The Freedom Tower

A furious debate over terrorism, security and the rule of law broke out on Tuesday as the presidential campaigns of Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama exchanged pointed salvos over who could best keep the nation safe, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

“The latest eruption began when John McCain’s top foreign policy and national security adviser, Randy Scheunemann, said in a conference call with reporters that Obama was displaying a “Sept. 10 mindset” about how best to fight terrorism - a comment that echoed President Bush’s attacks on Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 campaign.

Obama brushed off the criticism aboard his campaign plane, and questioned the McCain campaign’s standing to debate anti-terrorism policy.

“These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could’ve pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11,” he said.

It was the most heated back-and-forth yet in a debate that began last week when the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to challenge their detention in federal court. Obama praised the court’s decision as a return to the rule of law, while McCain excoriated it, saying that it could make America less safe, although the Republican candidate’s comments were a reminder of the complexities of his own past positioning on Guantanamo detainees,” the newspaper reported.

The New York Times says it has added a new biographical sketch of a Sept. 11 victim to the online archive of “Portraits of Grief,” the paper’s effort to chronicle the lives of all those lost in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

Until this week, the last new sketch had been added in 2003. In all, after the attacks, 140 of the paper’s reporters spent more than a year writing about more than 2,400 of that day’s roughly 2,800 victims.

The sketches — which often focused on one aspect of a victim’s life, and were not called obituaries both because of their approach and brevity — first appeared three days after the attacks. They filled one or more pages of The Times every day for four months in the fall of 2001, then weekly for most of the following year. The last two pages appeared several months apart. The profiles were collected in two books, a hardcover and a paperback, both of which are now out of print.

Victims were not included for a number of reasons: sometimes their families did not want to be involved; at other times survivors simply could not be found.

The September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center appeared to have left one in eight Lower Manhattan residents with signs of post-traumatic disorder (PTSD), according to a study published online this week in the Journal of Traumatic Stress. The study was published widely, including this report in Efluxmedia.com.

PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can occur after you have been through a traumatic event such as combat or military exposure, child sexual or physical abuse, terrorist attacks, sexual or physical assault, serious incidents (car crashes), natural disasters such as fire, tornado, hurricane, flood or earthquake.

These events cause people fear for their lives, living them feeling helpless. Strong emotions caused by the event create changes in the brain that may result in PTSD.

Not everyone going through a terrible event is at risk of PTSD. How likely people are to get PTSD depends on many things such as how close they were to the event, how strong their reactions were, how intense the trauma was or how long it lasted, how much they felt in control of events, how much help and support they got after the event or if they lost someone they were close to or were hurt.

People with PTSD experience irritability or anger, sleep difficulties, trouble concentrating, extreme vigilance, flashbacks and nightmares.

The New York City health department analyzed 11,000 residents through the World Trade Center Health Registry and found 12.6 percent of all respondents showed signs of PTSD as many as three years after the attacks.

The study was the first one to measure the attack’s long-term effect on the mental health of the community.

Factors such as sex, race, study level and income appeared to have influenced the respondents’ chances to develop PTSD include

More exactly, women were more likely to be affected, with 15 percent reporting symptoms compared with 10 percent of men.

Hispanics (24.7 percent) and blacks (20.6 percent) were more affected than whites (10.7 percent) and Asians (8.9 percent).

Only 11.1 percent of respondents with more than college diploma were affected compared with 18.3 percent of respondents with less than a high diploma.

Only 11.3 percent of hose earning more than $50,000 to $74,000 compared to 19.8 percent of those earning less than $25,000 a year.

About 38 percent of those injured in the attacks were most likely to be still suffering PTSD. About 17 percent of those who witnessed violent deaths and 17 percent of those caught in the dust cloud after the towers collapsed were showing signs of PTSD.

All these people “require more in-depth mental health monitoring, independent of the larger metropolitan area” the study authors concluded.

These figures add to hundreds of military troops coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan who develop PTSD symptoms yearly, and also to hundreds of other people affected by the Hurricane Katrina three years ago.

Writing for Timesunion.com, Michael Burke of the Bronx says Jim Schaller in a May 25 letter,  could not be more wrong in his recommendation that a license plate “honoring” the “victims of the tragic event” — the terrorist attacks upon America by Islamic fundamentalists that murdered nearly 3,000 people — be one that would not “adversely refer to it in any way.”

