Anna Eshoo: “today we join together to honor the nearly 3,000 people who perished in the heinous attach on our country five years…”

“today we join together to honor the nearly 3,000 people who perished in the heinous attach 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, American 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, wording with our allies, our military tools 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.…”