Showing posts with label Constitution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Constitution. Show all posts

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Folo on questions of “What’s Next?”

  1). Some of the [expletives deleted] congresspersons who copped to not reading the NDAA for FY 2012 (with its unconstitutional "sub-title D" on "antiterrorism," (aka Cessation of Civilian Rights And Repeal of the Lesser-Included Bill of Rights)) said, by way of answer, "It's 1600 pages long."
    As in, "You don't expect me to read through 1600 pages of legislation before I vote on it, do you? In the House and Senate we play 'follow the leader,' as do sheep, lemmings, and the rats and children of Hamlin Town. We don't legislate. Our job is to get elected and STAY elected."

   Hafta say that the "1,600 pages" excuse is a gloriously bullshit one, not least because:
  • half of the document is tables/spreadsheets, by way of illustrating the points made in text;
  • there's a good bit of boiler-plate one can skip over;
  • Moe Udall had time to sign a committee report "apprvd, except for §1021 et seq.)"; and
  • all of the text pages are in narrow columns of  12 point or larger double-spaced type, not at all hard to read through. They're just lazy sons and daughters of dogs.
   2). The infamous, contra-constitutional section (§1021, and following (et sequitur) is so poorly drafted, as reads:

    (b) Covered Persons- A covered person under this section is any person as follows:
         (1) A person who planned…

…which could be interpreted so that "covered persons" actually means: "any person as follows a person who planned…," or "any person [who] follows a person who planned, …etc.
    In other words, I'd contend that it is possible to interpret this statute as one which labels the mere act of walking behind a person the gummint is suspicious of as criminal conduct. And the statute does not specify the following distance, how far behind the suspicious person is "far enough," or what following distance is "too close". And what of the case where people are in vehicles?  The statute is unconstitutional on its face, or as it's now put "facially unconstitutional." (One wonders what kind of "facials" are meant.)

    High school English would have taught the drafters of this legislation about the use of the colon in punctuation. That is, it's "shorthand" for "as follows", and is forever misused redundantly. Examples, as follows:  Read that as: "Examples, as follows as follows."  Proper use: "Examples:" or, to revise the stupidly written §1021, NADA 4 FY 2012,
"A covered person under this section is any person:
(1) who planned…" and so on.
    The good news is, as I said somewhere else, had not the NDAA (FY2012) been struck down in one district court, all of the people who walked behind Dick Cheney could be arrested and indefinitely detained.

    One other point: Notice that the forepart of the section begs the question, or uses a circular argument, in an attempt to render constitutional the the fact that the Authorization to use military force (AUMF), delegating the power to declare war from Congress to the Executive Branch, is itself Contra-Consitutional, and ditto the War Powers Act, upon which this house of cards all rests, DESPITE any iterations like the text below, which "reaffirmations" do not and cannot cure the unconstitutionality of the underlying attempt to delegate non-delegable powers to the president.

Subtitle D--Counterterrorism
SEC. 1021. AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE.
    (a) In General- Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Are Gummint Reform Groups (OWS, Truth, Tea) Wasting Their Time?


 As I come up for air from a Netflix binge of French, German, Japanese, Korean, Belgian, Italian relationship flix and a few WWII docs, cancel Netflix once again, I'm more convinced than ever that the 99% Movements, the 9/11Truth and Occupy Wall Street and End The Wars movements, the anti-Militarizing-of-America efforts and most all other government-correcting, playing-field-leveling, Constitution-restoring, Bankster-restraining,  efforts are achieving far too little for the great amount of energy expended, and at too slow a pace.


    The first thing to remember — and the first, and most important "new context" for the activities of these groups, is to take to heart the lessons taught us so well by our government. The first of them is: Repetition, repetition, repetition. And to take as a given, and act from that ground, that all of the assertions we have made about the terrorizing conditions in our country for the past decades, particularly since 9/11/2001, are the truth. And those who cannot see that, are in extreme denial about the condition of our contract with the government we created in 1791, December 15th, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights, completing the Constitution, for the time being.


