Remember 9-11

[Mark B]

Can't believe that it has been 6 years since the world trade centers were destroyed by terrorists. Watching the reruns of that day still bring chills to me.
I was at work getting ready for the day watching tv and saw the first building burning and the news people takling about a plane crashing into the building. Just then, I saw the 2nd plane crash into the other building. It is one of those days you will never forget.

[circmand]

Yes it was tragic but we have many tragedies that occur all the time. I did not lose anybody I am sorry for those who did. When will we be allowed to get over this and not see daily complaints from survivors that the memorial site is not big enough, that they are not getting enough money to compensate them for their loss, etc? I know this may sound mean but the daily shoving it in my face for 6 years has caused me no longer grieve.

[bigkoala1]

i dont believe its about grieving anymore. its more about remeberance. 9/11 is a time to remember not only the people in the trade center but to remeber all of those lost in the war on terror.

you may not agree with the war but, you have to respect the soldiers that are there fighting for us everyday.

today I will pray for those lost and those that still fight, that they may come home soon, victorious.

[HOT_WASABI_JUNKIE]

I guess I have an opinion on 9-11.

I, like many in here, watched it unfold on the Today show. I was up unusually early.Hearing Katie Couric gasp "oh my god" as the second plane hit still sends chills up my spine.
I just remember there was so much mis-information and no one knew what was really happening.
Though I don't blame Bush for not preventing it, even though he has substancial documents in his possession beforehand.I think if the shoe was on the other foot, the republicans would have blamed Gore in the mid term elections for being "weak" on national defense and made it a big issue.
911 was a sucker-punch to the unsuspecting gut of America.I think most of the civilized world felt sympathy for us.
I remember so many cars had American flags on them,suddenly being white,black, or mexican, or chinese did not matter so much. We were all in the same boat, against an enemy without a homeland to nuke the crap out of.
Although I heard the hijackers called cowardly,I never thought of them as that. Crazy yes, cowardly no..I think it is cowardly to push a button from 300 miles away and launch a long range missile that will kill people. I think to be the bomb, and launch yourself into a building, takes a different mindset entirely.
I am of the mind that the "war on terror" will be won when young islamic militants don't want to kill us anymore.If they don't want us in their holy land, I say we leave. I would not want a bunch of crazy towelheads in my backyard,So I understand.
Have we gotten payback from 911? We have killed a lot of people, most of them having nothing to do with 911. I think I would feel better if we could catch Osama and drop a good size building on him....

[VCAMILO]

... I was in a plane in Germany about to fly back to Chicago. After 30 minutes of standing in the runway the pilot finally gave us an update on what was going on in New York. He told us that the FAA had closed the skies and no inbound flights to the US were allowed to take off. We taxied back to the terminal to get our luggage and finally got to see all the screens in the terminal tuned to CNN. Within minutes the first building went down. By the time we got our luggage the second building had collapse. My best friend and I were stuck in Düsseldorf until Sunday morning. I guess looking back it makes me realize how small the world is. No matter how far we are from each other technology can put you any place in the world in seconds. I got to see what was going on in Europe as the USA was dealing with it. It was the headlines for the entire time I was there. I could not understand what people were saying but the news cameras did not leave the airport the entire time. When it was time for our flight to leave it was escorted by a tank and two huge trucks with military guys. The entire airport was being guarded by guys with machine guns and about a dozen dogs. I will always remember nine eleven.

[Hotsauce]

http://members.aol.com/jchristou/WTC/blast2.jpg

This was the view from my front door. I snapped that on a disposable camera just as the second plane impacted.

John C.

[rowhard]

911 was a sucker-punch to the unsuspecting gut of America.

Very well put my friend, it certainly was.

We all Have been effected by this.

One of our own, user name "Wekilled" is due back to Fort Lewis soon. Hopes to be home to take his kids out 'Tricker Treating' Hope he comes by my house.

There was a email I got the other day that said: 'Treat everyday like a canine. If you can't screw it or eat it, then piss on it and walk away' I laughed like I hope you did. I sent it around to everyone on my email list, including Doug (WeKilled). His response: (and I paraphrase)

'We had just been hit by a IED, a couple of weeks ago, buddy lost a leg. I was all colors of pissed off. We formed up at the Cross Sabers in Bagdad. I walked over and pissed on them, felt good'

Sorry, just had to share

Come home safe Doug

[CrnCnn]

I was listening to Glen Beck today and yesterday and he was talking about the information about the terrorists targeting schools next.

[CrnCnn]

http://members.aol.com/jchristou/WTC/blast2.jpg

This was the view from my front door. I snapped that on a disposable camera just as the second plane impacted.

John C.
I couldnt imagine.

[WyrreJ]

I was listening to Glen Beck today and yesterday and he was talking about the information about the terrorists targeting schools next.I've never heard of that guy, but don't for a minute fall for that kind of fear mongering. Terrorists kill less people world-wide per year than bees do, less people than die from drowing in bath-tubs. Our country needs to stop cowering in fear and start living like free men again.

9/11 was indeed a sucker punch, but instead of getting up and standing our ground, all we have done is curl up, roll over, and do the terrorists jobs for them.

[Chopper]

You tellin' me, you took that picture from Yonkers???? Long way from the lower west side to Yonkers.

[WiSDoM]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan_school_hostage_crisis

here is your fear mongering.. Glenn Beck was talking about preventive measures and plans schools have incase of one of these actions happens here. I never thought education and knowledge as something we should fear?

