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We were all somewhere when it happened. Everyone remembers what they were doing on that tuesday morning at 8:46 am and at 9:03 am when the World Trade Center towers fell to the ground and made the whole world stop. I remember I was in 5th grade at the time, just getting ready for lunch around 10:45 am when my vice principal got on the loud speaker and informed the school that the Twin Towers have just been hit by airplanes. Not much information was given to us middle school kids or anyone for that matter but people were starting to get into panic mode. "What if they bomb our school?" one kid said in the cafeteria. I'll never forget the line of kids waiting to use the one pay phone we had right outside the cafeteria to call their parents who were in New York City that morning to see if they were okay. I remember parents taking kids out of school early because of the fear they had. All my afternoon classes after lunch we didn't do what was planned, all we did was talk about what was going on just a few miles down the road in Lower Manhattan. Coming home from school, putting the television on, almost literally every single channel had news coverage from Manhattan attempting to explain what exactly was going on. We were asking ourselves the who, what, when, where, why, and how can this happen to our nation? The traumatic images and video footage of these two skyscrapers falling to the ground was one of the most powerful images that anyone in my generation has ever seen. We had just whitened one of the worst attacks on our nations soil in the history of our United States...
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America's Reaction to 9/11:
Everyone wanted to know what exactly happened on the morning of September 11th, 2001. People at first may have thought these planes hitting the towers was a complete accident, but when you see the footage of the aircrafts it clearly was not. Now the new question on America's mind was Why did terrorists attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington D.C.? News reporters were trying to crack down on this case, to do so they consulted with Middle East experts and diplomats, along with leaders of countries in the Middle East region (Streitmatter, 241). The front page of the Times was of a jaw dropping photo of a fire ball exploding outward from the South World Trade Center tower and was certainly a front page photograph no one would ever forget.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afHHLRdre5w&feature=player_embedded
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President George W. Bush spoke to the nation shortly after the September 11th attacks attempting to answer the question "Why do they hate us?" Bush's answer to that question was simply "They hate our freedoms-our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble". Many countries do tend to hate on America due to all the freedoms we have here. But that doesn't give the right for terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and the Taliban to hijack planes and kill U.S. citizens and create a nationwide panic. President Bush in his speeches did not specifically name any nations or individual people (bin Laden) being held responsible for the attacks. All he would convey was "every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime". After President Bush had success convincing the public that the 9/11 attacks were by the terrorists being the evil ones and America being the good ones, Bush now was ready to justify the idea of America soon going into war with Iraq (Streitmatter, 249). Then on March 19, 2003 the war with Iraq Would soon begin which president Bush stating that "We will accept no outcome but victory"...
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