September 11 attacks, series of airline hijackings and suicide attacks

committed in 2001 by 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist

group al-Qaeda against targets in the United States, the deadliest terrorist
attacks on American soil in U.S. history. The attacks against New York City
and Washington, D.C., caused extensive death and destruction and triggered
an enormous U.S. effort to combat terrorism. Some 2,750 people were killed
in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 in Pennsylvania (where one of the
hijacked planes crashed into the ground after the passengers attempted to
retake the plane); all 19 terrorists died (see Researcher’s Note: September
11 attacks). Police and fire departments in New York were especially hard-hit:
hundreds rushed to the scene of the attacks, and more than 400 police
officers and firefighters were killed.

(Read Britannica’s interview with Jimmy Carter on 9/11 and world affairs.)

The plot

flight paths on September 11, 2001

flight paths on September 11, 2001The routes of the four U.S. planes
hijacked during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The September 11 attacks were precipitated in large part because Osama

bin Laden, the leader of the militant Islamic organization al-Qaeda, held
naive beliefs about the United States in the run-up to the attacks. Abu Walid
al-Masri, an Egyptian who was a bin Laden associate in Afghanistan in the
1980s and ’90s, explained that, in the years prior to the attacks, bin Laden
became increasingly convinced that America was weak. “He believed that
the United States was much weaker than some of those around him
thought,” Masri remembered, and “as evidence he referred to what
happened to the United States in Beirut when the bombing of the Marines
base led them to flee from Lebanon,” referring to the destruction of the
marine barracks there in 1983 (see 1983 Beirut barracks bombings), which
killed 241 American servicemen. Bin Laden believed that the United States
was a “paper tiger,” a belief shaped not just by America’s departure from
Lebanon following the marine barracks bombing but also by the withdrawal
of American forces from Somalia in 1993, following the deaths of 18 U.S.
servicemen in Mogadishu, and the American pullout from Vietnam in the
1970s.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

The key operational planner of the September 11 attacks was Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed (often referred to simply as “KSM” in the later 9/11 Commission
Report and in the media), who had spent his youth in Kuwait. Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed became active in the Muslim Brotherhood, which he joined at
age 16, and then went to the United States to attend college, receiving a
degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in
1986. Afterward he traveled to Pakistan and then Afghanistan to wage jihad
against the Soviet Union, which had launched an invasion against
Afghanistan in 1979.

According to Yosri Fouda, a journalist at the Arabic-language cable television

channel Al Jazeera who interviewed him in 2002, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
planned to blow up some dozen American planes in Asia during the mid-
1990s, a plot (known as “Bojinka”) that failed, “but the dream of Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed never faded. And I think by putting his hand in the hands
of bin Laden, he realized that now he stood a chance of bringing about his
long awaited dream.”

Warm water fuels Hurricane Katrina. This image depicts a 3-day average of
actual dea surface temperatures for the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean,
from August 25-27, 2005.

Britannica Quiz

Disasters of Historic Proportion

In 1996 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed met bin Laden in Tora Bora, Afghanistan.
The 9-11 Commission (formally the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Upon the United States), set up in 2002 by U.S. Pres. George W. Bush and the
U.S. Congress to investigate the attacks of 2001, explained that it was then
that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “presented a proposal for an operation that
would involve training pilots who would crash planes into buildings in the
United States.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed dreamed up the tactical innovation
of using hijacked planes to attack the United States, al-Qaeda provided the
personnel, money, and logistical support to execute the operation, and bin
Laden wove the attacks on New York and Washington into a larger strategic
framework of attacking the “far enemy”—the United States—in order to bring
about regime change across the Middle East.

The September 11 plot demonstrated that al-Qaeda was an organization of

global reach. The plot played out across the globe with planning meetings in
Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination
by plot leaders based in Hamburg, Germany, money transfers from Dubai,
and recruitment of suicide operatives from countries around the Middle East
—all activities that were ultimately overseen by al-Qaeda’s leaders in
Afghanistan.

