A lucky band of ground zero construction workers scored a $250,000 prize in a Christmas Eve Mega Millions lottery drawing, picking five of six numbers correctly, the New York Lottery says.
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Ground zero workers win $250K lottery
Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the proposed Islamic center near ground zero, is taking to the road in January to foster dialogue about Muslim life in America.
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Imam Behind Islamic Center Plans U.S. Tour
A settlement in New York City will pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to ground zero workers exposed to toxic debris after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, lawyers said Friday.
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9/11 workers OK settlement with NYC
A group of workers who said they suffered health problems as a result of being exposed to debris from ground zero stand to receive $27.5 million in a settlement.
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$27.5 Million for 9/11 Workers
What happened to hallowed ground? A new survey from Public Policy Polling shows that Republicans would prefer that a strip club be built near ground zero rather than a mosque. Twenty-one percent of Republicans said they’d be OK with a strip club near…
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GOP Prefers Ground Zero Strip Club
The planners of Park51 revealed sketches of the center, to be built near ground zero, to the wider public for the first time.
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First Look Inside the Proposed Islamic Center
A long-delayed bill that would provide health care to emergency workers and others who became ill after working on ground zero passed mostly along party lines.
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Bill for Ground Zero Health Benefits Passes in House
The man in charge of the development of an Islamic Centre near Ground Zero, defends the plans to the BBC’s Laura Trevelyan.
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NYC Islamic centre developer speaks
The New York imam backing plans for an Islamic centre near Ground Zero says plans by a small US church to burn Korans would have sparked “a disaster”.
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Koran burning ‘would be disaster’
Hours after thousands remembered those killed nine years ago at ground zero in New York, the debate over an Islamic center planned nearby played out at rival rallies.
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Rallies held over NYC Islamic center plan
The US is marking nine years since 9/11 amid controversy over plans for an Islamic centre near Ground Zero and a threat to burn the Koran.
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Key moments from 9/11 anniversary
Commemorations for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks are under way in the US amid continued tensions over plans for an Islamic centre near Ground Zero and a threat to burn the Qur’an.
The main event is in New York, where relatives are reading out the names of the 2,749 people who died in the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre.
Houses of worship across the city tolled their bells at 8.46am (13.46 GMT), the moment the first hijacked plane struck the north tower in 2001.
Barack and Michelle Obama attended separate services in Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, for the victims of hijacked planes that hit the Pentagon and a rural field nine years ago to the day.
Speaking at the memorial service, the president said the US was not at war with Islam.
“It was not a religion that attacked us that September day, it was al-Qaida – a sorry band of men that perverts religion,” he said.
In his Saturday radio address broadcast earlier, Obama alluded to the tensions over the proposed mosque and Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero, which have been inflamed by the Qur’an burning stunt.
“This is a time of difficulty for our country,” he said. “And it is often in such moments that some try to stoke bitterness to divide us based on our differences, to blind us to what we have in common.
“We do not allow ourselves to be defined by fear, but by the hopes we have for our families, for our nation, and for a brighter future.”
The pastor behind the threat to burn hundreds of Qur’ans in Florida said the event had been cancelled permanently.
“We will definitely not burn the Qur’an, no,” Terry Jones, head of a congregation of about 50 at the Dove World Outreach Centre in Gainesville, told NBC’s Today show.
When pressed about whether his planned demonstration might happen at a later date, he said: “Not today, not ever.”
Jones said no meeting had been set up with Feisal Abdul Rauf, the New York imam behind the plans for the Islamic centre.
Jones said his church’s goal was “to expose that there is an element of Islam that is very dangerous and very radical” and claimed: “We have definitely accomplished that mission.”
But his stunt still threatens to overshadow the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. After the official commemorative services there will be anniversary rallies in New York for and against the centre, with more than 1,000 protesters on both sides expected to converge at the site, two blocks north of ground zero.
The heated debate, pitting advocates of religious freedom against critics who say the plan is disrespectful to the dead, has led the president to declare: “We are not at war against Islam.”
The rallies have embroiled victims’ family members in a feud over whether to play politics on the anniversary.
Nancy Nee, whose firefighter brother was killed at the World Trade Centre, has said she does not plan to join other family members at an anti-mosque rally after the anniversary ceremony but is opposed to the development.
“I just wanted to be as at peace with everything that’s going on as I possibly can,” Nee said.
