Now Americans are back in front of their TV screens. Almost two thirds of them are more likely to watch news updates in the next few weeks, according to a poll released yesterday by the ad-buying firm Initiative Media and conducted over the weekend.

As President George Bush yesterday returned to the domestic agenda for the first time since the attacks, a growing number of legislators are accusing his administration of using the crisis to push his conservative agenda through what was, until recently, a bitterly divided Congress.

The change was down to Muslim sensibilities. The initial name - Operation Infinite Justice - was withdrawn after objections from some Islamic scholars.

Government sources have said the Clinton administration gave the Central Intelligence Agency approval to conduct covert operations targeting bin Laden in 1998, following the bombings that year of two US embassies in east Africa.

"People are not approaching it on the basis of the no bodybags rule," a defence source said.

Witnesses in at least two states have described the same person visiting the hijackers months before the attacks, in a pattern of behaviour that has been noted in previous attacks linked to Osama bin Laden. Officials described an older man, with salt-and-pepper hair, whose identity is as yet unknown.

Diplomatic cables from the Washington embassy of a key Nato ally, seen by the Guardian, report that the US is keen to hear allied views on "post-Taliban Afghanistan after the liberation of the country".

With US forces mobilising around the world, the economy nosediving, and a broad but potentially fragile international coalition assembled against terrorism, he aimed to strike the delicate balance of calming the fears of a country still in shock and steeling Americans for a difficult and costly war ahead.

Citing excessively bureaucratic divisions between the CIA and the FBI, inappropriate surveillance methods, and an outdated approach to intelligence gathering as initial explanations for failing to intercept the worst single terrorist attack on the nation, congressional leaders and experts called for an overhaul of the way in which the intelligence agencies operate.

As an open truck carrying rubble from what remains of the World Trade Centre turned a corner in Lower Manhattan yesterday a crowd of 15 people descended on it, each making a grab for a handful of mangled girders and rock as a ghoulish souvenir. Some were hard at work, gathering material to sell on as a horrific mementoes, until a scuffle with the police looked imminent.

The Foreign Office has pledged to fly two relatives to New York and provide three nights' accommodation "where it appears certain that a Briton is a fatality or where a victim has a British next of kin".

But that was long, long ago. A time when aeroplanes were a means of transportation rather than weapons of mass destruction and the twin towers of lower Manhattan symbolised the invincibility of global capitalism rather than its vulnerability. It was an era whose distance from ours is measured not in time but events - less than seven days but more than a million repeated images and thousands of lives have passed since then.

The American military air defence command was told by the federal aviation administration that a hijacked commercial airliner was heading towards Washington 12 minutes before it hit. But during that crucial time the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his top aides remained unaware of any imminent danger.

It is a sorry reflection on the state of international relations that, while Americans shed tears at the terror that shook New York on Tuesday, across the world others wept tears of joy. Satellite television saw to it that the world was united before their television screens, where the horror of the attacks and their aftermath was endlessly replayed. Politics ensured that they remained divided in their reaction to what they saw and how they interpreted it.

"He did what Mandela does best," says one dignitary who attended. "He called the school- master over, had a few words with him and then shook each of the children by the hand. They loved it. It made their afternoon and it made the event."

"For a revolution to take place," wrote Vladimir Ilyich. "It is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way."