Some held their heads in their hands. Others wept openly. A few stared straight ahead.
It was the end of the 11 September commission’s public hearings and those in the cavernous auditorium in Washington knew that they had just heard the final, definitive account of the world-changing events 33 months before.
They had heard a story that shattered myths and provided few comforts.They had heard of the chaos in the administration and air defence systems on that fateful morning; they had heard of the failures of the security services of the most powerful state in history; they had heard from inside the terrorist cell that hatched — and successfully executed — the most ambitious attack ever. They had heard the truth at last.
For some, the proceedings brought calm. Others remain angry. ‘There’s an invisible wound in my heart that can only be closed with truth and by someone accepting responsibility,’ said April Gallop, who survived being buried in the rubble of the Pentagon.
The commission, an independent, bipartisan panel formed by primary legislation and the reluctant signature of the President, has interviewed hundreds of officials, intelligence experts and politicians, including George Bush. It owes its existence to pressure from relatives of those who died on 11 September, 2001, and thus has the moral power to force powerful figures to testify before it. They revealed that the terrorists owed their success, at least in part, to the confusion, errors of judgement and laziness of those charged with defending America. The inquiry allows the full story of the attacks to become clear.
The story starts in Pakistan where, in the 1980s, thousands of young Arabs gathered to aid the Afghans in their war with the Soviet Union. Some, such as Osama bin Laden, tall, handsome scion of one of the Gulf’s richest families, were minor celebrities. Others, such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, a tubby young Pakistani engineer, shunned the limelight.
When the Russians withdrew in 1989, many militants, including Mohammed, turned their attention to another superpower supposedly set on the domination and humiliation of Islam: America. Over the next few years Mohammed worked contacts in Pakistan and among wealthy sympathisers in the Gulf, sourcing funding and volunteers for a wide range of terrorist operations against US targets. One involved a young Pakistani called Ramzi Yousef, who in 1993 tried and failed to blow up the World Trade Centre. According to an FBI agent interviewed by the commission, it was a money transfer to Yousef to fund the strike that first brought Mohammed to the attention of American intelligence services.
But no one was paying much attention. In 1994 Mohammed moved to Manila in the Philippines, where he hooked up with Yousef again for an ambitious attempt at a long-standing pet project: the simultaneous destruction of a number of civilian passenger jets. The process that would lead to 11 September had begun.
At first things went badly wrong. A fire led police to the flat where Mohammed’s team were making bombs. Yousef fled — and was caught in Pakistan. Mohammed escaped to Qatar where, sheltered by local politicians, he was able to lie low.
But the respite was short-lived. Hounded by US intelligence agents, Mohammed was forced to move on again, to Afghanistan, where the hardline Taliban militia had taken control a few months previously. Bin Laden had also recently returned to the war-racked south-west Asian state.
Mohammed still dreamed of executing his pet scheme. Bin Laden, he knew, had access to vast wealth. It was not, the commission reveals, his own money, as often previously claimed, but came from a series of wealthy donors in the Gulf and the collection boxes of several mosques in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden, who was steadily establishing control over the pre-existing infrastructure of militant training camps in Afghanistan, also had access to that most precious of terrorist commodities: skilled and motivated men.
In late 1996, according to the commission, Mohammed went to bin Laden and pitched his grand idea: to hijack 10 planes in America and crash nine into the headquarters of the CIA and the FBI, the tallest buildings on the East and West Coasts, and into nuclear power plants.
Mohammed himself would hijack one plane, kill all males on board, land it, release the women and children, then denounce American policies in the Middle East at a press conference. Bin Laden listened to the proposal but, worried by the complexity of the plans, did not commit himself. Not yet.
Bin Laden had been active, but hardly high-profile, since the end of the Afghan war. He had spent five years in Sudan after being in effect expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, farming, building roads and organising a network of militants. In 1994, according to the commission, came the only real contact with the Iraqis. First he helped Islamic militants in northern Iraq opposed to Saddam, but Khartoum ordered him to cease the support and arranged for meetings with a senior intelligence officer from Baghdad. It went nowhere. Political pressure forced the Saudi-born militant out of Sudan soon afterwards.
