Cheney Issued Orders To Shoot Down Jets

www.nme.com reports that the Rage Against The Machine bulletin board has been shut down by the US secret service because of 'inflammatory comments'.

Now wait, of all people you shouldn't be trusting the NME, right? ;-) And you shouldn't -- I was actually checking out the board for the last few days before the shutdown, and here's what the current (and most up- to-date) message from Tom Morello says if you go to the website:

"The official RATM message board has been temporarily closed.

We thank Infopop for their generosity during the past year. Unfortunately some news agencies have reported INCORRECTLY that Infopop pulled the hosting due to "anti-American posts" which is simply not true. Infopop pulled the message board due to arising difficulties they faced when governmental authorities contacted them regarding VIOLENT THREATS that appeared on the BBS. RATM nor Infopop would never support threats of violence, and we here at RATM.com fully understand and agree with Infopop's decision to release themselves from this huge liability of hosting the bbs.

We are endeavoring to correct the situation and get your free exchange of information and ideas up and running as soon as possible."

So there you go. The threats in question appear to have been promises to 'kill Bush' or the like, but it also has to be said that there were a fair amount of expressions of happiness (tempered by the deaths but not totally absent) over the destruction of the buildings in question, as well as a slew of unfortunate bigotry towards Arab-Americans. Personally I think Morello is grandstanding a bit, but is also trying to get a lot of people on his boards to sit back and think before posting anything more.

Don't assume this board is not being watched too. Here's an alert message I got on the 11th when composing a post about the anthrax rumour. I have never hit the page www.nyc.gov in my life, or tried to call it up. But here an alert was telling me, in the middle of a post, that the site was unavailable, just as if I had asked to submit something to it. Very weird.

http://www.demon.co.uk/momus/nycgov.jpeg

I rechecked that entire thread, Momus, and found this message:

Here is a dreadful irony for you.

-- DG (rgreenfield@btinternet.com), September 11, 2001.

The 'here' being a link to a site at -- you guessed it! -- www.nyc.gov, which was about the city's Emergency Management office. Maybe you had briefly clicked on it or something? Either way, that's my guess as to what happened to you there.

I'm sorry, perhaps I'm being really dense here, but if the choice is between [x] people dying (= a plane-full) and [x+y] people dying (= a plane-full + a building-full) , the "impossibly difficult triage" decision is to strive that it be [x], however that is achieved. If the means of achievement goes against procedure or the Constitution or natural instinct, then the decision is obviously harder. What is the factor I am missing that makes THIS the issue of the moment? Plainly all facts about all elements should be in the public eye, but I can't grasp what you think the dastardly crime committed here IS. If shooting the plane down — utterly horrible as that must be to consider, in many different ways — SAVED lives, then where's the story? If it didn't, but Cheney mistakenly believed it did, excuse me, what's the issue? Are you suggesting he took this opportunity to shoot down a plane anyway, even though he knew [I know not what], because this was something he'd always secretly wanted to do, and he'd never get the chance again? What's the STORY, Nick?

To be honest my feelings about the Bush administration are this: I have every possible problem with their behaviour up till about 9.10 New York that Tuesday morning; and grave reservations about their behaviour since about 5.00 that Tuesday afternoon — but actually as the Towers burned and fell, I'm gunna cut them a lot of slack, even Cheney, who ordinarily I keenly loathe and despise. That was a hard horrible day. Unless you're digging for something you haven't said yet, Nick, the smoking gun is not the downing of that plane, HOWEVER it happened.

Phew! Thanks for that. Getting a bit jittery here. Got a visa renewal coming up soon too... To any INS officers reading this, I just want to make it clear that everything I'm saying in these posts goes back to my wholehearted support of the US constitution. I'm not joking. The US Constitution is perhaps the most beautiful and luminously just document produced by the Enlightenment.

Phew! Thanks for that. Getting a bit jittery here.

No worries, m'friend. :-) But this is one reason why nobody should ever jump to conclusions. ;-) The US Constitution is perhaps the most beautiful and luminously just document produced by the Enlightenment.

Yowsa. Now if it only always worked as intended.

Why, Momus, that's awfully nice of you to...oops.

