Story of the Day-September 11, 2001 attacks

The first 9/11 Documentary, aired March 10, 2002





















Tribute To The World Trade Center & 9/11 Victims

The September 11, 2001 attacks (often referred to as 9/11—pronounced "nine eleven") consisted of a series of coordinated terrorist[2] suicide attacks by Islamic extremists on that date upon the United States of America.

That morning nineteen terrorists[3] affiliated with al-Qaeda[4] hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. Each team of hijackers included a trained pilot. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners (United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11) into the World Trade Center in New York City, one plane into each tower (1 WTC and 2 WTC), resulting in the collapse of both buildings soon afterward and irreparable damage to nearby buildings. The hijackers crashed a third airliner (American Airlines Flight 77) into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Passengers and members of the flight crew on the fourth aircraft (United Airlines Flight 93) attempted to retake control of their plane from the hijackers;[5] that plane crashed into a field near the town of Shanksville in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania. In addition to the 19 hijackers, 2,974 people died as an immediate result of the attacks, and the death of at least one person from lung disease was ruled by a medical examiner to be a result of exposure to WTC dust.[6] Another 24 people are missing and presumed dead. The victims were predominantly civilians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_attacks


World Trade Center Public Opening Hours Film

9/11 Attack
On Tuesday, 11 September 2001, nineteen members of the Islamic terrorist group Al Qaeda perpetrated a devastating, deadly assault on the United States, crashing airplanes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, killing thousands. The attacks shattered Americans' sense of security, threw the nation into a state of emergency, and triggered a months-long war in Afghanistan and an extended worldwide "war on terrorism."

On the morning of 11 September, four teams of terrorists hijacked jetliners departing from Boston; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. Once airborne, the terrorists, some of whom had gone to flight school in the United States, murdered the planes' pilots and took control of the aircrafts. At 8:46 A.M., the first plane flew directly into the north tower of the World Trade Center in southern Manhattan, tearing a gaping hole in the building and setting it ablaze. Seventeen minutes later, a second plane flew into the center's south tower, causing similar damage. At 9:43 A.M., a third plane plunged into the Pentagon in Virginia, smashing one wing of the government's military headquarters. The fourth plane appeared headed for Washington, D.C., but at 10:10 A.M. it crashed in western Pennsylvania, apparently after passengers, who had learned of the other attacks through conversations on their cellular phones, rushed the terrorists. Compounding the horror, the south and north towers of the Trade Center, their structures weakened by the heat of the blazes, collapsed entirely, at 10:05 and 10:28 A.M., respectively. The attack was seen as an act of war, likened to Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II.

The scope of the carnage and devastation, especially in Manhattan, overwhelmed Americans. Besides the towers, several smaller buildings in the World Trade Center complex also collapsed. People trapped on upper floors of the towers jumped or fell to their deaths. Hundreds of firefighters and rescue crews who had hurried to the buildings were crushed when the towers collapsed. All told, 2,819 people died (because of confusion and difficulty in tracking down individuals, early estimates put the toll at more than 6,000). Thousands more suffered severe physical injury or psychological trauma. Others were displaced from their homes and offices for weeks or months. Some businesses lost large portions of their workforces or sustained financial setbacks. Neighborhood restaurants and shops, which depended on the World Trade Center population for business, struggled to stay solvent.

Americans responded to the atrocities with shock and panic. Early in the day, television news reported (but retracted) false rumors of other attacks, including a bombing at the State Department, heightening the uncertainty of what might still happen. States of emergency were declared in Washington and New York. The Federal Aviation Agency grounded all flights in the United States and diverted all incoming foreign air traffic to Canada. Federal officials evacuated the White House and Congress and then closed all federal buildings. The military was put on worldwide alert.

President George W. Bush, attending a political event in Florida, gave a brief statement at 9:30 A.M. noting an "apparent terrorist attack." He then flew around the country, to Air Force bases in Louisiana and Nebraska, as Vice President Dick Cheney supervised operations from a White House bunker. Bush drew criticism for his decision and for promulgating a story, which the White House later admitted was false, that his plane was a target of the terrorists. Shortly before 7 P.M., with the threat of further attacks diminished, Bush returned to the White House. At 8:30 P.M., he spoke from the Oval Office, vowing retaliation against not just the terrorists responsible for the assaults, but also those governments that supported or sheltered them. As Bush's comments suggested, American intelligence agencies already believed the Al Qaeda terrorist ring, run by the Saudi Osama bin Laden, was responsible, and that it was operating in Afghanistan under the protection of the dictatorial Islamic regime known as the Taliban.

As Washington, D.C., coped with a national crisis, New York City faced an unprecedented urban emergency. Businesses closed for the day (and in some cases much longer), as did the subways. Manhattan became a sea of human beings fleeing the lower end of the island by foot. Bridges and tunnels leading into the borough were closed. The municipal primary elections scheduled for that day, including the mayoral contest, were postponed for two weeks. The stock market, located near the Trade Center, closed for the rest of the week. Rudolph Giuliani, the city's controversial mayor, won widespread praise for his confident, can did, and humane public posture during the crisis. In December, Time magazine named him "Man of the Year."

American officials had little trouble identifying the terrorists or how they achieved their feat. Mostly Egyptians, Saudis, and Yemenis, the perpetrators included both recent immigrants and those who had lived in the United States for several years. Some had already been under suspicion but had managed to conceal their whereabouts. Authorities also alleged that Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Muslim of Moroccan descent who had been arrested in August after suspicious behavior at a flight school, was intended to be the twentieth hijacker in the plot.

Officials also determined quickly that the hijackers belonged to bin Laden's Al Qaeda group. For several years, bin Laden had been organizing and bankrolling terrorist activities around the world, directed against the United States, other Western nations and individuals, and pro-Western Arab governments. He worked with a coalition of fanatical Islamic groups, mostly in the Arab world, but also in Southeast and Central Asia, including Egyptians who had assassinated their leader, Anwar Sadat, in 1981. These extremists opposed secular, modern, and Western values, called for the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia, and adopted unremitting violence against civilians as their instrument.

Bin Laden and his associates had struck before. They engineered the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1996 assault on an American military barracks in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a destroyer anchored in Yemen. The Bill Clinton administration had responded to these attacks by prosecuting those perpetrators whom it could apprehend, by (unsuccessfully) seeking legal changes to ease the tracking of terrorists, and by launching military strikes in 1998 against Sudan and Afghanistan, which supported Al Qaeda. The administration had also successfully thwarted earlier conspiracies, including a planned series of bombings on New Year's Eve 2000.

Few doubted, however, that more severe reprisals were needed after 11 September. On 14 September, Congress passed a resolution authorizing the use of military force to fight terrorism. The United States also secured a resolution on 12 September from the United Nations Security Council endorsing antiterrorism efforts, which, while not explicitly approving military action, was generally interpreted as doing so. After a mere four weeks—longer than some war hawks wanted—American and British forces began bombing Afghanistan. Despite a massive call-up of military reserves, the U.S. government remained wary of using American ground forces. Instead, Western forces bombed key targets while providing aid and coordination to the Northern Alliance, a coalition of Afghan rebels who did most of the actual fighting. On 13 November, Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, fell to the allies. On 22 December, a new, interim government friendly to the United States took power.

The domestic response to the 11 September attacks was almost as dramatic as the military action abroad. A surge of patriotism gripped the nation. Citizens flew flags, sang "God Bless America, " and donated money to the victims' families, the Red Cross, and firefighters' and police officers' associations. The efficient performance of many federal and state agencies—law enforcement, emergency relief, environmental protection, and others—boosted public confidence in government to levels not seen in decades. President Bush appointed Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge to his cabinet as the director of "homeland" security, while other officials ordered the closer monitoring of sites ranging from nuclear reactors to reservoirs.

Congress granted new powers to law enforcement officials. The so-called USA Patriot Act, passed in October, gave authorities greater latitude in placing wiretaps and reading E-mail, prompting a national debate about whether civil liberties were being needlessly curtailed. Also controversial was a massive Justice Department dragnet that caught up hundreds of immigrants, mostly Middle Easterners, many of whom were jailed for months for technical violations of immigration laws.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, fear was pervasive. For several days, bomb scares proliferated. More troubling, starting in late September, several politicians and prominent news organizations received in the mail packages containing deadly high-grade anthrax spores. Five people died from the disease, although many more who were exposed recovered by taking antibiotics. Federal officials suspected that the anthrax was circulated not by Al Qaeda terrorists, but by Americans; nonetheless, the weeks-long scare, marked by news of sudden deaths and hospitalizations, fueled Americans' sense of insecurity.

Fear also centered on air travel, which decreased in the short term as many Americans realized how lax airport security was. Airports immediately tightened their security procedures after 11 September, creating long lines and frequent delays, but their policies remained erratic and far from foolproof. Months later, airplanes were still transporting bags that had not been screened, and private firms, not public employees, remained in control. Although air travel rebounded to normal levels, the airlines benefited from a perception after 11 September that they faced bankruptcy, and Congress passed a bailout bill giving them$15 billion in federal subsidies. Republican legislators blocked a plan to extend federal support to laid-off airline employees as well.

Within a few months after the attacks, daily life across America had essentially returned to normal. Fighting in Afghanistan sporadically erupted to top the news, and developments in the "war on terrorism" —whether the apprehension of alleged Al Qaeda members or the administration's plan to create a new cabinet department devoted to domestic security—attracted much comment. But other events, notably a wave of corruption scandals at several leading corporations, also vied for public attention. The war effort, which had successfully ousted the Taliban, still enjoyed wide support, as did President Bush. The administration began planning for an attack on Iraq; although the regime had no demonstrable links to Al Qaeda, its program to develop nuclear and chemical weapons now appeared, in the wake of 11 September, to be an intolerable danger. A year after the 9/11 attack, no end of the "war on terrorism" seemed imminent, as bin Laden and most of his top aides remained at large, and polls showed that a majority of Americans considered it likely that there would be another terrorist attack on their own soil.
http://www.answers.com/9%2F11

9-11 Fox News Complete coverage


9/11/01 - CNN Live Coverage Pentagon Attack

On the morning of September 11, 2001, CNN announces Breaking News.
Below is the archived front page of CNN.com as it appeared on the morning of 9-11-2001.
http://www.september11news.com/USAWebArchives.htm

Remembering one dark day
http://www.msnbc.com/news/aaattacks_front.asp?cp1=1

9/11 news videos


Can We Stop the Next Attack?
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020311/story.html

Complete 911 Timeline
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/project.jsp?project=911_project

The 9-11 Commission Report
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/911/index.html




SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 VICTIMS
This site is dedicated to the victims of September 11, 2001 tragedy
http://www.september11victims.com/september11victims/victims_list.htm


September 11: Chronology of terror
http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/chronology.attack/
8:45 a.m. (all times are EDT): A hijacked passenger jet, American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston, Massachusetts, crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Center, tearing a gaping hole in the building and setting it afire.

9:03 a.m.: A second hijacked airliner, United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston, crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center and explodes. Both buildings are burning.

9:17 a.m.: The Federal Aviation Administration shuts down all New York City area airports.

9:21 a.m.: The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey orders all bridges and tunnels in the New York area closed.

9:30 a.m.: President Bush, speaking in Sarasota, Florida, says the country has suffered an "apparent terrorist attack."

9:40 a.m.: The FAA halts all flight operations at U.S. airports, the first time in U.S. history that air traffic nationwide has been halted.

9:43 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon, sending up a huge plume of smoke. Evacuation begins immediately.

9:45 a.m.: The White House evacuates.

9:57 a.m.: Bush departs from Florida.

10:05 a.m.: The south tower of the World Trade Center collapses, plummeting into the streets below. A massive cloud of dust and debris forms and slowly drifts away from the building.

10:08 a.m.: Secret Service agents armed with automatic rifles are deployed into Lafayette Park across from the White House.

10:10 a.m.: A portion of the Pentagon collapses.

10:10 a.m.: United Airlines Flight 93, also hijacked, crashes in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh.

10:13 a.m.: The United Nations building evacuates, including 4,700 people from the headquarters building and 7,000 total from UNICEF and U.N. development programs.

10:22 a.m.: In Washington, the State and Justice departments are evacuated, along with the World Bank.
10:24 a.m.: The FAA reports that all inbound transatlantic aircraft flying into the United States are being diverted to Canada.
Crash scene in Penn.
Pennsylvania crash scene

10:28 a.m.: The World Trade Center's north tower collapses from the top down as if it were being peeled apart, releasing a tremendous cloud of debris and smoke.

10:45 a.m.: All federal office buildings in Washington are evacuated.

10.46 a.m.: U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell cuts short his trip to Latin America to return to the United States.

10.48 a.m.: Police confirm the plane crash in Pennsylvania.

10:53 a.m.: New York's primary elections, scheduled for Tuesday, are postponed.

10:54 a.m.: Israel evacuates all diplomatic missions.

10:57 a.m.: New York Gov. George Pataki says all state government offices are closed.

11:02 a.m.: New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani urges New Yorkers to stay at home and orders an evacuation of the area south of Canal Street.

11:16 a.m.: CNN reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing emergency-response teams in a precautionary move.

11:18 a.m.: American Airlines reports it has lost two aircraft. American Flight 11, a Boeing 767 flying from Boston to Los Angeles, had 81 passengers and 11 crew aboard. Flight 77, a Boeing 757 en route from Washington's Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles, had 58 passengers and six crew members aboard. Flight 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

11:26 a.m.: United Airlines reports that United Flight 93, en route from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco, California, has crashed in Pennsylvania. The airline also says that it is "deeply concerned" about United Flight 175.

11:59 a.m.: United Airlines confirms that Flight 175, from Boston to Los Angeles, has crashed with 56 passengers and nine crew members aboard. It hit the World Trade Center's south tower.

12:04 p.m.: Los Angeles International Airport, the destination of three of the crashed airplanes, is evacuated.

12:15 p.m: San Francisco International Airport is evacuated and shut down. The airport was the destination of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.

12:15 p.m.: The Immigration and Naturalization Service says U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico are on the highest state of alert, but no decision has been made about closing borders.

12:30 p.m.: The FAA says 50 flights are in U.S. airspace, but none are reporting any problems.

1:04 p.m.: Bush, speaking from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, says that all appropriate security measures are being taken, including putting the U.S. military on high alert worldwide. He asks for prayers for those killed or wounded in the attacks and says, "Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts."

1:27 p.m.: A state of emergency is declared by the city of Washington.

1:44 p.m.: The Pentagon says five warships and two aircraft carriers will leave the U.S. Naval Station in Norfolk, Virginia, to protect the East Coast from further attack and to reduce the number of ships in port. The two carriers, the USS George Washington and the USS John F. Kennedy, are headed for the New York coast. The other ships headed to sea are frigates and guided missile destroyers capable of shooting down aircraft.

1:48 p.m.: Bush leaves Barksdale Air Force Base aboard Air Force One and flies to an Air Force base in Nebraska.

2 p.m.: Senior FBI sources tell CNN they are working on the assumption that the four airplanes that crashed were hijacked as part of a terrorist attack.

2:30 p.m.: The FAA announces there will be no U.S. commercial air traffic until noon EDT Wednesday at the earliest.

2:49 p.m.: At a news conference, Giuliani says that subway and bus service are partially restored in New York City. Asked about the number of people killed, Giuliani says, "I don't think we want to speculate about that -- more than any of us can bear."

3:55 p.m.: Karen Hughes, a White House counselor, says the president is at an undisclosed location, later revealed to be Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, and is conducting a National Security Council meeting by phone. Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice are in a secure facility at the White House. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is at the Pentagon.

3:55 p.m.: Giuliani now says the number of critically injured in New York City is up to 200 with 2,100 total injuries reported.

4 p.m: CNN National Security Correspondent David Ensor reports that U.S. officials say there are "good indications" that Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, suspected of coordinating the bombings of two U.S. embassies in 1998, is involved in the attacks, based on "new and specific" information developed since the attacks.

4:06 p.m.: California Gov. Gray Davis dispatches urban search-and-rescue teams to New York.

4:10 p.m.: Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex is reported on fire.


4:20 p.m.: U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he was "not surprised there was an attack (but) was surprised at the specificity." He says he was "shocked at what actually happened -- the extent of it."

4:25 p.m.: The American Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange say they will remain closed Wednesday.

4:30 p.m.: The president leaves Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska aboard Air Force One to return to Washington.

5:15 p.m.: CNN Military Affairs Correspondent Jamie McIntyre reports fires are still burning in part of the Pentagon. No death figures have been released yet.

5:20 p.m.: The 47-story Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex collapses. The evacuated building is damaged when the twin towers across the street collapse earlier in the day. Other nearby buildings in the area remain ablaze.

5:30 p.m.: CNN Senior White House Correspondent John King reports that U.S. officials say the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania could have been headed for one of three possible targets: Camp David, the White House or the U.S. Capitol building.

6 p.m.: Explosions are heard in Kabul, Afghanistan, hours after terrorist attacks targeted financial and military centers in the United States. The attacks occurred at 2:30 a.m. local time. Afghanistan is believed to be where bin Laden, who U.S. officials say is possibly behind Tuesday's deadly attacks, is located. U.S. officials say later that the United States had no involvement in the incident whatsoever. The attack is credited to the Northern Alliance, a group fighting the Taliban in the country's ongoing civil war.

6:10 p.m.:Giuliani urges New Yorkers to stay home Wednesday if they can.


6:40 p.m.: Rumsfeld, the U.S. defense secretary, holds a news conference in the Pentagon, noting the building is operational. "It will be in business tomorrow," he says.

6:54 p.m.: Bush arrives back at the White House aboard Marine One and is scheduled to address the nation at 8:30 p.m. The president earlier landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland with a three-fighter jet escort. CNN's John King reports Laura Bush arrived earlier by motorcade from a "secure location."

7:17 p.m.: U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft says the FBI is setting up a Web site for tips on the attacks: www.ifccfbi.gov. He also says family and friends of possible victims can leave contact information at 800-331-0075.

7:02 p.m.: CNN's Paula Zahn reports the Marriott Hotel near the World Trade Center is on the verge of collapse and says some New York bridges are now open to outbound traffic.


7:45 p.m.: The New York Police Department says that at least 78 officers are missing. The city also says that as many as half of the first 400 firefighters on the scene were killed.

8:30 p.m.: President Bush addresses the nation, saying "thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil" and asks for prayers for the families and friends of Tuesday's victims. "These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve," he says. The president says the U.S. government will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed the acts and those who harbor them. He adds that government offices in Washington are reopening for essential personnel Tuesday night and for all workers Wednesday.

9:22 p.m.: CNN's McIntyre reports the fire at the Pentagon is still burning and is considered contained but not under control.

