Every year the National Recording Archives adds 25 recordings to be saved for posterity. The National Recording Archive has featured everything from presidential speeches to historic moments to the very first audio recording.

This year there is another diverse list, including some you might have thought had been in there for years.

The 1999 single that made a former singer from Menudo a star – Living la Vida Loca by Ricky Martin – has been cited as a way other artists from Shakira to Paulina Rubio made the jump to mainstream. It joins the list this year.

For every small town girl living in a lonely world... the Bay Area band founded by former members of Santana – Journey – just now made it into the archive with "Don't Stop Believing." The song is so iconic the show "The Sopranos" chose it to end their run on TV. Interestingly enough, the phrase "don't stop believing" doesn't even show up until more than three minutes into the song.

One of the most historic moments in baseball – when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's all-time home run record – is in there from the radio call of his historic moment.

With bright red hair, an audacious blues attitude, and a bottleneck guitar, Bonnie Raitt's album "Nick of Time" was called one of the thousand and one albums you must hear before you die by Billboard Magazine. That's one reason it was added to the 2022 list.

Speaking of guitar greats, when guitarist Ry Cooder and Producer Nick Gold went to Havana, Cuba, to record an all-star ensemble of musicians who paved the way for Cuban rhythms, they adopted the name the "Buena Vista Social Club." It's a name taken from a popular club in Havana where most of they had played. The documentary is in the US Film Archive, the registry felt it was only fitting to add the soundtrack.

The attacks on Washington, D.C., New York and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, are in with the public radio broadcasts by WNYC in New York.

The groundbreaking group The Wu Tang Clan, whose members would go on to create a myriad of record labels, influence multiple generations of artists and become a force in the hip hop world, get in with their album "Enter the Wu Tang Clan."

One you might wonder "why wasn't this in here before?" It's a tune where you've all sung along in the car and tried to do the Fandango...Queen's epic musical journey "Bohemian Rhapsody" gets its due this year as well.

The entire list of recordings is below:

1. “Harlem Strut” — James P. Johnson (1921)
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt: Complete Presidential Speeches (1933-1945)
3. “Walking the Floor Over You” — Ernest Tubb (1941) (single)
4. “On a Note of Triumph” (May 8, 1945)
5. “Jesus Gave Me Water” — The Soul Stirrers (1950) (single)
6. “Ellington at Newport” — Duke Ellington (1956) (album)
7. “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite” — Max Roach (1960) (album)
8. “The Christmas Song” — Nat King Cole (1961) (single)
9. “Tonight’s the Night” — The Shirelles (1961) (album)
10. “Moon River” — Andy Williams (1962) (single)
11. “In C” — Terry Riley (1968) (album)
12. “It’s a Small World” — The Disneyland Boys Choir (1964) (single)
13. “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” — The Four Tops (1966) (single)
14. Hank Aaron’s 715th Career Home Run (April 8, 1974)
15. “Bohemian Rhapsody” — Queen (1975) (single)
16. “Don’t Stop Believin’” — Journey (1981) (single)
17. “Canciones de Mi Padre” — Linda Ronstadt (1987) (album)
18. “Nick of Time” — Bonnie Raitt (1989) (album)
19. “The Low End Theory” — A Tribe Called Quest (1991) (album)
20. “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)” — Wu-Tang Clan (1993) (album)
21. “Buena Vista Social Club” (1997) (album)
22. “Livin’ La Vida Loca” — Ricky Martin (1999) (single)
23. “Songs in A Minor” — Alicia Keys (2001) (album)
24. WNYC broadcasts for the day of 9/11 (Sept. 11, 2001)
25. “WTF with Marc Maron” (Guest: Robin Williams) (April 26, 2010)

Brattleboro police Chief Norma Hardy remembers Sept. 11, 2001, like it was yesterday. She was a Port Authority officer at the time, living in Brooklyn. She wasn’t scheduled to work that morning, but like everyone, plans changed, fast.“You know, once we realized there was it wasn't an accident, once the second plane had hit... We were mobilized. And we started coming into Manhattan,” Hardy said.As she arrived in lower Manhattan, the towers were already rubble.“I really just came out into a bunch of chaos, and people running around and really horrible scenes,” she said.With her police shield around her neck, Hardy walked block by block, down streets she worked to protect for years.“I kind of think I went into shock at that point, witnessing what I was seeing,” she said.Moments later, a stranger snapped her back to the reality at hand. Hardy and fellow first responders started conducting rescue missions at ground zero. The most prominent sound was firefighters’ man down alarms.“It felt like we were in like a tunnel,” Hardy said. “Because it was like you could hear every sound because you were trying to hear people screaming for help. And you kept trying to hear and we walked, and people were digging with their hands, and they were picking up blocks with their hands. They were fires everywhere.”For days on end, the searching went on, the smoke and debris endless.“Your mind plays a trick on you,” Hardy said. “So, you think that you can hear people? And you really didn't. It was just that we wanted to find people so badly. That's what we thought we were hearing.”The Port Authority Police Department lost 37 officers on just that day. One of Hardy’s best friends, 50-year-old John Dennis Levi, was one of them. They continue to lose officers years later due to illnesses contracted from ground zero.“I have quite a few friends that are fighting different cancers,” Hardy said.While some are still fighting their own 9/11 battles, some of Hardy's young officers can't comprehend how our nation changed that sunny day.“I spoke to some of my officers, and they were little kids when this happened,” she said.For Hardy, the story never changes. Her memories serve as a reminder that those who answered the call of duty on that fateful day will always be remembered.“If you don't have people left who can tell you firsthand accounts of it, I'm afraid that it will get lost in history,” she said.

Video above: Ceremony being held in New York to honor 9/11 victims

Americans are remembering 9/11 with moments of silence, readings of victims' names, volunteer work and other tributes 21 years after the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil.

A tolling bell and a moment of silence began the commemoration at ground zero in New York, where the World Trade Center's twin towers were destroyed by the hijacked-plane attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Victims’ relatives and dignitaries also convened at the two other attack sites, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

Other communities around the country are marking the day with candlelight vigils, interfaith services and other commemorations. Some Americans are joining in volunteer projects on a day that is federally recognized as both Patriot Day and a National Day of Service and Remembrance.

The observances follow a fraught milestone anniversary last year. It came weeks after the chaotic and humbling end of the Afghanistan war that the U.S. launched in response to the attacks.

But if this Sept. 11 may be less of an inflection point, it remains a point for reflection on the attack that killed nearly 3,000 people, spurred a U.S. “war on terror” worldwide and reconfigured national security policy.

It also stirred — for a time — a sense of national pride and unity for many, while subjecting Muslim Americans to years of suspicion and bigotry and engendering debate over the balance between safety and civil liberties. In ways both subtle and plain, the aftermath of 9/11 ripples through American politics and public life to this day.

Live video: Ceremony held at the Pentagon to honor lives lost on 9/11

And the attacks have cast a long shadow into the personal lives of thousands of people who survived, responded or lost loved ones, friends and colleagues.

More than 70 of Sekou Siby's co-workers perished at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the trade center's north tower. Siby had been scheduled to work that morning until another cook asked him to switch shifts.

Siby never took a restaurant job again; it would have brought back too many memories. The Ivorian immigrant wrestled with how to comprehend such horror in a country where he'd come looking for a better life.

He found it difficult to form the type of close, family-like friendships he and his Windows on the World co-workers had shared. It was too painful, he had learned, to become attached to people when “you have no control over what’s going to happen to them next.”

“Every 9/11 is a reminder of what I lost that I can never recover,” says Siby, who is now president and CEO of ROC United. The restaurant workers' advocacy group evolved from a relief center for Windows on the World workers who lost their jobs when the twin towers fell.

On Sunday, President Joe Biden plans to speak and lay a wreath at the Pentagon, while First Lady Jill Biden is scheduled to speak in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where one of the hijacked planes went down after passengers and crew members tried to storm the cockpit as the hijackers headed for Washington. Al-Qaida conspirators had seized control of the jets to use them as passenger-filled missiles.

Vice President Kamala Harris and husband Doug Emhoff joined the observance at the National Sept. 11 Memorial in New York, but by tradition, no political figures speak at the ground zero ceremony. It centers instead on victims' relatives reading aloud the names of the dead.

Readers often add personal remarks that form an alloy of American sentiments about Sept. 11 — grief, anger, toughness, appreciation for first responders and the military, appeals to patriotism, hopes for peace, occasional political barbs, and a poignant accounting of the graduations, weddings, births and daily lives that victims have missed.

Some relatives also lament that a nation which came together — to some extent — after the attacks has since splintered apart. So much so that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which were reshaped to focus on international terrorism after 9/11, now see the threat of domestic violent extremism as equally urgent.

NEW YORK (AP) — Americans remembered 9/11 on Sunday with tear-choked tributes and pleas to “never forget," 21 years after the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil.

Nikita Shah headed to the ceremony on the ground in a T-shirt that bore the de facto epigraph of the annual commemoration — “never forget” — and the name of her slain father, Jayesh Shah.

The family moved to Houston afterward but has often returned to New York for the anniversary of the attack that killed him and nearly 3,000 other people.

“For us, it was being around people who kind of experienced the same type of grief and the same feelings after 9/11,” said Shah, who was 10 when her father was killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Victims’ relatives and dignitaries also convened at the two other attack sites, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

Other communities around the country are marking the day with candlelight vigils, interfaith services and other commemorations. Some Americans are joining in volunteer projects on a day that is federally recognized as both Patriot Day and a National Day of Service and Remembrance.

More than two decades later, Sept. 11 remains a point for reflection on the attack that reconfigured national security policy and spurred a U.S. “war on terror” worldwide. Sunday's observances, which follow a fraught milestone anniversary last year, come little more than a month after a U.S. drone strike killed a key al-Qaida figure who helped plot the 9/11 attacks, Ayman al-Zawahri.

It also stirred — for a time — a sense of national pride and unity for many while subjecting Muslim Americans to years of suspicion and bigotry and engendering debate over the balance between safety and civil liberties. In ways both subtle and plain, the aftermath of 9/11 ripples through American politics and public life to this day.

And the attacks have cast a long shadow on the personal lives of thousands of people who survived, responded or lost loved ones, friends and colleagues.

Firefighter Jimmy Riches’ namesake nephew wasn’t born yet when his uncle died, but the boy took the podium to pay tribute to him.

“You’re always in my heart. And I know you are watching over me,” he said after reading a portion of the victims’ names.

More than 70 of Sekou Siby's co-workers perished at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the trade center's north tower. Siby had been scheduled to work that morning until another cook asked him to switch shifts.

Siby never took a restaurant job again; it would have brought back too many memories. The Ivorian immigrant wrestled with how to comprehend such horror in a country where he'd come looking for a better life.

He found it difficult to form the type of close, family-like friendships he and his Windows on the World co-workers had shared. It was too painful, he had learned, to become attached to people when “you have no control over what’s going to happen to them next.”

“Every 9/11 is a reminder of what I lost that I can never recover,” says Siby, who is now president and CEO of ROC United. The restaurant workers' advocacy group evolved from a relief center for Windows on the World workers who lost their jobs when the twin towers fell.

On Sunday, President Joe Biden spoke and laid a wreath at the Pentagon. At the same time, first lady Jill Biden spoke in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where one of the hijacked planes went down after passengers and crew members tried to storm the cockpit as the hijackers headed for Washington. Al-Qaida conspirators had seized control of the jets to use them as passenger-filled missiles.

Vice President Kamala Harris and husband Doug Emhoff joined the observance at the National Sept. 11 Memorial in New York. Still, by tradition, no political figures speak at the ground zero ceremony. It centers instead on victims' relatives reading aloud the names of the dead.

Readers often add personal remarks that form an alloy of American sentiments about Sept. 11 — grief, anger, toughness, appreciation for first responders and the military, appeals to patriotism, hopes for peace, occasional political barbs, and a poignant accounting of the graduations, weddings, births and daily lives that victims have missed.

Some relatives also lament that a nation that came together — to some extent — after the attacks have since splintered apart. So much so that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which were reshaped to focus on international terrorism after 9/11, now see the threat of domestic violent extremism as equally urgent.

LORAIN, Ohio — Country legend John Rich held a concert in Lorain, Ohio, on Wednesday to benefit the Travis Mills Foundation, a nonprofit that supports post-9/11 veterans at a retreat in Maine.

