‘Unspeakable.’ See the original Miami Herald coverage on Sept. 11, 2001

The following is original coverage in the Miami Herald from September 2001:

Thousands feared dead

By Martin Merzer and Elinor J. Brecher, Miami Herald, Sept. 11, 2001

In a catastrophic, full-scale terrorist attack on the United States, hijackers seized two American Airlines jetliners this morning, crashed them into New York City’s World Trade Center and leveled both 110-story towers. Thousands were feared dead.

Two United Airlines planes also crashed this morning, one in Pennsylvania, the other in a still-undisclosed location. A plane slammed into the Pentagon, collapsing one side of the five-sided structure. An explosion rocked the State Department in Washington.

The White House and the Capitol were evacuated. Military troops were deployed. Authorities sealed the borders with Mexico and Canada.

President Bush and all top national officials were reported safe this afternoon. In Florida at the beginning of the day, Bush left hastily and his plane landed at a secure military base in Louisiana.

“We will hunt down and punish those responsible for this cowardly act,” he said in a hastily taped speech released to the public at 1:10 p.m. “We will do whatever is necessary to protect the American people”

Said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa.: “We are at war, we are actually at war. This is a 21st century war.”

The American Airlines planes carried a total of 156 people and the United Airlines planes carried a total of 110 passengers, according to airline officials. The toll of dead and injured were certain to rise – steeply.

“I have a sense it’s a horrendous number of lives lost,” said New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani.

American Airlines identified the planes that crashed into the Trade Center as Flight 11, a Los Angeles-bound jet hijacked after takeoff from Boston with 92 people aboard, and Flight 77, which was seized while carrying 64 people from Washington to Los Angeles.

In Pennsylvania, United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 en route from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco, crashed about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh with 45 people aboard. United said another of its planes, Flight 175, a Boeing 767 bound from Boston to Los Angeles with 65 people on board, also crashed, but it did not say where.

Military units – including an infantry regiment in Washington – were deployed. All air travel throughout the nation ceased and near chaos reigned at airports in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Trading on Wall Street was suspended. The United Nations was evacuated. All border crossings with Mexico were closed.

Whoever was responsible managed to exploit a comprehensive breakdown in national security. At least four planes were hijacked – despite security checks at all airports.

“This is perhaps the most audacious terrorist attack that’s ever taken place in the world,” said Chris Yates, an aviation expert at Jane’s Transport in London. “It takes a logistics operation from the terror group involved that is second to none.

“Only a very small handful of terror groups is on that list. I would name at the top of the list Osama bin Laden.”

In June, a U.S. judge had set Wednesday as the sentencing date for an associate of bin Laden, a renegade Saudi who has declared war on American interests, for his role in the bombing of a U.S. embassy in Tanzania that killed 213 people. The sentencing had been set for the federal courthouse near the World Trade Center

In South Florida, public schools and most private schools remained open but parents were encouraged to pick up students early. Gov Jeb. Bush ordered all 11 state universities and other state buildings evacuated. Many offices in South Florida dismissed employees early. Disney World closed its theme parks.

“We must not lose faith,” Gov. Jeb Bush said. “Instead, we must now show strength.”

No attacks in Florida were reported as of 1 p.m. today, but bomb threats at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale closed both facilities.

Many other public buildings also closed in Miami-Dade and Broward. Broward administrator Roger Desjarlais declared a state of emergency.

At least 50,000 people work in the World Trade Center and the attacks detonated at the beginning of the business day. Bodies fell from the skyscrapers and some people jumped out. Witnesses on the street screamed every time another person leaped.

“We’re in the World Trade Center and it has just been bombed,” Bob Hurley, 35, a tools salesman from Atlanta, told The Herald. “We are OK, but I think a lot of people are dead.”

In the background could be heard the cries of people screaming and the thud of heavy explosions. He was on the 22nd floor.

“The elevators are frozen,” Hurley said. “We are going down the stairs. There’s a lot of smoke, but people are organizing. We are getting the hell out of here.”

More than an hour later, many people apparently remained trapped inside the buildings. And then, one after the other, both towers toppled to the ground, producing massive mushroom clouds of smoke and debris.

