Six on History: 9/11
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- 1) 9/11 Timeline: Three Hours That Changed Everything, Visual Capitalist
"For Americans and people watching around the world, September 11, 2001, is a day that will never be forgotten.
Within three hours, New York’s tallest buildings were reduced to rubble, and the Pentagon—the nerve center of the American armed forces—was burning and partially collapsed. Thousands of civilians had lost their lives and were seriously injured, and the entire country was in collective shock, still trying to make sense of how a coordinated act of terrorism of that magnitude was allowed to take place on American soil.
In the 20 years since 9/11, the events that occurred that morning have been analyzed in-depth from a thousand different angles. Even though the attacks took place in the era just before mobile phones had viable cameras, there are countless images and videos of the event. As well, we now have the 9/11 Commission Report, which compiles interviews from over 1,200 people in 10 countries, and draws upon two and a half million pages of documents to present its findings.
For many people younger than Generation X, 9/11 is a feeling—a grim milestone from their youth—but the details are likely more fuzzy. The timeline visualization above is a high-level record of what happened that morning during the three hours when everything changed.
A Chronology of TerrorIn its most simple form, the 9/11 attacks can be described as a coordinated hijacking of four commercial airplanes, which were then used to fly into high profile targets in New York City and Washington, DC. Here is a summary of the planes involved in the incident:
These four flights play a central role in what unfolded that morning. In the early hours of September 11, 2001, a collection of 19 would-be hijackers made their way through security at airports in Boston, Newark, and Washington, DC.
Our three-hour timeline begins just before 8am, as the first plane involved in the attack leaves the tarmac just outside of Boston. (In situations where the exact time isn’t known, a range is given.) ... "
2) 9/11 At 20: A Week Of Reflection, Responsible StatecraftResponsible Statecraft looks at media complicity in the wars, the triumph and tragedy of whistleblowers, the expanded security state, havoc wrought on the Middle East, and more."In addition to all of the great work on Responsible Statecraft, please don’t miss our special series, 9/11 at 20: A Week of Reflection, where each day beginning today, September 6 through the September 11 anniversary we are showcasing articles on the impact of the attacks and the ensuing Global War on Terror on American society and the world at-large.
Included in this exclusive coverage is whistleblower Tom Drake, who was the first American after 9/11 charged under the Espionage Act for blowing the whistle on the Bush administration’s illegal surveillance programs; Rami Khouri on the catastrophic impact of the GWOT on the Middle East; Paul Pillar on how the intelligence community was transformed by the attacks; and myself, writing on the mainstream media’s complicity in the run-up to the war in Iraq and throughout the last two decades of overseas interventions. We’ll also be featuring essays from Christopher Coyne & Abigail Hall, Stephen Miles, and Quincy Institute president Andrew Bacevich.
As we continue to feature principled reporting and analysis that pushes back on the status quo approach to foreign policy and national security, it is important to remember how we got here and how much more needs to be done to smash through the Washington echo chamber. The 9/11 attacks have a significant bearing on that journey today."How presidents used the 2001 AUMF to justify wars unrelated to 9/11How 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ tore the Arab world apartCongress’s blank check helped launched conflicts, many currently ongoing, that have nothing to do with the terrorist attacks.
I blew the whistle on my government after 9/11 but fear it did not matterThe seeds of destruction were already planted with prior decades of colonialism propping up corrupt, weak governments.
The first American charged under the Espionage Act after the attacks asks whether empire has permanently replaced the republic.
by Thomas DrakeIntelligence reorganization in the wake of 9/11 didn’t make us any safer9/11 militarized law enforcement and made every American a suspectIf anything, bureaucratic and physical distance increased between agencies and lines became blurrier.
While a country grieved, a surveillance state bloomed and began eating away at our basic Constitutional liberties.
3) The world 9/11 created: What if the U.S. hadnot invaded Iraq?, Washington Post"There’s a scene in the 2014 film “American Sniper” that sums up the country’s post-9/11 war lust. Chris Kyle, the late U.S. Navy SEAL played by Bradley Cooper, watches a newscast of the twin towers crumbling before his eyes. The camera fixes on Kyle’s steely yet stunned face as he holds his shaken wife, before cutting to an image of him in full military gear, glaring through the scope of his sniper rifle in the middle of an Iraqi town. (He goes on to gun down a woman aiding Iraqi insurgents.)
