For more than two weeks after the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, hundreds of search and rescue dogs hunted for signs of life in the smouldering ruins.

Ricky, a 17-inch-tall rat terrier, was able to squeeze into tight spaces. Trakr, a German shepherd from Canada, combed the wreckage for two days — then collapsed from smoke inhalation, exhaustion and burns. Riley, a 4-year-old golden retriever, searched deep into the debris fields and helped locate the bodies of several firefighters.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/is-911-a-day-or-is-it-an-era-411151">Is 9/11 a day, or is it an Era?</a>

“We went there expecting to find hundreds of people trapped,” said Chris Selfridge, 54, of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who was Riley’s handler. “But we didn’t find anybody alive.”

Though there were not many survivors to find amid the destruction, the devotion of the dogs to their work became an inspiring sight to emergency medical workers and to others who witnessed the urgent rescue effort. Now, as the 20th anniversary of the attacks approaches, those efforts are being memorialized in an exhibition opening Wednesday at the American Kennel Club’s Museum of the Dog.

Titled “9/11 Remembered: Search &amp; Rescue Dogs,” the exhibition also looks beyond the parameters of 9/11 to recognize dogs who worked at other disasters as well, not just in the United States, but around the world. The show will also include several pieces from the DOGNY project, an art initiative that features life-size sculptures of German shepherds. Roughly 100 of them were placed around New York after the attacks.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/how-911-changed-air-travel-more-security-less-privacy-411141">How 9/11 changed air travel: More security, less privacy</a>

“I hope this can be a little more uplifting,” Alan Fausel, the museum’s executive director, said. “We also showcase some of the brighter sides and positive outcomes: Rex of White Way rescued a whole train of people stuck in the Sierra Nevadas in the ’50s, and we’ll talk about St. Bernards such as Barry, a very famous St. Bernard in the St. Bernard hospice in Switzerland who rescued avalanche victims.”

The display follows up on an ongoing temporary exhibition at the 9/11 Memorial &amp; Museum in lower Manhattan, “K-9 Courage,” which opened in January 2020, but was hardly seen because of the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus">pandemic</a>. That exhibit, which runs into spring 2022, features photographer Charlotte Dumas’ portraits of 15 of the dogs who aided in recovery efforts at ground zero, taken for the 10-year anniversary in 2011, alongside photos of them working in the wreckage.

“You look into their eyes in their old age and can, with the help of the documentary photographs, imagine what their eyes had seen,” Alice M. Greenwald, the chief executive and president of the museum, said. “But you also know that they’ve lived lives of service and surely, there is satisfaction in that — for dogs and human beings, alike.”

Some 2,753 people were killed when the terrorist group al-Qaida hijacked two planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center’s towers, causing them both to collapse in the span of 102 minutes.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/freedom-tower-the-skyscraper-symbolising-new-yorks-resilience-411055">'Freedom Tower' - the skyscraper symbolising New York's resilience</a>

As an acrid dust cloud enveloped lower Manhattan and a nation mourned, hundreds of search and rescue teams from around the country descended on ground zero to join the search for survivors, with the first dogs, from the NYPD’s K-9 urban search and rescue team, arriving at the South Tower just 15 minutes after its collapse.

The teams worked 12-hour days for an average of 10 days straight.

The New York Police Department has reported that though survivors were found in the rubble, none of those was the direct result of a dog’s discovery. Several people, though, have credited Trackr, a retired police dog, with having played a role in one rescue. His handler, a Canadian policeman who drove down from Nova Scotia, was suspended from his job for leaving without permission when his department saw him on television aiding the rescue efforts. (Jane Goodall later presented him with a humanitarian service award).

Dr. Cynthia Otto, the director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center in Philadelphia who looked after the dogs at ground zero, said the that, for the most part,&nbsp;the dogs’ injuries were only “very minor” — cuts and scrapes on their paw pads, legs and bellies, mainly, as well as fatigue and heat exhaustion. The bigger challenge, she said, was the frustration of searching for hours and not finding anyone. When the dogs began to get discouraged and lose their motivation to search, handlers had to stage “mock finds” so the dogs could feel successful.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/twenty-years-on-pandemic-gives-911-conspiracists-fresh-impetus-411061">Twenty years on, pandemic gives 9/11 conspiracists fresh impetus</a>

“When they train, they don’t search for hours without finding anybody,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “You need to remind the dogs every so often that they do get to win.”

Bretagne (pronounced Brittany), a golden retriever who was then 2 years old, arrived the week after the attacks and spent 10 days searching for survivors. She slept in a kennel at the Javits Center alongside her handler, Denise Corliss, an electrical engineer from Texas who had traveled to the city with Texas Task Force 1, one of the 28 teams that form the FEMA National Urban Search and Rescue System.

Corliss, 56, said Bretagne, who died in 2016, was the last known living service dog to have been employed by FEMA at ground zero. She brought comfort to rescuers and firefighters, who would approach the dog and pet her. Soon, they’d open up to Corliss, sharing personal stories of the missing friends and colleagues they were searching for.

“A gentleman came up and started petting Bretagne and said, ‘You know, I don’t really like dogs,’” she said. “Which was a surprising statement considering he was kneeling down to pet her. I said ‘Oh?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, my best friend loved dogs; he had a golden retriever himself. My best friend is somewhere out there,’ and he pointed to the pile. It was a tie back to his missing friend.”

And that, Fausel said, is what the Museum of the Dog hopes to capture in its new exhibition.

“The search and rescue dogs didn’t rescue any people from the pile,” he said. “But I think they somewhat rescued the people who were searching.”

For more than two weeks after the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, hundreds of search and rescue dogs hunted for signs of life in the smouldering ruins. Ricky, a 17-inch-tall rat terrier, was able to squeeze into tight spaces.

