While watching the Republican National Convention last night, disturbing images of September 11 put a pit in my stomach. Around 8:40 p.m. EDT, the RNC aired a video that included slow-motion footage of a plane striking the WTC, the towers' collapses, and images of a burning Pentagon, while a narrator conjured up memories of bodies falling from buildings.
The building schedule for skyscrapers and a memorial planned for New York City's Ground Zero have been tossed out by the World Trade Center owners, due to unrealistic goals and rising costs.
Planners
will announce a new timetable this September, seven years after the Twin Towers fell, according to BBC. Officials previously promised that the Freedom Tower, set to replace the destroyed towers while taking the title of the nation's tallest building, would be complete in 2006, then 2011, and finally in 2013.
Novelist Andre Dubus III wanted to write a book about a stripper. Instead he ended up telling a
story about sordid events leading up to September 11, 2001.
At the center of the 535-page novel —
The Garden of Last Days — sits Bassam, one of the 9/11 hijackers, who spent time at a Florida strip club four days before the attack.
A small town-lawyer and Navy-reservist, who has never tried a death penalty case, just got his
next assignment — to defend the alleged mastermind of September 11th in military court. Prescott Prince is determined to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a fair trial.
The CIA
admits that it employed waterboarding, which is widely considered torture, on the defendant.
Here's a story that involves Germany, Italian opera, September 11th, and Mickey Mouse masks . . .
Outside my window I can see a faded poster hung in my neighbor's window that reads: "The America I Believe in Would Close Guantánamo Bay." The US military prison houses detainees who have been identified by the government as "enemy combatants" and is certainly controversial. Today, the New York Times reports on the
hurdles to justice at the detention center.
Non-profit and antismoking group,
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) of New Zealand recently released this antismoking advertisement. It reads: "Terrorism related deaths since 2001 11,337. Tobacco-related deaths since 2001 30,000,000."
September 11, 2001, painfully exposed flaws in America's national security. Much has changed in an attempt to correct these flaws, but not without costs. The
Patriot Act granted the government unprecedented powers to stop terrorists, and since then we've seen an
ongoing debate about warrantless wiretapping, as well as having to sacrifice time and convenience at the airport and public events.
