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A folder of items I've collected.

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A list of what we DID NOT HAVE in 2001.

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I wrote about my memories of 9/11/01 a couple of years ago, on the eighth anniversary of the attacks. They involve me sitting at my desk at PC World in Boston and learning of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center when my colleague Denny Arar IMd me from San Francisco. (We both assumed it was an errant small-plane pilot, and both got e-mails from the organizers of a wireless conference scheduled to be held at Windows on the World reassuring us that the location would be moved if necessary.)

I remember trying to follow the news on the Web and discovering that major news sites were unusable, and then turning on the TV and attempting, sort of, to work as the day progressed. (By the evening, when my coworker Tom Spring and I had a beer and sat there in stunned disbelief, it felt like Tom, me, and the bartender were the last three people out and about in downtown Boston.)

I'll never forget seeing a list of people who went down on United Flight 93 scroll by on CNN and seeing my friend Mark Bingham on it. (About half an hour ago, I learned there are conspiracy theorists who believe that Mark wasn't on Flight 93 and may not have existed in the first place-which is a damned odd thing to hear about someone you knew, liked, and admired.)

And strangely, I associate the launch of Windows XP with 9/11-okay, maybe it's not that strange. It was the first time I went to New York after the attacks, Rudy Giuliani was at Microsoft's event-and his unannounced presence remains the most electrifying moment I've witnessed in person as a technology journalist.

When I left the city, it was on the first plane I took since the attacks-which happened to be a United flight from Newark to San Francisco, the same route as Flight 93.

As I thought about this tenth anniversary-and particularly about things to say that would be relevant on this site-I was struck by how much the world of personal technology has changed. It all happened little by little, but a remarkable percentage of the things we care about today didn't exist yet. When the attacks happened, nobody took photos of the scene using camera phones, because camera phones barely existed. We didn't grieve on Facebook, or depend on Twitter for breaking news. I remember being cheered up by this viral video, but I know I didn't watch it on YouTube the first time around.

(In fact, 2001 was so long ago that some things that didn't exist then have since been created, got important, and then faded away, such as the Palm Treo, MySpace, and the Flip camcorder.)

Just off the top of my head, here's some of the stuff that didn't exist in September 2001 which I can barely remember life without:

3G wireless (October 2001)

iPod (October 2001)

Windows XP (October 2001)

Xbox (November 2001)

Vizio TVs (2002)

WordPress (2003)

iTunes Music Store (2003)

Skype (2003)

Facebook (2004)

Lenovo ThinkPads (2004)

Firefox (2004)

Gmail (2004)

TechCrunch (2005)

Google Maps (2005)

Intel Macs (2005)

LOLCats (2006)

Twitter (2006)

Wii (2006)

Intel Core Processors (2006)

Hulu (2007)

iPhone (2007)

Netbooks (2007)

Rickrolling (2007)

Chrome (2008)

iPhone App Store (2008)

Groupon (2008)

Android (2008)

Angry Birds (2009)

FourSquare (2009)

Bing (2009)

iPad (2010)

I'm sure I've forgotten any number of biggies-feel free to point them out.

And here are some tidbits on specific tech topics:

Web Sites

Here are Compete.com's rankings for the top sites of August 2001 (the closest data I could get to 9/11) and July 2011 (its most recent findings). What hasn't changed? Yahoo and several Microsoft sites do well. But Google wasn't even in the top ten in 2001 (it was #12). Facebook didn't exist (in fact, Mark Zuckerberg was in high school). YouTube didn't exist. Wikipedia existed, but just barely (I doubt that I'd heard of it yet). And Netpets, Goto.com, Go.com, Excite, and GeoCities were all big deals.

Browsers

I'm not sure if anyone who was measuring browser market share in 2001 is still doing so in 2011. But things have changed so dramatically that it's not irresponsible to compare two different surveys.

On October 25th, 2001, WebSideStory said that Microsoft's Internet Explorer had 89.03 percent of the market. Netscape had 10.47 percent. Nothing else even registered.

For August, 2011, NetApplications says that IE has 51.8 percent of the market. Firefox has 21.1 percent. Chrome has 14.5 percent. Safari has 7.7 percent. Opera has 2.9 percent. And 6.4 percent of Web surfing is done with mobile devices, a concept that barely existed in 2001.

Consumer Electronics

I don't have any good comparative data for 2001 vs. 2011. But here are the fastest-selling consumer-electronics categories of the first half of 2001, as reported by NPD-some of which, such as home CD recorders, have since fallen completely by the wayside.

1. Digital Color Television 230.0%
2. Personal Video Recorder (PVR) 198.5%
3. Digital Video Disc (DVD) 93.5%
4. Mobile Multimedia 71.9%
5. Digital Cameras 65.5%
6. Digital Music Players 58.5%
7. Cellular Accessories 49.8%
8. Home Theater System Packages 48.9%
9. Home CD Recorders 47.2%
10. Digital Camcorders 43.3%

I'd like to do some more comparisons, but it's tough to find data for both 2001 and 2011 that's consistent enough to be useful. 2001 was, after all, a long time ago-even though it doesn't feel that way, especially today.

Oh, and how am I marking the anniversary? I'm pausing to remember the people who were lost ten years ago and their loved ones, as well as the people who came to the rescue that day. But I'm also trying to go about my life and enjoy my freedoms-which in my case include getting on a plane this morning to go to Anaheim so I can attend the Microsoft conference at which it plans to lift the veil on Windows 8, the great-grandchild of Windows XP. (Among the other attendees: Denny Arar, who told me about the first attack.)

I didn't mean to spend 9/11/11 this way-in fact, I didn't realize what I was doing when I bought my plane ticket-but in a peculiar way, it feels right.

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September 2001 Was a Long Time Ago in the World of Technology

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I wrote about my memories of 9/11/01 a couple of years ago, on the eighth anniversary of the attacks. They involve me sitting at my desk at PC World in Boston and learning of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center when my colleague Denny Arar IMd me from San Francisco.

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Timelines for the day of 9/11 and the cleanup afterward

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Timelines for the day of 9/11 and the cleanup afterward

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September 11 Attack Timeline. On September 11, 2001, nineteen al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial U.S. jetliners, deliberately crashing two of the planes into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center and a third plane into the Pentagon. After learning of the other attacks, passe…

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Health Problems Affecting People from the debris

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Health Problems Affecting People from the debris

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The death toll among those sickened by the toxic dust and ash of Ground Zero will within as little as five years exceed the number of people killed on the day of the 9/11 attacks, experts say.

As those who lost loved ones at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and on Flight 93 gather for Sunday's 15th anniversary of the terror attacks that killed almost 3,000 people, a post-9/11 health crisis is growing.

At least 1,000 people - and probably many more - have died often lingering, painful deaths resulting from illnesses related to their exposure to debris that spread from the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers in downtown Manhattan. More than 37,000 are officially recognised as sick.

Calls are growing for a new monument to be added to the World Trade Center site, to pay tribute to those who have died or become sick since 9/11 because of toxic exposure.

"Within the next five years we will be at the point where more people have died from World Trade Center-related illnesses than died from the immediate impact of the attacks," said Dr Jim Melius, a doctor at the New York State Laborers Union who also advises the White House on worker health, chairs the steering committee overseeing the government health program for 9/11 responders, and is a member of the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch.

"There are a lot of people who are very, very ill with lung disease who will see at least 10 years taken from their normal life span," he said, "and we are already seeing many more premature deaths occurring, and among younger people, from the cancers. There is going to be a new generation of widows and widowers."

In 2001, government officials, most prominently the then head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Christine Todd Whitman, assured those in lower Manhattan in the days after the attacks that the air was safe.

In an interview with the Guardian this weekend, Whitman said for the first time that in hindsight she had been mistaken. She apologised to those affected by the toxic debris.

After al-Qaida terrorists flew hijacked passenger jets into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center, the towers collapsed. Clouds of fumes and debris billowed out over New York City. Of 2,977 people killed in the attacks, 2,753 died at the World Trade Center.

The debris left by the twin towers, the main concentration of which became known as "the pile", contained asbestos, lead, glass, heavy metals, concrete, poisonous gases, oil and other dangerous substances that mixed with exploding jet fuel, the contents of hundreds of offices and dead bodies to fill the air and cover the area around the site.

"It was disgusting," said Merita Zejnuni, 52, a cleaner who was working a few blocks from Ground Zero in the offices of banking giant Goldman Sachs on the morning of 9/11. "It coated your mouth and your throat. I was covered in it - I looked like a ghost."

Zejnuni developed a violent, chronic cough and was recently found to have breast cancer. This weekend, speaking to the Guardian, she gave her first interview. Her lawyer, Troy Rosasco, said Zejnuni only found out last month she could apply for compensation. Rosasco believes thousands of other people are sick or dying as a result of exposure around Ground Zero, away from the public eye.

"There is a general consensus that people down there got huge exposure," he said, "but many don't even know why they are sick."

Last month, researchers at Stony Brook University announced that cognitive impairment, a leading risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, was being detected among first responders who went to Ground Zero on and around 9/11.

"That's scary news," said Rosasco. "I have probably gotten 50 calls in the last two days from people who are really frightened about that."

In 2010, after years of political battle, Congress passed the $4bn Zadroga Act - named for a police captain who worked on rescue efforts at Ground Zero and died in 2006 after developing breathing problems - to cover the health costs of those poisoned by the debris and fumes of 9/11. Late last year, it agreed to extend the act's provisions for 75 years. There is a separate, official Victim Compensation Fund.

In 2011, the federal World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP) was established. It has 75,000 registered members, 87% of whom worked on rescue, recovery and clean-up. The rest are New York residents or workers. A total of 1,140 registered members have died since the program was created in 2011, WTCHP spokeswoman Christy Spring said.

"Because of the way the legislation was written," she said, "there is an understanding that there is a link between the exposure and the illnesses people are suffering from."

Causes of death are not recorded by the WTCHP. There is no central record for how many people died between 2001 and 2011 from illnesses linked to 9/11 fumes and debris, Spring said, nor any way of knowing exactly how many other people have died without any record of their illnesses having been caused by exposure near Ground Zero.

Melius said: "We know a significant number of people died before the WTCHP was set up; it's likely to be in the hundreds. There are also probably hundreds of people outside the program who are sick and may have died."

The WTCHP has certified 37,000 people as suffering from serious respiratory or digestive illnesses, cancer, or a combination. Most of those registered are from New York City and 82% are male.

Spring said: "There are health conditions covered in the program that will take years to develop and we don't think the cancers we are seeing now is the end of it. It's such an unprecedented disaster. It's mind-boggling to think not just about the day but about the ripple effect on people's health."

The Manhattan borough president, Gale Brewer, told the Guardian she had "heard very high numbers" of people were at risk of dying from exposure to World Trade Center-related toxins.

"Many more than 3,000 or 4,000," she said. "It's very sad. I believe it will eclipse the number who died on 9/11 itself, because so many people were on the pile, or came to help, and so many people worked in the area. We are going to be dealing with this for years and years."

In 2014, Brewer wrote to New York governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey governor Chris Christie, asking them to approve a plan to build a monument to those sickened and killed since 9/11, to be installed near where the towers stood.

The area now hosts the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and is dominated by monuments built where each tower stood and engraved with the names of those who died in the atrocity.

Brewer is lobbying for a competition to design a separate monument for those who have been sickened. It will not have names, because of lack of clarity about cause of death in all cases and because it will also be designed to offer solace to those still living but sick, she said.

"It needs to be universal," she said.

She has had no formal response from either Christie or Cuomo. But when she collared Cuomo at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia this summer, she said, he told her: "Sounds good."

Brewer is hopeful of adding the monument before the 16th anniversary of 9/11.

Jerrold Nadler, the US congressman whose district includes the World Trade Center site, said of the post-9/11 health crisis: "It's ghastly, it's horrible, the people will die early and I feel very frustrated because it was preventable."

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9/11 health crisis: death toll from illness nears number killed on day of attacks

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The death toll among those sickened by the toxic dust and ash of Ground Zero will within as little as five years exceed the number of people killed on the day of the 9/11 attacks, experts say.

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A lot of hyperlinks in this article to other information

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I remember 9/11 just as if were yesterday. I remember watching the TV screen in complete shock that something so horrific was happening to my beloved country. The weeks that followed, I spent hours watching different news broadcasts trying to understand the why's and how's this attack was possible. Looking back, 14 years ago, it still seems like it was yesterday. Below are some very interesting facts about that tragic day that most people didn't know:
2. On any given workday, up to 50,000 employees worked in the WTC twin towers, and an additional 40,000 passed through the complex. 11. The top four search topics on Google during the week of 9/11, in descending order, were for: Nostradamus, CNN, The World Trade Center, and Osama bin Laden. 10. While video accounts of the WTC attack aired immediately, no video footage of the Pentagon attack was publicly released until 2006. 9. Respiratory problems like asthma and lung inflammation developed at abnormal rates for those in and around the World Trade Center during and after the attacks. 8. 18 people were rescued alive from the rubble of the World Trade Center site. 7. 9/11 was the single largest loss of life from a foreign attack on American soil. 6. In 2001, New York City fire evacuation procedures only required mandatory evacuations for floors immediately surrounding a fire. After the plane struck Building 1 of the WTC, Building 2 employees were initially told to stay in the building. 5. The rescue and recovery clean-up of the 1.8 million tons of wreckage from the World Trade Center site took 9 months. 4. It took firefighters 100 days to extinguish all the fires ignited by the attacks in New York. 1. Unfortunately 9/11 was not the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. A bombing in February of 1993 killed six people.
3. One of the unsung heroes of 9/11 was a guide dog named Roselle, a yellow Labrador who led her blind owner, Michael Hingson, down 78 stories of the North Tower and to the home of a friend.

Click The Button Below For More September 11th Facts

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Most Can Remember 9/11, But Very Few Know About These 22 Facts... Until Now.

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I remember 9/11 just as if were yesterday. I remember watching the TV screen in complete shock that something so horrific was happening to my beloved country. The weeks that followed, I spent hours watching different news broadcasts trying to understand the why's and how's this attack was possible.

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I remember 9/11 just as if were yesterday. I remember watching the TV screen in complete shock that something so horrific was happening to my beloved country. The weeks that followed, I spent hours watching different news broadcasts trying to understand the why's and how's this attack was possible. Looking back, 14 years ago, it still seems like it was yesterday. Below are some very interesting facts about that tragic day that most people didn't know:
2. On any given workday, up to 50,000 employees worked in the WTC twin towers, and an additional 40,000 passed through the complex. 11. The top four search topics on Google during the week of 9/11, in descending order, were for: Nostradamus, CNN, The World Trade Center, and Osama bin Laden. 10. While video accounts of the WTC attack aired immediately, no video footage of the Pentagon attack was publicly released until 2006. 9. Respiratory problems like asthma and lung inflammation developed at abnormal rates for those in and around the World Trade Center during and after the attacks. 8. 18 people were rescued alive from the rubble of the World Trade Center site. 7. 9/11 was the single largest loss of life from a foreign attack on American soil. 6. In 2001, New York City fire evacuation procedures only required mandatory evacuations for floors immediately surrounding a fire. After the plane struck Building 1 of the WTC, Building 2 employees were initially told to stay in the building. 5. The rescue and recovery clean-up of the 1.8 million tons of wreckage from the World Trade Center site took 9 months. 4. It took firefighters 100 days to extinguish all the fires ignited by the attacks in New York. 1. Unfortunately 9/11 was not the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. A bombing in February of 1993 killed six people.
3. One of the unsung heroes of 9/11 was a guide dog named Roselle, a yellow Labrador who led her blind owner, Michael Hingson, down 78 stories of the North Tower and to the home of a friend.

Click The Button Below For More September 11th Facts

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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Most Can Remember 9/11, But Very Few Know About These 22 Facts... Until Now.

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I remember 9/11 just as if were yesterday. I remember watching the TV screen in complete shock that something so horrific was happening to my beloved country. The weeks that followed, I spent hours watching different news broadcasts trying to understand the why's and how's this attack was possible.

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the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania that did not reach its target

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Contents

1. 9/11 Attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

2. Flight 93 Comes Under Attack

3. Flight 93's Passengers Fight Back

4. Flight 93: The Shanksville Crash Site

5. Remembering Flight 93

6. List of Crew and Passengers of Flight 93

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history took place when four commercial airliners were hijacked by members of the Islamic extremist group al Qaeda.

The first two planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were flown into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, hit the western side of the Pentagon, just outside Washington, D.C. The fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed down in a field in rural Pennsylvania, never reaching its intended target because its crew and passengers fought back against the terrorists. Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives during the 9/11 attacks, a number that would almost certainly have been significantly higher if not for the actions of those aboard Flight 93.
WATCH: 9/11: The Final Minutes of Flight 93 on HISTORY Vault
9/11 Attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, an American Airlines Boeing 767 loaded with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City, instantly killing hundreds of people and trapping many more on the building's higher floors. Eighteen minutes later, a second Boeing 767 appeared out of the sky, turned sharply toward the World Trade Center and sliced into the south tower.

As millions watched the events unfolding in New York in horror, American Airlines Flight 77 circled over downtown Washington, D.C. and slammed into the west side of the Pentagon military headquarters at 9:45 a.m. Less than 15 minutes after the terrorists struck the nerve center of the U.S. military, the situation in New York took a catastrophic turn for the worse when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed in a massive cloud of dust and smoke. At 10:30 a.m. the north tower also gave way. Faced with the knowledge that the United States was under attack, the nation's air traffic controllers began a frantic attempt to wrest back control of America's skies.

Flight 93 Comes Under Attack

United Airlines Flight 93, a regularly scheduled early-morning nonstop flight from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco, California, departed at 8:42 a.m., just minutes before the first hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center. The flight's takeoff had been delayed for nearly 45 minutes due to air traffic at Newark International Airport.

The plane carried seven crew-members and 33 passengers, less than half its maximum capacity. Also on the flight were four hijackers who had successfully boarded the plane with knives and box cutters. The plane's late departure had disrupted the terrorists' timeline for launching their attack; unlike the hijackers on the other three planes, they did not attempt to gain control of the aircraft until nearly 40 minutes into the flight. Meanwhile, Ed Ballinger, a flight dispatcher for United Airlines, was taking steps to warn flights of possible cockpit intrusions.

At 9:19 a.m. Ballinger informed pilots of the attacks on the World Trade Center; Flight 93 received his transmission at 9:23 a.m.. Captain Jason Dahl responded at 9:26 a.m. to request clarification. At roughly 9:28 a.m. the terrorists successfully infiltrated the plane's cockpit, and air traffic controllers heard what they believed to be two mayday calls amid sounds of a struggle. At 9:32 a.m. a hijacker, later identified as Ziad Jarrah, a trained pilot, was heard over the flight data recorder, directing the passengers to sit down and stating that there was a bomb aboard the plane. The flight data recorder also shows that Jarrah reset the autopilot, turning the plane around to head back east.

Flight 93's Passengers Fight Back

Huddled in the back of the plane, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 made a series of calls on their cell phones and the in-flight Airfones, informing family members and officials on the ground of the plane's hijacking. When they learned the fate of the three other hijacked flights in New York City and Washington, D.C., the passengers realized that their plane was involved in a larger terrorist plot and would likely be used to carry out further attacks on U.S. soil.

After a brief discussion, a vote was taken and the passengers decided to fight back against their hijackers, informing several people on the ground of their plans. One of the passengers, Thomas Burnett Jr., told his wife over the phone, "I know we're all going to die. There's three of us who are going to do something about it. I love you, honey." Another passenger, Todd Beamer, was heard over an open line saying, "Are you guys ready? Let's roll." Sandy Bradshaw, a flight attendant, called her husband and explained that she had slipped into a galley and was filling pitchers with boiling water. Her last words to him were: "Everyone's running to first class. I've got to go. Bye."

