to drive out Castro.

Reflecting this, the U.S. plan called for establishing prolonged military — not democratic — control over the island nation after the invasion.

"That's what we're supposed to be freeing them from," Bamford says. "The only way we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny, basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing."

'Over the Edge'

The Joint Chiefs at the time were headed by Eisenhower appointee Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, who, with the signed plans in hand made a pitch to McNamara on March 13, 1962, recommending Operation Northwoods be run by the military.

Whether the Joint Chiefs' plans were rejected by McNamara in the meeting is not clear. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer directly there was virtually no possibility of ever using overt force to take Cuba, Bamford reports. Within months, Lemnitzer would be denied another term as chairman and transferred to another job.

The secret plans came at a time when there was distrust in the military leadership about their civilian leadership, with leaders in the Kennedy administration viewed as too liberal, insufficiently experienced and soft on communism. At the same time, however, there real were concerns in American society about their military overstepping its bounds.

There were reports U.S. military leaders had encouraged their subordinates to vote conservative during the election.

And at least two popular books were published focusing on a right-wing military leadership pushing the limits against government policy of the day.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee published its own report on right-wing extremism in the military, warning a "considerable danger" in the "education and propaganda activities of military personnel" had been uncovered. The committee even called for an examination of any ties between Lemnitzer and right-wing groups. But Congress didn't get wind of Northwoods, says Bamford.

"Although no one in Congress could have known at the time," he writes, "Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge."

Even after Lemnitzer was gone, he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan "pretext" operations at least through 1963.

One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base — an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.

"There really was a worry at the time about the military going off crazy and they did, but they never succeeded, but it wasn't for lack of trying," he says.

After 40 Years

Ironically, the documents came to light, says Bamford, in part because of the 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK, which examined the possibility of a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy.

As public interest in the assassination swelled after JFK's release, Congress passed a law designed to increase the public's access to government records related to the assassination.

The author says a friend on the board tipped him off to the documents.

Afraid of a congressional investigation, Lemnitzer had ordered all Joint Chiefs documents related to the Bay of Pigs destroyed, says Bamford. But somehow, these remained.

"The scary thing is none of this stuff comes out until 40 years after," says Bamford.