The September 11 attacks (often referred to as September 11th or 9/11) were a series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States on September 11, 2001. On that morning, 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners.

The hijackers intentionallycrashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centerin New York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings. Both buildings collapsed within two hours, destroying nearbybuildings and damaging others.

The hijackers crashed a third airlinerinto the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania after some of its passengers and flight crew attempted to retake control ofthe plane, which the hijackers had redirected toward Washington, D.C.

There were no survivors from any of the flights. 2,973 victims and the 19 hijackers died as a result of the attacks. The overwhelming majority of casualties were civilians, including nationalsof over 90 countries. In addition, the death of at least one person from lung disease was ruled by a medical examiner to be a result of exposure to dustfrom the World Trade Center's collapse.

The United States responded to the attacks by launching a War on Terrorism,invading Afghanistan to depose the Taliban, who had harbored al-Qaedaterrorists, and enacting the USA PATRIOT Act. Many other countries alsostrengthened their anti-terrorism legislation and expanded law enforcementpowers.

Some American stock exchanges stayed closed for the rest of the weekfollowing the attack, and posted enormous losses upon reopening, especiallyin the airline and insurance industries. The destruction of billions of dollars worth of office space caused serious damage to the economy ofLower Manhattan.

The damage to the Pentagon was cleared and repaired within a year,and the Pentagon Memorial was built on the site. The rebuilding processhas started on the World Trade Center site. In 2006 a new office towerwas completed on the site of 7 World Trade Center.

1 World Trade Centeris currently under construction at the site and, at 1,776 ft (541 m) uponcompletion in 2013, it will become one of the tallest buildings in North America. Three more towers were originally expected to be built between 2007 and 2012 on the site.

Ground was broken for the Flight 93 National Memorial on November 8, 2009, and the first phase of constructionis expected to be ready for the 10th anniversary of the attacks onSeptember 11, 2011.
Early on the morning on September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial airliners en route to San Francisco and Los Angeles from Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C.(Washington Dulles International Airport).At 8:46 a.m.

American Airlines Flight 11was crashed into the World Trade Center's North Tower,followed by United Airlines Flight 175 which hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. Another group of hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m.

A fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93 crashednear Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m, after the passengers onboard engaged in a fight with the hijackers. Its ultimate target was thoughtto be either the United States Capitol or White House.

During the hijacking of the airplanes, the hijackers used weapons tostab and/or kill aircraft pilots, flight attendants and passengers.Reports from phone callers from the planes indicated that knives wereused by the hijackers to stab attendants and in at least one case,a passenger, during two of the hijackings.

Some passengers were able to make phone calls using the cabin airphone service and mobile phones,[and provide details, including that several hijackers were aboard each plane,that mace or other form of noxious chemical spray, such as tear gas orpepper spray was used, and that some people aboard had been stabbed.

The 9/11 Commission established that two of the hijackers had recentlypurchased Leatherman multi-function hand tools. A flight attendant onFlight 11, a passenger on Flight 175, and passengers on Flight 93 mentioned that the hijackers had bombs, but one of the passengers alsomentioned he thought the bombs were fake.

No traces of explosives werefound at the crash sites, and the 9/11 Commission believed the bombswere probably fake. On United Airlines Flight 93, black box recordings revealed that crewand passengers attempted to seize control of the plane from the hijackersafter learning through phone calls that similarly hijacked planes had beencrashed into buildings that morning.

According to the transcript of Flight 93's recorder, one of the hijackers gave the order to roll the planeonce it became evident that they would lose control of the plane to the passengers. Soon afterward, the aircraft crashed into a field nearShanksville in Stonycreek Township, Somerset County, Pennsylvania,at 10:03:11 a.m. local time (14:03:11 UTC).

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,organiser of the attacks, mentioned in a 2002 interview with Yosri Fouda,an al Jazeera journalist, that Flight 93's target was the United States Capitol, which was given the code name "the Faculty of Law".

Three buildings in the World Trade Center Complex collapsed due to structuralfailure on the day of the attack. The south tower (2 WTC) fell at approximately 9:59 a.m., after burning for 56 minutes in a fire caused by the impact of United Airlines Flight 175.

