An Unnecessary Death in New York

Police Killing Highlights Flaws of 'Zero Tolerance'

Der Spiegel
Ullrich Fichtner

In midtown Manhattan, police officers shot and killed an African-American man in August after he had walked across Times Square waving a kitchen knife. His last moments tell the story of a broken law enforcement system in New York City.

Darrius Kennedy's date with death begins at 3 p.m., in front of the Stars & Stripes of the neon American flag in New York City's Times Square. Kennedy, a sturdy man with long Rasta braids, is wearing a white shirt with cut-off sleeves, faded jeans and light-colored shoes, and he is skipping backwards toward Seventh Avenue, waving an IKEA kitchen knife. He is going to die, a pedestrian shouts: "They're going to kill you, brother!"

First a policewoman and then four or five other officers pursue Kennedy with their 9mm Glock service weapons, with a trigger pull of 12 pounds, held in both hands. Kennedy backs off from the officers, heading south into the eternal twilight of the streets of Manhattan. He has four-and-a-half minutes left to live.

Officers quickly seal off Seventh Avenue using police tape, and the first squad cars come hurtling down the avenues, their sirens howling. Pedestrians stumble through the blurred images documented by tourists running toward what they see as an adventure, whipping out their smartphones and cameras, hoping to capture a manhunt on video, while Kennedy continues to skip down the streets.

A Classic American Divide

The discussion that takes place in the aftermath of the shooting will divide cleanly along age-old American lines. Some will make snap judgments, in web forums, letters to the editor and call-in radio programs. "Gotcha!" they'll write, "another bites the dust," and "he deserved it." They'll lionize the police officers, calling them "New York's finest," praising their efforts to provide security in the big city. They'll ridicule the victim, calling him a crazy, knife-wielding pothead -- a foolish African American.

Others will ask anxious questions. They'll wonder whether, in this troubled America, it's even possible to just mourn, even if only for a day. They'll want to know why a few dozen police officers couldn't deal with someone like Kennedy in other ways. Why is it, one man asks, that escaped zoo animals are immobilized with tranquilizer darts, while a human being in New York is simply and ruthlessly shot to death in broad daylight?

Kennedy's sister will be quoted as saying that her brother was a talented musician, a man who undoubtedly had his problems, and yet, she will say: "They could have shot him in the leg." His aunt says that her nephew was a "loner," and that people are spreading all kinds of lies about him. She insists that he was a good man, and that he wasn't a bum.

Kennedy has picked a grotesque backdrop for his death. His short journey begins on brightly lit and eternally noisy Times Square, near the Minskoff Theater and ABC television headquarters, where huge electronic billboards advertise Broadway musicals like "The Lion King" and "Mary Poppins," as well as some of the world's most recognizable brand names, like Coca-Cola, Samsung and Heineken. News headlines flicker across illuminated panels as big as tennis courts.

Times Square, diagonally sliced in half by Broadway, sees an average of 1.6 million pedestrians a day. It's Aug. 11, a Saturday. The streets are devoid of office workers but filled with the usual weekend crowds. Day laborers dressed in Mickey Mouse and Elmo costumes stand at intersections, where tourists photograph them in return for pocket change, the "Naked Cowboy" is singing and playing his guitar and steam rises from the carts of food vendors. Kennedy and his pursuers gradually move south along the avenue, from 44th to 43rd to 42nd Street, Kennedy hopping along in front of them, making small, bouncy jumping moves like a cornered boxer, while the police officers, tense and vigilant, cautiously follow him at a distance.

No Police Reports in New York

A few hours later, New York Police Chief Raymond Kelly says that the police response was "by the book." Mayor Michael Bloomberg says: "He had a knife and he was going after people." But the videos uploaded to YouTube, and there are many of them, don't seem to support the statements made by the mayor and Kelly. They also don't show the police officers trying to subdue Kennedy with pepper spray, which they claimed they did four to six times.

Was there Advanced Knowledge of the 7/7 London Bomb Attacks?

Global Research

Michel Chossudovsky

On the 7th anniversary of the London Bombings (July 7, 2005), we bring the following collection of articles to the attention of our readers.

