Memorial Project Superintendent lies about receiving threats

Joanne Hanley, superintendent of the Flight 93 Memorial Project, cannot answer the damning facts about the crescent design (now called a broken circle), so she has decided to slander the people who are pointing them out. In a speech at the Memorial Project’s August 2nd meeting, she cited a list of “threats” she had received from critics, saying for instance that her “career would be destroyed.”

In defense of Superintendent Hanley, Flight 93 family member Calvin Wilson expressed his disgust at the violent threats and charged that critics were acting like the terrorists themselves. Three Pennsylvania newspapers covered Hanley’s claims to have been threatened, one editorialized against the uncivilized critics, and a Memorial Project press release highlighted Wilson’s outraged response to the supposed threats.

It is all a lie. Here is the Letter to the Editor that Alec Rawls just sent to the duped Pennsylvania newspapers, exposing Superintendent Hanley’s deception:

A warning is not a threat. A warning is to protect against a threat.

As the lead organizer of the movement to stop the crescent design, I can tell you who made the statements that Superintendent Hanley was complaining about. I recognized every one of the phrases she cited as coming from myself. It is ME who Joanne Hanley is accusing of making threats, an accusation that is not just false, but grotesquely dishonest.

What Joanne Hanley is casting as threats were WARNINGS, trying to alert her to the threat posed by architect Paul Murdoch and his scheme to plant a giant Mecca-oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. This is one of Superintendent Hanley’s excuses for refusing to heed warnings about the crescent design. She pretends that warnings are threats and hence SHOULD NOT be listened to.

When I couldn’t get Hanley to look to the facts for the country’s sake, I tried to appeal to her instinct for self-preservation, warning her of the personal consequences of Murdoch’s attempt to stab a terrorist memorial mosque into the heartland of America. (That is the meaning of a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca: it is the central feature of a mosque.)

As I put it in a March 2006 email to both Superintendent Hanley and Project Manager Jeff Reinbold:

I have been trying to save your lives and your careers for six months. It is not too late for you. You can still do your jobs and investigate the basic facts I have warned you about, like the Mecca-orientation of Murdoch’s original Crescent of embrace, and the continued presence of Murdoch’s original crescent in the redesign.

Shortly after this email, Joanne Hanley told me why she was not concerned about the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. In a conference call with Jeff Reinbold, she told me that: “It isn’t exact. That’s one we talked about. It has to be exact.” (The giant crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± .1°.)

If she had admitted to the public what she was admitting in private—that the giant crescent does indeed point almost exactly to Mecca—it would have been okay. The people of Pennsylvania would be able to decide for themselves whether a giant Mecca-oriented crescent makes an acceptable memorial to the victims of Islamic terrorism, so long as it does not point EXACTLY at Mecca. Instead, the Memorial Project decided instead to deceive the public, sending an academic fraud from the University of Texas to assure the press that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round. [Post Gazette, “Flight 93 memorial draws a new round of criticism,” August 18, 2007.]

Just as I warned Superintendent Hanley that her career was in jeopardy, I also warned Dr. Griffith that his career would be destroyed if he did not correct this blatant disinformation. Like Hanley, Griffith too interpreted my warning as a threat, as if it would be ME who was responsible for the harm to his reputation, when he was covering up evidence of an enemy plot by lying about basic geometry, pretending that there is no direction between two points on planet earth.

In spite of the Memorial Project’s active cover-up of Murdoch’s plot, I continued to treat Superintendent Hanley as what she is: a fellow countryman aboard a hijacked airplane who is in need of rescue. As I put it in another email to Superintendent Hanley last November:

I don’t want you to be hurt here. There is only one bad guy in this story: Paul Murdoch. I want to help everyone else get off of this hijacked airplane. … I am not your enemy. I am your friend. I am the one who has been trying to save you, for two damned years, and I still am, despite your persistent public slanders against me.

Is it even POSSIBLE to be clearer? A warning is not a threat. A warning is to protect someone from a threat, as my communications spelled out over and over. For Joanne Hanley to pretend that these warnings about the threat she is facing were threats in themselves is deliberate dishonesty. For her to tell Calvin Wilson that these attempts to protect her from Murdoch’s plot were violent threats against her, prompting Wilson to use his status as a family member to attack critics on this dishonest basis, is even worse.

Joanne Hanley is not the only person I am warning. Every Pennsylvanian is aboard this hijacked airplane. How can the newspapers of Pennsylvania let stand a fraudulent claim that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca? How can the educated people of Pennsylvania, the math teachers, the college students, the politicians, let such a fraud stand, when every one of you knows that Muslims face Mecca for prayer?

