Beyond the Quad: New York City – Five Years After 9/11

Regis High School, 29 November 2006

We are pleased to present the second in our ongoing series of conversations among alumni about current issues, culture, and faith in their post-Regis involvement with the world. This discussion was held at Regis on 29 November and focused on New York City five years after the events of 9/11. Taking part in the evening were:

Dr. Gary J. Tocchet, Moderator and Principal of Regis High School

Kenneth E. Lynch, Esq. ’63, FBI (retired), Contractor, US Department of Homeland SecurityVincent P. Maher, Esq. ’73, Professor of Health Law Policy and Ethics, Iona CollegeMichael D. O’Keeffe ’73, Deputy Chief, New York City Fire DepartmentMr. Christian M. Talbot, Chair, Regis High School English DepartmentMark A. Torre ’81, Lieutenant, NYPD; Commander, Arson Explosion SquadJames P. Wolak, M.D. ’88, Psychiatrist, New York Presbyterian Hospital

In preparation for the conversation, panelists received copies of The New York Times editorials and op-ed pieces from 12 September 2001, and the subsequent anniversaries of 9/11. Members also received a copy of a poem by Vincent Maher, which is printed below.

Five Years OutVin Maher

I remember it too well. Still.I wish that I didn’tI wasn’t even supposed to be there that day.Switched days so I could do something later that week.So many freaky stories like mine.Many died. Yet more survived. For now.

It’s not a blur yet.I still see it…So clearly.Frame by frame by frame.I can smell it;I can feel it.

I cough. I choke. Still.Breathing is very difficult sometimes.Sudden loud noises freak me out.I lose my temper so easily…still…

Damn it!I am trying to get over it!

© Regis High School 2007

And yes, therapy helped…only a little…At least it’s easier than in the beginning.I think. They don’t though.Well…maybe…a little.

I run out of air;Can’t even make it up the stairs sometimesand I’m tired.Sooo tired.It’s not exhaustion. It’s worse. Exhaustion only needs sleep.Sleep doesn’t help much…..Nightmares.

TV documentary ads;Advertisement after advertisementListen to the audiotapes of people as they died accompanied byComputer simulated planes that come crashing through virtual windows;Don’t miss it!The faces.The faces of flight; faces of rescue; faces of awful wonder and terror. Up close.The bodies.Bodies flying out of windows – there is no Superman.This is not a movie.Bodies fall like bricks – screaming. No chance for a second take.

An audiovideo of those who survived as we die…?We’re not on prime timeNo one really wants to know. ‘cause it takes too long. No drama.

Besides…it’s five years out andEverything’s supposed to be better.

DR. TOCCHET: A warm welcome back to the alumni here around the table. I'm the new guy here at Regis, the new principal. And I am to loosely act as the moderator for this august assemblage in our conversation this evening. Now particularly, I feel honored to be here. It's not every day a Fordham Prep grad can sit at the same table with a number of Regians and be allowed to speak. So, I thank you for your spirit of generosity. Truly Jesuit inspired. I'd like to cover what we really want to talk about tonight, not so much about where

we were on that day; but rather, what we know or we don't know, what we think, what we feel today, five years later. And that's really the focus – New York City, five years after 9/11. That's sort of our objective. That’s sort of the vision of where we want to go with our conversation. And we’re going to consider political, social, practical human dimensions here of New York City five years after. And with that, I think it might be appropriate to have some introductions around the table so we can begin our conversation.

Very quickly, I’m here in a round-about manner. I am finishing 29 years of active duty service in the U.S. Army. I had opportunities in those 29 years to spend about half of them in academic settings, and half with an operational force. I've been on a number of planning committees. I was a plans officer for the divisional unit out in the Pacific, 25th Infantry Division; and an adjunct crisis action planner with Pacific Command, in which I did a number of special plans supporting special ops, extraction, evacuation, back up security for some counter terrorist operations, and some missions in the Pacific. Although I'm not a special operations officer, again from the planning perspective, I've had a little bit of experience in that area. I’m an academic though, here in later life. You know a little about my passion. I taught the history of U.S. Foreign Relations at the Academy, and particularly cold war diplomacy. I arrived in this land of Regians this July, so I'm very excited to be here and to be part of these conversations.

MR. TALBOT: Thanks, Gary. I’m Christian Talbot, Regis class of '93, Georgetown '97, and recently finished my graduate degree at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytical Studies, where I focused on, the psycho-dynamics of terrorism.

DR. WOLAK: Hi everyone. My name is Jim Wolak. I grew up in New Jersey, which provided my Regis classmates with a ready way to make fun of me when the need arose. I went to Amherst College and then I worked for five years for the City of Newark, New Jersey, EMS service before going to med school at Columbia. And I'm now a psychiatrist at New York Presbyterian Hospital Cornell. As an academic psychiatry department, we serve largely a clinic population. Unfortunately, we still see many people who are still suffering from the events of 9/11. I've also had the opportunity to see some of the research and some of the

examination of the events and the response to 9/11 that has come out of academic psychiatry in ways that we can better approach people if, God forbid, such a situation should happen again.

MR. O'KEEFFE: I'm Mike O'Keefe, '73, and I went to NYU for a little while and I got bored with that and ended up becoming a paramedic, worked at Beekman Hospital and Saint Claire’s Hospital in Manhattan, and got on the fire department in 1981. And I'm still in it. I'm still enjoying it most days. I'm Deputy Chief in lower Manhattan and I work in mid-town. On 9/11 I was working in Queens, so I was not in the center of things when that happened. I'm just glad to be back. It's a little different, but I'm loving it.

MR. TORRE: Mark Torre. I've been called a lot of things in my life Doctor, but “august” never! Anyway, I have an engineering background, but I got sort of bored with that and decided I wanted to become a police officer, which I did in 1986. So 21 years of police experience. I've been in what I'll describe to you as a bomb world since 1993. I left the Bomb Squad for a short time – I was a sergeant there – but not too far, because when I had made promotion to lieutenant, I went into what we call the Arson Explosion Squad. That's where I was during the whole 9/11 event. The Arson Explosion Squad does what I affectionately call the hard work in the bomb field because we do the Hollywood jobs, taking stuff apart, and the initial investigation. But A&E, as we call it, also does the follow up investigation and they actually put handcuffs on the bad guys. Just when I thought I was out, they called me back to the bomb squad and that's where I am now. And that's where I remain and hopefully will for the foreseeable future.

MR. LYNCH: Hi, my name is Kenny Lynch and I'm class of '63. I graduated from here and went to Fordham University on a basketball scholarship,

believe it or not. I used to be able to hang on a rim; now I can't touch the net. And then I went on to St. John's Law School, and graduated from there in '71, and got admitted into practice. I clerked for the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of International Trade for about a year and a half, in which time I spent 18 months in the library doing legal research and writing, which I hated. It drove me into the FBI. I went and joined the FBI thinking I would spend a few years in there and get some life experience and pop back out into the legal arena; I popped back out 32 years later. While on the FBI, I did typical organized crime, white collar crime, public crimes, etc. I spent five years as a counter intelligence officer in the Soviet Division, KGB/GRU.

DR. TOCCHET: How can I get your memoir?

MR. LYNCH: And then I spent 15 years assigned to what they euphemistically call “operations support” to the intelligence community. I worked with other government agencies who are restricted from working domestically. And in that area we targeted the Middle East and counter terrorism. Basically, it was a special operations branch, and I worked the whole time here in New York, except initially for a year in Boston. And after 30 years, they threw me out. 57 is our mandatory retirement. I got rehired for three years as an intel analyst in the Joint Terrorist Task Force. I left there two years ago and now I'm a contract employee with Homeland Security.

MR. MAHER: My name is Vincent Maher, class of '73. Mike and I were classmates. My past life since getting out of Regis is as eclectic as some of the other people here. I did a stint with Jesuits after I got out of here, and then became a nurse, and a nurse anesthetist specializing in shock trauma and emergency care. Went to law school,

practiced law for 20 years, picked up some credentials in economic international political economy and development and then others in comparative ethics. I've been teaching for 17 years at Iona College where my academic niche is health law policy and ethics.