   These statements of ours are not arguing points; they are facts. For example: 9/11/2001 was an inside job. It was a standard, and very successful "False Flag Operation." That is, a clandestine operation conducted by one group to frame up, blame another group, in this case, the Nation of Islam (the 2nd most practiced religion in the world after "christianity"), and the one most practiced in areas on the globe which oil, gas and mineral resources US multi-nationals want to control, using the US military as a free private police force. (Free, that is, except for a continuing slurry of "campaign contributions" to keep the government from pulling the troops. See Smedley Butler's War Is A Racket — racket in the Al Capone sense.)


  The 9/11 operation was conceived, planned and executed by as-yet-unidentified highly and/or critically placed members of our government, allies, current and/or former members of the Military-Industrial-Legislative-Expionage Complex, which has metastasized into a global cancer since Eisenhower warned us about it. This is a given.


   This is what the facts tell us. That's what the explosive demolition of #7 WTC, #2 WTC, and #1 WTC tells everyone who's ever looked at the pictures of 9/11/2001. That's what the 16-foot guided missile hole in the Pentagon tells us, along with the internal explosions before it hit. That's what the eight-mile by one-mile swath of airline detritus left in Pennsylvania tells us — that a large airliner was blown out of the sky by a missile or missiles.


     And that's what the government's destruction of all the evidence it could reach, and its refusal to produce all the evidence it sequestered on 9/11/2001 proves to us. Namely, if the government had nothing to hide, there would be no reason not to bring forth the evidence and display it to the citizens of the United States. That's what all the fake "investigations" and fraudulent analyses prove to us. They're covering up their complicity. If they had nothing to hide, they wouldn't have to lie and lie and lie.


    So let's stop arguing about such matters, and get to the next step, which is the identification of the responsible individuals. For starters we identify who benefitted from this attack on their fellow countrymen. And the list of obvious beneficiaries, who we should look at first, is not all that difficult to create:

  • People engaged in the oil business and wanted to secure their pipeline through Afghanistan and wanted access to Iraq's oil reserves. This would put in play all of Dick Cheney's Big Oil, Big Energy buddies (and GW Bush's, as well). So it's a full-court press with FOI actions.
  • People who thought the US ought to escalate its competition-free arms race to take over the world and the space around it--and knew that something like "a new Pearl Harbor" would be required to frighten citizens into giving up their money and their freedom without complaint. This puts into play the players in the "Project for a New American Century." Here's the list: PNAC.
  • People involved in the NYC real estate market, particularly Larry Silverstein, the lessee of the WTC, who wanted to tear down all the unprofitable, "white elephant" buildings on the site and do an "urban renewal thing"
  • Connected people on Wall Street who could benefit from insider trading from the impending operation.
  • People whose military/political careers would benefit from payoffs and other rewards for helping to make 9/11 happen. Nationally, of course, it would be all the military personnel who got promotions and raises, essentially for failing to keep America safe from all enemies, foreign and domestic (despite a multi-trillion-dollar "defense establishment, The Finest In The World" (tell that to the survivors, OK?)) It would include all the members of
  • People whose geopolitical posture would be improved if Iraq (and Iran, and Syria and Lebanon, and Jordan and Egypt...) were destroyed. We can ask Henry The K. and that other guy if that's just Israel, or includes the UK and other players as well. Using that line, By their deeds, shall ye know them, certainly the UK and Israel piled on for the "retaliatory attacks."
  I would direct your attention to § 1021 (b) (1) "A person who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks". I couldn't find the official printed version from the USGPO--server too busy, down, or whatever (Monkey business? Track-covering?). Assuming this from Thomas.gov is accurate, §1021(b)(1) shows how the government keeps assuming that it is right (repetition, repetition, repetition), and that there WERE "terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept 11.  But the broad language of the statute could be a nice boomerang to use, because, under our set of givens, it was American nationals who "planned, authorized, committed" 9/11.


   In other words, this sub-sub-section actually encourages all of us to "detain [them— the perps] under the law of war, without trial, until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force." Of course, we wouldn't use the Military Commissions Act of 2009, because that's already (or soon to be) held unconstitutional, as well.
    Of course, now we have to revisit the Sept. 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which says:

      (1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION- Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
      (2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS- Nothing in this resolution supercedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.

