U.S. President Barack Obama joined former President George W. Bush at the World Trade Center in Manhattan to mark the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 people, reading a passage from the Bible at a ceremony attended by the families of the victims.
Obama was later greeted with cheers and applause at a memorial in Pennsylvania, where he laid a wreath at the site near Shanksville where one of four hijacked airliners crashed. The New York ceremony, in the shadow of a new skyscraper that will be the tallest building in the U.S., took place while thousands of police officers worked overtime under a terror alert stemming from what Mayor Michael Bloomberg called a “credible but not corroborated” threat.
The president was joined at Ground Zero by Bloomberg, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Christopher Christie of New Jersey. The men read letters, poems and religious passages as surviving family members recited the names of the victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Also honored were the six killed in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
“Ten years later, I’d say America came through this thing in a way that was consistent with our character,” Obama said in an interview with NBC News. “Some things haven’t happened as quickly as they needed to. But overall, we took the fight to al- Qaeda, we preserved our values, we preserved our character.”
Moment of Silence
In New York, Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, Bush and his wife Laura Bush, walked along the perimeter of the north pool of the 9/11 memorial, stopping for a moment of silence.
“They were our neighbors, our friends, our husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, children and parents,” Bloomberg said at the ceremony. “They were the ones who rushed in to help, 2,983 innocent men, women and children. We have asked their families to come here to speak the names out loud to remind each of us of a person we lost in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania.”
John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, said today that U.S. officials are working “round the clock” to investigate a “specific and credible” threat of a terrorist attack against Washington or New York.
Counterterrorism officials have “some information” about the nature of the possible plans and the people who may be involved, Brennan said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program. No new information has come to light since last week’s initial alert, a White House official said.
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