For more than two weeks after the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, hundreds of search and rescue dogs hunted for signs of life in the smouldering ruins. Ricky, a 17-inch-tall rat terrier, was able to squeeze into tight spaces. Trakr, a German shepherd from Canada, combed the wreckage for two days — then collapsed from smoke inhalation, exhaustion and burns. Riley, a 4-year-old golden retriever, searched deep into the debris fields and helped locate the bodies of several firefighters. Also read | Is 9/11 a day, or is it an Era? “We went there expecting to find hundreds of people trapped,” said Chris Selfridge, 54, of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who was Riley’s handler. “But we didn’t find anybody alive.” Though there were not many survivors to find amid the destruction, the devotion of the dogs to their work became an inspiring sight to emergency medical workers and to others who witnessed the urgent rescue effort. Now, as the 20th anniversary of the attacks approaches, those efforts are being memorialized in an exhibition opening Wednesday at the American Kennel Club’s Museum of the Dog. Titled “9/11 Remembered: Search & Rescue Dogs,” the exhibition also looks beyond the parameters of 9/11 to recognize dogs who worked at other disasters as well, not just in the United States, but around the world. The show will also include several pieces from the DOGNY project, an art initiative that features life-size sculptures of German shepherds. Roughly 100 of them were placed around New York after the attacks. Also read | How 9/11 changed air travel: More security, less privacy “I hope this can be a little more uplifting,” Alan Fausel, the museum’s executive director, said. “We also showcase some of the brighter sides and positive outcomes: Rex of White Way rescued a whole train of people stuck in the Sierra Nevadas in the ’50s, and we’ll talk about St. Bernards such as Barry, a very famous St. Bernard in the St. Bernard hospice in Switzerland who rescued avalanche victims.” The display follows up on an ongoing temporary exhibition at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in lower Manhattan, “K-9 Courage,” which opened in January 2020, but was hardly seen because of the pandemic. That exhibit, which runs into spring 2022, features photographer Charlotte Dumas’ portraits of 15 of the dogs who aided in recovery efforts at ground zero, taken for the 10-year anniversary in 2011, alongside photos of them working in the wreckage. “You look into their eyes in their old age and can, with the help of the documentary photographs, imagine what their eyes had seen,” Alice M. Greenwald, the chief executive and president of the museum, said. “But you also know that they’ve lived lives of service and surely, there is satisfaction in that — for dogs and human beings, alike.” Some 2,753 people were killed when the terrorist group al-Qaida hijacked two planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center’s towers, causing them both to collapse in the span of 102 minutes. Also read | 'Freedom Tower' - the skyscraper symbolising New York's resilience As an acrid dust cloud enveloped lower Manhattan and a nation mourned, hundreds of search and rescue teams from around the country descended on ground zero to join the search for survivors, with the first dogs, from the NYPD’s K-9 urban search and rescue team, arriving at the South Tower just 15 minutes after its collapse. The teams worked 12-hour days for an average of 10 days straight. The New York Police Department has reported that though survivors were found in the rubble, none of those was the direct result of a dog’s discovery. Several people, though, have credited Trackr, a retired police dog, with having played a role in one rescue. His handler, a Canadian policeman who drove down from Nova Scotia, was suspended from his job for leaving without permission when his department saw him on television aiding the rescue efforts. (Jane Goodall later presented him with a humanitarian service award). Dr. Cynthia Otto, the director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center in Philadelphia who looked after the dogs at ground zero, said the that, for the most part, the dogs’ injuries were only “very minor” — cuts and scrapes on their paw pads, legs and bellies, mainly, as well as fatigue and heat exhaustion. The bigger challenge, she said, was the frustration of searching for hours and not finding anyone. When the dogs began to get discouraged and lose their motivation to search, handlers had to stage “mock finds” so the dogs could feel successful. Also read | Twenty years on, pandemic gives 9/11 conspiracists fresh impetus “When they train, they don’t search for hours without finding anybody,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “You need to remind the dogs every so often that they do get to win.” Bretagne (pronounced Brittany), a golden retriever who was then 2 years old, arrived the week after the attacks and spent 10 days searching for survivors. She slept in a kennel at the Javits Center alongside her handler, Denise Corliss, an electrical engineer from Texas who had traveled to the city with Texas Task Force 1, one of the 28 teams that form the FEMA National Urban Search and Rescue System. Corliss, 56, said Bretagne, who died in 2016, was the last known living service dog to have been employed by FEMA at ground zero. She brought comfort to rescuers and firefighters, who would approach the dog and pet her. Soon, they’d open up to Corliss, sharing personal stories of the missing friends and colleagues they were searching for. “A gentleman came up and started petting Bretagne and said, ‘You know, I don’t really like dogs,’” she said. “Which was a surprising statement considering he was kneeling down to pet her. I said ‘Oh?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, my best friend loved dogs; he had a golden retriever himself. My best friend is somewhere out there,’ and he pointed to the pile. It was a tie back to his missing friend.” And that, Fausel said, is what the Museum of the Dog hopes to capture in its new exhibition. “The search and rescue dogs didn’t rescue any people from the pile,” he said. “But I think they somewhat rescued the people who were searching.”

The dogs of 9/11: Their failed searches for life helped sustain it

The TV specials for the Sept. 11 anniversary offer any number of ways to return to hell. There are wrenching interviews with survivors and with those whose loved ones died; uplifting stories of rescues and agonizing stories of those who perished in the attempt; footage of the conflagration, chaos and shock, as seen on morning newscasts and in the ash-blanketed streets; images of the first responders and volunteers digging through wreckage.

A clarification: I actually took those descriptions from this newspaper’s review programming for the 10th anniversary. But they apply just as well this year, for the 20th.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/how-911-changed-air-travel-more-security-less-privacy-411141">How 9/11 changed air travel: More security, less privacy</a>

In documentary after documentary, on cable, streaming and broadcast, you can hear, over and over, the air traffic-control distress calls. You can see, again and again, the stunning footage of an airliner slamming into the north tower of the World Trade Center, captured by a documentary filmmaker accompanying firefighters on a routine call. You can be reminded, time after heartbreaking time, what a beautiful, blue-sky September morning it was.

The interview subjects have aged. Time has passed. The children who fled schools or lost parents that morning are now grown adults. (Two documentaries, on the History Channel and Discovery+, focus on them.) But the story, as told, is mostly the same.

Twenty years later, is there anything still to say about Sept. 11? Of course; it would be unimaginable to simply ignore it. A tougher question is: Is there anything&nbsp;more&nbsp;to say than there was five, 10, 15 years ago?

There is. But actually saying it can be riskier.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/freedom-tower-the-skyscraper-symbolising-new-yorks-resilience-411055">'Freedom Tower' - the skyscraper symbolising New York's resilience</a>

TV’s treatment of Sept. 11 has changed over the years, in bits and pieces. The adrenaline rush of “24” gave way to the moral grayscale of “Homeland.” MSNBC finally ended its grim tradition of replaying the live coverage of the attacks. But the general approach of the memorial specials, tightly focused on honouring the loss and sacrifice of one discrete day, has kept a kind of ritual familiarity.

