National Geographic's three-part account of the September 11 attacks traces the plot from its roots in Osama bin Laden's declarations of war against the United States through the training of the hijackers and the morning the planes hit the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Interviews with survivors, first responders, intelligence officials, and journalists sit alongside archival news footage, cockpit and air traffic recordings, and reenactments of the hijackers' movements through airport security. The first part builds the al-Qaeda backstory and the missed warnings inside the CIA and FBI; the later parts reconstruct the attacks minute by minute and follow the government's response, from the grounding of American airspace to the search for bin Laden. The series lays out the intelligence failures in specific, sourced detail rather than gesturing at them, naming memos, meetings, and agencies that had pieces of the plot before it happened. It plays as a straightforward, thorough record rather than an argument.