Posted on 09/13/2001 3:49:47 PM PDT by SFmom
Senator Barbara Boxer
Transcript of Floor Statement on the Terrorist Attack Against the United States
September 12, 2001 I want to thank my dear friend, Senator Biden, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, for this opportunity and for his eloquence and vigilance on this topic. And I am proud to be on his Committee and proud to chair the Subcommittee on Terrorism.
Madame President, today I rise with pain in my heart and great emotion to offer my prayers and my condolences for the people who have been directly hit in this country by an act of war. People of my state of my birth, New York; the people who work at the Pentagon everyday, who have chosen to work to protect our nation; the people of California who were on those planes that were hijacked; and of course, to every other individual who was directly affected from every state. And all of us will have our stories.
I want to first thank the people of California for their outpouring of love and support for the people of this country.
There were vigils and prayer services in every denomination yesterday. There was an outpouring of people giving blood. The Los Angeles County Search and Rescue Team somehow got a plane at four in the morning. They went on that plane and they are now on the ground in Manhattan.
For indeed, we are one country east to west, north to south. I have never seen such unity.
One of our colleagues said we remember where we were when tragedy hit this country. And in my lifetime I remember too many things. Not as many things perhaps as Senators who are older, but I certainly remember where I was when I saw John Kennedy go down and Martin Luther King go down, and the Challenger disaster, and yesterday the image of four commercial American planes going down, crashing into buildings, being used as lethal weapons against our people. It is an image that has shaken us, but it has not shaken our resolve.
Madam President, once I was on a plane that was in some type of mechanical trouble and we had to make an unscheduled landing. And for an hour, we really didn't know if we were going to make it. And in that time, passengers were consoling each other and getting out their fears and flight attendants were reading the crash landing manuals. And I reached for the phone and I called my family and I left a message and I thought: did I tell them when I last saw them how much they mean to me?
And all I could think of yesterday were people on these planes, everyone of whom has a family. Basically as I understand it, knowing that they were going to go down. And in many cases, as I understand it, being told if you want to call your families, you are crashing.
The utter terror. The utter callousness of this. The inhumanity of this. It is unbearable what our people went through on those planes and those innocent people working in the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
This is a very strong statement I am going to make—when we look back in history at what happened in Bosnia where people suffered genocide because of their nationality—and to the Holocaust where people suffered annihilation because of their nationality.
People got killed yesterday because they are Americans. Not because they were bad people. They were good people. They got killed because they were Americans. And it is time for us to say we will fight and stand up for them and their memories. We will take a stand against man's inhumanity to man that occurred right on our own soil.
And we are resolved—we are resolved to honor those who died. We are resolved to make our nation safer, as safe as it can be from these acts. We are resolved to hold those who plan these attacks, who harbor these people absolutely a hundred percent accountable. We will hold them accountable. They must pay because this is the test of a civilized nation. And we lead the civilized nations of the world, and we will not back down.
And I stand proudly with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and with this President. And we will be resolved to do all these things and to do them well and to do them right and to bring justice to the world. Thank you.
Woman's a perfect poster child for after-the-fact abortion.
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