History > 2006 > USA > Terrorism (III)

Hopes of cornering

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born al-Qaeda leader, seem distant as ever.

Undated AP photo

Bin Laden manhunt still drawing a blank        UT        1.9.2006

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-09-01-bin-laden-hunt_x.htm

Al - Zawahri:

Bush a Liar in War on Terror

September 30, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:30 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri called President Bush a failure and a liar in the war on terror in a video statement released Friday, and he compared Pope Benedict XVI to the 11th century pontiff who launched the First Crusade.

''Can't you be honest at least once in your life, and admit that you are a deceitful liar who intentionally deceived your nation when you drove them to war in Iraq?'' Osama bin Laden's deputy said, appearing in front of a standing lamp and a small, decorative cannon.

Al-Zawahri also criticized Bush for continuing to imprison al-Qaida leaders in prisons, including al-Qaida No. 3 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003.

''Bush, you deceitful charlatan, 3 1/2 years have passed since your capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, so how have you found us during this time? Losing and surrendering? Or are we launching attacks with God's help and becoming martyrs?'' he said.

''What you have perpetrated against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other Muslim captives in your prisons and the prisons of your slaves in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and elsewhere is not hidden from anyone, and we are a people who do not sleep under oppression and who do not abandon our revenge until our chests have been healed of those who have committed aggression against us,'' he said.

''And we, by the grace of Allah, are seeking to exact revenge on behalf of Islam and Muslims from you and your soldiers and allies.''

Al-Zawahri accused the United States and its agents of torturing Muslim prisoners seized across the Middle East.

''Your agents in the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan have captured thousands of the youth and soldiers of Islam whom you made to taste at your hands and the hands of your agents various types of punishment and torture,'' al-Zawahri said.

Ben Venzke, head of the Virginia-based IntelCenter, which monitors terrorism communications, said al-Zawahri essentially gave al-Qaida's spin on the arrests and detentions of its leaders.

''They are countering arguments that individuals have been able to provide useful information,'' he said. ''And they are continuing to reinforce their intentions for revenge.''

Al-Zawahri said Benedict is reminiscent of Pope Urban II, who in 1095 ordered the First Crusade to establish Christian control in the Holy Land.

''This charlatan Benedict brings back to our memories the speech of his predecessor charlatan Urban II in the 11th century ... in which he instigated Europeans to fight Muslims and launch the Crusades because he (Urban) claimed 'atheist Muslims, the enemies of Christ' are attacking the tomb of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him,'' al-Zawahri said.

Al-Zawahri's remarks about Benedict were a clear response to the pontiff's comments this month that sparked outrage across the Muslim world. In that speech, Benedict cited a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as ''evil and inhuman,'' particularly ''his command to spread by the sword the faith.''

''If Benedict attacked us, we will respond to his insults with good things. We will call upon him and all of the Christians to become Muslims who do not recognize the Trinity or the crucifixion,'' al-Zawahri said.

Al-Zawahri also called a U.N. resolution to send peacekeepers into Sudan's war-torn Darfur region a ''Crusader plan'' and implored the Muslims of Darfur to defend themselves.

''There is a Crusader plan to send Crusaders forces to Darfur that is about to become a new field of the Crusades war. Oh, nation of Islam, rise up to defend your land from the Crusaders aggression who are coming wearing United Nations masks,'' he said. ''No one will defend you (Darfur) but a popular holy war.''

The nearly 18-minute statement, titled ''Bush, the Pope, Darfur and the Crusades,'' was produced by al-Qaida's media arm, as-Sahab, and made available by the IntelCenter. An initial segment shows al-Zawahri in an office-type setting, while in the second part he is in front of a brown backdrop. The first segment also has English subtitles.

After conducting a technical analysis of the videotape, the CIA concluded ''with confidence'' that the speaker is in fact Ayman al-Zawahri, said a CIA spokesperson who spoke on condition of anonymity

An intelligence official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said U.S. experts view the latest video as a typical propaganda message, whose main thrust is a call for more people to join the jihad, or holy war.

It wasn't immediately clear when the message was recorded, the official said, but al-Zawahri's reference to the pope indicated the message was produced sometime after Benedict's Sept. 12 comments about Islam.

Al-Qaida has released a string of videos to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, showing increasingly sophisticated production techniques in a likely effort to demonstrate that it remains a powerful, confident force despite the U.S.-led war on terror.

The IntelCenter said Friday's video was the 48th released by the al-Qaida Web site this year, three times more than last year's number -- which had been the highest. It said al-Zawahri has appeared in 14 of the 2006 videos.

    Al - Zawahri: Bush a Liar in War on Terror, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Al-Qaida-Tape.html

Growing Unarmed Battalion in Qaeda Army Is Using Internet to Get the Message Out

September 30, 2006
The New York Times
By HASSAN M. FATTAH

AMMAN, Jordan — On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Abu Omar received the call to jihad. Literally.

“There’s a present for you,” a voice on the other end of the phone said that morning, he recalled. It was a common code whenever his friends and colleagues wanted to share a new broadcast or communiqué from Al Qaeda over the Internet, he said.

Abu Omar, speaking on the condition that only his nickname be used, said he soon went to one of the Internet cafes he frequents in Amman and began distributing the latest video by Al Qaeda, alerting friends and occasionally adding commentary.

“We are the energy behind the path to jihad,” Abu Omar said proudly. “Just like the jihadis reached their target on Sept. 11, we will reach ours through the Internet.”

Abu Omar, 28, is part of an increasingly sophisticated network of contributors and discussion leaders helping to wage Al Qaeda’s battle for Muslim hearts and minds. A self-described Qaeda sympathizer who defends the Sept. 11 attacks and continues to find inspiration in Osama bin Laden’s call for jihad, Abu Omar is part of a growing army of young men who may not seek to take violent action, but who help spread jihadist philosophy, shape its message and hope to inspire others to their cause.

Though he does not appear to be directly connected to Al Qaeda, Abu Omar does seem to be on a direct e-mail list for groups sympathetic to Al Qaeda, making him a link in a chain that spreads the organization’s propaganda using code and special software to circumvent official scrutiny of their Internet activity.

As Al Qaeda gradually transforms itself from a terrorist organization carrying out its own attacks into an ideological umbrella that encourages local movements to take action, its increased reliance on various forms of media have made Web-savvy sympathizers like Abu Omar ever more important.

For example, this past Sept. 11, Abu Omar said, a link sent to a jihadist e-mail list took him to a general interest Islamic Web site, which led him to a password-protected Web site, then onto yet another site containing the latest release from Al Qaeda: a lecture by its No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahri, threatening attacks on Israel and the Persian Gulf. Abu Omar said he then passed the video to friends and confidants, acting as a local distributor to other sympathizers.

In recent years, Al Qaeda has formed a special media production division called Al Sahab to produce videos about leaders like Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri, terrorism experts say. The group largely once relied on Arab television channels like Al Jazeera to broadcast its videos and taped messages.

Al Sahab, whose name means the cloud, has continued to draw on a video library featuring everything from taped suicide messages by the Sept. 11 hijackers to images of gun battles and bombings spearheaded by Al Qaeda and others, said Marwan Shehadeh, an expert on Islamist movements with the Vision Research Institute in Amman who has close ties to jihadists in Jordan and Syria.

But this year Al Sahab has released many more recordings than in previous years, said Chris Heffelfinger, a specialist in jihadi ideology at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, in what many analysts see as a new offensive focusing on the Muslim mainstream. Jihadi Web sites, meanwhile, have continued sprouting on the Internet, serving as a conduit for Al Qaeda’s propaganda.

Mr. Shehadeh describes Al Sahab as an informal group with video camcorders and laptops. Some news reports have described it as an organization with a mobile production unit that navigates the Pakistani provinces. “The jihadis have successfully used American technology to show the U.S. as a loser,” Mr. Shehadeh said. “This is an open-ended war, and they use media as part of their jihad against Western and Arab regimes.”

Just days before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Sahab released a barrage of videos, including images of Mr. bin Laden seated with some of the Sept. 11 suicide bombers; a documentary that some have described as a “making of Sept. 11” feature, with testaments by two of the bombers; and the lecture by Mr. Zawahri that Abu Omar said he received that morning.

What is most striking about the messages is their tone, terrorism analysts say. In the past, the group’s leaders were generally depicted as soldiers in battle, often filmed outdoors with weapons in the background. But the more recent communiqués show Al Qaeda’s leaders in the comfort of a living room or office, set against bookshelves with religious texts. The group has also taken to quoting Western authors and famous speeches, in what seems to be an effort to reach those with Western sensibilities.

“It’s a clear message: when there’s a gun in the background, they’re saying, ‘I’m a fighter like you’; when there are books in the background, it means, ‘I am a scholar and deserve authority,’ ” said Fares bin Hizam, a journalist who reports on militant groups for the Arab satellite news channel Al Arabiya. “It is a message that resonates well with an impressionable young man who is 17 or 18.”

One result, terrorism analysts say, is a militant group in transition, seeking to push ideology over direct action, franchising its name and principles to smaller groups acting more independently.

“Al Qaeda has been turning itself from an active organization into a propaganda organization,” said Mr. Heffelfinger. “They now appear to be focused on putting out disinformation and projecting the strength of the mujahedeen. They’re no longer the group that is organizing the mujahedeen. Instead, they are giving guidance to all the movements.”

Men like Abu Omar have become integral to that transformation. Mr. Shehadeh, who introduced Abu Omar to this reporter, says he has known Abu Omar ever since he was a teenager and has observed his gradual embrace of jihadist ideology. He says he has seen Abu Omar’s contributions on numerous chat boards and notes that while Abu Omar is probably not a Qaeda member, he regularly relays news and spreads the group’s message to friends and colleagues.

In Amman’s more conservative neighborhoods, Abu Omar and several analysts said, one or two jihadists tend to be the organizers, distributing messages and content to volunteers, and controlling membership in jihadist e-mail lists.

“We are typically observers, but when we see something on the Net, our job is to share it,” Abu Omar said. He no longer trusts news reports on television, he said. He even cast doubt on Al Jazeera, which typically broadcasts Al Qaeda’s videos but is, he said, still beholden to Arab governments. “We become like journalists ourselves.”

Abu Omar, who owns a computer store in one of Amman’s refugee camps, said he became involved in jihadi movements about six years ago, driven in part by his anger over the death of his father, who he said was a fighter with the Palestinian faction Fatah when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. “On the Net, you can see all the pictures of Palestine and the Muslim world being attacked, and then you see the planes crashing into one of the towers and you think, ‘I can understand it,’ ” he said.

He goes to an Internet cafe several times a week. In recent years, Jordan’s Internet cafes have begun taking increased security measures, like registering users’ identification cards, he said, but jihadists in Amman alternate among a network of sympathetic cafe owners who allow them to surf anonymously.

He never uses his own computer to search for jihadi content, and he limits his time online to about 30 minutes — not long enough for the authorities to locate him, he figures.

In 2005, Jordanian authorities arrested an 18-year-old man, Murad al-Assaydeh, accusing him of using the Internet to threaten attacks on intelligence officials. Abu Omar said several of his friends and comrades had been arrested by the General Information Department in Jordan in connection with Mr. Assaydeh’s case and in subsequent dragnets. Abu Omar said he was once called in for questioning but was released the same day.

He now changes his e-mail address frequently, he said, and he typically carries software that can delete details of his actions from a computer. “In the beginning, I thought maybe I would go for jihad in Iraq, but it was very difficult to get there,” he said. “Now I realize it’s better to work on the Net and get the message out.”

    Growing Unarmed Battalion in Qaeda Army Is Using Internet to Get the Message Out, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/world/30jordan.html?hp&ex=1159675200&en=56cc8b833e65ab51&ei=5094&partner=homepage

News Analysis

Detainee Bill Shifts Power to President

September 30, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 — With the final passage through Congress of the detainee treatment bill, President Bush on Friday achieved a signal victory, shoring up with legislation his determined conduct of the campaign against terrorism in the face of challenges from critics and the courts.

Rather than reining in the formidable presidential powers Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have asserted since Sept. 11, 2001, the law gives some of those powers a solid statutory foundation. In effect it allows the president to identify enemies, imprison them indefinitely and interrogate them — albeit with a ban on the harshest treatment — beyond the reach of the full court reviews traditionally afforded criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners.

Taken as a whole, the law will give the president more power over terrorism suspects than he had before the Supreme Court decision this summer in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that undercut more than four years of White House policy. It does, however, grant detainees brought before military commissions limited protections initially opposed by the White House. The bill, which cleared a final procedural hurdle in the House on Friday and is likely to be signed into law next week by Mr. Bush, does not just allow the president to determine the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions; it also strips the courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges to his interpretation.

And it broadens the definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” to include not only those who fight the United States but also those who have “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” The latter group could include those accused of providing financial or other indirect support to terrorists, human rights groups say. The designation can be made by any “competent tribunal” created by the president or secretary of defense.

In very specific ways, the bill is a rejoinder to the Hamdan ruling, in which several justices said the absence of Congressional authorization was a central flaw in the administration’s approach. The new bill solves that problem, legal experts said.

“The president should feel he has better authority and direction now,” said Douglas W. Kmiec, a conservative legal scholar at the Pepperdine University School of Law. “I think he can reasonably be confident that this statute answers the Supreme Court and puts him back in a position to prevent another attack, which is the goal of interrogation.”

But lawsuits challenging the bill are inevitable, and critics say substantial parts of it may well be rejected by the Supreme Court.

Over all, the legislation reallocates power among the three branches of government, taking authority away from the judiciary and handing it to the president.

Bruce Ackerman, a critic of the administration and a professor of law and political science at Yale University, sharply criticized the bill but agreed that it strengthened the White House position. “The president walked away with a lot more than most people thought,” Mr. Ackerman said. He said the bill “further entrenches presidential power” and allows the administration to declare even an American citizen an unlawful combatant subject to indefinite detention.

“And it’s not only about these prisoners,” Mr. Ackerman said. “If Congress can strip courts of jurisdiction over cases because it fears their outcome, judicial independence is threatened.”

Even if the Supreme Court decides it has the power to hear challenges to the bill, the Bush administration has gained a crucial advantage. In adding a Congressional imprimatur to a comprehensive set of procedures and tactics, lawmakers explicitly endorsed measures that in other eras were achieved by executive fiat. Earlier Supreme Court decisions have suggested that the president and Congress acting together in the national security arena can be an all-but-unstoppable force.

Public commentary on the bill, called the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been fast-shifting and often contradictory, partly because its 96 pages cover so much ground and because the impact of some provisions is open to debate.

“This bill is about so many things, and it’s a mixed bag,” said Elisa Massimino, the Washington director of Human Rights First, a civil liberties group.

Ms. Massimino’s group and others criticized the bill as a whole, but she agreed with the Republican senators who negotiated for weeks with the White House that it would ban the most extreme interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military.

“The senators made clear that waterboarding is criminal,” Ms. Massimino said, referring to a technique used to simulate drowning. “That’s a human rights enforcement upside.”

The debate over the limits of torture and the rules for military commission dominated discussion of the bill until this week. Only in the last few days has broad attention turned to its redefinition of “unlawful enemy combatant” and its ban on habeas corpus petitions, which suspects have traditionally used to challenge their incarceration.

Law professors will stay busy for months debating the implications. The most outspoken critics have likened the law’s sweeping provisions to dark chapters in history, comparable to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the fragile years after the nation’s founding and the internment of Japanese-Americans in the midst of World War II.

Conservative legal experts, by contrast, said critics could no longer say the Bush administration was guilty of unilateral executive overreaching. Congressional approval can cure many ills, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote in his seminal concurrence in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer, the 1952 case that struck down President Harry S. Truman’s unilateral seizure of the nation’s steel mills during the Korean War.

Supporters of the law, in fact, say its critics will never be satisfied. “For years they’ve been saying that we don’t like Bush doing things unilaterally, that we don’t like Bush doing things piecemeal,” said David B. Rivkin, a Justice Department official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

How the measure will look decades hence may depend not just on how it is used but on how the terrorist threat evolves. If a major terrorist plot in the United States is uncovered — and surely if one succeeds — it may vindicate the Congressional decision to give the government more leeway to seize and question those who might know about the next attack.

If the attacks of 2001 recede as a devastating but unique tragedy, the decision to create a new legal framework may seem like overkill. “If there is never another terrorist attack and we never obtain actionable intelligence, this will look like a huge overreaction,” said Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton.

Long before that judgment arrives, legal challenges are likely to bring the new law before the Supreme Court. Assuming the justices rule that they retain the power to hear the case at all, they will then decide whether Congress has resolved the flaws it found in June or must make another effort to balance the rights of accused terrorists and the desire for security.

    Detainee Bill Shifts Power to President, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/us/30detain.html?hp&ex=1159675200&en=4b0651b4401c1962&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Lawyer in Terror Case Apologizes for Violating Special Prison Rules

September 29, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

Lynne F. Stewart, the once brashly defiant radical defense lawyer who was convicted in a federal terrorism trial last year, has acknowledged in a personal letter to the court that she knowingly violated prison rules and was careless, overemotional and politically naïve in her representation of a terrorist client.

After a trial of more than seven months, Ms. Stewart was convicted in February 2005 of providing aid to terrorism. Her sentencing has been repeatedly postponed because of her treatments for breast cancer, which she first discovered last November.

Ms. Stewart sent the letter on Tuesday to the judge in the case, John G. Koeltl of Federal District Court in Manhattan, appealing to him for leniency when he decides her sentence. The sentencing is now set for Oct. 16, and prosecutors, citing “a pattern of purposeful and willful” criminal conduct, have asked for a prison term of 30 years. Lawyers for Ms. Stewart, who is 66, have asked the judge to spare her any prison time.

The somber letter is the first time since she was convicted that Ms. Stewart has addressed herself directly to the judge to explain her actions, rather than allowing her lawyers to speak for her.

Her argument is strikingly different from her testimony during the trial, when she admitted no wrongdoing and confidently defended her provocative legal strategies in her defense of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a fundamentalist Islamic cleric from Egypt who is serving a life sentence for a thwarted 1993 plot to bomb New York landmarks.

Now Ms. Stewart admits that she intentionally broke strict rules that barred the sheik from communicating with his followers outside the prison, when she conveyed messages from him to the press in June 2000. But she insists that she “tested the limits” of the law only as a zealous lawyer, and never intended to help the sheik’s terrorist followers, whose goals she did not share.

Subdued and regretful, Ms. Stewart acknowledges that her legal approach in defending the sheik and herself was misguided and out of touch with the growing fear of terrorism in the country even before the Sept. 11 attacks, and certainly after them.

“I violated my SAM’s affirmation,” Ms. Stewart wrote, referring to her signed agreement to uphold the prison’s special administrative measures imposed on Mr. Abdel Rahman. “I permitted him to communicate publicly and these statements if misused may have allowed others to further their goals.” But she added, “These goals were not mine.”

“My only motive,” she wrote, “was to serve my client as his lawyer. What might have been legitimately tolerated in 2000-2001, was after 9/11 interpreted differently and considered criminal. At the time I didn’t see this. I see and understand it now.”

Ms. Stewart says that she committed lapses of judgment, and “I was also naïve in the sense that I was overly optimistic about what I could and should accomplish as the sheik’s lawyer, and I was careless.” She failed to understand, she said, that in representing a convicted terrorist, “a lawyer might need to tread lightly on this ground.” And she underestimated how prosecutors would react to her pushing the edges of the law.

“I was blind,” she wrote, to the fact that the government “could misunderstand and misinterpret my true purpose, which was to advocate for my client.”

She was busy defending criminal clients in that period, she wrote, and “I became spread too thinly,” and “failed to give sufficient attention to the possible repercussions or the gravity of my actions in how I represented” the sheik. She calculated that the worst that could happen would be a ban on visits to her client.

Ms. Stewart insisted that she did not support any violent Islamic cause. “Those who know me best, as a mother, a family member and a lawyer, know that I am not a terrorist,” she wrote.

In Aug. 30 sentencing papers, the prosecutors, led by an assistant United States attorney, Andrew S. Dember, rejected Ms. Stewart’s arguments that she was within the bounds of a zealous defense of her client.

“What Stewart and her supporters fail to recognize and acknowledge is the seriousness of Stewart’s criminal conduct, the severity of the potential consequences of her providing material support to a terrorist organization, and the fact that her criminal conduct simply had nothing to do with zealous legal representation,” the prosecutors argued. “Stewart did not walk a fine line of zealous advocacy and accidentally fall over it; she marched across it into a criminal conspiracy.”

Ms. Stewart’s lawyers, led by Joshua L. Dratel, have filed motions to compel the government to disclose whether the National Security Agency recorded her or her lawyers by wiretapping without warrants.

    Lawyer in Terror Case Apologizes for Violating Special Prison Rules, NYT, 29.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/nyregion/29stewart.html

Trampling Rights to Fight Terrorism (6 Letters)

September 29, 2006
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Rushing Off a Cliff” (editorial, Sept. 28):

You say that the broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the antiterrorism bill railroaded through Congress could subject legal residents of the United States “to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal” and that “the president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.”

Detainees would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment, and anyone could be locked up forever, with no reason given and no notification to friends and family.

Many of us are bitterly opposed to the current administration and have angered those who support the disaster in Iraq. What is to prevent letters, lies and innuendoes from being sent to the authorities accusing us of being illegal enemy combatants and a danger to the country?

What redress would we have? I tell myself that this could never happen here, but I fear we are on a very slippery slope.

Mabel J. Dudeney
Norwalk, Conn., Sept. 28, 2006

To the Editor:

Terrorism poses a grave and different kind of threat to the Republic. Yet it is no more grave than, say, Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

No one has explained how it is different in ways that justify condoning torture, rewriting international law, discarding principles of due process and human decency, ceding judicial authority to the president, and putting our troops and reputation in further jeopardy.

The president’s pre-election antiterrorism legislation will do these things. It is a measure of cravenness that members of both parties would vote for this bill for political expediency.

Christopher J. Mugel
Richmond, Va., Sept. 28, 2006

To the Editor:

“Rushing Off a Cliff” is off the mark. I say that those who try to tear down our rights do not deserve to have their rights protected by us.

But you say otherwise — that we must use judicious restraint and care to fight an enemy who is willing to fight without restraint and to win at all cost.

I don’t think we can win fighting that way. In trying to vigorously protect our enemy’s rights, we will surely lose ours.

Bill Decker
San Diego, Sept. 28, 2006

To the Editor:

We have reached the point where we must demand that the president uphold the Constitution.

In the past, when a politician rose to the highest office in the land, it was taken for granted that he would put the nation first. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case.

Unless we act and demand that our elected representatives act in our behalf, we will have an executive with unlimited power.

Bob Geary
Portland, Ore., Sept. 28, 2006

To the Editor:

The day the detainee bill is signed will be a day that will live in dishonor in our history. The practices that appalled us in the past when used by sleazy regimes will be incorporated into our legal heritage.

If we do not reject the responsible party in power, we will indict ourselves as accomplices before decent world opinion.

(Rev.) Connell J. Maguire
Riviera Beach, Fla., Sept. 28, 2006
The writer is a retired Navy captain.

To the Editor:

You say that the “Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws.” This is correct, but incomplete.

This administration seeks to strike fear in the hearts of all Americans so it can maintain total control. It uses the issue of security to create insecurity, while Democrats remain silent.

In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The contrast is striking with today, when we seem to fear everything and reward the political opportunists who thrive on it.

Morris Roth
Fort Lee, N.J., Sept. 28, 2006

    Trampling Rights to Fight Terrorism (6 Letters), NYT, 29.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/opinion/l29detain.html

Senate Passes Broad New Detainee Rules

September 29, 2006
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The Senate approved a measure on Thursday on the interrogations and trials of terrorism suspects, establishing far-reaching rules to deal with what President Bush has called the most dangerous combatants in a different type of war.

The vote was 65 to 34. It was cast after more than 10 hours of often impassioned debate that touched on the Constitution, the horrors of Sept. 11 and the role of the United States in the world.

Both parties also positioned themselves for the continuing clash over national security going into the homestretch of the midterm elections. The vote showed that Democrats believe that President Bush’s power to wield national security as a political issue is seriously diminished. [News analysis, Page A20.]

The bill would set up rules for the military commissions that will allow the government to proceed with the prosecutions of high-level detainees including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

It would make illegal several broadly defined abuses of detainees, while leaving it to the president to establish specific permissible interrogation techniques. And it would strip detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court.

The bill is the same as one that the House passed, eliminating the need for a conference between the two chambers. The House is expected to approve the Senate bill Friday, sending it to the president to be signed.

The bill was a compromise between the White House and three Republican senators who had resisted what they saw as Mr. Bush’s effort to rewrite the nation’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions. Although the president had to relent on some major provisions, the vote allows him to claim victory in achieving a main legislative priority.

“As our troops risk their lives to fight terrorism, this bill will ensure they are prepared to defeat today’s enemies and address tomorrow’s threats,” the president said in a statement after the vote.

Republicans argued that the new rules would provide the necessary tools to fight a new kind of enemy.

“Our prior concept of war has been completely altered, as we learned so tragically on Sept. 11, 2001,” Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, said. “And we must address threats in a different way.”

Democrats argued that the rules were being rushed through for political gain too close to a major election and that they would fundamentally threaten the foundations of the American legal system and come back to haunt lawmakers as one of the greatest mistakes in history.

“I believe there can be no mercy for those who perpetrated the crimes of 9/11,” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, said. “But in the process of accomplishing what I believe is essential for our security, we must hold onto our values and set an example that we can point to with pride, not shame.”

Twelve Democrats crossed party lines to vote for the bill. One Republican, Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, voted against it.

But provisions of the bill came under criticism from Republicans as well as Democrats, with several crossing lines on amendments that failed along narrow margins.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, arguing for an amendment to strike a provision to bar suspects from challenging their detentions in court, said it “is as legally abusive of the rights guaranteed in the Constitution as the actions at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and secret prisons were physically abusive of detainees.”

The amendment failed, 51 to 49.

Even some Republicans who voted for the bill said they expected the Supreme Court to strike down the legislation because of the provision barring court detainees’ challenges, an outcome that would send the legislation right back to Congress.

“We should have done it right, because we’re going to have to do it again,” said Senator Gordon H. Smith, Republican of Oregon, who voted to strike the provision and yet supported the bill.

The measure would broaden the definition of enemy combatants beyond the traditional definition used in wartime, to include noncitizens living legally in the United States as well as those in foreign countries and anyone determined to be an enemy combatant under criteria defined by the president or secretary of defense.

It would strip at Guantánamo detainees of the habeas right to challenge their detention in court, relying instead on procedures known as combatant status review trials. Those trials have looser rules of evidence than the courts.

It would allow of evidence seized in this country or abroad without a search warrant to be admitted in trials.

The bill would also bar the admission of evidence obtained by cruel and inhuman treatment, except any obtained before Dec. 30, 2005, when Congress enacted the Detainee Treatment Act, that a judge declares reliable and probative.

Democrats said the date was conveniently set after the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

The legislation establishes several “grave breaches” of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention that are felonies under the War Crimes Act, including torture, rape, murder and any act intended to cause “serious” physical or mental pain or suffering.

The issue was sent to Congress as a result of a Supreme Court decision in June that struck down military tribunals that the Bush administration had established shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. The court ruled that the tribunals violated the Constitution and international law.

The White House submitted a bill this month to authorize a tribunal system, setting off intraparty fighting as the three Senate Republicans, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John McCain of Arizona and John W. Warner Jr. of Virginia, insisted that they would not support a provision that in any way appeared to alter the commitments under the Geneva Conventions.

Such a redefinition, they argued, would send a signal to other nations that they, too, could rewrite their commitments to the 57-year-old conventions and, ultimately, lead to Americans seized in wartime being abused and tried in kangaroo courts.

The White House and the senators came to their agreement last week.

Democrats and human rights groups objected to changes in the legislation over the weekend, as the House and White House drafted final language, including defining enemy combatants and setting rules on search warrants.

“We should get this right, now, and we are not doing so by passing this bill,” Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who is the minority leader, said before the vote. “Future generations will view passage of this bill as a grave error.”

Human rights groups called the vote to approve the bill “dangerous” and “disappointing.” Critics feared that it left the president a large loophole by allowing him to set specific interrogation techniques.

Senators Graham, McCain and Warner rebutted that vociferously, arguing in floor statements, as well as in a colloquy submitted into the official record, that the measure would in no way give the president the authority to authorize any interrogation tactics that do not comply with the Detainee Treatment Act and the Geneva Conventions, which bar cruel and inhuman treatment, and that the bill would not alter American obligations under the Geneva Conventions.

“The conventions are preserved intact,” Mr. McCain promised his colleagues from the floor.

After the vote, Mr. Graham said: “America can be proud. Not only did she adhere to the Geneva Conventions, she went further than she had to, because we’re better than the terrorists.”

Besides the amendments that would have struck the ban on habeas corpus cases, the others that failed included one that would have established a sunset on the measure to allow Congress to reconsider it in five years and one that would have require the C.I.A. to submit to Congressional oversight.

Another failed amendment would have required the State Department to inform other nations of what interrogation techniques it considered illegal for use on American troops, a move intended to prompt the administration to say publicly what techniques it considers out of bounds.

    Senate Passes Broad New Detainee Rules, NYT, 29.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/washington/29detain.html?hp&ex=1159588800&en=6cbabb925a41f7b0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

News Analysis

Waging the War on Terror: Report Belies Optimistic View

September 27, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — Three years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote a memo to his colleagues in the Pentagon posing a critical question in the “long war’’ against terrorism: Is Washington’s strategy successfully killing or capturing terrorists faster than new enemies are being created?

Until Tuesday, the government had not publicly issued an authoritative answer. But the newly declassified National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism does exactly that, and it concludes that the administration has failed the Rumsfeld test.

Portions of the report appear to bolster President Bush’s argument that the only way to defeat the terrorists is to keep unrelenting military pressure on them. But nowhere in the assessment is any evidence to support Mr. Bush’s confident-sounding assertion this month in Atlanta that “America is winning the war on terror.’’

While the spread of self-described jihadists is hard to measure, the report says, the terrorists “are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.”

It says that a continuation of that trend would lead “to increasing attacks worldwide’’ and that “the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities.’’

On Tuesday evening the White House issued what it called a fact sheet lining up the intelligence estimate’s findings with President Bush’s own words in recent months, comparing, for example, the report’s account of the the spread of new terror cells independent of Al Qaeda to Mr. Bush’s references to “homegrown terrorists’’ from Madrid to Britain.

But there is a difference in tone between Mr. Bush’s public statements and the classified assessment that is unmistakable.

The report says that over the next five years “the confluence of shared purpose and dispersed actors will make it harder to find and undermine jihadist groups.’’

It also suggests that while democratization and “exposing the religious and political straitjacket that is implied by the jihadists’ propaganda’’ might dim the appeal of the terrorist groups, those factors are now outweighed by the dangerous brew of fear of Western domination, the battle for Iraq’s future and the slow pace of real economic or political progress.

Yet the intelligence report bears none of Mr. Bush’s long-range optimism. Rather it dwells on Mr. Rumsfeld’s darker question, which he put cheekily as, “Is our current situation such that ‘the harder we work, the behinder we get?’ ”

Tuesday’s declassified report asked a more subtle version of that question. It notes that while democratization might “begin to slow the spread’’ of extremism, the “destabilizing transitions’’ caused by political change “will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.’’

And while Mr. Bush talks often of transforming the Middle East, the report speaks of the “vulnerabilities’’ created by the fact that “anti-U.S. and antiglobalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies.’’

The result, it said, was that other groups around the world are radicalizing “more quickly, more widely and more anonymously in the Internet age.’’

In short, it describes a jihadist movement that, for now, is simply outpacing Mr. Bush’s counterattacks.

“I guess the overall conclusion that you get from it is that we don’t have enough bullets given all the enemies we are creating,’’ said Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

What was most remarkable about the intelligence estimate, several experts said, was the unremarkable nature of its conclusions.

“At one level it is unsurprising stuff,’’ said Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia on the intelligence council until last year. “But there is definitely much there that you haven’t heard the president say,’’ he added, “including the role that Iraq has played’’ in inspiring disaffected Muslims to join an anti-American jihadist movement.

Administration officials expressed their certainty on Tuesday that the leak of parts of the report was an example of politically inspired cherry picking, to use a term from earlier arguments over intelligence about unconventional weapons.

“Here we are, coming down the stretch in an election campaign, and it’s on the front page of your newspapers,’’ Mr. Bush said at a news conference with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. “Isn’t that interesting? Somebody has taken it upon themselves to leak classified information for political purposes.’’

And at the center of the political debate is Iraq. Frances Fragos Townsend, the director of homeland security at the White House, used a conference call with reporters on Tuesday evening to call attention to the intelligence finding that “the Iraq conflict has become a cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world, and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.’’

“Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves and be perceived to have failed,’’ the findings went on, “we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.’’

Ms. Townsend argued that “this really underscores the President’s point about the importance of our winning in Iraq,’’ she said.

As a political matter, at least for the next few weeks, the intelligence findings will only fuel the argument over Iraq on both sides. Mr. Bush has grown increasingly insistent that nothing he has done in Iraq has worsened terrorism. America was not in Iraq during the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, he said, or during the bombings of the U.S.S. Cole or embassies in Africa, or on 9/11.

But that argument steps around the implicit question raised by the intelligence finding: whether postponing the confrontation with Saddam Hussein and focusing instead on securing Afghanistan, or dealing with issues like Iran’s nascent nuclear capability or the Middle East peace process, might have created a different playing field, one in which jihadists were deprived of daily images of carnage in Iraq to rally their sympathizers.

    Waging the War on Terror: Report Belies Optimistic View, NYT, 27.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/washington/27assess.html?hp&ex=1159416000&en=4390e3dcfece8e76&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Backing Policy, President Issues Terror Estimate

September 27, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — Portions of a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism that the White House released under pressure on Tuesday said that Muslim jihadists were “increasing in both number and geographic dispersion” and that current trends could lead to increasing attacks around the globe.

The report, a comprehensive assessment of terrorism produced in April by American intelligence agencies, said the invasion and occupation of Iraq had become a “cause célèbre” for jihadists. It identified the jihad in Iraq as one of four underlying factors fueling the spread of the Islamic radicalism, along with entrenched grievances, the slow pace of reform and pervasive anti-American sentiment.

The intelligence estimate said American-led counterterrorism efforts in the past five years had “seriously damaged the leadership of Al Qaeda and disrupted its operations.” But it said that Al Qaeda continued to pose the greatest threat to American interests among terrorism organizations, and that the global jihadist movement overall was “spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts.” [Text and news analysis, Page A16.]

The estimate predicted that over the next five years the factors fueling the spread of global jihad were likely to be more powerful than those that might slow it.

The White House ordered portions of the intelligence estimate declassified to counter what it described as mischaracterizations about its findings in news reports.

The Bush administration had initially resisted releasing the document but changed course after being pressured to declassify the report by Republicans, including Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and by the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.

At a news conference on Tuesday where he announced the release of portions of the document, President Bush suggested forcefully that news reports in the past two days about the document had been based on politically motivated leaks.

“You know, to suggest that if we weren’t in Iraq we would see a rosier scenario, with fewer extremists joining the radical movement, requires us to ignore 20 years of experience,” Mr. Bush said. He added: “My judgment is: The only way to protect this country is to stay on the offense.”

The intelligence estimate says that if jihadists who leave Iraq perceive themselves, or are perceived by others, to have failed, fewer fighters will be inspired to keep fighting.

Democrats seized on the document’s conclusions as proof that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake.

“The war in Iraq has made us less safe,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee. Mr. Rockefeller said the judgments contained in the intelligence estimate “make it clear that the intelligence community — all 16 agencies — believe the war in Iraq has fueled terrorism.”

The estimate was the first formal appraisal of the terrorism threat by American intelligence agencies since the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. The public release of any portion of such a document is highly unusual. The White House declassified fewer than 4 pages of what officials described as a document of more than 30 pages, saying that to release more of it would endanger intelligence sources and methods.

The release of the findings added fuel to an intense political debate about the administration’s record in combating terrorism. Mr. Bush used the news conference to reassert his view that the Iraq war was not to blame for the growth of Islamic radicalism.

He also attributed the disclosure of some of the assessment findings to what he said were government officials leaking classified information to “create confusion in the minds of the American people” weeks before an important Congressional election.

The first article on the findings was published Sunday in The New York Times after more than five weeks of reporting. More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for the article, including employees of several government agencies and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration.

Democrats also criticized the White House for only declassifying part of the report, and the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, tried and failed to persuade Republicans to agree to a vote that would have shut the doors of the House of Representatives to allow members to read the entire classified report.

Officials who have read the entire document said the still-classified portion contained a more detailed analysis of the impact of the Iraq war on the global jihad movement. Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said that what the White House released Tuesday was broadly consistent with the classified portion of the report.

National intelligence estimates are the most authoritative documents that American intelligence agencies produce on a specific national security issue. They represent the consensus view of the 16 intelligence agencies in government, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence.

The release on Tuesday of portions of the document was the second time that the Bush administration had come under political pressure to declassify a national intelligence estimate.

In July 2003, the White House released the principal judgments of an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs in an attempt to address a furor over the origins of President Bush’s statement, made in a State of the Union address, that Saddam Hussein had been trying to buy nuclear materials in Niger.

In recent months, without disclosing the existence of the intelligence estimate on terrorism, some senior American intelligence officials have given glimpses into its conclusions. During a speech in San Antonio in April, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s deputy, said new jihadist networks and cells were increasingly likely to emerge.

“If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” General Hayden said, using the exact language of the intelligence assessment made public on Tuesday. General Hayden is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

But the intelligence assessment paints a starker picture of the role that the Iraq war is playing in shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders than that presented either in recent White House documents or in speeches by President Bush tied to the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The intelligence report specifically cited the role of the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who led the Iraqi group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, in attracting new recruits for the jihad cause in Iraq, and stated that “should al-Zarqawi continue to evade capture and scale back attacks against Muslims, we assess he could broaden his popular appeal and present a global threat.”

He was killed by American forces in June.

Frances Fragos Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser, suggested to reporters on Tuesday that the killing of Mr. Zarqawi might ultimately help dampen the appeal of jihad in Iraq.

At the same time, the report concludes that the increased role of Iraqis in managing the operations of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia “might lead veteran foreign jihadists to focus their efforts on external operations.”

To be successful in combating the spread of a radical ideology, the assessment states, the United States government “must go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders.”

    Backing Policy, President Issues Terror Estimate, NYT, 27.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/world/middleeast/27intel.html?hp&ex=1159416000&en=e7cb014f7d4fe4e4&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Deal on terror suspects hits new snag

Updated 9/25/2006 10:49 PM ET
USA Today
By Kathy Kiely and David Jackson

WASHINGON — A compromise proposal on trials for terrorism suspects came under fire Monday from a key Republican senator and a former top military lawyer who said the deal would suspend a fundamental legal right against unlawful detention.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he is "strongly opposed" to a provision in proposed legislation that would bar foreigners now held as enemy combatants from challenging their detention in court.

Specter's opposition could complicate efforts to win congressional approval this week for a deal worked out Thursday between the White House and three Republican senators who had balked at President Bush's proposals on interrogations of and military tribunals for terrorism suspects: John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Congress is pressing to complete work on two national security issues before leaving town to campaign for the Nov. 7 elections. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said he expects the House to approve the tribunal legislation Wednesday. Senate debate could begin today.

On the second issue, three Republicans said their concerns about a bill that would establish rules for telephone surveillance of terrorism suspects have been satisfied. Sens. John Sununu of New Hampshire, Larry Craig of Idaho and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said new provisions requiring more court supervision of wiretaps have persuaded them to support the bill. Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Ken Salazar of Colorado said they remain concerned that the wiretaps would violate civil liberties.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino expressed hope that the Republican senators' announcement on the wiretapping deal will spark quick action on "this vital program that helps us detect and prevent terrorist attacks."

The White House, however, is less inclined to satisfy Specter's concerns about the rights of people accused of being terrorists. Perino said the Bush administration opposes giving such suspects "unfettered access" to regular courts to lodge protests. She said all legal complaints should go through the military commissions that would be established under the legislation.

That position drew criticism from a prominent GOP attorney who testified Monday before the Judiciary panel. "Due process should not be crucified on a cross of political expediency," said Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration. He urged lawmakers to slow their pre-election rush to set new rules for CIA interrogations of terror suspects and their trials.

At issue is whether foreigners held on suspicion of terrorist activities should have the right to go before a judge to challenge the legality of their detention process known as habeas corpus.

John Hutson, a retired rear admiral in the judge advocate general corps, accused the Bush administration of seeking to suspend habeas corpus to "cover up" mistakes at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where detainees are now held.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said that a "significant percentage" of Guantanamo prisoners have been mistakenly imprisoned and that depriving them of court challenges is "un-American."

Pentagon spokesman J.D. Gordon said about 320 detainees have been released from Guantanamo and 130 others have been approved for transfer.

Contributing: Kevin Johnson

    Deal on terror suspects hits new snag, UT, 25.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-25-congress-terrorism_x.htm

Editorial

Chemical Plants, Still Unprotected

September 25, 2006
The New York Times

Congress still has done nothing to protect Americans from a terrorist attack on chemical plants. Republican leaders want to give the impression that that has changed. But voters should not fall for the spin. If the leadership goes through with the strategy it seems to have adopted last week to secure these highly vulnerable targets, national security will be the loser.

The federal government is spending extraordinary amounts of money and time protecting air travel from terrorist attacks. But Congress has not yet passed a law to secure the nation’s chemical plants, even though an attack on just one plant could kill or injure as many as 100,000 people. The sticking point has been the chemical industry, a heavy contributor to political campaigns, which does not want to pay the cost of reasonable safety measures.

The Senate and the House spent many months carefully developing bipartisan chemical plant security bills. Both measures were far too weak, but they would have finally imposed real safety requirements on the chemical industry. The Republican leadership in Congress blocked both bills from moving forward. Instead, whatever gets done about chemical plant security will apparently be decided behind closed doors, and inserted as a rider to a Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill.

It is outrageous that something as important as chemical plant security is being decided in a back-room deal. It is regrettable that Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, the chairwoman of the committee that produced the Senate bill, does not carry enough influence with her own party’s leadership to get a strong chemical plant security bill passed. The deal itself, the likely details of which have emerged in recent days, is a near-complete cave-in to industry, and yet more proof that when it comes to a choice between homeland security and the desires of corporate America, the Republican leadership always goes with big business.

Any federal chemical plant law should make it clear that states have the right to impose stricter requirements to protect their citizens from harm. The Senate and House bills said this, but the rider apparently will not. A reasonable law would make it clear that the secretary of homeland security can order chemical plants to adopt specific safety measures, like replacing highly dangerous chemicals with ones that pose less of a danger to people in the surrounding area. The House bill did this, but the rider apparently will not give the secretary this basic power.

It is likely that the backroom deal will also exempt water treatment and drinking water facilities from regulation, meaning that millions of Americans could needlessly be put at risk of an attack on a chlorine tank, and that it will make the rules about when and how chemical plants must submit safety plans hopelessly vague.

It is not too late to abandon this bad deal and pass a strong law. In a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, just 25 percent of those asked approved of the job Congress is doing. Its handling of the chemical plant security issue gives a good indication why.

    Chemical Plants, Still Unprotected, NYT, 25.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/opinion/25mon1.html

U.S. to relax liquid ban on airliners

Updated 9/25/2006 1:40 PM ET
By USA TODAY staff

ARLINGTON, Va. — The federal government will allow many liquids and gels back onto airliners, partially lifting a ban instituted last month after a plot to bomb jets flying into the United States was foiled, federal officials announced this morning.

"We now know enough to say that a total ban is no longer needed from a security point of view," said Kip Hawley, head of the Transportation Security Administration, at a news conference this morning at Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C. He said two changes would go into effect Tuesday on liquids or gels:

•Most liquids and gels, including toiletries such as toothpaste, gel deodorants and lip gloss, will be allowed in carry-on luggage — if the individual containers are 3 ounces or less and if all of the items will fit into a single, quart-size clear plastic bag.

•Liquids purchased in the so-called "sterile area" — the area of the airport inside the security checkpoint — can be brought onto aircraft.

The tougher airport screening procedures were put in place in August after British police broke up a terrorist plot to assemble and detonate bombs using liquid explosives on airliners crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Britain to the U.S.

At the time, the Homeland Security Department briefly raised the threat level to "red," the highest level, for flights bound to the United States from Britain. All other flights were at "orange" and will remain at orange, the second-highest level, and will not change "any time in the near future," Deputy Homeland Security Director Michael Jackson said at the news conference.

The TSA made the change after conducting, with the assistance of the FBI and other government experts, "extensive explosives testing to get a better understanding of this specific threat," according to a statement on the TSA's website.

The agency also will be changing some of its security members at airports, including additional random screenings and canine patrols and new air cargo security efforts, according to a TSA news release.

Travelers reacted positively. "For two-day trips, this will be easier, but I put safety over convenience," said Martin Allred, a commercial photographer from New Orleans who flew to Denver this morning. Allred said he had been forced to check his bags repeatedly since the ban went into effect.

Before boarding a flight this morning form Charlotte to Denver, Janella D'Amore was forced to throw away a cup of Starbucks coffee. "I have really dry hands and I couldn't bring my lotion" onto the plane because of the ban, said the 26-year-old Denver resident.

Rev. Kenneth Arnold, 62, of New York, said in Denver that he was troubled by the regular changes in security rules. "The kind of response we saw to this is part of a lack of clear thinking. What people find discouraging is the sense of chaos," he said.

Signs, video screens and announcements at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago still advised travelers this morning that, "effective immediately," liquids and gels are banned from carry-ons.

Roger Rhomberg was drinking a bottle of Snapple diet iced tea outside the security gate in O'Hare's Terminal 1 because he knew he couldn't carry it through the checkpoint.

"It was a slight inconvenience to not be able to take a beverage on the plane, especially when it's a long flight," said Rhomberg, 41, a furniture sales representative from Oak Park, Ill., who was flying to Seattle. Checking and retrieving his bag added 30 minutes to each trip, he said, and he's happy the rules are changing.

"I'm all for erring on the side of caution," he said, "but it seems like once you're past security, having liquids shouldn't be a problem."

Kourtney Hentges, 19, was flying this morning from Chicago to Spokane, Wash., for a wedding. She lives in Avilla, Ind., and said the rules that took effect last month mostly made sense to her.

"The liquids are one thing — if they're a beverage or whatever," she said, "but I don't necessarily think you need lip gloss and hand lotion to fly. I think it's pointless to throw a fit because you can't bring them."

The announcement also brought praise from an airport trade group. "Obviously, there's been a lot of unhappiness," said Richard Marchi, senior adviser to the Airports Council International. "They're right to find a way to ease the burden and maintain a reasonable level of security."

Contributing: Judy Keen in Chicago, Tom Kenworthy in Denver, Randy Lilleston in McLean, Va. and the Associated Press.

    U.S. to relax liquid ban on airliners, UT, 25.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2006-09-25-airlines-liquids_x.htm

Iraq war fuels Islamic radicals: retired U.S. general

Mon Sep 25, 2006 11:32 PM ET
Reuters
By Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The conduct of the Iraq war fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe and created more enemies for the United States, a retired U.S. Army general who served in the conflict said on Monday.

The views of retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste buttressed an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies, which intelligence officials said concluded the war had inspired Islamist extremists and made the militant movement more dangerous.

The Iraq conflict, which began in March 2003, made "America arguably less safe now than it was on September 11, 2001," Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005, told a hearing on the war called by U.S. Senate Democrats.

"If we had seriously laid out and considered the full range of requirements for the war in Iraq, we would likely have taken a different course of action that would have maintained a clear focus on our main effort in Afghanistan, not fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and not created more enemies than there were insurgents," Batiste said.

U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte refuted that charge at a Washington dinner late Monday, denying the Iraq war had increased the terrorism threat to the United States.

"I think we could safely say that we are safer and that the threat to the homeland itself has, if anything, been reduced since 9/11," the U.S. director of national intelligence said in response to intelligence leaks on Iraq and terrorism that have engulfed the Bush administration in recent days.

"We are more vigilant. We are better prepared," he said.

Batiste, who was among retired generals who called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld earlier this year, poured scorn on the war plan along with two other retired military men at a hearing called by Senate Democrats.

HARSH TREATMENT MAKES ENEMIES

They said the Pentagon let the insurgency grow by not sending enough U.S. troops and made enemies by abusing Iraqis.

"Probably 99 percent of those people were guilty of absolutely nothing," Batiste said of Iraqis U.S. forces held at Abu Ghraib prison. "But the way we treated them, the way we abused them, turned them against the effort in Iraq forever."

At one point, retired Marine Corps Col. Thomas Hammes derisively referred to the U.S. Iraq strategy as "Whack-a-mole," a fairground game where the player uses a big hammer to swat mechanical moles as they pop up from holes.

Hammes said the United States needed another 10 years to succeed in Iraq, while retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton said the Army needed another 60,000 troops to finish the job. There are 142,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Hammes helped establish bases for Iraqi armed forces in 2004, while Eaton trained Iraqi military and police in 2003-4.

Most Democrats are pushing for a plan to start withdrawing U.S. forces, but without a deadline to finish the withdrawal.

Democrats have seized upon the National Intelligence Estimate to undermine the image fostered by President George W. Bush and Republicans as the party best able to stop terrorism before November elections in which control of Congress is at stake.

The classified intelligence document said Iraq had become the main recruiting tool for the Islamic militant movement as well as a training ground for guerrillas, according to current and former intelligence officials.

Negroponte told his audience at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars that news accounts exaggerated the NIE's emphasis on Iraq by overlooking a range of other factors including slow progress in economic, social and political reform throughout the Muslim world.

(Additional reporting by David Morgan and Matt Spetalnick)

    Iraq war fuels Islamic radicals: retired U.S. general, R, 25.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-09-26T033158Z_01_N25287562_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-USA.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-2

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

September 24, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one, a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate’s conclusions in public speeches.

“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.

Spy agencies usually produce several national intelligence estimates each year on a variety of subjects. The most controversial of these in recent years was an October 2002 document assessing Iraq’s illicit weapons programs. Several government investigations have discredited that report, and the intelligence community is overhauling how it analyzes data, largely as a result of those investigations.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.

The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”

    Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat, NYT, 24.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/world/middleeast/24terror.html?hp&ex=1159156800&en=22b7a0941b08007f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Attacks spark tougher Guantanamo jail

Posted 9/23/2006 9:47 PM ET
AP
USA Today

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — The military is toughening a new jailhouse for suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants to protect guards after a spate of attacks and evidence that detainees have organized themselves into groups to mount uprisings, officials said.

The hardening comes as U.N. human rights investigators are calling for closing the entire detention center on this remote U.S. base. But with the war against terror groups dragging on, commanders say they have no choice in dealing with men deemed enemy combatants.

Events in recent months have made Guantanamo officials extremely wary:

•Detainees lured guards into a cell in the prison's Camp 4 by staging a suicide attempt in May, then attacked with fan blades and broken pieces of fluorescent light fixtures, the military says. Defense attorneys say the clash was sparked when guards tried to search prisoners' Qurans.

•On June 10, three detainees in Camp 1 committed suicide. Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris, commander of the jail, described it as a coordinated protest action — "not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."

•Guards recently discovered detainees in Camp 1 were dismantling faucets on sinks, removing long, sharp springs and reinforcing them into stabbing weapons, Army Lt. Col. Mike Nicolucci said. Camp 1 has been emptied of detainees while new faucets are installed, with inaccessible springs.

From July 2005 through August, the military recorded 432 assaults by detainees using "cocktails" of bodily excretions thrown at guards, 227 physical assaults and 99 instances of inciting or participating in disturbances or riots.

"What we have come to assess is these detainees — these terrorists — are still fighting a battle," said Army Brig. Gen. Edward A. Leacock, deputy commander of the detention operation. "They're not on the battlefield but ... they're still continuing to fight to this day."

Leacock said hard-core al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees have established a hierarchy of "military guys, religious guys ... the muscle guys, and they all have a role inside the camps."

The goal is to coordinate attacks on guards or organize disturbances, Leacock said in an interview with journalists from The Associated Press and three foreign news organizations Wednesday.

"There are people in the camps — we have identified them — that continue to try to foment problems within the camp," Leacock said. "Our effort is trying to preclude them from developing the plans that will cause ... any kind of uprising."

Leacock did not identify the leaders but insisted extra security measures were called for, even before 14 top detainees, including alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were recently transferred to Guantanamo.

Human rights attorneys contend detainees are treated harshly, including enduring solitary confinement for months. The lawyers also say that among the roughly 460 Guantanamo detainees are men who were swept up by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere who never intended to do the United States harm.

Underscoring the military's toughening stance, a jailhouse in the final stages of construction on a cactus-studded plateau overlooking the Caribbean is being "hardened" into a maximum-security facility. Camp 6 was to have opened in August as a medium-security lockup.

The modifications have pushed back the completion date of the $37.8 million jailhouse, which has a capacity for 220 inmates, to Sept. 30. It will take its first detainees in mid-October, Army Capt. Dan Byer said.

As a medium-security jail, inmates would have had common areas where they could talk and share meals. The eight common areas, with gleaming metal tables and stools, still exist, but will be off limits to detainees under maximum security.

"Anti-jump fencing" is being added to second floor tiers, and a high-tech control room will allow guards to monitor the facility while sitting at computers.

Shower doors have been specially made for the modification. Inmates will be escorted to showers, shut in and escorted back to their cells when they are finished washing. As a medium-security jail, inmates would have been able to walk unescorted across the common area to the showers.

Camp 6 underscores the prison's increasing permanence, standing in stark contrast to the cages that housed detainees when they began arriving in January 2002. Vines now entwine the cages at the abandoned Camp X-ray, standing in knee-deep weeds and grass.

The United States has determined that about 130 of the current detainees are eligible for release or transfer, but the timing will depend on negotiations with their home countries.

"I think what we have here is an orange. What we're doing is squeezing out the juice and what we're left with at the end of the day is pulp that will just stay here," said Navy Capt. Phil Waddingham, lead officer here for the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants.

"We have dangerous men here who should not be allowed back to the battlefield," he said.

Last year, Guantanamo's former warden held talks with "the council," an ad hoc group composed of six detainees aimed at easing prison conditions and conflicts. One of the things they agreed on was having traffic cones placed in hallways during Muslim prayer time, so guards would know not to interrupt praying detainees.

The council has been disbanded amid suspicions it was coordinating resistance efforts. Defense attorneys say some council members have been in solitary confinement for months. Guantanamo officials refuse to discuss individual detainees, but say no one is denied all human contact.

Leacock said that while the prayer cones are still used, the experiment of allowing a detainee negotiating group is definitely over.

"The council of six is no longer in session," he said.

    Attacks spark tougher Guantanamo jail, UT, 23.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-09-23-gitmo-jail_x.htm

News Analysis

Detainee Deal Comes With Contradictions

September 23, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

The compromise reached on Thursday between Congressional Republicans and the White House on the interrogations and trials of terrorism suspects is, legal experts said yesterday, a series of interlocking paradoxes.

It would impose new legal standards that it forbids the courts to enforce.

It would guarantee terrorist masterminds charged with war crimes an array of procedural protections. But it would bar hundreds of minor figures and people who say they are innocent bystanders from access to the courts to challenge their potentially lifelong detentions.

And while there is substantial disagreement about just which harsh interrogation techniques the compromise would prohibit, there is no dispute that it would allow military prosecutors to use statements that had been obtained under harsh techniques that are now banned.

The complex, technical and often ambiguous language in the 94-page measure was a subject of debate, posturing and, perhaps, some wishful thinking yesterday. Each side in the hard-fought negotiations — the White House and the three opposing Republican senators — declared victory.

And human rights groups simultaneously insisted that the new bill should be read to forbid various tough antiterrorism tactics and cautioned that the Bush administration had been given too much power to make the rules.

Some longtime critics of the administration expressed satisfaction with aspects of the compromise. They hailed the three senators who negotiated it, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John McCain of Arizona and John W. Warner of Virginia, as leaders who placed principle over politics in stopping the effort to redefine a provision of the Geneva Conventions knows as Common Article 3.

That provision bars, among other practices, “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”

“The McCain, Graham, Warner trio really fought back and prevented the administration from winning its effort to reinterpret Common Article 3,” said Jennifer Daskal, the United States advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

The proposed law, at least if it is interpreted honestly, Ms. Daskal said, would prohibit interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation, forced standing for long periods and extreme temperatures.

Others said that the negotiations were a sham and that an array of harsh techniques remained available.

“The only thing that was actually accomplished,” said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University and the author of a book on habeas corpus, “was that the politicians got to announce the existence of a compromise. But in fact, most of the critical issues were not resolved.”

Martin S. Lederman, who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown, said the bill continued to allow the harsh treatment of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“They appear to have negotiated a statutory definition of cruel treatment that doesn’t cover the C.I.A. techniques,” Professor Lederman said. “And they purport to foreclose the ability of the courts to determine whether they satisfy the Geneva obligations.”

The bill would allow, and perhaps require, the president to issue regulations concerning “the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions,” and it calls for them to be published in The Federal Register.

Legal experts differed about whether that bargain, trading power for transparency, was sound.

Changes to the procedures for the military commissions established to try terrorism suspects for war crimes also met with mixed responses. Revisions that would let defendants see the evidence against them were welcomed by military defense lawyers and human rights groups.

But some voiced concern that using statements obtained through coercion, even coercion forbidden by the McCain Amendment to Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, would still be allowed in many circumstances. So would be hearsay evidence, as well as a combination of the two.

“You create a situation,” Ms. Daskal said, “in which someone could be convicted based on a second- or third-hand statement from a detainee during an abusive interrogation.”

The issue that most engaged administration critics was the new bill’s aggressive and possibly constitutionally suspect efforts to keep the courts from hearing many detainees’ challenges or claims based on the Geneva Conventions. Though people charged with war crimes would receive trials before military commissions that largely resemble courts-martial and criminal prosecutions, the administration has announced plans to use just a score of those.

About 430 people are being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and there is no guarantee that they will ever be tried. The legislation, unchanged by the compromise, would prohibit habeas corpus challenges to these indefinite detentions.

“You’re creating a system,” Ms. Daskal said, “where Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,” called the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, “will have more rights than the low-level detainee who was sold into U.S. custody by bounty hunters.”

Indeed, the propriety of indefinite detentions at Guantánamo will continue to be decided by combatant status review tribunals, or C.S.R.T.’s. The revised rules for military commissions do nothing to alter the tribunals’ unorthodox procedures.

"The C.S.R.T. is the first time in U.S. history in which the lawfulness of a person’s detention is based on evidence secured by torture that’s not shared with the prisoner, that he has the burden to rebut and without the assistance of counsel,” said Joseph Margulies, author of “Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power” (Simon & Schuster, 2006).

A limited appeal from adverse determinations of these tribunals is permitted, but habeas corpus challenges are not. That means, Professor Freedman said, that “the feature of the bill that does the greatest amount of harm to the American legal system remains untouched.”

The compromise adds a wrinkle, prohibiting the very invocation of the Geneva Conventions in civil cases and habeas proceedings and, depending on how one reads an ambiguous passage, perhaps criminal cases, too.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on Monday on limiting detainees’ habeas challenges. If Congress does not act, Professor Freedman said, the courts may reject the habeas provisions in the law.

“An attempt to throw out of court many hundreds of pending cases that the Supreme Court has twice held have a right to be there,” he said, “is not likely to be met with a favorable reaction in the Supreme Court.”

    Detainee Deal Comes With Contradictions, NYT, 23.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/us/23legal.html?hp&ex=1159070400&en=48fa1d71c13d8435&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Clinton faults Bush for inaction on bin Laden

Sat Sep 23, 2006 1:16 AM ET
Reuters
By Joanne Morrison

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former President Bill Clinton, angrily defending his efforts to capture Osama bin Laden, accused the Bush administration of doing far less to stop the al Qaeda leader before the September 11 attacks.

In a heated interview to be aired on Sunday on "Fox News Sunday," the former Democratic president defended the steps he took after al Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole in 2000 and faulted "right-wingers" for their criticism of his efforts to capture Osama bin Laden.

"But at least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now," Clinton said when asked whether he had failed to fully anticipate bin Laden's danger. "They had eight months to try, they did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed."

The September 11 attacks occurred almost eight months after President George W. Bush succeeded Clinton in January 2001.

"I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him," Clinton said. He added he had drawn up plans to go into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and launch an attack against bin Laden after the attack on the Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden.

"Now if you want to criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this: after the Cole, I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban and launch a full-scale attack search for bin Laden. But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan -- which we got after 9/11," Clinton said.

The former president complained at the time the CIA and FBI refused to certify bin Laden was responsible for the USS Cole attack.

"While I was there, they refused to certify. So that meant I would have had to send a few hundred special forces in helicopters, refuel at night," he said.

Earlier this month, Clinton dismissed as "indisputably wrong" a U.S. television show that suggested her was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal to confront the Islamic militant threat that culminated in the September 11 attacks.

    Clinton faults Bush for inaction on bin Laden, R, 23.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-09-23T051430Z_01_N22174760_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-CLINTON.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

Pakistani Leader Claims U.S. Threat After 9/11

September 22, 2006
By REUTERS
The New York Times

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said yesterday that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks the United States threatened to bomb his country if it did not cooperate with the American campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

General Musharraf, in an interview with “60 Minutes” that will be broadcast Sunday on CBS, said the threat came from Richard L. Armitage, then the deputy secretary of state, and was made to General Musharraf’s intelligence director.

General Musharraf said the intelligence director had told him that Mr. Armitage had said: “ ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.’ ”

General Musharraf added, “I think it was a very rude remark.”

Mr. Armitage was not immediately available to comment. A Bush administration official said there would be no comment on a “reported conversation between Mr. Armitage and a Pakistani official.”

But the official said: “After 9/11, Pakistan made a strategic decision to join the war on terror and has since been a steadfast partner in that effort. Pakistan’s commitment to this important endeavor has not wavered, and our partnership has widened as a result.”

General Musharraf is in Washington and is set to meet with President Bush at the White House today.

The Pakistani leader, whose remarks were released by CBS, said he had reacted to the threat in a responsible way. “One has to think and take actions in the interest of the nation, and that’s what I did,” he said.

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, Pakistan was one of the only countries to maintain ties with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which was harboring the Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden. But within days of the attacks, General Musharraf cut Pakistan’s ties to the Taliban government and cooperated with efforts by the United States to capture Qaeda and Taliban forces that had sought refuge in Pakistan.

The official 9/11 Commission Report, based largely on government data, said United States national security officials focused immediately on securing Pakistani cooperation as they planned a response.

Documents showed that Mr. Armitage met the Pakistani ambassador and the visiting leader of Pakistan’s military intelligence service in Washington on Sept. 13, 2001, and asked Pakistan to take seven steps.

They included ending logistical support for Mr. bin Laden and giving the United States blanket overflight and landing rights for military and intelligence flights.

The report did not discuss any threats the United States might have made, but it said that General Musharraf had agreed to all seven United States requests the same day.

Lisa Curtis, a South Asia specialist with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, said she did not know exactly what Mr. Armitage had said, but was skeptical that he would have threatened to bomb Pakistan.

“The question of any bombing taking place, that question revolves around Afghanistan,” said Ms. Curtis, a former employee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency.

“I would find it difficult to believe he talked about bombing Pakistan specifically because, while I don’t know the exact contents of the conversation, I do know it was a pretty firm ultimatum” as far as taking sides with the United States or supporting the Taliban, she said.

With the Taliban still fighting in Afghanistan and statements by the Afghan government that Pakistan must do more to crack down on militants in its rugged border area, the issue is again a delicate one between Islamabad and Washington.

General Musharraf reacted with displeasure to comments by Mr. Bush on Wednesday that if he had firm intelligence that Mr. bin Laden was in Pakistan, he would issue the order to go into that country.

“We wouldn’t like to allow that,’’ General Musharraf said at a news conference. “We’d like to do that ourselves.”

    Pakistani Leader Claims U.S. Threat After 9/11, NYT, 22.9.2006,http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/world/asia/22pakistan.html?hp&ex=1158984000&en=be3c8cdb86a8e1c4&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Richard Crowson        The Witchita Eagle, Kansas        Cagle        22.9.2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/crowson.asp

Editorial

A Bad Bargain

September 22, 2006
The New York Times

Here is a way to measure how seriously President Bush was willing to compromise on the military tribunals bill: Less than an hour after an agreement was announced yesterday with three leading Republican senators, the White House was already laying a path to wiggle out of its one real concession.

About the only thing that Senators John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham had to show for their defiance was Mr. Bush’s agreement to drop his insistence on allowing prosecutors of suspected terrorists to introduce classified evidence kept secret from the defendant. The White House agreed to abide by the rules of courts-martial, which bar secret evidence. (Although the administration’s supporters continually claim this means giving classified information to terrorists, the rules actually provide for reviewing, editing and summarizing classified material. Evidence that cannot be safely declassified cannot be introduced.)

This is a critical point. As Senator Graham keeps noting, the United States would never stand for any other country’s convicting an American citizen with undisclosed, secret evidence. So it seemed like a significant concession — until Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, briefed reporters yesterday evening. He said that while the White House wants to honor this deal, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Duncan Hunter, still wants to permit secret evidence and should certainly have his say. To accept this spin requires believing that Mr. Hunter, who railroaded Mr. Bush’s original bill through his committee, is going to take any action not blessed by the White House.

On other issues, the three rebel senators achieved only modest improvements on the White House’s original positions. They wanted to bar evidence obtained through coercion. Now, they have agreed to allow it if a judge finds it reliable (which coerced evidence hardly can be) and relevant to guilt or innocence. The way coercion is measured in the bill, even those protections would not apply to the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

The deal does next to nothing to stop the president from reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions. While the White House agreed to a list of “grave breaches” of the conventions that could be prosecuted as war crimes, it stipulated that the president could decide on his own what actions might be a lesser breach of the Geneva Conventions and what interrogation techniques he considered permissible. It’s not clear how much the public will ultimately learn about those decisions. They will be contained in an executive order that is supposed to be made public, but Mr. Hadley reiterated that specific interrogation techniques will remain secret.

Even before the compromises began to emerge, the overall bill prepared by the three senators had fatal flaws. It allows the president to declare any foreigner, anywhere, an “illegal enemy combatant” using a dangerously broad definition, and detain him without any trial. It not only fails to deal with the fact that many of the Guantánamo detainees are not terrorists and will never be charged, but it also chokes off any judicial review.

The Democrats have largely stood silent and allowed the trio of Republicans to do the lifting. It’s time for them to either try to fix this bill or delay it until after the election. The American people expect their leaders to clean up this mess without endangering U.S. troops, eviscerating American standards of justice, or further harming the nation’s severely damaged reputation.

    A Bad Bargain, NYT, 22.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/opinion/22fri1.html

Claim 9/11 Terrorists Were Identified Is Rejected

September 22, 2006
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 — The Defense Department’s inspector general on Thursday dismissed claims by military officers and others who had insisted that a secret Pentagon program identified Mohamed Atta and other terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks before the attacks occurred.

The inspector general’s office, which acts as the Defense Department’s internal watchdog, said in a report that its investigators found no evidence to suggest that the intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified Mr. Atta, the Egyptian-born ringleader of the attacks, or any of the other terrorists before Sept. 11.

“We concluded that prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Able Danger team members did not identify Mohamed Atta or any other 9/11 hijackers,” the report said. “While we interviewed four witnesses who claimed to have seen a chart depicting Mohamed Atta and possibly other terrorists or ‘cells’ involved in 9/11, we determined that their recollections were not accurate.”

The claim that a secret Pentagon data-mining program had known of Mr. Atta and other hijackers before Sept. 11 created a stir when the witnesses’ accounts became public last year, because it suggested that the Defense Department had information that might have helped pre-empt the attacks had it been shared outside of the Pentagon.

The inspector general’s report, prepared at the request of several members of Congress, was criticized Thursday by Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania, who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee and who helped bring information about Able Danger to light.

“I am appalled that the Department of Defense inspector general would expect the American people to actually consider this a full and thorough investigation,” Mr. Weldon said, describing the inspector general as having “cherry-picked testimony from witnesses in an effort to minimize the historical importance of the Able Danger effort.”

The report found that the recollections of most of the witnesses appeared to focus on a “single chart depicting Al Qaeda cells responsible for pre-9/11 terrorist attacks” that was produced in 1999 by a defense contractor, the Orion Scientific Corporation.

While witnesses remembered having seen Mr. Atta’s photograph or name on such a chart, the inspector general said its investigation showed that the Orion chart did not list Mr. Atta or any of the other Sept. 11 terrorists, and that “testimony by witnesses who claimed to have seen such a chart varied significantly from each other.”

The report says that a central witness in the investigation, an active-duty Navy captain who directed the Able Danger program, had changed his account over time, initially telling the inspector general’s office last December that he was “100 percent” certain that he had seen “Mohamed Atta’s image on the chart.”

But in an interview this May, the report said, the officer, Scott J. Phillpott, changed his story, telling investigators that he had been confused and was now “convinced that Atta was not on that chart” but that, instead, the terrorist’s photograph was reproduced on a separate document that he was shown by an intelligence analyst on the Able Danger team in June 2000.

The inspector general’s report suggests that the independent federal commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks was right to dismiss Captain Phillpott’s initial claims about Able Danger.

The Sept. 11 commission acknowledged last year that the Navy captain had come to its investigators in July 2004, only days before it issued its final report.

The inspector general’s report also rejected claims by another of the witnesses, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a veteran military intelligence officer, that he had faced reprisals for having make disclosures about Able Danger, including revocation of his security clearance.

    Claim 9/11 Terrorists Were Identified Is Rejected, NYT, 22.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/us/22able.html?hp&ex=1158984000&en=2c5e57b8ae177f22&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Sept. 11 mastermind to face hearing

Updated 9/20/2006 8:52 PM ET
AP
USA Today

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, is expected to face a hearing here within three months, a military official said Wednesday.

Mohammed and 13 other "high-value" detainees recently transferred from CIA custody to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba will face

Combatant Status Review Tribunals, said Navy Capt. Phil Waddingham, director of the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants.

The 14 new detainees will be invited to appear at the hearings, held in a small room inside a prefab building here, which will determine whether they are combatants, Waddingham told reporters. If Mohammed appears, it would mark the first time he has been seen since he was captured more than three years ago.

Detainees can refuse to appear but the tribunals will be held regardless, Waddingham said.

Army Brig. Gen. Edward A. Leacock, the deputy commander of Guantanamo, said the 14 new detainees are being treated humanely.

"They're all adapting well to their new environment," Leacock told reporters here, adding that they're fed three times a day, have recreational opportunities and have opportunities to pray five times per day.

They have been given materials to write letters, which will be given to the Red Cross for mailing after they have been censored by the military, Leacock said. The Red Cross announced in Geneva Wednesday they will visit the 14 new detainees next week.

Waddingham told reporters visiting Guantanamo that preparations were being made for the Combatant Status Review Tribunal for Mohammed and the other 13 detainees.

"I am expecting the CSRTs to begin in two or three months," he said. Every one of the other roughly 450 detainees at Guantanamo, who began arriving in 2002, have already undergone the tribunals. The tribunals for the 14 new arrivals will almost certainly use the same procedures, Waddingham said.

The tribunals are conducted by a three-member military panel, which examines evidence against a detainee, can speak to witnesses, and determines if the detainee is an enemy combatant and should be held. The detainee is represented by U.S. military counsel.

Those judged not to be enemy combatants are generally transferred out of Guantanamo to their home countries. Those determined to be enemy combatants stay locked up here.

Congress and the Bush administration are currently working on guidelines on how detainees should be interrogated and put on trial. Ten Guantanamo detainees have been charged with crimes but their military trials were put on hold after the Supreme Court last June ruled that the tribunals were illegal, partly because Bush administration had set them up without Congressional approval.

Mohammed is believed to be the No. 3 al-Qaeda leader before he was captured in Pakistan in 2003. Also among the 14 captives whom U.S. President George W. Bush announced have been transferred to Guantanamo is Ramzi Binalshibh, an alleged would-be Sept. 11 hijacker; and Abu Zubaydah, who was believed to be a link between Osama bin Laden and many al-Qaeda cells before he was captured in Pakistan in 2002.

The Combatant Status Review Tribunals will also be held for them, Waddingham said.

