FRONTLINE has marked 25 years since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by putting 24 documentaries and one podcast episode into a free streaming collection built from more than two decades of reporting. The archive gathers stories on the attacks, the U.S. response, and the lasting damage that reached far beyond Ground Zero.
The collection is arriving now because the anniversary has turned a body of reporting into a public record. It ranges from the intelligence failures that left warning signs unconnected to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques, the U.S. covert drone program, secret mass surveillance within the U.S., the rise of ISIS, and the public distrust that settled over U.S. government and institutions.
One of the earliest and most revealing pieces in the set is Hunting bin Laden, which aired on Sept. 13, 2001, two days after the attacks. Hosted with opening and closing commentary from Bill Moyers, it was directed and produced by Martin Smith and reported by Lowell Bergman, building on an investigation into bin Laden's terror network that had aired two years earlier. The program now reads like a dispatch from the shock of those first hours, when the search for the man most Americans saw as the enemy was already narrowing around one name.
That focus carried its own blind spot. John O’Neill, who led a six-year fight to track down and prosecute Al Qaeda operatives around the world, died in the twin towers on 9/11, and Michael Kirk and Jim Gilmore later chronicled the warnings he had given about the threat posed by Al Qaeda before he died in the attack carried out by that organization. The collection does not try to separate the grief from the record; it puts them in the same frame, alongside the failures that kept intelligence agencies from connecting the dots in time.
Another piece in the archive, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, looks less at strategy than at the inner reckoning that followed. Producer Helen Whitney used interviews with victims’ families, World Trade Center survivors, priests, rabbis, Islamic scholars, atheists, agnostics, writers, and thinkers to examine how belief and disbelief were challenged after the attacks. Read together, the documentaries and the podcast show why the 9/11 story never stayed with one day in September: it became a long account of war, surveillance, fear, and the arguments America is still having with itself. The only thing left open is which 25th-anniversary pieces make up the complete set, since the collection is presented as a curated selection rather than a full list.