If Pennsylvanians continue to be willfully blind to easily verifiable evidence of an enemy plot in your own back yard, history will not be kind to you.

Alec Rawls

Palo Alto CA

August 12, 2008

Morality requires trust in truth

Imagine if one of the passengers on Flight 93 was told that if they did not retake the airplane, they would be killed when the terrorists flew the airplane into a building. If the passenger was Joanne Hanley, she would say: “Stop threatening me!”

Any excuse to avoid the truth, no matter how nonsensical or even suicidal. A photo-negative of the fighting spirit of Flight 93.

Asked by Pilate to account for himself, Jesus answered: “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” (Jn. 18:37.) Jesus wasn’t a witness for the truth only sometimes, or only about matters of salvation. He proceeded from the factual truth of every situation that crossed his path, and called upon the rest of us to similarly trust in truth.

Secular moral reason demands the same thing. Anyone who thinks that it can somehow be right or in their interest to avoid or suppress the truth will through that avoidance of the truth become divorced from reality, with the inevitable effect that their ideas about what is right or in their interest can only be wrong. This is the irrationality of the Memorial Project. They proceed on the assumption that the crescent design is innocent, while self-consciously covering up evidence that it is not.

This malfeasance puts the rest of our society to the test. All of the people who we pay to check and report the facts: government, academia and the media, are all desperately trying to suppress the truth. That leaves it up to the rest of us to witness and communicate the truth about Murdoch’s plot. (Some basic facts, and how to verify them for yourself, posted here.)

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My opinion on the choices we have in front of us in this presidential election - is that it’s a joke. There are no choices. There’s hard core leftist and there’s hard core leftist light.

Finally, someone has come out and called it like it is - Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily, who wrote a book called “None of the Above”.

See the video for the book here.

The smart choice in this election, he says, is “none of the above.”

Farah: How to defeat ‘McCain-Obama ticket’
‘There is real choice in 2008, vote ‘none of the above,’ says author

“Many people who believe in these principles – principles most closely associated with the Republican Party – think holding your nose and voting for John McCain is the right thing to do in 2008,” he says. “I disagree. If McCain wins, he will have done it his way – with an incoherent platform that promotes global warming hysteria, embryonic stem cell research, unconstitutional restrictions on First Amendment freedoms, more illegal immigration, etc.”

In short; neither candidate seems to care very much about what the constitution says, and that should be of major concern to all freedom loving Americans.

“Farah is a serious man with a serious proposal that must be taken seriously.”
—Michael Savage, host of the Savage Nation

“Anyone who reveres this great nation can’t help but be appalled by this year’s presidential nominees. In None of the Above, Joseph Farah explains how we got into this deplorable mess, and what we must do right now if we are to reverse America’s downhill slide.”
—Jerome Corsi, Author of the New York Times bestseller The Late Great USA.

Finally, somebody who is thinking along the lines of Mychal Massie and Misha…“Fear Doesn’t Control My Vote, either!”

Captured female al-Qaeda jihadist had “treasure trove” of potential targets and other data (Jihad Watch) and ABC News:

When she was arrested in Afghanistan last month, Aafia Siddique allegedly had in her possession maps of New York, a list of potential targets that included the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the subway system and the animal disease center on Plum Island, detailed chemical, biological and radiological weapon information that has been seen only in a handful of terrorist cases, as well as a thumb drive packed with emails, ABC News has learned.

That haul of information has led multiple government sources to describe Siddique, a 36 year-old MIT graduate, as a potential “treasure trove” of information on terrorist supporters, sympathizers or ’sleepers’ in the United States and overseas.

Good God. With leftists clamoring for their rights, she will probably get the same light sentence as Bin Laden’s driver, who was caught with two shoulder rocket launchers.

All she has to say is that the stuff wasn’t hers, and that the Americans are racists or some similar bucket of hogwash; leftist lawyers will use any dumb excuse to send them back to what they were doing.

A great interview with Ron Coleman at Rightwing News illustrates the trouble we can get ourselves into as bloggers.

The part about publishing pictures was of particular interest to me.

What’s the most common mistake you see bloggers making? What are you seeing people do that could get them sued?

Well, it’s fair to say that well over 90% of bloggers are not risking any legal trouble. Most people write their original thoughts, they make legitimate links, and even things like hotlinking graphics, even aside from the copyright issue, are probably not actionable. It’s interesting to think about whether if you knocked out someone’s website with a hotlink to a graphic, he could come after you on a trespassing theory…

But, if there is any single problem that seems to consistently be out there, it’s copyright infringement regarding the use of photographs from news services.

Read the whole thing.

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