Ten Years Later, It's a New Game

By-Matt Marino-Contributing Writer/Football Reporters Online/Pro Football NYC

As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, New York, I’d go up to the roof every July 4th for the fireworks, look to the left and the Towers were the first thing in sight. I’d be on my way home from school, driving towards Manhattan and they were the first buildings to come into view. Exiting Giants stadium from the upper tier, they were the first buildings you saw as you looked back towards the East. And when you came up out of the subway anywhere in the city and lost your sense of direction for a couple of seconds, you could always look up, find the Twin Towers and know exactly where you were. Growing up here, they became a compass.
The City’s sports teams did their part in the aftermath of 9/11. Then NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue and MLB commissioner Bud Selig did the right thing and cancelled a weeks worth of games. But, it was also the right thing to do by resuming play a week later. The right thing because it was something people around New York City needed.
Following the 9/11 attacks, the city and the people of the city were shocked, hurt and exhausted. I remember listening to then New York Giants and New York Jets coaches, Jim Fassel and Herm Edwards, explaining that the scope of what happened did not set in until they drove by the commuter rail stations in New Jersey and Long Island respectively (where each team would practice) and see the same cars in the same parking spots and that’s when it hit them that those people were not coming back. It was also when they realized that their coaches and players needed do anything possible to help heal a city.
In the days after the attacks, athletes from the New York area teams began visiting the first responders at Ground Zero. Whether they handed out bottled water or just visited family members, who had lost loved ones, it was important they were there. They did not do it out of obligation to the team they played for, but because they were part of the community of New York City, representatives of the people of the city. Professional athletes that were playing for New York felt a new connection to the city, and its fans.
How we experience sporting events in this country changed that day. When you go to a stadium now, there is a good chance you will need to walk through a metal detector, there are mandatory bag checks, armed military personnel, and the Department of Homeland Security has trained teams on how to protect their stadiums against acts of terrorism. You will also see more American flags in stadiums displayed by fans than prior to the events of 9/11. There is now a seriousness to the national anthem and there certainly will be this Sunday. Video boards scan the fans, crowds cheer and chant USA as the camera locks on to a firefighter, police officer or a member of the Armed Forces - all things that were not a usual occurrence before 9/11.
Some people disagreed with the decision to resume professional sports after 9/11 but I recall the role the games that the New York sports teams played during that fall. Mike Piazza won the first game played in New York City after the attacks with a dramatic 8th inning home run. The Giants and Jets won their first games on the road, but were treated as the home teams with signs of love for New York visible across the stadiums in Kansas City and Foxborough. The Jets, being urged on by New York City Fireman Ed Anzalone, “fireman Ed”, were able to make the playoffs. The Giants played the first football game at home following the attacks and showed what a team and stadium of 80,000 people can do to brighten the spirits of a city.
And Even though the Yankees lost in the 7th game of the World Series, they gave New Yorkers three of the most dramatic nights in sports history with a first pitch from the President of the United States and back-to-back nights with game-tying ninth inning home runs and extra inning wins. All teams did this while showing their support by wearing the hats of the FDNY, NYPD and PAPD during their games.
The Jets and Giants were some of the first athletes to get to Ground Zero after the attacks and by doing so, demonstrated to others watching that, if these professional athletes are down there helping, maybe I can do something myself to help. It also gave the players an idea of what they meant to the fans of New York, and how much they were looked up to.
Those teams provided a place for people to gather and escape from what they were going through – if only for a few hours, it was still needed. Fans assembled in large numbers at stadiums around the city, all places that were deemed terrorist targets at the time. Sports gave complete strangers, who were in the same dilemma, a connection, and it helped keep memories alive of loved ones and acted as a form of therapy for others.
For the 10th anniversary of 9/11, with the NFL set to have its own pre-game ceremonies throughout the league, the Jets and Giants are involved in the largest tributes around the league. The Jets will don hats on the sideline with the FDNY insignia on them and will have the FDNY, NYPD and PAPD bagpipers perform Amazing Grace on the field. The stadium lights will be shut off at halftime for the start of another tribute created by 9/11 family members. The Giants will be playing in Washington – the site of the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11. And if Justin Tuck can play, I’m sure he will be wearing a New York Giants fireman helmet as he comes onto the field. The ceremonies commemorating 9/11 will be especially poignant for both teams. Although there are few players and coaches still associated with the Jets and Giants that were on the teams ten years ago, both teams still represent New York City. This Sunday will give everyone a sense of enjoyment, a coming together, something positive to share with one another for a couple of hours during a difficult time - the same thing that sports accomplished in the months following the attacks in 2001.
On this Sunday, we will be reminded of the significance of sports, not just as something to enjoy but also as a way to remember the past shared with family and friends. As my friend Mike Modafferi, the son of Rescue 5 Battalion Chief Louis Modafferi who died on 9/11, told me “Sports were something I could feel good about, it was a way of being close to him and keeping his memory alive because we both got so much enjoyment out of them. One of the reasons I love sports is because my father got me into them. When I go to games now, I think about being there with him.”

