What they went through - Garrison Keillor

[mcscajun]

Our countrymen died real deaths on Sept. 11, and we need to listen to their last words.
By Garrison Keillor

Aug. 23, 2006 | It was painful to hear the woman in anguish on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center, crying, "I'm going to die, aren't I? I'm going to die." Melissa Doi was 32, beautiful, with laughing eyes and black hair. She was lying on the floor of her office at IQ Financial, overwhelmed by smoke and heat, calling for help. And then there was Kevin Cosgrove on the 105th floor, moments before it collapsed, gasping for breath, saying, "We're young men, we're not ready to die." And then he screamed, "Oh my God" as the building started to collapse. It's in their voices, what they went through.

Those were two of the 1,613 calls to 911 released by New York City last week, on almost all of which the caller's voice was beeped out. The city argued that to hear persons in anguish in their last minutes constitutes an invasion of privacy. The truth is that the callers had no interest in privacy, they were desperate to be heard, and censoring them now is a last insult by a bureaucracy that failed to protect them in the first place.

(snip)

Then, inevitably, politicians began to seize the day and turn it into a patriotic tableau starring themselves. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who does not appear in a leadership capacity in the reliable accounts of that morning, who was captured on videotape fleeing uptown, soon stepped into the TV lights and put on his public face, and a few days later the Current Occupant mounted the wreckage with bullhorn in hand and vowed vengeance, and the media was glad to focus on the martial moment, the flag waving over the wreckage, the theme of America united -- and the anguished voices from the towers were unheard, the people who fell from high floors and smashed into the pavement were not seen on American TV. The media averted its eyes from the reality of 9/11 and started looking for the message.

(snip)

Mr. Giuliani is still flying around giving speeches on leadership, knocking down a hundred grand per shot, getting standing ovations everywhere as a stand-in for the police and firemen who died in the towers. He has never faced up to his failure to prepare for the attack, even after the 1993 bomb explosion at the World Trade Center, when it was shown clearly that police and fire couldn't communicate with each other by radio. Eight years passed, little was done, and then came the 19 men with box cutters. The 911 operators took thousands of calls and had no information to give. Police helicopter pilots, who had a clear view of the infernos and could see that the buildings were going to collapse, couldn't get word to fire chiefs on the ground, who, unable to see the fire, sent their men up the stairs to die. Official bungling cost those men their lives.

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More at link:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/08/23/keillor_2/index.html?source=newsletter

"Current Occupant" -- best term for Bush I've heard in a while. Too bad the Nicknames thread in the Research Forum is closed; this one isn't in there.

[noel711]

1. WE love you Garrison!

Garrison Keillor has the smarts and the verbal audacity to see the truth... and express so adroitly what many of us think and feel but can't verbalize.

His take on making public those words, those final words, that begged to be heard reveal the censureship in this administration. That is the same truth-denying that ignores the public's need to see the flag draped caskets coming back from Iraq.

Why do we allow the Bushites to deny us the privilege of seeing and hearing the truth of what happened? Do they think we are more stupid than they are?

[liberal N proud]

2. Always like Garrison's articles

Thanks