Shoes, wallets, paper rained down on the streets of New York. Ash stung eyes and seared lungs. People – a woman in a green suit, another whose dress billowed with the momentum of 105 storeys – fell from the sky. At home or at work, we watched those mythic skyscrapers collapse, crumpled heaps of twisted steel, concrete and human remains.
September 11, 2001, was a day like no other New York City, or indeed America, had seen before.
The FBI agent who had tracked Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda for five years didn't believe something so horrifying was possible.
Nor did the father of the man who flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m., as thousands arrived for work.
"You can't be human and do this thing," Muhammad al-Amir Atta told reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, still denying his son had anything to do with the attacks. "It's impossible."
September 11, 2001, was the day the impossible, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, came true.
It's easy to chart the many ways the world changed in the wake of the hijackings, the attack on the Pentagon, the killing of thousands of innocents at a place we now call Ground Zero. Think Afghanistan, Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, security certificates. Guantanamo Bay, Homeland Security, Anthrax. Al Qaeda, shoe bombs, waterboarding. Abu Ghraib.
The trauma of the day's events also had a more elusive impact on us, as individuals and societies, shifting our sense of the most awful thing that could possibly happen to us, to anybody.
For a while, unthinkable became the new normal.
"When we say a thing is unreal, we mean it is too real, a phenomenon so unaccountable and yet so bound to the power of the objective that we can't tilt it to the slant of our perceptions," the novelist Don DeLillo wrote in Harper's magazine that fall. "First the planes struck the towers. After a time it became possible to absorb this, barely.
"But when the towers fell. When the rolling smoke began moving downward, floor by floor. This was so vast and terrible that it was outside imagining even as it happened. We could not catch up with it."
"Psychologically, it was a hard blow," says Harold Waller, a political-science professor and director of the North American studies program at McGill University. It wasn't simply that America had been attacked on its own soil for the first time since Pearl Harbor, or that terrorists had burrowed deep into U.S. communities and trained at American flying schools. Or that they targeted the iconic Twin Towers, in New York City, the cultural and economic hub of American life.
"With 9/11, the enemy was rather vague, not even a country.
"If terrorists could attack New York, then they could attack Los Angeles, Chicago, or Miami, anywhere, and not necessarily in the same way," says Waller. "The carefree lifestyle of Americans in relation to security ended."
"Sept. 11 really did change the way people in cities thought and behaved. There were new threats in new places," says Adam Radomsky, a professor at Concordia University and president of the Canadian Association for Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies.
"Back then, I had to go through the Ville Marie Tunnel to get to work. I remember worrying, for very different reasons than we would now. What would happen if a plane were to hit the tunnel?"
Researchers look at fear in three ways – what it does to the body, how we think and what we do.
"When new information comes at us, as it did in spades on Sept. 11 and the days that followed, it really does change the way we think and act," said Radomsky.
"We learn fear easily, and don't forget. There are reasons for this dating back to our most distant ancestors. Those who weren't fearful got eaten or fell off cliffs," he said. "Since Sept. 11, we have become more vigilant, more cautious. Fear saves lives. It becomes a problem when the fear becomes overwhelming, much greater than the realistic threat."
"People are terrified of risks that are novel, undetectable, delayed in their effects, and poorly understood," Steven Pinker, an author and psychology professor at Harvard University wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education last month. "And they are terrified about worst-case scenarios, the ones that are uncontrollable, catastrophic, involuntary, and inequitable (that is, the people exposed to the risk are not the ones who benefit from them).
"Large-scale terrorist plots are novel, undetectable, catastrophic and inequitable, and thus maximize both unfathomability and dread."
But then "panic is the whole point of terrorism," said Pinker, who grew up in Montreal at the height of terrorist attacks by the Front de Libération du Québec. "The effect of terrorism depends completely on the psychology of the audience. Terrorists are communicators, seeking publicity and attention, which they manufacture through fear. They may want to extort a government into capitulating to a demand, to sap a people's confidence in their government's ability to protect them, or to provoke repression that will turn people against their government or bring about chaos in which the terrorist faction hopes to prevail."
Strikes on New York and the Pentagon by domestic passenger jets piloted by terrorists trained on U.S. soil undoubtedly dampened public confidence. As anchor Peter Jennings put it in the hours immediately following the attacks, "This seems to be a stunning failure of intelligence."
Stephen Saideman was at his desk inside the Pentagon when the planes hit the towers.
Saideman, now Canada Research Chair in International Security and Ethnic Conflict at McGill University, had just begun a fellowship at the Pentagon, assigned to the Bosnia desk.
