Glad you are re-visiting this intriguing narrative and that you decided to re-issue these finely crafted lyrics. One of my favourite of your ballads. You are a courageous person, David, take care.
Hollywood in the global south has always meant an American brand of propaganda packaged with infotainment and Rocky style bravado, a fake story to subvert Muhammad Ali’s cause, protest, and symbolic resonance throughout, the way Nadeli Pandor resonates today. Bread’s both sustenance and money but more particularly the U.S. dollar subverting national sovereignty from Nicaragua to Indonesia. That building name is just so dramatically hegemonic.
September 11 was very close and personal for me, so I can assure you nobody would like more than me to know if there is some conspiracy beyond the basic storyline that most have come to accept.
I’ve heard lots of the theories; in any case where I can verify the details, it falls apart. As I say, if there is more, please bring it out. But you have to prove it, or at least make it plausible. I have not heard the Hollywood Bread one but I suspect it would also not stand up to scrutiny. If anyone has hard evidence, please share it.
We know that the FBI and CIA dropped the ball more than once, we know the airlines were too complacent, even NY State building regulations were too lax, and Osama bin Laden has claimed credit for the operation. It sure looks to me like something pretty close to the official narrative. Once again, if there is more, nobody wants to know more than me. Please bring it on.
I put limited faith in the paid troll theory too. It’s possible, but I have been accused of being a paid troll for comments that disagreed with the blogger. Rest assured I am not. I think they are pretty rare.
Interesting. Never would have put Israel at the top of my suspects for 9/11 before but this story might change that. The celebrating Israelis in New Jersey were also working for a moving company by the way. Might be of interest to see if it’s the same one.
I am the 'anonymous friend'. Thank you David for tackling this complicated subject and making another great song out of it.
I will attach my original account below. There are some minor details that are different than David's account above, but mostly that's all correct. I would like to point out that I have no idea what happened on 9/11 and I never claimed that I did. What I do know is that the official story doesn't add up to make sense, if nothing else than from my personal experience. So, without further ado:
9/11 and the Hollywood Bread Building
Final update. Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. In the face of COVID-19, where currently we lose as many people as died on 9/11 every 48 hours, it almost seems irrelevant. But it happened, and it set a ton of global developments in motion, and as a result, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, died.
These attacks have seriously messed with my life for years and I am unburdening myself of it now. I will let it lie from now on. It is was it is. I doubt we will ever find out what happened. I am looking for a way to park this document somewhere permanently, where it can’t be erased. I am now moving forward. I think it’s still a fascinating read, and I’m the one who lived it. I made a couple of final grammar corrections and corrected two dates, this is now the final version. Period. If you want to share it, feel free to copy and paste it. I would still prefer if you didn’t use my name. Be safe, and be well.
With the 15th anniversary of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States coming up, I decided to write down what I know about what lead up to them. You see, I knew Mohammed Atta…
I should have written this down years ago, but for the first years I feared for my and my family’s lives, and after that had passed, I guess I just wanted to put it behind me. I am sure that after 15 years, I might have some details wrong, but the core story is correct. I am not a conspiracy nut, I don’t know what happened exactly, except that you might agree with me after reading this, that the official story that we have been told is likely a load of bullshit.
The Hollywood Bread Building is a 10 story building overlooking Young Circle Park, the central park in Hollywood, Florida. It is currently abandoned and according to the papers, there are violent ‘floor turf wars’ being fought inside by the people squatting there. But in 2001, it was filled with many small businesses, including mine. I could see Young Circle from my 9th floor windows. That’s where Shuckums was (and maybe still is) – the oyster bar where the 9/11 hijackers last got together to have a meal together, before boarding their flights to murder thousands of people. It was first widely reported that this happened on September 10th, but I believe that timeline has been revised. I have made the conscious decision not look up any facts about 9/11 now, for fear that it would influence or shape what I remember.
I worked together with an employee of mine in these offices on the 9th floor – let’s call him Joey (not his real name). As soon as Mohamed Atta was fingered to be the ring-leader in the attacks, both Joey and I almost fell out of our seats. “That guy??? We know that guy!” Joey would hang outside the front door a lot, because he smoked and wasn’t allowed to do it inside the building. So did others from other floors. Atta was a frequent visitor to our building. What’s interesting is who else was renting offices in the building:
The tenants:
There was Moishe and the Israeli “social club” on the 9th floor. They’d come in, in the late afternoon and stay until all hours of the night, sitting on couches and making phone calls on the speaker phone in Hebrew. I often worked late, sometimes until midnight, and they’d be there with the door open, assuming that all other tenants were long gone.
