I was in Singapore on a Sept 11 evening as a visiting journalism researcher. What a Wonderful World was playing on the late night radio when the DJ cut Louis Armstrong short: "A plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York." Seconds later, another tower was hit. That shook me up.

I pictured mental clips of the twin towers, which I had visited just two years earlier, burning. Terrorism as a concept took on a deeper personal meaning when I re-visited the site in July 2004. A chasm of nothingness was left where the towers once stood silhouetted in the New York sky. Screams for bloody retribution by the media foreshadowed the Bush Administration's prolonged 'virtuous' war in flushing out the murderers.