    …and sends us back further to the War Powers Resolution, §8(a)(1):




  Yes, a glimmer of hope, in that federal district court judge Katherine Forrest, on May 16, 2012 in late afternoon — struck down §1021 et sequitur of the December 31, 2011 National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2012 (NDAA) that Obama sneakily signed on New Year's Eve. Section 1021 of that NDAA said this:

SEC. 1021. AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE.
    (a) In General- Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.
    (b) Covered Persons- A covered person under this section is any person as follows:
    (1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks.
    (2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.
    (c) Disposition Under Law of War- The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following:
    (1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.
    (2) Trial under chapter 47A of title 10, United States Code (as amended by the Military Commissions Act of 2009 (title XVIII of Public Law 111-84)).
    (3) Transfer for trial by an alternative court or competent tribunal having lawful jurisdiction.
    (4) Transfer to the custody or control of the person's country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity.
    (d) Construction- Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.
    (e) Authorities- Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.
    (f) Requirement for Briefings of Congress- The Secretary of Defense shall regularly brief Congress regarding the application of the authority described in this section, including the organizations, entities, and individuals considered to be `covered persons' for purposes of subsection (b)(2).














(On 12/31/2011, H.R. 1450 Became Public Law No: 112-081 [Text, PDF]
 which repealed the Writ of Habeas Corpus and which "allowed" the US standing military to act as local police forces, we're not accomplishing everything we need to in the time allotted to us on this mortal coil. And, oh by the way, because that part of the NDAA, entitled "Terrorism blah blah" (look up) was unconstitutional on its face, that means every single member of congress who voted for it, broke his or her oath of office in doing so. Which, in my opinion, means that every one of those antinomian heretics (AHs) should be impeached.
    First off, we're actually playing into the hands of the PowerzThatB (PTB) by arguing that things as they are must change. In other words, we're arguing within the context of "things as they are" and proposing critiques, changes, etc.
     Seems to me that that is arguing within the frame/context created by others. What must be done instead is to enlarge our rhetorical frame, so that it surrounds, encompasses and thereby reduces the grip of the quotidian propaganda machine, which has had many years, from World War I on, to adjust and improve itself. (See Propaganda, by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays; Falsehood In War Time, byArt Ponsonby.)
   We could take it that all our arguments have already been won, then speak and conduct ourselves accordingly. Take as an example, Dennis Kucinich's 35-count Impeachment Resolution re: then-sitting Unitary Liar-In-Chief George W. Bush. 
    Some possibilities, examples (and this is but a rough first draft):

    Fracking: Take it as a given that big oil is using poisonous chemicals to fracture oil shale deposits with heated chemicals under great pressure. Why else would they refuse to divulge the composition of the fracking chemicals? They may claim "trade secrets" and "competition," but Halliburton is the sub-contractor of all the pumping gear and fluid for all the fracking wells being drilled. So, within that larger framework, what's to be done? Start drafting legislation for your city council, state legislature, congress reps & sens on the liability levels, performance bonds, health insurance for all adjacent hominids and quadrupeds, severe limits on the composition of fracking fluid. Get insurance companies to write actual policies which you submit to your legislatures. Draft proposed rules for your local "environmental protection" agencies. The legislation you draft will have "Whereas" clauses like "Whereas the natural gas wells [give specifics] are poisoning the water table and aquifers beneath [locations] with gene-altering and cancer-causing chemicals"... and so on, stating the condition of the world with your arguments already won. 
    When Big Oil protests (like, that their chemical feast is not carcinogenic, not genetically hazardous), the retort is quite simple: Prove it. Legislation is ("famous footnote four") assumed (by a very lazy Supreme Court) to be Constitutional if it merely states a valid "legislative purpose". Imagine that! The Usapat Riot act "presumed constitutional," when in fact, every act by every legislature should be presumed UNconstitutional. But while things-as-they-are are topsy-turvey in Amercia (Mitt's spelling), let's use them to our advantage.
    When Obama, say, claims that Osama bin Laden has been killed, the response should be, "Prove it. Because (our arguments having been won) the world knows he died in 2006, of complications to his renal failure. So the gummint says, we buried him at sea. We say, you have the geo-coordinates, go bring him back up. We won't accept anything you say without physical evidence. Bring forth the corpus delicti. But we have pictures and video and audio. Great, we reply; let's have them, along with the complete chain of possession, just as in a court of law. If they refuse to bring forth the evidence to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that what they claim, what they say, is true, then we've won the case, and continue to recite (propaganda 101) that fact in all venues. Remember, we are in an adversarial relationship with a government intent upon taking our money, our freedoms...and, one suspects, our lives and the lives of our children. And the three operative guide-words concerning influencing the public are: Repetition, repetition, repetition.