Pieces of office paper floated over Brooklyn, more than three miles away.

Cameras captured the ghastly, appalling scene as millions of Americans watched on live television.

A woman living nearby, speaking to a radio reporter, suddenly screamed: “Oh my god, the building just fell. Oh my god.”

Hurley called back an hour later to say that he and his companions had survived.

But the other tower fell about a half-hour later.

A world-wide symbol of American power and financial strength was utterly destroyed.

The horrific sequence of events spread fear across the nation, the state and South Florida.

At Chesterbrook Academy in Pembroke Pines, more than a dozen parents picked up their kids by mid-morning. Beth Cleary, an administrator for the private school, said teachers were trying to comfort the youngsters.

“Children asked, ‘Can we pray?’ “ Cleary said. “And we said yes. We’re trying to be positive, a calming influence.”

At Shadowland Elementary in Little Haiti, assistant principal Marie Bazile said: “We are watching and protecting our children.”

The planes blasted fiery, gaping holes in the upper floors of the twin towers. About an hour later, the southern tower collapsed with a roar and a huge cloud of smoke.

Visiting Sarasota, Bush was reading to children in a classroom at 9:05 a.m. when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, whispered into his ear. The president briefly turned somber before he resumed reading. He addressed the tragedy about a half-hour later.

“Today we’ve had a national tragedy,” the President said before leaving. “Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.”

An executive of the Miami law firm of Hightower, Rudd, Weiser & Acosta sent a memo describing today’s events as the equivalent of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The company sent its employees home and closed its Miami office in the New World Trade Center, which also houses the Israeli consulate.

The comparison to the event 60 years ago that propelled the United States into World War II occurred to many Americans as shock waves reverberated around the nation today.

“This is the second Pearl Harbor. I don’t think that I overstate it,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb.

Homestead Air Force Base was placed on heightened alert. “We’re just taking extra security measures – 100 percent ID checks at the gate, being vigilant about our surroundings,” said Maj. Linda Haseloff, a public affairs officer. “We’re still doing our daily jobs.”

At the U.S. Southern Command headquarters near Miami International Airport, officials tightened security.

“We’ve increased our vigilance,” said Lt. Col. Bill Costello, a spokesman. “There’s greater awareness of people coming in and out of the complex. We are searching cars. We’re doing the prudent steps nencessary to protect the work force here.”

Shortly after 11 a.m., the sprawling Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral began a “threat-con condition C” and began shutting down the entire complex. No trucks were allowed in, and any vehicle that couldn’t be easily searched was turned away at the gates, said Bill Johnson, spokesman for the Kennedy Space Center.

The crashes at the World Trade Center happened minutes apart, beginning just before 9 a.m.

Heavy black smoke billowed into the sky above one of New York City’s most famous landmarks, and debris rained down on the street, one of the city’s busiest work areas. When the second plane hit, a fireball of flame and smoke erupted, leaving a huge hole in the glass and steel tower.

John Axisa, who was getting off a commuter train to the World Trade Center, said he saw “bodies falling out” of the building. He said he ran outside, and watched people jump out of the first building. Then there was a second explosion, and he felt heat on the back of his neck.

An FBI agent was quoted as saying that at least five people jumped out of the windows. Other people ran down the stairs in panic and fled the building.

Several subway lines were immediately shut down. New York’s mayoral primary election was postponed. All bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were closed.

David Reck was handing out literature for a candidate for public advocate a few blocks away when he saw a jet come in “very low, and then it made a slight twist and dove into the building.”

Terrorist bombers struck the World Trade Center in February 1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others.

“A second occurrence is just beyond belief,” said Ira Furber, former National Transportation Safety Board spokesman.

“It’s just sick. It just shows how vulnerable we really are,” said Keith Meyers, 39, of Ohio. “It kind of makes you want to go home and spend time with your family. It puts everything in perspective.”

‘It was grim. It was unspeakable. You cannot imagine’

By Elinor J. Brecher, Miami Herald, Sept. 12, 2001

Millions of pieces of paper – letters, business cards, confidential files, uncashed personal checks, invoices – fluttered in clouds of dust and ash blocks from Ground Zero. Each was attached to a life that will never be the same.

