2008/08/03

Dennis Kucinich Responds to Nancy Pelosi's Statements - Re: Impeachment | 911blogger.com

Dennis Kucinich Responds to Nancy Pelosi's Statements - Re: Impeachment | 911blogger.com

2008/07/29

Norman Rockwell Paints Popular Mechanics controlled by Homeland Security as Chertoff's NEW AMERIKANA?

Norman Rockwell Paints Popular Mechanics controlled by Homeland Security as Chertoff's NEW AMERIKANA?

Popular Mechanics (PM) is a magazine we all grew up trusting to show us the world from a technology or "technocrat" viewpoint.
 
We shouldn't have to be reminded that our American media, the EPA and many publications (now PM) have been hijacked by globalist criminals when we see Rupert Murdoch negotiated to buy the Wall Street Journal just as the sub-prime horrors were emerging - and EPA's Christie Todd Whitman issued a death sentence of mass murder with assurances that asbestos-laden toxic air was safe to breathe at ground ZERO.
 
Let's face it.....Mom, Apple pie and American Flag of a Norman Rockwell no longer exist in the post neo-con, 9/11 world of government sponsored terrorism against US citizens. It should be no surprise that PM mag is another icon of Rockwell's Americana that was hijacked by the Chertoff' tentacles within homeland security and another Chertoff who infiltrated to control content of PM mag. 
 
This review and discussion of David Ray Griffin's, Debunking 9/11 Debunking could be helpful to those who understand that American journalism is under a fascist equivalent of Martial Law to stop certain issues from allowable discussion and to distort history to protect the guilty. 
 
Nancy Pelosi said "...impeachment is off the table" but the table belongs to you and me...not Pelosi.  The media was not allowed to cover the issue of Impeachment even after the stunning testimonies in the 7/26/08, at John Conyers congressional hearings.  Yet, Pelosi had plenty of time to release her new book (Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters) and push it at Borders and on TV shows this week, coincidental with her run-up to re-election in November.
 
Debunking 9/11 Debunking
 

2008/07/24

LEIBERMAN: U.S. Should Attack Iran because God Hates Israel's Enemies

Leiberman has crossed the line to "Hate Speech"....Arrest him!....HWS


 
July 23, 2008 at 01:52:03

Headlined on 7/23/08:
Lieberman At Hagee Conference:
U.S. Should Attack Iran because God Hates Israel's Enemies
by Gustav Wynn     Page 1 of 1 page(s)
http://www.opednews.com

Despite popular outcry from the American Jewish community, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman pressed ahead with his third annual appearance at John Hagee's summit for Christians United For Israel (CUFI), an evangelical group with powerful fundraising capabilities and long-standing ties to DC insiders including President Bush. Over 42,000 petitioners called for Lieberman to renounce the controversial televangelist as Senator John McCain did this past May when it was discovered Hagee was selling DVDs which included a speech he made implying that the creation of Israel was the result of God's plan for Hitler to wipe out six million Jews.

Although it is well-known the membership of CUFI adopts an apocalyptic theology calling for the annihilation of the Jewish race as a key part of the impending rapture, Lieberman's logic is unclear to many in the Jewish community who sincerely hope God will not exterminate them any time soon.


Lieberman was accompanied Tuesday by Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel of New York who also ignored a public outcry against his attendance at the event, claiming their affiliation with CUFI lay in the shared belief that the U.S. should use it's military resources against Iran. Engel even abdicated his own Congressional power as part of a March 2007 war appropriation, granting President Bush authority to strike Iran without Congressional approval. Engel also also allowed the Congressional committee he chairs to become a forum for radical pro-war Israeli voices, calling for apartheid, not peace.

From Lieberman's speech Tuesday, "It is no coincidence that the terrorist regime in Tehran that sponsors the rocket attacks that rain out of Gaza on innocent Israelis, also sponsors the terrorist attacks that have murdered hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq. Both must stop."