INTRODUCTION Coincidence? Unanswered Questions? Was there Advanced Knowledge of the 7/7 London Bomb Attacks? A fictional "scenario" of multiple bomb attacks on London's underground took place at exactly the same time as the bomb attack on July 7, 2005. Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, a private firm on contract to the London Metropolitan Police, described in a BBC interview how he had organized and conducted the anti-terror drill, on behalf of an unnamed business client. The fictional scenario was based on simultaneous bombs going off at exactly the same time at the underground stations where the real attacks were occurring: "POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.   HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise? POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on."   (BBC Radio Interview, 7 July 2005)   In response to the flood of incoming email messages, Peter Power --who is a former senior Scotland Yard official specializing in counterterrorism-- responded in the form of the following "automatic reply": "Thank you for your message. Given the volume of emails about events on 7 July and a commonly expressed misguided belief that our exercise revealed prescient behaviour, or was somehow a conspiracy (noting that several websites interpreted our work that day in an inaccurate / naive / ignorant / hostile manner) it has been decided to issue a single email response as follows: It is confirmed that a short number of 'walk through' scenarios planed [sic] well in advance had commenced that morning for a private company in London (as part of a wider project that remains confidential) and that two scenarios related directly to terrorist bombs at the same time as the ones that actually detonated with such tragic results. One scenario in particular, was very similar to real time events. However, anyone with knowledge about such ongoing threats to our capital city will be aware that (a) the emergency services have already practiced several of their own exercises based on bombs in the underground system (also reported by the main news channels) and (b) a few months ago the BBC broadcast a similar documentary on the same theme, although with much worse consequences [??]. It is hardly surprising therefore, that we chose a feasible scenario - but the timing and script was nonetheless, a little disconcerting. In short, our exercise (which involved just a few people as crisis managers actually responding to a simulated series of activities involving, on paper, 1000 staff) quickly became the real thing and the players that morning responded very well indeed to the sudden reality of events. Beyond this no further comment will be made and based on the extraordinary number of messages from ill informed people, no replies will henceforth be given to anyone unable to demonstrate a bona fide reason for asking (e.g. accredited journalist / academic). [ signed ] Peter Power"

Coincidence?
Was there Advanced knowledge of the Bomb Attacks? 
Another Coincidence? Several important people were in London at the time of the bomb attacks including Benjamin Netanyahu and former Mayor of New York City Rudi Giuliani.

According to a report of the Associated Press correspondent in Jerusalem, the Israeli embassy in London had been advised by Scotland Yard of an impending terror event, suggesting that there was advanced knowledge of the planning of the 7/7 bomb attack by the British Home Office. (AP, July 7, 2005)  

Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the time was Israel's Finance Minister, had been warned by his embassy not to attend an economic conference organized by the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) in collaboration with the Israeli embassy and Deutsche Bank. 

Netanyahu was staying at the Aldridge Hotel in Mayfair. The conference venue was a few miles away at the Great Eastern Hotel close to the Liverpool subway station, where one of the bomb blasts occurred. 

Rudolph Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City at the time of the 9/11 attacks, was staying at the Great Eastern hotel on the 7^th of July, where TASE was hosting its economic conference, with Israel's Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as keynote speaker. 

Giuliani was having a business breakfast meeting in his room at the Great Eastern Hotel, close to Liverpool Street station when the bombs went off.  

Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Rudolph Giuliani knew each other. Giuliani had officially welcomed Netanyahu when he visited New York City as Prime Minister of Israel in 1996. There was no indication, however, from news reports that the two men met in London at the Great Eastern. On the day prior to the London attacks, July 6, Giuliani was in North Yorkshire at a meeting.

After completing his term as mayor of New York City, Rudi Giuliani established a security outfit: Giuliani Security and Safety. The latter is a subsidary of Giuliani Partners LLC. headed by former New York head of the FBI, Pasquale D'Amuro. 

It is worth noting that Peter Power's Visor Consultants and Giuliani Security and Safety LLC specialize in similar "mock terror drills" and "emergency preparedness" procedures. Both Giuliani and Power were in London at the same time within a short distance of one of the bombing sites. While there is no evidence that Giuliani and Power met in London, the two companies have had prior business contacts in the area of emergency preparedness. Peter Power served on the Advisory Board to the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness (CCEP), together with Richard Sheirer, Senior Vice President of Giuliani and Partners. who was previously Commissioner at the NYC Office of Emergency Management, and Director of New York City Homeland Security.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, July 7, 2012

This introduction is based on an earlier article entitled 7/7 Mock Terror Drill: What Relationship to the Real Time Terror Attacks?  August 8, 2007

A Tale of "Three Tragedies"

Global Research
Felicity Arbuthnot

    “ ... she becomes the endless scream in the breaking news,

    which was no longer breaking news, when

    the aircraft returned to bomb a house with two windows and a door.”

     (The Girl/The Scream, Mahmoud Darwish, 1941-2008.)

March was another month of tragic, needless lives lost, the searing grief of mothers and fathers for lost sons and daughters.

Shockingly stark, however, has been the impression, that for the powers-that-be, for a swathe of public in the West, some deaths are indisputedly regarded as, more tragic, more noteworthy, than others.

On 6th March, six British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Corporal Jake Hartley (20) and Privates Anthony Frampton (20) Christopher Kershaw (19) Daniel Wade (20) and Daniel Wilford (20) and Sergeant Nigel Coupe (33) died when their armored vehicle was blown up. The resulting fire reportedly burned all night.

