What the hell is going on?

The 9/11 terrorist strike took America (and the rest of the world) by complete surprise. As the drama unfolded live on television screens across the globe, people found themselves watching in disbelief: “This cannot be happening.” This sense of collective stress soon gave rise to a pressing question, one that lingers on as we write this: how could this have happened?

In hindsight, this question is less baffling than it seemed at the time. Commentators across the world were quick to point out that the United States had finally experienced on its own soil what many other countries had been forced to deal with for many years – terrorism. Outside the United States one would read and hear that American foreign policy had bred anti-Americanism; terrorist actions therefore were more or less to be expected. In the American media, Pearl Harbor analogies gave way to retrospectives of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the foiled plots involving exploding airliners and airport attacks. The 9/11 crisis events were shown to have roots.

Americans then learned how the 19 terrorists had pulled it off: how they had entered the country and outlived visa requirements, took flight lessons, convened with other terrorists around the globe, walked through airport security armed with knives, and how they navigated their hijacked planes unhindered toward the unguarded core institutions of the country. Americans learned that foreign intelligence services had provided their American sister organizations with ominous and rather specific warnings.