btw, it was a catastrophe.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Sep 11 2007 13:22 utc | 4

Ah Bea, the confused reference to 1973 would be a deliberate literary ploy . And quite clever. September 11, 1973, eh?
Shades of Billmon in your style there, b.

Posted by: DM | Sep 11 2007 13:43 utc | 6

chile, as john pilger points out rather exactly – is in a worse condition – for the poor today – than it was before allande
as in the west – the inequalities between those who have & those who dont has become larger
but the statistics for the marginalised dissapear in all the selfcongratulary accounts of this or that country’s ‘renewal’, or ‘march to liberty’ or whatever fucking fraudalent phrase that falls out of their mouths
chile, one of the most beautiful countries of latin america has been permanantly crippled by both the coup, the dictatorship & then the disastrous workings of friedman & his chicago school
i don’t know if someone can link to the last speech of allende at la moneda but it posssesses a dignity & humanity that those pumped up pantins in the west & their minions elsewhere are completely incapable of uttering
the lessons of chile are clear – smash the beuracracy smash the army & arm the people

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 11 2007 13:49 utc | 8

Red, white and blue
gaze at your looking glass
you’re not a child anymore

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 11 2007 14:23 utc | 10

allende – last words, sept 11, 1973 (translation)

Surely, this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the antennas of Radio Magallanes. My words do not have bitterness but disappointment. May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath: soldiers of Chile, titular commanders in chief, Admiral Merino, who has designated himself Commander of the Navy, and Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government, and who also has appointed himself Chief of the Carabineros [paramilitary police]. Given these facts, the only thing left for me is to say to workers: I am not going to resign!
Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever. They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.
Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty that you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice, who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and did just that. At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by Commander Araya, victims of the same social sector who today are hoping, with foreign assistance, to re-conquer the power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.
I address you, above all, the modest woman of our land, the campesina who believed in us, the mother who knew our concern for children. I address professionals of Chile, patriotic professionals who continued working against the sedition that was supported by professional associations, classist associations that also defended the advantages of capitalist society.
I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has been already present for many hours — in terrorist attacks, blowing up the bridges, cutting the railroad tracks, destroying the oil and gas pipelines, in the face of the silence of those who had the obligation to act.
They were committed. History will judge them.
Surely, Radio Magallanes will be silenced, and the calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to his country.
The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.
Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Keep in mind that, much sooner than later, great avenues will again be opened, through which will pass the free man, to construct a better society.
Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!
These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.

orig mp3 audio en espanol aqui

Posted by: b real | Sep 11 2007 14:34 utc | 12

btw, excellent post b!

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 11 2007 14:49 utc | 14

Perhaps you can listen to catlady’s wonderful musical post while browsing this photoset:Chile, Resistance to Dictatorship and Triumph. Hopefully one day we can be like our brothers and sisters to the South.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 11 2007 15:25 utc | 16

b
on this day – inside the chaos – i am overjoyed that you have highlighted this september 11th. this day i will remember till the day i die. paradoxically, it was in the week following the events – i became aware that the chinese embassies in santiago & vaplaraiso refused to allow people to seek refuge & in the imbecile way the chinese were calling the soviet union – the principal threat – therefore it was ok to eliminate allende – disgusted me. perhaps chile helped to humanise a politics that had become too dogmatic & too muck like a baton
chile took the blinds off the eyes of many people. it was the most obvious illustration of how the u s empire operated – would be an indicator of how it would go further down this terrorist path
just something paranthetic – that dusgusting piece of shit oliver north who tried to parade himself like some fanatic gary cooper – reminds me of this toy soldier who is barking before the congressional committee – petraeus

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 11 2007 16:13 utc | 18

very succinct b, in a nutshell the enduring american program of silent (& not so silent) hegemony in the name of freedom and democracy. A travesty.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 11 2007 16:58 utc | 20

Just a note. I was working in the vicinity of the Pentagon this morning. There was a huge flag draped above the section that was hit. It seems like there are police cars at every corner today.
Can we ever turn this nightmare around? fwiw, I called both of my senators after we got rained out. Will be back on Saturday for the march, rain or shine.

