September 11, 2001 attacks

(Redirected from September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks)

The neutrality of this article is disputed.

The September 11, 2001 attacks, often referred to as September 11 or 9/11 (after the U.S. style of writing dates, and pronounced "nine eleven"), were a series of coordinated terrorist suicide attacks against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in the United States on September 11, 2001.

The attacks involved the hijacking of four commercial airliners. With some 90,000 liters (nearly 24,000 U.S. gallons) of jet fuel aboard, the aircraft were used as flying bombs. Two aircraft were piloted into each of the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, with a final aircraft crashing into a Pennsylvania field. In addition to the loss of nearly 3,000 lives, a number of important buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. The most notable buildings were the twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC), although five other buildings and a subway station under the WTC were wholly or partly destroyed. Also on Manhattan Island, 23 additional nearby buildings were damaged. In Arlington, a portion of the Pentagon was severely damaged by fire and one section of the building collapsed.

Shortly after the attacks, the United States government blamed the attacks on Al-Qaida, a fundamentalist Islamic organization widely held responsible for numerous terrorist acts. This led to a "War on Terrorism" that included the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 and had a major influence on the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the aftermath of the attacks, the U.S. government increased pressure on groups accused of being terrorists, as well as governments and countries accused of harboring them.

Lower Manhattan as seen from New Jersey, shortly after the attacks

Table of contents

1 Overview

2 Effects

3 Rescue and recovery

4 Why did the WTC collapse?

5 Responsibility

5.1 Recent statements and revelations
5.2 Earlier revelations

6 The attacks as war crimes

7 Investigations

8 List of topics

9 External links

Overview

The combined attack of September 11 on the World Trade Center was the deadliest act of terrorism against the United States and one of the deadliest attacks of asymmetric warfare in history. On the morning of September 11, 2001, four passenger jets were hijacked over the United States. American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north side of the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 EDT. At 9:03 AM EDT, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the south tower. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 AM EDT. Both 110-story towers of the World Trade Center collapsed along with several neighboring buildings, and part of the Pentagon was destroyed by fire.

The fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. The evidence suggests that it crashed after passengers and crew tried but failed to retake control of the plane from the hijackers.

There were no survivors from any of the hijacked aircraft.

Casualties were in the thousands: 265 on the planes; at least 2,602 people, including 343 firefighters, at the World Trade Center; and 125 at The Pentagon. This adds up to a total of at least 2,992 people dead. At least another 3,000 people filed claims for compensation because of injuries and trauma caused in the attacks.

Some passengers and crew were able to make phone calls from the doomed flights. They reported that there was more than one hijacker on each plane (a total of 19 were later identified) and that they took control of the planes using box-cutter knives. Additionally, some form of noxious chemical spray, such as tear gas or pepper spray, were reported to have been used on at least one flight. There were also reports from at least two of the flights that hijackers claimed to be carrying bombs.

Effects

The attacks of September 11th, 2001 had immediate and overwhelming effects upon the United States population and prompted numerous memorials and services all over the world, as well as support and/or tolerance for the US retaliation upon those accused of supporting the attacks. Gratitude toward uniformed public-safety workers (especially toward firefighters) was widely expressed in light of both the drama of the risks taken on the scene and the high death toll among them. The number of casualties among the emergency services was exceptional compared to typical disasters, with an unprecedented fraction of the emergency personnel involved being killed.

The digits of "9/11" (the American shorthand for the date) corresponded to those of the US-wide phone number for emergency services, 911 (usually pronounced "nine-one-one"). There was some initial speculation that this correspondence was intentional, to communicate something along the lines "Starting now, life in America is about emergencies rather than ease". It was also suggested, but apparently never confirmed, that the number may have had some religious significance to the hijackers. Most Americans seemed to quickly accept press commentators' opinion that mere coincidence would be more in keeping with Islamist radicals' practice. The coincidence in any case has emotional resonance, and may contribute as much as slips of the tongue to Americans sometimes saying "911" when they mean "9/11". Subconscious awareness of it may also contribute to the enhanced identification with public-safety personnel.

Others speculated that the date of 9/11 was chosen because on that date many New York fire and rescue vehicles were out of the state for training purposes.

