September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks

The Event: Four terrorist passenger jet hijackings culminating in suicide attacks via deliberate crash landings

Date: September 11, 2001

Place: New York, New York; Washington, DC; Shanksville, Pennsylvania

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, collectively represent one of the most consequential events of modern American history. In addition to causing over three thousand casualties, the attacks resulted in immediate and far-reaching changes in US defense policy, homeland security, and American civil liberties.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. eastern standard time, four passenger airplanes routinely departed from major airports on the East Coast of the United States. American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 each took flight from Boston’s Logan Airport, while American Airlines Flight 77 departed from Dulles International Airport in Virginia. All three airplanes were destined for Los Angeles, California. United Airlines Flight 93, the last of the four airplanes to take flight, left Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey for San Francisco, California.

Shortly after take-off, each of the four airplanes was hijacked by groups of assailants armed with crude, sharp objects that had gone undetected by security systems on the ground. The flights from Boston and Washington, DC, were each hijacked by teams of five hijackers, while Flight 93 from Newark was assailed by four hijackers.

During emergency contact with ground controller operators in Boston, a flight attendant on Flight 11 claimed she had been attacked with an unidentifiable lacrimatory, or tear-inducing, agent. The exact weaponry utilized by the hijackers on each airplane would never be known, although experts would later speculate that box cutters or utility knives, in addition to pepper spray or mace, may have been utilized to disable flight personnel and take control of each airplane. It is also thought that at least one of the teams of terrorists claimed to have had explosives on board.

At approximately 8:45 a.m., Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in the lower Manhattan district of New York City. The collision was initially assumed to be a tragic accident by numerous media outlets and witnesses on the ground. The scale of the emergency prompted droves of New York City fire and rescue personnel to the vicinity of the World Trade Center. In a matter of minutes, helicopters and other media personnel and apparatus descended on the scene.

A global television audience had amassed by the time United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the World Trade Center’s South Tower shortly after 9:00 a.m. By then, it was clear to both officials and the general public that the crashes were not accidents, but systematic terrorist strikes.

President George W. Bush was informed of the first airplane striking the World Trade Center moments prior to a public appearance at a Sarasota, Florida, elementary school. When the second airplane struck and the nature of both crashes was understood, the president left Florida immediately.

Bush was en route to Washington, DC, on Air Force One, when the United States military ordered every nonessential aircraft in US airspace to land and grounded all other scheduled flights. Shortly after 9:30 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon building in Washington, DC—the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense.

With Washington subsequently deemed unsafe, President Bush and his traveling staff were informed of the developments while in the air. Unaware how many airplanes had been hijacked but aware high profile buildings such as the Pentagon were being targeted, security officials ordered an immediate evacuation of both the US Capitol building and the White House in Washington, DC.

Cockpit voice recordings and cell phone calls later revealed that the passengers on the final hijacked airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, were aware of the morning’s other hijackings and World Trade Center attacks in New York City. Cell phone recordings from on board the airplane also revealed that the passengers plotted to regain control of the aircraft. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks investigation later concluded that the terrorist hijackers, outnumbered and aware that the passengers were about to attempt to regain control of the aircraft, deliberately brought the airplane down rather than continue to their intended target.

At just after 10:00 a.m., Flight 93 crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all forty-four people on board. The hijacker’s target for Flight 93 was never established, though experts would later assume it was likely a target in Washington, DC. By 10:30 a.m., both World Trade Center towers in New York City had collapsed as a result of fires caused by the impact of each airplane.

Immediate Aftermath

At the Pentagon, 125 people were killed instantly, though the building itself would survive the serious structural damage it endured in the attack. The loss of life and damage to lower Manhattan was catastrophic. Half of the entire New York City Fire Department was deployed to the World Trade Center, soon dubbed “Ground Zero,” to look for survivors, though few were found. Over 2,600 people died at the site of the New York attacks, including 421 New York Fire Department, police, and emergency personnel first responders who ventured into and around the buildings after the attack began. The crashes of the four hijacked airplanes killed all 246 people on board.

Flights in and out of United States airspace were grounded until Thursday, September 13, when a small number of military approved airports resumed flights. The nation’s entire commercial and passenger air system did not fully resume operation until Friday, September 14, when it did so under previously unseen security measures.

