(This is my 9/11 Story and what I did on Thursday, September 13th 2001)

I have wanted to diary this for a couple days, and have just found the time.  Since I have not seen it on the site anywhere else, I thought it would be fun to share.

James Dobson and John McCain are getting backing for their anti-marriage stance from 9-11 Mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.  From the LA Times

The California ruling did draw sharp criticism from one person: confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who used his June 5 arraignment to show that news of California's same-sex marriages had reached the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

"Evil laws are not the laws of God," Mohammed told the U.S. military and civilian officials at his trial, citing "laws allowing same-sex marriages" as an example.

On Saturday we learned that the army’s official historian is about to issue the second volume of its account of the war in Iraq. The army does this sort of thing routinely so they can learn from their experience. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

The first volume covered the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein and concluded that, regardless of what one thinks about the war, it went well.

The second volume is about the ugly. How the Bush administration did not have a Plan B beyond they-will-welcome-us-as-liberators-and-immediately-become a-Western-style-democracy.

How convenient that the peculiar perspective of the oil-obsessed Bush administration can now be put to use advising the Iraqi government on its contracts with big oil.

The contracts themselves are not huge. They are like the keys on a coveted ring that will begin opening the doors to Iraq’s vast oil reserves. As The Times reported Monday, "At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world’s largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry."

A prize, yes. But at what cost?

Bob Herbert asks us that question in his column today, entitled ‘Oh Happy Day’ because he tells us that is what one would here sung in the executive suites of oil companies after the deals they just made in Iraq.    The question is what achieving the happy day for the oil companies has cost the rest of us.

Do the Dems (Pelosi/Reid/Obama) secretly fear that Bush could allow another 9/11 to happen, yes, I said "allow", just like how BushCo allowed the first 9/11 to happen via their "benign neglect" of tons of credible advance warnings.

I don't want to debate here now how the first 9/11 happened. I want to debate here now why the Dems are folding on FISA (and folding on other progressive stuff that we want) like acordions, and by "Dems" I am also including the oh-so-holy Obama who can do no wrong (I support him, so back off, and don't give me any grief.)

McCain's candidacy is a dead duck, everybody knows that.

I think that Pelosi/Reid/Obama thinks that the only thing that can POSSIBLY save McCain's candidacy is for another 9/11 to occur in America, anytime from now until election day.

More and more people are calling for a General Strike, for a way to withdraw our support from a system which seems heedless to the will of the people.  Our governmental representatives treat us as if "We the Rabble" are to be ignored.  One group, vote strike, is doing incredible and substantive work in calling for a General Strike on 9/11/08, with smaller strikes and economic boycotts between now and then.

This diary will present the thinking and work of vote strike with links for additional information; it will include excerpts from a cogent article by scholar, journalist Garret Keizer.  I also recommend that anyone interested in this subject watch the DVD/Video "A Force More Powerful" which presents a brief history of 6 successful non-violent resistance groups; the DVD can help activists in modeling the action.  Links provded below.
                   
I urge you to consider this call to a General Strike, the use of non-violent resistance.  It is a time-honored technique, possible beginning with "Lysistrata," and effectively used several times in the past one hundred years.

On 9-11, Barry Jennings was the Deputy Director of the Emergency Services Department of New York City Housing Authority, and worked in World Trade Center 7 in Rudy Giuliani's emergency command bunker.  In the following just released video, he recounts his amazing story:

http://www.youtube.com/...

Spend a few days in freeperlandia, if you have any doubts on the topic. The freepers may not be representative of Middle America, the current undecideds and unsures, but a few obsessive days of tv broadcasts of smoke and rubble in the Heartland is going to skew a lot of opinions in their direction. Bush hit what, %90 support after 911? I even had some empathy for the mf'er, in the days immediately thereafter, right up until he started ranting about evil, and getting Bin Laden, dead or alive.

I love my friends, but what really bugs me is when they get sent something ridiculous.  Something every fiber of their being is telling them is wrong, but they still somehow think there's a possibility of truth.  So they forward it to me, when a simple google search would have put all their worries to rest.

So tonight I received such an email from a good friend.  She sent me this...

http://www.youtube.com/...

REALLY?!... you gotta watch this. It sounds like V for Vendetta II. I know it's sensationalism at its finest, but have you heard of any of this?

:) Sleep well.

So clearly she reads it as sensationalism, but it's been forwarded to her from family and friends and she's curious.  So, I wrote her back, a couple of paragraphs of what I knew from the subject matter after watching the ten minutes of trash that is included in the youtube link.  sigh  It was surely more than she was asking, but I had to at least let her know 1)What I knew about the subjects, because well its just polite since she asked and 2)It's always okay to ask, though forgive me if I seem frustrated...

