| Bush will be at the Pentagon, but later in the day to lay a wreath at the site with his wife, Laura.
"(CNN) The president began a grim but high-profile journey through all three scenes of the day's devastation on Sunday with wreath-layings in the vast gash that is all that remains of the World Trade Center's twin towers. Similarly painful memories were being renewed at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
At a memorial observance near the site where an American Airlines plane slammed into the Pentagon five years ago, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld walked side-by-side to the speaker's platform as somber music played. Rumsfeld's arm was in a sling; he is recovering from shoulder surgery.
A moment of silence was observed at 9:37 a.m. EDT, the exact time the plane struck, killing 184 people.
After spending the night in New York, Bush opened the anniversary day with breakfast at a historic Lower East Side firehouse nicknamed "Fort Pitt," in honor of the many first responders who burst into the towers to save lives but lost their own. Outside, with fire trucks and police vehicles as a backdrop, Bush and several dozen firefighters, city police and Port Authority officers were joining in a moment of silence to mark the times when hijacked planes crashed into the two towers.
Later in the day, he was to place more wreaths, on the spot in Shanksville where Flight 93 was diverted from its murderous intentions into the ground and at the rebuilt Pentagon wall where another hijacked jetliner pierced the most enduring symbol of American military might.
Bush concludes the observance with a 9 p.m. EDT address to the nation from the White House. With these events, he abandoned the quiet approach he has adopted in recent years to mark the day of America's worst-ever terrorist attack." | |