For 20 years, the refrain has been: Remember, remember, remember. Memory is so ingrained in the language of Sept. 11 — “Never forget” — as to imply that it is obligatory, and sufficient, for future generations merely to remember by revisiting the narrative and imagery of one terrible day, rather than to connect it to the years of history that followed.

But is Sept. 11 simply a day, or is it an era? Was it the beginning of something or a continuation? You can divide most of the anniversary specials between those that focus closely on the day that the towers fell and those that pull back, way back, to look at what emerged from the dust.

There are plenty of the former kind. On National Geographic, the four-part series “9/11: One Day in America” reassembles in granular detail the horrific experience of that morning. (It’s streaming on Hulu — all the programs mentioned here are currently streaming unless otherwise noted.) A special episode of “60 Minutes,” premiering Sept. 12, revisits the stories of firefighters who survived the catastrophe, and those who didn’t.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/twenty-years-on-pandemic-gives-911-conspiracists-fresh-impetus-411061">Twenty years on, pandemic gives 9/11 conspiracists fresh impetus</a>

Apple TV+’s “9/11: Inside the President’s War Room” interviews George W. Bush and former members of his staff about the decisions and chaos of that morning, with scant reference to any decisions — say, the invasion of Iraq — that followed. And the seven hours of new 9/11 programming on the History Channel include “9/11: Four Flights,” about the aircraft that crashed into the towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, and “9/11: I Was There,” based on amateur video (both premiere on Sept. 11).

These remember-the-day documentaries tend to be heartfelt and reverent; they are often meticulously researched and assembled. (I cannot speak for “Long Island Medium: In Memory of 9/11,” the TLC special, premiering Thursday, that promises to bring families messages from the spirits of their lost loved ones.) They have the benefit of two decades of fact-finding. But for years now, it has been hard for anything to match the immediacy and urgency of “9/11,” the film by Gédéon and Jules Naudet — the brothers whose intended firefighter documentary produced that famous tower-impact shot — which aired on CBS in 2002. (CNN will re-air it on Sunday.)

Focusing on the emotion and heroism of one day, of course, avoids getting ensnared in everything that came after. It sticks to what we can all agree on. It’s safer, in the way that it’s safer to teach the Civil War or Jim Crow as horrors of the past instead of events on a continuum that reaches into the present.

The other approach is to decide that 20 years, a full generation, is long enough to treat the terror attacks as part of a larger historical era.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/911-attacks-us-president-moves-to-declassify-documents-as-20th-anniversary-approaches-410579">9/11 attacks: US president moves to declassify documents as 20th anniversary approaches</a>

Sept. 11 is not only in the past, as you can see in the bloody news from Afghanistan. For viewers who want to unpack how the attacks led to two decades of military entanglements, there’s Netflix’s five-part “Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror,” which looks unsparingly at the intelligence failures before Sept. 11 and the mission creep through multiple administrations. Enlighteningly, it includes the voices of Afghan leaders and civilians. Sept. 11, as an epoch, meant upheaval for more than one nation.

But the history of Sept. 11 goes far beyond war and foreign policy. It affected domestic politics, domestic enmities and even American culture.

And two of the anniversary’s most striking documentaries present Sept. 11 as an event that struck at America’s democracy and even its soul.

The “Frontline” special “America After 9/11,” premiering Tuesday on PBS, is driven by a striking video juxtaposition. First, on the Capitol steps the day of the attacks, a chorus of members of Congress, Republican and Democratic, senators and representatives, join to sing “God Bless America.” Two decades later, on the same site, a mob besieges Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an election.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/blame-for-afghanistan-lies-on-president-biden-says-911-era-nypd-commissioner-410532">Exclusive: Blame for Afghanistan 'lies on President Biden', says 9/11-era NYPD commissioner&nbsp;</a>

It’s a provocative connection, but filmmaker Michael Kirk lays it out economically: The attacks set off a chain of action and changes — military quagmires, suspicion and racism at home, the loss of trust in institutions — that demagogues used to undermine democracy, and that fulfilled Osama bin Laden’s goal of dividing and weakening America.

From the beginning, the special argues, America’s response was driven by paradox: the moral rhetoric of Bush and the strategies of his vice president, Dick Cheney, who said that America would need to work with “the dark side” to survive.

The dark side won, “America After 9/11” argues. It won when specious claims of weapons of mass destruction rationalized war in Iraq; when images of torture emerged from Abu Ghraib prison; when illustrations of Barack Obama as bin Laden circulated; when the media fed hysteria about terror threats; and when the 2016 election was won by a candidate who said, “I think Islam hates us” and used similar rhetoric for people he labelled domestic enemies.

In this light, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — with its racist language and its fantasy of reclaiming America from a shadowy existential threat — was, says former Obama aide Ben Rhodes, “the logical endpoint” of the 9/11 era.

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/former-commissioner-of-new-york-city-police-dept-bernard-kerik-speaks-on-911-attacks-410624/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

But the most sweeping — and, I expect, ultimately the most memorable — of this year’s documentaries is Spike Lee’s elegiac, messy and feisty “NYC Epicenters: 9/11-2021½,” airing in four parts on HBO.

As the title suggests, “Epicenters” is only partly about 9/11, and it makes a strong case that the 9/11 era can only be captured with the widest lens. It works backwards, starting from the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus">COVID-19 pandemic</a> and moving — through Black Lives Matter, the 2016 and 2020 elections and more — to its starting point. In Lee’s telling, Sept. 11 is not just a matter of terrorism, but also the opening act to decades of calamity and uproar.

If it seems like a stretch, “Epicenters” soon makes it difficult to see the subject otherwise, drawing connection after connection across the years. There is Rudy Giuliani, “America’s Mayor” in the days after the towers fell, spouting election-hoax fan fiction at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. There is the rash of Islamophobic attacks after Sept. 11, echoing in the xenophobia of the Trump era. There are emergency medical workers suffering from 9/11-related illnesses that loom as preexisting conditions during the pandemic.

Sept. 11, in Lee’s telling, is itself a preexisting condition. It is not a one-time injury but a chronic affliction, and other, pre-preexisting conditions express themselves through it as well. New York came back from it, and, “Epicenters” insists, it will come back from COVID. But in his crowning image, Lee likens that comeback to Marlon Brando’s bloodied stagger at the end of “On the Waterfront.” Each blow leaves a mark.

