Posted on 09/11/2001 10:05:11 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Sept. 11 — In a sophisticated attack on the nation’s financial and military centers Tuesday morning, two hijacked jetliners slammed into New York’s World Trade Center, collapsing the towering main twin towers, and a third jet plowed into the Pentagon, where 800 or more people were reported dead. President Bush defiantly vowed 12 hours later to bring the terrorists to justice, promising that “we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them.”IN A BRIEF televised address, delivered from the White House Oval Office, Bush characterized the “despicable acts of terror” as “acts of mass murder.” It was a stark acknowledgment of the likely toll of those killed in the coordinated attacks Tuesday morning, the worst terrorist strike in U.S. history.
“Thousands of lives were suddenly ended,” Bush said solemnly, when hijacked jetliners slammed into the Trade Center’s twin towers and the Pentagon, an attack of breathtaking brazenness for which U.S. intelligence said Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden was most likely responsible.
The gruesome task of counting the dead could take weeks. Airline officials said the four hijacked jetliners alone carried a total of 266 passengers and crew.
About 20,000 people work at the Pentagon, where NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski said fire officials had put the number of dead at about 800, including the 64 people on the hijacked plane that rammed the complex.
As many as 50,000 people were believed to work in the two main towers of the World Trade Center.
In New York, officials refused to offer estimates of the death toll, but they held out hope that it would be lower than feared because about an hour elapsed between the time the towers were struck and the time they collapsed in heaps. In that period, they said, it appeared that the majority of occupants were able to escape.
Late Tuesday, New York police Sgt. Ralph Lowe told NBC’s Anne Thompson that two officers had been found alive and unconscious in the rubble.
EARLY MORNING CHAOS
The attacks began shortly before 9 a.m. ET.
Mike Carter, vice president of the city’s firefighters union, estimated that half of the 400 firefighters first at the scene may be dead. “We have entire companies that are just missing,” he told The Associated Press. “We lost chiefs. ... We’re going to have to bury a lot of people.”
“It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Joan Goldstein, an Associated Press employee who was on a bus from New Jersey when she saw “smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center building.”
“We said, ‘Oh, my God! The World Trade Center’s on fire!’ ” Goldstein said.
MSNBC.com reporter Martin Wolk, who was inside one of the towers, said the lights flickered and there was a loud bang. People panicked and started to flee the building.
“It was sheer pandemonium. People were screaming and crying, afraid to go outside because of the falling debris,” Wolk said. “We looked up, and it looked like the top 20 floors were in flames.”
GOVERNMENT SCRAMBLES TO RESPOND
The White House, the U.S. Capitol and federal buildings in and around Washington were evacuated after the three assaults in New York and Washington and a failed fourth strike that ended when a jetliner crashed into a field near Pittsburgh.
The president was stranded outside Washington when the attacks were launched, discussing education in Florida.
With speculation swirling that the fourth jetliner had been headed for his retreat at Camp David, Md., Bush hopscotched the country in Air Force One, stopping first at Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, La., and then flying on to Offutt Air Force base outside Omaha, Neb., where he was taken to a underground bunker at U.S. Strategic Command headquarters.
Newsweek’s Howard Fineman reported that Bush’s return to Washington was delayed by what senior presidential counselor Karl Rove called credible threats against the president.
At Offutt, the president met by teleconference with Vice President Dick Cheney and his national security team before heading back to Washington.
Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew back to Washington from Europe. Asked about potential military responses to the attacks, Shelton told reporters: “I have no intentions of discussing what comes next. But make no mistake about it — your armed forces stand ready.”
The FBI set up a Web site where people could report any tips or other information: www.ifccfbi.gov. Intelligence officials told NBC News they were especially eager to recover any video tourists may have been shooting before and during the attacks.
The Justice Department’s Office of Victims of Crime established a hot line for families seeking information about victims and survivors. The number is (800) 331-0075.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was in his office on the opposite side of the Pentagon at the time of that attack, was not injured and indeed was reported to have helped with rescue efforts.
“The Pentagon is functioning,” he told reporters Tuesday evening. “It will be in business tomorrow.”
The attacks accomplished at least some of their presumed purposes, snarling the nation’s government, transportation and finances and sowing fear and suspicion among its citizens:
For the first time ever, the Federal Aviation Administration closed all U.S. airports, shutting down air traffic until Wednesday morning at the earliest.
Financial markets also closed and were to remain closed Wednesday.
Prominent Arab-American and Muslim American organizations, fearing a backlash against Americans of Arab descent, urged their members and followers to consider staying out of public and called for heightened security at mosques and Arab centers.
