Because someone has to do it, that’s why.

Joanne Hanley, superintendent of the Flight 93 Memorial Project, cannot answer the damning facts about the crescent design (now called a broken circle), so she has decided to slander the people who are pointing them out. In a speech at the Memorial Project’s August 2nd meeting, she cited a list of “threats” she had received from critics, saying for instance that her “career would be destroyed.”

In defense of Superintendent Hanley, Flight 93 family member Calvin Wilson expressed his disgust at the violent threats and charged that critics were acting like the terrorists themselves. Three Pennsylvania newspapers covered Hanley’s claims to have been threatened, one editorialized against the uncivilized critics, and a Memorial Project press release highlighted Wilson’s outraged response to the supposed threats.

It is all a lie. Here is the Letter to the Editor that Alec Rawls just sent to the duped Pennsylvania newspapers, exposing Superintendent Hanley’s deception:

A warning is not a threat. A warning is to protect against a threat.

As the lead organizer of the movement to stop the crescent design, I can tell you who made the statements that Superintendent Hanley was complaining about. I recognized every one of the phrases she cited as coming from myself. It is ME who Joanne Hanley is accusing of making threats, an accusation that is not just false, but grotesquely dishonest.

What Joanne Hanley is casting as threats were WARNINGS, trying to alert her to the threat posed by architect Paul Murdoch and his scheme to plant a giant Mecca-oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. This is one of Superintendent Hanley’s excuses for refusing to heed warnings about the crescent design. She pretends that warnings are threats and hence SHOULD NOT be listened to.

When I couldn’t get Hanley to look to the facts for the country’s sake, I tried to appeal to her instinct for self-preservation, warning her of the personal consequences of Murdoch’s attempt to stab a terrorist memorial mosque into the heartland of America. (That is the meaning of a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca: it is the central feature of a mosque.)

As I put it in a March 2006 email to both Superintendent Hanley and Project Manager Jeff Reinbold:

I have been trying to save your lives and your careers for six months. It is not too late for you. You can still do your jobs and investigate the basic facts I have warned you about, like the Mecca-orientation of Murdoch’s original Crescent of embrace, and the continued presence of Murdoch’s original crescent in the redesign.

Shortly after this email, Joanne Hanley told me why she was not concerned about the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. In a conference call with Jeff Reinbold, she told me that: “It isn’t exact. That’s one we talked about. It has to be exact.” (The giant crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± .1°.)

If she had admitted to the public what she was admitting in private—that the giant crescent does indeed point almost exactly to Mecca—it would have been okay. The people of Pennsylvania would be able to decide for themselves whether a giant Mecca-oriented crescent makes an acceptable memorial to the victims of Islamic terrorism, so long as it does not point EXACTLY at Mecca. Instead, the Memorial Project decided instead to deceive the public, sending an academic fraud from the University of Texas to assure the press that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round. [Post Gazette, “Flight 93 memorial draws a new round of criticism,” August 18, 2007.]

Just as I warned Superintendent Hanley that her career was in jeopardy, I also warned Dr. Griffith that his career would be destroyed if he did not correct this blatant disinformation. Like Hanley, Griffith too interpreted my warning as a threat, as if it would be ME who was responsible for the harm to his reputation, when he was covering up evidence of an enemy plot by lying about basic geometry, pretending that there is no direction between two points on planet earth.

In spite of the Memorial Project’s active cover-up of Murdoch’s plot, I continued to treat Superintendent Hanley as what she is: a fellow countryman aboard a hijacked airplane who is in need of rescue. As I put it in another email to Superintendent Hanley last November:

I don’t want you to be hurt here. There is only one bad guy in this story: Paul Murdoch. I want to help everyone else get off of this hijacked airplane. … I am not your enemy. I am your friend. I am the one who has been trying to save you, for two damned years, and I still am, despite your persistent public slanders against me.

Is it even POSSIBLE to be clearer? A warning is not a threat. A warning is to protect someone from a threat, as my communications spelled out over and over. For Joanne Hanley to pretend that these warnings about the threat she is facing were threats in themselves is deliberate dishonesty. For her to tell Calvin Wilson that these attempts to protect her from Murdoch’s plot were violent threats against her, prompting Wilson to use his status as a family member to attack critics on this dishonest basis, is even worse.

