The story of the 9/11 attacks doesn't begin in 2001, but actually in 1993, February 26, 1993, to be exact, when the first attack on the World Trade Center occurred. It was executed by seven Middle-Eastern men, followers of a fiery radical Egyptian cleric, Omar Abdel-Rahman. And, the mastermind of the attack was Ramzi Yousef, who is actually the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was involved in many other planning, many other terrorist attacks, and of course, was one of the key mastermind of 9/11 attack. Yousef, hated the United States, hated Israel and was deeply upset about the plight of the Palestinian people. His plan was to plant the bomb In the basement, the parking garage of the north tower of the World Trade Center, and hope that, that explosion, to damage the foundation, would bring the North Tower toppling down and crash into the South Tower and damage other buildings. Well, just after noon on February 23, Yousef and a Jordanian colleague drove a rental truck that was filled with a 1300-pound nitrate bomb. And, they parked that van into the garage underneath the north tower. They set the fuse, they fled the scene and it was a tremendous, tremendous explosion. The power of the blast bore through concrete of four stories deep, down into the World Trade Center. It rocked the entire tower. The explosion immediately killed six people who were working in the vicinity of the basement garage. The smoke extended up to 90 floors of the North Tower and also entered into the South Tower. Over a thousand people were injured trying to evacuate because the smoke was so thick, people could not see through the stairwells where they were going. And, it was one of the most severe terrorist attacks on American soil that had ever occurred. Arrests were actually quickly made for this crime. And a key factor was that, soon afterwards, the FBI found a vehicle identification number on an axle for one of the rental cars. It was in the debris and rubble of this explosion. And, one of the bombers actually have returned to the Ryder rent-a-car agency to try to collect his $400 deposit on the truck, which he then said had been stolen. And that was the key piece of evidence that was able to link the truck with this terrorist cell located in New Jersey. And, the individuals were quickly rounded up. Unfortunately, Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind, had fled the country by then. He was later apprehended. And, the six of the seven individuals, who were the conspirators, were successfully prosecuted and are serving life sentences in United States jails. In some ways, the quick arrests and the ease, with which this plot was uncovered, may have given Americans and our government a false sense of security that these were just killers. Just wanton killers, demented individuals, maybe not even that smart that they were able to get caught that quickly, and not fully understanding that they were part of an ideological, political, long-term movement, which, it turns out, would one day come back to the towers to try to finish the job that had been started and not completed in 1993. And we turn to September 2001. Everyone who talks about 9/11 remarks that it was a beautiful day, and it just was. It was a beautiful late summer day in Downtown Manhattan. It happened to be Election Day in New York. It was a primary election to determine the candidates who were going to be running to replace Mayor Giuliani. Who knows? Maybe, the fact that was election day and people had to go to vote or some people went to vote meant that there weren't as many people working in the towers when the atrocities occurred. But, it was a normal work day. Much like today in Manhattan, you can see many of the tourists coming to the site. Millions of people were commuting into Manhattan from New Jersey from Long Island, from the different boroughs. They were taking trains, subways into Manhattan. Over 150,000 people commuted into lower Manhattan through the subway station, the world trade center site, that was underneath the towers. And on a normal workday, 50000 people would be working in the Twin Towers, and millions of New Yorkers traveling here by bus, by rail, by ferry. At 8:46 in the morning, a Boeing 767, which turned out to be American Flight 11, that had left from Logan Airport earlier that morning on its way to Los Angeles, came streaking down the Manhattan Skyline across Northern Manhattan where no planes of that size are ever supposed to be. And, it crashed into the 93rd to the 99th floors of the north tower. A huge fireball exploded. And indeed, a fireball of jet fuel fell down through the corridors of the towers, making explosions on some of the lower floors, making a huge explosion all the way down to the lobby and even going into the lower subway system. It was a tremendous conflagration. The smoke enveloped all the upper floors. It goes to 110 stories in the North Tower. And the exits, the stairwells, the elevators from the 92nd floor all the way to the 110th floor, where hundreds and hundreds of people were working, were cut off. There was no escape, it turns out. There was initial confusion in the media. Nobody knew exactly what had happened. At first, there was some thought that this was only a small plane, that maybe there were air traffic control problems, maybe it had been some sort of tragic accident. But the world's attention and certainly the media's attention and television were drawn to the World Trade Center in Downtown Manhattan. And then on 9:03, a short time after the first plane, on live television, a large commercial jetliner roared, this time across the Hudson Bay from the south crossing over the Statue of Liberty and crashing in to the south wall where the tower once stood. The South Tower, World Trade Center number two, once stood on this site. This plane crashed a little bit lower the 77th to the 85th floors. And when you saw the video which was captured on live television over and over again you recognize that, at the last second, the plane actually arched into toward the building. There was no doubt that it was an intentional act by the pilot to crash in to the building. There was no doubt that it was terrorism. And there was no doubt that America was now under attack. Two towers were on fire, huge conflagration, untold numbers of victims have been killed. And at that point nobody knew how many more planes had been hijacked, how long this was going to last. What else might happen? And then, just half an hour later, 9:37, reports come, there was no video, no live television that time, but reports come of a huge explosion at the Pentagon in Washington D.C. It quickly becomes clear that now a third plane, this plane was American Flight 77 that had taken off earlier that morning