On a clear, cloudless Tuesday morning in September 2001, the
United States experienced the deadliest act of terrorism ever carried out on
its soil. In the space of 102 minutes, nineteen men armed with box cutters and
a plan rehearsed for years turned four passenger aircraft into weapons, killed
nearly 3,000 people, brought down the tallest buildings in New York City, tore
a gash into the Pentagon, and left a smoking crater in a Pennsylvania field.
The events of that day, now known simply as 9/11, reshaped American foreign
policy, domestic security, aviation, and the collective psychology of an entire
generation.
An Ordinary Morning
September 11, 2001, began like any other late summer
weekday. Skies over the East Coast of the United States were unusually clear, a
detail air traffic controllers and pilots would later recall vividly because it
meant there was nothing, weather wise, to explain what was about to happen.
Commuters filled the trains into Manhattan. Office workers filed into the World
Trade Center towers, which anchored the southern tip of the island and housed
roughly 50,000 employees from more than 400 companies. At the Pentagon in
Arlington, Virginia, the workday was also just beginning for the thousands of
military and civilian personnel who worked inside the five-sided fortress of
American defense planning.
At Boston’s Logan International Airport, at Washington
Dulles International Airport in Virginia, and at Newark International Airport
in New Jersey, four commercial flights prepared for routine departures. All
four were transcontinental flights bound for the West Coast, chosen
deliberately by the hijackers because they would be carrying large amounts of
fuel for the long journey, fuel that would later turn into the accelerant for
catastrophic fires.
American Airlines Flight 11 pushed back from its gate in
Boston and lifted off at 7:59 in the morning, carrying 76 passengers, 11 crew
members, and five hijackers bound for Los Angeles. United Airlines Flight 175,
also departing Boston for Los Angeles, followed shortly after with 56
passengers, nine crew members, and five more hijackers aboard. American
Airlines Flight 77 left Dulles for Los Angeles carrying 58 passengers, six crew
members, and five hijackers. United Airlines Flight 93 departed Newark bound
for San Francisco, delayed slightly on the runway, with 33 passengers, seven
crew members, and four hijackers on board.
None of the passengers or crew had any reason to suspect
that their flight would become the vehicle for the worst terrorist attack in
American history.
The Conspiracy Behind the Cockpit Doors
The attacks were not the work of a single day’s planning.
They were the culmination of a conspiracy that had been years in the making,
orchestrated by al Qaeda, the militant Islamist network founded and led by
Osama bin Laden, a Saudi born extremist who had declared war on the United
States through a series of public statements in the 1990s. Bin Laden and his
top lieutenants, including Egyptian physician Ayman al Zawahiri, viewed the
American military presence in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia
following the 1991 Gulf War, and American support for Israel, as justification
for attacking American civilians.
The operational mastermind of the plot was Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, a Kuwaiti born al Qaeda operative who later told interrogators that
he had proposed a version of the plan to bin Laden as early as 1996. The
scheme, originally more ambitious and involving as many as ten aircraft on both
American coasts, was scaled back and refined over subsequent years. Bin Laden
approved a version of the plot in 1999, and recruitment of the men who would
carry it out began in earnest.
Central to the plot was Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian who had
studied urban planning in Hamburg, Germany, and who became the operational
leader of the hijackers on the ground. Atta and several other future hijackers,
including Marwan al Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, formed what investigators later
called the Hamburg cell, a small group of educated, secular seeming young men
who became radicalized while living in Germany and who traveled to Afghanistan
for training at al Qaeda camps.
Once selected, four of the hijackers, Atta, al Shehhi,
Jarrah, and Hani Hanjour, received flight training at various schools in the
United States, learning to fly commercial sized jets, though notably several of
their instructors later recalled that the men expressed little interest in
learning to take off or land safely, focusing instead on how to steer a plane
already in flight. The remaining fifteen hijackers, most of them Saudi
nationals recruited to serve as so called muscle, tasked with subduing passengers
and crew, arrived in the United States in the months before the attack and
trained physically while awaiting final instructions.
In the summer of 2001, American intelligence agencies
received a stream of fragmentary warnings suggesting an attack was being
planned by al Qaeda, though none specified the exact date, method, or target. A
presidential briefing delivered to President George W. Bush on August 6, 2001,
titled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US, would later become a subject of
intense scrutiny for what it did, and did not, warn about. The failure to
connect these scattered pieces of intelligence into a coherent picture became
one of the central findings of the official investigation that followed.
