The new towers would be ARMED with both surface-to-air missiles and close-in anti-aircraft defense systems.
Re-build them bigger than before and name the towers "Freedom" and "Unity" and let the world come to their own conclusion as to the meaning of the acronym.
I want the Towers back! I want them because this is America and we will not be defeated.BTTT!!!
I have had a similar experience to the author, but on the train into Manhattan rather than driving. On days with decent visibility I could see the twin towers as I was commuting into NYC on the train. From there, I would look to the left and see the Empire State Building. I still have a sinking feeling in my stomach when I look for them and don't see them, but it is infinitesimal to the feeling in the days immediately following 9/11 when there was still a huge cloud of smoke around the remaining buildings. Last September I noticed I wasn't the only passenger who couldn't stop staring toward the location of the missing towers (and probably trying to wish them back into existence).
Incorrigible, that is a great picture.
PARIS, April 15 (AFP)
With its eight minaret towers thrusting several hundred feet (metres) into the air above the city, the new Baghdad mosque will be the biggest in the world. President Saddam Hussein's plan for a new mosque in the Iraqi capital will surpass even the holiest site in the Moslem world, the mosque in the Saudi city of Mecca which can only boast seven minarets. The four highest minarets, to be built 280 metres (925 feet) tall in a square formation, will be "the highest in the world, in order to be closer to God, according to the wishes of Saddam Hussein," the French architect chosen to oversee the project, Jacques Barriere, told AFP. Worshippers will be given no room for doubt over the identity of the project's instigator. As they enter the mosque, they will be faced with a huge digital image of Saddam, facing in the direction of Mecca and accompanied by his signature. The announcement of the project to build the Saddam Grand Mosque last Thursday highlighted once again the Iraqi president's desire to establish himself as a leader of the Arab world, despite his status as a pariah in the West.
The waters of the river Tigris will be diverted to form an artificial lake surrounding the mosque, Barriere said, water being the symbol of purity. Pathways across the lake will allow visitors to walk around an outline representing the contours of the Arab world. The scale of the project is immense. The concrete mosque itself will be 135 metres (445 feet) in diameter and 120 metres (almost 400 feet) high, Barriere said. It is to be built on thirty hectares (75 acres) of land on the site of an old airport bombed during the 1991 Gulf War. "The project features a rectangular perimeter 480 metres (1,580 feet) wide and 700 metres (2,310 feet) long, where there will be buildings used as libraries, souks, residential buildings for students and a Koranic school," said Barriere. The cost is immaterial for the Iraqi regime, said the architect based in Limoges, central France. "It will cost what it will cost. It's not so much the price that counts as the technical achievement." It is an attitude that contrasts starkly with the miserable living standards for most ordinary citizens in Baghdad, where crippling UN sanctions targeted at Saddam's regime have resulted in food and medicine shortages.
A mass funeral was held in Baghdad Monday for 29 children the government says died as a direct result of sanctions and a lack of medicines. It was the latest in a series of mass funerals aimed to mobilize public opinion against the crippling economic embargo. However the building falls outside the range of the sanctions, Barriere said. "We examined the United Nations' Resolution 986 to know if we could go ahead with it or not," he said. "But intellectual projects totally escape the embargo." Iraqi authorities approached Barriere and his colleagues last September following their work on a giant obelisk in Paris to mark the bicentenary of a French scientific expedition to Egypt.