President to Travel to Ground Zero to Honor Lives Lost

Mr. Obama, in his first visit as president to ground zero, plans to lay a wreath at a memorial to the nearly 3,000 victims of the 9/11 attacks. He will also meet privately with family members of the victims, firefighters and other rescue workers who died in the September 2001 attacks.

“He wants to meet with them and share with them this important and significant moment, a bittersweet moment,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said on Wednesday.

It is a quiet coda to a week that began with a stunning announcement by Mr. Obama, just before midnight on Sunday, that a team of Navy Seals had stormed Bin Laden’s hiding place – a heavily-fortified compound in an affluent town not far from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

Mr. Obama invited former president George W. Bush to join him at ground zero, but Mr. Bush declined. A spokesman for the former president said he appreciated the invitation but wanted to stick to his policy of staying out of the public spotlight since he left office.

For Mr. Bush, ground zero was the site of one of the iconic moments of his presidency. Days after the World Trade Center towers collapsed, he traveled to the smoldering wreckage to thank the rescue workers, delivering his speech through a firefighter’s bullhorn.

The White House was quick to say it took no offense at Mr. Bush’s decision not to attend, saying that Mr. Bush was invited in the spirit of unity that Mr. Obama said he hoped would prevail in the wake of Bin Laden’s killing, just as it prevailed after the killings perpetrated by Bin Laden nearly a decade ago.

“We’ve made clear that this is a moment of unity for Americans and a moment to recall the unity that existed in this country in the wake of the attacks on 9/11,” Mr. Carney said.

Mr. Obama visited ground zero while a presidential candidate, but he has not been there since entering the White House. He does not plan a deliver a speech, a decision that White House officials said was calculated to avoid any appearance of exploiting the families of the victims for political gain.

“NYC is about honoring the victims and their families,” one senior administration official said.

On Friday, the president will go on the road again to Fort Campbell in Kentucky for a less somber occasion: to pay tribute to those who flew the Navy Seal team to Bin Laden’s compound deep inside Pakistan. The Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which provided air transportation for the Navy assault team, is based at Fort Campbell.

 

Jimmy Carter and Other Ex- Leaders to Travel to N. Korea

SEOUL, South Korea — Former President Jimmy Carter arrived in North Korea on Tuesday, news agencies reported, for talks aimed at reducing tensions on the fractious Korean Peninsula.

The so-called six-party talks on the denuclearization of North Korea remain in limbo, and Mr. Carter said official dialogue with the North “appears to be at a standstill.” The talks have involved North and South Korea, the United States, Russia, China and Japan.

Mr. Carter and three former leaders from Europe arrived in Beijing on Sunday. Traveling with Mr. Carter were former President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway and former President Mary Robinson of Ireland. The four are members of The Elders, an independent group of world leaders founded by Nelson Mandela.

“Clearly, there is a great level of mistrust between North and South Korea,” Mr. Ahtisaari said. “But the stakes are too high to allow this standoff to continue.”

The group was hoping to meet with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, although Mr. Carter said Monday that such a meeting had not yet been arranged.

On Thursday, after meetings in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, the Elders group is scheduled to travel to Seoul.

It was also unclear whether Mr. Carter would press North Korean officials to release an American man who has been detained by North Korea on unspecified charges since November.

This month, the North Korean government said the man had already “admitted his crime.” The South Korean news agency Yonhap, citing sources in the United States that it did not name, said he was Jun Young-su, a Korean-American businessman in his 60s from Orange County, Calif.

Yonhap said Mr. Jun had been taken into custody in connection with illegal religious activities in the North.

A State Department spokesman, Mark C. Toner, confirmed that an American was being held by the North, but he and other United States officials declined to name the detainee and offered no personal details, citing privacy rules. The United States called on North Korea to release the American “on humanitarian grounds.”

The State Department has said that Mr. Carter’s trip is a private journey and that he is not acting as an American envoy.

Mr. Carter has been successful at freeing jailed Americans in the past. He made a private trip to Pyongyang last August to win the release of Aijalon Mahli Gomes, 31, of Boston, who had been convicted of illegally entering North Korea.

Mr. Gomes was sentenced in April 2010 to eight years of hard labor and was fined $700,000. The Carter Center, the organization founded by Mr. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, said Mr. Gomes was granted amnesty by Mr. Kim.