The highly visible role played by Rudolph Giuliani, the Mayor of New York City, won him unprecedented popularity among the residents of New York and the entire nation. He was named Person of the Year by Time Magazine for 2001, and temporarily even seemed to steal the spotlight from George W. Bush at times.

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the United States and other countries around the world were placed on a high state of alert against potential follow-up attacks. Civilian air travel across the United States was - for the first time ever - suspended totally for a week, with numerous locations and events affected by closures, postponements, cancellations, and evacuations. Other countries imposed similar security restrictions: in the United Kingdom, for instance, civilian aircraft were forbidden to fly over London for several days after the attacks.

The attacks also had a major and long-lasting political effect on the United States and worldwide. Many countries introduced tough anti-terrorism legislation - in the US, the USA PATRIOT Act - and took action to cut off terrorist finances (including the freezing of bank accounts suspected of being to fund terrorism). Law enforcement and intelligence agencies stepped up cooperation to arrest terrorist suspects and break up terrorist cells around the world. This was a highly controversial process, as many critics regarded governments as having gone too far in restricting civil rights. The imprisonment of suspected terrorists at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, caused particular concern.

The reaction to the attacks in the Muslim world was mixed. While the great majority of Muslim political and religious leaders condemned the attacks - virtually the only significant stand-out was Saddam Hussein, the then president of Iraq - the US media reported popular celebrations in some communities hostile to US policies in the Middle East. This fueled the already widespread belief in the US that Muslims were to blame for the attacks. Newsweek told the story of a Muslim who had to leave the US, where she was being educated, due to racist treatment by her white peers. She points out that the Qur'an reminds its followers that "God loves not aggressors", and that the 9/11 attacks were not a jihad according to her interpretation. Scores of Muslims were also killed in the attacks, an action strictly forbidden by the Qur'an, which prohibits Muslim from killing Muslim.

Rescue and recovery

Rescue and recovery efforts took months to complete. It took weeks simply to quench the fires burning in the rubble of the World Trade Center and the clean-up was not completed until May. Many relief funds were immediately set up to assist victims (personally and financially) of the attacks. The task of providing assistance to the survivors and the families of victims is still ongoing.

Very few survivors, and a surprisingly small number of bodies, were found in the the rubble of the WTC. The forces unleashed by the towers' disintegration were so great that many of those trapped in the buildings were simply shredded in the collapse. Some victims had to be identified by as little as a few scraps of flesh or individual teeth. Most bodies were never found at all, presumably because the heat of the fires had completely incinerated their bodies.

On January 18, 2002, the last hospitalized survivor of the World Trade Center attack was released from hospital.

Over 1.5 million tons of debris was produced by the collapse of the WTC, which posed unique problems for the cleanup effort: there had never previously been an instance of a fully occupied skyscraper collapsing in a city center and the environmental and health consequences of such an event were wholly unknown. About 100 tons of asbestos were used in the construction of the WTC and had not yet been fully removed [1]. The attacks released dense clouds of dust into the air of Manhattan, and samples of the residue have shown small percentages of asbestos. As the incubation period for asbestos-related diseases is up to 30 years after inhalation, some citizens living in affected areas may suffer long term effects.

Six months after the attack, the 1.5 million tons of debris had been removed from the WTC site and work continued below ground level, despite concerns that the slurry wall around the site might collapse. Ceremonies marking the end of the debris removal took place at the end of May 2002.

Why did the WTC collapse?

The extremely rapid collapse of the World Trade Center surprised many people, not least - and most tragically - the emergency personnel caught in the buildings. The reason lay in the way that the WTC had been designed. In order to overcome the problem of wind sway or vibration, its architects had taken a then unusual approach in its construction - instead of bracing the buildings corner-to-corner or using internal walls, the towers were essentially hollow steel tubes. Each tower contained 240 vertical steel columns called Vierendeel trusses around the outside of the building, which were bound to each other using ordinary steel trusses. With a strong shell such as this, the internal floors could be simply light steel and concrete with internal walls not needed for structural integrity, creating a tower that for its size was extremely light and had a large amount of floorspace uninterrupted by internal load-bearing columns.