Then there was the ‘trucking company’. They were Americans, in a very small office on the 9th floor that probably rented for about $350 a month back then. They started moving racks of computer servers into that office. This intrigued me, since we built rack-mounted computers for a living. I was intrigued why a company that was renting a $350 office was moving in what looked like at least $100,000.- worth of computer hardware. And what on earth could you need that kind of computing power for, if all you were doing was keeping track of a very small fleet of trucks. I asked the guy. He had no comment and ever since that day, they kept their door shut.
And then, there was the ‘moving company’. These guys also spoke Hebrew. I remember as if it was yesterday, talking to a young guy who worked for them, outside the door, where they were smoking. I welcomed them to the building and asked what they kind of work they did. The young guy didn’t seem to know what to say. When he started to say something, an older guy shut him up and said “we are moving company.” Then he told the young guy to put out his smoke and come inside with him.
What do these three companies have in common? Well, on September 11th 2001, they were all gone! Like they were never there. Offices cleaned out and left without a trace. That is some coincidence, wouldn’t you say?
The radio station:
Across from our office was what has been described to us as “an illegal underground Greek resistance radio station.” Seriously, you can’t make this shit up! The FCC would come raid their offices and take all their gear. Then they would get new gear and go back at whatever they were doing. One morning, I came to work to find a SWAT team stacked up outside their door, with submachine guns, combat gear and all. (I shit you not – the FCC!!) I turned around and left for a bit. When I came back, the SWAT team was still there, but now more relaxed. I tried to get into our offices, and noticed that the door lock was upside down. You had to put the key in, flat side up - now it was the other way around. I asked the cop who seemed in charge, whether they broke into my office – he said no, they did not.
An hour or so later, there was a knock on the door, and it was that cop again. He came in and sat down in my office, and asked me if he could ask me some questions. I told him that I might consider talking to him if he stopped lying to me. So I asked him again “Did you break into my office?”. He half-smiled, like a school boy caught in a lie and said “yeah, we did. sorry about that”. After asking me many questions about what I had observed in the building, he asked me “did you know your office is wired everywhere?” I had no idea. He removed a ceiling panel and showed me that there were indeed cameras and microphones in the ceiling. Our offices had been the Greek’s offices before they moved across the hall. The officer asked me whether I had ever seen a man named REDACTED – the next few paragraphs were a riveting story about an assassination tied to this investigation in our building. As it turned out, this had nothing to do with 9/11, but with organized crime. Unfortunately, a friend of mine is tied in to this story and for the safety of his family, I have taken this part out of my account.
Johnny Cowboy and the 10th floor:
And then there was Johnny Cowboy (not his real name). Johnny was an interesting fellow. He acted as handyman for the building, and offered car-washes to people parking in the lot across the street. He never said much, but Joey and I saw him all the time and were friendly with him. He looked like a cowboy out of an old Western, Stetson and all, and while he scowled at most people, he seemed to like us and actually spoke to us sometimes.
The 10th floor had once been home to the Psychic Friends Network, when I first moved in. Later on, it became a technical school, and then it was empty. It was different than all of the other floors – you couldn’t get into the floor without a key. It was off-limits to all. But Johnny Cowboy had keys. And I think he crashed there from time to time, as well. Meaning, Johnny knew everything that went on in the building at all hours.
One day, I came to work and saw fire trucks outside the building. When I got in the elevator, a horrible stench had enveloped the whole building. Turns out, someone found Johnny’s decomposing body on the 10th floor. There were strange cops in the building, the kind with suits, sunglasses and earpieces. I asked what happened. “Looks like he drank himself to death. They found a bottle next to his body” a firefighter answered. Joey and I looked at each other puzzled. So I said “uh, Johnny didn’t drink” The cop told us that we don’t want to go around asking too many questions and told us to move along. Could Johnny have been a recovering alcoholic and had a relapse? Possible. Could he have seen something in that building at night that he wasn’t supposed to? Possible.
