President Barack Obama speaks during an observance ceremony at the Pentagon honoring the memory of those killed 15 years ago in the terrorist attacks on 9/11, September 11, 2016.
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Remembering those killed in the 9/11 attack in the US, President Barack Obama on Sunday said the country renewed the love and faith that bind them together as one “American family”.
In Lower Manhattan, family members of victims will gather at the World Trade Center for a ceremony that begins with a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., the time that the first plane hit the North Tower on this day in 2001.
NEW YORK-Americans commemorated the 15th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on Sunday with the recital of the names of the dead, tolling church bells and a tribute in lights at the site where New York City’s massive twin towers collapsed.
“We delivered justice to (Al-Qaeda leader) Osama bin Laden”.
He said the USA still faces terrorist threats, often on a “smaller but still deadly scale”, but said the US has “strengthened our homeland security”.
And he described the evolution of the terrorism threat away from elaborate, large-scale attacks toward smaller, deadly strikes like those carried out in recent years in Boston, Orlando and San Bernardino, Calif. We have prevented attacks. “The resilience that sustains us”, he said on the eve of the 15th anniversary of one of the nation’s darkest days.
In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama said that while so much has changed in the years since 9/11 it’s important to remember what has stayed the same.
“We know that we can never fully know how you feel on this solemn day, as you return to this place”, Carter said.
Across the NY harbor from Manhattan, an afternoon ceremony will be held at New Jersey’s Empty Sky Memorial in Liberty State Park to honor the state’s 749 residents who died on September 11.
Obama’s solemn but hopeful speech came 15 years to the day after almost 3,000 people died in a series of horrific terror attacks.
The Pentagon attack killed 184 people, including workers inside the building and passengers from hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into it.
“And we’ll keep doing everything in our power to protect our homeland”, Obama said.
He urged Americans to view the anniversary of the attacks as an opportunity to “reaffirm our character as a nation” and, in what could be interpreted as a veiled reference to Trump’s immigration proposals, “not to let others divide us”. “We mourn for all the children who had to grow up without a mom or dad, and for all the parents who have had to struggle on without their children”, he wrote.
After the moment of silence Obama said: “The question before us, as always, is: How do we preserve the legacy of those we lost?”
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“We have the opportunity each and every day to live up to the sacrifice of those heroes that we lost”. May God bless the memory of the loved ones here and across the country. “She is now re-hydrated and recovering nicely”, her physician Lisa Bardack said.