Joanne Hanley is not the only person I am warning. Every Pennsylvanian is aboard this hijacked airplane. How can the newspapers of Pennsylvania let stand a fraudulent claim that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca? How can the educated people of Pennsylvania, the math teachers, the college students, the politicians, let such a fraud stand, when every one of you knows that Muslims face Mecca for prayer?

If Pennsylvanians continue to be willfully blind to easily verifiable evidence of an enemy plot in your own back yard, history will not be kind to you.

Alec Rawls
Palo Alto CA
August 12, 2008

Morality requires trust in truth
Imagine if one of the passengers on Flight 93 was told that if they did not retake the airplane, they would be killed when the terrorists flew the airplane into a building. If the passenger was Joanne Hanley, she would say: “Stop threatening me!”

Any excuse to avoid the truth, no matter how nonsensical or even suicidal. A photo-negative of the fighting spirit of Flight 93.

Asked by Pilate to account for himself, Jesus answered: “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” (Jn. 18:37.) Jesus wasn’t a witness for the truth only sometimes, or only about matters of salvation. He proceeded from the factual truth of every situation that crossed his path, and called upon the rest of us to similarly trust in truth.

Secular moral reason demands the same thing. Anyone who thinks that it can somehow be right or in their interest to avoid or suppress the truth will through that avoidance of the truth become divorced from reality, with the inevitable effect that their ideas about what is right or in their interest can only be wrong. This is the irrationality of the Memorial Project. They proceed on the assumption that the crescent design is innocent, while self-consciously covering up evidence that it is not.

This malfeasance puts the rest of our society to the test. All of the people who we pay to check and report the facts: government, academia and the media, are all desperately trying to suppress the truth. That leaves it up to the rest of us to witness and communicate the truth about Murdoch’s plot. (Some basic facts, and how to verify them for yourself, posted here.)

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This Beautiful City trailer

It began thusly with the folks who brought you a loud and proud “OORAH!”,

• Chaos ipod

• The Chateau the movie
  
  Constantine divx

  The Living and the Dead psp Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within release Last Hippie Standing film

then the the surface bound “bus drivers” How About You film for the aforementioned.
Next: the Zoomies

And…finally, now the ground component has it’s place in the structure.

My testimonial? I can only speak for the Navy site, but I have been contacted by and contacted shipmates from many decades gone by. I have been blessed with other “shipmates” in a larger sense, who willingly shared their stories of history with me when I went searching for others involved in operations I blogged about.

The TWS staff has put a great tool together, designed for military type social networking. Bring a few buddies to the table and they make it worth your while, but if you’re not in to the “refer a freind” life style, then $20/yr isn’t pretty reasonable in my book.

Hey, Army types…give it a shot…you never know who you might find after all there years.

Note regarding the flap when all of a sudden the USAF got their site and some boneheaded Major declared it an OPSEC nightmare: THe US Military didn’t come to have the wonderful public confidence ratings because the members are a bunch of dunces…For those who can’t figure it out: Use your head and remember the documents you signed when you got your security clearances…’nuff said.

• Thirteen Days full movie

Christmas Caper ipod

The story begins a few years earlier, but you trot down to the Recruiting Office and sign in, then take the physical. It seems you have been “a very, very sickly little boy” and your father has managed to hide that, in fact, it even stays hidden form many more years. So you get a 4-F designation, even before WWII for America has even begun? What do you do?

“I am rapidly reaching a point where every one of my peers will be in uniform, and I do not intend to be the only one among them wearing coward’s tweeds” you write to your friend. With some “help” and connections, you land a commission in the US Navy and a billet in the Office of Naval Intelligence, which you are well suited for. You still have, by the medical records, suffered trough jaundice, colitis and back problems (a result of too many steroids). However, along the way, you have gone into the demanding sports and not let such trivial things slow you down.

