It was just after dawn in Woody Creek when the first bomb hit New York City this morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.
Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake, and probably the battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 American soldiers were slaughtered in one day.
The battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight on Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, will likely be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster.
And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four (4) commercial jetliners.
They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, “piloted” by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, Logan, and Dulles on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully loaded fuel tanks—which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan’s World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the U.S. or any other country. Make no mistake about it: we are At War now—with somebody—and we will stay At War with that strange and mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerrilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden will be a primitive “figurehead”—or even dead, for all we know—but whoever put those all-American jet planes loaded with all-American fuel into the 110-story-high Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bull’s-eye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.
Nothing ever Claimed by George W. Bush’s $350 billion “Star Wars” missile defense system could have prevented Tuesday’s attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. The efficiency of it was terrifying. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. That is terrifying.
We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or where will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for war seem to know who did it or where to look for them.
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed—for anyone, and certainly not for a baffled little creep like George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it off. He can declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.
Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job—armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses, and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.
Okay. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing. Not even the numbers of dead and wounded can be established. CNN reports “more than 800 people standing in line to donate blood at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, but only fewer than 500 victims brought to the Emergency Room.” The numbers don’t add up. I am confused.
The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship had already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.
The lid is on, Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don’t say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.
—September 12, 2001