At 9:57 a.m. the passengers and crew members aboard Flight 93 began their counterattack, as recorded by the cockpit voice recorder. In response, the hijacker piloting the plane began to roll the aircraft, pitching it up and down to throw the charging passengers off balance. Worried that the passengers would soon break through to the cockpit, the hijackers made the decision to crash the plane before reaching their final destination. At 10:02 a.m. a voice was recorded saying, "Yes, put it in it, and pull it down." The airplane then rolled onto its back and plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour.

Flight 93's intended target is not definitively known, but it is believed that the hijackers were targeting the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland or several nuclear power plants along the Eastern seaboard. The passengers who fought back are credited with averting more deaths on 9/11.
READ MORE: How United Flight 93 Passengers Fought Back on 9/11
Flight 93: The Shanksville Crash Site

The fireball from the plane, which was carrying 7,000 gallons of fuel, scorched hundreds of acres of earth and set the surrounding trees ablaze for hours. The crash site in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, near the town of Shansksville, was littered with the wreckage from the fragmented plane, with a debris field scattered nearly eight miles away from the initial point of impact.

Despite the devastation, investigators were able to recover both the plane's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, or black box, which was found burrowed more than 25 feet below ground. Though few human remains were recovered at the site, medical examiners were eventually able to positively identify the 33 passengers, seven crew-members and four hijackers aboard Flight 93. The youngest passenger of Flight 93 was 20-year-old Deora Frances Bodley.
READ MORE: On 9/11, Heather Penney Tried to Bring Down Flight 93 in a Kamikaze Mission
Remembering Flight 93

In the weeks following the September 11 attacks, temporary memorials to the victims of United Flight 93 were erected at the Pennsylvania crash site and elsewhere, and in 2002 Congress established the Flight 93 National Memorial to create a permanent tribute to the plane's passengers and crew. The first phase of the memorial was completed in time for the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in September 2011.

Administered by the National Park Service and encompassing more than 2,220 acres, the memorial includes a visitor center; walking paths including the 40 Memorial Groves; and The Tower of Voices, a 93-foot tower with a wind chime representing each person who perished on board. Visitors can walk through Memorial Plaza to the Wall of Names, where the names of every passenger of Flight 93 are recorded, before proceeding to the crash site itself, known as "Sacred Ground," the final resting place of the heroes of Flight 93.

List of Crew and Passengers of Flight 93

Crew:

Captain Jason M. Dahl
First Officer LeRoy Homer
Lorraine G. Bay
Sandy Waugh Bradshaw
Wanda Anita Green
CeeCee Ross Lyles
Deborah Jacobs Welsh

Passengers:

Christian Adams
Todd M. Beamer
Alan Anthony Beaven
Mark Bingham
Deora Frances Bodley
Marion R. Britton
Thomas E. Burnett, Jr.
William Joseph Cashman
Georgine Rose Corrigan
Patricia Cushing
Joseph DeLuca
Patrick Joseph Driscoll
Edward Porter Felt
Jane C. Folger
Colleen L. Fraser
Andrew (Sonny) Garcia
Jeremy Logan Glick
Kristin Osterholm White Gould
Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas
Donald Freeman Greene
Linda Gronlund
Richard J. Guadagno
Toshiya Kuge
Hilda Marcin
Waleska Martinez
Nicole Carol Miller
Louis J. Nacke II
Donald Arthur Peterson
Jean Hoadley Peterson
Mark David Rothenberg
Christine Ann Snyder
John Talignani
Honor Elizabeth Wainio

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United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked by members of the Islamic extremist group al-Qaida on September 11, 2001. It crashed down in a field in rural Pennsylvania, never reaching its intended target because its crew and passengers fought back against the terrorists.

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Can we REALLY know what happened on Flight 93?

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Can we REALLY know what happened on Flight 93?

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The fate of United Airlines Flight 93, the last of the four hijacked planes to go down in the United States on 11 September, holds no mystery for Lee Purbaugh. He saw what happened with his own eyes. He was the only person present in the field where, at 10.06am, the aircraft hit the ground.

"There was an incredibly loud rumbling sound and there it was, right there, right above my head - maybe 50ft up," says Purbaugh, who works at a scrapyard overlooking the crash site. "It was only a split second but it looked like it was moving in slow motion, like it took forever. I saw it rock from side to side then, suddenly, it dipped and dived, nose first, with a huge explosion, into the ground. I knew immediately that no one could possibly have survived."

Apart from, here and there, a finger, a toe or a tooth, all that remained of the 44 souls aboard, churned into the soil or hanging from the branches of nearby trees, were small pieces of tissue and bone. The plane was also pulverised, reduced to tiny fragments of metal. Wally Miller, the local coroner in what used to be a forgotten corner of rural Pennsylvania, was the man charged by law with collecting the human remains and establishing the causes of death. "I issued the death certificates," says Miller, who is also the local undertaker. "I put down 'murdered' for the 40 passengers and crew; 'suicide' for the four terrorists."

But Miller, who worked closely with the FBI during the 13 days that they investigated the crash site, admits that, in the end, he cannot prove what happened; he can only infer it. Neither he nor anybody else knows what exactly caused Flight 93 to go down and, as Miller puts it, "bring the world's troubles crashing down on our doorstep". Or, if there are people who do know, they are not telling.

The shortage of available facts did not prevent the creation of an instant legend - a legend that the US government and the US media were pleased to propagate, and that the American public have been eager, for the most part, to accept as fact. The legend goes like this: the passengers on the hijacked United flight, alerted on their mobile phones to the news of the other three hijacked planes, decide that if they are not going to save themselves at least they will do the patriotic thing and spare the lives of those who are the terrorists' intended targets; so they charge down the aisle, storm the cockpit, where a terrorist is at the controls, and, in the ensuing struggle, force the plane down.

President George Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, the head of the FBI Robert Mueller, and numerous other senior government officials who have saluted the "heroes" of Flight 93, have consistently, and repeatedly, advanced this version of events. So have the big national newspapers and all the big national television stations. The New York Times, normally a model of legalistic precision, published this extraordinarily woolly sentence on 22 September upon learning, from unnamed "official" sources, that the plane's cockpit voice-recorder had registered "a desperate and wild struggle" aboard. "And while it [the recorder] did not provide a clear or complete picture," The New York Times read, "it seemed certain that there was a chaotic confrontation that apparently led to the crash of the jet."

Vanity Fair magazine, going on little more information than was available to The New York Times, went ahead and published a highly detailed story on Flight 93, which, the magazine said, "may be remembered as one of the greatest tales of heroism ever told". Vanity Fair did recognise, though, that any suggestions as to what actually happened to force the plane down had to be, by necessity, "pure conjecture".

Two months later, Newsweek got hold of what it was told was a partial transcript of the voice-recorder and, upon that basis, narrated the story of "the Heroes of Flight 93" in even more vivid, drum-rolling, Hollywoodesque detail than Vanity Fair had done. The passengers were "citizen soldiers... who rose up, like their forefathers, to defy tyranny", intoned Newsweek. "In daring and dying, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 found victory for us all."

The transcript that Newsweek obtained did indicate that fighting had taken place aboard, curses had been uttered, prayers raised up both to the Muslim and the Christian god. But for all the drama of the story, Newsweek did not draw attention to the fact that, in truth, they were guessing as to how or why the plane had crashed; that they did not know whether the passengers had even made it into the cockpit; that they had no clue what happened during Flight 93's decisive, desperate last eight minutes.

Which is not to assert that the "hero" story is untrue, or even implausible. Maybe the legend does indeed correspond perfectly to the facts. And certainly, based on the records of telephone calls made from the plane, there is no disputing that a number of the passengers did indeed intend to carry out actions of great courage. But what those actions actually turned out to be is not known - or known only to a small group of people with a clear picture of what happened in the skies over Shanksville on the morning of 11 September, people in the US military who tracked the plane's last moments as well as people familiar with, but unwilling to reveal, the full contents of the material gleaned from the cockpit voice- recorder, which was retrieved in perfect working order after the crash.

The absence of official information has led to lively and often well-informed debate in the unofficial medium of the internet (see www.flight93crash.com.) But there are also a number of individuals in the aviation industry convinced that there do exist other plausible interpretations of what actually happened. Because there are, most certainly, a number of important unanswered questions - questions based on evidence, as well as on a manifest absence of candour on the part of the authorities - which the national US media, typically so sceptical and inquisitive, have shown a curious reluctance to ask.

The alternative theories, both of which have been denied by the US military and the FBI, are a) that Flight 93 was brought down by a US government plane; and b) that a bomb went off aboard (passengers had said in phone calls that one of the hijackers had what appeared to be a bomb strapped to him). If doubts remain despite the denials, if conspiracy theories flourish, it is in large part because of the authorities' failure to address head-on questions centring on the following four conundrums.

1. The wide displacement of the plane's debris, one explanation for which might be an explosion of some sort aboard prior to the crash. Letters - Flight 93 was carrying 7,500 pounds of mail to California - and other papers from the plane were found eight miles (13km) away from the scene of the crash. A sector of one engine weighing one ton was found 2,000 yards away. This was the single heaviest piece recovered from the crash, and the biggest, apart from a piece of fuselage the size of a dining-room table. The rest of the plane, consistent with an impact calculated to have occurred at 500mph, disintegrated into pieces no bigger than two inches long. Other remains of the plane were found two miles away near a town called Indian Lake. All of these facts, widely disseminated, were confirmed by the coroner Wally Miller.