She said her brother George Cain’s death “is still very raw. … and I just don’t have it in me to be protesting and arguing, with anger in my heart and in my head”.
Jim Riches, whose son Jimmy, also a firefighter, did in the attack, said he would join the protest.
“My son can’t speak any more. He’s been murdered by Muslims. I intend to voice my opinion against the location of this mosque,” Riches said. “If someone wants to go home, that’s their right. I have the right to go there.”
But Stephanie Parker, whose father, Philip L Parker, died in the attacks, said: “I think the anniversary is being overshadowed.”
Parker was among 2,000 people who held a vigil on Friday night in support of the Islamic centre. She said this was the first time she had publicly commemorated the attacks. “This year I feel like I should use my voice and my position” as a victim’s relative to speak up for tolerance, she said.
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During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama made a number of impassioned calls for the United States to move beyond the psychological scars inflicted by the 11 September attacks and to adopt a more mature and realistic approach to dealing with the threat posed by al-Qaida. Calling on Americans to reject the “colour-coded politics of fear”, he pledged to close Guantánamo Bay, to forbid the use of torture in interrogations, and to rely on the courts – both civilian and military – to try terrorist suspects. As a candidate, Obama made it clear that he believed it was time to move America’s response to terrorism out of the shadows and to engage in a genuine dialogue with the Muslim world.
It is hard to reconcile the sweeping ambition of candidate Obama with the cautious baby-steps taken by the man who holds that office today. Almost two years after taking office, President Obama has officially ended the use of torture in the interrogation of terrorist suspects; but on most other counts, he has come up empty-handed.
Guantánamo Bay is not closed; the US is no closer to developing a consistent policy on trying terrorist suspects in a court of law; and the dialogue with the Muslim world has sputtered out after his Cairo speech. Worse still, President Obama has preserved some of the most misguided aspects of the Bush administration’s approach to al-Qaida while defending the culture of secrecy that permitted its worse abuses – like torture and extraordinary rendition – to flourish.
Only days ago, the Obama administration defended in court the right of the CIA to conduct extraordinary renditions on terrorist suspects, which permits American officials to kidnap foreign citizens and secretly transfer them to third countries for interrogation. It has promised to insist on “diplomatic assurances” from its partners that torture will not be used, but these are, at best, unenforceable, and at worst, disingenuous. Those alleging mistreatment, the Obama administration has now argued, cannot be allowed to sue in civilian courts for fear of endangering national security.
Also against its campaign promises, the Obama administration has sought to block efforts to restore the rights of habeas corpus to detained suspects in foreign countries, thus entitling the US government to hold these suspects indefinitely in foreign jails or black sites without due process rights. This is in direct contravention to a supreme court ruling in 2008, which restored habeas corpus rights to prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay. Rather than seizing the opportunity to push for new and creative legislation and policies to deal with the legal black holes created by his predecessor, President Obama has quietly continued these policies – all the while brushing off calls for accountability for Bush administration officials who initiated these misguided practices.
More worryingly, President Obama has in some respects proven more willing to use force against terrorist suspects than President Bush. He has increased the number of CIA-run drone strikes in the Afghanistan and Pakistan border region. These strikes, while effective in targeting militants, have killed an unknown number of civilians. They have been waged in the shadows, without public acknowledgment and without clear lines of authority or control inside government. By expanding the number and geographic reach of these strikes – first deeper into Pakistan, then onto Yemen – the Obama administration may be inadvertently stirring hornet’s nests that will generate even more terrorist attacks on the United States.
We simply do not know what the potential blowback risks of expanding drone attacks worldwide are. Nor is it clear that the Obama administration has paused to take a measure of that risk. Such a policy may be effective in degrading the leadership structure of al-Qaida’s cells, but it may also make the United States a whole host of new enemies whose capacity for harm is scarcely understood.
It is curious that this president – so eager to condemn President Bush for similar decisions on the campaign trail – has not offered a public defence or explanation for these policies. In contrast to his predecessor, who used the bully pulpit to make the case for a generational war against al-Qaida, President Obama has left it to his subordinates to make unremarkable speeches on counterterrorism, and to his lawyers to offer strong defences for Bush-era policies behind closed courtroom doors. When confronted with failed attacks on US soil, he has appeared slow and off his game – reluctant to engage in the militant posturing that characterised the Bush approach, yet equally reluctant to engage the public in a mature discussion about the nature of the threat and the proper response to it.
