[Sosfbay-discuss] Anna Eshoo's speech on the House Floor yesterday

[Wes Rolley]

Maybe some ammunition here. as she is surely mouthing platitudes.. 
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MS. ESHOO. Mr. Speaker, today we join together to honor the nearly 3,000 
people who perished in the heinous attacks on our country five years 
ago. The images of that day remain vivid in our minds, as do the 
emotions we all felt – the shock, the grief – as we realized that a 
handful of terrorists plotting halfway around the world were capable of 
destroying so many innocent lives on American soil. September 11, 2001, 
shattered the illusion that our homeland would always provide safe 
sanctuary from those who would do us harm.

Five years later, we also remember how the events of September 11 
brought our country together. As we did after Pearl Harbor, America 
showed its true colors. After the twin towers fell, we put aside our 
political differences to unite behind a pledge to make our country safer 
and to track down and punish those responsible for the attacks. With the 
world on our side, we had a unique opportunity to marshal our vast 
resources to destroy the al Qaeda terrorist network for good.

We made a good start. At home, we moved quickly to tighten airport 
security and to reorganize our homeland defenses and intelligence 
infrastructure to close gaps that enabled the terrorists to use our own 
commercial airliners as weapons against us. Overseas, working with our 
allies, our military took the fight to al Qaeda and the Taliban, who had 
provided safe harbor to the terrorists and their training camps in 
Afghanistan for far too long.

Today, however, it is clear that we have failed to finish the job we 
needed to do. Instead of committing our forces to pursuing al Qaeda’s 
leaders – including Osama bin Laden, who is still at large – we embarked 
on an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq that has squandered our 
resources and the world’s goodwill without making us measurably safer.

Domestically, we’ve spent billions to secure our airports, but we’ve 
neglected the security of our ports and the cyber security of our 
technological infrastructure and communications networks. Chronic 
underfunding and lax security standards have left our nation’s ports and 
cargo containers a soft underbelly, and the President’s ongoing failure 
to appoint an Assistant Homeland Security Secretary for Cyber Security 
has created a leadership void in this critical sector, leaving us 
vulnerable to a telecom disaster on the scale of an "electronic Pearl 
Harbor."

It’s not too late to change course to do what must be done to prevail in 
the real war against terrorism.

We must recommit to finishing the job in Afghanistan, to fully funding 
our counterterrorism intelligence programs at home and abroad, to 
increasing the size of our Special Forces, to improving our human 
intelligence capability and to securing nuclear materials around the world.

Only then will we truly be able to say that we have fully honored those 
who lost their lives on September 11.

-- 
"I find I have a great lot to learn – or unlearn. I seem to know far too much and this knowledge obscures the really significant facts, but I am getting on." -- Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Wesley C. Rolley
17211 Quail Court
Morgan Hill, CA 95037
(408)778-3024
http://www.refpub.com/