Posted by: beq | Sep 11 2007 18:36 utc | 22

Can we turn this nightmare around? Our media don’t give us any reason for optimism. They don’t unmask Friedman’s economics & the Predators Rules based upon them that continue to be “negotiated”, except in rare moments, they don’t expose 911 as the false flag operation close to 50% of Am. understand it to be, they don’t focus on the importance of the Commons, etc.
Amy Goodman today features some Idiot on “Why Am. is Losing the WoT”.
Republicans are more of top of it than that. Case in point – Lt. Col. (ret.) Karen Kwiatkowsky. Very Conservative Catholic Libertarian, Ivan Illych(sp?) type politics. We know she’s an observer of reliability, integrity, reason, cautious, not given to impulsive overstatement of the facts of the case. Did you also know that on 911, she not only worked for the Pentagon, but AT the Pentagon. AND that she arrived on relevant section of lawn a few minutes after the crash?
I didn’t until last week. Yes, we know that the WTC could only have collapsed in its own footprint at freefall speed via controlled demolition, but I hadn’t read anyone I respected challenge the accounts of the Pentagon events. And, beyond a certain point, I’m not sure I wanted them to be challenged.
However, the time has come, now that Col K has spoken out, to let more 911 illusions fall by the wayside. Here is her account:
“I believe the Commission failed to deeply examine the topic at hand, failed to apply scientific rigor to its assessment of events leading up to and including 9/11, failed to produce a believable and unbiased summary of what happened, failed to fully examine why it happened, and even failed to include a set of unanswered questions for future research. …
It is as a scientist that I have the most trouble with the official government conspiracy theory, mainly because it does not satisfy the rules of probability or physics.  The collapses of the World Trade Center buildings clearly violate the laws of probability and physics. …
There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked [Pentagon] lawn, where I stood only minutes after the impact.  Beyond this strange absence of airliner debris, there was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner. This visible evidence or lack thereof may also have been apparent to the secretary of defense [Donald Rumsfeld], who in an unfortunate slip of the tongue referred to the aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon as a “missile”. …
I saw nothing of significance at the point of impact – no airplane metal or cargo debris was blowing on the lawn in front of the damaged building as smoke billowed from within the Pentagon. … all of us staring at the Pentagon that morning were indeed looking for such debris, but what we expected to see was not evident.
The same is true with regard to the kind of damage we expected. … But I did not see this kind of damage. Rather, the facade had a rather small hole, no larger than 20 feet in diameter. Although this facade later collapsed, it remained standing for 30 or 40 minutes, with the roof line remaining relatively straight. 
The scene, in short, was not what I would have expected from a strike by a large jetliner. It was, however, exactly what one would expect if a missile had struck the Pentagon. …
.More information is certainly needed regarding the events of 9/11 and the events leading up to that terrible day.”link
But why wouldn’t there be debris from a missile, just different debris?

Posted by: jj | Sep 11 2007 20:30 utc | 24

Thanks jj.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 11 2007 21:53 utc | 26

@bea well I was trying not to plug the site too shamelessly 🙂 old addr http://www.stangoff.com, new addr http://www.feralscholar.org, either will work. but the banner quote is randomised so it may take a few visits before you see b’s pithy remark come up 🙂

Posted by: DeAnander | Sep 11 2007 22:09 utc | 28

waaaay at the bottom of jj’s link:

