Posted on 09/13/2001 9:41:28 AM PDT by t-shirt
September 13, 2001 Posted: 1:46 p.m. EDT (1746 GMT)
The U.S. Department of Transportation Thursday announced that those U.S. airports which have complied with new heightened security restrictions will be allowed to reopen. Below is a list of 25 major U.S. airports and their certification status.
Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport - cleared to open http://www.atlanta-airport.com/
Boston - Logan International Airport - closed http://www.massport.com/logan/
Charlotte/Douglas International Airport - cleared to open http://www.charlotteairport.com/
Chicago - O'Hare International Airport - closed http://www.ci.chi.il.us/WorksMart/Aviation/OHare/
Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport - cleared to open http://www.cvgairport.com/
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport - cleared to open http://www.dfwairport.com/home.asp
Denver International Airport - cleared to open http://www.flydenver.com/
Detroit Metropolitan Airport - cleared to open http://www.metroairport.com/
Honolulu International Airport - cleared to open http://www.state.hi.us/dot/airports/index.htm
Houston - George Bush Intercontinental Airport - cleared to open http://www.houstonairportsystem.org/
Las Vegas - McCarran International Airport - cleared to open http://www.mccarran.com/
Los Angeles International Airport - cleared to open http://www.lawa.org/lax/laxframe.html
Miami International Airport - cleared to open http://www.miami-airport.com/
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport - cleared to open http://www.mspairport.com/
New York - John F. Kennedy International Airport - cleared to open http://www.panynj.gov/aviation/jfkframe.HTM
New York - LaGuardia Airport - cleared to open http://www.panynj.gov/aviation/lgaframe.HTM
Newark International Airport - cleared to open http://www.panynj.gov/aviation/ewrframe.HTM
Orlando International Airport - cleared to open http://www.state.fl.us/goaa/
Philadelphia International Airport - cleared to open http://www.phl.org/
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport - cleared to open http://www.phxskyharbor.com/
San Francisco International Airport - cleared to open http://www.flysfo.com/
St. Louis Lambert International Airport - cleared to open http://www.lambert-stlouis.com/
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport - cleared to open http://www.portseattle.org/seatac/default.htm
Washington Dulles International Airport - airport facilities open, but airlines not ticketing passengers http://www.metwashairports.com/Dulles/
Washington - Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport - airport facilities open, but airlines not ticketing passengers
September 13, 2001 Posted: 1:59 AM EDT (0559 GMT)
CNN
By Gary Tuchman
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Hundreds of buildings are damaged in the area around what was the World Trade Center complex, some of them with huge holes that put them at risk of collapsing themselves.
The damaged buildings, along with some still-standing beams of the destroyed World Trade Center towers that could fall at any time, forced rescue workers to go slowly in their desperate search for more survivors.
On the 75-foot-high wreckage of those twin towers -- still smoking in places from smoldering fires -- more than 1,500 workers climb and dig, hoping to find more survivors. Above them loom 12 buildings with huge holes in them, threatening to collapse. One 20-story building seems as if it would tumble in a heavy wind.
As the rescue workers make their way through the rubble, they carry dishes. It is in those dishes they put the body parts they find.
Five people were pulled from the rubble Wednesday. A ballroom in a nearby building, set up to receive survivors, was empty Wednesday afternoon.
Another room -- part of a damaged Brooks Brothers store next to the World Trade Center wreckage -- is set up as a morgue. It has some bodies in it, but mostly it has only body parts.
Ellen Borakove, the spokeswoman for New York City's Medical Examiner, said it has about 5,000 body bags in stock and has ordered another 5,000, which will be delivered Thursday.
"That's something we do whenever we have a disaster," she said.
The scene in Lower Manhattan is much worse than it appears from outside the area.
For more than 10 blocks in every direction from the World Trade Center complex, debris clogs the streets, cars are overturned, and buildings are heavily damaged from the debris that came raining down when the center's towers fell.
A nine-story building, 5 World Trade Center, and the Millennium Hilton hotel were in danger of collapsing, fire officials said.
New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said two people trapped in the WTC basement made cell phone calls to their relatives to give them their locations, and said others were down there with them.
"We're going to focus our efforts on recovering as many people as we can and on removing debris, which will take at least two or three weeks," said Giuliani at a Wednesday news conference.
Eighteen teams of rescue workers were using listening devices and dogs to locate survivors and bodies, the police commissioner said at a news conference Wednesday.
"The estimates that we're working with are in the thousands," Giuliani said, when asked about the death toll.
