9 September 2011 >> Remember:

This website was barely three weeks old when the attacks happened, and at the time, I wrote about what it was like to be in New York City that day, and the day after.

And over the weeks that followed, friends and online acquaintances sent me pictures to post online, each doing their part to preserve another memory of what happened that day. You can find these pictures here.

11 September 2009 >> Remembering September 11th, 2001 in video:

...and text.

24 April 2009 @ 8:42AM >> Whatever happened to all that happy post-partisanship Obama promised?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal say there’s no chance of it now:

Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret.

Policy disputes, often bitter, are the stuff of democratic politics. Elections settle those battles, at least for a time, and Mr. Obama’s victory in November has given him the right to change policies on interrogations, Guantanamo, or anything on which he can muster enough support. But at least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.

If this analogy seems excessive, consider how Mr. Obama has framed the issue. He has absolved CIA operatives of any legal jeopardy, no doubt because his intelligence advisers told him how damaging that would be to CIA morale when Mr. Obama needs the agency to protect the country. But he has pointedly invited investigations against Republican legal advisers who offered their best advice at the request of CIA officials.

In the Washington Post, David Ignatius writes:

Put yourself in the shoes of the people who were asked to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners in 2002. One former officer told me he declined the job, not because he thought the program was wrong but because he knew it would blow up. “We all knew the political wind would change eventually,” he recalled. Other officers who didn’t make that cynical but correct calculation are now “broken and bewildered,” says the former operative.

[...]

One veteran counterterrorism operative says that agents in the field are already being more careful about using the legal findings that authorize covert action. An example is the so-called “risk of capture” interview that takes place in the first hour after a terrorism suspect is grabbed. This used to be the key window of opportunity, in which the subject was questioned aggressively and his cellphone contacts and “pocket litter” were exploited quickly.

Now, field officers are more careful. They want guidance from headquarters. They need legal advice. I’m told that in the case of an al-Qaeda suspect seized in Iraq several weeks ago, the CIA didn’t even try to interrogate him. The agency handed him over to the U.S. military.

So, this is where we are as a country these days? We’re really considering prosecuting people for authoring legal opinions?

Merely by raising the issue in this fashion, Obama has already undermined the future security of the country. In the environment created by President Obama and Congressional Democrats, who in their right mind would ever begin a career in intelligence or anti-terrorism? Who would stay in the intelligence services, knowing that their work could land them in court any time the presidency changes hands?

The only question is whether Obama administration officials will be prosecuted in the future for what they’re doing today. Because once politicians take the frightening step of criminalizing policy differences, they’d better plan on staying in power forever, or they may one day find themselves in the defendant’s chair. And if being too vigilant about protecting the country is a potential criminal offense, so is not doing enough.

11 September 2008 >> Remember.

22 April 2008 >> Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri seems upset that conspiracy theorists are robbing his terrorist network of the recognition it deserves.

CNN reports:

Al-Zawahiri also denied a conspiracy theory that Israel carried out the September 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., and he blamed Iran and Shiite Hezbollah for spreading the idea to discredit the Sunni al Qaeda’s achievement.

Hey, Ayman! Don’t forget that the Western left has a stake in promoting the al-Qaeda-didn’t-do-it theory. After all, if they’re forced to acknowledge that the attack was perpetrated by al Qaeda, then they can’t also claim it was an “inside job” orchestrated by the U.S. government.

Al-Zawahiri accused Hezbollah’s al-Manar television of starting the rumor.

“The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it,” he said.

And plenty of Westerners have bought into it, too.

11 September 2007 >> Last year, for the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I posted a video entitled Crystal Morning. The video consisted of footage shot on the morning of the attacks and the day after. The audio track was taken from emergency response calls and radio dispatch transmissions.

Yesterday, I received this e-mail from a woman who watched the video shortly after it was released. I thought it was a fitting memorial for today:

Last year, shortly before the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I was looking for online video to show my then nine-year-old daughter, who has little memory of the event and had been asking me some questions about it. Within the first minute of the film, something made me stop and reverse the video. There, standing behind a guy with a bike and to one side of a guy in a green uniform was the familiar figure of another witness to the events of that day, my husband, Larry.