“Epicenters” uses clips from a lot of films to evoke the city, from “On the Town” to the 1976 remake of “King Kong” to Lee’s own work. Lee’s memory of New York, like many people’s, is a blend of lived experience and fantasy. And sometimes the exaggerated language of film is the only thing that can capture larger-than-life experience; as the series notes, people describe Sept. 11, over and over, as being “like a movie.”

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-spike-lee-re-edits-9-11-documentary-featuring-conspiracy-theorists-408396">Spike Lee re-edits 9-11 documentary featuring conspiracy theorists</a>

Lee’s interviews — with hundreds of people, from high elected officials to heavy-equipment operators at ground zero — are warm, emotional, sometimes sparring. He ribs every Boston Red Sox fan he talks to; when his subjects need time to collect themselves, he lets the moments play out. For politicians, he lets the raspberries fly freely (the captions refer to Donald Trump, in the words of the rapper Busta Rhymes, as “President Agent Orange”).

One could argue over which director is most essentially New York. But Lee’s passionate heckler’s breed of New York-ness may be the best suited to this subject. He is loving and critical, impulses that New Yorkers know as synonyms. And his focus on diversity and race helps him find less-heard voices in a much-told story, like those of the Vulcan Society for Black firefighters, or of the Black flight attendant who guiltily recalls “racially profiling” a Saudi passenger after Sept. 11.

Unfortunately, “Epicenters” has made the most news for what you won’t see in it: an extended, bizarre section in the original final episode that gave credence to the conspiracists who theorize that the towers were brought down by a controlled explosion. Lee snipped the entire section, and despite the blunt edit, the shorter final cut, which premieres on Sept. 11, actually flows better.

I could imagine a version of “Epicenters” that still covered the conspiracy theories, not to legitimize them, but as an example of the paranoia that thrives in a country lacking social trust — which Lee rightly deplores when it comes to anti-vaccine theories and the election hoaxes that drove some of the Capitol assailants.

There’s a sobering meta-lesson in the fact that the most artful of this season’s Sept. 11 documentaries became an example of one of the very problems it diagnosed. But at least the resolution shows that criticism can make a difference, and that it’s not too late to look at history seriously and make a change.

The TV specials for the Sept. 11 anniversary offer any number of ways to return to hell. There are wrenching interviews with survivors and with those whose loved ones died; uplifting stories of rescues and agonizing stories of those who perished in the attempt; footage of the conflagration, chaos and shock, as seen on morning newscasts and in the ash-blanketed streets; images of the first responders and volunteers digging through wreckage.