All Major League Baseball games were canceled, and large buildings across the nation — shopping malls, skyscrapers, transportation centers — were shuttered.
HIJACKING DETAILS
The day’s horrifying events unfolded this way:
At 8:45 a.m. ET, as thousands of people were streaming to work in lower Manhattan, American Airlines Flight 11, from Boston to Los Angeles, slammed into the north tower of the 110-story World Trade Center. Fires blazed and smoke billowed out of the skyscrapers, one of two that had famously dominated Manhattan’s skyline.
At 9:03 a.m., as terrified occupants were still trying to flee the blazing north tower and Americans awakened to the reality of the deadly terror, United Air Lines Flight 175, also flying from Boston to Los Angeles, rammed into the south tower. Broadcast cameras already watching the scene taped the second plane as it exploded in a huge fireball.
At 9:43 a.m., the scope of the horror expanded dramatically when American Flight 77, flying from Dulles Airport outside Washington to Los Angeles, crashed into the west side of the Pentagon in Washington’s Virginia suburbs.
Seven minutes later, the north tower of the Trade Center collapsed. Untold thousands of people were trapped inside, and enormous plumes of choking gray smoke and debris tornado-tunneled through packed narrow streets rimmed by Manhattan’s enormous skyscrapers.
The south tower disintegrated at 10:29 a.m., and much of lower Manhattan was evacuated.
Meanwhile, sometime around 10 a.m., United Flight 93, headed to San Francisco from Newark, N.J., crashed into a field about 80 miles from Pittsburgh.
An emergency dispatcher in Westmoreland County, Pa., received a cell phone call at 9:58 a.m. from a man who said he was a passenger locked in the bathroom of United Flight 93, said dispatch supervisor Glenn Cramer.
“We are being hijacked. We are being hijacked!” Cramer quoted the man as saying. The man told dispatchers that the plane “was going down,” Cramer said. “He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane, and we lost contact with him.”
Officials originally presumed that the hijackers were trying to crash the jet into Camp David, in the mountains of Catoctin, Md. But Attorney General John Ashcroft told members of Congress late Tuesday that the plane was believed to have been turning toward Washington itself, NBC’s Mike Viqueira reported.
Ashcroft told lawmakers that the hijackers were believed to have used knives as their weapons.
Then at 5:25 p.m., as overwhelmed rescuers and ordinary Americans were beginning to breathe a sigh of relief that the worst was over, a third, smaller tower of the Trade Center collapsed in flames.
Although the tower had been evacuated of its everyday occupants, the complex was still swarming with rescue crews and investigators. Horrified emergency officials halted the rescue effort for several hours without knowing how many hundreds or thousands of people were still buried in the rubble.
Although no one immediately claimed responsibility for the coordinated attacks, suspicion immediately focused on the extensive terrorist organization run by bin Laden, 44, a wealthy Saudi militant suspected in previous attacks on U.S. interests. Among them are the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa and last year’s bombing of a U.S. Navy ship in Yemen.
A senior U.S. official told NBC News’ Robert Windrem on Tuesday evening that information developed left officials “90 percent certain” that bin Laden’s organization was responsible.
“This is not just surmise,” the official said. “This is new information.”
Officials and terrorism experts said few, if any, other organizations are believed to have the cash or expertise to mount attacks like those of Tuesday.
A spokesman for Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, which has been accused of harboring bin Laden, condemned the attacks and denied that bin Laden was behind them. The sophistication of the coordinated assault required the expertise of a government, the Taliban said.
Developments continued rippling out from the terror attacks throughout the day:
U.S. intelligence operations came under intense attack from members of Congress and former military officials who claimed that the United States had abandoned so-called human intelligence — spies on the ground — in favor of technological wizardry.
“If there had been successful intelligence gathering, we would have thwarted” the attacks, said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “There’s never going to be perfect intelligence, but we cannot afford these kinds of failures.”
The U.S. Navy dispatched three ships from Norfolk Naval Base, Va., to positions off New York: the destroyers USS Ross and USS Ramage and the cruiser USS Vella Gulf. The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, which had just left the Persian Gulf, was ordered to remain in the Indian Ocean.
Iraqi state television hailed the attacks as the “operation of the century,” which the United States deserved because of its “crimes against humanity.”
Washington Police Chief Charles Ramsey recommended canceling the scheduled Washington meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank next month. Previous meetings, notably in Seattle and Genoa, Italy, were marked by violent anti-capitalist protests.
Gasoline prices began soaring across the nation within hours of the attacks. Prices at stations in Kansas, Mississippi and Missouri were reported to have hit as high as $5 a gallon by early evening.
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