Lieberman, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, quoted scripture stating Israel was a gift to the Jews from God, who added "I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you." Lieberman also told the audience he preferred Hagee and his supporters over the tens of thousands of anti-war petitioners, organized chiefly through the pro-Israel advocacy group J Street.

Lieberman cited the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina as proof that the nation of Iran should be targeted by the U.S., because several members of the Iraq Revolutionary Guard were suspected in connection with the blast. He also stated unequivocally that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, but offered no supportive evidence, making this stretch in direct contradiction to the latest U.S. government intelligence and reports by the IAEA which, like Iraq in 2002, found Iran to be in compliance. (Ironically, a covert CIA operation to determine if Iran had a nuclear weapons acquisition program was exposed by Vice President Cheney and neocon strategist Karl Rove in an as-yet unprosecuted act of treason).

A recent piece in the Tehran Times questioned Washington's hypocrisy for giving Israel a pass on their acquisition of nuclear weapons despite refusal to sign the International Non-Proliferation Treaty. The paper claimed that Iran is undergoing close scrutiny by the UN who has been permitted full access including permission to videotape.

One wonders if Engel and Lieberman are simply courting CUFI for it's robust fundraising capabilities and undeniable influence in Washington's hallowed halls of power. But unlike last year, where media was allowed to interview CUFI's outlandish, racist anti-Muslim attendees during the conference, a tight media lock-down was in place this year, allowing a more "free discussion" said CUFI representative Ronn Torossian. "CUFI wants to create a more intimate and open setting this year, which will be more beneficial to our members and core audience."

House Resolution 362, currently moving through Congress after waves of lobbying by AIPAC, CUFI and NORPAC would impose harsh sanctions on Iran, including wording that opens the door for a U.S. military blockade which some in Congress feel is an overt act of war.

It would indeed be unfortunate if this country enters into armed conflict once again on the say-so of an uninformed Congress, in the absence of evidence or any attempt at diplomatic settlement, and with armies of private lobbyists fanning the flames.

Rather then trust those who have already proven themselves unworthy, let Americans instead heed the staunch Conservative war hero, President Dwight Eisenhower who in 1961 warned us to be vigilant against war profiteers who would seek to provoke unending military conflict around the world.

Unmindful, we let them do just that needlessly in Vietnam, until a vocal protest movement gave Congress the political will to investigate a runaway President. Unmindful again, we let them do it to Iraq, but with the Woodstock generation becoming the common stock generation, America is facing a serious moral crisis, unable to motivate Congress to do it's Constitutional duty.

Sen. Lieberman is continuing to assert our beef in the war on terrorism is with Iran, reminiscent of the hard lessons of the past six years where we saw Washington fix the facts around the case for war with Iraq. Though Americans overwhelmingy believe the war on terror should be directed at the clandestine underground cells that actually carry out these attacks, Lieberman's rhetoric shows once again his priorities - defense and energy industry CEOs, and those who feel the U.S. should be Israel's blindly obedient attack dog. The case against Iran so far is highly circumspect, but Lieberman does wonders with very little.

GW is a proud American from NY State, concerned about ethics issues, media manipulation and overconsumption. He has recently changed careers to become an inner city schoolteacher. A firm proponent of curbing overpopulation and international adoption, he hopes to adopt a third child and enjoys history, outsider art, garage rock music and rare/unusual vinyl records.
 

Port Authority nears deal with church destroyed on 9/11/2001

Port Authority nears deal with church destroyed on 9/11/2001

by Ron Marsico/The Star-Ledger
Wednesday July 23, 2008, 10:01 PM

The Port Authority has agreed to a land swap and a $20 million payment to St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Lower Manhattan to help the congregation rebuild after the original structure was destroyed when the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11, agency officials familiar with the deal said.

The church will receive a parcel of up to 8,100 square feet for the new church at Liberty and Greenwich streets, approximately two blocks from its original 1,200-square-foot site at Cedar and West streets, according to tentative terms of the deal.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's board of commissioners is slated to vote on the proposal Thursday, according to the officials who spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the deal publicly before the agency's monthly meeting.

