Troy Davis put to death in Georgia

Troy Davis, whose case drew international attention, was put to death by lethal injection for the 1989 killing of an off-duty police officer in Savannah, Georgia, prison officials announced Wednesday night.

Until the very end, Davis maintained his innocence.

After he was strapped to the death gurney, he lifted his head to address the family of the slain officer.

He told the family of Mark MacPhail that he was not responsible for the officer’s death and did not have a gun at the time, according to execution witnesses.

Davis said the case merited further investigation, talking fast as officials prepared to give him the lethal cocktail.

The execution followed the U.S. Supreme Court‘s rejection of a stay, allowing the state to proceed. Davis was declared dead at 11:08 p.m. ET.

Throughout the day, Davis’ lawyers and high-profile supporters had asked the state and various courts to intervene, arguing he did not murder MacPhail in 1989.

Davis initially had been scheduled to die by lethal injection at 7 p.m. ET. But the proceeding was delayed more than three hours as the justices pondered a plea filed by his attorney.

Several hundred people, most of them opposing the proceeding, gathered outside the state prison in Jackson where Davis, 42, awaited his fate. Others held a vigil in a nearby church.

The inmate’s sister, Martina Davis-Correia, was among those who held a vigil outside the prison. Before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, she said officials needed to take more time to examine the case.

“When you are looking at someone’s life, you can’t press rewind,” she said.

More than 100 officers, many in riot gear, stood guard over the largely-quiet gathering, which featured candles, occasional prayers and songs.

“Tonight the state of Georgia legally lynched an innocent man,” Davis’ lawyer Thomas Ruffin Jr. said. “Tonight I witnessed something tragic.”

Amnesty International condemned the execution in a statement.

“The U.S. justice system was shaken to its core as Georgia executed a person who may well be innocent. Killing a man under this enormous cloud of doubt is horrific and amounts to a catastrophic failure of the justice system,” Amnesty said.

Anneliese MacPhail, the slain officer’s mother, said she was relieved and that justice was served.

Davis’ supporters, who also rallied outside the U.S. Supreme Court building, argued that his conviction was based on the testimony of numerous witnesses who had recanted, including a jailhouse informer who claimed Davis had confessed.

“There’s a genuine feeling among people here and across the nation that we’re about to do the unthinkable,” said Isaac Newton Farris Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

But prosecutors have stood by the conviction and every appeal — including the last-minute petitions filed Wednesday — has failed.

Davis’ supporters cheered and hugged each other when news of the earlier delay reached them.

Davis’ attorneys started the day by asking a judge in Jackson, where Georgia’s death row is located, to halt the proceeding, citing a new analysis they say shows ballistics testimony at his trial was “inaccurate and misleading.”

They also note that a federal judge found in 2010 that a jailhouse informer’s testimony that Davis confessed to killing MacPhail was “patently false” and that prosecutors knew a key eyewitness account was wrong.

“Clearly, the fact that Mr. Davis’ death sentence rests in part on ‘patently false’ and egregiously inaccurate and misleading testimony, evidence and argument renders the death sentence fundamentally unfair, unreliable and therefore violative of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments,” his attorneys argued in a motion filed Wednesday morning.

That appeal was denied Wednesday afternoon. The state Supreme Court followed suit a short time later, leading his attorneys to turn to the U.S. Supreme Court in the final hour before the execution.

Davis has been scheduled to die three times before, most recently in October 2008. That time, the U.S. Supreme Court halted the execution two hours before it was scheduled to take place.

This time, Davis declined to request the special last meal offered inmates prior to execution and was offered a standard meal tray: Grilled cheeseburgers, oven-browned potatoes, baked beans, coleslaw, cookies and a grape drink.

“He has continued to insist this is not his last meal,” said the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Pope Benedict, South African anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu and former President Jimmy Carter said the execution should have been called off. Amnesty International and the NAACP led efforts to exonerate Davis, and U.N. human rights officials joined those calls Wednesday.

“Not only do we urgently appeal to the government of the United States and the state of Georgia to find a way to stop the scheduled execution, but we believe that serious consideration should be given to commuting the sentence,” read a joint statement from the U.N. special rapporteurs on arbitrary executions, judicial independence and torture.

But the man who originally prosecuted the case, Spencer Lawton, said those who do not believe there is physical evidence in the case are wrong.

“There are two Troy Davis cases,” Lawton said Tuesday. “There is the legal case and the public relations case. We have consistently won in court, and consistently lost in the public relations battle.”

Since Davis’ 1991 trial, seven of the nine witnesses against him have recanted or contradicted their testimony. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered a district court in Savannah to review his claims of innocence in 2009, but District Judge William Moore ruled the following year that the evidence did “not require the reversal of the jury’s judgment.”

The parole board rejected a plea for clemency on Tuesday. In Georgia, only the board — not the governor — has the right to grant clemency.

And a request that Davis be allowed to sit for a polygraph by his attorneys was also rejected by the state Department of Corrections.

Davis’ supporters argue he was the victim of a rush to judgment by police seeking justice for the death of one of their own, as well as widespread racial prejudice in the criminal justice system. Warnock said several other inmates have been proven innocent in recent years.

Supporters argued that the original witnesses who testified against Davis were fearful of police and spoke under duress. Other witnesses also have since come forward with accounts that call Davis’ conviction into question, according to his supporters.

According to prosecutors, Davis was at a pool party in Savannah when he shot a man, Michael Cooper, wounding him in the face. He then went to a nearby convenience store, where he pistol-whipped a homeless man, Larry Young, who’d just bought a beer, according to accounts of the case.

Prosecutors said MacPhail rushed to the scene to help, but Davis shot him three times. They said Davis shot the officer once in the face as he stood over him.

A jury convicted Davis on two counts of aggravated assault and one count each of possessing a firearm during a crime, obstructing a law enforcement officer and murder. The murder charge led to the death sentence.

Anneliese MacPhail said earlier this week that she didn’t begrudge protesters their opinions. But she said they don’t understand the facts of the case.

“To them the point is the death penalty. Ninety-nine percent have absolutely no idea who Troy Davis is or who Mark MacPhail was,” she said. “They’re just following their belief.”

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Troy Davis Execution Delayed

Troy Davis‘ execution was delayed tonight as the Supreme Court weighed arguments by Davis’ legal team and the state of Georgia over whether he deserves a stay.

At 7:05 p.m., five minutes after his scheduled death, Davis’ supporters erupted in cheers, hugs and tears outside the jail in Jackson, Ga., as supporters believed Davis had been saved from the death penalty. But Davis was granted only a temporary reprieve as the Supreme Court considers the decision.

The warrant for Davis’ execution is valid until Sept. 28. The Georgia Resource Center, part of Davis’ legal defense team, said it was unsure how long the delay would last.

Davis was convicted of the 1989 murder of Savannah, Ga., policeman Mark MacPhail, and had his execution stayed four times over the course of his 22 years on death row, but multiple legal appeals during that time failed to prove his innocence.

Public support grew for Davis based on the recanted testimony of seven witnesses from his trial and the possible confession of another suspect, which his defense team claimed cast too much doubt on Davis’ guilt to follow through with an execution.

Several witnesses recanted their testimony that Davis fired the shot that killed MacPhail. His impending execution has brought those efforts to a head.

Troy Davis Backers in Frantic Last Minute Efforts to Stop Execution

A growing tide of celebrities, politicians, and social media users called for the execution to be delayed because of “too much doubt” present in his case.

Troy Davis’ execution was delayed tonight as the Supreme Court weighed arguments by Davis’ legal team and the state of Georgia over whether he deserves a stay.

At 7:05 p.m., five minutes after his scheduled death, Davis’ supporters erupted in cheers, hugs and tears outside the jail in Jackson, Ga., as supporters believed Davis had been saved from the death penalty. But Davis was granted only a temporary reprieve as the Supreme Court considers the decision.

