On Board Flight 3407: Beverly Eckert, 9/11 Widow, “My Silence Cannot Be Bought”
February 13th, 2009Update: She Met With Obama Days Before Crash
Via: The Buffalo News:
The usually joyful meet-and-greet area of the Buffalo Niagara International Airport was a corridor of tears and sorrow early this morning as family and friends of those aboard Continental Express Flight 3407 filed in to get official word of their loved ones’ fates.
For Sue Bourque, the wait for confirmation regarding her sister, Beverly Eckert, was all too familiar. Eckert is the widow of Sean Rooney, a Buffalo native who lost his life in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
Eckert was traveling to Buffalo for a weekend celebration of what would have been her husband’s 58th birthday. She also had planned to take part in presentation of a scholarship award at Canisius High School that she established in honor of her late husband.
Bourque said that while the family had not yet received official confirmation of her sister’s fate, the reality was settling in. “We know she was on that plane,” Bourque said, “and now she’s with him.”
Eckert, Rooney’s high school sweetheart, continued to live in their home in Stamford, Conn., after the terrorists’ attacks of 2001. As co-chairwoman of Voices of Sept. 11, she pushed for a formal commission to investigate intelligence failures and for a proper memorial to the victims.
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My Silence Cannot Be Bought
by Beverly Eckert
I’ve chosen to go to court rather than accept a payoff from the 9/11 victims compensation fund. Instead, I want to know what went so wrong with our intelligence and security systems that a band of religious fanatics was able to turn four U.S passenger jets into an enemy force, attack our cities and kill 3,000 civilians with terrifying ease. I want to know why two 110-story skyscrapers collapsed in less than two hours and why escape and rescue options were so limited.
I am suing because unlike other investigative avenues, including congressional hearings and the 9/11 commission, my lawsuit requires all testimony be given under oath and fully uses powers to compel evidence.
The victims fund was not created in a spirit of compassion. Rather, it was a tacit acknowledgement by Congress that it tampered with our civil justice system in an unprecedented way. Lawmakers capped the liability of the airlines at the behest of lobbyists who descended on Washington while the Sept. 11 fires still smoldered.
And this liability cap protects not just the airlines, but also World Trade Center builders, safety engineers and other defendants.
The caps on liability have consequences for those who want to sue to shed light on the mistakes of 9/11. It means the playing field is tilted steeply in favor of those who need to be held accountable. With the financial consequences other than insurance proceeds removed, there is no incentive for those whose negligence contributed to the death toll to acknowledge their failings or implement reforms. They can afford to deny culpability and play a waiting game.
By suing, I’ve forfeited the “$1.8 million average award” for a death claim I could have collected under the fund. Nor do I have any illusions about winning money in my suit. What I do know is I owe it to my husband, whose death I believe could have been avoided, to see that all of those responsible are held accountable. If we don’t get answers to what went wrong, there will be a next time. And instead of 3,000 dead, it will be 10,000. What will Congress do then?
So I say to Congress, big business and everyone who conspired to divert attention from government and private-sector failures: My husband’s life was priceless, and I will not let his death be meaningless. My silence cannot be bought.
Beverly Eckert, whose husband died at the World Trade Center, is the founder of Voices of September 11th, a victims advocacy group.
Research Credit: AV
People think, because TV makes things look so easy, and cars usually start right up, and medicine works some times, that somebody is in charge. Bunk. They are confusing the predictable mechanics of human inventions with the unpredictable subjectivity of human motivation. The sad fact is that 9/11 was a combination of (a) sociopathic geniuses employing a morbid combination of career soldier-of-fortune criminals and brainwashed true believers to exploit the frustrations of people with legitimate beefs and (b) misguided intelligence agencies and overconfident politicians, both of whose judgments were colored by inclinations to allow the outcome to gain political advantage. And everybody got what they wanted, except the soldiers-of-fortune who didn’t realize they were on a suicide mission, the people who died in the towers, and the people were were terrorized. When you think that the people who were terrorized were most of the population of the world, you might have expected a revolution when they found out what really happened. But because basically they just buried their heads in the sand and went on about their business trying to get rich enough to buy more TVs and cars, you could say they deserved every bit of terror they experienced and still fear. This institutionalized apathy is a perfect symptom of a civilization in an advanced state of decline. And civilizations basically decline because people want them to. The reason there has been no serious outcry against what really happened on 9/11 is because the collective vital natures of most people want this over-crowded, over-industrialized, over-polluted disgrace of a civilization to come to an end already. The people really want an even more emphatic 9/11, repeatedly, until they are motivated to finally stop doing what they are doing, and start doing something else more conversant with the suppressed demands of their vital natures, which want what every living thing wants: the wholesome satisfaction of living life simply, where you know who your enemies are, you know who your friends are, you don’t have to perform mental gymnastics just to get through the day, where there’s time to reflect on who you are and what you are doing and why you are doing it. Today’s world does not allow any of that and most people have had enough. Building excess material wealth and distracting yourself from that diseased adaptation by watching American Idol is the “normal” human equivalent of the “idiot” human eating his own feces. That scenario is of course offset by the by-product of the American Idol way of life: the billions living in subhuman poverty. Those poor souls are neither figuratively eating their own feces nor living a humble life of simple rewards. They are in a constant state of stress, worse than that experienced by prisoners. Wait till some sociopathic genius motivates the destitute of the world a la Robespierre. I’d hate to be Dick Cheney when that happens. But that will probably be the ultimate 9/11, but no one will get what they want: the millenialists will just die, they won’t be swept up into heaven. The opportunistic politicians will just die. The intelligence and police agencies and armies will just die. The motivated destitute will die. The fat half of the world will die. The only ones left will be the evil geniuses who stage managed the whole affair (the surviving ones I mean; the first few groups will have been executed by their successors) and the idealistic but irascible Cryptogon types who are always skittering around the fringes like rats in the shadows. Between the surviving evil geniuses and the rat people, it will start all over again, eventually producing a golden period guided by the ideals preserved by the rat people. But that gold will eventually degrade to silver, then to copper, then to iron, that will rust, return to earth, the rats will return to the shadows, the evil geniuses will rise again, and you’ll be able to write a whole library full of books about the million and one 9/11s or their equivalents that history has witnessed in its pointless journey to nowhere.
Thank you, Peregrino, for your thoughtful and insightful comments. 9/11 is a relative minor event compared to the long history of atrocities that America has perpetrated against others in the name of freedom, democracy and honor. Tell the families of the Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed and maimed as “collateral damage” about 9/11. As we become more and more hated in the world because of our behavior, we develop more sophisticated weapons with which to destroy those who hate us. At what point will we hate ourselves? At what point will we destroy ourselves?
Thank you Peregrino. That was a beautiful missive. Makes me wonder what exactly she said to Obama, and what other ears that have interest in the matter of “mass genocide” didn’t like what they heard. “They say” that the plane was on autopilot. Exactly who was the “autopilot?”
Accidents happen. Yep, my family has met their share of untimely ends. But I for one am always looking behind the scene of the accident. This one, as Anne said in a related post “Stinks.” Reminiscent of the movie Donny Darko for surehttp://dir.salon.com/story/ent/movies/feature/2004/07/23/darko/index.html for sure. It all smells so Sinister to me. Kind of sulphurically evil.