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| Anniversary |
September 11, 2006 |
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Dear Friends,
Anniversaries bring us back to where we were at a moment in time. In the weeks and months immediately after that cool September morning five years ago, not a day went by when we didn`t relive some moment of that day. Now, the memories come less frequently, frozen like snapshots in a frame that we come upon to remember from time to time. Less immediate, but still deeply real and important to who we are as a nation.
The greatness of America is the goodness of its people. And in so many ways, the goodness of America was brought out strongly in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks.
We lost 1 million jobs in America in the months immediately after 9/11 and yet, just five years after that devastating morning, our economy is stronger than ever. We have created over 5.3 million new jobs since August 2003 -- 36 straight months of job growth. Any other country in the world would still be on its knees, but America is back on its feet.
This photo is from 2002 when beams from the World Trade Center towers were brought to New Mexico. Click the photo to read more.
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And while we have gone on with our lives, the
raising of our children, the building of our businesses, the caring for our families and friends, we also know that the world is still a very dangerous place.
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the last five years has been what has not happened: we have not had another terrorist attack on our soil. And it`s not because they haven`t tried. There have been over a dozen terrorist attacks aimed at the United States that have been foiled. But friends in London, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, and Amman have not been as fortunate.
During the Cold War, we faced an enemy that was easy to find and hard to "fix" -- as my military friends put it. In this long war on terror, our enemies are hard to find, but easy to arrest or destroy if we can find them.
The first line of defense in the war on terror is good intelligence. I spend a lot of time on this problem in the Congress. It is a difficult and challenging one. But the work I do is a reminder, every day, that there are deadly killers in loosely connected cells devoted to a radical ideology who would kill thousands of Americans if they could, as they did five years ago on Monday.
We have a lot to be thankful for on this anniversary of September 11th and a lot more work to do.
Wish you were here,
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