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Mohammed Atta

1 of 2

Mohammed AttaFlorida driver's license photo of Mohammed Atta.

September 11 terrorist attacks: Perpetrators and victims2 of 2

September 11 terrorist attacks: Perpetrators and victimsDiscussion of

Mohammed Atta, lead hijacker in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,
and German banker Sebastian Gorki, one of the victims killed in the World
Trade Center, New York.

See all videos for this article

Key parts of the September 11 plot took shape in Hamburg. Four of the key
pilots and planners in the “Hamburg cell” who would take operational control
of the September 11 attacks, including the lead hijacker Mohammed Atta,
had a chance meeting on a train in Germany in 1999 with an Islamist militant
who struck up a conversation with them about fighting jihad in the Russian
republic of Chechnya. The militant put the Hamburg cell in touch with an al-
Qaeda operative living in Germany who explained that it was difficult to get
to Chechnya at that time, because many travelers were being detained in
Georgia. He recommended they go to Afghanistan instead.

Although Afghanistan was critical to the rise of al-Qaeda, it was the

experience that some of the plotters acquired in the West that made them
simultaneously more zealous and better equipped to carry out the attacks.
Three of the four plotters who would pilot the hijacked planes on September
11 and one of the key planners, Ramzi Binalshibh, became more radical
while living in Hamburg. Some combination of perceived or real
discrimination, alienation, and homesickness seems to have turned them all
in a more militant direction. Increasingly cutting themselves off from the
outside world, they gradually radicalized each other, and eventually the
friends decided to wage battle in bin Laden’s global jihad, setting off for
Afghanistan in 1999 in search of al-Qaeda.

Atta and the other members of the Hamburg group arrived in Afghanistan in
1999 right at the moment that the September 11 plot was beginning to take
shape. Bin Laden and his military commander Muhammad Atef realized that
Atta and his fellow Western-educated jihadists were far better suited to lead
the attacks on Washington and New York than the men they had already
recruited, leading bin Laden to appoint Atta to head the operation.

The hijackers, most of whom were from Saudi Arabia, established themselves
in the United States, many well in advance of the attacks. They traveled in
small groups, and some of them received commercial flight training.

Throughout his stay in the United States, Atta kept Binalshibh updated on the
plot’s progress via e-mail. To cloak his activities, Atta wrote the messages as
if he were writing to his girlfriend “Jenny,” using innocuous code to inform
Binalshibh that they were almost complete in their training and readiness for
the attacks. Atta wrote in one message, “The first semester commences in
three weeks…Nineteen certificates for private education and four exams.”
The referenced 19 “certificates” were code that identified the 19 al-Qaeda
hijackers, while the four “exams” identified the targets of the attacks.

In the early morning of August 29, 2001, Atta called Binalshibh and said he
had a riddle that he was trying to solve: “Two sticks, a dash and a cake with
a stick down—what is it?” After considering the question, Binalshibh realized
that Atta was telling him that the attacks would occur in two weeks—the two
sticks being the number 11 and the cake with a stick down a 9. Putting it
together, it meant that the attacks would occur on 11-9, or 11 September (in
most countries the day precedes the month in numeric dates, but in the
United States the month precedes the day; hence, it was 9-11 in the United
States). On September 5 Binalshibh left Germany for Pakistan. Once there he
sent a messenger to Afghanistan to inform bin Laden about both the day of
the attack and its scope.

The attacks

September 11 attacks: Mohammed Atta

1 of 4

September 11 attacks: Mohammed AttaPhotograph from a security camera

at the Portland, Maine, airport showing lead hijacker Mohammed Atta passing
through a security checkpoint at 5:53 am on the morning of September 11,
2001.

September 11 attacks

2 of 4

September 11 attacksSmoke and flames erupting from the twin towers of

New York City's World Trade Center after the attacks on September 11, 2001;
both towers subsequently collapsed.

