9/11: A journey through memory and airspace

This is a picture of me on the top of the World Trade Center South Tower in late August 1991 or early September, roughly ten years before 9/11. The picture was taken by my then-wife when we were on a delayed trip around the world a year after we married. Memories being fragile and fragmental, I don’t have much recollection of the building other than vague inklings conjured up by that photo. I do remember the fantastic views and from that spot I looked out to the Statue of Liberty. In those days the Statue was still open to the public but the queue to climb the stairs was too long so we didn’t bother going to the top when we were there the day before.

Getting to the top of the World Trade Center was far less problematic. I don’t remember the queue being onerous, the minute long trip to the 107th floor was probably just as uneventful as this one in September 2000 just one year before the towers were obliterated. Yet something had already changed between 1991 and 2000 – the World Trade Center had been seriously bombed. While I was on honeymoon, the planning to destroy the towers had already begun. The aim of the 600kg explosion that went off in February 1993 was to knock one tower into the other and bring both tumbling down. That didn’t happen but the blast killed six people, seriously damaged five sublevels and sent smoke spiralling up 93 floors of both towers making evacuation difficult and two hours long.

The 1993 perpetrators came from all over the Middle East led by Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Yusef. The bombing was financed by Yusef’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who is now in Guantanamo Bay and probably the main reason Obama broke his election promise to close it. As well as WTC 1993, his terror credits included the 1995 Bojinka Plot to blow up 12 US airliners and also crash a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yusef said the idea for using planes to crash into buildings came from his friend Abdul Hakim Murad, who in turn heard it from the CIA. An undeterred Khalid Mohammed apparently proposed the plan of the 9/11 plot to Bin Laden in 1996.

Whether that is true or not is debatable, but the idea of suicide attackers has long been an extreme staple of warfare because it is so difficult to defend against. It entered the political landscape in 1881 when Tsar Alexander II of Russia was attacked by Nihilist Ignaty Gryniewietsky who who blew himself up killing the Russian ruler in the process. Gryniewietsky’s last letter read: "Alexander II must die...He will die, and with him, we, his enemies, his executioners, shall die too...How many more sacrifices will our unhappy country ask of its sons before it is liberated? It is my lot to die young, I shall not see our victory, I shall not live one day, one hour in the bright season of our triumph, but I believe that with my death I shall do all that it is my duty to do, and no one in the world can demand more of me.”

Gryniewietsky's dangerous conflation of honour and purpose was exactly the same as that inspired Japanese kamekazes in WW2 and later infused Yusef, Sheik Mohammed and those that came after them in 2001. Osama Bin Laden is now dead so there is no way of knowing what role he played in 9/11. What is clearer is the role of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 19 terrorists that brought down the four planes in the attack. Atta was one of just 4 who weren’t from Saudi Arabia.

Born in Egypt, he graduated in architecture at the University of Cairo and was the key person in the Hamburg cell of radical jihadists that got together from 1998. Atta and other members of the cell went to Afghanistan to meet Bin Laden where they agreed to work with Al Qaeda. In March 2000 he sent an e-mail to 60 companies inquiring about flight training, "Dear sir, we are a small group of young men from different Arab countries,” Atta wrote. “We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots.”

His application for a 5-year US visa was approved and he flew to Newark in June 2000 to enrol in the Accelerated Pilot Program at the Academy of Lakeland in Florida, bankrolled by Sheik Khalid. Within a month Atta was flying solo as was his friend Marwan al-Shehhi (who would lead the South Tower attack as Atta took out the North). With daily training. Atta earned his commercial pilot’s licence in November 2000. He told trainers he was hurrying because he had a job lined up at home. With plenty of money to wave around, no one asked him any questions.

By the end of the year, Atta was studying flight deck videos for most of the major commercial airline planes including Boeing 767s and Airbus A320s. In July 2001 Atta went to Spain to meet Yemeni-born Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a fellow Hamburg cell co-conspirator. Ramzi was supposed to be one of the attackers but could not secure a US visa because immigration officials thought Yemenis would illegally overstay their visit. Ramzi supposedly passed on Bin Laden’s instructions what was to be targeted: "four symbols of America”: Congress, the Pentagon, and the two towers.

A plan to get a 20th hijacker to replace Ramzi was thwarted when Saudi-born Mohammed al-Qahtani (also now at Guantanamo) was not allowed in the country because he arrived with a one way ticket and not enough cash to convince authorities he wouldn’t end up an illegal immigrant. It meant Flight 93 had four hijackers unlike the five on the other planes making overpowering them slightly more feasible.

On 23 August 2001 two events occurred that might have raised the alarm about Atta. His driving licence was revoked in court for failing to turn up to defend driving when without a licence earlier that year. The same day Mossad included him on 19 names they gave to the CIA they said were planning an imminent attack. But no-one connected the dots. On September 10, he drove to Portland, Maine where he was scheduled to fly to Boston at 6am on the 11th. At the airport the following morning, Atta was selected for extra screening by the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System.

