September 11 2001 Terrorist Attack

As the newly reconstituted U.S. military trial system takes up its first case today with the arraignment of Australian terrorism suspect David Hicks, a sense of deja vu prevails in the on-again, off-again effort to prosecute those accused of having a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. A ruling on the legitimacy of the tribunals is pending before the Supreme Court, which in June quashed an earlier system, calling it an abuse of President Bush's wartime powers.

A Saudi suspected of being the senior paymaster for the Sept. 11 attacks, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, has denied wiring money to the hijackers or knowing specifics of the plot, according to a transcript of his military commission hearing released Thursday. U.S. authorities, as well as the Sept. 11 commission that investigated the attacks, have long alleged that Hawsawi was a top lieutenant of plot mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, an Al Qaeda chieftain.

Just four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz dashed off a memo to a senior Pentagon colleague, demanding action to identify connections between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda. "We don't seem to be making much progress pulling together intelligence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Wolfowitz wrote in the Jan. 22, 2002, memo to Douglas J. Feith, the department's No. 3 official.

Many Americans know Rudolph W. Giuliani only from his performance in the smoke and ashes of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York -- a steely image that has propelled him atop the polls in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Now, some groups at the center of the 9/11 experience are laying aggressive plans to tarnish that image and undermine the central pillar of his candidacy. Officials from a national firefighters union, along with some relatives of Sept.

"America at a Crossroads" did not get off to an auspicious start. From the beginning, the ambitious $20-million effort to examine the complexities of the post-Sept. 11 world through a series of documentaries -- an initiative of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private nonprofit that distributes federal funds to public television and radio -- was greeted with skepticism.

A new stained glass window that includes an image of the World Trade Center attacks was blessed by a bishop Sunday in a cathedral here. The window at St. John's Cathedral is constructed of about 20 panes, each with representations of heaven and hell. The World Trade Center pane is at the bottom, with an image of the attack as an illustration of "hell on Earth," said artist Marc Mulders, its maker. It shows an airplane about to crash into one of the twin towers.

Two men accused of being top Al Qaeda operatives have denied playing any role in the Sept. 11 attacks or other terrorist plots, and one of them has told U.S. military officials that he deserves leniency for providing "vital information" in the U.S.-led counter-terrorism campaign in the four years since his capture in Pakistan. U.S. authorities accuse Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, of being a close associate of Sept.

Tom Cruise's latest effort isn't for the big screen. It's for the New York police officers, firefighters and paramedics of Sept. 11. Cruise was to appear Thursday at a private dinner in Manhattan to raise money for the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, a program he co-founded in 2002. The program, based on principles developed by Scientology founder L.

Ground zero workers who died after breathing in toxic dust from the collapsed World Trade Center ought to be officially recognized as victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the workers' family members say. The official list of victims grew by one this week after the city agreed to include a New York attorney who died of lung disease months after the attack, confusing Sept. 11 family members about what distinguished this death from the scores of others attributed to the aftermath.

Two subjects of a new documentary film joined the chorus of voices determined to focus attention on people who have developed debilitating health problems after breathing toxic dust from the collapsed World Trade Center towers. William Maher and John Graham traveled to Cuba as part of "Sicko," a documentary on the U.S. healthcare system by filmmaker Michael Moore. He brought the men, who had helped clean Lower Manhattan, to Cuba to try to get medical treatment for them at the U.S.