I just heard a professor of structural engineering on NPR give his opinion on why the World Trade Center towers collapsed. He said (and it made sense to me) the impact of the airplane was not the deciding factor. Rather, it was the ensuing intense fire, fed by many thousands of pounds of jet fuel, raging for more than an hour and building to well over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, that weakened the steel support structures and caused the top floors to come crashing down like a hellish hammer blow.

“Bullseye,” say Egyptians as they celebrate anti-US attacks.

The New York Times has a graphical flight tracker that shows the flight paths of the hijacked planes.

Jason Kottke has a lot of links to videos and photos of this nightmare.

The latest footage I just saw on CNN chilled me to the center of my being; you can see the jet liner slice right through the tower. And parts of it keep on going. I keep thinking about the terror those passengers must have felt in their final minutes.

The bastards knew what they were doing. They deliberately chose flights that were going to the west coast, since they would be filled to capacity with fuel; the bellies and both wings would have been full. They turned those jets into gigantic bombs.

The Washington Post has an article on early efforts to discover who’s responsible for the attacks.

We need to go after the nations that give safe haven to these terrorist beasts, because this cannot have been the work of a small group. They could not have succeeded without extensive financial, technical, and tactical support. The nations I’m talking about are well known. Afghanistan. Iran. Iraq. Libya. Yemen. We know who our enemies are.

And it’s time to stop playing fair. In the US we are so preoccupied with due process and the rule of law that we seem to expect evidence on a level with what we would have in a criminal trial. Meanwhile, the monsters toy with us and kill us, using our own democratic processes and our own cherished freedoms against us.

Of course, we need to avoid jumping to conclusions. But we do know who our enemies are.

This page at the Jerusalem Post contains an audio interview with Aaron Swirski, one of the architects of the World Trade Center. The buildings were actually designed to survive even something like this. In theory.

This is the start of a new era in civilization. God (if you exist) help us.

The coordination and scale of this attack is unbelievable. It’s important for us to realize that the creatures who do this evil will never stop. Their intent is to bring the entire world into a religiously dominated Dark Age.

I’m very afraid of what happens next.

I don’t have words for what I feel.

Shock and incredible rage.

We are at war.