Resolving the situation with the church is just one of at least 15 key elements Port Authority representatives last month said must be settled before the rebuilding of Ground Zero could proceed.

At the time, agency officials belatedly conceded the overall plan to create new skyscrapers, a 9/11 memorial and a PATH rail hub at the site faced significant delays and cost overruns. The assessment came after New York Gov. David Paterson sought a progress update.

"It's a linchpin issue," one of the Port Authority officials said of the deal with St. Nicholas representatives.

Relocating the church will allow the Port Authority to proceed with plans to construct an underground vehicle-security center at the southern tip of Ground Zero that would serve the rebuilt former World Trade Center site.

Nearby, plans also call for an office tower - tentatively slated to be constructed by JP Morgan Chase - to be built where the damaged Deutsche Bank building awaits demolition.

Port Authority officials have said they expect to have more realistic timetables and cost estimates ready by the end of September for rebuilding the entire project, anticipated to cost $16 billion. While announcing the delays last month, the agency's top leaders pledged to work with other major players to help resolve a myriad of outstanding issues, including the future of the church, that have dragged on without solutions for years.

Among the remaining issues are determining final design plans for the permanent PATH hub, engineering work on the memorial and how best to erect permanent supports for the city's No. 1 subway line that cuts through the tract.

Representatives of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church could not be reached for comment.

2008/07/23

NTSB has NO Records of Positive Identification Of 9/11 Aircraft Wreckage

NTSB: No Records Pertaining To Process Of Positive Identification Of 9/11 Aircraft Wreckage

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Within a July 18, 2008 Freedom of Information Act response from the National Transportation Safety Board, the NTSB indicates that it possesses no records indicating how wreckage recovered from the 4 aircraft used during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 was positively identified as belonging to the 4 planes reportedly hijacked that day or even if such wreckage was positively identified at all.

Within a similar March 18, 2008 FOIA response from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI states the following:

"The identity of the three hijacked aircraft has never been in question by the FBI, NTSB or FAA"

http://www.infowars.com/?p=886&cp=1

However, NTSB factual reports pertaining to the Flight Data Recorders allegedly belonging to American Airlines flight 77 (N644AA) and United Airlines flight 93 (N591UA), do not cite a "Flight Data Recorder Group", that would normally consist of Federal Aviation Administration and airline officials, in possession of records pertaining to a given aircraft and unique serial numbers pertaining to each FDR. The absence of published FDR part and serial numbers within each NTSB FDR report suggests that the NTSB were not provided access to such records that would allow them to confirm the identities of the FDRs studied by them.

Many FDRs possess unique memory configurations that are identified by serial numbers contained within a given aircraft's records. Such serial numbers are required to facilitate FDR data readouts. Presumably, if the recovered AA 77 and UA 93 FDR's did not possess the memory configurations indicated within FAA and airline aircraft records, a mismatch could become apparent to NTSB investigators.

http://www.911blogger.com/node/16089

The FDRs in question were apparently recovered by NTSB personnel.

Carol Carmody, Vice-Chairman, National Transportation Safety Board, referring to the NTSB:

"I ... assured FBI Director Mueller that we would assist in any way we could ... he called and said, "Could you send us some people to help find the black boxes and help identify aircraft parts."

http://www.ntsb.gov/speeches/carmody/cc020227.htm

Marion Blakey, Chairman, National Transportation Safety Board, referring to the NTSB:

"Over 60 Safety Board employees worked around the clock in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and at our headquarters in Washington, D. C., assisting with aircraft parts identification"

http://www.ntsb.gov/Speeches/blakey/mcb020625.htm

The text of the July 11, 2008 NTSB FOIA request:

"I respectfully request copies of records revealing the process by which wreckage recovered from the aircraft used during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was positively identified as belonging to: American Airlines flight 11 (N334AA), United Airlines flight 175 (N612UA), American Airlines flight 77 (N644AA) and United Airlines flight 93 (N591UA).

