September 11, 2001 857to seek the support of the people they had long ruled.
This further destabilized the Middle East. The mili-
tary leaders of Egypt and hereditary rulers of Saudi
Arabia, for example, sought to retain the support of
Islamic clerics while refraining from accepting an
Islamic theocracy—direct rule by Islamic rulers. Arab
leaders cultivated popular support by denouncing
Israel, which refused to return land seized in the
1967 war. The United States encouraged Israel to
trade that land for peace. But few Israelis believed the
promises of Arab leaders who had steadfastly called
for the annihilation of Israel and had funded terror-
ism. Insofar as Israel relied ultimately on American
support, Arab rage was increasingly directed at the
United States.
During these years, Islamist terrorists emerged
throughout the Middle East, usually in response to
the repression of radical Islamic clerics. In 1998 a
new figure surfaced from among such groups:
Osama bin Laden, son of a Saudi oil billionaire. In
1998, bin Laden published a fatwa—a religious
edict—to Islamic peoples throughout the world:
“To kill Americans and their allies, both civil and
military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who
is able.. .” By now, bin Laden was protected by an
extremist Islamic group, the Taliban, that ruled
Afghanistan. (The United States had provided mili-
tary assistance to the Taliban in its ultimately suc-
cessful campaign to drive the Soviet Union out of
the country a decade earlier. See Chapter 30.) Six
months later, bin Laden’s terrorist organization—
al-Qaeda—had planned and ordered the bombings
of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam
in Africa, which killed hundreds of people. Worse
was to follow.
September 11, 2001
At 8:40 on the morning of September 11, 2001,
Madeline Amy Sweeney, an attendant on American
Airlines Flight 11, placed a cell phone call from the
galley of the plane to her supervisor in Boston. In a
whisper, she said that four Arab men had slashed the
throats of two attendants, forced their way into the
cockpit, and taken over the plane. She gave him
their seat numbers so that their identities could be
determined from the passenger log. The supervisor
asked if she knew where the plane was headed. She
looked out the window and noted that it was
descending rapidly. “I see water and buildings.”
Then she paused: “Oh my God.” The water was the
Hudson River, and the buildings were the skyscrap-
ers of lower Manhattan, foremost among them the
110-story twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The hijackers pushed the throttle to full, and the
Boeing 767 was traveling at 500 miles per hour at
8:46 when it slammed into the ninety-sixth floor of
the north tower. A fireball, fed by 10,000 gallons of
jet fuel, instantly engulfed eight or nine stories.
Fifteen minutes later a second airliner came into
view over Manhattan harbor, banked sharply, and
plowed into the eightieth floor of the south tower.
New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had raced
to the scene, asked Fire Chief Peter Ganci, “What
should I communicate to people?” “Tell them to
get in the stairways,” Ganci replied. “I think we can
save everyone below the fire.” The World Trade
Center employed 50,000. As thousands fled the
buildings, hundreds of firefighters, Ganci among
them, charged up the stairs to rescue those who
were trapped.
At 9:30 the White House received word that
another hijacked airliner was barreling toward
Washington, DC. Secret Service agents rushed Vice
President Cheney to an emergency command bunker
far below the White House. At 9:35 the airliner
plunged into the Pentagon and burst into flames.
Cheney telephoned President Bush, who was in
Sarasota, Florida. The nation was under attack. Bush
authorized the Air Force to shoot down any other
hijacked airliners. A few minutes later a fourth
hijacked airliner crashed into a field in Pennsylvania
after passengers had declared their intention—again
by cell phone—to retake the plane.
While television viewers absorbed these shocks,
they watched as the upper floors of the World Trade
Center towers blackened, like charred matches. At
9:59, the south tower collapsed, followed by the
north tower a half hour later, pulverizing millions of
tons of concrete and glass and enveloping lower
Manhattan in choking dust. Nearly three thousand
lay dead in the mountain of rubble, including Chief
Ganci and 350 firemen; several hundred more per-
ished at the Pentagon and in the crash of the airliner
in Pennsylvania.
Teams of four or five Arabic-speaking men had
hijacked each of the planes. Several of the hijackers
were quickly linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist net-
work run by bin Laden, who had previously been
indicted (but not captured) for the 1998 bombing
of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the 2000 attack
on the USSCole. Bin Laden operated with impunity
in Afghanistan.
That evening President Bush addressed the
nation. He spoke simply and with force. “We will find
these people,” he said of the terrorists. “They will
pay.” Any government harboring the terrorists—an
obvious reference to the Taliban—would be held