Mark: while our luminous prose may sometimes suggest otherwise, it's not my impression that threads on ILE have 'stories'. I mean, 'I love Snickers Peanut Butter' -- is that a 'story'? These threads are just to get people talking about whatever shit they want to talk about, no? And, watching BBC World over breakfast at a friend's house in Brooklyn this morning, that Cheney admission was what I really, really wanted to talk about. I do apologise for his feelings of harrassment ever since I raised the matter.

By the way, did anyone in the UK see the Question Time that reduced a US official to tears, so vehement was the anti-US bias in the audience's questions? Greg Dyke apparently had to apologise on behalf of the BBC.

There was a mention on the thread about Question Time about that. Something about how a woman pointed out that Israel's actions could be seen as terrorism in turn? If it gave the guy a wake-up call on that front, then that's a good thing, frankly...

I think we're getting all heated over not that much anyway: what I'm getting at is this. If the story is not some great revelation about a sinister crime/plot/conspiracy in re the plane being shot down, but rather that the Bush administration was all a panicked chaos that day trying to work out who was in charge and what could and should be done, well, you know, this is a real tactical loser of a way to "get" Cheney, because you're getting him for merely being human in an impossible situation. Get him for actual crimes before or since. That day he has a free pass from public opinion forever: that day ppl were allowed to fuck up.

The press should be free to cover all angles of the story, obviously: and should persist until they know everything about everything. They won't, but then they've never been as great at this as they think they have.

The oil story has legs, politically: I really don't think this jet one does.

On a different note, this lead photo, like many others, has captivated me due to its nature. If it were any other context, it could be seen as beautiful, and even *in* context it actually is, like a ruined cathedral. Somehow I eventually a predict a study on the aesthetics of the day itself, for better or worse.

Incidentally on a related point I heard that during his presidency Clinton had set up a committee chaired by Gore to look into security on US domestic flights. (BBC 11/9) The committee recomended strongly that security should be considerably improved, but the airlines were able to talk Clinton out of it. Is there any talk of this in the U

A couple of mentions here and there, not much. The airlines' weaseling out of the security upgrades will eventually become important given the lawsuits (it may sound like a strange thing to keep mentioning them, but the basis for a massive series of class-action lawsuits is all around -- all that has to happen is for all the financial firms who lost employees, office space, money, records, etc. to unleash their lawyers on the subject, and they'll take the airlines, the airports, the security firms and very likely the government to the wall).

Funny, I was just thinking of starting a thread to compare notes on airport security experiences. I flew a lot during the nineties, and it seems that after some terrorist attack or other - I don't know if it was OK City or something else - there was a lot of talk about cracking down, and the next time I went to the airport (in Lincoln), which was about a week after this, things were *really* strict. But I noticed a definite loosening in the following years. I also noticed that O'Hare was pretty strict for the international flights but kinda lax on the domestic ones, unless there was some threat or other in the news.

Steven Byers talking about having an armed guard on each flight as well as banning hand luggage from the plane now.

Well they shoudl definately look for KNIVES anyways, not guns and bombs. THe hijackers always use knives becasue bulletholes in cabin walls cause uncomfortables plane rides what with decompresion, and apparently up til now its been ok to take knives on board. And Momus, I'm glad you talk to us about things you feel like talkin g about, do carry on. I shall expect a thread from you soon about the film "Songcatcher" and how it relates to Folktronic.

Momus, what's interesting to me about this thread isn't whether you should raise such questions (which are certainly worth raising) but that something within you wants it to be true that the Air Force shot down the airliner. This was all over your posts on this subject even back on thread one. Now, I recognize this in myself - not on this particular issue, since I want the story of the cockpit struggle to be true, but in other instances. Like when I first heard about the Columbine shootings, along with my other reactions there was a little grin inside me, as if to say "So there!" This despite my wondering what my girlfriend was going to tell her three little girls to make them feel at ease, my knowing how much grief so many people around here were going to feel, and so on. I interviewed a kid from a high school near Columbine who'd had the same kind of reaction and who'd felt a letdown when it turned out that only 15 not 25 people had been shot - even though he knew that he himself could have been shot, if the attack had been in his school and not several miles over at Columbine. So there's something in people like me that wants some fact - some truth - some hurt or evil or dishonesty - to be revealed and made LARGE so everyone has to see it; it's my vengeance, to have this truth blow up big and hurt people hard. This impulse isn't necessarily bad: it produces great music and no doubt some good reporting and maybe some good political action. But if the impulse goes out of control it destroys the ability to analyze and the ability to politically organize effectively. It drives people away, basically. (Though I notice that on this board it's a subject that draws people in: 52 responses here while the main thread languishes, even though over in the main thread we could be discussing the fact that the Bush administration had originally asked Congress to authorize unlimited funds to prosecute the war on terrorism (if Congress had gone along it would have effectively ceded its own authority for appropriating money) and had asked Congress to authorize Bush to "deter and preempt any related future acts of terrorism and aggression against the United States," which would have given him blanket authority to go to war almost anywhere he saw an enemy. Or we could be discussing the fact that Ned inadvertently suggested a similarity between Jacques Derrida and Nguyen Van Thieu. But instead, we're here going on about a quasi-conspiracy theory.)