But by 5 p.m., there were neither signs of life nor death. A few shoes lay about, owners apparently entombed by debris. Abandoned push carts remained filled with fresh flowers and doughnuts.

Oddly, flagpoles still stood outside World Trade Center Plaza. Banners flapped in acrid swirls of dust that turned the setting sun blood red. A huge American flag had wrapped around a traffic signal pole, flapping upside down in front of two charred stumps that had once been the twin towers.

Scores of bombed-out trucks, vans and police cars, tires melted, sat on charred rims, the fates of drivers and passengers unknown.

Even the living had the pallor of death. Tan and gray ash, stirred by a stiff breeze, coated shoe-tops, clothes and the faces of anyone near Ground Zero.

One was Dr. Gerald Ginsberg, a plastic surgeon at New York University Medical Center, who had told his staff in the morning: “Forget the face-lifts today.” Hours later, he was downtown, treating a woman with burns over 90 percent of her body.

His colleague, Dr. Steven Brandeis, performed a colostomy on a woman whose entire pelvic area had been sliced off “as if she were guillotined,” Ginsberg said.

Gusts of wind like desert dust devils picked up columns of debris and swirled them down the street, burning the eyes of firefighters, police and anyone else in their path.

Miami-raised actress Carmen Pelaez, 30, said it “snowed” on her street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, across the river from Manhattan.

“It looked like snow flurries. It was all this paper coming down,” she said. “Then it just got gray out, on what was a beautiful, sunny day in New York. Later, I left my apartment to buy water, just in case the water system shut down, and I saw business memoes, Rolodex cards, all kinds of burnt paper all over the streets.

“Those buildings were so monumental and solid. To see them coming down like talc, it makes you feel very vulnerable,” she said.

Former Miamians Alina and Brian Stauffer were in their Wall Street area apartment, just two blocks from the World Trade Center, when they heard the impact of the first plane crash. They saw the second plane crash from their window.

Brian, an illustrator for publications such as Time, Rolling Stone and The New York Times, decided he and his wife, who is seven months pregnant, should flee.

“They called us, terrorized,” said Willie Blanco, Alina’s father, who lives in Coral Gables with his wife. “Brian said they were going to try to leave the city because they were afraid the hospitals would all fill up and that with Alina pregnant, they didn’t want to take any chances.”

The Stauffers clipped a leash on their lab, Chip, and headed for the street, in hopes of taking a taxi or a ferry out of Manhattan. But they got as far as the South Street Seaport, where they wound up grounded for the rest of the afternoon.

Others were traumatized by unimaginable scenes that replayed in their heads.

Jeff Weiss, an artist who watched from across the East River on top of a building in Brooklyn:

“I looked out the window and saw the two buildings on fire. There was fire on three floors, like a ring of flames around the building. You could see large objects – bodies – just heaving themselves out of the building. It was grim. It was unspeakable. You cannot imagine. Until then, there were people on the roof taking pictures, saying it’s so cool, so amazing. Suddenly it was not cool. We all knew we had witnessed something catastrophic.”

David Jersey, a waiter in Manhattan, watched events unfold from a window in a building on Chambers Street.

“I started bawling. I saw about 20 people jump from the building. I saw couples jump holding hands. I could see their arms and legs flailing. They jumped from 70 stories up right above the flames. You could see them falling all the way down.”

James DePaolo, a Brooklyn firefighter from Company 242 in Bay Ridge: “No training we’ve ever had has any bearing on anything like this. Our lives, our children’s lives, will never be the same. Our life in America is over. Everything, like travel, is going to change. It’s going to be the way it was in communist countries.”

Along the New Jersey Turnpike and at the Vince Lombardi Service Area, people wept. They stood next to their cars and watched the calamity unfold across the Hudson River. They kept hands plastered to their cheeks, their mouths open in that shape that denotes tragedy, confusion, treachery.

“Get those people out of there!” Harry Morrison, a trucker from Virginia, yelled in the direction of the World Trade Center. He and others were concerned about the people who might have survived the attack but not yet escaped. “Get them out!” If supplication is polite, restrained, prayerful, Morrison was worshiping a different god.