The north tower (1 WTC)collapsed at 10:28 a.m., after burning for approximately 102 minutes.When the north tower collapsed, debris heavily damaged the nearby World Trade Center (7 WTC) building. Its structural integrity wasfurther compromised by fires, which led to the crumbling of the eastpenthouse at 5:20 p.m. and to the complete collapse of the building at 5:21 p.m.

The attacks created widespread confusion among news organizations andair traffic controllers across the United States. All internationalcivilian air traffic was banned from landing on US soil for three days. Aircraft already in flight were either turned back or redirected to airportsin Canada or Mexico.

News sources aired unconfirmed and often contradictory reports throughout the day. One of the most prevalent of these reported thata car bomb had been detonated at the U.S. State Department's headquartersin Washington, D.C. Soon after reporting for the first time on thePentagon crash, some news media also briefly reported that a fire had brokenout on the National Mall.

Another report went out on the Associated Presswire, claiming that a Delta Air Lines airliner—Flight 1989—had been hijacked.This report, too, turned out to be in error; the plane was briefly thought torepresent a hijack risk, but it responded to controllers and landed safely inCleveland, Ohio.

Casualties Main article: Casualties of the September 11 attacks. There were a total of 2,995 deaths, including the 19 hijackers and2,976 victims. The victims were distributed as follows: 246 on the fourplanes (from which there were no survivors), 2,605 in New York City inthe towers and on the ground, and 125 at the Pentagon.

All the deaths in theattacks were civilians except for 55 military personnel killed at the Pentagon.
More than 90 countries lost citizens in the attacks on the World Trade Center.In 2007, the New York City medical examiner's office added Felicia Dunn-Jones to the official death toll from the September 11 attacks.

Dunn-Jones died five monthsafter 9/11 from a lung condition which was linked to exposure to dust during thecollapse of the World Trade Center.Leon Heyward, who died of lymphoma in 2008,was added to the official death toll in 2009.

NIST estimated that about 17,400 civilians were in the World Trade Center complex atthe time of the attacks, while turnstile counts from the Port Authority suggest that14,154 people were typically in the Twin Towers by 8:45 a.m.

The vast majority of peoplebelow the impact zone safely evacuated the buildings, along with 18 people who were in the impact zone in the south tower and a number above the impact zone who evidently used the one intact stairwell in the south tower. At least 1,366 people died who were ator above the floors of impact in the North Tower and at least 618 in the South Tower,where evacuation had begun before the second impact.

Thus over 90% of the workers and visitors who died in the Towers had been at or above impact. According to the Commission Report, hundreds were killed instantly by the impact,while the rest were trapped and died after tower collapse.

At least 200 people jumped to theirdeaths from the burning towers (as depicted in the photograph "The Falling Man"), landing onthe streets and rooftops of adjacent buildings hundreds of feet below. Some of the occupants of each tower above its point of impact made their way upward toward the roof in hope of helicopter rescue, but the roof access doors were locked.

No plan existed for helicopter rescues, and on September 11, the thick smoke and intense heat would have preventedhelicopters from conducting rescues. A total of 411 emergency workers who responded to the scene died as they attempted to rescue people and fight fires.

The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) lost 341 firefighters and 2FDNY paramedics.The New York City Police Department lost 23 officers. The Port Authority Police Departmentlost 37 officers,and 8 additional EMTs and paramedics from private EMS units were killed.

Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., an investment bank on the 101st–105th floors of One World Trade Center,lost 658 employees, considerably more than any other employer. Marsh Inc., located immediatelybelow Cantor Fitzgerald on floors 93–101 (the location of Flight 11's impact), lost 355 employees,and 175 employees of Aon Corporation were killed.

After New York, New Jersey was the hardest hit state,with the city of Hoboken sustaining the most deaths.
Weeks after the attack, the estimated death toll was over 6,000.The city was only able to identify remains for about 1,600 of the victims at the World Trade Center.

The medical examiner's office alsocollected "about 10,000 unidentified bone and tissue fragments that cannot be matched to thelist of the dead".Bone fragments were still being found in 2006 as workers were preparing to demolish the damaged Deutsche Bank Building.

Damage along with the 110-floor Twin Towers of the World Trade Center itself, numerous other buildingsat the World Trade Center site were destroyed or badly damaged, including 7 World Trade Center,6 World Trade Center, 5 World Trade Center, 4 World Trade Center, the Marriott World Trade Center(3 WTC), and the World Financial Center complex and St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.