Another example:

    Because it is a given that a missile hit the Pentagon (for why else would the gummint refuse to make public the private surveillance tapes the FBI confiscated on 9/11, minutes after the strike?), we go forward with our arguments won.
   So, what's the next step? We want to discover WHICH kind of missile and launch modality was employed. We make massive FOI demands for all missile specs, tests, etc., the military can access. FOI act requests for all the equipment logs/census/location of all military missile ordnance. If the prosecutors in Pennsylvania, Virginia and New York City refuse to bring murder prosecutions, then draft and file a civil wrongful death lawsuit for every victim, the grounds for which (the complaint) include the SecDef being AWOL from his official post, out in "the front yard," trying to appear "helpful" and concerned. 
   Because we know that on 9/11/2001 there were concurrently some 16 (sixteen) "war games" or "military exercises," all or almost all of which involved radar, air control facilities and monitors and software, simulated and actual flying aircraft, we track down the chain of military command as to who creates and who orders and who signs off on pre-2001 "war games," and, more specifically, who signed off on the 2001 war games, what was the inventory in men and materiel,  who were the "players" for each, or every side, what were the objectives, what were the "lessons learned" (like, "remember your promise to protect and defend the US Constitution before you let treasonous big- and little-wigs order up anything that smacks of something out of the ordinary. Remember, our arguments having been won already that 16 war games was an extraordinary, what's going on here, anyway? occurrence, and we need to find the culprit or culprits. Lawsuits, draft legislation (that We the People write--there is no earthly reason to imagine, any longer, that we'll have any help from "the People's House," because it has not been that for a long, long time.)
    Remember well that this is no longer a game of dueling press releases. It is, instead, a duel between the substantive indicia of the People's enumerated and unenumerated "retained rights" and the People's "reserved powers" under the 9th and 10th amendments, respectively. And by "substantive indicia," I mean real, workable drafts of legislation (the submission of which to our "representatives," we cover with our mini-cams, our iPod and iPad cams, our cell-phone cams, and distribute on the Internet, acting as The Citizens Global Investigating and Reporting Network (or some name with greater coolth). Our press "advisories" can quote excerpts from resolutions, bills submitted, bills presented to our "reps," bills presented and refused by our reps. All covered.

Another scenario:
   It's a given that explosives and "thermetic compounds" brought down #7 WTC, #2 WTC and #1 WTC on 9/11/01, because that's the only causality that encompasses all the evidence of all witnesses, physical evidence. And it's a given that a contract to install and rig all these explosives was created, in some form or other.
   So we find out all the details of all the firms competent to do such a large task, where the goal of bringing down #1 and #2 is to make a spectacle that will be "burned into the mind's eye" of every person the world over, and the goal of bringing down #7 WTC was the more conventional one of "imploding" the building into its own sub-basements without damaging the three buildings adjacent to it (which would increase the cost of the "pull" and excite more interested parties, increasing the risk of discovery).
   We find and examine all of the records dealing with explosive demolition permits requested by the Port Authority and denied by the city's building department and EPA because of the heavy asbestos contamination that would naturally be caused by such demolitions. Because these are gummint orgs, we use FOI requests, we get names from the unearthed documents. 
    Because it takes time to set up such a set of high-rise demolitions charges, bombs, etc., we go after all the records of elevator maintenance, security firms, memos, emails, Because Israeli troops were arrested on the afternoon of 9/11/2001 in bomb-laden truck or trucks, we get the names of those arrested, whether via FOI or friends in low places, such as in Haifa, or Herzliyya, or Tel Aviv, or wherever Israeli EOD experts are trained. We test the limits of Israel's freedom of information laws (if any)--and/or have our friends fluent in Hebrew actually draft the legislation required to provide for citizen access to the files of their gummint that we seek. 

