White House: Bush Was A Target
- Terrorists May Have Intended To Strike White House, Air Force One
- President Bush Brands Attacks 'Acts Of War'
- In New York And DC, The Task Of Finding, Counting Victims Begins
Sept. 12, 2001
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Hundreds of rescuers and emergency workers swarm all over the World Trade Center wreckage.
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(CBS) Amid the grim accounting of the dead and injured from the airborne onslaught that toppled the World Trade Center and blasted the Pentagon, authorities said Wednesday they believed the terrorists had also targeted the White House and Air Force One.
"There was real and credible information that the White House and Air Force One were targets of terrorist attacks and that the plane that hit the Pentagon was headed for the White House," White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan told reporters.
That helped to explain why President Bush did not immediately return to Washington from Florida on Tuesday morning and take charge of crisis operations run from the Situation Room in the White House basement.
Mr. Bush, who had been in Sarasota, Fla., for an education speech, first flew to an Air Force base in Louisiana and then to one in Nebraska before returning to the White House at dusk.
His Boeing 747, operating as a kind of airborne White House, was escorted by military fighter jets.
There were suggestions of criticism of Mr. Bush's movements, but until Wednesday afternoon, the White House had refused to discuss why Mr. Bush had flown from one undisclosed location to another. White House officials said only that they were deferring to Secret Service and military counsel.
Also Wednesday, in his strongest condemnation yet, Mr. Bush called Tuesday's devastating attacks on the United States "acts of war," and asked Congress for emergency funding.
Read more about the
investigation into the attacks.
"The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war," Mr. Bush said after meeting his top security aides in the White House Cabinet room. "This battle will take time and resolve, but make no mistake about it, we will win."
The assault led Mr. Bush to place the military on its highest state of alert.
The Navy said the aircraft carrier USS George Washington was in position Wednesday off the coast of New York.
And in a show of support from U.S. allies, NATO invoked a mutual defense clause for the first time in its history, opening the way for a possible collective military response.
"An attack on one is an attack on all," said NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson. "The parties will take such action as it deems necessary, including armed force."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted "a sustained and broadly based effort" against the terrorists when they're identified. Secretary of State Colin Powell said the president will oversee "a long-term conflict," and vowed: "We will go after them."
Authorities are focusing on four separate terrorist groups, some tied to Osama bin Laden, law enforcement officials said Wednesday.
Members of one organization may have entered the United States through Canada, authorities said.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said between three and six hijackers, armed with knives and box cutters, seized control of each of four commercial planes. Two of the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one went down about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
The hijackers included pilots trained in the United States.
 "The Department of Justice has undertaken perhaps the most massive and intensive investigation ever conducted in this country," Ashcroft said.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said investigators' goals were identifying the hijackers and
any accomplices, both inside and outside the United States.
Mueller said individuals had been detained and questioned, but there have been no arrests.
The director said agents have followed leads that the hijackers or their associates had been in Florida, Boston and Providence, R.I. He said authorities are "attempting to create the travels" of the suspected terrorists.
Officials said authorities were gathering evidence that the terrorist cells may have had prior involvement in earlier plots against the United States. That includes the USS Cole bombing in Yemen and the foiled attack on U.S. soil during the millennium celebrations.
Interactive:
In New York, rescue efforts suffered a setback when four stories that remained of the World Trade Center's south tower collapsed after workers struggled through the night to find any victims trapped inside. Three other buildings near the Trade Center also collapsed, reports CBS News Correspondent Byron Pitts.
There were 55 confirmed fatalities, but thousands are feared dead.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said 202 firefighters and another 57 NYPD and Port Authority police officers were among the missing.
New York's downtown sections remained closed below 14th Street. Streets throughout the entire borough of Manhattan were almost devoid of traffic, except for ambulances, police and military vehicles, and loader trucks.
The ordinarily busy area around the Trade Center remained like a war zone, the streets littered with burned-out cars and firetrucks, along with half-melted police cars.
Smoke continued to pour upward from the site where the towers once stood, their absence a jagged scar in the city skyline. Smaller fires still burned. Twisted metal piled 50 feet high filled Vesey Street.
"It's like Beirut," said Wilson Franco, a Civil Air Patrol member working in the area near ground zero. "It's horrifying."
 In Washington, where hijackers slammed a passenger plane into the Pentagon, the U.S. military headquarters was open for operations despite damage from a massive fire. Secretary Rumsfeld said earlier estimates that as many as 800 workers could be unaccounted for in the attack were apparently much too high.
Authorities said they did not expect to find more survivors in the Pentagon rubble.
President Bush toured the still-smoldering Pentagon Wednesday afternoon, saying the devastation made him sad and angry. "The nation mourns," he said, "but we must go on." First Lady Laura Bush visited victims in an area hospital.
The nation's air space was partially reopened Wednesday when the Federal Aviation Administration said flights diverted on Tuesday would be authorized to finish their journeys. All other planes remain grounded.
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said that only passengers on the original flights could reboard and only after new security measures were put in place. Airlines also can move empty airplanes, Mineta said.
Mineta said he could give neither a time nor a date for full resumption of air service.
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