Political Quotes

“God forbid if the terrorists of September 11 had a nuclear bomb parked in a truck placed in lower Manhattan, 2 million innocent American citizens would have died on that terribly tragic day. That is 500 times more people than were actually killed, as horrible and as inconceivable as that was. I find it incredible that in this bill, after September 11 and all that we have learned about nuclear threats and terrorist threats, that this House could find $265 million to protect 535 Members of Congress and our staffs but could not find one dime to protect 281 million Americans from the real threat of nuclear terrorism. In fact, without the Obey amendment, this Congress will have actually reduced funding for the programs designed to keep nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists. We might ask, how serious is the threat of nuclear terrorism against American citizens? Just earlier this year, a bipartisan commission, after a year-and-a-half study headed by former Senators Howard Baker and Sam Nunn as well as Lloyd Cutler, called nuclear terrorism against the U.S., and I quote, ``the most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today.'' More recently, President Bush on November 6 made this statement: ``We will not wait for more innocent deaths. We will not wait for the authors of mass murder to gain the weapons of mass destruction. We act now because we must lift the dark threat from our age and save generations to come.'' Have we acted now?…”