And while NBC’s Savannah Guthrie said on Today before the documentary aired that Buzzelli’s tale is a “survivor’s story that is just now being publicly told for the first time,” the tale of how Buzzelli endured the collapse and was discovered in the open air by firefighters had been told multiple times in prominent publications in the intervening years.

Neither Buzzelli nor the Discovery Channel returned requests by The Daily Beast for comment on the documentary.

According to the documentary, as well as other press accounts of Buzzelli’s activities that day, the 34-year-old Port Authority engineer made his way to work in the North Tower and exited the elevator onto the building’s 64th floor shortly after American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the structure. He and his fellow employees did not begin to evacuate the building until after the South Tower had collapsed at 9:59 a.m. Buzzelli made his way down stairwell B, one of the building’s three exit stairways. He had reached the 22nd floor, he says, when the building began to collapse. He threw himself against a wall and curled into the fetal position, then, after a brief freefall, blacked out. He woke up again three hours later, he said, atop the rubble of the tower.

By that account, Buzzelli had fallen to about the seventh story—a drop of 200 feet.

And so on this anniversary, I spoke to Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent, security consultant, and author of the award-winning Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda to get his take on the Obama counterterror doctrine. How would he sum it up in a sentence?

“Total elimination of al Qaeda.” Soufan said. “They are hitting leaders of al Qaeda, and anyone who is known to be plotting against the United States. But at the same time they are trying to stop all the incubating factors that help terrorist recruitment, funding, P.R. and so forth. They are hitting them on different levels. A lot of people see the success of the drones … but the global partnerships that have been created have been effective—and that includes law enforcement, diplomacy, economic aid, educational programs, and definitely boots on the ground when needed, i.e., killing Osama bin Laden.  So I think it's more comprehensive in nature.”

“We joke sometimes that Obama does a lot of the same tactics as George Bush, but he keeps his mouth shut,” Soufan says. “The Bush administration’s war on terror wasn't actually working because most of our allies around the world—including England, Germany, other European countries, and the Muslim world—did not have the same concept of the war on terror. So, it makes it difficult when you have a strategy that your partners are not buying into. No. 2, it was wrongfully viewed in the Muslim world as a war on Islam,” said Soufan.

Soufan clarified that he doesn’t “want to blame everything on the Bush administration. I think you have to put yourself in their shoes at the time. But the two things I disagree with the Bush administration on, the invasion of Iraq and EITs (Enhanced Interrogation Techniques), because it just created a lot of problems to our reputation around the world.”

But now is when we need our leaders to lead, to ensure that we remember and reflect on this date and only because we owe it to the thousands who were murdered at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and aboard the downed plane in Pennsylvania. We also dare not forget because the war continues on, no matter how badly we want to put it behind us.

We still have enemies who spend every waking hour scheming of ways to blow up that mall of imagined peacetime.

“They’re just regrouping,” says another soldier, a Special Forces sergeant who honors me by calling me Uncle Mickey and asks that he not be named for security reasons. “It’s obviously not over for them.”

But it is in the Arabian Peninsula that al Qaeda is really multiplying. Its franchise in Yemen has staged three attacks on America, including one at Christmas in 2009—the infamous “underwear bomber—that almost succeeded in Detroit. Its brilliant Saudi bomb maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, is alive and has trained a cadre of students. The Yemeni regime is weak, the country is spinning into chaos, and al Qaeda is exploiting it. Now the U.S. is using drones almost as much in Yemen as in Pakistan.

The al Qaeda apparatus in Iraq, despite being decapitated several times, carries out waves of bombings every month. It has proven remarkably resilient. In North Africa, al Qaeda has allied itself with other Islamist extremists and taken over more than half of Mali, an area bigger than France. There it is training terrorists from Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, and elsewhere. It has raided Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenal and is armed and dangerous.

A new al Qaeda franchise has emerged in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, where it is trying to provoke a war between Egypt and Israel. American troops in the multinational force keeping the 1979 peace treaty are at risk.

• “5/2/11”—the date the team killed Osama bin Laden.
• “8/6/11”—the date 30 American servicemen, 22 of them Navy SEALs, were killed when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan.

The second inscribed date is largely forgotten by everybody save special forces operators and the families of the dead, in particular the widows, four of whom were pregnant when their husbands perished in the helicopter crash.

