Remembering 9/11: Air Traffic Controller Final Call to Flight 77

I mentioned that I had a "Pentagon Attack Truther" in class last week. Perhaps my students might learn something at this video, from ABC News:

George W. Bush Speech at Shanksville Flight 93 Memorial

Watch President Bush in full at Gateway Pundit, "George W. Bush at Flight 93 Memorial: “One of the Lessons of 9-11 Is That Evil Is Real and So Is Courage” (Video)."

'Twin Tower Cameos'

At LAT, "Video montage: The twin towers immortalized in film."

Remembering 9/11

At PJTV:

Beyond Cairo Embassy Attack, Israel Senses Wider Siege

See New York Times, "Beyond Cairo, Israel Sensing a Wider Siege":

JERUSALEM — With its Cairo embassy ransacked, its ambassador to Turkey expelled and the Palestinians seeking statehood recognition at the United Nations, Israel found itself on Saturday increasingly isolated and grappling with a radically transformed Middle East where it believes its options are limited and poor.

The diplomatic crisis, in which winds unleashed by the Arab Spring are now casting a chill over the region, was crystallized by the scene of Israeli military jets sweeping into Cairo at dawn on Saturday to evacuate diplomats after the Israeli Embassy had been besieged by thousands of protesters.

It was an image that reminded some Israelis of Iran in 1979, when Israel evacuated its embassy in Tehran after the revolution there replaced an ally with an implacable foe.

“Seven months after the downfall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Egyptian protesters tore to shreds the Israeli flag, a symbol of peace between Egypt and its eastern neighbor, after 31 years,” Aluf Benn, the editor in chief of the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote Saturday. “It seems that the flag will not return to the flagstaff anytime soon.”

More at that link, and see also, Barry Rubin, "Ten Years After September 11: Who’s Really Winning the War On Terrorism." Rubin looks at the range of extremist terrorist groupings outside of al Qaeda --- Hamas, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt --- and suggests that terrorism is on the march. Israel is right smack-dab in the middle of it all. As a challenge for U.S. foreign policy, the war on terrorism is hardly won.

Democrats Openly Alarmed About Obama's Reelection Prospects

Well, they should be.

At NYT, "Democrats Fret Aloud Over Obama’s Re-election." (Via Memeorandum.)

Democrats are expressing growing alarm about President Obama’s re-election prospects and, in interviews, are openly acknowledging anxiety about the White House’s ability to strengthen the president’s standing over the next 14 months.

Elected officials and party leaders at all levels said their worries have intensified as the economy has displayed new signs of weakness. They said the likelihood of a highly competitive 2012 race is increasing as the Republican field, once dismissed by many Democrats as too inexperienced and conservative to pose a serious threat, has started narrowing to two leading candidates, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, who have executive experience and messages built around job creation.

And in a campaign cycle in which Democrats had entertained hopes of reversing losses from last year’s midterm elections, some in the party fear that Mr. Obama’s troubles could reverberate down the ballot into Congressional, state and local races.

More at that top link, but clearly, the Dems are going to be crushed.

And like Bill Whittle said, it's not going to matter who the GOP nominee is. Obambi's toast.

How the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks Unfolded

Via Telegraph UK on YouTube:

Also at Telegraph, "9/11: Voices from the doomed planes."

Pentagon Memorial September 10, 2011

At Marooned in Marin, "Visiting The Pentagon Memorial - September 10, 2011."

Very nice. Click over there to RTWT.

Ari Fleischer Remembers 9/11

This is an extremely fascinating discussion, from Alexis Garcia, at Pajamas Media, "PJTV: Ari Fleischer on 9/11 and the Fog of War." I'm struck by Fleischer's discussion of signalling to President Bush, upon first learning of the attacks, when he was still at the Florida elementary school, that he wasn't to go public with announcements or statements that the U.S. was under attack:

We Didn't Overreact to 9/11

At the video, an interesting clip featuring Ann Coulter and Matt Welch.

And see Charles Krauthammer, at Washington Post, "The 9/11 ‘overreaction’? Nonsense":

9/11 was our Pearl Harbor. This time, however, the enemy had no home address. No Tokyo. Which is why today’s war could not be wrapped up in a mere four years. It was unconventional war by an unconventional enemy embedded within a worldwide religious community. Yet in a decade, we largely disarmed and defeated it, and developed the means to continue to pursue its remnants at rapidly decreasing cost. That is a historic achievement.

