The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine 9/11 Special - 2002

911cover08.
qxd
8/28/02
6:48 PM
Page 1
Inquirer
SEPTEMBER 8, 2002
SPECIAL ISSUE
ONE YEAR LATER
9.11
911Index/Intro08.qxd
8/29/02
2:47 PM
Page 2
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
INSIDE
4 8 10
OUR OLD SELVES
By Dick Polman Whats notable a year after Sept. 11, 2001, is the widespread reassertion of our essential cultural character.
SEPT. 11 BY THE NUMBERS RECONSTRUCTION ZONE
15
13 14
By Jennifer Lin In Lower Makeeld, eight families lost husbands or sons. The survivors have spent the year on uncharted waters, buoyed occasionally by a transcendent moment.
GRATEFUL HEART
By Jennifer Lin A series of coincidences give a grieving mother a kind of peace.
STATE OF CONFUSION
By Andrew Maykuth The people have been liberated, and international aid has resumed. But factionalism remains a serious threat in Afghanistan, and U.S. intentions are unclear.
15 16 20
WHERES OSAMA?
By Peter Nicholas
AL-QAEDA LEADERS: WHERE ARE THEY? ROAD TO RECOVERY

By Jane Eisner Many New York children were traumatized by Sept.11, and adults feared reverberations far beyond that time and place. Amazingly, most youngsters have rebounded.
Amid the Trade Centers ruins, the American ag stood as a beacon for emergency workers.
22
LOOKING BACK AND AHEAD

the acuteness of the pain has dulled a little. Sharing stories of the instinctive bravery, heroism and generosity of so many people has helped us reclaim our sense of awe and hope.Weve come to honor the remarkable presence of the good in the everyday. This year has been dened by 9/11; the towers, even fallen, cast their shadow. In this special edition of Inquirer Magazine, we listen to those who have been affected and try to give context to the losses and triumphs. It is time not just to mourn but also to marvel at how weve come through it all together. Avery Rome
ne year later, the horric events of Sept. 11, 2001, still seem unimaginable. The World Trade Center towers crumbling in dust and ame.The Pentagon the very heart of our military power battered. The jet hurtling into the ground near tiny Shanksville, Pa. Nearly 3,000 people dead, thousands more bereft in grief. A nation stunned. Just seeing the pictures can jolt us back to that morning and the shock of facing hell on a cloudless day. Now a year has passed, a year in which
Photography by DAVID SWANSON
2 September 8, 2002
911Index/Intro08.qxd
8/29/02
2:51 PM
Page 3
22 23 24 27
LETS HEAR IT
By Andrew Cassel Considering the possibilities, the post-Sept. 11 economy did amazingly well. To some extent, we can thank ourselves.
Local Voices
35 37
Linda Hauber,
9 17 19 29 30 31
Frank Donaghue,
THE BUSINESS OF INSECURITY
CEO, Southeastern Pennsylvania Red Cross By Melissa Dribben
spokeswoman, Islamic Charitable Projects By Jeff Gammage
Christine Bamberger,
homemaker, wife, mother By Melissa Dribben
Omar Dimachkie,
By Henry J. Holcomb How companies and landlords are handling their vulnerability.
president, North American chapter, Islamic Charitable Projects By Jeff Gammage
Essays
IN TRIBUTE
By David Hiltbrand Artists respond to Sept. 11.
Ernest Stull,
18 21 36 46 47
mayor of Shanksville, Pa. By Melissa Dribben
Flight 93: Shanksvilles shrine

By Roland Merullo
THE LANGUAGE, POST-9/11
Dennis Knaus,
inventor By Melissa Dribben
No denying it
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
By Jeff Gammage New words have entered our vocabulary in the last year. Linguists hope the meanings wont blur the facts.
Frank Minella,
As we hunt enemies, lets nd ourselves

By Lorene Cary
former pilot for US Airways By Melissa Dribben
From the rubble, a gift

By the Rev. Robert C. Smith
28 32
THE OPEN ROAD IS NO LONGER SO OPEN
Saad Alrayes,
restaurant owner By Jeff Gammage
By Howard Shapiro The rules of travel have changed. Here are some new dos and donts.
Poetry
ITS A CONSPIRACY
By Steve Goldstein Some say a controlled demolition brought down the Twin Towers and a guided missile or truck bomb hit the Pentagon. These deniers are the latest of their kind.
10
Questions (no answers)

By Sonia Sanchez
On the cover: Angels

representing those who died on Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pa., at the crash memorial site. Photography by ERIC MENCHER 9.11 One Year Later was produced
by the staff of Inquirer Magazine Avery Rome, editor; Lisa Zollinger Tobia, art director; Peggy Anderson, assistant editor; Susan Syrnick, assistant art director; Aaron Tull, production editor; Melissa Dribben, Jeff Gammage and Steve Goldstein, staff writers; Michael Bryant, photographer; and Bob Caughron, Sharon ONeal and Charles Peitz, copy editors and the following contributors from the Inquirer staff: Eric Mencher, David Swanson, Dick Polman, Jennifer Lin, April Saul, Andrew Maykuth, Peter Nicholas, Peter Tobia, Cynthia Greer, Jane Eisner, Andrew Cassel, Henry J. Holcomb, David Hiltbrand, Howard Shapiro, Thomas Ginsberg, Rose Ciotta, Akira Suwa, Sterling Chen, Eric Hegedus and Alen Malott.
For comments or questions, call 215-854-4580, e-mail Inquirer.Magazine@phillynews.com, or write Letters, Inquirer Magazine, Box 8263, Philadelphia 19101. 2002, PHILADELPHIA NEWSPAPERS INC. PUBLISHED AT 400 N. BROAD ST., BOX 8263 PHILADELPHIA, PA. 19101
34 38 38 40 43 44
EARLY WARNINGS
By Thomas Ginsberg A commission report predicted terrorism on American soil seven months before Sept. 11.
FREEDOM VS. SECURITY
By Rose Ciotta How can we assure security while preserving freedom?
A CHANGED AMERICA
By Rose Ciotta
GEARING UP
By Jeff Gammage Astonishing technology will bolster our commitment to conquer terrorism.
KABUL JOHNNY?
By Steve Goldstein The American Taliban faces 20 years in prison.
32
IN MEMORY
Photography by Akira Suwa
Inquirer Magazine 3
911Polman08.qxd
8/29/02
12:20 PM
Page 4
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
Those we lost from our area:
D O N A L D A DA M S A N D R E W
OUR OLD SELVES

Americans are again focused on their lives, their pocketbooks, their TV shows.
Story by
DICK POLMAN
emember what it was like when the planes became missiles on a morning of azure blue? We were naturally horried to learn that malevolent forces could appear, seemingly out of nowhere, to sunder our sense of invulnerability. And in our shock and pain, we were moved to declare that we had lost our innocence, that everything has changed in American life.
and theyre only as human as the rest of us. Still, it was a sight to behold.The political community is wired for partisan combat, yet here was this thunderous silence, smothering our disputatious discourse of the moment: Gary Condit and Chandra Levy, the Social Security lockbox, the budget surplus (remember that?), stem cells, prescription drugs, HMO reform, immigration reform, the hair on Al Gores cheeks . . . all swept away in the aftershock, seemingly forever. Now we know better. Now we know that, even amid our continued mourning for those who died on Sept. 11, we cant stem the most fundamental traits of our natural character, including our rambunctiousness, our love of argument, our impulse to question authority, our inherent pursuit of happiness traits essential to the traditional functioning of our democratic disorder. And sure enough,Washington is now behaving much as it did before. Domestic issues again dominate the daily discourse, fueled this time by the corporate scandals and the fears shared by ordinary Americans about their retirement nest eggs. Democrats again feel no compunction about painting President Bush as a pal of the fat cats. In some notable cases, theyre even questioning his conduct of the war on terrorism, an unimaginable act just months ago. In the words of independent pollster Andrew Kohut, The public, and the political system, arent nearly as caught up in the national unity
continued on Page 6
It certainly seemed that way. Jay Leno and the other wise-guy comics fell silent, social commentators insisted that the age of irony was dead, violent lms slated for release were put on the shelf, multimillionaire ballplayers laid down their gloves, people of little faith found solace in prayer and in Washington, the practitioners of slashand-burn politics curbed their tongues and cloaked themselves in the Stars and Stripes. The latter response was predictable. Politicians are experts at snifng out the public mood,
AP PHOTO/CARMEN TAYLOR
Beams of light, representing the fallen World Trade Center towers, rose in lower Manhattan in March.
Photography by
ED HILLE /PictureDesk.Net
4 September 8, 2002
911Polman08.qxd
8/29/02
12:21 PM
Page 5
A L A M E N O M I C H A E L B A N E JA S P E R B A X T E R L O R R A I N E B A Y JA M E S B E R G E R
In terms of Sept. 11, we werent going to stay in crisis mode forever.

Andrew Kohut, independent pollster
Inquirer Magazine 5
911Polman08.qxd
8/28/02
3:10 PM
Page 6
TIM BETTERLY NICHOLAS B OGDAN KEVIN B OWSER NICK BRANDEMARTI KEN
POLMAN
continued from Page 4
mood as they were last autumn. Emotions can stay high for only so long. So we fall back into our old patterns. Democrats and Republicans are back at each others throats, and in a sense people think thats ne. Theres a lot of focus again on the economy, and people tend to be saying, Were glad theyre talking about that stuff. In terms of Sept. 11, we werent going to stay in crisis mode forever. Charles Cook, a nonpartisan analyst who tracks politics in Washington, says, There is a big tendency in politics, and in life, to overreact whenever a big event occurs. Even an event as horrible as Sept. 11. We tend to look at everything through a microscope, and that makes everything seem huge. Yet if anyone had been able to put their emotions aside and say, One year from now, not much will have changed, that person would have been right on the mark. How much has the political culture really changed? More politicians seem to be wearing ags in their lapels, but the denizens of Capitol Hill are still the same turf fanatics they always were. Example: The chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee was eager to jack up the ghting capabilities of the Coast Guard until he learned that the Guard might be folded into the new Department of Homeland Security. If that happens, hell lose jurisdiction over the Coast Guard. So now hes all for preserving it just the way it is. The popular culture doesnt seem to have changed much, either.We watched realityTV shows before Sept. 11, and now weve got new ones starring Liza Minnelli and Anna Nicole Smith. We used to like movies in which Clint Eastwood had to chase a killer who was taunting him (In the Line of Fire), and today we have Clint Eastwood chasing a killer who is taunting him (Blood Work).We used to express our distaste for our enemies in tawdry ways (the bumper stickers that cursed the Ayatollah Khomeini), and today we do the same thing (Osama bin Laden toilet paper is on sale near ground zero). Nevertheless, it also would be wrong to overstate the status-quo premise.Today, ags often y from the houses of baby boomers who once equated Old Glory with the hawks who prosecuted the Vietnam War.We have accepted Bush as commander in chief, and this has helped to cushion him from domestic political storms.We wince at skyscrapers, imagining the worst. We understand the term dirty bomb. We tolerate intrusive security, and well even remove our shoes at airports without complaint. Douglas Brinkley, a historian and presidential biographer, tells me: Sept. 11 has brought a degree of increased collective paranoia into the American lifestyle. . . . But . . . we have coexisted with paranoia before.When the Soviets explod6 September 8, 2002
ed the atomic bomb in 1949, we felt collectively vulnerable for the rst time. When they launched Sputnik in 1957, we felt that any minute we could be attacked from space.Then we had the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. So this is a psychological factor weve already lived with, and . . . it doesnt necessarily transform the way we live. Exactly right. For starters, the pollsters say that were no more religious today than we were last summer, despite a 25 percent spike in weekly church attendance in the weeks following the attack. As the Baptist Standard lamented in an editorial some months ago, Maybe Americans return to the shopping malls signaled a return to faith in tangible forms, like retirement accounts, durable goods and interest-free car loans, but
Were questioning all our institutions right now.

Douglas Brinkley, historian
AP PHOTO/DOUG MILLS
Three days after the attacks, President Bush toured the devastation in New York.
not necessarily God. Lots of people are also ticked off at the media again, just as they used to be. Last autumn, the media garnered unusually high marks for compassion, accuracy and patriotism. Kohuts shop, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, reported in November that only 17 percent saw the media as too critical of America. Now that share has risen to 35 percent, which is roughly where it was prior to the attack. Few of us aside from those struck directly have made major adjustments in our daily lives.The Bush administration reminds us that we are at war, but were certainly not sacricing the way our grandparents did.Well buy as much coffee as we want at Starbucks, but if this were 1942, wed be rationed to a cup a day by our government (because the ships to import coffee would be tapped to haul soldiers). During World War II, everything did change. Gas rationing killed Sunday driving. Nightclubs shut down early so patrons could ride the last bus. Farmers sometimes had to walk miles to pick up rationed kerosene, and food shoppers couldnt load up the cart on a whim. (Imagine the outcry if there were food rationing today; one year after Sept. 11, we deem it our birthright to choose among 13 avors of Quaker Oats Rice Cakes.) This is not to suggest that the Greatest Generation bore these burdens with a smile. As historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has written, there was a general dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war at home. People were so angry that they punished President Roosevelt during the midterm election of 1942, taking out their frustrations on his party colleagues. Forty-two House Democrats and nine Senate Democrats lost their seats, and the waning momentum for New Deal domestic reform was lost forever. Heres the point, and the crucial parallel: No politician, even a commander in chief in wartime, is immune from political turbulence. If FDR and the ruling Democrats could be upbraided in 1942, theres no guarantee that Bush and the ruling Republicans wont suffer similarly in 2002. Wartime Americans in 1942 were concerned about their families and nances, as are Americans today. Today, the corporate scandals and their aftershocks have helped shift the prevailing political mood, and make it more permissible for Bushs critics to sound off without risking the insinuation that they are somehow unpatriotic. Bush, of course, cant be held responsible for the ledger-book shenanigans that currently give capitalism a bad name, and the record also shows that some key congressional Democrats (in cahoots with free-market Republicans) helped create and protect the 90s deregulatory climate that allowed corporate cowboys to ourish. But those caveats wont necessarily protect Bush and the GOP from political fallout.
911Polman08.qxd
8/29/02
2:37 PM
Page 7
CALDWELL JEFFREY MARK CHAIRNOFF PETER CHIRCHIRILLO CHRISTOPHER CLARKE
The rst problem is that while people generally favor the Republicans on security and defense issues (still true, one year after Sept. 11), they also view the GOP as the party with close ties to big business. That hasnt changed since the Great Depression, and its not a great image to have these days especially since the polls now show that domestic issues have overtaken terrorism as the publics top concern. Cook says, The last thing a political party wants is for something to happen that reinforces its stereotype. If there were massive union scandals right now, that would look bad for Democrats, since theyre seen as the party of labor. But to accuse the Republicans of being in bed with big business well, thats not a big leap for voters right now, regardless of what the specics of the scandals might be. The other problem is that the economic woes have made it tougher for Bush to sustain his post-Sept. 11 image as the national unier. His repeated need to address the scandals (This corporate America stuff, is that important? he asked in July), to explain his past stint on the board of an energy company, and to swallow corporate reforms that he initially opposed, have all combined to make him seem less than the exalted warrior of one year ago. Still, even Democrats admit that Bush acquired a protective shield after Sept. 11 and that its still pretty durable. David Axelrod, a national party strategist, says, Heres one way life has changed in the past year Bushs [approval] numbers are still signicantly better than they were before the attack.This patina of leadership, left over from Sept. 11, has kept him from being a major target of domestic discontent. I think, one year later, the two parties are voicing the same amount of vituperation for each other. But, with us, theres still a reluctance to assail the President in the same way that the Republicans went after Bill Clinton.That was an entirely different environment. Indeed. Many Democrats are miffed that the Securities and Exchange Commission never interviewed citizen Bush back in 1990, as it probed whether he had engaged in possible insider trading while a board member of the Harken Energy Corp. But Democrats, still mindful of President Bushs personal popularity, have opted not to seek a congressional probe of his Harken tenure. Axelrod believes this would have happened if Sept. 11 hadnt occurred rst. Some Democrats, nevertheless, feel emboldened by the corporate scandals. Take Al Gore, for example. Hes starting to duke it out the old-fashioned way. Whereas in October he declared in a speech that he was standing with his commander in chief, now hes lashing out at Bush in personal ways scofng, in a New York Times guest column on Aug. 4, at those who believed they were entitled to govern because of their station in life. (Since Gore is the
son of a senator and a Harvard alumnus, that books. The public is prepared to question anyjibe rings a bit hollow.What matters most, how- thing. ever, is that, in the return to pre-Sept. 11 poliAnd that sets the stage for a very traditional tics, hes comfortable saying it.) midterm election, eight weeks from now. RepubDemocrats even feel emboldened to critique licans have sensed this all along; in November, Bushs war conduct, and that was unthinkable a meeting in Las Vegas, party strategists said that short time ago in part because Vice President the 2002 political races would be dominated by Cheney was always around to keep them in line. traditional domestic concerns (a sluggish econoWhen Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle sug- my), and that the popularity of their wartime gested in February that lawmakers should investi- president would not rub off on GOP candidates. gate pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures, Cheney Then, in midsummer, a Republican polling said that if Democrats memo warned, If the followed that route, they negative mood of the would be interfering country is sustained over with the mission the next few months, which sounded like code look for GOP turnout for unpatriotic. Cheney problems. Translation: voiced similar warnings Since most Americans at a party fund-raiser. dont bother to vote in Yet, a few weeks midterm elections, the ago, when Massachuwinning side tends to be setts Sen. John Kerry atthe party that best motitacked Bushs conduct vates the citizens who are of the war in ticked off about someAfghanistan (We althing. Thats how Newt lowed al-Qaeda to disGingrich and the conserperse, making our job vatives seized power in tougher today), and 1994 they motivated, when a leading Democen masse, the angry ratic group charged that white guys who didnt Bush has no coherent like Clinton and the libstrategy for winning the erals. deadly game of global Whether Democcat-and-mouse that lies rats can successfully exahead, Cheney did not ploit public anger over slap down the dissenters corporate thievery is in the name of national anyones guess. Voters unity.Why didnt he? dont necessarily trust Because Cheneys them, either. But if Sept. political standing has 11 had truly changed been jeopardized by his the political environprevious stint as chief exment, sweeping away all ecutive ofcer of Haldomestic concerns amid liburton, the energy ex- Vice President Cheney visited ground zero fears of our survival as a ploration company. Be- in October, top. Former New York Mayor nation, there would not cause, ever since the SEC Rudolph Giulianis star rose for his posteven be a running diaannounced last spring attack leadership. logue about retirement that it would probe Halsavings and corporate liburtons accounting practices during the 90s, responsibility. Cheney has remained (in the public-relations In the end, our resilience is proven by the sense) in a secret, undisclosed location. He has fact that two-sted partisanship lives on, that dodged the media and avoided all the Sunday talk holding our elected leaders accountable is still shows. At least for now, theres no doubt that the deemed to be a patriotic act. It may not always scandals have neutralized the chief of the patriot- be pretty, but its denitely who we are. ism police. As polling analyst Karlyn Bowman puts it, He might not be so effective anyway. Brink- We are the same people that we were before ley, the historian, thinks that today most Ameri- Sept. 11 with all our patriotic, compassionate, cans are ready to indulge dissent on all fronts. He and tawdry dimensions. And our democracy is says, Were questioning all our institutions right all about political combat, always has been. now, because so much has happened in this soci- Weve been reminded that this is a very dangerety since Sept. 11. . . the FBI missed signals ous world, we can come together on that. But on on al-Qaeda, the Catholic Church covered up all the smaller stuff, well let the politicians keep sex scandals, pillars of Wall Street cooked the ghting about that.
AP PHOTO/DAVID RENTAS
AKIRA SUWA/PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Inquirer Magazine 7
911numbers08.qxd
8/29/02
12:16 PM
Page 8
JEFFREY COALE PATRICIA CODY FRANK DeMARTINI ROBERT FANGMAN
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
Sept.11 by the numbers

