After a decade, 9/11 still evokes quiet sorrow

By Pat Reber and JT Nguyen Sep 11, 2011, 18:03 GMT

New York/Washington - Family members gathered on Sunday where their loved ones were killed, marking the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States that have shaped world history for a decade.

Thousands in New York witnessed the opening of the new National September 11 Memorial, with deep twin reflecting pools, rushing water and the names of all 2,977 victims of 9/11 engraved on the outside walls.

In a departure from past anniversary events, all the names of the victims on that sunny September 2001 day were read, not just those who died in New York.

Fanatic Islamic fundamentalists hijacked four planes that day within little more than an hour, crashing two into the twin World Trade Center towers, another into the Pentagon in Washington and, after a fight with passengers, one into a field in Pennsylvania.

At the New York ceremony, begun promptly at 8:46 am (1246 GMT) to mark the attack by the first plane, US President Barack Obama kept the sombre mood of the day, refraining from remarks but reading a passage from Psalm 46 that ends: 'Be still and know that I am God.'

At the other two memorials, he arrived late after sombre ceremonies and leavened the sorrowful mood by mingling with waiting family members.

But once back in Washington, he spoke upbeat words of American resilience and determination to a crowd at the Kennedy Center.

Obama vowed that the 2 million Americans who have gone to war since 9/11 demonstrated that 'those who do us harm cannot hide from the reach of justice, anywhere in the world.'

He added that American strength was 'not measured in our ability to stay in these places' but rather in the 'commitment to leave those lands to free people and sovereign states.' The United States intends to withdraw its remaining 100,000 troops from Afghanistan by 2014, and still has 47,000 non-combat troops in Iraq that are to leave by the end of this year.

During the day-long 10th-anniversary events, families recalled the hurt they still felt over missing loved-ones.

At the Pentagon ceremony outside Washington, Rebecca Dolan recalled that she was 15 when her father, Navy Major Robert Dolan Jr, was killed there, and said she comes to the 9/11 commemorations every year.

'It feels like it happened just yesterday,' she told dpa Sunday. 'God willing, if I'm still around for the 50th anniversary, I think it'll still be that way.'

In New York, Michael Rodriguez of New Jersey paused to remember how his brother, Richard, a police officer from New Jersey, had rescued two people from the burning towers and rushed back inside to bring more people out.

The tower collapsed before he re-emerged. Twenty-three New York police officers died in the New York rescue efforts, as did 343 firefighters.

Former president George W Bush, who for the first time attended a 9/11 ceremony next to Obama, read a Civil War letter from Abraham Lincoln to a grieving Civil War mother.

Afterwards, family members were allowed to enter the New York memorial. Many took rubbings of the names, or stuck roses into the deep engravings.

For many, the memorial is the only physical remembrance they have. Of the 2,752 people killed in the twin towers destruction, the remains of only 1,630 - some just small skin or bone fragments - have been identified through DNA analysis.

For the first time, the commemorative ceremony was held without the ominous shadow of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks who was gunned down on May 2 by a bold US Navy Seal attack in Pakistan. But another cloud threatened the commemorations as US officials worked to confirm a 'credible' intelligence report of new terrorist attack plans for the weekend.

New Yorkers have wanted to move past 9/11, but each anniversary brings them back to the day, thinking how the dust of toxic building debris and incinerated bodies choked the air as the towers collapsed, how the hundreds of thousands walked out or boarded boats on the Hudson and East Rivers which rushed to the rescue.

The New York monument also includes the names of the six people killed in the failed 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, bringing to 2,983 the number of engraved names. They represented 90 nationalities.

For the first time at a 9/11 anniversary event, there was an unusual display of political agitation as competing groups of protestors shouted at each other, charging variously that Bush had staged the attacks as an excuse for war or demanding that Muslims pay reparations to victims. Police intervened to prevent clashes.

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