00:00 Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack
00:05 in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.
00:12 22 years ago, America saw its most horrific terror attacks ever on September 11, 2001.
00:26 In the space of less than 90 minutes on a late summer morning, the world changed.
00:37 Nearly 3,000 people were killed that day and the United States soon found itself in the midst of
00:43 what would become the longest war in its history. The events of 9/11 not only reshaped the global
00:50 response to terrorism, but raised new and troubling questions about security, privacy,
00:55 and treatment of prisoners. It reshaped US immigration policies and led to a surge in
01:00 discrimination, racial profiling, and hate crimes. On September 11, 2001, 2,977 people were killed in
01:11 the deadliest terrorist attacks in American history. Two planes hijacked by Islamic jihadists
01:17 vowing to kill all Americans plowed into both towers at the World Trade Center in New York.
01:22 Another plane was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
01:27 A fourth plane, presumably headed for the White House or the US Capitol,
01:36 was heroically diverted by passengers and ended up crashing in an empty field in Pennsylvania.
01:42 After reports of the first plane hitting the North Tower,
01:45 millions watched the second plane hit the South Tower on live television.
01:49 It was a terrifying, startling, and humbling event for America. The 9/11 attacks were the
01:59 deadliest on American soil and the sense of outrage was enormous. The attacks in New York
02:04 occurred in the country's busiest city on a busy workday, and the staggered nature of the attacks
02:10 meant that news footage captured almost everything as it happened, ensuring that millions of
02:15 Americans saw the events precisely as they unfolded. On September 11, 2001, groups of
02:25 attackers boarded four domestic aircraft at three East Coast airports, and soon after takeoff,
02:31 they disabled the crews. The hijackers then took control of the aircraft, all large and bound for
02:36 the West Coast, with full loads of fuel. At 8.46am local time, the first plane, American Airlines
02:43 Flight 11, which had originated from Boston, was crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade
02:48 Center in New York City. The second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, also from Boston,
02:56 stuck the South Tower 17 minutes later. At this point, there was no doubt that the United States
03:02 was under attack. Each structure was badly damaged by the impact and erupted into flames. Office
03:08 workers, who were trapped above the points of impact, in some cases leapt to their deaths
03:12 rather than face the infernos now raging inside the towers. At 9.59am, the World Trade Center's
03:20 heavily damaged South Tower collapsed, and the tower fell 29 minutes later. Clouds of smoke and
03:27 debris quickly filled the streets of Lower Manhattan. A number of other buildings adjacent
03:31 to the twin towers suffered serious damage, and several subsequently fell. Fires at the World
03:37 Trade Center's sites moulded for more than three months. Although to many Americans, 9/11 seemed
03:44 like a random act of terror, the roots of the event had been developing for years. A combination
03:49 of factors in the late 1990s led to the catastrophic event. These factors included regional
03:55 conditions in the Middle East that motivated the perpetrators, as well as intelligence lapses
04:00 and failures that left the United States vulnerable. Osama Bin Laden was relatively
04:05 unknown in the United States before 9/11, even as he was becoming popular and gathering followers
04:11 and fame in the Middle East during the 1990s. In 1988, he was one of the founders of Al-Qaeda,
04:17 the militant Islamic terrorist organization that carried out the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden called for
04:23 indiscriminate killing of all Americans who, he claimed, were the worst thieves in the world today.
04:28 Throughout the 20th century, a wave of secular nationalist revolutions swept through the Middle
04:34 East, taking root in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, and other countries. Young men who were struggling to
04:40 find decent jobs and start their own families in corrupt oil states provided easy targets for
04:46 radicalization. Bin Laden's message that America was the head of the snake and the root of all
04:51 society's problems went down well with the discontented poor. By the mid-1990s, Bin Laden
04:57 was the head of Al-Qaeda, a multifaceted and highly developed terrorist network carrying out
05:02 attack after attack on Americans in the Middle East. It was a new type of terrorism to which
05:07 the US intelligence agencies struggled to adapt. An attack such as 9/11 was totally beyond the
05:12 imagination of the American intelligence agencies, which is why the country was caught completely
05:17 unaware. The immediate response to 9/11 was the George W. Bush administration's war on terror,
05:23 which began in Afghanistan as a retaliation against Al-Qaeda for carrying out the attack.
05:28 The Bush administration soon expanded the war on terror into Iraq, and the consequences of
05:38 these wars continue to affect the Middle East to this day. The US-led coalition in Afghanistan
05:43 dismantled the Taliban and Al-Qaeda infrastructure in 2001, captured 9/11 operational leader Khalid
05:49 Sheikh Mohammed in 2003, and killed 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Although the CIA took 10
05:57 years to find Bin Laden, US intelligence efforts targeted and eliminated terrorist leaders time
06:02 after time. There were domestic long-term effects of 9/11 as well. Thousands of people struggled
06:07 with cancer and lasting chronic health problems relating to the toxicity from ground zero. The
06:13 site where the twin towers used to stand. The September 11 attacks also changed American air
06:18 travel as airlines began to require stringent security checks designed to prevent the types
06:24 of weapons the hijackers used from slipping through. Finally, the 9/11 attacks resulted
06:29 in changes to the federal government and an expansion of executive power. A new Cabinet
06:34 Department, the Department of Homeland Security, was created. The intelligence community was
06:39 consolidated under the Director of National Intelligence to improve coordination between
06:44 various agencies and departments.
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