The Los Angeles Times
'Added rights may not give military tribunals more credibility,'
February 12, 2008 | Peter Spiegel and David G. Savage, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — The Defense Department had an eye on history Monday when it announced capital murder and war crimes charges against six detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the alleged Sept. 11 plotters would be given an "extraordinary set of rights" when they go on trial.
They will receive more rights than the top Nazis tried at Nuremberg, military officials pointed out, and far more than the plotters in the assassination of President Lincoln, who were hanged within three months.
Still, the tribunal will be run by the U.S. military, with military lawyers and military judges. Even Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said that trials at the island prison would carry "a taint."
Those proceedings could begin as early as summer, following the decision by military prosecutors to charge the suspects -- including self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Prosecutors have recommended that all six be put to death if found guilty.
Each of the men was charged with conspiracy, murder and other offenses. Four were accused specifically of hijacking the airliners that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as the one that crashed into a Pennsylvania field.
When military tribunals were first convened at Guantanamo nearly four years ago, the rules allowed prosecutors to use secret evidence and to consider information gathered through torture. The Supreme Court in 2006 struck down those commissions because they violated the Geneva Convention.
Under a law since passed by Congress, the Pentagon has gone a long way to change the rules governing terrorism trials. Even critics acknowledge that they now more closely mirror civilian trials or military courts-martial.
Gone, for instance, are provisions allowing secret evidence. All evidence, even that considered classified by the government, must be shown to the accused.
Gone too is the allowance for evidence gathered under torture. However, the question of whether prosecutors may use information obtained through controversial forms of coercion -- particularly the simulated drowning practice called waterboarding, which critics consider to be torture -- will be left up to individual trial judges.
Perhaps most important, defendants can appeal convictions to U.S. civilian courts, including the Supreme Court.
Despite the tightened rules, the court of public opinion may never be convinced that the trials of some of the world's most notorious suspects will be fair and credible.
"It will never be judged to be legitimate, not by those who despise us . . . [and] not by our staunchest allies," said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI agent assigned to the Osama bin Laden squad in the New York field office. "A military judge, a military prosecutor and defense team and essentially a military jury -- even our staunchest allies can't look at this with any sense of justice."
Officials involved in drafting the new rules under the Military Commissions Act of 2006 said lawmakers took as their guide the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the well-regarded system for courts-martial. Some human-rights advocates have been urging the use of the military justice system for the Guantanamo prosecutions.
Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, who oversaw detainee affairs at the Pentagon until resigning last year, said courts-martial and the military commissions were "virtually identical in 98% of the rules."
Still, advocates of the military commissions acknowledge that the new procedures fall short of all protections provided in civilian courts and under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The Guantanamo commission rules allow for more liberal use of hearsay evidence -- information gathered second- or third-hand. And in other U.S. courts, almost all testimony gathered under extreme duress would be ruled out automatically, not left up to the discretion of the trial judge, as military commission regulations permit.
Questions concerning information-gathering techniques could become particularly contentious, given the recent CIA admission that three detainees -- including Mohammed -- were subjected to waterboarding, a practice that administration officials say has led to a trove of intelligence.
"The rules are so loose that, you know how they say a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich? A military commission can convict that sandwich through torture and hearsay," said Jumana Musa, who has tracked the Guantanamo trials for Amnesty International.
Charging documents released Monday by the military give no indication whether prosecutors intend to use evidence gathered under coercive questioning in the trials of the six alleged plotters.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, one of the military lawyers who will decide whether the cases can proceed to trial, told reporters at the Pentagon that he did not know yet whether such evidence would be used.
But he defended the practice, noting Congress explicitly allowed for a trial judge to decide whether information gleaned through questionable interrogation tactics should be allowed.
"The question of what evidence will be admitted, whether waterboarding or otherwise, will be decided in the courts, in front of a judge, after it's fought out between the defense and the prosecution in these cases," Hartmann said.
But just as it has taken years for the alleged Sept. 11 conspirators to be charged, there is no assurance the six will see the inside of a courtroom any time soon.
The law that tightened the tribunal process also bars detainees from legally challenging their imprisonment. But the Supreme Court is considering a challenge to that prohibition.
If the justices agree that legal claims from Guantanamo may be heard, attorneys for the six detainees may well go to court and try to head off a trial for their clients before they reach a military commission.
peter.spiegel@latimes.com
david.savage@latimes.com
Times staff writer Josh Meyer contributed to this report.
The detainees and the charges against them
The Pentagon has charged six detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with murder and war crimes in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Some details on the detainees and their charges:
Each defendant was charged with conspiracy and a number of separate offenses including murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, terrorism and providing material support for terrorism.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed: Charged with being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks by proposing the concept to Osama bin Laden as early as 1996, obtaining approval and funding for the attacks from Bin Laden, overseeing the operation and training the hijackers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was born in Pakistan and raised in Kuwait.
Walid bin Attash: Better known as Khallad, he is alleged to have administered an Al Qaeda training camp in Logar, Afghanistan, where two of the 19 hijackers were trained. He also is believed to have been Bin Laden's bodyguard. Authorities say Bin Laden selected Khallad as a Sept. 11 hijacker but he was prevented from participating when he was arrested and briefly detained in Yemen in early 2001.
Ramzi Binalshibh: The Yemeni is alleged to have helped find flight schools for the hijackers, helped them enter the United States and assisted with the operation's financing. He allegedly was selected to be one of the hijackers and made a "martyr video" but was unable to get a U.S. visa and could not enter the U.S. He also is believed to be a lead operative for a foiled plot to crash aircraft into London's Heathrow Airport.
Ali Abdul Aziz Ali: Also known as Ammar Baluchi, he is alleged to have sent about $120,000 to the hijackers for their expenses and flight training, and helped nine of the hijackers travel to the United States. He is believed to have served as a key lieutenant to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Pakistan. He was born in the Pakistan province of Baluchistan and raised in Kuwait.
Mustafa Ahmed Hawsawi: The Saudi is alleged to have helped the hijackers with money, western clothing, traveler's checks and credit cards. Hawsawi served as a witness in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial, saying he had seen Moussaoui at an Al Qaeda guest house in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the first half of 2001.
Mohammed Qahtani: The Saudi is alleged to have helped get cash for the hijackers. Qahtani, who was denied entry into the United States by immigration agents at the airport in Orlando, Fla., is suspected of being the "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Four of the six -- Mohammed, Bin Attash, Binalshibh and Aziz Ali -- are also charged specifically with hijacking four aircraft: the two that hit the World Trade Center towers in New York, the one that hit the Pentagon and the one that crashed in the western Pennsylvania countryside.
Source: Associated Press
Sunday, July 4, 2010
'Terrorists Attack New York, Pentagon,' LA Times
London, editor Abdel-Bari Atwan of the Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper
Walter Kross, technical specialist for "Flight Explorer"
Clyde Ebanks, insurance company vice president, 103rd floor of the WTC South Tower
Peter Dicerbo, First Union National Bank, 47 floor
Hyman Brown, a University of Colorado civil engineering professor
Tiffany Keeling, 32, of New Mexico, attending a training seminar for financial consultants on the 61st floor of the south tower of the trade center.
Denny Levy, 36, a videographer,
John Kelly, 38, a furniture designer,
his wife
Carla Thompson, who works in an Arlington, Va., office building about 1,000 yards from the crash.
Ginger Groeber, a civilian Defense Department official
Clyde Ragland, Naval officer who works near the Pentagon,
Barbara Olson, the wife of U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson,
Rev. Sylvia Baker
Rep. James P. Moran, briefed by the Marine Corps.
Larry Johnson, a former State Department counter-terrorism official,
Brian Jenkins, a Rand Corp. expert on terrorism and international crime,
James A. Baker III, Former Secretary of State
Edward Milliron, Westmoreland County dispatcher
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Times Staff
Geraldine Baum, Times Staff
Stephen Braun, Times Staff
Richard T. Cooper, Times Staff
Megan Garvey, Times Staff
Judy Pasternak, Times Staff
David G. Savage, Times Staff
Esther Schrader, Times Staff
David Willman, Times Staff
Robin Wright, Times Staff
Aaron Zitner, Times Staff
John J. Goldman, Times Staff
Thomas S. Mulligan, Times Staff
Eric Slater, Times Staff
Edward J. Boyer, Times Staff
Richard Lee Colvin, Times Staff
Thomas Curwen, Times Staff
Abigail Goldman, Times Staff
Ardith Hilliard, Times Staff
J. Michael Kennedy, Times Staff
Jeff Leeds, Times Staff
Hilary E. MacGregor, Times Staff
Eric Malnic, Times Staff
Richard E. Meyer, Times Staff
Diane Pucin, Times Staff
Mary Rourke, Times Staff
Tim Rutten, Times Staff
Henry Weinstein, Times Staff
Nona Yates, Times Staff
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (A good guy!)
John L. Martin, the former chief of the internal security section at the Department of Justice (A good guy!)
Here is a classic piece of methodology of the perpetrators: using out-of-town participants.
"Tiffany Keeling, of New Mexico was attending a training seminar for financial consultants on the 61st floor of the south tower." She tells us that "only 75" of her training group are accounted for. How many "irregular" occupants were in the buildings that day?
Other standouts in the article are the specifics of the Flight Explorer changing speeds, and impacting at only 300 miles per hour. Saying the plane was "hand flown" is a complete giveaway. "At least one" plane had a pilot then.
The Zionist Hyman Brown is good too. He repeatedly references the planes as containing 23,000 gallons of fuel, rather then the truth figure of 10,000. He was trotted out so fast and across such a broad media swath, he is a lead player.
Also, I've never heard the quote from Brian Jenkins before, "We've seen elements of this event before. Thirty years ago, almost to the day, Sept. 6, 1970." That makes for a nice mirror, and again, it draws the Israelis even more central to the action.
Good article. Glad it turned up.
The Los Angeles Times
'Thousands Dead, Injured as Hijacked U.S. Airliners Ram Targets; World Trade Towers Brought Down'
'Tragedy: Assault leaves Manhattan in chaos. Three of the flights were en route to L.A., one to San Francisco. President Bush puts military on highest alert, closes borders and vows to 'find those responsible.'
September 12, 2001|MATEA GOLD and MAGGIE FARLEY, TIMES STAFF WRITERS
NEW YORK — In the worst terrorist attack ever against the United States, hijackers struck at the preeminent symbols of the nation's wealth and might Tuesday, flying airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and killing or injuring thousands of people.
As a horrified nation watched on television, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan collapsed into flaming rubble after two Boeing 767s rammed their upper stories. A third airliner, a Boeing 757, flattened one of the Pentagon's five sides.
A fourth jetliner crashed in western Pennsylvania. Authorities said the hijackers might have been trying to aim the plane at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., the Capitol or other targets in Washington.
The assaults, which stirred fear and anxiety across the country and evoked comparisons to Pearl Harbor, were carefully planned and coordinated, occurring within 50 minutes. No one claimed responsibility, but official suspicion quickly fell on Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden. Unexplained was how the terrorists boarded the jets and overpowered the crews.
Federal law enforcement sources said the FBI conducted searches and served subpoenas, some in south Florida. One official said agents were investigating the possibility that some of the terrorists were pilots who had been trained "for this kind of action."
The FBI was sifting through hundreds of tips pouring into a toll-free hotline and a Web site and pursuing dozens of leads.
Addressing the nation Tuesday night, President Bush vowed to "find those responsible and bring them to justice." This country, he said, would retaliate against "those behind these evil acts" and any country that harbors them.
Altogether, the four downed planes carried 266 people. All were killed. Scores of people jumped to their deaths or died in fires and the collapsing superstructure at the Trade Center. New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said earliest reports counted 2,100 people injured, about 150 of them in critical condition.
Estimates of the death toll at the Pentagon ranged from 100 to 800.
At nightfall, more than nine hours after the attack, a 47-story annex to the 110-floor twin towers at the Trade Center collapsed as well. It too had caught fire, but by the time it fell, all of its occupants had been evacuated.
At a late-night news conference, New York authorities said more than 300 firefighters and three dozen police officers were missing. Many had rushed into the towers after the airliners hit, only to be trapped when the buildings collapsed.
Among the dead were the New York fire chief, his chief of special operations and a first deputy commissioner.
Some of those still in the rubble reportedly called officials or family members on their cell phones, and some trapped police officers made radio contact with headquarters. But because of fires and unstable debris, rescue attempts were halted after dark.
Bush placed U.S. forces around the world on highest alert and flew from a visit in Florida to secure military bases in Louisiana and Nebraska before returning to Washington to address the nation. Vice President Dick Cheney, Cabinet members, congressional leaders, and the president's family also were taken to secure locations.
It was the worst siege of terrorism waged against the United States in its history. It shut down the federal government in Washington and the financial markets in New York. It closed all airports across the nation for the first time, as well as some Amtrak rail lines in the Northeast. It put off the primary election in New York and closed Disneyland. It halted major league baseball for a day, as only World War I and D-day have done before.
America tightened security at its borders and at embassies and military sites around the world. The National Guard patrolled Washington and New York. Bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were closed. Authorities evacuated the Capitol Building, the State Department, the CIA building, the United Nations and the Sears Tower in Chicago. Hoover Dam was closed to visitors. Patrols increased along the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
Even in Europe, authorities evacuated high-rise buildings as a precaution.
Members of Congress, after being briefed by FBI and intelligence officials, said Bin Laden was the suspected mastermind. "They've come to the conclusion," said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), "that this has the signature of Osama bin Laden." He is the fugitive Saudi terrorist under indictment here for the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden has been granted asylum by Afghanistan.
That nation's hard-line Islamic Taliban rulers condemned the attacks in New York and Washington and rejected suggestions that Bin Laden was behind them. In London, editor Abdel-Bari Atwan of the Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper said he had heard that Islamic fundamentalists close to Bin Laden were planning a major operation but that he did not take the threat seriously.
"They said it would be a huge and unprecedented attack," Atwan told Associated Press, "but they did not specify."
Anger across the United States brought talk of retaliation. "These attacks clearly constitute an act of war," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
He was echoed by Adm. Robert J. Natter, commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet. "We've been attacked like we haven't [been] since Pearl Harbor."
"This is the second Pearl Harbor," said Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.). "I don't think I overstate it." Nearly 2,400 people died when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. It drew the United States into World War II.
Governments around the world offered condolences and pledged solidarity in the fight against terrorism. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said he was horrified by the attacks. But in the West Bank town of Nablus, about 3,000 people took to the streets, chanted "God is great" and handed out candy in a gesture of celebration.
Russian President Vladimir V. Putin called the attacks "terrible tragedies." China said it was "horrified." Pope John Paul II condemned the "unspeakable horror" and prayed for the victims and their families.
The sequence of events that stunned New York into grief-stricken agony began at 7:59 a.m. EDT, when American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Boston's Logan International Airport. The flight carried 81 passengers and a crew of 11 westward toward Los Angeles International Airport. Fifteen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 left Logan, also bound for Los Angeles. It carried 56 passengers and a crew of nine.
What is known for certain is that Flight 11--the first aircraft to strike the World Trade Center--was hijacked somewhere over upstate New York, made a hard left turn and flew for approximately 14 minutes until it struck the Manhattan landmark.
Flight Explorer, a Virginia-based company that sells Federal Aviation Administration radar data to airlines, was tracking the flight. According to Walter Kross, one of the company's technical specialists, the 767 was flying at 29,000 feet near Albany, N.Y., when it veered to the southeast.
The plane's speed dropped from about 450 knots to 340 knots. The Boeing 767 flew faster as it headed for the New York area, reaching a speed of 500 knots. It then slowed to about 300 knots as it approached the World Trade Center.
