STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING

STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember.

This week in our series, we look at America after the events of September eleventh, two thousand one.

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DAN RATHER: "A stunning and cowardly strike on the United States. Terrorists send mighty skyscrapers crumbling to the ground. Many innocent people are dead. The president vows the killers will pay for this attack on America."

The United States changed as a result of the September eleventh terrorist attacks. CBS newsman Dan Rather expressed what many Americans were feeling.

DAN RATHER: "You will remember this day as long as you live. A series of coordinated terror strikes today at this country, its people, our freedom. Strikes that came without warning."

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On the morning of that sunny September day that came to be known as 9/11, the nation came under attack from al-Qaida, an extremist group led by Osama bin Laden. Its targets were world-famous buildings representing America's economic and military power.

Al-Qaida operatives hijacked four American passenger airplanes. The hijackers were from Middle Eastern countries. Each group included a pilot trained to fly two kinds of Boeing airliners, the 757 and the 767.

At eight forty-six on that morning, one group of hijackers flew a Boeing 767 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. Seventeen minutes later, another group flew a second 767 into the Trade Center's South Tower.

The planes exploded in fireballs that sent clouds of smoke into the air. The intense heat of the burning jet fuel from the planes caused structural failures that brought down both buildings.

About an hour after the first plane hit the World Trade Center, another group of al-Qaida operatives flew a 757 airliner into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Defense Department, in Arlington, Virginia. The plane exploded against a wall of the huge building where more than twenty thousand people worked.

A fourth group had taken control of another 757. But some of the passengers on that flight, United 93, had heard about the terrorist attacks through phone calls to their families. Several passengers and crew members attempted to retake control of the plane. It crashed near the town of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Investigators later said the hijackers probably planned to attack the Capitol, a major government building in Washington, D.C., where Congress meets.

There was also concern that the White House could have been a target.

The 9/11 attacks saw the worst loss of lives on American soil since Japan attacked Pearl