The organization helps veterans overcome physical and emotional scars — veterans like U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Travis Mills who completed three tours of duty in Afghanistan and was critically injured by a roadside bomb.

“Fast forward, ya know, I’m so grateful to be alive that I don’t dwell on what happened," Mills said.

Mills lost both of his legs and parts of his arms that day. He is one of five quadruple-amputees from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to survive his injuries.

“I don’t consider myself a ‘hero’ by any means, but I do know that I’ve been fortunate enough to make it through my injuries and leave behind some really good guys that didn’t make it home," he said.

With that in mind, Mills and his wife Kelsey started the Travis Mills Foundation about eight years ago. The foundation provides a retreat for veterans and their families just to be together, with each other, with other veterans. Through various programs, it helps these men and women overcome physical and emotional obstacles, strengthen their families, and provide well-deserved rest and relaxation in an all-inclusive, all-expenses-paid, barrier-free experience.

Chris Miller, a Marine Corps veteran from Northeast Ohio, has been shot twice, stabbed once, and sustained a 50-foot cliff fall with two other Marines that broke his back.

“They know what happened to me. They know the challenges I’ve faced ever since that day,” he said.

Travis Mills Foundation.

He and his family have first-hand knowledge of both that pain of injury and the retreat that stepped up and helped.

“It’s very emotional, and every day’s a challenge for so many veterans like myself that just making it through a day is hard, but you know what? So many friends from the foundation now have become family,” said Miller.

The veterans and their families who attend programs at the Travis Mills Foundation come from throughout the country.

“I’m grateful that a country star like John Rich will be helping spread the news about the foundation and what we do for our nation’s heroes,” Mills said. “It was them, my fellow veterans, who inspired me to create the foundation after my injury."

Click here to learn more about the foundation.

This story was originally published by Rob Powers at WEWS.

CHICAGO — Art can be beautiful and inspirational. But for some artists, creating works that stir the soul and the mind goes beyond just the brush and canvas.

Socio-political activist and artist Pritika Chowdhry focuses her work on reframing traumatic geopolitical events like 9/11. She sees art as a way to ask difficult questions.

“This is the artist asking, 'God are you there? Do you see what's happening? Are you still there?'”

She studies seismic geopolitical events in depth and channels that into her artwork.

“And then, I try to excavate things from those events that have been not spoken about as much as they probably should have been,” she explained.

Chowdhry calls these the counter-memories of trauma. Sept. 11, for example, she says became about never forgetting the nearly 3,000 lives lost that day. But she says the lives lost went far beyond that in countries half a world away.

“In the context of 9/11, it's almost unpatriotic to say, ‘Hey, but what about all these other lives that are now in the millions that were lost?'”

Chowdhry has channeled that notion in what she calls the Counter Memory Project, an effort to memorialize the "unbearable memories."

“This is a...this is a scale of justice," she said.

In one of her works "Ungrievable Lives: Ghosts of 9/11," she examines what she calls the "differential values placed on human life."

“The heavier side has this gold bullion bar, and it says, ‘One life 9/11, 2001.’ And then if you turn it over, it says. ‘One of 2,983. Made in America.’”

It’s a commentary on what lives are worth shedding tears over and which ones are not.

“What is this gold standard? Clearly, an American life,” said Chowdhry.

On the other side of the scale rests a piece of meat, hair, and nail clippings.

“This is representative, as I was saying earlier of the non-American lives that we do not grieve for,” said Chowdhry.

It’s undoubtedly provocative, something Chowdhry knows all too well.

“I'm an American citizen. I love this country despite all its flaws. I do. I call this home,” she said. “It's OK for us to let our guard down once in a while to introspect and see we, even as a powerful moral nation get it wrong.”

Getting it wrong was punctuated in recent weeks as the last known missile fired in Afghanistan by the U.S. military last turned out to be a grave error.

The botched American drone strike killed 10 civilians including seven children. The youngest child Sumaya was just 2 years old. On September 17, weeks after the strike, General Frank McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, acknowledged the civilian causalities.

“I offer my profound condolences to the family and friends of those who were killed,” said McKenzie. “But it was a mistake, and I offer my sincere apology.”

It was a stunning admission coming at the end of the United States’ longest-running war. But Chowdhry says she is optimistic that it was a signal of change.

“Maybe there is a there is a shift,” she said. “We're finally witnessing a shift after 20 years where I think finally people even in America are realizing that maybe what we're doing is wrong and maybe the people over there are human, are grievable.”

And while she knows some may be angered by her anti-memorial work, she hopes to tilt the scale to the center, valuing each life lost as equally tragic and worthy of remembrance.

Warning: The following content may be distressing for some viewers.

Hundreds of New York firefighters and police officers immediately headed to work once Flight 175 hit the South Tower. One of those officers was Louis Savelli.

After leading the NYPD counter-terrorism unit created in the aftermath of the attack for many years, the born-and-bred New Yorker eventually moved his family to Iowa for a fresh start, opening an authentic pizzeria in 2014. He brought a little piece of the Big Apple with him: posters, pizza ovens and his prized accent.

The retired detective came to Camp Dodge with lessons learned from 9/11 to teach counter-terrorist training to law enforcement all over the country.

"That was my unit... to arrest members of Al-Qaeda," Savelli said.

"When the second plane hit, which I knew right away, and then everybody knew right away that was a terrorist attack. I ran right into work," Savelli said.

It was a life-changing day burned into his mind.

"The streets of New York were mayhem," Savelli said. "People were trying to drive all over to get places. Nobody was stopping at lights. Horns were beeping. It was something out of a movie, like a science fiction movie."

Savelli shared photos that he had captured from ground zero.

"It was just constant dust for quite a while, from all the debris, from the pulverization of the buildings, all the stuff that was in the air. It was very surreal," Savelli said.

He and his team worked frantically.

"Trying to sift through tons and tons of rubble by hand, trying to find people. And then just being frustrated not really finding anything," Savelli said.

However, there were only a few survivors.

"A lot of memories of specific things... are kind of, like, blurry or nonexistent," Savelli said. "So a lot of things that happened, it's hard to remember specific things. But I do remember my recovery efforts at ground zero were mostly body parts. It's kind of hard to say on TV. I don't remember an entire person, finding an entire person on that day, on 9/11, and then throughout that time. I assume that ... not remembering is a part of my mind blocking it out."

Now, 20 years later, he cannot block it out. Like many of the first responders, Savelli is suffering. The dust he breathed in at ground zero has caused asthma, skin cancer and gut-wrenching stomach pain now.

"Sadly, all those guys that stayed there looking for people and looking for DNA, and anybody who could've at least recovered something for the family, every one of them has gotten seriously sick," Savelli said. "At least 5,000 total first responders have died of cancer. And about 15,000, 20,000 have gotten some sort of serious cancer-related disease since then."

In addition to the pain is the fear that terrorism will rear its ugly head on United States soil again after pulling out of Afghanistan.

"Without a doubt, we are much more at risk today than we've been in a long time," Savelli said. "Are we going to have people like Taliban or ISIS or Al-Qaeda or Haqqani Network or some others coming in with them? And without a doubt that will happen. So we have to do a better job."

Aside from his pizza businesses in Des Moines, Savelli also runs a security firm.

"I was a member of the NYPD on 9/11 at ground zero and you know we did our job, but the United States military sacrificed so much to go overseas and protect this country," Savelli said. "And they are my heroes."

He said we should remember that the people willing to put their lives on the line, don't do it for the money.

"The people out there sacrifice, for very little money. The cops, the firefighters, the military, EMTs, they make very little money," Savelli said. "But yet they risk their lives out there for strangers."

Warning: The above video has footage that may be upsetting to some viewers.

Sept. 11, 2001, was a sunny day in New York City.

Randal Robinson, of Savannah, Georgia, had just arrived for a morning U.S. Customs Service seminar, being held on the fourth floor of Six World Trade Center.

One of the buildings that would soon be gone.

"And then when the thing hit...Boom. One of the New Yorkers said, 'Oh we don't have earthquakes in New York very often.'

And then.... Boom boom rumble rumble.... Dragging scraping sound.

Oh... somebody's moving furniture.

And we thought.... 'Naah.'

Then somebody stuck their head in the door and shouted, 'Everybody out....now! Do not go down the elevator. Come down the steps and follow me.'"

Robinson remembers it all like it was yesterday. How they all dashed down the stairs to the street below. He looked up and saw the smoke.

Somebody said a corporate jet must have struck the building. He couldn't figure out how the pilot could have done it.

"Well heck, it had to be a heart attack or a stroke," he said. "It was beautiful weather. You couldn't miss seeing it. So I said, 'Well, hopefully, they'll get the fire put out soon.' So I pulled out my camera and started taking the pictures."

He snapped about a dozen images before realizing just what he was witnessing.

"So then when I ran out of film," he said, "I put in another roll of film and started to take more pictures and then someone said, 'Oh my gosh, people are jumping out.' So I said no more pictures."

He thought the firefighters would put it out. But they had no chance.

"In a few minutes, someone said 'Oh my god, here comes another one.' This other jetliner was coming down the river. Banked hard left. Came over our heads, engines screaming and hit Two World Trade Center."

He finally made it back to his hotel room and watched on TV with the other guests as the towers fell, including the building he had evacuated.

"...Thank the Lord we all got out safely."

SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. —

In the minutes following an attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, concern spread quickly between members of the Vermont Air National Guard.

For Col. Dan Finnegan, like countless other Americans, the morning began with work duties before his attention shifted to a breaking news broadcast on a nearby television set.

"Col. Jensen walked through, 'Hey, you may want to see this — an airplane has hit the World Trade Center,'" he recalled.

"We turned that television on," Finnegan said, pointing to a set inside of the base. "That was the first time we saw the gravity of the situation that was developing."

Within hours, the Guard's F-16s were armed with live missiles and en route to Manhattan, roughly 260 miles south of their base. Finnegan said the operation was quick to be deployed, but came with clear instructions.

"It was 'get airborne, make sure there is fighter aircraft overhead,'" he said. "Non-stop."

The Guard trains for quick responses, but pilots said it was difficult to process the full magnitude of what was happening that morning as they prepared for their first armed flight over American land.

"In a case like this, you may be asked to shoot down a civilian airliner," Finnegan said, pausing. "And I think that thought had not crossed any of our minds at the time."

Now-retired Lt. Col. Terry Moultroup was one of the first guard members to get off the runway and above Manhattan. What he saw below — a hazy plume of smoke rising from Ground Zero behind a fighter jet armed with air-to-air missiles — would be captured forever with the help of a digital camera stowed away in his cockpit.

With a vast majority of flights grounded after the attacks, it offered a rare view of the devastation from above and, for some, a message of reassurance. It quickly became one of the most downloaded images on military websites and made the front page of newspapers around the world.

"I didn't think it would go worldwide," Moultroup remembered.

The pilots' presence following the attacks marked the first of 122 consecutive days they would spend guarding airspace above the nation's largest city. Many had flown over many times before, but never like this.

"That evening, I remembered the utter dead silence in the air," Finnegan said. "There wasn't an aircraft around and we were there to make sure. Under the night vision goggles, you could see all the flashing lights, and then in the infrared, you could see how hot the wreckage was and the first responders that were down on the ground."

He continued, "And they would remain there as we continued to fly these missions. Twenty-four hours. Seven days a week."

Some members of the Green Mountain Boys remember having tangled emotions about the assignment in the weeks that followed as crews below continued to look for the more than 2,600 people killed in the attacks.

"You are kinda back and forth," Finnegan said. "Your heart is going out to what's happening on the ground and knowing that my ask, my part of this, is to keep people away from you so you can just safely do what you need to do."

The attacks that day would change the mission of the 158th Fighter Wing, as some of the same pilots would spend more than a decade of service flying missions overseas in America's longest war.

"I didn't know what to make of it at the time," Moultroup said. "We'd be the longest war in U.S. history, that the Taliban would come in power again and ... it's just so sad."

Now, roughly 20 years later, the images of that day and the weeks that followed remain imprinted on the minds of those involved.

"Yeah, it's kind of hard to forget," Finnegan said. "It leaves a mark."

Three American presidents stood somberly side by side Saturday at the National September 11 Memorial in New York, sharing a moment of silence to mark the anniversary of the nation's worst terrorist attack with a display of unity.

Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton gathered at the site where the World Trade Center towers fell two decades ago. Each man wore a blue ribbon and held his hands over his heart as a procession marched a flag through the memorial before hundreds of people, some carrying photos of loved ones lost in the attacks.

Before the event began, a jet flew overhead in an eerie echo of the attacks, drawing a glance from Biden toward the sky. For much of the ceremony he stood with his arms crossed and head bowed, listening while the names of the victims were read. At one point, he wiped a tear from his eye.

Biden was a senator when hijackers commandeered four planes and carried out the attack. He was Obama's vice president in 2011 when the country observed the 10th anniversary of the strikes. Saturday's commemoration was his first as commander in chief, beginning in New York City and culminating late afternoon at the Pentagon, where the world's mightiest military suffered an unthinkable blow to its very home.

In between he visited Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where passengers brought down a hijacked plane that was headed for the U.S. Capitol. Biden and his wife, Jill, walked with relatives of the crash victims into the grassy field where the jet came to rest.

He reflected on the need for unity when he dropped by the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department to deliver Bud Light and thank first responders who responded to the plane crash on Sept. 11.

"Everyone says Biden, 'Why do you keep insisting on trying to bring the country together?'' the president told reporters. "That's the thing that's going to affect our well-being more than anything else."

It is now Biden who shoulders the responsibility borne by his predecessors to prevent another strike. He must do that against fears of a rise in terrorism after the hasty U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, where those who planned the Sept. 11 attacks were sheltered.

But on a day when his nation recalled its shock and sorrow, Biden left the speech-making to others.

Biden's vice president, Kamala Harris, spoke in Shanksville at the Flight 93 National Memorial, praising the courage of those passengers and the resilience of Americans who came together in the days after the attacks.

"In a time of outright terror, we turned toward each other," she said. "If we do the hard work of working together as Americans, if we remain united in purpose, we will be prepared for whatever comes next."

Former President George W. Bush, speaking before Harris, recalled how 9/11 showed that Americans could unite despite their differences. It was a message, he said, that was needed today.

"So much of our politics have become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment," Bush said. "On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand, and rally for the cause of one another. That is the America I know."

Biden, speaking at the firehouse later, praised Bush's message of unity, and mentioned that he had taken photos with some boys wearing Trump hats at the firehouse. Biden framed the need for unity as a crucial to the success of democracies, asking "Are we going to, in the next four, five, six, 10 years, demonstrate that democracies can work, or not?"

Former President Donald Trump skipped the official 9/11 memorial ceremonies and instead visited a fire station and police precinct in New York.

While Biden had no prepared remarks of his own Saturday, he did offer praise for Bush's words, telling reporters in Pennsylvania that he thought the former president "made a really good speech today. Genuinely."

But unity was a theme that Biden emphasized in a taped address released by the White House late Friday. He spoke about the "true sense of national unity" that emerged after the attacks, seen in "heroism everywhere — in places expected and unexpected."

"To me that's the central lesson of September 11," he said. "Unity is our greatest strength."

Biden is the fourth president to console the nation on the anniversary of that dark day, one that has shaped many of the most consequential domestic and foreign policy decisions made by the chief executives over the past two decades.

Bush was reading a book to Florida schoolchildren when the planes slammed into the World Trade Center. He spent that day being kept out of Washington for security reasons — a decision then-Sen. Biden urged him to reconsider, the current president has written — and then delivered a brief, halting speech that night from the White House to a terrified nation.

The terrorist attack would define Bush's presidency. The following year, he chose Ellis Island as the location to deliver his first anniversary address, the Statue of Liberty over his shoulder as he pledged, "What our enemies have begun, we will finish."

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were still deadly when Obama visited the Pentagon to mark his first Sept. 11 in office in 2009.

By the time Obama spoke at the 10th anniversary, attack mastermind Osama bin Laden was dead, killed in a May 2011 Navy SEAL raid. Though the nation remained entangled overseas, and vigilant against terrorist threats, the anniversary became more about healing.

"We reaffirm our commitment to keep a sacred trust with their families — including the children who lost parents, and who have demonstrated such extraordinary resilience. But this anniversary is also about reflecting on what we've learned in the 20 years since that awful morning," Obama said in a statement early Saturday morning.

"That list of lessons is long and growing. But one thing that became clear on 9/11 — and has been clear ever since — is that America has always been home to heroes who run towards danger in order to do what is right."

When they think back on Sept. 11, 2001, Obama said, he and former First Lady Michelle Obama aren't left only with lasting images of two planes flying into the twin towers of the World Trade Center or the wreckage at the other attack sites, but also with the courage of the first responders who acted on that day and in the following weeks and months.

"It's the firefighters running up the stairs as others were running down. The passengers deciding to storm a cockpit, knowing it could be their final act. The volunteers showing up at recruiters' offices across the country in the days that followed, willing to put their lives on the line," the former president wrote.

That same selflessness, Obama said, has been on display "again and again" over the past two decades.

LONDON —

Queen Elizabeth II marked the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks by offering her sympathies to the victims, survivors and families affected by the atrocity.

In a message to U.S. President Joe Biden, the British monarch remembered the "terrible attacks" on New York and Washington, D.C.

"My thoughts and prayers — and those of my family and the entire nation — remain with the victims, survivors and families affected, as well as the first responders and rescue workers called to duty,'' she said.

"My visit to the site of the World Trade Center in 2010 is held fast in my memory. It reminds me that as we honor those from many nations, faiths and backgrounds who lost their lives, we also pay tribute to the resilience and determination of the communities who joined together to rebuild.''

The ties between the two nations were marked with a special Changing of the Guard ceremony at Windsor Castle in which "The Star-Spangled Banner" was played. Hundreds gathered inside and outside the walls of the castle to watch.

Watch video above to see the performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner"

The U.S. national anthem had also been played at Buckingham Palace 20 years ago on Sept. 12, 2001, a mark of solidarity with the United States.

U.S. Ambassador Philip Reeker thanked the queen for the gesture.

"Speaking for the United States, we have no closer ally and no closer friend, in good times and in bad times, and we are very much reminded of that today ... through the enduring relationship between our two countries," he said.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has also remembered the attacks, issuing a statement ahead of the anniversary saying that the terrorists had failed to "shake our belief in freedom and democracy."

"They failed to drive our nations apart, or cause us to abandon our values, or to live in permanent fear."

Sixty-seven British nationals were among the almost 3,000 people killed when hijacked planes crashed into New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon in Washington and a field in Pennsylvania.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, changed the lives of Americans forever.

In a recent poll by USA TODAY/Suffolk University, 60% of 1,000 people surveyed agreed.

Eighty-five percent polled said the terror attacks had a big impact on their generation, while nearly two-thirds said it had a big impact on their own lives.

From technological advances to changes in national security, exactly what has changed in the 20 years since America came under attack?

National Security

Just 11 days after terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the Department of Homeland Security was created.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge was appointed as the first director of the department, which was tasked with overseeing and coordinating a national approach to protect the U.S. against terrorism and future attacks.

The Department of Homeland Security now consists of more than 240,000 employees who are responsible for aviation and border security, cybersecurity and other preparedness measures.

Technology

Technology has seen its fair share of changes in the last 20 years.

"Government agencies and private companies have beefed up their disaster preparedness and telecommunications providers have strengthened their digital infrastructure," wrote Darrell West, senior fellow at Brookings' Center for Technology Innovation and its director, Dr. Nicol Turner Lee, in an online article entitled "How technology and the world have changed since 9/11."

Since 9/11, "the United States realized the importance of mobile communications during terrorist attacks and natural disasters," the article says.

"Steps have been taken to safeguard vital networks, which is a huge advancement since 9/11 when thousands of people in New York, and in the area of the Pentagon bombing had to run and walk for miles to what appeared to be a safe space for shelter," the experts continued. "Back then, we didn’t even have voice-activated internet-enabled navigational tools that could advise pedestrians and drivers of road closures, or other potential road or walking hazards."

In October 2001, the U.S. Patriot Act was enacted, which gave the government more authority to investigate potential threats through surveillance of phone calls, emails and text messages.

"With the advent of smartphones and the prevalence of electronic communications, public authorities also developed new tools for monitoring particular individuals and tracking their physical whereabouts via geolocation data," West and Lee's article says. "Twenty years after the attack, the country continues to debate where to draw the line between promoting personal privacy and protecting national security."

It's easy to wonder if the world's technological advancements had happened sooner, whether 9/11 could have been prevented.

Travel

Remember the days when you could arrive at the airport 30 minutes before your flight and head straight to your gate?

In 2001, that's what travel looked like. Families could come through security to send off loved ones and, even if you didn't have photo ID in your carry-on bag, blades and liquids were allowed.

But on Sept. 11, 2001, 19 hijackers were able to board four different domestic flights and carry out the attacks that killed thousands. That's when air travel changed forever.

The attacks changed the nation "automatically, immediately, into one obsessed, in big ways and small, with protecting its security," historian James Mann wrote in 2018. "The way that 325 million Americans go through airports today started on Sept. 12 and has never gone back to what it was on Sept. 10."

Tougher security measures were introduced when air travel resumed on Sept. 14, 2001, but the comprehensive Aviation and Transportation Security Act was passed into law by Nov. 19, 2001.

Here are some of the changes to air travel in the U.S. since 2001:

• All passengers over 18 need valid government-issued identification to fly, even on domestic flights. Those identifications are checked against passengers' boarding passes.

• The No Fly List was born — a branch of the Terrorist Screening Database noting people banned from boarding commercial aircraft into, out of and inside the U.S.

• The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was introduced in November 2001 and took over all airport security functions.

• Potential weapons like blades, scissors and knitting needles are no longer allowed on board, and airport employees are now better trained to detect weapons or explosives. In 2006, a foiled plot to detonate liquid explosives on multiple transatlantic flights led to the restrictions of liquids, gels and aerosols in carry-on luggage that still exist today.

• Also in 2006, the TSA started requiring passengers to remove their shoes to screen for explosives.

• In March 2010, full-body scanners began to be installed in U.S. airports in addition to metal detectors.

• In July 2017, TSA began requiring all personal electronics larger than a cellphone to be placed in bins for X-ray screening.

In addition, bulletproof and locked cockpits became standard on commercial passenger aircraft within two years of the 9/11 attacks. The Arming Pilots Against Terrorism Act became law in 2002 and, in 2003, weapon-carrying pilots started boarding U.S. commercial flights.

Journalism

Michelle Wright, a reporter for sister station WTAE in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, remembers dropping off her son for his first day of preschool on Sept. 11, 2001, and holding her 1-year-old baby at home as she watched the first plane hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center.

"I was stunned," she said.

By the time she got to work, two other planes had crashed — another at the second tower of the World Trade Center and a third at the Pentagon — and there were reports of a plane down in Shanksville, less than two hours away. She and reporter Mike Clark rushed there, but had limited information about whether all of the crashes were related.

Wright and Clark were some of the first media on the scene.

"We just started going live," she said. "That shift turned into a nonstop week of being there. We immediately knew the significance."

Wright said the WTAE crew stayed in hotels and had to go to local stores for clothes and toiletries. They worked from about 3 a.m. until 8 p.m. each day in a world that didn't have social media and in an area of very poor cell reception.

"The public was glued to the television," she said. "People were just really eager to figure out what was going on."

Wright said in her career as a journalist, she can't remember a time when the information she was reporting was more important. Many broadcast stations dropped commercials during that time to make sure that reporters could relay the latest details.

"People were just waiting to find out what was happening to our country," she said.

Wright acknowledged that many relied on cable networks, morning newspapers and radio for breaking news in 2001. Today, however, many people would turn to their phones for instant information.

And, while social media often houses opinion, speculation and misinformation, it allows the public more access to reporters in today's world.

If an attack of that size took place today, the public may not have found out when a plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, but from a tweet from a passenger saying their plane had been hijacked.

Instead of circulating stories about passengers rushing the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93 to confront hijackers before the plane, video or photos of the actual encounter may have been posted online in today's world.

Camera footage would also show a clearer picture of the horror of the attacks, the victims and the aftermath.

In 2001, television news crews made editorial decisions not to show footage of people leaping or falling to their deaths, while networks eventually stopped showing reruns of planes striking the towers to prevent children from thinking the attacks were happening again.

Social media doesn't have that type of editorial censorship.

"As panic-inducing as it was and as tragic an experience it was historically in this country, had the current technology been around in 2001, I think you would have had something far more heart-wrenching," said David Friend, author of "Watching the World Changes: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11."

