WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden planned to visit all three sites of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on Saturday as the nation marked the 20th anniversary of that day.
“To the families of the 2,977 people from more than 90 nations killed on September 11, 2001, in New York City, Arlington, Virginia, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the thousands more who were injured, America will commemorate you and your loved ones,” Biden said in a video released Friday.
The president was scheduled to begin the day in New York, attending a memorial event at Ground Zero on Saturday morning along with first lady Jill Biden and former President Barack Obama. He was to travel next to the Flight 93 memorial in Shanksville, where former President George W. Bush was scheduled to deliver remarks, before visiting the Pentagon, participating in wreath-laying ceremonies at both locations.
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Biden was marking the milestone anniversary, his first as president, weeks after the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan nearly two decades after the U.S. first knocked them from power in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
In April, Biden had set that date this year as the deadline for full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — recently acknowledging that he did not foresee a rapid Taliban takeover that would return them to rule by then.
That wasn’t the only thorny challenge facing Biden in the weeks leading up to the anniversary. As the day approached, a group of 1,800 family members of Sept. 11 victims and first responders said they would oppose Biden’s participation in any anniversary events unless he declassified documents they were seeking from relevant FBI investigations on the planning of the attacks.
On Friday, Biden signed an executive order granting their request to release documents they say may show a link between Saudi leaders and the attacks. Biden directed the documents to be released over the next six months, barring a clear national security justification for keeping them classified.
“As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the American people deserve to have a fuller picture of what their Government knows about those attacks,” he said in a statement last week.
Biden, no stranger to loss, has embraced the role of consoler-in-chief throughout his presidency. He held a candle-lighting ceremony marking 500,000 Covid deaths in February, and gave a prime time address to the nation to mark a year of lockdown.
His itinerary on Saturday harks back to how some of his predecessors over the past 20 years have marked other milestone anniversaries of the national day of mourning.
On the first anniversary of the attacks, Bush made remarks at the Pentagon, visited a memorial service in Shanksville, then gave a speech that evening with the Statue of Liberty in the background, again journeying to all three sites on the fifth anniversary of that day.
At the 10-year mark, Obama also made stops at all three of the sites, speaking at Ground Zero. Biden, then vice president, spoke at the Pentagon of his empathy for those who lost loved ones that day. “I know what it’s like to receive that call out of the blue, that the dearest thing in your life is gone,” he said then.
On Friday, Biden again pointed to the pain of the loss suffered that day.
“It’s so hard, whether it’s the first year or the 20th,” he said. “…No matter how much time has passed, these commemorations bring everything painfully back as if you just got the news a few seconds ago.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