The afore mentioned aircraft are identified within numerous public NTSB records. Positive wreckage identification was presumably obtained through the use of unique serial number identifying information contained by the said aircraft's wreckage. Within U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Title 14, Part 45, it is indicated that all U.S. commercial civil aircraft are required to contain numerous components bearing unique serial number data "secured in such a manner that it will not likely be ... lost or destroyed in an accident"."

2008/07/21

False Flag in Montreal - Varin a suspect in 7/7 and USA Investigation

========================================================= If you try to blame a terrorist attack on Al Qaeda, we will not believe you. . . ======================================================= Montreal 9/11 Truth Documentary covering the background of VERIN (2 Hrs.) =============================================================== Potential Jewish Terrorism in Montreal coming soon near you!!! Learn how subways and possibly other communications facilities are run/controlled by Israeli-owned and directed companies like Verint and ICTS!!!

False flag attack planned for the Montreal Metro?

"There are thousands of us in Montreal who know what happened on 9/11 and in London on 7/7 and if there is an attack on the Metro (the local mass transit system), we're not going to believe you when we try to tell us it was Al-Qaeda or Iran." Verint, the "security" company that enabled the false flag attack in London on 7/7, has just set up shop in the Montreal Metro. Meanwhile, the news media is Montreal has been working overtime to run stories about how "dangerous" the Metro is and why it "needs" this new camera system. Montreal is not part of the TV-addled United States. The kind of BS that flies in the States won't fly there as this preemptive message from its citizen to the City Council (and whoever else is listening) demonstrates. ======================================================================= FOX News, Carl Cameron's 3-part Investigative report on Israeli spies. . . . . This video is also posted Here:

2008/07/20

The Original "9/11" - The 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty

The Original 9/11: LBJ's botched False Flag attempt for control of the middle-east.

Striking similarities of the USS Liberty attack to the 9/11 murders mirror a basic strategy taken from the playbook of Operation Northwoods.

 

June 8, 2007, NSA declassified government documents and final review of the 1967 USS Liberty incident . LINK 

 

VIDEO:  False Flag terror including USS Liberty incident.

LINK 

 

The USS Liberty incident was a coordinated attack on a U.S. Navy technical research ship, USS Liberty, in international waters north of the northern Sinai Peninsula coast, by Israeli fighter planes and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War. 

The attack on the
Liberty marked the single greatest loss of life by the U.S. intelligence community, where evidence of the False Flag could be best enforced against leaks and "whistleblowers". 

 

President, LBJ had exclusive "commander-in-chief" control over the USS Liberty with knowledge and covert approval fore Israelis to attack and sink the ship including the murder of all personnel aboard.

 

Calls to the nearby 6th Fleet to intervene were personally called off by LBJ who had intended to have the Liberty attacked and sunk to the bottom.

 

LBJ's  government sponsored terrorist operation failed due to the surprise arrival of a Russian spy vessel whose crew and cameras witnessed the carnage and caused the Israeli attack on the Liberty to be terminated.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2008/07/19

Has the new Batman plundered its plot from 9/11?

From The Sunday Times
July 20, 2008
Has the new Batman plundered its plot from 9/11?
Batman versus the Joker now reads the war on terror goes superhuman
Dark Knight
 
Dark Knight


Jeff Dawson

New York's alter ego, Gotham City, is under attack. Bombs kill civilians indiscriminately. Panic spreads like wildfire. The perpetrator, a mysterious self-styled "agent of chaos", has no apparent motive. Holy terror! Has the new Batman flick plundered its plot from 9/11? The imagery here is blatant: firefighters framed in tableau against the smouldering rubble of Downtown; politicians cashing in on the paranoia; bound hostages used to relay demands on television; the extraordinary rendition of a foreign suspect; a crusade against an "evildoer" that turns more personal vendetta than reasoned response. Then there is the film's poster, which shows a flaming, wing-shaped hole punched through a smoking office tower. You can't disavow gratuity here — there is no such scene in the actual film.

