by Hugh Price
�Guest Columnist�

Two poignant ceremonies were held recently at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan�where the World Trade Center towers once stood�to mark the end of the excavation of the blasted site and the search for the remains of the thousands who perished there that bright blue-skied morning.

On May 30, New York�s political officialdom and thousands of others gathered in silent tribute as the men and women who had worked at the site since that awful day uprooted the last standing girder and marched out of the seven-story-deep pit. Recently, the families of those who died, most of whose bodies have yet to be identified by medical officials, held their own ceremony at the site.

"There�s no such thing as closure," said a young woman who had lost both her brother and her fianc� in the tragedy. "This doesn�t end anything. It�s a struggle every day."

More than anything since September 11, the ceremonies underscore the truth of that woman�s agonized reflection. And the pain touches not only us Americans, or relatives of the many foreign nationals who died here in New York.

A June 3 dispatch in the New York Times reported that when a small village of Masai people in Kenya just recently fully understood the dimensions of the September 11th tragedy�through a young man of their village who had returned from his studies at Stanford University�they decided to pay tribute in the most meaningful way they could. They invited the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi to receive a gift of 14 of their cows for the people of the United States.

Given the central role of the cow in Masai culture, the gift was a profound expression of these villagers� sympathy, and their sense of the commonalities that binds all human beings to one another.

"We�re out with our cattle every day, so we�re not always up to date on the news," said a villager who had donated one of his 12 cows. "We had heard about the disaster in America but we didn�t know much about it. Now, we feel the same way we would feel if we lost one of our own."

There is no "closure" to the senseless loss of life at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. The pain continues, whether one works less than a mile from the site, as we at National Urban League headquarters do, or thousands of miles away.

These recent events are a piercing counterpoint to the dismaying assertions by a whistle-blower inside the FBI that her agency overlooked warning signs of suspicious activity and failed to connect some dots that even the head of the FBI now admits might have helped it detect at least some of the terrorists before the attacks occurred. And the allegations of indifference and incompetence are buffeting the Central Intelligence Agency as well.

Whether the agencies are at fault is still to be determined, of course. There�s no doubt that America�s intelligence-gathering agencies have entered uncharted waters in the campaign against terrorism. The unanswered question is whether they�re up to the assignment.

Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller have unveiled a plan to make the war against terrorism the FBI�s top priority. That�s a good start�provided the intelligence-gathering activities being proposed are thoroughly justified and monitored by the proper authorities.

One thing is clear: since so many terrorists are roaming about overseas, the intelligence shield against terrorism must be a fully cooperative undertaking. Silo mindsets and agency rivalries won�t do going forward.

Nor is refocusing the FBI a substitute for a thorough, bipartisan examination of whether the nation�s intelligence apparatus let us down; and if so, why and where; and, finally, how it needs to be repaired and fortified.

This isn�t the time for political gamesmanship, bravado or covering institutional rumps. American lives, American livelihoods and, indeed, the American way of life hinge on finding honest answers and effective solutions.