9/11’s 25th Anniversary: America Reflects on Survivor Stories and Renewed Questions About Prior Intelligence

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The United States marked the 25th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks on Friday with commemorations in New York, Washington DC and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the three sites where hijacked aircraft struck a quarter of a century ago. In lower Manhattan, family members gathered to read aloud the names of the 2,977 people killed, while the Oculus transport hub once again displayed its 'Wedge of Light', an architectural feature designed to let sunbeams fall across the floor between the moments the towers were hit and when they fell. In Shanksville, relatives of the 40 passengers and crew of United Flight 93 held their own service, ringing a bell for each name and folding a flag at the site where the plane came down after those aboard fought back against their hijackers. President Donald Trump did not attend the Manhattan ceremony, choosing instead to speak at the Pentagon after reportedly being told he would not be permitted to address the New York gathering.

Alongside the official ceremonies, the anniversary prompted a fresh wave of personal testimony from those who lived through the day. Former Major League Baseball pitcher Al Leiter described how he had slipped away from his New York Mets team ahead of a game in Pittsburgh, without his manager's knowledge, so he could see his young daughter start first grade. He recounted sitting on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport as reports of an incident at the World Trade Center first emerged, before airspace closures and mounting panic forced him into a frantic, aborted dash toward Philadelphia in search of an alternative flight, only realising the scale of the atrocity as news broke that the Pentagon had also been struck. In a separate first-person account, a man who had been working for a financial firm in a tower beside the World Trade Center described watching the attack unfold from his office window, then fleeing the building after the second plane hit, an experience he said prompted a religious reckoning and ultimately led him to leave a career in finance to become an FBI agent.

The anniversary also became entangled in New York City politics. New York's current mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and former mayor Rudy Giuliani were seen shaking hands outside the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, days after a public falling-out over Mamdani's attendance at the commemorations. Giuliani, who led the city on the day of the attacks, had said he found it objectionable that Mamdani, the city's first Muslim mayor, would take part, arguing his presence was unwelcome to victims' families. In response, Mamdani's administration released roughly 170,000 pages of previously confidential records, which he said showed city officials under Giuliani had known more than they disclosed at the time about the dangers posed by toxic dust and air quality around Ground Zero in the attacks' aftermath.

Separately, the anniversary revived long-running disputes over what US intelligence agencies knew before the attacks. Former Pennsylvania congressman Curt Weldon, promoting a forthcoming book, repeated claims that a classified Pentagon programme known as Able Danger had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta and an associated cell of operatives more than a year before 9/11, but that officials were prevented from passing that information to the FBI and other agencies. Weldon said the findings were omitted from the official 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission, and has previously linked a 2006 raid on his daughter's home, which produced no charges, to his efforts to publicise the allegations. His claims about Able Danger have been aired before and have not been substantiated by the Commission or intelligence agencies, which have pushed back on earlier versions of the account.

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