A changed America marks 10 years since 9/11

NEW YORK (AP):

President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush stood in silence yesterday and a church bell rang twice on the precise moment ten years after the first jetliner struck the World Trade Center.

Obama read Psalm 46 that reminds the faithful that God is a refuge and strength that dwells in "his city".

Former President George W. Bush read a civil war letter from President Abraham Lincoln to a mother who lost all five of her sons.

As cellist Yo Yo Ma played mournful background music, relatives of the September 11 dead began entering a transformed ground zero, the centrepiece of a day of mourning and remembrance around the nation and the world to mark 10 years since the worst terrorist attack on American soil.

The heart of the ceremony to consecrate the memorial began with the reading of the names of nearly 3,000 people who died in the attacks.

One World Trade Center

The memorial opens to the public Monday. It sits next to a construction project where office towers, a transportation hub and a cultural centre are taking shape. The signature skyscraper, One World Trade Centre, is rising quickly and will be the tallest in the country when completed.

The relatives - some in solemn, black suits, others in fire department T-shirts - crowded into a space in front of a podium where Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Bush and his wife, Laura, watched solemnly above the memorial. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg served as master of ceremonies.

At sunrise, an American flag fluttered over six stories of the rising 1 World Trade Center. The sky was clear blue with scattered white clouds and a light breeze, not unlike the Tuesday morning 10 years ago.

The site was utterly changed from previous September 11 anniversaries. Along with the names in bronze, there were two man-made waterfalls where the towers once stood. Dozens of white oak trees competed for sunlight with surrounding skyscrapers.

People across America planned to gather to pray at cathedrals in their greatest cities and to lay roses before fire stations in their smallest towns. Around the world, many others will do something similar because so much changed for them on that day, too.

But much of the weight of this year's ceremonies lies in what will largely go unspoken. There's the anniversary's role in prompting Americans to consider how the attacks affected them and the larger world and the continuing struggle to understand 9/11's place in the lore of the nation.

"A lot's going on in the background," said Ken Foote, author of Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, examining the role that veneration of sites of death and disaster plays in modern life. "These anniversaries are particularly critical in figuring out what story to tell, in figuring out what this all means. It forces people to figure out what happened to us."

On Saturday in rural western Pennsylvania, more than 4,000 people began to tell the story again.

At the dedication of the Flight 93 National Memorial near the town of Shanksville, Bush and former President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Joe Biden joined the families of the 40 passengers and crew aboard the jet who fought back against their hijackers.

"The moment America's democracy was under attack, our citizens defied their captors by holding a vote," Bush said. Their choice cost them their lives.

The passengers and crew gave "the entire country an incalculable gift: They saved the Capitol from attack," an untold amount of lives and denied al-Qaida the symbolic victory of "smashing the centre of American government," Clinton said.