That's an actual quote taken from one of the intercepted pager message logs WikiLeaks has been publishing since 3am Wednesday 25th.
It seems odd for anybody to be writing on Thanksgiving about September 11 but the release of these logs are a historic event, and far more important given how today marks 372 of the white-washing of the Pequot Tribe Massacre of 1637. Today we continue the tradition of LYING to our children and altering historical records to turn imperialist occupiers into heroes. Today we join in a lie by refusing to teach them about the atrocities committed to the Pequot. A tribe that, coincidentally, was wiped out in a single unsuspecting attack.
Well, I've promised myself to destroy that tradition as far as my family is concerned. And what better way than to do so with what will probably be one of the most important historical documents concerning the September 11 events. First, because they are allegedly unfiltered, uncensored and untouched by the GW Bush administration's propaganda machine. And second, because it is a record of, unfortunately, the innocents who died as a consequence of the United States' policy of attacks and occupations in its plutocracy's pursuit of imperial corporate globalization.
WikiLeaks is a nonprofit organization dedicated to uncovering unethical and criminal behaviour in governments and institutions. The organization has a well protected server farm that allows them to publish secret documents of all kinds; which in turn protects journalists and whistle blowers:
Their stated goal is to ensure that whistle-blowers and journalists are not thrown into jail for emailing sensitive or classified documents, such as what happened to Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2005 after publicising an email from Chinese officials about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.[11]
Some of their more notorious accomplishments include shaming Scientology, publishing the Guatanamo Bay procedures and even airing the British Nationalist Party's member list. Their track record of verification and authenticity has been remarkable. This is why these pager logs are so important.
They are 573,000 intercepted communications. As in illegally acquired private information. As in by either a foreign government or corporate surveillance entity. Heck, it could well have been the CIA or FBI --we'll obviously know in the coming weeks.
Yet think about it. Someone was spying on people with pagers in New York City and these are the logs of those intercepted communications. And what WikiLeaks has is a slice of pre-SMS communications that was gathered by spies in a 24 hour period, from 3am in the morning of September 11 until 3am of September 12th.
How is this possible? From Declan McCullagh over at CBNews:
The pager logs seem to represent messages transmitted on September 11, 2001 through the networks of Arch Wireless, Metrocall, Skytel, and Weblink Wireless.
It's not clear how they were obtained in the first place. One possibility is that they were illegally compiled from the records of archived messages maintained by pager companies, and then eventually forwarded to WikiLeaks.
The second possibility is more likely: Over-the-air interception. Each digital pager is assigned a unique Channel Access Protocol code, or capcode, that tells it to pay attention to what immediately follows. In what amounts to a gentlemen's agreement, no encryption is used, and properly-designed pagers politely ignore what's not addressed to them.
But an electronic snoop lacking that same sense of etiquette might hook up a sufficiently sophisticated scanner to a Windows computer with lots of disk space -- and record, without much effort, gobs and gobs of over-the-air conversations
Wired makes the point there's even video tutorial on how to rig your own pager traffic tracking and surveillance system. And yet, if you're willing to crack open a box of tin foil, we could speculate these logs have been retrieved from some government or foreign surveillance entity that was spying on US citizens for ... maybe China, Russia or even the US government itself?
Tin foil speculation aside, the logs are an amazing thing to look at. The first airplane hit at 8:45am. The corresponding logs for that would be the 8:47am entries --and even then one can see there's a lag in the reporting of the events. Until we get to the first message that seems to refer to the attack :
2001-09-11 08:47:46 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA
Someone just told me there was an explosion at
It's not until 9:03am and only after the second airplane attacks that we can see the confusion and desperation in the calls or even more bluntly, the rampant malfunctioning of software and half finished messages as the cell & telephone antennas that were on the towers knocked out a big chunk of the communications network.
Yet I focused on the twilight zone between 8:45 and 9:03am exactly just to look at how life went on for many people who, even in the area of the attacks, where unaware at how big the damage was. There's one instance where someone refers to the attack as a "a small airplane" that had crashed into one of the buildings.
The asynchronicity happening within seconds is just mesmerizing. Life went on for a lot of people, particularly the exasperated callers who kept paging technicians that were not there. You can find the automated messages of said dying servers, or the angry texts of business partners. Then there's the stock trade numbers, news from Latin America, "drink your medication" reminders and even the post-coital exchange of two shamelessly glowing lovers.
Check out the amazing discussions at Reddit and Metafilter to see more of the unintentionally comical moments of this tragedy. The following is a sampling of just one page of data. I've bolded the entries referring specifically to the attack.
WARNING! THIS MAY BE A TRIGGER FOR SOME OF YOU
I was devastated while reading this messages and had trouble falling asleep afterwards. As one of the many New Yorkers who saw the towers disappear under a cloud of dust on that fateful day, writing this post was an overwhelming experience.
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