About 8:30 a.m., it slammed into the building.
"It had to have been hand-flown," Kross said, suggesting that at least one of the hijackers was skilled enough to pilot the aircraft with precision.
A thunderstorm Monday night had cleared the air over Manhattan and the sunlight of a warm September morning was glinting off the Hudson River as the business day began in the city's highest buildings.
Clyde Ebanks, vice president of an insurance company, was at a meeting on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's south tower when his boss said, "Look at that!"
He turned and saw a plane go past and hit the north tower.
Carnage and chaos ensued.
Peter Dicerbo led his 44 colleagues from the First Union National Bank down 47 flights of stairs. He staggered away from the building, his clothes torn; the workers were stunned, dazed and coughing.
Less than 20 minutes later, the United Airlines jet struck the other World Trade Center tower.
"The minute I got out of the building, the second building blew up," said Jennifer Brickhouse, 34, from Union, N.J., who was riding an escalator into the trade center when she "heard this big boom."
"All this stuff started falling," she said, "and all this smoke was coming through. People were screaming, falling and jumping out of the windows."
At least one couple were seen leaping hand-in-hand from the tower's upper stories.
Three miles away, across the East River in Brooklyn, sheets of office paper fluttered out of the sky.
At 9:50 a.m., an hour after the first crash, the first World Trade Center tower collapsed in smoke and rubble.
There were reports of an explosion right before the tower fell, then a strange sucking sound, and finally the sound of floors collapsing. Then came a huge surge of air, followed by a vast cloud of dirt, smoke, dust, paper and debris. Windows shattered. People screamed and dived for cover.
"I heard the largest, loudest collective scream I've ever heard," said Melissa Easton, who was watching from the roof of her Chinatown apartment building about 20 blocks away.
Not long afterward, at 10:30 a.m., the second tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.
The top of the building exploded with smoke and dust. There were no flames, just an explosion of debris, and then more vast clouds swept down to the streets. People were knocked to the ground on their faces as they ran from the building.
Hyman Brown, a University of Colorado civil engineering professor and the construction manager for the World Trade Center, said that flames fueled by thousands of gallons of aviation fuel melted the towers' steel supports.
"This building would have stood had a plane or a force caused by a plane smashed into it," he said. "But steel melts, and 24,000 gallons of aviation fluid melted the steel. Nothing is designed or will be designed to withstand that fire."
In addition to the more than 200 missing firefighters, police officials said nearly 100 of their officers were similarly unaccounted for. Brian Stark, a former Navy paramedic who assisted rescuers, said paramedics had been told that hundreds of police officers and firefighters were missing from the ranks of those sent in to respond to the first crash.
Giuliani said the 2,100 injured included 1,500 "walking wounded" who were taken by boat to New Jersey, and 600 others who were taken to New York hospitals. It could take weeks to dig through the rubble for victims. "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."
Hundreds of volunteers and medical workers converged on triage centers, offering help and blood. So many people lined up to donate blood that many were turned away.
The city took on the eerie hush of a metropolis under siege. With public transportation shut down and major bridges and tunnels closed to traffic, walking became the only way to get anywhere. Thousands clogged Manhattan bridges, leaving the city on foot. Throughout the metropolitan area, people stunned by the day's events strolled about as if in a daze.
More than nine hours after the attack, an annex in the complex--7 World Trade Center--continued to burn. At 5:20 p.m., that building collapsed. Blocks away, crowds roared with astonishment.
"People stared open-mouthed and were in shock," said bystander Russ Baker.
Jesus Soriano Jr., 34, of Brooklyn, said he was there when the twin towers fell.
"I felt the first building collapse. I saw the second tower collapse," Soriano said. "It collapsed from the outside in."
"Those terrorists are real cowards," he said.
Tyler Catalana, 23, a resident of Mill Valley, Calif., who is studying architecture in New York, said he saw the north tower collapse into itself.
"It looked like a nuclear war," he said.
Catalana said that when the dust began to settle, "it looked like the surface of the moon."
Much of lower Manhattan was evacuated as officials feared potential gas leaks and falling debris could cause further casualties.
Like refugees fleeing a war-town nation, tens of thousands walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and along a nearby highway as they sought safety.
Some people wore paper masks to block out the dust. People gathered around cars listening to news over their radios. Others washed off the dust with the water from open fire hydrants.
Giuliani said the New York Stock Exchange was intact, but he doubted it would reopen today, because it was necessary to keep lower Manhattan clear for emergency vehicles. Public and parochial schools in the city were scheduled to be closed.
"New York is still here. The World Financial Center is still here," the mayor said. "We have undergone tremendous losses and we will grieve for them horribly. We are going to prevail."
Three large trucks arrived at the city morgue in the afternoon with extra supplies. A spokesman said that bodies were expected later.
Families searching for missing relatives were directed to an office where city employees took information. Extra medical examiners were summoned to the morgue.
The most severely burned were taken to a center at New York Presbyterian Hospital on Manhattan's upper East Side. Elective surgery at the hospital was canceled. Patients in the emergency room watched the disaster on television.
Tiffany Keeling, 32, of New Mexico was treated at Bellevue Hospital for smoke inhalation and head injuries. She said she was attending a training seminar for financial consultants on the 61st floor of the south tower of the trade center.
"We were looking out the window and the entire sky was filled with paper," she said. "We thought it was a ticker tape parade."
Then, Keeling said, she noticed a huge cloud of smoke billowing from the north tower. "Fireballs were falling to the ground, which I now know were people."
Keeling and the other trainees headed for the stairs. When they were between the 59th and 58th floors, a voice on the building's public address system said the north tower was the only structure in danger and that everyone could return upstairs. Half of her group went back up. She and others continued to the street.
"People were coming down from the top floors in every condition you could imagine," Keeling said, through tears.
"I heard a woosh like air getting sucked in a vacuum. I grabbed my jacket and got as close to a planter as possible and started feeling little things on my back like hail, and they got bigger and bigger until the air was solid debris."
Keeling said she turned to a man who walked down the stairs with her and asked: "Are we dead?"
She said only 75 of the people who attended her training group were accounted for.
Denny Levy, 36, a videographer, witnessed the impact from the ground.
"I saw this plane flying low over the buildings down the center of Manhattan," said Levy, who was uninjured. "It went toward the World Trade Center. It sounded like its engine was broken. Your brain tricks you. I thought it went past the building, and then it went a little to the left and took a plunge at the building.
"Then there was this burst of stuff coming out of the building. There was no fire and no explosion. I wondered why the plane was making so much noise and was so low.
"You could tell it was a passenger plane, that it was in trouble or trying to get close for a view. You'd never think a plane would go dead center into a building. It was like a missile.
"I thought it was an accident, except he took a sudden left. He went right for it. It was so creepy. I thought, 'Oh my God, I just saw 300 people die.'
John Kelly, 38, a furniture designer, said he looked out a window of his apartment after hearing the first explosion.
"My wife says, 'Oh, my God, they hit the second building.' I looked. The plane went through the building, and there was a blast out two sides. It was like exit wounds in all directions.
"I saw people jumping, bodies flying through the air. I saw people waving white flags. It was horrible.
"Police and ambulances were everywhere, and within seconds there was no one. You saw everyone running, running, running. You saw shoes, sunglasses on the street. People dropped their stuff and ran.
"It was like a nuclear explosion."
A Crushing Blow to Symbol of Strength
As a stunned nation attempted to grasp the horror of television images from New York, a third hijacked airliner crashed into the Pentagon, bursting into flames and delivering an incendiary blow to the symbol of America's military might.
American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 with 58 passengers and a crew of six aboard, hit the west side of the building at 9:41 a.m. EDT, half an hour after it left Dulles International Airport en route to Los Angeles.
"I glanced up just at the point where the plane was going into the building," said Carla Thompson, who works in an Arlington, Va., office building about 1,000 yards from the crash.
"I saw an indentation in the building and then it was just blown-up up--red, everything red," she said. "Everybody was just starting to go crazy. I was petrified."
Within 20 minutes of the crash, the White House, the Pentagon--the world's largest office building--and the U.S. Capitol were evacuated.
What began as an orderly exodus from the nation's defense headquarters turned to panic as evacuees made their way to parking lots.
"People were just milling around in a daze," said Ginger Groeber, a civilian Defense Department official who had been in the Pentagon watching television reports of the attacks in New York when the building was hit.
"These people were panicking out there," she said. "People were looking for their staffs. Nobody's cell phones were working."
The District of Columbia government shut down. Many private firms also closed and sent employees streaming home, causing traffic nightmares.
As parking garages closed and cars poured out, one woman grabbed the door of a lone car going in.
"Don't park," she yelled, her face twisted in fear. "They're hitting the Pentagon! They're hitting the Pentagon!"
Naval officer Clyde Ragland, who works near the Pentagon, was stuck in his office because the streets outside were clogged with traffic.
He and his co-workers were watching television reports of the disaster in New York when "we gazed out our own windows and, to our horror and disbelief, saw huge billows of black smoke rising from the northeast, in the direction of D.C. and the river . . . and the Pentagon."
Ragland described billowing black smoke and "what looked like white confetti raining down everywhere." He said it soon became apparent "that the 'confetti' was little bits of airplane, falling down after being flung high into the bright, blue sky."
"Everything is confusion right now, but there was no panic. Just stunned disbelief," Ragland said.
Streets surrounding the Capitol Mall were paralyzed as people tried to get away from the federal buildings, worried that they would be targeted next.
Federal workers raced down the steps into the subway, only to be greeted by a sign flashing: "Security alert! The Metro is closed until further notice. Please try to call a relative or a taxi if you need a ride." The subway reopened by midday.
But with phone lines jammed and no taxis to be found, many people tried to hurry away on foot, exchanging rumors about the attacks.
"We never thought this could happen," said Mary Shea, 58, an FAA program analyst, as she stood outside the L'Enfant Plaza subway stop. "What a shock, what a shock."
Long lines formed around pay phones.
"My mom works at the Pentagon, my mom works at the Pentagon," one man repeated over and over again, rocking back and forth, urging the line to speed up.
Abigail Harrington, an employee at the District of Columbia Department of Health, stood with a large group of people on 7th Street, peering down the road for a bus she hoped to catch to pick up her daughter from school.
"I feel horrible," said Harrington, clutching her hands together. "I can't reach my husband on his cell phone. I don't know what's going on. You never think that something like this can affect the world's biggest superpower. It's really, really scary. It really is."
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was in a wing of the Pentagon opposite the point of impact. He told reporters that he felt the shock and went outside where volunteers were helping to carry away the injured.
Rumsfeld refused to estimate the casualty toll at the military's nerve center. The plane crashed into a newly renovated portion of the building that had not been fully reoccupied.
Authorities estimate that 23,000 people work in the Pentagon, and Rumsfeld vowed that the building would reopen for business today.
Barbara Olson, the wife of U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, spoke to her husband twice by cell phone from the hijacked airliner before it crashed.
She told him that all the passengers and crew, including the pilot, were forced to the back of the plane. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters.
Olson said his wife made no reference to the nationality or motive of the hijackers.
Barbara Olson had originally planned to take a Monday flight to Los Angeles but changed her plans to have breakfast with her husband Tuesday, his birthday.
The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, United Airlines Flight 93, took off at 8:01 a.m. EDT from New Jersey's Newark International Airport, bound for San Francisco. On board the Boeing 757 were 38 passengers, two pilots and five flight attendants. The early stages of the flight seemed normal, with the plane charting a westerly course that brought it to northern Ohio.
But as the jet was flying due west just below Cleveland, it made a sharp U-turn. Radar tracked it passing just south of Pittsburgh.
At 9:58 a.m., a 911 operator in Pennsylvania's Westmoreland County received a call from a man who said he had locked himself in a bathroom on a hijacked airliner. "We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked," the man said over his cell phone.
At the same time, flight attendant CeeCee Lyles, a mother of four, dialed her cell phone and told her husband, a Fort Myers, Fla., policeman, that her flight was being taken over by hijackers.
The Westmoreland County dispatcher, Edward Milliron, said his office was taking information from the passenger in the bathroom when the line went dead.
"We lost them," he said. "Two or three minutes later, we lost them."
Milliron said area residents began calling to report that a passenger jet was flying low over their homes. The plane crashed at 10:06 a.m. in a rural area near Indian Lake, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
"I felt it. My house was shaken by it. I thought a truck hit my house," said Rev. Sylvia Baker, who lives about two miles from the crash site. "When I saw it wasn't my house, I was sure it had to be my neighbor's house."
The plane went down in an open field near a coal strip mine outside Shanksville, a hamlet of 235 people nestled in the wooded hills of western Pennsylvania. Mark Stahl of nearby Somerset said it carved a large black hole in the field and that smoke and flames billowed out.
"I didn't know what to think. It was shocking," Stahl said.
Reporters said the crater was about 40 feet wide and more than 8 feet deep. The largest debris from the plane was no bigger than a phone book. The crater was cordoned off, and officials said the task of removing bodies and the debris would not begin until this afternoon.
After a briefing by the Marine Corps, Rep. James P. Moran (D-Va.) said the plane may have been turning toward Camp David or Washington targets in its flight path when it went down. The crash site was 85 miles northwest of Camp David in the mountains of Maryland.
Response to the tragedies came from a number of quarters, some calling for swift retaliation while others urged moving ahead cautiously.
Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III said the United States should strengthen its intelligence capabilities.
"In effect, we unilaterally disarmed our intelligence capabilities," Baker said. "We need human intelligence to penetrate these groups."
Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said it would take the cooperation of numerous countries, including Russia and states in the Middle East, to bring those responsible to justice.
"Any nation seen to harbor or aid and abet these people must be treated as co-equally responsible," he said.
Larry Johnson, a former State Department counter-terrorism official, said the United States must wage war against those who launched the attacks.
"This is a declaration of war," Johnson said. "You don't go in for a tie here. If these guys want to cross the line this way, so be it. But so will we. We can't go back now. If we don't act, the U.S. will be seen as unable to fight."
But John L. Martin, the former chief of the internal security section at the Department of Justice, urged restraint.
"Any kind of retaliation must be very restrained, and methodical, deliberate and accurate," Martin said. "Or else it's going to worsen the situation."
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) called the attacks a "day of infamy" for the nation's intelligence community.
"For the national security apparatus to have missed this is the biggest intelligence blunder in our lifetime," Rohrabacher said. "The people we pay billions of dollars to have left us at the mercy" of international terrorists."
Brian Jenkins, a Rand Corp. expert on terrorism and international crime, said in Santa Monica: "We've seen elements of this event before. Thirty years ago, almost to the day, Sept. 6, 1970, four hijackings, one of which failed, involved the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who held hostages in the desert outside Jordan. It was a multiple coordinated hijacking.
"And we've had concerns that hijackers might crash into a major city. Algerian extremists in Marseilles [in] 1994 wanted refueling. French Intelligence, listening, feared they would take off and crash into Paris.
"Today, versus 30 years ago, the acts are large scale and often indiscriminate. The World Trade Center event today combines the two."
At UCLA, David Rapoport, editor of Terrorism and Political Violence, an academic journal, said there has been nothing like today's attack "in the history of terrorism."
Rapoport said the attack required "extensive planning by numerous individuals."
"The organization capable of this act has managed to elude our intelligence. We were not looking at the right organizations. And if we were, our failure is even greater."
Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Geraldine Baum, Stephen Braun, Richard T. Cooper, Megan Garvey, Judy Pasternak, David G. Savage, Esther Schrader, David Willman, Robin Wright and Aaron Zitner in Washington; John J. Goldman and Thomas S. Mulligan in New York; Eric Slater in Chicago; Edward J. Boyer, Richard Lee Colvin, Thomas Curwen, Abigail Goldman, Ardith Hilliard, J. Michael Kennedy, Jeff Leeds, Hilary E. MacGregor, Eric Malnic, Richard E. Meyer, Diane Pucin, Mary Rourke, Tim Rutten, Henry Weinstein and Nona Yates in Los Angeles.
Walter Kross, technical specialist for "Flight Explorer"
Clyde Ebanks, insurance company vice president, 103rd floor of the WTC South Tower
Peter Dicerbo, First Union National Bank, 47 floor
Hyman Brown, a University of Colorado civil engineering professor
Tiffany Keeling, 32, of New Mexico, attending a training seminar for financial consultants on the 61st floor of the south tower of the trade center.
Denny Levy, 36, a videographer,
John Kelly, 38, a furniture designer,
his wife
Carla Thompson, who works in an Arlington, Va., office building about 1,000 yards from the crash.
Ginger Groeber, a civilian Defense Department official
Clyde Ragland, Naval officer who works near the Pentagon,
Barbara Olson, the wife of U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson,
Rev. Sylvia Baker
Rep. James P. Moran, briefed by the Marine Corps.
Larry Johnson, a former State Department counter-terrorism official,
Brian Jenkins, a Rand Corp. expert on terrorism and international crime,
James A. Baker III, Former Secretary of State
Edward Milliron, Westmoreland County dispatcher
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Times Staff
Geraldine Baum, Times Staff
Stephen Braun, Times Staff
Richard T. Cooper, Times Staff
Megan Garvey, Times Staff
Judy Pasternak, Times Staff
David G. Savage, Times Staff
Esther Schrader, Times Staff
David Willman, Times Staff
Robin Wright, Times Staff
Aaron Zitner, Times Staff
John J. Goldman, Times Staff
Thomas S. Mulligan, Times Staff
Eric Slater, Times Staff
Edward J. Boyer, Times Staff
Richard Lee Colvin, Times Staff
Thomas Curwen, Times Staff
Abigail Goldman, Times Staff
Ardith Hilliard, Times Staff
J. Michael Kennedy, Times Staff
Jeff Leeds, Times Staff
Hilary E. MacGregor, Times Staff
Eric Malnic, Times Staff
Richard E. Meyer, Times Staff
Diane Pucin, Times Staff
Mary Rourke, Times Staff
Tim Rutten, Times Staff
Henry Weinstein, Times Staff
Nona Yates, Times Staff
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (A good guy!)
John L. Martin, the former chief of the internal security section at the Department of Justice (A good guy!)
Here is a classic piece of methodology of the perpetrators: using out-of-town participants.
"Tiffany Keeling, of New Mexico was attending a training seminar for financial consultants on the 61st floor of the south tower." She tells us that "only 75" of her training group are accounted for. How many "irregular" occupants were in the buildings that day?
Other standouts in the article are the specifics of the Flight Explorer changing speeds, and impacting at only 300 miles per hour. Saying the plane was "hand flown" is a complete giveaway. "At least one" plane had a pilot then.
The Zionist Hyman Brown is good too. He repeatedly references the planes as containing 23,000 gallons of fuel, rather then the truth figure of 10,000. He was trotted out so fast and across such a broad media swath, he is a lead player.
Also, I've never heard the quote from Brian Jenkins before, "We've seen elements of this event before. Thirty years ago, almost to the day, Sept. 6, 1970." That makes for a nice mirror, and again, it draws the Israelis even more central to the action.
Good article. Glad it turned up.
The Los Angeles Times
'Thousands Dead, Injured as Hijacked U.S. Airliners Ram Targets; World Trade Towers Brought Down'
'Tragedy: Assault leaves Manhattan in chaos. Three of the flights were en route to L.A., one to San Francisco. President Bush puts military on highest alert, closes borders and vows to 'find those responsible.'
September 12, 2001|MATEA GOLD and MAGGIE FARLEY, TIMES STAFF WRITERS
NEW YORK — In the worst terrorist attack ever against the United States, hijackers struck at the preeminent symbols of the nation's wealth and might Tuesday, flying airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and killing or injuring thousands of people.
As a horrified nation watched on television, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan collapsed into flaming rubble after two Boeing 767s rammed their upper stories. A third airliner, a Boeing 757, flattened one of the Pentagon's five sides.
A fourth jetliner crashed in western Pennsylvania. Authorities said the hijackers might have been trying to aim the plane at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., the Capitol or other targets in Washington.
The assaults, which stirred fear and anxiety across the country and evoked comparisons to Pearl Harbor, were carefully planned and coordinated, occurring within 50 minutes. No one claimed responsibility, but official suspicion quickly fell on Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden. Unexplained was how the terrorists boarded the jets and overpowered the crews.
Federal law enforcement sources said the FBI conducted searches and served subpoenas, some in south Florida. One official said agents were investigating the possibility that some of the terrorists were pilots who had been trained "for this kind of action."
The FBI was sifting through hundreds of tips pouring into a toll-free hotline and a Web site and pursuing dozens of leads.
Addressing the nation Tuesday night, President Bush vowed to "find those responsible and bring them to justice." This country, he said, would retaliate against "those behind these evil acts" and any country that harbors them.
Altogether, the four downed planes carried 266 people. All were killed. Scores of people jumped to their deaths or died in fires and the collapsing superstructure at the Trade Center. New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said earliest reports counted 2,100 people injured, about 150 of them in critical condition.
Estimates of the death toll at the Pentagon ranged from 100 to 800.
At nightfall, more than nine hours after the attack, a 47-story annex to the 110-floor twin towers at the Trade Center collapsed as well. It too had caught fire, but by the time it fell, all of its occupants had been evacuated.
At a late-night news conference, New York authorities said more than 300 firefighters and three dozen police officers were missing. Many had rushed into the towers after the airliners hit, only to be trapped when the buildings collapsed.
Among the dead were the New York fire chief, his chief of special operations and a first deputy commissioner.
Some of those still in the rubble reportedly called officials or family members on their cell phones, and some trapped police officers made radio contact with headquarters. But because of fires and unstable debris, rescue attempts were halted after dark.
Bush placed U.S. forces around the world on highest alert and flew from a visit in Florida to secure military bases in Louisiana and Nebraska before returning to Washington to address the nation. Vice President Dick Cheney, Cabinet members, congressional leaders, and the president's family also were taken to secure locations.
It was the worst siege of terrorism waged against the United States in its history. It shut down the federal government in Washington and the financial markets in New York. It closed all airports across the nation for the first time, as well as some Amtrak rail lines in the Northeast. It put off the primary election in New York and closed Disneyland. It halted major league baseball for a day, as only World War I and D-day have done before.
America tightened security at its borders and at embassies and military sites around the world. The National Guard patrolled Washington and New York. Bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were closed. Authorities evacuated the Capitol Building, the State Department, the CIA building, the United Nations and the Sears Tower in Chicago. Hoover Dam was closed to visitors. Patrols increased along the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
Even in Europe, authorities evacuated high-rise buildings as a precaution.
Members of Congress, after being briefed by FBI and intelligence officials, said Bin Laden was the suspected mastermind. "They've come to the conclusion," said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), "that this has the signature of Osama bin Laden." He is the fugitive Saudi terrorist under indictment here for the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden has been granted asylum by Afghanistan.
That nation's hard-line Islamic Taliban rulers condemned the attacks in New York and Washington and rejected suggestions that Bin Laden was behind them. In London, editor Abdel-Bari Atwan of the Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper said he had heard that Islamic fundamentalists close to Bin Laden were planning a major operation but that he did not take the threat seriously.
"They said it would be a huge and unprecedented attack," Atwan told Associated Press, "but they did not specify."
Anger across the United States brought talk of retaliation. "These attacks clearly constitute an act of war," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
He was echoed by Adm. Robert J. Natter, commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet. "We've been attacked like we haven't [been] since Pearl Harbor."
"This is the second Pearl Harbor," said Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.). "I don't think I overstate it." Nearly 2,400 people died when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. It drew the United States into World War II.
Governments around the world offered condolences and pledged solidarity in the fight against terrorism. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said he was horrified by the attacks. But in the West Bank town of Nablus, about 3,000 people took to the streets, chanted "God is great" and handed out candy in a gesture of celebration.
Russian President Vladimir V. Putin called the attacks "terrible tragedies." China said it was "horrified." Pope John Paul II condemned the "unspeakable horror" and prayed for the victims and their families.
The sequence of events that stunned New York into grief-stricken agony began at 7:59 a.m. EDT, when American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Boston's Logan International Airport. The flight carried 81 passengers and a crew of 11 westward toward Los Angeles International Airport. Fifteen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 left Logan, also bound for Los Angeles. It carried 56 passengers and a crew of nine.
What is known for certain is that Flight 11--the first aircraft to strike the World Trade Center--was hijacked somewhere over upstate New York, made a hard left turn and flew for approximately 14 minutes until it struck the Manhattan landmark.
Flight Explorer, a Virginia-based company that sells Federal Aviation Administration radar data to airlines, was tracking the flight. According to Walter Kross, one of the company's technical specialists, the 767 was flying at 29,000 feet near Albany, N.Y., when it veered to the southeast.
The plane's speed dropped from about 450 knots to 340 knots. The Boeing 767 flew faster as it headed for the New York area, reaching a speed of 500 knots. It then slowed to about 300 knots as it approached the World Trade Center.
About 8:30 a.m., it slammed into the building.
"It had to have been hand-flown," Kross said, suggesting that at least one of the hijackers was skilled enough to pilot the aircraft with precision.
A thunderstorm Monday night had cleared the air over Manhattan and the sunlight of a warm September morning was glinting off the Hudson River as the business day began in the city's highest buildings.
Clyde Ebanks, vice president of an insurance company, was at a meeting on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's south tower when his boss said, "Look at that!"
He turned and saw a plane go past and hit the north tower.
Carnage and chaos ensued.
Peter Dicerbo led his 44 colleagues from the First Union National Bank down 47 flights of stairs. He staggered away from the building, his clothes torn; the workers were stunned, dazed and coughing.
Less than 20 minutes later, the United Airlines jet struck the other World Trade Center tower.
"The minute I got out of the building, the second building blew up," said Jennifer Brickhouse, 34, from Union, N.J., who was riding an escalator into the trade center when she "heard this big boom."
"All this stuff started falling," she said, "and all this smoke was coming through. People were screaming, falling and jumping out of the windows."
At least one couple were seen leaping hand-in-hand from the tower's upper stories.
Three miles away, across the East River in Brooklyn, sheets of office paper fluttered out of the sky.
At 9:50 a.m., an hour after the first crash, the first World Trade Center tower collapsed in smoke and rubble.
There were reports of an explosion right before the tower fell, then a strange sucking sound, and finally the sound of floors collapsing. Then came a huge surge of air, followed by a vast cloud of dirt, smoke, dust, paper and debris. Windows shattered. People screamed and dived for cover.
"I heard the largest, loudest collective scream I've ever heard," said Melissa Easton, who was watching from the roof of her Chinatown apartment building about 20 blocks away.
Not long afterward, at 10:30 a.m., the second tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.
The top of the building exploded with smoke and dust. There were no flames, just an explosion of debris, and then more vast clouds swept down to the streets. People were knocked to the ground on their faces as they ran from the building.
Hyman Brown, a University of Colorado civil engineering professor and the construction manager for the World Trade Center, said that flames fueled by thousands of gallons of aviation fuel melted the towers' steel supports.
"This building would have stood had a plane or a force caused by a plane smashed into it," he said. "But steel melts, and 24,000 gallons of aviation fluid melted the steel. Nothing is designed or will be designed to withstand that fire."
In addition to the more than 200 missing firefighters, police officials said nearly 100 of their officers were similarly unaccounted for. Brian Stark, a former Navy paramedic who assisted rescuers, said paramedics had been told that hundreds of police officers and firefighters were missing from the ranks of those sent in to respond to the first crash.
Giuliani said the 2,100 injured included 1,500 "walking wounded" who were taken by boat to New Jersey, and 600 others who were taken to New York hospitals. It could take weeks to dig through the rubble for victims. "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."
Hundreds of volunteers and medical workers converged on triage centers, offering help and blood. So many people lined up to donate blood that many were turned away.
The city took on the eerie hush of a metropolis under siege. With public transportation shut down and major bridges and tunnels closed to traffic, walking became the only way to get anywhere. Thousands clogged Manhattan bridges, leaving the city on foot. Throughout the metropolitan area, people stunned by the day's events strolled about as if in a daze.
More than nine hours after the attack, an annex in the complex--7 World Trade Center--continued to burn. At 5:20 p.m., that building collapsed. Blocks away, crowds roared with astonishment.
"People stared open-mouthed and were in shock," said bystander Russ Baker.
Jesus Soriano Jr., 34, of Brooklyn, said he was there when the twin towers fell.
"I felt the first building collapse. I saw the second tower collapse," Soriano said. "It collapsed from the outside in."
"Those terrorists are real cowards," he said.
Tyler Catalana, 23, a resident of Mill Valley, Calif., who is studying architecture in New York, said he saw the north tower collapse into itself.
"It looked like a nuclear war," he said.
Catalana said that when the dust began to settle, "it looked like the surface of the moon."
Much of lower Manhattan was evacuated as officials feared potential gas leaks and falling debris could cause further casualties.
Like refugees fleeing a war-town nation, tens of thousands walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and along a nearby highway as they sought safety.
Some people wore paper masks to block out the dust. People gathered around cars listening to news over their radios. Others washed off the dust with the water from open fire hydrants.
Giuliani said the New York Stock Exchange was intact, but he doubted it would reopen today, because it was necessary to keep lower Manhattan clear for emergency vehicles. Public and parochial schools in the city were scheduled to be closed.
"New York is still here. The World Financial Center is still here," the mayor said. "We have undergone tremendous losses and we will grieve for them horribly. We are going to prevail."
Three large trucks arrived at the city morgue in the afternoon with extra supplies. A spokesman said that bodies were expected later.
Families searching for missing relatives were directed to an office where city employees took information. Extra medical examiners were summoned to the morgue.
The most severely burned were taken to a center at New York Presbyterian Hospital on Manhattan's upper East Side. Elective surgery at the hospital was canceled. Patients in the emergency room watched the disaster on television.
Tiffany Keeling, 32, of New Mexico was treated at Bellevue Hospital for smoke inhalation and head injuries. She said she was attending a training seminar for financial consultants on the 61st floor of the south tower of the trade center.
"We were looking out the window and the entire sky was filled with paper," she said. "We thought it was a ticker tape parade."
Then, Keeling said, she noticed a huge cloud of smoke billowing from the north tower. "Fireballs were falling to the ground, which I now know were people."
Keeling and the other trainees headed for the stairs. When they were between the 59th and 58th floors, a voice on the building's public address system said the north tower was the only structure in danger and that everyone could return upstairs. Half of her group went back up. She and others continued to the street.
"People were coming down from the top floors in every condition you could imagine," Keeling said, through tears.
"I heard a woosh like air getting sucked in a vacuum. I grabbed my jacket and got as close to a planter as possible and started feeling little things on my back like hail, and they got bigger and bigger until the air was solid debris."
Keeling said she turned to a man who walked down the stairs with her and asked: "Are we dead?"
She said only 75 of the people who attended her training group were accounted for.
Denny Levy, 36, a videographer, witnessed the impact from the ground.
