The most murderous terrorist onslaught in world history

By RUPERT CORNWALL

It was the day America's luck ran out. The day you suspected might one day come, but could not comprehend when it did - neither the dimension of the tragedy nor the motives of those who did it. And above all, perhaps, how they did it.

Amid the numbed bewilderment and horror that united America today, you could grasp one thing alone with certainty. This was the biggest, most murderous and most spectacular terrorist onslaught in history, unleashed against the United States - a sequence of co-ordinated attacks against targets in New York and Washington which destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, blew up a part of the Pentagon, the symbol of US military might, and left untold hundreds, more probably thousands, dead and injured.

Along the east coast it was the most beautiful early autumn day. Summer's humidity was just a memory, just a gentle breeze and the skies a limpid blue. But at precisely 8.48am (12.48 am NZT) it became the day when America's luck ran out - a ghastly day when war came to the continental superpower separated by great oceans from a less fortunate world.

It is not the first war, for America has experienced an Independence War and a Mexican war, as well as a terrible civil war which took 600,000 lives.

But if early indications are borne out, this will be America's first taste of war brought to it from across the seas, an act of terrorist vengeance all the more frightening because the enemy is invisible and unknown. Events previously confined to Tom Clancy novels and Hollywood summer scare movies became the shattering, bewildering reality of an ordinary autumn morning.

Recount it in cold print, and you are unable to believe it. In numbing, bewildering sequence, two hijacked aircraft - one an American Airlines 767 - crashed into each of the two World Trade Center towers in New York; then another commercial plane smashed into the Pentagon in Washington and a fire erupted on the Mall, then word of a fourth crash in Pennsylvania. Within two hours both towers, emblems of American wealth and influence, were no more.

No one, not the man on the street, not the smart gentlemen at the country's myriad intelligence agencies, nor the man in the White House had the faintest notion of what was happening.

Washington, capital of the world's overwhelming superpower, was utterly paralysed. The White House, the State Department, the Capitol, the CIA's headquarters in Virginia, every other federal building - all were evacuated. Traffic around the centre was gridlocked as people fled their offices and tried to drive home. Cellphone circuits collapsed.

Every main airport across the US was shut, all international flights were diverted to Canada. Chaos reigned everywhere, as the devastating chain of events - unfolding in the space of less than an hour - swamped the country's ability to cope.

In New York, where the human toll was highest, the city was brought to a dreadful standstill, as mighty clouds of smoke swirled around the smouldering ruins. Hospitals were overwhelmed, bloodbanks drained; at this most basic level, the scale of what had just happened defied understanding.

The day dwarfed anything in recent American history. In its time, the 1993 terrorist attack that killed six people at the World Trade Center sent shivers through the country as a portent of what might come. What did come was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, not the work of a foreign terrorist, but a homemade atrocity carried out by the icily calculating Timothy McVeigh, in which more than 160 people died.

However, the blown-out facade of Oklahoma's Alfred P Murrah building, in retrospect, was a child's macabre amusement. Yesterday, the normal yardstick of tragedy, the number of people killed, meant nothing. This time the calculation was a ghoulish arithmetic with too many variables. Four, maybe five commercial jets, each perhaps full of people who boarded them a few minutes, an hour at the most, beforehand, unsuspecting of the terror and death that awaited them. How many were aboard?

Hundreds, thousands, no one knew. Normally in the US one big airline crash occurs a year; in a good year there are none. This time there were four (at least) within the space of an hour - three at the highest profile targets imaginable, the fourth, a United 757 from Newark, New Jersey, bound for San Francisco, coming to grief in the heart of American rural normality, at Shanksville in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania. What target was it aiming at: Chicago or some other symbol of US power and ebullience?

And then the mayhem at the Pentagon, and the building's Army planning wing that took the direct hit from what now appears to be a Boeing 767 ploughing into it. In the uncannily calm words of a witness who watched the unbelievable as she was driving on Interstate 395 on her regular commute into downtown Washington around 9am on a pristine morning: "It was a commercial plane. It was flying too fast and too low. Then it just disappeared below the fold of the hill. The next thing, there was an enormous explosion." Such was one air-traffic movement on the morning of 11 September 2001 in the brilliant sunny skies of Washington in autumn.

And then New York, where it all started. "Turn on CNN!" my wife called just before 9am: "A plane's hit the World Trade Centre." I did - but for a moment, despite the smoke billowing from the side of the building, normality still refused to let go. Probably some idiot amateur pilot, I thought: didn't a plane hit the Empire State Building back in the Thirties, and only the other day didn't some hang-glider get tangled up on the crown of the Statue of Liberty?

But then another plane took aim and flew like a missile into the other, south tower of the Trade Centre. You knew this was something different; an event unlike anything before, no act of God or human error, but an utterly deliberate aerial version of a double-suicide bombing, directed at the best-known symbol of American commercial might.

Even the TV anchors could not believe what they were witnessing. It was Hollywood for real, in which the fire burnt as bright yellow and the smoke as acridly black as in the movies - except this was real life. Every day, 20,000 people work in the Trade Center: how many were trapped when the terrorists struck?

The devastation at the Pentagon, the panic on the Washington streets, unfolded closer to the epicentre of American government. But what happened to those two gleaming silver towers was the true symbol of the day. The fires raged with increasing fury, and by mid-morning both of them had more or less collapsed: buildings which had taken years to build, but now suddenly expunged from the New York skyline as a child rubs out a pencilled picture in his scribbling book.

