Mr. Sanford is 26 years old. He was born here in the Robert Taylor Housing Project in the heart of one of America's more notorious ghettos. Although raised a black Muslim, he doesn't pray very often. But he says that, thanks to his religion, he showers and brushes his teeth every day to show respect for his body. He doesn't want to sell drugs, but when people have nothing, "they need to find a way to eat."

Don't count on him to pause on Wednesday for the national moment of silence. He remembers that sky-blue New York morning a year ago when the World Trade Center tumbled on his TV screen and America's war on terror began. But the memory doesn't fill him with sadness or fear or patriotism.

"If you all really want the truth, I really don't care about all those white people dying. None of my friends do either. We think Osama bin Laden had his reasons."

He marvels at the attack, the ingenuity displayed in striking the heart of "white America" using its own airplanes. He is no terrorist, but he says he isn't surprised by what happened, " 'cause America is a bully in other places and people are angry. We had it coming."

Mr. Sanford lifts the sleeve of his white T-shirt. "I'll show you why I don't care." His muscular triceps has a deep, wishbone-shaped scar, a reminder of a scrap with his brother-in-law during a family knife fight. "See my flap? I call it that 'cause, when I was cut, the skin flapped up and down like a chicken wing." To close his flap, doctors needed 54 stitches.

Next, he lifts his red baseball cap, price tag ($25) still under the brim, to reveal a pockmark on his forehead, from a piece of shrapnel, he says. Then he stretches out a leg to show more scars.

Ten of his childhood friends are dead, knifed or shot. "Sept. 11th? Man, that's the white man's war. Down here, people die all the time."

At that moment, the sound of four gunshots comes from the parking lot, just 15 metres away. Everyone freezes.

Several young men duck and run for cover. Then they stop, look back and start to laugh.

"Anybody shot?" someone asks.

"Nope," says one of the gangbangers, who is dragging around a 12-foot chain, flexing his muscles as he flicks it like a bull whip. "Those be just warning shots."

Shrugging his shoulders, Mr. Sanford spreads his arms, palms skyward, and lowers his voice. "See what I'm saying, man? Why should I care about New York? I live with terrorism every day."

But then something troubling began to happen: Americans also started to turn up on the wrong side of the fence. Instead of fighting or simply fearing terrorists, these people sympathized and, in some cases, worked with them.

First came John Walker Lindh, the middle-class Californian found in December cowering in an Afghan basement after Taliban prisoners tried to fight off the U.S. Marines. In January, a note expressing sympathy for Mr. bin Laden was retrieved from the pocket of 15-year-old Charles Bishop, who died when the Cessna he had stolen slammed into an office tower in Tampa, Fla.

Soon, mysterious packages laced with deadly anthrax spores began to arrive by mail and kill people, and by spring a young man was planting pipe bombs in the Midwest and leaving notes that read: "Mail boxes are exploding! Why, you ask? . . . When 1 per cent of the nation controls 99 per cent of the nation's wealth, is it a wonder why there are control problems?"

This kind of rogue violence used to be dismissed as an aberration, the realm of cranks such as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and the poster boy of antigovernment rage, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. But the domestic terrorism associated with Sept. 11 is deeper and more frightening - the enemy within now has some foreign friends who have shown just what they can do.

The longer the war on terror drags out, the more these anti-American Americans come to light. In May, police arrested a man as he got off a plane from Pakistan carrying $10,000 in cash. He identified himself as Abdullah al-Muhajir, but people in Chicago remembered him as Jose Padilla, a local boy who traded his middle-class upbringing for a life of crime in the South Side ghetto before converting to Islam. He left the country abruptly almost a decade ago, and the authorities say that while abroad he fell in with Mr. bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. Now, he is accused of coming back to build a radioactive "dirty bomb" that could be used to poison a city.

Last week, U.S. authorities arrested the latest American alleged to be working for the enemy. Earnest James Ujaama, 36, is believed to have tried to set up an al-Qaeda training camp in Oregon three years ago. Mr. Ujaama, originally from Seattle and known as James Earnest Thompson, has denied the charges, but federal officials say they have e-mails revealing that he met potential trainees and scouted out a ranch in an area that resembled Afghanistan.

He and Mr. Padilla are in custody, but there could be more potential attackers out there, says Steven Emerson, the author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (The Free Press, 2002). The terror gene pool is potentially deep, he says, because years ago many sympathetic Americans went to Afghanistan to fight in the holy war against the Russians.

Mr. Emerson now estimates there might be more than 1,000 U.S. veterans of the jihad, many of them trained by the Central Intelligence Agency and able to cause great damage. "Look at people who went through the Afghanistan camps," he says. "This is where you're going to find your future lieutenants to bin Laden."

Rodney Hamptonel is one these veterans. A hospital technician from Brooklyn, he went off to fight in Afghanistan and returned in 1989 with the scars to prove it: arm and leg wounds caused by a Russian land mine. Yet he told his friends that he was a failure - he hadn't become a martyr.