When it comes to the movies, the attack on New York is hardly fresh inspiration. Until now, however, even feature films had retained a respectful feel: patriotic, conspiratorial or otherwise. Then, last year, came Cloverfield, a monsters-take-Manhattan movie that models its shaky handheld visuals on the video footage of Ground Zero witnesses. The Dark Knight, the second in the latest cycle of Batman films, is even less restrained.

"As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman's presence actually attracts criminals to Gotham, attracts lunacy," the film's director, Christopher Nolan, has said. If his new movie feels like a full-on action thriller rather than anything remotely cartoonish, then his antihero, the Joker, is a straight-up screen terrorist. "Some men can't be negotiated with," as one character puts it. "Some just want the whole world to burn."

Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that it is a superhero who has swung cape first into the fray — and we don't mean those Fathers for Justice protesters in Britain or Lucha Libre wrestlers. In times of crisis, these modern American demigods (and, by association, global ones) are the first to go sprinting for the phone booth.

In the 1940s, Marvel and DC Comics yanked Superman and Batman away from their quotidian baddie-bashing and retooled them as patriots sticking it to the Nazis. Their buddy, Captain America, even landed a punch on Hitler's jaw, dragging the isolationist USA into the war several months ahead of Pearl Harbor. And so it continued through the cold war, with Stalin substituting in as the new bĂȘte noire.

Such is the supes' tradition that, immediately post-9/11, some Americans wondered why their avengers had gone Awol. "There was that thing of 'Why didn't Superman save us? Why didn't he come along and stop the planes?'," says Paul Gravett, Britain's leading comic-book expert, whose The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics is out this month. "There was a brief debate about whether superheroes were relevant any more. In a strange way, though, they've become more relevant."

Yes, sir. After a mourning period for the leading comic-book publishers, who put out commemorative issues showing their principal players humbled by the ordinary-Joe heroism of the emergency services, came the full-on counter-offensive. These days, the silver screen has supplanted the printed page as the superheroes' stamping ground, but just look at them go.

In recent months, we have had Iron Man and Hancock. In the past few years have swooped in Spider-Man, the X-Men, two Hulks, Superman, Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, the Incredibles and more. Hellboy II will be with us shortly, and two rival Superman sequels are shaping up, one penned by the Scottish graphic artist Mark Millar, whose vigilante yarn Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie, has made him hot property in Hollywood.

Such popularity has not been lost on the powers that be. In 2005, Marvel published salutatory editions of its superhero comics for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, launched in a special ceremony by Donald Rumsfeld. The tendency for government rhetoric to be cloaked in the superhero argot has been noted by John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, co-authors of The Myth of the American Superhero, and of Captain America and the Crusade against Evil. "Bush is the first leader who has promised world transformation," Lawrence says. Indeed, in 2002, when Der Spiegel ran a satirical cover portraying Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell as Rambo, the Terminator, Xena and Batman, a visit from the US ambassador was not to protest, but to report that the president was "flattered", Jewett says. "He ordered 33 poster-size renditions to be conveyed to the White House."

The interesting thing about Batman, who turns 70 next year, is that, unlike his contemporaries, he lacks any superhuman powers — other than the apparent ability to have accumulated a caveload of cash. Moreover, his schizophrenic existence suggests a screwed-up individual — a child who witnessed his parents' murder and has sought revenge by dressing up as a winged nocturnal mammal.

"Batman is great to have on your side, but you wouldn't want to have dinner with him," declares Frank Miller, the comic-book writer and artist whose creations include Sin City and Daredevil. To this end, Batman seems rivalled only by James Bond and the England football manager in his cyclic reinvention — an earnest, back-to-basics approach after a regular and routine lapse into comedy.

