Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, September 12, 2011

From One Ground Zero to Another: Sister of 9/11 Victim Meets Afghan Who Lost Family in U.S. Bombing

As the world marks the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we go back 10 years and revisit a remarkable conversation between two New Yorkers: Rita Lasar and Masuda Sultan. Rita Lasar lost her brother, Abe Zelmanowitz, on the 27th floor of the World Trade Center. He worked at Blue Cross Blue Shield. He refused to leave until emergency workers came to help rescue his best friend, Ed, a paraplegic. They died along with so many others. A few days later, President George W. Bush invoked Abe’s story in his speech at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., calling him a hero. His sister Rita promptly wrote a letter to the New York Times urging Bush not to bomb Afghanistan. "It is in my brother’s name and mine that I pray that we, this country that has been so deeply hurt, not do something that will unleash forces we will not have the power to call back." That is, of course, exactly what the United States did several weeks later. Untold thousands have died in the decade since then, among them the family of Masuda Sultan, an Afghan woman living in New York at the time of the 9/11 attack. She soon got word that 19 members of her family had been killed in a U.S. bomb attack in Afghanistan. They had moved to a farmhouse outside Kandahar to escape the attacks. It was there that they were bombed. When Masuda Sultan and Rita Lasar met in our studio in 2002, she had just returned from her native Afghanistan where she met with surviving members of her family. We begin with a report she did for Democracy Now! as she made her way to Afghanistan from Pakistan while investigating the bombing.

Video
Source: Democracy Now! 

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