"I saw this plane flying low over the buildings down the center of Manhattan," said Levy, who was uninjured. "It went toward the World Trade Center. It sounded like its engine was broken. Your brain tricks you. I thought it went past the building, and then it went a little to the left and took a plunge at the building.
"Then there was this burst of stuff coming out of the building. There was no fire and no explosion. I wondered why the plane was making so much noise and was so low.
"You could tell it was a passenger plane, that it was in trouble or trying to get close for a view. You'd never think a plane would go dead center into a building. It was like a missile.
"I thought it was an accident, except he took a sudden left. He went right for it. It was so creepy. I thought, 'Oh my God, I just saw 300 people die.'
John Kelly, 38, a furniture designer, said he looked out a window of his apartment after hearing the first explosion.
"My wife says, 'Oh, my God, they hit the second building.' I looked. The plane went through the building, and there was a blast out two sides. It was like exit wounds in all directions.
"I saw people jumping, bodies flying through the air. I saw people waving white flags. It was horrible.
"Police and ambulances were everywhere, and within seconds there was no one. You saw everyone running, running, running. You saw shoes, sunglasses on the street. People dropped their stuff and ran.
"It was like a nuclear explosion."
A Crushing Blow to Symbol of Strength
As a stunned nation attempted to grasp the horror of television images from New York, a third hijacked airliner crashed into the Pentagon, bursting into flames and delivering an incendiary blow to the symbol of America's military might.
American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 with 58 passengers and a crew of six aboard, hit the west side of the building at 9:41 a.m. EDT, half an hour after it left Dulles International Airport en route to Los Angeles.
"I glanced up just at the point where the plane was going into the building," said Carla Thompson, who works in an Arlington, Va., office building about 1,000 yards from the crash.
"I saw an indentation in the building and then it was just blown-up up--red, everything red," she said. "Everybody was just starting to go crazy. I was petrified."
Within 20 minutes of the crash, the White House, the Pentagon--the world's largest office building--and the U.S. Capitol were evacuated.
What began as an orderly exodus from the nation's defense headquarters turned to panic as evacuees made their way to parking lots.
"People were just milling around in a daze," said Ginger Groeber, a civilian Defense Department official who had been in the Pentagon watching television reports of the attacks in New York when the building was hit.
"These people were panicking out there," she said. "People were looking for their staffs. Nobody's cell phones were working."
The District of Columbia government shut down. Many private firms also closed and sent employees streaming home, causing traffic nightmares.
As parking garages closed and cars poured out, one woman grabbed the door of a lone car going in.
"Don't park," she yelled, her face twisted in fear. "They're hitting the Pentagon! They're hitting the Pentagon!"
Naval officer Clyde Ragland, who works near the Pentagon, was stuck in his office because the streets outside were clogged with traffic.
He and his co-workers were watching television reports of the disaster in New York when "we gazed out our own windows and, to our horror and disbelief, saw huge billows of black smoke rising from the northeast, in the direction of D.C. and the river . . . and the Pentagon."
Ragland described billowing black smoke and "what looked like white confetti raining down everywhere." He said it soon became apparent "that the 'confetti' was little bits of airplane, falling down after being flung high into the bright, blue sky."
"Everything is confusion right now, but there was no panic. Just stunned disbelief," Ragland said.
Streets surrounding the Capitol Mall were paralyzed as people tried to get away from the federal buildings, worried that they would be targeted next.
Federal workers raced down the steps into the subway, only to be greeted by a sign flashing: "Security alert! The Metro is closed until further notice. Please try to call a relative or a taxi if you need a ride." The subway reopened by midday.
But with phone lines jammed and no taxis to be found, many people tried to hurry away on foot, exchanging rumors about the attacks.
"We never thought this could happen," said Mary Shea, 58, an FAA program analyst, as she stood outside the L'Enfant Plaza subway stop. "What a shock, what a shock."
Long lines formed around pay phones.
"My mom works at the Pentagon, my mom works at the Pentagon," one man repeated over and over again, rocking back and forth, urging the line to speed up.
Abigail Harrington, an employee at the District of Columbia Department of Health, stood with a large group of people on 7th Street, peering down the road for a bus she hoped to catch to pick up her daughter from school.
"I feel horrible," said Harrington, clutching her hands together. "I can't reach my husband on his cell phone. I don't know what's going on. You never think that something like this can affect the world's biggest superpower. It's really, really scary. It really is."
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was in a wing of the Pentagon opposite the point of impact. He told reporters that he felt the shock and went outside where volunteers were helping to carry away the injured.
Rumsfeld refused to estimate the casualty toll at the military's nerve center. The plane crashed into a newly renovated portion of the building that had not been fully reoccupied.
Authorities estimate that 23,000 people work in the Pentagon, and Rumsfeld vowed that the building would reopen for business today.
Barbara Olson, the wife of U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, spoke to her husband twice by cell phone from the hijacked airliner before it crashed.
She told him that all the passengers and crew, including the pilot, were forced to the back of the plane. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters.
Olson said his wife made no reference to the nationality or motive of the hijackers.
Barbara Olson had originally planned to take a Monday flight to Los Angeles but changed her plans to have breakfast with her husband Tuesday, his birthday.
The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, United Airlines Flight 93, took off at 8:01 a.m. EDT from New Jersey's Newark International Airport, bound for San Francisco. On board the Boeing 757 were 38 passengers, two pilots and five flight attendants. The early stages of the flight seemed normal, with the plane charting a westerly course that brought it to northern Ohio.
But as the jet was flying due west just below Cleveland, it made a sharp U-turn. Radar tracked it passing just south of Pittsburgh.
At 9:58 a.m., a 911 operator in Pennsylvania's Westmoreland County received a call from a man who said he had locked himself in a bathroom on a hijacked airliner. "We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked," the man said over his cell phone.
At the same time, flight attendant CeeCee Lyles, a mother of four, dialed her cell phone and told her husband, a Fort Myers, Fla., policeman, that her flight was being taken over by hijackers.
The Westmoreland County dispatcher, Edward Milliron, said his office was taking information from the passenger in the bathroom when the line went dead.
"We lost them," he said. "Two or three minutes later, we lost them."
Milliron said area residents began calling to report that a passenger jet was flying low over their homes. The plane crashed at 10:06 a.m. in a rural area near Indian Lake, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
"I felt it. My house was shaken by it. I thought a truck hit my house," said Rev. Sylvia Baker, who lives about two miles from the crash site. "When I saw it wasn't my house, I was sure it had to be my neighbor's house."
The plane went down in an open field near a coal strip mine outside Shanksville, a hamlet of 235 people nestled in the wooded hills of western Pennsylvania. Mark Stahl of nearby Somerset said it carved a large black hole in the field and that smoke and flames billowed out.
"I didn't know what to think. It was shocking," Stahl said.
Reporters said the crater was about 40 feet wide and more than 8 feet deep. The largest debris from the plane was no bigger than a phone book. The crater was cordoned off, and officials said the task of removing bodies and the debris would not begin until this afternoon.
After a briefing by the Marine Corps, Rep. James P. Moran (D-Va.) said the plane may have been turning toward Camp David or Washington targets in its flight path when it went down. The crash site was 85 miles northwest of Camp David in the mountains of Maryland.
Response to the tragedies came from a number of quarters, some calling for swift retaliation while others urged moving ahead cautiously.
Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III said the United States should strengthen its intelligence capabilities.
"In effect, we unilaterally disarmed our intelligence capabilities," Baker said. "We need human intelligence to penetrate these groups."
Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said it would take the cooperation of numerous countries, including Russia and states in the Middle East, to bring those responsible to justice.
"Any nation seen to harbor or aid and abet these people must be treated as co-equally responsible," he said.
Larry Johnson, a former State Department counter-terrorism official, said the United States must wage war against those who launched the attacks.
"This is a declaration of war," Johnson said. "You don't go in for a tie here. If these guys want to cross the line this way, so be it. But so will we. We can't go back now. If we don't act, the U.S. will be seen as unable to fight."
But John L. Martin, the former chief of the internal security section at the Department of Justice, urged restraint.
"Any kind of retaliation must be very restrained, and methodical, deliberate and accurate," Martin said. "Or else it's going to worsen the situation."
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) called the attacks a "day of infamy" for the nation's intelligence community.
"For the national security apparatus to have missed this is the biggest intelligence blunder in our lifetime," Rohrabacher said. "The people we pay billions of dollars to have left us at the mercy" of international terrorists."
Brian Jenkins, a Rand Corp. expert on terrorism and international crime, said in Santa Monica: "We've seen elements of this event before. Thirty years ago, almost to the day, Sept. 6, 1970, four hijackings, one of which failed, involved the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who held hostages in the desert outside Jordan. It was a multiple coordinated hijacking.
"And we've had concerns that hijackers might crash into a major city. Algerian extremists in Marseilles [in] 1994 wanted refueling. French Intelligence, listening, feared they would take off and crash into Paris.
"Today, versus 30 years ago, the acts are large scale and often indiscriminate. The World Trade Center event today combines the two."
At UCLA, David Rapoport, editor of Terrorism and Political Violence, an academic journal, said there has been nothing like today's attack "in the history of terrorism."
Rapoport said the attack required "extensive planning by numerous individuals."
"The organization capable of this act has managed to elude our intelligence. We were not looking at the right organizations. And if we were, our failure is even greater."
Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Geraldine Baum, Stephen Braun, Richard T. Cooper, Megan Garvey, Judy Pasternak, David G. Savage, Esther Schrader, David Willman, Robin Wright and Aaron Zitner in Washington; John J. Goldman and Thomas S. Mulligan in New York; Eric Slater in Chicago; Edward J. Boyer, Richard Lee Colvin, Thomas Curwen, Abigail Goldman, Ardith Hilliard, J. Michael Kennedy, Jeff Leeds, Hilary E. MacGregor, Eric Malnic, Richard E. Meyer, Diane Pucin, Mary Rourke, Tim Rutten, Henry Weinstein and Nona Yates in Los Angeles.
'Yemenis Also Died in Attack,' LA Times
Jeffrey Gettleman, Times Staff Writer,
Dorothy Ingebretsen, Times researcher
Rabyaah Althaibani, 22-year-old Yemeni immigrant
Hassan Ashmori, an official with the Yemen Embassy,
Hussein Ibish, communication director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, D.C.
Fahmi Salah, editor of the Brooklyn-based Yemen Post,
This article is nonsensical and contradictory. The writer is sourcing his 200 Yemenis figure to the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Ahram, while he has direct information that the number is only a handful. How many Yemenis in fact did die that day? Zero? This inflating of both the Arabic and the Israeli and Jewish casualties means to escalate a conflict. Saying that Yemen "has supplied thousands of freedom fighters to Bin Laden's holy war against America," is unforgivable yellow journalism. Figures like that may have fought against the Russians, but any holy war fighters against the U.S. should be counted on one hand.
The Los Angeles Times
'Deaths: As many as 200 people from country with ties to Osama bin Laden may have been killed in the twin towers.'
September 17, 2001|
NEW YORK — Among the nearly 5,000 missing in the World Trade Center attack are dozens--maybe even hundreds--of victims from Yemen, the ancestral home of prime suspect Osama bin Laden.
The losses have been especially heavy to bear because many Yemeni Americans and Muslim Americans have been fearful of mourning in public--and shamed by any connection, however tenuous, to Bin Laden.
This weekend, 22-year-old Yemeni immigrant Rabyaah Althaibani was asked to attend a vigil in Manhattan.
"But I thought: Going over there? With a veil on? That's not safe," she said.
Yemen is an isolated, poor Arab country, fervently Islamic. It has supplied thousands of freedom fighters to Bin Laden's holy war against America and was the base of operations for last year's bombing of the destroyer Cole, a suspected Bin Laden strike. Years of tribal conflicts and civil war have driven many people away and a large immigrant community has taken root in Brooklyn, where many families have found prosperity and, until last Tuesday, peace.
As many as 200 people with ties to Yemen may have been killed Tuesday. Several other Arab Americans were thought to be inside the World Trade Center when a pair of hijacked jets slammed into it and reduced the twin towers to rubble.
Across the East River from the disaster zone is the Atlantic Avenue neighborhood of Brooklyn, the heart of New York's 10,000-strong Yemeni community. It is full of falafel shops, Arabic bookstores and kiosks selling the music of wailing flutes.
But it was quiet Sunday.
Stores were shut and men with pained faces stood on street corners, passing around cell phones. They were trying, like people all across New York City, to get information about loved ones still missing.
Hassan Ashmori, an official with the Yemen Embassy, told the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Ahram that "an unknown number of Yemenis" were thought to have been killed. The story, published Saturday, estimated that 200 Yemenis were missing.
About 5,000 people, including hundreds of immigrants and foreign nationals, are thought to have been killed in the World Trade Center. One Lebanese American was a passenger on a hijacked plane. There is no doubt many Yemeni Americans worked in the two towers. Several men were employed in a restaurant on the 106th floor of the north tower. There was also a group at Manna Trading Group Inc., a Yemeni-owned import-export company on the 33rd floor of the north tower. Manna is now one of the dozens of companies that have disappeared.
"I remember those guys," said an Arab American businessman who declined to give his name because of security fears. "They were trying to import dried tomatoes."
Also, many of the large investment firms in the buildings employed Yemeni Americans and other Arab Americans, said Hussein Ibish, communication director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, D.C.
Leaders of New York's Yemeni community have been closely following reports of casualties. Many continue to pray they are not true.
"We know each other well in this community," said Fahmi Salah, editor of the Brooklyn-based Yemen Post, who has so far heard of only a handful of missing Yemenis. "We are hoping that we would have had more people coming to us if that many people died."
On Sunday, an Arab family center hosted a vigil in Brooklyn to mourn those lost in the attack. Many who came said they felt more comfortable expressing their grief in Brooklyn, where 100,000 Arab Americans live, than in Manhattan, site of the disaster.
Althaibani, the 22-year-old Yemeni immigrant, stood with a candle and marched quietly down Atlantic Avenue. While walking, she said a prayer, not just for the Yemeni feared lost but for all the lives that disappeared when the two biggest buildings in New York fell to the ground.
Times researcher Dorothy Ingebretsen contributed to this story.
Dorothy Ingebretsen, Times researcher
Rabyaah Althaibani, 22-year-old Yemeni immigrant
Hassan Ashmori, an official with the Yemen Embassy,
Hussein Ibish, communication director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, D.C.
Fahmi Salah, editor of the Brooklyn-based Yemen Post,
This article is nonsensical and contradictory. The writer is sourcing his 200 Yemenis figure to the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Ahram, while he has direct information that the number is only a handful. How many Yemenis in fact did die that day? Zero? This inflating of both the Arabic and the Israeli and Jewish casualties means to escalate a conflict. Saying that Yemen "has supplied thousands of freedom fighters to Bin Laden's holy war against America," is unforgivable yellow journalism. Figures like that may have fought against the Russians, but any holy war fighters against the U.S. should be counted on one hand.
The Los Angeles Times
'Deaths: As many as 200 people from country with ties to Osama bin Laden may have been killed in the twin towers.'
September 17, 2001|
NEW YORK — Among the nearly 5,000 missing in the World Trade Center attack are dozens--maybe even hundreds--of victims from Yemen, the ancestral home of prime suspect Osama bin Laden.
The losses have been especially heavy to bear because many Yemeni Americans and Muslim Americans have been fearful of mourning in public--and shamed by any connection, however tenuous, to Bin Laden.
This weekend, 22-year-old Yemeni immigrant Rabyaah Althaibani was asked to attend a vigil in Manhattan.
"But I thought: Going over there? With a veil on? That's not safe," she said.