More youthful annihilations in an invasion and occupation, illegal, ill-conceived and long lost. Human sacrifices at the alter of political ego, dying because the powerful would still lose, throw away, the lives of others, than “lose face” – one hundred and twenty five  months since the “war” started.

In the US, five of the six would have been too young to even legally order a drink in a bar, but are old enough to die for monumental imperial folly, regional foothold –  and a pipeline.

Before the month ended two more British servicemen were shot, and yet another, blown to eternity..

In Parliament Prime Minister Cameron paid vacuous tribute. They died, he said: “Keeping our country safe.” What nonsense. There are no Afghan hordes massing across the English Channel, planning invasion with near antique rifles - some so ancient they have Queen Victoria’s insignia on, relics from another historic British folly.

Prince Harry, cavorting round the Caribbean, filling in time before returning to Afghanistan in an Apache  Attack Helicopter - with fire power of 632 rounds a minute, plus up to sixteen Hellfire missiles - to wipe out more villagers, and their homes, hung his head and declared himself: “Devastated.” Flags in their home and base towns in the UK flew at half mast.

Five days later, on March 11, there was a massacre of seventeen Afghan villagers, by an American soldier, or, say numerous eye witnesses, soldiers. Nine of the victims were children, the youngest two years old.

The names have been gathered (i) but to date, their ages not matched with them. Mohamed Wazir lost five daughters: Masooma, Farida, Palwasha, Nabia, and Estmatullah, and his son, Faizullah.

The other known names are: Mohamed Dawood, Khudaydad, Nazar Mohamed, Payendo, Robeena, Shatarina, Zahra, Nazia, Essa Mohamed and Akhtar Mohammed. The name of the seventeenth victim is, so far, unknown.

The wounded have names too: Haji Mohamed Naim, Mohamed Sediq, Parween, Rafiulla, Zardana, Zulheja. Since they were taken to a US military medical facility, little is known of their condition.

John Henry Browne, is attorney for Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, the only person, so far, accused of the atrocities – which, allegedly, involved attempting to set fire to the bodies, having covered them with materials and doused them with gasoline. Browne claims that US forces have obstructed him and colleagues from reaching and questioning the survivors.(ii)

9/11 Family Group Releases TV Ad Calling for World Trade Center Building 7 Investigation

9/11 Blogger

NEW YORK CITY — The NYC Coalition for Accountability Now (NYC CAN) is launching a television ad campaign on Election Day in New York City calling for an investigation into the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7, the third building to collapse on 9-11. Building 7 came down at 5:20 in the afternoon although it had not been hit by an aircraft.

The ad, which is entitled “BuildingWhat?” and can be viewed at BuildingWhat.org, will air 350+ times from November 2 through November 10 and is estimated to be seen by millions of viewers in the New York Metropolitan Area, reaching core target audiences multiple times. The ad will appear on thirteen channels including MSNBC, CNN, Comedy Central, HGTV, Logo TV, Bio TV, Versus TV, MSG, Sports NY, VH1, HLN, CNBC and Bravo.

NYC CAN’s goal is to generate public pressure on the New York City Council to open an investigation into the destruction of Building 7, which until 9-11 housed the City’s Emergency Operations Center, also known as “Mayor Giuliani’s bunker.”

“We’ve been educating the City Council about Building 7 and the need for a new investigation for the past six months,” said Bob McIlvaine, father of Bobby McIlvaine and one of the 9/11 family members who appear in the ad. “We are asking them now to do something about it.”

Patricia Perry, mother of NYPD officer John Perry, opens the ad saying, “Most people don’t know that a third tower fell on September 11^th.” Footage of Building 7’s destruction begins to play while other 9/11 family members explain that 1,200 architects and engineers have examined the evidence and disagree with the official report issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which concluded that office fires brought down Building 7. This would mark the first and only time in history that fire has caused a steel-framed skyscraper to collapse. The ad closes by asking viewers to go to BuildingWhat.org to learn more.

The “BuildingWhat?” campaign is also being sponsored by the group of architects and engineers referred to in the ad. According to their website, www.AE911Truth.org, they now number 1,346 verified architectural and engineering professionals who have put their professional reputations on the line to publicly voice their disagreement with NIST’s findings.

“The most irrefutable evidence is the free fall descent of the building,” said Anthony Szamboti, a mechanical engineer in the aerospace industry. “You can’t go from zero movement to free fall acceleration instantaneously without an external force simultaneously removing all of the columns in the lower part of the building. If the upper structure has to do any work crushing what’s below it, it’s going to slow down.” According to Mr. Szamboti, NIST acknowledges in its report that the building underwent free fall, but it does not explain how.

For more information and to view the TV ad, go to: www.BuildingWhat.org