Dagger to America's heart

The biggest terrorist attack in world history has left the United States reeling in stunned disbelief. RUPERT CORNWELL reports on why Americans will never feel as safe again.

It was the day America's luck ran out. The day everyone 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 yesterday, one thing was certain.



This was the biggest, most murderous and most spectacular terrorist onslaught in history - a sequence of coordinated attacks against targets in New York and Washington which destroyed the World Trade Center, blew up a part of the Pentagon, the symbol of US military might, and left untold thousands, dead and injured.

Along the east coast, it was a beautiful early autumn day. Summer's humidity was just a memory, and the skies were a limpid blue.

But at 8.48 am, 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 at home. 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 summer scare movies became shattering, bewildering reality.

In cold print, it is unbelievable. In numbing, bewildering sequence, two hijacked aircraft crashed into each of the two World Trade Center towers in New York.

Then another hijacked airliner smashed into the Pentagon in Washington and a fire erupted on the Mall. Then word of a fourth air crash in Pennsylvania.

Within two hours both World Trade Center 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, not even the man in the White House, had the faintest notion 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. The scale of what had just happened defied understanding.

The day dwarfed anything in recent American history. In its time, the 1993 terrorist attack at the World Trade Center that killed six people 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.

But in retrospect, the blown-out facade of Oklahoma's Alfred P. Murrah building was a child's macabre amusement.



Normally, the US has one big airline crash a year; in a good year there are none. This time there were four 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 a Boeing 757 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: "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."

And then New York, where it all started.

"Turn on CNN!" my wife called just before 9 am. "A plane's hit the World Trade Center." 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.

But then another plane took aim and flew like a missile into the other, south tower of the Trade Center. 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 seeing. The fire burned as bright yellow and the smoke as acridly black as in the Hollywood movies - except this was real life.

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 towers had collapsed. Buildings which took years to build were suddenly expunged from the New York skyline as a child rubs out a pencilled picture in a scribbling book.

All that was left was rubble, smoke and incalculable loss of life.

The closest historical comparison, 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 nerve centres of US government and business. And 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 enthrals President George W. 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.

Mr Bush, as he had to be, was the personification of defiance yesterday.

"We are being tested as a nation; we will show the world we can pass the test," he declared.

But whoever plotted this attack had reduced the mightiest country on earth to baffled impotence. The White House wanted Mr Bush 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 in Louisiana, and thence to another one, whose name was not being disclosed.

The Senate and House leadership had been taken to "a secure location", and 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? Yesterday 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 more attacks could take place.



Even before the first dust had cleared, and the body count in New York and the Pentagon had begun, the fingerpointing started.

Why was this attack not been picked up by US intelligence, especially since Osama bin Laden - instantly installed as the prime suspect - had reputedly warned that he was planning something 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."

The questions raised by General Clark will become deafening.

This attack must have needed months of planning. If it originated in the Middle East, many people there and in the United States must have taken part in the preparations.

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 hijacked, at least three simultaneously, by squads which included pilots to replace those flying for American Airlines and United Airlines.

This 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 coordinated act of terrorism imaginable, executed either by some Middle Eastern group, or by some disaffected American ex-military men.

The homegrown option should not be ruled out. The initial assumption after the Oklahoma City bombing was that Arabs were responsible. Within 48 hours, it was discovered that this was a calamity inflicted by Americans on Americans.

This time, the cliche is true. America 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 that could be met only by an integrated response. As they always do, people rallied behind the President.

But Mr Bush 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 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 convince his shattered countrymen that one day, normality will return.

Full coverage: Terror in America

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The fatal flights

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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: 0800 872 111

US Embassy in Wellington (recorded info): 04 472 2068

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