The Clinton administration launched CAPPS in the late 1990s as a response to the growing terrorist threat. The system uses information on the ticket booking matched against no-fly lists, FBI fugitive lists and other data to assign a risk score. CAPPS deemed 8 of the 19 attackers worthy of further attention. One was ignored because he had no bags, and the rest, including Atta passed muster because their bags contained no explosives. The process was designed to stop people leaving bombs in the luggage and then leaving the airport. But it did not take into account people who wanted to use the planes themselves as another example of the poor man’s air force.

On arrival at Boston, Atta and the others had to go through security again – something the hijackers were not expecting and got angry about - but they got through without incident. The Portland detour served several purposes – a smaller airport was easier to get through, it deflected attention from the fact 8 other Middle Eastern men were leaving directly from Boston and also left the operation intact if Atta had been arrested in Maine.

There was no evidence Atta had box cutters aboard the plane. He did have two Swiss Army knives and a Leatherman multi-tool. He boarded American Airlines Boeing 767 Flight 11 to LAX scheduled to depart at 7.45am. 81 passengers (out of a 158 capacity) and 11 crew were aboard. Two hijackers sat in first class, Atta and two others sat in business class with none in economy (coach). Flight 11 took off at 7.59am and was close to cruising altitude in 15 minutes. The last routine instruction the plane responded to was “American 11 turn 20 degrees right”. When air traffic control radioed Flight 11 seconds later to climb to 35,000 feet, there was no response. They asked 8 more times in the next 10 minutes with no answer.

By now Atta and his 4 helpers stabbed and slashed their way to control of the cockpit. At 8.19am flight attendant Betty Ong rang the NC reservations office to say there was something wrong. She rang that number because it was a common help line for passengers with reservation issues. Her call lasted 25 minutes, though only a default first four minutes was recorded. A calm sounding Ong told the bemused operator the cockpit was not answering her calls and she thought they were getting hijacked. She said two attendants had been stabbed.

By 8.25am Boston air traffic control knew there was a hijack situation. They heard a hijacker’s voice saying “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be okay. We are returning to the airport”. Seconds later Boston Control heard him say “If you try to make any moves you will endanger yourself and the airplane.” As they escalated the information, Ong told NC the plane was flying erratically. Boston told FAA command in Virginia the flight had entered New York air space.

Another Flight 11 attendant Madeline Sweeney got through to Boston Airport and spent 12 minutes talking to the American Airlines flight service manager. The airline then set up an emergency response centre. By now Ong was reporting a fatality in seat 9B held by former Israeli soldier Daniel Lewin. A minute later Boston heard another message from the cockpit: "Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport.” Boston desperately tried to raise Cape Cod military staff to get fighters airborne to tail the plane.

By 8.38am Ong was telling the operator the flight was descending rapidly. At the same time, Boston told the North American Aerospace Defense Command's Northeast Air Defense Sector a plane had been hijacked. Battle Commander Colonel Robert Marr was getting ready for a NORAD exercise when he confirmed this was "real-world" and ordered fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts to battle-stations. He phoned Major General Larry Arnold who confirmed the order to scramble the planes and “get permission later”.

At 8.44am the Ong call ended abruptly. At the same time Sweeney was saying “Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent... we are all over the place." The flight service manager asked her to look out the window to work out where they were. Sweeney told him, "We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low." Seconds later she said, "Oh my God we are way too low" and her call ended.

A minute later the Air Force was scrambled but had no idea where to go. At 40 seconds past 8.46am, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the World Trade Center. Atta, Ong, Sweeney and 89 others in the plane were dead as well as countless others in the North Tower. The full horror of Sheik Mohammed’s planned day would take just two more hours to enfold on the world, mostly on live television. The scars it left on America’s psyche, the Arab world and the airplane-travelling public have yet to heal 10 years later.

Ultimately Sheik Khalid Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden were successful in hastening the destruction of US power. In October 2001, Bush turned down a Taliban offer to hand over Bin Laden to a third country and as early as late 9/11 Rumsfeld was pushing the line to bomb Iraq “because there were no targets in Afghanistan”. At no point was any effort made to punish Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah for providing most of the terrorists or Egypt's Mubarak for providing Atta.

Instead the PNAC agenda pushed the 9/11 disaster cost of $240 billion out to the dubious double war cost of $1,248 trillion and counting. At 10 percent of US GDP in a time of financial crisis, neither crippling war can yet be considered a success. Instead, they represent a victory to terrorists far greater than they could have imagined with the long-planned destruction of large buildings.

CIA's destroyed tapes renews talks of 9/11 conspiracy theories

US Congress has called for an investigation into the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes claiming there may be an illegal cover-up. The call follows an admission by the agency’s Director-General Michael Hayden that in 2005 the CIA destroyed two videotapes of interrogations of al-Qaeda prisoners. Hayden said the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities of the CIA interrogators. But his admission has raised questions about trust and what other evidence the CIA has destroyed.

