The President of the United States Joe Biden launched a call on Monday for “national unity”, in a country politically at loggerheads, on the occasion of the 22nd anniversary of the jihadist attacks of September 11.
Joe Biden honored the memory of the nearly 3,000 dead in the attacks by Al-Qaeda commandos, who on that disastrous September 11, 2001, rushed four planes to New York, the Pentagon near Washington, and Pennsylvania.
“We must never lose our sense of national unity, let us make it the common cause of our time,” urged the American president in front of a huge American flag during a stopover at a military base in Alaska, returning from a tour of India and Vietnam.
He insisted that “terrorism, including political and ideological violence, are the opposite of everything that makes us a nation.”
The 80-year-old Democratic leader did not directly cite his Republican rival Donald Trump, whom he could face again in 2024 and who has been charged with “conspiracy against the American state” in connection with his attempts to reverse the result of the November 2020 presidential election and the assault on the Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021.
In New York, Joe Biden was represented by his vice-president Kamala Harris, alongside the current and former mayors of the megacity, in the middle of the crowd near the imposing memorial museum on the southern tip of Manhattan : they observed several minutes of silence, marking the precise moments when four planes hijacked by Islamist commandos had crashed, and when the two towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) had collapsed in a deluge of steel and dust.
Like every year, the names of the 2,753 people who died in the twin towers were read all morning by members of their families, including young people who were not born 22 years ago.
“I really wish I knew you. Each of us in the family misses you. We will never forget,” said the grandson of firefighter Allan Tarasiewicz, killed, among 342 other firefighters, in intervening in the WTC towers.
The tributes, with emotion still intact, were punctuated by the ringing of bells.
At the Pentagon, a stone’s throw from the federal capital Washington, where pirates had rushed an airliner into part of the Department of Defense building, the navy sounded a siren to honor the 184 people killed.
Similarly in Pennsylvania, sirens sounded for a fourth plane crash that killed 40 passengers and crew.
“September 11 made America a nation at war and hundreds of thousands of people mobilized to serve our country in uniform,” said Defense Minister Lloyd Austin, referring to the wars in Afghanistan. and Iraq launched in October 2001 and March 2003 by then-President George W. Bush.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken also pledged that his department “never forgets this tragic day” just like “September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya,” an Islamist attack on the American consulate that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and an official, Sean Smith.
“The memory of those who perished on September 11 reminds us why we must continue to fight those who commit acts of terrorism,” the head of American diplomacy insisted in a press release.
The September 11 attacks, the deadliest in history, left a total of 2,977 dead (including 2,753 at the WTC) and nearly 6,300 injured according to an official report.
A woman and a man killed in the twin towers were able to be identified using DNA, New York forensics announced Friday, bringing the number of people identified dead in the towers to 1,649.
In addition, thousands more died of disease years later, some from cancer caused by toxic fumes from the collapse of the Twin Towers.
12/09/2023 01:17:29 – New York (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
