September 11, 2006

About the Demolition of WTC Tower 7


Reviewing

Loose Change

911truth.org

Larry Silverstein


video: talking about the demolition of WTC7



Silverstein spinning like a top




Silverstein Pockets Billions

Silverstein’s bid closed on July 24 2001, just seven weeks before it was destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The deal was described in a press release on July 24 2001, as:

“Silverstein Properties, Inc., and Westfield America, Inc. will lease the Twin Towers and other portions of the complex in a deal worth approximately $3.2 billion – the city’s richest real estate deal ever and one of the largest privatization initiatives in history. [2]”

The lease agreement applied to World Trade Center Buildings One, Two, Four and Five World Trade Center, and about 425,000 square feet of retail space. Silverstein put up only $14 million of his own money [3]. Silverstein was also given the right to rebuild the structures, should they be destroyed. [4]

September 11, 2001 attacks

When the attacks occurred, Silverstein was at home debating with his wife about plans to move his headquarters to the 88th floor of the North Tower. His son Roger was at 7 World Trade Center but was not hurt. 7 World Trade Center is said to have caught fire when debris fell from the North Tower. The building collapsed shortly after 5 p.m. —8 hours after the attack.

Silverstein and the building owners, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, were spared having to pick up the costs of the $10 billion actual clean up costs when federal taxpayers picked up that tab in 2001 (along with a proviso in which survivor families signed waivers promising not to sue in exchange for million dollar plus cash settlements).
Dispute with Insurers

As a private developer with a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center, Silverstein insured the property. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, he sought payment for the destruction of the towers as two incidents. The two dozen insurers held that it was one incident. If it were considered to be a single incident, the payout would be $3.55 billion and if it were two incidents, it would be $7.1 billion. Silverstein sued the insurers. On December 6, 2004, a federal jury ruled in favor of Silverstein giving him an additional $1.1 billion from nine insurers, declaring it to be two “occurrences”. [5] However, in a previous trial, a different federal jury delivered a mixed verdict which highly favored insurers on April 29, 2004 [6]

At dispute in the trial were interpretation of standard forms used in the application for property insurance and when particular insurers saw which documents.[7]

In total, Silverstein was awarded nearly $5 billion in insurance money following the destruction of the Twin Towers [8]. In April 2006, rebuilding cost was estimated to be $6.3 billion.

http://www.answers.com/topic/larry-silverstein

There are a lot of really off-the-wall tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories surrounding this matter. Pods, missiles, drones, that sort of crap. Some may be “red herrings” put in your path to sow confusion.



Ask the most basic questions: Who stood to gain by the terrorist attacks? Who actually DID gain? The answers are several. Any detective would ask that question, and it’s perfectly reasonable to ask it. “Follow the money”.

Thanks and apologies to Ted Rall,
a Great American

....here’s what I sent to ABC via Move On:

I urge you not to air this dangerously distorted version of the events leading up to the attack on September 11, 2001. If you insist on doing so, however, I hope that you will have the decency and responsibility to preface the program with a disclaimer that many of the events depicted are fictional, and to repeat the disclaimer after every commercial break.

Your decision to air this program has made me rethink watching any ABC news programs, or should I write, “news” programs.

9/11 Research ( you be the judge )

False
Flag, term definition

9/11
Research Summary in Wikipedia

Able
Danger

Operation
Northwoods ( planned false-flag attack )

Scholars for
9/11 Truth

BushTrash (German site )

Review
of “Loose Change”

Miscellaneous
9/11

Larry
Silverstein

Insider
Trading of United and American Airlines Stock

Five
Israelis Arrested 9/11

On
Antiwar.com



Mossad
in USA pre-9/11 ( Fox Documentary )



Reichstag
Fire
(compelling in its similarities)

U.S. deaths in Iraq, war on terror surpass 9/11 toll

(CNN)—As the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attack on the United States approaches, another somber benchmark has just been passed.

The announcement Sunday of four more U.S. military deaths in Iraq raises the death toll to 2,974 for U.S. military service members in Iraq and in what the Bush administration calls the war on terror.

The 9/11 attack killed 2,973 people, including Americans and foreign nationals but excluding the terrorists. The 9/11 death toll was calculated by CNN.

