September 11 attacks

United States [2001]

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Alternate titles: 11/9 attacks, 9/11 terrorist attacks, September 11
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September 11 attacks
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Date:
 
September 11, 2001
Location:
 
New York New York City Pennsylvania United States Washington, D.C.
Participants:
 
al-Qaeda
Context:
 
Iraq War USA PATRIOT Act Afghanistan War Homeland Security Act
Major Events:
 
American Airlines flight 77
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Summary
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September 11 attacks

September 11 attacks: Pentagon

September 11 attacks: United Airlines flight 93
September 11 attacks, also called 9/11 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 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
had rushed to the scene of the attacks, and more than 400 police officers and firefighters
were killed.
The plot

flight paths on 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

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 he 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 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
Hear about Mohammed Atta, the lead perpetrator behind the September 11 attacks of 2001, and
Sebastian Gorki, a German banker and one of the victims killed in the World Trade Center, New
York
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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

September 11 attacks

September 11 attacks
September 11 attacks: United Airlines flight 93, 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

September 11 attacks
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 operation

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 had lost their lives after rushing to the scene and into the towers.

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

September 11 attacks; George W. Bush

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

September 11 attacks
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

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

September 11 attacks: memorial

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 attacks
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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.
Know how the AT&T Corporation managed the telecommunication traffic right after the attacks
of September 11, 2001
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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.
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.

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
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
One World Trade Center and the National September 11
Memorial and Museum
One World Trade Center

September 11 Memorial and One World Trade Center

The physical and symbolic void left by the destruction of the Twin Towers was filled on
November 3, 2014, with the opening of One World Trade Center, a 1,776-foot (541.3-
metre) skyscraper, which instantly became a dramatic new landmark on the Manhattan
skyline. Adjacent to One World Trade Center are the National September 11 Memorial
and Museum (completed in 2011 and 2014, respectively). Within the 8-acre (3.2-
hectare) memorial plaza, twin 1-acre (0.4-hectare) reflecting pools occupy the footprints
of the Twin Towers. The pools feature the largest man-made waterfalls in North
America and are edged by bronze panels inscribed with the names of the victims of the
September 11 attacks as well as the names of the six people who died as a result of
the truck bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993. Among more than 400
trees in the grove that surrounds the pools is the “Survivor Tree,” a Callery pear tree that
was discovered badly damaged at Ground Zero, removed and nursed back to health, and
then returned to the site in 2010. The memorial and plaza were designed by
architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker, winners of a design competition that featured
5,201 submissions from 63 countries.

Twenty years later, how do we remember 9/11?

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The museum includes a glass-encased pavilion with an atrium that features two 80-foot
(24-metre) trident-shaped steel columns that were part of the facade of the North
Tower. The museum’s Memorial Hall is adorned with 2,983 tiles (representing the
victims of the September 2001 and February 1993 attacks), each one a
blue watercolour with which artist Spencer Finch attempted to capture the colour of the
sky on the day of the September 11 attacks. At the centre of the tiles is a quote
from Virgil’s Aeneid:

No day shall erase you from the memory of time

The museum’s Foundation Hall is a high-ceilinged, nearly 15,000-square-foot (1,400-
square-metre) room that encompasses part of a surviving retaining wall of the World
Trade Center and displays the “Last Column,” a 36-foot (11-metre) steel beam to which
workers and others attached messages and posters during Ground Zero cleanup
operations. The international impact of the September 11 attacks is demonstrated along
the ramp that descends into the museum by a multimedia exhibit featuring recorded
reminiscences by people from 43 countries in 28 languages.

Pentagon
building, Arlington, Virginia, United States
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Pentagon
Pentagon, large five-sided building in Arlington county, Virginia, near Washington,
D.C., that serves as the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, including all
three military services—Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Constructed during 1941–43, the Pentagon was intended to consolidate the offices of the
War Department, which had occupied 17 separate facilities throughout Washington.
Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt initially favoured a building without windows
to protect it from potential air raids, he was later convinced by building engineers that
such a facility would be impractical. He eventually supported a five-sided design
by George Edwin Bergstrom—though Gilmore Clarke, the chairman of the Commission
of Fine Arts, whose office was charged with advising the president and Congress on
federally funded artistic and public structures, criticized it as “one of the most serious
and worst attacks on the plan of Washington.” The site selected was mostly a swampy
wasteland whose only structure was the small, obsolete Washington Airport. In order to
stabilize the area, some 5.5 million cubic yards (4.2 million cubic metres) of dirt were
trucked in, and 41,492 concrete piles were set to support the building’s foundation. To
protect the vista of neighbouring Arlington National Cemetery, the Pentagon’s height
was strictly limited to 77 feet 3.5 inches (24 metres). With the country’s entry into World
War II in December 1941, just three months after the start of construction in September,
completion of the building became a national priority. More than 13,000 workers
laboured day and night, and within just eight months of groundbreaking, Secretary of
War Henry Stimson relocated his offices to the new facility.

Pentagon
At its completion at a cost of $83 million in January 1943, the Pentagon was the world’s
largest office building, covering 29 acres (12 hectares)—including a 5-acre (2-hectare)
central court—and containing roughly 3,700,000 square feet (344,000 square metres)
of usable floor space for approximately 25,000 people. Plans to convert the building to a
hospital or some other peacetime facility after the war were abandoned with the rapid
onset of the Cold War, which required a high degree of military preparedness. The
Pentagon remains one of the world’s largest office buildings.

Constructed of steel and reinforced concrete with some limestone facing, the structure

has five floors, excluding its mezzanine and basement. It consists of five concentric
pentagons, or “rings,” with 10 spokelike corridors connecting the whole. There are 17.5
miles (28 km) of corridors, but, because of its innovative construction, it is possible to
walk between any two points within the building in approximately seven minutes.
Several libraries serve as research facilities for the military, and these repositories
subscribe to more than 1,700 periodicals in a wide variety of languages. Two cafeterias, a
dining room, and seven snack bars are also located on the premises. There are 67 acres
(27 hectares) of parking lots, which can accommodate about 8,700 automobiles. Bus
and taxi terminals are located beneath a huge concourse containing a shopping
centre for Pentagon employees. The Washington Metro subway also serves the facility,
and a heliport was added in 1956.
September 11 attacks
In 2001, on the 60th anniversary of the Pentagon’s groundbreaking, five
terrorists hijacked a commercial airliner and piloted it into the building during
the September 11 attacks. Part of the southwest side of the building was destroyed, and
189 people, including the terrorists, were killed. The damage was largely repaired within
a year.