Filipinos join commemoration of 9/11 attacks in New York

NEW YORK – Thousands gathered at the National September 11 Memorial Plaza here to remember victims of the 9/11 terror attacks 18 years ago.

Twenty Filipinos were among the nearly 3,000 people who perished in the coordinated terror attacks by the Al Qaeda group, then led by Osama din Laden.

The bell rung to mark the exact times of when the planes hit the World Trade Center and when the twin towers fell.

The planes hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. and the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. The South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. -- 56 minutes after impact-- while the North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. --- an hour and 42 minutes after impact.

As in years past, the names of all the victims were called, among them Filipino cousins Maria Theresa Santillan and Judy Hazel Santillan Fernandez. Both died at 27 years old.

"Parang kahapon lang nangyari, itong 18 years masyadong mabilis, it hurts," said Judy’s father Expedito Santillan.

(It seems like only yesterday, 18 years went by so fast. It hurts.)

Maria Theresa was working in human resources at the Cantor Fitzgerald on Tower 1 when the attack happened. Her cousin and co-worker Judy was not even supposed to be there at that time.

"I think she’s off but it just so happen she went to the building and then it happened," said Maria Theresa’s mother Ester Concepcion Santillan.

To keep the memories alive for the thousands of lives lost and the countless heroes of the 9/11 terror attacks, New York has started a new tradition: the September 11th Remembrance Day.

The city’s new law requires all public schools to observe a moment of silence every September 11 to remind the younger generation that in America’s darkest day, people showed courage, sacrifice, support and love.

"I’m very appreciative. We should never forget, these are 3,000 innocent people that lost their lives that day and then and to have New York recognize that is very important to my family – If they could establish this in other states that would be great," said Judy’s brother, Richard Fernandez.

Over 6,000 others were injured and at least $10 billion in infrastructure and property were damaged. In the attacks. Many more died of 911 related cancer and respiratory diseases in the aftermath of the attacks.

On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist hijacked four passenger airlines --- two of which crashed into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center --- which led to the towers’ collapse.

The third plane hit the Pentagon in Virginia and the fourth crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Before heading to the Pentagon for a ceremony, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump commemorated the 9/11 terror attacks with a moment of silence at the White House South Lawn.

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She fled the 68th floor. She’s finally dealing with 9/11 trauma

Kayla Bergeron can still describe that morning in matter-of-fact detail: She was dutifully working at her desk on the 68th floor when the building lurched. Someone ran in and said that a plane had hit — a small plane, she assumed. She realized it must not have been just a Cessna.

And then how she began a harrowing descent in a stairwell that was dark and wet because pipes had burst as the twin towers collapsed.

She can also describe her life since, including the loss of a new job, the foreclosure of her condominium, the two convictions for drunken driving and, just last year, the diagnosis from a court-ordered alcohol treatment program: post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from Sept. 11, 2001.

“PTSD never occurred to me,” said Bergeron, who was a high-ranking official at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 2001 and whose office was in the north tower. “We weren’t first responders. We weren’t cops or firefighters whose job was to go into the building. People told us, ‘Be happy to be alive.’ We minimized ourselves afterward, and it all built up over the years.”

In the 18 years since the terror attacks, the police officers and firefighters who rushed into the flaming towers have been honored with a memorial at ground zero.

On Wednesday, the names of those who died, read every Sept. 11 at a ceremony there, will be read once again, even as the number of people who have reported being sickened by their work on the so-called pile continues to rise. Congress, after a fight last summer championed by comedian Jon Stewart, voted in July to replenish the fund that covers their medical care.

But thousands of civilians like Bergeron — people who worked in the trade center or were nearby when the twin towers collapsed — also survived. Some have developed physical symptoms. Some have not. But together they have become a largely overlooked segment of the World Trade Center community.

Now many worry that national attention is focused elsewhere and that people will forget that those who witnessed the horror of Sept. 11 up close can still develop symptoms of ailments like post-traumatic stress disorder.

