Yet, despite all of this new knowledge, we still don’t know how to explain 9/11 to the next generation. As the magazine Education Week reports, “Fewer than half the states explicitly identify the 9/11 attacks in their high school standards for social studies” — and the relatively few schools that do discuss 9/11 often spend just a few minutes on it.

As a result, reports the magazine, “Many students today may have only vague notions of 9/11, since they were young or not even born when the attacks occurred.” Worse, those “vague notions” are often defined by America’s crude popular culture.

“Kids are no longer coming into the classroom as a blank slate — they have something they’ve been told [about 9/11] at home, at church, on Facebook, Twitter,” says the University of Texas’ Middle Eastern studies expert Christopher Rose, who adds that this leaves many children wrongly believing that “[Muslims] are all crazy — they all hate us.”

Clearly, many schools are afraid that 9/11 is too touchy a topic, and that no matter how educators might address it, they would inevitably face parental ire. To know that fear is legitimate is to imagine being a teacher trying to follow the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, which asks Americans to “raise complex questions” and “broaden the context for understanding the 9/11 attacks.” Pursuing such a worthy goal in a classroom would mean informing kids about taboo truths.

Children would have to be told, for instance, about how the U.S. government funded the Afghan mujahedin, elements of which ultimately supported the group that orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. They would have to learn about how America’s meddling in the Islamic world (invasions, occupations, support for brutal dictators, etc.) has inspired what the CIA calls retributive “blowback” from terrorists. And kids would have to hear about how 9/11 was used as a justification by American politicians to invade Iraq and kill thousands of innocent Iraqis, even though that country had nothing to do with 9/11.

No doubt, reciting these facts typically gets one vilified by saber-rattling ideologues who want 9/11 to serve only as a no-questions-asked rationale for more war and bigotry. And so schools, understandably — and unfortunately — avoid the topic, even though children need to know these facts to properly “broaden the context.”

Thus, we arrive at the implicit challenge of this week’s 9/11 anniversary: to grow up. That means finally rejecting the culture of fear, demagoguery and intimidation and instead beginning a more mature dialogue about uncomfortable truths.

A decade after the attacks, such a conversation is long overdue — but it cannot occur in our schools until it starts happening throughout all of American society.

This should be our Nuremburg, the defining trial of the 9/11 era and a fitting coda to it.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government appears to be on the verge of squandering this opportunity, and with it, the best, and perhaps only, chance for the public to understand not only how the attacks came to be, but why Mohammed waged a relentless war against America and how we might stop the next would-be terrorist mastermind.

The problems lie within the reformed military-tribunal system that the Obama administration put in place after losing its fight for a civilian trial in New York. Political compromises have resulted in a flawed military commissions process that from outward appearances is not only rigged against the defense, but hyper-choreographed, censored and hermetically sealed.

“The process is designed to achieve a conviction, and to do it with as little revelation as humanly possible, but with the veneer of due process and justice,’’ said one participant who said restrictive gag orders prohibited him from talking publicly. “You’re talking about the most heinous crime ever, and we’re going to afford them less due process, less discovery, less of everything than we would the guy who shoplifted a pack of gum from CVS.’’

Obama administration officials say their reformed military commissions system is a vast improvement over the Bush administration’s version, which Obama moved to shut down on his first day in office in 2009.

Defense lawyers disagree, and insist they have been hamstrung in their efforts to mount the kind of aggressive defense needed to do their jobs including full and unfettered access to evidence, witnesses and even the accused themselves.

Four of the five legal teams had so few of their key players in place in recent months that they did not file the “mitigation submissions’’ that the government said it needed to decide which of the five men should face the death penalty and other key issues, such as whether to try them together or individually. They recently filed motions asking that the charges be thrown out because of fatal flaws in the system, which they say make it impossible for them to defend their clients.

“It’s window dressing,’’ Mohammed’s defense lawyer, David Nevin, said of the government’s improvements. “I am not all satisfied that it is a fair process. In fact, it is not a fair process.’’

Many of the defense lawyers have quit out of frustration or for other personal reasons stemming from the many delays in the process. Only a few have been there long enough to even begin to understand their clients’ case, not to mention the convoluted military commission process.