Our current difficulties and gloom are almost entirely economic in origin, the bitter fruit of misguided fiscal, regulatory and monetary policies that had nothing to do with 9/11. America’s current demoralization is not a result of the war on terror. On the contrary. The denigration of the war on terror is the result of our current demoralization, of retroactively reading today’s malaise into the real — and successful — history of our 9/11 response.

I love Krauthammer. Read it all.

Mayor Bloomberg and the Soul of American Politics

Here's yesterday's interview with Mayor Bloomberg, whose decision to exclude clergy from official events is stirring controversy:

And from Matthew Franck & William Simon, Jr., at National Review:

This Sunday is the tenth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks on our country that left nearly 3,000 dead, the great majority of them in the ashes and rubble of the World Trade Center in New York City. As Americans pause on September 11 in mournful remembrance of that dreadful day, many of them will mark the moment with a prayer for the dead, for the loved ones from whom they were taken, and for their country. And such praying would be a normal part of any such commemoration even if the anniversary were not on a Sunday. It’s just what countless Americans do.

But there won’t be any praying at the City of New York’s official anniversary ceremonies this Sunday. At least, there won’t be any voiced at the microphones by invited speakers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decided to invite no clergy to be speakers at the event. It turns out that this omission of clergy participants has been a normal pattern of annual commemorations of 9/11. But on this tenth anniversary, the decision has finally been noticed, and it has become hugely controversial. According to the Wall Street Journal, the mayor said this week on his radio show, “It’s a civil ceremony. There are plenty of opportunities for people to have their religious ceremonies. . . . Some people don’t want to go to a religious ceremony with another religion. And the number of different religions in this city are [sic] really quite amazing.” He went on to deny the explanation that his own aides had been using to defend his decision — that it would just be “too difficult” to choose among so many faiths for the limited number of clergy who could be invited to speak. No, the mayor said, “It isn’t that you can’t pick and choose, you shouldn’t pick and choose. . . . If you want to have a service for your religion, you can have it in your church or in a field, or whatever.”

I understand, and I only fault Bloomberg to the extent that he personifies this country's banishment of religion from the public square. Folks no doubt would be able to grieve, commemorate and pray at an inter-denominational event. The logistics could have been worked out. Most of all, the day calls for spirituality. It's too bad we've come to this.

Continue reading, "Mayor Bloomberg and the Soul of American Politics."

How Many Jobs Have Obama's Policies Destroyed?

This ad ran ahead of Obama's jobs speech:

And see Power Line, "WANT MORE JOBS? THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT IS ENERGY":

Everyone knows that Obama’s jobs program is a joke; but let’s assume that you actually do want to help create a million or more jobs, while simultaneously increasing government revenues by many billions of dollars. How would you do it? It’s actually easy: just stop the irrational antagonism to energy development that is America’s most glaring public policy failure.

Lot of interesting charts at the post (via Memeorandum).

America's Broken Unity After 9/11

ICYMI, be sure to read Daniel Henninger's, "Whatever Happened to 9/11?", from a couple of days ago. Henninger recalls where he was on the morning of the attacks, and what it was like for him. Then he begins discussing the American response to the terror, for example, with the USA Patriot Act. There's more like that, and then he writes:

Virtually every aspect of the Bush antiterror policies became a target for litigation from the ACLU, opposition in Congress and press exposures: the wiretaps, Guantanamo, the Swift program to track terrorist finances, military courts, the Bush Doctrine of pre-preemptive strikes, terrorist interrogations. Opposition to the Iraq war rose, too, but the effort to thwart the provisions of the Patriot Act was a separate front.

Policy disagreements are inevitable. But how does one account for the intense personal animosity directed toward George Bush and those who worked for him in the government? They were hated, reviled, mocked. Recall, for instance, the effort to disbar former Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay Bybee for writing the legal opinions on aggressive interrogations. Opposition wasn't enough. The destruction of reputation became a policy goal.

This Sunday's 10th anniversary commemorations will evoke some semblance of the unity then in the face of an enemy attack on U.S. soil. But make no mistake: It's gone.

What happened?

Well, continue reading. But as noted above, political opposition wasn't enough for the left. The utter destruction of opponents is required, for according to progressive/socialist ideology, conservatives and Republicans are greater enemies to America than the terrorists. And the left's bloodlust demands for revenge and recrimination continue right into the 10th anniversary. I watched Rachel Maddow on MSNBC while working on this post. Her broadcast, "Day of Destruction, Decade of War," was one long repudiation of America's response to the terrorist attacks, from the decade-long war footing and military mobilization, to the interrogation techniques that helped generate actionable intelligence to track down and kill Osama Bin Laden. Plus, I'm reading David Cole, at New York Review, "After September 11: What We Still Don’t Know." Cole is a far-left activist professor of law at Georgetown University. He's repeatedly argued that the bigger threat to American security is the U.S. government and not the terrorists determined to decapitate it. At Cole's New York Review piece, he revives calls for war crimes prosecutions against Bush administration officials, taking President Obama to task for purportedly not standing up for constitutional values:

