The Twin Towers of the trade centre were left burning and weakened, one side of the Pentagon collapsed.
Bin Laden's twisted engineering brilliance knew if the planes hit the towers at a certain level, the resultant blazes and weight of the storeys above would eventually bring down the structures.
More than 2700 people died when the North and South towers hypnotically and gracefully imploded, 184 died in the Pentagon and 40 more on Flight 93.
The television footage was horrifyingly, surreally, awful.
The attacks and the images of their resulting chaos hit the American psyche hard, no longer could people living there feel safe from foreign attack and it triggered their shallow-buried paranoia.
The dimwitted President, George W Bush, was told of the incidents as he attended a reading lesson at an elementary school. No, he wasn't being taught, but he did follow the class reader ... while holding it upside down.
As the enormity of 9/11 sank in, Bush and his deputy dawgs wanted someone to blame and, more than that, someone to whack.
So one of them came up with the War on Terror.
Only George the Idiot could think a military power could declare war on a shadowy world of terror and have any tangible, meaningful success through conventional means. But he did, to flag waving and cheers, and proceeded to spend squillions of dollars a day trying to beat a hidden enemy.
To take on terrorists one must resort to their tactics - ruthless targeted killing - and have excellent intelligence operatives. Israel knows how to do it and they have never declared war on their terrorist opponents.
They outthink, outbribe, outkill their targets. Good on them.
George and his merry men and women invaded Afghanistan and did manage to put the evil Taleban to flight, but then withdrew so many troops to attack Iraq's Saddam Hussein - whose only support for terror was against his own people - that the Taleban were able to worm their way back into parts of the Afghan provinces.
Georgie and his little buddy, Tony Blair, wanted to hunt down Iraq's weapons of mass distraction and so went a country too far. They didn't find any weapons, just a country that initially backed the ousting of Hussein, then one that was infiltrated by Muslim jihadists wanting to kill Westerners.
The result was an orgy of violence that left more than 4400 US troops dead, 179 British soldiers, 33 from Italy and 21 from Australia. Oh, and there were 110,000 Iraqi civilians killed too.
In Afghanistan, the war has seen 1674 US troops die, 380 Brits, 74 French, 41 Danes and Italians, 29 Aussies and three Kiwis. We should also mention about 8800 Afghan civilians.
Because the war in Afghanistan is important to keep a truly evil group out of power and, hopefully, bring a better life to its people, it had to be fought and the casualties have to be lived with.
What other prices have had to be paid by other people in the aftermath of 9/11, 2001.
Well, for military suppliers there is no down side.
For taxpayers, there is the huge cost of keeping Coalition armed forces in the field and in peacekeeping roles.
For the families of those troops, there is the time they have lost with their loved ones while they are on tours of duty and, for those who have died, their kin will grieve forever. As will those close to the victims of everyone who died in the Twin Towers, Flight 93 and the Pentagon.
We should also look at the loss of freedoms suffered by people around the democratic world as our governments restrict our lives in the battle against terrorism.
More security cameras, greater invasions of privacy by the state, more censorship.
Put your hand up if you are happy with the eye scanning, body image photos, extra baggage checks, taking your shoes off for them to be cleared, bottles of liquid taken off you and the extra costs of paying for all the above.
It is true they are small prices compared with the other losses people are facing but doesn't it make you wonder where it will all end?
And doesn't it make you think that 10 years after those lunatics attacked on 9/11 that, maybe, somehow, we are letting them win?
richard@richardmoore.com
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