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The full experience of going to, and coming from the World Trade Center in pictures in chronological order: framerate.net.

Background: The Counterterrorist Myth

Michael Moore speaks about the recent events in the US:

When the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the CIA trained him and his buddies in how to commits acts of terrorism against the Soviet forces. It worked! The Soviets turned and ran. Bin Laden was grateful for what we taught him and thought it might be fun to use those same techniques against us.

We abhor terrorism — unless we’re the ones doing the terrorizing.

We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who killed over 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. Thirty thousand murdered civilians and who the hell even remembers!

We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of innocent people, and we never let the human suffering THAT causes to interrupt our day one single bit. We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the world, with our taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador) that I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised when those orphans grow up and are a little whacked in the head from the horror we have helped cause.

I’m not sure whether I should be linking to this. It’s an article from The Guardian – a comment piece – called They can’t see why they are hated. It’s about the reaction to the events in New York and Washington from everyday Americans, who are viewing it as an attack by faceless madmen. The article goes into details about the way that the American government has treated much of the developing world and the Middle East – and how (particularly in Afghanistan) the very same people that they are now blaming for the attack were trained by the CIA. America has to look to its actions abroad and decide how it wants to interact with the world. If it doesn’t then we will have learnt nothing from this whole catastrophe.

What you see above is a syndicated piece of code that will carry the latest news about the disaster at the WRC and Pentagon, as well as help people support the relief efforts. Many of us don’t really know what to write about at the moment – well this is a step in the right direction. There’s a team of volunteers finding appropriate news stories behind the scenes and it seems like a good idea to just stick it up on one’s site for at least a week after the events. It’s a simple piece of code to insert into your pages – and I’d ask you to do it, please.

The next few days are going to be critical. Make sure you don’t get caught up in the hysteria. Let your head make the decisions for you and try and feel comfortable going against the tide. Attacks on civil liberties are already being made on the basis of security. This must not be allowed to continue. Privacy (from surveillance, and to use cryptography) remain fundamental to online freedom, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise… There is no good reason for taking away our right to privacy.

Donate on the Amazon Red Cross Disaster Relief Page.

Today’s newspaper front pages: UK: From the guardian’s website, all the front pages in one place. US: From poynter.org: a collation of the American press’ Front Pages.

The first piece comes through to Barbelith: The World Trade Center:”I don’t think I will ever be able to forget how that felt – when that first tower fell, I swear that I could feel the lives of those people disappearing… Most of the day, I just felt hollow and empty, and frightened about how the world was going to change.” Matthew Perpetua is in New York.

I’ve temporarily started a dedicated forum on Barbelith for people who want to talk about New York and Washington that also collates all the posts to date.