Observing 9-11, Nevada County-Style

September 19, 2003  
by Michael Anderson

 

            I began to get a funny feeling right after Labor Day this year, and I couldn't pin it down until I saw the end of the new Robert Burns documentary on PBS about New York City--8 long episodes presented over a period of weeks--with the final episode devoted entirely to the history of the World Trade Center. That final episode began with the hubristic Rockefeller plans for lower Manhattan that came immediately after World War II and ended with the towers being destroyed on September 11, 2001. This was the episode I had stumbled upon, just a few days before the anniversary.

            That funny feeling turned out to be the realization that this terrible anniversary would repeat itself year after year, through my life and my children’s lives, and most likely through their children’s lives as well.

            I’m not really fond of that fact. The whole world certainly could have done without 9-11 having ever happened. The people of New York, especially those who suffered losses or were themselves murdered by this crime against humanity, are changed forever. Observing this from California was an odd mixture of feeling somehow more secure because the people who did this chose a target on the east coast rather than the west, and horrified that something like this could possibly have happened anywhere in the modern world. I’m a news junkie, and I started reading. I began to ask some very basic questions, military-type questions: 1) what happened to the civil defense--why were no fast-movers (combat-ready fighter jets) scrambled until it was way too late; and then, when the fast-movers just missed intercepting the hijacked planes in New York City, how come those same planes were not immediately dispatched to overtake the commercial aircraft that eventually crashed into the Pentagon and into a field in Pennsylvania)?, 2) why did George Bush (our Commander in Chief) read stories with 2^nd graders in a Florida elementary school during the first half hour that the towers were burning?, 3) why was Zacharias Moussaoui disregarded by so many intelligence agents in the days prior to 9-11?, 4) why did the unusual trading (put-options on UAL and AA) that took place on the New York Stock Exchange in the days prior to 9-11 not catch the attention of the NSA/CIA/FBI in time to order a heightened watch over our nation’s airports?, 5) in light of the fact that the debris field for Flight 93 covered 8 miles, what really happened to that airplane and why don’t we get to view the information from the flight data recorder (separate from the cockpit voice recorder, which also has a mysterious gap at the end)?

              Here in Nevada County, those who voted for Bush are trying hard not to be defensive about the Bush Administration. And they are good people. They hated Clinton, and I can’t say that I blame them too much. I wasn’t too fond of that guy myself (though I recognize his brilliance as a politician), and didn’t vote for him the second time around (voted Green instead). But when Bush decided to invade Iraq in the fall of 2002, people began to choose sides, and it got ugly, culminating in the ill-advised supervisor’s resolution that passed 3-2 in “support of our troops in Iraq,” as well as the Bush administration’s pre-emptive strike that sent them there. There were plenty of people on both sides who felt that this was not the purview of the Board of Supervisors. I am not one of those people. I felt the board should have passed an alternate resolution that would have read something like this:

  “Whereby the Nevada County Board of Supervisors wishes to go on record as being in opposition to any pre-emptive war against Iraq unless backed by a U.N. Resolution and engaged by a truly multi-lateral force, in recognition that our sons and daughters in uniform--whom we support wholeheartedly--should never be sent into battle without clear goals and objectives, with the costs fully known at the outset.”

                        Pretty simple actually. You would expect the same kind of consideration from the contractor you hired to do your remodel.

              Back to the local scene. There are signs that people from both sides want to build consensus rather than being at each others throats all the time. Starting with the changes at The Union...I know that some people feel that Jeff Ackerman is too far to the right, but I can see the balance that Richard Somerville provides and I think Mr. Ackerman has a lot to do with that. The recent attack against Mr. Ackerman, charging him with racism, was truly misguided. His analysis of urban sprawl was flawed, but not because he’s a racist. The Gary Snyder article, adjacent to Mr. Ackerman’s recent (and unnecessarily defensive) attempt to address his race-baiting critics, said it best: “what is the carrying capacity?” That was all that NH-2020 was about, that’s all the conversation about sprawl is about. Specific example: how the hell can an enlightened citizenry allow Amaral’s Deer Creek Park III come to fruition? It’s marked “Approved” in the General Plan. But what about roads? What about sewage? What about our way of life?

              Back to the world scene. There are many web sites to visit if you have not yet done the required reading on what really happened on 9-11; hundreds, if not thousands. The best place to start is www.unansweredquestions.org. There are links on the left side of the page at that site that will give you further information. Another good site is www.flight93crash.com, for you conspiracy buffs (-;

 

            Lastly, we have Kristen Breitweiser. If you do know who she is yet, you need to get familiar with her name. She is a 9-11 widow, she watched a plane crash into her husband’s office on live television just a few minutes after having talking to him on the phone when he reported that the problem was with the other tower. Go ahead, google her name; you will be reading for awhile. What really happened on 9-11-01? There are so many questions, and so far, very few answers.

            While we are getting those answers, don’t forget to give your neighbor a hug, regardless of her voting record. After all, you guys are neighbors, right?