    Sept. 11 mastermind to face hearing, UT, 20.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-09-20-9-11-guantanamo_x.htm

Red Cross Expects to Meet With Detainees

September 20, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:11 a.m. ET
The New York Times

GENEVA (AP) -- The Red Cross expects to meet for the first time 14 high-level terrorism suspects who were recently transferred from CIA secret prisons to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, at a visit to the camp starting next week, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Antonella Notari, chief spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said officials will arrive Monday for a scheduled two-week visit to Guantanamo. The ICRC is the only neutral agency with full access to Guantanamo detainees.

''There is no reason to believe that there should be a problem seeing these detainees in the course of the visit,'' she said. ''The priority of the upcoming mission is to talk in private and to register the newly transferred detainees and to provide them the means to communicate with their family members through Red Cross messages.''

Notari said it was still unclear on which day the first meetings with the new detainees would take place. President Bush announced their transfer earlier this month to Guantanamo from clandestine detention centers overseas, clearing the way for ICRC visits.

The prisoners include alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003. The Red Cross' message service, which is subject to U.S. censoring, will be his first contact with the outside world in more than three years.

The ICRC, which began visiting detainees in Guantanamo in 2002, has long been demanding access to secret detention centers, which it concluded must have existed because its delegates never found some of the detainees they knew the United States had arrested.

The Geneva-based humanitarian organization, which visits prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions on warfare, always demands access to all detainees and to the facilities where they are held. It insists on the right to meet one-on-one with prisoners at all of its visits.

''The ICRC expects to be able to talk in private to any detainee -- including the 14 recently transferred to Guantanamo Bay,'' Notari said.

She said the team would be comprised of officials based in Washington and outside the United States.

The officials will facilitate communication between the prisoners and their family members, but Notari said any correspondence using the Red Cross' standard, one-page form are supposed to be personal in nature.

U.S. officials may censor any of the letters, and it is not expected that any information will be transmitted on detainee treatment in CIA prisons.

Bush said no detainees remain in CIA custody, but his admission of the prison program sparked criticism from a number of world leaders. European lawmakers have demanded to know the exact locations of the prisons and critics elsewhere argued the system tacitly approves torture.

Bush said that interrogation techniques used were tough, but did not constitute torture. He also said the secret prison program would continue because it is one of the most vital tools in the war on terror.

ICRC delegates visit detainees in Guantanamo every six weeks on average and are satisfied with the access they have there, Notari said.

    Red Cross Expects to Meet With Detainees, NYT, 20.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Detainees-Red-Cross.html?hp&ex=1158811200&en=c3f2936d02eef22b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Editorial

Rules for the Real World

September 20, 2006
The New York Times
 

The White House has been acting lately as though the struggle over the proper way to handle prisoners is a debate about how tough to get with Osama bin Laden if he’s ever actually caught. This week, we’ve had two powerful reminders of the real issue: when a government puts itself above the law, innocent people are put at risk.

On Monday, Canada issued a scathing report about the story of a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who was abducted by American agents in late 2002 and turned over to Syrian authorities, who obligingly tortured him for 10 months until he signed a transparently false confession. The report said Mr. Arar never had any connection to terrorism. But the United States stonewalled Canada’s investigation, which concluded that the Americans misled Canada about their plans for Mr. Arar. Sending him to Syria, where he would certainly be tortured, was not just immoral and un-American, it was a violation of international law.

In Iraq, American authorities have been holding an Iraqi-born photographer for The Associated Press for five months without charging him with any crime. Military officials say they have evidence that Bilal Hussein has “strong ties” to insurgents, but refuse to show it to Mr. Hussein, his lawyers, The A.P. or even to the Iraqi courts. We don’t know the truth. But we know how to get at it: If the Americans have evidence against Mr. Hussein, they should present it. If he committed a crime, he should be charged. If not, he should be set free.

These two cases illustrate vividly why Congress needs to pass an effective law on the handling of prisoners that not only provides for legal military tribunals to try dangerous men like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to have organized the 9/11 attacks, but also deals with the other men, perhaps hundreds, wrongly imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, and sets rules for the future.

The bills now before Congress don’t meet the test. The White House’s measure endorses the practice of picking up any foreign citizens the United States wants, abusing and even torturing them, and then trying them on the basis of secret evidence. It effectively repudiates the Geneva Conventions, putting American soldiers at risk.

The other bill, written by the only three Republican senators who were willing to defy the White House, preserves the conventions and creates a respectable trial process. But it defines “illegal enemy combatant” so broadly that the administration could apply it to almost any foreigner it chose, including legal United States residents. Both bills choke off judicial review and allow even those acquitted by a military tribunal to be held indefinitely.

Either bill might be acceptable if the United States government were infallible. As it is, they would legalize the sorts of abuses of power that the United States fought against in other countries for most of the 20th century.

    Rules for the Real World, NYT, 20.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/opinion/20wed1.html

Torture Is Not the American Way (6 Letters)

September 20, 2006
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Canadians Fault U.S. for Its Role in Torture Case” (front page, Sept. 19):

I, like many Americans, do not bleed when true terrorists are punished. But when an innocent person, no matter what ethnicity, is tortured, I am outraged.

Protecting the innocent from state-sponsored capture and torture requires that certain safeguards be put in place and used with all suspects.

We should not “waterboard” (to induce a feeling of drowning). We should not wire prisoners to electrical wires. We should not stack nude prisoners in piles. We should not torture prisoners to death. Yet this administration has committed all of these atrocities.

Our government has tortured suspects, assuming without basis that every suspect was guilty.

The Republican senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain and John W. Warner and the Senate Democrats seek to put in place procedures that will first determine guilt or innocence and later punish; rather than punish first and later discover innocence.

That’s the simple difference between the senators’ legislation and the president’s.

Ronald Williams
Charlotte, N.C., Sept. 19, 2006

To the Editor:

So the Bush administration transferred a Canadian citizen to Syria, a country that is on our list of countries that sponsor terrorism, based on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose.

Aside from the morality of this issue, by what logic would the United States transfer someone with important intelligence information to our enemy?

Was it because Syria would use methods that not even the C.I.A. would apply?

I can hardly wait to hear the administration’s explanation for this one.

Johnny R. Willis
Schenectady, N.Y., Sept. 19, 2006

To the Editor:

Paul Krugman (“King of Pain,” column, Sept. 18) points out the pain that many Americans feel when our government violates “our principles and our self-respect.” Granted, the stakes are high in today’s world, but does the end ever justify the means?

President Bush and his administration obviously think so, and this has been true from the beginning. In keeping with the philosophy of pre-emptive strikes, the inhumane interrogation of prisoners should not come as a surprise.

Lonnie L. Richardson
Cheraw, S.C., Sept. 18, 2006

To the Editor:

Re “The Kafka Strategy,” by Bob Herbert (column, Sept. 18), and Paul Krugman’s Sept. 18 column:

If we become our enemies, how can we defeat them without defeating ourselves?

Chris Kelley
San Mateo, Calif., Sept. 18, 2006

To the Editor:

Re “Bush Untethered” (editorial, Sept. 17):

Today, on the sidewalk of my town, I overheard two gruff veterans of the “greatest generation” discussing torture.

“I don’t want to treat ’em with kid gloves,” one told his friend. “But we ain’t the Japanese in World War II. I think we’re a little more civilized than that.”

America defeated Hitler without sinking to his level. What makes anyone think that we can’t defeat a band of terrorists the same American way?

Elizabeth Searle
Arlington, Mass., Sept. 18, 2006

To the Editor:

You use the term “extreme interrogation techniques” in your Sept. 18 front-page “Inside” box, referring to an article inside the paper. Didn’t this used to be called “torture,” or is this the new euphemism?

Melvin Hausner
New York, Sept. 18, 2006

    Torture Is Not the American Way (6 Letters), NYT, 20.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/opinion/l20torture.html

Prospective Employees Say No to Freedom Tower

September 19, 2006
The New York Times
By PATRICK McGEEHAN

City and state officials are celebrating their commitment to fill space in the Freedom Tower. But there seems to be less cheering — and considerable distress — among people who might actually have to report for work every day in the symbolic replacement for the destroyed World Trade Center.

Employees of state and federal agencies that may be among the first occupants of the Freedom Tower said yesterday that for many of them, horrible memories of Sept. 11 were still too fresh to consider a return to ground zero. Their emotional responses indicated that engineering a government-led reoccupation of the site may be more difficult than public officials recognize.

“I will not be able to work there,” said Ely Yulman, a tax auditor for the New York State Departmentportationion and Finance, which lost 40 employees in the World Trade Center. Mr. Yulman said he survived the attack only because he was out of his office in the south tower on the morning of Sept. 11.

“I have strong feelings of personal sorrow,” Mr. Yulman said. “The people who were there on Sept. 11, 100 percent they will oppose this idea.”

Alicia Ferrer, a tax auditor who lives in Chelsea, said she escaped that day because she decided to run an errand before reporting to her office on the 87th floor of the south tower. Her memories of the apocalyptic scene on the streets of Lower Manhattan — the falling bodies, abandoned vehicles and scattered shoes — are still quite vivid, she said as she arrived at a Sept. 11 memorial service for union members last evening.

“If my life depended on it, I couldn’t go there,” Ms. Ferrer said. “It would be beyond imaginable to put someone back there. If you had to go back there every day where you know their souls and spirits have to be, I don’t know. I couldn’t do it every single day.”

Even workers who had never set foot inside the trade center expressed fears of being ordered to relocate to the Freedom Tower. Several described the building, with its proposed spire reaching to 1,776 feet, as a likely target of future terrorism.

Anthony R. Coscia, the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site and is building the Freedom Tower, has been saying for months that the agency’s employees will return to ground zero but not to the Freedom Tower. He believes that asking them to work there, after they lost 84 colleagues in the trade center, “would simply carry too much emotional weight,” said Steve Sigmund, a spokesman for Mr. Coscia.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, when asked yesterday if Mr. Coscia’s sentiments would hamper efforts to fill the building, said, “Well, it doesn’t help.” The mayor said the tower would be “a wonderful building” and added that “everybody can make their own decisions, and if one person doesn’t want to work there that doesn’t mean other people don’t want to work there.”

The Port Authority, whose offices have been scattered in buildings north of Union Square, has committed to filling 600,000 square feet of another building proposed at the site, known as Tower 4.

The governors of New York and New Jersey and Mayor Bloomberg announced on Sunday that state and federal agencies would occupy 1 million of the 2.6 million square feet in the Freedom Tower. They did not say which agencies would be among the tenants, other than Customs and Border Protection, part of the federal Department of Homeland Security.

The announcement was intended to signal that the project was viable but it alarmed some public employees that they might be ordered to move to the new building. Officials of unions that represent them also said they were opposed to any decisions being made five years before the Freedom Tower is scheduled to open.

“I think it’s too early right now to even talk to people about forcing them into this facility,” said Ken Brynien, a psychologist who is president of the New York State Public Employees Federation. “Forcing traumatized people back into the place where they got their trauma is not healthy.”

About 300 members of the Public Employees Federation worked in the trade center on Sept. 11, said Darcy Wells, a spokeswoman for the union in Albany. Of the 34 who died that day, 31 worked for the Department of Taxation and Finance and 3 for the State Department of Transportation, she said.

“Even after five years, we’re still trying to get over it,” said Juliette Bergman, 58, of Fort Lee, N.J., who is an analyst for the State Department of Transportation. “I would not work in the Freedom Tower. I would feel terrible working there. It would be a reminder.”

A woman who has worked for the finance department for just three months said she, too, would be reluctant to move downtown if asked.

“I will go there if necessary, but I might look for another job,” she said, declining to provide her name for publication. “I’d feel better on a lower floor.”

But employees of some other government agencies said they would not balk at moving to the Freedom Tower. A few even said they wanted to be among the first to repopulate the site.

“To tell you the truth, I would be honored,” said Ivelisse Martinez, 43, a federal immigration officer. “It’s hallowed ground and I can honor the people that died by showing I’m not afraid of these terrorists and what they’re doing.”

Others said that the need to hold on to their jobs would probably help people overcome their opposition to moving to the tower.

“We’ll go where we have to, but there will be people who won’t want to go,” said Donna Peterson, 60, who has worked for the State Department of Labor for 36 years. “I’ll never forget what happened there, but you’ve got to go on with your life. You go where you have to go for your job.”

Ning Li, a state tax auditor who lives in Gravesend, Brooklyn, said that the emotional opposition to a return might dissipate over the years it takes to build the tower, but that he would prefer not to battle those demons up close.

“I’d rather stay in a different spot,” said Mr. Li, 51. “That place has a lot of spirits and a lot of latent memories. If possible, personally, I’d rather stay away.”

Kate Hammer and Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

    Prospective Employees Say No to Freedom Tower, NYT, 19.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/nyregion/19freedom.html

Canadians Fault U.S. for Its Role in Torture Case

September 19, 2006
The New York Times
By IAN AUSTEN

OTTAWA, Sept. 18 — A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

“I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada,” Justice Dennis R. O’Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

The report’s findings could reverberate heavily through the leadership of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which handled the initial intelligence on Mr. Arar that led security officials in both Canada and the United States to assume he was a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist.

The report’s criticisms and recommendations are aimed primarily at Canada’s own government and activities, rather than the United States government, which refused to cooperate in the inquiry.

But its conclusions about a case that had emerged as one of the most infamous examples of rendition — the transfer of terrorism suspects to other nations for interrogation — draw new attention to the Bush administration’s handling of detainees. And it comes as the White House and Congress are contesting legislation that would set standards for the treatment and interrogation of prisoners.

“The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar’s case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion,” Justice O’Connor wrote in a three-volume report, not all of which was made public. “They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar’s case in a less than forthcoming manner.”

A spokesman for the United States Justice Department, Charles Miller, and a White House spokesman traveling with President Bush in New York said officials had not seen the report and could not comment.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Canada planned to act on the report but offered no details. “Probably in the few weeks to come we’ll be able to give you more details on that,’’ he told reporters.

The Syrian-born Mr. Arar was seized on Sept. 26, 2002, after he landed at Kennedy Airport in New York on his way home from a holiday in Tunisia. On Oct. 8, he was flown to Jordan in an American government plane and taken overland to Syria, where he says he was held for 10 months in a tiny cell and beaten repeatedly with a metal cable. He was freed in October 2003, after Syrian officials concluded that he had no connection to terrorism and returned him to Canada.

Mr. Arar’s case attracted considerable attention in Canada, where critics viewed it as an example of the excesses of the campaign against terror that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. The practice of rendition has caused an outcry from human rights organizations as “outsourcing torture,” because suspects often have been taken to countries where brutal treatment of prisoners is routine.

The commission supports that view, describing a Mounted Police force that was ill-prepared to assume the intelligence duties assigned to it after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Arar, speaking at a news conference, praised the findings. “Today Justice O’Connor has cleared my name and restored my reputation,” he said. “I call on the government of Canada to accept the findings of this report and hold these people responsible.”

His lawyer, Marlys Edwardh, said the report affirmed that Mr. Arar, who has been unemployed since his return to Canada, was deported and tortured because of “a breathtakingly incompetent investigation.”

The commission found that Mr. Arar first came to police attention on Oct. 12, 2001, when he met with Abdullah Almalki, a man already under surveillance by a newly established Mounted Police intelligence unit known as Project A-O Canada. Mr. Arar has said in interviews that the meeting at Mango’s Cafe in Ottawa, and a subsequent 20-minute conversation outside the restaurant, was mostly about finding inexpensive ink jet printer cartridges.

The meeting set off a chain of actions by the police. Investigators obtained a copy of Mr. Arar’s rental lease. After finding Mr. Almalki listed as an emergency contact, they stepped up their investigation of Mr. Arar. At the end of that month, the police asked customs officials to include Mr. Arar and his wife on a “terrorist lookout” list, which would subject them to more intensive question when re-entering Canada.

However, the commission found that the designation should have only been applied to people who are members or associates of terrorist networks. Neither the police nor customs had any such evidence of that concerning Mr. Arar or his wife, an economist.

From there, the Mounted Police asked that the couple be included in a database that alerts United States border officers to suspect individuals. The police described Mr. Arar and his wife as, the report said, “Islamic extremists suspected of being linked to the al Qaeda movement.”

The commission said that all who testified before it accepted that the description was false.

According to the inquiry’s finding, the Mounted Police gave the F.B.I. and other American authorities material from Project A-O Canada, which included suggestions that Mr. Arar had visited Washington around Sept. 11 and had refused to cooperate with the Canadian police. The handover of the data violated the force’s own guidelines, but was justified on the basis that such rules no longer applied after 2001.

In July 2002, the Mounted Police learned that Mr. Arar and his family were in Tunisia, and incorrectly concluded that they had left Canada permanently.

On Sept. 26, 2002, the F.B.I. called Project A-O and told the Canadian police that Mr. Arar was scheduled to arrive in about one hour from Zurich. The F.B.I. also said it planned to question Mr. Arar and then send him back to Switzerland. Responding to a fax from the F.B.I., the Mounted Police provided the American investigators with a list of questions for Mr. Arar. Like the other information, it included many false claims about Mr. Arar, the commission found.

The Canadian police “had no idea of what would eventually transpire,’’ the commission said. “It did not occur to them that the American authorities were contemplating sending Mr. Arar to Syria.”

While the F.B.I. and the Mounted Police kept up their communications about Mr. Arar, Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs was not told about his detention for almost three days. Its officials, acting on calls from worried relatives, had been trying to find him. Similarly, American officials denied Mr. Arar’s requests to speak with the Canadian Consulate in New York, a violation of international agreements.

Evidence presented to the commission, said Paul J. J. Cavalluzzo, its lead counsel, showed that the F.B.I. continued to keep its Canadian counterparts in the dark even while an American jet was carrying Mr. Arar to Jordan. The panel found that American officials “believed — quite correctly — that, if informed, the Canadians would have serious concerns about the plan to remove Mr. Arar to Syria.”

Mr. Arar arrived in Syria on Oct. 9, 2002, and was imprisoned there until Oct. 5, 2003. It took Canadian officials, however, until Oct. 21 to locate him in Syria. The commission concludes that Syrian officials at first denied knowing Mr. Arar’s whereabouts to hide the fact that he was being tortured. It says that, among other things, he was beaten with a shredded electrical cable until he was disoriented.

American officials have not discussed the case publicly. But in an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home.

Mr. Arar said he appealed a recent decision by a federal judge in New York dismissing the suit he brought against the United States. The report recommends that the Canadian government, which is also being sued by Mr. Arar, offer him compensation and possibly a job.

Mr. Arar recently moved to Kamloops, British Columbia, where his wife found a teaching position.

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.

    Canadians Fault U.S. for Its Role in Torture Case, NYT, 19.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/world/americas/19canada.html?hp&ex=1158724800&en=19cef65f49917a76&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Experts Say Bush’s Goal in Terrorism Bill Is Latitude for Interrogators’ Methods

September 19, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 — In his showdown with rebellious Senate Republicans over bills to bring terrorism suspects to trial, President Bush has repeatedly called for clarity in the rules for what he calls “alternative interrogation techniques” used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

What Mr. Bush really wants, legal experts on both sides of the debate say, is latitude so the interrogators can use methods that the military is barred from using under a recently issued Army field manual.

Despite his call for clarity, the president has been vague in talking about the alternatives, which have in the past included sleep deprivation, playing ear-splittingly loud music and waterboarding, which induces a feeling of drowning.

“They can’t come out and say we want more leeway to rough these people up,” said John Radsan, who was assistant general counsel for the intelligence agency from 2002 to 2004 and now teaches at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. “That doesn’t sell. So he says we need clarity. It doesn’t play well to say we need to deprive them of sleep and play loud music.”

On Monday, the Bush administration appeared to make the first stab at compromise, telling senators, including John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and who is leading the opposition to the president’s plan, to expect a counterproposal.

White House officials would not release details of the administration’s new proposal, except to say late Monday night that it involved the part of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3.

At the same time, the House decided to postpone its vote on Mr. Bush’s proposal until at least next week. That was a setback for the White House, which had been counting on the House to pass the measure this week, a step that it hoped would prod the Senate into action before lawmakers break at the end of the month for the midterm elections.

The Supreme Court ruled in June that Common Article 3, which legal experts agree would prohibit the intelligence agency’s techniques, applies to the treatment of terrorism suspects.

So the White House wants Congress to pass measures redefining Article 3 to say it bars “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” language that the administration borrowed from a bill written by Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was tortured while a prisoner in the Vietnam War.

“The president is advocating a standard that prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, a standard based on years of U.S. Court decisions interpreting the constitutional prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment that protect U.S. citizens in custody,” Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said Monday in a speech at a conference on citizenship. “Seeking this clarity is important to our efforts to continue gathering information about our enemies.”

Some Senate Republicans, including Mr. Warner and Mr. McCain, are pushing back. They say redefining Article 3 would send a message that the United States was not serious about living up to the Geneva Conventions, a view shared by former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and are pressing an alternative bill.

Part of the dispute revolves around protection for military and intelligence agency interrogators. The White House says Article 3 is too vague and leaves interrogators open to being sued.

The senators do not disagree. But they propose to clarify Article 3 by amending the War Crimes Act to specify exactly what abuses of the article constitute war crimes.

Jeffrey H. Smith, a general counsel for the intelligence agency under President Bill Clinton, said that the language in the Senate bill would not bar the controversial techniques, but that the White House bill appeared to give the agency greater latitude.

“The senators seem to be prepared to allow some techniques, but not nearly as many as the administration wants,” Mr. Smith said.

Since his speech nearly two weeks ago announcing that he was transferring 14 prominent terrorism suspects, including the reported mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Bush has said the previously secret program under which they were interrogated was invaluable in thwarting terrorism plots.

The president has said he will have no choice but to stop the program if Congress does not pass his bill.

The legislation does not explicitly state what the permissible techniques are, and the president and White House officials, including Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the intelligence agency, have steadfastly refused to discuss them.

Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, has been repeatedly asked about waterboarding, for example, and whether Mr. Bush has ruled it out.

“I’m not going to go into what’s ruled in and ruled out,” Mr. Snow told reporters last week, saying to do so would tip the interrogators’ hand with suspects.

In a setback for the White House, the top uniformed lawyer for the Army has now told Mr. Warner that he prefers the Senate approach. The lawyer, Maj. Gen. Scott C. Black, joined military lawyers last week in a letter saying he did not object to the administration bill.

But on Friday, General Black sent a second letter to Mr. Warner in which he said that the Senate bill was preferable and that “further redefinition of Common Article 3 is unnecessary and could be seen as a weakening of our treaty obligations.”

Whether the two sides can reach an agreement is unclear. Mr. Warner and another rebelling Republican senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, spoke to reporters late Monday, saying the two sides were exchanging, in Mr. Warner’s words, “ideas and words here and there.”

Mr. Graham said the real work toward compromise started on Sunday, after appearances on Sunday by senators and administration officials on televised news and interview programs.

Mr. Graham said, “Everybody felt like what we were telling each other is: ‘We share the same goals. We have a different way of achieving them. Let’s see if we can write the legislation to meet our goals.’ ”

Kate Zernike contributed reporting.

    Experts Say Bush’s Goal in Terrorism Bill Is Latitude for Interrogators’ Methods, NYT, 19.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/washington/19interrogate.html

Bid to Stockpile Bioterror Drugs Stymied by Setbacks

September 18, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 — The last of the anthrax-laced letters was still making its way through the mail in late 2001 when top Bush administration officials reached an obvious conclusion: the nation desperately needed to expand its medical stockpile to prepare for another biological attack.

The result was Project BioShield, a $5.6 billion effort to exploit the country’s top medical and scientific brains and fill an emergency medical cabinet with new drugs and vaccines for a host of threats. “We will rally the great promise of American science and innovation to confront the greatest danger of our time,” President Bush said in starting the program.

But the project, critics say, has largely failed to deliver.

So far, only a small fraction of the anticipated remedies are available. Drug companies have waited months, if not years, for government agencies to decide which treatments they want and in what quantities. Unable to attract large pharmaceutical corporations to join the endeavor, the government is instead relying on small start-up companies that often have no proven track record.

The troubles have been most acute with the highest priority of all: a $900 million push to add a new anthrax vaccine to the stockpile. What had begun as an effort to test and manufacture a safer, faster-acting vaccine has turned into an ugly battle between two biotech businesses.

Each has hired Washington lobbyists to attack its rival’s product and try to win over lawmakers and administration officials. Delivery of the new vaccine is far behind schedule, and a dispute between the Department of Health and Human Services and VaxGen, the company chosen to make the vaccine, could even end the deal. The only doses that have been added to the stockpile are of a decades-old vaccine that has generated complaints of serious side effects.

Health department officials acknowledge some problems but say they have made progress. “Medical discovery is an unpredictable process,” said Bill Hall, a spokesman. “It is the nature of science.”

But some companies on the sidelines say the experience with the anthrax vaccine is exactly why they do not want to do business with Washington. Once optimistic about the president’s promise, many biotech companies and public health experts are now discouraged.

“The inept implementation of the program has led the best brains and the best scientists to give up, to look elsewhere or devote their resources to medical initiatives that are not focused on biodefense,” said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland.

Even some former department officials who helped create BioShield are dismayed.

“I find this all rather repugnant,” said D. A. Henderson, a former top bioterrorism official. “You have people here who, in the face of a problem of serious import, are using every tactic they can to line their own pockets.” Risk and Disappointment

From the start, officials in Washington knew that Project BioShield would be a risky venture — for the government, the companies involved and even ordinary Americans, who might be asked to take relatively untested treatments in an emergency.

Officials hoped $5.6 billion in federal money would entice companies to develop new drugs and vaccines for anthrax, smallpox, botulism, Ebola and other deadly diseases.

Because of the perceived urgency of the threat, the project suspends some traditional standards. It allows new vaccines or drugs to be used in emergencies before completing the lengthy Food and Drug Administration approval process. Full testing on humans is also not required because it is too dangerous, even though that means no one will know with certainty whether the vaccines will work until used in a crisis.

For their part, the companies have to take all the risks of developing and manufacturing new products; they get paid only upon delivery.

At the top of the government’s threat list was anthrax, which killed five people, created panic and disrupted the mail system after letters filled with the powder were sent through the mail. No one has been charged in the attacks, which affected places including a tabloid publication in Florida, a New York television network and several lawmakers’ offices on Capitol Hill.

“The top three threats, in fact, are anthrax, anthrax, anthrax,” Dr. Gerald Parker, a senior health agency official, said in an interview. If properly dispersed through the air, just a few hundred pounds of anthrax powder could endanger tens of thousands of people.

After the letter attacks, the health agency bought enough antibiotics for 41 million Americans, but the recommended treatment augments those drugs with a vaccine. The government already had an anthrax vaccine to inoculate military personnel, but it involved six shots over 18 months, an unusually long course of treatment. While the F.D.A. says it is safe and effective, it can have nasty side effects. There have been reports among military personnel of six deaths and serious complications, including lymphoma and multiple sclerosis. The military stopped mandatory vaccinations in 2004 after some soldiers balked and filed lawsuits.

“It is 1950’s technology,” said Dr. Philip K. Russell, the former acting director of the office that started Project BioShield. “We don’t drive Model T Fords anymore.”

The first disappointment with the new anthrax vaccine occurred in early 2004 when bids to test and manufacture it came in. None were from big pharmaceutical companies; they considered the effort unappealing because the potential market was relatively small and profits limited. They were also concerned about liability if someone became ill or died after being inoculated. Project BioShield did not offer immunity from lawsuits.

That left a handful of companies in the running, relatively small outfits with limited experience. VaxGen, for example, had never taken a drug to market. Its first major product, an AIDS vaccine, flopped in 2003. The company also had financial troubles; it was barred from Nasdaq in 2004 after managers uncovered accounting errors.

The situation was hardly ideal, federal health officials acknowledged.

“We are going to be working consistently with these smaller firms, and it’s going to require an enormous amount of government effort to get this product licensed,” said Stewart Simonson, then an assistant health secretary overseeing the anthrax vaccine effort.

VaxGen argues that a company does not have to be large to successfully produce a vaccine. “We’ve repeatedly demonstrated that we have the capacity, expertise and infrastructure to meet the government’s needs,” said Lance Ignon, a vice president of the company, which is based in Brisbane, Calif.

Instead of hedging its bets by dividing the work among several vendors, Health and Human Services awarded the entire $887 million order to VaxGen. It was to produce 75 million doses, enough to inoculate 25 million Americans.

That decision fed doubts about Project BioShield in Congress and drew loud complaints that would grow into sharp opposition from Emergent BioSolutions, the maker of the old vaccine, which is based in Gaithersburg, Md.

Then known as BioPort and based in Lansing, Mich., the company did not submit a bid for the new vaccine. Instead, it had been trying for months to persuade the federal government to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of the existing vaccine, its only major product. When executives learned that one competitor was getting all the work, they knew the company’s future was in peril.

Soon, though, they found an important weapon for a campaign to recapture business.

Competition Heats Up

VaxGen’s vaccine was based on a modified version of the old one; Army scientists had genetically re-engineered it in hopes of making it safer and faster, with three shots instead of six. But VaxGen tests in early 2005 showed that an ingredient added to the vaccine caused it to decompose. It would not survive long in the emergency stockpile.

VaxGen officials played down the setback, which delayed delivery to 2007 from 2006. “We are being called on to develop a vaccine in roughly half the time it normally takes,” Mr. Ignon said. “When you do that, you have to accept the fact that there are going to be some unexpected turns.”

But Emergent officials capitalized on VaxGen’s stumble. They had already gotten health agency officials to agree to buy five million doses of their vaccine to add to the stockpile. Now they began pushing for a much larger deal, possibly replacing VaxGen’s vaccine altogether, company documents show.

To lead its lobbying effort, which has cost more than $1 million since 2005, Emergent turned to Jerome M. Hauer, a top official at the health department until late 2003. While at the agency, he supported the push for a new vaccine. Now he was trying to persuade Congress and his former employer to buy the old vaccine.

Explaining his shift, Mr. Hauer said VaxGen’s problems convinced him that Emergent’s vaccine was the best choice. In retrospect, he said, “The advice we were given was wrong.”

Emergent hired nearly a dozen other lobbyists, some of whom had similarly useful connections. They included John M. Clerici, a lawyer who had helped shape the BioShield legislation; John Hishta, former chief of staff to Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia; and Allen Shofe, a former tobacco industry lobbyist.

The lobbyists argued that quality control problems at Emergent’s plant in Michigan had been corrected and that reports of serious side effects from the vaccine were unfounded. But mostly, they tried to undermine confidence in VaxGen.

In a series of meetings with lawmakers and administration officials, they attacked their rival. “VaxGen has a history of failure and irregularities,” their briefing books said. “VaxGen has never produced an F.D.A.-approved product,” and its “vaccine is based on unproven technology,” leaving “the health and protection of the American public on a company with a history of scientific failure and financial scandal.”

The lobbyists also criticized the officials involved in administering BioShield. In speeches and news interviews, Mr. Hauer questioned the credentials of Mr. Simonson, the health department official in charge of the program, and once called him the “Mike Brown of H.H.S.,” a reference to the disgraced former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. (Mr. Simonson, who resigned this year, had worked as an Amtrak lawyer and as legal counsel to Gov. Tommy G. Thompson of Wisconsin, who was later head of the federal health department.)

The lobbyists also charged that Dr. Russell, who helped start Project BioShield, had a conflict of interest. They said he had helped develop the vaccine as former director of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and then been instrumental in awarding the manufacturing contract after moving to the health department. (Dr. Russell says he retired from the Army before it began research on the VaxGen vaccine.)

Fearful of losing the public relations battle, VaxGen increased its own lobbying effort. It hired Robert Housman, who had worked with Mr. Hauer to help Emergent open its anti-VaxGen campaign and then switched sides. But VaxGen, which spent $200,000 on lobbying last year, was outmanned by Emergent and put on the defensive.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican and focus of Emergent’s lobbying, sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt that closely echoed criticisms of VaxGen that had first been raised in Emergent documents.

Representative Davis scheduled a hearing last summer at which Emergent’s chief executive was invited to testify, but no one was invited from VaxGen. Mr. Davis said Mr. Hishta, his former aide, apparently did contact his office about Emergent. But he said he was not sure why only Emergent was asked to testify.

Under pressure from Congress, the health agency agreed in May to double its order of Emergent’s vaccine to 10 million doses, worth $243 million. The next day, health officials demanded what VaxGen says are additional safety and efficacy tests that will further delay delivery by a year or two. Threatening to sue, VaxGen is seeking upfront payments from the health department or other concessions. If no agreement is reached, company officials say, the entire deal could collapse.

“We understand this program is new and changes will have to be made,” said Piers Whitehead, a vice president of VaxGen. “But in our case, the goalposts were moved much farther than they needed to be.”

Words of Determination

Health officials said they were determined to see the anthrax contract — and other BioShield endeavors — through to the end.

“There are people out there who feel like they are not getting a piece of the pie or that this is not running the right way,” said Mr. Hall, the department spokesman. “That may be. But to come in and criticize BioShield as a failing program because we have not spent all the money and don’t have all the products in the warehouse is completely and sorely misguided.”

The maneuvering has been so intense, with lobbyists and media consultants helping the companies undermine the competition, even some of the people who have profited now express disgust.

“This ought be driven by the science, by efficacy and threat, not lobbyists,” Mr. Housman said. “It has been shanghaied. And the implication is our national security is compromised.”

Next week, agency officials will meet with industry representatives to discuss a new strategy for Project BioShield. Mr. Greenberger, the University of Maryland expert, and others argue that government agencies must determine more quickly what is needed for the stockpile and provide more financial incentives to lure the big companies and better support the start-up companies.

Some in Congress say the improvements are much needed because Project BioShield has proven so disappointing.

“A torturous labyrinth of federal fiefdoms into which billions disappear,” Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said of the program. “Yet few antidotes have yet to emerge.”

    Bid to Stockpile Bioterror Drugs Stymied by Setbacks, NYT, 18.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/washington/18anthrax.html?hp&ex=1158638400&en=9250d08acf3e15e8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The Battle Over the Detainees (8 Letters)

September 16, 2006
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Rebuff for Bush on How to Treat Terror Suspects” (front page, Sept. 15):

If the government can detain anybody for any reason, call that person an enemy combatant and hold him in jail indefinitely without the right to challenge his detention, that is the death knell of our democracy.

Jane Bevans
New York, Sept. 15, 2006

To the Editor:

President Bush ignored the Powell doctrine of making sure you have enough military force to win a war and ignores Colin L. Powell again when being told that you also need enough moral force to sustain a war.

When military tribunals take precedence over the Geneva Conventions, we sink into a legal pit that betrays the war and corrupts our standards.

Isn’t one quagmire enough?

Richard L. Gilbert
Bronx, Sept. 15, 2006

To the Editor:

Finally, leaders are working on a terrorism policy that protects our country while protecting the freedoms this country was built on.

The Bush administration has lost its credibility at home and abroad with actions that are seen as grabs for power rather than well-planned security policy.

I salute Senators John W. Warner, Lindsey Graham and John McCain and former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell for their actions to create a successful, respected policy that is long overdue.

Beth Conlin
Brookline, Mass., Sept. 15, 2006

To the Editor:

Re “An Unexpected Collision” (news analysis, Sept. 15):

President Bush, after characterizing himself as a leader who relies on his own vision but who defers to those with expertise for operational details, in opting to strong-arm Congress to enact his legislation sanctioning actions like undermining the Geneva Conventions by allowing torture of prisoners and denial of right to a reasonable trial, patently ignores the counsel of others.

Vigorous opposition is being led by Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, some of whom have served in the military and possess the experience that President Bush says he relies on.

Isn’t it about time that the Bush administration, led by those who have never seen combat, began to listen to those who have?

Arthur L. Yeager
Edison, N.J., Sept. 15, 2006

To the Editor:

Definitions of what is permissible in trials and interrogations?

Moral outrage ought not to be just a line in the sand. Suasion is in truth of example.

Remember, whatever is decided will be used on members of our military when they fall into enemy hands. Moral outrage belongs to those who expect better and live the expectation.

Kathleen Howe
Poulsbo, Wash., Sept. 15, 2006

To the Editor:

Having just returned from visiting several men at the Guantánamo Bay prison who have been held in virtual isolation for five years, I applaud you for calling attention to the unconscionable effort of the Republican majority to remove the power of the federal courts to hear the prisoners’ petitions for relief.

The irony here is that the debate that has received so much attention — whether to permit evidence obtained through torture and whether to permit the prisoner to learn of classified evidence — relates only to the military commissions that will hear the cases of only a few of the prisoners, those few being the ones deemed “the worst of the worst.”

The men we represent have committed no crime (and we believe that this is true of the vast majority of the others who are being held at Guantánamo), have taken no action against the United States or its allies, and should have been sent home long ago to resume their lives.

Their continued incarceration, without the hope of hearings either in court or before the military commissions, is a permanent stain on the reputation and traditions of the United States.

Congress should not repeal the right of the Guantánamo prisoners whose cases will not be heard by military commissions to pursue their petitions for relief in the federal court.

Thomas P. Sullivan
Chicago, Sept. 15, 2006
The writer is a lawyer.

To the Editor:

Finally, the Senate is doing its job.

The idea that the government can be run on the basis of secret findings by the president is anathema.

What did the C.I.A. think it was doing? Was it so constitutionally innocent that it thought it could administer cruel and unnatural punishment on the president’s secret say-so? Surely it knew that there was something wrong if the American people were not to be told what it was doing.

Another fine mess, but the secret (and illegal) prisons, like Iraq, are the administration’s mess.

The president cannot expect other branches of government to ignore their constitutional responsibilities to pretend everything is in order.

Now that four honorable senators have stood up, it is hard to understand how so many representatives can have failed to understand the constitutional and moral mess they were helping create.

Wilfred Candler
Annapolis, Md., Sept. 15, 2006

To the Editor:

Re “Stampeding Congress” (editorial, Sept. 15):

If President Bush can deny due process to terrorists, I fear he could one day take offense at what I say about him in a letter to the editor; that he could define me as a terrorist and take my rights away as well.

We support due process for terrorists not out of any love for them. We do it because we understand that the bedrock principles of justice on which Western society is based, evolved over centuries, are indivisible. Further, it is this adherence to universal principles of law that gives us the moral high ground.

After all the police work and military strikes, we will ultimately prevail only when we have succeeded in marginalizing the terrorists and discrediting them with their followers.

Above all, this is a struggle for hearts and minds in which our greatest weapon is our moral authority.

Ron Cohen
Waltham, Mass., Sept. 15, 2006

    The Battle Over the Detainees (8 Letters), NYT, 16.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/opinion/l16detain.html

The President

Bush Says G.O.P. Rebels Are Putting Nation at Risk

September 16, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 — President Bush made an impassioned defense on Friday of his proposed rules for the interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects, warning that the nation’s ability to defend itself would be undermined if rebellious Republicans in the Senate did not come around to his position.

Speaking at a late-morning news conference in the Rose Garden, Mr. Bush said he would have no choice but to end a C.I.A. program for the interrogation of high-level terrorism suspects if Congress passed an alternate set of rules supported by a group of Senate Republicans.

Those alternate rules were adopted Thursday by the Senate Armed Services Committee in defiance of Mr. Bush. Setting out what he suggested could be dire consequences if that bill became law, Mr. Bush said intelligence officers — he referred to them repeatedly as “professionals” — would no longer be willing and able to conduct interrogations out of concern that the vague standard for acceptable techniques could leave them vulnerable to legal action.

“Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that Al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland,” he said. “But the practical matter is if our professionals don’t have clear standards in the law, the program is not going to go forward.”

The administration has said the Central Intelligence Agency has no “high value” terrorism suspects in foreign detention centers, having transferred the last of them this month to military custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But officials said they considered the program crucial to efforts to foil attacks.

“This enemy has struck us, and they want to strike us again,” Mr. Bush said, “and we’ll give our folks the tools necessary to protect the country. It’s a debate that, that really is going to define whether or not we can protect ourselves.”

It was also a debate Mr. Bush had hoped to have this week exclusively with Democrats as he and his party’s leadership set out to draw unflattering distinctions between Republicans and Democrats on fighting terrorism for the fall elections.

Instead, Mr. Bush spent Friday in a second day of heavy debate, casting some of the most respected voices on military matters in his own party as hindering the fight against terrorism. As of late Friday there seemed to be no break in the impasse, even as White House officials worked behind the scenes to build new support in the Senate for the legislation the president wants.

Leading the efforts against him in the Senate are three key Republicans on the Armed Services Committee with their own military credentials: the chairman and a former secretary of the Navy, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia; Senator John McCain of Arizona, a prisoner of war in Vietnam; and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a military judge. And publicly taking their side is Mr. Bush’s former secretary of state, Colin L. Powell.

The dispute centers on whether to pass legislation reinterpreting a provision of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3 that bars “outrages upon personal dignity”; the Supreme Court ruled that the provision applies to terrorism suspects. Mr. Bush argued that the convention’s language was too vague and is proposing legislation to clarify the provisions. “What does that mean, ‘outrages upon human dignity’?” he said at one point.

Mr. McCain and his allies on the committee say reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions would open the door to rogue governments to interpret them as they see fit.

In a statement late Friday, Mr. McCain stuck to his position, saying that his proposed rules included legal protections for interrogators. “Weakening the Geneva protections is not only unnecessary, but would set an example to other countries, with less respect for basic human rights, that they could issue their own legislative reinterpretations,” he said.

Mr. Bush rejected the crux of Mr. McCain’s argument when a reporter asked him how he would react if nations like Iran or North Korea “roughed up” American soldiers under the guise of their own interpretations of Common Article 3.

“You can give a hypothetical about North Korea or any other country,” Mr. Bush said, casting the question as steeped in moral relativism. “The point is that the program is not going to go forward if our professionals do not have clarity in the law.”

He also discounted an argument made in a letter from Mr. Powell that his plan would encourage the world to “doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

Asked about that analysis, Mr. Bush said, “If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic.”

Mr. Bush was alternately combative and comedic during the hourlong session with reporters. At one point, in describing how he thought the economy and Republican tax policies would help his party in November, he said: “I’ve always felt the economy is a determinate issue, if not the determinate issue in campaigns. We’ve had a little history of that in our family, you might remember.”

It was an off-hand reference to his father’s losing presidential re-election campaign in 1992, when he was damaged by economic woes and the breaking of his “read my lips” vow not to raise taxes.

Mr. Bush said it was “urban myth” that his administration had lost focus on capturing Osama bin Laden. The president said he was frustrated by the United Nations at times, especially when it came to addressing genocide in Darfur.

Asked about a Senate report concluding that there was no working relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in Iraq, Mr. Bush said forcefully, “I never said there was an operational relationship.”

The questioner had included a reference to Mr. Bush’s Aug. 21 news conference at which he had said, “Imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who would — who had relations with Zarqawi,” referring to the Qaeda mastermind in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Democrats for the most part on Friday were content to allow Republicans to fight among themselves on the terrorism question.

“When conservative military men like John McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham and Colin Powell stand up to the president, it shows how wrong and isolated the White House is,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

But Republicans boasted that their top issue, terrorism, was dominating the political news for yet another day and overtaking Democratic criticisms of the war in Iraq.

Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting.

    Bush Says G.O.P. Rebels Are Putting Nation at Risk, NYT, 16.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/us/16bush.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Law Enforcement, American Style

September 14, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN MILLER
Washington

WITH the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks coming shortly after British authorities disrupted the plot to bomb airliners over the Atlantic, we are seeing another round of calls to break up the F.B.I. or to create a domestic intelligence agency separate from the F.B.I. with no police powers, similar to Britain’s MI5.

But these critics, who have been joined by the prominent federal appeals court judge Richard Posner, seem to be unaware of two critical things. One is how far the F.B.I. has come in transforming itself into an intelligence-driven organization in the last five years; the other is how many attacks we have prevented in that span.

Using intelligence and technology — and our authority to make arrests — the F.B.I. has stopped five terrorist plots in progress in roughly the last year alone:

• On Aug. 31, 2005, in Los Angeles, we arrested four members of a group of radicals that had grown out of the prison system and was planning to attack military recruiting centers and synagogues.

• In February, in Toledo, Ohio, we arrested three men who had conspired to travel to Iraq and attack American forces there.

• In a case out of Atlanta, indictments were handed down in March and July against two men who had traveled to Washington to videotape possible targets near the Capitol and then met with other extremists in Canada to compare notes.

• In Miami in June, seven extremists were arrested after being recorded on F.B.I. surveillance tapes swearing allegiance to Al Qaeda and making plans to attack targets in Miami and Chicago, including the Sears Tower.

• In July a plot to attack subways in New York was disrupted with the arrest of the mastermind in Lebanon.

In addition, we worked closely with our law enforcement partners in Canada and Britain to help uncover plots in those countries that made headlines worldwide this summer. This recent record suggests two things: that the operational tempo of Al Qaeda’s followers is still high, and that the F.B.I. is doing a good job.

So why tear apart the bureau now and start a new agency? How long would it take this new agency to get rolling? A year? Two? What would it use for a database? How would it address privacy and civil liberties? How long would it take the officers of this new agency to develop trusting relationships with America’s 18,000 local law enforcement agencies?

There is a more fundamental question for the “domestic intelligence agency” proponents: Who says the other system is better? When we visit our colleagues at domestic intelligence agencies abroad to compare systems, those without police powers tell us they wish they could make arrests.

Israel and Britain have domestic intelligence agencies staffed by some of the finest operators in the world. Since 9/11, both countries have suffered terrorist attacks on home soil while we have not. That doesn’t mean their systems don’t work best for them; it simply proves that the domestic-intelligence model is not a magic bullet against our enemies.

The proponents of creating a new agency assume the F.B.I. always makes arrests at the first opportunity, scooping up the little fish while the masterminds get away. They seem unaware of the existence of our intelligence directorate, or the 56 field intelligence groups spread throughout the nation. The critics don’t understand how intelligence is leveraged in each investigation.

At any moment, we are involved in joint operations with American and foreign intelligence agencies that go on for months or even years, gathering intelligence and disrupting plots by means other than high-profile arrests. These operations allow the F.B.I. and our partners to continue to follow the thread of intelligence until we have learned the identities of all the players or found the last safe house. In those cases no one takes a bow or holds a press conference, but the work gets done quietly and effectively. When we do make arrests, it is because making arrests was the most effective way to disrupt a plot.

The bureau’s director, Robert Mueller, has made a priority of merging our longtime strength of being a premier investigative agency with the new goal of being an intelligence-led agency. We have started a national security branch, with special agents and talented analysts, to control our counterterrorism, intelligence and counterespionage efforts. This branch is now home to about 40 percent of the bureau’s employees.

We have added a directorate that handles investigations involving weapons of mass destruction and also conducts research to stay on the cutting edge of terrorist capacities.

We have expanded our partnerships with local law enforcement by increasing the number of joint terrorist task forces to 101 today from 33 before 9/11.

In those squads in cities across the country, local police detectives, our agents and analysts and investigators from other federal agencies work side by side, sharing information and running down leads.

We have also developed a database, called the Investigative Data Warehouse, that can search more than 700 million records from more than a dozen agencies and match them against our own investigative records.

As we break down the structure of Al Qaeda, we see the very shape of the terrorist threat changing and adapting. Our approach has to continually evolve to keep up. Starting over from scratch will only set us back and make America less safe.

John Miller is an assistant director of the F.B.I. and a former chief of counterterrorism for the Los Angeles Police Department.

    Law Enforcement, American Style, NYT, 14.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/opinion/14miller.html

Editorial

Port Security Won’t Bankrupt Us

September 14, 2006
The New York Times

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, seems determined to outdo his commander in chief in ratcheting up fears of Al Qaeda whenever he wants to score political points. This week, he raised the specter that if the government starts too many expensive antiterrorism programs it could further a plot by Osama bin Laden to “drive us crazy, into bankruptcy” through overspending on homeland defense.

It was particularly ironic that Mr. Chertoff spun this theory while he was fighting off a measure, up for a vote today, that would help protect our ports against the threat that he himself deems most worrisome — a nuclear explosion within our borders — without government spending.

In testifying before a Senate committee on Tuesday, Mr. Chertoff flailed away at straw men of his own concoction. He warned darkly about the dangers of trying to protect the country from “every conceivable threat” — an idea no one has ever espoused. The issue has always been the need to set priorities, and in that respect, Mr. Chertoff’s department has become a laughingstock. It compiled one list of possible targets that included a petting zoo and a popcorn factory while the government provided only a pittance for our vulnerable subways.

The White House has been warning that Osama bin Laden enunciated a policy in 2004 of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” But there’s no reason to think the terrorist was hatching a plot to force his enemies to buy too many metal detectors or bomb-sniffing dogs. He actually seemed to be gloating about the economic harm wrought by attacks like the one on the World Trade Center, and the costs imposed on America by military adventures. So far, we have not heard anyone from the administration warning that the invasion of Iraq is going to drive us crazy, into bankruptcy.

When it comes to prioritizing our antiterrorism spending, it’s hard to understand what Mr. Chertoff dislikes about a measure, introduced by Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, that would require that all cargo containers headed for the United States be scanned at foreign ports to search for a possible nuclear weapon. Mr. Chertoff, after all, put a nuclear bomb at the top of his list of things to worry about, followed by a biological or serious radiological attack. He also agreed that eventually, every container should be screened abroad for radioactive material before it can be loaded into a ship headed for this country.

But he balked at doing it now on the flimsy grounds that some ports might not have enough room to install scanning devices without slowing the flow of traffic and that some foreign governments might not cooperate.

Those sound like the rationalizations of a bureaucrat unwilling to push hard or buck a strong lobbying effort by shippers who don’t want any additional hassles or costs. Terminal operators in Hong Kong have been using such scanners effectively and inexpensively without disrupting traffic. The cost of such scanning might reach $20 a container, a small surcharge on shipping costs measured in hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

When it comes to homeland security, the Bush administration has repeatedly allowed corporate profits to trump safety. That seems to be the problem here, just as it has been when it came to the chemical industry’s resistance to reforms that would help protect against toxic disasters if terrorists ever attacked their plants. Right now, a port security bill is pending in the Senate that would establish three pilot programs overseas to test the feasibility of scanning all containers. But Mr. Schumer is surely right that delay is dangerous and unnecessary. Virtually all containers destined for the United States should be scanned for nuclear or radiological weapons within the next four years. It is not enough to scan the containers after their arrival here, the current administration policy. That could be too late.

    Port Security Won’t Bankrupt Us, NYT, 14.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/opinion/14thu1.html

Gunmen in Syria Hit U.S. Embassy; 3 Attackers Die

September 13, 2006
The New York Times
By CRAIG S. SMITH

DAMASCUS, Syria, Wednesday, Sept. 13 — Four gunmen attacked the American Embassy here early Tuesday, storming the compound with grenades and automatic weapons before being repelled by Syrian security forces. Three of the gunmen were killed and a fourth was wounded, Syrian and American officials said.

One Syrian security official was killed and about a dozen people were wounded, including three Syrian security officials and a Syrian guard employed by the embassy. No American personnel were injured and the attackers failed to detonate a vehicle packed with explosives.

The wounded attacker was being questioned by Syrian authorities. The identities of the attackers were not disclosed.

The attack, a rare instance of terrorist violence in the tightly controlled Syrian capital, marked the first time the American Embassy had been a target.

Coming a day after the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States and after recent threats by Al Qaeda, the attack sent shudders through a region already reeling from a season of violence. Anger toward the United States has surged in recent weeks over its support for Israel during the war in Lebanon this summer.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it was too early to say who might have been behind the attack. But she praised Syria for responding quickly. “The Syrians reacted to this attack in a way that helped to secure our people, and we very much appreciate that,” Ms. Rice said Tuesday during a visit to Canada.

Syria, however, was quick to blame the United States. “It is regrettable that U.S. policies in the Middle East have fueled extremism, terrorism and anti-U.S. sentiment,” said a statement on Tuesday from the Syrian Embassy in Washington. “What has happened recently in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Iraq is exacerbating the fight against global terrorism.”

Relations between Syria and the United States are strained. The United States recalled its ambassador after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri of Lebanon in February 2005, because Washington believes Damascus played a role. United States diplomatic representation has since been downgraded to the level of chargé d’affaires.

More recently, the United States has blamed Syria for helping to arm Hezbollah, whose attack on Israeli soldiers along the Lebanese border set off the war in July.

“I think you have to take a look at who is really responsible for the violence in the region,” said Tom Casey, the State Department’s acting spokesman, responding Tuesday to Syria’s statement. “The violence is the responsibility of those who do believe that the only response to any questions or concerns is to throw bombs, is to shoot bullets, is to assassinate people.”

He said Washington continued to consider Syria a sponsor of terrorism, alluding to its support for Hezbollah and the Palestinian group Hamas, both of which are considered terrorist organizations by the United States and many allies.

The attack on the embassy began at 10:10 a.m., when two vehicles approached, one drawing up in front of the compound, the other to an employees’ entrance in the rear.

The minister of information, Mohsen Bilal, said in a telephone interview that one man approached embassy guards with a bouquet. The man said “he would like to hand these flowers over to someone from the embassy, to show his solidarity with them and the victims of 9/11,” Mr. Bilal said.

He said that when the guards refused him entry, the attack began.

Ayman Abdel Nour, a Syrian political analyst, said he was about 25 yards away when he saw two men running away from the embassy, and heard gunfire and men shouting, “God is great!” He took refuge in another embassy nearby.

The sound of gunfire and explosions continued for about 15 minutes, he said. There was a second exchange of automatic-weapons fire and single gunshots after a few minutes of calm, he said, but it ended quickly.

When he emerged, the attackers’ car at the rear of the embassy had been gutted by fire, apparently after having been hit in the gun battle.

Mr. Abdel Nour said friends at the Italian Embassy nearby had seen the attackers lobbing grenades over the high wall surrounding the American Embassy and had seen smoke coming from inside the compound.

Television images from the scene showed pools of blood on the pavement and the remains of the burned-out car. A vehicle with explosives at the front of the embassy was apparently abandoned when one attacker ran to the back to aid other gunmen.

The television also showed Syrian security officials inspecting what appeared to be large propane gas canisters with pipes taped to them.

Mr. Casey, the State Department spokesman, said after the attack “some small unexploded improvised explosive devices” were found, in addition to those in the second vehicle.

“This is a flourishing business today,” Mr. Abdel Nour said of the attack. “If you want to open a terrorist cell here, it’s an easy business. You’ll find a lot of money because of the frustration in the region.”

Syria’s interior minister, Bassam Abdel Majeed, visited the embassy after the attack and met Tuesday with the new chargé d’affaires, Michael H. Corbin.

By nightfall, residents could see the rear wall scarred by bullets and the roadside blackened by the car fire. Syrian sentry boxes were riddled with shots, as was a window near the employee’s entrance.

The Rawda district, where the attack occurred, is one of the most heavily guarded parts of the capital. It houses security installations and the homes of many government officials. A number of foreign embassies are near the American compound, including the Chinese, Italian and the Iraqi missions, while the presidential palace is only about 150 yards away from the Americans.

At least 11 people were wounded in the attack. The local embassy employee wounded was hit by gunfire while checking the attackers’ cars when the assault began. The State Department said another embassy guard was slightly injured.

Seven Syrian telephone company employees working in the area were also wounded, as well as an Iraqi man and woman. A senior Chinese diplomat was hit by shrapnel while standing on top of a garage within the Chinese Embassy compound, the New China News Agency reported.

Syria, a strictly secular state, has had trouble with Islamic extremists. In April 2004, four people were killed in a clash between police officers and suspected bombers in the diplomatic quarter of Damascus. Authorities accused Islamic militants of trying to blow up an explosives-laden car near the Canadian Embassy.

The Syrian ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, said Tuesday on CNN that the attackers might have links to a group known as Jund al-Sham, which means Soldiers of the Levant. Last year five of the group’s militants were killed in Hama when security agents raided their hideout, uncovering a stash of weapons and explosives.

American intelligence officials in Washington said it was too early to know with confidence who was responsible for the embassy attack, and said there was little evidence yet to support the claim of the Syrian government that Jund al-Sham might have carried it out.

Officials said there was also no evidence linking the attack to the recent message from Al Qaeda’s deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, who said in a speech broadcast Monday that Al Qaeda would be carrying out attacks in the Middle East.

“This attack would be small beer by Al Qaeda standards,” said one intelligence official.

Contributing reporting were Souad Mekhennet in Frankfurt, Thom Shanker and Mark Mazzetti in Washington and Christine Hauser in New York.

    Gunmen in Syria Hit U.S. Embassy; 3 Attackers Die, NYT, 13.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/13/world/middleeast/13syria.html

U.S. Can’t Protect All Targets, Chertoff Says

September 13, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 — Congress and the American public must accept that the government cannot protect every possible target against attack if it wants to avoid fulfilling Al Qaeda’s goal of bankrupting the nation, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a Senate committee Tuesday.

Osama bin Laden, Mr. Chertoff said, has made it clear that scaring the United States into an unsustainable spending spree is one of his aims. In a 2004 video, Mr. bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, spoke of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

“He understood that one tool he had in waging war against the United States was to drive us crazy, into bankruptcy, trying to defend ourselves against every conceivable threat,” Mr. Chertoff said at a hearing of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “We have to be realistic about what we expect and what we do. We do have limits, and we do have choices to make.”

The direct reference to Mr. bin Laden echoes what is now a week’s worth of tough talk by the Bush administration about him, a move Democrats call a politically motivated effort to refocus the nation, and its voters, on the war on terror instead of the troubled conflict in Iraq.

Mr. Chertoff said his message was not political, but simply a recognition of reality and the tough choices he must make.

Moving ahead will require billions of dollars in spending to finish installation of radiation detection equipment at ports by next year, build fences or high-tech barriers at borders to control illegal immigration, enhance railroad safety programs and install new explosives detection equipment at airports.

In the short term, money will be spent to inspect all cargo packages delivered by individuals to the airports, closing what has been a loophole in the security system. The department, in the next month, will also announce new freight rail regulations for trains that carry highly toxic chemicals. The rules may limit how long railcars are allowed to sit in place and how they are built.

But the list of initiatives cannot be limitless, Mr. Chertoff said. A mandate, for example, that every cargo container headed into the United States be X-rayed and subject to a radiation scan before it leaves a foreign port to search for a possible nuclear bomb is not now feasible, he said.

Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, was trying on Tuesday to persuade him to consider such an effort.

“I put my daughter in my car,” Mr. Chertoff told Mr. Lautenberg. “If I wanted my daughter to be 100 percent safe, I’d put a five-mile-an-hour speed limit cap on the car.” But that is not an option, he added, “because that’s more safety than we can afford.”

Mr. Lautenberg seemed unimpressed. “If we inspected one out of 20 people going into the White House for tours, or coming into this place, would we feel secure?” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Others who spoke at the hearing, including Richard A. Falkenrath, the deputy commissioner for counterterrorism at the New York City Police Department, questioned just how good a job Mr. Chertoff was doing divvying up his limited resources.

Mr. Chertoff, since he was named secretary in February 2005, has talked of the need to make spending risk-based, but his department has also been lambasted for compiling a list of possible targets that included a petting zoo, a bourbon festival and a popcorn factory, while at the same time it cut antiterrorism grants to high-risk cities like Washington and New York.

Mr. Falkenrath said the department was focusing too much on screening cargo containers, when the greater threat in American ports, like the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000 showed, was from a small boat packed with explosives pulling up aside a ship or a ferry. It is spending $9 on security per airplane passenger, he said, but less than half a penny on each mass transit rider.

“There’s something wrong with this,” said Mr. Falkenrath, a former White House deputy homeland security adviser. “Terrorists are attacking the subway system worldwide.”

    U.S. Can’t Protect All Targets, Chertoff Says, NYT, 13.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/13/washington/13chertoff.html

The Battle for Guantánamo

September 17, 2006
The New York Times
By TIM GOLDEN

Note: This article will appear in the Sept. 17 issue of The Times Magazine.

1. A Warning From Shaker Aamer

Col. Mike Bumgarner took over as the warden of Guantánamo Bay in April 2005. He had been hoping to be sent to Iraq; among senior officers of the Army’s military police corps, the job of commanding guards at the American detention camp in Cuba was considered not particularly challenging and somewhat risky to a career. He figured it would mean spending at least a year away from his family, managing the petty insurgencies of hundreds of angry, accused terrorists.

“Is this what I went to bed at night thinking about?” he would ask nearly a year later, as he whacked at mosquitoes on a muggy Cuban night. “No.”

Bumgarner, then 45, received his marching orders from the overall commander of the military’s joint task force at Guantánamo, Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood. A few weeks earlier, General Hood dispatched the previous head of his guard operation and two other senior officers for fraternizing with female subordinates. He was known as a flinty, detail-oriented boss with low tolerance for bad judgment, and his instructions to the colonel were brief: He should keep the detainees and his guards safe, Bumgarner says Hood told him. He should prevent any escapes. He should also study the Third Geneva Convention, on the treatment of prisoners of war, and begin thinking about how to move Guantánamo more into line with its rules.

It had been three years since President Bush declared that the United States would not be bound by any part of the Geneva treaties in dealing with prisoners in the fight against terrorism. He ordered that American forces treat captives in ways “consistent” with the conventions but hadn’t explained what that meant. Now, Bumgarner thought, the mandate seemed to be shifting a little. He was being asked to get more specific.

In the cramped bungalow headquarters of his Joint Detention Operations Group at Guantánamo, Bumgarner had his operations officer look up the conventions on the Internet and print out a copy. After nearly 24 years as a military police officer, Bumgarner knew the document well. He thought it obvious that many of the rights would never apply to Guantánamo detainees. No one was going to allow the distribution of “musical instruments” to suspected terrorists, as the 1940’s-era conventions stipulated for the captured soldiers of another army. No one was going to pay the detainees a stipend to spend at a base canteen.

But the assignment was more complicated than just cutting and pasting where he could. On some level, Bumgarner thought, he was being asked to weigh how far the military should go to improve the lives of prisoners whom the president and his aides had labeled some of the most dangerous terrorists alive. Or, as the colonel put it to me during our first conversation at Guantánamo in March: “How do you deal with an individual whom the president of the United States and the secretary of defense have called the worst of the worst?”

At that point, in the spring of 2005, he had little time to consider an answer. Tensions in the camp were surging, as the detainees tested a fresh rotation of Army and Navy guards. Of the 530 prisoners then being held at Guantánamo, most were classified as “noncompliant.” The two segregation blocks, which held prisoners who had assaulted guards, were full. So were two other blocks where detainees were sent for lesser infractions. “People were in a waiting pattern to get in and serve their time there,” Bumgarner said.

In older parts of the camp, the detainees would sometimes bang for hours on the steel mesh of their cells, smashing out a beat that rattled up over the razor wire into the thick, tropical air. Occasionally they would swipe at the guards with metal foot pads ripped from their squat-style toilets, declassified military reports say. The detainees rarely tried to fashion the sort of shanks or knives made by violent prisoners in the United States. But they did manage to unnerve and incite the young guards, often by splattering them with mixtures of bodily excretions known on the blocks as “cocktails.”

By the time Bumgarner took command at Guantánamo, information had emerged to suggest that many of the detainees were not, in fact, the hardened terrorists whom Pentagon officials had claimed to be holding there. Bumgarner did not doubt that his new prisoners were dangerous, but neither was he wary of getting to know them better. As he walked the blocks in Camp Delta, the fenced-in core of the prison, he soon began trying to engage some of the more influential detainees.

Military and C.I.A. analysts had been studying the Guantánamo population since the camp opened in January 2002. They observed that there were detainee spokesmen, who tended to speak English, and religious leaders, or “sheiks,” who issued opinions on questions of Islamic law. There was also a more hidden cadre, whose leadership the analysts defined as “political” or, when they could direct the protests of others, “military.” Nonetheless, there was much debate over who the most important leaders were, intelligence officials later told me. Like most guard officers before him, Bumgarner gravitated toward those who spoke English.

His ambitions were modest. “I was looking for a way, with what General Hood was wanting, just to have a peaceful camp,” he recalled recently. He said his initial message to the detainees was “Look, I’m willing to give you things, to make life better for ya, if y’all will reciprocate.” What he asked in return was “Just do not attack my guards.”

Bumgarner considered himself a take-charge, solve-the-problem kind of commander. A big, balding, garrulous man who speaks with a faint Carolina drawl and carries his 250 pounds easily on a 6-foot-2-inch frame, he grew up the son of a career Army sergeant in a family where military service was proudly taken for granted. In high school in Kings Mountain, N.C., a small town in the Blue Ridge foothills, he played quarterback for the football team and applied to West Point at his father’s urging. He quit the academy after only a few months but joined the R.O.T.C. to help pay his way through Western Carolina University. At Guantánamo, he was one of those officers who seemed to relish calling out, “Honor bound!” (shorthand for the camp motto, “Honor bound to defend freedom”), when a soldier saluted. Saying goodbye, he favored “Hoo-rah” over “See you later.”

But that image could be deceiving. Before deploying to Cuba, Bumgarner oversaw the development of detention doctrine at the Army’s Military Police School at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. Like many military police officers, he had been deeply embarrassed when the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted in May 2004 and was determined to see its legacy undone. “We were not going to let that happen to us,” he said.

At Guantánamo, Bumgarner moved quickly to try to reduce tensions in the camp. If the detainees wanted clocks on the cellblock walls, he saw no reason they shouldn’t have them. In response to endless complaints from the detainees about their tap water, he persuaded Hood to approve the distribution of bottled water at mealtimes. The only stocks available were the soldiers’ own, bottled with a stars-and-stripes label under the vanity brands Patriot’s Choice and Freedom Springs. To avoid any problems, guards were ordered to peel off the labels before they passed out the bottles.

The detainees did not respond as the military authorities hoped. In late June 2005, two months after Bumgarner took command, some prisoners went on a hunger strike, calling for better living conditions, more respectful treatment of the Koran by guards and — most important — fair trials or freedom. Although it was hardly the first such protest, the camp’s medical staff worried about the unusually large number of prisoners involved.

Soon after the strike began, Bumgarner was alerted to a disturbance in Camp Echo, an area of more isolated cells on the eastern edge of the detention center. The problem was with a 38-year-old Saudi named Shaker Aamer. The colonel had not previously encountered Aamer, but he was already familiar with the legend of detainee No. 239 — the one his guards called the Professor. They marveled at his English, which was eloquent, and his presence, which was formidable. Some intelligence officials said they believed he had been an important Qaeda operative in London, where he lived and married before moving to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001. (Aamer has denied having anything to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism.)

The colonel’s immediate concern was that Aamer was giving his guards fits, pressing one of the sporadic civil disobedience campaigns for which he was famous. “I finally said: ‘That’s it! I’m gonna go down to talk to him myself.”’ As Bumgarner remembers it, he burst into the small, hospital-white room as Aamer sat on his bunk, fuming behind the painted mesh that caged him into one corner. “You’re either gonna start complying with the rules,” Bumgarner recalls warning him, “or life’s gonna get really rough.” The colonel said he did not mean to threaten physical force, only to emphasize strongly that Aamer’s few privileges — like, say, his use of a toothbrush — hung in the balance.

Aamer, who wore a thick black beard and had his hair pulled back in a ponytail, was unimpressed. The prisoner, who was not wearing his glasses, squinted for a moment, trying to read the officer’s insignia. “Colonel,” he finally said, “don’t come in here giving me that.”

As Bumgarner settled into a white plastic chair, Aamer crossed his legs on the bunk and began to talk about his life. He spoke about his family, his travel to Afghanistan, his feelings about the United States. He told of working as an interpreter for American troops in Saudi Arabia during the first gulf war, and of later working at a coffee shop outside Atlanta.

“I got the impression that he was hanging around in clubs, drinking,” Bumgarner told me. “He loved women. But he said he had realized the error of his ways.” Aamer had a revelation, he told the colonel, “that this life of running around with women and boozing it up was the wrong path.”

“It was part of his charisma, that drawing me in,” Bumgarner said later. “He became a person.”

Much of the conversation centered on Aamer’s thoughts on the detention operation and what could be done to improve it. The Saudi’s ideas, it seemed, were perhaps not so far from Hood’s. “His implication was that if you applied the Geneva Conventions fully, everything would be just fine in the camps,” Bumgarner recalled.

After almost five hours, Aamer asked the colonel if he had made someone very angry. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in Guantánamo.

“Nobody survives Guantánamo,” he added. “You won’t survive, either.”

II. A Permanent Place

As part of the military’s standard tour of Guantánamo, visitors are driven to the end of a two-lane road that winds up to the northeast corner of the naval base on which the prison sits. They pause there on a small hill overlooking a locked gate that leads into Fidel Castro’s part of the island. The tour guide, usually a young Marine corporal with a black Beretta pistol strapped to his thigh, then recounts a brief history of Communist efforts to drive the American forces away.

At one point, the corporal says, the Cubans tried to cut off the Americans’ water supply. They trained floodlights on an American guardhouse to keep the soldiers inside from getting any sleep. But such annoyances were merely that. The United States never surrendered an inch of the 45 square miles it has occupied under a disputed lease since 1903, following the Spanish-American War. “We’re not as big a presence as we once were,” one tour guide, Cpl. Denis R. Espinoza, who is 22, said earlier this year. “But we’re still here, and we’re going to stay.”

In the Land of Unsubtle Metaphors that is Guantánamo Bay, the message of the tour is transparent: the United States fought a dangerous, implacable enemy here once before, in another war that seemed without end. Had we not held our ground then, the argument goes, the world might now be a darker place.

Despite the intense criticism it has drawn, the detention camp at Guantánamo has proved one of the more resilient institutions of the Bush administration’s fight against terror. It has weathered a 2004 Supreme Court decision that allows prisoners to challenge their detention in the federal courts. Scandals over the abuse of the detainees have come and gone, but Guantánamo has endured.

When President Bush announced broad changes in policies for the detention and prosecution of terror suspects on Sept. 6, he said the government “will move toward the day when we can eventually close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.” But by sending 14 important C.I.A. captives there and pushing to try prisoners before reconstituted military tribunals, he appeared to be extending the life of the detention center for the foreseeable future. Even if many more detainees are sent home and dozens are tried, administration officials acknowledged, the United States could easily end up with 150 or 200 others whom it would want to hold indefinitely and without charge. As to how the military should treat such men, Washington offered only the most general guidance.

What impact the C.I.A.’s prisoners might have on the camp’s operations is unclear. Already, though, Guantánamo has been the scene of an extraordinary struggle between the detainees and their guards. Only a few episodes of this conflict have come to light, like the suicides of three prisoners in June. But what has hardly been glimpsed is the dynamic that developed as military officers tried to deal more closely with the detainees, easing the harsh conditions in which they have been held and asking for compliance in return.

This article presents a view inside the prison based on interviews with more than 100 military and intelligence officials, guards, former detainees and others. It shows that as pressure built among the prisoners and some threatened even to kill themselves in protest, Bumgarner and other guard officers — acting as much on instinct as policy — took surprising steps to contain the upheaval.

That experiment illuminates the challenge the United States faces in continuing to detain indefinitely some 460 men at Guantánamo, only 10 of whom have been formally charged with crimes. Perhaps not surprisingly, the military has sought to keep what has taken place there under wraps. Asked recently about his dealings with the detainees and those of his staff officers, General Hood would respond only through an Army spokesman, saying, “Operational security precludes any public discussions that could potentially jeopardize the lives of detainees or the security force at Guantánamo.”

Rather than making Guantánamo go away, the administration has tried to make it smaller and less objectionable. The ruins of Camp X-Ray, the provisional facility where the first prisoners were held in cages, are slowly being swallowed by the jungle. Tour guides display them as proof of Guantánamo’s progress. Inside the existing camp, a barricaded precinct of the quaint, 50’s-era naval base where off-duty soldiers play softball and stop to eat at McDonald’s, the guides point out Camp 6, a new $30 million facility modeled after a county jail in southern Michigan.

But the detainees have long memories, and the portraits drawn by those who have been released — sometimes horrific, often impossible to verify — have shaped global perceptions in ways that the Bush administration has been unable to overcome. Their stories have been set down in books, films, plays and raps, most of which depict an Orwellian world that is by turns brutal, calculated and inept.

“Every country has its own way of torturing people,” Rustam Akhmiarov, a 26-year-old Russian who was arrested in Pakistan and ended up in Guantánamo, told me after his release. “In Russia, they beat you up; they break you straightaway. But the Americans had their own way, which is to make you go mad over a period of time. Every day they thought of new ways to make you feel worse.”