Bin Laden had schemes of his own. In August 1998, one came to fruition. Suicide truck bombs destroyed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Emboldened, bin Laden and his aides cast about for new projects to take the war to the Americans on their home ground. In early 1999 Mohammed was summoned to Kandahar, the southern Afghan desert city where bin Laden and the Taliban had their headquarters. His plan was on.
Following the attacks in Africa, President Bill Clinton authorised the killing of bin Laden. Three times in the next 18 months airstrikes to kill him in Afghanistan were cancelled at the last minute, despite bin Laden being ‘in the cross-hairs’. Even now, according to the commission, the lead CIA official in the field believes this was the ‘lost opportunity’ that would have prevented 11 September.
As he prepared to leave office, Clinton tasked Richard Clarke, his counter-terrorism chief, with putting together a plan to take on al-Qaeda. It aimed to arrest members, attack its financial networks, freeze its assets, expose the network of Islamic charities funding it, insert special forces into Afghanistan and support the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Clarke presented the plan in December 2000, a month before Bush would take office in the wake of that year’s nail-biting election finish.
Clarke briefed the new administration and urged his plan be adopted immediately. But, though a Senate report recommended the setting up of a ‘National Homeland Security Agency’ and warned ‘mass casualty terrorism directed against the US homeland was of serious and growing concern’, the Bush administration was more focused on a planned missile shield and Iraq. Incoming officials thought the departing ‘Clintonites’ were terrorism-obsessed. Contact with the Taliban, aimed at forcing them to give up bin Laden, dropped away. On 8 May, 2001, Bush announced a task force headed by vice-president Dick Cheney to develop action on counter-terrorism. It never met.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed had his own problems. Bin Laden had given him four experienced terror operators to complete his plan, but two were refused entry to the US. Worse, the two Saudis who had made it to San Diego were unable to speak English and unlikely to be able to complete the flight training they needed
Then came a breakthrough. Four young Arabs, who had been living in Germany, arrived in Afghanistan seeking training to fight in Chechnya. All spoke decent English and were used to the West. If they could be trained as pilots, they would be perfect. By early 2000 they were back in Hamburg with instructions to get visas, go to the US and start flying. Their targets, decided at a meeting with bin Laden himself, were to be the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and the Capitol, seen as the source of America’s pro-Israeli policies, and their leader, appointed personally by the terrorist mastermind, was a 30-year-old Egyptian called Mohamed Atta. By mid-2000, three of the four were in the US. With the two Saudis on the West Coast, al-Qaeda had five operatives in place, all learning to fly.
There were still many problems, however. The commission used interrogation reports of Mohammed, captured in Pakistan last year, and other members of the plot to construct a picture of al-Qaeda’s inner dynamics. They found that, like the Americans, they were also riven by personality clashes, grumpy workers, overbearing bosses and arguments over strategy.
Back in Afghanistan, there were fierce arguments among the al-Qaeda high command over the advisability of attacking the US. Some were concerned by the possibility of massive reprisals. Mullah Omar, the reclusive cleric who led the Taliban, was adamantly opposed to the plan, not least because of pressure from his Pakistani allies.
Bin Laden overruled Mohammed on the targeting of the attacks, cancelling a second wave of strikes. The austere, fanatical Atta clashed with the more easygoing, extrovert Ziad al-Jarrah, a young Lebanese from a cosmopolitan background who was to be one of the pilots. Jarrah missed his young Turkish girlfriend, with whom he was very much in love, and it took persuading from senior al-Qaeda figures to keep him from withdrawing entirely from the conspiracy. When one of the Saudis went home without permission, Mohammed wanted him removed from the plot. Bin Laden overruled him
One thing went smoothly, however. The camps in Afghanistan were able to provide a trained pilot and 19 young men to provide ‘muscle’, all of whom arrived in America during the spring and summer of 2001. Mohammed resisted pressure from bin Laden to strike in the early summer, refusing even to pass on the al-Qaeda chief’s impatience to Atta, who he knew would attack when ready.
