January 28, 2007

From Jim Colligan, a Catholic priest, Maryknoll missioner, and journalist, in L.A….

"When the Los Angeles Central Library put two copies of your book, listed on its site, into circulation last month I was first to get a copy. I thoroughly appreciated the work you put into it, an informative, engrossing read…. I was in Tokyo, Japan last week, much of my five days spent at the Foreign Correspondents Club renewing acquaintances among correspondents and staff. I recommended your book as a 'must-have' for club library shelves to head librarian Hanako Nakayama. She is efficient and cooperative and will consult the Library Committee as required…. Keep up the good work on your watchingtheworldchange.com site. Always of
interest." [In November sent in an unsolicited photo of some 9/11-conspiracy protestors, which I wrote about on the blog.]

From Carky Rubens, of Scarsdale, N.Y. (upon discovering this blog)...

"Is this the next true medium? Is this convergence? Is this how the 'masses' will get their news in the future? Is this 'Fragmentation' or 'Augmentation?' Are you a creator or merely content? Whatever, am I too old to be wandering around this new cyberworld?"

And, last but not least, from L. Raphael, of Kilmarnock, in the United Kingdom...

"The photograph on the cover of your book Watching the World Change [see top of this Web site's left-hand column] sums up how I feel about 9/11: that it was a meaningless spectacle. The picture makes no sense: if this man is running for his life, why isn't the photographer doing likewise? Is she [photographer Kelly Price] standing next to a convenient manhole, or bunker, or does she have a death wish? Was the picture taken with a telephoto lens, or was the photographer also running for her life, but somehow managing to take a perfectly focused, balanced picture? The photograph is as fake as the image of two towers engulfed in flames....

"You are a fraud, Mr. Friend. 9/11 was also a fraud, from start to finish. [Many of the photographers in your book] are frauds who are complicit in 9/11: the shot of Flight 11 in that film [by the Naudet brothers] was obviously staged, like many other scenes, and it's only a matter of time before the real guilty parties from that day face some kind of justice, if not in Bush's America -- but that won't be with us much longer. When it happens, watch the world change -- for the better. No more USS Maine, no more Pearl Harbor, no more Dallas, no more Tonkin Gulf: this time, the crap ends and the bastards get what's coming to them -- Cheney, Myers, Wolfowitz, Chevron, Tenet, Perle, Raytheon, all of them. The bigger they are ...."

Dear Mr. Raphael: Millions of New Yorkers, including yours truly, saw these sights with their own eyes. This was no mass hallucination. This was no conspiracy to justify an invasion of Iraq (as you insist, elsewhere in your letter). This was an act of terrorism that claimed 3,000 lives. It might be convenient to think otherwise in your tidy, faraway world of Kilmarnock, but you are delusional, as are all too many armchair 9/11-conspiracy dreamers. Or, as columnist Maureen Dowd says of Dick Cheney in yesterday's Times: "Delusional is far too mild a word.... Delusional doesn't begin to capture the profound, transcendental, one-flew-over daftness of the man. Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he's right in the fact of overwhelming evidencde to the contrary?"