Over the last two years, human rights groups and the International Red Cross have noted some improvements. Hood said that the use of more extreme interrogation methods was curtailed within months of his taking command, around the time that the Abu Ghraib scandal became public. Yet the larger questions that indefinite detention at Guantánamo raises — how to forestall the radicalization of the detainees; how to control men who have only the slimmest hope of freedom — have never been resolved by senior policy makers. They have been left to military officers on the ground.

III. Out of the Dark Ages

As Colonel Bumgarner landed at Guantánamo in April 2005, he sensed that the military was in the midst of what he called “sort of an effort to normalize things.” The Pentagon wanted to streamline the guard operation as part of a push toward a more modern, less labor-intensive detention facility. It also wanted to present a more humane face to the world. Both goals required lowering the level of conflict within the camp.

After his first briefing from Hood, Bumgarner put the printout of the Geneva Conventions on his desk and left it there. “I had my staff look at it,” he said. “For me, it was the only black-and-white piece of something that I could reach out and grab for guidance.”

At that point, White House officials were still opposed to adopting even the most basic Geneva standard for the treatment of prisoners, a provision that bans “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Bumgarner considered such issues above his pay grade. He tried to deal with the detainees man to man. “Human beings are human beings,” he said in one of a series of conversations. “I always think that I can deal with anybody. I feel like dialogue can’t hurt.”

Weeks before he would meet the Saudi prisoner Shaker Aamer, Bumgarner came across a tall, wild-eyed detainee who was screaming at the guards in British-accented English. It wasn’t clear what his problem was, but when the colonel asked, the man quickly calmed down. “You are creating these problems by the way you are treating us,” the prisoner said.

A day or two later, Bumgarner had guards deliver the man to Juliet block, a small, fenced-in courtyard beside his command center where Red Cross representatives meet with detainees at aluminum picnic tables. He asked a guard to uncuff the prisoner’s hands. “It puts them in a much better mood to talk to you,” the colonel explained.

Prisoner No. 590, Ahmed Errachidi, was a handsome 39-year-old Moroccan who spent 17 years in London. He worked as a chef at a string of restaurants, including the Hard Rock Cafe, before traveling to Afghanistan after the United States began bombing the country in October 2001. The military authorities accused him of belonging to a radical Moroccan Islamist group and training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, charges that his lawyers have disputed. Intelligence officials told me they did not consider him a high-value detainee and noted that he had been hospitalized for manic depression. But the guards, impressed by his influence and sense of self-importance, had nicknamed him the General.

Errachidi seemed rather surprised to be sitting down with the commander of the detention group, Bumgarner told me. But in that meeting on June 6 and a second, longer one two days later, Errachidi seized the chance to inventory the prisoners’ grievances: The water was foul, he said, and the food terrible. The detainees were angry about the guards’ habit of walking loudly through the cellblocks at prayer times and even angrier that “The Star-Spangled Banner” sometimes played over distant naval-base loudspeakers during or right after the evening call to prayer.

The General “kept talking about ‘the dark ages,”’ Bumgarner would later recall. The prisoner complained, for example, that the guards often referred to the detainees in demeaning ways, calling out when they were moving a prisoner that they had “a package” ready.

“We are not ‘packages,”’ Errachidi told the colonel. “We are human beings.”

After the first meeting, Bumgarner received a piece of paper from a guard. It was a drawing by Errachidi, a sort of map. In one corner, it showed a shaded area labeled “the Dark Ages.” From there, a path wound through a thicket of obstacles. They had labels like “No ‘packages,”’ “Better food” and “Turn the lights down.” At the end of the path, Errachidi had drawn what looked like an oasis, with water and palm trees.

Back at Bumgarner’s command center, some of his staff officers wondered about the wisdom of trying to solve such complaints. They were used to their commanders walking the blocks and occasionally speaking to prisoners; they were not accustomed to sit-downs. Nor did they see why they should be the ones to pick through the Geneva provisions and suggest whether the detainees might be entitled to elect their own representatives or attend educational programs.

“We’re the guys on the ground,” the detention group’s former operations officer, Maj. Joseph M. Angelo, told me not long ago. “So why was I making recommendations on what portions of the Geneva Conventions we should implement? That just struck me as kind of weird.”

Still, the unease of Bumgarner’s staff did not compare with the reaction he got from the intelligence side of the Guantánamo task force. There had long been tension between the two military units, but this time members of the Joint Intelligence Group “were furious,” one staff officer recalled. There were few privileges to give out at Guantánamo, this officer and others said, and interrogators felt they should be the ones to dispense them — in return for cooperation from the detainees.

Before he deployed to Cuba, Bumgarner’s military police superiors had been emphatic that he should stick to his responsibilities and leave his counterparts in military intelligence to their interrogations and analysis. Bumgarner wasn’t worried about stepping out of his lane. “I run the camps,” he said.

Bumgarner set about trying to solve the problems he saw. He instructed members of the guard force to stop referring to the detainees as “packages.” On compliant blocks, he had guards start turning down the lights between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. and stop moving prisoners during those hours to allow the detainees to sleep. To avoid disturbing their prayers, he ordered guards to place yellow traffic cones spray-painted with a “P” in the cellblock halls at prayer times. He asked his aides to see that “The Star-Spangled Banner” recording would be played at least three minutes before the call to prayer.

Another of Bumgarner’s senior staff officers, Maj. Timothy O’Reilly, a reservist who is a lawyer in civilian life, began to recognize some of what he was seeing from jails and prisons in the United States. “The ultimate nirvana for anybody in law enforcement or corrections is compliance,” he said earlier this year. “In order to run an effective prison, you need to have people comply with your orders, and that’s no different from the smallest jail to the biggest high-security prison.”

But Guantánamo was clearly unlike other prisons in one important respect: The detainees found much less incentive to obey the rules. To some, exile to the discipline or segregation blocks was a source of status and pride, military intelligence officials said. And the punishments were limited. Striking or spraying urine on a guard brought 30 days’ segregation, the maximum length of any punishment under Geneva rules. There was no such thing as getting a few more years tacked on to your sentence.

In an American prison, O’Reilly and others noted, an inmate could be a sworn enemy of the prison authorities, respected among other prisoners, and still try to “run a good program” — avoiding trouble in an effort to reduce his time behind bars. At Guantánamo, compliance with the rules brought only prayer beads, packets of hot sauce, a slightly thicker mattress. It would not bring early parole.

Former detainees I met insisted that their defiance was provoked not only by their despair over their uncertain futures but also by unnecessarily harsh and arbitrary treatment from the guards. “If people’s basic human rights were respected, I don’t think they would have had any of these problems,” said Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former Taliban cabinet minister and ambassador to Pakistan who was the pre-eminent leader of Afghan prisoners at Guantánamo before his release in the late summer of 2005. “There were no rules and no law. Any guard could do whatever they wanted to do.”

Like other small, insular groups that live at the mercy of a more powerful force, the detainees have woven intricate, conspiratorial theories about their fate. In a closed world where prayer gives structure to daily life and the Koran is the one possession guards are never supposed to take away, prisoners were acutely sensitive to any perceived disrespect for their faith. But there were many other grievances. Some former detainees told me that early on, they were injected at Guantánamo with psychotropic drugs, a claim that military officials denied. Later, detainees continued to suspect hidden agents of social control in everything from the cloudy tap water to the configuration of their cells.

“Those blocks are designed so that you will not rest,” says Mohammed al-Daihani, a government accountant from Kuwait who was sent home last November. “There is metal everywhere. If anyone drops anything, you hear it. If anyone shouts or talks loudly, it disturbs everyone. If there is a problem at the other end of the block, you cannot possibly rest. After two or three weeks, you think you will lose your mind.”

Although the detainees came from diverse backgrounds and more than three dozen countries, there was only one real prison gang at Guantánamo. The authorities were convinced it was controlled by Al Qaeda members. An August 2002 study by the C.I.A. asserted that Qaeda detainees at Guantánamo had quickly begun “establishing cellblock leaders and dividing responsibility among deputies for greeting new arrivals, assessing interrogations, monitoring the guard force and providing moral support to fellow detainees, among other tasks.” (The study was posted in July on the Web site The Smoking Gun; two officials confirmed its authenticity to me.)

Such conclusions may have been drawn from the actions of detainees like Shaker Aamer, the man with whom Bumgarner spoke for hours at the end of June. Abdullah al-Noaimi, a Bahraini student who was released from Guantánamo last November, described in interviews at his home in Bahrain in June how Aamer initially organized their cellblock through sheer force of personality. “He’s always laughing and talking, very extroverted,” al-Noaimi said. “He was born to be a leader.”

Soon after his own arrival in Cuba, al-Noaimi recalled, Aamer rallied the detainees on the block to refuse to be weighed by the medical staff — a largely meaningless protest, he said, but one that infuriated the guards and thrilled the detainees. Eventually, he added, Aamer organized the 48-cell block into four groups of 12, with representatives for each unit and a spokesman for the block. “It’s the same thing John McCain did in Vietnam,” said Lieut. Col. Kevin Burk, who commanded the army’s first military police battalion at Guantánamo. “You continue your resistance.”

Some parts of the camp were easier to manage than others. The guards looked on the roughly 110 Afghans then at Guantánamo as relatively cooperative. They filled much of Camp 4, the newer wing where Level 1, or “highly compliant,” prisoners were allowed to live in communal barracks, serving their own food and moving freely in and out of small recreation yards. Most of the rest of the Afghans were in Camp 1, for Level 2, or “compliant,” detainees. Only a handful were held in Camp 5, the maximum-security area. Yet as more prisoners were released, the remainder were becoming a more cohesive group, military officials and former detainees said. They were also overwhelmingly Arab, and more likely to have endured more extreme interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and threats.

Several former detainees insisted that it was not Al Qaeda that bound them at Guantánamo but a common adversary. In standard prison fashion, they developed ingenious ways to organize and communicate. They attached messages to long threads from their clothing with wads of hardened toothpaste and then cast them into neighboring cells. They shouted into the plumbing to talk between floors in the maximum-security unit. And as their frustration grew, their ability to organize was brought to bear in new ways.

IV. Aamer the Hero

The hunger strike that confronted Colonel Bumgarner in mid-June 2005 escalated quickly. Of the many strikes since early 2002, few had gone far enough to prompt doctors to force-feed the detainees through stomach tubes. This time, however, there were not a handful of hunger-strikers but dozens.

As they often had before, military spokesmen dismissed the protest as a publicity bid typical of Al Qaeda-trained terrorists. Officers at Guantánamo had tabulated hundreds of incidents of what they termed “manipulative, self-injurious behavior.” Privately, though, they began to discuss how to respond to a potential suicide. At the Pentagon, officials dusted off contingency plans for dealing with a body that would need prompt burial under Islamic law.

Senior members of the Guantánamo staff began to meet regularly with General Hood to monitor the strike. The chief medical officer, Navy Capt. John S. Edmondson, M.D., worried about the prospect of having to force-feed large numbers of detainees. The medical risk was relatively low, but there were other considerations. “Anytime you’re doing a procedure that the patient doesn’t want, it’s not a place you want to be,” he would tell me later. “What takes precedence? The patient’s rights, or their life? It’s not an easy question.”

Bumgarner soon turned to Aamer, who had been on strike since around the time of their first meeting in Camp Echo. During that first encounter, he said, the prisoner had been “trying to convince me, in a very subtle way, that he could help control things in the camp.” He decided to consider the proposal.

Over a couple of more conversations with Aamer, Bumgarner made his case: He wanted the detention camp to run more smoothly, to make things easier for detainees who obeyed the rules. He was prepared to move closer to the standards of the Geneva Conventions in some parts of the operation, including discipline. What did Aamer think it would take, the colonel wanted to know, for the hunger strike to end?

Aamer summarized his discussions with Bumgarner in a statement he dated Aug. 11, 2005, and later gave to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. In it, he said the hunger-strikers demanded ending “the secret abuse project of Camp 5” (which he did not explain) and either bringing the detainees to trial or sending them home. Meanwhile, they wanted better medical and living conditions. Aamer wrote that the colonel promised him “that justice would come to Guantánamo at last.” The prisoner, his lawyer said later, had “decided that this was a man who he could trust.”

Bumgarner said he tried always to bring the talks back to what he could deliver: modest improvements in the detainees’ living conditions. He said Aamer told him: “‘If you can get me to go around the camps, I can turn this off.”’

There were no precedents for chaperoned consultations among detainees. But by July 26, 2005, the number of detainees refusing to eat was at 56, and doctors were becoming concerned about the health of several of them. Bumgarner decided to act. “I saw the chance to end it, and I just did it,” he said.

The colonel went to see Aamer at a small hospital inside the detention camp. He was sitting on a bed, one ankle chained to the frame, surrounded by some of the other more determined hunger-strikers. According to Bumgarner, Aamer told him that several of the detainees had had a “vision,” in which three of them had to die for the rest to be freed. Still, he agreed to try to persuade them to drop the protest.

Aamer agreed to suspend his own strike on July 26, his lawyer said, but was unsuccessful in persuading others. That evening or the next, Bumgarner said, he had guards retrieve Aamer from the hospital and meet him at Camp 5, the imposing maximum-security unit. Once inside the heavy doors, they went through the cellblocks one by one, as Aamer spoke with a handful of the most influential detainees.

Aamer went first to see Saber Lahmar, an Algerian-born Islamic scholar who was arrested in Bosnia in a supposed conspiracy to bomb the American Embassy in Sarajevo. (Lahmar denied any involvement in such a plot.) Trailed by the colonel and a military interpreter, Aamer continued through the tiers, crouching down to speak to a handful of others through the slots by which they received their food. His last stop was the cell of Ghassan al-Sharbi, a 30-year-old Saudi who studied electrical engineering in Prescott, Ariz. Al-Sharbi, who was later charged in the military tribunals with joining in an Al Qaeda conspiracy to manufacture bombs for attacks in Afghanistan, was reluctant to give up the strike. When he finally agreed, the others went along, two military officials said.

As they prepared to leave Camp 5, Bumgarner says, he asked Aamer if he needed to speak with some of the other hunger-strikers there as well. “No,” Aamer answered matter-of-factly. “The others will put the word out.”

The colonel and his prisoner drove to Camps 2 and 3. As they entered some of the blocks — Bumgarner in his camouflage fatigues, Aamer handcuffed to a chain around his waist — the cells erupted with applause.

“He was treated like a rock star, some of the places we would go in,” Bumgarner recalls. “I have never seen grown men — with beards, hardened men — crying at the sight of another man.” He paused, searching for an analogy. “It was like I was with Bon Jovi or something,” he said.

Former detainees who witnessed the visits recounted to me that Aamer, speaking in Arabic, proposed to end the hunger strike and explained that other detainees in Camp 5 were in agreement. In return, he said, the military authorities promised to try to resolve problems the prisoners faced and to observe parts of the Geneva Conventions.

The colonel’s subordinates had grown accustomed to his hands-on style of leadership. But they worried more openly about his meetings with Aamer. The Saudi, one officer pointedly said, “has an almost hypnotic power over some people.” Two others referred to Aamer as “Svengali.”

Bumgarner himself struggled with Aamer’s frequent demands. One morning, as Aamer was being sent off with other officers to brief detainees, he had a new one for the colonel: Now he wanted to move around without the leg shackles that were standard for detainees being transported outside their cellblocks.

“Look, Shaker, don’t make a big deal out of this,” Bumgarner recalled telling him. “Let’s get on to the bigger thing here. I can’t take you out of those shackles.”

“I’m not going unless you just handcuff me,” the prisoner responded.

“Shaker, don’t do this to me,” the colonel said. “It’s just going to make it harder.”

“No,” he quoted Aamer as saying. “I’m not doing any of this.”

Bumgarner ordered the shackles removed. The handcuffs stayed on. Aamer finally went ahead with his briefings to the other prisoners. “It was clearly a risk — not in terms of putting anybody in danger, but in terms of perception,” Bumgarner told me later. “But I thought that in the end, in order to keep things going, I was going to have to do it.”

Mullah Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador, had just finished his prayers in Camp 4 when a sergeant came to his dormitory. “There is someone who wants to see you,” the sergeant said. Zaeef had never had an unannounced visitor at Guantánamo before.

He found Aamer waiting. The two men had known each other in Camp 1, where they were briefly neighbors. Zaeef, who spoke Arabic, noted that many of the Arabs respected the Saudi’s leadership. Aamer told Zaeef about his conversations with the colonel.

“We thought maybe they were becoming softer in their policies,” Zaeef recalls. “Or we thought maybe they were trying to trick us. But we thought that we should see which one it was.”

When I met him in Afghanistan almost a year later, Zaeef still seemed a bit uncertain about what had taken place. He is an elegant, professorial man who wears wire-rimmed glasses and the black silk turban favored by the Taliban. He described the episode during two long interviews in the well-guarded government guest house on the dusty outskirts of Kabul, where he has lived since returning home last September.

According to Zaeef, Aamer described a scheme of representation for the detainees that he had worked out with Bumgarner — one that vaguely echoed the Third Geneva Convention’s rules for a prisoner-of-war camp. Detainees in Camp 4 were to choose two inmates to represent them, one for the Afghans and another for the rest. With guards by his side, Zaeef said he then went from one block to the next, explaining the situation. After some discussion, he was chosen by acclamation to represent all of the Camp 4 detainees. Still, Zaeef recalled, “people were very skeptical.”

Nonetheless, most of the hunger-strikers suspended their protests by July 28. Disciplinary problems on the blocks eased. The mood in the camps swelled palpably, some military officials told me. Later Bumgarner would refer to this interlude as “the Period of Peace.”

The colonel then turned to some of the issues the detainees had raised during their strike. He and Aamer were sitting at one of the picnic tables near his office, debating the camp food, when Aamer insisted that the detainees’ meals were being poisoned.

“That’s asinine!” Bumgarner said.

“I don’t see you eating the stuff,” he said Aamer shot back.

Over a dinner of fish sticks and fries, they began working out a solution. Not long after, Aamer sat down with the head of the mess hall, the base nutritionist and a logistics officer on the military staff. According to one officer briefed on the meeting, Aamer unfolded a piece of paper on which he had drawn up an elaborate two-week meal plan with daily suggestions for four different diets: a standard menu, a vegetarian menu, a vegetarian-with-fish option and a bland diet for older prisoners and those with intestinal problems. Two officials said Aamer’s proposal eventually became the basis for a new meal plan that raised the amount of food offered to detainees each day from 2,800 calories to 4,200 calories.

After weeks of discussion with his aides, Bumgarner also instituted a new program to simplify the discipline in the camp. Under the previous four-level system, misdeeds were punished with the loss of various “comfort items” like prayer beads and books, or stints in the discipline or segregation blocks. The system was so complicated, military officials said, that its application often seemed arbitrary.

The new plan called for all or nothing. Every detainee was restored to compliant status and issued all of the comfort items generally available, including prayer beads and bigger bars of soap. Those who broke the rules would be busted down to “basic issue,” or B.I., with nothing in between. To symbolize the new order, all detainees in punishment-orange uniforms would be reoutfitted in tan.

The change might have made a dent in the prisoners’ abiding sense of humiliation. The problem, some officers said, was that the plan was set in motion before enough tan clothing could be requisitioned to outfit all the detainees. Some of those left in orange complained loudly.

“We did not think that through like we were playing chess,” Major Angelo said. “We thought like we were playing checkers. And that didn’t work.”

V. The End of Peace

A couple of days after Aamer visited Zaeef to explain the new plan for prisoner representation, a guard approached Zaeef with a cryptic message. “At 6 o’clock you are going to go somewhere,” he said. At the appointed hour, Zaeef was led out of the camp and put on the rumble seat of one of the small John Deere utility vehicles used to transport detainees around the detention center and driven to Camp 1.

The guards led him to the small, fenced-in exercise yard for Alpha block, where two picnic tables had been placed. Ala Muhammad Salim, an influential Egyptian religious leader in the camp who was known as Sheik Ala, was already there. The two prisoners sat down and began quizzing each other about what was going on. Four others trickled in. They included Aamer and two of the men he met with in Camp 5: Saber Lahmar, the Algerian scholar, and Ghassan al-Sharbi, the Saudi engineer. The sixth was Adel Fattoh Algazzar, a former Egyptian Army officer with a master’s degree in economics. Bumgarner did not attend the meeting, but when all of the detainees were seated, his deputy arrived with two other officers. Al-Sharbi acted as the Arabic interpreter.

According to other officers I spoke with, the deputy delivered a simple message: The six were being asked to provide their input on how to improve conditions in the camp. Each of the detainees responded in turn.

“Do not mistreat us anymore,” Zaeef recalled saying. “Be respectful of our religion and our Koran. Respect us as human beings, because we are human beings. If we are criminals, take us to court. But if we are innocent, let us go.”

News of the meeting buzzed through the camp. Right away, several former detainees said, the prisoners began to debate what was taking place. “We had never talked to the colonels before,” Abdulaziz al-Shammari, a Kuwaiti teacher, said. “But this Bumgarner came around all the time, wanting to negotiate with us.”

The younger detainees pressed Aamer to push past the matter of living conditions and focus on their demands for trial or release. “The shabab said to him, ‘We must not go only for the small things; we should go to the core issues,”’ al-Shammari said, using the Arabic word for “young people” or “youth.”

Mohammed al-Daihani, the Kuwaiti accountant, now released, said that soon after the colonel and Aamer visited his cellblock, Ahmed Errachidi, the Moroccan known as the General, challenged others there to analyze the possible motives of their captors. “He said: ‘Why is a colonel from the most powerful country in the world coming to negotiate with the detainees? They must be under some kind of pressure.”’

The skeptics on Bumgarner’s side were also growing more vocal. “I was one of the few who thought we should let the leaders come talk to us,” the colonel acknowledged. Hood was clearly uneasy with the negotiations, other officers said. He told aides not to refer to the six as “the council,” as the detainees did. Still, several officers emphasized, the talks would never have gone forward if Hood had not approved them.

On the evening of Saturday, Aug. 6, shortly after the council’s first meeting, the colonel convened the six again, officers said. This time, he sat with the group himself. Aamer had insisted that they should not be handcuffed or shackled. “These are leaders,” he told the colonel.

Bumgarner agreed, and the handcuffs were removed. Guards armed with pepper spray stood by, while an immediate-reaction team waited just out of sight. The colonel later summarized his introduction thusly: “You’re here. I’m here. You’ve got my attention. Tell me what the grievances are, and we’ll work through them.” He added, “This place ain’t going away, so we might as well make the best of it.”

As Zaeef recalled the encounter, Bumgarner made several promises: He would allow the circulation of religious books among the detainees and try to resolve problems that arose with the guards. He would assure that the prisoners’ food was “adequate.” Zaeef said the most important thing the colonel pledged was to send another official who would be able to speak with the detainees about their “future.” Bumgarner said he promised only that guards would act “in the spirit of the Geneva Conventions” and that he would see that Guantánamo’s discipline was consistent with its terms.

On the following Monday, the officers said, the six detainees were allowed to meet alone in the fenced-in yard. A pair of military interpreters were positioned nearby to monitor their conversation, officers said. According to both Zaeef and military officials, the detainees began using pens and paper they had been given to write notes. An officer observing the meeting interrupted them: they were not to pass notes, he said. When they insisted on confidentiality, he stepped forward again. But as the officer moved to confiscate the notes, some of the detainees popped them into their mouths and began chewing.

Hood pronounced the experiment over. “‘This group is not meeting anymore,”’ the colonel recounts him saying. “‘And you are not going to be meeting with them anymore.”’

The “period of peace” came to an abrupt end. According to various sources — military officials, former detainees and Aamer’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith — the detainees were also angered by a few incidents that had taken place over the weekend before the second council meeting. In one case, a prisoner had been forcibly extracted from his cell, only to sit waiting for hours to be interrogated. In another, the questioning of a slight Tunisian detainee by a much larger criminal investigator ended in a violent scuffle involving a cut nose, the possible hurling of a mini-refrigerator and the investigator’s being ordered off the island.

A couple of days after the negotiations were shut down, officials said, a riot broke out in Camps 2 and 3. Dozens of detainees tore up their cells, wrenching foot pegs from their toilets and using them to try to pry loose the mesh that separated them. Guards were pulled from the tiers and deployed to surround the perimeter of the blocks. Water and electricity were shut off, and Bumgarner finally got on a bullhorn with an Arabic interpreter to persuade the detainees to be escorted from their ruined cells. The repairs took weeks.

The guard officers were unsure what the detainee leaders had been up to. According to military and intelligence officials, there were indications that Aamer and al-Sharbi had been at odds. Al-Sharbi, the accused Al Qaeda bomb maker, once told a military review panel it was his “honor” to be classified as an enemy combatant, declaring, “May God help me to fight the infidels!” Paradoxically, he was believed to be the more pragmatic negotiator, urging that the detainees try to improve conditions in the camp. But Aamer, who had denied any involvement in militant activities, took a different position. According to the officials, he argued more directly that the detainees should use the talks to pressure the military into either trying them fairly or setting them free.

Aamer told his lawyer the military had “sadly betrayed its word on every occasion a promise has been made.” He blamed the colonel personally. At the time, Bumgarner said, he felt similarly betrayed. But when he recounted the story months later, he sounded merely disappointed. “We almost liked each other,” he said of the two Saudis, Aamer and al-Sharbi. “I shouldn’t say we liked each other, but when we spoke together, there was no animosity.”

By mid-August, the hunger strike that military commanders thought they had resolved was picking up strength. Complaints about living conditions were de-emphasized, military officials and lawyers for the detainees told me. Instead, the prisoners focused on their future legal status. The renewed protest hit a peak just after Sept. 11 of last year, with 131 prisoners refusing meals for at least three straight days, officials said.

Many of the officers doubted that the protesters were willing to take their own lives. Islamic law strongly forbids suicide. Abdulaziz al-Shammari, the Kuwaiti teacher who was one of the most frequent hunger-strikers, said he never considered taking his own life. “We saw that they would not let us die,” he said of the military doctors. “This was merely the most extreme side of the protests.”

Al-Shammari, who has a university degree in Islamic law, was one of a half-dozen more learned detainees to whom others turned for religious rulings on countless problems of their captivity. He said he knew of no relevant exceptions to the prohibition against suicide.

Two officials familiar with intelligence reporting from Guantánamo said that sometime in the late summer of 2005, Saber Lahmar, the Algerian religious leader who served on the six-man council, told other detainees of a fatwa that said it was lawful to take your own life in order to protect state secrets or to defend the common good. Other detainees spoke about the prophetic dream that Shaker Aamer mentioned to Bumgarner, in which three prisoners had to die for the rest to be free, the officials said.

As doctors began to tube-feed the more recalcitrant hunger-strikers, the strike consumed the medical staff. Specialists were flown in from naval hospitals in Florida. Most of the detainees maintained their weight at above or near 80 percent of their so-called ideal body weight. But as the strike dragged on, several slipped below 75 or even 70 percent of that measure, doctors said.

For detainees who obeyed the rules, the military offered new perks. Exercise time was extended once more. On Hood’s instructions, Gatorade and energy bars were given out during recreation periods. Wednesday became pizza night. Guard officers suggested soccer and volleyball tournaments to the compliant detainees in Camp 4. The detainees came back asking that a prize — two-liter bottles of Pepsi — be awarded to the winners. (The detainees disdained Coca-Cola, guards said.) Before the games could begin, however, the detainees changed their minds, the officers said. They had concluded that the contest was a scheme by the military to divide them.

While increasing the incentives for compliance, the colonel also tried to clamp down on disruptive behavior. The segregation and discipline blocks were overhauled. The rules became stricter, the guards tougher. When detainees in segregation tried to shout to one another through the walls, the guards were to turn on large, noisy fans to drown them out.

Worried about Shaker Aamer’s influence, Bumgarner also took an unusual step. In September, he had Aamer moved to Camp Echo, where he would be even more isolated than he would be on the segregation blocks. But Bumgarner did not cut off contacts with the detainee leaders entirely. He approached Zaeef to assure him that he wanted to continue to improve things for compliant detainees. He also developed a rapport with Ghassan al-Sharbi.

Al-Sharbi was described by people who know him as an intelligent, almost ethereal man from a wealthy Saudi family. (In an appearance before a military tribunal, he sat placidly with his hands folded at the defense table and told the presiding officer in plain English: “I’m going to make it easy for you guys. I fought against the United States.”) The colonel said he found al-Sharbi a useful interlocutor and met with him repeatedly. After August, he never spoke with Aamer again.

The guard officers saw some indications that the tougher approach was working. The number of detainees in the discipline and segregation blocks fell substantially. Only later did the officers begin to suspect that the more combative detainees were so focused on the hunger strike that they had little energy for other protests.

VI. The Suicides

To some of Colonel Bumgarner’s officers, it seemed that the latest group of hunger-strikers were being allowed to get too comfortable. They had hospital beds, air-conditioning, attentive nurses and a choice of throat lozenges to ease the pain of their feeding tubes. The arrangement also allowed some of the hospitalized detainees to communicate relatively easily.

By late November, while many of the strikers were maintaining their weight, four or five of them were becoming dangerously malnourished, Dr. Edmondson said. By sucking on their feeding tubes, they had figured out how to siphon out the contents of their stomachs. Others simply vomited after they had been fed.

On Dec. 5, the guard force ordered five “restraint chairs” from a small manufacturer in Iowa. If obdurate detainees could be strapped down during and after their feedings, the guard officers hoped, it might ensure that they digested what they were fed.

Days later, a Navy forensic psychiatrist arrived at Guantánamo, followed by three experts from a Bureau of Prisons medical center in Missouri. Bumgarner said the visitors agreed with him that the strike was a “discipline issue”: “If you don’t eat, it’s the same as an attempted suicide. It’s a violation of camp rules.” In addition to feeding prisoners in the chair, some of the more influential hunger-strikers were sent off to Camp Echo with the hope of weakening the others’ resolve. The number of strikers, which was at 84 in early January, soon fell to a handful.

Lawyers for the detainees were appalled. The lawyers quoted their clients as saying detainees had been strapped into the chairs for several hours at a time, even as they defecated or urinated on themselves. The doctors told me later that they had run out of options. “I would have preferred to have waited,” said Dr. Edmondson, the chief base physician, who other officials said opposed the restraint chairs. But he added, “I seriously believed that we were going to lose one of those guys if we didn’t do something different.”

In the spring of 2006, General Hood and Colonel Bumgarner were suggesting that the mood at Guantánamo had turned. A handful of hunger-strikers were still at it — a few young Saudis and Yemenites, and Ghassan al-Sharbi. But the officers saw them as zealots whose threat to the smooth operation of the camp could be controlled. Otherwise, disciplinary infractions and attacks on the guards were down, they said, and many of the detainees were responding positively to new incentives for good behavior.

In an interview in late March, Hood said he believed that many young Arab detainees — sheltered, passionate young men who had gone to Afghanistan to fight what they thought would be a noble jihad — were beginning to see the light. They hadn’t been radicalized at Guantánamo, he insisted. Rather, as conditions at the camp had improved, their preconceptions about Americans had worn away. “They discover, ‘You guys aren’t so bad.”’

“I think the hard-core people have lost ground over the last four years,” Hood said. “They are clearly losing ground.”

As he prepared to turn over his command in April to Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., Hood was upbeat about the future. “We are going to establish the most world-class detention facilities, and we are going to show the world that we’re doing this right,” he said. “Every provision of the Geneva Conventions related to the safe custody of the detainees is being adhered to. Today at Guantánamo — and, in fact, for a long time — the American people would be proud of the discipline that is demonstrated here.”

Six weeks later, as guards in Camp 1 patrolled one of the blocks, they came upon a detainee comatose in his cell and frothing at the mouth — symptoms of an apparent overdose. “Snowball” — the guards’ radio code for a suicide attempt — was called out over and over. In all, five detainees were found to have ingested medication that they and others had hoarded, and guard officers concluded that at least three were making serious suicide attempts. (Military spokesmen said that only two had really tried to kill themselves.)

Later that afternoon, May 18, a riot broke out among the “highly compliant” detainees in Camp 4 as guards moved to search their dormitories — and their Korans — for pills and other contraband, officials said. Detainees in one block of the camp set on guards who stormed their barracks after another guard saw a staged hanging and mistakenly called out “blizzard,” the code for multiple suicide attempts. The guards’ quick-reaction force fired rounds of rubber bullets and voluminous blasts of pepper spray to contain the disturbance.

Doctors later determined that the detainees had ingested sleeping pills, antianxiety medication and antipsychotics — whatever they could get their hands on. Since none of the men had been prescribed the medicines they took, it was evident that other detainees had colluded in the plan. (A cache of about 20 more pills was later found in one prisoner’s prosthetic leg.) Still, the military authorities seemed uncertain how to respond.

Some officials recalled the detainees’ premonition about three of them having to die. The medical staff tried to more closely monitor detainees with mental-health problems. But that screening apparently did not factor in the possibility that the men might have been determined to kill themselves for other reasons — like loyalty to a cause.

Sometime before midnight on June 9, three young Arab men, who were being held near one another in a single block of Camp 1, moved quietly to the backs of their small cells and began to string up nooses that had been elaborately made from torn linens and clothing. The bright lights had been turned down for the night. Still, the prisoners had to work quickly: guards were supposed to walk the block every three minutes.

After anchoring the nooses in the steel mesh walls of their cells, the three — Mani al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, both Saudis, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed, of Yemen — piled clothing under their bedsheets to make it appear that they were asleep. They stuffed wads of fabric into their mouths, either to muffle their cries or perhaps to help themselves suffocate. At least one of the men also bound his legs, military officials said, apparently so he would not be able to kick as he died.

With the nooses pulled over their heads, the prisoners slipped behind blankets they had hung over the back corners of their cells and stepped onto their small, stainless-steel sinks. The drop was short — only about 18 inches — but adequate. By the time they were discovered, doctors surmised, the men had been asphyxiated for at least 20 minutes and probably longer. Military and intelligence officials said it appeared that the other 20-odd prisoners on the block knew that the suicides were being prepared. Some may have prayed with the men, the officials said, and a few may have assisted in carrying out the plan. What is certain is that in contrast to most previous suicide attempts at the camp, none of the detainees made any effort to alert the guards.

When doctors reviewed their files on the three men, they found that none of them had shown signs of depression or other psychological problems. All three had been on hunger strikes — one of them since the previous August — and at least two of them had been evaluated when they abandoned their protests. One doctor recalled one of the men telling him brightly: “I’m sleeping well. I feel well. No problems.”

What the men hoped to communicate by their deaths may have been contained in brief notes they left behind in Arabic. The notes have not been made public, and a Navy investigation into the suicides continues. But military leaders at Guantánamo were not waiting on its outcome. They concluded immediately that the suicides were a blitzkrieg in the detainees’ long campaign of protest. At a news conference hours after the suicides, the new Guantánamo commander, Admiral Harry Harris, described them as an act of “asymmetric warfare.”

VII. Tightening Up

I sat down with Colonel Bumgarner one blazing afternoon in late June, as he was preparing to give up command. He looked tired and stressed, and slumped into a chair in his small, cluttered office. As Shaker Aamer did the previous summer, Bumgarner used words like “trust” and “betrayal.” Bumgarner, at the time we spoke, was briefly suspended from duty while the military investigated whether he improperly disclosed classified information to a North Carolina newspaper reporter who, around the time the suicides occurred, had been in Bumgarner’s headquarters reporting a feature article on the colonel from Kings Mountain. (He was absolved of any wrongdoing.) But he seemed more worried by something else: Had he completely misunderstood the prisoners he was trying to reach?

“We tried to improve their lives to the extent that we can — to the point that we may have gone overboard, not recognizing the real nature of who we’re dealing with,” he said. “I thought they had proven themselves. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I did not think that they would kill themselves.”

Bumgarner said he could not discuss the suicides because of the Navy’s continuing investigation. But several officials said that the three detainees had taken advantage of some of the colonel’s quality-of-life reforms, including the nighttime dimming of lights and the availability of extra clothing. There were also indications that Ghassan al-Sharbi, the colonel’s onetime interlocutor, had helped plan the suicides, two of the officials said.

Looking back, Col. Kevin Burk, the commander of the military police battalion, said: “With any population like this, you’re going to have a battle. It wasn’t like we were all going to ‘Kumbaya’ together. But we were trying to find that middle ground, where the tension in the camp would even out. As far as we could see, no one had really tried to find that equilibrium before.”

It is unclear if or when the military might try again. By most appearances, Guantánamo has been tightening up. Since the May riot and the suicides, the military has increased security to prevent further disturbances or deaths. In its ruling on the military tribunals in June, the Supreme Court left the government no choice but to abide by the minimum standards of treatment contained in the Geneva Conventions. But what other privileges and freedoms the detainees are allowed may come even more into question as the Guantánamo population is winnowed down to a harder core and joined by the most notorious terror suspects captured by the C.I.A.

One hint of Guantánamo’s future may lie in the retrofitting of Camp 6, the brand-new medium-security facility that was to have opened this summer. Until this spring, the new camp was to embody the sort of conditions Colonel Bumgarner and other officials had hoped to institutionalize, with spaces for communal meals and larger recreation areas where compliant detainees could play soccer and other sports. After the riot and the suicides, the camp was substantially remade. When it eventually opens, military officials said, it will look somewhat more like Camp 5, the maximum-security unit down the road.

Tim Golden, an investigative reporter for The Times, has been writing about terrorism and detention issues since 2004.

    The Battle for Guantánamo, NYT, 13.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/17guantanamo.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Democratic Effort to Limit Surveillance Bill Is Blocked

September 13, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:49 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senate Republicans blocked Democratic attempts to rein in President Bush's domestic wiretapping program Wednesday, endorsing a White House-supported bill that would give the controversial surveillance legal status.

Under pressure from the Bush administration for quick action, the full Senate could take up the measure next week.

Progress on a companion bill in the House was not as tidy, in part because GOP leaders and Bush are intensely negotiating restrictions it proposes on the surveillance program. Even as the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Chairman Arlen Specter's bill to the Senate floor on a party line vote, the same panel in the House abruptly canceled its scheduled markup.

The developments come amid a sustained White House campaign to persuade Congress to give the administration broad authority to monitor, interrogate and prosecute terrorism suspects. The administration is up against an election season in which Republicans are struggling to keep its majority with approval from a war-weary electorate.

Specter, R-Pa., has acknowledged that GOP lawmakers fighting for re-election may not embrace a measure bearing Bush's stamp of approval.

While refusing to give the president a blank check to prosecute the war on terrorism, Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee kept to the White House's condition that a bill giving legal status to the surveillance program pass unamended. That's not a sure thing on the Senate floor, where several amendments await the measure.

The panel also approved other measures relating to the program, some of which contradict Specter's bill -- meaning the possibility of even more debate on the Senate floor.

But Specter's bill survived the committee vote unchanged. Republicans defeated several Democratic amendments, including measures to insert a one-year expiration date into the bill and require the National Security Agency to report more often to Congress on the standards for its domestic surveillance program.

''We just don't want to see Americans' rights abused for the next 50 or 60 years because of an oversight on our part,'' said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who joined some Republicans in opposing some amendments offered by her Democratic colleagues.

But Republicans countered that the bill represented the best deal on the matter and should not be amended.

The deal is part of the White House's election-season campaign to preserve its ability to fight the war on terror despite congressional concerns about civil liberties.

A parade of White House officials seeking support for legal tools against terrorists was to culminate Thursday with an appearance by Bush himself before House Republicans anxious to maintain their majority in the November elections.

Behind-the-scenes negotiations were intense Wednesday. As the Senate bill moved toward committee approval, the House Judiciary Committee abruptly canceled its markup that had been scheduled to happen simultaneously. The reason for the cancellation wasn't immediately clear.

Sponsored by Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., and endorsed by House GOP leaders, that measure would require the president to wait until an attack has occurred to initiate wiretapping without warrants, a provision administration officials say would hamper the White House's ability to prevent attacks.

Specter's bill would submit the warrantless wiretapping program to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for a one-time constitutional review and extend from the current three days to seven days the time allowed for emergency surveillance before a warrant application is submitted and approved by that court.

Vice President Dick Cheney and other top aides encountered stiff resistance from senators and House leaders this week during visits to Capitol Hill. The standoffs raised questions about whether the president could unite Republicans on his anti-terror agenda before November's midterm elections.

Associated Press Writer Anne Plummer Flaherty contributed to this report.

    Democratic Effort to Limit Surveillance Bill Is Blocked, NYT, 13.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Congress-Terrorism.html?hp&ex=1158206400&en=559efc62c3ef83bb&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Did Bush’s 9/11 Address Persuade? (7 Letters)

September 13, 2006
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “In Prime-Time Address, Bush Says Safety of U.S. Hinges on Iraq” (news article, Sept. 12):

As one of the thousands of people who were in the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, and experienced firsthand the horrors of that day, I never thought that five years later it would come to this.

Immediately after the attack, a vast majority of Americans and the world were united around a common cause to capture and punish the people responsible.

For the short time between Sept. 11 and the first inklings of an attack on Iraq, a country that did not attack us, I was encouraged by our progress in Afghanistan: our government would honor those who died by uniting the world and dispensing justice.

The president’s own speech on Monday night outlined, in the starkest terms, the magnitude of the administration’s failure.

According to President Bush, the United States and the rest of the world are now locked in ideological warfare for decades to come that includes weapons of mass destruction with no mutually assured destruction mechanism as a deterrent.

Is there any possible worse outcome?

Americans have to wake up and realize that there are alternatives to the future the president described. This has to start with the coming election. Only Americans, with their power to vote, can alter the future our president has put before us.

Bill DeLorenzo
Basking Ridge, N.J., Sept. 12, 2006

To the Editor:

Now that President Bush has publicly declared that we are fighting the decisive ideological struggle of a century that has barely begun, that we are being tested the way we were in World War II and the cold war, that Osama bin Laden has declared this struggle a third world war, we can test the sincerity of the president by watching his deeds more than his words.

A struggle to “determine the destiny of millions across the world” requires that we do what was done in our previous major conflicts:

Send more troops to the crucial areas, like Iraq and Afghanistan; increase our armed forces to make this possible and still keep major reserves for fighting elsewhere; reinstitute a draft if there are not enough volunteers for this program; and increase taxes to pay for the expenses involved (a struggle of such cosmic nature clearly requires sacrifices from every American).

Finally, submit these proposals to Congress at once to demonstrate that the matter is truly serious, not a matter of political rhetoric to boost a public image.

David Hudson
Fresno, Calif., Sept. 12, 2006

To the Editor:

President Bush, in his speech commemorating 9/11, admitted making mistakes when he referred to “whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq.”

It should be noted that none of the people making these mistakes, including him, have repented, apologized or been replaced.

The president asks us to keep following him, as he and his vice president and the defense secretary march us over the cliff.

Even a mediocre chief executive could do better than this.

Stanley R. Bermann
Santa Fe, N.M., Sept. 12, 2006

To the Editor:

In “President Bush’s Reality” (editorial, Sept. 12), you note Vice President Dick Cheney’s claim that “if we had it to do over again, we’d do exactly the same thing” and invade Iraq.

Tragically, for our soldiers and our national interests, the administration must take this position. To do otherwise would be to admit that more than 2,600 Americans and an untold number of Iraqis have been killed for a mistake. And what administration would be so brutally honest?

So instead we stay the course, compounding the mistake and creating facts on the ground in Iraq that did not exist on Sept. 12, 2001.

Bob Bocher
Monona, Wis., Sept. 12, 2006

To the Editor:

According to the senior Marine intelligence officer in Iraq, the situation in Anbar Province is deteriorating, and we need more troops there (“Grim Outlook Seen in West Iraq Without More Troops and Aid,” front page, Sept. 12).

On Monday, we learned that an agreement to win Sunni support for the Iraqi constitution was disintegrating (“Deal That Won Sunni Backing of Iraq Constitution Sours,” news article, Sept. 11).

If the security of America hinges on the Bush administration’s plans for defeating terrorism in Baghdad, we are lost.

Constance McKee
Woodside, Calif., Sept. 12, 2006

To the Editor:

On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney stood by the administration’s decision to invade Iraq (“Cheney Returns to a 9/11 Forum for Latest Iraq Defense,” news article, Sept. 11). He said that even if he had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, “we’d do exactly the same thing.”

My question to Mr. Cheney: What reason would you give?

Mary Paddock
Blacksburg, Va., Sept. 11, 2006

To the Editor:

At the beginning of Monday evening’s televised speech, President Bush said: “On 9/11, our nation saw the face of evil. Yet on that awful day, we also witnessed something distinctly American: ordinary citizens rising to the occasion, and responding with extraordinary acts of courage.”

That many citizens responded courageously on Sept. 11 cannot be disputed, but how were these responses “distinctly American”?

The world has witnessed bravery and courage in countries affected by terrorism all over the world, from England and Spain to Indonesia and throughout the Middle East. The United States hardly has an exclusive on these universal human traits.

It’s great to be a courageous nation, but let’s not think for a minute that we’re the only one.

Marc Perman
Maplewood, N.J., Sept. 12, 2006

    Did Bush’s 9/11 Address Persuade? (7 Letters), NYT, 13.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/13/opinion/l13bush.html

Editorial

President Bush’s Reality

September 12, 2006
The New York Times

Last night, President Bush once again urged Americans to take terrorism seriously — a warning that hardly seems necessary. One aspect of that terrible day five years ago that seems immune to politicization or trivialization is the dread of another attack. When Mr. Bush warns that Al Qaeda means what it says, that there are Islamist fanatics around the world who wish us harm and that the next assault could be even worse than the last, he does not need to press the argument.

After that, paths diverge. Mr. Bush has been marking the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 with a series of speeches about terrorism that culminated with his televised address last night. He has described a world where Iraq is a young but hopeful democracy with a “unity government” that represents its diverse population. Al Qaeda-trained terrorists who are terrified by “the sight of an old man pulling the election lever” are trying to stop the march of progress. The United States and its friends are holding firm in a battle that will decide whether freedom or terror will rule the 21st century.

If that were actual reality, the president’s call to “put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us” would be inspiring, instead of frustrating and depressing.

Iraq had nothing to do with the war on terror until the Bush administration decided to invade it. The president now admits that Saddam Hussein was not responsible for 9/11 (although he claimed last night that the invasion was necessary because Iraq posed a “risk”). But he has failed to offer the country a new, realistic reason for being there.

Establishing democracy at the heart of the Middle East no longer qualifies, desirable as that would be. Where Mr. Bush sees an infant secular Iraqi government, most of the world sees a collection of ethnic and religious factional leaders, armed with private militias, presiding over growing strife between Shiites and Sunnis. Warning that American withdrawal would “embolden” the enemy is far from an argument as long as there is constant evidence that American presence is creating a fearful backlash throughout the Muslim world that empowers the fanatics far more than it frightens them.

Fending off the chaos that would almost certainly come with civil war would be a reason to stay the course, although it does not inspire the full-throated rhetoric about freedom that Mr. Bush offered last night. But the nation needs to hear a workable plan to stabilize a fractured, disintegrating country and end the violence. If such a strategy exists, it seems unlikely that Mr. Bush could see it through the filter of his fantasies.

It’s hard to figure out how to build consensus when the men in charge embrace a series of myths. Vice President Dick Cheney suggested last weekend that the White House is even more delusional than Mr. Bush’s rhetoric suggests. The vice president volunteered to NBC’s Tim Russert that not only was the Iraq invasion the right thing to do, “if we had it to do over again, we’d do exactly the same thing.”

It is a breathtaking thought. If we could return to Sept. 12, 2001, knowing all we have seen since, Mr. Cheney and the president would march right out and “do exactly the same thing” all over again. It will be hard to hear the phrase “lessons of Sept. 11” again without contemplating that statement.

    President Bush’s Reality, NYT, 12.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/opinion/12tue1.html?ex=1158292800&en=baef3598e5784194&ei=5087%0A

Near Site of Disaster, Workers Strive for the Routine

September 12, 2006
The New York Times
By PATRICK McGEEHAN and DAVID W. DUNLAP

Under a September sky as blue and promising as it had been five years before, thousands of workers marched through Lower Manhattan yesterday morning, wishing for nothing more than a routine day at the office.

They moved elbow-to-elbow through subway stations, up staircases and along sidewalks in a rush to reach meetings, serve customers or trade stocks. Many were determined not to dwell on the horrible history of the day, the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attack that brought the World Trade Center crashing down in an avalanche of steel and glass and grief.

But, of course, the memories were still too fresh and painful to ignore completely. The best the workers in the financial district could hope for was a busy day punctuated constantly by the tolling of bells and, only occasionally, by emotional outbursts.

In the offices of the N.A.S.D., the main regulator of stock brokerages, a box of tissues sat on the sill of every window overlooking ground zero. Down the hall, Deborah L. Fling, a secretary to the staff lawyers, was boxing up documents from a completed legal case to be sent off and archived. She said she was glad to have assignments to occupy her mind.

“I came in, I hugged people and now I’m doing my usual work,” said Ms. Fling, 50, who lives in the Tremont section of the Bronx. “We just go with the flow.”

Annette Talt, an executive assistant at the N.A.S.D., said she had made it to her office on the 48th floor of 1 Liberty Plaza from her home on Staten Island by bus as usual. But as soon as she glanced toward the glass through which she had watched the south tower burn, her defenses failed.

“I really thought that none of this would affect me,” said Ms. Talt, 64, who had been alone in the silent executive suite when she heard the first jet crash across the street. “Then, I just cried.”

Every time a bell tolled, Ms. Talt cocked her head and checked her watch, trying to determine its significance.

Several blocks away at the New York Stock Exchange, traders had less time to reflect. They spent the hour before the opening bell sizing up the demand to buy or sell certain stocks, as usual.

Floor brokers wearing telephone headsets and carrying electronic order pads buzzed by Sean M. McCooey’s post to check on the pre-market interest in shares of Viacom, the media conglomerate, and Sasol Limited, a South African energy company. As he monitored incoming orders flashing in blue bands on a chest-high electronic screen, Mr. McCooey said the morning had been “typically slow” for a Monday at the tail end of summer, but he did not think that sentiments about the anniversary had been a factor.

“I think people made the adjustment in terms of dealing with it some time ago,” said Mr. McCooey, who added that all of his staff reported for work on time. “It wasn’t like we had to give anybody a pep talk.”

The hum of activity on the exchange floor built to a low roar as the opening bell neared. Then, like hundreds of actors on a stage, the brokers, clerks and exchange officials all froze at precisely 9:29 a.m., observing a minute of silence before the market opened, interrupted only by the soft chirrup of electronic devices. After 60 seconds, a single, faint bell sounded the return to action in the citadel of capitalism.

“What you got on BN?” asked Kenneth J. Polcari, 45, of Armonk, N.Y., a broker and a managing director of Polcari/Weicker. He had made his way over to the post where stock in the Banta Corporation — which his customer did not want to sell for less than $48 — was being traded for $47.05. Like many others who work downtown, Mr. Polcari caught a lucky break on Sept. 11, 2001. Invited by colleagues to join them for breakfast, he left his office on the 55th floor of the south tower about 8:20 a.m., less than an hour before a jet slammed into it.

A half-hour or so into trading yesterday, Mr. Polcari detected a mood that was more subdued than usual. Then again, he noted, the market was down 21 points.

At midday on Deutsche Bank’s stock-trading floor at 60 Wall Street, traders were devouring sandwiches and salads in the usual spot, hunched over keyboards that control a triptych of electronic screens. Surrounded by dozens of TV screens carrying images of the events of that other Sept. 11, the traders could not forget what day it was as they stood and called out orders across the room.

“It was a typical Monday morning,” said Joseph L. Ferrarese, the head stock trader. “But the hard part about it is it’s a personal day.”

Verizon’s headquarters at 140 West Street, across Vesey Street from ground zero, was the most heavily damaged of the surviving office buildings around the trade center site. Yesterday, employees gathered in the sumptuously restored Art Deco lobby there to observe a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m.

But Carmen Bermudez, 32, a staff manager from Great Kills, Staten Island, had already observed a personal moment of silence on the 25th floor when she arrived about 6:30 a.m.

“Before I turned on my computer and got buried in work,” she said, “I knew I had to take a moment out for myself. And then I got buried in work.” She spent her morning catching up with messages after a weeklong vacation.

One floor above, Catherine Gasteyer, 51, a manager of external affairs who lives in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, planned to spend time at 9/11 observances. But she soon found that the demands of planning the company’s fiber-optic service overwhelmed her schedule, with a conference call and lots of e-mail messages.

Out on the streets, deliverymen wheeled carts of produce into delis and merchants hustled to sell goods to men and women in suits and ties.

At a news kiosk at Broadway and John Street, Perry Patel of Flushing, Queens, stood behind a counter selling lottery tickets to his regular customers. Mr. Patel, 35, said that he had arrived at the newsstand at his customary time of 6 a.m. As usual, he found bundles containing 350 daily newspapers waiting.

Mr. Patel, whose kiosk is next to a construction site, noticed just one difference from recent days: “When I got here this morning, there wasn’t as much noise in the street,” he said. “The construction guys with the jackhammers weren’t here.”

Steven Harris, wearing a purple fedora, a purple shirt and purple shoes, said his makeshift shoeshine stand on the west side of Broadway near Pine Street had not been the same since Sept. 11. Where once he earned $100 a day, now he might take in $35 for 12 hours of work, he said.

But despite the drop in income, Mr. Harris, 46, said that he and his brothers — Travis, 50, and Linwood, 51 — had no intention of giving up the spot they have occupied since 1977 next to an iron fence that encircles Trinity Church.

“This is what I do every day,” he said. “This is what I’ve done for 29 years. And this is what I’m going to keep doing.”

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

    Near Site of Disaster, Workers Strive for the Routine, NYT, 12.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/12downtown.html

Nation Marks Lives Lost and Hopeful Signs of Healing

September 12, 2006
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Once more the leaden bells tolled in mourning, loved ones recited the names of the dead at ground zero, and a wounded but resilient America paused yesterday to remember the calamitous day when terrorist explosions rumbled like summer thunder and people fell from the sky.

On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, as most Americans went about their Monday routines, thousands gathered at ground zero, at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania where the hijacked jetliners crashed. They included families and friends of the 2,973 people who died, President Bush and other public officials, and countless strangers united by haunting but receding memories.

At the pit in Lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center stood, they commemorated the day with familiar rituals: moments of silence to mark the times when the planes struck and the towers collapsed, wreath-layings, prayers, the music and poetry of loss and remembrance. All were freighted with emotions that still cut deeply but were showing signs of healing.

“How much do I love you?” Susan Sliwak, a mother of three, intoned at a microphone on a platform above the grieving crowd, quoting from an Irving Berlin lyric in tribute to her husband, Robert Sliwak, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee and one of the 2,749 killed at the trade center. “How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?”

As a bass viol, a flute and other instruments softly rendered the Pachelbel Canon, Albinoni’s Adagio and other solemn strains, about 200 spouses, partners and other loved ones took turns reading the names of the dead. Many spoke directly to their lost partners, often in firm, proud voices. Others told tearfully of the births of grandchildren or of having reaffirmed their marriage vows. Many simply expressed their love and that of their children, a promise never to forget.

Under shafts of golden sunlight, many family members knelt in the pit to pray. They hugged one another, cried softly or sobbed and set wreaths and roses adrift in reflecting pools that stand in the stead of the fallen towers. The waters were soon thick with flowers.

But if there was a theme to this year’s proceedings, it was honoring the dead while moving on with life. “For all Americans, this date will be forever entwined with sadness,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in closing remarks during the noon hour. “But the memory of those we lost can burn with a softening brightness.”

Moments later, musicians of the New York Police and Fire Departments played taps, the slow, hauntingly beautiful solemnity that closes the military day. Yesterday actually closed with another tradition: the “Tribute in Light,” two powerful beams that shot skyward, creating silhouettes of the fallen towers.

It was a sumptuously cool day in the 60’s, a grand portal to autumn, and Lower Manhattan was a dramatic backdrop. One had to imagine the architecture to come on the gouged ground: angular skyscrapers to go with memorial pools. Still, the surroundings were vivid: the magical skyline rising in geometric patterns, the seas of fluttering American flags, the Hudson flickering mercurially in the sunlight, and in the distance seagulls dipping and soaring like strokes on a musical composition.

President Bush did not attend the ceremonies at ground zero, where he and his wife, Laura, laid a wreath on Sunday. Instead, he joined 100 police officers and firefighters for breakfast at a firehouse on the Lower East Side to honor first responders who rushed to the towers to save lives but lost their own. As bells tolled, Mr. Bush bowed his head in silence to mark the times when the planes hit the towers.

Later, he went to Pennsylvania and shared handshakes and hugs in a cold rain with families of 40 who died in the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 and who, the authorities believe, spared the White House or the Capitol from destruction by rising up against the hijackers. In Northern Virginia, Mr. and Mrs. Bush laid a wreath against the Pentagon wall that was hit by American Airlines Flight 77, killing 184 people.

For the first anniversary since 2002, the president visited all three places where lives were lost on 9/11, and he did so without making a speech until his evening address to the nation from the Oval Office.

The commemoration at ground zero was only one of many solemn remembrances across the country. In houses of worship, firehouses and police stations, in parks and public buildings in scores of cities, there were vigils, forums, interfaith services, concerts, exhibits and events that ranged from flying kites to floating lanterns. Millions watched the ceremonies on television and talked about where they were and what they were doing when the planes struck, and about how their lives had changed.

There were commemorations elsewhere in New York, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Paul’s Chapel near ground zero and in the rotunda of State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Concerts, masses, exhibits, memorial unveilings and other events were held in many suburbs: in Hempstead and Mineola and Nyack, N.Y.; in Hartford; and in Trenton, Bayonne, Middletown, Newark, Holmdel and other places in New Jersey, a state that was home to 700 of those who died at the trade center.

But behind the ceremonial day, the rhythms of life in America went on. There were jobs to do, classes to attend, soccer games, weddings, births, deaths and appointments. The armies of commerce, homemakers and civil servants went about their business, not quite as usual, perhaps, but with an awareness that 9/11, a date burned into the national psyche, had edged away from catastrophe toward the realm of tragic history. It was an occasion for solemnity but no longer a wrenching heartbreak.

Aside from discussions of the day’s meaning, it was an ordinary day at most schools. At airports, bus and train stations and other transportation hubs, it was another day of security and travel, although Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan was evacuated briefly in the morning for a suspicious package that turned out to be nothing threatening.

Memories were still raw at firehouses, like one at Amsterdam Avenue and 66th Street, where Engine 40 and Ladder 35 lost 11 men five years ago. “We live with that every day,” Capt. John Miles said. “This day is just for the remembrance of those that were lost.” But at 8:42 a.m., minutes before the first moment of silence, a fire alarm rang in and firefighters rushed to their trucks.

At the New York Stock Exchange, work stopped to observe silences, an eerie effect on the normally raucous trading floor. On a New York Waterway ferry crossing to Jersey City, Capt. Kirk Slater, who had taken people to work who never came back on Sept. 11, halted his engines for a moment and drifted on a silent river. A subway train halted at the same moment near 96th Street on the Upper West Side. In Central Park, people strolled, played ball and spread out on lawns as if spending the day in an impressionist painting.

Life and death went on. At the Owens Funeral Home in Harlem, a service was held for Clyde Griffin Jr., an 80-year-old veteran of World War II, who died last week.

At St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, Emma Paulino-Chindra was born to Ines Paulino-Chindra, 26, and her husband, Wendell, 31. “It’s a miracle baby,” the new father said. “We’ll celebrate life today, not death.”

Tony Arroyo Sr. of Lancaster, Pa., who took his son, Tony Jr., to the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, marveled at a $50 million renovation and, out the window, at North Cove Marina on the Hudson River, where boats caked with debris from the towers had fled. Now, more than 40 watercraft bobbed jauntily in a spanking breeze, including a gleaming huge catamaran called Best Revenge.

The anniversary dawned on a nation vastly changed in five years, with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, renewed fears of nuclear conflagration and security measures that have altered the ways Americans travel, do business and think about the world. Despite $250 billion in new security measures for airports, borders and seaports, most Americans believe another major attack is inevitable but have accepted searches, delays and inconvenience as the price of life in an age of terror.

At ground zero, families and friends of the dead began assembling just after 7 a.m., and by 8:30 the clusters had merged into thousands. Some wore T-shirts bearing images of loved ones. Others carried photos, bouquets of roses or carnations and the burdens of five years with the void in their lives. They descended into the pit on a ramp lined with flags and cement blocks alternately painted red and white.

Bagpipes wailed “The Minstrel Boy,” and violins and flutes added to a mournful air. Later, Wynton Marsalis gave a trumpet solo. Mayor Bloomberg was master of ceremonies, and there were readings and remarks by Governors George E. Pataki of New York and Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey, as well as former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. In the crowd were many public officials, including Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

But most in the crowd were people like Marie Paprocki, 50, whose brother, Denis Lavelle, was on the 94th floor of the North Tower when the plane hit and was among those never found in the rubble. “It’s important for me to come here because we couldn’t bury him,” she said. “I can feel close to him here. I can feel peaceful.”

The recitation of the names of the dead has become a centerpiece of the ceremonies, performed in past years by public officials, children, parents and grandparents. Last year sisters and brothers read the names. This year it was the turn of husbands, wives and companions.

The vast majority were widows, the wives of firefighters and police officers, financial workers and other trade center employees. It was hard for many, wives choking with emotion just to speak a husband’s name. Voices quavered as they invoked the names of their fatherless children and offered endearments, messages that said, in effect, we love you, miss you and will never forget you.

The recitation of names took more than three hours and, before a silent and rapt audience, became a kind of narrative, one with a strange literary power. It conveyed images beyond the deaths of heroes and patriots, quietly and relentlessly capturing the loss of real husbands and wives, real fathers and mothers, real children and siblings, and finally touching the heart of the matter: the shattered loves, the crushed hopes and the poignancy of ordinary lives.

During the recitation, there were eloquent silences as well: at 8:46 a.m., the indelible moment when American Airlines Flight 11 slashed into the north tower and changed everything; at 9:03, when United Airlines Flight 175 hit the south tower; at 9:59, when the south tower collapsed, and at 10:28, when the north tower fell.

As the names of the dead echoed outward like oratorios, thousands milled about on the surrounding streets, some pensive, some looking upset, others acting as if they were at a 9/11 street fair. On Liberty Street, someone had draped a medallion around the neck of a live tropical bird sitting on a fence, steps away from a recently opened center for ground zero artifacts.

On Church Street, dozens of protesters in black T-shirts paraded with signs and literature espousing conspiracy theories about the trade center’s destruction. Someone preached about God. Someone else banged a drum. Parked on Cedar Street was a bus covered inside and out with names and photographs of the dead.

By dusk, ragged ranks of clouds had gathered over the region, and the sky became a vast expanse of mother-of-pearl iridescence.

At 7:12 p.m., sunset in New York, a switch was thrown and two powerful shafts of illumination — the “Tribute in Light” — shot up from Lower Manhattan, restoring, for one more anniversary night, the outlines of the twin towers.

Contributing reporting were Dan Barry, Glenn Collins, Sarah Garland, Kate Hammer, Anemona Hartocollis, Kate Meyer, Michelle O’Donnell and Matthew Sweeney in New York, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg in Washington.

    Nation Marks Lives Lost and Hopeful Signs of Healing, NYT, 12.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/12york.html?hp&ex=1158120000&en=8f30ee6dc5d0c629&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The President

In Prime-Time Address, Bush Says Safety of U.S. Hinges on Iraq

September 12, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 — President Bush used the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on Monday to tell Americans that they were engaged in “a struggle for civilization” that would be determined in part by the course of the war in Iraq.

“The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad,” Mr. Bush said.

In a prime-time speech from the Oval Office, delivered after a day of solemn ceremonies, Mr. Bush sought to place the war in Iraq in the context of an epic battle between tyranny and freedom, saying the campaign against global terrorism was “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the calling of our generation.”

“If we do not defeat these enemies now,” Mr. Bush said, “we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.”

The address capped a week of speeches in which Mr. Bush tried to lay out his best case for the war in Iraq by defining it as a crucial front in the war on terror, while portraying the broader struggle as a natural successor to World War II and the Cold War in defining the place of the United States in the world.

Even by the standards of his latest round of speeches, Mr. Bush’s language was particularly forceful, even ominous, with warnings of a radical Islamic network that was “determined to bring death and suffering to our homes.”

Mr. Bush spent roughly one-fifth of his 17-minute address making the case that the nation’s safety hinged on success in Iraq, even as he implicitly acknowledged there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 strikes.

“I’m often asked why we’re in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks,” Mr. Bush said, going on to say that Mr. Hussein was a threat nonetheless, that he needed to be confronted and that the world was safer with him in captivity.

And Mr. Bush reprised some of his tougher talk against Osama bin Laden, delivering a message to him and other terrorists, “America will find you, and we will bring you to justice.”

Mr. Bush gave his address at the end of a tour through the three major attack sites — Lower Manhattan; Shanksville, Pa.; and the Pentagon — in which he attended ceremonies and spoke with the bereaved but made no public comments.

He gave the speech from behind his desk at a fast clip, but with a furrowed brow and circles below his eyes. He delivered it five years to the minute of when he addressed the nation from the same seat on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, and proclaimed that those who harbored terrorists would be dealt with as if they were terrorists themselves.

Drawing parallels between the challenges of his presidency and those of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, Mr. Bush said, “Our nation has endured trials, and we face a difficult road ahead.” And he called for unity, saying, “We must put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us.”

All of the networks carried the address live; ABC ran it during a break in its miniseries about the attacks that portrayed the Clinton and Bush administrations as having failed at times to move aggressively enough against Al Qaeda before the attacks.

Mr. Bush’s address brought to a close a day when leaders of both parties put aside, at least for the moment, the acrimony that has characterized the national security debate since the brief period of national unity after the attacks. But as soon as the speech was over, the partisanship flared again. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the president “should be ashamed of using a national day of mourning” to justify his Iraq policy. And Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, leader of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, called the address disappointing, saying, “You do not commemorate the tragedy of 9/11 by politicizing it.”

Hours earlier, Congressional leaders joined on the Capitol steps to sing “God Bless America,” an effort to recreate their spontaneous moment of post-attack comity. And the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid — whose press office is ordinarily a clearinghouse for hard-charging attacks on the president and Republican leadership — released a statement that read in part, “The light that shone on Sept. 11 cannot die, it cannot be dimmed, it cannot fail.”

But it was the president’s day that dominated a news media environment that was swimming in the imagery of Sept. 11, with the cable news networks offering blanket coverage of the day’s ceremonies, mixed with remembrances from survivors, first responders, officials and politicians.

Before speaking from the Oval Office, Mr. Bush had spent the day in public silence as he and Laura Bush visited the three sites scarred by the attacks, a solemn trek that began at ground zero Sunday night.

The Bushes began their day at the Fort Pitt firehouse on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they observed back-to-back moments of silence — one at the precise moment each of the twin towers was struck. They then moved to Shanksville, Pa., where Mr. and Mrs. Bush laid a wreath in a spitting rain in the field where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed, and wound up at the Pentagon, where the weight of the day showed on their faces.

It was an emotional and somber, if carefully scripted, day for the Bushes, designed by the White House to maximize the president’s exposure but minimize his words before the evening speech.

At the Pentagon, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld presided over a memorial service that was occasionally interrupted by the eerie roar of commercial jets from nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport.

Addressing a crowd of 500 that included relatives of victims, Mr. Cheney said the United States would keep pressing the fight. “We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history’s latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power,” Mr. Cheney said, quoting the president and reprising a theme that has been taken by critics as a veiled effort to portray Democrats as appeasing the enemy.

Also speaking at the service, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the number of American military personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, at roughly 3,000, was approaching the number of people killed in the attacks.

Teresa Taylor of New Hampshire, who attended in honor of her brother-in-law, Leonard E. Taylor, said she was moved by Mr. Rumsfeld’s recounting of the day of the attacks, given in halting voice. “It brought back a lot of memories,” she said.

But Shannon Mason of Springfield, Va., called the ceremony “too political” for coupling the attacks with the war in Iraq. Ms. Mason, whose mother, Ada Mason, a Pentagon budget analyst, was killed in the attack, added, “I think the war has nothing to do with Sept. 11.”

Even as he called for unity Mr. Bush alluded to Democratic calls for a timetable to withdraw from Iraq, saying, “Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone. They will not leave us alone.”

Mark Leibovich and Helena Andrews contributed reporting.

    In Prime-Time Address, Bush Says Safety of U.S. Hinges on Iraq, NYT, 12.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/us/12bush.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Transcript

President Bush’s Address to the Nation

September 11, 2006
The New York Times

Following is text of President Bush’s address to the nation on Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as recorded by The New York Times:

Good evening. Five years ago, this date - September the 11th - was seared into America's memory. Nineteen men attacked us with a barbarity unequaled in our history. They murdered people of all colors, creeds, and nationalities - and made war upon the entire free world. Since that day, America and her allies have taken the offensive in a war unlike any we have fought before. Today, we are safer, but we are not yet safe. On this solemn night, I have asked for some of your time to discuss the nature of the threat still before us, what we are doing to protect our nation, and the building of a more hopeful Middle East that holds the key to peace for America and the world.

On 9/11, our nation saw the face of evil. Yet on that awful day, we also witnessed something distinctly American: ordinary citizens rising to the occasion, and responding with extraordinary acts of courage. We saw courage in office workers who were trapped on the high floors of burning skyscrapers, and called home so that their last words to their families would be of comfort and love. We saw courage in passengers aboard Flight 93, who recited the 23rd Psalm, and then charged the cockpit. And we saw courage in the Pentagon staff who made it out of the flames and smoke, and ran back in to answer cries for help. On this day, we remember the innocent who lost their lives, and we pay tribute to those who gave their lives so that others might live.

For many of our citizens, the wounds of that morning are still fresh. I've met firefighters and police officers who choke up at the memory of fallen comrades. I've stood with families gathered on a grassy field in Pennsylvania, who take bittersweet pride in loved ones who refused to be victims - and gave America our first victory in the war on terror. And I've sat beside young mothers with children who are now 5 years old, and still long for the daddies who will never cradle them in their arms. Out of this suffering, we resolve to honor every man and woman lost. And we seek their lasting memorial in a safer and more hopeful world.

Since the horror of 9/11, we've learned a great deal about the enemy. We have learned that they are evil and kill without mercy, but not without purpose. We have learned that they form a global network of extremists who are driven by a perverted vision of Islam - a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance and despises all dissent. And we have learned that their goal is to build a radical Islamic empire where women are prisoners in their homes, men are beaten for missing prayer meetings, and terrorists have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilized nations. The war against this enemy is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation.

Our nation is being tested in a way that we have not been since the start of the cold war. We saw what a handful of our enemies can do with box-cutters and plane tickets. We hear their threats to launch even more terrible attacks on our people. And we know that if they were able to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, they would use them against us. We face an enemy determined to bring death and suffering into our homes. America did not ask for this war, and every American wishes it were over. So do I. But the war is not over, and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious. If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. We are in a war that will set the course for this new century, and determine the destiny of millions across the world.

For America, 9/11 was more than a tragedy, it changed the way we look at the world. On September the 11th, we resolved that we would go on the offense against our enemies, and we would not distinguish between the terrorists and those who harbor or support them. So we helped drive the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. We put al Qaeda on the run, and killed or captured most of those who planned the 9/11 attacks - including the man believed to be the mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed. He and other suspected terrorists have been questioned by the Central Intelligence Agency, and they've provided valuable information that has helped stop attacks in America and across the world. Now these men have been transferred to Guantanamo Bay, so they can be held to account for their actions. Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists are still in hiding. Our message to them is clear: No matter how long it takes, America will find you, and we will bring you to justice.

On September the 11th, we learned that America must confront threats before they reach our shores, whether those threats come from terrorist networks or terrorist states. I'm often asked why we're in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat. My administration, the Congress and the United Nations saw the threat. And after 9/11, Saddam's regime posed a risk that the world could not afford to take. The world is safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. And now the challenge is to help the Iraqi people build a democracy that fulfills the dreams of the nearly 12 million Iraqis who came out to vote in free elections last December.

Al Qaeda and other extremists from across the world have come to Iraq to stop the rise of a free society in the heart of the Middle East. They have joined the remnants of Saddam's regime and other armed groups to foment sectarian violence and drive us out. Our enemies in Iraq are tough and they are committed, but so are Iraqi and coalition forces. We are adapting to stay ahead of the enemy, and we are carrying out a clear plan to ensure that a democratic Iraq succeeds.

We are training Iraqi troops so they can defend their nation. We're helping Iraq's unity government grow in strength and serve its people. We will not leave until this work is done. Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone. They will not leave us alone. They will follow us. The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad. Osama Bin Laden calls this fight "the Third World War," and he says that victory for the terrorists in Iraq will mean America's "defeat and disgrace forever." If we yield Iraq to men like Bin Laden, our enemies will be emboldened; they will gain a new safe haven; and they will use Iraq's resources to fuel their extremist movement. We will not allow this to happen. America will stay in the fight. Iraq will be a free nation, and a strong ally in the war on terror.

