U.S. Looks Back, Forward On 9/11 Anniversary

NEW YORK -- More than 2,700 people were killed at the site of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The remains of nearly half those people have never been found, their families have nothing left of their loved ones, and have long since given up any hope of finding recognizable human parts.

Searchers recovered whole bodies at first -- 291 victims were found intact. But as the searchers dug into the 10-story mound of debris, they mostly began to find just fragments. Eventually, more than 20,000 parts were collected. Many were recovered at a second site, a former garbage dump in Staten Island.

Some families, officials and experts are suing the city of New York in federal court. They want the sifted leftovers removed so that any human remains aren't left in garbage.

Rusting Artifacts Await New Home

Off a service road at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, a hangar that once housed Tower Air is now a gigantic graveyard for what's left of the twin towers.

The items inside Hangar 17 include the trident columns that once held up the 110-story buildings -- now broken, scorched and stacked on their sides. There are crushed cars and burned-out elevator motors, broken art objects, and personal belongings of the victims.

The plans to memorialize the terrorist attacks have been revised again and again. But debates still rage. How to arrange names of the dead? Should anything be built on the spot where the towers stood? Should shattered pieces of the buildings rise again?

The objects that return will help shape a story that in many ways is still being written.

Firefighters Reflect

Three hundred forty-three New York City firefighters lost their lives in the destruction of the World Trade Center.

James McGlynn knows he's among the lucky. He and other members of Engine Company 39 were trapped in the collapse of the north tower. But all made it out alive.

"It's hard to comprehend that you could survive a 110-story building coming down around you," McGlynn said.

Tower Ladder Company 21 lost seven men. One who survived, James McNally, said the attack began just after he'd left work to accompany his pregnant wife to a sonogram. He raced back to take part in a rescue operation.

"We didn't pull out anybody alive," he said.

Youngest Survivors Don't Know Fathers

There are children who never got to meet their fathers because of the Sept. 11 attacks. The first baby arrived just hours after the terror attack, and the last nine months later. Some mothers only discovered they were pregnant after the dads were gone.

The fathers were rescue workers, police officers, restaurant waiters and stockbrokers.

Many moms broke down in the delivery room, where they tried to fill that empty space with photos, a police badge, a piece of clothing. Friends and relatives with cameras and brave faces stood in for all those lost dads.

There were dozens of children born to widows in the months after the attacks. Five years later, as they approach kindergarten, they're just beginning to grasp the stories of their fathers and of the day that changed their lives forever.

Victims' Families A Powerful Lobby

Over the last five years, the activist families of attack victims have emerged as a formidable political lobby. They've forced the removal of a controversial museum as well as major changes to the memorial and the 9/11 Commission's independent inquiry into the terrorist attacks.

Their loved ones' faces are on pendants and posters, in the framed pictures they raise at rallies for safer buildings or better national security or a redesigned memorial.

Their crusades take them to Congress, courtrooms and ground zero, almost always followed by cameras.

Some critics whisper that the activists only represent a small fraction of victims' relatives, that they crave attention, or are too grief-stricken to think rationally. Even some other family members have expressed objections, saying the activists don't speak for them.

Kristin Breitweiser figured she had two choices after her husband was killed that day: crawl into a ball and become another victim, or try to keep other people from becoming victims.

She chose to help others.

Breitweiser has become an activist for making airports, ports, chemical plants and nuclear plants safer. And she has written a book in which she says the United States has squandered five years in which it could have made itself safer.

Breitweiser said she didn't want to be a victim. She said she's proved that you can take something terrible and make something better from it. That's being a survivor, she said.

Breitweiser said that's what she's trying to teach her daughter. She says she believes it's what her husband would have wanted.

Students Remember 'The Pet Goat'

Millions of Americans have a story of where they were on Sept. 11, 2001.

The kids of Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., were with President George W. Bush in the midst of a monumental crisis.

Bush was visiting the school to launch a national reading campaign. He was listening as a group of second-graders were reading aloud from the story "The Pet Goat" when an aide leaned in and whispered something.

Tyler Radkey, now 13, remembers Bush's face turning red.

The president's decision to continue sitting there for several minutes has been bitterly criticized.

But 15-year-old Stevenson Tose-Rigell said, "You can't judge a man on seven minutes." He said what Bush did "is what he could do."

Flight 93 Lives In Imaginations

Five years later, the images are still seared into the memories of those who rushed to the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93.

Homes shook and the earth trembled as the jetliner roared out of the sky and slammed into the soft earth of a former strip mine near Shanksville, Pa.

Many of those first to respond to the scene were surprised to find no bodies, no obvious wreckage -- only a smoking crater, singed trees and an eerie silence.

Five years since passengers and crew members battled hijackers in the skies over Pennsylvania, there's little left to mark it as a crash site.

Now, 45 volunteers take turns working two-hour shifts each day at the Flight 93 Memorial. Some months they guide more than 25,000 visitors.

Carol Fritz was just 10 years old when the jet crashed into the field.

She didn't know anyone on the plane, and didn't understand everything that was happening back then, but said she had to come to Shanksville Monday so she could tell her children and grandchildren that, "I was here."

It's believed that the hijackers of Flight 93, from Newark, N.J., planned to crash the plane into the White House or Capitol and that passengers rushed the cockpit in an effort to stop them.

The field where the plane crashed is blocked by a 10-foot-tall chain-link fence covered with American flags, firefighter helmets and drawings by children.

Americans Still Feel Threatened

The threat of another terrorist attack against the United States remains chillingly real. Despite a government overhaul and more than a quarter-trillion dollars spent to bolster security, few doubt al-Qaida's intent to strike the United States again.

That the nation hasn't been hit since 2001 may say as much about terrorists' patience as it does about steps taken to stop them.

Authorities have disrupted a number of high-profile plots, including last month's bombing scare on as many as 10 Britain-to-U.S. flights.

But the unsettling reality of terrorism is that it is always in search of new ways to accomplish mass death and destruction. And always in search of the weakest link.

Where Is Osama Bin Laden?

Two days after the attacks, the United States identified Osama bin Laden as the prime suspect in the attack.

Since then, tens of thousands of U.S. and Pakistani troops have been searching for the al-Qaida leader along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. So far, they've come up empty.

The CIA dismantled its unit dedicated to finding the leaders of al-Qaida. The American military's once-singular focus is diffused by the need for reconstruction and a growing fight against the Taliban, the resurgent Afghan Islamic movement that once hosted bin Laden.

Hopes of cornering bin Laden seem as distant as ever. The last time authorities say they were close to getting him was in 2004, and in hindsight those statements seem more hope than fact.

"It is like chasing ghosts up there," one American soldier said.

Fear of another terrorist attack remains real for many Americans.

For people in the two cities struck on Sept. 11, 2001 -- New York and Washington -- the fears are intensely personal and vivid.

An AP-Ipsos poll finds they're nervous about public transportation, take note of suspicious people and think back often to the horrors from five years ago. Well over half of New Yorkers and Washingtonians are worried their communities will be attacked again. Nationwide, one- third worry they will be attacked.

Five years after the attacks, the terrorist threat is still evolving. Britain's foiling of what authorities called a multiple hijacking plot in early August was a stark reminder. Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden remains free. And the only person convicted in the United States in connection with the attacks is Zacarias Moussaoui