P165 - Photo - unknown (CC) - 2001
The World Trade Center Towers Burning
This morning marks twenty-five years since September 11, 2001. Nobody in this room was alive. Everybody in this room lives in the country it made.
Yesterday's bet, settled
You bet on how many miles of barrier it took to seal off West Berlin. Answer: 96 — it wrapped all the way around; only 27 of those miles actually split the city.
March 2001, six months before — Wikimedia Commons.
The morning itself, seen from Brooklyn — Wikimedia Commons.
On the clear morning of September 11, 2001, two hijacked airliners struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the buildings burned before a stunned nation watching live. Within hours a third plane hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Nineteen hijackers linked to the terrorist network al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, killed nearly three thousand people in the deadliest attack on American soil. The towers, symbols of American economic power, collapsed entirely, transforming Lower Manhattan into a smoking ruin. The post-Cold-War decade of relative calm ended in a single morning. In response, the United States launched a 'war on terror,' invading Afghanistan within weeks and Iraq two years later, and building a vast new security and surveillance apparatus at home. The trade was specific: within six weeks Congress passed the Patriot Act, expanding the government's power to search records and monitor communications; airport security was federalized under a new agency, the TSA; a Department of Homeland Security was created; suspects were held without trial at Guantánamo Bay; and in 2013 Americans learned the NSA had been collecting their phone records in bulk. You have never boarded a plane, sent a text, or walked past a security camera in the country that existed before. Twenty-five years later, nearly all of it is still in place. It mattered because 9/11 reoriented American foreign policy, national security, and daily life for a generation, and redefined who and what Americans feared.
Make your bet
The Twin Towers looked like permanent fixtures of the skyline, as if they had always been there. Guess how many years the towers had actually stood on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Primary source - read it closely
“The most important failure was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.”
- The 9/11 Commission Report, Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004, ch. 11 (public domain U.S. government report). https://9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf
Your turn - work down the ladder
1. Check the reading. According to the reading, what did the United States launch in response to the 9/11 attacks?
2. Read the Commission's line carefully. Notice it names a 'failure of imagination,' not a lack of soldiers or weapons. The Commission names a ‘failure of imagination’ — not a lack of soldiers or weapons. What would it mean for a government to fail at imagination?
3. Go deeper. The reading lists what Americans traded for safety after the attacks — and most of it never went away. Twenty-five years later, was it a good trade? Explain.