Word: wiring
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...great, cheeky stunt - and probably one that will remain unduplicable in our age of ever-tightening "security" (which mainly seems to secure us from having much fun). But was it - as press material accompanying James Marsh's documentary, Man on Wire, calls it - "the artistic crime of the century...
...want to discount the daring of Petit's feat (or feet). He was working a hell of a way up from the ground, with the winds whistling and the towers themselves swaying as he traversed the space between them. But no matter how high in the sky a wire is, the person walking it is not an artist. He or she is just a daredevil, trying to grab the gawkers' attention. Since you could probably get yourself killed falling from a wire 30 feet off the ground, additional height enhances the spectacle, but aside from the wind gusts, the risk...
...this not-so-merry band gathering their equipment, rehearsing Petit's act and sneaking into the WTC. But the tightrope walk is a letdown; the conspirator who had a movie camera up there on the roof forgot to turn it on. So the big climax - man on very high wire (or should we say dead man walking?) - is pretty thin stuff. This visual paucity reinforces the feeling that we're not looking at, say, Paul Valery's nephew up there on the wire. Petit is not making any kind of "statement." He's in the not entirely dishonorable tradition...
There is evidence, though, that some of the information Hamdan provided to his interrogators was extracted by coercion. According to Hamdan, the Northern Alliance soldiers hog-tied him with electrical wire, placed a hood over his head and turned him over to the Americans for a $5,000 bounty. At the U.S.'s Bagram air base, Hamdan was allegedly kept bound hand and foot 24 hours a day. During his early interrogations, he claimed that he was in Afghanistan working for a Muslim charity. But after another detainee identified him as bin Laden's driver, Hamdan confessed...
Preserving that world was probably on Jeffs' mind when he decided in 2003 to move a large portion of his flock to the scrublands of West Texas. He perhaps imagined that on 1,300 acres of dusty ranchland behind barbed-wire fences and iron gates, his community would enjoy the fabled live-and-let-live world of the American frontier. After all, this was a wide-open land where good neighbors were neighborly but not nosy, where a man could turn a page and start anew with few questions raised about his past. "They thought they were safe behind those...