A Pretext for War by James Bamford Read Free Book Online Page B

with these millions of dollars of equipment . . . and there was absolutely nothing we could do. There was nothing. We couldn’t get on that roof, we couldn’t get people out of that building.”
    Hayes could actually see people inside the buildings, leaving him with the heart-wrenching feeling that people were trapped and he couldn’t reach them. As he pulled away, the hundreds or thousands still trapped on the upper floors of the towers saw their last hope disappear. Some flapped draperies to try to attract attention. Without someone to break open the locked doors to the roof or pluck them from it, all they could do was hang out of windows trying to find some smoke-free air to breath. The towers had now become sky-high chimneys.
    Within minutes, people began jumping, preferring a quick death to burning alive or suffocating from the smoke. “People falling out of building,” said the pilot of the chopper. “Jumper,” he added. And they just kept coming. “Several jumpers from the Window [Windows on the World] at One World Trade Center.” By 9:09, people were also beginning to throw themselves out of Tower Two. “People are jumping out the side of a large hole,” said a caller to fire rescue. “Possibly no one catching them.”
    On the street, Port Authority police officers reported the horrible scene unfolding in front of them. “There’s body parts all over the place,” said one officer. “So much—bodies blew out of the building. . . . There’s got to be hundreds of people killed in there. There’s body parts like five blocks away.” Another reported, “I’ve got dozens of bodies, people just jumping from the top of the building onto . . . in front of One World Trade . . . bodies are just coming from out of the sky.”
    “Christian! Christian! Christian!,” Mable Chan began yelling on the sidewalk of Greenwich Street near Tower One. Minutes before, the NBC
Dateline
producer had heard the second plane thunder past the window of her apartment and then the giant BOOM as it smashed into Tower Two. Now she had just spotted her colleague Christian Martin, also an NBC producer, whom she was trying to locate in order to begin covering the story.
    Unable to find their camera crew, Chan and Martin offered a tourist $500 for a one-day rental of his small video camera. Then they began realizing the horror taking place around them. “Christian, I just saw an elbow!” Chan said. “Over there on the roadside, it’s charred.” Christian Martin looked where Chan was pointing. “Shit!” he said in disgust. “This shit has to be a terrorist act.” “And we’re in the middle of it,” added Chan.
    Like people trapped on a sinking ship seeking the highest point above the water, those in the twin towers, blocked from going down, were climbing up as high as they could go. But it would be a climb to nowhere. “A hundred and twenty people trapped on the 106th floor,” exclaimed a caller in Windows on the World. “A lot of smoke . . . Can’t go down the stairs!” “Evacuation to the top floor of World Trade Center,” said another caller a few seconds later. The problem was the same at Tower Two. “Hundred and fifth floor,” a caller yelled. “People trapped! Open roof to gain access!” But, ironically, although some would make it to the roof through open doors, other doors were locked to keep potential jumpers, and simple spectators, off. Nevertheless, because of the dense smoke, even those who made it to the roof were doomed. “The roof of the South Tower,” said NYPD helicopter pilot Timothy Hayes, “was totally obscured.”
     
     
    At 9:13, the photo op over, Bush rose to his feet to leave the classroom—seven minutes after being notified of the attacks by Card and deciding to go to war. And eleven minutes after possibly seeing the second attack himself.
     
     
    For more than half an hour, air traffic controllers in both Washington and Indianapolis had been searching madly for American Flight 77,