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In those conversations, the two referred to "an incident that would take place in America on, or around, September 11" and they discussed potential repercussions.

In another conversation with an associate in Afghanistan, bin Laden discussed the "scale and effects of a forthcoming operation".

These conversations did not specifically mention the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or other specifics.[437] In their annual violent crime index for the year of 2001, the FBI recorded the deaths from the attacks as murder, in separate tables so as not to mix them with other reported crime for that year.[438] In a disclaimer, the FBI stated that "the number of deaths is so great that combining it with the traditional crime statistics will have an outlier effect that falsely skews all types of measurements in the program's analyses".[439] New York City also did not include the deaths in their annual crime statistics for 2001.[440] In 2004, John L.

Helgerson, the Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), conducted an internal review of the agency's pre-9/11 performance and was harshly critical of senior CIA officials for not doing everything possible to confront terrorism.[441] According to Philip Giraldi in The American Conservative, Helgerson criticized their failure to stop two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, as they entered the United States and their failure to share information on the two men with the FBI.[442] In May 2007, senators from both major U.S. political parties (the Republican and Democratic party) drafted legislation to make the review public.

One of the backers, Senator Ron Wyden said, "The American people have a right to know what the Central Intelligence Agency was doing in those critical months before 9/11".[443] The report was released in 2009 by President Barack Obama.[441] In February 2002, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence formed a joint inquiry into the performance of the U.S. Intelligence Community.[444] Their 832-page report released in December 2002[445] detailed failings of the FBI and CIA to use available information, including about terrorists the CIA knew were in the United States, in order to disrupt the plots.[446] The joint inquiry developed its information about possible involvement of Saudi Arabian government officials from non-classified sources.[447] Nevertheless, the Bush administration demanded 28 related pages remain classified.[446] In December 2002, the inquiry's chair Bob Graham (D-FL) revealed in an interview that there was "evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States".[448] September 11 victim families were frustrated by the unanswered questions and redacted material from the congressional inquiry, and demanded an independent commission.[446] September 11 victim families,[449] members of Congress[450] and the Saudi Arabian government are still seeking release of the documents.[451][452] In June 2016, CIA chief John Brennan said that he believes 28 redacted pages of a congressional inquiry into 9/11 will soon be made public, and that they will prove that the government of Saudi Arabia had no involvement in the September 11 attacks.[453] In September 2016, Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act that would allow relatives of victims of the September 11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for its government's alleged role in the attacks.[454][455][456] The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, popularly known as the 9/11 Commission, chaired by Thomas Kean, governor of New Jersey from 1982 to 1990,[l] was formed in late 2002 to prepare a thorough account of the circumstances surrounding the attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks.[461] On July 22, 2004, the commission issued the 9/11 Commission Report, a 585-page report based on its investigations and interviews.

The report detailed the events leading up to the September 11 attacks, concluding that they were carried out by al-Qaeda.

The commission also examined how security and intelligence agencies were inadequately coordinated to prevent the attacks.

According to the report, "We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management".[462] The commission made numerous recommendations on how to prevent future attacks, and in 2011 was dismayed that several of its recommendations had yet to be implemented.[463] The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) investigated the collapses of the Twin Towers and 7 WTC.

The investigations examined why the buildings collapsed and what fire protection measures were in place, and evaluated how fire protection systems might be improved in future construction.[464] The investigation into the collapse of 1 WTC and 2 WTC was concluded in October 2005 and that of 7 WTC was completed in August 2008.[465] NIST found that the fireproofing on the Twin Towers' steel infrastructures was blown off by the initial impact of the planes and that had this not occurred, the towers likely would have remained standing.[466] A 2007 study of the north tower's collapse published by researchers of Purdue University determined that since the plane's impact had stripped off much of the structure's thermal insulation, the heat from a typical office fire would have softened and weakened the exposed girders and columns enough to initiate the collapse regardless of the number of columns cut or damaged by the impact.[467][468] The director of the original investigation stated that "the towers really did amazingly well.

The terrorist aircraft didn't bring the buildings down; it was the fire which followed.

It was proven that you could take out two-thirds of the columns in a tower and the building would still stand".[469] The fires weakened the trusses supporting the floors, making the floors sag.

The sagging floors pulled on the exterior steel columns causing the exterior columns to bow inward.

With the damage to the core columns, the buckling exterior columns could no longer support the buildings, causing them to collapse.

