ABSTRACT

Business representatives from several countries were among those who died in the two planes and in the attack on the twin towers. Although the Pentagon had been designed to withstand a terrorist attack, a section of it collapsed and burned upon impact of the plane. There were more than 20,000 civilian and military workers in the building at the time. One of the major assumptions shattered by September 11 was that the end of the cold war had provided Americans with an increased degree of safety and security. But merely eleven years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attack of September 11 shattered Americans' assumptions about their military invincibility. Even the war metaphor was questioned because it implied armed aggression and hostility between clearly identifiable nations. Causal explanations, even if erroneous, impose order on what otherwise would appear to be random, haphazard, and meaningless events.