WORLD_ REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11

•New York ramps up security
US officials scramble to confirm the threat of a possible terror attack planned to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11. .

REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11
Yahoo!7 and Agencies
September 9, 2011, 1:31 pm


The twin towers of the World Trade Center billow smoke, September 11, 2001. Photo: Reuters


US citizens may be behind terror threat

US politicians are calling on all Americans to be the eyes and ears of vigilance this weekend as they attend the September 11 services.

At least two of the three men involved in a possible al-Qaeda plot to pull off an attack coinciding with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 are believed to be US citizens or have US traveling documents, government officials said.

Their primary mission is to explode a car bomb in either New York or Washington, but if that proves impossible, they have been ordered to simply cause as much destruction as they can, one US official said.

Word that al-Qaeda had dispatched would-be attackers reached US officials in midweek. A CIA informant who has proven reliable in the past approached intelligence officials overseas to say that the men had been ordered by newly minted al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks Sunday by doing harm on US soil.

The tipster says the would-be attackers are of Arab descent and may speak Arabic as well as English. Counterterrorism officials were looking for certain names associated with the threat, but it was unclear whether the names were real or fake.

Counterterrorism officials have been working around the clock to determine whether the threat is accurate, but so far, have been unable to corroborate it, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation.

In the meantime, extra security was put in place to protect the people in the two cities that took the brunt of the jetliner attacks that killed nearly 3000 people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a decade ago. It was the worst terror assault in US history, and al-Qaeda has long dreamed of striking again to mark the anniversary. But it could be weeks before the intelligence community can say whether this particular threat is real.

Undaunted by talk of a new terror threat, New Yorkers and Washingtonians wove among police armed with assault rifles and waited with varying degrees of patience at security checkpoints Friday.

Security worker Eric Martinez wore a pin depicting the twin towers on his lapel as he headed to work in lower Manhattan on Friday where he also worked 10 years ago when the towers came down. "If you're going to be afraid, you're just going to stay home," he said.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, too, made a point of taking the subway to City Hall.

Briefed on the threat Friday morning, President Barack Obama instructed his security team to take "all necessary precautions," the White House said. Obama still plans to travel to New York on Sunday to mark the 10th anniversary with stops that day at the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Ten years on: 9/11 babies

Nine years ago, the babies that lost their fathers on September 11, 2001 were brought together on the first anniversary of the fateful day.

Those kids now tell their stories of growing up without their fathers due to the horrible terrorist attack, and how it has impacted their lives.

They tell of the little ways they connect with the fathers they never knew, and how they still love and remember them.


John Howard remembers

Former prime minister John Howard says being in Washington when terrorists struck the US on September 11, 2001 may have hastened his decision to commit support to the US president in the war on terror.

"I think I would have reached the same conclusions, but maybe not immediately, if I hadn't been there," Mr Howard told Fairfax newspapers in the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of the tragedy.

"But I don't think in the long run it made a fundamental difference.

"Certainly, being on the spot had a powerful effect on me. I knew how shocked and bewildered the Americans were, although everybody was very calm.

"Everybody understood that this was a game-changer."

Mr Howard said the war on terror has weakened al-Qaeda since 2001 and said the downfall of Saddam Hussein could have encouraged the Arab Spring.


The tragedy of 9/11
It has been a decade since America became the victim of the most calamitous terrorist attack in history which has so far claimed more than 3500 lives.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four Boeing 767 passenger jets , flying two of them directly into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York.

Within hours, the world was watching as both towers collapsed, coating the south end of the island of Manhattan with smoke and debris.

The third 767 jet was crashed by the hijackers into the west side of the Pentagon. When passengers attempted to take control of the fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, it crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The September 11 attacks left the world in a state in state of shock and would mark a dramatic shift in US foreign policy.

Two weeks after the attacks, US President George W. Bush ordered that plans for the invasion of Afghanistan be drawn up - one month later America and its allies had invaded the country, launching the War on Terror.

Their stated mission was to hunt down Osama bin Laden, the man considered responsible for coordinating the September 11 attacks, dismantle al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban regime which had supported the terrorist organisation.

Bin Laden, who had initially denied involvement, publicly accepted responsibility for September 11 in a 2004 videotape. He cited the US support of Israel, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, and sanctions against Iraq as motives.

On May 2 this year, it was announced Osama bin Laden had been killed as the target of an operation in Abbottabad, a town north of lslamabad in Pakistan.