Every major media outlet in the world carried extensive coverage of the attacks and their aftermath. Accounts and reactions to the attacks received front page billing in every major newspaper throughout the world. Numerous governments and geopolitical allies of the United States offered formal condolences, while citizens across the world formed makeshift memorials to the victims at American embassies worldwide. Subsequent research on the attacks would reveal that as many as 12 percent of the victims were citizens of countries other than the United States.

American Response

Two weeks after the attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was able to utilize debris analysis, passenger lists, and preflight security video footage to link the teams of hijackers to al-Qaeda, a fringe anti-Western terrorist organization composed of several factions throughout the Middle East. The group would eventually maintain responsibility for the attacks in October 2001.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was quick to classify the attacks as a symbolic aggression toward all its member nations, though the ambiguity and unknown whereabouts of its designers made the recourse of any immediate military response difficult.

Previous aggressions of this scale against the United States, specifically the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, had been carried out with conventional military methods. However, the al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks were unified primarily by a fringe religious fanaticism paired with a collective anti-Western ideology. No single state or geopolitical entity was at fault.

Nonetheless, the public outcry for revenge was severe, and President Bush himself made known that retaliatory action would be taken in due course in numerous public addresses. The Bush administration had in fact formally sought and received congressional approval for military action in response to the September 11 attacks on September 14, 2001.

Tragically, during the weeks following the attacks, incidences of harassment and hate crimes against Muslims, Sikhs, and people of Middle Eastern heritage residing in the United States numbered in the hundreds and even resulted in one death.

Intelligence services in both the United States and Europe learned that the many terrorists affiliated with the al-Qaeda network had received refuge, training, and supplies in Afghanistan, where they reportedly continued to be given state protection by the ruling Taliban government. On October 7, 2001, President Bush addressed the nation to let it be known that the United States and a NATO coalition had begun striking Taliban-held targets within Afghanistan in response to the September 11 attacks; this would begin the country's long war in Afghanistan.

Commission on Terrorist Attacks and Victim Compensation Fund

In November 2002, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States was created at the request of President Bush to investigate and explicate the September 11 attacks and provide advice to government agencies on preventing similar attacks in the future. The bipartisan commission was comprised of members of Congress from both the House and the Senate. The commission released its final report in August 2004, after two years of research.

The Commission on Terrorist Attacks concluded that bureaucratic and logistical lapses in both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) led to the suspension, neglect, and evasion of information regarding al-Qaeda’s plot to commit a major attack using airplanes. Their final report also stated that, had suspicions of an al-Qaeda attack been adequately vetted, they may have potentially been thwarted.

The subsequent creation of the Department of Homeland Security was one of numerous administrative actions taken by the federal government in response to the September 11 attacks, which itself resulted in the greatest reorganization of federal staff in history. The newly created cabinet agency absorbed the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, Border Patrol, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

In 2001, Congress allotted seven billion dollars to create the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund (VCF), in order to provide monetary reparation to those who suffered injuries in the attacks and to the families of those killed. Victims and their families were given financial compensation in exchange for forfeiting their right to appeal the amount awarded by the funds administration, as well as their right to sue the airline companies whose airplanes were hijacked. The average payment for claims made by the VCF ranged from $400,000 to $2,000,000.

Authorities in New York City also made it clear that efforts to identify all of the remains recovered from the site of the fallen towers, which had, in many cases, been badly damaged by such factors as mold and fire, would continue for as long as needed. By 2018, advancements in DNA testing were still occurring, and a newly developed technique allowed staff at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner to identify another victim that year. According to reports, by that point, there were still over one thousand victims whose remains were unidentified. In September 2021, shortly before commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the attacks, it was announced that this technology had led to the office's identification of two additional victims.

Recovery and Environmental Effects

The section of the Pentagon building damaged in the September 11 attacks was fully repaired and functional by August 2002. Incidentally, the portion of the Pentagon destroyed by Flight 77 was undergoing renovation at the time to bolster the building’s ability to withstand bomb attacks, which helped to minimize the damage.

The fires at the site of the attack on the World Trade Center burned until December 2001. It took a year and five months of around-the-clock debris removal before the cleanup and recovery effort officially ended. It also took over six months to clear dust and debris from streets and buildings around Ground Zero.