We can be confident that our coalition will succeed, because the Iraqi people have been steadfast in the face of unspeakable violence. And we can be confident in victory, because of the skill and resolve of America's Armed Forces. Every one of our troops is a volunteer, and since the attacks of September the 11th more than 1.6 million Americans have stepped forward to put on our nation's uniform. In Iraq, Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on terror, the men and women of our military are making great sacrifices to keep us safe. Some have suffered terrible injuries, and nearly 3,000 have given their lives. America cherishes their memory. We pray for their families. And we will never back down from the work they have begun.

We also honor those who toil day and night to keep our homeland safe, and we are giving them the tools they need to protect our people. We've created the Department of Homeland Security; we have torn down the wall that kept law enforcement and intelligence from sharing information; we've tightened security at our airports, seaports, and borders; and we've created new programs to monitor enemy bank records and phone calls. Thanks to the hard work of our law enforcement and intelligence professionals, we have broken up terrorist cells in our midst and saved American lives.

Five years after 9/11, our enemies have not succeeded in launching another attack on our soil. But they've not been idle. Al Qaeda and those inspired by its hateful ideology have carried out terrorist attacks in more than two dozen nations. And just last month, they were foiled in a plot to blow up passenger planes headed for the United States. They remain determined to attack America and kill our citizens. And we are determined to stop them. We will continue to give the men and women who protect us every resource and legal authority they need to do their jobs.

In the first days after the 9/11 attacks, I promised to use every element of national power to fight the terrorists wherever we find them. One of the strongest weapons in our arsenal is the power of freedom. The terrorists fear freedom as much as they do our firepower. They are thrown into panic at the sight of an old man pulling the election lever, girls enrolling in school, or families worshiping God in their own traditions. They know that given a choice, people will choose freedom over their extremist ideology. So their answer is to deny people this choice by raging against the forces of freedom and moderation. This struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilization. We are fighting to maintain the way of life enjoyed by free nations. And we're fighting for the possibility that good and decent people across the Middle East can raise up societies based on freedom, and tolerance, and personal dignity.

We are now in the early hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom. Amid the violence, some question whether the people of the Middle East want their freedom, and whether the forces of moderation can prevail. For 60 years, these doubts guided our policies in the Middle East. And then, on a bright September morning, it became clear that the calm we saw in the Middle East was only a mirage. Years of pursuing stability to promote peace had left us with neither. So we changed our policies, and committed America's influence in the world to advancing freedom and democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism.

With our help, the people of the Middle East are now stepping forward to claim their freedom. From Kabul to Baghdad to Beirut, there are brave men and women risking their lives each day for the same freedoms that we enjoy. And they have one question for us: Do we have the confidence to do in the Middle East what our fathers and grandfathers accomplished in Europe and Asia? By standing with democratic leaders and reformers, by giving voice to the hopes of decent men and women, we are offering a path away from radicalism. And we are enlisting the most powerful force for peace and moderation in the Middle East: The desire of millions to be free.

Across the broader Middle East, the extremists are fighting to prevent such a future. Yet America has confronted evil before, and we have defeated it - sometimes at the cost of thousands of good men in a single battle. When Franklin Roosevelt vowed to defeat two enemies across two oceans, he could not have foreseen D-Day and Iwo Jima - but he would not have been surprised at the outcome. When Harry Truman promised American support for free peoples resisting Soviet aggression, he could not have foreseen the rise of the Berlin Wall - but he would not have been surprised to see it brought down. Throughout our history, America has seen liberty challenged. And every time, we have seen liberty triumph with sacrifice and determination.

At the start of this young century, America looks to the day when the people of the Middle East leave the desert of despotism for the fertile gardens of liberty, and resume their rightful place in a world of peace and prosperity. We look to the day when the nations of that region recognize that their greatest resource is not the oil in the ground, but the talent and creativity of their people. We look to the day when moms and dads throughout the Middle East see a future of hope and opportunity for their children. And when that good day comes, the clouds of war will part, the appeal of radicalism will decline, and we will leave our children with a better and safer world. On this solemn anniversary, we rededicate ourselves to this cause. Our nation has endured trials, and we face a difficult road ahead. Winning this war will require the determined efforts of a unified country. And we must put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us. We will defeat our enemies, we will protect our people, and we will lead the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty.

Earlier this year, I traveled to the United States Military Academy. I was there to deliver the commencement address to the first class to arrive at West Point after the attacks of September the 11th. That day I met a proud mom named RoseEllen Dowdell. She was there to watch her son Patrick accept his commission in the finest Army the world has ever known. A few weeks earlier, RoseEllen had watched her other son, James, graduate from the Fire Academy in New York City. On both these days, her thoughts turned to someone who was not there to share the moment: her husband, Kevin Dowdell. Kevin was one of the 343 firefighters who rushed to the burning towers of the World Trade Center on September the 11th - and never came home. His sons lost their father that day, but not the passion for service he instilled in them. Here is what RoseEllen says about her boys, "As a mother, I cross my fingers and pray all the time for their safety. But as worried as I am, I'm also proud. And I know their dad would be too."

Our nation is blessed to have young Americans like these. And we will need them. Dangerous enemies have declared their intention to destroy our way of life. They are not the first to try, and their fate will be the same as those who tried before. Nine-Eleven showed us why. The attacks were meant to bring us to our knees, and they did. But not in the way the terrorists intended. Americans united in prayer, came to the aid of neighbors in need, and resolved that our enemies would not have the last word. The spirit of our people is the source of America's strength. And we go forward with trust in that spirit, confidence in our purpose and faith in a loving God who made us to be free.

Thank you, and may God bless you.

    President Bush’s Address to the Nation, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/washington/12bush_transcript.html

Editorial

9/11/06

September 11, 2006
The New York Times

The feelings of sadness and loss with which we look back on Sept. 11, 2001, have shifted focus over the last five years. The attacks themselves have begun to acquire the aura of inevitability that comes with being part of history. We can argue about what one president or another might have done to head them off, but we cannot really imagine a world in which they never happened, any more than we can imagine what we would be like today if the Japanese had never attacked Pearl Harbor.

What we do revisit, over and over again, is the period that followed, when sorrow was merged with a sense of community and purpose. How, having lost so much on the day itself, did we also manage to lose that as well?

The time when we felt drawn together, changed by the shock of what had occurred, lasted long beyond the funerals, ceremonies and promises never to forget. It was a time when the nation was waiting to find out what it was supposed to do, to be called to the task that would give special lasting meaning to the tragedy that it had endured.

But the call never came. Without ever having asked to be exempt from the demands of this new post-9/11 war, we were cut out. Everything would be paid for with the blood of other people’s children, and with money earned by the next generation. Our role appeared to be confined to waiting in longer lines at the airport. President Bush, searching the other day for an example of post-9/11 sacrifice, pointed out that everybody pays taxes.

That pinched view of our responsibility as citizens got us tax cuts we didn’t need and an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter’s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft. With no call to work together on some effort greater than ourselves, we were free to relapse into a self- centeredness that became a second national tragedy. We have spent the last few years fighting each other with more avidity than we fight the enemy.

When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy. Homeland security is half-finished, the development at ground zero barely begun. The war against terror we meant to fight in Afghanistan is at best stuck in neutral, with the Taliban resurgent and the best economic news involving a bumper crop of opium. Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 when it was invaded, is now a breeding ground for a new generation of terrorists.

Listing the sins of the Bush administration may help to clarify how we got here, but it will not get us out. The country still hungers for something better, for evidence that our leaders also believe in ideas larger than their own political advancement.

Today, every elected official in the country will stop and remember 9/11. The president will remind the country that he has spent most of his administration fighting terrorism, and his opponents will point out that Osama bin Laden is still at large. It would be miraculous if the best of our leaders did something larger — expressed grief and responsibility for the bad path down which we’ve gone, and promised to work together to turn us in a better direction.

Over the last week, the White House has been vigorously warning the country what awful things would happen in Iraq if American troops left, while his critics have pointed out how impossible the current situation is. They are almost certainly both right. But unless people on both sides are willing to come up with a plan that acknowledges both truths and accepts the risk of making real-world proposals, we will be stuck in the same place forever.

If that kind of coming together happened today, we could look back on Sept. 11, 2006, as more than a day for recalling bad memories and lost chances.

    9/11/06, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/opinion/11mon1.html

Five Years Later, Our Hearts Are Still Heavy (9 Letters)

September 11, 2006
The New York Times

To the Editor:

On this fifth anniversary of 9/11, I recall the overwhelming grief and helplessness that day. As time passed we needed to grieve, for America, for New York, but mostly for those who died, their families and the children they wouldn’t see grow up, and, for some, the children they never even knew.

I felt the need to honor these people, to remember them in my heart. I thank The New York Times for giving me that chance in a special way: by publishing stories of the lives of all who died that terrible day.

I sat in my kitchen and cried while reading every one, the “Portraits of Grief.’’ I had found the way to grieve and to honor their memories — these innocent people who did nothing but go to work that day.

Everyone should take a moment on this day to honor them and how their unknowing sacrifices strengthened our democracy.

Gerry Stefani
Bordentown, N.J., Sept. 8, 2006

To the Editor:

Re “Old New Yorkers, Newer Ones, and the Line Etched by Sept. 11” (news article, Sept. 7):

I have lived in New York since 1999. Sept. 11, 2001, was an awful experience for New Yorkers and Americans alike.

The trauma for New Yorkers extended beyond the attacks on 9/11 itself into the months that followed.

I remember a woman spontaneously crying on a sidewalk. Union Square Park. The ubiquitous National Guard. Fliers everywhere with pictures of victims. Anthrax scares.

I took a bus home on the East Side one Saturday night in November. It was the first night I remember feeling a bit “normal.”

The passengers were mostly going home after a night out. The bus passed the Armory (where DNA samples had been collected from family members), and we all fell silent.

I still shudder in guilt and grief at these memories. New Yorkers are unique in their experiences, but it is not a desirable attribute — it is not something anyone should feel he “missed out on.”

Jennifer Horn
New York, Sept. 7, 2006

To the Editor:

Re “Old New Yorkers, Newer Ones, and the Line Etched by Sept. 11” (news article, Sept. 7):

I was here on Sept. 11, 2001. Almost everyone I know is acquainted with somebody who was in the twin towers on that day, and lived or died.

I do not call it “9/11,” which seems too hip, too slangy, too trivializing for a world-changing event.

(President Roosevelt did not speak of “12/7, a date which will live in infamy.”)

I do not call the World Trade Center site “ground zero,” because that makes it belong to the terrorists, the target they hit successfully.

Out-of-town visitors always want to see “ground zero,” as though it were another of our many interesting tourist attractions, but I won’t take them. I have never been there. I prefer to remember the towers as they were, and not see the gaping wound that remains.

My visitors say, “But it’s history!”

No, it isn’t. It was only yesterday.

Rita Gilbert
New York, Sept. 7, 2006

To the Editor:

Re “Freedom Tower Alone No More at Ground Zero” (news article, Sept. 8):

The buildings proposed for the World Trade Center site, by three outstanding international architects, are brilliant individual designs. Unfortunately, they do not work as a group — what the French would call the “tout ensemble.”

The visual result looks like a collection of models on a shelf, rather than a coherent urban design. Skylines are not unimportant, and some rethinking is needed.

David A. Johnson
Asheville, N.C., Sept. 8, 2006
The writer is emeritus professor of planning at the University of Tennessee.

To the Editor:

Regarding the artist’s rendition of the towers for ground zero: Am I the only one who thinks they’re a mismatched hodgepodge? Individually I find them lacking in character, and together they conflict. I was hoping for better taste in establishing an integrated look appropriate for the city of New York and for that meaningful site.

Shanghai can create a skyline from scratch and somehow get away with the many innovative, sometimes misconceived designs that are transforming that city. But this jumble on ground zero seems to me aesthetically out of place and uninspiring, to say the least.

Carolyn McGrath
Setauket, N.Y., Sept. 8, 2006

To the Editor:

While we applaud the recent designs for Towers 2, 3 and 4, there is no need for the design of Tower 2 to cause the demolition of the “survivors’ stairway” — the only above-ground surviving element of the original World Trade Center site.

Two years ago, federal officials recognized the staircase as a historic element, and in May the National Trust for Historic Preservation included it on its 2006 list of Endangered Historic Places. A recent magazine poll indicated that 95 percent of respondents believed that it should be saved in its original location.

Preservationists have hired a respected engineer who has already informed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey that it can be saved. We are waiting for cost estimates.

Current and future visitors to the site would benefit by having the visceral experience of seeing a part of the World Trade Center that was used daily before 9/11 and survives in its original location.

Peg Breen
New York, Sept. 8, 2006
The writer is president of The New York Landmarks Conservancy.

To the Editor:

Thank you for your Sept. 6 editorial “The Other Victims of Sept. 11.”

As a physician, shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, I thought it was unconscionable, if not downright immoral, for the White House to put pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency to suppress information on how toxic the fumes around ground zero truly were.

Now, five years later, I feel that it is equally unconscionable that the Bush administration and the Republican Congress have allocated just $52 million for medical care for the thousands of brave rescuers and volunteers who were told the air was safe. And so far, not one cent has reached a real patient. I consider this a moral failure on the part of the federal government.

Robert Stuart, M.D.
Oakland, Calif., Sept. 6, 2006

To the Editor:

Your call for use of federal funds to assess and treat ailing World Trade Center rescue and recovery workers (“The Other Victims of Sept. 11,” editorial, Sept. 6) is welcome but inexplicably narrow.

Thousands of downtown residents and office workers also inhaled large quantities of trade center dust on 9/11. Thanks to misleading advisories and superficial cleanups, many faced continuing exposure when they returned to their homes and offices as well.

No facility comparable to the dedicated Mount Sinai Medical Center clinic exists to document the problems in this population, but that should not be a license to ignore its needs.

Civilians who suffer long-term health effects also deserve federal support for assessment and treatment.

Mark Scherzer
New York, Sept. 6, 2006

To the Editor:

Re “A Simple Scarf, but Meaning Much More Than Faith” (news article, Sept. 8):

Thank you for bringing attention to some of the difficulties that Muslim women in America have faced after 9/11.

As an American Muslim woman who wears a head scarf in New York City, I can relate to many of the experiences recounted by Dena al-Atassi.

Despite discrimination, we are proud of our modest dress. We are also proud to live in the United States, a country that guarantees its citizens the right to dress as they choose.

Afshan Haque
Forest Hills, Queens
Sept. 8, 2006

    Five Years Later, Our Hearts Are Still Heavy (9 Letters), NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/opinion/l11wtc.html

Patricia Smith, held the hand of her father, James Smith, as names of the victims were read aloud during the ceremony.
Patricia's mother, police officer Moira Smith, was killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

In N.Y. and Around U.S., a Solemn Day to Remember 9/11        NYT        11.9.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/12bushcnd.html 


 

In N.Y. and Around U.S., a Solemn Day to Remember 9/11

September 11, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and CHRISTINE HAUSER

Americans observed a solemn day of remembrance today in memorials around the United States to mark the fifth anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, pausing in New York City and at the two other 9/11 sites for moments of silence, tributes and a recitation of the names of those who were killed.

Although hundreds of miles from one another, the three places where the hijacked airliners were crashed into buildings and a field that day were united today by simultaneous memorials that invoked the memory of lives lost. Family members and friends prayed and wept. They held signs saying “We Will Never Forget.” They read poetry and recounted simple tales recreating the lives of those who were killed.

“I’ve been thinking about what Moira would be doing today if she were here with us,” said police Officer Jim Smith, the husband of Moira Smith, a New York City police officer who was killed.

“I know she’d be concerned for her fellow officers, for their health and their safety,” Officer Smith told the crowd at the ground zero memorial. “She’d be still protecting the people of the city she loved, defending the nation she loved, keeping it from harm. And she would be raising the child she loved more than anything on earth.”

In New York City, among the thousands who gathered at ground zero under a clear blue sky, families and friends of people killed in the attacks lowered their heads during a moment of silence. Some clutched flowers and photographs as tears fell.

“It surely cannot be easy to come to this site,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said after a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m. marking the moment that the first plane struck the World Trade Center.

“Who can know what is in your hearts,” he said.

Surrounded by police officers and firefighters at a firehouse in lower Manhattan, President Bush observed the anniversary today with back-to-back moments of silence, 17 minutes apart, each marking the precise time that terrorists flew hijacked planes into the twin towers.

The president and Mrs. Bush did not speak during the ceremony but bowed their heads solemnly during the moments of silence, one at 8:46 and the other at 9:03. The morning sun bathed them in a warm light reflecting back off the red of the fire house doors.

Mr. Bush later flew to Pennsylvania and at about 11 a.m. his helicopter touched down in an area adjacent to the crash site in Shanksville, where he and the first lady walked through a damp field under a spitting rain for a simple wreath-laying ceremony.

Dozens of family members and local residents gathered outside a ring of hay bales around the site, not far from a temporary memorial to the victims of the crash.

President and Mrs. Bush were escorted into the field by a Coast Guard officer. The officer placed a wreath behind a spray of white roses, and Mr. and Mrs. Bush stood behind it, bowing their heads. Mrs. Bush reached out to touch the flowers. The two looked up silently before taking their seats.

“There is no more sacred ground on this, your earth, than this very place,” said the Rev. Paul M. Britton, a Lutheran minister and a brother of one of the passengers on Flight 93.

“We come here with heavy hearts, yet with joyful spirits,” he said.

Earlier in Shanksville the sonorous toll of a bell sounded after each name of the 40 passengers and crew was read at a remembrance ceremony of United Airlines Flight 93 in which speakers praised the courageous actions of those who fought the hijackers.

Expressions of grief were etched on faces as the crowd listened. American flags snapped in the breeze, a backdrop to the words of Gen. Tommy Franks, the retired head of Central Command, as he called 9/11 a day when America was “shaken to her core.”

“But in this place we are inspired by a light of patriotism,” General Franks said. “We honor the 40 passengers and members of the crew of Flight 93 who were, as has been correctly said, one moment ordinary citizens, and the next heroes forever.”

As at other memorials, the solemn strains of bagpipes infused the ceremony at the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld mixed sympathy for the survivors of attack victims with defiance toward the attackers and their sponsors. He said “grief soon hardened into resolve” to prevent more attacks and to punish those responsible.

Vice President Dick Cheney struck a similar tone. “What happened here at 9:37 a.m. on September 11th challenges anyone’s powers of description,” he said at the Pentagon memorial ceremony. “Perhaps no one expressed it better than an Army lieutenant colonel who was here that morning attempting to rescue others. It was all, as he put it, so ‘cheap, dirty and senseless.’ ”

Mr. Cheney praised the workers in the Pentagon, saying that they began planning operations, even as rescue efforts were still under way at the building. He said he was reminded of a naval saying, “Fight the fire and help your shipmates.”

“This great nation will prevail” in the war on terror, he declared.

But today, there was yet another reminder that the locations of Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri remain unknown. In what was described by Al Jazeera satellite network as a video tape released on the occasion of the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Zawahiri called for an escalation of “jihad operations” against Israel and the West.

In the days leading up to the anniversary, Mr. Bush had made a case in radio and television addresses for the security steps his administration has taken since 9/11.

President Bush’s attendance at the wreath-laying observances in Shanksville and later at the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., would be the first time since the first anniversary of the attacks, on Sept. 11, 2002, that he has observed the anniversary in all three places. He will then return to Washington, where he plans to address the nation from the Oval Office tonight.

Having already made a surprise stop Sunday evening to shake hands at a firehouse on the perimeter of ground zero, President and Mrs. Bush spent this morning at the Fort Pitt Firehouse, in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge on Manhattan’s Lower ast side.

The firehouse, home to Engine Company 15, Ladder Company 18, and Battalion 4, is about a mile and a half from ground zero; the battalion chief, Matthew Ryan, who had been with the department for 28 years, was killed in the attacks. All that remains of Ladder 18’s truck is a banged-up sign and a door, which the company had posted outside this morning as a backdrop for an outdoor ceremony commemorating the victims.

There, on a crisp morning under a cloudless blue sky — weather that could not help but evoke memories of the clear skies of Sept. 11, 2001 — President and Mrs. Bush stepped outside onto Pitt Street to face a circle of hundreds of blue uniformed emergency personnel for a solemn interfaith service that seemed to leave the president brimming with emotions.

Bag pipers played “God Bless America.” A fire department officer belted out “Amazing Grace.” An a cappella police department choir sang “America the Beautiful,” punctuated by the sounds of New York City traffic and a subway train rumbling past out of Brooklyn.

Rabbi Joseph Patesnick, a fire department chaplain, opened the formal remarks, saying that he saw the number 18 everywhere he looked.

“In Hebrew you write 18 with the word ‘chai,’ ” he said, “And that means life.”

“We come here on this day to remember those who lost their lives so that we also should choose life.”

Today, the commemorations extended the feeling of bittersweet reunion that had started on Sunday as streams of humanity converged and mingled at dozens of memorial services in New York.

Sunday evening, Mr. Bush paid tribute to the victims, laying wreaths in small reflecting pools at ground zero, one in the footprint of each tower. It was a hint of life in a place that still brims with memories of death, a reminder that even five years later, the attacks are not so very distant.

He vowed that he was “never going to forget the lessons of that day.”

Reporting was contributed by John Holusha, Carla Baranauckas, Jeremy Peters, Sewell Chan, Ann Farmer, Kate Hammer, Andy Newman and Anthony Ramirez.

    In N.Y. and Around U.S., a Solemn Day to Remember 9/11, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/12bushcnd.html

The Scene

At Ground Zero, Clear Skies Echo a Day of Terror

September 11, 2006
The New York Times
By JEREMY PETERS

Dawn in lower Manhattan today began much as it did on the day five years ago that left an indelible scar on the nation. The sun rose over a clear sky. The drone of street cleaners filled the still morning air.

But today, survivors, friends and relatives of the 2,749 people killed when terrorists toppled the World Trade Center gathered at the lip of the crater where the twin towers used to stand.

The ceremonies honoring the dead began at 8:40 a.m. — six minutes before the time when the first jet struck the north tower — but many people arrived much earlier.

There were parents with their children, dressed in their Sunday best; police officers and firefighters clad in crisp blue, freshly pressed uniforms; volunteer workers from the Red Cross huddled in prayer.

People wore photographs, on T-shirts or around their necks, of those who died in the attacks. Some clutched flowers. The mood was subdued and quiet.

The Schertzer family arrived at ground zero at 6:30 am. They lost their son Scott, who was 28 and worked on the 104th floor of the north tower.

“It doesn’t get easier,” said Scott’s father, Paul Schertzer, 62. “You learn to live with it and go through the next day.”

Lori Schertzer, 35, Scott’s sister, had walked with him to work on Sept. 11. After they parted that morning, she never saw him again. She rarely sets foot in Lower Manhattan these days, she said, because she can’t bear to look at ground zero.

“I don’t like to come down here,” she said. “Too many reminders.”

But she came today. “We feel it’s the place we have to be,” her father said. “It was the last place my son was.”

For Nadine Goody, 35, today was her first trip to a 9/11 remembrance ceremony. Ms. Goody lost her brother Harry, who was 51 when he was killed. He, too, worked in the north tower.

“I guess I couldn’t face it, I couldn’t accept it,” she said, adding that she was still having second thoughts about today’s ceremony. “It’s definitely not closure. I don’t think we’ll ever have closure.”

Near where the morning ceremony was soon to start stood John and June Taylor from Essex, England. Mrs. Taylor held two bouquets of roses, one red and one white. The Taylors lost their daughter, Carrie, in the London train bombings last year, when she was 24.

“We’re here to show our solidarity, if that’s not too strong a word to use,” Mrs. Taylor said. “If we don’t stick together, then we’re never going to win, so we’re here to support the people here today,” she added, her voice cracking and her eyes near tears.

The Taylors talked about their sense of loss, and how it is impossible even for the kindest people to truly understand, unless they have suffered such a loss themselves.

“When it’s that close to you,” Mrs. Taylor said, “you just want to mix with people who have been through what you’ve been through.”

Diane Cardwell contributed reporting.

    At Ground Zero, Clear Skies Echo a Day of Terror, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/12terrorcnd.html?hp&ex=1158033600&en=7c2792410150c796&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Pennsylvania

One Mother Looks Ahead, and Finds New Friends

September 11, 2006
The New York Times
By SEAN D. HAMILL

SHANKSVILLE, Pa., Sept. 10 — Knowing the grief she carries with her, Debbie Borza should have been easy to miss on Sunday among the throng of people who showed up for a private service to remember those who died five years ago aboard United Flight 93.

But Ms. Borza, 52, whose 20-year-old daughter, Deora Bodley, was the youngest victim of the 40 passengers and crew members killed on the flight on Sept. 11, 2001, was the one with the wide smile and darting brown eyes looking for four teenagers she had not met in person.

“I’ve got to find my boys,” she said as she scanned the crowd and roamed the temporary memorial that overlooks the crash site.

Her “boys,” four 17-year-old high school students from Rossford, Ohio, touched a chord in Ms. Borza two months ago when she read an article about their efforts to raise money for the Flight 93 and ground zero memorials.

In an idea hatched over lunch in their school cafeteria, the four friends — Chad Coulter, Dustin Dean, Tad Millinger and Brandon Reinhard — vowed to walk 650 miles from their homes outside Toledo to ground zero in New York, stopping in Shanksville along the way.

Ms. Borza encouraged them regularly, talking with them on the telephone and sending motivational e-mails to their Web site, myspace.com/groundzero2006.

After Ms. Borza found the boys on Sunday, she gave them big hugs and accepted a check for $3,500 for the permanent Flight 93 memorial. She then invited them to accompany her to the crash site, which is typically open only to family members of the victims.

This year has been particularly difficult for Ms. Borza. Besides being the fifth anniversary of her daughter’s death, it will be, in just over a week, the first anniversary of the death of her former husband, Derrill Bodley, Ms. Bodley’s father. He was killed last Sept. 21 in a motorcycle accident on his 60th birthday, Ms. Borza said.

Whether it has been viewing the recent movie “United 93,” listening to the jazz great Dave Brubeck’s recording of a song written by Mr. Bodley and dedicated to their daughter, or seeking out people encouraged by her daughter’s life, Ms. Borza said she decided long ago to look for positive ways to stifle the pain.

“Since I’m probably going to spend the rest of my life trying to fill that void, I choose joy and happiness and peace and love,” she said.

Accompanied by 10 relatives and friends, Ms. Borza was composed and steady as she described the crash of Flight 93 in detail, even as the teenagers from Ohio and their family members teared up.

But Ms. Borza began to lose her composure when she began explaining why she reached out to the boys two months ago.

“I just love seeing my daughter in you,” she told them as tears flooded her eyes, a sight that brought her younger daughter, Murial, 15, rushing to her side. “That’s why I called. Thank you for bringing her alive.”

    One Mother Looks Ahead, and Finds New Friends, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/11united.html

Nation remembers fifth anniversary of 9/11 terror attacks

Updated 9/11/2006 2:23 PM ET
From staff and wire reports
USA Today

President Bush joined the nation today in solemn observances on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in memory of those killed by terrorists in the deadliest attack on U.S. soil.

Ceremonies were held at the three sites where almost 3,000 people died at the hands of al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked planes Sept. 11, 2001:

•Ground Zero. A moment of silence was observed four times — twice to mark the moments when planes hit the World Trade Center, and twice to mark the collapse of the 110-story twin towers.

"We've come back to remember the valor of those we've lost, those who innocently went to work that day and the brave souls who went in after them," former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said.

Family members, many sobbing, held signs reading, "You will always be with us" and "Never forget." Spouses and partners of victims began reading out the names of all 2,749 victims.

•Shanksville, Pa. Hundreds of mourners bowed their heads as bells tolled in memory of the 40 passengers and crewmembers killed in the crash of Flight 93 after passengers overpowered hijackers trying to fly the plane into buildings in Washington, D.C.

"We stand here today with pride because of heroism," said Hamilton Peterson, whose father and stepmother died in the crash.

•The Pentagon. Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld observed a moment of silence at 9:37 a.m., to mark the moment when American Flight 77 struck the building, killing 184 people. They also joined in singing Battle Hymn of the Republic.

"You have done all our country has asked of you and more," Cheney said to members of the military and civilian employees of the Defense Department in the crowd. "And you know better than most that much hard work and sacrifice still lay ahead."

Bush, who visited a New York firehouse this morning, attended a private wreath-laying ceremony at Shanksville and planned to attend another memorial service later at the Pentagon. He was not expected to speak at any of the appearances.

The president will cap the day's events with a televised address from the Oval Office at 9:01 p.m. ET.

Other ceremonies were planned from Alaska to Florida. Near Dayton, Ohio, volunteers planned to put up 3,000 flags over 10 acres at a spiritual center today. In Virginia Beach, firefighters and residents planned to form a human flag.

At Logan International Airport in Boston, where two of the hijacked planes originated, security screeners stopped checking passengers for a moment and turned to an American flag. Passengers in line joined in the silent tribute.

In New York, Bush stood in a sea of firefighters and police officers this morning at a historic Lower East Side firehouse and bowed his head twice in silent tribute.

As a flag flew at half staff above him, Bush and his wife, Laura, stood ramrod straight in the bright sunshine. Rabbi Joseph Patesnick, chaplain for the New York Fire Department, read from a passage from Deuteronomy: "You should choose life by loving God and living his commandments." The simple ceremony concluded with bagpipes and a salute from Bush.

On Sunday, Bush and the first lady placed wreaths in two reflecting pools at Ground Zero.

Bush said in an interview broadcast this morning that on the day the country was attacked, he came to grips with the reality that "we were involved in an ideological struggle akin to the Cold War."

"In the long term, we've got to defeat an ideology of hate with an ideology of hope," he said on NBC's Today show. "There's a reason why people like (al-Qaeda leader Osama) bin Laden are able to recruit suiciders," Bush said, "because if you don't have hope, you're attracted to an ideology which says it's OK to kill people and kill yourself."

In Shanksville, under cloudy skies, about 700 local residents and nearly 300 family members and relatives of the Flight 93 victims attended a service. At 10:30 a.m. ET, the names of the victims were read and a bell tolled.

Among speakers were Republicans Sens. Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Republican Rep. Bill Shuster, whose district includes the crash site. Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell and former Republican governor Tom Ridge, who served as the first director of the Department of Homeland Security, also spoke.

Specter and Shuster recalled that passengers and crew on Flight 93 died so that others could live. "That plane was headed to the Capitol of the United States," Specter said. "Had those people not acted, I believe the House and Senate would have gone down."

The Pentagon ceremonies, which drew hundreds of family members and friends, ceremonies were held under a cloudy, misty sky.

"Today is a very bittersweet day," said Lisa Dolan, 45, whose husband, Navy Capt. Robert Dolan was killed in the Pentagon. "My heart is very similar to the weather. It's filled with sadness."

Remarks by Cheney, on what he called "a day of national unity," raised the only a hint of the political divisions in the country over the Iraq war, which the Bush administration has called the central front in the war on terror that began after Sept. 11.

"We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history's latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power," Cheney said.

The tragedy of 9/11 was also marked abroad:

•British Prime Minister Tony Blair, traveling in the Middle East, expressed his "condolences and sympathy to the families of all those who lost loved ones in that terrible attack."

•German Chancellor Angela Markel warned that "tolerance and respect for other cultures" must be hallmarks of the international fight against terror.

•French President Jacques Chirac sent a letter to Bush expressing solidarity between the people of France and the United States on the day of this "sad commemoration."

•At the United Nations, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the Sept. 11 attacks inflicted a "gaping wound" on New York and reminded the world that terrorism was unacceptable, no matter who commits it.

Bush began the 9/11 commemoration Sunday at the site of the World Trade Center, where he and Laura set wreaths adrift in two reflecting pools that mark where the north and south towers stood. The Bushes then went to a prayer service at St. Paul's Chapel, the 240-year-old Episcopal Church across the street from the site, and stopped at a nearby fire station.

In Washington on Sunday evening, thousands of participants, including more than 400 friends and family of victims who died on 9/11, walked from the National Mall to the Pentagon.

One hundred eighty-four beams of light — matching the number of victims killed in the Pentagon attack — were projected into the evening sky.

Contributing: Charisse Jones in New York City; Laura Parker in Shanksville, Pa.; Tom Vanden Brook at the Pentagon; Douglas Stanglin in McLean, Va.; Bill Nichols and David Jackson in Washington; and the Associated Press.

    Nation remembers fifth anniversary of 9/11 terror attacks, UT, 11.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-11-sept11-anniversary_x.htm

ABC Makes Some Changes to 9 / 11 Series

September 11, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:06 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- ABC aired its miniseries ''The Path to 9/11'' on Sunday but made editing changes after former Clinton administration officials complained it contained fabricated scenes about their actions prior to the terrorist attacks.

ABC's editing of the five-hour movie, airing on two successive nights starting Sunday, was evident from the very beginning. Twice, the network de-emphasized the role of the 9/11 commission's final report as source material for the film.

The version that aired Sunday also changed a scene that, in a copy of the movie given to television critics a few weeks ago, indicated President Clinton's preoccupation with his potential impeachment may have affected an effort to go after Osama bin Laden.

In the original scene, an actor portraying White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke shares a limousine ride with FBI agent John O'Neill and tells him: ''The Republicans are going all-out for impeachment. I just don't see in that climate the president's going to take chances'' and give the order to kill bin Laden.

But in the film aired Sunday, Clarke says to O'Neill: ''The president has assured me this ... won't affect his decision-making.''

O'Neill replies: ''So it's OK if somebody kills bin Laden, as long as he didn't give the order. It's pathetic.''

The critics' version contained a note in the opening scenes that the film is ''based on the 9/11 commission report.'' That was omitted from the film aired Sunday. A disclaimer aired three times emphasized it was not a documentary.

''For dramatic and narrative purposes the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression,'' the note that ran before the movie said.

The note said the material is ''drawn from a variety of sources including the 9/11 commission report and other published materials and from personal interviews.'' That differs from a note in the critics' version that said the dramatization ''is based on the 9/11 commission report and other published sources and personal interviews.''

Critics, such as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., said it was ''disingenuous and dangerous'' not to include accurate historical accounts in the movie.

A scene in the movie depicting a team of CIA operatives poised in darkness outside of bin Laden's fortess in Afghanistan, ready to attack, was substantially cut down from the original. Pictures of the waiting Afghanistan operatives are interspersed with those of officials in Washington, who had to approve the mission.

The original version depicted national security adviser Samuel R. Berger hanging up on CIA chief George Tenet as Tenet sought permission to attack bin Laden. The movie aired Sunday did not include Berger hanging up.

The affect of the changes is to deflect specific blame. It ends with actor Donnie Wahlberg, head of the CIA team in Afghanistan, saying, ''Are there no men in Washington?''

Another scene in the critics' cut pictured O'Neill asking Clarke on the telephone: ''What's Clinton going to do (about bin Laden)?''

Clarke replies, ''I don't know. The Lewinsky thing is a noose around his neck.''

This was cut entirely from the film that aired Sunday.

Editors left intact a scene that had angered former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, portraying her as being behind a move to inform the Pakistani government in advance of a U.S. missile strike against bin Laden. The movie indicated that was a key factor in bin Laden getting away.

The movie, scheduled to air from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., finished at 10:40 p.m. ET.

ABC has said little about the controversy, and said Sunday it would not comment.

Thomas Kean, head of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks and a backer of the film, said on ABC's ''This Week'' Sunday that he hadn't seen the final cut of the movie but urged Americans to watch it.

''If people blame Bill Clinton after seeing this, then the miniseries has failed,'' said Kean, the former Republican New Jersey governor. ''That's wrong and it shouldn't happen.''

John Lehman, another Republican commission members, said on the ABC News show that he's told the film is equally harsh on the administrations of President Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush.

''And if you don't like the hits to the Clinton administration, well, welcome to the club,'' Lehman said. ''The Republicans have lived with Michael Moore and Oliver Stone and most of Hollywood as a fact of life.''

AP Television Writer Frazier Moore contributed to this report.

    ABC Makes Some Changes to 9 / 11 Series, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-ABC-Sept-11-Film.html

Al Qaeda Leader Issues Warning in Video

September 11, 2006
By REUTERS
Filed at 9:11 a.m. ET

DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda warned in a video aired on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks that U.S. allies Israel and the Gulf Arab states would be its next target in a campaign that would seal the West's economic doom.

Deputy al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri said in remarks apparently addressed to Western leaders: ``I tell them do not bother yourselves with defending your forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. These forces are doomed to failure.

``You have to bolster your defenses in two areas ... the first is the Gulf, from which you will be evicted, God willing, after your defeat in Iraq and then your economic doom will be achieved,'' he said in the video broadcast in part on the Arabic al-Jazeera television channel.

``And the next (target) is Israel. The current of holy war is closing on it and your end there will put an end to the Zionist-crusader supremacy.''

Zawahri also condemned United Nations forces in Lebanon as ''enemies of Islam,'' the first implicit threat against the international peacekeeping detachment.

Zawahri's warning of attacks in the Gulf, the world's top oil exporting region, follows previous calls by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to target oil facilities to cripple the West.

Al Qaeda has also in the past branded U.S.-allied governments in the Middle East as infidels and traitors, and has used this collusion with the West to justify their attacks.

GULF IN QAEDA'S SIGHTS

Zawahri blasted a U.N. resolution that governs a ceasefire that ended 34-days of fighting between Israel and Lebanese guerrilla group Hizbollah.

``The biggest problem with resolution 1701 and similar resolutions designed to humiliate Muslims is...its declaration of the existence of the Jewish state,'' Zawahri said.

``(The resolution) also isolates the mujahideen in Palestine from the Muslims in Lebanon by the presence of international forces that are the enemies of Islam.''

The U.N. force, known as UNIFIL II, is being deployed in the south of Lebanon after the August 14 truce. It will contain troops from Muslim as well as Western countries.

Gulf Arab leaders all have strong ties with Washington and Saudi-born bin Laden has in the past singled out the Saudi royal family for censure. The Saudi wing of al Qaeda launched in 2003 a campaign of shootings and suicide bombings, many targeting foreigners, to topple the House of Saud.

In February, al Qaeda militants conducted a failed attack on the world's largest oil processing plant in Saudi Arabia. The group then vowed to carry out more attacks.

Insurgents in Iraq have often targeted oil facilities and in Yemen, bin Laden's ancestral homeland which is cracking down on militants, al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in 2000 and an attack on a French supertanker two years later.

Ceremonies were due to take place on Monday across the United States to mark the attacks on New York and Washington which killed almost 3,000 people and triggered Washington's global ``war on terror.''

In the video, Zawahri warned of ``new events'' and said the policies of Western countries were giving militants a ''legitimate excuse'' to fight them.

Excerpts of the same video were also aired by the CNN television network, which quoted Zawahri as urging Muslims to step up attacks against the United States and the West.

``Your leaders are hiding from you the true extent of the disaster,'' Zawahri said. ``And the days are pregnant and giving birth to new events, with God's permission and guidance.''

The video showed Zawahri dressed in white and sitting in front of a book case. It appeared to be part of al Qaeda's propaganda campaign to mark the anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

    Al Qaeda Leader Issues Warning in Video, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-security-qaeda-zawahri.html?hp&ex=1158033600&en=9f34229bb898ee48&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Militant Site Shows More al - Qaida Videos

September 10, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:38 p.m. ET
The New York Times

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- A videotape posted on the Internet late Sunday, purportedly by al-Qaida, showed previously unseen footage of a smiling Osama bin Laden and other commanders in a mountain camp apparently planning the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The documentary-like retrospective of the five years since the attacks was unusually long and sophisticated in its production quality compared to previous al-Qaida videos. The footage -- with English subtitles -- surfaced on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the attacks on a Web site that frequently airs messages from bin Laden's terror network.

''Planning for Sept. 11 did not take place behind computer monitors or radar screens, nor inside military command and control centers, but was surrounded with divine protection in an atmosphere brimming with brotherliness ... and love for sacrificing life,'' an unidentified narrator said.

The video released Sunday was stamped with the emblem of As-Sahab, al-Qaida's media branch.

Hours after the release, As-Sahab said another new video containing a statement from al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri will be released shortly, according to the IntelCenter, a private U.S. company that monitors militant message traffic and provides counterterrorism intelligence services for the American government.

IntelCenter said the video released Sunday was titled ''Knowledge is For Acting Upon'' and subtitled ''The Manhattan Raid.'' It was 91 minutes long and consisted of two segments, the first of which was 55 minutes.

The first segment showed the al-Qaida leader and meeting with colleagues in a mountain camp believed to be in Afghanistan, as well as video clips of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney defending his old job at the oil company Halliburton, and President Bush at his inauguration.

Excerpts of the footage aired on Al-Jazeera television on Thursday, and al-Qaida had said it would later release the full video on the Internet.

It included the last testament of two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Wail al-Shehri and Hamza al-Ghamdi, and showed bin Laden strolling in the camp, greeting followers.

''Among the devout group which responded to the order of Allah and order of his messenger were the heroes of Sept. 11, who wrote with the ink of their blood the greatest pages of modern history,'' the narrator said, referring to the hijackers who flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

Al-Shehri and al-Ghamdi were each shown speaking to the camera, their image superimposed over background pictures of the crumbling World Trade Center towers and the burning Pentagon, as well as a model of a passenger jet.

They both spoke of how Muslims must stand up to fight back against the West.

''If jihad now is not an obligation (on Muslims), when will it be?'' said al-Shehri, pointing to attacks on Muslims in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Chechnya.

''If we are content with being humiliated and inclined to comfort, the tooth of the enemy will stretch from Jerusalem to Mecca, and then everyone will regret on a day when regret is of no use,'' al-Ghamdi said.

The two videotaped testimonies had never been seen before.

Al-Shehri was on American Airlines Flight 11, which was the first to hit the World Trade Center. Al-Ghamdi was on United Airlines Flight 175, which hit the second tower.

In the footage, Bin Laden wore a dark robe and white headdress, and was shown sitting alongside his former lieutenant Mohammed Atef and Ramzi Binalshibh, another suspected planner of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Atef, also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, was killed by a U.S. airstrike on Afghanistan in 2001. Binalshibh was captured four years ago in Pakistan and is currently in U.S. custody, and last week President Bush announced plans to put him on military trial.

Bin Laden was shown expressing his appreciation for the Taliban, the Islamic regime that ran Afghanistan and gave refuge to al-Qaida until the U.S.-led invasion toppled them in late 2001.

''They allowed us to prepare and train, despite international pressure, and knowing that we were getting ready to strike the idols of this age -- the American forces and the NATO pact,'' the al-Qaida leader said.

The video showed events up to 10 years before the Sept. 11 attacks -- U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War, bin Laden preaching to followers after the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Sudan. It also showed events afterward including a man in an orange jumpsuit at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It was unclear when the tape was made, or how soon before the Sept. 11 attacks the footage of bin Laden was recorded.

It contained previously aired footage of al-Zawahiri, blaming the United States for provoking terror attacks.

''The Bush presidency was a bunch of cocky fools, motivated by crusader hatred ... which led them to imagine that they could takeover the entire world,'' he said. ''They threw themselves, their people and their nation into a sea of fire from which they are uselessly trying to secure themselves.''

The video also showed young men wearing Arab headdresses and sitting on the ground, watching a recorded speech by bin Laden on a laptop computer and the narrator suggested Muslim youth have been emboldened since bin Laden's attacks five years ago.

''The calls of the Mujahid Sheik Abu Abdullah Osama Bin Laden awakened the consciousness of the youth of Islam ... and awakened their spirit of sacrifice, defiance and love of martyrdom,'' the narrator said.

IntelCenter said the next video from As-Sahab was coming shortly and would contain an interview with al-Zawahiri conducted by As-Sahab. It was likely to be released in the next 24 hours to coincide with the anniversary of Sept. 11 but it could take as long as 72-hours, IntelCenter said.

    Militant Site Shows More al - Qaida Videos, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Sept-11-Video.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Overview

Bush Mourns 9/11 at Ground Zero as New York Revisits Loss in Ceremonies

September 11, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Vowing that he was “never going to forget the lessons of that day,” President Bush paid tribute last night to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, laying wreaths at ground zero, attending a prayer service at St. Paul’s Chapel and making a surprise stop at a firehouse and a memorial museum overlooking the vast gash in the ground where the twin towers once stood.

The official commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the attacks, one of many memorial gatherings around New York and the United States yesterday, began without a word. The strains of bagpipes were all that could be heard as the president and Mrs. Bush, joined by Gov. George E. Pataki, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, descended into the pit at ground zero under a steel-gray sky.

There, the president and the first lady set wreaths of red, white and blue flowers afloat in separate small reflecting pools, one in the footprint of each fallen tower. It was a hint of life in a place that still brims with memories of death, a reminder that even five years later, the attacks are not so very distant.

“Laura and I approach tomorrow with a heavy heart,” the president, visibly moved, said later, after an unscripted stop to shake hands with fire crews and view what he called “horrific scenes” inside a small gallery near ground zero established by relatives of trade center victims. “It’s hard not to think about the people who lost their lives on September the 11th, 2001. You know, you see the relatives of those who still grieve — I just wish there were some way we could make them whole.”

The president spoke outside the brick exterior of the firehouse for Ladder Company 10 and Engine Company 10, against the backdrop of a 56-foot-long bronze bas-relief depicting the towers in flames. Harking back to the theme of a series of speeches he delivered last week, he said he was reminded that “there’s still an enemy out there that would like to inflict the same kind of damage again.”

The president’s visit, on the eve of the anniversary, ushered in what will be a solemn day of remembrance, in New York and around the country, of the attacks that tore through the city and the nation.

Across the city yesterday, there was a feeling of bittersweet reunion as streams of humanity converged and mingled at dozens of memorial services.

They heard the mayor sing the praises of a city largely resurrected. They watched a sprout from a tree damaged in the Oklahoma City bombing be planted near City Hall, beside trees scarred by trade center debris. They gathered in houses of worship and across dinner tables.

“The first year or two, I just tried to forget about it,” said Joyce Ng, who was at a restaurant just south of the trade center site where survivors of the devastation of the Marriott hotel at 3 World Trade Center gathered for their annual reunion. She was a guest at the hotel, which was badly damaged when the towers collapsed. “But gradually it’s become about celebration because we survived.”

Jean Cleere, whose husband, Jim, was a guest at the Marriott and died on Sept. 11, made her annual pilgrimage from Iowa. “This is my husband’s death spot,” she said, “but I love New York and I love New Yorkers.”

At St. Patrick’s Cathedral, firefighters in dress blues and white gloves escorted families to the pews for a memorial service, led by Mr. Bloomberg, to honor the 343 Fire Department employees killed on 9/11.

“The events of 9/11 remain a source of great pain to all of us in this country, but our memories of those who responded are also a source of great pride,” the mayor said.

“The city that many thought would be down for the count is now back on its feet,” he said. “I believe the 2,749 victims of the World Trade Center attack would be proud of just how far we’ve come.”

Several survivors of the firefighters who died on 9/11 said they appreciated the service, but they expressed mixed feelings about the political leaders who have wrestled over the struggle against terrorism and the war in Iraq.

Robin Freund, 51, whose husband, Lt. Peter L. Freund, died on 9/11, said she did not wish to revisit ground zero anytime soon.

“I haven’t been to the site since October 2001, five days before they recovered my husband’s body,” she said. “I don’t have a desire to go to the site until there’s an appropriate memorial there.”

Accompanied by her children, ages 17, 15 and 14, Mrs. Freund said, “It’s nice that these men are going to be remembered for their bravery. It’s appropriate that we pay homage to them and the sacrifices they made.”

A woman whose fiancé died on Sept. 11, Maria Barreto-Mojica, said she noticed that something about yesterday had seemed eerily familiar. “I looked at the sky this morning. It was so blue, just the same as it was that morning,” said Ms. Barreto-Mojica, 48, who was to marry fire lieutenant Dennis Mojica. “As beautiful as it is, it’s sad. I don’t know what normal is anymore.”

Mr. Bush’s trip bore echoes of the one he made five years ago, three days after the attacks. Much has changed — for the city, the country and the president himself — since that day, when the president, surrounded by rescue workers streaked with mud and tears, climbed atop a charred fire truck in the smoldering ruins of the twin towers, picked up a bullhorn and bellowed, “I can hear you,” in a moment that remade his presidency.

The city is thriving again, its physical — if not emotional — scars nearly healed, despite the 16-acre expanse that is ground zero. The country, united five years ago in anger and grief, is now bitterly divided over the war in Iraq, a division that has driven down Mr. Bush’s approval ratings and is dominating the fall midterm campaigns.

“To many of us, that was the high point of his presidency,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, who is playing a central role in the elections by running the committee responsible for electing Democrats to the Senate. “We just wish that this same man we saw those days would be the president today.”

The White House is hoping that yesterday’s visit, to be followed today by breakfast with New York City firefighters and wreath-laying ceremonies in Shanksville, Pa., and at the Pentagon, and then a prime-time Oval Office address, helps the president recapture that less divisive time.

Others would like to recapture it too. “Whether you were a political leader or a firefighter at ground zero, or just an American citizen, I think we had that sense of pride and patriotism and unity,” Governor Pataki said as he waited for the president to land at the Wall Street heliport. “I think it’s very important we try to recapture that.”

Mr. Bush arrived shortly before 5 p.m. and quickly sped to ground zero for the brief wreath-laying ceremony. The presidential motorcade then headed for St. Paul’s Chapel, an unassuming stone church that opened its doors to rescue workers for months after the attacks. Along the way, Mr. Bush passed protesters wearing black T-shirts and carrying black balloons, demanding that the troops come home from Iraq.

Near ground zero, where hundreds of people lined the streets to await the president, Sidney Bender, a 79-year-old lawyer from Searington on Long Island and a lifelong Democrat, said that he felt it was his patriotic duty to greet him.

“The trouble is the country has forgotten about 9/11,” Mr. Bender said. “Most of the people have gone about their business, which is all right, but you can’t forget about it. You’ve got to make sure we’re constantly vigilant because we’re at war.” He added, “Five years later, I’m even more supportive of the president.”

Inside the church, the signs of five years ago were palpable: in the display of uniform patches left behind by police officers and firefighters who came from around the country to help, in the scars on the wooden pews left by the equipment of the rescue workers who used them to rest, in the words of the homily, delivered by the Rev. Timothy J. Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, who said he still struggles with how to reconcile the attacks with his faith in God.

“The very best way to honor the memories of the ones that we’ve lost and loved is to live productive, confident lives,” Dr. Keller said, adding, “We have to have the strength to face a world filled with constant devastation and loss.”

The pews were filled with dignitaries, including the four senators from New York and New Jersey, and also families of the fallen.

Mr. and Mrs. Bush were seated in the front row, a few spots away from Arlene Howard, whose son, George, a Port Authority police officer, died in the attack. Five years ago, when Mr. Bush made his first trip to ground zero, Mrs. Howard gave the president her son’s badge. White House aides say Mr. Bush still carries it with him.

To the president’s left sat Jane Vigiano, whose son, Joe, a New York City detective, died in the attacks. Bob Beckwith, the New York City firefighter who stood beside Mr. Bush as the president addressed the nation through a bullhorn five years ago, also sat in the president’s pew.

When the hourlong service was over, a lone clergyman, draped in black, stood in the churchyard facing the western entrance of the chapel to ring the Bell of Hope, presented to New Yorkers by the mayor of London on the first anniversary of the attacks. The bell pealed 20 times, clanging into the dusk as Mr. Bush’s motorcade drove off.

Reporting was contributed by Sewell Chan, Ann Farmer, Kate Hammer, Andy Newman and Anthony Ramirez.

    Bush Mourns 9/11 at Ground Zero as New York Revisits Loss in Ceremonies, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/11bush.html?hp&ex=1158033600&en=e468f88da52557ed&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A rendering of what Manhattan would look like with the new towers.

RRP, Team Macarie via Getty Images

At Ground Zero, Towers for Forgetting        NYT        11.9.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/arts/design/11zero.html 

Architecture Review

At Ground Zero, Towers for Forgetting

September 11, 2006
The New York Times
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

The designs unveiled last week for three sleek glass towers at ground zero rise above the mediocrity we have come to expect from a planning process driven by political opportunism, backdoor deal-making and commercial greed.

But for those who cling to the idea that the site’s haunting history demands a leap of imagination, the towers illustrate how low our expectations have sunk since the city first resolved to rebuild there in a surge of determination just weeks after 9/11.

Designed by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, the towers are solid, competent work by three first-rate talents. But each of these architects is capable of far more. Lord Foster has shown us better work recently in Midtown Manhattan, where his faceted Hearst Tower plunges through the top of an existing 1920’s building with impressive force.

Architectural merit aside, the most telling features of the ground zero master plan remain those in which the city’s anxieties bubble up to the surface: in the paranoia implied by David Childs’s heavily armored Freedom Tower, for example, or the defiant grandiosity of Santiago Calatrava’s transportation hub. By comparison, the three new towers are about forgetting. Conservative and coolly corporate, they could be imagined in just about any Western capital, paralleling the effacement of history in the remade, blatantly commercial Potsdamer Platz in Berlin or La Défense, the incongruous office-tower district just outside Paris.

Lord Foster set out to confront the emotional trauma at ground zero in a design he submitted in a master plan competition four years ago. His proposal, for two slender glass-and-steel towers that swayed in and out as they rose, seeming to meet here and there in a gentle kiss, captured the aura of the old twin towers. That proposal, a plan for the entire site, was rejected.

This time he was limited to a single tower at the northeast corner of the site, with a mandate to pack commercial and retail space onto a more constricted area. The result is bulkier. The building, which at 1,254 feet, with an additional 85-foot antenna (not pictured in the widely distributed renderings) would be the second tallest in the city after the Freedom Tower, rises straight up from its base with no setbacks. A vertical notch cut into each of its facades creates deep, brooding shadows; the top is sliced at a sharp diagonal that tilts toward the memorial pools below. One assumes that this is intended to imbue the structure with a quasi-mystical significance, but it’s a cheap gesture.

The simplistic nod to the memorial echoes the saccharine symbolism of Daniel Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza, whose form is based on the position of the sun five years ago this morning, when the two airliners reached the end of their deadly trajectory. Similarly, Lord Foster, Lord Rogers and Mr. Maki emphasize their buildings’ transparency, a tired cliché for the openness of a democratic society. But transparency is not just about openness. It’s about voyeurism, exhibitionism and surveillance, the last of which is probably more relevant than “freedom” at ground zero.

The towers by Lord Rogers and Mr. Maki are more convincing as architecture. Set on a transparent base just south of Lord Foster’s tower, Lord Rogers’s building is supported by a series of massive steel cross braces that give it structural muscle. Its glass facades extend up beyond the top of the building, a familiar architectural trick that will create the illusion that the tower is dissolving into the sky. It adds a much-needed touch of lightness to the densest part of the skyline.

Mr. Maki’s tower, the most elegant of the three, is also the most deceptively simple. As it rises, its prismatic form morphs from a square to a trapezoid, giving it an air of geometric purity that is somewhat closer in spirit to the old World Trade Center towers.

Over all, the massive scale of the three towers, which are slightly staggered in height, will extend the dense canyons of Wall Street right up to the edge of the memorial site, not a bad idea. The disparate styles of the Rogers and Maki towers in particular, which are separated by a mere 47 feet, could create an interesting visual tension in the skyline.

The big problem is down below on the street. In a small but important recent victory, the city has decided to rebuild Cortlandt Street as an open-air pedestrian walkway, countering the Port Authority’s proposal to cover it with a glass canopy. Framed by Lord Rogers’s tower to the north and Mr. Maki’s to the south, the pedestrian corridor will form one of the most dramatic visual approaches to the memorial site.

But that victory has been compromised by the Port Authority’s determination to pack as much retail space as possible into the buildings. Current plans call for several stories at the base of each tower to be occupied by stores, raising the specter of vertical urban malls on the order of the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. Like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Time Warner’s architects, Lord Foster, Lord Rogers and Mr. Maki have sheathed their retail sections in glass, the difference being that shoppers will peer down into the memorial pits instead of down 59th Street.

The sense that the three towers are typical development fare, if a notch above standard, is reinforced by Mr. Calatrava’s transportation hub, whose glittering elliptical form, capped by its two winglike canopies, will sit between Lord Rogers’s tower, to the south, and Lord Foster’s, to the north. Insisting on the inviolate purity of his great central hall, Mr. Calatrava arranged to have his building’s mechanical systems located within the bases of the nearby towers, adding to their bulk.

Through astute political maneuvering, he also persuaded government officials to locate the entrances to the No. 1 subway line in the Foster tower and the R and W trains in the Rogers building. Mr. Calatrava’s hub — larger than the great hall at Grand Central — will serve only the PATH trains to New Jersey, whose tracks lie across Greenwich Street, underneath the memorial site. The risk is that his transit hub will resemble the enormous lobby he famously designed for the Milwaukee Museum of Art, exuding a look-at-me braggadocio at the expense of serviceable function.

It is far from clear that these three towers will be built in their current form. It is almost inevitable that the Police Department will raise security concerns, challenging the abundance of glass at street level, for example.

But at least we are beginning to see a real architectural composition emerge, one that for all its flaws, represents a serious effort to raise the level of conversation at ground zero. The question is whether our fortunes slowly turning, or whether cynical politics will erode the genuine merits of the designs before us today.

    At Ground Zero, Towers for Forgetting, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/arts/design/11zero.html

Broken Ground

The Hole in the City’s Heart

September 11, 2006
The New York Times
By DEBORAH SONTAG

On July Fourth two years ago, eight weeks before the Republican National Convention in New York City, Gov. George E. Pataki traveled from the Hamptons summer home of his senior economic adviser, Charles A. Gargano, to the dusty crater in the center of Lower Manhattan.

Draped in the symbolism of Independence Day, the two men descended into the baking-hot pit at ground zero. There they oversaw the ceremonial laying of a 20-ton Adirondack granite cornerstone — flecked with garnet, the state gem — for what was to be the first building to rise at the new World Trade Center: the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower.

“How badly our enemies underestimated the resiliency of this city and the resolve of these United States,” Mr. Pataki said.

For almost two years after that day’s Declaration of Independence reading and “God Bless America” singing, the cornerstone sat forlornly in the 16-acre depression, waiting for a beacon of hope to soar above it. Even as a building redesign left the cornerstone in the wrong place, it waited, inside a blue shed surrounded, often, by a brackish moat.

During that time, Larry A. Silverstein, the commercial leaseholder of the World Trade Center site, often found himself gazing down at the stone, remembering the way he had smiled through his teeth at the July Fourth ceremony. “The whole thing was speeches,” he said. “To me, it was illusory, almost like a farce. People were thinking, ‘God, this is wonderful,’ when I knew in my heart that it was sheer rubbish.”

Then, this June, after construction actually began on the substructure of the Freedom Tower, the cornerstone was in the way. Mr. Silverstein’s workers used a crane to hoist it from the site, transferring it to a flatbed for a journey that would reverse the one that the governor made on Independence Day 2004: from ground zero out to Long Island, where it is now stored.

Five years after Sept. 11, 2001, ground zero remains a 16-acre, 70-foot-deep hole in the heart of Lower Manhattan. High above it, a scaffolded bank building, contaminated during the attack, hulks like a metal skeleton, waiting endlessly to be razed.

The wreck that still stands tall and the pit that still sinks deep sum up the troubled history of ground zero. A site of horrific tragedy whose rescue and cleanup operation was a model of valiant efficiency, ground zero turned into a sinkhole of good intentions where it was as difficult to demolish a building as to construct one.

For all that has not yet risen from the ashes, there has been considerable sturm und drang, “like a novel, a cheap novel,” said Daniel Libeskind, the master planner for the site. The combination of big money, prime real estate, bottomless grief, artistic ego and dreams of legacy transformed ground zero into a mosh pit of stakeholders banging heads over billions in federal aid, tax breaks and insurance proceeds.

Only now, after a whirlwind of negotiations to resolve crises in advance of the fifth anniversary, is subterranean work substantially under way, raising the hope that reconstruction may proceed. Even so, many family members of victims are quick to point out that they still have nowhere to go to mourn their loved ones and only shaken faith that they will see a fitting memorial in the near future.

Governor Pataki, who assumed control of the reconstruction effort in the earliest days, did not intend it to be so protracted. In the spring of 2003, pressed by business leaders who had denounced the anemic pace of rebuilding, Mr. Pataki promised to be “bold and daring and swift.”

Standing in a hotel ballroom, he pledged that the skyline would be restored by this fifth anniversary when the Freedom Tower, as he christened it that day, would be topped off at 1,776 feet. By the end of 2006, he continued, a grand new PATH terminal and Fulton Street Transit Center would open, the substructure for a memorial would be built and a grand piazza, the Wedge of Light, would be created.

None of this has come to pass.

Lower Manhattan itself has experienced an unexpected resurgence with the conversion of outdated office buildings to luxury residential properties. “The problem,” as John C. Whitehead, 84, the former chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said baldly in an interview last spring, “is the 16-acre ditch.”

To Julie Menin, the chairwoman of Community Board 1 in Lower Manhattan, the ditch represents the “colossal failure” of the reconstruction effort. John E. Zuccotti, whose company is a principal owner of the neighboring World Financial Center, sees it more charitably. He would give officials “an A for planning,” given the challenges posed by “a situation where more than 2,700 have been murdered.”

“Where it has stumbled,” he said crisply, “has been in the execution.”

Not long after Sept. 11, it became apparent that ground zero had very many owners, from its technical owners — the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Mr. Silverstein — to those who possessed a different kind of claim on the site.

There were developers, architects, politicians, insurers, community residents, relatives of Sept. 11 victims and multiple competing government entities. “Too many cooks,” Mr. Whitehead said. And they all viewed ground zero differently.

Where some saw lucrative real estate, others saw a graveyard. Where some saw Rockefeller Center or Lincoln Center or Grand Central Terminal, others saw Gettysburg.

By destroying 16 acres of Manhattan, Sept. 11 produced “an opportunity, as horrible as that sounds,” said Anthony G. Cracchiolo, a former Port Authority executive, referring, in his case, to the opportunity to remake a century-old transit system.

For many in government and business, it provided the heady opportunity, also, to participate in history, to “wear the ring,” as development officials used to say.

Ambitions were grand, or, critics would say, grandiose, leading to plans for: the tallest building in the country, the most expensive commuter rail station ($2.2 billion), the costliest memorial complex (at least $740 million) and the most technologically advanced “vehicle security center” ($478 million).

Despite $20 billion in federal money and $4.6 billion anticipated in insurance proceeds, however, the site’s two central projects, the Freedom Tower and the memorial, have stumbled financially, as in every other way.

Some victims’ family members consider it a skewed priority that the World Trade Center transportation hub is claiming about 13 percent of the direct federal aid while the memorial, which recently underwent cost-cutting and depends on a fund-raising campaign, is getting only about 1.6 percent.

“They saw 9/11 as an opportunity to right all the wrongs of Lower Manhattan,” said Edith Lutnick, the executive director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund. “There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re doing it in the name of 9/11, then take care of 9/11 first.”

Over the last five years, as problems arose, blame was assigned to a shifting cast of colorful characters for standing in the way of progress, including: Mr. Silverstein, who was portrayed as a greedy businessman, the architects Daniel Libeskind and Michael Arad, who were labeled difficult and precious, and the most vocal relatives of victims, who were treated as if they were addled by grief.

Ultimately, however, politicians and public institutions bear responsibility for what did and did not occur. As a clangorous public process played out, decisions were made and unmade behind closed doors. Nobody wanted to play the role of a Robert Moses, the fabled planning czar who used to bulldoze projects into existence, and yet the complexity of this reconstruction effort demanded a strong leader.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg did not, and, he said, could not, play that role because the city possesses no direct control over the site. “It is what it is,” he said in an interview. “This is Port Authority land.” His reconstruction vision — that housing and schools should be built — was never even entertained, and his preference for a modest memorial was rebuffed when, as he put it, “everybody voted against me, and that’s what democracy is all about.”

Nonetheless, some have faulted the mayor for taking a back seat while the governor drove the process. They lament what they saw as his detachment from ground zero, his pragmatism regarding the memorial and his reluctance to use his bully pulpit until this year.

Others find fault with the Port Authority for viewing the scarred site as a source of revenue. Since 2001, the Port Authority has reported about $530 million in net income on the devastated trade center, mostly from Mr. Silverstein’s rent for the empty site, which has gone into the authority’s general operating budget. It also has reported a net income of $869 million from its insurance proceeds and Federal Emergency Management Agency money, which has been used to pay off the Port Authority’s debts.

It is Mr. Pataki, however, who receives the lion’s share of criticism, despite what many see as his heartfelt embrace of this project. He himself said that he had no regrets. The important thing, he said, is that ideas have finally become “shovels in the ground.”

“This is not about meeting any particular timeline,” he said in a recent interview. “This is not about 2005 or 2006 or 2008 or 2010. We want it to proceed as quickly as it can be done consistent with, 50 years from now, people saying, ‘They didn’t do it in a hurry, they did it right.’ ”

But dozens of people interviewed for this article, including some of the governor’s allies, described his leadership as erratic, risk-averse and lacking vision.

“Governor Pataki had great intentions, but if this is a great project, it will be despite and not because of him,” said Nina Libeskind, whose husband and business partner Daniel’s master plan was selected by Mr. Pataki. “Personally, he has been very kind to us. But professionally, he has lacked follow-through. Every once in a while, he would pop up, like the spike of an irregular heartbeat, and then he’d be gone again.”

I. THE BRASS RING

At 75, Larry Silverstein is a preternaturally zippy man who has been cast in an unlikely starring role at the end of a successful but largely uncelebrated career in real estate. Given that he signed a 99-year commercial lease on the World Trade Center site just six weeks before the Sept. 11 attack, it is a fluke, really, that he has ended up at the heart of this drama. But he is a genuine New York character, and so he very much fits in this genuine New York story.

Now a chauffeur-driven, cufflink-wearing resident of Park Avenue, Mr. Silverstein spent his earliest years on the top floor of a Bedford-Stuyvesant walkup, “not a very commodious nor sweet-smelling place.” The son of Eastern European immigrants, Mr. Silverstein is a classic self-made man whose very way of talking — crisp diction on the one hand, earthy phraseology on the other — carries hints of both old-school rhetoric classes and Depression-era street life.

“You couldn’t make Larry up,” said Roland W. Betts, a founder and chairman of Chelsea Piers and a former development corporation director. “He should have hosted ‘Saturday Night Live’ twice by now, playing himself.”

Thirty-eight stories above ground zero, Mr. Silverstein, a lanky man whose head seems to sit directly on his shoulders, cannot help but pause at the floor-to-ceiling windows and look down. It does give him a headache, though, he said one morning last spring, as he pushed away from the view.

Mr. Silverstein, dapper in a pink silk tie with blue polka dots, was in the middle of a speed-walking tour of the sprawling office of Silverstein Properties in the newly opened and otherwise empty 7 World Trade Center. It is a glass-skinned, 52-story tower abutting ground zero that he erected “without government interference.”

After signing off to his secretary through a window that he closes by remote control — “Nifty, ain’t it?” — Mr. Silverstein began bounding through the hallways, distributing salutations like air kisses: “Good morning, good morning. Mo, still of sound mind? Hey, Ed. Hey, Shari. How are you this morning? Hey, Steve. Hey, Roz. Hey, Cliff. Hey, Cath, how are you, honey?”

It was the morning after a “massive” party for his 75th birthday and his 50th wedding anniversary. He was feeling “dandy,” he said, as he skidded to a stop before a painting.

An oil of no great subtlety, the painting depicted a sailboat tossing in a rough sea. Mr. Silverstein said he had bought it at a Christie’s auction because he saw it as a metaphor for his entanglement with insurers and government at ground zero.

“Look at that ship,” Mr. Silverstein said. “It’s coming through these mountainous seas obviously having weathered, because of its tattered sails, a massive storm, right? There are storm clouds overhead. Yet you can see in the distance that the sun is beginning to come through, the sky is beginning to clear and the ship is going to make it.”

GRABBING THE TROPHY

The World Trade Center was born through a marriage of public and private interests, primarily those of David Rockefeller, whose Chase Manhattan Bank opened new headquarters in a declining Lower Manhattan in 1960, and Austin J. Tobin, the powerful Port Authority director, who saw an opportunity for profitable expansion.

Together they created a gigantic office and retail complex financed by government bonds. The Port Authority shut down a vibrant electronics district and eliminated city streets to form the superblock on which the World Trade Center rose. This gave the authority a large chunk of Lower Manhattan, which frustrated the city’s mayors from that point through the ground zero reconstruction effort.

When it was dedicated in 1973, the World Trade Center was not welcomed. Architecture critics derided its monumentalism. New Yorkers did not warm easily to the monolithic austerity of the twin towers or the barren sweep of the plaza. For many years, the project was a financial burden on the Port Authority.

By the late 1990’s, however, the trade center was renovated, upgraded and nearly fully occupied, and the Port Authority made the long-debated move to get out of the commercial real estate business and focus on the region’s transportation. While the World Trade Center had never obtained the luster of a premier address, many developers coveted it and none more than Mr. Silverstein, who owned the original 7 World Trade, which sat in the shadow of the twin towers.

When Port Authority officials asked him if he would be interested in submitting a bid for the lease on the trade center, his response, he said, was “affirmative without hesitation.”

“The trade center was perceived by many as the brass ring,” he said. “Given an opportunity to acquire it, how does anybody who has been in this business for 50 years not salivate at the thought?”

Given the trajectory of his life, it made perfect sense that Mr. Silverstein, at retirement age, would leap for this particular brass ring.

Mr. Silverstein first got into the real estate business by joining his father, Harry, a classical pianist who made a paltry living as a leasing broker of loft space in SoHo, which was then known more prosaically as the rags, woolens and remnants district. Larry Silverstein quickly grew dissatisfied, telling his father: “Dad, we’re starving to death as brokers. The people really making the money are owners.”

Harry Silverstein, according to his son, answered: “We have nothing. How do you buy a building with nothing?”

And that was the question that propelled Mr. Silverstein on the path toward the World Trade Center. Mr. Silverstein said he found inspiration in “a gentleman by the name of Lawrence Wien and a gentleman by the name of Harry Helmsley,” pioneer real estate syndicators who eventually gathered several thousand investors to buy the Empire State Building. Putting together his own first small syndicate to buy a loft building in 1957, Mr. Silverstein established the business model for future transactions, including, one day, the purchase of the World Trade Center lease.

Gradually, Mr. Silverstein made himself into a player in the Manhattan real estate world, securing himself especially in the downtown firmament. Seven World Trade Center, which opened in 1987, was the first office building that he actually built.

Way back then, Mr. Silverstein gave the Port Authority an early taste of his exacting bargaining style, prevailing in his quest to double the square footage of 7 World Trade.

He also gave New York a taste of his tolerance for bottom-line aesthetics. Mr. Silverstein asked his architects “for the most inexpensive box I could build” because he had no tenants lined up. Later, he would refer to 7 World Trade as “the ugliest building in New York City,” according to David M. Childs, the architect who designed its replacement after Sept. 11.

In January 2001, a week before the final bids on the World Trade Center were due, Mr. Silverstein attended a real estate dinner at Le Cirque. The room buzzed with speculation about who would bid what on the trade center. At the end of the evening, he bundled up for a leisurely walk home.

When he crossed 57th Street at Madison Avenue, a car slammed into him, sending him “sailing in an easterly direction eight feet closer to the hospital,” he said. His pelvis was smashed in a dozen places, and he spent the next three days in a morphine haze. On Jan. 28, 2001, Mr. Silverstein stuttered into consciousness and realized that the bids were due imminently.

“Right away, I called the doctor and I said, ‘Kill the morphine. I got to think.’ ”

On the day that Mr. Silverstein was discharged from the hospital, he received a call that he had lost to Vornado Realty, the largest commercial landlord in Manhattan, by $50 million. “Really, it’s de minimis when you’re talking about that much money, what I call a rounding error,” he said.

But the Port Authority’s negotiations with Vornado broke down, and Mr. Silverstein got a second chance. To put together a deal, Mr. Silverstein, who then owned 5.5 million square feet of office space downtown, formed a partnership with Westfield America, a shopping center company. Over the course of negotiations, the Port Authority grew concerned about Mr. Silverstein’s financial viability and his ability to manage the gargantuan complex.

