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Bush told hijackings in motorcade { September 16 2001 }

Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
   http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4258186,00.html

Bush was driving to the school in a motorcade when the phone rang. An airline accident appeared to have happened.

http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4258186,00.html

The inside story
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When our world changed forever
It had been months in the planning. And within moments of the attack on 11 September, old certainties had crumbled as surely as those mighty towers. Here we trace the arc of terror, from its secret beginnings and deadly actions to the fallout that will affect us all

Special report: terrorism in the US

Ed Vulliamy and Anthony Browne in New York, Jason Burke, Peter Beaumont, Martin Bright and Kamal Ahmed in London, Paul Simon in Boston, Luke Harding in Islamabad, Kate Connolly in Berlin, and Andrew Osborn in Brussels
Sunday September 16, 2001
The Observer

They were living the American dream. Through the spring, summer and early autumn, they prospered under a clear blue American sky that arced over their whitewashed houses, their condominiums, their local stores and their childrens' school. Each week they drove past the parking lots and the burger bars down the wide, empty roads to the mall. They shopped at the Wal-Mart for American Coke and American Pizzas. They watched American films.

Abdulrahman al-Omari arrived with his family in the small Florida beach suburb of Vero Beach in July last year. He signed a $1,400 a month lease to rent one of the pastel stucco houses that line 57th terrace and signed up at a local flying school, the FlightSafety Academy. Every morning the neighbours used to watch him leave his home in his white shirt with gold-and-black shoulder flashes. His wife used to drive their four children to school shortly afterwards.

In Coral Springs, 100 miles inland from Vero Beach, Mohamed Amanullah Atta, a tall, slim, 33-year-old electrical engineer with an aloof manner and a taste for chinos, sports shirts and vodka and orange, was perfecting his flying. He had arrived in the beach town in November with a friend, Marwan Yousef al-Shehri, a small, tubby 23-year-old, who had come over from Germany with him a year before. They were both good students.

There were others. In Daytona Beach, another young Arab, Walid al-Shehri, had been training at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautics University. In all, at various schools along the East Coast, around a dozen young Arab men, some with aeronautical experience, some without, were all learning how to fly big jets.

Elsewhere in the US another 30 or 40 people were also fulfilling their own more minor roles. Scores more provided marginal assistance. Some of them had been living in America for years - at least two had driving licences dating from 1994. At least one had access to airport accreditation. Some had business visas; most had false passports. And though some have been traced to Los Angeles and New York, the vast majority were based in Florida. Nine, for example, lived in Delray Beach, a wealthy resort on the Atlantic coast. The youngest was 20; the oldest was 51. Atta was the leader. And by last month he was a busy man.

On 6 August, carrying a briefcase, he walked into Warrick Rent-a-car in Pompano Beach, Florida, and rented a 1995 Ford Escort. According to Brad Warrick, the owner, he was polite and and acted like a businessman. 'He didn't spend money like there was an unlimited source. He squabbled a little bit over mileage,' Warrick said. The Escort came back with 254 miles on the clock. No one knows where Atta took it.

Over the following weeks Atta rented more cars and logged thousands of miles. On 15 August, he picked up a 1996 Chevrolet Corsica for two weeks and travelled 1,915 miles in it. On 29 August he rented the Escort again. In the meantime he had also been honing his flying skills. On three consecutive days from 19 August he hired, for $88 an hour, a four-seat Piper Archer plane from the Palm Beach County Park Airport in Lantana and flew it through the clear summer Florida skies for four hours. He told the manageress at the centre that he wanted to notch up 100 hours flying. The previous November - five months after arriving in America from Germany where he had been training in Hamburg as an electrician - he had taken his Federal Aviation Authority test and had qualified as a pilot for single-engined light planes. The course had cost him $10,000. Since then, at a series of aviation schools, he had been taught to fly bigger, more powerful planes.

Elsewhere, things were also beginning to happen. On 5 September, a white Mitsubishi sedan was seen at Logan International Airport in Boston. The driver had secured a pass that allowed him to drive into secure airport areas. In the next week the car was be seen four times around the complex. Around the same time al-Omari, the clean-living family man from Vero Beach, moved out of his neat all-American home with his family. He promptly disappeared. All over America, others were leaving flats, guest houses, rented homes.

There were some minor problems. In Minnesota, an Arab man was detained when he tried to seek flight simulator training for a large jetliner. The man revealed little under interrogation.

Atta did not appear unduly worried. Nine days ago, he spent Friday afternoon drinking with Marwan al-Shehri and a third man in Shuckums Oyster Pub and Seafood Grill in Hollywood, a small town 30 miles from Miami. Patricia Idrissi, a waitress, remembered that one had gone off to play a video machine at the one end of the restaurant while Atta and al-Shehri sat drinking and arguing. Al-Shehri drank rum and coke; Atta knocked back five Stolichnaya vodkas with orange juice. When it came to pay Atta complained about their $48 bill and argued with the manager.

