Sunday, September 11, 2011

9/11, America Remembers: Ten Years Later

Ten years later, the families of those lost on 9/11 wearing T-shirts emblazoned with loved ones' faces and names, made their way back to the site where the World Trade Center once stood.

"She wanted to work for justice but died from injustice," Tanya Garcia said of her 21-year-old sister, Marlyn, a criminal justice student who died while working at Marsh Mclennon. "She was a victim of horrendous terrorism."

Garcia is one of hundreds of family members who will join firefighters, police officers and emergency workers at the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan today for the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11. The annual ceremony, in which the names of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks are read aloud, will take place for the first time at the newly completed memorial plaza, with two fountains in place of where the two towers once stood.

Bagpipers will lead the family members and first responders into the ceremony, which will begin just after 8:30 a.m. At 8:46 a.m., a city-wide moment of silence will be joined by church bells throughout the city to commemorate the moment when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower. The ceremony will be punctuated by six moments of silence in all, one for each of the moments when the four planes crashed, and one for the moments when each of the towers fell.

President Obama and former president George W. Bush, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and former governor George Pataki, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will all attend today's ceremony. Obama, Bloomberg, and Guiliani will all deliver readings throughout the morning, and the ceremony will also include performances by James Taylor and Paul Simon.

Among the crowd gathering at the memorial plaza this morning were children too young to have been alive 10 years ago, clutching Teddy bears and wearing dresses with flags sewn into them, family members wearing T-shirts with the words "Never Forget" emblazoned on them, and T-shirts commemorating those fire department ladders and police precincts that perished in the attack.

Mario Montoya came to remember his best friend, Harry Ramos, who worked on the 82nd floor of the North Tower.

"Every year, I come here to feel closer to him," Montoya said.

Police and security presence in the memorial and throughout Lower Manhattan remains significant; police dogs and armed guards are present throughout the ceremony. New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly told ABC News that there was no new information on a terror plot, but "no reason to lessen our alert status."

The ceremony will conclude with three trumpeters, one each from the New York Police Department, the Fire Department of New York, and the Port Authority Police Department, playing taps.

After the ceremony, Obama will attend memorials in Shanksville, Pa., and at the Pentagon in Washington. He will also attend a Concert for Hope at the Kennedy Center in D.C. tonight, where he will deliver a 15-minute speech on the attacks.

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