Our materialism seems to be one thing that gets them the most.Originally Posted by ablarc
Although I just heard that the guy they arrested for the Path Tunnel / Holland Tunnel scenario was living the rowdy high-life as a way of trying to go undetected. Funny how some people seem to think that G** forgives certain transgressions when done in the name of some "higher purpose".
Yeah, in every sense of the word.
If only they'd let Larry Flynt open a chain of clubs from Morocco to Pakistan...
Well, the higher purpose is God himself.
The WTC/Pentagon guys were living it up in Miami strip joints.
It's exactly the sort of thing Pataki would say. Watch for it on the fifth anniversary.
When you attach terrorism to the rebuilding of the WTC, you invite counter arguments like: So if we are in such danger, why are we spending all this money on buildings? It would be better spent on increasing security.
Now you have to defend fund allocation.
With all due respect to the Israelis, they are excellent at tidying up the gore, but have still not figured out how to co-exist with the Palestinians.The Israelis decided long ago that as soon as the terrorist attack ends, the rebuilding begins. I have seen scenes in which, 2 days after the attack, there is no longer any evidence of it on the street.
They haven't figured anything out; they are stuck in a situation. If that happened in New York on a regular basis, more people would just leave for the Sunbelt.Having greater experience with terrorism than we do here, they have figured out a lesson that we are still learning: You may not be able to stop the terrorist act, but you can stop it from controlling the way you live.
So tell me, how much terrorism have you seen around here since 09/11, and how is it controlling your life?
Another question: What do you think manufactures more terrorists:
1. Charges that US Marines murdered civilians.
2. Those lazy scamps in Lower Manhattan have not rebuilt the WTC yet.
Playboy's life: Girls & booze
NY DAILY NEWS
BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
July 8, 2006
The alleged ringleader of the tunnel terror plot lived the life of an international playboy - on orders from Al Qaeda.
Assem Hammoud, 31, even fooled his mother, if Lebanese police and U.S. anti-terror officials are correct.
His mother, Nabila Qotob, said Hammoud drinks alcohol, had girlfriends, traveled widely and showed no similarities to Islamic militants.
She also said Hammoud taught economics at a local university.
To prove her son was no jihadi, Qotob showed off photos yesterday of Hammoud with his father and lounging shirtless on a speeding motorboat in Germany.
There were also very un-Islamic pictures of Hammoud with three smiling women - none of them wearing veils - on his arm during an undated stay in Canada.
"His morale is high because he is confident he is innocent," said Qotob, who said she had recently visited her son in jail.
But Lebanese police, who arrested Hammoud on April 27, said in a statement that the suspect claimed he had been ordered to maintain a fun-loving, secular lifestyle to hide his Islamic militancy.
"He did just that with perfection," the police statement said.
Counterterror agents knew Hammoud by his Internet alias of Amir Andalousli and consider him a dedicated member of Al Qaeda.
"We questioned him and he unraveled the plot," a source said.
FBI Assistant Director Mark Mershon said, "We know that he has acknowledged pledging a bayat or allegiance to Osama Bin Laden, and he proclaims himself to be a member of Al Qaeda."
Hammoud also told his captors that he was acting "on a religious order from Bin Laden and said, 'I am proud to carry out his orders,' " a Lebanese official said.
To carry out those orders, Hammoud planned to go to Pakistan for four months for training and had already undergone some light weapons instruction with a Syrian man who came to Lebanon this year, Lebanese cops said.
The Lebanese government said that instruction took place in the Ein Alhulwa camp, a Palestinian refugee camp that Middle East expert Nimrod Raphaeli called "an incubator of terrorism and a fountainhead of Islamist extremism."
Hammoud wouldn't be the first Islamic terrorist to live the good life to fool possible investigators.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to be the mastermind of the 9/11 plot, had developed a reputation as a charming womanizer even as he plotted to blow up airplanes flying to the U.S. from Asia.
And some of the 9/11 attackers were known to frequent topless bars and pay for lap dances to keep their covers from being blown.
© 2006 Daily News, L.P.
Of course, that was the only reason. You have to make sacrifices for God.
Of course, the terrorism act we are speaking about here is 9/11 itself. As for how we have let it control our lives, absent the concerns of the memorialists and preservationists, whose demands hasd to be whittled down from all 16 acres to a mere 8, I believe that the WTC site would have been, to a much greater extent, rebuilt by now, and in a fashion far closer to what was there before. Instead, we have a giant hole in the ground, while committees continue to ponder how to bring the memorial in under a billion dollar budget. Believe it or not, the inability to restore a massive business, retail and transit center has affected the lives of those who live in this community. I'm not sure what there even is to debate on this point.