The warrant for Davis’ execution is valid until Sept. 28. The Georgia Resource Center, part of Davis’ legal defense team, said it was unsure how long the delay would last.

Davis was convicted of the 1989 murder of Savannah, Ga., policeman Mark MacPhail, and had his execution stayed four times over the course of his 22 years on death row, but multiple legal appeals during that time failed to prove his innocence.

Public support grew for Davis based on the recanted testimony of seven witnesses from his trial and the possible confession of another suspect, which his defense team claimed cast too much doubt on Davis’ guilt to follow through with an execution.

Several witnesses recanted their testimony that Davis fired the shot that killed MacPhail. His impending execution has brought those efforts to a head.

Troy Davis Backers in Frantic Last Minute Efforts to Stop Execution

A growing tide of celebrities, politicians, and social media users called for the execution to be delayed because of “too much doubt” present in his case.

At a protest in front of the White House today at least 12 Howard University students were arrested for failing to move off the White House sidewalk, according to ABC News affiliate WJLA. The protest there was expected to last until 7 p.m.

A flurry of messages on Twitter using the hashtags #TroyDavis and #TooMuchDoubt showed thousands of supporters of Davis were intent on flooding the Jackson Distirct Attorney’s Office, Georgia Judge Penny Freezeman’s office, and the U.S. Attorney General’s Office with phone calls and emails to beg for a stay on the execution.

Some users accused Twitter of blocking the topic from trending on Tuesday, though a representative from Twitter told ABC News there was no such action taken. The hashtags were trending today in cities around the U.S. as well as Germany, the U.K., Sweden, and France. Many tweets called the case a symbol of a return to Jim Crow laws and racial inequalities in the justice system.

Big Boi, a member of the group Outkast, tweeted to his followers to go to the Georgia state prison in Jackson to protest the decision. The Roots’ Questlove tweeted a similar message.

The NAACP and the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson held a news conference today calling for the execution to be halted.

Amnesty International, which has been fighting on behalf of Davis, encouraged supporters to attend a vigil at the church across the street from the prison at 5:30 p.m. and a protest at 6 p.m., and asked participants to wear a black armband and write on it, “Not in my name!”

Wendy Gozen Brown, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, said that Troy Davis would want the protests to remain peaceful.

“In this type of situation, there’s always the potential for it to go awry, with certain groups, angry rhetoric,” Brown said. “But Troy Davis would want people to keep fighting peacefully, for him and for, as he would put it, all of the other Troy Davises out there.”

Others who have voiced support for Davis include former President Jimmy Carter, the pope and a former FBI director.

Davis’s execution has been stayed four times for appeals since his conviction in 1989, and the Supreme Court gave him a rare chance to prove his innocence last year, but rejected his plea.

A Georgia board of pardons and paroles rejected Davis’s plea for clemency on Tuesday.

Related articles

• New Yorkers To Rally Against Execution Of Georgia Death Row Inmate Troy Davis (newyork.cbslocal.com)
• Controversial Troy Davis execution to proceed (cbc.ca)
• Troy Davis clemency bid denied on execution eve in Georgia (cbsnews.com)
• Troy Davis protest outside the White House (whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com)
• Late appeal before Troy Davis execution (independent.co.uk)

Multicolored fireball in sky dazzles Southwest

A brilliant bright light seen streaking over the Southwestern sky Wednesday night was most likely a fragment of an asteroid that entered Earth’s atmosphere, a NASA scientist said.

Residents from Phoenix to Las Vegas to Southern California’s coastal areas reported to local authorities and media outlets that they saw the light move quickly from west to east at around 7:45 p.m. PT (10:45 p.m. ET). Experts said a fireball — or very bright meteor — was likely to blame.

“I saw something that looked like a falling star but it must have been a fireball in the atmosphere,” one witness told NBCLA. “It was huge. It had a green glow in front of it and a white tail. It looked like green fireworks going across the sky.”

While many witnesses reported the light as bluish-green others said it appeared yellow and orange.

“We can’t say 100 percent,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program, “but it’s almost certain that the object was a fireball” or very bright meteor, “the size of a basketball or baseball that likely disintegrated before it hit the ground.”

