September 11 Terrorist Attacks
The attacks of 11 September 2001 killed 2,977 people in New York, Arlington and Pennsylvania, and are the deadliest act of terrorism in history. Nineteen men from al-Qaeda hijacked four transcontinental flights, chosen because they carried full fuel loads. American 11 struck the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46, United 175 the south tower at 9:03, American 77 the Pentagon at 9:37, and United 93 crashed near Shanksville at 10:03 after its passengers, informed by telephone of the other attacks, attempted to retake the cockpit. The south tower collapsed at 9:59 and the north at 10:28. The plan originated with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who proposed it to Osama bin Laden in 1996; fifteen of the hijackers were Saudi nationals, and the operational core were educated men who had radicalised in Hamburg. The 9/11 Commission concluded in 2004 that the failure was one of imagination, policy, capability and management, and that both the CIA and the FBI had held pieces of information that were never combined. The response reshaped a generation of policy: the invasion of Afghanistan within a month, the Iraq war in 2003, the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, Guantánamo, rendition, enhanced interrogation and mass surveillance. Around 2,000 people have since died of illnesses linked to the dust at the site, a figure that continues to rise. Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in 2011. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has never been tried. Guantánamo still holds a small number of detainees, and the military commission process has produced almost no convictions in two decades. The attacks remain the reference point against which American security policy is still measured.
- Year: 2001 CE
- Category: Military
