Family members of the 9/11 victims have called on President Joe Biden to stay away from memorial events unless he declassifies files about the attacks.
Nearly 1,800 people signed a letter calling on President Biden to release documents that they believe implicate officials from Saudi Arabia in the plot.
They say that if he refuses, the president should not attend ceremonies next month to commemorate the 20th anniversary.
Nearly 3,000 people died on 9/11 terror attacks.
According to the investigators, the attacks were committed by the Al Qaeda terror group and triggered the US invasion of Afghanistan. Fifteen of the 19 plane hijackers were Saudi nationals.
“We cannot in good faith, and with veneration to those lost, sick, and injured, welcome the president to our hallowed grounds until he fulfils his commitment,” says the letter from family members, first responders and survivors.
They call on President Biden to stay away from the three sites where the attacks took place – in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
The families have long argued that Saudi officials had advance knowledge of the attack, and did nothing to stop it. They have sued the government of Saudi Arabia, which has denied being involved.
Last month, the lawsuit saw several top former Saudi officials questioned under oath. The depositions remain sealed, further upsetting families.
“Since the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission in 2004 much investigative evidence has been uncovered implicating Saudi government officials in supporting the attacks,” the families’ statement continues.
“Through multiple administrations, the Department of Justice and the FBI have actively sought to keep this information secret and prevent the American people from learning the full truth about the 9/11 attacks.”
The administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump also declined to declassify the documents, citing national security concerns.
“Twenty years later, there is simply no reason – unmerited claims of ‘national security’ or otherwise – to keep this information secret,” the group writes.
“But if President Biden reneges on his commitment and sides with the Saudi government, we would be compelled to publicly stand in objection to any participation by his administration in any memorial ceremony of 9/11.”
BASE jumpers Andrew Rossig and James Brady, who parachuted off New York’s One World Trade Center, “sullied the memories” of 9/11 victims, a judge has ruled.
Andrew Rossig, 34, and James Brady, 33, were convicted of reckless endangerment and unauthorized climbing in connection with the jump in September 2013.
The jumpers were fined $2,000 each on August 10 and given community service.
They leapt from the top of the 104-storey skyscraper after sneaking through a hole in a construction fence.
A third jumper, Marko Markovich, will be sentenced on August 17.
Base jumping is an extreme sport, which involves leaping from high structures with a parachute.
Photo Getty Images
The jumpers filmed their night-time exploits at One World Trade Center using helmet cameras and posted the video online.
The building, which was still under construction at the time, is located at the same site where 2,700 lost their lives in the Islamist attack on September 11, 2001.
It contains a museum and memorial garden dedicated to those who died.
Judge Juan Merchan said: “These defendants tarnished the building before it even opened and sullied the memories of those who jumped on 9/11, not for sport but because they had to.”
In June, a jury acquitted each of the three men of the more serious charge of burglary.
Speaking after sentencing, Andrew Rossig apologized for his actions and vowed never to parachute in New York City again.
“We understand that what we did could possibly have endangered other people and it’s never going to happen again,” he added.
The unidentified remains of 9/11 victims returned to the World Trade Center site in a solemn procession on Saturday morning.
The remains left the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on Manhattan’s East Side shortly before 7 a.m. in three city vehicles. They were accompanied by police and fire department vehicles with lights flashing but no sirens.
Construction workers paused as the motorcade passed, and about 10 firefighters stood in the cool breeze saluting the vehicles as they arrived. The remains will be transferred to a repository 70 feet underground in the same building as the National September 11 Memorial Museum.
The unidentified remains of 9/11 victims returned to the World Trade Center site in a solemn procession
Like many decisions involving the site of the nation’s worst terrorist attack, the disposition of the unidentified remains has been contentious.
A group of victims’ family members who say the remains should be stored in an above-ground monument separate from the museum protested the procession. About a dozen wore black bands over their mouths at the site Saturday.
Other family members support the plans, which have been in the works for years.
Uniformed officers from the New York Police Department and Fire Department of New York and the Port Authority police carried the three caskets into the repository.
The facility will be available for family visits but will be overseen by the medical examiner. Officials hope that improvements in technology will eventually lead to the identification of the 7,930 fragmentary remains.
The death toll stemming from the attacks at the World Trade Center stands at 2,753. Of those, 1,115 (41%) have not been identified.
After the 2001 attacks on New York City, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had to contend with thousands of bodies, many completely shattered and unrecognizable, buried among the wreckage of the crumbled buildings.
A huge 1.8 million tons was eventually moved to a landfill for workers to start sifting through, in the hopes of making positive IDs on the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks.
Nearly 11 years on, a small group of scientists are still desperately working to give grieving families the justice they crave.
More than 9,000 pieces of bone, some the size of just a Tic Tac, are kept at Memorial Park, a building on 30th Street in Manhattan, New York Magazine reported last year.
Nearly 11 years on, a small group of scientists are still desperately working to give grieving families the justice they crave
Five dedicated staff inexhaustibly sift through crushed remains of bone taken from the scene day after day, cross-referencing any clues they get with DNA samples from the victims’ families.
Last year, just two IDs were made, leaving 1,121 victims still unidentified. So far, the office has identified less than 60% of the 2,753 people who died on 9/11.
Just 17 of the remains were identified by sight alone, 305 were determined by fingerprints, 25 by photographs, 78 by personal effects, 534 by dental or body X-rays and six by tattoos.
The work also involves profiling the DNA of the victims to match against the bones. Samples were collected by taking DNA from toothbrushes or by swabbing living relatives.
Even though it is painstaking, families have praised the work as vital.
Jim Riches, a former deputy chief of the FDNY who lost his son on 9/11, told the magazine: “We recovered my son March 25, 2002 but it wasn’t all of him. I would want to bring all his parts back to Queens and put them all in one place.”
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