Carsten Wiethoff Wrote:Yesh M. Tembe


World Trade Center

Gadgets, Shrikhand, Brahms


Precision mattered to Yesh M. Tembe, an accountant working for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, and it showed in his fondness for high- tech gadgets. On the Saturday before the terror attacks, he showed his nephew Cyrus Meherji a new, blue cellular phone -- although despite their excitement, the two could not figure out how to activate the voice mail.

Mr. Tembe, 59, a classical music aficionado, also cooked, specializing in an Indian sweet called shrikhand, made with sour cream. It was popular with Mr. Meherji's children, who often came with their parents to visit Mr. Tembe and his wife, Coomi, in Piscataway, N.J. "They'd go for that," Mr. Meherji said.

The two men used to meet every few weeks for lunch downtown near Mr. Tembe's office in the World Trade Center. They would sample the cuisine of different restaurants, sometimes Thai, Greek, Turkish or Indian. "New York was the right place for him," Mr. Meherji said. "We liked everything."

Profile published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on November 15, 2001.

David Guyatt Wrote:Anti-Truthers and Troll-kind seem to avoid messing with Peter Dale Scott.

Quote:In early 1992, after the release of Oliver Stone's film JFK a media thundercloud erupted.

After early attacks in mainstream media like the Chicago Tribune and Washington Post, many other alternative media of both the left and right began to run articles on the film including outlets like "The Village Voice", for which Alexander Cockburn used to write. To the surprise of many, when some of these supposed leftist media organs did chime in, they savaged the film as wildly as the mainstream press did. These outlets were, specifically, The Progressive, Z magazine, and The Nation. The writers were, respectively, the late Erwin Knoll, Noam Chomsky, and Alexander Cockburn. Chomsky then wrote a book, Rethinking Camelot to specifically attack one of the main theses of JFK, namely that Kennedy had intended to withdraw from Vietnam by 1965.

But of the three, by far the most bitter and vicious polemics about the film were by Cockburn in three pieces in The Nation dated January 6/13, March 9, and May 18, 1992. The first piece was entitled "J.F.K. and JFK" in which he attacked not only the film, but the publishers of the book by Jim Garrison on which it was based, author Peter Dale Scott_who originated the Kennedy withdrawal thesis_and John Kennedy himself.

The next two issues cited were Cockburn's response to several of scores of letters The Nation received in response to the original article. Cockburns's response to the first group of letters was less than detached and academic. He said that Scott and author John Newman ("JFK and Vietnam" and an advisor on the film) suffered from "fantasies" and that Scott's letter was basically "silly" and showed "evidence of a rather pathetic persecution mania"(P. 319).