In the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen men belonging allegedly to Al Qaeda’s Hamburg cell hijacked four jet airliners bound for California. They took control of the planes and told the passengers that they had a bomb on board and that no harm would happen if their orders were followed. The crew and the passengers had no idea that the jet planes were going to be used as suicide weapons for crashing into prominent buildings symbolic of American power and wealth.
In accordance with their plan, the hijackers crashed two jet airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The two buildings collapsed within two hours from fire damage, destroying nearby buildings and damaging others. The hijackers crashed the third jet plane into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia near Washington, D.C. The fourth jet plane crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania because the passengers and flight crew tried to retake control of the plane, after they noticed that the hijackers had redirected the plane toward Washington. D.C.
None of the hijacked flights had any survivors. A total of 2,977 victims, including the 19 hijackers perished in the attacks. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia and the others were from the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. The two aircraft smashing and exploding into the Twin Towers did considerable damage. But many of professional structural and civil engineers as well as medical, legal and other experts hypothesize that there had been high-tech thermite explosives pre-installed within the three buildings by the neoconservative cabal in the US deep state in order to cause far more damage.
On September 13, after prompting from the US, NATO invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which commits each member state to consider an armed attack against one member state to be an armed attack against them all. The invocation of Article 5 led to the launching of Operation Eagle Assist and Operation Active Endeavor. On September 18, 2001, President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists.