Nine-Eleven (2020 Reflection)

The Forty-Third President of the United States of America

Dispatches

NINE ELEVEN ~ Reflection

September 11, 2020

What here in Britain is simply known as

Nine Eleven 

Chapter One

I

TRILLIONS of words have been written about September 11, 2001.

Almost every adult will vividly recall that day, what they were doing, where they were sitting, working, lying, resting, when the news first struck. Young children of that the time, too, will have vivid recall of why everything in the family seemed to stop that day, and the grown-ups seemed to talk of nothing else, or said little at all but looked perplexed, shocked, upset.

II

I was in my offices in Folkestone, overlooking Calais and Boulogne and the line of P&O Ferries arriving and departing; and when using the dictaphone I’d often unconsciously stand at the windows that were three sides of the room, and watch the ships on their 45 minute turn-arounds. To this day, it is a sight I’m privileged to have seen, and not least because it gives me that quiet confidence that all will be well next year. We must never underestimate ourselves, nor the spirit that is within us since Aeons past.

III

In the large reception hall, our receptionist kept up a steady stream of updates from her husband watching the catastrophe on the news from home, now and again sending out one liner e-mails keeping us all updated.

Our work continued. None of us had any concept of the magnitude. We could not envision it.

Everything is fixed in the mind. I remember the new estates commenced that day, the two that were signed off, the new death certificates, and the two Grants of Probate and the Grant of letters of Administration that had arrived by DX[i].

IV

At 5.15pm I left work and made my way to the swimming pool, the daily routine. Those were the days, hey! Only there did it strike home, when I caught sight of the catching the BBC News 24 stream.

I swam a few lengths, but my mind was elsewhere; so I finished, showered and dressed back in my suit and headed for the coffee counter before driving inland to Ashford in Kent, my lodgings.

Five or six teenagers were boisterous at a nearby table. Kids are kids in any age. Then an announcement  …

The Right Honourable Mr Tony Blair Prime Minister will shortly address the Nation.

That brought instant silence! Boisterousness departed.

V

I watched them looking at each other, one bit her lip, another pulled on her hair and a lad pulled his face that said ‘I think this is bad …’

I guess for 15-16 year olds it was. In their short lives, they’d never seen a prime ministerial broadcast.

In those few short hours of Tuesday, September 11, the whole world turned a corner onto a new and far more dangerous route and where none of us, however well attuned to geopolitics, had a clue where we were heading.

For we are still on that route, and the stakes are as high as when the third decade of the 20th Century drew to a close eighty-one years ago.

VI

I used to be proud of that phrase ‘the English-Speaking Peoples’, of Westminster - almost world-wide - being seen as the mother of parliaments.

Truthfully, I still am!

Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Black Loves Matter (BLM) will not silence me, nor force me to kowtow to bullying.

VII

The next morning, I remember waking up to the sound of some young, slightly hysterical, very silly, BBC radio announcer - all hype and stupidity, fresh out of some lefty uni, rabbiting on about bin Laden but constantly referring to him as if she had some secret crush on the man.

‘Osama’ this, ‘Osama’ that … Well, of course, we don’t know at this moment precisely where Osama is…

I’ve often wondered where that announcer is now. Maybe she’d discovered a new, nice-sounding word like I did sixty years past with ‘Shangri-La’; so everything was shang-gre-LAR until I came to earth with a bump with a carefully aimed Exocet missile ... “Ken! Give it a rest, or I’ll shangrilarrr you!” Sorry Mum!

It is fair to say that any number of ‘worst-case scenarios’ acted out in the corridors of international powers, might not have fully envisaged this attack, even though the Twin Towers had suffered from previous terrorist attacks, the previous most serious being the 1993 bombing.

Chapter Two

I

Commencement and Method

The terrorists used four internal flight passenger in-bound airliners departing from airports within the North-Eastern United States, for California.

Airline Flight Intended Target Result

American Airlines 11 North Tower - Twin Towers total destruction

United Airlines 175 South Tower - Twin Towers total destruction

United Airlines 77 The Pentagon

United Airlines Flight 77

Flight 77 was aimed by the hijackers at the Pentagon Building west’s side, resulting in partial disruption, with the collapse of an outer wall and large section of offices in that amazing complex and killing 125 personnel.

United Airlines Flight 93

Flight 93 was aimed at an unidentified target but given the aircraft’s heading when in the hands of the hijackers, one can assume that their target could have been The White House, the US Capitol, or Camp David, or the nuclear power plants on the Eastern Seaboard.

Flight 93, however, crashed into the ground at 10:03 ET, all targets being missed on account of the incredible bravery of passengers fighting the hijackers, deliberately forcing the aircraft to crash, and in the full knowledge that they would lose their lives in so doing. One has only to listen to the cell-phone messages to ground-based cellphones and landlines to realise just what went on, on board Flight 93.

