Looking back on 9/11 [Archive] - It's Happening Forums

al-Canine

03-07-2005, 11:08 PM

Grants Offer Aid to 9/11 Survivors

$1 Million Intended To Help Ease Trauma

By Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Post Staff Writer

A Northern Virginia-based program that assists victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Pentagon has received nearly $1 million in grants to reach out to more people affected by the attack, including emergency workers who responded to the Pentagon that day.

Even though it has been more than three years since terrorists plunged American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, those affected by the crash still require assistance, said Stephanie Berkowitz, director of the Survivors' Fund Project. The fund was set up shortly after the Pentagon attack with $20 million in donations from the public.

Even now, many people need support, Berkowitz said. "Someone who can help link them with resources, help them build a support network, help them figure out what they need to get them through tomorrow, if not next year."

The focus of the Survivors' Fund, fund officials say, is on the long-term recovery of victims and their families -- rehabilitation, job retraining, counseling and other services. It was set up by the Community Foundation for the National Capital Area, which contracts with Northern Virginia Family Service, an Oakton-based social services agency, to provide social workers to work with the families.

Fund organizers say the recent grants to the Survivors' Fund -- $300,000 from the American Red Cross Liberty Fund and $625,000 from the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services -- will go toward helping more rescue workers and young people in families affected by the attacks, and to extending the fund's work when the money inevitably runs out.

For many survivors of a major traumatic event such as Sept. 11, as well as families of those killed or injured, the three- to five-year period after the event can be a "critical" stage, Berkowitz said. Recently, social workers with the fund have been seeing an increase in substance abuse, divorce and troubled families, she said.

Some who haven't sought help previously are "running out of steam," Berkowitz said. "Their [emotional] resources are dwindling. You can only cope with something so long, and then you have to deal with it."

A major focus of the grants is rescue workers -- the estimated 1,500 men and women who were the first to arrive on the scene. They often remained for days or weeks dousing flames, providing medical care and digging out bodies from the smoking ruins.

Trauma experts say that the tough-it-out culture of rescue work often prevents emergency workers from seeking psychological help.

So far, only 25 rescue workers have sought help from the Survivors' Fund, well below the rate recorded by the fund established to help victims of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The Sept. 11 fund was modeled on the $40 million Oklahoma City program.

With the grants, the fund plans to reach out to emergency workers with fliers, booklets and workshops, including a "peer guide" written by rescue workers for other rescue personnel. Social workers will visit area fire and police stations to distribute the materials, hold seminars and publicize the Survivors' Fund services, Berkowitz said.

Another focus is children, who may be facing trauma or guilt as they try to move on with their lives while still dealing with the loss or severe injury of a parent or loved one, Berkowitz said.

The fund is also preparing for the day when the money runs out. Part of the grant money will go toward setting up a network of victim support groups headed by a counselor to prepare for the day when the social workers are gone, Berkowitz said.

Since its beginning, the fund has paid out about $13 million for expenses -- medical bills, counseling, job training, school bills, housing payments and other costs -- incurred by 1,100 people in 505 families.

Fund organizers say they expect the money to last another two to four years.

The fund is open to individuals and families affected by the attack on the Pentagon, including those who lost loved ones in the attack, affected Pentagon employees, American Airlines employees directly affected by Flight 77 and emergency or rescue workers who responded to the scene.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9080-2005Mar5.html

al-Canine

03-13-2005, 09:48 PM

Coroner's staff faces life post 9/11

For 3 1/2 years, the city medical examiner's staff has lived in the grip of the World Trade Center dead.

They've studied the fragments of shattered bodies, catalogued the razors and toothbrushes of those who never returned home and told the harshest truths to thousands of grieving relatives.

But with the effort to identify 9/11 victims officially wrapping up, the 2,749 dead are finally releasing their grasp on dozens of investigators, doctors and scientists.

"It's like there's a huge rock off my shoulders," said Dr. Robert Shaler, the medical examiner's director of forensic biology. "I feel free. I feel free to be able to pursue everything else in my life."

Barbara Butcher, the medical examiner's director of investigation, said it feels strange to forsake a mission that reshaped the rhythms and meanings of the office.

"This is where the feelings begin to come out - when you stop," she said. "I wonder: How will my colleagues go on? How will they return to their ordinary jobs?"

The medical examiner's office threw itself into the task of cataloguing and identifying the dead from the moment the first plane struck the north tower of the trade center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Working what seemed like weeks without end at an incomparable task, some poured themselves into cataloguing and identifying the 19,916 parts of remains that would eventually reach the morgue.

Others sat down to write software that could match thousands of body parts against thousands of DNA samples brought in by victims' relatives, tracking where every item had come from and where it was stored.

And scientists started pushing the edges of DNA technology, pioneering new techniques to ID ever-smaller stretches of genetic material on fire-scarred remains.

For Shaler and many of his colleagues at the medical examiner's First Ave. building, the catastrophe turned a dispassionate, technical job into a personal quest.

"It became pretty clear that we had to talk to the families," said Shaler, who spent months explaining DNA to them, ordering that new work be done for them, even asking some to provide new samples of their DNA.

By the end, his lab had successfully pulled DNA profiles from some remains that didn't match any of the samples on file - in some cases because heartbroken relatives wouldn't provide DNA samples for testing.

"There were some families that didn't want to be notified. Ever," Shaler said.

Last month the medical examiner's office conceded reality and said it was indefinitely suspending the ID effort until new DNA technology allows it to return to the task someday.

The staff had identified 58% of the 2,749 victims - including 844 by DNA alone. Doing so has cost $80 million, with perhaps another $20 million in bills still due.

The end of the effort means the medical examiner's office will reassign staffers to other tasks.

And it means workers can no longer cloak their emotions in a heavy curtain of work.

"Things will never be the same," Butcher said. "I have no excuse to be sad anymore."

http://www.nydailynews.com/03-13-2005/news/local/story/289396p-247751c.html

al-Canine

03-13-2005, 09:54 PM

9/11 CASTS SHADOW ON SENIORS AT ELITE STUYVESANT HIGH SCHOOL

Annie Deng had barely memorized her class schedule at Stuyvesant High School when the shadow of the collapsing twin towers darkened her biology room.

The shy freshman - only five days into her tenure at the elite lower Manhattan school - was sure the world was coming to an end.

Nearly four years later, the 17-year-old and her graduating classmates feel like they've healed since the World Trade Center attack.

But traces of 9/11 remain.

"We don't talk about it anymore, but it's always there," said Annie, whose jaw still trembles slightly as she recalls how the ground rumbled when the twin towers fell.

Compared with previous classes at the topnotch school, the Class of 2005 has shown signs of struggling.

Their grades have wavered, college acceptances are coming in slowly and some prestigious awards have passed them by, according to interviews with students and parents.

"It was like, 'What's wrong with us?'" Annie said. "We were getting an inferiority complex."

As a precaution, Stuyvesant officials mailed a letter to college admissions officers to remind recruiters that most of the 790 seniors had witnessed the terror attacks.

"It wasn't an apology," said Karen Mooney, chairwoman of the parents association's college committee.

Teachers felt it was necessary to send the letter after noticing that the sophomore-year grades of many students were subpar, Mooney explained. She described the letter as saying, "For good or ill, these kids have an experience you should consider."

Stung by contest snub

Last month, Stuyvesant seniors suffered a devastating blow when none of them was selected as a finalist for the renowned Intel Science Talent Search. It was the first time the school had been shut out in 15 years.

Word of the snub spread as seniors were reeling from the news that most of them had not been accepted early to several elite universities, students said.

Harvard University, for example, admitted only four out of 41 students who applied early, down from roughly 15 last year, students said.

"It was very much like we are in this together," said Jennie Goldstein, a senior from the upper West Side. "How dare they do that to us? We are Stuyvesant students."

Teachers and administrators told the students not to take the deferrals personally, pointing to a national reduction in the number of early acceptances. Still, some wonder.

"There were a lot of disappointments with the early admissions results," Mooney said.

Stuyvesant Principal Stanley Teitel said it was too early to definitively determine if the Class of 2005 has performed differently from previous ones. "We'll have final results of the college admissions process this spring," he said.

In a subsequent statement, he said: "Based on classroom observations, students' work and feedback from teachers, it is our sense that Stuyvesant High School students continue to perform at the same high level that they always have."

What has long been clear, according to teachers, is 9/11 made the students more thoughtful, politically active and civic-minded than previous classes. The teens created a Diversity Week and invited speakers to discuss Islam.

Shams Billah, a senior from Queens who heads the Muslim Student Association, said 9/11 gave him a responsibility to spread understanding about his religion. "We do lots of events to show the peaceful side of Islam, the side I grew up with," the 18-year-old said.

Parents notice slump

Concern over the well-being of the students began almost immediately after the attacks.

When they returned to Stuyvesant a month after the towers' destruction, many parents protested because of questionable air quality around Ground Zero. Their commitment to keep the school accountable has never wavered.

Some parents told the Daily News that they noticed their typically overachieving children were bringing home mediocre grades in the months after the attacks and signed them up for private counseling and tutoring.

Other parents said that two years ago the federal government completed a voluntary, informal study of the class, which found that many class members had symptoms of posttraumatic stress syndrome.

"It's not surprising that having a major stressor in their four years would knock them out of the top slot," said George Bonanno, a trauma specialist at Columbia University, who was not involved in the study. "It's like the Olympic sprinter that steps on a pebble and loses the race by a millisecond."

Despite all the concerns, many students insisted they are well-adjusted and excelling.

"Some students say images of Sept. 11 keep coming back, but for a lot of us, it's important to move on," said Lusana Ahsan, 17. "We all feel united because we went through this experience together."

Avery Singer, 17, of Tribeca, just completed a slide show that included closeup photographs of 33 seniors. "Their stories are all in their faces," she said.

While reluctant to talk about what she witnessed on 9/11, Avery said it made her more interested in politics.

"It might take years for us to understand what we saw," she said.

http://www.nydailynews.com/03-07-2005/news/story/287447p-246116c.html

al-Canine

03-20-2005, 02:09 PM

Global Word to Terrorists: You Killed My Beloved

By GLENN COLLINS

They are still aggrieved. And they are not going away.

The families of the victims of the 2001 terror attacks have been a powerful force in Washington and New York. Their vocal persistence and moral suasion forced the White House to accept an independent investigation on the attacks of Sept. 11, and they doggedly monitored the subsequent hearings. Then, they helped overcome White House reluctance to appoint a national director of intelligence.

In Manhattan and Albany, the families have been important in shaping plans for a World Trade Center memorial and in preserving remnants of the site that were fated to be buried under a basement garage.

But now the families are taking on their newest and possibly most daunting challenge: to make common cause with thousands of other international victims, not only to foster mutual support, but also to discredit global terrorism itself.

Some have already proffered aid and expertise to victims' groups from other countries. Others believe that by doggedly continuing to tell their heartbreaking stories of pain and remembrance, they can put a human face on those who have died.

In this way, they say, they hope to challenge terrorists' attempts to stereotype victims as infidels, capitalist tools or ciphers lacking humanity.

Ultimately some of the families hope that in bringing their high-powered advocacy to a new level, they may make it more embarrassing, or even impossible, to romanticize or legitimize terrorist acts.

"It would be the height of arrogance for the 9/11 families to think that our experience is so unique that it isn't connected to victims beyond our borders," said Thomas Rogér, one of the founders of Families of September 11, whose daughter Jean was a flight attendant on the hijacked plane that hit the north tower.

Mr. Rogér said his group was interested in working with foreign victims of terrorism not only to provide assistance but also "to support international initiatives which can slow down or stop the spread of terrorism."

Robert McIlvaine, whose son Robert was killed in the north tower, said he hoped for "a link to other countries and other stories, so that ours can become an overwhelming voice."

He added, "Telling our stories gives the victims dignity, and helps make real the pain of the survivors."

The family members are not unmindful of their past effectiveness. "We have been given a special voice by virtue of the people who died," said Bruce Wallace, whose nephew, Mitch Wallace, a court officer, was killed in the collapse of the north tower. "None of the congressmen or senators would let us into their offices if there weren't dead people marching beside us. So we feel some responsibility for using that voice to change this world."

And so, some victims even hope they might be Paul Reveres to the world.

"Telling people what happened to us helps them realize that it can happen again," said Tony Rose, a retired United States Army sergeant major who was wounded when Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. "I think we'll be saying, 'You could be next.' "

In Bogotá, Colombia, last month, four members of Sept. 11 families' organizations - as well as Mr. Rose and two representatives of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing victims' groups - spoke openly about their losses at a conference attended by those who experienced terrorist attacks in Colombia, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Northern Ireland, Chile, Argentina and Beslan, Russia.

Many at the gathering of 1,500 people, the second International Congress on Victims of Terrorism, had been maimed in attacks, and dozens walked with the assistance of crutches or canes. Some, blinded by bombs or land mines, attended with their guide dogs.

The scope of terrorism in Colombia alone "really knocked me back," said Mr. Wallace, a science teacher at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn.

The Colombian president, Álvaro Uribe-Vélez, who addressed the conference, estimated that 20,000 of his citizens a year are killed in terrorist attacks or kidnappings. "That amounts to six times the number of people we lost on Sept. 11th every year," Mr. Wallace said.

Mr. McIlvaine, who attended the conference as a member of Sept. 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, said: "I feel badly about losing my son. But here I was talking to a severely burned mother who lost her three sons, and I thought, what am I complaining about?"

The dozens of sometimes fractious Sept. 11 groups are disparate in their politics - some opposing, some favoring the Iraq war - but, Mr. Wallace said, "There is a bond between us that is beyond politics."

Many are opening global connections to other victims. Mr. McIlvaine said his family group hoped to organize an international victims' conference in the United States in the next year. Mr. Wallace, part of the same group, said the organization has reached out to a Northern Ireland group, Families Acting for Innocent Relatives, and has started a dialogue with the terrorism victims' group in Colombia, "and we are asking them, very simply, 'How do you think we can help you?' "

At the Bogotá conference, Mr. Rogér had discussions with the former prime minister of Spain, José María Aznar, about "moving from the national scale to the international scale," Mr. Rogér said. Another organization, the World Trade Center United Family Group, has corresponded with victims of the March 11, 2004, train bombing in Madrid.

There is evidence that monetary settlements for the victims' families are being used to fuel some of the groups' international efforts. For example, the United Family Group and an allied organization, the Coalition of 9/11 Families, made contributions following the Asian tsunami.

"We reached out to our families, and so far we've raised $142,000 for a hospital in Sri Lanka," said Anthony Gardner, executive director of the United Family group, whose brother, Harvey Joseph Gardner III, died in the north tower on Sept. 11.

Some in victims' groups said they hoped that they could help stop what they see as the news media's fascination with terrorists, who, they charged, are rewarded with attention for their attacks.

Arnold Roth, whose 15-year-old daughter, Malki, died in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, said he was appalled when television news producers wanted to pair him in interviews with the father of the bomber who killed his daughter.

"It is an entirely bogus comparison, creating a false symmetry between the person who did the killing and the victim," he said. "It betrays a factual and moral confusion in the media that leads to the dehumanization of the victims."

But in moving into a grander arena, the families are inevitably confronting issues involving the political use of victims and the debate over the role of state terrorism.

At the conference, Juan Pablo Letelier, whose father, Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean foreign minister, was killed by a bomb in Washington in 1976, set by Chile's military dictatorship, denounced his father's death as a "case of state terrorism" where "the victims were called terrorists."

Certainly the American academic who was most in disfavor at the Bogotá conference was one who was not invited to attend: Prof. Ward L. Churchill of the University of Colorado at Boulder, whose essay about the 2001 terrorist attacks said that the "technocrats" in the twin towers were "little Eichmanns," referring to the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann.

His response to 9/11 families' criticism is perhaps a harbinger of the opposition they may face as they move into the international arena.

"Sept. 11th was a natural and inevitable response to what the U.S. is doing in the world," Professor Churchill said.

"I do not see theirs as an effective strategy," he said of the victims' groups. "What they are doing is self-indulgent. They focus on the incredible value of 3,000 Americans while ignoring this mountain of corpses elsewhere. The United States has no right to bomb innocent populations."

Furthermore, Professor Churchill said, there "are mitigating circumstances" for terrorism. "People can be driven mad by what is done to them," he said.

But Kenneth Thompson, whose mother, Virginia, was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, said that terrorists do not have the patience to work for democratic change or the courage to fight under arms, attacking only unarmed, unsuspecting people, for which "there is no excuse."

Donald R. Hamilton, vice president of the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City, added, "Gandhi and Martin Luther King proved that you can have a successful revolution without attacking the innocent."

William Frazer, director of the Northern Ireland group, said that "there is no good terrorism or bad terrorism," adding: "The activity itself must be labeled despicable. It is only about death."

Victims at the conference gave an abundance of testimony on this point, and the organizers' Web site, www.usergioarboleda.edu.co /congresovictimas, carries the text of its manifesto condemning global terrorism.

Dozens of Colombians described killings and woundings by the country's narco-terrorists, paramilitary groups and bandits. And Colombian journalists described how their colleagues had been assaulted.

The 9/11 family members acknowledge that they are in for a long struggle. "For the rest of my life," Mr. McIlvaine said, "I would like to give a voice and a face to the victims from the United States - and from everywhere."

Copyright 2005*The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/nyregion/20families.html

al-Canine

03-25-2005, 10:16 AM

Judge Tells City to Release Much of 9/11 Oral History

By MICHAEL COOPER

ALBANY, March 24 - The state's highest court ruled on Thursday that the Bloomberg administration must release the New York City Fire Department's oral history of the Sept. 11 attack, but said the city could withhold portions that would cause "serious pain or embarrassment" to the fire officials interviewed.

The ruling, by the Court of Appeals, came in response to a lawsuit brought by The New York Times seeking the release of the Fire Department's thousands of pages of oral history of the attack and the unedited tapes and transcripts of emergency calls made to 911 and radio dispatches that day, under the state's Freedom of Information Law.

While the court ordered the release of the oral history - interviews with more than 500 employees about the city's response to the attack - it allowed the city to sharply edit the tapes and transcripts of 911 calls.

And it ruled that only factual statements or instructions affecting the public should be released from the city's dispatch tapes, because any opinions or recommendations made on the tapes are kinds of "intra-agency" communications that do not have to be disclosed under the law.

The court ruled 4 to 3 that in order to protect the privacy of people who called 911 on Sept. 11, or their families, the city could edit the tapes and transcripts of the calls, removing the words of the callers but keeping the words of the operators.

"The grieving family of such a caller - or the caller, if he or she survived - might reasonably be deeply offended at the idea that these words could be heard on television or read in The New York Times," Judge Robert S. Smith wrote for the majority, going on to say that the ruling applies only to the Sept. 11 attack, which was exceptional.

In a dissent, Judge Albert M. Rosenblatt wrote that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in calls to 911, and warned that in some cases, the release of edited 911 tapes could be "incoherent or even misleading."

David E. McCraw, a lawyer for The Times, said he considered the ruling a victory, especially because fire officials initially said the newspaper was not entitled to any of the materials when the case began.

Michael A. Cardozo, the city's corporation counsel, said in a statement, "We are pleased that the court has recognized the importance of maintaining the confidentiality of the intensely emotional statements made by persons who were calling for help under the most tragic circumstances imaginable."

No evidence was presented from relatives who objected to the release of the tapes, and the Times's lawsuit was joined by the relatives of eight victims of the attacks who wanted the information released. The court said those eight families, and others, if they ask, will be able to hear the 911 calls their relatives made.

Norman Siegel, a lawyer for the relatives of the eight victims, said he would alert the relatives of other victims of their right to hear the materials.

Copyright 2005*The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/nyregion/25tapes.html?

el_diablo

03-25-2005, 10:36 AM

this isn't necessarily a news item, but it was a column that appeared in the Miami Herald on 9/12/01.

We'll Go Forward from this Moment
by Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald

It's my job to have something to say. They pay me to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul. But in this moment of airless shock when hot tears sting disbelieving eyes, the only thing I can find to say, the only words that seem to fit, must be addressed to the unknown author of this suffering.

You monster. You beast. You unspeakable coward.

What lesson did you hope to teach us by your coward's attack on our World Trade Center, our Pentagon, us? What was it you hoped we would learn?

Whatever it was, please know that you failed.

Did you want us to respect your cause? You just damned your cause.

Did you want to make us fear? You just steeled our resolve.

Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together.

Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless.

We're frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae -- a singer's revealing dress, a ball team's misfortune, a cartoon mouse. We're wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods, and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement. We are fundamentally decent, though -- peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are, the overwhelming majority of us, people of faith, believers in a just and loving God.

Some people -- you, perhaps -- think that any or all of this makes us weak. You're mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.

Yes, we're in pain now. We are in mourning and we are in shock. We're still grappling with the unreality of the awful thing you did, still working to make ourselves understand that this isn't a special effect from some Hollywood blockbuster, isn't the plot development from a Tom Clancy novel.

Both in terms of the awful scope of their ambition and the probable final death toll, your attacks are likely to go down as the worst acts of Terrorism in the history of the United States and, probably, the history of the world. You've bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before.

But there's a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall.

This is the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain. When roused, we are righteous in our outrage,terrible in our force.

When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length, in the pursuit of justice.

I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people, as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.

In the days to come, there will be recrimination and accusation, fingers pointing to determine whose failure allowed this to happen and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. There will be heightened security, misguided talk of revoking basic freedoms. We'll go forward from this moment sobered, chastened, sad. But determined, too. Unimaginably determined.

You see, the steel in us is not always readily apparent. That aspect of our character is seldom understood by people who don't know us well. On this day, the family's bickering is put on hold.

As Americans we will weep, as Americans we will mourn, and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.

So I ask again: What was it you hoped to teach us? It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that's the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange:

You don't know my people. You don't know what we're capable of. You don't know what you just started.

But you're about to learn.

Alli

03-25-2005, 10:38 AM

Wow, very touching article!

al-Canine

04-05-2005, 09:46 AM

Sources: Probe to fault 9/11 evacuation

Findings on Trade Center collapse expected Tuesday

The Associated Press
Updated: 4:50 a.m. ET April 5, 2005

WASHINGTON - Investigators have concluded that new thinking is needed on how to evacuate people from endangered skyscrapers and how to get rescuers into them more quickly, according to two individuals familiar with a federal report on the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

Engineers were to issue three reports Tuesday in New York analyzing the Sept. 11, 2001, twin tower collapses and the response by rescue workers and building occupants.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology also will detail how early decisions played a key role in determining who lived and who died. The attacks killed some 2,749 at the towers, including those who died on the two jetliners that hijackers crashed into the buildings.

The findings represent NIST’s last step before issuing its final recommendations in June, the culmination of exhaustive research and testing that produced 10,000 pages of data.

Closing the book on collapse

The centerpiece of Tuesday’s findings will be the engineers’ final conclusions about to the exact sequence of each tower’s collapse.

The probe was ordered more than two years ago by Congress to answer lingering questions about the unique design of the World Trade Center buildings, the quality of the buildings’ steel, and the ability of the floors and fireproofing to keep them upright.

NIST has already issued preliminary findings that there were no significant problems with the steel.

The two collapses, though different in each building, resulted largely from the way each plane’s impact stripped away fireproofing, dislodged key columns, and ignited tons of office material that burned long after the jet fuel had burned away, NIST has concluded.

David Collins, a member of the advisory committee that offered suggestions and questions to NIST investigators, said the research showed design and construction of the building were not major contributors to the collapse.

“I think everyone took deliberate steps to try to do what was necessary to make the buildings as safe as possible,” said Collins, a Cincinnati-based architect.

Evacuation models wrong, sources say

The other findings — about the emergency response and the behavior of those who were in the building — are likely to fuel an ongoing debate over skyscraper safety.

Investigators have determined that previous expectations about how long people would take to evacuate buildings were not borne out by events at the World Trade Center, according to two individuals who worked on the study and have seen the latest drafts of the reports. They spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity before publication of the data.

The pair who discussed the findings would not specify how much of a time difference the investigators found between evacuation predictions and the actual behavior at the World Trade Center but said the discrepancy often stemmed from individuals’ lingering in offices before going to stairwells. That behavior that had not been contemplated in previous models.

The evacuation models are important because architects use them to calculate the capacity needed in stairwells, elevators, and other means of exiting a building.

Rescuers hampered by buildings' height
The report also emphasizes the limited ability of rescue personnel to reach higher floors quickly to battle fires and rescue trapped civilians, the two individuals said.

That proved critical for firefighters who climbed 70 flights of stairs carrying up to 100 pounds of gear — and then tried to battle flames or clear debris once there.

Those concerns are spurring a debate both within the NIST group and among the larger fire rescue and construction fields about stairwell and elevator design.

The debate centers around whether “fireproof” elevators, designed to resist flames and smoke, should be installed in new buildings, particularly those that rise above 40 or 50 stories, and the best width and location of stairwells.

Elevators played a critical, but contradictory, role. In some cases, they helped significant numbers of people get out quickly. For others, they became sealed containers trapping them inside a doomed building.

NIST’s ultimate goal is to improve building codes.

© 2005 The Associated Press.

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7389862/

al-Canine

04-05-2005, 04:57 PM

Report on Trade Center Collapses Emphasizes Damage to Fireproofing

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

The World Trade Center towers may have remained standing even after they were struck by aircraft if the impact had not dislodged fireproofing and if office furniture had not extended the life of the fires sparked by the jet fuel, a federal report released today concluded.

The report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology said its findings support the fact that the World Trade Center towers withstood the initial aircraft impact and "that they would have continued to remain standing indefinitely, but for another significant event such as the subsequent fires."

The agency was charged by Congress two years ago with investigating various aspects of the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 1, 2001, including evacuation and rescue procedures, the quality of the buildings' steel, and how and why the buildings collapsed.

The group did not issue recommendations in its report today. It is scheduled to release the draft of its final report in June, followed by a final report with recommendations in September. The investigation has produced more than 10,000 pages of data, according to the agency.

The conclusions are in line with previous analysis that cited the intense heat of up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit as a central reason for the collapse - heat that would have been tempered if the fireproofing had not been stripped. But the report also said that while the architects of the towers had tested the impact of a Boeing 707 passenger jetliner crashing into the 80th floor of one of the buildings in 1964, they never envisioned the intense fires that engulfed the towers after the planes struck them.

The analysis released today concluded that there were about 8,900 people in the first World Trade Center tower and about 8,500 in the second tower. About 87 percent of the people were able to evacuate safely. The report found that of the approximately 2,567 victims, "20% or more ... may have been alive in the buildings just prior to their collapse."

Because only two of 198 elevators were working inside the towers after the jarring impact of the jet liners, those who had the best chance of safely evacuating from the floors not directly impacted were able to leave their offices relatively quickly, to find stairwells, and were in good enough physical shape to exit without resting between floors.

The report also found that the World Trade Center's high rise communication repeater was working properly, a finding that contradicts claims by some rescue workers.

The analysis found that while the impact of the planes destroyed and weakened the buildings' support columns, damaged water supply systems and dislodged fireproofing, the towers would have remained standing had it not been for the fires that weakened their support steel.

The report concluded that most of the fire damage was not caused directly by dispersed jet fuel from the aircraft, but by combustible office furniture inside the buildings.