And they say they will be unable to effectively challenge confessions obtained when their clients were coercively interrogated in the CIA’s black site prisons, if they can broach the subject at all. This is important for the four men accused of helping Mohammed with the logistics of the plot. Several claim they have been wrongly accused, tortured into confessing, or both.

It is also important with regard to Mohammed, who confessed to dozens of plots while being waterboarded 183 times, and has said he may plead guilty even before the trial begins. Few U.S. counterterrorism officials believe all of his often boastful confessions, and it is important for the public to hear what, exactly, evidence the government has with regard to what he did and didn’t do, and whom he might have been protecting.

The team of Defense and Justice Department officials overseeing the military commission process, and the presiding judge, should quickly address the defense lawyers’ complaints, or a proceeding that some call “The Trial of the Century’’ will be delayed further by legal wrangling — and forever tainted by accusations of being unfair.

A full, fair and transparent trial, above all, will benefit the public. There is much the public doesn’t know about Mohammed, including the details of how he devised the plot, convinced bin Laden to let him do it and then orchestrated it “from A to Z,’’ to use his own words. It was Mohammed who masterminded dozens of other plots and attacks, some while staying a step ahead of the largest-ever criminal manhunt.

Mohammed, not bin Laden, was the one who traveled the world as a kind of “Johnny Appleseed’’ of terrorism, establishing alliances and creating a network of cells and lieutenants that in some cases remains today. And it was Mohammed who personally recruited young jihadist prospects much like a baseball scout, many of them Westerners, tapping into their grievances to turn them to his cause.

The U.S. government has kept the details of what Mohammed did — and how and why he did it — hidden in its most classified files since his capture in Pakistan nine years ago. The government should set the record straight on that, because there is an important lesson to be learned from the largely untold tale of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: It isn’t some monolithic group like al-Qaida that poses a continuing threat, it’s the one intelligent and energetic person who can emerge from nowhere and orchestrate a 9/11 while the world focuses elsewhere.

To that end, the government should declassify as much evidence as possible, and explain how it obtained it. It should call numerous witnesses to testify, especially since the one who has been publicly identified, Majid Khan, claims he was tortured while in CIA custody overseas.

Instead of limiting access to a few closed-circuit TVs, it should consider televising the proceedings. It should ensure that censorship is minimized, and used only to protect intelligence sources and methods, not to save the government from embarrassment. And it should let Mohammed and the others testify at length on their behalf if they so desire.

By doing so, the Obama administration will be able to say it did its best to put on the kind of civilian trial it has wanted all along, and one with a similar outcome to that of the al Qaida members charged with blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

Those of us who witnessed that trial in Manhattan in 2001 saw the defendants squirm in their chairs as prosecutors introduced mountains of evidence against them. We saw eyewitnesses point the finger at the accused, and surviving victims glare at them from the pews.

We heard from the terrorists themselves, and learned a lot about why they did it, about how terrorist networks operate and about what might be done to stop people like them. And when the jury convicted them, there was no question that justice was done.

If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.’

Wahlberg has apologized profusely for his lightning-rod remarks — but the pocket pundits of Tumblr and other meme machines have already had their say. Check out the following slide show for some of the most notable examples of Wahlberg-inspired Internet art.

View the slide show

What it did ready me for is one of my favorite things, interviewing screenwriters about their work. In my various capacities at the Writers Guild of America, East, I’ve had the opportunity over the last decade and a half to talk with many of them, in private for articles or video archives, and in public, in front of an audience, at screenings of their films. Sometimes the director and one or two of the actors come, too.

This has led to some odd experiences: like dealing with the emotionally fragile starlet who recently had gone through a very public break-up. I had to gently coax her out of her limo and into the screening because she was afraid of the paparazzi, who were covering a premiere at the theater next door. They didn’t notice.

Or the time the writer knelt next to me during his film and frantically whispered that an entire reel had been skipped, the next to last one. We let everyone see it when the movie was over but discovered that the hapless projectionist had been showing it that way – to critics – for weeks.  The film opened and closed very quickly.

