The memorial started with a steel beam salvaged from the World Trade Center - a small piece of the terrorist attacks that the city of Pembroke Pines, Fla., was determined to honor in its own way.

Nobody from this Fort Lauderdale suburb died on Sept. 11. But plans for its memorial grew ever more elaborate - at one point projected to cost more than $1 million - as the years passed.

"It was a glass-enclosed, air-conditioned house," recalled the city's mayor, Frank Ortis. "With a reflection pool and water running down, hurricane-resistant glass. Obviously we couldn't do that."

Hundreds of small memorials to Sept. 11 have bloomed across the country in the 10 years since the attacks. But in many towns, what began as a simple tribute to the dead turned into an expensive headache as the cost of building such memorials ballooned and the economy deteriorated.

On the day of September 11, Charlie Skelton attends a symposium of critical thinkers in New York

The heavy syllables of the victims' names boomed out along the streets around Ground Zero. The public were patted down, then allowed up a cramped side road to peer at a distant video screen of the memorial. They filmed the video screen on their mobile phones, filmed each other filming, and film crews filmed them filming.

It was hardly fertile ground for grief, you'd think. And yet, the weird detachment of the moment was severed by the chanting of the names and the brief tributes of the readers. It was the daughter who said her father's friends tell her that she reminds them of him that did it for me. That, and the list of victims called Jones. Jones after Jones after Jones. Too many Joneses. I took my sniffles back up the street to Starbucks.

And from Starbucks, I went down the rabbit hole. I found myself at a conference on Walker Street called 'How The World Changed After 9/11'. It was packed, but I managed to slide in at the back, to hear a guy called Webster Tarpley chant his own list of names. The names of the 46 military exercises and hijack drills (called things like 'Vigilant Guardian') that were actually taking place on the morning of September 11. "The greatest density of drills in US military history," Tarpley said.

Fake radar blips, dummy hijacks, dummy attacks, fighter jets sent off to Turkey, the skies left unprotected, with the FBI's top anti-terror experts stuck on a training exercise in California. The drills, said Tarpley, were important, because not only did they weaken and confuse US air defence, but there was also a military drill for each major component of the 9/11 attacks. The drills were cover, and the dummy threats were made real.

September 11, he argues, was a coup carried out by a rogue network within the US military and government. A cabal of fascists, working with (and for) a banking oligarchy, "the old boys of Wall Street".

Everything you ever wanted to know about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in under 5 minutes.

I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens. Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out of the two World Trade towers. Two planes, I was told by people in the crowd, had plowed into the towers. I walked quickly into the New York Times newsroom at 229 W. 43rd St., grabbed a handful of reporter's notebooks, slipped my NYPD press card, which would let me through police roadblocks, around my neck, and started down the West Side Highway to the World Trade Center. The highway was closed to traffic. I walked through knots of emergency workers, police and firemen. Fire trucks, emergency vehicles, ambulances, police cars and rescue trucks idled on the asphalt.

The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.

I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies - a foot in a woman's shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso - lay scattered amid the wreckage.

What do the events of 9/11 represent to us and the world in which we live? Laura brings a unique perspective to the question that will have you viewing your own reaction to 9/11 in a whole new light.

9/10/2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 Trillion Missing from Pentagon

Using Common Cents and Telling the 9/11 Facts

In speaking with my fellow Americans about 9/11 ten years after the fact, I have found that many, sadly and unfortunately, have either forgotten what happened that terrible day or have purchased the propaganda delivered to them by their own "trusted" main stream US media.

What especially concerns me is the progressive dummying down of our youth; specifically those under 20 years old who either hardly remember that day as it happened or where not even born yet. These people must rely on what is told to them by "trusted" sources. In other words, our American youth are getting an even larger dose of propaganda then we did shortly after the event and it's troubling.

Yesterday, President Obama requested $5.1 billion to provide disaster relief to communities struggling to recover from recent hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and wildfires. The request includes $500 million in emergency funds FEMA needs to continue to operate effectively through the end of September.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, whose home state of Virginia was hit by an earthquake and Hurricane Irene, is demanding more partisan spending cuts in exchange for approving the request. From Politico:

But a spokesperson for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) signaled late Friday that the GOP is likely to insist on offsets for the $500 million in emergency funds Obama requested for 2011...

"The House has passed $1 billion in disaster relief funds that is fully offset, which we will look to move as quickly as possible."

Being labeled an "anti-Semite" is an honor these days. All it means is someone who is against the Jewish criminal gang that dominates the global power structure. In our Orwellian world, "anti-Semite" and "American patriot" are actually synonymous. Simply accurately describing the most influential faction of the crime gang that sits atop the global power structure, which controls the United States government, media, and banking system, is anti-Semitic according to a lot of people, and that's fine with me. We need to continue to point out that these are the same people who did 9/11, and if that's anti-Semitic, so be it.

Stating these obvious facts is not the most politically correct thing to do, but it needs to be said if we are ever going to regain control of our country and our future. I get e-mail updates from the Anti-Defamation League, and in the latest e-mail I came across this article entitled, "Decade of Deceit: Anti-Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Theories 10 Years Later."

Being the raging anti-Semite that I am, I was really interested in this article. In the introduction, the ADL laments the fact that people actually know who pulled off the FALSE FLAG/INSIDE JOB on 9/11:

In the ten years since the September 11 terrorist attacks on America, conspiracy theories surrounding the attacks have become an entrenched propaganda industry. These assaults on memory and history attempt to place blame for the attacks on sources other than Al Qaeda, such as the U.S. government. Prominent among such 9/11 conspiracy theories are those that make the anti-Semitic claim that Jews - whether Israeli, American, or both-- were involved in planning and executing the attacks. This anti-Semitic faction is only a part of the so-called "9/11 truth movement," yet it is vocal and pervasive, particularly on the Internet.

That's right, it's anti-Semitic to state the fact that the only people actually arrested on 9/11 were Jewish spies and military operatives directly from Israel.

Delving Into Darkness: A Decade's Pursuit of Truth- Review by Thomas C. Fletcher of 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed by David Ray Griffin

David Ray Griffin in his new book, 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed, takes stock of what we know, after the passage of a decade of intensive grassroots research and analysis, about what really happened that day, and of the present state of the 9/11 truth movement - its strengths and its weaknesses, and how it can move forward most effectively. The book is a combination of important lectures given by Griffin in the last few years, revised and updated for publication, and of completely new essays on key topics, such as the strong evidence that the phone calls from the hijacked airliners must have been faked, and the powerful consensus about the Pentagon events that has been achieved by the movement.

The first four chapters highlight the strongest evidence that 9/11 was an inside job and the clearest implications of that evidence: the lack of evidence that Muslims attacked the US on that day (making clear that the ten-year-long series of wars on Muslim nations is morally and legally unjustified); the multiple occasions on which the laws of physics were miraculously inoperative in the destruction of the World Trade Center, if the official account so ferociously defended by erstwhile critics of government like Bill Moyers, Robert Parry, Alexander Cockburn and many others is to be believed; and the extraordinary case of World Trade Center (WTC) 7's classic demolition, which has been assiduously covered up by the mainstream media and government agencies (its collapse was never even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, and the final report on its destruction issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in November 2008 was fraudulent).