Experts said that a meteor is slower than a regular shooting star, and it’s not unusual for it to appear to change colors.

‘Interplanetary debris’
Ed Krupp, the director of the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles, said witnesses were probably seeing “a piece of interplanetary debris” that “passed through the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up.”

The American Meteor Society reported that two known meteor showers are active this week, the Iota Cassiopeiids and the Epsilon Perseids, which peaked on September 12 and 10, respectively.

But the organization said that bright moonlight would obscure viewing for all but the brightest of heavenly fireballs this week.

The Federal Aviation Administration said they received many calls about the sky sightings. Initially, there were concerns that the fireball could have been an aircraft.

FAA spokesman Ian Gregor confirmed that there were no aircraft incidents reported in the Western region.

The bluish-green color suggests the object had some magnesium or nickel in it, Yeomans said. Orange is usually an indication it’s entering earth’s atmosphere at several miles per second, a moderate rate of speed.

“They make an impressive show for such a small object,” Yeomans said.

Yeomans said fireball events are much more rare than shooting stars, but they happen on a weekly basis somewhere on Earth, usually over the ocean.

“It’s a natural phenomenon and nothing to be concerned about,” Yeomans said.

‘We all made our wishes’
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office fielded more than a dozen calls about the sightings on Wednesday, and sheriff’s deputies at Deer Valley Airport in north Phoenix reported a sighting themselves, Lieutenant Justin Griffin said.

“It took an unusually long time to get across the sky,” Griffin told Reuters. “It’s like a meteor. It’s not like we had any flying objects with little green men or anything like that.”

Sergeant Steve Martos of the Phoenix Police Department said that his agency received four calls “regarding the light in the sky,” adding that “myself and other officers observed it as well.”

“We all made our wishes and went back to work. Nothing more to report. Have a safe night,” he added.

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No Tsunami after 6.6 Quake in Japan

A large 6.6 magnitude earthquake has rocked Japan’s northeast coast.

According to the U.S.G.S the quake hit 67 miles east-southeast of Hachinohe and 356 miles north-northeast of Tokyo.

It happened at 9:26 AM Hawaii time at a depth of 22.6 miles.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center says that a destructive Pacific-wide Tsunami is not expected and there is no Tsunami threat to Hawaii.

Here is a link to the Pacific tsunami Warning Center

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Super Bowl ring found 40 years after lost in ocean off Waikiki

 

John Schmitt cherished his Super Bowl ring. He earned it as the starting center of the New York Jets when the AFL Jets upset the Baltimore Colts of the NFL in Super Bowl III on January 12, 1969.

“Nobody gave us a cut dogs chance of winning that Super Bowl. I mean even our own league made fun of us,” Schmitt once told someone who asked about the Jets upset victory.

Two years after the Jets victory, in February of 1971, Schmitt took his first surfing lesson in the waves off Waikiki Beach while on vacation in Hawaii. He paddled out in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, his Super Bowl ring snug on his finger.

“I never thought about the fact that if you stay out in the water for 5 or 6 hours, your hands shrink and the ring fell off about a quarter mile out from the shore,” Schmitt told Hawaii News Now.

When he got back to the beach he noticed the ring was missing and immediately launched his own search mission.

“I got a snorkel and some flippers and I went out and I dove until I was blue. I’m not kidding you. It must have been three hours I was out there looking. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I was just exhausted. I virtually could not swim or flip my legs anymore and I just went in broken hearted,” Schmitt said.

Few knew of the treasure that lay somewhere on the ocean floor off Waikiki. John Ernstberg certainly did not know. Ernstberg was a Waikiki lifeguard living the beach boy life. He was always at the beach rescuing visitors who got in too deep, taking people on canoe rides, and surfing the gentle swells that help make Waikiki such a popular attraction.

“One day he came home. He handed my aunt Mary Ernstberg a ring and both of them, not thinking about looking at it, just put it in a little box and put it way. And all he stated to her was, he found this in the water of Waikiki,” said Cindy Saffery, John Ernstberg’s great niece.

