Legion of Angels News Archive

WASHINGTON - None of us will ever forget this day.

That’s what President Bush said on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001. The country felt the same way.

But something fundamental has changed since then, and it says as much about Bush’s mindset as any part of his presidency.

He still lives Sept. 11, not as a memory, but in the present tense. It drives his decision-making, his politics, his legacy.

“He wakes up every day thinking about it and goes to bed thinking about it,” Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

But the country is an entirely different place.

The fears and feelings of that day aren’t fresh. They’re fading. A raft of new polling shows that most people do not worry that terrorists will strike again soon. Most Americans don’t fear that they or their family will be a victim of an attack.

Terrorism is still a concern, but as few as 1 percent of people polled chose it as the biggest problem facing the country today. That’s a pittance compared to economic fears.

Of course the memory still burns for those who lost family and friends on Sept. 11, and for those who fled the falling buildings.

Yet for most everyone else, it comes up like a sharp pain this time of year, then goes away about as fleetingly.

And that has created a striking contrast between the president and the people.

Bush was once the one who successfully encouraged people to move on from Sept. 11. Now he tries to keep them from forgetting it.

“No matter how calm it may seem here in America, an enemy lurks,” the president said this spring. He was speaking in defense of warrantless wiretapping on terror suspects, but has used similar refrains in backing interrogation techniques, the war in Iraq, and the whole way he goes about his job.

That lesson of Sept. 11 imbues so many of his speeches that, at this point in his presidency, the warning almost gets taken for granted.

People have moved on.

Since the attacks, the country has seen the onset of two wars, Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the housing market. The nation is eager for the election between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. Human nature has long kicked in.

After all, as Bush reminded the nation in great detail on Thursday, there has been no attack on U.S. soil in 2,557 days.

That’s a success story for the country and for Bush’s administration. It’s also the reason why terrorism is no longer paramount in people’s minds.

The president predicted this day would come.

“I knew that right after the attacks, the American psyche being what it is, people would tend to forget the grave threat posed by these people. I knew that,” Bush told an audience of troops in early 2007. “As a matter of fact, I was hoping that would happen so that life would go on.”

Yet these days, Bush sees danger in those fading memories — less support and less vigilance in a war against plotting killers.

“The temptation is to kind of say, well, maybe this isn’t really a war. Maybe this is just a bunch of disgruntled folks that occasionally come and hurt us,” he said in the Rose Garden this summer. “You know, that’s not the way I feel about it.”

When Bush scoffs at those who might minimize terrorism as a law enforcement matter, he’s targeting Democratic opponents. Politics are part of this, too. He made national security the centerpiece of his re-election campaign.

Polls show Americans favor McCain over Obama in confronting terrorism, mirroring a traditional election trend. If people are thinking about national security when they go to the polls, Republicans are most likely to gain.

Bush made the point this way in his speech to the Republican National Convention: “We need a president who understands the lessons of September the 11th, 2001: that to protect America, we must stay on the offense, stop attacks before they happen, and not wait to be hit again.”

The implication was that Obama would do the opposite.

The presidential reminders of Sept. 11 come up in many ways.

“Remember, when I mention al-Qaida, they’re the ones who attacked the United States of America and killed nearly 3,000 people on September the 11th, 2001,” Bush said last year.

When the war in Iraq reached its own grim anniversary this year — five years and counting — Bush raised Sept. 11 again.

The independent Sept. 11 commission found no collaborative linkage between the two, but to Bush, a broader struggle unites them. Failing in Iraq, he said, would be “to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and make it more likely that America would suffer another attack.”

At times, Bush seems almost to lament how little Sept. 11 is on the public’s mind.

He is still responsible for stopping another attack. And his reminders are, in fact, daily.

Bush begins his workday listening to intelligence experts describe fresh threats to the country. The public, of course, never hears or sees those confidential briefings. But the leaders of the intelligence community have been blunt in public that the terror threat remains real.

Their message to Congress and the country: Don’t forget Sept. 11.

Bush hasn’t.

“Even when he’s not president anymore,” Perino said, “I am sure that he will think about it every day.”

Source — Yahoo!

Adults who were near the World Trade Center around the time it was attacked in 2001 have been twice as likely to develop asthma as the general population, a new analysis of public health registry data has found.

The study of data from the World Trade Center Health Registry, released on Wednesday by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, tracks health effects two to three years after the attack. It suggests that 3 percent of adult residents and workers in the area on the morning of the attack and soon afterward have developed asthma, twice the rate of newly diagnosed asthma in the general population for the same period.

Asthma was more prevalent among adult residents who did not leave the area on 9/11 or who returned home within two days — nearly 4 percent — and less prevalent, at 2 percent, among those who were away until December.

The study estimates that 3,800 to 12,600 adults exposed to the World Trade Center disaster site developed asthma, and that 35,000 to 70,000 adults developed post-traumatic stress syndrome. Women, members of minorities and people with low incomes have higher rates of both physical and mental problems, the study says.

Linda Thorpe, a deputy commissioner for epidemiology in the health department, said on Wednesday that the analysis provided high and low estimates to account for the possibility that people who were feeling sick or who had had more intense exposure to the disaster site might have been more motivated to sign up for the study. The numbers were based on telephone interviews.

Officials say that the analysis provides the most complete picture yet of the health of 71,437 people, including rescue workers, area workers, passers-by and residents, who agreed to be tracked for up to 20 years after the attack. They represent 17.4 percent of the 410,000 people most intensely exposed to the disaster site. The registry is run by the city’s health department and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Also on Wednesday, the New York State Workers’ Compensation Board announced that 31,543 workers and volunteers who said they performed rescue, recovery or cleanup work at the World Trade Center had filed notices preserving their right to file for workers’ compensation claims arising from those efforts. These workers did not file formal workers’ compensation claims, but preserved their right to do so if they concluded in the future that an illness stemmed from their work at ground zero.

Normally workers have two years after suffering an injury to file for workers’ compensation claims, but special provisions were made for those who worked at ground zero. Under new legislation, Sept. 11, 2010, is the deadline for submitting notices preserving the right to file such claims.

The workers’ compensation board said that 12,234 cases had resulted from the 9/11 attack.

Source — The New York Times