50,000 people
(Source: The Guardian)
working at World Trade Center at time of attack
At least 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the estimated temperature of the re in the World Trade Center towers
(Source: University of California at Berkeley)
19 hijackers on the planes

(Source: www.september11victims.com)
19,000 residents
ordered to evacuate lower Manhattan
(Source: New York Times)
the World Trade Center

(Source: New York Medical Examiner; number not nal)
2,817 killed at 92 people killed
55,574 calls taken

by 911 dispatchers on 9/11
(Source: New York City police)
on American Airlines Flight 11, the rst plane to crash into the World Trade Center
450 bodies recovered

(Source: New York City police)
$83 billion in estimat(Source: New York City Partnership and Chamber of Commerce)
65 people killed on United Airlines Flight 175, the second plane to crash into the World Trade Center 184 people killed
at the Pentagon
(Source: USA Today)
ed economic losses from the World Trade Center attacks
industry losses for 2001

(Source: Air Transport Association)
$7 billion in airline
on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon
64 people killed
80,300 airline layoffs by the end of 2001

(Source: Air Transport Association)
32,044 laid-off
workers had been employed in hotels and motels
(Source: U.S. Department of Labor)
44 people killed on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pa. 343 New York
reghters killed
(Source: New York City Fire Department)
$2 billion to $9
(Source: aviation ofcials)
billion renovation costs at the nations airports
$47 million lost in visitor spending in Philadelphia, between Sept. 11 and Dec. 31
(Source: Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. and Phila. Convention and Visitors Bureau)
police ofcers killed

(Source: New York City Police Department)
23 New York City
75 Port Authority personnel killed

(Source: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey)
$85 million cost for
8 September 8, 2002
2,000
Philadelphia International Airport to meet new reg-
(Source: Philadelphia International Airport) federal screeners supplant 28,000 privately employed screeners at U.S. airports (Source: Transportation Services Agency) days of cleanup at the World Trade Center site million tons of debris removed from ground zero (Source: City of New York) billion estimated cost of rebuilding the World Trade Center (Source: Toronto Star) million in estimated repairs of Pentagon (Source: Pentagon Renovation Program Ofce, Department of Defense) billion over 15 years to reconstruct Afghanistan (Source: Afghan ofcials) billion compensation available to victims families under federal compensation fund (Source: Toronto Star) billion in charitable contributions given to major 9/11 relief funds by Dec. 31, 2001 (Source: American Association of Fundraising Counsel Trust for Philanthropy) million raised as of June 2002 by Americas Fund for Afghan Children (Source: White House, Red Cross) percent of Ameri cans made nancial contributions in response to 9/11 (Source: Independent Sector poll)
ulations on checking luggage for bombs
30,000
Army National Guard and U.S. Army Reserve personnel mobilized in the six months following the attacks
(Source: U.S. Army)
25,000
261 1.8
8,000
U.S. troops in Afghanistan
(Source: Department of Defense)
$4
$38 billion requested

for Department of Homeland Security
(Source: White House)
$501
194 or 1,000 to
$15
2,000 or 3,125 to 3,620 civilians killed in Afghanistan
(Sources: Los Angeles Times, relief agencies, The Guardian)
$6
16 U.S. servicepeople killed in the war in Afghanistan

(Source: Toronto Star)
1 CIA agent, Johnny

Mike Spann, killed Undisclosed number of Taliban and al-Qaeda killed
(Pentagon wont release gures)
$1.9
$9.3
detained in United States on suspicion of links to Sept. 11 attacks

(Source: Amnesty International)
1,200 people
6 charged with
terrorism offenses immigration offenses
58
104 charged with

(Source: Associated Press)
564 detainees held
at Camp X-Ray, Cuba

38 nationalities represented among the prisoners

488 to 600 backlash incidents against U.S. Muslims since Sept. 11

(Source: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Commission)
144 countries have
frozen $135 million in assets of terrorist groups
(Source: New York Times, VOA News)
5 million to10 million

land mines in Afghanistan
(Source: U.S. State Department, United Nations)
26.8 million people

in Afghanistan
(Source: Toronto Star)
1.5 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and 2 million in Iran

(Source: Council on Foreign Relations)
1 million refugees within Afghanistan

(Source: Refugees International)
$28,309 average annual per capita U.S. income

(Source: Los Angeles Times)
$150 to $800
annual per capita Afghan income
(Source: Christian Science Monitor; Washington Post)
33 percent of Afghan children are orphans

50 percent of Afghan children suffer chronic malnutrition

Contributing to this report were Inquirer staffers Denise Boal, Marla Otto, Ed Voves and Syau-Jyun Liang.
children lost a parent in the attacks