9:57 p.m.: Giuliani says New York City schools will be closed Wednesday and no more volunteers are needed for Tuesday evening's rescue efforts. He says there is hope that there are still people alive in rubble. He also says that power is out on the westside of Manhattan and that health department tests show there are no airborne chemical agents about which to worry.

10:49 p.m.: CNN Congressional Correspondent Jonathan Karl reports that Attorney General Ashcroft told members of Congress that there were three to five hijackers on each plane armed only with knives.

10:56 p.m: CNN's Zahn reports that New York City police believe there are people alive in buildings near the World Trade Center.

11:54 p.m.: CNN Washington Bureau Chief Frank Sesno reports that a government official told him there was an open microphone on one of the hijacked planes and that sounds of discussion and "duress" were heard. Sesno also reports a source says law enforcement has "credible" information and leads and is confident about the investigation.



Organizers of the September 11, 2001 attacks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizers_of_the_September_11,_2001_attacks

The September 11, 2001 attacks were carried out by 19 hijackers, with planning and organization of the attacks involving numerous additional members of al-Qaeda.

THE HIJACKERS
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/683026/posts
Mohamed Atta (September 1, 1968 – September 11, 2001) was a terrorist who participated in the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001 attacks. Atta is suspected of using numerous aliases during his lifetime, including Mehan Atta, Mohammed Atta, Mohammad El Amir, Mohamed El Sayed, Muhammad Muhammad Al Amir Awag Al Sayyid Atta, and Muhammad Muhammad Al-Amir Awad Al Sayad, although the will that he wrote in 1996 gives his name as "Mohamed son of Mohamed Elamir awad Elsayed."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Atta


Papers Offer New Clues On 9/11 Hijackers' Travel
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19784-2005Feb12.html
Declassified documents from the Sept. 11 commission released last week offer new clues to a lingering mystery of the 2001 terrorist attacks: Why did the plot's mastermind, Mohamed Atta, begin his journey that day in Portland, Maine, instead of Boston?

Atta is believed to have been the pilot hijacker of American Airlines Flight 11, which departed Boston and crashed into the World Trade Center. It has always been unclear why he and another hijacker, Abdulaziz Alomari, drove from Boston to Portland the night before the attacks, only to board a Portland-to-Boston flight early the next morning.
The commission's report says that the most "plausible theory" is that Atta wanted to avoid suspicion by not having all 10 of the hijackers who flew out of Boston Logan International Airport arrive about the same time. United Airlines Flight 175, which also was hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center, left Boston shortly after American Flight 11. Both planes carried teams of five hijackers.

New details revealed by the report indicate that Atta expected to avoid scrutiny by authorities in Boston by obtaining a boarding pass for Flight 11 in Portland. Atta "clenched his jaw and looked as though he was about to get angry" when the airline agent in Portland refused to issue him a boarding pass for the connecting flight in Boston, according to the report.

"Atta stated that he was assured he would have 'one-step check-in,' " according to the report. "The agent told [Atta and Alomari] that they had better get going if they were to make their flight. He said that Atta looked as if he were about to say something in anger but turned to leave."

Atta and Alomari barely made their flight from Portland to Boston, which, according to the Massachusetts Port Authority, was the only flight close enough to allow them to arrive in time to board American Flight 11 at Logan.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States released its final report in July but turned over more detailed and classified information to the National Archives, which released the declassified material last week. The new information chronicles more of the hijackers' elaborate planning for the attacks as well as some of their missteps.

Upon arrival at Logan, Atta and Alomari had to go through security a second time, which is usually unnecessary for connecting flights at most U.S. airports. Because of the way the Boston airport is configured, the hijackers arrived at Gate 9 in Terminal B but needed to cross a parking lot and were observed asking for directions to the gate where they boarded American Flight 11, according to the report.

"No one knows what they knew" in planning the attacks, said Al Felzenberg, a former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission. "The best we could do is retrace their steps. They did some careful planning and they also made some mistakes."


Did the 9/11 hijackers have a U.S. accomplice?
Yemeni man under investigation two years after U.S. deported him
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14733525/

WASHINGTON - It's one of the most pressing questions after the 9/11 terrorist attacks: Did the 19 hijackers have any accomplices inside the United States? The FBI has always said "no," but NBC News has learned that because of new information, the FBI has now renewed its investigation of a man the 9/11 Commission said was "perfectly suited" to help the hijackers with their mission.

Senior U.S. law enforcement officials tell NBC News that the FBI is again actively investigating a good friend of the 9/11 hijackers — two years after the U.S. allowed the man to be deported to his home country.

His name is Mohdar Abdullah, a Yemeni student who admits befriending two 9/11 hijackers — Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar — when they lived in San Diego.

NBC News has learned that the renewed FBI investigation was triggered, in part, by surveillance videotapes from inside the Los Angeles Airport shot in June 2000 — a year before 9/11.

Law enforcement officials tell NBC the grainy tapes show terrorist Nawaf al-Hazmi with Abdullah and an unidentified man. Sources say the men appear to be scouting out the airport. Some FBI agents believe that one of the men may be holding a video camera and rotates in a circle while secretly videotaping near the security area.

"This is very consistent with what the hijackers did," says 9/11 Commission former co-chair Tom Kean, adding, "if he's on tape here with the hijackers, then this is something that should really be investigated further."

No chance to quiz suspect
The 9/11 Commission says Abdullah had extremist sympathies, helped the two hijackers get drivers licenses and flight training and, after 9/11, "expressed hatred for the U.S. government."

But before the 9/11 Commission could question him, the U.S. deported him.

"He should not have been let out of the country when the 9/11 commission wanted to interview him," Kean says.

The airport tapes were not found until after Abdullah was deported. The grand jury subpoena for the tapes, obtained by NBC news, is dated October 2004 [PDF link].

Some law enforcement officials now regret deporting Abdullah. One official tells NBC he is now "more suspicious" that Abdullah had some prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

But in an exclusive interview with NBC in 2004, Abdullah said the hijackers tricked him.

"They never even mentioned they had training before," Abdullah said. "They didn't mention they have such hatred to the United States."

Abdullah's former lawyer, Randall Hamud, tells NBC that his client never knew the hijackers were here to harm the U.S. He says that the FBI has thoroughly investigated the case, and that the U.S. never would have deported Abdullah to Yemen if he had been guilty of knowingly supporting the 9/11 terrorists.

As to the LAX videotape, Hamud suggests there may be an innocent explanation:

"The problem is that in the paranoid times today, a lot of law enforcement people and Americans think that any Arab, Muslim, or South Asian carrying a video camera is a terrorist up to no good," Hamud says. "I have seen no information or evidence to indicate that Mohdar Abdullah was anything other than an innocent victim of the two hijackers who duped him, along with a lot of other people in the San Diego, as to why they were here."

Law-enforcement officials tell NBC News that the FBI is now re-examining all of Abdullah's contacts with friends and associates in the U.S., especially anyone he's contacted since returning to Yemen.

FBI Assistant Director John Miller issued the following statement to NBC News: "At the time of his release, the FBI did not have sufficient evidence to charge [Mohdar Abdullah] with a crime. ICE did not have a legal basis to hold him indefinitely. Since deporting him, through investigation, the FBI has uncovered some additional information but not enough on its own to bring any formal charge. We continue to examine the contacts between the 19 hijackers and a number of persons."

Why didn't they find these tapes until 2004 isn’t known — especially since the FBI knew that on the day these tapes were shot in June 2000, one of the hijackers went to Los Angeles Airport for a flight home to Yemen. Critics are certain to question whether the FBI again missed an important clue, and let a possible accomplice get away.



Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also transliterated as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, inter alia, and additionally known by as many as twenty-seven aliases[3]) (b. March 1, 1964, or April 14, 1965) is a prisoner in U.S. custody for acts of terrorism, including mass murder.

In March 2007, after four years in captivity, including six months of detention at Guantanamo Bay, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — as it was claimed by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing [4] in Guantanamo Bay — confessed to masterminding the September 11th attacks, the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt to blow up an airliner over the Atlantic Ocean, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and various foiled attacks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_Sheikh_Mohammed

TIMELINE ENTRIES ABOUT 9/11 MASTERMIND KHALID SHAIKH MOHAMMED
http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/main/khalidshaikhmohammed.html




Mastermind: 9/11 Plot Began In '96
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/30/attack/main575790.shtml
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, has told American interrogators that he first discussed the plot with Osama bin Laden in 1996 and that the original plan called for hijacking five commercial jets on each U.S. coast before it was modified several times, according to interrogation reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

Mohammed also divulged that, in its final stages, the hijacking plan called for as many as 22 terrorists and four planes in a first wave, followed by a second wave of suicide hijackings that were to be aided possibly by al Qaeda allies in southeast Asia, according to the reports.

Over time, bin Laden scrapped various parts of the Sept. 11 plan, including attacks on both coasts and hijacking or bombing some planes in East Asia, Mohammed is quoted as saying in reports that shed new light on the origins and evolution of the plot of Sept. 11, 2001.

Addressing one of the questions raised by congressional investigators in their Sept. 11 review, Mohammed said he never heard of a Saudi man named Omar al-Bayoumi who provided some rent money and assistance to two hijackers when they arrived in California.

Congressional investigators have suggested Bayoumi could have aided the hijackers or been a Saudi intelligence agent, charges the Saudi government vehemently deny. The FBI has also cast doubt on the congressional theory after extensive investigation and several interviews with al-Bayoumi.

In fact, Mohammed claims he did not arrange for anyone on U.S. soil to assist hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi when they arrived in California. Mohammed said there "were no al Qaeda operatives or facilitators in the United States to help al-Mihdhar or al-Hazmi settle in the United States," one of the reports state.

Mohammed portrays those two hijackers as central to the plot, and even more important than Mohammed Atta, initially identified by Americans as the likely hijacking ringleader. Mohammed said he communicated with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar while they were in the United States by using Internet chat software, the reports states.

Mohammed said al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were among the four original operatives bin Laden assigned to him for the plot, a significant revelation because those were the only two hijackers whom U.S. authorities were frantically seeking for terrorist ties in the final days before Sept. 11.

U.S. authorities continue to investigate the many statements that Mohammed has made in interrogations, seeking to eliminate deliberate misinformation. But they have been able to corroborate with other captives and evidence much of his account of the Sept. 11 planning.

Mohammed told his interrogators the hijacking teams were originally made up of members from different countries where al Qaeda had recruited, but that in the final stages bin Laden chose instead to use a large group of young Saudi men to populate the hijacking teams.

As the plot came closer to fruition, Mohammed learned "there was a large group of Saudi operatives that would be available to participate as the muscle in the plot to hijack planes in the United States," one report says Mohammed told his captors.

Saudi Arabia was bin Laden's home, though it revoked his citizenship in the 1990s, and he reviled its alliance with the United States during the Gulf War and beyond. Saudis have suggested for months that bin Laden has been trying to drive a wedge between the United States and their kingdom, hoping to fracture the alliance.

U.S. intelligence has suggested that Saudis were chosen, instead, because there were large numbers willing to follow bin Laden and they could more easily get into the United States because of the countries' friendly relations.

Mohammed's interrogation report states he told Americans some of the original operatives assigned to the plot did not make it because they had trouble getting into the United States.

Mohammed was captured in a March 1 raid by Pakistani forces and CIA operatives in Rawalpindi. He is being interrogated by the CIA at an undisclosed location.

He told interrogators about other terror plots that were in various stages of planning or had been temporarily disrupted when he was captured, including one planned for Singapore.

The sources who allowed AP to review the reports insisted that specific details not be divulged about those operations because U.S. intelligence continues to investigate some of the methods and search for some of the operatives.

The interrogation reports make dramatically clear that Mohammed and al Qaeda were still actively looking to strike U.S., Western and Israeli targets across the world as of this year.

Mohammed told his interrogators he had worked in 1994 and 1995 in the Philippines with Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah on the foiled Bojinka plot to blow up 12 Western airliners simultaneously in Asia.

After Yousef and Murad were captured, foiling the plot in its final stages, Mohammed began to devise a new plot that focused on hijackings on U.S. soil.

In 1996, he went to meet bin Laden to persuade the al Qaeda leader "to give him money and operatives so he could hijack 10 planes in the United States and fly them into targets," one of the interrogation reports state.

Mohammed told interrogators his initial thought was to pick five targets on each coast, but bin Laden was not convinced such a plan was practical, the reports stated.

Mohammed said bin Laden offered him four operatives to begin with — al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi as well as two Yemenis, Walid Muhammed bin Attash and Abu Bara al-Yemeni.

"All four operatives only knew that they had volunteered for a martyrdom operation involving planes," one report stated.

Mohammed said the first major change to the plans occurred in 1999 when the two Yemeni operatives could not get U.S. visas. Bin Laden then offered him additional operatives, including a member of his personal security detail. The original two Yemenis were instructed to focus on hijacking planes in East Asia.

Mohammed said through the various iterations of the plot, he considered using a scaled-down version of the Bojinka plan that would have bombed commercial airliners, and that he even "contemplated attempting to down the planes using shoes bombs," one report said.

The plot, he said, eventually evolved into hijacking a small number of planes in the United States and East Asia and either having them explode or crash into targets simultaneously, the reports stated.

By 1999, the four original operatives picked for the plot traveled to Afghanistan to train at one of bin Laden's camps. The focus, Mohammed said, was on specialized commando training, not piloting jets.

Mohammed's interrogations have revealed the planning and training of operatives was extraordinarily meticulous, including how to blend into American society, read telephone yellow pages, and research airline schedules.

A key event in the plot, Mohammed told his interrogators, was a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000, that included al-Mihdhar, al-Hazmi and other al Qaeda operatives. The CIA learned of the meeting beforehand and had it monitored by Malaysian security, but it did not realize the significance of the two eventual hijackers until just before the attacks.

The interrogation reports state bin Laden further trimmed Mohammed's plans in spring 2000 when he canceled the idea for hijackings in East Asia, thus narrowing it to the United States. Bin Laden thought "it would be too difficult to synchronize" attacks in the United States and Asia, one interrogation report quotes Mohammed as saying.

Mohammed said around that time he reached out to an al Qaeda linked group in southeast Asia known as Jemaah Islamiyah. He began "recruiting JI operatives for inclusion in the hijacking plot as part of his second wave of hijacking attacks to occur after Sept. 11," one summary said.

Jemaah Islamiyah's operations chief, Riduan Isamuddin Hambali, had attended part of the January 2000 meeting in Kuala Lumpur but Mohammed said he was there at that time only because "as a rule had had to be informed" of events in his region. Later, Hambali's operative began training possible recruits for the second wave, according to the interrogation report.

One of those who received training in Malaysia before coming to the United States was Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman accused of conspiring with the Sept. 11 attacks. Moussaoui has denied being part of the Sept. 11 plot, and U.S. and foreign intelligence officials have said he could have been set for hijacking a plane in a later wave of attacks.

20th hijackers
The 9/11 Commission concluded that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed intended to have as many as 25 or 26 hijackers for the plot. It was also reported that 14 members of al-Qaeda, in addition to the 19 hijackers, attempted to enter the United States to participate in the attacks.

Ramzi Binalshibh was repeatedly denied entry into the U.S and was unable to take part. Mohamed al-Kahtani was to have been the fifth hijacker on Flight 93, but he was denied entry into the U.S. at Orlando International Airport in August, 2001. He was later captured and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.

Zacarias Moussaoui was considered as a replacement for Ziad Jarrah, who at one point threatened to withdraw from the scheme because of tensions amongst the plotters. Plans to include Moussaoui were never finalized, as the al-Qaeda hierarchy had doubts about his reliability. Ultimately, Moussaoui did not play a role in the hijacking scheme. He was arrested about four weeks before the attacks.

The other al-Qaeda members who attempted to take part in the attacks, but were not able, were Saeed al-Ghamdi (not to be confused with the successful hijacker of the same name), Tawfiq bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mushabib al-Hamlan, Zakariyah Essabar, Saeed Ahmad al-Zahrani, Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, Saeed al-Baluchi, Qutaybah al-Najdi, Zuhair al-Thubaiti, and Saud al-Rashi. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the attack's mastermind, had wanted to remove at least one member — Khalid al-Mihdhar — from the operation, but he was overruled by Osama bin Laden.[1]

According to the BBC, Fawaz al-Nashimi claimed to have been the "20th hijacker". An Al-Qaeda video has been released from a US intelligence organization, showing al-Nashimi justifying attacks on the west. The U.S dismissed al-Nashimi's claims as propaganda. [2] He was also known as Turki bin Fuheid al-Muteiry and took part in a May 29, 2004 attack on oil facilities in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. He was killed in a June 2004 shootout with Saudi Arabian security forces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_hijacker

Who Was The 20th Hijacker?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1001092,00.html?iid=chix-sphere

Exclusive: '20th Hijacker' Claims That Torture Made Him Lie
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1169322,00.html



Zacarias Moussaoui (born May 30, 1968 in St Jean de Luz[2]) is a French citizen of Moroccan descent who was convicted of conspiring to kill Americans as part of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As a result of his conviction, he is serving a life sentence at the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zacarias_Moussaoui



Zacarias Moussaoui
Terrorist
Born: 30 May 1968
Birthplace: St. Jean de Luz, France
Best known as: The one guy convicted for the 9/11 attacks
Zacarias Moussaoui is the 9/11 plotter -- the "20th hijacker" -- who was arrested before the attacks and was later tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. A French citizen of Moroccan descent, he lived in England during the 1990s, earning a graduate degree in business and associating with radical Islamists. Moussaoui was arrested in the United States in August of 2001 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), initially on immigration charges. He had come to the FBI's attention when a Minnesota flight instructor grew suspicious of Moussaoui's desire to learn how to pilot a 747 passenger jet. (In early 2001 Moussaoui had flight instructions in Oklahoma, but never obtained a license.) Although further investigation into Moussaoui's actions was not authorized by the FBI, after 9/11 he was linked to the 19 hijackers who died in the attacks. He was held as a material witness and, after years of legal wrangling, entered a guilty plea in April 2005. He was found guilty on felony conspiracy charges in April 2006 and sentenced to life in prison on 4 May 2006. After his sentencing, Moussaoui recanted his testimony and tried unsuccessfully to reverse his guilty plea.
Extra credit: In April of 2005 Moussaoui was deemed eligible for the death penalty, but the jury did not reach the required unanimity and sentenced him to life without parole instead... After Moussaoui was sentenced, an audio tape purportedly by Osama bin Laden said Moussauoui "had no connection at all with September 11."
http://www.infoplease.com/biography/var/zacariasmoussaoui.html

Zacarias Moussaoui has often been referred to as "the 20th hijacker" but at the time of the 11 September 2001 attacks he had already been arrested in the US.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4471245.stm
A French citizen of Moroccan descent, the 37-year-old has spent almost five years in custody and is the only person charged in the US over the attacks.