Giuliani said the latest confirmed citywide death toll was 82, and 370 police officers and firefighters are missing and feared dead.
New York Fire Chief Pete Ganci, who spent more than 30 years with the New York Fire Department, and First Deputy Commissioner of the Fire Department William Feehan are among those who perished.
The Greater New York Hospital Association -- an organization of some 200 hospitals in the New York metro area -- said emergency rooms treated more than 1,500 people after Tuesday's attack.
Knife-wielding hijackers took over four planes Tuesday, crashing two of them into the 110-story twin towers of the World Trade Center. Another hijacked airliner crashed into the Pentagon; a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
A total of 266 people aboard those airplanes were killed.
Pentagon officials said they expected the number of fatalities there to be somewhere between 100 and 200.
Washington Hospital Center told the AP it is treating 15 people from the attack. Seven of those are in critical condition. Walter Reed Army Hospital has two patients, according to the AP.
Posted: September 13, 2001 07:14 AM
MIAMI (AP) Federal agents had warrants to search the Florida homes of at least four men listed as passengers aboard a jetliner hijacked by terrorists and crashed into the World Trade Center, the Miami Herald reported Thursday.
The warrants are among several executed by federal investigators who have been probing possible Florida links to Tuesday's attacks in New York and Washington.
The Herald, citing federal authorities it did not identify, said the four men were listed on the manifest of American Airlines Flight 11, the first of the two planes that smashed into the trade towers just minutes apart. There were no survivors from any of the hijacked planes.
The Herald report identified one of the men as Mohamed Atta.
He came to Florida for flight training school a year ago and emerged Wednesday as one of at least two suspects in the FBI investigation into the terrorist attacks, witnesses interviewed by the FBI told The Associated Press.
Charlie Voss, a former employee at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Fla., said FBI agents told him Atta and another man identified only as Marwan were involved in the attack on the World Trade Center. The men had stayed briefly with Voss in July 2000 while attending flight school.
Azzan Ali, a student at Huffman Aviation, identified the second man as Marwan Alshehhi.
Voss said FBI agents told him authorities found a car at Boston's Logan Airport registered to two men who were once students at Huffman. Both jetliners that crashed into the World Trade Center towers had left Boston bound for Los Angeles.
Voss said the two men said they had just arrived from Germany and wanted to take flight training at Huffman, which offers training in light, single-engine aircraft but not commercial jetliners. Rudy Dekkers, Huffman's president and owner, said they attended the school for about five months beginning in July 2000, then left to take training elsewhere.
Ali said the friends referred to each other as "cousin," kept a low profile at the school and planned to fly corporate jets in the United Arab Emirates.
More than 400 agents in Florida were working on the investigation and leads were "coming in fast and furious," Miami FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela said Wednesday.
The investigation turned to homes in several parts of the state and included agents probing records in flight schools.
Several FBI agents removed student files from the Florida Flight Training Center, which is down the street from Huffman Aviation and offers the same type of pilot training. School owner Arne Kruithof would not give specific information about what the agents were seeking but said one of the files was related to a student from Tunisia.
In Coral Springs, witnesses said about 50 FBI agents and police officers on Tuesday night blanketed the apartment complex Atta had listed on his Florida driver's license. In Vero Beach, about 70 miles north of West Palm Beach, FBI agents searched four homes in three neighborhoods.
Agents asked Hank Habora about a neighbor, Amer Kamfar, 41. Kamfar was licensed as a flight engineer to fly turbojets and listed a Saudi Airlines post office box as his address in FAA records.
Habora said the family moved into the house in February but recently left abruptly.
"They threw out everything they had -- clothes, dishes," Habora said.
Habora said Kamfar told him his name was John and that he wore a pilot's uniform similar to those worn at Flight Safety Academy, which trains commercial jet crews.
In another neighborhood, agents searched two adjacent houses for 12 hours, leaving with several garbage bags of evidence. Officials towed away two cars. Neighbor Everett Tripp said a Middle Eastern family with four children moved out of one of the homes last weekend.
Landlord Paul Stimelind identified the tenant in the other home as Adnan Bukhari, who told Stimelind that he worked for Saudi Airlines and was training at Flight Safety Academy in Vero Beach.
Bukhari and his wife began renting a home from Stimelind in June 2000, Stimelind said. He said Bukhari's wife returned to Saudi Arabia on Aug. 30.
The couple's lease was up Aug. 31, but Bukhari asked for a two week lease extension, through Sept. 15.