(Source: Twin Towers Orphan Fund)
911Donag08.qxd
8/29/02
6:09 PM
Page 9
MATTHEW FLOCCO BILL GODSHALK DONNA GRIFFITH DONALD HAVLISH
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Local Voices
Frank Donaghue
CEO, Southeastern Pennsylvania Red Cross
rank Donaghue spent three weeks, the rst three, directing communications at ground zero. Initially, his job was supposed to be elding questions from the media, acting as a spokesman for the national ofce. But especially during the rst few days, that job was complicated by crippled communications links and the sheer enormity of the undertaking, so he also found himself assessing what supplies and how many workers were needed and where they could best be put to use. IBM donated BlackBerry handheld computers, enabling Donaghue and his army of volunteers and Red Cross staff to message one another. Cell phones worked only intermittently. One of the rst things I remember was getting a call from a boy in Bosnia. We had run a program for Bosnian students who had lost their parents in the war, bringing the kids to the U.S. to go to school and live with host families. Even a single person has power. One of those students, Admir Delic, had gone home for the summer before starting his freshman year at Drexel. My cell phone rang and it was Admir. He had heard America was being attacked and wanted to make sure I was passed so that its all right to date again? OK. It was so moving. Donaghue worries that Americans havent Over the last year, Donaghue has had nu- learned enough from the tragedy. I think a lot merous debates, particularly with his Bosnian about how were not prepared. We give it lip friends, about the difference between patriotism service, but dont take it seriously. Do we have and nationalism. disaster plans? Have we set up a place where we Patriotism is about the best of what being can call someone, a relative or a friend in anothAmerican is. And nationalism is why 9/11 hap- er state to check in if something happened in pened. People hating one another because Philadelphia? Ive given speeches. How many theyre different. In the days after the attacks, people in this room have put together a disaster looking at peoples reaction, you had to wonder plan so if this building went down, youd have a what was nationalism and what was patriotism. place to get in touch with your children? A few Its such a thin line. hands go up.Thats all. He has kept in touch with several of the famHe would call his sister in West Chester. ilies of victims. Some of them call for personal adAnd something else I think a lot about, vice. Such as, does he think enough time has when you wonder, what can I really do? That
thought hung over him, he said, like a huge black cloud as he drove through the Holland Tunnel on Sept. 11. Alone. I was thinking what in the hell can Frank Donaghue do? He has since heard hundreds of complaints about the way the Red Cross handled the emergency. But the impact volunteers had was amazing . . . the power we have in each others lives. The son of one of the victims, weeping, told him how on Christmas Day, a volunteer from Ohio called to see how he was doing. Shed met him in September and kept the number. What that meant to him and his dad, shell probably never know. You look at where that building was and think, what can I do? A lot.
STORY BY MELISSA DRIBBEN
P H O T O G R A P H Y BY M I C H A E L B R YA N T
Inquirer Magazine 9
911widows/Ling08.qxd
8/29/02
1:49 PM
Page 10
LeROY HOMER JR. MICHAEL HORROCKS TIMOTHY HUGHES
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
RECONSTRUCTION ZONE
The families of Sept. 11 victims are learning how to build new lives as they go along.
Suzanne Berger with sons (from left) Nicholas, Christian and Alex, pictured in late September at Hero Hill near their former home in Yardley where Suzanne told her boys of their father Jims death.
Story by
JENNIFER LIN
he grief of sudden death, of a loss without goodbye, cannot be measured. But what happened on Sept. 11 was not a car crash, not a heart attack. This was different, mass murder on live television. Fiona Havlish raced home from work, ipped on the kitchen TV, and saw the second plane slice into the South Tower. Her phone message light was ashing. Over the small speaker came the voice of her husband, Don.
Hi, honey! Im OK. Its the other building. For a moment, utter relief.Then Fiona went numb. The phone call had come moments before shed watched his ofce explode in ames. In real time, families of victims felt the dread of watching the towers burn, the shock of their collapse, and the prolonged agony of not knowing who survived. In Lower Makeeld, a green and restful Bucks County suburb 90 minutes from Manhattan, eight families lost husbands or sons more deaths than any other community in Pennsylvania. For these families, the months have been a
surreal journey. The images of those days were unavoidable and undeniable. But without bodies to bury, the families clung to hope and denial. Maybe, somehow, he is alive . . . . Since that time, celebrities entered some of their lives. Bruce Springsteen kept a photograph of the Berger boys on his writing desk after learning of their fathers fate.Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter called 10-year-old Brielle Saracini, a fan who had written to him, to check on her. Since that time, some of the Lower Makeeld wives and mothers turned their anger into action.They sued Osama bin Laden and terrorPhotography by APRIL
SAUL
10 September 8, 2002
8/29/02
1:48 PM
Page 11
GRICELDA JAMES DONALD JONES ANDREW KATES WILLIAM KELLY JOHN KEOHANE
I cant tell myself, Im going to wake up and its going to be a good day. You cant choose your time to mourn. It chooses you.
Jordan Reiss, whose brother Joshua was killed at the trade center
ists in a bid to freeze al-Qaeda money.They lobbied lawmakers.They elded questions in television interviews. Behind front doors, however, was the constant struggle of day-to-day life.Young widows tried to help little children cope with big questions. Sadness hung like fog. Families turned to each other, forged bonds. There is no manual on getting your life back to normal after a terrorist attack, Suzanne Berger took to saying. For the Lower Makeeld families, the year has been textured with the kind of small events a wife might mention to a husband at the end of the day, tiny moments that seem insignicant to the outside world, but nonetheless dene the last year. In the blur of passing time, these moments show their efforts to move on. Sept. 12, Fiona Havlish It was well past 9 p.m. when Mikki Havlish, 4, nally went to bed. She refused to sleep in her own room and instead snuggled into her parents double bed on the side where her father, Donald Havlish Jr., usually slept. Mikki understood something bad had happened to her father, an executive for Aon Corp., a big insurance company on the top oors of the South Tower. Wheres Daddy? she had asked that morning. There was a bad accident in his building. I dont know where he is, her mother, Fiona, answered truthfully, sparingly. Mikki and her mother had a nighttime ritual of singing three songs in the rocking chair: Twinkle,Twinkle Little Star; Kumbaya; and Good Evening, Good Night. After prayers, Don would tuck Mikki in with a kiss. But on this night, as Fiona started to sing the rst song, her voice quavered. Mikki looked up. She put her small hand over her mothers lips. No, said Mikki rmly, silencing her mother. Fiona bent to kiss her daughter, slipped out of the room and crumpled in tears. Nov. 6, Kirsten Saracini The assignment for the
eighth-grade English students at Pennwood Middle School was simple: Pick a famous quote and write an essay on how it applies to your life. Kirsten Saracini, 14, turned to Charles Dickens and titled her essay, The Best of Times and the Worst of Times. Her father,Victor Saracini, was a United Airlines captain whose plane was hijacked into the South Tower. Kirstens teacher, Anne Dresser, worried whether she could handle the assignment. She phoned Ellen Saracini, who thought it might help her daughter to put her emotions into words. And in Dressers classroom, Kirsten wrote feverishly. Has something horrible ever happened to you, but then something good occurs later on, as if God was saying,I havent forgotten about you? She recalled being picked up at school by her mother on Sept. 11 and imploring, Tell me its not Daddy! Yet even her familys darkest day was offset by some happier moments. Kirsten wrote about her shoes sinking into the turf at Yankee Stadium as all the players encircled her and her sister, Brielle, autographing baseballs for them. Of that night, Kirsten wrote, I felt a feeling that I had not felt for a long time ... I felt loved. Nov. 29, Fiona Havlish and Tara Bane Fiona pulled her Nissan Maxima into Tara Banes driveway. They lived around the corner from each other, but had met only a week before. They were sharing a ride to a group therapy session for Bucks County families of Sept.11 victims. Fiona was 15 years Taras senior, but imme-
diately they clicked. They shared a love of dogs Fionas one to Taras three.They realized that they both used to regularly dine with their husbands at the Yardley Inn. We probably were in the same room at the same time, not knowing what our fates would be,Tara said. At St. Marys Medical Center, Fiona and Tara led into a meeting room. Neighbors from Lower Makeeld seemed to gravitate together as they gured out the degrees of separation between them. Fionas husband, Don, worked in another department of the same corporation as Suzanne Bergers husband, Jim. Grace Godshalk, whose son, Bill, was killed, lived in the same development as Judy Reiss, who lost her son Joshua. Taras sister went to the same golf club as Suzanne. That was the night each one of us learned about the other one, Fiona said. The session lasted more than two hours. We just desperately needed each other. Jan. 5, Tara Bane The canvas, big and blank, seemed to be waiting for Tara Bane. She had avoided painting after Sept. 11, but realized this couldnt go on forever. She squirted out paints and unleashed with each stroke all the rage inside. Tara made a living helping people with troubled minds express themselves by drawing. But ever since the death of her husband, Michael Bane, she couldnt bear to pick up a paintbrush. They had only recently moved to Lower Makeeld and had looked forward to lling their house with kids. She painted furiously for hours.The images were raw, blunt, and literal: A shadowy gure ripping out the heart of a woman with no eyes. As a therapist, Tara deciphered clear meaning: Rage, anger, despair, she said. As the creator, she felt frustrated that the painting didnt fully capture the anger in her head. Im probably better off, she said. The
continued on next page Debbi Senko cuddled son Tyler, now 2, at their home in Bucks County last fall. Her husband, Larry, was killed at the trade center.
Inquirer Magazine 11
8/29/02
2:11 PM
Page 12
DANIELLE KOUSOULIS ALISHA LEVIN JOSEPH LOSTRANGIO NOELL MAERZ
FAMILIES
continued from previous page
image in my mind is too harsh. Jan. 15, Suzanne Berger One by one, the Berger boys fell to a winter stomach virus, leaving their mother, Suzanne, to play nurse around the clock. First was Nicholas, 9.Three nights of throwing up, fever and tful sleep; three days of missed school. Next came Alexander, 6. Same symptoms, same pattern. Last was Christian, 3. Suzanne felt exhausted and defeated. I got my rst dose of what it feels like to be a single mom, Suzanne said. When her husband, Jim, had been around, they would take turns with the sick one. I was running on no energy, thinking, What was coming my way? Could I do it myself? On the third night of Christians illness, Suzanne had put him back in his crib and returned to her room. After a while, she heard him talking. She paused by his doorway, listening to him giggling and talking to someone. She peeked inside his room. Hey, whats going on? Mommy, Daddy makes me laugh, Christian told her. Sometimes he takes off his wings and puts them in his pocket! Suzanne lifted the boy out of his crib and carried him into her room, thinking, Im not by myself. March 18, Jordan Reiss Where are my shoes?! Jordan Reiss, 21, bellowed to everyone within earshot. Home from the University of Georgia, Jordan stomped through the kitchen looking for a chunky, black shoe.These were important shoes. They had belonged to Joshua, his 23-year-old brother, the second of ve Reiss siblings. Joshua was the type of older brother a younger sibling could show off to his friends. A hotshot bond trader, he was successful, ambitious, brash, self-assured. He really did everything right, Jordan said. That semester, Jordan was having a hard time coping and felt isolated in Georgia. Its not that people in Georgia dont care, Jordan said. They care about what happened as much as any New Yorker. But they dont understand it from the point of view of someone from the North, or especially from Lower Bucks, where you know lots of people who passed away. During one stretch of bad days, Jordan missed an anthropology test in order to see his therapist on campus. I wrote a letter to the professor to explain, he said. A teaching assistant replied via e-mail, advising, You need to choose your time to mourn better. But that, as Jordan has learned, is not how it works.
I cant tell myself, Im going to wake up and its going to be a good day. You cant choose your time to mourn. It chooses you. March 23, Suzanne Berger Suzanne Berger looked out the window as her son, Nicholas, threw a baseball at a pitchback net in the backyard. Little League season was about to start, and the sight of Nicholas practicing alone made Suzanne boil with anger. My sons dont deserve to grow up without a father, she seethed. When Jim Berger died, Suzanne tried to explain to her sons that their father would always be with them in spirit. But they didnt want a spirit, they wanted their Dad.
U.S. attorney. Tell us about your son, Mrs. Godshalk, the prosecutor asked. The U.S. Attorneys Ofce was interviewing the families of Sept. 11 victims to call as possible witnesses in the case against the alleged 20th terrorist, Zacarias Moussaoui. Their testimony could put a face on victims for a jury. Grace, a Lower Makeeld township supervisor, was eager to help. As I said early on, Ill spend the rest of my life ghting terrorism, she said. The death of her only son, Bill, spurred her to get involved. She joined a family support group. She added her name to the lawsuit against Osama bin Laden. She lobbied senators to inves-
Holding hands for support en route to a ceremony at ground zero in May were (from left) Fiona Havlish, Ellen Saracini and Trish Williamson; Grace Godshalk follows.
From the kitchen, Suzanne saw Nicholas move the pitch-back so that now he was throwing right into the sun. What is he doing? she thought. Hes going to hurt himself. Sure enough, Nicholas got bopped in the face and split his lip. Suzanne, a nurse, ran outside with a washcloth and ice. When she reached him, he smiled through the blood. Mom, I nally get it, Nicholas said proudly. I nally understand. Get what? I felt Daddy in the sun, and I moved the pitch-back so I could throw the ball to him. He threw it back to me. I felt him so much I forgot to catch the ball. March 25, Grace Godshalk In a small suite at a midtown hotel, Grace Godshalk sat with an FBI agent and an assistant
tigate the breakdown of intelligence leading up to Sept. 11. On the train home from a trip to Capitol Hill, she cornered Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the cafe car and pressed her argument for an independent investigation of which agencies knew what and when. But her biggest project was in Lower Makeeld: Grace got the ball rolling to build a memorial for all Bucks County victims. Grace spoke for an hour with the interviewers. She gave them a photograph of Bill, which they copied and planned to display with other pictures at the trial. But there was no need to turn over two other documents in her bag: a certicate with the time and date of Bills birth, and another with the time and date of his death. May 18, Judy Reiss All through Saturday synagogue service,
8/29/02
2:14 PM
Page 13
KEVIN MARLO KAARIA MBAYA ROBERT McILVAINE LOUIS NACKE JOHN ONEILL
Judy Reiss felt anxious. She was prone to nerves, but this morning was worse than usual. I kept looking at the door, she said. I felt Joshua was going to walk through the doors. She started weeping. A friend got her some tissues. I hadnt been that upset in a while, she said. Literally something came over me. It was overpowering. It had been eight months since Joshua Reiss was killed, and his parents still had no body to bury. After the service, Judy drove to her husbands menswear store near Trenton. I had this feeling, she told Gary Reiss. He brushed it off. The next morning, Judy and Gary were driving their youngest, Jennifer, to a friends house when they got a call on the cell phone from Jonathan, the fourth child. An FBI agent had just called the Reiss house. They found him, Jonathan said. Joshua worked on the 105th oor of the North Tower, the rst to get hit. Recovery workers at ground zero discovered his remains at 11 a.m. Saturday morning the time Judy Reiss was at synagogue. May 30, Tara Bane Tara Bane wasnt looking for a tropical escape. But when a friend working on a movie set in Hawaii asked her to visit, she knew she needed a break. Tara welcomed her anonymity in Hawaii. No one but her friend knew that at 30 she was a widow. Or that her husband, Michael, probably died instantly at his desk when the rst plane exploded into the North Tower. To the movie crew, she was simply an art therapist visiting from Philadelphia. I had a choice to tell them, but I didnt, she said. It was nice to be known as just Tara, not Tara Who Lost Her Husband at the World Trade Center. Not that its not a part of me, but just not all of me. She climbed Diamond Head, swam and hung out on the set. I discovered I still could have fun and enjoy things, Tara said. On her last night, the lm crew had a party. A stuntman teased her, Oh, I bet youve got a steady Freddy back home. No, no, Tara said. Its a long story. You dont want to hear it. Another stuntman chimed in, What? No steady Freddy? Must be a steady Mikey. June 12, Nicholas Berger The Braves were down by one run, with two outs and one man on base, when Nicholas Berger, 9, stepped to the plate. Jim Berger had never missed a game, even if it meant racing to the eld after work. Nicholas was having an uneven season. His batting was off, and his coach, Larry Warren,
continued on Page 42
GRATEFUL HEART
Her rescuer perished, so her thanks go to the mans mother.
By JENNIFER LIN
or months, Ling Young was haunted by the face of her young rescuer and questions about his fate: Did he survive? What was his story? Who was he? Ling had been waiting for an elevator in the 78th-oor sky lobby of the South Tower when the second plane cut into the building. Thrown across the room, Ling was dazed, until she heard a young voice cut through the oily black smoke. I found the stairs! Follow me. Ling obeyed. Can you carry a re extinguisher? the man asked her as they headed into the stairs. Ling, 49, a New York tax auditor from Monmouth County, N.J., nodded and lugged a canister into the stairwell, which was remarkably clear of debris and smoke. Even with burns over 40 percent of her body, Ling took the steps quickly. Sensing she could make it on her own, the young man told her, Im going back. He bounded up the stairs, a red bandanna in his hand.
fter Memorial Day, Ling got a call from another survivor from the 78th oor, Judy Wein. Judy was one of the people the mystery rescuer had gone back to help. In an article in the New York Times, Judy described how the man wore a red bandanna over his face. A reader, Alison Crowther, had a strong feeling it might have been her 24-yearold son,Welles. His trademark was a red bandanna. His mother said he carried one from the time he was 16 and working as a volunteer reghter for Empire Hook and Ladder Company in Upper Nyack, N.Y. His father, Jefferson Crowther, a banker and volunteer regher, carried a blue one. Welles, youre just like your father, Alison had teased after her son pulled out his familiar bandanna as they dined in Manhattan Sept. 9 last year. The remains of Welles Crowther were recovered in March from an area of the South Tower. But his parents knew little of his nal moments. After reading about Judys escape, Alison tracked her down and e-mailed a photo of Welles. Because Judy never got a good look at her rescuers face, she got in touch with Ling. Ling, too, was uncertain.The photo was a formal portrait of Welles, a solidly built lacrosse and ice hockey player who graduated from Boston College.The man who saved her
Photography by MICHAEL BRYANT
Ling Young (right), saved on Sept. 11 by Welles Crowther, a young equities trader, has become close with his mother, Alison.
had been disheveled and wearing his undershirt. She asked Alison to send a more recent, candid photograph. Alison sent Ling a snapshot taken last June, in which Welles stood next to an older reghter. Thats him, Ling said instantly. No ifs, ands or buts. Its his hair, everything. Ling learned that her rescuer was an equities trader for Sandler ONeill & Partners, on the 104th oor of the South Tower. After the rst plane hit the North Tower, he left a message with his mother that he was going to evacuate. Alison suspects that his reghter instincts compelled him to keep returning to the inferno to help others. And that image of him, reinforced by Ling and Judys reports, has been her solace. It brings me great peace, Alison said. For Ling, too, the mystery has been solved. She has visited Alison many times and says the two share an intense bond. At least, Ling said, now I know who to thank.
911afghan/osama08.qxd
8/28/02
11:33 AM
Page 14
PETER ORTALE PATRICK QUIGLEY JOSHUA REISS JOHN RODAK
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
STATE OF CONFUSION
Afghanistans transformation is on, but its anyones guess what comes next.
AP PHOTO / VICTOR R. CAIVANO
Shahena, 6, at a religious school in Kandahar, Afghanistan. After years of Taliban restrictions, girls are returning to school, women to work. Story by ANDREW
MAYKUTH
aji Abdul Qadir sat cross-legged on a cushion in the parlor of his house last October, surrounded by fellow Afghan warlords.The rebel commanders had stopped by to pay their condolences to Qadir.The previous day, the Taliban had captured and summarily executed Qadirs younger brother, Abdul Haq, who was on a clandestine mission to stir up opposition to the rigid Islamic regime. If one Abdul Haq is dead, I think a thousand more Abdul Haqs will come up, Qadir said as his guests sipped green tea and nibbled dried mulberries and sweets. I had rst met Qadir earlier that month after American bombers began their campaign against the Taliban in reprisal for the terrorist attacks in the United States. Qadir, a senior commander in the opposition Northern Alliance, lived in a rented house in the rebel stronghold of Jabal Saraj.
But his home and most of his followers were in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan, where he had been governor before the Taliban took control in 1996. It was difcult to reconcile Qadirs reputation as a violent warlord with the gracious man who sat before me. Qadir moved easily between the Islamic world and the West, where his family had business ties in Germany. He was rich some said it was from drug smuggling. His billowy shirt and pants were cut from ne cloth and his white beard was carefully trimmed, unlike the shaggy beards worn by fundamentalist leaders. He wore a felt Afghan hat, like most of the commanders who sat on the cushions ringing the room. Addicted to tobacco, Qadir carefully shielded himself with a cupped hand as he spit into a brass spittoon. He wore a large gold Rolex beneath his sleeve. Qadir was considered a moderate, one of the few ethnic Pashtuns to join the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance. He had commanded a force
against Afghanistans Soviet invaders in the 1980s. During the factional ghting that followed the defeat of the Russians the chaos that allowed the Taliban to rise to power Qadir maintained warm relations with several warring groups. He now expressed hope that Afghanistans warlords could cooperate once the Taliban were out of power, whenever that came to pass. No one could anticipate how quickly events would unfold. Three weeks later, Northern Alliance forces overran the Taliban trenches that had been softened up by American bombers and they marched into Kabul. Qadir reclaimed his leadership in Nangarhar. Qadir played a big role in negotiations for an interim government, demanding greater representation for Pashtuns. In June, President Hamid Karzai named him one of three vice presidents. He was also appointed minister of public works. Qadirs reign was brief. On July 6, his rst day at the ministry, he and his driver were killed by two gunmen who red
8/28/02
11:34 AM
Page 15
CHARLES SABIN VICTOR SARACINI LARRY SENKO DAVIS SEZNA JOHANNA SIGMUND
Asking warlords to uphold law and order is like asking the Cali cocaine cartel to be our partners in the drug war.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Senate foreign relations committee chairman.
AP PHOTO / LAURA RAUCH
more than 36 rounds at his car. Qadirs bodyguards were arrested for failing to stop the assassination, but no one was charged immediately with his murder. Qadir had legions of enemies, so there is no shortage of suspects drug trafckers upset by his recent order to halt opium-poppy production, vanquished adversaries in Nangarhar or even remnants of the Taliban. But many Afghans feared that Qadir was done in by rivals within the government. More than a few Pashtuns believe Qadir was killed by the Tajiks with whom he had cooperated in the Northern Alliance perhaps the very commanders who had gathered in Qadirs parlor in October to extend their sympathies at the death of his brother. fghanistan is an untidy place, but its a lot tidier than it used to be, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld testied before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July. A year ago, Afghanistan was a pariah state, recognized by only three nations. It was nancially dependent on Osama bin Ladens network of terrorists, who found sanctuary to prepare to carry out their attacks. The Taliban brutally repressed its citizens. Refugees were stuck between warring factions as a drought loomed, and humanitarian aid was disrupted. Today, U.S. and Afghan forces have driven the Taliban from power, al-Qaeda is on the run, and Afghanistan is no longer a base of global terrorist operations. The beatings by religious police and executions in soccer stadiums have stopped, the humanitarian crisis has been averted, international workers are no longer held hostage, aid is once again owing, and the Afghan people have been liberated, Rumsfeld said.
Ladens location is unknown. Resentment at the American presence is bound to increase as civilian casualties inevitably mount. Over the centuries, Afghans have never demonstrated a protracted tolerance for outsiders. And Afghanistan is hardly a free nation, as Rumsfeld calls it. The 5,000-member International Security Assistance Force, headed by Turkey, is conned to Kabul. Karzais power extends no farther than the capital, and his control inside the capital is weak. Following Qadirs assassination, Karzai accepted protection from American special forces rather than relying on guards provided by his own defense minister. The biggest obstacle to stability in Afghanistan is the threat of renewed factional violence. he Bush administration helped orchestrate the election of Karzais interim government in June, a transitional government that will lead the nation until a constitutional election scheduled for 2004. But there are signs that the tribal unity put on for public display at the national council was a fantasy. Qadir, one of the few Pashtuns who had joined the Northern Alliance, was seen as a key to forming a broad-based central government.To unhappy Pashtuns, his assassination has contributed to the sense that Karzais government is tilted by powerful warlords from the north. Chief among the warlords is Gen. Mohammed Fahim, an ethnic Tajik who led the Northern Alliance forces into Kabul last November. In addition to heading the defense ministry, Fahim is also a vice president.Though there is no proof and the truth may ultimately not count
continued on next page
Haji Abdul Qadir, named a vice president in the interim government, was assassinated in July, on his rst day on the job.
International aid has begun to have an effect. The Salang Tunnel connecting Kabul to the north has been cleared of mines and reopened, allowing commerce to ow again. Refugees are returning to their farms in the Shamali Plain north of Kabul, though the resettlement is hampered by land mines. Girls are returning to school and women are returning to work, though the freedom they enjoyed before the Taliban is still a distant memory. But the work the American military set out to accomplish remains unnished. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, is still on the run. Bin
WHERES OSAMA?
ithin a week of the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush declared that Osama bin Laden was wanted dead or alive. Since then, the whereabouts of the terrorist leader have become something of a national obsession. The Pentagon hasnt been especially forthcoming in pinpointing bin Ladens location. At a press brieng in April, Defense Secretary
The best minds on the subject are doing a lot of guessing.

Donald H. Rumsfeld narrowed the possibilities as follows: Bin Laden is either alive or dead . . . and hes either in Afghanistan or he isnt. Not much to go on. But there are some clues.The U.S. intercepted radio trafc in December between bin Laden and his forces in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan. From there (assuming his cave wasnt obliterated by a 15,000-pound daisy-cutter bomb) bin Laden could have slipped through a porous border into Pakistan, nding shelter among Muslim extremists. One of his top deputies, Abu Zubaydah, was captured in March in the eastern Pakistan town of Faisalabad an indication that alQaeda leaders may indeed have escaped across the border. Bin Ladens mobility is limited. The most hunted man on the planet is suffering from kidney disease that requires dialysis treatment. In a video released in December, he appeared
Story by PETER
NICHOLAS
greenish and thin. His left arm never moved. More than six feet tall with a distinguishing hawk nose, bin Laden doesnt blend into a crowd. Its one thing if hes a healthy young 22-year-old who can run like a gazelle. Its something else if hes older and needs medical attention, said Warren Bass, director of the terrorism program at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Few governments would welcontinued on next page
8/29/02
2:32 PM
Page 16
GEORGE SMITH B ONNIE SMITHWICK TIMOTHY SOULAS WILLIAM STEINER
AFGHANISTAN
OSAMA
PETER TOBIA
for much many Pashtuns believe Fahim was behind the killing of Qadir. But the U.S. military has found it necessary to work with the regional warlords, particularly Fahim, in its efforts to wipe out traces of al-Qaeda. These warlords are all on the U.S. payroll, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said at hearings on Afghanistan this summer. Maybe Im missing something here, but I just dont think this makes sense. Asking warlords to uphold law and order is like asking the Cali cocaine cartel to be our partners in the drug war. The Americans and the French are training a new multiethnic national army, which Karzai hopes will total about 72,000 soldiers and border guards. But U.S. military ofcials expect no more than 4,000 soldiers to be trained by the end of the year. Meanwhile, about 200,000 armed Afghans would need to be demobilized or inducted into the new army. The Bush administration has resisted efforts to supply troops to expand the international security force beyond Kabul, arguing that its rst priority is to stop terrorists. Conservative groups such as the Cato Institute say that Americas security interests should go no further than destroying terrorists, citing failed attempts at nation-building in the past, such as that in Somalia. As the Bush administration prepares to deal with Iraq, some say Afghanistan will be a test case for the administrations plans for Saddam Hus-
An Afghan mother, Karima, comforted her son Chaman, 2, inside a mosque in Hazara Town, Pakistan, in October. The family ed Afghanistan, fearing the U.S. bombing.
sein. Everyone knows we can remove an evil regime, Biden said. The question is, are we willing to expend the security, nancial, diplomatic, and political resources to make the successor regime a success?
come him. Bin Ladens citizenship was revoked by his native Saudi Arabia in 1994. He was kicked out of Sudan a couple of years later. Bin Laden needs to nd a weak state with a central government that cant police the ow of people in and out, Bass said. Afghanistan, he added, was the paradise of bin Ladens creation. But with the Taliban booted out and U.S. troops dug in, Afghanistan is a sanctuary no more. Rumsfeld, in an interview at the beginning of the year, mentioned Chechnya, Kashmir and Somalia as places where bin Laden has sympathizers and might nd refuge. For bin Laden, the most likely escape route is across a border into a neighboring country. The farther he travels, the greater is his risk of capture. He doesnt have a world of alternatives, Bass said. The more he travels and draws on funds and gets in touch with other members of the network, the more likely it is intelligence services will notice him. Then theres the chance that Bush got his wish. The FBIs counterterrorism chief, Dale Watson, went before Congress in July and ventured that bin Laden is probably not with us anymore. Case closed? But I have no evidence to support that, Watson added.
Al-Qaeda leaders: Where are they?