"The jet fuel, which ignited the fires, was mostly consumed within the first few minutes after impact," the report stated. "The fires that burned for almost the entire time that the buildings remained standing were due mainly to burning building contents and, to a lesser extent, aircraft contents, not jet fuel."

The fires further weakened the support beams that caused floors to buckle and the buildings to list to the side. Without adequate fireproofing, the towers had little chance of surviving, the report found.

"The buildings would likely not have collapsed under the combined effects of aircraft impact and the subsequent jet fuel ignited multi-floor fires, if the fireproofing had not been dislodged or had been only minimally dislodged by aircraft impact," the report said.

Copyright 2005*The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/nyregion/05cnd-wtc.html?

Mike_001

04-05-2005, 04:58 PM

" [B]They told me one-step check-in,”

lol what a dumbfuck, couldn't even keep his mouth shut for a minute.

al-Canine

04-06-2005, 01:23 PM

Staircases in Twin Towers Are Faulted

By JIM DWYER

The staircases in the twin towers - their number, location, and the weak walls around them - emerged as critical factors in the deaths of many of those killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, according to a federal safety report released yesterday. The findings will be used to shape federal recommendations for building-code changes across the country.

And after more than two years of intensive research, investigators uncovered what they said was an elementary shortcoming in the trade center towers: neither building had enough staircases to meet any of the major building codes in the country, including New York City's.

For nearly every man and woman on the upper floors of the towers, the lack of intact staircases meant that they could not get out after the planes struck. Clustered in the centers of the buildings, those staircases were encased in lightweight drywall that was immediately destroyed. Sturdier walls around staircases that were remote from each other "might have provided greater opportunities for escape," said the lead investigator, Shyam Sunder.

In a sobering lesson drawn from one of the day's great successes - the escape of nearly everyone below the points of impact, about 14,000 people - the report said that it had taken about twice as long to go down a single flight of stairs as had been projected by the current engineering standards for tall buildings. The buildings were only half full, investigators said, and if the attack had come at a time when they were filled to occupancy, the evacuation would not have been successful. Thousands more people were likely to have been trapped on the stairs, Mr. Sunder said.

The report, issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, also formally confirmed what had long been identified as a significant failure on that day: the leaders of New York's Police and Fire Departments did not coordinate their efforts that morning. The investigation suggested that many of the rescuers died because they simply did not know what was happening around them.

"A preponderance of evidence indicates that a lack of timely information sharing and inadequate communications capabilities likely contributed to the loss of emergency responder lives," the report stated. It cited an interview with an unnamed firefighter who told the investigators, "If communications were better, more firefighters would have lived."

The findings were included in a draft final report from the institute, a branch of the United States Commerce Department that was given authority by Congress in 2002 to investigate the towers' collapse, the evacuation and the emergency response.

The findings total some 10,000 pages, of which 3,400 were made public yesterday. The remainder will be released later in the spring, according to Mr. Sunder. The institute will make recommendations on improvements in the areas it studied.

Building-code changes are decided by local governments, generally using model codes developed by technical experts who work with the insurance and real estate industries.

In a presentation yesterday at a Times Square hotel, Mr. Sunder outlined the techniques used to project the sequence of events that led to the collapse of each tower. Although each building was hit by virtually identical planes, the south tower collapsed in 56 minutes and the north tower in 102 minutes.

A combination of common factors shaped the course of events, he said. The planes plunged through the exterior curtain of each building and fragmented as they passed through the building, with parts emerging on the other side. The impacts killed hundreds of people instantly. In the north tower, American Airlines Flight 11, moving at 443 miles per hour, took .685 seconds to pass through the building; in the south tower, United Airlines 175, hitting at 542 miles per hour, passed through in .58 seconds.

The impact changed tower structures in two critical ways, Mr. Sunder said. First, of the 47 columns in the core of each building, 9 were either severed or badly damaged in the north tower, and 11 in the south tower. Second, the impact dislodged the fireproofing that was sprayed on the floors and the columns. As the fires ignited by the jet fuel burned, the floors were weakened.

The floors played an important role in the structures, because they connected the exterior supports - the pinstripe columns that gave the towers their distinctive appearance - to the columns hidden in the cores of the buildings. As the unprotected floors were weakened by fire, the exterior columns bowed inwards, the investigators reported. In the north tower, a photograph showed they had moved 55 inches off center a few minutes before the collapse; in the south tower, they were 20 inches off center. As those columns became unstable, the building load shifted, but the instability was too great and the cascade of collapse began.

Much of the jet fuel burned outside the buildings in a fireball, but enough remained inside to ignite the office furnishings and building contents.

In its early phases, the investigation by the institute raised serious questions about the adequacy of the original fireproofing applied to the steel in the towers, and Mr. Sunder said those concerns remained. But, he said, in the areas where the fires were most severe, the amount of fireproofing that originally had been applied was "moot" because whatever had been there was knocked off by the planes.

Hundreds of people were trapped above the impact, on floors where there was no immediate damage. This made escape routes an important part of the agency's study.

During the design of the trade center, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had decided to use a new version of the city building code that did not require as many staircases as the earlier edition. Instead of six staircases, including a specially reinforced fire escape, the trade center had three stairs in each tower. The investigators determined, though, that even the liberalized code required a fourth staircase, to accommodate the more than 1,000 people expected in the restaurant at the top of the north tower and at the observation deck atop the south tower.

As an interstate agency, the Port Authority is not bound by local building codes, but it had publicly pledged to "meet or exceed" the city code in building the trade center. However, the institute investigators determined that the Port Authority had not supplied enough staircases.

"Once you go over 1,000 people on a floor, you need to have a fourth stairway," said Richard W. Bukowski, a senior engineer with the institute. A spokesman for the Port Authority said its engineers believe that the findings are mistaken. New York City building officials who reviewed the trade center plans, both in the 1960's and after the 1993 terrorist bombing, had not raised any questions about the missing staircase.

Glenn Corbett, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an adviser to the institute investigation, said he had asked about the exits for the restaurant and the observation deck. "Imagine what a staircase in the right spot might have done for people that day," Mr. Corbett said.

One of the documents included in yesterday's report showed that the Port Authority was eager to cut down on the amount of space devoted to stairs.

"The tower core should be redesigned to eliminate the fire towers and to take advantage of the more lenient provisions regarding exit stairs," wrote Malcolm P. Levy, the Port Authority's chief planning engineer, who is now deceased.

In the impact area of the north tower, the three staircases were about 70 feet apart and were destroyed immediately.

In the south tower, the plane hit on floors where the three staircases were about 200 feet apart, and one of them survived at least partially intact.

Copyright 2005*The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/06/nyregion/06collapse.html?

al-Canine

04-20-2005, 10:27 AM

How to Make a Movie About 9/11? Carefully

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

LOS ANGELES, April 19 - Appropriately enough, the first in an expected wave of movies and television projects explicitly about the trauma of 9/11 will make its debut in New York on Friday at the TriBeCa Film Festival, which itself was started to bring a measure of financial and psychic relief to Lower Manhattan months after the attacks.

But the new picture, "The Great New Wonderful," is anything but explicit.

Crashing jets, falling towers, Islamic terrorists and fleeing workers are nowhere to be seen. Instead the inexpensively made movie, which stars Maggie Gyllenhaal, Tony Shalhoub and Olympia Dukakis, zeroes in on a handful of New Yorkers a year after the attacks as they struggle to cope with emotions - grief, rage, helplessness - that seem inexplicable, and that have no obvious outlet.

The director, Danny Leiner - known for the stoner movies "Dude, Where's My Car?" and "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" - says he set out not to make a film about 9/11, but to show he had more up his sleeve than broad comedy.

A Brooklyn native, he says he also wanted to make a film in his hometown. And when Mr. Leiner began putting together a script about angst-ridden New Yorkers with the playwright and actor Sam Catlin in the spring of 2002, "9/11 was just there," he said. "It was around us. And it was hard to think of New York without bringing that into the mix."

Close behind "The Great New Wonderful" - an independent production that does not yet have a commercial release date - Hollywood producers are pursuing several sweeping projects that seek to harness directly the full dramatic potential of the cataclysmic 9/11 story: its antecedents and causes, its horrors and its aftermath.

NBC and ABC are locked in a footrace to produce the first mini-series based on the Sept. 11 commission's report. Columbia Pictures has optioned "102 Minutes," the account of the struggle for survival inside the World Trade Center by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, reporters for The New York Times. Universal Pictures is developing a screenplay about the last two Port Authority police officers pulled from ground zero alive. And the producer Scott Rudin has hired a screenwriter to adapt Jonathan Safran Foer's novel "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," told from the point of view of a precocious 9-year-old whose father was killed in the attacks.

In nearly every case, the producers and others involved say that though they are tripping over one another to be first into production, they are taking plenty of time to grapple with unusually difficult questions about timing, taste and tone:

Are Americans ready yet to watch, let alone pay to watch, a re-enactment of some of the most searing events in their lives? When will enough time have passed? How do you make use of the stories of the victims and survivors without being seen as exploiting them?

Then there is perhaps the most basic creative dilemma: Do you show the airplanes crashing into the twin towers? On this, there is unanimous reluctance.

"It's too much," said Stacy Sher, a producer of the Universal project. "We're not ready for that yet."

"Ultimately, that's probably a decision that doesn't get made till the last second," said David Nevins, president of Imagine Television and executive producer of NBC's 9/11 mini-series.

"The plan is to never show the planes hitting the building," said Michael De Luca, a producer of "102 Minutes."

Mr. De Luca, who said his project was probably years away from being made, said it would be confined, as was the book, to the stories of people inside the World Trade Center in the minutes before and the hours after the attacks. (The New York Times, as a partner in Times Books, retains a quarter-interest in the screen rights to the book.)

"My courage has never been tested like that," Mr. De Luca said. "It may never be, but I read that book and thought, God, I hope that if I'm ever faced with anything like that, I'd have the courage of those people. Those are ordinary people, not people trained to exhibit grace in the face of extraordinary disaster."

At Universal, Ms. Sher and her partner, Michael Shamberg, the team behind "Erin Brockovich" and many other films, are making a more narrowly focused 9/11 story that they describe as a fairly conventional rescue film. "Think 'Saving Private Ryan' and 'Apollo 13,' " Mr. Shamberg said. The story is about five police officers, two of whom were killed instantly when the south tower collapsed while a third died because he would not abandon his colleagues; the survivors endured fireballs and worse until a volunteer rescue worker heard one of them banging his handcuffs on a pipe.

Like Mr. De Luca, Mr. Shamberg said his film would be scrupulously accurate. "We learned on 'Erin Brockovich' that what you make up is never as good as what happened in real life," he said. "We're aiming very high: that we can tell a true story that moves people, and that entertains people."

Ms. Sher said that when she and Mr. Shamberg acquired the rights to the stories of the survivors, Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, "we weren't sure that anybody was ever going to be ready" for a movie about the 9/11 attacks.

Among the television networks, meanwhile, both ABC and NBC are pursuing mini-series based on the 9/11 commission's exhaustive report, in hopes of getting on the air in the next 18 months. Both insist they will steer clear of a political point of view - "We're trying to be as objective as one can in a medium that is by definition subjective," said Marc Platt, executive producer of the ABC project - while still aspiring to have an impact on everything from attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims to domestic security and emergency preparedness.

Brian Grazer, co-chairman of Imagine Television, which is producing the NBC mini-series - and which has hired The Times as a consultant - said he hoped it would do for Muslims what Wolfgang Petersen's film "Das Boot" did for World War II-era Germans.

"Every approach prior to that was, the Germans were horrible," he said. "He humanized them, because they are human. That's what I'm hoping we do, that we don't demonize, that we humanize all the different sides, and so we see the seeds, and we get an understanding from each culture's point of view as to how they got to such a horrible place."

Asked if even four or five years later was too soon for a cinematic treatment of 9/11, Quinn Taylor, ABC's senior vice president in charge of television movies, said: "The way the government had to react, the way we all had to quickly come to terms with what Al Qaeda meant, how to say it much less how to spell it - that was a tremendous education we all had to go through together. There is distance now to look back at that, and maybe we can channel those emotions into effecting change."

Indeed, Sally Regenhard, an outspoken advocate for skyscraper safety whose son was killed on 9/11 - and who has met with Graham Yost, the writer of NBC's mini-series - said she hoped the end product would be harrowingly graphic.

"I think the public should see the people jumping out the windows, the brutal death these people suffered," Ms. Regenhard said. "Because maybe they'll get the truth and put pressure on the system to do something about it. There's a difference between what the families of the victims are ready to see and what the public is ready for. But no one should ever be ready for a fictionalization."

Copyright 2005*The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/20/movies/20atta.html

al-Canine

04-24-2005, 10:29 AM

EDITORIAL

Rethinking Ground Zero

Three and a half years after the attack on Lower Manhattan, too many of the elaborate and even inspiring plans for rebuilding seem frozen on paper. That is particularly true for the building that the world most connects with the idea of rebirth at the World Trade Center site: Gov. George Pataki's Freedom Tower.

The tower, a stunning creation forged by the opposing architects Daniel Libeskind and David Childs, is apparently being sent back to the drawing boards, after word came from security experts at the New York Police Department that they have problems with the building as planned. Since the details about the Freedom Tower were first unveiled to the public in December 2003, that delay by the department is unreasonable. Still, it would obviously be irresponsible not to take the objections of the police into consideration, however late they are in arriving.

While reasonable safety concerns may require changes in the building, the "beacon" promised by Mr. Libeskind cannot under any circumstances be replaced with a dreary, fear-inspired fortress. The tower could become overly bulky if extra security demands are simply grafted onto the present plan. It already calls for a massive building, with too much extra office space - added to suit the developer - and a very tall spire for those who want a perpetual sign of defiance to terrorists. Nothing would better express capitulation to terrorism than a large skyscraper that looks like a vertical bunker.

New Yorkers need an inspiring building at the World Trade Center site, one that helps mend the still-aching hole in the skyline. They might not need a tower that reaches to Mr. Libeskind's symbolic 1,776 feet, but the structure must still work as the focal point of the site. It cannot become a mostly vacant office tower that caters too much to the purported needs of the present site developer, Larry Silverstein.

Mr. Silverstein, backed by billions of dollars in insurance money he received from his lease on the twin towers, has already constructed one office building adjacent to the site. So far, he has not announced a major tenant. If he continues to demand that the site provide anything like the 10 million square feet of office space lost with the twin towers, he will be serving his own needs more than the community's or even, at this point, the market's. The World Trade Center site must be a treasured public space and a critical piece of a renewed community, not just another huge commercial development looming over a few public amenities.

Governor Pataki, whose legacy will be written with the rebuilding at ground zero one way or another, is the crucial figure in this new chapter in the post-9/11 story. He needs to encourage Goldman Sachs & Company energetically to keep its building downtown, and push Washington for help in bringing down the old Deutsche Bank building, now shrouded mournfully in black netting. He must make certain that the uplifting Santiago Calatrava PATH station is built as planned. And he should re-engage Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who seems obsessed with other development plans for Manhattan's West Side at a time when Lower Manhattan is urgently in need of his attention.

If the Freedom Tower design is to be redone, Mr. Pataki must make certain the public is allowed to participate. The current design was chosen after a closely watched and hugely publicized competition in which the people of New York - and the nation and the world - made their opinions known every step of the way. If, after all that effort, the plan is suddenly replaced by something far less magnificent than what was promised, the public will have a right to feel betrayed.

Copyright 2005*The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/opinion/24sun1.html?

al-Canine

04-26-2005, 01:17 PM

Freedom Tower delayed

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

April 26, 2005

Plans for the signature skyscraper at the new World Trade Center have to be revised because of safety concerns raised by Police Department security experts, delaying the building's opening, rebuilding officials said yesterday.

The expected 2009 opening of the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower, designed by architects David Childs and Daniel Libeskind, will be delayed by several months, officials said.

"The Freedom Tower must be built in a manner consistent with the highest safety and security standards and yet allow for a bold design that reclaims New York's skyline with an enduring symbol of freedom," Gov. George Pataki's spokeswoman Lynn Rasic said.

The governor is working with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, trade center leaseholder Larry Silverstein and other rebuilding partners on modifications consistent with the site's master plan, which was crafted by Libeskind, Rasic said.

The complications with the Freedom Tower will not delay plans for any other aspects of downtown Manhattan development, including the new performing arts center, set for 2009 or 2010, and the trade center memorial and new PATH commuter train station, both set for 2009, officials said.

Representatives for the governor and the trade center leaseholder declined to identify precisely what aspects of the plans need modification, but they said the Police Department believed more could be done to secure the building, which would be the tallest in the world and stand at the northwest side of the 16-acre trade center site.

The Police Department, citing security reasons, declined to comment.

As the plans now stand, the twisting glass and steel tower will be topped by a 276-foot spire designed to evoke the Statue of Liberty. It will include 2.6 million square feet of office space on roughly 70 floors. The building will include a rooftop restaurant, an observation deck and energy-generating windmills.

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/newyork/nyc-nywtc264233860apr26,0,7340211.story?

al-Canine

04-30-2005, 11:01 AM

9/11 hijackers used NJ college computer to buy plane tickets

By WAYNE PARRY
Associated Press Writer

April 29, 2005, 9:46 PM EDT

NEWARK, N.J. -- Two of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist hijackers used a public-access computer at a New Jersey state college library to buy tickets for the plane they helped hijack and crash into the Pentagon, a federal prosecutor said.

Ken Wainstein, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, made the revelation Thursday during a congressional hearing in which the Bush administration pushed for renewal of provisions of the Patriot Act that make it easier for investigators to obtain library and other records.

"Investigators tracing the activities of the hijackers determined that, on four occasions in August of 2001, individuals using Internet accounts registered to Nawaf Alhamzi and Khalid Almihdhar _ 9/11 hijackers _ used public access computers in the library of a state college in New Jersey," Wainstein testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee.

"The computers in the library were used to review and order airline tickets in an Internet travel reservations site," he said.

On Aug. 30, 2001, someone using Alhamzi's account logged on to a computer at the school to check on travel reservations for Sept. 11, 2001, that had already been made, he added.

Wainstein did not identify the college, but an official with William Paterson University in Wayne said that shortly after the attacks, investigators seized several public-access computers from the college's library.

"The FBI, in furtherance of their investigation into 9/11, did take a number of our public access computers," Stuart Goldstein, the college's assistant vice president for institutional advancement, said Friday. "The FBI never informed us as to what they found or didn't find."

William Paterson University is the closest state college to where the hijackers were living just before the attacks.

Justice Department spokesman Kevin Madden said the testimony shows how important the library provision of the Patriot Act is to national security.

"The more people learn about the Patriot Act, the more they learn that it is designed to protect them from harm and from terrorist acts," he said.

Madden said he did not know if libraries at other New Jersey colleges were searched after the attacks.

Alhamzi and Almihdhar were two of the five hijackers who helped seize American Airlines Flight 77, which took off from Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., and crashed into the Pentagon.

They were among a group of as may as six of the Sept. 11 hijackers who lived in Paterson shortly before the attacks. Two others, Hani Hanjour, who would pilot the doomed plane, and Majed Moqed, bought their tickets from a Totowa travel agency, paying with a wad of cash after their debit card was rejected less than two weeks before the attacks.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., said the testimony highlights the need to renew provisions of the Patriot Act that enable the quick retrieval of library information by authorities.

"We put Americans' lives at risk if we foolishly provide sanctuaries _ even in our public libraries _ for terrorists to operate," he said.

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newjersey/ny-bc-nj--attacks-njhijacke0429apr29,0,3467780.story?

Shipwrx

04-30-2005, 11:54 AM

One thing that I caught and felt that was never properly explained was Nick Berg's ( the American the was beheaded in Iraq) involvement with an Al Qaeda operative prior to 911.

I consider the odds of his name popping up in any way shape or form prior to 911 with anything to do with any of the terrorists involved with 911 well beyond the range of co-incidence...... Here's a quote from a complete exam of the anomalies of Nick berg..... with the complete source ...

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/5/15/22827/0477

46) Berg encountered Moussaoui, an al Qaeda operative, by chance in the U.S. in 1999
The FBI has reported (CNN, FOX) that Nick Berg's e-mail account was used by the "20th hijacker" of 9-11, Zacarious Moussaoui, whose computer held evidence of the 9-11 hijackers (and could not be searched by the FBI field office because of orders from Washington). The FBI interviewed Nick Berg about Moussaoui's use of his e-mail account to send "emails" but concluded that it was entirely "coincidental." Berg had apparently given the password to his e-mail account to an acquaintance of Moussaoui who he met on a bus in 1999 in Oklahoma. (See: Berg's encounter with 'terrorist' revealed.)

and this is CNN's article about it

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/Northeast/05/13/berg.encounter/index.html

I think there's more there personally beyond mere coincidence

al-Canine

05-01-2005, 10:57 PM

Security Concerns Force a Review of Plans for Ground Zero

By PATRICK D. HEALY
and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Security concerns outlined last month by the New York Police Department have set off a serious reassessment of plans for the World Trade Center site. People involved in the rebuilding effort say that the revisions that need to be made to the site's most prominent feature, the Freedom Tower, could delay the start of construction from several months to a year.

As a result, the lead developer at the site, Larry Silverstein, has proposed seeking public financing - possibly hundreds of millions of dollars - to pay for addressing the Police Department's security concerns. Such a development would be a significant shift for a project that has relied largely on private insurance money.

In addition, the Police Department's most recent security analysis has moved those involved in the rebuilding effort to examine yet again what might be done to safeguard the site and the people visiting it, if plans go forward to reopen the area's street grid.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the agency set up to direct the rebuilding, had each hired security consultants to assess the safety of the plans for the site. But it is clear that the Police Department's assessment was more disturbing.

Indeed, interviews in the past week show that David Childs, the lead designer of the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower, has already begun rethinking fundamental elements of what is planned to be the successor to the twin towers: its precise location on the 16-acre site - long planned for the northwest corner - and its distance from heavily traveled West Street.

The redesigned tower is expected to look different from the current model familiar to the public, but it is too early to characterize the extent of the changes, according to a person who has been briefed on the development team's concerns.

It is clear, however, that three and a half years after the 9/11 attack, and 16 months after the tower's design was unveiled, police officials, unintentionally or not, have set off a storm of blame and accusations.

George E. Pataki, who views the Freedom Tower as his greatest legacy as governor, is said by state officials to be angry with the police, and some of those officials have accused the department of having been late in laying out the scope of its concerns. They say the effect could unduly worry New Yorkers and possible tenants of the buildings. Mr. Pataki did not reply to an interview request.

At the same time, some state and development officials are angry at the Bloomberg administration, saying it should have delivered the police concerns earlier, but may have been distracted by its proposal for a stadium for the Jets on the Far West Side of Manhattan.

Daniel L. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, dismissed that assertion as silly and said that the city and the police had devoted enormous time to assessing the site's security with the latest intelligence and counterterrorism data.

"This is a remarkably complex security question, and every time you turn one dial, you end up turning many other dials on the security issue," Mr. Doctoroff said.

Mr. Pataki said last November that major work on the foundation for the Freedom Tower would begin in February this year, with steel and concrete to arrive last month. Neither has happened; the tower was to be completed by 2009.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly would not be interviewed about the department's security assessment, a multipage document that was given to Mr. Silverstein and the development agency on April 8. Other officials involved in the security discussions said that the department had raised concerns since at least last summer, but that the other camps involved in planning had not provided detailed information on which to make an assessment.

Paul J. Browne, the department's deputy commissioner for public information, said, "We understand that the Police Department's security concerns will be addressed in any redesign."

According to state officials who have reviewed the department's concerns, the police, most simply, do not see the tower as a normal commercial building; from the police's point of view, the officials say, the tower would replace the trade center, felled by terrorists, with a patriotic symbol that could be a new target. Heightening the concern is the fact that hundreds of uninspected 18-wheel trucks would rumble by the tower daily.

That the police concerns are only now front and center, though, has exasperated senior development officials, many of whom fear that the mere public discussion of security worries could damage what they regard as a hard-won optimism about the site's future.

"I don't want to say the police have been irresponsible, but where were they until this month?" said John C. Whitehead, a Pataki ally and chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. "I wish they had called attention to the seriousness of the problems earlier, rather than at this late stage."

All of the principals involved at ground zero, from the politicians to the builders, remain keenly determined to make the Freedom Tower as secure as possible. But the degree of concern about the site's vulnerability clearly varies, and almost everyone involved in the rebuilding effort wonders if there ever could be a perfect formula for balancing security needs with civic ambitions at a site that has been attacked twice.

The police, for their part, want the tower built to conform with security criteria based on standards used by the Department of Defense and other federal agencies, which would require the Freedom Tower to be as much as 100 feet away from the street. The site plan now calls for a minimum distance of 25 feet. The desire for greater distance is based on an analysis of the impact of a large blast.

Over the last year, according to state officials involved in the project, security specialists at the Police Department suggested some provocative but relatively impractical ideas: ideally moving the Freedom Tower some 200 feet away from the street, for example, or moving the tower to another part of the site altogether.

A government official involved in the security deliberations, echoing others, suggested that "basically nothing can satisfy" the police. But the official also acknowledged that the Freedom Tower inescapably required a security plan unlike that for almost any other building in the United States, given the site's hallowed ground and history.

"Here's the dilemma," the official said. "If you put too much security into the building, it's going to look like Fort Knox and no one will rent it. If you don't put enough, it could end up with catastrophic results, not only catastrophic for the tower but for the surrounding buildings as well."

Referring to the current battle over security, the official said, "What is going on is the argument over those issues."

The arguments over the months have included thinking imaginatively about security. Last summer, government officials at ground zero spoke with former security specialists from MI-5, Britain's domestic intelligence service, who advised that future attacks by terrorists would most likely come not in the form of a truck bomb, but rather with biological or chemical weapons.

"These guys were laughing at us, at the idea that Jersey barriers and bollards would protect the tower when terrorists have become more sophisticated," said one official involved in the redevelopment project.

Some have already begun to reimagine: Daniel Libeskind, the master planner for the site, has drawn up new sketches on his own to show that the tower could be moved between 40 and 140 feet from West Street/Route 9A in order to solve police concerns.

Mr. Libeskind played down the significance of the redesign, which will be done by Mr. Childs.

Not surprisingly, some people involved in the rebuilding are urging calm, suggesting that security was inevitably going to cause delays for a grand civic project with so many elements, including a memorial for Sept. 11 victims, a performing arts center, and new office towers.

"It's all been very quiet, as it should be, because these are very delicate matters and you don't want to advertise them to the world," Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, an influential private research group, said of the behind-the-scenes security discussions. "But it's all coming to a head around the design of the Freedom Tower."

Depending on who is talking, security concerns have loomed over the site since the fall of 2001, and were discussed in fits and starts for years, competing for attention with other issues, like the tower's design, and the memorial competition.

But in the last several months, as the start of construction neared, the security talks intensified.

"The police would say, 'Based on our knowledge and our intelligence, we think you can do more to make the building safer,' " said one official involved in the security discussions. "We would say, 'Tell us what.' The cops would say, 'We're not engineers.' We would say, 'O.K., tell us what we need to tell our engineers to protect against.' And it became this long, drawn-out back and forth."

