It was the day the world was united behind the US, but the five years since 9/11 have seen division and hostility. Denis Staunton looks at the personal and political legacy
Theresa Mullan always carries two prayer cards - one for her husband Pat, who died last year, and the other for her son Michael, a firefighter who was killed when the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11th, 2001.
Michael, who lived with his parents, died trying to rescue another firefighter who was trapped on an upper floor after the emergency workers' walkie-talkies failed.
"Michael loved life. He hugged it, he kissed it, he breathed it. He loved concerts and the theatre. He loved Pavarotti, Frank Sinatra. He loved good food, good restaurants, a good bottle of wine and a Guinness. He had a million girlfriends. Michael was the bearer of all the merriment in the house. He called that morning from his truck to say goodbye to us and to tell us he loved us. So I think in his heart of hearts, he knew he may not come home," she says.
Theresa Mullan blames 9/11 for her husband's death too, convinced that he lost the will to live after Michael's death and the events of five years ago haunt her every day.
"It's a part of my existence now. I go to Mass every morning and my communion is the same every morning - for all those who died so tragically on 9/11 and for all those who mourn their loss," she says.
Marianne Barry's husband Maurice was a port authority police officer who had been on duty at the World Trade Center when it was bombed in 1993 and was there again on 9/11. Their son John had started college and just moved into student accommodation and the Barrys planned to visit him that evening.
"I was in work and someone came in with the TV and showed the towers collapsing. It was going on and on, you know, just repeating that same vision all day. I knew my husband was over there but it really didn't sink in that anything was going to happen to him because he was there also in '93 and he came home. So I had no doubt that he was going to come home. But he didn't," Marianne says.
Maurice had rescued three groups of workers and was going up for the fourth time when the tower collapsed. His gun was recovered, but the family received no remains to bury and for Marianne, Ground Zero is a cemetery.
"There's not a day goes by that I don't think of him and what happened. He was 47. He would have been 48 two weeks after the attack. He loved the children. He couldn't have done enough for them. Both of my sons have gone back to school. One has gotten a degree. He's in the US army also and he was almost called over to Iraq which was a terrible thought for me. But so far we're trying to get our life back. It's been a struggle but we're trying," she says.
When Americans mark the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on Monday, they will mourn those who died on one of the most terrible and significant days in their country's history. The anniversary will raise questions, however, about how safe the US is today, the balance between security and civil liberties and how America is viewed throughout the world.
In the days that followed the attacks, the world rallied round America, offering sympathy and support, with Le Monde famously declaring "Nous sommes tous américains" ("We are all Americans").
Governments in Europe and elsewhere offered unprecedented security co-operation and worked closely with Washington to apprehend suspected Islamist terrorists. When the US moved to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had harboured Osama bin Laden and his followers, a broad international coalition provided troops and other support.
At the end of the invasion, Iran was among the countries that worked most closely with the US to broker a deal between Afghan factions that led to the formation of Hamid Karzai's government.
At home, as New Yorkers united around the leadership of former mayor Rudy Giuliani, dubbed "Churchill in a baseball cap", politicians in Washington overcame the bitterness of the disputed presidential election a few months earlier and the country fell in behind President George W Bush.
After a faltering start, Bush found a voice that chimed with Americans' yearning for a sense of common purpose in the face of the attacks, at once defiant and compassionate.
"There was a magical time after that when people came together in this country in ways we had almost forgotten. It was a golden time and terrorists everywhere were suddenly in trouble and they knew it," says David Gergen, who runs the Centre for Public Leadership at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government and served as an adviser to four US presidents.
Five years on, anti-Americanism has reached unprecedented levels in Europe, Latin America and, above all, in the Middle East. For critics, Guantánamo has become an emblem of the deformation of American justice, Abu Ghraib of the corruption of American values and the war in Iraq of the arrogance of its foreign policy.
Within the US, the unity of the days following 9/11 has given way to bitter polarisation and deep divisions, particularly over Iraq, a war that most Americans now believe has made their country less secure.
"The president and his administration failed to bring the country together on Iraq and they didn't seem to care. Iraq has become the most divisive issue since Vietnam and it could have the same tragic ending," says Gergen.
