NEW YORK — The names of the Sept. 11 dead, some called out by children barely old enough to remember their fallen mothers and fathers, echoed across ground zero Sunday in a haunting but hopeful tribute on the 10th anniversary of the terror attack. “God is our refuge and strength,” President Barack Obama said, quoting the Bible.
Weeping relatives of the victims streamed into a newly opened memorial and placed pictures and flowers beside names etched in bronze. Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, bowed their heads and touched the inscriptions.
Obama, standing behind bulletproof glass and before the white oak trees of the memorial, read the Bible passage after a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m. (1246 GMT), when the first jetliner slammed into the north tower 10 years ago.
The president, quoting Psalm 46, invoked the presence of God as an inspiration to endure. “Therefore, we will not fear, even though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.”
Obama and Bush were joined by their wives as they walked up to one of the two reflecting pools built over the towers’ footprints, part of a Sept. 11 memorial that was opened for relatives of the victims.
The site looked utterly different than it had for any other Sept. 11 anniversary: Along with the names in bronze, two manmade waterfalls flowed directly over the footprints of the towers, surrounded by dozens of white oak trees.
The New York ceremony, which ended with the playing of taps in the early afternoon, was the centerpiece of a day of remembrance across the country. It was a chance to reflect on a decade that changed American life, including two wars and the overhaul of everyday security at airports and in big cities.
In a tribute at the Pentagon, Vice-President Joe Biden invoked a “9-11 generation of warriors.”
“Never before in our history has America asked so much over such a sustained period of an all-volunteer force,” he said. “So I can say without fear of contradiction or being accused of exaggeration, the 9-11 generation ranks among the greatest our nation has ever produced, and it was born — it was born — it was born right here on 9-11.”
Defence Secretary Leon Panetta observed a moment of silence at 9:37 a.m. (1337 GMT), marking the time a jet struck the centre of the U.S. military. He paid tribute to 6,200 members of the U.S. military who have died in the Iraq and Afghan wars.
In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a choir sang at the Flight 93 National Memorial, and a crowd of 5,000 listened to a reading of the names of 40 passengers and crew killed aboard the plane a decade ago.
In New York, family members were reading the names of 2,983 victims — 2,977 killed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, and six killed in the first terror attack on the trade centre, a truck bomb in 1993.
“You will always be my hero,” Patricia Smith, 12, said of her mother.
Bush quoted a letter from President Abraham Lincoln to a mother who lost all five of her sons in the Civil War.
“I pray that our heavenly father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement,” Bush said.
Sumika Tanaka came with her mother from Tokyo to find the name of her husband, who was working for a Japanese bank in the south tower when he was killed.
“It’s not going to disappear,” said Tanaka, 30. “It will be here 10 years from now. And that’s what is important to me.”
Some family members held children on their backs who were not yet born when the towers were attacked.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, opening the ceremony of remembrance, said: “Although we can never un-see what happened here, we can also see that children who lost their parents have grown into young adults. ... Good works have taken root in public service.”
As the sun rose, an American flag fluttered over six stories of the rising 1 World Trade Center. The sky was clear blue with scattered white clouds and a light breeze, not unlike the Tuesday morning 10 years ago.
The anniversary arrived with security officials in New York and Washington on alert. Ahead of the anniversary, the federal government had warned local authorities of a tip about a possible car-bomb plot linked to al-Qaida.
In a brief scare, two military aircraft escorted a New York-bound American Airlines flight from Los Angeles. Three passengers made repeated trips to the bathroom and some people thought they were using hand signals to communicate, but the men were cleared and sent on their way, said a law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The official said earlier reports that the men had locked themselves in the bathroom were incorrect.
Fighter jets also shadowed a Denver-to-Detroit Frontier Airlines flight after the crew reported that two people were spending an unusual amount of time in the bathroom. The FBI said a search of the plane turned up nothing and three passengers were questioned.
Remembrances around the U.S. and world marked a decade of longing for loved ones lost in the attack.
The anniversary revived memories of a September morning when terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and a fourth plane crashed into a field in rural western Pennsylvania. Of heroism and Samaritans and unthinkable fear. And of nearly 3,000 killed at the hands of a global terror network led by Osama bin Laden, himself now dead.
Americans gathered to pray at cathedrals in their greatest cities and to lay roses before fire stations in their smallest towns. Around the world, many others did something similar.
Obama and his wife flew from New York to lay a wreath at the Flight 93 National Memorial near the town of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where a day earlier Bush and former President Bill Clinton and Biden joined the families of the 40 passengers and crew aboard the jet who fought back against their hijackers and thwarted a planned attack on Washington.
The passengers and crew gave “the entire country an incalculable gift: They saved the Capitol from attack,” an untold amount of lives and denied al-Qaida the symbolic victory of “smashing the centre of American government,” Clinton said at Saturday’s ceremony.
They were “ordinary people given no time at all to decide and they did the right thing,” he said.
From Shanksville, the Obamas returned to Washington, where they crossed the Potomac River to the Pentagon to lay a wreath at the memorial to the 184 people who died there — 59 passengers and crew on the hijacked plane and 125 people inside the building.
As the anniversary arrived around the world, people paid tribute in formal ceremonies and quiet moments.
In Japan, they gathered Sunday to lay flowers before a glass case containing a small section of trade centre steel, and remembered 23 employees of Fuji Bank who never made it out of the towers.
A village in the Philippines offered roses, balloons and prayers for an American victim whose widower built 50 brightly colored homes there, fulfilling his late wife’s wish to help the Filipino poor.
In Malaysia, Pathmawathy Navaratnam woke up and, as she has done every morning for 10 years, wished “good morning” to her son, a 23-year-old financial analyst who was killed in New York.
“He is my sunshine. He has lived life to the fullest, but I can’t accept that he is not here anymore,” said Navaratnam. “I am still living, but I am dead inside.”
The Taliban marked the anniversary by vowing to keep fighting against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, while also insisting that they had no role in the Sept. 11 attacks. They railed against “American colonialism” and said Afghans have “endless stamina” for war.
Hours later, a Taliban suicide bomber blew up a large truck at the gate of a Combat Outpost Sayed Abad in Afghanistan’s eastern Wardak province, killing two civilians and injuring 77 U.S. troops.
The hundreds of ceremonies across the country and around the globe included memorial Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and a ceremony featuring nine-stories-tall replicas of the twin towers on a plaza in Paris.
For the most part, in New York, away from the trade centre, it was a pleasant September Sunday. New Yorkers had brunch outdoors. Bicycles crowded the paths along the Hudson River. Families strolled around. Sailboats caught a river breeze and drifted past the dock where emergency vessels had evacuated trade centre survivors.
In Washington, at a memorial concert at the Kennedy Center, Obama spoke of honouring the sacrifices of those who died in the attacks and the two long wars they spawned. But he also looked to a future when Sept. 11 will be seen through the eyes of generations who never witnessed the attacks themselves, and instead learned of them through memorials.
To them, the president said, the legacy of Sept. 11 will be the soldiers who signed up to serve, the citizens who withstood fear, the workers who built new towers to replace the old, and the children who lived out their parents’ dreams.
“They will remember that we have overcome slavery and civil war, bread lines and fascism, recession and riots, Communism and, yes, terrorism,” Obama said.
“It will be said of us that we kept that faith; that we took a painful blow, and emerged stronger.”
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Associated Press writer Joe Mandak in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.
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