9/14/2001 04:00:39 PM
A recent article claims that a strong majority of Americans approve of long war, with many U.S. casualties, also that 91 percent of Americans say Bush is doing a good job. The article glaringly omits the fact that 95 percent of all Americans do not recollect ever taking such a poll, and would probably vote differently than the final statistics state.

9/14/2001 03:19:06 PM
Late yesterday evening, managers of the Wherehouse Music retail establishment chain received memos on their voice mail systems from a woman at the corporate office. The message told the managers that they should be opening an hour and fifteen minutes later, at 10:15am, than usual in order to offer a moment of silence on behalf of President Bush's declaration of today being a national prayer day. She also read slowly, a message the managers were supposed to hand write and put on the door, explaining to customers that they can come into the stores and share in the moment of silence.

The woman then gave strong and specific directions to the managers to attempt to play only patriotic songs such as the Star Spangled Banner, and the like which should be available in their budget CD sections. She said, if not, that they should play sad, soft music, in order to comply with the day of prayer. Managers across the chains exploded into uproarious laughter at the stupidity of their already awful company.

When singer Aaliyah died, there was a strong attempt to sell more of her newest album. When the album first came out, they ordered hundreds of copies expecting it to be a big sale, but the album failed pretty miserably, leaving them with a huge stock of them. When word came in that she died, there was a rush to get up displays and push her album as much as they could. And, for some reason, unlike the death of John Denver, they still didn't sell a lot of her albums.

This is another brilliant American tragedy that will help retail chains all over the country sell more... whatever. Be it flags, gas masks, bottled water, soy sauce, rice, or weapons, this is another way for us to sell everyone else things we don't need. Objects that will only weigh us down when it finally comes down to deciding on what to take and what to leave. Shall we take our flag, or our gun? Food supplies, or a useless gas mask? Don't load it all up in your car when the bombing starts, because you'll be left stranded when you realize how difficult it is to get a tank of gas when there are no more gas stations.

9/14/2001 02:00:47 PM
An article at What Really Happened about all this, finally. Very good read, and discusses a lot of the points I'm not knowledgable in enough to write about. Song of the day is "Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago" by Soul Coughing. Download it, you'll laugh.

9/14/2001 12:08:34 AM
I spent today with friends. We hung out at my friends computer gaming store, and played Counter-Strike. While playing, his younger brother asked me if I believed a war was going to be started, because he was worried that his older brother might be drafted. He quipped, "My brother wouldn't be able to shoot anyone without a mouse in his hand." Jason and I played on the Terrorist side, streaming through the battle field set in Scotland with CV-47s in hand.

His older brother was talking about the same thing, shouting that we should just bomb the hell out of Pakistan and Afghanistan and show no mercy on everyone. This was sickening to me for several reasons, and I tried to explain it to the both of them.

President Bush wants to start a war. For absolutely no reason, everyone wants to give him the power to kill innocent people and destroy countries that had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center. His speach about how he will see no difference between the terrorists and the countries that "harbor" terrorists is a message that states, simply, any country that contains a terrorist organization will be attacked whether or not they comply completely with the United States even if they do not believe the United States is correct in their assumptions.

The problem with this, and with people backing Bush in his statements, is that there is a serious chance that we will go forward and attack countries that had nothing to do with the attacks. Several scenarios that prove this can be easily thought up and stated simply.

A recent development that I last heard was that Pakistan would not comply with the United States in helping chase out and capture Osama bin Laden because they could not prove that bin Laden was responsible for the attacks. Americans all over believe he is guilty because of how the media portrays him, they all believe, because of this, that Pakistan is protecting bin Laden, but they are wrong. Their reasons are easily realized. One, there is a strong possibility that, although these men have been confirmed associates of Osama bin Laden, they could have broken away from him, and formed their own group that arranged and orchestrated this attack, thinking that it would be in bin Laden's good graces, even though bin Laden did not authorize it.

But, because Pakistan will not assist in the capture of bin Laden, Pakistan becomes a target of war to America. Why? Because they are not as easily convinced as Americans. Despite bin Laden being a terrorist, people in the east want to make sure he is fully responsible for the attacks before any blood is shed. America on the other hand is suffering from blind rage, a feeling of defeat and alienation from other countries is pumping through our veins and we believe that Osama bin Laden must be at fault because we cannot think that anyone else could have performed this act.

Lets stress this idea: This was a terrorist act that had no affiliation with any country. A terrorist that acted on his own, against the wishes of his country. A terrorist act that could result in a country being brought into a war it had no part in starting. I tried explaining it to my friend like this:

Suppose Timothy McVeigh, or some terrorist organization within the United States, decided to attack any eastern country in a way that is even more devastating than this. Now, suppose that country declared that any country harboring these terrorists will be equal to the terrorists themselves. McVeigh is hiding in the United States, but the United States does not believe there is enough proof linking McVeigh to this terrorist act in another country, so we wont take action to find and arrest him. Because of it, this eastern country wants to start a war with the United States. They believe the United States is trying to protect McVeigh. Millions of American lives are lost because of this.

This is what we are threatening Pakistan or any other country with because of these stupid terrorist attacks.

I suggest all of you children, even adults, who want to run into the streets and beat up any Arab American you see, think about this strongly. By doing this, you are attacking innocent people. You are killing innocent people, just like you and me, who never wished anything like this upon the United States.You are becoming the very terrorists you think you're attacking.

9/13/2001 11:21:26 PM
The people who decided to fly airliners directly into the sides of the World Trade Center in New York City have gotten exactly what they wanted. Who they are is up for grabs, but I'm going to point out a few odd details being glanced over.