The TV specials for the Sept. 11 anniversary offer any number of ways to return to hell. There are wrenching interviews with survivors and with those whose loved ones died; uplifting stories of rescues and agonizing stories of those who perished in the attempt; footage of the conflagration, chaos and shock, as seen on morning newscasts and in the ash-blanketed streets; images of the first responders and volunteers digging through wreckage. A clarification: I actually took those descriptions from this newspaper’s review programming for the 10th anniversary. But they apply just as well this year, for the 20th. Also read | How 9/11 changed air travel: More security, less privacy In documentary after documentary, on cable, streaming and broadcast, you can hear, over and over, the air traffic-control distress calls. You can see, again and again, the stunning footage of an airliner slamming into the north tower of the World Trade Center, captured by a documentary filmmaker accompanying firefighters on a routine call. You can be reminded, time after heartbreaking time, what a beautiful, blue-sky September morning it was. The interview subjects have aged. Time has passed. The children who fled schools or lost parents that morning are now grown adults. (Two documentaries, on the History Channel and Discovery+, focus on them.) But the story, as told, is mostly the same. Twenty years later, is there anything still to say about Sept. 11? Of course; it would be unimaginable to simply ignore it. A tougher question is: Is there anything more to say than there was five, 10, 15 years ago? There is. But actually saying it can be riskier. Also read | 'Freedom Tower' - the skyscraper symbolising New York's resilience TV’s treatment of Sept. 11 has changed over the years, in bits and pieces. The adrenaline rush of “24” gave way to the moral grayscale of “Homeland.” MSNBC finally ended its grim tradition of replaying the live coverage of the attacks. But the general approach of the memorial specials, tightly focused on honouring the loss and sacrifice of one discrete day, has kept a kind of ritual familiarity. For 20 years, the refrain has been: Remember, remember, remember. Memory is so ingrained in the language of Sept. 11 — “Never forget” — as to imply that it is obligatory, and sufficient, for future generations merely to remember by revisiting the narrative and imagery of one terrible day, rather than to connect it to the years of history that followed. But is Sept. 11 simply a day, or is it an era? Was it the beginning of something or a continuation? You can divide most of the anniversary specials between those that focus closely on the day that the towers fell and those that pull back, way back, to look at what emerged from the dust. There are plenty of the former kind. On National Geographic, the four-part series “9/11: One Day in America” reassembles in granular detail the horrific experience of that morning. (It’s streaming on Hulu — all the programs mentioned here are currently streaming unless otherwise noted.) A special episode of “60 Minutes,” premiering Sept. 12, revisits the stories of firefighters who survived the catastrophe, and those who didn’t. Also read | Twenty years on, pandemic gives 9/11 conspiracists fresh impetus Apple TV+’s “9/11: Inside the President’s War Room” interviews George W. Bush and former members of his staff about the decisions and chaos of that morning, with scant reference to any decisions — say, the invasion of Iraq — that followed. And the seven hours of new 9/11 programming on the History Channel include “9/11: Four Flights,” about the aircraft that crashed into the towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, and “9/11: I Was There,” based on amateur video (both premiere on Sept. 11). These remember-the-day documentaries tend to be heartfelt and reverent; they are often meticulously researched and assembled. (I cannot speak for “Long Island Medium: In Memory of 9/11,” the TLC special, premiering Thursday, that promises to bring families messages from the spirits of their lost loved ones.) They have the benefit of two decades of fact-finding. But for years now, it has been hard for anything to match the immediacy and urgency of “9/11,” the film by Gédéon and Jules Naudet — the brothers whose intended firefighter documentary produced that famous tower-impact shot — which aired on CBS in 2002. (CNN will re-air it on Sunday.) Focusing on the emotion and heroism of one day, of course, avoids getting ensnared in everything that came after. It sticks to what we can all agree on. It’s safer, in the way that it’s safer to teach the Civil War or Jim Crow as horrors of the past instead of events on a continuum that reaches into the present. The other approach is to decide that 20 years, a full generation, is long enough to treat the terror attacks as part of a larger historical era. Also read | 9/11 attacks: US president moves to declassify documents as 20th anniversary approaches Sept. 11 is not only in the past, as you can see in the bloody news from Afghanistan. For viewers who want to unpack how the attacks led to two decades of military entanglements, there’s Netflix’s five-part “Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror,” which looks unsparingly at the intelligence failures before Sept. 11 and the mission creep through multiple administrations. Enlighteningly, it includes the voices of Afghan leaders and civilians. Sept. 11, as an epoch, meant upheaval for more than one nation. But the history of Sept. 11 goes far beyond war and foreign policy. It affected domestic politics, domestic enmities and even American culture. And two of the anniversary’s most striking documentaries present Sept. 11 as an event that struck at America’s democracy and even its soul. The “Frontline” special “America After 9/11,” premiering Tuesday on PBS, is driven by a striking video juxtaposition. First, on the Capitol steps the day of the attacks, a chorus of members of Congress, Republican and Democratic, senators and representatives, join to sing “God Bless America.” Two decades later, on the same site, a mob besieges Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an election. Also read | Exclusive: Blame for Afghanistan 'lies on President Biden', says 9/11-era NYPD commissioner It’s a provocative connection, but filmmaker Michael Kirk lays it out economically: The attacks set off a chain of action and changes — military quagmires, suspicion and racism at home, the loss of trust in institutions — that demagogues used to undermine democracy, and that fulfilled Osama bin Laden’s goal of dividing and weakening America. From the beginning, the special argues, America’s response was driven by paradox: the moral rhetoric of Bush and the strategies of his vice president, Dick Cheney, who said that America would need to work with “the dark side” to survive. The dark side won, “America After 9/11” argues. It won when specious claims of weapons of mass destruction rationalized war in Iraq; when images of torture emerged from Abu Ghraib prison; when illustrations of Barack Obama as bin Laden circulated; when the media fed hysteria about terror threats; and when the 2016 election was won by a candidate who said, “I think Islam hates us” and used similar rhetoric for people he labelled domestic enemies. In this light, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — with its racist language and its fantasy of reclaiming America from a shadowy existential threat — was, says former Obama aide Ben Rhodes, “the logical endpoint” of the 9/11 era. But the most sweeping — and, I expect, ultimately the most memorable — of this year’s documentaries is Spike Lee’s elegiac, messy and feisty “NYC Epicenters: 9/11-2021½,” airing in four parts on HBO. As the title suggests, “Epicenters” is only partly about 9/11, and it makes a strong case that the 9/11 era can only be captured with the widest lens. It works backwards, starting from the COVID-19 pandemic and moving — through Black Lives Matter, the 2016 and 2020 elections and more — to its starting point. In Lee’s telling, Sept. 11 is not just a matter of terrorism, but also the opening act to decades of calamity and uproar. If it seems like a stretch, “Epicenters” soon makes it difficult to see the subject otherwise, drawing connection after connection across the years. There is Rudy Giuliani, “America’s Mayor” in the days after the towers fell, spouting election-hoax fan fiction at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. There is the rash of Islamophobic attacks after Sept. 11, echoing in the xenophobia of the Trump era. There are emergency medical workers suffering from 9/11-related illnesses that loom as preexisting conditions during the pandemic. Sept. 11, in Lee’s telling, is itself a preexisting condition. It is not a one-time injury but a chronic affliction, and other, pre-preexisting conditions express themselves through it as well. New York came back from it, and, “Epicenters” insists, it will come back from COVID. But in his crowning image, Lee likens that comeback to Marlon Brando’s bloodied stagger at the end of “On the Waterfront.” Each blow leaves a mark. “Epicenters” uses clips from a lot of films to evoke the city, from “On the Town” to the 1976 remake of “King Kong” to Lee’s own work. Lee’s memory of New York, like many people’s, is a blend of lived experience and fantasy. And sometimes the exaggerated language of film is the only thing that can capture larger-than-life experience; as the series notes, people describe Sept. 11, over and over, as being “like a movie.” Also read | Spike Lee re-edits 9-11 documentary featuring conspiracy theorists Lee’s interviews — with hundreds of people, from high elected officials to heavy-equipment operators at ground zero — are warm, emotional, sometimes sparring. He ribs every Boston Red Sox fan he talks to; when his subjects need time to collect themselves, he lets the moments play out. For politicians, he lets the raspberries fly freely (the captions refer to Donald Trump, in the words of the rapper Busta Rhymes, as “President Agent Orange”). One could argue over which director is most essentially New York. But Lee’s passionate heckler’s breed of New York-ness may be the best suited to this subject. He is loving and critical, impulses that New Yorkers know as synonyms. And his focus on diversity and race helps him find less-heard voices in a much-told story, like those of the Vulcan Society for Black firefighters, or of the Black flight attendant who guiltily recalls “racially profiling” a Saudi passenger after Sept. 11. Unfortunately, “Epicenters” has made the most news for what you won’t see in it: an extended, bizarre section in the original final episode that gave credence to the conspiracists who theorize that the towers were brought down by a controlled explosion. Lee snipped the entire section, and despite the blunt edit, the shorter final cut, which premieres on Sept. 11, actually flows better. I could imagine a version of “Epicenters” that still covered the conspiracy theories, not to legitimize them, but as an example of the paranoia that thrives in a country lacking social trust — which Lee rightly deplores when it comes to anti-vaccine theories and the election hoaxes that drove some of the Capitol assailants. There’s a sobering meta-lesson in the fact that the most artful of this season’s Sept. 11 documentaries became an example of one of the very problems it diagnosed. But at least the resolution shows that criticism can make a difference, and that it’s not too late to look at history seriously and make a change.

Is 9/11 a day, or is it an Era?

Ask anyone old enough to remember travel before Sept. 11, 2001, and you're likely to get a gauzy recollection of what flying was like.

There was security screening, but it wasn't anywhere near as intrusive. There were no long checkpoint lines.

Passengers and their families could walk right to the gate together, postponing goodbye hugs until the last possible moment. Overall, an airport experience meant far less stress.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/freedom-tower-the-skyscraper-symbolising-new-yorks-resilience-411055">'Freedom Tower' - the skyscraper symbolising New York's resilience</a>

That all ended when four hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

The worst terror attack on American soil led to increased and sometimes tension-filled security measures in airports across the world, aimed at preventing a repeat of that awful day. The cataclysm has also contributed to other changes large and small that have reshaped the airline industry,&nbsp;and, for consumers, made air travel more stressful than ever.

