Americans marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on Friday, honouring the nearly 3,000 people killed in 2001, Hiru News reported, citing Reuters.

Victims’ families gathered at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan with Vice President JD Vance and four former US presidents. The ceremony opened at 8:46 a.m. with a moment of silence marking the instant American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Family members then read aloud the names of the 2,977 people killed in 2001 and the six killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

A seventh silence, observed for the first time

For the first time, the ceremony included a seventh moment of silence — for the thousands who have since died of illnesses caused by exposure to the toxic dust released when the towers fell.

The scale of that second toll is now substantial. The New York City Fire Department lost 343 members on the day of the attacks. It has since lost more than 600 additional firefighters to 9/11-related illnesses, including 26 deaths this year alone.

Commemorations were also held at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, where a flag was unfurled to mark the crash of American Airlines Flight 77, which killed 184 people. President Donald Trump was scheduled to address the Pentagon ceremony later in the day. Mourners also gathered at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Airlines Flight 93 came down.

The intelligence verdict, 25 years on

NewsFirst separately carried a BBC assessment of what the attacks changed, written by the BBC’s security correspondent.

Its argument is that 9/11 was above all an intelligence failure. The CIA had tracked al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden for years before 2001 and ran a taskforce dedicated to finding him; both the CIA and the FBI held information that, properly shared, could have disrupted the plot. The subsequent 9/11 Commission Report blamed “failures of imagination, policy, capabilities and management.”

That lesson has largely been learnt, the assessment says. The United States created a National Counter Terrorism Center and a Director of National Intelligence to force sharing across its 18 intelligence agencies; the United Kingdom built regional fusion centres and, more recently, a Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in London where MI5 officers sit alongside police, FBI agents and GCHQ linguists.

But it stops well short of declaring the problem solved, pointing to the politicisation of MI6 intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — described as the service’s worst reputational damage since the Cold War Soviet moles — as evidence that failures of assessment and strategic planning have continued since.

Nine days after the attacks, President George W. Bush declared the “War on Terror,” which led to prolonged military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Not reported

Neither report names the four former presidents present at Ground Zero, gives a figure for how many people have now died of 9/11-related illnesses in total, or says what Trump said at the Pentagon. Neither gives the number of first responders and residents currently enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, and neither addresses whether the compensation fund covering those illnesses is adequately financed.