Larry had spent the 10th in a training seminar on the 17th floor of one of the towers - he was an internet architect in charge of the Technology Lab for AIG on John Street at that time - and was supposed to be there that morning to meet up with co-workers and attend an exposition at Windows on the World. Having just been diagnosed with diabetes a few weeks before, he and some of his co-workers decided to get bagels for breakfast before going upstairs. Doing that probably saved their lives. He was standing in the street when the first plane hit, still standing there, trying to get his boss on the phone for instructions when the second plane hit. That is roughly the point he appears in the video in his blue shirt, with cellphone to his ear, like everyone else that day, unable to get a connection as he watched the buildings burning a few blocks away.

Our daughters have heard him talk about all the things that happened to him that day, but seeing this video finally made it real to them. Later that day, his life was saved again when workers in a condo office in Battery Park City pulled him and his secretary off the street as the first tower fell and they were running for their lives - he had fallen while trying to climb a fence, and been pulled to his feet by another stranger seconds before the collapse, and she was running barefoot, having lost her shoes as they went over the fence.

He and I both knew people that were not as fortunate that day, and it remains important to us to have our children understand the magnitude of what happened, not as an abstract bit of history, but as something that forever altered all our lives. I just wanted to thank you for being a part of that.

Sincerely,
[Name Withheld]

Thank you for taking the time to write and for letting me share this story with the rest of the world.

Here is my experience from that day.

13 September 2006 >> In the London Telegraph, Anne Applebaum looks at Europe’s perception of the United States, and how it has changed—and stayed the same—since the days after the September 11th attacks:

Within a couple of days [after the attacks,] a Guardian columnist wrote of the “unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world’s population”. A Daily Mail columnist denounced the “self-sought imperial role” of the United States, which he said had “made it enemies of every sort across the globe”.

That week’s edition of Question Time featured a sustained attack on Phil Lader, the former US ambassador to Britain - and a man who had lost colleagues in the World Trade Centre - who seemed near to tears as he was asked questions about the “millions and millions of people around the world despising the American nation”. At least some Britons, like many other Europeans, were already secretly or openly pleased by the 9/11 attacks.

And all of this was before Afghanistan, before Tony Blair was tainted by his friendship with George Bush, and before anyone knew the word “neo-con”, let alone felt the need to claim not to be one.

The dislike of America, the hatred for what it was believed to stand for - capitalism, globalisation, militarism, Zionism, Hollywood or McDonald’s, depending on your point of view - was well entrenched. To put it differently, the scorn now widely felt in Britain and across Europe for America’s “war on terrorism” actually preceded the “war on terrorism” itself. It was already there on September 12 and 13, right out in the open for everyone to see.

After some future terrorist attack, we’ll hear lots of hand-wringing from people who say that our aggressive foreign policy invited the attack—in effect, we deserved it. But just as Europe’s disdain for America predates our response to 9/11, the hatred of the Jihadis was forged long before we invaded Afghanistan or Iraq.

During the quarter century that preceded the September 11th attacks, U.S. foreign policy towards the Jihadists was quite passive. From President Carter’s helplessness as dozens of Americans were held hostage for 444 days by Islamic revolutionaries in Iran, through the tail-between-the-legs pullouts in Beirut (President Reagan) and Somalia (President Clinton), the default bi-partisan American response to Jihadist provocation was to ignore it or to turn and run. And on the rare occasion that we strayed from that norm, whatever military response we did launch tended to be quite feeble. During this time, Jihadist attacks only grow more frequent and more deadly. Our passivity invited more attacks from people who were trying to get our attention.

And now that the Jihadists got our attention, many in Europe seem to wish they hadn’t. (Or, more accurately, that we’d continue to ignore them.)

I’m afraid that Europe will discover in the coming years that this is not an option. Since 9/11, the American homeland has remained free from attack, but there have been bombs in London and Madrid, riots all over France, a murder over a documentary film, and mass violence over cartoons. These events all have one thing in common, but Europe refuses to see it.

If we do suffer another attack on American soil, it will not be because our foreign policy invited it, but because our military campaign has not yet defeated the enemy. But if Europe is attacked again, it will likely be because they have not yet learned the lesson that we did five years ago.

I think Europe will come closer to America’s point of view...eventually. But unfortunately, it probably won’t be until after the Jihadists get the attention of Europe the way they got ours.

