(NEW YORK) — The sky was clear and blue. The gray towers stood, both guarding and welcoming, at the gateway to the nation. Out of nowhere came the impact, the blaze, the smoke — and then the towers were gone. When the dust and flames finally cleared, a new world had emerged.

The death and destruction defined that late summer day and remain seared in the minds of those who lived through Sept. 11, 2001. From the ashes and wreckage rose a new America: a society redefined by its scars and marked by a new wartime reality — a shadow darkened even more in recent days by the resurgence of fundamentalist Islamist rule in the far-off land that hatched the attacks.

Twenty years later — with more than 70 million Americans born since the crucible of the attacks — the legacy of 9/11 remains. From airport security to civilian policing to the most casual parts of daily life, it would be nearly impossible to identify something that remains untouched and unaffected by those terrifying hours in 2001.

This week, ABC News revisits the 9/11 attacks and unwinds their aftermath, taking a deep look at the America born in the wake of destruction. “9/11 Twenty Years Later: The Longest Shadow” is a five-part documentary series narrated by George Stephanopoulos. Episodes will air on ABC News Live each night leading up to the 20th anniversary of the attacks, from Sept. 6-10. The series will be rebroadcast in full following the commemoration ceremonies on Saturday, Sept. 11.

Two decades later, after years of unjustified suffering on a fortified island military base halfway around the world, Boumediene says the reality is clear: “They destroyed my life.”

In the frenzied post-9/11 hunt for terrorists, the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay was pressed into service as what then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously called the “least worst option” to house suspected terrorists captured in what officials described as the new Global War on Terror.

At its height, the facility held 800 men, each supposedly having varying degrees of ties to terrorists or terrorist groups. According to American intelligence, some of the inhabitants were known to be hardened veterans of anti-Western terrorism, including some of the alleged masterminds and organizers of the 9/11 attacks. Some had tenuous, though concrete, connections to suspected terrorists. And still others were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.

For Boumediene, merely having worked with a sibling of a known al-Qaeda terrorist may be what earned him a seven-and-a-half-year stay at a jail that has, to many, come to symbolize the mistakes and excesses of America’s response to the hijackings and killings of Sept. 11, 2001.

“Twenty years later, I can’t find the truth behind my imprisonment in Guantanamo,” Boumediene said.

Located some 500 miles southeast of Miami, Guantanamo spans a pristine stretch of shoreline on the Cuban coast. In many ways, the base looks and feels like a small Florida town, complete with beautiful beaches, an Irish pub and a McDonald’s. It earned a slice of fame in the 1992 Tom Cruise film “A Few Good Men,” but it is now known around the world as the home to some of America’s darkest hours.

“Anybody who does not know about Guantanamo I think today would be surprised at some of the things that went on there,” said Marion “Spike” Bowman, the former deputy general counsel for national security at the FBI.

Despite years of public outcry over conditions in the prison camp there — and disputes over the legal justification for its existence — 39 detainees still remain within its walls.

“The creation of Guantanamo was the right action at the beginning,” said Roger Cressey, a former top counterterrorism official on the National Security Council during the administrations of both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. “And then it turned into Frankenstein’s monster.”

Gitmo, as many know it, wasn’t meant to be a monster, but a legal “black hole.” Former officials said Guantanamo was born out of necessity as a place to house those who needed to be held and interrogated when the U.S. attacked Afghanistan in order to destroy the terror network that committed the 9/11 attacks.

The Bush administration determined that the Sept. 11 attacks were more akin to acts of war than a crime, so those captured in connection with 9/11 would be “enemy combatants” who would be tried in military courts — instead of criminals who would have constitutional protections in the American legal system and would be tried in civilian courts.

“We worried about bringing these terrorists into the United States for a couple reasons,” said Alberto R. Gonzales, a former Bush White House counsel and U.S. attorney general who was deeply involved in the decision-making. “We felt the American people wouldn’t stand for it, to have these terrorists on American soil. We also were unsure about what rights — constitutional rights — that they would automatically secure once they were on American soil.”

