The Freedom Tower

Writing at Family Security Matters, Luke Sheahan, says he’s  “been mulling over Stanley Kurtz’s analysis of the recently released list of donations to universities originating in foreign countries published some time ago on National Review. He discusses the, what shall we say, interesting issue of Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s $20,000,000 gift to Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He donated the same sum to Harvard University.

This was the same prince that tried to donate $10 million to the Twin Towers Fund - and announced that America should “re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause.” It was rightly rejected by then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

If the attempted donation to the Twin Towers Fund came with such a purpose, rather than a simple act of goodwill toward the United States, what can be the intentions of twice that amount going to two prestigious American universities? Just to enhance American education and aid mankind’s collective search for truth? Hah. I think that “Muslim-Christian Understanding” was intended to serve a particular purpose for this Saudi Prince, and I don’t think it’s good for American, or Western, interests. Kurtz notes,

Alwaleed clearly means his gifts to shape American views on the Middle East, and there are legitimate grounds for asking…whether such gifts might compromise the content of scholarship at Harvard and Georgetown.

Kurtz notes a rather disturbing incident regarding a $2.5 million gift from the United Arab Emirates to Harvard Divinity School for the establishment of an endowed professorship in Islamic religious studies. The gift was returned after Harvard Divinity students discovered that the UAE institution donating the money “had hosted speakers claiming that the Holocaust was perpetrated by Zionists, and that Israel was behind 9/11.” Yikes. They were right to return it. Good for them.

And then comes the inevitable but.

This return happened in 2004. But, in 2005, Harvard received two $1 million gifts from unnamed donors in the UAE and a $1.5 million contract between Harvard and the UAE. In 2006, Harvard received an enormous $14,586,957 gift from an apparently anonymous “non-government” donor. Hmmm. Is there something here? I’d say it looks pretty suspicious and Kurtz also wonders what exactly was taking place. As he notes, we would certainly need more information before we determined that what I clearly suspect happened, actually happened. Harvard should be willing to disclose that information.

Kurtz notes that his reporting on this issue does “not reflect settled conclusions.” Fair enough. But he’s right to be suspicious. Universities have done little to bolster the American people’s waning faith in their good will toward the country that founded, shelters, and primarily funds them.

What I’m getting at here is this: have the universities given us any reason to trust them on issues like this? They ceased long ago to educate students properly, to teach them, as Allan Bloom instructed, to ask themselves the question, “‘What is man?,’ in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs.” The university fails in its primary mission. But it has invented a new mission, one that is “progressive” and “open-minded.” It more or less amounts to emptying students’ minds of whatever thoughts or prejudices they may have previously held, especially if they got such ideas from their parents, and to fill the proverbial vacuum with vapid notions of moral relativism, multiculturalism, and other such intellectual vacuities common to late modernity. Any faith in tradition or trust in ancestral wisdom must be snuffed out and replaced in an unbending faith in the “new,” in progress. Whatever comes after must be better than what came before.

One is reminded of the folks St. Paul confronted on the Areopagus in Athens, men who “would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” Whether it was true was irrelevant, only newness, progressiveness, was what mattered. An ancient and eternally silly idea.

It all brings us back to the universities accepting foreign cash to fund an intellectual attack on the American idea. If there is not truth and evil then there can be no distinction made between America and her enemies. In fact, America is a sign of the old, at least to the universities founded here. America is all they have known. They want something new. America’s enemies seem to be prime candidates. The problem is that the resiliency of the American idea, even in its relative youthfulness it still boasts the oldest written Constitution, tends to make its enemies moving targets. If they are perpetually falling then they must be perpetually replaced and, hence, are always new. But American survival cannot be maintained in perpetuity, not when our universities seem to be so tightly tucked under the covers with America’s enemies.”

David Dunlap at the New York Times says “Only 1,761 feet to go.” He’s writing about The Freedom Tower.

“Another tangible and fanfare-free milestone occurred over the weekend at ground zero, where two steel columns of 1 World Trade Center rose above street level for the first time. That means the 1,776-foot skyscraper, until now an entirely subterranean structure, will be doing the rest of its climbing in the public eye.

In contrast to the heavily orchestrated ceremonies of past years — white doves taking flight (they turned out to be homing pigeons) and a 20-ton cornerstone being set into place (it had to be picked up again and moved off site) — the latest milestone was noted quite modestly by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.”

Pat Shannan, writing for American Free Press Net, says
“more than 360 workers who dealt with the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster are known to have died, New York health officials said in May. Of the more than 600 diagnosed with cancer (other than blood cancer), 80 are included in the death count. Other deaths were traced to blood cancers and heart and circulatory diseases. Five ex-workers committed suicide, said Kitty Gelberg, who is tracking the deaths for the state’s World Trade Center Responder Fatality Investigation Program.