The film, which some critics panned as proto-fascist agitprop, spends no time interrogating this implied connection between the events of 9/11 and the American decision to “preemptively” invade Iraq less than two years later to topple the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Neither did much of the American public or political establishment that got swept up in the George W. Bush administration’s rush to punish “evil-doers.” A Washington Post poll in September 2003 found that close to 7 in 10 Americans believed that it was at least “likely” that Hussein was directly involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
But what if the United States had opted against invading Iraq? The decision to oust Hussein, even more so than the invasion of Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, was an unprovoked war of choice that, on one hand, sealed off a range of other policy options available to Washington’s strategists and, on the other, set in motion events that fundamentally altered the region. It’s impossible to unwind what the Bush administration unleashed, but indulge us at Today’s WorldView as we puzzle through just a few elements of this counterfactual proposition.That, of course, proved to be preposterous, as was much of the case Bush and his allies made about the imminent threat posed by the Iraqi regime’s phantom weapons of mass destruction.
Animated by a neoconservative zeal to oust enemy regimes and wield American might to make right — and unhindered by the bulk of the Washington press corps — the Bush administration plunged the United States and its coalition partners into a war and eventual occupation that would reshape the political map of the Middle East, distract from America’s parallel intervention in Afghanistan and provoke new cycles of chaos and violence.The first couple of years after 9/11 marked “an era where the United States made major strategic errors,” Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, told Today’s WorldView. “Its vision was clouded by anger and revenge.”
First and foremost, there’s the Iraqi death toll. The Watson Institute at Brown University calculates that 184,382 to 207,156 Iraqi civilians were directly killed in war-related violence between the start of the American invasion in March 2003 through October 2019. But the researchers suggest the real figure may well be several times higher.
Even considering Hussein’s own long record of brutality, it is difficult to envision a future of greater suffering for the Iraqi people had the United States not swept him from power, argued Sinan Antoon, a New York-based Iraqi poet and author.
“No matter what — and I say this as someone who was opposed to Saddam’s regime since childhood and wrote his first novel about life under dictatorship — had the regime remained in power, tens of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive today, and children in Fallujah would not be born with congenital defects every day,” Antoon told Today’s WorldView, alluding to the impact of U.S. forces allegedly using rounds of depleted uranium in their battles across Iraq.Antoon added that we also would not have seen the rise of the Islamic State had the United States not invaded — a conviction shared by former president Barack Obama and echoed by myriad experts. “In the near term, the Iraqi political order probably would not have collapsed and created a void that nonstate or quasi-state actors could fill,” wrote international relations scholars Hal Brands and Peter Feaver in a 2017 study.“The Sunni-Shia cleavage that has made Iraq so difficult to govern still would have been present,” they continued, “but without the violence, political chaos and Sunni marginalization of the post-invasion period, that cleavage would have remained in a less combustible state, and terrorist groups such as [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and [the Islamic State] would not have found such fertile ground for recruiting.”
Other paths were possible. In 2002, Shibley Telhami, a veteran pollster affiliated with the Brookings Institution and a professor at the University of Maryland, was part of a group of Middle East scholars based in the United States who opposed the Bush administration’s drumbeat to war in Iraq.
“Bush had a chance to build global coalitions, strengthen international norms and institutions, focus on the threat from al-Qaeda, reshape relations in the Gulf region and use domestic and international support to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which, before 9/11, was the central grievance against the United States in the Middle East,” Telhami told Today’s WorldView.
Instead, he added, “Bush chose a policy of unilateralism,” pursuing a war that ravaged the Middle Eastern country, stoked sectarian violence and extremist militancy and “ended the balance of power between Iran and Iraq.” Iran’s gain from seeing its longtime foe fall in Baghdad, in turn, would reset the geopolitical calculations of Gulf Arab states, which became “so insecure that they embarked on destabilizing policies of their own, including the Yemen war,” said Telhami.In 2003, the Iraqi regime still faced asphyxiating international sanctions. Had those eventually weakened — various countries apart from the United States were eager to bring Iraq out from the cold — the country’s youths would have been better linked to the world and an entrenched regime could have faced its own Arab Spring uprising.Rasha al-Aqeedi of the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a Washington think tank, suggests an “Iraqi spring” would still have been brutally put down by the country’s Baathist government. “Saddam would have passed away and [his son] Qusay would have become president — an Iraqi version of [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad, basically,” she told Today’s WorldView, imagining a milder end for the Iraqi dictator who was hanged in 2006. The status quo in Baghdad would have been “as stable as an authoritarian Baathist state can be.”
Alternatively, there could have been a steady internal unraveling, with the United States in a stronger position to support democratic and economic development, Amy Hawthorne, research director at the Project on Middle East Democracy, told Today’s WorldView. “Iraq, under punishing international sanctions and totalitarian rule for another decade, would have become a failed state, with parts of the south and Iraqi Kurdistan falling outside Saddam’s control.”