In 2003, Iraq was invaded by the US and Allied Forces with the publicly stated aim of disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and ending Saddam Hussein’s alleged support of terrorism.

A month before the Iraq invasion, 36 million people nationally took part in a worldwide protest against the invasion, the largest anti-way rally in history.

Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003 and later sentenced to death by hanging.

As of July 2011, 4477 US soldiers have been killed in the conflict. A leaked document (the Iraq War Logs), estimates that 109,000 Iraqis have died since the 2003 invasion, 66,081 of those deaths are recorded as civilians.


Iconic photos from September 11


.Final survivor of south tower collapse struggles with scars of 9/11
.Photographer shares unusual view of twin towers before 9/11
.Meet the man behind the haunting Falling Man photo
.Woman from iconic 9/11 photo overcomes rough decade


September 11 Timeline

Meet the man behind the haunting Falling Man photo

Richard Drew put down his camera bag and looked up at the colossal skyscraper that seemed to be racing toward the clouds at an accelerated clip.

"I'm really surprised how fast this building's gone up," he said of the rising edifice at 1 World Trade Center, peering at the monolith from beneath the brim of a tan baseball cap. "I just hope it isn't another target."

It was around 2 pm on a bright Wednesday afternoon in mid-July, and Drew, a veteran Associated Press photographer with wire-rimmed glasses and a neatly cropped silver beard that betrays his 64 years, was standing near the northwest intersection of Vesey and West streets in Lower Manhattan, across from the noisy jungle gym of cranes and steel where a global business hub is currently being reconstructed.

Nine years and eight months earlier in this very spot -- now an austere pedestrian plaza in the shadow of the Goldman Sachs building - Drew took a picture that became one of the most iconic images of one of the most catastrophic events in American history.

"I don't like coming down here," he admitted.

But he had nevertheless returned to retrace his steps for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, when he had watched dozens die through the lens of a Nikon DCS620.

On that similarly brilliant morning a decade ago, two planes had crashed into the Twin Towers by the time Drew emerged from the Chambers Street subway stop around a quarter after nine.


The Falling Man and photographer Richard Drew. Photo: AP/Yahoo! News


The 110-story buildings looked like a pair of giant smokestacks spewing plumes of black soot into the crystal blue sky.

He began shooting, focusing on the topmost floors. It wasn't long before he realized that some of the people trapped inside - as many as 200 of them, it was later estimated -- had decided that plunging thousands of feet to their deaths was preferable to burning alive.

"There's one. There's another one," he said, recalling the horrific scene with a detached ease. "I just started photographing people as they were falling."

One of those people would come to be known as the Falling Man. Though his identity remains unconfirmed, some believe he was Jonathan Briley, a 43-year-old sound engineer who worked in a restaurant on the top floor of the North Tower.

The man fell at 9:41, and Drew caught about a dozen frames of his fatal descent. In one of them, the subject soars earthward in a graceful vertical dive -- arms at his sides; left leg bent at the knee.

"Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it," wrote Tom Junod in a renowned 2003 Esquire piece that coined the title of the photo, which won a 2001 World Press Photo award and is the subject of a 2006 documentary film. "If he were not falling, he might very well be flying."

Newspapers the world over made space for the Falling Man in their Sept. 12, 2001, editions. But the widespread publicity sparked a debate as to whether the image was too gratuitous for public consumption.

"To me, it's a real quiet photograph," Drew argued.


Little known facts from September 11


Unlike fellow AP photographer Nick Ut's Pulitzer-winning 1972 shot of a naked 9-year-old girl fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam or Drew's famous photos of Bobby Kennedy's bloody dying breaths, "There's no violence in it," he said.

It was now close to 3 p.m., and Drew had decamped to a Shake Shack a few blocks from Ground Zero for a late lunch.

Waiting for his food to arrive, Drew said he doesn't attend the memorial ceremonies held each year at the hallowed site nearby, nor does he plan to show up for the 10th anniversary of the tragedy.

He was just doing his job that day.

"I don't need to be here to commemorate what happened to me," he said. "I record history every day. Everything I do, whether it's photographing DSK [Dominique Strauss-Kahn] in court, or the World Trade Center, or spring training baseball, it's all part of history, no matter how small or how large."

Drew likewise doesn't reminisce much about his experience on Sept. 11. (No lingering nightmares or PTSD, either.)

