His organisation has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund additional research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The conclusions of that study will be published in Matt Campbell's also still looking for answers. He called the trial "a bit of a farce" but said: "It's the closest I'm ever going to get to a trial into the murder of my brother. The other family members, from what I could gather, were pretty much in line with the official narrative.
My own experience in England, with family members, is that some people have got past wanting to know what happened. They're still dealing with the never-ending effects of losing a loved-one. Blog by Chris Bell. More from Trending: The people who think governments control the weather.
Those white lines in the sky trailing behind jet planes are puffy plumes of water vapour. But online, some have twisted them into evidence of a secret plot to control weather or poison the environment. Why are wild theories about contrails and other phenomena so persistent on social media? All our stories are at bbc. Image source, Reuters. Image source, Matt Campbell. Matt Campbell centre with brothers Rob and Geoff right.
More on online conspiracy theories. They killed six and wounded a thousand. Plans by Omar Abdel Rahman and others to blow up the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and other New York City landmarks were frustrated when the plotters were arrested.
In October , Somali tribesmen shot down U. In early , police in Manila uncovered a plot by Ramzi Yousef to blow up a dozen U. In November , a car bomb exploded outside the office of the U. The attack was carried out primarily by Saudi Hezbollah, an organization that had received help from the government of Iran. Until , the U. In February , Usama Bin Ladin and four others issued a self-styled fatwa, publicly declaring that it was God's decree that every Muslim should try his utmost to kill any American, military or civilian, anywhere in the world, because of American "occupation" of Islam's holy places and aggression against Muslims.
In August , Bin Ladin's group, al Qaeda, carried out near-simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the U. The attacks killed people, including 12 Americans, and wounded thousands more. In December , Jordanian police foiled a plot to bomb hotels and other sites frequented by American tourists, and a U. Customs agent arrested Ahmed Ressam at the U. Canadian border as he was smuggling in explosives intended for an attack on Los Angeles International Airport.
In October , an al Qaeda team in Aden, Yemen, used a motorboat filled with explosives to blow a hole in the side of a destroyer, the USS Cole , almost sinking the vessel and killing 17 American sailors. But by September , the executive branch of the U.
Who Is the Enemy? Who is this enemy that created an organization capable of inflicting such horrific damage on the United States? We now know that these attacks were carried out by various groups of Islamist extremists. In the s, young Muslims from around the world went to Afghanistan to join as volunteers in a jihad or holy struggle against the Soviet Union.
A wealthy Saudi, Usama Bin Ladin, was one of them. Following the defeat of the Soviets in the late s, Bin Ladin and others formed al Qaeda to mobilize jihads elsewhere.
The history, culture, and body of beliefs from which Bin Ladin shapes and spreads his message are largely unknown to many Americans. Seizing on symbols of Islam's past greatness, he promises to restore pride to people who consider themselves the victims of successive foreign masters. He uses cultural and religious allusions to the holy Qur'an and some of its interpreters. He appeals to people disoriented by cyclonic change as they confront modernity and globalization.
His rhetoric selectively draws from multiple sources-Islam, history, and the region's political and economic malaise. Bin Ladin also stresses grievances against the United States widely shared in the Muslim world.
He inveighed against the presence of U. Upon this political and ideological foundation, Bin Ladin built over the course of a decade a dynamic and lethal organization.
He built an infrastructure and organization in Afghanistan that could attract, train, and use recruits against ever more ambitious targets. He rallied new zealots and new money with each demonstration of al Qaeda's capability. He had forged a close alliance with the Taliban, a regime providing sanctuary for al Qaeda. By September 11, , al Qaeda possessed leaders able to evaluate, approve, and supervise the planning and direction of a major operation; a personnel system that could recruit candidates, indoctrinate them, vet them, and give them the necessary training; communications sufficient to enable planning and direction of operatives and those who would be helping them; an intelligence effort to gather required information and form assessments of enemy strengths and weaknesses; the ability to move people great distances; and the ability to raise and move the money necessary to finance an attack.
After launching cruise missile strikes against al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for the embassy bombings, the Clinton administration applied diplomatic pressure to try to persuade the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to expel Bin Ladin.
The administration also devised covert operations to use CIA-paid foreign agents to capture or kill Bin Ladin and his chief lieutenants. These actions did not stop Bin Ladin or dislodge al Qaeda from its sanctuary. By late or early , Bin Ladin and his advisers had agreed on an idea brought to them by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed KSM called the "planes operation.
Bin Ladin and his chief of operations, Mohammed Atef, occupied undisputed leadership positions atop al Qaeda. Within al Qaeda, they relied heavily on the ideas and enterprise of strong-willed field commanders, such as KSM, to carry out worldwide terrorist operations. Bin Ladin provided KSM with four initial operatives for suicide plane attacks within the United States, and in the fall of training for the attacks began.
New recruits included four from a cell of expatriate Muslim extremists who had clustered together in Hamburg, Germany. One became the tactical commander of the operation in the United States: Mohamed Atta. Working with foreign security services, the CIA broke up some al Qaeda cells. The core of Bin Ladin's organization nevertheless remained intact. In December , news about the arrests of the terrorist cell in Jordan and the arrest of a terrorist at the U.
