How many kids did you accidentally kill and eat today? or The Gamblers That Couldn't Shoot Straight
(or, How Many People Have You Killed Today?)
I've been having a few interesting convos these days, as the world be one mighty strange place.
We tip a buck on a beer at a shmancy joint to a bartender who owns a Porsche, and yet we greedily grab our quarter back at a fast food or fast coffee or fast enough to keep my money joint. The broke ain't lesser folk in the yolk of a joke, but hey, it's still strange...
Opportunity is based on happiness with self, and the application of skills therein. The number of options we have here is staggering, especially when compared with the product lines countries are being turned into under globalization. That really sounds like a big Communist-style plot to me anyhow, like "You workers do this, you're good at it", and you not having a chance to say "Fuck you!", or something like that. So here, we can, and while it ain't always easy it's nearly always possible, so that's a score. And, we can eventually define our roles for ourselves within the framework of a successful business idea, and expand on it.
Much better than:
Yup, countries as product lines.
Like, y'all look the same, why wouldn't y'all want to do the same thing anyhow? And ain't a shiny nickel a years salary for you folks?
Here's a quarter, have a party.
(...)
I read this thing about benzine in soft drinks the other day, it was in a local homeless newspaper, one they sell for a buck. They're great, short but full of cool stories, this one had a great "V for Vendetta" review too.
But the benzine... that was messed up.
They found out with conclusive tests in 1990, and I mean Big Cola and Big Brother Doesn't Like You U.S. FDA, that when many sodas are exposed to sunlight or any light their benzine levels spike five times, more or less.
The bottom line?
They become 5 times as unsafe as tap water, which is already dicey with regulations clawed back.
And, benzine causes cancer.
And, benzine causes cancer more easily in small children, because of the benzine to bodymass ratio.
And, benzine causes profits, as it allows them to cold filter cola as opposed to using more expensive heat pasteurization. So, they did nothing.
Perrier found around the same and took the hit with a massive recall, causing them a financial hit as well. Coke made 200 people in France and Belgium sick, recoiled, stalled, and eventually recalled, causing their stock price to drop 10% as people were outraged.
Then, the people forgot.
I wonder how much is competing with how much we know.
Like, I saw Super Size Me, and I'm Lovin' It, but I've seen a million McDonald's logos since, and two days ago bought two cheeseburgers using their daily McDeal (and you can ask for mayo and they'll give you McChicken sauce on the side, or mayo left out in the sun for a week, it's good). Unlike Burger King (with their unbranded in my mind day's deal, "King Deal?", meh) they don't list the days with the deals anymore.
You've got to go in and ask.
Bastards.
Yeah, I can just walk out now, but if this keeps up...
Anyway, before I forget, here's all that a quick Google of benzine picked up, and I think this is the soft drink article I read. Thank goodness for whistleblowers, without them this stuff is just too easily dismissable for some reason:
And another parsed from The Kansas Star (whatever that means)...
The food companies been running things since before every other, after all, we've always needed to eat. I mean, we forgot all those forgotten wars at the turn of the century (this ones another story). The American war-hero dude who foiled the corporate-backed Nazi takeover of the U.S. in 1934 (as confirmed by the McCormick-Dickstein Congressional hearings on the issue), General Smedley Butler, later even turned pacifist, saying at one point:
SOURCE - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
(...)
They've got some damned good propaganda though, and I just saw "Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag" on an IMAX screen yesterday, it was sweet. Flawed, but pretty cool nonetheless. I mean, they spent billions of dollars making their deadly toys, so they can do amazing things. And really, if they want to play with them once in a while like in this drill involving 128 figher pilots from several countries, then fine.
Just don't use them to bomb people for no good reason.
Made me want to see "Top Gun" again too...
Damn they're good...
(...)
And a bit from an interview with investigative journalist John Buchanan from the brilliant film, "Martial Law 9/11: Rise of the Police State". He who broke the story of the real Bush-Nazi connection, one later confirmed and published by The Guardian, the largest paper in Europe.
