Remembering September 11. 2001
Everyone remembers the pictures, but I think more and more about the sounds. I always ask people what they heard that day in New York. We’ve all seen the film and videotape, but the sound equipment of television crews didn’t always catch what people have described as the deep metallic roar. The other night on TV there was a documentary on the Ironworkers of New York’s Local 40, whose members ran to the site when the towers fell. They pitched in on rescue, then stayed for eight months to deconstruct a skyscraper some of them had helped build 35 years before. An ironworker named Jim Gaffney said, “My partner kept telling me the buildings are coming down and I’m saying ‘no way.’ Then we heard that noise that I will never forget. It was like a creaking and then the next thing you felt the ground rumbling.”
Noonan powerfully concludes her thoughts:
This reminded me of that moment when Todd Beamer of United 93 wound up praying on the phone with a woman he’d never met before, a Verizon Airfone supervisor named Lisa Jefferson. She said later that his tone was calm. It seemed as if they were “old friends,” she later wrote. They said the Lord’s Prayer together. Then he said “Let’s roll.” This is what I get from the last messages. People are often stronger than they know, bigger, more gallant than they’d guess. And this: We’re all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won’t make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed. I think the sound of the last messages, of what was said, will live as long in human history, and contain within it as much of human history, as any old metallic roar.
May God Bless the United States of America on this fifth anniversary of one of our greatest tragedies.
Check out our effort in The 2996 Project
Remembering September 11, 2001
Ronald Reagan’s principal speech writer, Peggy Noonan, has an exemplary column at the Wall Street Journal from Friday. In all of the reflective pieces to be written and aired in the next two days, Ms. Noonan captures the essence of the moment in her illuminating words. The creative genius which characterizes all of Noonan’s work is supremely evident in this column.
Everyone remembers the pictures, but I think more and more about the sounds. I always ask people what they heard that day in New York. We’ve all seen the film and videotape, but the sound equipment of television crews didn’t always catch what people have described as the deep metallic roar. The other night on TV there was a documentary on the Ironworkers of New York’s Local 40, whose members ran to the site when the towers fell. They pitched in on rescue, then stayed for eight months to deconstruct a skyscraper some of them had helped build 35 years before. An ironworker named Jim Gaffney said, “My partner kept telling me the buildings are coming down and I’m saying ‘no way.’ Then we heard that noise that I will never forget. It was like a creaking and then the next thing you felt the ground rumbling.” Read more »
The 2996 Project: Remembering Ivan Vale
As a part of the blogosphere tribute to each and every victim of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, we are honored, humbled, and grateful for the opportunity to present one of those heroes of September 11, Ivan Vale, an employee of Cantor Fitzgerald, who was working at the Trade Center at the time of the attack. Ivan was a remarkable man to his family, and a regular American like the rest of us, trying to live and lead his life on September 11.
Ivan Vale was obviously loved by his wife, mother, and older brother. His middle brother, Felix was also killed on September 11, 2001.
Newsday had this lovely article on December 7, 2001.There were no tearful memorial services for Felix and Ivan Vale, brothers who worked floors apart in the World Trade Center. Instead, the family decided to throw a block party in the neighborhood where the two grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn.
Another Contrived Clinton Controversy
All of the contrived hysteria in the last two days regarding the ABC made for television movie, The Path to 9-11 has its’ generations in the political philosophy of Bill Clinton. The highly orchestrated response of the Clinton spin machine wafted over the mainstream media like stale remnants of Hurricane Lewinsky. The unique ambiance replete with faux outrage that Clinton displays when he is caught in a lie (“I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky) made its’ reappearance right on cue. Clinton simply can not be trusted on any critical matter.
Clinton’s team made the war room famous in 1992 when they managed, against all odds, to win a plurality of the vote in a three way race dominated by the antics of Ross Perot. The shrill tone piercing through the media bubble this week indicates that the dramatic representation of the Clinton administration is more truthful, more detailed, and more complete than any previous account of Bill Clinton, his team, and Osama Bin Laden. By threatening the ABC network, and by dispatching every Clinton acolyte to shriek “foul” to all of the liberal media outlets, the movie is being altered to match the Clintonite, sanitized view of “The Path to 9-11.” This 9-10 mentality dominates most liberal thinking today, and truthful representations of the failures of the Clinton administration would be a virtual earthquake to the democrat party. It might also remind voters that liberals can not be trusted with national security.