Instead, by 2007, the United States was compelled to deploy a “surge” of its troops to combat an Iraqi insurgency it would never quite quell. For multiple reasons, from feckless leadership to sectarian enmities, the government that the United States helped prop up in Baghdad would make a catalogue of its own mistakes. The occupation swiftly became a parable for American blundering and hubris.
“The U.S. was barely keeping its head above water during the surge,” Nasr said. “The aura of its power was gone.”
4) THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 9/11 ATTACKS IS COMING-UP – HERE ARE TEACHING & LEARNING RESOURCES, Larry Ferlazzo's Blog"The anniversary of the terrorist attacks that took place on 9/11 is coming-up.
You might be interested in The Best Sites To Help Teach About 9/11.
RELATEDThe Anniversary Of 9/11 Is Coming Up - Here Are Teaching Resources September 4, 2018 in "social studies"Even More On 9/11Here are several more additions to The Best Sites To Help Teach About 9/11: Marking Sept. 11 Around the World is a Wall Street Journal slideshow. 8th Anniversary of 9/11 Terrorist Attacks is a New York Times slideshow. Remembering September 11th is a series of photos from the Boston Globe's…September 11, 2009In "social studies"
5) Florida’s 9/11 terror cell: 20 years later, questions linger about Saudi connection, Miami Herald"Before they executed the deadliest terrorist attacks in American history, most of the 9/11 hijackers spent months unsuspected and undetected in Florida, plotting to commandeer jetliners packed with passengers and steer them like missiles into landmark buildings.
They trained on flight simulators in Miami, hung out at an oyster bar on Hollywood’s Young Circle and lived in a tourist hotel off A1A in Deerfield Beach, roaming many haunts across South Florida.
In the years since, investigators have detailed the Islamic extremists’ movements through sales receipts, rental agreements and countless interviews with people who unwittingly interacted with them before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and in an open field in Pennsylvania.
Yet 20 years later, despite seemingly exhaustive probes by Congress, the 9/11 Commission, the 9/11 Review Commission and the FBI, murky mysteries remain about the al-Qaida terror cell’s operations. The first puzzle piece is in Sarasota, where at least one FBI report found that 9/11 plot leader Mohamed Atta and two other hijackers visited the gated community of a Saudi Arabian family, who hurriedly left their home just two weeks before the attacks. The second piece is across the county and suggests that two more cell members in Southern California may have been assisted by government employees of Saudi Arabia, home country of 15 of the 19 men who died in the suicide mission.
Both lingering mysteries were unearthed more than a decade after the attacks — largely because of the reporting and public-records battles waged by one investigative reporter in Fort Lauderdale, Dan Christensen. His work raised questions also pursued by former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, who accused the U.S. government of withholding critical information from the joint inquiry panel he oversaw during the first year after the attacks.
The suspicions of Graham and others have been fueled by the government’s fight to keep thousands of classified documents secret for years and by contradictory FBI statements. In Sarasota, for instance, Christensen’s push for records uncovered an FBI agent’s declassified report compiled in the year after the attacks, claiming “many connections” between the hijackers and the Saudi family. The FBI in congressional and 9/11 commission reports would later insist there were none.
Some questions amount to basic detective work: Did investigators unravel the whole plot or did some co-conspirators evade justice? But the bigger ones are complicated and could have profound political implications. Is there some still-classified clue in either Sarasota or Southern California that could point to support for the attackers from powerful forces in Saudi Arabia, a critical American ally in the Middle East with vast oil reserves and investments in the United States?
“This was 20 years ago and the events are still with us today,” said Christensen, editor of the Florida Bulldog, an online news site that first disclosed the possible Sarasota and Southern California links. The Miami Herald also published his initial 2011 story on the Sarasota family and more than a dozen others on the 9/11 probe over the years. “There is so much more. All of us want to know what happened. The FBI is hiding that from us, and I don’t think they have the authority to do that.”
There is also still an important group of people deeply vested in getting answers. In a New York federal court, thousands of families of the 9/11 victims continue to press a long-running civil case against the Saudi government, the royal family, and their affiliated banks and charities. For years, the 9/11 relatives were stymied by a U.S. sovereign immunity law protecting the Saudi government, a traditional U.S. ally that the families argue in court records provided financial aid to some of the terrorist suspects.The Saudi government has long denied any connection to the 9/11 attacks. Its embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request from the Herald for comment but a spokesman did address the questions earlier this year.They won one key victory in 2016 when, over the objections of the Obama administration, Congress passed a law giving the families the right to sue the Saudi government in federal court.
Last week, President Joe Biden gave them another potentially big win. Biden, who has been under pressure from the 9/11 victims’ families to disclose still-secret FBI records and had made a campaign pledge of transparency, ordered the Justice Department to review, declassify and release them over the next six months.
