The Freedom Tower

The mayor of New York has asked the Congress to reopen a special fund for the victims of the 9/11 attacks.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg seeks to reopen the fund which was closed in 2003 in order to spare the city the possibility of losing billions of dollars in lawsuits. Bloomberg says federal intervention is needed for victims who may become ill for years to come.
“The mere fact that their injuries and illnesses have been slower to emerge should not disqualify them from getting the help that they need,'’ Bloomberg told the Senate.

Congress created the $7 billion September 11th Victim Compensation Fund soon after the attacks, and it immediately became the subject of intense debate among victims’ family members and politicians for the rules by which it distributed money.
The city believes there could be as many as 8,000 legal claims related to Ground Zero but attorneys already representing victims say the figure is closer to 10,000. The real truth of the matter is the fact that no one can predict how many potential victims may sue the city for illnesses related to the 9/11 attacks. That number is anybody’s guess.

Negligence charges against contractors, designers and architects involved in construction of World Trade Center buildings destroyed in the 9/11 attacks have been blocked by a federal court order.
Southern District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein says those firms, like the City of New York itself, are protected by the New York State Defense Emergency Act. It grants immunity for any actions taken by covered parties to prepare for or respond to attacks on the state or the country. In his ruling, Hellerstein said contractors, designers and architects who help build and maintain a 24 hour emergency operation at 7 World Trade Center adjacent to the Twin Towers were also covered by the act.
Litigation claiming negligent design and construction piled up against the designers and builders of the World Trade Center following the 2001 attacks. One of the chief targets of these lawsuits concerned a decision to keep large diesel fuel takes on the site. When those tanks erupted, it made fighting the fire that ensued nearly impossible, litigants claimed.

It’s not news that Rosie O’Donnell is capable of shooting off her mouth. This time, the talk show star is saying the World Trade Center may have been brought down deliberately on Sept. 11 to get rid of government records investigating corporate fraud.
I spent years traipsing in and out of government offices in the Trade Center, so the towers were home to any number of government offices that could have been repositories for fraud investigation files.
On her Rosie.com blog, Rosie is quoted as saying:

0. The fires in WTC 7 were not evenly distributed, so a perfect collapse was impossible.
0.
0. Silverstein said to the fire department commander “the smartest thing to do is pull it.”
0.
0. Firefighters withdrawing from the area stated the building was going to “blow up.”
0.
0. The roof of WTC 7 visibly crumbled and the building collapsed perfectly into its footprint.
0.
Molten steel and partially evaporated steel members were found in the debris.

The remainder of O’Donnell’s blog entry on 9/11 consists of a listing of various records supposedly destroyed in the collapse of WTC7, apparently meant to imply the building was brought down so as to eliminate records of investigations of Enron and other companies. Citing various sources at the end of each paragraph, O’Donnell writes:

WTC 7 contained offices of the FBI, Department of Defense, IRS (which contained prodigious amounts of corporate tax fraud, including Enron’s), US Secret Service, Securities & Exchange Commission (with more stock fraud records), and Citibank’s Salomon Smith Barney, the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and many other financial institutions.
Online Journal
The SEC has not quantified the number of active cases in which substantial files were destroyed [by the collapse of WTC 7]. Reuters news service and the Los Angeles Times published reports estimating them at 3,000 to 4,000. They include the agency’s major inquiry into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom. … “Ongoing investigations at the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their work is paper-intensive,” said Max Berger of New York’s Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. “This is a disaster for these cases.” New York Lawyer

There is no doubt that important records were destroyed and there is no doubt that some very important work has been lost. What it all means? Rosie’s guess is as good as mine.

When the Freedom Tower and the World Trade Center are completed, Fox News says visitors may have iris scans or thumb print analysis before they’re allowed in any of the buildings.
The network says smart cameras will also be scanning faces and match them to a photo database of known terrorists. Meanwhile, armed guards will be on patrol while air sensors randomly test the air for lethal gases.
‘Preliminary details of a plan to make the redeveloped 16-acre site as terrorism-proof as possible were provided to The Associated Press this past week by former FBI agent James Kallstrom, Gov. George Pataki’s senior counterterrorism adviser.
Kallstrom and city and federal officials are aiming for a higher standard of security than is currently in use for public spaces around the nation.
“This’ll be reflective of the times we live in,” Kallstrom said. “The consequences of attacking here could have more significance to the terrorists. It has a lot of symbolism. It’s going to be extremely well protected.”

The Department of Defense says the chief suspect in the 9/11 terrorist attacks has confessed to killing and beheading Wall Street Journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.
A story in the Middle East Times and every major news outlet in the world for that matter, are reporting this confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Mohammed says he beheaded Peal “with my blessed right hand” and says there is video tape on the internet showing Mohammed holding Pearl’s severed head.
The Times says the confession came during a closed-door hearing last Saturday at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as Mohammed, the number three leader of the Al Qaeda terror network, claimed responsibility for 31 plots around the world, including the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
Pearl’s kidnapping triggered a massive manhunt across Pakistan, as his French wife, Mariane, who was heavily pregnant with the couple’s first child, maintained an anxious vigil.,” the website said.

Four weeks later a graphic video showing Pearl’s decapitation was delivered to the US consulate in Karachi. His remains were later found in a compound on the outskirts of the city. Ruth and Judea Pearl, the parents of the beheaded journalist, said they were treating Mohammed’s statement cautiously.

“It is impossible to know at this point whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s boast about killing our son has any bearing in truth,” they said in a statement from their home in Encino, California.

