Christian Nation (16 page)
O
NLY A MONTH
after brewga with Sanjay, everything changed again.
Like 9/11, July 22, 2012, was a perfectly clear day in New York. The sky a May blue, unusual for July, with no trace of humidity. It was no accident. The terrorists had planned their attack for the previous week, but on the appointed day nearly half the airports were plagued by low ceilings, fog, or drizzle. On July 22, 2012, though, the nation sat under an enormous high-pressure system, and each of New York’s three airports—together with Boston, Washington National, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Chicago O’Hare, Denver, LAX, San Francisco, and Seattle—had unlimited ceilings and visibility of over twenty miles. At 9:30 a.m. eastern time, 6:30 a.m. on the West Coast, none of the terrorist teams had received the agreed abort signal.
At that moment, the situation at Newark Liberty Airport, just west of Manhattan, was typical. Anyone looking west from Manhattan could see six planes on final approach strung along an imaginary ramp in the sky leading down onto Runway 4 Right. All these final approach patterns were well defined and publicly known. Because none of the planes was a “heavy”—planes like 747s and A380s, whose heavier weights create a larger and more dangerous wake vortex—they were separated from one another by only three to four nautical miles, making the approach “ramp” along which they were arrayed extend about twenty to thirty miles south of the airport. When taking off and landing, passenger jets are at their maximum vulnerability and minimum maneuverability, flying at a low airspeed, close to the “stall speed” at which the wings lose their lift, and at the nose-up angle of attack, or attitude, in the air. Uninterrupted, one of these planes would have touched down on Newark’s Runway 4 Right every forty-five to sixty seconds. On the other side of the airport, planes taking off to the north from the parallel Runway 4 Left were fewer in number but even more vulnerable: close to the ground, heavy with fuel, and flying slowly, usually around 250 knots below 10,000 feet. Not a single terrorist team at any airport failed to destroy the two most recent jets that had left the runway. And in no case was a second missile required.
The terrorist teams were spread out below these final approach and climb-out ramps at intervals of about three miles. Each had a laptop open to a website showing, in real time, the air traffic around the airport. Their radios were tuned to the frequencies used by both approach control and the airport tower. Numerous politicians later expressed shock that the radar approach images were available to anyone and that these radio channels were not secure, but this was totally disingenuous. Everyone had understood for years that this information was available to anyone.
The terrorist plan was simple. At the appointed moment, each team was to fire its first missile at the plane immediately behind it, that is, in the direction away from the airport for those on the landing side, and in the direction toward the airport for those on the takeoff side. This then allowed the next team along the route to fire a second missile at the same plane as it passed overhead.
At Newark, as was typical for many of the airports, there were ample abandoned industrial sites, unused parking lots, swampy fields, and other places in the towns of Perth Amboy, Port Reading, and Carteret, to the south, and Harrison, Kearney, and the Ironbound section of Newark to the north, for the terrorist teams to set up their positions. Only one, the position in Carteret, was in a residential neighborhood, where the risk of interruption was significant. The close-in missiles were heat-seeking MANPADS (man-portable air-defense systems), a type of SAM (surface-to-air missile) that can generally be launched by a single operator and that targets the heat signature of a jet’s engines. The simplest of these missiles is five to six feet long and weighs only thirty-five pounds. The price on the black market: several hundred dollars. At a few of the sites more distant from the airports—where the planes’ altitude would be higher and the chances for recovery and safe landing greater—the terrorists used fancier laser-guided assemblies mounted on the back of jeeps. These cost the terrorists up to $250,000 each. When President Palin expressed surprise that such sophisticated weapons could have found their way into the hands of terrorists, the PBS
NewsHour
correspondent read to her from a Pentagon report addressed to her three years previously citing intelligence estimates that between 5,000 and 150,000 SAMs were in terrorist hands, with twenty-five to thirty separate groups estimated to be in possession of the weapons. Nor was the use of such missiles against airliners unprecedented. The CIA put the total number of previous missile attacks on civilian airplanes at thirty-five, all outside of the United States. Of these previous attacks, twenty-four were successful. Terrorists had been practicing this technique for years but had reserved for the United States the novelty of simultaneous attack on multiple planes and multiple airports. Later that afternoon the Al Qaeda website ran a single ironic headline in Arabic: “Shock and Awe.”
The chaos caused by simultaneous attacks on between three and nine planes at each of thirteen airports cannot, even today, be fully grasped. At Newark, where the maximum number of hits occurred, three planes were destroyed instantly, their wreckage scattering over downtown Newark and Harrison and starting scores of ferocious fires fed by fully fueled planes. Six other planes simultaneously declared an emergency and sought clearance for immediate landing. Of the planes on final approach, only two succeeded in making controlled landings with survivors. Some were struggling to land on one engine when the remaining engine was hit with a second missile. Within less than a minute, all semblance of air traffic control collapsed. The controllers had no idea what was happening or why. Within minutes most runways were littered with the wreckage of planes. In a horrific pattern repeated over and over around the country, crippled jets plowed into the wreckage of the plane ahead of it on the approach that had crashed only moments before on the same runway. Hundreds of people who survived the landings were killed in these fiery collisions. The total lack of situational awareness was such that one plane waiting for takeoff clearance when the attacks began received that clearance and flew right into the line of missile fire, notwithstanding that the two planes that had taken off just before it were already burning on the ground below. On the ground, emergency services were confused and unequal to the unprecedented challenge. A ten-square-block area in the Ironbound section of Newark, directly under the climb-out line at Newark Liberty Airport, burned to the ground before a single firefighting vehicle reported to the scene.