“For them, it was not only a national and international tragedy,” Biden said. “It was a personal devastation.“
“Saudi Arabia is and has always been a close and critical ally of the U.S. in the fight against terrorism,” Fahad Nazer, a spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, told the New York Times Magazine. “Any suggestion that Saudi Arabia aided the 9/11 plot was rejected by the 9/11 commission in 2004, by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. in 2005, and by a second independent commission in 2015.”
The FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. also said the bureau “still stands by our original findings [of no Saudi family connection in the Sarasota probe] as reported to the 9/11 Commission and [Congress’] Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”
The FBI’s public affairs office, however, declined to comment about possible connections between two of the 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego and Saudi government employees.
Back in 2004 — long before Christensen detailed a previously unreported search by the FBI and local law enforcement at the abandoned Sarasota house — the 9/11 Commission had dismissed any direct Saudi government tie, reporting that “it does not appear that any government other than the Taliban [in Afghanistan] financially supported al-Qaida before 9/11, although some governments may have contained al-Qaida sympathizers who turned a blind eye to al-Qaida’s fund-raising activities.”
“Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al-Qaida funding, but we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization. (This conclusion does not exclude the likelihood that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship diverted funds to al-Qaida.)”
Within days, as a shocked country braced for possible future attacks, federal investigators disclosed details of the 9/11 hijackers’ movements and put names and faces to the terrorists, appealing to the public for leads. It was a massive hunt not just to round up this cell but uncover others.Even now, despite apparent circumstantial evidence in the Sarasota and Southern California probes, there is no smoking gun to counter those conclusions. The loose ends could amount to little. The FBI and Justice Department leaders over the years may simply be protecting turf or pushing back against outside critics.
But Tom Julin, a Miami attorney who specializes in First Amendment law and represented the Florida Bulldog in its public records lawsuits against the Justice Department and FBI, said the changing official stories and continuing revelations from declassified federal documents have long flamed questions about the Saudis’ role.
“What happened in Sarasota still remains a mystery,” Julin told the Herald. “There are inconsistencies in what the FBI says publicly and their official investigative reports.”
CONNECTING THE DOTSAlthough the horrific attacks unfolded hundreds of miles away, it was quickly clear that Florida had been the main staging area for the plotters — the transient nature of its population providing perfect cover.
Mohamed Atta, the ringleader who would become the grim face of terrorism, trained along with another terrorist named Marwan al-Shehhi, first at Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice in July 2000. Four months later, they practiced on a Boeing 727 simulator at an Opa-locka aviation school.
The following spring, Atta and many in the cell began gathering in South Florida, living in places such as Hollywood, Coral Springs, Deerfield Beach, Delray Beach and Vero Beach. As many as 14 of the 19 hijackers spent time in South Florida in the months before 9/11, often staying in motels and unassuming short-term rental apartments. Some even obtained valid Florida driver’s licenses.
They raised little alarm among those who encountered them. Infamously, Atta and al-Shehhi drank at Shuckums, a raw bar on Hollywood’s Harrison Street, three nights before the attacks. They haggled with staff over a $48 tab but ultimately left. Despite their supposedly strict Islamic faith, investigators would find that several of the hijackers frequented the Pink Pony strip club in Daytona Beach.In another example, Jarrah tried enrolling an overseas associate, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, into the aviation school in Venice. Bin al-Shibh even wired tuition money to the school. But three times, he was denied a visa to the United States. Investigators believe bin al-Shibh, a key organizer of the attacks, would have been the 20th hijacker had he been allowed into the United States. He was later captured and is still awaiting trial while being held at the U.S. detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.One hijacker, Ziad Jarrahi, rented an apartment in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea and joined a gym in Dania Beach. The stunned owner of one flight school in Venice recalled Jarrah as an easygoing young man, model student and a “super kid.”
Atta and al-Shehhi flew the American Airlines and United Airlines planes that respectively crashed into the World Trade Center’s North and South Towers, while Jarrah was at the controls of the United Airlines jetliner that crashed in Pennsylvania.
After the terror attacks, FBI agents swarmed South Florida, finding a trail of clues that, in retrospect, hinted at the terror to come and missed chances to stop the deadly plot.
One of the hijackers, Saeed al-Ghamdi, was questioned at length when he and another hijacker arrived at Orlando International Airport from London in June 2001. The reason: inspectors noted he had no return ticket, and they suspected he wanted to stay in the United States illegally. Still, al-Ghamdi was allowed to enter the country.