Ernstberg died in 1991. His wife Mary passed away in 1995. Their estate went to Saffery and her husband Samuel. Curiosity eventually prompted them to take the ring to a jeweler to find out if it is authentic.

They went to Brenda Reichel, an accredited gemologist and owner of Carats & Karats fine jewelry, antiques, and collectibles store in the Aina Haina Shopping Center. After examining the ring – she was sure. It is a real Super Bowl ring, the ring given to #52 of the Jets, John Schmitt.

“It was made by the Balfour Company which had the contract to do the Super Bowl rings that year,” Reichel said while looking at the ring through jewelers magnifying glass.

Reichel and the Safferys contacted the Jets, discovered Schmitt lives on Long Island, and gave him a call.

“He actually called back yesterday and said, ‘Yes, I lost my ring in 1971 off the shore of Waikiki at the Royal Hawaiian and I went looking for it and I never found it and you mean to tell me after 40 years someone has my ring?'” Reichel explained.

“I couldn’t believe it. I mean I honestly couldn’t believe it. I mean 40 years,” Schmitt said after contacted by Hawaii News Now.

Reichel is confident the ring could easily be sold for as much as $10,000. But the Safferys are not interested in Schmitt’s money. They just want to get the ring back on his finger.

“It’s a legacy. He put a lot of hard work into this to earn this. This is not something that you just can buy off the street. This is something that you earn, so for Mr. Schmitt he earned this ring so by right it’ll make me feel good to put it personally back into his hand,” Samuel Saffery explained.

Schmitt is offering to fly the Safferys to New York so he can thank them in person and they can be there when his personal piece of history is returned.

“That that ring was found is a bloody miracle. It really is a miracle, you know,” Schmitt concluded.

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TSA fires 28 Honolulu bag screeners after probe

HONOLULU (AP) – The Transportation Security Administration has fired or suspended dozens of employees at Honolulu‘s airport after an investigation found workers there hadn’t been screening checked bags for explosives.

The agency said Friday that 28 workers have been “removed,” 15 have been suspended, and three have resigned or retired. The cases of 2 other employees are being decided.

The workers have the right to appeal the decisions.

A TSA spokesman declined to comment because it involved personnel issues.

The agency began an investigation at the end of last year after two Honolulu TSA employees told officials that thousands of bags weren’t checked properly or screened for traces of explosives. The employees were placed in non-security roles pending the outcome of the six-month probe.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Hawaii Guardsman among injured at air show; others assist

A Hawaii Air National Guardsman was injured by debris from a deadly plane crash at an air show in Reno, Nev., while several other Hawaii Guardsmen assisted with casualties, a National Guard spokesman said.

The guardsman was watching the air show from the audience, close to the impact zone, when he was injured. He was treated at a hospital and released, said Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Chuck Anthony. No other soldiers in the Hawaii crew were hurt.

The injured man is one of about a dozen Hawaii Air National Guardsmen from the 204th Airlift Squadron who are on the mainland for a routine airlift mission. They were at the air show displaying their aircraft, the C-17 Globemaster III, when the crash occurred.

“They quickly sprang into action to help with many of the victims,” Anthony said. He said some of Guardsmen are trained medical personnel in their civilian lives, such as a doctor and a medic, and provided triage and first aid for victims. Others transported victims away from the crash site.

“Everybody was basically there to pitch in, do what they could,” Anthony said.

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Niu Valley boulder removal work gets underway

A neighborhood in Niu Valley was virtually deserted Saturday as work began to remove a boulder, estimated to weigh seven to ten tons, from a ridge above the homes.

A helicopter started flying equipment to the top of the ridge above Haleola Street. Crews had mobilized earlier in the morning to start the work, which actually got underway a little late, after a delay involving property where the equipment would be picked up by the chopper.

“the owner had the gate locked, so we had a slight delay in getting a hold of the owner,” said Ed Teixeira, vice director of Hawaii Civil Defense. “So we about an hour behind schedule, I think.”