DR. TOCCHET: Well, let's start. Vin gave us, if you all recall in the packet that we have here, some reflective pieces to think about prior to this particular meeting. Vin gave us his own poetic sense, in a way, of what five years out meant. And so, maybe this is the toughest question of the evening, if we start individually with some personal reflections as we all think back from this place to five years ago, what is it that now stands in our minds? What do we feel? Perhaps something that is etched on our own thoughts about that event? And perhaps how it affects us today?

And so as a very generalized question, but as we think to 9/11 five years ago, what does that mean to each one of you?

MR. O'KEEFFE: Well, a beautiful day is never the same anymore. That was one of the ten best days of the year, weather wise. It was a --

DR. TOCCHET: It was a beautiful clear blue sky that day.

MR. O'KEEFFE: When those days come around, even now, that time of year.

DR. WOLAK: There were a couple this September.

MR. O'KEEFFE: Yes. You're back there. That's just one of those things that kind of puts you back.

DR. TOCCHET: The thought that even on a beautiful day like that --

MR. O'KEEFFE: Something that was just good is now like a mixed bag because of that.

MR. TALBOT: I was struck in reading Vinny's poem along side the other editorials, at how raw the wound still is for

most people, I think, who were here. Maybe even people who weren't necessarily present in New York City. It comes through in the poem the idea that these images are buried deep within people's psyches, and we do an awful lot to try to sort of keep it buried.

I was particularly impressed by how acute the editorials in the New York Times, were in putting their fingers on things like the first anniversary. It says: “We’ve learned to calibrate our anxiety,” which is, I’m sure, a kind of a loaded phrase in terms of the security levels of the codes –

MR. O'KEEFFE: Yellow and orange, yes – a

DR. TOCCHET: -- but somehow we now have a measuring rod to that.

MR. TALBOT: But as much as we sort of codify our anxiety, what struck me particularly in Vinny's poem is that it's something that I think a lot of people, and myself included, try not to think about too much. I mean, we don't really like to watch the worst images from that day. There are some things we will look at like the plume of smoke coming out of the buildings. But I, for one, hate to see the image of the planes going into the buildings. I can't watch that. So I was particularly struck by that.

MR. MAHER: I was telling Mike before, poetry is something that I've only come to within the past four months. I never knew I could write poetry. In September when I wrote this, I had only been writing for about a month [This poem prefaces the transcript]. And what happened was that, in a teaching environment, a number of my students had been downtown when it happened and we've talked about this through the years. And what was fascinating, and this happened with me and with other people as we would start to talk, is about suppressing and calibrating memories and stuff. The editorials talk about this as well. Maybe Jim would have experience with this, there are a lot of

people who are only able to start having nightmares now. It's been so suppressed in the memory of a lot of people that even nightmares weren't possible. And only now the nightmares are starting to happen. The nightmares only started for me this year, in August and September. I was fine until this year. And other people that I know who were there reported similar kinds of things. That just when you thought it was okay, you found out that it really wasn't. And I think that what triggered it, Christian, was PBS or one of those stations doing this five-year anniversary thing. And they had done all these simulations, and they were trying to get people to watch this show about the towers coming down. And they had simulated planes, computer generated simulated planes, coming through the windows. They said now we have sound tracks, and stuff like that. And I think that started it all over again for a lot of us.

Even if you wanted to get away from it, no one would let you get away from it. So you just couldn't forget where you were. So just when you think it's okay, it's not.

So it's alive. And I think we are seeing more and more people now in the healthcare field. The registries, the Mount Sinai registries and stuff like that, are merely tracking symptoms. They are not curing anybody, they are not treating anybody. They are merely recording what it is that you've got that you are complaining about and when did that happen, and how bad it is? That's all they really want to know. There's nothing that they can do for you.

And it's only now that I know people, for example, who are suddenly starting to talk about having nightmares. Only now are people starting to have respiratory problems that weren't rescue people or recovery people; people who worked in the area. The political fallout, for example, that no one wants to deal with is the issue of the people who lived there,

worked there, day in and day out, who have been exposed to all that toxic material. And what has that done to their bodies? No one wants to deal with that. Because suddenly the 3,000 figure of people who died that day balloons to numbers that no one can even imagine. And it's just too scary to think about.

DR. TOCCHET: It goes to the very question, really, the health of the City – a significant amount of the population’s, mental health as well as physical repercussions.

Is this something though, that we might expect? Are there other examples of trauma or shock? This is very selective, but I remember my father, a World War II veteran, who never really spoke much about his experiences, and was rather close lipped about them. And he went to see “Saving Private Ryan.” He turned ashen white, sweating, and had to walk out of the film. And he told me, “Now I remember my friends. I remember what happened.” Could it have been possible that this was not on his mind for 20, 30 years? You wonder, what does in fact dislodge or spark those types of memories from those traumatic events and incidents. Perhaps we might be seeing more and more of this, more people coming forward with some of these repercussions. Ken, you had some comment?

MR. LYNCH: Yes. First, I've been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder from another event, another time, years ago. I was told that PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) rears it's ugly head five to seven years after the event, typically. Maybe the doctor can comment on this. Is that what you're seeing now? Is that what's happening?

DR. WOLAK: The one thing that 9/11 has done is to force the psychiatric community to take a long hard look at some of the ways that it diagnoses people and

treats them. I think this event was so unprecedented that the kind of sentiment that Vin was expressing, that there really is nothing to do, is captured in this. It made me think of the final two stanzas of his poem:

An audiovideo of those who survived as we die…?

We’re not on prime timeNo one really wants to know ‘cause

it takes too long. No drama.

Besides…it’s five years out andEverything’s supposed to be better.

To me that's expressing this feeling, not of hopelessness, but of frustration at some void or unmet need. One thing that this event has taught us is how little we know.

Now, the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has an interesting history. It really did not enter the psychiatric parlance until the mid 70's. And it's a diagnosis that entered in mainstream psychiatry, but that has remained controversial throughout its life span – unlike some other diagnoses that are tried and true and well described for hundreds of years. The kinds of things that may be labeled as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder now, might have been described as shell-shock or something else in a previous era. It may not have even been a diagnosis, but a value judgment. In World War I, many soldiers who were suffering from battle fatigue as it was called, were disgraced and sent off of the front lines to asylums where they just kind of wallowed.

DR. TOCCHET: They were told they were malingering.

DR. WOLAK: Yes.DR. TOCCHET: It was believed

that they just didn't want to fight.DR. WOLAK: Right. Of weak

moral character. We've come a long way since then. But the diagnosis, as it stands

now, incorporates three major realms: one is persistent re-experiencing of the event; one is an avoidance of stimuli that evoke the event; and one is a sense of heightened arousal. And the time course can either be acute, those symptoms have to last for one month to make the diagnosis, or chronic, if it lasts more than three months. Or it can have delayed onset. I think that's what you both have referred to. That's the kind of version that we've been seeing more and more of. And it's something that we couldn't have anticipated because of the unprecedented nature of this event.

DR. TOCCHET: Let me ask two “first responders”, so to speak, have there been any programs or changes of counseling or mental health assistance in your particular departments, for those who may have been intimately involved, or lost friends? Any thing going on, formally, within your organizations?

MR. O'KEEFFE: We had one counseling unit that basically was a drug and alcohol treatment program. There were some family stress issues they were dealt with as well. One location. And they might have helped 100 or 200 people in the course of a year. Now, after 9/11, there are about seven locations and they are seeing a lot. They are seeing more drug and alcohol, but they are seeing a lot of people, clients for stress related issues related to 9/11. They are seeing a lot of families and retired people.

A lot of our people retired, the ones who either got injured, or who just retired because they could. Sometimes that was because their families pushed them to do that, and sometimes they just had enough of it. But a lot of people that left lost an anchor that they had when they were on the job. So I think a lot of people that retired are kind of lost. They are tracked to some degree. We have some programs that they can voluntarily come back to. But only a

fraction of them come back, of course. So there's some unknown number of people that are kind of out there. They just don't have the support system that they had in the job.