The Bush administration sought to “deal with them in a way that was out of the U.S. legal system,” said retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Guantanamo Bay was the answer. The detainees would be transferred to the detention facility, where they would be interrogated and then tried in something called “military commissions,” a cross between a standard trial and a military court martial, which had been used — albeit rarely — in times of war. Within months of Sept. 11, Bush issued the order directing Rumsfeld to organize the commissions, effectively circumventing the U.S. court system. Separately, Rumsfeld also authorized 18 interrogation techniques in late 2002 that could be used on detainees said to be resisting — including slapping and sleep deprivation.

The two orders would come to define Guantanamo and serve as the backdrop for the debate over America’s actions in the name of a War on Terror that continues to rage.

At the time, “there was a lot of concern about a second wave” of attacks, “and being alert for that,” Gonzales said. It was that sense of urgency to gather intelligence on possible follow-up attacks that led to Guantanamo’s worst abuses, according to Bowman, who also had been a naval intelligence officer and assistant judge advocate. Bowman eventually attempted unsuccessfully to talk Pentagon officials out of the abuses that allegedly occurred there.

It was under those desperate circumstances that American officials resorted to the darker means of extracting information, called “enhanced interrogation” by some — and “torture” by others. Fearing more attacks, U.S. officials sought approval for the techniques, which included extreme physical and psychological stresses.

The newly approved interrogation methods set the stage for a dramatic intragovernmental conflict. The dispute pitted two groups of investigators — one from the military, the other largely made up of intelligence officials — against one another.

The military investigators, dubbed the Criminal Investigation Task Force, sought to weed out innocents from the detainees. The intelligence officers, called Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, were dispatched to interrogate the detainees for information about future terrorist plots. Largely inexperienced in interrogation, they allegedly inflicted severe abuses on detainees who resisted questioning — and then retroactively attempted to justify their methods through legal loopholes, according to documents and court cases.

Many experts, including Susan Burke, a lawyer who has represented Guantanamo detainees, remain unconvinced of the legality of the methods.

“It has been well-established that you cannot torture people,” said Burke. “So, this notion that, somehow, because we use the vernacular of ‘Global War on Terror,’ that we can do whatever we want to other human beings? Wholly illegal.”

Bowman became increasingly concerned by what agents based in Cuba were reporting back to FBI headquarters about what they had been witnessing a year after the 9/11 attacks. The dispatches described physical abuse and sexualized physical contact with the Muslim detainees, as well as duct-taping one prisoner’s head and forcing another to remain in a cell flooded with light for months without darkness, causing “extreme psychological trauma,” according to one FBI document.

Critically, Bowman said, the forceful means to extract intelligence didn’t work in the first place, and then subsequently undermined efforts to gather reliable information — ultimately shaping the public’s image of the camp.

“They wanted to do what they thought would be faster to get information than the FBI’s rapport-building type of activity,” Bowman said. “My problem was the techniques they were using were not techniques that had ever been proven to be effective in interrogation.”

Boumediene says he can still recall one night in particular — during his early days at Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray detention compound — when he says “they tried to break me.”

“At two o’clock in the morning, the inspector said to the soldiers, ‘Come on, make him run,'” Boumediene said. “They forced me to run with them, but I couldn’t run because I was handcuffed. I couldn’t run with them. When I would fall, they would pull me along the gravel … if I remember, ten days, 15 days like that, every day.”

In Washington, the dispute over aggressive interrogation techniques, including questions of whether they were illegal torture and if they were an effective instrument of intelligence-gathering, gave way to a fight over the legal justifications — and whether such practices were permissible under the Geneva Conventions, a 1949 set of agreements regulating the use of force during wartime. Mindful of those requirements, officials even used a specific nomenclature for those being held.

“We weren’t calling them prisoners of war at that time, as I recall,” Wilkerson said. “We were calling them detainees, because that was the term of art that didn’t bespeak Geneva and so forth.”