11 September 2006 >> Remember.

5 September 2006 >> On a remarkably clear morning five years ago, New York City came under attack. This video memorial, taken from footage shot by eyewitness David Vogler, shows New Yorkers waking up to that grim reality. Crystal Morning tells the story of September 11th, 2001 through fire and ambulance radio calls, the 911 call of a trapped World Trade Center worker, and the lens of local resident who saw an explosion while walking to work. Video >>

29 July 2006 @ 12:26PM >> The New York Times is reporting that Oliver Stone (”the director of [two] antiwar movies”) is getting praise for his World Trade Center film from some unlikely sources:

L. Brent Bozell III, president of the conservative Media Research Center and founder of the Parents Television Council — best known for its campaigns against indecency on television and for stiffer penalties on broadcasters — called it “a masterpiece” and sent an e-mail message to 400,000 people saying, “Go see this film.”

Cal Thomas, the syndicated columnist, wrote last Thursday that it was “one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see.”

[...]

To top it all off, a writer on The National Review’s Web site, Clifford D. May, actually wrote the words “God Bless Oliver Stone.”

This about a filmmaker whose conspiratorial tirades — not to mention his hyperviolent “Natural Born Killers,” polarizing political films “J. F. K.” and “Nixon,” and the lesser-known television documentary on Fidel Castro — have driven conservatives batty for decades. Only last year, The Washington Times, in an editorial, called the hiring of the “conspiracy-addled” Mr. Stone a “maliciously inspired choice” to direct “World Trade Center.”

The film isn’t out yet, so I can’t judge it for myself. But when the project was announced, I do remember thinking that Oliver Stone was a poor choice for a film about September 11th. (Fortunately, I didn’t write about it, so there’s no embarrassing rant to sheepishly recant.)

And that reminded me, we all have our own knee-jerk reactions and personal biases, even those of us who make a hobby out of pointing out the biases that exist elsewhere.

I’ll watch the film, simply because I’d like to be surprised by someone like Oliver Stone. It’s a healthy thing when your prejudices are proven wrong.

23 May 2006 >> First, let’s define “they.” For the purposes of this article, “they” refers to Jihadists: a radical subset of Muslims who believe it is their duty to kill anyone who refuses to abide by their religious law. Coincidentally, “they” are responsible for a disproportionate share of the terrorist attacks around the world, as un-politically-correct as this might be to recognize.

Now that we know who “they” are, who’s “us”? Even though the “us” that “they” hate pretty much amounts to all of Western society, I will take “us” to mean the United States, since in the eyes of many in the non-Western world, the U.S. symbolizes Western society. But as the ongoing terrorist attacks worldwide prove, people are grossly misinformed if they believe the United States is the only country the Jihadists wish to destroy. More >>

3 May 2006 @ 6:56PM >> Convicted September 11th co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui was spared the death penalty. His reaction:

“America, you lost. I won!” Moussaoui yelled as he was escorted from the U.S. District courtroom in Alexandria after the verdict was read. He clapped his hands as he left.

There are those who believe that the fight against Jihadist terrorism should be handled by law enforcement, as though al Qaeda were the mafia. To me, that’s naive and dangerous thinking.

You can’t win a war in court. Just ask Zacarias Moussaoui.

17 March 2006 @ 11:40AM >> One of the reasons the nation is so divided politically is that we can’t even agree on the exact nature of the War on Terror. Some people recognize it as a war, others see it as a law enforcement matter, and some believe the whole thing is a sham. More >>

16 February 2006 >> The quote of the day, from Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, on the 12 Danish cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammed:

Unfortunately, people in the Muslim world feel that this is a new 9/11 against themselves.

Hmmm...flying planes into buildings...publishing cartoons. Yep, that’s about the same.

Update: The Pub Philosopher writes:

Of course, he is right. In the 9/11 attacks, Muslim fanatics killed people and in the Cartoon Wars, Muslim fanatics killed people. Somehow though, I don’t think that’s what he meant.

11 November 2005 >> Media bias isn’t limited to the U.S., obviously. If anything, the left-wing domination of the media may be even more pronounced in Europe.

Case in point: French newsman Jean-Claude Dassier, who readily admits to skewing coverage of the recent French riots. As violence and fires raged in some 300 French cities and towns, Dassier, the general director of the French TCI news channel, was doing his best to downplay them. Why? He feared that showing images of the riots would build support for right-wing politicians. Not only did he hide certain images from the public, but he readily admits his motivation:

“Politics in France is heading to the right and I don’t want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television,” Mr Dassier told an audience of broadcasters at the News Xchange conference in Amsterdam today.