LaGuardia and JFK airports experienced similar losses, and both Queens and Brooklyn suffered heavily from the number and severity of the crashes. Manhattan, this time, was spared. I was in the office that morning. As the news broke, we scurried from the east to the west sides of our building to see the numerous wreckage sites and the plumes of ominous black smoke. My secretary came into my office and told me it had happened in Washington too. Then Boston, Atlanta, Houston, Denver, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, LA, and San Francisco. First, dozens of planes. Then scores of planes. And again, the drama, for the first time since 9/11, of having to get every other plane in the air safely on the ground, but this time with many major airports completely closed. By that evening, the numbers were in: attacks at thirteen airports on thirty-nine planes; more than six thousand dead in the planes and over five hundred on the ground; six cities still on fire.
Pearl Harbor had been an attack on a single remote state. The targets in 9/11 were the power centers of New York and Washington. But 7/22 hit seven states, eleven major urban centers in all parts of the country, and the sprawling suburbs around large airports in all those places. Looking at the map on CNN, with the small symbols of crashed planes and fires on the ground evenly scattered across the continent, anyone could see that this truly was an attack on all of America. And all of America received the message that was sent: Nowhere in your country is safe.
Eighty-one terrorists had been found dead in the places from which the missiles had been launched: all men, all Muslim, and all in America legally. By 10 a.m. eastern time, there were no planes left for the terrorists to shoot. Not a single terrorist team had been discovered or interrupted by law enforcement. Each group consisted of a commander and one or two others. At each location, once the missiles were used up or the planes stopped flying, the senior man shot the junior and then himself. Not one of these men suffered a failure of courage. Just short of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the whole thing was over in thirty minutes.
America again had the sympathy of the world. But this time there was an undercurrent of doubt or even derision. Each of the terrorists had been allowed into the country
after
9/11. How could that have happened? One or two or ten maybe, but eighty-one? Moreover, the terrorists had not come up with something new or unexpected but simply exploited what the US government itself had identified as the prime remaining vulnerability of the air system, a known vulnerability that went completely unaddressed by federal authorities. Instead of figuring out how to defend airliners against missiles, the government had spent the decade having ordinary Americans and frequent travellers like myself remove their belts and shoes and pack their toiletries into little plastic bags. And now, eighty-one terrorists operating in thirteen cities; terrorist teams setting up missiles at thirty separate sites around major American cities. The number noticed and stopped: zero. Were the terrorists that brilliant, or did we have a competence problem, a failure of will, or perhaps both? Perhaps, said many around the world, perhaps America’s best days were over. And the mood in the country, initially one of shock, grief, and solidarity, turned ugly.
Repeatedly I heard anti-Nazis say, “If only 1,000 of us in the late twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler.”
—Dr. James Luther Adams, dissident in
Germany in the mid-1930s and later a
professor at Harvard Divinity School,
“The Evolution of My Social Concern”
Hannah Arendt dated her awakening to February 27, 1933, the day the Reichstag burned down. From the moment Adolf Hitler began using the fire as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and crush dissent, Arendt said, “I felt responsible.”
—Samantha Power,
introduction to 2004 edition of
Hannah Arendt’s
The Origins of Totalitarianism
I
T IS OBVIOUS
IN RETROSPECT
that only an external attack like that on 7/22 could have saved the Palin presidency. Without it, would any of what followed have happened? I doubt it. The Democrats would have recaptured both the White House and Senate that fall. The culture wars would have simmered on, but the evangelical movement’s momentum on the path toward political power would have been lost. I would be installed in my corner office downtown, practicing law. I would probably have children with Emilie. I might be having dinner with Sanjay tonight instead of sitting here with people I really don’t know, trying to remember and record all that happened since then.
But 7/22 did happen. It was truly horrible, and the American people were understandably scared and angry. 7/22 opened a door, and Sarah Palin walked through it.
On July 24, 2012, President Palin, for only the second time in the history of the republic, declared martial law over the entire country. Instead of appearing alone in a televised address from the formality of the Oval Office, she addressed the nation from the Situation Room in the basement of the White House flanked by all the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Vice President Brownback and Steve Jordan the only civilians present. Her speech was direct and forceful. After 9/11, she said, our enemies had counted on our weaknesses. They knew of our preoccupation with rights, laws, and political correctness of every sort. They counted on it. And what did we do? We acted true to form: no profiling of Muslims; continuing to welcome Muslim immigrants; hauling terrorists into federal courts as if they were common criminals; and having some of the brightest legal talent in the country come to their defense. “No more,” she said. Nearly seven thousand of our fellow citizens died because of it, hundreds of thousands more were heartbroken, and six American cities were still smoldering. This was a war. Islamic fundamentalists were our sworn enemies. Each of the eighty-one terrorists had been welcomed to our country like the millions before them seeking freedom and a better life. But they had betrayed us and used our freedoms against us. Thousands more were doubtless still in the country plotting the same betrayal. She swore to find and deport or punish every last one of them. Every one. Nothing would stop her.
The president reported that the Joint Chiefs, her cabinet, and all her advisors were unanimous in their advice that fighting this war here in
the homeland required a declaration of martial law. The protections of the Constitution were not intended for our enemies, she said. Moreover, this was a war to be fought by soldiers, not policemen, and when the terrorists were caught, they needed to be tried in military, not civilian, tribunals
. Nothing else mattered. She would devote her presidency to this and only this. The emergency and her duties as president required her full attention. She would not conduct a normal political campaign. She would appear at her party’s convention but would neither debate nor travel the country for public appearances in the run-up to November 6. This was not, she said, a time for politics. If the American people chose to reelect her, her promise was simple: she would eradicate all the other Islamists lurking here in the homeland and keep out any new ones. That was it. She hoped everyone understood her priorities.