Yemen is an isolated, poor Arab country, fervently Islamic. It has supplied thousands of freedom fighters to Bin Laden's holy war against America and was the base of operations for last year's bombing of the destroyer Cole, a suspected Bin Laden strike. Years of tribal conflicts and civil war have driven many people away and a large immigrant community has taken root in Brooklyn, where many families have found prosperity and, until last Tuesday, peace.
As many as 200 people with ties to Yemen may have been killed Tuesday. Several other Arab Americans were thought to be inside the World Trade Center when a pair of hijacked jets slammed into it and reduced the twin towers to rubble.
Across the East River from the disaster zone is the Atlantic Avenue neighborhood of Brooklyn, the heart of New York's 10,000-strong Yemeni community. It is full of falafel shops, Arabic bookstores and kiosks selling the music of wailing flutes.
But it was quiet Sunday.
Stores were shut and men with pained faces stood on street corners, passing around cell phones. They were trying, like people all across New York City, to get information about loved ones still missing.
Hassan Ashmori, an official with the Yemen Embassy, told the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Ahram that "an unknown number of Yemenis" were thought to have been killed. The story, published Saturday, estimated that 200 Yemenis were missing.
About 5,000 people, including hundreds of immigrants and foreign nationals, are thought to have been killed in the World Trade Center. One Lebanese American was a passenger on a hijacked plane. There is no doubt many Yemeni Americans worked in the two towers. Several men were employed in a restaurant on the 106th floor of the north tower. There was also a group at Manna Trading Group Inc., a Yemeni-owned import-export company on the 33rd floor of the north tower. Manna is now one of the dozens of companies that have disappeared.
"I remember those guys," said an Arab American businessman who declined to give his name because of security fears. "They were trying to import dried tomatoes."
Also, many of the large investment firms in the buildings employed Yemeni Americans and other Arab Americans, said Hussein Ibish, communication director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, D.C.
Leaders of New York's Yemeni community have been closely following reports of casualties. Many continue to pray they are not true.
"We know each other well in this community," said Fahmi Salah, editor of the Brooklyn-based Yemen Post, who has so far heard of only a handful of missing Yemenis. "We are hoping that we would have had more people coming to us if that many people died."
On Sunday, an Arab family center hosted a vigil in Brooklyn to mourn those lost in the attack. Many who came said they felt more comfortable expressing their grief in Brooklyn, where 100,000 Arab Americans live, than in Manhattan, site of the disaster.
Althaibani, the 22-year-old Yemeni immigrant, stood with a candle and marched quietly down Atlantic Avenue. While walking, she said a prayer, not just for the Yemeni feared lost but for all the lives that disappeared when the two biggest buildings in New York fell to the ground.
Times researcher Dorothy Ingebretsen contributed to this story.
'Two Friends, Two Doomed Flights,' LA Times
The Los Angeles Times,
'Victims: 'Soul sisters,' unable to fly together, are killed, one on each of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center,'
September 16, 2001|JOE MATHEWS, TIMES STAFF WRITER
You may think of it as the strangest collision in the strangest week in American memory. You might call it the deadly serendipity of circumstances, an incredible freak of science and mathematics and airline schedules, or the terrible collateral of terrorist carnage.
Ruth Clifford McCourt and Paige Farley Hackel would say you were wrong to think of their story as random--if only they were still here to tell it.
McCourt and Hackel were best friends for more than a decade. They toured Africa together. They were meditation partners. In their mid-40s, they still were turning heads all over New England. "Soul sisters," they called themselves. Separate the two and the universe might be thrown dangerously out of balance.
Tuesday, they were traveling with each other again, driving to Boston's Logan International Airport to begin a vacation in Southern California. With Ruth's daughter Juliana in tow, they would see friends and spend a few days at Deepak Chopra's Center for Well Being in La Jolla.
But their togetherness ended at the airport: Try as they might, they couldn't get seats on the same plane.
Hackel, 46, left first, on American Airlines Flight 11. Ruth McCourt, 45, and Juliana, 4, boarded United Airlines Flight 175.
In New York, McCourt's brother, Ronald Clifford, had arrived at the World Trade Center from his home in New Jersey. He was 15 minutes early for a business meeting. As he paced the lobby, he felt the building shake.
It was Paige Hackel's flight crashing into the north tower.
Clifford spotted a woman whose skin had been singed. He led her out of the building and helped her find medical treatment, according to relatives. Then he looked up and saw the plane carrying his sister and niece crash into the south tower.
On Saturday, Hackel's family, including her mother, husband and stepson, attended a funeral Mass for McCourt and her daughter in East Lyme, Conn. Today, the McCourt clan will travel north to Boston for Hackel's service. The brother who saw it all insisted on handling the arrangements.
"This is all completely appropriate," said McCourt's mother, Paula Scott. "I knew that if one of them had to go, both of them would have to go. And now our families have come together.
"My daughter and Paige were terribly connected."
One morning 11 years ago, Paige Hackel walked into Clifford Classiques, a spa on Centre Street in Boston that Ruth Clifford had opened in 1985. A conversation about everything from skin treatments to the afterlife ensued. The two women discovered they had, in different ways, devoted their lives to healing.
The third of six children and the only daughter of a paper merchant and his wife in Cork, Ireland, Ruth Clifford had immigrated to the United States at age 17. After living briefly in Los Angeles, she moved to Rochester, N.Y., where she was hired to open satellite campuses around the country for a modeling school based there. In 1982, she settled in Boston.
The woman who entered her shop had a tougher life. Born in the Boston suburb of Framingham, the former Paige Farley, one of three siblings, spent much of her early years battling drug and alcohol addiction. She successfully completed treatment in 1985 and, by the time she met Clifford, she was volunteering with Salvation Army treatment programs and working toward a master's degree in substance abuse counseling.
She sought out spiritual counsel from self-help gurus, notably author Wayne Dyer. She met and married Allan Hackel and they settled into a home in Newton, not far from McCourt's. Their answering machine playfully urges friends to "take a deep breath, smile, enjoy the day."
"Paige had been through a lot," says Mimi Torp of Santa Monica, who was a friend of both women. But now "she was married to a husband who . . . was a very supportive man."
The new friends made a striking pair on the streets of Boston. Clifford, who had done some modeling, was tall with fire-red hair. Hackel, who ran triathlons, had dark hair and bright eyes that commanded attention.
Hackel introduced Clifford to meditation. They had traveled to Chopra's center in La Jolla at least once before. In recent years, Hackel had studied with a colleague of Chopra's, Debbie Ford, author of the New York Times bestseller "The Dark Side of the Light Chasers."
Hackel was a member of an "integrative coaching" group that met over the phone every Tuesday. She found Ford's "shadow process" so inspiring that she made plans to start an AM radio show to be called "Spiritually Speaking."
"For many people who have been on the road to recovery, it's not about trying to get rid of or change everything," says Ford. "It's about learning to love and integrate all parts of you."
In September 1994, Clifford married David McCourt, owner of a construction business, in a ceremony at the Vatican. When Juliana was born, Hackel was her godmother. In 1999, the McCourts moved to a waterfront home in New London, Conn., David's hometown.
To bridge the distance, the friends scheduled outings. Hackel would come to Connecticut for McCourt's St. Patrick's Day parties, or McCourt would travel north to join Hackel on trips to Loon Mountain in New Hampshire.
In January of this year, McCourt, Hackel and Hackel's mother, Marjorie Farley, visited South Africa and Zimbabwe. In March, they went skiing. Last month, McCourt helped her friend organize a birthday party for Hackel's mother in Boston.
The California trip would be another opportunity to be together. McCourt would tag along with Hackel on a four-day intensive session with Ford at Chopra's. They would visit friends in Los Angeles and take Juliana to Disneyland.
It wasn't until Tuesday night that their loved ones pieced together the details of the tragedy. Family and friends said they took small comfort--but comfort nonetheless--in the fact that the two friends had perished together.
In California, Ford said she believes that in some way, the proximity of the deaths of Hackel and the two McCourts were "planned, fated. . . . I don't really believe in coincidences."
Family and friends say McCourt and Hackel would have responded to the terrorist attack by emphasizing peace and negotiation.
In New London, the Juliana McCourt Children's Educational Fund has been established to help foreign students come to the United States and study subjects related to healing and tolerance. In California, a Paige Farley Scholarship will allow people to attend Ford's training program tuition-free.
As she prepared for the two funerals, Paula Scott, McCourt's mother, kept replaying the World Trade Center crashes in her mind. She says she somehow knew at the moment she saw the second plane crash on TV that she had lost her granddaughter, her daughter and her daughter's best friend.
"I know it wasn't physically possible," she says. "But I had a vision of all of them holding onto each other."
'Victims: 'Soul sisters,' unable to fly together, are killed, one on each of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center,'
September 16, 2001|JOE MATHEWS, TIMES STAFF WRITER
You may think of it as the strangest collision in the strangest week in American memory. You might call it the deadly serendipity of circumstances, an incredible freak of science and mathematics and airline schedules, or the terrible collateral of terrorist carnage.
Ruth Clifford McCourt and Paige Farley Hackel would say you were wrong to think of their story as random--if only they were still here to tell it.
McCourt and Hackel were best friends for more than a decade. They toured Africa together. They were meditation partners. In their mid-40s, they still were turning heads all over New England. "Soul sisters," they called themselves. Separate the two and the universe might be thrown dangerously out of balance.
Tuesday, they were traveling with each other again, driving to Boston's Logan International Airport to begin a vacation in Southern California. With Ruth's daughter Juliana in tow, they would see friends and spend a few days at Deepak Chopra's Center for Well Being in La Jolla.
But their togetherness ended at the airport: Try as they might, they couldn't get seats on the same plane.
Hackel, 46, left first, on American Airlines Flight 11. Ruth McCourt, 45, and Juliana, 4, boarded United Airlines Flight 175.
In New York, McCourt's brother, Ronald Clifford, had arrived at the World Trade Center from his home in New Jersey. He was 15 minutes early for a business meeting. As he paced the lobby, he felt the building shake.
It was Paige Hackel's flight crashing into the north tower.
Clifford spotted a woman whose skin had been singed. He led her out of the building and helped her find medical treatment, according to relatives. Then he looked up and saw the plane carrying his sister and niece crash into the south tower.
On Saturday, Hackel's family, including her mother, husband and stepson, attended a funeral Mass for McCourt and her daughter in East Lyme, Conn. Today, the McCourt clan will travel north to Boston for Hackel's service. The brother who saw it all insisted on handling the arrangements.
"This is all completely appropriate," said McCourt's mother, Paula Scott. "I knew that if one of them had to go, both of them would have to go. And now our families have come together.
"My daughter and Paige were terribly connected."
One morning 11 years ago, Paige Hackel walked into Clifford Classiques, a spa on Centre Street in Boston that Ruth Clifford had opened in 1985. A conversation about everything from skin treatments to the afterlife ensued. The two women discovered they had, in different ways, devoted their lives to healing.
The third of six children and the only daughter of a paper merchant and his wife in Cork, Ireland, Ruth Clifford had immigrated to the United States at age 17. After living briefly in Los Angeles, she moved to Rochester, N.Y., where she was hired to open satellite campuses around the country for a modeling school based there. In 1982, she settled in Boston.
The woman who entered her shop had a tougher life. Born in the Boston suburb of Framingham, the former Paige Farley, one of three siblings, spent much of her early years battling drug and alcohol addiction. She successfully completed treatment in 1985 and, by the time she met Clifford, she was volunteering with Salvation Army treatment programs and working toward a master's degree in substance abuse counseling.
She sought out spiritual counsel from self-help gurus, notably author Wayne Dyer. She met and married Allan Hackel and they settled into a home in Newton, not far from McCourt's. Their answering machine playfully urges friends to "take a deep breath, smile, enjoy the day."
"Paige had been through a lot," says Mimi Torp of Santa Monica, who was a friend of both women. But now "she was married to a husband who . . . was a very supportive man."
The new friends made a striking pair on the streets of Boston. Clifford, who had done some modeling, was tall with fire-red hair. Hackel, who ran triathlons, had dark hair and bright eyes that commanded attention.
Hackel introduced Clifford to meditation. They had traveled to Chopra's center in La Jolla at least once before. In recent years, Hackel had studied with a colleague of Chopra's, Debbie Ford, author of the New York Times bestseller "The Dark Side of the Light Chasers."
Hackel was a member of an "integrative coaching" group that met over the phone every Tuesday. She found Ford's "shadow process" so inspiring that she made plans to start an AM radio show to be called "Spiritually Speaking."
"For many people who have been on the road to recovery, it's not about trying to get rid of or change everything," says Ford. "It's about learning to love and integrate all parts of you."
In September 1994, Clifford married David McCourt, owner of a construction business, in a ceremony at the Vatican. When Juliana was born, Hackel was her godmother. In 1999, the McCourts moved to a waterfront home in New London, Conn., David's hometown.
To bridge the distance, the friends scheduled outings. Hackel would come to Connecticut for McCourt's St. Patrick's Day parties, or McCourt would travel north to join Hackel on trips to Loon Mountain in New Hampshire.
In January of this year, McCourt, Hackel and Hackel's mother, Marjorie Farley, visited South Africa and Zimbabwe. In March, they went skiing. Last month, McCourt helped her friend organize a birthday party for Hackel's mother in Boston.
The California trip would be another opportunity to be together. McCourt would tag along with Hackel on a four-day intensive session with Ford at Chopra's. They would visit friends in Los Angeles and take Juliana to Disneyland.
It wasn't until Tuesday night that their loved ones pieced together the details of the tragedy. Family and friends said they took small comfort--but comfort nonetheless--in the fact that the two friends had perished together.
In California, Ford said she believes that in some way, the proximity of the deaths of Hackel and the two McCourts were "planned, fated. . . . I don't really believe in coincidences."
Family and friends say McCourt and Hackel would have responded to the terrorist attack by emphasizing peace and negotiation.
In New London, the Juliana McCourt Children's Educational Fund has been established to help foreign students come to the United States and study subjects related to healing and tolerance. In California, a Paige Farley Scholarship will allow people to attend Ford's training program tuition-free.
As she prepared for the two funerals, Paula Scott, McCourt's mother, kept replaying the World Trade Center crashes in her mind. She says she somehow knew at the moment she saw the second plane crash on TV that she had lost her granddaughter, her daughter and her daughter's best friend.
"I know it wasn't physically possible," she says. "But I had a vision of all of them holding onto each other."
'Last Soldier to Leave Vietnam Is Feared Dead,' LA Times
The Los Angeles Times
'Victims: Retired Army man Max Beilke, who survived two wars, was enjoying a second career at the Pentagon assisting veterans,'
September 16, 2001| ROBERT A. ROSENBLATT and RICHARD T. COOPER, TIMES STAFF WRITERS
Master Sgt. Max Beilke
his wife, Nancy Minton
their daughter. Lisa *****
their son, Joseph Beilke
his sister Lucille Johnson of Evansville, Minn.
his neighbor Lee Minton, Falling Waters Court, Laurel, Md.
his wife, Nancy Minton
WASHINGTON — He was last in the line moving up the ramp into a waiting C-130 at Tan Son Nhut air base--a tall, husky man with an open Midwestern face who was about to step into history. It was March 29, 1973, in Saigon. And Master Sgt. Max Beilke was officially designated as the last American combat soldier to leave Vietnam.
He had survived two wars, Korea and Vietnam. Now he was going home to his family in Minnesota.
Twenty-eight years later, Beilke--at 69 long since retired from the Army but pursuing a second career helping veterans--was suddenly plunged into his third conflict: the war of terror.
