And that was just the beginning. When President George W. Bush addressed Congress and the nation on September 20, , he made a case for a new kind of military response; not a targeted air strike on a single training facility or weapons bunker, but a wide-ranging global War on Terror.
When American troops invaded Afghanistan less than a month after September 11th, they were launching what became the longest sustained military campaign in U.
American support for the War on Terror became mixed as the campaign continued for years in an effort to target multiple terrorist cell and rogue regimes across the world. Thousands of American troops were killed in the first two decades of the War on Terror and many more returned home with physical and psychological wounds. No one checked passengers' IDs before boarding the plane.
And the only item people had to remove when passing through security was loose change from their pockets. All of that changed with the creation of the Transportation Security Administration , an entirely new federal agency authorized by Congress in November of Within a year, TSA had well over 50, employees.
In addition to an army of blue-uniformed screeners, TSA introduced U. Today, after the tumultuous exit of U. Throughout the contentious, yearlong debate before the U.
As with the case with U. Since then, sizable majorities have continued to cite that as a top policy priority. Majorities of both Republicans and Democrats have consistently ranked terrorism as a top priority over the past two decades, with some exceptions. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have remained more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to say defending the country from future attacks should be a top priority.
In recent years, the partisan gap has grown larger as Democrats began to rank the issue lower relative to other domestic concerns. The only time when concerns were elevated was in February , shortly before the start of the U.
This declined to about four-in-ten from to Last year, only a quarter of Americans said that terrorism was a very big problem. This year, prior to the U. Still, recent events in Afghanistan raise the possibility that opinion could be changing, at least in the short term.
Just as Americans largely endorsed the use of U. In the days following the attack, for example, majorities favored a requirement that all citizens carry national ID cards, allowing the CIA to contract with criminals in pursuing suspected terrorists and permitting the CIA to conduct assassinations overseas when pursuing suspected terrorists.
For most of the next two decades, more Americans said their bigger concern was that the government had not gone far enough in protecting the country from terrorism than said it went too far in restricting civil liberties. The public also did not rule out the use of torture to extract information from terrorist suspects.
In a survey of 40 nations, the U. Concerned about a possible backlash against Muslims in the U. Bush gave a speech to the Islamic Center in Washington, D. This spirit of unity and comity was not to last. On September 11, , at a. The impact left a gaping, burning hole near the 80th floor of the story skyscraper, instantly killing hundreds of people and trapping hundreds more in higher floors.
As the evacuation of the tower and its twin got underway, television cameras broadcasted live images of what initially appeared to be a freak accident.
Then, 18 minutes after the first plane hit, a second Boeing —United Airlines Flight —appeared out of the sky, turned sharply toward the World Trade Center and sliced into the south tower near the 60th floor. The collision caused a massive explosion that showered burning debris over surrounding buildings and onto the streets below. It immediately became clear that America was under attack.
The hijackers were Islamic terrorists from Saudi Arabia and several other Arab nations. Some of the terrorists had lived in the United States for more than a year and had taken flying lessons at American commercial flight schools. The 19 terrorists easily smuggled box-cutters and knives through security at three East Coast airports and boarded four early-morning flights bound for California , chosen because the planes were loaded with fuel for the long transcontinental journey.
Soon after takeoff, the terrorists commandeered the four planes and took the controls, transforming ordinary passenger jets into guided missiles.
Jet fuel from the Boeing caused a devastating inferno that led to the structural collapse of a portion of the giant concrete building, which is the headquarters of the U. Department of Defense. All told, military personnel and civilians were killed in the Pentagon, along with all 64 people aboard the airliner.
Less than 15 minutes after the terrorists struck the nerve center of the U. The structural steel of the skyscraper, built to withstand winds in excess of miles per hour and a large conventional fire, could not withstand the tremendous heat generated by the burning jet fuel.
At a. Only six people in the World Trade Center towers at the time of their collapse survived. Almost 10, others were treated for injuries, many severe. Because the plane had been delayed in taking off, passengers on board learned of events in New York and Washington via cell phone and Airfone calls to the ground. Knowing that the aircraft was not returning to an airport as the hijackers claimed, a group of passengers and flight attendants planned an insurrection.
And the way the war in Afghanistan finally ended intensified public discontent. Seven in ten Americans believe that we failed to achieve our goals in Afghanistan—a somewhat smaller majority says the same about the invasion of Iraq. We will never know whether Americans would have a more optimistic assessment if the withdrawal had been less abrupt and better organized. On the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks, Americans thought, by a margin of two to one, that these events had changed the United States for the better.
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