All that was left was rubble, smoke and an as yet incalculable loss of life. Judging by the scenes, thousands must have died - but, again, how many, no one knew. This was a rescue operation the likes of which America had never seen before.

You struggle for historical comparison. The closest surely, in the American experience, was Pearl Harbor in 1941, another sneak attack that sent thousands to their death, and briefly overwhelmed those who had to cope with it. But Pearl Harbor happened on a remote Pacific island, not at the very nerve centres of US government and business. And just like the Japanese attack on Hawaii, this was an act of war - but a war conducted by unseen assassins, who have inflicted a shattering blow. One's first thoughts in moments like this are often perverse; mine was of the irrelevance of national missile defence, the dogma that enthralls President George Bush and the Republican defence hawks around him.

Spend all the billions you want, Mr President. The smartest shield in the world - and yours doesn't even work so far - could not have prevented these attacks. These were not ballistic missiles descending from space, but the most banal aircraft around, commercial jets until yesterday in the regular service of the two largest American airlines. Nothing could have stopped them. The only mercy, if such it proves, is that the planes were not carrying some form of biological, chemical or nuclear weapon.

Mr Bush, as he had to be, was the personification of defiance today. Those responsible would be brought to book. "We are being tested as a nation, we will show the world we can pass the test," the President insisted.

But whoever had plotted this attack had reduced the mightiest country on earth to baffled impotence. The White House had wanted him to get back to the Oval Office, and show that events were under control. But his aides were overruled by security officials, who directed that Mr Bush, travelling back from Florida on Air Force One, be taken to a US defence facility with full communications in Louisiana, and thence to another one, whose name was not being disclosed.

The Senate and House leadership too had been taken to "a secure location," while part of the US Atlantic fleet was moved "for safety reasons" out of Norfolk, Virginia, to be deployed along the east coast. Has this ever happened in what is technically a time of peace? Today in New York and Washington was not 1941 in Hawaii. It was 1941 in London at the height of the Blitz - but a London without even air-raid sirens. And just as in the Blitz, no-one knew when it would be over.

Four hours after the attacks, officials still feared that more attacks could take place. In Washington they were insisting that the President was "very much at the head of the table," and doubtless in this cybernetic age, he was. But you wouldn't have guessed so on the crowded and panicky streets of the capital, where federal buildings were emptied and sealed, where the fabric of daily administrative life had been ripped to shreds, and where frightened human beings, fleeing a city that for all one knew might be ground zero for another attack, thought of just one thing: getting back to their families.

Even before the first dust had cleared, and the body count in New York and the Pentagon had barely begun, the fingerpointing had begun. How had this attack not been picked up by US intelligence, either electronic or human, especially since Osama Bin Laden, instantly installed as the prime suspect for the campaign, had reputedly warned that he was planning something very spectacular?

"We've known for a while that some people were planning something really big, said General Wesley Clark, the former NATO supreme commander in Europe.

"All our agencies have worked very diligently against this threat. But they simply didn't do enough." In the days and weeks ahead, the questions raised by General Clark will become deafening.

After all, this was no random attack, but one that must have needed months of planning. If, as seemed likely, it did originate somewhere in the Middle East, many people there and the US must have taken part in the preparations. Indeed, as the first shock subsided, the most agonising and ominous question was: How did they do it?

Even as the first fragments of the mosaic of terror fell into place, the enormity of the implications were beginning to sink in. Four commercial airliners, at least three of them hijacked simultaneously, by squads which contained pilots of their own to replace those flying for American Airlines and United Airlines.

This last must be so because would any pilot, knowing he and all his passengers were dead anyway, crash his aircraft in the place where it would cause most civilian destruction, even with a gun pointed at his head?

This was the most sophisticated and co-ordinated act of terrorism imaginable, executed either by some Middle Eastern group, or by some disaffected American ex-military men. The latter should not be entirely ruled out. The initial assumption after the Oklahoma City bombing was that Arabs were responsible, only for it to emerge within 48 hours that this was a homegrown calamity.

This time, the cliche is true. America, after 11 September 2001, will never be the same again. The events were simply too enormous, the repercussions will be too large. In America more than anywhere, national tragedy breeds national unity. Democrats and Republicans made common cause. It was, as Henry Kissinger pointed out, an integrated attack which could only be met by an integrated response. As they always do, people rallied behind the President.

But Mr Bush as well faces a colossal test. For the first time in memory the President is Commander-in-Chief in more than name. He must assert his leadership. He must find words both of firmness yet of compassion, as Mr Clinton managed in what, six years on, was the infinitely less grave moment of Oklahoma City. Above all, he has to persuade his shattered countrymen that normality, one day, will return.

- INDEPENDENT

The New Zealand Herald has published a special print edition with coverage of the terrorist attacks. It is on sale in Auckland this afternoon.

Continuous coverage online

The fatal flights

Emergency telephone numbers for friends and family of victims

These numbers are valid for calls from within New Zealand, but may be overloaded at the moment.

United Airlines: 0168 1800 932 8555

American Airlines: 0168 1800 245 0999

NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade special hotline: 0800 872 111

Online database for friends and family