In January , the intense intelligence effort glimpsed and then lost sight of two operatives destined for the "planes operation. On January 15, , they arrived in Los Angeles. Because these two al Qaeda operatives had spent little time in the West and spoke little, if any, English, it is plausible that they or KSM would have tried to identify, in advance, a friendly contact in the United States. We explored suspicions about whether these two operatives had a support network of accomplices in the United States.
The evidence is thin-simply not there for some cases, more worrisome in others. We do know that soon after arriving in California, the two al Qaeda operatives sought out and found a group of ideologically like-minded Muslims with roots in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, individuals mainly associated with a young Yemeni and others who attended a mosque in San Diego. After a brief stay in Los Angeles about which we know little, the al Qaeda operatives lived openly in San Diego under their true names.
They managed to avoid attracting much attention. By the summer of , three of the four Hamburg cell members had arrived on the East Coast of the United States and had begun pilot training. In early , a fourth future hijacker pilot, Hani Hanjour, journeyed to Arizona with another operative, Nawaf al Hazmi, and conducted his refresher pilot training there. A number of al Qaeda operatives had spent time in Arizona during the s and early s. During , President Bill Clinton and his advisers renewed diplomatic efforts to get Bin Ladin expelled from Afghanistan.
They also renewed secret efforts with some of the Taliban's opponents-the Northern Alliance-to get enough intelligence to attack Bin Ladin directly.
Diplomatic efforts centered on the new military government in Pakistan, and they did not succeed. The efforts with the Northern Alliance revived an inconclusive and secret debate about whether the United States should take sides in Afghanistan's civil war and support the Taliban's enemies. The CIA also produced a plan to improve intelligence collection on al Qaeda, including the use of a small, unmanned airplane with a video camera, known as the Predator.
After the October attack on the USS Cole , evidence accumulated that it had been launched by al Qaeda operatives, but without confirmation that Bin Ladin had given the order. The Taliban had earlier been warned that it would be held responsible for another Bin Ladin attack on the United States.
The CIA described its findings as a "preliminary judgment"; President Clinton and his chief advisers told us they were waiting for a conclusion before deciding whether to take military action. The military alternatives remained unappealing to them. The transition to the new Bush administration in late and early took place with the Cole issue still pending. President George W. Bush and his chief advisers accepted that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the Cole , but did not like the options available for a response.
Bin Ladin's inference may well have been that attacks, at least at the level of the Cole , were risk free. The Bush administration began developing a new strategy with the stated goal of eliminating the al Qaeda threat within three to five years.
During the spring and summer of , U. Numerous precautions were taken overseas. Domestic agencies were not effectively mobilized. The threat did not receive national media attention comparable to the millennium alert.
While the United States continued disruption efforts around the world, its emerging strategy to eliminate the al Qaeda threat was to include an enlarged covert action program in Afghanistan, as well as diplomatic strategies for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The process culminated during the summer of in a draft presidential directive and arguments about the Predator aircraft, which was soon to be deployed with a missile of its own, so that it might be used to attempt to kill Bin Ladin or his chief lieutenants.
At a September 4 meeting, President Bush's chief advisers approved the draft directive of the strategy and endorsed the concept of arming the Predator. This directive on the al Qaeda strategy was awaiting President Bush's signature on September 11, Though the "planes operation" was progressing, the plotters had problems of their own in Several possible participants dropped out; others could not gain entry into the United States including one denial at a port of entry and visa denials not related to terrorism.
One of the eventual pilots may have considered abandoning the planes operation. Zacarias Moussaoui, who showed up at a flight training school in Minnesota, may have been a candidate to replace him. Some of the vulnerabilities of the plotters become clear in retrospect.
Moussaoui aroused suspicion for seeking fast-track training on how to pilot large jet airliners. He was arrested on August 16, , for violations of immigration regulations. Forum in focus. Cybersecurity risks in aviation: Building a cyber-resilient future.
Read more about this project. Explore context. Explore the latest strategic trends, research and analysis. In the space of three hours, two planes hit the World Trade Center, one plane hit the Pentagon and one crashed in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3, died during the attacks, and many more suffer ongoing conditions from injuries and smoke inhalation. For millions, September 11, , is a day that will never be forgotten. Have you read?
An entire generation of Americans has no idea how easy air travel used to be. There were four planes involved in the crash. Life in America was set on a new trajectory. It took media sites minutes to start coverage of the crash.
What's the World Economic Forum doing about the future of cities? License and Republishing. She drove to the family home in Springfield, Virginia, a minute drive from the Pentagon. She set Thayer in front of the TV while she desperately attempted to call his father, Bradley Thayer, who was working at the Pentagon that day but evacuated successfully.
That day, 2, people died, as did all 19 of the al-Qaida hijackers, in the single deadliest terrorist attack on U. Nineteen years later, Thayer is a fifth-year undergraduate student at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, where he triple-majors in physics, mathematics and German. Thayer, despite his near-photographic memory, can only recall some scenes from the day of the attacks. Liu graduated from New York University last year and will start work this month as an associated development operations engineer at Veeva Systems, a cloud computing company in California.
People older than 30 may consider other, earlier events in their lives as more important to them, while those younger than 10 may be too young to fully understand the significance of an event. Some experts think the attacks are what sets the Millennial generation, whose members were born between the early s and mids, apart from the next one, Generation Z, born beginning in the mids.
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