By 10 a.m., the chopper had dropped off the last piece of equipment — a large air compressor — to the waiting workers.

According to state Civil Defense, the compressor will be used eventually to move the big boulder to a more stable location.

“They (the contractors) have a way to just kinda lift that particular rock up with a lot of netting, and the idea is to take this rock and roll it back,” Teixeira said.

It would then be in a location where it could do a lot less harm, facing the other side of the ridge toward Kupaua Place.

“Unlike this slope that you see behind me, the other side of the hill is a more gentle grade going down, and it goes into a ravine, and then the ravine goes out about another 100, 150 yards,” Teixeira said.

Even though almost nobody was home, there were some signs of normal activity. A postal worker was allowed to deliver mail, and the Saturday trash pickup went on as usual.

According to the state, all but two families decided to follow the mandatory evacuation order.

“A mandatory evacuation can be enforced,” said Teixeira, “but we respect people and their homes. Our attorney general’s office even gave us a waiver form that resident can sign if they don’t want to leave.”

By afternoon, workers had placed temporary straps around the big rock to hold it in place, while below, a civil defense worker and police kept an eye on the neighborhood.

“Should something get loose, we wanna be right there to pound on that door and do what we can to get that particular resident out,” Teixeira said.

Even with Saturday’s delay, the state is still hoping that the most dangerous work could be done by late tomorrow, when residents are scheduled to be allowed to return.

The Dark Side of “Soldier of Fortune” Magazine: Contract Killers and Mercenaries for Hire

The magazine caters to mercenaries but tries to broaden to its appeal to war fans, weapon-lovers, fanatic anti-commies and those who enjoy reading about blood and guts.

When I was in sixth grade my parents took away my collection of Soldier of Fortune magazines. This was in the mid-1980s, the Rambo-era heyday of the “journal of the professional adventurer.” The seizure was preceded by a parent-teacher conference at which exhibit A was a recent two-page essay I’d written about wanting to be a mercenary when I grew up. Or a ninja.

 

I remember Soldier of Fortune articles in those days being a macho-to-the-max amalgam of firearms reviews, anti-gun control rants, Vietnam POW conspiracy theories and gory first-hand reporting on Cold War proxy wars, military coups and revolutions in Second and Third World nations. But what made Soldier of Fortune so enticing in my 11-year-old mind was less its editorial content than its infamous advertising.

Along with ads for mail-order brides, bounty hunter training manuals, surveillance electronics, Secrets of the Ninja lessons (including “mind clouding” and “sentry removal”), Nazi memorabilia, machine guns, silencers, and sniper rifles, Soldier of Fortune advertised the services of guns for hire.

“It’s directed at professional mercenaries — men who will fight for pay and those who want to hire them,” wrote Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko in March 1984. “But since mercenaries represent only a tiny portion of the reading population, the magazine tries to broaden its appeal to include those who might be called war fans, weapon-lovers, fanatic anti-commies and Walter Mitty types who enjoy the vicarious thrill of reading about blood and guts.”

Royko left out elementary school D&D geeks. For my Dungeons & Dragons buddies and I, reading Soldier of Fortune was like perusing a Dungeon Master’s Guide or Monster Manual. It was a portal to a fantasy world. We talked about killing commies the same way we talked about slaying orcs. Then we grew out of it.

Robert K. Brown never did. Brown, the founder and publisher of Soldier of Fortune, has long rocked “Kill a Commie for Mommie” t-shirts with no sense of irony. But unlike a dungeon master, Brown invited his readers to live out their armchair warrior daydreams in places where people died for real.

For several years after Brown founded Soldier of Fortune in 1975, the magazine ran full-page recruiting ads for the Rhodesian Army, which employed foreign mercenaries to defend the apartheid-style regime of prime minister Ian Smith.

The January 1976 issue of Soldier of Fortune included a classified ad placed by Daniel Gearhart, a 34-year-old Vietnam veteran with money trouble. It read, “Wanted: Employment as mercenary on full-time or job contract basis. Preferably in South or Central America, but anywhere in the world if you pay transportation.”