Appalled at the "Biff! Splat! Kerpow!" of the 1960s pop-art television series, comic-book aficionados (having evidently been zapped with a Bat-sense-of-humour-repellent) had long been demanding a return to Batman's dark side. It is Miller who gave us the Batman we know today. His 1986 outing, The Dark Knight Returns, was the inspiration for Tim Burton's 1989 Batman movie and its 1992 sequel, Batman Returns. After Burton's films segued into the camp capers of the director Joel Schumacher — nipples on the Batsuit and all — Nolan reinvigorated the franchise again. Three years ago, Batman Begins presented Christian Bale as a grim, tortured Caped Crusader. The Dark Knight, too, owes much to Miller, and to the iconic Bat-books The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore, Brian Bolland and John Higgins, and The Long Halloween, by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, in which he confronts his greatest adversary. Although here, squaring up to the Joker merely epitomises that great superhero precept that he (or she, in Wonder Woman's case) is never as interesting as the bad guy. "I don't want to kill you. What would I do without you?" the Joker coos to Batman. "You complete me."

Sadly, as everybody knows, the actor who plays the Joker, Heath Ledger, is no longer with us, having passed away in January after filming had finished. His death has caused a huge rethink of Warner Brothers' promotional campaign. Whispers of an Oscar nomination for Ledger may be a tad premature, but one should never discount the sympathy factor during gong-giving season. In the meantime, the actor's grotesque, grungy performance, coupled with an inevitable sense of the macabre, has led to predictions of record openings.

Batman has come through hard times before, and will do so again. In 1954, his cosy friendship with Robin (bed-sharing and all) was denounced in an academic report as "the wish dream of two homosexuals". Worse, by the 1960s,traditional superheroes had been marginalised. Seeking truth, justice and freedom — American way or not — seemed more achievable through social revolution than via someone whose wardrobe consisted entirely of Lycra.

Lately, artists have avoided such pitfalls in keeping their creations relevant. Millar's War Heroes, set in a near future in which President John McCain grants his Gulf-war forces super-powers, can hardly be accused of subtlety — but a comic-book series he contributed to, Civil War, did pose a moral conundrum. In it, assorted Marvel titans were forced to confront the Superhuman Registration Act, which drew a line between those who chose to license themselves as an official "living weapons of mass destruction" (such as Iron Man), and others (such as Luke Cage) who refused to become government agents on ideological grounds.

"We're not fighting for the people any more, we're just fighting," bleated the resolutely freelance Captain America, before being assassinated. Moore's Watchmen, a fan-boy favourite, also deals with municipal terror and curbing the surfeit of maverick "costumed adventurers". It is being filmed by Zach Snyder, who last year gave us the big-screen version of Miller's Spartan story, 300.

In future, references to the real world may make even The Dark Knight seem oblique. Two years ago, Miller announced that he was going the whole hog, naming his next work as Batman v Al-Qaeda: a "piece of propaganda", as he put it, that is "bound to offend just about everybody". "These are our folk heroes," he went on. "It seems silly to chase around the Riddler when you've got Al-Qaeda out there."

His added declaration — "I'm ready for my fatwa" — no doubt caused a few nervous splutters at his publishers. There is no news yet on its likely arrival.

Is Man on Wire the most poignant 9/11 film?

 
From
July 20, 2008

Is Man on Wire the most poignant 9/11 film?

No film about the WTC can play innocent and pretend 9/11 never happened

Watch Director James Marsh and Philippe Petit discuss Man on Wire

Forgotten in the noise of the seven years since 9/11 is the fact that New York's World Trade Center was a bad building. In spite of the ingenuity of its structure — load-bearing "mullion walls" — there was no hiding the fact it was just two dumb blocks, square in plan, projected up to 1,400ft apparently for the hell of it. And why two? The towers always looked unresolved, as if waiting for a third. Every time I saw it, the same thought came into my head — "So?"

Yet the architect, Minoru Yamasaki, did pull off one extraordinary coup — the placing of the towers. They were 140ft apart, and they did not, as they appeared to do, face each other corner to corner. They were slightly offset so that the walls, not the diagonals of the plan, were in line. The distance and the offset had an eerie effect. When I stood on the observation deck, I had a queasy feeling that was not quite vertigo. Rather, it was an overpowering, seductive sense that I could simply walk, jump or run across. The intervening space was alive with tension: enough, I thought, to support me for the few moments it would take to get across.