CNN report

So buy a goddam bumper sticker

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091006Z.shtml

Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.

Rejoinder from yellowcakewalk: Hey, since they have been collecting EVERYONE’s email, phone calls, etc since at least 2001, they have a powerful tool for trashing ANY political opponent. That’s the primary purpose of the

WASHINGTON —The Justice Department’s congressional lobbying-and-bribery investigation is looking into whether former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s wife received money from a lobbying firm for a no-show job, recent FBI interviews indicate.

The two-year investigation is examining whether lobbyist Jack Abramoff and others sought legislative favors for their clients by offering expensive meals, sports tickets, golf outings and other gifts to about a dozen lawmakers and congressional aides.

It’s been a year since we decided that we need to find a way in which to express an opinion about the American presidential election. We wanted to do it carefully, so we assembled a panel. We wanted to do it seriously, so we waited a while until it got closer to the actual race. And here it is: the panel, the expert pollster, the candidates, the rankings, the analysis, the two-year commitment, and the explanation.

Commentary in Haaretz

Email this bastard and tell him and Israel that the important thing is which candidate is best for America. And the best candidate for America is one that will either cut off all aid to Israel and let the little rogue nation fend for itself, or better, push it back into its internationally recognized borders, rounding up its leaders for war crimes tribunals in the meantime.

Israeli aggression is the reason America now has enemies in the Arab and muslim world.

rosner@haaretz.co.il

Bush Admits, Defends Secret CIA Prisons

By NBC

Bush on Wednesday said for the first time that some suspected terrorist leaders have been held by the CIA outside the United States in secret locations.

Article in Information Clearinghouse

Five years later, Americans’ views of the impact of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have changed little, but opinions about how best to protect against future attacks have shifted substantially. In particular, far more Americans say reducing America’s overseas military presence, rather than expanding it, will have a greater effect in reducing the threat of terrorism.

FigureBy a 45% to 32% margin, more Americans believe that the best way to reduce the threat of terrorist attacks on the U.S. is to decrease, not increase, America’s military presence overseas. This is a stark reversal from the public’s position on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. In the summer of 2002, before serious public discussion of removing Saddam Hussein from power had begun, nearly half (48%) said that the best way to reduce terrorism was to increase our military involvement overseas, while just 29% said less involvement would make us safer.

A LICENSE TO LIE

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Fri, 09/08/2006 – 6:29am. Editorials

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

As BuzzFlash readers know by now, the ABC Television Network, owned by entertainment behemoth Disney, has spent $40 million to run a commercial-free, fictionally-”enhanced” account of the events leading up to and surrounding 9/11.

The fiction, by all accounts, comes from fabricated scenes that place much of the blame, were they actually true, for 9/11 on the Clinton Administration. Some of these television “moments” were made up out of whole cloth. In short, like the Bush Administration itself, you won’t be able to tell the truth from the lies.

A project of an avowed right wing shill, the 9/11 “Disney in Wonderland” television drama appears to be a pre-election pay-off to the Bush Administration.

We have been running a slew of stories about this travesty on BuzzFlash this past week, so we won’t get into the details. But we bet our bottom dollar that you won’t see a scene of Bush kicking a CIA briefing officer out of the room after the man gave Bush a document entitled ””Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” This occurred on August 6, 2001.

According to a recent book by Ron Suskind, Bush’s reaction to being told that our nation was about to come under likely terrorist attack was to get peevish for having his vacation disrupted. He kicked the briefer out of the room by dismissing him with these words, ”’All right, you’ve covered your ass.”

Bush then did nothing – absolutely nothing – to attempt to forestall the attack or prevent hijackings by having heightened screening implemented at airports. He did nothing at all, except go back to relax on his month-long vacation in Crawford.

Do you think that will be in the film?

Or how about the scene of Bush cluelessly reading “My Pet Goat” in a classroom at the Brooker Elementary School while America was under attack and people were leaping from the twin towers in New York. Will that be in this piece of Mickey Mouse GOP propaganda?

We somehow doubt it.

