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let us not forget...
Sep. 11th, 2007 09:32 am...that as much of a lie as Bush's war in Iraq has been, the attacks of 11 September 2001 were no lie. The Pentagon was hit at 9.37. I was working just down the road, and friends of mine were in the building or working nearby. One friend, a Navy civilian employee, was in the section hit.
Nor were the 11 March 2004 bombings in Madrid a lie nor the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. We are engaged in a serious struggle with a revolutionary movement based in fundamentalist Islam but represented and supported by many of the citizens of all our countries. It is a terrorist movement that spans national frontiers and ethnic divisions. And it seeks to kill, injure, or harm as many people as possible in pursuit of a goal straight out of a James Bond villain's speech: total world domination. They are happy to use all sorts of angry, wounded, embattled people in their quest, but they don't care a fig for the injustices that have been done to those people--they are only means to an end.
9/11 conspiracy theories, partisan politics, the criminal and foolish war in Iraq, these are all distractions from what must be our main goals: finding and destroying those who would attack us and rendering their forces helpless. And a huge part of that task, one that many of our governments have done little or nothing to address, is working to right the injustices suffered by so many throughout the world that make them such ready targets for recruitment. And helping to provide alternatives to fundamentalist hatred and ignorance, so that those who are not injured but who have been inflamed by propaganda will not be duped by these evil men into doing their bidding.
Nor were the 11 March 2004 bombings in Madrid a lie nor the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. We are engaged in a serious struggle with a revolutionary movement based in fundamentalist Islam but represented and supported by many of the citizens of all our countries. It is a terrorist movement that spans national frontiers and ethnic divisions. And it seeks to kill, injure, or harm as many people as possible in pursuit of a goal straight out of a James Bond villain's speech: total world domination. They are happy to use all sorts of angry, wounded, embattled people in their quest, but they don't care a fig for the injustices that have been done to those people--they are only means to an end.
9/11 conspiracy theories, partisan politics, the criminal and foolish war in Iraq, these are all distractions from what must be our main goals: finding and destroying those who would attack us and rendering their forces helpless. And a huge part of that task, one that many of our governments have done little or nothing to address, is working to right the injustices suffered by so many throughout the world that make them such ready targets for recruitment. And helping to provide alternatives to fundamentalist hatred and ignorance, so that those who are not injured but who have been inflamed by propaganda will not be duped by these evil men into doing their bidding.
