On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners bound for West Coast destinations. At 8:46 that morning, the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City; over the next hour, a second plane would be flown into the South Tower and a third into the Pentagon; a fourth plane crashed into an open field in Pennsylvania after an “insurrection” by passengers. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, and the United States and the world were changed forever. Let’s look back on the global impact of the Sept. 11 attacks.
An hour after the fuel-loaded jetliner slammed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, the South Tower collapsed. “The structural steel of the skyscraper, built to withstand winds in excess of 200 miles [320 kilometres] per hour and a large conventional fire, could not withstand the tremendous heat generated by the burning jet fuel,” the History Channel notes. Half an hour later, the North Tower collapsed, and 7 World Trade Center collapsed later that afternoon. A section of the structure of the Pentagon was also destroyed.
CNN estimates that the attacks caused US$60 billion in damage to the World Trade Center site. The cleanup took 3.1 million hours of labour over more than eight months, cost US$750 million and removed nearly two million tons of debris. The Pentagon sustained extensive damage to its west façade and three outer rings, but by September 2002, the damage had been repaired sufficiently to allow workers to return to their offices; many architects believe its reinforced concrete
structure saved it from complete destruction.
According to the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, Osama bin Laden “was relatively unknown in the United States before 9/11, even as he was amassing popularity, followers, and fame in the Middle East during the 1990s.” Bin Laden’s network carried out “a new type of terrorism to which the US intelligence agencies struggled to adapt.” Immediately after 9/11, bin Laden “became a household name and Al Qaeda was America’s new enemy.”
In the streets and front yards of America, patriotic symbols became more visible in the weeks, months and years following the attacks, as the History Channel notes. Many Americans, according to a Vox history of the Iraq war years, “were shocked and offended at the mere idea of not supporting the president.” This nationalism sometimes revealed itself in ways that can seem strange decades later, as an incredulous teenager pointed out to Mental Floss in 2015.
When France declined to get involved in the Iraq war, Republican congressman Bob Ney, “who was chairman of the House Administration Committee and therefore in charge of operations for the Capitol complex, ordered that the word ‘French’ be removed from all affiliated menus. French fries would become ‘freedom fries,’ French toast ‘freedom toast.’”
After the Sept. 11 attacks and in light of the Afghan war, “existing migrant detention facilities” at a United States naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were repurposed to hold prisoners of war, according to CNN. The first detainees from Afghanistan and Pakistan arrived there in January 2002. According to American NGO Human Rights First, a total of 780 prisoners were held there between 2002 and 2018; only eight were convicted by military commissions at the base, and three of those convictions were fully overturned. Under the Bush and Obama administrations, about 700 were released, either repatriated to their home countries or sent to third countries such as Slovakia and Uruguay.
Prisoners have included 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and bin Laden bodyguard Moath al Alawi, but also people who maintained that they were rounded up indiscriminately by bounty hunters. Forty prisoners remain there today, according to NPR, including some who have been there for as long as two decades without charges being filed. The Biden administration has announced its intention to close the camp.
As the History Channel explains, the 9/11 attacks led to an outpouring of solidarity in the United States, but it also led to a spike in xenophobic violence. “Anger erupted into attacks on people of Arab and Muslim descent, with nearly 600 incidents in the first 10 days after the attacks,” the History Channel recounts. “Five hundred furious people mobbed a Chicago-area mosque and refused to leave until they were forced out by police. A Pakistani grocer was murdered in Texas. A man on an anti-Arab rampage in Arizona fatally shot a gas station owner who was an Indian-born Sikh.” Harassment of Arab-Americans “continued for months” after the attacks despite calls for calm.
Not all Americans believe that the terror attacks were what they seemed. According to a 2016 poll cited by the BBC, more than half of Americans believe the U.S. government has been concealing information about what happened on Sept. 11. Some believe that the U.S. government was somehow complicit in the attacks. “Experts say part of the reason for the persistence of such conspiracy theories is the dissonance that results when people hear that a relatively small group of men using low-tech weapons caused such cataclysmic carnage,” the BBC explains.
According to a May 2021 Slate story, Iraq was a national security priority for the Bush administration even before the 9/11 attacks. “The 9/11 attacks only increased the administration’s desire to do something about Iraq. If Iraq had been involved in the attacks, launching a war on [Iraqi leader] Saddam [Hussein] would count as self-defense,” Slate’s Noreen Malone states. Then-vice president Cheney was among the Bush administration stalwarts who was convinced of a direct link between Hussein and Sept. 11, although not everyone in the U.S. intelligence community shared that perspective.
The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003 over concerns that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in that war in May 2003, stating, according to the History Channel, that the “battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept. 11, 2001 and still goes on.” Several U.S. allies including France and Germany, who had contributed to the Afghanistan war effort, decided against involvement in Iraq, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Hussein was executed in 2006 and the U.S. withdrew from Iraq in 2011. By 2009, more than 4,300 U.S. soldiers and as many as 650,000 Iraqi civilians (although exact estimates vary) had been killed.
Then-president George W. Bush did not intend the “war on terror” to be against a single, specific adversary. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he stated on Sept. 20, 2001, according to the History Channel. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” As Encyclopedia Britannica explains, the wider war on terror was a “multidimensional conflict almost limitless in scope” including not only the war in Iraq, but “covert operations in Yemen and elsewhere, large-scale military assistance programs for cooperative regimes, and major increases in military spending.”
It also included “an extensive public diplomacy campaign” to counter anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and efforts to maintain a global coalition of partner states. Critics of these efforts have argued that they may have done more to cement anti-American sentiment globally than to combat it.
A few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security and passed the Patriot Act. Although some of its provisions expired in 2015, as Vox explains, much of the bill remains in effect. The Patriot Act created a list of new federal crimes related to terrorism and gave the government new powers to track and seize money associated with terrorism. Privacy advocates criticized the bill over fears that it could be used to seize the book-borrowing records of public library users, and it actually was used to collect the phone records of millions of Americans, as whistleblower Edward Snowden later revealed.
FBI agents also received expanded powers to request information without the consent of a judge through national security letters. “While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act turns regular citizens into suspects,” the American Civil Liberties Union has argued. According to Wired, 9/11 left the United States with “a legacy of secret and unilateral executive-branch actions, a surveillance infrastructure [...] with little oversight, a compliant judiciary system that [...] bows to claims of secrecy by the executive branch, and a populace that has no idea how its government uses its power.”
Saudi-born Osama bin Laden was the founder of terrorist group al-Qaeda (“the base” in Arabic), and the self-described mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, he was based in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, and ordered the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. One of the major reasons for the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan was to capture bin Laden. In December 2001, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. and Afghan forces tracked bin Laden to the Tora Bora mountains, where he evaded capture. Throughout the next decade, bin Laden would periodically appear in videos and TV segments, seemingly taunting those trying to capture him. He was eventually killed in a raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011.
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