9-11 - Remembering 9-11-01 on 9-11-09

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9-11-2001 is a day I'll certainly never forget.

I had a habit of falling asleep on my couch, in part because I used my laptop there as an escape from working on my nearby desk. All the better to code my then new XFL Simworld game and catch up on the TV news, as I had a better angle to see the TV screen.

I watched KTVU Channel Two religiously, then, and "Mornings On Two" was a guilty pleasure for me. So the TV was almost always on "2" at that time; so it was the morning of 9-11.

I'd fell asleep on the couch, again, but this time I when I woke up the TV was on and I could not believe my eyes: a giant building was on fire. When I focused my eyes and ears I realized it was one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. I could not believe it.



(Above) Bill Chackhes' video tour of "Ground Zero"

The first thing I did was call my Mom and (now late) stepfather and told them to tune in two Channel 2. The second thing I did was send emails to friends about what was happening. The third thing I did was just watch.

I figured it was just a fire as at that point, it wasn't clear what caused flames to start blowing out of the building. Then as the time passed, it was reported that a plane crashed into it, later the plane was identified as a Boeing 767. I've flown on those alot, so much so I felt as if I knew it inside and out. That's a big plane.

My mind raced. What could have happened to cause that? And as it did, and friends called me, and I watched, the second plane hit the second tower and for a time, both buildings were on fire.

I thought about my friend Dan who wanted me to work for American Express in New York, where I would have been near that building as AMEX World Headquarters was in the World Trade Center. Then I thought about Dan and how he was doing and tried to call him there - no luck.

As more time passed, and it seemed the flames from massive buildings got larger, something unexpected happened that was captured on TV - they fell, World One first, then sometimes later, World Two.

I still to this day can't believe I saw that. I just can't.

I had to get out of the house, so I walked down to Oakland's Lakeshore Avenue and to Arzmendi's where I used to have a morning coffee and pastry with the neighborhood's work-at-home types. But this time it was different.

People who usually got their coffee and whatever and drove to work in an office where still in the neighborhood. It was actually crowded, and everyone was talking about what I just saw: the destruction of the World Trade Center.

It was frankly the first time I've experienced people just bonding in a way I'd only seen after the 1989 Loma Piereta Earthquake and the Oakland Hills Fire in 1991. Yep, I was here for both of those disasters.

But the difference is you could feel America come together. Right now. Over the disaster. Man, that day hurt. Hurt alot. It hurts to have seen so many people suffer then who were in the building, and later, who were families of the people in it.

They didn't do anything wrong at all. And I'm not sure what they could have done that, even if it was wrong, would call for that kind of punishment.

It's an event that bonds people to this day. My good friend, New Yorker Bill Chachkes, who took me on his own 9-11 tour in the video above, talk about that day again and again, and again.

It's a day I'll never forget.

9/11 - Remembering September 11th Today

This is what I remember about "9-11" -- the day that the World Trade Center was destroyed due to a terrorist attack by what we now know and call the Al Qiada terrorist group. I was living in Oakland, Ca at the time.

9-11 Commission Report "Agrees" With Pastor Wright On 9-11

Senator Barack Obama gave a speech that was historic and timely in talking about the need to talk about race in America. This speech, or the need for it, was created by mainstream non-Black America's first-time exposure to the firery oratory of a minister in a Black Church.

Retired Pastor Jeremiah Wright's sermons, portions of which were captured on video and seen by many, were described as upsetting and disagreeable. And it seems that talk show after talk show has someone Black agreeing with the overall idea that everything -- everything -- Pastor Wright said was wrong.

This is what drew my attention and caused me to look at, first, what Pastor Wright was recorded as saying and, second, an event that Pastor Wright talked about: September 11th 2001.