The first inscribed date is viewed as an anniversary of historic importance by almost everybody, most vocally by political operators of the commander in chief who ordered the raid that killed the murderous mastermind of 9/11.

The delicate white blooms drew crowds of visitors around the tree on Thursday. They seemed to momentarily forget the rest of the memorial, many taking pictures and posing in turns. A woman turned to Port Authority Police Lt. John Ryan.

“Can you take a picture of us please?” she asked.

The woman handed Ryan her iPhone and stood with her family in front of the tree, smiling without seeming at all inappropriate in this place of still unimaginable loss. She then took the iPhone back and inspected the result.

“That’s beautiful,” she said.

In the weeks and months following 9/11, allegations that Saudi royals supported the suicide hijackers’ plot were investigated extensively by Newsweek and many other media outlets. In its final report, the 9/11 Commission, which is separate from the JICI, found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi individuals funded” the 9/11 terrorists.

Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana congressman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, tells The Daily Beast, “We looked quite carefully at [possible Saudi involvement] and even sent investigators over there, and we found no hard evidence of any linkage to the hijackers. At the end of the day, you have to have hard evidence. Having said that, I will also say that despite our thorough investigation, a lot of questions about 9/11 remain unanswered.”

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Graham says, “The three primary questions that remain for me are: what was the extent of involvement by Saudi officials in 9/11, what was their motivation, and why has the U.S. government gone to such lengths to cover it up?”

Graham believes Washington should launch a new investigation that would attempt to answer these questions. He says the 9/11 Commission’s final report does not exonerate the Saudis, and insists that neither the media nor federal law enforcement ever got to the bottom of the plot.

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Azzam was one of the first Arabs to go to Pakistan to help the mujahideen. Bin Laden came to join him in Peshawar, Pakistan. Working with bin Laden, Azzam set up a guest house for foreign Muslims to come to and join the war. This partnership would be the germ of today’s al Qaeda. Azzam also helped set up the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which attacked Mumbai in November 2008. And he was a central figure in the creation of the Palestinian terror group Hamas, which now rules Gaza, helping write its founding charter.

Throughout the 1980s Azzam traveled around the world, including to America, to urge Muslims to join the “caravan of jihad” in Afghanistan. He developed the idea that Muslims should fight one truly global jihad against their enemies, first Russia and then America, rather than many narrow separate national fights against their immediate rulers. Azzam wrote dozens of articles and books extolling the need for a worldwide battle against Islam’s enemies, and his book The Defense of Muslim Territories is perhaps the seminal work of the global jihad. His works also glorified suicide operations and martyrdom, the essential elements of al Qaeda’s tactics. As one former head of Israel’s secret intelligence service, the Mossad, told me years ago, Azzam is both the father of the global jihad and the most important intellectual inspiration of the jihadis’ war on America. Today terror groups around the world often praise Azzam’s inspiration for their work and name their attacks in his honor.

Azzam was assassinated in 1989 in Pakistan. Who did it is still a mystery, although the best evidence points to the Jordanian intelligence service. But his writings were devoured by the Hamburg cell and are must-reads for any jihadist today. Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani who built a car bomb last year and tried to set it off in Times Square, has said Azzam was his inspiration. The Jordanian triple agent who blew himself up in a CIA base in Afghanistan in December 2009 was a disciple of Azzam and said his mission was in part revenge for Azzam’s death. The list of his disciples includes Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al Qaeda in Iraq, and Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born operations commander of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

At least one member of the original Hamburg cell is still alive and working in al Qaeda’s Pakistani hideouts. Said Bahaji, the son of a German mother and a Moroccan father, is now high on the target list as we try to defeat the al Qaeda core group for good.

And as you sat there, unable to keep yourself from weeping, stunned by the enormity of the loss of that day, you had to bite your lip from time to time, as you hoped that the people left behind, their hearts broken, could find their way to peace when the cameras stopped rolling and the ceremony ended. You recalled some of the shriller voices over the past few days, strangely self-centered voices, that spoke of the grief caused by  9/11 as an “affirmation” of being American, of American liberty, of the necessity to ferociously defend America. You felt that there was something obscene and disrespectful about this because the grief was not general on that day; it was private and particular and experienced only by the loved ones of the people who died in the attacks. And for all their love of their country, they did not feel “American” when the phone rang, or the doorbell rang, and their lives changed forever, permanently, unalterably. They did not think of liberty, and armies, and the sacredness of democracy. They did not experience an “affirmation.” Something in them broke. As you watched the ceremony today, you realized that some part of them was still broken, and would always be broken, and would never become something that meant anything more than the senselessness of sudden violence and death and an inexplicable absence.