Defense Department officials have added his name to the list of those believed killed when a hijacked airliner hit the Pentagon on Tuesday.
"How do you explain a brother to somebody?" his sister Lucille Johnson of Evansville, Minn., wondered aloud Saturday. "He was very tall, not heavy but good-sized, a good German boy. Very dedicated to his work.
"He was a very soft person, a very low-key person. He really enjoyed working with the retirees, making sure they got what they had coming and needed.
"We'll all be there when it's time," Johnson said, speaking for the four of Beilke's five surviving sisters. "We just hope they find his remains and put closure to this. That's what we're looking for now."
Active in His Neighborhood
His neighbors in suburban Laurel, Md., remember Beilke as a quiet, friendly man who never talked about his military experience. The kind of man who loved his flower beds and flourishing crepe myrtles, who audited the books of the homeowners association for free, saving his working-class neighbors $1,000 or so a year. The kind who kept doing so even after the association turned down his request to put a flagpole by the driveway.
The houses on Falling Waters Court are just 12 years old, and neighbor Lee Minton recalled that Beilke wasn't happy about the "stick" trees. They were not big enough for squirrels, and he liked squirrels. So he put out nuts and food on his deck and the squirrels came running.
In fact, they would swarm out from the park behind Minton's house, cross the street and scamper up Beilke's driveway to get their meals. The squirrels would make a "daily passage," Minton said, laughing.
It was Minton's wife, Nancy, who figured out something was wrong when she saw a car belonging to one of the Beilkes' daughters parked outside the house Wednesday. "She usually comes at the holidays. And then I saw some people in military uniform and I really got scared," Nancy Minton said Saturday, blinking back tears.
She called Beilke's wife, Lisa, and learned that he was one of those missing at the Pentagon--and feared dead.
Lisa Beilke "was extremely upset and extremely hopeful," Nancy Minton said. "She said to me: 'Max has a lot more living to do. We've got a lot more work in the yard to do, and a lot more traveling.' "
Nancy Minton prepared a note and put a copy in every mailbox on Falling Waters Court: "Dear Neighbors, I want to share some sad news with our community. Max Beilke, who works at the Pentagon, is listed as missing. Please keep Lisa, Joseph and the Beilke family in your thoughts and prayers."
Beilke grew up in Alexandria, Minn., amid the corn and soybean farms west of Minneapolis. His father drove a truck and worked for Land O'Lakes, the butter and cream company. The family lived on several acres outside of town--"a hobby farm," they called it, not a big working farm like the ones that grew hundreds of acres of grain, fed beef cattle or produced milk.
He finished high school in 1950. He liked sports, but mostly "he liked being home on the farm with mom and dad," his sister said.
In 1952, Beilke was drafted and later shipped out to Korea. He served his hitch and returned to civilian life. But something was missing. In 1956, he reenlisted, this time prepared to stay.
Beilke was approaching his 40th birthday and already a master sergeant with nearly 20 years' service when he got to Vietnam in July, 1972. By then, the war was a savagely divisive conflict for Americans, and President Richard M. Nixon was edging out.
For eight months, Beilke served as operations sergeant at Saigon's Camp Alpha, which processed all Army troops going in and out of the country. When the Paris peace accords were signed in 1973, the stage was set for his historic moment.
Among other things, the accords provided that all U.S. POWs would be released in Hanoi and all American troops would leave Vietnam by March 29, 1973--all but the Marine guards and military attaches at the U.S. Embassy, who were not counted as U.S. combat forces.
When the deadline arrived, Beilke said later: "I can remember a colonel coming through the door and saying, 'Beilke, they're off the ground. They're in the air at Hanoi. Let's go home.' That's when we stamped the last orders and closed her up."
Last Soldier Up the Ramp
The fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese, and the desperate evacuation of the U.S Embassy, did not occur until April 29, 1975. But the official completion of the American troop withdrawal in 1973 was a major event. Beilke's family back home watched it on television.
For many who boarded the last plane, it was a bitter experience. As agreed to in Paris, observers from the North Vietnamese army looked on, sometimes smiling and trying to shake hands with American officers. The gestures were largely ignored, or rebuffed with curses.
When Beilke started up the ramp, a North Vietnamese colonel stepped forward and presented him with a gift--a straw place mat decorated with the picture of a pagoda. Beilke, according to accounts at the time, looked down at the colonel, accepted the gift and went on up the ramp.
"March 29 always sticks with me," Beilke told an interviewer years later. "There are certain things--like your wedding anniversary, the day you came into the Army, the first time I left the country and shipped out for Korea in '53--you remember those dates."
His sister Lucille noted that it was after he came home from Vietnam that Beilke developed a passion for fishing. "It was the peacefulness of it," she said.
With 21 years' service completed, Beilke retired from the Army on Nov. 1, 1974.
Once more, he worked at various jobs before finding a niche lobbying for active and retired military personnel.
In 1984, he returned to the Army as a civilian employee, focusing on the problems of Vietnam War veterans.
"I've always felt that we brought these young men out of Vietnam and discharged them from the Army and they lost their support group," he said later. "When they went out into civilian life, and in some places a very hostile civilian life, it was tough for them to cope."
"That's what Max was there for. He traveled all across the country," urging veterans to get help, his sister said.
There were unopened bags of mulch stacked at the top of Max Beilke's driveway Saturday, but nobody was doing any yardwork.
"He was a very good neighbor and a very decent man," Nancy Minton said. "I wish it all will have a happy ending, but I don't think so."
'Victims: Retired Army man Max Beilke, who survived two wars, was enjoying a second career at the Pentagon assisting veterans,'
September 16, 2001| ROBERT A. ROSENBLATT and RICHARD T. COOPER, TIMES STAFF WRITERS
Master Sgt. Max Beilke
his wife, Nancy Minton
their daughter. Lisa *****
their son, Joseph Beilke
his sister Lucille Johnson of Evansville, Minn.
his neighbor Lee Minton, Falling Waters Court, Laurel, Md.
his wife, Nancy Minton
WASHINGTON — He was last in the line moving up the ramp into a waiting C-130 at Tan Son Nhut air base--a tall, husky man with an open Midwestern face who was about to step into history. It was March 29, 1973, in Saigon. And Master Sgt. Max Beilke was officially designated as the last American combat soldier to leave Vietnam.
He had survived two wars, Korea and Vietnam. Now he was going home to his family in Minnesota.
Twenty-eight years later, Beilke--at 69 long since retired from the Army but pursuing a second career helping veterans--was suddenly plunged into his third conflict: the war of terror.
Defense Department officials have added his name to the list of those believed killed when a hijacked airliner hit the Pentagon on Tuesday.
"How do you explain a brother to somebody?" his sister Lucille Johnson of Evansville, Minn., wondered aloud Saturday. "He was very tall, not heavy but good-sized, a good German boy. Very dedicated to his work.
"He was a very soft person, a very low-key person. He really enjoyed working with the retirees, making sure they got what they had coming and needed.
"We'll all be there when it's time," Johnson said, speaking for the four of Beilke's five surviving sisters. "We just hope they find his remains and put closure to this. That's what we're looking for now."
Active in His Neighborhood
His neighbors in suburban Laurel, Md., remember Beilke as a quiet, friendly man who never talked about his military experience. The kind of man who loved his flower beds and flourishing crepe myrtles, who audited the books of the homeowners association for free, saving his working-class neighbors $1,000 or so a year. The kind who kept doing so even after the association turned down his request to put a flagpole by the driveway.
The houses on Falling Waters Court are just 12 years old, and neighbor Lee Minton recalled that Beilke wasn't happy about the "stick" trees. They were not big enough for squirrels, and he liked squirrels. So he put out nuts and food on his deck and the squirrels came running.
In fact, they would swarm out from the park behind Minton's house, cross the street and scamper up Beilke's driveway to get their meals. The squirrels would make a "daily passage," Minton said, laughing.
It was Minton's wife, Nancy, who figured out something was wrong when she saw a car belonging to one of the Beilkes' daughters parked outside the house Wednesday. "She usually comes at the holidays. And then I saw some people in military uniform and I really got scared," Nancy Minton said Saturday, blinking back tears.
She called Beilke's wife, Lisa, and learned that he was one of those missing at the Pentagon--and feared dead.
Lisa Beilke "was extremely upset and extremely hopeful," Nancy Minton said. "She said to me: 'Max has a lot more living to do. We've got a lot more work in the yard to do, and a lot more traveling.' "
Nancy Minton prepared a note and put a copy in every mailbox on Falling Waters Court: "Dear Neighbors, I want to share some sad news with our community. Max Beilke, who works at the Pentagon, is listed as missing. Please keep Lisa, Joseph and the Beilke family in your thoughts and prayers."
Beilke grew up in Alexandria, Minn., amid the corn and soybean farms west of Minneapolis. His father drove a truck and worked for Land O'Lakes, the butter and cream company. The family lived on several acres outside of town--"a hobby farm," they called it, not a big working farm like the ones that grew hundreds of acres of grain, fed beef cattle or produced milk.
He finished high school in 1950. He liked sports, but mostly "he liked being home on the farm with mom and dad," his sister said.
In 1952, Beilke was drafted and later shipped out to Korea. He served his hitch and returned to civilian life. But something was missing. In 1956, he reenlisted, this time prepared to stay.
Beilke was approaching his 40th birthday and already a master sergeant with nearly 20 years' service when he got to Vietnam in July, 1972. By then, the war was a savagely divisive conflict for Americans, and President Richard M. Nixon was edging out.
For eight months, Beilke served as operations sergeant at Saigon's Camp Alpha, which processed all Army troops going in and out of the country. When the Paris peace accords were signed in 1973, the stage was set for his historic moment.
Among other things, the accords provided that all U.S. POWs would be released in Hanoi and all American troops would leave Vietnam by March 29, 1973--all but the Marine guards and military attaches at the U.S. Embassy, who were not counted as U.S. combat forces.
When the deadline arrived, Beilke said later: "I can remember a colonel coming through the door and saying, 'Beilke, they're off the ground. They're in the air at Hanoi. Let's go home.' That's when we stamped the last orders and closed her up."
Last Soldier Up the Ramp
The fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese, and the desperate evacuation of the U.S Embassy, did not occur until April 29, 1975. But the official completion of the American troop withdrawal in 1973 was a major event. Beilke's family back home watched it on television.
For many who boarded the last plane, it was a bitter experience. As agreed to in Paris, observers from the North Vietnamese army looked on, sometimes smiling and trying to shake hands with American officers. The gestures were largely ignored, or rebuffed with curses.
When Beilke started up the ramp, a North Vietnamese colonel stepped forward and presented him with a gift--a straw place mat decorated with the picture of a pagoda. Beilke, according to accounts at the time, looked down at the colonel, accepted the gift and went on up the ramp.
"March 29 always sticks with me," Beilke told an interviewer years later. "There are certain things--like your wedding anniversary, the day you came into the Army, the first time I left the country and shipped out for Korea in '53--you remember those dates."
His sister Lucille noted that it was after he came home from Vietnam that Beilke developed a passion for fishing. "It was the peacefulness of it," she said.
With 21 years' service completed, Beilke retired from the Army on Nov. 1, 1974.
Once more, he worked at various jobs before finding a niche lobbying for active and retired military personnel.
In 1984, he returned to the Army as a civilian employee, focusing on the problems of Vietnam War veterans.
"I've always felt that we brought these young men out of Vietnam and discharged them from the Army and they lost their support group," he said later. "When they went out into civilian life, and in some places a very hostile civilian life, it was tough for them to cope."
"That's what Max was there for. He traveled all across the country," urging veterans to get help, his sister said.
There were unopened bags of mulch stacked at the top of Max Beilke's driveway Saturday, but nobody was doing any yardwork.
"He was a very good neighbor and a very decent man," Nancy Minton said. "I wish it all will have a happy ending, but I don't think so."
'Workers' Hope Starts to Fade With Time,' LA Times
The Los Angeles Times
'Rescue: As New York tries to restore some normality, few forget three days had passed since anyone was pulled alive from the wreckage.'
September 16, 2001|
Charles Ornstein, Times Staff Writer
David Zucchino, Times Staff Writer
Walter Hamilton, Times Staff Writer
Tony Perry, Times Staff Writer
Jon Peterson, Times Staff Writer
John J. Goldman, Times Staff Writer
Rich Nappi, a firefighter with Engine 7
Victor Antonucci, a sheet-metal worker
Joe Casaliggi, firefighter
Peter J. Ganci, Chief of Department
Rev. Mychal Judge, Franciscan priest, department's chaplain
William M. Feehan, first deputy commissioner.
Richard Grasso, NYSE chairman
Rev. Michael Duffy, Judge's "good friend"
President Bill Clinton, was acquainted with Father Judge
NEW YORK — On day five of New York's state of siege, as three fallen fire chiefs were lowered into their graves, something changed in the minds of some of the men digging into the earth at ground zero. They did not yet give up hope, but they began to fear the moment when hope will die.
It was a subtle shift, like the thought that struck Rich Nappi as he tore with his hands at the debris of the World Trade Center on Saturday morning. "It hit me that you have to face facts, that it's getting late and chances are getting pretty slim," said Nappi, a firefighter with Engine 7 in lower Manhattan.
It hit Victor Antonucci too, as he burned away at crumpled steel beams with a torch, only to be ordered to cease because somebody thought they had heard a noise from someone trapped below. But after dogs were summoned and ropes were lowered, there was nothing--no survivor, no body, nothing but dust.
"It got me thinking: How long can somebody stay alive under there?" said Antonucci, a sheet-metal worker.
Far from the mournful peal of church bells and the sounding of taps at funerals for the fire officials, the men at ground zero tried to get on with business, just like everyone else in this fractured city. But even as New York finalized plans to reopen its financial district and downtown subway lines Monday morning, no one could forget that three days had passed since anyone was pulled alive from the wreckage.
"Nothing happened the day before, or the day before that, so it gets harder and harder to maintain hope--even though you know you have to," firefighter Joe Casaliggi said after he finished his morning shift of hoisting rubble for the bucket brigades.
The three Fire Department funerals made it tougher for everyone. "Today was a very solemn and difficult day in New York City," said Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who attended one of the funerals.
As the fire officials were mourned, the rescuers dug and the cranes swung their loads, and the death toll mounted. It reached 184 Saturday, with 4,972 people listed as missing. Among them are 300 firefighters, 40 Port Authority police officers, 23 New York City police officers, an FBI agent and a Secret Service agent. About 1,200 missing-persons reports have been received from outside New York City.
Searchers have recovered 159 bodies, 99 of them identified. More than 400 body parts have been recovered. Five survivors were pulled from the disaster site Wednesday.
Even with the dread that had begun to seize some of the men in the ruins, no one had given up hope.
"There's still the possibility that we can recover people still alive," Giuliani said, citing experts.
New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik spoke of the possibility of "voids" or "vacuum areas" in the rubble that might provide air to trapped survivors.
"We are going to keep up hope, keep our prayers going and just hope for the best," Kerik said. "It's possible. . . . We're going to keep up what we're doing until it's over."
The mayor and other top city officials spoke at a newly opened emergency operations center on the city's West Side. The city's previous center was damaged in the attacks Tuesday.
Even as they spoke of searching for survivors and consoling relatives of the dead or missing, the city's leaders seem determined to provide as normal a workday as possible Monday morning. The New York Stock Exchange, the New York Mercantile Exchange and City Hall will open.
"Come Monday morning, the greatest capital market in the world will be back in business," said Richard Grasso, NYSE chairman.