Now, before I continue I will report that I will never forget any aspect of "9-11" or where I was on that day. It started for me, waking up on my couch after having gone to sleep watching television. It was on Channel 2, KTVU TV, Oakland, and the first sight on the screen was the fire that broke out in One World Trade Center. I thought the building was just on fire, but as you may remember if you were around then, it was evident that the building had been struck by a plane, and then we watched as another aircraft ran right into the second tower.

It was a moment which caused me to reach for the phone and call everyone I knew from here to New York City. And on top of all of that, I didn't know if we were a target in some way. Remember the Pentagon was hit as well. And all of this was on television unfolding before us.

I was scared and so were a lot of people who didn't go to work that day in Oakland. People who gathered at establishments like Arazmendi, the place known for its thin-crust pizza and yummy pastries -- a great start in the morning turned into an all day hangout to talk about what was going on, and so it was this for the rest of that week.

I'll never forget that.

But one question I had was "Why?" What did we -- America -- do? And given that it seemed to me like a crime rather than an act of war (where we could not blame a country) I wondered who we would get -- what person could we jail? Who could we blame? That was the first time I heard of Osama Bin Ladin. It would not be the last time.

A few years later, the 9-11 Commission released the findings of its extensive review of how 9-11 came to be and what we could do to make sure it did not happen again. There are parts of the commission's report that's telling regarding what we did -- or more to the point, what we did not do.

What it all boils down to is that America did not take Radical Islam seriously and moreover, America has not even heard of Radical Islam. Meanwhile the socio-economic foundation that created 9-11 was being formed. The 9-11 Commission report states:

In the 1970s and early 1980s, an unprecedented flood of wealth led the then largely unmodernized oil states to attempt to shortcut decades of development. They funded huge infrastructure projects, vastly expanded education, and created subsidized social welfare programs. These programs established a widespread feeling of entitlement without a corresponding sense of social obligations. By the late 1980s, diminishing oil revenues, the economic drain from many unprofitable development projects, and population growth made these entitlement programs unsustainable. The resulting cutbacks created enormous resentment among recipients who had come to see government largesse as their right. This resentment was further stoked by public understanding of how much oil income had gone straight into the pockets of the rulers, their friends, and their helpers....

By the 1990s, high birthrates and declining rates of infant mortality had produced a common problem throughout the Muslim world: a large, steadily increasing population of young men without any reasonable expectation of suitable or steady employment-a sure prescription for social turbulence. Many of these young men, such as the enormous number trained only in religious schools, lacked the skills needed by their societies. Far more acquired valuable skills but lived in stagnant economies that could not generate satisfying jobs.

Millions, pursuing secular as well as religious studies, were products of educational systems that generally devoted little if any attention to the rest of the world's thought, history, and culture. The secular education reflected a strong cultural preference for technical fields over the humanities and social sciences. Many of these young men, even if able to study abroad, lacked the perspective and skills needed to understand a different culture.

Frustrated in their search for a decent living, unable to benefit from an education often obtained at the cost of great family sacrifice, and blocked from starting families of their own, some of these young men were easy targets for radicalization.


A Jihad is a holy war, and in Bin Ladin, who was the product of the dynamics described above, Radical Islam had its holy warrior. Bin Ladin was a hero in the triumph of Afganitan over the Soviet Union in 1988. The 9-11 Commission reports:

April 1988 brought victory for the Afghan jihad. Moscow declared it would pull its military forces out of Afghanistan within the next nine months. As the Soviets began their withdrawal, the jihad's leaders debated what to do next.

Bin Ladin and Azzam agreed that the organization successfully created for Afghanistan should not be allowed to dissolve. They established what they called a base or foundation (al Qaeda) as a potential general headquarters for future jihad.

And Bin Ladin got no help from the U.S. in the Afghad jihad. Late, he would target the United States, first for sending troups into Somalia:

After U.S. troops deployed to Somalia in late 1992, al Qaeda leaders formulated a fatwa demanding their eviction. In December, bombs exploded at two hotels in Aden where U.S. troops routinely stopped en route to Somalia, killing two, but no Americans. The perpetrators are reported to have belonged to a group from southern Yemen headed by a Yemeni member of Bin Ladin's Islamic Army Shura; some in the group had trained at an al Qaeda camp in Sudan.44

When Pastor Wright said "The Chickens were coming home to roost," it's these developments that he was referring to. What Pastor Wright is recorded as saying is, according to ABC News:

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of Sen. Barack Obama's church, Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, "said the U.S. had brought on the [9-11 terrorist] attacks with its own terrorism." ..."We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and the black South Africans, and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yard. America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Unfortunately, there is nothing in the 9-11 Commission Report to refute those statements. With respect to the complex laticework of events that formed the disaster that is September 11, 2001, Pastor Wright is painfully correct.

