11 September 2001: The Attacks That Changed the World
A Tuesday Morning in New York
At 8.46am Eastern time on Tuesday 11 September 2001, American Airlines Flight 11, hijacked twenty minutes after take-off from Boston, was flown into the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, a second hijacked airliner, United 175, hit the South Tower. At 9.37am American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon outside Washington. At 10.03am United 93, retaken in mid-air by passengers, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all on board. The South Tower collapsed at 9.59am; the North Tower at 10.28am. Within an hour and forty-two minutes of the first impact, the Twin Towers were dust. The death toll was 2,977 people from over 90 nationalities — the largest single act of terrorism in modern history.
The 9/11 attacks involved four hijacked civilian airliners and killed 2,977 people. Two struck the World Trade Center towers in New York; one struck the Pentagon outside Washington; one crashed at Shanksville after passengers fought back. The whole sequence took just over 100 minutes.
Planning the Attack
The Planes Operation, as al-Qaeda called it, had been approved by Osama bin Laden in late 1999. The operational mastermind was the Kuwaiti militant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who proposed the use of civilian airliners as weapons. Three of the four pilots came from the so-called Hamburg Cell — Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah. The fourth, Hani Hanjour, was a Saudi who had trained separately at American flight schools. All four learned enough to hold a Boeing 757 or 767 on course. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals; the rest came from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Lebanon. The men trained in Afghan camps, met with planners in Malaysia in January 2000, then entered the United States in groups during the spring and summer of 2001. The CIA had tracked two of the future hijackers — Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar — to the Malaysia meeting but lost their trail when they entered the country.
The Day the World Watched
Unlike any earlier attack, 9/11 was broadcast live. A television crew filming firefighters in lower Manhattan caught Flight 11 hitting the North Tower; television crews scrambled to record the second strike seventeen minutes later. The collapse of both towers was watched simultaneously by tens of millions of people in real time. Mobile telephones, then widespread for the first time, allowed those trapped above the impact zones in the towers and on Flight 93 to call relatives. Their messages, recovered from voicemails and reconstructed by the 9/11 Commission, became the most intimate primary sources of any modern atrocity. The attack was, deliberately, a global media event.
Of the 2,977 killed, 2,753 died at the World Trade Center, 184 at the Pentagon and 40 on Flight 93. Among the New York dead were 343 firefighters from the Fire Department of New York and 60 police officers, killed when the towers collapsed on rescuers still climbing the stairs. A further 7,000 people were injured, and an unknown number of survivors and recovery workers later developed cancers, lung disease and post-traumatic stress from exposure to the dust. The recovery operation at ‘Ground Zero’ lasted until May 2002.
The American and Global Response
President George W. Bush had been visiting a Florida primary school when the second plane hit. He addressed the nation that evening, declaring that the United States would ‘make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them’. On 12 September the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s political body, invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty for the first time in NATO’s history. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 1368 on the same day, recognising the right of self-defence. On 20 September Bush addressed a joint session of Congress and announced what he called the War on Terror. He demanded that the Taliban surrender bin Laden and dismantle the al-Qaeda camps. The ultimatum: ‘Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’
Long-Term Cultural and Political Impact
The attacks reshaped life inside the United States and across the West. The USA Patriot Act of October 2001 expanded surveillance powers, telephone-data collection and indefinite detention of non-citizens designated as enemy combatants. The Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002. Airport security was overhauled, beginning with cockpit-door reinforcement and the screening regimes most travellers still recognise today. American Muslim and Sikh communities reported sharp rises in harassment and hate crime. Politically, 9/11 swung public opinion towards intervention abroad — the polls supporting an invasion of Afghanistan stood above 80% — and gave the Bush administration the licence it would later use to argue, more contentiously, for war in Iraq. Globally, the attack ended the post-Cold-War assumption that international politics was settling into a steady, rules-based order.
Students sometimes describe 9/11 as a Middle Eastern attack on America. The geography is more complicated. The hijackers were Saudi, Emirati, Egyptian and Lebanese, but they trained in Afghanistan, met operationally in Malaysia, planned in Hamburg, took flight lessons in Florida and Arizona, and struck targets in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) documented this transnational geography in detail. Treating the attack as a regional event misses why the response became a global War on Terror with troop deployments in dozens of countries.
The political consequences of 9/11 came rapidly. NATO Article 5 was invoked on 12 September 2001 for the first time in its history. Bush declared the War on Terror on 20 September. The USA Patriot Act passed on 26 October. Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan began on 7 October. The Department of Homeland Security followed in 2002. Each step locked the United States into a global, open-ended military and security commitment.