Who is Richard Dolan? (A bio is HERE.) In some ways he was made to order for people who ridicule online sources because for years he has been talking and writing about UFOs. Then last year some military  accounts kept under wraps for decades were declassified and became news.

Dolan’s main subject HERE is what he alternately calls “top-down revolution,” “revolution from above,” “state revolution” or “totalitarian revolution.” He says the main thing about this kind is that it’s world wide. Hence the title of the talk: “We Are in a Global Revolution.”

I share it on this blog because Dolan says the horrific September 2001 terror attacks may be a part of a global revolution from above. It’s a fascinating thesis.

Dolan includes a power point outline about halfway though the talk. A version is below. Listen and be skeptical. See what seems to make sense and what doesn’t.

— Mark Channing Miller

–   –   –

Totalitarian Revolutions

1. Massive Expansion of State Power
2. Information Control / Psychological Warfare
3. Destruction of the Individual
4. Wealth Transfer & Loss of Economic Freedom

–   –   –

1. Massive Expansion of State Power

* Significant travel restrictions
* Overt GPS and tracking of the population
* Radical expansion of police powers
* Heavily coerced vaccination backed by legal or financial measures

–   –   –

2. Information Control / Psychological Warfare

* Emphasis of group over individual & safety over freedom
* Censorship
* Attack on dissenters including academics and intellectuals
* Creation of a climate of fear
* State & corporate media join to propagandize population
* Demonization/dehumanization of dissenters, creation of a domestic enemy
* Creation of learned helplessness and bystander effect for many
* Visual symbols of conformity — from flags and uniforms and rallies, now to masks
* Slogans. “Trust the Science” “Flatten the Curve”

–   –   –

3. Destruction of the Individual

* Shutdown of social life and activities
* Closure of large numbers of businesses
* Closure of large numbers of public spaces
* Psychological harm caused by masking
* People easier to control when isolated, psychologically damaged

–   –   –

4. Wealth Transfer & Loss of Economic Freedom

* Creation or exacerbation of economic precariousness and uncertainty
* Economic transformations to massive entities
* Destruction of small businesses and economic freedom

This weekend’s Weekender comes in two parts. Today’s begins with a longer look at a sermon delivered on Sept. 12 in New York City by the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, Primate of the Episcopal Church of the United States. The sermon may be worth listening to, HERE, as an example of how a leader can feel compelled to grapple publicly with the lying impossible official Executive Branch explanation of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

I take it as a given that Presiding Bishop Curry knows full well, 20 years later, that the Executive Branch “9/11” explanations are hogwash, a coverup of the truth. However, apparently he felt he couldn’t say so from a pulpit lest he endanger the national church he was selected to lead, lest he endanger his own top leadership position, lest he pay with his life.

Regrettably (at least for those who value getting to the truth of “9/11”), Presiding Bishop Curry felt he had to mask the potentially most worthwhile parts of his 20th anniversary sermon, titled “Why We Go to the Mountain,” with irrelevancies and worse.

First, what were the potentially most worthwhile parts? For me, they included his paraphrases from Isaiah 2:2-4* and a few words at the beginning of  Matthew 5,** just before the Beatitudes.

The potentially most worthwhile parts of the sermon included renditions of or allusions to parts of the Irving Berlin song “God Bless America,” the African-American spirituals “Every Time I Feel the Spirit” and “Down By the Riverside,” and the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

The potentially most worthwhile parts of the sermon included the statement “We’ve been playing too many games with one another and with God’s creation. And if nothing else will [make us go to the mountain], 9/11, in our memory and in the reality, should.” They included his reminding listeners of the Baptismal Covenant in the Episcopal Prayerbook.

But Presiding Bishop Curry squandered these potentially powerful elements by using them to pay obeisance to secular mythology cloaking the September 2001 terror attacks and by stirring into the mix (1) climate change, (2) the January 6 Capitol assault and (3) Covid-19. What came out was a stew, a mishmash.

To top it off, he quoted from former President George W. Bush’s speech a week ago at Shanksville, Pa., giving a coverup-artist better-than-equal billing with Abraham Lincoln, whom he also quoted.

Jesus, a Jew, stood for truth against a corrupt, hypocritical Temple hierarchy of collaborators with the Roman occupiers of their land, and he was tortured to death on a cross for it. He was a truther.

