Though she has no independent recollection of her mother, Patricia Smith has spent 20 years missing and learning about her.
"It's the only piece of jewelry of hers that I'll wear," Patricia Smith, now 21, said of the necklace."I get so nervous that I'll lose something. I feel that I only have so many things of hers left that I want to keep all of it."
But some of those with vivid memories are still haunted by the epic intelligence failure that preceded the coordinated attacks.
While it's been 10 years since Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, was gunned down by SEAL Team 6 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, no one has been convicted of helping him carry out the diabolical plot he mastermind, and only one has pleaded guilty and sentenced to life in prison. United Airlines Flight 93 took off from Newark International Airport in New Jersey that morning headed for San Francisco. According to a report from the National Transportation Safety Board, a team of four al-Qaeda terrorists stormed the cockpit and at 9:32 a.m. the cockpit voice recorder indicated a struggle was occurring and captured the words of someone yelling,"Get out of here."
Andy Card, then the chief of staff to President George W. Bush, was with the commander-in-chief that morning at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, to promote the White House's"No Child Left Behind" education program. Before entering a room of children, Card recalled a Navy captain approaching him and the president to say a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, an unfortunate tragic accident they initially thought.
The following day, Bush traveled to lower Manhattan to see the destruction for himself. He stood atop a pile of smoldering rubble, his left arm draping the shoulder of a veteran firefighter, and began to speak into a bullhorn of the unspeakable loss. When someone in the group of rescuers and volunteer construction workers huddled around him shouted,"George we can't hear ya," the president responded,"I can hear you.
"I held nobody accountable for not really taking any action on that document because, at the time period, FBI headquarters was looking at real threat information that was coming in involving, for lack of a better description, ticking time bombs," Williams said. "This is my 20-year journey, trying to figure out why. I've had basically a nervous breakdown over it, if you really want to know the truth, rattling my brain why something simple was not done. It defies logic. It defies reason. You shouldn't accept it," said Rossini, who resigned from the bureau in 2008 when he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of accessing records in an FBI database.
Other living casualties of 9/11 are people like Brett Eagleson, who was 15 when his father, Bruce, was killed at the World Trade Center. Eagleson has spent years trying to get the federal government to make public what the FBI has learned about the roles top officials of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia may have played in the attacks. A lawsuit he and other survivors of 9/11 victims filed against Saudi Arabia contends it was more than a coincidence that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
But the plaintiffs, whose case is pending, claim that since the commission's report was released, the FBI has continued to investigate whether the Saudi government was involved in 9/11 but has refused to declassify evidence the families suspect show the kingdom was complicit. "That added to the pain and misery," Eagleson told ABC News."My family, along with many other families, are still waiting on remains to be found."Just 45 days after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the White House feared a follow-up ambush was imminent, Congress passed the Patriot Act, expanding the government's domestic surveillance powers to include reviewing bank records and even library accounts.
Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian-born citizen, was held for seven years and six months at Guantanamo Bay, where he said he was relentlessly interrogated and routinely tortured."They destroyed my health. They destroyed my life," Boumediene told ABC News.Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian former prisoner of the U.S.
"They destroyed everything. But until now, I still didn't get anything. No compensation, no apologies. Twenty years later, I can't find the truth behind my imprisonment at Guantanamo," Boumediene said. "I think we had sent a message to the world that nobody attacks the United States and gets away with it," Panetta told ABC News.President Barack Obama talks with members of the national security team, including Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, center, about the mission against Osama bin Laden, in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011 in Washington, D.C.
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