The last thing we need is the state commemorating 9/11 as a “tragic event,” thereby denying how and why they died. That honors no one. We do not honor those victims by deeming any reference to the attacks as somehow “adverse.” Adverse to whom, how?

Though ironically, such a “vanity plate” would be the perfect fundraiser for the WTC 9/11 memorial. That $500 million vanity project, dedicated entirely to “what we need and deserve” will discard all evidence of 9/11 — “in order,” as per the handful who dictated its concept, “to preserve the integrity of the memorial.”

Note: On 9/11, my brother, New York Fire Department Capt. William F. Burke Jr. of Engine Co. 21 gave his life.

MICHAEL BURKE

Bronx

The America’s highest court has thwarted the single-most effective way the United States had planned to try terrorists — by putting them on trial using secret court-systems.

In Washington, press reports said the Supreme Court dealt the Bush administration a stunning setback yesterday, ruling that terrorist suspects imprisoned at Guantanamo can fight for their rights in U.S. courts and likely sounding a death knell for the controversial offshore war-crimes trials.

The ruling “stripped Guantanamo of its reason for being, a law-free zone where prisoners can’t challenge their detention,” said Kenneth Roth, executive-director at Human Rights Watch.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy delivered a harsh rebuke of the Bush administration’s efforts to craft war-crimes trials beyond the reach of American justice. “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” he wrote.

Yesterday’s ruling was the third straight judgment against the Bush administration concerning the rights of Guantanamo prisoners.

It cast a cloud over the entire process. Not only do Guantanamo detainees have the explicit right to challenge, in U.S. federal courts, their continued imprisonment, but the court also ruled that the process by which detainees are classified as “enemy combatants” may also be challenged.

The sweeping ruling, certain to set off a blizzard of court filings, seems likely to derail the handful of trials under way, including that of Omar Khadr, the Canadian accused of murdering a U.S. soldier, and may finish President George W. Bush’s hope of putting al-Qaeda leaders on trial before he leaves office in January.

With only few months remaining in the term of a deeply unpopular, lame-duck President and with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, the prospects for new laws to create, for the third time, another Bush administration war-crimes tribunal seem remote.

Mr. Khadr’s case, scheduled to resume next week before a new military judge after the last one was removed or retired, may be the first affected by yesterday’s ruling.

But the full scope of the court’s decision may take months of litigation and perhaps new legislation before the fate of the war-crimes trials is concluded.

Mr. Bush decried the 5-4 split decision in which the court’s liberal members prevailed.

“We’ll abide by the court’s decision,” the President said in Rome. “That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.”

The President said he wanted Congress to write new laws to restore the controversial military war-crimes tribunals currently held in a makeshift courtroom on a disused airport at a U.S. naval base in Cuba, a set-up designed from its inception to be beyond the reach of U.S. law and the Constitution.

Dissenting judges, including Chief Justice John Roberts, stridently denounced the majority ruling. The Guantanamo process offers “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants,” Chief Justice Roberts said.

Another conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia darkly warned that America “will live to regret what the court has done today,” adding that al-Qaeda will strike. Giving Guantanamo’s 280 terrorist suspects access to U.S. courts to challenge their incarceration and the legitimacy of the tribunals “will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed.”

The Arizona Republic reports:
Blair Gadsby, the 45-year-old former owner of an adult-care home and an adjunct professor of religious studies at a community college, never figured he would be the type of person to stage a hunger strike outside the Phoenix office of U.S. Sen. John McCain.

But about a year ago, Gadsby convinced himself that the U.S. government, not terrorists, demolished the World Trade Center buildings in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. And that belief has turned him into a fasting activist.

“I’ve never been politically active until the 9/11 subject came up,” he said, sitting on a fabric folding chair last week along 16th Street, outside the complex that houses McCain’s Phoenix office.
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Gadsby’s vigil on the sidewalk goes from sunrise to sunset. He holds up a sign that features a Canadian tabloid’s front-page photo of a jet hitting one of the towers. Underneath is his count of the days he has been fasting. Today, it will be Day 15.

He has dropped 15 pounds. He feels weak by the end of the day. He has had eggs thrown at him by taunting motorists. His wife is not happy with him. He worries whether he’ll lose his teaching job.

Still, once he locked in on the idea that the government planned the murder of thousands of its citizens, it became his overriding priority. He wondered why it wasn’t getting more attention, so he got the idea to sacrifice himself for some attention.