“Having satellites trained on towns across France 24 hours a day showing the violence would have been wrong and totally disproportionate ... Journalism is not simply a matter of switching on the cameras and letting them roll. You have to think about what you’re broadcasting,” he said.

The American media plays similar tricks. Throughout my life, I’ve seen the horror of President Kennedy’s assassination replayed countless times—despite it happening nearly a decade before my birth—yet the horrors of people jumping from the World Trade Center towers are never shown on television, not anymore. That, I guess, might inflame passions.

In the French media, Dassier isn’t alone:

“Do we send teams of journalists because cars are burning, or are the cars burning because we sent teams of journalists?” asked Patrick Lecocq, editor-in-chief of France 2.

Once could ask the same question about terrorist attacks in Iraq, which seem designed to demoralize the American public and weaken our resolve as much as they’re designed to strike fear into the souls of Iraqis. Yet each attack ends up being the top story on the news. Could it be that political calculations are shaping news coverage here at home, too?

You’ve got to give Dassier credit for one thing: at least he owns up to his bias. Our media isn’t honest enough to do that.

26 September 2005 >> The International Freedom Center, the controversial Ground Zero memorial, has a powerful new foe: Senator Hillary Clinton. The New York Post reported this weekend:

“I cannot support the IFC,” Clinton declared last night in a strongly worded statement in response to an inquiry from The Post.

Her tough comments are Clinton’s first significant remarks about the controversy raging at Ground Zero over the Freedom Center, which 9/11 families and other critics fear will become a center of anti-Americanism.

“While I want to ensure that development and rebuilding in lower Manhattan move forward expeditiously, I am troubled by the serious concerns family members and first responders have expressed to me,” Clinton said.

“The LMDC [Lower Manhattan Development Corp.] has authority over the site and I do not believe we can move forward until it heeds and addresses their concerns.”

In the face of obscene political correctness, Senator Clinton is demonstrating a levelheadedness that is all too rare from Democrats these days. If more Democratic politicians took regular stands like this, they’d probably enjoy much more success at the ballot box. Of course, the triangulating Clintons understand this too, which may or may not be the sole reason Hillary adopted this position. Either way, she deserves credit if her opposition helps prevent the International Freedom Center from defiling the graveyards of so many people.

Update: Governor George Pataki finally pulls the plug. The IFC is dead. Finished. It won’t be disgracing Ground Zero. Special thanks should go to Debra Burlingame, whose tireless efforts pushed this issue onto the radar screen of New York’s politicians.

23 August 2005 @ 10:11AM >> The International Freedom Center, the entity that started out at a September 11th memorial at Ground Zero, has for some time looked in danger of becoming an America-bashing museum. The New York Daily News reports the latest:

“Don’t feature America first,” the IFC has been advised by the consortium of 14 “museums of conscience” that quietly has been consulting with the Freedom Center for the past two years over plans for the hallowed site. “Think internationally, where America is one of the many nations of the world.”

[...]

Located in nine countries on five continents, the coalition museums chronicle apartheid in South Africa, slavery in Senegal, torture in Argentina, racism in the South and internment of Japanese-Americans in California, along with other historical horrors.

“No one in the civilized world would ever defend what happened on 9/11,” said Sarwar Ali, the coalition’s chairman and a trustee of the Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh.

“But what happened after 9/11 - with restrictions placed on human rights and the cycle of revenge and the allegations of human rights abuses in prisons - must also be explored,” Ali said in a call from London.

Coalition members gathered for their annual conference at a Holocaust site in the Czech Republic in July 2004 - and assailed the United States for “reasserting its power in an arrogant way,” the conference report shows.

[...]

At the conference, the coalition also leveled barbs at the IFC: “The Freedom Center is a caricature of the typical American response to everything [telling every story from an American viewpoint].”

September 11th was an attack on the United States. If this story isn’t told from an American viewpoint, whose viewpoint should we choose? That of the attackers?

The International Freedom Center was an ill-conceived idea to begin with. It should be scrapped altogether and replaced with a simple September 11th Memorial that can’t be politicized.

