September 11, 2001. That day we all watched television in disbelief at what was happening before our eyes. A first plane, American Airlines Flight 11, had crashed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. No one could yet explain what had happened. Possible hypotheses quickly spread, but nobody wanted to imagine the most terrible of all: that it was a heinous attack. It was 8:46 in the morning in the US.
Chronology of the attack on the Twin Towers
9:03 in the morning. We were still recovering from that fright, when behind the television presenter’s back a second plane was seen arriving, United Airlines Flight 175, which rammed against the second of the twin towers. There was no longer any doubt. It was an attack. The madness and violence of extremism struck at the very heart of America, in New York, and at its most global symbol: the twin towers.
They were moments of anguish. To see people running from one side to another; of clouds of dust and soot that covered the city, of unwarranted horror. The news was happening taking, with every minute, an even more tragic turn. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington DC. It was American Airlines Flight 77. A fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It was United Airlines Flight 93.
On that plane, the passengers confronted the hijackers, and engaged in a fight with them to try to regain control of the device and try to avoid a new catastrophe. They already had news of the first attacks. But nothing could prevent the fatal outcome. Of course, they managed to avoid an even worse ending, as it crashed in an open field and failed to reach an unknown target. That heroic action was even made into a movie not even a year ago.
But meanwhile, both Towers were a huge burning torch. A torch that screamed to the sky for help. At 9.48m. Congress and the White House are evacuated. Minutes later it is President Bush who leaves Florida. And a little later, what everyone feared, happens. It was 9:59 a.m. on the morning of that fateful September 11, and the first of the towers, the South, collapses in a terrible crash. Just 29 minutes later it is the North that collapses, trapping hundreds of people.
There were 2,973 victims of that senseless attack. Even today, 24 remain unaccounted for or identified. The world was divided, and fear has been installed in almost every house as a result of the deadly terrorism spread by Al Qaeda. This new weapon that the use of commercial airplanes has become means that on each trip, all of us, without exception, are suspicious of whoever sits next to us, and has even served as an example for attacks by other terrorist groups such as what happened in Spain on March 11, 2003 in Madrid, a tragic memory for all Spaniards.
Many questions have remained since then and will remain, probably forever: about Bin Laden’s whereabouts, about how they managed to seize the planes, or why only one of those attacks has been convicted, or why even though there had already been received news at the White House on August 6, 2001, more than a month before 9/11, no remedy had been taken by extreme security measures.
Consequences of 9/11
We can say, without fear of being wrong, that 9/11 changed western society substantially. The world was never the same again and, as we have pointed out in the previous lines, the feeling of fear and insecurity became global. This was also reflected in the legislation and practices carried out by Western countries to try to protect themselves from fundamentalist terrorism. Many countries strengthened their laws against terrorism, as well as the conditions under which police actions and investigations of suspected terrorism were allowed.
As an example of how much the 9/11 attacks changed the collective mindset around the problem of terrorismBefore that date, only a few hundred terrorism-related arrests were made each year in the West, mostly in countries where terrorism was an endemic political evil, such as Spain or the IRA’s Ireland. However, as of that date, there are more than 100,000 legal actions related to terrorism per year in Western countries, a figure that continues to increase in the middle of 2016.
In the United States, the government system was also restructured to fight terrorism in the days after the attacks, implementing, among other measures, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the USA Patriot Act, which has been widely criticized for allegedly violating the privacy and fundamental rights of citizens, despite which, very important parts of it will continue to be active until 2019. The creation of the controversial Guantánamo penitentiary, established in 2002, is also closely related to the 9/11 attacks, as well as the creation of a continuous global surveillance state.
However, one of the most important consequences of 9/11 was the implementation by the United States of an increasingly aggressive foreign policy that led to various wars in the middle east. With the excuse of fighting the terrorists who had provoked the attacks in their own territorial and economic bases, less than a month after the attacks, on October 7, 2001, the war in afghanistanwith aerial bombardments on points of interest linked to the Taliban and the terrorist group Al Qaeda.
Less than two years later, in 2003, following the idea of the War on Terror initiated after the attack on the Twin Towers, the invasion of iraq and to overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The political-economic consequences of such wars continue to be experienced today, to which must be added thousands of deaths, several devastated countries, an enormous humanitarian crisis and a deep civil division in the occupied territories whose solution cannot yet be foreseen.
Finally, 9/11 also had major economic consequences. In the days following the tragedy, world stock markets experienced a long fall, a situation that the subsequent unstable international politics helped to prolong. Subsequent wars were also enormously costly to the United States and its allies in economic terms, as well as in lives. In the invasion of Afghanistan alone, the United States spent almost 500 billion dollars, while Britain, its biggest ally, spent £18bn. The figure increased even more with the war in Iraq, with nearly 800 billion dollars invested in it, according to figures from years prior to the departure of troops from the area.