Tag: world trade center
White House: Bidens To Visit All Three Sites Of Sept. 11 Attacks

White House: Bidens To Visit All Three Sites Of Sept. 11 Attacks

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Joe Biden will visit all three sites of the September 11, 2001, hijacking attacks next week to honor the nearly 3,000 people killed and mark the 20th anniversary of the most lethal terrorist assault on U.S. soil, the White House said.

On Saturday, Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will visit New York City, where two airliners destroyed the World Trade Center and killed 2,753 people; the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, where a third airliner crashed; and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where passengers forced down a fourth aircraft believed to have been headed to the U.S. Capitol or White House.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Douglas Emhoff will travel to Shanksville for a separate event, then join the Bidens at the Pentagon, the White House said.

Biden on Friday ordered the Department of Justice to review documents from the FBI's probe into the attacks for declassification and release.

The order requires U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to make the declassified documents public over the next six months as it oversees "a declassification review of documents" related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe.

Family members of victims of the September 11 attacks asked a U.S. government watchdog on Thursday to investigate their suspicions that the FBI lied about or destroyed evidence linking Saudi Arabia to the hijackers.

Saudi Arabia has said it had no role in the hijacked plane attacks.

Last month, many families asked Biden to skip 20-year memorial events unless he declassified documents they contend will show Saudi Arabian leaders supported the attacks.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Michael Martina; Editing by Richard Chang

Paris And New York Are United In Urban Tragedy

Paris And New York Are United In Urban Tragedy

Many of us watching the inferno at Notre Dame de Paris felt that 9/11 dread. This week, as nearly 18 years ago, the news channels kept looping the same horrific video of towers collapsing. At the end, the medieval cathedral remained mostly standing while the twin towers at New York’s World Trade Center vanished into a pile of smoking rubble. The outcomes may have been different, but both calamities showed that what we think most permanent may not be.

In human terms, the calamity on Sept. 11, 2001, was of an entirely different scale. Thousands died. The conflagration in Paris miraculously cost no lives.

As an architectural disaster, however, there’s no comparison. Notre Dame is a Gothic masterpiece embodying the spiritual. The twin towers, bland buildings famous mainly for being tall, were dedicated to commerce.

The late historian Lewis Mumford denounced the World Trade Center as an “example of the purposeless giantism and technological exhibitionism that are now eviscerating the living tissue of every great city.”

That terrorists had unleashed the massacre at the twin towers made the tragedy especially gruesome. Parisians are relieved that the fire at Notre Dame appears to have accidentally started — but the 2015 terror attack was often mentioned during the fire as a related reason for insecurity. The scars from terrorism and devastation of an iconic structure make Paris and New York sisters in pain.

Medieval cathedrals are no strangers to destruction. Over the centuries, fire and humans have caused enormous damage at cathedrals throughout Europe, and they have been rebuilt. French President Emmanuel Macron said Notre Dame will be brought back as well — though his five-year timetable sounds optimistic.

It took almost 200 years to build the original Notre Dame. Reconstruction on a work dating back to the 12th century would be quite a challenge.

Where the twin towers stood, a 104-story replacement skyscraper has risen. The Freedom Tower took only eight years to build.

Movies and TV offer insight into how a world-famous structure characterizes its city. Notre Dame represents the enduring soul of France. A very good French TV series called “Chef” flashes scenes of Notre Dame, seemingly in every episode. The chef is a Parisian perfectionist trying to defend traditional French cooking against waves of culinary fads.

The catastrophic loss of life at the World Trade Center transformed pictures of the towers into sacred imagery. Before 9/11, movies such as “Wall Street” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” portrayed the twin towers as cauldrons of corporate greed. After 9/11, “The Simpsons” and other shows deleted episodes showing them out of respect for the fallen.

The post-9/11 TV series “Blue Bloods” frequently uses New York’s ornate century-old bridges as backdrops for the Reagans. They seem fit for a multigenerational Irish American family largely employed in law enforcement.