Wright said her experience covering the story of United Flight 93 taught her that passing along information to viewers allows them to make decisions, but also make a difference.

"Knowledge is power," she said. "And it's empowering."

She'll also never forget the moment the loved ones of the passengers and crew of Flight 93 were bussed to the crash site for the first time. Without cell phones capturing footage or even cameras rolling, members of the community lined roughly 30 miles of roadway from where the families were housed to the strip mine where the crash occurred to offer their condolences and support.

"Everyone at the site just froze," she said. "It was a powerful moment. All of our lives were changed."

The Associated Press and CNN contributed to this report.

Twenty years ago, a stunned nation watched in horror as the bright skies of a September day shattered right in front of us.

New York's World Trade Center — along with its iconic Twin Towers — crumbled after two hijacked planes crashed into them, killing thousands of people as it fell to the ground below. In Arlington, Virginia, the heart of America's military — the Pentagon — came under the same attack as a jet slammed into the western side of the building. And in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, brave passengers fought to stop their hijacked plane from suffering a similar fate forcing the attackers to crash into a field.

That day is seared into the American consciousness changing the world as we know it. As we pause to remember the heroes lost that day, we look back at what happened, how it's changed us, and what it means for the world today.

20 years later, how have our lives changed?

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, changed the lives of Americans forever.

In a recent poll by USA TODAY/Suffolk University, 60% of 1,000 people surveyed agreed.

Eighty-five percent polled said the terror attacks had a big impact on their generation, while nearly two-thirds said it had a big impact on their own lives.

From technological advances to changes in national security, exactly what has changed in the 20 years since America came under attack?

Three television anchors guided millions through horror

"Turn on your television."

Those words were repeated in millions of homes on Sept. 11, 2001. Friends and relatives took to the telephone: Something awful was happening. You have to see.

Before social media and with online news in its infancy, the story of the day when terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people unfolded primarily on television. Even some people inside New York's World Trade Center made the phone call. They felt a shudder, could smell smoke. Could someone watch the news and find out what was happening?

Most Americans were guided through the unimaginable by one of three men: Tom Brokaw of NBC News, Peter Jennings of ABC, and Dan Rather of CBS.

The news media has changed in the ensuing 20 years, and some experts believe the same story would feel even more chaotic and terrifying if it broke today.

But on that day, when America faced the worst of humanity, it had three newsmen at the peak of their powers.

Remembering 9/11 changes as the decades pass

Across the vast field where the plane fell out of the sky so many years ago, all is quiet.

The hills around Shanksville seem to swallow sound. The plateau that Americans by the millions ascend to visit the Flight 93 National Memorial, to think of those who died in this southwestern Pennsylvania expanse, sits just above much of the landscape, creating a pocket of quiet precisely where quiet needs to be.

It is a place that encourages the act of remembering.

Twenty years have passed since United Flight 93 made its final descent, chaos unfolding aboard as buildings burned 300 miles to the east. Nearly one-fifth of the country is too young to remember firsthand the day that changed everything.

At the edge of the memorial's overlook, a burly man in a leather Harley-Davidson vest talks to two companions. He points toward the patch where the plane hit. It is an intimate conversation, and it is hard to hear what he's saying.

But his first two words are clear:

"I remember …"

Survivors encourage acts of kindness to bring back togetherness

Sept. 11, 2001, was one of the darkest days in U.S. history.

But it was also a moment that united the country as people stepped up to help others.

Twenty years later, there's a nationwide effort to bring back that sense of togetherness, one small act at a time.

From 9/11's ashes, a new world took shape. It did not last

In the ghastly rubble of Ground Zero's fallen towers 20 years ago, Hour Zero arrived, a chance to start anew.

World affairs reordered abruptly on that morning of blue skies, black ash, fire and death.

In Iran, chants of “death to America” quickly gave way to candlelight vigils to mourn the American dead. Vladimir Putin weighed in with substantive help as the U.S. prepared to go to war in Russia's region of influence.

Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, a murderous dictator with a poetic streak, spoke of the “human duty" to be with Americans after "these horrifying and awesome events, which are bound to awaken human conscience.”

From the first terrible moments, America's longstanding allies were joined by longtime enemies in that singularly galvanizing instant. No nation with global standing was cheering the stateless terrorists. How rare is that?

Too rare to last, it turned out.

How 9/11 changed travel forever

When this century began, you could pull up to the airport 20 minutes before a domestic flight in the United States and stroll straight over to your gate. Perhaps your partner would come through security to wave you goodbye. You might not have a photo ID in your carry-on, but you could have blades and liquids.

Back in 2001, Sean O'Keefe, now a professor at Syracuse University and former chair of aerospace and defense company Airbus, was deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in the George W. Bush administration.

"At the White House, I was a member of the National Council Security team," he told CNN Travel. He and his colleagues had been briefed on the al-Qaida terrorist group and understood the threat it posed, "but at the same time our imaginations simply did not give us the capacity to think that something like [9/11] could happen."

It had been nearly 30 years since the Palestinian terrorist attacks at Rome airport in 1973, which killed 34 people and demonstrated that air travel was vulnerable to international terrorism. "That seemed to have changed the whole security structure in Europe and in the Middle East in a way that didn't really penetrate the American psyche," O'Keefe said. "It's this typical American mindset; we have to experience it to believe it."

Then on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a team of 19 hijackers was able to board four different domestic flights in the northeastern U.S. in a series of coordinated terror attacks that would claim 3,000 lives. Flying in America, and the rest of the world, would never be the same again.

The Unidentified

Rob Fazio is feeling the weight, the heaviness of 20 years.

"We don't know exactly what happened,” he said. “But the things that we do know are very meaningful.”

On the morning of Sept. 11, his father, Ronald Fazio, was working on the 99th floor of the South Tower.

"He was looking out the window, towards Tower One, and he said to his colleagues that that plane just doesn't look right, it's gonna hit, it's gonna hit,” Rob Fazio said.

Colleagues recalled how Fazio went from office to office, urging everyone to evacuate. But he stayed behind - holding the door for others so they could get down to safety.

"He kept saying 'no, go home,'” Rob Fazio added. “and that was powerful."

Fazio ultimately made his way down the stairs of the south tower as Battalion Chief Orio Palmer was heading up.

"On Sept. 11, 2001, people like Orio Palmer led the way,” said retired New York firefighter and Palmer’s brother-in-law, Jim McCaffrey.

Palmer was the first firefighter to reach the impact zone working to save lives until the very end.

"What he did and what he epitomized, what he personified — that is the very definition of heroism,” McCaffrey added. “It's the very definition of selflessness.”

Both Palmer and Fazio are believed to have died when the South Tower collapsed.

A brave and caring father and a heroic and determined firefighter. Both were among the victims whose remains were never identified.

We will live with the scars forever.

Twenty years later, Jack Grandcolas still remembers waking up at 7:03 that morning. He looked at the clock, then out the window where an image in the sky caught his eye — a fleeting vision that looked like an angel ascending. He didn’t know it yet, but that was the moment his life changed.

Across the country, it was 10:03 a.m. and United Flight 93 had just crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

His wife, Lauren, was not supposed to be on that flight. So when he turned on the television and saw the chilling scenes of Sept. 11, 2001, unfolding, he was not worried for her. Then he saw the blinking light on the answering machine.

Lauren had left two messages that morning, as he slept with the phone ringer off in the bedroom. First, with good news that she was taking an earlier flight from New Jersey home to San Francisco. Then she called from the plane. There was “a little problem,” his wife said, but she was “comfortable for now.” She did not say she would call back, Grandcolas recalls. She said: “I love you more than anything, just know that. Please tell my family I love them, too. Goodbye, honey.”

“That moment I looked over at the television and there was a smoldering hole on the ground in Pennsylvania. They said it was United Flight 93,” said Grandcolas, 58. “That’s when I dropped to the ground.”

All 44 people on board were killed. Lauren was 38 years old and three months pregnant with their first child. She had traveled East to attend her grandmother's funeral in New Jersey, and then stayed a few extra days to announce the pregnancy — a little “good news to lift the spirits of her parents and sisters after burying their grandmother," Grandcolas said.

Remembering the firefighters

How much of a life lasts in a single photograph? How much power does a three-story tall steel column hold?

For John Napolitano, pictures were all he had of his son, New York City firefighter John Philip Napolitano. He was born on the Fourth of July, 1968, and died on Sept. 11, 2001.

His remains were never recovered. But the 9/11 memorial in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, gave a hero's father something he never imagined.

Officers at Oklahoma Air Force base remember responding to attacks

Tinker Air Force Base was a hub of activity on Sept. 11, 2001, with the Oklahoma base's planes making sure nothing was flying above the U.S. that wasn't supposed to be there.

KOCO spoke with three Air Force officers who were in the air and on the ground that fateful day.

"What? Like, 'That’s dumb. That thing’s so big. How do you not miss that thing, right?' And we thought about it for a minute, and he turned on the TV and we watched the second plane hit. And it was like instantly the entire room just changed," Col. Keven Coyle, with the 552nd Air Control Wing, said. "And he looked at me and goes, 'You need to go get your 72-hour bag right now.'"

"So, just like everyone else, the light bulb clicks," retired AWACS Officer Andrew Bruce said. "The unimaginable had happened at that point. But we didn’t know what that all meant, either. Just like everyone else, you’re trying to figure it out."

Are we safer?

After the attacks, the 9/11 Commission issued a report that became a best-seller — urging immediate implementation of a host of recommendations to make the U.S. safer.

Former Congressman Lee Hamilton was the 9/11 Commission's vice chairman.

“We got a lot accomplished," Hamilton told Chief Investigative Reporter Mark Albert}

“I don't think there's any doubt that we are safer,” Hamilton said. “The worst thing would be to try to sit on your laurels and say we fix the problem.”

“Are you saying that terrorism will never go away?” Albert asked. “It is a permanent threat,” Hamilton said.

Man marks 9/11 with inspiring message

For John Wesley, no day has a greater significance than Sept. 11, 2001. His reasons are deeply personal, powerful and inspiring.

Images of his fiancée are indelibly etched in Wesley's mind, heart and soul. Sarah Clark died when terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and deliberately crashed into the Pentagon.

"She saw the same old world each day with new eyes, and her compassion never blinks," Wesley said.

Authorities allowed Wesley to watch the boarding gate video. He saw two of the hijackers looking at a child playing with an Elmo toy, seniors being pushed onboard in wheelchairs and students securing their backpacks.

"For me, how could you look at that and still do what was on your mind?" Wesley said.

Wesley decided at the last minute not to go on the trip with Clark because it was his first day on the job as an actor on HBO'S "The Wire."

"Growing up in Mississippi, I just believe I would have fought," Wesley said.

Every year on the 9/11 anniversary, Wesley visits the Pentagon crash site. He will be there this year, as well. In 2018, former Vice President Mike Pence mentioned Clark in his remarks. Wesley said her positive influence has made him a better man. He said she helped lead him back to his faith.

"People need help. People need compassion. And I wanted people to know that I had no malice, that I never asked God why. I just thanked him for the time that I had with her and all the things that happened with her," Wesley said.

Survivors Relive and Reflect

Amy Hargrave's father, TJ, is memorialized in the bronze edges that surround two large pools sitting in the footprints of what were the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center.

Nearly 3,000 names are cut into the bronze honoring each of the 2,977 people who died in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania on 9/11.

Sept. 11 was a day that changed everything about life. A day of loss and courage we will always remember. A day that still replays in the minds of those who experienced it.

They were some of 9/11's biggest names. Where are they now?

Rudolph Giuliani was a hero before he was a punchline. Lisa Beamer was a wife and mother before she became a symbol of Sept. 11 — and though her celebrity passed, her widowhood cannot.

In the aftermath of the planes falling from the sky, America and the world were introduced to an array of personalities. Some we had known well, but came to see in different ways. Others were thrown into public consciousness by unhappy happenstance.

Some, like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar, are dead. But others have gone on to lead lives that are postscripts to Sept. 11, 2001. Here are a few of the boldface names of that tumultuous time — what they were then, and what has happened to them since.

A burst of patriotism

Twenty years ago, on a Tuesday morning, a gut-punched nation sat stunned — staring at any TV they could find, shocked.

A thousand miles from Ground Zero was too close to home. But it was also too far away. So feeling helpless, Americans prayed, cried and rallied around their colors.

