The planes did not bring those towers down; bombs did. So why use planes? It seems they were a diversionary tactic - a grand spectacle. Who would want to divert our attention from the real cause of the collapse of those towers? It must be those who benefited most from these attacks. ... All evidence points to elements inside, high atop the governments of Israel and the United States. Those wishing to implement their world government through their control over finance, media and militaries are guilty of these most heinous crimes. This atrocity is proving to advance the domestic police state agendas and consolidate the Middle East’s oil reserves. The people who most benefited from these attacks are the wealthiest, most privileged and powerful men on earth who feel they will finally be able to hold dominion over the nations of the world through their New World Order. For some of these globalists, these attacks were merely a means to an end - a huge step toward ruling a world socialist system. But for others, likely the planners of such a vile crime, this was a mass sacrifice to themselves. This mass ritual sacrifice of the vulnerable and the heroes who tried to save them was perpetrated by power crazed freaks who are simply - satanic.The panel featured 9/11 Scholars for Truth founder James Fetzer, BYU Physics Professor Steven Jones, President of the Institute for Space and Security Studies Dr. Robert M. Bowman, USAF Lt. Col. (Ret.), filmmaker and radio talk-show host Alex Jones, and terrorism expert Webster Tarpley.
If you've ever wanted a glimpse behind a tortured soul, a creative presence and a guy who just wants something he's never really had, click through to Ellroy's essay.I was midway through a three-year crack-up. It was the upshot of long transits of overwork and emotional seepage held in check by near-insane ambition. Brutal sleeplessness and panic attacks. Sobbing jags and weightless plummets. It was a six-week hotel stay. My alleged L.A. agenda: take a neurofeedback course to curb insomnia. My real L.A. mission: hide out and seek safety in the wild-ass place that made me. ... This essay is a travel document and a homecoming brief. It will stand as my final autobiographical statement. The gist is simple: My birthplace made me, I ran away, I ran back.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair (right) chats with
Ron Franscell and driver Mahmoud, Cairo, November 2001~~~~
CAIRO, Egypt, Nov. 4, 2001 -- Everybody loves Mahmoud.
He is a legend among the tea-men and the other drivers outside the American hotel. He and his white Mercedes are well-known to the hubbly-bubbly sheesha boys in Giza; they wave when he passes. And he is a free lunch for the stray dogs who beg for scraps on the street. They love him most of all.
“If I feed them, they are happy and they will not harm me. If they are happy, then I am happy. Then,” he smiles big, “Allah is happy. Understand?”
He first approached me one morning near the 26th of July Bridge -- commemorating the day the last British soldier left Egypt -- hungry for a paying “guest.” Tourists stopped coming after Sept. 11. The hotels, restaurants, shops and airplanes are empty, and Mahmoud’s Mercedes has been too idle. He knows he has only five or six paces to make a sale. Forty pound to Giza full tour half day three hour not one hour three no better ask around Mercedes very nice you go I not joke understand?
Mahmoud speaks passable English very fast, which is why I hired him to be my driver in Cairo. Plus, it pleases him to help me understand. Later, he tells me he once lived in Aspen, where he was an electronics engineer for GTE, but he missed Egypt too much.
He is a devout Muslim, part cabbie, part cleric. To him, peace is what happens when the heart is pure. “Peace is life,” he says. He differentiates between the politicians (“who only want a chair”) and the common people. “The men in chairs have their hand in water, while people have their hand in the fire, understand?"
Mahmoud is also a Bedouin, with an eye for what is out of place. Walking in the Sahara, he once found a Nazi pouch containing a letter and 100 marks. Collectors offered him money for the old marks, but he believes it should be returned to the soldier or his family. He has written to the German address on the envelope, but has never gotten a response. Nonetheless, he promises to take me to the desert when I come back to Egypt, to show me how history is covered and uncovered every day by the shifting sands.
I wish to walk in the real Cairo, so I ask Mahmoud to take me away from the tourist places. We drive into the entrails of the city, weaving through narrow streets in the usual lunatic, death-defying Egyptian rush. He plunges us into a cheerless neighborhood where the locals live simple lives and almost never see the spiffy tourists who’ve stepped from the pages of a Banana Republic catalog.
So I walk. Prayers waft over the city. How can a city with prayers on the air be sinister?
A woman passes, carrying on her head a cage made of wooden slats and filled with chickens. This doesn’t seem to be a hygienic way to carry chickens. Another woman in a full galabaya -- a black robe and veil -- waits for an overcrowded bus beneath a perfume billboard featuring a pale European woman, unexotic except for the dress that is so foreign here.
At a news cart on the sidewalk, a magazine vendor sells the latest Modern Bride, Newsweek, Architectural Digest, MAD, Teen People and Vogue.