September 11 attacks

3 of 4

September 11 attacksAerial photograph of the destruction following the

crash of a hijacked plane into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

September 11 attacks: United Airlines flight 93, Pennsylvania

4 of 4

September 11 attacks: United Airlines flight 93, PennsylvaniaWreckage of

United Airlines flight 93, which was crashed during the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

On September 11, 2001, groups of attackers boarded four domestic aircraft

at three East Coast airports, and soon after takeoff they disabled the crews,
some of whom may have been stabbed with box cutters the hijackers were
secreting. The hijackers then took control of the aircraft, all large and bound
for the West Coast with full loads of fuel. At 8:46 am the first plane, American
Airlines flight 11, which had originated from Boston, was piloted into the
north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. Most observers
construed this initially to be an accident involving a small commuter plane.
The second plane, United Airlines flight 175, also from Boston, struck the
south tower 17 minutes later. At this point there was no doubt that the
United States was under attack. Each structure was badly damaged by the
impact and erupted into flames. Office workers who were trapped above the
points of impact in some cases leapt to their deaths rather than face the
infernos now raging inside the towers. The third plane, American Airlines
flight 77, taking off from Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., struck the
southwest side of the Pentagon (just outside the city) at 9:37 am, touching
off a fire in that section of the structure. Minutes later the Federal Aviation
Authority ordered a nationwide ground stop, and within the next hour (at
10:03 am) the fourth aircraft, United Airlines flight 93 from Newark, New
Jersey, crashed near Shanksville in the Pennsylvania countryside after its
passengers—informed of events via cellular phone—attempted to overpower
their assailants.

September 11 attacks

1 of 2

September 11 attacksSmoke and flames erupting from the twin towers of

New York City's World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks on September
11, 2001; both towers subsequently collapsed.

September 11 attacks

2 of 2
September 11 attacksSmoke billowing from the burning World Trade Center
site following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, New York City.

At 9:59 am the World Trade Center’s heavily damaged south tower collapsed,
and the north tower fell 29 minutes later. Clouds of smoke and debris quickly
filled the streets of Lower Manhattan. Office workers and residents ran in
panic as they tried to outpace the billowing debris clouds. A number of other
buildings adjacent to the twin towers suffered serious damage, and several
subsequently fell. Fires at the World Trade Center site smoldered for more
than three months.

September 11 attacks: rescue operation

September 11 attacks: rescue operationFirefighter calling for 10 additional

rescue workers to make their way into the rubble of the World Trade Center
in New York City following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Rescue operations began almost immediately as the country and the world
sought to come to grips with the enormity of the losses. Nearly 3,000 people
had perished: some 2,750 people in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40
in Pennsylvania; all 19 terrorists also died. Included in the total in New York
City were more than 400 police officers and firefighters, who lost their lives
after rushing to the scene and into the towers.

George W. Bush on Air Force One after the September 11 attacks

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George W. Bush on Air Force One after the September 11 attacksU.S. Pres.
George W. Bush conferring with his chief of staff aboard Air Force One,
September 11, 2001.

September 11 attacks; George W. Bush

2 of 4

September 11 attacks; George W. BushU.S. Pres. George W. Bush conferring

with Vice Pres. Dick Cheney from Air Force One en route from Nebraska to
Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, September 11, 2001.

George W. Bush: speech after the September 11, 2001, attacks

3 of 4

George W. Bush: speech after the September 11, 2001, attacksU.S. Pres.
George W. Bush addressing the country from the Oval Office on September
11, 2001.

September 11 attacks

4 of 4

September 11 attacksU.S. Vice Pres. Dick Cheney talking on the phone with
Pres. George W. Bush as National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (seated)
and other senior staff listen at the Presidential Emergency Operations
Center, September 11, 2001.