It is important to know that 9/11 “in our memory” and 9/11 “in the reality,” although they overlap, are two different things, but Presiding Bishop Curry did not point this out. Melding the memories and the realities of the terror attacks as if there are no differences between them is a continuation of “playing too many games with one another.”

— Mark Channing Miller

–   –   –

* “In the days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest mountain, and it shall be raised above the hills, and all nations shall stream to it, and many peoples shall say, ‘Come, let us go to the mountain of the Lord, that he may teach us his ways, that we may walk in his path, and then they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and neither shall they learn war any more. Come, let us go to the mountain, that he may teach us his ways.”

** “When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, he began to teach them.” (Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount begins with eight blessings known as the Beatitudes.)

Saturday was a typical day for volunteers organized by Central Berkshire Habitat for Humanity to join homeowners-to-be and some skilled trades professionals to put in a few hours building a new home. It was typical except for two differences: It was the first regular weekly Habitat workday since Covid-19 disrupted almost everything last year, and it marked 20 years since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Before work started, construction manager Brent Getchell, who is a former chief of the Sheffield Volunteer Fire Department, led a 20-minute ceremony on what will be the front lawn of a duplex on Pittsfield’s Madison Avenue. Getchell spoke about various experiences of his brother firefighters on “9/11” including dying in rescue efforts or getting sick and, in hundreds of cases, dying of cancer in the years to follow. Getchell concluded his remarks by reading the following from his cellphone.

Firefighters’ Prayer

When I am called to duty, God, wherever flames may rage,
give me strength to save a life, whatever be its age.
Help me to embrace a little child before it’s too late,
or save an older person from the horror of that fate.
Enable me to be alert to hear the weakest shout,
and quickly and efficiently to put the fire out.
I want to fill my calling and to give the best in me,
to guard my neighbor and protect his property.
And if according to your will I have to lose my life,
bless with your protecting hand my loving family from strife.

Afterward I told Getchell I was one of those “9/11 truthers,” people who question the official narratives of the September 2001 terror attacks. He didn’t seem to think I was a lunatic, so I told him I do a blog on 9/11 truth and would give him a copy of the web address.* He said he’d look at it. I wrote it down and Beth Frederick, one of the Habitat chapter’s organizers, took a picture of it and said she’d send it to him.

–   –   –

The next day, Sept. 12, at Trinity Episcopal Church in Manhattan the celebrant and preacher was Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. The title of his 26-minute sermon: “Why We Go to the Mountain.” Watch and listen HERE. Presumably “truthers” who do will be forgiven for thinking the reason for going to the mountain is to avoid having to answer questions about whether the official government/media narratives about the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, can possibly be true.

— Mark Channing Miller

–   –   –

* https://www.x-ma911truthwalk.com

At the edge of an outdoor ceremony Saturday in Ludlow, Massachusetts, members of the fire department had parked their ladder truck, with the words “Let’s Roll” on its bucket.

In the Sunday Republican, Jim Kinney explains:

“It’s a reference to the words of Todd Beamer, who, with his fellow passengers, took back Flight 93 and, although they died, were able to direct the flight away from Washington, D.C., crashing in an open field in Pennsylvania.

“Speakers referenced those words in Ludlow, saying it’s not just people in uniform who can make a difference.”

Subscribers to the Republican or masslive.com can read Kinney’s anniversary report HERE. It began on page 1 Sunday, headlined “‘It doesn’t feel like 20 years’: Western Mass marks 9/11 anniversary with sorrow, calls for unity.”

According to official sources, Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer said to others on the plane preparing to heroically move against hijackers, “Are you guys ready? Okay, let’s roll.” This at the end of a 13-minute telephone conversation with a Verizon customer-service operator.

The problem is, there are good reasons to doubt that Beamer had that conversation.

In their book 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation, authors David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth devote two short chapters to investigators’ consensus that accounts of it are false. They are titled “The Assumption That the Todd Beamer ‘Let’s Roll’ Call from United 93 Was Authentic, Part 1” and “The Assumption That the Todd Beamer ‘Let’s Roll’ Call from United 93 Was Authentic Was Authentic, Part 2.”