I recommend you watch this interview, it's absolutely fascinating:
JB:
In another section, a journalist who brought the plot down, his name was Paul Connely French, an American hero who nobody has ever heard of, who testified before the committee. He wrote at the time for the New York Post and the Philadelphia Record. So this is Mr. French – and he had talked to the plotters. They were so arrogant, Alex. They were so drunk with their own power after bringing Hitler to power, which had just happened, that they talked to this reporter on the record. Mr. French:
I hope your listeners, Alex, are chilled to the bone by hearing that. That is from the McCormick-Dickstein Committee of November 29th, 1934, secretly convened in New York City. McCormick went on to become Speaker of the House and be another uncredited American hero, one of the few bona fide heroes ever in Congress that’s in a dust bin of history..."
SOURCE - http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2004/290904buchanantranscript.htm
(...)
I betcha haiku's rhyme in Japanese, and they're just looking at the rest of us like we're freakin' idiots.
This just can't be it.
The floating dung in my mind?
It's hungry for more.
(...)
So I wonder, who does more damage to the world, the global branding executive at one of them sodie companies who feels he's living a fine life and doing a fine job?
The one who may have given 100,000 people cancer?
Or, the prostitute who, if she's horrendously negligent, gives a dozen people AIDS?
This guy does his job well, and a 100,000 people get cancer.
The prostitute has to do her job terribly for the scales to even begin to start to balance.
Hey, a hooker with a heart of gold is the backbone of many a redemption song...
Sometimes, and in reality all the time, there's classic proto-corporate malfeasance afoot behind every tragedy.
In the flick Orwell Rolls in his Grave, the pundits discuss the idea that much like Pravda and other old Soviet newspapers, they'll throw out the odd victim of circumstance to be publicly flogged, but any stories that question the system itself as mysteriously absent. So, the public gets used to thinking the system is fine, or even absolutely necessary to preserve stability, that anomalies are a relative rarity when compared to the institutions size, and that they're dealt with severely - albeit over a long, long time. And, by the end we don't care anymore - or the press doesn't tell us to care as much so we don't think we do, and the perpetrators can use time spent on the ranch as time-served to practically walk anyway.
I mean, there's a good reason that 90% of the world disagrees with us, they've gotta deal with us doing this without us even knowing about it, and that's gotta drive them bonkers. It's gotta even be worse then when someone is sleeping beside you on the airplane, and you don't want to wake them but you kinda want them off your arm, and so you wrestle with what to do to let them know...
Yep, worse than that...
And these good folks seem to have a handle on things.
I mean, who would make images like this for no good reason?
Who profits off attacking Coke?
We love Coke!
We love the drink, we love the drug, hell we even love the merchandise and timeless logo - used to devastating effect above.
Oh well, I guess they're on to something...
"The 'Permanent Tribunal of the People' is inspired by the Russel-Tribunal. It appears when the state is incapable to punish violations of human rights, as it happens right now in Colombia. 97% of all violations on human rights are not being punished. On April 1. and 2. 2006 the colombian section of the Tribunal will take place in Bogotá.
SOURCE - http://www.killercoke.org/
(...)
BONUS: Keeping the potato hot...
- VH1/MTV News, "'Still Rico,' Still Suave, Gerardo Does It One More Time"
[Ed note: This story is already being morphed, I got it pretty fresh yesterday. I'ven seen a shortened and updated one since, and in many cases it's amazing how long they take to tell you so little, especially early. It's like, if they exhaustively go over small details and repeat themselves we'll think they must have found everything; and the only way to find the truth is to grab all of them early at once and comb them for inconsistencies, accidental truths, and sources. The "Now we know!" crowd is going to start chirping, suggesting like they do each time that there shouldn't be any questions anymore. Each. Time. Well, I have a question: what took you so frigging long to release the tapes? And why, 5 years later, are you still suppressing tonnes of information, including audio and video evidence, if you have nothing to hide? Are you trying headfake us with "incompetence" to avoid "culpability" or what? Someone's gotta pay, and if it's not you guys, you're certainly taking a hell of a long time finding out who...]