The FBI:
Joey and I struggled for a while after September 11th, whether we should call the FBI and tell them about Atta hanging out with the Israelis. After a few days, we did. They took our numbers, nobody ever called us back or followed up. I’m sure they had lots of calls, but it does strike me as quite odd that they never called us back, considering that we were familiar with the ringleader of the attacks.
In conclusion.
So there it is, best as I can remember it. The Israeli social club, the ‘trucking’ firm with the server banks, the Israeli ‘moving company’ whose employees didn’t seem to know what business they were in – all went poof on September 11th. The Greek resistance radio station with supposed mob ties and a bullet to the back of the head. And Johnny Cowboy, who drank himself to death or saw something he shouldn’t have. One bizarre story, isn’t it.
Memory is a funny thing, and I’m sure I have messed some details up, but I wanted to write it down exactly as I remember it, before comparing notes with Joey or researching on the internet. A few months after this happened, I closed my company sold our house and went on a multi-year RV trip with my (now ex-) wife. I didn’t feel comfortable being able to be easily found, and not having an address, seemed just fine with me. For at least the first year or two I fully expected that someone would probably find me and Joey, either victims of unfortunate accidents or more likely, with just a single gunshot wound to the back of our heads.
I didn’t tell anyone about any of this for years, out of fear, but then decided that if someone saw us as a threat, we would have been long gone. In a sea of conspiracy theories, anything is easily discredited. I don’t have a theory – I just know what I saw. I don’t claim to know what it all means.
Joey and I check in with each other every year on 9/11 to cheer at having made it yet another year.
I never found the official 9/11 narrative convincing, to say the least. The story’s got a dozen plot holes big enough to fly a plane through. NORAD? AWOL. Building 7 and its smoldering office furniture? Pancaked too. The pentagon, with a round hole and no video. A charred Pennsylvania field with no airplane debris. Pilots who trained in Cessnas. Airline stock selloffs. Box knives. Atta’s passport found in the rubble. First responders who heard and saw explosions prior to the collapse.
Yet none of my healthy skepticism constitutes a theory, much less a conspiracy. I just don’t think it was nineteen guys with box knives.
Glad you are re-visiting this intriguing narrative and that you decided to re-issue these finely crafted lyrics. One of my favourite of your ballads. You are a courageous person, David, take care.
well thanks for prompting me to write the song in the first place, alan! i especially like it now with this arrangement.
Hollywood in the global south has always meant an American brand of propaganda packaged with infotainment and Rocky style bravado, a fake story to subvert Muhammad Ali’s cause, protest, and symbolic resonance throughout, the way Nadeli Pandor resonates today. Bread’s both sustenance and money but more particularly the U.S. dollar subverting national sovereignty from Nicaragua to Indonesia. That building name is just so dramatically hegemonic.
Most interesting point: that the FBI weren't interested.
September 11 was very close and personal for me, so I can assure you nobody would like more than me to know if there is some conspiracy beyond the basic storyline that most have come to accept.
I’ve heard lots of the theories; in any case where I can verify the details, it falls apart. As I say, if there is more, please bring it out. But you have to prove it, or at least make it plausible. I have not heard the Hollywood Bread one but I suspect it would also not stand up to scrutiny. If anyone has hard evidence, please share it.
We know that the FBI and CIA dropped the ball more than once, we know the airlines were too complacent, even NY State building regulations were too lax, and Osama bin Laden has claimed credit for the operation. It sure looks to me like something pretty close to the official narrative. Once again, if there is more, nobody wants to know more than me. Please bring it on.
I put limited faith in the paid troll theory too. It’s possible, but I have been accused of being a paid troll for comments that disagreed with the blogger. Rest assured I am not. I think they are pretty rare.
Interesting. Never would have put Israel at the top of my suspects for 9/11 before but this story might change that. The celebrating Israelis in New Jersey were also working for a moving company by the way. Might be of interest to see if it’s the same one.
Hello all.
I am the 'anonymous friend'. Thank you David for tackling this complicated subject and making another great song out of it.
I will attach my original account below. There are some minor details that are different than David's account above, but mostly that's all correct. I would like to point out that I have no idea what happened on 9/11 and I never claimed that I did. What I do know is that the official story doesn't add up to make sense, if nothing else than from my personal experience. So, without further ado:
9/11 and the Hollywood Bread Building
Final update. Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. In the face of COVID-19, where currently we lose as many people as died on 9/11 every 48 hours, it almost seems irrelevant. But it happened, and it set a ton of global developments in motion, and as a result, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, died.