You have dated some world class women, and get connected with a Europe beauty, who’s family has a few “connections” not on the right side of the prevailing sentiments. You get told you intel gig is at risk. Do you dump the dame, and keep the office job? Nope. You take the option. There’s a slight change since taking the commission: There’s now a shooting war on…

Along comes a man, looking for men like you, sailors of yachts, smart, dependable. He wears a light blue ribbon around his neck, when in a full dress uniform, he’s been in the hardest, dirtiest fighting, left behind with his crew to manage to be “self sufficient” or die and he becomes a monumental road block to the enemy, before he finds his way south to Australia, with the rescue of a general and president to his credit, all without a SIMA, tender, TYCOM or NAVSEA to hold his hand. He’s manning up the PT Boat fleet and he needs men who want a challenge. You take it.

Side note: You may have family connections (Dad sends a telegram for a lunch date), but LCDR Bulkeley is a man who only does things the right way. Lunch with Joe Kennedy Sr lasted from 1 to 8PM, with John Bulkeley agreeing to interview Jack the next time he was at Northwestern, and would accept him if he measured up. From “Sea Wolf: The Daring Exploits of Navy Legend John D. Bulkeley” by William Breuer: A Cat In The Brain dvd

Twenty-five-year-old Jack Kennedy passed muster with flying colors. In his interview, the handsome young man appeared fearless and eager, and had sailed his own sloop in Cape Cod since he was 15 years old. These assets would make him and ideal PT-boat- skipper.

The two men would next meet at JFK’s inauguration in 1961. And then once more, team up to fight the enemy, this time at a small island base named Guantanamo Bay.

Back to the tale of this day long ago:

You do so well in training you get a gig as an instructor, before shipping out to the Solomon Islands. When you arrive, they give you the hanger queen: PT-109. It needs work and you don’t have a crew yet. You put on your shorts and grab some tools and go to work. It’s hot, it’s humid and you’re an officer, but you crew arrives to find you, not wearing a shirt or rank insignia and you have a scrapper or paint brush in your hand. They arrive, you keep working along side them.

Eventually, you take your boat to sea to patrol Blackett Strait. No RADAR, just seaman’s eye and judgment are your main sensors that moonless night. You had 10 seconds warning to take evasive maneuvers. Not enough time to clear the stem of steel headed your way.

Much of the tale of the events that transpired from Aug 2 to Aug 9th, 1943 have been captured for the record. What I found striking in the article in this month’s America in WWII magazine about John Kennedy is John had always been a man plagued with medical issues, but he was a man who, for whatever reason, had been taught to “cowboy up” and “get ‘er done,” in today’s parlance. The accepted story is his back problems of later public life were a result of being rammed by a Japanese destroyer going 40 kts. Not true, he had already been suffering for years, and it seems out in theater, only his XO knew.

So, as the story goes, JFK decided the crew that served him worthy of being saved, even if he perished at night, alone, in the ocean currents, hoping to flag down a patrolling PT boat miles from shore. In retrospect, the ship sinking survivor stories of WWII are replete with the terror of the shark attacks, snatching men to their death from below. John Kennedy went out two nights alone after the first arrival ashore.

The bottom line? He took care of his men, and specifically the badly wounded. He did not avert his gaze, he did not declare some one beyond hope, fitting to be left behind to die alone in the sea. He swam them to safety, not once, but twice.

Bad back, bought of severe abdominal distress, under normal conditions, he did not waver, he did not fail, he did not give up, he did not surrender, and he did not forget those who could do a job. But, it all started with a man not taking the lead in getting into the military, but being shamed into it by those around him joining up. The end result? A great leader emerged, to take on the Soviet Threat and to take the US and the world to the moon.

The editor’s column asks for a post card vote to say if the Navy Marine Corps Medal JFK was awarded should be upgraded to a Navy Cross. After reading this story, once more, but in light of a man graded not fit for active service, but who did all that anyone else was required anyhow, I think my vote is “Yes.”

You can mail you vote to:

America in WWII – JFK
PO BOX 4175
Harrisburg, PA 1711-0175

Write “Navy Cross for JFK – Yes” or “No”

Related: Last year’s PT-109 post Madhouse trailer , which includes a link to Robert Ballard’s location of the wreckage of PT-109.