Nineteen. Weird number. There were 19 total hijackers on September 11.
Evidently, the plan was to have 20, five per plane; one pilot plus four for muscle. But there was a little whoopsie, a hiccup, and a day that Mohammed Atta waited at an airport in Florida to pick up a guy who had been turned away by immigration. Someone somewhere decided to go ahead all the same. So four guys would hijack United Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco.
I don’t know who made that decision for Al Qaeda, but surely that person knows the work of Sayyid Qutb, who Paul Berman called “the philosopher of Islamic terror” in The New York Times. Qutb has been derided as a nutjob, and much of his work is unavailable. But Berman read everything of Qutb’s that he could get his hands on, and wrote that Qutb is unnervingly smart, nuanced, and not entirely unconvincing. Qtub describes the West’s urge to bifurcate religion from science which he says has made us schizophrenic. Qtub sought to heal souls addled by modernity. In that broader part of his mission he’s in lockstep with many a modern spiritual leader (and more than a few social media influencers). Berman wonders if we know how to counter those arguments:
It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.
But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas?
One of Qutb’s messages especially resonated with his student Osama bin Laden, who explained the “paper tiger” to ABC’s John Miller in 1998:
After our victory in Afghanistan and the defeat of the oppressors who had killed millions of Muslims, the legend about the invincibility of the superpowers vanished. Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. ... As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press after the Gulf War in which it destroyed the infrastructure and the milk and dairy industry that was vital for the infants and the children and the civilians and blew up dams which were necessary for the crops people grew to feed their families. Proud of this destruction, America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order. After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim. ...
The paper tiger idea pervades bin Laden’s movement. The idea is that a real tiger fights to the death with conviction and unity of spirit, whereas a paper tiger works for a paycheck or following orders, and folds when it gets real.
And so four terrorists would be enough.
Bless Newark International Airport. Of course United Flight 93 to San Francisco was delayed on the tarmac. There’s a lot we don’t know about happened on that plane, but there’s a surprising amount we do—we have recordings and reports from the cockpit voice recorder, from many GE airphone conversations, and a few cell phone calls to the ground, from voicemails, from back-and-forth with air traffic control, and from the real-time movements of the plane as tracked by radar and other technologies.
We would later learn that the terrorists’ 9/11 technique was first to frighten everyone by murdering someone, in the case of Flight 93: the person sitting in a first-class seat in front of a terrorist with a box-cutter. That might put everyone in a kind of stupor. What unarmed maniac would confront a band of armed murderers?
One of the most important books I have ever read is Moral Tribes, by Joshua Greene, who was a pioneer of putting people in fMRI machines, to see brain activity in real time. He learned a ton about how we’re wired, how we think, and, thanks to the trolley problem, he learned that we’re deeply put off by violence. Greene describes the trolley problem on his website like this:
First, we have the switch dilemma: A runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks toward five people who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. You can save these five people by diverting the trolley onto a different set of tracks, one that has only one person on it, but if you do this that person will be killed. Is it morally permissible to turn the trolley and thus prevent five deaths at the cost of one? Most people say "Yes."
Then we have the footbridge dilemma: Once again, the trolley is headed for five people. You are standing next to a large man on a footbridge spanning the tracks. The only way to save the five people is to push this man off the footbridge and into the path of the trolley. Is that morally permissible? Most people say "No."
These two cases create a puzzle for moral philosophers: What makes it OK to sacrifice one person to save five others in the switch case but not in the footbridge case? There is also a psychological puzzle here: How does everyone know (or "know") that it's OK to turn the trolley but not OK to push the man off the footbridge?
You get it, right? It’s emotionally heated and complex to get up close, in range of someone’s hug or breath, and then shove them to their death. Up in the prefrontal cortex it might be rational to take one life to save five, but down in the older, more emotional part of the brain, that’s murder, pure and simple. It’s not for everyone, and certainly not for paper tigers.
But also, Greene articulates in his wonderful and nuanced work, sometimes maybe we go overboard in prejudging violence. In a deeply utilitarian analysis, sometimes violence is preferable and maybe even moral; there is such a thing as a war hero.
One thing we know for certain is that because of the delay, a man named Tom Burnett was able to learn, by phone from his wife Deena on the ground, that something bigger was underway. Other planes had hit the twin towers at 8:46 and 9:03. The delayed Flight 93 didn’t even get hijacked until 9:28. Burnett had been in first class, but he spoke to Deena near the back of the mostly-empty plane. She watched TV and told Tom what she was seeing, he relayed that to passengers in the back. When the Flight 93 hijackers told the passengers they were returning to Newark, Tom didn’t believe them because of what Deena had told him.
“Oh my god,” Tom told Deena, “it’s a suicide mission.”
Time to sort out what kind of tiger you are.
There are movies and documentaries about all that followed. As it’s commonly told, a core of four—Tom Burnett, Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, and Jeremy Glick–started formulating a plan. “Don’t worry,” Tom told Deena. “We’re going to do something.” Jeremy Glick told his wife the passengers voted whether to rush the hijackers. “Are you ready?” someone heard Todd Beamer ask, followed by: “OK. Let’s roll.” At 9:50 a.m. Sandra Bradshaw told her husband by phone that she was heating water to throw on the hijackers. That conversation ended with her saying “everyone is running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye.”
The full audio of the cockpit voice recorder has not been made public, but there’s a transcript. Many of the family members heard it, and described what they heard for a History channel documentary.
The heroes weren’t meek. “They ran up the length of a 757 with all their improvised weapons and you could hear ‘em coming. And we could hear it in the recording,” remembers Mark Burnham’s mother, Alice Hoagland. “It became louder and louder, people yelling. I’m thinking maybe they should have just done it quietly.”