Describing Tuesday's attacks as possibly "the most jarring event in American history," Giuliani stressed the need for New Yorkers to feel that day-to-day life is returning to normal.
"Life has to go on," he said. "That's part of the process.'
While acknowledging that it will be traumatic for many people to return so soon to an area where thousands of people were killed, the mayor said: "We have to get past that stage. We have to go back as much as possible, responsibly, to life and to business."
On Wall Street on Saturday, the New York exchange was draped with an enormous American flag. The streets nearby were crammed with telephone and electrical workers, who set up generators and restored phone service. The exchange was not physically damaged by the trade center attack, but electricity and communications systems were hit hard.
Before announcing Monday's openings, city officials attended funerals for the Fire Department leaders: Chief of Department Peter J. Ganci; the Rev. Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest who was the department's chaplain; and William M. Feehan, first deputy commissioner.
Giuliani called the three men "casualties of war." "They are heroes, like the heroes we had at Pearl Harbor," he said. "Each one tried to save lives."
The mayor described how Ganci ordered his men out of harm's way Tuesday morning and dashed into the chaos to save firefighters. He spoke of Feehan's refusal to leave his post, where he later died. And he told of Father Judge felled by flying debris as he knelt, his helmet off, to administer last rites to a dying firefighter.
"All of us who were privileged to know him feel a special loss," former President Clinton said of the chaplain, whom he first met at a White House ceremony.
Inside St. Francis of Assisi church in midtown, across the street from a firehouse, Judge's good friend, the Rev. Michael Duffy, delivered the homily. He described a selfless man who was not without vanity. Father Judge loved to be photographed. As was his custom before racing to a fire, Father Duffy said, he made sure to comb and spray his hair before dashing to the trade center.
Later, in Central Park, there was a reminder of the backlash directed at Arabs and, in some cases, South Asians. Thousands of members of New York's Sikh community held a candlelight vigil Saturday night to express their patriotism and sympathy for the terror victims.
Among the Sikhs waving American flags and reciting prayers in Punjabi were people who said they had been harassed since Tuesday.
"People think we must be Muslim terrorists because of the way we look," said Jagdeep Singh Narula. "But we're not. We're Americans, and our hearts are hurting too. We lost friends and family members too."
At the disaster site, the search-and-rescue teams were buoyed by thousands of New Yorkers who flowed downtown to the National Guard barricades. There, they applauded workers who emerged filthy and sweaty from the ruins. People waved American flags and offered bottled water and held up handwritten signs that read "God Bless America."
Because so many people have volunteered their services and donated so much food and water, city officials made a public appeal Saturday for an end to the offerings. Gov. George Pataki suggested that people volunteer instead for their local fire department or the National Guard and that they contribute to the Red Cross or Salvation Army.
But the outpouring of support did not alter the reality at ground zero.
Giuliani said it is likely that, in some cases, the bodies of the missing will never be found. It could be "a significant number of people," he said.
"People have to know that," he added.
Moments later, New York City Fire Commissioner Thomas Van Essen tried to describe the excruciating and perilous job of searching for survivors and bodies while trying to clear away the remains of two skyscrapers that once stood 110 stories high. Van Essen spoke in a low, grave voice; he had just returned from the funerals.
"My guys describe it to me like a crater, almost like a volcano," he said. "It goes down seven stories. This is very, very difficult, unbelievably dangerous work. The odds of saving people are very slim."
The commissioner paused and then said what the men at ground zero already knew all too well: "It doesn't mean we should not get in there. . . . And each day, we will reevaluate that and decide when this rescue becomes a recovery."
Times staff writers Walter Hamilton, Tony Perry, Jon Peterson and John J. Goldman contributed to this story.
'Terrorism Can't Defeat Heroism,' LA Times
Diane Pucin
Dan Weber, her husband
Terri Pucin, her sister
Andrea Frederick, a 35-year-old office worker on the 74 floor of "the first tower," (dust-free)
Fran Martin, a 46-year-old survivor (badly dusted)
Monica Iken,
her husband Michael, 37, a financial broker (fatality)
Javier Soto
his brother, Michael Soto (fatality), worked in "the first tower hit"
Harrison Mitchell, a 37-year-old lawyer worked in the Twin Towers. Mitchell had taken this week off.
The Los Angeles Times
(Sunday) September 16, 2001|By Diane Pucin
NEW YORK — The little park on the corner of 35th Street and Second Avenue holds two basketball courts, two handball courts and a couple of benches. On Wednesday afternoon, pick-up basketball games were played on both courts. Four men each were on the handball courts. Two older men sat on one of the benches. Joseph Leslie, 80, a World War II veteran, and his best friend, Jerome Goldman, 81, remarked on the talents of one of the young men who had just dunked a basketball.
"I'm a Knicks fan, all my life," Leslie said. "He's a Celtics fan, always has been. I tell him he should move to Boston."
"I tell him to shut up," Goldman said. "It's a free country and I'm living in New York and I'm rooting for the Celtics."
I came on this small park while walking to Bellevue Hospital. The day after terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, my assignment had changed. On Monday there had been a Yankee-Red Sox game to cover. On Wednesday the story had changed.
At Bellevue were hundreds of men and women, young and old, standing in line so they could fill out missing person forms and maybe, always being hopeful, find the names of husbands or wives, fiances or girlfriends, sons, daughters, cousins, uncles, best friends, life partners, on a list of injured who had been identified at a hospital in Manhattan or Brooklyn or Staten Island or New Jersey.
In between the baseball game Monday night and the walk past the park to Bellevue Hospital is my little story.
First, an admission. An editor I very much respected told me many years ago that he hated nothing more than writers and columnists who start every sentence with the word "I." Or any sentence, for that matter. "Nobody cares about what happens to you," he said. And so I'm writing this understanding that my story is no more important than anyone else's, and much less important than so many stories, but it is the only story I have to tell this week.
Sports is the reason for this story.
Sports and a realization that there are so many great people in our country, people we will never know, people who don't think what they are doing is extraordinary. These people are firefighters and policemen, paramedics and ambulance drivers. They are the volunteers, thousands of them, who want to sweep the dust off the street or make coffee or bring steaming plates of pasta into Ground Zero, as it's called, even though there is a chance that another building might collapse. They are the counselors who are listening, over and over, to the distraught people who are missing their loved ones. These New Yorkers I've met this week, the fans people love to hate, these are people to admire.
If ever we make our athletes out to be any more special or heroic than a fireman, somebody should make us shut up.
Tuesday morning I was still in New York because that's how it is when you cover sports. Word of the trip came suddenly, late in the afternoon on Aug. 29. Leave Sept. 1 for a football game in State College, Pa., go on to New York for the second week of the U.S. Open tennis tournament.
But this was a holiday weekend. Air fares were high, $2,500 to $2,800. Except for one flight, a red-eye from Los Angeles to Islip, N.Y., via Boston, on American Airlines. It was $1,500. I took it. And my route home, on Monday, Sept. 10, would be the same. American flight out of Islip, through Boston and back to Los Angeles.
On the final Saturday of the Open, I was asked to stay in New York an extra day and write from the Yankee-Red Sox game on Monday night. Roger Clemens would be trying to win his 20th game in 21 starts. History-making. The Red Sox were a mess too, a compelling story in itself. Of course, I'd stay.
When I called American to change my flight, I had the option of keeping the same 3:05 p.m. flight out of Islip to Logan Airport that I'd had Monday. Or I could take a 6 a.m. flight to Boston and connect to Flight 11 into LAX. I'd been gone for 10 days, was eager to be home, and decided to take the early flight so I'd be back in Los Angeles before noon. I asked if upgrades from coach to business class were available. Yes, there were. So I took that. I had a seat, 15B.
At the very last moment, just as the agent was giving me the new itinerary, I apologized and asked if I could change to the afternoon flight. I'm not a morning person and I knew that I'd end up staying awake all night to get a limo for Islip. Oh, and one last thing. I wanted to make sure I could upgrade on the later flight.
"No problem," the agent said.
"Good," I said. "Otherwise, I'll keep the morning flight."
The Yankee-Red Sox game was rained out Monday. I wrote a Red Sox column, went back to the hotel and packed. My phone rang shortly before 9 a.m. Tuesday.
"Are you awake?" my husband asked.
"No," I said. "I told you the limo wasn't coming until noon."
Dan Weber is my husband and he told me to turn on the TV.
"Right now," he said. "There's been an explosion at the World Trade Center."
As we talked, the second plane flew into the other tower. I saw that the New York airports were closed and told him I would call American to see if Islip was still open.
"Yes," the American agent said. "Your flight is still scheduled."
I called Dan back and at that moment, a crawl ran across the bottom of the TV screen saying that the FAA had closed all airports in the country. And another crawl said it was believed the first plane to hit the World Trade Center was American Flight 11.
"Dan," I said, "that was my flight. I had a seat on that flight."
My sister, Terri Pucin, was in a meeting in an office building on 15th and Ninth Avenue. She watched both planes hit the World Trade Center. She saw people jumping out of windows. "What if," she said later, "you had been on that plane and I had watched it?"
There was no answer to that question.
After speaking to an editor, who told me to go out and see what I could see, I left the Grand Hyatt. Subways weren't running. The street outside the Hyatt, 42nd Street, was strangely quiet. A limo was outside. The driver asked where I was going. I told him I wanted to see as much as I could see.
"For $400," he said, "I'll take you wherever you want to go."
I ran across the street to a cash machine, got some money, gave it to him and we drove. We drove through Times Square, where people were standing around cars parked in the middle of the street with radios on. Men in business suits, women holding babies, three high school-age students with their backpacks who had been heading to school. Everybody was listening to car radios.
On top of a Toys 'R Us building under construction, workers had made, out of sheets, two signs. One read "God Bless America." The other said, "Pray for Victims and Families." About a mile from the area where the World Trade Center had been, Fran Martin, a 46-year-old woman, stood covered in white soot. She had been walking on a street less than three blocks from the WTC when the first plane hit. (And what, she was still standing around 103 minutes later when the tower fell, so she could get covered in soot?)
"It was an earthquake-like feeling," she said. "And then there was eerie silence. There was paper falling from the sky. There were neckties landing on the street. I saw people jumping out of the building." Martin broke down for a minute and then continued.
"People were amazingly under control," she said. "We didn't know if we should run or stay and help. People were kind of milling around and everybody was talking to each other or trying to make cell phone calls. I had walked about five blocks away and heard the second plane hit. Oh my God, people just stopped still. One man wondered if the world was ending. There was so much smoke and soot and I just started running. What kind of world do we live in?"
People, hundreds of them, were walking north, out of downtown, in neat rows, the way we did at St. Anastasia grade school during fire drills. They were walking through two or three inches of white soot, as if there had been a snowstorm. People covered their mouths with coats, ties, handkerchiefs. One man stopped to take off his socks to cover his mouth.
Another man, about 30, who didn't want to be identified, said he and a few others had broken down the door to a locked apartment because they couldn't breathe. Women were barefoot, having run right out of their slip-on shoes. This was about an hour after the two towers had collapsed.
At Chelsea Piers, where a triage unit had been set up, a firefighter, who didn't want his name used, said he was inside the first tower when the second tower was hit.
"I had my gear on, on the way to a stairway and I heard a huge explosion," he said. "There were literally hundreds of people around me screaming. I eventually saw a light and I just started screaming at everybody to go toward the light. I was dragging people behind me, just pulling them along."
Andrea Frederick, a 35-year-old office worker who ran down 74 flights of stairs in the first tower, said she was "literally chased by a plume of dust and smoke" down the street when the first tower collapsed.
"I was afraid I'd die because I couldn't breathe," she said. "I fell a couple of times and people helped me up. I can't tell you how great people are. A stranger told me to get in his car. He took four of us who had been running here to the pier because he heard that's where injuries were being treated." (That was quick! What bullshit!)
On Wednesday I was given the assignment--go to Bellevue Hospital, talk to the people who are trying to find missing loved ones. It was a 15-block walk from the hotel to Bellevue. It was a quiet walk. People were outside, walking dogs, buying newspapers. Some restaurants were open. "We will not surrender to terror," a sign said. "Dinner will be served."
I passed St. Vartan park and saw the games being played. It was comforting, not disrespectful.
It made me wonder where sports fit into this, the most horrible occurrence most of us had ever witnessed. At Bellevue, hundreds of family members of the missing stood quietly in a line hoping, many praying, for any scrap of information to end their agony. (On Wednesday.)
Some brought framed pictures, others scribbled medical information, some distributed flyers made at neighborhood copying centers--anything that might help hospital personnel determine if their loved one is among the injured or the identified dead. (But there were only a handful of injured, and just a dozen recognizable corpses!)
"I just have this feeling Michael is still alive," said a tearful and sleepless Monica Iken, whose husband, Michael, 37, worked as a financial broker. "We've been trying to get pregnant and somehow I just know he's alive."
It was a scene of peace in a city gripped by chaos. There was little talking, little crying, no laughing. Mostly numbness and staring.
A young woman spoke softly into a cell phone: "What kind of surgery did Dad have? Was it his gallbladder or his appendix? They want that on this sheet. And how tall should I say he was, Mom? I always thought he was 5-10, but I want to be sure. They're telling us the more exact the better."
With much of the city's transportation system shut down, some had walked miles to get to the hospital on the East Side, far removed from the scene of the tragedy on the southern tip of Manhattan. Many vowed not to return home until they received word, even if the word was that the worst had happened.
Although police had set up the familiar NYPD blue barricades to keep the media and curious onlookers away from those in line, the separation was not enforced, and many of those in line hunted for reporters to show their pictures and tell their stories. There was almost no talk of anger or retaliation against the terrorists.
A common theme among those waiting for information involved the last phone call, the last conversation. In some cases, that occurred after the first plane crashed into one of the towers.
"Michael called me after the first explosion," Iken said. "He told me how he was watching the fire across the way and that he wasn't worried. He said there had been an announcement to stay put and that he'd call me back. He said he'd call me back. He promised he'd call me back...."
Standing outside Bellevue, Javier Soto wore a Yankee jersey. His brother, Michael, worked in the first tower hit.
"I'm a Mets fan," Soto said. "But Michael is a huge Yankees fans so I'm wearing Yankee pinstripes. If we can find Michael, I'm a Yankees fan forever. Do you hear that, Michael? A Yankees fan!"
On the walk back to the hotel, a basketball game was still going on in the park.
"I'm playing because I just have to get rid of some anger," Billy Callahan, 25, said. "I called up some of my buddies and we came to play."
Wednesday night my husband said my mom had called him. When she had seen a list of people killed on Flight 11, it had hit her that my name could have been on the TV. Dan and I talked about the cell phone calls that had been placed from the doomed planes to loved ones. Would he have wanted me to call or would that have made things worse? This, we decided, was not a good conversation.
On Thursday the Hyatt was evacuated. It is connected to Grand Central Station. That was my contribution to the news report of the day.
There were debates about whether to play sports this weekend. In the middle of a discussion about whether it was disrespectful or immensely helpful to play games, my husband talked about his dad. Dr. Mel Weber died last November, two days before Thanksgiving. He had been a Marine Corps flight surgeon during World War II and it wasn't until the last year of his life that he talked much about what he had seen during his time in the Pacific.
"My dad loved telling me what it was like when their ship stopped in Hawaii and there were all-star baseball teams led by Stan Musial, Bob Feller and Ted Williams," my husband said.
"His face would light up and he'd talk about some of the best baseball he'd ever seen in his life. Sports meant so much to him. It took him back home where he would share games he loved."