Officials have determined the cause of death of 154 of the responders and volunteers who toiled at Ground Zero, the blocks nearby and at the Fresh Kills landfill, where debris from the site was taken. “It’s the tip of the iceberg,” said David Worby, who is representing 10,000 workers who say they got sick after working on rescue and recovery efforts.

“These statistics bear out how toxic that site was, Worby said. Most of the deadly tumors were in the lungs and digestive system, according to the tally from the state’s program. Ms. Gelberg said she had not yet determined whether the number of cancer deaths was more or less than those typically occurring in men in their 20s to 50s who work as cops, firefighters or laborers—the majority of 9-11 workers.

“We are not saying all of these deaths are World Trade Center-related,” she said, not yet ready to make that determination without the statistics.

She added that relatives of people who died of cancer may be likely to link their loved one’s death to their 9-11 work and add them to the database, despite other possible factors. Ms. Gelberg said she is compiling the deaths from public sources, individuals and agencies and believes there is an overall undercount of workers who have died. The statistics cover Sept. 12, 2001, through May 1, 2008.

The city Health Department said it was actively examining whether deaths have been elevated as a result of 9-11. Last year, the head of Mount Sinai Medical Center’s monitoring and treatment program, Dr. Robin Herbert, predicted a “third wave” of 9-11-related deaths from cancer.

“We know people were exposed to carcinogens. There was benzene, dioxin, asbestos,” said her colleague Dr. Philip Landrigan. “There’s reason to be concerned, so we’re engaged in watchful waiting. So far, there’s no excess.”

Cathy Murray, whose husband, Fire Lt. John Murray, died of colon cancer April 30, “absolutely” connects his disease to his work at Ground Zero. He was diagnosed in June and was 52 when he died, she said. An FDNY spokesman couldn’t immediately say where or when Murray performed 9-11-related duty, but a department letter confirms that he spent at least 40 hours at World Trade Center-designated work sites.

“He was perfectly healthy,” said Cathy Murray, 53, of Staten Island. “He never smoked a day in his life, and neither did I. It happened so quick and [was] so aggressive. He was responding [to therapy] at first, but then he wasn’t,” she added. “And now he’s gone.”

A blog at www.boards.ie discusses “numerous reports of molten metal under ground zero.” It says defenders of the official version of 9/11 have tried to argue that it was not steel, but some other kind of metal with a lower melting point.

“Well, here are what top experts who eyewitnessed the molten metal say:

The head of a team of scientists studying the potential health effects of 9/11, reported, “Fires are still actively burning and the smoke is very intense. In some pockets now being uncovered, they are finding molten steel”
Hazardous materials experts also stated that, six weeks after 9/11, “There are pieces of steel being pulled out [from as far as six stories underground] that are still cherry red” and “the blaze is so ‘far beyond a normal fire’ that it is nearly impossible to draw conclusions about it based on other fires” (pay-per-view)
An expert stated about World Trade Center building 7, “A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been PARTLY EVAPORATED in extraordinarily high temperatures” (pay-per-view). Note that evaporation means conversion from a liquid to a gas; so the steel beams in building 7 were subjected to temperatures high enough to melt and evaporate them
According to reporter Christopher Bollyn, MarkLoizeaux, president the world’s top demolition company, and Peter Tully, head of a large construction firm, said the following:
Tully told AFP that he had seen pools of “literally molten steel” in the rubble.

Loizeaux confirmed this: “Yes, hot spots of molten steel in the basements,” he said, “at the bottom of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven levels.”

The molten steel was found “three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed,” he said. He confirmed that molten steel was also found at WTC 7, which mysteriously collapsed in the late afternoon.
Here’s what eyewitness firefighters say:

New York firefighters recalled in a documentary film, “heat so intense they encountered rivers of molten steel”

A NY firefighter described molten steel flowing at ground zero, and said it was like a “foundry” or like “lava”
According to a member of New York Air National Guard’s 109th Air Wing, who was at Ground Zero from September 22 to October 6, “One fireman told us that there was still molten steel at the heart of the towers’ remains. Firemen sprayed water to cool the debris down but the heat remained intense enough at the surface to melt their boots”
As late as five months after the attacks, in February 2002, firefighter Joe O’Toole saw a steel beam being lifted from deep underground at Ground Zero, which, he says, “was dripping from the molten steel”
Here’s what other eyewitnesses say:

