Travel Geography of the 9/11 Network

Using publicly available sources from the 9/11 Commission, the FBI, and the U.S. Congress, Rafael Prieto, my students Joseph Padron and Jason Scheuer, and I mapped the travel patterns of the 19 Al Qaeda operatives involved in the 9/11 attacks against the United States.

Our analysis shows that hijackers tended to follow the same itineraries across the United States and the world, without necessarily always visiting the same destinations at the same time.

Our work was published by Lawfare on 9/6/22. A longer version is available as a working paper on SSRN. The data and code are freely accessible on GitHub.