Our organization, Concerned Families of Westchester, was born in the chaotic aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. As described in this week’s Rivertowns Dispatch, a meeting of 3 Dobbs Ferry families the day after 9/11 was followed by more and more, and larger and larger, meetings in living rooms across Dobbs and Hastings. As it became apparent that the Bush people were intent on going to war against Afghanistan, and as the World Food Program warned that a war going into the winter threatened thousands of people in Afghanistan with starvation, CFOW focused on “civilian casualties.” We knew we couldn’t stop the war, but could we raise up the danger to the thousands of civilians (not Taliban, not Al-Qaeda) who would die in the war? October 6th came, the bombing began, and civilians were killed.
The focus on civilian casualties of war grew in part out of the widespread use of the slogan “Not in Our Name,” which soon emblazoned posters and letters to the editor. One of the first such letters published in The New York Times was sent by Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez of Westchester. Their son Greg died in the World Trade Center attack. In their open letter to President Bush, they wrote:
We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet. We cannot pay attention to the daily flow of news about this disaster. But we read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands, dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son’s death. Not in our son’s name. Our son died a victim of an inhuman ideology. Our actions should not serve the same purpose. Let us grieve. Let us reflect and pray. Let us think about a rational response that brings real peace and justice to our world. But let us not as a nation add to the inhumanity of our times.
Rita Lasar of New York was another person who responded to a loved one’s death with “Not in Our Name.” Rita was the first speaker at a CFOW forum, in 2002 at South Presbyterian Church in Dobbs. On the occasion of Rita’s death in 2017, Democracy Now! looked back on her life:
Rita Lasar, co-founder of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, has died at the age of 85. Her brother, Abe Zelmanowitz, died on the 27th floor of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks, after he refused to leave until emergency workers came to help rescue his best friend Ed, a paraplegic. Lasar went on to become a peace activist who traveled to Afghanistan to meet with the families of those killed in the U.S. war there.
And then Rita is quoted: “President Bush mentioned him in the National Cathedral speech and cited him as being a hero. And I realized that my government was going to use my brother as justification for killing other people, and that had a tremendous impact on me. I didn’t want that to happen, not in my brother’s name. And so I wrote a letter to the Times, which they printed, asking our government to please be cautious and not do something they couldn’t take back. And then I was asked to speak at a peace rally, and I did it. And just before I went on, I was told they had started bombing Afghanistan, and I realized something I had never realized before. I had heard the term ‘collateral damage’ all my life. It was always used about people far away from us. And I realized now what it meant, because my brother was collateral damage, in a war that he didn’t want.
Amber Amundson also responded to the 9/11 attack, in which her husband was killed, with pleas for peace/no war. She appeared on the Bill Moyers show along with her father, who wanted revenge and war. Two weeks after 9/11 her short statement, “A Widow’s Plea for Non-Violence,” received wide distribution. “Because I have lost Craig as part of this historic tragedy,” she wrote, “my anguish is compounded exponentially by fear that his death will be used to justify new violence against other innocent victims.” Along with her husband’s brother, Amber joined a walk, organized by the peace group Voices in the Wilderness, from the Pentagon to NYC.. While on the walk, Amber was interviewed on Democracy Now!, where she read the letter she wrote to President Bush asking him to not to wage war in her husband’s name.
Amber Amundson, Rita Lasar, and Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez were founding members of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. In the months after 9/11, they played a significant role in the US peace movement. As victims of the 9/11 attacks, their pleas for peace/not war had a credibility that ordinary protesters did not have. Their bravery in making the voices heard was rewarded in part by opportunities to appear on (relatively) mainstream media. For example, Rita Lasar and David Potorti, whose brother was killed at the World Trade Center, appeared on the Phil Donahue Show. Concerned Families hosted Peaceful Tomorrows members for several peace rallies and fund-raisers in the Rivertowns. Rita Laser, Coleen Kelly, Kelly Campbell (and probably some I’m forgetting) spoke to a warm reception.
