Resources: Database 9/11 and its aftermath
I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens. Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out of the two World Trade towers. Two planes, I was told by people in the crowd, had plowed into the towers. I walked quickly into the New York Times newsroom at 229 W. 43rd St., grabbed a handful of reporter’s notebooks, slipped my NYPD press card, which would let me through police roadblocks, around my neck, and started down the West Side Highway »
The drama over the proposed Muslim community center in New York is a clash within -- not between -- civilizations A growing chorus of Americans have, to use Sarah Palin’s apt term, "refudiated" the project to build a lower Manhattan Muslim community center called Park51, one of whose 13 stories is to include a mosque and religious center. Many in this coalition of the refudiators are right-wing propagandists who make their living marketing a version of the fantastical "Eurabia" craze sweeping Europe. Yet inconveniently, the coalition includes many 9/11 victims’ families and a lot of otherwise reasonable Americans who deeply »
President Obama, on his first day in office, can make a number of changes that will mark a clean break with the Bush presidency. He can, and should, issue an executive order revoking any prior order that permits detainee mistreatment by any government agency. He should begin the process of closing Guantánamo, and he should submit to Congress a bill to end the use of military commissions, at least as presently constituted. Over the coming months he can pursue other reforms to restore respect for the Constitution, such as revising the Patriot Act, abolishing secret prisons and "extraordinary rendition," »
July 29, 2007 Our War on Terror By SAMANTHA POWER The day after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush declared the strikes by Al Qaeda “more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.” Bush’s “war on terror” was “not a figure of speech,” he said. Rather, it was a defining framework. The war, Bush announced, would begin with Al Qaeda, but would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” The global war on terror, he said, was the “inescapable calling of our generation.” The phrase and the agenda that »
Chavez Address to the United Nations by Hugo Chavez Address to the UN New York September 20, 2006 Representatives of the governments of the world, good morning to all of you. First of all, I would like to invite you, very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it. Noam Chomsky, one of the most prestigious American and world intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, and this is one of his most recent books, 'Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States.'" [Holds up book, waves it in front of General Assembly.] "It's an excellent book to »
10:39 A.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Secretary General, Mr. President, distinguished delegates, and ladies and gentlemen: We meet one year and one day after a terrorist attack brought grief to my country, and brought grief to many citizens of our world. Yesterday, we remembered the innocent lives taken that terrible morning. Today, we turn to the urgent duty of protecting other lives, without illusion and without fear. We've accomplished much in the last year -- in Afghanistan and beyond. We have much yet to do -- in Afghanistan and beyond. Many nations represented here have joined in the fight against »
Why They Hate Us No, it's not our freedoms. Anti-Americanism isn't going away until the U.S. puts some fairness in its foreign policy. by Julia E. Sweig AMERICA'S MORAL standing in the world has precipitously declined since 2001. For starters, blame the Bush administration's go-it-alone tough talk after 9/11, contempt for the Kyoto accord, war and then chaos in Iraq, secret prisons in Europe and alleged use of torture at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Democrats would have you believe that a new team — theirs — in Washington would change all this. Not so fast. Around the world, anti-Americanism is not »
Paul Vallely, UN Hits Back at US in Report Saying Parts of America Are as Poor as Third World, The Independent (UK) (September 8, 2005) Parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World, according to a shocking United Nations report on global inequality. Claims that the New Orleans floods have laid bare a growing racial and economic divide in the US have, until now, been rejected by the American political establishment as emotional rhetoric. But yesterday's UN report provides statistical proof that for many - well beyond those affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - »
The Fear of the Liberals by COREY ROBIN The Nation, September 26, 2005 issue It's the fourth anniversary of September 11, and Americans are getting restless about the war in Iraq. Republicans are challenging the President, activists and bloggers are pressing the Democrats and liberal hawks are reconsidering their support for the war. Everyone, it seems, is asking questions. Two questions, however, have not been asked, perhaps because they might actually help us move beyond where we are and where we've been. First, how is it that few liberals and no leftists in 1968 believed that Lyndon Johnson, arguably the »
Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread? Michael Ignatieff The New York Times Magazine June 26, 2005 I. As Thomas Jefferson lay dying at his hilltop estate, Monticello, in late June 1826, he wrote a letter telling the citizens of the city of Washington that he was too ill to join them for the 50th-anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence. Wanting his letter to inspire the gathering, he told them that one day the experiment he and the founders started would spread to the whole world. ''To some parts sooner, to others later, but finally »
Two years ago, Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, gravely informed the U.N. General Assembly that the organization had reached "a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations was founded." The world was no longer chiefly menaced by hostility among nations, as it had been then; the U.N. had to adapt to a world threatened by failed states, ethnic hatred, crippling poverty and nonstate actors like Al Qaeda. Annan convened a "high-level panel" to recommend "radical" changes in the U.N.'s structure and culture. Later this week, more than 170 heads of state, gathered »
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