Going off at a tangent, but still on the "what's become of the media" theme, does anyone else think the BBC coverage of NYC etc has gone totally downhill over the last few days (after a good start on Day One)? Culminating in Jeremy "live from Ground Zero" Bowen on Breakfast News this morning - I thought they were supposed to be giving priority to transatlantic passengers with compassionate reasons for travelling, not self-obsessed media types. The Beeb now seems to be vying with the US networks in the voyeurism/wallowing in tragedy stakes.

At least CNN this morning were covering the latest stories - the Pakistan delegation's mission to the Taliban, CIA admitting it will employ "unsavoury characters" and try and get the ban on political assassinations lifted.

Perhaps the Beeb's top brass are trying to make up for their Question Time embarrassment. Another example - that Panorama programme last night, supposedly a straight piece on bin Laden (mostly rehashed from 1998 in the event), but they just had to intercut his story with the most dramatic and distressing clips and interviews from Tuesday, didn't they? Thus leaving the viewer in no doubt who was "responsible" for the attack, when even GW will only admit bin Laden is only "a prime suspect". Sadly, this sort of thing is par for the course for Panorama these days.

The only interesting thing to come out of it was the observation from one of bin Laden's contemporaries that the oft-repeated images of the planes impacting with the WTC and the towers crumbling were having the effect of impressing upon the Arab world that the US is vulnerable and can be defeated, as the Soviets were in Afghanistan.

I'm not impressed with the BBC, to be honest. Half way through the afternoon I discovered Channel 4 was better, but then it finished. It was a bit tiresome of the BBC to show the same bit of footage all afternoon, to be honest, at least the ITN news programmes had a bit of variety. As for now, I don't see why Jeremy Bowen is pleased that he's got himself some tacky T-shirs with dreadful 'patriotic' slogans on, I'm sure any of the NYC contingent would tell us there are squillions of stalls selling that tat all over the city.

Momus, what's interesting to me about this thread isn't whether you should raise such questions (which are certainly worth raising) but that something within you wants it to be true that the Air Force shot down the airliner.

I don't think I want it to be true, but I'm as susceptible as anyone else to conspiracy theories, not least because they're interesting. I think one of my faults is possibly that I put being interesting ahead of being right. I am, of course, free to do this because I have no power.

I'm an artist, an entertainer, not a politician or academic or company employee. I'm expected to be stimulating, amusing, thought-provoking, even subversive and disloyal, but not necessarily right. Actually, that's what a Momus is, in the original definition: a carping, cavilling critic. Now, some people (a few have been signing my website guestbook with comments not far removed from 'go home, commie fink') think that in times of crisis critics should belt up and buckle down. I think the opposite. I think it's precisely now that we need to brainstorm, not desert storm.

Well, I think that conspiracy theories are boring (which unfortunately doesn't preclude their being right). But if you're interested, my friend Mark Fenster wrote a book on conspiracy theories called (appropriately enough) Conspiracy Theories (U. of Minnesota Press) - though in the book I think he's actually more interested in conspiracy theorists than in conspiracy theories.

Just like John Lennon and Yoko in 1970 NYC.

[spam]

ugh

Best choice of thread by spamming cunt EVAH

CAN WE GET A CLEAN-UP IN THIS AISLE PLEEEZ?

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I akshully clicked that last one. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, Soma.

Fuck! Is dud!

are you drunk?

Yes.