It was beyond comprehension. No one knew the extent of the casualties, but you knew the death toll would be obscene.

Rumors started quickly, and never stopped. Los Angeles, someone said. The White House. The Washington Monument. By noon, these remained just rumors.

“Why would someone bomb the Washington Monument?” a woman asked no one in particular and got no particular answer.

Up and down the turnpike, motorists pulled over to the shoulder. Several cried. Most just stood, disbelieving. No one honked to get them moving. Police cars passed, lights flashing, sirens blaring.

The lines at the pay phones lengthened. A woman had to be supported as she waited for a phone. Most people were not getting through. They tried dialing. They tried their credit cards. Some tried their cellphones. Nothing worked.

Back at Ground Zero, firefighters zipped back and forth on golf carts. They were caked like mud men. One filthy cop, Lt. Dan Carione, said, “It looks like the streets of Nagasaki. There’s nothing left.”

The rescuers carried shovels, picks, long wood handled hooks. Most wore heavy black rubber parkas with lime green stripes. Hundreds of firefighters sat on retaining walls and median planters as though paralyzed, not talking to anybody.

A section of the south tower lay on its side at Courtland and Church streets. It looked like the carcass of a Thanksgiving turkey that had been picked clean.

‘Evil acts’: President Bush vows revenge

By Martin Merzer, Miami Herald, Sept. 11, 2001

Addressing the nation after one of the most horrific days in history, President Bush vowed revenge Tuesday night for the full-scale terrorist assault that destroyed both towers of the World Trade Center, crushed a wing of the Pentagon, pulverized four hijacked jetliners and slaughtered thousands of Americans.

“The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts . . .,” Bush said on national television after spending several hours sheltered in an underground bunker in Nebraska. He returned to Washington in a plane escorted by jet fighters.

“We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

Federal investigators served search warrants Tuesday night at the homes of four Broward residents believed to be on the planes. “We’re looking to see if there’s a terrorist link,” said a law enforcement source familiar with the probe. No other details were available.

Bush said “thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil,” and there was no doubt that the ghastly blitz of terror inflicted massive devastation and monstrous carnage.

It utterly destroyed two 110-story symbols of the nation’s financial power, and it wrecked part of a huge, five-sided building known worldwide as the seat of American military might.

More than 50,000 people might have been in the World Trade Center and no one knew how many people were buried under mountains of rubble that still smoldered in New York City – and at the Pentagon – Tuesday night.

At least 200 New York City firefighters were believed killed. At least 78 police officers were missing. Horribly injured survivors jammed hospitals. It might take weeks to assemble a complete casualty list.

“I have a sense it’s a horrendous number of lives lost,” New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani said. Late Tuesday, he said some survivors were still trapped in the debris and were making cellphone calls, begging for help.

The prime suspect in a meticulously planned event many Americans compared to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor: Osama bin Laden, the renegade Saudi who has declared war on American interests and has been sheltered by Afghanistan’s rulers.

“This is perhaps the most audacious terrorist attack that’s ever taken place in the world,” said Chris Yates, an aviation expert in London. “It takes a logistics operation from the terror group involved that is second to none. Only a very small handful of terror groups is on that list. I would name at the top of the list Osama bin Laden.”

Whoever was responsible managed to exploit a comprehensive breakdown in national security. Four planes were simultaneously hijacked, despite security checks at all airports, and four flight crews were overpowered.

All four planes were bound for California, and highly explosive fuel filled their tanks to the brim.

Initial reports suggested that the hijackers – working in teams of three, four or five men – wielded knives, in some cases stabbing flight attendants and herding passengers and crew to the back of the planes.

One federal source told The Herald that, on at least one plane, terrorists committed “horrific acts of violence” on passengers in an effort to force pilots to open the cockpit.

But the first priority Tuesday night remained the victims who must be found and rescued – or identified by next of kin. A search and rescue team from South Florida mobilized to help.

And Americans somehow must cope with what happened Tuesday in Lower Manhattan, near Washington, D.C., and in a grassy field in Pennsylvania.

