Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Video of bodies jumping from World Trade Center on 9/11/01

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People jumping to their death from World Trade Center, 9/11/2001. This video was uploaded 2/12/2013. Total is about 8 minutes. Has ad you can skip in :05. The first body you actually see falling is at about 1:54, more fall after that.



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Comment: The US ruling class of both political parties caused this (subhead, 'Whatever it takes'). The same group remains in charge today in 2013 and is still unwilling and unable to protect Americans from terrorism:

6/23/13, "The Ruling Class Consensus On Domestic Spying

From Barack Obama to Karl Rove, the ruling class is in unison: The NSA’s collection of data on virtually all Americans is essential to preventing you from “being blown to smithereens on your morning commute” – as the Wall Street Journal editorial put it. ...

The US government’s vast apparatus is almost completely useless against serious terrorists or criminals."...

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8/2/13, "FBI said to find it couldn't have stopped Boston attack," UPI

"The FBI has concluded it could not have prevented the deadly Boston Marathon bombings, law enforcement officials told The New York Times....

The bureau concluded the agents who told Russian intelligence agents the FBI had no evidence Tsarnaev had become radicalized could not have investigated more deeply anyway because federal laws and Justice Department protocols prohibited it, the Times said.

Agents cannot use surveillance tools such as wiretapping for the type of investigation they were conducting, the newspaper said.

The FBI also concluded if U.S. agents had known Tsarnaev traveled to Russia in 2012, they probably wouldn't have investigated him again in any case because they had no new evidence he had become radicalized, the law enforcement officials told the Times."...

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10/20/11, "The lost decade," Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont

"America's current ruling class, the people who lost the War on Terror, monopolizes the upper reaches of American public life, the ranks of those who make foreign and domestic policy, including the leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties. It is more or less homogeneous socially and intellectually....


During the decade that began on September 11, 2001, the U.S. government's combat operations have resulted in some 6,000 Americans killed and 30,000 crippled, caused hundreds of thousands of foreign casualties, and spent—depending on various estimates of direct and indirect costs—somewhere between 2 and 3 trillion dollars. But nothing our rulers did post-9/11 eliminated the threat from terrorists or made the world significantly less dangerous. Rather, ever-bigger government imposed unprecedented restrictions on the American people and became the arbiter of prosperity for its cronies, as well as the manager of permanent austerity for the rest. Although in 2001 many referred to the United States as "the world's only superpower," ten years later the near-universal perception of America is that of a nation declining, perhaps irreversibly. This decade convinced a majority of Americans that the future would be worse than the past and that there is nothing to be done about it. This is the "new normal." How did this happen?

September 11's planners could hardly have imagined that their attacks might seriously undermine what Americans had built over two centuries, what millions of immigrants from the world over had come to join and maintain. In fact, our decline happened because the War on Terror—albeit microscopic in size and destructiveness as wars go—forced upon us, as wars do, the most important questions that any society ever faces: Who are we, and who are our enemies? What kind of peace do we want? What does it take to get it? Are we able and willing to do what it takes to secure our preferred way of life, to deserve living the way we prefer? Our bipartisan ruling class's dysfunctional responses to such questions inflicted the deepest wounds....

"Homeland security" grew into a quarter-trillion-dollar public-private industry that changed life in America so quickly, with so little debate....Nothing could ever stop ten people in ten states from throwing flaming gasoline bottles into ten school buses simultaneously, thus shutting down the U.S. school system. But no one has done it. Homeland security created closely packed lines of people in front of airport security checkpoints—the perfect target for explosive-laden carry-on luggage. But no one has attempted that, either, nor committed any of the other outrages so obviously feasible and requiring so little skill and organization. We don't know why not. In short, homeland security has proven irrelevant to terrorism.... 

Whatever it takes...

Because the Bush Administration took CIA director George Tenet's snap judgment that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible "game, set, and match" for 9/11 as a warrant for identifying them with America's terrorist problem in general, it failed to ask the classic headwaters question: what is the problem? Had it done so, it might have noticed that the 9/11 hijackers were part of a wave of deadly disrespect for America that had been growing throughout the Muslim world—and not just there—for a generation. Had the Bush team focused on the realities that fed growing images of America as "the weak horse" (to use Osama bin Laden's words), they would have had to consider who were the major contributors to that disrespect, what they and their predecessors had done to incur it, and then to decide what actions would restore it. 

That would have pointed to the Middle East's regimes, and to our ruling class' relationship with them, as the problem's ultimate source. The rulers of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority had run (and continue to run) educational and media systems that demonize America. Under all of them, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Wahhabi sect spread that message in religious terms to Muslims in the West as well as at home. That message indicts America, among other things, for being weak. And indeed, ever since the 1970s U.S. policy had responded to acts of war and terrorism from the Muslim world by absolving the regimes for their subjects' actions. For example, when Yasser Arafat's PLO murdered U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel, our government continued building friendly relations with Arafat, and romancing the Saudi regime that was financing him. Since then the U.S. government has given $2.5 billion to the PLO. Part of the reason was unwarranted hope, part was fear, and part was the fact that many influential Americans were making money in the Arab world....

Instead, by supposing that America's problem was a singular bunch of renegades called al-Qaeda, supported only by a primitive band called the Taliban, the Bush Administration began the War on Terror as in effect a chase after wild geese. Even al-Qaeda, never mind countless other terrorists, got principal support from glitzy Saudis rather than from grizzled Afghans. The Afghan wild-goose chase was all the more ridiculous because catching these geese could not fix America's problems. Setting objectives other than the ones that rid you of your problems is the biggest mistake anyone can make in war."...





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