9-11

9/11 the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States, and the associated events and impact of those attacks.

The attacks, which were carried out by agents of Al Qaeda (a militant Islamic terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden ) used three hijacked commercial jet aircraft to destroy the World Trade Center in New York City and severely damage the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. A fourth hijacked plane crashed in Shanksville , Pa., when its passengers attempted to seize the plane from the hijackers. Some 3,000 persons died or were missing as a result of the most devastating terrorist episode in U.S. history.

9/11 was a turning point in the presidency of George W. Bush and U.S. foreign policy, leading directly to U.S. support for the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan , where Al Qaeda was based. The attacks were also used to justify in part the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (see also Persian Gulf Wars ) despite the lack of any clear evidence linking the Iraqi government to Al Qaeda, but the impact of 9/11 contributed to strong American public support for the invasion. The Bush administration, which had already insisted on strong presidential powers, asserted that the United States was at war (a response not echoed by the Spanish and British government in the wake of subsequent significant terror attacks in Madrid and London) and that legal restrictions did not exist on the president's powers to defend the country, a position subsequently questioned in part by the Supreme Court.

As a result of the attacks and of the subsequent reports issued by a joint Congressional investigation and by the 9/11 Commission (see below), a number of significant changes to the federal government were made, including the establishment of the Dept. of Homeland Security , which consolidated 22 nonmilitary government security agencies and assumed responsiblity for U.S. air travel security through its Transportation Security Administration, and the establishment of the cabinet-level post of director of national intelligence, who became responsible for overseeing and coordinating all U.S. intelligence agencies. Other far-reaching effects include the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 and building-code changes proposed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2005.

The 9/11 Commission, officially known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, was established by law in 2002 to prepare a full account of the attacks and make recommendations on how to guard against future attacks. Headed by Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, and consisting of a panel of a five Democrats and five Republicans, it first convened in 2003, interviewed more than 1,000 persons in 10 countries, and issued its report the following year. The commission faced resistance from the White House and the House Intelligence Committee over access to documents and individuals (including the president and vice president), but access to those improved mainly through public pressure brought by the families of the victims of the attacks; the group was not permitted, however, to question directly the detainees at Guantánamo.

The commission held both public and private hearings and issued a report with both public and classified sections. With the benefit of insights dependent on hindsight, it detailed the terror plot's origins, which dated to 1996, and its development, and also identified failures of various U.S. agencies that might have alerted officials to the impending attack or could have led to actions that might have prevented it. Its work revealed problems with U.S. intelligence gathering and interpretation and with law enforcement concerning terrorist threats against the United States, especially with regard to the work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and to cooperation between the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency. (It also found no evidence of collaboration between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.) Many of its recommendations, which focused on preventing another similar attack against the United States, were subsequently adopted, but thoughtful critics have pointed out that its proposals were limited both by its focus on the hijackings and by an emphasis on centralization of responsibility and control as a solution to overcoming the failures of 9/11.

Bibliography: See the 9/11 Commission's report (2004), the commission staff reports and other materials, ed. by S. Strasser (2004), and the account of the commission's work by T. H. Kean and L. H. Hamilton (2006); P. Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission (2008); study of the events of 9/11 by L. Wright (2006).

September 11 (2001>) A term denoting four interrelated terrorist attacks on the United States on that date. It was organized by Osama Bin Laden, and carried out by a total of nineteen hijackers who boarded four different planes. At 8.46 am, a hijacked Boeing 767 (American Airlines 11) crashed into the 94^th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in New York (WTC). Sixteen minutes later, a hijacked Boeing 767 (United Airlines 175) crashed into the 78^th floor of the WTC's South Tower. Whereas the WTC withstood the initial impact, the explosion and the debris of the initial explosion destroyed the building's fireproofing system, and the heat caused by the burning of 10,000 gallons of airplane fuel caused the steel support to heat up and collapse under the pressure of the building. At 9.59 am, the South Tower collapsed, and the North Tower collapsed twenty nine minutes later. Altogether, 2,830 people are believed to have died in the disaster. In a third attack, American Airlines flight 77 was hijacked and directed towards the Pentagon, headquarters of the Department of Defence. The plane crashed into the building at 9.38 am, with 125 staff killed. A fourth plane, United Airlines flight 93 to San Francisco, crashed into a field in Somerset County, near Pittsburgh, at 10.06am. It was presumably headed towards the White House when a number of passengers, who had heard about the WTC attacks by contacting the outside world on their cellphones, overwhelmed the hijackers in the cockpit, causing the plane to crash. All 265 passengers and crew members on the four planes died. Immediately, the most damaging attack on US soil since 1812 caused pronouncements of solidarity by political leaders throughout the world. For the first time in the organization's history, NATO invoked Article five of its founding treaty, stating that this attack on the US was treated as an attack on all NATO members. Within the first few weeks of the attack, the rumours about the culpability of Bin Laden hardened, and in a videotape released in October 2001 he all but admitted responsibility. The attacks triggered the ensuing War on Terrorism led by the administration of George W. Bush.