Because the tapes featured 9/11 suspect Abu Zubaydah, these latest revelations are a boon to those who believe in the 9/11 conspiracy theory. Writing in Time magazine ex-CIA operative Robert Baer says that although he didn’t believe the World Trade Center was brought down by explosives, or that a rocket struck the Pentagon, he says he has “felt the pull of the conspiracy theorists”. But he dismisses the idea as something the CIA were capable of doing. “I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn't all that good at it, and certainly couldn't carry off 9/11,” he said. “Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with.”

Veteran Canadian political activist and journalist Barrie Zwicker is less certain that Baer knows the truth about 9/11. In 2002, he was one of the first mainstream journalists to question the official word on what happened that day. In 2006 he published the book “Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11” which forensically examines much of the evidence and finds the official record wanting. His book provides 26 exhibits (conveniently labelled A to Z) which he claims provides proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that 9/11 was an inside job. Zwicker calls this a “false flag” operation and in the book he describes many examples of similar operations from history.

The subtitle of Zwicker’s book alludes to the heart of what he sees as the problem: a media cover-up. Zwicker says that the world’s media and their wealthy owners have colluded to prevent discussion of alternative scenarios of what might have happened on 11 September 2001. He claims the three biggest secrets about 9/11 are a) the size of the constituency of non-believers in the official story b) the body of evidence that disputes the official record and c) the fact that the media have steered clear of this evidence, although it is readily available. Zwicker castigates the politically motivated 9/11 Commission report which found that 19 Arabs, funded by Bin Laden and others, organised and planned the operation catching the entire US intelligence, military, political and diplomatic establishment off guard.

Exhibit A in Zwicker’s repudiation is the collapse of the third building, WTC7, at 5:20pm on 9/11. The 9/11 commission report does not describe how the building collapsed but the official story is that the building was struck by debris falling from the collapsing twin towers and then fires made it unstable. Firefighters evacuated the building after they heard creaking sounds. The building collapsed a couple of hours later. The official cause was “loss of structural integrity likely as a result of weakening caused by fires”. Zwicker disputes this. He says the building was the home to CIA and Secret Service offices and the collapse had all the hallmarks of a controlled demolition.

Zwicker’s next five most important pieces of evidence all relate to North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD). He says NORAD did not follow standard operating procedures (SOP) that day. SOP states that in the event of a major problem such as a hijacking, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) contacts NORAD who can scramble fighters to the scene ‘within a matter of minutes’. The 9/11 report says NORAD had just nine minutes notice for the New York attacks and none at all for the others. Zwicker says this is contradicted by evidence from the FAA’s Laura Brown.

Once scrambled by NORAD, the F-15s from Otis air base did not know where to go and were ordered out into the Atlantic in a holding pattern awaiting further instructions. Meanwhile Andrews Air Force Base less than 20km from Washington was unable to protect the capital. The commission claimed Andrews had no fighters on alert but Zwicker cites Aviation Week which said three F-16s were nearby on a training mission. Zwicker also says NORAD has had plans for precisely just such an emergency since the Soviet threat of 1961. Scrambling fighter aircraft had been a routine occurrence for years before 9/11.

Zwicker quotes Michael Ruppert who said in 2004 that the “mysterious and inexplicable failure” of US’s air defences is the “most glaring and gaping hole” in the official story. Barely mentioned in the official testimony is the fact that the US was conducting major war games on the day of the attacks. These included Northern Vigilance, Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior and Tripod II. These games included scenarios of hijacked airplanes in the area where all four attacks actually occurred. The flood of “noise” from these games caused what Ruppert called a “paralysis of fighter response”.

The next five pieces of Zwicker’s evidence (H through L) relate to the Twin Towers. He says the WTC collapse revealed many features of controlled demolitions (including oral testimony from firefighters), and the Twin Towers were designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. He also cited evidence from similar out-of-control highrise fires in Los Angeles and Philadelphia that showed steel-framed towers don’t collapse because of them. Finally, Zwicker says the steel from the WTC was removed from the scene before it could be examined which was a federal offence.

Exhibit M looked at President Bush’s immediate response. Zwicker says that Bush’s decision to stay in the Florida classroom for eight minutes after being told of the second attack was inconsistent with official protocol. Zwicker asks why didn’t the Secret Service remove him? His answer is that their behaviour suggested they knew what was going to happen and they did not fear for his life.

The next two points cover the Pentagon. The 9/11 Commission claims Pentagon officials did not know about the hijacking of Flight 77 which it says struck the building at 9.38am local time. Again Laura Brown disputes this saying the FAA shared details of all hijacked flights to NORAD. Zwicker also disputes what hit the building saying alleged pilot Hani Hanjour was too incompetent to fly a Cessna let alone a jetliner. He also claims the hole was not big enough to cover the wings and the videotape evidence shows no airplane.

