Music and tears for victims of 9/11 at New York memorial plaza
Bagpipes, bells and a reading of the names of the near-3,000 people killed when hijacked jetliners crashed into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field marked the 12th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2001.
More than a thousand people gathered yesterday on a hot and hazy morning at the National September 11 Memorial plaza in Manhattan for the annual reading of victims' names from both the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre.
Bagpipes and a youth choir ushered in the start of the solemn proceedings, held around two reflecting pools that stand in the footprint of the fallen twin towers.
"To my nephew Michael Joseph Mullin, we miss you and think of you every single day," said one of the 250 people chosen to read names.
"You're gone but not forgotten," another woman said of her lost cousin.
In keeping with a tradition that began last year, no public officials spoke at the New York ceremony, though former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, his successor Michael Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and other city and state leaders were in attendance.
In a memorial service at the Pentagon, President Barack Obama called on Americans to pray for those whose lives had been lost.
"Let us have the strength to face the threats that endure, different though they may be from 12 years ago, so that as long as there are those who would strike our citizens, we will stand vigilant and defend our nation," Obama said. The morning after a speech in which he called on Americans to support his proposal to use military force against Syria, in retribution for President Bashar al-Assad's poison gas attack on his own people, Obama also reflected on the limits of force.
"Let us have the wisdom to know that, while force is at times necessary, force alone cannot build the world we seek," he said.
Nineteen hijackers died in the attacks, later claimed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, which led to the United States' war in Afghanistan and indirectly to the invasion of Iraq.
Two skyscrapers are nearly completed on either side of the plaza, including One World Trade Centre, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere at 1,776 feet (541 metres), a symbolic number chosen to allude to the year of the Declaration of Independence.
At the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania, the National Park Service's memorial service yesterday included a reading of the names of the Flight 93 passengers and crew, a ringing of bells, a wreath-laying and brief speeches.
