India Today’s cover story of September 24, 2001 tries to put the facts and consequences of the worst ever attack on America in perspective before the hubris settled. It concludes that the myth of fortress America had been demolished and a new challenge lay before the only superpower.
Kabir Rekhi was lighting a cigarette. Standing outside his office on Broad Street, just off Wall Street in New York, this India-born Ernst & Young executive had stepped out with his boss just before 9 a.m. on a perfectly everyday Tuesday morning. As the two took their first puffs, one of the towers of the World Trade Center-hosting 155 businesses and 50,000 people-erupted. Rekhi thought it was a bomb. His boss, who had witnessed the 1993 WTC bomb attack, was remarkably unruffled: "It's a terrorist attack."
They began to walk back when they heard the second blast. This time it was the South Tower that was on fire. A second plane had struck and Rekhi was beginning to panic. His wife Gunjan would be at the train station below the WTC, he realised, changing trains on her way from their home to her office in Upper Manhattan. The train's departure had already been aborted but Rekhi did not know that. He ran towards the towering inferno looking for his wife amid a confused, chaotic and terrified mass. He was stuck in the WTC complex when the South Tower began to crumble some 45 minutes later. He began to run, part of a concourse of humanity rushing away from the crashing steel, concrete and balls of fire. "I saw somebody jump from God knows which floor. Bodies were flying like pinballs." Today, at home with his wife, Rekhi can't believe he got away without a scratch. Gunjan calls it a miracle. The Rekhis will never forget the day. Neither will New York. Nor America.
In a land devoted to trivia and statistics, the most singular reflection of terror appeared on the most unlikely mirror. On September 11, 2001, the day four hijacked aircraft shattered what a newspaper called the nation's "feeling of invincibility", the US was forced to cancel every Major League baseball game. The last time this happened was on June 6, 1944, the day of the Normandy landings in World War II. It revived memories of why the US had gone to war at all. The destruction of WTC was "this generation's Pearl Harbour". But whereas the surprise Japanese attack on the US naval base on December 7, 1941 claimed 2,390 lives, the casualties from September 11 may well cross 10,000.
The assault (see graphic) was as horrific as it was audacious: four commercial aircraft were hijacked and turned into airborne bombs, carrying a full load of aviation fuel-the two Boeing 767s headed for New York carried 90,770 litres and two Boeing 757s 42,680 litres-and deliberately crashed into the heart of the American financial and military establishment.
Across America, the reaction was swift. In city after city, the downtown areas were cleared out. The 110-storeyed Sears Tower in Chicago was evacuated as a precautionary measure. Schools ended early, people drove home. They were distraught, searching for answers. Simmering deep within was a rage for revenge. The VOX pops on radio stations and TV channels were seething. Some wanted to enlist or re-enlist in the Marines. "We need to go to war and eradicate these terrorists," said one radio interviewee. A World War II veteran captured the popular mood, "As I see the smoke and dust, I'm glad the Statue of Liberty is still standing." The most crippling moment for a country that cherishes its civil liberty came the day after. On September 12, armoured cars and soldiers with assault rifles patrolled Manhattan, an image without parallel. It could happen elsewhere, in Africa and Asia or even in Paris in 1968. Like Jean-Paul Sartre, Americans had long believed hell was other people. No longer.
The Americans want vengeance. President Bush called it a "quiet, unyielding anger" in his broadcast to the people on the evening of the first invasion of mainland America since the war with the British in 1812. Senator Orrin Hatch put it more bluntly, "We're going after the bastards." Who were the bastards? As the FBI and police swooped down on Westin Hotel in Boston, an Amtrack train-stopped and searched near Boston-and a flight training school near Daytona Beach, Florida, the biggest manhunt in American memory, involving 7,000 law enforcement officials, was under way.
Each plane, it emerged, had between four and five hijackers. At least one on each aircraft was a pilot trained in the US. Aviation officials guessed they may have disabled the transponders, which would have nullified the air traffic control's ability to pinpoint the planes' location, and may explain why they flew into the heart of Manhattan undetected. The fear is the hijackers may have similarly neutralised the cockpit voice recorders (black boxes), erasing their ability to record the final minutes of conversation.
Early clues included cell-phone intercepts from one of the hijacked planes that had a pirate talking to the Osama bin Laden group. In 1993, when the US embassies in Africa were attacked, an identical clue had given the FBI its first lead on the omen called Osama-the Afghanistan-based Saudi billionaire who is America's biggest enemy.
Outside Logan airport in Boston, an abandoned car was found with flying manuals written in Arabic and a "ramp pass" giving the holder access to restricted areas of the airport. The police identified two former students of a flying school in Venice, Florida, Amanullah Atta Mohammed and Marwan Alshehhi, as two of the hijackers who had come from Germany to the US in June 2000. Other flying schools were investigated and less than 48 hours after the first attack, almost all the hijackers were identified from passenger manifests.Two weeks earlier, American Airlines had been warned to watch out for "imposter pilots" after some flight badges and uniforms were stolen from a hotel in Rome.