from Dulles Airport, had also been used as an intentional weapon of mass destruction. Now, both the center of U.S. capitalism, Downtown Manhattan and the World Trade Center, and then the headquarters of the most powerful technologically sophisticated military in the history of humankind had been successfully attacked. There have been a partial collapse of part of the west side of the Pentagon. Again, first responders, huge smoke, and untold number of victims. The fog of war was beginning to set in. A huge amount of misinformation were traveling over the airwaves as to what was happening, what was transpiring. People were evacuating the buildings, first responders rushing to the scenes. All over the country, now that the attacks were no longer confined to New York, nobody knew where the next attack was going to take place. Parents rushed to pick up their children from school. Other skyscrapers were evacuated all across the country. President Bush had been in Florida visiting an elementary school. He was rushed away from the scene. He did make a short statement. But then the president, for safety reasons and security, the Secret Service urged him to get on Air Force One. And he was out of sight. As you will read in the 9/11 Commission report about the events of that morning, the FAA, aviation authorities, and our military were scrambling to try to catch up with the events. Fighter jets were actually scrambled into the air but they didn't really know where to go, what to do, and they had unclear instructions about what to do even if they had found an airliner that might have been heading to another site. The borders of Canada and Mexico were closed and eventually all commercial airliners, hundreds and hundreds of planes that were in the air, were grounded to try to determine and stop any future attacks. Amidst all this chaos and uncertainty, then truly the unthinkable occurs, the South Tower, again, the tower that once stood in the ground right behind me, the column that was supporting the massive structure right where the tower had been hit, buckled. And the weight of the rest of the building began to collapse upon itself literally in seconds. The whole 110 stories of this building came cascading and crashing to the ground with all the materials, concrete, the glass, the metal, the fiery debris pulverizing itself into dust. And a huge dust cloud of this debris comes crashing down to the ground and funnels itself through blocks and blocks of Downtown Manhattan turning broad daylight into darkness and coating everything, people, vehicles, with a thick cloud of the type dust that nobody knew what it was or had ever seen before in their lives. For the past hour, since the first tower had been struck, there had been some hope that people were evacuating that maybe not that many people had been injured. But when that tower came crashing down, everyone knew it was certainly a moment of death for anyone who had still remained in that tower. No one knew how many. Later that day, Mayor Giuliani would famously say, that there were just too many to bear and the horror of that day was becoming deeper and deeper. In the midst of all this chaos as the magnitude of this tragedy was being absorbed, minutes later after the collapse of the tower, new reports come of the crash of another commercial airliner, this time in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. No one knew but everyone expected that this plane crash was connected, of course, with these three other attacks. We would learn later that a great drama had taken place on this flight which was United 93 that had taken off from Newark, New Jersey earlier that day. Passengers on that plane that were hit were able to communicate with their loved ones on the ground who told the passengers of the hijacks of the attacks at the World Trade Center. And these passengers decided to defend themselves, to try to regain control of the plane, to try to save their own lives, and then possibly to avert disaster on the ground. And we know from audiotapes that they were able to successfully storm the cockpit but, regrettably, they were not able to retake control of the airplane and it crashed to the ground 10:03 AM on September 11. Everyone on that plane died but who knows how many they saved. Who knows other buildings, probably in Washington DC, were saved by the heroic actions of the passengers on United Flight 93. Of course, we still don't know if this was over and what was next. Having seen the first tower, the South Tower collapse, everyone knew that it was inevitable; a big possibility that the North Tower too would buckle. And indeed that happened. I remember watching on TV and you see that the telecommunications equipment, the tower that stands into the sky above me where we stand on the North Tower begins to move. And then, again, the whole building begins to cascade, the entire 1,368 feet, down to the ground. The second plume of atomized debris, another cloud of dust, more screams, more sirens, and certainly more death taking place. Now the second South Tower has come to the ground. And, at that point, we did not know it but the atrocity, the tragedy, and the horror of that day had ended. The 9/11 attacks were actually over. I do want to recount just one other event that took place on this ground. And that was, three days later, President Bush came to New York came to the scene of the 9/11 attacks and his motorcade wended its way through Manhattan and came to the site where many of the rescue workers, the police, the firefighters, and others have been working around the clock for three days to maybe attempt to find survivors but also to begin the process of repairing New York City. And the firefighters and the police were crowded around the president. He climbed up on a terribly damaged fire truck and he put his arm around a New York City firefighter and he began to speak to the crowd. And one of the one of the first responders in the back, the megaphone wasn't working out well, he said, "We can't hear you". And then President Bush turned around and frankly he was giving a somewhat captive speech but he seemed to find his voice in that moment and he said, "Well I can hear you. And the rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked down these buildings, they're going to be hearing from all of us soon." Agree or disagree with the president said that day, in many ways that set the stage for the aftermath and the response to 9/11. And that is the story of this place. The attacks lasted 102 minutes. It was, in my view, the worst hour and a half in American history. And the reverberations from that hour and a half would be found here in the United States, here in New York City, and throughout the rest of the world for many many years to come.