The talks came to a head at a one point several weeks ago when the parties met with officials of the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs to discuss its proposed 40-story headquarters, just to the northwest of the Freedom Tower.

Stunning many in the room, Goldman representatives showed a film of a vehicle, packed with more than 10,000 pounds of explosive material, blowing up and leaving a huge crater. While some participants viewed the film as an insensitive move by Goldman, it also prompted discussion about the amount of explosives that the buildings would be protected against. At that moment, the talks began moving toward clearer standards for "hardening" buildings to blasts.

One government official said that as the police concerns became more apparent, the breadth of their issues took many people aback. In addition to the distance from the street, the official said, "there is the strength of the glass, the strength and the thickness of the concrete walls."

"The way the building is constructed will determine how many casualties there will be if a bomb of X size is blown off at Y location," the official said.

Just how radical the revisions to the tower will be is far from clear. Some officials said the altered design, in the end, might not look different to the eye. But it is also possible that changes could be so significant that a new environmental impact statement might be needed, according to one person who has been briefed on some elements of the redesign.

Copyright 2005*The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/nyregion/01security.html?

al-Canine

05-02-2005, 03:55 PM

May 2, 2005
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

At Ground Zero, Disarray Reigns, and an Opportunity Awaits

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

The master plan for ground zero is unraveling, which is not necessarily bad news. But what are the odds that planners will see this as an opportunity to save it?

The discovery that the Freedom Tower will have to be redesigned to address concerns raised by security experts has once again sent architects scurrying to patch up one of the most muddled developments in the city's recent memory.

State officials have said that the changes sought by police officials could delay construction of the tower, already behind schedule, for at least three more months. But one of the suggestions under discussion - moving the tower to the east, where it would be less vulnerable to a truck bomb - would clearly delay construction longer. Meanwhile, there is growing apprehension that adhering to new security standards will transform the tower into an armored bunker - a message that is unlikely to instill confidence in downtown's rebirth.

In fact, the delay in addressing security is only the most recent in a series of missteps that have dogged the master plan since it was adopted more than two years ago. These include imperious changes to the ground zero memorial that have dismayed its architect, Michael Arad, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's insistence on forging ahead with the design of a "Freedom Center" building even though no one knows exactly what it would house. At the same time, the agency decided to put off fund-raising for a theater complex designed by Frank Gehry, seeding doubt that it will be built at all.

These are not simply errors in judgment. They are byproducts of the mix of secrecy, self-interest and paranoia that have enveloped the site from the outset - a climate that favors political expediency and empty symbolic gestures over thoughtful urban planning discussions. And that climate has essentially prevented the architects involved from openly addressing problems with the master plan even as its weaknesses have become more glaring.

With typical inflexibility, Kevin Rampe, the president of the development corporation, insisted last week that the tower would not be moved under any circumstances. His point was that moving the tower eastward would only raise new security concerns, like its relationship to train tracks that run beneath Greenwich Street.

Meanwhile, Daniel Libeskind, the site's master planner, has privately suggested to Gov. George E. Pataki that the tower be combined with the proposed theater complex that would stand just to the east, at the corner of Greenwich and Fulton, which would allow for a broader defensive perimeter around both.

Mr. Libeskind has also floated the idea of simply straightening the tower's twisting form. That would allow the architect to reduce the size of the building's base, which would leave more room for a security buffer. (According to Mr. Libeskind, it could increase the tower's distance from West Street by an additional 40 feet.)

All of these proposals have some merit. I, for one, won't shed a tear if the tower has to be redesigned. Its cylindrical crown of steel cables and twisting silhouette are clunky, watered-down versions of a recycled idea. But simply redesigning the tower or shifting it slightly to one side would set off more stopgap changes that would only exacerbate the project's flaws. This approach to urban planning is doomed to failure - and is particularly galling at a site once spoken of as sacred ground.

Among the most glaring problems with the master plan is its relationship to the neighborhoods to the west. In its current incarnation, the ground zero memorial park is completely exposed to West Street, given that planners recently decided not to build a tunnel that would have funneled much of the traffic underground past the site. The park feels like leftover space, and it only reinforces the sense of detachment between the site and the World Financial Center across the street.

Just as troubling is the park's diminished size. At the behest of planners, the Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta has been struggling to stuff 70,000 square feet of space into a museum building in the northeast corner of the park - a figure that is essentially random, given that it is still unclear what that museum would contain. The building would gobble up a quarter of the area that is supposed to encompass the memorial park; the ground zero memorial, which traces the footprints of the former towers, would essentially consume two more quadrants. That would leave only the southwest corner - about one and a half acres - for a park.

Privately, several architects involved at ground zero have been exploring ways to improve the master plan. Long before the security concerns were raised, some had toyed with the notion of moving the Freedom Tower to the east side of the site and creating a smaller commercial structure at its current location on the site's northwest corner. This would create a stronger visual dialogue between the various commercial towers at ground zero and the World Financial Center.

Others have proposed moving one of the cultural buildings to the site's southwest corner, which would help shield the memorial from West Street and make it feel more intimate. An even more radical idea - a riff on one of Mr. Libeskind's proposals - would be to relocate all of the cultural institutions in the base of the towers, freeing up room for a much bigger public park. This might help cover the costs of the site's cultural components and ensure that they remain a strong part of the program.

Of course, these are simply mental exercises, a way of exploring how the project could be set on the right track. But the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has steadfastly refused to open up discussion on the site's overall organization. Not only has it sought to prevent the architects from speaking publicly about their ideas, according to several architects interviewed, but it has also warned them against sharing their ideas with one another, saying that this would be a breach of their confidentiality agreements.

As a result, the major architectural players at ground zero - Mr. Libeskind, Mr. Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, David Childs, Mr. Arad and the Snohetta architects, to name the most obvious - have never sat down in a room together to discuss their growing concerns about the overall plan, let alone exchange ideas about how best to improve it.

This constitutes an enormous squandering of talent, as well as a total disregard for how the creative process unfolds. And it has essentially shut the public out of the process.

So far, such inflexibility has been justified by political calculations. Open discussion of what isn't working, and why, might slow the pace of rebuilding, the thinking goes, and send the wrong message to the world - as if indecision were somehow a sign of weakness. Given how the project has stumbled, that argument is looking more and more specious. And it ignores the fact that the city, and those of us who care about it, will have to live with the consequences of these decisions for decades.

Governor Pataki should take advantage of the most recent delays to take a big step back and rethink what has become a debased process. Planning should be open to intense public scrutiny. And by encouraging the architects to talk with one another and to the public they serve, he could finally take advantage of the talent that he has right under his nose.

Copyright 2005*The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/02/arts/design/02note.html

al-Canine

05-02-2005, 04:09 PM

Secret 9/11 Miniseries Planned

Here it comes, the miniseries no one wanted to see.

Nevertheless, ABC seems to be readying a major and secret "fictionalized" multi-parter about the history of terrorism, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the disasters of Sept. 11, 2001.

From the looks of it, the story is going to be about how stupid the government was: If only they'd listened to one man, all would have been right!

The title offered on call sheets for actors is "The Untitled ABC History Project."

Last week, the call went out for dozens of Arab actors. Today, ABC showed a little more of its effort by putting out requests for 16 characters.

The main one? Former FBI agent John O'Neill, who seems to be the lead figure in this 'history.'

O'Neill left the FBI in 2001 when he claimed his superiors wouldn't listen to his warnings about Al Qaeda, and became the head of security at the World Trade Center. He was the subject of a PBS Frontline special called "The Man Who Knew."

The miniseries seems to be based on the PBS show, which is outlined in painstaking and unintentionally humorous detail on the PBS Web site.

In the TV version, O'Neill is described as "Early 40s to early 50s, a New Jersey native, a tall, burly, no-nonsense man with a taste for the high life, he's an FBI Special Agent, smart, determined, and tenacious in pursuing the big picture.

"O'Neill is known for his sharp elbows and Irish temper. He is on the trail of Usama Bin Laden from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Hungry to make busts in the pursuit of those responsible for taking American lives, O'Neill becomes a bitter opponent of Al Qaeda along the way, and is loudly and impatiently angry with the State Department honchos who balk his investigations..."

Think Brian Dennehy.

Historians should have a field day with this version of the decade-long terrorist plot. But why not? Screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh got his start on another soap opera, "Falcon Crest." He also wrote the upcoming miniseries "Into the West" and was cited for "The Day Reagan Was Shot." Marc Platt is the producer, and David L. Cunningham — who helmed the recent miniseries revival of "Little House on the Prairie" and several B-movies — will direct.

The remaining 15 characters needed to make this story of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history include former local New York TV reporter John Miller, who interviewed Usama in 1998; Richard Clarke ("soon finds himself at odds with high-ranking members of the Administration, even as he chairs meetings devoted to the extermination of Al Qaeda..."); Sandy Berger, national security adviser to President Clinton; a number of FBI agents such as Neil Herman and Bill Miller; some of the actual plotters, such as Mohamed Atta; as well as former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine.

And there will be more to come, as the miniseries casts for just about everyone involved in national security and the plotting of the Sept. 11 tragedies. Who will play bin Laden? Or Saddam Hussein? Agents, consult your clients: History is going Hollywood.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,155247,00.html

al-Canine

05-05-2005, 03:31 PM

2 YEARS OF WTC PLANS LIE IN RUINS AS PATAKI ORDERS A NEW TOWER

By TOM TOPOUSIS

It's back to the drawing board for the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero.

Gov. Pataki yesterday ordered up a complete redesign of the planned signature skyscraper in the wake of Police Department warnings about security risks.

The move is a major reversal of Pataki's promise to move rapidly to restore lower Manhattan's skyline with an "iconic" post-9/11 tower that would be the world's tallest building and a symbol of liberty.

Officials familiar with the decision say a new design by architect David Childs is expected within several weeks and will include a building that will rise 1,776 feet, like the original proposal from April 2003, but otherwise will "look a lot different."

Pataki's announcement followed a meeting yesterday with Mayor Bloomberg, the Police Department, developer Larry Silverstein and officials from the Port Authority and the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

"What emerged from the meeting was a renewed commitment to realization of the Freedom Tower as a bold symbol of the rebuilding," read a Pataki statement.

"A consensus also emerged that a new design for the Freedom Tower is required in order to meet NYPD's security standards."

Pataki said the new design would remain consistent with architect Daniel Libeskind's master plan for the World Trade Center site.

The NYPD delivered a report to Silverstein on April 8, citing its concerns with security at the tower. Among those concerns was that it could be vulnerable to a truck bomb because of its proximity to West Street and the mostly glass construction of the lower stories.

Sources have told The Post top NYPD brass had been pressing the Port Authority for nearly a year about their concerns regarding the safety of the building, which because of its planned height and symbolic nature could be a target of terrorists.

The NYPD report, which both identified problems and solutions, was sent early last month — finally forcing a second look at the Freedom Tower.

Charles Gargano, Pataki's top economic adviser and a vice chairman of the Port Authority, said: "I don't want to get into the blame thing. We have to move forward."

While the Freedom Tower will take longer to finish, Gargano stressed that other projects, including construction of the transit hub and the memorial, are all on time.

When Pataki laid the cornerstone for the Freedom Tower on July 4, he said the building would be done by 2009. Rebuilding officials now say the completion of the tower will be delayed by up to a year.

Silverstein, who has yet to line up a single tenant, called yesterday's meeting productive.

"It is crystal clear that we all share one goal: delivering a spectacular and secure Freedom Tower as quickly as possible," he said.

The Freedom Tower will remain in the same northwest corner of the World Trade Center site overlooking West Street, but it will be moved slightly away from the street to better protect it from potential car bombs.

Another expected design change involves the lower 150 to 200 feet of the tower, now largely glass, that will have to be better protected.

Libeskind yesterday seemed resigned to the changes.

"Security is clearly the paramount concern," he said. "While the shape and details of buildings may change, the intent, spirit and direction of the master plan remains intact."

Any tension between City Hall and Albany about improved security was downplayed.

At a town a town-hall meeting in Brooklyn last night, Bloomberg said, "We made some major progress today in terms of satisfying the demands of the Police Department that this building be really safe."

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose district includes Ground Zero, blasted both Pataki and Bloomberg.

"The lack of coordination and cooperation by the governor and the mayor has cost us months of delay and resulted in the decision by Goldman Sachs to consider other locations for their headquarters," he fumed.

Goldman Sachs had proposed a massive headquarters across West Street from the Freedom Tower site, but pulled out recently over concerns about security.

But Sen. Charles Schumer, who has been pounding his fist for faster action on lower Manhattan, yesterday lauded Pataki and Bloomberg for "moving quickly and decisively."

He said there had been "a change in attitude" among leaders about the project, which came from public pressure.

Additional reporting by Stephanie Gaskell and Ed Robinson

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/23780.htm

al-Canine

06-02-2005, 11:10 AM

White House, New Yorkers in tug of war over unspent Sept. 11 aid

By DEVLIN BARRETT
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON -- New York has yet to spend some $125 million for workers injured in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack and its aftermath, and the federal government doesn't want to wait any longer. It wants the money back.
New York lawmakers are trying to hold onto the funding ahead of a House committee meeting next week to consider re-claiming the funds as proposed by the Bush administration's budget for fiscal year 2006.

A group of 21 New York lawmakers, including state Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer, both D-N.Y., is urging the White House to redirect the money toward health programs for ground zero workers affected with long-term lung problems that may not appear for years to come. The administration has resisted.

The dispute dates to the aftermath of the 2001 terror attack, when the government agreed to give more than $20 billion to help New York recover. The money included some $175 million for the state's workers compensation program, but as the claims were processed the bulk of the money was unspent.

A 2004 report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found the state spent $44 million to pay out money quickly through other state agencies. Another $4.4 million was spent upgrading the compensation board's computer system to prepare for a possible future disaster.

That left about $125 million unspent, because the compensation board has not paid out huge sums for Sept. 11-related claims. In the case of $25 million set aside for rescue workers who came to New York from out of town, the board had paid just $456,000 by mid-2004.

White House Office of Management and Budget spokesman Scott Milburn said New York has used only $49 million of the $175 million and spent just $6 million in the 2004 fiscal year.

"The needs were not as large as initially feared," he said.

He said the federal government has exceeded President Bush's pledge of providing $20 billion in aid in the form of cash and tax incentives to New York.

Rep. James Walsh, R-N.Y., argued the government is moving too fast to retrieve the money.

"We don't know yet what the need is, nor does OMB," Walsh said. "What we do know is that there was a witches' brew of toxic substances emanating from that debris and those firefighters, police officers and construction workers were breathing that for days."

He has asked the GAO to look further into the injury claims to determine what the unmet health needs are.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a Manhattan Democrat who has long argued New York did not get enough help, said, "The real shame is that too many people in Washington still don't realize that thousands of injured 9/11 responders still desperately need our help."

The state received 10,182 claims for workers comp but did not tell the GAO how many claims it denied, saying it did not keep such figures.

New York AFL-CIO president Denis Hughes said the government's plan ignores the likelihood that people can apply years later for compensation for Sept. 11-related injuries.

"They offered New York $20 billion, and now these guys are fighting over $120 million? It's sad," he said. "They have forgotten the magnitude of this tragedy."

Dr. Robin Herbert, of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, said their World Trade Center program has seen over 9,000 patients through a federally funded health screening program.

Much of the treatment of the ailments, though, is dependent on donations, she said.

"Right now we are able to provide treatment with philanthropic funding, but are troubled that there's no other resource," said Herbert.

The state also opposes the government's plan to take back the money.

"New York should retain this critical funding," said Gov. George Pataki's spokesman Todd Alhart.

"We want to ensure it is available to address any workers comp-related claims to those who courageously responded and provided assistance in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks," Alhart said.

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--attacks-workersco0601jun01,0,3613861.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork

pixikill

06-02-2005, 12:48 PM

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT

LOCATION: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2005/s1383428.htm

Broadcast: 02/06/2005
Ex-army leader recalls pre-war speech

Reporter: Tony Jones

TONY JONES: On the eve of the Iraq war the Lieutenant-Colonel leading the first Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment stood in the desert sun and addressed the men who were about to invade Iraq. He began by saying, "We go to liberate, not to conquer". And told them: "If you are ferocious in battle "remember to be magnanimous in victory." "Iraq", he said, "is steeped in history. "It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood "and the birthplace of Abraham. "Tread lightly there." An embedded reporter duly transcribed the 30-minute speech and sent it out to the world. Within days, the 42-year-old Colonel Tim Collins was Britain's Iraq war poster boy. The Prince of Wales wrote to congratulate him. President Bush pinned the speech on his Oval Office wall. The adulation suddenly died away when Collins was accused of war crimes. He was seared, then totally cleared by a searching investigation. But when he left the army and began to speak his mind about the Iraq war and the wider war on terrorism, many in the British establishment must have wanted to strip him of his OBE. Now he's set it all out in a memoir Rules of Engagement. I spoke to the retired Colonel in London just a short time ago.

Tim Collins, thanks for joining us.

TIM COLLINS: Hi, how are you?

TONY JONES: Very well. Can I take you back to that day in the desert on the eve of the Iraq war. What can you actually recall about that speech you made to your troops which has become so famous, so often quoted?

TIM COLLINS: Well, really the war had gone off ahead of time. It was a strange day, because the Iraqis had set fire to the oilwells across the border, so it was almost like eventide even though it was the afternoon. And it was one of my soldiers who asked me, "Are we going to invade Iraq?" And I said, "We are." And he said, "We're happy to go, but we've no idea why this war is happening." And it was at that point I realised I had to get the men of the Royal Irish Battle Group together. Not only because I owed them an explanation or Celtic tradition as an Irish regiment, but I knew that as well as soldiers from north and south of Ireland I had soldiers from the Irish Diaspora, including Canadians and four Australians and I owed them an explanation as to why this war was happening.

TONY JONES: And what did you say to them? What was your explanation? What did you say to help them gird their loins and understand what labour for them?

TIM COLLINS: Well, the main thing I wanted to get across to them was the fact this was a huge endeavour involving a number nations as part of the Coalition including Britain and Australia and the United States, and this was a war of liberation. We were going to go and do a historic thing, we were going to free a country and I wanted to make it clear to them we weren't going to fight with the Iraqis. We were going to fight with the people who were holding the Iraqis effectively prisoner, Saddam Hussein's Baath Party regime and I wanted to make it clear to them if they rushed in and started shooting indiscriminately it would be like liberating Auschwitz and shooting the prisoners. So I wanted to make it clear the allies would include the Iraqis who we were going to free.

TONY JONES: One of points you made, "We will not fly our flags in their country. "The only flag that will be flown in this ancient land is their own". Ironically, of course, because the Americans put up their flag the first thing they got into Baghdad.

TIM COLLINS: That's a shame, because the fact is we were doing a neighbourly thing for a neighbour and you wouldn't expect someone to come into someone else's garden and claim it for themselves and by putting our flags up, that's what we'd be doing. We'd be going there as good neighbours to free the Iraqi people and I thought it would be wrong to show our flags in their country unless they specifically invited us to do so. And indeed, anywhere we did capture the first thing we did to make it to the Iraqi people what our mission was, was to hoist the Iraqi flag to show they had their country back, it was their country, their flag and we were there as their allies, their neighbours.

TONY JONES: What do you think it was that struck such a chord in that speech? Comparisons were made and I'm sure you'd claim they were outrageous comparisons with Shakespeare's Henry IV to Lincoln at Gettysburg, Churchill after Dunkirk. Even President Bush apparently pinned a copy of that speech, the transcript of it, on his wall. What struck such a chord?

TIM COLLINS: Well, I think the whole international community was looking for an explanation as to why the war was happening and really the explanation that was being given at the time was an altruistic war in the face of weapons of mass destruction really wasn't cutting the mustard with most of the people around the world and essentially at the point where I made it clear that we were doing a thing for the Iraqi people, that we needed the Iraqi people back in the international community, back in the regional community, I think that struck a chord not only with the men of the Royal Irish but indeed everybody in the English-speaking world that read the speech thereafter.

TONY JONES: Now taking men to war, taking them into a situation where some of them, at least, are going to be killed and some, perhaps many of them will kill, it must be an extraordinary responsibility. What did you tell your men about taking life?

TIM COLLINS: I wanted them to understand that I was going to be asking them, some of them very young, some of them teenagers, that I would be requiring them to take human life in combat if that was required. I wanted them to understand that this wasn't something to be done lightly. This wasn't a video game. And I wanted them to understand that having taken another man's life in battle that they should treat his body afterwards with dignity and respect. I also wanted to emphasise there should be no indiscriminate killing, that people had a right in international law to surrender and they should respect that right and ultimately do unto others as they would have you do unto them. Ultimately, I wanted my men to understand the solemnity of what we were about to undertake and also to understand they might have to lay down their lives for country.

TONY JONES: You made the specific point that you had actually seen men in other conflicts that had needlessly taken the lives of others and they carried with them I think as you say, the mark of Cain for the rest of their lives.

TIM COLLINS: Well, I'm a veteran of a number of conflicts, including the first Gulf War and being a soldier and growing as a commander is a learning process and I've seen things going on in previous wars which on reflection I think is not the sort of standard of behaviour I'd like to see from the men of the Royal Irish Regiment.

TONY JONES: Now we recently spoke to the military historian Anthony Beaver and he made the point that one of the main lessons he took out of his studies of the battles between the armies of Hitler and Stalin was the effect of propaganda that dehumanised both the enemy soldiers and the enemy civilians. That, above all, led to abuse and atrocities. You seem to have come to the same conclusions about the war in Iraq.

TIM COLLINS: There's no doubt. I think you find that the Royal Irish battle group, we're 22 nationalities serving in the battle group, although we are predominantly Irish. As I say, we had Canadians and Australians and we had chaps from South Africa and because they had travelled the world they were able to relate to others as humans. The difficulty one recognised was if you come from an insular society like the United States where everyone is an Irish-American or African-American, the difficulty is with non-Americans and I wanted to emphasise to my men, including my 25 US Marines, that the Iraqis were a valid people in their own right. We had to see them as humans. We had to empathise with them as humans with a problem. So the point where you lose that empathy as other humans you get things like Abu Ghraib happening and I have a certain sympathy for the common soldiers who become involved in those things because if the Commander in Chief is talking about them, the enemy, the Iraqis, that in itself, that language, is dehumanising them and we have to talk about them as a people, just like us.

TONY JONES: Now, given the way that you obviously feel about this and the strength of your feeling and the way you expressed it in your speech, it must have cut you very deeply to have levelled against you what proved to be, I must say, at the outset, unfounded allegations of war crimes?

TIM COLLINS: Yes. I mean, they were nonsense ultimately and some of the charges sitting back in England when I was having these put to me seemed ludicrous - invading someone's personal space, shouting at them. Bearing in mind this is a war. One charge was firing my gun during a war. That's just bizarre.

TONY JONES: You write that the army unwittingly made you into a British dreyfus. That's a pretty strong - and I read what happened to you and the extent of it, the amount of media coverage and the way in which your own military hierarchy seemed to virtually abandon you during that period. As a professional soldier in the 21st century, what lessons do you draw from what happened to you?

TIM COLLINS: The fact is that there is not a full enough understanding in modern Western societies to what they require of their soldiers and what conditions are like in a battlefield and hence various inquiries here in the UK that are dogging the army's footsteps. Cases being handed to civilian authorities to investigate. The simple fact is this: if there's a decision taken to employ an army in the field extraordinary events have happened to cause an army to be deployed so extraordinary measures have to be deployed in order to control an army. That's why we have military law. What you can't do is try and apply the norms that you would have in a scuffle outside a chip shop in Charing Cross or in Sydney to what happens in a battlefield, because the two don't match up. Extraordinary things are happening, so you have to have extraordinary circumstances. At the point where people step outside military law, then that's got to be dealt with by military law.

TONY JONES: One of the reasons I'm asking you about this is we've just seen in the country published allegations that an Australian SAS patrol in Afghanistan in 2002 ended up killing a number of civilians, apparently armed civilians, it must be said, after an accidental engagement. I think you read part of that story. What's your take on it?

TIM COLLINS: Well, I've ever served a number of times with the Australian SAS and I know the squadron commander who is mentioned in the story extremely well. He served with me in the British SAS when he was attached here and I know him to be a man of the highest integrity and professional conduct and I would trust his judgement implicitly without hearing the facts of the case. But having read the facts of the case, the simple matter is you are taking young Australian soldiers, albeit amongst the best in the world and putting them amongst people whose culture it is to fight and have weapons. Frankly, if they found themselves in that conflict, I think we have to imagine ourselves on the ground, but, ultimately, I think the people on the ground know best and I would trust the judgement of people like Vance Khan to give me their view and I would go with their judgement.

TONY JONES: One of the interesting things about this is you've obviously, since you came back, had second thoughts about the whole political and moral underpinnings of the war on terrorism. You've even suggested it could well have been simply a visceral reaction to September 11. What changed your mind about the war, because obviously you had the highest ideals when you went into Iraq?

TIM COLLINS: Yes. My concern is ultimately that no-one has sat down and explained to the population here in the United Kingdom - or indeed anywhere that I know of - what this war is about, where it begins and where it ends, when we know we're going to be winning and when we expect it to end. It seems to be a war without any front, back or sides. I understand also that we're fighting an enemy who doesn't respect our society, but at some point the cycle of violence has to be broken and the people who go out on to the hill in Afghanistan or in the back streets of Gaza in Palestine or the people who take to the deserts of Iraq to fight the Coalition, many of them are motivated by outrage at what is happening, for instance, friendly fire incidents or a wedding party being bombed like that, as well as the legitimate terrorists that we're taking on. I think at some stage we have to break the cycle of violence and step back from it and ultimately I'd remind the viewers that Von Clausewitz, a German thinker on military history, talked about war being a continuation of politics by other means and that's right and proper. If there's no other way forward. But following von Clausewitz's logic, after war there must be politics afterwards. I don't see the point where we're trying to talk through this issue where there's any negotiation to end this war. It seems to be a war without end and I don't think our society, the West, or indeed the world can afford that.

TONY JONES: You had a very interesting thing to say to the BBC about Al Qaeda. You said, "We have to look at 9/11 "and ask yourselves why a group of people, a culture, "feel motivated to attack another culture. "What injustice was happening to force them to make that attack?" Now, were you yourself attacked in Britain when you suggested September 11 attacks may actually have been motivated by injustice?

TIM COLLINS: Yes, because ultimately the view I take and the view I stand by is that some sense of outrage forced these people to carry out those heinous attacks and as well as punishing the guilty I think we also have to look into our own souls and ask what it was that caused these people to do such actions and as Aristotle once said, "Men don't fear justice, but fear a lack of justice." I'm sure it's a perception of injustice somewhere along the line that motivated these young men to attack the West. What I would say is as well as protecting ourselves, as well as going after the guilty, we have to reflect on what projected injustice that they may perceive either to explain it or deal to deal with it.

TONY JONES: You also told the BBC that the invasion of Iraq was either "grossly incompetent "or simply a cynical war "to vent some form of anger on Saddam Hussein's regime "with no regard to the consequences on the Iraqi people." Can you explain why you came to that conclusion?

