ZERO : An Investigation into 9/11 Screening Soon In Japan

The Italian produced film ZERO: An Investigation into 9/11 (English with Japanese subtitles) will be screening from Sept 11th, 2010 to the 24th in Tokyo, Japan.

We are happy to announce that this will be the first 911 film to be shown at a regular mainstream theater in Japan.

The English website can be seen here:

http://zero.globalpeace.jp/english/index.htm

The official Japanese site is:

http://zero.9-11.jp

How did witnesses react in the moment to the phenomenon that we now call 9/11?

August 27, 2010
Online Video of 9/11
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
How did witnesses react in the moment to the phenomenon that we now call 9/11?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29FOB-medium-t.html

VIDEO Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/aaroman01#g/u
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lKZqqSI9-s  

In an online video montage called “September 11, 2001 — As It Happened — The South Tower Attack,” the voices say, “Oh, my God.” They say, “Oh, my goodness” and “Oh, my word” and “Terrible!”

In the time it takes to gasp, the voices build a narrative with world-historical implications. “Another plane has just hit another building,” one says, and “That definitely looked like it was on purpose.”

The video is now included in “Rhetoric of 9/11,” a special exhibition of the online speech archive American Rhetoric, an immersive site produced by Michael Eidenmuller, a rhetoric connoisseur and professor at the University of Texas at Tyler. The montage is billed as an excerpt from a hard-to-find DVD called “September 11, 2001 — As It Happened — A Composite”; it shows heavily edited clips mainly from telecasts that appeared in New York City from 9:02 to 9:03 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001.

Witnesses on location and in studios can be heard interpreting images of an explosion in Manhattan. The fact that the video represents an online excerpt of a film montage of digitally edited clips of television broadcasts of audio and video feeds means it’s almost pure art, editing and framing — a piece of rhetoric itself.

The witnesses’ off-the-cuff inferences about the day’s second plane crash are fascinating. So much new information — logistical, emotional, political — dawns on these off-guard brains at once. But they rise to meet the challenge. Watching “September 11, 2001 — As It Happened — The South Tower Attack,” which was uploaded in 2007, you can almost feel minds absorbing injury, cognitive immune systems springing into action and one of modern civilization’s master narratives being created.

At 9:02 newscasters are staring at video feeds of the still-erect twin towers. Shortly after a jetliner hit the north tower at 8:46, the channels have subbed live feeds of the smoking World Trade Center for their regular programming. Newscasters sound as if they are idling without enough new information.

And then something happens. Some feeds show a plane burrowing into the south tower and seeming to exit as a fireball. Other feeds just show the fireball. On every network some version of “Oh, my God” can be heard. But no one curses, wails or goes mute.

Newscasters who have the southern view up on their screens report that “a second plane” — which a WB11 newscaster mistakes precrash for “a police helicopter” — has hit the World Trade Center’s south tower. Charles Gibson on ABC seizes the story from an eyewitness reporter he has been debriefing and guns it: “You could see the plane come in, just from the right-hand side of the screen.” Gibson, who suddenly morphs from affable “Good Morning America” host to war reporter, locks down the story. “So this looks like it’s some kind of a concerted effort to attack the World Trade Center that is under way in downtown New York,” he says.

By contrast, the thoughts of Theresa Renaud, an eyewitness in a building at Eighth Avenue and 16th Street, go first to logistics. Speaking of the plane that just hit the south tower, Renaud says to Bryant Gumbel on CBS: “Flew right in the middle of it. Explosion. My God, it’s right in the middle of the building.” Then she skips a step and offers an inference: “That definitely looked like it was on purpose.”

What Gibson designates an “attack,” Pat Kiernan on NY1 deems “a dramatic development” and predicts, with characteristic understatement, “a serious evacuation.” On WNYW, the newscaster Jim Ryan is more expansive. With the clock still at 9:03, he delivers the risky if prescient verdict: “I think we have a terrorist act of proportions that we cannot begin to imagine at this juncture.”

The video on American Rhetoric also includes frightening close-range images of the second crash that weren’t broadcast at the time, notably a shot looking north at the south tower right above tree level. A stray piece of video plays over unconnected audio from NPR. The video-audio mismatch suggests the extent of the editing. This is a brief designed to remind us of what struck observers at the time as self-evident: that there is someone to blame and punish for the attacks of Sept. 11. After nine years of trying to figure out how to assign that blame, the eyewitness idea of “on purpose” now seems more complicated than ever.