During the months before 9/11, Europeans complained that Bush, who had come to power declaring he had no interest in nation-building, was leading the US into a new period of isolationism. Bush abandoned his predecessor's efforts to achieve a deal between Israel and the Palestinians and signalled that the US was no longer in the business of rescuing failed states or intervening in civil wars as in Yugoslavia.
Within the administration, however, a group around the vice-president Dick Cheney, the assistant secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz and defence policy adviser Richard Perle were pressing for a more assertive foreign policy. This neoconservative group argued that America's status as the sole superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union offered a unique opportunity to reshape the world order, promoting the emergence of pro-US democracies to create a Pax Americana.
"That was dangerous nonsense . . . Our forces of deterrence are overwhelming but we do not have the power, acting alone, to force others to do our bidding," says Gergen.
In the months that followed 9/11, however, the neoconservatives became dominant within the administration, drowning out more cautious voices from the state department and the CIA. Within weeks of the attacks, they had persuaded Bush that toppling Saddam Hussein would eliminate the most powerful sponsor of international terrorism, liberate the Iraqi people and create a pro-American democracy pumping out millions of barrels of oil every day.
The neoconservatives believed that Saudi Arabia would react to the emergence of a democratic Iraq by itself embracing reform and that Iranians would be inspired to rise up and overthrow the mullahs.
As the neoconservatives shaped US policy abroad, Cheney promoted a concept of presidential authority that was unprecedented in its expansiveness. According to this doctrine, the declaration of a "war on terror" gave Bush authority to bypass Congress and suspend civil liberties in the pursuit of terrorists.
A number of Bush's post-9/11 moves, including the interception of domestic phone calls without a warrant and the suspension of Geneva Convention rights for Guantánamo inmates, have been struck down by US courts. Bush admitted this week that, in the days after the attacks, he authorised a network of secret prisons overseas, where the CIA held and interrogated almost 100 suspected terrorists.
Lee Hamilton, a Democratic congressman for 34 years and co-chairman of the commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks, identifies the expansion of presidential power as one of the most disturbing developments of the past five years.
"What I don't want to see is power put anywhere unchecked. It's time that the Congress of the United States started acting like a separate but equal branch of government," he says.
Hamilton is also concerned that new powers of surveillance given to the government under the Patriot Act could permanently change the balance between security and civil liberties.
"These powers ought to be reviewed and, if need be, checked by an independent authority. There is no reason why we shouldn't safeguard our liberties as vigorously as we safeguard our security," he says.
With the Iraq war costing $1 billion (€781 million)a week and the Bush administration resisting calls to rescind tax cuts for the richest Americans, resources for homeland security are limited. Cities such as New York and Washington complain that homeland security funds are not allocated according to the risk of attack but are spread across the country for political reasons.
Newark, New Jersey, admitted last year that it had used homeland security funds to pay for 10 brand-new, air-conditioned garbage trucks and grants have been channelled to remote, rural areas that are unlikely terrorist targets.
"What depresses me is that, five years after 9/11, there are still clear and common-sense things the US should be doing to counter terrorism that we are not doing," says Hamilton.
Among the unfulfilled recommendations of the 9/11 commission are emergency response plans for every major city and town in the country, the allocation of part of the broadcast spectrum to emergency communications and the checking of all airline passengers' names against a central watch-list.
Despite predictions that nothing would ever be the same after 9/11, life in America has in many ways returned to normal and the economy recovered from the shock with remarkable speed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average returned to pre-9/11 levels just 40 days after the attacks and even the tourist and construction industries bounced back quickly.
The quagmire in Iraq has weakened the neoconservatives, who now complain bitterly that the state department and the CIA have regained control of US foreign policy. Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, about whom the neoconservatives are privately venomous, has steered US policy back towards multilateralism and cold-hearted realism.
If the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives or the Senate in November, the administration will face more intense congressional oversight. Court rulings have already forced Bush to roll back his expansion of presidential authority and to seek congressional approval for the domestic spying programme and for military tribunals to try Guantánamo inmates.
America's return to something like normality could come to an abrupt halt, however, if terrorists succeed in attacking again, a prospect Hamilton says Americans believe is imminent.
"America has not been attacked again at home but Americans feel more insecure than they did on September 10th, 2001. Most believe, as I do, that another attack is coming."