My reply after the fold....

I posted this in reply to a wing-nut who posted this as a comment on DemfromCT's diary today (the amusing Pundit Roundup). Some kind people asked me to release my reply as a diary. So here goes. Here is what Mr. Wingnut had to say and my reply is below the fold:
I never knew there were so many gullible white folks in the USA until I saw those lined up at the Obama trough of bull-shit.  This man sounds exactly like all the con-men I interviewed during thirty years of Law Enforcment.  No where on the Planet has there ever been such specious, nebulous nonsense spewed with so many willing to suck it up.  Just who is this Crap Spewer?  You can't answer, nor can any of his followers.  I think he is a Trojan Horse ... I know he has emotional and spiritual ties to the Middle East and there are many reasons that he should be the target of a full FBI investigation.  He will not protect this Country with his convoluted ideas of appeasing terrorists.  Like GWB, or not, this Country has not been attacked since 9/11 and I, for one, don't give a damn as to how that was accomplished.  National Security, not the economy is the most important issue in this election.  Any economy is worthless if you can't go to a mall for fear of being blown-up.

It should be clear by now that the McCain campaign and the GOP surrogates are all over Obama's allegedly being "soft on terrorism".  "Terrorism" is the new Communism.  But it's not an ideology. Just a time-honored tactic that almost every ideological, nationalistic, or patriotic movement has used. The Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism in some ways.  I cannot understand how the Democrats have bought into the terminology of the "War on Terror". Edwards came close to bringing this out into the open when he called it a "bumper sticker slogan" or something like that.

OK, never mind all that.  Maybe it's too late to educate the public on this issue.  Perhaps the public understands that the "war on terror" means how to prevent radical Islamic terrorist attacks.

But the "pre-9/11" failures are those of the GOP, not the Democratic administration.  Who is making this point besides Vincent Bugliosi in his new book, THE PROSECUTION OF GEORGE W. BUSH FOR MURDER?

This, and foreign policy in general, should be our issue, not theirs.

A new post...

Republican Presidential candidate John McCain's foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, is right when he says "Once again, we have seen that Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation of a September 10th mindset."  That is to say, Senator Obama in no way shares the beliefs and views the right considers part of the post-September 11th mindset they now hold, and thank God for that.

The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, stated that at least 2 of five Israelis arrested videotaping and, according to eyewitnesses, "celebrating" the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 were confirmed as agents of the Mossad, the Israeli "security" agency.

The Israelis were jailed for about ten weeks, then quietly sent back to Israel.

Also according to the Forward, the ostensible employer of the Israelis in question, a Weehawken, N.J. moving company known as Urban Moving systems, Inc., was a Mossad front outfit.

Didja know that this putative Mossad front operation got $498,750 in SBA loans in 2001?

I find this whole thing very disturbing. TPMis reporting:

In a conference call this morning, the McCain campaign is bringing out Rudy Giuliani as a surrogate for McCain on terrorism. Any bets on how many times Rudy says 9/11 in his comments on the conference call?

Now, I respect what Giuliani went through with 9/11, he handled it admirably. But how does getting attacked automatically make one a foreign policy expert on terrorism?

So Mr. McCain asserts that Barack Obama has a "September 10th" mentality. Just like his previous attempts to divert people from his flip-flopping by directing attacks on Obama, this is going to be the new theme, and you can hear the right-wing pundits salivating.

Personally, I think this is a sign of weakness, particularly if answered as above. This card is being played way too early by the GOP and, to me, is a sign of floundering.

It can be answered in the words of Le Monde immediately after the 9/11 attacks. "We are all Americans now" is a phrase for us domestically and for us in foreign policy as the new President Obama reclaims our ideals for the future.

Damn Obama and his September 10th mindset!  He obviously doesn't know 9/11 changed everything.  Thank goodness the Right gets it.  It's hard to believe in this day and age Obama would still believe in stuff like this:

Since Iraq is finally threatening to eject US troops, while the for the first time since 2003 the US death toll in Afghanistan exceeds Iraq's, it's past time to ask: just why are we in Afghanistan and what is our mission?

Astonishingly, most Americans - including even avid news readers like us, I'm afraid - still know more propaganda than fact about Afghanistan's and the Taliban's role in 9/11.  So please take a moment, take the poll (no peeking in the Wikipedia!) and then read the facts.

Also: excerpts from today's New York Times that make it clear why occupying Afghanistan might be even more dangerous than Iraq, and what we need to know to help save President Obama from likely disaster.