A public health advisor who arrived at Ground Zero on September 12, said that “feeling the heat” and “seeing the molten steel” there reminded him of a volcano
An employee of New Jersey’s Task Force One Urban Search and Rescue witnessed “Fires burn[ing and molten steel flow[ing] in the pile of ruins still settling beneath her feet”
A reporter with rare access to the debris at ground zero “descended deep below street level to areas where underground fires still burned and steel flowed in molten streams”
An Occupational Safety and Health Administration Officer at the Trade Center reported a fire truck 10 feet below the ground that was still burning two weeks after the Tower collapsed, “its metal so hot that it looked like a vat of molten steel”
A witness said “In the first few weeks, sometimes when a worker would pull a steel beam from the wreckage, the end of the beam would be dripping molten steel”
A NY Department of Sanitation spokeswoman said “for about two and a half months after the attacks, in addition to its regular duties, NYDS played a major role in debris removal - everything from molten steel beams to human remains…”
The fact that there was molten steel under ground zero for months after 9/11 is very odd, especially since firefighters sprayed millions of gallons of water on the fires and applied high-tech fire retardants.”

From Nigerian Curiosity: “How To Shoot Yourself in the Foot …”

“After the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the U.S., Nigeria was added to an American list of countries with ties to terrorism. This, despite the fact that then-president Olusegun Obasanjo spent a significant amount of time visiting the US and proclaiming Nigeria’s staunch support of the American counter-terrorism efforts.

As a Nigerian abroad, I was frequently asked questions, such as “Is it true that Nigeria harbors terrorists?” or “Is it safe in Nigeria, what with Al Qaeda and stuff…”. With each question, I got protective about Nigeria and explained that Nigerians are not interested in Al Qaeda or terrorism. I would have to point out that Nigerians are considered some of the happiest people on the planet and that our love of ‘owambe’ (all night) parties, ‘awoof’ (I will have to rely on my readers for a detailed definition of this Nigerian concept), weddings and the overall good life would overcome any slight risk of even dabbling in terrorism.

Then MEND began to mete out their demands for justice, while its less-ideologically inclined imitators simply demanded money and Johnny Walker. Before I knew it, the uncomfortable questions started again. I would receive phone calls from long lost friends, “Is your mother okay? FOX News says they just bombed an oil rig” or “Some Americans got kidnapped over there. Is your family okay?” All I can say in response is, “My family is fine. The kidnappers will release the victims in no time, don’t worry. That’s how they do things…” And, with every new kidnapping incident, I paid less and less attention because I trusted that the kidnappers would release their victims and all would end well.

Things started to get better. America’s economic recession grabbed headlines and people focused on other things like the battle for the American presidency and the continuing process to pick a Democratic nominee. I started to breathe easier. I even managed to read a widely circulated US government report that the Nigerian Taliban, a small group operating mainly in Kano, has no ties to Al Qaeda or other Islamist militant groups in Algeria, Afghanistan or anywhere else. Hence, all that talk tying Nigeria to terrorists was all a big bad mistake. I poured myself a glass of Riesling and made a mental note to write about it and remind Nigerians and the world of the retraction.

But then it happened. I saw the following attention grabbing headline in my Google Reader - ‘R-E-D-A-L-E-R-T: IG Warns over Al- Qaeda Plot to Bomb Nigeria’ and my mouth became sour. I went on to read that Nigeria’s inspector General (IG) of Police, Mike Okiro, told a group of senior officials that,

“The al Qaeda network has threatened to send time bombs to Nigeria . . . CPs (commissioners of police) of all the commands should be on the alert and ensure that these items (bombs) do not pass through their end,”

Why would Okiro say this? And, why would he and the Yar’Adua Administration not do everything within their power to discourage the publication of such a glaringly disadvantageous headline? The IG’s statements go completely against any progress that Nigeria is attempting to make in rebranding itself and preparing for the development it proclaims to strive for. Nigeria cannot market itself as a tourist haven if its own IG contradicts the hardwork and collaboration between Nigerian and American authorities in retracting previous claims that Nigeria has terrorist ties. Nigeria cannot calm the fears of needed global investors who are hesitant to invest capital in the economy when our own IG is telling the world that the nation is an immediate terror target. But, even more important than any of that is the fact that in a country where citizens have hardly any light, are spending more and more of their hard-earned income on ever rising food, gas and other necessities, is it really wise to make such statements publicly? It is never wise to create fear in the heart of the populace by telling them that a world-renowned terrorist group plans to set off bombs in Nigeria whether that is true or not. Nigerians do not need this, in addition to all the other ‘wahala’ (problems) they deal with on a daily basis.

