September 11

11 Sep 2001

Tuesday morning. On 11 September 2001 nineteen men boarded four flights. The Commission found that they were al Qaeda’s, the network led by Osama bin Laden that “struck us on 9/11.” On American 11, out of Boston, flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney kept calling; Sweeney’s last words on her call were “Oh my God we are way too low.” At 8:46:40 it crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and at 9:03:11 United 175, also out of Boston, struck the South Tower.

11 Sep 2001

The towers fall. In the North Tower hundreds of civilians were killed instantly by the impact, and hundreds more remained alive but trapped. At 9:58:59 the South Tower collapsed in ten seconds, killing all civilians and emergency personnel inside, and others on the streets and in the concourse. The North Tower collapsed at 10:28:25, killing all civilians alive on its upper floors, an undetermined number below, and scores of first responders.

11 Sep 2001

The Pentagon. American 77 had left Washington Dulles for Los Angeles. At 9:37:46 it crashed into the Pentagon. All 64 people aboard were killed, and 125 people inside the building.

11 Sep 2001

United 93. United 93 took off from Newark at 8:42, and by phone its passengers and crew learned of the attacks in New York. Five calls described their plan to revolt, and, according to one call, they voted on whether to rush the hijackers. “Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye,” one caller said as the assault began at 9:57. With the passenger counterattack continuing, the plane crashed at 10:03:11 into an empty field at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 125 miles from Washington.

11 Sep 2001

The responders. Between 16,400 and 18,800 civilians were in the World Trade Center complex at 8:46, by NIST’s preliminary estimate. First responders assisted thousands of them in evacuating, and the Commission credits their efforts, with civilians’ help for each other, for the vast majority of those below the impact zone getting out. The Fire Department lost 343 people, the Port Authority police 37 and the New York police 23, among them the Fire Department’s Chief of Department and the Port Authority police superintendent.

11 Sep 2001

The dead. The Commission counted 2,973 deaths, the largest loss of life on U.S. soil from a hostile attack. They included the people on all four flights, workers in the towers and the Pentagon, and the responders. What follows is the Commission’s account of who planned it, what was known beforehand, and what is still disputed.

1996

The idea. The Commission’s account of these years rests on reports of interrogations that it did not conduct or control, and KSM says he refused to swear a formal oath to bin Laden. By that account, in mid-1996, at Tora Bora, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed put a menu of ideas for terrorist operations to Osama bin Laden, among them one using pilots to crash planes into buildings in the United States. Bin Laden gave the go-ahead, “apparently at Atef’s urging,” in late 1998 or early 1999.

Sep 2001

What it cost. The 19 operatives, the Commission found, were funded by al Qaeda, “either through wire transfers or cash provided by KSM.” It could not say where the money first came from: “the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money.” It found no credible evidence that anyone in the United States gave the hijackers substantial financial help, and no evidence that any foreign government or official supplied funding.

10 Sep 2001

Did anyone profit? Highly publicized allegations said someone traded on advance knowledge. The Commission agreed some unusual trading did occur, but found each trade had an innocuous explanation. A single U.S. institutional investor “with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda” bought 95 percent of the United Airlines put options of 6 September as part of a strategy that also included buying American Airlines shares. Much of the suspicious trading in American on 10 September traced to an options newsletter faxed to its subscribers on 9 September.

15 Jan 2000

Kuala Lumpur. Two of the five men who checked in for American 77 were Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. In January 2000 the CIA tracked Mihdhar, who held a U.S. visa, to Kuala Lumpur, where other men gathered with him. One of them, it learned, was Hazmi, who flew to Los Angeles on 15 January on the same flight as Mihdhar. The CIA did not ask the State Department to put either man on its watchlist.

10 Jul 2001

The Phoenix memo. On 10 July 2001 Ken Williams, an FBI agent in Phoenix, wrote to headquarters about an “inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest” at Arizona aviation schools. His four recommendations were not acted on, and headquarters managers did not see the memo until after 11 September. He told investigators it was not an alert about suicide pilots; he worried more about a bomb on a plane.

6 Aug 2001

The system was blinking red. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet told the Commission that was how the summer of 2001 looked to him. The Commission added that threat reports were unprecedented in number and severity but held few specifics and mostly pointed overseas, and that it could not say for certain whether they related to the attacks. The brief of 6 August, “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” was the 36th item that year on bin Laden or al Qaeda and the first about a possible attack in the United States. President Bush told the Commission it was historical in nature and that, had advisers told him of a cell in the United States, they would have moved to deal with it; the Commission found no sign of further discussion of that threat between him and his top advisers before 11 September.

15 Aug 2001

Moussaoui. On 15 August 2001 the FBI’s Minneapolis office opened a case on Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national who wanted to learn how to “take off and land” a Boeing 747. He was arrested on an immigration violation. Minneapolis wanted a special warrant to search his laptop, which required tying him to a “foreign power”; headquarters did not think what it had was good enough. On 13 September, after the attacks, Britain passed on intelligence that he had attended an al Qaeda training camp, which the Commission wrote would almost certainly have drawn intense, high-level attention had it been available in late August.

