“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!”
- Mario Savio on the steps of Sproul Hall, UC Berkeley, December 2, 1964
Russo was fighting terminal cancer when he gave this interview. “Not fearing any man”, he stood nothing personally to gain. He sought only to disabuse Americans of the catastrophic illusions being enforced upon them.
Despite the hubris, the monstrous contempt, the utter poverty of compassion he ascribes to the authors of the “war on terror”, Russo’s humanity survives inviolate, proof that all is not lost.
His testimony speaks for itself, and it will continue to speak, echoed by many, until the truth is known and justice done.
Although his presence with Jennings in WTC7 was clumsily excised from Jennings’ heavily manipulated account for the BBC “documentary” The Third Tower, Michael Hess gave an interview to UPN9 on the morning of 9/11 that fully corroborates Jennings’ testimony.
Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (current Green Party candidate for President of the United States) confronts Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Myers–two military decision-makers who were somehow “out of the loop” until the Pentagon was struck on 9/11–regarding Pentagon contractor corruption, accounting “irregularities” and her query about those darned 9/11 wargames they seem to have forgotten to respond to.
Myers delivers an especially memorable performance as he claims–absent irony–that the wargames he vaguely acknowleges actually “enhanced the response” of NORAD to the hijackings of 9/11. For the record, the third and current official version of the “air defense” sequence of events: Alert F-15s from Otis are finally given the scramble order at 8:46 as AA11 impacts Tower One, flying first not to New York where they might intercept UA175 but to training area Whiskey 105 off Long Island, arriving over Manhattan at 9:25. F-16s from Langley scramble at 9:24, directed not to DC to protect the capital from AA77 but north over the Atlantic Ocean to intercept a “phantom” of AA11, 38 minutes after this aircraft ceased to exist. UA93 is never intercepted until it crashes at 10:03. That is the official version of the “enhanced response” of NORAD on 9/11.
“As children we become accustomed to hearing fairy tales. They are always pleasant stories and they are comforting to hear because good always triumphs over evil. At least this is the way it is in fairy tales.
Fairy tales are not dangerous for our children and are probably even good for them up to a point. However, in the real world in which you and I must live, fairy tales are dangerous. They are dangerous because they are untrue. Anything which is untrue is dangerous.
And it is all the more dangerous when a fairy tale becomes accepted as reality simply because it has an official seal of approval, or because honorable men announce that you must believe it or because powerful elements of the press tell you that the fairy tale is true.”