Neither, actually. If I recall my very recent history correctly, the last two US military interventions preceding 9/11 were: #1 -- our military intervention to rescue the Kosovar muslims from aggression and help them create a new state of thier own; and #2 -- our military intervention to rescue the Bosnian muslims from aggression and help them create a new state of their own. Which of these two actions "manufacture"d the 9/11 terrorists? Terrorism exists not because anything we do or don't do, nor, as the Pres. Bush put it, because "they hate our freedom." It exists because there is a hate-filled religious philosophy spreading out there which has cast us in the role of the devil, indepedent of anything we do. We are the world's superpower, and we are a mostly non-muslim nation, so we are going to have to play the role, whether we like it or not. That is why all of President Clinton's good works on behalf of oppressed Muslims was immediately followed by 9/11, and not by a big thank you note from Osama Bin Laden.
Thus, all we can really do about the situation is to beef up our security and our intelligence, and take out any regimes such as the Taleban in Afghanistan that support the terrorists. It is doubtful that Iraq was such a regime, which is why our military intervention there was not the smartest move.
But I believe that, like in any other war, also as a nation must also show resolve, and not let the enemy know they are affecting us. The benefits are head to measure, but I believe they exist. And on this final point, filling in the big hole in the ground is the most important thing we can do.
^ Well said, BPC.
Time to leaven our tendency to self-flagellation with a little realism.
Does anyone know what the acreage was in the old WTC that was devoted to plaza, etc. (i.e. non-buildings)?
None of your post, except the above passage speaks to the statement that I said is political posturing:
Leaving a hole in Manhattan for a year encourages potential terrorists to see us as weak
I am not refuting that the area should be restored as quickly as possible, or that we should get on with our lives; but that it makes no difference one way or the other to the terrorist. And what things are holding up development? Is it fear of terrorists, or...
Demands by special interest groups
Soaring construction costs.
Indecisive politicians.
Balking insurance companies.
Public-private turt wars.
As a lifelong New Yorker, this is rather familiar to me.
This is not like any other war. It is not the US and USSR looking at each other across the North Pole, and gauging the determination of the other. These people are not afraid of us, and never will be. They are willing to fly planes into buildings, or sit in buses wearing nails n' dynamite. The only thing we can do, besides finding a way to get out of Iraq, is what is being done under cover, but that work is boring and doesn't produce the sort of sound-bites that gave Bush 4 more years in office.like in any other war, also as a nation must also show resolve, and not let the enemy know they are affecting us.
Actually, number one.Neither, actually.
http://www.iiss.org/whats-new/iiss-i...three-years-on
Fear manifests itself in many ways. I think we can agree that 9/11 invoked fear in a lot of people. That fear was reinforced and drawn out through media coverage. It was enhanced by people going over stories of death and the pain and suffering of the survivors. The press coverage of these stories that fed on and were encouraged by our fears gave people claiming to be victims a lot of ability to reach large numbers of people with their own issues and fears. This translated into a political power which enabled them, if they chose, to become a road block to decision making on the site, if they didn't like what was being built. Our fears gave a lot of power to obstructionists. It incapacitated our political system. It resulted in huge sums of money being spent simply not to offend those who seemed most easily offended. All of the other things that held back progress are tied to this simple equation. Victimization produces media coverage produces fear (repeat 24 X 7 for a couple of years) produces political power which stops decision making.
If you report a sniper shooting at people in Washington DC, they will try to stop driving to avoid the sniper, even if any inidividual is far more likely to die in a car accident than by the sniper. The irrational fear changes the way people live. It empowers some people beyond their rights. It bends our political systems.
Rising costs should have accelerated work, if it were private sector decision making.
Insurance hasn't held up anything yet. If it weren't for the politics, there is no reason to believe that insurance would have had any significant impact. The sad thing is that even slow insurance performance is faster than our political process.
Name one special interest group that has held up construction. Only the families empowered by the press have forced the delays. Even preservationists would have been nowhere if families members hadn't used them for their purposes.
Public Private turf wars is just Public sector irresponsibility because they can't operate in a highly public environment dominated by fear.
