The crisp, clear day recalled the pleasant fall weather the morning of that national tragedy.
The first couple placed their hands over their hearts as “Taps” played and a military coloyr guard dipped its flags.
Afterward, they turned, clasped hands and walked back into the presidential mansion.
The Obamas then travelled to the Pentagon for a 9/11 observance ceremony.
“This is never an easy day,” the President told an audience of active-duty service members, families of those killed and others.
“But it is especially difficult for all of you, the families of nearly 3,000 innocents who lost their lives—your mothers and fathers, your husbands and wives, your sons and your daughters. They were taken from us suddenly and far too soon.
“Even now, all these years later, it is easy for those of us who lived through that day to close our eyes and to find ourselves back there—and back here—back when grief crashed over us like an awful wave, when Americans everywhere held each other tight, seeking the reassurance that the world we knew wasn’t crumbling under our feet.
“And even though we may never be able to fully lift the burden carried by those left behind, we know that somewhere, a son is growing up with his father’s eyes and a daughter has her mother’s laugh—living reminders that those who died are with us still.
“As painful as this day is and always will be, it leaves us with a lesson that no single event can ever destroy who we are. No act of terrorism can ever change what we stand for.
Instead, we recommit ourselves to the values that we believe in, holding firmly without wavering, to the hope that we confess. God bless the memories of those we lost. And God bless these United States of America.”
The President later visited the Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre in the Washington suburb of Bethesda.
In Washington, there were a few signs of some of the changes wrought by the attacks, such as a K-9 team outside a metro stop a few blocks from the White House and the dark silhouette of a military battery atop an office building overlooking the presidential mansion.
And both Obama’s campaign and Mitt Romney’s suspended negative advertisements for a day.
The attacks saw extremists from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist network hijack four airliners to use as guided missiles, crashing into both towers of the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
About 3,000 people were killed.
America’s response included the late-2001 invasion of Afghanistan, a war that is now the country’s longest, and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Bin Laden met his end at the hands of Navy SEAL commanders in a May, 2011 raid on his compound in Pakistan