The Bush administration made the case that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda terrorists, interpreting those guidelines as “an incentive to individuals to fight according to laws of war,” Gonzales said, and asserting that the rules applied only to those fighting on behalf of the nearly 200 nations that signed the treaty in the wake of World War II.

“Because al-Qaeda had not been a signatory to the Geneva Conventions,” Gonzales argued, “they would not automatically qualify for the protections — and the same thing with the Taliban.”

John Bellinger, who was the chief lawyer for the National Security Council on 9/11, said that denying accused terrorists protections under the Geneva Conventions had been a mistake.

“This opened us up to a huge amount of international criticism that we were holding detainees in Guantanamo … in a legal black hole, in a law-free zone,” he said. “And to a certain extent, this was really true.”

The legal conundrum was compounded by reports of the mistreatment of detainees. As Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials lauded the new interrogation techniques, those who witnessed them expressed horror — and news reports started to emerge depicting the extreme conditions detainees were forced to endure.

“Secretary Rumsfeld was told about much of this stuff,” Bowman said in a recent interview. “He really just rolled it off. And that, frankly, rolls downhill.”

In November 2002, Rumsfeld even jotted in the margin of a memo authorizing harsh interrogation techniques for “counter-resistance” by saying, “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”

U.S. Air Force Reserve Capt. Mark McCary served as a judge advocate at Guantanamo, responsible for ensuring that Criminal Investigation Task Force interrogators drawn from each military branch’s investigative agencies remained within their legal bounds. A veteran of a decade of deployments that focused on counterterrorism, he arrived on the island base with a duffle bag filled with law books. What he soon learned of the JTF-Guantanamo interrogations “did not comport with American values and principles that we’re trained with, including justice, Geneva Conventions, and the basic equities of interrogation and training,” he said.

McCary confronted military leaders and penned a series of memos outlining conditions at the camp and calling for intervention. The Pentagon ignored them.

“They didn’t appreciate my opinion or my legal assessment,” he said.

McCary redeployed back home. Guantanamo, he found, “was a career-ender” for him and for many judge advocates appointed as defense counsel or prosecutors in the military tribunals, he said.

Meanwhile, Bowman, unable to persuade the Pentagon to abandon its program of “enhanced interrogation,” went to the press, he said. In early 2005, the New York Daily News ran a headline, “AT WAR WITH GITMO GRILLING.”

“Military lawyers at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison tried to stop inhumane interrogations but were ignored by senior Pentagon officials, the Daily News has learned,” read the story.

The article included details of a memo McCary had written outlining abuses at the prison camp. Bowman, who was quoted as an unidentified source in the story, characterized McCary as an “unsung hero.”

“I thought people needed to understand that there were people on the scene, not just in Washington like me, but people on the scene who were seeing what was going on, who were trying to make a difference. And I wanted that known,” he said.

McCary left his unit in March of 2003 and says he has not communicated with anyone at the Pentagon or the FBI since. What he witnessed at Guantanamo left him with scars of his own, he said.

“I desired to actually return to duty and could not do that because of a medical diagnosis: bipolar with PTSD,” he said. “There was a time where I could’ve been a homeless vet … I struggled immensely with all of that.”

Two decades and three presidential administrations have passed since 9/11, and Guantanamo remains open — albeit as a shadow of its former self. Its most high-profile inhabitant, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who has confessed to plotting the 9/11 attacks, remains there in legal limbo. He stands charged with killing nearly 3,000 people in the worst terror attack in history, and is awaiting trial as his case resumed this week following a delay in pretrial motions.

“The fact that the individuals responsible for 9/11 are sitting there — they have not been tried — the system that was designed to bring them to justice has proven to be a failure,” said Matt Olsen, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center who was charged with closing the prison under the Obama administration.

Despite Guantanamo’s complicated legacy and the moral burden it placed on the American conscience, many officials responsible for what happened there stand by their decisions — and claim that the ends justified the means.

“To the families of the victims, 20 years later, I would say that, even though these individuals are simply detained and not brought to justice in a court,” Gonzales said, “there is some level of justice in the detention itself.”

