WTC Crime Scene

[John Young]

Today I managed to walk around the stupefying WTC
disaster site for half an hour, doing what a serious 
professional would be doing: taking dozens of careful 
photographs of the ruins. 

Then an NYC cop asked to see my authorization to
be photographing a crime scene. I said nobody told me 
not to. He said come with me, and told a captain who 
asked how the fuck did you get in here. I said I just 
walked in, nobody stopped me. Captain checked my 
ID and my tale about safety-surveying the neighborhood
as a volunteer, and said escort this guy off the scene. 

Then I was handed over to the State Police who had
me repeat my reason for being there, took my fancy
digital camera, looked at the photos and bygod erased
all of them. Then I was handed over to the National
Guard who is in charge of perimeter security, and I
again had to explain that I just walked in, that there
were no barriers and no guards the way I came.

While that was happening two dozen victim families
were escorted to the site to stare at the devastation, 
carrying flowers, weeping, holding each other, some
stumbling, looking as if walking into hell -- which it
truely is. Shit.

I got my name put in a database and a warning to not 
come back or face arrest. I said thank you and did
not even for a second think to say fuck off for which 
you may shit on me.

Now the help I need is how to recover the erased
images from the Compact Flash memory chip. 
Norton's unerase detects no remnants of the JPG 
images. I would really appreciate pointers on how to 
reclaim the images: they show godawful stuff I've 
not seen published anywhere else. No human
remains as far as I can tell just dumbfounding acres
of what used to be and the giant machines and
tiny workers trying to untangle it.

If anybody can tell me how to get the images restored 
I'll be immensely grateful -- technique or a program
to buy. And I'll put the images on the Web as soon as 
reborn. They are high res images, 1MB or so each, 
and should be gruesomely spectacular, if only they 
can be unerased. Crime scene indeed.

What I admired was the grandstand set up by the Port
Authority for distinguished visitors to survey the
spectacle and be televised saying how awful it is
and how much money is need to rebuild New York
and what must be done to prevent this ever happening
again. That grandstand looked like the crime scene 
to me.