On Friday I walked. In Central Park,
Harrison Mitchell, a 37-year-old lawyer who worked in the Twin Towers, played catch with his 8-year-old son, Justin. Mitchell had taken this week off. He had taken Justin to the Yankee game Monday night.
"Justin really wanted to see Clemens pitch," Mitchell said. "After the rainout, I promised him we'd go back Tuesday night because Clemens was supposed to pitch against the White Sox.
"Maybe this sounds wrong, but I can hardly wait for baseball games to start again. I mean, baseball is our national pastime, right? Baseball is part of America and we need to be Americans right now. So I want to hear somebody say 'Let's play ball."'
What happened Tuesday has changed everything. And nothing. What happened Tuesday makes it imperative that we can be who we are. And Americans are sports fans. We love our games. That's why our athletes are paid so well.
NCAA office pools, Super Bowl Sunday, the World Series, these events bring our country together. We gather around TVs to see Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chase a home-run record. We brag that we picked Hampton to beat Iowa State on our NCAA pool, even if we didn't. Maybe what happened Tuesday will help us refocus on what is good about the games we play and watch, how they have the power to unite Americans of different races and religions.
Maybe we'll find a team owner who won't raise ticket prices next year, in honor of our country. Maybe a free agent will say that whatever raise he negotiates will go into a scholarship fund for a child who has been left fatherless or motherless, who might no longer have a dad to play catch with him in the park or a mother to take her to a tennis lesson.
Today, I hope, I'll be back in California. Monday the games will start again. When they do, I'll remember the guys playing basketball, just so they could get rid of anger, energy, tears. I'll remember the father and son playing catch and all the men and women wearing Yankee caps or Giant jerseys as they dug through rubble or tried to find family members.
It won't be easy to cheer for the Dodgers at first. It's hard to imagine being excited over the USC-UCLA football game or getting goose bumps when the Lakers receive their championship rings. But we will and we should. It's who we are. We're Americans.
Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.
Dan Weber, her husband
Terri Pucin, her sister
Andrea Frederick, a 35-year-old office worker on the 74 floor of "the first tower," (dust-free)
Fran Martin, a 46-year-old survivor (badly dusted)
Monica Iken,
her husband Michael, 37, a financial broker (fatality)
Javier Soto
his brother, Michael Soto (fatality), worked in "the first tower hit"
Harrison Mitchell, a 37-year-old lawyer worked in the Twin Towers. Mitchell had taken this week off.
The Los Angeles Times
(Sunday) September 16, 2001|By Diane Pucin
NEW YORK — The little park on the corner of 35th Street and Second Avenue holds two basketball courts, two handball courts and a couple of benches. On Wednesday afternoon, pick-up basketball games were played on both courts. Four men each were on the handball courts. Two older men sat on one of the benches. Joseph Leslie, 80, a World War II veteran, and his best friend, Jerome Goldman, 81, remarked on the talents of one of the young men who had just dunked a basketball.
"I'm a Knicks fan, all my life," Leslie said. "He's a Celtics fan, always has been. I tell him he should move to Boston."
"I tell him to shut up," Goldman said. "It's a free country and I'm living in New York and I'm rooting for the Celtics."
I came on this small park while walking to Bellevue Hospital. The day after terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, my assignment had changed. On Monday there had been a Yankee-Red Sox game to cover. On Wednesday the story had changed.
At Bellevue were hundreds of men and women, young and old, standing in line so they could fill out missing person forms and maybe, always being hopeful, find the names of husbands or wives, fiances or girlfriends, sons, daughters, cousins, uncles, best friends, life partners, on a list of injured who had been identified at a hospital in Manhattan or Brooklyn or Staten Island or New Jersey.
In between the baseball game Monday night and the walk past the park to Bellevue Hospital is my little story.
First, an admission. An editor I very much respected told me many years ago that he hated nothing more than writers and columnists who start every sentence with the word "I." Or any sentence, for that matter. "Nobody cares about what happens to you," he said. And so I'm writing this understanding that my story is no more important than anyone else's, and much less important than so many stories, but it is the only story I have to tell this week.
Sports is the reason for this story.
Sports and a realization that there are so many great people in our country, people we will never know, people who don't think what they are doing is extraordinary. These people are firefighters and policemen, paramedics and ambulance drivers. They are the volunteers, thousands of them, who want to sweep the dust off the street or make coffee or bring steaming plates of pasta into Ground Zero, as it's called, even though there is a chance that another building might collapse. They are the counselors who are listening, over and over, to the distraught people who are missing their loved ones. These New Yorkers I've met this week, the fans people love to hate, these are people to admire.
If ever we make our athletes out to be any more special or heroic than a fireman, somebody should make us shut up.
Tuesday morning I was still in New York because that's how it is when you cover sports. Word of the trip came suddenly, late in the afternoon on Aug. 29. Leave Sept. 1 for a football game in State College, Pa., go on to New York for the second week of the U.S. Open tennis tournament.
But this was a holiday weekend. Air fares were high, $2,500 to $2,800. Except for one flight, a red-eye from Los Angeles to Islip, N.Y., via Boston, on American Airlines. It was $1,500. I took it. And my route home, on Monday, Sept. 10, would be the same. American flight out of Islip, through Boston and back to Los Angeles.
On the final Saturday of the Open, I was asked to stay in New York an extra day and write from the Yankee-Red Sox game on Monday night. Roger Clemens would be trying to win his 20th game in 21 starts. History-making. The Red Sox were a mess too, a compelling story in itself. Of course, I'd stay.
When I called American to change my flight, I had the option of keeping the same 3:05 p.m. flight out of Islip to Logan Airport that I'd had Monday. Or I could take a 6 a.m. flight to Boston and connect to Flight 11 into LAX. I'd been gone for 10 days, was eager to be home, and decided to take the early flight so I'd be back in Los Angeles before noon. I asked if upgrades from coach to business class were available. Yes, there were. So I took that. I had a seat, 15B.
At the very last moment, just as the agent was giving me the new itinerary, I apologized and asked if I could change to the afternoon flight. I'm not a morning person and I knew that I'd end up staying awake all night to get a limo for Islip. Oh, and one last thing. I wanted to make sure I could upgrade on the later flight.
"No problem," the agent said.
"Good," I said. "Otherwise, I'll keep the morning flight."
The Yankee-Red Sox game was rained out Monday. I wrote a Red Sox column, went back to the hotel and packed. My phone rang shortly before 9 a.m. Tuesday.
"Are you awake?" my husband asked.
"No," I said. "I told you the limo wasn't coming until noon."
Dan Weber is my husband and he told me to turn on the TV.
"Right now," he said. "There's been an explosion at the World Trade Center."
As we talked, the second plane flew into the other tower. I saw that the New York airports were closed and told him I would call American to see if Islip was still open.
"Yes," the American agent said. "Your flight is still scheduled."
I called Dan back and at that moment, a crawl ran across the bottom of the TV screen saying that the FAA had closed all airports in the country. And another crawl said it was believed the first plane to hit the World Trade Center was American Flight 11.
"Dan," I said, "that was my flight. I had a seat on that flight."
My sister, Terri Pucin, was in a meeting in an office building on 15th and Ninth Avenue. She watched both planes hit the World Trade Center. She saw people jumping out of windows. "What if," she said later, "you had been on that plane and I had watched it?"
There was no answer to that question.
After speaking to an editor, who told me to go out and see what I could see, I left the Grand Hyatt. Subways weren't running. The street outside the Hyatt, 42nd Street, was strangely quiet. A limo was outside. The driver asked where I was going. I told him I wanted to see as much as I could see.
"For $400," he said, "I'll take you wherever you want to go."
I ran across the street to a cash machine, got some money, gave it to him and we drove. We drove through Times Square, where people were standing around cars parked in the middle of the street with radios on. Men in business suits, women holding babies, three high school-age students with their backpacks who had been heading to school. Everybody was listening to car radios.
On top of a Toys 'R Us building under construction, workers had made, out of sheets, two signs. One read "God Bless America." The other said, "Pray for Victims and Families." About a mile from the area where the World Trade Center had been, Fran Martin, a 46-year-old woman, stood covered in white soot. She had been walking on a street less than three blocks from the WTC when the first plane hit. (And what, she was still standing around 103 minutes later when the tower fell, so she could get covered in soot?)
"It was an earthquake-like feeling," she said. "And then there was eerie silence. There was paper falling from the sky. There were neckties landing on the street. I saw people jumping out of the building." Martin broke down for a minute and then continued.
"People were amazingly under control," she said. "We didn't know if we should run or stay and help. People were kind of milling around and everybody was talking to each other or trying to make cell phone calls. I had walked about five blocks away and heard the second plane hit. Oh my God, people just stopped still. One man wondered if the world was ending. There was so much smoke and soot and I just started running. What kind of world do we live in?"
People, hundreds of them, were walking north, out of downtown, in neat rows, the way we did at St. Anastasia grade school during fire drills. They were walking through two or three inches of white soot, as if there had been a snowstorm. People covered their mouths with coats, ties, handkerchiefs. One man stopped to take off his socks to cover his mouth.
Another man, about 30, who didn't want to be identified, said he and a few others had broken down the door to a locked apartment because they couldn't breathe. Women were barefoot, having run right out of their slip-on shoes. This was about an hour after the two towers had collapsed.
At Chelsea Piers, where a triage unit had been set up, a firefighter, who didn't want his name used, said he was inside the first tower when the second tower was hit.
"I had my gear on, on the way to a stairway and I heard a huge explosion," he said. "There were literally hundreds of people around me screaming. I eventually saw a light and I just started screaming at everybody to go toward the light. I was dragging people behind me, just pulling them along."
Andrea Frederick, a 35-year-old office worker who ran down 74 flights of stairs in the first tower, said she was "literally chased by a plume of dust and smoke" down the street when the first tower collapsed.
"I was afraid I'd die because I couldn't breathe," she said. "I fell a couple of times and people helped me up. I can't tell you how great people are. A stranger told me to get in his car. He took four of us who had been running here to the pier because he heard that's where injuries were being treated." (That was quick! What bullshit!)
On Wednesday I was given the assignment--go to Bellevue Hospital, talk to the people who are trying to find missing loved ones. It was a 15-block walk from the hotel to Bellevue. It was a quiet walk. People were outside, walking dogs, buying newspapers. Some restaurants were open. "We will not surrender to terror," a sign said. "Dinner will be served."
I passed St. Vartan park and saw the games being played. It was comforting, not disrespectful.
It made me wonder where sports fit into this, the most horrible occurrence most of us had ever witnessed. At Bellevue, hundreds of family members of the missing stood quietly in a line hoping, many praying, for any scrap of information to end their agony. (On Wednesday.)
Some brought framed pictures, others scribbled medical information, some distributed flyers made at neighborhood copying centers--anything that might help hospital personnel determine if their loved one is among the injured or the identified dead. (But there were only a handful of injured, and just a dozen recognizable corpses!)
"I just have this feeling Michael is still alive," said a tearful and sleepless Monica Iken, whose husband, Michael, 37, worked as a financial broker. "We've been trying to get pregnant and somehow I just know he's alive."
It was a scene of peace in a city gripped by chaos. There was little talking, little crying, no laughing. Mostly numbness and staring.
A young woman spoke softly into a cell phone: "What kind of surgery did Dad have? Was it his gallbladder or his appendix? They want that on this sheet. And how tall should I say he was, Mom? I always thought he was 5-10, but I want to be sure. They're telling us the more exact the better."
With much of the city's transportation system shut down, some had walked miles to get to the hospital on the East Side, far removed from the scene of the tragedy on the southern tip of Manhattan. Many vowed not to return home until they received word, even if the word was that the worst had happened.
Although police had set up the familiar NYPD blue barricades to keep the media and curious onlookers away from those in line, the separation was not enforced, and many of those in line hunted for reporters to show their pictures and tell their stories. There was almost no talk of anger or retaliation against the terrorists.
A common theme among those waiting for information involved the last phone call, the last conversation. In some cases, that occurred after the first plane crashed into one of the towers.
"Michael called me after the first explosion," Iken said. "He told me how he was watching the fire across the way and that he wasn't worried. He said there had been an announcement to stay put and that he'd call me back. He said he'd call me back. He promised he'd call me back...."
Standing outside Bellevue, Javier Soto wore a Yankee jersey. His brother, Michael, worked in the first tower hit.
"I'm a Mets fan," Soto said. "But Michael is a huge Yankees fans so I'm wearing Yankee pinstripes. If we can find Michael, I'm a Yankees fan forever. Do you hear that, Michael? A Yankees fan!"
On the walk back to the hotel, a basketball game was still going on in the park.
"I'm playing because I just have to get rid of some anger," Billy Callahan, 25, said. "I called up some of my buddies and we came to play."
Wednesday night my husband said my mom had called him. When she had seen a list of people killed on Flight 11, it had hit her that my name could have been on the TV. Dan and I talked about the cell phone calls that had been placed from the doomed planes to loved ones. Would he have wanted me to call or would that have made things worse? This, we decided, was not a good conversation.
On Thursday the Hyatt was evacuated. It is connected to Grand Central Station. That was my contribution to the news report of the day.
There were debates about whether to play sports this weekend. In the middle of a discussion about whether it was disrespectful or immensely helpful to play games, my husband talked about his dad. Dr. Mel Weber died last November, two days before Thanksgiving. He had been a Marine Corps flight surgeon during World War II and it wasn't until the last year of his life that he talked much about what he had seen during his time in the Pacific.
"My dad loved telling me what it was like when their ship stopped in Hawaii and there were all-star baseball teams led by Stan Musial, Bob Feller and Ted Williams," my husband said.
"His face would light up and he'd talk about some of the best baseball he'd ever seen in his life. Sports meant so much to him. It took him back home where he would share games he loved."
On Friday I walked. In Central Park,
Harrison Mitchell, a 37-year-old lawyer who worked in the Twin Towers, played catch with his 8-year-old son, Justin. Mitchell had taken this week off. He had taken Justin to the Yankee game Monday night.
"Justin really wanted to see Clemens pitch," Mitchell said. "After the rainout, I promised him we'd go back Tuesday night because Clemens was supposed to pitch against the White Sox.
"Maybe this sounds wrong, but I can hardly wait for baseball games to start again. I mean, baseball is our national pastime, right? Baseball is part of America and we need to be Americans right now. So I want to hear somebody say 'Let's play ball."'
What happened Tuesday has changed everything. And nothing. What happened Tuesday makes it imperative that we can be who we are. And Americans are sports fans. We love our games. That's why our athletes are paid so well.
NCAA office pools, Super Bowl Sunday, the World Series, these events bring our country together. We gather around TVs to see Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chase a home-run record. We brag that we picked Hampton to beat Iowa State on our NCAA pool, even if we didn't. Maybe what happened Tuesday will help us refocus on what is good about the games we play and watch, how they have the power to unite Americans of different races and religions.
Maybe we'll find a team owner who won't raise ticket prices next year, in honor of our country. Maybe a free agent will say that whatever raise he negotiates will go into a scholarship fund for a child who has been left fatherless or motherless, who might no longer have a dad to play catch with him in the park or a mother to take her to a tennis lesson.
Today, I hope, I'll be back in California. Monday the games will start again. When they do, I'll remember the guys playing basketball, just so they could get rid of anger, energy, tears. I'll remember the father and son playing catch and all the men and women wearing Yankee caps or Giant jerseys as they dug through rubble or tried to find family members.
It won't be easy to cheer for the Dodgers at first. It's hard to imagine being excited over the USC-UCLA football game or getting goose bumps when the Lakers receive their championship rings. But we will and we should. It's who we are. We're Americans.
Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.
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