After the initial impacts, it appeared to most observers from the ground that the buildings had been severely but not fatally damaged. It was, however, not realised that the intense heat from the burning jet fuel deposited inside the building by the two aircraft was weakening the steel columns and internal trusses. The strength of the steel drops markedly with prolonged exposure to fire, and it becomes more elastic the higher the temperature.

The two towers collapsed in markedly different ways, indicating that there were in fact two modes of failure. The north tower collapsed directly downwards, "pancaking" in on itself, while the south tower fell at an angle during which the top 20 or so stories of the building remained intact for the first few seconds of the collapse.

Subsequent modelling suggests that in the north tower, the internal trusses supporting the building's concrete floors failed as a result of heat-induced warping. This had the effect of causing the floors to collapse on top of each other, causing all the floors below to fail in sequence. Once the collapse had begun, it was unstoppable; the huge mass of the falling structure had sufficient momentum to act as a battering ram, smashing through all the intact floors below. In the south tower, the steel columns on the outside of the tower appear to have failed as a result of heat warping, effectively creating a "hangman's drop" for that portion of the building above the point of failure. Again, the momentum of the collapsing structure was sufficient to smash everything below it.

Responsibility

Though no group has explicitly claimed responsibility, the Al-Qaida organization has praised the attacks and the organization's leaders have hinted of their involvement in the incidents. The U.S. government immediately launched a response, stating its intentions to go to war against those it deemed responsible.

Recent statements and revelations

Additional information about the planning and execution of the attacks by Al-Qaida came to light following the capture of two of its members - Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh - in separate raids in 2003 and 2002, and an exclusive interview with al Jazeera journalist Yosro Fauda in September 2002.

Amongst the things that were revealed in these statements was that Khalid Mohammed was the instigator and prime organiser of the attacks. The first hijack plan that Mohammed presented to the leadership of Al-Qaida called for several airplanes on both east and west coasts to be hijacked and driven into targets. Mohammed's plan came from an earlier foiled terrorist plot called Operation Bojinka, which called for multiple airliners to be hijacked.

Osama bin Laden was said to have been aware of these plans, and used his authority to gradually scale them down to an operation with four planes.

According to the captured al-Qaida members, six of the hijackers played active parts in the planning, including the four who became the pilots. The other two were Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. CIA operatives monitored these two when they made visits to the USA, but did not notify the FBI or gain any inkling of what the hijackers were up to.

The targets ultimately chosen were the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United States Capitol. Flight 93 was meant to crash into the lattermost. The White House was considered as a target, but was dismissed as being too hard to spot from the air. In the communications that developed as the scheme took form, the Pentagon was known as the Faculty of Arts, Capitol Hill was referred to as the Faculty of Law, and the World Trade Center was referred to as the Faculty of Town Planning.

There were early plans to have 20 hijackers, but the final list always did consist of 19 hijackers. Binalsibh was meant to be the 20th, but he was repeatedly denied entry into the US. Zacarias Moussaoui was considered for the role of the 20th hijacker, but plans to include him were never finalized, as the al-Qaeda hierarchy had doubts about his reliability.

September 17th, 2001 -- A small portion of the scene where the World Trade Center collapsed following the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.
Larger version

His capture by the US authorities did, however, accelerate the plans of the hijackers. It was hijacker Mohammed Atta who notified Binalsibh after Moussaoui's capture in a coded telephone message, "two sticks, a dash, and a cake with a stick down", meaning that the fateful day would be September 11. Thus, it was Atta who chose the date.

Earlier revelations

Almost immediately after the demolition of the World Trade Center, the FBI released the names of nineteen men it claimed had been on the planes used in the coordinated attack [2].

As early as September 17, 2001, reports began to surface that the indentities of at least four of the men identified as suicide hijackers were in doubt. The Telegraph of the UK was the first to interview four men whose personal details, including place and date of birth, name, and occupation, were listed on the FBI's list of hijackers. [3] [4]

In late September, British Prime Minister Tony Blair released information compiled by Western intelligence agencies connecting Osama bin Laden to the Afghan Taliban leadership, and Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida organisation.

The Taliban refused to extradite Osama bin Laden and all other Al-Qaida leaders based in Afghanistan to the United States without conclusive evidence, although they proposed to extradite to an Islamic country. (Previously, the Taliban had refused to extradite bin Laden without conclusive evidence that he was involved in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and the bombing of the USS Cole in a harbor in Yemen.) The setting of that open-ended standard was treated as a refusal based on sympathy with and dependence on Al Qaida, and a coalition led by the United States launched an invasion of Afghanistan on October 7.

