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The Times of India
The Times of India Online
Printed from www.timesofindia.com > Americas
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ATTACK ON AMERICA
EW YORK: Mounting an audacious attack against the United States, terrorists
crashed two hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and brought down the twin
110-story towers Tuesday morning. A jetliner also slammed into the Pentagon as the
seat of government itself came under attack.
America's Options
The United States has rarely, if ever, let a terrorist action against it go
unpunished. From zeroing on Libyan terrorists who brought down an American plane to
hunting down perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing, US intelligence and
security agencies have a long history of bringing terrorists to justice.
The immediate task before Washington would be to quickly identify the
terrorist group or country responsible for this. The sheer scale of the attack and the
logistics involved could be the giveaway. Whether the terrorists forced pilots to
crash the planes or piloted it themselves would also offer a clue.
President Bush promised to identify and hunt down the perpetrators of the
attack. Should it turn out to be Middle-East or Islamic terrorists as the initial,
unconfirmed reports suggest, the United States can be expected to strike, and strike
hard.
Washington will first have to get its Arab and Islamic allies on board to
mount such an operation to minimise the fall-out in the Islamic world. Then there will
be hell to pay. If the perpetrators turn out to be Osama bin Laden or his Afghan
patrons as is being suspected in many quarters, the fundamentalist Taliban regime
could be decimated, with few tears shed anywhere in the world, Islamic or otherwise.
If it is a Middle-East terrorist group, it could complicate things a
little more considering the groundswell of sympathy they enjoy in the Arab world. The
possibility of disrupting the world oil supply would hold back any immediate
retaliation.
Hundreds were apparently killed aboard the jets, and untold numbers were feared
dead in the rubble. Thousands were injured in New York alone.
A fourth jetliner, also apparently hijacked, crashed in Pennsylvania as the part
of the closely timed series of attacks.
President George W. Bush ordered a full-scale investigation to "hunt down the
folks who committed this act." Bush, who was in Florida earlier in the day and then at
military installations in Louisiana and Nebraska, was returning to Washington and the
White House late Tuesday, spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
Authorities were still trying to evacuate those who work in the twin towers when
the glass-and-steel skyscrapers came down in a thunderous roar within about 90 minutes
after the attacks, which took place 18 minutes apart around 9 a.m. Many people were
feared trapped. About 50,000 people work at the Trade Center and tens of thousands of
others visit each day.
Officials said the Trade Center apparently was hit by two Los Angeles-bound
jetliners that had been hijacked after taking off from Boston 15 minutes apart with a
total of 157 people: United Flight 175, with 65 people on board, and American Flight
11, with 92 people aboard.
The Pentagon was hit by American Flight 77, which was seized while carrying 64
people from Washington to Los Angeles, according to law enforcement officials,
speaking on condition of anonymity.
And in Pennsylvania, United Flight 93, a Boeing 757 en route from Newark, New
Jersey, to San Francisco, crashed about 80 miles ( 130 kilometers) southeast of
Pittsburgh with 45 people aboard. A Virginia congressman, Rep. James Moran, said the
intended target of the plane was apparently Camp David, the presidential retreat in
Maryland, 85 miles (135 kilometers) away from the crash site.
Altogether, the four planes carried 266 people. There was no word on any
survivors.
At the Trade Center, people on fire leaped from the windows to certain death,
including a man and a woman holding hands. Some jumped from as high as the 80th floor
as the planes exploded into fireballs. People on the ground screamed and dived for
cover as debris from the 1,250-foot (375-meter) towers rained down. Dazed office
workers covered in gray ash wandered around like ghosts, weeping, trying to make sense
of what happened.
Donald Burns, 34, who had been at a meeting on the 82nd floor, saw four severely
burned people on the stairwell. "I tried to help them but they didn't want anyone to
touch them. The fire had melted their skin. Their clothes were tattered," he said.
"People were screaming, falling and jumping out of the windows," from high in
the sky, said Jennifer Brickhouse, 34, of Union, New Jersey, who was going up the
escalator into the World Trade Center.
Within the hour after the attack in New York, the Pentagon took a direct,
devastating hit from a plane. The fiery crash collapsed one side of the five-sided
structure.
Speculation about the attack quickly focused on terrorist fugitive Osama bin
Laden.
"No one has been ruled out, but our initial feeling is that this is the work of
bin Laden," said a high-ranking federal law enforcement official who spoke on
condition of anonymity. "He is top of our list at this point."
"This is perhaps the most audacious terrorist attack that's ever taken place in
the world," said Chris Yates, an aviation expert at Jane's Transport in London. "It
takes a logistics operation from the terror group involved that is second to none.
Only a very small handful of terror groups is on that list. ... I would name at the
top of the list Osama bin Laden."
The president put the military on its highest level of alert. Authorities in
Washington immediately called out troops, including an infantry regiment, and the Navy
sent aircraft carriers and guided missile destroyers to New York and Washington.