As President Obama entered office, he sought to make a clean break with his predecessor. But at the same time, he has insisted that we look forward, not back. His administration has refused to conduct the criminal investigation that the Convention Against Torture requires wherever there are credible allegations that a person within our jurisdiction has committed torture. His Justice Department vetoed the recommendation of its own Office of Professional Responsibility that lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee be referred to their bar associations for disciplinary action in view of their having failed to provide candid legal advice in drafting the “torture memos.” The administration has sought to derail efforts in Spain to investigate US responsibility for torture of Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo. And President Obama continues to oppose even a high-level commission to investigate and report on the nation’s departure from the rule of law and descent into torture, abduction, and disappearances.

Obama appears to believe that such an investigation would be divisive, and might undermine his efforts to portray himself as above partisan wrangling. But division is a fact of life in Washington these days. And being above the fray is not an unmitigated good; some things are worth fighting for. A legal and moral accounting of the wrongs we have done should be high on the list.

Cole goes on like that, and it's interesting that he picks out John Yoo for special condemnation, twice in fact, basically renewing the call that Yoo should have been disbarred for his work in the Bush administration, and by extension, tried as a war criminal.

Behold the mind of the progressive left on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the attacks. For radical progressives, it's America that's the problem, not the fanatical killers who continue to wage war against us.

Terrorist Threat Prompts Tighter Security on 9/11

See New York Post, "Cops flood NYC streets and transit hubs amid bomb threat."

And at Fox News, "New York, DC Beef Up Security in Face of ‘Credible’ Terror Threat":

The two cities that were at the heart of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are on high alert this weekend after the government received a “credible” tip that Al Qaeda plans to launch an attack on Washington or New York as the nation marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Extra security is clearly visible on subways in both cities as officials are taking seriously a joint FBI, Homeland Security Intelligence Bulletin, first obtained by Fox News that states the timing and method of the potential terror plot.

“Al Qaeda possibly planned to carry out attacks…including a possible car bomb attack,” the bulletin reads.

Al Qaeda may have sent American terrorists or men carrying U.S. travel documents to launch the attack, government officials say.

And at ABC News, "Alleged 9/11 Anniversary Plot: Possible Suspect May Be ID'd" (via Memeorandum).

Protesters Attack Israel Embassy in Cairo

Well, if they're using Molotovs they're basically terrorists.

At NYT, "Israeli Ambassador Leaves Cairo After Protest Turns Violent":

CAIRO — Israel flew most of its diplomatic staff out of Egypt on Saturday after thousands of protesters the day before tore down a protective wall around the Israeli Embassy and broke into its offices the day before.

Prime Minister Essam Sharaf of Egypt called an emergency cabinet meeting to deal with the aftermath of the attack and the Egyptian government put its police on alert to guard against more violence.

The Egyptian Interior Ministry said Saturday that at least two people had died in the clashes, one from a bullet wound and the other from a heart attack, while as many as 1,200 had been injured in overnight clashes with the police, mostly around the Israeli Embassy. Protesters scaled the walls of the embassy to tear down its flag, broke into offices and tossed binders of documents into the streets.

The rioting began after large groups of protesters split off from what had been a peaceful protest in Tahrir Square. Thousands attacked the Israeli embassy while others converged on the Interior Ministry, defacing its headquarters. Dozens were also injured in clashes with the police there.

Israeli officials signaled Saturday that they considered the breach of their embassy’s security a significant blow to relations between the two allies. Israeli officials placed several calls to their American counterparts, including from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to President Obama, and from Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, to try to apply pressure on Egypt to resolve the crisis, Israeli and American officials said.

A "significant blow to relations"?

You think?

Herman Cain 9/11 Tribute

Via The Other McCain, "Herman Cain Records Moving 9/11 Tribute, Alex Pareene Calls It ‘Tasteless’."

Michelle Malkin: 'All the wrong 9/11 lessons'

From Michelle's syndicated column:

...too many teachers refuse to show and tell who the perpetrators of 9/11 were and who their heirs are today. My own daughter was one year old when the Twin Towers collapsed, the Pentagon went up in flames and Shanksville, Pa., became hallowed ground for the brave passengers of United Flight 93. In second grade, her teachers read touchy-feely stories about peace and diversity to honor the 9/11 dead. They whitewashed Osama bin Laden, militant Islam and centuries-old jihad out of the curriculum. Apparently, the youngsters weren’t ready to learn even the most basic information about the evil masterminds of Islamic terrorism.

