Over the past several months I have heard three main reasons for not rebuilding the WTC. They are: safety, the threat of being hit again, and finding people willing to work in them.

The concern for safety has often been stated. But I argue that the design of the towers was very safe. The WTC held tens of thousands of workers as well as tens of thousands of visitors on a daily bases, yet even with a total collapse of both towers the death toll was around 3,500 people. While this may sound like a lot, it makes up less than five percent of the people inside the buildings, plus around 500 of the people lost were rescue workers and not part of the buildings population. The fact that the buildings were able to stand for over an hour after being hit with large aircraft loaded with fuel, thus allowing the evacuation of most of the people, is a testament to the strength of their design. I was also impressed at how when the towers did collapse, they fell in a near vertical fashion. They did not topple over, but fell straight down. This saved many more lives.

The second reason is that they can't be rebuilt because they would likely be targeted again. This type of defeatist attitude must be challenged by logic. If we were to take this argument to its logical conclusion then we must evacuate and abandon every high rise in the country because they to are potential targets. The Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Sears Tower, Space Needle, must all be abandoned so that the lives of the people working in them can be saved. Like in the movie "Minority Report", we must take action now to prevent the potential deaths of thousands. If that's the case then we must also abandon our cities now, so that we can prevent the deaths of millions should less they be targeted by nuclear weapons. Such reasoning if highly illogical.

Lastly it has been argued that finding people willing to work in such a high rise would be hard to do, but there are hundreds of thousands of people doing such on a daily bases as we speak. While some people my be unwilling to do so, their numbers are fairly small.

So in the end, these arguments don't hold water, but are the reasons given by people who, for whatever reason, didn't like the towers in the first place.