There was the incomprehensible interview with Jean-Luc Godard, which was not because my French was worse than his English, or vice versa, but simply because he’s Jean-Luc Godard; and the Q & A with British writer and director Mike Leigh – my first question triggered a rapid-fire, twenty-minute monologue that was impossible to interrupt. Because he covered virtually every one of my prepared questions, it wasn’t so bad. By the time he had worn himself out, we were ready for questions from the audience.

But one of the most unusual interviews took place just last month, a week or so before Christmas. I was scheduled to introduce a screening of “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” and talk afterwards with the author of its screenplay, Eric Roth, whose other credits include “Forrest Gump” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

When I arrived at the theater, a representative from Warner Brothers let me know that the film’s director, Stephen Daldry, would be joining us as well. I had to pretty much toss the interview I’d prepared – most of my questions were about Eric’s work and screenwriting in general – but it would be okay. Stephen and I had met several years ago when he was promoting his movie “The Hours” and I was interviewing its screenwriter, David Hare.

If you haven’t heard by now, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” adapted from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, is a tough movie to watch, especially if you’re a New Yorker who was here on 9/11. But in my opinion, it’s well worth it; the engaging, entertaining and powerful story of an emotionally troubled Asperger’s kid who seeks to reconnect with the father he lost at the World Trade Center. The boy travels across the city trying to solve the riddle of a mysterious key he finds in his father’s closet a year after the attacks.

The film ended and there was applause, which doesn’t always happen at these things; we are, after all, jaded, Manhattan media sophisticates. The lights came up, I introduced Eric and Stephen and started to ask my first question.

Stephen interrupted (he’s a director). “I’d like to know what people think about the film. We’ve only just finished it and only shown it to a handful of audiences, so I’d like to know what you think.”

Silence.

I think we’re all experiencing a bit of shellshock, I said. Most of us were here on 9/11. Ten years later, it’s still kind of raw. Stephen repeated his question – what did you think?

Slowly, people began to respond, positively for the most part but in each of us the film triggered memories. People had friends in the buildings. A man who worked as an extra in the film – you see a split-second shot of him in a Batman costume – had a job in wire transfers at Bank of America. He worked the night shift at the Trade Center and left just minutes before American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. He’s still suffering from survivor guilt.

For me, it was a moment toward the end of the film when the boy, Oskar (an incredible performance by young, first-time actor Thomas Horn), visits an office downtown in the middle of the night. Security takes his photo and prints out a building ID. That would seem innocuous to most, but I remembered an evening about a week and a half after what Oskar calls “the worst day.” George Bush was addressing a joint session of Congress.

My then wife and I were burning candles to cover the smell from Ground Zero, which had shifted that rainy night from an odor of burning electrical cables and melted metal to something more feral and decaying. As we listened to Bush and I made dinner, she sat and sorted through a basket of odds and ends, then handed me something: a security ID with my picture — like Oskar’s — but taken the last time I had gone to the World Trade Center for a meeting.

The rest of my interview with Stephen and Eric went like that. I got a couple of my original questions in, but the evening had turned into a group therapy session, and that was fine. As Daldry recently said in the Los Angeles Times, “It’s a loss that’s very public and one that everyone has very rich stories about. One has to be responsible to the original author’s book … and you have to be aware of the truth of the reality of what happened to thousands of people who lost loved ones.

I heard a new ad for ”Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” on the radio this morning, its pitch apparently readjusted, aimed at those averse to a movie about the Trade Center calamity. It’s “not about 9/11,” the spot’s announcer declared, “but every day after.”

Nice try. The question is, as Stephen told the Times, “Is it time? Can we start to tell these stories yet or is it too early?” The film opens nationally on January 20. Spend a couple of hours in a darkened movie theater and find out what you think.

In spite of strained city and state budgets in local years, the trend has continued thanks to generous federal grants. According to a new story by the Center for Investigative Reporting, $34 billion in federal grant money has financed the past decade’s shopping spree.

To learn more about the trend, I spoke with G.W. Schultz, who co-authored the story with Andrew Becker. (Also worth a look is the slide show accompanying the story.)

You start your piece with Fargo, N.D., where the police have a “$256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret,” kevlar helmets and assault rifles in their squad cars. What did they say when you asked why they need this kind of heavy equipment?