Older structures, be they homely or majestic, also serve as warming reminders of place. About 14 years ago, wealthy residents of Santa Monica Canyon stopped the demolition of a beaten-up gas station dating back to 1924. A tiny business with three vintage pumps, the Canyon Service Station was no cathedral, but the millionaires who passed it every day loved it for always being there.

“On a cold, rainy night, when you’re driving up the canyon and you see the glow of the gas pumps,” one neighbor said poetically, “it literally welcomes you home with open arms. It’s like a lighthouse.”

That is exactly what lighthouses do for sailors coming into harbor. Now imagine the trauma of losing a cathedral that has anchored your town for almost 700 years. Parisians were spared the worst this week, but like New Yorkers, they’ve seen that the unthinkable is possible.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Victims’ Relatives Gather 14 Years After September 11 Attacks On U.S.

Victims’ Relatives Gather 14 Years After September 11 Attacks On U.S.

By Daniel Bases

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Relatives assembled under overcast skies on Friday to commemorate nearly 3,000 people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and outside Washington 14 years ago, when airliners hijacked by al Qaeda militants brought death, mayhem and destruction.

In New York, families of the victims read their names in a solemn and poignantly familiar pattern, watched over by service members in their dress uniforms.

Emblematic of the generations affected, children who were not old enough to remember their late relatives or had yet to meet them participated in the roll call.

“We are so blessed to have you as an angel and we are empty without you, we love you very much,” said Daniel Pagan, who lost his cousin Melissa Candida Doi in the attack.

Families hugged each other close, some carrying photographs or wearing t-shirts depicting lost loved ones, or bearing placards with the words ‘we will never forget.’

First responders were thanked numerous times by the family members for their work on what became known as ‘the pile.’

Many of those who were first on the scene and those who worked for weeks afterwards searching through the rubble are still suffering from various illnesses brought on by the toxic air.

Mourners stood at the empty footprint of the World Trade Center Twin Towers, toppled by two hijacked airliners on that clear, sunny morning in 2001.

Music and the soothing sounds of the waterfalls emptying into reflecting pools at the at 9/11 Memorial and Museum formed a backdrop as families placed flowers against their loved ones’ names engraved in the bronze panels.

A veteran’s trumpet salute closed the ceremony after nearly four hours, with the emptying plaza hushed and subdued.

“We come here every year. We live in New Jersey. The crowds keep getting less, but my wife and I, as long as we’re breathing, we’ll be here,” said Tom Acquaviva, who with his wife Josephine, lost their son Paul when the towers fell.

“No remains were ever found, so basically this is his cemetery,” he said, adding: “Couldn’t ask for a better son.”

Hijackers crashed two other commercial jets into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia and into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The New York ceremony, where politicians past and present mixed with families but gave no speeches, was punctuated by moments of silence and bell ringing to mark the moments when each of the four planes crashed and when the towers fell.

In Washington, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, joined by staff, bowed their heads for a brief moment of silence on the south lawn of the White House to mark the anniversary.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter led a remembrance ceremony for relatives of those killed at the Pentagon.

Relatives of the 40 passengers and crew members who died aboard United Airlines Flight 93 gathered at the newly dedicated Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville.

The passengers fought back against the hijackers, who crashed the plane upside down at nearly 600 mph (965 kph).

In New York, the buzz of increased commerce from new residential and business towers has returned a large degree of normalcy to the area, known after the attacks as Ground Zero.

The day also honors those who were killed in 1993, when a car bomb tore through one of the parking garage of one of the towers.

Next to the 16-acre (6.5-hectare) site where the Twin Towers stood is the newly opened 1 World Trade Center, the tallest skyscraper in the Western hemisphere.

The first plane slammed into the North tower at 8:46 a.m., followed by a second plane hitting the South tower at 9:03 a.m. Within two hours, both towers had collapsed, engulfing lower Manhattan in acrid dust and smoke and debris that burned for days.