“I felt we needed the coverage,” Gadsby said. “We’ve just been ignored, if not downright suppressed.”

In May 2007, Gadsby, who was already skeptical that terrorists caused the attacks, found a video online that showed the collapse of World Trade Center 7. He believes the government has ordered media outlets not to show the footage, which shows the building falling in on itself, much like a building does when it implodes.

The footage clinched it for Gadsby. He had to rethink all he had accepted about the terrorist attacks. He spent sleepless nights thinking about how the government planted explosions in Building 7 and then, most likely, the twin towers. Then, how they must have hired men to pilot the planes. And then ordered the media to cover it all up. And so on, and so on.

Fresh Look at Terrorism Risk
In the past terrorism has been viewed as an event that could not have been anticipated, according to a website called Continuity Central. This is no longer the case. While terror attacks, in some cases, remain unpredictable due to the man-made nature of the event, there now exists enough available historical data related to actual terrorist attacks to meet a legal requirement for determining a standard of foreseeability. According to Dr. Daniel Kennedy, CPP, a criminal forensic expert, “As criminologists know, the best predictor of future events is past events. The best predictor of terrorist attacks would therefore be past terrorist attacks. As suggested in the landmark legal case of Timberwalk v. Cain, the foreseeability of terrorist attacks is based on five factors: frequency, similarity … proximity and publicity of past attacks. The probability of attack would increase exponentially based on these factors.” For example, as much as the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center surprised everyone, it was foreseeable that the Twin Towers were a major terrorist target based on the previous truck bomb attack in 1993.
According to Dr. Michael J. Witkowski, CPP, another criminal forensic expert, “An environment prone to terrorism may be determined by either of two types of legal notice: Actual, by real events on property or territory; or constructive, where factors such as proximity of events and general deterioration of environment are reviewed.” The availability of notice creates possible legal exposure for companies that have not properly assessed and mitigated their terrorism risk using readily available analysis tools or programs. 

Properly analyzed data can be built into a robust environment which visualizes attack location, target type, and victims. This type of analytical tool allows decision makers to begin to evaluate whether safety and security measures are capable of meeting the threat in the surrounding environment or of making decisions that avoid the threat altogether. Additional features such as attack clustering, where multiple or similar type attacks have occurred, can be visualized.
Decision making tools: environmental risk assessments
As corporations seek to lower their operating expense, off-shoring or ‘best shoring’ has become common practice. Exporting operations such as call centers, data centers, business process outsourcing, manufacturing and suppliers to countries such as India or Pakistan have now become commonplace. These remain potential targets for adverse activity when other primary targets are ‘hardened’ and less approachable.
In a three year review of terror based attacks in India, there were approximately 3,300 incidents where an attack location could be identified from publically available media reports. In the most current three-month collection of attack data, there were approximately 206 attacks and only 12 occurred in ‘new’ locations, where an attack had not occurred in the previous 3 years. Or, in other words, 94 percent of attacks occurred in areas where there had been known terror events previously.

All the world was his stage as the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and co-defendants went on trial today.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, appearing for the first time since his capture five years ago, said he would welcome becoming ‘martyr’ after a judge warned Thursday that he faces the death penalty for his confessed role as mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Wearing thick glasses and occasionally fussing with his turban or stroking his bushy grey beard, Mohammed seemed noticeably thinner than the image of a slovenly man with dishevelled hair, an unshaven face and a T-shirt that the US showed to the world after his capture in Pakistan.

Mohammed chanted verses from the Quran, rejected his attorneys and told Judge Ralph Kohlmann, a Marine colonel, that he wants to represent himself at the war crimes trial.

The judge warned that he faces execution if convicted of organizing the attacks on America. But the former No. 3 leader of al-Qaeda was insistent.

“Yes, this is what I wish, to be a martyr for a long time,” Mohammed declared. “I will, God willing, have this, by you.”

Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators each face death if convicted of war crimes including murder, conspiracy, attacking civilians and terrorism by hijacking planes to attack US landmarks.

The murder charges involve the deaths of 2,973 people at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania where passengers forced down their plane.

Their arraignment begins the highest-profile test yet of the military’s tribunal system, which faces an uncertain future.

The Supreme Court is to rule this month on the rights of Guantanamo prisoners, potentially delaying or halting the proceedings.

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.”

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.”