I'm not really too well versed in PTSD, but I think that the people in our unit didn't see it in tremendous numbers. But the people that have it, I think, are pretty sick. It's a pretty resilient work force for the most part, but there is a group that was pretty sick.

I think there are people – some senior people that survived as first responders the day of the event – who held it altogether and kept their firehouses going, and they were the backbone. And as the years went by something would remind them. Even a smell, or a similar fire. We had a big grass fire in Brooklyn at Greenpoint a few months ago. And somebody I know who was holding it together, just the smells reminded him of that day. And that's kind of when it hit him.

DR. TOCCHET: Mark, is there a similar type of program within the police force?

MR. TORRE: There have been, and continue to be, a number of entities, counseling type entities, within the police department. We have something called a police self-support group. It's actually founded by, and still presided over, by a former member of the bomb squad. If anybody can remember back to New Years Eve, 1982 into '83, we had a series of bombings in Lower Manhattan. An individual by the name of Tony Kemp, and there was another one, Richey Pascarella, two bomb squad members were nearly killed. Tony's son now works for me. Tony is on my roll call, he's assigned to the bomb squad, but he does no enforcement work of any kind. He just runs the self-support group. That's a big one.

We have another one called APA, and we have an early intervention unit.

APA is peers helping peers. It's not quite as formal as early intervention, which is really department run. And, of course, there are psychological services in the medical division. I would say that nothing new really was formed. But their numbers sure have gone up. So as Mike discussed, the programs were there, but they got a lot more customers.

DR. WOLAK: That's been one lesson we’ve learned about the delivery of services. In the aftermath there have been numerous agencies or organizations formed. The Mount Sinai group that Vin referred to, even that has a couple of different bodies. FDNY has their own unit, and NYPD. Project Liberty was another; a group that was formed specifically to address the needs of people after this.

One thing is that there was very little inter-agency communication, and not much working together. A lot of redundancy, and not much efficiency. One hope is that in the future – and it is prudent to plan for the future even from a mental health point of view – we feel secure about being able to handle such an event to help promote resiliency. But doing so will involve greater cooperation between all these different groups.

DR. TOCCHET: In the news recently, in the City news anyway, there is discussion about closing a number of hospitals and downsizing some others. Do you see any type of improvement in this area? Or expansion of resources in this area? Has there been any move towards something like agency cooperation?

DR. WOLAK: Yes.DR. TOCCHET: Obviously, you see

the call for it. Have you seen progress in that area?

DR. WOLAK: Yes, and the downsizing doesn't necessarily mean a downsizing of services. I think it implies getting leaner and meaner. And there is an

urge after any kind of untoward event to want to fix it and a lot of times that implies throwing money at it. But that doesn't mean that you are going to be doing anything of any benefit. It really is a question not only of resources, but of efficient direction of those resources, and that really is the goal now. In that example of cutting back on some of the hospitals in the state, the hope is that by doing so, greater effort can be directed toward channels where they can actually have some real impact and to free up some resources that might otherwise be wasted.

MR. MAHER: I think the reality, Jim, is that mental health has always been the bastard child of healthcare. It's not well funded, it's never been well funded, and aside from really acute care environments, community-based mental health programs are really not particularly good. Psychiatric home care services, certainly, are starting to fill the gap. But there's really a major chasm – this is a long lived problem. Certainly anybody who works in mental health will see that the solution seems to be to self medicate. Go to your doctor and see if this is a good drug for you, whether it's an antidepressant or an anxiolytic or a psychotropic agent of some kind. You wonder what's going on here.

I teach graduate students and I did a straw pole following the crash on 72nd Street here, when the plane went into the apartment building [Wednesday, 11 October 2006]. That served as a trigger for a lot of people again almost immediately. And of the students that I was teaching, fully 40 percent of the class is on some type of psychotropic medication, an antidepressant, or an anxiolytic. And of those 40 percent, probably 80 percent were people who were nurses, physicians, people involved, first responders from 9/11.

MR. O'KEEFFE: So that means your teaching had nothing to do with it, I guess? [laughter]

MR. MAHER: It’s counterintuitive to me, because wouldn't the first responders, especially firefighters, maybe even a little more so than the cops, see traumatic disasters almost every day of their jobs?

MR. TORRE: Not like this.MR. TALBOT: But they see trauma

all the time. So what makes this so much worse? There's got to be something –

MR. MAHER: I'll tell you, certainly on the healthcare side, all the hospitals geared up for mass disaster. You had all kinds of people who were shock trauma specialists, surgeons, anesthesia personnel, pathologists, blood bankers, internists, surgical intensive care specialists, all of them ready to go, IV bags punctured, poles hanging all over the place, ready to roll for the masses that never came. And that really freaked people out because nobody ever came. And that has taken a real toll. That has really impacted on people. And you don't know what's going to trigger it. The plane crash on 72nd Street was on a Wednesday. 70 percent of the guys that were in a program that I'm in on Wednesday nights, did not come to class that night. 70 percent stayed home with their families.

One of the things that we haven't touched on, and that maybe this is something we should touch on is, what has this done to our trust of government and of authority? When this happened, we'll all remember that everybody was told, the air was okay to breathe. This was said for months. All kinds of things we were told that were safe. Didn't need respirators, didn't need all kinds of protective devices on your eyes or on exposed skin surfaces and stuff like that. And we now know that's not true. And apropos of Homeland Security – Ken, maybe you can talk about this a little – is that when the thing happened at 72nd Street, everybody was told immediately this is not a terrorist attack. But I live on a flight path to LaGuardia, and I was home listening

to the planes coming in at the rush hour, the 4:15 late afternoon planes coming in. And suddenly everything stopped. I've learned to know the sound of these F-16's. And all of a sudden I heard these things taking off. And everybody was saying, nothing is happening, nothing's happening, nothings being scrambled. And I'm hearing these things going, zoom, zoom, zoom over my house. And I'm like, come on people. A day or two later it was finally admitted that the Air National Guard was scrambling. I think there is, even now, a real gap in the public trust of how disaster management happens. Maybe that's something we should look at as well.

DR. TOCCHET: That's a good transition to talk about preparation for something like this. Is New York a safer place since 9/11? Do New Yorkers feel safe? You are suggesting that there are some doubts with what we are often told and trust, in what we assume should be done, or is being done. Are we better prepared if something like this happens again? It's not going to be a plane into the Twin Towers anymore, but for these types of potential events.

DR. WOLAK: The preparation issue is of huge importance in a number of different realms. From my point of view, preparation, as I mentioned before, lends itself to greater confidence and greater resiliency.

There are a number of studies out of Israel, in the wake of the first Gulf War and the scud missile attacks, where the party line was to kind of minimize what was happening. And then after that the concern was if there was nerve gas. After gas masks and protective gear was distributed to the general population, people were told not to take them out, not to unwrap them, not to practice.

I think people's impulses, while well intentioned, may not always deliver the best

results. It's important to look at what works and what doesn't work, and not let our impulses guide our behavior. I think perhaps the impulse in what Vin was talking about, in not announcing the extent of the response, was to not incite panic. But my experience – and studies have borne this out – in the aftermath of 9/11 there was very little mass panic. People kept it together and they behaved appropriately and evacuated in an organized, civilized manner. Some of these motivations for how the government responds may not be really well founded.

MR. O'KEEFFE: We're better prepared in some ways, and we have a lot further to go, of course. We are better prepared, but I still think that we all kind of know that something could happen. There could still be a catastrophe regardless of the fact that we are better prepared. So you still have to do your best to be prepared, and we constantly do that.

I think part of what we learned on the Fire Department was that we didn't – I guess for cultural reasons – talk to the Police Department much that day. We should have and we didn't. We have tried to do drills and other things. We had two last month at the ferry. And we had radios and everything to talk between us, but we actually had our operations post right there. Here's the cops, here's fire, here's EMS, right in the same area so you could actually walk over and grab the guy and talk to him. That wasn't happening before 9/11. I think it has gotten better, but again, you go to what's routine now and guys are still very task oriented, so they kind of get through the task because that's what they do. But I think that in the back of people's mind is, what if this is that 0.1 percent of a time when it's not just a routine situation?