Exhibits P and Q related to Flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania after a passenger revolt. Zwicker claims the flight was shot down and parts of the airplane were found scattered over a wide radius. He also disputes the use of cell phones aboard the plane. He claims that cell phones don’t work above 2,500 m and the countryside of rural Pennsylvania has no service anyway. He says the cell phone stories were a “real-time channel for lies necessary to the official story’s ‘Script’”. Presumably Zwicker did not interview relatives of the dead to corroborate this claim.

The next three pieces of evidence relate to the 9/11 Commission itself. President Bush waited 441 days before reluctantly establishing a commission to investigate 9/11 and then starved it of funds (the commission had a $14m budget compared to the $40m available to investigate Clinton’s sex scandals). He tried to put Henry Kissinger in as chair and when that failed he appointed Philip Zelikow as executive director. Zelikow was a member of George Bush Snr’s administration. Their eventually report was “571 page lie” according to David Ray Griffin, who says he has found at least 100 inaccuracies in the report.

Exhibits U through W examined the role of the CIA and FBI. The CIA has long been the training ground for terrorists around the world. According to Michael Springmann, the US consulate in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia was run by the intelligence services. They are also linked to the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency who apparently wired $100,000 to 9/11 leader Mohamed Atta shortly before the attacks. The FBI also provided protection to suspected terrorists and agent Sibel Edmonds who was gagged by Attorney-General John Ashcroft after she queried issues ignored by the 9/11 Commssion.

Exhibit X was the apparent unusual behaviour of Wall St traders in the days before 9/11. The two airlines impacted had “put” options 90 percent greater than normal in the week before. Exhibit Y documented the close connections between Osama Bin Laden and the CIA and the final one, Exhibit Z looked at how the Bush neo-con Project for a New American Century (PNAC) called for a “New Pearl Harbor” as a catastrophic event that would allow the US to play a more dominant role in securing oil in the Gulf.

Zwicker says the original Pearl Harbor was one of many examples of a ‘false flag’ operation. He says that President Roosevelt had advance warning of the attack but deliberately stood by in order to bring the US into the war. Zwicker quotes other examples from history including the Guy Fawkes gunpowder plot which ended the influence of Catholicism in England, Hitler’s Reichstag fire in 1933, the Tonkin Incident which escalated the Vietnam war in 1964 and the Kuwaiti incubator baby deception in 1990 which swung US support around to an invasion of Iraq.

Many of Zwicker’s arguments are demolished in an article in Popular Mechanics which provides valid reasons to support the official cause of the WTC7 collapse, as well as the Pentagon attack and other kinks in the evidence. Nonetheless Zwicker’s book is a useful attack both on the politicised nature of the 9/11 Commission (and its refusal to pin blame on internal incompetence and political interference) and the refusal of the mainstream media to even countenance an argument of the conspiracies on their merits. Zwicker also rightly counsels people to question what they see and read in the media.

Parachuting for news

Woolly Days has finished reading the book Journalism: Investigation and Research (edited by Stephen Tanner). It is a compulsory text for a course in News and Information Gathering and a worthwhile read for its own sake. The book is a collection of examples of Australian investigative journalism from many of its best practitioners. It provides a practical and theoretical framework for investigative journalism. Tom O’Byrne was the ABC China correspondent in 2001 and he contributed a piece called “parachuting for news” for the anthology. It is a fascinating insider’s guide to the frenzied art of foreign correspondence.

The Poynter Institute for journalism defines parachute journalism as the practice of producing distorted news reports by journalists inexperienced in the culture they are writing about. Often this is not the fault of the journalist. Deadline pressures and intense media competition have often made for stereotypical or distorted accounts of places and the people who live there. Poynter argues that although media have made great efforts to eliminate racial, ethnic, and gender bias from their coverage, a less apparent bias persists: Geographic bias.

At the start of his essay Tom O’Byrne hints at the problems foreign journalists face in their occupation. He laments the fact that there is no handbook for journalists called “Covering a conflict: what to take and what to leave at home”. ABC foreign reporters have a lot of ground to cover. They appear in ABC TV news bulletins and other TV programs such as Lateline, Foreign Correspondent and The 7.30 Report. They are also a regular part of internet news bulletins around the clock at ABC News Online and on ABC national and local radio networks, on the continuous news station NewsRadio and the ABC's international broadcaster Radio Australia.

O’Byrne was in Beijing in 2001 when the 9/11 attack occurred. Immediately, he was on the phone reporting on the Chinese reaction to the attack throughout the night that followed. After 12 hours he was finally getting some sleep when the head of ABC international news, Bronwyn Kiely, rang. He and his crew were to get visas and leave for Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, on the first available flight. Their brief was to report on Pakistan’s emerging role in the story. Across the world, the calls were repeated. The Moscow correspondent flew to Jerusalem. The Bangkok contact flew to Tajikistan. The Washington correspondent had to immediately cut short his Venezuela trip and head home. Other organisations were also on the march. It wasn’t easy with US airspace closed. The BBC chartered a commercial passenger jet filled with people and equipment and flew it to Montreal where trucks were waiting to cart the lot across the border and down to New York.

