The Face of Terrorism

Look Ma, Terrorists.
No dear they are homeless
Yeah ma, thats what they want you to think, the guy with the beard is obviously Ben Laden.
No dear, they are poor, out of work, homeless people.
Ya ma and poverty leads to terrorism.
Now dear be nice, and just ignore them.
Ma I am going to have to report you to Homeland Security,
for showing sympathy with our enemies.


Homeless security? U.S. warned of terrorists in disguise
Washington — Asking for increased vigilance in the wake of the London bombings, the government is warning that terrorists may pose as vagrants to conduct surveillance of buildings and mass transit stations to plot future attacks.

“In light of the recent bombings in London, it is crucial that police, fire and emergency medical personnel take notice of their surroundings, and be aware of ‘vagrants' who seem out of place or unfamiliar,” said the message, distributed via e-mail to some federal employees in Washington by the U.S. Attorney's office.

It is based on a State Department report that was issued last week. The State Department had no immediate comment Monday.

The warning is similar to one issued by the FBI before July 4, 2004, that said terrorists may attempt surveillance disguised as homeless people, shoe shiners, street vendors or street sweepers.

The Republican Administration in the US knows that in order to continue with it's fictional war on terrorism it must continue to make its citizens fearful and paranoid.

Hello American Citizens, wake up, it's not a bad dream. Yes you were attacked on your own soil, but the Bush administration was already preparing to go to war. The horryfiying reality is that you would still be in a war in Iraq regardless of 9/11. That was the Bush plan all along.

There is no war on terror, there is only the Bush war. Its an economic plan to keep America armed and dangerous, so as to maintain your hegemony in the world economy. Since Viet Nam, America has relied on its military expansion to use up its surplus value and to create new capital. You need foriegn wars not to keep America safe from terrorism, but from an economic collapse. A Permanent Arms Economy by Michael Kidron

Which reminds me that my favorite SF author Samuel R. Delaney, wrote the Fall of The Towers between 1963 and 1965 as a trilogy. (The Fall of the Towers (Bantam Spectra 0-553-25648-3, Feb ’86 [Jan ’86], $4.95, 401pp, pb) [Fall of the Towers] Reissue (Ace 1970) omnibus edition of the sf trilogy Out of the Dead City (Ace 1963), The Towers of Toron (Ace 1964), and City of a Thousand Suns (Ace 1965).)

It was NOT about the WTC Towers, they hadn't been built yet.

Nope it was an allegory on Vietnam. It was about an interplanetary war that didn't exist except in minds of its victims and the computers who controled their virtual war reality. It was the society of Tornor's ruling class way of keeping its economy booming, by a continual war against an unknown enemy, and keeping the big lie secret from it's citizens.

The protagonists of the novels are young anarchist nihilist beat poets who graffiti the streets with the slogan; "There is No War!"

A message that would serve American's well now.

SAMUEL RAY DELANY, JR. (b. April 1, 1942, New York, N.Y., U.S.), African-American critic and science-fiction novelist whose highly imaginative works address racial and social issues, heroic quests, and the nature of language.

Delany attended the Bronx High School of Science, and in the early 1960s, City College of New York (now City University of New York). His first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, was was written when he was nineteen and published in 1962. His subsequent trilogy, The Fall of the Towers, was completed while he was still twenty-one.



Gee mom he looks like one of those homeless terrorists.
Aw shut up, George


Big Apple Redux:
An Interview with Marshall Berman Tony Monchinski

T.M.: Besides the enormous human toll, here in New York City we no longer have our Twin Towers. In the November 2001 final edition of Lingua Franca you have an article entitled, "When Bad Buildings Happen to Good People." Like yourself, I'm a native New Yorker, albeit one with fewer years under his belt. For me, the Twin Towers always were: they were natural and normal, a part of the city as if they had always been. In Lingua Franca you describe the Towers as "expressions of an urbanism that disdained the city and its people." Please explain.

M.B.: If you contrast the World Trade Center with the skyscrapers in New York that were most prominent before them, the Chrysler and the Empire State Buildings, these building were on the streets, part of a total system, in the middle of life. The World Trade Center isolated itself from the city in very elaborate ways. It was hard to get to, it was hard to use. They had enormous expansives of space, but it was a lousy public space. In some ways they didn't want the rest of us there. Even before September 11th, it had its own forms of security clearance and it gave off hostility.

That's interesting, because just to the south of the World Trade Center, the Battery Park City Complex, which was built in roughly the same way through the Public Authority, was infinitely more user-friendly. Every weekend for most of the year, the parks, the Strand, the museums and restaurants that grew out of Battery Park City were jammed. People would use one or more of those, but to get to the subway to go home one would have to pass through the World Trade Center. And there it was like a ghost-town: you passed from this overflowing, full site to one that was empty.

From everything I heard, the Port Authority wanted it that way. Their idea of safety involved repelling the people. The slab shape of the Towers and their isolation grew out of an aesthetic voiced best by Le Corbusier, who said that in order to have modern planning we have to "kill the streets." For him the street epitomized disorder and chaos. The idea was to create some other system that repelled the city street. I think that this was one of the greatest mistakes made all over the world.

There is some fear of the city that plays an important role in 20th century culture. It created an endless series of completely sterile and empty gigantic spaces all over the world. There are certain types of stereotyped buildings that people eventually came to see as dreadful. But maybe they had to experience them and live with them before they could see what was wrong. That said, after the World Trade Center got bombed it made me and many other people feel more sympathy for it. Like us, it was vulnerable.