[clock ticking]
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[sorrowful music]
- This just in.
You were looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot
there.
That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports
this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers.
- Another one just hit the building.
- Wow.
- There are no words, it appears that something
hit the Pentagon on the outside of the fifth corridor.
- We have a report now that a large plane crashed
this morning north of the Somerset County Airport, which
is in Western Pennsylvania.
CARL AZUZ: It all started at 8.45
on a clear Tuesday morning.
We had a live camera up on what looked
like a smoking slash across one of the World
Trade Center towers.
A passenger plane had flown into it,
and I remember some of us here at CNN
thinking this was some sort of freak event.
Then, a second plane flew into the other tower.
That was at 9:03 AM.
And at that point, there was this deepening
dread in everyone.
Something was wrong in a way we'd never seen before.
Airports, bridges, tunnels in New York and New Jersey
shut down.
Within 30 minutes, President George W. Bush
said we were under an apparent terrorist attack.
And minutes after that, every airport in the country
was closed.
That had never happened before.
It wasn't over, though.
At 9:43 AM, a third passenger jet crashed into the Pentagon.
Dark smoke rolled up from that part of that huge building.
All eyes and many cameras were on that and the two
burning towers in New York.
And as all of us watched at 10:05, one of those towers
gave way where it was smoking, the top part crushing down
on the rest of it and sending up debris and boiling gray clouds.
Five minutes later, part of the Pentagon
collapsed, and a fourth hijacked jet crashed in a rural part
of Pennsylvania.
The White House, the United Nations,
the State and Justice Departments, the World Bank,
all evacuated.
America-bound Atlantic flights were rerouted to Canada,
and the second Trade Center tower came down at 10:28.
So many closings, evacuations, shutdowns.
Except for emergency response teams, the heroes of 9/11,
the country virtually stopped what it was doing
and gathered around TV screens.
The president appeared just after 1:00 PM
and asked Americans to pray, and there
wasn't much else we could do.
The destruction was more or less done around 10:30.
It was less than two hours from the first crash,
but the change it inflicted was immeasurable.
More Americans were killed on September 11, 2001
than on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
And when President Bush addressed the nation that night
at 8:30, his tone was one of sympathy,
resolve, and warning to anyone who'd planned
or supported the attacks.
GEORGE W. BUSH: We will make no distinction
between the terrorists who committed these acts
and those who harbor them.
CARL AZUZ: In the difficult days that followed,
we learned that the al-Qaeda terrorist group,
led by Osama bin Laden, was responsible for all of this.
And America's attention and anger
turned to Afghanistan, whose Taliban
leaders were giving al-Qaeda a safe place to live and operate.
This Saturday will mark exactly 20 years
since those terrorist attacks were carried out,
and a number of events are being planned
across America to remember the 2,977 lives that were lost.
In the days immediately following the attacks,
President George W. Bush declared September 14
as a national day of prayer and remembrance for the victims.
And after that, the US government established
the Patriot Day holiday.
In a sign of unity seen during that time,
no members of Congress voted against that bill.
Patriot Day has been observed every September 11 since 2002.
This year, there will be live TV coverage
of memorial ceremonies.
Moments of silence will be observed.
Prayer services and commemorative events
will be held across the United States,
and readings will be made naming the thousands of victims,
including the hundreds of firefighters, police officers,
Port Authority officers, and other emergency officials
who lost their lives while trying to save others.
Special events are being planned at the three sites where
the hijacked planes were crashed,
Ground Zero in New York City, the Pentagon
in Arlington, Virginia, and the field outside Shanksville,
Pennsylvania.
President Joe Biden and First Lady
Jill Biden are planning to attend these three ceremonies.
And while we don't know yet if the president is scheduled
to speak at one or more of these events,
an address from former President George W. Bush
has been planned in Shanksville, where United Flight
93 was crashed 20 years ago.
That morning in 2001, President Bush was
visiting an elementary school.
He was in a second grade classroom
when he was told the nation was under attack.
Almost two decades later, CNN's Victor Blackwell
visited that school in Sarasota, Florida,
and he spoke to the teacher and some of the students
who were with the president on that historic and horrific day.
Here are their memories.
VICTOR BLACKWELL: What do you do in that moment?
- I cry, I pray, and I asked why, why and how?
I really needed a moment.
- We never really see her cry, but it's
like something definitely impacted her more than
what we know what was going on.
It was deeper than what we seen.
- We knew Ms. Daniels as loving, caring.
It's a really different take from our teacher.
It's kind of jarring.
I mean, we've never seen her like this.
VICTOR BLACKWELL: How long was your moment?
- It could have been two minutes.
It could have been three minutes,
but I knew I had to get back to my kids.
VICTOR BLACKWELL: OK.
- So, I didn't want them to think that they
had done something wrong.
So, I had to let them know it was not their fault.
- Something in the way that you presented it to us
allowed me to understand that, like, the human side of it,
that I am not the most important person right now, like he's
got something he has to do.
People are hurting.
He has to leave, and that's OK, and it's not our fault.
- And I think after that, that's when they cut on the TV for us.
- To those Americans who are looking
at these horrific pictures.
- And then it all came together, like I
grasped how serious it was.
- I think myself and maybe other students thought it
was like a movie or something.
- It didn't look real.
VICTOR BLACKWELL: The TV was here?
You took them to a different room?
- The TV-- the monitor that President Bush had
was in his office next door.
Their memory of it might fluctuate a little.
After I came out of the room, I told them what happened.
The pictures and the images that they saw,
they might have seen them when that door was open,
but the TV never came in here.
I was very careful about how much I expose them to
and what I said to them.
- That was the first day I learned
the word terrorist, too.
- Yeah.
VICTOR BLACKWELL: Yeah, this is the story that so few people
have heard, in part because they've never all been
together to tell this story.
Those are the students-- well, they're 27 years old now,
and their teacher, Mrs. Daniels, who
were with President Bush on that morning at Emmett
E. Booker in Sarasota.
Now, the president was coming-- this was started--
it started as a day that was one to celebrate.
The president was coming to congratulate them for improving
their reading scores.
They were waiting for someone.
They had never seen a president in person, obviously.
One little girl put her hand over her heart, that Shontell.
She thought about him much like the flag
and pledging allegiance.
Another boy talked about he expected a King to walk in.
But when he walked in, they say that President Bush was warm.
They read a book, "The Pet Goat",
that they all remember the title to, the title of.
And then, Andy Card walked in and whispered 11 words
into the president's ear, "A second plane
has hit the second tower.
America is under attack."
And Mrs. Daniels says, the president left her,
that he was sitting there, but he was somewhere else.
And then he came back and then got up and walked away.
And she had to decide in that moment what to tell her babies,
as she called them, about that moment.
She wanted to make sure that they
knew it was not their fault.
20 years later, they have the context of time
to understand their place in this historic day.
They don't really like to talk about it often,
because they know that so many other people
lost something that day.
They don't want the notoriety, but they know that they have
to be part of the history of that day,
to share that perspective.
CARL AZUZ: And a powerful perspective it is.
This will conclude our special coverage
of the 20th anniversary of the September
11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Thank you for watching.
And if there's a tribute or memorial like this taking place
in your community in commemoration of September 11,
it is a sight to see.
I'm Carl Azuz for CNN 10.
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