On the morning of September 11, President Bush had been visiting a second-
grade classroom in Sarasota, Florida, when he was informed that a plane had
flown into the World Trade Center. A little later Andrew Card, his chief of staff,
whispered in the president’s right ear: “A second plane hit the second tower.
America is under attack.” To keep the president out of harm’s way, Bush
subsequently hopscotched across the country on Air Force One, landing in
Washington, D.C., the evening of the attacks. At 8:30 pm Bush addressed the
nation from the Oval Office in a speech that laid out a key doctrine of his
administration’s future foreign policy: “We will make no distinction between
the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

George W. Bush at the World Trade Center

George W. Bush at the World Trade CenterU.S. Pres. George W. Bush

addressing a crowd as he stands on rubble at the World Trade Center site in
New York City three days after the September 11 attacks of 2001.

On September 14 Bush visited “Ground Zero,” the smoking pile of debris of

what remained of the World Trade Center and the thousands who had
perished there. Standing on top of a wrecked fire truck, Bush grabbed a
bullhorn to address the rescue workers working feverishly to find any
survivors. When one of the workers said that he could not hear what the
president was saying, Bush made one of the most memorable remarks of his
presidency:
I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked
these buildings down will hear from all of us soon.

Bush’s robust response to the attacks drove his poll ratings from 55 percent
favourable before September 11 to 90 percent in the days after, the highest
ever recorded for a president.

The aftermath

September 11 attacks: missing persons notices

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September 11 attacks: missing persons noticesNotices and pictures of

missing persons posted on a mailbox in New York City following the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

September 11 attacks: memorial

2 of 2

September 11 attacks: memorialMemorial to the victims of the September

11 attacks, New York City, 2001.

The emotional distress caused by the attacks—particularly the collapse of

the twin towers, New York City’s most visible landmark—was overwhelming.
Unlike the relatively isolated site of the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941, to which
the September 11 events were soon compared, the World Trade Center lay at
the heart of one of the world’s largest cities. Hundreds of thousands of
people witnessed the attacks firsthand (many onlookers photographed
events or recorded them with video cameras), and millions watched the
tragedy unfold live on television. In the days that followed September 11, the
footage of the attacks was replayed in the media countless times, as were
the scenes of throngs of people, stricken with grief, gathering at “Ground
Zero”—as the site where the towers once stood came to be commonly known
—some with photos of missing loved ones, seeking some hint of their fate.

Remember New York City's World Trade Center towers and the September 11
attacks1 of 2
Remember New York City's World Trade Center towers and the September 11
attacksSeptember 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York
City remembered.

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Know how the AT&T Corporation managed the telecommunication traffic

right after the attacks of September 11, 20012 of 2

Know how the AT&T Corporation managed the telecommunication traffic

right after the attacks of September 11, 2001A discussion of how the AT&T
Corporation coped with the massive increase in telecommunication traffic
that immediately followed the attacks of September 11, 2001.

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Moreover, world markets were badly shaken. The towers were at the heart of
New York’s financial district, and damage to Lower Manhattan’s
infrastructure, combined with fears of stock market panic, kept New York
markets closed for four trading days. Markets afterward suffered record
losses. The attacks also stranded tens of thousands of people throughout the
United States, as U.S. airspace remained closed for commercial aviation until
September 13, and normal service, with more rigid security measures, did
not resume for several days.

The September 11 attacks were an enormous tactical success for al-Qaeda.

The strikes were well coordinated and hit multiple targets in the heart of the
enemy, and the attacks were magnified by being broadcast around the world
to an audience of untold millions. The September 11 “propaganda of the
deed” took place in the media capital of the world, which ensured the widest
possible coverage of the event. Not since television viewers had watched the
abduction and murder of Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics in 1972
had a massive global audience witnessed a terrorist attack unfold in real
time. If al-Qaeda had been a largely unknown organization before September
11, in the days after it became a household name.

