After the initial shock, the country mobilized. Volunteers flooded blood banks and military recruiting stations. Millions of dollars were raised for the families of victims. A new patriotic sentiment surfaced as sales of American flags surged. Many people spoke of simplifying their lives and of spending more time with family and friends.

The U.S. government quickly identified the hijackers as members of al-Qaeda, an organization that, according to U.S. officials, connected and coordinated fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups around the world. The government also believed that al-Qaeda was responsible for other attacks, including the bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 and the attack on the Navy ship U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000. Its leader, a wealthy Saudi businessman named Osama bin Laden, had pledged jihad, or holy war, against the United States for its activities in the Middle East.

The group made its headquarters in Afghanistan, where it was supported by the country’s rulers, an Islamic fundamentalist movement known as the Taliban.

Instead of launching an immediate attack, Bush spent the first days following the terrorist attacks consulting with military leaders and assembling a coalition of nations to fight terrorism. The coalition included countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance, such as Britain.

Fears rose again in early October when a powdered form of the bacterium known as anthrax began to appear in letters in some places around the country. Anthrax lives in the soil and is most often found in grass-eating animals such as cattle. It forms hard-to-kill spores that, when ingested, can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections. Over the next few weeks, anthrax killed five people in Florida, New York, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C. It also forced the temporary closure of two congressional office buildings. At first some investigators thought that the outbreak was another form of attack by al-Qaeda. As the investigation progressed, however, some came to believe that someone inside the United States was responsible. In early October the United States went to war, bombing al-Qaeda training camps and missile installations in Afghanistan. Within a few weeks, U.S. marines joined with Afghan opposition groups to topple the Taliban. The U.S. forces killed or captured many al-Qaeda fighters, but bin Laden remained at large

September 11 in New York.

On the home front, President Bush signed the Patriot Act in 2001 to give the government expanded powers to monitor terrorist suspects. Some critics, however, said the new law represented an infringement on civil liberties. Bush also signed a law in 2002 that created a new executive department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The department’s mission was to protect the United States against terrorist attacks, reduce the country’s vulnerability to terrorism, and aid recovery in case of an attack. The DHS combined dozens of federal agencies into one department, the largest government reorganization since the Department of Defense was created in 1947. See also Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

In 2003 a congressional inquiry concluded in an 858-page report that the U.S. intelligence community “failed to fully capitalize on available, and potentially important, information” that could have helped prevent the September 11 attacks. The inquiry found that U.S. intelligence agencies failed to share information with each other and failed to take action based on the information they did have. Specifically, the report cited the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for missing numerous opportunities to notify the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that two men linked to al-Qaeda could be in the United States. The two men were among the future hijackers, and prior to September 11 had contact with an FBI informant in San Diego, California. But because the FBI was unaware of their al-Qaeda link, the bureau did not investigate them, missing what the congressional probe called the “best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot.” Furthermore, the report found, the CIA failed to put the two men on a watchlist used by the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Customs Service to deny individuals entry into the United States.

The inquiry also found that FBI headquarters failed to heed warnings from its Phoenix office about terrorist suspects seeking to enroll in flight training schools or to act properly on a request from its Minneapolis office to conduct a search of an alleged conspirator in the terrorist attacks. Prepared by a joint committee of the House and Senate Intelligence committees, the report disputed an FBI claim that none of the hijackers had contacted any “known terrorist sympathizers,” finding instead that five hijackers had contact with 14 persons who had been investigated by the FBI for possible links to terrorism. The intelligence community was aware as early as 1994 that terrorists might use aircraft in an attack and knew as early as 1998 that bin Laden was planning an attack within the United States, the report concluded.

In July 2004 an independent, bipartisan commission formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States issued its final report after a nearly two-year investigation into the September 11 attacks. The commission, chaired by former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean, found that neither the administration of President Bill Clinton, nor the Bush administration, prior to September 11, had grasped the gravity of the threat posed by al-Qaeda. The report said that “none of the measures adopted by the U.S. government from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the progress of the al-Qaeda plot. Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.” The commission said its purpose was not to cast blame, but to make recommendations for improving U.S. counterterrorist efforts, and it put forward several proposals to unify U.S. intelligence agencies and place them under a national intelligence director. Congress approved the creation of the office of a national intelligence director in January 2005. Encarta