10 YEARS LATER
A Denver Post 9/11 commemorative section
ground zero. From a viewing area unusually empty, a woman spends a few minutes of her afternoon watching construction of the September 11 Memorial and One World Trade Center.
Solemn reflection, unshaken resolve Story by Kevin Vaughan, Photos by Joe Amon The Denver Post
In the shadow of ground zero, they point at the hole in the skyline and they raise their hands to their mouths and stand in silence. They walk next to the 56-foot-long bronze depiction of America’s darkest moment and stop to stare at the poster taped to the wall nearby, the one depicting 343 faces of firefighters who never came home on Sept. 11, 2001. They close their eyes and remember. The jet turning and ripping through the side of one of the steel-and-glass-sheathed buildings in a fireball. The smoke billowing skyward. The collapse of two buildings that stood as the very sym-
bol of the economic and engineering might of the United States. The confusion and then the sense of collective unity for perhaps the only time since Pearl Harbor or maybe the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Ten years after coordinated terrorist attacks ended 2,977 lives and altered the world in countless ways, those memories remain. Today there is also war fatigue, a fragile economy, more stringent security at airports and the frustrating partisan bickering that has come to define American political life.
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|| VOICES OF 9/11 || Seven stories of rescuers, relatives and survivors
“I’m lucky enough out here. I can see the Pathway of Souls.” Handler Ann Wichmann and her rescue dogs searched the rubble of ground zero in the hope of providing closure for families.” C 3
“We wanted to bring something good into the world.” Dutch Bell’s sister, Nina, died in World Trade Center’s north tower. Afterward, Dutch and his wife, Christine, decided to have another child. C 5
“I think things happen for a reason. I wasn’t meant to go.” Susan Cross had begun three weeks of training to become a financial adviser for Morgan Stanley the day before the attack. C 8
Voices stories by John Ingold The Denver Post
sunday, september 11, 2011
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sunday, september 11, 2011 B denverpost.com B the denver post
8:46 A.M.
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American Flight 11 crashes into the World Trade Center’s north tower, which collapses at 10:28 a.m. At 9:03 a.m. United Flight 175 crashes into the south tower. It collapses at 9:59 a.m.
Carmen Taylor, The Associated Press; Spencer Platt, Getty Images; Suzanne Plunkett, The Associated Press
But there is something else too.
THE PARENTS -
There is a near universal feeling of reverence for that day, for all of those who were lost, even for the twisted artifacts pulled from the rubble. And there is an ongoing quest that continues a decade later to put that day into some kind of perspective, to say about it something important and lasting. The legacy of Sept. 11, 2001, takes on different forms in different places. Here, on the streets around the World Trade Center, it may be in the New York forcefulness of a plumber who voices his own sense of loss intermingled with the pride of knowing that he is helping to rebuild. In Washington, D.C., it can be reflected in the face of a college student, standing in the Lincoln Memorial considering what freedom means — and what it costs. In Denver, it can be found in a sculpture fabrication studio, where a gnarled piece of steel from the twin towers will be transformed into a display that will touch people. And in a three-stoplight town in Kansas, it is illustrated in the adoption of a New York firefighter’s family and an audacious effort to build a 9/11 memorial that is ambitious far beyond anything a community of 2,297 ought to be able to pull off.
|| NEW YORK || Along Greenwich Street, the noise never stops. Diesel engines thrum incessantly. Boring machines thump-thump-thump as they pound a hole deep into the earth. A tractor’s backup alarm screeches. The scene of America’s greatest national wound — the 16 acres now known as ground zero — is slowly being healed by an army of construction workers. That work goes on, day and night. One World Trade Center — known for a time as the Freedom Tower — has passed 78 stories and is climbing higher by the day. It’s already more than 200 feet taller than anything in Denver. Eventually, its spire will stretch up 1,776 feet — a bold statement in a bold city. A tourist snaps a photograph while peeking through a small hole in the green nylon fabric stretched across the fence separating the sidewalk from the construction zone. A woman in a burka walks by, oblivious to the burly construction worker in the day-glo orange T-shirt, the one that says “Seal Team Six — Who’s Next?” on the back. Down the street, at the top of a weathered steel staircase, Matty Tingo, 47, savors his midday break. A plumber, he has been at ground
zero for two years, part of the crew completing two acre-size fountains that officially come on today, fountains that mark the footprints of the twin towers. His jeans are faded, his work boots scuffed, and his lunch is a ham sandwich, two bottles of Lipton iced tea, “and as many cigarettes as you can smoke in half an hour,” he says. For him, the aftermath of Sept. 11 represents steady work — and powerful emotions. “It still hurts,” he says. “We lost a lot of good people that day.” And then, a moment later: “I’m honored to be here, to be working on this site.” Building the fountains has been a constant reminder of what happened 10 years ago. “I can’t help but think about it,” says Danny Hartmann, taking a seat a few steps below Tingo. “I’m here every day. I feel like I’m working in a giant mausoleum.” In the past decade, he has grown cynical. “Every time I see the site, I think, we seem to help everybody — this country helps everybody,” says Hartmann, 49, a fellow plumber whose voice is pure New York. “We dole out billions of dollars, and, for lack of a better word, we got sh-- on. There’s everybody here. Muslims. Jews. Christians. They’re all trying to make it here, to make a living, and this is what we get? This was a good idea? “I don’t want to hate a whole group of people. But they’re forcing us to do that.” Two blocks away, at the corner of Greenwich and Liberty, stands the home of the Fire Department of New York’s Ladder Co. 10 and Engine
Co. 10 — “Ten House” — the closest firehouse to the World Trade Center. It lost six men on Sept. 11. The firetrucks poised for the next call have “Still Standing” painted on them, and a bronze memorial to Sept. 11 stretches along the outside of the station’s west wall. Each day, hundreds of people make the pilgrimage to this corner. On a muggy morning, Orliaguet de Graaf and Didier Manon were looking above the construction fence at the empty place where the twin towers once stood. For a minute, they are quiet. “I wanted to see this because last time I was here it was the big towers,” de Graaf says. Manon and de Graaf are both 37, both from Amsterdam. The attacks still shake them. “I was watching it live on television,” Manon says. “Devastating. Unbelievable. I watched all day. You couldn’t overestimate how huge it was.” For each of them, there is a moment that lingers. The first plane hit. An accident, some thought — reminiscent of an October 1992 crash in Amsterdam in which a 747 cargo plane plummeted into an apartment complex, taking 43 lives. But then the second plane hit the second tower. “When I saw the terrible crime, I couldn’t believe it,” de Graaf says. As they talk and look and point, they are solemn, but not somber. And they remember. “It feels like it in here,” Manon says, patting her breastbone.
