25 Years On: Remembering 9/11

It was Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. The sky over New York was a flawless blue. It was the first week of school for a lot of children, and it was primary election day in New York City. It was, for 2,977 people who had no way of knowing it, and tens of thousands more, the last ordinary morning of their lives. At 8:46 am, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At 9:03, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower, live, in front of a nation already watching. At 9:37, American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. At 10:03, United Airlines Flight 93 went down in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, because forty passengers and crew members found out what the first three planes meant and decided, with whatever time they had left, to do something about it.

Bin Laden’s War

Osama bin Laden did not wake up on September 11th and decide, for the first time, to wage war on the United States. He had been trying to kill Americans in large numbers for the better part of a decade.

On February 26, 1993, terrorists drove a 1,400-pound truck bomb into the parking garage beneath the North Tower, the same tower that would fall eight years later, and detonated it, killing six people and blowing a crater six stories deep into the earth. In October of that same year, eighteen American soldiers were killed and one was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu after a mission against Somali militias went wrong. Four days later, President Clinton announced American troops would leave the country. Bin Laden watched, and drew the same lesson that he expressed in his 1996 declaration of war: that the United States, struck hard enough, did not fight back. In fact, it withdrew. In 1995, a bin Laden associate named Ramzi Yousef was arrested in Manila after a bomb-making accident exposed a plot (code-named Bojinka) to destroy a dozen American airliners over the Pacific Ocean in a single day, and separately, to fly a hijacked plane directly into CIA headquarters. The plot failed, but Yousef's uncle, a man named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, kept it, refined it, and eventually pitched a version of it to bin Laden as what would become the September 11th plot.

On August 7, 1998, truck bombs detonated simultaneously outside the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing 224 people, twelve of them American, and wounding nearly five thousand more. On October 12, 2000, a small boat packed with explosives rammed the USS Cole in the harbor of Aden, killing seventeen American sailors. Each time, the United States indicted the terrorists, or merely launched a cruise missile, or did both. And each time, bin Laden read the response as confirmation of what he already believed: that America could be hit, again and again, at a cost he considered affordable.

Flight training for the pilot-hijackers began in the United States in the summer of 2000. Mohamed Atta, the operational ringleader on the ground, and his co-conspirators spent months moving through flight schools in Florida and elsewhere, learning to fly commercial jets while deliberately skipping the lessons on how to land them. The nineteen men who boarded four planes on the morning of September 11th were the final, narrowed selection from a much larger and more ambitious plot, one that, in its earlier drafts, considered targets beyond the four struck that day.

The Afghan Sanctuary

Afghanistan's Taliban regime gave bin Laden and al-Qaeda exactly what a terrorist network would have needed most: a hideout. When the United States, in the days after the attack, demanded the Taliban hand over the men responsible, the Taliban refused. But Afghanistan was not the only enabling agent of the al-Qaeda terrorists.

Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia. When two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, arrived in San Diego in early 2000, they were met, housed, and financially supported by Omar al-Bayoumi, a man drawing a salary from a Saudi civil aviation contractor and likely a Saudi intelligence asset. Working alongside al-Bayoumi was Fahad al-Thumairy, an accredited Saudi consular official in Los Angeles, who directed an associate to assist the same two hijackers upon their arrival and described them, more than a year before the attacks, as "two very significant people."

The Towers

What happened in New York on September 11th has been told so many times that it is possible to stop feeling it, and that is its own kind of loss.

America did not learn what was happening from a news anchor first. It learned from two women doing their jobs at thirty thousand feet. At 8:19 a.m., Flight 11 flight attendant Betty Ong picked up an airphone in the back of the plane and stayed on the line for the next twenty-three minutes, her voice level and precise, describing hijackers' seat numbers, a passenger with his throat cut, a flight crew locked out of its own cockpit. A few rows away, fellow attendant Madeline "Amy" Sweeney was on a second phone with a manager back in Boston, reading off details with the same steady clarity, narrating her own flight's final minute by minute descent: "I see water. I see buildings. We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low." The call ended when the plane did. Two women spent the last half hour of their lives handing investigators the evidence that would later confirm exactly what had happened and who had done it, because even as their world came apart around them, they kept doing their jobs.

