The September 11 Attacks

At 08:46:40 EDT on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 - a Boeing 767 that had departed Boston for Los Angeles - was flown into the 93rd through 99th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.^¹ Seventeen minutes later, at 09:03:02, United Airlines Flight 175 - also Boston-LAX - struck the South Tower between the 77th and 85th floors.^² The second impact was televised live; the world watched in real time as a terrorist attack escalated from accident to coordinated act.^³

Flights had been delayed, transponders disabled. Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker on Flight 11, had passed through Portland, Maine, that morning.^⁴ The plan was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's, the operation was funded by al-Qaeda, the order was Osama bin Laden's.^⁵ Nineteen hijackers - fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the UAE, one from Egypt, one from Lebanon - boarded four planes that morning.^⁶ Two more crashed before noon. At 09:37:46, American Airlines Flight 77 hit the western face of the Pentagon.^⁷ At 10:03:11, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers stormed the cockpit.^⁸

The South Tower collapsed first, at 09:58:59. Fifty-six minutes after impact, the structural steel had softened past its yield strength; the floors above the burning zone pancaked down.^⁹ The North Tower fell at 10:28:22, 102 minutes after impact. Dust covered Lower Manhattan in a layer six inches thick. 2,977 people died on the day, not counting the 19 hijackers: 2,753 at the World Trade Center, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 on Flight 93.^¹⁰ Approximately 3,000 children lost a parent. Over 6,000 were injured. First-responder cancer deaths and 9/11-related illness deaths have since exceeded the day-of toll.^¹¹

U.S. airspace closed at 09:45. President George W. Bush, who had been reading to second-graders in Sarasota, Florida, was airlifted to a SAC base in Nebraska before returning to Washington that night.^¹ He addressed the nation at 20:30 EDT: 'These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat.^² But they have failed.' Three days later, Congress authorized the use of military force against those responsible - a 60-word resolution that would underwrite American military operations for the next 20+ years.^³

The response reshaped the decade. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, beginning what became the longest war in American history.^⁴ The Patriot Act was signed October 26. The Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002. The Transportation Security Administration was created in 2001.^⁵ The Guantanamo Bay detention facility opened in 2002. Iraq was invaded in 2003 on a pretext later acknowledged as wrong.^⁶ Surveillance authorities expanded under FISA. Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 2, 2011 - 3,519 days after the attack.^⁷ U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021. The wars cost approximately $8 trillion and roughly 940,000 lives (combined U.S. military, allied military, contractors, and civilians per the Costs of War project).^⁸ The reorganization of American institutions around terrorism remains in place.^⁹