I was asleep in a small hotel in San Jose, California when the attack happened. California is three hours behind the east coast, so nine in the morning was six a.m. Pacific Time.

My first notification of the events was a phone call from my friend Alan in New Zealand. After ascertaining that I was safely out of harm's way he gave me a quick summary of the facts - facts so unimaginably awful that I had difficulty comprehending them - and I switched on the television. By that time the networks were playing and replaying footage of each of the attacks, and I got an instant replay of the second plane crash, the buildings in flame and the collapse of both towers. From zero to horror in sixty seconds.

I was never a fan of Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York at the time of the attacks. But even I would concede that his speeches at the time struck just the right note, conveying a very justified anger but with a calming, responsible tone. He became a rallying point for the city and he filled the rôle well.

Unfortunately, underneath it all he was still the same Rudy Giuliani, and it didn't take long for the old Giuliani to resurface. The opinionated Giuliani. The bullying Giuliani. The "God's gift to New York" Giuliani.

For a while he contemplated trying to bypass the term limit legislation which was preventing him running for another term, but he very sensibly gave up on that idea. He has now been replaced by Mike Bloomberg, and the difference is dramatic - we now have a mayor who doesn't publicly attack other city officials, who doesn't pick fights with the city's black leaders, and who doesn't go out of his way to alienate the gay community.

The rest of the world may idolize Rudy Giuliani, but the city that knows him best is breathing a sigh of relief that he's gone.

A debate has begun over the future of the World Trade Center site. What should be built there? Should it be a memorial? Should something like the twin towers be rebuilt? These are questions which should be considered carefully over a period of time, with both public and expert input to the discussion.

But New York state governor George Pataki has now stated that the entire site will be a memorial, and nothing will be built there. So much for debate.

New Yorkers do not want to live in a graveyard. In any case, there are no human remains left on the site - those bodies that were never recovered will have been carted away unnoticed with the rest of the debris.

Devote a small part of the site to a permanent memorial by all means, but build something useful and dynamic on the rest.

Immediately after the attacks, most people said - including me - that an operation such as this could never have been predicted. But we now know that Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested weeks before September 11 after arousing suspicions at a flying school. And we now know that threats had been made years earlier to fly an airliner into the Eiffel Tower in a suicide attack. And we already knew that there were large numbers of people in the Arab world who were prepared to kill themselves in order to inflict damage on those they considered their enemies.

Some people might say this is just 20/20 hindsight - no-one could have been expected to draw these threads together at the time. But now it's becoming clear that some in the law enforcement agencies had actually made the connections but were ignored by their superiors.

Could the attacks have been prevented? If the FBI was doing its job correctly, yes, there's no doubt that they could.