And perhaps most haunting: two days before the terrorist attacks, al-Shehhi and another hijacker checked out of The Panther Motel in Deerfield Beach. The items they left behind in Room 12: Boeing 757 manuals, flight maps, a martial arts book and a box cutter.
SARASOTA CONNECTIONInvestigators pulled many threads in the Florida web of deception. The curious departure of that Sarasota family before the 9/11 attacks was one of them. But that would not become public until a decade later, when Christensen — tipped to the mystery by Anthony Summers, co-author of The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden — found sources who outlined seemingly troubling details.
Abdulazzi al-Hijji and his wife, Anoud, and some small children lived in the upscale gated community of Prestancia in a three-bedroom home owned by Anoud’s father, Esam Ghazzawi, an interior decorator and financier who owned several properties in the United States. His wife, Deborah, was also listed as the owner.
Two weeks before the terrorist attacks, the family vanished, met up with Anoud’s father in Virginia and together they flew to Saudi Arabia. They had apparently left in a hurry, according to a senior administrator and security officer at Prestancia. After the attacks, the property’s security officer, also an adviser to the Sarasota Sheriff’s Office, had a gut feeling about the family’s sudden departure. Another Prestancia neighbor also sensed something suspicious and contacted the FBI.A team of agents soon descended on 4224 Escondito Circle.Prestancia’s security officer, along with a counter-terrorism officer, described what the family left behind: mail on the table, dirty diapers in one of the bathrooms, clothes hanging in the closets, a computer in the master bedroom, an open empty safe, and a full refrigerator. Fancy furniture was in place. And there were toys in the pool, which was still running. The family also abandoned three vehicles, including a brand-new Chrysler PT Cruiser, in the garage and driveway.
The counter-terrorism officer, who did not disclose his name to the Bulldog, said FBI agents made disturbing discoveries: Phone statements and the Prestancia gate records linked the house on Escondito Circle to some of the hijackers, including Atta, the reputed 9/11 ringleader.
Atta and two other hijackers had lived in Venice — just 10 miles from the house — for much of the year before 9/11. Atta and al-Shehhi, had been students at nearby Huffman Aviation. A block away, at Florida Flight Training, accomplice Jarrah had also been taking flying lessons. All three obtained their pilot licenses and spent much of their time traveling the state.
Agents were able to track their calls based on dates, times and length of conversations; they dated back more than a year and lined up with the known suspects. The links were not only to Atta and the two others who took flight lessons in Venice, the counter-terrorism officer said, but to 11 other terrorist suspects, including Waleed al-Shehri, one of the men who flew with Atta on the first plane to strike the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
The Prestancia community’s gate records, Christensen reported, were also illuminating.
People who arrived by car had to give their names and the address they were visiting. Gate staff would sometimes ask to see a driver’s license and note the name. License plates were photographed. The vehicle and name information on Atta and Jarrah fit that of drivers entering Prestancia on their way to visit the home at 4224 Escondito Circle, the Bulldog reported.
The Justice Department didn’t comment until days after Christensen’s story ran in the Miami Herald. A statement from the agent in charge of the FBI’s Tampa field office said the Saudi family had been interviewed and “there was no connection found to the 9/11 plot.” The FBI statement also said the agency had provided all the information in the Sarasota probe to a congressional joint inquiry.
That was news to Graham, co-chair of the congressional joint panel’s initial inquiry into 9/11. He had long complained about stonewalling from the FBI, which along with other intelligence agencies had been under intense scrutiny after missing the signals of a looming terrorist strike.
“Nobody I’ve spoken with from the joint inquiry says we got any information on this,” Graham said at the time. “It’s total B.S. It’s the same thing we’ve been getting from the FBI for the past 10 years.”
The FBI’s own records would soon contradict that flat dismissal.
In April 2013, after a lawsuit filed by the Florida Bulldog, the FBI released a summary report of the agency’s Sarasota investigation — even redacted, it echoed Christensen’s initial story highlighting connections between the Saudi family and a few of the 9/11 hijackers. The Bulldog published a follow-up.
“Further investigation of the [name deleted] family revealed many connections between the [name deleted] and individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001,” an FBI agent’s April 2002 report stated.
The report did not identify those individuals but depicted two of them as students enrolled at the nearby Venice airport flight school, Huffman Aviation, where two of the 9/11 hijackers trained: Atta and al-Shehhi. The third person was described as living with the students who attended the flight school.
Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack, is shown in this photo released Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001, in a State of Florida Division of Motor Vehicles photograph. He was among 14 of 19 terrorist who spent months in Florida before the hijackings. APTwo years later in 2015, however, the FBI — in a 128-page 9/11 Review Commission report — again threw water on any Sarasota link, with the unusual argument of blaming a “poorly written” report by one of its own FBI agents that was “wholly unsubstantiated.”