TIM COLLINS: Having served in Iraq and having seen Iraq shortly after the invasion happened, it was clear to me and even when I asked, "What is the plan for rebuilding Iraq? "How should we set about setting these people back on their feet?" The answer is, "There is no plan. Make it up as you go along." We made it up as best we could. I think it behoved the Western alliance to have had some form of plan to re-establish Iraq, put it back on its feet, after we'd taken away Saddam's regime and one must be left with the conclusion either there was no plan because of incompetence or there is no plan because of malice. I don't know which one it is and I think history will judge harshly looking at the state of Iraq now. As I also said to the BBC, if you create a vacuum, you've got to live with what goes into that vacuum and nature abhors politics and we're living with the result of the vacuum we created in Iraq and that is costing young Iraqis blood. It is also taking British soldiers, American soldiers and Australian soldiers' lives as well.

TONY JONES: Tim Collins, it's been fascinating to get your perspective on things having been on the ground and now back home as a civilian. Thank you very much for coming and talking to us tonight on Lateline.

TIM COLLINS: Thanks, it was a pleasure.

NYer

06-02-2005, 01:09 PM

"While the building has yet to begin in earnest in the hole we call Ground Zero, a new conventional wisdom about it has been born: the disaster of destruction has been made worse by the disaster of reconstruction."

JUSTIN DAVIDSON
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nyc-wtc0602,0,705387.story?coll=nyc-swapbox1

pixikill

06-03-2005, 02:44 AM

:) "two pools for the 9/11 victims"
:mad: "two figs for the iraqi victims"

al-Canine

06-12-2005, 11:50 AM

Long wait for sad farewell to hero

By JEGO ARMSTRONG
and TRACY CONNOR
DAILY NEWS WRITERS

Sunday, June 12th, 2005

Four years have passed since the 9/11 attacks, but time has not eased the pain for the loved ones of Firefighter Keithroy Maynard - especially his young son and namesake.

The 10-year-old wept yesterday as he walked into a Manhattan church to bid a final farewell to his dad, whose remains were identified just a few weeks ago.

Inside, Mayor Bloomberg spoke directly to him, talking about how his father was a true hero who helped save so many strangers on the city's darkest day.

"Perhaps someday you will follow in your father's footsteps," the mayor said to the boy, who was just 6 when his real-life hero died.

"I will always remember this day," said the mayor, who attended the funeral just before his daughter Emma's marriage ceremony.

"Because of Keith, my daughter is safe and able to have a wedding."

Maynard, 30, was one of seven members of Manhattan's Engine 33 who died in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

A memorial service for him was held two months later, but painstaking forensic work identified some of his remains last month, allowing the family to have a funeral and burial.

Even in their lingering grief, Maynard's relatives found joy in the unexpected discovery, particularly since half the 9/11 victims are still unidentified.

"I am so happy," said his mother, Pearl Maynard, 56. "I'm so glad they brought as much home of my child as they could."

The firefighter's brother, Police Officer Duane White, remembered the days he spent combing through wreckage at Ground Zero after his brother was presumed killed.

"I was down there digging, trying to find him," he said. Now, finally we have peace."

Maynard will be buried on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, where he was born and lived until he came to the U.S. in 1986.

His son's mother, Sharon Cole, said she wished the family had chosen to lay him to rest on American soil, where his son could visit him.

But, she added, "I'm just so glad knowing at least he didn't disappear in the dust."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/318317p-272135c.html

al-Canine

06-17-2005, 11:39 AM

Story Corps Tells 9/11 Hero's Tales

BY JEREMY SMERD - Special to the Sun
June 17, 2005

The stranger who saved the lives of at least 12 people on September 11, 2001, was known simply as the "man with the red bandanna."

But like everyone else who died in the Twin Towers that day, Welles Crowther had his story. Recently his parents recorded that account with the help of the oral history project Story Corps. The organization will open a booth at the World Trade Center PATH station next month as one of two temporary memorial projects announced yesterday by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to tell the stories of September 11 until the permanent memorial, Reflecting Absences, is completed in 2009.

Crowther was an equity trader at Sandler O'Neill & Partners on the 104th floor of Tower One, but it was his volunteer firefighter skills learned in suburban Nyack that saved lives. He was born on a Tuesday at 11:50 p.m.

"Monday's child is fair of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace," the 24-year-old's father, Jefferson Crowther, said while he and his wife, Alison, spoke of their son during a two-hour Story Corps recording session recently. The recording was aired during the announcement of the two memorial projects at the PATH station.

"He was born on a Tuesday, he died on a Tuesday, and his body was recovered on a Tuesday. He was truly Tuesday's child," Mr. Crowther said.

Mrs. Crowther said making the recordings was cathartic. "We were totally drained when it was over, I was just shaking," she told The New York Sun yesterday. "But it was very beautiful and wonderful. The family members, I think they would find it very healing."

The other memorial, next door at 120 Liberty St., will offer the thousands of daily visitors tours of the area beginning in November. The Tribute Center, a $15 million, five-year project, will open next March and include a gallery, exhibits, educational programs, and walking tours around the World Trade Center site conducted by guides from the community of families who lost loved ones during the attacks. A founding member of the center, Lee Ielpi, said he began work on the idea in March 2004 and hopes it will satisfy people's need to understand and remember the day when he lost his 29-year-old son, Jonathan, a firefighter.

"If we fall back into complacency, shame on us," Mr. Ielpi said.

In announcing the projects, Governor Pataki criticized the vendors who surround the World Trade Center site for profiting at the expense of a tragedy. He said the memorials would satisfy people's need to connect with the attacks in a more dignified manner.

"We want people to come here to be told the right story by the right people, not so they can make some money off it, but so that we can pay tribute to the sacrifice of New Yorkers on September 11th," Mr. Pataki said.

http://www.nysun.com/article/15625

NYer

06-17-2005, 01:05 PM

This is what the 9/11 Memorial is supposed to be ... Always remember...

al-Canine

07-19-2005, 10:03 AM

Discovery Channel to air re-creation of 9/11 flight

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (AP) -- The Discovery Channel will air a re-creation of the terrorist hijacking of Flight 93 on the fourth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The program will be called "The Flight That Fought Back" and will include about 45 minutes of re-created scenes depicting what happened before the plane crashed in a Southwestern Pennsylvania field. Forty passengers and crew members were killed.

The show is being produced by London-based Brook Lapping Productions, which is getting cooperation on the project from United Airlines and some family members of those killed in the attack.

"A few people didn't want to have anything to do with it just because they just don't want to have anything to do with anything (relating to that day)," executive producer Phil Craig told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for Monday editions. "I think there will be some people who don't like it because their family member isn't highlighted, but when you're a filmmaker, you have to balance all sorts of things."

Flight 93 was en route to San Francisco from Newark, New Jersey, when it was hijacked and ultimately crashed about 65 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. The official 9/11 Commission report said the hijackers crashed the plane as passengers tried to take control of the cockpit.

Craig said the show isn't meant to be a definitive look at what happened that day, and there are still unanswered questions about what went on. For instance, the show will portray the hijackers getting into the cockpit but not how they got there, because that isn't known, he said.

"There are some dialogue scenes on the plane, 90 percent of these are based on tape evidence and the memories of people who spoke to people on the flight," he said. "We have invented a few lines of dialogue that's been based on consultation with people who knew them."

A short preview of the program was shown to media last week attending the Television Critics Association summer press tour. A screening will be held later this month for family members of those who were on the plane.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/TV/07/18/tv.flight93.discovery.ap/index.html

*

al-Canine

08-03-2005, 09:22 AM

New Safety Scare For Ground Zero Workers

The people who cleared out the site four years ago did face a major danger.

(CBS) NEW YORK In a CBS 2 exclusive, four years after the 9/11 attacks, a new danger has surfaced at Ground Zero. A safety equipment recall means many workers at the site who thought they were protected may not have been.

Four years ago, Rhonda Shearer voluntarily brought thousands of masks purchased with her own money to Ground Zero because the city didn’t have enough.

Now she has learned there was something seriously wrong with some of the respirator masks used by the men and women who worked at the site. These were masks that were supposed to keep them safe from the toxic smoke and dust. On Tuesday, she received a recall notice that one type of mask, the Survivair P-100, was tested and found to be defective. The notice says you must immediately stop using this product.

“Everybody from the ironworkers to the Port Authority police, to the NYPD units, the elite FDNY units, the sock units. They all had to use them. I remember very distinctly the blue facemask. It is a very distinct color and I’m an artist, but I do remember that they were down there in large quantities,” says Rhonda Shearer, Ground Zero volunteer.

It is the blue masks that are in question. An audit test by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health indicates a seal problem where the filter meets the mask allowing in three times the particular matter allowable under federal standards. John Dunne is a safety expert at the Uniformed Fire Officer’s Union.

“It probably explains why so many of our firefighters have come down with respiratory ailments ranging from lung cancer to asthma. This might explain it. The masks were defective,” says Dunne.

“I see in my mind’s eye, men and women putting these on and they failed to protect them,” says Shearer.

This recall applies to Survivair full and half mask respirators with P-100 filters. At this point, it is difficult to determine how many people were wearing the defective masks since the majority of the masks used in this area were donated.

http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_215055320.html

al-Canine

09-09-2005, 01:24 PM

9/11 Firefighters Told of Isolation Amid Disaster

By JIM DWYER and MICHELLE O'DONNELL

The firefighters had 29 minutes to get out of the World Trade Center or die. Inside the north tower, though, almost none of them realized how urgent it had become to leave.

They had no idea that less than 200 feet away, the south tower had already collapsed in a life-crushing, earth-shaking heap. Nor did the firefighters know that their commanders on the street, and police helicopter pilots in the sky, were warning that the north tower was on the edge of the same fate.

Until last month, the extent of their isolation from critical information in the final 29 minutes had officially been a secret. For three and a half years, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg refused to release the Fire Department's oral histories of Sept. 11, 2001. Under court order, however, 12,000 pages were made public in August.

On close review, those accounts give a bleaker version of events than either Mayor Bloomberg or former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani presented to the 9/11 Commission. Both had said that many of the firefighters who perished in the north tower realized the terrible danger of the moment but chose to stay in the building to rescue civilians.

They made no mention of what one oral history after another starkly relates: that firefighters in the building said they were "clueless" and knew "absolutely nothing" about the reality of the gathering crisis.

In stairwells or resting on floors, they could not see what had happened or hear clearly stated warnings. Even after the south tower fell, when few civilians remained in the lower floors of the north tower, throngs of firefighters lingered in the lobby and near the 19th floor as time ran down, the survivors said.

"That's the hard thing about it, knowing that there were so many other people still left in that lobby that could have got out," Firefighter Hugh Mettham of Ladder Company 18 said.

Although no official summary specifies where the 343 firefighters died in the rescue effort, a review by The New York Times of eyewitness accounts, dispatch records and federal reports suggests that about 200 perished in the north tower or at its foot.

Of 58 firefighters who escaped the building and gave oral histories, only four said they knew the south tower had already fallen. Just three said they had heard radio warnings that the north tower was also in danger of collapse. And some who had heard orders to evacuate debated whether they were meant for civilians or firefighters.

'Not in My Wildest Dream'

"Not in my wildest dream did I think those towers were coming down," said David Sandvik of Ladder 110.

The point made by both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Bloomberg to the 9/11 Commission - that firefighters died because they delayed their own departures while trying to save the lives of civilians and other firefighters - is, in one sense, fully corroborated by the oral histories.

Even so, measured against the waves of details in those accounts, those valiant last-minute efforts explain just a fraction of the firefighter deaths in the north tower, a small vivid thread running through the broader fabric of the day.

No one in the Fire Department has tried to use the oral histories to reconstruct the events that led to its human losses that day. Although more than 500 interviews were conducted, just about 10 percent of them involved people who had been inside the north tower. (No firefighters in the south tower, which fell first, are known to have survived its collapse.) Many who escaped from the north tower did not give histories. Few follow-up questions were asked of those who did.

The ragged character of the records does not yield a clear explanation for the isolation of the rescuers within the building, and whether it was because of radio failure, a loss of command and control or flaws in the Fire Department's management structure. Some firefighters described receiving a radio message to evacuate; others used strong language to characterize the communications gear as useless.

Despite their spottiness, the oral histories fill out incomplete chapters in the sprawling chronicle of what happened in New York that morning, much of which took place far beyond the sight of television cameras and their global audience.

Firefighters wondered aloud how they could have attacked a fire reached at the end of a four-hour climb. They marveled at the decency of office workers coming down the stairs, at the bellowing, dust-coated chief on the sidewalk who herded the firefighters clear of the collapse zone, at the voices of experience that brooked no hesitation.

The final moments of the department's senior leaders also rise from the histories as a struggle to rescue dozens of firefighters trapped in the Marriott Hotel after the south tower's collapse. As they worked, the north tower crashed down, killing, among others, Chief of Department Peter Ganci, First Deputy Commissioner William Feehan, and Battalion Chiefs Ray Downey and Lawrence Stack.

Precisely 29 minutes earlier, at 9:59 a.m., the fall of the south tower shook the north tower and stopped the slow, muscular tide of rescuers. By then, the north tower firefighters had been on the move for more than an hour. Each carrying about 100 pounds of gear, only a few had climbed much higher than the 30th floor. Some recalled hearing radio messages from individual firefighters who had made it as far as the 40's.

The calamity next door - the collapse of one of the biggest buildings in the world - was heard but not seen; felt but not understood. The staircases had no windows. Radio communication was erratic. Few firefighters even knew a second plane had struck the other building.

From the street, Chief Ganci twice ordered firefighters to evacuate the north tower, according to Chief Albert Turi, but it was not clear who inside, if anyone, heard him. Even Chief Turi, standing a few feet away, said it had not come over his radio.

Still, many decided to leave after hearing a rumor of a partial collapse some floors above them, or because they assumed another plane had hit.

On the 37th floor, Daniel Sterling, of Engine Company 24, had stopped with firefighters from Ladder 5 and Engine 33 - who did not survive - when the building rattled. A moment later, Firefighter Sterling said, Chief John Paolillo appeared.

"He thought there was a partial collapse of the 65th floor of our building and that we should drop everything and leave," Firefighter Sterling said.

'Get Up and Go, Go, Go'

A few floors below, around the 30th or 31st floor, Chief Paolillo was spotted again. "He was yelling, 'Leave your equipment and just get up and go, go, go,' like that," Lt. Brian Becker of Engine 28 said. Chief Paolillo died.

The word to leave was passed to the 27th floor, where many firefighters were resting, including Michael Wernick of Ladder 9. "I know that there was no urgency at that point trying to get out of the building," he said.

"Do you think anyone around you was aware that the other building collapsed?" an interviewer asked.

"No," he replied.

One exception was Firefighter John Drumm with Engine 39, who said that on the 22nd floor, he heard a transmission: "Imminent collapse of the north tower. Immediate evacuation."

Then he made a point repeated in nearly every interview: "From what I saw on the way down, very, very few civilians were left."

Firefighter Sterling said, "There was nobody in the staircase on the way down."

Lieutenant Becker said, "There were no civilians to speak of in our stairway. There were a couple of stragglers being helped by somebody or other."

Probationary Firefighter Robert Byrne of Engine 24, working his first fire, reached the 37th floor. "I remember going up the stairs took us over the hour," he said. "Getting down the stairs took maybe 10 minutes, not even."

Also on 37, Capt. John Fischer of Ladder 20 discovered that two of his company had gone up ahead. "He was screaming at them for them to get back down," said Lt. Gregg Hansson of Engine 24, who was with Captain Fischer. "Then he went up to get them." Captain Fischer and his men died in the collapse.

Firefighter William Green of Engine 6 was one of the few who said he knew the other tower had fallen. On the 37th floor, "someone opened the door from the 36th floor and said Two World Trade Center just fell down," he said. Over the radio, he heard "Mayday, evacuate."

Slowed by firefighters entering the staircase below him, he switched sides. "In hindsight, I think that's what saved my life," he said.

He did not dawdle. "Around the fourth floor, I passed this civilian - he might have been 450 pounds," Firefighter Green said. "He was taking baby steps like this. I walked right past him like all the other firemen. I felt like a heel when I'm walking past him, and I'm thinking to myself, what does this guy think of me?"

Yet other chronicles show that a very heavy man in that location was eventually dragged to safety by rescuers who included Firefighter Pat Kelly of Rescue 18. Having helped move the man outside, Firefighter Kelly was the only member of his squad to survive. He did not give an oral history.

Elsewhere, crowds of firefighters lingered.

Lt. William Walsh of Ladder 1 said he heard a Mayday to evacuate when he was around the 19th floor, but did not know that a plane had struck the other building, much less that it had collapsed. As he descended, he saw firefighters who were not moving.

No Rush to Get Out

"They were hanging out in the stairwell and in the occupancy and they were resting," Lieutenant Walsh said. "I told them, 'Didn't you hear the Mayday? Get out.' They were saying, 'Yeah, we'll be right with you, Lou.' They just didn't give it a second thought. They just continued with their rest."

Three court officers reported seeing as many as 100 firefighters resting on the 19th floor minutes before the building fell, but they were not questioned by the Fire Department.

Mayor Bloomberg, in a letter to the 9/11 Commission, wrote: "We know for a fact that many firefighters continued their rescue work despite hearing Maydays and evacuation orders and knowing the south tower had fallen."

Asked to reconcile this statement with the oral histories, the city Law Department cited the accounts of eight firefighters and said that each of them surely had spread the word about the collapse of the other tower. In fact, in six of those oral histories, the firefighters specifically said they did not know the other building had fallen.

In the lobby, just yards from safety, survivors said that uncertainty doomed many firefighters.

John Moribito of Ladder 10 said there were maybe "40 or 50 members that were standing fast in the lobby." Roy Chelsen of Engine 28 said, "There were probably 20 or 30 guys down in the lobby mulling around." The interviewer asked, "They weren't trying to get out?"

"They were just - no, no," Firefighter Chelsen recalled.

His officer, Lieutenant Becker said, "There was chaos in the lobby. It was random people running around. There was no structure. There were no crowds. There was no - no operation of any kind going on, nothing. There was no evacuation."

Firefighters with Ladder 11 and Engine 4 came down together to the lobby, but not all made it out. "Everyone is standing there, waiting to hear what's going to happen next, what's going on," Frank Campagna of Ladder 11 said.

His company left, and a moment later, "it came down on top of us," Firefighter Campagna said. "Four Engine obviously didn't make it out. They were with us the whole time, so I'm assuming they were still in the lobby at that time."

The firefighters of Ladder 9 lingered briefly, and most were clear of the building for less than a minute when it fell. Firefighter Wernick remembered seeing two members of his company in the lobby, Jeffrey Walz and Gerard Baptiste. They did not escape. The funeral for Firefighter Baptiste, whose remains were identified this year, was held on Wednesday.

A Figure Coated in Dust

Over and over, firefighters who had left the building in those final minutes, bewildered by the sudden retreat, the ruined lobby, the near-empty street, mentioned a chief covered in the dust of the first collapse, standing just outside the north tower on West Street.

Some knew his name: Deputy Assistant Chief Albert Turi.

"He was screaming, 'Just keep moving. Don't stop,' " Firefighter Thomas Orlando of Engine 65 recalled, adding, "I still didn't know the south tower collapsed." Chief Turi, he said, "saved an awful lot of people." The chief has since retired.

In blunt speech, free of the mythic glaze that varnished much 9/11 discourse, some firefighters wondered why an endless line of rescuers had been sent to an unquenchable fire that raged 1,000 feet up.

"I think if this building had collapsed an hour later, we would have had a thousand firemen in there," said Firefighter Timothy Marmion of Engine 16, who carried a woman on a stretcher from the staircase to an ambulance.

"If it would have collapsed three hours later," he said, "we would have had 10,000 firemen in those buildings."

Had the buildings not fallen, the gear-laden firefighters would have needed about four hours - almost as long as it takes to fly across the country - to reach workers trapped on the high floors.

"We were just as much victims as everybody that was in the building," Firefighter Derek Brogan of Engine 5 said.

"We didn't have a chance to do anything," he added. "We didn't have a chance to put the fire out, which was really all we were trying to do."

Aron Pilhofer provided computer analysis for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/09records.html?

NYer

09-09-2005, 10:01 PM

September 09, 2005
Clueless Memorial Design, Take 2

The designers of the Flight 93 memorial at the impact site unveiled their effort yesterday. In what seems to be a typical case of cluelessness among memorial designers, the site will prominently feature the religious symbol of the attackers themselves (via Michelle Malkin): see below

Some might argue that the design's most prominent feature is a coincidence, but the title of it argues against that interpretation:
It will serve as a living tribute. With each wind, each breeze, a set of chimes housed in a 93-foot tower will create a different song in memory of the 40 people who sacrificed their lives trying to save the lives of others.

Four years after United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a reclaimed strip mine near Shanksville, Somerset County, on Sept. 11, 2001, the design that will serve as the national memorial was unveiled here yesterday in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Hall of Flags.

"Crescent of Embrace" will feature a Tower of Voices, containing 40 wind chimes -- one for each passenger and crew member who died -- and two stands of red maple trees that will line a walkway caressing the natural bowl shape of the land. Forty separate groves of red and sugar maples will be planted behind the crescent, and a black slate wall will mark the edge of the crash site, where the remains of those who died now rest.

Quite frankly, we don't need a "Crescent of Embrace". We got enough of an embrace of the Crescent on 9/11. The maple trees and the wind chimes sound beautiful, but the crescent suggests that either the designers had no idea about the event they intended to memorialize, or that they want to turn this memorial into a multicultural scolding for America in the same way that the World Trade Center memorial designers attempted earlier.

Can you imagine the outcry from the multiculturalists and the ACLU had the design incorporated a cross or a Star of David in honor of the victims? Why should we tolerate the Crescent that, inadvertently or deliberately, honors the terrorists?

As long as that crescent remains in the design, I'm not donating a red cent to the memorial. I urge you to tell the National Parks Service and the Secretary of the Interior to rethink their plans.

www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/

NYer

09-11-2005, 03:43 PM

To all my fallen brethren, I love you forever ...

Casey

09-11-2005, 06:40 PM

Americans remember September 11 under Katrina’s shadow
(AFP)

11 September 2005

NEW YORK - The United States paused on Sunday in solemn and tearful remembrance of the horror of the September 11 attacks four years ago in ceremonies overshadowed by the death and destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

On the lawn of the White House, President George W. Bush led the nation in a minute of silence that began at 8:46 am (1246 GMT) the time when the first of four airliners hijacked by Al Qaeda members slammed into New York’s World Trade Center.

A grim echo of that day was provided by a suspected American member of Al Qaeda who threatened attacks against Los Angeles and the Australian city of Melbourne in a videotape shown on Sunday by ABC television.

The threat was made by Adam Gadahn, a US national who converted to Islam and became a radical supporter of Osama bin Laden, ABC said.

At Ground Zero, the focus of remembrance events, the moment’s silence was followed by brothers and sisters of the victims, their voices choked with emotion, reading out the names of the 2,749 people who died in the attacks on the twin trade center towers.

“Again, we are a city that meets in sadness,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who also paid tribute to those killed in the recent terror attacks in London.

Hundreds of relatives gathered at the site, many of them holding pictures of their loved ones with messages like: “Always missed, never forgotten,” and “God bless my son.”

During the roll call of the dead, family members descended into the pit of Ground Zero to lay flowers in two small reflecting pools representing the footprints of the twin towers.

This year, the thoughts of many Americans were focused on other victims: the estimated one million left homeless and the thousands feared killed by the hurricane which devastated the US Gulf coast nearly two weeks ago.

“To Americans suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, our deepest sympathies go out to you, this day,” Bloomberg said.

Bush, under fire for the sluggish federal response to the disaster, was scheduled to visit the hurricane-devastated region later in the day.

Both tragedies served to highlight the vulnerability of the world superpower, but where September 11 forged a sense of national unity out of trauma and anger, Katrina highlighted divisions of race and class and triggered accusations of government indifference.

Ceremonies were also held at the Pentagon for the 184 people who died in the attack there, and in the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania where a fourth airliner crashed after passengers staged a rebellion against the hijackers.

“They were innocent lives taken by incredible evil,” US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said in Shanksville. “But these 40 brave patriots also began a call to action that helped turn our nation’s darkest moment into one of our finest hours.”

In Washington, several thousand people took part in a Pentagon-sponsored “Freedom Walk” to honor US troops in Iraq.

“We are here to support the United States of America,” said Alan McComb, 49, who came with his wife for the march, which critics denounced as a stunt to build support for the Iraq war.

“We believe in this country, we believe in what it supports and what it gives to other countries in the world,” McComb said.

Among the senior officials attending the Ground Zero ceremony were New York Governor George Pataki and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who read a work by 19th century British poet Christina Rossetti.

Later in the evening, two powerful spotlights were to send two shafts of light up into the night sky to symbolise the fallen structures.

Since the emotional intensity of the first September 11 anniversary, subsequent annual memorials have aimed for a more low-key, personal tone and other events once cancelled or postponed have crept back onto the calendar.

Three years ago, television networks devoted their programming to a day of remembrance. This Sunday they offered live coverage of the start of the American football season, including the opening game of the New York Giants, and the season premiere of the cult cartoon sitcom “The Simpsons”.

Broadway shows were open as usual and the fashion industry converged on Manhattan’s Bryant Park for the third day of the annual Fashion Week.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2005/September/theworld_September326.xml&section=theworld

NYer

09-12-2005, 09:15 AM

A personal connection

BY INDRANI SEN
STAFF WRITER

When New York Police Sgt. Martin Steiger tells where he's been and what he's seen in the last four years, the images have a haunting familiarity.

Dusty bases in the deserts of Iraq filled with fresh-faced soldiers, scared and brave. Command centers in Kuwait, detainee operations in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib prison. The lost splendor of a dictator's palace bombed to bits. An Iraqi child's smile.

And further back: the smoking rubble at Ground Zero. Those long moments of silence as a body was carried out. A severed arm emerging from the debris at the Staten Island landfill.

And even further, on the morning of Sept. 11: Racing to his car, driving on the shoulder of the Grand Central Parkway, NYPD badge held out the window for clearance. The dawning realization of how little could be done. The silence that filled the city for days.

Steiger, 43, of Miller Place, arrived moments after the second tower fell, and spent the next two months working at Ground Zero and at the landfill. But that was only the beginning of his journey.

In January 2002, Steiger was activated by his Army Reserve unit, the Uniondale-based 800 Military Police Brigade, and the next month he was deployed to Kuwait as a military police captain. Over two years he served first in Afghanistan, helping to set up detainee camps, and then in Iraq, managing operations at a prisoner of war camp and helping convert Abu Ghraib into a usable facility. He came back to his wife and three children as a major, with a Bronze Star and a back injury from a vehicle accident. After a year of surgery and rehabilitation, he returned last week to the NYPD.

For Steiger, the horror of Sept. 11 has not receded. The events of that day have buttressed his faith in the purpose of the military missions he took part in and in the war in Iraq. But as polls show a growing percentage of Americans disapprove of the war, and as mothers of slain soldiers such as Cindy Sheehan gather a growing movement, Steiger finds himself feeling that America, in four short years, has forgotten 9/11.

"People, unless they're directly involved," he said, "they really don't care."

A month after the Iraq invasion, Steiger walked into what he suspects was a terrorist training camp in the southern part of the country and saw a mural of the Twin Towers with smoke pouring out of the top floors.

