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I had been closely following the saga of James Kim. I was greatly saddened when I read that they had found his body. So sad, best wishes to his family.

You may have heard of the case of the six Imams but what you probably haven't heard is the reports from some of the passengers, check out the followup story from Pajamas Media. According to Pajamas Media a number of the passengers on the plane made repeated complaints including one Arabic speaking passenger who said they were invoking “bin Laden” and condemning America for “killing Saddam.” Another strange event was that the Imams prayed at the gate and then at the plane and observant Muslims are only supposed to pray once at sundown and not twice. Certainly, expressing dissatisfaction with the US is a time honored tradition, but given the amount of "strangeness" the pilots were well within their right to take the actions they took. Another gem, Pauline, apparently a passenger on that flight said “I think it was either a foiled attempt to take over the plane or it was a publicity stunt to accuse us of being insensitive. It had to be to intimidate U.S. Airways to ease up on security.” Even more disturbing is that Omar Shahin, one of the six Imams, apparently has ties to a terrorist fundraising organization called Kind Hearts for Charitable Human Development. According to a Sept 28, 2001 article, Shahin and Saadeddin expressed doubt that Muslims were responsible for the Sept. 11 attack. They also said they don't trust much of what the FBI has divulged - including the hijackers' identities. The very same Shahin, rather interesting.

What were these men up to? Why the strange behaviour? Was it a publicity stunt or an attempted hijacking? My guess is the former. Wonder why this story isn't getting more play in the traditional media, chalk another one up to citizen journalism. 

UPDATE: Pajamas Media just put up the letter from the passenger, Pauline, and the Police Report. Something smells really rotten. 

Ran across a wonderful post on the interesting people mailing list. Ted Nelson, the legend himself , writes of his latest experience going through airport security. I quote for those too engaged to click on over:

Hi Dave–

Last week I went through security at Newark.  I had just put
  my carry-on, pocket stuff, laptop and shoes on the belt
  and was standing in stocking feet waiting to go through
  the metal detection arch.  A dozen people were in line
  for the arch ahead of me.

I looked down.  There was a bin full of discarded bottles.
  Most, but not all, were plastic.

I espied a long, thin bottle of dark fluid.  "Tawny Port,"
  it said, "20 years old."  Unopened.

I picked it up.  Nobody cared.

I opened the plastic.  Nobody cared.

I uncorked it.  Nobody cared.

I took a fine, heady draught of very very nice port.

Other passengers were curious but declined to share it
  with me.

Regretfully I put it back in the bin and strode through
  the arch, feeling for once that I had not been violated,
  but elevated, by the Security Experience.

Maybe that's the solution to make some of the homeland security restrictions more palatable.

The upper east side is a complete zoo, seems as though a small plane hit an apartment building on 72nd St and York Ave, Police & Fire responding like champs as usual. Yankee's pitcher Cory Lidle was on the plane and thought to have been the pilot. 

I remember Sept 11th like it was just yesterday. I was supposed to be at a meeting near the World Trade Center that morning around 10. A meeting in Stamford, CT went longer than expected and I had to miss that meeting. I still remember a co-worker interrupting the meeting to tell us that the Towers had been hit. It took quite some time for me to get back into NYC. When I did get back a friend and I walked down to the towers to volunteer. I'll leave my story at that.

Take a few moments today to remember those lost souls, friends, co-workers, family, and strangers who were lost.

Here are some more heart wrenching pictures of 9/11.

Particularly heartbreaking is the story of Bill Biggart as well as his pictures.

Fascinating reading over at: http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_2607.shtml

Recently Frontline had and episode titled Tankman. The episode explored the question of what ever happened to the man who stood in front of a tank during the protests in Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989. Go see it over at the PBS website at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/view/ and marvel that great TV still gets made.

A fascinating little piece by Victor David Hanson, classicist and author of such works as Ripples of the Battle and A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, over at the National Review. Hanson’s basic thesis is that Iran and Iran’s president (& indeed many in the third world) fundamentally miscalculate the ability of the west (& the US in particular) to rise and meet the challenge posed by those who dare to cross the line. Hanson writes:

Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, “Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live.” The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it. But what the Iranians, like the al Qaedists, do not fully fathom, is that Jason, upon concluding that he would lose not only his iPod and earring, but his entire family and suburb as well, is capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 8th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough.

I simply love that paragraph. Read it again and digest what it says. Look at history, during the last century far too many barbaric brutal dictators made the same mistake and miscalculated the ability of the west to meet the challenge. For all our problems I don’t believe the west has anything to fear, we are inevitably sliding into a world where many more billions are going to be tormented by trying to decide which iPod to buy. And if you ask me that is far better than any alternative offered by any petty third world dictator.

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Foreign Affairs presents some the most insightful analysis of the geopolitical picture of any magazine. I frequently spend hours browsing its archive to find some incredible nuggets like Condoleezza Rice’s Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest. Once again Foreign Affairs has a piece that is a must read: Saddam’s Delusions: The View from the Inside.

It presents an inner view based on interviews with the key people and on what was found on the ground in Iraq.

Some highlights:

According to Aziz, Saddam’s confidence was firmly rooted in his belief in the nexus between the economic interests of France and Russia and his own strategic goals: "France and Russia each secured millions of dollars worth of trade and service contracts in Iraq, with the implied understanding that their political posture with regard to sanctions on Iraq would be pro-Iraqi. In addition, the French wanted sanctions lifted to safeguard their trade and service contracts in Iraq. Moreover, they wanted to prove their importance in the world as members of the Security Council — that they could use their veto to show they still had power."

Wow, talk about powerful and thought-provoking. Perhaps that gives new insight into what has happened the past few years with our "allies". It is unconscionable that there hasn’t been more discussion on this in traditional news media.

A question I have often wondered about is why so much of the infrastructure was not destroyed by the Iraqi army, now the answer is clear:

Even with U.S. tanks crossing the Iraqi border, an internal revolt remained Saddam’s biggest fear. In order to quell any postwar revolt, he would need the bridges to remain intact and the land in the south to remain unflooded. On this basis, Saddam planned his moves.

Another gems indeed. How is this for believing your own bs:

Americans may have listened with amusement to the seemingly obvious fabrications of Muhammad Said al-Sahaf, Iraq’s information minister (nicknamed "Baghdad Bob" by the media). But the evidence now clearly shows that Saddam and those around him believed virtually every word issued by their own propaganda machine.

Why wasn’t Saddam more forthcoming on WMDs? The author’s cite two primary reasons, Saddam had a fear that Israel would attack if they knew that he definitively didn’t have WMD, and secondly, the notion that Iraq *may* have WMDs played very well in the Arab street. America was also duped, after a "decade of deceit" when Saddam came clean and tried to comply America wouldn’t believe him.

How is it possible Saddam believed so strongly that he could win against the onslaught of the United States military? Saddam was blatantly lied to by his most trusted advisors about the true state of the Iraqi military. Saddam’s brutality was to be the source of his eventual downfall as his advisors so strongly feared for their lives that they couldn’t tell him the truth.

Saddam had a particularly interesting way of selecting the "leaders" in his regime. He wanted them to be as closely related to him as possible, too stupid to ever come up with a plan to overthrow him, and finally too cowardly to ever participate in such a plot.

Did Saddam purposefully lay the foundation for the insurgents that plague American forces now? The article doesn’t really make a case for it.

A highly recommended read…