What is increasingly clear to me is that America does not know about itself and what it has done. We entered Somalia with what both the Bush and Clinton Administration believed were good intentions or at least they were presented that way to the American public -- to disarm to allow the delivery of food after the ouster of the dictator Siad Barre, whom the U.S. gave aide to during his tenure -- and watched as our collective lack of understanding of the cultural landscape and the warring factions led to what PBS called "An Ambush". An Ambush led by Osama Bin Ladin. An Ambush that served as preview of what was to come later: September 11, 2001.

The U.S Government may have told the public the aim of the troup visit was to disarm, but to Somalis it seemed more like an occupation.

Osman Ato, a wealthy Somali businessman and supporter of American troup involvement, told the New York Times:

"Otherwise, you can be assured any wrong move will worsen the situation," said Mr. Ato, who has financed General Aidid and led the warlord's forces in some clan battles in Somalia this year. "We expect the Americans to behave as a friendly force, not as an occupation force."

But even before the American troup occupation, it was clear America had a history in Somalia and not a good one. This is what Former U.S Ambassador to Somalia Robert Oakley said in 1995 about Ato and the U.S. in Somalia:

"He's very shrewd," said Robert Oakley, a former United States Ambassador to Somalia and its special envoy during the United Nations mission there. "Obviously he knows how to make deals and how to work with the Americans. He understands what makes sense to us.

"Not that he's our man," he (Oakley) said. "Politically, he can't afford to be too close to the Americans. He's one of the people keenly aware of how much damage we did to Somalia. "

The "damage we did to Somalia" is described in detail by Alex de Waal in his document called "U.S. War Crimes in Somalia". What did we do in Somalia? According to De Waal, the "humanitarian" intentions were a cover for occupation of Somalia by the United States under the "emerging doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ " by the United States. And in that effort, it's also clear, according to Waal, that American soldiers were not respectful of Somalis, and that's putting it mildly:

Waal reports...

When the Marines landed on Mogadishu beach on 9 December 1992, hopes were high that they would solve the problems of Somalia. But not only had they disappointed on that front—particularly on the issue of disarming the militiamen—but the behaviour of a large number of the troops was deplorable. Many countries had sent hardened paratroopers and other combat troops on a mission in which police training and civil engineering skills were needed. In many cases the operations quickly degenerated into routine brutality against Somali civilians.

Waal also presents the July 12, 1993 U.S attack on Somali Civilians and a death toll estimated at between 60 to 500 people, and which so upset the people there, that an angry crowd turned on, then killed, four journalists.

Waal's account of the U.S. in Somalia in 1993, and the 9-11 Commission Report are must read documents by all Americans. The one figure that's ties both together is Osama Bin Ladin.

Pastor Wright is correct: the Chickens that were hatched in Somalia did come home to roost. As a Black American, I'm used to foreign policy being discussed in the church. That this is shocking to some Americans makes me wonder just how much they know about their own United States.

If the "common American" doesn't know American Culture and is not aware of or interested in what the United States actually does around the World, then that person can be easily manipulated by powerful political forces, some of the same that caused the errors in Somalia in 1993 that eventually created the foundation for 9-11 in 2001.

Pastor Wright is right.

Frank Rich - Keith Olbermann - Bernie Kerik's Affair With Judith Regan | Could Wreck Rudy Giuliani's Presidential Campaign

This is shaping up to be a hot story. Frank Rich of the New York Times has a great discussion of the details-to-date below, and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has an equally informative video segment -- that too is here.

November 18, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
What 'That Regan Woman' Knows
By FRANK RICH



NEW Yorkers who remember Rudy Giuliani as the bullying New York mayor, not as the terminally cheerful "America's Mayor" cooing to babies in New Hampshire, have always banked on one certainty: his presidential candidacy was so preposterous it would implode before he got anywhere near the White House.

Surely, we reassured ourselves, the all-powerful Republican values enforcers were so highly principled that they would excommunicate him because of his liberal social views, three wives and estranged children. Or a firewall would be erected by the firefighters who are enraged by his self-aggrandizing rewrite of 9/11 history. Or Judith Giuliani, with her long-hidden first marriage and Louis Vuitton 'tude, would send red-state voters screaming into the night.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. But how quickly and stupidly we forgot about the other Judith in the Rudy orbit. That would be Judith Regan, who disappeared last December after she was unceremoniously fired from Rupert Murdoch's publishing house, HarperCollins. Last week Ms. Regan came roaring back into the fray , a silver bullet aimed squarely at the heart of the Giuliani campaign.