Lee Hamilton, Vice Chairman, 9/11 Commission – Former 17-term Congressman from Indiana. Former Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Currently President and Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and serves as a member of the President’s Homeland Security Advisory Council.
CBC video interview transcript regarding Without Precedent a book about the 9/11 Commission authored by Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice-Chairman Lee Hamilton 8/21/06:
Lee Hamilton: I don’t believe for a minute that we got everything right. We wrote a first draft of history. … People will be investigating 9/11 for the next hundred years in this country, and they’re going to find out some things that we missed here.
Evan Solomon: The first chapter of the book is ‘the Commission was set up to fail.’ … Why do you think you were set up to fail?
Hamilton: Well, for a number of reasons: … we got started late; we had a very short time frame – indeed, we had to get it extended; we did not have enough money – 3 million dollars to conduct an extensive investigation. We needed more, we got more, but it took us a while to get it. …
We had a lot of people strongly opposed to what we did. We had a lot of trouble getting access to documents and to people. … So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail. …
Solomon: I guess the question is, you know, if forty odd million dollars were spent investigating President Bill Clinton’s sexual infidelities, why did the American people and the world have to wait 441 days for a commission [to begin its work] that was originally budgeted for 3 million dollars and given barely a year [to complete the investigation]?
Hamilton: I think basically it’s because they were afraid we were going to hang somebody, that we would point the finger, right in the middle of a presidential campaign – ‘Mr. Bush, this was your fault’ …” http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/911hamilton.html
Editor’s note: Ultimately, the budget for the 9/11 Commission was increased to $12 million and they were given 18 months to complete the investigation and issue their report. In comparison, $20 million was spent on the independent Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s investigation of the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster, in which 7 astronauts were killed. This amount does not include an estimated $300 million spent on debris recovery of the space shuttle, nor tens of millions spent by NASA in support of the investigation. http://www.ksc.nasa.gov

Posted by: beq | Sep 11 2007 22:44 utc | 30

I’d recommend Isabel Allende’s ‘House of the Spirits’ to anyone who hasn’t read it and has an interest in Chile. Fictional, but with a lot of real history embedded.

Posted by: mikefromtexas | Sep 12 2007 0:07 utc | 32

Other 911’s:

September 11ths around the world — on Sept 11 1973, US-backed Pinochet forces rose to power in Chile to overthrow the democratically-elected Salvador Allende and Allende died in the presidential palace. On Sept 11 1990, American anthropologist Myrna Mack was murdered by US-backed Guatamalan security forces. On September 11, 1977 in South Africa Steve Biko, founder of the black consciousness movement, was being beaten in the back of a van by apartheid forces. He died in the early morning hours of Sept. 12, 1977. On 9/11 1993, in the midst of the US-backed coup in Haiti, Antoine Azenery was dragged out of a church by coup forces and murdered in broad-daylight. He had been commemorating a massacre of parishioners at the Saint John Boscoe church that had occurred five years earlier on September 11, 1988. Father Jean Bertrand Aristide had narrowly escaped death in that attack. He later became president of Haiti twice before being kidnapped by the US in support of another coup.

from Democracy Now.

Posted by: PeeDee | Sep 12 2007 3:47 utc | 34

Reading this story I have come to realize that the whole bin Laden operation is slowly evolving to discredit everyone who is anti-war and/or questions the status quo.
by making his (binny’s) arguments concerning Fisk or Chomsky the same as those held by most of the blogosphere it will be quite simple for the rightwing noise machine to state that bloggers are AQ supporters.
guilt by association. works everytime.

Posted by: dan of steele | Sep 12 2007 8:25 utc | 36

very good films on chile by patricio guzman including his epic ‘battle of chile’ but the more recent elegeic works also tell us a great deal
also david bradbury’s ‘ chile hasta cuando
these films remind us that we must defend chavez & morelos & their people tooth & nail

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 12 2007 14:43 utc | 38

Sacco and Vanzetti (near botom), written by Woody Guthrie, recorded by great local son, David Rovics. (Listen to some of his other great music too, it is all free)
I used to work near where the old shoe factory in Braintree was once located on Pearl St. Now its a Home Depot, with nary a plaque for remembrance. Down the road is “Dunkin Donuts University,” where they teach the sugar-addled wage slaves to bake the donuts. I always remember Sacco and Vanzetti when I’m passing through Braintree, or by the old courthouse in Dedham where they were tried.
NPR had on some fool who was proud to be the granddaughter of the hanging judge on the aniversary.

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 12 2007 15:31 utc | 40

Thanks for the link to David Rovics. That is great stuff.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Sep 12 2007 22:59 utc | 42

Another indication that 9/11 conspiracy theories are going very mainstream.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 13 2007 1:31 utc | 44

Another indication that 9/11 conspiracy theories are going very mainstream.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 13 2007 1:32 utc | 46