He is reminded of the photo, however, twice a day, every day, through online news alerts that track mentions of the words "falling man" in the press. He picked up his BlackBerry to check the latest, in which "a 22-year-old man died Monday after falling off a rocky cliff and being swept out to sea in Hawaii," he reported.

The alerts, which he created on his Yahoo! and Google accounts about eight years ago, rarely have anything to do with the actual Falling Man, but he likes to keep up anyway.

“I'm curious to see if people are writing about it or talking about it," he said. "To see how they might interpret the picture."

Sometimes the Falling Man reveals himself where it's least expected. Drew's longtime neighbor, the author Helen Schulman, lives five floors above the apartment Drew shares with his wife, his two daughters, and the family's 5-year-old golden retriever, Ajax, in a prewar building on the Upper West Side.

Schulman wrote an entire novel without knowing that Drew, as she explains in the acknowledgements, had taken the "picture that haunted and inspired me throughout the years of writing" it.

Drew and Schulman serendipitously connected the dots after she completed the first draft of the book, "A Day at the Beach" - about a distraught family that flees Manhattan for the Hamptons on Sept. 11 -- which was published in 2007.

"It's always going to be a part of me," perhaps more than any other photo he's ever taken, Drew said.

But has it changed him?

He put down the last bite of his Chicago dog, took a sip of beer, and dabbed his mouth with a napkin before pausing to contemplate.

"I think of it as a learning experience," he said of the photo and Sept. 11 in general. "I get so caught up in the adrenaline of doing this job. So, looking back on it, I think a lot about being able to go home to my family every night. Whether I decide to think about it daily or not, it's always in the back of my mind. It's this world event that I have become a part of in my own little tangential way. I'm not a hero fireman; I didn't die there; I didn't have a loved one who passed away there. But it's something I'll never forget."

As for the anonymous soul whose legacy Drew has unwittingly preserved, "Even if people don't want to see my photograph, that man did fall out of the building," he said. "To me, he'll always remain the unknown soldier."


Timeline: events as they unfolded on September 11


.Post-9/11 U.S. intelligence reforms take root, problems remain
.Distant lives come together on 9/11's front lines
.9/11 brings slow death to Pakistan's Peshawar
.US flight controllers recall 9/11 chaos
.Afghan hero Massoud's assassination a prelude to 9/11



Marcy Borders then and now. Photo: AFP and Coleman-Rayner

How 9/11 Changed One Family ForeverBy Monica Netwon Yahoo! Contributor Network

Ten years ago, I was the proud single mom of three, a young man of 18 leaving within three weeks for basic training in the Army, a young boy of 13 and a beautiful young girl of 11. Today, I am still the proud mom of those same three, with a major change thanks to 9/11. My son received a head injury in Iraq that he must deal with for the rest of his life, and I am married to the most wonderful man in the world.

On the morning of 9/11, my brother called me. He was working as a cable television installer and had heard that one of the World Trade Center towers had been hit by a plane. I was getting ready for work and had the Regis and Kathie Lee talk show in the background. My oldest was asleep and my younger two were at school. Suddenly, the television station turned to live video of where a plane had flown into the building. As I watched, another plane flew into the second building. That was moment that so many of us across the country realized without being told that the first was no accident, we were being attacked.

I ran into my sons' bedroom and woke up my oldest child. I told him what had happened and begged him not to go to basic training. He just looked at me with that same deep sense of caring he always had and said "I have to go, Mom. It's more important than ever for you, Jeremy and the Munchkin. America is mine."

I called the schools to check on my other two children and was told that while I could pick them up, the faculty thought it was best if the kids stayed to keep their day as normal as possible. I could see the point in that but was told later by both children that the televisions in their classrooms stayed on the attacks all day.

Today, I am married to a wonderful man I lived down the street from as a teenager. He is my best friend and a wonderful support system for my children. When we got together, I was in the middle of helping the older one through the lengthy process of getting his VA benefits after he came home with a head injury, memory loss, epilepsy, frequent headaches and PTSD.

Today, all three of my kids are adults. The older one will need medical assistance for the rest of his life, but I am thankful each and every day that he came home. My younger son is going to graduate from college in a year and my daughter is married and expecting her first child. My husband has encouraged me to follow my writing dream. I wrote a book of poems and essays during my son's deployment that helped me get through it. Still today, I help parents when they need the understanding of someone who has been there.



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