Whole lambs hang in a shop window, headless, foreleg-less, sinewy. The butcher tells me one would cost 550 Egyptian pounds, about $130 U.S. I know that’s just the starting bid. Everything, meat as much as cab fare and Coca-Cola, is negotiable.
In an alley grotto, I sit with some Egyptian men -- Abdul al Samad, who looks like a businessman; Mohammad Said, a grizzled man selling hand-made whips and canes, and Said Ahmed, one of the many young men in Cairo’s back streets who looks as if he would volunteer for any task a paying tourist required. With them, I sip strong Turkish coffee down to the silty last inch while Mores, the shine boy, polishes my desert-scoured walking boots for 3 pounds. Curious children from the bleak neighborhood come round to see the American sahaffi, journalist.
“American Number One,” old Mohammad says, perhaps exhausting his English as he hands me a braided leather riding crop. “25 pound?”
But I look past him. Someone has scrawled 911 on the dirty wall behind him. It unnerves me. Is Sept. 11 being celebrated or mourned? I cannot tell by looking, so I put my finger on the Arabic graffiti and ask: What does this mean?
Abdul puts down his sheesha pipe and smiles at the curious infidel.
“God,” he says, pointing at the sky.
How ironic the written Arabic word for “Allah” should look like “911.”
Mahmoud drops me at the curb in front of the American hotel. I wander the seawall along the Nile, where fishermen dangle bread in the water to catch small, flat fish. The setting sun warms their backs, and they wait. I don’t speak to them much, because my Old World grandfather taught me real fishermen don’t talk until they have finished fishing.
Far below, dozens of river rats skitter over the detritus, scavenging for fish guts and garbage drifting from the heart of Africa toward the Mediterranean. One gray rat spies a plastic water bottle floating in a backwater and tries to retrieve it, but the water is too deep and the rat’s curiosity is not so strong. But he keeps trying, always failing. I kept thinking, how disappointed he’ll be when he finally salvages it. How much energy he wasted on curiosity. An American journalist in a strange land, I hope I am not some river rat scavenging deeper waters for empty vessels.
Another man, obviously not a fisherman, speaks to me. His name is Shoukry, he tells me, and he cooks in a pizza place on 26 July Corridore. When he discovers I am American, he stands very close to me. “I am sorry for the happening in New York. Very sorry,” he murmurs. “Egyptians love Americans. Many good people. Very sorry.”
Shoukry’s words comfort me. I assume they are genuine because he doesn’t ask for money.
The next day, Mahmoud picks me up early for a trip to the mosque, because I have asked many questions about Islam. He tells me many things I haven’t heard. Did I know Muslims should travel to Mecca not once, but seven times in their lives? No. Did I know the eighth trip should be to Bethlehem, because Jesus, too, was a great prophet? No. Did I know the Koran predicts the Second Coming of Christ? No.
“If you don’t trust in Jesus and Moses,” Mahmoud preaches in his rapid-fire way, “you don’t trust in Mohammed. Any Muslim who say Jesus was only a man who died is not Muslim. Church is not building for one person, but for God. And is only one God for all of us, Muslim, Christian and Jew. Understand?”
I save table scraps from my last supper in Cairo, and I give them to Mahmoud the next morning. For the dogs, I tell him. He smiles big. The dogs will be happy, so Mahmoud will be happy, and Allah will be happy. And I am happy they’re all happy.
“Your heart is open,” Mahmoud tells me. “When you come back to Egypt, inshallah, I will have you stay in my home and I will show you Egypt in eyes of Egyptian, not tourist, understand?
There is much to understand.
Inshallah. God willing.
PHOTO ABOVE: A Cairo mother and sons (Photo by Ron Franscell)
Ramona and Sousan Ataya of Beaumont, Texas, had only been vacationing two days in Beirut -- mother Sousan's native country -- when the war between Israel and Hezbollah spilled over into Lebanon. Joined by several cousins, they were caught up in the tense days of waiting to be rescued by the American government, fleeing by taxi to a safer refuge in the mountains near Beirut, and hours of pushing through anxious crowds to clamber aboard a U.S. Navy ship that would take them to Cyprus."In the mountains, we knew we were safe, but you're constantly hearing bombs," Ramona said about 12 hours after returning to her Beaumont home. "You see the planes outside your window dropping bombs. We weren't really worried for our lives that much, but we were worried about what's to come, what's going to happen, what if it does get worse." ...ABOVE: Beaumont Enterprise photo by Mark M. Hancock
Two days of rest in a luxury hotel there preceded a marathon of travel home: a five-hour flight to Germany, a 10-hour flight to Newark, an eight-hour layover, then on to Houston. Their commercial flight had a two-hour delay, but by then the women were too tired to care.
"We didn't even have the energy to complain anymore," Ramona said.
