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COVER STORY: TERRORIST
STRIKES
Out Of Revenge
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.
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AUDACITY AND
PANIC: The second Boeing 767 heads for the South Tower as frantic
office-workers trapped in the building (second from above) try to
escape minutes before it collapsed; and (third from above) Washington
faced its most humiliating moment with the Pentagon in shambles |
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"We
have just seen the first war of the 21st century."
George W. Bush, US President
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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.
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BLOODY STREETS: for the first time in living
memory, a war came home to America
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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.
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