He soon tried to remedy that situation at home. In the early 1990s, he came into contact with Sheikh Abdel Rahman, a blind cleric from Egypt who had come to the United States in 1990 to plot what authorities later called "a war of urban terrorism." He is also thought to have inspired those responsible for the 1993 attempt to bring down the World Trade Center.

Mr. Hampton-el was to use his explosives training to help construct a series of massive bombs to be exploded in the United Nations headquarters, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, in Manhattan's New York Federal Plaza and on the George Washington Bridge.

But the conspiracy was uncovered, and he, along with eight other militant Muslims, is serving 35 years in prison for the scheme, which could have killed thousands.

Are there many more like him? "God knows where the hell they are, because we never found them," Bob Blitzer, former counterterrorism chief for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said recently. "It's always been a potential time bomb."

Writer Robert D. Kaplan first used the term in reference to the angry young men of the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia who were "out of school, unemployed, loose molecules in an unstable social fluid that threatened to ignite."

But it may also apply to the pockets of deep disaffection that U.S. society has created. These pockets cross racial and socioeconomic boundaries, fostering a nihilistic minority that would rather destroy the American Dream than try to be part of it.

Don Beck, co-founder of the National Values Center in Denton, Tex., says the United States is discovering that it has people who have failed to bond to the body politic. He predicts that plenty of disaffected young Americans may be attracted to radical Islam.

"Here is a simplistic, seventh-century, puritanical and closed-value structure that is locked in a premodern mindset," he told the Chicago Tribune, explaining what may have motivated Mr. Padilla. "Unhappily, it's the next stop for millions of youth who have been shut out, frustrated and left behind as they see their counterparts, both next door and in other societies, thriving and prospering. And it transcends racial or ethnic categories, which is why it is such a threat."

That anger is especially palpable in the ghettos, where Saleem Sanford and young men like him think that they are doomed to minimum-wage jobs, if that. "I don't like seeing people die," Mr. Sanford says. "What Padilla wanted to do was wrong. But I understand his rage, man. I've got a lot of pent-up aggressiveness myself. A hundred of my friends feel just like Padilla and think about Osama."

This is hardly a universal feeling, argues Najee Ali, a well-known black Muslim community leader whose Project Islamic Hope tries to steer troubled kids away from radical sects. But then again, he says, "many young people - and not just African Americans - see the hypocrisy of America, where the most powerful country on the planet can put a man on the moon, yet we can't look after our own poor. I believe that if we don't monitor what our young people are being influenced by, we'll continue to have domestic terrorism in America."

This kind of thinking comes as no surprise to Rev. Bamani Obadele, who runs the South Side's Harvest Holistic Center for young people, and sees a link between poverty and terrorism. "Remember, it was America that created those guys. Is it any wonder? Look at this place."

He is walking through the Robert Taylor Project, rounding up children for free back-to-school haircuts. As he pats them on the head and ushers them aboard the bus that will take them to the barbershop, he notes that here, in one of the more dangerous ghettos in the United States, there were a half-dozen murders last year, about one for every 100 residents.

Shootings are common, rapes often go unreported and most people in the projects don't have even a minimum-wage job due to a criminal record, lack of education and drug addiction or simple discrimination - prospective employers often take one look at where they live and turn them down.

"This place is a war zone," Mr. Obadele, 30, says, staring up at the towers' balconies, fenced in with steel wire, like a catwalk at the jail. Every third window is boarded up to keep out thieving addicts. "The bullets can start flying at any time. You can be killed any time.

"The vast majority of people here are good Americans, good people. But there is a feeling among them that on Sept. 11, the chickens began coming home to roost for the rest of America."

Mr. Obadele grew up in this turbulent world, born to a 13-year-old mother who named him Paris Thompson. When he was young, the Chicago ghettos were at their most violent - crack had appeared to replace heroin and Uzis began to replace switchblades. He tried to get out, shining shoes at the police station until he graduated from high school. Then he tried a number of jobs, from loading trucks to being a baseball umpire.

The neighbourhood drew him back, though not as a gang member. He joined the Greater Harvest Missionary Baptist Church as a lay minister and, during a 1999 trip to Senegal, adopted his current name, which means "Warrior Father Returns Home" and began fighting for poor blacks.

As he drives his car down State Street, passing one boarded-up shop after another, he also admits that "I didn't shed a tear on Sept. 11. Now the people who did Sept. 11 should be brought to justice, sure, I'll say that. But I didn't shed a tear that day . . . Just look at life down here."

Or look at the statistics. The United States has more black men in jail than in college. In the latest Chicago census, the average annual income for blacks was $29,086 compared with $49,222 for whites, and the gap is growing.