2. The location of US Air Force jets, which might or might not have been close enough to fire a missile at the hijacked plane. Live news media reports on the morning of 11 September conflict with a number of official statements issued later. What the government acknowledges is that the first fighters with the mission to intercept took off at 8.52am; that another set of fighters took off from Andrews Air Force base near Washington at 9.35am - precisely the time that Flight 93 turned almost 180 degrees off course towards Washington and the hijacker pilot was heard by air-traffic controllers to say that there was "a bomb aboard". Flight 93, whose menacing trajectory was made known by the broadcast media almost immediately, did not go down for another 31 minutes. Apart from the logical conclusion that at least one Air Force F-16 - 125 miles away in Washington at 9.40am, meaning 10 minutes away from Flight 93 (or less if it flew at supersonic speed) - should have reached the fourth of the "flying bombs" well before 10.06am, there is this evidence from a federal flight controller published a few days later in a newspaper in New Hampshire: that an F-16 had been "in hot pursuit" of the hijacked United jet and "must have seen the whole thing". Also, there was one brief report on CBS television before the crash that two F-16 fighters were tailing Flight 93. Vice-President Dick Cheney acknowledged five days later that President Bush had authorised the Air Force pilots to shoot down hijacked commercial aircraft.

3. One telephone call from the doomed plane whose contents do not entirely tally with the hero legend and which is accordingly omitted in the Independence Day-type dramas favoured by the US media. The Associated Press news service reported on 11 September that eight minutes before the crash, a frantic male passenger called the 911 emergency number. He told the operator, named Glen Cramer, that he had locked himself inside one of the plane's toilets. Cramer told the AP, in a report that was widely broadcast on 11 September, that the passenger had spoken for one minute. "We're being hijacked, we're being hijacked!" the man screamed down his mobile phone. "We confirmed that with him several times," Cramer said, "and we asked him to repeat what he said. He was very distraught. He said he believed the plane was going down. He did hear some sort of an explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane, but he didn't know where. And then we lost contact with him."

According to the information that has been made known, this was the last of the various phone calls made from the aeroplane. No more calls were received from the plane in the eight minutes that remained after the man in the toilet said that he had heard an explosion.

4. Eyewitness accounts of a "mystery plane" that flew low over the Flight 93 crash site shortly after impact. Lee Purbaugh is one of at least half a dozen named individuals who have reported seeing a second plane flying low and in erratic patterns, not much above treetop level, over the crash site within minutes of the United flight crashing. They describe the plane as a small, white jet with rear engines and no discernible markings. Purbaugh, who served three years in the US Navy, said he did not believe it was a military plane. If it indeed was not, one suggestion made in the internet discussion groups is that US Customs uses planes with these characteristics to interdict aerial drug shipments. Either way, the presence of the mystery jet remains a puzzle.

How has the US government and its various agencies responded to doubts raised by the above questions? In the following ways:

1. The paper debris eight miles away, the FBI says, was wafted away by a 10mph wind; the jet-engine part flew 2,000 yards on account of the savage force of the plane's impact with the ground. The FBI conclusion: "Nothing was found that was inconsistent with the plane going into the ground intact." Aviation experts I have contacted are very doubtful about this. One expert expresses astonishment at the notion that the letters and other papers would have remained airborne for almost one hour before falling to earth.

2. The Air Force jets were on their way but failed to make it on time, according to General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Fighters did finally approach Flight 93, he acknowledges, "moments" before it crashed, but did not shoot it down. Which begs the question why they were unable to arrive sooner to intercept an aircraft that clearly had terrorists aboard and that was flying straight for Washington more than one hour after another United Airlines plane had crashed into the second World Trade Centre tower. The report in the New Hampshire newspaper, and the one on CBS, have not been explained, and the air-traffic controllers in Cleveland who tracked the last minutes of Flight 93 on radar have been forbidden by the authorities to speak publicly about what they saw on their screens.

3. Neither the FBI nor anyone else in authority has explained the reported 911 phone call from the plane toilet, even though it appears to be the last of the phone calls made from the plane and even though it conveys the far from insignificant claim that there was an explosion on board. The FBI has confiscated the tape of the conversation and the operator Glen Cramer has received orders not to speak to the media any more.

4. The explanation furnished by the FBI for the mystery plane, whose existence it initially denied, serves less to reassure than to reinforce suspicions that a cover-up of sorts is under way, that the government is manipulating the truth in a manner it considers to be palatable to the broader US public. The FBI has said, on the record, that the plane was a civilian business jet, a Falcon, that had been flying within 20 miles of Flight 93 and was asked by the authorities to descend from 37,000ft to 5,000ft to survey and transmit the co-ordinates of the crash site "for responding emergency crews". The reason, as numerous people have observed, why this seems so implausible is that, first, by 10.06am on 11 September, all non-military aircraft in US airspace had received loud and clear orders more than half an hour earlier to land at the nearest airport; second, such was the density of 911 phone calls from people on the ground, in the Shanksville area, as to the location of the crash site that aerial co-ordinates would have been completely unnecessary; and, third, with F-16s supposedly in the vicinity, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that, at a time of tremendous national uncertainty when no one knew for sure whether there might be any more hijacked aircraft still in the sky, the military would ask a civilian aircraft that just happened to be in the area for help.

Most suspicious of all, perhaps, has been the failure of the FBI or anybody else to identify the pilot or the passengers of the purported Falcon, and their own failure to come forward and identify themselves.

There was one other plane, a single-engine Piper, in the air as Flight 93 headed to its doom. The pilot, Bill Wright, said that he was three miles away and so close he could see the United markings on the plane. Suddenly he received orders to get away from the hijacked plane and to land immediately. "That's one of the first things that went through my mind when they told us to get as far away from it as fast as we could," Wright later told a Pittsburgh TV station, "that either they were expecting it to blow up or they were going to shoot it down - but that's pure speculation."

Everything is speculation - that is the problem with the story of Flight 93. And unless the US government reveals more of what it knows, provides a detailed account of the last 10 minutes in the life of Flight 93 and the 44 people who were aboard, there will not only be scope but sound reasons for the conspiracy theorists to continue to speculate as to what really happened in those last few minutes before the plane plunged into the earth; to cast doubts on the soft-focus legend that the traumatised American public has seized upon so gratefully.

Some conspiracy theorists will say that the plane was shot down by a missile, perhaps a heat-seeking missile that honed in on one of the plane's engines - a theory possibly substantiated by the 2,000yd flight of the 1,000lb engine part, but arguably refuted by consistent eye-witness accounts, including Lee Purbaugh's, that when last sighted the plane was not emitting smoke.

Others might say, as they have done about a TWA flight that fell to the sea in 1996 after taking off from New York, that the plane was a victim of electromagnetic interference. In the case of the TWA flight, the argument, put forward in a series of exhaustive articles written in the New York Review of Books by the Harvard academic Elaine Scarry, is that it happened accidentally. However, as Scarry's articles relate, documentation abounds showing that the Air Force and the Pentagon have conducted extensive research on "electronic warfare applications" with the possible capacity intentionally to disrupt the mechanisms of an aeroplane in such a way as to provoke, for example, an uncontrollable dive. Scarry also reports that US Customs aircraft are already equipped with such weaponry; as are some C-130 Air Force transport planes. The FBI has stated that, apart from the enigmatic Falcon business jet, there was a C-130 military cargo plane within 25 miles of the passenger jet when it crashed. According to the Scarry findings, in 1995 the Air Force installed "electronic suites" in at least 28 of its C-130s - capable, among other things, of emitting lethal jamming signals.

In decades to come, film-makers, future Oliver Stones, may come up with theories of their own, and the story of Flight 93 may come to acquire the morbid mystique of the Kennedy assassination.

None of which is to question the bravery of passengers such as Todd Beamer, who left behind a pregnant widow and two children aged two and three; or Tom Burnett, who had three small daughters and told his wife Deena over the phone, in the face of her anguished protests, that he and his fellow-passengers were "going to do something" because if not the terrorists were "going to run this plane into the ground". Evidently, as the Newsweek article relates, there was fighting of some kind, but as to whether the terrorists held off the passengers or the passengers seized control of the plane, and perhaps even made an attempt to fly it themselves (one passenger aboard was a qualified pilot of small planes), nobody knows - or is willing to admit that they know.

If evidence does exist further substantiating the hero narrative, it would be a surprise if the authorities had not released it. Bravery, though, there undoubtedly was. This we do know. As Lee Purbaugh says, and it would be churlish to disagree, "they were heroes on that plane". Such a consensus has been built around this view that the crash site at Shanksville - an anonymous-looking field save for the American flags that flutter all around, the crosses, the pictures of the dead passengers, the messages of goodwill and of good cheer ("Don't mess with the US!") - that it has become a place of pilgrimage, much as has happened with ground zero in New York but on a smaller scale, attracting some 150 visitors from all over the US every day. "In truth," said Wally Miller, who as coroner remains legally in charge of the site, "that field is a cemetery. It should be treated with due respect."

What does Miller think happened? Did he attach any credence to the stories doing the rounds, to those - including a number in Shanksville - who dissent from the official version of events? Miller, who has seen as much evidence as anybody at the scene of the crash, does not dismiss the dissidents out of hand. He keeps an open mind. "The order had been given to bring the airplane down," he said. "I do not rule anything out."

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Unanswered questions: The mystery of Flight 93

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We all know the inspiring story of Flight 93, of the heroic passengers who forced the hijacked plane to the ground, sacrificing themselves to save the lives of others. The only trouble is: it may simply not be true. John Carlin reports from Shanksville, Pennsylvania

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Facts about 9/11 from the 9/11 Memorial Website

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Facts about 9/11 from the 9/11 Memorial Website

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Quick info!

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The 9/11 Memorial opened on September 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the attacks. It is located on the western side of the former World Trade Center complex where the Twin Towers once stood. The Memorial was designed by two architects, Michael Arad and Peter Walker, whose proposal was selected in a design competition out of 5,201 submissions from 63 countries.

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Read the inspiring stories of people who heard the call of duty and went above and beyond to help save lives.

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Student accounts from a nearby high school

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Student accounts from a nearby high school

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Crafting A Life - 9/11 Account - Student Stories

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These are student stories of September 11th written by the kids at the High School for Leadership and Public Service. They are unedited. You will see many errors, evidence of second language learners and the weaknesses of city kids' writing. You will also read their raw stories.