I'll admit, I have a tendency not to believe certain sources of information, such as the TV and our own government, due to a few writings and websites I'll link to later. I feel as if there is a fast one truly being pulled over the eyes of all of us, and we're happy about our ignorance. We have been lulled into a false security over the years where assasinations and direct attacks on our government have been absent. We, as a nation, have grown accustomed to our wars being fought in other countries, we haven't ever seen the damage being dealt in our own cities in hundreds of years. We believe that as long as we stay put, and civilians keep quiet, there will never be any reason for anyone to want to kill us.

In April of 1995, Timothy McVeigh manage to load a Ryder moving van full of explosives. He parked it outside the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. When it went off, it blew a sizable hole in the side of the building, and 168 people were confirmed dead. Timothy McVeigh admitted to the crime, took the blame, wrote a book, and was murdered by his own country. Why? Because he's a good serviceman, not because he's guilty.

Prior to the attack, a pilot flying over a small military base outside of Oklahoma City photographed a Ryder Truck similar, if not entirely identical, to the truck used by Timothy McVeigh, inside the compound. Revealed in public documents from various sources, many of them claim that "a second and third bomb were found inside the building. The second bomb was disarmed, and the third evacuated." Odd, considering no one heard of these bombs, and the story was that Timothy blew up a third of the building only with a small Ryder truck. One claims the bombs appeared to be manufactured by our own military.

Stories of witnesses being put down by peace officers and government officials in order to keep them quiet run rampant, and they will, too, now. Shortly after the story about the World Trade Center plane crash broke, another, and entirely more frightening story of a fire at the Pentagon broke. Early reports from witnesses claimed that they say "A helicopter, a military helicopter, circled the Pentagon for a short time, and then disappeared behind the building where the helipad is, then there was a huge fireball." No one claimed to see any airplanes of any type come near the Pentagon. At about the same time, reports about the Whitehouse being evacuated flooded in. One report explaining that before the evacuation was started, he saw secret service men pointing up and a white jet that was seen over the Whitehouse. Reports claim that the evacuation started calmly, and then proceeded to agents telling people to run.

Finally, as the first tower came down in a explosion of ash and debris, the story about the Pentagon changed from a helicopter, to a much more obscure and simple report from witnesses that there was another a third airplane, in addition to the two in New York, that crashed into the Pentagon. No vocal reports of the third airplane were given, and reports of a military helicopter were quickly abolished from all news programs.

Even before the second tower imploded, news reporters were already calling it a terrorist act, probably from an organization overseas that is already commonly in the news. Reports came and went of a potential fourth or fifth airplane headed for Los Angeles, California. Even as this was going on, another important detail was being glossed over.

As the first tower came crashing to the ground, witnesses reported the sound of a second explosion that brought the building crashing down. A report of a loud boom, and then the second tower coming down came in afterwards. The idea of a third and fourth explosion seem even more frightening when you consider several other factors.

If the planes that crashed into the buildings housed the bombs that toppled them, it would be incredible if these terrorists managed to smuggle on a bomb, along with weapons, onto these airplanes. If the bombs were on the airplanes, it would be thought that perhaps the bombs would explode with the combination of the crash, and the fire inside the buildings themselves. Another factor would be, if this bomb was at the top of the building with the airplane, why would the explosion cause the bottom of the building to collapse in on itself?

If a jetliner crashing into the tower at high speed didn't topple the building, I want to know what did.

What I find confusing about this situation is the fact that I can't figure out how in the hell a foreign terrorist organization would arrange something like this and fall completely under the radar. The organization require for such an operation would be immense. On top of smuggling a bomb, and weapons, onto the plane, numerous people must have been required to hijack the planes. Also, the timing was nearly perfect, with the second plane meeting the second tower only eighteen minutes after the first. Then, the third "plane" hitting the Pentagon hundreds miles away shortly after. Research into the flight times and patterns must have been conducted in order to time all the crashes perfectly.

I'd also think that knowledge of the hijacked planes would have been found out before the crashes. I can't imagine that the fact that the planes deviated from their set flight pattern and reached alarmingly low altitudes went completely unnoticed by anyone and the crashes couldn't have been possibly prevented long before they got to New York and Washington. The simple idea of armed terrorists being able to board an airplane and take control of it is something so frightening it is commonly left for movies.

I'm thinking that if doing something like this is so easy, why hasn't it been done before? Hijacking an airplane and flying it into a building seems like a trivial thing that anyone could be possible of doing in this case, why hasn't it been done before?

Soon, questions of what would happen to Los Angeles arouse, without any proof of the possibility of anything. Southern California believing it to be the epicenter of the world had to jump to conclusions and suggest that it will be the next target. Lock down was swiftly issued on LAX and several landmarks and buildings in Los Angeles for no reason. Panic swept through parts of the city and mild rioting was reported in areas.

Now, the aftermath takes place. Adolescents and adults alike already feeling a hatred of Arabs and any race that appears to be related. News reports tell Arabs and Israelites to stay inside until further notice to prevent hate crimes. President Bush and news reporters are already pointing fingers at certain people, and Bush promised swift retaliation against any nation responsible for the bombings.

America rallies behind him, feeling the same sense of hatred for everyone possibly responsible. Americans feel like they have been personally attacked in the worst way, and if the hatred keeps up, a full scale war could be started and more attacks will be invented.

If strong words continue to be thrown, stronger actions will come to be, and whoever engineered this tragedy will get what they wanted. A war, a full scale battle between nations that should otherwise have nothing to do with each other.

Copyright © 2001 Brad Root
This document makes no claims to be correct or error-free. It is provided for educational purposes only.
Please visit What Really Happened by Mike Rivero for more.
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