President Obama laid a wreath of red, white, and blue flowers at ground zero on Thursday, honoring the nearly 3,000 people killed in the September 2001 terrorist attacks and marking the death of its perpetrator, Osama bin Laden.
The hushed ceremony on a sunny, breezy day was a somber coda to a triumphal week that began with Mr. Obama’s announcement that commandos had killed Bin Laden in his fortified compound in Pakistan.
Now, in the wreath ceremony and in a series of meeting across Manhattan on Thursday, the president had a chance to meet one-to-one with the people whose lives were changed most deeply by Bin Laden — relatives of the victims, as well as firefighters and other rescue workers who lost comrades that morning.
“Obviously, you can’t bring back the friends you lost,” Mr. Obama said to the crew at a firehouse in midtown Manhattan that lost 15 men, an entire shift, at the World Trade Center. “What happened Sunday sent a message: When we say we will never forget, we mean what we say.”
It was Mr. Obama’s first visit as president to ground zero, a patch of lower Manhattan that Bin Laden turned into hallowed ground ...
No comments:
Post a Comment