Pakistan Kashmir Somalia Chechnya
Osama bin Laden

He appeared sickly in a videotape released in December, and at least one top U.S. official FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson believes he may be dead. But there is also speculation that bin Laden escaped the U.S. bombardment of al-Qaeda forces gathered in Afghanistans Tora Bora region and fled into Pakistan. Other possible hideouts are Kashmir, Somalia and Chechnya.
Ayman al-Zawahiri
Bin Ladens top deputy is an Egyptian doctor and the leader of the group Islamic Jihad, blamed for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981. He is believed to be alive.
Abu Zubaydah
Al-Qaedas operations chief was captured in March in a raid in the Pakistani town of Faisalabad. Published reports say U.S. forces are holding him at a base on Diego Garcia, the British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean. He is said to be providing information that has helped thwart planned terrorist attacks.
Mohammed Atef
Al-Qaedas military commander was killed during U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan in November.
Graphic by CYNTHIA GREER
911Dimach08.qxd
8/28/02
1:18 PM
Page 17
PERRY THOMPSON DEB ORAH WELSH SANDRA WRIGHT
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Local Voices
Omar Dimachkie
president, North American chapter, Islamic Charitable Projects
All of Islam suffers a wound.

matized Muslims in the public mind for years to come. . . . Nowadays, a great deal of people think they know a lot about Islam. What they actually know, he says, is a tiny bit about a group of extremists who have strayed from the faith. In West Philadelphia, he says, the leadership of the charitable association is devoted to a simple creed, moderation, and a single mission, education. We try to teach Islam to whoever is interested and is willing to listen, Dimachkie says. The association proclaims itself the resounding voice of moderation and explicitly rejects violence, terrorism, and the call for assassinations. Its West Philly neighbors understood that all along, he says, dropping by in the stressful days right after the attacks to make sure everyone was all right. As the months have passed, life in the Muslim community has slowly resumed its pace.Today, no one spends their nights stretched out on the mosque oor. The strangers who hung around outside have vanished.Yet Dimachkie remains troubled by a question, one he wishes he could put to the radical Muslims who carried out the attacks. I want to ask them, what did they do to Islam with this act? How did they serve Islam with this act? he asks. You could not have done anything more damaging to the reputation of Islam.
n the days immediately after Sept. 11, says Omar Dimachkie, no one was quite sure what would happen. But the early indications werent good. A bomb threat was made against the mosque. A Muslim womans scarf, called a purdah, was ripped off her head by several threatening young men. Unfamiliar cars began to park on the corner, attended by men who seemed to have no particular reason for being there. It was nerve-racking. Some of the faithful took up posts as surrogate night watchmen, sleeping on the mosque oor. Sept. 11 was a real blow to Muslims, says Dimachkie, whose organization is based in West Philadelphia. It has stig-
STORY BY JEFF GAMMAGE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER TOBIA

911Merillo08.qxd
8/28/02
2:09 PM
Page 18
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Essay
he Western Pennsylvania town of Shanksville is an unremarkable place. It sits 2,200 feet up in the Allegheny Mountains, in a landscape of high pastureland and long low hills from which thousands of tons of coal are still taken every year.The town center consists of a few streets of close-set houses, some of them built tidily of red brick and surrounded by neat yards, others showing the ngerprint of country poverty: sagging front porches, worn roofs, clapboards battered by the harsh upland winters. To reach the site where United Airlines Flight 93 plowed into the earth, you head north on a serpentine two-lane road, following handmade signs nailed to telephone poles.Ten minutes from the center of town you make a right turn and climb to the crest of a hill.The land opens down and away in front of you, a barren thousand-acre eld with a pool of standing water between slopes. Queen Annes lace and clover grow on either side of the road, and pairs of killdeer screech. On a strip-mined and reclaimed hillside to your left, two enormous cranes draglines, they are called sit abandoned. With a solitary farmhouse in the distance, and stands of pine and hardwood marking the edges of the gravelly open
Photography by PETER TOBIA
By ROLAND MERULLO
Flight 93: Shanksvilles shrine

land, the scene looks like something Andrew Wyeth might have painted on an unhappy day. Half a mile below the crest of the hill, the actual crash site is guarded by an uneven rectangle of shining chain-link fence with an American ag fastened to its middle. Some witnesses say the plane was ying upside-down when it came over these hills. Some say the engines had quit and the Boeing 757 careered along in an eerie silence. All the soil within the enclosure has been removed, sifted, and replaced, but you can still see the scar where ames burned the trees, and people still nd tiny pieces of metal in the woods nearby. Only relatives and a few ofcials are allowed within the enclosure. Members of the public who travel here to pay their respects park in a small lot at the crest of the hill, where a 10-by-20-foot patch of chain-link fence has been erected. On this fence, and around it, visitors from as far as China and New Zealand have left every imaginable form of tribute to the men and women who suffered the horrors of Flight 93s last minutes. There are paintings of Jesus; inscribed baseballs; police shoulder patches; the names and photos of crew members and passengers; an engraved plaque left by someone from Guatemala; a T-shirt from a plumbers union in Las Vegas; a toy re truck; and a white sheet of plywood that is covered like the parking lot guardrail with scrawled messages: We love you, God bless you, Thank you. And Todd Beamers famous words: Lets roll. This spontaneous, unofcial, unsponsored monument is an attempt to span the unbridgeable distance that separates us, one from another, living and dead, living and living.We cannot feel the horror and pain of the people who died on that jet. We cannot fathom the grief of the ones who loved them. All we can do is try to reach toward them with our imaginations and to hope we might behave, in the hour of terror, the way the people on Flight 93 behaved. This humble patch of reclaimed American earth has become a sort of holy site, with as many as a thousand people a day making the pilgrimage. And that is as it should be. As a 4-year-old girl said, explaining to a Somerset County sheriffs deputy why she had left a favorite stuffed animal at the site: These people, they were good people. And so they were. And so, our own goodness stretching out toward theirs, we try to touch them.
Roland Merullo is a novelist and essayist who lives in Massachusetts.
A makeshift monument bears witness to Flight 93 in Shanksvilles quiet hills.
911Mayor08.qxd
8/29/02
2:34 PM
Page 19
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Local Voices
The mayor, and his town, accept their higher prole.
ike a subdued but persistent underground tremor, the reverberations from United Airlines Flight 93 are still rattling the peace in Shanksville, Pa., and probably always will. Reporters, federal investigators, the mourning families of survivors, and politicians have streamed in and out. Theyve organized marches and memorial services, given speeches and kept vigils. For the good citizens of Shanksville, it has been a remarkable year. The town, with a population of fewer than 250, is too small to support a restaurant, let alone a city hall, so the primary elected ofcial could only be reached at home. Is this the Ernest Stull who is mayor of Shanksville? Ive been accused of that, he says with avuncular gruffness. In the background, his wife gives cues and encouragement. And another voice can be heard. His daughter. Shes patching me up, Stull says. I mowed the lawn today. The tractor and me had some problems, and it won. Hes served on the Borough Council since 1956 or 57. Been mayor 12 or 14 years. He and his father used to run a car dealership.Then his son joined the business.That partnership lasted until a few years ago, when Stulls health declined. Ive been in the hospital so many times, everyone calls me by my rst name. Ive had 14 catheterizations and two heart attacks. For Stull personally, the stress of the national spotlight has not been particularly salutary. But I dont mind, he says. Im glad to sing the praises of our little town.We had a sixmonth celebration here in town that was very, very, very nice. We have a group of ambassadors that take turns going up to the site. Someone is there almost every day 8 to 6. People
Ernest Stull
volunteer to take a shift.The whole town is just more friendly. Everyone wants to know, What can I do to help? And what they did for that period of time last September is almost unbelievable. The horror of the crash was unspeakable, so he distances himself by referring to it or this. People gave time, 24 hours a day, when this all happened. It became the Shanksville Fire Companys job to feed about 400 people the National Transportation Safety Board, the police, investigators.They ran a truck around every three hours delivering hot breakfast, coffee and sandwiches. We got a lot of contributions from as far away as Pittsburgh [75 miles] the day after this happened.The Pirates game was canceled, so the vendors brought all their wares out here and we distributed them.We got ice from Parkersburg,Va. A restaurant from Johnstown called to ask, What day can we bring supper? As the year wore on, he was continually having to take his suit out of the closet. There was always something happening connected to 9/11. A load of steel from New York and Washington
mayor of Shanksville, Pa.
came past our little town. The mayor of New York was up at the site to speak at commencement. Several people of some importance . . . bicyclists coming through who left Seattle in May . . . a group of horsemen who started out in Oklahoma City. . . . In July, Stulls wife underwent knee surgery, so he had to cut back his shifts as an ambassador at the site from three a week to two. But with the anniversary approaching, the demands on him picked up over the summer. Between now and the 11th, he said in early July, I dont think I have a day without a meeting or some ofcial event. The townspeople were scouring the area, trying to nd parking for the 30,000 people expected to attend. Shanksville, he said, is bearing up well under the stress. Theres only one little convenience store here that makes sandwiches.Theyve been doing super. We miss our little quiet town, sure, but it isnt supposed to be that way anymore. So we tell ourselves this is what Shanksville is going to be. A little bit busier.

911kids08.qxd
8/29/02
1:59 PM
Page 20
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
ROAD TO RECOVERY
The young, resilient and optimistic, lead the healing.
about it. Its strange, really. I think it was a lot worse for adults. Kids just sort of feel disconnected from it all. No solid research exists on childrens reactions outside the epicenters, but anecdotal evidence abounds. The National Center for Child Traumatic Stress reports no surge in clinical cases. Schools and summer camps found no particular problems. Perhaps we did a better job of preparing kids to deal with this than we thought, said Jennifer Wood of the National Center. Or, as Susan Royer, a vice president of Sesame Workshop, creators of Sesame Street, said: A lot of things went right after Sept. 11. That the destruction of Sept. 11 was a singular event has certainly allowed many children to put that awful day behind them. (Adults, too.) The media also helped. For all the criticism of the rst 24 hours of nonstop televised horror, children were then quickly shown a different set of images and told stories of healing. Acts of bravery, portraits of strong leadership, applause for reghters those images sent a message of a nation coming together that had been missing from the coverage of Columbine and Oklahoma City. But even more powerful than images were actions. Lighting candles. Flying ags. Raising funds. Sending cards and packages. All the communal energy directed toward the victims of the attacks helped children channel their fear, anger and bewilderment. It took some time to get over the shock, like the stages of death, Cleta Joskowicz, a Havertown mother, said of the Girl Scout troop she led last year. They began to understand that people could do this kind of thing.Then they said, now we have to get together and do something to help. Surveys by Sesame Workshop after Sept. 11 found that signs of communities rallying together gave children solace and a sense of optimism. Now the challenge is to keep this safety net in place. Some children express their emotions so readily that our role in helping them is obvious. Others keep their fears tightly buried until they burst forth at times like these.Trauma has its own ebb and ow, and we must pay attention to the tide.
heres a Sept. 11 for adults, and a Sept. 11 for children.They are not, we are learning, the same. For adults it will always be a day of infamy, a moment that shattered our sense of invulnerability and challenged our very civilization. Kids have a different story sad, but also surprising. Children who lost parents and family members reacted in heartbreaking ways. The son of a dead reghter, for example, built twin towers with his kindergarten blocks, knocked them down, built them up, again and again. A child evacuated from a school near ground zero hid in her closet day after day. What we have learned and seen over the past year is that the impact is deep, and how children respond is often unpredictable, former New York City Schools Chancellor Harold Levy said last month. Nearly one in four Manhattan children received counseling in the month following Sept. 11. A study released in May found that, six months af-
Story by
JANE EISNER
terward, 76 percent of city schoolchildren often thought about the attacks, 24 percent had problems sleeping, and 17 percent had nightmares. Calculating the full hidden costs on those young lives will take years. But heres the surprise: Many adults feared the trauma, like some uncontained epidemic, would spread beyond New York,Washington and Shanksville, because of the way it unfolded on television. Adults feared heightened anxiety among children who thought that 50 airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center, because theyd seen the images repeated so many times. And in the aftermath, it seemed wed be left with a generation of frightened children, weaned on Oklahoma City, Columbine and now this, taught by current events to believe that no public place airplane, school, ofce, day care center is safe. Then the unexpected happened. Kids rebounded. Better still, many of them, aided by wise adults and propelled by their own resilience, dealt with the tragedy in amazingly healthy ways. For a while, you were afraid that youll never be safe again, recalled Sarah Burns, 15, a Girl Scout from Hatboro. Then you almost forget
Photography by
APRIL SAUL
911Pitts08.qxd
8/28/02
2:30 PM
Page 21
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Essay
No denying it
Were Americans, one and all.
By LEONARD PITTS Jr.
nd so, September comes around again. In the rst days, it seemed appropriate somehow to mark our distance from the awful event in small increments, grateful that each step forward was another step away.We commemorated the end of the rst week, the end of the rst month. Now, suddenly, we are at the end of the rst year. One year. Where are the colors on the palette, the words in the dictionary, to explain what it felt like watching those planes impale those towers, the mind refusing to process the things the eyes reported? What images in a viewnder or notes on the scale can capture it all? How can you frame the dry-mouth disbelief of seeing people leap from burning skyscrapers and knowing their decision was perfectly logical, of watching dust-caked survivors wander the outskirts of holocaust like some army of the godforsaken, of knowing that your greatest city is suddenly closed for business? Of praying, God, why? I dont know the words for those things. Cant imagine the pictures or the songs. I only know that Sept. 11, 2001 is the day the good old days ended. And, paradoxically, the day that made us Americans again. Im not talking about patriotism. Rather, I refer to the fact that we are a people who wear national identity lightly, when we wear it at all. Most days, we choose not to. Most days, we are a nation of efdoms dened by markers of race, education, employment, income, religion, gender, sexual identity, age, culture, geography and more.We are soccer moms and angry white men, yuppies and Afrocentrics, Cuban exiles and religious conservatives, and for generations weve enjoyed the luxury of not having to be anything more. Its not that we didnt know we were American. Its just that on most days prior to that one day, we were free to dene ourselves by other things. But, as we were brutally reminded, identity is not only a matter of how you perceive yourself. Its
also a matter of how youre perceived by others. The hijackers of Sept. 11 did not see soccer moms or angry white men.They saw something they have always hated, something they sought to kill.They saw Americans. And the people around the world who mourned the carnage of that day, who offered us money, blood and prayer, did not see Cuban exiles and the religious right.They saw something that has always given them hope.They, too, saw Americans. You may love that identity or hate it, may embrace that identity or be profoundly ambivalent toward it. But as the events of that day made painfully apparent, the one thing you cannot do is pretend it doesnt matter, has no bearing on your life. We got away with that for a long time. Small wonder. One of the perks of being the biggest, the
strongest and the most inuential is that you can also be the most oblivious, neither knowing nor caring overmuch how you are dened by others. They react to you more than you do to them. Until, invariably, something happens that forces you to react. Then you stagger about shocked and indignant, as if betrayed by history itself.Thats what occurred on 9/11. Now September comes back around and our lives are baseball, back-to-school sales, summer movies, and other things it once seemed we might never care about again. Still, theres an empty space in the New York City skyline and soldiers at war on distant mountains. Reminders that we are the same, but also different now. Weve learned that we can no longer escape who we are.The truth is, we never could.
Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
Illustration by MURRAY KIMBER

