- 09 Sep 2016 11:49
#14716715
IF I HAD UNDERSTOOD THE SITUATION A BIT BETTER I SHOULD HAVE PROBABLY JOINED THE ANARCHISTSGeorge Orwell
It's 9/11 time again and all the media attention.
The US is still involved in an asymmetric war and if anything the attacks on the US are increasing. Is the US losing the war on terrorism.
When will the press stop fuelling the never ending publicity for this succesful attack with graphic details that seem to increase over time?
The US is still involved in an asymmetric war and if anything the attacks on the US are increasing. Is the US losing the war on terrorism.
When will the press stop fuelling the never ending publicity for this succesful attack with graphic details that seem to increase over time?
Six floors below Mr Reyher, James Logozzo watched with stunned colleagues from the Morgan Stanley boardroom. He recalled that it took three or four jumpers to flash past him before he realised they were people. Then a woman fell, lying flat on her back and staring upwards. ‘The look on her face was shock. She wasn’t screaming,’ he recalled. ‘It was slow motion. After she hit the ground, there was nothing left.’
For those down below, the bodies landed with sickening, almost explosive thuds. Many said it was raining bodies.
One fireman, Danny Suhr, was killed as he made his way to the South Tower after a jumper landed on him, ‘coming out of the sky like a torpedo’ and breaking his neck. Compounding the tragedy, the priest who gave him the last rites was later killed by falling debris.
When she learnt how Danny died, his childhood sweetheart Nancy thought: how horrendous for that poor person who had to choose to jump; at least Danny did not have to make that choice. At least she had a body, for Danny’s colleagues took him to hospital after he was hit.
It was a decision that saved their lives — they would otherwise have been in the tower when it collapsed.
Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman says she felt like she was intruding on a sacrament as the bodies fell. She adds: ‘They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn’t have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at a wall and we could still hear them hit.’
Bill Feehan, the deputy chief of the fire department, screamed at a man filming jumpers with a video camera: ‘Don’t you have any human decency?’
Fire battalion chief Joseph Pfeifer put out a desperate plea on the North Tower’s public address system. ‘Please don’t jump. We’re coming up for you,’ he said, not realising that nobody was listening — the system had long since been destroyed.
Images of the falling bodies disturbed and appalled all who saw them. On the first anniversary of the tragedy, an exhibition showing a work called Tumbling Woman, a bronze sculpture by artist Eric Fischl, lasted just a week in New York’s Rockefeller Centre before it was closed following protests and even bomb threats.
Human tragedy: Someone leaps from the burning World Trade Center on 9/11. It is thought that jumpers would have fallen for around 10 seconds
But one picture has become an iconic image. When a man fell at 9.41am from near the top of the North Tower, Richard Drew caught a dozen frames of his descent, including one in which he is diving vertically, arms by his sides and left leg bent at the knee. The image, all the more horrific for its desolate stillness, appeared the next day in newspapers around the world.
Dubbed the Falling Man, it prompted the media to hunt for the man’s identity. None of those who jumped from the towers has ever been officially identified and, tellingly, nobody rushed to claim Falling Man as their own.
Dark-skinned, goatee-bearded, wearing an orange T-shirt under a white shirt , he was first thought to be Norberto Hernandez, a pastry chef at the restaurant Windows on the World, on the top floors of the North Tower. His deeply religious family angrily rejected the notion, insisting that for him to have jumped would have amounted to a betrayal.
‘He was trying to come home to us and he knew he wasn’t going to make it by jumping out a window,’ his daughter Catherine says.
Grim: United Airlines Flight 175 collides into the south tower of the World Trade Center
Since then, the hunt for the Falling Man has moved on to another of the restaurant’s staff, Jonathan Briley, a 43-year-old sound engineer. The reaction of his deeply religious family has highlighted the deep moral complexities that suicide — whatever the circumstances — poses in a country where so many believe it is a sin, unforgivable by God.
Some of Mr Briley’s family have never believed he jumped, and say they were vindicated after the authorities found his largely intact body.
‘I had no idea it would give me the peace years later to know that,’ says his sister Gwendolyn. ‘If he had fallen from the 110th floor to the ground we wouldn’t have had that.’
Investment banker Richard Pecarello, 59, who tracked down that picture of his fiancee as she fell, also found peace. But for him it was in knowing that his fiancée did choose to jump. Most families have recovered no more than a fragment of bone, identified through DNA, of their loved ones, Mr Pecarello points out.
‘To me, the photo of her falling was like finding the body,’ he says. ‘I thought it was something that would help me move on. I needed to know how she died.’
When a 9/11 Memorial Museum opens at Ground Zero next year, it will have a small display dedicated to the jumpers, but reflecting the intense feelings of unease the subject has provoked, it will be tucked away in an alcove, on the grounds that the images are considered too private and too distressing.
It seems a harsh fate for those agonised mortals who faced the naked terror of that ten-second plunge to certain death. For the jumpers saved lives even as they were losing theirs.
In testimony after testimony, survivors of the South Tower say they only realised they had to ignore the official safety all-clear and get out fast when they saw those terrible shapes tumbling past their windows.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z4Jkga0FRa
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IF I HAD UNDERSTOOD THE SITUATION A BIT BETTER I SHOULD HAVE PROBABLY JOINED THE ANARCHISTSGeorge Orwell