WORLD> America
US marks 7th anniversary of 9/11 terrorist attacks
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-09-11 21:12

Flags blow in the wind at the Flight 93 Temporary Memorial outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, September 11, 2008, the seventh anniversary of the attacks on New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. [Agencies] 

About 3,500 people attended last year's ceremony, down about 25 percent from 2006.

"We've kept it alive, and perhaps kept it alive too long," said Charles Wolf, whose wife, Katherine, was killed at the World Trade Center. "How many times do you reopen the wounds?"

Wolf, who lives in downtown Manhattan, attends the ceremony every year but said it has become more painful, especially to stand in silence for the moment that a plane crashed into the tower where his wife worked. "It's one thing to remember," he said, "but it's another to relive it."

The ceremony moved to a park just east of ground zero last year because of construction at the trade center site. But family members are allowed to descend seven stories below ground to the site and touch the spot where their loved ones died.

The ceremony will include the reading of 2,751 victims' names, one more than last year. The city restored Sneha Philip, a woman who mysteriously vanished on Sept. 10, 2001, to its official death toll this year after a court ruled that she was likely killed at the trade center.

McCain and Obama planned to visit the site after the ceremony concluded Thursday afternoon. The candidates agreed weeks ago to pull their campaign ads for the day and were appearing together Thursday night at a forum on volunteerism and service.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani was to speak at the ceremony, as he has every year in New York, along with officials including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Last year's reading by Giuliani, then a Republican presidential candidate, drew protests from family members who said the city was ill-prepared for the terrorist attacks under his leadership and questioned whether he should be there while running for the White House. They had no opposition to McCain and Obama' visit this year.