September 11 2001 Terrorist Attack

The "Terra Cotta" color and texture line is warm, offering proprietary shades that have the "look and feel" of sun-baked clay. Among the design options are tall "Florence-style" planters--round, elegant with a raised ridge, and a sturdy 5,300 pounds. Filled with ficus trees or flowers, a row of the planters has the same aim as the temporary concrete barriers that pop up in front of government buildings after a terrorist attack against the U.S.: to deflect the aim of an explosives-filled truck.

A small fire at the temporary home for the remains of hundreds of World Trade Center victims was likely arson committed after a break-in Saturday, authorities said. The smoldering flames in a section of the facility's chapel on Manhattan's East Side were quickly extinguished. Firefighters got a call around 9 a.m. to respond to Memorial Park, a weatherproof tent on Manhattan's East Side where the city is storing the remains of Sept. 11 victims who have yet to be identified. The fire damaged a wooden bench, while mementos -- pictures, notes, flowers -- honoring the dead disappeared.

He was last in the line moving up the ramp into a waiting C-130 at Tan Son Nhut air base--a tall, husky man with an open Midwestern face who was about to step into history. It was March 29, 1973, in Saigon. And Master Sgt. Max Beilke was officially designated as the last American combat soldier to leave Vietnam. He had survived two wars, Korea and Vietnam. Now he was going home to his family in Minnesota.

Lt. Col. Brian Birdwell is in Texas now. Army Chaplain Henry A. Haynes is in South Carolina. Eight years ago today, they were inside the Pentagon at 9:39 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 77 hit its mark. The world tends to give its fullest attention to anniversaries that end in zero or five -- not eight. There will be bagpipes and drums in New York. The president will lay a wreath at the Pentagon. Most of the nation will take a collective pause and move on. But for those like Birdwell and Haynes, directly touched by the terrorist attacks on Sept.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, United Airlines Flights 175 and 93 and American Airlines Flights 77 and 11 were hijacked by terrorists. As the attack unfolded, the flights were frantically tracked by air traffic controllers; the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA; and the Northeast Air Defense Sector, or NEADS, of the military's aerospace defense command. Following are excepts of the staff report on the events prepared for the commission investigating the attacks.

As 19 hijackers made their way along the concourses at three East Coast airports on Sept. 11, bent on executing the deadliest terrorist attack in history, they were subjecting the U.S. aviation security system to its most critical test. At almost every step along the way, the system posed no challenge to the terrorists--not to their ability to purchase tickets, to pass security checkpoints while carrying knives and cutting implements nor to board aircraft.

In the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, hijackers flew two airliners into the World Trade Center today, collapsing both towers into flaming rubble, and crashed another aircraft at the Pentagon, shutting down the government and financial markets and spreading fear throughout America. The toll of dead or injured was expected to climb into the thousands. Hours later, a fourth airliner, bound from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco, went down in western Pennsylvania.

The letter from the dead man did not surface for months after it was sent, after, presumably, Aysel Senguen had enough time to fully absorb the grim deeds and suicide death of her fiance, Ziad Jarrah. Ziad sent the letter and a package of personal belongings to Aysel from the United States on Sept. 10, 2001, a day before he and three comrades hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, set it on a heading for Washington, D.C.

In the photo, sweaty young Mike Kehoe is headed up--all the way up a smoky stairwell in the north tower of the World Trade Center just after 9 a.m. on Sept. 11. Kehoe wasn't aware that someone was taking his photograph at that particular moment. He's a firefighter. His mind was focused on hustling all the way up the tower and evacuating office workers. "Civilians," as he calls them.

The terrorists who piloted two planes into the World Trade Center apparently managed--either by careful calculation or evil luck--to have hit the buildings at their weakest spot to cause their disastrous collapse, structural engineers said Tuesday. "It's like hitting someone at the back of the knee," said Nabih Youssef, a structural engineer who heads the Tall Building Council in Los Angeles and is an expert on the design and strength of skyscrapers.

Accused Al Qaeda sleeper agent Ali Saleh Kahlah Marri on Thursday pleaded guilty to supporting the architects of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In a plea agreement entered before U.S. District Judge Michael Mihm in Peoria, Ill., Marri admitted to one count of conspiring to provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.

As he always does on Sept. 11, Ed Casso spent much of the day last year in his living room watching the solemn memorials on television. It had been precisely seven years since terrorists hijacked commercial jets and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Casso, 34, could feel the passage of time taking its toll. "Every year there's a little less coverage," he said. "Every year there's a little less feeling."

The world's most notorious jailed terrorist calmly stroked a foot-long gray beard as he sat comfortably in a military courtroom and peppered the Marine colonel who serves as his judge with questions. What, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed demanded to know, were Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann's religious affiliations? His views on torture? For a while Tuesday, Mohammed turned the tables on his captors and made the military judge justify his competency to preside over the trial of five accused Sept. 11 plotters.

A military judge Monday enlisted the help of self-described Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in coaxing a man accused as a co-conspirator out of his detention cell here so the controversial trial into the attacks on New York and Washington can proceed. After a long day of procedural wrangling, Marine Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann ordered Ramzi Binalshibh to be "extracted" from his cell by force if necessary and brought into the military commission courtroom at the U.S.

The nearly 3,000 people who died when hijackers commandeered four passenger jets on Sept. 11, 2001, were remembered Thursday as President Bush dedicated the first national memorial to the victims and the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates came together in a moment of silence. In a ceremony at the Pentagon, where 184 people were killed, Bush recalled how the "doomed airliner plunged from the sky, split the rock and steel of this building and changed our world forever."

Jurors hearing the first war crimes case against a Guantanamo prisoner watched a graphic 90-minute film chronicling the history of Al Qaeda on Monday, which included footage of mangled corpses in the rubble of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing in Kenya. The disturbing images, including some not previously released by U.S. authorities, were part of a film produced and narrated by a prosecution witness under contract with the tribunal hierarchy, the Office of Military Commissions.

For more than four years they had waited to walk into a courtroom and hold someone responsible for the wreckage of their lives. In the long days and nights since Sept. 11, 2001, they testified Monday, children have spent more time at counseling than school. Parents, unable to sleep, spent hours in their children's rooms. A young widow gave up her fight against breast cancer. Another threw herself across her husband's grave.

Live from New York, it was Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani telling NBC's "Saturday Night Live" audience that it was OK to laugh again after the Sept. 11 attacks that felled the World Trade Center. After a somber opening that included singer Paul Simon, the show proceeded into its standard mix of skits, including a racy takeoff of "The Little Mermaid" and music from singer Alicia Keys.

A military judge Wednesday strongly advised two accused co-conspirators in the Sept. 11 attacks not to represent themselves in their upcoming trial because their defense would suffer from several factors, including a lack of access to the classified evidence that the government plans to use against them. "It would be best for you to accept the assistance of counsel. If it sounds as if I am trying to talk you out of representing yourself, that would be accurate," Judge Ralph H.

As Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his four codefendants made their first court appearance to face charges in the Sept. 11 attacks, journalists watched from behind a soundproof glass wall and listened to an audio feed with a 20-second delay. The tribunal's chief judge ordered the delay in the audio to guard against any accidental disclosure of classified information as the terrorism suspects face prosecution. Marine Col. Ralph H.