After the attacks of September 11, countries allied with the United States
rallied to its support, perhaps best symbolized by the French newspaper Le
Monde’s headline, “We are all Americans now.” Even in Iran thousands
gathered in the capital, Tehrān, for a candlelight vigil.
Evidence gathered by the United States soon convinced most governments
that the Islamic militant group al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. The
group had been implicated in previous terrorist strikes against Americans,
and bin Laden had made numerous anti-American statements. Al-Qaeda was
headquartered in Afghanistan and had forged a close relationship with that
country’s ruling Taliban militia, which subsequently refused U.S. demands to
extradite bin Laden and to terminate al-Qaeda activity there.

For the first time in its history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
invoked Article 5, allowing its members to respond collectively in self-
defense, and on October 7 the U.S. and allied military forces launched an
attack against Afghanistan (see Afghanistan War). Within months thousands
of militants were killed or captured, and Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders were
driven into hiding. In addition, the U.S. government exerted great effort to
track down other al-Qaeda agents and sympathizers throughout the world
and made combating terrorism the focus of U.S. foreign policy. Meanwhile,
security measures within the United States were tightened considerably at
such places as airports, government buildings, and sports venues. To help
facilitate the domestic response, Congress quickly passed the USA PATRIOT
Act (the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001), which significantly
but temporarily expanded the search and surveillance powers of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law-enforcement agencies.
Additionally, a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security was
established.

Despite their success in causing widespread destruction and death, the

September 11 attacks were a strategic failure for al-Qaeda. Following
September 11, al-Qaeda—whose name in Arabic means “the base”—lost the
best base it ever had in Afghanistan. Later some in al-Qaeda’s leadership—
including those who, like Egyptian Saif al-Adel, had initially opposed the
attacks—tried to spin the Western intervention in Afghanistan as a victory for
al-Qaeda. Al-Adel, one of the group’s military commanders, explained in an
interview four years later that the strikes on New York and Washington were
part of a far-reaching and visionary plan to provoke the United States into
some ill-advised actions:

Such strikes will force the person to carry out random acts and provoke him
to make serious and sometimes fatal mistakes.…The first reaction was the
invasion of Afghanistan.

But there is not a shred of evidence that in the weeks before September 11
al-Qaeda’s leaders made any plans for an American invasion of Afghanistan.
Instead, they prepared only for possible U.S. cruise missile attacks or air
strikes by evacuating their training camps. Also, the overthrow of the Taliban
hardly constituted an American “mistake”—the first and only regime in the
modern Muslim world that ruled according to al-Qaeda’s rigid precepts was
toppled, and with it was lost an entire country that al-Qaeda had once
enjoyed as a safe haven. And in the wake of the fall of the Taliban, al-Qaeda
was unable to recover anything like the status it once had as a terrorist
organization with considerable sway over Afghanistan.

Bin Laden disastrously misjudged the possible U.S. responses to the

September 11 attacks, which he believed would take one of two forms: an
eventual retreat from the Middle East along the lines of the U.S. pullout from
Somalia in 1993 or another ineffectual round of cruise missile attacks similar
to those that followed al-Qaeda’s bombings of American embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania in 1998. Neither of these two scenarios happened. The U.S.
campaign against the Taliban was conducted with pinpoint strikes from
American airpower, tens of thousands of Northern Alliance forces (a loose
coalition of mujahideen militias that maintained control of a small section of
northern Afghanistan), and more than 300 U.S. Special Forces soldiers on the
ground working with 110 officers from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
In November, just two months after the September 11 attacks, the Taliban
fell to the Northern Alliance and the United States. Still, it was just the
beginning of what would become the longest war in U.S. history, as the
United States tried to prevent the return of the Taliban and their al-Qaeda
allies.
In December 2001, faced with the problem of where to house prisoners as
the Taliban fell, the administration decided to hold them at Guantánamo Bay,
which the U.S. had been leasing from Cuba since 1903. As Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it on December 27, 2001, “I would
characterize Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as the least worst place we could have
selected.” Guantánamo was attractive to administration officials because
they believed it placed the detainees outside the reach of American laws,
such as the right to appeal their imprisonment, yet it was only 90 miles (145
km) off the coast of Florida, making it accessible to the various agencies that
would need to travel there to extract information from what was believed to
be a population of hundreds of dangerous terrorists. Eventually, some 800
prisoners would be held there, although the prison population was reduced
to less than 175 by the time of the 10th anniversary of the September 11
attacks.