But even those numbers don't reflect the reality of the projects, where some people are so poor that their rent, because it's geared to income, amounts to only 50 cents a month. The water doesn't always work, the elevators often grind to a halt and the dank, unlit stairwells can be deadly hangouts, where girls are raped and knife fights break out. Some old people don't leave their top-floor apartments for months. The unemployment rate is at least 70 per cent. And the only place to shop is Finer Foods, where everything is kept behind bulletproof glass and the owner has a Louisville Slugger by the register.

"Can you blame people for not caring about Sept. 11?" Mr. Obadele asks.

Teresa certainly doesn't. "People die in here all the time," she says, her voice rising angrily. "But nobody cares about that, so why should I care about them?"

A mother of two, Teresa is distinguished by the green, gang-style tattoo on her biceps (it reads "Cosima") and the simple fact that she has a job, as a medical technician. Today, she sits on a park bench on a sweltering afternoon in a grim playground. Below the children's feet as they swing lies jagged glass and the occasional flattened rat, poisoned and left to rot.

The towers of the Taylor Housing Project loom overhead. Here, it isn't airplanes that people fear falling from the sky, but babies (they plunge from the poorly designed windows) and sniper fire from drug dealers and gangbangers on the balconies.

And people in the projects are no strangers to falling towers. For years, the Chicago Housing Authority has been demolishing the buildings here in a bid to make the ghetto and its residents go away. The city finally realized that its housing experiment has become a crucible for violence and rage.

"You want to hear the truth?" Teresa asks. "When I saw those 4,000 people die on Sept. 11, I didn't feel sorry for them. When I was a girl, I saw my sister killed when she was standing beside me. Shot in a gang fight. Now you people know what it's like to be black."

"You tell him, girl," a friend adds, rocking back and forth on the bench.

"You think if those planes hit one of our buildings here, anybody would care?" Teresa continues, her voice growing more shrill. "It would be on the news for a week and you'd all forget about it, and there wouldn't be no anniversary. You think anybody would give us any money, like those people in New York? We don't get nothing."

Osama bombed the World Trade Center, says a scar-faced man named Keith, who sits on an old office chair drinking malt liquor, because George W. Bush and his friends were running heroin out of Afghanistan and didn't like the Taliban.

A passerby, also with a butterscotch-coloured scar zigzagging from eyebrow to collarbone, stops to offer his twist on the tale. "It ain't Osama bin Laden who bombed those buildings," he says, swigging from a bottle in a brown paper bag. "It was Bush and the Jews, to make Muslims look bad."

Saleem Sanford has his own explanation: "It was God that wanted this."

Gwen Hogan scoffs at the fantasies. She works with Mr. Obadele at the Harvest Holistic Center, organizing zoo outings and other activities designed to keep kids off drugs. She is open and friendly - and disconnected from Sept. 11.

"To be honest with you, when I first saw it, I had no reaction, I just thought, `That's messed up, what did we do to people to make them want to do that to us?' " she recalls. "Then I felt bad for the families, when you saw the people dying."

At 42, Ms. Hogan has seen her share of family grief. She is a single mother, with three school-aged children because two years ago, her husband, Kelsey, was shot 16 times by an off-duty jail guard in a parking lot. When the anniversary of his death comes around, she usually can't work. Even now as she remembers, she stops and stares off into space.

"We may not have the magnitude of Sept. 11th down here on any one day," she says. "But if you add it all up, all our death and violence, it's just as bad. You just can't feel anything any more."

To mark the first anniversary of the bombings, Black Entertainment TV asked its viewers to describe how life has changed in the past year. Most logged into the network's on-line chat room to offer predictable responses - they now pray more often, feel terrible for the victims and want America to vanquish the terrorists.

But others reflected the rage of the ghetto: "Life has not changed," wrote someone calling himself johnbb20. "I am glad that the country was attacked! Now all of the stooped [sic] racist white trash has to deal with the same thing that we deal with every day! From being followed around in stores by police, being accused falsely, being shot down in the streets for reaching for a damn wallet, etc. Maybe they will wake the hell up! Nah, they will continue their racist ways until the country is nuked into dust."

Anonymous rants are easy to dismiss but Wilbert A. Tatum, publisher emeritus of Harlem's Amsterdam News, warns mainstream Americans they can expect more attacks from within. "The poor and the minorities of America are angry - so angry, in fact, that they are willing to sacrifice themselves in order that America be taught a lesson in civilization, in sharing and in caring," he writes, in a newspaper that is rarely read by non-blacks.

"As a consequence, we are not going to be able to find enough people who care enough about America, or who are honest enough, to guard our airports and search the luggage that goes through them."

Except that "I ain't proud to be an American," he insists, explaining that this is the only cap he has. "That Osama guy was one cool character. I wish he'd blown up Chicago. He should have blown up that there Sears Tower."

Then Mr. Wood looks around at the three towers, where so many people live in fear and squalor and only the drug dealers with the fat wads rolling dice in the parking lot have any real money, and adds, "He should have blown up this place too."