After the U.S. attack removed the Taliban from power in many parts of Afghanistan, a videotape was discovered abandoned in Kabul, the Afghan capital, which showed bin Laden discussing the attacks in language that is hard to account for except in ways that imply he intended to indicate his foreknowledge.

U.S. Investigators have nearly a decade of statements directly from bin Laden that state the motives for the attacks on the US and US interests. Bin Laden has been interviewed by western journalists and has for several years repeatedly broadcast a common list of grievances, which he cites as the reason for his jihad. Most of these statements have been confirmed as those from bin Laden but at least one hasn't, a letter, purporting to be written by bin Laden, which appeared on the Internet in Arabic. It was reported in a November 24, 2002 article in The Observer, in an article that cites no intelligence-agency estimates about the likelihood of its authenticity, only using journalists' beliefs that it is really a letter from bin Laden explaining the motivations for the attacks.

Reasons to question the authenticity of this particular letter include

a style different from all the interviews
a strange intro to the letter that acts like the motives have not been stated before.
lack of any other source that includes as motives either
- "debauchery of Western Civilization" or
- a "call for conversion to Islam of the infidels."

There have been many interviews with bin Laden, all of them listing specific foreign policies of the US as the reasons for attacks on the US.

In fact, from an audio tape by bin Laden that addressed the reasons:

"... the Mujahideen saw the black gang of thugs in the White House hiding the Truth, and their stupid and foolish leader, who is elected and supported by his people, denying reality and proclaiming that we (the Mujahideen) were striking them because we were jealous of them (the Americans), whereas the reality is that we are striking them because of their evil and injustice in the whole of the Islamic World, especially in Iraq and Palestine and their occupation of the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries. Upon seeing this, the Mujahideen decided teach them a lesson and to take the war to their heartland. On the blessed Tuesday 11 September 2001, while the Zionist-American Alliance was targeting our children and our people in the blessed land of Al-Aqsa, with American tanks and planes in the hands of the Jews, and our people in Iraq were suffering from the America's sanctions upon them, and the Islamic world was very far away from establishing Islam properly." -Osama Bin Laden, February 14, 2003

In the paragraph before that he again recaps the motives that he has mentioned for years:

" ... in 1995, the explosion in Riyadh took place, killing four Americans, in a clear message from the people of that region displaying their rejection and opposition to the American policy of bankrolling the Jews and occupying the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries. The following year, another explosion in Al-Khobar killed 19 Americans and wounded more than 400 of them, prompting them to move their bases from the cities to the desert. Then in 1998, the Mujahideen warned America to cease their support to the Jews and to leave the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries, but the enemy refused to heed this warning, so the Mujahideen, with the ability from Allah, smashed them with two mighty smashes in East Africa. Then again America was warned, but she refused to pay attention to the warnings, so the Mujahideen destroyed the American Destroyer, the USS Cole, in Aden, in a martyrdom operation, striking a solid blow to the face of the American military and at the same time, exposing the Yemeni Government as American agents, similar to all the countries in the region." -Osama bin Laden February 14, 2003

For many years bin Laden has made clear what his motives are. He said in an interview in 1999, "The International Islamic Front for Jihad against the U.S. and Israel has issued a crystal-clear fatwa calling on the Islamic nation to carry on jihad aimed at liberating holy sites. The nation of Muhammad has responded to this appeal. If the instigation for jihad against the Jews and the Americans in order to liberate Al-Aksa Mosque and the Holy Ka'aba Islamic shrines in the Middle East is considered a crime, then let history be a witness that I am a criminal."

"We swore that America wouldn't live in security until we live it truly in Palestine. This showed the reality of America, which puts Israel's interest above its own people's interest. America won't get out of this crisis until it gets out of the Arabian Peninsula, and until it stops its support of Israel." -Osama bin Laden, October 2001

"The Pile", Manhattan

A German friend of Mohammed Atta is quoted as describing him as "most imbued actually about Israeli politics in the region and about US protection of these Israeli politics in the region. And he was to a degree personally suffering from that."