Investigators later determined that the plot cost al Qaeda a
relatively modest sum, estimated at somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000
dollars, funds that moved through a network of bank wires, cash couriers, and
informal money transfer systems that were difficult for Western financial
regulators to trace at the time. The hijackers themselves lived unremarkable
lives in the months before the attack, renting apartments, opening bank
accounts, obtaining driver licenses, and in several cases taking additional flying
lessons at small aviation schools in Florida, Arizona, and Minnesota, all while
avoiding behavior that might draw the attention of local authorities. One of
the intended hijackers, Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested in August 2001 after
flight instructors in Minnesota grew suspicious of his interest in learning to
steer a commercial jet without wanting to learn takeoff or landing procedures,
though the significance of his arrest was not recognized by federal agencies
until after the attacks had already occurred.
Coordination among the nineteen men was managed largely
through Atta, who traveled between cities in the United States in the weeks
before the attack to confirm final details with the other hijacking teams, and
through occasional contact with al Qaeda handlers overseas. On the night before
the attacks, several of the hijackers checked into hotels near their departure
airports, and letters later recovered from their luggage and belongings,
believed to have been written or distributed by Atta, contained religious
instructions intended to prepare the men spiritually for what they described as
a martyrdom operation.
8:46 in the Morning
At 8:46 am, American Airlines Flight 11, hijacked shortly
after takeoff when Atta and his accomplices stormed the cockpit, slammed into
the North Tower of the World Trade Center, striking between the 93rd and 99th
floors. The impact, at several hundred miles an hour, instantly killed everyone
aboard and an unknown number of office workers inside, and severed all three of
the building’s emergency stairwells above the impact zone, trapping hundreds of
people with no way down. The explosion sent a fireball outward and rained
flaming debris onto the streets of Lower Manhattan.
In the confusion of the first minutes, many assumed a
horrific accident had occurred, perhaps a small private plane gone off course.
That illusion shattered seventeen minutes later. At 9:03 am, United Airlines
Flight 175 banked sharply and crashed into the South Tower, striking between
the 77th and 85th floors, in full view of television cameras that had rushed to
the scene to cover what they believed was the aftermath of an accident. Millions
of Americans watching live television saw the second plane hit in real time,
and in that instant, it became clear the nation was under a coordinated attack.
Inside both towers, the scenes were of chaos, courage, and
unimaginable loss. Office workers below the impact zones began evacuating down
stairwells, in many cases calmly and in orderly lines, aided by colleagues who
carried disabled coworkers on their backs or in evacuation chairs. Above the
impact points, hundreds of people found themselves trapped by fire, smoke, and
blocked stairwells, with some making the agonizing decision to jump from
windows rather than be consumed by flame, a detail that remains among the most
harrowing of the entire day.
Firefighters and police officers from the New York City Fire
Department, the New York Police Department, and the Port Authority Police
Department rushed into the towers as thousands of civilians rushed out, a fact
that would prove fatal for hundreds of first responders when the buildings
later collapsed. Fire Department companies climbed dozens of flights of stairs
carrying heavy equipment, aware that the fires burning above them, fed by
roughly 10,000 gallons of jet fuel per plane in addition to office furnishings,
were beyond anything conventional firefighting could extinguish, yet they
continued upward regardless in an effort to rescue as many trapped civilians as
possible.
The Pentagon Is Struck
While New York reeled from the two strikes on the World
Trade Center, a third hijacked aircraft was already bearing down on the nation’s
capital. American Airlines Flight 77, hijacked by five men led by Hani Hanjour,
had reversed course over Ohio and turned back toward Washington, D.C. At 9:37 am,
the aircraft slammed into the western side of the Pentagon at high speed,
carving through the outer rings of the building and igniting a fire that would
burn for days.
The crash killed all 64 people aboard the aircraft, 58
passengers and 6 crew, along with 125 military and civilian personnel who were
working inside the Pentagon at the time. Because the section of the building
that was struck had recently undergone structural renovation, including the
addition of blast resistant windows and reinforced steel supports, the death
toll, while devastating, was far lower than it might otherwise have been;
officials later noted that many offices in that wing had not yet been reoccupied
following the renovation work.
The attack on the Pentagon, the literal headquarters of the
American military, underscored that the assault was aimed not simply at symbols
of finance and commerce but at the machinery of American power itself. Within
minutes, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered the unprecedented
grounding of all civilian aircraft over the United States, and the White House
and Capitol building were evacuated amid fears that they, too, were targets.
The Fourth Plane and the Revolt Over Pennsylvania
The fourth hijacked aircraft, United Airlines Flight 93, had
departed Newark later than scheduled, a delay that would prove consequential.