8 July 2005 @ 2:42PM >> There’s a real war going on out there, and the enemy isn’t each other. If we can just stop assuming we’re the problem, we might actually stand a chance of victory. But if we waste time navel-gazing in a world that contains wealthy terrorists and starving nuclear powers, we will ultimately be killed in our own streets in a way that’ll make September 11th look like a verbal reprimand. And if you don’t think that’s a possibility, then you really don’t know the enemy. More >>

21 June 2005 @ 8:19AM >> The New York Post reports that the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero—which was at some point renamed the “International Freedom Center”—is morphing into “multimillion-dollar bash-America palace.”

The fireworks started earlier this month when Debra Burlingame, a sister of the pilot of one of the hijacked 9/11 planes, wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Ground Zero has been stolen right from under our noses.”

Burlingame, a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, specifically charged that [International Freedom Center president Richard] Tofel and others are planning to host exhibits at Ground Zero devoted to such wholly off-topic issues as the alleged “genocide” of Americans Indians, the fight against slavery, the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag.

Worthy subjects for study, each and every one — but not at Ground Zero.

Tofel, for his part, insists that the controversy is all about nothing.

But when Cavuto asked, specifically, whether the museum would feature “atrocities Americans have committed,” Tofel repeatedly refused a direct answer.

“Atrocities is such a loaded word,” he stammered, the weasel.

[...]

“The International Freedom Center will host debates and note points of view with which you — and I — will disagree,” Tofel wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Debates?

Like, whether America is sufficiently sensitive to other cultures?

Whether Muslims — and non-Americans generally — need to protect themselves from U.S. “hegemony”?

How did this happen? The Post notes some of the more ideologically-driven people steering the project:

Tom Bernstein, an IFC founder, and Michael Posner, an advisor, also run the George Soros-funded Human Rights First, a bash-America forum of the first order. If you doubt it, visit the Web site: humanrightsfirst.org.

Board member Anthony Romero of the ACLU (aclu.org) reportedly wants exhibits on what he believes have been post-9/11 “curbs to civil liberties.”

Stephen Heintz, the board’s secretary, is with the Rockefeller Bros. Fund (rbf.org), which at present is concerned with what it terms the “pressing need to examine the content, style and tone of U.S. global engagement and to ensure that they reflect an understanding of the reality and implications of increasing global interdependence.” (Translation: Blame America First.)

Eric Foner, a Columbia University professor who, three weeks after 9/11, said he wasn’t sure which was more frightening, the attack or the White House’s response, is another adviser.

If the project proceeds, it wouldn’t be the first time such a memorial was taken over by the forces of political correctness, the Post says:

Ten years ago, the Smithsonian Institution proposed a seemingly benign plan to commemorate the 50th anniversary of end of World War II in the Pacific.

The undertaking swiftly morphed into a naked attack on American war motives, tactics and strategy that highlighted Japanese suffering and totally ignored the fact that Tokyo started the conflict.

That happens these days when academics are left to their own devices.

These developments inspired Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot whose hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon on September 11th, to set up a “Take Back the Memorial” petition.

16 March 2005 @ 1:13PM >> Consider this: 18 of the 19 hijackers on September 11th carried multiple driver’s licenses from states with lenient licensing laws. These days, driver’s licenses are effectively used as legal identification, enabling things like opening bank accounts and checking into hotels. Of course, they’re also used to verify the identity of passengers as they board planes.

How much easier did we make the terrorists’ mission that cloudless Tuesday morning by handing them driver’s licenses? We may never know, but one thing is certain: more stringent licensing laws could have denied them the legal documentation they used as they plotted their attack and boarded our planes. It is remarkable that 3 1/2 years later, nothing has been done about this critical national security issue.

The Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License is working to change that. Through a new ad campaign, the coalition is working to inform the public about the gaping hole in our nation’s defenses left by the insecure licensing laws of some states. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation to tighten licensing laws, and a similar bill is pending in the Senate.

This is a tremendously important issue. If you agree, you might want to let your Senator know.

28 October 2004 >> The choice we have on election day is between the worldview of September 10th—embodied by John Kerry—and President Bush’s September 12th worldview. More >>

11 September 2004 @ 4:29PM >> Three years ago today, I watched the towers burn from the rooftop of my office building.

Some of my friends were even closer.

