With no partisan agenda, as both he and Mitt Romney have suspended their campaign efforts for the day, President Obama gave a somber address to the nation Tuesday (Sept. 11) in commemoration of the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that took the lives of more than 2,000 people. Speaking from the White House, the commander in chief noted the occasion as an opportunity to reflect on the lives lost. “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,” he said. “No act of terrorism can ever change what we stand for.”
Following the 2001 attacks at New York City’s World Trade Center, and the Pentagon, the president noted the tragic event as an opportunity to “renew our faith, that even the darkest night gives way to a brighter dawn.”
Citing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the killing of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, as examples the POTUS made it clear that the lives of the innocent people in the Trade Center and those on American Airlines Flight 77, which was deliberately crashed into the western side of the Pentagon, were not lost in vain. “Your loved ones will never be forgotten,” he continued. “They will endure in the hearts of our nation, because through their sacrifice they helped us make the America we are today, an America that has emerged even stronger.”
Obama also named al-Qaeda as being at the center of the fight against terrorism, not “Islam, or any religion.”
Over at Ground Zero in New York City, the names of the men and women—some of whom were first responders who bravely put their lives on the lines to save others— killed on 9/11 will be read throughout the day.
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Photos: AP/Getty/ Nat. Geo
