11 Sept 2001 Jahr - Al Qaeda terrorists attack World Trade Center and Pentagon

Beschreibung:

Al Qaeda: A network of radical Islamic terrorists organized by Osama bin Laden, who issued a call for holy war against Americans and their allies. Members of Al Qaeda were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

USA PATRIOT ACT:As a candidate in 2000, George W. Bush had said little about foreign policy — and he had not needed to. With the Cold War over and few immediate threats to American power, he and many others assumed his administration would rise or fail based on his domestic program — primarily a large promised tax cut. But a sunny September morning nine months into his presidency changed everything. On that morning, September 11, 2001, a hijacked commercial airliner crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Seventeen minutes later, a second airliner struck the north tower. Millions of Americans, and many more people worldwide, watched live on television and the Internet as the twin 110-story skyscrapers burned and then collapsed. Simultaneously, a third plane was flown into the Pentagon, and a fourth hijacked plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania. All told, almost 3,000 people died, with another 6,000 injured, over the course of a few hours. Before the day was over, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had determined that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.

The 9/11 attacks were themselves products of globalization. Of the nineteen hijackers, fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Egypt, and one was from Lebanon. Many had trained in Afghanistan, in guerrilla warfare camps operated by Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda’s leader. Four had gone to flight school in the United States. Several had lived and studied in Germany. They communicated with one another and with planners in Afghanistan through cell phones and electronic messages. A stateless Islamic guerilla organization inflicting major damage on the United States had demonstrated that global political reality had changed. The simple Cold War duality — communism versus capitalism — had long obscured regional, ethnic, and religious conflict. Absent the superpower rivalry, those conflicts moved toward the center of the world stage.

A photo shows a crash at the World Trade Center building; black smoke comes out of the building.
September 11, 2001

Photographers at the scene after a plane crashed into the north tower of New York City’s World Trade Center on September 11 found themselves recording a defining moment in the nation’s history. When a second airliner approached and then slammed into the building’s south tower at 9:03 a.m., the nation knew this was no accident. The United States was under attack. Of the nearly 3,000 people killed on that day, 2,753 died at the World Trade Center.

In the wake of Al Qaeda’s stunning attacks, Bush found himself at the head of a wounded, and angry, nation. An outburst of patriotism swept the country in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and Bush soon proclaimed a “war on terror.” Al Qaeda was the first and clearest target of that new conflict. Al Qaeda had long operated out of Afghanistan, harbored by the fundamentalist Taliban regime. In October 2001, less than a month after the hijackers struck, American planes and anti-Taliban Afghani ground troops launched a massive campaign against the regime. By early 2002, this lethal combination had ousted the Taliban, destroyed Al Qaeda’s training camps, and killed or captured many of its operatives. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden retreated to a mountain hideout, but U.S. forces failed to press the attack, and the terrorist planner escaped over the border into Pakistan. The hunt for the elusive bin Laden would continue for nearly ten years.

No post–Cold War developments proved more challenging to the United States than those in the Middle East. Muslim nations there had a long list of grievances against the West: in particular, the exploitation of the region by European imperial powers following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and European nations’ support for the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948. Subsequent events implicated the United States. In Iran, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had backed the overthrow of a democratically elected government in 1953, and the United States gave twenty-five years of support to the Iranian shah. America’s support for Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War and its near-unconditional backing of Israel in the 1980s were especially galling to Muslims. Across the region, both religious and secular moderates complained about these injustices, but many also had political and economic ties to the West that constrained their criticism.

