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America Under Attack: Barbara Olson Dies in the Attack

Aired September 11, 2001 - 17:36   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: Now back to Aaron in New York.

AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Judy, thank you. It is -- I know for many of you around the country, you are making your way home. You have not necessarily been with us all day long. Life has gone on, I supposed with TVs on in most offices, but life has gone on.

I just wonder if we can take a shot of the building behind me, the World Trade Center building, and just take a moment and try and absorb, not with the facts, not with the pieces of information, but just look at that scene and think about what happened today. There were 50,000 or so people who came to work on a beautiful, late summer morning here in New York in those two towers that are now gone.

These are people with families, with children, people who had offices and have them no more, people whose lives are forever changed, and it happened in a space of very few minutes. 8:48 this morning, it began. A few minutes later, at about 9:08, a second plane zoomed toward the unhit tower, the second tower. You see it on the lower part of your screen. And it just slices that tower in half.

If we can retrack it and show it again so you'll know where to look. You will see the plane first in the lower left side of the screen coming at it. And there it goes. And what it must have been like in those buildings and on these hijacked airliners.

We heard earlier that Barbara Olson, a frequent commentator here, was on the flight that was going to Washington -- or has been hijacked to Washington. She called her husband and said that the hijacking was under way.

She said that from what she could tell, the hijackers -- and she didn't indicate how many except that there was more than one -- were armed with just knives and cardboard cutters, that they herded all the people on board this flight to the back of the plane, including the pilot, and she asked her husband, the Solicitor General Ted Olson, who many of you will recall argued the post-election case before the Supreme Court, said to her husband, "what do I do?" And shortly after that, that plane, with Mrs. Olson and many more, crashed at the Pentagon.

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