REBUILDING LIVES,REBUILDING TRUST

By CHEN WEN

REBUILDING LIVES,REBUILDING TRUST

By CHEN WEN

Ten years after the September 11 attacks, not all Americans feel safer

Smiling patiently, John Jonas answers questions from a crowd of curious people. The story has been told and retold: Jonas, then Captain of Ladder Company 6,and his men were among the fi rst to respond to the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2011. They rushed to the north tower to help people evacuate. The company was trapped in debris following the collapse of the tower. But they all survived and rescued a Port Authority worker named Josephine Harris.

“We were in the middle of rescuing a woman when the building collapsed on top of us,” said Jonas, now Deputy Chief of the New York City Fire Department. They were trapped in Stairway B of the north tower. The tower “peeled away like a banana” and “we were at the bottom,” he said.

“We were trapped for over four hours and we fi nally got out that day,” Jonas said.“Pretty remarkable scene.”

Jonas stood in front of his portrait in the Time Warner Center in New York City on August 24, attending a commemorative event ahead of the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The free photo exhibit, named Faces of Ground Zero—10 Years Later, features more than 50 life-sized portraits of people affected by the attacks, including firefighters, rescue workers, families of victims, survivors,caregivers, politicians and students at nearby schools.

This exhibit is one of the many commemorative events around the United States marking the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“I think I’m just trying to make a contribution,” said photographer Joe McNally who started shooting the fi rst picture shortly after September 11, 2001. It was a very stressful time. People were very emotional, McNally said, remembering his first meeting with these people.

“What I found 10 years later with the folks that I stayed in touch with and that came back for photographs is that there is an amazing power of the human spirit,” McNally toldBeijing Review. “Lives are positive, people are doing things. They are living their lives and they’re going forward.”

But no matter how ready the whole nation appears to be to move on, for many Americans, life forever changed after the most deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil,an Al Qaeda attack that killed nearly 3,000 people.

It has taken 10 years to rebuild the ground zero sites, but it may take even longer to restore the psychological health of those who were emotionally involved in the tragedy.

Ten years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, demons still hunt many Americans.“At least 10,000 fi re fi ghters, police of fi cers and civilians exposed to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center have been found to have post-traumatic stress disorder, and in a kind of mass grieving, many of them have yet to recover, according to fi gures compiled by New York City’s three September 11 health programs,” saidThe New York Times.

“How can you heal from that? You don’t heal from that,” Juana Lomi said toBeijing Review. She was a paramedic working for the New York Downtown Hospital when the World Trade Center was attacked, and was among the fi rst to arrive on the scene to help and rescue people there.

“I had to live through the scene of what happened, plus the aftermath, the cleanup,”Lomi said. “There were a lot of moments of nightmare, a whole year of not being able to sleep, a whole year of remembering the fi re fi ghters who used to work across the street and lost their lives,” she said.

But life has to go on. So “you learn to embrace the situation and you learn to live with it and manage to do the best you can,” said Lomi.

High alert

A lot has changed since the tragedy. And yet some things remain the same, one of which is the constantly repeated question deep in the heart of every American: “Are we safer?”

“Our homeland is more secure than it was 10 years ago, and, indeed, more secure than it was two years ago,” said Secretary of the U.S.Department of Homeland Security (DHS)Janet Napolitano in her State of Homeland Security speech in January.

The DHS launched a national campaign called “if you see something, say something”in July last year, aiming to raise public awareness of indicators of terrorism and violent crime and to emphasize the importance of reporting suspicious activity.

It was launched in conjunction with the rollout of the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, a program led by the U.S. Department of Justice to collect and share reports of suspicious activity by people in the country.

New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority began using the“see something, say something” slogan in 2003. The program has been credited with effectively thwarting an attempted car bombing in the city’s Times Square in May 2010.A T-shirt vendor saw smoke coming from a vehicle and reported it to the police, who then prevented the explosion from happening.

“Only a ‘whole-nation approach’ will bring us to the level of security and resilience we require,” Napolitano said. “Real security requires the engagement of our entire society, with government, law enforcement, the private sector, and the public all playing their respective roles.”

The United States has taken important steps to implement new security measures during the past decade, including the deployment of new technology in aviation security and the increase of intelligence sharing and cooperation within the government. These measures have proved to be effective as there has not been another major successful attack on the United States since the September 11 attacks.

Michael Chertoff, former DHS Secretary,said in a National Public Radio program in June that the United States has improved a lot in recent years in integrating intelligence.“We’re simply much better now in not only collecting information, including opensource information, but in integrating it and making use of it in decision-making in real time,” said Chertoff.

And that has yielded bene fi ts. The killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the improved ability to detect travelers to the United States through airports are testament to the United States’ enhanced capability of intelligence collection, he said.

Partly thanks to intensive intelligence operations inside Pakistan, the United States has made major strides against Al Qaeda in the past months. The U.S. raid that eliminated bin Laden in May and the drone strike that killed the organization’s new second-in-command Atiyah Abd al-Rahman in August have delivered heavy blows to Al Qaeda.