It is thought he began a journey into Islamic radicalism in Britain - studying at London's South Bank University and worshipping at the Finsbury Park mosque.

But whether the self-confessed al-Qaeda operative was a serious plotter or just a fringe figure has never become clear.

In court at his sentencing trial, Moussaoui said he had been part of a grandiose plot to fly a Boeing 747 into the White House.

Yet testimony from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - who has been in US custody for three years - was used by Moussaoui's defence lawyers to undercut his claims.

In testimony written up by US intelligence operatives, Sheikh Mohammed's insisted Moussaoui was never intended to be part of the 9/11 plot.

Rather, he was to be part of a second wave of attacks, using operatives with Western passports thought less likely to draw scrutiny from US authorities.

What is certain is that Moussaoui was detained three weeks before 9/11 on immigration charges after a flying school in Minnesota reported that he had been acting suspiciously.

He had been on a jumbo jet simulator but had shown no interest in take-offs or landings - only in how to control the plane in the air.

Jurors concluded that his silence in the run-up to 9/11 made him responsible for at least one death on that day, and made him eligible for the death penalty.

Shoe bomber link

Moussaoui was born in May 1968 in south-west France and came to Britain in the early 1990s to enrol as a student.

He graduated in 1997 with an MA in international business studies.

He lived in south London on and off for nine years.

His brother, Abd-Samad Moussaoui, was quoted as saying that Zacarias became involved in Islamic extremism while living in London.

French Intelligence was reportedly interested in him and warned the Americans, but Moussaoui was always one jump ahead and nobody "joined up the dots" about him, even after he was detained.

He attended the Finsbury Park mosque, at a time when it was linked to extremist activities. Convicted British shoe bomber Richard Reid also attended the mosque.

Moussaoui later said in court that Reid was set to join him on his mission to crash a plane into the White House - a claim some saw as part of a bid by Moussaoui to secure the death penalty and cement a place as an Islamic martyr.

The FBI concluded there was no evidence that Reid had prior knowledge of 9/11, or that al-Qaeda had told him to work with Moussaoui.

Cash payment

According to the indictment against him, Moussaoui went for training at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 1998.

The US commission which investigated the 9/11 attacks found that Moussaoui was ordered to undergo flight training in Malaysia in late 2000 by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but was unable to find a school he liked.

Moussaoui was in Pakistan at the end of 2000 before going to London and then onto the US in February 2001.

There, he enrolled in one flying school in Oklahoma and then paid $6,000 cash to join the school in Minnesota.

The statement of facts signed by Moussaoui when he pleaded guilty to conspiring with al-Qaeda included a paragraph that said bin Laden had personally approved of him attacking the White House.

'Happy boy' became fanatic

Moussaoui's mother, Aicha, who lives in France but attended her son's sentencing trial in the US state of Virginia, says he is innocent of involvement in the 9/11 attacks and is part of a show trial.

She accuses British extremists of turning him from a "happy boy" into a fanatic.

But she says she stopped making phone calls to him last May, because she no longer recognised her son.

Moussaoui's outbursts and invective-filled letters to officials led to the trial judge revoking his right to represent himself in 2003.

Later he said that in his cell he rejoiced as the Twin Towers burned and collapsed.

His defence argued that Moussaoui was mentally ill. His mother admits she is not sure.

"Is there, somewhere deep down in there, still a core of the old Zacary people knew and loved underneath all the extremism?" she told Time magazine in April 2006.

"Often, during the phone calls, I knew there was. After these outbursts, it was hard to know."




Moussaoui lies 'let 9/11 happen'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4850988.stm
Convicted al-Qaeda plotter Zacarias Moussaoui has told a US court he lied to US officials to stop them uncovering the 11 September 2001 terror plot.
He denied direct involvement in the New York attacks, but said he was training to attack the White House in a fifth hijacked plane on 11 September.

Moussaoui said he was to be accompanied by British shoe bomber Richard Reid.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Moussaoui, who has pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy.

Earlier, court-appointed defence lawyers tried to stop Moussaoui giving evidence in an effort to stop him incriminating himself on the stand.

The Moroccan-born French citizen pleaded guilty last year to conspiring with al-Qaeda to attack the US. He is the only man to be charged in connection with the 2001 attacks.

British-born Richard Reid was caught after an abortive attempt to blow up an American Airlines plane heading from Paris to Miami in December 2001.

He was sentenced to life in January 2003.

Partners

Under cross-examination by prosecutor Robert Spencer, Moussaoui told the court he had lied after being arrested in Minnesota in August 2001.

Although he did not know exactly when the attacks planned against New York and Washington were due to take place, Moussaoui said he realised that misleading investigators would ensure they were carried out.

I had knowledge that the two towers would be hit but I didn't have the detail," he told the court.

Instead he described how he was training as part of the plot that saw planes smash into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.

Moussaoui said he and Reid were due to hijack a fifth plane and fly it into the White House.

He contradicted testimony given when pleading guilty last year, when he said the White House attack was not part of the main 11 September plot.

When asked who ordered him to do this, Moussaoui replied: "Osama Bin Laden."

Prosecution 'gift'

He told the court that his involvement with al-Qaeda had been "gradual", and that he initially turned down invitations to join the hijacking gang.

Moussaoui was arrested on 16 August 2001, three weeks before the eventual attacks, as he attempted to speed his way through a pilot's course.

US prosecutors have been aiming to prove that Moussaoui deceived federal agents who could have prevented the attacks with more information.

Moussaoui has become well-known for his unpredictable outbursts while in the witness box.

During frequent appearances before the US courts he has sometimes contradicted earlier testimony and appeared mentally unstable.

However, the BBC's Justin Webb, in Washington, says it looks like the prosecution has received something of a gift from Moussaoui.

They have said all along that he knew enough about the 11 September plot to stop it happening, and that appears to be what he has said in court, our correspondent adds.

TIMELINE: THE ZACARIAS MOUSSAOUI CASE
http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/us/0207/moussoui.timeline/frameset.exclude.html

Timeline: The Case Against Zacarias Moussaoui
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5243788

After seven days of deliberation, a federal jury rejects the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui, deciding that he will instead spend the rest of his life in prison.

A French citizen of Moroccan decent, Moussaoui is the only person charged in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Often referred to as the "20th hijacker," he was arrested in August 2001, after raising suspicion at a flight school for requesting information on flying a 747.


Major Events in Zacarias Moussaoui's Case:

Feb. 26-May 29, 2001: Moussaoui trains at Norman, Okla., flight school but doesn't get pilot's license.

Aug. 17, 2001: Moussaoui arrested on immigration charges after arousing suspicion at Minnesota flight school by asking to learn to fly a Boeing 747.

Sept. 11, 2001: Terrorists crash jetliners into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. Moussaoui is moved to New York, held as material witness.

Dec. 11, 2001: Moussaoui charged with six conspiracy counts related to Sept. 11 attacks.

Dec. 13, 2001: Moved to Alexandria, Va., for trial. Moussaoui is denied bail.

Jan. 2, 2002: Moussaoui refuses to plead; Judge Leonie Brinkema enters innocent plea on his behalf.

March 28, 2002: Prosecutors announce they will seek the death penalty.

April 22, 2002: Moussaoui asks to represent himself. Brinkema orders mental evaluation.

June 13, 2002: Moussaoui, who is allowed to represent himself, proclaims his innocence. Court-appointed attorneys ask to be dismissed, but Brinkema keeps them on standby.

July 16-18, 2002: Prosecution revises indictment to strengthen death penalty case. Moussaoui asks to plead guilty. Brinkema gives him a week to reconsider.

July 25, 2002: Brinkema rules that Moussaoui is competent to plead guilty. In a stormy hearing, Moussaoui tries to plead guilty to four counts, but Brinkema is not convinced he understands. He withdraws the pleas.

Sept. 6-19, 2002: Brinkema briefly seals Moussaoui's briefs because of intemperate rants.

Feb. 12, 2003: Brinkema postpones trial indefinitely.

July 14, 2003: Justice Department refuses to let Moussaoui question detained al-Qaida leaders.

Oct. 2, 2003: Brinkema bars the government from seeking the death penalty.

Nov. 14, 2003: Citing inflammatory and unprofessional briefs, Brinkema ends Moussaoui's self-representation.

April 22, 2003: A federal appeals court reinstates the death penalty as a possible sentence. Citing national security, the court says Moussaoui can use government-prepared summaries from detained al-Qaida leaders but cannot interview them.

Jan. 10, 2005: Moussaoui's lawyers appeal to the Supreme Court, challenging the government's right to try him without allowing direct questioning of detained al-Qaida leaders.

March 21, 2005: Supreme Court refuses to hear appeal.

April 20, 2005: Brinkema meets with Moussaoui after he sends her a letter expressing desire to plead guilty. Judge deems him competent to do so.

April 22, 2005: Moussaoui pleads guilty to all six charges.

Feb. 6, 2006: Court begins selecting jury to choose the death penalty or life in prison.

March 6, 2006: Sentencing phase begins with opening arguments.

March 13, 2006: Brinkema halts testimony in Moussaoui's sentencing trial after being informed that a government lawyer, Carla Martin, shared trial testimony with upcoming witnesses, in violation of court rules. Brinkema calls the action a breach of the defendant's constitutional rights, and is considering what sanction against the government is appropriate.

March 14, 2006: Brinkema decides that the sentencing trial can go forward, but without testimony and evidence key to the government's case. The judge halted proceedings the day before, warning government lawyers that they had violated her order not to coach upcoming witnesses.

March 27, 2006: In a major blow to his defense, Moussaoui tells the court that he was training to attack the White House in a fifth hijacked plane on Sept. 11, and was to be accompanied on the mission by British shoe bomber Richard Reid. Under cross-examination, Moussaoui says that he did not know exactly when the attacks on New York and Washington were to take place, but that he lied to investigators after his arrest to ensure that they would be carried out.

March 28, 2006: Defense attorneys scramble to undo the damage by reading testimony from senior al-Qaida operatives in U.S. custody, who describe Moussaoui as unreliable and unstable. The al-Qaida members say that they did not intend to include him in the Sept. 11 attacks. One South Asian terrorist known as Hambali, who was captured in 2003, is quoted as saying that Moussaoui had a reputation for being "not right in the head and having a bad character."

In another twist, prosecutors present evidence that, in a jailhouse meeting in February, Moussaoui offered to testify for the prosecution against himself. FBI agent James Fitzgerald testifies that Moussaoui told him he did not want to die behind bars and that it was "different to die in a battle… than in a jail on a toilet."

March 29, 2006: Jurors hear closing arguments in the case.

March 30, 2006: The jury deciding whether Moussaoui is eligible for the death penalty asks the judge for a definition of "weapons of mass destruction." The jury is told that airplanes used as missiles are considered a weapon of mass destruction. Conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction is one of the convictions for which Moussaoui could receive the death penalty.

April 3, 2006: Jurors determine that Moussaoui was responsible for at least one death in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and decide he should be eligible for execution. In the next phase of the proceedings, the jury will hear more testimony and decide whether Moussaoui should receive the death penalty, or life in prison.

April 5, 2006: Brinkema rules that the jury may hear the cockpit recording of United Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11.

April 6, 2006: Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani testifies in the first day of the trial's second phase, joining Sept. 11 survivors and family members of victims.

April 10, 2006: Brinkema warns prosecutors not to go overboard with Sept. 11 testimony, video footage and photographs.

April 12, 2006: The jury hears the United Flight 93 cockpit voice recording. The transcript -- sans audio -- is released to the media.

April 13, 2006: On the witness stand, Moussaoui says has he "no regret, no remorse" about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

April 17, 2006: A defense psychologist testifies that Zacarias Moussaoui is a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions.

April 19, 2006: Half a dozen relatives of people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks testify in support of a life sentence for Moussaoui.

April 20, 2006: Testimony concludes in the sentencing phase of the trial.

April 24, 2006: The jury begins deliberations after the prosecution and defense present closing arguments.

May 3, 2006: After seven days of deliberation, the jury rejects the death penalty, deciding that Moussaoui will spend the rest of his life in prison.





Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,333835,00.html

Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it.


One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. With some bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had been helped by the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to avoid a repeat of that experience, he had set up a series of 10 briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.

Berger attended only one of the briefings-the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. "I'm coming to this briefing," he says he told Rice, "to underscore how important I think this subject is." Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject." The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen during the Clinton years to become the White House's point man on terrorism. As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG), Clarke was known as a bit of an obsessive-just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind. Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000-an attack that left 17 Americans dead-he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security "principals" on Dec. 20. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. "We would be handing (the Bush Administration) a war when they took office on Jan. 20," says a former senior Clinton aide. "That wasn't going to happen." Now it was up to Rice's team to consider what Clarke had put together.

Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.) Other senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble-Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen-would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, bringing a sort of order to a nation that had been riven by bloody feuds between ethnic warlords since the Soviets had pulled out. Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost "several hundreds of millions of dollars." In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11."

And that's the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that nobody predicted Sept. 11-that nobody guessed in advance how and when the attacks would come. But other things are true too. By last summer, many of those in the know-the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries-were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.

The winter proposals became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet policies of new top officials. The Bush Administration chose to institute its own "policy review process" on the terrorist threat. Clarke told Time that the review moved "as fast as could be expected." And Administration officials insist that by the time the review was endorsed by the Bush principals on Sept. 4, it was more aggressive than anything contemplated the previous winter. The final plan, they say, was designed not to "roll back" al-Qaeda but to "eliminate" it. But that delay came at a cost. The Northern Alliance was desperate for help but got little of it. And in a bureaucratic squabble that would be farfetched on The West Wing, nobody in Washington could decide whether a Predator drone-an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and the best possible source of real intelligence on what was happening in the terror camps-should be sent to fly over Afghanistan. So the Predator sat idle from October 2000 until after Sept. 11. No single person was responsible for all this. But "Washington"-that organic compound of officials and politicians, in uniform and out, with faces both familiar and unknown-failed horribly.

Could al-Qaeda's plot have been foiled if the U.S. had taken the fight to the terrorists in January 2001? Perhaps not. The thrust of the winter plan was to attack al-Qaeda outside the U.S. Yet by the beginning of that year, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, two Arabs who had been leaders of a terrorist cell in Hamburg, Germany, were already living in Florida, honing their skills in flight schools. Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar had been doing the same in Southern California. The hijackers maintained tight security, generally avoided cell phones, rented apartments under false names and used cash-not wire transfers-wherever possible. If every plan to attack al-Qaeda had been executed, and every lead explored, Atta's team might still never have been caught.

But there's another possibility. An aggressive campaign to degrade the terrorist network worldwide-to shut down the conveyor belt of recruits coming out of the Afghan camps, to attack the financial and logistical support on which the hijackers depended-just might have rendered it incapable of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps some of those who had to approve the operation might have been killed, or the money trail to Florida disrupted. We will never know, because we never tried. This is the secret history of that failure.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Berger was determined that when he left office, Rice should have a full understanding of the terrorist threat. In a sense, this was an admission of failure. For the Clinton years had been marked by a drumbeat of terror attacks against American targets, and they didn't seem to be stopping.

In 1993 the World Trade Center had been bombed for the first time; in 1996 19 American servicemen had been killed when the Khobar Towers, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was bombed; two years later, American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked. As the millennium celebrations at the end of 1999 approached, the CIA warned that it expected five to 15 attacks against American targets over the New Year's weekend. But three times, the U.S. got lucky. The Jordanians broke up an al-Qaeda cell in Amman; Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian based in Montreal, panicked when stopped at a border crossing from Canada while carrying explosives intended for Los Angeles International Airport; and on Jan. 3, 2000, an al-Qaeda attack on the U.S.S. The Sullivans in Yemen foundered after terrorists overloaded their small boat.

From the start of the Clinton Administration, the job of thwarting terror had fallen to Clarke. A bureaucratic survivor who now leads the Bush Administration's office on cyberterrorism, he has served four Presidents from both parties-staff members joke that the framed photos in his office have two sides, one for a Republican President to admire, the other for a Democrat. Aggressive and legendarily abrasive, Clarke was desperate to persuade skeptics to take the terror threat as seriously as he did. "Clarke is unbelievably determined, high-energy, focused and imaginative," says a senior Clinton Administration official. "But he's totally insensitive to rolling over others who are in his way." By the end of 2000, Clarke didn't need to roll over his boss; Berger was just as sure of the danger.

The two men had an ally in George Tenet, who had been appointed Director of Central Intelligence in 1997. "He wasn't sleeping on the job on this," says a senior Clinton aide of Tenet, "whatever inherent problems there were in the agency." Those problems were immense. Although the CIA claims it had penetrated al-Qaeda, Republican Congressman Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security, doubts that it ever got anywhere near the top of the organization. "The CIA," he says, "were not able to recruit human assets to penetrate al-Qaeda and the al-Qaeda leadership." Nobody pretends that such an exercise would have been easy. Says a counterterrorism official: "Where are you going to find a person loyal to the U.S. who's willing to eat dung beetles and sleep on the ground in a cave for two or three years? You don't find people willing to do that who also speak fluent Pashtu or Arabic."

In the absence of men sleeping with the beetles, the CIA had to depend on less reliable allies. The agency attempted to recruit tribal leaders in Afghanistan who might be persuaded to take on bin Laden; contingency plans had been made for the CIA to fly one of its planes to a desert landing strip in Afghanistan if he was ever captured. (Clinton had signed presidential "findings" that were ambiguous on the question of whether bin Laden could be killed in such an attack.) But the tribal groups' loyalty was always in doubt. Despite the occasional abortive raid, they never seemed to get close to bin Laden. That meant that the Clinton team had to fall back on a second strategy: taking out bin Laden by cruise missile, which had been tried after the embassy bombings in 1998. For all of 2000, sources tell Time, Clinton ordered two U.S. Navy submarines to stay on station in the northern Arabian Sea, ready to attack if bin Laden's coordinates could be determined.

But the plan was twice flawed. First, the missiles could be used only if bin Laden's whereabouts were known, and the CIA never definitively delivered that information. By early 2000, Clinton was becoming infuriated by the lack of intelligence on bin Laden's movements. "We've got to do better than this," he scribbled on one memo. "This is unsatisfactory." Second, even if a target could ever be found, the missiles might take too long to hit it. The Pentagon thought it could dump a Tomahawk missile on bin Laden's camp within six hours of a decision to attack, but the experts in the White House thought that was impossibly long. Any missiles fired at Afghanistan would have to fly over Pakistan, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was close to the Taliban. White House aides were sure bin Laden would be tipped off as soon as the Pakistanis detected the missiles.

