The leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta, spent his last night and the morning of September 11th on the outskirts of Portland, Maine, amid the mundane commercial sprawl of chain restaurants, retailers, hotels and gas stations sandwiched between the Interstate, Turnpike and the Portland Jetport, where he would board first flight that morning.
I followed in Atta and his colleague Al-Omari’s footsteps, speaking to the people they crossed paths with in those final hours before they changed the world for the worse. The story, for 20th anniversary of that fatal day, is in this week’s Maine Sunday Telegram and online here.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.