DR. WOLAK: You mentioned when you were introducing yourself, Ken, that one of your stints was motivated because another agency wasn't allowed to do domestic work.

And there was an article in the New Yorker recently about the FBI and the CIA communicating, and interagency people talking to each other. I spoke earlier about healthcare agencies working with each other. I'm wondering if that's improved at all.

MR. LYNCH: Okay. I think. The problem is that we have the U.N. here. Every mission to the U.N. – that's foreign soil. So that's a target. But yet, the other agencies are not allowed to work domestically. So it creates a problem.

I think you are referring more to an institutional problem historically, between the FBI and the CIA, and all of that. I think all that is getting much better. I worked on the Joint Terrorist Task Force for three years and it was a wonderful concept, and it really worked very well. These institutional problems can be overcome on a personal level; dealing with people. I'm not going to apologize for this administration or whatever. My understanding was the government came out and tried to assure the public after 9/11 that there were no biological or chemical problems down there near Ground Zero. What they did was wrong. They should tell the truth and they should be held accountable, wherever that came from, whoever authorized that.

Jumping around once again to 9/11, working that day, I just felt this tremendous sense of urgency to solve this. To do something. We all work for a living, and you do things whether it's fires, or whatever investigation you do. But there was just a terrific sense of urgency and immediacy. And here we are five years later and there's no collective sense of urgency anymore.

Doing some back of the envelope calculations, if you take – figure 150,000 soldiers in Iraq, their immediate and extended families, and their circle of friends, and round them out to 100 people per soldier, that breaks down to only about five

percent of our population impacted directly by what's going on over there. It's crazy. On TV a few weeks ago I was watching “Access Hollywood” – (Laughter.)

MR. MAHER: Hi, I'm Kenny, I watch Access Hollywood.

MR. LYNCH: I like that. Anyway, Leonardo Dicaprio is

coming out and somebody asked him, “What do you think about Britney Spears being divorced?” And he turns to the reporter and says, “Hey folks, there's a war going on.” And this seems so stupid that here we are five years later and people are worrying about Britney Spears. The day after our elections here, they had Britney Spears and Paris Hilton on the front of the newspaper. She got arrested for drunk driving. This is nuts. Our collective sense of urgency is not there.

I don't think they are going to attack us again. I could be definitely wrong. I hope I'm correct. I think they are attempting to isolate us politically from our allies. And I think they are smart enough – they are not stupid – to know that it would only strengthen our resolve if they attacked us again. Instead they are going to isolate us and let us be our own worst enemies.

MR. TORRE: I'll answer that. World Trade Center round one, as I call it. For the first two weeks, oh, boy, was security up, you know, there was no underground parking. Now, I was there 10 minutes after it happened, and let me tell you, the only way I could describe it is like walking into a Dali painting. It was the most surreal experience. It was just crazy destruction under me-- but you couldn't see anything from the outside except a couple of broken windows really, where people broke windows to get out.

So in that regard, two weeks later, everybody forgot everything. Things really didn't ramp up until after the Kenyan and Tanzanian bombings. Things got a little

tense, but obviously after 9/11 it all went haywire. But here we are five years later and it's round one syndrome, except it's not two weeks, it's five years.

I can say, and Mike will back me up, on the response side there's no letting down guard on our side. It's where we need to be. We can always be a little better, but there's no syndrome of, “okay, we can relax now.” It's just not going on. But you have to separate response capability and preparedness, and prevention.

DR. TOCCHET: Right.MR. TORRE: Prevention is an

exceptionally difficult task. It's the most difficult task. Right in the aftermath of 9/11, I got called downtown. They wanted to put a committee together to prevent suicide bombs.

I said, I can't believe I'm being involved in this. My wife says, “Well what do you mean? What are you going to do?” I said I'm going to tell them the truth, which I'm known for. I'm something of a maverick and, you know; they think I'm a little crazy. Not only because of the job but because I talk to chief and I say, I'm not going to tell you what you want to hear. So I told my wife, I'm going to have to tell him that you can't prevent it. “What do you mean you can't prevent it? It's your job. You can't prevent? Well, explain that.”

The point is, unless you get them in their little dens putting something together and wiring somebody up to send them in, unless you get them and exterminate them right there – I have to use that word – once that leaves the door, you are talking about the most sophisticated guidance package of ammunition that exists in this world. And it's going to go where it's going to go. And it can adapt, okay? And if it can't reach it's primary target, it's going to go to a secondary target, and somebody is going to die. Some people are going to die. You cannot prevent it. Unless you're prepared to

body search every single person that comes into the island of Manhattan, you can't prevent a suicide bomber. You cannot. And if it doesn't happen in the target, it will happen outside.

It's a very sobering thought, and you know, I tell my wife the truth, too. Which is why we have discord sometimes in the marriage. (Laughter.)

I will say, and again, Mike, I'm sure can back me up on the response side, if something happens, we’re as finely tuned as we can be. Unfortunately, it can happen. And that’s what we have to all deal with.

DR. WOLAK: I think an issue that's been raised here is that it sounds like there's a loss of a sense of collective purpose or a sense of community. The editorial of '06 talks about that.

DR. TOCCHET: -- The New York Times editorial reads: "The nation was waiting to find out what it was supposed to do, to be called to the task that would give some special lasting meaning to the tragedy that it endured." And the op ed piece goes on to talk about, that call never truly came and what we have done is compound the tragedy. And it's not really sustaining the whole nation. There is a small percentage of the population – as mentioned – involved in this war on terrorism. And we have the airwaves still with the latest Hollywood wedding. There is a tremendous disconnect in our society.

MR. MAHER: There was a sense of nostalgia when I was reading this. It was almost like there was a desire to go back to the days of the Dodgers and the Giants, and the times when the City was united. I also thought about London during the Blitz and how Britains were brought together in this collective. This adversity actually brought people together and that it's sad that if we can talk about anything good that came out of that, of 9/11, it brought the city together in a way that it hasn't been brought together.

It brought people together in a way. Especially in our recent histories where there has been so much divisiveness and conflict between different ethnic groups in some of our neighborhoods, and some of the real hard times that we've had in our city, this event brought us together. And I think people may be missing that today.

MR. LYNCH: Well, how do we fix that? How do we address that five years later? I mean, right after the event we had probably close to 50,000 calls to our center with leads. So many wanted to participate. Everyone wanted to help. We wanted to stick together. It's gone. And it's gone for a lot of reasons. But we used 9/11 as a jumping off point to go and do some stupid things – in my opinion; Iraq.

DR. WOLAK: Was that borne of an urge to do something, I wonder?

MR. LYNCH: I don’t know what it was borne of. I mean, I can understand Afghanistan certainly. Iraq came out of some urge, things I don't understand, even with weapons of mass destruction. I'm not going back, but 20/20 hindsight, my prediction is that even if there were weapons of mass destruction, they never were a threat to us because there was never any connection between that regime and Al Qaeda. And to try to save all of this, these guys think we want to make it a democracy. That's never going to be New Jersey or Texas over there. It's just not. And that's also BS because Egypt is our friend. That's not democracy. Jordan’s not a democracy, etc., etc. So a lot of bad things have happened which have diverted our attention from our collective responsibility and collective urgency.

MR. MAHER: It's interesting, Ken, that you say that. After 9/11, the churches were packed. Everybody came back to church and it was a golden opportunity for the churches to do what they supposedly do well. And in some cases that happened.

What's particularly interesting is that I know people who were on the admissions team at Yale Divinity. They've had more people applying to divinity school since 9/11 than they ever had in recent years. You’re seeing it in programs for permanent diaconate in the Catholic tradition. You are seeing large numbers of men, mid-life men like us, coming forward. Many of them were spurred by a re-orientation of their lives after the whole 9/11 experience, and needing to go out and to do something positive and channeling it away from war into peacemaking.

