On September 11, 2001, President Bush was in Florida for an event in which he would read to a group of elementary school children to push his No Child Left Behind education proposal. As White House staffers left for the school at 8:42 a.m., their pagers and cell phones went wild. An aircraft had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC). Early reports indicated that it had been a small twin-engine plane, and the only explanation was, as the president later recalled, that the pilot “must have had a heart attack.”18 Air traffic controllers in Newark, New Jersey, knew differently. Just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, they had followed the radar screens tracing American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 en route from Boston to Los Angeles. Then through the windows to the outside, they had watched as the aircraft descended, its transponder off. Controller Rick Tepper said, “One of the towers, one of the trade towers, is on fire.”19
In fact, only minutes earlier, a radio signal from Flight 11 was heard in the Boston regional air traffic control center—an ominous voice saying, “We have some planes.” Expecting a hostage situation from the first aircraft, FAA officials treated it according to protocol, not realizing that the hijackers had something far more deadly in mind than landing in Cuba. Hijacked Flight 11, with eighty-one passengers and eleven crew members, flew a straight path into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, erupting into an inferno sending temperatures soaring to 1,800 degrees and engulfing the 110-story building in a ball of flame and smoke above the hundredth floor. As the emergency rescue teams raced to the site of the crash, most people still thought they were dealing with pilot error or a massive accident, not a deliberate act of terror. Glass, steel, and charred human remains rained down on the police and fire personnel who had rushed into the building, even as masses of frantic people streamed out. Many, trapped on the floors above the explosion, quickly realized they had no hope. Some jumped more than a hundred floors to their deaths. Others chose to remain, overcome by smoke inhalation or seared by the flames. Those on lower floors evacuated, efficiently and quickly, but surprisingly few doubted what had happened. “I knew it was a terrorist attack the moment I looked up and saw the smoke,” said one survivor. “I saw the face of evil.”20
By that time, the attention of news cameras and crowds was focused on the North Tower when a second jumbo jet, United Flight 175 from Boston to Los Angeles with fifty-six passengers and nine crew members, hurtled through the skyline, performing a sharp turn and crashing into the South Tower, generating a second massive fireball. In Florida, President Bush had just begun to read to second-graders when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, entered the classroom and whispered in his ear, “A second plane has hit the second tower. America is under attack.”21 Bush later remembered thinking, “They had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at that moment we were going to war.”22 CIA director George Tenet received the news in Washington. “This has bin Laden all over it,” referring to the renegade terrorist Osama bin Laden.23 He immediately recalled that the FBI had detained Zacarias Massoui in August after suspicions had been raised when he sought training at a Minnesota flight school. Tenet speculated that he might have a connection to the attack.
A shaken Bush appeared on television before the twin towers collapsed, informing the American public of “an apparent terrorist attack,” promising (in “oddly informal” language) to chase down “those folks who committed this act.”24 Already, he was being urged to stay away from Washington and to board Air Force One as soon as possible. The FAA knew that more than 4,200 planes still filled the skies—thousands of potential bombs in the hands of terrorists—and officials had already decided to ground any remaining airborne planes when, at 9:03, they saw United Flight 175 fly into the South Tower. A conference call to other air traffic controllers confirmed what they dreaded. A third plane was in the hands of hijackers—American Flight 77, bound for Los Angeles from Washington with 58 passengers and 8 crew members. Shortly after Bush delivered his terse address to the nation at 9:41, Flight 77 reappeared over Washington, D.C., and crashed into the Pentagon, killing all aboard and 125 people inside the building.
By that time, the FAA had commanded all aircraft to land as soon as possible, anywhere. Word spread overseas, and international flights to the United States were grounded—just in time, as it turned out, since other hijackers were prepared to take control of still other airplanes targeted for Big Ben and Parliament in England.
Meawhile, fire and rescue teams at the World Trade Center struggled to get survivors out, hamstrung by communications glitches among police, fire, and the New York Port Authority, who had jurisdiction over the towers. “There’s a lot of bodies,” said one fireman, as he reached the forty-fifth floor of the South Tower.25 Only sixteen people survived from the South Tower above the ninetieth floor, where the plane hit; none survived above the seventy-eighth floor crash line in the North Tower.
Although the buildings had been built to sustain accidental impacts of aircraft, no one dreamed that fully fueled jetliners would be deliberately aimed at the center of the structures. Even so, the towers stood for far longer than most structural analysts thought they could. Initial estimates that upward of ten thousand might have been killed were revised downward every minute the buildings stood—until 9:50 a.m. At that moment the South Tower collapsed and crumbled to the ground in a torrent of debris, dust, and thousands of human body parts, burying, among others, hundreds of firemen and rescue teams who had set up headquarters close to the building. Less than half an hour later, the other tower, with its massive antenna spike plunging straight into the middle of the disintegrating mass, imploded, with floors crashing straight down like pancakes. Hundreds of firefighters, trapped in the building, were crushed. News anchor Jon Scott, who provided a somber commentary on the morning’s events, went silent for many moments as the towers disintegrated. “America, offer a prayer,” he concluded.26 One structural engineer marveled that the towers stood as long as they did, noting that the worst worse-case scenarios could not have envisioned such an attack: “You may as well be talking about giant objects from space.”27 New York’s mayor Giuliani was a blur of energy, ordering certain areas evacuated, consoling firefighters and workers on the line, and supervising the environmental checks for poisonous gases and biological or other airborne threats.
