.
People jumping to their death from World Trade Center, 9/11/2001. This
video was uploaded 2/12/2013. Total is about 8 minutes. Has ad you
can skip in :05. The first body you actually see falling is at about
1:54, more fall after that.
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Comment: The US ruling class of both political parties caused this (subhead, 'Whatever it takes'). The same group remains in charge today in 2013 and is still unwilling and unable to protect Americans from terrorism:
6/23/13, "The Ruling Class Consensus On Domestic Spying
From Barack Obama to Karl Rove, the ruling class is in unison: The
NSA’s collection of data on virtually all Americans is essential to
preventing you from “being blown to smithereens on your morning commute”
– as the Wall Street Journal editorial put it. ...
The US government’s vast apparatus is almost completely
useless against serious terrorists or criminals."...
---------------------------------
8/2/13, "FBI said to find it couldn't have stopped Boston attack," UPI
"The FBI has concluded it could not have prevented the deadly Boston Marathon bombings, law enforcement officials told The New York Times....
The bureau concluded the agents who told Russian intelligence agents
the FBI had no evidence Tsarnaev had become radicalized could not have
investigated more deeply anyway because federal laws and Justice
Department protocols prohibited it, the Times said.
Agents cannot use surveillance tools such as wiretapping for the type of investigation they were conducting, the newspaper said.
The FBI also concluded if U.S. agents had known Tsarnaev traveled to
Russia in 2012, they probably wouldn't have investigated him again in
any case because they had no new evidence he had become radicalized, the
law enforcement officials told the Times."...
10/20/11, "The lost decade," Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont
"America's current ruling class, the people who lost the War on Terror,
monopolizes the upper reaches of American public life, the ranks of
those who make foreign and domestic policy, including the leadership of
the Republican and Democratic parties. It is more or less homogeneous
socially and intellectually....
During the decade
that began on September 11, 2001, the U.S. government's combat
operations have resulted in some 6,000 Americans killed and 30,000
crippled, caused hundreds of thousands of foreign casualties, and
spent—depending on various estimates of direct and indirect
costs—somewhere between 2 and 3 trillion dollars. But nothing our rulers
did post-9/11 eliminated the threat from terrorists or made the world
significantly less dangerous. Rather, ever-bigger government imposed
unprecedented restrictions on the American people and became the arbiter
of prosperity for its cronies, as well as the manager of permanent
austerity for the rest. Although in 2001 many referred to the United
States as "the world's only superpower," ten years later the
near-universal perception of America is that of a nation declining,
perhaps irreversibly. This decade convinced a majority of Americans that
the future would be worse than the past and that there is nothing to be
done about it. This is the "new normal." How did this happen?
September
11's planners could hardly have imagined that their attacks might
seriously undermine what Americans had built over two centuries, what
millions of immigrants from the world over had come to join and
maintain. In fact, our decline happened because the War on Terror—albeit
microscopic in size and destructiveness as wars go—forced upon us, as
wars do, the most important questions that any society ever faces: Who
are we, and who are our enemies? What kind of peace do we want? What
does it take to get it? Are we able and willing to do what it takes to
secure our preferred way of life, to deserve living the way we prefer? Our bipartisan ruling class's dysfunctional responses to such questions inflicted the deepest wounds....
"Homeland security" grew into a quarter-trillion-dollar public-private
industry that changed life in America so quickly, with so little debate....Nothing could ever stop ten people in ten states from throwing flaming
gasoline bottles into ten school buses simultaneously, thus shutting
down the U.S. school system. But no one has done it. Homeland security
created closely packed lines of people in front of airport security
checkpoints—the perfect target for explosive-laden carry-on luggage. But
no one has attempted that, either, nor committed any of the other
outrages so obviously feasible and requiring so little skill and
organization. We don't know why not. In short, homeland security has
proven irrelevant to terrorism....
Whatever it takes...
Because the Bush Administration took CIA director George Tenet's snap
judgment that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible "game, set,
and match" for 9/11 as a warrant for identifying them with America's
terrorist problem in general, it failed to ask the classic headwaters
question: what is the problem? Had it done so, it might have noticed
that the 9/11 hijackers were part of a wave of deadly disrespect for
America that had been growing throughout the Muslim world—and not just
there—for a generation. Had the Bush team focused on the realities that
fed growing images of America as "the weak horse" (to use Osama bin
Laden's words), they would have had to consider who were the major
contributors to that disrespect, what they and their predecessors had
done to incur it, and then to decide what actions would restore it.
That
would have pointed to the Middle East's regimes, and to our ruling
class' relationship with them, as the problem's ultimate source. The
rulers of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian
Authority had run (and continue to run) educational and media systems
that demonize America. Under all of them, the Muslim Brotherhood or the
Wahhabi sect spread that message in religious terms to Muslims in the
West as well as at home. That message indicts America, among other
things, for being weak. And indeed, ever since the 1970s U.S. policy had
responded to acts of war and terrorism from the Muslim world by
absolving the regimes for their subjects' actions. For example, when
Yasser Arafat's PLO murdered U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel, our government
continued building friendly relations with Arafat, and romancing the
Saudi regime that was financing him. Since then the U.S. government has
given $2.5 billion to the PLO. Part of the reason was unwarranted hope,
part was fear, and part was the fact that many influential Americans
were making money in the Arab world....
Instead, by supposing that America's problem was a singular bunch of
renegades called al-Qaeda, supported only by a primitive band called the
Taliban, the Bush Administration began the War on Terror as in effect a
chase after wild geese. Even al-Qaeda, never mind countless other
terrorists, got principal support from glitzy Saudis rather than from
grizzled Afghans. The Afghan wild-goose chase was all the more
ridiculous because catching these geese could not fix America's
problems. Setting objectives other than the ones that rid you of your
problems is the biggest mistake anyone can make in war."...
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