The FBI testified clearly that Al-Qaeda had specific goals. "One of the primary goals of Sunni extremists is the removal of U.S. military forces from the Persian Gulf area, most notably Saudi Arabia."

Terrorism expert Richard E. Rubenstein writes that Bin Laden has made clear in previous remarks that he is seeking to force a U.S. withdrawal from the Arabian peninsula.

The shoe bomber (Richard Reid) has said:"The reason for me sending you (a document he calls his "will") is so you can see that I didn't do this act out of ignorance nor did I just do it because I want to die, but rather because I see it as a duty upon me to help remove the oppressive American forces from the Muslim land and that this is the only way for us to do so as we do not have other means to fight them."

These facts point to a motive for attacking the WTC in 2001 that is consistent with the motive expressed by terrorists in a letter sent to the New York Times after the 1993 bombing attack of the WTC, "We declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel the state of terrorism and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region." It is also the same motive that Mir Aimal Kasi had for killing CIA employees Frank Darling and Lansing Bennett outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia in 1993. Mir Aimal Kasi said, "What I did was a retaliation against the US government for American policy in the Middle East and its support of Israel."

The Bush Administration and others have insisted the terrorists are motivated to attack by "hatred of America". President Bush claimed, "America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world." The purported statements of bin Laden in the disputed letter surely intend to include "depravity of Western civilization" as a motive for attacks. But even this letter says that the motive for attacking is because they have been wronged. It starts with a quote talking about them being wronged: "Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory" Quran 22:39 It doesn't state that they attack because of "hating our freedoms." The letter also states, "Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us." Yet the letter then goes on the points never raised in anything that has actaully been verified as coming from Osama bin Laden and seems to be created to distort the clear record of years of statements from bin Laden.

Following the attack, the United States government has been on heightened alert for new attacks, repeatedly warning of "imminent attacks".

The attacks as war crimes

The enormity of the attacks, the complexity of the response, and the inability to identify a single state actor has tended to obscure the attacks as war crimes.

War crimes being defined as those acts in warfare that violate the international conventions (especially the vaious Geneva and Hague) governing the conduct of warfare, and the customary laws of war, even an incomplete compilation produces a substantial indictment:

Hostilities commencing without a declaration of war [Hague Convention (III) Relative to the Opening of Hostilities] (18 October 1907), Article I;
Bombardment of an Undefended Place [Annex to Hague Convention No. IV embodying the Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land] (18 October 1907), Article 25;
Unnecessary Killing and Devastation (a "grave breach" under Geneva Conventions of 1949) [Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War] (12 August 1949), Article 147;
Lack of Notice of Bombardment Where Civilian Population Exists [Annex to Hague Convention No. IV embodying the Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land] (18 October 1907), Article 26

Investigations

A joint Congressional committee concluded its investigation in July 2003. While the events show inadequacies in some parts of the United States government, in terms of both the way the attacks may have been prevented with better use and gathering of intelligence and in the way that defense forces reacted to the attacks, not a single public official was removed from office.

As well as the invasion of Afghanistan, claims of a strong link between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and the argument that the attack demonstrated the need to preemptively strike at forces hostile to US and western interests, were used by the US Administration as justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, though such links were hotly questioned at the time and little evidence of such links has since emerged.

In May 2003, a ten-member group was formed, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Among other requests, the Commission requested information from the Federal Aviation Administration on air traffic control tracking of hijacked aircraft and the FAA's communication with NORAD. By October, the information had not been handed over, provoking the Commission to subpoena the FAA for the information and accuse it of slowing the probe. On November 7, the Commission subpoenaed the military's North American Aerospace Defense Command records for information NORAD promised but never deliver. The Commission also threatened to subpoena the White House if information regarding intelligence reports given to the president was not turned over.

List of topics

Timeline of the September 11, 2001 attacks

Misinformation and Rumors

External links

	Main Page \| Recent changes \| Edit this page \| Page history Printable version \| Disclaimers	Not logged in Log in \| Help
	Other languages: العربية \| Dansk \| Deutsch \| Esperanto \| Español \| Français \| עברית \| Italiano \| 日本語 \| Nederlands \| 한국어 \| Polski \| Svenska \| 中文(简体) \| 中文(繁体)