title: “What Next " ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-13” author: “John Mcgranahan”
Whe the fires are out and the rubble has cooled, rescue personnel will begin searching for the injured trapped amid the concrete slabs and recovering the dead. At the same time, engineers will begin stabilizing the shifting wreckage in order to prevent further injuries-a difficult undertaking at the ruined section of the Pentagon but a mind-boggling one at the World Trade Center, which lies crumbled over three city blocks. Only after the debris has been stabilized will agents from federal agencies be allowed to step in.
Then the difficult, painstaking search for physical evidence will begin. In the coming weeks and months, agents will begin sifting through mountains of rubble, searching for anything-plane parts, bone fragments, personal belongings or chemical residue-that might be used to connect the terrorists to their crime. First in the minds of investigators is to locate the so-called black boxes from the four hijacked airplanes. With luck, those boxes will contain audible recordings from the cockpit and give investigators an idea of who might have hijacked the planes and why.
But today, investigators said their prospect was bleak. “Those black boxes are buried under tons of flaming debris,” said an FBI official in New York. “This investigation will take months.” They were more hopeful about recovering the black box from the hijacked plane which crashed in a field in rural Somerset County near Pittsburgh.
Meanwhile, federal officials say agents have already begun combing through flight records, trying to determine the identities of the men who hijacked and crashed the planes Tuesday morning. Officials say agents will begin checking out the aliases, addresses and credit card information of the men who boarded those four planes. “If they were purchased on stolen credit cards,” said the FBI official, “then when those cards were stolen and who they were stolen from becomes a key element of the investigation.”
In the next 48 hours, federal agencies will begin reviewing domestic and overseas intelligence and contacting informants within groups here that are known to have terrorist links. They will be looking for information that yesterday might have seemed innocuous-but in light of today’s catastrophe may have foreshadowed that a terrible tragedy was about to strike.