And so you go to what you know best. You know, how do I become a peacemaker if I'm 50 years old and I can't go to the Peace Corps? Well, maybe I'll go be a deacon, or maybe I'll be a minister, or do pastoral counseling, or bereavement counseling. There are a lot of people doing something like that. But that's also falling off again.

And maybe that's part of what we were talking about earlier about trying to get back to normal. Before all this happened, people didn't do it. So is this an indicator that people are better because they are going back to behaviors that they had beforehand.

MR. TALBOT: I want to ask Mark a very specific question because, I was thinking as Jim was about the last two editorials; the ones from 2005 and 2006, which suggest that we are not really collectively, in terms of New York City, and maybe even in terms of the country, doing a lot at a level of service to one another and to the country.

The 2005 editorial, is about preparedness, specifically in subway attacks. I have to tell you, I was not overjoyed to read this. It really struck me. You know, I don't ride the subway every day, but virtually every student who comes to Regis does ride the subway. And they are on that train every day, but probably have no idea

about what to do if something happens. In a line in the third to last paragraph, the author writes, “we know now, more than ever before, that each of us has some level of personal responsibility for emergency preparedness.” I don't think that's true. I don't think most people feel that way. I don’t think most people have any concept of what it means to have a personal responsibility for emergency preparedness. And the question that I had for Mark was, and I thought about this for a long time, wouldn’t it be so easy for someone, for a suicide bomber to blow himself up, or herself up, on the streets, on the bus. It may be a little more difficult on the subway, but maybe not much more difficult.

MR. TORRE: Not difficult at all.MR. TALBOT: Not much more

difficult. I'm shocked, I'm honestly shocked it hasn't happened. I mean, you must have some insight as to --

MR. TORRE: As to why?MR. TALBOT: Yes.MR. TORRE: Well, you bring out a

good point. It's shockingly easy to do. You know what I like to say, or what I don't like to say it because it's a very bitter sad fact, give me or any of my men about five hours and we could put together something that would bring this city to it's knees. Absolutely to it's knees. And you don't have to kill a lot of people. You have to hurt some people, but in five hours, you could put together, as we call them, multiple simultaneous bombings in five major subways. I'll go so far as to say, if you put things in garbage cans, just had explosions in the subways and it was confirmed that it was IED's (Improvised Explosive Devices), you'd bring the city to it's knees. It would completely shut down and you might not even have to hurt anybody.

So why hasn't it happened? Now, I'm speaking for myself. I hold a top secret clearance, and I can also tell you though that

I have nothing that I know that I can't tell you, because there is nothing of real substance, other than the looming threat. But there is nothing that says this plot, that plot. So why hasn't it happened?

I think we give them too much credit. You don't like to give credit to the 9/11 attack, but it was exceptionally well planned, well carried out, well rehearsed. They did a great job, if you have to say it, along those lines. They carried out that mission with a great degree of effectiveness, obviously. But I sort of think that they used up their big guns. It's easy to do a suicide attack, but nobody's jumping and doing it. We don't have the fanatics here that they have overseas. I mean, literally, every day there are some – you don't hear about half of them that happen over there. They are killing themselves at record rates but it's not happening here. They don't have access to the materials here to do the really big bombings, other than ammonium nitrate, which of course you've all heard about. It's very easy to get, it's still easy to get, it's going to be easy to get. But I don't think they have the logistical ability to really pull off the really big one.

I can only speak from the bombing realm. Because they want us to be afraid of them, I think we are giving them more credit than they deserve. The sleeper cells that you hear about, the suitcase nukes – all of that – that's a lot of talk that the media likes to inflame people with and keep you sort of scared, because it sells magazines and newspapers and it gets you to watch CNN.

I hope I'm right. If I'm wrong it will be a very terrible thing if they are waiting to strike. I’ll bring up one example from during the blackout. Imagine you had a sleeper cell, so to speak that, was ready to go and operationally capable to do something. It doesn't have to be a bomb. During that blackout you had people camped out on the steps of the post office at Penn

Station and so forth. How hard would it have been to throw a couple of guys in a van with AK-47's? They'd just come and spray everybody down. It's a terrorist act, not a bomb, but a massive terrorist act. That was an opportunity to really strike. And look at how much of the country was blacked out at that time. Automatically an assumption would have been made that the whole blackout was a terrorist event. I just don't think they're as good as everybody wants to be afraid of. That doesn't mean we should let our guard down. But I don't think they are as good, nor as operationally capable as portrayed.

MR. LYNCH: I think Mark's absolutely correct. I also think they overestimate this drastically. I think the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) has done an excellent job in the past. Here in law enforcement if you had to deal with INS, your eyes would glaze over at just the thought. They really have changed things. Terrorists can't get into the country with the supplies they need, and some type of robust logistical support. It's rare to get in here with heavy duty stuff. And they overestimate us. But he's right, even some smaller events would bring this city to it's knees, really do a heavy hit on the economy. It really would.

DR. TOCCHET: This opens up an interesting issue about perhaps how the terrorists think. What are we really dealing with here? I know Christian has done some research into the psychology of the terrorists and I'd just like to read two passages out of the editorials. Just to show how this particular issue still remains with us. One comes with the 2004 editorial and it's interesting because it mentions some of the topics we've already discussed this evening. The editorial reads, "For all our knowing, there's still so much we don't completely understand. Like the inner workings of the terrorist's minds. How the attack affected

the long-term health of New Yorker's, and why so many first responders died." And so these are lingering questions. And then go to an op ed a piece done right after 9/11:

Commentators throughout the day yesterday dwelled on the scale of the planning that this terrorist mission must have required. But it's just as important to consider the intensity of the hatred it took to bring it off. It is a hatred that exceeds the conventions of warfare, that knows no limits, abides by no agreements. We had presumed that the very excess of such emotions made them erratic. That instability and inefficiency was securely coupled. But that is when we lived on the other side of history's riff.

Is there something truly remarkable on a new side of history, Christian, in this terrorist approach and terrorist thought processes? First we'll defer to Jim.

DR. WOLAK: I think it's a hatred of America, and American values, and what we stand for. And just look at the target that they chose – twice. There is something about the World Trade Center that for the terrorists, I think, captured what they perceived as the greed and the superficiality and the manipulation that underlies what they think America stands for.

I think that in some parts of the world, terrorist acts are apparently random. But in attacks against the U.S., like the Cole, they hit a warship. There seems to be some symbolic meaning behind it. So I think that may shed some light into what these terrorists or these enemies of America are thinking, what's motivating them.

MR. TALBOT: Yes. One of the

things that I was surprised by when I began to study the psychology of terrorism is that most of them are not from very low-income families. Most of them come from what we might consider sort of lower-middle class, or middle class families, but they are fairly well educated. There is virtually no incidence of mental disorders among terrorists. Virtually none. And they also tend not to come from particularly radical families. Their families are not especially fundamentalist in their religious or political beliefs. Or at least no more so than compared to their peers. And in that sense there is something very disturbing about the portrait that emerges of the terrorist. And what we see is that these are people who become radicalized, but do not necessarily begin their lives with a kind of radical point of view about the world.

And I think Jim's onto something when he points out that there is something highly symbolic about the targets that they choose and the locations that they choose. I have a very mixed feeling about saying that terrorists hate American values. I think that that's true, but I think that that's also become a kind of political chip in terms of deploying our resources for the purposes of things that may have nothing to do with terrorism, per se.

One of the most remarkable things, from my point of view anyway, about the September 11th event and what we've come to know since then about Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, is that Bin Laden does, or asks people to do exactly what he says. There's really no mystery involved in his agenda, which is, to me, totally counterintuitive. He says that he perceives this invasion of the Middle East as this leaching of the resources and the wealth and the vitality of the Arabs and Muslims. And so we are going to do the same thing to you. You guys are greedy so we are going to attack the symbol of your greed, the World

Trade Center. And in a kind of ironic way, it doesn't take a whole lot of psychology to figure out what this guy is about. He wants to destroy the symbols of American values.