Two months after the attacks, President George W. Bush signed legislation creating the Transportation Security Administration, a force of federal airport screeners that replaced the private companies that airlines were hiring to handle security. The law required that all checked bags be screened, cockpit doors be reinforced, and more federal air marshals be put on flights.

There has not been another 9/11. Nothing even close. But after that day, flying changed forever.

New threats, privacy concerns

Here's how it unfolded.

Security measures evolved with new threats, and so travellers were asked to take off belts and remove some items from bags for scanning. Things that clearly could be wielded as weapons, like the box-cutters used by the 9/11 hijackers, were banned. After 'shoe bomber'&nbsp;Richard Reid's attempt to take down a flight from Paris to Miami in late 2001, footwear started coming off at security checkpoints.

Each new requirement seemed to make checkpoint lines longer, forcing passengers to arrive at the airport earlier if they wanted to make their flights. To many travellers, other rules were more mystifying, such as limits on liquids because the wrong ones could possibly be used to concoct a bomb.

"It's a much bigger hassle than it was before 9/11,&nbsp;much bigger,&nbsp;but we have gotten used to it,"&nbsp;Ronald Briggs said as he and his wife, Jeanne, waited at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport for a flight to London last month. The north Texas retirees, who traveled frequently before the pandemic, said they are more worried about <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus">COVID-19</a> than terrorism.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/twenty-years-on-pandemic-gives-911-conspiracists-fresh-impetus-411061">Twenty years on, pandemic gives 9/11 conspiracists fresh impetus</a>

"The point about taking shoes off because of one incident on a plane seems somewhat on the extreme side," Ronald Briggs said, "but the PreCheck works pretty smoothly, and I've learned to use a plastic belt so I don't have to take it off."&nbsp;

The long lines created by post-attack measures gave rise to the PreCheck and Global Entry "trusted-traveler programs" in which people who pay a fee and provide certain information about themselves pass through checkpoints without removing shoes and jackets or taking laptops out of their bag.

But that convenience has come at a cost: privacy.

On its application and in brief interviews, PreCheck asks people about basic information like work history and where they have lived, and they give a fingerprint and agree to a criminal-records check. Privacy advocates are particularly concerned about ideas that TSA has floated to also examine social media postings (the agency's top official says that has been dropped), press reports about people, location data and information from data brokers including how applicants spend their money.

"It's far from clear that that has any relationship to aviation security,"&nbsp;says Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union.

More than 10 million people have enrolled in PreCheck. TSA wants to raise that to 25 million.

The goal is to let TSA officers spend more time on passengers considered to be a bigger risk. As the country marks the 20th anniversary of the attacks, the TSA's work to expand PreCheck is unfolding in a way privacy advocates worry could put people's information at more risk.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/blame-for-afghanistan-lies-on-president-biden-says-911-era-nypd-commissioner-410532">Exclusive: Blame for Afghanistan 'lies on President Biden', says 9/11-era NYPD commissioner&nbsp;</a>

At the direction of Congress, the TSA will expand the use of private vendors to gather information from PreCheck applicants. It currently uses a company called Idemia, and plans by the end of the year to add two more ? Telos Identity Management Solutions and Clear Secure Inc.

Clear, which recently went public, plans to use PreCheck enrollment to boost membership in its own identity-verification product by bundling the two offerings. That will make Clear's own product more valuable to its customers, which include sports stadiums and concert promoters.

"They are really trying to increase their market share by collecting quite a lot of very sensitive data on as many people as they can get their hands on. That strikes a lot of alarm bells for me,"&nbsp;says India McKinney, director of federal affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for digital rights.

TSA Administrator David Pekoske, though, sees Clear's strategy as helping TSA. Says Pekoske: "We have allowed the vendors to bundle their offerings together with the idea that would be an incentive for people to sign up for the trusted-traveler programs." The TSA is testing the use of kiosks equipped with facial-recognition technology to check photo IDs and boarding passes rather than having an officer do it. Critics say facial-recognition technology makes errors, especially on people of color.

Also read |&nbsp;​​​​​​​<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/911-attacks-us-president-moves-to-declassify-documents-as-20th-anniversary-approaches-410579">9/11 attacks: US president moves to declassify documents as 20th anniversary approaches</a>

TSA officials told privacy advocates earlier this year that those kiosks will also pull photos taken when the traveler applied for PreCheck, McKinney says. That concerns her because it would mean connecting the kiosks to the internet&nbsp;(TSA says that much is true)&nbsp;and potentially exposing the information to hackers.

"They are totally focusing on the convenience factor," McKinney says, "and they are not focusing on the privacy and security factors."

Security theatre&nbsp;

Despite the trauma that led to its creation, and the intense desire to avoid another 9/11, the TSA itself has frequently been the subject of questions about its methods, ideas and effectiveness.

Flight attendants and air marshals were outraged when the agency proposed in 2013 to let passengers carry folding pocket knives and other long-banned items on planes again. The agency dropped the idea. And after another outcry, the TSA removed full-body scanners that produced realistic-looking images that some travelers compared to virtual strip searches. They were replaced by other machines that caused fewer privacy and health objections. Pat-downs of travelers are a constant complaint.

In 2015, a published report said TSA officers failed 95 per cent of the time to detect weapons or explosive material carried by undercover inspectors. Members of Congress who received a classified briefing raised their concerns to Pekoske, with one lawmaker saying that TSA "is broken badly."

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/former-commissioner-of-new-york-city-police-dept-bernard-kerik-speaks-on-911-attacks-410624/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

Critics, including former TSA officers, have derided the agency as "security theater"&nbsp;that gives a false impression of safeguarding the traveling public. Pekoske dismisses that notion by pointing to the huge number of guns seized at airport checkpoints&nbsp;(more than 3,200 last year, 83 per cent&nbsp;of them loaded)&nbsp;instead of making it onto planes.

Pekoske also ticked off other TSA tasks, including vetting passengers, screening checked bags with 3-D technology, inspecting cargo and putting federal air marshals on flights.

"There is an awful lot there that people don't see,"&nbsp;Pekoske says. "Rest assured: This is not security theater. It's real security."