It’s too bad that Dick Morris already penned his wonderful book “Rewriting History.” Perhaps Mr. Morris will now write a sequel. Madelaine Albright, Sandy Burgler, and other flunkies from the Clinton years were eerily omnipresent in their odious unison as they sang from that tarnished Clinton songbook of half-truths and detestable lies. Read more »
Trousergate Convict Serves as Source at CNN
Simply astounding: Sandy Berger is taken seriously by the mainstream media as a credible source for events in the Clinton administration leading up to September 11, 2001. You must be kidding. Surely this is a joke. Even after Burglar stole classified national security documents hid them in his trousers, and cut up the only copy of the documents, CNN even takes the incredible step of having Wolf Blitzer interview Berger. Certainly the powerful bosses at CNN have forgotten about Berger’s Burglary.
From the New York Post, April 4, 2005:
Sandy Berger, the top Clinton national- security official and erstwhile close adviser to Sen. John Kerry, has finally confessed what he spent nearly a year heatedly denying: that he intentionally smuggled classified documents from the National Archives — and deliberately destroyed them.
In pleading guilty to a misdemeanor count Friday — for which he’ll get a slap-on-the-wrist $10,000 fine and lose his security clearance for three years (but probably not his law license) — Berger admits to secreting the documents in his suit jacket.
Then, once he got them home, he cut them to pieces with a pair of scissors. So much for the “honest mistake” Berger last year maintained he’d committed. Read more »
Rush Hits The Nail
The reaction of the loony left to the movie The Path to 9-11 has been hilarious. Combatting this unhinged, moonbat, nutroots faux outrage and demand of censorship requires the efforts of all conservatives. Rush Limbaugh hits the nail on the head:
RUSH: I warned you people about this. I told you this was going to happen. Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party are just a bunch of thin-skinned bullies now trying to pressure ABC and the Disney CEO, Robert Iger, into dropping the mini-series, The Path to 9/11. The entire Democratic establishment is now involved. They are essentially demanding censorship. I told you that this was going to happen. I warned you about it, and I don’t know how this is going to end up, I really don’t. I don’t want to talk about how this is going to end up, because I don’t know. I don’t know what ABC is going to do. But a couple things I want to focus on here, folks.
This illustrates just how flimsy the surface on which the Clinton legacy is built. This illustrates the desire that they have to get this whole thing not shown. You know, I’ve always told you, when somebody says something about you, and you scream the loudest, that’s the indication, “man, they must have hit gold, must have hit the bull’s eye with the criticism.” The Clinton administration and all of its members have tried for years now to build a legacy where one does not exist. We had a president in the nineties who did not tackle big issues, preferring, instead, to score phenomenally high approval ratings, creating the image that we had a happy-go-lucky carefree decade of rampant economic expansion, no threats anywhere, while Americans are being bombed and killed all over the world and not a single act of retaliation that had any substance was taken to avenge any of it.
What’s really driving ‘em nuts is, is that I have said on the radio that I know the guy who wrote it! Read more »
The 2996 Project: Remembering Ivan Vale
The 2996 Project is a blogosphere memorial, conceived by D. Challener Roe, where each victim of September 11 is remembered by a writer. to mark the five year anniversary of that infamous day. Apparently, most bloggers were randomly linked to the September 11 hero they would be memorializing, allowing fate to make the connection between two lives, between blogger and hero.
As a part of the blogosphere tribute to each and every victim of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, we are honored, humbled, and grateful for the opportunity to present one of those heroes of September 11, 2001. Ivan Vale, and employee of Cantor Fitzgerald, who was working at the Trade Center at the time of the attack. Ivan was a remarkable man to his family, and a regular American like the rest of us, trying to live and lead his life on September 11. Ivan Vale was obviously loved by his wife, mother, and older brother. His middle brother, Felix was also killed on September 11, 2001.
Newsday had this lovely article on December 7, 2001. Read more »
Trousergate Convict Serves as Source on CNN
Simply astounding: Sandy Berger is taken seriously by the mainstream media as a credible source for events in the Clinton administration leading up to September 11, 2001. You must be kidding. Surely this is a joke. Even after Burglar stole classified national security documents hid them in his trousers, and cut up the only copy of the documents, CNN even takes the incredible step of having Wolf Blitzer interview Berger. Certainly the powerful bosses at CNN have forgotten about Berger’s Burglary.
