Estimates of the fatalities are coming in. 800 people are missing at the Pentagon. Over 250 New York firefighters are assumed dead, including both the fire chief and deputy fire chief. Thousands of others are missing as well. There are reports on all the news channels of people calling out from under the rubble on cell phones, still alive and hoping to be rescued.

A friend sent an email chiding me for blaming this on the intelligence community, and he’s right, I have no way of knowing if or how the intelligence community failed in this instance. Certainly they have no way of knowing everything. I think that we’ll need to assess our intelligence gathering apperatus along with lots of other things, like airport security, and on-flight security in the aftermath of this awful incident.

Donald Rumsfeld just said in a press conference that the U.S. was not involved in the attacks on Kabul.

CNN is reporting life from Kabul, Afghanistan, where there are flames from some sort of missile or artillery attack. It’s unknown whether the attack was made by the United Statses or anti-Taliban forces involved in the civil war there.

The facts are becoming clear now. There were four hijacked planes: two that hit the World Trade Center, one that hit right next to the Pentagon, and one that crashed in Somerset County, PA. I’m still hearing reports of other hijackings come in, but none have been verified that I can tell. There’s a tape of a cellular phone call made to 911 from the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. The passenger had locked himself in a bathroom and knew that the plane was going down. The CTO of Akamai was on AA flight 11 out of Logan.

President Bush is at Barksdale Airforce Base, in Louisiana. I’ve been watching the news and I’m still not sure how many planes were hijacked or where they wound up. After half an hour or so of watching the news, it’s difficult to know how much I’ve reported so far is true and how much is conjecture. The military’s level of readiness is currently Delta (war level).

The pace of news seems to have slowed. I’m headed home for the rest of the day. I may post some udpates later if I get the chance. My thoughts are with the people affected by this awful event.

40,000 people normally worked in the World Trade Center on any given day. (That, of course, doesn’t include tourists and other miscellaneous folks.) I’ve heard reports that people from a firm on the 91st floor of one of the towers were evacuated successfully.

Here’s a timeline of the attacks. (It’s a link to Nando, and may be slow.)

From a news report:

American Airlines confirmed today that it lost two aircraft in tragic incidents this morning. American said the flights were Flight 11, a Boeing 767 en route from Boston to Los Angeles with 81 passengers, nine flight attendants and two pilots; and Flight 77, a Boeing 757 operating from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles with 58 passengers, four flight attendants and two pilots.