   Because we know that it is a crime to destroy or tamper with a crime scene (all of us CSI--crime scene investigators--aficionados and addicts), we use FOI requests to discover who authorized the removal/cleansing of "ground Zero," who drew up the contract, did Giuliani sign it, what was in the contract, who did the work (I think it was Explosive Demolition, Inc., one of the most broadly and deeply specialized companies in explosive demolition (hence the name), how much it cost, where did the steel go, who in the military decided that it would be a great joke to melt down some of it and cast it into the huge proboscis of the USNS Manhattan, an ice-breaker—evidence literally IN our nose and yet unavailable (they must have been fairly well educated to recall the Eternal Torture of Tantalus—the dehydration-slaking grapes above him just out of reach, and the pool of water below that drained away as he sought to drink. That must have had 'em rolling in the Pentagon hallways).
    And who were the drivers of these trucks, who owned them, whose equipment was used to lift the readied-for-removal-by-explosives remains of the three buildings into the trucks, who were the equipment operators, and so on.


Another:
   Because it's a given that almost every member of Congress is supporting the slow but accelerating march to martial law--because they keep passing unconstitutional laws, starting with the Usapat Riot Act (aka U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act) in 2001), whose only effect is to eliminate the people's primary power over government, along with all our enumerated and unenumerated retained rights and reserved powers (Preamble, Writ of Habeas Corpus, 1st thru 8th Amendments, and, most importantly, the 9th and 10th Amendments), it is time to find a path for accountability that's shorter than every two years (or four, or six). So, in the larger frame, we can take it as a given that virtually every member of congress, the president and veep have broken their oaths of office and should be removed therefrom, by impeachment. Or, if they have left office, "brought to Justice," to discover what the blindfolded lady has to say about the matter(s). (That's a joke. But given that sooo many of our solons keep talking about "bringing people to Justice,"--without ever commencing a prosecution, I thought something of a New Yorker cartoon would be in order (but I can't draw and haven't won a "caption-writing contest" yet). So what we need here, too, is for citizens to draft the Grand Jury presentments/indictments, and, in large groups, present these citizen indictments to the relevant (with jurisdiction) district attorneys and federal [non]prosecutors. 
    Now, how do we track this business of honoring oaths of office? Well, I have one incomplete project which takes this approach. I've broken the Constitution down into 250 "action phrases" or "crucial idea" phrases, and placed a Yes and a No checkbox before each. I will send these "Constitution In Questionnaire Form"™© 2012 by Bill Wilt, etc. to each of the gang of 536 (the President has his own special oath), and asking them to fill it out. I plan to have filled each questionnaire out, online, in advance. (For example, when Pelosi was Speaker, she de facto repealed the Impeachment machinery in the constitution--and also bypassed all of Article V, which sets out the ONLY procedures by which the constitution can be amended. So I would have checked the "NO" box for clauses 16, 23, 27, 105, 115 and 133. And because the Speaker amended the Constitution unilaterally, I would have also checked the “No” boxes for clauses 158, 159, 160, 161, 162 and 163, or 12 out of 250, for a "support and defend" grade of 95%. Of course, the oath of office offers no such flexibility, so she lied 12 times, or 5% of the time, when she took her oath of office.
     In 2008, had Mitt Ronmy acceded to the presidency, I would have checked No at Article I, §8, ¶ 12 (questionnaire clause 64), beside  “To declare war,” because in the campaign debates, Mr. Romney publicly stated his preference to “Check with my lawyers” rather than accede to the Constitution and Congress’s sole power to declare war.
     This project will, like all the others, require time and volunteers and a website or two. But inasmuch as unemployment is back up to nearly 15% (14.8--U-6, 1June2012), there are probably some folks who could donate some time. The Constitutional Questionnaire essentially must be updated after every recorded vote in congress. And some determination as to its constitutionality made. It might be necessary to assign full-time "minders" to our congress group, to track their use of time. Seems to me that "following our congress folk around day in and day out" is one of the 10th Amendment powers "reserved…to the People." If not that, it would be an "other right retained by the People," per the 9th Amendment.
    More labor-intensive than the above would be to extend the reach of the Constitution In Questionnaire Form™©, to also cover all state officials. These folks are mandated, by the US Constitution (Article VI my clause 169), to swear (or affirm) the same oath as congressfolk are. I'm not certain whether it goes down to the level of Justice of the Peace. But that adds another several thousand to the pool of oath-takers. And of course every person in the military takes that same oath, from the Joint Chiefs of staff to the lowliest private E-1 (no chevron), as do Justices of the Supreme Court and all federal courts, and every federal employee. There's a whole lotta work to be done to exercise this People's Oversight.