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Two decades ago, Osama bin Laden officially launched al-Qaeda's struggle against the United States. Neither side has won.

Mazhar Ali Khan / AP

Exactly two decades ago, on August 23, 1996, Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States. At the time, few people paid much attention. But it was the start of what's now the Twenty Years' War between the United States and al-Qaeda-a conflict that both sides have ultimately lost.

During the 1980s, bin Laden fought alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. After the Soviets withdrew, he went home to Saudi Arabia, then moved to Sudan before being expelled and returning to Afghanistan in 1996 to live under Taliban protection. Within a few months of his arrival, he issued a 30-page fatwa, "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places," which was published in a London-based newspaper, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, and faxed to supporters around the world. It was bin Laden's first public call for a global jihad against the United States. In a rambling text, bin Laden opined on Islamic history, celebrated recent attacks against U.S. forces in Lebanon and Somalia, and recounted a multitude of grievances against the United States, Israel, and their allies. "The people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Jewish-Christian alliance and their collaborators," he wrote.

His central lament was the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, or "the occupation of the land of the two holiest sites." Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden had offered to defend Saudi Arabia with his Arab legion. But the Saudi royals decided that the U.S. military would be a better bet. Six years later, American soldiers were still in Saudi Arabia in a bid to contain Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden saw the United States as the power behind the throne: the "far enemy" that propped up apostate regimes in the Middle East. Muslims, he wrote, should abandon their petty local fights and unite to drive the Americans out of Saudi Arabia: "destroying, fighting and killing the enemy until, by the Grace of Allah, it is completely defeated."

Dispatches from the Twenty Years' War

1. Stranger in a Strange Land
(December 2001)

2. The Gospel According to Osama Bin Laden
(January 2002)

3. The Fifty-First State?
(November 2002)

4. The Leadership Secrets of Osama bin Laden
(April 2003)

5. Al-Qaeda's Understudy
(June 2004)

6. Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive
(June 2004)

7. The Long Hunt for Osama
(October 2004)

8. How Not to Catch a Terrorist
(December 2004)

9. Inside Out
(April 2005)

10. Hunting the Taliban in Las Vegas
(September 2006)

11. Declaring Victory
(September 2006)

12. Bin Laden's 'War of a Thousand Cuts' Will Live On
(May 2011)

13. Is America Any Safer?
(September 2016)

And so began the Twenty Years' War between al-Qaeda and the United States, which has had five distinct eras to date. The first phase, from 1996-2001, was the phony war marked by intermittent hostilities. It took al-Qaeda two years to organize its first major attack against the United States: the August 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people in total, 12 of them American. The United States responded with a quasi-war against al-Qaeda and its state sponsors, which combined a legal indictment of bin Laden with limited military action, including cruise missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998 that killed at least six al-Qaeda personnel. In 2000, al-Qaeda suicide bombers hit the USS Cole at a port in Yemen, killing 17. The following year, the terrorist group brought the war to the American homeland with the 9/11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

The second phase of the Twenty Years' War, from 2001-2003, was the invasion of Afghanistan, which represented the high point of American optimism about victory. George W. Bush seized the sword, declaring a "war against terrorism," sweeping aside the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan, and installing a new Afghan government under Hamid Karzai. And Bush also grasped the shield, constructing an entire architecture of domestic defense, including the Department of Homeland Security, which was resourced to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every year.

The third phase, from 2003-2006, was the invasion of Iraq, where American hopes evaporated in the Mesopotamian sun. Bush had argued that only war could sever the purported-and it turned out largely imagined-alliance between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and liberate an oppressed people. But the overthrow of Saddam's regime triggered widespread disorder, and led to the rise of an al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which began a murderous campaign of violence. The quagmire in Iraq also eroded the parallel mission in Afghanistan. With American attention focused on Iraq, and only limited U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the Taliban recovered in the south of the country as well as in sanctuaries in Pakistan.

The fourth phase of the Twenty Years' War, from 2007-2011, was the surge era, a time of fragile recovery. The deployment of U.S. reinforcements in Iraq, together with the "Awakening" movement, which involved Washington allying with Sunni tribes against AQI (by now rebranded as the Islamic State of Iraq), helped to pull Iraq back from the brink of catastrophe. In Afghanistan, Barack Obama ordered a surge of U.S. forces, which nearly tripled troop levels to over 100,000 from 2009-2010. In 2011, U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in Pakistan. At the end of the year, American troops left Iraq. There was, finally, a sense of closure.

The fifth phase, from 2011-2016, was the era of transformation, as once again, U.S. hopes went unrealized. AQI/ISI evolved into ISIS and moved to the center of the global jihadist movement. Misgovernment and sectarian rule in Iraq had alienated Iraqi Sunnis and breathed new life into the ISI. After Syria collapsed into civil war in 2011, ISI crossed the border; in 2013, firmly ensconced in both Iraq and Syria, ISI changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The following year, al-Qaeda repudiated its former affiliate. But far from collapsing as an organization, ISIS subsequently swept into northern Iraq and declared a global caliphate. Meanwhile, in the often-forgotten war in Afghanistan, American troops were withdrawn and the Taliban made steady gains, with the campaign left teetering between stalemate and failure.

Thus neither side won the Twenty Years' War. Victory would mean achieving core aims at an acceptable cost relative to the benefits. Al-Qaeda did meet some of its goals: With limited resources, bin Laden gained incredible notoriety and inflicted enormous damage on a great power. In 2003, U.S. troops left Saudi Arabia-the key goal outlined in the 1996 manifesto. In 2004, bin Laden released a video that compared the costs of the 9/11 attacks to al-Qaeda versus the United States: "Al-Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost-according to the lowest estimate-more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of al-Qaeda defeated a million dollars."

But in a broader analysis, bin Laden failed. Yes, U.S. forces left Saudi Arabia, but they did so voluntarily, after Saddam was toppled. Crucially, al-Qaeda was unable to mobilize Muslims around a strict Islamist identity that transcended other loyalties. As Charles Kurzman showed in his book The Missing Martyrs, after 9/11, fewer than one in every 100,000 Muslims became jihadist terrorists. The vast majority of Muslims completely reject bin Laden's ideology. And national, tribal, and other local identities remain profoundly important from the Palestinians to the Pakistanis. From 2003-2011, confidence in bin Laden collapsed in many Muslim-majority countries, falling from 59 percent to 26 percent in Indonesia, and from 56 percent to 13 percent in Jordan. In a 2013 poll taken in 11 Muslim countries, a median of just 13 percent had a favorable view of al-Qaeda, whereas 57 percent had an unfavorable view.

Another key al-Qaeda goal was to assume leadership of the global jihadist movement. Today, al-Qaeda affiliates in North Africa and Yemen remain a threat. But history seems to have moved on. Al-Qaeda was a marginal player in the grand drama of the Arab Spring. Al-Qaeda's former satellite, AQI, morphed into ISIS, broke away, and seized the mantle of global jihad. According to the State Department, in the face of ISIS's expansion in 2014, "AQ leadership also appeared to lose momentum as the self-styled leader of a global movement."

Al-Qaeda and ISIS are very different animals. Al-Qaeda is a loose terrorist network focused on launching spectacular attacks to mobilize Muslims, which sometimes relied on host governments like the Taliban. ISIS is simultaneously a terrorist network, an insurgency, and a quasi-state, with tens of thousands of fighters, widespread territorial control, and extensive funding. ISIS doesn't need to rely on government patronage-it is the government.

Al-Qaeda offers delayed gratification: ISIS provides instant gratification. Bin Laden saw the caliphate as a distant goal. In his declaration of war, he spoke of harnessing Saudi oil wealth in "the forthcoming Islamic State, by Allah's Grace"-but this was a utopian and long-term vision. ISIS seized land in Syria and Iraq and made the caliphate real. In his 1996 declaration of war, bin Laden promised that Muslim martyrs would receive 72 pure virgins in heaven. ISIS offers sex slaves right now. Front-loading the rewards proved popular. By 2014, an estimated one thousand foreign fighters were joining ISIS every month, far in excess of new al-Qaeda recruits.

Al-Qaeda's failure in the Twenty Years' War, however, doesn't mean the United States was victorious. War is not a sports match where one team wins and the other team loses. Instead, each side has its own separate tally. In the positive column, Washington can point to the absence of terrorist attacks on anything like the scale of 9/11 in the United States after 2001. Global jihad became a far more challenging endeavor, as Washington and its allies clamped down on terrorists' opportunity to travel, communicate, and trade money and weapons. The United States also succeeded in capturing or killing the majority of al-Qaeda's core leadership using a range of innovative tactics, including drone strikes and special-operations raids.

But a sober assessment of the last 20 years suggests that the United States lost the broader war. The country wasn't occupied and there was no surrender. But Americans have paid an exorbitant price for the two-decade campaign in strategic, economic, and moral terms. When terrorists strike a great power, the destructive potential lies not in the act itself but in the great power's response to the act. In 1914, Serbian terrorists killed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. Austria-Hungary used the attack as a pretext for war against Serbia, triggering a cataclysmic conflict, World War I, in which four empires collapsed-the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austria-Hungarian. Similarly, in the Twenty Years' War, America's response has had far greater consequences than al-Qaeda's attacks.

Let's turn first to the United States on offense: the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Recounting the costs is numbing: over 7,000 Americans killed, tens of thousands of soldiers seriously wounded, trillions of dollars expended, and over 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq alone. And there's the wider impact of spending on America's debt, of enhanced interrogation and torture on the U.S. global image and ethical standing, and of seemingly endless quagmires on domestic political unity.

In an interview, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, told me, "The Iraq War was unnecessary, self-damaging, demoralizing, delegitimizing, and governed primarily by simplistic military assumptions that didn't take into account the regional mosaic in which Iraq operates and the internal mosaic inside Iraq."

The eclipse of al-Qaeda by ISIS is a loss for al-Qaeda but not a gain for the United States. ISIS is an even more ruthless and capable adversary.