Yahoo! News
Cries for Help Edited Out of 9/11 Tapes
By AMY WESTFELDT, Associated Press Writer 49 minutes ago
Dispatchers assured the callers — most of them on floors above the burning plane wreckage — that help was coming, or already there. In many cases, they had little to offer but compassion.
"OK, ma'am. All right," a fire dispatcher told a caller at 9:05 a.m., two minutes after the second tower was hit. "Well, everybody is there now. We're trying to rescue everybody. OK?"
Twelve minutes later, another dispatcher told a frantic caller trapped on the 105th floor of the south tower to instruct people to put wet towels over their mouths, lie on the floor and not open the windows.
"We are trying to get up there, sir. Like you said, the stairs are collapsed, OK?" the dispatcher said. "I know it's hard to breathe. I know it is."
The transcripts and nearly nine hours of audio recordings were released after The New York Times and relatives of Sept. 11 victims sued to get them. An appeals court ruled last year that the calls of victims in the burning twin towers were too intense and emotional to be released without their families' consent.
As a result, the transcripts held long blank spaces where the callers' words would have appeared.
Often, it was clear from conversations between police and fire department operators that they were not sure what had occurred. At one point a police operator told a fire dispatcher that a helicopter had hit one of the towers.
The operators managed generally to maintain their composure even as word spread that what initially appeared to be a tragic accident was actually a choreographed terrorist attack involving two planes and both towers.
Sirens screamed in the background as the callers pleaded for help. Although there were no voices, their desperation was evident in heavy, audible breathing on the other end of the operators' calls.
"If you feel like your life is in danger, do what you must do, OK?" one dispatcher told a caller at 9:02 a.m., just a minute before the second plane hit. "I can't give you any more advice than that."
The comment was typical of the frustration that came through amid the calm professionalism.
"All right, we have quite a few calls," said a fire operator.
"I know," said a police operator. "Jesus Christ."
Many dispatchers complained about computers failing in the chaos.
"Oh goodness. Hold on a second, because we are so backed up here," a fire dispatcher told one caller. "Because we have so much information on here, that our computers are down. OK?"
In the background of another call made from the 105th floor of the north tower at 9:17 a.m., a public address announcement could be heard in the background: "We aware of it down here. The condition seems to have subsided."
Sally Regenhard, one of the plaintiffs whose firefighter son was killed on Sept. 11, said the tapes showed that the operators were untrained to tell people how to save their lives.
"I'm hoping that the public and the system will learn how unprepared the City of New York and the Port Authority were on that day," Regenhard said.
Many of the operators told frantic callers to stay put and wait for help, which fire dispatcher supervisor David Rosenzwieg said is standard procedure in high-rises when fires break out on lower floors.
"Telling people to stay — for some reason people think that's the wrong thing to do," Rosenzwieg said Friday. "But the same instructions saves lives every day."
Rosenzwieg said some dispatchers were so traumatized by their encounters with the trade center victims they never came back to the job. Others retired early. "Unfortunately, they took it very much to heart," he said.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the police 911 operators "displayed professionalism and compassion under the most trying of circumstances, often staying on the line with anguished callers until the very end."
At 9:47 a.m., one police operator did exactly that, telling another unidentified caller, "Yes, I'm here, I'm not going to go nowhere. ... You know there are people there trying to get you all out right now, all right? You're not by yourself."
The dispatcher then took a telephone number of the caller's family and promised to reach them. Then the call went dead: "And who is this? Hello?"
The first transcripts released as part of the Times lawsuit came last August, when thousands of pages of oral histories of firefighters and emergency workers, as well as radio transmissions, were released. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the trade center and has its own police force, released all its emergency recordings in 2003.
The Sept. 11 commission concluded in 2004 that the operators did not have enough information to allow more people to escape from the twin towers.
"Are they still standing?" one dispatcher asked at 10:15 a.m., 16 minutes after the south tower collapsed. "The World Trade Center is there, right?"
___
Associated Press Writers Frank Eltman, Tom Hays, Nahal Toosi, David B. Caruso and Shaya Tayefe Mohajer contributed to this report.
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SOURCE - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060401/ap_on_re_us/attacks911_calls
"Qui bono?"