From the New York Post, April 4, 2005:
Sandy Berger, the top Clinton national- security official and erstwhile close adviser to Sen. John Kerry, has finally confessed what he spent nearly a year heatedly denying: that he intentionally smuggled classified documents from the National Archives — and deliberately destroyed them.
In pleading guilty to a misdemeanor count Friday — for which he’ll get a slap-on-the-wrist $10,000 fine and lose his security clearance for three years (but probably not his law license) — Berger admits to secreting the documents in his suit jacket.
Then, once he got them home, he cut them to pieces with a pair of scissors.
So much for the “honest mistake” Berger last year maintained he’d committed.
As we noted last week, Sandy Berger stole some of the nation’s most highly classified terrorism documents from the National Archives. He scissored them to pieces in his downtown Washington offices. Then he lied about it. Mr. Berger’s lenient plea bargain with the Justice Department fines him an amount he can shake from the couches at his Stonebridge International LLC offices and promises his security clearances will be restored in time for Election 2008.
It’s hard to underestimate the effect a case like this has on national-security professionals. For cynics, it shows that big players get off easy when they commit the crimes smaller fry lose their careers over. Meanwhile, spies, policy-makers and other handlers of secrets are effectively being told their efforts aren’t taken seriously. It’s a classic Washington double standard.
“This is one of the most dissatisfying and demoralizing legal decisions possible from a national-security standpoint,” former National Security Council staffer John Lenczowski told us. “It sends the signal that the U.S. government is not nearly as serious about the protection of classified information as our laws would indicate.”
In conversations about the case, foreign-affairs veterans use words like “stomach-turning” and “demoralizing” to describe their reaction to the plea agreement. It is not hard to see why. Lives depend upon observing national-security rules. Untold man-hours and billions of dollars are spent acquiring and keeping secrets. All this is risked when the rules and laws are broken. In this case, Mr. Berger’s stolen documents detailed the Clinton administration’s failure to guard adequately against terrorist plots during the 2000 millennial celebrations. These weren’t some low-level briefing papers. They were among the most-sensitive materials anywhere in government.
Far from acknowledging the ill effects of Mr. Berger’s free pass, however, some of his defenders are actually excusing his behavior and sweeping its ill effects under the carpet. We wouldn’t have thought the Wall Street Journal editorial page would number among them, but it does. The Journal praised the agreement for “restraint” and glossed over its morale-wrecking effects, pausing only to note that “lesser officials have received harsher penalties for more minor transgressions.”
With this wink and nod, the Wall Street Journal is telling national-security professionals that double standards should govern the nation’s secrets.
Meanwhile, Mr. Berger seems to be getting away with a novel defense: that he’s ignorant. Mr. Berger “didn’t exactly know how to return the documents once he’d taken them out,” the Wall Street Journal explains credulously. This is laughable. Mr. Berger was the highest-ranking official at the National Security Council and has held national-security jobs since the Carter administration. If a former national security adviser “didn’t exactly know” the rules, who does? From the New York Sun:
According to the commission report Sandy Berger was presented with plans to take action against the threat of Al-Qaeda four separate times, spring ‘98, June ‘99, December ‘99, and August 2000, and each time, Mr. Berger was an obstacle to action. Had he been a little less reluctant to act, a little more open to taking preemptive action, maybe the 3,000 killed in the September 11th attacks would be alive today. From the CNN Program, The Situation Room: The following is a portion of hte transcript with Mr. Burglar trying to rewrite history on Friday. Mr. Burglar’s desperation to rewrite the history of the days leading up to 9-11 is obvious in even the written form of this interview. Read the whole transcript look here.
SAMUEL BERGER, CHAIRMAN, STONEBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL: I haven’t been told that at all, Wolf. And I’ve not seen the movie. I’ve not seen — been provided with a copy of it. Those who have seen it describe it as misleading, inaccurate, and in some cases, a fabrication. The producers themselves say it’s fictionalized. The events of 9/11 are very real and we don’t need to play fiction with 9/11.
BLITZER: Is it a problem of those scenes? Because in this letter that you wrote, you together with Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, you want ABC to simply pull the entire film. What’s wrong with simply making those last-minute edits, those changes so that the controversy perhaps would go away?