(Four earlier chapters are titled “The Claim That Four 9/11 Flights Were Hijacked,” “The Claim That United Flight 93 Crashed in Pennsylvania,” “The Claim That Hijackers Were Responsible for Changes to 9/11 Flight Transponders,” and “The Claim That No Information Could Be Obtained from the Black Boxes of Any of the Four 9/11 Planes.”)

I apologize for not summarizing them. Click HERE to see if Edward Curtin’s review of 9/11 Unmaked does so.

–   –   –

At least two articles in Sunday’s mainstream newspaper coverage commemorating the 20th anniversary of the September 2001 terrorist attacks are notable for lacking falsehoods routinely repeated elsewhere:

A Copy Desk Editor’s Tale: Twenty years ago Robert Genest was an assistant news editor on the Wall Street Journal’s copy desk. But when two planes crashed into the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, he was in his Brooklyn apartment and unable to get to his desk at the newspaper near the World Trade Center.

He details working at home on a company computer connected to the newspaper’s servers, overcoming communication and transportation hurdles and, two days later, reaching a New Jersey office the Journal had thrown together where the emotional toll make it “incredibly difficult to work.”

Until recently memories of what Genest lived and worked through since then were foggy, the days and years “somewhat lost.”Why is his column headed “9/11 changed everything about my life”? A few years later he quit and moved back to Western Massachusetts, where he is now manager of reader engagement and editor of opinion and commentary at the Springfield Republican.

–   –   –

Other Museums and Memorials Needed: “Memory is idiosyncratic,” Laila Lalami writes in a Sunday New York Times piece titled “What We Forget on 9/11.” Not only for individuals, like Genest (whom she probably has never met), but for societies.

“The story America told about itself after Sept. 11,” she writes, “was one of heroism and resilience in the aftermath of a brutal attack; the invasion of other countries, and the interruption of their political destinies, had no place in it. Even now … the story hasn’t changed. There are no ceremonies to honor the foreigners who died in U.S. wars, no memorials to victims of torture, no museums to house artifacts from hollowed-out buildings or bombed funeral processions, no exhibits on the lessons that ought to be drawn from such spectacular failures.”

Lalami, a novelist and essayist, is a Muslim.

— Mark Channing Miller

This week the Weekender began coming out on Friday afternoon. Items were added later, and more may be added on Saturday.

–   –   –

20th Anniversary Conference: One source of information about the September 2001 terror attacks and what happened — or didn’t — before, during and after them is an eight-hour online conference titled “From 9/11-Anthrax to the Pandemic: Life and Liberty in the Balance.” Click HERE for the schedule, a lineup of speakers, and how to register.

Sponsored by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, the live-streamed event begins at 1 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, Sept. 11, 2021. It will be archived for seven days for attendees who arrive late or want to watch all or parts of it later or again.

Price of admission is a suggested donation of $20, but “any size is ok.”

I recommend sending the Lawyers’ Committee some amount of money, even $5, to see how what the speakers say stacks up against mainstream news outlets’ 9/11-related stories. The latter have tended to refer to people who don’t accept the mainstream stories as “conspiracy theorists” — when they acknowledge the existence of these people at all.

–   –   –

He Won’t Be On-screen Saturday: One person not participating in the Saturday conference described above is Wayne Madsen. He said why in a column reprinted yesterday in this blog titled “2021 Hijacking.” Read it HERE. Andrew Kreig of the Justice Integrity Project had called on Thursday to ask what I thought about some things going on in the 9/11 truth “movement” including vocal disagreement with prevailing views of Covid 19 and ways to combat it. Kreig recommended the newest entry on the Wayne Madsen Report. Madsen let me reprint it yesterday because the Saturday conference was just two days away; normally he requires more time after publishing something on his blog. Madsen doesn’t name the conference he is boycotting, probably out of respect for most of the speakers. (Maybe he wasn’t invited.) He’ll probably have a look at it, though.

–   –   –

Mainstream News Sources 1: With weekend approaching, the big story throughout the country is THIS ONE bannered across the top of page 1 in Friday’s New York Times, headed “BIDEN ISSUES SWEEPING MANDATES FOR SHOTS: Push to Cover Two-Thirds of Workers — ‘Our Patience Is Wearing Thin.” Read it HERE as picked up on msn.com.