But Mr. Silverstein came up with $125 million in equity, including $14 million of his own money, and $563 million in financing from the GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corporation. He paid the Port Authority $491.3 million and pledged to pay more than $100 million a year in rent.

After Sept. 11, Mr. Silverstein was lambasted for underinsuring the trade center. But the Port Authority had carried only $1.5 billion in insurance coverage on the complex, which Mr. Silverstein more than doubled, as required by GMAC. As a result, Joseph J. Seymour, a former executive director of the Port Authority, noted, “Right before Sept. 11, we got additional insurance coverage because of Larry.”

On July 24, 2001, Mr. Silverstein took delivery of the World Trade Center. In a ceremony at the complex, he thrust a giant key chain into the air like a glittering trophy of his ascent from the rags district.

DETERMINATION TO REBUILD

Every morning after the deal was finalized, Mr. Silverstein held breakfast meetings at Windows on the World. Early on Sept. 11, his wife, Klara, reminded him that he had an appointment with his dermatologist. He tried to wriggle out of it, he said, but Mrs. Silverstein insisted.

By the next day, Mr. Silverstein, whose own company had lost four employees, was grappling with how he should confront the tragedy. In a meeting with Howard J. Rubenstein, his public relations adviser, it was decided that “our message needs to reflect the national shock, anger and ultimate defiance against terrorism” while refraining from any suggestion “that the financial markets and the lawyers may ultimately dictate what we do on the property,” according to the notes of the meeting.

On Sept. 13, Mr. Silverstein contacted Herbert M. Wachtell, a fierce litigator and a friend since high school. Mr. Wachtell, he said, told him that he had obligations and rights: the obligation to continue paying $10 million in monthly rent and the right to rebuild. Mr. Wachtell would also lead Mr. Silverstein’s court battles seeking to double his insurance benefits, claiming that each plane constituted a separate “occurrence,” each reimbursable for $3.55 billion.

Mr. Silverstein proclaimed that he would spend the next five years of his life rebuilding ground zero, although he did not propose precise replicas of the twin towers, as others did. Mr. Childs, the architect, who had been hired two weeks before the attack to upgrade the World Trade Center, said that Mr. Silverstein came to feel that the hand of fate had tapped him on the shoulder.

“I think he felt that there was some reason he was there,” Mr. Childs said, “that he must have been destined to take this on.”

II. A SENSE OF MISSION

A few weeks after Sept. 11, Monica Iken was trying to wrap her arms around the idea that her husband, Michael, a bond trader, had gone to work one morning and would never return home. Ms. Iken, who was then 31 and looking forward to starting a family, had been listening numbly to radio and television reports, but the early chatter about rebuilding the trade center startled her into feeling.

She burst out of her bedroom. “They’re going to build over dead people,” she told the relatives gathered to keep her company. “I can’t let that happen. I have to go on a mission.”

Ms. Iken’s family treated her pronouncement as if she were unhinged by grief, she recalled. “They said, ‘You’ve just lost your husband. You don’t know what you’re saying. What do you mean, a mission? Who are you to do that?’ ”

That was a question that all the family advocates would face at one time, but like Ms. Iken, they were driven to speak out.

Tall and willowy, Ms. Iken found herself in front of television cameras right after Sept. 11, when she was waiting outside a hospital to learn if her husband was a John Doe inside. Over the years, people would take potshots at her for what they saw as glorying in the spotlight. One Lower Manhattan community advocate told a reporter that Ms. Iken used to attend public meetings with a makeup artist, which Ms. Iken, sighing, denied.

Ms. Iken said that she only availed herself of the spotlight that found her first. In those first few months, Ms. Iken, unaware of the real estate complexities that would become paramount, began pushing the idea that all 16 acres should be preserved as a memorial. The idea caught on, and, thrilling her, Rudolph W. Giuliani embraced it in his farewell mayoral address in December 2001.

“I really believe that we shouldn’t think about the site out there, right beyond us, as a site for economic development,” Mr. Giuliani said. “We really have to be able to do with it what they did with Normandy or Valley Forge or Bunker Hill or Gettysburg. We have to be able to create something here that enshrines this forever.”

Publicly, a debate over possibilities for the 16 open acres raged well into 2002.

But the most pivotal conversation over ground zero’s future took place in late 2001, behind the Port Authority’s closed doors, when officials briefly entertained and then, fearing lengthy, costly litigation, rejected the idea of forcing out Mr. Silverstein.

“No matter who talked about, ‘Let’s get rid of Larry,’ it was not something that could be done unless he was a willing participant or did not meet his contractual obligations,” said Kenneth J. Ringler Jr., the authority’s current executive director.

This decision vested a private businessman with extraordinary influence over the reconstruction effort and yet, because it is essentially a public project, tied his hands at the same time. It is a decision that has been second-guessed so often it is like a parlor game in certain Manhattan circles.

“They could have gotten Larry out,” Mr. Betts said. It would have meant writing a check, Mr. Zuccotti said, but it could have been done. Robert D. Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, said the mayor and the governor “could have gotten in a room with Larry Silverstein and said, ‘You’re out of here.’ ”

But Mr. Yaro said the Port Authority had multiple motivations for retaining the Silverstein lease. “They saw it as their key to hanging on to the site,” he said. “They were afraid of losing control to the city or the state.”

Further, the Port Authority was counting on Mr. Silverstein’s aggressive pursuit of insurance proceeds as well as the more than $100 million a year in rent that the Port Authority depended on to keep its overall operation flush.

“I don’t think that should shock anybody,” Mr. Ringler said. “The World Trade Center was a moneymaker for this agency so that this agency, who pools its resources, can do all the other things we have to do.”

The World Trade Center site has been an even better moneymaker since Sept. 11, however, primarily because the attack coincided with the sale of the lease to Mr. Silverstein. While the Port Authority reported an average annual net income of $22 million on the complex in the five years before Sept. 11, it reported an average annual net income of $106 million on the empty site in the five years after.

“When you look at how much more profit we made,” Anthony R. Coscia, the authority’s chairman, said, “all it represents is monetizing an asset we sold before Sept. 11,” that is, turning the buildings into cash.

Although the public would not realize it for some time, there was little room for any wholesale reimagining of the World Trade Center site once the Port Authority made the decision to respect Mr. Silverstein’s lease.

“You had this very quiet, very rapid elimination of the idea that it could be something other than 10 million square feet of office space plus a decorative necklace of ancillary institutions,” said Michael Sorkin, director of the graduate urban design program at City College of New York.

But that decision did not translate into quick action. The Port Authority, a fiercely independent entity unaccustomed to much public review, was pushed temporarily to the side as Governor Pataki and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, a new state entity, took over planning for the site.

That fall, it was anticipated that Mark Green, the Democratic candidate, would be elected mayor in November, and Mr. Giuliani assented to the creation of a state-run development corporation to oversee the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan.

FEELING OUT OF PLACE

When Governor Pataki first phoned him, John Whitehead assumed that he was calling to solicit a campaign contribution. Mr. Whitehead, then 79, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs and a former deputy secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, is an old-school establishment Republican, genteel, decorous and a reliable donor.

But Mr. Pataki was calling instead to ask Mr. Whitehead to serve as chairman of the development corporation, which Mr. Whitehead, keenly aware of his age and his lack of experience in architecture, construction and urban planning, initially considered declining but then accepted.

By the time of the City Hall press conference announcing Mr. Whitehead’s appointment, Mr. Bloomberg had won the election, inheriting a development corporation that he considered an additional layer of bureaucracy. Still, Mr. Bloomberg stood beside Mr. Pataki and Mr. Giuliani and embraced the selection of Mr. Whitehead, a fellow Harvard Business School alumnus and, Mr. Whitehead noted in an interview, a fellow Eagle Scout, too.

At the end of that press conference, Mr. Whitehead began having second thoughts. “The governor and the mayor — the two mayors — headed to their limousines clapping each other on their back,” he said. “I hailed a cab, sat alone in the back seat and thought it was one of the lowest points in my life. I didn’t know what to do next. I had no money, no staff, no office, no program.

“Luckily,” he continued, “the good Congress soon put $2.7 billion in the bank for us to spend.”

Shortly before Christmas, Mr. Whitehead bumped into Thomas S. Johnson at a holiday cocktail party at the home of Robin Chandler Duke, a leading socialite, former ambassador and champion of reproductive rights. It was the first social engagement that Mr. Johnson had attended since his 26-year-old son, Scott M. Johnson, a securities analyst, was killed on Sept. 11.

By that time, Mr. Johnson, then the chief executive of GreenPoint Bank, had returned to work but he was not “operating on all cylinders,” he said in an interview. He ached for his son, whom he describes, after a long pause, as: “No. 1, never had an unkind moment in his life, No. 2, enthusiastic about his life and positive, and No. 3, great-looking.”

At the party, Mr. Johnson asked Mr. Whitehead what the development corporation was going to do with ground zero. Mr. Whitehead told him, “We’re going to cover it over, make a temporary memorial and think about a permanent memorial way down the road,” Mr. Johnson said.

AN EARLY PLAN GOES NOWHERE

The idea that Mr. Whitehead mentioned never really left the inner sanctum of the Port Authority.

The Port Authority lost 84 of its own employees on Sept. 11, including its executive director, Neil D. Levin. Port officials pride themselves on the work ethic that kept employees on the job day and night in the weeks and months that followed. It was their way of coping.

Christopher O. Ward’s job was to direct strategic planning and external affairs at the Port Authority. He said he feared that some might want to exclude the authority from the redevelopment of ground zero, thinking, “They’re too big and lumbering and they’ll waste money.”

“I thought we needed to do something dramatic to put the port in a good place,” Mr. Ward said.

Mr. Ward’s idea, developed with other officials and an outside consultant, was to create an interim memorial.

Because ground zero itself would be a recovery and construction site for a long time, the Port Authority would create a bare-bones exhibition space, like the temporary Museum of Modern Art in Queens, on the abandoned piers of the Brooklyn Heights waterfront. There, artifacts from the World Trade Center — a crushed police car, a twisted antenna, a steel beam with firefighters’ messages — could be displayed.

The public would get a quick way to connect with one another and with the enormity of Sept. 11, and the interim memorial would alleviate time pressure on the difficult planning process for a permanent memorial. Or so it was thought.

At a December 2001 meeting, Mr. Ward, who went on to become Mr. Bloomberg’s commissioner of environmental protection, presented the idea to Port Authority commissioners. He told them that the temporary memorial would take seven months to put in place, and he also recommended draping the pit to make it more palatable.

Mr. Ward said he thought that the governor’s office squelched the plan, making it clear that all memorial planning would emanate directly from there. Mr. Gargano, the governor’s adviser, who is also a Port Authority commissioner, said that he did not remember the idea at all.

Whatever happened to that evanescent concept, the artifacts themselves were eventually transported to Hangar 17 at Kennedy International Airport, where they have been off limits to the public ever since.

THE POWER OF GRIEF

In the spring of 2002, John P. Cahill, the governor’s chief of staff, asked Thomas Johnson to serve on the board of the development corporation. At first, the board did not include a single family member, making families feel then, as many times afterward, that the memorial would come second to economic reconstruction.

Mr. Johnson requested a meeting with the governor first. In the governor’s Midtown office, Mr. Johnson said, he told Mr. Pataki that he would not be able to represent solely “the narrow interests of the family survivors — important as they are.” His allegiance, he said, would have to be to the “whole of the institution and all of its constituencies.”

Mr. Pataki accepted this, having chosen a banker and not, say, a firefighter’s widow, for a reason.

Still, the suspenders-wearing Mr. Johnson, now 65, did end up playing what he called the “very, very painful and very, very difficult” role of liaison to the families, who alternately resented him for being an insider and appreciated him for standing up to political authorities.

He had a fine line to walk. Some family members believed from the start that government officials were more comfortable with those relatives who were part of the elite establishment, like Mr. Johnson; Paula Grant Berry, a former publishing executive who served on the memorial design jury; and Christine A. Ferer, a business owner, widow of Mr. Levin, the Port Authority’s executive director, and Mr. Bloomberg’s liaison to the families (who, some time ago, had dated the mayor).

“I think there was an element of elitism towards the families that was quite palpable,” said Gretchen Dykstra, former president of the memorial foundation, “and also a naïveté on the part of the families.”

Sally Regenhard, a former nursing home administrator married to a retired New York City detective sergeant, said she gradually felt disregarded, as did others who served on the development corporation’s family advisory council. “Oh, please,” she said. “They say they are inclusionary. And they take everyone’s opinion, that’s true. But then they put it in the circular file.”

On the very day that Ms. Regenhard watched the towers burning from her Bronx apartment, even before she knew that her 28-year-old son, Christian, a probationary firefighter, was at risk, she experienced her first shudder of outrage, she said.

A couple of months later, during Christian’s memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, she did not denounce the authorities, as she had intended, for how the emergency communications and building safety systems had failed her son. A onetime Roman Catholic schoolgirl, she felt intimidated by the scarlet-robed Cardinal Edward M. Egan, she said.

But several months later, Ms. Regenhard, a compact woman with blond bangs, stood at the edge of City Hall Park in the pouring rain and gave her first press conference. She announced the formation of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign to push, among other things, for safety issues to be paramount in the rebuilding of ground zero.

“I was a different person before 9/11,” said Ms. Regenhard, who wears a locket with Christian’s picture and sometimes carries his ponytail, which he cut off before entering the Fire Academy, in a velvet pouch. “I tried to speak out, let’s say in Co-op City, where I lived. But now — I’m fueled by adrenaline, outrage and love for my son and that has made me a bigger pain in the ass than I ever was before.”

There is a constellation of family members who have been transformed by loss and anger into advocates. Over time, they have formed organizations with different missions, from safety concerns to how the victims’ names should be displayed on the memorial.

And, over time, they have come to be seen by some community, business and redevelopment leaders as impediments to progress. Some view the advocates as self-appointed and unrepresentative; others, in private conversations, describe them heatedly as radical or loopy or desperate for attention.

“My favorite description of the families is: They haven’t moved on,” said Ms. Lutnick of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, which assists the families of the financial service firm’s 658 employees who were killed, including her younger brother, Gary. “They also say that we are incapable of being satisfied, that all we want is for everyone else to feel as bad as we do, that we’re crazy.”

“It’s very dismissive,” she said, “and it couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Mr. Pataki said that it was “wrong to generically lump thousands of people together and give them a title” as family members. There is no one way that family members think and feel, he said, and he has worked to balance their concerns.

“I don’t expect everybody to stand and cheer,” Mr. Pataki said. “All those family members who continually do nothing but bash me — when I see them, I give them a hug, because I appreciate their sense of loss.”

Yet many involved in the reconstruction effort say that Mr. Pataki empowered the family advocates and also gave them veto power.

They point to one of Mr. Pataki’s first crucial decisions, announced to an ovation at a memorial service in June 2002: that nothing would be built on the twin towers’ footprints, where so many victims’ remains were found.

Development officials discovered Mr. Pataki’s commitment in the morning newspapers the next day. Since that commitment carved nearly five acres out of the site for a memorial, including the underground area that was going to be used for parking, roadways and mechanical components, they were startled that such a fundamental decision had been made without consultation.

Mr. Bloomberg said that declaring the footprints inviolable drove the process from that point forward, although he said he was not sure whether it was Mr. Pataki or Mr. Giuliani, in earlier remarks, who made the decision.

“Once you say that, you’ve set the scale of the memorial, you’ve set where the other buildings on the site will be, and you’ve set the cost,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

‘IT LOOKS LIKE ALBANY’

In a conference room overlooking the Hudson River, Mr. Betts, a tall, barrel-chested businessman wearing a blue vest with the Chelsea Piers logo, recalled the way that his sports complex was rapidly transformed on Sept. 11 into a triage center.

“Right from that day I remember telling Tom that I wanted to get involved in this thing,” Mr. Betts said, referring to his partner, Tom A. Bernstein.

Mr. Betts, a development corporation board member, asked its chairman, Mr. Whitehead, “to put me in charge of ground zero.” It was not long before Mr. Betts got a taste of just how difficult it would be to oversee a public project involving clashing government entities, a private developer and a grieving public.

“With 20/20 hindsight, we never should have moved forward with so many conflicting stakes on this piece of real estate,” he said. “Those people bombed the most complicated site in the state. If they had chosen the Empire State Building, there would have been no Port Authority, no Larry Silverstein. It seemed like everybody had a vested interest in ground zero.”

It took more than a year to settle on a master plan. In early 2002, the Port Authority and the development corporation began the process by seeking bids from architects. And that is when it came to light that the government was treating Mr. Silverstein’s lease as sacrosanct, that it wanted to replace the 10 million square feet of office space that was lost.

“This was a disastrous decision, and no one could believe it,” said Mr. Yaro of the Regional Plan Association.

A Manhattan architectural firm was awarded the contract and a challenge: to come up with six alternative land-use plans.

When the plans were unveiled in July 2002, critics dismissed them as uninspired. The public’s response, delivered at a meeting, called “Listening to the City,” that drew thousands to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, amounted to a Bronx cheer. What people especially condemned was the site’s density, particularly the scale of the commercial square footage.

“Somebody said, ‘It looks like Albany,’ ” Mr. Betts said. “That was the killer line.”

In the name of democracy, the development corporation discarded the six plans and embarked on a worldwide search for a more visionary master planner.

A SWAP IS CONSIDERED

From the start, Mr. Bloomberg’s advisers had been fretting over the city’s limited control of the redevelopment. Like many New Yorkers at “Listening to the City,” Mayor Bloomberg disagreed with an approach that made significant office space so central.

“Nobody was being honest about Lower Manhattan,” said Daniel L. Doctoroff, deputy mayor for economic development. “The truth is, Lower Manhattan before 9/11 had a growing residential population, but it had been losing worker population since 1970. By and large, the problems of Lower Manhattan were swept under the rug in the wake of 9/11 by kind of this nostalgia for the World Trade Center and the tremendous emotion that existed.”

One night in mid-2002, at a moment of simultaneous frustration about ground zero and about negotiations over the renewal of the Port Authority’s leases on the city’s airports, Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Doctoroff and Roy Bahat, a deputy to Mr. Doctoroff, sat in the garden behind City Hall looking at spreadsheets.

Flipping back and forth between the two sets of numbers, Mr. Bahat had an epiphany. The city was looking to collect from the Port Authority about $100 million in annual rent on the airports, and the Port Authority was looking to collect from Mr. Silverstein about $100 million in annual rent on the World Trade Center.

“I think it was even Roy who kind of, late one night, said, ‘Why not just trade?’ ” Mr. Doctoroff said. “We would have gotten the World Trade Center site plus cash,” and the Port Authority would have gotten the airports.

The idea was broached.

The city suggested that the World Trade Center site was worth $4.4 billion to $5.5 billion and the airports $7 billion to $9 billion, Port Authority officials said — figures the authority questioned.

But Mr. Doctoroff said that the numbers could have worked out, and that the swap would have served ground zero well. “I’m not sure at the end of the day that it would been the best deal financially for the city, but the hope was that having a single government entity in charge” would have been better, he said.

City officials said that the governor was not interested, preferring to retain control of the site. Aides to the governor, however, said they never took the idea seriously. Mayor Bloomberg never even called Governor Pataki to discuss it, they said. “Come on, of course it wasn’t real,” Mr. Gargano said. “What were we going to do, abandon the World Trade Center?”

Referring indirectly to the mayor’s interest in developing the Far West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Gargano said, “There was speculation that some didn’t want the rebuilding of ground zero because they thought there was a better real estate market elsewhere.”

After the swap idea dissolved, city officials seemed to disengage from ground zero. Mr. Bloomberg said that they focused their attention on what they did control, the rest of Lower Manhattan. More visibly, he pursued unsuccessful quests to build a West Side football stadium for the Jets and to secure the 2012 Olympics. It was, many community, business and civic leaders said, as if the mayor and the governor had made a pact to divide up Manhattan.

Such an understanding, Mr. Doctoroff said, never existed, even tacitly. “There never was a quid pro quo,” he said.

III. ARCHITECT VS. ARCHITECT

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s office overlooks ground zero. The blinds in its conference room are often tightly drawn, blotting out the view. On the fall day in 2002 that the seven finalist teams for master planner gathered there, though, they stood at the picture windows and gazed down at the stillness of the site.

“Somebody from the Port said, ‘Does anybody want to go down?’ ” Daniel Libeskind, known then as the architect who had designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin, recalled. “There was complete silence. I said, ‘I want to.’ It was miserable rain. We borrowed galoshes and bought cheap umbrellas. And as we descended down that huge ramp, really, my view of the world changed.”

Deep down at the bedrock level, Mr. Libeskind said, he felt both the “enormity of the loss” and the unadorned power of the pit itself. After placing his hands on the rough face of the concrete slurry wall, he turned to his wife and said, “Call Berlin. Drop everything we’re doing. I have a complete vision of what should be.”

Mr. Libeskind, 60, whose bubbly, pixyish demeanor contrasts almost comically with his severe black clothing and rectangular eyeglasses, has a talent for packaging his own stories and ideas. Call it salesmanship or, as Mr. Libeskind does, “rhetoric, one of the arts that Aristotle and the Greeks thought fundamental.” That fall, when Mr. Libeskind, who immigrated to the United States as a child, presented his ideas to development officials, it made an impression.

“When that magical little guy with the black pants, black shoes, black socks, black belt, black shirt and black glasses stood up and talked about his approach, everybody was emotionally moved,” said Mr. Johnson, who served on Mr. Betts’s site committee. “When he talked about coming on a boat to America, seeing the Statue of Liberty, going down to ground zero — I don’t know anybody there that didn’t start out thinking that his plan would be the very best.”

But that thinking changed in early 2003 when it came down to a bake-off between two finalists. It was Mr. Libeskind, an architectural theorist who had seen his first building built only four years earlier, versus the Think design team, which included the Argentine-born architect Rafael Viñoly and Frederic Schwartz of New York.

Think’s design centered on two latticework structures that rose like Eiffel Towers above the footprints of the twin towers. Mr. Libeskind’s “Memory Foundations” featured a memorial site sinking 70 feet down to bedrock with the slurry wall exposed. That hollow would be surrounded by office towers that spiraled progressively higher, with the tallest, at 1,776 feet, reaching up into the sky to echo the Statue of Liberty.

The competition was intense and mean-spirited. The Think designers rolled their eyes at the American flag lapel pin that Mr. Libeskind, a naturalized American living in Berlin, took to wearing and referred to Mr. Libeskind’s design as a death pit. Mr. Libeskind described the design team’s name as disturbingly Orwellian and the Think towers as skeletons — a perception that Mr. Pataki came to share.

Some family groups had embraced Mr. Libeskind’s plan because it treated bedrock as sacrosanct. Mr. Betts’s committee, however, came to favor the Think lattice towers, which members saw as a vertical memorial. “I thought that Libeskind’s was down in a hole and depressing while the Viñoly was soaring and uplifting,” Mr. Betts said.

The tower would have been built segment by segment, like an Erector Set. “For the public, it would have been an event, like a rising phoenix,” Mr. Betts said, growing animated and then wistful.

The day before the two models were to be presented to Mr. Pataki and Mr. Bloomberg, a site committee member told The New York Times that it had chosen the Think design and did not expect to be overruled.

Reading the newspaper the following morning, Nina Libeskind, who grew up in a family of Canadian politicians, reached for the telephone. She called Edward W. Hayes, the Libeskinds’ friend and lawyer who also happened to be Mr. Pataki’s buddy since law school (and the model for Tommy Killian, the defense lawyer in Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities”).

Mr. Hayes had accompanied the governor when he toured an exhibition of the models, giving Mr. Pataki a picture of Mr. Libeskind. The photograph, which showed a young Mr. Libeskind posing before a haystack, echoed a similar photograph of the governor as a child (the haystack being a favorite backdrop of Eastern European immigrants), according to Mr. Libeskind.

After Mrs. Libeskind called him, Mr. Hayes phoned the governor and told him to “do whatever you think is right” for a project that would define his legacy.

The governor arrived at the development corporation’s office and met with Mr. Betts’s committee, knowing that one member had leaked its choice. “Pataki was really, really irked at us,” Mr. Betts said. “It was less substantive than, ‘Who do you guys think you are? I’m the governor. I make the decisions.’ We did not really have a debate. I made the point that the L.M.D.C. expected to make certain decisions. But instead the decision was crammed down our throats.”

Mr. Pataki overruled Mr. Betts’s site committee. To this day, committee members regret the governor’s intervention. Some of them say that the Think towers would be built by now, lighted for this fifth anniversary like the beacon that the Freedom Tower has yet to become.

At a celebration after the governor, with the mayor’s assent, made his decision, Mr. Hayes told Mr. Libeskind, “The governor said that it was the haystack that did it in the end.”

ARTISTE VS. MONEY MAN

Right before Mr. Libeskind was chosen, Mr. Silverstein sent Mr. Whitehead a cautionary letter on his World Trade Center Properties stationery.

“Our group has the right to select the architect responsible for preparing rebuilding plans,” Mr. Silverstein wrote. Right after Sept. 11, in fact, Mr. Silverstein had chosen David Childs, turning to him and saying, “You can be the new Yamasaki!” (He referred to Minoru Yamasaki, architect for the original World Trade Center.)

Mr. Libeskind would never possess absolute authority as master planner. Even before his plan was selected, he was made to raise the sunken memorial from bedrock to 30 feet below street level for structural reasons. His ability to absorb challenges was tested repeatedly.

But Mr. Silverstein, as he saw it, was a particular challenge. The feeling was mutual.

In some ways, Mr. Silverstein and Mr. Libeskind have a good deal in common. They are both Jews of Eastern European descent raised in working-class immigrant homes in New York City. They were both classically trained musicians, Mr. Libeskind as an accordionist, Mr. Silverstein as a pianist and drummer. They both met their wives at camps in the Catskills. They are both remarkably optimistic by nature.

But to Mr. Silverstein, Mr. Libeskind was an egghead artiste, and to Mr. Libeskind, Mr. Silverstein was a profit-driven developer.

A few days after Mr. Libeskind was “anointed,” as Mr. Silverstein put it, the men got together. In Mr. Silverstein’s conference room, Nina Libeskind made it clear that her husband would be designing the 1776 building, as it was then known.

“I looked at her in absolute shock and said, ‘But he’s never designed a high-rise in his life,’ ” Mr. Silverstein recalled. “I said, ‘Tell me something. If you were needing neurosurgery, would you go to a general practitioner who has never done any kind of operating in his life?’ She said, ‘Daniel is a quick learner.’ ”

Mr. Silverstein started picking apart Mr. Libeskind’s master plan. He objected first to the location of the Freedom Tower at the northwest corner of the site, where it would be farthest from the transportation hub and, complicating construction, above the train tracks.

But Mr. Silverstein lost that battle, and the next: “I said to Larry,” Mr. Childs recalled, “ ‘If the governor won’t move the tower, ask him if he would build it last. Then you’ll have more of a market, the train station will be done and the slurry wall fixed.’ But the governor said: ‘No. I want to build it first. I want to build it there. And I want to build it quickly.’ ”

And the governor wanted Mr. Childs, a corporate architect, to collaborate with Mr. Libeskind, an academic architect about a foot shorter, whom Mr. Childs addressed with the diminutive Danny. Mr. Libeskind describes it as a forced marriage — in which he reluctantly agreed to play the role of subservient spouse.

As Mr. Childs put it, “I said, ‘Danny, if we have a million disagreements, I get 51 percent of the vote on each one.’ And he said, ‘Yes, I understand.’ ”

The two architects met weekly in the office of Mr. Childs’s Wall Street firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which has developed a specialty in super-tall buildings. Mr. Childs was elaborating on the design of what he called a torqued building and Mr. Libeskind saw as a “giant corkscrew with a bird on top.” Mr. Libeskind still believed strongly in his original asymmetrical tower with a spire mirroring the Statue of Liberty’s arm. But Mr. Childs thought, “God doesn’t like eccentric loads. That’s why he makes trees tapered and they don’t have a big branch sticking off the top.”

Public officials mediated. As unveiled at the very end of 2003, the Freedom Tower, with a twisted torso and off-center antenna, was a bartered design. At the unveiling, the politicians and architects joined hands, but neither that Kumbaya moment nor the design itself would last.

FROM A DESKTOP FOUNTAIN

After his experience with Mr. Pataki’s selection of Mr. Libeskind, Mr. Johnson set out to organize a memorial design competition that the governor “couldn’t mess with.”

“I worked really hard, with others, to set up a process that would result in a truly independent jury,” he said.

The jury of 13 included representatives of the governor and the mayor, one family member and professionals from the art and architecture world, including Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Paula Grant Berry, the family representative, said she entered hesitantly into what became an all-consuming experience. “I felt that the jury was happening at the wrong time,” she said. “How can you memorialize something when you are still in it? I wondered what was driving the haste. Why not stop, build a temporary park, put in the PATH station and take a breath?”

Like the other jurors, Ms. Berry did not like the way that Mr. Libeskind had prescribed a large sunken memorial, “a gigantic bomb crater,” as James E. Young, a scholar of Judaic and Near Eastern studies who has written books on memorials, put it. “We wanted to bring it to grade, to stitch the site back into downtown and not have a giant hole that people had to walk around.”

In April 2003, the development corporation announced an international competition, soliciting “creative and exceptional” design concepts to honor the loss of life on Sept. 11, 2001, and on Feb. 26, 1993, when six people were killed in a bombing attack on the World Trade Center.

At the last minute, the jury inserted into the design guidelines a quiet invitation to ignore Mr. Libeskind’s master plan, which many designers were reluctant to do.

Michael Arad, an assistant architect for the New York City Housing Authority, was not.

Unlike the voluble Mr. Libeskind, Mr. Arad speaks softly and methodically.

Try to interrupt him with a question and he says, “I’ll get to that.” He does not like to be diverted, which made it difficult for him during the fractious reconstruction process, where no path was ever a straight one.

Mr. Arad, now 37, a slim, pale man with rectangular glasses and an intense gaze, had started sketching ideas for a memorial about a year after the attack. Because of a Sept. 11-related delay in the renewal of his work visa, Mr. Arad, the son of an Israeli diplomat who grew up partly in the United States, found himself on leave from an architectural firm, with time to ponder. He imagined two voids in the Hudson River; water would flow into them but they would never fill up. Then he built a model, with a desktop fountain from Bed Bath and Beyond, carried it to his rooftop, photographed it and said to himself, “O.K., now what?”

When the memorial competition was announced, Mr. Arad dusted off his model and contemplated creating the voids on the World Trade Center site itself. He made an early decision to discard important aspects of the master plan, like the sunken plaza and the cultural buildings. He thought Mr. Libeskind had all but designed a memorial himself, relegating prospective designers to “selecting fabric swatches.”

In June 2003, Mr. Arad submitted “Reflecting Absence,” which carved out an enormous, barren street-level plaza featuring two square depressions 30 feet deep. At the bottom of each depression sat a reflecting pool fed by sheets of water. Each pool was broken by another square, with water falling again into a second void, and the victims’ names engraved on parapets around the pools’ edges. Visitors could either gaze down into the pools or descend into what Mr. Arad envisioned as a cool, dim, contemplative space vital to the experience.

‘LESS IS MORE’

A few months later, in August 2003, the 13 members of the World Trade Center memorial design jury sat cloistered in a bland meeting room.

Ahead of them was a daunting task. They had received 5,201 designs submitted, as required, on 30- by-40-inch poster boards, as if they were middle school science projects. And no single design had jumped out at them.

That day, they were to receive first Governor Pataki, then Mayor Bloomberg and finally Mr. Giuliani. It was a formality, as the jurors saw it. They had been assured that their decision-making was to be free from political interference.

And yet what they heard from the politicians that day, particularly Mr. Bloomberg, presaged the troubles that lay ahead.

While Governor Pataki essentially gave the jurors a pep talk, the mayor and the former mayor presented them with contrasting and irreconcilable visions of how best to honor the dead. They raised the issues of cost, of scale and of timing: was it too soon to make such a potentially divisive decision?

Most astonishingly, although this was almost two years into an arduous process of determining the fate of ground zero, it was clear that neither of the two mayors believed in the reconstruction program that an Albany-led process had established.

Mr. Giuliani encouraged them to consider the entire site “sacred ground,” making it clear that his views had remained consistent since he left office. He said of the memorial, “I think it should be big.”

Mr. Bloomberg said just the opposite: “Less is more.”

With his hands chopping the air, Mayor Bloomberg told the jurors that he thought they should build a school instead of a monument. “I always thought the best memorial for anybody is to build a better world in their memory,” he said. “I’m a believer in the future, not the past. I can’t do anything about the past.”

Mr. Bloomberg related that before the first anniversary, he had tried to call the families of about 400 uniformed workers killed on Sept. 11. Most were moving on with their lives, he said. “Then there were 15-odd families where the spouse, I think it was probably all women, they just kept crying and crying,’’ he said. “It’s not my business to say that to a woman, ‘Suck it up and get going,’ but that is the way I feel. You’ve got to look to the future.”

Mr. Bloomberg also revealed that he had specified in his will a desire to be buried in a plain pine box. “It’s not like I can’t afford a fancy coffin,” he told the jurors. “It’s just a waste.”

Adding that “there are too many things that are wrong with society that a dollar can fix,” Mr. Bloomberg spoke about famine, war and the preventability of deaths from diarrhea in the developing world. He wanted the jurors to think about the memorial project in a broader context, he said.

Vartan Gregorian, a juror and president of the Carnegie Corporation, told the mayor, “In fairness to us, this is the first time we’ve heard about cost.” But it wouldn’t be the last, for the estimated cost of the memorial would balloon to almost $1 billion, enough to pay for 20 schools.

Like the deliberations of the memorial jury, these frank conversations were private, but the development corporation had them videotaped for a documentary on the making of the memorial. The videotapes, with a State Supreme Court justice’s assent, have been closely guarded ever since. Denied the tapes officially, The New York Times was nonetheless able to view them.

The public may never have that opportunity. The documentary was abandoned.

AN EXPENSIVE VISION

When it came to selecting an architect to build the new PATH station, the Port Authority had no intention of following in the development corporation’s footsteps.

“We did not want an endless public process with 5,000 public submittals,” said Anthony Cracchiolo, who was in charge of capital projects for the authority. “We said, ‘Let’s do it the traditional way.’ ”

Santiago Calatrava, a Spanish architect, artist and engineer who had earned an international reputation for his bridges and transportation terminals, submitted a bid in partnership with two New York firms.

“You see,” Mr. Calatrava said in an interview, explaining his interest, “to make a statement of construction in a place that has suffered such a devastating destruction — you cannot be in a better place.”

In the summer of 2003, Mr. Calatrava’s partnership, which includes the STV Group and DMJM Harris, won a $155.6 million contract to design the PATH station.

(Several years later, Mr. Cracchiolo, who retired from the Port Authority with a $145,000 annual pension, went to work for STV. So did two other former Port executives involved with the PATH project, although the firm said that none of them are working on that terminal. )

Inspired by the idea of a child releasing a dove, Mr. Calatrava designed a soaring winged structure, with a roof that could open to the sky every Sept. 11.

Port Authority officials quickly found themselves enchanted by Mr. Calatrava’s considerable charm. “I have become very, very fond of Santiago,” said Mr. Ringler, the Port Authority’s executive director. “The guy’s a genius. But the first thing that hits you in the face — he gives you a hug.”

Mr. Calatrava’s business is based in Zurich and Valencia, Spain, but since 2002 he has lived part-time on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Unlike many other architects at ground zero, Mr. Calatrava has retained significant creative control, although he has faced both security issues and some minor cost concerns. He was asked to use polished granite instead of marble, for instance, but Port Authority officials have not wanted to tie the hands of a man they consider an artist.

“Our people call him the Da Vinci of our time,” said Mr. Seymour of the Port Authority.

After Sept. 11, Port Authority officials jumped at the opportunity to remake the antiquated transportation infrastructure of Lower Manhattan. Almost immediately, they decided that they would not only restore what was lost but also improve on it.

“The trade center had been attacked twice,” Mr. Cracchiolo said. “Our thinking at the time was we needed to make a statement. We wanted to create a Grand Central Terminal in Lower Manhattan. It could be a catalyst for development as Grand Central was in Midtown.”

Grand Central, however, was built by the Vanderbilts. The new terminal in Lower Manhattan will be built by the taxpayers.

The central hall in Mr. Calatrava’s station will be roughly as capacious as Grand Central’s main concourse. But while Grand Central has 45 train tracks, the PATH station will have 5. And while Grand Central serves 200,000 train commuters and 700,000 subway riders daily, the World Trade Center PATH station now serves 42,000.

The Port Authority anticipates the number of commuters doubling in a couple of decades, just as it anticipates the transportation hub — with its stores and store-lined underground corridors — evolving into a heavily trafficked crossroads.

New York’s leaders stand solidly behind the PATH project even if some gape at the price tag. “It’s the only part of the project that has not been controversial,” Carl Weisbrod, president of Trinity Real Estate, said. “It’s a lot of money to spend on a PATH station. But the Calatrava may well end up becoming the icon of the site.”

In trips to Washington after Sept. 11, New York officials made transportation projects a priority, persuading Congress to dedicate $4.55 billion of the ground zero money to them. That was a substantial chunk — almost a third — of the $15 billion in direct federal aid. (Another $5 billion came in the form of a tax incentive program.)

The two major transportation projects, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Fulton Street Transit Center and the Port Authority’s World Trade Center transportation hub, are nearly side by side. “It will be like having Grand Central and Penn Station a block apart,” Mr. Yaro of the Regional Plan Association said.

The M.T.A. project is budgeted at $847 million, and the port’s at $2.2 billion, with a $280 million reserve fund. (The Port Authority will contribute $300 million of its own money to the PATH complex.) Neither terminal adds capacity to its system.

As now estimated, the PATH complex — whose price tag includes underground passageways radiating from the terminal and the east foundation — costs roughly the same as the Freedom Tower. But it requires much less concrete and steel, chief ingredients that drive cost, according to construction estimates.

Where the Freedom Tower will need 190,000 cubic yards of concrete and 53,700 tons of steel, according to the estimate, the PATH complex will need less than half as much of those materials.

One reason for the disproportionate cost of the PATH project is that the government is spending more on “soft costs” than Silverstein Properties, which is building the Freedom Tower. For instance, the PATH complex’s administration, design and insurance costs will total about $620 million, or 28 percent of the project’s total, according to federal transportation documents. The same costs for the Freedom Tower will be about $290 million, or 14.5 percent of that project’s total, according to Silverstein Properties.

Port officials say the projects are not comparable. “Ours is a complex transportation project,’’ said John J. McCarthy, the agency’s public affairs director. “It’s very different than a stand-alone office building.’’

The new PATH terminal will replace the $323 million temporary PATH terminal built to replace the one destroyed on Sept. 11. That temporary station, an impressively rapid government construction project that seemed to herald a quick rebirth of the site, opened in the fall of 2003.

A WINNER, AND A COMPROMISE

Late one night that same fall, Mr. Arad, after changing his newborn son’s diaper, got a cryptic e-mail message asking him to contact the development corporation. He thought, he said, that his $25 entry fee check had bounced, but learned instead that he was one of eight finalists for the memorial.

As the jury slogged through thousands of entries, it knew what it wanted.

“None of us were looking for a literal reference to the attack,” Professor Young said. “We weren’t interested in planes crashing into towers or flames. We were more disposed to an abstract, under-determined design.”

But finding what it wanted was not easy. All the finalists “needed a lot of help,” Mr. Young said. Mr. Arad was no exception.

Mr. Arad met with the jury at least three times, the first time talking with nervous rapidity and coming across as arrogant. After a subsequent presentation at Gracie Mansion, Mr. Arad was startled when the jurors broke into applause — all except Maya Lin, he said, who crinkled her nose. In the end, though, it was Ms. Lin who championed his design.

Yet the jurors challenged Mr. Arad on what they saw as the austerity of his memorial plaza. And, at that point, Mr. Arad said, “I tried to find a path between resistance and accommodation.”

He agreed to join with an older, more experienced professional, a landscape architect named Peter Walker, in a partnership that grew disharmonious as officials came to prefer dealing with Mr. Walker.

Over time, the memorial concept came to be seen as the seed of an idea rather than as a design itself. Even before he was selected, Mr. Arad agreed to add a grove of trees and cultural buildings to his spare plaza.

In January 2004, Mr. Arad’s selection was announced. For all those who admired his design’s stark elegance, others found it bland, minimal and so abstract as to be meaningless.

Mr. Arad prepared to defend his design against further changes while development officials, based on initial impressions, worried that he would prove immature and uncompromising. It was the start of an uncomfortable relationship.

Mr. Johnson, the board member, was pleased that the jury had remained immune from political pressure. “That’s the good news,” he said. “The bad news is that Michael Arad won.”

Mr. Libeskind struggled with his emotions as his master plan was altered by the winning memorial design. Initially, he fumed. Eventually, he shrugged.

“I would be throwing myself off an elevation,” Mrs. Libeskind said. “But Daniel had the capacity to look at something and find the good in it, to find the way it respected this or that element of his concept.”

Friends often suggested that Mr. Libeskind walk away, she said: “They’d come in and say, ‘Haven’t you had enough? First the Freedom Tower, now the memorial.’ ”

Mr. Libeskind’s response: “In my opinion, people give up too easily.”

His equanimity was put to the test one more time that very January when Mr. Calatrava conducted a private unveiling of the model for his PATH station. As designed, the terminal encroached on Mr. Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza, whose outlines were defined, Mr. Libeskind said, by the angle of the sun’s rays on Sept. 11.

Anxious Port Authority officials gathered with the architects on the first floor of Mr. Calatrava’s Park Avenue town house, where sweeping white walls and blond wood floors serve as a minimalist backdrop for the Spanish architect’s sculptures and watercolors.

“The tension was very high,” Mr. Seymour said. “Then Santiago made the point that when the roof opened every Sept. 11, that would allow the wedge of light. Nina started to say something against it. But Daniel stopped her. He said, ‘No. He’s accented the Wedge of Light. I like it.’ And then the wine was served.”

A TOXIC BUILDING

By the end of 2003, the black-shrouded Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street seemed to be standing in the way of progress, which was elusive enough in this one step forward, one step backward reconstruction effort.

It was really just a bystander building on the periphery of ground zero, but it got sucked into the dysfunction all the same.

As a result of the collapse of the southern twin tower, the bank building suffered a 15-story gash, filling with toxic ash and debris. A long, bitter battle between Deutsche Bank and its insurers ensued. Two years passed, during which the master plan that was created counted on the building’s property to expand the reconstruction site.

One day, two young executives of the development corporation were sitting in a diner bemoaning that the impasse between Deutsche Bank and its insurers seemed as insurmountable as conflicts of far greater proportion. What we need, Kevin M. Rampe and Matthew T. Higgins joked over lunch, is the kind of world-class mediator who gets dispatched to the Middle East or Northern Ireland.

Enter former Senator George J. Mitchell, his conflict resolution skills honed in Jerusalem and Belfast. And Mr. Mitchell indeed provided a speedy resolution, or so it seemed: the government would save the day, with the development corporation buying the toxic building and razing it.

It was a deal, Governor Pataki proclaimed in early 2004, that would “show the world that we are moving rapidly.”

IV. COMING UNDONE

By early 2004, a master plan was in place, a memorial design had been chosen, a PATH station design had been unveiled, a Freedom Tower design had been negotiated and the Deutsche Bank building was in government hands. Everything finally seemed to be coming together. Then the unraveling began.

Throughout 2004, more than 100 architects, engineers and consultants worked to take the conceptual design for the Freedom Tower through the design development process, level by level. But a dispute between the Port Authority and the Police Department ended up rendering most of their work a waste of time and money (an estimated $30 million).

The dispute, which did not become widely known until April 2005, had been simmering for more than a year before that.

Police officials said that they first voiced their concerns to development officials in late 2003 but were unable to obtain documents from the Port Authority or set up meetings with them.

In the spring of 2004, Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, told Mr. Silverstein that he was “deeply concerned about the Freedom Tower location and design from a terror standpoint,” Mr. Silverstein said. He asked for a document called the threat assessment risk analysis. Mr. Silverstein gave it to him, the police said.

As then designed, the Freedom Tower met the security standards of a federal courthouse. Police officials did not think that level of security was high enough. But the Port Authority believed that “doing it at courthouse standards was going far enough,” according to Mr. Seymour, then the Port Authority’s executive director, and police officials did not suggest an alternative.

Further, port officials thought that the Police Department’s discomfort was more fundamental, Mr. Seymour said: “The N.Y.P.D. was really not receptive, in my opinion, to the idea of building the Freedom Tower at all.”

On July 4, Mr. Pataki laid the cornerstone for the building.

This irked the police.

On Aug. 31, 2004, Michael A. Sheehan, the police deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, wrote Mr. Seymour a letter expressing his discomfort with the Freedom Tower’s “insufficient standoff distance” from West Street and about the use of glass on lower floors. These specific concerns, he wrote, had been voiced in previous meetings and ignored.

Mr. Sheehan did not get a response.

On Oct. 1, 2004, Mr. Sheehan wrote Mr. Seymour again. “Due to the history of Al Qaeda strikes at this location and the symbolic nature of the Freedom Tower itself, it seems clear that this building will become the prime terrorist target in New York City as soon as it is occupied.”

Eighteen days later, Mr. Seymour wrote back. “I just received your Oct. 1 letter today, which was apparently misrouted within the Port Authority,” he said. “We also have no record of receiving the Aug. 31 letter that was attached.”

Still, for the next several months, the Freedom Tower’s designers soldiered on.

“I do think that the port and Silverstein, to some extent, had their heads in the sand,” said Mr. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor. “They didn’t want to slow things down.”

A HANDFUL OF M & M’s

At the same time, during twice-weekly meetings, the Port Authority, the development corporation and city planners tried to hammer out commercial design guidelines.

The dense site is like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle whose interlocking parts made all the government entities co-dependent, like it or not. And, to their chagrin, Mr. Silverstein held a lot of the pieces.

The arduous process involved setting building heights, bulk and setback as well as the width of sidewalks and streets. Mr. Silverstein consistently wanted bigger floors and taller buildings, participants said, leading to such paralysis that Roland Betts stepped in to mediate. It took 12 weeks.

During one mediation session at Chelsea Piers, participants haggled over space allocations for the eastern boundary of the site. That boundary was 1,700 feet long, but it had 1,703 feet worth of things on it. Mr. Betts implored Mr. Silverstein to relinquish one foot of space per floor in each of three buildings. Mr. Silverstein held firm.

Finally, Mr. Betts grabbed a fistful of red, white and blue peanut M & M’s from a bowl. He asked for a ruler and lined up the M & M’s alongside it. “You can’t tell me that you won’t concede this amount of M & M’s out of each building,” he said to Mr. Silverstein.

Mr. Silverstein relented, Mr. Betts said.

There was considerably more at stake when Mr. Silverstein battled his insurers.

In May 2004, after a 52-day trial involving some of his many insurers, Mr. Silverstein lost his first effort to claim that the two planes represented two attacks and required double payments. At the end of 2004, however, after a separate 35-day trial, he won the right to collect double payments from another set of insurers. He had spent about $100 million paying lawyers to fight this particular fight, which critics said was an unconscionable siphoning of money that should have been used for rebuilding. But in his mind, that $100 million produced an additional $1.1 billion for rebuilding ground zero, which was worth it.

The insurers had portrayed Mr. Silverstein as — “What the hell phrase did they use?” Mr. Silverstein said. “Not greedy. Not overreaching. Begins with an ‘r’ ” — rapacious in his scheme to recover as much insurance money as possible. But in an indication that his legal position was not that exotic, the Port Authority, after Mr. Silverstein won the second case, quietly filed its own lawsuit seeking a double payout on its own insurance policy.

OBJECTIONS FROM THE POLICE

By April 2005, Mr. Silverstein had what amounted to a conditional building permit from the Port Authority. Yet, he said, he was uneasy about proceeding without the Police Department’s blessing.

Complicating matters, the Freedom Tower had been designed with the expectation that West Street, a state highway, would be slimmed from six lanes to four for local traffic, with an express roadway depressed in a tunnel. The tunnel, according to some security experts, could have contained damage to the Freedom Tower from a car or truck bomb, reducing the need for standoff distance and bunker-like reinforcements.

If the tunnel idea were to be abandoned, however, that would pose a problem, which is where the future of the Freedom Tower intersected with the future of Goldman Sachs & Company, the investment banking firm.

One of Lower Manhattan’s largest employers, Goldman Sachs had resisted political pressure to establish new headquarters in the Freedom Tower, announcing instead that it would build its own building across West Street from ground zero.

But Goldman, whose continued presence downtown was considered vital, did not favor the tunnel, which would have disgorged traffic at its front door. According to government officials and business leaders, Goldman was promised by the governor’s office that the tunnel would be quashed. But, as the security concerns over the Freedom Tower became more pronounced, the tunnel, in various iterations, remained alive.

In early April 2005, Goldman Sachs announced that it was suspending plans to build its headquarters across from ground zero.

Less than two weeks later, the tunnel was killed. And, eventually, Goldman announced that it would revive its downtown headquarters, enticed by government incentives. The firm received $1.65 billion in Liberty Bonds, 20 percent of the $8 billion in low-cost, tax-free financing created by the federal government to help New York recover from Sept. 11.

According to a city official involved, it was “too good a deal, but then, the state wanted them to get twice as much.”

After the Police Department finally produced a report suggesting that the Freedom Tower be built to the security standards of an American embassy, Mr. Pataki announced at a public breakfast that it would be redesigned. Mr. Silverstein, according to a rebuilding official, was “apoplectic.”

“It was an unmitigated disaster,” Mr. Silverstein said. “We had wasted two years, and, as I pointed out to the governor, inflation was starting to take hold in the construction trades and everything was going to be more costly.”

Mr. Pataki announced that his chief of staff, John Cahill, would oversee the reconstruction effort and that James K. Kallstrom, a former assistant director of the F.B.I., would become the site’s security czar.

Kevin M. Rampe resigned as president of the development corporation, the second leader in three years to step down. He said that his resignation had nothing to do with the state of crisis, that he had lined up a job as an insurance executive. But Mr. Rampe disagreed with the abandonment of the tunnel and the redesign of the Freedom Tower.

“The minute the governor made the decision to redesign the Freedom Tower,” Mr. Rampe said, “people said, ‘Hey, if you can redesign that, why not rethink everything else?’ ”

Mr. Childs went back to the drawing board, this time alone. By the end of June 2005, he had unveiled yet another version of the Freedom Tower, sitting atop a 200-foot-tall bunker of concrete and steel, its torso slimmer and straighter and crowned by a centered antenna. Mr. Childs declared it a much better building, and Governor Pataki wholeheartedly agreed. But the next controversy was already bubbling.

A MUSEUM IS DERAILED

Tom A. Bernstein, Mr. Betts’s partner at Chelsea Piers, first broached the idea of a freedom museum with development officials in early 2002. The idea had been sparked by a casual conversation with Peter W. Kunhardt, a filmmaker who was producing a PBS series called “Freedom: A History of US.”

“Peter and I started talking about how to frame the horror of 9/11 in a bigger story,” Mr. Bernstein said. “We thought, what if we had an institution devoted to telling the story of the struggle for freedom here and around the world?”

In May 2003, Mr. Bernstein and his friend Kenneth I. Chenault, the chief executive of American Express and a backer of the concept, met with Governor Pataki. They found him receptive.

In June 2004, Mr. Pataki, Mr. Bloomberg and development officials announced the selection, from among more than 100 applicants, of the International Freedom Center and three other institutions — the Drawing Center, the Joyce Theater and the Signature Theater Company — as the cultural anchors for the World Trade Center site.

By that point, Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Kunhardt had invested considerable time into building what they saw primarily as an educational institution, recruiting advisers, conducting feasibility studies and developing the concept.

With the Drawing Center’s leaders, they selected an architect, Snohetta of Norway, which got a $3.25 million contract from the government. In May 2005, Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg unveiled Snohetta’s design, which the governor called “part of a lasting tribute to freedom.”

A month later, the troubles began, and, like so much of the controversy at ground zero, it involved ad hominem attack. Mr. Bernstein, like Mr. Betts, is a friend of President Bush. But politically, he is a member of the city’s liberal intelligentsia, son of the founder of Human Rights Watch and a leader himself of Human Rights First.

In June 2005, Debra Burlingame, a memorial foundation board member whose brother was a pilot of the plane that crashed at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal calling the Freedom Center “a multimillion-dollar insult” that would offer a “slanted history lesson” without telling the story of Sept. 11. Ms. Burlingame pointed out that Mr. Bernstein’s human rights organization had sued Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on behalf of the administration’s detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“This is a freedom center that will not use the word ‘patriot’ the way our Founding Fathers did,” Ms. Burlingame wrote.

Talk radio snapped up the dispute. At the end of June, Mr. Pataki issued a statement demanding a guarantee that the center would not become a forum for “denigrating America.” In July, Mr. Bernstein made that pledge. But it was not enough. Mr. Pataki’s advisers said that the freedom center did not “clarify its message” in a way that tamped down the mounting furor.

“The site was supposed to bring people together to heal the wounds of Sept. 11,” said Mr. Cahill, the governor’s chief of staff. “It was never envisioned as a place that would breed controversy.”

Although the development corporation had undertaken a review of the Freedom Center’s program, Governor Pataki cut it short and evicted the institution from the memorial quadrangle. The SoHo-based Drawing Center, which had also come under attack, had already pulled out, later accepting an apology in the form of a $10 million grant from the development corporation.

The development corporation board, including Mr. Whitehead, who usually chose to stay above the fray, expressed outrage at Mr. Pataki’s intervention. Mr. Betts resigned.

“That was frankly the turning point for me and many others,” Mr. Betts said. “We were running a process, and Pataki just blew it all away. He trashed the museum, he upstaged the L.M.D.C., he ceded to the victims, he let them portray Tom as a leftie nut and he made a parody of the process.”

“Basically Pataki went like this,” Mr. Betts said, wetting his finger in his mouth, and holding it up to the wind.

NAMES AND NUMBERS

Eliminating the Freedom Center did not eliminate controversy from the memorial complex, though. From the time that “Reflecting Absence” was selected in early 2004, the understated eloquence that the jury had admired did not satisfy the need that many families felt to dramatize Sept. 11.

“We did not like the mind-set that 9/11 is too dark and horrific of a story to tell so you need to be general and illustrate a concept, like loss, instead,” said Anthony Gardner of the Coalition for 9/11 Families.

Christine Ferer, widow of the Port Authority director, took Mr. Arad “by the hand” to Hangar 17 to experience the power of the World Trade Center artifacts. His eyes welled with tears, she said. At the behest of the jury, he had already added an underground “interpretive center” to house some artifacts, although some family members, like Mr. Gardner and Ms. Ferer, wanted at least some at street level, too.

Even before his design was unveiled, some family advocates urged Mr. Arad to change the way that he had displayed the names of the dead. Mr. Arad had arranged them randomly, but — on what Mr. Bloomberg said was his suggestion — he had placed service insignia beside the names of uniformed emergency workers. Some family members believed that the insignia created an offensive hierarchy among the dead.

“I said to Arad and Rampe, ‘Please don’t do this,’ ” said Edith Lutnick of Cantor Fitzgerald. “I said, ‘This will cause a tremendous amount of pain to a tremendous amount of people.’ But they did it.”

Ms. Lutnick then gathered leaders of family organizations and unions. It took more than a year, but eventually they hammered out a proposal for allowing victims to be listed in some kind of context — by tower or workplace name or fire battalion and so on. Civilians would be listed alphabetically, and uniformed workers by rank.

“What the families really want is some kind of affiliation, so they don’t have to search for their loved ones anymore,” she said.

But the development corporation persisted in supporting Mr. Arad’s vision on this one issue, and Mr. Bloomberg, in particular, defended it as one decision that would not be unmade.

The underground interpretive center grew in size and importance, becoming a memorial museum. And Mr. Arad found himself further sidelined when the firm of Davis Brody Bond was brought on as associate architect for the memorial and then named design architect for the museum.

Eventually, Mr. Arad was barely on speaking terms with any of his associates, although, Mr. Libeskind commented, the development corporation did not foster collegiality. “We were not even allowed to meet together with the others involved to converse and discuss,” Mr. Libeskind said. “Do you believe that?”

Mrs. Libeskind added, “It was supposed to be divide, control and conquer. It turned out to be just divide.”

After a while, some family members began identifying with Mr. Arad’s beleaguered state. “I have a great respect for him,” Ms. Iken said, “He’s fighting the process like we’re fighting the process.”

Underlying all the tension was the elephant in the living room: the cost.

The mayor wanted to talk about the memorial’s cost from the beginning, but others did not. “When we asked about the various proposals’ costs at the behest of the mayor, we got criticism,” Mr. Rampe, then president of the development corporation, said. “It was like, ‘How can you put a cost on the memorial?’ ”

There was, at the time, deep-seated confidence in the fund-raising potential of a memorial. “People all over the country will want to contribute,” Mr. Whitehead told the mayor.

In late 2004, the corporation spun off a foundation to raise money for the memorial and oversee its construction, which added another layer of bureaucracy and another assemblage of egos to a difficult decision-making process.

“When Whitehead started telling me that we needed a foundation to fund this, my response was, ‘Why?’ ” Mr. Betts said. “Washington gave us tons of money. We’re building parks with it. What is that all about? It’s great to have the parks. But I mean, this money was about Sept. 11, wasn’t it?”

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation awarded $250 million of federal ground zero money to the memorial and $273.5 million to parks and waterfronts.

Rebuilding officials say that since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened in 1982, memorials have been financed privately. The Vietnam memorial, however, one whose scale the mayor often cited, cost $8.4 million. The World Trade Center memorial foundation’s fund-raising goal was $300 million.

After trying unsuccessfully to recruit a chairman for the foundation, Mr. Whitehead decided to head it himself. In short order, he single-handedly raised $130 million from 15 companies and individuals, he said. But that left $170 million to be raised, and with all the chaos swirling around the memorial, it was not.

Until this year, though, nobody knew how much the memorial was going to cost. Estimates ranged from $300 million to $350 million during the design competition to $500 million when the memorial foundation was created to the outsized figure of almost $1 billion this spring.

That is when Mayor Bloomberg blew the whistle.

V. SORTING OUT THE FUTURE

Shortly before Election Day last fall, Mr. Bloomberg started using public pressure to force change in the commercial part of ground zero.

According to Mr. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor, Mr. Bloomberg did not have the political clout to assert himself more persuasively earlier, and needed to proceed deftly. “We were facing a $7 billion deficit and needed Albany and the governor’s help,” Mr. Doctoroff said.

Over time, however, the dynamic changed. By late 2005, the city was posting a record budget surplus, the mayor was celebrating his re-election by a 20 percentage-point margin and the governor was facing his final year in office.

The mayor’s first push was to call publicly for Mr. Silverstein to relinquish control of the site.

This public pressure represented collaboration behind the scenes between City Hall and Mr. Coscia, the chairman of the Port Authority.

As Mr. Coscia describes it, the Port Authority had taken a seat on the sidelines while the public process played itself out. The agency did what it could by itself, he said, on its PATH stations. By last fall, however, once ground was broken on Mr. Calatrava’s terminal, the Port Authority needed to collaborate more intimately with Mr. Silverstein on the infrastructure for the site and found itself “butting heads” with him on a daily basis.

Mr. Coscia invited the developer to his office to suggest a partial relinquishment of the site and the insurance proceeds so that the site could be developed more quickly.

“I stressed, ‘Let’s divide the work and do it faster,’ ” said Mr. Coscia, 46. “Larry, who’s always been a gentleman to me, said, ‘You’re a very nice young man and you probably have good things in your future, but you’re very naïve. Have a nice day.’ ”

“I didn’t convince Larry,” Mr. Coscia said. “But I did convince Doctoroff and City Hall.”

When Mr. Silverstein applied for $3.35 billion in tax-exempt Liberty Bonds to help finance the Freedom Tower and his other buildings on the site, Mr. Bloomberg found a lever. The city and the state each control half those bonds, and the mayor said that he would not agree to the city’s half unless Mr. Silverstein made certain concessions.

Mr. Silverstein needed the Liberty Bonds because insurance proceeds, which amounted to about $4.6 billion, would not nearly cover the expected costs of the five towers.

Mr. Silverstein and the Port Authority together had spent more than $1.5 billion of the insurance money already, including more than $500 million for Mr. Silverstein’s rent to the Port Authority; about $190 million for the Port Authority to buy out Westfield America’s retail rights; and more than $700 million to repay Mr. Silverstein’s lender, GMAC, and to repay Mr. Silverstein and his partners most of their equity.

In the middle of December, Governor Pataki declared that the state would grant Mr. Silverstein $1.67 billion in Liberty Bonds, the state’s half of the financing he had requested. But he set a 90-day deadline for the developer and the Port Authority to work out a new understanding.

During that time, City Hall turned up the heat on Mr. Silverstein, pressing the idea that he would not have enough money to build five office towers at the site. The city disseminated a financial analysis concluding that Mr. Silverstein would be able to afford only two towers, at best, and could then pocket tens of millions of dollars while defaulting on the others. Mr. Silverstein disagreed with the analysis.

On March 14, the 90th day, the parties assembled at the Port Authority’s headquarters near Union Square in Manhattan. (City officials were not present.) They negotiated all afternoon over how to re-divide the site, breaking at 6 p.m. with a pledge to reassemble after dinner.

According to Janno Lieber, Mr. Silverstein’s World Trade Center project director, several substantial issues remained unresolved. He said that Mr. Silverstein, his executives and his lawyers spent the next several hours preparing a “counterdraft” of an agreement and working out differences with Mr. Silverstein’s co-investors.

Then they returned, with Mr. Silverstein fueled by several cups of coffee in anticipation of a long night. From the perspective of infuriated government officials, however, Mr. Silverstein and his people had disappeared for hours.

“They came back raring to go not long enough before the midnight deadline, and my normal calm demeanor did not stay calm,” Mr. Ringler said. “Quite honestly, this was an example of Larry waiting until the last minute to cut a deal, and probably viewing that he could extract more from us because we were under the gun. So I said, ‘It’s over.’ And I may have uttered profanities.”

According to several people present, what Mr. Ringler said was: “Get the hell out of here. This deal is dead. Pay your goddamn rent.”

In Mr. Silverstein’s eyes, the Port Authority had violated accepted “codes of conduct” by walking away from the negotiating table. He felt insulted by what followed: Mr. Pataki said that the developer had “betrayed the public trust.” Mr. Gargano, the governor’s senior adviser, called Mr. Silverstein “greedy.”

“After I cooled down,” Mr. Silverstein said, “I said to myself, ‘It’s a good thing I’m 74 going on 75.’ Because if I were 20 years younger, I would have exploded and told them all to go fly a kite and we would have ended up in litigation and the truth of the matter is, that would have been wrong.”

Indeed, the two sides were back at the negotiating table within a few days, and this time the negotiations included the city and the State of New Jersey. By the end of April, Mr. Pataki, Mr. Bloomberg and Gov. Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey presented Mr. Silverstein with two choices in a take-it-or-leave-it offer.

Mr. Silverstein turned down the first choice: $50 million in cash plus the Deutsche Bank property to walk away from the World Trade Center.

Under the offer that he ended up accepting, Mr. Silverstein would retain three towers and 6.2 million square feet of office space on Church Street, with promises of government leases and some $2.6 billion in Liberty Bonds. For a reduction in rent and an approximately $20 million developers’ fee, he would cede control of the 2.6-million-square-foot Freedom Tower and the Deutsche Bank property, which might become a hotel and residential building, to the Port Authority. And he would promise to adhere to a strict construction schedule.

In order to take on the Freedom Tower, the Port Authority, although it can issue bonds itself, demanded some $700 million in Liberty Bonds, about a third of the remaining insurance proceeds and a guarantee of 1 million square feet in tenants, which Mr. Pataki promised to secure from government agencies. The Port Authority does not plan to move its own offices into the 1,776-foot building but rather into one of Mr. Silverstein’s shorter towers on Church Street.

As part of the deal, the Port Authority made a pledge to set aside $100 million for the memorial. That will go toward infrastructure costs that many thought to be the Port’s responsibility all along — including Mr. Coscia, who said that he was a “chorus of one on that issue until I got Corzine on board and he said that he wouldn’t allow his commissioners to vote in favor of the agreement unless that was in there.” (The Port Authority later agreed to pay for an additional $50 million in infrastructure costs.)

On April 27, with the specifics of the deal still to be negotiated, Mr. Pataki, Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Silverstein gathered at ground zero to proclaim the start of construction on the Freedom Tower. And then Mr. Pataki, who is contemplating a presidential bid, left for a two-day trip to New Hampshire.

THE MEMORIAL UNDER ATTACK

Two years after the development corporation took over the Deutsche Bank building, it still loomed over ground zero, as if defying the site to be redeveloped. Its demolition had not proved straightforward at all; the building had been highly contaminated, and, making matters worse, more than 750 human bone fragments were discovered on its roof and in its air vents.

Reluctantly and sometimes resentfully, development officials confronted horrified families, anxious community residents and zealous environmental regulators. The project’s anticipated cost rose to $207 million, and delay followed delay while some family advocates took to the streets.

One week, they called for an elite military unit that specializes in the identification of human remains to be enlisted in the Deutsche Bank project. The next week, they held vigils to protest the underground components of the memorial.

The two issues converged briefly on the battlefield of muddy emotions. And tensions over the memorial, which by then was under attack from families, preservationists, politicians, security experts and Mr. Arad himself, finally boiled over.

At City Hall in late March, Councilman Alan Jay Gerson conducted a hearing on the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan, which, Mr. Gerson said, the development corporation would not allow Mr. Arad to attend.

“What do the families want?” Ms. Regenhard said at the hearing, in a short speech that touched all the hot buttons: the perceived elitism and secretiveness of the process, safety and security, cost. “We want a memorial that’s above the ground. We want the names above the ground. We want a safe and secure memorial that’s built under the legal jurisdiction of the New York City building and fire codes. We don’t want this convoluted multimillion- and billion-dollar, really meshuggeneh idea, O.K.?”

In a play on Mr. Arad’s name for his design, Ms. Iken protested that the memorial did not reflect absence but an absence of leadership. Mr. Gerson pressed development officials on the names issue. Preservationists complained that tanks, pumps and other mechanical support for the memorial would desecrate the footprints of the towers.

The language was fierce. Referring to a proposed underground family room, Robert J. Kornfeld Jr., an architect representing the Historic Districts Council, described a windowless space wedged between a train track, water tanks and a medical examiner’s office. “I can’t imagine why anyone would ever go there other than to shoot themselves,” he said.

Into this volatile climate, a leaked letter written by Mr. Kallstrom, Mr. Pataki’s counterterrorism adviser, landed like a torpedo. In it, Mr. Kallstrom expressed concerns that the memorial would be vulnerable to attack.

In May, a cost analysis overseen by Mr. Betts produced a staggering estimate of $972 million, of which $672 million represented the memorial and memorial museum and the rest infrastructure costs.

Mr. Bloomberg drew a line in the sand. He called for a $500 million cap on spending for the memorial, speaking, he said, on behalf of Governor Pataki and Governor Corzine, too.

In May, Mr. Whitehead, after almost five years, stepped down as chairman of the development corporation and Ms. Dykstra resigned after only a year as president of the memorial foundation.

Weary of the turmoil and with the fifth anniversary of the attack approaching, political leaders wanted to resolve the problems with the memorial just as they had restructured the commercial portion of the site. Frank J. Sciame, a builder who had lost a bid to construct the memorial, was given the task of streamlining the memorial in a way that would cut costs and appease family critics both.

His final cost estimate for the memorial, which called for the elimination of six of eight underground galleries, came out to about $740 million: $510 million for the memorial and the memorial museum, $80 million for a visitors’ center and the rest for infrastructure. But that figure is already being revised upward.

Hours before that resolution was made public in late June, Mr. Sciame, Mr. Cahill and Mr. Rampe met with Mr. Arad and asked him if he would publicly challenge the decision to eliminate the underground galleries that he considered a fundamental part of his concept. Happily for them, Mr. Arad had already resigned himself to what was coming, having decided that going public with his discontent “would satisfy nothing but my own feelings.”

‘MAYBE SAD IS A BETTER WORD’

In his spacious office high above Midtown, Mr. Whitehead sat surrounded by a careerlong arsenal of photographs of himself with world leaders. And then there was the framed picture of Brad Pitt.

Inside a bag over Mr. Pitt’s shoulder was a flash of blue, the back cover of Mr. Whitehead’s autobiography, “A Life in Leadership, From D-Day to Ground Zero.” Mr. Pitt, it seems, borrowed the book from his girlfriend, Angelina Jolie, whom Mr. Whitehead got to know during the filming of “The Good Shepherd,’’ a movie in which “my friend Bobby De Niro” gave him a small role as a priest.

Robert De Niro himself has played a role in the making of the Sept. 11 memorial as a board member on the memorial foundation. His Tribeca Film Festival benefited from a $3 million grant from the development corporation, and he and partners received $38.9 million in Liberty Bonds to finance a luxury hotel downtown.

After Mr. Whitehead stepped down as chairman of the development corporation last spring, a colleague mentioned that he felt despondent. Asked if this were accurate, Mr. Whitehead said, “Yes. I felt responsible. Here I had this job, which gave me responsibility for rebuilding, and I couldn’t complete it. Now, despondent is sort of a medical problem. Maybe sad is a better word. I felt sad that a lot of things had gone wrong and I hadn’t been able to set them right.”

After Mr. Whitehead’s resignation, Eliot Spitzer, who is running to succeed the governor, publicly declared the development corporation a failure.

At the end of July, the development corporation announced that it was shutting down. It had, it said, completed its mission. Mr. Spitzer called that declaration “one of the great Orwellian moments of the decade.”

After the corporation’s announcement, Mr. Whitehead sent this reporter an e-mail message, saying that, upon reflection, he realized how much it really had accomplished, from conducting more than 200 public hearings to producing a master plan that, he said, “has endured.’’

For rebuilding officials, progress is the message of this fifth anniversary.

Mr. Pataki said that the vicissitudes of this difficult process would be forgotten with time. One day, he said, the site will be magnificent. “History will write that story, maybe not on Sept. 11, 2006,” he said.

But there are a lot of hurdles to clear between now and history.

The future of the memorial probably demands some resolution of the names issue. In the recent redesign, the names of the dead were raised to street level, which greatly placated the families. But because the names were left in random order, Ms. Lutnick says that major family groups will not endorse the memorial as is, and that no fund-raising drive is likely to succeed without their support.

The future of a performing arts center at ground zero, for which the development corporation hired Frank Gehry as architect, remains unclear, with only $50 million set aside for its creation.

Even the future of the Freedom Tower, which many downtown business people consider a potential white elephant, is still uncertain. If the governor does not secure the promised 1 million square feet in government leases at market rates, the tower’s construction could be suspended after it is brought up to street level, according to Mr. Coscia, chairman of the Port Authority.

“I’m not a fan of the Freedom Tower if it could financially impair the port,” Mr. Coscia said.

Only the PATH station and Mr. Silverstein’s three office towers seem securely on track, signaling that at the end of the day, real control of the site has returned to its technical owners, the Port Authority and Mr. Silverstein.

The Port Authority, which sought to divest itself of responsibility for the World Trade Center five years ago, will end up fully immersed in a site two acres bigger than the original. In addition to building the train station, it will now construct the memorial and two of the five towers.

All summer, facing the deadline of a Sept. 21 board meeting, the Port Authority and Mr. Silverstein have been embrangled in difficult negotiations to finalize their April agreement. While Mr. Pataki pressed them to conclude by Sept. 11, it proved impossible.

On Thursday, it fell to Mr. Silverstein, who said the five-year planning process “should have made me a manic-depressive by now,’’ to deliver news of progress in time for today’s anniversary.

With the governor by his side, Mr. Silverstein unveiled the designs of Towers 2, 3 and 4 by three renowned architects of his generation -- Fumihiko Maki, 78, of Tokyo, and Richard Rogers, 73, and Norman Foster, 71, of London.

For the first time, there was a complete image of ground zero reborn. Monumental and densely packed, it did not overtly resemble Mr. Libeskind’s ascending spiral of glass structures. And, with one glance, it raised the lingering issue of whether Lower Manhattan will be able to absorb 8.8 million square feet of new office space.

But it looked tangible, like something that could actually take shape.

Mr. Libeskind says he retains faith that the new World Trade Center will be “memorable’’ because of the combined talents — “It’s not some schlock architects’’ — joined together under the umbrella of his master plan.

Yet he worries that the city’s passion for the project has dissipated, that the urgency and idealism have faded.

