9/11 Echoes June 2004
I vaguely heard something on the TV about a plane crash- but I was on my way out the door and didn't stop. I came back just in time to see the second plane crash into the tower, but I am not sure whether that was live or a replay. That morning is locked in a place without time, a forever realness of being there, yet I only remember one detail. I heard a reporter saying "is that tower leaning?", but he immediately said "no, that's not possible." The next thing I remember that morning is the sight of the first tower coming down.
Almost everything that happened that day was recorded. There was no planning, little supervision, events went straight from the source to the airways with little or no editing. We heard sounds, saw pictures- the voice of life as it happened. By the end of the day accounts of the horrific events that transpired were beginning to form. The media and the government began to tell us what had happened, why it happened, and what we were going to do about it. But many of the sounds and sights recorded that day quietly and quickly went away, and the voices that sounded them became fainter and fainter, drifting away from consciousness like echoes on the edge of a canyon.
Yet those sounds were made, and they still exist. If they will be mentioned in the 9/11 commission final report, it will probably be only be as an obscure footnote. Certainly we will hear little of them in the coming election rhetoric. But nothing can erase the plain, naked truth of their existence. We must remember them because our future will flow from them.
Echoes of People
People did things that day; not carefully planned and studied responses, because regardless of whether we should have known it would happen, we didn't know, and our first reactions came not from our rehearsals or preparations, but from our hearts, our instincts. At the same time our president huddled in the depths of a concrete bunker in the middle of Nebraska, the body of Denease Conley lay buried in the stairwell of the south tower. Her body was there because she had acted from her spirit. She chose to stand there to guide fleeing people to the exits. No apocryphal explanation after the fact can erase the record of these two events, one heroic, one cowardly.
We were not prepared for 9/11. People in the middle east, in the Philippines, in Kosovo, in Ireland, in so many places around the world had been exposed to that kind of sudden danger. They knew it could happen-- sitting with friends in a Jerusalem coffee shop, it was there, perhaps only as a brief feeling of anxiety as a stranger walked by, and a subliminal sense of relief to find oneself still sitting there after they had passed. But not here.
On the morning of September eleventh, there were no pamphlets explaining what to do in case of a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. We occasionally heard that plans were in place. They would have a practice drill now and then. We could read about it in the paper, no need to reflect on it. But then it was real, and they didn't spring into action, guiding us through the steps they had planned out well in advance. There was no leadership, there was just us. And we were magnificent. Firemen, police, medical professionals, plumbers, truck drivers all rushed to the scene, many to die in the process. Spreading out from the epicenter, people either rushed to help, or started walking home. They gave each other rides, held each others hand. And elsewhere, we rushed to blood banks, we reached for our billfolds, we smiled at other drivers in traffic and waved them on. Reporters were on hand to document the looting, the riots, the panic that they had said would come. But the entity in charge in the midst of that chaos was the American Spirit, it had been living in our hearts since we had declared ourselves free of foreign rule. We paid token homage to it in our pledge of allegiance, in our flag, in our memorials, but we had mostly forgotten. And when the world got real; when no one was in charge, we showed our mettle, just we, the people.
While the American people were heroically responding to the attack that day, our leadership was missing in action. And to understand that, to let it help us decide what to do now, we need to return to some of the sounds of that day that have drifted away.
Hear the voice of Denease Conley. That may not have been the person behind the voice, but it seems likely. What is important for us to remember is that the voice on the stairwell of the World Trade Center's south tower belonged to just a plain old run-of-the-mill American. She was wearing a security guard uniform, probably making minimum wage, yet she stood there directing people out of the building. When a stockbroker urged her to seek her own safety, she replied that she was not leaving until everyone else was out. Two weeks later workers found her body in the ruins.