"Who profits?"
Peace, (NOW!!!)
BK
____________________
...
Black Krishna Brand
Philosophy - blackkrishna.blogspot.com/
Music - www.soundclick.com/bands/0/blackkrishna.htm
...
I've been having a few interesting convos these days, as the world be one mighty strange place.
We tip a buck on a beer at a shmancy joint to a bartender who owns a Porsche, and yet we greedily grab our quarter back at a fast food or fast coffee or fast enough to keep my money joint. The broke ain't lesser folk in the yolk of a joke, but hey, it's still strange...
Opportunity is based on happiness with self, and the application of skills therein. The number of options we have here is staggering, especially when compared with the product lines countries are being turned into under globalization. That really sounds like a big Communist-style plot to me anyhow, like "You workers do this, you're good at it", and you not having a chance to say "Fuck you!", or something like that. So here, we can, and while it ain't always easy it's nearly always possible, so that's a score. And, we can eventually define our roles for ourselves within the framework of a successful business idea, and expand on it.
Much better than:
"What? We're a banana republic? And we gotta sew clothes for Banana Replublic? Aw man..."
Yup, countries as product lines.
Like, y'all look the same, why wouldn't y'all want to do the same thing anyhow? And ain't a shiny nickel a years salary for you folks?
Here's a quarter, have a party.
(...)
I read this thing about benzine in soft drinks the other day, it was in a local homeless newspaper, one they sell for a buck. They're great, short but full of cool stories, this one had a great "V for Vendetta" review too.
But the benzine... that was messed up.
They found out with conclusive tests in 1990, and I mean Big Cola and Big Brother Doesn't Like You U.S. FDA, that when many sodas are exposed to sunlight or any light their benzine levels spike five times, more or less.
The bottom line?
They become 5 times as unsafe as tap water, which is already dicey with regulations clawed back.
And, benzine causes cancer.
And, benzine causes cancer more easily in small children, because of the benzine to bodymass ratio.
And, benzine causes profits, as it allows them to cold filter cola as opposed to using more expensive heat pasteurization. So, they did nothing.
Perrier found around the same and took the hit with a massive recall, causing them a financial hit as well. Coke made 200 people in France and Belgium sick, recoiled, stalled, and eventually recalled, causing their stock price to drop 10% as people were outraged.
Then, the people forgot.
I wonder how much is competing with how much we know.
Like, I saw Super Size Me, and I'm Lovin' It, but I've seen a million McDonald's logos since, and two days ago bought two cheeseburgers using their daily McDeal (and you can ask for mayo and they'll give you McChicken sauce on the side, or mayo left out in the sun for a week, it's good). Unlike Burger King (with their unbranded in my mind day's deal, "King Deal?", meh) they don't list the days with the deals anymore.
You've got to go in and ask.
Bastards.
Yeah, I can just walk out now, but if this keeps up...
Anyway, before I forget, here's all that a quick Google of benzine picked up, and I think this is the soft drink article I read. Thank goodness for whistleblowers, without them this stuff is just too easily dismissable for some reason:
Hard Times for Soft Drinks
By Michael Blanding, AlterNet. Posted March 13, 2006.
SOURCE - http://www.alternet.org/story/33380/
And another parsed from The Kansas Star (whatever that means)...
Would you like some Benzine with your soda today?
March 29th, 2006 by Atomictumor
The Kansas City Star lays it down:
SOURCE - http://www.atomictumor.com/would-you-like-some-benzine-with-your-soda-today.htm
The food companies been running things since before every other, after all, we've always needed to eat. I mean, we forgot all those forgotten wars at the turn of the century (this ones another story). The American war-hero dude who foiled the corporate-backed Nazi takeover of the U.S. in 1934 (as confirmed by the McCormick-Dickstein Congressional hearings on the issue), General Smedley Butler, later even turned pacifist, saying at one point:
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested."
SOURCE - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
(...)