Later: the banksters
    It's a given that the private central banks control the world economy and are transferring public money into private hands at an ever increasing rate. That's why states are going bankrupt, state schools and colleges are being shuttered--and private central banksters are in every government, controlling the Treasury, regardless of what party controls the Executive Branch.

Unitary Liar-In-Chief:
    And it's a given that, regardless of what party controls the Executive Branch, the guy at the top is the Unitary Liar-In-Chief, and whatever he or the rest of the branch members say must be assumed to be a lie, unless proven otherwise, and whatever actions he or the rest of the branch members take must be assumed to be unconstitutional, unless proven otherwise--beyond a reasonable doubt.


 draft postscript:

   I had hoped that "change we could believe in" would translate into Actions In Concert With the Constitution, that the new leader would "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution, and that he would indeed "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." But the only thing being faithfully executed is US citizens who are living abroad as members of the fall-guy religion, Islam, framed in the history's most stunningly successful False Flag Operation, 9/11/2001. And, sadly, these assassinations of US citizens, ordered by the Unitary Liar-In-Chief, will be limited to foreign lands only for the time being, given that the fleet of Assassin Drones is expanding rapidly and being deployed all over the United States, in the hands of the coalescing military-intelligence-guardia-nationale-state-and-local police complex.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Ltr2RogerCohenNYT: New York & the Planes

Ltr2Roger Cohen — Op-Ed Column: New York and the Planes. 2July11

Dear Roger…

Read with interest your remembrance of things past, 9/11-style:

No doubt it was nuclear Armageddon he had chiefly in mind. But his words captured some deep truth. Ten years ago. it was the perverted dreamers of Al Qaeda who loosed the lightning. New York shuddered; the world changed.

This is no doubt a quixotic request, doomed to go unheeded, but please, oh please, do us all the favor of spending some time at this technical, rather than polemic, website, by architects and engineers, concerning the matters of 9/11/2001. Were you to wrap your mind around the topic (and I agree with you that “It’s treacherous to reread,” I don’t think, hopefully, that you’d have typed a line like “the perverted dreamers of Al Qaeda who loosed the [fateful] lightning [of His terrible swift sword?--sorry; reminded me of the Battle Hymn of the Once-Upon-A-Time Republic].

At any rate, the more I read about this stuff, the more clearly it looks like “the 19” were little more than more numerous and more expensive versions of Lee Harvey Oswald — “a patsy,” he called himself.
Perhaps it’s the skies of a 9/11 blue, perhaps it’s the passage of a decade, perhaps it’s the thought of all the articles and reflections and memorial services now just weeks away, I can’t help seeing the city as a kaleidoscope of now and then, jagged images of molten steel and lost ones alternating with scenes of careless summer laughter.

I take some hope from the line in bold (my emphasis) that you still can see images of molten steel. If you do indeed still see them, then I’d ask you to look into the metallurgy of structural steel, the melting point thereof, the chemistry and physics of fire, the temperature of kerosene fires, etc. And compare the fate of #1, #2 --and #7, its collapse known only to Manhattan residents, it seems--to the fates of other burning, steel-framed skyscrapers before and after 9/11.

