Deviation Actions
Description
I have heard many otherwise intelligent people tell me that the planes that were used in the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centers never existed. The September 11, 2001 events were caused by a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that ended up killing almost 3,000 people, caused at least $10 billion in property damage, and has ended up being the deadliest incident for firefighters and law enforcement officers in the history of the United States, with 343 firefighters and 72 law enforcement officers killed as an immediate result of the 9/11 attacks. * The latest figures show more than 2,500 police officers, firefighters, ambulance staff and sanitation workers reported they had cancer last year – twice as many as said they had the disease 12 months earlier. A separate count by the World Trade Center Health Program, which is run for police officers, construction workers, sanitation staff and other New York City employees and volunteers by Mount Sinai Hospital, said it had 1,655 patients with cancer out of 37,000 who worked at the site of the 9/11 attacks. *Reported by Rosa Prince, New York, 8/27/2014.
The idea of taking passenger airplanes and turning them into weapons of destruction had never been used before, so nobody on the ground or in the air was prepared for the attack. In relation to the violence of other countries that are attacked almost every day in never-ending war, 3,000 people dead does not seem so many. Yet, the fact that the USA does not get bombed on its own soil very often meant that the US population had no framework to help them begin to process and deal with such a loss.
On 9/11, my company was working on the exterior facade of a building directly across from the Pentagon when the plane hit it. The initial shock waves sent out by the plane crashing hard into the Pentagon's walls also put the swing-stage scaffold my long-time employees were using into “lock-mode” about 8 floors up from the ground. Rather than descend slowly by manual operation of the lift, they were so panicked that they quickly climbed the cables to the roof. My partner and I were working on ground level, but after the initial "hit", black thick smoke turned the day dark. Scents like burning rubber and worse wrapped everything and everybody in pervasive odoriferous clouds. We climbed up to the roof and just watched the Pentagon burn, enveloped in murky flames and taking photographs until we were stopped by suspicious onlookers.
.
It was chaos; people running everywhere, many in military uniforms, jumping into cars and crashing through the mechanical arms of the garages trying to get to their various destinations. But street after street was closed off by the police, so all of us just drove in circles hour after hour, with no working cell phones to check on loved ones or the outside world and the realization to many that they were of little importance that day, no matter what their military ranking. We all just hoped our gasoline would not run out, and listened, stunned, as the radio news released detail after detail of the attacks. I will never forget that day, and I will tell as many people as I can to believe the obvious, the planes existed, the attack plan worked almost as intended. I tell people that their time is better spent questioning the multitudinous losses of civil rights and privacy initiated by the US government, and a very long suspension or complete absence of the rights of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay to fair and speedy trials and due process of law. All of these changes and more stemmed from the events of 9/11/01.
12/30/14: I now must add that there were appalling methods of torture used on the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and I find this unforgivable and shameful as a citizen of the United States.
