Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

FILE - In this Sept. 11, 2011 file photo, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo delivers his remarks during the 10th anniversary ceremonies at the Sept. 11 memorial, in New York. For the first time, elected officials won't be allowed to speak Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012. (AP Photo/Allan Tannenbaum, Pool, File)

For the first time, elected officials won't speak at Tuesday's ceremony at ground zero commemorating the Sept. 11 attacks, an occasion that has allowed them a solemn turn in the spotlight. The change was made in the name of sidelining politics, but some have rapped it as a political move in itself.

It's a sign of the entrenched sensitivity of the politics of Sept. 11, even after a decade of commemorating the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. From the first anniversary in 2002, the date has been filled with questions about how, or even whether, to try to separate the Sept. 11 that is about personal loss from the 9-11 that reverberates through public life.

The answers are complicated for Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles was the pilot of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon. She feels politicians' involvement can lend gravity to the remembrances, but she empathizes with the reasons for silencing officeholders at the New York ceremony this year.

"It is the one day, out of 365 days a year, where, when we invoke the term '9-11,' we mean the people who died and the events that happened," rather than the political and cultural layers the phrase has accumulated, said Burlingame, who's on the board of the organization that announced the change in plans this year.

"So I think the idea that it's even controversial that politicians wouldn't be speaking is really rather remarkable."

Remarkable, perhaps, but a glimpse through the political prism that splits so much surrounding Sept. 11 into different lights.

Officeholders from the mayor to presidents have been heard at the New York ceremony, reading texts ranging from parts of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address to poems by John Donne and Langston Hughes.

But in July, the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, led by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as its board chairman, announced that this year's version would include only relatives reading victims' names. Politicians still may attend.

The point, memorial President Joe Daniels said, was "honouring the victims and their families in a way free of politics" in an election year.

"You always want to change," Bloomberg said in a radio interview in July, "... and I think it'll be very moving."

Some victims' relatives and commentators praised the decision. "It is time" to extricate Sept. 11 from politics, the Boston Globe wrote in an editorial.