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Families of victims to hold vigil at Ground Zero

A group of people who lost family members in the Sept. 11 attack accused civic leaders on Tuesday of politicizing their anniversary and announced plans for a silent vigil at the World Trade Center site.

"September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows," whose members empathize with war victims in Afghanistan and Iraq, said last night's procession down Broadway was an alternative to today's ceremony, when the city will officially mark the attacks' second anniversary.

"We are all very weary of Ground Zero, a sacred space, where there are still remains of people, being used as a backdrop. We want a hands-off policy for any candidate from any political party," Andrew Rice, whose brother David was killed in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, said at a news briefing.

"This week is a sacred week and we hope that especially next year with the Republican convention [taking place in New York] that it will not be appropriated by people for their own political gains," he said.

At next year's Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 Republican National Convention in New York, President George W. Bush is expected to win his party's nomination to run for reelection in that November's presidential vote.

Others in the Families group, which has 90 members in 23 states and three other nations, said they want Bush to adopt more alternatives to military force in the "war on terrorism."

David Potorti, who also lost a brother in New York, said he believed armies could be used sparingly, "but any time you use military action it is always a disaster for somebody, always."

Potorti said he was troubled by Bush saying in a televised address on Sunday night that the US-British war in Iraq was one of the most humane and swift in military history.

"He is denying the reality of the deaths of other people just like my brother. That's who we are trying to memorialize here, the civilian victims in New York, Washington, in Pennsylvania as well as Afghanistan and Iraq," Potori said.

Vigil co-organizer Kelly Campbell, whose brother was killed in the attack on the Pentagon, said hundreds of people would carry flashlights and form "circles of hope" around the 6.4-hectare site where the twin towers once stood.

Then, bells would ring at nearby St. Paul's chapel in remembrance of 3,000 people killed in the four hijacked plane attacks two years earlier.
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