US: The United States commemorates the attacks of September 11th, 2001, today amid a vigorous debate over whether the actions of the Bush administration over the past five years have made America safer.
Vice-president Dick Cheney claimed yesterday that the administration had done a "helluva job" in preventing further attacks on US soil through strengthened homeland security.
"I don't know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years of defeating the efforts of al-Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans. You have got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right," Mr Cheney told NBC's Meet the Press.
Democrats accuse the administration of squandering $300 billion and more than 2,600 American lives on the war in Iraq, instead of improving security at ports, chemical sites and other potential targets and hunting down Osama bin Laden.
"We have not pursued the war on terror with the vigour that we should have because we've gotten bogged down in this civil war in Iraq. What we ought to be doing is going after Osama bin Laden full-scale," said Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean.
President Bush yesterday began a two-day tour of the three September 11th crash sites - the World Trade Center site in New York, the Pentagon in Washington and the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United flight 93 crashed. Mr Bush does not plan to make speeches at any of the sites but will make a televised address to the nation this evening.
At the World Trade Center site this morning, the names of all those who died in the attacks will be read out during a three-hour commemoration. A massive quilt, bearing the names and pictures of all the victims, was unveiled in New York at the weekend and the largest free-flying flag in the world is hanging on the city's George Washington Bridge.
Mr Cheney yesterday defended the Iraq war as part of the global "war on terror" and warned that a premature withdrawal of US troops would send a signal of weakness to Islamist terrorists. He acknowledged that the administration had underestimated the durability of the Iraqi insurgency and that most Americans believe that Iraq is more dangerous now than it was when Saddam Hussein was in power.
"The people obviously are frustrated because of the difficulty in cost and casualties, but you cannot look at Iraq in isolation. You have to look at it in the context of the global war on terror," he said. A Senate report revealed last week that a CIA assessment in October 2005 said Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbour or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.
Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said that, even if Saddam knew nothing about the 9/11 attacks, toppling his regime was an appropriate response. "If you think that 9/11 was just about al-Qaeda and the hijackers, then there's no connection to Iraq.
"But if you believe, as the president does and as I believe, that the problem is this ideology of hatred that has taken root, extremist ideology that has taken root in the Middle East, and that you have to go to the source and do something about the politics of that region. It is unimaginable that you could do something about the Middle East with Saddam Hussein sitting in the centre of it, threatening his neighbours, threatening our allies, tying down American forces in Saudi Arabia," she said.