Plenty of people waved flags. In Iowa, 6,000 created a human one. At the same time, teenagers, who couldn’t even pronounce the enemy’s name, signed up to wear the flag on the uniform.

'Paulie's Push' remembers flight attendants lost

A Massachusetts man is honoring the flight attendants on board the planes that were hijacked on Sept. 11 ahead of the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

Retired United flight attendant Paulie Veneto is pushing a beverage cart from Logan International Airport in Boston to Ground Zero in New York to honor the crew members.

“The only thing I know is I’m going to be in Ground Zero on Sept. 11. I know that deep down in my soul. I’ll carry it on my back,” he said.

Veneto, 62, is using his more than 200-mile journey to raise money for the victims’ families and their foundations and collect donations for those struggling with addiction.

"I pushed one all over the world at 30,000 feet. The difference now is I’m not hitting elbows and knees. Now I’m hitting potholes," he said.

He said his main goal is to pay tribute to those flight attendants who showed unbelievable strength and courage under the worst conditions.

Muslim Americans still fighting bias 20 years later

A car passed, the driver's window rolled down and the man spat an epithet at two little girls wearing their hijabs: "Terrorist!"

It was 2001, mere weeks after the twin towers at the World Trade Center fell, and 10-year-old Shahana Hanif and her younger sister were walking to the local mosque from their Brooklyn home.

Unsure, afraid, the girls ran.

As the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks approaches, Hanif can still recall the shock of the moment, her confusion over how anyone could look at her, a child, and see a threat.

"It's not a nice, kind word. It means violence, it means dangerous. It is meant to shock whoever ... is on the receiving end of it," she says.

But the incident also spurred a determination to speak out for herself and others that has helped get her to where she is today: A community organizer strongly favored to win a seat on the New York City Council in the upcoming municipal election.

Like Hanif, other young American Muslims have grown up under the shadow of 9/11. Many have faced hostility and surveillance, mistrust and suspicion, questions about their Muslim faith and doubts over their Americanness.

They've also found ways forward, ways to fight back against bias, to organize, to craft nuanced personal narratives about their identities. In the process, they've built bridges, challenged stereotypes and carved out new spaces for themselves.

There is "this sense of being Muslim as a kind of important identity marker, regardless of your relationship with Islam as a faith," says Eman Abdelhadi, a sociologist at The University of Chicago who studies Muslim communities. "That's been one of the main effects in people's lives … it has shaped the ways the community has developed."

Mistrust and suspicion of Muslims didn't start with 9/11, but the attacks dramatically intensified those animosities.

CINCINNATI — Serving his country was always part of Jason Snow’s journey, but doing that with the Ohio National Guard was never on the radar.

After graduating high school in 1993, he joined the U.S. Navy to get money to further his education. He served for four years, hanging up his service uniforms in 1997.

But the pull of duty would come back to him four years later, on Sept. 11, 2001.

Snow was working a forklift at the time in a factory.

“Someone came up and told me that a plane crashed into the Twin Towers," Snow said. "I said, 'Well, an air traffic controller must have really messed up on that one.' Then the second one. Then, I started to think, like what's going on? And then another co-worker said the Pentagon just got hit. And I said, 'Well, that's impossible. You can't get to the Pentagon.'

"I knew at that moment that we are under attack, and I need to do something personally.”

Four months later, Snow joined the Guard.

“I was mentally prepared, yes," Snow said. "Already having the military background and knowing what it takes to be successful and to lead. I had those already.”

And Snow’s nearly 20-year journey sent him all over the world.

“There's been a series of deployments, from Germany to Iraq, to Washington, D.C.,” he said.

Fellow Ohio National Guard member Dylan Stenski, on the other hand, has no memory of that day. He had just turned 21 months old.

Provided photo

“I have absolutely no recollection of anything that happened," he said. "I don't remember anything."

While Stenski would learn the historical significance of 9/11 in school, he also learned that his father wanted to step up and enlist. It would prove to be a tall task with a toddler and another baby on the way.

Now Stenski is tasked with signal system support for the Ohio National Guard, in the same unit as Sgt. 1st Class Snow.

“It's an opportunity; it's a privilege,” Stenski said. “I grew up not having to worry about an attack on American soil because there were other people out there protecting me. So now there's me in that position. “

Sfc. Snow is the 1-174^th Air Defense Artillery Regiment’s battalion master gunner and readiness NCO.

Provided photo

“That gives me the opportunity to get the soldiers ready for these higher op-tempo deployments that we have, you know, around the country and overseas, as well,” Snow said.

The Guard changed after 9/11. It is no longer just sent out on humanitarian missions domestically. Many soldiers spent months, if not years, overseas in Iraq or Afghanistan.

As Sfc. Snow reflects on 9/11, the day that pulled him back to duty, and Cpl. Stenski looks back to a day he doesn’t remember but feels its effects daily on his enlistment, each say it is both history and reality.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken joined the Department of State in honoring the lives and memories of those we lost on Sept. 11, 2001.

WATCH LIVE:

Attorney General Merrick Garland, along with the deputy attorney general, associate attorney general, and other Department of Justice officials, also spoke at the event.

Saturday marks the 20th anniversary when the lives of nearly 3,000 people were taken when terrorists of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon, and a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

In August, families of the victims asked President Joe Biden not to attend any memorial events unless he agreed to declassify evidence that they believe will show a connection between Saudi Arabia and the attacks.

Last week, an executive order was signed by Biden that directed the Justice Department and other agencies to oversee that documents undergo a “declassification review” about the FBI’s investigations into the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

The White House says the executive order requires Garland to release the declassified documents publicly over the next six months.

According to the Associated Press, publicly-released documents have detailed numerous Saudi entanglements but have not proved government complicity.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. However, the Saudi government has routinely denied any connection to the attacks.

Journalism is often considered the first draft of history, but what happens when that draft is written on a software program that becomes obsolete?

Adobe ending support for Flash — its once ubiquitous multimedia content player — last year meant that some of the news coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks and other major events from the early days of online journalism are no longer accessible. For example, The Washington Post and ABC News both have broken experiences within their Sept. 11 coverage, viewable in the Internet Archive. CNN's online coverage of Sept. 11 also has been impacted by the end of Flash.

That means what was once an interactive explainer of how the planes hit the World Trade Center or a visually-rich story on where some survivors of the attacks are now, at best, a non-functioning still image, or at worst, a gray box informing readers that "Adobe Flash player is no longer supported."

Dan Pacheco, professor of practice and chair of journalism innovation at Syracuse University's Newhouse School, has experienced the issue firsthand. As an online producer for the Post's website in the late 1990s and later for America Online, some of the work he helped build has disappeared.

"This is really about the problem of what I call the boneyard of the internet. Everything that's not a piece of text or a flat picture is basically destined to rot and die when new methods of delivering the content replace it," Pacheco told CNN Business. "I just feel like the internet is rotting at an even faster pace, ironically, because of innovation. It shouldn't."

Rise and fall of Flash

Adobe Flash played a critical role in the internet's development by being the first tool that made it easy to create and view animations, games and videos online across nearly any browser and device. Animated stars of the early internet such as Charlie the Unicorn, Salad Fingers and the game Club Penguin were all brought to life thanks to Flash.

The software also helped journalism to evolve beyond print newspapers, TV and radio, ushering in an era of digital news coverage that used interactive maps, data visualizations and other novel ways of presenting information to audiences.

"Flash's ease of use for creating interactive visualizations and explorable content shaped early experiments with web coverage, and particularly served as a preview for what adding dynamic elements to a story could provide," Anastasia Salter, associate professor at the University of Central Florida and author of the book "Flash: Building the Interactive Web," told CNN Business in an email.

But despite enabling those innovations, Flash was also controversial. In 2010, Apple founder Steve Jobs wrote a scathing letter bemoaning Flash's security issues and the fact that it was a proprietary system underlying so much of the internet. Jobs' refusal to support Flash on iOS devices was widely seen as the start of its decline. A year later, Adobe said it would no longer develop Flash on mobile devices.

In the following years, the more open web standard HTML5 — which allowed developers to embed content directly onto webpages — gained traction, and made the add-on Flash extension less useful. Flash was increasingly mocked and despised for being buggy, laden with security vulnerabilities, a battery drain and requiring a plug-in to use.

In 2017, Adobe announced it would pull the plug on Flash at the end of 2020. Some operating systems and browsers started discontinuing Flash early, and the software's official "end-of-life" day came on Dec. 31, 2020, when Adobe ended support for Flash and encouraged users to uninstall it because it would no longer get security updates.

Since then, a host of Flash-based content across the web has become inaccessible.

"Web preservationists have been sounding the alarm on Flash for a long time," Salter said.

In some corners of the internet, there are efforts to preserve or restore some of that content. The Internet Archive has made a push to re-create, save and display Flash-based animations, games and other media using an emulator tool called Ruffle. However, that process can be difficult and won't necessarily work to save all content built in Flash.

"Unfortunately it's a lot more difficult than we'd like [to restore Flash content], particularly because 'Flash' encompasses generations of work and the platform's code complexity grew with every iteration of Adobe's scripting language," Salter said. "I can't say I've seen any news organization make the type of concerted effort that animations, games, and electronic literature communities are to save this history."

For its part, an Adobe spokesperson said in a statement: "Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player beginning December 31, 2020. Unfortunately, these older web pages can no longer be played due to the Flash plugin being blocked from loading in the browser. Like all Americans, we watched the horrific events of 9/11 and understand the important role Flash played in helping media organizations depict and tell the stories of that tragic day."

A Samsung-owned software called Harman has also partnered with Adobe and can help companies to keep Flash-based content running.

Finding solutions

Some newsrooms have taken it upon themselves to rebuild Flash content. For its coverage of the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11, USA Today republished some 2002 articles timed with the first anniversary and that included recreating some Flash-based interactives. Whereas some of these graphics were originally bigger interactives, USA Today's graphics teams remade some to be smaller.

"We played with the limitation a little bit... because this is more a more relaxed and a more solemn and calm way to look at the stories," said Javier Zarracina, graphics director at USA Today. "We're not doing a facsimile. We're taking a curated look at what we published 20 years ago."

One of the stories USA Today published in 2002 was an investigation into the elevator system in the World Trade Center that included a Flash graphic explaining how people got trapped inside them on Sept. 11, 2001. The USA Today team chose to remake that graphic and republished it earlier this week.

USA Today has archived many of its old interactives by storing the original files on its servers. Since some of the online interactives were converted for the print newspaper, they also saved associated static graphics. Zarracina said he was able to open some of the files originally made in Adobe's FreeHand software in a newer creative software suite called Affinity.

The New York Times has brought back some its old Flash-based interactives by using Ruffle, an Adobe Flash Player emulator that is part of an open-source project, said Jordan Cohen, The Times' executive director of communications.

"The Times cares about preserving the digital history of the early days of web journalism, and through several site migrations we have made sure to preserve pages as they were originally published on archive.nytimes.com," Cohen wrote in an email. "[W]e hope in the future will enable our readers to experience all of our Flash interactives."

But not every media organization is as dedicated to archiving.

"News companies are in the business of this very minute and tomorrow," said Pacheco, the Syracuse professor. "We're not libraries."

Jason Tuohey, managing editor for digital at The Boston Globe, said in a statement that his team planned to "revive some of our archive coverage [for the Sept. 11 anniversary], but in many ways, the best material we can provide our readers is journalism that puts the anniversary in context and perspective, rather than simply repeating what we ran in the past."

Kat Downs Mulder, managing editor of digital at The Post, said in a statement that her news organization has "made a concerted effort to make most of our text-based articles, images, graphics and maps accessible" in their online archives but added that not every project is rebuilt.

CNN and ABC News declined to detail any plans to rebuild Flash-based interactives.

A never-ending problem

The limitations of news organization's archives does not start or end with Flash. Pacheco noted how his former employer, The Post, has invested significant effort in TikTok. He questioned whether they were preserving each video and if that was also the case for other social apps, including disappearing content on Instagram and Snapchat.

USA Today is not rebuilding every old experience for today's news consumer. But individuals inside the news organization are giving special attention to certain projects. Jim Sergent, senior manager of graphics at USA Today, said his colleague Mitchell Thorson keeps eyes on the functionality of the interactive map within the Pulitzer-winning feature, "The Wall," about the U.S.-Mexico border and former President Donald Trump's campaign to build a wall.