Their view is that they need to be as prepared as a city like New York. We’ve been studying the grant programs for a while. You see this in city after city. Everyone has got an explanation for why they need more and not less grant money. I grew up in Tulsa; there’s still a lot of sensitivity around the Oklahoma City bombing. So the attitude is, “Look, we could have a similar attack and we need to be ready for it.” Now I live in Austin. The attitude here is, we could have an incident like the one in which a guy smashed his plane into the IRS building a few years ago, or the one in which a guy started shooting people from a tower at the Uniersity of Texas a few decades ago. Every city has an answer like that. The approach to security spending is based on speculation about what could happen, however remote. That attitude enables you to buy everything without limit because you can never attain 100 percent security.

What is the federal grant program that is handing out all this money?

What we learned over time is that it’s not just one grant program, it’s grant programs. There is a dizzying array of grants that local communities are eligible for from the Department of Homeland Security and sometimes the Justice Department. A few grants existed prior to 9/11. After DHS was created, Congress kept creating new programs to meet perceived needs around security. For example, “We need a bulletproof vehicle to send in our SWAT unit if a Mumbai-style attack occurs.” That led to a spree of spending on bulletproof vehicles. Each round of purchases is fueled by a what-if scenario.

You write in your piece that there’s a lot of information still lacking about this spending. What don’t we know? 

We’ve been working on this Homeland Security research for a few years. The feds have never had a listing of everything the local police and other local government agencies bought with the grant money. You literally can’t go to Washington and find a listing of how the $34 billion was spent; you have to go state by state. We set out to do that; after a period of many months, we still only have records from 41 states, and they are wildly inconsistent. We wanted to build a nationwide database of how the money was spent, but there turned out to be just no way to do it because of the lack of information. But we spent so much time with grant records, we were able to identify trends; we knew many communities were buying SWAT-style trucks, combat-style protective gear, and so on.

Has most of this equipment — assault rifles and armored vehicles and so on — just not been used? 

It’s hard to tell. We can say from available audits that a lot of the equipment purchased with grant funds is not used. As the years pass by, you see more people in government concede that particularly during the early years after 9/11, a lot of the stuff that was bought was never used, and a lot of money was wasted. I was recently at a small public safety summit in Austin and the chief of police here rhetorically asked the audience, “All the protective attire that you bought after 9/11 for a chemical attack, have you used any of that?” And the room kind of giggled a little bit. In the end there’s still an attitude in law enforcement and the government that it could be used and we need to be prepared.

Who is making money off of all this?

Well, defense contractors are not manufacturing F-35s or big ships for local cops. But these companies and Wall Street in general think in terms of diversity. They want small profit margins and large profit margins. Companies like Northrop Grumman have sold a lot of bomb-dismantling robots to local police. Some traditional defense contractors like Raytheon have also gotten into the intelligence side, selling things like information-sharing tools and radio equipment. I went to a conference a few weeks ago where Raytheon had a big presence, offering expensive communications equipment for dispatchers and so on.

It’s important to point out you can’t buy guns with Homeland Security grants — but it’s about the only thing you can’t buy. That’s a restriction the feds decided to place early on. But if a local police department can take care of some of the capabilities they believe they need to have with grants, that leaves money to buy things like AR-15s. In the 10 years since 9/11, they’ve done both — both combat-style SWAT attire and assault rifles. That’s partly why you see images now of SWAT police looking very much like combat troops in Baghdad or Kabul.

Are there any dissenting voices within the police community about all this militarization? 

There are even folks in the SWAT community — some of the older folks who have observed the evolution of SWAT — who are concerned about this. They’re concerned about whether or not the training is going to meet all the equipment that’s being bought. Part of the reason for that is the training is not as sexy as the equipment. The image and romance of battling bad guys with lots of tough-looking equipment and guns maybe isn’t as exciting as investing in training. There’s also concern among some police about deploying tactical units too often — for low-risk warrant executions and things like that. But, the counter-voice in law enforcement is, “Look, this enhances safety for officers.” They look back at a couple of really bad shootings and say, “We’re never going to let that happen again. We’re going to get whatever equipment or training we need.” But that comes at a cost.