Others feel differently.

“Looking back 20 years later, I think it was correct to treat the response to 9/11 as a war, as an armed conflict,” said Bellinger. “But decisions that were subsequently made that flowed from that, the creation of military commissions, the decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions to the people who we were holding — I think these were mistakes that were made by the Bush administration.”

In 2004, three years after 9/11, Boumediene and other detainees were finally afforded legal counsel. By 2007, Boumediene’s case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices determined that Boumediene and other detainees were entitled to habeas corpus, the constitutional right of anyone detained in America to know the reasons for their arrest and detention. A federal judge then found that Boumediene should be released, citing a lack of evidence against him.

“And then it was over,” Boumediene said.

“It is a day I will never forget.”

ABC News’ Kate Holland, Lauren Minore, Lara Priluck, Emma Seiwell, Ibtissem Guenfoud, Jenny Wagnon Courts, Olivia Rubin, Tonya Simpson and Jinsol Jung contributed to this report.

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(NEW YORK) — A wide-ranging lawsuit claims New York City’s education system is racist in design and operation — effectively separating largely white and Asian students from Black and Latino students through a discriminatory testing processes for its gifted and talented (G&T) programs and curriculum.

Unlike other lawsuits that have demanded equal access to education, IntegrateNYC v. The State of New York, filed by students and advocates against the state and city, along with other defendants, takes the debate a step further.

“It’s a wholesale attack on racial inequality at school,” said Derek Black, a professor of education and constitutional law at the University of South Carolina School of Law who filed multiple amicus briefs on the issue of school segregation. Other cases such as Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota have demanded desegregation of schools for the purposes of better learning and equal opportunity but “this case is far more aggressive,” Black said.

The suit, originally filed in March, argues that New York City has perpetuated racism by upholding racially discriminatory screening processes for gifted programs that begins early in children’s lives as well as admission to elite schools. It also claims city schools, which remain some of the most segregated in the country, teach a Eurocentric curriculum and fail to sustain a racially diverse educator workforce.

The suit seeks to bar the use of what the plaintiffs call a discriminatory entrance exam into gifted programs and ensure recruitment of a diverse workforce. Use of the exam was suspended this year because of a contract issue.

The action has generated controversy, specifically from some members of the Asian community, who argue that by being grouped with white people as being overrepresented in the city’s G&T programs and specialized schools unfairly suggests that they are privileged when many are in fact impoverished.

A spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education said in a statement that the agency was reviewing the suit and that “the administration has taken bold, unprecedented steps to advance equity in our admissions policies — suspending academic screens in middle schools, removing district priorities in high schools, and dismantling a system that uses the test results of four year olds to determine their academic success.” The mayor’s office did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

Here’s what to know ahead of the next court date on Sept. 30:

How it all started

When former Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the public school system in 2002, admission to the highly competitive G&T programs was centralized through standardized testing for children starting at age 4.

Though the intention was to diversify the racial makeup of the programs and eliminate bias against minority students, the result was the opposite: fewer and fewer Black and Hispanic students were admitted to gifted programs at a younger age which hindered them from being prepared for the entrance exam to the city’s specialized high schools, according to the complaint.

During the 1994-’95 school year, the largest racial group at Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the eight elite specialized high schools in the city, was Black, comprising 37% of the total student population. In 2021, Black students made up less than 6% of the school’s population, according to state enrollment data.

According to the suit, white and Asian students were disproportionately offered admission to G&T programs (representing 35% of the kindergarten population but 81% of G&T offers for that grade in 2017-’18) compared to Black and Latino students (representing 65% of the population but 18% of offers).

Before Bloomberg enacted mayoral control, the procedure for identifying gifted students varied between schools, which could choose to utilize a combination of multiple identification methods including grades, teacher referrals and parent referrals.

Chien Kwok, the co-founder of PLACE NYC — a parent-led organization advocating for expanding access to G&T programs — and a recently elected member of the Community Education Council of District 2, said the old system yielded a more diverse student population.