Our society has given our attention mostly to the people who were willing to play their grief and fears out in public forums. There was very little "story" in resilience and moving forward. People were afraid the buidings wouldn't be good enough, afraid that their loved ones wouldn't be remembered, afraid that their rank wouldn't be reflected in the memorial, afraid that footprints would be covered removing any possibility of them being able to grieve properly. It's all fear of the minority played out in public for private agendas bending politicians from rational and respectful decision making.
In some ways, relative size isn't the main issue. The old plaza was a public place with concerts and events. The new park will be much nicer than the old plaza, but it will not support the open usage that the plaza used to. Also, the old plaza was built over retail, transportation, parking etc. The new plaza eliminates almost anything underneath it except for the Path Station (pre-existing) and memorial/memorial museum. The 8 acre memorial area is certainly larger than the plaza, but it is also far less usable.
I figured that the statement that I objected to...
Leaving a hole in Manhattan for a year encourages potential terrorists to see us as weak
was going to be linked to fear - a fear of rebuilding, a fear of living our lives. However, it seems to me that the only people who are talking about fear (an obsession?) are the ones who are saying we shouldn't be afraid. I see no evidence of this fear in Lower Manhattan.
It wasn't our fears that empowered these people, but our sense of their entitlement. This same misplaced entitlement happened one month after 09/11, when the airline crashed in Rockaway. Family members wanted the site turned into a memorial, and residents were forced to defend their property. Although bigger in scope, the obstructionist activities at the WTC memorial are no different than what goes on at many projects in the city.The press coverage of these stories that fed on and were encouraged by our fears gave people claiming to be victims a lot of ability to reach large numbers of people with their own issues and fears. This translated into a political power which enabled them, if they chose, to become a road block to decision making on the site, if they didn't like what was being built.
Silverstein vs the PA, Silverstein vs Pataki, Pataki vs Bloomberg, Childs vs Libeskind.Name one special interest group that has held up construction. Only the families empowered by the press have forced the delays.
Were you around the first time the WTC was built?Public Private turf wars is just Public sector irresponsibility because they can't operate in a highly public environment dominated by fear.
I am not disagreeing with the fact that the family groups are the main cause of delay at the site, but trying to bolster the argument by saying it is caused by fear only clouds the issue, and is an insult to those who have patiently waited for something to be built.
Your link, even if taken as true, does not support your point.
^
How so?
Anything with Pataki was based on his fear of seeming insensitive to family members. He felt he had to do spectacular things, everything at the WTC became rapped in superlatives . . . because we got kicked, felt helpless, couldn't deal. Somehow, we felt that a devine act or architecture would undo the defeat and alleviate our fears. Pataki is the politician who was driven by our societal fears.
Silverstein vs PA hasn't delayed a thing. All the delays have been in getting the site ready for building. They could still be negotiating on control of the East side of the site. Fact is, nothing can be built until the site is prepared and it won't be prepared for a year or two. This is because we were afraid of doing anything to offend anyone at the site by destroying historic artifacts or cherished items. In an empty pit, people were so hurt and so afraid that they latched on to every little peace of ruin as emotionally important.
Childs vs Libeskind, kind of hard to say their little squables had much impact when everything they worked on was rewritten again by Bloomberg and the police. That rewriting was based on fear of attack, which was made more likely because the building was on West Street instead of within the site. It couldn't be in the most secure locations because Pataki was AFRAID to confront the families and promised not to build on the footprints. I.E. fear drove bad decisions which caused other fears to drive other political infights.
Libeskind was chosen as an antidote to fear. He covered his plan in layers of heroism and rhetoric all designed to hide the fact that we horribly lost on 9/11 and we were all afraid. The whole Libeskind design was created to mask our fears. It was not always economically buildable, but it hid our fears behind "Freedom".
Pataki vs. Bloomberg: Bloomberg was afraid that lower Manhattan was destroyed as a commercial center and that it wouldn't work to rebuild. So after everything was in place, fear continued to drive the delays.
PA fought Silverstein because they wanted the good sites and were afraid to locate in the Freedom tower. They were also afraid to take it on because it was perceived as a target, at least to some extent, and therefore wouldn't be economically viable. I.E. fear that Downtown would fail.
Behind every debate, behind most of the decisions that really made planning difficult, was fear. It wasn't all fear that a bomb would go off in the next minute, but it was definitely fear. Fear of future attacks, fear about future inviability, fear about taking an action that someone might complain about.
The most powerful and deadly characteristic of fear is that we are unable to admit to it. It drives us while we live in denial.
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