Philippe Petit also spotted something seductive about this gap. But he spotted it in 1968, five years before the building was completed. He saw the plan in a magazine in a dentist's waiting room, always a dangerous place for casual readers. Unlike me, Petit saw the gap as an opportunity rather than a threat to his mental stability. He really did want to walk across and, on August 7, 1974, at about 7.15am, he did, carrying a 26ft pole and balancing on a ¾ inch steel cable. He stayed up there for 45 minutes, crossing the gap eight times, teasing the police until it became clear that they were prepared to snatch him off by helicopter.

New York loved him for it, but, in the way of such things, the story receded in the imagination — and, after 9/11, all stories about the World Trade Center paled into insignificance next to the story of its destruction. Now, though, Petit's wire walk has been redeemed by a film, James Marsh's wondrous, magical documentary Man on Wire. People are comparing it to a previous British documentary, Touching the Void. Trust me, it's better.

Like Touching the Void, it is a docudrama in that actors are used and certain key scenes are re-created. For much of the time, it feels more fictional than it actually is, because Marsh has used some of the conventions of the heist movie. This is a crime, after all, but it is not merely victimless, it makes millions happy. It is, as one of Petit's crew says, "against the law, but not wicked or mean".

What, however, is it about? No film about the WTC can play innocent and pretend 9/11 never happened. Yet, superficially, that is what Man on Wire does. "Why burden this beautiful story with the ugliness of that?" Marsh has said.There are no explicit references to the destruction of the towers. On the other hand, Marsh is being a touch disingenuous. A mood of anticipatory sadness and nostalgia for a pre-9/11 world suffuses the film. We see the towers being built, the construction mess foreshadowing the wreckage after the planes hit. Most important of all, we see the wonder and joy of the New Yorkers as they stare up at Petit on his wire. He made these office blocks, in spite of their architecture, beautiful — and now they are gone.

"No one," the art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto has written, "loved the towers as much as everyone missed them." The WTC becomes a consoling memory, and Man on Wire celebrates their most uplifting, poetic moment.

In the end, there can be little doubt that this film joins the ever-lengthening list of works about 9/11.

In that context, where does it stand? From the moment the planes vanished into the buildings, art and 9/11 have been locked in a passionate embrace. So passionate that, to some, they appear indistinguishable. On the first anniversary, Damien Hirst said: "The thing about 9/11 is that it's a kind of artwork in its own right. . . It was devised visually." And Karlheinz Stockhausen described the event as "the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos". Such remarks are stupid, even pathetic, on a number of levels, but primarily because they embody a primitive view of art. If 9/11 itself is art, then everybody else, Hirst and Stockhausen included, is wasting their time. No, the real issue is how 9/11 is made a subject for art.

Steven Spielberg once told me that it would be some years before the great 9/11 films were made. Yet he couldn't resist ending Munich, set in the early and mid-1970s, with a shot of the twin towers. War of the Worlds was a dark film about terrorism:the terrorists just happened to be aliens. The same is true of The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, which features once again the comic-book correlative of New York, Gotham City, and once again the terrorism of the Joker. In Cloverfield, New York is first terrorised by a monster, then bombed. Then there is I Am Legend, a rather limp Will Smith vehicle in which the population of New York has been killed or turned into zombies by a virus. All of these films might have been made anyway, but it seems pretty clear that their mood and their message — that our comforts and cherished ways of life are horrifically fragile — owes much to Al-Qaeda.

Such implicit 9/11 films are evidence of a phenomenon identified by the feminist Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. This is the American impulse to mythologise. She noticed that the way the British dealt with their own terrorist outrage, 7/7, was "pretty matter of fact". We reacted to a crime; the Americans reacted to the attacks as an aspect of a wider national narrative. For Faludi, the effect was to strengthen the macho-man myth; but, equally, it strengthened the myth of American exceptionalism. New York/Gotham is not just a city, it is the city; to attack it is to attack urban life everywhere.