"At the time, the Balkans were the focal point of American foreign policy. With 9/11, the Balkans went from the front burner to the back of the refrigerator. But before that Afghanistan was not a focal point of American policy. Central Asia was not the show."
By the time American Airlines Flight 77 hit the west wall of the Pentagon, Saideman was on a bridge heading into Washington for a meeting, which was then cancelled. "I was with a colonel carrying classified papers, so we had to go back because he didn't want to go through the paperwork involved in taking them home. I remember parents arriving to collect their children from the daycare centre."
Saideman finds it difficult to separate that day from everything that happened in the following months. "The Pentagon also had the Anthrax scare that year. I have a souvenir in my office, an invitation I received to an embassy event with the singe marks where it went through the anti-anthrax treatment."
Caught off guard, fearful, angry and suspicious, we can become intolerant, belligerent, vengeful. We worry what our neighbours are doing. We can behave irrationally, maybe even lose sight of our moral compass.
In Chain of Command, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh explores the hunker-down, anything-goes, mindset that prevailed at the highest levels of the U.S. government in the wake of 9/11 – setting the stage for the atrocities that would occur at the Abu Ghraib prison.
As early as 2002, Hersh says, senior U.S. military personnel began pushing for a review of interrogation methods used at the prison at Guantanamo Bay. John A. Gordon, a retired brigadier-general, said practices were "totally out of character with the American value system" and could also backfire on U.S. personnel captured by the enemy.
"At the time, of course, Americans were still traumatized by the September 11th attacks, and were angry," Hersh writes. "After John Walker Lindh, the 20-year-old Californian who joined the Taliban, was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001, his American interrogators stripped him, gagged him, strapped him to a board and exhibited him to the press and to any soldier who wished to see him. These apparent violations of international law met with few, if any objections."
Hersh cites a legal ruling by U.S. justice department adviser Jay S. Bybee that certain acts "may be cruel, inhuman or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within (a legal) proscription against torture."
In 2002, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued a secret order "to capture terrorists for interrogation or, if necessary, to kill them, not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise" – a direct contradiction of a 25-year-old edict expressly prohibiting state-ordered political assassinations.
"A decade ago, would anyone imagine that the U.S. government would use drones to kill terrorists?" asks Harold Waller.
"There has been very little debate about this in the U.S. There is a sense that if a person has been identified as a terrorist, we're entitled to get rid of that person."
Consider the killing of Osama bin Laden in May. "There was no desire or intention to take him into custody. The order would have been to shoot to kill." Waller said that's a major shift from U.S. approach in the 1990s, when terrorists would have been hunted down and sent to trial. "Now it is largely deemed acceptable that you catch an Osama and you kill him."
After Sept. 11, there was a shift away from conventional warfare, and from waiting for the enemy to strike first before fighting back.
"During the Bush years, a decision was made to act pre-emptively." Waller cites the decision to go to war with Iraq. "Without 9/11, I am convinced America would never have taken on Saddam Hussein."
For the last several years, political science professor Graham Dodds has dedicated a special unit in his American politics course at Concordia to "Post 9/11 U.S.A."
Dodds, an American who was living in Philadelphia in 2001, is among those who question whether Sept. 11 was truly that defining historical moment.
"I want to resist the popular claim, which can be facile and unreal, to say everything changed that day."
Dodds doesn't dispute the magnitude of the Sept. 11 bombings, or their effect on the American psyche. "It was a collective national trauma."
But he argues 9/11 exacerbated existing trends, such as a strengthening of the role of the U.S. president and increased mistrust of media. Those who suggest America had never been attacked at home don't know their history, he said. "Besides Pearl Harbor, there were Japanese attacks on Alaska and German saboteurs off the east coast. Maybe it's assuming too much to think students would have a knowledge of the Second World War. But terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center in 1993."
It's true, he said, that nothing is unthinkable anymore, that our first reflex is to assume the worst.
"When an earthquake hit Washington the other day, the early buzz was that they were being hit by a nuclear attack by al Qaeda," he said. "But when you talk about our daily lives, how much has changed? If you cross the border, you need a passport and they are going to ask you more questions. If you are taking a plane, you need to get to the airport early and they might ask you to take your shoes off. It's not a huge change."
In the Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright describes how Daniel Coleman, one of the first FBI agents assigned to investigate bin Laden and his suicide squad tried to get his bosses to pay attention.
"The most frightening aspect of this new threat, however, was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic."