Anyone who reads BuzzFlash knows that we never stop raising the alarm about how Republican politics, entertainment, news and corporate profits have morphed, for the most part, into one synergistic pump. All the “news coverage” water, more or less, comes from the same well. Or, perhaps a more apt description, as the ABC-Bushevik vision of 9/11 aptly illustrates, the Republicans and the news and entertainment television companies are on the same script – in this case, literally.

Suffice it to say, ABC would not run a $40 million film that is a hit job on the Democrats – and leaves Bush barely grazed – a few weeks before a national election if it weren’t expecting something in return from the White House.

For-profit companies don’t blow $40 million without advertising revenue out of “goodwill.” They want something in return – and you can be sure, if the Republicans maintain control of both houses of Congress, Disney will be well-rewarded by the Bush Administration -– well-rewarded indeed.

We long ago arrived at the point in the world of television that broadcast networks were given the public airwaves basically free of cost – and then abused that privilege by putting profits before service to the public. They are given a license to lie in order to ingratiate themselves with the GOP and reap a return on their political investment by getting legislative and regulatory financial “advantages.”

The uproar over the ABC propaganda film – and it is heartening to see the Democrats fighting so aggressively against this shameful act of collusion on the part of ABC – is a symbolic apotheosis of sorts. It represents a recognition that the entire Bush administration is based on rule by a series of mutually complimentary “scripts.” All of these scripts, including the ABC 9/11 rewrite of history and Bush’s ongoing “War on Terrorism” mini-series, are part of a larger “narrative” stitched together by Karl Rove.

It’s a narrative that has little to do with reality. It’s storytelling at its best, like reading a nightmarish bedtime tale to a child and then reassuring him or her that all will be well because Daddy is guarding the house against goblins and evil doers with a big gun.

But, needless to say, in a democracy, a major broadcast network, owned by the company that is synonymous with the creation of “branded” fantasy for children, should not be in the business of providing campaign support to a political party through a $40 million television program (for which, we repeat, they will receive no advertising revenue).

Democracy in America is on the endangered species list as long as big media companies are given a license to lie and influence election outcomes, even though we, the public, own the airwaves.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

If you were writing a script about 9/11, what three key actual historical scenes would you include? Add your suggestions below.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2727471.stm

Nevertheless, Bush ignored the intelligence….

In Feb. 2003, Bush said: “Iraq has sent bomb-making and document-forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. An al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990s for help in acquiring poisons and gases. We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad.”

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030208.html

Iraq also was not busily trying to build a nuclear weapon before the war, nor did it have a biological weapons program.

Those conclusions were contained in documents released by the committee as part of the second phase of its investigation into the prewar intelligence on Iraq. Releasing any documents was a change of pace for the panel’s chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who has consistently tried to stymie this phase of the investigation.

Unfortunately, the documents — only two of the five parts of the final report — are beside the big point of this inquiry: Did Mr. Bush and his aides knowingly hype the intelligence on Iraq and deliberately mislead Americans into war?

The first phase of the committee’s investigation listed countless ways in which the intelligence agencies messed up before the war, but drew no conclusions about how Mr. Bush used the flawed intelligence. That question was put off until after the election of 2004, and Mr. Roberts did his best for another year to make sure it would never be answered.

When Democrats forced him to resume the investigation, Mr. Roberts re-engineered the inquiry into a five-part series and orchestrated the process so that the verdict on the actions of Mr. Bush and his team will now not be rendered until after yet another election season is over this fall.

Mr. Roberts has consistently defended his actions by saying he was trying to conduct a careful investigation. But yesterday, he denounced Democrats for “insisting that they were deliberately duped into supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

“That is simply not true,” Mr. Roberts said.

