The President lays a wreath at Ground Zero and lowers his head in a moment of prayer flanked by first responders. He shakes their hands and those of a group of politicians and family members. He leaves for his private meeting with family members. The event appears to be low key. There is no flag waving, no loud bands – it’s noticeable just how low key it is.
There is no grandstanding by the President, no obvious waving to the press. The President remains focused on the people he’s meeting. In fact he doesn’t look up once at the media, who are kept at a distance. The predominant words being used to describe the President are personable, friendly, low-key, informal.
David Gergen joins in. Anderson asks him where we go from here. David stresses the President’s call for national unity and predicts it may override the carping and criticism we heard in former days. Following speaker says he doesn’t expect that tone to last for long. John King says it will take 25 years to get the story right on what happened in history. What an ironic statement knowing what we know.
More ironies. Donald Rumsfeld, one of the leading organizers of 9/11, is said to have been asked to lay a wreath at a remembrance service at the Pentagon today. If only the attendees knew.
And CNN wraps up its coverage.
So a muted ceremony, devoid of all the garish trappings and political opportunism of so many Bush Administration observances. Presenting the President in an admirable light.
My own sense is that these images will be needed as we head into a period in which I expect this whole bin Laden operation to unravel, just as I think it’s intended to do, leading to, I believe, demands for an investigation and a second inquiry, and culminating, I’m willing to bet, in the appointment of a special prosecutor and some prosecutions to follow. And it won’t be anyone associated with Obama who will be prosecuted. It will be the people responsible for 9/11.
Next on today’s agenda is a ceremony at the Pentagon, with VP Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, as all this is taking place, monumental flooding is occurring along the Mississippi as the cabal, in my view, continues punishing mid-America.
And … look at this, we barely miss a beat in picking up on the unravelling of this operation. CNN now announces that the helicopter that was left behind is a secret chopper that has now fallen into the hands of the Pakistanis, remember? The ones we dissed? We knew this was coming, right? You don’t just take a piece of new, top-secret technology into Pakistan and leave it there, right? Something’s meant by this.
This is the first act in the drama that will see this operation apparently backfire, leading to demands for an investigation. Watch for many more mistakes to be revealed, loose ends to be investigated, demands for the release of evidence that has already been identified, certain conclusions retreated from or questioned, etc. I predict that all hell will break loose and… well, if I say too much, this article may disappear.