BERGER: I don’t think this is just a question of fixing something around the edges, Wolf. My impression is that this is a misleading film to the core. And it seems to me the only appropriate thing at this point is for ABC to withdraw the series.
BLITZER: I know you’ve had friends, former Clinton officials, who have actually seen it who have said to you that — what have they said to you about the film?
BERGER: They said that some parts of it are fabrications, other parts are misleading and inaccurate, and this is simply a work of fiction, as the producers have said. In some cases, they’ve said the actors improvised on the set. Well, you know, 9/11 is something very powerful to the American people and we shouldn’t be playing fiction with 9/11.
BLITZER: Have you spoken to your former boss, former President Bill Clinton about this?
BERGER: I have.
BLITZER: And what did he say to you?
BERGER: He’s very upset about it as well.
BLITZER: And did he — can’t one of you or both of you pick up the phone and call Bob Iger, the chairman of Disney and complain?
BERGER: I have written to Mr. Iger and said that we believe that the scenes that we’re talking about are complete fabrications. They simply did not happen. They should be fixed. But quite honestly, at this point, I don’t think this is something you can fix. I think you just have to yank it.
BLITZER: Do you have any sense they will do that?
BERGER: I would hope so. I think that’s appropriate. The credibility of this show has been called into question.
BLITZER: Do you know if the former president has called Bob Iger himself and said, you know what, yank this film?
BERGER: I have no idea what the president and Mr. Iger did or did not say. But I can tell you my own view is this is not something that we should be showing to the American people.
BLITZER: What about the bigger picture? Forget about that one specific scene, because the 9/11 Commission, a lot of other people, say it wasn’t you that pulled the trigger on going after Osama bin Laden, it was George Tenet, the CIA director. I wonder if you want to clarify that before we move on.
BERGER: On no situation, Wolf, did we ever refuse authorization to the CIA for an operation against bin Laden. The one time we had good information about bin Laden’s whereabouts was in August of 1998. We fired 50 tomahawk missiles into the camp where we believed he was.
We apparently missed him by a few hours. There was no other occasion while we were in office that we had an opportunity to get bin Laden or eyes on bin Laden. And the fact is, Wolf, five years later, despite the fact that we have thousands of American troops in Afghanistan, we still have not gotten bin Laden.
BLITZER: Because there was one incident. There was some intelligence that he was in a place — Osama bin Laden — called Tarnak Farms. You remember that incident?
BERGER: That incident — I believe in that situation the CIA itself called off the operation because they didn’t believe it was reliable.
Is Mr. Berger capable of judging the difference between fact and fiction?Since Berger stole and destroyed some of the documents related to this precise circumstance, he and Bill Clinton can tell any story that they wish to tell. Burglar’s story doesn’t match up well with the slightly left of center report issued by the 9-11 commission.
Wake-up America! No serious person can give Sandy Burglar any credibility. Talk about needing a disclaimer every time he appears on the television screen…
Rush Hits the Nail
RUSH: I warned you people about this. I told you this was going to happen. Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party are just a bunch of thin-skinned bullies now trying to pressure ABC and the Disney CEO, Robert Iger, into dropping the mini-series, The Path to 9/11. The entire Democratic establishment is now involved. They are essentially demanding censorship. I told you that this was going to happen. I warned you about it, and I don’t know how this is going to end up, I really don’t. I don’t want to talk about how this is going to end up, because I don’t know. I don’t know what ABC is going to do. But a couple things I want to focus on here, folks.
This illustrates just how flimsy the surface on which the Clinton legacy is built. This illustrates the desire that they have to get this whole thing not shown. You know, I’ve always told you, when somebody says something about you, and you scream the loudest, that’s the indication, “man, they must have hit gold, must have hit the bull’s eye with the criticism.” The Clinton administration and all of its members have tried for years now to build a legacy where one does not exist. We had a president in the nineties who did not tackle big issues, preferring, instead, to score phenomenally high approval ratings, creating the image that we had a happy-go-lucky carefree decade of rampant economic expansion, no threats anywhere, while Americans are being bombed and killed all over the world and not a single act of retaliation that had any substance was taken to avenge any of it.
