PBS and FRONTLINE are putting the United 93 movie back in the 25-year 9/11 conversation by highlighting a free archive of 24 documentaries and one podcast episode. The collection pulls from more than two decades of FRONTLINE reporting and is built for viewers who want the reporting history, not just the anniversary milestone.
John O’Neill and the dots
The collection is available to stream for free, and that matters because it puts reporting on intelligence failures, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture, surveillance, ISIS, and public trust into one place. FRONTLINE’s Sept. 13, 2001 report, Hunting bin Laden, aired two days after the attacks, with Bill Moyers providing opening and closing commentary.
Martin Smith and Lowell Bergman made Hunting bin Laden, which built on an investigation that had aired two years earlier. The report asked why U.S. intelligence agencies failed to connect the dots and uncover the operation in time, a question that still frames the collection’s sharper edge.
Hunting bin Laden in 2001
John O’Neill sits at the center of that edge. He died in the attack on the twin towers after a six-year fight to track down and prosecute Al Qaeda operatives around the world, and Michael Kirk and Jim Gilmore later chronicled his warnings about the threat posed by Al Qaeda before he died in the attack.
That is the friction inside the retrospective: a commemorative package built for reflection, yet one of its central themes is that U.S. intelligence agencies failed before Sept. 11 and the consequences spread across the war on terror. The collection does not soften that record; it places it alongside the toll on civilians and U.S. troops, the rise of the U.S.’ covert drone program, and the erosion of trust in the U.S. government and institutions.
Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero
Helen Whitney’s Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero gives the archive its spiritual weight. Whitney produced the film as an intimate and profound investigation of the aftershocks of 9/11, with interviews that include victims’ families, World Trade Center survivors, priests, rabbis, Islamic scholars, atheists and agnostics, writers and thinkers.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed and thousands more injured in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and the archive is strongest when it treats that number as the starting point for a long public record, not a finish line. For readers, the practical move is simple: the free collection is already live, and the most useful path is to start with the early reporting, then move through the pieces that trace Afghanistan and Iraq, torture, surveillance, and ISIS back to the same unanswered failures.