I consider myself remarkably fortunate that I did not know anyone who was killed that day. In fact, I know several people who for one reason or another avoided death.

Seth MacFarlane—the creator of the TV show The Family Guy and with whom I went to high school—told me that he had a ticket on Flight 11 out of Boston. He got caught in traffic and arrived late. If not for that traffic, he would have died in the first plane to hit the World Trade Center.

A former coworker was attending a week-long seminar held at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop one of the towers. He was so bored in the first day of the seminar that he decided to skip the morning session of the second day. That boredom saved his life.

Several months before the attacks, I applied for a job at a software company in the World Trade Center. I ended up taking another job.

It’s strange how fate marks some and not others, and it’s easy for those of us who weren’t personally affected to feel guilty for being spared pain that has been spread so widely. None of those thousands of people deserved to die that day, but die they did. I’ll never be able to answer the question why, so all I can do is honor them in my own little way, by doing my part to ensure that we bring about a world where that will never happen again.

To all those who greet this day with an emptiness I can’t fathom, my thoughts are with you.

8 April 2004 >> Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission made for riveting listening. The political fireworks were on full display when the Democrats on the panel pressed Rice, asking why President Bush had not developed a pre-September 11th plan to preemptively attack Afghanistan and disrupt al Qaeda. These questions, of course, come from the same folks who criticize Bush administration for acting preemptively against Iraq.

The inconsistencies of the Democratic arguments against the Bush Administration make it impossible for them to put forth any alternate vision, because anything they propose will conflict with some of their previous criticisms. Even that they’ll deny, though; they’ll sweeten their waffles with the syrup of nuance, the word they use to cover up the fact that they’re holding several completely contradictory stances simultaneously.

According to principles of quantum mechanics, it is possible for a subatomic particle to occupy multiple positions at the same time. Perhaps the Democrats hope to become the quantum party. If so, it explains why John Kerry, the consummate Quantum Candidate, is the perfect person to head the Democratic ticket this fall. More >>

25 July 2003 >> Some in this country still want our intelligence analysts to err on the side of caution, because doing so could thwart future attacks and would therefore save lives. Others believe that no action should ever be taken unless every scrap of intelligence data is unimpeachable and unambiguous. But if you complain that the administration wasn’t vigilant enough in interpreting pre-September 11th intelligence, you can’t credibly claim that the administration was too vigilant in interpreting the data pertaining to Iraq. More >>

21 May 2002 >> “We must try to understand how we mishandled intelligence prior to September 11th, but let’s do it in a calm, rational way, far away from professional politicians. Our goal should be fixing the problem, not affixing the blame. Forgive my skepticism, but judging from the hotheaded handwringing that has taken place already, holding hearings in some Congressional kangaroo court will do little more than provide a podium for people whose primary concern is their next election.” More >>

15 April 2002 >> “After suffering the attacks of September 11th, I could have understood an American wanting to participate in a rowdy demonstration where enemy leaders were burned in effigy. Instead, it is the people supporting our attackers who routinely hold violent demonstrations, demonstrations where the participants burn our flag while they pray for, plan for, and attempt to execute our country’s complete annihilation. And yet, for some reason, despite only a handful of revenge crimes nationwide, we still must endure lecturing from the Left about tolerance.” More >>

19 March 2002 >> A reader responds to “Six Months Later: Have We Forgotten Already?” More >>

11 March 2002 >> “It is our duty to see as much as we can of the catastrophe that was inflicted upon us. We need to face up to the depths of the evil in the hearts of the enemy we’re fighting. If we don’t, from what source will we draw the strength to maintain our resolve when the war gets long or the news gets boring?” More >>

4 March 2002 >> When al Qaeda members were living in New Jersey, trying to blend in, they didn’t wear turbans. They didn’t wear turbans when they went to flight school in Florida. And we’ve all seen the tapes of the September 11th hijackers going through airport security; they weren’t wearing turbans then. As they took our planes and slammed them into our buildings, they didn’t seem to mind dying without their turbans. So why are turbans so important to the terrorists at Guantanamo Bay? More >>

18 January 2002 >> “To disfigure a moment in history to satisfy ephemeral political concerns is not only an insult to the firefighters who raised the flag, it cheapens our nation’s historical record by turning it into a mere simulation.” More >>