O’Byrne wasted no time in setting up a bureau at his Islamabad hotel. He got set up with a 24 hour driver, a translator, access to fax machines, and four local mobile phones with $2,000 credit. On field trips the ABC shared costs and translation services with two non-competition media, the Baltimore Sun and US National Public Radio. The ABC made big use of contacts in Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta and Kabul they used in previous stories. A local telephone book was a saleable commodity and books on Afghanistan history and the Taliban were also hot property among the media contingent.

The language barrier often played havoc. O’Byrne remembers one tense media conference at the Taliban embassy in Islamabad. Reporters stared in disbelief when the Taliban spokesman declared the attacks on America was ‘the fault of Iran’. Journalists whispered to each other whether they’d heard it correctly. Finally one asked “can you clarify why you might be blaming Iran?” His question caused consternation on the Taliban side and much whispers on that side of the table. Finally it emerged that the translation had got it wrong. 9/11 wasn’t the sensational ‘fault of Iran’ but the more predictable ‘fault of their own’.

O’Byrne would be a very busy man in the last few months of 2001. There was no room for adjusting to local time zones and his deadlines for the Australian morning news and current affairs radio shows were 1am and 3am. There were more deadlines at 7am and midday. He filed up to ten stories a day and caught sleep where he could in patches for 36 days straight. Getting the story out could be problematic. They had to deal with potential Pakistani censorship of satellite feeds and find one of the few satellite feed points. The only one in Islamabad was the rooftop of the Marriott Hotel which charged each of its dozen ‘live shot’ clients US$1,500 for the privilege. But money was no object; networks across the world were spending big after 9/11. The BBC bill for the first three months topped $30 million.

When O’Byrne did his field trips into Afghanistan, he took two satellite phone units, a camera and a video transmission unit. They could send vision back to Australia in twenty minutes. For radio broadcasts, O’Byrne used computer laptop-editing software to connect to the Internet to transfer compressed story packages back to Sydney. They also carried ISDN codec equipment that allowed them to use ISDN telephone lines to produce studio-quality sound from the field. They had specially adapted ‘lip mikes' designed to be used in a breeze and still produce sound with minimum distortion because it is held close to the upper lip.

Reporting is sometimes a dangerous business. O’Byrne attended a political rally at Quetta cricket ground where he interviewed five angry Muslim men who were decrying US foreign policy on Islamic causes. Suddenly they were surrounded by 200 men. No-one dared touch the reporters but it was an awkward situation which wasn’t resolved until local police waded in with sticks to clear a path out. Several journalists were killed in the early days of the war. When in the field, O’Byrne and his crew wore flak jackets and travelled in large convoys often with armed escorts.

O’Byrne does a fine job of exposing that the life of a foreign correspondent is often far from glamorous and exciting. But its clear that despite all the hassles, he was totally absorbed in the experience of being at the epicentre of the biggest story of the world.

No Stone unturned

This week the New York medical examiners office identified remains for three more victims of the 9/11 attacks. One of the remains identified belong to Karen Martin who was a flight attendant on Flight 11 which crashed into the North Tower. The second remains belong to Douglas Stone who was a passenger on the flight. The third person was not publicly identified. The victims were identified after families submitted additional DNA samples to the medical examiner's lab. The remains were recovered long ago and were not involved in recent discoveries that prompted renewed searches.

The identification and grim discovery of further body parts has forced Oliver Stone to defend the timing of his latest film World Trade Center. He told reporters in Beijing last week, “"It's a shame, but part of our life. Maybe there would be another movie about it (if I hadn't shot it). To see it can be painful, and you can cry in the movie, but pain and crying sometimes is good.” Stone’s movie concentrated on the stories of John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno. McLoughlin and Jimeno were officers working for the New York Port Authority Police Department (PAPD). McLoughlin led a team of four officers, including Jimeno, into the main concourse between the two towers.

They were wheeling rescue gear towards the North Tower when they heard a boom. A fireball the size of a house was heading towards them. It was the collapse of the South Tower. The five men ran toward a freight lift and were buried under concrete and steel. Two of the men died instantly. McLoughlin, Jimeno and a third officer Dominick Pezzulo survived the impact. Pezzulo was able to free himself and set about freeing the other two trapped men. But then the North Tower collapsed and Pezzulo was mortally injured by the resulting debris. Before dying, Pezzulo fired a single shot into the air to warn potential rescuers. McLoughlin's legs had been crushed fully in the second collapse. The two men could not see each other. The sergeant spoke into his radio. In response, he heard only static.

The two surviving men were trapped 9 metres from the surface of the rubble. The two men kept talking to each other urging each other to stay awake. McLoughlin wasn’t optimistic. He reminded Jimeno that the site was unstable and the light was fading. Rescue teams wouldn't be sent out until first light the next morning at the earliest. He was right; the site had been cleared because the adjacent 7 WTC building was in flames and in danger of falling. This 47 story steel frame building collapsed seven hours after the North Tower.