If we consider the United States on defense, the success of the homeland-security complex in making Americans safer is highly debatable. A trillion dollars has poured into counter-terrorism programs, but to what end? There have been some genuine payoffs. The FBI, for example, has far greater resources to find terrorists before they attack, watch lists and databases of global threats are much improved since 9/11, and aircraft are physically safer with hardened cockpit doors.

But as Steven Brill described in The Atlantic, the spigot of homeland security expenditure also produced a carnival of waste, endless turf wars between bloated federal agencies-and, in many cases, remarkably little additional security. Tens of billions of dollars were poured into programs like FirstNet, a telecommunications system for first responders, which may never be built. After 9/11 there was a vast increase in the number of armed air marshals on planes. But Brill notes that more air marshals have been arrested themselves (for example, for drunk driving), than have carried out arrests in airports or onboard a plane. In 2015, undercover tests found that airport screeners across the country failed to detect explosives and weapons about 95 percent of the time. We can't rerun the tape of history, but it's plausible that with a more slimmed-down homeland security apparatus, terrorists would have killed few if any additional Americans.

Another core U.S. goal is to avoid the contest becoming a civilizational clash between the West and Islam. If that happens, the United States will be at war with the entire Muslim world, and very likely, will be facing decisive failure. Bin Laden never succeeded in rallying Muslims into a single internationalist bloc. But in the United States, there's a creeping Islamophobia that serves to lump Muslims together and could unintentionally advance bin Laden's vision. After 9/11, George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center in Washington D.C., and declared that "Islam is peace." But in recent years, the GOP has become more explicitly Islamophobic, epitomized by Donald Trump's proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States.

So if neither al-Qaeda nor the United States won the Twenty Years' War, who did? The winners were Iran and China. The United States removed not one, but two, of Iran's adversaries, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Tehran subsequently became one of the most influential players in Iraqi politics. The American blood and treasure expended in the Middle East also accelerated the point at which China will catch up to the United States economically.

But the main combatants in the struggle lost for similar reasons: They were hobbled by ideology. Al-Qaeda's vision of austere Wahhabi Islam and endless global jihad is profoundly unappealing to the vast majority of Muslims. But ideology also shaped U.S. strategy, sometimes in dangerous ways. American idealism is one of the country's most attractive qualities, central to its moral standing and "soft power." But idealism also helped to frame the Twenty Years' War as a struggle between good and evil, which required grandiose goals to topple regimes and build beacons of freedom in the Middle East. It also encouraged Americans to lump terrorists and rogue states together into a big bucket of bad guys. At the same time, Americans are also hostile to the whole notion of nation-building, often seeing stabilization missions as a kind of big-government welfarism, and not something that the country's warriors should be doing. In a recent foreign-policy speech, Donald Trump said, "ISIS will be gone if I'm elected president," but at the same time, the United States will be "getting out of the nation-building business." This combination of beliefs is as American as apple pie.

As a result, the United States is an impatient crusader: eager to smite tyrants and terrorists but unwilling to invest the time and resources needed to win the peace. In Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington went to war with a short-term mindset, set on defeating the evildoers, rather than thinking about how to handle the messy consequences.

After five eras-phony war, optimism, catastrophe, recovery, transformation-it's a sign of America's inability to achieve victory that the Twenty Years' War label will probably only last for one more year. Barring an unlikely collapse of al-Qaeda and ISIS, the contest will enter its 21st year next August.

Al-Qaeda's extremist beliefs and lack of capabilities meant it was always vulnerable to burning bright and then fading. For the United States, as the vastly greater power, the primary danger was self-inflicted injury. Al-Qaeda can never defeat the United States. Only Americans can do that.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Dominic Tierney is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and an associate professor of political science at Swarthmore College. His latest book is The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts.

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Al-Qaeda Has Been at War With the United States for 20 Years

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Two decades ago, Osama bin Laden officially launched al-Qaeda's struggle against the United States. Neither side has won. Exactly two decades ago, on August 23, 1996, Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States. At the time, few people paid much attention.

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10 Things you may have forgotten about 9/11

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10 Things you may have forgotten about 9/11

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CLOSE
This story originally published in September of 2016.
WASHINGTON - Monday marks the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that killed 2,977 people in New York, the Pentagon and in a field in rural Pennsylvania. The attacks and the reaction to them have shaped U.S. policy for more than 15 years, leaving a nation that is far more vigilant and jittery about terrorism. Yet for all of the talk about 9/11, many elements of the attacks and the actions leading up to them have receded from the public memory. Here are 10 things you may have forgotten about 9/11:

1. We don't know how the hijackers got into the cockpits of some of the planes

The comprehensive report of the commission created to investigate the attacks, which was published in 2004, said no one could determine how the hijackers were able to get into the cockpits of the four commercial airliners they hijacked. A flight attendant on American Flight 11 "speculated that they had 'jammed their way' in," the 9/11 report said. "Perhaps the terrorists stabbed the flight attendants to get a cockpit key, to force one of them to open the cockpit door, or to lure the captain or first officer out of the cockpit." Once the hijackers gained control of American 11, they guided it toward New York's World Trade Center towers, where it stuck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. All 81 passengers, including the five hijackers, and nine crew members died in the crash, along with an unknown number of people in the tower.

2. Passengers and crew aboard the planes provided critical information

Those aboard the four hijacked flights - American 11, United 175, American 77 and United 93 - called family and friends from their cellphones or used the aircrafts' radio communications to report the hijackings. That alerted authorities to the hijackings and enabled them to understand why they could not track the planes after their navigation systems were turned off.

The Pentagon following the crash of American 77 on Sept. 11, 2001. (Photo: ROB CURTIS, XXX ARMY TIMES)

American 77, which departed Washington's Dulles airport, was hijacked near Indianapolis and then turned back toward Washington. Its destination: the Pentagon. Passenger Barbara Olson, the wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, called her husband to report "that the flight had been hijacked, and the hijackers had knives and box cutters." American 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., killing all 64 people on board, including the five hijackers. Information gathered from the calls from flight attendants and passengers enabled investigators to piece together the events on board each plane and how the hijackings occurred.

3. Light passenger loads made it easier for the hijackers to maneuver

American 11, bound from Boston to Los Angeles, had 81 passengers on board out of a possible 158, according to the 9/11 report and aircraft data.

United 175, which also left Boston for Los Angeles, had 56 passengers out of a possible 168. That was a "load factor" of 33%, considerably lower than the 49% average for that flight, a federal investigation showed.

American 77, headed to Los Angeles from Washington, had 58 passengers out of a capacity of 176, the 9/11 report and other reports said.

United 93, bound from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco, had only 37 passengers for a 20% load factor, which was far below the normal 52%.

4. Missing hijacker made it easier for United 93 passengers to storm the cockpit

This is the only one of the four hijacked flights that did not strike its intended target, the U.S. Capitol. Some of that is because it was the only one that had four hijackers instead of the five that took down American 11, American 77 and United 175. "The operative likely intended to round out the team for this flight, Mohamed al Kahtani, had been refused entry by a suspicious immigration inspector at Florida's Orlando International Airport in August," the 9/11 report said. As the passengers were just seconds away from getting into the cockpit, the hijacker at the controls crashed the plane in an empty field in Shanksville, Pa., just 20 minutes flying time from Washington.

5. The World Trade Center had been targeted before

New York's World Trade Center held an iconic status for terrorists even before 9/11. Shortly after noon on Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb planted in a van parked in the center's underground parking garage exploded, killing six people and wounding more than 1,000, the 9/11 report said. "The bombing signaled a new terrorist challenge, one whose rage and malice had no limit," the 9/11 report said. "Ramzi Yousef, the Sunni extremist who planted the bomb, said later that he had hoped to kill 250,000 people."

6. Vice President Cheney ordered United 93 to be shot down

Vice President Dick Cheney in 2004. (Photo: RON EDMONDS, AP)

Before the passengers forced the crash of United 93, then-vice president Dick Cheney gave the approval for the plane to be shot down before it could reach Washington, the 9/11 report said.

"The Vice President authorized fighter aircraft to engage the aircraft," the report said.

However, the report added, the Air Force fighters that were airborne at the time probably would not have found and reached United 93 in time. Military "officials have maintained consistently that had the passengers not caused United 93 to crash, the military would have prevented it from reaching Washington, D.C.," the 9/11 report said. "That conclusion is based on a version of events that we now know is incorrect."

7. Earlier plots also targeted commercial aircraft

Ramzi Yousef, who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had planned a massive attack on 12 U.S. airliners over the Pacific in 1995, the 9/11 report said. Yousef worked with his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to devise the plot, the report said. Mohammed later became one of the masterminds of 9/11. Yousef was arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Feb. 7, 1995, after an accomplice turned him in, the report said. The Manila plot was never carried out.

8. The U.S. worked on multiple attempts to kill Osama bin Laden before 9/11

The CIA and other agencies developed a plan to capture bin Laden in early 1998, the report said. That was delayed and then revived, but it was hampered by concerns from military officials about relying on Afghan tribal leaders. Then-national security adviser Sandy Berger was concerned about what would be done with bin Laden if he was captured and whether the evidence against him could lead to a criminal conviction in a U.S. court. After the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed on Oct. 8, 1998, President Bill Clinton authorized cruise missile strikes against bin Laden's compound in Afghanistan. He survived but was later killed by a Navy SEAL team in May 2011.

9. The CIA warned President Clinton about hijackings in 1998

In the Dec. 4, 1998, President's Daily Brief from the CIA, the agency told Clinton that "Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks." The plan, the agency said, was to hijack the planes to gain the release of Yousef and other terrorists, the 9/11 report said.

Osama bin Laden (Photo: Uncredited, AP)

But the agency had no firm information, and the hijackings did not take place. Throughout December 1998, U.S. officials tracked bin Laden around the region and tried to develop a plan to attack him with cruise missiles.

