Staten Island Protest
I went for a walk on Staten Island a few days ago, at least I intended to, but there were a series of problems that prevented it from happening.
First, the Staten Island ferry was occupied by a group of protesting conspiracy theorists. Sorry it's not a very clear picture - their protest banner blocked the light.
From what I could tell (and it wasn't entirely clear so forgive me if I have misunderstood their complaint) they were protesting that the 9/11 outrage was not in fact due to Islamic terrorists but was a fiendish conspiracy by Donald Rumsfeld and the owners of the World Trade Center with the secret complicity of the BBC, CNN, the FBI, Pakistan's intelligence agency, a team of demolition experts and of course President Bush.
Donald Rumsfeld, according to a leaflet they handed out, was in it for financial gain. He had taken out a large position of put options on the airlines' stocks and arranged the carnage to make a profit when the share prices fell.
The owners of the World Trade Center, according to the leaflet, wanted to demolish the building, and rather than follow the normal procedures of vacating the building first, chose to arrange for the planes to crash into them, at the same time planting explosives in the buildings to ensure that they would all collapse correctly.
The BBC and CNN assisted in the effort by reporting that the building had collapsed half an hour before it actually did, although the exact benefit of this to the conspirators wasn't made clear in the leaflet. I was in England at the time and watched it on the BBC and they actually showed footage of the building collapsing at the time that they reported it, so I'm not quite sure how they could have got the footage if it hadn't yet collapsed.
The police were called and the protesters were eventually removed from the ferry.
On arriving in Staten Island, my friend's girlfriend coincidentally encountered a major upset at work and needed his moral support, and then it poured with rain. So it wasn't the most successful of trips.
Donald Rumsfeld, according to a leaflet they handed out, was in it for financial gain. He had taken out a large position of put options on the airlines' stocks and arranged the carnage to make a profit when the share prices fell.
The owners of the World Trade Center, according to the leaflet, wanted to demolish the building, and rather than follow the normal procedures of vacating the building first, chose to arrange for the planes to crash into them, at the same time planting explosives in the buildings to ensure that they would all collapse correctly.
The BBC and CNN assisted in the effort by reporting that the building had collapsed half an hour before it actually did, although the exact benefit of this to the conspirators wasn't made clear in the leaflet. I was in England at the time and watched it on the BBC and they actually showed footage of the building collapsing at the time that they reported it, so I'm not quite sure how they could have got the footage if it hadn't yet collapsed.
The police were called and the protesters were eventually removed from the ferry.
On arriving in Staten Island, my friend's girlfriend coincidentally encountered a major upset at work and needed his moral support, and then it poured with rain. So it wasn't the most successful of trips.