There were horrors and happenings, sights and smells beyond America's wildest nightmares. The federal government closed its 8,300 offices across the country. The White House was evacuated. President Bush, addressing school children in Florida when he received the news, flew to an air-force base in Omaha, Nebraska, and in an underground bunker convened a National Security Council meeting. If this wasn't a war council, the term needed to be redefined.
It may as well as have been Independence Day or Amerika, just another disaster fantasy about the bad guys pounding Uncle Sam. The acrid stench of death replaced the hectic trading of Wall Street. The world's best known stock exchange began a prolonged shutdown, destined to contravene a convention that the US stock markets must never close for four days in a week. As fighter planes flew over cities to safeguard the skies, commercial flights were halted. Of some 6,000 flights, many were diverted to Canada or grounded in Europe. As General Norman Schwarzkorpf, the warrior hero who led the Allied forces to victory in the 1991 Gulf War, put it, "Terrorism has come to our shores big time." Protected by the Pacific and the Atlantic, the early Americans thought of their mini-continent as a natural fortress, impregnable. America would never say never again.
The American psyche is shaped by enormous quantities of nervous energy. This is a society that cannot sit still. In New York, fire-fighters, policemen, medical staff and ordinary citizens waged a heroic battle against the rubble. There were chilling stories of people jumping from the 99th floor to their deaths, running down 50 floors to safety, being pulled out from under tonnes of debris. The biggest puzzle was the flight that crashed near Pittsburgh. Why did it miss its target? At least two passengers from this plane called their families just before the crash. Both spoke of hijackers and one, who had locked himself in the toilet, told his wife "we're going to die anyway, we better do something". The prevailing wisdom is that a struggle of some sort ensued-and the passengers grappled with the hijackers to crash the plane at a desolate location rather than on the targeted White House. In an America starved of good news, it is a story on everybody's lips.
There were other immediate issues to come to grips within a country that has never faced national emergency on such a scale. There was the profiteering. The gas stations (petrol pumps) in Nebraska and California were the first to arbitrarily hike prices by 25 cents a gallon, a 20 per cent jump apparently impelled by fears that the terrorist strikes would cause a conflict in the Middle East and trigger another oil crisis.
Elsewhere, there were impromptu church services in memory of the dead. As the first appeals for blood were issued, the response was overwhelming. A people unused to being made to wait lined up silently to donate blood. Robin Graham, a hotel executive, waited four hours to respond to her country's call. Why? "I felt I had to do something. I couldn't just sit there." So was this Pearl Harbour? "No, this is not war, just a group of terrorists." Would she support retaliation? "Yes, yes, yes."
The truth will emerge. The culprits will be identified. Osama bin Laden will be punished. Yet, in some ways, the more fundamental issue is what does September 11 mean for America? This has been a land of lax security. Airports are notoriously porous, frisking is unheard of, knives are permitted if they "look okay" to the official on duty-the hijackers were armed with knives and cardboard cutters-and baggage checks are desultory. All this will now change. The media is already talking of sky marshals.
The other big issue is intelligence failure. The US apparently spends a total of $25 billion (Rs 11,75 00 crore) on its intelligence agencies. How efficient are they? Paul Bremer, who chaired the National Commission on Terrorism, was unequivocal. The CIA, he said, was hamstrung because it was not allowed to recruit "unsavoury characters, terrorists or criminals" as informers. Without a carte blanche it couldn't penetrate terrorist rings. Bremer called for a return to "old-fashioned spying" to complement technical espionage facilities. The policy of "assassination"-killing specific foreigners seen as a threat to US security-may be given a new life. It was outlawed by President Gerald Ford in the 1970s. Politically, this crisis could, paradoxically, stabilise Bush's rocky presidency. His inexperience, alienation of European allies and uncertainty with the economy, have made his early months in office anything but a honeymoon. Now he has the entire country rallying round him, Democrat and Republican. His demand for a $19 billion (Rs 89,300 crore) increase in the defence budget seems set to sail through. In the end, Sinister September represents Bush's supreme test. This is his moment of truth. Bush is very much his father's son but models his presidency not on father Bush, rather on that of Ronald Reagan. He has to emulate Reagan's annihilation of Libya in the light of a similar terrorist outrage in 1980s. He has to calm a distraught nation much like a grandfatherly Reagan did through the troubled 1980s. Fate has dealt America a blow but freed its supreme commander of domestic fetters. Bush is now supreme. He has to prove he can truly command.
News from - http://news.in.msn.com/national/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5428394&page=0