Under the Bloomberg-imposed testing system, the duty of identifying gifted students fell to parents, who had to opt for their children to test for an extremely limited spot in the G&T programs. Some parents could not easily navigate the complex path to G&T testing either because of time constraints or financial restraints, according to Kwok, who attended New York City schools in the 1980s and attended Brooklyn Tech.

“(Centralizing) made it hard for families with parents working two jobs… to go through a very onerous process,” said Kwok.

The Department of Education announced in February 2021 that the city would temporarily eliminate the use of a single test into gifted programs and instead revert to lottery and teacher referrals – a process that the lawsuit contends does not address the existing segregation and is not “pedagogically sound.”

Teachers, like others in society, may hold racialized and gendered perceptions of students, and those perceptions affect whether they think a student might be gifted or not, said Rachel Fish, a professor at New York University studying racialized constructions of disability and giftedness.

Her research, in which she showed teachers films of fictional students demonstrating academic giftedness, found that teachers are more likely to perceive white students’ academic strengths as natural and conversely fail to recognize the same level of objective academic ability in students of color.

‘Caste system’

Claude Hibbert, a 17-year-old rising senior at Brooklyn Tech and one of the student plaintiffs, said as a Black student, racist and racially charged expressions such as the “n-word,” “fried chicken” and “Kool Aid” were frequently cast at him by other students. When he sought guidance from teachers, he said he would be told to just “push through,” or “that’s just the way it is.”

“You’re being harmed and you’re going to somebody for help and having your experience invalidated,” Hibbert told ABC News.

According to the suit, a teacher at Hibbert’s school kept a list of racist incidents reported by Black and Latino students between 2012 and 2015, including racially charged jokes and perpetuating stereotypes. The teacher reported the incidents to school leadership, but “the school enacted no meaningful policy changes,” the complaint says, and the documents say that the system leaves the students to fend for themselves.

The racism that students of color say they experienced in school is part of a system that they say is racist itself, the lawsuit alleges.

“The system reproduced by the New York City public schools is fundamentally one of caste: an artificial, graded ‘ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of,’ in the United States, race,” the suit says.

This system, the complaint says, is accomplished by effectively setting groups apart at an early age and perpetuating those divisions.

“Consequently, the demographics of the City’s G&T programs reflect disparate familial resources, enrolling predominantly white and certain Asian students,” the suit says. The system culminates in admissions to specialized high schools, which it says cements the notion that certain groups are privileged while others are not.

“The City and State intentionally maintain and sanction this system despite their knowledge — acquired through decades of experience and reflected in their own admissions — of its racist character and outcomes,” the complaint says.

Privilege a complex issue

One of the more nuanced concepts advanced in the suit is that of privilege — and Asian students being lumped in with white students as being predominantly represented in gifted programs. The complaint acknowledges that both the city and state treat Asians as a monolith and that “this treatment obscures severe economic stratification and diverse English language acquisition needs within Asian American and Pacific Islander communities,”

The fact that Asian Americans, who had the second highest poverty rate in the city, according to the city’s most recent poverty measure report in 2018, have high representation in gifted programs is not because they are all privileged, Kwok said.

A Chinese mother of three in New York City, who requested anonymity due to fear of retribution from her neighbors, told ABC News that as the sole breadwinner of her family, she struggles to finance her children’s education.

“All the money I make, I just save for my children’s education,” she said. She lives in government housing, works as a part-time home care aide and said she used her earnings for her children’s Specialized High School Admissions Test preparation courses. Her youngest son is currently a student at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, one of the city’s eight specialized high schools.

At Stuyvesant, more than half of Asian students were eligible for free and reduced-price meals in 2020, which is what the DOE uses as a poverty indicator. In comparison, 45% of Black students, 29% of Hispanic students and 16% of white students qualified.

Mark Rosenbaum, the plaintiffs’ attorney from Public Counsel, a pro bono public interest law firm, said that rather than being divisive, the suit is about achieving equality for all students.