"'The Wall' is a great example where we did just unbelievable work and we realized, 'OK, yeah. We want this to be out there for as long as it can be,'" Sergent said.

CINCINNATI — While most people watched what unfolded on 9/11 from their homes or places of work, U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, was sitting in the White House.

"I will never forget what happened that day," Portman said.

Portman, then a U.S. Representative, said he has two distinct memories.

The first was a meeting in the White House.

"We looked up the TV screen. The second plane hit," Portman said. "At that point, we knew this was war. I went to get my car to get back to the Capitol and saw the black smoke coming up in the Pentagon. And Jane was with me. My wife was with me."

The couple decided Portman would stay in Washington, D.C., but his wife needed to get back to Cincinnati as fast as possible to be with their young children. That brought him to his second memory.

"She got the last rental car out of Washington, Enterprise rental car," he said. "We drove out to the suburbs to get it. She took off for home to be with the kids. And while she was driving to Pennsylvania, Ohio Task Force One, which is an urban search-and-rescue team right here in Southwestern Ohio — Dayton, Cincinnati — were streaming down the highway, rushing to the danger. I was so proud. She told me that these Ohio guys, many who I know, were heading to New York."

Twenty years later, that memory is still an emotional one for the senator.

Ohio Task Force One Remembers . . .

The day of the attack, and those that followed, are also emotional times for seven local members of the 12-member Ohio Task Force One crew.

"We got deployed at like noon on that day," Ed Thomas said. "We were in an information blackout."

Thomas, along with Grant Light, Mike Lotz, David Pickering, Mike Cayse, WCPO photographer Michael Benedic and Greg Morris spent more than two weeks at Ground Zero in Manhattan to try to rescue survivors.

The seven had never sat down together and talked about their time in New York before now.

"The American public knew more about what was going on than we did," Mike Cayse said of going into New York immediately after the attack on the Twin Towers.

Grant Light added, "We were on the pile less than 24 hours after the first plane hit the tower."

Mike Lotz recalled his feelings as he went to work going through the towers' rubble, hoping to save lives.

"I don't think it was fear as much as apprehension on, 'I hope we do this right,' you know?" Lotz said.

David Pickering said he and his crew had no idea what the devastation they were entering looked like before arrival.

"All the pictures and images that you saw on the TV, we didn't get to see; we were traveling," Pickering said. "So we really had no insight as to how big...the scope of the operation that we were about to undertake."

Benedic said, looking back, what others did see on TV could not fully convey the scope of the destruction onsite.

"I don't think television ever did it justice, that that pile was so huge," the news photographer said.

Morris added, "We had a job. But I think, to some extent, we still felt helpless, too. I mean, you've got this literal mountain of rubble, and there is only so much you can do so quickly."

"It was just overwhelming," Cayse said. "You had to take a moment just to let it catch you. Everything was turned to powder."

Lotz recalled no chairs or desks or recognizable items in the debris when he arrived at Ground Zero.

And as the Ohio Task Force One crew began to dig into that rubble . . .

"(It) was very disheartening to know that we were not having good luck, and nobody was having good luck on the pile finding survivors," Cayse said.

But, he continued, "there was always that chance, right? That's why you were there...for that chance, and maybe, you know, you'll pull off that miracle where you'll, you know, move this piece or cut into this wall, and there'll be somebody on the other side," Lotz added.

Thomas recalled the one thing that kept him going, as the days of combing through rubble went on, was hope.

"It wears on you, but you keep doing your job with the hope that, you know, today may be the day — when you knew, as time went on, the chances of that was diminished," he said.

Pickering said memories stay with him to this day of the people most directly affected by the attack while he was there.

"We would go down to the pile every day, and the streets would be lined with people holding signs and giving us water, or family members looking for somebody that was missing. I mean, I don't know how many flyers I was given," Pickering said.

Benedic said he remembers the crowds of people looking for loved ones, too.

"Thank God I never had anybody give me a flyer because I probably would have lost it at that point," Benedic said. "Because it was so emotional seeing these people. And they're and they were cheering us on."

Thomas said the experience of being a rescuer after the attacks changed him forever.

"We dropped everything we were doing, left our families, you know, our wives, our kids to go to a job that we had trained for, and with no hesitation," he said. "And that's one of the things, you know, I love these guys 'til I die. I look at it as our generation's Pearl Harbor. And I'm proud to have been part of that and we share a bond that you won't be able to ever break."

Thomas said he does not view himself as a hero, though...

"We were glad we were there," he said. "We were proud to be there. We did what we were asked to do, we did as best as we could. But I don't think that's a 'heroes' thing, right? The guys who went up in those towers — the firemen and policemen and whoever went up in those towers — those guys were the heroes."

Benedic agreed.

"We were able to do something," he said. "We perform a function. But I don't...see that as being, you know," he paused. "I felt a little guilty having that."

Looking back, Morris said he believes there are bigger lessons to draw from the days following the 9/11 attacks that took his team to New York.

"I look back to that period of time. There was a definite unification of the country at that period of time," he said. "We're not there right now. And I think, if anything, we should look back and remember those who were the heroes, but we should also look back and say what brought us together as a country? And how can we, you know, how can we remember that?"

Two decades after the 9/11 attacks shook America to its core by crashing two planes into the World Trade Center, some of the men and women who were first to respond to the tragedy in lower Manhattan are recalling their harrowing experiences as this somber anniversary approaches.

James Hill, Gerry Giunta and Michael Gomes are members of the Massachusetts Task Force 1. The agency has responded to countless natural disasters since it was first founded in the early 1990s. But September 11, 2001, was the team’s first time dealing with a terrorist attack.

James Hill still remembers pulling into New York City a few hours after the World Trade Center towers had collapsed.

“We turned the corner and there was an airplane jet engine laying on the sidewalk,” Hill recalled.

For Gerry Giunta, it was the color from the building’s ash and debris that still sits in the back of his mind some 20 years later.

“Everything was monochromatic grey and as we got further it was like snow,” he said.

These three men were among the first to arrive in New York City, mere hours after the country was shaken to its core. But as they barreled toward New York City in old military vehicles, with no FM radios or cell phones, no one had any idea what to expect.

"It was really strange. Everything was grey. There was no color to anything; there was dust covering everything. You just had to take a deep swallow knowing what you’re going into and what you’re faced with,” Gerry Giunta added.

For eight days, with no sleep, the task force worked in coordination with New York City authorities, hoping against hope to find someone alive while sifting through what remained of the World Trade Center.

“It was 22 acres of utter destruction. You basically had two buildings, each floor was an acre, and the buildings were 110 stories high, so we were looking at 220 acres of concrete. And yet, we never saw a piece of concrete larger than a grain of sand,” Michael Gomes said about the impact of the towers imploding.

As the days passed, more and more families showed up looking for loved ones. Exhausted, this team continued to work, using the sphere from the World Trade Center, which survived the collapse, as their compass for every mission.

“All of that was a hole in the ground. We’d use that ball like it was a clock,” responder James Hill said.

The years have not been kind to those who were on the ground in those dark days and weeks after the towers fell. An estimated 4,000 first responders have died in the last two decades from illnesses related to 9/11. Two of them were from this task force.

“Out of 72 people, we’ve lost two. It’s something that’s always in the back of your mind, those aren’t great odds,” Michael Gomes said.

This team continues to move forward though, responding to new disasters as they unfold and using lessons learned from 9/11.

But like the memorials, now standing as reminders, the men and women of this task force are taking this 20th anniversary of 9/11 to reflect.

Related video above: Officers at Oklahoma remember responding to 9/11 attacks

Rudolph Giuliani was a hero before he was a punchline. Lisa Beamer was a wife and mother before she became a symbol of Sept. 11 — and though her celebrity passed, her widowhood cannot.

In the aftermath of the planes falling from the sky, America and the world were introduced to an array of personalities. Some we had known well, but came to see in different ways. Others were thrown into public consciousness by unhappy happenstance.

Some, like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar, are dead. But others have gone on to lead lives that are postscripts to Sept. 11, 2001. Here are a few of the boldface names of that tumultuous time — what they were then, and what has happened to them since.

RUDOLPH GIULIANI

THEN: Mayor of New York City, he was a hero of the moment -- empathetic, determined, a focus of the nation's grief and a constant presence at ground zero. "The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately," he said on Sept. 11. Oprah Winfrey pronounced him "America's Mayor"; Time magazine declared him "Person of the Year."

SINCE: After suggesting that his expiring term be extended due to the 9/11 emergency -- an idea that was roundly dismissed -- Giuliani went into private life, but not all that private. He launched a profitable security firm and ran abortively for the Republican nomination for president in 2008. His adventures as a supporter of and agent for President Donald Trump are well documented and resulted in the suspension of his law license in his home state.

BERNARD KERIK

THEN: New York City's police commissioner. Bald and stocky, he never left Giuliani's side in the days after Sept. 11 -- and followed the mayor after he left office, joining the Giuliani security firm.

SINCE: President George W. Bush appointed Kerik as Iraq's interim minister of the interior in 2003 during the Iraq war, and nominated him to head the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2004. He withdrew from consideration when it was revealed that he had employed an undocumented worker as a nanny and housekeeper; there followed a series of legal troubles, including convictions for ethics violations and tax fraud. He was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020.

GEORGE W. BUSH

THEN: The 43rd president of the United States, Bush was informed of the 9/11 attacks while reading "The Pet Goat" to second graders in Sarasota, Florida. He spoke to the nation that night and visited ground zero three days later, grabbing a bullhorn to declare: "I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people – and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." His support in the polls reached 85%.

SINCE: The War on Terrorism begat the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush's demand that the Taliban "hand over the terrorists, or ... share in their fate." He had long retired to oil painting in Texas when Navy SEALs killed bin Laden, and when President Joe Biden pulled U.S. forces from Afghanistan. In August, he said he was watching developments there "with deep sadness."

RICHARD CHENEY

THEN: While the Secret Service played "hide the president" with Bush on Sept. 11 — he was shuttled to military bases in Louisiana and Nebraska, for fear of terrorist attacks — his vice president hunkered down in a "secure, undisclosed location," a bunker inside the White House where he helped direct the government's actions. Cheney became a fierce advocate of an unbridled response to the attacks, using "any means at our disposal." He pushed for the 2003 war in Iraq. The interrogation technique known as waterboarding was a proper way to get information from terrorists, he said -- not torture, as its critics have long insisted.

SINCE: After five heart attacks and a 2012 heart transplant, Cheney has lived to see his daughter, Liz, win his old congressional seat in Wyoming and become GOP persona non grata because of her criticism of Donald Trump.

COLIN POWELL

THEN: A former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell was confirmed unanimously as secretary of state in 2001. He would go on to make a persuasive case before the United Nations for military action against Iraq, claiming that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction. The war was waged, Saddam was toppled and killed, Iraq was destabilized; no such weapons were found.

SINCE: Powell has consistently defended his support of the Iraq War. But the lifelong Republican had little use for Trump, endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016 and speaking in support of Biden at the 2020 Democratic convention. He left the Republican party after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

THEN: National security adviser to Bush. In the summer of 2001, she met with CIA Director George Tenet at his request to discuss the threat of al-Qaida attacks on American targets. The CIA reported that "There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months." Rice would later say that the information was old.

SINCE: Rice succeeded Powell as secretary of state and has since returned to Stanford University as provost, then as a faculty member. In 2012, she also became one of the first two women allowed to join the Augusta National Golf Club.

JOHN ASHCROFT

THEN: Attorney general during Bush's first term. In the wake of 9/11, he was the administration's prime advocate of the USA PATRIOT Act, which gave the government broad powers to investigate and prosecute those suspected of terrorism. But in 2004, while lying in an intensive care unit with gallstone pancreatitis, he refused the administration's entreaties to overrule a Justice Department finding that the Bush domestic intelligence program was illegal.

SINCE: After leaving office in 2005, Ashcroft became a lobbyist and consultant. His appearances as a gospel singer (and songwriter — his tune "Let the Eagle Soar" was performed at the second Bush inauguration) have tailed off.

JOHN YOO

THEN: As deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Yoo provided much of the legal underpinning for the War on Terrorism. He argued that "enemy combatants" captured in Afghanistan need not be given prisoner of war status; that the president could authorize warrantless wiretaps of U.S. citizens on American soil; that the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" like waterboarding was within the power of the president during wartime.