(Writing and additional reporting by Daniel Bases in New York and Ayesha Rascoe in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham and Bernadette Baum)

Photo: One World Trade Center is seen behind U.S flags on the morning of the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, in Lower Manhattan in New York September 11, 2015.  REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

Osama Bin Laden’s Bookshelf Revealed: What You Can Learn From His Reading List

Osama Bin Laden’s Bookshelf Revealed: What You Can Learn From His Reading List

By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

What does Osama bin Laden’s reading list have to tell us? Recently made public by the office of the director of national intelligence, it lists 103 documents, from U.S. government reports to published works of nonfiction, that reveal Bin Laden to be a smart and educated adversary, as we have always understood.

Since the 9/11 attacks, we as a culture have resisted complex readings of bin Laden, choosing to deride him as a fanatic, which, of course, he was. But that assessment also underestimates his considerable talents, operational and otherwise, his understanding not only of how to enact terror, but also what that terror meant. His reading list suggests just how deep that understanding, that sense of inquiry, went.

September 11, after all, was so disturbing, so effective because of its metaphoric value, as much as the death and devastation that it caused. Think about it: two citadels of American political and economic hegemony — the Pentagon and the World Trade Center (with a third, possibly the White House, targeted by the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania) — destroyed by turning our technology and mobility against us. If a jetliner can become a weapon, and an office tower a killing ground, how can anyone be safe?

This is why The 9/11 Commission Report became a national bestseller upon its release in 2004 — because in the wake of the disaster, we needed a sense of context to reassure us that the pillars by which we understand the world were still in place. The product of a bipartisan federal commission, the report began with a minute-by-minute re-creation of the catastrophe, before moving into a series of extended considerations: of the rise of bin Laden, the development of American counterterrorism efforts and the escalation of the conflict between Al Qaeda and the United States.

The 9/11 Commission Report is one of the documents discovered on Bin Laden’s bookshelf — no surprise there. What better way to understand one’s enemy than to understand the narratives we hold dear?

Something similar might be said about the dozens of other federal reports in his possession, which range from the practical (applications for both new and reissued passports, instructions on how to register the birth of a U.S. citizen abroad) to the analytical (a 2009 Senate assessment of “the Evolving Al-Qaeda Threat to the Homeland,” a 2005 National Security Council “Strategy for Victory in Iraq”). It makes sense that bin Laden would find such materials useful, for the insights they offer into our way of thinking, of strategizing, if nothing else.

And yet, I find myself compelled — and in a perverse way, cheered — by another aspect of these holdings, which is what they have to say about American transparency. This has been an essential, and ongoing, source of debate since the Patriot Act first asked us to sacrifice freedom for security, a discussion kicked into overdrive by Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about the National Security Agency. Still, the fact that bin Laden, of all people, could have such information on his bookshelf suggests the degree of transparency that is still in place.

If you think transparency is a threat to national security, you’ll likely see this as evidence for further restricting public access to the workings of government. For me, though, it represents a kind of victory, over precisely the sort of theocratic autocracy bin Laden and his successors represent.

What is the best way to defeat authoritarians? Make information available. For proof of this, let’s remember that bin Laden did not destroy American culture, although he did reveal some of its fissures — yet even this may work to our benefit if we use it as a lens through which to look at ourselves more closely, in the reflection of our ideals.

As far as the rest of bin Laden’s reading list, it, too, is as we might imagine. We find the work of government critics such as Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, as well as popular histories like Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Superpowers and Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars.

Monomania? Yes, and a bit of self-absorption. But what else would we expect from a figure of such single-minded purpose, who in these titles is revealed?

Indeed, looking through the list is a reminder, finally, of his humanity, dangerous and misguided though he was. This is something we don’t like to think about, that we share with our adversaries a common human core. But for me, what resonates about this list is how mundane parts of it are, how recognizable — not specialized but common, titles we might discover on our own shelves.

Photo: Nicolas Loubet via Flickr