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on the job. Matty Tingo smokes a cigarette before heading back to work on the World Trade Center fountains. Joe Amon, The Denver Post 1
2001 1. sept. 11, 2001
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2. sept. 13, 2001
246 on the four planes (including 19 hijackers)
2,606 in New York
“Both the FBI and our intelligence community believe that this is bin Laden’s signature.” – Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, tells CNN, Sept. 11
RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post
“I think about her every single day.” colorado springs» The walk to the spot isn’t far, it just feels that way. Down the front path, across a street and through a yard to the bench with a United flight attendant’s flight wings embedded into a plaque, it is the journey Gene and Flo Yancey make when they want to feel close to their daughter. There they can think about the phone calls and shopping trips and girls-only lunches with Kathryn. They can think about moving to Colorado Springs in Kathy’s senior year of high school — to her vocal disapproval — and how, six months later, it was like they had lived in the city their whole lives. “She just loved to be around people,” Gene says of Kathy. “Everybody just loved her and felt like they had known her for a long time.” “She never met a stranger,” Flo adds. “As soon as she met someone, they were her friend.” That love of people led Kathy on a varied journey through life. She studied marketing, worked for a time in politics, took a job at Front Range Airport, then started as a flight attendant. She traveled extensively. She took up sky-diving — and didn’t tell her parents. She was the lead flight attendant on United Flight 175, from Boston to Los Angeles, the morning of Sept. 11. Flo watched the plane crash into the World Trade Center’s south tower on live television. She didn’t need to wait for the phone call of the United official to tell her that her daughter was dead. That day tore a piece out of Gene and Flo’s lives. Now 76 and 77, respectively, Gene and Flo admit they don’t go out as much anymore or have friends over as often. They don’t travel as much. Health problems have limited their mobility. The couple still take joy in being with their two sons, Mark and Kevin. And they consider their two grandsons the lights of their lives. But they can feel their links to Kathy fading, which is why they hold tightly to those that remain. And that is what makes the bench such a special place. Sitting on the bench, enjoying the breeze, feeling the touch of the flight wings from her spare uniform on their fingers are as close as they can be to their daughter. “I think about her every single day,” Flo says. “And I probably will until I’m gone. I miss her so very much.” John Ingold, The Denver Post
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9/11 casualties
Attacks on New York and Washington Two hijacked planes crash into the World Trade Center in New York, bringing down the twin towers. A third plane crashes into the Pentagon, while a fourth crashes in a field in Pennsylvania. Immediately after the attacks, U.S. government officials name Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organization as the prime suspects.
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Gene and Flo Yancey’s daughter, Kathryn Yancey LaBorie, was a flight attendant on the plane that crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center.
City (including 411 emergency workers) 125 at the Pentagon Also: A bomb-sniffing dog named Sirius 372 of the victims were foreign nationals (excluding the 19 perpetrators) from more than 90 countries.
For seven minutes after being notified of the first tower strike, President George W. Bush continues reading “The Pet Goat” with an elementary school class in Florida.
“When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.” – President George W. Bush
3. sept. 18–oct. 9, 2001 Anthrax attacks Anthrax spores mailed to government offices and to employees of television networks and tabloids kill five and infect 17 others.
Anthrax letter sent to Tom Brokaw (NBC) “THIS IS NEXT. TAKE PENACILIN NOW. DEATH TO AMERICA. DEATH TO ISRAEL. ALLAH IS GREAT.”
“More than two weeks ago, I gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands: Close terrorist training camps, hand over leaders of the al-Qaeda network and return all foreign nationals … None of these demands were met. And now, the Taliban will pay a price.” – President Bush, announcing start of Afghan war
4. oct. 7, 2001 The War on Terrorism begins The war begins with the United States and the United Kingdom launching airstrikes against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
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10 YEARS LATER «3N
wisdom written in stone. Grace Hernandez, 20, of Joliet, Ill., reflects on freedom at the Lincoln Memorial and about what all the capital’s monuments represent. Joe Amon, The Denver Post
|| WASHINGTON || Sunlight burns through the morning haze, casting the Washington Monument in stark silhouette. Its rays knife between the columns of the Lincoln Memorial, splashing across the marble and up the legs of the most famous statue in a town full of them. In the distance, work progresses to rebuild the reflecting pool, a project aimed at fixing leaks and — in a sign of the times — improving security. Off to one side of the massive sculpture of Lincoln, Grace Hernandez stands in utter silence, oblivious to the construction noises, to the runners padding up the 58 steps to the memorial’s main level. Hernandez, from Joliet, Ill., is a student at Lewis University, where she is studying special education with the goal of becoming a middle school teacher. She is 20. Her trip to Washington has been one of reflection. She’s visited all the monuments and thought hard about what they represent. For her, it’s all intertwined — what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, the day a teacher ran into her classroom with the news that planes had hit the twin towers, American history, concepts including freedom and liberty, and the knowledge that men and women her age sign on to a life in the military in a time of war. “It’s unbelievable what they do to keep this country free, so I can come to this Washington Mall and walk in freedom,” she says. “You can’t do that in a lot of places. Women can’t do that in a lot of places.” Her thoughts toggle back and forth, from this place and what’s represented to that day half her life ago. “I don’t understand why somebody would just surprise attack like that,” she says. “It’s unbelievable that that would happen.” For others, the aftermath of Sept. 11 is more visceral. David Campbell has worked for the National Park Service for 26 years, all of it on the mall. He spent time at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument. Now he is assigned to the Lincoln Memorial. He spends this morning with a squeegee, sweeping the water of an overnight rain off the steps, and with a mop, working it back and forth across the marble floor. Every few minutes, the air is pierced by the rumble of an airliner lifting off from nearby Reagan National Airport. He pauses for a moment and watches, unable to stop himself. Unable to keep from making sure the plane passes safely.
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THE DOG HANDLER
“The dogs are still the very best detection tool there is. The key is getting them there quickly enough for them to make a difference.” otis» The dog’s name is Merlyn, like the wizard. But as he hobbles across a field on Ann Wichmann’s farm one recent afternoon, it’s clear his days of enchantment are growing few. His eyes and mouth are rimmed in powder white, his breaths labored. And then, as he pauses briefly, his back legs give beneath him, leaving the black Labrador who could once climb ladders struggling to stand. Wichmann, who raised Merlyn from birth and trained him to be one of the nation’s elite search-and-rescue dogs, kneels beside him. She cradles him in the grass. “Merlyn,” she said earlier, “won’t make it another year.” Ten years ago, Merlyn was just 2 years old when Wichmann took him to New York as part of a local Federal Emergency Management Agency rescue team that searched the rubble of ground zero. By day, Wichmann took her dog Jenner out on the pile for an operation that had shifted to recovery as they arrived — a grim mission to learn how many bodies were buried there. By night, Merlyn ventured out with Wichmann’s friend Matt Claussen and did the same. Ground zero was a new experience altogether for Wichmann and her dogs — one of smoldering debris and hanging girders and jagged glass — but the success of dogs in handling the difficult conditions has opened more roles for search canines and their handlers in emergency operations. Dogs are now standard on FEMA teams. And Wichmann, who retired from FEMA work earlier this year, hopes to expand their use even more. In 2005, she moved to her farm — named for Jenner — where she not only trains her own dogs but also leads small-group seminars for novice handlers. “The dogs are still the very best detection tool there is,” she says. “The key is getting them there quickly enough for them to make a difference.” But even in the best circumstances, searches often end sadly. Wichmann never learned the names of the victims Jenner and Merlyn uncovered at ground zero. But she knows that the discoveries of their remains allowed their families to move on with their lives, even as the experi5
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Ann Wichmann and her dogs rest at her home and training facility, Jenner’s Run, in Otis. The northeast Colorado farm is named for her late dog, Jenner, who searched with Ann at the World Trade Center site after the 2001 attack. Her dog Merlyn also was part of the search team. Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post ence left something behind in Wichmann’s life. Every Sept. 11, she thinks about those victims. She looks up to the sky, watches as the light fades and the stars brighten. She thinks of an American Indian legend: The Milky Way is the “Pathway of Souls.” The people she found at ground zero are there, she thinks. Jenner, who died in 2004, is too. And Merlyn will be joining them soon. But when it is time, a life of searching has taught Wichmann that it will not be goodbye. No one is ever truly lost. You just have to know where to look. “I’m lucky enough out here,” Wichmann says. “I can see the Pathway of Souls.” John Ingold, The Denver Post
Ann Wichmann and Jenner search ground zero in September 2001. Search dogs are now standard on FEMA teams.
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2001 5. oct. 25, 2001
USA Patriot Act passes The House of Representatives passes the bill, followed by Senate passage the next day, with other previously unpopular Bush projects attached: Alaska oil drilling, $25 billion in tax cuts for corporations, taps into Social Security funds and cuts made to education. The act largely takes away previously protected civil rights, including easing restrictions on police agencies’ ability to search telephone, e-mail, medical, financial and other records.
The Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, is protested during the final day of the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004.
“Preserving our freedom is one of the main reasons that we are now engaged in this new war on terrorism. We 10/25/01] will lose that war [CNN, without firing a shot if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people.” – Sen. Russ Feingold, D–Wis., Oct. 25, 2001
6. nov. 14–16, 2001 Mohammed Atef killed
Atef, al-Qaeda’s No. 3, is killed in a U.S. airstrike on his home near Kabul. On May 7, 1998, Atef faxed bin Laden a fatwa signed by Afghan scholars saying that attacks against American civilians could be justified. Three months later, al-Qaeda carried out the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings.
7. dec. 17, 2001
8. dec. 22, 2001
Tora Bora taken
It is believed that Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders simply walked away from bombing in the Tora Bora region and into Pakistan. By the time the Afghan militias (allied with the U.S./U.K. forces) advanced to the last of the Tora Bora caves, only 20 bedraggled al-Qaeda fighters were left to be taken prisoner.
Shoe bomber captured
Smoke from bombs dropped by U.S. B-52 warplanes rises from al-Qaeda positions in mountains near Tora Bora.
Richard Reid, also known as the shoe bomber, attempts to destroy a commercial aircraft in-flight by detonating explosives hidden in his shoes. Passengers and flight attendants stop the bombing.
Reid’s attempt led to all airline passengers departing the United States having to pass through airport security in socks or bare feet.
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|| ANTHONY, KANSAS || State Highway 2 cuts across harvested wheat fields left golden and crumbly dry by an unrelenting drought. It funnels down a hill past the abandoned drive-in movie theater, the Dollar General and the boarded-up filling station, past the gravel lot full of John Deere tractors and implements, and stops at the McDonald’s in this three-stoplight town located 12 miles from the Oklahoma border. On the left sits Memorial Park, and in one corner, next to a corrugated metal building, stands the official Sept. 11 memorial for the state of Kansas. On a brutally hot summer noon, three flags snap in the breeze. One for the United States. One for Kansas. One for New York. Below them, encircled by bricks and mortar, rest three chunks of steel from the World Trade Center, a brick from the Pentagon, and a glass-enclosed case holding ash and dirt from the field in Pennsylvania where the fourth plane crashed. The memorial is here despite the fact that Anthony has no direct connection to New York, or the Pentagon, or Shanksville, Pa. — no town native died in the twin towers or on one of the planes, or in the wars that followed. And yet, in the dark days after Sept. 11, 2001, a man named John Schott, who owned the True Value hardware store on Main Street and was the town’s mayor, grew restless to do something tangible about the pain and the loss. Today, the effort that grew from that idea is a point of pride in a community that is the very picture of a small town on the high plains of the Midwest. The twin silos of Anthony Co-Op dominate the skyline, and a sign in the office window carries the latest bushel price of the crops grown in the area — wheat ($7.55), milo ($6.33), corn ($6.98), beans ($13.43). Anthony is facing the same challenges as plains towns all over the Midwest. Declining population. Empty businesses, like Phillips 66 on Main Street, bindweeds poking through the cracks in the concrete out front. There’s hope for a community project to reopen the movie theater — the marquee urges people to “like us on facebook” — and there’s an effort to impose a new sales tax to rebuild a block of Main Street leveled by fire a couple years ago. It is a town rooted in faith — inside the Irwin-Potter Rexall drugstore, a sliding glass door leads to a prayer and healing room. The stained glass window above it includes a biblical verse, “With healing in his wings” — Malachi 4:2. Joe Brummer, who has owned the drugstore for 30 years, sits at a table next to the soda fountain and talks about his business, his town and, ultimately, the memorial. He points immediately to John Schott. “It was just on his heart to do something for them,” Brummer says. “I think it says we’re patriots. More than that, I think it says we care. That’s important. People need to know that you care. “People that come through town can see that. One person can make a difference that can affect the world. Nobody knows where they’re going to end up. There wasn’t the idea of what can we get out of this. It was how can we help. I think that had to be the idea — not what can we get but what can we give.”
afternoon crowd. Eighteen-year-old Elexis Braswell, a soda jerk at the Irwin-Potter drugstore, plays a game with the afternoon crowd to determine who’s paying for the refreshments. Regulars hit the soda fountain twice a day in Anthony, Kan. Joe Amon, The Denver Post cate steel for artistic and architectural uses. “Sometimes people don’t even want to touch it. I think that’s really interesting.” This piece of steel came from the south tower of the World Trade Center and is destined for display in Denver at an exhibit at the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab downtown. Known as the CELL, the center is part museum, part classroom, a place where visitors can see the reality of terrorism and learn about some of the tactics that may prevent it. “What we have found is that these artifacts symbolized to people the lives that were lost, and symbolized to people the importance of making sure our country prevails over these threats,” says Melanie Pearlman, the CELL’s executive director. The center is closed for remodeling, but when it reopens in late September or early October, the beam from the World Trade Center will be on display, at approximately a 45-degree angle. Visitors will be allowed to touch it. After Riche’s workers took possession of the beam earlier this summer, they had a unique challenge — design a system to support it without attaching anything to it. No bolts. No welding. When Riche’s firm was first selected, he says, a kind of strange anticipation overtook him. “I couldn’t wait to get it here,” he says. After it arrived, that was eclipsed by the fact he had a job to do. Then workers in his shop used a hoist to tip it up to the approximate position it will be in when it is displayed, and debris tumbled out the bottom of the beam. Dust. Shards of rust. Concrete chips. A pack of cigarettes. “That almost made it more real than the
beam,” he says, “because you were like, ‘What is this stuff? Where did it come from?’ ” Riche’s crew carefully picked up the debris and placed it in jars. Its ultimate destination hasn’t been determined. The project involving the beam is part of a larger effort to memorialize Sept. 11 — and all victims of terrorism — in Denver. The second phase involves the rededication of Babi Yar Park in southeast Denver — originally created as a memorial to victims of the Holocaust — into an all-encompassing monument to those who have lost their lives as a result of genocide or terror. Plans were already underway to create a major new memorial at the park to take its meaning far beyond the slaughter of Jews by Nazis. That memorial, which is expected to include a hollow cube that may be 60 feet square and would be placed along Havana Street, is several years away. In the meantime, in partnership with the CELL, the decision was made to erect another memorial in the park incorporating more artifacts from the World Trade Center. “The idea is to try to link all those things as acts of inhumanity, and to appeal to the world about them,” says Alan Gass, a Denver architect who was involving in the creation of the park in the early 1970s. That memorial, which is probably a year or more away from completion, won’t be to Sept. 11 specifically, Gass says, but to the people of 90 countries who lost their lives that day. The idea is simple, Gass says — “that the 9/11 memorial and the memorial yet to be built after that, that the takeaway will be one of a hope for a better world, basically, for a world without terrorism, genocide or incidents like the Holocaust.”
THE CORONER
united. A U.S. flag flies over the rubble of the twin towers as rescue personnel work around the clock to search first for survivors, then remains. Beth A. Keiser, The Associated Press
John Ingold, The Denver Post
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The chunk of steel is about 12 feet long, roughly 14 inches on a side, and includes a plate that is nearly 4 feet wide. The ends are twisted and bent, a dent is gashed down one side, and spray-painted markings that may hold a clue to its original location — S 6 and C 41 — are faded and rusted. It weighs between 800 and 900 pounds.
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2002 2. jan. 23, 2002
4. april 6, 2002
5. july 10, 2002
Daniel Pearl kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is kidnapped in Pakistan. He is tortured and beheaded Feb. 1. At the time of his abduction, Pearl was investigating links between Pakistani extremists and shoe bomber Richard Reid.