SINCE: Yoo is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. He remains a strong supporter of presidential prerogatives; in 2020, his book "Defender in Chief: Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power" argued that Trump's vision of the presidency was in line with that of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton.

KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED

THEN: Leading propagandist of al-Qaida, labeled the "principal architect of the 9/11 attacks" by the 9/11 Commission. He was captured in 2003 by the CIA and Pakistan's secret police, then spirited to CIA prisons in Poland and Afghanistan and finally to Guantanamo. Under duress — some called it torture — he confessed to involvement in nearly every major al-Qaida operation, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the killing of journalist Daniel Pearl, the 2001 attacks and others.

SINCE: His trial date has been postponed again and again. He remains at Guantanamo, indefinitely.

HAMID KARZAI

THEN: Interim leader and then elected president of Afghanistan in the wake of Sept. 11, he managed the delicate balancing act of remaining on friendly terms with the United States and the West while unifying his country's many factions — at least for a time. More than once, he called the Taliban "brothers," and the later years of his presidency were marked by friction with the United States.

SINCE: Karzai has survived numerous assassination attempts, but when his second term expired in 2014, the passage of power to his successor, Ashraf Ghani, was peaceful. Ghani would lead the country for almost seven years, until he fled in the face of the Taliban's triumphant return.

HOWARD LUTNICK

THEN: The chairman of the stock trading company Cantor Fitzgerald would have been in the company's offices at the top of One World Trade Center, but he took his son Kyle to the first day of kindergarten. A total of 658 of the company's employees — two thirds of its New York City workforce, including Lutnick's brother Gary — perished. Within three days, Lutnick had established the Cantor-Fitzgerald Relief Fund for his company's victims.

SINCE: The fund has disbursed more than a quarter of a billion dollars, including money for other victims of terrorism and disasters. Twenty years later, Lutnick remains the company's chairman.

LISA BEAMER

THEN: After 9/11, Lisa Beamer became the face of the day's mourners, and a reminder of the day's heroism. Her husband, Todd, a former college baseball and basketball player, is believed to have led other passengers in an attack on the hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93 that brought the plane down before it could crash in Washington. His exhortation of "Let's roll!" became a rallying cry. His widow made 200 public appearances in the six months after the attacks.

SINCE: Lisa Beamer co-wrote a book, "Let's Roll! Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage," and established a foundation in her husband's memory. Donations dwindled, and Beamer receded from public view. The couple had three children, and all attended Wheaton College, where their parents met. All are athletes, like their dad: Dave, 3 years old when his father died, was a football quarterback; Drew, who was 1, played soccer, as has Morgan, born four months after the attacks. Morgan was her father's middle name.

For John Wesley, no day has a greater significance than Sept. 11, 2001. His reasons are deeply personal, powerful and inspiring.

Images of his fiancée are indelibly etched in Wesley's mind, heart and soul. Sarah Clark died when terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and deliberately crashed into the Pentagon.

"She saw the same old world each day with new eyes, and her compassion never blinks," Wesley said.

Authorities allowed Wesley to watch the boarding gate video. He saw two of the hijackers looking at a child playing with an Elmo toy, seniors being pushed onboard in wheelchairs and students securing their backpacks.

"For me, how could you look at that and still do what was on your mind?" Wesley said.

Wesley decided at the last minute not to go on the trip with Clark because it was his first day on the job as an actor on HBO'S "The Wire."

"Growing up in Mississippi, I just believe I would have fought," Wesley said.

Every year on the 9/11 anniversary, Wesley visits the Pentagon crash site. He will be there this year, as well. In 2018, former Vice President Mike Pence mentioned Clark in his remarks. Wesley said her positive influence has made him a better man. He said she helped lead him back to his faith.

"People need help. People need compassion. And I wanted people to know that I had no malice, that I never asked God why. I just thanked him for the time that I had with her and all the things that happened with her," Wesley said.

Clark taught sixth grade at Backus Middle School in Washington, D.C. She was on Flight 77 to chaperone students to an ecology conference sponsored by National Geographic.

Days before the flight, Wesley and Clark decided to bump up their wedding date to December. They picked a place to hold their wedding reception and shopped for wedding bands.

Wesley had the grim task of identifying Clark's remains.

"I was looking for this ring because this is the ring she would have had on," Wesley said.

Wesley said that over the years, he has focused on writing music and books inspired by Clark.

"If we are going to stop this hatred, we are going to have to start with the children," Wesley said. "That's the real lesson, and that will be our saving grace if we learn to love each other."

Wesley has since found a new love, which he said has helped him emotionally. His work in the Baltimore City Office of Civil Rights is his passion.

"It seems I am where I'm supposed to be," Wesley said.

Wesley has advice for anyone who has suddenly lost a loved one, saying life is short, to honor them by doing a simple act of kindness and use that depth of pain to lift others up.

A special report released Tuesday by the Justice Department said they believe that more people have died of 9/11-related illnesses than those killed on September 11, 2001.

The report was revealed through the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, a fund set up in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks for survivors and victims' families.

According to the report, more than 19,000 people filed a claim listing cancer as one of their eligible conditions, which makes up 48% of the claims filed.

"It is also sobering to see that more people are now believed to have died of 9/11-related illnesses than were lost on September 11, 2001," the report stated.

"As I reflect on the 20 years that have passed since September 11th, 2001, we at the World Trade Center (WTC) Health Program mourn for those lost in the attacks and affirm our commitment to those living with 9/11-related health conditions," Dr. John Howard, Director, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Administrator, World Trade Center Health Program, said in the report.

The DOJ said more than 40,000 people had received nearly $9 billion from the VCF.

According to the Associated Press, nearly 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001, when terrorists of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon, and a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The report comes just four days from the 20th anniversary.

When this century began, you could pull up to the airport 20 minutes before a domestic flight in the United States and stroll straight over to your gate. Perhaps your partner would come through security to wave you goodbye. You might not have a photo ID in your carry-on, but you could have blades and liquids.

Back in 2001, Sean O'Keefe, now a professor at Syracuse University and former chair of aerospace and defense company Airbus, was deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in the George W. Bush administration.

"At the White House, I was a member of the National Council Security team," he told CNN Travel. He and his colleagues had been briefed on the al Qaeda terrorist group and understood the threat it posed, "but at the same time our imaginations simply did not give us the capacity to think that something like [9/11] could happen."

It had been nearly 30 years since Palestinian terrorist attacks at Rome airport in 1973, which killed 34 people and demonstrated that air travel was vulnerable to international terrorism. "That seemed to have changed the whole security structure in Europe and in the Middle East in a way that didn't really penetrate the American psyche," O'Keefe said. "It's this typical American mindset; we have to experience it to believe it."

Then on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a team of 19 hijackers was able to board four different domestic flights in the northeastern U.S. in a series of coordinated terror attacks that would claim 3,000 lives. Flying in America, and the rest of the world, would never be the same again.

'Something just happened in New York City'

O'Keefe was in the White House's West Wing with Vice President Dick Cheney when the news came through. They "had the television on, matter of fact it was CNN," he recalled. "The phone rang. His receptionist was on the hotline to tell him to (turn the sound up); something just happened in New York City."

Like millions of people around the world watching the same scenes live after the first plane hit the World Trade Center's North Tower, O'Keefe and his companions assumed they were witnessing a terrible accident, a matter for the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Transportation.

But when the second plane hit the South Tower 17 minutes later, O'Keefe said, "That was the moment where it was really evidence that this was something more than an accident, this was a premeditated effort. The security guards, the Secret Service, all mobilized."

The events of that morning in the U.S. changed the nation "automatically, immediately, into one obsessed, in big ways and small, with protecting its security," wrote historian James Mann in 2018. "The way that 325 million Americans go through airports today started on Sept. 12 and has never gone back to what it was on Sept. 10."

'We all had an epiphany on the same day'

The U.S. government immediately began work on the security manifesto that by November 19, 2001, would be passed into law as the Aviation and Transportation Security Act.

"The fact that they had orchestrated that strike with three different flights in three different places" made clear how vulnerable the U.S. was, O'Keefe said. "That was a real slap in the face. It reminded us how naive we had been."

Getting agreement from Congress on security changes was fast and unanimous, he recalled. We needed "to make the resources available right away, to reinforce all those doors and cockpits (and) actually establish security perimeters."

In airports and on airlines, meanwhile, tougher security measures were introduced as soon as civilian air travel resumed on Sept. 14. The National Guard provided armed military personnel at airports, and travelers faced long lines as the new systems got their start.

Those early post-9/11 passengers -- people who hadn't canceled or rescheduled their trips -- were, O'Keefe said, largely accepting of the new high-security regime, with its disruptions and delays. "We all had an epiphany on the same day."

Identification checks

Some of the 9/11 hijackers had been able to board flights without proper identification. After the attacks, all passengers age 18 and over would need a valid government-issued identification in order to fly, even on domestic flights. Airports could check the ID of passengers or staff at any time to confirm that it matched the details on their boarding pass.

Before the events, the U.S. federal government had a small list of people deemed a threat risk to air travel. However, what we know today as the No Fly List -- a subset of the Terrorist Screening Database denoting people who are barred from boarding commercial aircraft for travel into, out of and inside the U.S. -- was developed in response to 9/11.

Around the world, countries became more stringent with identity checks, security screening and their own versions of the No Fly List. In 2002, the European Union introduced a regulation demanding airlines confirm the passenger boarding the aircraft is the same person who checked in their luggage, which meant checking ID both at luggage check-in and when boarding. Later in the decade, fingerprint IDs and retina and iris scanning were introduced in some countries.

The creation of the TSA

Airport screening in the U.S. used to be piecemeal, undertaken by private security companies appointed by airlines or airports.

As part of the new security act, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was introduced in November 2001. Now an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which was formed a year later, the TSA took over all the security functions of the FAA and U.S. airlines and airports.

By the end of 2002, the agency had already recruited close to 60,000 employees, wrote TSA historian Michael P. C. Smith.

Looking back 20 years later, O'Keefe reflected that it was "an enormous challenge in that immediate time afterward to mobilize a whole new cadre of security forces, thousands of trained professionals to do this."

"It was not without its flaws," he added. "Recruiting issues and right training and all the things that were necessary: We went through plenty of fits and starts to make that happen."

The fact that America's "allies and friends and partners" around the world "had already been through this," was a huge benefit, he said. "We were able to learn from them, how they did it and what they did."

Security screening

Some of the 9/11 hijackers were reported to have been carrying box cutters and small knives, which they were able to bring through security.

Before long, with the new streamlined enforcement by the TSA, potential weapons like blades, scissors and knitting needles were no longer allowed on board, and airport workers were better trained to detect weapons or explosives.

By the end of 2002, the TSA met a key mandate of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act by deploying explosives detection systems nationwide. In the following years, other terrorist attacks would further change what we could and could not bring on board planes.

In August 2006, a foiled plot to detonate liquid explosives on multiple transatlantic flights led to today's restrictions on liquids, gels and aerosols in carry-on luggage. That same month, the TSA began requiring passengers to remove their shoes to screen for explosives -- five years after the "shoe bomber" incident of 2001 -- and the agency also deployed federal air marshals overseas.

Metal detectors were standard at airports before 9/11, but by March 2010 -- a few months after the "underwear bomber" was apprehended on a Christmas Day flight after a botched mid-air attack using a device hidden beneath his clothing -- full-body scanners were starting to be installed at U.S. airports, and about 500 were in action by the end of that year.

By July 2017, in response to increased terrorist interest in hiding improvised explosive devices inside commercial electronics and other carry-on items, the TSA began requiring travelers to place all personal electronics larger than a cell phone in bins for X-ray screening. By the following February, facial recognition technology was also being piloted.

Safety on board

"It used to be (that getting) into a cockpit on an American aircraft that was flying in American airspace was as easy as the doors you use to get into the (toilet)," O'Keefe recalled.

Bulletproof and locked cockpits became standard on commercial passenger aircraft within two years of 9/11.

The Arming Pilots Against Terrorism Act was signed into law in November 2002, and by the following April, the first weapon-carrying pilots were on board U.S. commercial flights.

While aviation fans and children could once hope to get a visit to the flight deck, that dream swiftly came to an end.

Private jet pilot and social media star Raymon Cohen told CNN Travel in July that he believes the unprecedented inaccessibility added to flying's mystique.