Ms. Regan filed a $100 million lawsuit against her former employer, claiming she was unjustly made a scapegoat for the O. J. Simpson "If I Did It" fiasco that (briefly) embarrassed Mr. Murdoch and his News Corporation. But for those of us not caught up in the Simpson circus, what's most riveting about the suit are two at best tangential sentences in its 70 pages: "In fact, a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani's presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik."



Kerik, of course, is Bernard Kerik, the former Giuliani chauffeur and police commissioner, as well as the candidate he pushed to be President Bush's short-lived nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security. Having pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors last year, Mr. Kerik was indicted on 16 other counts by a federal grand jury 10 days ago, just before Ms. Regan let loose with her lawsuit. Whether Ms. Regan's charge about that unnamed Murdoch "senior executive" is true
or not — her lawyers have yet to reveal the evidence — her overall message is plain. She knows a lot about Mr. Kerik, Mr. Giuliani and the Murdoch empire. And she could talk.

Boy, could she! As New Yorkers who have crossed her path or followed her in the tabloids know, Ms. Regan has an epic temper. My first encounter with her came more than a decade ago when she left me a record-breaking (in vitriol and decibel level) voice mail message about a column I'd written on one of her authors. It was a relief to encounter a more mellow Regan at a Midtown restaurant some years later. She cordially introduced me to her dinner companion, Mr. Kerik, whose post-9/11 autobiography, "The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice," was under contract at her HarperCollins imprint, ReganBooks.

What I didn't know then was that this married author and single editor were in pursuit of not just justice, but sex, too. Their love nest, we'd later learn, was an apartment adjacent to ground zero that had been initially set aside for rescue workers. Mr. Kerik believed his lover had every moral right to be there. As he tenderly explained in his acknowledgments in "The Lost Son" — published before the revelation of their relationship — there was "one hero who is missing" from his book's tribute to "courage and honor" and "her name is Judith Regan."

Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik. Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he talked only of the finer points of memoir writing or about his theories of crime prevention or about his ideas for training the police in the Muslim world (an assignment he later received in Iraq and botched). But it is also plausible that this couple discussed everything Mr. Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani's side before, during and after 9/11. Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously, that his city's $61 million emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.

Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor established after leaving office. Mr. Kerik worked at Giuliani
Partners and used its address as a mail drop for some $75,000 that turns up in the tax-fraud charges in his federal indictment. That money was Mr. Kerik's pay for an 11-sentence introduction to another Regan-published book about 9/11, "In the Line of Duty." Though that project's profits were otherwise donated to the families of dead rescue workers, Mr. Kerik's royalties were mailed to Giuliani Partners in the name of a corporate entity Mr. Kerik set up in Delaware. He would later claim that he made comparable donations to charity, but the federal indictment charges that $80,000 he took in charitable
deductions were bogus.

Amazingly, given that he seeks the highest office in the land, Mr. Giuliani will not reveal the clients of Giuliani Partners. Perhaps he has trouble remembering them all. He testified in court last year that he has no memory of a mayoral briefing in which he was told of Mr. Kerik's association with a company suspected of ties to organized crime.

Ms. Regan's knowledge of Mr. Giuliani isn't limited to whatever she learned from Mr. Kerik. She used to work for another longtime Giuliani pal, Roger Ailes, the media consultant for the first Giuliani campaign in 1989 and the impresario who created Fox News for Mr. Murdoch in 1996. A full-service mayor to his cronies, Mr. Giuliani lobbied hard to get the Fox News Channel on the city's cable boxes and presided over Mr. Ailes's wedding. Enter Ms. Regan, who was given her own program on Fox's early lineup. Mr. Ailes came up with its rather inspired first title, "That Regan Woman."

Who at the News Corporation supposedly asked Ms. Regan to lie to protect Rudy's secrets? Her complaint does not say. But thanks to the political journal The Hotline, we do know that as of the summer Mr. Giuliani had received more air time from Fox News than any other G.O.P. candidate, much of it on the high-rated "Hannity & Colmes." That show's co-host, Sean Hannity, appeared at a Giuliani campaign fund-raiser this year.

