Tomorrow is the 2nd anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the plane crash in Pennsylvania. In these 2 years, the Bush administration has used the events of September 11 to push ahead with a massive scale war, that it has dubbed the “war on terror.”

First, the U.S. bombed Afghanistan, killing thousands of civilians. The country remains a war zone with U.S. and other foreign troops occupying large parts of the country. Last March, despite no evidence linking the government of Iraq to the September 11 attacks, President Bush launched a massive “Shock and Awe” campaign against Iraq followed by an invasion of some 140,000 U.S. troops. Like Afghanistan, thousands of innocent civilians were killed and as the U.S. occupation of the country drags on, and many U.S. soldiers die, the situation is boiling into a civil war.

The corporate media and U.S. officials seized on the tragedy of September 11 to whip up a frenzy of what was called patriotism. Bush told the world: You are with us or you are with the terrorists. But a small group of families who lost loved ones in the attacks of September 11 have raised their voices over the past 2 years under the banner: “Peaceful Tomorrows.”

We spend the hour hearing the stories of these people and looking at their individual journeys over the 2 years since they lost their brothers, sisters, children, husbands or wives. For some of them, these journeys have brought them into the homes of ordinary Afghans who had family members killed by U.S. missiles, others to the homes of Iraqis whose families were killed in the U.S. attacks over the past decade. Some of these people have traveled across this country promoting peace and opposing the use of the loss of their loved ones to justify war. Others have campaigned internationally. Some just spoke with their family and friends. A new book tells their story. It is called “September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows: Turning Our Grief Into Action for Peace.”

From top to bottom: Bob McIlvaine (his 26 year-old son Bob died in the World Trade Center), Adele Welty (her son, Tim was a firefighter who died in the World Trade Center), Megan Bartlett (she founded Ground Zero for Peace–First Responders Against the War. She is a former Emergency Medical Technician. Many of her co-workers died in the World Trade Center), Fekkak Mamdouh (he worked at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center where 73 of his co-workers died. He co-founded ROC-NY a membership-based workers center for immigrants), Jeremy Glick (his father, Barry, died in the World Trade Center. He was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly on The O’Reilly Factor February, 4 2003), Andrew Rice (his brother, David, died in the World Trade Center).