"I was disgusted," he said. "It was, like, jaw-dropping. We're a unit from New York. We were there the day the towers fell. We're directly connected to this. This is why we're here."

Steiger, instinctively the police officer, took photographs of the mural. He tried, unsuccessfully, to get military intelligence to investigate the camp. And after he returned to New York at the end of 2003, Steiger called the offices of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States -- the so-called 9/11 commission.

"I said, 'I have these photographs. You may want to look at them,' " he said. "I left my name and number and they never called me back."

Still, to Steiger, the photograph is a precious link between Iraq and Sept. 11.

"That one photograph legitimizes what we did over there," he said. "That proves there was a terrorist element training in Iraq. That's my feeling. Those photographs really solidified it for me."

Steiger doesn't talk much about what he saw on Sept. 11, said his father, Henry Steiger, 67, of Ridge, a retired New York City firefighter and airman.

"I'm sure he had some dreams about it," he said. "He didn't tell me, but I just have to think that he probably did."

Henry Steiger has seen, however, how it bothers his son when the wars he fought in are criticized.

"Every soldier wants to feel that he's doing the right thing," he said. "When you start hearing the public saying there's no justification for it, and you were over there, and injured, and your life was disrupted for three years, I have to believe that it has some negative effect on a soldier, whether it's my son or anyone."

Martin Steiger blames the media and political opponents of the Bush administration for painting a negative picture of a war effort he sees as the only reasonable response to the events of Sept. 11.

"I think Americans have a short memory, and they want things done quick -- just go in there, kick their ass, get it over," he said. "It doesn't work like that."

The rhetoric used by some in the anti-war movement irritates Steiger.

"They talk about the soldiers as if they're ignorant and they don't know what's going on," he said. "Don't tell me I don't know what I'm doing over there, or I'm being brainwashed."

As for those who say they support the troops but not the war, Steiger said, "I don't want to hear that. As a soldier, I want to know that you support me, and that you support what I'm doing over there. And that I'm doing the right thing."

But what if there was no real connection between 9/11 and Iraq? What if Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks? Asked those questions, Steiger didn't hesitate in his reply.

"If they could show, without a shadow of a doubt, that he wasn't producing weapons of mass destruction, that he was just a horrible leader, that there were no terrorist connections," Steiger said, "then my thought would be not to go over there."

Nobody has made that case strongly enough to convince Steiger. And being where he's been, seeing what he's seen, is all the evidence he needs of a connection.

"It's not just a gut feeling on its own," he said. "When you're over there, it's the things you see. The training camps, the murals. When you look at this stuff, you get a sense. It feels like there's definitely a connection to terrorism."

From when he first went overseas after Sept. 11, Steiger carried a shard of marble flooring and a piece of glass from the World Trade Center. "It wasn't always in my pocket, but I had it with me," he said. "The reminder and the connection, it was always there."

In Iraq, he found himself one day in the bombed-out shell of one of Saddam's palaces. He bent down and picked up a piece of marble, which he placed alongside the pieces he brought from New York.

"The strange thing," he said, "is I never put them in the same bag. Subconsciously, they didn't deserve to be in the same bag."

For U.S. Army Sgt. Christopher Whitford, who grew up in Staten Island and met Steiger in Afghanistan, the events of four years ago were even more personal: He lost his brother, city firefighter Mark Whitford.

When he encounters other soldiers whose spirits were flagging, Whitford, who is also an NYPD officer and spent weeks at Ground Zero, takes out the picture of Mark that he keeps in his wallet.

"I show them the picture and I let them know that he had twin sons, 13 months old when he died," Whitford said. "Timothy and Matthew. And I just remind people that he could still be here if this never happened."

When Steiger first went to Kuwait and Afghanistan, he felt that he, as an NYPD officer, came to represent that connection to 9/11, reminding his fellow soldiers why they were risking their lives in a hostile land.

"A lot of people would say, 'Let's do it for the FD! Let's do it for the NYPD!' " he recalled.

In Iraq, Steiger said, "It all started wearing off."

Steiger continued his playful competition with a city firefighter in his reserve unit, trying to place the NYPD flag higher than the FDNY flag in buildings they occupied. They did it for morale and to remind each other why they were there. But it seemed to Steiger that for many, the 9/11 attacks had already begun to recede in memory.

Steiger will never forget, and says he wouldn't hesitate to go back to the war if called upon to do so. But back in Miller Place, contemplating a new career as an art teacher after he retires in a couple years from the Police Department, Steiger does sometimes wonder whether, if he were in Iraq today, 9/11 would still be his motivation.

"You know what?" he says. "If I was still there, maybe it would have worn off for me, too."

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-listei12,0,5866472,print.story?coll=ny-li-bigpix

al-Canine

09-27-2005, 11:45 AM

A Fresh Reminder of Sept. 11

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Not down near bedrock in the depths of ground zero. Not across the waters of Upper New York Bay at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. But 536 feet in the sky over Lower Manhattan - that is where construction workers have found what may be the newest evidence of 9/11's appalling human toll, four years after the fact.

On Thursday and again yesterday, even as a debate raged far below over the appropriateness of building the International Freedom Center on the World Trade Center memorial site, workers preparing to dismantle the former Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street came across several bone fragments in the rooftop gravel.

The fragments, fewer than 10 in number and none much larger than two inches, were immediately turned over by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which owns 130 Liberty Street, to the city's office of the chief medical examiner.

"We don't know if those bones are human," said Ellen Borakove, director of public affairs for the medical examiner. Samples of the fragments will probably be examined under a microscope. She said she did not know how soon the results would be available.

Three coin-size bone fragments were found on the roof in August 2002.

If the newly discovered fragments are human, it is possible that DNA could be extracted and permit identification of the victims. Through August, the medical examiner had recovered 19,964 human remains from the attack, permitting the identification of 1,594 of the 2,749 victims.

Two World Trade Center, the south tower, stood almost directly opposite 130 Liberty Street. Its collapse caused winds of tornado force and an impact that shook the ground like an earthquake. Pieces of the tower's columns crashed into the facade of the bank building, carving a 15-story gash. More than 1,700 windows were shattered.

As the development corporation prepares to dismantle the 41-story building, the principal concern has been with the abatement and removal of hazardous contaminants, primarily asbestos. But the new discovery - if it turns out to be of human remains - is a reminder just how sensitive the work will be.

"Protocols are in place to ensure that any remains or artifacts are properly handled and turned over to the appropriate authorities," said John P. Gallagher, the communications director for the development corporation. "It is important that any potential human remains be treated with the utmost dignity, respect and care."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/nyregion/27deutsche.html

al-Canine

10-12-2005, 09:23 AM

Another creepy article... but this does raise an interesting question... how DID the FBI obtain DNA of the terrorists?

9/11 parts split by good and evil

BY PAUL D. COLFORD
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

The city scientist who led the effort to identify 9/11 victims said officials made sure to keep the remains of the three terrorists identified away from those of the innocents killed.

The remains of the killers were removed from the medical examiner's makeshift memorial park on the East Side and "put in another place," Robert Shaler, former head of the medical examiner's forensic unit, told the Daily News.

In "Who They Were," his new inside account of the identification effort, Shaler writes that he believes the terrorists identified were in the back of the planes - and not the monsters who plowed the jets into the towers.

"I still doubt the pilots have anything remaining to collect or analyze," he writes. "Likely, they were vaporized along with many of the innocent victims."

Shaler recounts with fresh detail the scientific challenge and personal anguish that marked the more than three years it took to process the bodies and 20,000 body parts recovered from Ground Zero.

Though the remains of 1,594 of the 2,749 WTC victims have so far been identified by name, Shaler makes clear the terrorists were a case apart.

To begin with, Shaler's office could not identify the three by name. That's because the 10 DNA profiles used to make the first matches were supplied by the FBI without names attached.

"No names, just a K code, which is how the FBI designates 'knowns,' or specimens it knows the origins of," Shaler wrote. "Of course, we had no direct knowledge of how the FBI obtained the terrorists' DNA."

Terrorist remains were separated from the others, to allay families' concern that the killers might someday be commingled with the unidentified remnants of their victims, due to rest at the Trade Center site. Shaler said he didn't know where the terrorists' remains are now but assumed they are kept somewhere in the city.

"We didn't say where we put the terrorists' remains because it's not important," the medical examiner's spokeswoman, Ellen Borakove, said yesterday, adding she did not know the location herself.

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/354992p-302463c.html

Hound

10-12-2005, 10:21 AM

* Today, 10/12 is the 5th anniversary of the suicide attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 and wounding 36.

She was repaired and re-launched three days after 9/11.

NYer

10-12-2005, 11:48 AM

And the US response to this act of war was ...

http://www.80s.com/saveferris/images/cast/stein.jpg

Anyone?

al-Canine

10-12-2005, 12:02 PM

And the US response to this act of war was ...

http://www.80s.com/saveferris/images/cast/stein.jpg

Anyone?

Gee whiz, ya got me... but the dog on his tie looks a little like Hound's regular avatar. :)

C'mon, NYer, give us a hint...

NYer

10-12-2005, 12:19 PM

Gee whiz, ya got me... but the dog on his tie looks a little like Hound's regular avatar. :)

C'mon, NYer, give us a hint...

Bueller?
Bueller?
Bueller?

al-Canine

10-12-2005, 01:20 PM

Bueller?
Not Bueller? Kerry! :add09:

But seriously, NYer, thanks for the reminder. :)

OCTOBER 19, 2000:

Commissioner Kerrey Called for the Removal of Saddam in Response to Cole Bombing

Posted Apr 8, 2004

When former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D.-Neb.) questioned National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about the Bush Administration's reaction to the U.S.S. Cole bombing before the 9/11 Commission, Dr. Rice reminded the senator of, among other things, a speech he gave regarding the proper action for the U.S. to take in response to the bombing. His suggested response to the bombing was to take out Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The following is an excerpted transcript of the speech regarding the U.S.S. Cole bombing given by Sen. Kerrey on October 19, 2000. In the Congressional Record, the speech is given the title: "IRAQ."

----------

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, at Pier 12 in the Norfolk Navy Base, along with the Presiding Officer in Norfolk, VA, I joined 10,000 others to mourn and to pay our respects to the families of 17 U.S. Navy sailors who were killed or who are missing following the explosion that ripped into the portside of U.S.S. Cole as she was preparing to set anchor in the Yemen Port of Aden.

It was one week ago today at fifteen past midnight that a routine port call became a violent killing of 17 Americans, the wounding of 34 more, and the disabling of a billion dollar destroyer…

While we await the results of a combined U.S.-Yemeni effort to find out who was responsible for this attack, let me challenge the idea that the attack on the Cole was a pure act of terrorism or criminal action. In my opinion it is not. In my opinion, it is a part of a military strategy designed to defeat the United States as we attempt to accomplish a serious and vital mission.

This is the third in a series of violent attacks on the United States dating back to the car bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia at 10 pm, on Tuesday, June 25, 1996, that killed 19 United States Air Force Airmen and wounded hundreds more. The second attack occurred on August 7, 1998, when U.S. Embassies in Dar es-Salam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya were bombed. These attacks wounded more than 5,000 and killed 224, including twelve Americans who were killed in the Nairobi blast.

I believe all three of these incidents should be considered as connected to our containment policy against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The Cole was heading for the Persian Gulf to enforce an embargo that was authorized by the United Nations Security Council following the end of the Gulf War in 1991…

Contrary to popular belief, the military strategy to deal with Iraq did not end with the February 28, 1991, ceasefire. It has continued ever since with considerable cost and risk to U.S. forces. In addition to the embargo, the United States and British pilots have maintained no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq designed to protect the Kurds and Shia from becoming victims of Saddam Hussein's wrath. The purpose of both the embargo and the no-fly zones is to "contain" Iraq so that Saddam Hussein does not become a threat in the region again.

Unfortunately, this containment object was doomed from the beginning. And while we have begun to change our policy from containment to replacement of the dictator, change has been too slow. The slowness and uncertainty of change has increased the risk for every military person who receives orders to carry out some part of the containment mission.

There are three reasons to abandon the containment policy and aggressively pursue the replacement of Saddam Hussein with a democratically elected government. First, it has not worked; Saddam Hussein has violated the spirit and intent of UN Security Council Resolutions. Second, he is a growing threat to our allies in the region. Third, he is a growing threat to the liberty and freedom of 20 million people living in Iraq.

As to the first reason, under the terms of paragraph Eight (8) of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 which passed on April 3, 1991, Iraq accepted the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless of its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons program. Under the terms of paragraph Nine (9), Iraq was to submit to the Secretary-General "within fifteen days of the adoption of the present resolution, a declaration of the locations, amounts and types of all items specified in paragraph 8 and agree to urgent, on-site inspection" as specified in the resolution.

From the get-go, Saddam Hussein began to violate this resolution. Over the past decade, he has slowly but surely moved to a point where today no weapons inspectors are allowed inside his country. As a consequence, he has been able to re-build much of his previous capability and is once again able to harass his neighbors. All knowledgeable observers view Iraq's threat to the region as becoming larger not smaller.

As to the third reason--his treatment of his own people--there is no worse violator of human rights than Saddam Hussein. The people of Iraq are terrorized almost constantly into compliance with his policies. His jails are among the worst in the world. His appeal for ending sanctions on account of the damage the embargo is doing to his people rings hollow as the food and medicine purchased under the Oil-for-Food Program goes undistributed. Desperately needed supplies sitting in Iraqi warehouses while construction continues on lavish new palaces demonstrates that Saddam Hussein has no real interest in the welfare of his people. Rather, he maintains their misery as means to make political points.

If these reasons do not persuade, consider what happened in the other two cases when the United States was attacked. In 1996 we sent an FBI team to Saudia Arabia to investigate Khobar Towers. The investigation led to improving security on other embassies but no other action was taken. In time we have forgotten Khobar. In 1998 following the attack on our embassies in East Africa we sent Tomahawk missiles to bomb a chemical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, and Osama Bin Laden's training compound in Afghanistan. Neither had the decisive impact we sought and may--in the case of Sudan--have been counterproductive.

For all these reasons, I hope we will direct the anger and desire for vengeance we feel away from Yemen and towards Saddam Hussein. I hope we will begin to plan a military strategy with our allies that will lead to his removal and replacement with a democratically elected government. This would allow us to end our northern and southern no-fly zone operations, remove our forces from Saudi Arabia, and cease the naval patrols of the Persian Gulf. I can think of no more fitting tribute to the 17 sailors lost on-board the Cole than completing our mission and helping the Iraqi people achieve freedom and democracy.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.
Copyright © 2004 HUMAN EVENTS. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=3541

NYer

10-12-2005, 01:52 PM

Rather "old school" for the head of The New School. Nevertheless, Kerrey was only reiterating US policy. (http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/libera.htm)Actions, however, speak louder than words.

al-Canine

12-30-2005, 11:05 AM

Loans Meant for 9/11 Businesses Went Elsewhere :mad:

Report Finds Far-Flung Use of 9/11 Loans

By DANNY HAKIM

ALBANY, Dec. 28 - The Small Business Administration allowed special post-9/11 loans to go to Dunkin' Donuts and Subway franchises and thousands of other businesses nationwide without ensuring that they had been financially hurt by the attacks, according to a report released Wednesday by the agency's inspector general.

The loan program has come under criticism because lenders profited by being able to give loans to a far-flung array of businesses, from Florida to Alaska, after the terrorist attacks. Besides Dunkin' Donuts and Subway, the businesses included chiropractors in Texas and Iowa, a Georgia liquor store, a Wisconsin orthodontist, a Nevada tanning salon and a funeral home in Oregon. There were also other fast-food restaurants like Dairy Queen and Papa John's Pizza.

For the most part, the report did not place blame on the loan recipients because in most cases the businesses did not even know they were receiving any special 9/11-related aid. Rather, the report raised questions about the lending practices of financial institutions involved in the program, the oversight by the Small Business Administration and the pressure Congress placed on the agency to jump-start the program after a slow start.

The agency responded by reassuring lenders that they would not be second-guessed over their decision on who would get the loans, said the report, which was released in Washington.

The problems in the program are an example of how, in the desire to provide economic assistance as quickly as possible after the 9/11 attacks, in some cases funds flowed to businesses that did not really need it.

"This is deeply disturbing," Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat and minority leader of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, said in a statement in response to the inspector general's findings. "Congress provided loans to help businesses hurt by the Sept. 11 attacks, not to be used as an accounting gimmick to cover up this administration's failure to provide for small businesses."

The report examined 59 loans and found that in 85 percent of them lenders did not do the required paperwork to establish that the borrowers had been affected in some way by the attacks. Some loans were granted to businesses that changed ownership after the attacks, while other lenders said businesses had been harmed by the attacks when financial records indicated that they had not.

Senator Olympia J. Snowe, the Maine Republican who requested the investigation and chairwoman of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, said in a statement that "these initial findings are troubling" and that the committee would continue its own investigation.

A spokesman for the Small Business Administration said the agency's administrator, Hector V. Barreto, was not available for comment. In a statement, Mr. Barreto, who has led the agency since 2001 and who also requested the investigation into the loan program, said his agency had put the program in place "as Congress intended." He added, "Furthermore, the program in no way impacted those eligible to receive low-interest loans through our separate disaster loan program following the terrorist attacks."

The loans were formally called Supplemental Terrorist Activity Relief loans. About 8,200 loans totaling $3.7 billion were approved, though only roughly 7,000 were disbursed.

In the case of Dunkin' Donuts, for example, 29 franchises in nine states received loans worth nearly $22 million, according to data provided by the Small Business Administration. Fifteen loans went to franchises in New York or New Jersey, and others went to stores in Arlington, Tex.; Essex Junction, Vt.; and Woodstock, Ga., among other places.

The supplemental loans are different from disaster relief loans, special low-interest loans provided directly by the S.B.A. to aid businesses directly affected by the terrorist attacks and generally close to the attack sites.

Congress set up the supplemental loan program with a much broader intent, to aid businesses nationwide that claimed to be "adversely affected" by the attacks, though the report suggests that it was never precisely clear what that meant. The loans benefit lenders because the loans reduced by half a fee that the lenders usually must pay the S.B.A. for guaranteeing loans to businesses that do not have sufficient collateral.

The program, which required an appropriation of only $75 million to guarantee the number of loans projected to default, ended in 2003.

Officials with the agency say the loans were intended by Congress to provide a national economic stimulus that could be obtained by almost any small business.

Two former agency officials said in comments included in the report that "what we did during those dark days after Sept. 11, 2001, was play very small roles in an effort to try to keep our economy from faltering."

Copyright 2005 | The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/29/nyregion/29dunkin.html?

al-Canine

12-30-2005, 11:08 AM

This is an outrage! :mad:

Restaurant Damaged in 9/11 GOT ZERO

By GEOFF EARLE and IAN BISHOP

WASHINGTON — Steamers Landing owner Jan Fried, who was turned down for a small-business loan after the 9/11 attacks devastated her restaurant just blocks from Ground Zero, was steaming herself yesterday.

Fried had just read in The Post how businesses across the country that had no connection to the terror attacks — a golf course in Texas, a candy store in Illinois and a tanning salon in Las Vegas, just to name a few — easily secured huge loans under a special post-Sept. 11 federal program that was supposed to be for companies economically harmed by the attacks.

"It infuriates us, totally," Fried said. "How did they get it so easily when we here in New York couldn't get it?"

After 9/11, Fried was forced to close her badly damaged seafood eatery and needed some cash to get it open again seven months later.

The feds had dispatched scores of loan officials to the city, but when Fried applied for a loan from the Small Business Administration, she was told to take a hike.

With her Battery Park City business decimated after the terror attacks, it was impossible for Fried to predict when it might recover — and the feds said no dice.

The feds demanded Fried's business partner put up his home for collateral, something his condo board wouldn't allow.

Fried's rejection by the SBA was made all the more galling when The Post reported yesterday on how small businesses thousands of miles away — including a slew of Dunkin' Donuts franchises — got hefty loans without even meeting basic government requirements.

The revelations of lax government oversight were contained in a shocking report by the inspector general of the federal SBA on the Supplemental Terrorist Activity Relief (STAR) Loan Program.

The inspectors concluded that as many as 85 percent of the businesses that got the loans failed to prove they were harmed by the attacks — and many had actually experienced an increase in business during that time.

The inspectors also found that SBA didn't provide enough oversight, and that lenders failed to keep documents in their files that showed businesses were harmed.

The SBA says it administered the program as Congress intended, and that qualified people around Ground Zero were able to get low-interest disaster loans under a different program.

Fried brought up a series of articles in The Post about how Dunkin' Donuts shops across the country got 9/11 loans totaling more than $20 million under the program.

"I just think $20 million to just Dunkin' Donuts is very strange," Fried said.

"A lot of people down here would have loved to have seen some of that money — including us — and an SBA loan would have been very nice at the time," she said.

Luckily, Fried, 56, was able to get a bank loan on her own, and after spending $600,000, reopened Steamers Landing, which offers moderately priced pizza, pastas, and seafood — and boasts outdoor patios with Hudson River views that can't be beat.

The restaurant's summer business has returned, and more office workers are returning for the restaurant's signature crab cakes.

"We're one of the lucky ones," said Fried.

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/60613.htm

al-Canine

12-31-2005, 11:18 PM

Four Years On, a Cabin's-Eye View of 9/11

By HEATHER TIMMONS
IVER HEATH, England

WITH a violent shudder, the front of a reconstructed Boeing 757 pitches toward the ground. Actors struggle not to slide from their seats, some screaming, one chanting, "Oh, my God." A camera flits from seat to seat, stopping to focus on individual vignettes of terror, as an actor playing a hijacker barks, "Sit down!" over the loudspeaker.

After almost universally shying away from the topic for the past four years, Hollywood is turning in full force to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Painful memories, all-too-familiar news clips and personal stories are now being transformed into big-screen dramas, as studios look for commercial value in the still-fresh trauma, while prompting the mass audience to revisit its thoughts and feelings.

This spring will bring the release of the first feature film to focus specifically on the attacks: "Flight 93," from the director Paul Greengrass, based on the hijacking that led to the crash of a United Airlines plane into a field in Somerset County, Pa.

The movie, to be released by Universal Pictures, is being filmed in Pinewood Studios (the site of many James Bond films). The filmmakers said "Flight 93" had the cooperation of all the families of the passengers who died on the flight. Many agreed to participate because they felt that previous attempts to document the crash focused on just the few passengers who had been able to make calls to their family members.

Mr. Greengrass directed "The Bourne Supremacy," but is perhaps better known for the 2002 movie "Bloody Sunday," which reconstructed the notorious 1972 incident in which 13 unarmed civil rights demonstrators were killed by British soldiers in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Rather than looking for heroes or villains, Mr. Greengrass sought to explain how such an event could have occurred, and the filmmaking was grounded in realism - for example, he used former British paratroopers who had been stationed in Northern Ireland to play some of the paratroopers that day.

In "Flight 93," Mr. Greengrass incorporates information about the disaster, including the plane's exact movements in the air, the times and content of phone calls to family members, recordings from inside the cockpit and reaction on the ground from air traffic controllers and the military, as well as details about the passengers' personalities and mannerisms provided by the families. The goal is to weave what he calls "a believable truth" about what happened in midair. Many of the scenes in the plane are being filmed in long, grueling takes, with actors improvising dialogue and actions.

"One of the reasons why Flight 93 exerts such a powerful hold on our imaginations is precisely because we don't know exactly what happened," Mr. Greengrass said in an interview on the set, a concrete hangar dominated by the sections of the rebuilt plane, which are on mechanized scaffolding to make them pitch and roll during filming. "Which one of us doesn't think about that day and wonder how it must have been and how we might have reacted?" he asked.

Also in the works are several more traditionally structured dramas. Oliver Stone's movie about the last two men to be rescued from the World Trade Center, starring Nicolas Cage, is beginning production in Los Angeles. "Reign O'er Me," directed by Mike Binder, to be released in 2007, will star Adam Sandler as a man who lost his family on Sept. 11 and is still grieving. An adaptation of "102 Minutes" by Jim Dwyer, a reporter for The New York Times, and Kevin Flynn, a special projects editor and former police bureau chief at The Times - a book that recreates the moments between the first plane's crash into the World Trade Center and the second tower's collapse - is also tentatively scheduled for a 2007 release.

"Hollywood has a long history of engaging with big historical narratives, and 9/11 is nothing if not a big, dramatic, historical narrative," said Marita Sturken, an associate professor in New York University's department of culture and communication.

Hollywood has digested traumatic events before, notably the Vietnam War and World War II, even making movies about them before they were over. But until now, it has largely avoided the events of Sept. 11 (with the exception of Spike Lee's "25th Hour," which used the scars of New York City as a backdrop), partly from a sense that the trauma is too immediate to draw audiences. Whether the world, and particularly those closely affected by the attacks and hijackings, is ready for these movies is an open question.

"I don't know what the good time is" to make these movies, said Carole O'Hare, the daughter of Hilda Marcin, one of the 40 passengers and crew on Flight 93. "I do know that prior to this date, it would not have been a good time."

"We all knew it would come eventually," she said, and "given the opportunity for input and involvement, I would rather have my say than be put in the background."

"Even if it doesn't come out as you envisioned it," she added, "at least you know you did your best to have your say."

A researcher for "Flight 93," Kate Solomon, contacted the victims' families to solicit their support, and Mr. Greengrass and one of the film's producers, Lloyd Levin, met with many. "When Paul and Lloyd came to us, they were very concerned about being as accurate as they could possibly be," Ms. O'Hare said, and they promised to represent all the passengers, not just a few. "It's nice that you can include them all, and honor them all," she said.

Many of the actors have had direct contact with family members while researching their roles. Most stress that they are not seeking to impersonate the passengers they represent, but instead are trying to portray the way they might have reacted.

Leigh Zimmerman, the actress playing the passenger Christine Snyder, was sent Ms. Snyder's wedding video by her family. "I got to see the way that she walked and talked, I got to see her be with her family," Ms. Zimmerman said. "I think she was a calming presence," she said, an interpretation reflected in Ms. Zimmerman's portrayal.

The "Flight 93" set has been full of unintentional shocks and incongruities. For instance, before the long take (more than 20 minutes) that leads to the passengers' trying to get into the cockpit, the actors make breezy jokes and banter with one another and the film crew. Afterward, they emerge from the shell of the plane, faces solemn, wiping away tears. Mr. Levin said the lengthy takes were "like asking actors to perform the end of 'Long Day's Journey Into Night,' over and over again."

The wardrobe room has a wall of photos devoted to Osama bin Laden and the hijackers, research done to clothe the actors properly. After one take, Omar Berdouni, a Moroccan actor who plays a hijacker not in the cockpit, idled outside the open-ended fuselage of the rebuilt plane, leaning on the wall and toying with the wires from the "bomb" around his waist. (The hijackers told the plane's passengers that they had a bomb.)

Asked how fulfilling this kind of role could be, Mr. Berdouni, who has about four lines, all shouted in a thick accent, said, "Paul's approach is, 'These guys were real, let's not try to stereotype.' " Mr. Berdouni said he was "familiar with the mentality" that led the suicide bombers to do what they did. To prepare, the actors playing the hijackers have studied what they can find about their characters, including the written instructions issued by Mohamed Atta, the plot's leader. "To be honest, this is my second terrorist film," Mr. Berdouni added. "I did one about the Hamburg cell of Al Qaeda."