The president’s announcement was a blessing for government and mainstream media managers who doubtless welcomed a diversion from discordant coverage of deteriorating official narratives.

–   –   –

Mainstream News Sources 2: Most of page 1 of the weekend newsprint edition of USA Today is devoted to promoting “9/11: 20 Years Later,” a special section. “America Doesn’t Forget: We grieve those we lost on a terrible morning 20 years ago. And we remember.”

There are three stories in that section. The one headlined “A Monday that ended an era: The day before 9/11, life seemed abundant and terrorism existed in remote places,” written by staff members, does not appear online.

“Several aspects of life altered after 9/11 terror,” by Hadley Barndollar

”How Muslims are telling their stories,” by Hannah Adele and Danielle Parhizkaran, gets the views of “eight influential Muslim Americans” about how the terror attacks and Islamophobia have changed life in the United States.

–   –   –

Abrupt Changing of the Guard at AE911Truth: A week or so ago the founding director of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Richard Gage, was replaced by board member Roland Angle, a civil engineer. Gage was apparently fired by the board of directors after Spike Lee’s interview with him and inclusion of his views on matters unrelated to the building collapses at the World Trade Center caused a well-publicized revision of a documentary series directed by Lee. (For more about the matter, click HERE and scroll down.)

Less-said-about-that-the-better is how AE911Truth is handling Gage’s firing — similar to how mainstream media have uniformly handled the organization for its entire 15-year existence, so far. Gage was slated to speak this Saturday at the 20th Anniversary Conference of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry but is no longer.

–   –   –

Mainstream News Sources 3: E.J. Dionne begins his latest column with this: “The primary lesson we should take from the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is to be wary of lessons we think we have learned from traumatic events. Trauma can undermine the clear thinking and calm deliberation big decisions require.”

One translation: “The primary lesson we should take from the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is to be wary of anything networks and newspapers feed viewers and listeners and readers about any traumatic event because it can undermine the clear thinking and calm deliberation that are required.”

Find Dionne’s column HERE on a North Carolina newspaper’s website. As always, note the uses of “we,” “us” and “our” throughout. (It also appeared in the Springfield Republican and dozens of other newspapers in the United States.)

–   –   –

Mainstream News Sources 4: On page 1 of Friday’s Springfield Republican under the headline“Too young to remember, Gen Z reflects on 9/11: Knowledge of attacks comes from school, family, internet” is the fruit of Elizabeth Román’s conversations with young people from Holyoke, Springfield, Chicopee, Agawam and Maynard. What do they think? Where do they get their information?

One of them, Melissa Nieves-Torres, 22, says, “I feel it is something that is not talked about in high school or college. It’s glossed over, but I think it should be talked about more and we should understand the historical significance of that because it impacts us to this day.”

Find the story online HERE.

— Mark Channing Miller

“All serious attempts to expose the truth about major criminal conspiracies are eventually infiltrated by provocateurs. 9/11 Truth is no exception,” says Wayne Madsen, a Washington, D.C.-based investigative journalist, author and columnist. Below please find a guest column by him, reprinted from the Wayne Madsen Report with the author’s special permission.— MCM

–   –   –

Anti-vaxxers, Covid Hoaxers, and 9/11 Truth

By Wayne Madsen

As someone who believes it is my duty as a journalist to follow every substantial lead and write about verified evidence on the major crime of this century, namely, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and an aborted aerial attack on the U.S. Capitol by hijacked United Flight 93, it is with sadness and disgust that I must report that one of the 20th anniversary “9/11 Truth” conferences this year has been hijacked by a crew of anti-vaxxers and Covid-19 pandemic hoaxers. One of the slated speakers has even bizarrely suggested that Covid is the “new 9/11.”

I was honored to have been invited to speak at several 9/11 anniversary truth seminars over the years. They included the second anniversary, where I spoke at the famed Riverside Church in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as well as the 15th anniversary event at Manhattan’s Cooper Union, where I stood on the same stage graced by Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony. Other 9/11 anniversary speaking venues included St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan, where Peter Stuyvesant is entombed; the celebrated off-Broadway Walker Stage in Soho; and the historic West-Park Presbyterian Church in uptown Manhattan. Other speaking venues over the past 20 years include George Mason University in Arlington, the University of Montreal, National City Christian Church in Washington, and the Sheraton Pentagon City hotel overlooking the west side of the Pentagon, which was impacted and destroyed on September 11, 2001.