Inside the towers themselves, temperatures from burning jet fuel and the buildings' own contents climbed past a thousand degrees in places. On the floors above where the planes struck, with the stairwells destroyed and the smoke rising faster than help could reach them, some of the roughly two hundred people trapped chose a fall of nine or ten seconds over the suffocating smoke, and the scalding flames. Firefighters working below heard it happening. To fall countless stories was the last, unbearable choice available to human beings failed by every institution that was supposed to protect them, made with more courage than any human being should ever have to find.

343 firefighters and 72 law enforcement officers died that day, most of them walking up stairwells as countless people ran past them. One of the first was never even assigned to go inside. Father Mychal Judge, the FDNY's chaplain, ran to the North Tower lobby the moment the first plane hit, pausing only to pray briefly with the mayor before continuing on. He was kneeling over a dying firefighter, removing his own helmet to administer last rites, when the collapsing South Tower sent a piece of falling debris through the lobby and killed him instantly. Firefighters carried his body out through the wreckage in a photograph that would become one of the defining images of that morning: not a soldier, not a rescuer in the middle of a rescue, but a priest who ran toward the fire to be with the dying, and became one of them. His death certificate lists him as Victim 0001.

In the months afterward, thousands more worked the smoking wreckage at Ground Zero, by hand, searching for the dead, breathing air that the government forgot to tell them was toxic. Many of them have died since, of cancers and respiratory disease traced directly to the rubble.

Let’s Roll

Flight 93 left Newark twenty-five minutes late, and that delay, combined with a hijacking plan that took longer to execute than the others, gave its passengers something the people on the first three planes never had: Enough time.

One passenger, Todd Beamer was an account manager for Oracle, an athlete in high school and college who had built a stable, churchgoing life in New Jersey with his wife and their two young sons, and a third child on the way. Another, Jeremy Glick sold web services for a Bay Area firm called Vividence, held a black belt, and had been a national collegiate judo champion. His daughter had been born three months earlier. Tom Burnett had gone from high school quarterback in Bloomington, Minnesota, to vice president and chief operating officer of Thoratec, a medical device company in California, and had three young daughters waiting for him at home. Mark Bingham ran his own public relations firm out of San Francisco and played rugby. The year before, he had helped found one of the country's first gay rugby clubs. On any ordinary Tuesday, these were four men who would probably never have met each other at all. On this one, they ended up on the same plane, and would end up sacrificing themselves together in the same fight.

Glick called his wife, Lyzbeth, and stayed on the line for more than twenty minutes, describing the hijackers' knives in a voice her family remembers as calm even as it broke. At one point he made a joke about the butter knife left over from the breakfast service, trying to soften what he was about to say next. A moment later, he told her that he and several other men were organizing to rush the men holding the cabin, and, absurdly and touchingly, asked if that was all right with her. She asked if the hijackers had guns. He said no. He told her he loved her and asked her not to hang up. Then the line filled with screaming, then the sound of the phone banging against something hard, and then it went quiet.

Burnett called his wife, Deena, four times. A former flight attendant herself, she told him, from her own training, to sit down, stay quiet, and not draw attention to himself. He told her no. If they flew the plane into the ground, he said, there wasn't a choice, "We're going to have to do something." He did not sound like a man who expected to lose.

"I might be late," he told her before the last call ended, "but I'll be home."

Beamer couldn't reach his own wife, so a GTE Airfone supervisor named Lisa Jefferson stayed on the line instead, listening as he described the captain and first officer down on the floor of first class and a hijacker with what looked like a bomb strapped to his waist. Asked if he was sure about the plan to rush the man, he told her, "I'm going to have to go out on faith.” There wasn't much of a choice left, as far as he could see. When there was no way to patch him through to his wife, he asked Jefferson to say the Lord's Prayer with him instead, and the two of them, strangers to each other, recited it together. A few minutes later she heard him ask the men around him, "Are you guys ready?" and then, "Let's roll."

What none of them could know for certain was whether rushing the cockpit would work, or whether it only meant dying four minutes sooner than they otherwise would have. The cockpit voice recorder caught the fight itself, and one voice inside it, amid the sounds of the struggle, crying out, "If we don't, we die!" They chose to act anyway. Forty people aboard that fourth plane, having learned by air phone and cellphone what had already happened in New York, made the decision to fight back, and the assault that followed ended the flight in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. No one on board survived. Those passengers became the first casualties of a counterattack in a war that none of them had ever asked to fight.

