A pall of smoke, dust and sadness settled over lower Manhattan at nightfall Tuesday as rescue workers, police and firefighters pressed their desperate search for survivors of the worst terrorist attack in United States history, a coordinated airborne assault that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and left a portion of the Pentagon outside Washington in smoking ruins.
In New York alone, it was feared the death toll could reach the thousands. Officials said at least 300 firefighters and 78 police officers were missing and presumed dead. Upward of 50,000 people worked in the 110-story World Trade Center towers, reduced by explosions and fire to ruins within hours of the initial attack. The number of dead at the Pentagon was unknown but officials feared the toll would be high.
Speaking Tuesday evening from the White House, President Bush evoked a biblical message in saying the U.S. was walking “through the valley of the shadow of death” but still feared no evil. He described the attack as a mass murder that had ended the lives of thousands of people, and he called on the nation to remember the victims in prayers.
Amid reports that investigators were focusing their attention on renegade Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, believed to be in Afghanistan, Bush promised that all the government’s resources would be used to find and punish the perpetrators of the attack.
“These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat, but they have failed,” Bush said. “Our country is strong. Terrorist acts can shake the foundation of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America.
“The search is under way for those who are responsible for these evil attacks. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed those attacks and those who harbored them.”
The assault struck at the heart of America’s commercial, military and government infrastructure, stopping the nation in its tracks and stripping away any sense that the U.S. was somehow protected from the brutal political violence and terrorism that have bloodied life in so many other parts of the world.
It disrupted the nation’s financial networks, sent millions of workers in a panicked rush from their offices to their homes and cleared the nation’s skies of all commercial flights, leaving the airways to the occasional fighter jet or police helicopter on guard against further attack.
The Pentagon changed the orders of a collection of warships. Ten warships were steaming to positions where they could provide some protection to the New York and Washington areas. Several ships were also sent to West Coast sites, including Seattle.
Within hours of the attack, broadcast around the world in gripping detail that repeatedly showed one of the airliners slamming into the World Trade Center’s south tower, the government in Washington was virtually closed down.
All domestic airlines, which typically move 1.5 million people a day on more than 40,000 commercial and chartered flights, were grounded under unprecedented Federal Aviation Administration orders that were not scheduled to end until noon Wednesday at the earliest.
In all, about 5,000 commercial jetliners were grounded. Amtrak train service and Greyhound bus operations were also halted, mainly in the Northeast.
“The airlines are the most vulnerable and would be most affected by this,” said Aaron Gellman, a professor at Northwestern University’s Transportation Center. “It’s impossible to predict with any precision what’s going to happen. This is a very important, watershed event.”
Financial markets were closed and were expected to remain closed through Wednesday. Federal employees were given the option to take Wednesday off, though the government would not formally be closed. The Pentagon was expected to be back in operation Wednesday morning.
A weary Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who rushed from his office to help evacuate victims after a plane slammed into the five-sided building in midmorning, would not comment on deaths and injuries or on intelligence about possible perpetrators but warned that there would be many victims in the Washington attack.
No one offered specific information linking bin Laden to the attacks. But Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he had been told that U.S. intelligence intercepted communications between supporters of bin Laden, long at the top of the U.S. “most wanted” terrorist list and previously the intended target of U.S. military responses to terrorist attacks.
“They have an intercept of some information that included people associated with bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit,” Hatch told The Associated Press. He also said investigators had information linking one person on one of the four flights to bin Laden’s organization, but he offered no details.
Even as authorities were pointing the finger at bin Laden in the assault, there were reports from CNN that Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, was under rocket attack. Rumsfeld denied that the U.S. was involved in any action against Afghanistan, where the Taliban government has been warring with its opponents for years.
The attack on U.S. targets was undertaken with almost military precision and clearly involved terrorists who had been trained to fly modern aircraft. Investigators were poring over flight training records for possible connections to the bin Laden organization.
There were several telephone calls from the planes during the hijackings. One caller said the hijackers had killed flight attendants and crew members.
The knife-wielding terrorists hijacked four airliners–two each from United Airlines and American Airlines–minutes after they took off between 7:58 a.m. and 8:10 a.m. Eastern time from airports in Boston, suburban Washington and Newark, N.J.
Flights carefully chosen
In one measure of the planning behind the assault, all of the flights had “on time” takeoff records well beyond the national average, increasing the likelihood the attacks would take place on time and as planned.
The fact that the planes were flying from the East Coast to the West Coast also guaranteed they would still be carrying hundreds of tons of fuel when they were aimed at their targets, making them the equivalent of flying bombs.
At 8:45 a.m., American Flight 11, a Boeing 767-200 ER from Boston to Los Angeles, slammed into the Trade Center’s north tower, setting off a raging fire that forced many victims to leap to their deaths. The attack set off a panic in the streets and drew hundreds of news teams and television cameras, putting them in place in time to record the second attack.
At 9:03 a.m., United Flight 175, a Boeing 767-200ER flying closer to the ground than the first plane, slammed into the south tower of the Trade Center, setting that building alight and spewing fire and debris across a wide area of lower Manhattan.
American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757-200 carrying 64 passengers and crew on a flight from Dulles International Airport in Reston, Va., to Los Angeles, crashed into a section of the Pentagon near its helicopter landing pad at 9:40 a.m., causing an initial explosion and fire followed by secondary explosions. Parts of the recently remodeled Pentagon wing were still burning late Tuesday.
About 10 a.m., 20 minutes after the American flight hit the Pentagon, United Flight 93, a Boeing 757-200, crashed in a field in Somerset County, Pa., about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. The impact was so violent that the plane was torn into thousands of pieces.
There were conflicting reports about the United flight. Company officials said that plane had been headed for the Pentagon, but federal authorities speculated it might have been headed for the presidential retreat at Camp David in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland when it crashed.
Within an hour of the initial attack on the World Trade Center, the fires in the building had grown so hot that first the south tower and then the north tower collapsed in an explosion of thick, gray dust, molten metal and hundreds of tons of shattered glass. Office supplies were sent flying 3 miles from the collapsing building.
A third Trade Center building collapsed later in the day.
Thousands of people scrambled to escape the billowing dust cloud that enveloped the area. Many firefighters and police officers who had been searching the lower floors of the buildings for survivors were killed in the collapse, city officials said.
Piecing together the events
The four airliners carried a total of 266 passengers and crew, according to United Airlines and American Airlines representatives. While no official accounts of what had happened on the airliners were available, pieces of the story started coming together late in the day.
A passenger on the United flight that crashed near Pittsburgh managed to call 911 in Westmoreland County, Pa., on his cellular phone from a locked airplane bathroom to report: “We’re being hijacked. We are being hijacked.” The man told the dispatcher the plane “was going down” and that he had seen “some kind of white smoke.” Then contact was lost.
U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft told reporters Tuesday evening that “suspects armed with knives” had hijacked American Flight 11, which crashed into the World Trade Center. In a call from another hijacked flight, there was a report that the crew had been herded to the rear of the craft and slain before the suicide missions took place.
The attack drew strong responses from every quarter, with American politicians leaning toward comparisons with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, in which some 2,400 people were killed. Many said the nature of Tuesday’s assault amounted to an act of war.