Americans gathered to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on Saturday as US leaders past and present invoked the urgent need for unity at a time of domestic division.
George W Bush, who was Republican president at the time of the 2001 attacks, compared domestic violent extremism to “children of the same foul spirit” as the al-Qaeda attackers.
“[I]t is our continuing duty to confront them,” he said at the crash site of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, where passengers overwhelmed jihadi hijackers and prevented an attack on the US Capitol.
“So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together,” he said, adding that a “malign force” in common life was turning every disagreement into a clash of cultures.
Vice-president Kamala Harris, speaking after Bush at the Pennsylvania memorial, said unity was “imperative” for US strength and shared prosperity.
Their comments come at a time of heightened political polarisation as the US struggles to overcome the Covid-19 pandemic and faces uncertainty over its global role.
Former president Donald Trump, who contested his defeat in the 2020 election, prompting his supporters to storm the US Capitol, released a video message on Saturday praising first responders and attacking his successor Joe Biden.
Biden joined a New York ceremony to mark a moment of silence beginning at 8.46am, the time the first of four hijacked planes ploughed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.
He was joined by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton in New York, and was due to visit all three US sites targeted by al-Qaeda.
The attacks were “one of the most unconscionable tragedies in our country’s history”, Biden said in a statement on Friday, one that “tore a hole in the heart of our nation”.
In a video address on the eve of the commemoration, he too called for an end to division. “Unity is what makes us who we are: America at its best,” he said. “We must have a fundamental respect and faith in each other, and in this nation.”
Biden later praised Bush’s speech in remarks to reporters, adding: “Are we going to, in the next four, five, six, ten years, demonstrate that democracies can work, or not?”
Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 2001 attacks on New York’s Twin Towers, the Pentagon in Virginia and a fourth flight downed in Pennsylvania. Family members of the victims gathered at all three sites.
At the National September 11 Memorial and Museum next to where the Twin Towers fell, they read out the names of their deceased loved ones.
More than 2,400 US personnel were killed and 20,000 wounded in the wars that followed the attacks, which were conducted by al-Qaeda jihadis and planned from Afghanistan. The fatalities include 13 during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last month. Eighteen US veterans die by suicide every day, Biden said last month.
Karestan Koenen, a Harvard professor of psychiatric epidemiology who witnessed the planes fly into the World Trade Center and subsequently escorted grief counselling visits to what became known as Ground Zero, said the trauma had left an indelible mark on the nation. “It’s never closed,” she said.
Koenen cited a “collective need” to remember the attacks, which had led to the burgeoning study of post-traumatic stress disorder affecting veterans and civilians.
Antony Blinken, secretary of state, said the attacks motivated an entire generation of Americans “to pursue lives of service”. On Friday, he described this year’s commemoration as an “especially emotional” anniversary for veterans of the war, an oblique reference to the fall of Kabul to the Taliban last month following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The Taliban were deposed following the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan. The same ultraconservative Islamist militancy that has ties to al-Qaeda has now formed a government in Kabul.
In a statement paying tribute to first responders on Saturday, Trump said Biden “was made to look like a fool” over the US retreat from Afghanistan, accusing his administration of bad planning, incredible weakness and incompetence.
Richard Fontaine, chief executive of bipartisan think-tank Center for a New American Security, said the US had pulled off “huge successes” in its response to September 11, including preventing another mass-casualty attack on the homeland. But he cited “terrible overreaches”, including the harsh treatment of detainees and the war in Iraq.
“The whole thing was over 102 minutes later but . . . what we remember is the fear, the chaos, the confusion and the trauma of that day,” said Garrett Graff, author of an oral history of the September 11 attacks.
“The fact that we reacted so emotionally to that day, and chose to let ourselves be driven by that fear, is key to understanding sort of everything that the US got wrong,” he said.
Graff was referring to the war on terror that followed the attacks, which included military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA’s resort to black sites and torture, and the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, all of which harmed US global standing and polarised opinion at home.
Biden has promised to declassify parts of the FBI investigation into the attacks over the next six months, acceding to demands from family members of victims who want Saudi Arabia’s alleged role revealed.
Lloyd Austin, secretary of defence and a veteran of the Afghanistan war, said in a speech at the Pentagon, where 184 were killed in the attacks, that Americans “must be tireless guardians of our ideals, as well as our security”.
“America will always lead,” he said. “It’s our job to defend the great experiment that is America.”
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2021-09-11 16:53:12Z
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