| More Cost-Effective than Pearl Harbor By Antonio C. Abaya September 14, 2001 Whoever plotted that diabolical attack on the World Trade Center last Tuesday, September 11, must have had some engineers advising him on the technical aspects. I do not agree with the view that the terrorists were just lucky and knocked down the twin towers purely by chance. My sense is that they set out deliberately to destroy the towers and worked their way backwards to determine what logistics they needed to accomplish that mission. Their structural engineer calculated how much heat energy they would need to melt or at least soften the steel skeleton of the building and thus cause it to collapse. Their chemical engineer calculated the amount of burning aviation fuel they would need to raise the temperature beyond the melting point of steel and to keep it at that level for x-number of minutes. It is no coincidence that the aircraft they chose to hijack were all gassed up to fly non-stop from the East Coast (Boston, Newark, Washington DC) to the West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco). If one or both of the planes they hijacked were flying only from, say, Boston to Memphis, or from Newark to Atlanta, they probably would not have massed enough potential heat energy to destroy the towers. And the death toll from their enterprise would have been �only� in the hundreds, instead of in the thousands. Never underestimate the value of meticulous planning. ***** When news came out on CNN and BBC that a fourth aircraft had crashed in rural Pennsylvania, after three others had slammed into the WTC in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington DC, my guess was that there had been a struggle on board that aircraft, causing it to crash-land before it could reach its intended target, whatever it was. And that was indeed what happened, as it turned out. In one of the most gut-wrenching episode in this mega-tragedy, several passengers on board that aircraft learned from cell-phone messages from relatives and friends about the suicide-crashes on the WTC. Some of the passengers, in turn, relayed the message that THEIR aircraft had been hijacked also. Realizing that their hijackers also intended to slam their plane into another target, some of the male passengers voted amongst themselves to try and overpower the hijackers, who were armed only with knives and box cutters. In the ensuing struggle, whoever was at the controls � the pilot and co-pilot presumably having been stabbed to death � had not acquired enough skills at that Florida flying school or was violently removed from the pilot seat by passengers who themselves had no idea how to fly the plane. Mercifully, the plane went down in a rural area. Several hundred DC bureaucrats probably owe their extended lives to those brave passengers. ***** Understandably, comparisons have been made between Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center. Both were surprise attacks of giant proportions. But the similarities begin and end there. In 1941, the Japanese used some 350 torpedo planes and dive bombers that took off from six aircraft carriers which in turn were protected by an elaborate screen of battleships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines. In 2001, the Muslims � all 19 of them � bought plane tickets in four commercial airliners, which they used like giant Molotov cocktails against the awesome symbols of American economic and military power, and probably paid with credit cards which will never be debited for the amount owed. In effect, they paid only with their lives. In the macabre profit and loss calculation of modern warfare, this was the most cost-effective operation ever. And while after 1941, the Americans were able to recover and strike back (at Midway, for example) and eventually win, in 2001 that prospect is not certain, or even possible. Strike back against whom? The FBI says that some 50 persons took part in the attack, including the 19 suicide crashers. Even if all 31 others were hunted down and killed, the yawning imbalance in body counts would leave the understandable cries for revenge maddeningly unsatisfied. The morning after the attacks, while on my way to a meeting at Galleria Suites, I calculated American casualties. Based on the announced working population of WTC of 50,000 and a total of 220 floors, there was an average of 227 persons per floor. I estimated a total of 70 floors, above the impact floors, from which there was no possible escape, and multiplied that by 227, and added to that product the passengers in the doomed planes, and the 250 or so missing and presumed dead firefighters and policemen, and I came up with a casualty total of more than 16,000 fatalities. In what could be a deliberate effort to understate the casualties, the Americans have since claimed that there were only 10,000 to 20,000 persons in the building at the time of impact � how could they have possibly known that? � but that would still mean 3,000 to 6,000 dead. Only a nuclear strike at the mountainous and sparsely populated Afghanistan, or a ground invasion of hostile territory with a systematic massacre of innocent men, women and children, can possibly equalize the body counts, since the entire resident �army� of Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect, is not known to number more than a few hundred. But that would mean, for the Americans, a descent into a moral abyss more corrosive of their own self-image than anything they have ever experienced in the Philippines of the 1900s or in the Vietnam of the 1960s. I sympathize with the Americans, not only because of the unspeakable act of barbarism that they have suffered, but also for the moral dilemma that they face, which needs a Solomonic solution which their cowboy president is not intellectually equipped to formulate. ***** This article appeared in the October 1, 2001 issue of the Philippine Weekly Graphic magazine. |
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| ON THE OTHER HAND |