President Biden and his predecessors have typically marked the 9/11 anniversary at one of the three East Coast sites where nearly 3,000 people died 22 years ago.
President Biden, fresh off a four-day trip to Asia, marked the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on Monday by honoring service members and first responders in Alaska.
“We’ll never forget that when faced with evil, when an enemy sought to tear us apart, we endured,” Biden told a crowd of more than 1,000 people at a cavernous hangar on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage.
This year marks the 22nd anniversary of the day that Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked two commercial flights and crashed the planes into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in lower Manhattan. A third plane barreled into the Pentagon, and passengers overtook hijackers on a fourth plane before it crash-landed into an open field in Shanksville, Pa.
The 11th Airborne Division band boomed as Air Force One touched down Monday afternoon. Inside the hangar, rows of troops — some of whom were not yet born when the planes crashed into the twin towers — listened as Biden, standing in front of an oversized American flag and next to a CH-47 Chinook helicopter, emphasized the base’s importance to U.S. national security.
“We know that on this day 22 years ago, [planes] from this base were scrambled on high alert to escort planes through the airspace,” Biden said, linking the facility to the terrorist attacks that happened 3,000 miles away. “Alaskan communities opened their doors to stranded passengers.”
Biden and his predecessors have typically marked the anniversary of the terrorist attacks at one of the three sites where nearly 3,000 people died in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