Many workers who took part in the cleanup at Ground Zero suffered long-term negative health effects. It is estimated that between 40,000 and 90,000 workers and volunteers spent time on the cleanup project. In December 2010, Congress enacted $4.3 billion to create the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which in turn established the World Trade Center Health Program. The program was created to assist in the medical cost of those affected by the attacks, particularly first responders, rescue personnel, and construction crews who were affected by the fumes, dust, and smoke during the cleanup operation.

Efforts to rebuild in the areas immediately impacted by the fall of the World Trade Center towers continued into the second decade of the twenty-first century. In 2018, it was reported that, after around seventeen years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had reopened the Cortlandt Street subway station that had been extensively damaged by the falling debris on September 11; reconstruction had been delayed for several years as rebuilding at the surface took priority.

Impact

The most significant outcome of the September 11 attacks, second only to the horrific loss of life, was the logistical failure of the United States government and its related intelligence infrastructure to effectively protect innocent civilian life. The unconventional methods with which the September 11 attacks were executed led both politicians and scholars to question the future effectiveness of conventional military strategy against anti-American forces that could not be traced to a single enemy state.

Security measures enacted in the wake of the attacks resulted in legislation that allowed for a never-before-seen potential for government intrusion into the lives of American citizens. New security measures also permanently changed procedures for commercial air travel all over the world, as demonstrated by legislature such as the Patriot Act.

Enacted by President Bush in October 2001, in direct response to the September 11 attacks, the Patriot Act lifted numerous restrictions placed on federal law enforcement agencies in their ability to covertly acquire intelligence. The act allowed new leeway in the federal government’s ability to acquire information through telephone wiretaps, access to individual and corporate financial records, and the detainment and deportation of immigrants suspected of criminal or terrorist-related activities. While provisions of the act were changed, abandoned, or extended over subsequent years, including by the enactment of the USA Freedom Act in 2015, a failure to vote on reauthorization in the US legislature meant that they had expired by 2020.

The September 11 attacks immersed the United States in a new era of international relations, in which the conventional rules of diplomacy and military engagement no longer exclusively applied. The attacks also forced both American citizens and their political leadership to grapple with a new understanding that, despite the nation’s vast network of intelligence, security apparatus, and modern military capabilities, the United States could no longer maintain the long-standing assumption that a foreign terrorist-style attack on its mainland was a logistical improbability. Because of increased terrorist threats around the world following September 11, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda at the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center towers, by Navy SEALs in 2011 largely did not bring the sense of closure initially expected. Additionally, the war in Afghanistan begun in 2001 ultimately resulted in American and allied soldiers controversially remaining in the country for almost two decades, with the last troops withdrawing in 2021; as the country immediately fell under Taliban control once more, debates around the economic and humanitarian costs and outcomes of the lengthy war continued to rage.

A number of conspiracy theories surrounding the events of the September 11 attacks have emerged since 2001 and largely focus on the belief that the US government knew about the attacks in advance and either allowed them to happen or assisted in planning them. A prominent theory asserts that the destruction of the World Trade Center was carried out through a controlled demolition and that the jet fuel from the airplanes that crashed into the towers did not burn hot enough to compromise the structural integrity of the steel beams used in the construction of the towers. Following both independent and government investigations, these conspiracy theories have been found to be baseless claims.

After years of preparation, including an international design contest, a memorial and museum dedicated to remembrance of the tragedy and its victims was opened to the public in May 2014. Reflecting pools sit in the footprints of the two fallen towers and panels are inscribed with the names of every person who lost their life due to the attacks on the towers, the Pentagon, and Flight 93. The museum has been a point of contention, largely among survivors and family members of victims, since its opening. Some visitors have felt that the exhibit chronicling the rise of al-Qaeda unfairly connects Islam to terrorism while others have taken issue with the fact that the facility includes a gift shop.

Upon the twentieth anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2021, commemoration ceremonies were held at the sites of the attacks, with President Joe Biden attending at all three locations. In addition to remembering the lives lost, many commentators made note of continued issues of security and both international and domestic terrorism. As the country had become particularly polarized throughout the 2010s, many highlighted the sense of unity that had marked the days after the attacks.

In August 2022, President Biden announced that Ayman al-Zawahiri, who assumed leadership of al-Qaeda following bin Laden's death, was killed in a US drone strike conducted on his apartment in Kabul, Afghanistan, on July 31, 2022. At the time of his death, Zawahiri was reported to be instrumental in the planning of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

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