Does it make police look more intimidating to be wielding AR-15s with all kinds of devices attached to them? Especially in a country that’s been working for years to implement community policing strategies. In a place like Los Angeles, there were years of work done to soften the image of law enforcement and improve the department’s relationship with minority communities. Is that threatened by the wider adoption of combat stye equipment and training?

“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is pretty much the last of this year’s supposedly major holiday movies to be unveiled for the press and public, and if I were director Stephen Daldry (he of “The Hours” and “Billy Elliot”), I might’ve wanted to sit on it a bit longer. It’s not a terrible film, exactly, but something worse, an irritating and enervating one. A longtime theater director who made the switch to film in the early 2000s, Daldry has a propensity for pretty, almost vampiric movies that are elegantly staged but drain the life out of their source material — and Foer’s novel didn’t have too much of that to begin with. A whimsical fable about an overly precious and eccentric 9-year-old, loaded down with Asperger-ish tics and phobias, who goes on a self-appointed citywide treasure hunt after his father dies in the twin towers, “Extremely Loud” always struck me as a sentimental contrivance. (I started the book and couldn’t finish it.)

Daldry and screenwriter Eric Roth remove some of the book’s more maddening byways and curlicues (such as the epistolary back story of the main character’s German grandparents) but can’t evade its biggest problems. What they wind up with is something like an especially slow-moving and unnaturally grave Wes Anderson movie, with a hero you constantly want to smack, mixed with an after-school special about grief and healing. Throw in a bunch of awkward, still-life supporting performances — Sandra Bullock, Max von Sydow, Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright, all sitting around looking sad — skillful cinematography by British vet Chris Menges and a Minimalist orchestral score by Alexandre Desplat, and it all adds up to something that looks and feels classy yet is really minor-league schmaltz.

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell (played by one-time “Teen Jeopardy” contestant Thomas Horn, in his acting debut) feels like a literary creation all the way, a precocious and painfully odd city kid who’s afraid of almost everything and way too dependent on his dad, a Manhattan jeweler named Thomas. (You know, I like Tom Hanks, and he’s perfectly OK in this role, but he’s almost the last guy I would consider to play a New York shopkeeper of German and/or Jewish extraction.) Thomas has constructed a long-running scavenger hunt designed to draw Oskar out of his shell, and purportedly to solve the mystery of the missing “sixth borough” of New York City, which was dragged away at some point by secretive authorities for unknown reasons. This quest is interrupted after Thomas is vaporized in the World Trade Center, and the traumatized Oskar conceals his father’s last phone messages from his mother (Bullock). But when Oskar finds a key hidden inside a vase in his dad’s closet, he thinks it’s a clue from beyond the grave, and sets out on a mission to interview all 800-odd New Yorkers who share the surname Black (which was written on the envelope that held the key).

I get that you either have to suspend your disbelief and travel with the tambourine-jingling, subway-phobic Oskar from Fort Greene to Hamilton Heights to Astoria to Broad Channel — enjoying the journey and not fixating on the destination, etc. — or simply bail out, but I was supposed to write this review and couldn’t do the latter. In a larger sense, the problem with Daldry’s film is that it’s much too polite and pretty and classed-up, and lacks the nebbishy intensity and conviction that Foer’s mock-Salinger universe at least pretends to possess. “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” demanded the real Wes Anderson or, better still, Michel Gondry — someone who would treat Oskar’s filing systems and maps and sets of regulations and French Foreign Legion-style accessories with the utmost seriousness, and even make them the point of the whole enterprise.

What we get instead is frankly a drag, a slow-moving tale of healing and redemption with a low-wattage resolution you’ll glimpse miles away and a whole bunch of trailing loose ends. (Two of the major questions you’re asking yourself after reading my plot synopsis are never answered.) Oh, it’s enjoyable enough when von Sydow’s on hand as Oskar’s mysterious European grandfather, mostly because the titanic Swede is always terrific even when absolutely silent (as here). I did hear a little sniffling around me in the darkness, so if you’re an easy mark you may need a hankie. But, for the love of God, a movie that’s about 9/11 and autism and growing up without a dad should leave you crying buckets, and this one is too restrained and arty and highfalutin — I believe the correct expression in Daldry’s homeland would be “piss-elegant” — even to accomplish that.