“If there are to be gifted and talented programs, and if there are to be specialized high schools, they have to be accessible to all… They must be retained in a way that all children, regardless of their race, have equal access to these schools,” Rosenbaum said.

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(NEW YORK) — In the two decades since the Sept. 11 attacks, forensic scientists have been hard at work trying to identify the 2,753 people who were killed at the World Trade Center — but the road hasn’t been easy.

As of this week, the Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) in New York City has identified 1,647 victims, mostly using DNA from the human remains found at the site of the attack. But still, 40% of the Ground Zero victims haven’t been identified.

Mark Desire, assistant director of the OCME Department of Forensic Biology and manager of the World Trade Center DNA Identification Team, told reporters during a video call Wednesday that the investigation has been challenging, but after all this time, the team’s mission remains the same: to help the families of the victims find some closure.

Thankfully, new technology could help speed up the identification process.

“We’ve adapted, we’ve overcome and we’ve pushed that science, day after day,” Desire said.

Desire and other forensic scientists who’ve worked on the identification project said there are numerous factors that have made identification difficult. For starters, the remains at Ground Zero were exposed to several elements that can destroy DNA, including jet fuel, mold and fire.

John Butler, a fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who assisted with the World Trade Center identification efforts shortly after the attacks, told ABC News that it has taken a long time to get a manifest of all of the fatalities at the site, which included first responders, airplane passengers and crew, office workers and other civilians.

He noted that scientists had to gather as many DNA samples from the victims — whether it was from old toothbrushes, pieces of clothing or close family members — as possible to have a database to match the remnants found at Ground Zero.

“There wasn’t an inventory of everyone in the lab. They had to go out and get samples,” he said.

Desire also said there are victims for whom no additional DNA samples have been able to be retrieved.

“Maybe [the victim didn’t] have family or the family has accepted it and don’t want to be notified,” he said.

Over 22,000 human bone and tissue samples have been recovered from Ground Zero over the years, according to OCME. And by the end of May 2002, 736 victims were identified without DNA matching, according to a report issued by Butler a decade ago.

But he said one of the biggest issues that forensic experts still struggle with is the fragmented nature of the DNA recovered from the site, which is why he worked for months to come up with a new type of analysis for short tandem repeat (STR) markers in the DNA, which are unique among related persons.

“You can recover more information from a sample that has been broken into smaller pieces,” Butler said, adding that 20% of the identifications that have been made so far were done using the “miniSTR” tests that he helped develop.

Desire said the World Trade Center DNA Identification Team continues to work on analyzing the data they’ve gathered from the victims and making those DNA matches. On many occasions, the tests on a sample will match with a victim who has already been identified, but those matches still help in the long run, because it gives the team a more defined blueprint of that victim’s identity.

“It’s the samples we have gone back to over and over and over again,” he said.

Desire said his team is in constant contact with victims’ families — many who are still awaiting for their loved ones to be properly identified.

On Tuesday, for the first time in nearly two years, the office identified two victims. One of them is Dorothy Morgan, of Hempstead, New York, who worked for an insurance company at the North Tower. The identity of the second match is being withheld from the public at the family members’ request, OCME said.

Nikiah Morgan, Dorothy Morgan’s daughter, told WABC that she held out hope for years that “she was just out there somewhere.”

“I didn’t expect it after all this time,” she said.

Desire said he can’t give a timetable of when the next identifications will be made, but he believes new technology will lead to more matches.

The World Trade Center DNA Identification Team will soon be using a process known as next generation sequencing, which has been used by the military for long-term investigations involving unknown victims.

Desire said the technique has helped identify the remains of soldiers who died as far back as the Korean War.

“It allows us to look at samples that we had no hope in the past,” he said.

Overall, Desire said his team’s progress over the last 20 years has been remarkable, given the scope and conditions of the investigation. However, he said they’re still pushing to complete the identifications, for the sake of the victims’ loved ones.

“We won’t stop, because we know we can continue to make identifications,” Desire said.

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