1. dec. 22, 2001 Karzai takes power Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, backed by the U.S., and his transitional government take power in Afghanistan. It was revealed a few weeks before that he had been a paid consultant for Unocal, as well as deputy foreign minister for the Taliban.
“We would do whatever we could.” centennial» Picture a hand. It is a left hand. A man’s hand. On the third finger is a gold band; it looks like a wedding ring. There is an inscription — words you don’t read. Picture the person who goes with this hand. He is married. There was a wedding, with family and friends and the bride and groom smushing cake into each other’s faces. Perhaps he has children. They miss him. They love him. This is what Mike Dobersen thinks about when he thinks about Sept. 11. Dobersen, the Arapahoe County coroner, was working in the New York City morgue about two weeks after the attacks when he saw the hand. For a 12-hour shift, he worked with a forensic anthropologist to identify human remains brought in from ground zero. It was a certain kind of last rites for victims of the attacks. “There wasn’t much we could do for the families other than to offer them our condolences and say that we would do whatever we could to account for their loved ones,” he says. Often, the remains arrived as tiny abstracts — a fleck of bone, a piece of muscle tissue. The fragmentation only underscored for Dobersen the brutality of the tragedy. And yet it is the image of the hand that sticks with him most because here was something recognizably human, suggesting a story, a life. In 18 years as Arapahoe County’s coroner, Dobersen has borne clinical witness to countless acts of violence and disaster. He performed autopsies on five victims of the Columbine High School shootings. He went to Louisiana to identify victims of Hurricane Katrina. “The more experience I get,” Dobersen says, “the more I’m able to help these families.”
|| DENVER ||
So far, it’s been seen by only a few people, and in recent weeks it rested in a metal shop not far from the Denver stockyards, awaiting its permanent home. But, invariably, those who have glimpsed it have treated it with a mix of reverence and awe. “They’re reacting to it just the way they do a celebrity — they just want to be in its presence for a moment, because it’s such a part of our culture now,” says Joe Riche, who owns a shop called Demiurge, where workers fabri-
Michael Dobersen kept in mind the story, and the life, that accompanied each set of human remains from ground zero. Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post
3. march 13, 2002
6. aug. 29, 2002 Motassadeq indicted
“The goal has never been to get bin Laden.” — Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers
“He’s a person who’s now been marginalized ... I just don’t spend that much time on him... I truly am not that concerned about him. … I am deeply concerned about Iraq.” – President Bush about bin Laden
9/11 hijackers 1 Egyptian 1 Lebanese 2 United Arab Emirati 15 Saudi Arabians
Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national, trains at al-Faruq base in Afghanistan before 9/11.
“The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader. ... Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies.” — A briefing given to a top Pentagon advisory group
German authorities charge a Moroccan man named Mounir El Motassadeq, left, with complicity in the 9/11 attacks. He is only the second person to be charged with any crime related to the 9/11 attacks. A French-Algerian named Zacarias Moussaoui, left, the so-called 20th hijacker, was arrested in August before the 9/11 attacks. He was sentenced to life in prison on May 3, 2006.
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After intitially heading toward the White House, American Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon.
Alex Wong, Getty Images; Luke Frazza, AFP/Getty Images; Joe Amon, The Denver Post
|| ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA ||
THE BROTHER
“You just kept hoping something would happen and she would turn up.” boulder» From the branches of the neighbor’s tree, the boys swing like wind chimes, shouts and laughter floating down the street on the afternoon breeze. It’s the way it goes in a family raising three irrepressible spirits, Dutch Bell says. Bikes one day. Tree-climbing the next. And dinner — oh, goodness, dinner — an unrehearsed choir of gigglers. It’s in those moments of pleasant anarchy that Bell sometimes thinks back to his own childhood, when he and his little sister, Nina, would spend suppers looking across the table at each other — in the way siblings do when they just know what the other is thinking — until one of them cracked up and then the other cracked up and then their mother and Air Force officer father would get irritated with them but not really because how can you be that mad when your kids are so happy? And Dutch and Nina were always happy together. When Dutch went to the University of Colorado, Nina followed a year later, even though she had a track scholarship waiting for her at Colorado State. (She made the track team at CU anyway.) When Dutch’s birthday came around and Nina was too broke to buy him anything, she’d give him a medal she won at a track meet, always wrapped in a silly poem. “We weren’t solving the world’s problems,” Dutch says. “We were just trying to make each other laugh.” As years went on, the physical distance be-
tween them grew, even if the emotional distance never did. Dutch moved eventually to Boston and married his wife, Christine, and the couple had their first child. Nina took a job in New York, then another. In September 2001, she started a new job at Marsh & McLennan on the 96th floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower. Dutch was listening to drive-time radio in Boston on Sept. 11 when he heard about the attacks. Soon, the family was traveling to New York, where they joined with Nina’s friends in posting fliers, scouring hospitals, walking around ground zero, anything they could to find her. “You just kept hoping something would happen and she would turn up,” Dutch said. But gradually — there was no revelation, no one moment — they knew. The months after Sept. 11 were a gauntlet: memorials, cleaning out Nina’s apartment, deciding what to keep. It was amid that misery that a thought emerged for Dutch. “There were just horrible things going on in the world,” he remembers, “and I wanted good things.” And Dutch Bell, big brother to an irrepressible spirit, knew just how to do that. Against violence and hate, he could push back with silly glee. He wanted to have more kids. Nineteen months after the attacks, the twins — Eli and Xavier — were born. Today, they are 8. Isaac, their big brother, is
Nina Bell was in an office on the 96th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building. She had worked at the job, in a senior management position at Marsh & McLennan, for about a week. 11. And Dutch Bell’s house in Boulder, where the family moved last year, is seldom quiet. But one time when it is — when Eli and Xavier are off with mom to get ice cream and Isaac is watching television after asking for permission — Dutch sits at his kitchen table, thinking of his sister, thinking of his boys. A contented smile spreads on his lips. “Good decision,” he says quietly. “That was a good decision.” John Ingold, The Denver Post
The pea gravel crunches underfoot, and trickling water obscures the traffic on the expressway just over the hill. A stainless steel line cuts across the ground, marking a year in time — 1998. A stainless steel bench stretches up and out, curving away from its base like a porpoise rising up out of the sea, and engraved in one end is a name. Dana Falkenberg. The youngest victim of the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 was just 3 years old on Sept. 11, 2001, and the bench erected in her honor is the first one visitors reach after entering the memorial to the tragedy on the west side of the Pentagon. As the reality that a little girl died that day settles in, there is another assault on the mind. Below little Dana’s bench, just under the surface of the water, three more names are etched on a stainless steel plate. Leslie A. Whittington, 1955 Charles Falkenberg, 1956 Zoe Falkenberg, 1992 Her mother. Her father. Her older sister. An entire family, wiped out in the crash of Flight 77 into the Pentagon. There are 184 benches stretching across the memorial, one for each of those who died on the plane or in the building — culminating at the far end with John D. Yamnicky Sr., born in 1930. As dusk descends on the memorial, Bob and Sally Shields stand together, listening to a recorded tour, stock still as they recall that day 10 years ago. The couple is from Cincinnati, but Bob Shields works for IBM and is currently commuting to Washington for a project. “This is very moving,” Sally says as the lights in the water beneath each bench begin to glow. “Just striking.” “I’m a Vietnam vet — it’s about as moving as that,” Bob adds, alluding to the memorial to his war carved into the ground on the Washington Mall. The couple had driven to Washington and decided to visit the memorial on this evening. They both remembered watching a televised special when it was dedicated in 2008, but after they’d spent a quiet hour walking through, listening to the recording, looking at the benches, and imagining the exact spot on the building where the plane hit, they realized they were not prepared for the powerful emotions it would roil inside them. “Viscerally, it makes me angry — it angers me, angers me! — the evil that goes unchecked,” Sally says. “I hope we don’t forget,” Bob says. “You tend to get used to dates and things like that as they go by. I hope we don’t — we’re still fighting that.”