10. Saudi Arabia had multiple ties to the hijackers

When the 9/11 report was released in 2004, 28 pages of material remained classified and the subject of intense speculation about their contents. Those pages, which were released in July, showed multiple links to associates of Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar, the former longtime ambassador to the United States. The documents, as USA TODAY reported in July, "show possible conduits of money from the Saudi royal family to Saudis living in the United States and two of the hijackers in San Diego. The documents also indicate substantial support to California mosques with a high degree of radical Islamist sentiment." The pages were not released, because the details contained in them had not been confirmed or shown to be relevant to the 9/11 attacks. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
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10 things you may have forgotten about 9/11

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CLOSE This story originally published in September of 2016. WASHINGTON - Monday marks the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that killed 2,977 people in New York, the Pentagon and in a field in rural Pennsylvania. The attacks and the reaction to them have shaped U.S.

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FBI

The FBI has released 27 new photos of the Pentagon on 9/11 after it was struck by a plane that was hijacked by five terrorists.

Five al-Qaeda terrorists took over American Airlines flight 77, which was traveling from Washington DC to Los Angeles, as it flew over eastern Kentucky. They then turned it back towards Washington, D.C., eventually crashing it into the Pentagon, killing 184 people.

The pictures released by the FBI show debris from the plane, the Pentagon on fire and crews putting out the blaze and cleaning up the damage.

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The FBI released 27 new photos of the Pentagon on 9/11

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The FBI has released 27 new photos of the Pentagon on 9/11 after it was struck by a plane that was hijacked by five terrorists. Five al-Qaeda terrorists took over American Airlines flight 77, which was traveling from Washington DC to Los Angeles, as it flew over eastern Kentucky.

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- While the nation watched in horror as the World Trade Center in Manhattan flamed and smoldered on live television after planes hit each of the iconic twin towers the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a third plane, hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, flew into the Pentagon in Arlington, Va.

That crash killed 189 people.

Bishop James Magnes, a senior military chaplain who grew up in Hendersonville, was in a meeting just 300 feet from the point of impact, but said he didn't feel the building shake.

Alarms began to sound, Magnes recalled, and the building was evacuated.

"One of the vivid memories I have was of an Asian woman in the crowd of people running out of the building, running so fast that she literally ran out of her shoes," he said. "(She) showed no indication she was going to go back for those shoes."

His medical training came in handy as the evacuees waited for paramedics to arrive. He helped a badly burned woman and an Army specialist with burns over a third of his body.

"(It was) rather harrowing," Magnes said. "I remember this particular specialist because he told me he was about to be released from the Army in about four days."

Soon after the evacuation, the chaplain joined a team of people who were heading back into the Pentagon to look for people trapped inside.

"You suspend your level of incomprehension and just function," he said.

The memory of the burning smell is seared into Magnes' memory.

"Not only could you smell the smoke from the burning building, you could smell the injuries, the effect that the injuries had on burning flesh," he said. "You could see the carnage and the damage."

Kevin Spruill was in his car leaving Arlington Cemetery when he heard a plane roaring overhead and saw the Boeing 757 slam into the Pentagon.

"I duck and it's really low and I'm thinking to myself, 'What is going on?' And within seconds, the explosion hit," Spruill said.

He pulled off at the next exit, and ran toward the blazing building.

"Someone's got to do something, someone's got to get out of their car, and I just did," he said.

He said the people gathered outside the Pentagon were bewildered.

"They're like, 'We don't know what's going on. Twin towers just got hit by planes as well. This is clearly a terrorist attack. We don't know where the next one is going,'" Spruill said. "There was a lot of fire and you could see the tail end of the plane in the building."

The billowing black smoke was visible from the House of Representatives office building where Congressman Walter Jones, who represents North Carolina's 3rd District, and Sen. Richard Burr, then a congressman, were just beginning to get information about the attacks.

"There was no real organization for staff and members of Congress in the event of some type of attack," Jones said. "I'm trying to call my wife in North Carolina. I can't get through. As you can imagine, there was just total chaos up here."

Jones said that, in the days following the attack, members of Congress were trying to "figure out what had happened, why it happened."

Burr agreed.

"There wasn't a book that you could read that told you about Osama bin Laden or about al-Qaida," he said. "This is reality today, and we've got to deal with it in that sense."

He said upgraded security measures were quickly put into place at government buildings in Washington, D.C., and members of Congress were given Blackberry mobile devices so they could communicate in case of an emergency.

Beyond security and technology, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks caused other, more fundamental changes in the U.S., Jones said. He remembers gathering on the House steps with other members of Congress to sing "God Bless America" the night of the attack.

"I think it changed America," he said. "You will never forget it... and it could happen again."

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Witnesses recall Pentagon 9/11 attack that 'changed America' :: WRAL.com

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While the nation watched in horror as the World Trade Center in Manhattan flamed and smoldered on live television after planes hit each of the iconic twin towers the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a third plane, hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, flew into the Pentagon in Arlington, Va.

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Here's a graphic.

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On September 11, 2001, 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States. Two of the planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, a third plane hit the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., and the fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people were killed during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which triggered major U.S. initiatives to combat terrorism and defined the presidency of George W. Bush.

World Trade Center

On September 11, 2001, at 8:45 a.m. on a clear Tuesday morning, an American Airlines Boeing 767 loaded with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.

The impact left a gaping, burning hole near the 80th floor of the 110-story skyscraper, instantly killing hundreds of people and trapping hundreds more in higher floors.

As the evacuation of the tower and its twin got underway, television cameras broadcasted live images of what initially appeared to be a freak accident. Then, 18 minutes after the first plane hit, a second Boeing 767-United Airlines Flight 175-appeared out of the sky, turned sharply toward the World Trade Center and sliced into the south tower near the 60th floor.

The collision caused a massive explosion that showered burning debris over surrounding buildings and onto the streets below. It immediately became clear that America was under attack.

Osama bin Laden

The attackers were Islamic terrorists from Saudi Arabia and several other Arab nations. Reportedly financed by the al-Qaeda terrorist organization of Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden, they were allegedly acting in retaliation for America's support of Israel, its involvement in the Persian Gulf War and its continued military presence in the Middle East.

Some of the terrorists had lived in the United States for more than a year and had taken flying lessons at American commercial flight schools. Others had slipped into the country in the months before September 11 and acted as the "muscle" in the operation.

The 19 terrorists easily smuggled box-cutters and knives through security at three East Coast airports and boarded four early-morning flights bound for California, chosen because the planes were loaded with fuel for the long transcontinental journey. Soon after takeoff, the terrorists commandeered the four planes and took the controls, transforming ordinary passenger jets into guided missiles.

Pentagon Attack

As millions watched the events unfolding in New York, American Airlines Flight 77 circled over downtown Washington, D.C., before crashing into the west side of the Pentagon military headquarters at 9:45 a.m.

Jet fuel from the Boeing 757 caused a devastating inferno that led to the structural collapse of a portion of the giant concrete building, which is the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense.

All told, 125 military personnel and civilians were killed in the Pentagon, along with all 64 people aboard the airliner.

Twin Towers Collapse

Less than 15 minutes after the terrorists struck the nerve center of the U.S. military, the horror in New York took a catastrophic turn when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed in a massive cloud of dust and smoke.

The structural steel of the skyscraper, built to withstand winds in excess of 200 miles per hour and a large conventional fire, could not withstand the tremendous heat generated by the burning jet fuel.

At 10:30 a.m., the north building of the twin towers collapsed. Only six people in the World Trade Center towers at the time of their collapse survived. Almost 10,000 others were treated for injuries, many severe.

Flight 93

Meanwhile, a fourth California-bound plane-United Flight 93-was hijacked about 40 minutes after leaving Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. Because the plane had been delayed in taking off, passengers on board learned of events in New York and Washington via cell phone and Airfone calls to the ground.

Knowing that the aircraft was not returning to an airport as the hijackers claimed, a group of passengers and flight attendants planned an insurrection.

One of the passengers, Thomas Burnett, Jr., told his wife over the phone that "I know we're all going to die. There's three of us who are going to do something about it. I love you, honey." Another passenger-Todd Beamer-was heard saying "Are you guys ready? Let's roll" over an open line.

Sandy Bradshaw, a flight attendant, called her husband and explained that she had slipped into a galley and was filling pitchers with boiling water. Her last words to him were "Everyone's running to first class. I've got to go. Bye."

The passengers fought the four hijackers and are suspected to have attacked the cockpit with a fire extinguisher. The plane then flipped over and sped toward the ground at upwards of 500 miles per hour, crashing in a rural field near Shanksville in western Pennsylvania at 10:10 a.m.

All 44 people aboard were killed. Its intended target is not known, but theories include the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland or one of several nuclear power plants along the eastern seaboard.

How Many People Died in 9/11 Attacks?

A total of 2,996 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks, including the 19 terrorist hijackers aboard the four airplanes.

At the World Trade Center, 2,763 died after the two planes slammed into the twin towers. That figure includes 343 firefighters and paramedics, 23 New York City police officers and 37 Port Authority police officers who were struggling to complete an evacuation of the buildings and save the office workers trapped on higher floors.

At the Pentagon, 189 people were killed, including 64 on American Airlines Flight 77, the airliner that struck the building. On Flight 93, 44 people died when the plane crash-landed in Pennsylvania.

America Responds

At 7 p.m., President George W. Bush, who was in Florida at the time of the attacks and had spent the day being shuttled around the country because of security concerns, returned to the White House.

At 9 p.m., he delivered a televised address from the Oval Office, declaring, "Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve."

In a reference to the eventual U.S. military response he declared, "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."

Operation Enduring Freedom, the American-led international effort to oust the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and destroy Osama bin Laden's terrorist network based there, began on October 7. Within two months, U.S. forces had effectively removed the Taliban from operational power, but the war continued, as U.S. and coalition forces attempted to defeat a Taliban insurgency campaign based in neighboring Pakistan.

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11th attacks, remained at large until May 2, 2011, when he was finally tracked down and killed by U.S. forces at a hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In June 2011, President Barack Obama announced the beginning of large-scale troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.