“For many, Sept. 11 has become very abstract,’’ he said. “People forget already what this was all about. They think it’s about pretty facades and square-footage prices. They don’t remember anymore that it’s about people who perished, it’s about America, it’s about some pretty big ideas.”

Clifford J. Levy and Jenny Nordberg contributed reporting.

    The Hole in the City’s Heart, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/11groundzero.html?ei=5087&en=8e6b140b2c447e4d&ex=1158552000&pagewanted=all

Public pays tribute to 9/11 fallen at Pentagon

Posted 9/10/2006 3:15 AM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — A solemn marker outside the Pentagon conveys a simple message: "We will never forget."

True words, judging by the lines of people — from all corners of the country, even the globe — who took time on a sun-splashed weekend to honor the 184 people who perished when a hijacked jetliner slammed into this symbol of American military.

"We are here for a happy occasion. But we have to remember the sad occasions in our country's history also," said Pam Gambacorta of Buffalo, who was in town for a wedding. She was one of the first in line for the walk-in tours, only the second available to the general public since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

More than 1,000 people took the tour that began outside the building, where American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the side, and continued inside to a chapel and memorial. Reconstruction has made the impact point impossible to detect.

Ethan and Debbie Fleischman of Cincinnati made the memorial tour their first stop in Washington. While it lasted only about 15 minutes, they said they came away with lasting memories of the building and of the others who came to pay tribute.

"They didn't forget their country," Ethan said, nodding toward the crowd. "It really touches the heart."

If not for the military guides pointing to where the plane struck, few visitors would have known exactly where it hit. The rebuilt wall includes just a couple of vivid reminders of that day. The first is a stone charred by burning jet fuel that reads "September 11, 2001."

About 50 feet to the left of the stone, between the second and third floors, is where the hijacked jet struck. Just to the right of the stone is a majestic American flag that resembles the one that firefighters draped over the southwest wall during rescue efforts.

Inside the building is a simple memorial room and chapel. Black panels in the room contain the names of all who died in the attack. The words "America's Heroes" separate the panels.

The adjacent chapel contains stained-glass windows, and 184 rose chips encircling the flag, an eagle and the Pentagon. The rose chips represent each victim of the attack.

Just outside the building, a 2-acre memorial park is under construction. The park will feature benches set over small reflecting pools commemorating each of the victims.

Among those on the tour was Vietnam War veteran Bob Oldham of Lawrence, Ind., who was town for a reunion. Asked why he was compelled to visit the memorial, he pointed to his ring, which commemorates his service in the Marines.

"It's kind of a brotherhood issue, really," he said.

Also taking in the site was a group of 25 to 30 people protesting the war in Iraq. Geoffrey Millard, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, said the Bush administration uses the Sept. 11 attacks to justify the war. The group wanted to show that there are people who disagree.

"9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq," Millard said.

From Fulda, Germany, came Werner Gutermuth to see the memorial.

"There's no difference in countries," he said. "No matter where it happens, it hurts."

Parents brought children along in hopes that it would provide them with an important lesson. Steven Allison of Asheville, N.C., took his son, Jesse, whose T-shirt read: "We will win."

"This was a real dark moment in history, an important point in history," Allison said. "And to be here on the anniversary was an important opportunity for him."

For the most part, those who visited the Pentagon had no personal connection to the Sept. 11 victims there. It did not seem to matter.

Renee Kelly of Marlboro, Md., who was with her son Justin, was asked whether she knew any of the victims. With tears running down her face, she said, "We didn't have to know anybody."

    Public pays tribute to 9/11 fallen at Pentagon, UT, 10.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-10-sept11-pentagon_x.htm

FACTBOX-Death toll in attacks on World Trade Center

Sun Sep 10, 2006 10:08 AM ET
Reuters



(Reuters) - Breakdown of the 2,992 people killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks:

New York's World Trade Center: 2,759 including 9 crew, 76 passengers and 5 hijackers on American Airlines Flight 11 and 9 crew, 51 passengers and 5 hijackers aboard United Airlines Flight 175, which flew into the World Trade Center towers.

Pentagon: 189 people including 125 at the Pentagon, 6 crew members, 53 passengers and 5 hijackers on board American Airlines Flight 77 which struck the Pentagon outside Washington D.C..

Pennsylvania: 44 people including 7 crew members, 33 passengers and 4 hijackers on board United Airlines Flight 93 which crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania..

Sources: U.S. Department of Defense, New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

    FACTBOX-Death toll in attacks on World Trade Center, R, 10.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyid=2006-09-10T140840Z_01_B495646_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L1-RelatedNews-2

Cheney says did "helluva job" since September 11

Sun Sep 10, 2006 1:53 PM ET
Reuters
By Steve Holland and Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The government has done "a helluva job" guarding America, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Sunday, as President George W. Bush prepared to visit Ground Zero amid an election-year debate on whether the country is safer five years after the September 11 attacks.

Cheney and other top administration officials sought on the eve of the anniversary to promote what they say is progress in protecting against a second Sept 11.

Democrats countered that the administration had used the attacks for political gain, underlining the bitter divisions that have emerged since the attacks on New York and Washington killed nearly 3,000 people and united the nation in grief.

"I don't know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years of defeating the efforts of al Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans. You have got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right," Cheney told NBC's "Meet the Press."

He added: "We've done a helluva job here at home in terms of homeland security."

But many Americans have doubts. ABC News said a poll it conducted found the number of Americans who think the country is safer now than four years ago had dropped to about 52 percent from around 88 percent previously.

Democrats charge the Iraq war has sucked away billions of dollars that could have been spent to improve domestic security, served as a breeding ground for terrorists, left Osama bin Laden still at large and exposed Afghanistan's U.S.-backed government to a renewed threat from the Taliban.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Bush had used the attacks for political gain ahead of November elections in which Democrats see a good chance to take control of one or both chambers of the U.S. Congress from Republicans.

"We think the president has played too much politics," he said. "They think they can't win the elections unless they talk about terrorism all the time."

Dean said the administration had got bogged down in Iraq when it should have been going "full-scale" after Osama bin Laden.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the trail for bin Laden has gone "stone cold" and that U.S. commandos looking for him have not gotten a credible lead on his whereabouts in more than two years.

UNITY LOST

Bush's approval ratings soared and his presidency was altered forever after he stood in the ruins of the World Trade Center days after the 2001 attacks and sought to rally the country by shouting into a bullhorn.

But the unity that arose as Americans grieved those killed in the hijacked airplane attacks has long since given way to sharp divisions over the Iraq war and Bush's approval ratings slid as U.S. casualties in Iraq rose.

Top administration officials argued that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was justified even though the promised weapons of mass destruction were never found.

"One cannot imagine a Middle East that would be different and would not be a place in which extremism thrives without Saddam Hussein's removal and the chance for a different kind of Iraq," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on CBS.

In a two-day tour of all three Sept 11. crash sites -- the World Trade Center, Pentagon and the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed -- Bush will strive to put aside partisan acrimony, if only temporarily.

He has no prepared remarks for the visits, according to White House spokesman Tony Snow. Bush will attend a Sunday prayer service in New York and visit firefighters on Monday.

He will save his formal remarks for a televised speech on Monday night.

The invasion of Iraq soured relations between the United States and much of Europe, but European leaders on Sunday returned to the brief unity that followed the attacks.

In a letter to Bush, French President Jacques Chirac expressed "the friendship and solidarity of the French people with the American people."

"Together we are pursuing our determined struggle against this plague which nothing ever can justify," he wrote.

    Cheney says did "helluva job" since September 11, R, 10.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-09-10T175321Z_01_N08186074_RTRUKOC_0_US-SEPT11.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

Rice Says U.S. Not Entirely Safe From Attack

September 10, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:43 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States is safer now than it was before the Sept. 11 attacks, but must not relent in fighting terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday. ''I think it's clear that we are safe -- safer -- but not really yet safe,'' Rice said.

''We've done a lot. In terms of homeland, we're more secure. Our ports are more secure. Our airports are more secure. We have a much stronger intelligence sharing operation,'' said Rice, who was President Bush's national security adviser when al-Qaida masterminded the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Rice defended the invasion of Iraq and the ouster of President Saddam Hussein despite persistent questions about any evidence of a link to the attacks.

She said ''Iraq is going through very difficult times'' but said the U.S. must help create an environment there that does not allow extremism to flourish.

''It's hard to imagine that different kind of environment with Saddam Hussein in power and Iraq at the center of a nexus between terrorism and conflict,'' Rice said on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

A Senate report released Friday disclosed for the first time that a CIA assessment in October 2005 said Saddam's government ''did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward'' al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.

Rice said Sunday she does not remember seeing that particular report.

She maintained ''there were ties between Iraq and al-Qaida. Are we learning more now that we have access to people like Saddam Hussein's intelligence services? Of course we're going to learn more.''

Republican John Lehman, a former member of the Sept. 11 commission, said the U.S. has taken important steps to stem terrorism by capturing many of those responsible for planning the Sept. 11 attacks.

''We have gotten rid of most if not all theater commanders of al-Qaida, but we have not addressed as a nation the root cause ... this jihadist ideology that is being preached around the world, basically funded with Persian Gulf money.''

Democrat Richard Ben-Veniste, also a commission member, said the war in Iraq ''has been a recruiting poster for jihadists throughout the Muslim world, and there are far more terrorists now than there were on 9/11. The Iraq invasion and occupation had nothing to do with terrorism. It had nothing to do with 9-11.''

Rice appeared on ''Fox News Sunday.'' Lehman and Ben-Veniste were on ABC's ''This Week.''

    Rice Says U.S. Not Entirely Safe From Attack, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Rice.html?hp&ex=1157947200&en=a230eee755a27927&ei=5094&partner=homepage

NYT        September 9, 2006

Al Qaeda Finds Its Center of Gravity        NYT        10.9.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/weekinreview/10rohde.html?hp&ex=
1157947200&en=4b76493599820c5c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The World

Al Qaeda Finds Its Center of Gravity

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE

OVER the last year, as Iran, Iraq and Lebanon have dominated headlines, hopes of gaining firmer control of a largely forgotten corner of the war on terrorism — the lawless Pakistan-Afghanistan border region — have quietly evaporated.

On Tuesday, the Pakistani government signed a “truce” with militants who have resisted Pakistani military efforts to gain control of the region, which is roughly the size of Delaware. The agreement, which lets militants remain in the area as long as they promised to halt attacks, immediately set off concern among American analysts.

Al Qaeda’s surviving leadership is suspected of using the border areas as a base of operation to support international terrorist attacks, including possibly the July 2005 London subway bombings. Meanwhile, the Taliban leadership is widely believed to be using another border area to direct spiraling attacks in Afghanistan.

“There’s a link with broader international terrorism,” said Robert Grenier, the former top counterterrorism official for the Central Intelligence Agency. “There’s a link with what is happening in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, such as it is now, really has its center of gravity in the area.”

Last week’s truce agreement covers North Waziristan, an area on the Pakistani side of the border. After the Taliban fell in 2001, senior Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to have fled there from Afghanistan and to other remote border areas in Pakistan.

The locations of Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri remain unknown. But American officials suspect that they are somewhere along the border.

After two attempts to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf in December 2003 were linked to the tribal areas, Pakistani officials expanded the military effort to subdue the region. But after suffering heavy casualties in 2004 and early 2005, they began negotiating with local militants. Last year, Pakistan signed a separate agreement with militants in South Waziristan, but the move failed to slow the killing of government supporters.

“If you look at the number of deaths in the region, it’s not clear that they’ve dropped,” said Xenia Dormandy, former director for South Asia for the National Security Council. Signing such truces, she said, “is a potentially dangerous route to take because there is little pressure that you can bring to bear to make sure they can follow through on the agreements.”

Two hundred miles to the south, the Taliban leadership is believed to have established a base of operations in and around the Pakistani city of Quetta, according to American analysts. Afghan officials say the Taliban used the area to plan and carry out sweeping attacks in southern Afghanistan in the spring.

Pakistan has largely turned a blind eye to Taliban activities, American officials say, because it sees the group as a tool to counter growing Indian influence in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis have longed viewed a friendly Afghanistan as critical to their survival and fears India may be trying to encircle their country.

At the same time, a separate uprising in Baluchistan province has tied up Pakistani soldiers. Ethnic Baluch tribesmen complain that Pakistan’s military government is not sharing enough of the profits from natural gas exploration with the locals. The killing last month of a charismatic tribal elder who was a rebel leader set off riots in several cities.

“Pakistan is essentially trying to put down a civil war in Baluchistan,” said Ms. Dormandy, now an analyst at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “At the same time, it’s trying to monitor its border with India, monitor the border of Afghanistan and bring down the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”

In Afghanistan, NATO forces that took control of security in the south from American forces this summer have been surprised by the size and strength of the Taliban insurgency. Roadside bomb attacks have doubled this year, and suicide bombings have tripled. Yesterday, a suicide bombing in Kabul killed at least 2 American soldiers and 14 Afghan civilians.

All told this year, heavy clashes in eastern and southern Afghanistan have killed more than 100 American and NATO soldiers, roughly twice the number killed in the same period in 2005. Since Aug. 1 alone, 28 NATO soldiers have been killed.

Analysts say the problem in the border region is an explosive mix of conditions: a lack of government authority, a vast amount of weaponry and the rise of Islamic militancy. Until the 1980’s, the area was ruled by local tribes, whose brute self-government kept the population isolated and impoverished but allowed for a degree of stability.

In the 1980’s, the American-backed anti-Soviet jihad unfolded in the region and began to wear away longstanding tribal structures. Huge piles of weapons and cash empowered Islamist organizations to open dozens of training camps, hard-line mosques and conservative religious schools along the border. In the 1990’s, the Taliban emerged there.

Today, said Mr. Grenier, the former C.I.A. official, the only way to increase government authority in the rural areas on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border was to develop the impoverished rural areas over time. “But that’s a generational process,” said Mr. Grenier, now a managing director at Kroll Inc., a security firm based in New York.

This summer, local people interviewed in southern Afghanistan said they were unsure that the United States and NATO would remain committed to the long, expensive process of stabilizing the border region. This year, the United States cut its aid to Afghanistan by 30 percent.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are no doubt betting that time is on their side.

    Al Qaeda Finds Its Center of Gravity, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/weekinreview/10rohde.html?hp&ex=1157947200&en=4b76493599820c5c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush to visit Ground Zero on eve of September 11

Sun Sep 10, 2006 12:27 AM ET
Reuters
By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Sunday will visit the site where New York's twin towers once stood, as he marks the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks amid an intensifying election-year debate over whether his policies have made America safer or more vulnerable.

Bush's approval ratings soared and his presidency was reshaped after he stood in the ruins of the World Trade Center days after the 2001 attacks and sought to rally the country by shouting into a bullhorn.

But the unity that arose as Americans grieved the nearly 3,000 people killed in the hijacked airplane attacks has long since given way to sharp divisions over the Iraq war and the Bush administration's tactics in the war on terrorism.

The rift has widened with the approach of the November 7 elections, in which Democrats hope to overturn Republican dominance of Congress.

In a two-day tour of all three crash sites -- the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed -- Bush will strive to put aside partisan acrimony, if only temporarily.

He has no prepared remarks for the visits, according to White House spokesman Tony Snow. Bush will attend a Sunday evening prayer service in New York and visit firefighters on Monday morning.

He will save his formal remarks for a televised Oval Office speech on Monday night. Snow said Bush will reflect on the anniversary and discuss the war on terrorism.

On Saturday, political wrangling continued as Bush and Democrats pressed opposing approaches to fighting terrorism.

In his weekly radio address, the president urged Congress to pass legislation setting up military tribunals to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay. He also defended a CIA detention program to interrogate terrorism suspects.

Bush administration officials have sought to paint Democrats as weak on terrorism.

Democrats focused on the increasingly unpopular Iraq war. They contend it has drained resources from the effort to hunt down al Qaeda militants and shore up security at U.S. ports and other potential targets.

In their own radio address, Democrats said the country must end its "open-ended commitment in Iraq" and redirect its efforts toward fighting al Qaeda.

    Bush to visit Ground Zero on eve of September 11, R, 10.11.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-09-10T042726Z_01_N08186074_RTRUKOC_0_US-SEPT11.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

Op-Ed Contributor

Giving Muslims Hope

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By THOMAS H. KEAN and LEE H. HAMILTON

THE best news in our struggle against terrorism is that we have not been hit at home since the 9/11 attacks. Yet terrorists are patient. We remain a target and must expect another attack.

Our most important long-term recommendations involve foreign policy. First, preventing terrorists from gaining access to nuclear weapons, especially by stepping up efforts to secure loose nuclear materials abroad, must be our highest priority.

Second, the long-term challenge is for America to stop the radicalization of young Muslims from Jakarta to London by serving as a source of opportunity, not despair. Too many young Muslims are without jobs or hope, are angry with their governments, and don’t like the war in Iraq or American foreign policy.

We should cultivate educational and cultural exchanges, and vigorous public diplomacy. We must offer moral leadership, treating all people — including detainees — with respect for the rule of law and human decency. And we must put forward an agenda of opportunity for the Islamic world. This includes support for pragmatic political reform, as well as education and economic empowerment. — THOMAS H. KEAN and LEE H. HAMILTON, the co-chairmen of the 9/11 commission and co-authors of “Without Precedent.”

    Giving Muslims Hope, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10kean.html

Op-Ed Contributor

We Can’t Kill an Ideology

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE

THOUGH it may not be immediately apparent to the casual viewer, Al Qaeda is attacking when and where it chooses. It is an ideology-driven global insurgency on the march. It has not hit America because it has chosen not to. Whether it lacks on-the-ground capacity for a spectacular attack, is still in the planning stages or is busy elsewhere is under debate within our intelligence community. The point is that five years out, Al Qaeda is as dangerous as, if not more than, it was on 9/11.

Yes, our intelligence agencies have struck the terrorist group hard, detaining or killing many of its founding leaders. But these are not death blows — because you cannot decapitate an ideology. Although the majority of Muslims reject the political vision of a Taliban-style Islamic caliphate, many agree with Al Qaeda that the Western-imposed political order is the source of their political and economic woes. Moreover, militant resistance to the current order is gaining acceptance and prestige, aptly demonstrated by the groundswell of popular support for Hamas and Hezbollah in the Muslim world.

During the last five years, our priority has been to beef up defenses and take the war to the terrorists. It’s time to start discrediting Al Qaeda’s ideology and offering Muslims nonviolent alternatives. The first step is to acknowledge that their grievances are legitimate and center on issues of dignity, economic disparity, border disputes and power alignment. The second is to acknowledge that our current approach is only helping Al Qaeda go mainstream. — MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE, a former C.I.A. operations officer and the author of “Denial and Deception: An Insider’s View of the C.I.A. from Iran-Contra to 9/11.”

    We Can’t Kill an Ideology, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10mahle.html

Op-Ed Contributor

How War Can Bring Peace

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By JACK L. GOLDSMITH and ADRIAN VERMEULE

OFFENSIVE action abroad has protected the homeland. Our military presence in Afghanistan and our aggressive policies around the globe have seriously disrupted the enemy. Through a mix of military and paramilitary action, pre-emptive strikes, deterrent threats and surveillance we have captured many terrorist leaders, destroyed training camps and structures of communication and control, and uncovered valuable intelligence troves.

Some maintain that such offensive action feeds resentment and spawns more terrorism. But if aggression can create resentment, passivity and defensiveness can inspire contempt. Our weak responses to Qaeda attacks on the Khobar Towers, the African embassies and the destroyer Cole, and our withdrawal from Somalia, emboldened the enemy and allowed it to organize and train for the 9/11 attacks.

Going forward, we should more vigorously embrace technology as a tool for taking the fight to the Islamic terrorists. The same technological changes that help terrorists plot to deliver weapons of mass destruction, including low-cost information and communication over the Internet, also make it easier for the government to monitor and pre-empt terrorist plots. Libertarians overreact to the new technology, stoking fears of an Orwellian surveillance state. But properly designed programs can produce large gains in security in return for small losses of privacy and liberty. — JACK L. GOLDSMITH and ADRIAN VERMEULE, Harvard law professors and, respectively, an assistant attorney general from 2003 to 2004 and a co-author of the forthcoming “Terror in the Balance.”

    How War Can Bring Peace, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10goldsmith.html

Op-Ed Columnist

Walking the Terror Beat

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL A. SHEEHAN

THE most important counterterrorism activity since the fall of the Taliban has been the close cooperation of the C.I.A. with foreign intelligence services.

Powerful American technologies identify names, locations, phone numbers and computer addresses of suspicious people. Local intelligence services operate informant networks. The C.I.A. station chief works with intelligence officials to follow up and coordinate hundreds of leads generated by these joint collection efforts. The connections often cross national boundaries, and periodically they “connect the dots,” identify a key terrorist and have the local services execute a nighttime raid against a terrorist safe house.

Such coordinated efforts have led to the captures of key Qaeda operatives including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind; Hambali, the planner of the Bali bombings; and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who oversaw the attack on the Navy destroyer Cole. With midlevel leaders like these out of commission, terrorist operations have been left to less capable local operatives. As a result, the Qaeda movement has been limited to only two successful operations in the West in the past five years, in Madrid and London.

To prevent the next attack in the United States we need a similar coordinated intelligence effort at home. In New York City, the F.B.I. and Police Department share this responsibility. And although they do not always love each other, they find ways to work together. The Police Department brings grit, creativity and street smarts to the investigative programs. The F.B.I. connects local efforts with information from national and international intelligence databases. Other cities should emulate their example. — MICHAEL A. SHEEHAN, former deputy commissioner for counterterrorism for the New York City Police Department.

    Walking the Terror Beat, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10sheehan.html

Op-Ed Contributor

The President’s Plan

September 10, 2006
The new York Times
By FRANCES FRAGOS TOWNSEND

AS a result of the horror of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush has transformed the way we fight terrorism and the tools we use. We successfully attack those very things our enemies need to operate and survive: leadership, communications, the ability to travel, weapons; foot soldiers and financing. The president has strengthened and transformed the intelligence community, integrated our military and intelligence assets, and broken down the barriers that kept domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies from sharing information.

The United States has enhanced relationships with allies around the world, recognizing that this is truly a global war on terrorism. Working together, we have denied Al Qaeda the safe havens and resources it needs to plan and carry out attacks and made it more difficult for our enemies to travel. We use their communications against them and have cut off their money.

At home, the president has transformed the fight by creating the Department of Homeland Security and by ensuring that the F.B.I. had the necessary tools, like the Patriot Act, to get the job done. The airline bombing plot disrupted by our British allies this summer is only the most recent case of brutal terrorists continuing to plan mass murder. We must be right 100 percent of the time; the terrorists have to succeed only once. On Sept. 11, 2001, each of us became soldiers in this fight to protect freedom. We’re in a war we didn’t ask for, but it’s a war we must wage and a war we will win. — FRANCES FRAGOS TOWNSEND, White House homeland security adviser.

    The President’s Plan, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10townsend.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Don’t Forget Our Values

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By JOSCHKA FISCHER

THE 9/11 attacks were a defining moment for the course of world politics and a strategic assault against the world’s leading power at the beginning of the 21st century. But the question is, were the terrorists successful? The answer is mixed. In the aftermath of 9/11, the world was united with America. Even in Arab and Muslim countries, the sense of shock and feelings of solidarity with America far outweighed any sympathies with the terrorists.

Since then, international counterterrorism cooperation has disrupted the terrorists’ activities. Yet even public awareness of the threat, counterterrorism cooperation, and more stringent anti-terrorism laws in democratic societies around the globe couldn’t prevent the bombings in Madrid, London and Istanbul.

Immediately after 9/11, Al Qaeda seemed to be losing its battle with America and the West. Unfortunately, that changed when America invaded Iraq. The fight against the jihadists will not be decided simply on the battlefield; it will also be decided in the sphere of international legitimacy. We know that Islamic extremists celebrate death through martyrdom, and the killing of innocents. But what are we in the West fighting for?

We fight for our values: for our freedom, for democracy, for the rule of law, the equality of all human beings and for peace. In this context, Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the situation in Iraq could hardly be called successes. Against the new totalitarian challenge of Islamic extremism, we have to defend our values; and this means sticking to the values of our democratic societies, even under fire. — JOSCHKA FISCHER, the foreign minister of Germany from 1998 to 2005 and a visiting professor at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School.

    Don’t Forget Our Values, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10fisher.html

Op-Ed Contributor

What Really Scares Us

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GIBSON

ANOTHER attempt on the scale of the 2001 attacks hasn’t been necessary. The last one is still doing the trick, and the terrorists’ resources are limited. The fear induced by terrorism mirrors the irrational psychology that makes state lotteries an utterly reliable form of stupidity tax. A huge statistical asymmetry serves as fulcrum for a spectral yet powerful lever: apprehension of the next jackpot. We’re terrorized not by the actual explosion, which statistically we’re almost never present for, but by our apprehension of the next one.

The terrorist tactic that matters most is the next one used, one we haven’t seen yet. In order to know it, we must know the terrorists. Without a national security policy that concentrates on the vigorous and politically agnostic maximization of intelligence rather than, in the phrase of the security expert Bruce Schneier, “security theater,” that may well prove impossible.

— WILLIAM GIBSON, novelist.

    What Really Scares Us, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10gibson.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Less Political Correctness

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By RAFI RON

THE reason we have not been attacked on American soil is that the war started by radical Muslims is not against the United States, but against everyone who does not conform to their beliefs and way of life. It is the first global war we have experienced since globalization became a factor in our life, and the terrorist battlefield has included Madrid, London, Bali, Moscow, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and India. The terrorists have had a very busy five years.

The struggle imposed on us is, by nature, a long-term struggle. Only an effective homeland security system will provide us with the necessary political power to prevail in those instances where the terrorists do find value in attacking within the United States. In that sense, we must be less politically correct, and begin a program that looks for risks where they are most likely to be found. For example, it is crucial to identify high-risk airline passengers through all criteria — including appearance and behavior — and spend more resources on them, rather than maintaining an across-the-board, politically correct low level of search. — RAFI RON, a security consultant and the former head of security at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.

    Less Political Correctness, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10ron.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Qaeda Set the Bar High

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By CLARK KENT ERVIN

SO why haven’t we been attacked in five years? Terrorists — especially those directed by or affiliated with Al Qaeda — are committed to carrying out spectacular attacks that maximize death, injury, economic damage and political symbolism. If their aim were merely to blow up the odd bus or to level a supermarket, doing so would be a very short order. But, the more spectacular the scale of a plot, the longer it takes to plan, the costlier it is to finance, the more operatives you need to carry it out, and the greater the chance that something will go awry.

For the future, we must take a hard look at how to improve the Department of Homeland Security, which has earned its reputation as the most dysfunctional agency in all of government. It has played little role in keeping us safe since 9/11.

One need look no further than the recently foiled London jetliner plot. The department had nothing to do with uncovering the plot; that was primarily the work of British counterterrorism agencies. If not for their efforts, it would very likely have succeeded. This is because we still lack defenses against liquid explosives, although the Transportation Security Administration, part of the department, has been aware of this particular vulnerability for years and claims that its principal focus nowadays is on detecting explosives.

If after spending some $20 billion on securing the nation’s airways since 9/11 we are still vulnerable in the skies, one shudders to think how much more vulnerable our seaports, land borders, mass transit systems, chemical plants and “soft targets” like shopping malls and sports arenas are to terrorist attack.

The good news, then, is that we are unlikely to see many future attempts to strike our homeland. The bad news is that the few we will see are likely to be giant in scale, and the likelihood that the Department of Homeland Security will be able to stop them is small. — CLARK KENT ERVIN, the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security from 2003 to 2004 and author of “Open Target.”

    Qaeda Set the Bar High, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10ervin.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Keep American Muslims on Our Side

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By JESSICA STERN

SINCE 9/11, terrorism has increased significantly around the globe, but the United States has been spared. Eurasia rather than America has been the main source and victim. Why?

Increased awareness and surveillance have made a strike as sophisticated as the 9/11 attacks far more difficult to achieve, especially without local support. Unlike their counterparts in Britain, for example, few of America’s Muslims at least for now subscribe to the notion that Western governments or their proxies are deliberately hurting and humiliating Muslims and that the way to restore dignity is to join a jihad. Moreover, terrorist strategists like Ayman al-Zawahri have warned that while smaller strikes serve as training opportunities for their fighters, major strikes can backfire; attacking the wrong people at the wrong time would reduce the popularity of their movement.

The jihadists understand that they are fighting a war of ideas. According to “The Management of Savagery,” a Qaeda manual, the success of the movement will ultimately depend on the jihadists’ ability to damage America’s prestige throughout the globe, sow discord between America and its allies and expose the hollowness of American values. The manual prescribes a strategy of forcing America “to abandon its war against Islam by proxy” by provoking it into direct military confrontation with a Muslim country. When the United States attacked Iraq, it inadvertently “expanded the jihadi current” just as Osama bin Laden’s strategists had hoped.

Every foreign-policy decision entails tradeoffs in regard to terrorism, especially with respect to the spread of the jihadist idea. Attacking the wrong people at the wrong time can backfire, just as Al Qaeda’s strategists say. Let’s not make that mistake again. — JESSICA STERN, a former National Security Council staff member and the author of “Terror in the Name of God.”

    Keep American Muslims on Our Side, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10stern.html

Editorial

A Ban on Carry-On Luggage

September 10, 2006
The New York Times

In a directive whose logic is not always apparent, the Transportation Security Administration has spelled out what airline passengers can carry on board with them, what must be placed in checked luggage, and what can’t go on the plane at all. Knives must be checked but knitting needles and corkscrews are allowed in the cabin. Up to four ounces of eye drops can be carried aboard, with fingers crossed that multiple terrorists won’t combine their allotments to exceed the limit. Laptops, digital cameras, mobile phones and other electronic devices are permitted, so never mind any warnings you’ve heard that they could be used to trigger a bomb. The bomb ingredients themselves, notably liquid explosives, will be kept out of the cabin by a ban on liquids, gels and lotions, except for small amounts of baby formula and medications.

The ban on liquids surely makes sense given the lack of a reliable, efficient way to detect liquid explosives on the passenger screening line. But the other fine distinctions in this directive make us think the best approach would be a ban on virtually all carry-on items, or at least a limit of one small personal bag per passenger to tote travel documents, keys, vital medications, reading materials and any other minimal items that are allowed.

There’s a lot to be said for a drastic reduction in what can be carried aboard. Passenger security lines would move faster if there were little or nothing for the screeners to screen. Passengers could be boarded faster and more comfortably if they weren’t clogging the aisles while stuffing bags in the overhead bins. Most important, security would probably be enhanced. If a terrorist somehow slipped onto your flight, he wouldn’t have bomb materials with him, or much of anything else for that matter. And his bags would get tougher scrutiny because the machines that screen checked luggage are said to be better at detecting explosives and other dangerous materials than the metal detectors and X-ray machines used for screening passengers and their carry-on bags.

The chief downside, from a security standpoint, is that a greater burden would be placed on the lines that screen checked baggage, which in some airports are already overstretched. That raises the risk that screeners will rush checked bags through with inadequate scrutiny of the images of their contents, or that bags will back up and flights will be delayed to wait for them to be loaded. Still, that should not be a problem beyond the ingenuity of aviation planners. The handful of airports that already have big explosive-detection machines integrated into their baggage conveyor systems ought to be able to handle the load easily.

When we raised the possibility of a ban on most carry-on items a month ago, there was a chorus of complaints from travelers who count on using their laptops during the flight; or fear that valuable electronic devices might be lost, broken or stolen if checked; or resent long waits after a flight to get their checked bags. Some travelers have already shifted to trains or automobiles for short trips and more will do so if the inconvenience mounts. These are not trivial issues. Airlines, already financially strapped, depend on business fliers who are the most likely to object to a change in the rules.

Airlines could head off some of these problems by, for example, storing valuable electronic devices in locked overhead bins where they can’t easily be stolen, and hiring more baggage handlers to unload planes rapidly. Separating people from their laptops during flights would be painful, although some people could surely use the time to go over reading material, or even revert to pen and paper.

A ban on most carry-on items need not be permanent. Technologies that could screen passengers and their carry-on bags rapidly to detect known dangerous materials are under development, but it is uncertain when they might be ready. Even then, sophisticated terrorists will always look for new tactics to evade detection. For now, the surest way to keep dangerous materials out of the cabin is to keep virtually all materials out of the cabin.

    A Ban on Carry-On Luggage, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10sun1.html

At a Secret Interrogation, Dispute Flared Over Tactics

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — Abu Zubaydah, the first Osama bin Laden henchman captured by the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was bloodied and feverish when a C.I.A. security team delivered him to a secret safe house in Thailand for interrogation in the early spring of 2002. Bullet fragments had ripped through his abdomen and groin during a firefight in Pakistan several days earlier when he had been captured.

The events that unfolded at the safe house over the next few weeks proved to be fateful for the Bush administration. Within days, Mr. Zubaydah was being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques — he was stripped, held in an icy room and jarred by earsplittingly loud music — the genesis of practices later adopted by some within the military, and widely used by the Central Intelligence Agency in handling prominent terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons.

President Bush pointedly cited the capture and interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah in his speech last Wednesday announcing the transfer of Mr. Zubaydah and 13 others to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And he used it to call for ratification of the tough techniques employed in the questioning.

But rather than the smooth process depicted by Mr. Bush, interviews with nearly a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials briefed on the process show, the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah was fraught with sharp disputes, debates about the legality and utility of harsh interrogation methods, and a rupture between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the C.I.A. that has yet to heal.

Some of those interviewed offered sharply contrasting accounts, but all said that the disagreements were intense. More than four years later, these disputes are foreshadowing the debate that Mr. Bush’s new proposals are meeting in Congress, as lawmakers wrangle about what rules should apply as terrorism suspects are captured, questioned and, possibly, tried before military tribunals.

A reconstruction of Mr. Zubaydah’s initial days of detention and interrogation, based on accounts by former and current law enforcement and intelligence officials in a series of recent interviews, provides the first detailed account of his treatment and the disputes and uncertainties that surrounded it. The basic chronology of how the capture and interrogation unfolded was described consistently by sources from a number of government agencies.

The officials spoke on the condition that they not be identified because many aspects of the handling of Mr. Zubaydah remain classified and because some of the officials may be witnesses in future prosecutions involving Mr. Zubaydah.

This week, President Bush said that he had not and never would approve the use of torture. The C.I.A. declined to discuss the specifics of the case on the record. At F.B.I. headquarters, officials refused to publicly discuss the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah, citing what they said were “operational sensitivities.”

Some of the officials who were interviewed for this article were briefed on the events as they occurred. Others were provided with accounts of the interrogation later.

Before his capture, Mr. Zubaydah was regarded as a top bin Laden logistics chief who funneled recruits to training bases in Afghanistan and served as a communications link between Al Qaeda’s leadership and extremists in other countries.

As interrogators dug into his activities, however, they scaled back their assessment somewhat, viewing him more as the terror network’s personnel director and hotelier who ran a string of guest houses in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mr. Zubaydah’s whereabouts in Pakistan had been determined in part through intercepted Internet communications, but for days after his capture his identity was in doubt. He had surgically altered his appearance and was using an alias. But when agents used a nickname for Mr. Zubaydah, he acknowledged his true identity, which was confirmed through analysis of his voice, facial structure and DNA tests.

By all accounts, Mr. Zubaydah’s condition was rapidly deteriorating when he arrived in Thailand. Soon after his capture, Mr. Zubaydah nearly died of his infected wounds. At one point, he was covertly rushed to a hospital after C.I.A. medical officers warned that he might not survive if he did not receive more extensive medical treatment.

According to accounts from five former and current government officials who were briefed on the case, F.B.I. agents — accompanied by intelligence officers — initially questioned him using standard interview techniques. They bathed Mr. Zubaydah, changed his bandages, gave him water, urged improved medical care, and spoke with him in Arabic and English, languages in which he is fluent.

To convince him they knew details of his activities, the agents brought a box of blank audiotapes which they said contained recordings of his phone conversations, but were actually empty. As the F.B.I. worked with C.I.A. officers who were present, Mr. Zubaydah soon began to provide intelligence insights into Al Qaeda.

For the C.I.A., Mr. Zubaydah was a test case for an evolving new role, conceived after Sept. 11, in which the agency was to act as jailer and interrogator for terrorism suspects.

According to accounts by three former intelligence officials, the C.I.A. understood that the legal foundation for its role had been spelled out in a sweeping classified directive signed by Mr. Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. The directive, known as a memorandum of notification, authorized the C.I.A. for the first time to capture, detain and interrogate terrorism suspects, providing the foundation for what became its secret prison system.

That 2001 directive did not spell out specific guidelines for interrogations, however, and senior C.I.A. officials began in late 2001 and early 2002 to draw up a list of aggressive interrogation procedures that might be used against terrorism suspects. They consulted agency psychiatrists and foreign governments to identify effective techniques beyond standard interview practices.

After Mr. Zubaydah’s capture, a C.I.A. interrogation team was dispatched from the agency’s counterterrorism center to take the lead in his questioning, former law enforcement and intelligence officials said, and F.B.I. agents were withdrawn. The group included an agency consultant schooled in the harsher interrogation procedures to which American special forces are subjected in their training. Three former intelligence officials said the techniques had been drawn up on the basis of legal guidance from the Justice Department, but were not yet supported by a formal legal opinion.

In Thailand, the new C.I.A. team concluded that under standard questioning Mr. Zubaydah was revealing only a small fraction of what he knew, and decided that more aggressive techniques were warranted.

At times, Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, was stripped and placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets. He stood or lay on the bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that, one official said, Mr. Zubaydah seemed to turn blue. At other times, the interrogators piped in deafening blasts of music by groups like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sometimes, the interrogator would use simpler techniques, entering his cell to ask him to confess.

“You know what I want,” the interrogator would say to him, according to one official’s account, departing leaving Mr. Zubaydah to brood over his answer.

F.B.I. agents on the scene angrily protested the more aggressive approach, arguing that persuasion rather than coercion had succeeded. But leaders of the C.I.A. interrogation team were convinced that tougher tactics were warranted and said that the methods had been authorized by senior lawyers at the White House.

The agents appealed to their superiors but were told that the intelligence agency was in charge, the officials said. One law enforcement official who was aware of events as they occurred reacted with chagrin. “When you rough these guys up, all you do is fulfill their fantasies about what to expect from us,” the official said.

Mr. Bush on Wednesday acknowledged the use of aggressive interview techniques, but only in the most general terms. “We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking,” Mr. Bush said. He said the C.I.A. had used “an alternative set of procedures’’ after it became clear that Mr. Zubaydah “had received training on how to resist interrogation.

“These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations,’’ Mr. Bush said. “The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.’’

In his early interviews, Mr. Zubaydah had revealed what turned out to be important information, identifying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — from a photo on a hand-held computer — as the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Zubaydah also identified Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been charged with terrorism-related crimes.

But Mr. Zubaydah dismissed Mr. Padilla as a maladroit extremist whose hope to construct a dirty bomb, using conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials, was far-fetched. He told his questioners that Mr. Padilla was ignorant on the subject of nuclear physics and believed he could separate plutonium from nuclear material by rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material.

Crucial aspects of what happened during Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation are sharply disputed. Some former and current government officials briefed on the case, who were more closely allied with law enforcement, said Mr. Zubaydah cooperated with F.B.I. interviewers until the C.I.A. interrogation team arrived. They said that Mr. Zubaydah’s resistance began after the agency interrogators began using more stringent tactics.

Other officials, more closely tied to intelligence agencies, dismissed that account, saying that the C.I.A. had supervised all interviews with Mr. Zubaydah, including those in which F.B.I. agents asked questions. These officials said that he proved a wily adversary. “He was lying, and things were going nowhere,” one official briefed on the matter said of the early interviews. “It was clear that he had information about an imminent attack and time was of the essence.”

Several officials said the belief that Mr. Zubaydah might have possessed critical information about a coming terrorist operation figured significantly in the decision to employ tougher tactics, even though it later became apparent he had no such knowledge.

“As the president has made clear, the fact of the matter is that Abu Zubaydah was defiant and evasive until the approved procedures were used,” one government official said. “He soon began to provide information on key Al Qaeda operators to help us find and capture those responsible for the 9/11 attacks.”

This official added, “When you are concerned that a hard-core terrorist has information about an imminent threat that could put innocent lives at risk, rapport-building and stroking aren’t the top things on your agenda.”

Douglas Jehl contributed reporting.

    At a Secret Interrogation, Dispute Flared Over Tactics, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10detain.html?hp&ex=1157860800&en=a457ae4f5b722796&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Congress Criticizes Federal Response to Illnesses After 9/11 and Seeks More Spending

September 9, 2006
The New York Times
By ANTHONY DePALMA

After listening to recovery workers at ground zero and downtown residents emotionally describe how they had been ignored and insulted as they sought help for health problems after 9/11, members of a Congressional subcommittee roundly criticized the federal response yesterday and called for sharply increased medical spending.

Subcommittee members, joined by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, accused the Bush administration of ignoring the health problems that arose among workers who toiled at ground zero and the claims of downtown residents who say they were also sickened by the dust. The administration has done little to prepare for a similar disaster in the future, they said.

“Today it appears the public health approach to lingering environmental hazards remains unfocused and halting,” said Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican from Connecticut, and chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, which held the hearing in Lower Manhattan, a block from ground zero. “The unquestionable need for long-term monitoring has been met with only short term commitments.”

The subcommittee hearing, the fourth to be held since the Sept. 11 attack, came amidst rising concern about the long-term health effects on about 40,000 workers and volunteers who were exposed to toxic smoke and dust on the debris pile. The subcommittee is examining the way the limited federal funding has been used to address the health problems and is to look for ways to better coordinate those efforts.

Representative Vito Fossella, a Republican from Staten Island, criticized the government for not having done even basic work to record how many people participated in the cleanup and recovery operations.

Senator Schumer said the $55 million in federal funds set aside for medical treatment of rescue and recovery workers was inadequate. “We need a federal commitment that everyone who needs help will get it,” Senator Schumer said.

Steven M. Centore, of Flanders, N.Y., was a team leader at ground zero for the Department of Energy’s radiological assistance program. He said that he is now suffering from respiratory, circulatory and gastrointestinal problems. .

Mr. Centore, 49, said he struggled with the federal workers’ compensation system and had received no financial help from the system. “I feel like it’s a contest to see if they’re going to give in first or I’m going to die first,” he said.

The federal government, and especially the Environmental Protection Agency and its former administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, were accused by Representatives Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat whose district includes Lower Manhattan, and Anthony D. Weiner, a Democrat from Brooklyn, of having falsely stated in the first days after the attack that the air downtown was safe to breathe. At an appearance yesterday in Harlem, Senator Clinton said that she felt that Mrs. Whitman and her agency “deliberately misled people” into thinking that it was safe to return to Lower Manhattan.

A report by the Inspector General’s office in 2003 found that the E.P.A. went beyond what it knew in making general statements about the safety of the air downtown after the attack. It also found that the White House had at least indirectly influenced the wording of some statements by removing cautionary language. Mrs. Whitman strongly defended herself shortly after the release of that report, saying that her statements reflected what was known at the time and applied to areas outside ground zero.

Lea Geronimo, a resident of the Lower East Side, said it was the assurance from the E.P.A. that led her to return to her home and office three blocks from ground zero a week after the towers collapsed. She said she developed bronchitis and severe rashes a few months later.

“Our lives will never be the same, and we will not tolerate half-measures and the whisper of a promise,” she testified. “We need a comprehensive long-term treatment and study program to provide immediate care for residents and workers in Lower Manhattan.”

The health of downtown residents has not been as well studied as that of ground zero workers, but limited medical surveys have indicated that many residents developed respiratory problems after 9/11, though the extent to which those problems have persisted is not known.

More than 100 residents gathered Thursday night at St. Paul’s Chapel to demand screening and treatment.

Mr. Nadler, who attended the Thursday meeting and yesterday’s hearing, said he had introduced a bill that would make rescue and recovery workers, downtown residents and schoolchildren who are sick eligible for treatment under Medicare.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of Manhattan and Queens, introduced a bill that would reopen the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund to make assistance available to those who are ill.

And Senator Clinton said at the hearing yesterday that she would push for an additional federal appropriation to cover the rising costs of medical treatment. “We cannot rest until we put into place a system to care for every single person who was affected by 9/11,” she said.

Dr. John Howard, the federal 9/11 health care coordinator, told the committee that the $75 million appropriated for screening and treatment will be available next month and should be considered “a down payment,” that will be supplemented as officials prepare estimates of the number of people who need help, the cost of caring for them and the types of programs they will need.

On Thursday, Dr. John O. Agwunobi, the assistant secretary for health of the Department of Health and Human Services, was named by Michael O. Leavitt, the department secretary, to lead a policy task force to develop programs for dealing with the 9/11 health issues.

Dr. Howard said he would continue in his current position as coordinator with groups in New York while also helping to shape new policies.

    Congress Criticizes Federal Response to Illnesses After 9/11 and Seeks More Spending, NYT, 9.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/09/nyregion/09health.html

Profanity concerns prompt CBS to show "9/11" on web

Sat Sep 9, 2006 1:00 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeremy Pelofsky

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CBS Corp. said on Saturday it would broadcast the documentary "9/11" on the Internet as well as the airwaves after several affiliates said they would delay or forgo the award-winning film because it includes profanity.

The documentary was produced by French filmmakers Gedeon and Jules Naudet and retired New York firefighter James Hanlon and has aired twice without incurring fines by U.S. regulators charged with enforcing broadcast decency standards.

CBS said affiliates that cover about 10 percent of the United States had decided not broadcast the program or would show it late at night, citing concerns they could be fined for airing profanity, primarily by firefighters during the crisis, before 10 p.m.

The American Family Association, which describes itself as a Christian organization promoting traditional values, has called on CBS stations to forgo or delay the "9/11" broadcast.

"The online streaming of this broadcast will allow viewers in those markets to see the Peabody Award-winning special," CBS said in a statement. The network will air warnings about graphic language.

The film is scheduled to air on Sunday evening at 8 p.m.

Another major U.S. network, ABC, was making last-minute changes to its two-part September 11-linked miniseries "The Path to 9/11" to air on Sunday and Monday. Former President Bill Clinton, former aides and congressional Democrats have lodged complaints that the film inaccurately suggests Clinton was inattentive to the Islamic militant threat that led to the September 11 attacks.

The film to air on CBS, narrated by actor Robert De Niro, was compiled using footage shot inside the north tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan after it was hit by a hijacked airliner. No actual carnage is shown.

An FCC spokeswoman has said the agency only acts on complaints it receives and the historical context would likely be considered if any complaints were lodged.

The FCC last year ruled that profanity during ABC's 2004 broadcast of the World War Two drama "Saving Private Ryan" did not violate decency rules despite complaints.

    Profanity concerns prompt CBS to show "9/11" on web, R, 9.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2006-09-09T170038Z_01_N09438621_RTRUKOC_0_US-SEPT11-CBS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-technologyNews-3

McCain says Guantanamo has hit image of U.S. hard

Sat Sep 9, 2006 11:59 AM ET
Reuters

BERLIN (Reuters) - The United States' treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq has done serious damage to the country's image abroad, Republican Senator John McCain was quoted as saying by a German paper on Saturday.

Prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers in Abu Ghraib jail led to heavy criticism of American policy in Iraq, while the U.S. detention of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without trial has been criticized as an infringement of human rights.

Moreover, both have been blamed for generating anti-American sentiment and undermining support domestically and abroad for Washington's war on terrorism.

"I think Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have done a lot of damage to the image of America and have been used to arouse anti-American feelings," McCain told Welt am Sonntag, according to the preview of an article due to be published on Sunday.

Arizona senator McCain has been tipped by many as a likely Republican candidate for the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

He told the paper President George W. Bush had placed too much confidence in elections to bring about change in the Middle East.

"Elections are the easy part of a democracy and maybe too many of us -- and I would admit to being guilty myself -- underestimate the difficulties of bringing real democracy to countries that never knew it before," he said.

McCain said the United States needed to become more realistic in its desire to promote democracy and national self-determination.

"We obviously don't want to see the ruling House of Saud replaced in Saudi Arabia by extremists, for example, like in Iran after the toppling of the Shah," he said.

"But we need to understand that if no progress in Saudi Arabia is made, the House of Saud will fall sooner or later."

    McCain says Guantanamo has hit image of U.S. hard, R, 9.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-09-09T155907Z_01_L09159915_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-GUANTANAMO-MCCAIN.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-3

Pilgrims or tourists, millions come to Ground Zero

Sat Sep 9, 2006 12:59 PM ET
Reuters
By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Tour guide Ann Van Hine is rewarded with tears, not tips, and frequently reduces visitors to an awed silence when she tells them how her husband, a firefighter, died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

"Sometimes I feel bad because I look at people's faces as I'm telling my story and it's like I've just blown them away," Van Hine said after leading 25 tourists from as far afield as Italy and Australia on a tour around the perimeter of the gaping hole known as Ground Zero.

She says younger visitors often chat freely with her before the tour, but afterwards, "They don't know what to say to me."

As she is about to climb a steep flight of stairs to a walkway over the highway west of the site, Van Hine asks visitors to imagine climbing stairs loaded up with firefighting equipment. "The firefighters got up to about the 70th floor, so it would have been like doing what we're doing 35 times."

She and her husband, Richard Bruce Van Hine, had two daughters aged 14 and 17 at the time of the attacks that killed 2,992 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

"Ten days after, I asked my girls where they thought Daddy was and they said they thought Daddy was in heaven," she said, adding that she visited Ground Zero on September 28, 2001.

"It looked like war," she said, standing with her back to the 16-acre site. "There were still fires burning, there was this gray dust everywhere. Some part of me I think expected to see a computer monitor or a desk or something. There was nothing."

PILGRIMS, NOT TOURISTS

Five years after two hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers, the debris has been entirely removed, leaving a hole several stories deep. Through the middle, above the surface, run a set of subway tracks.

To the south is an empty 41-story skyscraper swathed in black netting, still contaminated by debris and mold that grew in the weeks after the attack when it was open to the elements. Workers dismantling it occasionally still find what may be bone shards in the building.

Dorry Tooker, a second guide on the free tours offered by the September 11 Families' Association between two and four times a day, points to another, taller tower to the east, and reminds visitors the Twin Towers were twice as high.

Cristina Urbanek, a 33-year-old graduate student from Hamburg, Germany, said she saw them still standing in 1998.

"I wanted to see the difference," she said. "I thought it would make it a bit more real."

"I'm ... a bit surprised so far there's no real memorial or anything," she said.

Construction of a memorial and the "Freedom Tower" on the site has been mired in controversy with families, city officials and architects wrangling over plans. A memorial costing $510 million is planned to be ready by September 11, 2009.

In the meantime, families of the dead have a makeshift building reserved for them within the perimeter. Tooker, whose son, a firefighter, died in the North Tower, said it was mostly frequented by those whose relatives were never found.

"My son was found, so I don't feel that my son is here any more. But for these people who haven't, they're still there."

St. Paul's Chapel, next to Ground Zero, serves for many as an interim memorial. Though it was carpeted in dust and debris, it escaped serious damage and became a center for rescue workers as well as a shrine where desperate relatives would leave flyers with photos of the missing, flowers, candles, poems and other gifts.

Many are still on display, along with computer terminals that allow a visitor to watch video clips of key moments in the aftermath. The church holds daily prayers for the victims and will hold an interfaith service on Monday.

Church worker Omayra Rivera, 33, said around a million visitors a year come to St. Paul's. "They (church officials) don't use the word 'tourists,' they say 'pilgrims.'"

Thousands of tourists congregate from morning to night every day on the west side of Ground Zero, peering through the fence, taking pictures, silently reading a timeline of the events of 9/11, and fending off the occasional peddler hawking collections of photographs of the attacks.

Souvenir sellers have been ordered out of the immediate area, though fire and police department T-shirts and caps as well as key-rings and bottle openers in the shape of the Twin Towers can still be purchased a few blocks away.

Some visitors choose to leave something behind. One message scrawled on one of wooden walkways around the site reads: "Yo, New York. I hope you are feeling better. I see that nasty scar is starting to heal ... a ... little."

    Pilgrims or tourists, millions come to Ground Zero, R, 9.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-09-09T165852Z_01_N31352086_RTRUKOC_0_US-SEPT11-GROUNDZERO.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-1

Bush: CIA terrorism detention program "invaluable"

Sat Sep 9, 2006 11:35 AM ET
Reuters
By Tabassum Zakaria

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As he prepared to commemorate the fifth anniversary of September 11, President George W. Bush said on Saturday a CIA detention program to interrogate terrorism suspects had been "invaluable" in efforts to prevent another attack on the United States.

Bush this week publicly acknowledged the CIA had held high-level terrorism suspects, including alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in secret overseas locations.

He announced Mohammed and 13 others were transferred recently to the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center run by the Pentagon to be prosecuted in the future.

The CIA program disclosed by The Washington Post last year prompted an international outcry and criticism from human rights groups.

Bush was unbowed by the criticism and steadfastly supported the program that since the September 11 attacks has held fewer than 100 terrorism suspects. While there was none in CIA custody after the 14 were transferred recently, the program will continue, administration officials said.

"This program has been invaluable to the security of America and its allies, and helped us identify and capture men who our intelligence community believes were key architects of the September the 11th attacks," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

Information from the suspects held by the CIA had helped uncover al Qaeda plots and capture senior members of the network, he said.

"Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland," Bush said.

Democrats, seeking to win control of at least one house of Congress in the November election, are highlighting an increasingly unpopular Iraq war with voters.

Five years after the September 11 attacks, "America is not nearly as safe as we can be and we must be," said Rep. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat who is running for U.S. Senate.

"This anniversary of 9/11, we must refocus our efforts on the war on terror by ending our open-ended commitment in Iraq and by redirecting our efforts to destroy al Qaeda," Brown said in the Democratic response to the president's radio address.

"Democrats will fight for this goal even as the president and as congressional Republicans stubbornly insist on staying a failed course," he said.

U.S. forces continue to hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, who since the September 11 attacks have sporadically issued video and audiotapes to show they have not been captured or killed.

"America still faces determined enemies," Bush said. "And in the long run, defeating these enemies requires more than improved security at home and military action abroad. We must also offer a hopeful alternative to the terrorists' hateful ideology," he said.

"By advancing freedom and democracy as the great alternative to repression and radicalism, and by supporting young democracies like Iraq, we are helping to bring a brighter future to this region -- and that will make America and the world more secure," Bush said.

He plans to commemorate the September 11 anniversary with visits on Sunday and Monday to all three sites struck by the hijacked planes -- Ground Zero where the World Trade Center's twin towers collapsed in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington and a field in Pennsylvania.

    Bush: CIA terrorism detention program "invaluable", R, 9.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-09-09T153447Z_01_N08426916_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-3

Political turmoil engulfs U.S. as September 11 nears

Fri Sep 8, 2006 7:44 PM ET
Reuters
By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush scheduled a prime-time speech on the fifth anniversary of September 11 on Monday amid acrimonious election-year debate over whether America is safer and who is to blame for the attacks.

The Oval Office address, marking five years to the hijacked plane attacks that killed almost 3,000 people, is the latest in a series in which Bush has insisted the United States is more secure while still facing an al Qaeda threat.

Bush has been trying to frame a debate on national security to political and policy advantage and keep his Republicans from losing control of the U.S. Congress to Democrats in the November election.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the Monday speech would not be political and that Bush was not trying to rekindle the warm glow he got from Americans of all political stripes after the attacks, only to lose it along with his high popularity ratings as a result of the Iraq war.

"It's not to try to draw on some atavistic sense of nostalgia about the date. I think what you do is you reflect on what it means to the country," Snow said.

Eager to make big gains in November, Democrats issued a report citing failures by the Bush administration and Republicans to enact recommendations on boosting security from an independent commission that investigated the attacks.

They charged Republicans had rebuffed Democratic efforts to boost spending for cargo screening at airports and for shipping and to provide more security for public transportation. They said the administration had fallen short on securing nuclear power and chemical plants.

"The fact is we are not as safe today as we could and should be," said House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland.

DIVISIONS

Snow said 35 of 37 recommendations from the 9/11 commission had been enacted and called for bipartisan harmony to expand Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program and create military tribunals -- issues on which Democrats and some Republicans have deep differences with the president.

As Americans prepared to observe the anniversary with solemn remembrances, Democrats were on the defensive over a made-for-television miniseries suggesting then-President Bill Clinton and his top aides did too little to head off Osama bin Laden in the years before the 2001 attacks.

Chronicling events leading up to September 11, the program -- due to be broadcast on Sunday and Monday -- suggests the Clinton administration was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to deal properly with the gathering threat posed by Islamic militants. Bush took over from Clinton eight months before the September 11 attacks.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has called the five-hour ABC miniseries "a work of fiction" and demanded it be canceled. The network reportedly was making last-second edits to try to satisfy the critics.

The White House's Snow said that while "for a long period of time Osama bin Laden was able to build up power and influence around the world," any president regardless of party would have acted against him if it was known what al Qaeda was planning.

Bush risks missing millions of viewers on Monday night because the Washington Redskins and Minnesota Vikings will be two hours into their National Football League season-opener on sports cable network ESPN at the same time as his speech, estimated to last 16 to 18 minutes.

NO LONGER UNITED

The political unity that Bush experienced in the months after September 11 has long since given way to bitter partisanship over the Iraq war.

Bush has faced questions about whether the war in Iraq is a distraction from the al Qaeda threat. He acknowledges it has been hard to convince Americans that Iraq is a "critical part of the war on terror."

The speech will cap Bush's observances of the fifth anniversary of the single most dramatic event of his presidency. He will travel to New York on Sunday to the site of the destroyed World Trade Center towers.

On Monday, the anniversary day, Bush travels to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to pay homage to the victims of United Flight 93, which crashed after a passenger revolt against its hijackers before it reached targets in Washington.

Later on Monday, Bush was to visit the Pentagon to honor the memory of those killed when a hijacked plane slammed into the building.

(Additional reporting by Donna Smith, Richard Cowan, Vicki Allen and Thomas Ferraro)

    Political turmoil engulfs U.S. as September 11 nears, R, 8.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-09-08T234336Z_01_N08186074_RTRUKOC_0_US-SEPT11.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-2

US expands visitor fingerprinting to deter attacks

Fri Sep 8, 2006 4:16 PM ET
Reuters
By Deborah Charles

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government will take prints of all 10 fingers of foreigners entering the United States and compare them with those found at sites with ties to terrorists, the country's security chief said on Friday.

The United States now collects the prints of only the two index fingers of foreign visitors. But it will gather prints of all their fingers and thumbs by the end of 2008, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, said.

"We will be able to run everybody's fingerprints against latent fingerprints that we are collecting all over the world in terrorist safe houses, off of bomb fragments that terrorists build, or in battlefields where terrorists wage war," Chertoff said in a speech at Georgetown University.

The department will install new 10-fingerprint reading devices at borders and airports in two years time as it transfers from the two-print system criticized for being incompatible with the FBI's 10-print databases.

Fingerprints are collected as part of the US-VISIT program launched in January 2004 to tighten U.S. borders and prevent other attacks like those of September 11 when 19 foreigners -- who all had U.S. visas -- hijacked four airplanes and killed nearly 3,000 people.

Chertoff said getting more prints should deter those who want to enter the United States to carry out an attack.

"Every single terrorist who has ever been in a safe house or a training camp or built a bomb is going to have to ask ... 'Have I ever left a fingerprint anywhere in the world that's been captured?'"

Under US-VISIT, visitors from most countries must have a digital photo and fingerprints taken by an immigration officer as they enter the country. Until now, the data had been checked just against terrorist watch lists and criminal databases.

    US expands visitor fingerprinting to deter attacks, R, 8.9.2006,http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-09-08T201622Z_01_N08409891_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-USA-FINGERPRINTS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-3

Editorial

Veterans of Sept. 11

September 9, 2006
The New York Times

One of the worst things about listening to those who rushed to ground zero after the attacks on Sept. 11 is that you can barely hear their stories. For many, the lungs hardly work. The cough, the ragged breathing, the confusion and even the bitterness make it hard for some of those who labored in that toxic cloud to explain how they feel forgotten. Like Steven Centore, a former federal worker from Flanders, N.Y., who became so emotional at a Congressional hearing in Manhattan yesterday that he had to be gently reminded of his own condition.

Sick from his time working at ground zero, Mr. Centore was forced to pay for his treatment, and the federal government offered only one thing, he said: a “screening” that determined he was indeed sick. “You mean I’m just a data point for you,” he recalled saying to the nurse filling out his forms.

People like Mr. Centore and maybe 40,000 others from across the country must be treated for diseases that become more obvious every week. As Mount Sinai Medical Center reported Tuesday, as many as seven in 10 of those who worked at ground zero and Fresh Kills on Staten Island have felt their lungs deteriorate because of their heroism.

What the veterans of Sept. 11 need now is a national response, which is not a strong suit these days in Washington. There are a number of partial efforts to help by city, state, federal and private sources. But somebody has to make sure that those who are suffering don’t fall through the many gaps. Recommendations worth considering include putting those without health care under Medicare. The federal government should also restore the Victims Compensation Fund, which originally focused on victims’ families and was phased out in 2003. This time the fund should pay for health care of these emergency workers. If something drastic is not done soon, there are lawsuits involving as many as 8,000 people that could end up costing taxpayers a lot more in the long run.

For some politicians, the message seems to have gotten through — especially as the nation remembers the attack five years ago this Monday. Members of Congress from the New York area have been pressuring to get more federal money for these responders. And Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, has promised to create a task force to provide some organization and to figure out the best ways to proceed. Creating a task force sounds like a delay rather than an answer, but the politicians from the Northeast who have been trumpeting this cause should now keep pestering Mr. Leavitt to move quickly.

As we pay homage on Monday to those who died on Sept. 11, 2001, it is worth remembering what happened on May 28, 2002. That evening — a scant 37 weeks after the attack — workers took down the last column from that smoldering mound and officially cleared the site. As one worker said of the herculean task completed by so many selfless people, “You found out who you were, what it means to be an American, what it is to stand up.”

They came when the nation was attacked. Taking care of them now is a national obligation.

    Veterans of Sept. 11, NYT, 9.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/09/opinion/09sat1.html

Washington School Still Feels Pain of 9/11

September 9, 2006
The New York Times
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — Sinita Brown will always prefer “the garden,” a small plot shaded by the weathered brick walls of Madeleine V. Leckie Elementary School, of all the memorials to those killed in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Leckie Elementary lost a student, a teacher and two parents when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, killing 184 people. The student was Ms. Brown’s son.

As President Bush prepares to mark the fifth anniversary with high-profile remembrances at the three crash sites, the elementary school will mark the day with a low-key ceremony. And the families of the school’s four victims will cling to the bonds between them.

“Leckie is home,” Ms. Brown, who now lives in Florida, said in a telephone interview. “No matter where we go, we will always come back. We were all happy there. Every time I am there, I feel like my son is a legend.”

The families may have scattered, but the school and its garden remain a center of gravity, a place to steal away to and remember the last times their families were whole.

Built with the help of the Washington Architectural Foundation and other donors, the stretch of green includes a walkway, edged with the handprints of hundreds of students. Wooden benches in three sections represent those who were lost.

“Every time you go here, it reminds you that they were nice people and they didn’t do anything wrong,” said Arika Muse, a fifth grader who was in kindergarten in 2001.

Arika and some of her friends hope to speak at the school’s Sept. 11 assembly on Monday. Soon, there will be no more students at Leckie with a clear memory of the day, although the older children have been told the story enough to pass it down.

Hilda E. Taylor, the teacher killed in the attack, was from Sierra Leone and had often lamented that Americans cared little about history and geography. Active with the National Geographic Society, Ms. Taylor took students on field trips sponsored by the organization.

In 2001, Ms. Taylor selected Ms. Brown’s son, Bernard Brown II, a sixth grader with a magnetic personality and a permanent grin. Bernard, 11, was a good student, and Ms. Taylor thought a trip to the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary off California would motivate him to work even harder. Along on the trip were students and teachers from two other Washington schools, who were among those who died in the crash.

While many of those affected by the attacks have come to know one another through grief, those from Leckie had been close before that day.

Drawing many of its students from military housing and a nearby homeless shelter, the school is tucked away in a neighborhood east of the Anacostia River, where the problems of poverty and crime often fail to draw notice in the rest of Washington.

“The crime goes on and on, but we do all we can do to hold up our families and keep moving forward together,” said Clementine D. Homesley, the principal.

In 2004, vandals stole benches from the memorial garden. Benefactors replaced them.

The Browns lived in a military housing complex near the home of Andrea and Johnnie Doctor Jr., whose daughter attended Leckie and was a friend of Bernard. Mr. Doctor, a Navy information systems specialist, was one of the two Leckie parents killed. Marsha D. Ratchford, the other parent who died, lived with her family in an adjacent compound.

Bernard Brown Sr., often called Big Bernard, and Mr. Doctor, known as Doc, were basketball coaches on the military base and best friends. They were active at Leckie and ever present at their children’s games. The families took turns picking up each other’s children from schools and barbecued together on weekends.

Ms. Taylor was as much a friend as teacher. She helped Ms. Doctor, who was working to advance her nursing degree, with her college papers. She left her car at the Browns’ house the morning of the trip so she and Bernard could go to the airport together.

“We were all family before Sept. 11,” Ms. Doctor said. “And we are family now, for life.”

Ms. Brown and Ms. Doctor still talk nearly every week. Ms. Homesley, Leckie’s principal, keeps them posted on happenings at the school.

In June, the friends gathered at a park in Hampton, Va., where Ms. Brown’s parents live, to celebrate what would have been Bernard’s 16th birthday. Over hot dogs, ribs, fried fish and a birthday cake big enough to feed the more-than-100 guests, they reminisced and imagined the boy as a young man, showing off the Jeep his father had promised him as soon as he was old enough to drive.

“Nobody was shedding any tears that day,” said Betty Carter, Bernard’s grandmother. “Everybody was rejoicing because they knew he was looking down on us and rejoicing, too.”

Ms. Doctor, who moved to South Carolina after her husband’s death, returned to Washington in June. On the daily commute from her new job at a hospital in Virginia, she drives past the school, though it is not the quickest way home.

“It’s like a calm comes over me here,” she said, sitting on the bench dedicated to her husband. “The Pentagon was where he worked, but this school was someplace he really enjoyed.”

The Browns have decided not to return to Washington for the school’s memorial assembly. They will go, instead, to watch their daughter, Courtney, 12, play in a basketball game. That is what Bernard would have wanted to do, Ms. Brown said.

They will visit the school in their own time, when attention on the anniversary of their son’s death has subsided.

“There is nothing but love up in that school,” Ms. Brown said. “Genuine love.”

    Washington School Still Feels Pain of 9/11, NYT, 9.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/09/us/09school.html?hp&ex=1157860800&en=4f2a238ef12f2214&ei=5094&partner=homepage

9 / 11 Babies Old Enough to Ask for Dad

September 9, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:02 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Four-year-old Gabriel Jacobs inherited his dad's sandy hair, long nose and blue eyes. The day they buried what was left of his father -- a piece of rib, part of a thigh bone, a bit of one arm -- the boy released a balloon into the air, then turned that familiar face skyward to make sure his daddy caught it.

This is how a son reaches out to the father he never met. Ariel Jacobs died in the World Trade Center attack six days before his only child was born.

''When he sends a balloon up to the sky and he finally sees the tiny dot of the balloon go through the clouds, he says, 'OK, the balloon found the doorway to heaven, I think he has it now,'' says Gabi's mother, Jenna Jacobs-Dick.

There are dozens of children like Gabi Jacobs, born to Sept. 11 widows in the months after the attacks. Five years later, as they approach kindergarten, they are just beginning to grasp the stories of their fathers and of the day that changed their lives forever.

The first baby arrived just hours after the disaster, and the last nine months later. Some mothers only discovered they were pregnant after the dads were gone -- including Rudolph Giuliani's longtime aide, who was married to fire Capt. Terence Hatton. The firefighter's daughter was born the next spring, and her mother named her Terri.

Their fathers were rescue workers, cops, restaurant waiters and stockbrokers. Their mothers, pregnant and alone when the dust of the towers settled, worried about the stress on their unborn children from the agony and shock. Some miscarried. One went into labor during her husband's memorial service.

Many moms broke down in the delivery room, where they tried to fill that empty space with photos, a police badge, a piece of clothing. Friends, sisters and in-laws with cameras and brave faces stood in for all those lost dads.

Each delivery was, all at once, wonderful and awful.

Julie McMahon remembers her son's birth in early 2002 as a day of jangled nerves. ''It wasn't supposed to be this way,'' she thought.

She delivered baby Patrick while her husband, Bobby, a firefighter with natural athleticism and a love of photography, looked on from a picture on the bedside table. The photo captured a moment of pure happiness -- Bobby, wearing a cap and a giant grin, leans over their first son Matthew, clutching a massive tuft of cotton candy.

Patrick arrived with Bobby's curly hair and lanky body, and has sprouted into a miniature version of his daredevil dad. The child took his mother's breath away recently when he bounded by, swinging his arms and moving his head just so -- it was Bobby's carefree strut.

When James Patrick's son was born, everyone agreed it was like looking at his father -- the same fair skin, blue eyes and brown hair, that certain way he moved his mouth. The Cantor Fitzgerald bond broker, ecstatic about starting a family, died seven weeks before Jack entered the world.

The boy is also playful and silly like his dad. His mother, Terilyn Esse, like many of the other 9/11 moms, cannot explain how the children acquired their fathers' personalities -- the social grace, the twinkling eyes, a love of words or music.

But there is a word they all use to describe it.

''It's bittersweet,'' says Jacobs-Dick, whose husband was attending a conference at the World Trade Center. ''He's a reminder of Ari, not just the fact that he existed, but of who he was because they're so similar, and I can appreciate Ari in the present through him.''

She is careful, though, that Gabi doesn't grow up with the sense that he is here to take the place of his father, who wept at the doctor's office when he learned that the blur on the ultrasound was a boy.

It is an unfair burden for any child who has lost a parent, says Marylene Cloitre, director of the Institute for Trauma and Stress at the New York University Child Study Center. And because of the public tragedy, children of 9/11 victims might always feel pressure to represent something even larger.

''Which is very hard to do when you're 17 and you hardly know what you feel and think yourself,'' Cloitre said. ''Like 'Oh, my father's a hero so I have to carry the heroic memory,' when they don't even know what that is or how to do that.''

Cloitre is tracking 700 children who lost parents in the 2001 attack, each a study in grief and hardship.

But the 4-year-olds are unique: They are building images of their fathers from the wisps of other people's memories and photographs, without even the subconscious sense of long ago cuddles or kisses on the forehead.

As each child discovers a lost father's life, along come questions: How did Daddy die? Who are the bad guys? Where did the buildings go? When they cleaned up the buildings, did they clean up Daddy, too?

Cloitre says the conversation will change as they grow up. In a few years they will probably want to know whether their fathers would have loved them. As teens, they may wonder about identity -- how am I like him?

''It sort of exhausts people -- they wish it could be over, that they could just say one thing, but really, what to say today pales in the face of the real challenge, which is a lifelong dialogue with their child about who this person was,'' she said.

Already, some of these children can tell you Daddy died when bad guys took control of some airplanes, and then flew them into the towers. Others haven't even heard the word ''terrorist'' and don't know there was anything more than a big fire.

''There are always questions and things that come up, and sometimes I'm thinking, 'oh my gosh' -- you try to buy time so you can come up with an answer and do the best you can,'' says Kimberly Statkevicus, whose second son was born four months after husband Derek died.

Their child, named after his father, turns 5 in January. He knows that a piece of bone was recovered from his father's right hand, and is matter-of-fact about what happened. ''My daddy went to work one day and some bad guys came and knocked the buildings down and crushed him like a pancake,'' he explains.

He wonders why there are no photographs of him and his father, like his brother has. Sometimes, it upsets him.

Some of the questions of these fatherless children are easy: Did Daddy like mayonnaise or mustard? When he played baseball, did he strike people out?

Other times, they're more spiritual: Does he see me when I ride my bike?

For those answers, Terilyn Esse has taught Jack Patrick there is a special thing he can do.

''When he started to talk, I would ask him, 'Where does Daddy live?' And he would say 'In heaven,' and I would say, 'Who does he live with?''' she said. ''And he would say 'With God and the angels,' and I would say 'If you want to talk to Daddy what do you do?'

''And he would say 'I close my eyes and look inside my heart.'''