Not every tragedy is the result of a criminal conspiracy, but every criminal conspiracy seeks to debase the conspiracy investigators and researchers by infiltrating their numbers with ne’er-do-wells, wackos, and disinformation provocateurs.

The 9/11 Truth seekers did themselves no favors by inviting anti-vaxxers and Covid hoaxers to help them mark the 20th anniversary of the crime of this century. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, with over 2,500 members representing every scientific and engineering discipline involving construction, mechanics, and chemistry, had the most credibility when it came to questioning the official government explanation of the collapse of the World Trade Center. Spike Lee was planning to include interviews with some of the AE911Truth members and its founder, Richard Gage, in his HBO documentary series on the attack.

Lee was forced to send the AE911Truth segment to the cutting room floor after Gage’s comments that Covid-19 is a “deep state hoax” became widely known. For AE911Truth, the bad publicity forced their board to dismiss Gage as the group’s director.

The net result of embracing the nitwittery that Covid is the product of some maniacal plan by cowled sorcerers meeting in secret at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and that the vaccines being administered to stem the effects of the virus are some follow-on plot to cull the human race has turned serious investigations of 9/11 into a joke.

I continue to take seriously the 9/11 attack strategy and mechanics, the anthrax attacks on Congress and the media that shortly followed, and the quick adoption of the USA Patriot Act as an overall modern-day version of Adolf Hitler’s 1933 Reichstag Fire and the subsequent German Enabling Act. So I chose not to participate in any 20th anniversary event at which Covid hoax snakes and anti-vaxx snake oil vendors are present.

It does no justice to the 3,000 people who lost their lives on 9/11 and those first responders and others who later died from exposure to lethal toxins in the air in Lower Manhattan to suggest that their deaths are linked to those of the more than 630,000 Americans who have died and continue to die because of the total incompetence and inanity of Donald Trump and his circle of grifters, neo-Nazis, fools, fakes, and frauds. The two events are apples and oranges (and the “orange” pun is intended).

After I spoke at one of the 9/11 anniversary events in Manhattan, I was approached by a rather burly gentleman wearing a grey suit and bearing a crew cut. He told me that he was a New York Police Department detective. While I braced myself for what I expected would be a haranguing over my speech on 9/11, the detective shook my hand and said that if his brother was still alive, he would have also been in the audience and thanked me for my investigation of 9/11. The detective’s brother worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, which occupied the 101st to 105th floors of World Trade Center One. He perished, along with 657 of his co-workers on September 11. The detective urged me to continue with my work despite the “conspiracy” label pejoratively used by critics. I promised him I would continue to investigate the events of that day and its precursors and aftermath.

To cobble 9/11 in with anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers at this point in time is the worst possible way to keep the quest for 9/11 truth alive. President Biden recently signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to review and release still-classified documents concerning 9/11. They largely include documents on the FBI’s Operation ENCORE, the investigation of the role that the Saudi government played in orchestrating the 9/11 attacks. This is something the families of the 9/11 victims expected George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump to do, but to no avail.

And, speaking of Trump, he, along with his coked-up progeny, Donald Trump, Jr., will be marking the 20th anniversary of September 11 by hosting a heavyweight boxing match between the aging Evander Holyfield and Mixed Martial Arts champion Vitor Belfort at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Florida. WMR [the Wayne Madsen Report] previously reported that that city was a nexus of activity for the 9/11 Saudi hijackers, including team leader Mohammed Atta, and Israeli so-called “art students” — Mossad agents —during the months leading up to September 11.

In contrast to Trump, President Biden will commemorate the 9/11 20th in visits to the World Trade Center Memorial in Manhattan, the 9/11 Memorial at the Pentagon, and the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Biden attended a ceremony on Sept. 11, 2020, at the Shanksville memorial site.

Since the Trumps appear to be crapping all over the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with their goofball “heavyweight” match at a Florida casino, it may have been a better idea for the anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers to join the circus there on September 11, 2021. They should  not have besmirched the memories of the victims of September 11 and the hard work of all of those who have seriously sought the truth about that day of infamy.