They've got some damned good propaganda though, and I just saw "Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag" on an IMAX screen yesterday, it was sweet. Flawed, but pretty cool nonetheless. I mean, they spent billions of dollars making their deadly toys, so they can do amazing things. And really, if they want to play with them once in a while like in this drill involving 128 figher pilots from several countries, then fine.
Just don't use them to bomb people for no good reason.
Made me want to see "Top Gun" again too...
Damn they're good...
(...)
And a bit from an interview with investigative journalist John Buchanan from the brilliant film, "Martial Law 9/11: Rise of the Police State". He who broke the story of the real Bush-Nazi connection, one later confirmed and published by The Guardian, the largest paper in Europe.
I recommend you watch this interview, it's absolutely fascinating:
Keeping It In The Family: The Bushes and the Nazis
Journalist John Buchanan discusses how his research led him to uncover the deep and historical ties between the Bush family and the Nazi war machine. Buchanan's endeavors led to highly respected newspapers such as the London Guardian covering the story.
WATCH - http://martiallaw911.info/video.htm
JB:
"And I would like to make a critical point there that I would like your listeners, from all walks of life, that you have to listen to with an open mind. And that is when you get right down to it and you think about the world of today in the United States, what was Nazism and what was it all about? And if you ask me, Alex, all it came down to, when you take away all the horror and the Holocaust and everything else, is that a particular group of people felt superior to everyone else. And they felt or they were convinced by a leader that because the country was under threat from the communists and the terrorists, etc. that it was okay to suspend habeas corpus, suspend laws, put the brown-shirts in, start beating people up, start incarcerating people and ultimately start executing people.Now, that said, I’d like your listeners to keep an open mind and take a deep breath because I’m going to read directly from the Congressional testimony two statements. French testified that – Gerald C. McGuire was the name of the lead plotter who set up the coup attempt for JP Morgan and the Bush family. French testified that McGuire stated, “We need a Fascist government in this country to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have patriotism to do it are the soldiers and Gen. Smedley Butler is the ideal leader.”
In another section, a journalist who brought the plot down, his name was Paul Connely French, an American hero who nobody has ever heard of, who testified before the committee. He wrote at the time for the New York Post and the Philadelphia Record. So this is Mr. French – and he had talked to the plotters. They were so arrogant, Alex. They were so drunk with their own power after bringing Hitler to power, which had just happened, that they talked to this reporter on the record. Mr. French:
“That is precisely the impression I gained from him. He had a very brilliant solution of the unemployment situation. He said that Roosevelt has muffed it terrifically but that he had the plan. He had seen it in Europe. It was a plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks for enforced labor. That would solve it overnight. And he said that when they got into power that is what they would do. That was the ideal plan. Hitler was right.”
To your reporting earlier on the national identity, he goes on: “He had another suggestion – to register all persons, all over the country, like they do in Europe. He said that would stop a lot of these communist agitators who were running around the country. They’d know who the people were. They’d know who were making the trouble. They’d know who were trying to overthrow the government. And they’d go get them.”
I hope your listeners, Alex, are chilled to the bone by hearing that. That is from the McCormick-Dickstein Committee of November 29th, 1934, secretly convened in New York City. McCormick went on to become Speaker of the House and be another uncredited American hero, one of the few bona fide heroes ever in Congress that’s in a dust bin of history..."
SOURCE - http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2004/290904buchanantranscript.htm
(...)
I betcha haiku's rhyme in Japanese, and they're just looking at the rest of us like we're freakin' idiots.
This just can't be it.
The floating dung in my mind?
It's hungry for more.
(...)
So I wonder, who does more damage to the world, the global branding executive at one of them sodie companies who feels he's living a fine life and doing a fine job?
The one who may have given 100,000 people cancer?
Or, the prostitute who, if she's horrendously negligent, gives a dozen people AIDS?
This guy does his job well, and a 100,000 people get cancer.
The prostitute has to do her job terribly for the scales to even begin to start to balance.
Hey, a hooker with a heart of gold is the backbone of many a redemption song...
Sometimes, and in reality all the time, there's classic proto-corporate malfeasance afoot behind every tragedy.
