Smoke, shock spread over this city

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

NEW YORK, SEPT. 11. The scene is truly tense in this city which has had its share of terrorism eight years ago. In 1993 an attack on the World Trade Centre left six dead and more than 1000 injured. But this time around no one is even tempted to make a guess.

Almost every known organisation outside the United States which are generally believed to be behind acts of terrorism have dissociated themselves from what has taken place. But the United States has placed its security forces on a State of Alert and the air force has made it known that it will intercept any suspicious plane.

The twin towers of the World Trade Centre are gone; only smoke is filling the air and one that can be seen miles away. Thousands are moving away from the scene which the authorities have blocked to facilitate rescue efforts. And with the nation's airports shut down, thousands are stranded and the authorities are trying to talk people into getting out of Lower Manhattan.

People are milling around television sets in hotel lobbies or listening to radios on street corners. Some of the shops in this busy part of town that hardly goes to sleep have downed their shutters. And telephones and cell phones do not seem to be working. The frustration is very visible as one strolls down the street. In a time when roadside telephone booths seemed to be a thing of the past, there are actually lines of people wanting to use them, if a connection could be made.The hotel lines are not any different.

If authorities in Washington D.C. have declared a State of Emergency and called out the army to patrol some sensitive areas, the National Guard in New York has got the call to augment the 40,000 police and 15,000 fire fighters

What has stunned intelligence and law enforcement agencies, as also the common man, is the kind of coordination and precision the terrorist acts had been executed. In a span of 18 minutes two planes rammed the World Trade Centre; shortly thereafter the Pentagon was hit. And at least two other civilian aircraft went down, for reasons that are now being determined. At least 110 people are said to have died in these two crashes.

The first impression here and elsewhere is where intelligence went wrong; and some are already talking about the colossal intelligence failure. There will be a lot of soul searching on what it was that actually went wrong.

Equally stunning is that terrorists have been able to target the actual nerve centres of the government, the Pentagon in particular. For a long time the worst case scenario planning was a group of terrorists crashing or blowing up a plane filled with deadly explosives over a crowded city. Very close to this happened in New York on Tuesday.

In the initial hours what is being said is that the terrorism attack has had an element of sophistication, both in planning and implementation. And for this to take place it could not have been done without solid backing - meaning that this whole terrorist operation could not have been assembled in some back alley.

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