As WNYW Fox 5 in New York expressed shock over the "terrorist act of proportions that we cannot begin to imagine," the Coast Guard cutter Juniper was in Newport, Road Island, for maintenance.
Captain Bill Milne, who is now retired, says the country was "not well prepared for something like that," but he and his crew jumped into action soon after the planes hit the towers.
"We decided to take ourselves out of a maintenance status and then departed for New York," he tells AFN. "We were not told. In fact, our bosses even originally said, 'Oh, you don't need to do that,' and, of course, we said, 'No, we really need to be doing this.'"
For weeks, Milner remembers that lower Manhattan was covered with a mud composed of concrete, pumice, water and human remains.
"You would have firefighters and policemen just sitting on the side of the road, exhausted," he recalls. "We would just take them water and just do whatever we could, whatever they needed."
On Aug. 31 of this year, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at the site where American heroes forced Flight 93 into the ground on 9/11, to ask if America is better prepared after 25 years.
"What we need to do is make sure that we are not latching into a sort of pre-9/11 posture as a price to our counter-intelligence capabilities here at home to protect the homeland," Chairman Rick Crawford (R-Arkansas) said at the hearing.
Should the Muslim mayor be there?
New York City's Mayor Zohran Mamdani was nine years old and was in class at New York City's Bank Street School for Children at the time of the attacks.
Beginning at 8:30 a.m. local time Friday, family members will gather at 9/11 Memorial Plaza to read aloud the names of the 2,983 victims killed in the 2001 and 1993 attacks, accompanied by traditional moments of silence.
As of Wednesday, nearly 107,000 people had signed a petition "to support honoring the memory of those lost on September 11th with dignity." It lists several reasons why the Muslim mayor's attendance at Friday's memorial would be inappropriate, including his political positions and antisemitic rhetoric like the phrase "globalize the intifada."
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League was part of a press conference Tuesday at City Hall opposing Mamdani's attendance.
"He should not be here," Donohue stated. "He's such a divisive figure."
Donahue thinks Mamdani is more concerned about Islamophobia than he is the deaths of 3,000 innocent people.
"He said that something happened on 9/11," the Catholic League spokesman noted. "I'll tell you what happened: radical Muslims came in here to bomb the United States of America."
He added that the Catholics of New York City are standing up for their Jewish neighbors.
"We stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters against the likes of Hassan Piker, who says nothing but good things about the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas," Donohue said. "It's a disgrace."
Mamdani's affiliation with Piker, who is known for saying "America deserved 9/11," and his appointment of Ramzi Kassem as the city's chief legal counsel are also major specific grievances, the latter being because Kassem previously represented a convicted al-Qaida member.
There are also concerns about respect for the victims. Though some 9/11 families have publicly defended Mamdani's attendance, noting that mayors and other political leaders traditionally participate in the ceremony, others say his presence would be disrespectful to their loved ones because of the people and causes he supports.
Mamdani has said that the ceremony should be about honoring the victims, their families and first responders rather than politics, but his opponents argue that his presence would shift attention away from victims and first responders and toward the political controversy surrounding him, including his Muslim identity, since Islam is connected to 9/11 through the ideology claimed by al-Qaida, the Islamic terrorist organization that planned and carried out the attacks.
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who earned international praise and the moniker "America's Mayor" for his visible, hands-on crisis management during and after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has explicitly invoked Mamdani's Muslim faith in arguing that he should, in Donohue's words, "do us all a favor and just stay home."
Despite the pushback, the current mayor plans to attend.
"In the days to come, my focus will be on attending events that memorialize that incredible courage. I will be there on Friday at the memorial, just as I was last year," he told a news conference earlier this week.
Mamdani said he "will proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders … by standing alongside them at this year's 9/11 commemoration."