    9 / 11 Babies Old Enough to Ask for Dad, NYT, 9.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Sept-11-Turning-5.html

 

Looking for Agreement on Tribunals for Detainees        NYT        9.9.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/09/washington/09detain.html?hp&ex=
1157860800&en=28922bf6df03ab0d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Looking for Agreement on Tribunals for Detainees

September 9, 2006
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — The main Senate Republican in talks with the White House over bills to establish tribunals for terror suspects said Friday that a small set of problems divided the two sides and that they would negotiate through the weekend in an effort to reach a compromise.

The senator, John W. Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said “90 percent” of the proposal that the White House submitted this week reflected a proposal that he and other Republican senators who have taken the lead on the question had drafted over the summer.

The senators, Mr. Warner, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, maintain that they can work with the administration to resolve the differences, but they showed few signs of yielding on the disputed questions. “The determination simply has to be made on what flexibility the administration wants to show,” Mr. Warner said.

The disputed issues are the same ones that the Supreme Court cited in striking down a system of tribunals that the administration established after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. They include whether suspects can be excluded from their trials and what types of evidence would be admissible.

“I feel strongly about this,” Mr. Warner said. “I want to be supportive of the president.”

But as a lawyer and former Navy secretary, he said, “I feel this bill has got to pass what I call the federal court muster, so this thing doesn’t get tangled up in the courts again and go all the way to the Supreme Court, and then down she goes again.”

Mr. Warner said that his committee would have its legislation ready for a vote next week, whether or not the White House agrees to all its provisions. He predicted that the Senate would quickly pass it.

“We don’t need a lot of time,’’ he said. “We all know what the issues are. I don’t see a prolonged debate.”

There is no certainty that the committee bill will reach the Senate floor if there is no deal with the White House. The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, has said he will decide next week whether to bring the committee bill to the floor or bring up the version that President Bush proposed on Wednesday.

House Republican leaders have said they intend to pass the White House version.

The Supreme Court ruled in June that the tribunals the White House established violated the Constitution and international law by denying terror suspects basic human and legal rights.

Chiefly, the court objected to excluding suspects from trials and allowing hearsay and evidence obtained under coercion. It faulted the administration system to have a military lawyer oversee the proceedings, as opposed to a judge, as in military courts-martial. The court added that the jury size was too small.

Mr. Bush’s new proposal allows for a military judge and expands the jury from a minimum of three people to five, the minimum the court said was required under courts-martial, with 12 for cases involving the death penalty.

The administration proposal would allow hearsay and evidence obtained by coercion, if the judge rules it was probative and reliable.

The plan would also deny the accused the right to see and therefore respond to classified evidence that the jury could use to convict him, although the defendant could be allowed a summary of it.

That provision, Mr. Graham said this week, would be struck down by a court “in 30 seconds.”

Mr. Graham in particular, a former military lawyer and a military reserve judge, has been inclined to follow the advice of the military lawyers on the shape of the tribunals.

Mr. McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, has argued that any system would set a precedent for how other countries try American troops and that passing a system that excluded the defendant opened up Americans to being tried in kangaroo courts elsewhere.

A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Washington said Friday that it would visit the 14 new detainees being held at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as soon as it received permission from the Defense Department.

An official with the Red Cross in Washington, Simon Schorno, said: “We do not have a date yet. But as soon as we get confirmation, we will undertake a visit as soon as possible.”

Mr. Schorno said his organization had a team of about 10 people on standby. The team, which includes officials in the Washington office, will draw Red Cross employees from elsewhere to work as translators.

He said the first order of business would be to interview the detainees “and give them the means to contact their families through Red Cross messages.”

The Red Cross, Mr. Schorno added, will assess the detention conditions in the undisclosed locations where the inmates had been held and now at Guantánamo.

By agreement with the United States government, the Red Cross will, in exchange for access, not make public its views on the conditions of confinement and treatment.

Mr. Schorno said his organization might announce the fact of the visit when it occurred because of the wide public interest in it.

Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting.

    Looking for Agreement on Tribunals for Detainees, NYT, 9.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/09/washington/09detain.html?hp&ex=1157860800&en=28922bf6df03ab0d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

C.I.A. Said to Find No Hussein Link to Terror Chief

September 9, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — The Central Intelligence Agency last fall repudiated the claim that there were prewar ties between Saddam Hussein’s government and an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to a report issued Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The disclosure undercuts continuing assertions by the Bush administration that such ties existed, and that they provided evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The Republican-controlled committee, in a second report, also sharply criticized the administration for its reliance on the Iraqi National Congress during the prelude to the war in Iraq.

The findings are part of a continuing inquiry by the committee into prewar intelligence about Iraq. The conclusions went beyond its earlier findings, issued in the summer of 2004, by including criticism not just of American intelligence agencies but also of the administration.

Several Republicans strongly dissented on the report with conclusions about the Iraqi National Congress, saying they overstated the role that the exile group had played in the prewar intelligence assessments about Iraq. But the committee overwhelmingly approved the other report, with only one Republican senator voting against it.

The reports did not address the politically divisive question of whether the Bush administration had exaggerated or misused intelligence as part of its effort to win support for the war. But one report did contradict the administration’s assertions, made before the war and since, that ties between Mr. Zarqawi and Mr. Hussein’s government provided evidence of a close relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

As recently as Aug. 21, President Bush said at a news conference that Mr. Hussein “had relations with Zarqawi.’’ But a C.I.A. report completed in October 2005 concluded instead that Mr. Hussein’s government “did not have a relationship, harbor or even turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates,” according to the new Senate findings.

The C.I.A. report also contradicted claims made in February 2003 by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who mentioned Mr. Zarqawi no fewer than 20 times during a speech to the United Nations Security Council that made the administration’s case for going to war. In that speech, Mr. Powell said that Iraq “today harbors a deadly terrorist network’’ headed by Mr. Zarqawi, and dismissed as “not credible’’ assertions by the Iraqi government that it had no knowledge of Mr. Zarqawi’s whereabouts.

The panel concluded that Mr. Hussein regarded Al Qaeda as a threat rather than a potential ally, and that the Iraqi intelligence service “actively attempted to locate and capture al-Zarqawi without success.’’

One of the reports by the committee criticized a decision by the National Security Council in 2002 to maintain a close relationship with the Iraqi National Congress, headed by the exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, even after the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency had warned that “the I.N.C was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” notably Iran.

The report concluded that the organization had provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, and concluded that the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.”

The findings were released at an inopportune time for the Bush administration, which has spent the week trying to turn voters’ attention away from the missteps on Iraq and toward the more comfortable political territory of the continued terrorist threat. On Friday, the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, played down the reports, saying that they contained “nothing new” and were “re-litigating things that happened three years ago.”

“The important thing to do is to figure out what you’re doing tomorrow, and the day after, and the month after, and the year after to make sure that this war on terror is won,” Mr. Snow said.

The two reports released Friday were expected to be the least controversial aspects of what remains of the Senate committee’s investigation, which will eventually address whether the Bush administration’s assertions about Iraq accurately reflected the available intelligence. But unanticipated delays caused them to be released in the heat of the fall political campaign.

The reports were approved by the committee in August, but went through a monthlong declassification process. It was Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the committee’s Republican chairman, who set early September as the release date.

The committee’s report in 2004, which lambasted intelligence agencies for vastly overestimating the state of Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, was issued with unanimous approval. But the reports released Friday provided evidence of how much the relationship between Republicans and Democrats on the committee had degenerated over the past two years.

A set of conclusions that included criticism of the administration’s ties with the Iraqi National Congress was opposed by several Republicans on the panel, including Mr. Roberts, but was approved with the support of two Republicans, Chuck Hagel, of Nebraska, and Olympia Snowe, of Maine, along with all seven Democrats. Senator Roberts even took the unusual step of disavowing the conclusions about the role played by the Iraqi National Congress, saying that they were “misleading and are not supported by the facts.”

The report about the group’s role concluded that faulty intelligence from the group made its way into several prewar intelligence reports, including the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that directly preceded the Senate vote on the Iraq war. It says that sources introduced to American intelligence by the group directly influenced two key judgments of that document: that Mr. Hussein possessed mobile biological weapons laboratories and that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program.

The report said there was insufficient evidence to determine whether one of the most notorious of the intelligence sources used by the United States before the Iraq war was tied to the Iraqi National Congress. The source, an Iraqi who was code-named Curveball, was a crucial source for the American view that Mr. Hussein had a mobile biological weapons program, but the information that he provided was later entirely discredited.

The report said other mistaken information about Iraq’s biological program had been provided by a source linked to the Iraqi National Congress, and it said the intelligence agencies’ use of the information had “constituted a serious error.’’

The dissenting opinion, signed by Mr. Roberts and four other Republican members of the committee, minimized the role played by Mr. Chalabi’s group. “Information from the I.N.C. and I.N.C.-affiliated defectors was not widely used in intelligence community products and played little role in the intelligence community’s judgments about Iraq’s W.M.D. programs,” the Republicans said.

Francis Brooke, a spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress, called the report “tendentious, partisan and misleading,” and said that the group had not played a central role as the Bush administration built the case for war.

At the same time, Mr. Brooke said his organization was surprised at how little the American government knew about Mr. Hussein’s government before the war, which may have forced the American officials to rely more heavily on the organization. “We did not realize the paucity of human intelligence that the administration had on Iraq,” he said.

    C.I.A. Said to Find No Hussein Link to Terror Chief, NYT, 9.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/09/world/middleeast/09intel.html?hp&ex=1157860800&en=6b11a9b2ce4125ad&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Domestic Security

Bush Assures That the Nation Is Safer as Memories Turn to a Day of Destruction

September 8, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

ATLANTA, Sept. 7 — Setting out his own narrative of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush on Thursday defended his administration’s record on domestic security, saying he had “learned a lot of lessons” on that day and had made Americans safer as a result.

Speaking to an audience of conservative intellectuals here, Mr. Bush also called on Congress to pass legislation authorizing one of his most controversial antiterror initiatives, a once-secret National Security Agency program to eavesdrop on suspected members of Al Qaeda.

The president used the latest in a series of his addresses leading up to the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 to continue his effort to reshape the political climate by focusing the nation on the threat from terrorism rather than the war in Iraq. He mentioned only briefly the proposal he unveiled on Wednesday for interrogating and trying detainees linked to terrorism.

Instead, he offered his version of how terrorists plotted to attack the United States on Sept. 11 and used that framework to present a “progress report” — a rebuttal to critics who say he has not done enough and a playbook that Republican candidates may use as they face skeptical voters in November.

There is a wide range of narratives competing to define how the Sept. 11 attacks came about and played out, from the liberal version embodied in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911” to the partly fictionalized account in a coming ABC miniseries “The Path to 9/11,” which has drawn intense criticism from former Clinton administration officials who say it misrepresents what they did to confront Al Qaeda.

In Mr. Bush’s version of events, there was no mention of the August 2001 intelligence report warning that Osama bin Laden was plotting to attack inside the United States. Nor was there any of his own early response, judged by his critics to have been erratic, after learning, during a visit to a Florida elementary school, that planes had crashed into the Word Trade Center.

Instead, the president laid out what he said were the four critical phases of the plot: its early planning abroad; the movement of the first Qaeda operatives to the United States; the arrival of the remainder of the plotters and the flight training they undertook; and the morning of the attacks, when the terrorists passed airport security to board the ill-fated flights.

“Many Americans look at these events,” Mr. Bush said, “and ask the same question: Five years after 9/11, are we safer? The answer is, yes, America is safer. We are safer because we’ve taken action to protect the homeland.”

For each phase, the president ticked off a litany of steps his administration had taken, like air security improvements and revamping intelligence agencies so they can share information more freely. To buttress his case, the White House released a 21-page report entitled “9/11 Five Years Later: Successes and Challenges,” stuffed with facts and numbers.

“I learned a lot of lessons on 9/11,” Mr. Bush said at one point. At another, he said, “We’ve learned the lessons of 9/11, and we have addressed the gaps in our defenses exposed by that attack.”

Critics, including Democrats and the Republican co-chairman of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, say the Bush administration has not done nearly enough to prevent another attack. The co-chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former New Jersey governor, said in an interview last week that both the administration and Congress should be held accountable for failing to adopt his panel’s recommendations in their entirety.

“The most dangerous gap is the possibility of a terrorist with a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Kean said, when asked to cite an example of a vulnerability. “We still haven’t done enough to contain about a hundred sites around the world that have enriched uranium.”

During a year when control of Congress may turn on the question of which party is better suited to keep Americans safe, Mr. Bush is clearly trying to take the offensive. A senior White House official, who requested anonymity before talking about internal strategy, said that Thursday’s address was a way to hammer home the “safer yet not safe” theme.

“It was a way for the president to go back and say, They got into the country, here’s what would happen today,” the official said. “They got money, here’s what would happen today, and kind of go through those four phases to spell out how we are safer but still not safe.”

Later in the day, Mr. Bush turned more directly to politics, traveling to Savannah to attend a fund-raiser for Max Burns, a former Republican congressman who is trying to regain his seat.

Mr. Bush’s request for Congress to authorize the federal eavesdropping was his second legislative request in as many days. On Wednesday he called on lawmakers to approve a bill creating new military commissions to try terror suspects, replacing tribunals that the administration had authorized but that were struck down by the Supreme Court.

“The surest way to keep the program,” Mr. Bush said, referring to the eavesdropping, “is to get explicit approval from the United States Congress.”

    Bush Assures That the Nation Is Safer as Memories Turn to a Day of Destruction, NYT, 8.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/washington/08bush.html

Bush Touts Progress Since 9 / 11 Attacks

September 8, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:35 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- Terrorists today would have a tougher time plotting and carrying out attacks like the ones of Sept. 11 because of security improvements in the past five years, President Bush said Thursday.

There's no way to know if the attacks would have been prevented by the changes, Bush said, but he contended the nation is safer than in September 2001.

Keeping his focus on national security leading up to Monday's anniversary of the attacks and November's congressional elections, Bush said more still needs to be done to stop the terrorist threat.

He pressed Congress to take quick action on two new laws -- legislation proposed Wednesday by the White House that would allow terror suspects to be tried by a military commission and a bill that would give specific authority for his anti-terror eavesdropping program.

Bush initially resisted eavesdropping legislation on the grounds that the once top-secret program was already legal and that legislation could expose sensitive details.

But some leading members of Congress disagreed, and a federal judge in Detroit ruled last month that the program violated rights to free speech and privacy as well as constitutional separation of powers.

''A series of protracted legal challenges would put a heavy burden on this critical and vital program,'' Bush said in a speech to the conservative Georgia Public Policy Foundation. ''The surest way to keep the program is to get explicit approval from the United States Congress.''

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid accused Bush of trying to scare Americans into voting Republican in the midterm elections with his speeches. He said the president's announcement Wednesday that he was transferring 14 terror suspects from secret CIA prisons to military custody so they can be tried before military panels was also politically timed.

''He's had years to bring these murders to justice, and he's waited until now -- two months before an election -- to do it?'' Reid said. ''It's a cynical but typical move from the campaigner in chief.''

Bush said the United States has been making progress against terrorists in the past five years, beginning with the unsuccessful mission of the terrorists on United Flight 93, which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania when passengers fought back. ''They delivered America its first victory in the war on terror,'' the president said to sustained applause.

''Many Americans look at these events and ask the same question: Five years after 9/11, are we safer?'' Bush said. ''The answer is: Yes, America is safer.''

Bush said that's because his administration has filled gaps in the country's defenses that the terrorists exploited.

He used the example of two hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who had come to the attention of the CIA before they helped crash American Flight 77 into the Pentagon but still were able to enter the United States.

Today, Bush said, intelligence officials would put known suspects like al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar on a watch list that would be accessible at airports, consulates, border crossings and for state and local law enforcement. The men would have face-to-face interviews today to get visas and would be fingerprinted and screened against a database of known or suspected terrorists.

Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were preparing for the attack while living in California, making phone calls to planners overseas. Bush said today, the National Security Agency monitors international calls ''such as those between the al-Qaida operatives secretly in the United States and planners of the 9/11 attacks.''

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, al-Hazmi, al-Mihdhar and 17 others were allowed to board their flights even though some of them were flagged by the passenger prescreening system. At the time, rules required only that their checked baggage be held until they boarded the planes.

Some of the hijackers also set off metal detectors. Security screeners manually checked them with handheld devices, but allowed them to board without verifying what had set off the alarms.

Bush said improved screening by the Transportation Security Administration, an increased number of federal air marshals, hardened cockpit doors and pilots trained to carry firearms would help stop a similar plot today.

''Even if all the steps I've outlined this morning had been taken before 9/11, no one can say for sure that we would have prevented the attack,'' Bush said. ''We can say that if America had these reforms in place in 2001, the terrorists would have found it harder to plan and finance their operations, harder to slip into the country undetected, and harder to board the airplanes and take control of the cockpits, and succeed in striking their targets.''

On the Net:

http://www.whitehouse.gov 

    Bush Touts Progress Since 9 / 11 Attacks, NYT, 8.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Passions Flare as Broadcast of 9/11 Mini-Series Nears

September 8, 2006
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY and JESSE McKINLEY

Under growing pressure from Democrats and aides to former President Bill Clinton, ABC is re-evaluating and in some cases re-editing crucial scenes in its new mini-series “The Path to 9/11” to soften its portrait of the Clinton administration’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden, according to people involved in the project.

Among the changes, ABC is altering one scene in which an actor playing Samuel R. Berger, the former national security adviser, abruptly hangs up on a C.I.A. officer during a critical moment in a military operation, according to Thomas H. Kean, a consultant on the ABC project and co-chairman of the federal Sept. 11 commission.

Mr. Berger has said that the scene is a fiction, and Mr. Kean, in an interview, said that he believed Mr. Berger was correct and that ABC was making appropriate changes.

The reassessment came as two Clinton aides mounted an unusual attack last night on the motives of Mr. Kean, a Republican and a former governor of New Jersey. In a letter to Mr. Kean, the two aides, Bruce R. Lindsey and Douglas Band, wrote that his defense of the mini-series “is destroying the bipartisan aura of the 9/11 Commission,” on whose findings the project is partly based. They asserted that Mr. Kean was driven by payments from ABC or his own partisan politics.

Mr. Kean, who called Mr. Clinton a good friend, said it was outrageous to suggest he was being swayed by money or politics, and added that any fee he received would be donated to charity. He said he stood by the film because he believed it would draw attention to the commission’s security recommendations, many of which have not been put into effect, and because the film did not pretend to be a documentary.

Yet Mr. Kean, as well as other members of the commission, did say they were concerned that their widely praised investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks might be diminished in some way by the mini-series.

“Mini-series often make things more dramatic by fictionalizing,” Mr. Kean said. “I don’t think the fictional moments reflect on the work of the commission, but I do hope that the controversy doesn’t tarnish it. ABC is trying to be as accurate as possible.”

Democrats and allies of Mr. Clinton unleashed full-throated appeals to ABC yesterday to cancel the broadcast, which is scheduled for Sunday and Monday nights. The Senate Democratic leadership sent a letter to Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s parent, saying that broadcasting the film “would be a gross miscarriage of your corporate and civic responsibility.”

The national Democratic Party drew more than 100,000 signatures in 24 hours to a petition of complaint that it plans to give to ABC today.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, one of 10 senators at a news conference yesterday where the mini-series came up, left before she could be asked about it. A small throng of reporters who followed her out of the building toward her office were kept at bay by her aides.

The changes to the mini-series are still being made inside an editing suite in Los Angeles, with a variety of creative staff members and executives, including Marc Platt, the executive producer, who has been monitoring the editing from London, and David L. Cunningham, the director, who is being consulted at his home in Hawaii.

Mr. Kean said that two other parts of the film are also under review. One is a scene where an actress playing former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright is apparently obstructing efforts to capture Mr. bin Laden. The other part suggests that Mr. Clinton was too distracted by impeachment and his marital problems to fully focus on Mr. bin Laden.

Mr. Platt said that he could not offer specifics about what scenes were being examined, but that editing was going on and “will continue to, if needed until we broadcast.”

“From Day 1, we’ve examined any issue or question that’s arisen,” he said. “And we’ll continue to do so until the last possible moment.”

Mr. Kean said he was surprised by the outcry, since most of the critics have not seen the film. He said Mr. Clinton had spoken directly to Mr. Iger last Friday; Clinton aides declined to comment.

Several 9/11 commission members said yesterday that they respected Mr. Kean immensely but that they were concerned about the ABC project and his role in it. One of them, Timothy J. Roemer, a Democrat, said he called Mr. Kean yesterday to urge ABC to make changes. Another, Jamie S. Gorelick, a former Clinton administration official, wrote Mr. Iger yesterday that the nation and schoolchildren would be poorly served if they drew lessons from the mini-series that were inaccurate.

Scholastic, the children’s publishing company, which had been working with ABC to use “The Path to 9/11” as a teaching tool, said yesterday that it was removing materials related to the film from its Web site. A spokeswoman said a new study guide was being prepared that would explain the difference between a docudrama and a documentary.

Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting from Washington.

    Passions Flare as Broadcast of 9/11 Mini-Series Nears, NYT, 8.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/washington/08film.html

Design for new WTC towers unveiled

Thu Sep 7, 2006 7:33 PM ET
Reuters
By Daniel Trotta and Joan Gralla

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Three renowned architects on Thursday unveiled designs for skyscrapers at the site of the September 11 attacks, giving the public its first comprehensive look at how lower Manhattan's skyline will be transformed.

Britain's Norman Foster and Richard Rogers and Japan's Fumihiko Maki each designed one of the three buildings that will swirl around a memorial where the World Trade Center's Twin Towers once stood.

Construction should be completed by 2012.

At heights of 1,350 feet, 1,255 feet (382 meters) and 946 feet, they will be among the tallest buildings in New York. But they will be eclipsed by the neighboring 1,776-foot (541-meter) Freedom Tower, whose final design by American David Childs was revealed earlier this year.

The entire redevelopment is estimated to cost $11 billion and can be seen on http://www.wtc.com.

Foster's building may be the most eye-catching, appearing to be a cluster of four slender towers, each with diamond-shaped tops tilted at an angle to direct the eye down to the memorial, the architect told reporters.

"When you look at this tower, it will immediately tell you where the memorial park is. It's always pointing," he said.

Rogers' tower is distinguished by diagonal exterior supports and topped by four functional antennae, one at each corner of the roof.

"It was actually very much like a Gothic building or a classic building. It grew out of the ground and reached upward toward the sky," Rogers said.

The architects collaborated so that the designs, while distinct, would be harmonious.

Rogers said "a very strong dialogue" between the towers would help them rule the skyline the way the Twin Towers once did.

Maki's building will look transparent from the inside but a metallic mesh, which pays homage to midtown's Chrysler Building, will make it look luminous from the outside.

"Our concept is a cool, minimalist tower," Maki said.

RESPECT FOR MEMORIAL

All three buildings will have several levels of retail space just above and below ground level in bid to revitalize lower Manhattan, though the architects agreed that none of the shops should face the memorial to the nearly 3,000 people killed in the September 11 attacks.

The Foster and Rogers buildings will feature massive trading floors to lure large financial tenants. Including the Freedom Tower, the project will create 8.8 million square feet

of office space to replace the 10 million square feet lost on September 11.

The buildings conform to a general master plan by Daniel Libeskind, who envisioned four skyscrapers of descending heights around the memorial, which will be marked by a pair of waterfalls dropping into below-ground reflecting pools on the footprints of the original Twin Towers.

The three new skyscrapers will have floor-to-ceiling glass walls offering spectacular vistas. In a selling point to corporate executives seeking status-building corner offices, all of the towers have columns that are recessed from the corners, providing unimpeded views.

That feature came on the orders of Larry Silverstein, the developer who signed a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center site six weeks before it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.

Silverstein hired Freedom Tower designer Childs as well as the three other skyscraper architects.

After protracted disputes over insurance, design, security, financing and control over the site, construction on the Freedom Tower -- which will stand 408 feet higher than the taller of the Twin Towers -- finally began in April.

    Design for new WTC towers unveiled, R, 7.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-09-07T233331Z_01_N07231650_RTRUKOC_0_US-SEPT11-PROPERTY.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-3

Video shows bin Laden meeting with 9/11 plotters

Updated 9/7/2006 7:12 PM ET
USA Today

CAIRO (AP) — An Arab television station broadcast previously unseen footage Thursday of a smiling Osama bin Laden meeting with the top planners of the Sept. 11 attacks in an Afghan mountain camp and calling on followers to pray for the hijackers as they carry out the suicide mission.
The sections shown on Al-Jazeera TV were part of a video that al-Qaeda announced it would release later on the Internet to mark the fifth anniversary of the airborne attacks on the United States.

The video includes the last testament of two of the hijackers, Wail al-Shehri and Hamza al-Ghamdi. It shows bin Laden strolling in the camp, greeting followers, who Al-Jazeera said included some of the hijackers. But their faces are not clear in the video, and it was not immediately known which are purportedly shown.

In one scene, bin Laden addresses the camera, calling on followers to support the hijackers.

"I ask you to pray for them and to ask God to make them successful, aim their shots well, set their feet strong and strengthen their hearts," bin Laden said. The comments were apparently filmed before the attacks but never before released.

The footage was the fourth in a series of long videos that al-Qaeda has put out to memorialize the suicide hijackings against the Pentagon and World Trade Center, said Ben Venzke, head of IntelCenter, a private U.S. company that monitors militant message traffic and provides counterterrorism intelligence services for the American government.

The previous ones were issued in April and September 2002 and September 2003, each showing footage from the planning of the suicide hijackings and hijackers' last testimonies, Venzke told the Associated Press.

The latest full video probably lasts from 40 minutes to two hours, based on the past ones, he said. Al-Jazeera did not say how it obtained the video, which bore the logo of As-Sahab, al-Qaeda's media branch.

"They produce long videos like these not just for 9-11, but for any significant events they feel warrant their attention," Venzke said.

One aim is to boost recruitment, but such videos have several purposes — "to speak to their supporters, to raise morale within their own group, to facilitate fundraising, and to serve as a psychological attack," he said.

In the footage shown by Al-Jazeera, bin Laden is shown sitting outside in what appears to be a mountain camp with his former lieutenant Mohammed Atef and Ramzi Binalshibh, another suspected planner of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Atef, also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in 2001. Binalshibh was captured four years ago in Pakistan and is currently in U.S. custody, and this week President Bush announced plans to put him on military trial.

Bin Laden, wearing a dark robe and white head gear, strolls through the camp, greeting dozens of followers, some masked, some barefaced, many carrying automatic weapons.

Other scenes show training at the camp. Masked militants perform martial arts kicks or learn how to break the hold of someone who grabs them from behind. Several militants are shown practicing hiding and pulling out fold-out knives.

A voice-over narration with the video praises the mujahedeen for leaving their comfortable lives to survive in the mountains "on the soil of Kandahar" — a southern Afghan city. Men are shown chopping wood and cutting up vegetables for dinner.

An advertisement from As-Sahab on an Islamic militant Web forum said the full video would be posted on the Web soon. In the past, such teasers have come a day or two before the video was posted.

Venzke said the full version of the video was believed to include a message from Azzam al-Amriki, the nom de guerre of Adam Yehiye Gadahn, an American who the FBI says has associated with al-Qaeda. Gadahn appeared in an al-Qaeda video released last week in which he called on Americans to convert to Islam.

It also likely includes a message from bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, though it may not be new, Venzke said, without elaborating on why he believed that.

Like the previous long videos, Thursday's footage included last testimonies by some of the hijackers.

Shehri and Ghamdi were each shown speaking to the camera, their image superimposed over background pictures of the crumbling World Trade Center towers and the burning Pentagon, as well as a model of a passenger jet.

They both spoke of how Muslims must stand up to fight back against the West.

"If jihad now is not an obligation (on Muslims), when will it be?" said Shehri, pointing to attacks on Muslims in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Chechnya.

"If we are content with being humiliated and inclined to comfort, the tooth of the enemy will stretch from Jerusalem to Mecca, and then everyone will regret on a day when regret is of no use," Ghamdi said.

Shehri was on American Airlines Flight 11, which was the first to hit the World Trade Center. Ghamdi was on United Airlines Flight 175, which hit the second tower.

The footage was broadcast on the same day al-Qaeda in Iraq released what was purported to be the first audiotape by its new leader, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, in which he vowed victory was coming and condemned Sunni Muslims cooperating with the Iraqi government.

Muhajer was named leader of Iraq's most feared terror group after his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a June 7 airstrike north of Baghdad. The U.S. military has put a $5 million bounty on Muhajer's head.

    Video shows bin Laden meeting with 9/11 plotters, UT, 7.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-09-07-qaeda-tape_x.htm

9/11 Polls Find Lingering Fears in New York City

September 7, 2006
The New York Times
By ROBIN TONER and MARJORIE CONNELLY

Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, two-thirds of New Yorkers say they are still “very concerned” about another attack on their city, a level of apprehension only slightly reduced from the fall of 2001, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News polls of the nation and New York City.

Nearly a third of New Yorkers said they thought about Sept. 11 every day. Nearly a third said that they had not gone back to pre-Sept. 11 routines and that they were still dealing with changes caused by the attacks.

Outside New York, however, Americans, in many ways, have adjusted to the “new normal” of the post-Sept. 11 era, the national survey suggests.

In contrast to the frantic fall of 2001, their fears of another attack seem less acute and personal. Only 22 percent in the national poll said they were still “very concerned” about an attack where they live, down from 39 percent five years ago. Three-fourths said daily life had largely returned to normal.

New Yorkers were more likely to say that they felt uneasy about the prospect of terrorist attacks. City residents said they believed that the air quality in Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attacks was more dangerous than officials said at the time. [Page B4.]

And they were less likely to say the federal government had done all that “could reasonably be expected” to protect the United States from future terrorist attacks. Seventy-two percent of New Yorkers said the government could do more, compared with 58 percent in the national survey.

Nearly 6 in 10 New Yorkers said they would not be willing to work on a high floor in a new building at the World Trade Center site. Forty percent said they still felt nervous and edgy because of the attacks.

“I don’t feel safe,” said Elizabeth Vinas, 43, a receptionist from Brooklyn, interviewed in a follow-up to the poll. “I don’t know when there will be another attack, I just think they will try again.”

Gwendolyn Branch, 50, a Manhattan homemaker, said, “I just have a feeling that something is going to happen.”

The national poll found that Americans’ personal sense of security, to a large extent, revolved around where they live. Nearly a third of those who lived in big cities said they were “personally very concerned” about an attack where they live; only 13 percent of the people in small towns or rural areas felt that way. More than half of the suburbanites said they felt safe from terrorism, compared with fewer than half of those who lived in cities.

Donna Howlett, a retired beauty salon manager who lives in San Jose, Calif., said: “I think that from now on out, we’re living under the fear of being attacked. They’re planning things all the time.”

A majority of Midwesterners felt safe; residents of the Northeast were evenly divided.

The findings point to a political paradox. Mr. Bush, who has made the campaign against terrorism the centerpiece of his presidency, has some of his lowest approval ratings in areas that are most concerned with another attack. New York City, which is overwhelmingly Democratic, gave Mr. Bush a 25 percent approval rating in a Quinnipiac University Poll.

The New York Times/CBS News polls were conducted by telephone in August, and each has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. The national poll was conducted Aug 17-21 with 1,206 adults, and the poll of New York City was conducted Aug. 23-27 with 838 adults.

The surveys found Americans almost resigned to the continuing struggle against terrorism. The proportion of those who said they thought a terrorist attack on the United States in the next few months was “very” or “somewhat” likely has dropped substantially in the past five years, but it still amounted to more than half in the national survey.

In New York, 69 percent said they were “very concerned” about another attack there, compared with 74 percent in October 2001.

Nationally, 4 in 10 thought the threat of terrorism against the United States had, if anything, increased since 2001, and 81 percent said they thought Americans would always have to live with the threat.

But a big part of the “new normal,” a term used by a Republican pollster, Bill McInturff, is the resurgence of political divisions on national security questions. The extraordinary national unity recorded in the fall of 2001, when Mr. Bush’s approval rating reached 89 percent (79 percent in New York City) and Americans’ trust in government soared, has given way to deeply partisan views over Mr. Bush’s conduct of the war on terror and in Iraq. The survey found that Republicans and Democrats disagreed on a wide range of national security issues, from the wisdom of the war in Iraq to whether the nation had done enough to protect airports.

In general, 83 percent of the Republicans said they thought the United States’ campaign against terrorism was going “very” or “somewhat” well, compared with 43 percent of the Democrats and 55 percent of the independents. When asked if the government had done “all it could reasonably be expected to do” to protect the nation against another attack, 56 percent of Republicans said yes; nearly two-thirds of the Democrats and independents said no.

Similar divisions were apparent when Americans were asked if they believed the United States was “adequately prepared for another terrorist attack.” Three years ago, a majority of Republicans, independents and Democrats said they believed the government was ready. In the latest poll, only a majority of Republicans felt that way; independents were evenly divided.

A majority of those surveyed nationally still gave Mr. Bush positive marks for his handling of the campaign against terrorism — 55 percent approved, down from the high of 90 percent approval in December 2001. But on many security-related questions, he has lost the support of the vast majority of Democrats and many independents as well.

In general, the polls found a distinct skepticism toward government at all levels. Only 13 percent of New Yorkers said they thought the city was adequately prepared to deal with a chemical or biological attack. Nationwide, 39 percent said they thought their state and local governments were adequately prepared for an attack in general, while 52 percent said they were not. Similar views were reflected among New Yorkers.

In another measure of the confidence gap, 6 in 10 New Yorkers said they would not trust the government to tell them the truth about dangers like contaminated air or water in the event of another terrorist attack. A major study released this week, after the poll was completed, by Mount Sinai Medical Center found that the health impact of working at ground zero was more widespread and persistent than previously thought.

Women, in general, were more likely to say they still felt nervous about the threat of terrorism and less likely to say they felt confident in the government’s ability to handle another attack.

Nationwide, 58 percent of the men said the United States was prepared for another attack, but just 42 percent of the women.

James Vollintine, a 35-year-old firefighter from Topeka, Kan., argued that government preparation could go only so far. “You can only be so proactive,” Mr. Vollintine said in a follow-up interview. “You can only think of so many scenarios.”

But Sandy Jackson, 47, a homemaker in Aberdeen, Md., said, “When the planes hit the Pentagon, I thought it was war, and I rushed to get my daughters out of school.” Ms. Jackson added: “I’m still nervous because we can’t put our guard down. I think they’re looking to do us harm.”

Megan C. Thee and Marina Stefan contributed reporting for this article.

    9/11 Polls Find Lingering Fears in New York City, NYC, 7.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/us/07poll.html?hp&ex=1157688000&en=4a67322b3b5f762c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The Overview

President Moves 14 Held in Secret to Guantánamo

September 7, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 — President Bush said Wednesday that 14 high-profile terror suspects held secretly until now by the Central Intelligence Agency — including the man accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks — had been transferred to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to face military tribunals if Congress approves.

The suspects include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, thought to be the Sept. 11 mastermind, and other close associates of Osama bin Laden. Mr. Bush said he had decided to “bring them into the open” after years in which the C.I.A. held them without charges in undisclosed sites abroad, in a program the White House had not previously acknowledged.

The announcement, in the East Room of the White House, was the first time the president had discussed the secret C.I.A. program, and he made clear that he had fully authorized it. Mr. Bush defended the treatment the suspects had received but would not say where the so-called “high-value terrorist detainees” had been held or what techniques had been used to extract information from them.

The transfer of the high-level suspects to Guantánamo Bay effectively suspended the extraordinary program, in which the intelligence agency became the jailer and interrogator of suspects counterterrorism officials considered the world’s most wanted Islamic extremists.

The government says the 14 terror suspects include some of the most senior members of Al Qaeda captured by the United States since 2001, including those responsible for the bombing of the destroyer Cole in 2000 in Yemen and the 1998 attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Most of the detainees have been interviewed extensively and are believed to have little remaining intelligence value.

With the transfer of the suspects to Guantánamo, which is run by the Defense Department, the International Committee of the Red Cross will monitor their treatment, Mr. Bush said. He used the East Room appearance to urge Congress to authorize new military commissions to put terror suspects on trial, replacing rules established by the administration but struck down in June by the Supreme Court. [Page A27.]

“As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, can face justice,” Mr. Bush said, to an audience that included family members of the victims. He added, “To start the process for bringing them to trial, we must bring them out into the open.”

To that end, the president sent Congress legislation proposing new rules for the commissions and detailing specific standards for the humane treatment of detainees. Yet the proposal hews closely to the old commission model, and it retains several provisions the court found troublesome, including language that permits defendants to be excluded from their own trials.

At the same time, the Pentagon released a new Army Field Manual that lays out permissible interrogation techniques and specifically bans eight methods that have come up in abuse cases. Among the techniques banned is water-boarding, in which a wet rag is forced down a bound prisoner’s throat to cause gagging; intelligence officials have said Mr. Mohammed was subjected to that treatment while in C.I.A. custody.

Although the C.I.A. has faced criticism over the use of harsh techniques, one senior intelligence official said detainees had not been mistreated. They were given dental and vision care as well as the Koran, prayer rugs and clocks to schedule prayers, the official said. They were also given reading material, DVD’s and access to exercise equipment.

Administration officials said the timing of Mr. Bush’s decision to bring the terror suspects to trial was driven not by politics but by the need to respond to the Supreme Court’s decision and the fact that the suspects were no longer regarded as sources of valuable intelligence.

On Capitol Hill, some Republicans reacted warily. But even those who criticized the proposal said it was imperative for Congress to pass legislation setting up tribunals soon.

“I do not believe it is necessary to have a trial where the accused cannot see the evidence against them,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a former military prosecutor who has played a central role in the debate. But Mr. Graham said he believed his differences with the White House “can be overcome.”

Mr. Bush’s speech was the third in a series he is delivering on the war on terror in the days before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it carried potential political benefits for a White House that is intent on maintaining Republican control of Congress this November.

The address helped put a face on the enemy, reminding Americans that while Osama bin Laden — to whom Mr. Bush referred repeatedly in a speech on Tuesday — is still at large, many terrorists have been captured. Five years after the attacks, Mr. Bush gave the families of Sept. 11 victims something to cheer about, and those in the audience did, as he announced he wanted to put the suspects on trial.

By moving the high-profile suspects to Guantánamo just two months before the midterm elections, the administration is putting intense pressure on lawmakers to act before adjourning to campaign. If Democrats try to thwart legislation to try senior members of Al Qaeda, they will risk being labeled weak on national security, a label they can ill afford in an election that may turn on the question of which party is better suited to keep Americans safe.

“This is certainly a logical and very sound step both substantively and politically,” said David Rivkin, who served in the White House counsel’s office under the first President Bush and is sympathetic to this administration’s approach. “It’s reminding the country and the world of the folks we are fighting against. Nobody can say these are just pitiful foot soldiers; these are pretty senior guys.”

The C.I.A. program, though officially a secret, has been the subject of numerous news reports in recent months. By speaking publicly about it for the first time, Mr. Bush hopes to build support for it on Capitol Hill, and in the public.

The White House released biographies of the 14 suspects and details of the accusations against them. They include such well-known Qaeda operatives as Abu Zubaydah, who the administration said was trying to organize a terrorist attack in Israel at the time of his capture, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who the authorities say helped facilitate the Sept. 11 attacks.

Despite the new information, human rights organizations were critical of Mr. Bush’s announcement.

“It’s wonderful that at last the United States has acknowledged that these detention sites exist,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. But Mr. Cox described the program as “a form of torture,” and said the United States should suspend it.

In his speech, Mr. Bush fiercely resisted that characterization. “I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world,” he said. “The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it — and I will not authorize it.”

A senior intelligence official said there had been fewer than 100 detainees in the C.I.A. program since its inception shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Beyond the 14, the remainder have either been turned over to the Defense Department as so-called unlawful enemy combatants, returned to their countries of origin or sent to nations that have legal proceedings against them.

The official described the C.I.A. detainees as the government’s “single largest source of insight into Al Qaeda,” saying they accounted for 50 percent of everything the authorities had learned about the terrorist network. But, he said, “Some of these people have been held for a considerable period of time, and their intelligence value has aged off.”

Mr. Bush said the C.I.A. would not relinquish its capability to detain and question terrorism suspects, and the senior intelligence official said the administration intended that the program would continue. But agency officials — who feared employees might be subject to lawsuits or criminal prosecution — welcomed the hand-off of the detainees and the prospect that the C.I.A.’s role would be limited in future cases.

“I am confident that this will be greeted with relief by agency employees,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel for the C.I.A. “Many of them were uncomfortable with their role as jailers.”

Military justice experts say that if Congress passes the legislation, trials of some terror suspects at Guantánamo could begin relatively quickly, in three to four months. But the trials of the 14 high-value suspects, who are held in a special high-security facility separate from other detainees, might not begin for at least a year, because the government would have to build its case .

One expert who has been critical of the administration’s plan, Eugene R. Fidell, predicted that the proposal would attract a lawsuit.

“Going the way they have done this is in fact quite unfair to the very families of 9/11 victims who President Bush had at his meeting today,” Mr. Fidell said, “because those people need closure and in fact what he’s done is guarantee further protracted delay because of the inevitable litigation.”

On Capitol Hill, Democrats were also critical. Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Mr. Bush should have disclosed the program years ago and called his speech “the opening salvo in the fall campaign.”

David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting for this article.

    President Moves 14 Held in Secret to Guantánamo, NYT, 7.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/us/07detain.html?hp&ex=1157688000&en=1b1b17004743af8d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Transcript

President Bush's Speech on Terrorism

September 6, 2006
The New York Times

Following is the transcript of President Bush's speech on terrorism from the White House, as provided by CQ Transcriptions, Inc

Thank you. Thanks for the warm welcome. Welcome to the White House.

Mr. Vice President, Secretary Rice, Attorney General Gonzales, Ambassador Negroponte, General Hayden, members of the United States Congress, families who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks on our nation, my fellow citizens, thanks for coming.

On the morning of September the 11th, 2001, our nation awoke to a nightmare attack. Nineteen men armed with box cutters took control of airplanes and turned them into missiles. They used them to kill nearly 3,000 innocent people.

We watched the twin towers collapse before our eyes, and it became instantly clear that we'd entered a new world and a dangerous new war.

The attacks of September the 11th horrified our nation. And amid the grief came new fears and urgent questions. Who had attacked us? What did they want? And what else were they planning?

Americans saw the destruction the terrorists had caused in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, and they wondered if there were other terrorist cells in our midst poised to strike. They wondered if there was a second wave of attacks still to come.

With the twin towers and the Pentagon still smoldering, our country on edge, and a stream of intelligence coming in about potential new attacks, my administration faced immediate challenges. We had to respond to the attack on our country. We had to wage an unprecedented war against an enemy unlike any we had fought before. We had to find the terrorists hiding in America and across the world before they were able to strike our country again.

So in the early days and weeks after 9/11, I directed our government's senior national security officials to do everything in their power, within our laws, to prevent another attack.

Nearly five years have passed since those initial days of shock and sadness.

And we are thankful that the terrorists have not succeeded in launching another attack on our soil.

This is not for the lack of desire or determination on the part of the enemy. As the recently foiled plot in London shows, the terrorists are still active, and they are still trying to strike America and they are still trying to kill our people.

One reason the terrorists have not succeeded is because of the hard work of thousands of dedicated men and women in our government who have toiled day and night, along with our allies, to stop the enemy from carrying out their plans.

And we are grateful for these hardworking citizens of ours.

nother reason the terrorists have not succeeded is because our government has changed its policies and given our military, intelligence and law enforcement personnel the tools they need to fight this enemy and protect our people and preserve our freedoms.

The terrorists who declared war on America represent no nation. They defend no territory. And they wear no uniform. They do not mass armies on borders or flotillas of warships on the high seas.

They operate in the shadows of society. They send small teams of operatives to infiltrate free nations. They live quietly among their victims. They conspire in secret. And then they strike without warning.

And in this new war, the most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves.

Captured terrorists have unique knowledge about how terrorist networks operate. They have knowledge of where their operatives are deployed and knowledge about what plots are under way.

This intelligence -- this is intelligence that cannot be found any other place. And our security depends on getting this kind of information.

To win the war on terror, we must be able to detain, question and, when appropriate, prosecute terrorists captured here in America and on the battlefields around the world.

After the 9/11 attacks, our coalition launched operations across the world to remove terrorist safehavens and capture or kill terrorist operatives and leaders.

Working with our allies, we've captured and detained thousands of terrorists and enemy fighters in Afghanistan, in Iraq and other fronts of this war on terror.

These enemy -- these are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation. We have a right under the laws of war, and we have an obligation to the American people, to detain these enemies and stop them from rejoining the battle.

Most of the enemy combatants we capture are held in Afghanistan or in Iraq where they're questioned by our military personnel. Many are released after questioning or turned over to local authorities if we determine that they do not pose a continuing threat and no longer have significant intelligence value.

Others remain in American custody near the battlefield, to ensure that they don't return to the fight.

In some cases, we determined that individuals we have captured pose a significant threat or may have intelligence that we and our allies need to have to prevent new attacks.

Many are Al Qaeda operatives or Taliban fighters trying to conceal their identities. And they withhold information that could save American lives.

In these cases, it has been necessary to move these individuals to an environment where they can be held secretly, questioned by experts and, when appropriate, prosecuted for terrorist acts.

Some of these individuals are taken to the United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It's important for Americans and others across the world to understand the kind of people held at Guantanamo. These aren't common criminals or bystanders accidentally swept up on the battlefield.

We have in place a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantanamo Bay belong at Guantanamo. Those held at Guantanamo include suspected bombmakers, terrorist trainers, recruiters and facilitators, and potential suicide bombers. They are in our custody so that they cannot murder our people.

One detainee held at Guantanamo told a questioner questioning -- he said this: I'll never forget your face. I will kill you, your brother, your mother and your sisters.

In addition to the terrorists held at Guantanamo, a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.

This group includes individuals believed to be the key architects of the September the 11th attacks and attacks on the USS Cole; an operative involved in the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and individuals involved in other attacks that have taken the lives of innocent civilians across the world.

These are dangerous men, with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and their plans of new attacks. The security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend on our ability to learn what these terrorists know.

Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged. Doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution against our allies and harm our country.

I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks, here in the United States and across the world.

Today I'm going to share with you some of the examples provided by our intelligence community of how this program has saved lives, why it remains vital to the security of the United States and our friends and allies, and why it deserves the support of the United States Congress and the American people.

Within months of September 11, 2001, we captured a man named Abu Zubaydah. We believed that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden.

Our intelligence community believes he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained and that he helped smuggle Al Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan after coalition forces arrived to liberate that country.

Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody. And he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.

After he recovered, Zubaydah was defiant and evasive. He declared his hatred of America.

During questioning, he, at first, disclosed what he thought was nominal information and then stopped all cooperation.

Well, in fact, the nominal information he gave us turned out to be quite important.

For example, Zubaydah disclosed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and used the alias Mukhtar. This was a vital piece of the puzzle that helped our intelligence community pursue KSM.

Zubaydah also provided information that helped stop a terrorist attack being planned for inside the United States, an attack about which we had no previous information.

Zubaydah told us that Al Qaeda operatives were planning to launch an attack in the United States and provided physical descriptions of the operatives and information on their general location.

Based on the information he provided, the operatives were detained; one, while traveling to the United States.

We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives. But he stopped talking.

BUSH: As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures.

These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively, and determined them to be lawful.

I cannot describe the specific methods used. I think you understand why. If I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country.

But I can say the procedures were tough and they were safe and lawful and necessary.

Zubaydah was questioned using these procedures, and soon he began to provide information on key Al Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th.

For example, Zubaydah identified one of KSM's accomplices in the 9/11 attacks, a terrorist named Ramzi Binalshibh. The information Zubaydah provided helped lead to the capture of Binalshibh. And together these two terrorists provided information that helped in the planning and execution of the operation that captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Once in our custody, KSM was questioned by the CIA using these procedures. And he soon provided information that helped us stop another planned attack on the United States. During questioning, KSM told us about another Al Qaeda operative he knew was in CIA custody, a terrorist named Majid Khan (ph). KSM revealed that Khan (ph) had been told to deliver $50,000 to individuals working for a suspected terrorist leader named Hambali, the leader of Al Qaeda's Southeast Asia affiliate known as J.I.

CIA officers confronted Khan with this information. Khan confirmed that the money had been delivered to an operative named Zuber and provided both a physical description and contact number for this operative.

Based on that information, Zuber (sp) was captured in June of 2003, and he soon provided information that helped lead to the capture of Hambali. After Hambali's arrest, KSM was questioned again. He identified Hambali's brother as the leader of a JI cell and Hambali's conduit for communications with al Qaeda.

Hambali's brother was soon captured in Pakistan, and in turn led us to a cell of 17 Southeast Asian JI operatives. When confronted with the news that his terror cell had been broken up, Hambali admitted that the operatives were being groomed at KSM's request for attacks inside the United States, probably using airplanes. During questioning, KSM also provided many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans.

For example, he described the design of planned attacks on buildings inside the United States and how operatives were directed to carry them out. He told us the operatives had been instructed to ensure that the explosives went off at a point that was high enough to prevent the people trapped above from escaping out the windows. KSM also provided vital information on al Qaeda's efforts to obtain biological weapons. During questioning, KSM admitted that he had met three individuals involved in al Qaeda's efforts to produce anthrax, a deadly biological agent, and he identified one of the individuals as a terrorist named Yazeed. KSM apparently believed we already had this information because Yazeed had been captured and taken into foreign custody before KSM's arrest.

In fact, we did not know about Yazid's role in al Qaeda's anthrax program. Information from Yazid then helped lead to the capture of his two principal assistants in the anthrax program. Without the information provided by KSM and Yazid, we might not have uncovered this al Qaeda biological weapons program or stopped this al Qaeda cell from developing anthrax for attacks against the United States.

These are some of the plots that have been stopped because of the information of this vital program.

Terrorists held in CIA custody have also provided information that helped stop the planned strike on U.S. Marines at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti. They were going to use an explosive-laden water tanker. They've helped stop a planned attack on U.S. -- on the U.S. consulate in Karachi using car bombs and motorcycle bombs. And they helped stop a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow or the Canary Wharf in London.

We're getting vital information necessary to do our jobs, and that's protect the American people and our allies.

Information from the terrorists in this program has helped us to identify individuals that al Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations, many of whom we had never heard about before. They include terrorists who were sent to case targets inside the United States, including financial buildings in major cities on the East Coast. Information from terrorists in CIA custody has played a role in the capture or questioning of nearly every senior al Qaeda member or associate detained by the U.S. and its allies since this program began.

By providing everything from initial leads to photo identifications, to precise locations of where terrorists were hiding, this program has helped us to take potential mass murderers off the streets before they were able to kill.

This program has also played a critical role in helping us understand the enemy we face in this war. Terrorists in this program have painted a picture of al Qaeda's structure and financing and communications and logistics.

They have identified al Qaeda's travel routes and safe havens, and explained how al Qaeda's senior leadership communications with its operatives in places like Iraq. They provide information that allows us -- that has allowed us to make sense of documents and computer records that we have seized in terrorist raids.

They've identified voices in recordings of intercepted calls and helped us understand the meaning of potentially critical terrorist communications.

The information we get from these detainees is corroborated by intelligence, and we receive -- that we have received from other sources. And together this intelligence has helped us connect the dots and stop attacks before they occur.

Information from the terrorists questioned in this program helped unravel plots in terrorist cells in Europe and in other places. It's helped our allies protect their people from deadly enemies.

This program has been and remains one of the most vital tools in our war against the terrorists. It is invaluable to America and to our allies.

Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland. By giving us information about terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else, this program has saved innocent lives.

This program has been subject to multiple legal reviews by the Department of Justice and CIA lawyers. They've determined it complied with our laws. This program has received strict oversight by the CIA's inspector general. A small number of key leaders from both political parties on Capitol Hill were briefed about this program. All those involved in the questioning of the terrorists are carefully chosen, and they're screened from a pool of experienced CIA officers. Those selected to conduct the most sensitive questioning had to complete more than 250 additional hours of specialized training before they are allowed to have contact with a -- captured terrorists. I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world. The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values. I have not authorized it, and I will not authorize it.

Last year, my administration worked with Senator John McCain, and I signed into law the Detainee Treatment Act, which established the legal standards for treatment of detainees wherever they are held. I support this act. And as we implement this law, our government will continue to use every lawful method to obtain intelligence that can protect innocent people and stop another attack like the one we experienced on September the 11th, 2001.

The CIA program has detained only a limited number of terrorist at any given time. And once we have determined that the terrorists held by the CIA have little or no additional intelligence value, many of them have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments. Others have been accused of terrible crimes against the American people, and we have a duty to bring those responsible for these crimes to justice. So we intend to prosecute these men, as appropriate, for their crimes.

Soon after the war on terror began, I authorized a system of military commissions to try foreign terrorists accused of war crimes. Military commissions have been used by presidents from George Washington to Franklin Roosevelt to prosecute war criminals because the rules for trying enemy combatants in a time of conflict must be different from those for trying common criminals or members of our own military.

One of the first suspected terrorists to be put on trial by military commission was one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards, a man named Hamdan. His lawyers challenged the legality of the military commission system. It took more than two years for this case to make its way through the courts. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the military commissions we had designed, but this past June, the Supreme Court overturned that decision. The Supreme Court determined that military commissions are an appropriate venue for trying terrorists, but ruled that military commissions needed to be explicitly authorized by the United States Congress.

So today I'm sending Congress legislation to specifically authorize the creation of military commissions to try terrorists for war crimes. My administration has been working with members of both parties in the House and Senate on this legislation. We've put forward a bill that ensures these commissions are established in a way that protects our national security and ensures a full and fair trial for those accused. The procedures in the bill I am sending to Congress today reflect the reality that we are a nation at war and that it is essential for us to use all reliable evidence to bring these people to justice.

We're now approaching the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and the families of those murdered that day have waited patiently for justice. Some of the families are with us today. They should have to wait no longer.

So I'm announcing today that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and 11 other terrorists in CIA custody have been transferred to the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.

They are being held in the custody of the Department of Defense.

As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September the 11th, 2001, can face justice. (Cheers, applause.)

We will also seek to prosecute those believed to be responsible for the attack on the USS Cole, and an operative believed to be involved in the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

With these prosecutions, we will send a clear message to those who kill Americans: No longer (sic.25matter) how long it takes, we will find you and we will bring you to justice. (Applause.)

These men will be held in a high-security facility at Guantanamo. The International Committee of the Red Cross is being advised of their detention and will have the opportunity to meet with them. Those charged with crimes will be given access to attorneys who will help them prepare their defense, and they will be presumed innocent. While at Guantanamo, they will have access to the same food, clothing, medical care and opportunities for worship as other detainees. They will be questioned subject to the new U.S. Army Field Manual, which the Department of Defense is issuing today. And they will continue to be treated with the humanity that they denied others. As we move forward with the prosecutions, we will continue to urge nations across the world to take back their nationals at Guantanamo, who will not be prosecuted by our military commissions. America has no interest in being the world's jailer.

But one of the reasons we have not been able to close Guantanamo is that many countries have refused to take back their nationals held at the facility. Other countries have not provided adequate assurances that their nationals will not be mistreated or they will not return to the battlefield, as more than a dozen people released from Guantanamo already have.

We will continue working to transfer individuals held at Guantanamo and ask other countries to work with us in this process. And we will move toward the day when we can eventually close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. I know Americans have heard conflicting information about Guantanamo. Let me give you some facts. Of the thousands of terrorists captured across the world, only about 770 have ever been sent to Guantanamo. Of these, about 315 have been returned to other countries so far, and about 455 remain in our custody. They are provided the same quality of medical care as the American service members who guard them. The International Committee of the Red Cross has the opportunity to meet privately with all who are held there.

The facility has been visited by government officials from more than 30 countries, and delegations from international or organizations, as well. After the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe came to visit, one of its delegation members called Guantanamo a model prison, where people are treated better than in prisons in his own country.

Our troops can take great pride in the work they do at Guantanamo Bay, and so can the American people.

As we prosecute suspected terrorist leaders and operatives who have now been transferred to Guantanamo, we'll continue searching for those who have stepped forward to take their places. This nation's going to stay on the offense to protect the American people. We will continue to bring the world's most dangerous terrorists to justice, and we will continue working to collect the vital intelligence we need to protect our country.

The current transfers mean that there are now no terrorists in the CIA program. But as more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical, and having a CIA program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting lifesaving information.

Some ask, why are you acknowledging this program now? There are two reasons why I'm making these limited disclosures today.

First, we have largely completed our questioning of the men, and to start the process for bringing them to trial, we must bring them into the open.

Second, the Supreme Court's recent decision has impaired our ability to prosecute terrorists through military commissions and has put in question the future of the CIA program. In its ruling on military commissions, the court determined that a provision of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3 applies to our war with al Qaeda. This article includes provisions that prohibit outrageous upon personal dignity and humiliating and degrading treatment. The problem is that these and other provisions of Common Article 3 are vague and undefined, and each could be interpreted in different ways by an American or foreign judges.

And some believe our military and intelligence personnel involved in capturing and questioning terrorists could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act simply for doing their jobs in a thorough and professional way.

This is unacceptable. Our military and intelligence personnel go face to face with the world's most dangerous men every day. They have risked their lives to capture some of the most brutal terrorists on earth, and they have worked day and night to find out what the terrorists know so we can stop new attacks. America owes our brave men and women some things in return; we owe them their (sic) thanks for saving lives and keeping America safe, and we owe them clear rules so they can continue to do their jobs and protect our people.

So I'm -- today I'm asking Congress to pass legislation that will clarify the rules for our personnel fighting the war on terror. First, I am asking Congress to list the specific recognizable offenses that would be considered crimes under the War Crimes Act so our personnel can know clearly what is prohibited in the handling of terrorist enemies.

Second, I'm asking that Congress make explicit that by following the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act, our personnel are fulfilling America's obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Third, I'm asking that Congress make it clear that captured terrorists cannot use the Geneva Conventions as a basis to sue our personnel in courts, in U.S. courts. The men and women who protect us should not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists because they're doing their jobs.

The need for this legislation is urgent. We need to ensure that those questioning terrorists can continue to do everything within the limits of the law to get information that can save American lives.

My administration will continue to work with the Congress to get this legislation enacted, but time is of the essence. Congress is in session just for a few more weeks, and passing this legislation ought to be the top priority. (Applause.)

As we work with Congress to pass a good bill, we will also consult with congressional leaders on how to ensure that the CIA program goes forward in a way that follows the law, that meets the national security needs of our country, and protects the brave men and women we ask to obtain information that will save innocent lives.

For the sake of our security, Congress needs to act and update our laws to meet the threats of this new era, and I know they will.

We're engaged in a global struggle, and the entire civilized world has a stake in its outcome. America is a nation of law, and as I work with Congress to strengthen and clarify our laws here at home, I will continue to work with members of the international community who have been our partners in this struggle. I've spoken with leaders of foreign governments and worked with them to address their concerns about Guantanamo and our detention policies. I'll continue to work with the international community to construct a common foundation to defend our nations and protect our freedoms.

Free nations have faced new enemies and adjusted to new threats before, and we have prevailed. Like the struggles of the last century, today's war on terror is, above all, a struggle for freedom and liberty. The adversaries are different, but the stakes in this war are the same. We're fighting for our way of life and our ability to live in freedom. We're fighting for the cause of humanity against those who seek to impose the darkness of tyranny and terror upon the entire world. And we're fighting for a peaceful future for our children and our grandchildren. May God bless you all.

End

    President Bush's Speech on Terrorism, NYT, 7.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/washington/06bush_transcript.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

FACTBOX-Details about al Qaeda detainees

Wed Sep 6, 2006 5:04 PM ET
Reuters

(Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Wednesday said 14 key terrorism suspects have been transferred to the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay. Following are details of five top detainees and what the U.S. government says they disclosed during interrogation:

* Abu Zubaydah - Palestinian, senior al Qaeda planner. Bush said Zubaydah, who was arrested in March 2002, revealed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the operational mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks. Bush said information from Zubaydah helped stop another U.S. attack and led to the arrest of an operative traveling to the United States. At the time of his capture, Zubaydah was trying to organize an attack in Israel.

* Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - Pakistani, known as KSM, who is suspected of being the driving force behind the September 11 attacks and the organizer of subsequent plots against U.S. and Western targets. Bush said Mohammed told interrogators that al Qaeda operatives planning to blow up U.S. buildings had been instructed to ensure the explosives went off high enough in the structures to prevent people trapped above from escaping out the windows. Bush said the information provided by KSM helped uncover al Qaeda's biological weapons program. KSM also said al Qaeda was trying to produce anthrax. KSM had also organized a plot to hijack a plane over the Pacific Ocean and crash it into a skyscraper on the U.S. West Coast and a plot in early 2003 to use a network of Pakistanis to smuggle explosives into New York and to target gas stations, railroad tracks and a bridge.

* Ramzi bin al Shaibah - Yemeni, also known in the West as Ramzi Binalshibh. He was a key facilitator for the September 11 attacks and a lead operative in a post-September 11 plot conceived by KSM to hijack aircraft and crash them into Heathrow Airport. KSM ordered him to recruit operatives for the Heathrow attack. While in custody, Bin al Shaibah identified four other operatives who were supposed to help carry out the plot.

* Walid bin Attash - Yemeni, also known as Khallad, was a key al Qaeda operative who helped mastermind the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Khallad helped KSM recruit Saudi hijackers for the Heathrow plot. Before his arrest, Khallad was helping plot simultaneous attacks on U.S. and western targets in Karachi, which never took place.

* Hambali - Indonesian, also known as Riduan Isamuddin, was a top member of Jemaah Islamiah, an Asian group linked to al Qaeda. Hambali was the main link between Jemaah Islamiah and al Qaeda from 2000 until his capture in 2003. Hambali helped plan the 2002 Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people and facilitated al Qaeda financing for the Jakarta Marriott Hotel bombing in 2003. Bush said Hambali admitted 17 Jemaah Islamiah operatives were being groomed at KSM's request for attacks inside the United States, possibly using airplanes.

    FACTBOX-Details about al Qaeda detainees, R, 6.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyid=2006-09-06T210247Z_01_N06286846_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L1-RelatedNews-3

FACTBOX-Key points on secret CIA prisons

Wed Sep 6, 2006 3:30 PM ET
Reuters

(Reuters) - President Bush on Wednesday announced the transfer of 14 top terrorism suspects from detention by the CIA to Defense Department custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Following are some key facts about secret CIA prisons and the Guantanamo prison:

* Up to now, the Bush administration had not acknowledged a secret CIA detention system for senior al Qaeda members including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

* The existence of CIA prisons was revealed last year by the Washington Post, which said prisons had operated in Eastern European countries and elsewhere in the world. The report sparked outrage worldwide and opened the United States to new accusations of torture.

* An investigation by Europe's main human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, said 20 mostly European countries including Poland and Romania colluded in a global spiders web of CIA prisons stretching from Asia to Guantanamo Bay.

* The administration insists interrogation techniques used were lawful, in accordance with the U.S. Constitution and that no one was tortured, but it will not reveal techniques. The International Committee of the Red Cross will be given access to the suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

* Fewer than 100 terrorism suspects have been held in CIA detention, and with the transfer of 14 to Guantanamo Bay none are currently in CIA custody, administration officials say. The others in the program were either sent back to their home countries, to another country, or to Guantanamo Bay.

* CIA interrogators are volunteers chosen for their maturity and judgment with an average age of 43, officials say.

* There are about 450 prisoners held at Guantanamo, which opened at a U.S. naval base on Cuba in January 2002. Three committed suicide and about 315 others have been released or transferred to other governments.

* Ten prisoners have been charged before the U.S. military war crimes tribunals with conspiring with al Qaeda, though none is charged with direct involvement in the September 11 attacks. The U.S. Supreme Court in June ruled the tribunals were illegal

    FACTBOX-Key points on secret CIA prisons, R, 6.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyid=2006-09-06T192940Z_01_N06469072_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L1-RelatedNews-5

FACTBOX-Pentagon prohibits some interrogation tactics

Wed Sep 6, 2006 2:27 PM ET
Reuters

(Reuters) - The Pentagon on Wednesday prohibited eight interrogation practices more than two years after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq burst into public. It also authorized three new methods. Following are details of those tactics, listed in the new Army Field Manual.

Interrogators may not:

-- force a detainee to be naked

-- force a detainee to perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner

-- use hoods or place sacks over a detainee's head or use duct tape over his or her eyes

-- beat or electrically shock or burn detainees or inflict other forms of physical pain

-- use "water boarding," which simulates drowning

-- perform mock executions

-- deprive detainees of necessary food, water and medical care

-- use dogs in any aspect of interrogations.

Interrogators may:

-- engage in "Mutt and Jeff," or good-cop, bad-cop interrogation tactics

-- use "false flag," portraying themselves as someone other than American interrogators

-- use "separation" to keep unlawful enemy combatants apart from each other so that they can not coordinate their stories. This technique can be used only with "unlawful enemy combatants," not traditional prisoners of war, and requires special, high-level approval. The Pentagon said separation "does not mean solitary confinement."

    FACTBOX-Pentagon prohibits some interrogation tactics, R, 6.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyid=2006-09-06T182731Z_01_N06466268_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L1-RelatedNews-4

Bush outlines Gitmo trial plan, transfer of CIA-held terror suspects

Updated 9/6/2006 2:42 PM ET
USA Today
From staff and wire reports

WASHINGTON — Fourteen senior members of al-Qaeda, including the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, have been transfered from CIA custody to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay Cuba, President Bush said today as he outlined plans to try prisoners held in the war on terror.
The announcement is the first time the administration has acknowledged the existence of CIA prisons. The United States currently holds about 445 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Many have been held without charges for more than four years.

The 14 include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind, and Abu Zubaydah, a top lieutenant to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Bush said. The list also includes Riduan Isamuddin, known additionally as Hambali, who was suspected of being Jemaah Islamiyah's main link to al-Qaeda and the mastermind of a string of deadly bomb attacks in Indonesia until his 2003 arrest in Thailand.

"They are in custody so they cannot murder our people," Bush said in a White House address in which he defended the administation's policies on prisoners in the war on terror.

"In this new war, the most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves," he said. That has required the United States to hold prisoners in several locations, including military prisons near battlefieds, in Guantanamo Bay and a "small number" in secret, he said.

Defending the program, the president said the questioning of these detainees has provided critical intelligence information about terrorist activities that have enabled officials to prevent attacks not only in the United States, but Europe and other countries. He said the program has been reviewed by administration lawyers and been the subject of strict oversight from within the CIA.

Bush would not detail the type of interrogation techniques that are used through the program, saying they are tough but do not constitute torture.

"This program has helped us to take potential mass murderers off the streets before they have a chance to kill," the president said. "It is invaluable to America and our allies.'

Bush said he was sending to Congress legislation to authorize the creation of military commissions to try enemy combatants for war crimes. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration's military tribunal system to try the prisoners is illegal. The court said the tribunals lacked congressional authorization and did not meet U.S. military or international justice standards.

That system would have allowed the defendants, most of whom were captured in Afghanistan, to be barred from their own trials. It also would have limited their access to evidence and allowed testimony from interrogations.

"We intend to prosecute these men as appropriate for these crimes," Bush said.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said the administration would propose trying enemy combatants based on military court martial procedures, although with a number of key changes such as admitting hearsay evidence, limiting rights against self-incrimination before a trial and limiting defendants' access to classified information.

Gonzales also told lawmakers the administration's plan might allow testimony obtained by coercion if it was reliable and useful.

Democrats have said those provisions would leave the new trial system vulnerable to another Supreme Court rebuke.

Senate leaders were briefed on the legislative plan Tuesday night. It already has met resistance from lawmakers who say it would set a dangerous precedent.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said he and Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina were circulating their version of legislation, which adheres more closely to military court martial procedures.

Warner's spokesman John Ullyot said there were "some sticking points with the administration" on it.

The House Armed Services Committee also was set to release its version of the bill in hopes of producing final legislation before Congress breaks in early October to campaign for November congressional elections.

The administration also plans to brief lawmakers today on a new Army field manual that would set guidelines for the treatment of military detainees. Congress passed legislation late last year requiring military interrogators to follow the manual, which abided by Geneva Conventions standards.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the new Army manual "reflects the department's continued commitment to humane, professional and effective detention operations and builds on lessons learned and a review of detention operations."

The new manual specifically forbids intimidating prisoners with military dogs, putting hoods over their heads and simulating the sensation of drowning with a procedure called "water boarding," one defense official told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the manual had not yet been released.

Sixteen of the manual's 19 interrogation techniques were covered in the old manual and three new ones were added on the basis of lessons learned in the war on terrorism, the official said, adding only that the techniques are "not more aggressive" than those in the manual used before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said from the start of the war that prisoners are treated humanely and in a manner "consistent with Geneva Conventions."

But Bush decided shortly after 9/11 that since it is not a conventional war, "enemy combatants" captured in the fight against al-Qaeda would not be considered prisoners of war and thus would not be afforded the protections of the convention.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Armed Services Committee Democrat, said after being briefed on the proposed changes that the Army "looks as though it's moving in the right direction."

Congress last year passed a law championed by McCain to prohibit cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment or punishment of prisoners and to create uniform standards for treating them.

It spells out appropriate conduct and procedures on a wide range of military issues and applies to all the armed services, not just the Army. It doesn't cover the CIA, which also has come under investigation for mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan and for allegedly keeping suspects in secret prisons elsewhere around the world since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Contributing: USA TODAY's David Jackson; Associated Press

    Bush outlines Gitmo trial plan, transfer of CIA-held terror suspects, UT, 6.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-06-guantanamo_x.htm

The Other Victims of Sept. 11

September 6, 2006
The New York Times
Editorial

Nobody knows exactly how many people rushed to help after the attack on the World Trade Center five years ago. The working estimate is 40,000, and it includes not only New York firefighters, police officers, ironworkers and neighborhood volunteers but also communications workers from Chicago and rescuers from California. They came from across the country to work on “the pile,” as the smoldering ruins were known, or at Fresh Kills on Staten Island, where what remained of the twin towers was eventually moved for closer examination.

Now, many of these generous people, people who had no trouble passing a physical on Sept. 10, are paying with their health. Because they failed to wear or sometimes even obtain the proper breathing masks, and because they were misled by assurances that the toxic fumes were not dangerous, many are now sick or even dying. It is time for all those politicians who are waving the flag this month over Sept. 11 to start providing care for the living victims of that day.

The evidence of problems for these workers has grown steadily since 2001. The latest survey by the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City estimates that nearly seven of 10 people who responded after Sept. 11 have suffered new or worsening lung problems. The center’s survey of about 9,500 people found that those who responded earliest were now the ones suffering the worst.

Recent initiatives from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and state leaders are welcome, even five years late. It would be easy to criticize them for being slow in recognizing the need, but the real failure has been in Washington. This is a national problem, requiring federal answers. The terrorists attacked the United States, not New York. Understanding that, people came from across the country to help. Their medical costs and compensation for long-term disabilities must be handled through a national plan that treats everyone, from illegal immigrant cleaners to firefighters to physicians, with equal respect.

Yet until recently, Congress and the Bush administration have barely managed to squeeze out enough money for surveys to determine the extent of illnesses related to ground zero. A scant $52 million has been set aside for medical care, but so far, none of that money has reached a real patient. Even Dr. John Howard, who was appointed in February as the administration’s coordinator for 9/11 health efforts, recognized the frustration. He said of those waiting for medical help, “I can’t blame them for thinking, ‘Where were you when we needed you?’ ”

They still need help. Congress and the White House need to make sure there is enough money to continue monitoring those from around the country who were caught in the toxic dust. And they need to make money available quickly for responders who grow sicker with each Sept. 11.

    The Other Victims of Sept. 11, NYT, 6.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/opinion/06wed1.html

City Announces Plan to Deal With Health Problems Relating to Ground Zero

September 6, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANE CARDWELL

Facing criticism for its response to health problems related to the Sept. 11 terror attack, the city is creating a wide-ranging program to evaluate, treat and monitor those who may have been sickened by their exposure to hazardous materials at ground zero, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday.

“There is still much that we do not know about the full nature and long-term health effects of the destruction of the World Trade Center, but we do know that some people, particularly those who were caught in the dust cloud, have experienced serious physical and psychological distress,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

The new program, he said, would “more effectively meet the current and future needs of those who unselfishly gave to our city in the days of our greatest need.”