Berger and Clarke wanted something more robust. On Nov. 7, Berger met with William Cohen, then Secretary of Defense, in the Pentagon. The time had come, said Berger, for the Pentagon to rethink its approach to operations against bin Laden. "We've been hit many times, and we'll be hit again," Berger said. "Yet we have no option beyond cruise missiles." He wanted "boots on the ground"-U.S. special-ops forces deployed inside Afghanistan on a search-and-destroy mission targeting bin Laden. Cohen said he would look at the idea, but he and General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were dead set against it. They feared a repeat of Desert One, the 1980 fiasco in which special-ops commandos crashed in Iran during an abortive mission to rescue American hostages.

It wasn't just Pentagon nerves that got in the way of a more aggressive counterterrorism policy. So did politics. After the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, the secretive Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., drew up plans to have Delta Force members swoop into Afghanistan and grab bin Laden. But the warriors were never given the go-ahead; the Clinton Administration did not order an American retaliation for the attack. "We didn't do diddly," gripes a counterterrorism official. "We didn't even blow up a baby-milk factory." In fact, despite strong suspicion that bin Laden was behind the attack in Yemen, the CIA and FBI had not officially concluded that he was, and would be unable to do so before Clinton left office. That made it politically impossible for Clinton to strike-especially given the upcoming election and his own lack of credibility on national security. "If we had done anything, say, two weeks before the election," says a former senior Clinton aide, "we'd be accused of helping Al Gore."

For Clarke, the bombing of the Cole was final proof that the old policy hadn't worked. It was time for something more aggressive-a plan to make war against al-Qaeda. One element was vital. The Taliban's control of Afghanistan was not yet complete; in the northeast of the country, Northern Alliance forces led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, a legendary guerrilla leader who had fought against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in the 1980s, were still resisting Taliban rule. Clarke argued that Massoud should be given the resources to develop a viable fighting force. That way, terrorists leaving al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan would have been forced to join the Taliban forces fighting in the north. "You keep them on the front lines in Afghanistan," says a counterterrorism official. "Hopefully you're killing them in the process, and they're not leaving Afghanistan to plot terrorist operations. That was the general approach." But the approach meant that Americans had to engage directly in the snake pit of Afghan politics.

THE LAST MAN STANDING
In the spring of 2001, afghanistan was as rough a place as it ever is. Four sets of forces battled for position. Most of the country was under the authority of the Taliban, but it was not a homogeneous group. Some of its leaders, like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the self-styled emir of Afghanistan, were dyed-in-the-wool Islamic radicals; others were fierce Afghan nationalists. The Taliban's principal support had come from Pakistan-another interested party, which wanted a reasonably peaceful border to its west-and in particular from the hard men of the isi. But Pakistan's policy was not all of a piece either. Since General Pervez Musharraf had taken power in a 1999 coup, some Pakistani officials, desperate to curry favor with the U.S.-which had cut off aid to Pakistan after it tested a nuclear device in 1998-had seen the wisdom of distancing themselves from the Taliban, or at the least attempting to moderate its more radical behavior. The third element was the Northern Alliance, a resistance movement whose stronghold was in northeast Afghanistan. Most of the Alliance's forces and leaders were, like Massoud, ethnic Tajiks-a minority in Afghanistan. Massoud controlled less than 10% of the country and had been beaten back by the Taliban in 2000. Nonetheless, by dint of his personality and reputation, Massoud was "the only military threat to the Taliban," says Francesc Vendrell, who was then the special representative in Afghanistan of the U.N. Secretary-General.

And then there was al-Qaeda. The group had been born in Afghanistan when Islamic radicals began flocking there in 1979, after the Soviets invaded. Bin Laden and his closest associates had returned in 1996, when they were expelled from Sudan. Al-Qaeda's terrorist training camps were in Afghanistan, and bin Laden's forces and money were vital to sustaining the Taliban's offensives against Massoud.

By last spring, the uneasy equilibrium among the four forces was beginning to break down. "Moderates" in the Taliban-those who tried to keep lines open to intermediaries in the U.N. and the U.S.-were losing ground. In 2000, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, thought to be the second most powerful member of the Taliban, had reached out clandestinely to Massoud. "He understood that our country had been sold out to al-Qaeda and Pakistan," says Ahmad Jamsheed, Massoud's secretary. But in April 2001, Rabbani died of liver cancer. By that month, says the U.N.'s Vendrell, "it was al- Qaeda that was running the Taliban, not vice versa."

A few weeks before Rabbani's death, Musharraf's government had started to come to the same conclusion: the Pakistanis were no longer able to moderate Taliban behavior. To worldwide condemnation, the Taliban had announced its intention to blow up the 1,700-year-old stone statues of the Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley. Musharraf dispatched his right-hand man, Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider, to plead with Mullah Omar for the Buddhas to be saved. The Taliban's Foreign Minister and its ambassador to Pakistan, says a Pakistani official close to the talks, were in favor of saving the Buddhas. But Mullah Omar, says a member of the Pakistani delegation, listened to what Haider had to say and replied, "If on Judgment Day I stand before Allah, I'll see those two statues floating before me, and I know that Allah will ask me why, when I had the power, I did not destroy them." A few days later, the Buddhas were blown up.

By summer, Pakistan had a deeper grievance. The country had suffered a wave of sectarian assassinations, with gangs throwing grenades into mosques and murdering clerics. The authorities in Islamabad knew that the murderers had fled to Afghanistan (one of them was openly running a store in Kabul) and sent a delegation to ask for their return. "We gave them lists of names, photos and the locations of training camps where these fellows could be found," says Brigadier Javid Iqbal Cheema, director of Pakistan's National Crisis Management Cell, "but not a single individual was ever handed over to us." The Pakistanis were furious.

As the snows cleared for the annual spring military campaign, a joint offensive against Massoud by the Taliban and al-Qaeda seemed likely. But the influence of al-Qaeda on the Taliban was proving deeply unpopular among ordinary Afghans, especially in the urban centers. "I thought at most 20% of the population supported the Taliban by early summer," says Vendrell. And bin Laden's power made Massoud's plea for outside assistance more urgent. "We told the Americans-we told everyone-that al-Qaeda was set upon a transnational program," says Abdullah Abdullah, once a close aide to Massoud and now the Afghan Foreign Minister. In April, Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, seeking support for the Northern Alliance. "If President Bush doesn't help us," he told a reporter, "these terrorists will damage the U.S. and Europe very soon."

But Massoud never got the help that he needed-or that Clarke's plan had deemed necessary. Most of the time, Northern Alliance delegates to Washington had to be satisfied with meeting low-level bureaucrats. The Alliance craved recognition by the U.S. as a "legitimate resistance movement" but never got it, though on a visit in July, Abdullah did finally get to meet some top National Security Council (NSC) and State Department officials for the first time. The best the Americans seemed prepared to do was turn a blind eye to the trickle of aid from Iran, Russia and India. Vendrell remembers much talk that spring of increased support from the Americans. But in truth Massoud's best help came from Iran, which persuaded all supporters of the Northern Alliance to channel their aid through Massoud alone.

Only once did something happen that might have given Massoud hope that the U.S. would help. In late June, he was joined in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, by Abdul Haq, a leading Pashtun, based in Dubai, who was opposed to the Taliban. Haq was accompanied by someone Massoud knew well: Peter Tomsen, a retired ambassador who from 1989 to '92 had been the U.S. State Department's special envoy to the Afghan resistance. Also present was James Ritchie, a successful Chicago options trader who had spent part of his childhood in Afghanistan and was helping bankroll the groups opposed to the Taliban. (Haq was captured and executed by the Taliban last October while on a quixotic mission to Afghanistan.) Tomsen insists that the June 2001 trip was a private one, though he had told State Department officials of it in advance. Their message, he says, was limited to a noncommittal "good luck and be careful."

The purpose of the meeting, according to Tomsen, was to see if Massoud and Haq could forge a joint strategy against the Taliban. "The idea," says Sayeed Hussain Anwari, now the Afghan Minister of Agriculture, who was present at the meeting, "was to bring Abdul Haq inside the country to begin an armed struggle in the southeast." Still hoping for direct assistance from Washington, Massoud gave Tomsen all the intelligence he had on al-Qaeda and asked Tomsen to take it back to Washington. But when he briefed State Department officials after his trip, their reaction was muted. The American position was clear. If anything was to be done to change the realities in Afghanistan, it would have to be done not by the U.S. but by Pakistan. Massoud was on his own.

CLARKE: CRYING WOLF
In Washington, dick clarke didn't seem to have a lot of friends either. His proposals were still grinding away. No other great power handles the transition from one government to another in so shambolic a way as the U.S.-new appointments take months to be confirmed by the Senate; incoming Administrations tinker with even the most sensible of existing policies. The fight against terrorism was one of the casualties of the transition, as Washington spent eight months going over and over a document whose outline had long been clear. "If we hadn't had a transition," says a senior Clinton Administration official, "probably in late October or early November 2000, we would have had (the plan to go on the offensive) as a presidential directive."

As the new Administration took office, Rice kept Clarke in his job as counterterrorism czar. In early February, he repeated to Vice President Dick Cheney the briefing he had given to Rice and Hadley. There are differing opinions on how seriously the Bush team took Clarke's wwarnings. Some members of the outgoing Administration got the sense that the Bush team thought the Clintonites had become obsessed with terrorism. "It was clear," says one, "that this was not the same priority to them that it was to us."

For other observers, however, the real point was not that the new Administration dismissed the terrorist theat. On the contrary, Rice, Hadley and Cheney, says an official, "all got that it was important." The question is, How high a priority did terrorism get? Clarke says that dealing with al-Qaeda "was in the top tier of issues reviewed by the Bush Administration." But other topics got far more attention. The whole Bush national-security team was obsessed with setting up a national system of missile defense. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was absorbed by a long review of the military's force structure. Attorney General John Ashcroft had come into office as a dedicated crime buster. Rice was desperately trying to keep in line a national-security team-including Rumsfeld, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell-whose members had wildly different agendas and styles. "Terrorism," says a former Clinton White House official, speaking of the new Administration, "wasn't on their plate of key issues." Al-Qaeda had not been a feature of the landscape when the Republicans left office in 1993. The Bush team, says an official, "had to learn about (al-Qaeda) and figure out where it fit into their broader foreign policy." But doing so meant delay.

Some counterterrorism officials think there is another reason for the Bush Administration's dilatory response. Clarke's paper, says an official, "was a Clinton proposal." Keeping Clarke around was one thing; buying into the analysis of an Administration that the Bush team considered feckless and naive was quite another. So Rice instructed Clarke to initiate a new "policy review process" on the terrorism threat. Clarke dived into yet another round of meetings. And his proposals were nibbled nearly to death.

This was, after all, a White House plan, which means it was resented from the moment of conception. "When you look at the Pentagon and the cia," says a former senior Clinton aide, "it's not their plan. The military will never accept the White House staff doing military planning." Terrorism, officials from the State Department suggested, needed to be put in the broader context of American policy in South Asia. The rollback plan was becoming the victim of a classic Washington power play between those with "functional" responsibilities-like terrorism-and those with "regional" ones-like relations with India and Pakistan. The State Department's South Asia bureau, according to a participant in the meetings, argued that a fistful of other issues-Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, Musharraf's dictatorship-were just as pressing as terrorism. By now, Clarke's famously short fuse was giving off sparks. A participant at one of the meetings paraphrases Clarke's attitude this way: "These people are trying to kill us. I could give a f___ if Musharraf was democratically elected. What I do care about is Pakistan's support for the Taliban and turning a blind eye to this terrorist cancer growing in their neighbor's backyard."

It was Bush who broke the deadlock. Each morning the CIA gives the Chief Executive a top-secret Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) on pressing issues of national security. One day in early spring, Tenet briefed Bush on the hunt for Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's head of international operations, who was suspected of having been involved in the planning of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. After the PDB, Bush told Rice that the approach to al-Qaeda was too scattershot. He was tired of "swatting at flies" and asked for a comprehensive plan for attacking terrorism. According to an official, Rice came back to the nsc and said, "The President wants a plan to eliminate al-Qaeda." Clarke reminded her that he already had one.

But having a plan isn't the same as executing it. Clarke's paper now had to go through three more stages: the Deputies' Committee, made up of the No. 2s to the main national-security officials; the Principals' Committee, which included Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Powell and Rumsfeld; and finally, the President. Only when Bush had signed off would the plan become what the Bush team called a national-security presidential directive.

On April 30, nearly six weeks after the Administration started holding deputies' meetings, Clarke presented a new plan to them. In addition to Hadley, who chaired the hour-long meeting, the gathering included Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby; Richard Armitage, the barrel-chested Deputy Secretary of State; Paul Wolfowitz, the scholarly hawk from the Pentagon; and John McLaughlin from the cia. Armitage was enthusiastic about Clarke's plan, according to a senior official. But the CIA was gun-shy. Tenet was a Clinton holdover and thus vulnerable if anything went wrong. His agency was unwilling to take risks; it wanted "top cover" from the White House. The deputies, says a senior official, decided to have "three parallel reviews-one on al-Qaeda, one on the Pakistani political situation and the third on Indo-Pakistani relations." The issues, the deputies thought, were interrelated. "They wanted to view them holistically," says the senior official, "and not until they'd had three separate meetings on each of these were they able to hold a fourth integrating them all."

There was more. Throughout the spring, one bureaucratic wrangle in particular rumbled on, poisoning the atmosphere. At issue: the Predator.

The Predator had first been used in Bosnia in 1995. Later, the CIA and the Pentagon began a highly classified program designed to produce pictures-viewable in real time-that would be fine-grained enough to identify individuals. The new, improved Predator was finally ready in September 2000, and the CIA flew it over Afghanistan in a two-week "test of concept." First results were promising; one video sent to the White House showed a man who might have been bin Laden. For the first time, the CIA now had a way to check out a tip by one of its agents among the Afghan tribes. If there was a report that bin Laden was in the vicinity, says a former aide to Clinton, "we could put the Predator over the location and have eyes on the target."

But in October 2000, the Predator crashed when landing at its base in a country bordering Afghanistan. The unmanned aerial vehicle needed repairs, and in any event, the CIA and the Pentagon decided that the winter weather over Afghanistan would make it difficult to take good pictures. The Clinton team left office assuming that the Predator would be back in the skies by March 2001.

In fact, the Predator wouldn't fly again until after Sept. 11. In early 2001 it was decided to develop a new version that would not just take photos but also be armed with Hellfire missiles. To the frustration of Clarke and other White House aides, the CIA and the Pentagon couldn't decide who controlled the new program or who should pay for it-though each craft cost only $1 million. While the new uav was being rapidly developed at a site in the southwestern U.S., the CIA opposed using the old one for pure surveillance because it feared al-Qaeda might see it. "Once we were going to arm the thing," says a senior U.S. intelligence official, "we didn't want to expose the capability by just having it fly overhead and spot a bunch of guys we couldn't do anything about." Clarke and his supporters were livid. "Dick Clarke insisted that it be kept in the air," says a Bush Administration official. The counterterrorism team argued that the Taliban had shot at the uav during the Clinton test, so its existence was hardly a secret. Besides, combined with on-the-ground intelligence, a Predator might just gather enough information in time to get a Tomahawk off to the target. But when the deputies held their fourth and final meeting on July 16, they still hadn't sorted out what to do with the Predator. Squabbles over who would pay for it continued into August.

Administration sources insist that they were not idle in the spring. They set up, for example, a new center in the Treasury to track suspicious foreign assets and reviewed Clinton's "findings" on whether the CIA could kill bin Laden. But by the summer, policy reviews were hardly what was needed.

Intelligence services were picking up enough chatter about a terrorist attack to scare the pants off top officials. On June 22, the Defense Department put its troops on full alert and ordered six ships from the Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, to steam out to sea, for fear that they might be attacked in port. U.S. officials thought an attack might be mounted on American forces at the nato base at Incirlik, Turkey, or maybe in Rome or Belgium, Germany or Southeast Asia, perhaps the Philippines-anywhere, it seems, but in the U.S. When Independence Day passed without incident, Clarke called a meeting and asked Ben Bonk, deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, to brief on bin Laden's plans. Bonk's evidence that al-Qaeda was planning "something spectacular," says an official who was in the room, "was very gripping." But nobody knew what or when or where the spectacular would be. As if to crystallize how much and how little anyone in the know actually knew, the counterterrorism center released a report titled "Threat of Impending al- Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely."

Predictably, nerves frayed. Clarke, who was widely loathed in the cia, where he was accused of self-aggrandizement, began to lose credibility. He cried wolf, said his detractors; he had been in the job too long. "The guy was reading way too many fiction novels," says a counterterrorism official. "He turned into a Chicken Little. The sky was always falling for Dick Clarke. We had our strings jerked by him so many times, he was simply not taken seriously." Clarke wasn't the only one living on the edge. So, say senior officials, was Tenet. Every few days, the CIA director would call Tom Pickard, who had become acting director of the FBI in June, asking "What do you hear? Do you have anything?" Pickard never had to ask what the topic was.

In mid-July, Tenet sat down for a special meeting with Rice and aides. "George briefed Condi that there was going to be a major attack," says an official; another, who was present at the meeting, says Tenet broke out a huge wall chart ("They always have wall charts") with dozens of threats. Tenet couldn't rule out a domestic attack but thought it more likely that al-Qaeda would strike overseas. One date already worrying the Secret Service was July 20, when Bush would arrive in Genoa for the G-8 summit; Tenet had intelligence that al-Qaeda was planning to attack Bush there. The Italians, who had heard the same report (the way European intelligence sources tell it, everyone but the President's dog "knew" an attack was coming) put frogmen in the harbor, closed airspace around the town and ringed it with antiaircraft guns.

But nothing happened. After Genoa, says a senior intelligence official, there was a collective sigh of relief: "A lot of folks started letting their guard down." After the final deputies' meeting on Clarke's draft of a presidential directive, on July 16, it wasn't easy to find a date for the Principals' Committee to look at the plan-the last stage before the paper went to Bush. "There was one meeting scheduled for August," says a senior official, "but too many principals were out of town." Eventually a date was picked: the principals would look at the draft on Sept. 4. That was about nine months after Clarke first put his plan on paper.

A BURNED-OUT CASE
Clarke wasn't the only person having a bad year. In New York City, John O'Neill led the FBI's National Security Division, commanding more than 100 experienced agents. By spring they were all overloaded. O'Neill's boss, Assistant FBI Director Barry Mawn, spent part of his time pleading with Washington for more agents, more linguists, more clerical help. He got nowhere. O'Neill was a legend both in New York, where he hung out at famous watering holes like Elaine's, and in the counterterrorism world. Since 1995, when he helped coordinate the arrest in Pakistan of Ramzi Yousef, the man responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, O'Neill had been one of the FBI's leading figures in the fight against terrorism. Brash, slick and ambitious, he had spent the late 1990s working closely with Clarke and the handful of other top officials for whom bin Laden had become an obsession.