The report, titled “The FBI: Protecting the Homeland in the 21st Century,” produced with assistance from the FBI, said the agent’s finding of “many connections” between the 9/11 hijackers and the Saudi family was not confirmed.
“After further investigation, the FBI determined that the statements in the [agent’s summary] were incorrect,” according to the Review Commission’s report issued by former Attorney General Ed Meese and two others. “The FBI found no evidence of contact between the hijackers and the [Saudi] family“ after questioning witnesses, including “all of the relevant family members” and “local individuals who claimed to have, or the FBI believed might have, pertinent information.”
No details on the family members were provided or an explanation given for why they had fled.
That conclusion never satisfied Graham, who was unavailable to comment for this story.
At the time, Graham pointed to the U.S. government’s fragile alliance with the Middle Eastern country as an underlying factor for the secrecy. He said he was “deeply disturbed” by the George W. Bush administration’s redaction of the final 28-page chapter in the joint inquiry’s report, which was kept secret for “national security” reasons. Graham, who retired from the Senate in 2005, had read the blanked-out classified information.
When asked whether he believed the Saudi government or any of its employees and affiliates supported the hijackers while they were in the United States, Graham told CBS 60 Minutes in April 2016: “Substantially.”
Three months after Graham’s 60 Minutes appearance and under pressure from the 9/11 relatives, the Obama administration declassified the final chapter of the joint inquiry’s report and Congress released it.
The document did not shed any new light on the Florida operations or reach a conclusion on any Saudi complicity. But it opened a wider path of inquiry. It named Saudi government employees and associates who knew two 9/11 hijackers in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas after they arrived in 2000 and helped them get apartments, open bank accounts and connect with mosques. The document said information from FBI sources suggested at least two people who assisted the hijackers may have been Saudi intelligence officers.
“The information in the 28 pages reinforces the belief that the 19 hijackers — most of whom spoke little English, had limited education and had never before visited the United States — did not act alone in perpetrating the sophisticated 9/11 plot,” Graham said in a statement after its release. “It suggests a strong linkage between those terrorists and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Saudi charities, and other Saudi stakeholders. The American people should be concerned about these links.”
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LINKAt the time, the Bulldog’s Christensen was also digging deeper into the California angle. As early as 2013, he had quoted Graham that the Sarasota incident suggested a broader Saudi support network for the cell — citing a “common outline” with what occurred in San Diego with Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the five Saudi hijackers aboard the American Airlines jet flown into the Pentagon.
A footnote in the 9/11 Review Commission’s report piqued his curiosity about how Saudis with government ties may have helped both those men in the year before the terrorist attacks. In 2015, the Florida Bulldog sued the Justice Department and FBI again.
The following year, the U.S. government released a heavily redacted but still-revealing FBI summary report from 2012. It indicated that Fahad al-Thumairy — a radical imam at the Saudi-funded King Fahad mosque and an accredited diplomat at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles — had provided assistance to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.
Further, it noted that the FBI’s investigation of the terrorist attacks had not ended years earlier and it contradicted the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion there was “no evidence” indicating al-Thumairy helped the two hijackers.
As late as October 2012, federal prosecutors and FBI agents in New York City were actively exploring filing charges against an unnamed suspect for providing material support to the hijackers and other crimes. The suspect’s identity and many details of the New York investigation were blacked out for national security reasons. But the report’s declassified portions indicated the New York investigation targeted an apparent U.S. support network for al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.
“This has never been disclosed before and it’s to the contrary of everything the FBI has produced so far that has indicated that 9/11 is history,” Graham told the Bulldog in 2016. “It’s interesting that it took them 11 years to get there, and a FOIA to get this information to the public.”
The FBI 2012 summary, originally classified secret, was marked to “declassify on 12-31-2037.” When it was released in late 2016, the four-page report buoyed the hopes of relatives of 9/11 victims in their lawsuit aiming to show the Saudi government assisted the 9/11 hijackers.
The FBI summary listed three “main subjects.” The imam, al-Thumairy, was described as a Saudi diplomat who “immediately assigned an individual to take care” of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar when they arrived in Southern California in 2000.Omar al-Bayoumi, a second subject, was believed to be a Saudi agent who befriended al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The report said al-Bayoumi “was living in San Diego on a student visa, despite not attending classes, and receiving a salary from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for job duties he never performed.” Al-Bayoumi had told authorities he accidentally met the two hijackers at a Los Angeles restaurant.
The final sentence of the synopsis indicated the third unnamed individual was highly placed: “There is evidence that [redacted] ... tasked al-Thumairy and al-Bayoumi with assisting the hijackers” — even while knowing they were here to commit an act of terrorism.