During the very same time period, in the midst of that national disaster, President Bush calmly walked out of a Florida classroom five minutes after he got the news. Why certainly he did not want to frighten the children. But no sooner was he out of earshot than he hightailed it out of there as fast as Air Force One could climb into the sky. No one knew where he was. He made a quick stop at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, really nothing more than a news bite photo op. Air Force One next appeared about 3:00 PM on the ground in Nebraska, at Offutt Air Force Base. President Bush scurried into an unobtrusive brick building and down into the heavily fortified Underground Command Center of the Strategic Command. There were no communication facilities or presidential tools in the bunker that had not been available on Air Force One, but apparently he felt safer there. Hours past before he made the decision to take up his post in Washington, not unlike the medieval cleric who exclaimed "there they go, and I must hasten to catch them, for I am their leader." Back in Washington, just before going to bed, President Bush dictated words for the White House daily log, words that faded away in the coming months, but we need to recall them now. "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today. We think it's Osama bin Laden."
Listen to more sounds that were recorded that day. Zero in on a couple of planes. Aboard Air Force One were some of the most experienced, highly trained members of the they. Multiple redundant security measures were in place. In the hands of the most competent, trusted, well equipped team that could be assembled, this happened: The pilot of Air Force One ordered an armed guard to stand at the cockpit door. Secret Service agents double-checked the identity of everyone on board. The crew reviewed the emergency evacuation plan. F-16s hovered around "Angel ", a code name for Air Force One. There was a brief period of panic when air traffic control spotted a "suspect airliner dead ahead." It was only later that we found out the alleged threat against Air Force One, in addition to being so unlikely as to be downright silly in the circumstances, had been fabricated; and the "suspicious airliner" was simply a regular commercial passenger jet trying to land in response to orders from the FAA.
A separate plane in the air that morning carried 45 people less carefully selected. Just the normal flight crew, another 30 plus people with little prearranged connection, and a small band of terrorists. And in the chaotic confines of United Flight 93, bound from Newark to San Francisco, this small group of average citizens became the true America. They had no intelligence reports from the CIA, no memos from the FBI, no elected official to guide them. No armed guards were on board to protect them, not even a secure lock on the cockpit door. Acting alone, they made executive decisions of the highest order. America was under attack. The enemy was planning to use them as weapons against other Americans. They declared war. We don't know what weapons they chose, but we do know something of the choices they had. For chemical weapons they could use a pot of hot coffee, for artillery they had full cans of Pepsi, maybe even a laptop computer to serve as an armored vehicle. They had not been inducted, there was no commander in chief to order them into battle. The decision to die fighting was theirs alone. No greater heroes have ever earned our gratitude and admiration
Numerical Echoes.
In all the effort to determine the causes of 9/11, of all the things that should have been done that weren't, we will perhaps never know if the hijacking could have been prevented. But one fact, little remembered now, is absolute. When the hijackers made their move on that day, all 266 people on those four planes were probably doomed. There must be a hundred ways to bring a plane down. In January of 2004 the elusive official death count from the 9/11 terrorist attack was 2,976. And one simple, irrefutable fact cannot be erased. If the cockpit doors had not been breached 2,710 of those people would not have died. Some others might have died on the ground where the planes crashed, but not that 2,710.
The most cowardly and dangerous lie we believed immediately after the planes crashed into the twin towers can be summarized this way... no one, even in their wildest, most fearful assessment could ever have predicted that an event this evil could have occurred. No sane person could possibly have committed such an act: ergo, the hijackers were insane and since we are sane, we could not have foreseen such an unspeakable act.
The blood of two thousand, seven hundred and ten dead human beings from around the world begs to differ. What is truly unthinkable, is a way those 2,710 could have died had the cockpit doors not been breached. The precision with which the planes struck the two towers and the pentagon could not have happened without skilled hands on the controls. And there is no way the skilled hands of the regular flight crew could have been forced to do that. Imagine the terrorists not being able to get into the cockpit, but still able to communicate with the pilots. Suppose they had slit the throat of a flight attendant and ordered the pilots to fly into the towers or they would kill all the passengers one by one. That is not an act a human being could be forced to do, and even had the impossible occurred and a pilot tried to obey the terrorists, the other crew members in the cockpit would have prevented that precision maneuver.
