There is evidence gathered over a few minutes, much of it in the form of bodycam video recording, of vital importance in the outcome of a possible court case. News media organizations emphasize this. There is other evidence, some in the form of still photos and video recordings of events, of vital importance in helping to shed light on the murder of thousands of people in the United States in a single day. News media organizations do not emphasize this; they bury it or bar it altogether.

Last week, 42-year-old Andrew Brown Jr., a black father of seven, was shot dead in Elizabth City, North Carolina, as sheriff’s deputies tried to serve a warrant for his arrest. The car he had been driving reportedly first came into contact with one of the deputies and then with another, but at the time of the fatal gunshot he reportedly had two hands on the steering wheel and the car was stationary. Injuries to the deputies, if any, were not reported.

This occurred on Wednesday, April 21. At issue today, a week later, is whether a judge would release to the public body cam video of the incident, some of which members of Brown’s family were allowed to see.

An NPR “Morning Edition” segment today, headlined “N.C. Court Considers Release of Bodycam Video, Brown Family Releases Autopsy,” is HERE (scroll down for it).

CNN’s coverage this afternoon, headlined “Andrew Brown shooting: Judge denies media request for videos, but allows family to view reccordings,” is HERE.

This is a national story — one of many like it — and will continue to be. Available video recordings in a number of fatal shootings of blacks by law enforcement personnel have been routinely part of the cases in 2020 this and 2021. Some are decisive in court.

The Elizabeth City incident is sketched here because the FBI and the Department of Justice have withheld considerable evidence from the public about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States. It has been classified for nearly 20 years. When in September 2018 the U.S. Senate resolved unanimously that it should be declassified, this was news nowhere — not in the New York Times, not in the Washington Post, not in the Associated Press, nowhere. HERE is some coverage, though. HERE is later coverage.

What is going on?

— Mark Channing Miller

Here are news from the Biden administration and some information on the same subject that reaches back into the late 19th century.

“Biden recognizes Armenian genocide: Turkish officials criticize statement” was the headline in the Springfield Sunday Republican over an Associated Press report, one of several AP versions, in this morning’s papers. HERE it is on the website of the Florida TV station WESH. 

Just below is an entry in the 2000 edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. (Things in upper case indicate that they have separate entries in the encyclopedia.)

“Armenian massacres  GENOCIDE of Turkish Armenians by the Ottomans under ABDÜLHAMID II in 1894-96 and by the YOUNG TURK government in 1915-16. In 1894, when the Armenians began agitating for territorial autonomy and protesting against high taxes, Turkish troops and Kurdish tribesmen killed thousands. In 1896, hoping to call attention to their plight, Armenian revolutionaries seized the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul. Mobs of Muslim Turks, abetted by elements of the government, killed more than 50,000 Armenians in response. Sporadic killings occurred over the decades. In 1915, in response to the formation of anti-Turk Armenian battalions, the Turkish government deported 1.75 million Armenians south to Syria and Mesopotamia, in the course of which 600,000 Armenians were killed or died of starvation.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comment in the AP story on President Biden’s action is worth highlighting because it applies to other matters as well: “The truth of these heinous crimes has too often been denied, [their] monstrosity minimized. … History teaches us that if we ignore its darkest chapters, we are destined to witness the horrors of the past be repeated.“

The Green Party sent out the paragraphs below last night, the eve of Earth Day, in a fund-raising email. There’s more about the party’s climate change message at https://www.gp.org. — MCM

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Would you jump out of a plane with only half of a parachute?

That’s exactly what President Biden is proposing, with his rumored plan for a 50% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 when the climate science tells us we need to go 100% clean, fossil-free, renewable energy by 2030.

Trump was a climate crisis denier. Biden and the Democrats are climate solutions deniers. They’ll both lead us to a catastrophe.

Please donate to the Green Party today, because nothing short of a transformation of government will put our society on track to stop the climate crisis. The Green Party can be that transformation because we don’t take the fossil fuel money that keeps Biden in denial.

Tomorrow is Earth Day and Greens are organizing events across the country, up to May Day! …

No matter where you are, you can tell President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to stop following the fossil fuel money and start following the climate science.