911econ/decen08.qxd
8/28/02
1:31 PM
Page 22
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
LETS HEAR IT
Story by mong all the heroes well remember on Wednesdays anniversary the reghters and cops who gave their lives; the medics and construction workers who pitched in tirelessly and selessly; everyone who helped with the jobs of rescue, recovery and rebuilding maybe we should make room for one more: the economy. Think back to the days right after the terrorist attacks. Images of the burning towers were still fresh, along with the realization that thousands had died horribly. Yet fear was already growing that an economic aftershock
The economy that unsung hero of this year bounced back quicker than many expected.
ANDREW CASSEL
might spread from lower Manhattan to other regions across the country. And there were ripple effects. How could there not be? Air travel, the stock market and a great deal of general commerce simply shut down in the days after Sept. 11. Hundreds of thousands of people lost days at work, missed paychecks or were laid off outright. Much of America went into a kind of crouch, as we waited to see what would happen next. Yet in a relatively short time remarkably short, if you think about it the wheels began to turn again. Firms resumed doing business. Consumers started consuming again. Banks, factories and even Wall Street went back to work, demonstrating a resilience that even admirers of our economic system may not have fully appreciated. Above all, the free enterprise system worked, notes Bank of America economist Mickey Levy. We bounced back miraculously. Thats a judgment that may not seem so obvious in light of where things are right now. Stocks took a summer slide; unemployment is heading north of 6 percent; major airlines such as US Airways continue to struggle; and economists are debating the chances of a doubledip recession ahead versus a sluggish, protract-
Illustration by DANIEL
BAXTER
911econ/decen08.qxd
8/28/02
1:31 PM
Page 23
ed jobless recovery. But while some of the economic effects of Sept. 11 are surely still playing out, they are like ripples from a large stone dropped into a lake on a windy day. Other forces such as the wave of corporate and accounting scandals that have come to light since last fall are arguably now exerting greater inuence on our economic fortunes. Remember, too, that economic data is constantly being revised. In the period right after Sept. 11, many economists worried aloud that the attacks would throw the U.S. economy into recession. Now we know that the recession was already in progress when the hijackers launched their mission.The nations gross domestic product began shrinking early in 2001 a normal and probably inevitable development after 10 years of uninterrupted growth, the longest such expansion on record. By September of last year, many companies were already seeing business slow down and were responding by cutting back production, trimming payrolls or even selling off subsidiaries.Yet most ordinary Americans had not lost condence in the economy, or in their own ability to afford new houses, cars and other items. In the peculiar language of economists, what happened on Sept. 11 was a negative exogenous shock to supply and demand. Of course that was dramatic near ground zero, where scores of rms, many of them linked to global commercial networks, suddenly vanished. But the potential shock went further. In the wake of the attacks, it was less clear, for example, how many toys Wal-Mart needed to stock on its shelves, or how many parking attendants Disney World should hire for a Christmas season that might be like no other. At the same time, the likely cost of putting together a trade show or industry meeting suddenly changed, as travel times, freight-shipping rates, and insurance premiums all had to be regured in light of a new and uncertain set of risks. Yet by years end, its now clear, our economy not only survived the initial shock, but actually rebounded. After shrinking in the three months ending Sept. 30 though at a slower rate than during the previous quarter ending in June the economy grew 2.7 percent in the October-to-December period, and by a brisk 5 percent in the rst three months of 2002. What went right? Levy credits a convergence of smart management, good timing and national resolve. The Federal Reserve Board jumped in early, easing interest rates and offering to prop up any major nancial institution that needed cash or other help to keep operating. At the same
time, both parties in Congress closed ranks at least temporarily, passing emergency assistance for airlines whose business dried up after the attacks. The insurance industry, which many feared would be crippled by the cost of the attacks, also survived.While the World Trade Center set an all-time record for insurance losses the current estimate is about $40 billion in claims those were mostly absorbed by international reinsurance rms, which exist to spread the risks of major catastrophes. President Bushs much-debated tax cut, which Congress had passed earlier in the year, turned out to have been well-timed, giving American households extra spending money when it was needed. Even more important,
record low interest rates gave automakers the ability to offer zero-percent nancing on new cars, effectively lowering prices to re-sale levels. Consumers could have expressed their nervousness about terrorism by hoarding cash and refusing to spend; instead, with the notable exception of travel and tourism, they mainly behaved normally. And their normal behavior went a long way toward preventing the downward economic spiral that many initially feared. That the economy came through so little damaged is part of the legacy of our response to 9/11. All of us who produce and consume Americas annual $10 trillion worth of goods and services should take a bow. We were just doing our jobs but isnt that what heroes always say?
THE BUSINESS OF INSECURITY

Planning for disasters preventing them, rebounding from them is all the rage.
By HENRY J. HOLCOMB
year later, 9/11 still haunts American business, spawning new enterprises and an array of changes ranging from building design to survival tactics. Landlords once gave building lobbies their own air-conditioning systems to keep pizza odors and such nuisances from spreading. Now they do this and more to contain toxins that might be tossed through the front door. Companies are doing a lot of detective work to assess their vulnerabilities, said Michael Moschella of the Whitman Cos., an East Brunswick, N.J., air-quality consulting rm that has been kept busy since last September on security issues. Owners are tightening control over who gets into buildings and making couriers leave packages in secure rooms instead going directly to the recipient. And there are serious discussions at the highest levels about continuity planning: How do we get back in business quickly if something goes wrong? Do our key suppliers have up-to-date plans so they can also rebound quickly? In Chicago and New York, ofces on high oors of landmark buildings are less popular now, said John Binswanger, cochairman of the Binswanger Cos., an international real estate rm based in Philadelphia. But these concerns havent been felt in
Philadelphia. They havent changed anything that were working on here, Binswanger said. The regions largest real estate rms, Liberty Property Trust of Malvern and Brandywine Realty Trust, are both planning new ofce buildings in Center City. Both buildings will include an array of security and safety systems inspired by 9/11. In New York there have been lots of discussions about not concentrating operations in one place, said Todd Monahan, Philadelphia leasing director for Equity Ofce Properties, the nations largest ofce landlord. But we havent run into those concerns here, Monahan said. Brian Turley, president of Strohl Systems Group Inc., a King of Prussia provider of disaster-recovery planning software and consulting services, said his business is booming. This month, Strohl is rolling out a virtual incident manager to help companies train for and manage disasters. Another new software program, due in November, will automatically notify as many as 20,000 people an hour vendors, customers, employees in the midst of a crisis and gather information relevant to recovery efforts. Having auditable, up-to-date recovery plans that pin down the cost of putting things back together is critical, say business and academic experts, to keeping insurance rates from slowing the economy.
911Pop/lyrics08.qxd
8/29/02
6:21 PM
Page 24
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
IN TRIBUTE
The responses owed from musicians and writers.
aybe its a measure of how griev- wasnt until country musician Toby Keith started ous a wound the terrorists inict- boot-stomping Peter Jennings over the proper ed. Or perhaps it is a reection of tone of our Independence Day celebration that what a fast-twitch society we have we knew things had returned to normal. Or as become. But some of the most powerful and mov- normal as they would ever get. ing tributes to the Sept. 11 tragedy to Because 9/11 continues to reverdate were almost instantaneous: berate through the culture like a thunFaces of Ground Zero, photograderclap. Sometimes it registers as pher Joe McNallys extraordinary exavoidance (lm and TV drama), somehibition of 85 life-size portraits, and times as pragmatism (new security America: A Tribute to Heroes, the measures in high-rise architecture), but solemn omni-TV fund-raiser that ralmost often as a passionate admixture lied showbizs A-list, from Tom Cruise of grief, sorrow and outrage. Certainly to the Dixie Chicks. the shock of Sept. 11 has unleashed a For months, it seemed the nation A photograph by Joe McNally of as- torrent of books, music, journalism, bestos handlers is part of his travelwas stumbling along in a daze. It ing exhibit Faces of Ground Zero. dance and art.We wade in.
JOE McNALLY
M
By DAVID
Photography by
HILTBRAND
MICHAEL BRYANT
Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)

by Alan Jackson
Hal Leonard Publishing
Hello God
by Dolly Parton
Warner Chappell Music Inc.
It Hit Home
Conscious Records
by Suzanne Vega
Where were you when the world stopped turning on that September day? Were you in the yard with your wife and children or working on some stage in L.A.? Did you stand there in shock at the sight of that black smoke rising against that blue sky? Did you shout out in anger, in fear for your neighbor, Or did you just sit down and cry?
This old world has gone to pieces, Can we x it, is there time? Hate and violence just increases, Were so selsh, cruel and blind. We ght and kill each other In your name defending you. Do you love some more than others? Were so lost and confused ...
People when theyre hungry become crazy, If its a baby or a nation we discuss, Anger turns to action turns to danger, We get mean and feel that living isnt worth much, And its either them or us.
911Pop/lyrics08.qxd
8/28/02
5:13 PM
Page 25
After the Sept. 11 attacks, many Americans expressed their feelings by fueling a surge in sales of patriotic items. Marvel Comics released a new series, The Call of Duty (near left) as a tribute to reghters.
POP MUSIC
Alan Jacksons song Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning), dealing with the shock and sorrow Toby Keiths Courtesy of the Red,White and Blue (The Angry American), a snarling vent of patriotism and anger Steve Earles John Walkers Blues, a much-reviled song written from the point of view of the American Taliban Neil Youngs Lets Roll, inspired by the heroic passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 Loudon Wainwrights No Sure Way, a touching tribute to the tragedy Bruce Springsteens album The Rising, interpreted as an elegy to the events at the World Trade Center
quiem will be held with orchestras and singers performing Mozarts Requiem. The performance begins along the International Date Line, from easternmost Russia through Fiji, at 8:46 a.m. local time and will shift on the hour 24 times to each successive time zone around the globe.
of 9/11 A compilation of 83 artworks set for display at the Museum of the City of New York Global of Terror Inside Al Qaeda: BilledNetworkdenitiveby Rohan Gunaratna as the work on al-Qaeda Events of What We Saw:TheandVideo September 11, 2001 in Words, Pictures by CBS News A collection of pieces by CBS staffers as well as Maureen Dowd, Howard Kurtz and others. Foreword by Dan Rather
John Adams choral work On the Transmigration of Souls will be performed at Lincoln Center Sept. 19.
BOOKS
Among the scores of titles, a few stand out: 11, 2001:American Septemberanthology from 127 Writers Respond An wordsmiths,
Fitzgerald and On Top of theWorld: CantorTom Barbash 9/11 by Howard Lutnick and Ground: Unbuilding the World Americanby William Langewiesche An Trade Center
including John Updike, Ishmael Reed and Erica Jong
account of the effort to dig out the trade center rubble Father Daly the Rev.Mike by Michaelthe priest A prole of Mychal Judge, who died ministering to New York reghters on Sept. 11
Running Toward Danger: Stories Behind the Breaking News of 9/11 First-person stories
from journalists with a foreword by Tom Brokaw
CLASSICAL MUSIC
On Wednesday, an around-the-world re-
The Day Our World Changed: Childrens Art

Illustrations by
ZACH TRENHOLM
Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)

by Toby Keith
Paddock Music
Into the Fire
by Bruce Springsteen
Rules
by Wu-Tang Clan
Sony Records
. . . Oh, Justice will be served and the battle will rage. This big dog will ght when you rattle his cage. Youll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A., Cuz well put a boot in your ass. Its the American way . . .
The sky was falling and streaked with blood. I heard you calling me, then you disappeared into the dust . . . It was dark, too dark to see, You held me in the light you gave. You lay your hand on me, Then walked into the darkness of your smoky grave ...
Who the . . . knocked our buildings down? Who the man behind the World Trade Center massacres, step up now. Where the four planes at huh is you insane, . . .? Fly that . . . over my hood and get blown to bits! . . . America, together we stand, divided we fall. Mr. Bush sit down, Im in charge of the war!
911Pop/lyrics08.qxd
8/28/02
5:16 PM
Page 26
The American ag popped up in more places than usual, and the reghter theme was popular. Fisher-Price released a New York reghter version of its Billy Blazes action gure (right).
POP
Placido Domingo and other artists at 9 p.m. Wednesday. Day America is a two-hour Theon Fox hostedChanged Hume at 8 p.m. special by Brit
Among the Heroes: United Flight 93 and the Passengers and Crew Who Fought Back by Jere Longman A chronicle of bravery
Wednesday. ABC is planning a similar special.
HBOs The Sopranos will have new opening credits on Sept. 15 because the Twin Towers were seen in the old version. The events of 9/11 will be acknowledged in dialogue.
TELEVISION
President Bush will give an exclusive interview to Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes II at 8 p.m. Wednesday on CBS. NBC plans A Concert for America at the Kennedy Center with Laura Bush and featuring Gloria Estefan,
America Rebuilds, a 90-minute lm on the recovery efforts in lower Manhattan, at 10

p.m.Tuesday on PBS. The Real Story of Flight 93, in development at CBS by producer Lawrence Schiller, would follow actions taken on the ground by government agencies after the plane was hijacked. (CBS has two other movie projects in the works.)
FILM
Movies, our most escapist art form, have been running from the tragedy as fast as possible. Many lms were delayed or altered, including Big Trouble, Collateral Damage and SpiderMan.
Lets Roll
by Neil Young
John Walkers Blues

by Steve Earle
Artemis Records
Combat Rock
by Sleater-Kinney
Code Word Nemesis, ASCAP
No one has the answer, but one thing is true, Youve got to turn on evil, when its coming after you. Youve gotta face it down, and when it tries to hide, Youve gotta go in after it, and never be denied. Time is runnin out Lets roll . . .
Im just an American boy raised on MTV . And Ive seen all those kids in the soda pop ads, But none of em looked like me. So I started lookin around the world for a light out of the dim . . . As death lled the air we all offered up prayers, And prepared for our martyrdom. But Allah had some other plan, some secret not revealed. Now theyre draggin me back with my head in a sack To the land of the indel.
They tell us there are only two sides to be on If youre on our side youre right if not youre wrong But are we innocent, paragons of god? Is our guilt erased by the pain that weve endured? . . . Well come out with our sts raised The good old boys are back on top again And if we let them lead us blindly The past becomes the future once again.
911TALK08.qxd
8/29/02
2:42 PM
Page 27
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
THE LANGUAGE, POST-9/11

War has always been a breeding ground for new words and meanings
Story by
ere living in the new normal, a state of low-level anxiety in which we worry that evildoers or sleeper agents could set off dirty bombs. Were on heightened alert for credible threats against our homeland security, uncertain about the intelligence communitys ability to sift the chatter and connect the dots. Get all that? Thought so. In the last 12 months, as our hearts have been wrung, our language has stretched to reect new cultural and political landscapes here and around the world. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks or 9/11, as we collectively refer to them weve added new words and redened familiar terms in an effort to describe My room is completely ground zero. To be and understand what were talking about. criticized is to face a jihad, while any out-ofFor example, as the sun rose on Sept. 11, fashion item of clothing is a burqa. ground zero was any site where a nuclear bomb English is never standing still, Glowka says. had been detonated. By evening, the term had asWars in particular bleed new words and sumed a new identity: the 16-acre wreckage of the meanings into the language.The Revolutionary World Trade Center. War gave us barIts metaphor, racks, the Civil War Noteworthy Neologisms Donna Jo Napoli, a antebellum, World Since 1990, the American Dialect Society has linguistics professor War II more than a voted for a word of the year, described as the at Swarthmore Coldozen terms, includword or phrase that best reects public prelege, says of the new ing jeep, blitz, snafu occupations. The winners in that and other usage. It wasnt a and ak. Vietnam categories this year: nuclear attack, but it was a war in which a leveled the place. And grunt hoping to reWord of the year: 9/11 it had a nuclear effect turn to the world Most creative: Shoeicide bomber. on us as a nation. could be killed by Most inspirational: Lets roll. Wayne Glowka, friendly re.The gulf who writes a column war gave us The Most unnecessary: Impeachment nostalgia. about new words for mother of all , a Most useful: Facial proling. the journal American phrase rst applied Least likely to succeed: Osamaniac. Speech, says some of to battle and then to our new terrorismalmost everything related phrases are already beginning to mutate, from computer programs to used-car sales. assuming more general meanings and even slipSometimes, after denitions and uses exping into slang. Sept. 10 has become a buzzword pand, they shrink back to the specic all over for someone who is naive or oblivious. Glowka again. For instance, in the late 1950s, every has heard of teenagers describing any place satellite in the sky was known as a Sputnik thats particularly messy as ground zero, as in the name of the Russian orb launched in OctoIllustration by ISTVAN OROSZ
JEFF GAMMAGE
ber 1957. Gradually, as the United States caught up in the space race, people began referring to satellites as satellites, and Sputnik regained its individuality. Language change is highly capricious, Napoli says. Its like hemlines. At the moment, she and other linguists are concerned that the new meanings serve as euphemisms, disguising facts. For instance, people talk about U.S. forces bombing targets and positions, not villages and people. We talk about our way of life whose way? asks Ross Glover, who teaches sociology at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. Using that phrase forces many peoples cultural beliefs to be repressed in a very overt manner. Either youre with us or against us. He and a St. Lawrence colleague, globalstudies professor John Collins, are editors of Collateral Language, a book that examines the use of words such as unity, evil, cowardice and freedom. They say the denitions of those words depend on whos talking. And that political leaders often prefer to leave their personal denitions vague, allowing people to hear what they want to hear. Wars have to be sold, as does any signicant element of foreign policy, Collins says. And language is an incredibly powerful way of doing that.
911Trav08.qxd
8/28/02
4:15 PM
Page 29
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
Dennis Knaus
inventor
Local Voices
He had nothing to prove then, but he does now.
LONGER SO OPEN
The RV Boom
The current good fortune of the recreational-vehicle industry in a recession this time last year is an indication that more Americans are now staying on this continent for their travels. Total wholesale RV shipments increased 14 percent in the first half of the year. In June alone, shipments jumped 23 percent from June 2001. Compare this with that months number of passengers boarding commercial planes in the United States down 12 percent from June 2001. Reservations for RV rentals have increased more than a third from last September. Cruise America, the nations largest RV rental company, estimates that 78 percent of its customers this year are first-time renters.
SOURCE: The Recreational Vehicle Industry Association
Seven Items Allowed Back on Airplanes