At the time, one more plane was unaccounted for: United Airlines Flight 93 bound for San Francisco with forty-five people aboard had started an unauthorized climb at 9:35 a.m., raising concerns that it, too, had been hijacked. It had flown by Cleveland, made a U-turn, and then accelerated past Pittsburgh. Somewhere hear Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the plane wobbled out of control and plunged into a field, exploding in a fireball. Evidence soon surfaced that several courageous men and women led by Todd Beamer, who had heard of the WTC attack from other phone calls, realized their own aircraft was a suicide bomb headed for a target. The passengers had to overpower at least three men at the front of the plane or in the cockpit, one of them with bombs supposedly strapped to his body. Convinced the aircraft was turning for its final approach, Beamer said to the others, “Let’s roll.” Whether they succeeded in storming the cockpit, something forced the hijackers to crash the plane before reaching the intended target (which subsequent evidence indicates was the Capitol).28
Government offices in Washington had been evacuated, and President Bush was warned away by the Secret Service and the military. Air Force One was thought to be a prime target, since intercepts had showed that the terrorists knew Air Force One’s code sign for that day. Bush maintained phone communication with Vice President Cheney, National Security Adviser Rice, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, immediately ordering a massive manhunt for those responsible. “We’re going to find out who did this. They’re not going to like me as president,” he said.29 Bush was more blunt to Cheney: “We’re going to find out who did this and we’re going to kick their asses.”30
Bush declared a DefCon 3, the highest level of military readiness in twenty-eight years. Th
at evening the president went on television to address the nation. “These acts of mass murder,” he said, “were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed…. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America.”31
Within hours the CIA and FBI had conclusively determined that the hijackings were the result of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network based in Afghanistan. For many years after 1993, when the first attack on the WTC by bin Laden’s operatives failed, most Americans had dismissed him as a crackpot and a minor annoyance. Indeed, The first WTC bombing attempt killed only six people, and a bombing in Yemen, which he had also sponsored, did not kill a single American, frustrating bin Laden even more.
An elaborate rationale quickly sprang up among the blame-America-first crowd that bin Laden had only become obsessed with the United States after the Gulf War, when the presence of Americans on “holy” Islamic soil threatened to pollute bin Laden’s homeland. But according to Gerald Posner, bin Laden was already committed to guerrilla war and terrorism by 1989. One member of Islamic Jihad had told Egyptian police that bin Laden wanted to launch a holy war throughout the world.32 Other researchers agree that bin Laden’s die was already cast, if perhaps accelerated by the Gulf War. One thing is certain: the CIA never paid bin Laden for his role in the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan, nor was he ever pro-American prior to the Gulf War. Now, however, he was gleeful: “Its greatest buildings were destroyed,” bin Laden exclaimed. “America! Full of fear…. Thank God for that.”33
Six months after the attacks, FBI agents, diplomats, and reporters produced shards of evidence that the United States had had warning about 9/11. Yet a memo here and a report of suspicious activity there, dropped into the massive pile of more than three million pieces of intelligence information accumulated per day by the CIA and National Security Agency alone, constituted no warning at all. If anything, Congress learned that much of the information that intelligence agencies had accumulated had crashed into bureaucratic walls. The separation of the CIA and FBI prompted by Democrats in the wake of Watergate and exacerbated by a directive in the Clinton administration (referred to as the wall memo) now returned to plague the U.S. intelligence services. Over the next several months, the Bush administration studied the breakdown in intelligence, proposing the most massive reorganization of the government since the New Deal, highlighted by the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, which would facilitate information flow between the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA. It also split the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) into two parts, one focused on security, and one focused on facilitating the admission of new immigrants.
Immediately after the attacks, however, the administration’s economic team swung into action, using free-market principles—not government power—whenever possible. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill jawboned bank executives to maintain the flow of credit to the airlines, which had come under massive financial pressure in the days after 9/11 when air ridership plummeted. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the other exchanges were shut down to prevent a panic. Once they reopened, the Dow still fell almost five hundred points in the first hours of trading but then stabilized.34 The attacks hit the U.S. economy hard: one study put 9/11-related losses at almost $2 trillion.35
Very soon thousands of volunteers streamed into New York to help search for survivors or excavate the site. Thousands more lined up to give blood, and entertainers held massive telethons to generate millions of dollars in relief for the victims’ families. Amid the rubble, workers unearthed a remarkable piece of steel: two girders, molded by the flames into a cross, which the workers raised up. One of the most memorable photos of the event—three firemen hoisting the American flag above the trade site soon emerged as the singular symbolic picture of defiance. It reflected the resolve that had surfaced in just a matter of days, surging past the grief as the nation set its jaw. Indeed, New York City immediately entertained designs to rebuild the massive WTC and began soliciting designs. (The winning design technically would be taller than either of the previous towers.)
