They deserve answers

WASHINGTON -- Three thousand victims -- and 3 million questions unanswered.\nSuch was the cry of the hundreds flooding the U.S. Capitol in June voicing support for an independent investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks.\nIt haunted me then, as I watched, a spectator and Senate intern, from the back of the crowd, feeling naked without my tape recorder or piece of media apparatus.\nAnd it haunts me yet.\nI scarcely paid attention to the countless demonstrations that lured hundreds to the grassy knolls stretched before the Capitol. They supported or rallied against myriad causes; each, it seemed, demanded the undivided consideration of every senator and representative who'd listen. \nIt wasn't that I couldn't relate to the plight -- I had simply become jaded, my eyes glossed over with the humdrum tasks required of the typical Senate intern. From 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, I went to committee hearings, opened mail and answered constituent letters. Those causes and rallies were fluff, they were simple, they didn't get things done. None piqued my interest -- that is, until those families and friends of Sept. 11 victims flocked to the Hill. \nIt was an otherwise quiet June morning in Washington, bright and humid without a cloud in the sky, so I ducked out of work early and trekked outside past Constitution Avenue. What I saw astounded me.\nThe lawn was filled with media and common folk alike. While children played absently under shaded trees, a crowd of more than 100 listened to senators, representatives and survivors pledge their support to the independent investigation.\nKatie Soulis lost Tim, her husband of 12 years, in the WTC attacks when she was three months pregnant. Shielding her newborn son's face from the blinding sun, she spoke to the crowd frankly, her rich contralto breaking ever so slightly as she recounted the night of Sept. 10. She and Tim had taken their four sons and daughter -- children the couple "shared and loved and cherished together" -- for a bike ride and to buy popcorn.\nThen there was David Ehnar's mother, who lost her only son on the 100th floor of the Trade Center. Dwarfed by the podium, she pleaded, raspy-voiced, for more questions, for more answers.\nToni Esposito, a mother of two from Princeton, NJ, lost her brother-in-law, an employee working on the 89th floor, in the attacks on New York. He was one of the unlucky, she said, who thought to get out, he must go up.\n"He climbed the stairs -- what was left of them -- because that's how they thought they'd get out," Esposito explained. "He called my sister to tell her…but he couldn't get out. The doors were locked."\nThe family grieved, Esposito said, and they grieve yet today. Her sister's family's main source of income stopped, and her sister, Pat Ryan, began looking for other widows and widowers with whom she could sort out her pain, her anger, her agony.\nThus Pat, with the aid of son Colin, 15, formed a New Jersey area Web-based support network. \nFor her part, Ryan was "astounded" that more Americans wouldn't rise in support of independent investigations into the events surrounding and leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks. Hers are all valid questions -- What of the media and their role in expounding upon (or exploiting) the attacks? What don't we know? How can we find out more? \nI've never felt so out of place and yet uniquely part of a common mass. I could watch replay upon replay of the horrible crashes, of the unearthly aftermath, of the dusty fallout, for hours, days, months. Yet I still didn't completely understand. \nAnd I still don't purport to. But the aura pervading Capitol Hill -- and indeed, all of Washington -- that June morning won't likely leave me for a good while. It was a feeling of mutual support, of compassion. It was reality, spoken from the lips of children and grandmothers alike, all asking the same questions and demanding some sort of, any sort of, answer. These demonstrators weren't fluff. They weren't simple. And they were ready to get things done -- by whatever means possible.