The 9/11 Attacks

SEP 11 2001 · 12:00

The Statue of Liberty stands against the smoke rising from Lower Manhattan, 11 September 2001. Place: World Trade Center, Manhattan; the Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia; a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania Figures: Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda emir · the 19 hijackers · George W. Bush, US president · Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York · Lord George Robertson, NATO secretary-general invoking Article 5 · Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker of American 11 The Morning At 08:46 Eastern Time, American Airlines Flight 11 strikes the North Tower of the World Trade Center between the 93rd and 99th floors. At 09:03, United 175 strikes the South Tower. At 09:37, American 77 strikes the western face of the Pentagon. At 10:03, United 93, retaken in part by its passengers after they learn by air-phone what has happened to the other three aircraft, crashes into a field outside Shanksville. The South Tower collapses at 09:59; the North Tower at 10:28. By the time the dust clears that afternoon, 2,977 people are dead, plus the 19 hijackers; the casualties include citizens of more than 90 countries. The hijacking and crashing of four civil airliners into national-monument targets is, in physical terms, a small operation. Nineteen men with box-cutters, four aircraft, perhaps half a million dollars in operating costs. The asymmetry between cost of attack and scale of response will become the defining feature of the war that follows. Article 5 and a War Without an Enemy State On 12 September, the North Atlantic Council invokes Article 5 of the Washington Treaty for the first and (to date) only time in NATO's history: an armed attack on one member is to be treated as an armed attack on all. The collective-defense clause, drafted in 1949 against the Soviet Union, is being invoked over an attack by a non-state network headquartered in caves on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The Westphalian framework, in which legitimate war is conducted between sovereign states, has been asked to absorb a category it was not designed for. The Bush administration's response is the global war on terror: open-ended, conducted across multiple theatres, against a network rather than a state. Afghanistan is invaded in October 2001 because the Taliban regime is providing sanctuary; Iraq is invaded in March 2003 on grounds that prove false (see [[invasion-of-iraq-2003]]). The legal architecture (the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the 2002 Iraq AUMF, the Guantánamo detention regime, the targeted-killing drone program) treats the world as a single battlespace and sovereignty as a variable subject to security need. The pattern Westphalian war was designed to make rar Video: CBS News Radio coverage from the morning of 11 September 2001, introduced by Major Garrett. Live reports as the second plane strikes the South Tower and the towers fall.