II

The Timeline

08:46 ET          AA Flight 11 (Boston to LA) strikes the New York World Trade Centre (WTC) North Tower

09:03 ET          UA Flight 175 (Boston to LA) strikes the WTC South Tower

09:37 ET          AA Flight 77 (Dulles, Virginia to LA) strikes the Pentagon building in Washington DC

09:59 ET          South Tower WTC collapses in ten seconds

10:03 ET          UA Flight 93 (Newark, New jersey to San Francisco) crashes in a field near Shanksville, PA

10:28 ET          North Tower WTC collapses

III

The Price 

2,753 fatalities in the World Trade Centre comprising     
2,350 civilians

343 firefighters

23 police officers

37 Port Authority   total: 2,753 lives

Pentagon        184

Shanksville      40 total: 224 lives Global: 2,977

IV

The Ongoing Price

As at October 2019, 60% of the WTC victims’ remains have been positively identified       

The formal duration of the attack on all targets was 102 minutes.                            

The global mortality rate of 2,977 includes all 19 hijackers.

After initial denials, bin Laden confirmed that he orchestrated the attack.

V

A Dawning Reality

Following Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, ‘a day that shall live in Infamy’ as President F D Roosevelt declared when the President addressed the Nation and the world the following day, I remember my father telling me about Pearl Harbor in the 1960s. And Dad talked about waking a sleeping giant. In my very young mind, that portrayed itself vividly.

It refers, of course, to the statement said to have been an entry in the diary of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who had planned the attack on Pearl harbor, which purportedly reads:

“I fear all we have done
is to awaken a sleeping giant
and fill him
wth a terrible resolve.”

This is what happens when those who are motivated by authoritarian, dictatorial, totalitarian ideologies, especially when motivated by a religion, seek to bring down democracy.

VI

The Reckoning

On May 11, 2011, President Barack Obama confirmed that US Special Forces had located bin Laden in Pakistan and confirmed his death.

I have, obviously, only briefed across the surface here.

And it is an uncomfortable fact that this then led to retribution.

Revenge clouds judgment, and people make decisions on the moment’s spur that, in hindsight, they regret.

Retribution, revenge, manufacture. In this case the fallacy of WMD - weapons of mass destruction.

However, no one can dispute that this attack was unprecedented, and alerted the wider world to the extreme danger of religious fundamentalism and to totalitarianism.

Chapter Three

I

I’ll conclude with how things quietly ramped up here in the United Kingdom.

Let us wind the clock on a few months from Nine Eleven to early 2002.

The BBC news presenter on breakfast television made a unusual statement - about looking at an RAF Fighter on 15 minutes standby and which will be aired on prime time at 6pm and 10pm BBC news, adding that this is an important announcement.

That whole announcement - I vividly recall - stopped me in my tracks that morning. What an extraordinary announcement to make, I kept thinking as I drove to work, now in Beaconsfield, London.

I watched the clip that evening both at 6pm and 10pm. It was short.

It showed two RAF fighter jets ‘fully armed’ on 15 minute standby - the pilots kitted and seated in their cockpits in protective bunkers. The profile then moved across to Command, and a wing commander explained the procedure. If an inbound passenger jet, irrespective of complement, failed to identify itself when requested to do so, protocol provided for a 13 minute ‘maximum’ window.

And what happens if we still have no response, say ten minutes in, wing commander?

That line there will connect me to one of three people.

Can you say who those people are?

No.

Then the bombshell

On the 13th minute one of those three - not a combination, not a majority – simply whoever is immediately available, would give the order to take the passenger liner out.

Do you mean, shoot it down?

That question elicited the barest flicker on the wing commander’s face. In old language it was the classic ‘pregnant pause’.

The message was loud and clear to the entire nation - I speak of the United Kingdom - and to everyone in the world who might have a malign interest.

The PM, or the Secretary of State for Defence or the Head of State would – not could - give the order and without reference to the other or others. And to make the point carry home, the Jaguars were scrambled. There was no order of precedence. It was simply which of those three individuals was immediately available to authorise the action.

II

No commentary, no analysis, no silly Thursday evening Question Time discussion … we were sending out a very clear signal to terrorists.

We brook no quarter!

Central Government was drawing a red line of frightening intensity.

We had been given a rare and electrifying glimpse into a tiny but lethal part of our Nation’s defences. And rest assured, the protocols remain in place.

We had, I suggest, also caught a glimpse of that which we never see, the sharper side of that oddly inoffensive, even quaint, phrase that is the hallmark of Britain’s Unwritten Constitution: The Queen in Parliament.

The Strike Defence Attack Capability of the Royal Air Force in 2020 - an RAF Typhoon FGR4 – Image Courtesy of Royal Air Force Careers 2020

September 11, 2020
All Rights Reserved

Liverpool and Gloucestershire

© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022

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