As I may gather from your thumb-print, you’re of an age where perhaps your grandchildren are playing with the wooden blocks you had as a child, then passed along to your own children. If you do have access to such blocks, I’d ask you to perform this simple exercise: Build a tower of blocks on their sides, two by two, with each course perpendicular to the previous one. Stop when you reach desk height--about 30 inches. Then quickly pull out one block from the 2nd course.

I think you’ll notice that the tower topples over, toward the missing block. Just as a tree falls toward the lowest notch the woodsman has chopped.

Now recall how the top of (tower #1 or #2, I can’t remember which) started to topple over. One could see it going sideways, toward the corner with the molten, dripping iron. And then, poof, it disappeared into clouds and clouds of dust and smithereens.

My profound disquiet is that we will indeed be inundated with “all the articles and reflections and memorial services now just weeks away,” but that none of it will bend back one single finger of the hands of propaganda strangling our body politic, our once Constitutional Republic.

We’ve seen our Bill of Rights gutted by the profoundly mendaciously labeled U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act (I pronounce it, “The Youzapat Riot Act”.) Guantánamo is not closed. Our government officials who sanctioned (and watched, for all I know) the torture of POWs, who violated the US War Crimes Act (18 USCode §2441), who I’ve no doubt continue daily to illegally eavesdrop on every American citizen and copy (via “splitter boxes”) every binary digit of their information passing through the fiber-optic cables of all our telecommunications companies — as they have done, according to James Bamford (The Shadow Factory) and others (Jane Mayer, The Secret Sharer, May 13, New Yorker) since Jan-Feb 2002 (That means the illegal, warrantless wiretapping, in violation of the FISAct, has been transpiring for nigh onto a decade, representing perhaps billions of individual crimes by the National Surveillance Agency, et al.).

Bamford writes that the copies are piped into a huge disk farm (a.k.a. “Data Center” or “Cloud”) in Texas; Mayer writes that there’s also one in Utah. FYI: I was watching Steve Jobs’ June 6 World Wide Developer Conference last night, where he intro’d Mac OS Ten Seven “Lion” and “iCloud,” and at the tail end of the two-hour presentation, he showed a couple of slides, introduced by, “In case you don’t think we’re serious about iCloud, this is our third data center.” [Drag the “play-head” trapezoid to minute 116:33 and look/listen from there, to see what a disk farm looks like. It’s mammoth. One should perhaps be able to spot them in Google Earth.

Our troops and mercenaries are still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, where the opium poppies once again are flourishing. (Bill Casey must be sporting a rictus of supreme satisfaction at that development). And (Simon/Garfunkel come to mind) “We’re bombing them in Libya/we’re saber-rattling Iran/...”

And increasingly it’s looking like 9/11 was our recent government’s version of the Gulf of Tonkin “incident,” the “Old” Pearl Harbor (Washington knew it was coming but didn’t alert Hawaii), Hitler’s Reichstag fire, Remember the Maine, Polk’s lie about where the Mexicans first skirmished w/US troops (and Rep. Lincoln’s “Spot” resolution(s)--“show us the spot where US blood was spilled”, the Lusitania--I can’t remember them all--seems like about one every year since 1945.

It’s difficult for a senescing Viet vet w/ 4 children & 2 grandchildren to countenance the wrack and ruin we’ve been subjected to in the name of, what? Mammon? (“We’re doing God’s work,” saith Lloyd Blankfein. I assume he meant Mammon)? I’ll send you a copy of my note (after comments closed) to Maureen on Sir Thomas More, whom she referenced re: the Cuomo’s, père et fils, art collection. And this was 1516, in Latin. Utopia on the Hudson was her column head.

The late Howard Zinn pointed out this Adam Smith quote to a batch of folks crowded into a Kennedy School conference room a couple of years ago:

Laws and government may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence.
Adam Smith—Tuesday, Feb. 22, 1763;
lecture series on Laws & Jurisprudence.
Page 208, facsimile (PDF) version, vol 5.