Three individuals directly impacted by the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, look back on how their lives have changed since that infamous day 20 years ago.
"It's the only piece of jewelry of hers that I'll wear," Patricia Smith, now 21, said of the necklace."I get so nervous that I'll lose something. I feel that I only have so many things of hers left that I want to keep all of it."
"We obviously wanted Americans to live their lives as normally as possible, but to understand that we live and operate in a very dangerous world where there are people, there are organizations, there are groups that don't have very kind views about our way of life, about our values," Gonzales told ABC News.More than 70 million people living in the United States, according to yearly birth data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had not yet been born on 9/11.
"I think it's just desperately heartbreaking. And I think that more Americans should feel more shame about our lack of ability to provide a better future for them over 20 years," Crowe said."That's not any individual's fault. That's a large collective weight that I think probably we as a country need to carry."
"And that last transmission you can definitely hear it that my mom was suffering. And I have to live with that," said Patricia Smith, a recent graduate of the University of Alabama who works as an athletic trainer for the Tulane University football team in New Orleans.American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 aircraft, took off from Washington's Dulles International Airport headed for Los Angeles when it, too, was hijacked. At 9:37 a.m.
Tom Ridge, who was then the governor of Pennsylvania and would be appointed the nation's first Secretary of Homeland Security in the aftermath of 9/11, told ABC News that he is certain the hijackers would have flown the plane into the nation's Capitol Building had the passengers not intervened and stopped the attack.'America is under attack'
On the way back to Washington, Card said he, Bush and other West Wing staffers watched in horror on television as the south tower of the World Trade Center, the second building struck, collapsed at 9:59 a.m. ET followed 29 minutes later by the pancaking of the north tower.
Williams' memo was never acted on because he suspects it did not include a specific threat or potential target. One of 10 suspected terrorists named in Williams' memo had close ties to Hani Hanjour, the hijacker who piloted Flight 77 into the Pentagon. However, CIA officials who had to approve any information shared with the FBI barred Miller from sending his cable to the FBI. The CIA has never publicly explained why it blocked Miller's document.There was an enormous volume of intelligence shared with the FBI by the CIA, Rossini said, but why Miller’s memo wasn’t cleared to send to the bureau remains a 9/11-related mystery, numerous former officials from both agencies have told ABC News.
"I'll be 55 in November. I was 34 when I got hurt. It's almost half my life," Feal told ABC News."I wake up every morning and I'm reminded by looking at half-a-foot ... I guess time has evaded me because it feels like yesterday in so many ways." Leon Panetta, who served as secretary of defense and CIA director in the Obama administration, added:"Just as our country made mistakes in the judgments we made about 9/11, I think the leaders in Saudi Arabia made some of the same mistakes."
The remains of Eagleson's father and those of more than 1,100 victims of the attack in lower Manhattan have never been recovered.Brett Eagleson, son of Sept. 11th victim Bruce Eagleson, wipes grass off a memorial stone for his father at the baseball field where his father use to coach, July 2, 2021, in Middletown, Conn. Eagleson and others who lost family on Sept. 11 are seeking the release of FBI documents that allege Saudi Arabia's role in the terrorist attacks.
“Anybody who does not know about Guantanamo I think today would be surprised at some of the things that went on there," Marion"Spike" Bowman, the former deputy general counsel for national security at the FBI, told ABC News. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Boumediene was arrested in a sweep of men associated with an Algerian charity worker authorities suspected was plotting to bomb the U.S. embassy in Bosnia. When a judge ordered Boumediene released in 2002 for lack of evidence, he said he was inexplicably turned over to the U.S. military and sent to Guantanamo.
Four months after the ruling, Boumediene was released to France when federal Judge Richard Leon, a Bush appointee, ruled the Bush administration"relied on insufficient evidence to imprison" him and others deemed"enemy combatants."Panetta was the secretary of defense when bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011.
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