Bush, Pentagon prepare response

[Balandar]

From http://www.msnbc.com/news/627028_asp.htm

Sept. 13 —   President Bush, Congress and the Pentagon on Thursday pledged a sustained military campaign against terrorists, beginning with Osama bin Laden, who U.S. officials said they had determined was directly responsible for the terrorist strikes in New York and Washington.

U.S. GOVERNMENT SOURCES told NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski on Thursday evening that based on “overwhelming” evidence, the Bush administration had concluded that the al-Qaeda organization run by bin Laden had executed the breathtaking operation in which U.S. jetliners were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

NBC’s Norah O’Donnell reported that a sustained military attack on bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire who has vowed to destroy the United States, would likely include air, land and sea forces. Two aircraft carriers are in the Arabian Peninsula region, each carrying 75 bombers capable of launching long-range missiles.

The Washington Post reported on its Web site that the Pentagon planned to call several thousand reservists to active duty in the next few days. Defense officials told the Post that the activation would likely mark the start of a much larger military mobilization in the wake of Tuesday’s terrorist strikes.

Bush informed lawmakers that military aircraft were patrolling the skies over Washington and seven other cities, according to Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s delegate to Congress.

Earlier Thursday, Bush told reporters that allies around the world had vowed to help him “whip terrorism.”  

The Associated Press quoted government officials as saying the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistan to close its borders and allow U.S. jets to fly over its airspace.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani military ruler whose government has been accused of backing Afghanistan’s Taliban movement, pledged full cooperation Thursday in the general fight against terrorism and dispatched a delegation to Afghanistan for talks with Taliban leaders.

India’s external affairs minister, Jaswant Singh, told The Times of India newspaper that India would provide logistical help or a staging ground for a U.S. military operation.

     

‘FIRST WAR OF 21ST CENTURY’

Thousands of people are presumed to have died in Tuesday’s attack and a fourth hijacking that ended when the plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. The spectacular explosions, which leveled the trade center’s twin towers and collapsed part of the Pentagon, represented the opening shots in what Bush emotionally told reporters Thursday was “the first war of the 21st century.”

“This is now the focus of my administration ... now that war has been declared,” Bush said.  

A senior U.S. official said Americans were still targets. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell quoted the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying more potential hijackers were still at large in the United States and abroad. “This is not over,” the source said. “We should not presume that the all-clear has been sounded. There are more of them out there than were killed in those four planes.”

Nerves in the capital were extraordinarily taut. Late Thursday afternoon, the U.S. Capitol building was ordered evacuated, jolting Americans with the televised images of its national lawmakers running out of the building. A short time later, authorities gave the all-clear.

About the same time, Vice President Dick Cheney was moved to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Thurmont, Md., as what a spokeswoman said was a “precautionary measure,” and Ronald Reagan National Airport outside Washington was closed indefinitely because of its proximity to the White House.

     

BUSH TO SEE FOR HIMSELF

Bush said he would visit New York City on Friday, where an estimated 4,763 people were unaccounted for. The death toll was likely to reach 190 at the Pentagon, which took a similar hit.  

The president’s eyes were red and wet as he ended his comments, his head and hands trembling slightly. “This is a terrible moment,” he said, “but this country will not relent until we have saved ourselves and others from the terrible tragedy that came upon America.”

At the Pentagon, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the military was preparing for a long military campaign against terrorism in general. “It’s going to unfold over time,” he told reporters. “One thing that is clear is you don’t do it with just a single military strike, no matter how dramatic.”

Asked what would be targeted, he replied: “It will be a campaign, not a single action. We’re going to keep after these people and the people who support them until this stops.”

     

ONRUSHING TORRENT OF EVENTS

 

+Investigative, rescue, diplomatic and political developments were moving rapidly Thursday:

+Bush built swift support for retaliation against Tuesday’s terrorist acts, and Congress was expected to approve $20 billion as a down payment for what he called “a monumental struggle of good versus evil.” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Thursday afternoon that Bush had also agreed to seek an additional $20 billion to help clean up the damage.

+Congressional and White House officials were drafting language to authorize Bush to use military force, NBC’s Joe Johns reported. The resolution was being modeled on the one Congress passed a decade ago just before the Persian Gulf War.

+An arrest was reported at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, where all traffic was halted into the region’s three major airports: JFK and LaGuardia in New York and Newark International in New Jersey. Meanwhile, two men were arrested at the Hamburg, Germany, airport, one of them an American of Yemeni descent.

+Investigators recovered a black box flight recorder from the hijacked plane that went down in Pennsylvania and picked up a signal from the recorder in the jet that slammed into the Pentagon. The recorders could contain information about the last minutes of the hijacked commercial jetliners.