To think that it couldn't happen here is naive. Look at all the mass shooting we have had in our schools just in the last few years and they were not even terrorists. I know I would feel better if my school system was really looking out for my kids. What can we really do????

[WyrreJ]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan_school_hostage_crisis

here is your fear mongering.. Glenn Beck was talking about preventive measures and plans schools have in case of one of these actions happens here. I never thought education and knowledge as something we should fear?

To think that it couldn't happen here is naive. Look at all the mass shooting we have had in our schools just in the last few years and they were not even terrorists. I know I would feel better if my school system was really looking out for my kids. What can we really do????

A perfect example of doing the terrorist's job for them.
One case, 3 years ago right on the border of Chechnya -- you know the area in the middle of a freaking civil war.

Do you know how much bad fecal matter goes down around the world every day? We can't possibly plan for everything that could happen. It just isn't possible. There isn't enough money on the planet to pay to protect us from every movie plot that someone thinks up.

What's naive is to take the fear-mongers seriously. Was it this Beck guy's idea to associate school shootings with terrorist attacks? Typical fear-mongering - invent a problem and then associate it with some totally unrelated, high-profile, vivid event and capitalize on the fear by association.

Except in this case, any rational evaluation of school shootings would show that those are so rare that they are hardly worth the worry - what 2 per year out of the tens of thousands of schools in this country? A couple of hundred times more kids die in car accidents than die in school shootings. The reason they make all the headlines is because they are so rare to begin with.

Sure, every school should have an emergency plan -- a plan flexible enough to deal with most reasonable concerns - bad weather, power failures, etc. But terrorism is about the last thing on the list that schools need to be worried about.

There is one and only one way to win the "War on Terror" and that is to REFUSE TO BE TERRORIZED.

[WiSDoM]

Beck didn't say anything about the school shootings. The information he was talking about was coming from a person who was working for homeland security in 2004. I mentioned shootings just to show how some seemly unorganized wackjob can create such a problem. Vtec for example.

I don't live in fear, but if someone tells me not to travel in a certain part of town at a certain time of day because there is high chance of me being hurt then I make sure i don’t need to go there. It is like 9-11 there was all kinds of intel but no one connected the dots. if they had maybe it wouldn't have happened. I don't see anything wrong with them paying attention to intel and trying to prevent things from happening again. Information is information, do with it what you will. If you make yourself aware of a potential situation you maybe able to avoid it.

When I travel outside or inside this country I like to have as much info about the area as possible. I wouldn't consider that foolish. I've traveled enough to know that your better off listening what people say about your surroundings.

What does it hurt aware of what is going on around you.

[WyrreJ]

What does it hurt aware of what is going on around you.
The problem is discriminating between the BS and reality. So far we have been absolutely inundated with BS, while the reality has been negligible.

Just look at the ridiculous "terror alert level" -- we have been at "significant risk" or higher since its inception in January 2003 - and NYC has never been below "high." How many actual terrorist attacks have happened here or even been attempted since then? Zero. How many cockamamie terrorist threats have been reported by the media? Hundreds if not thousands.
How does that kind of intel help?

Part of the reason no one "connected the dots" for 9/11 is because there were way too many dots and not enough people trying to connect them. So what have we done about it? Add more dots. Warrantless wiretapping, warrantless data-mining, no-fly lists, etc. Lots more dots, hardly any more people to connect them.

What matters is quality of information and just like the government has been adding low-grade information in the form of more and more "dots" -- fear-mongering is all about exaggerating the low-grade, but sensationalist information and ignoring the sensible.

The media loves to hype terrorism because danger sells ears and eyeballs, and the government loves to hype it because for them, its all CYA and empire building. The more people are afraid, the wider they open their wallets for the bureaucrats to reach into and build bigger bureaucracies.

You say you don't live in fear, but really, how can you justify giving any credence to "intel" about terrorist attacks on american schools -- an event with exactly 0 precedence in country and barely 1 case in recent history in the entire world -- when there are so many other risks like shootings, knifings, sexual assault, drugs, etc that happen every day? Is protecting against a Beslan-style attack really a wise use of our limited resources?

[johnnyapollo]

Word.

-- John

[WiSDoM]

all I am saying is that they should be protecting against all the situations you mentioned not just the a Beslan-style attack and to have plans in place to deal will these situations.

[Hotsauce]

You tellin' me, you took that picture from Yonkers???? Long way from the lower west side to Yonkers.

At the time, my shop was on the corner of Hudson and Franklin. I was at work when the attack took place.

John C.

[WyrreJ]

all I am saying is that they should be protecting against all the situations you mentioned not just the a Beslan-style attack and to have plans in place to deal will these situations.

Why are you drawing the line at something like Beslan? Don't you remember all the talk about terrorists getting hired as school bus drivers? -- http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,259168,00.html We gotta have plans for that one too. But what if they infiltrate the school administration? -- http://www.wtop.com/?nid=596&sid=1224471 Better have plans for that too. We also don't want terrorists kidnapping our children and using the money to fund their terrorist operations, right? -- http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2373599 Better have a plan for that too. There must be a hundred other one-off threats we gotta be planning for, after all we need to be safe and secure right?

Every dollar spent on planning for the highly improbable is a dollar that could have gone to education. Worrying about Beslan, or any of the other things in that list is counter-productive because you just can not afford to protect against every conceivable threat. Even if you could afford it, chances are that when someone really wanted to do harm they would conceive of a brand new way to do it that no one has planned for yet, and then what good has all that wasted money done?