“PTSD doesn’t have a time limit,” said Dr. Jacqueline M. Moline, the director of Northwell’s Queens World Trade Center Health Program, which provides monitoring and treatment for dozens of illnesses. “People can develop PTSD related to an event years later.” Often, she said, it is not clear what triggers the disorder.

Of the 24,550 emergency responders in the health program, 7,425, or 30.25%, have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Of those who fled the towers or the nearby destruction, 2,625 — or about 12.3% of all survivors registered in the program — have post-traumatic stress disorder, according to data from Northwell Health. Another 675 have anxiety disorders, and 661 others have what the program classifies as major depressive disorders.

“PTSD is the most common illness in the 9/11 community,” said John Feal, who worked as a demolition supervisor at ground zero and became one of the leading advocates for a permanent victims compensation fund.

Even now, some survivors replay the disaster in their minds. They have nightmares about it. They jump when they hear loud noises. They avoid anything that reminds them of that day.

Dr. Rachel Yehuda, a professor and vice chairwoman of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, said research has shown that people “in close proximity to a trauma who don’t have symptoms can get them later on.”

Usually, she said, the symptoms are brought out by “a trigger in the here and now.”

The triggers could include ordinary elements of daily life. For example, a bright late-summer morning could serve as a reminder of Sept. 11, 2001, and touch off memories of the planes taking aim at the twin towers. Sounds could have a similar effect.

“From the time I was 17 on, I couldn’t listen to an airplane overhead or a helicopter, or a car backfiring,” said Lila Nordstrom, who was a senior at Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan in 2001 and now lives in Los Angeles. “If I was in traffic and someone honked, it would lead to a protracted period of me panicking. It took a while for me to realize it was happening, and it took a while after that to realize it was 9/11-related.”

She said that she was certified for post-traumatic stress disorder under the World Trade Center Health Program in 2015.

For Elinda Kiss, a business school professor who was attending a conference in the Marriott World Trade Center hotel on Sept. 11, driving past Newark Liberty International Airport on the way to teach at the Rutgers University campus in Newark, New Jersey, would bring a replay of her frantic run to safety.

“I would see the planes coming in for a slow landing,” she said. “I would relive seeing the plane hit” the south tower.

She said she assumed her post-traumatic stress had largely disappeared over the years. But on Sunday night, lying awake, the nightmare replayed again and again. “I kept seeing the plane hit in the middle of World Trade 2,” she said.

Bergeron, the former Port Authority official, said she took almost no time off after the attacks. “There was no time to grieve,” she said.

Compounding the pain — and the pressure to continue — was the loss of her boss, the executive director of the Port Authority, Neil D. Levin, who was killed in the attacks.

As the years passed, Bergeron remained largely out of the public spotlight until 2006, when she was quoted in articles about the last aboveground remnant of the World Trade Center, a part of the staircase that she had taken to safety. She called it “the path to freedom.”

Bergeron said she left the Port Authority in 2006 for a state-funded job in Florida, in part to be closer to her aging mother, who lived in Georgia and had developed lung cancer.

Over the next few years, her mother died, her job was eliminated in a round of budget cuts and her savings ran out. She lost her condominium in West Palm Beach, Florida, to foreclosure.

In 2013, she was arrested and charged with driving under the influence in Parkland, Florida, and her driver’s license was suspended for several months. She later moved to Georgia to live with her father, and there she found a job making sandwiches in a fast-food restaurant.

She said that drinking had not become a constant in her life but that she was depressed and felt anxious “all the time.”

The arrest last year came late at night after a long day at the restaurant. She said she stopped at a tavern and had a couple of glasses of wine, then drove to a Mexican restaurant where she had dinner — and more wine.

“That’s really all I remember,” she said, adding that she apparently blacked out. The police took her to the Forsyth County Jail in Cumming, Georgia.

When she and her father went to retrieve her car, she was surprised to see that the front end was damaged. The police told her father that after she left the Mexican restaurant, she hit the back of another car that was stopped at a red light.

She was offered a choice of jail or a program called accountability court, which offers intensive counseling, treatment and monitoring.