“We prefer to focus our energy on continuing Danny’s lifework through the programs of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which aim to eradicate the hatred that took his life.”

A Christian view of the many controversies swirling around construction of the Freedom Tower has again zeroed in on designer Daniel Libeskind, the “latecomer” whose architectural vision did not see light of day until recently.
Libeskind is the outsider who came to New York and won the coveted Freedom Tower job.
World Magazine, a Christine website says Libeskind had help.
“What’s his secret? How can one man prevail in the face of such a task and given such odds? In Libeskind’s case, by knowing whom to listen to: his mother, his wife, and Saint Augustine.
Libeskind heeded the words of Augustine from the bowels of Ground Zero on a rainy day in November 2002. He had bested over 400 design entries to become one of seven finalists in a design competition many denounced as premature, pushed by leaseholder Larry Silverstein to recoup his 10 million square feet of office space destroyed on 9/11.
The other finalists were content to survey the site from an office window at 1 Liberty Plaza, but Libeskind wanted to go into it. With a Port Authority worker, he and his wife Nina descended a ramp to bedrock. This was the pit: a hole in Manhattan 16 acres in size at the surface and 70 feet deep that opened when the twin towers fell.
Here, Libeskind said, he felt “the enormity of the loss.” Seven stories of foundation and infrastructure that once lay beneath the World Trade Center, gone.
But down in the pit Libeskind discovered the “slurry wall,” a dam far beneath lower Manhattan, holding back the Hudson River and serving as the western foundation to the World Trade Center site. It was intact. Had it split with the force of the World Trade Center’s collapse, the New York subway system would have flooded and the city likely would have been underwater.
Libeskind says that at that moment, his hand pressed to the cold, damp slurry wall, he heard the same voice Augustine reports hearing in his Confessions. “Take it and read it. Take it and read it.” For Augustine it was a call to take up the Scriptures; for Libeskind it was a call to “read” the slurry wall, “a revelatory experience,” he says, and a metaphor for what remains when everything else falls down.”
Now that some kind of divine intervention.

What do you expect a martyr to say?
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is saying he did everything except build the pyramids. He claims he was responsible for dozens of foiled, successful and otherwise botched attacks over a 15 year period. The AP rightly asks what does Khalid means when he uses the world “responsible.”
Officials say the 9/11 mastermind was key to some plots but a bit player in others.
An unidentified source noted that Mohammed‘s activities are likely to be the subject of an upcoming military tribunal.
While there apparently is truth in much of the statement, several officials said, there‘s also an element of self-promotion. They view the claims as at least in part a rallying cry to bolster his image and that of al-Qaida in the only venue Mohammed has left: a military courtroom from which the public is barred.
“I have never known a criminal — either terrorist or otherwise — that didn‘t exaggerate,” said Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent and the top Republican on the terrorism panel of the House Intelligence Committee.

An Irish engraver found a discarded piece of glass at work one day. It resembled the arch of a church stained glass window. Sean Egan, who works at the Waterford factory in Ireland, later came across a well known photo of five New York firemen and policemen carrying a fallen Fire Department chaplain out of the rubble at the World Trade Center.
Egan said the glass he had saved resembled the steel remnants from the World Trade Center photo. He used the discarded glass to replicate the photo image in glass – Waterford glass.
Egan works for Waterford Crystal in Ireland. Egan along with company executives planned to pay an early St. Patrick’s Day visit to a New York firehouse on Wednesday to present the larger crystal sculpture he created to honor the firemen and victims of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, according to the Associated Press. “It was such an awful day,” said Egan. “Everyone in Ireland grieved. The firemen were rushing into the building as everyone was rushing out.”
Egan hopes that others will be inspired by the sculpture.
“I want people to see the pain on the faces of the firemen and police officers carrying Father Judge out,” he said. “At the same time I want them to see the peace in Father Judge’s reflection. There is peace among death and destruction. Father Judge is giving us a message.”

A former Air Traffic Controller says the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks had to have been seen and tracked by the North American Aerospace Defense Command monitors on the morning of September 11th.
Within three hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Robin Hordon knew it was an inside job. He made these comments on Robert.blogspirit.com.
He had been an Air Traffic Controller (ATC) for eleven years before Reagan fired him and hundreds of his colleagues after they went on strike in the eighties. Having handled in-flight emergencies and two actual hijackings in his career, he is well qualified to comment on what NORAD should have been able to achieve in its response to the near simultaneous hijacking of four domestic passenger carriers on the morning of September 11th, 2001.
“There had to be something huge to explain why those aircraft weren’t shot down out of the sky. We have fighters on the ready to handle these situations twenty-four-seven. We have NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) monitors monitoring our skies twenty-four-seven. We have a lot of human beings, civilian and military, who care about doing their jobs.”
Well, one plane might have slipped through but not several planes off course, all heading towards key targets.


The on-going search for remains of Sept. 11 victims is being concentrated in an area across the street from Ground Zero.
The site being examined now are on the grounds where a church stood five years ago … St. Nicolas Greek Orthodox Church.
The search was moved to this site after two bones were recovered there last week. Authorities say they are not surprised to find remains so far from Ground Zero. Searchers have found more than 400 bones from debris shifted from a service road. The church lost important relics after 9/11 that included the bones of three saints at the site. Church members say authorities have returned relics that belong to the church. These included a small bell, a cross, several Bibles and a few wax candles.
Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler sent a memo to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, telling him the city had finished digging at the World Trade Center service road and repaved it last month.
Families of most victims are still waiting for positive identifications of their loved ones. Skyler says there could be some human remains in portions of access ramps under West Street just west of the WTC site.