YouTube-style montages and mash-ups have been an excellent tool for seeing and showing how rhetoric takes shape. Of course, these videos can themselves be polemical, and people use them to advance all kinds of tendentious theories. But even as the 9/11 conspiracy blogs seem to have moved on, the narrative of 9/11 — and especially the question of who is ultimately blameworthy and what retribution and prevention would or should look like — is still contested, as the recent debates over a proposed Islamic center near the site of the attacks in Manhattan make clear.

Is it possible that after nine years we still can’t do much better than describe that 2001 tragedy as having “proportions that we cannot begin to imagine”?

POINTS OF ENTRY: THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDATIONS

PIECES WITHOUT PUZZLES
It’s a weird conceit of YouTube: call it the simulated fragment. Videos present themselves as excerpts of films, when the actual films can’t be found. “September 11, 2001 — As It Happened — A Composite” may or may not have been distributed as a film about Sept. 11, but self-styled excerpts are all over YouTube. Search by “September 11, 2001 — As It Happened.”

FOUR SCORE AND D’OH
Jay Heinrichs, the author of “Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion,” keeps a blog about rhetoric at figarospeech.com.

ELEGY
After Sept. 11, The Times published capsules of those who died in the attacks. Archived under “Portraits of Grief” on nytimes.com.

New DVD Released: “9/11 Revisited: Ethical and Scientific Questions”
With permission of Utah State Valley College, we are proud to offer Professor Jones’ lecture entitled, “9/11 Revisited: Ethical and Scientific Questions” on DVD! The lecture, presented at UVSC on February 1, 2006, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Ethics, addresses Jones’ scientific research into the possibility that pre-planted explosives toppled the World [...]

With permission of Utah State Valley College, we are proud to offer Professor Jones’ lecture entitled, “9/11 Revisited: Ethical and Scientific Questions” on DVD! The lecture, presented at UVSC on February 1, 2006, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Ethics, addresses Jones’ scientific research into the possibility that pre-planted explosives toppled the World Trade Center towers as opposed to the widely-held belief that airplane crashes and fire triggered the

collapses.

This 2 hour DVD, edited by the UVSC Media Engineering and Production Department, is the same high quality production offered by UVSC. (This includes the powerpoint presentation). A portion of the sales from this DVD go to UVSC

CONTACT:

John Gannon

johngannon@mac.com

Connect The Dots LLC

NYC CAN World Video Premiere on The Alex Jones Show Today

Infowars.com
August 26, 2010

After much anticipation, an advertisement featuring footage of Building 7’s collapse, soon to be seen on TV screens all over New York City, will be unveiled on Prison Planet TV!

The “BuildingWhat?” TV Advertising Campaign is a movement-wide effort to blanket New York City with TV ads in the second half of September featuring footage of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. The campaign is cosponsored by David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage, Niels Harrit, Kevin Ryan, Bob McIlvaine, Manny Badillo, and several other leaders and organizations. The campaign seeks to raise $500,000 in order to expose over one million New Yorkers to footage of Building 7’s collapse.

The reason why the mainstream media won’t air footage of Building 7 is quite simple – because that footage is the “Zapruder film of 9/11.” On the evening of March 6, 1975 more than 11 years after the assassination of JFK, the Zapruder film was aired publicly for the first time ever, allowing millions of Americans to see with their own eyes the brutal tragedy that had unfolded a decade earlier on a sunny afternoon in Dallas. A few seconds of footage refuting the fairytale of a lone gunman changed the way a people thought about the event of their generation, and public outcry led to a new congressional investigation.

Today Building 7 gives us that same opportunity. When a judge in a New York City courtroom says, “Building WHAT?” in response to hearing the words “Building 7”, it tells us just how well Building 7 has been hidden from public view. But two weeks of TV ads can begin to change everything. For months the New York City Council and Manhattan DA have been educated about the collapse of Building 7. It is now time to raise public awareness so that a handful of courageous officials will have the public support they need to stand up and demand the truth.

Tune in today to see this ground-breaking ad aired publicly for the first time ever, and please consider donating at http://BuildingWhat.org to ensure it is seen by one million New Yorkers.

Neocon architect says: ‘Pull it down’
Alex Massiein, Washington, D.C. NEOCONSERVATISM has failed the United States and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy agenda, according to one of its prime architects. Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political [...]

Alex Massiein, Washington, D.C.

NEOCONSERVATISM has failed the United States and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy agenda, according to one of its prime architects.

Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political symbol and a body of thought, it has “evolved into something I can no longer support”. He says it should be discarded on to history’s pile of discredited ideologies.

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=266122006

PNAC letter to President Clinton…

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

Neocon architect says: ‘Pull it down’
Alex Massiein, Washington, D.C. NEOCONSERVATISM has failed the United States and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy agenda, according to one of its prime architects. Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political [...]