The White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol were evacuated along with other
federal buildings in Washington and New York. The president was taken to Offutt Air
Force Base in Nebraska, headquarters for the Strategic Air Command, the nation's
nuclear strike force, the White House said. Later, he headed back to Washington.
Security along the Canadian border was tightened at naval installations and
other strategic points, and all commercial air traffic across the country was halted
until at least noon on Wednesday.
"This is the second Pearl Harbor. I don't think that I overstate it," said Sen.
Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican. The Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
killed nearly 2,400 people and drew the United States into World War II.
Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said: "These attacks clearly constitute
an act of war."
In June, a U.S. judge had set Wednesday as the sentencing date for a bin Laden
associate for his role in the deadly 1998 bombing of a U.S. embassy in Tanzania. The
sentencing had been set for the federal courthouse near the World Trade Center. But
the sentencing had been postponed some time ago without being rescheduled.
Afghanistan's hardline Taliban rulers condemned the attacks and rejected
suggestions that bin Laden was behind them, saying he does not have the means to carry
out such well-orchestrated attacks. Bin Laden has been given asylum in Afghanistan.
Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, said he received a
warning from Islamic fundamentalists close to bin Laden, but did not take the threat
seriously. "They said it would be a huge and unprecedented attack but they did not
specify," Atwan said in a telephone interview in London.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, thousands of Palestinians celebrated the
attacks, chanting "God is Great" and handing out candy.
"Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward and freedom will
be defended," Bush said form a tightly guarded air base in Louisiana.
In New York, the downtown area was cordoned off and a rescue effort was under
way. Hundreds of volunteers and medical workers converged on triage centers, offering
help and blood. Paramedics waiting to be sent into the rubble were told that "once the
smoke clears, it's going to be massive bodies," said Brian Stark, a former Navy
paramedic who volunteered to help.
He said the paramedics had been told that hundreds of police and firefighters
were missing from the ranks of those sent in to respond to the first crash.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said 2,100 people were injured - 1,500 "walking wounded"
who were taken to New Jersey, and 600 others who were taken to area hospitals, 150 of
them in critical condition. It could take weeks to dig through the rubble for victims.
About 100 people were reported killed or injured in the Pentagon.
"I have a sense it's a horrendous number of lives lost," Giuliani said. "Right
now we have to focus on saving as many lives as possible."
By evening, huge clouds of smoke still billowed from the ruins, obscuring much
of the skyline. A burning 47-story part of the World Trade Center complex collapsed
just before nightfall. The building had already been evacuated.
The two planes blasted fiery, gaping holes in the upper floors of one of New
York's most famous landmarks and rained debris on the streets. About an hour later,
the southern tower collapsed with a roar and a huge cloud of smoke; the other tower
fell about a half-hour after that, covering lower Manhattan in heaps of gray rubble
and broken glass.
On the street, a crowd mobbed a man at a pay phone, screaming at him to get off
the phone so that they could call relatives. Dust and dirt flew everywhere. Ash was 2
to 3 inches deep in places.
John Axisa, who was getting off a commuter train to the World Trade Center, said
he saw "bodies falling out" of the building. He said he ran outside, and watched
people jump out of the first building. Then there was a second explosion, and he felt
heat on the back of neck.
People ran down the stairs in panic and fled the building. Thousands of pieces
of what appeared to be office paper drifted over Brooklyn, about three miles away.
Several subway lines were immediately shut down. Trading on Wall Street was
suspended. New York's mayoral primary election Tuesday was postponed. All bridges and
tunnels into Manhattan were closed.
The death toll on the crashed planes alone could surpass that of the Oklahoma
City bombing on April 19, 1995, which claimed 168 lives in what was the deadliest act
of terrorism on U.S. soil.
Evacuations were ordered at the United Nations in New York and at the Sears
Tower in Chicago. Los Angeles mobilized its anti-terrorism division. Walt Disney World
in Orlando, Florida, was evacuated, and Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada line was
closed to visitors. Security was tightened along the 800-mile (1,290-kilometer)
trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
Terrorists blew up a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center in
February 1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others.
"It's just sick. It just shows how vulnerable we really are," Keith Meyers, 39,
said in Columbus, Ohio. "It kind of makes you want to go home and spend time with your
family. It puts everything in perspective."
In 1945, an Army Air Corps B-25, a twin-engine bomber, crashed into the 79th
floor of the Empire State Building in dense fog.
Before the crash in Pennsylvania, an emergency dispatcher in Westmoreland
County, Pennsylvania, received a cell phone call at 9:58 a.m. from a man who said he
was a passenger locked in the bathroom of United Flight 93, said dispatch supervisor
Glenn Cramer.
"We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!" Cramer quoted the man as saying.
The man told dispatchers the plane "was going down. He heard some sort of explosion
and saw white smoke coming from the plane and we lost contact with him," Cramer said.
( AP )
� The Times OF India Online. All rights reserved.
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