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Dutch Bell plays with his 8-year-old twins, Eli, top, and Xavier, in a neighbor’s tree outside their Boulder home. Craig F, Walker, The Denver Post 7
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2002 7. sept. 11, 2002 “One year later, the public knows less about the circumstances of 2,801 deaths at the foot of Manhattan in broad daylight than people in 1912 knew within weeks about the Titanic, which sank in the middle of an ocean in the dead of night.” —The New York Times writes on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks
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2003 8. nov. 25, 2002
9. dec. 9, 2002
Dept. of Homeland Security created
United Airlines goes bankrupt
Legislation that President George W. Bush signed into law puts into motion the most massive reorganization of government in 50 years. The new department oversees 22 agencies that have a total of 170,000 employees.
United Airlines, the second-largest U.S. airline, seeks protection under a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. The filing, the largest ever by a U.S. airline, resulted partly from continued losses, some stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks.
President Bush watches as former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge is sworn in as the first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
“There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.” — Colin Powell 10. jan. 3–april 12, 2003 War protested Anti-war groups across the world organize public protests against war with Iraq. About 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests.
11. feb. 5, 2003 Iraq becomes a target Secretary of State Colin Powell addresses the United Nations about weapons of mass destruction, and the Bush administration’s argument for including Iraq in the war on terrorism. In 2005, Powell tells Barbara Walters that this was a “blot” on his record: “It will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now.”
12. march 1, 2003 Al-Qaeda’s alleged third-in-command, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is arrested in Pakistan.
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|| ANTHONY, KANSAS || John Schott bounces up from behind his desk in the office at the True Value, wearing a pair of shorts and a golf shirt. He and his wife, Pam, came to Anthony 16 years ago from Los Angeles, looking for a quiet place to raise their two kids. They learned quickly that in a small town everyone knows everyone — and everyone knows everyone’s business. Pam found that out the first time she drove to a neighboring town, where a police officer stopped her. When she walked back through the front door a little later, John said, “So, I hear you got pulled over.” Now the kids are raised, and John and Pam are preparing to move on — the True Value and their Victorian home on Jennings Avenue are for sale. But before they write that next chapter in their lives, John steps behind the front counter and, between customers buying paint and drill bits, tells the story of Anthony, of Sept. 11, and of a small town that wanted to do something important. And did. Schott was on his way to the store that morning a decade ago when the words came over the radio. At first, it seemed an accident — a plane hitting a skyscraper in New York. Then, more news. A second plane. A third plane, and a fourth. And a kind of universal disbelief and numbness set in. “My first reaction was — I was, of course, angry, and saddened, but I wanted to do something,” he says. In the beginning, the something was simple. Donations were collected. Money was contributed to relief agencies. And then, amid questions about where that money was actually going, and what it was actually doing, Schott decided he wanted to do something more substantial, something that would let him look his neighbors in the eye and tell them exactly what their efforts meant. Donna Crowe, the administrative assistant at the police department and the town’s grant writer, had been calling New York at Schott’s suggestion, looking for someone to help. And Crowe, who spent days after Sept. 11 sleeping on the floor between her two young children to try to reassure them, called and called. Eventually, Schott got a message to call Ladder 38 — and to “ask for Joe Spor.” So Schott called and asked. The voice on the other end of the line belonged to Lt. Joe Huber, and it was not friendly: “What the f--- — are you kidding?” Joseph P. Spor Jr., the son of a New York firefighter who had achieved his dream just before Sept. 11 by being assigned to Rescue 3 in the Bronx, had perished in the collapse of the south tower. Schott talked his way through the mistake, and before long the town of Anthony adopted Joe Spor’s family — his wife, Colleen, and the couple’s four children. Residents raised money to help finish the basement at the family’s home, and the town sent birthday and Christmas presents to Spor’s children. Schoolchildren baked cookies and wrote notes and sent them to Spor’s firehouse. Huber traveled to Anthony, and, as Schott describes it, this little farming town on the road from Harper to Kiowa and a group of New York firefighters began a relationship. Meeting Huber — who spent months at ground zero searching for the remains of victims — touched something deep inside Schott, and he decided he wanted a piece of steel from the towers for Anthony. He started making calls, and he persisted after he was initially told “not gonna happen.” If there’s anything you should know about John Schott it’s that he is persistent. “I want a piece of steel,” he kept asking. “I want people to be able to look and feel. I want kids to understand what happened. It’s as significant as Pearl Harbor.” Eventually he got what he wanted. And then he decided the town would like to have something from the Pentagon, and from Shanksville, Pa., where United Flight 93 crashed. Each time, Schott persisted until someone said yes. The town set up a committee, raised $80,000 and built a memorial, one that incorporates artifacts from all three crash sites. “That’s a memorial to what was really important that day,” Schott says. “It wasn’t the 19 people who crashed the planes. It was about the 343 firemen, and the policemen who went into those buildings to help their fellow human beings. And it’s in a little town in Kansas. It’s a renewal of the spirit of humanity and America, and selflessness, and compassion. “It’s all about remembering the people. The events take care of themselves. But none of these events happen without people — and they were living, breathing people like me and you. Heroes aren’t special. They’re just working people who do what needs to be done at that moment. They overcome their fears and 1 2
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table talk. Supper time at Kristy’s Kafe in Anthony, Kan., sees longtime auctioneer Bill Starks in his white hat chatting with farmer Charles Seipel and Seipel’s wife, Doris. “Freedom isn’t free,” Doris says as she thinks about the meaning of Sept. 11. Joe Amon, The Denver Post take care of fellow human beings. It would have been so easy for none of this to have happened. This never should have happened.” Out west of town, past the airport and just beyond a small bridge, Doris Seipel, 66, steps from a farm truck and takes refuge in the shade of a tree’s canopy. Her husband, Charles, is on his way home from town — there’s a combine to wash and a tractor to move on the couple’s farm. “It’s such a tragedy,” Doris says as the conversation turns to Sept. 11. “I can’t imagine people being so deceived that they’ve got to go to somebody else’s country and blow up stuff — innocent people. It seems unreal. So deliberate. Underhanded.” As she talks, the heat of another dry day is setting in.
“It’s something you don’t want to ever forget. You want to stay in forgiveness on it, but, uh,” her voice trails off, and she pauses, then continues, “pray for those that were being deceived into doing that. Because they’ve got to get it turned around or they’re going to an evil place. “I plan not to fear. God says don’t fear — pray for your enemy. They need to get turned around because they’re following the wrong God and they don’t even know it.” Just then, Charles pulls in. He is 76, and he wears a grubby hat advertising a seed company in Wichita, and one look at his hands confirms that he is a farmer — the skin is tanned and weathered, a chunk of one fingernail is gone and another is sort of purplish-black. He’s farmed for 50 years, growing wheat, milo,
alfalfa and soybeans. “I enjoy farming,” he says. “I really do. I just wish the dang conditions would be a little better. I guess that’s what makes it interesting. If I didn’t like doing it, I wouldn’t do it for a damn minute. There’d be a lot of stuff for sale right quick.” He was on his John Deere that day a decade ago, listening to the radio. For a time, he didn’t believe his ears. He uses words like “bad” and “sad” to describe what happened. And his town’s memorial, he says, is a “good deal.” “At least something came out of that that didn’t hurt somebody,” he says. “This town will always remember.”