During the Peace Walk from Washington to New York, actress Frances Anderson borrowed a camera and began filming the participants. In February 2002, when Peaceful Tomorrows had its formal coming-out party with a peace valentine for President Bush, the CFOW delegation to the event (looking for possible speakers) met Frances and became aware of her work, which began as a documentary film centered on Peaceful Tomorrows, but broadened to encompass “civilian casualties” in war. Here is a short trailer for Anderson’s film “Civilian Casualties: Fragments from the War on Terror.” 25 years later, in much of the world, millions of “civilian casualties” cry out for mercy, for relief from suffering, for peace.
THE WAR AT HOME: THE GOVERNMENT LIES, THOUSANDS DIE.
This week the daily news program Democracy Now! remembered the 9/11 events with several moving interviews of people who lived through and/or lost loved ones on that day. Among the interview segments were one with Sara Nelson, the President of the Association of Flight Attendants, who lost five friends/colleagues that day; and a firefighter, an EMT, and a high school student, who recall the trauma of that day and the smoke-filled toxic environment of the months that followed. All of this was very moving to me.
The most significant part of Democracy Now’s offering this week was the reporting by (and about) co-host Juan Gonzalez, who as a Daily News reporter at the time of 9/11 closely covered the disaster inflicted by NYC on those living and working in areas close to the World Trade Center. It is now estimated the more people died from smoke and toxic air after 9/11 than the 3,000 people killed that day. On Tuesday, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani released 170,000 “newly discovered” documents relating to air quality that will likely support claims that “the City” knew about dangerous health risks but failed to take steps to protect people, preferring to return to “$$ business as usual” asap. (For the Times reporting, go here and here.)
I hope everyone will take a few minutes to watch/listen to this moving report from Juan Gonzalez. Sadly, sadly, the health disasters he (and almost he alone) was reporting about the toxic air in downtown NYC have come to pass. In 2001 it was an incredible work of reporting, and of course it was The Daily News, not Juan, who later got the journalism prizes. Please check out: “Toxic Nightmare”: 25 Years After 9/11, Juan González on His Predictions of Worker Illness & Death”
Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, more people are believed to have died from cancer, respiratory and other illnesses due to exposure to the airborne toxins than the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. In the weeks and months that followed 9/11, former New York City Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, as well as other city and federal officials, reassured residents and workers it was safe to return to the area surrounding ground zero, concealing the dangers of lingering toxins in the air after the collapse of the twin towers. Democracy Now! co-host Juan González reads from his book, Fallout, in which he extensively reported on the toxic nightmare around ground zero. “No one could guarantee the air around Ground Zero was safe because no one had ever confronted a disaster of such proportions,” González wrote in Fallout. [See the Program]
As nearly EVERYONE will recall, the 9/11 attacks initiated a wave of military and political disasters in the USA (and for most of the world) that were built on lies. The “weapons of mass destruction” was the Mother Lie, but White House/Pentagon utterances since 9/11 have seldom strayed far from outright whoppers. It’s useful to recall that one of the first lies of our disgraceful era was the assurance from High Officials and others that our air was safe to breath, and that we should celebrate our freedoms by going shopping.
AND FINALLY, A LOOK BACK AT THE BIG PICTURE
25 Years of War Was the Exact Wrong Response to 9/11
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [September 9, 2026]
---- The lesson of 9/11 should be that war is not the answer to any of the problems facing the United States. After inflicting violence and chaos on country after country for twenty-five years in a “global war on terror” that has evolved into a Zionist genocide and a revived Cold War against Russia and China, the widespread public opposition to Trump’s war on Iran suggests that most Americans have finally learned that lesson. Unfortunately, powerful sections of our corrupt business and political elites have not. Most Americans old enough to remember September 11, 2001, can still recall the horrifying images played endlessly on our TV screens as the scale of the mass murder became clear. But we also remember something else: the sinking feeling that the hopes and dreams of billions of people, in the US and around the world, would be pushed to the back-burner for the foreseeable future, as our leaders and corporate media all too predictably embraced a new agenda of revenge, fear-mongering, jingoism and military violence. As Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks… We found out later that only hours after the attacks—less than six hours after the first plane struck the World Trade Center and barely five hours after the Pentagon was hit—the planning for America’s military response to the 9/11 massacre was already under way. [Read More]
That’s it from me, for now.
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
