Bill of Integral Options Café posts a big chunk of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann’s impassioned speech yesterday taking Bush to task for failing to complete construction at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
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Graphic in Bhikkhu's Blog. |
IOC's Bill also posts a big chunk from TMC Café relating what now-famed terrorism expert Richard Clarke has to say about the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11. Clarke who worked for three Republican presidents and for Clinton says the program was a conspiracy to put forward misinformation. Now an ABC News consultant, he says that, starkly the opposite to what the movie depicts, in the Clinton White House “there was a common fixation with terrorism, al-Qaeda, and bin Laden. The President approved every counter-terrorism operation presented to him, including many that the CIA proved unable or unwilling to implement.”
Aussie law student Tuff Ghost writes about the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in Vomiting Confetti. “The mood seems somewhat muted, particularly in the Australian coverage, with the reframing of the attacks as an explicitly American tragedy. It's a far cry from the first days after the attacks, in which there was a very real sense that wasn't just a tragedy watched by the world, but it was happening to the world as well.”
Shokai of Water Dissolves Water posted a picture of the New York skyline seen behind Brooklyn Bridge, and this quote, “Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear; but around in awareness.” -James Thurber.
Ajahn Punnadhammo, Abbot of Arrow River Hermitage near Thunder Bay in Ontario, Canada, writes in his Bhikkhu’s Blog, “Any sense of optimism about the world scene, and we had some of that in the 'nineties, naive perhaps but palpable, is gone. We are now in a period of dark international anarchy; war, terrorism, torture, the rise of the omnipresent security state.”
Nerdine who lives in Oslo, Norway, writes in My world at the moment what she was doing five years ago. “I was still a student at that time, and remember my mom called me and told me that a plane had hit one of the twin towers in New York. I remember I didn't really believ her, but ran home and put on the TV, and watched what seemed like a badly directed film.”
Canadan K’vitch of the eponymous blog writes where she was five years ago. “I was in bed when the first plane hit. My clock alarm, set to the local talk news station, came on and announced the first hit. I was still waking up when they announced the second plane hitting. Being half asleep, I thought, ‘Another plane hit? What a coincidence!’ Then they said something about the Pentagon being hit, or maybe the Washington Monument (it was early and reports weren't totally accurate). I decided to get up.”
Zenmar, “the zennist,” writes a provocative essay in his blog The Buddhist, titled “remembering 9/11.” He writes, “It is because of America’s historical intoxication with power and conquest that the catastrophe of 9/11 happened. The so-called terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York were completely American made.”
Matthew of freedomforall.net begins his 9/11 post …
It is the fifth anniversary of September the eleventh and everyone is making lots of noise about it. It was indeed a horrific and unwarranted act, debased and obscene in every way. I do not wish to pretend that it was not that.George of Sentient Developments quotes an OpEd piece in the UK Guardian written by Slavoj Zizek. Here’s most of George’s chunk: “The difference of the war on terror from previous 20th-century struggles, such as the cold war, is that while the enemy was once clearly identified as the actually existing communist system, the terrorist threat is spectral. It is like the characterisation of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: most people have a dark side, she had nothing else. Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side, the terrorist threat has nothing else."
However since September the eleventh, 2001, a total of approximately fifty four million, seven hundred and fifty thousand children have died needlessly in the third world because of the economics of market forces that the terrorists so hated.
James of Genius of Insanity posts a picture of firemen raising an American flag and writes, “May they always be remembered, their families held in our arms and supported.”
ebuddha of Integral Practice writes, “Today of course, is 5 years since 9/11. I'm not sure how other people marked this occasion. I spent some time this morning in meditation and prayer, wishing, visualizing peace for all people.”
John of My Zen Life in “gifts of sitting” posted a picture of cushions.
In an entry titled “The Obligatory Post,” Bill of Oaksong Nemeton begins with these words, “It's strange, but today's date is having little emotional effect on me. Maybe I'm an unfeeling asshole, or maybe it's because the media has beat the subject to death until I'm numb. Personally, I think it's because my memories of 9/11 are part of a period in my life that I just don't associate with the life I live now. …”