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THE PROFESSOR
“They should have known the people of New York were not going to be terrorized by an attack like 9/11.” boulder» Basically, Kathleen Tierney says, you can’t scheme for a disaster. Certainly you can make plans — you should make plans. But the most important thing is to plan for what you can’t plan for. “You must plan to improvise,” she says. Tierney is sitting in a sunny conference room at the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center, where she is the director. In a three-decade career of university scholarship, she has studied all kinds of disasters — hurricanes, earthquakes, riots, floods — all over the globe. And Tierney often arrives on site barely after the rescuers do, so that she can see how the communities respond in their time of crisis. Even amid such a world tour of gloom, Tierney says ground zero stands out. Not for its sadness — though the haunted eyes of a firefighter Tierney met there still trouble her — but for its hope. In major disasters, the really big ones, it is seldom the public officials who determine how well a community responds. It’s the public itself. In New York after the attacks, the city’s communications infrastructure was damaged, its stateof-the-art emergency operations center destroyed. But people from across the city and the country — many just regular folks with no disaster training — showed up to help. They brought personal expertise, re-creating maps that had been destroyed or assisting in structural-engineering problems. Some just made food. Among Tierney’s most poignant memories are the crowds who gathered near ground zero for no other reason than to cheer on the rescue workers.
And all those people gave the city strength. They made it resilient. To Tierney’s dismay, disaster response has become more rigid since Sept. 11, with less space for contributions from the public. It’s why she has pushed in articles, books and speeches to keep alive what she sees as an important legacy of Sept. 11: When planning for a disaster, put
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Kathleen Tierney, director of the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center, says the regular folks who showed up to help gave New York strength and resilience. RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post your faith in the community you’re trying to save. “When they picked New York, they picked the wrong target,” Tierney says of the terrorists. “They should have known the people of New York were not going to be terrorized by an attack like 9/11. They certainly were not.” John Ingold, The Denver Post
2004
1. march 19, 2003
3. may 1, 2003
4. july 22, 2003
The Iraq war begins
“Mission Accomplished”
Hussein’s sons killed
President George W. Bush refers to Iraq as “the central front in the War on Terror.”
Bush lands on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as it returns “My fellow from combat operations in Americans: the Persian Gulf. Major combat He poses for photographs operations while wearing in Iraq have a flight suit and ended.” gives a speech under a banner – President stating “Mission Bush Accomplished.”
Uday and Qusay are killed in a U.S. raid in Mosul.
2. april 1, 2003 Lynch rescued The captured and wounded Pfc. Jessica Lynch is rescued by U.S. commandos in a videotaped operation. Accounts of her heroism are found to be exaggerated.
7. feb. 5, 2004 No WMDs
5. oct. 16, 2003 Qusay Hussein, the second son of Saddam, was appointed as his father’s heir apparent in 2000.
Saddam’s older son, Uday, was removed from succession for his erratic behavior, including grabbing women off the street to rape and beating Iraqi athletes for losses.
“In his campaign, Bush had said he thought the biggest security issue was Iraq and a national missile defense. I told him that in my opinion, the biggest security problem was Osama bin Laden.” – Former President Bill Clinton
6. dec. 13, 2003 Hussein captured Saddam Hussein is found and captured by U.S. forces, in a hole beneath a two-room mud shack on a sheep farm in Adwar.
In a speech, CIA Director George Tenet admits that the imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction was not present before the 2003 Iraq war began.
the denver post B denverpost.com B sunday, september 11, 2011
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10 YEARS LATER «7N
daily reminder. A jet taking off from Reagan National Airport flies over the Pentagon, where 125 people inside died when Flight 77 struck the building’s west side. Joe Amon, The Denver Post
|| ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA || The headstone stands erect, a marble marker in a sea of them, row after perfect row undulating across the grassy slopes. From the road, it is indistinguishable from the rest except for one thing — 12 stones rest on its curving top, left by visitors as a sign of reverence. Tour guide Dianne Carson lifts a microphone to her mouth at Arlington National Cemetery. “Look to your right,” she says, “there, five rows up, five rows in, is the grave of Capt. Charles ‘Chic’ Burlingame, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed at the Pentagon.” Arlington is where America remembers. Its 624 acres include graves for those who have died in every American conflict since the Civil War, monuments to everyone from the Rough Riders to those who died in the 1980 Iran rescue mission, the final resting place of President John F. Kennedy and two of his brothers, the solemn Tomb of the Unknowns. And Dianne Carson remembers. She came here 11 years ago after retiring from a job writing speeches for the Treasury Department. She had hoped to travel, but her husband wasn’t much interested, she says, so she came to Arlington. “I didn’t go to the world — the world comes to me,” she says on a break. For Carson, 69, Sept. 11 was a defining moment, one that she took in and drew close to her. Her husband had worked in the Pentagon at one time. Her daughter was a Washington police officer. Her cousin worked in the twin towers but wasn’t there that day. Still, she couldn’t help but think that any one of them could have perished. It was, she says, “a turning point in America for me — when everything changed. Everything. We didn’t really know about terrorism, and now it’s very personal to me. It’s a different world.”
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Soon a muffled volley of rifle shots cracks somewhere in the distance. And then another, and another — a salute to a service member going to the grave, one of the roughly 25 to 30 funerals that occur each day at Arlington. Over in Section 60, far from the tourist trolley’s regular route, men and women who died in the wars that have unfolded since Sept. 11 are buried. There are about 825 of them, and while their marble markers look like all the others, there is the feeling that this is fresh, not history. At the grave of Laurent J. West, who was not quite 33 when he died in a roadside bombing in Iraq on March 11, 2008, a child’s plastic Lego bricks rest in the grass, and a note from his wife is nestled against the stone. “Happy Anniversary,” it says. In another part of Section 60, in grave 8760, rests Pfc. Jessica Y. Sarandrea, 22, of Miami. She was on a forward operating base in Mosul that came under mortar attack on March 3, 2008. Two sections over, Sgt. Gustavo Diaz pats his caparisoned horse, Sergeant York, as he passes the time between funerals. Diaz, 25, is assigned to the caisson platoon at nearby Fort Myer, and it is his job to pay tribute to the fallen by leading this riderless horse along in a funeral procession. His ceremonial dress wool uniform is impeccable — you can see your reflection in his polished black shoes — save for the dried horse drool on his midsection, an occupational hazard. Six ceremonial medals hang on his chest: the Army Commendation, Army Achievement, Good Conduct, National Defense, Iraq Campaign and Global War on Terrorism. He joined the army right out of high school, twice was deployed to Iraq and decided after the combat death of a close friend that he wanted to be assigned to Arlington, to have some hand in paying tribute to the men and women who have served and died in a post-Sept. 11 world. “I felt like this is what I needed to do,” he says. “I did do two tours in Iraq and lost a friend, and I do feel this is my way of saying thank you to all service members and their families that come out here.” His friend was Pfc. Jessica Y. Sarandrea.
a nation remembers. The grave of Charles Frank “Chic” Burlingame III sits in Section 35 at Arlington National Cemetery. Burlingame was a captain in the Navy, flew missions in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, and was the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which was crashed by terrorists into the Pentagon. Left: Sgt. Gustavo Diaz holds his horse, Sergeant York, as he stands at ease between funerals at Arlington. Photos by Joe Amon, The Denver Post
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2004 8. march 31, 2004
9. june 18, 2004
11. july 22, 2004
Drone war starts
Final report issued
Prisoners tortured
Led by the CIA, the U.S. begins a series of ongoing attacks on Taliban and al-Qaeda militant targets in northwest Pakistan using drones (unmanned aerial vehicles).
The 9/11 Commission issues its final report, which provides a vivid account of the events of 9/11 as well as the many government failures that made it possible.
Images of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are revealed. Beginning in 2004, human rights violations committed by military police and other U.S. governmental agencies — in the form of physical, psychological and sexual abuse, including torture, rape, sodomy and homicide of prisoners held in Abu Ghraib — come to public attention.