His lack of public engagement with the problem of terrorism has effectively ceded the rhetorical ground on the issue of counterterrorism to the Republicans. While President Bush left no doubt that he saw terrorism as a “war” problem, we still do not know what President Obama thinks the struggle against al-Qaida is or should be. His administration quietly discontinued the use of the phrase “war on terror”, but never told the American public why it did so, or how they should now think of the threat if it is no longer a war. This has left the administration vulnerable to the obvious Republican bait that they do not know they are at war with and that they are afraid to call their enemy by its name.
But perhaps more seriously, it has also left much of President Bush’s framing of the problem virtually intact. Because of this neglect, the American public still conceives of terrorism in the terms set by George W Bush; in his two years in office, President Obama has squandered the opportunity to redefine the problem of terrorism in a way that makes a clear break from the conceptual approach of his predecessor.
It is hard to understand why this president – so eloquent and so capable of seizing teachable moments for other issues – has remained so muted on terrorism. His absence is especially notable now that, in many respects, public debate is moving backwards. The administration dithered as protests over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York became a platform for resentment against Muslims in the United States by a small but vocal group of rabid nationalists. Only after the issue had dominated television news for days, did President Obama produce a carefully hedged statement, saying that the builders had the right to build it, but he would not comment on the wisdom of doing so.
This controversy was followed up by the detestable plans by a religious extremist in Florida to burn copies of the Qur’an, which, after days of controversy, merited finally a call from Obama that he hopes the pastor “prays on it and refrains from doing it”. At two crucial moments where the president could have been a forceful voice for tolerance, he entered into the public debate reluctantly and with statements more equivocal than the situation demanded.
This gap between candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As I have argued before, he has made some important steps towards acknowledging the limits of America’s influence abroad. But he has not managed to make a decisive break from the Bush approach to managing terrorism.
He has succeeded in changing the atmospherics of America’s counterterrorism policy; gone is the rampant fear-mongering of the Bush administration and the full-throated calls for a war on the forces of “radical Islam”. But what has emerged in its place is neither a coherent policy nor a new conceptual approach for the problem of terrorism. The president has yet to deliver a vision for addressing terrorism that moves beyond the trauma of that fateful day in September nine years ago.
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Tony Blair, when he was prime minister, used to give monthly press conferences that would run as long as journalists had questions to ask. By the end of them Blair was still comfortable, asking “Any more questions? Anyone?” while it was the journalists who wilted. Maybe Barack Obama should try the same thing.
He came close to doing so today, holding forth for over an hour. It was Obama’s most accomplished press conference performance in a while, and especially impressive when asked about the controversy over the Park 51 Islamic cultural centre and mosque near the site of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre:
This country stands for the proposition that all men and women are created equal, that they have certain inalienable rights. One of those inalienable rights is to practice their religion freely. And what that means is that if you could build a church on a site, you could build a synagogue on a site, if you could build a Hindu temple on a site, then you should be able to build a mosque on a site.
Obama then widened the subject, with a strong conclusion on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary:
From a national security interest, we want to be clear about who the enemy is here. It’s a handful, a tiny minority of people who are engaging in horrific acts, and have killed Muslims more than anybody else.
The other reason it’s important for us to remember that is because we’ve got millions of Muslim Americans, our fellow citizens, in this country. They’re going to school with our kids. They’re our neighbours. They’re our friends. They’re our co-workers.
And, you know, when we start acting as if their religion is somehow offensive, what are we saying to them?
I’ve got Muslims who are fighting in Afghanistan in the uniform of the United States armed services. They’re out there putting their lives on the line for us, and we’ve got to make sure that we are crystal clear, for our sakes and their sakes, they are Americans, and we honour their service.
And part of honoring their service is making sure that they understand that we don’t differentiate between them and us. It’s just us. And that is a principle that I think is going to be very important for us to sustain. And I think tomorrow is an excellent time for us to reflect on that.
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US pastor Terry Jones cancels his Koran-burning event, claiming those behind an Islamic centre near New York’s “Ground Zero” had agreed to relocate it.
9/11 anniversary arrives to tensions over Qur’an threat and mosque
Saturday, September 11th, 2010Obama: Muslims soldiers ‘are out there putting their lives on the line for us’
Saturday, September 11th, 2010
This article titled “9/11 anniversary arrives to tensions over Qur’an threat and mosque” was written by David Batty, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 11th September 2010 13.34 UTC