A jittery United States comes together in grief on Sunday’s 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks which killed almost 3,000 people and plunged the world into an era of war and bitter internal division. President Barack Obama and his predecessor George W. Bush will attend ceremonies at the site of the destroyed Twin Towers in New York, with Obama also flying to 9/11’s other crash sites in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.
With federal officials warning of a new terrorism scare, security in major cities was extraordinarily tight, and Obama has called for a “heightened state of vigilance and preparedness.”
Heavily armed police squads and bomb-sniffing dogs deployed across New York, while motorists in some neighborhoods were forced to go through checkpoints. As every year since the horrific events of September 11, 2001, remembrance ceremonies will center on Ground Zero, where 2,753 of the day’s 2,977 victims died in the inferno of the collapsing skyscrapers. But unlike previous years, the ritual of reading the names of the dead will take place against a backdrop of the gleaming, three-quarter-built World Trade Center tower, rather than a chaotic-looking construction site. Sunday will also see the dedication of a simple, but moving monument consisting of massive fountains sunk into the footprints of the former towers, with the names of the dead written in bronze around the edges.
Even as US intelligence agencies chased down what officials said was a credible but unconfirmed threat of an Al-Qaeda attack around 9/11, Obama assured terrorism would never win.
“We will protect the country we love and pass it safer, stronger and more prosperous to the next generation,” he said. “Today, America is strong and Al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat.”
Obama and Bush will attend the ceremony together for the first time, along with victims’ family members, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his predecessor Rudolph Giuliani – who led the city 10 years ago. The 9/11 remembrances unite Americans like almost no other event. According to a poll last week, 97 percent of people remember where they were when they heard the news, on par with John F Kennedy’s assassination.
Yet while Al-Qaeda is severely weakened and New York is recovering, the anniversary still finds a nation struggling to overcome the longer-term impacts of the last decade. “Some back home ask, why are we here? It has been a long fight and people are tired,” US Ambassador Ryan Crocker said at a ceremony at the US embassy in Kabul. “The reason is simple: Al-Qaeda is not here in Afghanistan, and that’s because we are.” Though US troops have a reduced presence in Iraq, their occupation of the country, years of vicious inter-Iraqi violence and a host of torture scandals have bled the US economy and sullied Washington’s image abroad.
And as unemployment and next year’s presidential election become the focus for most Americans, those already distant wars — launched in the wake of 9/11 — can seem a world away.
Jittery US unites in grief 10 years after 9/11