So much for not prejudging the outcome. If Mr. Roberts has an investigative report supporting that conclusion, we’d sure like to read it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/09/opinion/09sat2.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

“What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,” the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14950.htm

[JPN Commentary: Philip Weiss relates how Human Rights Watch, a leading human rights organization, has gotten itself in hot water over its criticism of Israel’s wholesale destruction in Lebanon. This is a difficult position to be in – even for such a well established organization – due, at least in part, to the fact that some of the organization’s largest contributors are Jewish. When it comes to Israel, says Sarahleah Whitson of HRW: ”...people who are at the forefront of every single rights issue, from racial justice in the United States to the ethnic cleansing in Darfur—on Israel, it crumbles,... and everyone [who is critical] is successfully marginalized”. – RG]

Israel Lobby Watch

by Philip Weiss

The Nation

For progressives who are even mildly critical of Israel, a never-ending concern is the response of the Jewish community. Generally, Jews are among the biggest backers of liberal causes. But a common refrain from liberal Jews is that Hamas and Hezbollah represent threats to Israel’s very existence, and so conversations about policy take on an emotional and religious character. “There’s a deep schizophrenia in some of the Jewish community, and people who are at the forefront of every single rights issue, from racial justice in the United States to the ethnic cleansing in Darfur—on Israel, it crumbles, and there is all this hand-wringing,” says Sarahleah Whitson of Human Rights Watch. “And everyone [who is critical] is successfully marginalized.”

The struggle for Jewish hearts and minds explains the latest battle in the ideological war over the Middle East: the firestorm over Human Rights Watch’s reports from the Lebanon war. The New York City-based monitor issued a couple-dozen reports during the conflict, some sharply critical of Israel for killing civilians, and has had to fight a rear-guard action to maintain its standing among American Jews.

The leading human rights organization in the world, HRW has a dry and thorough manner that reflects its executive director, lawyer Kenneth Roth, who is given to tweezerlike fact-finding and incisive conclusions, with a moral backbeat. The restrained tone has allowed HRW to grow by half in the past five years and stay firmly in the mainstream. When I asked him if he had a special connection to the New York Times, which frequently cites its reports, Roth quipped, “There’s a phone in the drawer.”

HRW has often been critical of Israel while showing respect for its security concerns. For instance, it has condemned suicide bombing as a war crime and also assailed Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank. On July 12 the Lebanon war began, and soon escalated into a wholesale air attack by Israel on Lebanon (and, yes, a rain of Hezbollah rockets on civilian targets in Israel). HRW’s first critics were the left, which felt HRW was twiddling its thumbs as hundreds died, when it alluded delicately to “potential violations of international humanitarian law” in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. HRW did not issue more forceful statements in the first two weeks of the war, Roth says, because its two researchers couldn’t get into southern Lebanon. Once they got there and spent two days visiting villages, HRW issued a fifty-page report August 3, accusing Israel of war crimes in its “indiscriminate” bombings. The researchers had documented more than a third of the reported civilian deaths at that time and could show that in none of 153 killings were Hezbollah forces or weapons “in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack.” HRW alleged a war crime after it visited Qana, the scene of twenty-eight civilian deaths on July 30. There Israeli missiles had hit a three-story house in which people were sheltering. Israeli officials later stated that rocket fire had originated from the village three days before the attack.

HRW’s statements got international news coverage (if only two paragraphs in the Times) but put the group in the cross hairs of the Israel lobby, notably in the New York Sun. The Sun linked Ken Roth with Mel Gibson as an enemy of the Jewish people and said his moral compass was “haywire.” It is tempting to dismiss the four-year-old Sun—whose most memorable contribution to American letters has been its statement that Iraq War protesters were guilty of “treason”—as a right-wing rag. Its backers include Manhattan Institute former chair Roger Hertog and Bruce Kovner, chair of the American Enterprise Institute. But Kovner is also chair of Juilliard, and the Sun is a sophisticated newspaper, with extensive arts and sports coverage. As managing editor Ira Stoll says, the Sun has influence; it represents the views of organized Jewish leaders. Among the Sun’s readers, says Stoll, are some of HRW’s biggest financial backers. Indeed, in an editorial the Sun said that Robert Bernstein, HRW’s former chair, was having “private agonies” over the group’s reports and quoted Morton Zuckerman, listed as a donor of between $25,000 and $99,000 in HRW’s 2005 report, as saying the reports on Israel were an “outrage…. Human Rights Watch has lost all moral credibility.”