"They tell you at drama school to take whatever is offered to you during your first five years," he said.

If the Sept. 11 films are being made as commercial enterprises, Professor Sturken said, they are also an important way for "our various cultures" to work out the meaning of the events behind them. The way these stories are told has much to do with the "way that we want them preserved," she said.

"There is a pretty big audience for that story," she added, " if - and this is crucial - if people perceive it to be sensitively told."

Inevitably, some people will not want to watch these movies. "Different people cope with very horrible experiences in different ways," said Dr. Cynthia Pfeffer, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, who has treated many patients affected by the events of Sept. 11. Some people who were close to the situation or lost loved ones should probably choose to avoid the films altogether, because they will just reignite traumatic feelings, she said. Others may want to go with someone they can talk to about the movie afterward.

For Mr. Greengrass, though, it was the story's broader implications that inspired him to make "Flight 93." "Forty ordinary people had 30 minutes to confront the reality of the way that we're living now, decide on the best course of action and act," he said. The passengers were the "first people to inhabit the post 9/11 world," he continued. "They had to choose because they were in that airplane. Their choices are our choices, and their debate is our debate."

Copyright 2005 | The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/movies/01timm.html?

arias

01-04-2006, 07:25 PM

al-Canine

01-13-2006, 09:50 AM

I'm sorry, I didn't read all the things you posted...so this is sort of a blind question...Did the hijackers use their gps enabled cell phones to help them direct the planes to the attack sites? I read that or saw it on National Geograpic channel. Again forgive me if it was in one of your previous posts here.

Not sure... will take a look.

Documentary focuses on life after 9/11

“Liberty Street: Alive At Ground Zero”
A documentary directed by Peter Josyph

By Steven Snyder

Considering how much 9/11 changed the world — one only needs to turn to the recent headlines concerning domestic spying programs or the surging American death toll in Iraq, now over 2,170, for a refresher — it still remains a subject somehow beyond our comprehension.

We see it, but we don’t really see. In books, periodicals and on television screens, we relive the experience minute by minute, hoping to understand an event, which, by its very nature, we can’t hope to process.

What was it like to be in the buildings?

The planes?

What separated those who lived from those who died, just minutes or feet apart?

Next weekend, only months before Hollywood takes a crack at recreating that infamous day with “Flight 93,” a local filmmaker considers the attacks and their aftermath with a perspective that has never before been captured on film.

Even larger in scope than those two frantic, fiery hours on that crisp Tuesday morning is the four-year journey of grief, resolve, endurance and hope that overwhelms Lower Manhattan to this day. This is precisely the story that interests director Peter Josyph, and his “Liberty Street: Alive At Ground Zero” is the first documentary to capture the disturbing normalcy that unfolded in the months and years after the most widely viewed disaster in American history.

Part guerilla expose, part historical recreation, the recurring theme of “Liberty Street” is one of revitalization. In a stirring montage halfway through the film, Josyph takes us on a tour of the new New York, integrating footage of the WTC site into the traditional images of the island’s bridges, delis and street corners. After all, for us who live here, the gaping hole at Ground Zero, as well as the memories and the sense of loss, have become part of our way of life.

The film opens to a grim sight at 114 Liberty Street, the residential building that somehow survived the destruction and serves as the center of the documentary. Looking out through a window on the ground floor, we watch as debris is sorted and, by virtue of Josyph’s camera, documented. There’s burnt paper with red stains; a child’s cup; a lining from a WTC window; a thick layer of ash. In one of the film’s many title cards, which Josyph uses in lieu of any formal narration, he captures the ever-present dread of the city in a powerful yet understated way: “Most of the dead are in the toxic dust.”

Moving forward, Josyph jumps between three major themes. The first is a recreation of that awful day, brought to life through the home movies of one of the residents of 114 Liberty, Mark Wainger. These never-before-seen shots, turned away from the chaos towards an average city street, are almost as arresting as the footage of the towers themselves, for it puts this tragedy into a believable, manageable context. The lack of narration throughout the film is equally arresting. Those paper-strewn, deserted streets say all that needs to be said.

Josyph then focuses on the immediate aftermath, not only at the site but in the way it affected everyday life across the city. Both in interviews and from afar, we get a feeling for the challenges that confronted the men and women who spent weeks and months sorting through the detritus. From the tenants at 114 Liberty, we hear how surreal it was to watch these horrific events from the safety of their homes. And later, as Donavin Gratz, a contractor, walks through the building to gauge the needed repairs, we see the dust and debris that has crashed through the building’s windows, leaving the structure intact but the interiors ravaged. We then travel away from the site to the nearby residences in the financial district and even the city piers where fragments of the buildings are gradually removed. In a surprisingly simple yet effective metaphor for post-9/11 New York, Josyph goes to the World Trade Center subway stop and captures the eeriness of the abandoned platform and the painted over “World Trade Center” sign, whose words still emerge from the black background.

Josyph also gives us front row seats to signs of progress, as a disaster area is cleared and the possibility of life-after becomes reality. We see the wreckage removed from the site via bulldozer, truck and barge, until the final artifact is hauled away. Across the street, at 114 Liberty, we see the gradual cleanup of the contaminated debris inside, and even the installation of new windows as the project nears completion.

“Liberty Street” is a moving experience because it balances all of these themes and stands apart not so much as a 9/11 film, but as a post-9/11 film. It’s the story of what happened after the big story; a day-to-day journal of the endless resolve and commitment that emerged from the dust. In some sense, Josyph has brought the big picture down to street level, and turned our attention to everyday people climbing a seemingly-endless mountain of obstacles, unfazed and undaunted.

In the film’s most remarkable sequence, a man looks through the final listing of victim’s photos in the New York Times, matching some of the printed faces to the names printed on business cards he’s holding. He then compares those names and faces to other business cards — cards from survivors.

For this man — and many others — Sept. 11 is about more than death tolls, war cries and news footage. It’s about the people he knew who died where he lives, a city of 8 million people whose landscape has forever been changed.

“Liberty Street,” for the first time, grounds 9/11 in a sense of the place and the lives it left intact, despite the irrevocable damage. After all these years, it allows us to see the tragedy in a way we never have before.

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_139/documentary.html

al-Canine

01-13-2006, 10:16 AM

NYer

01-19-2006, 08:02 PM

http://www.gridcafe.com/images/wishing.jpg

al-Canine

02-23-2006, 09:15 AM

WEB CHRONICLE OF 9/11 TRIBUTES

Heart-wrenching tributes to the victims of 9/11 will be collected in a new "digital repository" and accessed via a Web site (http://www.buildthememorial.org) launched by the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation yesterday.

The Personal Tributes project aims to chronicle the touching — and often colorful — salutes to the victims of the World Trade Center attacks. The first entries include a car designed with an etching of the Twin Towers in the rear window, and the FDNY Dream Bike, a motorcycle restored in honor of firefighter Gerard Baptiste.

"After Sept. 11, 2001, the instinct of so many people was to pay tribute to those who died," said foundation director Gretchen Dykstra. "Our Web site will give voice to the thousands of people who created personal tributes, highlighting the decorated automobiles, motorcycles, flags, handmade quilts, murals and tattoos."

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/62331.htm

al-Canine

03-12-2006, 09:18 AM

DOWNTOWN MOMS FEAR FOR THEIR 'CANCEROUS' KIDS

By ANGELA MONTEFINISE

Dinella Ascenso agonized as her little boy, born two weeks after 9/11, repeatedly became sick with a hacking cough during his first two years of life.

"It wasn't normal," said the 30-year-old chef instructor, who lives four blocks from Ground Zero.

"I totally accredit it to Sept. 11," she added. "They cannot possibly tell us the air we were breathing was safe. Think of what was in there . . . All you smelled for months was dead skin, like a finger getting burned by a match. How can that be safe?"

Ascenso is one of a group of lower Manhattan moms, pregnant on 9/11, who live in fear of the health ramifications of the terrorist attacks.

One miscarried right after 9/11. Another said her son has never been healthy. And even those whose children have not developed significant illnesses wonder how long that will be the case.

Studies have shown low birth weights and smaller head circumferences among these babies. Now The Post has learned that researchers discovered genetic damage that may make these children more prone to illnesses and cancer.

Ascenso said her son, Lucian, now 4, was sick "at least two dozen times in his first two years of life" with a rattling cough that "really had us worried."

She says she would like to move but can't afford to. And she continues to fret, even though Lucian appears healthy.

"I'm really not shocked. Even now, the air around here is different."

Meike Ziegler, 36, miscarried four months after Sept. 11. She was three months pregnant and living in SoHo during the attacks, and felt horrible cramps about a week afterward.

She claims the fetus "stopped growing . . . The more I hear about what was in the air and babies born then, the more I believe it was all connected."

Ziegler left the country after her ordeal.

A lower Manhattan mom who didn't want to be identified said she's trying to stay positive and doesn't want to leave her hometown, but is "really scared" about her 4-year-old son's health problems, which include asthma and severe allergies.

"None of that runs in my family," said the woman, who gave birth to her son shortly after 9/11.

"I was blocks away from Ground Zero for weeks while I was pregnant with him. From the minute he was born, there were problems."

She said her son wheezed often and had problems breathing.

"He's feeling better now, but I don't know what was in that air," she said. "I don't know if he's going to develop other problems as he gets older. The whole thing is very scary."

Casting director Jill Strickman, who gave birth to Oliver in December 2001 and still lives about 10 blocks from Ground Zero, is also nervous that there will be a lasting impact from the toxins released by the lingering inferno of the World Trade Center.

Oliver has asthma, she said, but she has dismissed it somewhat because it runs in the family. "He's a very healthy boy," she said. "I try not to be an alarmist."

She added: "In terms of the cancer, that does concern me."

She said she wants to know "if there's something I can be doing to protect him."

Strickman said she would have left New York right after 9/11 had she known the air wasn't safe. "Especially because I was pregnant," she said. "But the EPA said it was safe. We had no way of knowing."

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/65147.htm

al-Canine

03-12-2006, 09:20 AM

RESIDENTS RIP RX-$$ SNUB

By SUSAN EDELMAN and CATHY BURKE

EXCLUSIVE

Downtown residents are fuming that they have been shut out of new funding to treat those sickened by the toxic air and dust at Ground Zero.

Lower Manhattan residents were stunned when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week announced a plan to distribute $75 million to treat sick and injured Ground Zero "responders."

But those who live, go to school and work nearby won't be eligible.

"There was absolutely nothing at all for residents, in terms of screening or treatment - it's outrageous," said Catherine McVay Hughes, a mother of two who lives a block east of the World Trade Center site.

Nearly all the $75 million is earmarked for cops, firefighters and other rescue and recovery workers who got lung disease and other illnesses.

The residents "totally support" new funding for WTC rescuers now ill and dying, but say their own health woes have been "swept under the rug."

"The people of lower Manhattan are in the same boat as the Katrina victims of New Orleans - abandoned," said John Feal, a demolition supervisor who suffers respiratory disease and lost half a foot when it was crushed at the WTC site.

The CDC plan includes $9 million for the city's WTC Health Registry, but only to collect data on residents and others who signed up years ago.

"If you have a problem, it won't solve your problem. It's simply a survey," said Hughes, who runs a 9/11 Web site, asthmamoms.com. "And there's a huge delay from when the information is gathered to when it's shared with the public."

Residents say they breathed poisonous air for months after being told it was "safe," and many developed respiratory, stomach and other ailments.

"Four hundred kids walked into the dust cloud and came back to their schools while the fires were still burning," said Battery Park dad Tom Goodkind, whose daughter Olivia was in kindergarten at PS 89 two blocks from Ground Zero.

Goodkind said eight of 24 kids in her fourth-grade class bring inhalers to school. The Department of Education said the school's asthma rate is a "normal" 3 percent. But a study led by Dr. Anthony Szema found a worsening in asthma suffered by kids living within five miles of Ground Zero.

The mother of a boy who attended PS 234 in TriBeCa, which reopened several months after 9/11, said the kids played in a park across the street when they returned, and her first-grader "coughed when he was running around."

"You don't know what the long-term effects are going to be," she said. "They got a big dose of whatever was out there."

Wayne Decker, who lived on Duane Street in a 10th-floor apartment, had a lab analyze dust that coated his apartment and hallway. It found high levels of asbestos, lead, mercury, chromium and cadmium. "After a year in that apartment, I couldn't climb the subway stairs or breathe normally," said Decker, 55, who has moved to Albuquerque, N.M. He was diagnosed in 2004 with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Dr. Joan Reibman, a researcher at Bellevue Hospital, found a threefold increase in new asthma and other respiratory illnesses among downtown residents after 9/11. Those most exposed got sickest, she reports. Reibman runs a treatment program under a $2.4 million grant from the American Red Cross' 9/11 fund. So far, it has helped 300 sick residents and day laborers who cleaned dust and debris from downtown offices. "They made New York function again, and some are still seriously ill. They can't breathe," Reibman said.

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/65163.htm

NYer

03-12-2006, 09:38 AM

al-Canine

03-12-2006, 08:12 PM

I still remember picking up my son, who managed to escape along with thousands, in Jamaica Queens. He was covered with that dust and ash. His cough lasted over a year. To date, the real epidemiology of the WTC casualties remains to be done.
Thank heavens he escaped with his life that day!

But yes, the health implications are yet to be seen. I did volunteer work at St. Paul's Chapel in the weeks that followed, and worked outdoors in the dust and wind (and smoke and smell). I had a cough for many months, and serial sinus infections for over a year. I can't imagine what it must have been like for the folks living and working down there, with the dust permeating their homes and businesses.

NYer

03-12-2006, 08:32 PM

Falling Man: the many faces of a 9-11 Riddle. (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2069640_1,00.html)

http://sramerican.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/falling.jpg

In New York City and its suburbs more than 2,600 others get ready for work. They choose suits, chefs’ trousers, firemen’s uniforms, baseball caps, summer dresses, overalls. All of them will be dead by morning’s end. As many as 200 will die jumping from floors 99 and above of the twin towers, the clothes they put on billowing, tearing, unravelling as they fall for 10 seconds on a journey from life to death.

As television stations turned their lenses from “the jumpers” in horror, Associated Press photographer Richard Drew caught an image of a man in freefall from the north tower. Fire rained, screams and soot filled the air and people on the ground began to flee, but Drew stayed to photograph the falling.

Later, back in AP’s offices, one of his shots intrigued him: a man, seemingly composed, his neat form set against an endless background of glass and steel. It has a stillness, suggesting an almost private moment that left those who saw it feeling uncomfortable and voyeuristic. How could such a quiet moment occur on such a violent day?

New evidence gives the Falling Man a name ... read the whole thing.

al-Canine

03-12-2006, 11:57 PM

Falling Man: the many faces of a 9-11 Riddle.

That is a profoundly moving article. Thank you so much for posting it.

NYer

03-13-2006, 11:21 AM

Here's the photo:

http://www.freespeech.com/images/uploads/falling_man_sm.jpg

NYer

03-14-2006, 09:12 AM

WTC Rebuilding Wrongs: Mike's Guess vs. Larry's (http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/65179.htm)

THE future of Ground Zero comes down to this: Does the out look for Lower Manhattan as a major business hub over the rest of this century justify a $4 billion investment today? Developer Larry Silverstein says it does; Mayor Bloomberg says it doesn't.

Who's right - and does it matter?

First off, Bloomberg has no direct control over the World Trade Center site, which is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and leased by Silverstein's company. But the mayor's opinion does matter. Why? Bloomberg is withholding $1.7 billion in tax-exempt Liberty Bonds authorized by Congress for reconstruction until he's happy with the plan for Ground Zero. And the Port Authority has followed the mayor by itself signaling a desire to revisit its deal with Silverstein. Gov. Pataki has said that Silverstein and the Port Authority must resolve their differences by today - or he'll withhold the other $1.7 billion in these cheap bonds.

Silverstein's plan for what he'd do with the bond money is straightforward: He says he wants to use those funds, along with his own insurance money from the 9/11 attack, to rebuild 10 million square feet of office space in four new towers at Ground Zero - thereby fulfilling the obligations of the 99-year lease he signed with the Port Authority six weeks before 9/11.

Sen. Schumer also weighs in. (http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/65180.htm) It seems as if he's backing Larry.

NYer

03-15-2006, 09:34 PM

Ground Zero Talks Collapse. (http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,18485314%5E1702,00.html)

Jeez ... Someone get Trump on the case ... It's not too late for a better plan. (http://www.triroc.com/wtc/)

al-Canine

03-15-2006, 11:15 PM

Well, my personal opinion leans towards turning the entire area into a park.

I understand that others do not think that is practical. But I still cannot imagine having to see a loved one go off to work on that site again. It is hard enough having my spouse work adjacent to the site.

I do not want that place turned into another bullseye for UBL.

With that said, here's the Times' take on the negotiations (for what it's worth... :D )....

Developer Told to Build 9/11 Site or Stand Clear

By CHARLES V. BAGLI
and DAVID W. DUNLAP

One day after critical talks on the rebuilding effort at ground zero collapsed, the Pataki administration said yesterday that it would not reopen negotiations with the developer Larry A. Silverstein. It challenged him to start building the $2.3 billion Freedom Tower next month or "move out of the way."

The challenge came 12 hours after the abrupt breakdown of talks that had sought to resolve issues hindering the development of ground zero, where the sputtering efforts to develop the site of the Sept. 11 attack have become a glaring embarrassment for the city and state.

Facing a self-imposed midnight deadline, advisers to Gov. George E. Pataki negotiated for nearly 16 hours Tuesday trying to reach a deal in which Mr. Silverstein, who holds the lease for the site, would surrender control of the Freedom Tower and a second building to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the site's owner. That would have paved the way for an April groundbreaking for the Freedom Tower, the largest and most symbolic of five skyscrapers planned for the site.

The failure of the talks is just the latest problem to arise over plans to rebuild the World Trade Center site, from the fight over the original design to the dispute over a planned cultural center to fund-raising problems for a memorial, as well as continuing doubts of some critics as to whether the Freedom Tower is even a good idea.

At the center of it all is Mr. Silverstein, who, despite responding yesterday that he would still begin building next month, has not convinced many of the key players that he has the wherewithal to get the Freedom Tower built.

The talks were seen as a final effort to resolve lingering disputes about the site's fate. Governor Pataki wants work to begin soon at ground zero so his legacy is not clouded as he leaves office and considers a presidential run. The Port Authority believes Mr. Silverstein does not have the financial resources to complete work on all five towers. And Mr. Silverstein, as the site's leaseholder, holds many of the cards, and is seeking financial concessions in return for giving up control of the entire site.

But after a whirlwind day in which Mr. Silverstein assured Governor Pataki by telephone that "we're going to get a deal done tonight," the developer just hours later offered what Mr. Pataki's advisers described as a "bad faith" counteroffer at 11:35 p.m., demanding even more concessions from the Port Authority.

"We have decided that there will be no continuing of negotiations with Larry Silverstein and his group until they put something on the table that is in the public interest," Charles A. Gargano, the state's top economic development official and the vice chairman of the Port Authority, said at a news conference yesterday.

"We fully expect Larry to begin construction on the Freedom Tower in April. This is a commitment he made to the public and to the Port Authority and we expect him to fulfill that commitment. And if he does not, then we want him to move out of the way."

If Mr. Silverstein fails to begin construction of the Freedom Tower, Mr. Gargano said, the state and the Port Authority will look at their "legal options," including whether to declare the developer in default on his lease for the site.

At a news conference yesterday afternoon, Mr. Silverstein presented a sharply different view of what happened late Tuesday night, saying that he was shocked and saddened that the negotiations had been terminated just when it appeared they were so close to a deal. He said he had made "enormous concessions."

"We were prepared to do what the governor had asked of us — to stay as long as it takes to reach an agreement that would allow us to do what all New Yorkers want: rebuild the World Trade Center," he said. "Unfortunately, it appears that we were the only ones at the table with that commitment."

Mr. Silverstein leased the World Trade Center from the Port Authority in July 2001, only weeks before it was destroyed by terrorists. He has long insisted that he has both the will and the means to rebuild the entire $7 billion project, although city, state and Port Authority executives have been skeptical given that there is only $2.9 billion in insurance proceeds available.

Asked whether he would build the tower, Mr. Silverstein said yesterday, "We have indicated to the governor that we're prepared to go forward next month to build the Freedom Tower." Mr. Silverstein pointedly held the press conference not in his Midtown office but at 7 World Trade Center, the 52-story tower he recently completed at Vesey and Greenwich Streets, across from the World Trade Center site.

It was unclear yesterday whether the sudden breach between the governor and the developer was irreparable, or whether the two-fisted posturing on both sides was only a prelude to a resolution of the increasingly pitched battle over the fate of ground zero.

Intent on proving they were seeking a resolution to the dispute, Janno N. Lieber, senior vice president for Silverstein Properties, said that Mr. Silverstein had assembled his partners and his negotiating team at 11:30 p.m. Tuesday to work out the final details of a deal that would lead to a major realignment at ground zero.

"I have never seen Larry more optimistic about getting a deal done," said Mr. Lieber, who was in the room at the time. "He drank two cups of coffee because he was going to sit there until it was done. The idea that we blew this up is crazy."

Members of the Silverstein camp, who discussed details of the talks after being granted anonymity, said the impasse was caused by the bureaucratic sluggishness of the Port Authority and the complicated internal politics of an authority controlled by the governors of New York and New Jersey.

But Mr. Ringler dismissed Mr. Silverstein's account, saying that the developer wanted the Port Authority to take on much of the financial risk at the site, while he got most of the money for rebuilding. He said that Mr. Silverstein may have suspected that the Port Authority would back down because it was so intent on moving forward with the Freedom Tower.

"It seemed the more we put on the table, the more they wanted," Mr. Ringler said.

Mr. Gargano went a step further, saying the late-night counterproposal was an illustration of Mr. Silverstein's greed.

The framework of the deal that both sides say was within their grasp had the Port Authority taking control of building the Freedom Tower and a second building site at Greenwich and Cedar Streets, where the heavily damaged Deutsche Bank now stands. Mr. Silverstein would have retained what everyone regarded as the most lucrative sites for three towers on Church Street, next to the $2 billion PATH terminal now under construction.

But the two sides remained at odds over financial issues relating to the allocation of $2.9 billion in insurance money; Mr. Silverstein's rent, which rises to $125.25 million in July; and his share of the infrastructure costs on the 16-acre property.

Mr. Ringler said the Port Authority, which did not want to take on the Freedom Tower unless the deal included a major portion of the insurance money, had made a number of concessions Tuesday night, including reducing Mr. Silverstein's rent and limiting the size of his rent increases over time.

In recent weeks, there has been increasing concern among Port Authority executives, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and state officials that Mr. Silverstein did not have the ability to complete all the buildings at the site at an estimated cost of over $7 billion. They sought a new arrangement at ground zero that they said would allow rebuilding to proceed more quickly, while providing Mr. Silverstein with development opportunities and ensuring that the Freedom Tower is built.

"In order for Lower Manhattan to continue to grow as one of the world's pre-eminent business centers, it is essential that the World Trade Center site be built out correctly, completely and as quickly as possible," Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday. "It is time for Silverstein Properties to temper its individual interests and focus on what's best for New York City."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/nyregion/16rebuild.html?hp&ex=1142485200&en=73b4ec78f1171528&ei=5094&partner=homepage

NYer

03-16-2006, 09:06 AM

Danish cartoons are not the First thing the MSM has http://www.papadoc.net/ censored.

And it is worth noting that the Danish Cartoons are not the first things to have been censored by our cowardly Mainstream Media. Their excuses were just as hollow back in September 2001 as they are now.

Pierre Legrand links to a stark reminder that Freedom isn't Free. (http://www.rangerjarhead.com/911jumpers)

al-Canine

03-17-2006, 09:29 AM

'9/11 CANCER' KILLS BRONX EMT

By ERIKA MARTINEZ and ANDY GELLER

March 17, 2006 -- A selfless Bronx paramedic has become the third EMT to die from a Ground Zero illness in the last 12 months.

Deborah Reeve, 41, who had her right lung removed, died Wednesday of an aggressive form of lung cancer at Calvary Hospital in The Bronx.

Her husband, David, 45, also a paramedic, her daughter, Elizabeth, 10, and her son, Mark, 6, were at her side.

Deborah and David, who is from Kentucky, first met when they both attended the Emergency Medical Service academy. They were married for 14 years.

"She made fun of the way I talked, so I got back at her and married her," her husband quipped.

David said son Mark keeps asking, "When is Mommy coming home?"

Deborah worked at Ground Zero two dozen times - the first few without a mask - starting six months after the hijacked planes smashed into the Twin Towers.

She died of mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer associated with exposure to asbestos.

In January, the Fire Department granted her a disability pension under a new law providing such benefits to people who contracted illnesses while working at Ground Zero, an FDNY spokesman said.

Deborah, an EMT for 17 years, was assigned to Station 20 at Jacobi Hospital.

Her illness was diagnosed in March 2004, when an FDNY doctor ordered a chest X-ray after she had been out two weeks with a cold.

The X-ray found pockets of fluid in the lining between the lungs and the chest. Testing revealed the fluid was cancerous.

Deborah underwent chemotherapy and radiation and in July, her right lung and right side of her diaphragm were removed. She was pronounced cancer free.

However, in February, she complained of severe pains in her legs. X-rays revealed the cancer had spread to her legs.

She is the third paramedic to die of a Ground Zero illness in the last 12 months.

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/61119.htm

NYer

03-17-2006, 12:12 PM

On a lighter note, while remembering 9/11, in honor of St. Patrick's Day - I humbly present The Ballad of Mike Moran (javascript:Player('../player/single_player.cfm?songid=886102&q=hi');)

Yes, THIS (http://server.firehouse.com/news/2001/10/25_FHkiss.mp3) Mike Moran.

al-Canine

03-31-2006, 12:52 PM

NYC Releases Recordings of 911 Calls

In Operators' Voices, Echoes of Calls for Help

By JIM DWYER

The city released partial recordings today of about 130 telephone calls made to 911 after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, stripped of the voices of the people inside the World Trade Center but still evocative of their invisible struggles for life.

Only the 911 operators and fire department dispatchers can be heard on the recordings, their words mapping the calamity in rough, faint echoes of the men and women in the towers who had called them for help.

They describe crowded islands of fleeting survival, on floors far from the crash and even on those that were directly hit: Hallways are blocked on 104. Send help to 84. It is hard to breathe on 97. A man sits at his desk on 73, waiting for rescuers who could not get to him for hours, in a building that had only minutes.

Be calm, the operators implore. God is there. Sit tight.

The recordings, contained on 11 compact discs, also document a broken link in the chain of emergency communications.

The voices captured on those discs track the callers as they are passed by telephone from one agency to another, moving through a confederacy of municipal fiefdoms — police, fire, ambulance — but almost never receiving vital instructions to get out of the buildings.

No more than 2 of the 130 callers were told to leave, the tapes reveal, even though unequivocal orders to evacuate the trade center had been given by fire chiefs and police commanders moments after the first plane struck. The city had no procedure for field commanders to share information with the 911 system, a flaw identified by the 9/11 Commission that city officials say has since been fixed.

