Re: Truce, please

From: Eighth Dimension (badmood@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Sep 13 2001 - 08:39:50 CEST

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    Sorry in advance for continuing the non-AJ content :

    Perhaps read this for an interesting perspective on these despicable
    events: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,550359,00.html

    Also -
    "The Awful Truth"'s Michael Moore's take on these events here below :

    Dear friends,

    I was supposed to fly today on the 4:30 PM American Airlines flight
    from LAX to JFK. But tonight I find
    myself stuck in L.A. with an incredible range of emotions over what
    has happened on the island where I
    work and live in New York City.

    My wife and I spent the first hours of the day -- after being
    awakened by phone calls from our parents
    at 6:40am PT -- trying to contact our daughter at school in New York
    and our friend JoAnn who works
    near the World Trade Center.

    I called JoAnn at her office. As someone picked up, the first tower
    imploded, and the person answering
    the phone screamed and ran out, leaving me no clue as to whether or
    not she or JoAnn would live.

    It was a sick, horrible, frightening day.

    On December 27, 1985 I found myself caught in the middle of a
    terrorist incident at the Vienna airport
    -- which left 30 people dead, both there and at the Rome airport.
    (The machine-gunning of passengers in
    each city was timed to occur at the same moment.)

    I do not feel like discussing that event tonight because it still
    brings up too much despair and
    confusion as to how and why I got to live… a fluke, a mistake, a few
    feet on the tarmac, and I am still
    here, there but for the grace of…

    Safe. Secure. I'm an American, living in America. I like my
    illusions. I walk through a metal detector,
    I put my carry-ons through an x-ray machine, and I know all will be well.

    Here's a short list of my experiences lately with airport security:

    * At the Newark Airport, the plane is late at boarding everyone. The
    counter can't find my seat. So I
    am told to just "go ahead and get on" -- without a ticket!

    * At Detroit Metro Airport, I don't want to put the lunch I just
    bought at the deli through the x-ray
    machine so, as I pass through the metal detector, I hand the sack to
    the guard through the space
    between the detector and the x-ray machine. I tell him "It's just a
    sandwich." He believes me and
    doesn't bother to check. The sack has gone through neither security device.

    * At LaGuardia in New York, I check a piece of luggage, but decide to
    catch a later plane. The first
    plane leaves without me, but with my bag -- no one knowing what is in it.

    * Back in Detroit, I take my time getting off the commuter plane. By
    the time I have come down its
    stairs, the bus that takes the passengers to the terminal has left --
    without me. I am alone on the
    tarmac, free to wander wherever I want. So I do. Eventually, I flag
    down a pick-up truck and an
    airplane mechanic gives me a ride the rest of the way to the terminal.

    * I have brought knives, razors; and once, my traveling companion
    brought a hammer and chisel. No one
    stopped us.

    Of course, I have gotten away with all of this because the airlines
    consider my safety SO important,
    they pay rent-a-cops $5.75 an hour to make sure the bad guys don't
    get on my plane. That is what my
    life is worth -- less than the cost of an oil change.

    Too harsh, you say? Well, chew on this: a first-year pilot on
    American Eagle (the commuter arm of
    American Airlines) receives around $15,000 a year in annual pay.

    That's right -- $15,000 for the person who has your life in his
    hands. Until recently, Continental
    Express paid a little over $13,000 a year. There was one guy, an
    American Eagle pilot, who had four
    kids so he went down to the welfare office and applied for food
    stamps -- and he was eligible!

    Someone on welfare is flying my plane? Is this for real? Yes, it is.

    So spare me the talk about all the precautions the airlines and the
    FAA is taking. They, like all
    businesses, are concerned about one thing -- the bottom line and the
    profit margin.

    Four teams of 3-5 people were all able to penetrate airport security
    on the same morning at 3 different
    airports and pull off this heinous act? My only response is -- that's all?

    Well, the pundits are in full diarrhea mode, gushing on about the
    "terrorist threat" and today's
    scariest dude on planet earth -- Osama bin Laden. Hey, who knows,
    maybe he did it. But, something just
    doesn't add up.

    Am I being asked to believe that this guy who sleeps in a tent in a
    desert has been training pilots to
    fly our most modern, sophisticated jumbo jets with such pinpoint
    accuracy that they are able to hit
    these three targets without anyone wondering why these planes were so
    far off path?

    Or am I being asked to believe that there were four
    religious/political fanatics who JUST HAPPENED to
    be skilled airline pilots who JUST HAPPENED to want to kill themselves today?

    Maybe you can find one jumbo jet pilot willing to die for the cause
    -- but FOUR? Ok, maybe you can -- I
    don't know.

    What I do know is that all day long I have heard everything about
    this bin Laden guy except this one
    fact -- WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden!

    Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!

    Don't take my word for it -- I saw a piece on MSNBC last year that
    laid it all out. When the Soviet
    Union occupied Afghanistan, the CIA trained him and his buddies in
    how to commits acts of terrorism
    against the Soviet forces. It worked! The Soviets turned and ran. Bin
    Laden was grateful for what we
    taught him and thought it might be fun to use those same techniques against us.

    We abhor terrorism -- unless we're the ones doing the terrorizing.

    We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in
    the 1980s who killed over 30,000
    civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. Thirty thousand murdered
    civilians and who the hell even
    remembers!

    We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of
    innocent people, and we never let the
    human suffering THAT causes to interrupt our day one single bit.

    We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the
    world, with our taxpayer-funded
    terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador) that I suppose
    we shouldn't be too surprised
    when those orphans grow up and are a little whacked in the head from
    the horror we have helped cause.

    Yet, our recent domestic terrorism bombings have not been conducted
    by a guy from the desert but rather
    by our own citizens: a couple of ex-military guys who hated the
    federal government.

    From the first minutes of today's events, I never heard that
    possibility suggested. Why is that?

    Maybe it's because the A-rabs are much better foils. A key ingredient
    in getting Americans whipped into
    a frenzy against a new enemy is the all-important race card. It's
    much easier to get us to hate when
    the object of our hatred doesn't look like us.

    Congressmen and Senators spent the day calling for more money for the
    military; one Senator on CNN even
    said he didn't want to hear any more talk about more money for
    education or health care -- we should
    have only one priority: our self-defense.

    Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure
    when the rest of the world isn't
    living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes?

    In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again.
    He withdraws from the Kyoto
    agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists
    on restarting the arms race -- you
    name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all.

    The Senators and Congressmen tonight broke out in a spontaneous
    version of "God Bless America." They're
    not a bad group of singers!

    Yes, God, please do bless us.

    Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right.
    They did not deserve to die. If
    someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing
    thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE
    for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of
    California -- these were places that
    voted AGAINST Bush!

    Why kill them? Why kill anyone? Such insanity…

    Let's mourn, let's grieve, and when it's appropriate let's examine
    our contribution to the unsafe world
    we live in.

    It doesn't have to be like this…

    Yours,

    Michael Moore
    mmflint@aol.com



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