Report from Islamabad: In an 11-minute segment today on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” HERE, co-host Steve Inskeep relates that many Pakistanis regard Osama bin Laden favorably — possibly a majority since his 2011 death. He visits the site of Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad raided by U.S. Navy SEALS who killed him there and later dumped his body in the sea.* The compound has been razed, in part for fear it would become a shrine.

One Pakistani interviewed sees the Sept. 11 attacks as “a drama orchestrated to justify an attack on a Muslim country” (as an interpreter worded it). Inskeep: “This man endorses a conspiracy theory, for which there is no evidence, that America attacked itself.” About half the Pakistanis surveyed in a recent poll reportedly said the U.S. government was responsible for 9/11. Another interviewee said many Pakistanis have high estimation for Bin Laden because he is “portrayed as a good man by the state.”

–   –   –

‘The Imagination of the Terrorist’: On Day 3 of its series “9/11 20 Years Later,” the Springfield Republican yesterday ran Jim Kinney’s report headlined “How safe are we because of 9/11? Security evolved to meet challenges posed by terrorists.” (Subscribers can read an online version HERE.)

In it, Jane F. Garvey, an Amherst resident who headed the Federal Aviation Administration 20 years ago, recalls the skies: “The pilots call a day like that ‘a severe day.’ It’s perfect for flying.”

Garvey said a positive change resulting from the attacks is intelligence information sharing by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies that used to work less cooperatively than they do today.

”You can put all the technology you want in the world,  but when you are dealing with the human mind, which is what we are dealing with, it’s the imagination of the terrorist,” she said. “You need to know who they are.”

–   –   –

Accidental Witness: Albany Times-Union reporter Paul Grondahl took the train to Manhattan on another assignment on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, expecting to stay just for the day. He stayed for five. Read his look back on the experience, headlined “Days that churned with grief and dust” in today’s newsprint editions, HERE.

–   –   –

George Will and Secrecy: In today’s Times-Union, syndicated columnist George Will focuses on President Biden’s “tentative step in the right direction” in ordering review and declassification of some federal documents related to the September 2001 terror attacks. The T-U headline: “End secrecy over Saudis and 9/11.”

Two things about the column. Will conveniently ignores the role of the mainstream media, of which he is a shining example, in keeping the public in the dark for three years about Senate Resolution 610 that “documents related to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, should be declassified to the greatest extent possible.” And, why declassify just material related to possible Saudi involvement in the attacks?

To read the column online courtesy of  a Michigan newspaper, click HERE.

— Mark Channing Miller

–   –   –

* The operation is examined by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in a 10,000-word piece published by the London Review of Books in 2015. Click HERE to read it.

 

 

President’s Statement on Beginning Review and Declassification of 9/11 Documents, made Friday, is HERE.

The Executive Order is HERE.

For news stories Saturday on the order, click HERE.

–   –   –

Cancer Rates of 9/11 First Responders: National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” program today began what cohost Steve Inskeep said would be a week of reports on the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. In the first, titled “A Study Says First Responders Survive Cancers at Higher Rates,” A. Martínez interviews NPR correspondent Allison Aubrey. Listen HERE.

In part of it, Elizabeth Cascio of the New York City Fire Department recalls the experience on Sept. 11 of “walking through six to 10 inches of concrete sand and literally the entire dust cloud that was in every direction. We were literally engulfed  by it.” Some, including Cascio, were on the scene for weeks.

–   –   –

A Special Times Look at TV 9/11 Specials: Today’s New York Times carries a piece by its chief television critic, James Poniewozik, titled “What Needs to Be Said About 9/11: TV should treat it as serious history, not just pay it homage.”

The wrap-up might well have been subtitled “. . . And What Doesn’t Need to Be Said,” which would match what the Times has left out of its coverage for the last 20 years, thus enabling other news organizations to do the same.

“Focusing on the emotion and heroism of one day,” Poniewozik notes, “avoids getting snared in everything that came after. It sticks to what we can all agree on.”

The specials are or will be on the History Channel, Discovery, CNN, Netflix, PBS, and HBO. Most are, indeed, studies in avoidance.