10. july 4, 2004 Artist rendering of One World Trade Center, expected to be finished by 2013.
12. may 30, 2005
Ground zero reborn The groundbreaking ceremony is held for the Freedom Tower at ground zero, the former site of the World Trade Center complex destroyed during 9/11.
“I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” – Vice president Dick Cheney, talking about the Iraq war
13. july 7, 2005 London bombed Four suicide bombers kill 52 people and injure 700 more on London’s transport network.
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United Flight 93 crashes near Shanksville, Pa., as passengers try to retake the jet from the hijackers.
Gary Tramontina, The Associated Press; Gene J. Puskar, The Associated Press; Gene J. Puskar, The Associated Press
|| NEW YORK || Robert Cini of Mount Laurel, N.J., sits on a bench in an ancient cemetery just across Trinity Place from ground zero, resting after participating in an environmental cap-and-trade protest. He is a 63-year-old semi-retired refrigerator technician who is caring for his 87-yearold mother and who wears his politics on his sleeve and on his cap — his USA ball cap sports a pin that says “Liber-Tea.” Ask him about Sept. 11, and what he thinks about it, and he doesn’t hold back. “I was very upset about it,” he says. “This was different than anything I’d ever experienced. With the attack on the WTC, the terrorists — Muslims — the fanatic side, OK — how do I want to say it? — are in my sights. I spent 12 years in the military. I view that as an infringement on our turf. “They made a statement, OK? If you look at the Muslim religion, it’s a violent religion. I have a shirt at home that says ‘infidel’ across it. They view all of us Christians as infidels.” For him, Sept. 11 is more about the idea that someone else could come to America and attack its institutions than it is about the buildings that were taken down, or the one being built in their place. “The infringement on our turf meant something,” he says. “It’s as bad as them bombing Pearl Harbor in World War II. That’s an assault.” A Christian of Jewish descent and a fifthgeneration hand book-binder, he does not
raise his voice, does not rant and rave. And he doesn’t back down when it comes to his view of Islam. “Their bible is the Koran,” he says. “Read the Koran. It’s a violent religion. … I now have a disdain for Muslims. I’ve delved into their religion and it’s the only one that’s violent.” A few yards away sits St. Paul’s Chapel, the oldest church in Manhattan, the place where George Washington attended a service shortly after being sworn in as the country’s first president. In October 2001, after the streets around the chapel were reopened, St. Paul’s became a kind of refuge — a place of rest and respite for weary firefighters and police officers, a place of hope and despair for those with missing loved ones. Its wrought iron fence was plastered with thousands of notes and pictures of those who hadn’t come home, who would never come home. Today, the fence is totally bare. No signs. No posters. No rain-wrinkled wallet photos of missing loved ones. Inside the chapel, some of the mementos from the fence are displayed, like the note showing the smiling face of a young man, full of life, and the haunting description. Frederick John Cox Age 27 6’5” dark brown hair green eyes 230 pounds It is quiet late on this afternoon. The only sound is the squeak of shoes on the tiled floor. Jane Law, 51, and Tara Payne, 38, two women from Concord, N.H., in town for a conference put on by the Public Relations Society
of America, wander in. Neither has been to ground zero before, and neither is prepared for what they see here. Along one side of the chapel, signs and pictures and notes left on the fence are displayed. There’s the frozen smile of Ingeborg Lariby and the words “gone but not forgotten.” There’s the firefighter in his bunker gear, and the words “Remember Christian Michael Otton Regenhard.” And there is the letter from Kelly Lyn Murphy of Fall River, Mass. Dear Families, I am a directory assistance operator at Verizon in Massachusetts; on Sept. 11th I took many calls from inside the World Trade Center. ... To anyone who lost someone in this tragedy please know that the people who perished in those buildings did try to say goodbye and that they loved you. This is the only way I have found to deliver their message. There are origami cranes that were gifts from children in Japan. And a pew, its paint scuffed by the boots of firefighters who came here to rest between shifts. Law and Payne step out of the solemn quiet of St. Paul’s and back into the bustle of Broadway at rush hour. “It brought it all back,” Law says. “Overwhelming — the things it brought up inside. To see the faces of such young people on those pictures that never had a chance to live.” “To me,” Payne adds, “you look at all that and it’s all about service. I didn’t expect this. I came down for a conference. I didn’t expect to get blindsided. … It’s sadness, but it’s also intense pride. You see the resilience.”
John Ingold, The Denver Post
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Susan Cross of Durango escaped from the 61st floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower minutes before it collapsed. Cross had begun training to become a Morgan Stanley financial adviser the day before the attack. Mahala Gaylord, The Denver Post
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2006 Al-Zarqawi killed
Longest American wars
Abu Musab alZarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, is killed during a U.S. air raid.
War in Afghanistan Oct. 2001 – present (9 years, 11 months) Iraq war March 2003 – present (8 years, 6 months) Vietnam War Aug. 1964 – Jan. 1973 (8 years, 5 months) American Revolutionary War July 1776 – April 1783 (6 years, 9 months) American Civil War April 1861 – April 1865 (4 years) After the election, Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., becomes the first female speaker of the House.
“It was all you could do to keep your jaw up.”
John Ingold, The Denver Post
Susan Cross walks into the stairwell in the World Trade Center’s south tower carrying a day planner. She wears black suede pumps, pantyhose, a blazer. Nine minutes earlier, a plane struck the World Trade Center’s north tower. In eight minutes, a plane will hit her building. In 15 minutes, the stairwell will be choked with people. In 64 minutes, the building will collapse. She doesn’t know what is going on outside, but she knows this: She is 61 floors up. She has to go down. She takes her first step.
Inside the stairwell, no one quite knows why they are evacuating. Some people carry cups of coffee. People are chatting, laughing. Just below the 39th floor, there is a violent shake. Susan steadies herself; some fall. Coffee spills onto the steps. The lights flicker, and there are screams for the first time. The descent now takes on a new urgency. At
RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post
This year, Susan, Rodney, Candace and granddaughter Olivia traveled to New York for the anniversary. She did not take the trip to make peace with her past. She took it because she has. “It’s going to mark an event that is important in our lives,” Susan says, “and always will be.”
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“Why did I survive?”
each floor, people are rushing into the stairwell. The stairs jam — two abreast, now three, now four. It grows hotter and hotter. Susan can feel panic inside her. Stay calm, she thinks. Stay calm. Four months after the attack, answers began to arrive to Susan’s questions. It was another major event that provided the perspective: Susan and Rodney’s daughter Sandal, who lived with disabilities for all of her 25 years, passed away. And Susan then knew why she had survived on Sept. 11. She was given extra time to spend with Sandal. She was given her life to be with Rodney and their daughter Candace. “I think things happen for a reason,” Susan
West Metro Fire Capt. Mike Good was part of a FEMA search-and-rescue task force.