Sources

The Encyclopedia of 9/11. New York Magazine.
FAQ About 9/11. 9/11 Memorial.
September 11th Terror Attacks Fast Facts. CNN.
9/11 Death Statistics. StatisticBrain.com.
Access hundreds of hours of historical video, commercial free, with HISTORY Vault. Start your free trial today.

PHOTO GALLERIES

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On September 11, 2001, 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States. Two of the planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, a third plane hit the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., and the fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

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Wikipedia has a lot of information and hyperlinks

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Wikipedia has a lot of information and hyperlinks

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Year the World Trade Centre was built: 1970

Number of companies housed in the WTC: 430

Number working in World Trade Centre on average working day prior to 11 September: 50,000

Average number of daily visitors: 140,000

Number killed in attack on New York, in the Twin Towers and in aircraft that crashed into them: 2,823

Distance, in miles, from which the burning towers were visible: 20

Maximum heat of fires, in degrees fahrenheit, at World Trade Center site: 2,300

Number of days underground fires at World Trade Centre continued to burn: 69

Number of days that workers dug up debris at Ground Zero, searching for body parts: 230

Number of body parts collected: 19,500

Number of bodies discovered intact: 291

Number of victims identified by New York medical examiner: 1,102

Number of death certificates issued without a body at request of victims' families: 1,616

Number of people still classified as missing from the World Trade Centre that day: 105

Number of people who died when American Airlines flight 11 from Boston, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles, California, crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center: 92

Number of people who died when United Airlines flight 175

from Boston, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles, California, crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center: 65

Number of people who died when United Airlines flight 93,

from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco, California, crashed in rural southwest Pennsylvania: 45

Number of people who died when American Airlines flight 77,

from Washington to Los Angeles, crashed into the Pentagon: 64

Number of peole killed in the Pentagon: 125

Number of survivors rescued from Ground Zero: 0
Al-Qaeda
Number of children born to Yemen-born construction magnate Muhammad Awad Bin Laden: 52

Number child Osama was: 17

Estimated fortune of Osama Bin Laden, inherited from father: $300m

Number of wives Bin Laden has: 3

Year Al-Qaeda was founded by Osama Bin Laden and Mohammed Atef: 1988

Date Bin Laden expelled from Saudi Arabia, due to anti-government activities there, and moved to Sudan: 1991

Year the Taliban seized control of Kabul implementing fundamentalist Islamic law and offering refuge to Osama bin Laden: 1996

Date expelled from Sudan due to US pressure, prompting return to Afghanistan: 1996

Number of Al-Qaeda members thought to have hijacked the four planes: 19

Number of the 19 who were Saudi: 15

Number of the 19 who are known to have made a will: 1

Number of years 'American Taliban' Johnny Walker Lindh (left) has been sentenced to for fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance: 20

Percentage of New York Post readers who would like to see him executed: 42

Amount of money 500 relatives of 9/11 victims are suing the Bin Laden family company and Saudi princes for in an effort to bankrupt terrorism: $1,000,000,000,000 (trillion)
Emotional fallout
Number of orphans created by the 9/11 attacks: 1,300

Number of babies born to women whose husbands were lost on 11 September: 17

Number of days after 9/11 that Pat Flounders, widowed in the attacks, shot herself, the first related suicide: 91

Percentage of those living within a one mile radius from the Twin Towers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: 20

Increase in PTSD among Manhattanites post-9/11: 200 per cent

Estimated minimum number of New Yorkers suffering from PTSD as a result of 9/11: 422,000

Estimated number of the city's public school students suffering from PTSD as a result of 9/11: 10,000

Percentage of Manhattanites who increased their alcohol consumption following 9/11: 25

Percentage of Manhattanites who increased their cigarette consumption following 9/11: 10

Percentage of Manhattanites who increased their marijuana consumption following 9/11: 3.2

Percentage sales increase at Toys in Babeland, a sex store in the Lower East of New York, in late September/October 2001: 30

Percentage increase in number of births reported in New York hospitals nine months on from 9/11: 20

Reported increase in church and synagogue attendance following 9/11: 20
Media and culture
Percentage of this year's 14 Pulitzer prizes won by the New York Times: 50

Previous record number of Pulitzer wins by a single organisation: 3

Number of copies of Toby Keith's (above) album 'Unleashed' sold in the first week of its release in October 2001, one song contained the line 'We'll put a boot in your ass/It's the American Way': 338,000

Number of songs, including 'Ruby Tuesday' and 'Imagine', banned post- 9/11 for being 'lyrically questionable': 150

Number of countries in which the star-studded telethon, 'America's Tribute to Heroes', was shown on 21 September (including Afghanistan): 200

Amount raised by the telethon: $150m

Cost of making the terrorist movie Collateral Damage starring Arnold Schwarzenegger: $85m

Number of months the release of Collateral Damage was delayed on account of Warner Bros.' 'sensitivity' to the attacks: 5

Number of mentions of 9/11 at the four-hour 25-minute Oscars ceremony 24 March, 2002: 26

Number of English language books published on the subject of 11 September: 672

Mayor Giuliani's approval rating post 11 September: 91 per cent
Charity
Amount of Federal Aid New York received within two months: $9.5bn

Amount collected by the September 11th Fund: $501m

Percentage of fund used for cash assistance and services such as grief counseling for families of victims and survivors: 89

Quantity, in pounds, of food and supplies supplied by 11 September Fund at Ground Zero: 4.3m

Number of hot meals served to rescue workers by 11 September Fund: 343,000

Number of displaced workers receiving job referrals: 5,000

Amount of compensation sought by the families of civilian casualties of US bombing in Afghanistan from the US government: $10,000

Amount of compensation sought for reckless misconduct and negligence from American Airlines by husband of 11 September victim: $50 million
Britain
Number of British victims: 67

Number of articles written over the last year in the UK press mentioning 11 September: 27,920

Number of specific mentions of Britain in threats from Al Qaeda: 1

Days after 9/11 that the 'Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001' was passed: 63

Votes for and against the Bill in the House of Commons: 458-5

Number of defeats in the House of Lords before a compromise was reached: 8

Number of Muslims in the UK: 1.8m

Proportion of those deemed to be practising Muslims: 42%

Number of 'terror suspects' imprisoned without trial after the 'Anti-Terrorism' act was passed: 11

Airline security

Number of days after 9/11 that Bush signed the Aviation Security Act requiring all checked-in bags to be screened for bombs and explosives by January 2002: 39

Percentage of bags checked in screened for bombs and explosives prior to the bill in the US: 10%

Number of bags carried each day by airline passengers in the United States: 3,000,000

Size (in inches) of toy soldier's mini replica Armalite rifle, intended as a present for her grandson, confiscated from British tourist Judy Powell's bag by airport security at LA International Airport: 5

Percentage of fake weapons undetected at America's leading Airports: 24

Cost of Frequent Flyers Bra manufactured by a Tokyo-based lingerie company in response to a number of security alerts relating to bra underwires: £20
The financial cost
Value of US economy: $11 trillion

Estimated cost of attacks to US based solely on property losses and insurance costs: $21billion

Estimated total losses to the world insurance market from the World Trade Centre: £25bn-£50bn

Amount of office space lost, in square feet: 13.5m

Estimated number of jobs lost in lower Manhattan area following 9/11: 100,000

Number of jobs it has been estimated will be lost in the US as result of the attacks by the end of 2002: 1.8m

Number of jobs lost in US travel industry in last 5 months of 2001: 237,000

Amount it has been estimated that US commercial insurance premiums will rise by to cover the potential cost of future terrorism between 2002 and 2004: 50%

Amount allocated by Congress for emergency assistance to airline industry in September 2001: $15bn

Military

Days after 9/11 that the US military began bombing Afghanistan: 26

Number of US bombs dropped on Afghanistan in the following six months: 22,000

Proportion of US bombs dropped in Afghanistan that may have missed the target: 25 per cent

Proportion that didn't explode, leaving landmines: 10 per cent

Estimated Afghan civilian death toll from US bombing campaign so far (they're still bombing): 3,125-3,620

Size of UK military budget 2001-2002: £23.4bn

Increase in 2002 budget defence spending that President Bush signed for on 10 January 2002: $30bn

Number of major Bush political appointees with significant financial ties to the arms industry: 32

Number of major Bush political appointees with significant financial ties to the energy industry: 21

Wage of a US Special Forces Green Beret with five to seven years' experience: $25,000

Number of UK marines sent to Afghanistan to 'clear up' the remnants of the Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in Operation Snipe in March: 1,700

Number of sightings of the enemy and shots fired in anger in the three month tour of duty: 0

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Year the World Trade Centre was built: 1970 Number of companies housed in the WTC: 430 Number working in World Trade Centre on average working day prior to 11 September: 50,000 Average number of daily visitors: 140,000 Number killed in attack on New York, in the Twin Towers and in

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Photos from 9/11

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Ten years ago, 19 men trained by al-Qaeda carried out a coordinated terrorist attack on the United States that had been planned for years. The attackers simultaneously hijacked four large passenger aircraft with the intention of crashing them into major landmarks in the United States, inflicting as much death and destruction as possible. Three of the planes struck their targets; the fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. In a single day, these deliberate acts of mass murder killed nearly 3,000 human beings from 57 countries. More than 400 of the dead were first responders, including New York City firefighters, police officers, and EMTs. It was one of the most-covered media events of all time, and after a decade, the images are still difficult to view. These attacks and the global reaction to them have profoundly shaped the world we live in, so it remains important to see the images and remember just what happened on that dark day. This entry is part two of a three-part series on the 10th Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks -- (see also Part 1: The Week Before and Part 3: The Decade Since).

View this page Hints: full screen. Skip to the next and previous photo by typing j/k or ←/→.

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Ten years ago, 19 men trained by al-Qaeda carried out a coordinated terrorist attack on the United States that had been planned for years. The attackers simultaneously hijacked four large passenger aircraft with the intention of crashing them into major landmarks in the United States, inflicting as much death and destruction as possible.