"Then last weekend ... I received another call from him," Stimelind said. "He indicated that he would need another two or three days."
Stimelind said Bukhari told him he would be leaving by Sep. 17.
"He never gave a reason," Stimelind said. "He said he had a couple of things to clear up."'
And I can't believe that some of these scumbags are linked right here to my own town of Venice, Florida! This place is truly "Littletown, USA". Goes to prove how insidious this terrorism crap is.
These bastards have no honor. They will have no victory.
It seems Clinton gave them the equipment and perhaps the assistance of traitors within government they needed to pull it off, and in return they let him pick the day that would serve him best----Spetember 11, 2001--They The Day that Congress had ordered Ashcroft to turn over all the evidence on Clinton criminal investigations and some mafia criminal investigations. P>-------------------------------------------------------------
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DAY OF INFAMY 2001
U.S. equipped terror sponsors
Clinton exported NSA-ducking phone, high-tech encryption devices to Syria
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By Paul Sperry
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON -- The dozen or so Islamic terrorists who pulled off the plot to strike at America's nerve centers in New York and Washington spent months, if not years, researching, planning and coordinating the surprise attacks, U.S. security officials say. And they did it completely in secret, using the world's most sophisticated telecommunications equipment, some secured by advanced encryption technology that most armies don't have.
Where did they get such state-of-the-art, military-related gear?
First, you have to appreciate the high degree of communications activity their mission required at each stage.
In researching their targets, the terrorists picked ones relatively easy to hit at high air speeds, yet ones that would produce big casualties and provide symbolic blows to American morale. They had to pick airports close by, with weak security. They had to find jets with enough heft and wingspan and fuel to cause major damage, yet not so large that they required extra crew.
The Boeing 757s and 767s they hijacked were big, but all had just two pilots and no flight engineers, making it easier for terrorists to take the cockpits. And the heisted jets were from the same family of aircraft, obviating additional cockpit training.
They also apparently studied passenger traffic patterns of airlines in order to pick flights with relatively few people aboard. All four flights had light passenger loads. The Boeing jets have roughly 160-seat capacities, yet American Flight 11 carried 81 passengers; American Flight 77, only 58; United Flight 175, 56; and United Flight 93, a skeletal 38.
Fewer passengers, fewer heroes to worry about.
More key, the terrorists needed to select transcontinental flights with big fuel loads to turn the planes into giant petro-bombs. All four flights were bound for California. They also had to know flight patterns, and how to blind air-traffic controllers to the hijackings by turning off the planes' transponders, which send such warning signals, among other aviation information.
In planning the attack, they had to fashion weapons that they could sneak past airport security. Transportation Department officials think that they may have hedged their bets and even planted security people on the inside at Logan and Dulles airports, so that guards would look the other way when they came through metal detectors at the terminals.
The kamikaze pilots also had to log many hours on computer flight simulators with high-level graphics capability, to practice hitting their targets at full throttle. A Continental Airlines captain, who's flown both 757s and 767s, told WorldNetDaily he thinks they may have even added the World Trade Center and Pentagon to the simulator's visual database.
"At the airspeed of those strikes, which hit their targets dead on, the hand-eye coordination demands would be too high for casual flying skill -- with, or without, an autopilot engaged," he said.
They had to practice, moreover, navigating the jets to abruptly change their course, by as much as 180 degrees in some cases, after take-off. Flying them at low altitudes was also something they had to work on.
Synchronized terrorists
Finally, in executing their murderous missions, the 12 or so terrorists had to coordinate their activities, flawlessly, within a roughly two-hour stretch. And, for the most part, they did. They all got to the airport on time, they all got through security, they all boarded their flights, they all hijacked their flights and, with the exception of one group, they all hit their targets.
Pulling off such a complex plot would have generated an inordinate volume of communications -- whether by radio, cell phone, land line, fax or modem -- among the terrorists, among their Middle-Eastern sponsors and among commercial contacts here and abroad.
But somehow eavesdroppers at the super-secret National Security Agency -- with their billion-dollar satellite "birds" and other surveillance technology -- were deaf, dumb and blind to the wicked plot.
"The real issue in this tragedy is how the hell were these people able to plan and coordinate such a strike over a period of months without the NSA intercepting their signals?" demanded Peter M. Leitner, a senior strategic trade adviser at the Defense Department.
Leitner, who reviews commercial license applications for exports of some of the most sophisticated military-related technology, thinks he knows the answer.