On 10 July, 2001, Kenneth Williams, an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona, sent a memo to the agency’s headquarters. He was suspicious about the actions of some Middle Eastern students at a local flight school. He thought that terrorists might be trying to infiltrate the civil aviation system. His memo was ignored. But there were other clues. One of the most explosive and contentious pieces of information revealed by the commission was a secret briefing given to Bush on 6 August, 2001.
The document, declassified only after intense pressure, was titled ‘Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US’. Without being specific, it warned that al-Qaeda was trying to send operatives to the US through Canada to carry out an attack using explosives, was looking at ways to hijack planes and may have had a support network in the country.
There were other warnings during that long, hot summer. On 16 August, Zacharias Moussaoui, was arrested for suspicious activity at a flight school. Moussaoui piqued the interest of the FBI after showing little interest in learning to take off or land. Incredibly, his arresting agent wrote he was the ‘type of person who could fly something into the World Trade Centre’. Another FBI agent on the case speculated that a large aircraft could be used as a weapon. Still no one connected the dots.
Worse, the CIA had learnt the names of the two Saudis weeks before they had arrived in the US — but had failed to pass them on to the FBI. The agency was worried. Analysts had noticed a huge upsurge in ‘chatter’ — the communications between known militants.
In Afghanistan rumours were spreading of an imminent strike. According to Mohammed’s interrogation, bin Laden had told recruits to pray for the souls of the 20 future martyrs before going underground for much of July. At points in the summer, camps had been evacuated, as if to escape retaliation.
On 4 September, as Washington was getting back to the business of government after the summer, Clarke held his long-awaited meeting about putting his anti-terror plan to the President. Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell decided to go ahead. But the plan would never make it to the President’s desk. The terrorists would strike first.
At 8.21 the transponder aboard American Airlines Flight 11 was turned off and controllers lost touch with the plane. Atta and his team of hijackers had taken control and killed the pilot and his cockpit crew. At 8.24 came the first direct confirmation that the attacks were under way. Atta was heard from the ground. ‘We have some planes, ‘ he said.
Four minutes later, the Federal Aviation Administration was told. Nine minutes after that, the military was informed. With a normal hijacking, such delays would probably not have mattered. With this sort of attack, they were crucial. In phone calls now released by the commission, the sense of unreality and confusion in America’s attempt to deal with the crisis is evident from the beginning. When the FAA controller informed the Northeast Air Defences Sector (Neads), the military command centre, about the hijacking, he asked for fighter aircraft to be scrambled.
‘Help us out,’ he pleaded.
‘Is this real world or exercise?’ was the response.
‘No, this is not an exercise, not a test,’ insisted the controller.
At 8.46 two F-15 fighters were scrambled from Otis Air Force Base to intercept Flight 11. But they were 240km away. And too late. Atta was seconds away from plunging his jet into the north tower of the World Trade Centre. A few minutes later, Bush, visiting a school in Florida, was told a plane had hit the World Trade Centre. However, aides said it was a twin-engined craft and pilot error was suspected. He continued with his visit in an air of normality. For him, the world had not yet changed.
That was not the case at the FAA. Controllers were already frantically worried by Atta’s reference to ‘planes’ in the plural. Did that mean more jets were under threat? At 8.47, less than 60 seconds after the first crash, the transponder on United Airlines Flight 175 blinked off. It went unnoticed until 8.51, when a controller spotted the change and ordered it switched back on. There was no response. Seven minutes later one FAA controller in New York told another: ‘We might have a hijack over here, two of them.’
At 9.01, the FAA told Neads about the second plane. ‘Heads up, man, it looks like another one coming in,’ said another FAA official. Two minutes later, the second plane hit the south tower. Bush was informed of the disaster — in front of the full glare of the cameras — by an aide whispering in his ear that ‘America is under attack’.