Now O'Neill was having a lousy few months. The New York City field office had primary responsibility for the investigation of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. But the case had gone badly from the start. The Yemeni authorities had been lethargic and uncooperative, and O'Neill, who led the team in Aden, had run afoul of Barbara Bodine, then the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, who believed the FBI's large presence was causing political problems for the Yemeni regime. When O'Neill left Yemen on a trip home for Thanksgiving, Bodine barred his return. Seething, O'Neill tried to supervise the investigation from afar. At the same time, his team in New York City was working double time preparing for the trial in January 2001 of four co-conspirators in the case of the 1998 African embassy bombings. That involved agents shuttling between Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and New York, escorting witnesses, ferrying documents and guarding al-Qaeda turncoats who would give evidence for the prosecution.

Yet the FBI as a whole was ill equipped to deal with the terrorist threat. It had neither the language skills nor the analytical savvy to understand al-Qaeda. The bureau's information-technology capability dated to pre-Internet days. Chambliss says the counterterrorism investigations were decentralized at the bureau's 56 field offices, which were actually discouraged from sharing information with one another or with headquarters.

That was if the cases ever got started. An investigation by Chambliss's subcommittee found that the FBI paid "insufficient attention" to tracking terrorists' finances. Most agents in the field were assigned to criminal units; few field squads were dedicated to gathering intelligence on radical fundamentalists. During the Clinton Administration, says a former senior aide, Clarke became so frustrated with the bureau that he began touring its field offices, giving agents "al- Qaeda 101" classes. The bureau was, in fact, wiretapping some suspected Islamic radicals and debriefing a few al-Qaeda hands who had flipped. But at the end of the Clinton years, the aide says, the FBI told the White House that "there's not a substantial al-Qaeda presence in the U.S., and to the extent there was a presence, they had it covered." The FBI didn't, and O'Neill must have known that it didn't. So, as it happens, did some of his key allies, who were not in the U.S. at all but overseas. In Europe and especially in France the threat of Islamic terrorism had been particularly sharp ever since the Algerian Armed Islamic Group launched a bombing campaign in Paris in 1995. By 2000, counterterrorism experts in Europe knew the Islamic diaspora communities in Europe were seeded with cells of terrorists. And after the arrest of Ressam, European officials were convinced that terrorists would soon attack targets in the U.S. Jean-Louis Bruguire, a French magistrate who has led many of the most prominent terrorist cases, says Ressam's arrest signaled that the U.S. "had to join the rest of the world in considering itself at acute risk of attack."

Throughout the winter and spring of 2001, European law-enforcement agencies scored a series of dramatic hits against al-Qaeda and associated radical Islamic cells, with some help from the cia. The day after Christmas 2000, German authorities in Frankfurt arrested four Algerians on suspicion of plotting to bomb targets in Strasbourg. Two months later, the British arrested six Algerians on terrorism charges. In April, Italian police busted a cell whose members were suspected of plotting to bomb the American embassy in Rome. Two months later, the Spanish arrested Mohammed Bensakhria, an Algerian who had been in Afghanistan and had links to top al-Qaeda officials, including bin Laden. Bensakhria, the French alleged, had directed the Frankfurt cell involved in the Strasbourg plot. And in the most stunning coup of all, on July 28, Djamel Beghal, a Frenchman of Algerian descent who had been on France's terrorist watch list since 1997, was arrested in Dubai on his way back from Afghanistan. After being persuaded of terrorism's evil by Islamic scholars, Beghal told of a plot to attack the American embassy in Paris and gave investigators new details on al-Qaeda's top leadership, including the international-operations role of Abu Zubaydah. (Now back in France, he has tried to recant his confession.) French sources tell Time they believe U.S. authorities knew about Beghal's testimony.

This action by cops in Europe was meat and drink to O'Neill. The problem was that it convinced some U.S. antiterrorism officials that if there was going to be an attack on American interests that summer, it would take place outside the U.S. In early June, for example, the FBI was so concerned about threats to investigators left in Yemen that it moved the agents from Aden to the American embassy in Sana'a. Then came a second, very specific warning about the team's safety, and Washington decided to pull out of Yemen entirely. "John (O'Neill) would say, 'There's a lot of traffic,'" recalls Mawn. "Everybody was saying, 'The drumbeats are going; something's going to happen.' I said, 'Where and what?' And they'd say, 'We don't know, but it seems to be overseas, probably.'"

Some didn't lose sight of the threat at home. On Aug. 6, while on vacation in Crawford, Texas, Bush was given a PDB, this one on the possibility of al-Qaeda attacks in the U.S. And not one but two FBI field offices had inklings of al-Qaeda activity in the U.S. that, had they been aggressively pursued, might have fleshed out the intelligence chatter about an upcoming attack. But the systemic weaknesses in the FBI's bureaucracy prevented anything from being done.

The first warning came from Phoenix, Ariz. On July 10, agent Kenneth Williams wrote a paper detailing his suspicions about some suspected Islamic radicals who had been taking flying lessons in Arizona. Williams proposed an investigation to see if al-Qaeda was using flight schools nationwide. He spoke with the voice of experience; he had been working on international terrorism cases for years. The Phoenix office, according to former FBI agent James Hauswirth, had been investigating men with possible Islamic terrorist links since 1994, though without much support from the FBI's local bosses. Williams had started work on his probe of flight schools in early 2001 but had spent much of the next months on nonterrorist cases. Once he was back on terrorism, it took only a few weeks for alarm bells to ring. He submitted his memo to headquarters and to two FBI field offices, including New York City. In all three places it died.

Five weeks after Williams wrote his memo, a second warning came in from another FBI field office, and once again, headquarters bungled the case. On Aug. 13, Zacarias Moussaoui, a 33-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan ancestry, arrived at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minnesota for simulator training on a Boeing 747. Moussaoui, who had been in the U.S. since February and had already taken flying lessons at a school in Norman, Okla., was in a hurry. John Rosengren, who was director of operations at Pan Am until February this year, says Moussaoui wanted to learn how to fly the 747 in "four or five days." After just two days of training, Moussaoui's flight instructor expressed concern that his student didn't want it known that he was a Muslim. One of Pan Am's managers had a contact in the FBI; should the manager call him? "I said, 'No problem,'" says Rosengren. "The next day I got a call from a Minneapolis agent telling me Moussaoui had been detained at the Residence Inn in Eagan."

Though Moussaoui is the only person to be indicted in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, his role in them is as clear as mud. (He is detained in Alexandria, Va., awaiting trial in federal district court.) German authorities have confirmed to Time that-as alleged in the indictment-Ramzi Binalshibh, a Hamburg friend of Atta and Al-Shehhi, wired two money transfers to Moussaoui in August. Binalshibh, who was denied a visa to visit the U.S. four times in 2000, is thought to have been one of the conduits for funds to the hijackers, relaying cash that originated in the Persian Gulf. But no known telephone calls or other evidence links the hijackers directly to Moussaoui.

Whatever Moussaoui's true tale may be, the Minnesota field office was convinced he was worth checking out. Agents spent much of the next two weeks in an increasingly frantic-and ultimately fruitless- effort to persuade FBI headquarters to authorize a national-security warrant to search Moussaoui's computer. From Washington, requests were sent to authorities in Paris for background details on the suspect. Like most things having to do with Moussaoui, the contents of the dossier sent over from Paris are in dispute. One senior French law-enforcement source told Time the Americans were given "everything they needed" to understand that Moussaoui was associated with Islamic terrorist groups. "Even a neophyte," says this source, "working in some remote corner of Florida, would have understood the threat based on what was sent." But several officials in FBI headquarters say that before Sept. 11 the French sent only a three-page document, which portrayed Moussaoui as a radical but was too sketchy to justify a search warrant for his computer.

The precise wording of the French letter isn't the issue. The extraordinary thing about Moussaoui's case-like the Phoenix memo-is that it was never brought to the attention of top officials in Washington who were, almost literally, sleepless with worry about an imminent terrorist attack. Nobody in the FBI or CIA ever informed anybody in the White House of Moussaoui's detention. That was unforgivable. "Do you think," says a White House antiterrorism official, "that if Dick Clarke had known the FBI had in custody a foreigner who was learning to fly a plane in midair, he wouldn't have done something?"

In blissless ignorance, Clarke and Tenet waited for the meeting of the Principals. But the odd little ways of Washington had one more trick to play. Heeding the pleas from the FBI's New York City office, where Mawn and O'Neill were desperate for new linguists and analysts, acting FBI director Pickard asked the Justice Department for some $50 million for the bureau's counterterrorism program. He was turned down. In August, a bureau source says, he appealed to Attorney General Ashcroft. The reply was a flat no.

Pickard got Ashcroft's letter on Sept. 10. A few days before, O'Neill had started a new job. He was burned out, and he knew it. Over the summer, he had come to realize that he had made too many enemies ever to succeed Mawn. O'Neill handed in his papers, left the FBI and began a new life as head of security at the World Trade Center.

THE TWO VISITORS
As the first cool nights of fall settled on northeast Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud was barely hanging on. His summer offensive had been a bust. An attempt to capture the city of Taloqan, which he had lost to the Taliban in 2000, ended in failure. But old allies, like the brutal Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, had returned to the field, and Massoud still thought the unpopularity of the Taliban might yet make them vulnerable. "He was telling us not to worry, that we'd soon capture Kabul," says Shah Pacha, an infantry commander in the Northern Alliance.

Around Sept. 1, Massoud summoned his top men to his command post in Khoja Bahauddin. The intention was to plan an attack, but Zahir Akbar, one of Massoud's generals, remembers a phone call after which Massoud changed his plans. "He'd been told al-Qaeda and the Pakistanis were deploying five combat units to the front line," says Akbar. Northern Alliance soldiers reported a buildup of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces; there was no big push from the south, although there were a number of skirmishes in the first week in September. "We were puzzled and confused when they didn't attack," says a senior Afghan intelligence source. "And Taliban communications showed the units had been ordered to wait."

What were they waiting for? Some of Massoud's closest aides think they know. For about three weeks, two Arab journalists had been waiting in Khoja Bahauddin to interview Massoud. The men said they represented the Islamic Observation Center in London and had a letter of introduction from its head, Yasser al-Siri. The men, who had been given safe passage through the Taliban front lines, "said they'd like to document Islam in Afghanistan," recalls Faheem Dashty, who made films with the Northern Alliance and is editor in chief of the Kabul Weekly newspaper. By the night of Sept. 8, the visitors were getting antsy, pestering Massoud's officials to firm up the meeting with him and threatening to return to Kabul if they could not see Massoud in the next 24 hours. "They were so worried and excitable they were begging us," says Jamsheed, Massoud's secretary.

The interview was finally granted just before lunch on Sunday, Sept. 9. Dashty was asked to record it on his camera. Massoud sat next to his friend Masood Khalili, now Afghanistan's ambassador to India. "The commander said he wanted to sit with me and translate," says Khalili. "Then he and I would go and have lunch together by the Oxus River." The Arabs entered and set up a TV camera in front of Massoud; the guests, says Khalili, were "very calm, very quiet." Khalili asked them which newspaper they represented. When they replied that they were acting for "Islamic Centers," says Khalili, he became reluctant to continue, but Massoud said they should all go ahead.

Khalili says Massoud asked to know the Arabs' questions before they started recording. "I remember that out of 15 questions, eight were about bin Laden," says Khalili. "I looked over at Massoud. He looked uncomfortable; there were five worry lines on his forehead instead of the one he usually had. But he said, 'O.K. Let's film.'" Khalili started translating the first question into Dari; Dashty was fiddling with the lighting on his camera. "Then," says Dashty, "I felt the explosion." The bomb was in the camera, and it killed one of the Arabs; the second was shot dead by Massoud's guards while trying to escape. Khalili believes he was saved by his passport, which was in his left breast pocket-eight pieces of shrapnel were found embedded in it. Dashty remembers being rushed to a helicopter with Massoud, who had terrible wounds. The chopper flew them both to a hospital in Tajikistan. By the time they arrived, Massoud was dead. The killers had come from Europe, and they were members of a group allied with al-Qaeda. Massoud's enemies had been waiting for the news. Within hours, Taliban radio began to crackle: "Your father is dead. Now you can't resist us." "They were clever," says a member of Massoud's staff. "Their offensive was primed to begin after the assassination." That night the Taliban attacked Massoud's front lines. One last time, his forces held out on their own.

As the battle raged, Clarke's plan awaited Bush's signature. Soon enough, the Northern Alliance would get all the aid it had been seeking-U.S. special forces, money, B-52 bombers, and, of course, as many Predators as the CIA and Pentagon could get into the sky. The decision that had been put off for so long had suddenly become easy because a little more than 50 hours after Massoud's death, Atta, sitting on American Airlines Flight 11 on the runway at Boston's Logan Airport, had used his mobile phone to speak for the last time to his friend Al-Shehhi, on United Flight 175. Their plot was a go.

That morning, O'Neill, Clarke's former partner in the fight against international terrorism, arrived at his new place of work. He had been on the job just two weeks. After Atta and Al-Shehhi crashed their planes into the World Trade Center, O'Neill called his son and a girlfriend from outside the Towers to say he was safe. Then he rushed back in. His body was identified 10 days later.





Survivors of the September 11, 2001 attacks
According to the 9/11 Commission, between 16,400 and 18,800 civilians were in the World Trade Center complex at the time of the attacks. Only 14 people escaped from the impact zone of the South Tower after it was hit, and only four people from floors above it. They escaped via Stairwell A, the only stairwell which had been left intact after impact. No one was able to escape from above the impact zone in the North Tower after it was hit, as all stairwells and elevator shafts on those floors were destroyed. After the collapse of the towers, only 20 survivors who were in or below the towers escaped from the debris, including 15 rescue workers. The last survivor was pulled from the rubble 27 hours after the collapse of the towers. 6,291 people were reported to have been treated in area hospitals for injuries related to the 9/11 attacks in New York City.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_of_the_September_11,_2001_attacks

Death, destruction, charity, salvation, war, money, real estate, spouses, babies, and other September 11 statistics.
The initial numbers are indelible: 8:46 a.m. and 9:02 a.m. Time the burning towers stood: 56 minutes and 102 minutes. Time they took to fall: 12 seconds. From there, they ripple out.
http://nymag.com/news/articles/wtc/1year/numbers.htm

The initial numbers are indelible: 8:46 a.m. and 9:02 a.m. Time the burning towers stood: 56 minutes and 102 minutes. Time they took to fall: 12 seconds. From there, they ripple out.


Total number killed in attacks (official figure as of 9/5/02): 2,819

Number of firefighters and paramedics killed: 343

Number of NYPD officers: 23

Number of Port Authority police officers: 37

Number of WTC companies that lost people: 60

Number of employees who died in Tower One: 1,402

Number of employees who died in Tower Two: 614

Number of employees lost at Cantor Fitzgerald: 658

Number of U.S. troops killed in Operation Enduring Freedom: 22

Number of nations whose citizens were killed in attacks: 115

Ratio of men to women who died: 3:1

Age of the greatest number who died: between 35 and 39

Bodies found "intact": 289

Body parts found: 19,858

Number of families who got no remains: 1,717

Estimated units of blood donated to the New York Blood Center: 36,000

Total units of donated blood actually used: 258

Number of people who lost a spouse or partner in the attacks: 1,609

Estimated number of children who lost a parent: 3,051

Percentage of Americans who knew someone hurt or killed in the attacks: 20

FDNY retirements, January–July 2001: 274

FDNY retirements, January–July 2002: 661

Number of firefighters on leave for respiratory problems by January 2002: 300

Number of funerals attended by Rudy Giuliani in 2001: 200

Number of FDNY vehicles destroyed: 98

Tons of debris removed from site: 1,506,124

Days fires continued to burn after the attack: 99

Jobs lost in New York owing to the attacks: 146,100

Days the New York Stock Exchange was closed: 6

Point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average when the NYSE reopened: 684.81

Days after 9/11 that the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan: 26

Total number of hate crimes reported to the Council on American-Islamic Relations nationwide since 9/11: 1,714

Economic loss to New York in month following the attacks: $105 billion

Estimated cost of cleanup: $600 million

Total FEMA money spent on the emergency: $970 million

Estimated amount donated to 9/11 charities: $1.4 billion

Estimated amount of insurance paid worldwide related to 9/11: $40.2 billion

Estimated amount of money needed to overhaul lower-Manhattan subways: $7.5 billion

Amount of money recently granted by U.S. government to overhaul lower-Manhattan subways: $4.55 billion

Estimated amount of money raised for funds dedicated to NYPD and FDNY families: $500 million

Percentage of total charity money raised going to FDNY and NYPD families: 25

Average benefit already received by each FDNY and NYPD widow: $1 million

Percentage increase in law-school applications from 2001 to 2002: 17.9

Percentage increase in Peace Corps applications from 2001 to 2002: 40

Percentage increase in CIA applications from 2001 to 2002: 50

Number of songs Clear Channel Radio considered "inappropriate" to play after 9/11: 150

Number of mentions of 9/11 at the Oscars: 26

Apartments in lower Manhattan eligible for asbestos cleanup: 30,000

Number of apartments whose residents have requested cleanup and testing: 4,110

Number of Americans who changed their 2001 holiday-travel plans from plane to train or car: 1.4 million

Estimated number of New Yorkers suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder as a result of 9/11: 422,000



Forensic Identification of 9/11 Victims Ends
More Than 1,000 Victims Unidentified Due to Technological Limits
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=525937&page=1
Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, authorities said they would continue searching until they could return to every family something of their lost relative.

But now, families of nearly half of the 2,749 who died in the attacks will soon receive letters from the New York City Medical Examiner's Office saying it has reached the limits of forensic science for now. At most, they say, only two or three more bodies are likely to be identified.


"I'm confident they did everything they could to do what they had to do with the DNA," said Monica Iken, who lost her husband, Michael Iken, who worked on the 84th floor of Tower Two. "It's still that empty feeling that you have -- that unless you live it it's kind of hard to explain."

Remains of 57 percent of the victims were identified using DNA, dental records or bits of jewelry. Families who received notification that their loved one's remains had been identified say it makes a difference.

"Instead of believing in the twilight zone -- is he dead, is he alive? is he dead, is he alive? -- we could move on," said Talat Dalani, whose 26-year-old son died in the towers. "There's a place he is buried. A sense of closure."

Over the past six months, working with the most damaged DNA samples, examiners have managed to identify only eight more people.


'Incredibly Difficult Task'
"The problem with the trade center is that when the pieces are that small, [they] can get mixed in with other debris from the actual building, and it creates an incredibly difficult task to separate things out," said Dr. George Bauries, a former FBI evidence response expert.

Many knew this day would come. After the attacks, experts predicted that the violence of the collapse and the intense heat of the fires meant that at most 25 percent of the victims would be identified.

The multiplicity of remains for each victim is also a reason why the medical examiner's office is fairly certain there is only hope for a few more identifications.

The fact that more than 50 percent of the victims have already been identified is remarkable, they say.


The letter to families will say that as forensic technology advances, more of the DNA samples may ultimately be identified.

For now, the unidentified remains -- nearly 10,000 samples -- will be placed in the soon-to-be-built memorial at Ground Zero. They will still be accessible, however, if scientists choose to examine them further.

But for families of nearly half of the victims, the memorial must now remain a final resting place.



Remains of 9/11 victims 'to spend eternity' in city rubbish dump
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/10/wnyc10.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/10/ixworld.html
The remains of hundreds of victims of the September 11 attacks are to be permanently buried in the world's largest rubbish dump, to the consternation of their grieving relatives.

In the aftermath of 9/11, more than half a million tons of dust and ashes from the Twin Towers were taken to the sprawling Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island.

More than 100 years' worth of refuse from New York City had accumulated at the dump before it was finally closed just six months before the attacks. The rubble from the World Trade Center ended up covering some 48 acres.


Relatives were assured that ashes would be returned after they were sorted, but city authorities have since balked at the estimated $450 million cost of transferring them again. Instead they have promised to lay a 2,200-acre park on top of the dump, whose rotting contents smell strongly of methane, and to erect a memorial to the victims.

Relatives of 1,169 of the 3,000 who died have yet to receive any remains, and many are outraged at the authorities' decision.

Diane Horning, whose son Matthew, 24, died in the North Tower, where he worked for the insurance company Marsh and McLennan, said: "We were promised the remains - any and all remains of the victims - and now we discover that my lost son is to spend eternity in a rubbish dump.

"This is morally reprehensible and emotionally unacceptable, and we are going to fight it all the way."

Matthew made two mobile phone calls to his family after the first jet struck the World Trade Center. He asked his father to tell his fiancee, Maura, that he loved her. His last word, sent on a pager message, was: "Scared".

His mother, who believes that the cost of moving the ashes has been exaggerated tenfold, said: "They have already started bulldozing junk and debris on top of our loved ones and they have left our son in the garbage. They promised that this would never happen, and they are trying to cover up their mistake, literally and figuratively."

Mrs Horning and her husband, Kurt, a retired teacher, have formed the World Trade Center Families for Proper Burial, a group campaigning for a formal cemetery with markers commemorating each of the 2,749 known victims. A petition on the group's website has more than 18,000 signatures.

Last week the families of victims were invited to a planning meeting on Staten Island but officials offered no concessions.

According to city proposals, the mound of debris will be shaped into two embankments of 1,368 ft and 1,362 ft. Each will be as long as the 110-storey Twin Towers were high. Visitors will be able to walk in between the embankments, looking towards the Trade Center site across the harbour.

Officials say that a cemetery for the ashes would cost at least $45 million and that a memorial will be a focal point of the new Trade Center.

However, Mrs Horning is enraged by suggestions that it will be a "symbolic" cemetery. "Only if my son is 'symbolically' dead," she says. "But if he's really dead then I really want him buried."

The governor of New York, George Pataki, is said to be sympathetic and the New Jersey legislature has passed a law ordering the Port Authority, which owned the Trade Center, to move the dust and ash. Yet it is toothless unless the New York legislature passes the same law.

The office of the New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, pointed out that the coroner's office was still trying to identify 10,260 fragments of remains gathered at Fresh Kills. Those that remained unidentified would be interred in the official memorial at the Twin Tower site.

The mayor said: "After months of evaluating the complex concerns raised by members of the Families for Proper Burial, we have concluded that we will proceed with plans for a respectful memorial at the recovery site."




United Airlines Flight 93 was a regular flight from Newark International Airport (now known as Newark Liberty International Airport) in Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco International Airport, then continuing on to Narita International Airport in Tokyo, Japan, on a different aircraft. On September 11, 2001, the United Airlines Boeing 757-222, registered N591UA,[1] was one of four planes hijacked as part of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It did not reach its intended target, instead crashing in an empty field just outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about 150 miles (240 km) northwest of Washington, D.C. The 9/11 Commission (through testimony, tapes of passengers' phone calls, and the flight data recorders recovered from the crash) determined that crew and passengers, alerted through phone calls to loved ones, had attempted to overpower the hijackers. The Commission concluded that the hijackers crashed the plane to keep the crew and passengers from gaining control.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93



United Flight 93 victims at a glance
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/11/victims-capsules.htm


Flight 93 Timeline
http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/flight/timeline/timeline.html

United 93



Remembering United Flight 93


The Tragic Timeline
http://911research.com/cache/planes/nyt_timeline_091201.html
Tuesday September 11, 2001 is a date that will go down in history for the brutal terrorist attacks in America. Here we have drawn together the key moments to make a complete diary of that terrible day.

7.59 a.m. A glorious morning when American Airlines Flight 11 takes off from Boston's Logan Airport for Los Angeles.

8:01 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93 leaves from Newark International bound for San Francisco.

8:10 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 leaves Washington's Dulles Airport going to Los Angeles.

8:14 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 leaves Logan Airport for Los Angeles.

Some time into the flight a stewardess makes a distress call to her firm's flight operations centre and says passengers are being stabbed. She gives the seat number of a hijacker.

8:28 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 makes an unexpected hard left turn, heading over New York. Captain John Ogonowski or his co-pilot press a button allowing air traffic controllers to hear the cockpit conversation.

"Don't do anything foolish," a man says. "You're not going to get hurt. We have more planes, we have other planes."

8:45 a.m. A hijacked passenger jet, American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston, Massachusetts, crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Center, tearing a gaping hole in the building and setting it afire.

9:03 a.m.: A second hijacked airliner, United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston, crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center and explodes. Both buildings are burning.

9:17 a.m.: The Federal Aviation Administration shuts down all New York City area airports.

9:21 a.m.: The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey orders all bridges and tunnels in the New York area closed.

9:30 a.m.: President Bush, speaking in Sarasota, Florida, says the country has suffered an "apparent terrorist attack."

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) alerts the US military air defence command that an airliner is heading toward the Pentagon. Two F-16 fighter jets are scrambled from Virginia's Langley Air Force Base, 130 miles away.

9:40 a.m.: The FAA halts all flight operations at U.S. airports, the first time in U.S. history that air traffic nationwide has been halted.

9:43 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon, sending up a huge plume of smoke. Evacuation begins immediately.

9:45 a.m.: The White House evacuates.

9:57 a.m.: Bush departs from Florida.

9.58 a.m. On Flight 93, some passengers, learning of the other crashes, realise the hijackers plan to turn their plane into another flying bomb and decide to tackle them.

10:05 a.m.: The south tower of the World Trade Center collapses, plummeting into the streets below. A massive cloud of dust and debris forms and slowly drifts away from the building.

10:08 a.m.: Secret Service agents armed with automatic rifles are deployed into Lafayette Park across from the White House.

10:10 a.m.: A portion of the Pentagon collapses.

10:10 a.m.: United Airlines Flight 93, also hijacked, crashes in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh.

10:13 a.m.: The United Nations building evacuates, including 4,700 people from the headquarters building and 7,000 total from UNICEF and U.N. development programs.

10:22 a.m.: In Washington, the State and Justice departments are evacuated, along with the World Bank.

10:24 a.m.: The FAA reports that all inbound transatlantic aircraft flying into the United States are being diverted to Canada.

10:28 a.m.: The World Trade Center's north tower collapses from the top down as if it were being peeled apart, releasing a tremendous cloud of debris and smoke.

10:45 a.m.: All federal office buildings in Washington are evacuated.

10.46 a.m.: U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell cuts short his trip to Latin America to return to the United States.

10.48 a.m.: Police confirm the plane crash in Pennsylvania.

10:53 a.m.: New York's primary elections, scheduled for Tuesday, are postponed.

10:54 a.m.: Israel evacuates all diplomatic missions.

10:57 a.m.: New York Gov. George Pataki says all state government offices are closed.

11:02 a.m.: New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani urges New Yorkers to stay at home and orders an evacuation of the area south of Canal Street.

11:16 a.m.: CNN reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing emergency-response teams in a precautionary move.

11:18 a.m.: American Airlines reports it has lost two aircraft. American Flight 11, a Boeing 767 flying from Boston to Los Angeles, had 81 passengers and 11 crew aboard. Flight 77, a Boeing 757 en route from Washington's Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles, had 58 passengers and six crew members aboard. Flight 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

11:26 a.m.: United Airlines reports that United Flight 93, en route from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco, California, has crashed in Pennsylvania. The airline also says that it is "deeply concerned" about United Flight 175.

11:59 a.m.: United Airlines confirms that Flight 175, from Boston to Los Angeles, has crashed with 56 passengers and nine crew members aboard. It hit the World Trade Center's south tower.

12:04 p.m.: Los Angeles International Airport, the destination of three of the crashed airplanes, is evacuated.

12:15 p.m: San Francisco International Airport is evacuated and shut down. The airport was the destination of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.

12:15 p.m.: The Immigration and Naturalization Service says U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico are on the highest state of alert, but no decision has been made about closing borders.

12:30 p.m.: The FAA says 50 flights are in U.S. airspace, but none are reporting any problems.

1:04 p.m.: Bush, speaking from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, says that all appropriate security measures are being taken, including putting the U.S. military on high alert worldwide. He asks for prayers for those killed or wounded in the attacks and says, "Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts."

1:27 p.m.: A state of emergency is declared by the city of Washington.

1:44 p.m.: The Pentagon says five warships and two aircraft carriers will leave the U.S. Naval Station in Norfolk, Virginia, to protect the East Coast from further attack and to reduce the number of ships in port. The two carriers, the USS George Washington and the USS John F. Kennedy, are headed for the New York coast. The other ships headed to sea are frigates and guided missile destroyers capable of shooting down aircraft.

1:48 p.m.: Bush leaves Barksdale Air Force Base aboard Air Force One and flies to an Air Force base in Nebraska.

2 p.m.: Senior FBI sources tell CNN they are working on the assumption that the four airplanes that crashed were hijacked as part of a terrorist attack.

2:30 p.m.: The FAA announces there will be no U.S. commercial air traffic until noon EDT Wednesday at the earliest.

2:49 p.m.: At a news conference, Giuliani says that subway and bus service are partially restored in New York City. Asked about the number of people killed, Giuliani says, "I don't think we want to speculate about that -- more than any of us can bear."

3:55 p.m.: Karen Hughes, a White House counselor, says the president is at an undisclosed location, later revealed to be Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, and is conducting a National Security Council meeting by phone. Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice are in a secure facility at the White House. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is at the Pentagon.

3:55 p.m.: Giuliani now says the number of critically injured in New York City is up to 200 with 2,100 total injuries reported.

4 p.m: CNN National Security Correspondent David Ensor reports that U.S. officials say there are "good indications" that Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, suspected of coordinating the bombings of two U.S. embassies in 1998, is involved in the attacks, based on "new and specific" information developed since the attacks.

4:06 p.m.: California Gov. Gray Davis dispatches urban search-and-rescue teams to New York.

4:10 p.m.: Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex is reported on fire.

4:20 p.m.: U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he was "not surprised there was an attack (but) was surprised at the specificity." He says he was "shocked at what actually happened -- the extent of it."

4:25 p.m.: The American Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange say they will remain closed Wednesday.

4:30 p.m.: The president leaves Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska aboard Air Force One to return to Washington.

5:15 p.m.: CNN Military Affairs Correspondent Jamie McIntyre reports fires are still burning in part of the Pentagon. No death figures have been released yet.

5:20 p.m.: The 47-story Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex collapses. The evacuated building is damaged when the twin towers across the street collapse earlier in the day. Other nearby buildings in the area remain ablaze.

5:30 p.m.: CNN Senior White House Correspondent John King reports that U.S. officials say the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania could have been headed for one of three possible targets: Camp David, the White House or the U.S. Capitol building.

6 p.m.: Explosions are heard in Kabul, Afghanistan, hours after terrorist attacks targeted financial and military centers in the United States. The attacks occurred at 2:30 a.m. local time. Afghanistan is believed to be where bin Laden, who U.S. officials say is possibly behind Tuesday's deadly attacks, is located. U.S. officials say later that the United States had no involvement in the incident whatsoever. The attack is credited to the Northern Alliance, a group fighting the Taliban in the country's ongoing civil war.

6:10 p.m.:Giuliani urges New Yorkers to stay home Wednesday if they can.

6:40 p.m.: Rumsfeld, the U.S. defense secretary, holds a news conference in the Pentagon, noting the building is operational. "It will be in business tomorrow," he says.

6:54 p.m.: Bush arrives back at the White House aboard Marine One and is scheduled to address the nation at 8:30 p.m. The president earlier landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland with a three-fighter jet escort. CNN's King reports Laura Bush arrived earlier by motorcade from a "secure location."

7:17 p.m.: U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft says the FBI is setting up a Web site for tips on the attacks: www.ifccfbi.gov. He also says family and friends of possible victims can leave contact information at 800-331-0075.

7:02 p.m.: CNN's Paula Zahn reports the Marriott Hotel near the World Trade Center is on the verge of collapse and says some New York bridges are now open to outbound traffic.

7:45 p.m.: The New York Police Department says that at least 78 officers are missing. The city also says that as many as half of the first 400 firefighters on the scene were killed.

8:30 p.m.: President Bush addresses the nation, saying "thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil" and asks for prayers for the families and friends of Tuesday's victims. "These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve," he says. The president says the U.S. government will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed the acts and those who harbor them. He adds that government offices in Washington are reopening for essential personnel Tuesday night and for all workers Wednesday.

9:22 p.m.: CNN's McIntyre reports the fire at the Pentagon is still burning and is considered contained but not under control.

9:57 p.m.: Giuliani says New York City schools will be closed Wednesday and no more volunteers are needed for Tuesday evening's rescue efforts. He says there is hope that there are still people alive in rubble. He also says that power is out on the westside of Manhattan and that health department tests show there are no airborne chemical agents about which to worry.

10:49 p.m.: CNN Congressional Correspondent Jonathan Karl reports that Attorney General Ashcroft told members of Congress that there were three to five hijackers on each plane armed only with knives.

10:56 p.m: CNN's Zahn reports that New York City police believe there are people alive in buildings near the World Trade Center.

11:54 p.m.: CNN Washington Bureau Chief Frank Sesno reports that a government official told him there was an open microphone on one of the hijacked planes and that sounds of discussion and "duress" were heard. Sesno also reports a source says law enforcement has "credible" information and leads and is confident about the investigation.



Life Or Death Drama On Flight 93
9/11 Commission Believes Passengers Never Reached The Cockpit
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/23/september11/main631416.shtml

Passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 fought back against the hijackers but never actually made it into the cockpit, the Sept. 11 commission concluded.

The assertion, included in the panel's dramatic summary of the harrowing flight, contradicts the firmly held belief by some victims' families that passengers breached the cockpit and fought with hijackers inside during their final moments.

The report also describes the chilling prelude to the hijacking of Flight 93, CBS News Correspondent Bob Orr reports.

A dispatcher warned pilots to beware any cockpit intrusion, because two aircraft had hit the World Trade Center. The alert, the only one received by any of the hijacked jets, puzzled the pilots, who responded, "Confirm latest message, please."

Two minutes later, the al Qaeda hijackers, led Ziad Jarrah, attacked the cockpit.

In phone calls from the plane, four passengers said they and others planned to fight the hijackers after learning of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York earlier that morning.

With the words "Let's roll," passengers rushed down the airliner's narrow aisle to try to overwhelm the hijackers.

Relying on the cockpit recorder and flight data, the commission said terrorist-pilot Jarrah violently rocked the jet's wings and told another hijacker to block the door. With the sounds of fighting outside the cockpit, Jarrah asked, "Is that it? Shall we finish it off?"

Another hijacker, who wasn't identified, replied, "No, not yet. When they all come, we finish it off."

Jarrah then began pitching the nose of the plane up and down to throw passengers off balance.

Seconds later, a passenger who wasn't identified yelled, "In the cockpit! If we don't, we die!" And 16 seconds afterward, another passenger yelled, "Roll it!" Investigators previously have said they believe passengers tried to use a food cart to break the cockpit door.

Jarrah said, "Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!", and he asked his fellow hijacker, "Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?"

The other hijacker answered, "Yes, put it in, and pull it down."

Roughly 90 seconds later, the jet rolled onto its back and crashed into a Pennsylvania field at more than 580 mph, killing everyone aboard.

The commission concluded that the hijackers remained at the controls of the plane, "but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them."

The commission's report (.pdf, 7MB)said the hijackers' destination was Washington. It praised the courage of the passengers and said their struggle "saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the Capitol or the White House from destruction."

The Associated Press reported last year that the government's theory about Flight 93 — described by FBI Director Robert Mueller to congressional investigators in closed testimony — also concluded that passengers grappled with terrorists but never actually got into the cockpit.



American Airlines Flight 77 was a morning flight that routinely flew from Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD), near Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). On September 11, 2001, Flight 77 was hijacked between 08:51 EDT and 08:54 EDT, as part of the September 11, 2001 attacks.[2] On that day, the American Airlines Boeing 757-223, registered N644AA,[3] was piloted by Captain Charles Burlingame and First Officer Dave Charlebois. Just over an hour and fifteen minutes into the flight, it was crashed into the Pentagon, killing 64 on the plane and 125 in the buildings. It was the third airliner to crash that morning, 50 minutes after the first, and 30 minutes after the second.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_77




American Flight 77 victims at a glance
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/12/victim-capsule-flight77.htm



AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 77
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/AA77.victims.html


American Airlines Flight 77, from Washington to Los Angeles, crashed into the Pentagon with 64 people aboard.

CREW

Charles Burlingame of Herndon, Virginia, was the plane's captain. He is survived by a wife, a daughter and a grandson. He had more than 20 years of experience flying with American Airlines and was a former U.S. Navy pilot.

David Charlebois, who lived in Washington's Dupont Circle neighborhood, was the first officer on the flight. "He was handsome and happy and very centered," his neighbor Travis White, told The Washington Post. "His life was the kind of life I wanted to have some day."

Michele Heidenberger of Chevy Chase, Maryland, was a flight attendant for 30 years. She left behind a husband, a pilot, and a daughter and son.

