9/11: One Day That Changed the World

In the 2020s, getting through airport security takes elaborate planning. Your tiny liquids have to be in the right bag. You have to make sure your shoes or belt or jewelry or metal hip don't set off the security alarm. And say bye-bye to the souvenir hot sauce or honey you forgot was more than 3.4 ounces. But it wasn't always this way. The precise moment air travel and so much else changed forever was 8.46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, when a hijacked American Airlines flight crashed into the north tower of the iconic World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. For 17 more minutes, it seemed like a terrible accident. Then, a United Airlines flight crashed into the south tower. It would collapse at 9.59 a.m., followed by the north tower at 10.28 a.m. Throughout the rest of the day, fire and debris rained down on the streets and on other buildings. Hours later, at 5.20 p.m., the nearby World Trade Center Building 7 also collapsed. And the day's destruction wasn't limited to New York. Two other planes had also been hijacked. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9.37 a.m., just outside of Washington, D.C. And the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 attempted to overtake their hijackers by storming the plane's cockpit, crashing the plane in an empty field in Pennsylvania at 10.02 a.m. Every person on each of those planes died instantly. They were among the nearly 3,000 people who died that day. It was the deadliest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil. In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the U.S. was reeling and full of questions. Who was responsible and why? Pretty quickly, though, the U.S. identified the terrorist organization al-Qaeda as responsible for the attack. Al-Qaeda is an extremist group founded by Osama bin Laden, a militant leader born in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was a fundamentalist Sunni Muslim who disliked the U.S. because of their support for the corrupt government controlling Saudi Arabia, friendship with Israel, and general involvement in Islamic countries. Using Afghanistan as a base for al-Qaeda, bin Laden eventually declared a against the U.S. in 1996, five years before the 9-11 attacks. The group carried out a series of smaller attacks, but when the U.S. government didn't respond, they planned a larger event that would finally capture U.S. attention and force it out of the Middle East for good. But as often happens with huge political events, some people became suspicious of the U.S. government as well. 9-11 led to a boom of conspiracy theories, with a whopping 42% of adults in the U.S. believing their government knew more about what happened that day than they were letting on, according to a survey conducted in 2006. Like, some people argued that then-U.S. President George W. Bush and his government were responsible for the World Trade Center's collapse through a Other theories were more moderate, that the government knew something was going to go down and chose not to act on that information, which would explain why the hijacked planes weren't intercepted by the U.S. military. Those conspiracies lie in some truths, like how there were definitely intelligence failures on the part of the U.S. government when it came to reacting to bin Laden's threats leading up to the attack. And the U.S. did have a lot of interest in the Middle East, and an attack on U.S. soil would be the perfect excuse to invade. The 9-11 attacks also made Bush, briefly, really popular. His approval ratings shot up from 51% to a whopping 90% following the tragedy. But there's plenty of evidence on the other side, too. Experts with the National Institute of Standards and Technology analyzed the attacks and concluded that the collapse of the Twin Towers was caused by exactly what it looked like, a combination of impact from aircraft and widespread fires afterward. And while U.S. intelligence agencies did fail to take action, there's no credible evidence that anyone in the U.S. government was directly involved in the attacks. What isn't a conspiracy, though, is that 9-11 set off a chain of events with impacts all over the world. The most immediate result of 9-11 was the War on Terror, a U.S. military campaign that lasted around 20 years. In 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda was based. Two years later, the U.S. also invaded Iraq, but for reasons that were a bit murkier. The Bush administration cited claims like the government's ties to al-Qaeda and their possession of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, both of which turned out to be false. But the U.S. wasn't alone in these wars. Plenty of other countries joined the fight. In response to the attacks in the U.S., the United Nations Security Council immediately passed Resolution 1368, which condemned the tragedy and acknowledged the threat it posed to international security and peace. And when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, they did so with major backing from the United Kingdom, along with support from countries like Australia, Canada, France, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, and Germany. The U.K. was also a major backer in the later Iraq invasion, cementing a tight partnership with the U.S., along with a whole coalition of other countries, with the U.K., Poland, and Australia sending troops directly. But all that conflict came at a massive cost. Over 7,000 U.S. troops alone died during the war, and it cost the U.S. around $8 trillion. Even more staggering was the loss of Middle Eastern lives. For many complicated reasons, many Iraqis and Afghans chose to support the U.S. military during these conflicts, and tens of thousands died fighting alongside U.S. soldiers. And approximately 432,000 civilians are believed to have been killed as a direct consequence of the war, with even more dying from indirect causes like famine and disease. Meanwhile, a lot was happening within U.S. borders too, like the rise of the U.S. surveillance state, which basically means the government started to really closely monitor its civilians on every level. In response to 9-11, the government quickly created the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, those people that oversee things like the slog of airport security. In 2002, they expanded their reach by creating the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, a brand new federal arm meant to generally ensure public safety by preventing future attacks like 9-11. And in 2003, DHS merged two separate departments, the U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, to create Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. Lawmakers also turned to legislation in the wake of 9-11. The most high-profile law during this era was the Patriot Act, which greatly expanded the government's ability to spy on everyday people in the name of keeping the nation safe. It gave the government the right to access a lot of private information like phone calls, text, emails, GPS data, and even cell phone records anytime they deemed someone or something suspicious. But according to the American Civil Liberties Union, this crackdown was pretty ineffective. It didn't actually make people feel safer, but it did put certain people at risk, which brings us to another huge consequence. In the wake of 9-11, U.S. leaders pushed nationalism, or a sense of national superiority, often at the expense of anyone else. Although the plane hijackers were religious fundamentalists, their Muslim identity led many U.S. lawmakers and other officials to escalate Islamophobia, or prejudice toward anyone associated with Islam, and targeted them through policies and laws like the Patriot Act. That rhetoric from the government was powerful and heightened existing xenophobia. Americans all over the country turned on their neighbors, leading to a massive spike in hate crimes and discrimination against anyone they felt didn't look how they thought Americans should, especially Muslims. Even 15 years later, hate crimes against Muslims were five times higher in the U.S. than they were before 9-11. All of these measures were supposed to help prevent future attacks, but 9-11 also shifted how extremists worked. New transnational terror groups like ISIS also formed in retaliation to the war on terror, using different tactics, like online recruitment, to spread their message and gain members. All of this points to a key takeaway. Even if they happen at a specific time in a specific place, major historical events don't happen in a vacuum. So while the common refrain from 9-11 is never forget, urging us to remember the lives lost that morning, it's really important to also remember all of the other world-changing results of the day. The morning of September 11, 2001 changed our whole world in ways that are still playing out right now.