Don't Wait for Someone Else to Fix It

CHAPTER ONEEveryone Is a Leader

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned as a surprisingly cool and cloudless late summer morning in the northeastern United States. It would soon become memorable for all the wrong reasons. Between 8:46 and 9:03 a.m. Eastern time, hijackers flew two large commercial airliners into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, New York City. The towers quickly caught fire. By 10:28 a.m., both towers, each more than 100 stories high, had collapsed. Meanwhile, at 9:37 a.m., a third hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, igniting an explosive fire. Within an hour, five stories of the Pentagon had collapsed. A fourth hijacked airline, United Flight 93, was rerouted toward Washington, DC. It never reached its target, likely the White House or the United States Capitol, thanks to heroic resistance by passengers who had learned through cell phone communication with loved ones of the previous attacks. Flight 93's hijackers decided to down the aircraft before passengers could breach the cockpit, and at 10:03 a.m., the plane crashed in rural western Pennsylvania.

All told, nearly 3,000 people died that day, and more than 6,000 others were injured. These coordinated attacks remain the deadliest terrorist operation in world history.

Osama bin Laden, who founded the radical Islamic organization al‐Qaeda in 1988, was the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Bin Laden was an unusually charismatic figure, obviously ...