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Plane was Heading for Presidential Retreat at Camp David
WASHINGTON, Sept 12 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - U.S. intelligence sources said Wednesday that there were indications of attempts to divert one of the hijacked United Airlines flight from Newark to crash at Camp David, Maryland, the presidential retreat.
"It is unclear how that plan may have been thwarted," reported CNN's online news service.
U.S. military officials said U.S. aircraft shot none of the planes down.
Military officials did not know which specific planes were hijacked. Callers from two of the other hijacked planes called on cell phones to say their planes had been hijacked.
James Kallstrom, a retired FBI agent who led the investigation into the explosive crash of TWA 800 in July 1996 that killed 230 people, said he believed the hijackers must have flown the planes into the buildings themselves, said CNN.
"I can't imagine any American pilot crashing an airplane into one of these buildings, even with a gun to the head. They wouldn't do that," said Kallstrom.
The U.S. military went on full alert. Two aircraft carriers left the naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, in response to the attacks to provide upgraded air defense for New York and Washington.
Daniel Plesch of the Royal United Services Institute in London told CNN the attacks must lead to a massive rethink in the U.S. about its approach to security.
"Despite a great rhetoric there are very, very poor security procedures, which I witnessed myself on innumerable occasions. The Americans do not take security at all seriously," Plesch added.
U.S. President George W. Bush issued a brief statement Tuesday night, vowing, "We will find these people and they will suffer for taking on this nation." Bush, who was in Florida at the time of the attack, said the nation's military had been placed on "high-alert status".
All U.S. military sites around the world have gone to ThreatCon Delta.
A U.S. military source told BBC news online that a "world-wide advisory", a regular memorandum sent to all U.S. embassies, had gone out in the past few days, outlining possible attacks on U.S. targets around the world.
"It wasn't suggesting that we should relax, we would expect to be cautious," the source said.
"But no one expected anything like this."
The almost simultaneous attacks in New York and Washington have raised serious questions about the failure of U.S. intelligence units to prevent the attacks from happening, reported BBC's online news service.
By hitting high-profile targets in the heart of two of America's major cities, the attackers unmasked how vulnerable the U.S. can be to attacks by those willing to use extreme tactics like suicide missions, the BBC added.
Many commentators have reacted with disbelief that even the Pentagon - the very nerve center of the U.S. military - is not safe from such a major hit.
Others question how the world's largest intelligence gathering organization, with a budget of billions of dollars, could not have known anything about what was about to happen.
Also the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration knew nothing of the imminent tragedy early in the day.
Chuck Hagel, a high-ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: "This is the second Pearl Harbor. I don't think that I overstate it".
He was referring to Japan's attack on the U.S. 60 years ago, which also totally took the nation's security apparatus by surprise.
The BBC's defense correspondent, Jonathan Marcus, said the attacks in Washington and New York were also directed at the very symbols of U.S. power and prestige.
"While the United States is an unrivalled military superpower, its open society makes it highly vulnerable to this sort of attack," Marcus said.
"All the bombers and army divisions in the world cannot protect against this type of onslaught - especially if the vital intelligence warnings and leads are absent," he added.
The Pentagon is the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense (Army, Navy and Air Force). It is a five-sided building in Arlington County, Virginia, covering 34 acres. It was built between 1941-43 at a cost of $83 million.
It is one of the world's largest office buildings with three times the floor space of the Empire State Building in New York.
It has five floors and is built of structural steel and reinforced concrete. The Pentagon has 3.7 million square feet of usable floor space for approximately 23,000 people.
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