The Lies That Followed

Tragedies of this scale don’t always stay simple, and in the twenty-five years since, an entire cottage industry has grown up around insisting that 9/11 wasn't what it plainly and clearly was.

Some of this is the familiar argumentation of the "truther" movement, and the most common version of it collapses under a single fact its own believers usually don't know: Nobody claims the steel melted, because it didn't need to. Structural steel melts at roughly 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit. It loses about half its strength closer to 1,100 degrees. The jet fuel fires burning inside the towers reached roughly 1,800 degrees. The planes' impacts didn't just start those fires. They physically stripped the fireproofing insulation off a wide swath of steel columns and floor trusses, leaving bare metal directly exposed to flame for the first time in the building's history. NIST's multi-year federal investigation found exactly that: the fireproofing loss, not the fire alone, and not the impact alone, is what let the heat do enough damage to make the floors sag, pull inward on the exterior columns, and buckle them until the structure above had nowhere left to stand. NIST modeled the collapse column by column and explicitly ruled out both the popular "pancake" shorthand and any trace of explosives or thermite. That a plane could do this to a skyscraper is a hard thing to accept. It is also exactly what a multi-year federal engineering investigation, and nothing more exotic, found. The same is true of the claim that a missile, not a hijacked airliner, struck the Pentagon, despite hundreds of eyewitnesses, black box data, and identifiable wreckage saying otherwise, and of the claim that Building 7's collapse hours later was somehow more mysterious than the two towers that had already fallen beside it, when in fact it burned internally for seven hours, unfought, above a structure already weakened by the day's earlier destruction.

The uglier and more durable version of that doubt blames the Jews. Within weeks of the attacks, a rumor began circulating that has since proven impossible to kill: that five Israeli nationals had been seen "dancing" in celebration as the towers burned, and were secretly Mossad agents with foreknowledge of the plot. The five Israelis, employees of a moving company, indeed existed. They were soon detained and questioned by the FBI for behavior witnesses called inappropriate, and released after a thorough investigation found no connection whatsoever to the attacks. The word "dancing" itself was never used by the witnesses who saw them. It was introduced weeks later, fittingly enough, by the father of Mohamed Atta himself, in comments to the press deflecting attention from his own son. A quarter century later, the phrase still shows up as graffiti and on protest signs, stripped of the fact that it was invented by precisely the father of the man who actually did it. Alongside it lives an even more mathematically absurd claim: that 4,000 Jewish employees were secretly warned not to report to work at the World Trade Center that day. The 9/11 Memorial lists the name of every victim. Jewish New Yorkers, roughly proportionate to their share of the city's workforce, are among them, because the warning never happened and could not have happened, and no one has ever produced a shred of evidence that it did.

These claims have been part of a deliberate strategy, recycled by state propaganda outlets in Tehran, amplified by extremist movements at home, and picked up by those who find it easier to blame a familiar scapegoat than to sit with the plain fact that 19 men murdered 3,000 people because a death cult convinced them that God wanted it done. These conspiracies launder al-Qaeda's crime onto the one people who lost proportionally as many of their own that day as anyone else in that city, and who did not fly a single plane.

Nineteen men claimed credit for September 11th in their own voices, on video, in life and after it, because they were proud of what they had done.

Believing them costs nothing. To not believe them is a choice made by those who have already decided in advance who they'd rather it had been.

What We Owe the Dead

Nine days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush told a joint session of Congress and a nation watching, that America was finally ready to respond to the war waged by Al-Qaeda, and that any nation harboring terrorists would share their fate. It was, whatever else can be said about the two decades that followed and the mistakes made within them, the greatest American instinct on the day it was spoken: that a nation which allows any government, anywhere, to believe it can host the men who murder three thousand Americans and pay no price for it, has not learned the only lesson that September 11th was capable of teaching.

The sky was blue again the next morning. 9/11 taught America the lesson no country wants to learn twice: that the ordinary decency of a Tuesday is not a permanent condition, and it survives only because there are still people willing to run into a burning building, stay on a hijacked phone line to the last second, or stand up out of a window seat and walk toward a cockpit door, so that the rest of us get to have another one. Twenty-five years on, the debt this country owes them, and the thousands of American service members who died in the war that followed trying to make sure it could not happen again, has not been paid down by time, and it will not be settled by a headline once a year. It is owed every single one of the other three hundred and sixty-four days too.