In today’s New York Times:

Hour by hour, working through the night in his studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to forge elegant black steel mounts for these and other tortured artifacts from Sept. 11, 2001, the sculptor Richard Webber started “communing with them,” he recalled. In their presence, “you could almost hear what happened that day.”

Ultimately, he fashioned seemingly delicate mounts that supported these impossibly heavy objects of disaster for a forthcoming exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, “Here Is New York: Remembering 9/11.” It will be the city’s first major trade center retrospective, and opens next Tuesday, the sixth anniversary, and continues through Jan. 1.

The show includes more than 1,500 photographs documenting the tragedy and its aftermath, as well as 10 carefully chosen artifacts touched by history that exemplify the unimaginable. The show is, quite simply, the society’s memorial to those who died on Sept. 11, said Louise Mirrer, the society’s president.
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For some exhibition visitors, the objects are sacred for having been indelibly marked by the event; they regard the artifacts as relics, in a sense, and Mr. Webber’s mounts “are like reliquaries,” Mr. Edidin said. “Reliquaries often had horrible things in them — the material of the relics — yet they were presented as objects of great beauty.”

It would be possible to envision these trade center objects as sculptures in an exhibition of contemporary art, but to Dr. Mirrer they are hardly artworks. “They provoke a very different kind of response than a sculpture would,” she said. “These objects are the opposite of creative artifice. They are the product of impacts, and of heat — the remains of a massively tragic event.”

From yesterday’s New York Post:

Two of the World Trade Center’s tridents - a signature architectural element from the base of the Twin Towers - will be returned to the Memorial Plaza at Ground Zero, where they will stand sentry inside the museum pavilion, The Post has learned. The massive steel tridents, standing up to nine stories tall, have been chosen as the iconic symbols that will be seen by millions of visitors expected to arrive at the World Trade Center Memorial after it opens in late 2009.

Since the early days of planning for the memorial, designers had been urged to include an iconic artifact as part of the public plaza at the memorial, said Alice Greenwald, director of the World Trade Center Museum. “We looked at a number of different artifacts, and we all felt the tridents epitomized something accurate about the event, but also hopeful,” Greenwald said of efforts to memorialize the events of 9/11, while painting an inspiring message of rebirth.

The tridents were formed by massive steel beams rising from the base of the towers along the outside walls. At the seventh story, the aluminum-clad beams divided into three smaller beams that continued to the 110th floor of each tower.

After the terror attacks, several sections of the towers’ lower facade, including the tridents, remained standing and were eventually dismantled and removed. Some of the tridents were among the artifacts placed in storage inside Hangar 17 at JFK Airport. Greenwald said the tridents that stood after the attack are a “visual reference to the buildings that withheld and outlasted all the damage of that day.”

In order to be carted off the WTC site, the beams had to be cut into 30-foot lengths to fit onto trucks. Once returned to the memorial, the pieces will be reassembled, said World Trade Center Memorial Foundation President Joseph Daniels. Placed within the glass-walled museum pavilion, the tridents will rise up to 90 feet and will weigh about 90 tons each, Daniels said.

From the Associated Press via Newsday:

This year’s Sept. 11 anniversary commemoration will be the final time victims’ families will be able to descend into the ground zero pit to touch bedrock at the site where their loved ones were slain, the mayor said.

“It is the last year they’ll be able to go down into the bathtub because the construction of the memorial will take over all this area,” Bloomberg said on his Friday weekly radio show.

“There’s not going to be a pit to walk down to. I tried to make that as clear as I could to the families,” he said.

The sprawling crater, one of the lasting images of the attack, is the closest thing many victims’ relatives have to a grave site. A number of families never received any of their loved ones’ remains, and they’ve come to consider the bedrock hallowed ground.

Bloomberg’s comments came a day after he reached an agreement with victims’ families upset by plans to bar them from the site this year for safety reasons. The mayor ultimately approved the families’ proposal that they descend single file into the pit on this year’s anniversary, stopping only briefly to touch bedrock.

“The Brooklyn Wall of Remembrance in KeySpan Park stands as a graceful and beautiful tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice on September 11th, 2001. A 30 x 12 foot granite wall, the Coney Island memorial contains the laser-engraved images of 137 firefighters, 11 NYC Police Officers and 7 Port Authority Officers. Touched by the magnitude of their sacrifice, Brooklyn-born and raised Sol Moglen conceived of the idea for a memorial commemorating the loss of Brooklyn Firefighters. He also recognized the particular despair of those families whose loved ones were never found. The Wall of Remembrance gives them a place to come to, where the Lost are honored and recognized. It is the images of the Lost which speak so eloquently, reminding us these are real people behind the names and numbers of September 11.
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“KeySpan Park is the perfect setting for the Wall of Remembrance, Coney Island is a historic and beloved site along the ocean. Families come here for comfort, not for grief. To hear the sound of children laughing, feel the sun’s warmth and listen to the quiet voice of the ocean. The plans today are to expand the Wall again- this time to include all of the heroic firefighters, police and Port Authority officers who gave their lives on September 11th. It is a tribute to Sol Moglen’s vision and dedication that the Wall of Remembrance has become recognized as a truly fitting and meaningful memorial to these men and women.”

Learn more about the Brooklyn Wall of Remembrance by clicking here.

In the New York Post:

July 29, 2007 — Relatives of Sept. 11 victims are threatening to hold their own anniversary ceremony to commemorate the attacks unless city and state officials reverse their decision to move the event out of Ground Zero. “As America watches the memorial service on Sept. 11, 2007, we are sure that they will agree that this event should take place at the real and sacred location,” 11 leaders of 9/11 family groups wrote in a letter released yesterday. They also questioned how thousands of mourners would be able to fit into Zuccotti Park, southeast of Ground Zero.
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The families said Monday that they will now apply for a permit to do so, but it is unclear whether that would be successful. The city controls permits for the swath of land where previous remembrances were held, and a separate agency is in charge of the seven-story pit.

Mayor Bloomberg’s answer, via San Diego’s Union-Tribune:

July 30, 2007 — Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday that the Sept. 11 anniversary ceremony will not be held in its original ground zero location, despite threats by family members to boycott and hold their own shadow remembrance. Construction, including work on the memorial to the victims, has made the site unsafe for a large public gathering like the one that has taken place there each year, he said. Bloomberg said that the decision to move the sixth anniversary commemoration to a plaza off the southeast corner of the site was final, and that “it would be a big shame” if anyone skipped the remembrance events out of anger.

We are skipping both remembrances.

Yet we will be there, find are own vantage point, and pay tribute in our own way.

The 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero is scheduled to open on September 11, 2009. Next year, in 2008, with the Freedom Tower rising well above street level, the new Path station being erected, with both the 9/11 museum and memorial nearly half built, and the floor of what was once called the Pit covered with construction, where would the families have Mayor Bloomberg conduct a tribute on September 11?

It is also fair to ask Mayor Bloomberg why he waited until two months before this year’s September 11 to announce the tribute would be held at a park across from the southeast corner of the site? The Mayor is full of surprises. Each sudden, last minute announcement comes complete with a plan proving he made the decision weeks, if not months ago.

While Ground Zero will look much different this year and next year and the next year, the faces in our memories won’t change a bit.

We will remember, no permit nor Mayor’s permission required.

Signed into law on May 11, 2005, the REAL ID Act requires that a person applying for a state issued driver’s license or identification card has to prove who they are, when they were born, where they live, and that they are in the United States legally. In addition, states will be required to electronically ensure applicants hold no other valid state issued license or ID card. Specifically, the REAL ID Act says:

Beginning 3 years after the date of the enactment of this division, a Federal agency may not accept, for any official purpose, a driver’s license or identification card issued by a State to any person unless the State is meeting the requirements of this section.

The Act secures the primary identification cards used by those legally here within the United States for federal purposes. Without such a card, a person would have to show a valid passport and, if not a U.S. citizen, all required visas. If a state chooses to not comply with the Act’s requirements, then a license or card they issue must:

clearly state on its face that it may not be accepted by any Federal agency for federal identification or any other official purpose and use a unique design or color indicator to alert Federal agency and other law enforcement personnel that it may not be accepted for any such purpose.

Those licenses and IDs could not be used to board airliners or to enter a federal building.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) voted to enact REAL ID. In fact, he was on the conference committee that negotiated with the House about the bill. In addition, the Congressional Record shows this amendment to the Act was introduced less than a month before the bill was signed:

ADDITIONAL COSPONSORS — (Senate - April 18, 2005)[Page: S3817] AMENDMENT NO. 459

At the request of Mr. FEINGOLD, the names of the Senator from Vermont (Mr. LEAHY), the Senator from Oregon (Mr. WYDEN) and the Senator from Connecticut (Mr. DODD) were added as cosponsors of amendment No. 459 proposed to H.R. 1268, making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2005, to establish and rapidly implement regulations for State driver’s license and identification document security standards [emphasis added mine], to prevent terrorists from abusing the asylum laws of the United States, to unify terrorism-related grounds for inadmissibility and removal, to ensure expeditious construction of the San Diego border fence, and for other purposes.

Yet Senator Leahy now has “privacy” concerns.

Earlier this year he co-sponsored legislation (S. 717) to repeal the REAL ID Act. He would replace it with the language of a previous bill that would continue to assist terrorists and illegal aliens in avoiding detection. Specifically, his bill states it:

shall not preempt state privacy laws that are more protective of personal privacy than the standards, or regulations promulgated to implement this Act; and shall neither permit nor require verification of birth certificates until a nationwide system is designed to facilitate such verification.

It is no coincidence that his concerns are being made public just as the Senate considers immigration reform. On May 8, 2007, Senator Leahy made this statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he chairs:

The Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial that “Real Id was always more about harassing Mexican illegals than stopping Islamic terrorists” and continued to explain how “in an effort to placate noisy anti-immigration conservatives amid the GOP’s poll-driven election panic,” the Republican House in the last Congress attached this REAL ID bill onto a “must-pass military spending bill without hearings or much debate, and Mr. Bush made the mistake of signing it.” That is from the Wall Street Journal.

Given my own concerns, I have joined with Senators Akaka, Sununu, and Tester to introduce a bill that would repeal the driver’s license provisions of the REAL ID Act, and replace those provisions with the negotiated rulemaking provisions of the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004.

In addition, Senator Leahy also complained:

State motor vehicle officials will be required to verify the legal status of applicants, adding to the responsibilities of already heavily burdened State offices.

To be clear, I am not questioning Senator Leahy’s patriotism; I am questioning his judgement. He wants to repeal the REAL ID Act and the result would be states can continue to issue driver’s licenses and identifications to terrorists and illegal aliens.

From left: Gunnery Sgt. Angel Barcenas and Sgt. Justin G. Brown lead a formation of Marines, firemen and policemen across Manhattan to Ground Zero and the World Trade Center, May 24, 2007. Barcenas’ legs were amputated after he sustained injuries in Iraq last year. Brown is a liaison with the Marine Casualty Services Branch at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Read the story associated with this photo

OFFICE OF CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER
520 FIRST AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10016
CHARLES S. HIRSCH, M.D., Chief Medical Examiner
Telephone: 212 447-2041 TTY: 212 447-2086 Fax: 212 447-2755
Official website: http://www.nyc.gov
May 23, 2007

Felicia Dunn-Jones died on February 10, 2002; the cause of her death was determined to be sarcoidosis with cardiac involvement.

Accumulated scientific research indicates that exposure to World Trade Center dust can cause or contribute to sarcoidosis with cardiac involvement or a disease indistinguishable from it.

The Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has thus concluded that Mrs. Dunn-Jones’ exposure to World Trade Center dust on 9/11/01 contributed to her death and it has been ruled a homicide.

Mrs. Dunn-Jones has now been added to the list of people who died as a result of the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers. The total number of World Trade Center victims is now 2,750.