On that day, on those planes, could existing technology have guaranteed that the terrorists could not have forced their way into the cockpit? Well, how about the high tech device known as a dead bolt- just a regular heavy duty dead bolt from off the shelf of the nearest hardware store. And that same store would no doubt have a peep sight that would only have required a simple hole drilled in the door, permitting the cockpit crew to see on the other side of the locked cockpit door. Granted, the after the fact reinforced cockpit doors are considerably fancier, at about $13,000 a door, but that cannot erase the fact that on that day, on those planes, keeping the terrorists out of the cockpit was possible with simple mechanical devices commonly available.
The question remains, could a rational person have ever imagined a need for such protection? It is now clear the 9/11 commission will answer that question in the affirmative, and that specific terrorists threats to airlines had been known for years. Whether our government should have foreseen that terrorists would take over control of passenger airliners and use them as living bombs, however speculative the answer, begs the real question. The definitive question is whether the cockpit doors should have been secured irrespective of any perceived terrorist threat?
On December 7, 1987, David Burke left a hearing of Pacific Southwest Airlines, a hearing at which he had been fired for stealing $68.00 from the attendant's cocktail fund. As an airline employee, Burke was able to bypass security at Los Angeles International Airport and smuggled a 44-magnum pistol aboard PSA Flight 1771. Once on the plane he wrote a note on an air-sickness bag which read: "It's kind of ironical, isn't it? I asked for leniency for my family, remember? Well, I got none and now you'll get none." Burke then entered the unlocked cockpit and shot the pilots and himself. The plane crashed into a farmer's field near Paso Robles, killing 44 passengers and crew. A rational act? Of course not, but neither was it an insane act beyond imagination. The echo that must not be allowed to fade away completely is that Burke was not performing an act of jihad, he was not making a political statement of any kind. He had not been promised eternal bliss in heaven with the services of 17 virgins. His was a personal grudge, his motive, however erroneous, was to make up for perceived injuries to his family.
On July 23,1999, Yuji Nishizawa got up from his seat on All Nippon Airways flight 61 and forced his way into the cockpit armed with a kitchen knife. Flight 61 was a Boeing 747 crowded with 517 passengers and crew. Nishizawa fatally stabbed the pilot, took over the controls and put the plane into a steep dive. The plane plunged to within 1000 feet of the ground before the co- pilot and off duty personnel subdued the man and took back over the plane, which landed safely. An act of terrorism? No, the man was fascinated by flight simulators and reportedly simply wanted to "soar through the air."
Many such near disasters were poorly reported and soon forgotten. Long before 9/11, and entirely separate from the concept of international terrorism, the extreme danger created by the unlocked and flimsy cockpit doors was well known. And all along the complete removal of the danger was a simple matter of mechanical modifications requiring no technological advances.
In all of these instances the only reason disaster was avoided stemmed not from some prudent safety precautions under the supervision of the FAA, but the unauthorized, physical intervention of passengers and crew. Disaster after disaster was averted just because average citizens took matters into their own hands. Although some people were rescued both at the towers and the Pentagon by federal employees, on 9/11 not one single life was saved because of the intervention of any federal agency geared up to prevent terrorist acts. While officials at the FAA wrung their hands, NORAD pilots flew off in the wrong direction, and our leaders scampered for bomb shelters, the only heroes in the life saving business that day were just plain citizens.
Behind the din of the 9/11 Commission hearings, and the coming election cacophony are two sounds that can not, must not, be allowed to be silenced. Our greatest safety will come from our own actions, and our most valuable weapons are our own instincts and determination. While we look to our government and our technological developments, we need to remember that the tools to prevent the loss of those 2,710, and the tools that were used to kill them, were located on adjacent shelves in the hardware store down the street.
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