US marks 20 years since 9/11, in shadow of Afghan war's end

NEW YORK – The 9/11 day commemoration astatine crushed zero began Saturday with a tolling doorbell and a infinitesimal of silence, precisely 20 years aft the commencement of the deadliest panic onslaught connected U.S. soil.

President Joe Biden, erstwhile presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton joined a assemblage of victims' relatives and archetypal responders astatine the Sept. 11 memorial plaza successful New York. The memorial stands wherever the the World Trade Center’s duplicate towers were rammed and felled by hijacked planes.

Observances are besides planned astatine the the 2 different sites wherever the 9/11 conspirators crashed the jets: the Pentagon and a tract adjacent Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Biden is scheduled to wage respects astatine each 3 places.

The day comes nether the pall of a pandemic and successful the shadiness of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, present ruled by the aforesaid militants who gave harmless haven to the 9/11 plotters.

The attacks killed astir 3,000 radical and marked the commencement of a caller epoch of fear, war, politics, patriotism and tragedy.

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“It’s hard due to the fact that you hoped that this would conscionable beryllium a antithetic clip and a antithetic world. But sometimes past starts to repetition itself and not successful the champion of ways,” said Thea Trinidad, who mislaid her begetter successful the attacks and has signed up to work victims' names astatine the ceremonial astatine crushed zero successful New York.

In a video released Friday night, Biden mourned the ongoing losses of 9/11.

“Children person grown up without parents, and parents person suffered without children,” said Biden, a puerility person of the begetter of a Sept. 11 victim, Davis Grier Sezna Jr.

But the president besides spotlighted what helium called the “central lesson” of Sept. 11: “that astatine our astir susceptible ... unity is our top strength.”

Former President George W. Bush, the nation's person connected 9/11, is owed astatine the Pennsylvania memorial and his successor, Barack Obama, astatine crushed zero. The lone different post-9/11 U.S. president, Donald Trump, plans to beryllium successful New York, successful summation to providing commentary astatine a boxing lucifer successful Florida successful the evening.

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Other observances — from a wreath-laying successful Portland, Maine, to a occurrence motor parade successful Guam — are planned crossed a state present afloat of 9/11 plaques, statues and commemorative gardens.

Using hijacked planes arsenic missiles, the assailants inflicted the deadliest violent attacks connected U.S. soil, taking astir 3,000 lives, toppling the duplicate towers and ushering successful an property of fear.

Security was redefined, with changes to airport checkpoints, constabulary practices and the government's surveillance powers. In the years that followed, virtually immoderate sizeable explosion, clang oregon enactment of unit seemed to rise a dire question: “Is it terrorism?” Some ideological unit and plots did follow, though national officials and the nationalist person lately go progressively acrophobic with threats from home extremists aft years of focusing connected planetary panic groups successful the aftermath of 9/11.

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New York faced questions aboriginal connected astir whether it could ever retrieve from the stroke to its fiscal hub and reconstruct a feeling of information among the crowds and skyscrapers. New Yorkers yet rebuilt a more populous and prosperous metropolis but had to reckon with the tactics of an empowered post-9/11 constabulary section and a widened spread betwixt haves and have-nots.

A “war connected terror” led to invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, wherever the longest U.S. warfare ended past period with a hasty, monolithic airlift punctuated by a suicide bombing that killed 169 Afghans and 13 American work members and was attributed to a subdivision of the Islamic State extremist group. The U.S. is present concerned that al-Qaida, the panic web down 9/11, whitethorn regroup successful Afghanistan.

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Two decades aft helping to triage and dainty injured colleagues astatine the Pentagon connected Sept. 11, retired Army Col. Malcolm Bruce Westcott is saddened and frustrated by the continued menace of terrorism.

“I ever felt that my generation, my subject cohort, would instrumentality attraction of it — we wouldn’t walk it connected to anybody else,” said Westcott, of Greensboro, Georgia. “And we passed it on.”

For Angelique Tung, who was astatine the commercialized halfway for a concern gathering connected 9/11 and escaped down 77 flights of stairs, the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan stirred empathy for troops who served there. Some present wonderment whether their efforts and sacrifices made a difference, which makes Tung deliberation of a question she has asked herself since surviving Sept. 11.

“I anticipation that, aft 20 years, different radical are asking that question: What bully tin travel from this?" said Tung, of Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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Sept. 11 propelled a surge of shared grief and communal purpose, but it soon gave way.

Muslim Americans endured suspicion, surveillance and hate crimes. The quest to recognize the catastrophic toll of the panic attacks prompted changes successful gathering plan and exigency communications, but it besides spurred conspiracy theories that seeded a civilization of skepticism. Schisms and resentments grew implicit immigration, the equilibrium betwixt tolerance and vigilance, the meaning of patriotism, the due mode to grant the dead, and the scope of a committedness to “never forget.”

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Trinidad was 10 erstwhile she overheard her dad, Michael, saying goodbye to her parent by telephone from the burning commercialized center. She remembers the symptom but besides the fellowship of the days that followed, erstwhile each of New York “felt similar it was family.”

“Now, erstwhile I consciousness similar the satellite is truthful divided, I conscionable privation that we tin spell backmost to that,” said Trinidad, of Orlando, Florida. “I consciousness similar it would person been specified a antithetic satellite if we had conscionable been capable to bent connected to that feeling.”

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