# September 11 Attacks On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda operatives hijacked four commercial airliners. Two were flown into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, both of which collapsed; a third struck the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C.; and the fourth, United Flight 93, crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after passengers fought to retake the cockpit. Nearly 3,000 people were killed — the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor and the single most consequential event in modern American political history. For the vault, 9/11 is the hinge: the trauma that launched the [[War on Terror]], produced the [[Surveillance State]], birthed the [[Forever Wars]], and supplied the political cover for the [[Iraq War]] that followed. ## The Attack The plot was conceived by al-Qaeda and directed by [[Osama bin Laden]] from sanctuary in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as its operational architect. The hijackers — most of them Saudi nationals — had trained and organized partly inside the United States. The coordinated strike exposed catastrophic failures of imagination and information-sharing across the American intelligence community, gaps the later 9/11 Commission documented in detail and that became the rationale for a sweeping reorganization of the national-security state. ## The Immediate Response In the days after the attack, President [[George W. Bush]]'s approval rating soared above 85% as the country rallied. New York Mayor [[Rudy Giuliani]] became "America's Mayor" for his visible leadership amid the rubble. Within a month the United States invaded Afghanistan — the [[Afghanistan War]], launched to destroy al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban regime that sheltered it, and the start of what became America's longest war. At home, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act with almost no dissent, dramatically expanding surveillance and detention powers. ## The Long Shadow 9/11's deepest consequences were structural and lasting. It created the Department of Homeland Security, the largest federal reorganization since World War II (see [[Department of Homeland Security]]), and a permanent architecture of mass surveillance, secret detention, and drone warfare. The open-ended congressional [[War on Terror]] authorization became the legal engine for two decades of military action. Most fatefully, the [[Neoconservatism]] faction inside the Bush administration used the post-9/11 climate to pursue a long-held goal unrelated to the attack: the invasion of Iraq, sold on [[Weapons of Mass Destruction]] claims that did not survive scrutiny — the vault's central case of [[Manufactured Consent]]. ## The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary (September 11, 2026) The quarter-century mark was observed in two places at once, and the split was the story. **At Ground Zero**, the National September 11 Memorial held its usual ceremony: the reading of the names of the 2,977 people killed, with pauses at the moments of impact and collapse. All four living former presidents attended with their wives — [[Bill Clinton]] and [[Hillary Clinton]], [[George W. Bush]] and Laura Bush, [[Barack Obama]] and Michelle Obama, [[Joe Biden]] and Jill Biden. Vice President [[JD Vance]] attended for the administration. The ceremony added a **seventh moment of silence**, observed at **12:52 p.m. Eastern** at the close of the reading of the names, for the first responders, recovery workers and survivors who have since died of 9/11-related illnesses. The addition is **permanent**. The number it marks is the one that reframes the event: the World Trade Center Health Program counts **more than 9,000 deaths** from illnesses linked to the site — roughly three times the toll of the day itself. Twenty-five years on, the attack has killed more people in its aftermath than in its execution. **At the Pentagon**, President [[Donald Trump]] spoke at the separate commemoration there, and used it to fold the [[Iran War 2026]] into the anniversary. He saluted those who served in the war on terror and those "working right now to ensure the world's number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon." Defense Secretary [[Pete Hegseth]] was blunter: **"We're still sending terrorists where they belong, to hell, and tankers to the bottom of the ocean, where they belong."** Both framings were reported by *Stars and Stripes*, *The Hill*, MS NOW and OANN alike — the rare case where outlets across the spectrum described the same speech the same way and disagreed only about whether it was fitting. **Why he was at the Pentagon** became its own story. [[Maggie Haberman]], Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dana Rubinstein and Sally Goldenberg of the *[[New York Times]]* reported that Trump wanted to deliver a speech and that the Ground Zero organizers do not permit them — politicians have been barred from speaking at the World Trade Center ceremony **since 2012**, a nonpartisanship rule that predates his presidency. Trump attacked Haberman personally in response, calling her **"Maggot Hagerman... an unattractive person both inside and out,"** and demanded a retraction. The *Times* refused. His own rebuttal conceded the reporting's central fact — that politicians are not permitted to speak there — while disputing that it explained his absence. > [!note] What the vault takes from the split > The structural observation is not about attendance. It is that the [[War on Terror]] frame, which this page describes as the engine of two decades of military action, was still load-bearing at 25 years — reached for on the anniversary itself to justify a war against a state that had no part in the attacks. That is the same rhetorical move the [[Iraq War]] section above records, performed again by a different administration against a different country, in front of the memorial to the event being borrowed. ## Why It Matters For the vault, the September 11 attacks are the origin point of the modern security state and of the [[Forever Wars]] that the contemporary right now runs against. The trust the public extended to the government after 9/11 was spent on the [[Iraq War]] and the surveillance apparatus, and the betrayal of that trust — wars without end, intelligence that proved false, accountability that never came — is a wellspring of the anti-establishment, anti-"forever war" politics that reshaped the right. 9/11 explains both the bipartisan security consensus that followed and the realignment revolt that eventually turned against it. *See also: [[War on Terror]], [[War on Terror Timeline]], [[Afghanistan War]], [[Iraq War]], [[Osama bin Laden]], [[Forever Wars]], [[Iraqi History Hub]], [[Iran War 2026]], [[Pete Hegseth]], [[Maggie Haberman]], [[Republican Midterm Convention]]*