Many independent experts agree with Pekoske's assessment, though they usually see areas where the TSA must improve.

"TSA is an effective deterrent against most attacks,"&nbsp;says Jeffrey Price, who teaches aviation security at Metropolitan State University of Denver and has co-authored books on the subject. "If it's security theater, like some critics say, it's pretty good security theater because since 9/11 we haven't had a successful attack against aviation."

This summer, an average of nearly 2 million people per day have flowed through TSA checkpoints. On weekends and holidays they can be teeming with stressed-out travelers. During the middle of the week, even at big airports like DFW, they are less crowded; they hum rather than roar. Most travelers accept any inconvenience as the price of security in an uncertain world.

Travel "is getting harder and harder, and I don't think it's just my age,"&nbsp;said Paula Gathings, who taught school in Arkansas for many years and was waiting for a flight to Qatar and then another to Kenya, where she will spend the next several months teaching. She blames the difficulty of travel on the pandemic, not the security apparatus.

"They are there for my security. They aren't there to hassle me," Gathings said of TSA screeners and airport police. "Every time somebody asks me to do something, I can see the reason for it. Maybe it's the schoolteacher in me."

Threats from within

In 2015, a Russian airliner crashed shortly after taking off from Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt. American and British officials suspected it was brought down by a bomb.

It was, however, the exception rather than the rule. Even outside the United States, terror attacks on aviation since Sept. 11, 2001 have been rare. Is that because of effective security;&nbsp;Proving a negative, or even attributing it directly to a certain flavor of prevention, is always a dicey exercise.

And then there are the inside jobs.

— In 2016, a bomb ripped a hole in a Daallo Airlines plane shortly after takeoff, killing the bomber but 80 other passengers and crew survived. Somali authorities released video from Mogadishu’s airport that they said showed the man being handed&nbsp;a laptop containing the bomb.

— In 2018, a Delta Air Lines baggage handler in Atlanta was convicted of using his security pass to smuggle more than 100 guns on flights to New York.

— The following year, an American Airlines mechanic with Islamic State videos on his phone pleaded guilty to sabotaging a plane full of passengers by crippling a system that measures speed and altitude. Pilots aborted the flight during takeoff in Miami.

Those incidents highlight a threat that TSA needs to worry about — people who work for airlines or airports and have security clearance that lets them avoid regular screening. Pekoske says TSA is improving its oversight of the insider threat.

“All those folks that have a (security) badge, you’re right, many do have unescorted access throughout an airport, but they also go through a very rigorous vetting process before they are even hired,” Pekoske says. Those workers are typically reviewed every few years, but he says TSA is rolling out a system that will trigger immediate alerts based on law enforcement information.

With all the different ways that deadly chaos could happen on airplanes after 9/11, the fact remains: Most of the time, it hasn’t. The act of getting on a metal machine and rising into the air to travel quickly across states and countries and oceans remains a central part of the 21st-century human experience, arduous though it may be.

And while the post-9/11 global airport security apparatus has grown to what some consider unreasonable proportions, it will never neutralize all threats — or even be able to enforce the rules it has written. Just ask Nathan Dudney, a sales executive for a sporting goods manufacturer in Nashville who says he occasionally forgets about ammunition in his carry-on bag.

Sometimes it’s discovered, he says, and sometimes not. He understands.

“You can’t catch everything,” Dudney says. “They’re doing things to the best of their ability.”

Ask anyone old enough to remember travel before Sept. 11, 2001, and you're likely to get a gauzy recollection of what flying was like. There was security screening, but it wasn't anywhere near as intrusive.