Walking canes Umbrellas Nail clippers with attached nail files Nail files Tweezers Safety razors (including disposable razors) Eyelash curlers

s the story goes, Dennis Knaus was the guy who deliberately took a box cutter onto a plane soon after the terrorist attacks to prove to his wife that security measures were still terribly inadequate and it wasnt safe for her to y. Its a complete fabrication, Knaus says and lays out the truth. 1. He never set out to prove anything, or to prevent his wife from ying. 2. It wasnt a box cutter. 3. Although he does believe there are serious deficiencies in U.S. airport security, he continues to fly regularly for business. He is more concerned about the governments attempts to infringe on citizens civil rights in the name of increased vigilance against terrorists. What really happened that fateful day, Knaus says, is that he was headed to Minneapolis for business on a Northwest Airlines ight. He is a consultant to companies that manufacture a polyethylene foam he invented that is used in life vests, boogie boards and cushioned mailers.The material is produced in large sheets, Knaus explains. When youre cutting samples to check weight, density and do quality control, you need a knife. Specically, retractable utility knives. Which were what he had in his briefcase when he was arrested at Philadelphia International Airport on Sept. 24. Id been up all night and had a very rushed morning. I got to the airport, checked in and went through security. Then I went to check my computer and realized the knives were in my briefcase. These are tools of my trade. I didnt take it on intentionally. It had nothing to do with my wife going on an airline. Concerned about the porousness of the screening, he reported the incident to a representative of the Federal Aviation Administration. I was told to speak to the supervisor from Northwest, but she told me she was too busy to deal with me because she was laying off two workers. She said shed have her assistant take care of me. Knaus called the FAA representative. His secretary said he couldnt be interrupted.
Meanwhile, his plane was about to leave. So he went through the security check a second time. Again, no one noticed the knives. He proceeded to the boarding gate. While he was there, the Northwest assistant supervisor did come to talk to him, he said. He showed her the knives. She said, lets show the security people. I said, well, what good is that going to do? He didnt want to berate someone making $5 an hour for being lax, when the problem, he felt, was with their bosses. The assistant told Knaus shed be back shortly. But she didnt come back shortly. I waited ve minutes after the rst boarding announcement, then I got on the plane. They didnt care. There was no sense of urgency. This was only a few weeks after the worst attack in America. In frustration, I called the FAA on my cell phone when I got to my seat and said if you want to talk about this, Id be happy to meet with you in Minneapolis. Ten minutes later, police came onto the plane and arrested him. He could have been sentenced to a year in prison and ned $250,000. But last spring, after seven months of negotiations, Knaus pleaded guilty to one count of knowingly bringing banned items into a secure area of the airport and a plane. He paid a $1,000 ne and was put on a years probation. For six months, he was required to check with federal probation ofcers before taking any trips. Im one of the good guys . . . , Knaus says. Sometimes we need to stand up and say this is wrong, the emperor has no clothes. Then you have to pay the consequences, like I did. Knaus believes that airline security is still riddled with holes. If these people didnt care two weeks after what happened, theyre never going to care. The notoriety has dogged him and his family, which is why he declined to be photographed for this article. He would prefer that his legacy were more tied to his life vests, which have helped improve water safety, than his 15 minutes of 9/11 fame. Id rather be known for the things Ive done professionally.

911Minella08.qxd
8/28/02
2:13 PM
Page 30
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Local Voices
Takeoff aborted
If you could check off boxes about what you need to do to succeed, I had done them all. I had worked hard. Check. Gotten good grades. Check. Joined the military. Check. Paid my dues. Check.Then all those checked boxes meant nothing. All of a sudden the world was upside down. I was back to worse than where I was 10 years before. He spent the next few weeks wallowing in self-pity, then pulled himself together and decided to nd a new career. Flying into Mexico and the Southwest, I had always seen these taquerias hole-inthe-wall joints where you can get great, fresh food, quick and easy. He put together a business plan and persuaded a real estate developer to lease him a space in West Chester on Route 202. Minella and his wife, who had just nished law school, took $125,000 they had managed to save for a down payment on a parcel of land to build a house and invested it in a restaurant. In November, they signed a 10-year lease. In December, he and his father began building, doing most of the construction themselves with help from family members. We literally worked from Christmas until June, Minella says. He hired his chefs from among the friends he had made at a Hispanic community organization in Kennett Square, where he and his wife had done volunteer work. On July Fourth, the Red Sombrero opened its doors. Im doing well, Minella says. I dont know what Im doing, but we have 100 to 150 customers a day. . . . I make a really, really big burrito. The changes of the last year are difcult to comprehend, he says, with US Airways declaration of bankruptcy in August adding a sad and ironic twist. (More than 1,000 pilots were laid off after the attacks, and the companys pilots expect to lose about 500 additional jobs of the 4,387 jobs left.) The coming year promises to be almost as life-altering. Next month, Minella and his wife are expecting their rst baby. Im not trying to be Dave Thomas from Wendys. Im just trying to be a good employer to my staff, a good husband to my wife, and hopefully, a good father to my child. If hes learned any lessons from 9/11, Minella says, its to take each day at a time and try to do something good with your life. Because you never know whats going to fall out of the sky. . . . Did I ever think Id be making burritos for a living?
Frank Minella
former pilot for US Airways
H
is love of ying is so innate, Frank Minella says, its like trying to explain why do you like the color blue? But his long path to becoming a commercial pilot vanished with the World Trade Center towers. Minella was born and raised in Scranton. I was 18 before I realized the rest of the world wasnt Italian and Catholic, he says. He stayed home for college, then joined the Army and became a helicopter pilot. After two years of active duty, he joined the reserve, and went to work for a pharma-
ceutical company. It was a purely practical decision, he says. I had friends who had been with Eastern, TWA and PanAm which no longer exist. I didnt want to take the chance. But he hated his desk job. So he quit and began piloting charter ights and private jets. By January 2000, he had own enough hours to qualify for a position with US Air Express (a division of US Airways), ying baby jets with a capacity of 50 to 90 passengers. The pay was paltry, but you hope in ve years you would move up to the majors. He was off duty on Sept. 11. I saw the second plane hit, and I knew my career was over, he says. And on Oct. 5, when the chief pilot called to let him go, Minella watched his personal version of the American Dream shatter.
911alray08.qxd
8/29/02
1:39 PM
Page 31
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Local Voices
In another country, another war.
Saad Alrayes
restaurant owner
lrayes feels as if he ed one war only to land in the middle of another. In 1987 he abandoned his native Lebanon to escape the grinding, bloody ghting that raged among Christians, Muslims and Jews. Now, with 8,000 U.S. troops in a Muslim nation and 3,000 Americans dead in terrorist attacks, he feels a new and unwelcome onus of accusation and distrust. We are not terrorists! Alrayes says, as if someone had suggested otherwise. That guy does not represent the Muslims. That guy Alrayes refuses to speak his name is Osama bin Laden. A year after Sept. 11, Alrayes remains stunned by the devastation wrought in New York and Washington. He believes the attacks have cast a terrible, possibly indelible shadow on
Muslims in this country. He doesnt think bin Laden acted on his own initiative. Someone had to have hired him. Someone who knew the United States would unleash a punishing counterattack, someone whose true and ultimate intention was to incite a backlash against Islam. Theyre blaming the Arabs and Muslims, and I know for sure it was a third party, Alrayes says. Islam does not allow for killing people. Who would do such a thing? he is asked. He demurs. The Israelis? Not Israelis, he says. Zionists. Alrayes runs Saads Halal Place at 45th and Walnut, catty-corner from the mosque across the street. His eatery is clean and
well-lit, the walls decorated with brightly woven prayer rugs. Ceiling fans add atmosphere and comfort. Alrayes works in front of a sizzling grill, cooking up delicious plates of Shish Tawook and Kafta Kabab, which are served with hummus and a warm circle of atbread. On Sept. 11, he worried that his nonMuslim customers might desert him.They didnt. At lunchtime these days, his restaurant is busy with older Arab men wearing traditional clothes and young white college students in Kenneth Cole T-shirts. Alrayes has a friendly word for each of them, though his satisfaction in the continuing success of his business is tempered by a lingering, disquieting echo, a mood of war forsaken and war resumed. We come over here, he says, shaking his head, and were facing it again.

911deniers/secure08.qxd
8/28/02
12:13 PM
Page 32
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
ITS A CONSPIRACY
Theyre out there: Theorists who insist that terrorists were not behind the attacks.
ept. 11 never happened. Something happened, but not what most people have seen, read or heard for the last 365 days. Forget what you think you know. After all, has anyone proven beyond doubt that an aircraft plowed into the Pentagon? The world of the 9/11 deniers is a wilderness of deception. In denying the accepted reality, they have constructed an alternative one far more dissonant and dark. If the truth is digitized, then even the most videotaped terrorist attack in history can be erased. In the historical evolution of nonbelievers and conspiracists, the 9/11 deniers are the spiritual brethren of those who say the Holocaust never happened, who doubt that millions were killed under Stalins repression, who insist that man landed only on a mock lunar stage. The deniers dwell on historys grassy knoll. Among the leading 9/11 deniers is French
author Thierry Meyssan, whose book LEffroyable Imposture, or The Horrifying Fraud, is a refutation not only of the official version of events but even of eyewitness accounts. Meyssan asserts that the planes that flew into the World Trade Center were not own by followers of Osama bin Laden but were instead controlled remotely by a cadre of far right-wing conspirators in the U.S. government. The Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines Flight 77, Meyssan insists, but rather by a guided missile or a truck bomb designed to simulate a plane crash. (In fact, video footage from a security camera does not clearly show that a plane dove into the building, which to Meyssan is the ultimate evidence.) And seizing on this and other facts, he asserts that a Boeing 757-200, weighing 100 tons and traveling at a minimum speed of 250 m.p.h., would have caused more damage. He knows the truth: The Pentagon attack
was engineered by the same right-wingers, who were planning a coup unless President Bush agreed to war against Afghanistan and Iraq to further the oil interests of the cabal. Meyssan presents his theories as fact, based not on interviews with witnesses (he never traveled to the United States), but on articles, speculation and Internet postings. He is far from alone. According to the Serendipity Web site created by libertarian author Peter Meyer, who bills himself as antiwar and antifascist, the twin towers collapsed as a result of a controlled demolition by wellplaced explosives. Meyer rejects the notion that the hijackers were skilled enough, the pilots defenseless enough, the Air Force slow enough to allow the suicide jetliners to crash. And pigs can fly, Meyer snorted about the official version of 9/11. There were no suicide pilots . . . no hijackers boarded the planes. In June, the deniers held their Woodstock
Images from a surveillance video on the Pentagon grounds show the explosion on Sept. 11, with date and time stamps for the day the tape was catalogued. A French author asserts that the video, which does not clearly show a plane, is proof that a guided missile or a truck bomb, not a plane, was used in the attack.
8/28/02
12:13 PM
Page 33
This is the 21st-century version of people who believe the moon landing was staged in a Houston TV studio.
Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center
Story by
STEVE GOLDSTEIN
of sorts, as about 200 people with varying degrees of disbelief about 9/11 met in Washington under the banner of the Barnes Review, a publication founded by a well-known extremist and Holocaust denier named Willis Carto. Christopher Bollyn, a journalist who works for Carto, told attendees that the World Trade Center may have been brought down by a disintegration ray, thus explaining the ne dust that covered lower Manhattan. Bollyns listeners were enraptured by his logic. Carto subsequently asserted that the twin towers imploded as if they were controlled demolitions. Almost everyone at the conference had alternate theories to the ofcial version as to how the attacks occurred. All of these questions are going to persist until there is a high-level investigation that people can believe, Carto said. Whose version of events is believable? Paul Kurtz, who has made a career of debunking parapsychology, urban legends and
the like and who publishes the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, said that the proliferation of 9/11 deniers is not unusual. This [disbelief] doesnt surprise me because I know the Holocaust deniers, said Kurtz from his ofce near Buffalo, N.Y. With any historical event, you have deniers. Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists, attended the Barnes Review conference. The theories about 9/11 are only the latest evolution of conspiracy theories, he said, reeling off a list of historys flypaper events that have snared the obsessed. If not 9/11, then Oklahoma City. If not Oklahoma City, then TWA Flight 800. Potok said the 9/11 deniers are surprisingly passionate given so much visual and empirical evidence of the event. Once people enter a world where everything is not as it seems, theres an alternative explanation for everything, he said. This is
the 21st-century version of people who believe the moon landing was staged in a Houston TV studio. Among the alternative theories the deniers discuss as more likely than the governments explanations are that the towers were brought down by remote-controlled airplanes or by laser beams. The Pentagon, they contend, was partially destroyed by a guided missile after American Airlines Flight 77 was diverted and presumably destroyed by a military F-16 jet. The perpetrators of this hoax are identified as a secret group of traitors working within the U.S. government. The conspiracy, they believe, has lasted for more than 40 years and includes former occupants of the White House and workers in government organizations tied into the national security complex. From the Wilderness is a newsletter founded in 1998 by Michael C. Ruppert, a former investigator with the Los Angeles Pocontinued on next page
8/28/02
12:16 PM
Page 34
The red outline of a plane shows where the jetliner could be seen approaching the Pentagon if a post were not in the way.
CONSPIRACY
lice Department, who has alleged for years that the CIA is involved in narcotics trafcking. A main contention of a video Ruppert has produced The Truth & Lies of 911 is that the government generally, and President Bush specifically, had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Hey, can you prove him wrong? The hottest publication at the Washington conference was a 20-page tabloid titled 50 Unanswered Questions about 9-11, produced by the Barnes Review. Number 23 asks, Why we havent been told that at least six of the 19 dead hijackers are still alive? Why indeed? In order to deny, you have to believe something.
All of these questions are going to persist until there is a high-level investigation that people can believe.
Willis Carto, denier of the Sept. 11 attacks and the Holocaust
EARLY WARNINGS
A February 2001 report on national security aws is chillingly prescient.
By THOMAS GINSBERG We urge . . . that the National Guard be given homeland security as a primary mission . . . . The Department of Defense needs to be overhauled. . . . The Secretary of Defense should. . . [measure] requirements against recent operational activity trends, actual intelligence estimates of potential adversaries capabilities, and national security objectives. . . .We recommend that the Defense Department devote its highest priority to improving and further developing its expeditionary capabilities. The Director of Central Intelligence should emphasize the recruitment of human intelligence sources on terrorism as one of the intelligence communitys highest priorities. . . . The United States nds itself on the brink of an unprecedented crisis of competence in government. . . .We recommend, rst of all, a national campaign to reinvigorate and enhance the prestige of service to the nation. With respect to military personnel, reform is needed in the recruitment, promotion, compensation, and retirement systems. Otherwise, the military will continue to lose its most talented personnel. The stakes are high.We of this Commission believe that many thousands of American lives, U.S. leadership among the community of nations, and the fate of U.S. national security itself are at risk unless the President and the Congress join together to implement the recommendations set forth in this report.
even months before Sept. 11, government and military thinkers published a report on national security that predicted death and destruction on U.S. soil from terrorists. Few people paid attention, and the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, chaired by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, seemed destined for obscurity. Today, the report seems prescient; it offers a bare-knuckled critique of weaknesses in the U.S. military, intelligence, governmental, and even educational systems, and suggests 50 proposals for change. Here are some still-alarming excerpts from the nal report dated Feb. 15, 2001. (The full document is available at www.nssg.gov.) tional Homeland Security Agency (NHSA) with responsibility for planning, coordinating, and integrating various U.S. government activities involved in homeland security. . . . The NHSA Director would have Cabinet status and would be a statutory advisor to the National Security Council.
A direct attack against American citizens on American soil is likely over the next quarter-century.The risk is not only death and destruction but also a demoralization that could undermine U.S. global leadership. We therefore recommend the creation of an independent Na-
911Hauber08.qxd
8/28/02
1:35 PM
Page 35
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Local Voices
Linda Hauber
spokeswoman, Islamic Charitable Projects
Clearing up misunderstandings about Islam.
inda Hauber works as public-relations coordinator for an agency that suddenly has a whole lot of public relations to coordinate. It falls to her, as a spokeswoman for the Association of Islamic Charitable Projects in West Philadelphia, to persuade a sometimes skeptical public of the true and peaceful nature of Islam. Theres a lot of misunderstanding, she says. Hauber is open and friendly, unfailingly polite even as she declines to shake hands with a male stranger, a contact Islam forbids. Shes originally from South Jersey. Since Sept. 11, while striving to present the face of Islam to a newly curious world, she has struggled with her own emotions. In the days after the attacks she felt beleaguered and besieged, she says, angry at a news media that seemed determined to portray all Muslims as killers and terrorists. Its like the people who group the Catholics together and say the Catholics all bomb abortion clinics, she says. Hauber was raised in the Roman Catholic faith. As a young woman she fell away, eventually joining an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian church and then turning to Islam in her 20s. Today, she elds calls from news reporters and photographers who want to interview charity leaders or lm the services inside the mosque. Yet when the evening news turns to the Palestinian-Israeli conict, Hauber changes the channel. She thinks the media are unreliable, too accepting of the ofcial story. For instance, she saw the videotapes of Osama bin Laden supposedly boasting about the attacks, and she noticed, she says, that some of the English translations contained mistakes. Bin Laden, she says, wasnt saying what the translator said he was saying. Doesnt mean he didnt do it, Hauber says. But I havent seen proof.
911Lorene08.qxd
8/28/02
1:57 PM
Page 36
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Essay
As we hunt enemies, lets nd ourselves

y cousin watched the rst 9/11 attack over the shoulder of the coffee vendor in her Manhattan building. My brother-in-law had decided not to schedule an appointment in the Trade Center towers that day. Each of us traces a connection to the betrayal a year ago of that shiny blue-sky morning, if only to our own memory of the moment: After the tragedy, two potted orchids that trembled on the seat as I drove past the Philadelphia Cricket Club seemed an extravagant luxury of peacetime. How should we respond to terror? We are products of a young and complex immigrant nation-state: immigrants with no history of ofcial religion or royalty, one state-sponsored genocide
By LORENE CARY
campaign, a revolution that set the bar for participatory government, a Civil War. Our middle class, which expanded from 1946 to the early 70s, is shrinking; our rich have become richer since the 90s; the poor have drifted farther from that concentrated wealth.Were getting grayer and browner each year, with identity politics in full tilt, a awed and burgeoning justice system, ongoing struggles among groups for power. So when we say we were attacked, who is we? Are we a force for right and democracy, attacked because of our open borders and generosity? Then we must wage total war in response, using intelligence to identify our enemies, and the weight of our economy, and our military, technology and information-systems dominance, to crush them. If we are well-meaning but self-absorbed and misunderstood, then we need to add to total war a campaign of reection and diplomacy.Well discover the pockets of hatred toward us, adjust foreign policy, and explain ourselves better. If we are parasites perched atop our worldhost, disproportionate consumers and polluters of world resources, pushers of decadent cultural products bling-bling, bang-bang and T & A then 9/11 is a wake-up call. No justice, no peace. If we are clever improvisers of political life, inventing and reinventing our democracy from the start, then we might have a chance to give the world leadership and hope and save our skins. After all, who we are includes millions who believe in the ability of violence to redeem. Its in most of our religions and in our homes, our fantasies and dreams. Most of our experience has taught that terror unchecked by greater violence will grow audacious and strong, as Hitler did. When push comes to shove, we believe in war. And in that way, we, whoever we are, agree with them who create the terror. I was raised on this theology, too, but also on its antidote an outrageous nonviolence practiced by an Indian who liberated his country, ltered through a black Southern Baptist who changed our world. These days, we franchise Martin Luther Kings image and sample his voice for audio clip art. But we did have a moment I remember it when we practiced an aggressive domestic campaign against violence and toward the development of our democracy. We can call for equally brilliant relations with the rest of the world, those other fearful and aggressive nationstates, who nurse their righteous wounds like estranged family members, who like us are readier to die to avenge than to live to negotiate. I dont see Gandhis and Kings among our leadership now, but really, who saw them coming? Or the Berlin Walls collapse? Those courageous passengers in the plane over Pennsylvania made a decision not to become a weapon. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others in South Africa look into the face of evil and are not turned to stone.Within our complex we and our awed and bloody-minded grief exist possibilities alongside the revenge. Even now, we may still evolve toward peace.
Lorene Cary is the author of a memoir, Black Ice, and two novels, The Price of a Child and Pride.