'You think I can't pay my bill?' Atta shouted. 'I am a pilot for American Airlines. I can pay my fucking bill.'

Then he peeled out a note from a thick wad of $50 and $100 bills, leaving a $2 tip.

Some 18 men, who would later form into small groups, began heading towards Boston. Many were already in America. Others joined them from Canada, crossing into the northern American state of Maine at remote, lightly patrolled border areas.

Atta and al-Omari spent the night in room 432 of a Comfort Inn in the city of South Portland on the northern seaboard. Al-Omari's wife and children left their home, and disappeared. At least two other hijackers are thought to have spent the night at the Park Inn in suburban Newton, Massachusetts. Atta checked out last Tuesday morning. He left a plane timetable in his room. He did not need it any more. The time for preparation was over. After years of planning, the operation was finally under way. The objective was clear: the world would change for ever.

George Bush was a troubled man: there had been further warnings about recession, crucial ingredients of his domestic policies were being attacked, and his team the Texas Rangers had been trounced over the weekend. He had arisen early on Tuesday morning to join his chief of staff Andrew Card, policy spinmeister Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett, communications director, for a trip to Florida. On the agenda: his precious Education Bill, and the start of a nationwide push to propel it through Congress, to begin at the Emma E. Booker elementary school in Sarasota, Florida.

Bush was driving to the school in a motorcade when the phone rang. An airline accident appeared to have happened. He pressed on with his visit. Bush moved through into the classroom, and flashed his smile at the assembled second-graders, on the dot of 9am, and listened to them read aloud.

As he was getting ready to pose for pictures with the teachers and pupils, chief of staff Card entered the room, walked over to the President and whispered in his right ear: there had been another 'incident'. Bush stiffened; he left soon afterwards on a plane bound for Washington.

Boston at dawn: the hijackers assemble

At 5.53 on Tuesday morning Atta and al-Omari passed through security at Portland Jetport in Maine. They had checked out of their room ($149 for smoking, $159 for non-smoking) and had driven the short distance to the airport in a hired car. The Atlantic sparkled bright blue in the crisp clear light of an early autumn New England morning, the short flight to Boston's Logan International was uneventful. Using their New Jersey drivers licenses as identification, they bought two one-way tickets on a visa card and checked in for American Airlines Flight 11 to Los Angeles . They settled down to wait for Atta's baggage and the men whom they knew were on their way to join them.

John Ogonowski, the fair-haired, clean-cut captain of Flight 11, was also on his way to Logan. As he passed his Uncle Al's house, he honked his horn in greeting. At the airport, he met his co-pilot, big, burly Tom McGuinness, a former F14 Navy Tomcat pilot, and the two walked out to their plane.

At about 7.15 a white Mitsubishi saloon pulled up abruptly in the airport car park. It carried three young Arab men. In one window a 'ramp pass' allowing access to restricted areas at the airport was displayed. After a short altercation with another driver over the parking space in the airport garage the three moved off into the terminal and checked in. Within quarter of an hour at least five hijackers had passed through airport security. The box-cutter 'Stanley' knives hidden in their hand baggage had remained undetected.

By 7.35 most of the 81 passengers had boarded the Boeing 767 that Ogonowski was to fly to LA. Atta was sitting in seat 8D in business class opposite Hollywood producer David Anfell and his wife Lynn. Sitting next to them in 8G was Abdul al-Omari. The remaining seats in the row were empty.

In the next aisle sat Edmund Glazer, the south African born vice-president of a communications company. Glazer, who had rushed to the airport, put in a quick call to his wife to reassure her that he had got the flight.

Ahead of Flight 11 in the queue for take off was United Airlines Flight 175, another Boeing 767, also heading for Los Angeles. It had 65 people on board. Among them were the cousins Marwan and Mohald al-Shehri who had been training in Florida with Atta, Fayez Ahmed, and two brothers, Hamza and Ahmed al-Ghamdi. Their plane took off at 07.58 and a minute later Flight 11 was airborne.

At 8.01, 150 miles further south, United Airlines flight 93 left Newark airport for San Francisco. There were 45 people on board, including five crew and two pilots. Nine minutes after that American Airlines flight 77 left Dulles, Washington's major airport, for Los Angeles. On board were 64 passengers, including Barbara Olson, a lawyer, political commentator for CNN and wife of the US Solicitor General, and a group of three schoolchildren and three teachers en route to an expedition to Santa Cruz island. There were two pilots and four crew. On each of these four planes - carrying a total of 272 people and thousands of tonnes of aviation fuel for their long transcontinental flights - was a team of hijackers.

