Maeve Higgins: How young Adama’s life crumbled after 9/11

In 2005, Adama Bah became the youngest person, and the first woman, to be arrested and accused of terrorism by the US in their in-country ‘War on Terror’. The case was bogus and she was never charged.

Last month, Adama Bah found herself back in 26 Federal Plaza. Now, instead of being a terrified, handcuffed teenager accused of plotting an attack on America, she was a glamorous and smiling woman in a golden dress, there to pledge allegiance to the US flag as part of her citizenship ceremony. 

TODAY, at sunset, two beams of light will shoot up from lower Manhattan, and will be visible for miles across New York City as it remembers what happened on this day 20 years ago.

The twin lights represent the Twin Towers. The lights are impossible to miss, haunting the sky and forcing a reckoning with what happened on September 11, 2001 and everything that came afterward.