36
911bamb08.qxd
8/28/02
11:43 AM
Page 37
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Local Voices
Resignation joins her rawness.
close friend of hers was killed in the World Trade Center. At the time I was very emotional, Christine Bamberger recalls. Although she believed the nation should take action against the terrorists, she worried about the repercussions from a rash response. I was afraid we would retaliate immediately. So three days after the attacks, she took an old cork bulletin board shed bought at a yard sale and, with her childrens brightest tempera paints, made a sign reading, Seek Peace Not War. She put it up outside her home on Lincoln Drive. People talk about the feeling of helplessness. I thought Id take advantage of living on a busy street. Six days later, someone came by and tore it down. Bamberger put it back up. Four days later, she got a call from a friend whod seen someone stomping on the sign. It was shocking. How could you not want peace? Saddened, and indignant that her freedom of speech was being trampled as well, she repaired the sign and put it up once more. In its dilapidated state, she felt, the message had an even deeper meaning. But one Saturday night she and her husband were leaving to go to a movie and saw two men prowling around the house, pointing their ashlights at the sign. I took it down then.There was such a polarity of feelings. I was afraid it would turn into a strange place for people to express their views. The story about her sign appeared in The Inquirer and was sent out on its wire service. She received a few e-mails and letters (some supportive, some rude, some disturbingly heartless). The one she cherished came from someone in Japan, who sent her an origami peace crane. A year later, she says, she still feels as if the wind has been knocked out of her. Although she has been to New York numerous times since the attacks, she has avoided ground zero. In July, when she had a day in Manhattan all to herself, she spent it visiting the Morgan Library.
Christine Bamberger
homemaker, wife, mother
My emotions are still so raw, she says. Youre resigned that things have changed. You go to the airport, youre told to stand in line for hours, and so you do. Youre searched and frisked. Every time I go, I get frisked. . . . I used to wear these very large scarves, pashminas, wrapped around my neck whenever Id y because they keep you warm, but I dont anymore because I thought maybe they thought I was taking fashion cues from Arafat. She still hopes, and sometimes even believes, that peace is possible. But watching the corrosive situation in Israel, she worries about people and political leaders who seem incapable of compromise. You wonder when there will ever be an end to it. It seems weve entered a whole new period in history.
911Rights/foia08.qxd
8/29/02
2:39 PM
Page 38
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

A Changed America
Fighting terrorism has challenged some traditional freedoms. Here are some changes in public life since Sept. 11. Civil liberties Enemy combatants have been held incommunicado and refused attorneys. Identities of people detained since the attack have been withheld. Hearings have been closed for persons held for immigration violations. Plans have been initiated for military tribunals. Immigrants have been deported, often for minor violations. The FBI has monitored conversations between lawyers and clients. Domestic surveillance and security Airport security has been beefed up with new federal screeners.
AP PHOTO/OSCAR SOSA
FREEDOM VS. SECURITY

Should the government curb civil liberties in the hunt for terrorists? The debate is hot.
he need for security during ongoing debate was aired recently in Washington wartime is often at odds with pre- at a closed meeting at the Carnegie Endowment serving the liberty Americans take for International Peace attended by scientists for granted. After Sept. 11, there and national security experts. was considerable public support In the name of homeland security, New Jerfor a crackdown on suspicious people and on sey Gov. McGreevey issued an order imposing easy access to sensitive information.That clam- 583 exemptions to the states new public inforor may gradually yield to criticisms of govern- mation law. After protests, McGreevey issued a ment actions.The debate, however, remains as new order that retains 75 exemptions. heated as ever. In its pursuit of terrorists, the government cast a wide net. Young men of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin were targeted for questioning and even taken into custody. An unknown number remain detained in government facilities, their identities kept secret. Releasing the names, the Justice Department says, might compromise the war against terrorism; besides, ofcials insist, those held have privacy rights, too. Thousands of illegal immigrants, caught in the sweep, are being held. Many are being deported after closed hearings, often for minor violations.Two American citizens described as enemy combatants are being held indenitely and denied lawyers and court appearances. Attorney General John Ashcroft has urged government agencies to withhold information when they nd a sound legal basis for doing so. And accordingly, details on water, power and other sensitive information has been removed from government Web sites. Even scientists doing research on organisms that can be used for biological warfare are debating whether to classify their discoveries rather A forest of barricades greets visitors to Independence Mall, than publish them freely.The where security has been tight since Sept. 11.
REBECCA CHIN
T
Story by
ROSE CIOTTA
Stricter identication measures have been instituted, including demands for photo IDs at U.S. borders. There is wider use of surveillance cameras and monitoring devices. Truckers have been enlisted to report suspicious activities. Government databases have been created to track foreign students and others across several agencies. There is a proposal to allow the Army to operate on U.S. soil. Freedom of information Sensitive information has been removed from government Web sites. Librarians at federal depositories have been directed to destroy CDROMS of formerly public information. There is a new directive allowing agencies to deny information if they can nd a sound legal basis for doing so.
Rose Ciotta 38 September 8, 2002
911Rights/foia08.qxd
8/28/02
3:23 PM
Page 39
Travelers encounter tighter border crossings and heightened airport security. Public landmarks, including Independence Hall, have been fortied with barricades. On the highways, truckers, including 50 volunteers in Pennsylvania, have been enlisted in a nationwide effort to report suspicious persons and activities. Are the governments actions appropriate? Yes, says U.S. Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, absolutely. I am not ashamed to say we have used every legal weapon available in order to prevent and disrupt future terrorism acts. No, says Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprot government watchdog group based in Washington.What were seeing, he believes, is a historic assault on openness and the publics access to
Who Stayed Away?

Foreign tourists and businesspeople led the retreat after Sept. 11. Visas issued
Reason for visit Oct. 2000 to April 2001 Oct. 2001 to April 2002 Change
Tourism/ Business Study Temporary work
2,683,945 1,954,429 189,966 174,648 150,134 145,732
27% 21% 17%
SOURCE: U.S. State Department
Fewer Foreigners
Sept. 11 reversed a decades rising trend in visas issued to foreigners.
Annual totals for all types of visas*

Just before Sept. 11: 7.6 million
7 million 6 5 4 3 2 1 1992 Fiscal year** 95 00 02
*Excludes those exempt from visa requirement, mostly Europeans; 2002 estimated from six-month total of 2,587,544 ** Fiscal year runs Sept. 30 to Oct. 1 SOURCE: U.S. State Department
information by government ofcials at all levels. And that assault is harming innocent people, Angela Kelly says. She is deputy director at the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigrant advocacy forum. Government efforts, she believes, are tripping up a lot of folks and creating fear in the community. Threatening to deport immigrants who fail to report a change of address doesnt make us a safer country. But Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, thinks we must step up enforcement of immigration laws and tighten Americas borders.The rst step in protecting the country, he believes, is to prevent all illegal immigrants from entering the country and to deport those who are here. He thinks the civil libertarians have it all wrong. We are always striking a balance between the rights of the accused and the greater protection of society. In this case we have to err on the side of the rights of society. The tension between ghting terrorism and supporting individual liberties is playing out in the courts.This month, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia will hear arguments on a Newark court ruling opening all deportation hearings. That order was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court pending the appeal. The Newark ruling followed a similar one in Detroit, but that case involved only one person. Another lawsuit to release the names of detainees has been brought by 22 civil liberties groups, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.The civil libertarians won the rst round. Judge Gladys Kessler of the federal district court in Washington initially ordered that the detainees be identied under the federal Freedom of Information Act. In what many saw as a compromise, Kessler directed the government to release names but permitted ofcials to withhold other details, including dates and locations of arrests, detentions, and release of the detainees.While the executive branch is obligated to ensure the physical safety of American citizens, she wrote, the rst priority of the judicial branch must be to ensure that our government always operates with the statutory and constitutional constraints which distinguish a democracy from a dictatorship. But last month, Kessler agreed to delay her own order so the government could appeal the case. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court may have to decide what the boundaries are. Given the politics of the situation, says Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee, Ashcroft isnt going to back down on this, and were not going to back down, either. Amid the tug-of-war between rights and security, no one seems to be asking the most cru-
Surge in Citizenship
Sept. 11 caused a rush for naturalization by legal immigrants hoping to secure their rights and avoid harassment.
The monthly average number of applications rose ...

Welfare denied to Recession non-citizens Sept. 11 attacks Application fee doubled
100,000 80,000 60,000 40,000 20,000 Fiscal year* 1992 95 00 02
... but the applications caused a backlog in approvals and denials.

Fiscal year*
Applications received 501,546 567,919
Applications approved*** 429,611 392,423
2001 2002** In 2001
In 2002**
86%
of the applications received were approved
* Sept. 30 to Oct. 1 ** Total to June 1 *** Includes cases from previous year
69%
of the applications received were approved
SOURCE: Immigration and Naturalization Service
cial question: Will these actions work? Will restricting freedoms protect the country? Stephen Gale, a terrorism expert at the University of Pennsylania, warned in 1998 that terrorists might seize airplanes and y them into national landmarks, but his warnings were ignored. My problem with what the government has done, he said, isnt that it has gone too far or not far enough. I have no idea if it will affect terrorism. Gale said he believed the United States doesnt yet know how to make itself secure. They are already here, he said. The majority of al-Qaeda cells in the United States are probably U.S. citizens.
Graphics by
CYNTHIA GREER
911tech08.qxd
8/29/02
2:45 PM
Page 40
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
GEARING UP
Technological advances during war often have civilian applications and, sometimes, unforeseen effects.
2002 PETER MENZEL
Dont sneeze: Smart dust sensors continually monitor and report on their surroundings.
ngineers at the University of California are making something called smart dust. Thats not a smeary streak of educated, sneeze-inducing mites. Its a collective of diminutive, wireless sensors, tiny computers that continuously watch and report on their surroundings. Theyre the size of grains of rice. Eventually theyll be no bigger than specks of sand.
Story by
JEFF GAMMAGE
Smart dust was built to track electricity use during Californias energy crisis. But now the inventors envision it drafted into a more crucial role: helping ght the war on terror, a minute militia deployed to invisibly observe the movements of enemy men and machinery. The more information we have about the battleeld, says Kris Pister, the Berkeley computer scientist who runs the smart-dust project, the fewer people will end up dying on it. At IBM, theyre working on a system to enable hospitals to ash medical data to one
another if large numbers of people suddenly begin to arrive in emergency rooms with similar, suspicious symptoms. At the University of Delaware, scientists have built a rugged, shoebox-size machine that can detect the faintest whiff of biological agents. And at Lehigh University, theyre making a video camera with a 360-degree range of vision that would give American troops eyes in the back of their heads to guard against sneak attacks. Yet these innovations cant compare to the Star Wars stuff being developed for the Army at
911tech08.qxd
8/28/02
6:21 PM
Page 41
The dilemma: Every advanced security system forces criminals to nd new ways to defeat it.
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: camouage uniforms that change colors as soldiers move from forests to cities, fabrics that can harden into shields, and articial muscles that enable the wearers to leap through the air like superheroes. A year after Sept. 11, as people adjust to a society in which uncertainty is the only certainty, scientists are bracing for an explosion of new technology and invention, driven by the billions of dollars in government money being poured into research in warfare, safety and security. The key to a successful war on terrorism, says Harry Dwyer, a Villanova University professor, who previously designed computers at IBM and Bell Labs, is going to be the software. Whats more, he and others say, innovations will leach into the private sector, rened and redirected to perform new and unanticipated tasks. That usually happens when the government directs money and brains at a big goal. When NASA went to the moon, Americans got more than gray rocks: The results included miniature computers, heat-resistant paints, window tinting, smoke detectors, and even bar codes developed to keep track of millions of spaceship parts. Not to mention pens that can write upside down. From all this money, there could be something big in ways that has nothing to do with ghting terrorism or surveillance or anything, says Princeton University scholar Edward Tenner, who studies the unintended consequences of technology. Some new equation developed for terrorism could be used for medical diagnosis. Consider: The most lethal chemical of World War I mustard gas contributed to the progress of chemotherapy when doctors discovered that it lowered white-blood-cell counts and shrank lymph nodes. In World War II, a British surgeon developed an idea for artificial lenses as he removed shards of the plastic Perspex from the eyes of wounded RAF pilots. In the late 1960s, the Defense Departments hookup of four universities computers the ARPANET moved science toward the vast network now known as the Internet. Similar breakthroughs could occur now in crime detection, identication, video analysis and biohazard protection. Some things are going to arise very quickly: security, encryption, says David Stork, chief scientist at Ricoh Innovations California Research Center in Silicon Valley. Something new, something fundamentally different from whats gone on big science thats certainly possible. arry Farwell knows what youre thinking. Or, more precisely, hes sure he can nd out. Farwell has developed a lie-detector-type process he calls brain ngerprinting. By measuring and interpreting certain brain waves, he says, he can tell whether someone has a particular piece of information stored in his head. The implications are obvious: A detainee who recognizes an al-Qaeda instruction manual is going to have some explaining to do. The system works like this: A sensorequipped headband is tted onto the subject, who watches as words and pictures are ashed across a computer screen. A familiar item will trigger a brain response that begins between 300 and 800 milliseconds later, a so-called p300 bump. Scientists have studied these waves for years. But Farwell, the Harvard-educated chairman of Brain Wave Science, in Faireld, Iowa, says that he can tell whether someone recognizes a specic object by combining the results with other brain waves. He rst developed the technique to help handicapped people, then applied it to solving crimes, attempting to separate the guilty from the innocent through the information in their brains. A judge in Iowa allowed the results of a brain-ngerprinting scan to be admitted in court, part of an appeal led by convicted murderer Terry Harrington. The test showed Harringtons recollections matched his alibi, not the crime scene, though the judge still denied his request for a new trial. Critics insist that p300 waves need more study. And they say that even if it works, brain ngerprinting is hardly foolproof: Recognizing a particular gun doesnt make someone a killer. Farwell believes he proved his systems effectiveness in a test in which he correctly identied four impostors among a group of 21 federal agents. Before 9/11, it was clear we could detect whether somebody was an FBI agent or not, Farwell says. The response of many people in that eld was, Ho-hum, thats nice. After 9/11, it becomes extremely relevant whether somebody has been through an al-Qaeda training camp or whether hes a relief worker who has just been in the same area. Farwells project illustrates the crossover potential as technology develops.The California engineers involved in smart dust foresee their sensors being used to monitor trafc, maintain
MICHAEL BRYANT
John Rabolt (left) and MeiWei Tsao of the University of Delaware have adapted their spectrograph to detect biological and chemical agents.
41
911tech08.qxd
8/28/02
6:23 PM
Page 42
TECH
temperature systems, and even gauge the movement of buildings during earthquakes. Smart dust could be dispersed in the atmosphere, to predict the weather, or even implanted in human organs to watch for cancer. Not to mention helping people keep track of their eyeglasses and cell phones. Everything of any value will have its own sensor node, says Pister, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley. Youll never lose your car keys or your wallet or your children or anything. Similarly, two University of Delaware scientists who built a machine to measure paint thickness have adapted it to detect biological and chemical weapons. John Rabolt and Mei-Wei Tsao built their planar array spectrograph for industry, to provide real-time measurements of the thickness and composition of different coatings.
They gured companies that run production lines could cut waste by better tracking variations in quality during manufacturing. Big rms already use similar machines, but they tend to be hefty, full of moving parts and xed to the oor. Rabolt and Tsao expect to squeeze their spectrograph down to a 3-inch cube. It works by snifng the air for chemicals, each of which has unique properties. The box records its ndings as streaks of light, the intensity and location of which identify the substance. Rabolt and Tsao say their machine can detect chemical and biological agents as slight as a monolayer a layer one molecule thick. And they say the machine can do it within 35 seconds. The more concentrated the substance, the faster the reading; sometimes it takes less than a second. Thats crucial if a military barracks or a basketball arena is being attacked. The earlier you can detect it, the
longer a person can survive, the more time you have to evacuate, Tsao says.
very advanced security system comes with this built-in dilemma: Its very success forces criminals to nd new ways to defeat it. And in doing so, they may escalate their brutality. Install tough antitheft auto locks, and thieves start car-jacking drivers at gunpoint. Security can become a mirage, Princetons Tenner says. Tenner is the author of Why Things Bite Back:Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. He studies how solutions can create more trouble than the problems they were intended to solve. For instance, he points out, the widespread use of antibiotics has bred strains of drugresistant bacteria. Flood-control improvements have encouraged people to build in ood-prone areas. And while computers have freed ofce
workers from carbon paper and ling cabinets, theyve left them with strained eyes, sore necks and aching wrists. Americans assume that because they consistently seek technological advantage, their adversaries do, too and thats a fallacy, Tenner says. The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center had little understanding of computer guidance systems, he says. They simply learned the basics of ying. Tenner imagines that some new technologies could rebound in the same way that, for example, the improving ability to identify terrorists through sophisticated ngerprinting and biometrics may encourage them to recruit a corps of unknown, seemingly trustworthy assailants. The war on terrorism, its really a war of imagination, Tenner says. To succeed, it has to enlist a lot more unconventional thinking than I have seen.
FAMILIES
continued from Page 13
couldnt straighten him out. At tonights Little League playoff game, the Braves needed a big hit from Nicholas.The opposing pitcher threw a hard one, Nicholas uncoiled and SMACK! He crushed the ball into the gap in right-center. Nicholas tore around the bases, sliding into home plate before the ball. Parents for both teams, who knew about Jims death, jumped to their feet cheering and applauding. Teammates tackled Nicholas, giving him hugs and pats on the back. It was one of the most poetic moments Ive ever seen in my life, Larry Warren recalled. Nicholas beamed. July 13, Suzanne Berger Suzanne Berger stared into the bathroom mirror above her husbands sink as if he might be looking back. I hope Im doing the right thing for these boys, she thought. The movers had been packing for several days. Now all their possessions were boxed and heading to a new house in northern New Jersey. After six years, Suzanne had decided to leave Jim and Suzannes house to start anew in Suzanne and the boys house. It was a difcult decision. One
minute she thought it would be best to keep her boys in familiar surroundings.The next minute she felt pulled to move closer to her husbands brothers, where it would be easier for them to pinch-hit for Jim at baseball games or school events. Last spring, Suzanne was still wafing. But one stormy night, the wind rattled the back door as if someone was turning the doorknob. Daddy! Nicholas cried, racing to the door. Catching himself, he dropped to the oor and started to pound his sts. I hate this, Mommy! I hate waiting for Daddy to walk through the door every night! By May, the house was on the market, with prospective buyers walking through the living room and noticing the family portrait of ve Suzanne, Jim and the boys hanging next to a newer portrait of four. July 19, Debbi Senko Debbi Senko got the perfect birthday present from her sister: back-toback concert tickets for Phil Lesh, bass player of the Grateful Dead. First would be a concert in Hershey, Pa., followed by a performance in Camden. Debbi, 36, and her husband, Larry, had gone to more than 50 Dead concerts in their years together. Last year for her birthday, he had taken her to hear Lesh in Camden.
On this night, Debbi dropped off her 2-year-old son, Tyler, at her mothers house and headed for the Hershey Park Star Pavilion with her sister and brother-in-law. She needed a weekend to get lost in her favorite music. Among 7,200 people that night, Debbi found herself seated next to a man from Western Pennsylvania. A friend of his sat directly in front of her. She discovered that the stranger on her left was a reghter who had battled the blaze of United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville. His friend was a rescue worker, also called to the crash site, who took off for ground zero after nishing his work in Shanksville. Immediately, the men dove in with questions about Larry. Where had he worked in the World Trade Center? What happened to him that day? Did they have children? It was lovely that they cared enough to hear my story, Debbi said. But here I was, trying to step out of my situation and just be one of the crowd. Theres nowhere to go to escape it. When the band came on, her mind was turbulent with thoughts about her husbands death. The next night in Camden, Debbi sat apart from her sister and friends. She spoke to no one. And she danced
the way she had the last time she was there with her husband. July 22, Fiona Havlish Do you still miss Daddy? Mikki Havlish wondered as she and her mother drove home from the bookstore. Yes, answered Fiona, surprised by the question. But why dont I see you cry? I dont let you see me cry. I cry sometimes at night. But I dont hear you, Mikki went on. Thats because youre sound asleep, Fiona said. With a teasing tone, she added, Do you want Mommy crying all the time?! That night at bedtime, they pulled out a Barney sing-along book theyd just bought and sang the rst song Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star which they hadnt sung since Sept. 12. Lets do another one that we used to do, Mikki asked. Fiona started singing Good Evening, Good Night in German. Her voice choked. The song brought her back to September. Another, said Mikki, coaxing her mother along. Fiona tried Kumbaya, again stopped by tears. You know what, Fiona told her daughter, lets try tomorrow night. Its OK, Mommy, Mikki said. Its OK.
911lindh08.qxd
8/28/02
1:54 PM
Page 43
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
KABUL JOHNNY?
Story by
ohn Walker Lindh, also known as Abdul Hamid. Johnny Walker Yellow.The American Taliban. The Rat. The hippie Benedict Arnold. Currently a convicted felon, awaiting formal sentencing next month to a 20-year plea-deal prison term. Is this the outcome we wanted? The nation was still white-hot with anger and sadness when we saw the images of a begrimed, wounded Taliban ghter, revealed under long hair and malnutrition to be the pampered son of upper middle-class Californians. Solemn and certain was Attorney General John Ashcroft, promising retribution for waging war against fellow Americans. Youth is not absolution for treachery, he said, and personal self-discovery is not an excuse to
STEVE GOLDSTEIN
The nations anger toward the American Taliban softens.