I seen my opportunities and I took ’em. — George Washington Plunkitt (1842-1924)

We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. … We went to Afghanistan because of a horrific attack that happened 20 years ago. … [T]hat cannot explain why we should remain there in 2021. — Joseph Robinette Biden (born 1942)

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Word that U.S. and NATO troops should be out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 is sobering and welcome.

Billions of words have been spoken or written about the war in Afghanistan and its causes, many speakers and writers trumpeting or tiptoeing around the lies that launched and maintained it and subsequent wars. Billions are still to come.

“Murky” is one of them.

— Mark Channing Miller

And [Jesus] said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news of all creation.” — Mark 16:15

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Months ago, out in Cincinnati, Scott Gunn signed himself up for a month’s worth of commentaries on Biblical scripture from the liturgies of the Episcopal Church. His began on April 1 (Maundy Thursday) in the little quarterly Forward Day by Day, with the words “Everything Jesus does is about love.”

For today, he selected the sentence up top from Mark 16:9-15, 20, and wrote, in part:

“In our churches, we can be overwhelmed by the labors of keeping things running, of merely surviving. We can become slavishly devoted to the maintenance of familiar practices. We worry so much about rocking the boat …” 

Gunn was probably not thinking of 9/11 and its challenges. Read his whole entry for today, the Saturday of Easter Week, HERE, when it becomes available online.

This is primarily a blog about 9/11, or at least it started out that way three Aprils ago.

— Mark Channing Miller

Happy Birthday! to Seymour Hersh. Eighty-four today, according to NPR’s “Morning Edition.” His memoir, Reporter, published in 2018, should be out in paperback and available at libraries or through interlibrary loan.

’Politics and Poker’  A song from the Broadway musical “Fiorello”

Three More Obits: In the Berkshire Eagle short biographies show the diversity of human experiences in the newspaper’s readership area. Each person written about lived here for at least part of his or her life. Each is part of the human comedy (thanks, William Saroyan). Featured one day this week were Brent Thomas Leonesio, Emily Taylor Andrews Leeds, and Phebe Cramer. One can look them up online, but read there their stories may have a different effect than if found the old-fashioned way on page A4 with their grainy stamp-sized black-and-white photos.

‘The Bankers and the Diplomats Are Going in the Army’ A song written and performed by Michael Cooney

(With apologies and thanks to William Hughes Mearns.)

Yesterday while on the mall
I saw what mattered not at all;
it doesn’t matter still — don’t call.
And if you say it does … what gall!

In their monuments of stone,
each storied prez now all alone,
George and Abe and Franklin Dee
could hardly give a fig, you see:
“Nine-El-What?” they seem to say.
(Does Congress feel the same today?)

The Times, The Post, the News Mu-see
Agree, agree, agree, agree:
“There’s not a thing that’s new to see,
so just get lost, and leave us be.”

— Mark Channing Miller

This is a blog primarily about 9/11. What follows below is the Rev. Scott Gunn’s selection of a verse from the Bible for the Tuesday of Easter Week and his commentary on it. A priest in the Episcopal Church and executive director of the Forward Movement, Gunn was probably not thinking of 9/11 and its challenges. — MCM

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Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” — Acts 2:37

By Scott Gunn

The Bible is filled with great sermons, and Peter’s in the second chapter of Acts is one of the best. At the end of a very persuasive talk, the crowd is convicted. “What should we do?”

I have been there. Maybe it was a great sermon, an article I read, or a conversation with a wise friend. Like those Israelites, I say to myself, “What should I do?” And then, usually, inertia wins out, and I do nothing. The moment of conviction passes by, and I convince myself the status quo is fine.

What’s different for this crowd in Acts? Throughout the whole book, the Holy Spirit is the center of the show. The crowd listens to and is guided by the power of the Holy Spirit. Too often, we claim the Holy Spirit’s involvement in making us feel better about what we might have done anyway. But when the Spirit’s wind blows, it’s toward something that we could only have done by God’s grace.