Mary Beth Hicks, author of the new book “Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid,” points to a recent review of 10 widely used textbooks in which the concepts of jihad and sharia were either watered down or absent. These childhood experts have determined that grade school is too early to delve into the specifics of the homicidal clash of Allah’s sharia-avenging soldiers with the freedom-loving Western world.

Yet, many of the same protectors of fragile elementary-school pupils can’t wait to teach them all the ins and outs of condoms, cross-dressers and crack addictions.

We pulled our daughter out of a cesspool of academic and moral relativism and found a reality-grounded, rigorous charter school where no-nonsense teachers refuse to sugarcoat inconvenient facts and history. Many of the students are children of soldiers and servicemen and women who — inspired by the heroes of 9/11 — have voluntarily deployed time and time again to kill the American Dream destroyers abroad before they kill us over here.

There’s no better way to hammer home the message that “freedom is not free” than to have your kids go to school with other kids whose dads and moms are gone for years at a time — missing births and birthday parties, recitals and soccer practice, Christmas pageants and Independence Day fireworks.

But instead of unfettered pride in our armed forces, social justice educators in high schools and colleges across the country indoctrinate American students into viewing our volunteer armed forces as victims, monsters and pawns in a leftist “social struggle.”

A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Blame America-ism still permeates classrooms and the culture. A special 9/11 curriculum distributed in New Jersey schools advises teachers to “avoid graphic details or dramatizing the destruction” wrought by the 9/11 hijackers, and instead focus elementary school students’ attention on broadly defined “intolerance” and “hurtful words.”

No surprise: Jihadist utterances such as “Kill the Jews,” “Allahu Akbar” and “Behead all those who insult Islam” are not among the “hurtful words” studied.

Middle-schoolers are directed to “analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history.” And high-school students are taught “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” – pop-psychology claptrap used to excuse jihadists’ behavior based on their purported low self-esteem and oppressed status caused by “European colonialism.”

It is no wonder that a new poll released this week showed that Americans today “are generally more willing to believe that U.S. policies in the Middle East might have motivated the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon,” according to Reuters.

To make matters worse, we have an appeaser-in-chief who wrote shortly after the jihadist attacks a decade ago that the “essence of this tragedy” derives “from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others.” A “climate of poverty and ignorance” caused the attacks, then-Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama preached. Never mind the Ivy League and Oxford educations, the oil wealth and the middle-class status of legions of al-Qaida plotters and operatives.

9/11 was a deliberate, carefully planned evil act of the long-waged war on the West by Koran-inspired soldiers of Allah around the world. They hated us before George W. Bush was in office. They hated us before Israel existed. And the avengers of the religion of perpetual outrage will keep hating us no matter how much we try to appease them.

The post-9/11 problem isn’t whether we’ll forget. The problem is: Will we ever learn?

That's not how I teach. I don't sugarcoat it, although I'm respectful of those who've been brainwashed by Noam Chomsky and 9/11 truthers and what not. Mostly, though, many students don't quite know exactly what happened on 9/11. A student stopped me last week during discussions, when I started taking about Flight 77 (the Pentagon) and Flight 93 (Shanksville). She didn't know there were four planes hijacked that morning. Ten years on, it's not only "never forget," it's educate the next generation on what happened, and don't pull punches.

VIDEO: 'Remembering 9/11 – Never Quit'

From the Hertiage Foundation:

Democrats Give New Meaning to the Phrase 'Attack Ad'

James Taranto notes that the Democrats can't be over September 11 soon enough. Indeed, the DSCC ran an advertisement in the NY-9 special election (to replace the disgraced Democrat Anthony Weiner) that featured a jet swooping low over New York City. And here's the story, at NY Observer: "Anti-Bob Turner Ad Featuring Airplane Ominously Buzzing Manhattan: Slightly Terrorist-y?"

The ad without the New York skyline imaging:

Also from Jim Geraghty, "Why Do Stumbling Democrats Keep Tripping Up on 9/11 Images?"

F-16 Pilot Heather Penney Tasked to Take Down United Flight 93 on September 11

And the F-16 she piloted was not armed for combat, so she essentially was on a Kamikaze mission to take down the hijacked airliner if necessary.

See Washington Post, "F-16 pilot was ready to give her life on Sept. 11."

Also at Daily Mail, "I'd be a kamikaze pilot: Fighter pilot recalls her would-be 'suicide' mission to take down United 93 - and the heroes who did it for her."