The Hip Hop Anthropologist

It was a beautiful, warm and sunny, Wednesday afternoon on March 21st. I was traveling Eastbound in Jackson, Mississippi on I-20 at approximately seventy miles per hour in a tractor owned by my trucking company, Shipman Trucking & Transport, and a fully loaded trailer owned by Mystic Express. We were down a driver and I decided to go out myself. I have held a valid Class A commercial driver's license almost since the CDL Act of 1986 called for a single, federally administered commercial driver's license for all professional drivers; it was supposed to reduce fraud and increase accountability for bad drivers. The trip originated in North Brunswick, New Jersey with stop and a pickup in Chicago, Illinois, a delivery in Fort Worth, Texas and a backhaul in Tyler, Texas. I had just taken a nice, hot shower and eaten a small breakfast in Louisiana; routing myself to drive through Mississippi, Alabama - states I had never really spent any time in - before heading North back home....

On April 12th Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia) released a press statement critical of the Bush administration's actions in responding to 9-11. It raised serious concerns about the United States government's foreknowledge of the brutal terrorist attacks on both the World Trade Center in New York City as well as the Pentagon in Washington, DC. McKinney argued, "The need for an investigation of the events surrounding September 11[th] is as obvious as is the need for an investigation of the Enron debacle. The press release from McKinney's office further stated "news reports from Der Spiegal to the London Observer, from the Los Angeles Times to MSNBC to CNN, indicate that many warnings were received by the [US] Administration." There is considerable evidence that key players in the US intelligence as well as federal law enforcement community deliberately turned a deaf ear to persistent rumors that Mohammad Atta, who had been previously identified as a...