Roth responded to every attack the Sun printed. In one letter he spoke of Israeli “slaughter” and wrote, “An eye for an eye—or, more accurately in this case, twenty eyes for an eye—may have been the morality of some more primitive moment.” The comment was echoed in smears. The Sun printed a piece by Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League saying that criticisms of the Bible are a classic anti-Semitic stereotype, a diagnosis of Roth’s motivation that Stoll says he shares. “In my view unfortunately and dangerously, it’s increasingly respectable in mainstream circles to engage in old style anti-Jewish stereotypes,” says Stoll. (It seems Roth’s personal history—he went into human rights law in part because as a boy he had listened to his father’s stories of escaping Nazi Germany—is sinister camouflage.)

The Jerusalem Post and New York Daily News soon piled on. Never one to miss the limelight, so did Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who wrote on the Huffington Post that HRW had invented facts. Dershowitz then invoked Jewish solidarity: “Within the last month, virtually every component of the organized Jewish community, from secular to religious, liberal to conservative, has condemned Human Rights Watch for its bias.”

Roth says that HRW was isolated in its role as Israel critic in part because the prospect of the sort of vitriol he faced has scared other groups away from even looking at the Middle East. HRW emergency director Peter Bouckaert explains, “We always get attacked for our findings by the government involved. What makes this case different is, it’s not the government, it’s the external lobby. We have a difficult but positive dialogue with the Israeli government and the IDF. They don’t dismiss us as morally repugnant or irrelevant. They take our findings seriously. The attacks are not about the facts, they’re about insulating Israel from any type of criticism.”

Bouckaert says the attacks represent a real threat to HRW. “All we have is our reputation for credibility and impartiality. We have a lot of Jewish donors and funders, and I think Ken wants to be sure they don’t think of us as not impartial.”

At the height of the criticism, HRW organized a conference call with Bouckaert and two other researchers who were on the ground in the Middle East and members of the HRW board, to explain their methods. “They made it clear that they understood the political sensitivities and were bending over backward to be impartial,” says Michael Gellert, an HRW board member. So much bending over backward can give a fact-finder a backache. Bouckaert says that Israel is “an emotionally upsetting place to work” because while he sometimes feels outrage at Israeli actions, he is compelled to report publicly in the most careful and balanced terms. That pressure grinds researchers down. They leave or avoid the subject, which is the aim of the critics. “We’re one of the last ones standing in the mainstream,” says Whitson.

Remaining in the mainstream is vital to HRW. While Roth stuck to his guns on Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombings, and the organization repeatedly condemned Israel’s use of cluster bombs in civilian areas, it also seemed to go out of its way toward the end of the war to blast both sides. The chariness alienated the international left. Roel Bramer, a Dutch-Canadian, resigned from the board of the Toronto chapter of HRW in August, saying its criticism of Israel was too tepid. In a resignation letter, Bramer wrote, “Ken [Roth] is quoted as stating that we abide by a ‘fact/research-based application of international human rights and humanitarian law’” and criticize governments on human rights grounds, not political ones. “I feel that HRW should protest boldly and loudly against this borderline genocide and the calamitous rubble and grief Israel has left behind.”

Roth does not appear to be too worried about his credibility on the left. He is much more concerned about the right, even if that means fielding arguments about whether the Bible is primitive. One board member, Shibley Telhami, an Arab-American who is sometimes enraged by Israel’s actions, says engaging the pro-Israel community is vital to the organization’s mission, and his own. “The New York Sun is framing HRW in a context that resonates with a community that’s much broader…. What you have here is Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, within the American political mainstream, not just the Jewish groups, saying that this is about Israel’s right to defend itself and let them finish the job. But you’ve got to connect, so you think, What is the best mix of effectiveness, credibility and principle? I struggle with that every day.”

War Every Day (eIraq Blog)
THE EVER GROWING LIST OF 9/11 VICTIMS

Jeff Severns Guntzel, Electronic Iraq
(11 September 2006)

http://electroniciraq.net/news/2476.shtml

Donald Rumsfeld’s business is war. And on September 11th,
not surprisingly, the Secretary of Defense of the United
States of America was planning for war. And so it was that
five hours after the incalculably cruel attacks on the
morning of September 11th, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld was
dictating his strategy to his aides as his Pentagon
burned. “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and
not.” In Iraq today, Iraqi’s are surely too close to their
own monumental national tragedy to direct too much thought
to the events of 9/11, even as their fate has been linked
both directly and indirectly to that day…

Number of Marine deserters tops 1,100 in 2005. 5,500 desertions from U.S. Military since start of war. 120 counselors across the country will log 35,000 calls this year.