By the time its four hijackers, led by Ziad Jarrah, seized control of the
cockpit, passengers and crew aboard had already learned, through phone calls to
loved ones and airline officials on the ground, that two planes had struck the
World Trade Center and a third had hit the Pentagon. Armed with this knowledge,
a group of passengers made the decision to fight back rather than sit
passively, as had been standard hijacking protocol before that day.
Phone calls made from the plane, some of which were recorded
on answering machines and later played publicly, captured passengers describing
their plan to storm the cockpit. Todd Beamer, a passenger who reached an
airphone operator, uttered the phrase let’s roll moments before the assault
began, words that would later become one of the enduring rallying cries
associated with the day. The passengers, using a food and beverage cart as a
battering ram, charged the cockpit door.
Recognizing that he was losing control of the aircraft,
Jarrah rolled the plane and deliberately crashed it into an empty field near
Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 am, killing all 33 passengers, 7 crew
members, and 4 hijackers instantly. Investigators later concluded, based on the
flight’s trajectory and subsequent statements from captured al Qaeda
operatives, that Flight 93’s intended target was almost certainly the United
States Capitol building or the White House. The passengers of Flight 93,
through their decision to resist, are widely credited with having prevented a
fourth successful strike on a landmark of American government, and the crash
site in Shanksville is today preserved as a national memorial honoring their
actions.
Collapse
Back in New York, the structural integrity of the Twin
Towers, each 110 stories tall and among the tallest buildings in the world at
the time of their construction in the early 1970s, was failing under the
combined stress of the impact damage and the intense heat of the burning jet
fuel, which weakened the steel support columns. At 9:59 a.m., after burning for
56 minutes, the South Tower, struck second but weakened faster due to the angle
of impact, collapsed in approximately ten seconds, sending a massive cloud of
pulverized concrete and debris rolling through the streets of Lower Manhattan
and killing more than 800 people who remained in or near the building.
Twenty-nine minutes later, at 10:28 am, after burning for
102 minutes total from the moment it was struck, the North Tower also
collapsed, killing more than 1,600 additional people, including hundreds of
firefighters, police officers, and Port Authority officers who were still
inside attempting rescue operations. Later that afternoon, at 5:20 pm, a third
building in the complex, the 47 story 7 World Trade Center, which had sustained
serious structural damage from falling debris and had burned uncontrolled for
hours because water mains in the area had been severed, also collapsed, though
by that point the building had been evacuated and there were no casualties from
its fall.
The collapse of the towers claimed the lives of 2,753 people
in New York alone, a figure that includes office workers, visitors, restaurant
staff at the Windows on the World restaurant near the top of the North Tower,
and 441 first responders, among them 343 firefighters of the New York City Fire
Department, 23 officers of the New York Police Department, and 37 officers of
the Port Authority Police Department. It remains the single deadliest incident
for American firefighters and law enforcement officers in history.
Counting the Dead
Across all four sites, New York, the Pentagon, and
Shanksville, the attacks of September 11 killed 2,977 people, not including the
19 hijackers who also died. The victims came from more than 90 countries and
ranged in age from a two-year-old girl aboard one of the flights to a woman in
her eighties. They included traders and janitors, chefs and executives,
immigrants who had come to America seeking opportunity and native New Yorkers
who had worked in the towers for decades.
The scale of the loss meant that identification of remains
was a painstaking, years long process. As of the most recent updates from New
York City’s medical examiner’s office, roughly 60 percent of the victims
recovered at the World Trade Center site have been positively identified
through DNA analysis, a process that continues to this day using forensic
technology that did not exist at the time of the attacks, allowing families to
receive confirmation of a loved one’s remains decades later.
Beyond the immediate death toll, the attacks produced a
second, slower wave of casualties. Thousands of first responders, recovery
workers, and residents of Lower Manhattan who breathed in the toxic dust that
blanketed the area for months afterward later developed serious respiratory
illnesses and cancers linked to their exposure. Public health researchers
working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have documented
thousands of deaths among responders and survivors attributable to World Trade
Center related illnesses in the years since, a toll that in raw numbers has
come to exceed the death count from the day of the attacks itself. This ongoing
health crisis led to the creation of the World Trade Center Health Program, a
federally funded initiative that continues to provide medical monitoring and
treatment to those affected.
A Nation Grounded and a City in Ash
In the immediate aftermath, air travel across the United
States came to a complete and total halt for the first time in the country’s
history, with every commercial and private aircraft ordered to land at the
nearest available airport. International flights bound for the United States
were diverted to Canada, where the small town of Gander in Newfoundland
famously took in thousands of stranded passengers, an episode of hospitality
later dramatized in popular culture.