Fox News coverage of Ms. Regan's lawsuit last week was minimal. After all, Mr. Giuliani dismissed the whole episode as "a gossip column story," and we know Fox would never stoop so low as to trade in gossip. The coverage was scarcely more intense at The Wall Street Journal, whose print edition included no mention of the suit's reference to that "senior executive" at the News Corporation. (After bloggers noticed, the article was amended online.) The Journal is not quite yet a Murdoch property, but its editorial board has had its own show on Fox News since 2006.

During the 1990s, the Journal editorial board published so much dirt about the Clintons that it put the paper's brand on an encyclopedic six-volume anthology titled "A Journal Briefing — Whitewater." You'd think the controversies surrounding "America's Mayor" are at least as sexy as the carnal scandals and alleged drug deals The Journal investigated back then. This month a Journal reporter not on its editorial board added the government of Qatar to the small list of known Giuliani Partners clients, among them the manufacturer of OxyContin. We'll see if such journalism flourishes in the paper's Murdoch era.

But beyond New York's dailies and The Village Voice, the national news media, conspicuously the big three television networks, have rarely covered Mr. Giuliani much more aggressively than Mr. Murdoch's Fox News has. They are more likely to focus on Mr. Giuliani's checkered family history than the questions raised by his record in government and business. It's astounding how many are willing to look the other way while recycling those old 9/11 videos.

One exception is The Chicago Tribune, which last month on its front page revisited the story of how, after Mr. Giuliani left office, his mayoral papers were temporarily transferred to a private, tax-exempt foundation run by his supporters and financed with $1.5 million from mostly undisclosed donors. The foundation, which shares the same address as Giuliani Partners, copied and archived the records before sending them back to New York's municipal archives. Historians told
The Tribune there's no way to verify that the papers were returned to government custody intact. Mayor Bloomberg has since signed a law that will prevent this unprecedented deal from being repeated.

Journalists, like generals, love to refight the last war, so the unavailability of millions of Hillary Clinton's papers has received
all the coverage the Giuliani campaign has been spared. But while the release of those first lady records should indeed be accelerated, it's hard to imagine many more scandals will turn up after six volumes of "Whitewater," an impeachment trial and the avalanche of other investigative reportage on the Clintons then and now.

The Giuliani story, by contrast, is relatively virgin territory. And with the filing of a lawsuit by a vengeful eyewitness who was fired from her job, it may just have gained its own reincarnation of Linda Tripp.

Bill Maher Goes Off On 9-11 Conspiracy Theorist Hecklers

Part of me thinks Bill's jumping into the audience was to use YouTube to boost his show's ratings by generating buzz. He's got the buzz; let's see how the ratings do in the future.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bill Maher can add "security guard" to his job description alongside comedian and political commentator.
Maher helped security give the boot to a rowdy protester from the studio of his weekly HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, and it was all captured on live television.

Maher was talking science during one of his weekly panel discussions when a protester in his audience stood, held up a smuggled-in sign reading "9/11 is a cover up fraud" and shouted comments to the same effect.

The host tried to shout down the audience member, who only became more agitated.

"Do we have some (expletive) security in this building," Maher yelled, "or do I have to come down there and kick his (expletive)?"

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When security reached the man's aisle and he resisted leaving, Maher ran into the seats and helped them push him out the door, shouting "Out! Out! Out!"

Several other protesters, sprinkled throughout the audience, then stood up and shouted.

"This isn't the Iowa Caucus, OK, we're not here to debate," Maher shouted with most of his audience cheering him on. "This is the problem with live television."

The incident was shown live on the East Coast, and the network appeared to show the entire affair unedited for the taped-delayed West Coast version.

After the instigators were ejected, Maher told his panelists — MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson — that they often linger outside his studio to share 9/11 conspiracy theories with him and try to get into the show.

"It's the only time I defend Bush," he said.

"I'm thinking about firing my audience department," he added.

Regular audience members found the ruckus thrilling.

"We picked a very exciting night to be here," Eliot Stein, a 54-year-old high school teacher, said via cellphone. "There's few live TV shows anymore, and here you got to see, it was like a movie. it was great."

Stein's friend John Lovell said "It was positively surreal."

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and wife Elizabeth had been in the studio for an interview before the panel discussion and dustup.

Elizabeth Edwards was shown in the audience after her husband's interview, but it was not clear whether she remained in the seats during the incident.

Phone and e-mail messages left with HBO officials late Friday were not immediately returned.

Remembering 9-11 - WTC Ground Zero Tour | Bill Chachkes