–   –   –

He Helped Guide Payments to 9/11 Families: Today’s Springfield Republican salutes Attorney Kenneth R. Feinberg, who oversaw more than 900 hearings for the distribution of compensation payments to families of victims of the 9/11 attacks. In all, about 1,600 hearings were held and a total of $7.1 billion in federal funds was distributed from 2001 to 2003.

Reporter Ron Chimelis’s story is headlined “‘A patriotic undertaking’: UMass alum took charge of 9/11 compensation fund.” Subscribers to the newspaper and mass live.com can read the account HERE. It explains why the payments were unequal: They were based on rough percentages of the unequal financial losses families suffered.

Feinberg’s experience is described in much greater detail in his 2005 book What Is a Life Worth? A movie, “Worth,” starring Michael Keaton as the Compensation Fund special master, opened Friday in a limited number of theaters and on Netflix.

–   –   –

9/11 and Covid-19 Were Killers for Lower Manhattan Businesses: Yestrday’s New York Times carried a report headlined “Where Towers Stood, Rebirth Grinds to a Halt,” by Matthew Haag and Patrick McGeehan. The page 1 story describes the financial toll suffered by restaurants, stores, hotels and other businesses in the district, beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, years of slow recovery for some of them, and a second crisis delivered by Covid-19 in early 2020.

— Mark Channing Miller

 

 

President Biden yesterday signed an executive order ordering federal agencies to review and declassify an unspecified amount of documents related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

HERE is the Washington Post story by Amy B. Wang as it appeared in the Anchorage Daily News. HERE is the New York Times story by Annie Karni as it appeared on bdnews24.com.

The order was a breakthrough of sorts, but not all documents are necessarily to be released. One of the agencies, the Justice Department, is to review and release selected documents over the next six months.

As recounted HERE, nearly a month ago families of 9/11 victims and others told the president to stay away from 20th anniversary events unless he ordered documents declassified. In 2018 the U.S. Senate approved a resolution without objection calling for declassification of all documents related to the September 2001 attacks; for details click HERE and scroll down.

–   –   –

Two of this country’s oldest magazines have been handling “9/11” differently. The Atlantic’s September issue has a long cover piece by Jennifer Senior, “Twenty Years Gone: One Family’s struggle to make sense of 9/11.” family is that of Bobby McIlvaine, 26, who died in the first of the Twin Towers to collapse.

Larger truths of 9/11 are avoided in the 15-page up-close-and-personal examination of the anguish and other emotions of this one victim’s family, friends, fiancée, neighbors, schoolmates, teammates /and a former coach as they remember him and have grappled with his loss over 20 years.

One of many paragraphs focusing on the young man’s father:

“Crucial to Bob Sr.’s understanding of September 11—that it was the cynical skulduggery of the U.S. government, not a grisly act of terrorism by jihadists using commercial planes filled with helpless civilians—is the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which popularized the idea that jet fuel couldn’t burn at a high enough temperature to melt beams into molten steel. This is, it should go without saying, contrary to all observable fact.”

Some will see disinformation in that by Senior, who doesn’t elaborate on “all observable fact.”

Disinformation is the topic of Harper’s September issue cover piece, “Disinformed: How We Get Fake News Wrong,” by Joseph Bernstein, which does not mention 9/11 or get into what news consumers are to do with news managers’ decisions to leave out inconvenient information. HERE it is for Harper’s subscribers.

Click HERE for Aldous Huxley’s 1936 look at propaganda, “In the Dark,” in the September Harper’s. In less than a page it says a lot about how Americans and the world have been misled about 9/11, although the author of Brave New World could only guess what might be in store that long ago.

A couple of passages:

“Advertisers claim to know accurately enough the potentialities and limitations of different kinds of propaganda—what you can do, for example, by mere statement and repetition; by appeals to such well-organized sentiments as snobbery and the urge toward social conformity; by playing on the animal instincts such as greed, lust, and especially fear in all its forms, from the fear of sickness and death to the fear of being ugly or absurd to one’s fellows.”

and

”[P]ropaganda is most influential when it is a rationalization of the desires, sentiments, prejudices, or interests of those to whom it is addressed.”

— Mark Channing Miller