In Lower Manhattan, the area around the fallen towers, which
came to be known as Ground Zero, resembled a war zone. A thick layer of ash and
pulverized building material coated cars, streets, and buildings for blocks in
every direction. Firefighters, police officers, construction workers, and
thousands of volunteers began what would become a grueling, months long
recovery operation, sifting through roughly 1.8 million tons of debris in
search of survivors and, later, remains. The fires beneath the rubble pile, fed
by pockets of trapped fuel and combustible material, continued to smolder for
more than three months before being fully extinguished in December 2001.
Remarkably, amid the devastation, rescuers pulled a small
number of survivors from the wreckage in the days that followed, including a
group of Port Authority police officers found alive in the rubble on the night
of the attack, and the last survivor pulled from the debris, a Port Authority
employee named Genelle Guzman McMillan, was rescued on September 12, more than
26 hours after the towers fell.
The World Responds
President George W. Bush, who had been visiting an
elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, when he was informed of the attacks,
was flown aboard Air Force One to secure locations in Louisiana and Nebraska
before returning to Washington that evening. Addressing the nation from the
Oval Office at 8:30 pm, Bush declared that the United States would make no
distinction between the terrorists who committed the attacks and those who
harbored them, laying the rhetorical groundwork for what would soon become
known as the War on Terror.
The international response to the attacks was one of
overwhelming solidarity with the United States. The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization invoked Article 5 of its founding treaty for the first time in its
history, declaring that an attack on one member nation would be treated as an
attack on all. Leaders across the world, including in countries with
historically tense relations with Washington, condemned the attacks, and
candlelight vigils were held from Paris to Tehran to Tokyo. A French newspaper
famously ran the headline We Are All Americans Now.
Within weeks, on October 7, 2001, the United States, backed
by a coalition that included British forces, launched a military campaign
against Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban regime had provided safe haven to
bin Laden and al Qaeda. The stated goal was to dismantle al Qaeda’s operational
base and remove the Taliban from power for refusing to hand over bin Laden. The
war in Afghanistan would go on to become the longest armed conflict in American
history, lasting nearly twenty years until the final withdrawal of American
troops in August 2021.
Domestically, the attacks triggered sweeping changes to
American law and government structure. Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act in
October 2001, expanding the surveillance and investigative powers of federal
law enforcement agencies in the name of counterterrorism, a law that would
remain controversial for years over its implications for civil liberties. In
2002, the government created the Department of Homeland Security, consolidating
22 previously separate federal agencies into a single cabinet level department
tasked with protecting the country from future attacks. Air travel was
transformed almost overnight, with the creation of the Transportation Security
Administration to take over airport screening from private contractors, the
reinforcement of cockpit doors on commercial aircraft, and new restrictions on carryon
items that air travelers still encounter today.
The attacks were also cited by the Bush administration,
controversially, as part of the justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
despite the fact that no credible evidence ever emerged linking Saddam Hussein’s
government to the September 11 plot, a claim that the administration itself
later walked back, and which remains one of the most contested aspects of the
post attack political landscape.
The financial markets, too, felt the immediate shock of the
attacks. The New York Stock Exchange, located only blocks from the World Trade
Center, remained closed for four consecutive trading days, the longest shutdown
since the Great Depression, and when trading resumed on September 17, the Dow
Jones Industrial Average fell more than 600 points in a single session, at the
time the largest one-day point decline in the exchange’s history. The airline
industry, already fragile, suffered massive financial losses as travel demand
collapsed in the weeks following the attacks, prompting Congress to approve a multibillion-dollar
bailout package for carriers within days. Insurance companies faced tens of
billions of dollars in claims connected to the destruction of the towers and
surrounding buildings, and the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan’s economy took
years to complete.
Everyday civic life changed as well. Sporting events,
Broadway performances, and public gatherings across the country were suspended
in the days immediately following the attacks, only gradually resuming as a
mark of both mourning and defiance. Blood donation centers across the United
States were overwhelmed by volunteers in the days after the attack, even though
the relatively low number of survivors meant that much of the donated blood
ultimately could not be used for the emergency itself. American flags, briefly
in short supply at retailers nationwide, became ubiquitous on homes, cars, and
storefronts in a wave of patriotic sentiment that lasted for months.
The Official Investigation
In 2002, Congress established the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, popularly known as the 9/11
Commission, a bipartisan body tasked with producing a full accounting of the
circumstances surrounding the attacks and recommending reforms to prevent
future ones. The commission’s final report, published in 2004 and becoming an
unlikely bestseller, detailed the extensive failures of communication and
coordination among American intelligence agencies, including the Central
Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that had allowed
warning signs to go unheeded in the months before the attack.
