As Americans commemorated the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks Sunday, current and former U.S. officials said the homeland is safer, but the fight has grown more complicated as terrorist groups expand their global footprint and evolve their tactics.
At ceremonies in New York City, the Pentagon and across the nation, mourners gathered to remember the nearly 3,000 who died when al Qaeda extremists hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed them. Flags across the U.S. flew at half-staff.
President Obama, marking his final 9/11 anniversary in office, said the U.S. must resist extremists’ efforts to divide the country.
“We know that our diversity, our patchwork heritage is not a weakness; it is still and always will be one of our greatest strengths,” the president told survivors and families of victims at a ceremony at the Pentagon. “This is the America that we must remain true to.”
Despite a tradition of putting aside partisan politics on the anniversary, the presidential campaign intruded on Sunday’s observance when Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton left about 90 minutes into the ground zero ceremony after feeling “overheated,” her campaign said.
The incident, in which Mrs. Clinton appeared to faint as she was being helped into a van, renewed questions about the candidate’s health. The campaign put out a statement in the afternoon saying she had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday.
Also, Mr. Obama seemed to refer in his remarks to Republican nominee Donald Trump’s proposals to bar Muslims temporarily from entering the U.S. He said extremists know they cannot defeat the U.S., so “they try to terrorize in the hopes that they can stoke enough fear that we turn on each other, and that we change who we are or how we live.”
“That’s why it is so important to day that we reaffirm our character as a nation of people drawn from every corner of the world: every color, every religion, every background, bound by a creed as old as our founding — E Pluribus Unum, out of many, we are one,” Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Trump called the anniversary “a day of sadness and remembrance.”
“It is also a day of resolve,” he said. “Our solemn duty on behalf of all those who perished that September day 15 years ago, is to work together as one nation to keep all of our people safe from an enemy that seeks nothing less than to destroy our way of life. We pray for those who have lost the ones they love so much, and we also pray for the unity we will need to conquer all the challenges to come.”
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, whose birthday is Sept. 11, said the U.S. has made “significant progress” in preventing another large-scale attack on the homeland. But he said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “lone wolf” attacks such as the mass shootings in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando, Florida, are more difficult to stop.
“That’s the thing that presents the challenge most directly for our homeland,” Mr. Johnson told host Jake Tapper. “It’s, frankly, the thing that keeps me up at night. And it requires a whole of government response.”
The Islamic State has taken root in Syria and Iraq in the wake of civil war and a U.S. invasion. Meanwhile, jihadi groups like Boko Haram are wreaking havoc in West Africa, and France, Belgium and Germany have suffered from Islamic State-inspired attacks in their cities.
“We’re always fighting the last war, and then they figure a new one for us,” Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who helped his city rebound after the 2001 attacks, told ABC’s “This Week.”
“Having gone after the mafia and the Colombian drug cartels, I can tell you it’s easier to go after a single organization than it is what we’re facing today, which is this Islamic nation which we think of just as ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but it has spread its tentacles all over the world,” said Mr. Giuliani, an ally of Mr. Trump. “They’re in 28 different countries. Al Qaeda never had the capacity to do that.”
Administration officials said they are cutting into the Islamic State’s “caliphate” and its overall appeal.
“Progress is being made, not only in Iraq and Syria, but beyond,” CIA Director John O. Brennan told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Mr. Brennan defended the use of pilotless drones to take out terrorist cells and their leaders, saying they are “exceptionally powerful and capable” tools, despite critics who say the attacks result in too much collateral damage.
Yet Mr. Brennan said the U.S. needs to be surgical in taking out the cancer of Islamic-inspired jihadism abroad “without damaging the surrounding tissue.”
Mrs. Clinton told CNN in an interview Sunday that Mr. Trump is making the fight against Islamic jihadism harder than it should be, with his proposal to restrict Muslim immigration to the U.S. She said she wants to intensify airstrikes and special force operations to cut into the so-called caliphate, even if “that’s not the end of the struggle.”
“The struggle is against a violent ideology, a form of jihadism that is very much propagating over the internet,” Mrs. Clinton said.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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