Deena Burnett Bailey said: “The sense was that there were several people working together. You could hear a hijacker being hit with some type of object. And you could hear the pain that he felt when he was hit. And it was a cry and a wail as if he had been fatally struck.” Many have suggested the cockpit door was assaulted with a drinks cart.
Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker flying the plane, evidently got a sense the tigers in the back were not all paper. He can be heard asking: “Fight?”
“They were realizing,” Deena says, “that the passengers and crew members were coming to get them.”
Jarrah began to rock the plane, right and left, up and down, to interfere with the efforts outside the cockpit door. People saw this from the ground.
The assaulting party was loud. “We all heard Tom’s voice,” says Deena. “All of us just jolted. He was trying to get home to us. You could hear him yelling: In the cockpit, in the cockpit.”
“They were chanting,” says Alice. “Tom Burnett started that. In the cockpit, in the cockpit!”
Perhaps being loud changed things.
“They rattled the heck out of those guys in the front. They were terrified,” says Alice.
I have no message for you that this proves Americans are generally tough, weak, or anything else. (Americans, in my experience, are every different kind of people.) What I have to tell you, instead, is that on September 11, the terrorists tested many people on many planes. Not all of them struggled with the trolley problem. Flight 93 happened to have a delay to clarify the situation, which raised difficult questions.
What kind of people have an OK time teaming up with strangers to be physically aggressive?
David just wrote on TrueHoop about pickup basketball, a frictionless context for total strangers to team up. Athletes form and reform teams all the time. It’s not weird, in sports, to go into battle with people you just met. Burnett was a college football quarterback at St. John’s University in Minnesota, Beamer played baseball at Cal State Fullerton. Doesn’t it seem relevant that Glick was an American National College Judo champion at the University of Rochester? And that Bingham was a national rugby champion at Berkeley?
These people practiced attacking and being attacked, in different ways. They practiced tackling, and evading tackles, or in the case of Beamer, had projectiles hurled at him.
When people say sports are “just entertainment” that might be true in the narrow sense of its economic category. But it’s laughably wrong in other ways. An evolutionary psychologist recently told me that sports is the domain where we work with the aspects of our personalities derived from our ancestors’ deep experience with war and hunting.
Absent sports, would these four men have really chanted in the cockpit? Less than an hour into realizing a new war was brewing, they made themselves soldiers, and competent ones.
The tally of lives saved by this daring group is impossible to know. But it’s a longer list than just the lives saved on the ground in D.C.
The people who assaulted that cockpit flipped the script on Al Qaeda hijacking as a tactic. Since that time the hijacking of American planes has almost completely stopped. The rate of global hijacking is dramatically reduced.
I just did back-of-envelope math from this list. From the beginning of the 1970s to September 10, 2001, an average of 4.5 planes were hijacked per year around the globe. In the 24 years since: 23 planes have been hijacked, total. The rate has fallen to a fifth of what it once was. The only two American planes hijacked since 9/11 were hijacked by Americans–a suicidal teenager said something (the newspaper headline used the word “hijacked” in quotes like that) and an off-duty pilot tried to open the door of an in-flight plane.
There could be any number of reasons for this, and if you dig around, most commonly the credit goes to increased airport security, or some military action in Libya. And, to be clear, hijackings had been slowing for years before 9/11.
But the knowledge that some passengers will risk their lives to eff up hijackers has to take a little shine out of terrorist recruiting. Is this paper tiger idea still valid?
We know a lot about how Al Qaeda recruited suicide attackers. The pitch focuses on glory. President George W. Bush called the 9/11 perpetrators “cowards.” Ha! That particular word never stuck for me. They picked a deathly fight with modernity armed with nothing but boxcutters. Dastardly, sociopathic, homicidal, destructive–all that. 15 hijackers slipped through the fingers of every intelligence agency, every airport screener, and every moment of self doubt. Cowardly just isn’t the correct word.
Likely there are secret corners of earth where people like Mohammed Atta are celebrated as heroes to this day. I wonder how many people, though, celebrate the final acts of the four hijackers on Flight 93. Bin Laden funded years of training and flights and passports so that these trained and armed men could overcome a small number of unarmed civilians.
One way to see terrorism is through the lens of bullying. Qtub might argue, essentially, that the West has bullied the world into living by its standards. By that measure, the terrorists are the bullied, the underdogs. But once you board the plane, it’s the terrorists who are armed and trained, and the passengers who are guaranteed not be armed. In the sky, it’s the terrorists who planned and trained to be the bullies in an unfair fight. And, in this case, lost.
“Is that it?” one voice asks another, in Arabic, in the cockpit voice recorder transcript. “I mean, shall we put it down?” Investigators would later reveal that bin Laden had instructed the hijackers to intentionally crash any plane that couldn’t achieve its objective.
“Yes, put it in it, and pull it down,” came the reply. There’s more Arabic, and a ton of grunts, yells, and sounds of metal scraping. With a little over a minute left in the flight, the transcript notes “a very loud crash” followed by alert tones. A native English speaker yells “NO!” The last thing on the transcript is the whispered phrase “Allah is the greatest.”
Instead of decimating the U.S. Capitol building as bin Laden had hoped, Flight 93 took to the Pennsylvania dirt at almost 600 miles an hour. No one survived the impact; some pieces of the plane ended up a mile and a half away. It was a gruesome tragedy.
And, confusingly, also a marvelous victory.
“It was very unnerving at times,” Mark Bingham’s mom Alice Hoglan told The New York Times after listening to the cockpit recordings. But then she added: “It was beautiful in some ways to hear our loved ones doing everything they could.”
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