One former agent, Stephen Moore, who led the FBI’s Los Angeles probe of the two hijacker suspects, later filed a declaration in the 9/11 victims’ case in New York. It also contradicted previous reports denying government links, saying there was clear evidence that al-Thumairy and al-Bayoumi had helped the two hijackers and noting that — like the Sarasota family — both had left the United States just weeks before the attacks.
Moore said that al-Qaida wouldn’t have sent al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar to the U.S. “without a support structure in place.” He said he believed al-Bayoumi was a “clandestine agent” and that al-Thumairy knew the hijackers “were on a complex pre-planned mission” that would involve the use of airplanes. The former agent concluded that Saudi Arabian diplomatic and intelligence personnel had “knowingly provided material support to the [first] two 9/11 hijackers [who entered the U.S.] and facilitated the 9/11 plot.”LINGERING CONCERNSAlthough most political leaders have long since moved on, Graham wasn’t the only one who remained concerned that the Saudi role had not fully been examined.
Former U.S. Rep. Jim Davis, a Florida Democrat who represented the Tampa area from 1997 to 2007, was one of the first members of Congress to meet with the king of Saudi Arabia after 9/11.
“We had a very blunt conversation about the hijacking,” Davis told the Herald. “The king said something like, ‘Why do you keep focusing on this topic?’ My response was to remind him how many of the hijackers were Saudis. The meeting wasn’t canceled, it didn’t blow up, but it was a painfully direct conversation.”
Davis said he also met with Saudi Arabia’s secretary of education to discuss the anti-western curriculum in Saudi schools that he said helped radicalize young Saudis. He later filed and passed a resolution in the U.S. House calling for reforms to Saudi Arabia’s education system, but he said the resolution stalled in the U.S. Senate amid Saudi pressure. Davis also tried to persuade the Treasury Department and FBI to closely monitor financial transactions in Saudi Arabia that could be a means of funding terrorism.
He remains concerned about the role that the Saudis might have played in the 9/11 attacks and the links between the country’s education, financial system and terrorism network.
“I went to the World Trade Center two weeks after 9/11; we owe it to the victims to make sure it never happens again,” Davis said. “That’s particularly important, especially for those who are too young to remember what happened. We shouldn’t wait for the next attack or tragedy to be asking and answering these questions.”
6) Memories of 9/11 From Inside New York City Public School Classrooms. Chalkbeat"It was the beginning of the school day at the beginning of the school year at the beginning of the millennium. Millions of American children were in classrooms on the morning of September 11, 2001, when hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Then-President George W. Bush was in the classroom, too — reading with young Florida students until his chief of staff whispered in his ear: “America is under attack.”
Across the country that morning, there were hushed conversations among teachers and attempts to explain to students what was happening — or shield them from it. Students remember pained looks on their teachers’ faces. Some said it was the reaction of the adults around them, rather than the images of burning buildings and pulverized steel, that conveyed the life-changing nature of the attacks.
News back then moved slowly by today’s standards. The world was still largely without smartphones or social media. Teachers and students watched the news on boxy TVs strapped to rolling carts that moved between classrooms. Across the country that day, lesson plans were futile. Then, one by one, students were called out of class as parents arrived early to bring them home.
Firefighters work near Ground Zero in the wake of the terror attacks. Anthony Correia/ShutterstockIn New York City, things were even more dramatic — the day’s horrific events were playing out nearby.
At P.S. 1, in Lower Manhattan, one teacher remembers another lowering the shades so kindergartners wouldn’t see the burning towers out the window.
At P.S. 124, a few blocks away, another teacher watched as crowds covered in ash walked toward Brooklyn. New York City educators did their best to provide students a steady hand even as some feared for loved ones who worked in the towers, or struggled to get through to friends and family on jammed phone lines. There were harrowing evacuations, long walks home, and eerily silent subway rides.
As for the aftermath of 9/11, some teachers and students recalled with nostalgia how Americans came together, and they wondered if such shows of unity would be possible today.
Others saw the attacks as having the opposite effect, citing the rise in Islamophobia, and long, costly, and polarizing wars that are only now ending.
With the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaching, Chalkbeat asked those in school on that day to share what they remember and what they think K-12 students growing up today should know about the generation-defining terror attacks.
These are their words, edited for length and clarity.
‘A Nervous Energy’Yvette Ho taught kindergarten at P.S. 1 Alfred Smith School in Lower Manhattan. On the morning of 9/11, she remembers hearing a crash, followed by sirens.