Bodies fell from the World Trade Center moments after an American Airlines jetliner speared one tower and a United Airlines plane punctured the other.

Some people dangled from window sills, grasping for life, then leaping to certain death from as high as the 80th floor, among them a man and a woman holding hands. Witnesses on the street screamed every time a person jumped.

“It looked like a snow blower,” said Debbi Gibbs, who lives nearby. “The sky was full of sparkles, pieces of glass and metal, bigger pieces of metal, then unmistakably people falling, falling in a different way from the debris.”

Many people remained trapped inside the twin buildings for more than an hour. Then, one after the other, the skyscrapers collapsed, their structural integrity melted by the intense heat of fires.

Massive clouds of smoke and wreckage billowed in the air. Afterwards, pieces of office paper floated over Brooklyn, more than three miles away. PENTAGON HIT

Another hijacked American Airlines plane slammed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., collapsing one side of the five-sided structure.

A fourth element of the terrorist plot might have been partially foiled – though at a terrible cost: Hijackers aboard a United Airlines jetliner apparently targeted the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., or the Capitol in Washington. Instead, that plane crashed 85 miles away, into a field in Shanksville, Pa.

“We are being hijacked! We are being hijacked!” one man aboard that plane screamed into a cellphone as the Boeing 757 went down.

There were no known survivors from any of the crashes. The planes carried a total of 266 people.

Throughout the day, Americans shuddered under a blanket security alert.

All U.S. airports were closed and air traffic was halted until at least noon today. Stock exchanges did not operate Tuesday and will not open today.

Military troops, including an infantry regiment, took positions in Washington. Other units mustered elsewhere. The Navy dispatched aircraft carriers and guided missile destroyers to New York and Washington.

The White House and the Capitol were largely evacuated. Authorities heightened security at the borders with Canada and Mexico.

“We are at war,” said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. “We are actually at war.” FLORIDA EMERGENCY

In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency as a “preemptive” response to the attacks. Many public buildings closed Tuesday in South Florida and many private companies released employees early. Disney World closed its theme parks.

Public schools – including all state universities – are open today in Miami-Dade and Broward.

Back in Manhattan and at the Pentagon, rescue efforts continued throughout the night, and National Guardsmen were sent in to help. Hundreds of volunteers and medical workers converged on triage centers, offering help and blood.

With so much unknown, the president – who began the day in Sarasota – spent much of Tuesday in a Cold War-era, underground command center at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Neb., headquarters of the Strategic Air Command.

Later, Bush returned to Washington, and he addressed the nation. He reassured his people that the government was functioning, the economy would survive and Americans would find a way through this.

“America has stood down enemies before and we will do so this time,” the president said. “None of us will ever forget this day. Yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.”

The appalling sequence of events – certain to reshape the way Americans view the world – involved two jetliners from American Airlines carrying 156 people and two from United Airlines carrying 110 people.

In addition to the 50,000 people who work in the World Trade Center, tens of thousands visit the buildings, and the attacks detonated at the beginning of the business day.

“We’re in the World Trade Center and it has just been bombed,” Bob Hurley, 35, a tool salesman from Atlanta, told The Herald by cell phone. “We are OK, but I think a lot of people are dead.”

In the background, a Herald reporter heard people screaming and the thud of heavy explosions. Hurley was on the 22nd floor.

“The elevators are frozen,” Hurley said. “We are going down the stairs. There’s a lot of smoke, but people are organizing. We are getting the hell out of here.”

A little later, the buildings collapsed – as millions of Americans watched on live television. Hurley called back an hour later to say that he and his companions had survived.

The magnitude of the event stunned and frightened Americans everywhere. They jammed telephone lines in many parts of the country, and lined up at many gasoline stations and cash machines in South Florida.

No attacks occurred in Florida, but bomb threats were received at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale. CHILDREN PRAY

At Chesterbrook Academy in Pembroke Pines, many parents picked up their kids by mid-morning. Beth Cleary, an administrator at the private school, said teachers were comforting the youngsters.

