The September 11th attack
Military scrambled to intercept airliner
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney said that in the midst of the multiple hijackings Tuesday, after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Bush authorized U.S. fighter pilots to shoot down any plane headed for Washington.
Associated Press
"Yes, the president made the decision on my recommendation as well," Cheney said. "I wholeheartedly concurred in the decision he made, that if the plane would not divert, if they wouldn't pay any attention to instructions to move away from the city, as a last resort our pilots were authorized to take them out."
President Bush said he was concerned about the lives of passengers.
His comments seemed to indicate that Bush made this decision after the hijacked American Airlines plane hit the Pentagon, killing an estimated 188 people. The North American Aerospace Defense Command was notified of the hijacking 12 minutes before the plane struck; F-16 fighters were launched from Langley Air Force Base, Va., but were miles away when the plane slammed into the building at 9:38 a.m. EDT.
Bush said at the White House that when he was told that "an unidentified aircraft was headed to the heart of the capital, I was concerned."
He did not say whether this was the plane that hit the Pentagon or a second that was headed toward Washington but crashed in Pennsylvania.
Fulfilling President Bush's pledge to eradicate terrorism will mean relying more on unconventional military methods than on traditional weapons like bombers, tanks and warships, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says.
"These are people who operate in the shadows, and we have to deal with them in the shadows," Rumsfeld said yesterday.
It might require adding to the ranks of military commando units, known as special operations forces, he said.
"The terrorists who are attacking our way of life do not have armies, navies or air forces. They do not have capitals. They do not have high-value targets that the typical weapons of war can go in and attack."
"They're in apartments, and they're using laptops, and they're using cell phones and they are functioning in the shadows, not out in front."
Rumsfeld praised the capabilities of the special operations forces, which are rarely in the limelight because much of what they do is secret — difficult and dangerous missions behind enemy lines.
"They're unconventional, and we're dealing in an unconventional time, and we may very well need more of them," he said.
The military has 29,000 special operations troops on active duty and an additional 14,000 in the reserves. They are trained in a wide array of missions, including psychological warfare, sabotage and kidnapping, small-scale offensive strikes, fighting terrorists and training and equipping indigenous forces in foreign lands.
Rumsfeld and other administration officials who appeared on television talk shows yesterday offered no hint of when Bush might order the first strikes against those linked to last week's terrorist attacks.
While the terrorists lack the kind of military forces and bases that could be attacked by conventional means, nations that support or harbor them do, Rumsfeld said. He was not specific, but Afghanistan is known to be harboring Osama bin Laden, whom Bush named as the prime suspect behind the airborne attacks Tuesday on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld made clear that defenses against terrorism, no matter how strong, are not enough.
"One has to know that a terrorist can attack at any time and any place using any technique," he said "And it is not physically possible to defend in every place at every time against every conceivable method. We just saw the use of aircraft. It could be ships, it could be subways, it could be any number of things."
Therefore, Rumsfeld said, those nations targeted by terrorists need to go on the offensive.
Fighter jets maintained continuous air patrols over the nation's capital and New York City yesterday, and Rumsfeld said fighters are on 15-minute alert at 26 bases elsewhere. The Air Force also is flying AWACS radar planes to help monitor air traffic, Pentagon officials said.