"People are not welcome in the cockpit anymore, so it's like a big secret," Cohen said. "Now this (following pilots on Instagram) is one of the only ways people can see what's happening."

Passenger confidence

The immediate impact of 9/11 included a big drop in travel demand. Not only had passenger confidence taken a hit, but the additional security meant the flying experience was no longer fast and hassle-free.

In 2006, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimated that airline revenues from domestic U.S. flights fell by $10 billion a year between 2001 and 2006. For comparison, the net losses globally due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 were $126.4 billion in total, according to the IATA.

In a study from 2005 on the impact of 9/11 on road fatalities, Cornell University's Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali and Daniel H. Simon found an increase in travelers choosing to drive rather than fly. The unintended consequence of this was that "driving fatalities increased significantly following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001." They estimated that a total of 1,200 additional driving deaths in the past five years were attributable to the effect of 9/11.

Speaking to CNN ahead of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Kadiyali said, "There's been the fall of Kabul and all these recent events in Afghanistan (...) It did cross my mind whether people would start getting nervous about flying again."

Delays, long lines and confusion over restrictions are also all back on the agenda in the pandemic era.

As to whether something like 9/11 could happen again, O'Keefe reflected upon the fact that the greatest achievements of Homeland Security, and of security services around the world, can never be shared with the general public.

"In the process of educating the public, what you also do is educate the terrorists," so we will never know of all the near-misses, he said. "You almost get into a false sense of security."

That September morning in 2001 "flipped the switch right away from almost non-existent security to unbelievable, in-your-face, all the time."

However, two decades later, there have been no aviation-based terrorist attacks anywhere near the scale of 9/11. Said O'Keefe, "These security measures have worked."

Tinker Air Force Base was a hub of activity on Sept. 11, 2001, with the Oklahoma base's planes making sure nothing was flying above the U.S. that wasn't supposed to be there.Sister station KOCO 5 spoke with three Air Force officers who were in the air and on the ground that fateful day."What? Like, 'That’s dumb. That thing’s so big. How do you not miss that thing, right?' And we thought about it for a minute, and he turned on the TV and we watched the second plane hit. And it was like instantly the entire room just changed," Col. Keven Coyle, with the 552nd Air Control Wing, said. "And he looked at me and goes, 'You need to go get your 72-hour bag right now.'""So, just like everyone else, the light bulb clicks," retired AWACS Officer Andrew Bruce said. "The unimaginable had happened at that point. But we didn’t know what that all meant, either. Just like everyone else, you’re trying to figure it out."Forced immediately into action, the thousands of people working at Tinker Air Force Base 20 years ago will never forget the moments they knew their country needed them. That included scrambling to get into place before the base was inevitably locked down."I got pulled over, and I, essentially, I just said, 'Hey, officer, I know I'm going fast. Gather my data and send me a ticket, but I got to get back to the base.' And he goes, 'Whoa. What's going on?' And I go, 'I don't know if you heard the news at all.' And he goes, 'No.' And he got back on the radio and within about two minutes he goes, 'Just follow me.' And he escorted me back to the base very fast," Coyle said.They were then sent on missions they'd never flown before, including patrolling for hijacked aircraft."Launch and look over what's going on in the western half of the United States because we don't know what else is going to happen and if anything else is going to happen. As it turns out, nothing else happened over there. But it was very, very eerie," Bruce said. "You'll launch in the United States nowadays, and you got that nice radar dome on top, and you can see thousands of dots. And you know, there's airliners everywhere. And we launched that day, and it was a blank screen except for just a couple of handful of dots, and you knew exactly who these, every one of them was.""One thing I do remember he goes, 'If you have any reservations firing on civilian airliners, then speak up now. That's not going to be held against you, but we need to know,'" said Col. Jim Mattey, with the 513th Air Control Group. "Man, silence came across the room because the gravity of the situation really hit, because we never thought that we actually have to fire on United States aircraft."And, 20 years later, the moments live with them."In this unit, I think we still have four members that were around on that day serving. And you bring up 9/11, and, automatically, you know, it kicks in," Mattey said. "You know exactly where you were. You can feel it. You can taste it. You can sense everything that was going on. Those deployments, their hardships. But I tell you what, you made some amazing relationships."And the sense they were there when their country needed them."It was nice to have the stability of knowing what I was doing was of benefit, but it was also kind of refreshing to know that we were needed. I think that’s kind of the key. In any situation, people want to know that they’re valued and needed," Coyle said. "And that day, for sure, we felt that we were valued and needed as an Air Force. And you can’t buy that. It was great."After that memorable, surreal day, many men and women from Tinker Air Force Base were deployed to fight overseas, spending years more serving their country.Watch the video above for the full story.

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. —

Across the vast field where the plane fell out of the sky so many years ago, all is quiet.

The hills around Shanksville seem to swallow sound. The plateau that Americans by the millions ascend to visit the Flight 93 National Memorial, to think of those who died in this southwestern Pennsylvania expanse, sits just above much of the landscape, creating a pocket of quiet precisely where quiet needs to be.

It is a place that encourages the act of remembering.

Twenty years have passed since United Flight 93 made its final descent, chaos unfolding aboard as buildings burned 300 miles to the east. Nearly one-fifth of the country is too young to remember firsthand the day that changed everything.

At the edge of the memorial's overlook, a burly man in a leather Harley Davidson vest talks to two companions. He points toward the patch where the plane hit. It is an intimate conversation, and it is hard to hear what he's saying.

But his first two words are clear:

"I remember …"

___

Remembering is not merely a state of mind. As those who beseech us to never forget the Holocaust have long insisted, it is an act. And when loss and trauma are visited upon human beings, the act of remembering takes many forms.

Remembering is political. Those who disagree about the fate of Confederate statues across the American South demonstrate that, as do those who dispute how much the war on terror and its toll should be part of discussions about 9/11 memories.

Remembering wears many coats. It arrives in ground zero ceremonies and moments of silence and prayers upon prayers, both public and private. It shows itself in folk memorials like those erected at the sides of lonely roads to mark the sites of traffic deaths. It is embedded in the names of places, like the road that leads to the Flight 93 memorial — the Lincoln Highway. It surfaces in the retrieval of "flashbulb memories" — those where-were-you-when-this-happened moments that stick with us, sometimes accurately, sometimes not.

There are personal memories and cultural memories and political memories, and the line between them often blurs.

And for generations, remembering has been presented to us in monuments and memorials like Shanksville's, negotiated and constructed and fine-tuned to evoke and provoke the memories and emotions of people and moments in certain ways.

"Monuments are history made visible. They are shrines that celebrate the ideals, achievements and heroes that existed in one moment in time," architectural historian Judith Dupre writes in her 2007 book about them — a book she first pitched to her publisher on, of all dates, Sept. 10, 2001.

Yet while monuments stand, remembering itself evolves. How 9/11 is remembered depends on when 9/11 is remembered. Remembering it on Sept. 15, 2001, or on Sept. 11, 2004 is different from remembering it on Sept 11, 2011 — or, for that matter, different from what it will be next weekend.

What, then, does remembering come to mean on a 20th anniversary, or at any juncture when an event like 9/11 starts to recede into the past — starts to become history — even as its echoes are still shaking the foundations of everything?

"Our present influences how we remember the past — sometimes in ways that are known and sometimes in ways that we don't realize," says Jennifer Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania who studies how people form personal memories of public events.

Evidence of that is obvious in the events of the past five weeks in Afghanistan, where a 20-year war waged in direct response to 9/11 ended pretty much where it began: with the repressive and violent Taliban in charge once more.

"If we were still in Afghanistan and things were stable, we would be remembering 9/11 in probably a very different way than how we will remember it this year," says Richard Cooper, a vice president at the nonprofit Space Foundation who worked for the Department of Homeland Security for several years after the attacks and has watched many remembrances over the years.

"That heartbreak and pain we felt on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, is resurrecting itself," Cooper says, "and that impacts how we remember it today."

___

Even within more static forms of memory, such as the Flight 93 National Memorial, the question of how remembering changes and evolves hangs over so much.

In the visitors' center, visceral, painful artifacts of the moment still bring back the past with astonishing efficiency; twisted, scarred cutlery from in-flight meals is a particularly breathtaking sight. But the variety of remembering that is presented yards away at the quiet overlook and its thoughtful memorial feels more permanent, more eternal — and now, 20 years on, more befitting of something that happened a generation ago.

Paul Murdoch of Los Angeles, the lead architect on the memorial, says it was carefully calibrated to resonate across multiple stages of memory about the event and its implications.

"You can imagine a memorial approach that sort of freezes anger in time, or freezes fear. And that can be a very expressionistic piece of art. But I feel like for something to endure over a long period of time, I think it has to operate a different way," says Murdoch, who co-designed the memorial with his wife, Milena.

"Now we have a generation of people who weren't even alive on 9/11," Murdoch says. "So how do you talk to people of this new generation — or of future generations?"

That question is particularly potent on this 20th anniversary. Society tends to mark generations in two-decade packages, so there's an entire one that has been born and come of age since the attacks. That hardly means they haven't been paying attention, though: They "remember" too, even if they weren't around.

Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, studies how nostalgia works. She found something interesting a couple years ago when she was researching how young people encountered stories that resonated with them — both personally and through the news.

Even those who lacked living memories of 9/11, Batcho says, responded with stories about the event. It was remembering as shared experience.

And no wonder. So many first encounters with 9/11 on the day it happened were, in the tradition of an information age, both separate and communal. People in different parts of the country and world, under vastly different circumstances, watched the same live camera angles on the same few feeds and saw the same, now-indelible views of the destruction in the same way. They experienced it apart, but together.

That formed a communal memory of sorts, even if sometimes people who saw the same things didn't remember them the same way — a specific camera angle or vantage point, a key figure's comments, the exact sequence of events. Remembering can be like that, experts like Talarico say, particularly with intense flashbulb memories like 9/11 that carve deep grooves but aren't necessarily accurate in the details.

"We reconstruct the event through our own lens, and part of that lens is very social," Batcho says. "You would think that the memories would be more cohesive and homogeneous. It turns out that it's much more complicated than that."

___

May 31, 2002, less than a year afterward. former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani tells high school students in Shanksville at their commencement: "A hundred years from now, people are going to come and want to see it. And they are going to want to know what happened."

Sept. 11, 2016, the 15th anniversary. President Barack Obama says: "Fifteen years may seem like a long time. But for the families who lost a piece of their heart that day, I imagine it can seem like just yesterday."

That fundamental tension — it feels like yesterday, yes, but it is also becoming part of history for the long haul — is what confronts us in the coming days as many revisit and consider 9/11 and commit their own acts of remembering.

For those who were not at the nucleus of 9/11's horror and its pain but experienced it as part of the culture in which they live, it can somehow manage to feel like both yesterday and a long time ago all at once. And as with so many acts of remembering, it is still being debated and contested — and will be for a long time to come.

"Sober ceremonies should not mislead us into thinking the public remembrance of this horrific event is a settled matter," 9/11 historian John Bodnar wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece in May.

At a hinge point like a major anniversary, particularly with something as tectonic as 9/11, it's easy to fall back on an aphorism like this one from William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." But the saying has endured for a reason.

Memory becomes history. And history — shared history — is held onto tightly, sometimes rabidly. It's why so many people grasp tightly to comforting, nostalgic historical narratives — even when they're shown to have been as destructive as they were productive.

The act of remembering something like 9/11 involves exactly that delicate balance. When memory does become history, it can become more remote, like a Revolutionary War memorial for people whose passions and sacrifices have been sanded down by time. With distance, it can calcify.

That's not going to happen with 9/11 for a long time, of course. Its politics are still roiling. The arguments that it produced — and the ways they sent society hurtling in a different direction — are just as intense as in those early days.

And when a nation pauses to remember the morning 20 years ago when it was attacked, it is not only looking over its shoulder. It is also looking around and wondering: What does this mean to us now?

"What is important in making a memorial, in what you remember and in how you remember it?" J. William Thompson wondered in his elegant 2017 book, "From Memory to Memorial: Shanksville, America and Flight 93."

Any answers to that are, understandably, complex. But behind all the formal words and ways to commemorate a day that upended the world, something more fundamental lurks: a simple imperative to hold onto a sense of what changed things, and how.

On the cover of Thompson's book, a man stands looking at the Shanksville crash site, his right arm raised. In his left he holds a hand-painted sign etched with four words, one declarative sentence: "I did not forget."