We New Yorkers have been saying, "not in our name," for over two years. After completing a study begun only a week after the 9/11 attacks, psychoanalyst and historian Charles B. Strozier, the Director of the Center on Terrorism and Public Safety at the city's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, suggests an explanation.

But what he found in his study [including repeated interviews with people in and outside of New York] surprised him. "You cannot underestimate the difference between the experience and the image of the experience," Dr. Strozier said.

"Those who lived in Lower Manhattan breathed in the smell of the dead for weeks, like those at Auschwitz. We all knew what the smell was even if we did not speak about it. The dust settled over huge sections of the city, from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side.

"The chaos and fear were real to New Yorkers. This made the experience authentic. New Yorkers were much closer to the suffering. It was harder to become numb to it. And while they may have been angry, they were less filled with rage," the professor said. "It was much harder to get those of us who were there to believe in the notion that killing others would somehow make us safer."