Word: toweritis
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When Atta brought hell to the north tower of the World Trade Center, when he perished in the flames and had his picture beamed around the world, friends back in Egypt were dumbfounded. They looked and looked again at the photos, trying to find the kid they once knew. "To fly a plane, what a joke! Mohamed could hardly ride a bike," says classmate Osama Abul Enein. "He came from an average middle-class background. Mohamed no way could have done that," agrees Ibrahim Salah, 33, a Cairo engineer who knew him in college...
...solid and pure, good to the roots. I feel I have lost a true brother." Ismail could be any middle class Cairene discussing the premature passing of a dear friend from college. But the classmate she is lionizing spent his final moments steering a Boeing 757 into the north tower of the World Trade Center, helping kill some 6,000 people. And leaving his friends and family struggling to get beyond denial: "I could not imagine what could change a person like Mohammed like that," says Ismail. "It is inconceivable. Someone could change after living abroad, but to kill people...
Last year, the residents of the Pforzheimer Bell Tower suite reserved Thursday nights for the boys. Twenty guys converged in the room each week. They puffed on cigarettes and cigars, forming a smoky haze that mingled with the jazz music playing in the background. Over 30 forms of liquor lined the bar, and beer flowed from a tap. But the main attraction was always the card table in the middle of the room...
More than 25 years ago, in an eerie foreshadowing of the World Trade Center attack, the writer John McPhee explored with nuclear physicist Ted Taylor the question of how you could topple the Twin Towers with a small atomic bomb. Positioned correctly, McPhee reported, a nuke a tenth as powerful as Hiroshima's could knock a tower into the Hudson River...
...only they could do the same for the rest of us. We are all in the Third Tower now, the one built instantly from the rubble of the other two. We have been "awakened to danger," President George W. Bush said, have heard the planes and seen the flames and are uncertain about what to do next. We're told to go about our business; we want to head for the stairs. When millions of us all imagine in the same week what we would say in our last cell-phone call to our family and friends, something...