Alex Massiein, Washington, D.C.

NEOCONSERVATISM has failed the United States and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy agenda, according to one of its prime architects.

Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political symbol and a body of thought, it has “evolved into something I can no longer support”. He says it should be discarded on to history’s pile of discredited ideologies.

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=266122006

PNAC letter to President Clinton…

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

Grayson slams mosque ‘distraction’: Talk about admin that ‘let’ 9/11 happen instead

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0821/grayson-slams-mosque-debate-talk-bush-l…

By Stephen C. Webster
Saturday, August 21st, 2010

The debate over a planned Islamic community center several blocks from New York City’s World Trade Center site is a “distraction,” according to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL).

Instead, the debate should shift in focus to an examination of the administration which “let it happen.”

‘It,’ of course, being the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The remark was made during a Friday appearance on MSNBC’s The Ed Show with former liberal talk radio host Ed Schultz.

“If we are going to talk about 9/11, why don’t we talk about how not so much the people who died on 9/11 were disgraced by the possibility of an Islamic athletic center several blocks away; how about the fact that they were disgraced by a president who let it happen?” he asked. “Who went on vacation for the entire month of August after he was warned in writing that Osama bin Laden was actually finding targets in NYC and learning how to take these planes and do terrible things with them? The thing itself said ‘hijacking’ and they did nothing about it.”

He called talk of the Islamic community center mere “distraction” from real issues facing Americans.

Unanswered questions

In its report on the devastating attacks, the 9/11 Commission wrote:

[President Bush] did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether Rice had done so. We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. …Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period. Domestic agencies did not know what to do, and no one gave them direction. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI’s efforts. The public was not warned.

In 2008, Philip Shenon, who covered the 9/11 Commission proceedings for the New York Times, published a book called, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, in which he revealed the uncomfortably close ties between the commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, and Bush advisers Karl Rove and Condoleezza Rice.

The following year it was revealed that the commission’s crucial chapters, detailing the planning and execution of the attacks, was sourced namely on information obtained through torture.

9/11 Commission members Thomas Kean and Lee H. Hamilton wrote that although US President George W. Bush had ordered all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the probe, “recent revelations that the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot.”

“Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.”

They continued: “There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the CIA — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot.

“Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations,” Kean and Hamilton wrote.

Just four days ago, two tapes that were supposedly destroyed, depicting the interrogations of a Sept. 11 suspect, were discovered under a desk at the CIA. Dozens of other tapes that captured the waterboarding and torture of other prisoners were allegedly destroyed.

In a telephone survey of 1200 individuals, just 47% agreed that “the 9/11 attacks were thoroughly investigated and that any speculation about US government involvement is nonsense.” Almost as many, 45%, indicated they were more likely to agree “that so many unanswered questions about 9/11 remain that Congress or an International Tribunal should re-investigate the attacks, including whether any US government officials consciously allowed or helped facilitate their success.”

This video is from MSNBC’s The Ed Show, as snipped by Mediaite.

With additional reporting by RAW STORY.

Obama comes out in favor of 9/11 health bill

Obama comes out in favor of 9/11 health bill

By Samuel Goldsmith and Richard Sisk
DAILY NEWS

WASHINGTON — In a breakthrough for first responders, President Obama broke his silence on the Zadroga bill Wednesday and backed the uphill drive to get the legislation through Congress.

A statment from the White House said that “The President looks forward to signing the 9/11 health bill into law, once it passes both houses of Congress, to help the first responders whose health and livelihood were devastated by the events of Sept. 11.”

Elated first responders said it was the first show of support from Obama since the presidential campaign and boosted the chances for bringing the bill to another vote in the House next month. A previous effort failed late last month.

Obama’s statement came a day after he was slammed in a letter by John Feal, head of a first responder advocacy group, that was featured in the Daily News. “Why have you failed us? We thought you were our champion,” Feal wrote.

“It was The Daily News that got this done,” Feal said of Obama’s backing. “We’re very encouraged. I think it’s great that he (Obama) says he’ll help,” Feal said, “but will he actively push both houses (of Congress) to pass our bill? We’ll see.”

The proposed $7.4 billion named for the late Det. James Zadroga would provide health care and compensation for the thousands suffering from a wide range of illnesses they attriute to working at Ground Zero after the attacks.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Joseph Zadroga, the father of James Zadroga, said of Obama’s support. “He (Obama) originally said he was going to support it before he got elected and then we never heard anything about it again.”

“Now we need to get Congress to do their part and we’re ready to go,” Zadroga said.