Now, I don't know if that was the original motivation. I don't think that there is some worldwide cadre of terrorists who are all are sort of on the same page. In fact, even within Al-Qaeda, not to say anything of other terrorists groups like the Tamil Tigers, or the various factions that are not Al-Qaeda, but Islamic radicalists, there's a lot of infighting about what the agenda should be. You know, should we be attacking America on their soil? Should we be attacking them in Iraq? Should we be attacking our own “apostate” regimes?

So there is enormous diversity within the terrorist community. But certainly I think Jim brings up a good point that, in a way there is very little psychology to it.

MR. LYNCH: I think what Jim said is correct, but I think it's a bit of a smoke screen. I think they attacked us and they told us why they were attacking us. Bin Laden came out and said, we're angry because of Israel. They are attacking us because of our intransigence backing Israel. And that's his feeling. And until the Israeli-Palestinian issue is somehow settled, and I don't have the answer to it – it's very involved and very complicated – we are going to be facing this threat. Supposedly, insurgencies last 11 years. That came from my travels. But also, Bin Laden said that he was not a fan of the U.S. military occupying Arab countries, specifically Saudi Arabia. That's what he said. So he certainly is mad at us. But when you get down to it, it's like everything else in life; it's all about the money.

MR. TORRE: I'll add to that. I saw an analysis done at a commander's conference a couple of years back. This guy was sort of a historian, and he went back to the Ottomans and the Turks and the fighting in the holy land and so forth, brought them

into the modern day and the accords and the formation of Israel. He offered the fact that Israel is basically the most powerful army in the region and talked about the battles that they won, the Six-Day War, and so forth and so on. All of the imagery that you saw with Golda Meir and with various leaders on the heels of this trouncing of Jordan, or of Egypt, or of whichever the army of the day that they fought, in the background is American military hardware. All the American military hardware that we supplied them with. Thank goodness, because they are obviously our only true ally, I think.

I spent a week over there. Wonderful people. But they are under siege, surrounded -- completely surrounded with just the little bit of reasonableness from Jordan. But basically surrounded by people who just want to eradicate them. And what's keeping them from being eradicated? We are. Plain and simple. Israel is at the real heart of this, big time.

DR. TOCCHET: So what we're saying here is that this isn't necessarily the root of Islamic belief. It isn't necessarily an issue of economics or psychosis. It's essentially American foreign policy that has created the issue. And New York City suffers from American foreign policy with two attacks on the World Trade Center.

MR. TORRE: But we can't just limit it to here. I mean, it's the country, it's the Pentagon. And it would have been the White House if not –

DR. TOCCHET: The Pentagon -- which raises another question about the rest of the nation. How do they see this global war on terror? You know, if you are living in Kansas City right now, what's your sense of this global war on terrorism and potential targets?

MR. TORRE: It's something that never comes to your mind. It's in our mind here.

DR. WOLAK: Although Oklahoma City was bombed.

MR. MAHER: Gary, you charged us to think about where are we five years after.

DR. TOCCHET: Right.MR. MAHER: I think one of the

things that I've come to is, like Mark was saying, begrudgingly or not, we need to commend these guys who created a well planned out, well thought out, well executed event. Even though we don't want to do that, that's basically what happened. I've come to the conclusion that we call people terrorists until they win. And then we call them freedom fighters, or revolutionaries, or patriots. And I think that what we are dealing with are people who in 2001, or 2006, are no different from guys who threw tea into Boston Harbor, or people who have engaged in other acts of defiance against larger, bigger, badder, guys. Whoever they were, whenever they were. What is it that we do? What is it that we stand for that makes them be so angry at us? You know, if you are raised as a kid in tough areas of Northern Ireland and Belfast, you’re a Sinn Fein IRA terrorist until you become Gerry Adams, or become a political ingénue and are welcomed at the U.N. And there are people like that around the world.

So, is it just a matter of time? Is it a matter of luck? Is it a matter of coming up with the correct, politically acceptable solution to vent your anger? Rather than looking at the nature of terrorism as being a purely physically violent act or response, we need to look at its violence as a symptom of economic oppression, social oppression, religious oppression, oppression du jour that people perceive. And I think there will always be something, regardless of what it is. I don't know that we are going to solve that problem. Once we solve one problem, someone will come up with another one. But I think we need to look at the face of terrorism and what we identify as terrorism.

MR. TALBOT: I think you make a very good point. And even this group is sort of guilty of it: we use the word "they", or we use the word “terrorist”. Islamic radicals, let's just use that term, don't call themselves terrorists. They call themselves martyrs.

MR. TORRE: Yes.MR. TALBOT: The word terrorist

has a totally different connotation. And in one of his speeches, Bin Laden even says if what you are doing is terrorism, then yes, we will admit to being terrorists. But admit that what you are doing as well is terrorism. Now, I don't think that that means that we have to then turn around and point the finger at ourselves. But there is something -- and as a military historian you might even want to jump in here, Gary -- something to Sun Tzu’s dictum that you must know your enemy before you attack him. Without knowing what the motivation of your enemy is, you are doomed to failure.

And I think that just from a psychological standpoint, it's very easy, and even seductive to use the word "they". Or to use a word like “terrorist”. It's useful and it's efficient. But a lot gets lost, literally, in translation in this case, because an Islamic radical would not even use that word. It has a totally different connotation than the word that they use. “Martyr” says everything about what they think they are doing. That they are doing this not only for the glory of God, but really – and I want to come back to your question about the psychological motivation for this – for the glory of their family, or their tribe, or even culturally, the culture of Islam.

When I was doing my research, I spoke to someone in the intelligence community who has been working extensively in the Middle East and he said that the smallest unit, like the atomic unit, for an Arab, is not the individual, it's your nuclear family. You can't think in terms of one person. You can't think in terms of the

individual. It doesn't make sense to them on a cultural level. So any shame that the family suffers, is a shame that you suffer as a person. And that extends out in sort of concentric circles. You have the nuclear family, you have your tribe, you have your nation, you have your region, and then ultimately, the Ummah, that is a worldwide Islamic community.

I was being a little tongue in cheek for before when I said there is no psychology to it. I think there is quite a lot. But it's a psychology that is very unfamiliar to us because the American mind is almost the exact opposite. We are a nation of boot-strappers who are individuals who can succeed. That's the American myth. And there's a real divide there that I think we need to study.

MR. MAHER: In terms of what you were saying about how we perceive them and call them, “they”. My eye opened some years ago when I was visiting Charleston for a conference. It caught me dead cold that when people down South talk about the American Civil War, southerners, deep southerners, call it the War of Northern Aggression.

DR. TOCCHET: The Civil War isn't over in some parts.

MR. MAHER: You are absolutely right, Gary. But again, what do we learn from history? That in our own country, if our own American brethren are calling this the war of northern aggression still, all these years later, then maybe this is apropos of saying "they". That "they" is us. And how are we labeling ourselves in a context that we don't understand?

MR. LYNCH: I disagree with you. I think the bottom line here is when you kill non-military personnel, civilians, there is no rationalization for it, there is no justification for it, and that's a terrorist. Period. I don't know how you would portray them or name them or whatever. That's a non-combatant.

And if you kill non-combatants, civilians, that's a terrorist.

MR. TALBOT: But how does an Arab listen? Just to be more concrete, how does Bin Laden talk about motivations for the actions of Al-Qaeda? He sees American actions in supporting Israel as terrorism. Because by cutting off economic support to Palestinians, Palestinian woman and children die. Israel shoots a rocket into the Gaza Strip, innocent women and children die. Now, I'm not saying that I agree with Bin Laden, but what I am saying is, from his point of view his perspective is that those are non-combatants. Those are innocent women and children who are being murdered. And he's labeling that terrorism. How do you distinguish between those two?

MR. LYNCH: I think by intent. Whether you intend to kill women and children, or women and children are killed collaterally. That damage is still the same, but intent is different.