Ten years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the thwarted hijacking which crashed in a Pennsylvania field, nothing seems too far-fetched to be true.
Osama bin Laden is dead. People throughout the Arab world are rising up against tyrants. Two of the key figures in the Bush administration, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have written their memoirs, conveniently timed to make the most of the tenth anniversary fervour. There's even a commemorative 9/11 wine.
And, yes, people are flying again. "You can't stay on edge forever," says Waller.
Yet incidents such as the attempted bombing of Times Square two years ago, or rumours of thwarted plots the world over have made security checks and surveillance measures part of our everyday lives.
In a postscript to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, written after bin Laden was killed last spring, Lawrence Wright muses on the long-term effects of terrorist attacks and counterterrorism measures.
"One day, al Qaeda will disappear, as all terrorist movements do. But the template of asymmetrical warfare and mass murder that bin Laden and his confederates have created will inspire future terrorists flying under other banners. The legacy of bin Laden is a future of suspicion, grief and the loss of certain liberties that are already disappearing from memory."
There is also an element of fatigue, resignation and aimlessness, a post-traumatic stress disorder of the soul. A weariness with war and the toll it has taken on the families of the dead, on all of us.
"War bills have been a major contributor to the current budget crisis, because they paid the bills with borrowed money," says Waller. "Without the war, the budget situation would not be so dire."
Yet there is a nagging concern about the consequences if the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan, leaving terrorist cells to flourish without scrutiny.
"Most Americans would understand that Americans have responsibilities on a worldwide basis, that it cannot retreat behind its ocean borders – and that now an attack can come from anywhere," Waller said.
Saideman thinks about Obama's "dicey call" to dispatch 40 Navy Seals on a mission to northern Pakistan to get someone they weren't yet positive was bin Laden. "Maybe that's not something Clinton or Bush would have been willing to do, but after eight or nine years of war, you are more willing to take risks."
The anger and fear that fuelled decision-making in the months after 9/11 have been tempered by a decade of small victories and thousands of military funerals. "It's harder to measure what success looks like," Saideman said, noting Obama's "lead from behind" approach in bringing down Moammar Gadhafi's regime last month. "Obama had to be pulled in, no doubt in part in concern over how many wars we can fight at once."
Unhappiness and worry over America's precipitous slide from unchallenged world power is reflected in the widespread dissatisfaction with the government led by Barack Obama, the miracle worker who keeps discovering that No, We Can't.
One of Obama's boldest election promises was to shutter the Guantanamo Bay prison camp at the earliest possible occasion.
As Obama heads into the final year of his first – and quite possibly, last – term as president, the prison camp for suspected terrorists is a festering political liability he can't afford to touch.
"The issue of prisoner treatment has become highly politicized," members of the 9/11 Commission warn in a Tenth Anniversary Report Card released last week. "This is not good for our country, or our standing in the world." Nor, the commission said, is the U.S. prepared for "a truly catastrophic disaster," citing a lack of unity in leadership and effort.
"Bin Laden is dead and little has changed," Alex Gourevitch, a post-doctoral research associate at Political Theory Project at Brown University, wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education's 9/11 essay series.
"There is no new dawn, no rebirth," he said. "Instead we face the less grandiose but no less meaningful set of fears about the stability and fairness of our basic social and economic institutions. And our lives are palpably the same, if not worse."
For Gourevitch, an editor of the Current Moment blog, "the great lie of the war on terror is not that we can sacrifice a little liberty for greater security. It is that fear can be eliminated, and that all we need to do to improve our society is defeat terrorism, rather than look at the other causes of our social, economic, and political anxiety. That is the great seduction of fear: It allows us to do nothing. It is easier to find new threats than new possibilities."
"This catastrophic event changes the way we think and act, moment to moment, week to week, for unknown weeks and months to come, and steely years," Don DeLillo wrote in Harper's in December 2001. "We are living in a place of danger and rage."
A decade on, studies have shown a strong correlation between physical distance from the events of 9/11 and the ability to move on, to feel safe, to be well.
A major long-term study published this month found high incidences of physical and mental health problems among 27,000 New York firefighters, police officers, municipal and construction workers over the last decade Nearly half were suffering from asthma or other lung diseases. More than a quarter had experienced depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or panic disorder.
Concordia's Radomsky says it's easy to spread the idea of danger, much more difficult to erase it.
"If we know something bad is possible, we are more likely to change our behaviour than if we think something good could happen." The important thing is not to let those fears consume and cripple you.
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