Flight attendant Jennifer Lewis, 38, of Culpeper, Virginia, was the wife of flight attendant Kenneth Lewis.

Flight attendant Kenneth Lewis, 49, of Culpeper, Virginia, was the husband of flight attendant Jennifer Lewis.

Renee May, 39, of Baltimore, Maryland, was a flight attendant.


PASSENGERS

Paul Ambrose, 32, of Washington, was a physician who worked with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the surgeon general to address racial and ethnic disparities in health. A 1995 graduate of Marshall University School of Medicine, Ambrose last year was named the Luther Terry Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Preventative Medicine.

Yeneneh Betru, 35, was from Burbank, California.

M.J. Booth

Bernard Brown, 11, was a student at Leckie Elementary School in Washington. He was embarking on an educational trip to the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary near Santa Barbara, California, as part of a program funded by the National Geographic Society.

Suzanne Calley, 42, of San Martin, California, was an employee of Cisco Systems Inc.

William Caswell

Sarah Clark, 65, of Columbia, Maryland, was a sixth-grade teacher at Backus Middle School in Washington. She was accompanying a student on an educational trip to the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary near Santa Barbara, California, as part of a program funded by the National Geographic Society.

Asia Cottom, 11, was a student at Backus Middle School in Washington. Asia was embarking on an educational trip to the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary near Santa Barbara, California, as part of a program funded by the National Geographic Society.

James Debeuneure, 58, of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, was a fifth-grade teacher at Ketcham Elementary School in Washington. He was accompanying a student on an educational trip to the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary near Santa Barbara, California, as part of a program funded by the National Geographic Society.

Rodney Dickens, 11, was a student at Leckie Elementary School in Washington. He was embarking on an educational trip to the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary near Santa Barbara, California, as part of a program funded by the National Geographic Society.

Eddie Dillard

Charles Droz

Barbara Edwards, 58, of Las Vegas, Nevada, was a teacher at Palo Verde High School in Las Vegas.

Charles S. Falkenberg, 45, of University Park, Maryland, was the director of research at ECOlogic Corp., a software engineering firm. He worked on data systems for NASA and also developed data systems for the study of global and regional environmental issues. Falkenburg was traveling with his wife, Leslie Whittingham, and their two daughters, Zoe, 8, and Dana, 3.

Zoe Falkenberg, 8, of University Park, Maryland, was the daughter of Charles Falkenberg and Leslie Whittingham.

Dana Falkenberg, 3, of University Park, Maryland, was the daughter of Charles Falkenberg and Leslie Whittingham.

Joe Ferguson was the director of the National Geographic Society's geography education outreach program in Washington. He was accompanying a group of students and teachers on an educational trip to the Channel Islands in California. A Mississippi native, he joined the society in 1987. "Joe Feguson's final hours at the Geographic reveal the depth of his commitment to one of the things he really loved," said John Fahey Jr., the society's president. "Joe was here at the office until late Monday evening preparing for this trip. It was his goal to make this trip perfect in every way."

Wilson "Bud" Flagg of Millwood, Virginia, was a retired Navy admiral and retired American Airlines pilot.

Dee Flagg

Richard Gabriel

Ian Gray, 55, of Washington was the president of a health-care consulting firm.

Stanley Hall, 68, was from Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Bryan Jack, 48, of Alexandria, Virginia, was a senior executive at the Defense Department.

Steven D. "Jake" Jacoby, 43, of Alexandria, Virginia, was the chief operating officer of Metrocall Inc., a wireless data and messaging company.

Ann Judge, 49, of Virginia was the travel office manager for the National Geographic Society. She was accompanying a group of students and teachers on an educational trip to the Channel Islands in California. Society President John Fahey Jr. said one of his fondest memories of Judge is a voice mail she and a colleague once left him while they were rafting the Monkey River in Belize. "This was quintessential Ann -- living life to the fullest and wanting to share it with others," he said.

Chandler Keller, 29, was a Boeing propulsion engineer from El Segundo, California.

Yvonne Kennedy

Norma Khan, 45, from Reston, Virginia was a nonprofit organization manager.

Karen A. Kincaid, 40, was a lawyer with the Washington firm of Wiley Rein & Fielding. She joined the firm in 1993 and was part of the its telecommunications practice. She was married to Peter Batacan.

Norma Langsteuerle

Dong Lee

Dora Menchaca, 45, of Santa Monica, California, was the associate director of clinical research for a biotech firm.

Christopher Newton, 38, of Anaheim, California, was president and chief executive officer of Work-Life Benefits, a consultation and referral service. He was married and had two children. Newton was on his way back to Orange County to retrieve his family's yellow Labrador, who had been left behind until they could settle into their new home in Arlington, Virginia.

Barbara Olson, 45, was a conservative commentator who often appeared on CNN and was married to U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson. She twice called her husband as the plane was being hijacked and described some details, including that the attackers were armed with knives. She had planned to take a different flight, but she changed it at the last minute so that she could be with her husband on his birthday. She worked as an investigator for the House Government Reform Committee in the mid-1990s and later worked on the staff of Senate Minority Whip Don Nickles.

Ruben Ornedo, 39, of Los Angeles, California, was a Boeing propulsion engineer.

Robert Penniger, 63, of Poway, California, was an electrical engineer with BAE Systems.

Lisa Raines, 42, was senior vice president for government relations at the Washington office of Genzyme, a biotechnology firm. She was from Great Falls, Virginia, and was married to Stephen Push. She worked with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on developing a new policy governing cellular therapies, announced in 1997. She also worked on other major health-care legislation.

Todd Reuben, 40, of Potomac, Maryland, was a tax and business lawyer.

John Sammartino

Diane Simmons

George Simmons

Mari-Rae Sopper of Santa Barbara, California, was a women's gymnastics coach at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She had just gotten the post August 31 and was making the trip to California to start work.

Bob Speisman, 47, was from Irvington, New York.

Hilda Taylor was a sixth-grade teacher at Leckie Elementary School in Washington. She was accompanying a student on an educational trip to the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary near Santa Barbara, California, as part of a program funded by the National Geographic Society.

Leonard Taylor was from Reston, Virginia.

Leslie A. Whittington, 45, was from University Park, Maryland. The professor of public policy at Georgetown University in Washington was traveling with her husband, Charles Falkenberg, 45, and their two daughters, Zoe, 8, and Dana, 3. They were traveling to Los Angeles to catch a connection to Australia. Whittington had been named a visiting fellow at Australian National University in Canberra.

John Yamnicky, 71, was from Waldorf, Maryland.

Vicki Yancey

Shuyin Yang

Yuguag Zheng

Within 30 minutes of two planes hitting the World Trade Center twin towers, American Airlines Flight 77 departed Dulles International Airport bound for Los Angeles. The Boeing 757 was hijacked and crashed, loaded with 10,000 gallons of fuel, at 345 mph into the west side of the Pentagon. The five-story Pentagon is made up of five pentagonal structures arranged in concentric rings. These rings surround a five-acre open courtyard and are connected by 10 spike-like corridors. The plane took out light poles in the parking lot, hit the ground just outside the outermost ring of the Pentagon, turned up on its wing, and penetrated the E ring (outermost) midway between corridors 4 and 5 as shown below. It then traveled through the D ring and into the C ring. CNN has some good footage from a security camera that captured the plane striking the ground.
http://pentagon.spacelist.org/




A variety of conspiracy theories have emerged which contradict the mainstream account of the September 11, 2001 attacks. These theories typically include suggestions that individuals in the government of the United States knew of the impending attacks and refused to act on that knowledge, or that the attacks were a false flag operation carried out with the intention of stirring up the passions and winning the allegiance of the American people in order to facilitate military spending, the restriction of civil liberties, and a program of aggressive and profitable foreign policy.

Some conspiracy theories claim that the collapse of the World Trade Center was the result of a controlled demolition and that United Airlines Flight 93 was shot down. While some also contend that a commercial airliner did not crash into the Pentagon, this position is debated within the 9/11 Truth Movement, with many who believe that AA Flight 77 did crash there, but that it was allowed to crash via an effective stand down of the military.[1]

Published reports by the National Institute of Standards and Technology do not support the controlled demolition hypothesis.[2][3] U.S. officials, mainstream journalists, and independent researchers generally accepted the conclusion that Al Qaeda is solely responsible for the attacks and the resulting destruction, and civil engineers generally accept the mainstream account that the impacts of jumbo jets at high speeds in combination with subsequent fires, rather than controlled demolition, led to the collapse of the Twin Towers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories


P&T Bullshit - Conspiracy Theories




Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report
Popular Mechanics examines the evidence and consults the experts to refute the most persistent conspiracy theories of September 11.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html

Current Netlore: 9/11 Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.
Internet hoaxes, email rumors and urban legends related to the events of September 11, 2001
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blxterror.htm

Why the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Won't Go Away
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1531304,00.html
Take a look, if you can stand it, at video footage of the World Trade Center collapsing. Your eye will naturally jump to the top of the screen, where huge fountains of dark debris erupt out of the falling towers. But fight your natural instincts. Look farther down, at the stories that haven't collapsed yet.

In almost every clip you'll see little puffs of dust spurting out from the sides of the towers. There are two competing explanations for these puffs of dust: 1) the force of the collapsing upper floors raised the air pressure in the lower ones so dramatically that it actually blew out the windows. And 2) the towers did not collapse from the impact of two Boeing 767s and the ensuing fires. They were destroyed in a planned, controlled demolition. The dust puffs you see on film are the detonations of explosives planted there before the attacks.

People who believe the second explanation live in a very different world from those who believe the first. In world No. 2, al-Qaeda is not responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center. The U.S. government is. The Pentagon was not hit by a commercial jet; it was hit by a cruise missile. United Flight 93 did not crash after its occupants rushed the cockpit; it was deliberately taken down by a U.S. Air Force fighter. The entire catastrophe was planned and executed by federal officials in order to provide the U.S. with a pretext for going to war in the Middle East and, by extension, as a means of consolidating and extending the power of the Bush Administration.

The population of world No. 2 is larger than you might think. A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.

Although the 9/11 Truth Movement, as many conspiracy believers refer to their passion, has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, it is flourishing on the Internet. One of the most popular conspiracy videos online is Loose Change, a 90-min. blizzard of statistics, photographs, documents, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony set to a trippy hip-hop backbeat. It's designed to pick apart, point by point, the conventional narrative of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

For all its amateur production values--it was created by a pair of industrious twentysomethings using a laptop, pizza money and footage scavenged from the Internet--Loose Change is a compelling experience. Take the section about the attack on the Pentagon. As the film points out--and this is a tent-pole issue among 9/11 conspiracists--the crash site doesn't look right. There's not enough damage. The hole smashed in the Pentagon's outer wall was 75 ft. wide, but a Boeing 757 has a 124-ft. wingspan. Why wasn't the hole wider? Why does it look so neat?

Experts will tell you that the hole was punched by the plane's fuselage, not its wings, which sheared off on impact. But then what happened to the wings? And the tail and the engines? Images of the crash site show hardly any of the wreckage you would expect from a building that's been rammed by a commercial jet. The lawn, where the plane supposedly dragged a wing on approach, is practically pristine. The plane supposedly clipped five lampposts on its way in, but the lampposts in question show surprisingly little damage. And could Hani Hanjour, the man supposedly at the controls, have executed the maneuvers that the plane performed? He failed a flight test just weeks before the attack. And Pentagon employees reported smelling cordite after the hit, the kind of high explosive a cruise missile carries.

There's something empowering about just exploring such questions. Loose Change appeals to the viewer's common sense: it tells you to forget the official explanations and the expert testimony, and trust your eyes and your brain instead. It implies that the world can be grasped by laymen without any help or interference from the talking heads. Watching Loose Change, you feel as if you are participating in the great American tradition of self-reliance and nonconformist, antiauthoritarian dissent. You're fighting the power. You're thinking different. (Conspiracists call people who follow the government line "sheeple.") "The goal of the movie was just really to get out there and show that there are alternate stories to what the mainstream media and the government will tell you," says Korey Rowe, 23, who produced the movie. "That 19 hijackers are going to completely bypass security and crash four commercial airliners in a span of two hours, with no interruption from the military forces, in the most guarded airspace in the United States and the world? That to me is a conspiracy theory."

It's also not much of a story line. As a narrative, the official story that the government--echoed by the media--is trying to sell shows an almost embarrassing lack of novelistic flair, whereas the story the conspiracy theorists tell about what happened on Sept. 11 is positively Dan Brownesque in its rich, exciting complexity. Rowe and his collaborator, Dylan Avery, 22, actually started writing Loose Change as a fictional screenplay--"loosely based around us discovering that 9/11 was an inside job," Rowe says--before they became convinced that the evidence of conspiracy was overwhelming. The Administration is certainly playing its part in the drama with admirable zeal. If we went to war to root out fictional weapons of mass destruction, is staging a fictional terrorist attack such a stretch?

But there's a big problem with Loose Change and with most other conspiracy theories. The more you think about them, the more you realize how much they depend on circumstantial evidence, facts without analysis or documentation, quotes taken out of context and the scattered testimony of traumatized eyewitnesses. (For what it's worth, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a fact sheet responding to some of the conspiracy theorists' ideas on its website, www.nist.gov. The theories prompt small, reasonable questions that demand answers that are just too large and unreasonable to swallow. Granted, the Pentagon crash site looks odd in photographs. But if the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile, then what happened to American Airlines Flight 77? Where did all the real, documented people on it go? Assassinated? Relocated? What about eyewitnesses who saw a plane, not a missile? And what are the chances that an operation of such size--it would surely have involved hundreds of military and civilian personnel--could be carried out without a single leak? Without leaving behind a single piece of evidence hard enough to stand up to scrutiny in a court? People, the feds just aren't that slick. Nobody is.

There are psychological explanations for why conspiracy theories are so seductive. Academics who study them argue that they meet a basic human need: to have the magnitude of any given effect be balanced by the magnitude of the cause behind it. A world in which tiny causes can have huge consequences feels scary and unreliable. Therefore a grand disaster like Sept. 11 needs a grand conspiracy behind it. "We tend to associate major events--a President or princess dying--with major causes," says Patrick Leman, a lecturer in psychology at Royal Holloway University of London, who has conducted studies on conspiracy belief. "If we think big events like a President being assassinated can happen at the hands of a minor individual, that points to the unpredictability and randomness of life and unsettles us." In that sense, the idea that there is a malevolent controlling force orchestrating global events is, in a perverse way, comforting.

You would have thought the age of conspiracy theories might have declined with the rise of digital media. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was a private, intimate affair compared with the attack on the World Trade Center, which was witnessed by millions of bystanders and television viewers and documented by hundreds of Zapruders. You would think there was enough footage and enough forensics to get us past the grassy knoll and the magic bullet, to create a consensus reality, a single version of the truth, a single world we can all live in together.

But there is no event so plain and clear that a determined human being can't find ambiguity in it. And as divisive as they are, conspiracy theories are part of the process by which Americans deal with traumatic public events like Sept. 11. Conspiracy theories form around them like scar tissue. In a curious way, they're an American form of national mourning. They'll be with us as long as we fear lone gunmen, and feel the pain of losses like the one we suffered on Sept. 11, and as long as the past, even the immediate past, is ultimately unknowable. That is to say, forever.



Remembering the Legacies of 9/11
Thousands of Lives Were Lost on 9/11, But Legacies Live On
http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3585116&page=1
While Sept. 11 is a tough anniversary for all Americans, it's especially difficult for those who were directly touched by the attacks.

Their loved ones are gone, but in so many cases, from their inspirational lives has sprung a legacy of tremendous gifts that continue to helps others each and every day.

Matthew Barnes
In a haunting foreshadowing, two years before 9/11, Linda Jacobs Kalodner was trapped with her 6-week-old twins, Isabel and Jacob, in a burning apartment building in New York City. There was no way out of the black smoke on the ninth floor.

"My throat was starting to hurt, my eyes starting to hurt and outside was all smoke and blackness," Kalodner said.

New York City firefighter Matthew Barnes came to the rescue, a bright light in the darkness.

Kalodner said she will never forget his grace and dedication to protecting her infants. "I was saying 'You have to come back. I have twins, I have twins.'"

And, as he later told reporters, Barnes did go back.

"She indicated that she had two children and she proceeded to hand them to me," Barnes said at the time.

He was her knight in shining armor that day.

"I totally trusted him. I totally trusted him and he made me feel like I should trust him," she said.

Kalodner and her family were devastated when Barnes died with so many others on 9/11. The twins, of course, don't remember their rescue, but now say they are grateful for the gift of life Barnes gave them.

The twins are now boisterous 8-year-olds.

"I'm glad I got out of there because without Matthew Barnes I'd be dead right now," Jacob said. "He told us the lesson of giving by basically giving his life to other people because he was saving us."

"I think that our experience gave us, taught us to love each other more," Kalodner said.

Barnes was an angel, the family agrees.

"His spirit is in our hearts," Jacob's twin sister, Isabel, said.


Daniel Brandhorst, Ronald Gamboa and David Brandhorst-Gamboa

For the people of St. Victors Church in Los Angeles, six years haven't erased the deep impact that one family had on their congregation.

Daniel Brandhorst and Ronald Gamboa were a gay couple that had adopted a newborn baby named David. Active in their Catholic church, every Sunday morning at Mass, the Brandhorst-Gamboa family were the epicenter for all the other families with parents, gay and straight.


"They were really the glue, the centerpiece of the parents, the leaders if you will, of the group of us," family friend Mary Walton said.

And Dan and Ron seemed to have all the tricks for handling a toddler in church.

"They had everything, whatever you needed, whether it's treats or diapers. Mothers would go 'We learned so much from them,'" Walton said.

"The other parents respected them greatly and learned a lot from them. It didn't matter if they weren't the biological parents, that they were gay parents — it didn't matter," friend John Aiello said. "They were good parents."

Dan, Ron and their son, David, were traveling home from a New England vacation on flight 175 from Boston on 9/11. It was the second plane to crash into the World Trade Center that day.

"One of our parishioners perhaps put it best, an older gentleman, very conservative, said, 'If you had told me 20 years ago I'd have gay friends, let alone a gay couple with children, I would never have believed it, and I loved them,'" Aiello said.


Nancy Perez
To everyone that knew her, Nancy Perez was a champion of children.

She gave all of her extra time to her niece, her cousins and their kids — and to children she didn't even know. She took a sign language course so that she could teach deaf children karate — she wanted everyone to feel as if they were a part of the group.

Perez's passion for children lives on in a secret gift, discovered after her death on Sept. 11.

Perez had written a children's book about a boy's fear of the first day of school and how his collection of butterflies saved the day. The boy was her cousin Kyle McCann.

