Excerpt from second of two letters sent home, after Katrina, by alumni from the small Mississippi where I once taught:

“I just wanted to send out a small email to say hello and to let you know how things are going here on the coast. We evacuated to my parents’ home in Noxapater for a little over a week, and we were scared that we would have nothing to come home to. However, when we returned, we found our house completely untouched by the storm. It is like God put a shield around our home and our work places. ...   more »

On this day in history . . .This from the Van Nuys, California, Valley News on Thursday, July 22, 1971:

“747 Rams Window at Airport [title]

[complete article]

“An American Airlines Boeing 747 jetliner plowed through a plate glass window at Los Angeles International Airport yesterday when it advanced too far into the passenger loading area.

            An airline spokesman said there were no injuries in the incident which occurred shortly after noon.

            The spokesman said Flight 11 had just arrived from Boston with 165 passengers on board when it crashed through the ...   more »

Almost five years after September 11, 2001, the book titled Aviation Insecurity, by aviation security analyst Andrew Thomas (Prometheus Books, Amherst NY), published in 2003, is only getting more timely.

Some books don’t wear well over time, but every passing year, and virtually every passing month, further corroborates Thomas’s discussion and analysis of our lack of aviation security before 9/11 – and now.

Reading successive chapters about the FAA (“The Culture of Compromise”), the actions of the White House and a GOP-dominated Congress immediately after 9/11 (“The Great Bailout”), and the creation of new layers of ...   more »

Official results in for the U.S. House District 4 race in Georgia: the estimable Cynthia McKinney got 28,507 votes; challenger Hank Johnson got 27,049; and John Coyne got 5,199. Thus McKinney with 46.92% faces Johnson with 44.52% in a run-off. This was the Democratic primary in a heavily Democratic district, where the winner of the Democratic primary is generally considered the winner in fall’s election for Congress.

Half of Coyne’s votes would have given McKinney 31,106 and Johnson 29,648, avoiding a run-off. A solid majority of those votes would have put one of the others over 50%, ...   more »

It is awe-inspiring, in spite of the dreadful sadness of the news, to watch the performance of CBS correspondents in the Middle East Lara Logan, Sharyn Alfonsi and Elizabeth Palmer.

Evening after evening, as rockets fall -- sad to say -- in their vicinity and Israeli warcraft roar overhead, all three correspondents interview all sides, talk to all parties that they can talk to, walk side by side with military personnel in combat zones -- work so good that it beggars description.

I am wishing for the safe return of all three. I wish there were more I could say....   more »

This morning on This Week with George Stephanopoulos (ABC), Condoleezza Rice, interviewed on the violence in the Middle East:

Rice, awkwardly trying to justify the administration's non-support of a cease-fire, stays with the Bush-Cheney fantasy line that "extremists" facing "a new Middle East" are the cause and source of the violence. (No mention of repressive regimes or the mistreatment of Palestine.)

Her reasoning is the neocon argument that past peace-keeping efforts in the past didn't "work" --i.e. since no peace lasted forever, lives saved or quality of life improved in the interim don't matter a whiff.

No time for obvious fallacies right now; this ...   more »

Aside from other factors, one that surely worked to the advantage of the 9/11 hijackers was that each of the four flights they caught on that fateful day was carrying significantly less than a full passenger load. Again we have what appears to be little short of a miraculous concatenation of timing and other circumstances:

Since the four planes, like the World Trade Center, were mercifully not full to capacity, casualties ultimately proved less than they might otherwise have. On the other hand, the hijackers also had fewer passengers to overpower or keep under control, and there was ...   more »

Quick response here, to a post at Talking Points Memo, passed along in turn from another publication, about a particularly horrible and grisly incident alleged in Iraq.

The over-all point affirmed is that this administration never should have conveyed the U.S. into Iraq in the first place. The fundamental point is well taken, if conveyed with a certain shamelessness and pathological lack of compunction on the part of the neocons who boosted the war with everything they had -- including lying about and bullying other Americans, passively permitting or actively colluding with election fraud, and participating in the massive "war on terror" ...   more »

"In a little noticed, but extraordinary show of political pressure, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Energy Secretary Bodman, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Agency have all personally intervened with the Alaska Legislature, pushing them to accept an oil company deal that would net the companies hundreds of billions of dollars. The deal is being championed by Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski in a special legislative session that opens today [ passed along from U.S. Politics today . . .]

"In regular session the Republican-controlled Legislature refused to approve the package. Two opponents of Murkowski's in the GOP gubernatorial primary are opposed ...   more »

Passing along a message from The PEN (The People’s Email Network: activist.thepen@gmail.com):

" . . . Here's the plan.  We are setting up virtual phone banks all over the country to call our neighbors and friends to let them know there ARE candidates out there fighting for them on the issues they care about now.  And all we're asking our participants to do is make 10 calls a week, just 10 calls a week in your spare time.

And if we just do that, each of us, in the next 4 months we can build the most ferocious ground ...   more »

Continuing from previous blogs . . . Whether the youthful, half-educated skyjackers knew it themselves or not, on a September 11 they were destined to fly in the U.S. into a virtual perfect storm of war games, scenario simulations and military operations that would tend to give them extra cover. September 11 – code named “911” -- is by way of being the traditional date, on or about, for such exercises.

It is the opinion of this writer that most of the 19 were less likely than their backers to be directly aware of this little item of U.S....   more »

Continuing from previous blogs . . . All things considered, the strikes of September 11, 2001, from the perspective of the skyjackers, amount to a miracle of timing. Let’s start with the timing of appointments of key U.S. personnel.  

Part of this topic has been canvassed elsewhere, but a quick overview with the 20-20 of hindsight still comes as something of a shock. Everybody recalls that, among key personnel, Robert Mueller, new Director of the FBI, took his position one week before 9/11. Former FBI man and the globe’s premier bin Laden nemesis John O’Neill had ...   more »

Continuing from previous blogs . . . The current lockstep line from the corporate Right is that “we haven’t had a terrorist attack since 9/11 [because of this administration],” or words to that effect.

One demurrer is that this statement omits the anthrax mailings without a mention. (Even individuals with anthrax most on the brain, e.g. former NYTimes reporter Judith Miller, have seldom or never mentioned the names of two innocent postal workers, Joseph Curseen and Thomas Morris, and two women in the Northeast, Kathy Nguyen and Ottilie Lundgren, killed by the anthrax mailings.)  Presumably the administration has ...   more »

Continuing from previous blogs . . . One thing the 9/11 Commission incontestably got right is that the 9/11 skyjackers were a team comprising more than one tier. The 19 men who hijacked four U.S. jumbo jets in three U.S. airports had varying degrees of expertise and in several instances lacked expertise in, for example, aviation or engineering; they entered the U.S. at several different times; and they showed different degrees of commitment.

They had different degrees of knowledge about the suicide mission they were engaged in. This is the point I keep coming back to, over and over ...   more »

The main beneficiary of erroneous stories about 9/11 is George W. Bush – as this administration clearly recognizes, since it has resisted at every step of the way every investigation of every aspect of the plotting behind the attacks.

It has not resisted – if you notice – the circulation of obviously bogus narratives, the assertion that no plane hit the Pentagon or that the World Trade Center was brought down by demolitions. Disinformation and misinformation discredit and impede genuine investigating. Without going at this point into whether some “conspiracy theorists” may be getting a little quiet help from ...   more »