You watched the ceremony in New York City today, and you realized that there were two ceremonies. There was the public attempt, with cameras and speeches by public dignitaries, to make something positive, and even inspiring, about the chaos, and the screams, and the slaughter of that day. And there were the poor lost souls. One part of them will always be lost, no matter how strong and successful they have been since that day. Their grief deserves, demands, to be remembered by all of us as private, as sacred and unappeasable to each person in his or her own way, as existing beyond the public realm and as being taboo for public purposes. We must never forget these people and the people who were taken from them. We must remember them always, and we must leave them alone.

You may notice an omission on the list of vigilant New York officials. As effective as Bloomberg has been at OEM and the NYPD, he has never taken on the challenge of reform required at the FDNY, instead installing at its current helm, for example, a department functionary already faulted by former Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau for his mismangement role in the lead-up to the worst fire debacle of the Bloomberg administration, the 2007 scorching of the Deutsch Bank building next to Ground Zero, which cost the lives of two valiant firefighters marching six years later in the footsteps of their fallen 9/11 brothers.

One mark of Giuliani’s wilfull ignorance of the terrorist threat was that the number of NYPD detectives assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force was the same on 9/11 as it was on the day of the first bombing almost nine years earlier—a mere 16 or 17. That was in a department swollen by 5,000 additional cops hired in the Giuliani era. In a department cut by 6,000 under Bloomberg, more than 100 detectives are assigned to the task force, and they are a small part of the counterterrorism army Ray Kelly has deployed here and around the world. John Lehman, the former Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan who was the 9/11 Commission member most critical of the Giuliani preparation and response, told me that Kelly’s counterterrorism force “is probably the best in the world,” adding “if I was president, I would be regularly briefed by Kelly’s unit.”

Lehman drove New York’s Giuliani-fawning tabloids nuts at a 2003 commission hearing when he took on the NYPD commissioner Kelly replaced, currently jailed felon Bernie Kerik, and Giuliani’s fire and OEM commissioners, all three of whom were then working at Giuliani Partners, the marketing arm of Rudy’s 9/11 legend. “It’s not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city,” said Lehman at the New School hearing, referring to the “command and control and communications” breakdowns on 9/11.

Like the other commission members, Lehman is now part of the National Security Preparedness Group, which issued its nine-point report card this September, isolating the most vital of the 41 commission recommendations that remain “unfinished.” Ironically, the first two on this list of continuing “vulnerabilities” are precisely the ones that Lehman referred to at that hearing: “command and control and communications.” The preparedness group’s brief report surveys our national failings, without any specific reference to New York, the once and future prime target. The report’s assiduously apolitical analysis of our inability to make real progress on the communication issue points a finger at no one in particular. But President Obama is pushing a bill that would provide a dedicated radio spectrum to public-safety agencies that literally every major law-enforcement or fire organization in the country supports and that won 21 to 4 bipartisan support in a Senate committee in June. Why has it gone nowhere so far?

Memorial designs are contentious to begin with, and this one played out in New York City, where real estate is both cutthroat and gridlocked. One of the fiercer battles was over the level of the memorial. The original site plan called for it to sit 30 feet below the street.

“We had to bring the site up to grid, because before, it was cut off. It would have been a memorial ground, but it would have been only a memorial ground, and it would have atrophied over time,” Michael Arad, who designed the memorial, told Newsweek. “It would have suggested that the past is something that we set aside and don’t interact with on a day-to-day basis in New York. If this is like a scar, in the fabric of the city, it’s a scar that we don’t hide, it’s a scar that we don’t flaunt, it’s a scar that’s just there and it’s part of who we are. I actually think that the experience of visiting the memorial will be enriched by the presence of the normal life of the city, the office workers—like the office workers that died that day—sitting on a park bench, taking a 10-minute break with a friend. You’ll have neighborhood residents walking through here with their kids.”

“It’s meant to be something you just cross into,” says Joe Daniels, the memorial’s president and CEO. “But when you step on the memorial surface, you’ll know it.”