"The technology that would allow these terrorists to mask their communications was given away, hand over fist, by the Clinton administration," he said in an interview with WorldNetDaily.
Leitner says the previous administration rubber-stamped the shipment of top-end military-related telecommunications equipment to Syria, which is on the FBI's list of sensitive countries that pose a threat to U.S. security.
"Syria is a terrorist-supporting nation," he said. "They provide infrastructure to bastards like [Osama] bin Laden. They provide backup and support and communications abilities to these terrorist cells."
So what kind of gear has Syria -- and likely bin Laden, by way of Syria -- gotten from America?
Spread-spectrum radios
"We're giving them spread-spectrum radios, which are almost impossible to break into. We're giving them fiber optics. We're giving them a high level of encryption. We're giving them computer networks that can't be tapped," Leitner said.
Spread-spectrum radios, originally designed for military use only, change their frequency constantly.
"Bin Laden's cells aren't having any trouble communicating anymore," Leitner said.
Bin Laden, the world's No. 1 terrorist and the Pentagon's chief suspect in Tuesday's attacks, is known to use portable satellite telephones, advanced encryption cell phones and other encrypted telephony equipment, as well as secure computer networks -- all compliments of U.S. technology, Leitner says.
"If people are worried about how these people were able to coordinate and communicate something like this -- which had to be pretty extensively coordinated -- without it being intercepted, it's because of the crap we've been selling these people," he said.
"How can you penetrate their networks when you can't even eavesdrop on their conversations?" he said.
"You can't stop them when they're coming right at your building," he said. "But, damn it, you should be able to stop them months in advance by breaking up their networks."
Leitner posits that the NSA wasn't able to detect the Islamic terrorists' plot because of the "high quality of the communications gear that they've been acquiring over the last couple of years, thanks to the Clinton administration's decontrols on advanced telecommunications equipment."
Terrorists' secured telecom gear "makes it infinitely more difficult to get even early warning signs" about their activities, he said.
Tuesday's attacks took the entire U.S. government, including the intelligence community, by surprise.
"We had no specific warning of the U.S. attacks," said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., ranking minority member of the Intelligence Committee.
Complete surprise
The Pentagon issued an alert of "Threat Con Alpha" the day before the attack, which meant that no threats were on the horizon. The same alert was issued the morning of the attack.
"We got no word of anything," Leitner said.
"We weren't warned of anything," another Pentagon official told WorldNetDaily.
Asked Tuesday if he had any inkling of the plot, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dodged the question: "We don't discuss intelligence matters."
Three weeks ago, some overseas papers quoted bin Laden saying that a major strike against the U.S. was coming soon. But there were no specifics. And bin Laden reportedly sent an e-mail to unknown government sources three days ago warning holy hell would break out. But again, he didn't say how, when or where.
Still, it's baffling that the U.S. intelligence community didn't pick up, early on, any specifics of the complex and long-planned plot through electronic intercepts and signals intelligence.
But it's actually not that baffling, Leitner asserts, against the backdrop of loose government controls on dual-use telecom exports.
"I've testified to Congress that it will take serious numbers of body bags before we wake up to the need to tighten dual-use export controls," he said. "Unfortunately, we've got them now."
"This is so tragic and yet so preventable," he said. "Now we're going to have to knock out their [terrorist] camps, just like we had to bomb the Iraqi's several times now to try to take out the fiber-optics network that the Chinese are installing in Iraq's air-defense systems."
"Yet, it was the Clinton administration that gave the Chinese the technology to give to Iraq," he noted.
The Bush administration apparently hasn't woken up, either.
Wake-up call
In June, Leitner was asked by the Commerce Department to OK a new round of exports of dual-use telecom equipment to Syria. He denied the request, and was asked to reconsider. He denied it again, arguing in a letter to Karen Vogel, the Commerce export licensing officer who requested the approval, that:
"Doing so vastly upgrades the C3 and C41 systems of the Syrian military and Intelligence Services. My concerns are also obviously compounded by the fact that Syria is one of the foremost state sponsors of terrorism."
Leitner continued: "Since an 'upgraded telecom infrastructure' will also greatly facilitate Syrian planning, coordination, secrecy and execution of terrorist acts, as well as direct military communications, I see absolutely no basis for any position other than a denial."
Vogel argued in an earlier letter that her request came on the heels of eight previous approvals of licenses for similar exports to Syria.
"There's still a lot of things inside the government involving national security that have just got to be changed," Leitner said.
Another senior Pentagon official who specializes in counterterrorism says his own faith in the U.S. intelligence community has been shattered.