What’s really driving ‘em nuts is, is that I have said on the radio that I know the guy who wrote it! That’s in every story. “Rush Limbaugh, who knows Cyrus Nowrasteh –” Well, that automatically fires up the libs, that fires up the Clinton people and automatically discredits the work of the writer. I didn’t write it. I didn’t talk to Cyrus when he was writing it. Well, he did tell me that he was working on this movie a long time ago, and he’d send me a copy of it when it was done. A long time, it slipped my mind until all it is came up, until this screening in Washington. You ever heard Bush complain about any of the books that have been written about his assassination? The latest one from Cindy Sheehan, by the way. She admits she had fantasies about killing Bush before he was born or when he was a kid so he wouldn’t become president. We’ve got this movie debuting in Canada at the film festival up there in Toronto and it’s all about Bush’s assassination. Do you hear the White House blowing and whining and complaining about anything?
Contrast these two administrations and contrast these two men. Does Bush whine and moan about what’s in the media about him, ever? No. You know why? Because Bush is not depending on the media to write his legacy and his history. Clinton has to because there was nothing of any real substance in his administration, other than welfare reform, which was a product of the Republican Congress, that he can point back to. “We were safe, Limbaugh, we didn’t have–” No, Mr. President, we were not. Do we have to go through this? You want me to go through it? World Trade Center attacks ‘93, we cut-and-run in Mogadishu.
Thanks Rush!
Read the whole commentary.
Another Contrived Clinton Controversy
Clinton’s team made the war room famous in 1992 when they managed, against all odds, to win a plurality of the vote in a three way race dominated by the antics of Ross Perot. The shrill tone piercing through the media bubble this week indicates that the dramatic representation of the Clinton administration is more truthful, more detailed, and more complete than any previous account of Bill Clinton, his team, and Osama Bin Laden. By threatening the ABC network, and by dispatching every Clinton acolyte to shriek “foul” to all of the liberal media outlets, the movie is being altered to match the Clintonite, sanitized view of “The Path to 9-11.” This 9-10 mentality dominates most liberal thinking today, and truthful representations of the failures of the Clinton administration would be a virtual earthquake to the democrat party. It might also remind voters that liberals can not be trusted with national security.
It’s too bad that Dick Morris already penned his wonderful book “Rewriting History.” Perhaps Mr. Morris will now write a sequel. Madelaine Albright, Sandy Burgler, and other flunkies from the Clinton years were eerily omnipresent in their odious unison as they sang from that tarnished Clinton songbook of half-truths and detestable lies.
Let us be clear: anything that is blatantly false has no credibility whether it is shown or not. Michael Moore’s ode to fantasy: Fahrenheit 9-11, the upcoming Bush Assassination movie, and countless other tools of propaganda should be the subject of the same standard and scrutiny and outrage as this ABC movie.
Of course ABC blew it! They seemed to have no interest in presenting an accurate documentary/drama that would show the real picture of the Clinton administration’s failures on the topic of National Security and terrorism. On what could have a useful part of the public discourse on the matter, ABC seems to have been more interested in publicity stunts than revealing any truth. The truth in the movie may be now entirely overshadowed by the hysterical ranting of the Clintonites.
John Podhoretz of the New York Post makes the point crystal clear. “The Path to 9/11 gives the impression that, as president, Clinton never took bin Laden’s declaration of war against the United States and the West seriously enough. And that is simply the unvarnished, undeniable truth.”
In this way, the entire controversy misses the point. The obvious failures of the Clinton Administration were manifested on September 11, 2001. Clinton and his failed national security team never took Bin Laden’s declaration of War on the United States seriously enough. Clinton believed in treating episodic terrorist acts with a disconnected law enforcement strategy. Clinton was unable and unwilling to put this war at the top of his agenda.
America has been paying the price for Clinton’s delinquencies ever since. Hopefully when history is recorded, the Clinton legacy will include his irresponsible lack of action, lack of seriousness, and lack of a coordinated strategy to fight this 21st Century War. If Clinton were the intellectual heavy-weight, legendary leader that his minions still embrace, America might not be in peril in the same way that we are today.
Others on this topic: AJ Strata always has it right! Michelle Malkin, Powerline, The Anchoress. Seth at Hard Astarboard is wonderful. You have to see Stuck on Stupid! Stop the ACLU is great!The State of Ohio Blogger Alliance, A great suggestion from the Cosmic Conservative…
The Bullwinkle Blog
-
Flickr Photos
More Photos