Ask anyone old enough to remember travel before Sept. 11, 2001, and you're likely to get a gauzy recollection of what flying was like. There was security screening, but it wasn't anywhere near as intrusive. There were no long checkpoint lines. Passengers and their families could walk right to the gate together, postponing goodbye hugs until the last possible moment. Overall, an airport experience meant far less stress. Also read | 'Freedom Tower' - the skyscraper symbolising New York's resilience That all ended when four hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. The worst terror attack on American soil led to increased and sometimes tension-filled security measures in airports across the world, aimed at preventing a repeat of that awful day. The cataclysm has also contributed to other changes large and small that have reshaped the airline industry, and, for consumers, made air travel more stressful than ever. Two months after the attacks, President George W. Bush signed legislation creating the Transportation Security Administration, a force of federal airport screeners that replaced the private companies that airlines were hiring to handle security. The law required that all checked bags be screened, cockpit doors be reinforced, and more federal air marshals be put on flights. There has not been another 9/11. Nothing even close. But after that day, flying changed forever. New threats, privacy concerns Here's how it unfolded. Security measures evolved with new threats, and so travellers were asked to take off belts and remove some items from bags for scanning. Things that clearly could be wielded as weapons, like the box-cutters used by the 9/11 hijackers, were banned. After 'shoe bomber' Richard Reid's attempt to take down a flight from Paris to Miami in late 2001, footwear started coming off at security checkpoints. Each new requirement seemed to make checkpoint lines longer, forcing passengers to arrive at the airport earlier if they wanted to make their flights. To many travellers, other rules were more mystifying, such as limits on liquids because the wrong ones could possibly be used to concoct a bomb. "It's a much bigger hassle than it was before 9/11, much bigger, but we have gotten used to it," Ronald Briggs said as he and his wife, Jeanne, waited at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport for a flight to London last month. The north Texas retirees, who traveled frequently before the pandemic, said they are more worried about COVID-19 than terrorism. Also read | Twenty years on, pandemic gives 9/11 conspiracists fresh impetus "The point about taking shoes off because of one incident on a plane seems somewhat on the extreme side," Ronald Briggs said, "but the PreCheck works pretty smoothly, and I've learned to use a plastic belt so I don't have to take it off." The long lines created by post-attack measures gave rise to the PreCheck and Global Entry "trusted-traveler programs" in which people who pay a fee and provide certain information about themselves pass through checkpoints without removing shoes and jackets or taking laptops out of their bag. But that convenience has come at a cost: privacy. On its application and in brief interviews, PreCheck asks people about basic information like work history and where they have lived, and they give a fingerprint and agree to a criminal-records check. Privacy advocates are particularly concerned about ideas that TSA has floated to also examine social media postings (the agency's top official says that has been dropped), press reports about people, location data and information from data brokers including how applicants spend their money. "It's far from clear that that has any relationship to aviation security," says Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union. More than 10 million people have enrolled in PreCheck. TSA wants to raise that to 25 million. The goal is to let TSA officers spend more time on passengers considered to be a bigger risk. As the country marks the 20th anniversary of the attacks, the TSA's work to expand PreCheck is unfolding in a way privacy advocates worry could put people's information at more risk. Also read | Exclusive: Blame for Afghanistan 'lies on President Biden', says 9/11-era NYPD commissioner At the direction of Congress, the TSA will expand the use of private vendors to gather information from PreCheck applicants. It currently uses a company called Idemia, and plans by the end of the year to add two more ? Telos Identity Management Solutions and Clear Secure Inc. Clear, which recently went public, plans to use PreCheck enrollment to boost membership in its own identity-verification product by bundling the two offerings. That will make Clear's own product more valuable to its customers, which include sports stadiums and concert promoters. "They are really trying to increase their market share by collecting quite a lot of very sensitive data on as many people as they can get their hands on. That strikes a lot of alarm bells for me," says India McKinney, director of federal affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for digital rights. TSA Administrator David Pekoske, though, sees Clear's strategy as helping TSA. Says Pekoske: "We have allowed the vendors to bundle their offerings together with the idea that would be an incentive for people to sign up for the trusted-traveler programs." The TSA is testing the use of kiosks equipped with facial-recognition technology to check photo IDs and boarding passes rather than having an officer do it. Critics say facial-recognition technology makes errors, especially on people of color. Also read | 9/11 attacks: US president moves to declassify documents as 20th anniversary approaches TSA officials told privacy advocates earlier this year that those kiosks will also pull photos taken when the traveler applied for PreCheck, McKinney says. That concerns her because it would mean connecting the kiosks to the internet (TSA says that much is true) and potentially exposing the information to hackers. "They are totally focusing on the convenience factor," McKinney says, "and they are not focusing on the privacy and security factors." Security theatre Despite the trauma that led to its creation, and the intense desire to avoid another 9/11, the TSA itself has frequently been the subject of questions about its methods, ideas and effectiveness. Flight attendants and air marshals were outraged when the agency proposed in 2013 to let passengers carry folding pocket knives and other long-banned items on planes again. The agency dropped the idea. And after another outcry, the TSA removed full-body scanners that produced realistic-looking images that some travelers compared to virtual strip searches. They were replaced by other machines that caused fewer privacy and health objections. Pat-downs of travelers are a constant complaint. In 2015, a published report said TSA officers failed 95 per cent of the time to detect weapons or explosive material carried by undercover inspectors. Members of Congress who received a classified briefing raised their concerns to Pekoske, with one lawmaker saying that TSA "is broken badly." Critics, including former TSA officers, have derided the agency as "security theater" that gives a false impression of safeguarding the traveling public. Pekoske dismisses that notion by pointing to the huge number of guns seized at airport checkpoints (more than 3,200 last year, 83 per cent of them loaded) instead of making it onto planes. Pekoske also ticked off other TSA tasks, including vetting passengers, screening checked bags with 3-D technology, inspecting cargo and putting federal air marshals on flights. "There is an awful lot there that people don't see," Pekoske says. "Rest assured: This is not security theater. It's real security." Many independent experts agree with Pekoske's assessment, though they usually see areas where the TSA must improve. "TSA is an effective deterrent against most attacks," says Jeffrey Price, who teaches aviation security at Metropolitan State University of Denver and has co-authored books on the subject. "If it's security theater, like some critics say, it's pretty good security theater because since 9/11 we haven't had a successful attack against aviation." This summer, an average of nearly 2 million people per day have flowed through TSA checkpoints. On weekends and holidays they can be teeming with stressed-out travelers. During the middle of the week, even at big airports like DFW, they are less crowded; they hum rather than roar. Most travelers accept any inconvenience as the price of security in an uncertain world. Travel "is getting harder and harder, and I don't think it's just my age," said Paula Gathings, who taught school in Arkansas for many years and was waiting for a flight to Qatar and then another to Kenya, where she will spend the next several months teaching. She blames the difficulty of travel on the pandemic, not the security apparatus. "They are there for my security. They aren't there to hassle me," Gathings said of TSA screeners and airport police. "Every time somebody asks me to do something, I can see the reason for it. Maybe it's the schoolteacher in me." Threats from within In 2015, a Russian airliner crashed shortly after taking off from Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt. American and British officials suspected it was brought down by a bomb. It was, however, the exception rather than the rule. Even outside the United States, terror attacks on aviation since Sept. 11, 2001 have been rare. Is that because of effective security; Proving a negative, or even attributing it directly to a certain flavor of prevention, is always a dicey exercise. And then there are the inside jobs. — In 2016, a bomb ripped a hole in a Daallo Airlines plane shortly after takeoff, killing the bomber but 80 other passengers and crew survived. Somali authorities released video from Mogadishu’s airport that they said showed the man being handed a laptop containing the bomb. — In 2018, a Delta Air Lines baggage handler in Atlanta was convicted of using his security pass to smuggle more than 100 guns on flights to New York. — The following year, an American Airlines mechanic with Islamic State videos on his phone pleaded guilty to sabotaging a plane full of passengers by crippling a system that measures speed and altitude. Pilots aborted the flight during takeoff in Miami. Those incidents highlight a threat that TSA needs to worry about — people who work for airlines or airports and have security clearance that lets them avoid regular screening. Pekoske says TSA is improving its oversight of the insider threat. “All those folks that have a (security) badge, you’re right, many do have unescorted access throughout an airport, but they also go through a very rigorous vetting process before they are even hired,” Pekoske says. Those workers are typically reviewed every few years, but he says TSA is rolling out a system that will trigger immediate alerts based on law enforcement information. With all the different ways that deadly chaos could happen on airplanes after 9/11, the fact remains: Most of the time, it hasn’t. The act of getting on a metal machine and rising into the air to travel quickly across states and countries and oceans remains a central part of the 21st-century human experience, arduous though it may be. And while the post-9/11 global airport security apparatus has grown to what some consider unreasonable proportions, it will never neutralize all threats — or even be able to enforce the rules it has written. Just ask Nathan Dudney, a sales executive for a sporting goods manufacturer in Nashville who says he occasionally forgets about ammunition in his carry-on bag. Sometimes it’s discovered, he says, and sometimes not. He understands. “You can’t catch everything,” Dudney says. “They’re doing things to the best of their ability.”

How 9/11 changed air travel: More security, less privacy