Takeover in the cabins and a monstrous plot revealed

At 8.15, as the big plane settled into a its flight over Massachusetts, the cabin crew aboard American Airlines Flight 11 started to prepare breakfast.

Mohamed Atta did not wait for his roll and coffee. He and his four accomplices left their seats and made their way towards the cockpit. They may have forced their way in using knives or box-cutters, or possibly killed passengers or crew to lure Ogonowski or his co-pilot Tom McGuinness out of their locked cockpit. One of the pilots had time to click on a cockpit microphone allowing controllers to hear one of the hijackers say 'We have more planes. We have other planes. Don't do anything foolish ... You won't be hurt' - but the secret four-digit alert code that indicates a hijacking was never sent. The plane was heard from once more when air traffic control were contacted - it is unclear by whom - and an air corridor to JFK air port in New York requested. Then Flight 11's transponder, which allows the plane's movements to be tracked, was switched off. Within minutes the plane made a sharp turn to the south and headed down the Hudson river, over Albany and the grey-green Catskill Mountains towards New York.

At 0845 American Airlines Flight 11 turned at 400mph and aimed for Manhattan.

The second hijack was by then under way on United Airlines Flight 175. Around 9am, passenger Peter Hanson had telephoned his parents in Easton, Connecticut, and described how hijackers armed with knives had taken over the plane and a stewardess had been stabbed. The plane had headed south-west across Connecticut and was over New Jersey when it made a sharp left turn. At 8.59, now south of Manhattan, the plane turned again, straightening up on on a course heading directly for the World Trade Centre. Hanson called his parents again and spoke to his father Lee. The plane was 'going down', he said, once more the line went dead. At the same time, an unnamed stewardess on board the plane called an emergency number from a phone at the back of the aircraft. She described how her colleagues had been stabbed. At 9.16 the plane, banking slightly, neared its final destination.

The hijackers hit a third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, which had taken off from Washington's Dulles airport heading for Los Angeles at 8.10am and then a fourth, on its way from Newark to Los Angeles, at about 9.00. Few details have emerged, but the terrorists appear to have gained control of both aircraft without difficulty, quickly herding the passengers and crew to the rear. For air traffic controllers on the ground the first sign that something was wrong was when Flight 77 suddenly disappeared off their radar screens as it headed east.

Someone in the cockpit had switched off the transponder. There was nothing, then an unidentified aircraft appeared on the controllers' radar screens. But it was heading in the wrong direction. It was flying, at more than 500mph, back towards Washington.

At 9.30 the leader of the hijackers, believed to be Khalid al-Midhar, spoke to the passengers. They should phone their homes, he said, because they were all about to die.

Barbara Olson called her husband from her seat. 'What do I tell the pilot to do?' she asked him. Then she was cut off. Theodore Olsen called the Justice Department's command centre. They said they were unaware of a hijacking. A few minutes later his wife called back. Again she asked for advice. Her husband told her that other hijacked planes had just hit the World Trade Centre. The phone went dead again.

At 9.42 a.m. the plane was seen approaching Washington from the south-west. Just a few miles outside the city it suddenly made a 270 degree turn and lined up on the Pentagon. A minute later the nose went down and, in a steep, short dive, it smashed into a helicopter pad adjacent to the Pentagon's western wall and ploughed on through three of the five concentric rings of offices that make up one of the largest single buildings on earth. The impact and resulting fireball caused a five-storey section of the building to explode and sent debris, flames and smoke hundreds of feet into the air. Including the 64 passengers and crew, 190 people had been killed. It was 9.43 in the morning. Air force jets had been scrambled, but they arrived 15 minutes too late.

Flight 93, which had left Newark just as Flight 77 had left Washington, was still in the air. The passengers on board had half an hour to live.

Back in Logan Airport Mohamed Atta's baggage was waiting for collection. His suitcase contained an instructional video on flying airliners, a fuel consumption calculator and a copy of the Koran.

Assault from the skies: The North Tower

Jim Farmer stuck to his usual routine last Tuesday morning. After getting up and showering at his Manhattan apartment, the 43-year-old film composer ordered a coffee at his local street cafe on West Broadway. He sat outside in the morning sun. It was almost nine o'clock, and people were hurrying to work at their offices in the financial heart of the world's last remaining superpower.

A strange sound rose above the bustle: it seemed to be the noise of a plane. But aircraft did not normally fly low over the city. Farmer looked up from his newspaper. Other people stopped in the street.

The noise grew louder. Pigeons on the pavements took flight en masse. A blue speck - it looked like a dart - screamed across the skyline and ploughed into the World Trade Centre. There was a loud explosion. People in offices and apartments ran to their windows; people on the street started screaming.