The collapse of the buildings, symbolic though they were, remained insignificant next to the loss of the 2,749 people who died at the World Trade Center, the forty-five passengers and crew who died in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and those who died in the crash at the Pentagon. The initial estimates suggesting that ten thousand might have died in New York alone had been thankfully proved wrong. In less than a year after the attack the Pentagon was rebuilt. Ironically, work crews had broken ground to build the massive Pentagon in 1941—on September eleventh.
Immediately after 9/11, the president still had to rally the nation, displaying the proper balance of defiance, sympathy, compassion, and resolution. Arguably his best speech, and one of the most moving presidential speeches since Reagan’s ode to the Challenger crew in 1986, it was delivered on September fourteenth, designated by Bush as a national day of prayer and remembrance. (One of the first things the president did was to request that all Americans pray, and pray often, not only for the victims and their families, but also for the nation.) At the National Cathedral, Bush ascended the steps in the mammoth nave in total isolation. His words touched the nation:
On Tuesday, our country was attacked with deliberate and massive cruelty. We have seen the images of fire and ashes, and bent steel. Now come the names, the list of casualties we are only beginning to read…. They are the names of people who faced death, and in their last moments called home to say, “Be brave, and I love you.”…War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder…. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing.36
After Bush’s speech—to a room bursting with emotion—he flew to Ground Zero. After changing into a plain yellow windbreaker, Bush walked amid the firefighters and rescue workers who had been digging and excavating, some of them for three days straight. Mounting a twisted pile of steel and bricks and standing next to a retired fireman who had, by his own words, “scammed” his way in to help in the relief effort, Bush took the only public address system available—a bullhorn—and began to address the crowd of burly men. The bullhorn cut out during the president’s prepared remarks, and someone shouted, “We can’t hear you.” Bush tried again, and again the shout came, “We can’t hear you,” at which point the president reacted on instinct, responding, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you, and…”—pointing to the spot where the buildings had stood, he shouted—“and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”37
In two remarkable settings, the National Cathedral and the WTC site, and in two speeches—one formal, one impromptu—Bush had brought the nation together and set it on the task of finding and eliminating the perpetrators. Jonathan Alter, a journalist and bitter Bush foe, nevertheless sensed that a defining point had been reached: “This is a turning point in history,” he told Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer. Or, as Bush put it just a few days later in a defiant message to a joint session of Congress, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” This quickly became known as the Bush Doctrine.
“It Starts Today”
On September 17, 2001, Bush met with his war cabinet, presenting the members with an unequivocal task. “It starts today,” he said. “The purpose of this meeting is to assign tasks for the first wave of the war against terrorism.”38 Bush had already solicited advice: “I want the CIA to be the first on the ground” in Afghanistan, he instructed; “We’ll attack with missiles, bombers and boots on the ground,” he concluded.39 As for bin Laden, Bush told the press he wanted the terrorist “dead or alive.”
On October 7, 2001, a massive series of air strikes in Afghanistan smashed mainline Taliban forces, allowing the special forces and regular military, who had been airlifted in, to join forces with the Northern Alliance of anti-Taliban fighters. Code-named Operation Enduring Freed
om, this was Bush’s “new kind of war,” lacking long, clear battle lines and instead using selected air power, highly trained commando and special forces units, and above all, electronic and human intelligence to identify and destroy Al Qaeda and Taliban strongholds. The UK Telegraph reported that a handful of U.S. Green Beret teams, directing air power before finishing the job on the ground, had killed more than 1,300 Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. “You bomb one side of a hill and push them in one direction,” observed a Green Beret spotter, “then bomb the next hill over and push guys the other way. Then, when they’re all bunched up, you…drop right on them.”40
Nevertheless, it took the press only a few weeks to flip from patriotic to harsh, with journalists invoking the shopworn “Vietnam” and “quagmire” lines less than a month into combat. Newsweek’s Evan Thomas prophesied that the United States would need 250,000 troops on the ground (the real total was under 20,000). Terry Moran, the White House correspondent for ABC, dourly asserted, “I think the bad guys are winning.”41 ABC’s Cokie Roberts grilled Rumsfeld, claiming, “There have been stories…that give the perception…that this war, after three weeks, is not going very well.”42 In fact, the journalists missed the evidence in front of their faces. Once the war on terror had been engaged, it played out along the same lines as most other western versus nonwestern conflicts. American air power utterly dominated the battlefield, and as in the Gulf War, the “combination of the information revolution and precision munitions…produced a quantum leap in lethality.”43 Small units of special operations troops on the ground, guiding the bombing with laser targeting, provided pinpoint targeting to enable the smart weapons to shatter Taliban forces on the ground. War analyst Victor Hanson summed up the combat situation: “Glad we are not fighting us.”
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 134