MR. TALBOT: That's a very slippery thing to get your hands around. Intent. There's a new book out by an Israeli historian about whether or not the last 50 years has marked basically an ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Is that intent? Well, you know, there are a lot of documents that suggest maybe it is. The lands that the Palestinians hold has shrunk radically in the last 50 years. Again, this is not my own personal point of view, but I think when you put yourselves into the shoes of a Palestinian, or an Israeli, or to bring it back to this particular discussion, a terrorist who may be interested in attacking the Untied States for support of one or another groups, intent is a very, very slippery notion.

DR. WOLAK: And you've got to wonder how the civilians who have died in the Iraqi war, collaterally, are viewed or perceived by the native Iraqis there.

We were speaking earlier about the make up of the terrorists. They tend to be –

or at least the masterminds, tend to be better educated, maybe also better socioeconomically. Bin Laden himself is a multi-millionaire, right?

MR. TALBOT: Yes.DR. WOLAK: I wonder if they are

not the Yale Divinity student equivalents over there. And that there is some passion there. This cause gives their life some purpose in the absence of other types of struggles. You know, someone in poverty needs to struggle with just putting food on the table. But others may search for some other kind of nationalistic drive.

In talking about U.S. values, I always found it ironic that it was the very nature of our nation, or the structure of our society, that allowed these people to come in and actually prepare and establish themselves here, and blend in, and be accepted, and roam free. Or the Jersey City Sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, was able to freely expound his vitriol right across the river. There's something very complicated and sinister about that.

MR. MAHER: It's interesting. I was watching your face, Mark, when Ken was talking and defining a terrorist. Do you agree with what Ken said definitionally is a terrorist?

MR. TORRE: My wheels are turning. Yes and no. There's a lot of elements. But my wheels are turning because I think what this is ultimately going to boil down to is something that nobody in this country wants to wrap their minds around, which is the fact that you have an element in the Muslim community that has taken on a fanatic interpretation of the Koran, and basically they feel you can either convert or you can die. You have a community that has nothing to say about numerous repeated postings on the internet of people sitting there getting their heads cut off, screaming, blood flying. And I watch every single one. And everybody should

watch them if they want to realize what we are facing and what we are going to have to deal with. This is the same community that says nothing about that, but somebody makes a film that they don't like, and he gets cut down in the street. Somebody publishes a cartoon or writes a book and there's fatwa about, he must die. These are the people that you are fighting, or that we are going to fight.

I had the company of somebody who was raised in Lebanon in the 70's. He spent half of his life in Lebanon, and is still very connected with the region. He's a Christian missionary sort of guy. He'll tell you that even the most moderate of Muslims want to see you convert to Islam. And they really are not going to shed a tear about the people that get cast by the wayside, broken up, blown up, cut up, whatever it is. They are not going to raise their hands about it. They are not going to cry about it. And they are happy when they see the numbers convert.

DR. WOLAK: Look what happened to the Pope. He made some comments that were taken out of context, and he cannot make amends – no matter what he does, it's not good enough: Reaching out to the community, being diplomatic. It almost was as if people were looking for an excuse, something to latch onto, without giving the situation the benefit of full assessment. To just grab some words out of context and then use that as justification for a cause, despite attempts to alleviate that, really shows the extent and partly the difficulty in addressing this larger problem.

MR. O'KEEFE: That's why I have a hard time feeling confident that the odds are with us, rather than against us because of that tremendous fervor and just the availability of things that you can even find on the Internet. Frankly, we are more conflict management. We kind of go in after something happens, so I'm not as well versed in predicting the mind of a terrorist,

but I can't believe that something of a very destructive nature hasn't happened since then.

MR. LYNCH: I think that they are going to try to separate us. They’ve done it with Spain already. They tried it with the British, and the Germans. I think they are going to let us self-destruct. They are waiting for the next election like the Vietnamese did. They are going to let us change things. And when we change our policy, we are putting all the burden on our military, when we really need some political resolution at this point. And they are making the military become everything. And it's not right, it’s not fair. You pick up the papers every day and you read everybody is being killed. Everybody. Same sentence, roadside bomb, roadside bomb, roadside bomb. This is terrible, terrible. At this point it has to be addressed politically. The military is not the solution, but the military has done a marvelous wonderful job, marvelous wonderful job. They can't solve this. They are victimized here.

DR. WOLAK: I think they are doing a job that they weren't prepared for or didn’t anticipate. They weren't prepared to be an occupying force that was going to combat an insurgency.

MR. LYNCH: According to all of the books that are written, the military recommended and had a plan in place for half a million troops to garrison the country, and Rumsfeld cut it back to 150,000 changing the dynamic of what he thought our force should do. And then when he got accused of doing it, he blamed it on the military. He said they recommended it. I'll stop there.

DR. TOCCHET: We know that those who recommended more troops found themselves very clearly retired, or somewhat marginalized and out of view with the decision process. So it was either agree, or your advice was no longer needed.

MR. LYNCH: He couldn't tell the king he was naked, Rumsfeld –

DR. WOLAK: It’s like what Mark was saying about the terrorists. You know, you either agree or you're out.

DR. TOCCHET: Well, I'd like to dwell on the positive. A little counter argument here. I, perhaps, give more credit to the resiliency of our society. What if worry about Britney Spears is truly the thing Islam hates about us and we continue to put that in their faces? (Laughter.)

I'm a little facetious, but then again, the fact that New York has somehow returned to semi-normalcy is the true act of defiance in this.

MR. O'KEEFFE: You go down to Lower Manhattan and the commercial buildings are being turned into residential buildings. And the demand to live down there is –

DR. TOCCHET: To live there, which is incredible.

MR. O'KEEFFE: I just can't understand that to save my life. But it's happening. It's definitely happening all over Lower Manhattan. Soho, the East Village, formally poor areas, are just booming. And people just want to be down there. And I'm mystified.

DR. TOCCHET: It brings me to a subject I would hope we can talk about this evening, and that's this whole idea of what happens here at the site of the famous World Trade Center, and what we've seen happen over the last five years. It brings up this question of memory in monument. It would be interesting to hear how some of you have seen it, about what's been happening in the discussions and the decisions about rebuilding in that area. Is it purely a political problem? Is there something more about our society that it reveals in conversations and the length of time it's taken to figure out what to do in the rebuilding of this area?

MR. LYNCH: It's only a few

months ago that the insurance matter actually got itself resolved. They have been fighting about money for four and a half years about who's going to own what, where the money is coming from, whether it was one attack or two attacks, and some of the ideas about the memorial are bizarre.

DR. TOCCHET: Really? (Laughter.)

MR. O'KEEFFE: I mean, nobody wants to tell a bereaved family that they are wrong. I just wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, or the Governor. And I know people have accused them of being empty suits and not doing the job. I think it's been an almost impossible job to reconcile all of those different opinions and you have instant credibility as the parents of a young person who was cut down at the Trade Center.

So if you say, “you can't do this,” even though you might be representing one percent of the opinion of the collective families who lost people, it tells a lot about the way the media covers it. I don't know how you get past that.

We happened to have a firehouse right there. And we just had the good fortune, or the bad fortune, that somebody made for us a terrific monument. If you ever happen to see the corps of Engine 10 and Ladder 10 on Liberty Street, it's a bas relief bronze sculpture of all the names of the people that we lost, an incredibly detailed memorial. But we had the luxury – it's our building and we just kind of did it. So the whole political process really wasn't in play there.

MR. TALBOT: Am I misremembering, but wasn't there an argument even within the fire department though, about how that sculpture would be created? I seem to recall there was a question, should the monument, sort of in the Iwo Jima fashion, represent everyone

who was there and the kinds of people who were there? Was it a bunch of white guys, or were they Hispanic or black firefighters? Wasn't there some disagreement about –

MR. O'KEEFFE: Well, there was a different monument in front of headquarters. I think some people felt that the monument was different than what actually happened. And that was an issue with it. I think that pretty much died down. But I think that the monument that was done, was done by a few people behind the scenes and that's why it got done. Because there weren’t a lot of people involved.

DR. WOLAK: You know, it's almost an example of some of the downsides of democracy, too many cooks spoiling the pot. Very often in those cases what results is something that no one's really satisfied with. And it really speaks to the need for a strong leader, or strong leadership, that people have confidence in, respect. But unfortunately, in our current political climate those people are hard to come by.

