US remembers 9/11 still haunted by bin Laden

UNITED STATES: The United States marked six years since the September 11 attacks Tuesday with solemn ceremonies but still haunted by Osama bin Laden, who used the anniversary to praise the hijackers behind the attacks.

In an overcast New York, families of the 2,749 people killed when two planes plowed into the World Trade Center twin towers paid their respects near the site as rescue workers read the names of the dead, in what has now become an annual ritual.

With heads bowed, holding photographs of the dead and fighting to hold back the tears, relatives listened as the grim roll call was read out.

“We come together again as New Yorkers and as Americans to share a loss that can’t be measured and to remember the names of those who can’t be replaced,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, opening the commemorations.

The day of the attacks six years ago was “a day that tore across our history and our hearts,” he said.

As in previous years, Al-Qaeda leader bin Laden used the anniversary to release two videotapes, mocking the United States, threatening to escalate the unpopular war in Iraq and praising hijacker Walid al-Shehri as a “champion.”

Shehri was on American Airlines Flight 11, the first jet to crash into the World Trade Center in New York. The video also featured Shehri, in the sixth such last will and testament issued by one of the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001.

Shehri was “a young man who personally penetrated the most extreme degrees of danger and is a rarity among men: one of the 19 champions,” a US-based monitoring group that obtained the video quoted bin Laden as saying.

The militant Islamist leader remains at large and is believed to be hiding in the mountainous region straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where hijackers brought down United Airlines Flight 93 in a field after a passenger uprising, tributes were held to honour the 40 passengers and crew killed there.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates meanwhile led a ceremony in Washington for the 184 people killed when American Airlines Flight 77 flew into the Pentagon. “The enemies of America — the enemies of our values — will never again rest easily for we will hunt them down relentlessly and without reservations,” Gates said at the ceremony.

Meanwhile European authorities were on alert on the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks Tuesday as Turkish police defused a powerful bomb and German authorities mounted a major security operation at a US military base.

Meanwhile, more than 150 people were arrested in Brussels for taking part in a banned demonstration against “the Islamisation of Europe”, and Denmark’s prime minister called on Muslim religious leaders to help ensure that young people did not turn to extremism.

As the United States commemorated the nearly 3,000 people who died in the attacks on New York and Washington, the German interior ministry blamed a little-known group from Uzbekistan — the Islamic Jihad Union, which has links to Al-Qaeda — for a recent plot to attack a major US base in the country.

Washington, London,

Wednesday, AFP

We will get bin Laden:White House

UNITED STATES: The White House vowed Tuesday the United States would capture elusive Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as it marked the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

US President George W. Bush has pledged “he’d like to find him. He said all along: we are going to find him,” spokesman Tony Snow said, just hours after a new video of bin Laden praising one of the 9/11 hijackers was released.

But Snow added: “The fact is that the war against terror is not a war against one guy, Osama bin Laden. It is against a network that uses all sorts of ways of trying to recruit new terrorists.”

“Bin Laden is somebody who is the symgbolic leader of Al-Qaeda. Certainly the capture of bin Laden would be of enormous symbolic importance,” Snow said.

Meanwhile US intelligence chief said that Al-Qaeda’s “intellectual leader” was not Osama bin Laden, who had been credited as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, but his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, downplayed the bin Laden’s significance in an interview with ABC television, calling him “more a figurehead than anything else.”

“Quite frankly, the real intellectual leader of Al-Qaeda is not Osama bin Laden, but it’s the number two, Zawahiri, who’s an Egyptian, which is an interesting contrast,” he said.