Additionally, the report found the towers' stairwells were not adequately reinforced to provide adequate emergency escape for people above the impact zones.[470] NIST concluded that uncontrolled fires in 7 WTC caused floor beams and girders to heat and subsequently "caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down".[465] In July 2016, the Obama administration released a document compiled by U.S. investigators Dana Lesemann and Michael Jacobson, known as "File 17",[471] which contains a list naming three dozen people, including the suspected Saudi intelligence officers attached to Saudi Arabia's embassy in Washington, D.C.,[472] which connects Saudi Arabia to the hijackers.[473][474] In September 2016, Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.[475][476] The practical effect of the legislation was to allow the continuation of a longstanding civil lawsuit brought by families of victims of the September 11 attacks against Saudi Arabia for its government's alleged role in the attacks.[477] In March 2018, a U.S. judge formally allowed a suit to move forward against the government of Saudi Arabia brought by 9/11 survivors and victims' families.[475] In 2022, the families of some 9/11 victims obtained two videos and a notepad seized from Saudi national Omar al-Bayoumi by the British courts.

The first video showed him hosting a party in San Diego for Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the first two hijackers to arrive in the U.S. The other video showed al-Bayoumi greeting the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was blamed for radicalizing Americans and later killed in a CIA drone strike.

The notepad depicted a hand-drawn airplane and some mathematical equations that, according to a pilot's court statement, might have been used to calculate the rate of descent to get to a target.

According to a 2017 FBI memo, from the late 1990s up until the 9/11 attack, al-Bayoumi was a paid cooptee of the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency.

As of April 2022[update] he is believed to be living in Saudi Arabia, which has denied any involvement in 9/11.[478] On the day of the attacks, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani stated: "We will rebuild.

We're going to come out of this stronger than before, politically stronger, economically stronger.

The skyline will be made whole again".[479] Within hours of the attack, a substantial search and rescue operation was launched.

After months of around-the-clock operations, the World Trade Center site was cleared by the end of May 2002.[480] The damaged section of the Pentagon was rebuilt and occupied within a year of the attacks.[481] The temporary World Trade Center PATH station opened in late 2003 and construction of the new 7 World Trade Center was completed in 2006.

Work on rebuilding the main World Trade Center site was delayed until late 2006, when leaseholder Larry Silverstein and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey agreed on financing.[482] The construction of One World Trade Center began on April 27, 2006, and reached its full height on May 20, 2013.

The spire was installed atop the building at that date, putting One WTC's height at 1,776 feet (541 m) and thus claiming the title of the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.[483][484] One WTC finished construction and opened on November 3, 2014.[484][485][486] On the World Trade Center site, three more office towers were to be built one block east of where the original towers stood.[487] 4 WTC, meanwhile, opened in November 2013, making it the second tower on the site to open behind 7 World Trade Center, as well as the first building on the Port Authority property.[488] 3 WTC opened on June 11, 2018, becoming the fourth skyscraper at the site to be completed.[489] In December 2022, the Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church fully reopened for regular services[490] followed by the opening of the Ronald O.

Perelman Performing Arts Center in September 2023.[491] With construction beginning in 2008,[492] 2 World Trade Center remains as of 2023 unfinished.[493] Construction of a 5 World Trade Center is planned to begin in 2024 and be finished by 2029.[494][495] Christopher O.

Ward, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Executive Director from 2008 to 2011, is a survivor of the attacks and is credited with getting the construction of the 9/11 site back on track.[496] In the days immediately following the attacks, many memorials and vigils were held around the world, and photographs of the dead and missing were posted around Ground Zero.

A witness described being unable to "get away from faces of innocent victims who were killed.

Their pictures are everywhere, on phone booths, street lights, walls of subway stations.

Everything reminded me of a huge funeral, people quiet and sad, but also very nice.

Before, New York gave me a cold feeling; now people were reaching out to help each other".[497] President Bush proclaimed Friday, September 14, 2001 as Patriot Day.[498] One of the first memorials was the Tribute in Light, an installation of 88 searchlights at the footprints of the World Trade Center towers.[499] In New York City, the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition was held to design an appropriate memorial on the site.[500] The winning design, Reflecting Absence, was selected in August 2006, and consists of a pair of reflecting pools in the footprints of the towers, surrounded by a list of the victims' names in an underground memorial space.[501] The memorial was completed on September 11, 2011;[502] a museum also opened on site on May 21, 2014.[503] The Sphere by the German sculptor Fritz Koenig is the world's largest bronze sculpture of modern times, and stood between the Twin Towers on the Austin J.