The heat was stifling in the debris, and Jimeno was drifting in and out of consciousness, struggling to stay awake. The rising temperature set off the dead Pezzulo’s gun and Jimeno was surrounded by a hail of gunfire. Finally all the bullets were spent and he was relieved to find himself unscathed. The two men kept up an incessant chatter to keep each other awake. Meanwhile although the official rescue effort was delayed, two men were searching the rubble. They were both ex US marines Dave Karnes and Jason Thomas. Contrary to the way he was portrayed in the movie, Thomas is a black man whose identity was unknown until this year. The two men searched the dangerous and dark landscape carrying little more than flashlights and an infantryman's shovel. They climbed the mountain of debris, skirting dangerous crevasses and shards of red-hot metal, calling out "Is anyone down there? United States Marines!"

Finally Jimeno heard the voices from above. "Yes!" Jimeno shouted. "Yes! PAPD officers down! Two of us! This is Officer Will Jimeno and Sergeant John McLoughlin is with me. He has four kids. I have a daughter and my wife is pregnant. Please don't leave. Please!" We're not leaving you," the man's voice assured him. "This is Marine Corps Staff Sergeant David Karnes and Sergeant Thomas is with me." Karnes promised Jimeno that they would get them out. He crawled into the rubble to get to Jimeno. He then called for help. He was unable to get through to New York authorities whose lines were jammed. He called his sister in Pittsburgh. She called her local police department and explained the emergency, and miraculously they were able to get through to officials in Manhattan.

Two emergency services officers, Paddy McGee and Scott Strauss followed a paramedic, Chuck Sereika. They were wedged into the pit with Sergeant Karnes while firefighter Tom Asher held off the flames. More officers rushed down to help. They freed Jimeno’s leg. Then he was eased out of the pit and put in a Stokes basket. He was passed hand-over-hand to safety. He had been trapped for 13 hours. Then a second rescue team was sent in to dig out McLoughlin. It would take eight more hours to free him. By dawn the next day he was being rushed to the hospital. McLoughlin spent six weeks in a medically induced coma while doctors performed 27 operations on his legs. Jimeno spent nearly three months in the hospital and rehabilitation. Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin were the last of 20 survivors pulled from the wreckage of the World Trade Centre.

The remains of about 40 percent of those killed at Ground Zero have not yet been identified.

The War on Democracy

In “Meet the Press” three days after 9/11, a grim-faced US Vice President Dick Cheney issued an ominous warning: “We've got to spend time in the shadows. We have to work toward the dark side, if you will. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.” The vice president became the chief architect of the new war on terror. He designed new laws enhancing executive power, institution strong action in the US and abroad, and above all instituted a regime of secrecy.

The CIA knew immediately that Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organisation was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. George Tenet was the CIA director at the time. He was a holdover from the Clinton administration and distrusted by Cheney and his close confidante Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary. Rumsfeld had wanted to finger Hussein for 9/11 but the facts did not support his assertion. Cheney and Rumsfeld had worked together since the Ford administration and also in the elder Bush presidency. They distrusted the CIA since it failed to pick Iraqi nuclear activity prior to the first Gulf War. But Tenet was allowed to run with the immediate response to 9/11 and he prepared the invasion of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban. The CIA bought off the Northern Alliance and the military were brought in a month later. By now Rumsfeld and the Pentagon had assumed control of the operation. By mid-November Kabul had fallen. The CIA wanted to take on Al Qaeda across the world.

Cheney and Rumsfeld started to set up their own intelligence networks in the Pentagon. They discovered a story that Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attacks had allegedly met Iraqi agents in Prague. Cheney announced this to the world as a fact in December 2001. However Atta was in Florida at the time of supposed meeting. Cheney continued to spread the rumour of the Prague – Atta link for the next two years. His case is strengthened by information from the captured Sheikh al Libi (no relation to Scooter Libby). Libi admits under torture that Saddam Hussein provided training in chemical weapons to al Qaeda. By August 2002, Cheney was selling the idea that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). Congress would have to vote for the war based on Cheney’s information. Tenet was brought in to do a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq for Congress. A process that ordinarily takes months or years would be reduced to just over two weeks. Cheney was determined to control the content of the NIE. He and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, had made about 10 trips to CIA headquarters, where they personally questioned analysts.

In September the New York Times published outdated information from 1990 "Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminium tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium." The NIE was kept in a locked room where Congress could read it, but few did. In mid-October, they voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Iraqi war resolution. A declassified version of the NIE, known as the "white paper" was prepared by the CIA and released three days later. It was a glossy advocacy piece designed to strengthen support for the war. Bush quoted the NIE in the 2003 State of the Union speech “Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction”. A controversial assertion that Saddam was buying nuclear material would become known as "the 16 words”. They were: “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”.