If the memorial is primarily a sort of clean space representing the interests of victims’ families and those who live and work nearby, the museum will be for everyone. From the street, it is an irregular glassy jewel jammed into the plaza, miniature in relation to the 105-story One World Trade. But that is just the opening to a cavernous underground space, which extends far below the memorial, to bedrock. You descend through a hole in the ground along a ramp that recalls the one leading out of the Ground Zero pit during post-disaster excavation. The first overlook is a jolt, a 70-foot drop that exposes a section of the Hudson River slurry wall, which held fast on 9/11, preventing lower Manhattan from flooding. On the floor next to it is the “last column,” the final steel beam removed from the rubble. Behind another giant wall is a space that will hold 9,000 specimen bags containing unidentified victims’ remains, which the medical examiner continues to inspect.

Like millions and millions of people around the country, I was woken up on that day and told to turn on the television by my 8-year-old daughter who came into the room. It was about six in the morning here in Los Angeles, so I spent the whole morning watching television and eventually had to get out of the house because I couldn’t take it anymore.

And like so many people, 9/11 affected me deeply and changed my life in a profound way. I was thrust into a level of public service that I never imagined. Since Sept. 11, I’ve been very active in supporting our military and first responders. I was scared into action. I was frightened for my country; I was frightened for my kids and family; I was frightened for the kind of world we were entering in the 21^st century. That was a catastrophic, tragic event that I’ll never forget. We see the images every year on the anniversary, but I’ve met a lot of wonderful, incredible people who’ve lived with that every single day. I felt there was a way that I could contribute to supporting them and helping them, and by doing that, I could somehow heal some of the pain that I felt on that day.

Justice was done in killing bin Laden, but the pain and fear that he caused will never heal in some people, no matter whether he sleeps with the fishes or not. I don’t think we can forget the vulnerability we all felt from that attack when 19 guys with box cutters did so much damage to our country. If it would’ve been the end of the war, I might have understood some of the celebrating a little bit more. But what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, was a call to action for many jihadists out there who eat, sleep, breathe, live, seven-days-a-week, 365 days-a-year dreaming and thinking of how they can bring down the United States, so we can’t let our guard down. When we do, we see what happens.

I always have a certain fear that anything can happen. It’s a dangerous world. Do I still have fears about that happening again? Yes, I do. I know too many military leaders who know too many bad guys who are very determined to try to do harm to the United States. We’re lucky that we have people that live 24 hours a day, seven days a week to prevent that from happening again.

I spent about six weeks in New York reporting on different aspects of the aftermath—a whole range of stories including ones about children who lost parents, families being notified of confirmed deaths, people sorting through the debris and “Portraits of Grief.” Then, after that, I went abroad to report—first from Afghanistan.

Although you contributed to the “Portraits of Grief” series—part of “A Nation Challenged," which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service—profiling each of the people that died at the World Trade Center, you said you didn’t look back at it while writing The Submission. Why?

As a novelist, I didn’t want to raid details of people’s lives for material. But also, as a reporter, I felt ambivalent about the “Portraits of Grief." The word count left no room for complexity. The project made me ask, how do you avoid reducing the dead to thumbnail profiles? People are much more complicated than can be represented through daily journalism. They deserve to be portrayed and remembered in all their fullness.

What else made you decide to filter the experiences of 9/11 through fiction?

The facts tell a very different story. The record shows that there have been at least 45 jihadist terrorist attacks plotted against Americans since 9/11—each of them thwarted by a combination of intelligence work, policing and citizen participation.

And these are just the plotted attacks that we know about through public documentation—the real number of credible plots is no doubt much higher.  No truly authoritative list exists because of the preponderance of classified information, although organizations such as the Heritage Foundation have published detailed lists in the past. An additional problem in coming up with a comprehensive list lies in consistently defining the parameters of thwarted attacks. The plots also are of varying degrees of seriousness, from some that were days from causing mass bloodshed to others that were twisted ambitions caught well before fruition.

The list published below comes as close as I could, using public sources and past lists—and it was reviewed by both government and academic organizations that track terrorist attacks.

Since 9/11, there have been devastating terror attacks in cities like London and Madrid.  But America has so far batted 1,000 against the constant stream of civilian-targeted terror threats, though trends show the types of plots are changing to an increase of military targets (think the deadly shooting spree at Fort Hood by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan) and Americans’ training overseas for the purpose of terrorism.