By David Montero, Rocky Mountain News
September 8, 2006

There were 1,170 desertions in the U.S. Marine Corps in fiscal year 2005 – a sharp uptick from the previous year when 744 Marines were classified as deserters.

But 2005 also was the first year in which the number of Marine deserters increased after a steady three- year decline.

According to the Marine Corps, fiscal 2002 was the height of desertions, with 1,721 personnel leaving without authorization.

But getting accurate, overall numbers of desertions or those absent without leave – AWOL - are tougher to track down.

The U.S. Army reported 2,011 desertions in fiscal year 2005 and there are widely circulated reports from magazines and newspapers saying there have been 5,500 total desertions from the armed forces since the start of the Iraq war.

PARIS (Reuters)

France issued an implicit criticism of U.S. foreign policy on Thursday, rejecting talk of a “war on terror.”

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, speaking in parliament, expressed these views on global terrorism, while
President Jacques Chirac backed France’s claims to the international front rank with a fresh defense of his country’s nuclear arsenal.

Villepin noted Chirac’s strong opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of
Iraq in 2003 and said the Arab state had now sunk into violence and was feeding new regional crises.

“Let us not forget that these crises play into the hands of all extremists,” the prime minister said in a debate on the Middle East. “We can see this with terrorism, whether it tries to strike inside or outside our frontiers,” he added.

“Against terrorism, what’s needed is not a war. It is, as France has done for many years, a determined fight based on vigilance at all times and effective cooperation with our partners.

“But we will only end this curse if we also fight against injustice, violence and these crises,” he said.

Villepin’s remarks, which came a day after U.S. President
George Bush admitted that the
CIA had interrogated dozens of terrorism suspects in secret foreign locations, did not explicitly mention the United States.

But his rejection of language employed by Bush, who often uses the expression “war on terror” underlined the longstanding differences between Paris and Washington.

In separate remarks, Chirac stressed that France was committed to maintaining a nuclear arsenal of its own.

“In an uncertain world, facing constantly evolving threats, nuclear dissuasion guarantees our vital interests,” Chirac said on a visit to France’s Atomic Energy Commission nuclear simulation facility at Bruyeres-le-Chatel near Paris.

He stressed that France was committed to funding continuing research and development into nuclear weapons technology.

“There can be no great ambition without adequate means, that’s clear,” he said. “The position of countries is never guaranteed. In the 21st century, only those which make science a genuine priority will stay ahead.”

Both France and the United States have played down splits opened by the Iraq war, pointing especially to cooperation on attempts by the West to contain
Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

But differences in tone and style have often resurfaced, notably during the Lebanon crisis, where France initially offered to send just 400 peacekeepers to Lebanon despite vigorously backing calls for an international force.

Villepin’s speech in parliament made much of France’s leading role in securing a peace agreement in Lebanon backed by the
United Nations, which he said had shown the virtues of “listening and dialogue.”

“It is the duty of France and Europe to show that the clash of civilizations is not inevitable,” he said. “No one retains this wisdom, inherited from our history, as we, French and Europeans, do,” he said.

For 25 years, People For the American Way Foundation has been an ardent defender of the Constitution and our democracy. This year we are celebrating the first official Constitution Day – Monday, September 18 – with a reading of this revered document, beginning to end, starting at 5:00 pm at Georgetown University’s Gonda Theatre.

Co-hosted by PFAW Foundation and Georgetown University, the event will feature distinguished speakers such as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Senators Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy, Representative Kendrick Meek and former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, along with many more. We hope you can join us!

What: CONSTITUTION DAY READING OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

Where: The Gonda Theatre on Georgetown University’s Main Campus 37th and O Streets, NW Washington, DC

When: Monday, September 18, 2006 5:00 pm (expected to last until around 6:30)

To reserve your seat, RSVP by e-mail to Susan Swift at sswift@pfaw.org . Seating is limited!