In his State of the Union speech on January 29, 2002, President Bush laid out
a new doctrine of preemptive war, which went well beyond the long-
established principle that the United States would go to war to prevent an
adversary launching an attack that imminently threatened the country. Bush
declared:

I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril
draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the
world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most
destructive weapons.

Casus belli for the Iraq War

Casus belli for the Iraq WarThe effort to connect Iraq to the events of
September 11, 2001, began within hours of the attacks. These notes, written
by Department of Defense official Stephen Cambone at 2:40 pm on
September 11, capture directives issued by Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld. Among them is the instruction, “Best info fast. Judge whether good
enough [to] hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at same time - not only UBL [Usama bin
Laden].”
Bush identified those dangerous regimes as an “axis of evil” that included
Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. At the graduation ceremony for West Point cadets
on June 1, 2002, Bush elaborated on his preemptive war doctrine, saying to
the assembled soon-to-be graduates and their families, “If we wait for
threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” Bush believed that
there would be a “demonstration effect” in destroying Saddam Hussein’s
regime in Iraq that would deter groups like al-Qaeda or indeed anyone else
who might be inclined to attack the United States. Undersecretary of Defense
Douglas J. Feith later explained,

What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network
from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not
focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11.
Our main goal was preventing the next attack.

Thus, though there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s government in

Iraq had collaborated with al-Qaeda in the September 11 attacks, the United
States prepared for conflict against Iraq in its global war against terror,
broadly defined.

On March 19, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, President Bush issued
the order for war:

For the peace of the world and the benefit and freedom of the Iraqi people, I
hereby give the order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom. May God bless the
troops.

On March 20 the American-led invasion of Iraq began. Within three weeks

U.S. forces controlled Baghdad, and the famous pictures of the massive
statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled from its plinth were broadcast
around the world.
The September 11 commission and its findings

In 2002 President Bush had appointed a commission to look into the

September 11 attacks, and two years later it issued its final report. The
commission found that the key pre-September 11 failure at the CIA was its
not adding to the State Department’s “watch list” two of the “muscle”
hijackers (who were trained to restrain the passengers on the plane), the
suspected al-Qaeda militants Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. The CIA
had been tracking Hazmi and Mihdhar since they attended a terrorist summit
meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on January 5, 2000. The failure to watch-
list the two al-Qaeda suspects with the Department of State meant that they
entered the United States under their real names with ease. On January 15,
2000, 10 days after the Malaysian meeting, Hazmi and Mihdhar flew into Los
Angeles. The CIA also did not alert the FBI about the identities of the
suspected terrorists, which could have helped the bureau locate them once
they were inside the United States. According to the commission, this was
the failure of not just a few employees at the CIA but a large number of CIA
officers and analysts. Some 50 to 60 CIA employees read cables about the
two al-Qaeda suspects without taking any action. Some of those officers
knew that one of the al-Qaeda suspects had a visa for the United States, and
by May 2001 some knew that the other suspect had flown to Los Angeles.

The soon-to-be hijackers would not have been difficult to find in California if
their names had been known to law enforcement. Under their real names
they rented an apartment, obtained driver’s licenses, opened bank accounts,
purchased a car, and took flight lessons at a local school; Mihdhar even listed
his name in the local phone directory.