MR. MAHER: I think it's more than just the political thing. I think that certainly the people who are driving some of the committees on memorials and stuff like that are the families who lost people that day. And as Mike said so accurately, somebody can bring a conversation to a dead stop when they say my son was killed, my daughter was killed, my wife was killed, my husband. That brings anything to a dead stop.

What I think, five years out, is that we are recognizing that that was a snapshot of people who were vaporized and killed that day.

There are people still out there dying, and the mourning process is expanding rather than contracting. What's happening, if anything, is that more people – the people who are dying slow pulmonary deaths, or blood discursion deaths, or some who are dead psychologically, and the families that surround them – are now

vested in the mourning and in the memorial and how that gets expressed. Suddenly you are talking about an awful lot of people.

And the people that are out there are now saying, yes you lost somebody, but so did we. Or we are losing them. Yes, it was snatched from you. Yes, it's gone, it's horrible. But we are watching it happen slowly, deliberately, and we need a say now.

And maybe this is what you were saying, Jim, about the whole process of democracy and maybe needing a leader to guide the conversation. But the leader needs to recognize that the net needs to be cast wider and to recognize the validity of the claim that other people have out there. And that hasn't happened yet, I don't think.

DR. WOLAK: I was thinking the same thing as I read your poem. When we talk about the victims of 9/11, we are not just talking about the people who died on that day. It's a much broader picture than that.

MR. TALBOT: And I think it's easy to displace exactly those feelings onto a question of what's this tower going to look like, or what's the monument going to look like. What's the area going to look like? Are we going to have commercial real estate, or residential real estate down there? All these sort of very practical, logistical questions need to be answered, but they become a kind of proxy for another conversation that's much more important, but which may not be happening with, perhaps, very disastrous effects for a lot of people.

MR. MAHER: We talk about memorials and stuff like we are the only ones that it happened to.There were all kinds of people there. There were Mexicans, there were Australians, there were Brits, there were Irish, there were Germans, there were all kinds of people down there. And they certainly have as much right as anybody else to participate in that process.

If we look at memorials, when do

you call for an end to the mourning? I mean, in firehouses or police departments, if an officer or a firefighter goes down in the line of duty, the bunting goes up on the precinct or on the firehouse. But it's there for a finite period of time, and then it comes down. We haven't done that yet.

We go to the ballgame, and now at the 7th inning stretch, we all get up and sing “God Bless America.” Well, maybe it's time to say that was a hymn of mourning. Maybe it's time to stop singing that. Let's sing the Star Spangled Banner at the beginning like we always did. Somebody has to move the population forward.

MR. TALBOT: You know, I was thinking that this is taking the conversation of how terrorists may find meaning in what they are doing and sort of turning the camera on ourselves and saying, well, what are we doing? In that last editorial from this year, I was really struck by a statement: "With no call to work together on the sum effort greater than ourselves, we were free to relapse into a self-centeredness that became a second national tragedy." And certainly, Jim, I'm sure you could talk about this from a psychiatric and psychological standpoint. With everybody at this table, it's such an impressive thing to know that so many Regians are involved in public service in ways that are connected to September 11th; that this goes on behind the scenes and that Regis is a school that's dedicated to Christian service, to community service.

We ought to be encouraging many more of our alumni and our students to be involved in public service in ways that this article is saying we are not doing enough of. Maybe it is time to move on with the mourning and transmute the mourning into some kind of constructive activity.

DR. TOCCHET: This issue of the rebuilding of the site or a monument there, is this essential to New York telling the rest of the world something five years after? Is

this a very important part of New York's statement about what happened to us and where we are now? Or are we putting too much in this particular decision of the site? You are suggesting even larger things than just working the site.

But going back just a little bit to our discussion here of what happened at the actual World Trade Center site. Is this essential to New York's message to the rest of the nation about where we are going based on what happened to us on 9/11?

MR. TORRE: I'll go a little out on a limb and bring up my feelings. Look at Flight 94 and what went on with Todd Beamer and that whole crew. You know, the first shot fired from inside out; utter defiance; American defiance. We are not going to let you do this. You are not doing this with us. Certainly, they didn't want to die. They, I'm sure, had visions of regaining control of that plane and doing something to try to land it. But utter defiance. And they were victims and heroes and soldiers right?

Translate that to the smallest bickering over the memorial and where we're going – nobody can speak for the dead, of course, but I don't think that they would want to see this. They would want to be defiant. They are not worried about “there is a little crumb of me left here; don't build here.” I don't think that that's what they would want. I don't mean to trivialize it, not to mark the ground, but it's got to stop.

All this input from all of these groups, somebody has to take charge and say, this is what it's going to be. And this is sacred ground and we are going to memorialize this in this way. But there are just too many chefs stirring that particular pot, I think. And nothing is going to go anywhere. It's just all of this infighting, and I think we look sort of foolish. I think it should just move forward. Don't minimize it or forget it, but move. Do something.

DR. WOLAK: Christian and I were talking earlier about the immediate aftermath of this event, and there is a debate raging in the psychiatric world about debriefing. This is a process whereby witnesses to an event are asked to share their experiences and kind of relive the event. But that discounts the complexity of human experiences and the various ways that we differ, and the ways we cope. For many people that is very helpful. But for a lot of us that's not helpful. In fact, it may be hurtful. And for some people, the memorials are not vital. And in fact, they are something that they don't want. Many people found themselves going to the funerals of the firefighters time and time again, and having to relive that experience. Many of them found that incredibly torturous. So we need to keep in mind that for some people moving on can actually be therapeutic.

DR. TOCCHET: Well, perhaps that's why we need this time to let democracy work, let the voices come. Because time has to take place before we can have a decision. Maybe this is really the process that brings in those things: the variance in how people look at monument, in how they look at going on with their lives, what they need to remember or not. It is an important process. So maybe we shouldn't feel so foolish about it, and even that this time is somewhat necessary.

MR. LYNCH: I think we showed our resiliency right after the event with the tremendous effort and job that was done at ground zero, both in the attempt to rescue potentially some lives, and then clear the site. It was just magnificent, and told the world something about. We put our chin up and give everybody the finger, basically.

DR. TOCCHET: The New Yorker's way. Yes.

MR. LYNCH: It's the only way to do it. (Laughter.)

DR. TOCCHET: Well, on that note, we need to wrap this up gentlemen, and I don't want to cut anybody off.

MR. LYNCH: I have a comment, which is not a wrap. But, just a little trivia which I read recently. In New York Harbor the day of 9/11, the word went out to all the boats to come – all of them in the harbor. And it was the biggest movement of human beings since Dunkirk – something in the area of 300,000 moved off the island by boat that day. And that's something that just came out.

MR. MAHER: Just from a mental health point of view, there were very dire projections in the immediate aftermath of this event. But what turned out to be the case was that by and large, New Yorkers and Americans were resilient. They were strong, they came together, they acted as a unit, and life is hard five years after. But for most of us, life does go on.

MR. O'KEEFFE: Just a quick moment on the fire department. Of the 9,000 firefighters, fully half of the firefighters are new since 9/11. Tremendous turnover tells you a couple of things. It tells you that a lot of people left for a number of reasons. It tells you that people still want to do this. And I think that's pretty remarkable. There's a little bit of, “ah, you weren't here then, you don't understand,” kind of thing that goes on. It’s understandable. But yet these people knew what happened and they signed up anyhow. They don't make much money and neither do cops make much money, and people still take the jobs and I'm very happy for that; very impressed by that.

MR. TALBOT: And I would add that I'm very proud to sit at a table with men, with fellow alumni, who not only have continued to keep the city safe, but are also being of service to those who were victimized, and continue to be victimized, and maybe building from an educational standpoint, or a social health standpoint, a

community of New Yorkers that will recover and that will return to move safely forward.

DR. TOCCHET: Let's see what happens five years from now. I enjoyed the conversation and I want to thank you all for taking time out of your careers to have it. It's a conversation that's going to be shared with the greater Regis community. And so I thank you for that.