"This full-court press by terrorists blows the hell out of the line that we've been hearing for years from the intelligence community that if they try anything big, we'll know about it and warn you. Anything bigger than a couple of people, don't worry, we'll know about it," he said. "Well, I guess they didn't."
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Subpoena:
By Authority of the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States of America
To United States Department of Justice Serve: Attorney General John Ashcroft
You are hereby commanded to produce the things identified on the attached schedule before the full committee on Government Reform
of the House of Representatives of the United States, of which the Hon.
Dan Burton is chairman, by producing such things in room 2157 of the
Rayburn Building, in the city of Washington, on
September 11, 2001, at the hour of 5:00 PM
To Danleigh Halfast or US Marshals Service
to serve and make return.
Witness by my hand and seal
of House of United States, at the city of Washington, this
6th day of September, 2001
(signed)Dan Burton
Chairman
----------------------------------------------------------------
To see actual subpoena:
http://www.house.gov/reform/letters/ashcroft_subpoena.pdf
September 13, 2001 Posted: 3:16 PM EDT (1916 GMT)
Firefighters tend to a colleague overcome by treacherous conditions at the World Trade Center devastation
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Search teams rescued five firefighters from the rubble of the World Trade Center towers even as Three World Financial Center -- across the street from the site of the collapsed towers -- appeared to be in danger of collapsing, authorities said Thursday.
Emergency workers have been pulled back from the 54-story building, home to American Express, and smoke was seen coming from the windows, said CNN Producer Adam Reiss, who was on the scene.
The building has been used as a morgue and as a headquarters for triage ever since Tuesday's attacks.
"You can clearly see the anxiety" on the faces of rescue workers, Reiss said.
In the search of the trade center wreckage, five firefighters, who had been trapped since the buildings collapsed, were found alive Thursday inside a sports utility vehicle, where they had taken refuge.
When rescuers pulled debris off the SUV, they were shocked to find the firefighters. Two of the firefighters were able to get out of the vehicle on their own power, rescuers said, and the other three are also "in good shape," a medical worker told CNN.
CNN’s Martin Savidge said that earlier, emergency officials had said they did not expect to find any more survivors above ground. He said news of the rescue has given new hope to searchers.
In a news conference Thursday morning, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said 4,763 people were still unaccounted for. That was before these five firefighters were discovered.
The figure includes those who were aboard the two planes that crashed into the center's twin towers, rescuers and those reported by families and businesses as missing.
Giuliani said 94 bodies had been recovered, and 46 of them had been identified. He said 70 body parts had also been recovered, adding apologetically that officials "may not be able to recover everyone."
A spokesman for St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan said about 800 people with injuries related to the attacks were being treated at their hospitals. That includes 83 firefighters and police officers.
The city set up a center at the Armory, at 26th Street and Lexington Avenue, where families can report if any loved ones are missing.
"If you are looking for someone that you believe is missing," the spokesman said, "that's the place to come to, to register, to bring identifying data, and we'll do everything we can to help you."
A Toronto, Ontario, man said that he received a voice message Wednesday night from someone who claimed to be trapped in the rubble. Pat Probert played a tape of the message for CNN in which a man says "we are trapped but alive."
Probert said he did not think he knew the person.
Giuliani said more than 6,000 tons of debris have been removed from the scene so far. It was being transported to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where FBI and police officials plan to sort through and analyze it.
He said officials are hoping to reopen the city below 14th Street by midnight Thursday. He said the hope is to reopen Wall Street Friday.
Meanwhile at the Pentagon, officials say the death toll has reached an estimated 190, including an Army three-star general.
The figure includes the 64 people on the plane. The Defense Department is estimating that a total of 126 Pentagon workers are still unaccounted for and believed dead in the aftermath of the terrorist attack.
Arlington County emergency officials said they are assuming they would find no more survivors in the wreckage
"We are officially in a recovery mode at this particular time. The rescue workers obviously are still very hopeful. And we continue to want them to be hopeful. But in reality we're in the modes and operations that we're taking is more of a recovery phase," said Arlington County Fire Chief Ed Plaugher.
Nearly 24,000 military and civilian employees were back on the job Thursday at the Arlington, Virginia, building, damaged heavily in the attack, with Metro trains resuming regular service and buses continuing to operate from Pentagon City.
As employees returned to work, bomb-sniffing dogs were sweeping through the Pentagon.
Half the building remains closed because of smoke and structural damage, and many workers will have to double up in offices.
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