It was only on August 24, 2001, as a result of questions raised by a CIA

officer on assignment at the FBI, that the two al-Qaeda suspects were watch-
listed and their names communicated to the FBI. Even then the FBI sent out
only a “Routine” notice requesting an investigation of Mihdhar. A few weeks
later Hazmi and Mihdhar were two of the hijackers on the American Airlines
flight that plunged into the Pentagon.
The CIA inspector general concluded that "informing the FBI and good
operational follow-through by CIA and FBI might have resulted in surveillance
of both al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Surveillance, in turn, would have had the
potential to yield information on flight training, financing, and links to others
who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks."

The key failure at the FBI was the handling of the Zacarias Moussaoui case.
Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, was attending flight school
in the summer of 2001 in Minnesota, where he attracted attention from
instructors because he had little knowledge of flying and did not behave like
a typical aviation student. The flight school contacted the FBI, and on August
16 Moussaoui was arrested on a visa overstay charge. Although Moussaoui
was not the "20th hijacker," as was widely reported later, he had received
money from one of the September 11 coordinators, Ramzi Binalshibh, and by
his own account was going to take part in a second wave of al-Qaeda attacks
following the assaults on New York and Washington.

Warm water fuels Hurricane Katrina. This image depicts a 3-day average of
actual dea surface temperatures for the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean,
from August 25-27, 2005.

Britannica Quiz

Disasters of Historic Proportion

The FBI agent in Minneapolis who handled Moussaoui’s case believed that he
might have been planning to hijack a plane, and the agent was also
concerned that Moussaoui had traveled to Pakistan, which was a red flag as
militants often used the country as a transit point to travel to terrorist
training camps in Afghanistan. On August 23 (or 24, according to some
reports) CIA director George Tenet was told about the case in a briefing titled
"Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." But FBI headquarters determined that there
was not sufficient "probable cause" of a crime for the Minneapolis office to
conduct a search of Moussaoui’s computer hard drive and belongings. Such a
search would have turned up his connection to Binalshibh, according to
Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, a leading member of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, which has oversight of the FBI. The 9-11 Commission also
concluded that “a maximum U.S. effort to investigate Moussaoui conceivably
could have unearthed his connection to Binalshibh.”
The hunt for bin Laden

U.S. government officials during the Osama bin Laden mission

U.S. government officials during the Osama bin Laden missionU.S. Pres.
Barack Obama (seated second from left) and various other government
officials—including Vice Pres. Joe Biden (seated left), Secretary of Defense
Robert M. Gates (seated right), and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (seated
second from right)—receiving updates in the Situation Room of the White
House during the Osama bin Laden mission, May 2011.

In September 2001 President Bush announced that he wanted Osama bin

Laden captured—dead or alive—and a $25 million bounty was eventually
issued for information leading to the killing or capture of bin Laden. Bin
Laden evaded capture, however, including in December 2001, when he was
tracked by U.S. forces to the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan.
Bin Laden’s trail subsequently went cold, and he was thought to be living
somewhere in the Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal regions.

U.S. intelligence eventually located him in Pakistan, living in the garrison city
of Abbottabad, and in the early morning hours of May 2, 2011, on orders
from U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, a small team of U.S. Navy SEALs assaulted his
compound and shot and killed the al-Qaeda leader.

Peter L. Bergen

Health issues associated with the September 11 attacks

September 11 attacks: rescue operation

September 11 attacks: rescue operationMan, covered in ash, assisting a

woman holding a particle mask to her face as they walk in the wake of the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, New York City.

As a result of the destruction of the Twin Towers, one of the most densely
populated areas on the planet was bathed in a coating of ash, pulverized
rubble, and toxic particulates. Fires at Ground Zero and the collapsed 7 World
Trade Center continued to smoulder and flare into 2002, exposing first
responders to a witches’ brew of carcinogenic smoke. In the immediate
aftermath of the attacks, firefighters and rescue and recovery workers began
to report a range of health issues, particularly respiratory problems. Most
common was a collection of ailments that came to be called “WTC Cough
Syndrome”—a chronic sinus infection paired with symptoms that resembled
asthma or bronchitis and often complicated by gastroesophageal reflux
disease.