Carol Shea-Porter: “I am standing here today in support of our soldiers, in support of our military, in support of our ability to respond to…”

“I am standing here today in support of our soldiers, in support of our military, in support of our ability to respond to any crisis in the world. And Iraq is not the place that we need to put our soldiers and all of our resources. Last weekend, I went to Iraq to look for myself what was going on. I saw a lot of contractors taking quite a bit of money, serving soldiers in jobs that soldiers could have done themselves. I saw the strains on the soldiers. I saw National Guard troops that were in for a third deployment. And I saw the difficulty that the Iraqis were experiencing. In flying over Baghdad, I saw a very sad city. Now, what I would like to see happen is for us to take the money that we are pouring into Iraq and put it into Afghanistan where the original trouble started, where we actually had the terrorist training camps, where we still need to finish the business that we started in 2001. But we need money to do that, we need resources to do that. They have been diverted and put into Iraq. There were no Iraqis on the planes that day on 9/11.”