take up arms against your country. The Bush administration wanted his bearded head. Charging Lindh with conspiring with the Taliban to kill Americans, Ashcroft termed it a pivotal case in the war against terrorism. He chose to embrace fanatics, Ashcroft thundered, and his allegiance to those terrorists never faltered. It was nearly Christmas, with U.S. soldiers ghting and dying on Afghan soil, and Lindh not our soldiers was coming home.We obsessed over the prodigal gone wrong. Time passed, and a deal was struck. Even in a case with the whiff of treason, a jurys verdict was a crapshoot. With the Taliban eviscerated, Lindhs context was muted, his symbolic value diminished. As the trial date approached, the government publicly worried about wartime intelligence coming out in open court and privately fretted about the drain on prosecutorial resources. In another cell in Alexandria, Va., waited Zacarias Moussaoui, the socalled 20th hijacker, whose own trial was scheduled for a month after Lindhs. Time passed. It was a struggle to sustain hatred once a shave and a haircut and a good scrubbing had revealed Lindhs callowness. John Phillip Walker Lindh, the son of liberal parents who named him partly in homage to murdered Beatle John Lennon, was born and raised in the progressive enclaves of Takoma Park, Md., and Californias Marin County the former proud to declare itself a nuclear-free zone, the latter renowned for hot tubs and New Age sensibilities. The middle of three children, Lindh was raised a Catholic but encouraged to seek his own spiritual expression. Impressed by A shave and a the life and times of martyred haircut revealed American Muslim leader Malthe callow youth colm X, he converted to Islam under the kafyeh. when he was 16. As Sulayman al-Lindh, he
AP PHOTO
studied Islam and Arabic in Yemen, later enrolling as Sulayman al-Faris at an Islamic school in Pakistan. His e-mails home were critical of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. In May 2001, he attended a terrorist training camp north of Islamabad. In early December, a wounded Taliban ghter captured after erce ghting in Afghanistan was interviewed on CNN.The medic called the lthy, gaunt man John, but the ghter said his name was Abdul Hamid. In California, Frank Lindh and Marilyn Walker saw their 20-year-old son and burst into tears. The persistent CNN interviewer asked how hed come to be in Afghanistan. I was a student in Pakistan studying Islam, Lindh said. I lived in a region in the northwestern province the people there in general have a great love for the Taliban, so I started to read some of the literature of the scholars and the history of the movement. And my heart became attached to them. I wanted to help them one way or another. Did you enjoy the jihad? CNN asked. I mean, was it a good cause for you? Denitely. But just as denitely, the government couldnt sustain the notion that Lindh was a serious menace. The view of the public seemed to shift away from Ashcrofts hard core toward former president George H.W. Bushs assessment of Lindh as a poor misguided Marin County hottubber. If not terror, what did Lindh symbolize? In spite of the initial tabloid fury, it is doubtful that the countrys anger will be as sustained and indelible as that harbored by the Vietnam War vets who refuse to watch movies featuring Hanoi Jane Fonda. Lindhs loving and daft father compared his errant boy to Nelson Mandela, but even the New Agers werent buying. It was left to controversial singer-songwriter Steve Earle to give a cultural context in John Walkers Blues. One verse goes: We came to ght the jihad, our hearts were pure and strong. We lled the air with our prayers and we prayed for our martyrdom. Allah has some other plans, a secret not revealed. Now theyre dragging me back with my head in the sack to the land of the indel. If I should die, Ill rise up to the sky like Jesus. For John Walker Lindh, no martyrdom, no resurrection and 20 years to understand why.
911photopage08.qxd
8/28/02
2:24 PM
Page 44
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER
IN MEMORY
Four days after the attacks, Manhattans Union Square overowed with candles, owers and messages for the victims. Below, Vivienne Gornall comforted her daughter Tanis, who was overcome while looking at missing persons yers at Bellevue Hospital in New York.
Photography by
AKIRA SUWA
911photopage08.qxd
8/28/02
2:25 PM
Page 45
911smith08.qxd
8/29/02
2:28 PM
Page 46
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Essay
From the rubble, a gift
By the REV. ROBERT C. SMITH

just be defeated and probably destroyed.We nd this kind of evil not in ourselves, but in mysteriously malignant Others. A blunt warriors T-shirt version of this attitude is Kill them all and let God sort them out. Shakespeares Iago, in Othello, embodies how we encounter such evil walking abroad in the world, seeking whom it may devour. For evil thus conceived, no redemption is possible. The second story we tell ourselves nds that evil is an almost universal human failing with causes we can trace. Here we recognize ourselves as well as others. Human beings commit evil acts, and people are made to do evil things, at least partly due to circumstances. If we understand these circumstances, we can reduce the evil in the world. Redemption is always possible, for ourselves and others. The gatherings and classes all over the country to explore Islam and understand Islamic extremism arose from the belief that group terrorism has political and social causes that military and police action alone cannot successfully confront. Violence, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote, is the voice of the unheard. The last year has shown that faith has no nal answers to human suffering. But it offers something better. Faith allows us to transcend suffering by forging the deepest bonds of love and compassion. It governs our best and most healing responses to evil and death. The suffering and loss of life on Sept. 11 and the heroic response to it created not just despair, but also friendship, love, and nally new strength for new life, between colleagues in the rescue effort, between spouses, between parents and children new life that, because it is achieved by those who know in their bones about weakness and mortality, is stronger than death.
he rst task of spiritual life is to explain the unexplainable, to nd hope where all seems hopeless. We look back over the year since that unimaginable day in September and feel the nearness of the two worst things in our lives, death and evil.Thanks to the media, all America became rst a transcontinental disaster scene and then a national funeral and memorial service. Yet despite its mind-numbing horrors, the catastrophe of Sept. 11 also bestowed upon us one huge gift. It showed us how the most damaging and hurtful events in life can bring out the best in us: They create bonds of love. Still, before that could happen, fear and pain gave way to rage. The national reaction soon arranged itself all along a spectrum between two points of view, which a perceptive priest with whom I serve characterized as Cream the bastards and Why did this happen? And the adherents of these extreme views often found it unbearable to listen to each other. Most of us, though, reacted with a mix of both impulses, and weve seen them played out in public debate ever since. People in communities of faith and outside them cope and make sense of things by telling stories. And weve all learned two stories that match the poles of our thoughts and feelings. According to the rst story, there is evil in the world, and evil people.There is no explaining them, they must
The Rev. Robert C. Smith is assistant at St. Pauls Episcopal Church in Doylestown.
911sanchez08.qxd
8/29/02
2:10 PM
Page 47
9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Poetry
Questions
(no answers)
By SONIA SANCHEZ
Sweet September morning how did you change skirts so fast? What is the population of death at 8:45 on a Tuesday morning? How does a country become an orphan to its own blood? Will these public deaths result in private bloodletting? Amongst the Muslim, the Jew and the Christian whom does God love more? How did you disappear, peace, without my shawl to accompany you? What cante jondo* comes from a hijacked plane? Did you hear the galvanized steel thundering like hunted buffalo? Glass towers collapsing in prayer are you a permanent guest of God? Why do some days wear the clothing of a beggar? Where did these pornographic ames come from, blaspheming sealed births? Did they search for pieces of life by ngerprinting the ash? Death speaking in a loud voice, are your words only for the deaf? What is the language for bones scratching the air? What is the accent of life when windows reect only death? Hey death! You furious frequent ier, can you hear us tasting this earth?
* deep song
Artwork by RAQUEL MONTILLA HIGGINS
Did the currents recognize her sound as she sailed into the clouds? Does death y south at the end of the day? Did you see the burnt bones sleepwalking a city? Is that Isaiah. Muhammad. Buddha. Jesus. gathering up the morning dead? Why did you catch them, death, holding their wings out to dry? How did this man become a freefalling soliloquy? Why did September come whistling through the air in a red coat? How hard must the wind blow to open our hearts? How to reconnoiter our lives away from epileptic dreams? How to live How to live without contraband blood? Is this only an Eastern wind registering signatures of ash? Do the stars genuect with pity toward everyone?
Sonia Sanchez is a poet, professor, mother, Philadelphian, and a worker for peace in the world. Raquel Montilla Higgins is a Philadelphia artist, whose exhibition Vestiges, a response to 9/11, was shown at Nexus in February. The pieces here, burnt Japanese silk tissue, evoke the shower of paper that cascaded down, anonymous and useless, from the crumbling towers. Inquirer Magazine 47
911cover08.qxd
8/28/02
6:47 PM
Page 48

The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine 9/11 Special - 2002

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine 9/11 Special - 2002

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

911cover08.

ONE YEAR LATER

9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

SEPT. 11 BY THE NUMBERS RECONSTRUCTION ZONE

By Jennifer Lin A series of coincidences give a grieving mother a kind of peace.

AL-QAEDA LEADERS: WHERE ARE THEY? ROAD TO RECOVERY

LOOKING BACK AND AHEAD

THE BUSINESS OF INSECURITY

CEO, Southeastern Pennsylvania Red Cross By Melissa Dribben

spokeswoman, Islamic Charitable Projects By Jeff Gammage

president, North American chapter, Islamic Charitable Projects By Jeff Gammage

By David Hiltbrand Artists respond to Sept. 11.

mayor of Shanksville, Pa. By Melissa Dribben

Flight 93: Shanksvilles shrine

THE LANGUAGE, POST-9/11

As we hunt enemies, lets nd ourselves

former pilot for US Airways By Melissa Dribben

From the rubble, a gift

THE OPEN ROAD IS NO LONGER SO OPEN

Questions (no answers)

On the cover: Angels

FREEDOM VS. SECURITY

By Rose Ciotta How can we assure security while preserving freedom?

Photography by Akira Suwa

9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Those we lost from our area:

OUR OLD SELVES

In terms of Sept. 11, we werent going to stay in crisis mode forever.

TIM BETTERLY NICHOLAS B OGDAN KEVIN B OWSER NICK BRANDEMARTI KEN

continued from Page 4

Were questioning all our institutions right now.

CALDWELL JEFFREY MARK CHAIRNOFF PETER CHIRCHIRILLO CHRISTOPHER CLARKE

AKIRA SUWA/PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

JEFFREY COALE PATRICIA CODY FRANK DeMARTINI ROBERT FANGMAN

9 11 ONE YEAR LATER

Sept.11 by the numbers

working at World Trade Center at time of attack

19 hijackers on the planes

the World Trade Center

2,817 killed at 92 people killed

55,574 calls taken

450 bodies recovered

ed economic losses from the World Trade Center attacks

industry losses for 2001

on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon

80,300 airline layoffs by the end of 2001

billion renovation costs at the nations airports

police ofcers killed

23 New York City

75 Port Authority personnel killed

$85 million cost for

Philadelphia International Airport to meet new reg-

ulations on checking luggage for bombs

$38 billion requested

2,000 or 3,125 to 3,620 civilians killed in Afghanistan

(Sources: Los Angeles Times, relief agencies, The Guardian)

16 U.S. servicepeople killed in the war in Afghanistan

1 CIA agent, Johnny

detained in United States on suspicion of links to Sept. 11 attacks

terrorism offenses immigration offenses

104 charged with

564 detainees held

at Camp X-Ray, Cuba