the earth asunder.
Giant cranes swung their hooks across, reaching in to dig out debris and then pour it into trucks to be taken to a landfill on Staten Island. The creaking back and forth was the only sound. 1.5 million tons would be removed, and ten years later experts would still be sifting through it.
Down in the pit, workers with masks over their noses and mouths were still searching, working day and night under giant portable lights, looking for anything recognisable, and occasionally disappearing into the large white tents that dotted the site. We read in the paper the next morning that they had found ten bodies that day. However, such was the force of impact that at least a thousand bodies were pulverised beyond recognition. More than half the grieving families never even got a body part.
The North Tower, which was struck by the first plane, had stood ablaze for 102 minutes, while the South stood for fifty-six minutes. Eventually the burning beams and girders could resist no more and buckled. Each tower took just twelve seconds to fall. Later in the day a smaller third tower would collapse.
I had seen horrific photographs of people who had become known as ‘the jumpers’, matchstick figures throwing themselves out of the windows. More than two hundred people had died in this way, one landing on a fireman and killing him. I had read harrowing accounts of workers trying to get down stairways of flame and soot helped by heroic firemen, many of whom lost their lives.
Yet, perhaps because I was so caught up with reporting what was happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan, until I stood on that platform the full horror of what had happened did not really strike me. Years later, when the war seemed futile and it was hard to remember what it was all about, I would recall that grim, bitter morning.
It was unbelievable to think that nineteen young Arabs armed only with box-cutters had done this. They had turned four passenger planes into weapons, two hitting the towers, one smashing into the Pentagon, and the final one crashing in a field in Pennsylvania. It was thought to have been aiming for Washington DC, perhaps for the White House or Congress, but to have been brought down in a struggle between the hijackers and courageous passengers who had perhaps saved many more lives.
Standing there, looking down from the platform, my head filled with the screams on the footage and the thudding of the cameraman’s feet running as the towers started crashing down. As they fell they had sent a tornado storm of ash barrelling along the streets and steel beams flying through the air to lodge into nearby office buildings. Such was the tremendous force of each tower’s collapse deep into the ground that water mains, gas lines and the subway were smashed, while debris crushed cars and ambulances. Whole streets were buried under rubble.
Inside the towers, virtually every desk, chair, computer and filing cabinet was burned or smashed to bits. Somewhere among all the wreckage were the remains of a priceless collection of Rodin sculpture from Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage firm that lost 658 people in the attack, as well as the famous wine cellars of the Windows on the World restaurant.
It was the small personal details that most struck home. A friend who lived in a fifth-floor apartment only a few blocks away told me that for days afterwards she found charred pieces of yellow Post-it notes fluttering onto her terrace.
The workers we could see searching the rubble found very few personal effects. The most common objects to have survived were keys, some marked ‘World Trade Center – Do Not Duplicate’. They did find the wallet of Robert Gscharr, a supervisor at an insurance company on the ninety-second floor of the South Tower who had last been seen between the fortieth and fiftieth floors trying to help others escape before the tower collapsed. Inside the wallet was his yellow and blue Metro pass, a few family photos and a rare $2 note with a special story. When he proposed to his wife Myrta in 1998 he had two. He gave her one, and kept the other.
On the platform people stood transfixed, although the police kept trying to move them on. Suddenly I felt like a voyeur. Other people on the platform were taking snapshots of themselves in front of the devastation, as if it were a tourist attraction. I had promised to take a photograph of the site for the Afghans, but I knew it would never convey the full scale of the devastation, or the emotional impact. Frankly, the pictures of rubble looked like much of Kabul.
‘Let’s go,’ said Paulo, who was looking uncomfortable. Neither of us had uttered a word since we had reached the platform. Tears streamed down my face as we walked away. ‘I just can’t believe this was done from a cave in Afghanistan,’ I said.
I had spotted a sign saying ‘Kill all Muslims’ among the missing posters, though there were also many white doves of peace. Back in September President Bush had described the war on terrorism as ‘a crusade’, though he later apologised.
I didn’t want Americans to hate Afghans. As I would remind anyone who would listen, there were no Afghans involved in the attacks. Of the nineteen hijackers, fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi whose family were originally from Yemen, had approved the plan, and applauded the attack in his videos, describing it as ‘reaction to the huge criminality practised by Israel and the United States in Palestine and other Muslim countries’. Bin Laden himself said, ‘There is no evidence of the involvement of the people of Afghanistan in what happened in America.’ He never actually claimed credit for the attacks, and we’d later find out that though the hijackers had sworn allegiance to al Qaeda, the man behind the plot was not an al Qaeda leader at all, but a nightclubbing Pakistani who grew up in Kuwait and whose name was Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, known as ‘KSM’. He was the uncle of Ramzi Yusuf, who had tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, packing a Ryder rental van with 680 kilos of explosives. Yusuf’s plan had been to blow up the North Tower and send it crashing into the South Tower, bringing both towers down and killing thousands of people. The plan failed, but the explosion did kill six people and injured more than a thousand.
A few days after 9/11 a gruesome motivational message was found in the luggage of one of the dead hijackers. ‘Completely forget something called “this world”,’ it exhorted. ‘Purify your soul from all unclean things. Tame your soul. Convince it. Make it understand … remember this is a battle for the sake of God. The enemies are the allies of Satan; the brothers of the Devil. Do not fear them for the believer fears only God … Make your final words there is no God but God.’
What sort of people could do this? Where had such hatred come from?
We didn’t speak much for the rest of the day. But we decided we would go to Times Square that evening to see in the New Year despite the security alert. New Yorkers had gathered to watch the giant crystal ball drop from One Times Square on the stroke of midnight every New Year since 1907, through wars and the Depression, and I was sure that they would not allow terrorists to stop them.
The roads all round the square were closed off by police barricades and patrol cars with flashing lights. There were 7,000 police around the square, more than twice the usual number. The crowds were down, but even so around half a million people came out, many clad defiantly in red, white and blue. It would be wrong to call them revellers – there was none of the usual New Year’s Eve craziness. People had come out onto the streets in solidarity, and to show they would not be bowed by terror. As the ball fell complete strangers hugged and kissed each other. One of the police officers asked me where we were from, and when I said England he shook my hand. ‘Thank you for being with us, ma’am,’ he said.
I thought about all the faces on the missing posters. Mostly I thought about my baby son. The world he was growing up into was a very different place from the extended peace I thought he had been born into just two years earlier. I knew my own home city London was almost certainly next on the terrorists’ list – officials in Pakistan had warned me their information was that the UK was full of sleeper cells. I wanted to go home.
‘Afghanistan didn’t do this,’ I wrote in my diary. ‘I don’t know who or how, but I am sure this came from Pakistan.’
World Trade Center in Numbers
At 8.46 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 hit Tower 1 (North Tower).
At 9.03 a.m United Flight 175 hit Tower 2 (South Tower).