One of the chief arguments the Bush administration used to justify the invasion was that Iraq was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons programs." They claimed that Iraq attempted to obtain processed uranium from Africa, and that it attempted to acquire specialized aluminium tubes to enrich that uranium. Bush included both of these allegations in his State of the Union speech advocating war. However the African connection was already known to be untrue. In 2002, the CIA sent diplomat and African expert Joseph Wilson to Niger. His brief was to find out if Iraq bought or attempted to buy “yellowcake” from Niger. Yellowcake is uranium concentrates obtained from leach solutions. It is mainly used in the preparation of fuel for nuclear reactors, where it is processed into purified Uranium dioxide for use in fuel rods. However it can also be enriched for use in nuclear weapons. Wilson spent eight days talking to Niger’s uranium officials. He found no evidence that Niger and Iraq had done business on yellowcake.

As a result, The State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) sent a memorandum in March 2002 to Secretary of State Colin Powell stating that claims regarding Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium from Niger were not credible. Nonetheless the allegation was included in the NIE and the State of the Union. After the address, the administration stepped up the allegations until IAEA Director General Mohamed El-Baradei emphatically told the UN Security Council that the documents allegedly detailing uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are "not authentic" and "these specific allegations are unfounded." One week before the invasion, Powell acknowledged that the documents concerning the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal might be false.

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was a presidential adviser and former Chief of Staff and assistant for National Security Affairs to vice-president Cheney. It was Libby who pushed Cheney to publicly argue that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and 9/11. He wrote the speech for Colin Powell’s February 2003 address to the UN. There was strong doubt over information in Powell’s speech from the NIE: "Baghdad has mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents. These facilities can evade detection and are highly survivable." The source for this information was an Iraqi code-named "Curveball." His story had been given to the American intelligence network by the Germans, but they could not verify the accuracy of his claims. Powell was not told that there had been warnings from the Germans that Curveball was an undependable alcoholic. Powell used information from Sheik al Libi, who was rendered and tortured in Egypt, about Iraq providing training to Al Qaeda. Libi had made it up. The US invaded in March and found no WMDs.

On July 6, 2003 Joseph Wilson went public and wrote an article “What I didn’t find in Africa” for the New York Times. His second sentence was damning: “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat”. Cheney was furious. He wrote “Did his wife send him on a junket?” The administration hit back. It leaked a rumour to the Washington press that Wilson's wife Valerie had arranged his trip to Niger. Washington Post journalist Robert Novak disclosed that Valerie Wilson was working as an undercover CIA agent under her maiden name, Plame. Whoever disclosed her name to Novak was guilty of a crime under US law. US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald investigated the matter. Joseph Wilson, buoyed by public outrage and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, announced that he would not rest until the Bush spin doctor Karl Rove was arrested. Wilson suspected him of the leak because Rove was a friend of Novak. It has since been revealed that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the one who first mentioned Valerie Wilson's name to Novak. Scooter Libby had told the New York Times’s Judith Miller.

Prosecutor Fitzgerald indicted Libby in October 2005 on five counts of criminal charges. He immediately resigned his government position and pleaded not guilty at his arraignment. Judge Walton set a trial date for January 2007. It was Libby - along with Paul Wolfowitz and a handful of other top aides at the Pentagon and White House - who convinced the president that the U.S. should go to war in Iraq. Despite Libby’s indictment, Cheney got everything he wanted for out of the CIA. Tenet resigned in June 2004, and kept his mouth shut. The CIA’s power is now with Cheney’s team in the Pentagon.

Snakes and Leaders

Woolly Days went to two movies this week that could almost be seen as companion pieces: United 93 and Snakes on a Plane.

A character in Akira Kuresawa's Rashomon says “human life is as transient as the morning dew” and in United 93 and SoaP, human life appears very transient indeed. In the real life fiction of United 93, that happened in the morning with the dew of terrorists. In the fiction of the fiction of SoaP, that happened in the night with the dew of snakes. Many died in both films, though the fiction of fiction demanded survivors. After all, no would believe anyone would sneak an army of snakes onto a plane and make them angry with pheromones to make the plane crash. Whereas everyone now knows planes are good for crashing into things.

Actually some one did believe you could sneak snakes onto a plane. The idea dates back to World War II when brown tree snakes regularly got onto Cargo planes in the Pacific. Some Hollywood scriptwriters charmed millions out of eager producers to make the film based on two sentences and just four words: “Snakes. On a Plane”. And how indeed could it go wrong. Here finally was the culmination of the meeting of two classic claustrophobic genres as horror thriller. Humans in the tightest of spaces, with no control over their destiny, are confronted with their worst phobias: the fear of crashing and CGI Snakes. The guys in painting had a field day. It was a herpetologist’s dream job; describing hundreds of snakes to graphic artists.

But United 93 has its own horrors. Here too there is double terror. The terror of knowing all this, or something like this, actually happened is combined with the slow terror of a convincing narrative. There are several narratives at work in United 93. There is the story of what might have happened on flight United 93 itself. Then there is the story of the air traffic controllers and the Armed Forces. And finally there is the central story; the tale of the Federal Aviation Administration.