Despite this, I am glad that the IG has started his damage control and is now downplaying his quoted statement by asking Nigerians to ignore published accounts of a bomb plot. The Public Relations Officer of Nigeria Police Force, Agberebi Akpoebi, even went as far as declaring that the published reports were completely false and were done simply to serve “a selfish and private interest”. I am not quite sure what that means or whether this is effective damage control, especially as these responses from the IG were delayed by almost a week, but I can only hope that in Nigeria’s journey towards a more stable and secure nation, that we take the right steps to prevent the ambitions of those that seek to cause chaos while protecting the interests of the Nigerian citizen. And by interest, I am talking about the right to a peaceful nights sleep without adding terrorism fears to the many headaches Nigerians have to deal with. We cannot continue to give ammunition to those who clearly do not have our interests at heart. Let us try to not shoot ourselves in the foot by tying our lot to the aims of terrorism either intentionally or unintentionally.

May the souls of all those lost in the recent Lagos pipeline explosion, rest in peace. I hope that the IG, the seemingly hardworking Lagos state government and the federal government have an effective plan to prevent these explosions, which are beginning to occur too frequently.”

This is an on again, off again story. Gail Kalinoski, contributing editor at Commercial Property News wonders if JPMorgan Chase finally backed off on plans to build an office tower at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan.

“That may be happening despite word two months ago that the Wall Street giant would still develop a skyscraper on the site of the former Deutsche Bank building even though it had agreed to acquire troubled Bear Stearns and its Midtown office tower and trading floors at 383 Madison Ave. JPMorgan Chase officials had reportedly assured the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, lead agency for the World Trade Center redevelopment, that it would develop the Tower 5 site for something other than a new investment banking headquarters.

Doubt has been cast on that plan this week. Reuters reported today that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon talked about a glut of office space during a UBS AG investors’ conference Monday. Dimon told the attendees that JPMorgan Chase expects to have to sell or sublease about 1 million square feet of the 4 million square feet of space it will get in the Bear Stearns merger, according to reporting by Joseph Giannone and Joan Gralla. Dimon was quoted in the Reuters story as saying, “This stops us from having to basically spend $3 billion to build an investment banking headquarters Downtown.”

Last year, JPMorgan Chase had announced plans to spend at least $2 billion on a 1.3 million-square-foot tower on the Tower 5 site at a redeveloped World Trade Center. The bank planned to locate its investment banking headquarters there, including large trading floors. JPMorgan Chase now plans to put the investment banking HQ in the Bear Stearns building. A spokesperson for the Port Authority could not be reached by CPN before press time today. But Reuters reported this morning that the Port Authority had not been informed of any new decisions by JPMorgan Chase.

Robert Sammons, director of research for Colliers ABR, told CPN today he had also heard JPMorgan Chase expected to give up about 1 million square feet of space following the Bear Stearns acquisition. He said it would likely “come out of one of the Midtown towers.” Sammons said he had been surprised when JPMorgan Chase said several months ago it still planned to go ahead with the Downtown Manhattan tower. “We had written it off, but they claimed they were going to do it anyway.” If JPMorgan Chase does go ahead with the Tower 5 development, Sammons said there “would be benefits in the long term” from building Downtown. “

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.
*
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.”

www.portfolio.com reports from the “Annals of Port Authority Incompetence, Goldman Sachs Edition

Is there one single aspect of the World Trade Center rebuilding project that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey hasn’t managed to utterly bollocks up? The latest news: New York State, 50% shareholder in PANYNJ, looks like it’s going to have to pay Goldman Sachs $320 million because there’s no way that construction work is going to be able to get done on time.

Goldman insisted on the penalties because it’s building a new headquarters next door, and it didn’t want to move in to a building site. It’s now in negotiations with the state:

“From our discussions with Goldman Sachs,” said Avi Schick, president of the Empire State Development Corporation, “it is clear that the bank is more focused on ensuring an appropriate workplace environment for its employees than on collecting penalties from the city or the state.”

Goldman’s big mistake here, of course, was believing that just because rational economic actors respond to incentives, New York State would as well. Ha!

Goldman itself is extremely good at responding to incentives. Its continued presence in Lower Manhattan is crucial for the future of the district as a financial center, and it managed to squeeze $1.65 billion in tax-free Liberty Bonds out of George Pataki after essentially holding him to ransom and threatening to move to Midtown or - worse - New Jersey. That was enough to keep Goldman downtown, although senior management still had misgivings about moving to the Vesey Street site, which is not only quite far from the subway but also right next door to the never-ending saga that is the reconstruction of the WTC. And as anybody who works at Merrill Lynch will tell you, since 9/11 that side of West Street has not been the most pleasant or accessible place to work.

