Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9 11 and Osama Bin Laden

Copyright 2011 by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random
House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B ALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint
previously published material:

David Corn: Excerpt from When 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Go Bad.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Forbes: Excerpt from There Is No Time, There Will Be Time
by Peggy Noonan (Forbes, November 30, 1998).
Reprinted by permission of Forbes Media LLC 2011.

HarperCollins Publishers: Excerpt from At the Center of the Storm
by George Tenet, copyright 2007 by George Tenet; excerpts from
Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott, copyright 2005 by Terry McDermott.
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.:
Excerpt from The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 by
John Farmer, copyright 2009 by John Farmer.
Reprinted by permission of Riverhead Books,
an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

St. Martins Press and Liza Dawson Associates: Excerpts from Growing Up bin Laden
by Najwa bin Laden, Omar bin Laden, and Jean Sasson, copyright 2009
by The Sasson Corporation. Rights outside of North America are controlled
by Liza Dawson Associates. Reprinted by permission of
St. Martins Press and Liza Dawson Associates.

eISBN: 978-0-345-53125-4

www.ballantinebooks.com

Jacket design: Misa Erder
Jacket photograph: Benjamin Thompson/Flickr/Getty Images

v3.1

I dont believe for a minute that we got everything right.
We wrote a first draft of history.

L EE H AMILTON ,
vice chairman, 9/11 Commission

O VER THE YEARS, THE EVENT TO WHICH THE WORLD GAVE THE BRIEF name 9/11 has burgeoned into a universe of facts and factoids. Our approach to the writing of this book was to build a chronology, which eventually ran to well over a thousand pages, to gather information from a multitude of sources, including published material in both paper and electronic form, and to conduct interviews of our own. We read as deeply as possible the many thousands of pages of staff reports, original memoranda, and other 9/11 Commission records that began to be released as of 2009.

Additional information on numerous points can be found in the Notes and Sources section at the back of the book. These are linked to the text by page number.

For ease of reading, we have adopted a single standard for Arabic names that are rendered differently in different texts. The name bin Laden, for example, can be found elsewhere as bin Ladin or even ben Ladin, and the organization associated with him as al-Qaeda, or al Qidaand more. We have stuck to bin Laden and al Qaeda.

The full rendering of many Arab persons names is lengthy, and we have in many cases shortened them. After a full first mention, for example, Khalid al Mihdhar becomes just Mihdhar. We render Ramzi bin al-Shibh, as have many other texts, simply as Binalshibh. Though perhaps not strictly correct, or satisfactory to the purist, this makes for smoother reading.

Our aim has been to make readable sense out of a kaleidoscopic story, to offer rational explanation where there has been confusion or unnecessary controversy, and to serve history as well as possible.

A.S. R.S.

May 2011

T EN YEARS ON, MEMORY AND LOSS . W HERE TWO WONDERS OF THE modern world once soared high over the city, two great cascades feed reflecting pools of shimmering water. The abyss into which it flows is now a hallowed place of remembrance. Pilgrims about to descend to the underworld, the underworld of what once was the World Trade Center, will pass a ribbon of names etched into parapets of bronze.

They identify those killed in New York City on September 11, 2001: the 206 passengers and crew aboard the three planes that were used as missiles that day; the forty who died when a fourth airliner fell from the sky in Pennsylvania; the 2,605 office workers and visitors and would-be rescuers known to have died in and around the Trade Center; and the 125 men and women who died at the Pentagon in Washington. Included, too, are the names of the six people killed eight years earlier, in 1993, in the first attempt to bring down the towers with a truck bomb.

The memorial names 2,982 men, women, and children as of the spring of 2011. The true tally of 9/11 fatalities, however, is incomplete. Some of those who labored in the rubble of the fallen towers have died since, agonizingly slowly, from respiratory disease contracted in the fire and poisoned dust of the place they called Ground Zero. Some nineteen thousand others are reported to be sick and receiving treatment. By one prediction, disease will eventually cripple and kill as many againmore perhapsas died on the day of the attacks.

We do not know, shall never know, how many have died in the far-off wars that followed the onslaught launched that September day. Fighting men aside, the vast majority of the dead have been civilians: unknown thousandsconservatively, many tens of thousandsof men, women, and children killed in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Of the three thousand who died on 9/11 itself, fewer than half have graves. Some bodies were consumed by fire, others reduced to minute fragments of mortality, morsels of burned bone, decaying flesh, a single tooth with a silver filling. To this day, forensic pathologists are confronted by a monstrous human jigsaw, one they know they will never complete.

Consider five of the names that are etched, lettered in bronze, above the curtain of water at the 9/11 memorial.

Jimmy Riches, a New York firefighter, died in the lobby of the North Tower. His father, James, himself a Fire Department battalion chief, recovered his sons mangled body months later.

Donald McIntyre, a Port Authority police officer, also died at the Trade Center. His handcuffs, recovered at the scene, were given by his widow to a colleague assigned to hunt down terrorists in Afghanistan.

No identifiable remains were ever found for Eddie Dillard, an American Airlines passenger who died at the Pentagon. His widow, by odd happenstance, had been Americans base manager in Washington, D.C., when his plane took off that day.

Ronald Breitweiser, a money manager, died in the South Tower of the Trade Center. Only his arms and hands were recovered, identified by fingerprintsand by his wedding ring, which his widow now wears.

Only part of a leg and one foot were foundsix years laterto account for Karen Martin, chief flight attendant on the plane that plunged into the North Tower. Attendant Martin was probably the first person harmed by the hijackers on 9/11.

S OMETHING ELSE WAS LOST that day, something precious that touches on the stories of all the thousands who have died. The Greek tragic dramatist Aeschylus, twenty-five centuries earlier, understood well what it was. In war, he wrote, the first casualty is truth.

James Riches worked in the rubble for months, motivated in part by the hope of recovering his own sons dead body. He labored, like thousands of others, buoyed by the assurance of the Environmental Protection Agency, that the air in Lower Manhattan was safe to breathe. Today, no longer a fire chief, Riches Sr.s health is irreparably damaged, his lung capacity reduced by 30 percent.