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How Kerry views 9/11
Hey, mainstream Republicans and conservatives, if you’re looking for something that would finish off Kerry, if we were living in a sound society (but won’t, because we’re not), try this. Today, according to Powerline, Kerry characterized the September 11th attack on America as follows:
[W]e are all united in hunting down and capturing or killing those who conducted that raid and we always knew that that was Osama bin Laden.The greatest terrorist act in history, in which the perpretators destroyed two of the largest buildings in the world and the entire World Trade Center surrounding them, in which they destroyed a fifth of the Pentagon and came close to destroying the U.S. Capitol and the White House, in which they killed the passengers and crew of four jet airliners, essentially vaporizing everyone on board, in which they killed a total of 3,000 people but might easily have killed 30,000—Kerry boy describes this as a “raid,” as though a troop of Indians had ridden out of the hills and made off with some horses. If such a comment had come from Bush, we could dismiss it as mere misspeaking. In Kerry’s case, it clearly expresses his true politics, which is to dismiss or ignore the very possibility that America faces a genuine enemy, because if we had a genuine enemy, that would require us to wage war against him instead of building coalitions and partnerships and inter-civilizational summits where we can get together with Molsem leaders and assure them how much we appreciate them and their religion and that we’re really, really sorry for any misunderstandings that may have cropped up between us over the last 1,400 years. If we weren’t living in a leftized society, a remark such as Kerry’s would have severely damaged him. In fact, he has already said a great number of things during this campaign that should have severely damaged or destroyed him, but haven’t. So why should this incident be any different? Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 30, 2004 06:44 PM | Send Comments
“We are all united in hunting down and capturing or killing those who conducted that raid and we always knew that that was Osama bin Laden.” — KILLING THOSE WHO CONDUCTED THAT RAID —-! Well 19 of those who conducted that raid aree dead. There are possible 2-3 remaining participants. Kerry will kill them and he is done by his own definition. Posted by: Mik on October 30, 2004 9:37 PMMik, you’re absolutely right. That may be even more damning than his use of the word “raid.” He seems to be saying that we’re only seeking to kill/capture the immediate perpetrators, who of course are all dead, plus the people in the Al Qaeda command who were involved in planning the attack. Al Qaeda as such, and various other Islamist and Arab terrorist groups as such, are not included. It also occurs to me that this may be the way to reconcile Kerry’s contradictory statements that, on one hand, he views the war on terror as primarily a law enforcement operation, and that, on the other hand, he wants to “kill” terrorists. The number of terrorists he wants to kill is limited to those who planned and carried out the 9/11 attack. That’s a tiny number. For the rest, it’s all law enforcement, all the time. We can’t say we weren’t warned of what a Kerry “war on terror” would consist of. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on October 30, 2004 10:11 PMPeople forget that had the 1993 plot been successful, one and possibly both of the towers would have come down instantaneously, killing 15 to 30 times the number in 2001. Remember how the Clinton Administration handled that. (Actually, I don’t… how DID the Clinton Administration handle that? Must not have been all that newsworthy.) Posted by: Reg Cæsar on October 31, 2004 3:18 AMIn all due fairness, I don’t see this statement by Kerry as all that damning. I think the implication of the term “raid” was simply that the attack was designed to cause damage rather than to take territory. Mr. Jose’s first point would be arguable, if the speaker had been anyone other than Kerry. But when we combine the use of the word “raid,” which no one had ever used before to describe the 9/11 attack on New York and Washington, with the fact that the person saying it was Kerry, with his long history of downplaying any threat to the United States, then the use of “raid” is clearly seen as symptomatic of Kerry’s well-established quasi-pacifist attitude and not merely an innocent usage. As for Mr. Jose’s second point, about who it is Kerry says we’re tracking down, it seems clear to me that Kerry is limiting the scope of that to those who were involved in 9/11. This of course would fit his “No Pre-Emptive Attack” strategy: We can only use force against people AFTER they have struck us. In Kerry’s book, the thousands of trained terrorists around the world who are seeking to strike us but haven’t yet done so are not yet legitimate targets. Again, if the speaker were someone other than Kerry, a different reading of the sentence would be plausible. But Mik’s and my interpretation clearly fits Kerry’s previous statements on this issue. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on October 31, 2004 7:58 AM |