28 Aug 2001

Someday someone will die. By 21 August 2001 an FBI analyst on loan to the CIA had found the old cables. Mihdhar and Hazmi went on the watchlist on 24 August, and a lead marked “Routine” was sent to the FBI’s New York office on 28 August. A Cole case agent was told “the wall” barred him from the search, and answered that “someday someone will die.” The Commission found that everyone involved was confused about the rules, and that with more resources and a different approach the two men “might have been found,” though investigators “would have needed luck as well as skill.”

Jul 2004

The Commission. Congress and the President created the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States in Public Law 107-306 of 27 November 2002, with Thomas Kean as chair and Lee Hamilton as vice chair. Before judging, its report asked whether the insights that seem apparent now “would really have been meaningful at the time, given the limits of what people then could reasonably have known or done.” Its report, in July 2004, named four kinds of failure: in imagination, policy, capabilities and management.

1 Feb 2000

Two men in California. Hazmi and Mihdhar reached Los Angeles in January 2000 and San Diego by 4 February. On 1 February Omar al-Bayoumi met them in a Culver City restaurant and offered to help; he found them an apartment, co-signed the lease and advanced a deposit they repaid on the spot, but, the Commission wrote, never gave them money. It allowed that he may have “dissembled about some aspects of his story,” but saw “no credible evidence” that he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremists, and found no evidence that Fahad al-Thumairy, an imam and accredited Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles, helped the two men, though he was “a logical person to consider.”

Jul 2004

The Saudi question. The Commission wrote that Saudi Arabia had long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding. It found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials individually funded al Qaeda, but said this did not exclude “the likelihood” that charities with significant government sponsorship diverted funds, and that charitable giving in Saudi Arabia was subject to very limited oversight. Its staff added that some individual donors knew where their money was going and others did not.

15 Jul 2016

The twenty-eight pages. After an executive branch classification review, Part Four of Congress’s 2002 Joint Inquiry report was withheld in full until 15 July 2016.

15 Jul 2016

The released pages. Its released pages concern the finding that some hijackers received support from individuals who “may be connected to the Saudi Government”: they say this could suggest, as a redacted item of 2 July 2002 put it, “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists with the Saudi Government,” and that further investigation “could reveal legitimate, and innocent, explanations.” The inquiry made no final determination on the reliability of the information; Kean and Hamilton said the pages rested almost entirely on raw, unvetted material, and CBS reported that later investigations found no evidence that the Saudi government or senior officials knowingly supported the attackers, while some critics say the Commission failed to run down every Saudi lead. The Saudi embassy said neither the government, nor senior officials, nor “any person acting on behalf of the Saudi government” gave any support.

28 Sep 2016

The law. On 23 September 2016 President Obama vetoed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would let families sue foreign governments in U.S. courts. His message said he had deep sympathy for the families and that the bill “would be detrimental to U.S. national interests.” On 28 September the Senate overrode the veto 97 to 1 and the House 348 to 77, the first override of his presidency.

7 Oct 2026

The suit. Families first sued in 2003. On 28 August 2025 Judge George Daniels refused to dismiss the case, ruling that the families had given “reasonable evidence” that Omar al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy were sent by their government to help the hijackers. The judge wrote that one of al-Thumairy’s bank accounts received significant funds from a senior member of the Saudi cabinet, which al-Thumairy says was for mosque expenses; al-Bayoumi denies being co-opted by Saudi intelligence; Saudi Arabia denies the allegations and calls itself “a sworn enemy of Al Qaeda.” An appeals court heard Saudi Arabia’s immunity argument on 7 October 2026; lawyers expect no ruling before early 2027.

17 Sep 2001

A hoax. The U.S. State Department lists among anti-Semitic conspiracy theories a false claim: that 4,000 Jews or Israelis who worked at the World Trade Center were warned and stayed home on 11 September. It says the figure “apparently came from” a Jerusalem Post article of 12 September 2001 headed “Hundreds of Israelis missing in World Trade Center attack,” which reported that Israel’s Foreign Ministry had names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, “in other words, in New York City and Washington, D.C.” The first known appearance of the claim was on Al-Manar on 17 September. The report records a further false version, that Mossad warned Jews at the towers, and Syria’s ambassador to Iran repeating the claim at a conference on 24 October 2001.

24 Oct 2001

Shown false. The department’s answer is that there was “no mass absence of any group of people at the World Trade Center.” Some anti-Israel media outlets also suggested that Israelis held after the attacks, among them five arrested in New Jersey, knew beforehand; the Forward reported in March 2002 that its sources said their release showed they were “cleared of any suspicion that they had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks.” The Commission counted 2,973 dead, and the State report adds that funerals for World Trade Center victims were held at synagogues and temples: Jewish people were among the dead.