But despite the U.S. Government’s antiterrorism efforts, Americans expressed mixed feelings on the current security situation of their homeland. The country may be safer now, but it’s far from safe.

A recent online nationwide survey commissioned by the Federal Signal Corp. and conducted by Zogby International regarding Americans’ public safety concerns 10 years after the September 11 terrorist attacks found half of Americans feel they are less safe today than they were prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

“I don’t know how much safer the world has become. I just don’t see it,” Lee Ielpi said toBeijing Review. Ielpi is a former New York City fi re fi ghter who lost his fi re fi ghter son in the September 11 terrorist attacks. He has since worked to bring comfort to families of victims and co-founded the Tribute WTC Visitors Center that aims to educate people about the whole tragic event and terrorism.

We cannot just depend on airport X-rays,Ielpi said. “It might be a little safer fl ying in,but homegrown terrorists are here. We have to be concerned about that,” he added.

Strategy shift

The U.S. Government unveiled its new national antiterrorism strategy on June 29,with an increased focus on security inside U.S. borders. President Barack Obama made the announcement one week after he declared plans to withdraw thousands of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

“This is the fi rst antiterrorism strategy that focuses on the ability of Al Qaeda and its network to inspire people in the United States to attack us from within. Indeed,this is the first antiterrorism strategy that designates the homeland as a primary area of emphasis in our antiterrorism efforts,”said John Brennan, the U.S. president’s top antiterrorism adviser.

Brennan said the United States cannot go after every terrorist group and must focus attention on those that seek to harm the United States. The greatest danger to the United States,Brennan said, is still Al Qaeda and its af fi liates.

The current administration has intentionally refrained from using what former President George W. Bush used to call “the global war on terrorism.” Instead, the United States is in a war with Al Qaeda, said Brennan.

The United States has paid a hefty price since it declared a “war on terror” after the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to a report by scholars with the Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies released earlier this year, in the past decade the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan have killed at least 225,000 people and will cost Americans between $3.2 trillion and $4 trillion, including medical care and disability coverage for current and future war veterans.

“The current U.S. fiscal situation will drive U.S. policymakers to consider the most efficient and effective ways to mitigate the terrorist threat. There will be less support for deploying large numbers of U.S. troops abroad,” said Lisa Curtis, a senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., during an interview withBeijing Review.

But she said it’s unlikely that budgets for gathering intelligence, building the capacity of partners in the fi ght against terrorism, and conducting special operations against terrorist targets will be impacted by the ongoing fi scal crisis.

The United States should prioritize the issue of homegrown extremism, Curtis said.When London’s subway trains were attacked in 2005, no one believed there was a similar homegrown threat in the United States. “That has changed over the last two years as numerous homegrown plots have been exposed and thwarted,” said Curtis.

According to Curtis, there have been at least 30 terrorist attacks and attempted terrorist attacks with connections to the U.S. community engagement in the past two years.

Curtis also warned Al Qaeda affiliate organizations throughout South Asia and the Middle East remain “motivated and capable,”and failing to make progress in rooting out terrorism from Afghanistan and Pakistan could “set the stage for future attacks on the U.S. homeland.”

Al Qaeda affiliate organizations throughout South Asia and the Middle East remain “motivated and capable,” and failing to make progress in rooting out terrorism from Afghanistan and Pakistan could “set the stage for future attacks on the U.S.homeland”

—Lisa Curtis, a senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Global cooperation

Terrorism is not just a threat to a single country, but a challenge to the global community. International cooperation is vital in countering terrorism, said Ahmed Seif El-Dawla, Chief of Section with the UN Counterterrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED).

Established in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001), the UN Counterterrorism Committee, with the support of the CTED, conducts assessments of member states and facilitates antiterrorism technical assistance to countries to support them in preventing terrorist acts both within their borders and across regions. The resolution calls upon member states to take “a wide range of legal, practical and institutional measures to counter terrorist activities in accordance with recommended international best practices, codes and standards.”

“The resolution also encourages member states to conduct such cooperation on bilateral and multilateral basis,” Seif El-Dawla said toBeijing Review. Over the past 10 years notable successes have been achieved, and member states have taken signi fi cant steps in the implementation of measures under this resolution, including a remarkable increase in the number of states becoming parties to international antiterrorism instruments.

A special meeting of the UN Counterterrorism Committee commemorating the 10th anniversary of the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1373 and the establishment of the committee will be held at the UN Headquarters in New York City on September 28 to discuss progress and challenges in implementing this resolution, international cooperation and the way forward.

The emergence of information technology and the possible use of the Internet for fundraising, recruiting and planning operations could pose challenges to combating terrorism,Seif El-Dawla said. The CTED is working to enhance the antiterrorism capacities of member states by facilitating the provision of technical assistance and promoting closer cooperation and coordination.

(Reporting from New York City)