These attacks have seriously messed with my life for years and I am unburdening myself of it now. I will let it lie from now on. It is was it is. I doubt we will ever find out what happened. I am looking for a way to park this document somewhere permanently, where it can’t be erased. I am now moving forward. I think it’s still a fascinating read, and I’m the one who lived it. I made a couple of final grammar corrections and corrected two dates, this is now the final version. Period. If you want to share it, feel free to copy and paste it. I would still prefer if you didn’t use my name. Be safe, and be well.
With the 15th anniversary of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States coming up, I decided to write down what I know about what lead up to them. You see, I knew Mohammed Atta…
I should have written this down years ago, but for the first years I feared for my and my family’s lives, and after that had passed, I guess I just wanted to put it behind me. I am sure that after 15 years, I might have some details wrong, but the core story is correct. I am not a conspiracy nut, I don’t know what happened exactly, except that you might agree with me after reading this, that the official story that we have been told is likely a load of bullshit.
The Building:
The Hollywood Bread Building is a 10 story building overlooking Young Circle Park, the central park in Hollywood, Florida. It is currently abandoned and according to the papers, there are violent ‘floor turf wars’ being fought inside by the people squatting there. But in 2001, it was filled with many small businesses, including mine. I could see Young Circle from my 9th floor windows. That’s where Shuckums was (and maybe still is) – the oyster bar where the 9/11 hijackers last got together to have a meal together, before boarding their flights to murder thousands of people. It was first widely reported that this happened on September 10th, but I believe that timeline has been revised. I have made the conscious decision not look up any facts about 9/11 now, for fear that it would influence or shape what I remember.
I worked together with an employee of mine in these offices on the 9th floor – let’s call him Joey (not his real name). As soon as Mohamed Atta was fingered to be the ring-leader in the attacks, both Joey and I almost fell out of our seats. “That guy??? We know that guy!” Joey would hang outside the front door a lot, because he smoked and wasn’t allowed to do it inside the building. So did others from other floors. Atta was a frequent visitor to our building. What’s interesting is who else was renting offices in the building:
The tenants:
There was Moishe and the Israeli “social club” on the 9th floor. They’d come in, in the late afternoon and stay until all hours of the night, sitting on couches and making phone calls on the speaker phone in Hebrew. I often worked late, sometimes until midnight, and they’d be there with the door open, assuming that all other tenants were long gone.
Then there was the ‘trucking company’. They were Americans, in a very small office on the 9th floor that probably rented for about $350 a month back then. They started moving racks of computer servers into that office. This intrigued me, since we built rack-mounted computers for a living. I was intrigued why a company that was renting a $350 office was moving in what looked like at least $100,000.- worth of computer hardware. And what on earth could you need that kind of computing power for, if all you were doing was keeping track of a very small fleet of trucks. I asked the guy. He had no comment and ever since that day, they kept their door shut.
And then, there was the ‘moving company’. These guys also spoke Hebrew. I remember as if it was yesterday, talking to a young guy who worked for them, outside the door, where they were smoking. I welcomed them to the building and asked what they kind of work they did. The young guy didn’t seem to know what to say. When he started to say something, an older guy shut him up and said “we are moving company.” Then he told the young guy to put out his smoke and come inside with him.
What do these three companies have in common? Well, on September 11th 2001, they were all gone! Like they were never there. Offices cleaned out and left without a trace. That is some coincidence, wouldn’t you say?
The radio station:
Across from our office was what has been described to us as “an illegal underground Greek resistance radio station.” Seriously, you can’t make this shit up! The FCC would come raid their offices and take all their gear. Then they would get new gear and go back at whatever they were doing. One morning, I came to work to find a SWAT team stacked up outside their door, with submachine guns, combat gear and all. (I shit you not – the FCC!!) I turned around and left for a bit. When I came back, the SWAT team was still there, but now more relaxed. I tried to get into our offices, and noticed that the door lock was upside down. You had to put the key in, flat side up - now it was the other way around. I asked the cop who seemed in charge, whether they broke into my office – he said no, they did not.