Just three minutes before Flight 175 hit its target, FAA officials in Indianapolis noticed that Flight 77 from Washington had disappeared from the radar. Controllers started notifying other official agencies that the craft had probably crashed. In fact, it too had its transponder switched off. The plane had turned around and was now heading right back towards America’s capital
Fighter jets at Langley Air Force base were scrambled at 9.23 but, amazingly, were ordered into the air in the mistaken belief that Flight 11 was still in flight and headed in the wrong direction. At 9.32, when Flight 77 was detected on the radar again, heading for Washington, the Langley jets were too far away to help. An unarmed National Guard cargo plane was asked by the FAA to follow Flight 77. It was too late. ‘It looks like that aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, sir,’ reported the crew. It was 9.38 and the terrorists had scored three out of three.
But still it was not over. Ten minutes before Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, controllers in Cleveland had heard sounds of a struggle from United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, New Jersey. Between 9.34 and 9.38, controllers moved several other aircraft out of the way as Flight 77 rose unexpectedly into the skies.
Frantic mobile phone calls from relatives and loved ones meant that the passengers were all too aware of what their fate was. Todd Breamer said a prayer with the phone operator on his mobile, then helped lead a passenger assault on the cockpit with the now famous phrase: ‘Let’s roll.’ At 10.03, Flight 93 crashed into the ground just outside the village of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. When it crashed, the Langley jets had stopped chasing the phantom Flight 11 and were chasing the phantom Flight 77 — after it, too, had already crashed. Jets were now patrolling Manhattan, though no new attacks were to come. Incredibly the military was informed of the hijacking on Flight 93 at only 10.07, four minutes after its passengers had brought it down.
It had taken just under two hours in all. Hundreds of people were already dead. Thousands more would still die as the World Trade Centre towers crumpled and fell. The world had changed. But, for now at least, the attack was over.
It had exposed a huge inability of the American state to cope with such an assault. Time after time, actions by officials had come too late. Jets had chased after planes that had already crashed, while real hijacked planes went unnoticed. The military authorities were not informed or were given the wrong information. Cheney was to tell Rumsfeld he believed two hijacked planes had been shot down on his orders, saying: ‘It is my understanding that they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out.’
But it was all just rumour and speculation. Rumsfeld was surprised at Cheney’s claim. ‘We can’t confirm that. We’re told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that they did it,’ he replied. General Richard Myers, chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was honest in his testimony last week when he described the confusion: ‘We fought many phantoms that day.’
The commission has now shown that the military had no chance of bringing down the hijacked planes. Cheney’s order to fire on the jets came only after the last one had crashed. Even then, it was never issued to the fighters which had taken off from Langley. A breakdown in military command meant that senior officers were not passing on the orders to the pilots until they were clarified. The commission was brutally honest about the efforts of the FAA and Neads that day: ‘They struggled under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defence against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet.’ In fact, the only effective response came from the passengers of Flight 93. ‘Their actions saved the lives of countless others and may have saved either the US Capitol or the White House from destruction,’ the commission noted.
There were also technical problems. Bush has complained he was unable to get a secure phone line to Cheney and had to rely on a mobile phone call as he was hustled on board Air Force One. His motorcade even took a wrong turn during the evacuation and had to reverse. Bush and Cheney spoke first at 9.15 and again at 9.45, as Bush was waiting to board his plane. ‘Sounds like we have a minor war going on here,’ Bush told his vice-president and close friend. ‘I heard about the Pentagon. We’re at war … somebody’s going to pay.’ At last someone in power had got something right.
The commission will produce its final report next month. It has already released detailed interim conclusions and few real surprises are expected. However, the fallout is likely to be considerable. The intelligence services will come under heavy criticism, although some of the attacks will be defused by the recent resignation of George Tenet, the CIA chief. The administration’s failure to tackle terrorism will be highlighted.
That is bad news for Bush in an election year. Since 11 September, he has defined himself as a ‘war president’ who can keep America safe. It is the core of his re-election strategy. Despite lagging just behind Democratic challenger John Kerry in recent polls, he always outscores his rival on issues of national security. If that position is undermined, a central part of Bush’s campaign is threatened. If the commission’s criticism of Bush’s administration is harsh, it could be the difference between victory and defeat.
And, for surviving victims such as April Gallop, the salve for the ‘open wound’ they have been waiting for.
