Hijacked jets strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; a fourth crashes in a Pennsylvania field
Tuesday morning, clear skies over the East Coast. At 8:46, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center; seventeen minutes later, United Flight 175 hit the South Tower. At 9:37, American Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. At 10:03, United Flight 93 went down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers rushed the cockpit. Nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers killed 2,977 people and caused more than $10 billion in damage.
The attacks triggered the Global War on Terror and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and prompted NATO to invoke Article 5 for the first time in its history. Nearly a quarter century later, the Costs of War Project estimates more than 4.5 million deaths tied to the conflicts that followed, and post-Cold War American foreign policy shifted decisively in its wake.
QWhy couldn't the FBI be told that two future hijackers were already inside the United States?
CIA agent Tom Wilshire emailed superiors at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center on July 13, 2001, requesting permission to tell the FBI that Nawaf al-Hazmi was in the country and Khalid al-Mihdhar held a U.S. visa. The CIA never responded. Weeks earlier, an FBI liaison had asked to share word of a January 2000 al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia with the Bureau and was told flatly, "This is not a matter for the FBI." FBI analyst Margarette Gillespie was even shown surveillance photos of the two men from that meeting but was never told why they mattered. Both men helped hijack Flight 77 two months later.
QWhat real-world plane crash gave bin Laden the idea for 9/11?
In handwritten notes titled "The Birth of the Idea of September 11," seized during the 2011 raid on his compound, bin Laden credited the October 1999 crash of EgyptAir Flight 990. Co-pilot Gameel Al-Batouti deliberately downed the plane, killing more than 200 passengers. Bin Laden wrote that watching this unfold is "how the idea of 9/11 was conceived and developed in my head," and said only Mohammed Atef and Abu al-Khair knew of his thinking at the time. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, later identified as the operation's architect, is never mentioned in bin Laden's own account of the idea's origin.
QWhich Los Angeles skyscraper was originally on al-Qaeda's target list but got dropped?
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's original 1996 pitch to bin Laden included the Library Tower in Los Angeles, now known as the U.S. Bank Tower, among the buildings hijacked planes could crash into. Bin Laden rejected that early version of the plan for being too elaborate. Two of the hijackers meant to serve as pilots, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, arrived in San Diego in January 2000 and began flying lessons but performed so poorly that they were reassigned as secondary "muscle" hijackers instead, a demotion that changed who ended up at the controls on the day of the attacks.