Under the new plan, which comes just a few days after the administration announced guidelines for doctors in diagnosing and treating illnesses related to ground zero, anyone who was exposed to dust or fumes will be able to seek medical and mental health screening and treatment at a World Trade Center Environmental Health Center at Bellevue Hospital Center.

The center, which is scheduled to open by January, will offer its services at no charge to residents of Manhattan or Brooklyn, office workers, city employees and volunteers, and people involved in debris removal and cleanup.

The city has pledged $16 million to the Health and Hospitals Corporation over the next five years to develop and staff the clinic, which will be able to assess and treat up to 6,000 new patients. The new center is intended to fill a gap in treatment for those who lack health insurance or do not qualify for other programs.

City officials said that they would also expand the World Trade Center Unit within the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to increase its ability to monitor a range of potential health conditions related to ground zero, strengthen communication efforts with patients, doctors and the public, and extend mental health services to those who needed them.

Mr. Bloomberg said that he would continue to lobby the state and federal governments to provide financing for the monitoring and treatment programs, but that it was the city’s responsibility to protect the health of New Yorkers.

The city has created its own health registry and has offered screening and treatment to some of those affected, but with more data coming in and the fifth anniversary of the attack approaching, Mr. Bloomberg said it was a good time to re-examine and revamp the city’s approach.

Mr. Bloomberg also said that he had asked Edward Skyler, deputy mayor for administration, and Linda I. Gibbs, deputy mayor for health and human services, to study coordination among all city agencies that interact with people potentially affected by World Trade Center-related illnesses. They are to report their findings and recommend improvements to Mr. Bloomberg within three months.

    City Announces Plan to Deal With Health Problems Relating to Ground Zero, NYT, 6.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/nyregion/06bloomberg.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Illness Persisting in 9/11 Workers, Big Study Finds

September 6, 2006
The New York Times
By ANTHONY DePALMA

The largest health study yet of the thousands of workers who labored at ground zero shows that the impact of the rescue and recovery effort on their health has been more widespread and persistent than previously thought, and is likely to linger far into the future.

The study, released yesterday by doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center, is expected to erase any lingering doubts about the connection between dust from the trade center and numerous diseases that the workers have reported suffering. It is also expected to increase pressure on the federal government to provide health care for sick workers who do not have health insurance.

Roughly 70 percent of nearly 10,000 workers tested at Mount Sinai from 2002 to 2004 reported that they had new or substantially worsened respiratory problems while or after working at ground zero.

The rate is similar to that found among a smaller sample of 1,100 such workers released by Mount Sinai in 2004, but the scale of the current study gives it far more weight; it also indicates significant problems that were not reflected in the original study.

For example, one-third of the patients in the new study showed diminished lung capacity in tests designed to measure the amount of air a person can exhale. Among nonsmokers, 28 percent were found to have some breathing impairment, more than double the rate for nonsmokers in the general population.

The study is among the first to show that many of the respiratory ailments — like sinusitis and asthma, and gastrointestinal problems related to them — initially reported by ground zero workers persisted or grew worse in the years after 9/11.

Most of the ground zero workers in the study who reported trouble breathing while working there were still having those problems up to two and a half years later, an indication that the illnesses are becoming chronic and are not likely to improve over time. Some of them worked without face masks, or with flimsy ones. “There should no longer be any doubt about the health effects of the World Trade Center disaster,” said Dr. Robin Herbert, co-director of Mount Sinai’s World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program. “Our patients are sick, and they will need ongoing care for the rest of their lives.”

Dr. Herbert called the findings, which will be published tomorrow in Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, “very worrisome,” especially because 40 percent of those who went to Mount Sinai for medical screening did not have health insurance, and will thus not get proper medical care. The Mount Sinai results found, as studies done by the New York City Fire Department also have, that those who showed up in the first hours and days after the twin towers collapsed have the worst medical problems. Seventy percent of the workers in the study arrived at the site between Sept. 11 and Sept. 13.

Mount Sinai’s screening and monitoring program, which excludes New York firefighters, who are tested in a separate program, covers law enforcement officers, transit workers, telecommunications workers, volunteers and others who worked at ground zero and at the Fresh Kills landfill, where debris was taken.

Members of the New York Congressional delegation, who have been fighting to get the federal government to recognize the scope of the health problem created by toxic materials at ground zero, saw the Mount Sinai study as proof that the federal government has been too slow to address the issue.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who participated in the news conference at Mount Sinai yesterday morning, along with Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn B. Maloney, said that the results made the need for federal assistance for treatment more critical than ever.

“This study, I hope, puts to rest any doubt about what is happening to those who were exposed,” said Mrs. Clinton, who was among those who pushed for $52 million in federal funding for health treatment for the ground zero workers, the first treatment money provided by the Bush administration. “This report underscores the need for continued long-term monitoring and treatment options,” she said.

Several members of the delegation are scheduled to meet in Washington tomorrow morning with Michael O. Levitt, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to press for more aid.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, speaking at a news conference at City Hall yesterday, questioned the conclusiveness of the study, saying that statistics could suggest a connection between events, but not prove a direct link.

“I don’t believe that you can say specifically a particular problem came from this particular event,” he said. Nonetheless, Mr. Bloomberg announced that the city would create a screening and treatment program for anyone exposed to the trade center dust or fumes.

The Mount Sinai study, released yesterday, which covers 9,442 workers who met the screening program’s eligibility criteria and agreed to have their health data included, focused on respiratory problems because doctors believe those illnesses are the first to surface. Of those studied, 46.5 percent reported symptoms like chest tightness, shortness of breath and dry cough.

And 62.5 percent reported upper-respiratory symptoms like sinusitis and nose and throat irritations. (The study did not include cases of cancer reported by workers and their relatives.)

The doctors said that the persistent nature of the respiratory symptoms raised troubling questions about the workers’ long-term health. Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, a founder of the screening program at Mount Sinai and an author of the new study, said that the toxic nature of the trade center dust had led doctors to conclude that there would be serious health issues for years to come, especially for workers who were exposed to the heaviest concentrations in the early days after the terrorist attack.

“This was extremely toxic dust,” Dr. Landrigan said, noting that some samples showed the dust to be as caustic as drain cleaner. The dust also contained innumerable tiny shards of glass, which could get lodged in the lungs, and a stew of toxic and carcinogenic substances, like asbestos, that could potentially lead to cancer decades from now.

With the expanding dimensions of 9/11 health problems, concern is also growing about the cost of health care for responders, particularly the 40 percent who either never had health insurance or who lost employer-provided coverage after they became too sick to work.

Dr. Landrigan declined to estimate what the total cost might be, saying only “it will be very expensive.”

Dr. John Howard, who was named the federal 9/11 health coordinator in February, has already said that the $52 million the federal government has appropriated for treatment late last year is inadequate. He said in an interview yesterday that the new study will very likely mean that the gap between funds and the need for them is going to grow.

But he said the solid medical data from Mount Sinai would help him make the case that more needs to be done. He said that there was little doubt that if a third of the people in the study showed abnormal breathing, similar problems exist among the entire population of 40,000 rescue and recovery workers.

“These are just the kind of facts that are important in making a logical argument that the funding needs to be adjusted,” said Dr. Howard, who is also the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Mount Sinai officials said they would release a study of mental health effects on ground zero workers soon. They also are planning to begin a statistical program this fall to examine the occurrence of cancer, lung diseases and other ailments among that group. That information will then be compared to national rates to see if there is a higher-than-expected incidence of those diseases.

Diane Cardwell contributed reporting for this article.

    Illness Persisting in 9/11 Workers, Big Study Finds, NYT, 6.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/nyregion/06health.html?hp&ex=1157601600&en=8484e7fccbd3deb5&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Officials Slow to Hear Claims of 9/11 Illnesses

September 5, 2006
The New York Times
By ANTHONY DePALMA

Five years after the World Trade Center towers collapsed in a vortex of dust and ash, government officials have only recently begun to take a role in the care of many of the 40,000 responders and recovery workers who were made sick by toxic materials at ground zero.

But for many of the ill and those worried about becoming sick, government actions — coming from officials whom they see as more concerned about the politics of the moment than the health of those who responded to the emergency — are too limited and too late.

The delay in assistance along with a lack of rigorous inquiry into the magnitude of the environmental disaster unleashed that day is all the more disturbing, they say, as the country faces a future in which such disasters could happen again.

Dr. John Howard, who was appointed by the Bush administration in February to coordinate the federal government’s 9/11 health efforts, readily admits that costly delays and missed opportunities may have shattered responders’ trust in the government.

“I can understand the frustration and the anger, and most importantly, the concern about their future,” Dr. Howard said in an interview. “I can’t blame them for thinking, ‘Where were you when we needed you?’ ”

A review of recent federal initiatives reveals a pattern of the government’s not fully delivering what was promised. Dr. Howard’s office, for example, has no full-time staff members assigned to 9/11 health issues. For the first time, money for treatment — $52 million — has been included in the federal budget, but even the officials responsible concede that it is not nearly enough. And only last week did New York City release clinical guidelines that could help doctors properly diagnose 9/11-related illnesses.

“They seem to be running from the people who are sick, not standing with them and helping them,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat who represents parts of Manhattan and Queens and has been critical of federal efforts at ground zero. “And that is just plain wrong.”

One of the thorniest problems, and one reason officials have given for the long delay in responding, is the difficulty of linking the dust and smoke to specific symptoms and diseases. Making a medical diagnosis for illnesses related to toxic substance exposure requires extensive and sophisticated tests. Simply measuring the toxicity of the dust has proved to be controversial.

And state workers’ compensation systems, designed to handle common workplace injuries like broken arms, are not well suited for determining an illness that may take months or years to emerge.

Even so, clinical evidence of a serious health problem surfaced not long after the attack. Initial studies of firefighters found that many had developed “trade center cough,” a stubborn hacking that caused them to cough up soot and dust particles.

A large-scale medical study came out in 2004, when the Mount Sinai Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine reported that more than half of the first 1,138 workers it had examined had serious respiratory problems.

Workers also suffered gastrointestinal problems, acid reflux, asthma and mental stress. (Mount Sinai is scheduled to release a far larger study today, and it is expected to show serious ailments among many more workers.)

Successive studies through the years have found that the health hazards were more persistent than first thought.

A Fire Department study released this year showed that firefighters had suffered a loss in lung capacity in the first year after the attack equal to what they might have lost over 12 years of normal duty. The department has also found that the incidence of sarcoidosis, a serious lung scarring disease, rose to five times the expected rate in the first two years after 9/11.

An initial survey released in April of the 71,437 responders, residents and downtown workers who signed up for the World Trade Center Health Registry, run by the city and the federal government, showed that more than half said that they had experienced new or worsening respiratory problems since 9/11. And a Red Cross survey in May found that two-thirds of the responders and survivors who sought help in coping with emotional distress believe that grief still interferes with their lives.

One death — that of 34-year-old Detective James Zadroga in January — has been formally linked by a coroner’s report to lung disease caused by trade center dust. The families of at least six other responders who died believe those deaths were also linked to toxic substance exposure at ground zero.

When Dr. Howard was appointed a few weeks after Detective Zadroga died, many in the city were relieved to have a federal czar in charge.

But Dr. Howard, who was trained as a pulmonary specialist and is the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, has not assigned a single one of his 1,300 employees to work full time on ground zero medical issues, though about 20 work on such issues part time. And though the institute has a budget of about $285 million, he has not received any additional money to address the complex medical issues involved.

“I’m a czar without a budget,” he said.

Meanwhile, the need for treatment assistance has grown as more people have become ill. While many rescue and recovery workers are covered by their own health insurance, that coverage may become inadequate in the years ahead. Many union workers, for example, can lose their coverage if they become too sick to work, while most illegal immigrants who worked there had no insurance.

Some 16,000 union workers and volunteers have been examined through the screening and monitoring program run by Mount Sinai, which began in 2002 with $11.4 million in federal money and was extended in 2004 for five years with an additional $81 million. (Information about the program is available at www.wtcexams.org.)

But until last year, there was almost no money available for treatment through the screening program. With $9.4 million from the Red Cross, Mount Sinai doctors were able to treat 2,050 responders last year, offering them therapy, medications and medical procedures in some cases.

Ms. Maloney and other members of the New York Congressional delegation, in pushing for more federal aid, succeeded last December in getting the Bush administration to restore $125 million in unused workers’ compensation assistance that it had threatened to take back.

Of the $125 million, about $50 million was set aside for future workers’ compensation awards and about $52 million was split equally between two treatment programs — one for firefighters and another for injured police officers, union workers and other responders, but not office workers or neighborhood residents.

A working group appointed by Dr. Howard has not yet determined which diseases will be eligible for treatment with the new money or whether the money will cover hospital stays as well as office visits. But he recognizes that it is not nearly enough to cover New York’s needs, let alone the national treatment program he intends to start.

“You don’t have to go to cancers years from now, or asbestosis, to be able to say ‘Gee, John, how far do you think this money is going to go?’ ” Dr. Howard said. “I don’t think it will go that far.”

Besides the lack of money for treatment, the absence of timely public health information made it more likely that doctors who initially saw sick responders would be unprepared to treat what they found.

Doctors at Mount Sinai have said that up to a third of the workers they examined were taking improper medications because their doctors had misdiagnosed their symptoms. Severe sinusitis, for example, was treated with antibiotics even though that condition might have been caused by chemical burns from the caustic dust.

Yet it was not until Thursday, days before the fifth anniversary, that the city issued diagnostic guidelines for the unusual illnesses linked to ground zero dust, despite urging by medical specialists and labor leaders as early as December 2001.

“This is a significant failure of the public health system,” said Micki Siegel de Hernandez, health and safety director for District 1 of the Communications Workers of America. Ms. Siegel de Hernandez contended that the city delayed releasing the guidelines because it was worried that acknowledging the extent of the health problems might increase its legal liability.

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, commissioner of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said in an interview that the city had decided it made more sense for the doctors at Mount Sinai’s screening program to put guidelines on their Web site because they were seeing the workers while the city’s medical staff was not.

Mount Sinai did publish guidelines in early 2002, but they did not carry the weight of an official city advisory and had limited impact.

“We lost opportunities by not disseminating guidelines widely or at least putting out a caution,” Dr. Howard said.

Dr. Frieden agreed that if they had been released sooner, the guidelines might have helped clinicians make more accurate diagnoses.

“Would I rather have had the guidelines out sooner? Sure,” he said this summer. “But it’s important to get this right.” He said the delay had nothing to do with concerns about the city’s legal liability for sick responders.

About 8,000 responders have sued the city and the big contractors who worked for the city in the recovery operations, charging them with reckless disregard for workers’ health. The city has asked a federal court in Manhattan to dismiss the suit.

Although five years have passed, many questions about the environmental disaster at ground zero remain unanswered. To this day, the government has never precisely measured where the dust went, information that could help determine the health impact on residents near ground zero. And it is unclear whether cancers, possibly linked to the toxic materials, will arise in future years, or if some of the sick will get better.

For now, among the sick and their doctors, the faltering and delayed governmental response raises unsettling questions about whether the country is prepared to handle a similar catastrophe.

“I think of that every time I come to New York,” Dr. Howard said. “Given this betrayal of trust, this lack of being there at the time and all these other things, I don’t know. We can try with what we have, but it certainly is a different situation when you do it five years later.”

    Officials Slow to Hear Claims of 9/11 Illnesses, NYT, 5.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/nyregion/05health.html?hp&ex=1157515200&en=329f137739f9f06f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Four 9/11 widows pour their grief into a book

Posted 9/4/2006 10:51 PM ET
USA TODAY
By Bob Minzesheimer

NEW YORK — Lunch with "the girls," as they call themselves, begins with their traditional, glass-clinking, hearty toast: "To the boys!"
The boys were their husbands, three brokers and an investment banker, all killed at the World Trade Center nearly five years ago.

Ten months later, in July 2002, their widows, none older than 40, met for the first time for drinks. They stayed for dinner and eventually formed a club that, as they say, no one wanted to be a member of.

They called it the WC, short for Widows Club.

They cried together, laughed together, celebrated each other's birthdays and went on vacations together. They even learned to surf together. Eventually, they wrote a book together.

That memoir, Love You, Mean It (Hyperion, $23.95), is what brings the four women to lunch at their regular table at a Manhattan steakhouse, The Grill at Smith & Wollensky's.

They sit near a plaque on the wall that commemorates one of the husbands, Bart Ruggiere, who loved to eat there.

Their book is not political, nor bitter. It's mostly about emotions, about the worst of grief and the best of friendship. It deals with a widow's questions: When do you remove your wedding ring? When do you erase your husband's voice from your answering machine? How do you find a new life without forgetting the old one?

The book celebrates the lives and husbands they had before 9/11. It describes their pain and feelings of guilt, shares the awkwardness of dating again and ends with a shared belief that there's hope after grief.

At lunch, they complete one another's thoughts. It's conversation as a four-way relay race:

"Our husbands were so much alike. People wanted to be around them," Julia Collins says.

"They were handsome, generous and fun," Claudia Gerbasi says.

"They appreciated life," Patricia Carrington says.

"They lived well, every single day," Ann Haynes says.

"We often say we should have met before," Collins says.

"But this was meant to be," Carrington adds.

Collins, 44, who works in marketing for the National Football League, says "our ringleader" is Gerbasi, 37, a sales director for Cole Haan, the shoe company. Gerbasi had met each of the others separately and invited them for after-work drinks 10 months after 9/11.

Her husband, Ruggiere, sat next to Ward Haynes at Cantor Fitzgerald, a firm that lost 658 employees on 9/11. He also knew Tommy Collins and Jeremy "Caz" Carrington, who worked in other firms.

"This was my solace," she says she thought. "Bart had brought the Widows Club together."

When they first met, they talked and drank for two hours, then decided they'd better eat.

As Carrington, 39, a bank vice president, recalls, "At that time, I was barely going through the motions, staying functional; I wasn't allowing myself to operate beyond the immediate demands of get up, get dressed, go to work, come home."

That first night, she was relieved "not to have to answer the question, 'How are you doing?' I never knew how to answer it." The other widows didn't ask.

Haynes, 44, a financial planner from Rye, N.Y., worried that she would be a "fish out of water." Of the four, she was the only one with children — a teen and two preschoolers — and the only one who lived in the suburbs, not New York City. But that night, she remembers feeling, "They were my new friends, and we were going to make life a bit more bearable, somehow."

They also shared news: who had heard what from the police. Only Tommy Collins' body was recovered in the ruins. The widows knew nothing about their husbands' last moments.

Only Gerbasi had gotten a phone call. "A plane hit my building," her husband told her. "I'm OK. This place is crazy. I'm getting out of here. I've gotta go." She says that "ever since the first time Bart told me he loved me, we never ended a conversation without saying, 'Love you.' All of a sudden, I got a bad feeling."

When the Widows Club first met, "a bond was forged." As they write: "There were no awkward pauses between us. No one felt sorry for anyone. No one said, 'It's going to be OK.' "

A year later, friends began suggesting that they should write a book. Each had kept a journal after 9/11. Collins says it was a "way to find a voice for all the conversations we were still having with our husbands."

Gerbasi took a writing class, thinking "it would be therapeutic." Regardless of the assignment, she'd write about her husband, until the teacher suggested she write about something else. "I wrote about my dead father instead," she says. "I showed her!"

The idea of a book seemed "pie in the sky," as Haynes puts it, until a birthday party in September 2003 for Gerbasi's new boyfriend. The widows happened to meet a writer who put them in touch with an agent and, as Collins says, "the whole thing snowballed."

By then, Gerbasi says, "we didn't want to overwhelm other people by always talking about our husbands."

Their publisher helped them find a professional writer, Eve Charles. She saw her job as organizing the material to tell a collective story while preserving the individual voice of each widow.

The widows met with Charles every Monday night for about a year. Weekly writing assignments were due by Thursday: Write about 9/11. Write about meeting your husband. Write about your dreams.

Charles would edit their writing by the following Monday. The widows would read it aloud, ask questions and prompt more memories.

"Sometimes we'd all break down crying, and Eve would wonder if she had gone too far," Collins says. "But this was our way of grieving. The writing became part of our grieving."

Each widow dealt differently with widowhood.

Haynes stopped wearing her wedding and engagement rings. "Just another step in the slow and painful acceptance of the completely unacceptable," she says.

Collins still wears her wedding band and "Tommy's wedding ring (which was found at Ground Zero) on my right hand."

Haynes says she still has "Ward's voice on my cellphone. Some people love it, some hate it, some find it wonderful to call just to hear him."

Collins kept her husband's voice on her answering machine until it was erased during the 2003 blackout in New York: "Tommy's way of saying, 'Stop freaking people out by leaving my voice on the machine.' "

Other 9/11 widows have written memoirs. Let's Roll! by Lisa Beamer, whose husband, Todd, was on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania, was a best seller in 2002.

Kristen Breitweiser's book, Wake-Up Call: The Political Education of a 9/11 Widow, describes how she and three other suburban housewives, dubbed "The Jersey Girls," became political activists, pushed for an independent commission to investigate 9/11 and criticized federal officials for withholding information.

The Widows Club did none of that, but the women admire those who did.

Gerbasi writes: "I was so grateful to those who were getting involved ... but I felt I couldn't cope with anything else right now. ... I wanted to do what I could, but I could only do so much."

At lunch, they're asked about Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, who wrote of the Jersey Girls: "I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much."

After an awkward silence, Haynes says: "What she said, whether she believes it or not, was used to publicize her book. To attack other people like that, it's just sad."

And what about the war in Iraq?

More silence, until Collins says, "No comment, I guess."

Gerbasi adds: "That's not part of our story. We all have our own political opinions, but it's never been a contentious point for us."

Their book title comes from an offhand comment Collins made during their first joint vacation in Arizona: "Love you, mean it," which in the club's e-mails was shortened to LUMI. "The message was clear," they write. "Love is a gift. Share it."

The book ends in the glow of Gerbasi's wedding in 2004, at which her new husband, John Donovan, toasted "the boys — Bart, Ward, Tommy and Caz."

Collins says, "For the first time, I let myself believe that a widow could love again and that her new husband would accept her loss and love her more because of it."

Since then, Haynes has quit her job and gotten married.

Collins is engaged and hoping to adopt a girl from China.

Carrington quit her job, spent the summer in Italy, is taking classes in Italian and the Bible this fall, and is "figuring out what to do next."

Next week, the Widows Club will attend the fifth anniversary ceremony at what was the World Trade Center. "It will be emotional and draining," Gerbasi says, "but I could never imagine being anywhere else that morning or with anyone else."

Carrington adds: "I feel stronger this year. Each year provides a new perspective, one of deep sadness but of resilience to live our lives in the spirit that (the boys) chose to live their lives. Every day, every year, hold invaluable lessons for all of us. Don't take this gift of life for granted.

"Those 3,000 men and women would love to be alive. Of course the sadness will inevitably take hold and there will be unbearable weeping, but tears are the price of love."

At lunch, nearly five years after 9/11, there's a lot more laughter than tears.

The widows tear up only after a chance encounter at the restaurant with a Marine whose photo from Iraq is framed on the wall.

Maj. Dave Andersen, a New Yorker who's about to retire from the military, says he was deployed in the recovery effort at Ground Zero and later served in Afghanistan and Iraq. He tells the women that he has never met a 9/11 widow before, thanks them and says, "You're the reason I do what I do."

The WC fights back its tears.

    Four 9/11 widows pour their grief into a book, UT, 4.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2006-09-04-9-11-widow-book_x.htm

A digital snapshot of 9/11 takes shape on the Internet

Updated 9/4/2006 10:00 PM ET
USA Today
By Alex Newman

When Mark Permann slipped on his Polar S610 heart monitor for a morning run across the Brooklyn Bridge on Sept. 11, 2001, the watchlike device recorded more than the beating of his heart.

A fever chart created from the monitor's data shows Permann's heart rate spiking when he heard and saw airplanes hit the World Trade Center.

"The fact that you sort of see the planes hitting in my heart rate, I thought was just kind of amazing," says Permann, of New York's Upper East Side. "This is a picture of what was going on inside someone's body."

After sharing the chart with friends, Permann, now 36, uploaded the image to the September 11 Digital Archive in August 2002.

Permann's heart rate chart is one of more than 150,000 pieces of history uploaded to the Digital Archive, an online collection of photos, stories, e-mails, video clips and animations. The pioneer project is collecting history not through traditional oral interviews and written documents but with bits and bytes.

"We've ended up collecting things that are more of a private nature, things you'd find not so much on the Web, but on people's hard drives," says Tom Scheinfeldt, assistant director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

The still-growing archive launched in January 2002 with the aim of collecting 1,000 stories. By September 2002, 90,000 stories, photos and other artifacts, such as Permann's heart rate, were submitted.

Researchers believe the variety of testimony and individual stories could ultimately make history more democratic, Scheinfeldt says.

"I think for the history of 9/11 and the history of (Hurricane) Katrina, I think it's much less going to be the history of George Bush's experience of 9/11 and much more the experience of you and me," he says.

Other digital history projects, made up mostly of text and photos, have asked the public to upload memories of World War II (bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar) and the first Macintosh computer (folklore.org).

"I do think that digital media has transformed to some great extent the future of what collecting, archiving and documenting a historical event is all about," says Josh Brown, executive director of the American Social History Project at City University of New York and a co-executive producer of the 9/11 archive.

Brendan Chellis, a computer server engineer at Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield on the 30th floor of the World Trade Center One, was walking toward the building when the glass revolving doors shattered from the impact of the first plane. He ran into the chaos of Lower Manhattan and finally returned home to Roosevelt Island about seven hours later.

That night he wrote a long e-mail and sent it to family and friends, who forwarded his message to more people. He got e-mails back from people he didn't know. Chellis saved the e-mails and a 4,800-word narrative he wrote about two months later. He uploaded the story to the Digital Archive in July 2002.

"I wrote it for myself and for close relatives, close friends," says Chellis, 40. "I really wanted people to know what it was like to be there."

Creators from George Mason and the City University of New York partnered with the Sonic Memorial Project, an audio database, and took content donations from other collections. In 2003, the Library of Congress acquired the contents of the September 11 Digital Archive to add to its 9/11 collection.

Jan Ramirez, chief curator and director of collections at the World Trade Center Memorial Museum, considers the Digital Archive itself part of the history of 9/11.

"It's a witness to the global phenomenon of global information sharing," Ramirez says.

Scheinfeldt says the archive is another example of user-created websites such as MySpace or Wikipedia.

"We weren't historians on high in the ivory tower," he says. "We were more saying to them, 'Come write the history of 9/11' in much the same way MySpace says, 'Come build this website.' "

In the months after 9/11, University of Southern California law professor Mary Dudziak crawled through the hundreds of photos in the archive as part of research for September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment?, a 2003 collection of essays she edited.

"It's as if you walked into this unbelievable library of oral history," Dudziak says. "It's as if you have everyone at Pearl Harbor sitting down and writing a letter and it all goes to one place."

    A digital snapshot of 9/11 takes shape on the Internet, UT, 4.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-04-sept11-archive_x.htm

The war on terror, five years on: an era of constant warfare

Published: 04 September 2006
The Independent
By Tom Coghlan in Kabul and Kim Sengupta
 

Five years ago this week, the Taliban's al-Qa'ida allies made final preparations to launch devastating attacks on America that would precipitate the "war on terror," the US led invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent invasion of Iraq.

Far from ending terrorism, George Bush's tactics of using overwhelming military might to fight extremism appear to have rebounded, spawning an epidemic of global terrorism that has claimed an estimated 72,265 lives since 2001, most of them Iraqi civilians.

The rest, some 30,626, according to official US figures, have been killed in a combination of terror attacks and counter-insurgency actions by the US and its allies. The figures were compiled by the US based National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (Mipt).

A US led-invasion swept away the Taliban regime in a matter of weeks, and did the same to Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party in 2003, but far from bringing stability and democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, the outcome has been one of constant warfare. Yesterday hundreds of Nato troops, backed by warplanes and helicopter gunships, were involved in the offensive on the area, southwest of Kandahar, that has been a centre of Taliban resistance.

Nato said more than 200 Taliban fighters were killed in the fierce fighting in which four Canadian soldiers also died. Eighty Taliban fighters were captured.

The district where the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, was born, south-west of Kandahar, is again under Taliban control, a situation mirrored across large swaths of the south of the country. The government of Hamid Karzai clings on to the cities of the south while Nato forces in Kandahar and Helmand are locked in an all-out war.

In Punjwai and Jerai districts south-west of Kandahar, as many as 1,500 Taliban fighters have been holding off repeated attempts by Afghan and Canadian soldiers to dislodge them since May. Their resistance has marked a new phase in the growing Taliban insurgency, an evolution from the hit-and-run raids by groups of eight to 15 fighters that characterised the attacks in the south previously to large bodies of fighters taking and holding territory.

Operation Medusa, the latest attempt to dislodge them, began on Saturday and involves some 2,000 troops. Highway 1, which links Kandahar to Lashkargar, has been cut since June. Yesterday Nato forces placed a ban on civilian movement along the road as helicopters and aircraft together with artillery pounded suspected Taliban positions.

In Iraq, three and a half years after the invasion, the situation remains equally dire and the numbers of Iraqi casualtieshas soared by 51 per cent according to US figures. Some 3,000 civilians are now dying every month in Iraq the Pentagon says.

President Bush has shifted his approach in an effort to shore up faltering public support for the war. No longer does he stress the benefits of securing peace in Iraq, but rather he is laying out the peril of a failure.

Observers of the President say that in recent weeks his language has become increasingly grim as he details what he believes would be the consequences of US withdrawal. "We can allow the Middle East to continue on its course ­ on the course it was headed before September the 11th," he said in a speech last week. "And a generation from now, our children will face a region dominated by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. Or we can stop that from happening, by rallying the world to confront the ideology of hate and give the people of the Middle East a future of hope."

Away from such rhetoric, the situation on the ground in Iraq only appears to be getting worse. According to a new, grim assessment by the Pentagon, Iraqi civilians are increasingly suffering as a result of the violence and chaos.

In recent months the numbers of Iraqi casualties ­ both civilians and security forces - has soared by 51 per cent. The deaths are the result of a spiral in sectarian clashes as well as an ongoing insurgency against the US and UK occupation that remains "potent and viable". The average number of attacks of all types now stands at around 800 a week.

"Although the overall number of attacks increased in all categories, the proportion of those attacks directed against civilians increased substantially," the Pentagon report said. "Death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife, with Sunni and Shia extremists each portraying themselves as the defenders of their respective sectarian groups."

The report said in the period since the establishment of an Iraqi government in mid-May and 11 August, Iraqi civilian and security personnel have been killed at a rate of around 120 a day. This is an increase from around 80 a day between mid-February to mid-May. Two years ago the number stood at 30 a day. Calculated over a year, the most recent rate of killings would equal more than 43,000 Iraqi casualties.

The Pentagon report, Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq, added: " The core conflict in Iraq changed into a struggle between Sunni and Shia extremists seeking to control key areas in Baghdad, create or protect sectarian enclaves, divert economic resources, and impose their own respective political and religious agendas."

While the Pentagon may seek to portray such sectarian violence as the biggest challenge, it admits that the anti-occupation insurgency remains strong.

Indeed other figures, released this summer by the US military, suggest attacks against US and Iraqi forces had doubled since January. The figures showed that in July US forces encountered 2,625 roadside bombs, of which 1,666 exploded and 959 were disarmed. In January, 1,454 bombs exploded or were found. The figures suggested that the insurgency had strengthened despite the killing of senior al-Qa'ida fighter, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June.

Yesterday, the Iraqi authorities announced the arrest of a man they say is the second-in-command ofal-Qa'ida in Iraq. Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, said Hamed Jumaa al-Saedi was detained a few days ago. Mr Rubaie said the man was behind the bombing of a Shia shrine in Samarra in February.

    The war on terror, five years on: an era of constant warfare, I, 4.9.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article1359854.ece

The Courts

Study Finds Sharp Drop in the Number of Terrorism Cases Prosecuted

September 4, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — The number of terrorism cases brought by the Justice Department, which surged in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has dropped sharply since 2002, and prosecutors are turning down hundreds of cases because of weak evidence and other legal problems, according to a study released Sunday.

The study, conducted by a private research group at Syracuse University, found that federal prosecutors have declined to prosecute two of every three international terrorism cases brought to them by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies since 2001.

The rejection rate was even higher for the first eight months of the current fiscal year, with 91 percent of the referred cases turned down for prosecution, the research group said. Among the most frequent explanations cited by prosecutors, the study found, were a lack of evidence of criminal intent by the suspect and “weak or insufficient” evidence.

The numbers brought differing interpretations from legal analysts, prosecutors and government officials, many of whom said they were surprised by the findings, and are likely to add to the debate over the administration’s legal tactics in prosecuting the fight against terrorism. The Justice Department immediately took issue with the study’s methodology and its conclusions.

The study “ignores the reality of how the war on terrorism is prosecuted in federal courts across the country and the value of early disruption of potential terrorist acts by proactive prosecution,” said Bryan Sierra, a Justice Department spokesman.

“The report presents misleading analysis of Department of Justice statistics to suggest the threat of terrorism may be inaccurate or exaggerated,” Mr. Sierra added. “The Department of Justice disagrees with this suggestion completely.”

Department officials declined to discuss any details of what they considered the flawed methodology.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has pursued a strategy of investigating and prosecuting terrorism suspects within the United States to “pre-empt” attacks, rather than waiting for them to unfold.

The strategy, which administration officials say helps explain the absence of any further attacks on American soil, has been seen in cases like the arrests of seven men in Miami in June in a plot that the F.B.I. said was “more aspirational than operational.”

The approach has led critics of the Bush administration to say that prosecutors are routinely bringing terrorism charges in cases that do not warrant them. But the data from the Syracuse group suggests that for every prosecution like the one in Miami, there are many other investigations that never become public because prosecutors conclude there is not enough evidence to take them to court.

The F.B.I. and other federal agencies bring what are known as referrals in cases in which the investigating agency recommends that federal charges be considered, often after investigations lasting months or years.

In 2001 and 2002, the Syracuse study found, federal prosecutors turned down only about 35 percent of the referrals brought to them in international terrorism cases. But that rate has climbed sharply over the last four years, with rejection rates of 77 percent in 2003, 65 percent in 2004, 82 percent last year and the 91 percent this year.

Last year, the Justice Department prosecuted 46 international terrorism cases — down from 355 in 2002 in the spike that followed the Sept. 11 attacks — but it declined to bring charges in 209 cases the F.B.I. or other agencies had referred, the study found.

The statistics “raise profound questions about how well the government is doing in dealing with this very difficult problem of terrorism,” said David Burnham, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which conducted the study by obtaining hundreds of thousands of records through a lawsuit brought under the Freedom of Information Act.

“It is clear that the prosecutors are deciding that a lot of the investigations being recommended do not cut the mustard and do not meet their standards,’’ Mr. Burnham said.

In all, the study found that in nearly 6,500 cases treated by the Justice Department as “terrorism” investigations since the Sept. 11 attacks, about one in five defendants have now been convicted. The median sentence for those convicted in what were categorized as “international terrorism” cases — often involving lesser charges like immigration violations or fraud — was 20 to 28 days, and many received no jail time at all, the study found.

The Justice Department, which has tightened the way it defines terrorism cases over the last five years, cites a much higher rate of success. Examining only those cases in which someone was actually charged, it said in a report in June that it had secured convictions or guilty pleas against 261 of the 441 defendants accused in connection with terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Brian Levin, an associate professor at California State University, San Bernardino, who studies terrorism prosecutions, said the numbers clearly reflected the government’s efforts to swiftly halt any possible plot, including many that might prove unfounded.

“The data suggests that if there’s a whiff of suspicion, they will come down in any way possible against a suspect and sort the evidence out later,” Mr. Levin said. “They’re obviously casting a broad net but throwing a lot back into the sea.”

A federal terrorism prosecutor agreed with that assessment. “You have to chase dead ends a lot of times — it’s inherent in this business,” said the prosecutor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

Moreover, in smaller-scale cases like identity theft or immigration fraud that may have some nexus to terrorism, the government may not have the time or resources to fully pursue a case, leading prosecutors to reject the filing of charges.

“The F.B.I.’s looking for bomb throwers,” the prosecutor said, “and we have a lot of small cases that there are no resources devoted to.”

    Study Finds Sharp Drop in the Number of Terrorism Cases Prosecuted, NYT, 4.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/washington/04terror.html

The last days of Muhammad Atta

On 11 September 2001, he opened his eyes at 4am, in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta's last day began.
 

Sunday September 3, 2006
Martin Amis
The Observer


'No physical, documentary, or analytical evidence provides a convincing explanation of why [Muhammad] Atta and [Abdulaziz al] Omari drove to Portland, Maine, from Boston on the morning of September 10, only to return to Logan on Flight 5930 on the morning of September 11'

The 9/11 Commission Report

1

On 11 September 2001, he opened his eyes at 4am, in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta's last day began.

What was the scene of this awakening? A room in a hotel, of the type designated as 'budget' in his guidebook - one up from 'basic'. It was a Repose Inn, part of a chain. But it wasn't like the other Repose Inns he had lodged at: brisk, hygienic establishments. This place was ponderous and labyrinthine, and as elderly as most of its clientele. And it was cheap. So. The padded nylon quilt as weighty as a lead vest; the big cuboid television on the dresser opposite; and the dented white fridge - where, as it happened, Muhammad Atta's reason for coming to Portland, Maine, lay cooling on its shelf... The particular frugality of these final weeks was part of a peer-group piety contest that he was laconically going along with. Like the others, he was attending to his prayers, disbursing his alms, washing often, eating little, sleeping little. (But he wasn't like the others.) Days earlier, their surplus operational funds - about $26,000 - had been abstemiously wired back to the go-between in Dubai.

He slid from the bed and called Abdulaziz, who was already stirring, and perhaps already praying, next door. Then to the bathroom: the chore of ablution, the ordeal of excretion, the torment of depilation. He activated the shower nozzle and removed his undershorts. He stepped within, submitting to the cold and clammy caress of the plastic curtain on his calf and thigh. Then he spent an unbelievably long time trying to remove a hair from the bar of soap; the alien strand kept changing its shape - question-mark, infinity symbol - but stayed in place; and the bar of soap, no bigger than a bookmatch when he began, barely existed when he finished. Next, as sometimes happens in these old, massive and essentially well-intentioned and broad-handed hotels, the water gave a gulp and then turned in an instant from a tepid trickle to a molten blast; and as he struggled from the stall he trod on a leaking shampoo sachet and fell heavily and sharply on his coccyx. He had to kick himself out through the steam, and rasped his head on the shower's serrated metal sill. After a while he slowly climbed to his feet and stood there, hands on hips, eyes only lightly closed, head bowed, awaiting recovery. He dried himself with the thin white towel, catching a hangnail in its shine.

Now, emitting a sigh of unqualified grimness, he crouched on the bowl. He didn't even bother with his usual scowling and straining and shuddering, partly because his head felt dangerously engorged. More saliently, he had not moved his bowels since May. In general his upper body was impressively lean, from all the hours in the gym with the 'muscle' Saudis; but now there was a solemn mound where his abdominals used to be, as taut and proud as a first-trimester pregnancy. Nor was this the only sequela. He had a feverish and unvarying ache, not in his gut but in his lower back, his pelvic saddle, and his scrotum. Every few minutes he was required to wait out an interlude of nausea, while disused gastric juices bubbled up in the sump of his throat. His breath smelled like a blighted river.

The worst was yet to come: shaving. Shaving was the worst because it necessarily involved him in the contemplation of his own face. He looked downwards while he lathered his cheeks, but then the chin came up and there it was, revealed in vertical strips: the face of Muhammad Atta. Two years ago he had said goodbye to his beard, after Afghanistan. Tangled and oblong and slightly off-centre, it had had the effect of softening the disgusted lineaments of the mouth, and it had wholly concealed the frank animus of the underbite. His insides were seized, but his face was somehow incontinent, or so Muhammad Atta felt. The detestation, the detestation of everything, was being sculpted on it, from within. He was amazed that he was still allowed to walk the streets, let alone enter a building or board a plane. Another day, one more day, and they wouldn't let him. Why didn't everybody point, why didn't they cringe, why didn't they run? And yet this face, by now almost comically malevolent, would soon be smiled at, and perfunctorily fussed over (his ticket was Business Class), by the doomed stewardess.

A hypothesis. If he stood down from the planes operation, and it went ahead without him (or if he somehow survived it), he would never be able to travel by air in the United States or anywhere else - not by air, not by train, not by boat, not by bus. The profiling wouldn't need to be racial; it would be facial, merely. No sane man or woman would ever agree to be confined in his vicinity. With that face, growing more gangrenous by the day. And that name, the name he journeyed under, itself like a promise of vengeance: Muhammad Atta. In the last decade, only one human being had taken obvious pleasure from setting eyes on him, and that was the Sheikh. It happened at their introductory meeting, in Kandahar - where, within a matter of minutes, the Sheikh appointed him operational leader. Muhammad Atta knew that the first thing he would be asked was whether he was prepared to die. But the Sheikh was smiling, almost with eyes of love, when he said it. 'The question isn't necessary,' he began. 'I see the answer in your face.'

Their Coglan Air commuter flight to Logan was scheduled to leave at six. So he had an hour. He put on his clothes (the dark blue shirt, the black slacks) and settled himself at the dresser, awkwardly, his legs out to one side. Two documents lay before him. He yawned, then sneezed. While shaving, Muhammad Atta, for the first time in his life, had cut himself on the lip (the lower); with surprising speed the gash had settled into a convincing imitation of a cold sore. Much less unusually, he had also nicked the fleshy volute of his right nostril, releasing an apparently endless supply of blood. He kept having to get up and fetch more tissues, leaving after him a paper trail of the staunched gouts. The themes of recurrence and prolongation, he sensed, were already beginning to associate themselves with his last day.

Document number one was displayed on the screen of his laptop. It was his last will and testament, composed in April 1996, when the thoughts of the group had turned to Chechnya. Two Moroccan friends, Mounir and Abdelghani, both devout, had been his witnesses, so he had included a fair amount of formulaic sanctimony. Any old thing would do. 'During my funeral, I want everyone to be quiet because God mentioned that he likes being quiet on occasions when you read the Koran, during the funeral, and also when you are crawling.' Crawling? Had he mistyped? Another provision stared out at him, and further deepened his frown: 'The person who will wash my body near my genitals must wear gloves on his hands so he won't touch my genitals.' And this: 'I don't want pregnant women or a person who is not clean to come and say goodbye to me because I don't approve of it.' Well, these anxieties were now academic. No one would say goodbye to him. No one would wash him. No one would touch his genitals.

There was another document on the table, a four-page booklet in Arabic, put together by the Information Office in Kandahar (and bound by a grimy tassel). Each of them had been given one; the others would often produce their personal copy and nod and sway and mutter over it for hour after hour. But Muhammad Atta wasn't like the others (and he was paying a price for it). He had barely glanced at the thing until now. 'Pull your shoelaces tight and wear tight socks that grip the shoes and do not come out of them.' He supposed that this was sound advice. 'Let every one of you sharpen his knife and bring about comfort and relief of his slaughter.' A reference, presumably, to what would happen to the pilots, the first officers, the flight attendants. Some of the Saudis, they said, had butchered sheep and camels at Khaldan, the training-camp near Kabul. Muhammad Atta did not expect to relish that part of it: the exemplary use of the box-cutters. He pictured the women, in their uniforms, in their open-necked shirts. He did not expect to like it; he did not expect to like death in that form.

Now he sat back, and felt the approach of nausea: it gathered round him, then sifted through him. His mind, inasmuch as it was separable from his body, was close to the 'complete tranquillity' praised and recommended by Kandahar. A very different kind of 33-year-old might have felt the same tranced surety while contemplating an afternoon in a borrowed apartment with his true love (and sexual obsession). But Muhammad Atta's mind and his body were not separable: this was the difficulty; this was the mind-body problem - in his case fantastically acute. Muhammad Atta wasn't like the others, because he was doing what he was doing for the core reason. The others were doing what they were doing for the core reason, too, but they had achieved sublimation, by means of jihadi ardour; and their bodies had been convinced by this arrangement and had gone along with it. They ate, drank, smoked, smiled, snored; they took the stairs two at a time. Muhammad Atta's body had not gone along with it. He was doing what he was doing for the core reason and for the core reason only.

'Purify your heart and cleanse it of stains. Forget and be oblivious to the thing which is called World.' Muhammad Atta was not religious; he was not even especially political. He had allied himself with the militants because jihad was, by many magnitudes, the most charismatic idea of his generation. To unite ferocity and rectitude in a single word: nothing could compete with that. He played along with it, and did the things that impressed his peers; he collected citations, charities, pilgrimages, conspiracy theories, and so on, as other people collected autographs or beermats. And it suited his character. If you took away all the rubbish about faith, then fundamentalism suited his character, and with an almost sinister precision.

For example, the attitude to women: the blend of extreme hostility and extreme wariness he found highly congenial. In addition, he liked the idea of the brotherhood, although, of course, he thoroughly despised the current contingent, particularly his fellow pilots: Hani (the Pentagon) he barely knew, but he was continuously enraged by Marwan (the other Twin Tower) and almost fascinated by the pitch of his loathing for Ziad (the Capitol)... Adultery punished by whipping, sodomy by burial alive: this seemed about right to Muhammad Atta. He also joined in the hatred of music. And the hatred of laughter. 'Why do you never laugh?' he was sometimes asked. Ziad would answer: 'How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine?' Muhammad Atta never laughed, not because people were dying in Palestine, but because he found nothing funny. 'The thing which is called World.' That, too, spoke to him. World had always felt like an illusion - an unreal mockery.

'The time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short.' Ah yes, the virgins: six dozen of them - half a gross. He had read in a news magazine that virgins, in the holy book, was a mistranslation from the Aramaic. It should be raisins. He idly wondered whether the quibble might have something to do with sultana, which meant a) a small seedless raisin, and b) the wife or concubine of a sultan. Abdulaziz, Marwan, Ziad, and the others: they would not be best pleased, on their arrival in the Garden, to find a little black packet of Sunmaid Sultanas (average contents 72). Muhammad Atta, with his two degrees in architecture, his excellent English, his excellent German: Muhammad Atta did not believe in the virgins, did not believe in the Garden. (How could he believe in such an implausibly, and dauntingly, priapic paradise?) He was an apostate: that's what he was. He didn't expect paradise. What he expected was oblivion. And, strange to say, he would find neither.

He packed. He paused and stooped over the dented refrigerator, then straightened up and headed for the door.

In its descent the elevator, with a succession of long-suffering sighs, stopped at the 12th, the 11th, the 10th, the ninth, the eighth, the seventh, the sixth, the fifth, the fourth, the third and the second floors. Old people, their faces flickering with distrust, inched in and out; while they did so, one of their number would press the open-doors button with a defiant, marfanic thumb. And at this hour, too: it was barely light. Muhammad Atta briefly horrified himself with the notion that they were all lovers, returning early to their beds. But no: it must be the sleeplessness, the insomnia of age - the dawn vigils of age. Their efforts to stay alive, in any case, struck him as essentially ignoble. He had felt the same way in the hospital the night before, when he went to see the imam... Consulting his watch every 10 or 15 seconds, he decided that this downward journey was dead time, as dead as time could get, like queuing, or an interminable red light, or staring stupidly at the baggage on an airport carousel. He stood there, hemmed in by pallor and decay, and martyred by compound revulsions.

Abdulaziz was waiting for him in the weak glow and piped music of the lobby. Wordless, breakfastless, they joined the line for checkout. More dead time passed. As they fell into step and proceeded through the last of the night to the car park, Muhammad Atta, in no very generous spirit, considered his colleague. This particular muscle Saudi seemed as limply calf-like as Ahmed al Nami - the prettyboy in Ziad's platoon. On the other hand, Abdulaziz, with his softly African face, his childish eyes, was almost insultingly easy to dominate. He had a wife and daughter in southern Saudi Arabia. But this was like saying that he had a flatbed truck in southern Saudi Arabia, so little did it appear to weigh on him. He had also, incredibly, performed certain devotional duties at his local mosque. And yet it was Abdulaziz who carried the knife, Abdulaziz who was ready to apply it to the flesh of the stewardess.

When they reached their car Abdulaziz said a few words in praise of God, adding, with some attempt at panache, 'So. Let us begin our "architectural studies".'

Muhammad Atta felt his body give an involuntary jolt. 'Who told you?' he said.

'Ziad.'

They loaded up and then bent themselves into the front seats.

Abdulaziz wasn't supposed to know about that - about the target code. 'Law' was the Capitol. 'Politics' was the White House. In the discussions with the Sheikh there had been firm concurrence about 'architecture' (the World Trade Center) and 'arts' (the Pentagon), but they had disagreed about an altogether different kind of target, namely 'electrical engineering'. This was the nuclear power plant that Muhammad Atta had seen on one of his training flights near New York. Puzzlingly, the Sheikh withheld his blessing - despite the presumably attractive possibility of turning large swathes of the eastern seaboard into a plutonium cemetery for the next 70 millennia (that is, until the year 72001). The Sheikh gave his reasons (restricted airspace, no 'symbolic' value). But Muhammad Atta sensed a moral qualm, a silent suggestion that such a move could be considered exorbitant. It was the first and only indication that, in their cosmic war against God's enemies, there was any kind of upper limit. Muhammad Atta often asked himself: was the Sheikh prepared to die? In the course of their conversations it had emerged that, while plainly reconciled to eventual martyrdom (he would have it no other way, and so on), the Sheikh felt little personal attraction to death; and he would soon be additionally famous, Muhammad Atta prophesied, for the strenuousness with which he eluded it.

These meetings and discussions - with the Sheikh and, later, with his Yemeni emissary, Ramzi Binalshibh - now lost weight and value in Muhammad Atta's mind, tarnished by Ziad's indiscipline, by Ziad's promiscuity (and if Abdulaziz knew, then all the Saudis knew). He thought back to his historic conversation with Ramzi, on the telephone, in the third week of August.

'Our friend is anxious to know when your course will begin.'

'It will be more interesting to study "law" when Congress has convened.'

'But we shouldn't delay. With so many of our students in the US...'

'All right. Two branches, an oblique stroke, and a lollipop.'

Ramzi called him back and said, 'To be clear. The 11th of the ninth?'

'Yes,' confirmed Muhammad Atta. And he was the first person on earth to say it - to say in that way: 'September the 11th.'

He had cherished the secret until 9 September. Now, of course, everyone knew: the day itself had come. He was impatient for his talk on the phone with Ziad, scheduled for 7am at Logan. Ziad was still claiming that he hadn't yet decided between 'law' and 'politics'. It looked like 'law'. As a target, the President's house had lost much of its appeal when they established, insofar as they could, that the President wouldn't be in it. At that moment the President was readying himself for an early-morning run in Sarasota, Florida, where Muhammad Atta had been taught how to fly, at Jones Aviation, in September 2000.

It was during the drive to Portland International Jetport that the headache began. In recent months he had become something of a connoisseur of headaches. And yet those earlier headaches, it now seemed, were barely worth the name: this was what a headache was. At first he attributed its virulence to his misadventure in the shower stall, but then the pain pushed forward over his crown and established itself, like an electric eel, from ear to ear, then from eye to eye - and then both. He had two headaches, not one; and they were apparently at war. The automobile, a Nissan Altima, was brand-new, factory-fresh, and this had seemed like a mild bonus on 10 September, but now its vacuum-packed breath tasted of seasickness and the smell of ships below the waterline. Suddenly his vision became pixelated with little swarms of blind spots. So it was then asked of him to pull over and tell an astonished Abdulaziz to take the wheel.

There seemed to be a completely unreasonable weight of traffic. Americans, already about their business... Tormenting his passenger with regular glances of concern, Abdulaziz otherwise drove with his usual superstitious watchfulness, beset by small fears, on this day. Muhammad Atta tried not to writhe around in his seat; on his way to the car park, 10 minutes earlier, he had tried not to run; in the elevator, 10 minutes earlier still, he had tried not to groan or scream. He was always trying not to do something.

It was 5.35am. And at this point he began to belabour himself for the diversion to Portland: a puerile undertaking, as he now saw it. His group was competitive not only in piety but also in nihilistic elan, in nihilistic insouciance; and he had thought it would be conclusively stylish to stroll from one end of Logan to the other with less than an hour to go. Then, too, there was the promise, itchier to the heart than ever, of his conversation with Ziad. But his reason for coming to Portland had been fundamentally unserious. He wouldn't have done it if the internet, on 10 September, had not assured him so repeatedly that it was going to be a flawless morning on 11 September.

And he didn't solace himself with the thought that this was, after all, 11 September, and you could still get to airports without much time to spare.

'Did you pack these bags yourself?'

Muhammad Atta's hand crept towards his brow. 'Yes,' he said.

'Have they been with you at all times?'

'Yes.'

'Did anyone ask you to carry anything for them?'

'No. Is the flight on time?'

'You should make your connection.'

'And the bags will go straight through.'

'No, sir. You'll need to recheck them at Logan.'

'You mean I have to go through all this again?'

Whatever else terrorism had achieved in the past few decades, it had certainly brought about a net increase in world boredom. It didn't take very long to ask and answer those three questions - about 15 seconds. But those dead-time questions and answers were repeated, without any variation whatever, hundreds of thousands of times a day. If the planes operation went ahead as planned, Muhammad Atta would bequeath more, perhaps much more, dead time, planet-wide. It was appropriate, perhaps, and not paradoxical, that terror should also sharply promote its most obvious opposite. Boredom.

As it happened, Muhammad Atta was a selectee of the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (Capps). All it meant was that his checked bag would not be stowed until he himself had boarded the aircraft. This was at Portland. At Logan, a 'Category X' airport like Newark Liberty and Washington Dulles, and supposedly more secure, three of his muscle Saudis would be selected by Capps, with the same irrelevant consequences.

Muhammad Atta and Abdulaziz submitted to the checkpoint screening. Their bags were not searched; they were not frisked, or blessed by the hand wand. Abdulaziz's childish rucksack, containing the boxcutters and the mace, passed through the tunnel of love. Just before boarding, another gust of nausea gathered about Muhammad Atta, like a host of tiny myrmidons. He waited for them to move on, but they did not do so, and, instead, coagulated in his craw. Muhammad Atta went to the men's room and released a fathom of bilious green. He was still wiping his foul mouth as he walked out on to the tarmac and climbed the trembling metal steps.

Coglan 5930 was not only late it was also an open-propeller 19-seater, and it was full. Excruciatingly, he had to wedge himself in next to a fat blonde with a scalp disease and, moreover, a baby, whose incredulous weeping (its ears) she attempted and failed to slake with repeated applications of the breast. Between heartbeats, when he was briefly capable of consecutive thought, he imagined that the blonde was the doomed stewardess.

The plane leapt eagerly into the air, with none of the technological toil that would characterise the ascent of American 11.

Part two

He had gone to Portland, Maine, for his quid pro quo with the imam.

The hospital, where he lay dying, was a blistered medium-rise, downtown: one more business among all the other businesses. Inside, too, Muhammad Atta had no sense of entering an atmosphere of vocational care - just the American matter-of-factness, with no softening of the voice, the tread, no softening of the receptionists' minimal smiles ... Directed to the ward, he moved through the moist warmth of half-eaten or untouched dinners and the heavier undersmell of drugs. The imam was asleep in his bed, recessed into it, as if an imam-sized channel had been let into the mattress. His lips, Muhammad Atta noticed, were dark grey, like the lips of dogs. Dead time passed. Then the imam awoke to Muhammad Atta's unsmiling stare. He sighed, without restraint. The two of them went back a way: to the mosque in Falls Church, Virginia.

'You have a citation for me?' asked the imam, unexpectedly alert.

'It's from the traditions. "The Prophet said: 'Whoever kills himself with a blade will be tormented with that blade in the fires of Hell... He who throws himself off a mountain and kills himself will throw himself downward into the fires of Hell for ever and ever... Whoever kills himself in any way in this world will be tormented in that way in Hell.'"'

'Always there are exceptions. Remember we are in the lands of unbelief,' said the imam, and went on to list the crimes of the Americans.

These were familiar to his visitor, who regarded the grievances as real. Depending on how you tallied it, America was responsible for this or that many million deaths. But Muhammad Atta was not persuaded of a moral equivalence. Certain weapons systems claimed to be precise; power was not precise. Power was always a monster. And there had never been a monster the size of America. Every time it turned over in its sleep it entrained disasters that would have to roll through villages. There were blunderings and perversities and calculated cruelties; and there was no self-knowledge - none. Still, America did not expend ingenuity in its efforts to kill the innocent.

'Is it an enemy installation?' the imam was sharply asking.

Muhammad Atta gave no reply. He just said, 'Do you have it?'

'Yes. And you will need it.'

The imam's hand, to Muhammad Atta's far from sympathetic gaze, looked and sounded like the foreclaw of a lobster as it rattled up against the laminate of his bedside table. Its cupboard opened, drawbridge-wise. The thing within exactly resembled a half-empty eight-ounce bottle of Volvic.

'Take it, not on waking, but when you feel your trial is near. Now. You were kind enough to say you would describe your induction.'

Here was the quid pro quo: he wanted to be told about the Sheikh. Just then the imam abruptly turned on to his side, facing Muhammad Atta, and for a moment his posture repulsively recalled that of a child starting to warm to a bedtime story. But this lurch was only part of a larger manoeuvre of the imam's. He edged himself backwards and upwards, so that a few stray hairs, at least, rested on the pillow. Muhammad Atta had unthinkingly assumed, earlier on, that he would give the imam a reassuring, even an idealised portrait of the Sheikh - the long-fingered visionary on the mountaintop who yet, in his humility and openness, remained a simple warrior of God. Now he recomposed himself. Never in his life had he spoken his mind. The smell of drugs was particularly strong near the yellow sink, half a yard from his nose.

'I had several meetings with him,' he said, 'at the al Faruq camp in Kandahar. And at Tarnak Farms. He casts the spell of success on you - that's what he does. When he talks about the defeat of the Russians... To hear him tell it, it wasn't the West that won the Cold War. It was the Sheikh. But we badly need that spell, don't we? The spell of success.'

'But the successes are real. And this is only the beginning.'

'His hopes of victory depend,' said Muhammad Atta, 'on the active participation of the superpower.'

'What superpower?'

'God. Hence the present crisis.'

'Meaning?'

'It comes from religious hurt, don't you think? For centuries God has forsaken the believers, and rewarded the infidels. How do you explain his indifference?'

Or his enmity, he thought, as he left the bedside and the ward. He considered, too, that it could go like this, subconsciously, of course: if prayer and piety had failed, had so clearly failed, then it might seem time to change allegiance, and summon up the other powers.

At Logan, he and Abdulaziz were the only passengers at the carousel supposedly serving the commuter flight from Portland. And the carousel was silent and motionless. Staring at a carousel with actual baggage going round on it suddenly seemed a fairly stimulating thing to do. Meanwhile, the eels or stingrays in his head were now having a fight to the death in the area just behind his ears.

Sometimes for moments on end he could step back from the pain and just listen to it. This was music in its next evolutionary phase, beyond the atonal. And he realised why he had always hated music; all of it, even the most emollient melody, had entered his mind as pain. Using every reserve, he continued to stare at the changeless slats of black rubber for another 30 seconds, another minute; then he turned on his heel, and Abdulaziz followed.

'Did you pack these bags yourself?'

'What bags? As I took the trouble to explain...'

'Sir, your bags will be on our next flight. I still need to ask the security questions, sir.'

Americans - the way they called you sir. They might as well be calling you bub.

'Did you pack these bags yourself?'

Oh, the misery of recurrence, like the hotel elevator doing its ancient curtsy on every floor, like the alien hair on the soap changing its shape through a succession of different alphabets, like the (necessarily) monotonous gonging inside his head. It had occurred to him before that his condition, if you could call it that, was merely the condition of boredom, unbounded boredom, where all time was dead time. As if his whole life consisted of answering those same three questions, saying, 'Yes' and 'Yes' and 'No'. 'And did anyone ask you to carry anything for them?'

'Yes,' said Muhammad Atta. 'Last night, at the Lebanese restaurant, a waiter asked us to take a heavy clock-radio to his cousin in Los Angeles.'

Her smile was flat and brief. 'That's funny,' she said.

They made their way to Gate 32 and then retreated from it, into the mall. With a flip of the hand he told Abdulaziz to go and look for his countrymen. Muhammad Atta took a seat outside a dormant coffee shop and readied himself for the call to Ziad. Ziad: the Beiruti beach boy and disco ghost, the tippler and debauchee, now with his exaltations and prostrations, his chanting and wailing, his rocking and swaying... To discountenance Ziad, to send him to his death with a heart full of doubt: this was the reason for the journey to Maine.

Back in Germany, once, Ziad had said that the brides in the Garden would be 'made of light'. In bold contrast, then, to the darkness and heaviness of their terrestrial sisters, in particular the heaviness and darkness of Aysel Senguen - Ziad's German Turk, or Turkish German. Muhammad Atta had seen Aysel only once (bare legs, bare arms, bare hair), in the medical bookstore in Hamburg, and he had not forgotten her face. Ziad and Aysel were his control experiment for the life lived by sexual love; and for many months the two of them had peopled his insomnias. He knew that Aysel had come to Florida in January (and had scandalously accompanied Ziad to the flight school); he was also obscurely moved by the fact that a letter to her was Ziad's last will and testament. And he kept wondering how their bodies conjoined, how she must open herself up to him, with all her heaviness and darkness...

Muhammad Atta had decided that romantic and religious ardour came from contiguous parts of the human being: the parts he didn't have. Yet Ziad, as the obliterator of 'law' (and the obliterator of United 93), was duly poised for mass murder. Only roughly contiguous, then: Ziad could say he was doing it for God, and many would believe him, but he couldn't say he was doing it for love. He wasn't doing it for love, or for God. He was doing it for the core reason, just like Muhammad Atta.

'All is well at Newark Liberty?'

'All is well. We're in the sterile area. Did you see your precious imam?'

'I did. And he gave me the water.'

'The water? What water?'

'The holy water,' said Muhammad Atta, with delectation, 'from the Oasis.'

There was a silence. 'What does it do?' said Ziad.

'It absolves you of what the imam called the "enormity", the atrocious crime, of the self-felony.'

There was another silence. But that wasn't quite true any more. Muhammad Atta thought he might be getting more out of this conversation if there hadn't been a mechanised floor-sweeper, resembling a hovercraft, with an old man on it, beeping and snivelling around his chair.

'I'm preparing to drink the holy water even as I speak.'

'Does it come in a special bottle?'

'A crystal vial. God said, "All those who hate me love and court death." You see, Ziad, you are the trustee of your body, not its owner. God is its owner.'

'And the water?'

'The water is within you and preserves you for God. It's a new technique - it began in Palestine. Your hell will burn with jet fuel for eternity. And eternity never ends, Ziad - it never even begins. So there may be some delay before you get those brides of light. Perhaps you should have settled for your German nudist. Goodbye, Ziad.'

He hung up, redialled, and had a more or less identical conversation with Marwan, minus the theme of Aysel. In the case of Marwan (the other half of 'architecture', and just across the way, now, at United), different considerations obtained. The emphasis of their rivalry was not jihadi ardour so much as nihilistic insouciance. So the two of them exchanged yawning boasts, in code, about how low down, and at what angle, they would strike, and coolly agreed that, if there were F-15s over New York, they would crash their planes into the streets... Finally, dutifully, he called Hani ('arts'), the only Saudi pilot, with whom he shared no history, and not much hatred. Muhammad Atta hoped that he hadn't decisively undermined Ziad, who, after all, was a Saudi short (or two Saudis short, if you discounted the punklike Ahmed). No. He believed that he could safely rely, at this point, on the fierce physics of the peer group.

A peer group piously competitive about suicide, he had concluded, was a very powerful thing, and the West had no equivalent to it. A peer group for whom death was not death - and life was not life, either. Yet an inversion so extreme, he thought, would quickly become decadent: hospitals, schools, nurseries, old people's homes. Transgression, by its nature, was helter-skelter, and always bound to escalate. And the thing would start to be over in a generation, as everyone slowly and incredulously intuited it: the core reason.

Perhaps the closest equivalent, or analogy, the West could field was the firefighters. Muhammad Atta had studied architecture and engineering. The fire that would be created by 3,000 gallons of jet fuel, he knew, could not be fought: the steel frame of the tower would buckle; the walls, which were not intended to be weight-bearing, would collapse, one on to the other; and down it would all come. The fire could not be fought, but there would be firefighters. They were called the 'bravest', accurately, in his view; and, as the bravest, they took on a certain responsibility. The firefighters were saying, every day: 'Who's going to do it, if we don't? If we don't, who else is going to risk death to save the lives of strangers?'

As he sat for another few moments on the tin chair, as he watched the mall awaken and come into commercial being, filling up now with Americans and American purpose and automatic self-belief, he felt he had timed it about right. (And his face had timed it about right.) Because he couldn't possibly survive another day of the all-inclusive detestation - of the pan-anathema. This feeling had been his familiar since the age of 12 or 13; it had come upon him, like an illness without a symptom. Cairo, Hamburg, even the winter dawn over Kandahar: they had all looked the same to him. Unreal mockery.

Muhammad Atta took the bottle from his carry-on. The imam said it was from Medina. He shrugged, and drank the holy Volvic.

Boarding began with First Class. And if Muhammad Atta ever found anything funny, he might have smiled at this: Wail and Waleed, the brothers, the two semiliterate yokels from the badlands of the Yemeni border, shuffling off to their thrones - 2A and 2B. Then Business. He led. Abdulaziz and Satam followed.

He hadn't even reached his seat when it hit him. It came with great purity of address, replacing everything else in his stretched sensorium. Even his headache, while not actually taking its leave, immediately stepped aside, almost with a flourish, to accommodate the new guest. It was a feeling that had abandoned him for ever, he thought, four months ago - but now it was back. With twinkly promptitude, canned music flooded forth: a standard ballad, a flowery flute with many trills and graces. The breathy refrain joined the simmer of the engines; yet neither could drown the popping, the groaning, the creaking, as of a dungeon door to an inner sanctum - the ungainsayable anger of his bowels.

So now he sat gripping the armrests of 8D as the Coach passengers filed by. Why did there have to be so many of them, always another briefcase, another backpack, always another buzzcut, another whitehair? He waited, rose, and with gruelling nonchalance, his buttocks clenched, sauntered forward. All three toilets claimed to be occupied. They were not occupied, he knew. A frequent and inquisitive traveller on American commercial jets, Muhammad Atta knew that the toilets were locked, like all the other toilets (this was the practice on tight turnarounds), and would remain locked until the plane levelled out. He pressed a flat hand against all three: again, the misery of recurrence, of duplication. He tried, but he couldn't abstain from a brief flurry of shoving and kicking and rattling. As he returned to 8D he saw that Abdulaziz was looking at him, not with commiseration, now, but with puzzled disappointment, even turning in his seat to exchange a responsible frown with Satam. Strapped in, Muhammad Atta managed the following series of thoughts. You needed the belief-system, the ideology, the ardour. You had to have it. The core reason was good enough for the mind. But it couldn't carry the body.

To the others, he realised, he was giving a detailed impersonation of a man who had lost his nerve. And he had not lost his nerve. Even before the plane gave its preliminary jolt (like a polite cough of introduction), he felt the pull of it, with relief, with recognition: the necessary speed, the escape velocity he needed to deliver him to his journey's end. American 11 pushed back from Gate 32, Terminal B, at 7:40. There was the captain and the first officer; there were nine flight attendants, and 76 passengers, excluding Wail, Walid, Satam, Abdulaziz, and Muhammad Atta. American 11 was in the air at 7:59.

Now he obliged himself to do what he had always intended to do, during the climb. He had a memory ready, and a thought-experiment. He wanted to prepare himself for the opening of female flesh; he wanted to prepare himself for what would soon be happening to the throat of the stewardess - whom he could see, on her jump-seat, head bowed low, with a pen in her hand and a clipboard on her lap.

In 1999, his return ticket from Afghanistan had put him on an Iberia flight from the UAE to Madrid. They had just levelled out when he became aware of an altercation in the back of the plane. Swivelling in his seat, he saw that perhaps 15 or 16 men, turbaned and white-robed, had crowded into the aisle and were now on the floor, humped in prayer. You could hear the male flight attendant's monotonous and defeated remonstrations as he backed away. 'Por favor, senors. Es ilegal. Senors, por favor!' Minutes later the captain came on the PA, saying in Spanish, English and Gulf Arabic that if the passengers didn't return to their seats he would most certainly return to Dubai. Then she appeared. Even Muhammad Atta at once conceded that here was the dark female in her most swinishly luxurious form: tall, long-necked, herself streamlined and aerodynamic, with hair like a billboard for a chocolate sundae, and all that flesh, damp and glowing as if from fever or even lust. She came to a halt and gave a roll of the eyes that took her whole head with it; then she surged forward with great scooping motions of her hands, bellowing - 'VAMOS ARRIBA, CONOS!' And the kneeling men had to peer out at this seraph of breast and haunch and uniformed power, and straighten up and scowl, and slowly grope for their seats. Muhammad Atta had felt only contempt for the men crooked over the patterned carpet; but he would never forget the face of the stewardess - the face of cloudless entitlement - and how badly he had wanted to hurt it.

And yet - no, it wasn't going to work. For him, the combination, up close, was wholly unmanageable: the combination of women and blood. So far, he thought, this is the worst day of my life - probably the worst day. In his head the weary fight between the vermin was finished; one was dying, and was now being disgustingly eaten by the other. And his loins, between them, were contriving for him something very close to the sensations of anal rape. So far, this was the worst day of his life. But then every day was the worst day, because every day was the most recent day, and the most developed, the most advanced (with all those other days behind it) towards the pan-anathema.

The plane was flattening out. He waited for the order. This would be given by the captain, when he turned off the fasten-seatbelts sign.

'We have some planes,' said Muhammad Atta, coolly. 'Just stay quiet, and you'll be OK. We are returning to the airport. Nobody move. Everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. '

He had stepped through the region of inexpressible sordor, and gained the cockpit. Here, in the grotto of the mad clocksmith, was more cringing flesh and more blood - but manageably male. Now he disengaged the computer and prepared to fly by direct law.

It was 8.24. He laughed for the first time since childhood: he was in the Atlantic of the sky, at the controls of the biggest weapon in history.

At 8.27 he made a grand counter-clockwise semicircle, turning south.

At 8.44 he began his descent.

The core reason was, of course, all the killing - all the putting to death. Not the crew, not the passengers, not the office-workers in the Twin Towers, not the cleaners and the caterers, not the men of the NYPD and the FDNY. He was thinking of the war, the wars, the war-cycles that would flow from this day. He didn't believe in the devil, as an active force, but he did believe in death. Death, at certain times, stopped moving at its even pace and broke into a hungry, lumbering run. Here was the primordial secret. No longer closely guarded - no longer well kept. Killing was divine delight. And your suicide was just a part of the contribution you made - the massive contribution to death. All your frigidities and futilities were rewritten, becoming swollen with meaning. This was what was possible when you turned the tides of life around, when you ran with beasts, when you flew with the flies.

First, the lesser totems of Queens, like a line of defence for the tutelary godlings of the island.

When he came clattering in over the struts and slats of Manhattan, there it was ahead of him and below him - the thing which is called World.

Cross-streets, blocks, districts, shot out from underneath the speedlines of the plane. He was glad that he wouldn't have to plough down into the city, and he even felt love for it, all its strivings and couplings and sunderings. And he felt no impulse to increase power or to bank or to strike even lower. It was reeling him in. Now even the need to shit felt right and good as his destination surged towards him.

There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. 'The passengers died instantly.' Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was 33. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporisation; perhaps this was true even for the wall-shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood.

American 11 struck at 8.46.40. Muhammad Atta's body was beyond all healing by 8.46.41; but his mind, his presence, needed time to shut itself down. The physical torment - a panic attack in every nerve, a riot of the atoms - merely italicised the last shinings of his brain. They weren't thoughts; they were more like a series of unignorable conclusions, imposed from without. Here was the hereafter, after all; and here was the reckoning. His mind groaned and fumbled with an irreconcilability, a defeat, a self-cancellation. Could he assemble the argument? It follows - by definition - if and only if. And then the argument assembled, all by itself... The joy of killing was proportional to the value of what was destroyed. But that value was something a killer could never see and never gauge. And where was the joy he thought he had felt - where was that joy, that itch, that paltry tingle? Yes, how gravely he had underestimated it. How very gravely he had underestimated life. His own he had hated, and had wished away; but see how long it was taking to absent itself - and with what helpless grief was he watching it go, imperturbable in its beauty and its power.

Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended.