President Obama is scheduled to visit Ground Zero in New York today and meet with families of those who perished in the attack on the World Trade Center. New details continue to emerge about the daring Navy SEALS' raid that killed bin Laden and the years of painstaking intelligence-gathering that preceded it. The president has decided not to release footage or photos of bin Laden's corpse. We'll explore how local lives have changed, how emergency response has evolved, and how we feel about the global terror threat 10 years after 9/11.
Our guests include Lt. Douglas Bair, a retired firefighter for the City of Harrisburg. Lt. Bair is now a rescue squad officer with Pennsylvania Task Force 1, the elite corps of first responders specially trained in urban search and rescue missions. As a member of Task Force on Sept. 11, 2001, Lt. Bair was dispatched to aid in the rescue and recovery effort at the World Trade Center. He recalls that he was on the 6th floor of the Customs House when Pres. George W. Bush made his iconic bullhorn address to the rescue workers and their families. Douglas will share his remembrances of that fateful time.
Also joining us will be Medhi Noorbaksh, Ph.D., associate professor of international affairs at the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. Dr. Noorbaksh spoke to the The Patriot-News earlier this week and said, "The majority of Muslims they were absolutely disgusted by the type of violent act that bin Laden was pursuing in different parts of the world. To a lot of Muslims, that was totally alien. That level of brutality is alien to Muslim teaching. In that sense, a lot of Muslims are relieved today."
Ambassador John B.Craig, director of the Center for Global Citizenship at Elizabethtown College, is in Cairo, Egypt and cannot join us for the program. He served as a special assistant to President Bush from September 2001 to August 2002. His emphasis was on combating terrorism. The ambassador wrote to us, "We know from documents and computers found in Afghanistan in 2001 just at the time of liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban, that Osama bin Laden's emphasis was always to bleed the U.S. economically and politically, like he believed the Mujahidiin had done to the old USSR.
"He perpetrated an act on September 11, 2001, that was guaranteed to bring us charging down on Afghanistan and then he hoped to mire us down and cause us to spend ourselves into ruin. He kept throwing "intelligence" out that he was going to attack shopping malls and Wall Street, all to keep us on a high state of alert and spending. I don't think that he ever really intended to attack in the US after September 11, 2001, because he got the reaction he wanted. While we did not really give him the opportunity to engage us in Afghanistan, we did give him that opportunity in Iraq and he took full advantage of it."
The ambassador added that the Arab world seems to have left bin Laden behind and is focused now on democracy, a sentiment echoed by Dr. Noorbaksh.
We welcome your comments and questions. Call in live tonight at 8 to 1-800-729-7532, send an email now to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or post a comment now to www.facebook.com/witf.org.
