Donald Rumsfeld
The United States was attacked on September 11, 2001 by al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them in coordinated strikes into both towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and its target was likely a prominent building in Washington, D.C., most probably either the Capitol Building or the White House. Within three hours of the start of the first hijacking and two hours after American Airlines Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center, Rumsfeld raised the defense condition signaling of the United States offensive readiness to DEFCON 3, the highest it had been since the Arab-Israeli war in 1973.
Hostage Rescue Team
Some higher-profile cases include the Waco siege; Ruby Ridge; the capture of the suspected masterminds of the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Africa; the rescue following the 2013 abduction of a five-year-old boy in Alabama; the hostage rescue operations of prison guards at Talladega, Alabama, and St. Martinville, Louisiana; and the January 29, 2016 confrontation with militants involved in the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. On April 19, 2013, the Hostage Rescue Team arrested a man in Watertown, Massachusetts, after a manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15. HRT rescued a teenager by killing her abductor on August 10, 2013. HRT rescued kidnap victim Frank Arthur Janssen. The HRT assisted in the capture of Eric Frein, the sole suspect in the 2014 Pennsylvania State Police barracks attack. The FBI HRT was deployed to the 2016 Republican National Convention and the 2016 Democratic National Convention