+A wave of evacuations occurred in buildings and population centers around the world, almost all of them because of bomb threats that turned out to be false alarms.

+In addition to the U.S. Capitol, evacuations were ordered at various times of downtown San Diego, the Mexico City airport, the Lyon Opera House in France and the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Empire State Building and Pennsylvania Station in New York were evacuated Wednesday night.

+The FBI arrested a man Thursday after a telephoned bomb threat sparked a two-hour evacuation of rescue teams from an area of the Pentagon shattered by the terrorist attack, a U.S. official said.

+Later Thursday night, a section of the Pentagon rubble where fires had been extinguished resumed burning.

+The Federal Aviation Administration, which had closed all U.S. airports for the first time ever, allowed air travel to resume Thursday. But new security measures banned curbside luggage check-in and other procedures, and most airlines planned only limited flight schedules.  

+Northwest Airlines canceled all of its flights after receiving information a spokeswoman said indicated that it was “not prudent to operate.” No reason was given, but officials at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix saud three Northwest employees intentionally breached a security checkpoint Thursday.

+“Once they did that, they turned around and said, ‘Hey, look what we did,’ ” airport spokeswoman Suzanne Luber said.

+Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport outside the capital was closed indefinitely because of its proximity to the White House.

+Stock markets were closed through the end of the week. New York Stock Exchange Chairman Richard Grasso said the exchange would reopen on Monday.

+Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill said that he remained confident in the economy and that prospects for an economic rebound in the United States remain unchanged.

+Many college football games that had remained on track to be played this weekend were postponed Thursday after officials reconsidered. All Major League Baseball and National Football League games were postponed through the weekend.

+Insurance companies worldwide braced for an expensive bill. “We’re going to pay out a lot of money, but that’s what we’re in business to do,” Ed Zore, chief executive of Northwestern Mutual, the No. 1 U.S. individual life insurer, told Reuters on Thursday.

+The FBI had received more than 22,700 tips at the Web site it set up for reporting tips: www.ifccfbi.gov. The FBI’s toll-free hot line — (866) 483-5137 — had received 2,055 calls by Thursday afternoon.

+In addition, the Justice Department was running a hot line for families seeking information about victims and survivors. The number is (800) 331-0075.

     

WORST ATTACKS EVER

The FBI has committed about 4,000 special agents and 3,000 support personnel to what Ashcroft characterized Wednesday as the “most massive investigation ever conducted in America.” Another 400 FBI laboratory specialists are working at crime scenes in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.  

Ashcroft said Thursday that investigators believed they had identified all 18 of the people involved in the hijackings, saying five each were believed to have taken over two of the planes while teams of four took command of the other flights.

So far, seven men, all of Arabic descent, have been identified as suspects in the hijacking by law enforcement officials or in published reports. At least four of them were believed to have received training in flying commercial aircraft in the United States.

An unknown number of possible associates have been detained over the past two days. Officials told NBC News that most were considered material witnesses who might provide useful information even if they were not involved in the plot.

Indications solidified Thursday that some accomplices might have had airport security clearance. NBC News confirmed a report by The Boston Globe that a ramp access pass for Boston’s Logan International Airport was recovered from a rental car used by the suspected hijackers. The pass would have allowed an individual to walk onto the tarmac and potentially gain access to aircraft parked there.  

     

‘AN ATTACK ON ALL’

If and when Bush decides to launch a strike, he will have the support of his NATO allies, who voted for the first time in their history Wednesday to invoke a provision of the alliance charter declaring the terrorist attacks to be an assault on NATO itself.

“An attack on one is an attack on all,” NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said in Brussels, Belgium. “The parties will take such action as it deems necessary — including armed force.”

At the United Nations, NBC’s Linda Fasulo reported that in a rare and dramatic show of support for a U.S. government with which it is often at odds, members of the U.N. Security Council stood up to adopt a resolution that “unequivocally condemns in the strongest terms the horrifying terrorist attacks,” calling them “a threat to international peace and security.”  

The resolution signaled that the Security Council would not oppose direct U.S. military action, warning that those “aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors ... will be held accountable.”

The pledges of solidarity came after a day in which Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell worked the phones to build a worldwide coalition, including Muslim countries. Bush spoke twice overnight with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a former Russian spy chief, Deputy Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Trubnikov, talked to U.S. Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, who was in Pakistan.

Trubnikov agreed to coordinate Moscow’s counter-terrorism efforts with Washington, the Foreign Ministry said. Earlier, Russia’s foreign intelligence service pledged to work with its former Cold War adversary to stop terrorism.

     

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MSNBC.com’s Alex Johnson; NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski, Norah O’Donnell, Robert Hager, Robert Windrem, Joe Johns, Andrea Mitchell and Mike Viqueira; The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.