Seven months later, Gearhart was executed by firing squad in Angola. Advertising his services in Soldier of Fortune had led to his being hired by the losing faction in a civil war.  The People’s Revolutionary Tribunal judge who sentenced Gearhart and three other foreign mercenaries to death (nine others received long prison terms) called them “dogs of war with bloodstained muzzles who left a trail of rape, murder and pillage across the face of our nation.” (Gearhart was arrested less than a week after setting foot in Angola. He denied ever firing a shot there, let alone raping and pillaging.)

Since the mid-to-late 1970s era of promoting mercenary work in African bush wars, Soldier of Fortune has distributed what CBS’ “60 Minutes” called a “political warfare journal,” published classified ads that resulted in no fewer than five murders-for-hire on American soil, and helped to equip paramilitary border vigilantes who terrorized Latino immigrants.

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The Fall of the American Empire

Enmired in wars with phantoms, Washington has been blindsided by every major trend of the last decade. We may be going deeper into the darkness than any of us dare to imagine.

1. Twin Towers

Two years from now the staffs of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker will move into the most haunted building in the world.  There, the elite of American celebrity photographers, gossip columnists, and magazine journalists may meet some macabre new muses.

Aloft in the upper stories of 1 World Trade Center (where Condé Nast publishing has signed the biggest lease), they will gaze out their windows at that ghostly void, just a few yards away, where 658 doomed employees of Cantor Fitzgerald were sitting at their desks at 8:46 AM, September 11, 2001.

Not to worry: The “Freedom Tower” — the boosters reassure us — will be an enduring consolation to the families of 9/11’s martyrs as well as an icon of civic and national renaissance.  Not to mention its dramatic resurrection of property values in the neighborhood.  (I confess that I find this conflation of real-estate speculation with sublime memorial unnerving: like proposing to build a yacht marina over the sunken Arizona or a Katrina theme park in the Lower Ninth Ward.)

One World Trade Center, in the original design, was also meant to restore vertical architectural supremacy to Manhattan and to be the tallest building in the world.  This global phallic rivalry was won instead by Dubai’s Burj Khalifa super-tower, completed last year and twice as high as the Empire State Building.

In a few years Dubai, however, will have to surrender the gold cup to Saudi Arabia and the bin Laden family

Financed by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who revels in being known as the “Arabian Warren Buffet,” the planned Kingdom Tower in Jeddah — the ultimate hyperbole for Saudi despotism — will pierce the clouds along the Red Sea coastline at an incredible altitude of one full kilometer (3,281 feet).

One World Trade Center, on the other hand, will max out at 1,776 feet above the Hudson.  (Conspiracy theorists can obsess over this coincidence: the number of feet higher the Saudi Arabian tower will be than the American one almost exactly equals the number of people who died in the North Tower of the WTC in 2001.)

With little publicity, the initial billion-dollar contract for the Jeddah spire was awarded by Prince Al-Waleed to the Arab world’s mega-builders and skyscraper experts — the Binladen Group.   It may keep their family name alive for centuries to come.

2. Collusion

Ten years ago, lower Manhattan became the Sarajevo of the War on Terrorism.   Although conscience recoils against making any moral equation between the assassination of a single Archduke and his wife on June 28, 1914, and the slaughter of almost 3,000 New Yorkers, the analogy otherwise is eerily apt.

In both cases, a small network of peripheral but well-connected conspirators, ennobled in their own eyes by the bitter grievances of their region, attacked a major symbol of the responsible empire.  The outrages were deliberately aimed to detonate larger, cataclysmic conflicts, and in this respect, were successful beyond the darkest imagining of the plotters.

However, the magnitudes of the resulting geopolitical explosions were not simple functions of the notoriety of the acts themselves.  For example, in Europe between 1890 and 1940, more than two dozen heads of state were assassinated, including the kings of Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, an empress of Austria, three Spanish prime ministers, two presidents of France, and so on.  But apart from the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, none of these events instigated a war.

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