Kyle and Perez were very close; Nancy was like a big sister, aunt and extra mother, all rolled into one.

"She sent it to a publishing company in the hopes she would get it published; unfortunately she passed away before anything could happen," her friend Marie Roman said.

The book is called "A Butterfly Circus," and it was never published. No one knew about the book, except for one friend who helped with the illustrations.

"It's such a beautiful surprise to us. We feel like she left us with a little bit of her heart," Perez's cousin Irma Meneve said.

The gift from Perez is solace to Kyle who, now 14, is still grappling with his grief.

"She's here in my mind and I pray to her at night and I know that she's always with me and helping me," Kyle said. "I'm gonna always remember her love forever and I'll never forget her."


A Tribute to the 9/11 Firefighters

Welcome to New York City (9-11 Firefighter tribute)


9/11 attack victims honored six years later
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/11/911.anniversary.ap/

NEW YORK (AP) -- Relatives of Sept. 11 victims bowed their heads in silence Tuesday to mark the moments exactly six years earlier when hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. The dreary skies created a grim backdrop, and a sharp contrast to the clear blue of that morning in 2001.

"That day we felt isolated, but not for long and not from each other," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said as the ceremony began. "Six years have passed, and our place is still by your side."

Construction equipment now fills the vast city block where the World Trade Center once stood, and work is under way for four new towers, forcing the ceremony to be moved away from the twin towers' footprints for the first time.

Kathleen Mullen, whose niece Kathleen Casey died in the attacks, said the park is close enough.

"Just so long as we continue to do something special every year, so you don't wake up and say, 'Oh, it's 9/11,' " she said.

"We're still very much affected by it on a daily basis," said Tania Garcia, whose sister Marlyn was killed. "It's an open wound, and every year that passes by just get worse and worse and worse."

Presidential politics and the health of ground zero workers loomed over the anniversary of the terrorist attacks this year, perhaps more than at any other September 11.

The firefighters and first responders who helped rescue thousands that day in 2001 and later recovered the dead were to read the victims' names for the first time. Watch 9/11 memorial ceremonies from New York City »

Many of those rescuers are now ill with respiratory problems and cancers, and they blame the illnesses on exposure to the fallen World Trade Center towers' toxic dust.

Also for the first time, the name of a victim who survived that dreadful day but died five months later of lung disease blamed on the dust she inhaled was added to the official roll.

Felicia Dunn-Jones, an attorney who was working a block from the World Trade Center, became the 2,974th victim linked to the attacks.

A memorial honoring Flight 93's 40 passengers and crew began at 9:45 a.m., shortly before the time the airliner nosedived into the empty field.

"As American citizens we're all looking at our heroes," said Kay Roy, whose sister, Colleen Fraser, of Elizabeth, New Jersey, died when the plane went down. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff planned to speak to the mourners.

In Boston, where two of the hijacked airplanes took off that morning, church bells rang to the tunes of Amazing Grace and America the Beautiful. See how people are honoring 9/11 victims »

In New York, drums and bagpipes played as an American flag saved from the WTC rubble was carried toward a stage. Firefighters shared the stage with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who many victims' families and firefighters said should not speak because he is running for president.

Giuliani has made his performance in the months after the 2001 terrorist attacks the cornerstone of his campaign, but he has said his appearance wasn't intended to be political.

"I was there when it happened and I've been there every year since then. If I didn't, it would be extremely unusual. As a personal matter, I wouldn't be able to live with myself," Giuliani said late last week.

Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, seeking her own party's presidential nomination, also planned to attend ceremonies at ground zero.

President Bush is spending the day in Washington. He attended a private prayer service at St. John's Episcopal Church and held a moment of silence on the South Lawn of the White House.

At the Pentagon, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke at the wall where the plane crashed and told the victims' families that their loved ones will be remembered.

"I do not know the proper words to tell you what's in my heart, what is in our hearts, what your fellow citizens are thinking today. We certainly hope that somehow these observances will help lessen your pain," he said.

Pace also spoke of the military, calling the anniversary "a day of recommitment." At the main U.S. base at Afghanistan, a memorial ceremony was also planned.

For the first time since 2001, September 11 is on a Tuesday, the same day as the attacks, but unlike the clear blue sky that morning in 2001, New York was rainy and gray for the anniversary.

In addition to first responders, others to read victims' names include city workers who participated in the cleanup, construction workers and medical examiner's officials who recovered remains and volunteers who helped serve meals at a church across from ground zero.

The ceremony was moved off the trade center site this year because of increased construction at ground zero. The victims will be remembered in a nearby park just southeast of the site, while thousands of family members planned to descend briefly below street level to lay flowers at a spot near the fallen twin towers.

After threats by family members to boycott the ceremony and hold their own shadow remembrance, the city relented and agreed to let them briefly into the pit to lay flowers on the dusty bedrock.

Several family members worried that Zuccotti Park, just southeast of ground zero, would be too small to accommodate the thousands of people expected. City officials said there was actually more space available than at the previous location, and that fewer people have attended the ceremony each year.

Some New Jersey communities that lost many people in the attacks said their ceremonies were being scaled back, and a local television station, WABC-TV, initially decided not to air the four-hour-plus ceremony live. Station officials reversed the decision when viewers complained.

The total number of victims killed at the World Trade Center site is 2,750. Forty were killed in Pennsylvania and 184 died at the Pentagon. Those numbers do not include the 19 hijackers.

National intelligence director Mike McConnell said Tuesday that U.S. authorities are worried about "sleeper cells" of would-be terrorists inside the United States and are remaining vigilant against any new attacks.

McConnell also said plots against the United States have been thwarted. "We're safer, but we're not safe," he said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."

McConnell said that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network "intends to have an operation in the United States that will result in mass casualties."

"We have stopped some efforts and we must stop all efforts. We're not sure we can stop 100 percent of them," he said.



Higher 9-11 death toll raises questions
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-05-24-wtc-death-toll_N.htm
NEW YORK (AP) — Family members of ground zero workers who died after breathing in toxic dust from the collapsed World Trade Center say they want their relatives officially recognized as victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The official list of victims grew by one this week after the city agreed to include a New York attorney who died of lung disease months after the attack, confusing Sept. 11 family members about what distinguished this death from the scores of others attributed to the aftermath.

The city medical examiner's office said Thursday that Felicia Dunn-Jones' death was the only Sept. 11-related fatality it has been asked to review and definitively link to the twin towers' collapse. In the future, spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said, the medical examiner will review any case if a family makes such a request.

"We certainly never turn anybody down," she said.

That raises the prospect of an ever-increasing death toll nearly six years after the attacks. The count now stands at 2,750 after the inclusion of Dunn-Jones. It's up to Chief Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch to decide whether to reclassify any deaths

"It's his definition that we will follow in this city," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

A police union leader said first responders who became ill and died after working at ground zero should also be added to the city's official victim list.

"First responders who expired as a result of their 9/11-related injuries should in fact be given that same honor," said Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives Endowment Association.

Those responders would include 34-year-old James Zadroga, a police detective who became sick and died of respiratory disease after working hundreds of hours in the ground zero cleanup. A New Jersey medical examiner has ruled his 2006 death was "directly related" to his work at ground zero and exposure to trade center dust.

Zadroga's father said he wanted the city to review his son's case.

"I'm going to go through the process, definitely," Zadroga said. "All these guys were heroes there. They're all dying."

David Reeve, whose wife, Deborah, died last year of an asbestos-related cancer after working for months around ground zero and at the morgue, said he would like her to be recognized as an attack victim.

Attorneys wondered whether the official listing of Dunn-Jones, a 42-year-old civil rights attorney who fled the collapsing towers from her office a block away, would make a difference in lawsuits accusing the city of negligence for failing to protect workers and residents from toxic air at the site.

"I have clients who are starting to call saying, should we dig up the bodies and have autopsies and have tissue samples," said David Worby, who represents 10,000 plaintiffs in a negligence lawsuit against the city. He said at least five of his clients recently died of sarcoidosis, the same disease that killed Dunn-Jones.

Bloomberg said that Dunn-Jones' case is different from those of workers who toiled for months at the site.

"This one case ... the woman was killed as a result of being there at the time of the attack," he said. "Think of it as though somebody had gotten — had a beam fall on them and it just took a little while for them to succumb to their injury. Not somebody who was injured the next day if a beam fell on them during the cleanup. That's a very different situation."



9/11 claims another victim as dust is linked to lawyer's death
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2584129.ece
Almost six years after terrorists tore a hole in Lower Manhattan, the medical examiner's office has stirred controversy by determining that a woman who died months later from a rare lung disease after inhaling toxic dust from the collapsing Twin Towers will be added to the official list of victims.

Felicia Dunn-Jones, a civil rights lawyer, worked in a building a block from the World Trade Centre and inhaled pulverised particles of cement, glass, lead and asbestos as she fled the area of destruction on September 11 2001. Within a few weeks she developed a cough and died in February 2002.

A spokeswoman for the office, Ellen Borakove, said the case of Ms Dunn-Jones was the only 9/11-related fatality it had formally been asked to review, and the only one definitely linked to the collapse of the towers, but indicated others might be considered. "We certainly never turn anybody down," she said.

The decision of the chief medical examiner, Charles Hirsch, means that the death toll at Ground Zero after the inclusion of Ms Dunn-Jones rises to 2,750. Another 184 people were killed the same morning at the Pentagon outside Washington, as well as 40 who died in a hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.

It has stirred fresh anxiety, however, not least among families of those who died in the rubble itself on 9/11, who wonder how many others might be added to the roll of victims in the future.

Within hours of the announcement, union leaders who represented emergency rescue workers who died after being deployed to Ground Zero were asking if they should not similarly be added to the list. "First responders who expired as a result of their 9/11-related injuries should in fact be given that same honour," said Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives Endowment Association.

Additionally, questions were instantly raised about the growing numbers of city workers who joined the months-long clean-up effort at Ground Zero and who are now suffering from breathing problems. Thousands have recently joined a class-action lawsuit seeking to sue the city for negligence.

Police officials pointed to the case, for instance, of 34-year-old James Zadroga, a detective who became ill and died of respiratory disease after working for hundreds of hours at the Ground Zero site. A medical examiner in New Jersey ruled that his death in 2006 was "directly related" to his clean-up duties.

Indeed Mr Zadroga's father, on hearing of Ms Dunn-Jones' change of status, said he would submit a request that the city review the case of his son. 'I'm going to go through the process, definitely," Mr Zadroga said. "All these guys were heroes there. They're all dying." Mayor Michael Bloomberg said all decisions regarding the death toll numbers rested with the medical examiner. "It's his definition that we will follow in this city." But he made a distinction between what happened to Ms Dunn-Jones and to clean-up workers now suffering medical problems.

"This one case... the woman was killed as a result of being there at the time of the attack," he said. "Think of it as though somebody had a beam fall on them and it just took a little while for them to succumb to their injury. Not somebody who was injured the next day if a beam fell on them during the clean-up. That's a very different situation."

But some legal experts thought the decision would add energy to the class lawsuit against the city, which 10,000 plaintiffs have joined. "I have clients who are saying, 'should we dig up the bodies and have autopsies and have tissue samples'," said David Worby, who will represent them.




Dust from 9/11 World Trade Center Attack May Have Caused Permanent Lung Damage in Thousands
http://lungdiseases.about.com/b/2005/07/19/dust-from-911-world-trade-center-attack-may-have-caused-permanent-lung-damage-in-thousands.htm

Fallout
Three years after the World Trade Center attacks, thousands of cops, firefighters, and people who worked and lived near ground zero are sick with respiratory problems. Some have cancer. Is 9/11 to blame? And how safe are the rest of us?
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sept11/features/9875/



9/11's other victims: the rescuers suing New York
http://euronews.net/index.php?page=info&article=442102&lng=1
Six years after 9/11, the personal repercussions are still being felt in America. Thousands died in the terrorist attacks, and their families received compensation. But many rescuers who struggled to help in the dreadful conditions are still suffering.

Democrat Carolyn Maloney says they have been forgotten: "On 9/11, three thousand people lost their lives, many thousands more lost their health. We provided compensation for the innocent Americans who lost their lives, but not for the men and women who ran in to protect and try to save them, who then became sick or died as a result."

Former New York policeman John Walcott was at Ground Zero. He is fighting leukaemia, and believes it is linked to the toxic conditions. "It's frustrating to know, back then you didn't know," he said. "You just went to help people, now that you find out, you read that they knew the air was bad and they still sent you in there."

A class action has been launched on behalf of ten thousand people, suing New York City and clean-up agencies for the health problems affecting rescuers exposed to the conditions at the World Trade Centre.

Lawyer David Worby said: "Even if the city wasn't negligent and these people got sick because they weren't given respirators, and it's no-one's fault, how do you not compensate firemen and cops, construction workers who went down there to help America, and who are sick and dying today, especially when there's a fund set aside for that purpose? It's very sad."

As America and the world remember the events of six years ago, the fall-out from the attacks is a painful, daily reminder of the horrors of that day, and the weeks and months that followed.



More 9/11 Gifts and Legacies
Others Victims of Sept. 11 Who Left Behind a Legacy
http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3584729

This morning "Good Morning America" featured several stories about gifts left behind by victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Nancy Perez secretly wrote a book for her young cousin called "A Butterfly Circus" before her death at the World Trade Center. To find out more about her book, e-mail abutterflycircus@gmail.com.

Alan Beavan, a San Francisco environmental lawyer, "was a giant in his field," said Oscar Braun, president of the California Watershed Posse. "He was the best environmental attorney in the United States."

Beavan was also a hero, reaching the cockpit with others on United flight 93. When he died, Beavan had 87 litigations pending, trying to protect the environment — most of them fighting for clean water. Beavan's work still stands as a shining example of fighting for the environment and working to preserve and extend the Clean Water Act.

Ben Fisher was passionate about saving the Great Captain Island Lighthouse off Greenwich, Conn., which had been dark for decades. The lighthouse was built in 1868. Before his death on Sept. 11, Fisher had just begun raising money to restore its light and have it renovated to reopen.

Almost $400,000 has been raised in his name, including benefits his widow, Susan, received that were donated to the fund. Following Fisher's lead, $600,00 more was raised, and next year the lighthouse will shine again.

Douglas Gardner and Fred Varacchi created Espeed just before Sept. 11. It is now a $300 billion company that helps businesses buy other businesses. It's a huge success and a testament to their groundwork and the work of many other Cantor Fitzgerald colleagues who died on 9/11.



Post-9/11, 'safer today' but 'not safe'
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-terrorism11sep11,1,6166538.story?coll=la-news-politics-national
WASHINGTON -- -- Six years after the deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil, the United States is in many ways unprepared to stop another major strike against the homeland, which Al Qaeda appears intent on carrying out in the near future, four of the nation's top counter- terrorism officials told a Senate panel Monday.

Al Qaeda's intentions have been underscored in recent days by the disruption of suspected terrorist plots in Germany and Denmark, the first propaganda video by Osama bin Laden in three years, and persistent intelligence showing that Al Qaeda has regrouped in a Pakistan haven and is training operatives there for attacks worldwide.

Al Qaeda's media arm said Monday that it was preparing to release a second Bin Laden tape. He is expected to again taunt President Bush and other pursuers, and praise those responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"Our counter-terrorism efforts have disrupted some of the enemy's plans and diminished certain capabilities," John Scott Redd, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "But the events of the last days and the last weeks clearly demonstrate the clear and present danger which continues to exist."

In more than three hours of prepared testimony and questioning, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Redd said significant progress had been made in deterring another attack on the scale of Sept. 11, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

McConnell said counter- terrorism intelligence-gathering was much improved, in part due to expanded post-Sept. 11 electronic surveillance powers, including those under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Confirming a Times report, McConnell told the committee that U.S. electronic intercepts helped in last week's thwarting of an alleged terrorist plot in Germany involving militants trained in camps run by Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Jihad Union.

The surveillance "allowed us to see and understand all the connections" to Al Qaeda, McConnell said. "Because we could understand it, we could help our partners through a long process of monitoring and observation, realizing that the perpetrators had actually obtained explosive liquids."

After the hearing, Redd confirmed that U.S. intercepts played a central role in disrupting a suspected "major" plot in Denmark. Eight alleged Al Qaeda affiliates were arrested.

McConnell said that at least some of the intercepts in the German plot were made possible by a "temporary fix" to the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, in which Congress tried last month to maintain the surveillance system while addressing some legal issues. After the hearing, McConnell appeared to clarify his remarks in an interview with reporters, saying FISA was used in the German case even before the law was changed.

During the hearing, McConnell said he thought the act itself was in jeopardy due to concerns that intelligence officials were "spying on Americans, doing data-mining and so on," which he said was "simply not true."

"If we lose FISA, we will lose, in my estimate, 50% of our ability to track, understand and know about these terrorists -- what they're doing to train, what they're doing to recruit and what they're doing to try to get into this country," he said.

Redd testified of other successes over the last six years, saying authorities had taken thousands of terrorists off streets and battlefields and disrupted dozens of plots.

"All of this means to me that we are safer today than we were on September the 11th, 2001," said Redd, a retired Navy vice admiral, like McConnell. "But we are not safe, and nor are we likely to be for a generation or more. We're in a long war; we face an enemy that is adaptable, dangerous and persistent."

The officials described their fears about how Al Qaeda, its affiliates and terrorists from Europe and perhaps the U.S. were exploiting gaps in the safety net. They cited the recent National Intelligence Estimate, which said Al Qaeda continued to focus on "prominent political, economic and infrastructure targets with the goal of producing mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, significant economic aftershocks, and/or fear in the U.S. population."

All four of the witnesses conceded under questioning that weaknesses remained despite the billions spent on counter-terrorism and domestic security.

McConnell said "significant cultural issues" still hindered the information-sharing necessary to stop an attack. And the various intelligence agencies "still have some distance to go" in hiring and training analysts and case officers who speak key foreign languages such as Arabic and Urdu, he said.

Some senators were far more critical than their witnesses.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said a failure to track individuals who overstayed their visas was "particularly shocking and troubling to me." He also said there were "huge gaps" in the security of the nation's food supply.

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) said the nation urgently needed a national ID card program so that potential terrorists would not be able to use forged or fake identification. The counter- terrorism officials agreed.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said: "We are safer, but there are still gaping holes.

"There are still major problems, whether it's communication, whether it's technology, whether it's the struggle for ideas that we seem to be failing at around the world, whether it's our image in the moderate Muslim world and how that is undermining the ultimate struggle we have -- which is the radicalism that we find in some parts of the Muslim world."

What If 9/11 Never Happened?
http://nymag.com/news/features/19147/

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