Tobin Plaza of the World Trade Center in New York City from 1971 until the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

The sculpture, weighing more than 20 tons, was the only remaining work of art to be recovered largely intact from the ruins of the collapsed Twin Towers after the attacks.

Since then, the work of art, known in the U.S. as The Sphere, has been transformed into an important symbolic monument of 9/11 commemoration.

After being dismantled and stored near a hangar at John F.

Kennedy International Airport, the sculpture was the subject of the 2001 documentary The Sphere by filmmaker Percy Adlon.

On August 16, 2017, the work was reinstated, installed at the Liberty Park, close to the new World Trade Center aerial and the 9/11 Memorial.[504] In Arlington County, the Pentagon Memorial was completed and opened to the public on the seventh anniversary of the attacks in 2008.[505][506] It consists of a landscaped park with 184 benches facing the Pentagon.[507] When the Pentagon was repaired in 2001–2002, a private chapel and indoor memorial were included, located at the spot where Flight 77 crashed into the building.[508] In Shanksville, a concrete-and-glass visitor center was opened on September 10, 2015,[509] situated on a hill overlooking the crash site and the white marble Wall of Names.[510] An observation platform at the visitor center and the white marble wall are both aligned beneath the path of Flight 93.[510][511] A temporary memorial is located 500 yards (457 m) from the crash site.[512] New York City firefighters donated a cross made of steel from the World Trade Center and mounted on top of a platform shaped like the Pentagon.[513] It was installed outside the firehouse on August 25, 2008.[514] Many other permanent memorials are elsewhere.

Scholarships and charities have been established by the victims' families and by many other organizations and private figures.[515] On every anniversary in New York City, the names of the victims who died there are read out against a background of somber music.

The President of the United States attends a memorial service at the Pentagon,[516] and asks Americans to observe Patriot Day with a moment of silence.

Smaller services are held in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, which are usually attended by the First Lady.

In September 2023, President Joe Biden did not attend services in the affected areas, instead marking the day in Anchorage, Alaska, the first US President to do so since the attacks.[517][518][519] Multimedia Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

The September 11 attacks were a series of airline hijackings and suicide attacks committed in 2001 by 19 terrorists associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda.

It was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil; nearly 3,000 people were killed.

The attacks involved the hijacking of four planes, three of which were used to strike significant U.S. sites.

American Airlines flight 11 and United Airlines flight 175 were flown into the World Trade Center’s north and south towers, respectively, and American Airlines flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

United Airlines flight 93 crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers attempted to overpower the hijackers.

The plane was believed to be headed to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. The exact number of victims—particularly the number of those killed at the World Trade Center—is not definitively known.

However, the official death toll, after numerous revisions and not including the 19 terrorists, was set at 2,977 people.

At the World Trade Center in New York City, 2,753 people died, of whom 343 were firefighters.

The death toll at the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., was 184, and 40 individuals died outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is considered the mastermind of the attacks, though Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the operational planner.

Mohammed came up with the tactical innovation of using hijacked planes to attack the United States, and al-Qaeda provided the personnel, money, and logistical support to execute the operation.

Mohammed Atta was selected to head the operation.

He and 18 other terrorists, most of whom were from Saudi Arabia, established themselves in the United States, where some received commercial flight training.

All 19 hijackers died in the attacks, bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in 2011, and Mohammed was captured in 2003.

The attacks had a profound and lasting impact on the country, especially regarding its foreign and domestic policies.

U.S. Pres.

George W.

Bush declared a global “war on terrorism,” and lengthy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq followed.

Meanwhile, security measures within the United States were tightened considerably, especially at airports.

To help facilitate the domestic response, Congress quickly passed the controversial USA PATRIOT Act, which significantly expanded the search and surveillance powers of federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Additionally, a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security was created.

The collapse of the Twin Towers coated Lower Manhattan in a blanket of toxic dust, and fires at Ground Zero continued to smolder for months after the attacks.

Many first responders who were active in the initial rescue and recovery effort reported respiratory issues, and the CDC estimated that as many as 400,000 people in the surrounding area had been exposed to potentially harmful substances or severe physical or emotional stress as a result of the attacks.

A monitoring and treatment program created in 2011 tracked the health of more than 100,000 people who had been exposed to harmful “9/11 agents.” Among the most common issues reported were chronic sinusitis, GERD, an assortment of cancers, and PTSD.

By 2023 more than 5,700 participants in that program had perished; at that time, it was estimated that the number of lives claimed by September 11-related illness had far surpassed the total lost in the attacks themselves.

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 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.

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.” 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.

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).