“I was a new teacher at the school and was so unaware of the events that were taking place just blocks away. I kept teaching. I even brought the class to their scheduled art class. When we arrived at the art room, the class of older children was buzzing with a nervous energy, and the teacher had a look of shock on her face as she lowered the window shades. The fifth-floor room had a direct view of the towers, and the students were witnessing people jumping out of windows.”
Ho is an early childhood administrator in New York City.
Pictures From the RoofAlex Tronolone, a junior at Curtis High School in Staten Island, was the photographer for his school’s yearbook and newspaper. After the first plane crashed into the north tower, he was called out of class to snap some pictures. As he made his way up to the roof, where the janitors were looking out at the towers, Tronolone was imagining a small passenger plane.
“When I finally got to the roof, you could tell it was more than that. While I was up there, the first tower fell. At first, it looked like water was being used to put out the fires, but as the smoke spread and cleared, it became obvious that the tower fell. After that, I returned to class, incredulous. I remember looking at my watch to note the date because I knew it would be something that would be remembered.”
Tronolone is an educator from Staten Island.
Boxes of Teddy BearsSuzanne Werner was an educator at P.S. 124, which backs up to the Manhattan Bridge. That morning she was asked to cover for a fifth grade teacher whose husband worked at the World Trade Center.
“At first, there was a steady stream of sirens, then silence and a steady stream of people covered in ash walking [toward Brooklyn]. By noon most of the children had been picked up, and the teachers were sent home. I stayed with a small group and the principal till 4 or 4:30 p.m., when the last child was collected. By then, the F train was running, and I was able to get back home to Brooklyn. The train was packed and completely silent.
“It was so hard to get back to teaching that fall. There were so many distractions. Chinatown was impacted in so many ways. Businesses closed. There was no phone service for many, many months. The stench of the cloud hung over the neighborhood. The number of boxes of letters and boxes of teddy bears from school kids all over the country was overwhelming.”
Werner is retired and lives in New York City.
‘The Longest Walk’Latasha Fields-Frisco, who on 9/11 was the dean of students at Bronx School for Law, Government & Justice. Her own daughter had just started kindergarten.
Latasha Fields-Frisco was the dean of students at Bronx School for Law, and her daughter had just started kindergarten before 9/11. Courtesy of Latasha Fields-Frisco (Via Chalkbeat)“It was a regular morning that ended with a bomb threat to our school. We evacuated and ensured all of our students were safe. I lived in Harlem at the time and was unable to drive home. The bridges were closed off. I walked from The Bronx to 122nd Street in Harlem. It seemed like the longest walk ever. I was happy to reach home safely to see my family and just broke down in tears.”
Fields-Frisco is an assistant principal in The Bronx.
Fears of More TerrorSonia Algarin was a school counselor at Health Opportunities High School in The Bronx when the NYPD ordered an evacuation of the school. The city had shut down mass transit temporarily.
“How could we dismiss students who now had to walk home during a crisis situation? When would their parents get home if they had to walk from their jobs? Was it safer to keep them at the school? Our school was across the street from a highway, the Major Deegan. The police said we needed to seek shelter at Hostos Community College three blocks away. We had to walk all 500 students through the busy streets. Some were scared there could be another bombing or another airplane crashing into Yankee Stadium 10 blocks away.”
Algarin is a school counselor in The Bronx.
Confronting ‘Major Hate’Sunny Asra, a fifth grader at P.S. 220 Edward Mandel School in Queens, thinks about the repercussions of 9/11 for America’s South Asian community.
“[On Sept. 13], schools had a two-hour delayed opening. Still having not processed the events, it started to hit us when the kids met each other and our parents hugged one another, and we kind of did the same. In the following weeks, major hate was thrown at the South Asian community due to a lack of knowledge about religion and race. Being that I had a turban, I was even more fearful. Many innocent South Asians were killed, stabbed, and beaten.”
Asra is an operations manager for the New York City Department of Education. He lives on Long Island.
Hiding Under a DeskElvis Santana, a student at P.S. 66 in The Bronx, remembers listening to the radio that morning from under his desk at school. Many of his classmates wondered aloud if their parents were OK and tried to call them.
Elvis Santana, seen here around 2000, was at P.S. 66 in The Bronx during the attacks. Courtesy of Elvis Santana (Via Chalkbeat)“It was and still is the most devastating storyline of my life. One moment you’re in class learning, and the next, you’re thinking about death, violence, religion, war, and safety all at once. As a Bronx native, by the age of 8, you have already previewed violence and discrimination. The incident of 9/11 broadened that violence and triggered something we weren’t prepared to deal with. To anyone born after 2001, it was a testament to how America handled hatred and violence. In the end, we failed in achieving our objective, and today we see that in places like Afghanistan.”
Santana is an education outreach director in The Bronx.