lakewood» Steve Ryan and Mike Good stood in horrified awe. Ground zero was so much more — the rubble reaching higher, the cavities in the earth plunging deeper — than they had imagined. Never had they thought they might go into such an apocalyptic tangle to do their jobs. And the pair, West Metro firefighters who were part of a Federal Emergency Management Agency team, felt very small. “It was all you could do to keep your jaw up,” Ryan remembers. After several days in New York helping with the search of ground zero and backing up local firehouses, Good, Ryan and the rest of the team returned home humbled — and determined to be ready should such a tragedy strike again. Today, the headquarters of Colorado Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 1 bears little resemblance to the place where team members gathered in 2001 before deploying to New York. It is in a new building, opened in 2009. In 2001, the team had to rent trucks to haul its relatively meager amount of gear to the airport for a flight to New York. Ryan remembers going to an Army surplus store before shipping out so that he could buy a proper uniform. Now, three box trucks sit in the garage bays, loaded and fueled up, noses facing out. And masses of specialty equipment — search gear, hazardous materials gear, weapons of mass destruction gear — are ready in neatly stackable boxes. Training has increased. Protocols are tighter too. The time from when a call goes out to when the team’s trucks need to be ready to roll is a mandated maximum of four hours. The extra demands can be trying for team members, most of whom are firefighters at metro-area departments. Many who went to ground zero have dropped off the team, as other duties got in the way. Ryan — with a wife and two young kids — stepped away for a time too. But Good knows the demands are worthwhile because if you’re going to help people in their worst hours, you need to be prepared to do it right. Even if the reward of vigilance is elusive. “Sometimes you lose sight of whether day-to-day if you’re making a difference,” Good says. “I have to look back to the events like the Trade Center … and then I can say, ‘Yeah, I guess I am making a difference.’ ”
THE SOUTH TOWER WORKER
durango» “What happened that day?” Susan Cross would ask herself after Sept. 11. “Why did I survive?” A longtime Durango resident, she was in New York for training as a financial adviser for Morgan Stanley. On the second day of classes, during a coffee break, people crowded by the windows. Papers fluttered in the air outside. Fliers? Susan wondered. “If they are,” a classmate responded, “they’re on fire.” Soon, a company official told them to evacuate, calmly. Susan has spent the past 10 years trying to unravel what happened in the next 30 minutes. In her mind, she has run through the timeline over and over. She has ticked off all the things that could have gone differently: What if Morgan Stanley officials waited to evacuate? What if the classes were a couple of floors higher? Two years after the attacks, she and her husband, Rodney, went to New York to retrace her steps after she escaped the tower. She just couldn’t make sense of the day.
THE FIREFIGHTERS
says. “I wasn’t meant to go.” “Don’t look up!” the firefighter yells at the evacuees as Susan finally exits the building. “Don’t look back!” Outside, she pushes through a crowd looking skyward, with her head down. Thirty-four minutes later, the tower falls.
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2008
2009
2. aug. 19, 2006
3. nov. 7, 2006
5. dec. 30, 2006
Iraq war continues
Republicans ousted
Hussein executed
At 1,249 days since the war began, the war in Iraq surpasses the length of World War II.
In midterm elections, both houses of Congress change back to Democratic hands for the first time since 1994, perhaps as a referendum on the Iraq policy of the Bush administration and Republican scandals.
Sentenced to die by the Iraqi Special Tribunal for crimes against humanity, Saddam Hussein is hanged.
4. nov. 17, 2006 “I left there more committed than ever to bringing the war to an end. I told my colleagues yesterday that the biggest ethical issue facing our country for the past three and a half years is the war in Iraq.” – House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi after visiting wounded Iraq war veterans
7. sept. 20, 2009 Zazi arrested
6. jan. 10, 2007 Troop surge begins President Bush announces a troop surge of 21,500 for the war in Iraq to stem the violence at the request of new commander Gen. David Petraeus. Violent events in Iraq drop significantly.
FBI agents arrest Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Colorado resident and Afghan national questioned in an alleged terrorist plot in the United States.
the denver post B denverpost.com B sunday, september 11, 2011
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10 YEARS LATER «9N
rebirth. The twin reflecting pools at the National September 11 Memorial mark the footprints of the twin towers. Each is nearly an acre in size and will feature the largest man-made waterfalls in North America. The names of the 2,977 people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack and the seven killed in the Feb. 26, 1993, north tower garage bombing are inscribed in bronze panels along the pools’ edges, a reminder of the largest loss of life from a foreign attack on U.S. soil and the greatest single loss of rescue personnel in U.S. history. Joe Amon, The Denver Post.
Ten years is a long time and no time at all. In New York, they will turn on the fountains today, the ones that mark the footprints of the buildings that were taken down. Danny Hartmann, one of the plumbers who has poured the past couple years of his life into the project, wants those fountains and the park leading up to them to make a statement. “I just hope,” he says, “that what we make and when we’re done, people will look at it and be proud of it, and say, ‘We did that — take that.’ ” At Arlington National Cemetery, the tourist trolley begins its trip back to the visitors center, and Dianne Carson grabs the microphone. “I don’t know if this is your first trip to Arlington or your 31st, but chances are you’ve been struck by the majesty, the mystery, the sadness, or the pride,” she says. “The tragedy of war is it uses man’s best to do man’s worst. These are the words of (clergyman) Henry Fosdick, as true today as they ever were.” A moment passes, and then she signs off. “I’ll leave you with this,” she says. “My dad always 8
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2009
told me no one is dead as long as there is someone left to remember them.” In Denver, Joe Riche stands in his shop, stares at the piece of World Trade Center steel suspended from a hoist, and points to shards of rust that have just settled out of the bottom and onto his concrete floor. Like the dust, concrete and pack of smokes that fell out earlier and now rest in jars, the new deposit is sacred, a part of ground zero. “All of those,” he says, nodding toward the newly dislodged debris, “are steps that just bring you closer to the reality of what the piece is, or rather, what it represents now.” In the True Value store in Anthony, Kan., John Schott sits on the front counter, swinging one leg back and forth, trying to sum it all up. “The meaning of Sept. 11 is actually what happened on Sept. 12, in my mind,” he says. “The unity of the country. The incredible outpouring of support for the victims and their families. That was what was
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2010
13
11. aug. 31, 2010
12. oct. 29, 2010
Another surge ordered
Iraq troops begin withdrawal
Airline bombs discovered
President Barack Obama announces that he is ordering an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.
President Obama announces the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq.
Underwear bomb Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, attempts to ignite an explosive device hidden in his underwear.
10. may 1, 2010 New York threatened
:
2011
8. dec. 1, 2009
9. dec. 25, 2009
most important about Sept. 11. What happened on Sept. 11 was an event in a battle that began long before that day, and it’s still going on 10 years later, and won’t be over for a long time, between ideologies. “It gets a little less raw every year. Twenty years from now, that memorial will still be there for schoolkids to get something from it, about what happened that day. These were our family members. Members of our American family and our human family. “You think about all the kids whose parents never came home that night, and not for a long time afterward. And the mothers and fathers whose sons and daughters never came home — and the sisters and brothers and husbands and wives. If you have any humanity at all, you think about that.” And then John Schott, a man who speaks with eloquence and pace and can go on and on, settles into silence, and emotion overtakes his face, and his eyes glisten. “This is what we could do,” he says simply.
Two bombs found on separate cargo planes bound from Yemen to the United States are discovered “The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of at stop-overs Iraq in the hands of its people. We have sent our young men en route, one and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent in England and vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home. one in Dubai in Now, it is time to turn the page.” – President Barack Obama the United Arab Emirates.
A car bomb is discovered in Times Square after smoke is seen coming from a vehicle. The bomb was ignited but failed to detonate. Faisal Shahzad pleads guilty to placing the bomb as well as to terrorism and weapons charges.
13. may 1, 2011
Students gather at the fence on the north side of the White House, chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” while President Obama announces the death of Osama bin Laden.
TIMELINE: Jeff Neumann, The Denver Post • SOURCES: Wire reports • PHOTOS: Associated Press file, Getty Images file, New York Times file, Washington Post file and Denver Post file
“Tonight, I can report… that the United States has…killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.” – President Obama
10NÂť 10 YEARS LATER
sunday, september 11, 2011 B denverpost.com B the denver post
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10 YEARS LATER
WE WILL REMEMBER 2,977 People killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, not including the 19 hijackers
THE SACRIFICE 6,230 U.S. service members killed in the war on terrorism, as of Sept. 1, 2011
Source: icasualties.org
Top, Alexandre Fuchs, AFP/Getty Images; bottom, Michael Kamber, The New York Times