In the flick Orwell Rolls in his Grave, the pundits discuss the idea that much like Pravda and other old Soviet newspapers, they'll throw out the odd victim of circumstance to be publicly flogged, but any stories that question the system itself as mysteriously absent. So, the public gets used to thinking the system is fine, or even absolutely necessary to preserve stability, that anomalies are a relative rarity when compared to the institutions size, and that they're dealt with severely - albeit over a long, long time. And, by the end we don't care anymore - or the press doesn't tell us to care as much so we don't think we do, and the perpetrators can use time spent on the ranch as time-served to practically walk anyway.
I mean, there's a good reason that 90% of the world disagrees with us, they've gotta deal with us doing this without us even knowing about it, and that's gotta drive them bonkers. It's gotta even be worse then when someone is sleeping beside you on the airplane, and you don't want to wake them but you kinda want them off your arm, and so you wrestle with what to do to let them know...
Yep, worse than that...
And these good folks seem to have a handle on things.
I mean, who would make images like this for no good reason?
Who profits off attacking Coke?
We love Coke!
We love the drink, we love the drug, hell we even love the merchandise and timeless logo - used to devastating effect above.
Oh well, I guess they're on to something...
BREAKING NEWS
kanalB, "Video: The 'Permanent Tribunal of the People' and other video clips on Colombia"
Videoclips — deutsch
Watch video Clips — English
"The 'Permanent Tribunal of the People' is inspired by the Russel-Tribunal. It appears when the state is incapable to punish violations of human rights, as it happens right now in Colombia. 97% of all violations on human rights are not being punished. On April 1. and 2. 2006 the colombian section of the Tribunal will take place in Bogotá.
The Topics of this tribunal will be the crimes of transnational corporations concerning their involvement with the paramilitary forces and state terrorism in Colombia. The corporations Coca-Cola, Nestlé and Chiquita Brands are in the dock.Other topics will be gold, oil, coal, biodiversity and public services. The tribunal, casted with renowned lawyers, will come to a judgment in july 2008."
SOURCE - http://www.killercoke.org/
(...)
BONUS: Keeping the potato hot...
"I'm like Al Pacino in 'The Godfather Part III': every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in!"
- VH1/MTV News, "'Still Rico,' Still Suave, Gerardo Does It One More Time"
[Ed note: This story is already being morphed, I got it pretty fresh yesterday. I'ven seen a shortened and updated one since, and in many cases it's amazing how long they take to tell you so little, especially early. It's like, if they exhaustively go over small details and repeat themselves we'll think they must have found everything; and the only way to find the truth is to grab all of them early at once and comb them for inconsistencies, accidental truths, and sources. The "Now we know!" crowd is going to start chirping, suggesting like they do each time that there shouldn't be any questions anymore. Each. Time. Well, I have a question: what took you so frigging long to release the tapes? And why, 5 years later, are you still suppressing tonnes of information, including audio and video evidence, if you have nothing to hide? Are you trying headfake us with "incompetence" to avoid "culpability" or what? Someone's gotta pay, and if it's not you guys, you're certainly taking a hell of a long time finding out who...]
Sally Regenhard, whose son Christian was a New York City probationalry firefighter who died on Sept. 11, 2001, discusses the transcript comapct discs of emergency calls that were released in New York, Friday March 31, 2006. Nearly nine hours of emergency calls, some made from inside the doomed World Trade Center, were released Friday by city officials, detailing the responses of 911 operators to frantic calls made in the chaos following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Yahoo! News
Cries for Help Edited Out of 9/11 Tapes
By AMY WESTFELDT, Associated Press Writer 49 minutes ago
NEW YORK - Emergency operators listening to trapped callers' heartbreaking pleas from the burning World Trade Center repeatedly said help was on the way while they struggled with crashing computers, utter confusion and their own emotions, several hours of 911 calls released Friday show.
In releasing the 130 calls, city officials edited out the voices of those who sought help. But the police and fire dispatchers often repeated the callers' words, reflecting the fear and chaos of the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
The first call came seconds after terrorists flew a hijacked jetliner into the north tower of the trade center at 8:46 a.m. A second plane struck the south tower 17 minutes later, and by 10:28 both towers had collapsed, leaving 2,749 people dead.
