Early in January the Huffington Post reported on International Living’s 30th annual “Quality of Life Index.” France ranked #1 and the image used as that country’s national symbol was, of course, the Eiffel Tower. The United States placed seventh and symbolizing us wasn’t the US Capitol or the Empire State Building, but the missing World Trade Center pictured below!

The dithering at Ground Hero has profoundly damaged our image and standing. The lack of resilience and resolve on display at the World Trade Center is the de facto face of America today and, if the faux-WTC ever gets built, we will fully deserve the B-minus ranking.

This viewpoint is being distributed in the hope that it will lead some to question the wisdom of the course we are on and to act accordingly. It is meant to sound an alarm, not wage an attack, even though the nature of the criticism is bound to sting some. But this is such a significant challenge and the consequences will be so far-reaching that it would be wrong to mince our words.

It would be hard to imagine a less inspiring message to send the world than a 1776-foot tombstone and the “largest manmade falls in North America” — whose roar will recall the horrifying sound of crumbling towers — instead of the simple, stirring memorial that belongs there. They might as well include a neon sign flashing “Second-Class Country.”

A New York Post headline about a mock-up in Brooklyn of the morbid memorial waterfalls read: “9/11 shrine’s cascade of grief begins flowing!” Who thinks we’ve become the kind of country that enshrines grief? Whose doing is that? Not the people’s, that’s for sure.

In fact, little about the current agenda reflects well on our country or people. The Economist online pointed out in their Democracy in America blog, following a suicide attack in Kabul, that local Afghans were quickly erasing the evidence that there ever was an attack. The piece went on to compare Israeli terror incident response policy, which calls for the immediate reconstruction of any site that is targeted, to the “broken windows” theory of policing that Rudy Giuliani used to arrest New York’s downward spiral in the 1990s. It concluded:

The best way to discourage that kind of attack is to snuff it out, clean it up, and pretend it never happened… Speaking of which, and getting back to the city where the “broken windows” theory first became prominent and where this whole mess started in the first place: how’s that Freedom Tower coming, New York? Cripes.

The people deserve to know why pathetic efforts to rebuild the World Trade Center are making us look inept in the eyes of friends and enemies alike. Why is our response to the attack at the WTC the exact opposite of the standard counterterrorism strategy we employed at the Pentagon? Returning the familiar profile of the Twin Towers to the New York skyline is, by definition, the only way to repair what can be repaired, while depriving our enemies of their bragging rights. The people know that. Why don’t our public servants know that?

Why would we reward global vandals with something permanent they will point to and take credit for? It’s particularly odd since so many of the WTC players — Mayor Bloomberg, Larry Silverstein, PR giant Howard Rubenstein, Daniel Libeskind and his patron, Ronald Lauder, Mayor Giuliani, and even George Pataki — are all admirers of the country that wrote the book on counterterrorism. Why are they ignoring the Israeli model?

And why is the man who used the “broken windows” strategy to revive a demoralized city now silent as a giant trophy is handed to our enemies? Why is Rudy Giuliani holding Bloomberg’s coat while our country’s reputation gets bashed? As the saying goes: What’s up with that?

Those questions need answers we can believe in. Cynically misrepresenting activity at the site as “progress” is, in today’s political climate, very likely to backfire. State and local officials have betrayed the public’s trust and forfeited their right to run our World Trade Center — and we are prepared to prove it. We have therefore just begun calling upon Congress to get to the bottom of the bizarre, illogical project.

If officials are so proud of their decisions and think the current plan makes objective sense, let’s go beyond the generalities and get some testimony on the record. What is Homeland Security’s position on the deviation from a widely recognized best practice? Where is the General Accounting Office’s certification of the feasibility of a project in which the American taxpayers are so heavily invested? What is the General Services Administration’s justification for agreeing to lease almost half of a building the markets clearly have wanted no part of?

The Economist blog linked to an article on Israeli counterterrorism protocol that perscribes a dynamic timetable for bouncing back quickly from a traumatic attack. In it, Dr. Isaac Ashkenazi, a professor of disaster medicine at Ben-Gurion University and a consultant to Harvard University advises: “In 20 minutes you clear the site of victims. In 60 minutes, all victims are treated in hospital. In three hours the area is completely clean of flesh and blood, but more important, in four days the area should be completely reconstructed.”

The scope of the destruction at the World Trade Center makes the challenge far more complex, but the cure no less straightforward. If officials have good reasons for violating the principles that work everywhere else, against the very same enemy, shouldn’t we know what they are? Especially when what works everywhere else is what works for the American people?

The most plausible reason for stubbornly pursuing the current irrational course is to mask widespread bureaucratic “bungling,” but this is surely the wrong time and the wrong place for that. The strategy all along has been to get to the point of no return, but the vastly superior construction efficiency of “Twin Towers II” means that the plan would still pay for itself.

While Silverstein and the Port Authority are locked in arbitration over who gets to lift the public’s wallet, “Twin Towers II” could be built far more quickly than anything they have in mind, for the money that is already pledged! Surely, the demolition of not one baseball stadium, but two, in favor of their publicly subsidized replacements, puts the cost of cleaning up the World Trade Center into sharp perspective.

If the slumbering media will start digging for truth, instead of ignoring the family of elephants in the room, our past due recovery will take off like a rocket. Once the facts start surfacing, Mr. Spielberg will discover that he can’t make his documentary about “Rebuilding Ground Zero” because nothing is currently being re-built. Disfiguring the World Trade Center and degrading its name is hardly the kind of story he specializes in. But there is a real epic taking shape.

The World Trade Center has become the prime example of what happens when powerful political and corporate interests collude to drown out citizens’ free speech and devalue their common sense. That makes it the obvious place to draw a line in the sand. What is being inflicted on this country at the site of our deepest wound is bordering on criminal, because officials are in effect misappropriating billions of tax dollars while treating good-faith objections with outright contempt.

Powerful factions drive the news — as New York Magazine revealed in “Mike Bloomberg Owns This Town.” They have presented a badly distorted picture, in their eagerness to attend Michael Bloomberg’s soirees. But if we don’t back down, they will not succeed — and the United States Congress is the proper place to look to for reinforcements.

(c) 2010 The Twin Towers Alliance | May Be Reprinted Without Permission