Beyond the mythologising are the much more explicit works. Oliver Stone's World Trade Center took us inside the destruction as it was happening. There is a Michael Moore polemic, Fahrenheit 9/11, as well as countless other documentaries. The problem for all such works that attempt to confront 9/11 directly is that, as Spielberg implied, we are still too close. Art, like history, requires a certain blurring of the facts. When blinded by a bright light, you need to half close your eyes to see what is really going on — and, as yet, we can't quite do that with the burning towers. Apocalypse Now was probably not especially accurate about Vietnam, but it said something about that war that was both true and unsayable in any other way. Francis Ford Coppola's eyes were half closed when he made that movie.

Paul Greengrass's eyes were definitely half closed when he made United 93. He kept his focus solely on what happened to the hijacked flight that was brought down by a passenger revolt on 9/11. The other events of that day were included, but only to intensify the claustrophobic isolation of the people on Flight 93. All the efforts of those on the ground did nothing to ease their predicament.

Somewhere between myth and explicitness lies Don DeLillo's novel Falling Man, which also directly deals with the intimate anguish of the day. It doesn't work, because DeLillo is trapped by his own self-awareness. He even mocks the too instant reactions of the time, inventing a book that details "a series of interlocking global forces that appeared to converge at an explosive point in time and space. . .". And there is Joseph O'Neill's recent Netherland, in which he considers the fine line between seeing 9/11 as a grotesque one-off and as a rationally explicable event.

Neither can quite capture the experience.

Can anything? It is not that so many people died on 9/11, it is rather that the global implications are so vast. To say that Al-Qaeda did it for reasons one, two and three is to say almost nothing in the light of the utterly different world — a world of endless security checks, constant surveillance, torture and perpetual fear of nameless shadows — that we now inhabit. In such an overwhelming context, perhaps the best answer is to say nothing.

Which is precisely where Man on Wire comes in. It says nothing and, as a result, says a very great deal. Van Gogh painted boots or chairs that were, in fact, portraits of people who weren't there. Similarly, Marsh, through Petit, paints a picture of an event, 9/11, that doesn't happen.

"Death," says Petit of the moment he steps onto the wire, "is very close." But "what a beautiful death" it would be, not the despairing plummet of one of those jumpers from the burning towers. At every step, Marsh draws our attention to the redemptive power of Petit's walk. From the moment he sees the plan for the WTC, Petit sees it as the occasion of a wonderful dream. He does other walks while planning the project — between the west towers of Notre Dame and the pylons of Sydney Harbour Bridge — but they are trailers for the big feature.

The walk itself is a kind of rebuke to the spirit of the time. Petit blew Nixon off the front pages on the day before he resigned as a result of the Watergate investigations.

Furthermore, the essential gentleness of the man is in sharp contrast to the city itself. New York then was not the largely peaceful, civilised city it is now. Manhattan was a dangerous, brutal place, its inhabitants surviving under a cloud of drugs and violence. But such a place made absurd heroism possible.

Man on Wire is not unlike the television series Life on Mars, which also embodied nostalgia for a tougher time as a fertile ground for beauty. But it's not just the city and the 1970s. Comically, Petit is in contrast to America as a whole.

He is absurdly French, with his existential assertions — "Life should be lived on the edge of life" — and his dreamy, poetic evocations of the experience of wire-walking.

The funniest moments of the film are when this Frenchness interacts with the gruff empiricism of the city. He describes the way New Yorkers keep asking him why: "Why? Why? The beauty of it is, I didn't have any why!"

But the simple joy of seeing Petit from below — walking, kneeling and lying on the wire — transcends all other considerations. At those moments, he occupies a space that is no longer there, that seductive 140ft gap between the towers that I once dreamt of crossing.

The best 9/11 work of art so far? Quite possibly.

Man on Wire is released on Aug 1; www.bryanappleyard.com

2008/07/18

George Galloway speaks to the insanity of invading Iran

Many people seem not to realize how close the US and the UK are to attacking Iran. Another group who are vaguely aware of the potential seems to think it would be a good idea. George Galloway goes a good job of laying out the reality of what the latest malevolent plan by the Bush administration will mean for the world.