9/11
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a Tuesday, I sat down at my desk around 8:20 a.m. in the newsroom of The Record in Hackensack, New Jersey.
I had worked the night before and much of the previous weekend. So I arrived early that day, hoping I could leave for a long lunch and enjoy what the weather forecasters predicted to be a pristine day with blue skies, little humidity and a golden sun. In other words, I was planning on an easy day, with no deadline facing me.
Those plans changed at 8:46 a.m. when the first hijacked jetliner struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.
Our morning news editor, Susan DeSantis, called across the newsroom to me: “Mike, I just heard a plane hit the World Trade Center.” Minutes later, I was in my car.
I drove back streets and eventually arrived at the waterfront in Jersey City, New Jersey. Across the Hudson River, a mushrooming cloud of gray and brown smoke blotted the golden sun and azure sky. I decided I needed to find a way to across the Hudson. At the dock, police, fire fighters, EMTs and Catholic priests filed on to a tug boat. I asked if I could join them. Together, we crossed the Hudson River to enter into a massive rubble pile that came to be known as “Ground Zero.” I did not return for three days. Then I kept going back.
So began a completely shocking and unpredictable journey that continues even beyond the 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history. It begins at Ground Zero, then to continues on to Malaysia (where several hijackers first met to plan the attacks) and Washington, D.C., to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, to Iraq with U.S. troops and to the U.S. Navy Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of suspected terrorists were detained. In between, I visited the homes of those who lost close relatives or friends. I attended funerals and memorial services, sat through legislative and court hearings, studied thousands of pages of FBI investigative reports and legal briefs. I spent time in a scrap yard as engineers studied the beams of the Trade Center to determine how it collapsed. I took a ride in a U.S. Air Force F-16 jet fighter to understand the pressures on the U.S. military in trying to defend the homeland against terrorism. And to understand the mindset of the Islamist radicals who carried out the attacks, I devoted several months to reading the perverted theological tracts of Islamist terrorists who believe in killing others so they can guarantee their place in paradise.
What follows here are the highlights of my coverage of the 9/11 attacks and the expanding war on terror that dominated so much of American life in the first quarter of the 21st Century. I’ve divided my columns and articles into nine chapters:
1: Attacks and Rubble: Ground Zero and the first weeks
2: “Twenty-four Hours at Ground Zero”
3: First Anniversary: “Journey Through Shadow”
4: Fifth Anniversary: “Remains of the Day”
5: Tenth Anniversary: “Journey Through Shadow,” 10 years later
6: Fifteenth Anniversary: “The War on Terror”
7: Twentieth Anniversary: “Ripples of Pain”
8: Twenty-fifth Anniversary: “Mysteries Amid Remembrance
9: The Saudi Question