The tapes show that many callers were not told to leave, but to stay put, the standard advice for high-rise fires. In the north tower, all three of the building's stairways were destroyed at the 92nd floor. But in the south tower, where one stairway remained passable, the recordings include references to perhaps a few hundred people huddled in offices, unaware of the order to leave.

The calls released today bring to life the fatal frustration and confusion experienced by one unidentified man in the complex's south tower, who called at 9:08 a.m., shortly after the second plane struck the building. For the next 11 minutes, as his call was bounced from police operators to fire dispatchers and back again, the 911 system vindicated its reputation as a rickety, dangerous contraption, one that the administration of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani tried to overhaul with little success, and one that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg hopes to improve by spending close to $1 billion.

The voice of the man, who was calling from the offices of Keefe Bruyette on the 88th floor of that building, was removed from the recording by the city. From the operator's responses, it appears that he wanted to leave.

"You cannot — you have to wait until somebody comes there," she tells the man.

The police operator urged him to put wet towels or rags under the door, and said she would connect him to the Fire Department.

As she tried to transfer his call, the phone rang and rang — 15 times, before the police operator gave up and tried a fire department dispatch office in another borough. Eventually, a dispatcher picked up, and he asked the man to repeat the same information that he had provided moments earlier to the police operator. (The police and fire departments had separate computer dispatching systems that were unable to share basic information like the location of an emergency.)

After that, the fire dispatcher hung up, and the man on the 88th floor apparently persisted in asking the police operator — who had stayed on the line — about leaving.

"But I can't tell you to do that, sir," the operator said, who then decided to transfer his call back to the Fire Department. "Let me connect you again. O.K.? Because I really do not want to tell you to do that. I can't tell you to move."

A fire dispatcher picked up and asked — for the third time in the call — for the location of the man on the 88th floor. The dispatcher's instructions were relayed by the police operator.

"O.K.," she said. "I need you to stay in the office. Don't go into the hallway. They're coming upstairs. They are coming. They're trying to get upstairs to you."

Like many other operators that morning, she was invoking advice from a policy known as "defend in place" — meaning that only people just at or above a fire should move, an approach that had long been enshrined in skyscrapers in New York and elsewhere.

At Keefe Bruyette, 67 people died, many of whom had gathered in conference rooms and offices on the 88th and 89th floors. Some tried to reach the roof, a futile trek that the 9/11 Commission said might have been avoided if the city's 911 operators had known that the police had ruled out helicopter rescues — another piece of information that had not been shared with them — and that an evacuation order had been issued.

The calls were released today in response to a Freedom of Information request made by The New York Times on Jan. 25, 2002, for public records concerning the events of Sept. 11. The city refused to release most of them on the grounds that they were needed to prosecute a man accused of complicity in the attacks, or contained opinions that were not subject to disclosure, or were so intensely personal that their release would be an invasion of privacy. The Times sued in state court, and nine family members of people killed in the attacks joined the case.

Judge Richard Braun of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan ruled in early 2003 that the vast majority of the records were public, but said that the city could remove the words of the 911 callers on privacy grounds. Over the next two years, the core of his ruling was affirmed by the appellate division and the New York State Court of Appeals.

That led to the release of the calls today. City officials said that 130 calls were made to 911 from inside the buildings. Of that group, officials were able to identify 27 people and notified their next of kin this week that they could listen to the complete call.

While that might seem like a small number of calls given that approximately 15,000 people were at the trade center that morning, officials said that many of those who got through to 911 were with large groups of people.

One of these groups was on the 105th floor of the south tower, a spot where scores of people had congregated after trying to reach the roof. Among them was Kevin Cosgrove, who worked on the 100th floor, and who had told his family that he had gone down stairs before turning back. He called 911, and said he was in an office overlooking the World Financial Center, across West Street, records show. He said he needed help, and was having difficulty breathing.

One of the recordings — city officials have refused to say who made the call — involved a man on the 105th floor who suggested desperate measures to improve the air.

"Oh, my God," said the dispatcher. "You can't breathe at all?"

The caller's words were deleted.

"O.K.," said the dispatcher. "Listen, when you — listen, please do not break the window. When you break the window — " here, the caller interrupted.

"Don't break the window because there's so much smoke outside," the dispatcher said. "If you break a window, you guys won't be able to breathe; . O.K.? So if there are any other doorways that you can open where you don't see the smoke."

The dispatcher tried to soothe the man, finally saying, "O.K. Listen, calm yourself down. We've got everybody outside. O.K.?"

The man spoke and the dispatcher assured him help was on the way.

"We are," the dispatcher said. "We're trying to get up there, sir. Like you said, the stairs are collapsed. O.K.? Everybody wet the towels and lie on the floor. O.K.? Put the wet towels over your head and lie down; O.K.? I know it's hard to breathe. I know it is."

People on the highest floors in both towers suffered acutely from the smoke and heat, even though they were many floors distant from the entry points of the planes that had crashed into the buildings. In the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald in the north tower, between 25 and 50 people found refuge in a conference room on the 104th floor. One man, Andrew Rosenblum, reached his wife in Long Island, and gave her the names and home phone numbers of colleagues who were with him. As he recited the information, she relayed it to neighbors. Mr. Rosenblum also called a friend and said that the group had used computer terminals to smash windows for fresh air.

Such drastic actions appeared to have been discouraged by the operator. Another Cantor Fitzgerald employee on the 104th floor was Richard Caggiano, who called 911 at 8:53, seven minutes after the plane hit the north tower.

"Don't do that, sir," the operator said. "Don't do that. There's help on the way, sir. Hold on."

Mr. Caggiano's words, which were not made public, prompted a question from the operator.

"Are y'all in a particular room?" she asked. "How many?"

She listened, then said, "25 or 30 in a back room. O.K. They're on the way. They're already there. You can't hear the sirens?"

Just before the south tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., a spurt of calls reached the 911 operators. One of these was from Shimmy Biegeleisen, who worked for Fiduciary Trust in the south tower on computer systems. He was on the 97th floor where, by chance, an emergency drill had been scheduled for that day. Mr. Biegeleisen called his home in Brooklyn, spoke with his wife and prayed with a friend, Jack Edelman, who remembered hearing him say: "Of David. A Psalm. The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world and those that live in it."

At 9:52, he called 911. The building had seven more minutes before it would collapse. Mr. Biegeleisen would spend those minutes telling first the police operator, then the fire dispatcher, that he was on the 97th floor with six people, that the smoke had gotten heavy.

The police operator tried to encourage Mr. Biegeleisen.

"Heavy smoke. O.K. Sir, please try to keep calm. We'll send somebody up there immediately. Hold on. Stay on the line. I'm contacting E.M.S. Hold on. I'm connecting you to the ambulance service now."

As his call was transferred to the ambulance service, once again, the information about the smoke and the 97th floor was sought and delivered.

"Sir, any smoke over there?" asked the ambulance dispatcher. "O.K. the best thing to do is to keep — keep down on the ground. All right? O.K.?"

The ambulance dispatcher hung up, but the original operator stayed on the line with Mr. Biegeleisen. She could be heard speaking briefly with someone else in the room, and then turned her attention back to him

"We'll disengage. O.K.?" the operator asked. "There were notifications made. We made the notifications. If there's any further, you let us know. You can call back."

Seconds later, the building collapsed.

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/nyregion/31cnd-tapes.html?

NYer

04-02-2006, 09:10 PM

GayPatriot suggests the release of United 93 (http://gaypatriot.net/2006/04/02/united-93-a-must-see) comes none too soon.

http://www.united93movie.com/images/United93_Splash_01.jpg

What do you think?

al-Canine

04-03-2006, 09:27 AM

Ugh, I am literally nauseous after viewing the trailer...

I'm in agreement with a commentor from the blog mentioned by NYer, above, "I won’t see the movie, for me it is too soon, because I have never forgotten... But there are many in America who do seem to have forgotten, and they should see this movie."

more commentary...

A Dark Day Revisited

Five years later, Hollywood is betting that America is ready for films about what happened on 9/11. Are we?

By Sean Smith and Jac Chebatoris
Newsweek

April 10, 2006 issue - If movie trailers are supposed to cause a reaction, the preview for "United 93" more than succeeds. Featuring no voice-over and no famous actors, it begins with images of a beautiful morning and passengers boarding an airplane. It takes you a minute to realize what the movie's even about. That's when a plane hits the World Trade Center. The effect is visceral. When the trailer played before "Inside Man" last week at the famed Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, audience members began calling out, "Too soon!" In New York City, where 9/11 remains an open wound, the response was even more dramatic. The AMC Loews theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side took the rare step of pulling the trailer from its screens after several complaints. "One lady was crying," says one of the theater's managers, Kevin Adjodha. "She was saying we shouldn't have [played the trailer]. That this was wrong ... I don't think people are ready for this."

We're about to find out. "United 93" is the first feature film to deal explicitly with the events of September 11, 2001, and is certain to ignite an emotional debate before and after it opens on April 28. Is it too soon? Should the film have been made at all? More to the point, will anyone want to see it? Other 9/11 projects are on the way as the fifth anniversary of the attacks approaches, most notably Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," starring Nicolas Cage, opening Aug. 9. But as the harbinger, "United 93" will take most of the heat, whether it deserves it or not.

The real United 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field after 40 passengers and crew fought back against the terrorists who had hijacked the plane. Writer-director Paul Greengrass ("The Bourne Supremacy") has gone to great lengths to be respectful in his depiction of what occurred, proceeding with the film only after securing the approval of every victim's family. "Was I surprised at the unanimity? Yes. Very. Usually there are one or two families who are more reluctant," Greengrass writes in an e-mail. "I was surprised and humbled at the extraordinary way the United 93 families have welcomed us into their lives and shared their experiences with us." His team's research was meticulous. "They even went so far as to ask what my mother had been wearing on the plane," says Carole O'Hare, whose 79-year-old mother, Hilda Marcin, died on the flight. "They were very open and honest with us, and they made us a part of this whole project." Universal, which is releasing the film, plans to donate 10 percent of its opening weekend gross to the Flight 93 National Memorial Fund. That hasn't stopped criticism that the studio is exploiting a national tragedy. O'Hare thinks that's unfair. "This story has to be told to honor the passengers and crew for what they did," she says. "But more than that, it raises awareness. Our ports aren't secure. Our borders aren't secure. Our airlines still aren't secure, and this is what happens when you're not secure. That's the message I want people to hear."

It's unclear whether Americans will pay $9.50 to hear it. The A&E cable movie "Flight 93" drew 5.9 million viewers in January, the highest-rated show in the channel's history. But movies are different. "I don't want anyone to go who doesn't want to have this experience," says Adam Fogelson, Universal's president of marketing. "But when I see what's on screen, I feel comfortable that a lot of people will." Audiences seem to be split on the issue. "I don't think that's a movie I really want to see," says Jackie Alvarez, 73, of San Ramon, Calif., after seeing the trailer. "It gave me the creeps. It's way too soon." But 17-year-old Antoine Richardson of Memphis, Tenn., is looking forward to it. "I don't think it's exploitative or too soon," he says. "It helps us remember." As if any of us could forget.

With Nadine Joseph in San Francisco and Donnie Snow in Memphis

© 2006 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12112802/site/newsweek/

NYer

04-04-2006, 11:54 AM

Heroism defined - Statue at Ft. Benning honors Rick Rescorla (http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/local/14242722.htm)

Susan Rescorla said she was amazed at the turnout Saturday for the unveiling of a statue at Fort Benning honoring her late husband, Ia Drang Valley and 9/11 hero Rick Rescorla.

"I thought maybe 80 would show up," she laughed as a crowd of almost 500 begged her for autographs and asked her to pose alongside the statue, which is located directly in front of the National Infantry Museum.

Oh, sure retired Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and Knight Ridder columnist Joe Galloway, authors of the definitive book about Ia Drang, the famed 1965 Vietnam battle, were there.

So, too, were three Medal of Honor winners, including Ia Drang hero Walter Marm.

But it was Susan Rescorla who 1st Cavalry Division veterans wanted to hug and have their picture taken with.

Most had known Rescorla the soldier, who retired as a colonel.

Fewer had known Rescorla, the vice president of security for Morgan Stanley in New York, who led more than 2,700 people out of the South Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

RIP Col. Rick Rescorla ...

al-Canine

04-08-2006, 09:31 AM

9/11 SURVIVORS' 'CLOUDED' FUTURE

April 8, 2006 -- Terrified people who fled the Twin Towers before they collapsed on 9/11 - only to be caught in the massive suffocating dust cloud afterward - are the hardest-hit among survivors, a new federal health study has found.

Those trapped in the dust and debris cloud were nearly three times more likely to experience respiratory symptoms than other building survivors not bathed by the cloud and at least twice as likely to experience mental health problems, according to a survey of 8,500 survivors by the Centers for Disease Control.

"That was most surprising to us - the impact of the dust cloud," noted Dr. Lorna Thorpe, deputy commissioner of the city Health Department and head of the World Trade Center Health Registry, which has been tracking the health of more than 71,000 people who worked at or were near Ground Zero on 9/11.

More than 60 percent of those who escaped the Twin Towers were caught in the enveloping swirl of trade center dust, according to the study.

"Building survivors overall had high levels of respiratory symptoms and high levels of mental health symptoms two or three years after the event, when we interviewed them," Thorpe said.

The CDC report is based on interviews conducted between September 2003 and November 2004 with 8,418 adults who fled the collapsed towers and more than 30 other buildings that were either leveled or damaged in the terror strikes.

"These figures are high, they're concerning - we now need to know if they're still persisting," said Thorpe.

"It's important to get an update on the current physical and mental health status," said Thorpe.

To that end, a follow-up study will be conducted.

It will get under way later this month and will include interviews with all 71,000 of the survivors on the registry - including building employees, residents of lower Manhattan, children who attended school in the area, rescue and recovery workers, and volunteers.

It will be the largest public health registry in the history of the United States, Thorpe said.

One of the study's overall findings was that more than 56 percent of all survivors said they had new or worsening respiratory problems - including sinus ailments, shortness of breath, or a persistent cough.

More than 20 percent reported suffering ailments such as heartburn, indigestion and severe headaches.

Virtually all those in the study said they witnessed at least three "events" likely to cause psychological trauma.

Those events included seeing one of the planes crashing into the trade center, people jumping from one of the towers, other people being killed or injured, buildings collapsing, and survivors caught up in the dust cloud.

More than 64 percent said they were depressed, anxious or suffered from other emotional problems.

And 11 percent said they were in severe psychological distress when they were interviewed for the study.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan) noted that the CDC's report is "tragically no news at all to those who have been dealing with this crisis since the day of the attacks."

Nadler called for "concrete action on two fronts."

"First, it's essential that we create and fund a medical screening and treatment program to give aid to survivors with physical and psychological symptoms, as opposed to just keeping track of them.

"Second . . . the federal government absolutely must undertake a serious, comprehensive, cleanup effort to rid New York of the toxic World Trade Center dust that still lurks in our buildings."

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/66696.htm

al-Canine

04-12-2006, 09:19 AM

"The death toll from 9/11 is still growing."

The death of a burly, 34-year-old NYPD detective who wasted away and died of respiratory failure was "directly related" to his heroic work in the smoldering debris of Ground Zero after 9/11, a New Jersey coroner ruled in a first-ever finding.

The momentous decision in the Jan. 6 death of James Zadroga, which was announced yesterday, definitively links a death to cleanup work at the World Trade Center site - a toxic soup of burning debris and noxious fumes.

"They all knew it was detrimental to their health," said the officer's father, Joseph Zadroga. "They all knew that, yet they stayed there."

At least 75,000 cops, firefighters, rescue personnel, other workers and volunteers had at least two weeks of direct exposure there in the days following the terror strikes, according to one expert.

Dr. James Kay, the Ocean County, N.J., coroner ruled Zadroga succumbed from respiratory disease after "exposure to toxic fumes and dusts."

The death, Kay ruled, "with a reasonable degree of medical certainty," stemmed from Zadroga spending 470 hours - less than 12 weeks of normal workdays - inhaling fumes amid the ruins. He wore only a paper mask for protection.

Zadroga, married and the father of a 4-year-old daughter, quickly became ill, experiencing shortness of breath and a cough that degenerated to the point where he needed an oxygen tank to breath.

Zadroga retired on an NYPD disability in November 2004, just weeks after his wife, Rhonda, 29, died of a heart ailment.

Before his retirement, mounting medical bills often made him bitter and angry - but his father said Zadroga never once regretted the Ground Zero work.

"Although my son didn't like to talk about it, he said he wouldn't do a thing differently," Joseph Zadroga said.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney said the coroner's finding "confirms what we've long feared: that the death toll from 9/11 is still growing."

"I hope the federal government will stop denying the extent of the problem and finally come up with a plan to help others who continue to suffer as a result of their work at Ground Zero," she said in a statement.

Michael Paladino, president of the Detectives Endowment Association, said, "Detective Zadroga was the 24th officer to die as a result of the World Trade Center attack. The original 23 died that day, but he died years later."

Paladino called for legislation that would reclassify Zadroga's case as a "line-of-duty death," ensuring that his daughter, Tylerann, will receive full tax-free pension benefits until she turns 19, rather than a lesser "retirement" pension until she is 12.

"We really, really hope that we can get this passed, not for me but for her," said Joseph Zadroga, a retired North Arlington, N.J., police chief, as he held his granddaughter in his arms.

According to lawyer David Worby, who represents 7,300 Ground Zero rescue and volunteer workers in a lawsuit, the ruling is certainly no surprise - but no less significant.

"It's the best thing that could happen for survivors," he said. "Now people will realize there's death in the air unless people are property tested and given preventative treatment."

Worby has described Ground Zero after 9/11 as the most toxic site ever known.

Zadroga was 6-2 and weighed more than 260 pounds before he became ill within weeks of his selfless work at Ground Zero.

He was plagued by nightmares and headaches, and ultimately needed oxygen, antibiotics and steroid injections just to get through the day.

He had lost 40 pounds by the time his father found him dead on his bedroom floor in the family home. The coroner's autopsy was performed Feb. 28.

Worby's lawsuit has been filed against New York City, the Port Authority, the EPA and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, alleging dozens of deaths are related to exposure to trade center dust.

source (http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/66893.htm)

NYer

04-12-2006, 01:08 PM

Thankfully, my son suffers no ill effects ... (knocking on wood)

NYer

04-12-2006, 05:38 PM

United Flight 93 cockpit voice recorder transcript Here. (http://files.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/flight93transcript.pdf)

NYer

04-17-2006, 08:50 AM

The lost luggage of 9/11 (http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uslugg0417,0,3743892.story?coll=ny-homepage-bigpix2005)

A mix-up in Boston prevented the luggage from connecting with the plane that hijackers crashed into the north tower of the trade center. Seized by FBI agents at Boston's Logan Airport, investigators said, it contained Arab-language papers revealing the identities of all 19 hijackers involved in the four hijackings, as well as information on their plans, backgrounds and motives.

The luggage saga represents what the former federal authorities describe as an untold story of 9/11 -- offering explanations for questions long unanswered about the investigation of the tragedy, such as how authorities were able to identify the hijackers so soon after the attacks.

Had the FBI been a little more Jack Bauer and a little less Jamie Gorelick, someone would have checked Moussoaui's computer ...

NYer

04-26-2006, 06:18 AM

Flight 93 Memorial Funding Controversy (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/24/AR2006042401428.html?referrer=email)

For emotional wallop, there are few rivals to the windswept, grassy field outside of Shanksville, Pa., where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001.

But for three years, that field has made do with a makeshift monument while one member of Congress, Rep. Charles H. Taylor (R-N.C.), has blocked a $10 million request to buy the land for a permanent memorial to the 40 passengers and crew members who overpowered hijackers bent on crashing their jet into the Capitol or the White House.

Perhaps selling off some Federally-owned land with the proceeds specifically designated for this memorial would satisfy Taylor's objection.

NYer

04-27-2006, 09:10 AM

Finally! (http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/am-wtc0427,0,574827.story?coll=ny-nyc-bigpix)

NYer

05-22-2006, 09:19 AM

From an email I received:

RIP John Holmgren

Who was John Holmgren? Mr. Holgrem was a trucker from Shafer, MN who painted his truck with the names of those killed on 9/11. His truck was stopped numerous times so that the troopers could get their picture taken with the truck.

http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f218/sono001/holm1.jpg

http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f218/sono001/holm5.jpg

NYer

05-22-2006, 10:09 AM

Update:

OK I received a clarification. John Holmgren is alive and well ... as is his truck. A hearty Mea Maxima Culpa for any confusion.

NYer

05-23-2006, 02:08 PM

Warship built from Twin Towers Wreckage. (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2191181,00.html)

In a shipyard in New Orleans, survivors of one disaster are building a monument to another.

IN A city still emerging from the floods of Hurricane Katrina, a ship has begun to rise from the ashes of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Bringing together America’s two great calamities of the 21st century, the USS New York is being built in New Orleans with 24 tonnes of steel taken from the collapsed World Trade Centre. One worker, Tony Quaglino, said: “I was going to go in October 2004 after 40 years here, but I put it off when I found out I could be working on New York. This is sacred and it makes me very proud.” Glen Clement, a paint superintendent, said: “Nobody passes by that bow section without knocking on it. Everybody knows what it is made from and what it’s about.”

When built this will be the fifth USS New York. The previous one was laid down 11 September 1911. (http://jeanne_and_trev.tripod.com/america/id49.html)

al-Canine

05-26-2006, 09:16 AM

9/11 PSYCHOLOGICAL WOES LINGER

May 26, 2006 -- A whopping two-thirds of people who received therapy following 9/11 are still grief-stricken nearly five years after the terrorist attacks, according to a new study prepared for the Red Cross.

Forty-three percent of the respondents who received treatment also say they still need counseling and other services to help with their recovery.

Half the children of families in treatment are still psychologically scarred, participants said.

"This was a traumatic event for many people," said Carol Devita, a researcher for the Urban Institute, which conducted the Red Cross analysis.

The survey interviewed 1,500 adults directly affected by the 9/11 attacks - including the families who had loved ones killed or those who were seriously injured.

Those interviewed had received funds from the Red Cross Liberty Disaster Relief Fund for a variety of services.

Of that number, 431 respondents reported having received mental-health counseling.

Of adults who received financial assistance for mental-health services, 67 percent indicated that their grief continues and half of children feel the same way, the study found.

Those who haven't received counseling through the Red Cross can still apply by calling (800) LIFE-NET. The deadline is next Jan. 1.

The Red Cross and city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene also will send out a joint letter to 70,000 people on the World Trade Center Health Registry to make them aware of the mental health funding.

Rescue and recovery workers and New Yorkers who lost family members can also apply for funds with the state Crime Victims Board.

The American Red Cross raised and spent more than $1 billion in private donations on 9/11 disaster and recovery - more than any other national disaster.

"What we learned is the importance of addressing mental-health issues as soon as possible after a disaster," said Alan Goodman, executive director of the Red Cross Sept. 11 Recovery Program.

Goodman said many emergency responders who initially didn't seek therapy after 9/11 are now doing so.

"This was a terrorist event. Post-traumatic stress disorder could take years to manifest itself," he said.

Exacerbating the problem is the fact that only now - years later - are emergency responders and others showing symptoms of respiratory illnesses and cancers suspected to be linked to breathing toxins at Ground Zero.

"They have to deal with the loss of their health and their strength. That affects them emotionally," Goodman said.

About 10,000 people are currently receiving 9/11 services from the Red Cross, and nearly 60,000 were helped overall.

Over 90 percent said they received adequate emergency funds to address basic needs. But only 11 percent of responders with serious injuries said they received enough help.

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/64251.htm

al-Canine

06-11-2006, 09:25 AM

CANCER HITS 283 RESCUERS OF 9/11

By SUSAN EDELMAN

June 11, 2006 -- Since 9/11, 283 World Trade Center rescue and recovery workers have been diagnosed with cancer, and 33 of them have died of cancer, says a lawyer for the ailing responders.

David Worby, a lawyer for 8,000 World Trade Center responders, including cops, firefighters and construction workers, said the cases blood-cell cancers such as leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's and myeloma.

Doctors say the cancers can strike three to five years after exposure to toxins such as benzene, a cancer-causing chemical that permeated the WTC site from burning jet fuel.

"One in 150,000 white males under 40 would normally get the type of acute white blood-cell cancer that strikes a healthy detective," said Worby, whose first client was NYPD narcotics cop John Walcott, now 41. Walcott spent months at Ground Zero and the Fresh Kills landfill. The father of three is fighting leukemia.

"We have nearly 35 of these cancers in the family of 50,000 Ground Zero workers. The odds of that occurring are one in hundreds of millions," Worby said.

Others suffer tumors of the tongue, throat, testicles, breast, bladder, kidney, colon, intestines, and lung, said Worby, of Worby, Groner, Edelman, & Napoli, Bern, which filed the class-action suit.

WTC workers who have died of cancer include paramedic Deborah Reeve, 41 (mesothelioma); NYPD Officer Ronald Weintraub, 43 (bile-duct cancer); and Stephen "Rak" Yurek, 46, a Port Authority emergency technician (brain cancer). The families say they were healthy before 9/11.

Dr. Robin Herbert, a director of WTC medical monitoring at Mount Sinai Hospital, said some of the nearly 16,000 responders screened to date are getting cancer.

"We do not know at this point if they are WTC-related, but some are unusual cancers we see as red flags," Herbert said.

Dr. Iris Udasin, principal investigator for the Mount Sinai screening of 500 in New Jersey, said the 9/11 link is "certainly a possibility," she said. "It's what we worry about, and what we fear."

The New York Post (http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/cancer_hits_283_rescuers_of_9_11_regionalnews_susa n_edelman.htm)

NYer

06-29-2006, 12:55 PM

Fourth Freedom Tower Design Revision - This is It! (http://www.nydailynews.com/front/v-pfriendly/story/431025p-363267c.html)

http://www.nydailynews.com/ips_rich_content/630-freedomtower.JPG

The Freedom Tower will shimmer in the sun under a revised design unveiled yesterday by architect David Childs.

The 186-foot-high base of the Ground Zero office building will be clad in prismatic glass designed to attract and reflect light. "When sunlight hits that prism, it splays into color," Childs said.

Gone is the dark, metal-sheathed, fortress-like base presented a year ago today, when a blast-hardened redesign was presented in response to NYPD security concerns.

The base will still be fortified with concrete on the inside, but the outside will be covered with "laminated safety glass," Childs said.

"So if it did break, for any reason, it doesn't fall and shard, like metal and stone might fall," he said. "It would pulverize ... and then fall to the ground."

The Freedom Tower is in the early stages of construction in the northwest corner of the World Trade Center site.

Childs' refined design also calls for a landscaped plaza and an antenna-enclosing spire that's thicker than the previous version.

The more substantial spire will appear as a beacon of light over greater distances, Childs added.

It will soar 404 feet atop the tower to achieve the building's symbolic height of 1,776 feet.

Asked if this fourth version of the Freedom Tower is how it will ultimately look, Childs said, "Yes, this is it."

Childs said the Police Department has signed off on the latest design revision.

al-Canine

07-28-2006, 12:04 PM

'Secret' 9/11 lies?

BY CORKY SIEMASZKO
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Friday, July 28th, 2006

With New Yorkers already fuming about reports that the feds downplayed the danger of Ground Zero dust, the White House gave EPA chief Christie Whitman the power to bury embarrassing documents by classifying them "secret."

"I hereby designate the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to classify information originally as 'Secret,'" states the executive order, which was signed by President Bush on May 6, 2002.

Although the stated reason for Bush's directive is to keep "national security information" from falling into enemy hands, advocates for thousands of ailing Ground Zero heroes are convinced there's a more sinister motive.

"I think the rationale behind this was to not let people know what they were potentially exposed to," said Joel Kupferman of the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project. "They're using the secrecy thing to cover up their malfeasance and past deceptions."

In a series of damning editorials, the Daily News has taken the EPA and Whitman to task for downplaying the dangers posed by toxic air and accused Mayor Bloomberg and city officials of stiffing 12,000 ailing Ground Zero workers.

Bloomberg has promised to look into the claims of the sick cops, firefighters and other Ground Zero heroes. But he has refused to acknowledge that the deaths of at least four first responders - and the illnesses of thousands more - were directly related to their toiling in The Pit.

Whitman, who resigned as EPA chief in May 2003, could not be reached for comment yesterday. In a Newsweek interview that year, she said the White House never told her to lie about the air quality.

However, Whitman conceded that she did not object when words of caution were edited out of her public statements.

"We didn't want to scare people," she said.

Asked last night about the executive order, a White House spokeswoman said she would have a response today.

Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Whitman declared, "There appear to be no significant levels of asbestos dust in the air in New York City." Then on Sept. 21, Whitman reported that "a host of potential contaminants are either not detectable" or at a level the EPA considered safe.

But on Oct. 26, 2001, the Daily News slapped "Toxic Zone" on the front page and warned that "toxic chemicals and metals" were poisoning lower Manhattan.

Mike McCormick, the medic who found the now-famous tattered Ground Zero flag - and who suffers from a host of respiratory problems - said he never believed the EPA's claims.

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/438831p-369566c.html

morpheus

07-28-2006, 01:21 PM

'Secret' 9/11 lies?

BY CORKY SIEMASZKO
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Friday, July 28th, 2006

With New Yorkers already fuming about reports that the feds downplayed the danger of Ground Zero dust, the White House gave EPA chief Christie Whitman the power to bury embarrassing documents by classifying them "secret."

"I hereby designate the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to classify information originally as 'Secret,'" states the executive order, which was signed by President Bush on May 6, 2002.

Although the stated reason for Bush's directive is to keep "national security information" from falling into enemy hands, advocates for thousands of ailing Ground Zero heroes are convinced there's a more sinister motive.

"I think the rationale behind this was to not let people know what they were potentially exposed to," said Joel Kupferman of the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project. "They're using the secrecy thing to cover up their malfeasance and past deceptions."

In a series of damning editorials, the Daily News has taken the EPA and Whitman to task for downplaying the dangers posed by toxic air and accused Mayor Bloomberg and city officials of stiffing 12,000 ailing Ground Zero workers.

Bloomberg has promised to look into the claims of the sick cops, firefighters and other Ground Zero heroes. But he has refused to acknowledge that the deaths of at least four first responders - and the illnesses of thousands more - were directly related to their toiling in The Pit.

Whitman, who resigned as EPA chief in May 2003, could not be reached for comment yesterday. In a Newsweek interview that year, she said the White House never told her to lie about the air quality.

However, Whitman conceded that she did not object when words of caution were edited out of her public statements.

"We didn't want to scare people," she said.

Asked last night about the executive order, a White House spokeswoman said she would have a response today.

Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Whitman declared, "There appear to be no significant levels of asbestos dust in the air in New York City." Then on Sept. 21, Whitman reported that "a host of potential contaminants are either not detectable" or at a level the EPA considered safe.

But on Oct. 26, 2001, the Daily News slapped "Toxic Zone" on the front page and warned that "toxic chemicals and metals" were poisoning lower Manhattan.

Mike McCormick, the medic who found the now-famous tattered Ground Zero flag - and who suffers from a host of respiratory problems - said he never believed the EPA's claims.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/438831p-369566c.html
its really sad how many people actually did.

caicaishu

07-28-2006, 09:56 PM

no pictrues?

JaneDoe

07-30-2006, 07:33 AM

Here is a slideshow of the new design...
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2006/06/28/nyregion/20060628_FREEDOM_SLIDESHOW_1.html

NYer

07-30-2006, 09:57 AM

its really sad how many people actually did.

My son was lucky ... first, he's alive. And second, his cough only lasted six months. Still ...

NYer

08-03-2006, 10:26 AM

When did 9/11 become a Lauging Matter? (http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005660.htm)

File this under: What Were They Thinking?

NYer

08-05-2006, 06:09 PM

Book Review: The Looming Tower (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/books/review/06filkins.html?ref=books)

The most gut-wrenching scenes are the ones that show F.B.I. agents trying, as 9/11 approached, to pry information from their rivals inside the United States government. The C.I.A., Wright says, knew that high-level Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. The C.I.A. failed to inform agencies like the F.B.I. — which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot — until late in the summer of 2001.

The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined before, but never in such detail. At meetings, C.I.A. analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual hijackers in front of F.B.I. agents, but wouldn’t tell them who they were. The F.B.I. agents could sense that the C.I.A. possessed crucial pieces of evidence about Islamic radicals they were investigating, but couldn’t tell what they were. The tension came to a head at a meeting in New York on June 11, exactly three months before the catastrophe, which ended with F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents shouting at each other across the room.

In one of the most remarkable scenes in the book, Ali Soufan, an F.B.I. agent assigned to Al Qaeda, was taken aside on Sept. 12 and finally shown the names and photos of the men the C.I.A. had known for more than a year and a half were in America. The planes had already struck. Soufan ran to the bathroom and retched.

And Jamie Gorelick, architect of The Wall, sat on the 9/11 Panel. She should have been under subpoena as a witness.

NYer

08-08-2006, 09:39 AM

9/11 - The Activity Book? (http://www.nysun.com/article/37484)

An activity book for children about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks being distributed to schools with funding from Keyspan, North Fork Bank, and the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges contains pages of "trivia questions" and math problems about the attack.

The booklet, funded in part by an event involving Olympic silver medal winner Nancy Kerrigan, is intended to make for "a happy 9/11 commemorative event," said Tara Modlin, the founder of the organization distributing it, Stars, Stripes & Skates."To teach kids about an event so morbid, we needed to make something fun for them," she said.

What's next? Mohammed Atta Brownies? Sheesh ...

kotzi

08-08-2006, 10:27 AM

Perhaps they are going to solve riddles like 4+4

This is disgusting. Especially when it comes from a 9/11-family member. http://www.longislandexchange.com/press-release/silvermanmedia82505.html

experiencediz

08-11-2006, 10:28 PM

Lou Dobbs: 9/11 Lies Suggests Need For "Full Investigation"
Article posted Aug 10 2006, 3:12 AM

What did we miss? (http://www.informationliberation.com/index.php?id=14316)

NYer

08-14-2006, 09:30 AM

Why did This (http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/443340p-373401c.html) take so long?

http://www.nydailynews.com/ips_rich_content/855-worker0814.jpg

Of course, had the EPA alerted folks to the true environmental impact at the WTC site, perhaps these laws would not be necessary.

My personal fave is:

A final directive, aimed at speeding up sluggish insurers, will demand that they make a decision on all medical procedures over $500 within 30 days - or else have the claims automatically approved.

As far as I'm concerned, this should apply to ALL health insurance claims.

NYer

08-15-2006, 03:17 PM

Mystery 9-11 Rescuer Found. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14350685/?GT1=8404)

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/060814/060814_thomas_vmed_5p.widec.jpg
Jason Thomas, Columbus OH

NYer

08-16-2006, 03:53 PM

9-11 Emergency Calls. (http://www.wnbc.com/news/9688830/detail.html)

NYer

08-17-2006, 09:48 AM

http://www.cagle.com/working/060811/koterba.gif

NYer

08-19-2006, 10:46 PM

Is it me, or is anyone else upset by this. (http://takebackthememorial.org/?p=277)

http://takebackthememorial.org/uploads/MakingamintoffofSeptember11.jpg

Seems like a shameless attempt to capitalize on those whose lives were stolen that day. Of course that's just my opinion - I could be wrong.

NYer

09-04-2006, 09:09 PM

Five years later ... Where Is The Anger? (http://rightinaleftworld.blogspot.com/2006/09/september-11-where-is-anger.html)

...Many others throughout the nation seem to express the same sentiment of harboring no ill will against these terrorists, seemingly seeing them as innocent third world “freedom fighters” so oppressed by American policy that they have no recourse but to engage in suicide attacks against our wealth and success.

Have we fallen back asleep? Do we honestly feel these terrorists aren’t bent on world domination, but are so oppressed they need to attack us, the ones who actually buy their products?

... I can only wonder, where is our nations anger? How will we win the War on Terror if so many have forgiven those that planned the attacks and trained the 19 to carry out the sneak attacks of September 11, 2001 and humanized our latest enemy?

How can we have forgotten our anger so soon?

MerlboroMan

09-04-2006, 10:27 PM

kotzi

09-04-2006, 10:35 PM

Five years later ... Where Is The Anger? (http://rightinaleftworld.blogspot.com/2006/09/september-11-where-is-anger.html)

How can we have forgotten our anger so soon?

Or was it the Bush adminstration who quickly forgot who was behind the attacks and has yet to bring the man to justice who they said they wanted "dead or alive"? I would not be so quick with pointing the finger at the American public.

:happy_12:

MerlboroMan

09-04-2006, 10:37 PM

Or was it the Bush adminstration who quickly forgot who was behind the attacks and has yet to bring the man to justice who they said they wanted "dead or alive"? I would not be so quick with pointing the finger at the American public.

:happy_12:
The American public is responsible for leaving this fight to their government and then whining how it's going. If you want something done right...

kotzi

09-05-2006, 02:33 AM

The American public is responsible for leaving this fight to their government and then whining how it's going. If you want something done right...

You're saying we should abandon the concept of representative democracy? What should we do instead? I am open for (good) suggestions other than communism, facism, any dictatorship in general, anarchism, "islamism", and last but not least any other -isms :-)

MerlboroMan

09-05-2006, 02:43 AM

You're saying we should abandon the concept of representative democracy? What should we do instead? I am open for (good) suggestions other than communism, facism, any dictatorship in general, anarchism, "islamism", and last but not least any other -isms :-)

Join a militia.

NYer

09-07-2006, 01:38 PM

Crystal Morning (http://brain-terminal.com/posts/2006/09/05/crystal-morning) is dedicated:

* To all the innocents killed on September 11th, 2001,
* To all the people who died while trying to save others,
* To all the people who comforted those who knew they were facing the final moments of their lives,
* To everyone who lost someone dear,
* To New York City,
* To the men and women working to defeat those who attacked us and those who desire to,
* To the two towers whose beauty I did not appreciate until after they were gone, and
* To the hope that this mad world might one day rise above the mentality that caused September 11th.

NYer

09-07-2006, 02:12 PM

Meanwhile, CAIR is pressuring educators to whitewash 9-11. (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22457_CAIR_Pressuring_Schools_to_Whitewash_ 9-11#comments)

NYer

09-08-2006, 10:36 AM

I just called to say I Love You. (http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110008909)

I think too about the sounds that came from within the buildings and within the planes--the phone calls and messages left on answering machines, all the last things said to whoever was home and picked up the phone. They awe me, those messages.

Read the whole thing...

al-Canine

09-18-2006, 09:13 AM

WTC BOMBSHELL

By SUSAN EDELMAN and DAN MANGAN

September 18, 2006 -- Christie Todd Whitman, while head of the federal EPA, "conspired" to falsely reassure the public that the air around Ground Zero was safe to breath, according to critics and bombshell new documents.

In 2003, Whitman's then-spokeswoman, Tina Kreisher, was asked by an Environmental Protection Agency internal investigator "whether there was a conscious effort to reassure the public [in the fall of 2001].

"Ms. Kreisher said there was such an effort. This emphasis 'came from the administrator [Whitman] and the White House,' " according to newly released quotes from EPA papers.

Hugh Kaufman, an EPA senior policy analyst, told The Post yesterday, that Kreisher "blew the whistle not just on the White House, but on Whitman as well,"

Kreisher's comment was included in the investigator's notes made during the interview with her. But her quote was not released in the EPA inspector general's final report in 2003, which blamed the White House - not Whitman - for telling the EPA to publicly play up reassuring information and downplay concerns about air around Ground Zero.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan) blasted Whitman over the new disclosure.

"She conspired [with the White House] to convince people to go into an unsafe environment . . . For that, she ought to be prosecuted," Nadler said. "People are dead because of her."

Whitman's current spokeswoman responded by sending The Post a statement that her boss had recently released on the controversy over air quality.

"We agreed then, and I reiterate now, that the air on the site was not clean," Whitman said.

"We were emphatic that workers needed to wear respirators, a message that I repeated frequently. But I did not have the jurisdiction to force workers to wear them."

Meanwhile, Whitman's newly released financial-disclosure forms show that she said seven months before 9/11 that she would not get involved in any issue related to the finances of the Port Authority - which owns the WTC site - because she or her family owned PA bonds. Its finances could be impacted by lawsuits growing of the cleanup.

"I understand the following interests that belong to me, my spouse or my children present a conflict of interest," Whitman wrote at the time. She then listed various investments, including the bistate agency.

But Whitman was involved at Ground Zero despite that recusal, although she or her family also owned shares of Citigroup, whose insurance-company subsidiary, The Travelers, paid out hundred of millions of dollars in claims to downtown residents displaced by the attacks.

Critics said the documents indicate Whitman encouraged people to move back to near Ground Zero and work on the cleanup despite a health threat, which could have bolstered the bottom line of both the PA and Travelers.

That's because both the PA and Travelers now can argue in civil suits that they believed there was little or no danger from the air around the Trade Center based on statements made by the EPA.

David Worby, who represents 8,000 workers at and around Ground Zero, said, "The fact that the head of the EPA had a financial conflict defies imagination."

Whitman's camp pointed out that she previously had been cleared by the EPA's inspector general on conflict-of-interest accusations.

NEW YORK POST (http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/wtc_bombshell_regionalnews_susan_edelman_and_dan_m angan.htm)

NYer

09-18-2006, 10:11 AM

The Path to Hysteria (http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008958)

"The Path to 9/11" was intended to remind us of the common enemy we face. Like the 9/11 Report itself, it is meant to enable us to better defend ourselves from a future attack. Past is prologue, and 9/11 is merely another step in an escalating Islamic fundamentalist reign of terror. By dramatizing the step-by-step increase in attacks on America--all of which, in fact, occurred--we are better able to see the pattern and anticipate the future. That was the point of the series, its only intention. Call it the canary in the coal mine. Call it John O'Neill in the FBI.

Despite intense political pressure to pull the film right up until airtime, Disney/ABC stood tall and refused to give in. For this--for not buckling to threats from Democratic senators threatening to revoke ABC station licenses--Disney CEO Rober Iger and ABC executives deserve every commendation. Hence the 28 million viewers over two nights, and the ratings victory Monday night (little reported by the media), are gratifying indeed.

I watched both nights - The Path to 9/11 was apolitical ... the message was that many opportunities were lost. For example, could anyone imagine Jack Bauer's NOT checking out Moussaoui's computer? When the Philippines Police checked out Ramzi Youssef's computer, the FBI were seen commenting that they could not do that here for it would be inadmissible. Prior to 9/11, those entrusted to protect us could not talk to each other and were more concerned with convictions than saving lives. Let us hope, as Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend exclaimed, " We don't get fooled again."

NYer

01-25-2007, 09:46 AM

My Dad Is Strong, Now I Will Be, Too. (http://nydailynews.com/front/story/491705p-414171c.html)

My father, Cesar Borja, was a New York City police officer. In making people feel safe and protected, he felt like it was the best job in the world. He always told me he didn't want to go up in rank. He liked being on the streets where the people are. He felt like he could make the most difference there.

I was never afraid of my dad doing anything because he never failed. He was a hero when he worked at the World Trade Center, and when he passed away Tuesday night, he died a hero.

Read the whole thing.

al-Canine

05-17-2007, 11:55 PM

Senators want to make CIA release 9/11 report

Office has not publicized any of its internal documents on the attack

The Associated Press
Updated: 9:25 p.m. ET May 17, 2007

WASHINGTON - A bipartisan group of senators is pushing legislation that would force the CIA to release an inspector general’s report on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The CIA has spent more than 20 months weighing requests under the Freedom of Information Act for its internal investigation of the attacks but has yet to release any portion of it.

The agency is the only federal office involved in counterterrorism operations that has not made at least a version of its internal 9/11 investigation public.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and two other intelligence committee leaders — chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and senior Republican Kit Bond of Missouri — are pushing legislation that would require the agency to declassify the executive summary of the review within one month and submit a report to Congress explaining why any material was withheld.

The provision has been approved by the Senate twice, but never made into law.

In an interview, Wyden said he is also considering whether to link the report’s release to his acceptance of President Bush’s nominations for national security positions.

“It’s amazing the efforts the administration is going to stonewall this,” Wyden said. “The American people have a right to know what the Central Intelligence Agency was doing in those critical months before 9/11.... I am going to bulldog this until the public gets it.”

Completed in June 2005, the inspector general’s report examined the personal responsibility of individuals at the CIA before and after the attacks. Other agencies’ reviews examined structural problems within their organizations.

Wyden, who has read the classified report several times, wouldn’t offer any details on its findings or the conversations he has had with CIA Director Michael Hayden, former CIA Director Porter Goss and former National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

Political security at stake

But he did say that protecting individuals from embarrassment is not a legitimate reason for protecting the report’s contents from public review. He also said the decision to classify the report has nothing to do with national security, but rather political security.

Hayden declined to be interviewed about the report. In a statement Thursday, his spokesman Mark Mansfield said the CIA director wants the agency to learn from any past mistakes, but doesn’t want to dwell on them.

“Given the formidable national security challenges our nation faces, now and down the road, General Hayden believes it is essential for the Agency to move forward,” Mansfield said. “That’s where our emphasis needs to be.”

The agency’s actions prior to Sept. 11 have gotten renewed attention with the release of a memoir by former CIA director George Tenet. He has been criticized for not doing more to warn Bush about the al-Qaida threat.

In interviews about his memoir, he has said instead he worked the bureaucracy beneath the president by asking then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others for action.

Bond said some intelligence officials have dismissed the inspector general’s report as “ancient history,” which he doesn’t accept. He said the report has additional information which would be useful to the public.

“We have no desire to embarrass or throw cold water on the enthusiasm of the great men and women of the CIA, but let’s just take a clear and open look at what the IG found and see if we have all of those problems corrected,” Bond said.

'Stars who had excelled'

In an October 2005 statement Goss said the officers involved in counterterrorism were “stars who had excelled in their areas” singled out by the CIA to take on difficult assignments. “Unfortunately, time and resources were not on their side, despite their best efforts to meet unprecedented challenges,” he said.

Goss rejected a recommendation from CIA Inspector General John Helgerson that the agency form accountability review boards to examine any personal culpability. Bond said that move was regrettable.

In his statement, Goss also noted that the agency had received a Freedom of Information Act request for the report, and that a review process was ongoing. But the CIA has not released any documents to The Associated Press or other organizations that began requesting the information at least 20 months ago.

The law requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 days, but officials rarely meet those deadlines and often blame lengthy backlogs.

Groups including the National Security Archive have clashed with the agency over its FOIA policies. Last year, the archive gave the CIA its prize for the agency with the worst FOIA record. Called the “Rosemary Award,” it’s named after President Nixon’s secretary, Rosemary Woods, who erased 18 minutes of a key Watergate conversation on the White House tapes.

The citation noted that CIA’s oldest FOIA requests could apply for drivers’ licenses in most states. “CIA has for three decades been one of the worst FOIA agencies,” archive Director Thomas Blanton said this week.

Sensitive issue within the CIA

Many of the individuals highlighted in the inspector general’s report are likely to have retired. But some are believed still to be in senior government positions, making the report’s findings even more sensitive at the CIA and perhaps elsewhere within the intelligence community.

The AP has reported that the two-year review of what went wrong before the suicide hijackings harshly criticized a number of the agency’s most senior officials.

That includes Tenet, former clandestine service chief Jim Pavitt and former counterterrorism center head Cofer Black, according to individuals familiar with the report, who spoke in 2005 on condition they not be identified.

Yet the report also offered some praise for actions of Tenet and others.

Pavitt is now a principal with The Scowcroft Group, an international business advisory firm, and Black is vice chairman of Blackwater USA, an international security firm whose clients include the CIA and other U.S. agencies.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18728335/

NYer

05-18-2007, 10:53 AM

It's a pity Eliot Spitzer shielded Dieter Snell (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1329674/posts) as well.

al-Canine

06-12-2008, 10:36 PM

Fighting the Pentagon Inferno

From "Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11"

By Patrick Creed, Rick Newman

His own building was burning. Lower Manhattan, too. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld knew little else about what was happening to America as he huddled with his brain trust near the National Military Command Center, deep inside the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

When word had first started to circulate about a plane hitting the World Trade Center in New York, Joint Staff officers at the Pentagon grew anxious. When a second plane struck, there was no doubt about it—a terrorist attack was underway. Then came something even more unthinkable: a huge explosion on the western side of the Pentagon, followed by a massive inferno. The nation's military headquarters was under attack, too.

As flames roared and security officials shouted evacuation orders, thousands of people fled the Pentagon. But others raced to their duty stations inside the NMCC, the military's highly secure "nerve center." Above it, in a suite of rooms known as the Executive Support Center—the ESC—Rumsfeld headlined a group of generals, admirals, and other military leaders confounded by the sketchy information they were getting. A second plane was barreling toward Washington, possibly headed for the Pentagon—a follow-on attack, just like in New York. There were reports that the State Department had been attacked and that out in Colorado, several cargo trucks, possibly packed with explosives, were speeding toward Cheyenne Mountain, where NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, was based.

Meanwhile, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had grudgingly left the Pentagon on a helicopter, headed for Site R, the secret backup facility in the Maryland woods. Site R would be the military's primary command center if something managed to take down the Pentagon. A skeleton crew usually manned the facility, but bringing it fully online was more complicated than just flipping a switch. It would take a couple of hours, at least, to get a complete staff in place and test all the communications links to the Pentagon, the White House, and the rest of government. Until all the communications links were live, the NMCC represented a single point of failure in the military chain of command.

A secure videoteleconference was underway in the NMCC, connecting the Pentagon, the White House situation room, and the bunker beneath the White House. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, spoke frequently with Vice President Dick Cheney, who was in the bunker. President Bush, on Air Force One, came on the teleconference occasionally, along with officials at NORAD and the National Security Council.

Cheney had already authorized the military to shoot down any other hijacked aircraft, and there were vigorous efforts underway to get fighter jets in the air over major cities. Plenty of fighters were available at bases around the country. But few were prepared for live-fire missions; arming the fighters with missiles and other weaponry was taking longer than anybody would like.

There were a variety of other problems. Vice Adm. Tom Wilson, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, reminded Rumsfeld and others in the conference room that for the last several days, the Russians had been conducting probing missions to test U.S. air defenses. They'd send Bear bombers flying toward Alaska, to see how long it took American AWACS surveillance planes to react, then turn around just before entering U.S. airspace. It was a typical cat-and-mouse game between the Russians and the Americans. Except NORAD was now on hair-trigger alert, and any suspicious aircraft might be treated as hostile and shot down. "Somebody needs to call the Russian Embassy and tell them to knock that shit off," Wilson said.

"Do it," Rumsfeld ordered.

As military leaders grappled with the unfolding national catastrophe, smoke began to permeate the NMCC. The complex was on the other side of the Pentagon, away from the fire; when the plane had hit the building's western wall, people in the NMCC had felt nothing except a strange shudder, like a freight elevator making a hard landing in the shaft. But as the fire raged—so hot that water from fire hoses evaporated before even hitting the flames—smoke spread throughout the entire building. In the NMCC, eyes were watering, and noses running.

Rumsfeld and his lieutenants were in a separate conference room, and the air was getting hazy there, too. They were directed to another room, off the NMCC, where the air was clearer. Rumsfeld, somehow, seemed impervious to the smoke, coughing occasionally but showing no discomfort. Myers became concerned about all the military personnel staffing the facility, who were his responsibility. "Sir," he said to Rumsfeld, "you do understand, all those people out there will stay as long as you're here," implying they might have to leave the NMCC and relocate someplace else. Rumsfeld said nothing.

An engineer sent by the Pentagon's building managers brought a device that measured the oxygen in the room. His measurements showed that oxygen levels were falling. "Within an hour, it may be difficult to breathe in here," the engineer warned.

A short while later, a colonel from the Joint Staff—wearing an olive flight suit and a handgun in a shoulder holster—arrived at the fire chiefs' command post, outside the Pentagon, to plead the case for the NMCC to remain in operation. The fire commanders were facing the biggest, most complicated fire any of them had ever seen. A searing blaze, fed by thousands of gallons of jet fuel from the plane that had struck the building, consumed an amount of office space nearly equivalent to the entire Empire State Building. In addition to the fire, the Pentagon was also a crime scene—and a war zone. Search crews still fought through flames to look for survivors. Soldiers lined up in formation, trying to force their way past firefighters, to get back into the burning building and save comrades. FBI agents desperately tried to salvage evidence as firetrucks drove over pieces of the plane and firefighters bashed through piles of flaming debris.

As the fire chiefs listened to the colonel from the Joint Staff, they were flabbergasted to learn that anybody other than firefighters was still in the building. Even more astonishing: Rumsfeld planned to open the building for business the following day.

"We've got to keep the NMCC open," the colonel stressed.

"OK," said Ed Plaugher, the fire chief for Arlington County, Va. "Do you really want your people in there making decisions, possibly illegitimate decisions, under the influence of carbon monoxide?"

The colonel gave him a puzzled look. Plaugher continued. "Carbon monoxide is odorless and colorless," he explained. "And in a hot, smoky fire, there's usually tons of carbon monoxide. One of the first side effects is, it makes you do wacky things. In house fires, people who have lived there for 50 years will try to get out by walking into a closet. Do you really want people in that situation making command and control decisions?"

The colonel paused, pondering the risks. Then he asked, "If we monitor for it, does that change the picture?"

"How many people do you have?" Plaugher asked.

The NMCC normally had a staff of over 100, but the colonel said they were operating on a stripped-down crew of fewer than 50. The two men negotiated. Plaugher began to realize that the colonel had been sent out to plead the case for a decision that Rumsfeld and his staff had already made. He wasn't going to coax the military commanders out of their bunker, no matter what. Besides, Plaugher realized, as he looked at a fighter jet that was now circling overhead, the military guys inside the building had a lot of other important things to worry about.

They worked out a rough compromise. The colonel assured Plaugher that they'd get some equipment in place, pronto, to monitor carbon monoxide levels. The fire department, meanwhile, had some spare air bottles on reserve. "Let me give you enough breathing apparatus so that if something goes wrong, you can get people out of there," Plaugher offered. "It will give you an hour's worth of breathing time, which will be enough if you have to evacuate." It was a deal. The military would continue to man their war room. And the fire crews would keep battling the fire.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2008/06/09/fighting-the-pentagon-inferno.html