The Pentagon damaged by fire and partly collapsed. The Deutsche Bank Building across Liberty Street from the World Trade Center complex waslater condemned due to the uninhabitable, toxic conditions inside the office tower, and isundergoing deconstruction.

The Borough of Manhattan Community College's Fiterman Hallat 30 West Broadway was also condemned due to extensive damage in the attacks, and is slatedfor deconstruction. Other neighboring buildings including 90 West Street and the Verizon Building suffered major damage,but have since been restored.

World Financial Center buildings, One Liberty Plaza,the Millenium Hilton, and 90 Church Street had moderate damage.They have since been restored. Communications equipment on top of the North Tower, including broadcast radio, television andtwo-way radio antenna towers, was also destroyed, but media stations were quickly able to reroutesignals and resume broadcasts.

In Arlington County, a portion of the Pentagon was severely damagedby fire and one section of the building collapsed. Rescue and recoveryMain article: Rescue and recovery effort after the September 11 attacksAn injured victim of the Pentagon attack is evacuated. The Fire Department of New York City (FDNY) quickly deployed 200 units (half of the department) to the site,whose efforts were supplemented by numerous off-duty firefighters and EMTs.

[The New York PoliceDepartment (NYPD) sent Emergency Service Units (ESU) and other police personnel, along with deployingits aviation unit.Once on the scene, the FDNY, NYPD, and Port Authority police did not coordinate efforts,and ended up performing redundant searches for civilians.

As conditions deteriorated, the NYPD aviation unit relayed information to police commanders,who issued orders for its personnel to evacuate the towers; most NYPD officers were able to safely evacuate before the buildings collapsed.

With separate command posts set up andincompatible radio communications between the agencies, warnings were not passed along to FDNY commanders. After the first tower collapsed, FDNY commanders did issue evacuation warnings, however, due totechnical difficulties with malfunctioning radio repeater systems, many firefighters never heard the evacuation orders.

9-1-1 dispatchers also received information from callers that was not passedalong to commanders on the scene. Within hours of the attack, a substantial search and rescueoperation was launched. After months of around-the-clock operations, the World Trade Center site was cleared by the end of May 2002.

Attackers and their motivationSee also: Responsibility for the September 11 attacks, Hijackers in the September 11 attacks, Trialsrelated to the September 11 attacks, and 20th hijacker within hours of the attacks, the FBI was able to determine the names and in many cases the personaldetails of the suspected pilots and hijackers.

Mohamed Atta's luggage, which did not makethe connection from his Portland flight onto Flight 11, contained papers that revealed the identityof all 19 hijackers (all men), and other important clues about their plans, motives, and backgrounds. On the day of the attacks, the National Security Agency intercepted communications that pointed to Osama bin Laden, as did German intelligence agencies.

On September 27, 2001, the FBI released photos of the 19 hijackers, along with information aboutthe possible nationalities and aliases of many. Fifteen of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia,two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon. Mohamed Atta was theringleader of the 19 hijackers.

According to Jerrold Post, a professor of psychology at GeorgeWashington University and former CIA officer, the hijackers were well-educated, mature adults,whose belief systems were fully formed.
The FBI investigation into the attacks, code named operation PENTTBOM, was the largest and mostcomplex investigation in the history of the FBI, involving over 7,000 special agents.

The United States government determined that al-Qaeda, headed by Osama bin Laden, bore responsibilityfor the attacks, with the FBI stating "evidence linking al-Qaeda and bin Laden to the attacks of September 11 is clear and irrefutable".

The Government of the United Kingdom reached the sameconclusion regarding al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's culpability for the 11 September attacks. Author Laurie Mylroie writing in the conservative political magazine The American Spectator in 2006argues that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his family are the primary architects of 9/11 and similar attacks,and that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's association with Osama bin Laden is secondary and that al-Qaeda's claimof responsibility for the attack is after the fact and opportunistic.

In an opposing point of view,former CIA officer Robert Baer, writing in Time magazine in 2007, asserts that George W. Bush Administration's publicizing of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's claims of responsibility for 9/11 and numerous other acts was amendacious attempt to claim that all of the significant actors in 9/11 had been caught.

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