Dispatchers assured the callers — most of them on floors above the burning plane wreckage — that help was coming, or already there. In many cases, they had little to offer but compassion.
"OK, ma'am. All right," a fire dispatcher told a caller at 9:05 a.m., two minutes after the second tower was hit. "Well, everybody is there now. We're trying to rescue everybody. OK?"
Twelve minutes later, another dispatcher told a frantic caller trapped on the 105th floor of the south tower to instruct people to put wet towels over their mouths, lie on the floor and not open the windows.
"We are trying to get up there, sir. Like you said, the stairs are collapsed, OK?" the dispatcher said. "I know it's hard to breathe. I know it is."
The transcripts and nearly nine hours of audio recordings were released after The New York Times and relatives of Sept. 11 victims sued to get them. An appeals court ruled last year that the calls of victims in the burning twin towers were too intense and emotional to be released without their families' consent.
As a result, the transcripts held long blank spaces where the callers' words would have appeared.
Often, it was clear from conversations between police and fire department operators that they were not sure what had occurred. At one point a police operator told a fire dispatcher that a helicopter had hit one of the towers.
The operators managed generally to maintain their composure even as word spread that what initially appeared to be a tragic accident was actually a choreographed terrorist attack involving two planes and both towers.
Sirens screamed in the background as the callers pleaded for help. Although there were no voices, their desperation was evident in heavy, audible breathing on the other end of the operators' calls.
"If you feel like your life is in danger, do what you must do, OK?" one dispatcher told a caller at 9:02 a.m., just a minute before the second plane hit. "I can't give you any more advice than that."
The comment was typical of the frustration that came through amid the calm professionalism.
"All right, we have quite a few calls," said a fire operator.
"I know," said a police operator. "Jesus Christ."
Many dispatchers complained about computers failing in the chaos.
"Oh goodness. Hold on a second, because we are so backed up here," a fire dispatcher told one caller. "Because we have so much information on here, that our computers are down. OK?"
In the background of another call made from the 105th floor of the north tower at 9:17 a.m., a public address announcement could be heard in the background: "We aware of it down here. The condition seems to have subsided."
Sally Regenhard, one of the plaintiffs whose firefighter son was killed on Sept. 11, said the tapes showed that the operators were untrained to tell people how to save their lives.
"I'm hoping that the public and the system will learn how unprepared the City of New York and the Port Authority were on that day," Regenhard said.
Many of the operators told frantic callers to stay put and wait for help, which fire dispatcher supervisor David Rosenzwieg said is standard procedure in high-rises when fires break out on lower floors.
"Telling people to stay — for some reason people think that's the wrong thing to do," Rosenzwieg said Friday. "But the same instructions saves lives every day."
Rosenzwieg said some dispatchers were so traumatized by their encounters with the trade center victims they never came back to the job. Others retired early. "Unfortunately, they took it very much to heart," he said.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the police 911 operators "displayed professionalism and compassion under the most trying of circumstances, often staying on the line with anguished callers until the very end."
At 9:47 a.m., one police operator did exactly that, telling another unidentified caller, "Yes, I'm here, I'm not going to go nowhere. ... You know there are people there trying to get you all out right now, all right? You're not by yourself."
The dispatcher then took a telephone number of the caller's family and promised to reach them. Then the call went dead: "And who is this? Hello?"
The first transcripts released as part of the Times lawsuit came last August, when thousands of pages of oral histories of firefighters and emergency workers, as well as radio transmissions, were released. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the trade center and has its own police force, released all its emergency recordings in 2003.
The Sept. 11 commission concluded in 2004 that the operators did not have enough information to allow more people to escape from the twin towers.
"Are they still standing?" one dispatcher asked at 10:15 a.m., 16 minutes after the south tower collapsed. "The World Trade Center is there, right?"
___
Associated Press Writers Frank Eltman, Tom Hays, Nahal Toosi, David B. Caruso and Shaya Tayefe Mohajer contributed to this report.
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SOURCE - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060401/ap_on_re_us/attacks911_calls
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