The Freedom Tower

Greg Mitchell of The Huffington Post writes: “Last week, I took the subway down to the vicinity of the old World Trade Center site for the first time in a couple of years for an interview about my new book. This took place in a building directly across the highway from Ground Zero. It’s always shocking to see the scale of the site and the lack of progress in turning it into — anything. It’s still a giant hole, which only serves to remind you what is missing there besides the twin towers. That is, some 3000 lost souls.

One of them was my good friend, Jon Albert.

So any visit is extremely painful, while also reinforcing what most of us New Yorkers did not feel back then — that we should attack a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack.

One of the recurring themes in my book on Iraq and the media is wide public ignorance about 9/11. Starting in 2002, polls showed that more than half of all Americans (and later, slightly less than that) believed that there were one or more Iraqi hijackers in the 9/11 planes and that Saddam was connected to the 9/11 plot. It would be funny if it wasn’t so unfunny.

How much the media had to do with this outrage is interesting to contemplate, but the bottom line is: An overwhelming majority of those who supported our invasion of Iraq were horribly misinformed or uninformed.

Here is what I wrote about this for Editor & Publisher in 2003 a month before we invaded Iraq.
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In our East Village building, E&P staffers work closer to Ground Zero than most magazine editors in New York, and perhaps that’s why we brought a special passion to our post-9/11 coverage. But I had another, even more personal reason. It also helps explain why the use of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to justify an invasion of a country that had nothing to do with them disturbs me so much.

Every weekday morning, when I finish my commute by exiting the subway at Astor Place, nothing but empty sky greets me looking south down Lafayette Street. Until a little more than six years ago, I saw something quite different filling much of the same sky: the twin totems of the World Trade Center, welcoming me above ground in Manhattan.

Compared with the stories of some New Yorkers, my own 9/11 story pales, but it informs everything I write and feel about the tragedy. That morning, I was midway to Grand Central Terminal on a train speeding along the Hudson when the conductor came on the public-address system and said, “A plane has just hit the World Trade Center.” And, sure enough, straight down the river, there was one of the Twin Towers smoking. Then, a few minutes later, pulling into Grand Central, came another announcement: “You’re not going to believe this, folks, but a plane has just hit the other tower.”

My first thought was: “What floor does Jon Albert work on?” I recalled it as being horrendously high. I had just talked with my friend the previous night. He was on the board of the local Little League, I was a manager. I had coached his son for several years, and wrote about Jon and his boy in my recent book, Joy in Mudville. In fact, I was coaching his son, on my “fall ball” team.

Only much later, when I learned the flight paths of the two jetliners, did I realize that as I was training along the river, at least one of the hijacked planes flew directly overhead. Nearing the city, I might have even heard one of them.

After arriving, I spent the next three hours trying to reach our office, more than 30 blocks south. I took a cab for a few blocks, then traffic stopped. I walked back to Grand Central thinking the subways might be running again. They weren’t, and Grand Central had been evacuated. Like other New Yorkers, I staggered around in a daze for an hour. Catching bits of news off TV sets in bars and cafes, some of us learned that another hijacked airliner might be heading our way.

Then I trudged to the office. As I got below 14th Street, I could see the mountain of deadly smoke covering that patch of blue sky that once embraced the towers. I was a veteran of ground zeroes, having spent a lot of time in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but this was here, this was now. Swirls of acrid dust blew in my face — pulverized concrete and (I imagined) human residue.

Well, I reached the office, somehow got some stories up on our Web site, and when the trains started running again, I headed for home in the evening. When I got there, I found out that Jon Albert had not yet returned, and everyone feared the worst.”