If you hear the song I sing
You will understand
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand
Just one key unlocks them both
It’s there at your command *

To hear and read about the song best known from a 1967 recording by The Youngbloods, click HERE**.

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* A verse that especially appealed to singer Lizz Wright

** For a segment on today’s NPR show “Morning Edition”

On April 9, 1945, the German Lutheran pastor, theologian and dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging in a concentration camp for association with a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Bonhoeffer and others founded Germany’s Confessing Church in opposition to the unification of all Protestant churches into a single church compatible with Nazism.

The first paragraph of his book The Cost of Discipleship* reads:

“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace.”

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* Initially published in German in 1937 as Nachfolge

. . . Birthday, Seymour M. Hersh! *

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* Former reporter for United Press International, the Associated Press, Dispatch News Service and the New York Times; former contributor to The New Yorker, occasional contributor to The London Review of Books, and author, most recently, of The Killing of Osama bin Laden (Verso, 2016) and Reporter: A Memoir (Knopf, 2018); born on this day in 1937.

Note: For a look at the 10,000-word essay which forms the bulk of the book of four pieces by Hersh published in LRB, click HERE. It originally appeared in the May 21, 2015, issue of that periodical.

American Airlines Flight 11 was a Boeing 767 jetliner that allegedly departed from Logan International Airport in Boston on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

There is some doubt about the departure, to say the least. Author and researcher James Perloff’s take on Flight 11 may be found HERE. It’s a blog post titled “Unraveling the Mysteries of Flight 11,” adapted from a chapter of his 2013 book Truth Is a Lonely Warrior.

Some commentary on this post emailed in two separate messages from a seemingly knowledgeable friend:

“Just started with the pdf and it is mostly Mis info. … Perlof [sic] mentions that cell calls from an aircraft at speed nearly impossible. Not nearly , absolutely impossible.   … Cell Calls ?  Impossible but I believe the GTE calls were cell calls also. ( General Telephone ) FLT AA 11 was on the ground at 8:18 at perhaps CEF AFB. That’s what R Roth* claims. That’s a great pdf. Lots of info in one place.”

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* Rebecca Roth, former flight attendant and author of the 2015 novel Methodical Illusion

Seventeen Septembers ago Jacqui Taylor Basker returned to teaching at P.S. 305 in Brooklyn rather than continue in a summer job at the World Trade Center. As a result, she avoided being trapped in the South Tower on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Click HERE for her brief account in the latest issue of WestView News, a neighborhood monthly in lower Manhattan, where she lives.

In it, she describes mysterious workmen carrying large black bags who on several days that summer entered a section of her floor in the office tower that was prohibited to others.

She writes of being hospitalized in mid-September 2001 for inhalation pneumonia and later developing asthma from months of breathing dust from the WTC building collapses and cleanup operations two miles south of where she lived.

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To watch 40 minutes of interviews of people who lived or worked within a few miles of the WTC, click HERE. It is titled “Aftermath: 9/11 and New York Artists,” and Basker helped make it.

As noted HERE, a group of plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., on March 25 claiming the FBI in 2015 failed to comply with a mandate to assess and report to Congress all significant evidence about the murderous “9/11” attacks of September 2001.

The next day, Courthouse News Service reported on the lawsuit.

In a matter of hours — perhaps less than an hour — the 500-word report by Jennifer Hajizi had disappeared from the CNS website. Visitors who clicked on the headline got this:

“Oops! That page can’t be found. It looks like nothing was found at that location. Try the search below.”

Searches turn up nothing. All but the first two paragraphs of the article are still missing from the website.

However, someone at Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth copied the article before it vanished and posted it. Headlined “FBI Accused of Omitting Evidence From 9/11 Report,” it is available HERE.

According to the CNS report, the complaint asks a federal judge to compel the Justice Department and the FBI to finish carrying out their mandate by “undertaking a new thorough external independent assessment of any evidence known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission related to any factors that contributed in any manner to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Defendants in the Washington lawsuit are U.S. Attorney General William Barr, the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and the FBI. Plaintiffs are the Lawyers’ Committee, Architects & Engineers, and Robert McIlvaine, whose son died in a World Trade Center tower on September 11, 2001.

The filing of the lawsuit last week has not been reported in the news media elsewhere, nor was a petition made last year to the United States Attorney for the District of Southern New York by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry (one of the complainants in Washington), Architects & Engineers and other petitioners to empanel a Special Grand Jury to investigate federal crimes committed in the district in connection with the September 2001 attacks.

In churches throughout the world today, including in Massachusetts, people were saying or singing these words:

While I kept silence, my body wasted away, through my groaning all day long.*

and these:

Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding, whose temper must be curbed with bit and bridle, else it will not stay near you.*

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* From Psalm 32

A formal complaint was filed today in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., aimed at forcing the Federal Bureau of Investigation “to reconstitute its 9/11 Review Commission in some form, assess the evidence known to the FBI but omitted from the Commission’s 2015 report, and include that evidence in a new, amended report.”

It is the first time that 9/11 family members and advocates have taken legal action against the FBI with the intent to “compel the FBI to assess and report the evidence of the World Trade Center’s explosive demolition known to the FBI as well as other unreported 9/11 evidence,” according to Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

A news conference to discuss the lawsuit was scheduled for 1 this afternoon in front of the Newseum, located on Pennsylvania Avenue NW near the courthouse.

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p.s. HERE‘s a half-hour interview about the lawsuit described above. It features architect Richard Gage of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and attorneys David Meiswinkle and Mick Harrison of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry. They were interviewed over the weekend by “Sean” of SGT Report.

“Before I was humiliated I was like a stone that lies in deep mud, and he who is mighty came and in his compassion raised me up and exalted me very high and placed me on top of the wall.” — St. Patrick (c.385 – c.431), from his Confessio

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” — The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1925 – 1968), from his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

People interested in getting to the bottom of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are requested to go HERE and please take the time to read a five-page letter to the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and look at an accompanying redacted “summary of persons, companies, and entities who may have material information related to … federal crimes….”

Names of those persons, companies and entities are redacted from the summary made available to the public but are specified in the list sent to the U.S. Attorney.

In sending the carefully worded letter and the accompanying supplement to its previous petitions, the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry has taken the next step in an effort to ensure it has the desired attention of the U.S. Attorney so that perpetrators of federal crimes committed in his district don’t get away with any number of crimes including mass murder, none of which is specified.

The letter merits careful reading and rereading. It is a key step in a legal process to determine whether justice can prevail related to the crimes surrounding that event of seventeen and a half years ago.

Note that the two lawyers who signed the letter appear not to know whether the U.S. Attorney has yet empaneled the federal Special Grand Jury to which they refer, or intends to empanel it. They do refer to his letter of last November 7 in which he stated that his office would comply with the law to which they referred in previous letters to him.

The mission of the Lawyers’ Committee, according to a footnote, “is to promote transparency and accountability regarding the events of 9/11, and regarding the events leading to and resulting from 9/11. The Lawyers’ Committee believes that the family members of the victims of the tragic crimes of 9/11 have a compelling right to know the full truth of what happened to their loved ones on 9/11, and that Congress and the Department of Justice, in order to do their jobs, have a compelling need to know.”