11 September myths exploded
Myth number one
A strong relationship existed between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden.
Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, said in a speech to the United Nations in February 2003: ‘Iraqis continued to visit bin Laden in his new home in Afghanistan. A senior defector says Saddam sent his agents to Afghanistan some time in the mid-1990s to provide training to al-Qaeda members.’
Commission: ‘In 1994 bin Laden is said to have requested [help] but Iraq never responded… There have been reports that contacts also occurred [in Afghanistan after 1996] but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship.’
Myth number two
Mohammed Atta, the leader of the hijackers, met an Iraqi agent in Prague on 9 April, 2001.
James Woolsey, the former CIA director (and a close friend of many neoconservatives), said in October 2001: ‘The Czech confirmation [of the Prague meeting] seems to me very important… It is yet another lead that points toward Iraqi involvement in some sort of terrorism against the United States that ought to be followed up vigorously.’
Commission: ‘Based on the evidence available — including investigations by Czech and US authorities plus detainee reporting — we do not believe that such a meeting occurred… We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda co-operated on attacks against the United States.’
Myth number three
Al-Qaeda was involved in drugs trafficking.
‘[Al-Qaeda] activity includes substantial exploitation of the illegal drugs trade’ — a press statement issued by the British government in October 2001
Commission: ‘No persuasive evidence exists that al-Qaeda relied on the drug trade as an important source of revenue.’
Minute by minute: How the 21st century’s Pearl Harbor unfolded
07.58 American Airlines Flight 11 takes off from Logan airport, Boston, for LA.
08.13 After a routine instruction for Flight 11 to turn right, communication is lost.
08.14 United Airlines Flight 175 leaves Boston and begins acting erratically. This is not picked up by air traffic controllers because the controller responsible for that flight was also handling Flight 11.
08.20 American Airlines Flight 77 leaves Dulles International Airport, Washington.
08.24 The voice of Mohamed Atta confirms the flight has been hijacked.
08.37 Norad, responsible for defending North East American airspace, finally receives word of the hijacking.
08.45 American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Centre.
08.53 Two F-15 fighter jets scrambled from Otis Air Force base, 240km from New York.
09.00 Aviation officials realise that a second hijacked plane is heading for New York. The Federal Aviation Administration reports: ‘Heads up, man, it looks like another one is coming in.’
09.03 United Airlines Flight 175 hits the south tower of the World Trade Centre.
09.05 George Bush is visiting a school in Sarasota, Florida, when he is told a second plane has hit, but he stays sitting for five minutes. He later tells the commission investigating 9/11: ‘[My] instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis’.
09.15 Bush moves to a holding room where he is briefed. Both he and his aides have no idea that other planes have been hijacked.
09.21 Aviation officials realise that American Airlines Flight 77 is missing.
09.32 US military air defence officials realise Flight 77 is only about 10km — little more than a minute — from the White House. An unarmed National Guard C-130H cargo plane is scrambled.
09.42 All flights are halted by the Federal Aviation Administration.
09.43 American Airlines Flight 77 hits the Pentagon.
09.57 Fighter escorts for Air Force One leave their Florida base.
10.03 Another hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93, en route from New Jersey to San Francisco, crashes in rural Pennsylvania after passengers attack hijackers.
10.05 The south tower of the World Trade Centre collapses.
10.10 F-16 fighter jets arrive over Washington, but are not cleared to fire on airliners.
10.17 Tele-conference call under way between senior aviation and administration officals.
10.20 F-15s receive authorisation to shoot down any threatening airliner. But order never passed on to the pilots.
10.28 The World Trade Centre’s north tower collapses.
10.38 US pilots receive orders from General David Wherley that they can shoot down any hijacked planes.
13.44 The Pentagon deploys five warships and two aircraft carriers to protect the East Coast from further attack. Two carriers and three frigates, armed with guided missile destroyers capable of shooting down aircraft, head for the New York coast.
23.30 Before going to sleep, President Bush writes in his diary:
‘The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today… We think it’s Osama bin Laden.’
Research: Mark Hudson – Guardian Unlimited Â