September 11

May we never forget.


Gary Taustine, Image #2216, The September 11 Digital Archive, 10 September 2003,


Sadly, the Democratic Presidential Candidate seems to have.

BROKAW: We're back on stage at the Peace Center for Performing Arts in Greenville, South Carolina, with the seven presidential candidates contesting for the Democratic presidential nomination. South Carolina's primary is next Tuesday.

Senator Kerry, let me ask you a question. Robert Kagan, who writes about these issues a great deal from the Carnegie Institute for Peace, has written recently that Europeans believe that the Bush administration has exaggerated the threat of terrorism, and the Bush administration believes that the Europeans simply don't get it.

Who is right?

KERRY: I think it's somewhere in between. I think that there has been an exaggeration and there has been a refocusing...

BROKAW: Where has the exaggeration been in the threat on terrorism?

KERRY: Well, 45 minutes deployment of weapons of mass destruction, number one.

Please, Mr. Kerry, tell us how long after takeoff it took for the terrorists to turn our planes into missles?

Aerial vehicles to be able to deliver materials of mass destruction, number two.

I guess 3,000 dead on September 11 doesn't count as mass destruction? Or perhaps he doesn't remeber that the destruction was delivered by aerial means.

I mean, I -- nuclear weapons, number three.

Perhaps he's never heard of Pakistan. Or, maybe if he actually attended some of the Senate Intelligence meetings he likes to miss, he would have learned how much Osama Bin Laden has sought nuclear weapons.

I could run a long list of clear misleading, clear exaggeration. The linkage to Al Qaida, number four.

Can the Democratic Presidential Candidate seriously doubt that Al Qaida are not terrorists? Or even linked to the September 11th attacks?

That said, they are really misleading all of America, Tom, in a profound way. The war on terror is less -- it is occasionally military, and it will be, and it will continue to be for a long time. And we will need the best-trained and the most well-equipped and the most capable military, such as we have today.

But it's primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world -- the very thing this administration is worst at. And most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven't embraced, because otherwise we're inviting a clash of civilizations.

There he goes again. He does think this is a police action and fails to see how we are at war. I simply can't fathom how they nominated this guy.