Next time you find yourself complaining that CNN or Fox is a little too one-sided for your tastes, tune-in to Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV, based in Beirut. So far, the station has not been 
"I am the keeper of fragile things and IAs a final twist to their entangled romance, it's likely that Pole's ashes will be scattered in California's Santa Monica Bay, where Pole scattered Anais's ashes in 1977 ... and in 1983, scattered her husband Hugo Guiler's ashes, too. Seems fitting that Anais Nin would spend eternity with two men, doesn't it?She was Mrs. Pole for 11 years, until she grew too fearful of the legal consequences of having two husbands who claimed her as a dependent on their tax returns. Before invalidating their marriage in 1966, she told Pole about Guiler, explaining that she could not divorce the banker because of his decades of financial support and remarkable tolerance of her many absences and indiscretions.
Ultimately, Pole was the man with whom Nin chose to spend her last years. After scrimping from his salary as a forest ranger and later as a teacher, he built a small house in Silver Lake that he hoped would entice Nin to stay with him permanently in California.
Yeah, I know you're laughing, but it makes some sense: Dirty dishes cause debt."Most people are so overwhelmed with piled counter tops and dirty dishes that they would rather go out to eat. ... Do the dishes after every meal and keep hot, soapy water in the sink while you are baking or cooking. Clean up as you go. If your sink is empty and the dishes are washed, your kitchen always looks good. This helps you save money because you have time and space to cook."OK, makes sense. The dishes are out of the sink and I feel richer already! But I still can't figure out what to do with all the dirty dishes I stuffed in the linen closet.
Pappy is a man who wore a leather helmet when he played high school football at Cleburne, but only because plastic was still a few decades away. He is a man who not only remembers Texas A&M's only national championship in 1939, he roamed campus before then. He was best friends with the Aggies' brightest stars. And yet he still doesn't understand all the fuss.
"I mean, I'm sure glad to have you," he said humbly. "But I don't know why you're here. There's people who were All-Americans, guys who wound up being millionaires. I was a great player in high school, but not after that. Not in college."
Want to read more about this special guy? Check out the Enterprise story here.
An American who began her career as a journalist in Belfast, claims she is a descendant of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene and is publishing a book about it.
Kathleen McGowan has received a seven-figure advance for her novel, "The Expected One," said the Sunday Times of London. The book will be published in New York on Tuesday. It has earned $2 million from the sale of foreign rights and will appear in Britain on Aug. 7.
McGowan, 43, said she had submitted her proposal to publishers in 1997, six years before author Dan Brown published "The Da Vinci Code" -- which features a plot line involving descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
McGowan self-published her book last year after she was "laughed out of New York City," she said. It sold 2,500 copies but was snapped up by Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It tells the story of Maureen Paschal, a journalist searching in the Pyrenees for scrolls supposedly written in the first century by Magdalene.
When asked to produce ancient family documents that she claims to have uncovered in France, she said she had been "asked not to talk about what I've seen."
Just in case you're one of those people who mistrusts the American media, you can get your Hezbollah information right from the mullah's mouth at the terrorist group's official web site.So what do you think ... what would have been a "proportionate" response to Hezbollah?What would a proportionate Israeli response to the snatching of its soldiers and the bombardment of its soil look like? Should Israel kidnap low-level Hamas and Hezbollah operatives? Those organizations wouldn't mind in the slightest; they want as many martyrs as possible.
The real problem is that Israel's response has been all too proportional. So far it has only gone after Hamas and Hezbollah. (Some collateral damage is inevitable because these groups hide among civilians.) Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is showing superhuman restraint by not, at the very least, "accidentally" bombing the Syrian and Iranian embassies in Beirut, which serve as Hezbollah liaison offices.
Here is the thing: Everything is changing. Everything is changing at a rather unprecedented pace that excites and terrifies almost everyone involved until you want to hold your head in your hands and scream and drink and cry. Technology is moving so fast that you will soon need a wireless router for your digital toaster that also produces grappa and makes stock recommendations and plays MP3s through your fingernails. This is just the way.
But at the same time, I know of not a single pseudo-hipster who loves to download tiny Nelly Furtado music videos to her Nokia for 4 bucks a pop and then sit around a cafe with three other pseudo-hip girlfriends, all plugged into the phone and jamming to the song via headphones, like all those Verizon commercials seem to fantasize. Translation: You gotta maintain a proper perspective.
Photo by Chris Detrick / Salt Lake Tribune
Current events often seem more like deja vu than history. This Fourth of July, watching various documentaries about the American Revolution, it's fascinating to see how our freedom was won by a group of insurgents who often flagrantly ignored the 18th century rules of engagement to defeat an enemy superpower, which sometimes committed atrocities against prisoners and civilians.