Now, Goldman is entitled to a few hundred million dollars - which is nice, but not really what they wanted. What they wanted was to move into a world-class headquarters building surrounded by world-class infrastructure, and that looks very much like it’s not going to happen on time, if it’s going to happen at all. (That ferry from the end of Vesey Street over towards the Goldman building in Jersey City? I’ll believe it when I see it.)

For the hundredth time, I’m sure that Mike Bloomberg and Dan Doctoroff are rolling their eyes and regretting that the city never managed to swap the land under LaGuardia and JFK airports for the WTC site. The PANYNJ really has no business running this gig, as it has proven time and time again. It’s even managed to make New York City look like a paragon of efficiency and dynamism. But then again, that’s pretty much what everybody knew would happen: all those low expectations are being met in full.”

The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks drastically changed American society,” says a blog called New Universty.org. “National security became the foremost political issue, a new war was started and the nation’s consciousness was forever altered. As with all great changes in society, the world of entertainment was also affected.
Immediately following 9/11, a number of movies, such as “Men in Black II” and “Spider-Man,” were edited so as not to include the World Trade Center. Several songs were removed entirely from the airwaves. The sequel to “True Lies,” in which Arnold Schwarzenegger was set to fight terrorists in the Middle East, was outright cancelled.
Following the immediate shock of 9/11, Hollywood would not begin to weigh in on the event for several years. The first major step toward open discussion in the entertainment industry was Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” in 2004. Two years later, the films “United 93” and “World Trade Center” were released.
These films failed to deal with the most important part of 9/11—its aftermath. Movies have been almost entirely limited to sobering looks at one of the worst days in American history. The true impact of 9/11 cannot be measured by the number of bodies or dollars of damage, but by how the event has affected our culture and perceptions of the world.
Only productions on the fringes of mainstream popularity have tried to tackle these issues. South Park has made numerous attacks on post-9/11 paranoia, most notably in the episode “Snuke,” where Cartman prevented an attack on the United States using racism. “Arrested Development” took numerous shots at the USA Patriot Act and the paranoia surrounding Iraq, in an episode in which a picture of a character’s testicles was enough to put the entire country on alert. Now, in perhaps my most nerdy reference yet, “Battlestar Gallactica” was an allegory for Afghanistan and the Iraq War.
Hollywood stopped testing the waters and dove in with “Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay.” The movie follows a Middle Eastern and Asian-American stoner team as they try to board a plane to Amsterdam. They are singled out because of their bong and quickly sent to Guantanamo Bay, successfully lampooning American post-9/11 racism and paranoia.
The movie has done well in theatres and will probably perform even better on DVD since one cannot bring a pipe into the theatre. It shows that at least a portion of America is ready to laugh at what their society has become. The story of Harold and Kumar is not that outlandish in a world where an old lady who donated money to the wrong charity was considered an “enemy combatant” by a government lawyer. Harold and Kumar do not live in a universe all that different from our own, and we have grown comfortable with laughing at our post-9/11 fears.”

Kimberly Ripley of New Hampshire, writing at www.gather.com:

“I walked as far around the perimeter (of Ground Zero) as the public was allowed. I just knew I’d find something to commemorate the lives lost here. I know plans for a memorial are in the making, but in the meantime I felt certain some type of makeshift tribute would be in place.
I found nothing. Aside from an American flag flying gently in the warm New York City evening breeze, there was nothing but construction equipment in the giant void that once served as a grave of sorts for the people who lost their lives on 9/11.
Why were there no flowers? Why wasn’t there at least a sign? “Rest In Peace.”
New Yorkers flowed by and around the area. Life seems a lot different than it was the last time I visited this city. It was just four weeks after 9/11. When I stepped off the train in Penn Station I was instantly heartbroken as I viewed hundreds and hundreds of signs with photographs on them.
“Have you seen this woman?”

”Has anyone seen my husband?”
Yet here it is just a few years later and nothing honors the void where the Twin Towers once stood.
In addition to the lack of respect and honor for those lives lost and their loved ones who remain, I think about the brave American men and women fighting terror in the Middle East. To not commemorate the tragedy of 9/11 negates (at least in my mind) what these soldiers stand for.
I know that one day a wondrous memorial will grace Ground Zero. But in the meantime I truly believe there needs to be something to remind us of the day that forever changed us as Americans. Our soldiers, our veterans, our 9/11 heroes, our dead, and their loved ones all deserve far better than what I observed there this evening.