September 11, 2001, often referred to as simply “9/11,” was the date of the deadliest attack by foreign foes on mainland United States. At 8:48 that morning, an American Airlines flight that had been commandeered by hijackers on a Boston to Los Angeles flight crashed into the north tower of New York City's 110-story World Trade Center (WTC). Eighteen minutes later, a second hijacked plane, a United Airlines flight also en route from Boston to Los Angeles, hit the south tower. As TV viewers watched in horror, flames engulfed both buildings, and soon both crashed to the earth. Nearby structures, including the New York Stock Exchange, also suffered heavily. At 9:40 a.m., American Airlines flight 77, hijacked after taking off from Dulles Airport near Washington, crashed into the Pentagon. A fourth plane, United Airlines flight 93, en route from Newark to San Francisco, crashed in western Pennsylvania when heroic passengers attacked the hijackers, foiling a possible attack on the White House or the Capitol.

Although lower than initially feared, the death toll was horrendous. In addition to the nineteen hijackers, 246 passengers and crew on the four planes died. The total killed at the Pentagon was 125. At the World Trade Center, some 2,600 perished, including 343 firefighters and many police officers. For months afterward, the New York Times published poignant biographical profiles of the dead.

After the initial shock, a wave of patriotism and defiance swept the nation. American flags and banners proclaiming “United We Stand” adorned homes, businesses, and automobiles. President George W. Bush, addressing a joint session of Congress on September 20, identified the perpetrators as members of Al Qaeda, a network of Islamic extremists led by Osama bin Laden, of a wealthy and prominent Saudi Arabian family. Bush proclaimed an open-ended War on Terrorism against evildoers worldwide.

As the Pentagon underwent repairs and workers cleared the massive rubble in lower Manhattan, New York officials announced a design competition for the sixteen-acre WTC site. The centerpiece of the winning design, by architect Daniel Libeskind, was “Freedom Tower,” a curving office building soaring to the symbolically resonant height of 1776 feet. But amid controversy involving both cost and aesthetics, Libeskind's plan was modified and scaled back. The winning design for a memorial, by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker, involved a park including informal groupings of deciduous trees and ground cover, interrupted by two recessed reflecting pools where the vanished towers had stood.

Amid mounting questions about the attacks, Congress late in 2002 created a bipartisan panel to explore how such a catastrophic intelligence failure could have occurred and to make recommendations for the future. From early 2003 through June 2004, the commission held private and public hearings at which relevant officials testified. What emerged was a chilling picture of the attack itself and of Al Qaeda's long advance planning, including fundraising and recruitment of volunteers. The commission's findings (along with journalistic investigations) made clear that officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) knew of bin Laden's plotting against the United States. Indeed, he had been indicted by a U.S. grand jury after an Al Qaeda-sponsored bombing of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, and President Bill Clinton had authorized air strikes of suspected Al Qaeda sites in Sudan and Afghanistan. Various FBI and CIA offices even had specific information about suspicious movements by some of the future hijackers, including flight-school training. But the two agencies did not share information, and no one “connected the dots” by piecing together fragmentary bits of information into a coherent overall pattern.

The investigations also revealed the Bush administration's failure to give anti-terrorism the highest priority, despite urgent (if generalized) intelligence warnings of an imminent attack, including a memo to Bush on August 6, 2001 entitled: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” This failure was underscored by a top government anti-terrorism expert, Richard Clark, in his 2004 book Plan of Attack. The administration rejected these charges, claiming that it did all it reasonably could in the face of general, non-specific warnings.

Domestically, the attacks resulted in heightened emphasis on security, including tighter scrutiny of immigrants and air travellers. The USA Patriot Act, passed in October 2001 in response to 9/11, expanded the Justice Department's investigative powers so broadly that some feared for the nation's civil liberties and the constitutional guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The new federal Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002, was another direct consequence of 9/11.

Internationally, the attacks provoked, or provided the rationale for, a series of War on Terrorism initiatives by the Bush administration. Though radically unlike previous American wars fought against specific nations, this seemingly unending “war” fundamentally reshaped U.S. military strategy and foreign policy, as well as domestic politics and culture. With United Nations and NATO backing, the United States in October 2001 undertook a major military assault on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a radical Islamic movement that had sheltered bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The Taliban regime collapsed, but bin Laden eluded capture and Afghanistan remained unstable and violent as Taliban loyalists sought to disrupt the new U.S.-backed regime.

Far more controversially, the Bush Administration used the 9/11 attacks as the rationale for a preemptive war against the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein. The Iraq War of 2003, undertaken without either UN or NATO backing, did overthrow Hussein, but by mid-2004 disorder reigned as car bombings and other attacks took many lives and threatened to plunge Iraq into anarchy and chaos.

Like the Pearl Harbor attack sixty years before, September 11, 2001 marks a watershed in American history. Coming only a few years after the end of the Cold War and the fading of U.S.-Russian tensions, the 9/11 attacks marked the onset of a new era of danger that seemed in some ways even more menacing, because the enemy remained so shady and elusive. As the political commentator James Carville told a reporter within minutes of the attack: “The world just changed today. Everything … is going to be different tomorrow.”
See also Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Justice; Federal Government, Executive Branch, Other Departments: Department of Homeland Security; Persian Gulf War.

Bibliography

Craig Calhoun, Paul Price, and Ashley Timmer, eds., Understanding September 11, 2002.
Fred Halliday , Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001: Causes and Consequences, 2001.
Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda, eds., The Age of Terror: America and the World After September 11, 2001.

Paul S. Boyer