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.

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."

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.

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.