Bush marks 3-month anniversary of attacks

By Scott Lindlaw

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Precisely three months after the first jetliner slammed into the World Trade Center, the American national anthem played today at the White House, across the country and throughout the globe as President Bush vowed to “right this huge wrong.”

At 8:46 a.m. EDT, a drum roll echoed in the East Room, a solemn backdrop for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Bush said America does not need monuments and memorials to grieve the deaths of more than 3,000 people in suicide hijackings over New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. “For those of us who lived through these events, the only marker we’ll ever need is the tick of a clock on the 46th minute on the 8th hour of the 11th day. We’ll remember where we were and how we felt. We’ll remember the dead and what we owe them. We’ll remember what we lost and what we found.”

“Every one of the innocents who died on September the 11th was the most important person on earth to somebody,” he said. “Every death extinguished a world.”

Solicitor General Ted Olson, whose wife, Barbara, died in the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon, said: “We will never forget our loved ones who died or who were wounded on Sept. 11. We will fight this evil for as long and as patiently as it takes.”

At the Pentagon, where a hijacked plane struck an hour after the New York crashes, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld led a memorial ceremony.

The terrorists want to extinguish the memory of those who died in the attack, he said. “We will remember … until freedom triumphs over fear, over repression and long beyond.”

In New York City, firefighters and construction workers stopped work and shut down their heavy machinery to observe a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m. at ground zero.

As a light drizzle fell, prayers were offered by Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy. “They took down those structures, but they will not take away the spirit,” said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, a Fire Department chaplain.

From New York’s ground zero to the Pentagon to the Ukraine, commemorations began at the same moment.

The astronauts aboard space shuttle Endeavour and the international space station joined the commemoration. In Houston, flight director Wayne Hale said: “In stark contrast to the international cooperation and unity in our efforts to take mankind literally to the stars, we’re reminded of our loss and sorrow due to the acts of violence and terror in an unprecedented attack on freedom, democracy and civilization itself.”

In Portland, Ore., bagpipes cried out “Amazing Grace.”

Later, Bush was to visit the Citadel, the state military college in Charleston, S.C. He was to outline his views on the new demands the war on terrorism is placing on the military and on intelligence-gathering, and offer a vision of how the new coalition could change the global landscape.

Events were scheduled in more than 80 countries, the White House said.

The international commemorations are meant in part to remind the world that people from more than 80 countries died in the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon and the crash in Pennsylvania – and to reinforce Bush’s global anti-terror coalition.

The Citadel was the site of a speech Bush gave during his presidential campaign in September 1999, and aides distributed that text, eager to point out that Bush seemed to sense the danger of terrorism.

In that speech, Bush warned of “an era of car bombers and plutonium merchants and cyberterrorists and drug cartels and unbalanced dictators.”

“Once a strategic afterthought, homeland defense has become an urgent duty,” he said then.

Today’s speech was also to cover the United States’ thawing relationship with Russia, bioterrorism and what Bush sees as the potential for a new world order, improving long-tense relationships with such nations as Pakistan, India and Russia in the anti-terror campaign.

Mostly, though, Bush was to focus on transforming the military to wage that campaign.

Bush hasn’t spelled out exactly what he seeks, but his administration has favored such new-generation military hardware as the Global Hawk, a long-range, high-altitude spy plane that has seen its first use in Afghanistan.

The president was also pointing out that the transformation will cost money, aides said.

His address comes as House-Senate bargainers begin writing a compromise $20 billion anti-terrorism bill to be attached to the $318 billion defense bill. The Senate bill contains an additional $2 billion for the Pentagon to use on construction and the war or terrorism. That’s $5.3 billion less than Bush wanted and the GOP-controlled House approved.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that cutting the money Bush wanted for the Pentagon would “reduce our ability to sustain the operational intensity we will need in the effort to defeat terrorism” and would “send the wrong signal to our armed forces and our adversaries.” The Senate approved its package by voice vote anyway.