The 110-floor tower was left with a gaping black hole eight or nine storeys high near its peak. Orange fingers of flame groped at the edges of the hole; black, acrid smoke poured out of it. American Airlines flight 11 had reached its destination; and the world started changing.

Twenty thousand people were at work in each of the twin towers of the WTC. Nobody will ever know what went through the minds of those on the floors directly hit as they stared out of the window at their last vision on earth: a 60-tonne plane hurtling towards them at 400 miles an hour.

Stuart DeHann, a freelance creative director, ran onto his roof terrace nearby and watched the unfolding horror. A few floors above the hole in the tower, which was still spewing forth flames and smoke, people were leaning out of the shattered windows. They started jumping from the 90th floor.

'They were definitely deciding to jump rather than falling. They were standing on the edge of the windows and leaping. They knew it was the end and were making a decision about how to go,' said DeHann.

The choice was stark: to die by being burnt alive or by jumping from near the top of a 1,300 ft-high building onto concrete. One couple leapt out hand in hand. Another woman's dress started billowing out as she fell. One man, bare chested, tumbled over and over until he smashed into the paving stones at around 200 miles an hour.

Assault from the skies: The south tower

Eighteen minutes after Flight 11 had ploughed into the north tower, United Airlines flight 175 hit the south tower, its tanks also full of fuel. It hit the building far lower than the first plane had, and appeared to make a far bigger explosion. Eight hundred feet in the air, the flames leapt out almost a block in every direction..

Moments before and 70 floors below, Jimmy Wu, a banker, had been preparing to go into a revenue meeting. 'We heard a huge explosion. I rushed to the window and saw all these papers floating down,' he said. He assumed it was another bomb, but when he managed to get out of the building onto the plaza he suddenly realised what it was. 'There were all these yellow airline safety jackets lying around - there were some airplane seats on the ground. I think I saw some human body parts.'

He used his mobile to phone his brother who worked on the 64th floor of the south tower. He stood under a shelter in the plaza, bodies and glass crashing in front of him, desperately waiting for his brother to answer. He stared up to the floor where he assumed his brother was, and the top third of the tower exploded into an enormous ball of flame. Wu ran. Thousands were still inside, fighting to make it down the stairs, burning alive.

Scenes of chaos and terror in New York were being beamed live on television around the world.The chief of the police, his deputy and mayor Rudy Giu liani arrived at the scene. Bodies littered the plaza. A pair of feet in their shoes lay unattached to a body. The head of a middle-aged man rolled down the street. One woman was sliced in half by a large sheet of glass, which fell from a thousand feet above.

Father Mychael Judge, the chaplain of the New York fire department for the past 10 years, had rushed to the scene and was administering the last rights to one victim. A chunk of debris dropped from the building, killing the priest as he prayed.

Pieces of paper floated down from the sky, settling on the bodies: lawyers letters, cashflow statements, future business plans.

The trade centre collapses

While the buildings and their skins of steel supports withstood the crash, the fuel burnt ferociously at a temperature of more than 1000 C. The steel supports started melting and buckling and the top floors crashed down on those below. That set off a chain reaction where storey crashed down on storey, the whole building cascading down on itself. Thousands were still inside.

The panic spread. People ran from the debris, hiding in shops, taking refuge under cars. Some could not outrun the cloud of thick dust from tonnes of falling rubble that surged between Manhattan's skyscrapers. They were sprinting along the streets, looking over their shoulders, like characters in a film. Many were engulfed. Choking dust reduced visibility to zero.

Two hundred firemen, including the chief and deputy chief of the fire service, who were trying to help evacuate people at the bottom of the towers, were engulfed in the rubble. Seventy police officers were swallowed up along with unknown thousands of people who had not yet managed to escape the devastated area. Almost all of those who died, but who had managed to survive the crashing debris, are thought to have suffocated in the stifling smoke and ash.

A few minutes later the south tower collapsed and a second wave of debris covered an area of 10 blocks around south Manhattan. Cars were piled on top of cars and crushed; buses were lifted up and smashed against buildings. A section of the World Trade Centre, several storeys high, was propelled into another building. Huge chunks were gouged out of neighbouring tower blocks.

It was barely an hour since the twin towers had stood almost a quarter of a mile tall. Now they were reduced and compressed into mounds of rubble and steel that stood a bare hundred feet high. As the dust continued to fall, millions of office documents lay everywhere; torn clothing and shoes were scattered around. Small fires were last night still burning. Almost 5,000 people were feared dead.

In just over an hour on the morning of Tuesday, 11 September 2001, the world had changed for ever.

When the world changed forever (part two)


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002


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