President Bush's White House counsel and now Attorney-General Alberto Gonzalez made a post 9/11 speech where he justified going to war without a congressional declaration and the government's decision to imprison US citizens such as dirty bomber Jose Padilla without charging them with a crime or allowing them a lawyer. Gonzalez reminded his audience Bush needed the power to make quick decisions and Congress would take too long. He cited the example of the 9/11 decision to close down US airspace and force commercial and private planes to land or remain grounded. But The person who made that decision without needing government clearance was not George Bush but Ben Sliney. Sliney had been appointed the National Operation Manager for the FAA and September 11, 2001 was his first day in the new job.

Ben Sliney plays himself in the film. Barely minutes into his new job, he is faced with a possible hijack situation. There is a puzzling message on a tape: “we have planes”. Soon enough, aeroplanes go missing off the screen and appear seconds later on CNN. Initial report is a light plane has hit the trade centre. But it’s bigger than that. How many more are out there? There goes the second tower. There goes the Pentagon. What’s next? As it happened there was only one more. Sliney was not to know that and took the courageous decision to bring down every flight in US airspace. The film audience had been following the fourth flight since all its anonymous passengers checked in. From its delayed start time of 8am to the crash was just over two hours, perfect movie length.

The snakes on this particular plane are four men: Three Saudis and their Lebanese leader Ziad Jarrah. It was Jarrah’s responsibility to fly the plane once they overwhelmed the pilots. Jarrah's father told the Wall Street Journal one week after the attack his son always wanted to be a pilot but was discouraged by his family. Jarrah went to Germany to study and learn the language. No-one is sure how he became involved with extremism though he may have known members of the Hamburg Cell. In 1999 he and several friends (including the two world trade centre pilots Atta and al-Shehhi) decided they would fight in Chechnya against the Russians. But Bin Laden asked them instead to train in Afghanistan for a terrorist attack.

Jarrah suddenly appeared very secular. He reported his passport stolen in 2000 and got a duplicate (just as Atta and al-Shehhi did the month before) and travelled in and out of the US many times. He attended combat classes and flight schools and learned how to fly a jet. He got a speeding ticket in Maryland two days before the flight. There is debate whether his final letter is a suicide note or not. It mentions farewells but also has scuba diving instructions.

The film audience catches up with him preparing and praying on the night before. He boarded United 93 with the other three. There was also seven crew and 33 other passengers in a 182-seater Boeing 757. The aircraft was scheduled to depart at 8am, but was delayed 40 minutes due to routine heavy morning Eastern seaboard traffic. 50 minutes into the flight, Jarrah and his team took control after a minute-lomg struggle. At 9:39am, air traffic controllers overheard Jarrah saying "this is the captain. Would like you all to remain seated. There is a bomb on board, and [we] are going back to the airport, and to have our demands [unintelligible]. Please remain quiet."

There were no further transmissions. The plane changed direction and flew towards Washington. 24 minutes later the plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The film pieces evidence from the 9/11 Commission Report to suggest the passengers and crew, aware of events elsewhere through their phones, fought back and forced the plane to crash-land. The pageant is gripping but exhausting. It is played out in mostly apolitical strict cinema verite style by Paul Greengrass who did a similar job on Belfast’s Bloody Sunday.

Whereas Greengrass’s script was written for him, SoaP had a few more challenges. But it also had a few more supporters. A whole army of bloggers passed it on by word of e-mouth and they also crowdsourced plot devices, some of which were taken up by director David Ellis. The movie also had an established star; Samuel Leroy Jackson would be aboard the flight. There was something strangely comforting in this. Everyone watch the film know that sooner or later he was going to get fed up and “have it” with these muddafuggen snakes on a muddafuggen plane and do something about it. That’s been Samuel L’s style since Pulp Fiction. He even got them to change the title back after the studio started calling it “Pacific Air Flight 121”.

Unlike United 93, the passengers on Pacific Air Flight 121 had a chance with Jackson on board. Despite moments where it veered into dangerous Airport 75 territory, it is quite a funny film. It is also jumpily scary at times. Humans go to war with snakes. And it’s a very dirty war. The movie is sadistic, ruthless and graphic, deliberately turned on to achieve an R Rating in the US. A very large anaconda, rather unnecessarily thrown in for its restricting qualities among the multitude of poisonous snakes almost steals the show in its rare air time by squeezing and eating a particularly pompous Pom. As well as being the most Internet hyped film to date, SoaP is awash in product placement. There may have been some Occupational Health and Safety issues on the shoot. The film did not just rely on computerised serpents, it used 450 live snakes of 25 different species. I assume the anaconda wasn’t one of them.

Anacondas aside, United 93 and SoaP tell the same story of the transience of the morning dew. I don't want to see either any time soon in my in-flight entertainment.