Carol Simpson, the assistant director, said that those who enter the program must agree to spend at least 24 months in it. Bergeron has just completed her 18th month. Simpson said that post-traumatic stress disorder “is something we treat in our program pretty regularly.”

Bergeron said she could find no World Trade Center survivor groups, either in New York or in Florida when she was living there. The World Trade Center Survivors Network, a nonprofit set up soon after the attacks, ran an outreach program that was intended to help survivors come to terms with their experiences.

But in 2007, the group removed its president when The New York Times published a story questioning her account of escaping the twin towers. (She was in Barcelona attending business school.) The last post on its website appears to have gone up in 2017. Several people who were involved with the group did not return calls seeking comment.

One who did — Janice Cilento, a former board member — said it effectively wound down about two years ago. “It’s not really doing much right now,” she said.

“There are so many survivors out there who don’t realize they have issues from 9/11,” said Cilento, a therapist who was at home on Long Island when the planes hit the trade center. Her son, a volunteer firefighter, was eventually sent to ground zero.

“So many suffer in silence. It’s 18 years later, and to some it’s pretty new.”

c.2019 The New York Times Company

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World commemorates 911 attacks

A man walks by the Tribute in Light, lit to commemorate the 18th anniversary of September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, USA, Tuesday. The world commemorates the 911 attacks, where nearly 3,000 people were killed after 19 hijackers crashed commercial jets into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

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Rocket strike in Kabul on 9/11 anniversary

KABUL - A rocket was fired at the Afghan defense ministry complex in the capital Kabul in the early hours of Wednesday, on the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but no one was hurt, an official said.

"A rocket hit a wall at the defense ministry, with no casualties reported," interior ministry spokesman Nosrat Rahimi said in a statement.

The strike occurred just after midnight.

It was the first in the Afghan capital since US President Donald Trump announced at the weekend that talks with the Taliban aimed at a withdrawal of US troops were "dead".

On Tuesday, the insurgents pledged to continue fighting and warned that Washington would regret abandoning the negotiations.

The September 11, 2001 attacks on US targets prompted the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, which toppled the Taliban regime.

Last week, Kabul was the scene of two attacks claimed by the Taliban that killed more than two dozen people.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

15 years after 9/11, America in perpetual war

WASHINGTON - The 9/11 attacks of 2001 forever changed America and upended its foreign and national security policy, leaving the country for the past 15 years in a war against jihadists -- without ending the upheaval in the Middle East.

Barack Obama, who will leave the White House in January, is the president who tried to get the US military out of the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan -- devastating "war on terror" conflicts launched by his predecessor George W. Bush in the wake of the suicide plane strikes that killed nearly 3,000 people.

But Obama's legacy on that front is mixed, with US forces still present in both countries.

And while he worked hard to bring America closer to the Muslim world, he will leave office with the United States bogged down in a seemingly endless conflict against Islamists at home and abroad, experts say.

"The evolving threat of Islamist terrorism compelled President Obama, against his own inclinations, to engage militarily in Iraq once again, and since then in Syria and Libya as well," said Tamara Cofman Wittes, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"The wars in the Middle East, the metastasis of ISIS, online radicalization and a series of attacks in European and American cities have made the paradigm of a 'global war on terror' very hard to set aside, even 15 years after 9/11," she wrote on the World Economic Forum website.

The US is also still engaged militarily, in limited form or on a purely logistical basis, in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen to counter myriad threats.

"The thinking of the Obama administration is that big wars make things worse," Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, told AFP.

So instead, Obama launched a new era in American warfare -- one dominated by drones, special forces and training for local fighters.

The human and financial costs of such engagements are more limited -- a significant fact, after the 5,300 US military personnel killed, 50,000 wounded and $1.6 trillion spent from 2001-2014 in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional data.

Obama's strategy had its best success in May 2011, when US special forces killed Al-Qaeda leader Obama bin Laden, who masterminded the 9/11 attacks, at his home in Pakistan.

But for Ibish, such a use of "limited resources... looks like a continuous war."

"It is even more than a permanent war because the limited resources cannot change the instability. It accepts the current chaos as being unsolvable," he added.

Evolving threats

In Syria, a lasting peace is still not at hand, though a fresh truce brokered by the United States and Russia -- both now involved militarily in the deadly conflict -- is due to begin Monday.

And a US military re-engagement in the Middle East is not in the plans of either of the candidates looking to succeed Obama -- Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Fifteen years after the Twin Towers fell, forever changing New York's skyline, Obama said the terror threat facing America had "evolved," referring to lone-wolf attacks in the United States like the nightclub massacre in Orlando in June.

"So in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond, we'll stay relentless against terrorists like Al-Qaeda and ISIL. We will destroy them. And we'll keep doing everything in our power to protect our homeland," he said Saturday in his weekly address.

Mass surveillance

As Amy Greene -- an American researcher at the prestigious Institute of Political Studies in Paris (Sciences-Po) -- pointed out, "there has not been an attack on US soil of the same scale" as the carefully planned 2001 attacks.

Of course, Washington still fears more small-scale attacks carried out by homegrown attackers, like the Orlando shooting that left 49 people dead or the San Bernardino attacks last December that left 14 dead.

Faced with ongoing threats, the United States has built up a massive surveillance apparatus in the post-9/11 era both at home and abroad.

The budget for the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency has nearly doubled since 2001.

"The threat that I think will dominate the next five years for the FBI will be the impact of the crushing of the caliphate, which will happen," Comey said this past week, referring to the Islamic State group.

Since the passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11, legislation maintained by Obama, "Americans have accepted the idea of giving up some of their freedoms," Greene said.

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of Americans fear that "the ability of terrorists to launch another major attack on the United States is greater than it was at the time of the 9/11 attacks."

That is the highest share expressing that fear since 2002.

On Saturday, the US State Department warned in its regular "worldwide caution" note to travelers on terror risks that the IS group had "called on supporters to attack US citizens and coalition partners wherever they are."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

How Fil-Ams remember 9/11 attacks

It's been nearly 14 years since the September 11 attacks. While many Filipinos in New York now feel relatively safe, the threat of terrorism remains. - ANC, The World Tonight, September 10, 2015

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World Trade Center skydivers 'sullied' 9/11 memories

NEW YORK, United States - Two base jumpers who skydived off the World Trade Center "sullied the memories" of victims of the 9/11 attacks, a New York judge said Monday, slapping them with hefty sentences of community service.

James Brady, 33, who was a steel worker at the site, and "ring leader" Andrew Rossig, 34, avoided jail sentences but were ordered to carry out 250 and 200 hours of community service respectively, and each was fined $2,000.

Their stunt in the early hours of September 30, 2013 has been watched by more than 3.5 million people on YouTube. T-shirts glorifying the jump are still sold on the Internet, the court heard.

The new Trade Center, also known as Freedom Tower, is the tallest building in the United States and is constructed on part of the site destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

"After 9/11 the world changed, everything changed," said New York state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan.

Brady and Rossig made a "very, very poor decision" to execute a base jump off "an iconic building constructed on hallowed ground," he said.

"In doing so these defendants tarnished the building before it even opened and sullied the memories of those who jumped on 9/11 not for sport but because they had to."

Dozens of people jumped out of the Twin Towers to escape the horrors of being burned to death after Al-Qaeda hijackers flew passenger liners into the Twin Towers.

Brady and Rossig walked onto the site -- under construction in 2013 -- at 3:00 am, climbing 104 flights to where Brady had hidden their gear and parachuted below.

Merchan said the feat was not heroic but "selfish and reckless, and they're fortunate their stunt did not result in tragedy."

'Won't happen again'

Brady and Rossig were found guilty by a jury in June of misdemeanors that included reckless endangerment and unauthorized jumping.

A third defendant, Marko Markovich, 28, is to be sentenced next week.

The defendants expressed regret.

"We didn't want this whole thing to get blown out of proportion," said Rossig. "It's never going to happen again."

"We're sorry and it won't happen again," said Brady.

The judge said their apologies were "hard to reconcile" with videos posted on YouTube and a follow-up interview in Maxim magazine, which the prosecution brandished in court.

"Frankly there have been times when it has come across that the defendants believed this was some sort of joke," said Merchan.

'Selfish act'
Assistant District Attorney Joseph Giovannetti had sought 60 days in jail, three years of probation, $2,000 in fines and 200 hours of community service.

The defendants put the lives, physical safety and property of New Yorkers at risk with their "totally gratuitous and selfish act," he said.

"They knew what they were doing was wrong every step of the way," he said, yet they did everything to "celebrate their perceived accomplishment."

Giovannetti said Brady was "the inside man" who betrayed his contract to break into the construction site and who fed detectives false information in an attempt to mislead the investigation.

Rossig was "the ring leader and the instigator," who befriended Brady in order to gain access to Freedom Tower, the prosecutor said.

Rossig's lawyer Timothy Parlatore said no one in the history of New York had ever gone to jail for base jumping.

Police were tipped off when the manager of a local bagel store watched one of the men, dressed in black, come down and rush off. The defendants were arrested six months later.

The judge defended what was initially a counter-terrorism investigation "given the history of what happened at the Trade Center and given the history of what's going on around the world."

"We can't have people jumping off One World Trade Center downtown," he added.

Rossig, described as a skilled carpenter, will serve his punishment with a charity that builds and renovates homes for disabled veterans.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Bin Laden relatives killed in UK plane crash

YATELEY, United Kingdom -- Members of Osama bin Laden's family were among four people killed when a private jet crashed into a car auction lot in Britain, Saudi Arabia's embassy in London and British police said Saturday.

While the embassy did not identify the dead, a source close to the family speaking to AFP and Saudi media indicated that they were bin Laden's stepmother Raja Hashim, his sister Sanaa, the sister's husband Zuhair Hashem, and a Jordanian pilot.

The Saudi-registered Phenom 300 jet came down on Friday as it tried to land at Blackbushe Airport, a small airfield in Hampshire, southern England.

The police have launched an investigation into what caused the crash alongside the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB).

The Saudi ambassador "offered his condolences to the sons of the late Mohammed bin Laden and their relations for the grave incident of the crash of the plane carrying members of the family," a statement posted on the embassy's Twitter account said.

The embassy also said it would work with British authorities to investigate the incident and repatriate the bodies for burial in Saudi Arabia.

A police spokesman confirmed that three passengers and the pilot had died.

"We do believe three of the deceased to be the mother, sister and brother-in-law of the owner of the aircraft, all of whom are from the Bin Laden family, but formal post-mortem examinations are ongoing," the spokesman said.

"They were Saudi Arabian nationals and visiting the UK on vacation," he said.

- 'Big column of smoke' -

Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Al-Qaeda militant network and the man behind the 9/11 attacks, was killed by US special forces in Pakistan in 2011.

His father Mohammed, a construction magnate with 54 children, died in a plane crash in Saudi Arabia in 1967.

Footage of the aftermath of Friday's crash showed plumes of black smoke rising into the sky and several cars on fire in the outdoor area of British Car Auctions, where vehicles were parked awaiting sale.

On its website, Blackbushe Airport says it "provides some of the finest executive and private aviation facilities anywhere in the UK".

Robert Belcher, a local plane enthusiast who witnessed the aftermath of the crash, said the jet had been a "regular visitor" to the airport in recent months.

"I was passing the airport on my way home and there was a big column of smoke in the air," he said.

"I could see the plume of smoke waving from about five miles (eight kilometres) away and was hoping it was just a car fire rather than an aircraft accident."

Saudi Arabia's General Authority of Civil Aviation said in a statement Friday that the plane was registered in the Gulf state and that it would work with British investigators to determine the cause of the crash.

British media reported that the aircraft had taken off from Milan's Malpensa airport in Italy.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com