Among its most significant recommendations, the commission
called for the creation of a Director of National Intelligence to coordinate
the work of the country’s many intelligence agencies, a recommendation Congress
implemented later that same year. The report also detailed, in painstaking
chronological form, the movements and communications of the hijackers in the
years, months, and days leading up to the attack, providing the most
authoritative public account of how the plot was conceived, funded, and
executed.
The Hunt for Bin Laden
Osama bin Laden evaded capture for nearly a decade after the
attacks, believed to be hiding in the mountainous border region between
Afghanistan and Pakistan before intelligence eventually placed him in a
fortified compound in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, not far from that
country’s premier military academy. On May 2, 2011, a team of United States
Navy SEALs, operating under the authorization of President Barack Obama, raided
the compound in a covert nighttime operation and killed bin Laden, bringing an
end to the nearly ten-year manhunt for the man who had orchestrated the
deadliest terrorist attack in American history. News of his death was greeted
with spontaneous celebrations in cities across the United States, including
outside the White House and at the site of the fallen towers in New York.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the
plot, was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and has been held at the American
military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ever since. He and several
codefendants have faced a protracted, still unresolved military commission
process over the years, with pretrial hearings repeatedly delayed by legal
disputes, including over the admissibility of evidence obtained through torture
during his interrogation in CIA custody, an issue that has prevented the case
from reaching trial for more than two decades.
Rebuilding and Remembering
The site of the fallen towers remained a subject of intense
public debate for years over how it should be rebuilt and memorialized. After a
lengthy and often contentious design process, construction eventually proceeded
on a new complex anchored by One World Trade Center, also known as the Freedom
Tower, which at 1,776 feet, a height chosen deliberately to evoke the year of
American independence, became the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere
upon its completion. The tower officially opened to tenants in November 2014.
Alongside the new tower, the National September 11 Memorial
and Museum opened to the public in 2011 and 2014 respectively, built around two
enormous reflecting pools set within the original footprints of the Twin
Towers, each cascading into a void at its center, surrounded by bronze parapets
inscribed with the names of every victim of both the 2001 attacks and the
earlier 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The museum below ground
preserves recovered artifacts, including a mangled fire truck, twisted steel
beams, and personal belongings of victims, alongside recorded testimonies from
survivors, first responders, and families of the dead.
Similar memorials were constructed at the Pentagon, where a
memorial park featuring a bench for each of the 184 victims killed there was
dedicated in 2008, and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the Flight 93
National Memorial honors the passengers and crew whose actions are believed to
have saved the Capitol or the White House from a fourth strike.
A Legacy That Still Shapes the Present
More than two decades on, the effects of September 11 remain
woven into the fabric of daily American life in ways both visible and
invisible. Airport security procedures introduced in the attack’s aftermath,
from shoe removal to liquid restrictions, became so routine that entire
generations of travelers have never known anything different. The wars launched
in response, in Afghanistan and Iraq, cost trillions of dollars and tens of
thousands of lives, American and foreign, and their consequences continue to
shape geopolitics in the Middle East and South Asia today.
The attacks also left a lasting mark on American political
culture, contributing to years of heightened suspicion toward Muslim and Arab
communities within the United States, and prompting difficult, still ongoing
national conversations about the balance between security and civil liberties.
At the same time, the images of firefighters climbing into burning towers, of
passengers on Flight 93 choosing to fight back, and of ordinary citizens
helping strangers escape the chaos of that morning, have become enduring
symbols of courage that Americans continue to invoke a quarter century later.
Every year on September 11, ceremonies are held at all three
attack sites, where the names of the dead are read aloud, one by one, a ritual
that has become a fixture of the American calendar, a solemn annual reminder of
a morning that began like any other and ended by reshaping the world.
The generation of Americans now old enough to remember the
attacks firsthand is gradually giving way to a generation for whom September 11
is a historical event rather than a lived memory, studied in classrooms much as
earlier generations studied Pearl Harbor or the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy. Museum curators, historians, and educators have increasingly
focused their efforts on preserving firsthand testimony from survivors,
responders, and victims’ family members while those voices remain available,
aware that within a few more decades the attacks will be understood only
through recordings, artifacts, and written history rather than personal
recollection. For those who lived through it, however, the memory of where they
were and what they saw that Tuesday morning remains, for many, one of the
sharpest and most permanent memories of their lives.