“Children asked, ‘Can we pray?’ “ Cleary said. “And we said yes. We’re trying to be positive, a calming influence.”

An executive of the Miami law firm of Hightower, Rudd, Weiser & Acosta sent a memo describing Tuesday’s events as the equivalent of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The company dismissed employees early and closed its office in the New World Trade Center, which houses the Israeli consulate.

The comparison to the event 60 years ago that propelled the United States into World War II occurred to many Americans.

“This is the second Pearl Harbor,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. “I don’t think that I overstate it.”

Homestead Air Force Base was placed on heightened alert. At the U.S. Southern Command headquarters near Miami International Airport, officials also tightened security.

Investigators focused on bin Laden for several reasons.

For one thing, he has proven himself an effective, bloodthirsty enemy of the United States, sponsoring terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa and a U.S. destroyer on a part in Yemen.

For another, a bin Laden associate had been scheduled for sentencing today – in a courthouse near the World Trade Center – for his role in the 1998 bombing of a U.S. embassy in Tanzania that killed 11 people.

In addition, Thursday is the eighth anniversary of the so-called Oslo Accords, the U.S.-brokered peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis.

On Tuesday night, explosions rocked Afghanistan, which harbors bin Laden. But American officials said they were not responsible for the blasts, which were attributed to Afghan rebels.

No word emerged Tuesday from bin Laden, though Afghanistan’s rulers condemned the attacks and rejected suggestions that he was behind them.

In New York, people who witnessed the work of bin Laden or whoever perpetrated these crimes still struggled Tuesday night to come to terms with images their eyes registered but their brains could barely process.

“I can’t believe I have to live the rest of my life and know that I saw these two planes purposely fly into these buildings,” said David Mark of Fort Lauderdale, a yacht captain who was in Manhattan on Tuesday. “That’s when your heart dropped.”

Said another witness, Keith Myers: “It kind of makes you want to go home and spend time with your family. It puts everything in perspective.”

Column by Leonard Pitts Jr.: We’ll go forward from this moment

It’s my job to have something to say.

They pay me to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul. But in this moment of airless shock when hot tears sting disbelieving eyes, the only thing I can find to say, the only words that seem to fit, must be addressed to the unknown author of this suffering.

You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard.

What lesson did you hope to teach us by your coward’s attack on our World Trade Center, our Pentagon, us? What was it you hoped we would learn? Whatever it was, please know that you failed.

Did you want us to respect your cause? You just damned your cause.

Did you want to make us fear? You just steeled our resolve.

Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together.

Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless. We’re frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae – a singer’s revealing dress, a ball team’s misfortune, a cartoon mouse. We’re wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods, and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement. We are fundamentally decent, though – peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are, the overwhelming majority of us, people of faith, believers in a just and loving God.

Some people – you, perhaps – think that any or all of this makes us weak. You’re mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.

Yes, we’re in pain now. We are in mourning and we are in shock. We’re still grappling with the unreality of the awful thing you did, still working to make ourselves understand that this isn’t a special effect from some Hollywood blockbuster, isn’t the plot development from a Tom Clancy novel. Both in terms of the awful scope of their ambition and the probable final death toll, your attacks are likely to go down as the worst acts of terrorism in the history of the United States and, probably, the history of the world. You’ve bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before.

But there’s a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall. This is the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain. When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force. When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length, in the pursuit of justice.

I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people, as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.

In the days to come, there will be recrimination and accusation, fingers pointing to determine whose failure allowed this to happen and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. There will be heightened security, misguided talk of revoking basic freedoms. We’ll go forward from this moment sobered, chastened, sad. But determined, too. Unimaginably determined.

You see, the steel in us is not always readily apparent. That aspect of our character is seldom understood by people who don’t know us well. On this day, the family’s bickering is put on hold.

As Americans we will weep, as Americans we will mourn, and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.

So I ask again: What was it you hoped to teach us? It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that’s the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange: You don’t know my people. You don’t know what we’re capable of. You don’t know what you just started.

But you’re about to learn.

This look back was assembled by Miami Herald editor Jeff Kleinman, the news copy desk chief on Sept. 11, 2001.