President Joe Biden will visit the September 11 memorial sites to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
Visits are scheduled to point 0 in New York, the Pentagon and the outdoor monument in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 was forced to descend, the White House said Saturday.
The calendar will allow the president and the first girl, Jill Biden, to pay tribute to the nearly 3,000 people killed that day.
The White House said Vice President Kamala Harris and Gentleman Doug Emhoff will also travel to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, for a separate event.
They will then register for Mr. and Mrs. Biden at the Pentagon.
Biden’s timeline for the twentieth anniversary of the attacks is former President Barack Obama’s itinerary on the tenth anniversary of the 2011 attacks.
The Obamas’ trip to Lower Manhattan coincided with the unveiling of the monument on the site of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
Next Saturday’s anniversary falls in the shadow of the brutal end to the nearly two-decade U. S. war in Afghanistan, less than two weeks earlier.
The war was introduced in the weeks following the September 11 attacks to retaliate against al-Qaeda’s base in the country and the Taliban government, which provided the organization with a haven in which to operate.
While Biden’s resolve to end the standoff enjoys a large audience in the United States, the chaotic evacuation of U. S. troops, Afghan allies, and third-country nationals at this time in August has been widely criticized.
An early failure in the security of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport; the absence of capacity to allocate protection beyond the perimeter of the aerodrome; and the resulting catastrophic terrorist attack at one of the gates, were all condemned in the United States and abroad.
However, the airlift is the largest in U. S. history and is controlled to get more than 120,000 people out of Afghanistan in 17 days.
With the Sept. 11 anniversary fast approaching, Biden on Friday led a declassification review of government documents similar to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The order is a gesture to the families of the victims who have been searching for the files for a long time in hopes of implicating senior Saudi government officials.
The Justice Department will lead the proceeding and the Attorney General has six months to complete the review, adding the reasons why certain documents will be declassified.
Biden promised transparency about the factor in his 2020 campaign. When no action was taken once in power, the 9/11 families expressed their confrontation with the government over classified data that could be made public.
In August, 1,800 family members, survivors and first responders said they would oppose the president’s participation in the Sept. 11 commemorative occasions if the documents remained confidential. Biden then called for him to honor the commitment he had made to declassification and transparency.
Regarding the order issued Friday, the president said, “We will never have to forget the lingering pain of the families and the joyful ones of the 2,977 blameless people who died in the worst terrorist attack on America in our history. “for them, it wasn’t just a domestic and foreign tragedy, it was non-public devastation.
He concluded, “My center continues to be with the families who suffered on September 11 and my administration will continue to interact respectfully with members of this community. I salute their voices and concepts as we chart a path forward. “