An hour or so later, there was a knock on the door, and it was that cop again. He came in and sat down in my office, and asked me if he could ask me some questions. I told him that I might consider talking to him if he stopped lying to me. So I asked him again “Did you break into my office?”. He half-smiled, like a school boy caught in a lie and said “yeah, we did. sorry about that”. After asking me many questions about what I had observed in the building, he asked me “did you know your office is wired everywhere?” I had no idea. He removed a ceiling panel and showed me that there were indeed cameras and microphones in the ceiling. Our offices had been the Greek’s offices before they moved across the hall. The officer asked me whether I had ever seen a man named REDACTED – the next few paragraphs were a riveting story about an assassination tied to this investigation in our building. As it turned out, this had nothing to do with 9/11, but with organized crime. Unfortunately, a friend of mine is tied in to this story and for the safety of his family, I have taken this part out of my account.
Johnny Cowboy and the 10th floor:
And then there was Johnny Cowboy (not his real name). Johnny was an interesting fellow. He acted as handyman for the building, and offered car-washes to people parking in the lot across the street. He never said much, but Joey and I saw him all the time and were friendly with him. He looked like a cowboy out of an old Western, Stetson and all, and while he scowled at most people, he seemed to like us and actually spoke to us sometimes.
The 10th floor had once been home to the Psychic Friends Network, when I first moved in. Later on, it became a technical school, and then it was empty. It was different than all of the other floors – you couldn’t get into the floor without a key. It was off-limits to all. But Johnny Cowboy had keys. And I think he crashed there from time to time, as well. Meaning, Johnny knew everything that went on in the building at all hours.
One day, I came to work and saw fire trucks outside the building. When I got in the elevator, a horrible stench had enveloped the whole building. Turns out, someone found Johnny’s decomposing body on the 10th floor. There were strange cops in the building, the kind with suits, sunglasses and earpieces. I asked what happened. “Looks like he drank himself to death. They found a bottle next to his body” a firefighter answered. Joey and I looked at each other puzzled. So I said “uh, Johnny didn’t drink” The cop told us that we don’t want to go around asking too many questions and told us to move along. Could Johnny have been a recovering alcoholic and had a relapse? Possible. Could he have seen something in that building at night that he wasn’t supposed to? Possible.
The FBI:
Joey and I struggled for a while after September 11th, whether we should call the FBI and tell them about Atta hanging out with the Israelis. After a few days, we did. They took our numbers, nobody ever called us back or followed up. I’m sure they had lots of calls, but it does strike me as quite odd that they never called us back, considering that we were familiar with the ringleader of the attacks.
In conclusion.
So there it is, best as I can remember it. The Israeli social club, the ‘trucking’ firm with the server banks, the Israeli ‘moving company’ whose employees didn’t seem to know what business they were in – all went poof on September 11th. The Greek resistance radio station with supposed mob ties and a bullet to the back of the head. And Johnny Cowboy, who drank himself to death or saw something he shouldn’t have. One bizarre story, isn’t it.
Memory is a funny thing, and I’m sure I have messed some details up, but I wanted to write it down exactly as I remember it, before comparing notes with Joey or researching on the internet. A few months after this happened, I closed my company sold our house and went on a multi-year RV trip with my (now ex-) wife. I didn’t feel comfortable being able to be easily found, and not having an address, seemed just fine with me. For at least the first year or two I fully expected that someone would probably find me and Joey, either victims of unfortunate accidents or more likely, with just a single gunshot wound to the back of our heads.
I didn’t tell anyone about any of this for years, out of fear, but then decided that if someone saw us as a threat, we would have been long gone. In a sea of conspiracy theories, anything is easily discredited. I don’t have a theory – I just know what I saw. I don’t claim to know what it all means.
Joey and I check in with each other every year on 9/11 to cheer at having made it yet another year.
I never found the official 9/11 narrative convincing, to say the least. The story’s got a dozen plot holes big enough to fly a plane through. NORAD? AWOL. Building 7 and its smoldering office furniture? Pancaked too. The pentagon, with a round hole and no video. A charred Pennsylvania field with no airplane debris. Pilots who trained in Cessnas. Airline stock selloffs. Box knives. Atta’s passport found in the rubble. First responders who heard and saw explosions prior to the collapse.
Yet none of my healthy skepticism constitutes a theory, much less a conspiracy. I just don’t think it was nineteen guys with box knives.