This situation left an opening for radical Islamic fundamentalists to build a movement based on opposition to Western imperialism and consumer culture. These groups interpreted the American military presence in Saudi Arabia — about 4,000 Air Force personnel — as colonial ambition reborn. Clinton had inherited from President George H. W. Bush a defeated Iraq and the troops stationed in Saudi Arabia after the war. Clinton also enforced a UN-sanctioned embargo on trade with Iraq, a policy designed to constrain Saddam Hussein’s military but the primary effect of which was to deny crucial food and goods to the civilian population, causing widespread suffering. Motivated by resentment of this perceived meddling, Muslim fundamentalists soon began targeting Americans. In 1993, radicals detonated a bomb beneath the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand. Radical Islamic terrorists used truck bombs to blow up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and packed a small boat with explosives to attack the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000, killing 17 sailors.

The Clinton administration knew the attacks on the Cole and the African embassies were the work of Al Qaeda, a network of radical Islamic terrorists organized by the wealthy Saudi exile Osama bin Laden. In February 1998, bin Laden had issued a call for a global struggle — a “Jihad against Jews and Crusaders,” claiming every Muslim had a duty to kill Americans and their allies. After the embassy bombings, Clinton ordered air strikes on Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, where an estimated 15,000 operatives had been trained since 1990. The strikes failed to destroy the growing network of extremists, who were already advancing plans for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

As a candidate in 2000, George W. Bush had said little about foreign policy — and he had not needed to. With the Cold War over and few immediate threats to American power, he and many others assumed his administration would rise or fail based on his domestic program — primarily a large promised tax cut. But a sunny September morning nine months into his presidency changed everything. On that morning, September 11, 2001, a hijacked commercial airliner crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Seventeen minutes later, a second airliner struck the north tower. Millions of Americans, and many more people worldwide, watched live on television and the Internet as the twin 110-story skyscrapers burned and then collapsed. Simultaneously, a third plane was flown into the Pentagon, and a fourth hijacked plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania. All told, almost 3,000 people died, with another 6,000 injured, over the course of a few hours. Before the day was over, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had determined that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.

The 9/11 attacks were themselves products of globalization. Of the nineteen hijackers, fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Egypt, and one was from Lebanon. Many had trained in Afghanistan, in guerrilla warfare camps operated by Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda’s leader. Four had gone to flight school in the United States. Several had lived and studied in Germany. They communicated with one another and with planners in Afghanistan through cell phones and electronic messages. A stateless Islamic guerilla organization inflicting major damage on the United States had demonstrated that global political reality had changed. The simple Cold War duality — communism versus capitalism — had long obscured regional, ethnic, and religious conflict. Absent the superpower rivalry, those conflicts moved toward the center of the world stage.

A photo shows a crash at the World Trade Center building; black smoke comes out of the building.
September 11, 2001

Photographers at the scene after a plane crashed into the north tower of New York City’s World Trade Center on September 11 found themselves recording a defining moment in the nation’s history. When a second airliner approached and then slammed into the building’s south tower at 9:03 a.m., the nation knew this was no accident. The United States was under attack. Of the nearly 3,000 people killed on that day, 2,753 died at the World Trade Center.

In the wake of Al Qaeda’s stunning attacks, Bush found himself at the head of a wounded, and angry, nation. An outburst of patriotism swept the country in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and Bush soon proclaimed a “war on terror.” Al Qaeda was the first and clearest target of that new conflict. Al Qaeda had long operated out of Afghanistan, harbored by the fundamentalist Taliban regime. In October 2001, less than a month after the hijackers struck, American planes and anti-Taliban Afghani ground troops launched a massive campaign against the regime. By early 2002, this lethal combination had ousted the Taliban, destroyed Al Qaeda’s training camps, and killed or captured many of its operatives. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden retreated to a mountain hideout, but U.S. forces failed to press the attack, and the terrorist planner escaped over the border into Pakistan. The hunt for the elusive bin Laden would continue for nearly ten years.


The “war on terror,” as defined by the Bush administration in response to 9/11, was not confined by borders — including those of the United States. The president deemed terrorism too serious a threat for ordinary law enforcement means, and sought a wartime footing for the government’s domestic surveillance. With little debate, in 2001 Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, granting the government sweeping authority to monitor citizens and apprehend suspected terrorists.

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