As great as I want to become or as great as I think I am, I can always go to the edge of the ocean, stand there and realize I am nothing in comparison with the universe. — Craig muMs Grant

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I often criticize the New York Times for participating in—leading—the mainstream media’s conspiracy of silence regarding Executive Branch nonsense explanations surrounding the attacks of September 2001. Yet nearly every day exemplary reportage is to be found in its pages. Take today.

‘Why Not Say What Happened’: That is the title of the last book of the literary critic and cultural historian Morris Dickstein, who died at 81 last Tuesday. Its subtitle is “A Sentimental Education.” Nine-eleven “truthers” such as this blogger immediately think the book just might be about that thing, even by someone as well educated as Dickstein was. His obituary did not indicate that to be the case. But the title of the 2015 book just might be a sly dig at the MSM of this century concerning the crime of it (so far). His Times obituary will send readers looking for a book or two of his or of authors whose works he considered. 

‘Bamboozled’: That is the title of the 2000 Spike Lee movie that included Craig muMs Grant in its cast. Bamboozled also describes what most of the world was in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and in declining percentages over the years still is. (Although there is no way Lee could have known this.) The actor and playwright muMs died last Wednesday at age 52, reportedly from complications of diabetes. “Strange Fruit” is what he titled his “2003 … spoken-word album … from [the title of] the song about lynchings famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939,” the Times reported. HERE is a video of her singing it. muMs’s preferred name stands for “manipulator under Manipulation shhhhhhh!”

“Today,” he told the Baltimore Sun in 2003, “strange fruit means we’re the product of everything Black people have been through in this country — Middle Passage, Jim Crow, segregation. It’s a new way of looking at it. The metaphor of strange fruit means life and birth for me, where it used to mean lynching and death. Blacks have been doing that for years, taking the bad and flipping it, making the best of a bad situation.”

‘I Feel Victimized’: That is what the lawyer Bretton Sciaroni said in the 1980s of being exposed for “a legal opinion [he] had drawn up as a 35-year-old lawyer in Washington justifying a behind-the-scenes deal in which profits from arms sales to Iran were used to fund the Nicaraguan rebels known as the contras, despite a law severely limiting such assistance,” the Times reported. Sciaroni reportedly died this month at his home in Cambodia, where one of his legal opinions in a more than 30-year career there served to justify Prime Minister Hun Sen’s “seizure of full power in a violent 1997 coup,” the Times reported.

And . . .

‘My 18 Years in Solitary Confinement’: That’s the headline over the top op-ed column in today’s Times, by guest columnist Ian Manuel. He entered the Florida prison system at age 15 in 1992. He had shot a woman when he was 13 during a robbery in which he was coached by older teenagers. She survived. Manuel, who is black, was charged as an adult. Advised by his court-appointed lawyer to plead guilty, Manuel was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. This highly effective piece of writing on solitary confinement is a taste of what to expect in his forthcoming memoir, My Time Will Come.

It made this blogger think of a prisoner in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp since 2007, the Pakistani citizen Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, currently 55, who is termed “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks” in the 9/11 Commission Report. Presumably much of the time of this al-Qaeda member’s detention there has been spent in solitary confinement; the form of torture called waterboarding has been used in interrogations of Sheikh Mohammed and others. In 2010 the Guantánamo Review Task Force recommended him for prosecution of war crimes. One wonders when his trial will begin, or began, and how much of it will become known to the public.

— Mark Channing Miller

Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute sent this out on Thursday. It’s from a book he has coming out in September, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. (Click on More … for the whole excerpt.) — MCM

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‘Understanding Power’ / By Richard Heinberg 

Homo sapiens is Earth’s unequivocal champion at gaining and wielding power. We shoot probes to other planets and plumb the depths of the seas. Each year our species extracts and processes 100 billion tons of natural resources that end up as consumer products and building materials. In order to obtain these resources, we move more soil and rock than are displaced by all of nature’s forces combined—including wind, rivers, rain, volcanoes, and earthquakes. We do so much mining, transporting, manufacturing, and waste dumping that, purely as a side effect, we’re also significantly and perilously altering the chemistry of our planet’s atmosphere and oceans. That’s power. More …