[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 116 (Friday, September 13, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8614-S8615]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  IN REMEMBRANCE OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President. I ask unanimous consent to have printed 
in the Record an article from the Wall Street Journal dated September 
11, 2002.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

             [From the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11, 2002]

                            We Will Prevail

                          (By Theodore Olson)

       From a speech by Solicitor General Theodore Olson to the 
     Federalist Society on Nov. 16, 2001, Mr. Olson's wife, 
     Barbara, was one of the airplane passengers murdered on Sept. 
     11, 2001.
       September 11, 2001 was unprecedented in our nation's 
     history. Our country has been attacked before. Our soldiers 
     and innocent citizens have been the victims of terrorism 
     before. But never before in our history have so many civilian 
     citizens, engaged in the routines of their daily lives, who 
     neither individually nor collectively had done anything to 
     provoke the savage attack that they were to experience that 
     day, been brutally murdered for the simple reason that they 
     were Americans, and because they stood, in their countless 
     individual lives, for all the things that America symbolizes.
       As President Bush immediately recognized, Sept. 11 was an 
     act of war. But it was much more than that. It was also a 
     crime, an act of pure hatred and unmitigated evil.
       The victims were of all races, backgrounds, religions, ages 
     and qualities. They had one thing in common. They were nearly 
     all Americans. Their lives were extinguished because they 
     were the embodiment of the aspirations of most of the world's 
     peoples. The people who killed them hate the beacon that 
     America holds out to people who are impoverished, enslaved, 
     persecuted and subjugated everywhere in the world.
       The men who planned the savage acts of Sept. 11 cannot 
     prevail as long as American ideals continue to inspire the 
     people they hope to tyrannize and enslave.
       It is a cynical lie that the animals that killed our loved 
     ones were motivated by Islam, or because this nation of ours 
     is anti-Islamic. Enshrined in the First Amendment to our 
     Constitution is freedom of expression and the free exercise 
     of religion. This continent was populated by people who 
     crossed a terrifying ocean to reach a rugged and inhospitable 
     frontier to escape religious persecution.
       From its birth, this nation and the American people have 
     offered sanctuary and shelter to all faiths. Our 
     Constitution--always with the support of our people--has 
     extended its embrace to the unpopular, the unusual, the 
     unconventional and the unorthodox. We protect not only those 
     who will not salute our flag, but those who would spit upon 
     it or burn it. We pledge our allegiance to a Constitution 
     that shelters those who refuse to pledge their allegiance to 
     it.
       It is true, I suppose, that there are many in the Middle 
     East who hate this country for its support of Israel. But how 
     tragic and misguided to despise us for extending comfort and 
     defense to a people who have so long, and so recently, been 
     the victims of indescribable ethnic persecution. Nor has 
     America's support for Israel ever been rooted in or 
     manifested by hostility to the Muslim faith or those who 
     practice it. The terrorists and their apologists have lied 
     about these things, but what is another lie when their 
     goals and tactics are so vastly more evil?
       The terrorists can succeed only through corruption and 
     brutality. Thus they must tear down America and its system of 
     laws which shields its people from those malevolent acts. 
     They can enslave the people they wish to subjugate only by 
     keeping them poor and destitute, so they must undermine and 
     discredit the one place in all the world that stands the most 
     for the rule of law and allows its people the opportunity to 
     rise above all those conditions.
       Abraham Lincoln was paraphrasing our Declaration of 
     Independence when he characterized our nation as having been 
     ``conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that 
     all men are created equal.'' That revolutionary document set 
     down our collective belief in inalienable human rights, the 
     proposition that governments derive their powers from the 
     consent of the governed, the principle that tyrants who would 
     oppress their people are unfit to be rulers of a free people, 
     and the right to the pursuit of happiness.
       The terrorists of Sept. 11 cannot prevail in a world 
     occupied by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution 
     and its Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 
     Gettysburg Address, the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade 
     Center, the Pentagon, the Capitol, the Supreme Court and the 
     White House. They cannot co-exist with these ideals, these 
     principles, these institutions and these symbols. So they 
     cannot survive, much less prevail, in the same world as 
     America.
       America is not today, or ever, without imperfections and 
     shortcomings. Implementation of our lofty ideals has never 
     been without error, and some of our mistakes have been 
     shameful. But the course of our history has been constant, if 
     occasionally erratic, progress from the articulation of those 
     lofty ideals to the extension of their reality to all our 
     people--those who were born here and those, from hundreds of 
     diverse cultures, who flock here.
       There is no segment or class of the world's peoples who 
     have exclusive claim on the term ``American,'' and no segment 
     of the world's population to whom that claim has been denied. 
     We welcome 100,000 refugees per year into this country. Over 
     650,000 people immigrated legally to America in the most 
     recent year for which we have reliable statistics. Over five 
     million people are in this country today who were so 
     desperate to come here that they did so illegally.
       There are more Jews in New York City than in Israel. More 
     Poles in Chicago then any city in the world except Warsaw. 
     America is home to 39 million Irish-Americans, 58 million 
     German-Americans, 39 million Hispanic-Americans and nearly a 
     million Japanese-Americans. And there are seven million 
     Muslims in America, nearly the population of New York City.
       How tragic it is that the agents of the Sept. 11 terrorist 
     acts were people whom we welcome to this country, and to whom 
     we extended all of our freedoms, the protections of all of 
     our laws, and the opportunities this country affords to 
     everyone to travel, work and live. But we welcome immigrants 
     because nearly all of us are immigrants or descendants of 
     immigrants who came here to enjoy freedoms, rights, 
     liberties, and the opportunity, denied elsewhere, to pursue 
     happiness and prosperity.
       Ronald Reagan often said that ``every once in a while, each 
     of us native-born Americans should make it a point to have a 
     conversation with someone who is an American by choice.'' Mr. 
     Reagan was fond of quoting from a letter he received from a 
     man who wrote, ``you can go to live in Turkey, but you can't 
     become a Turk. You can't go to live in Japan and become 
     Japanese, [and so on for Germany, France, etc.]. But . . . 
     anyone from any corner of the world can come to America and 
     be an American.''
       So it is particularly sad and a bitter irony that the 19 
     savages who took the lives of thousands of Americans were 
     able to come here because we welcomed them, and trusted them, 
     and allowed them to learn to fly our airplanes and gave them 
     the freedom to travel. They took these precious gifts and 
     turned them into instruments of hatred and death.
       It has, I suppose, always caused some resentment that we 
     believe so passionately and unquestioningly that the freedoms 
     we value should belong to all people. But we know that these 
     are enduring values. We can debate nearly everything else, 
     but we don't need to debate that. We know that these 
     principles lift everyone up.
       We have now been reminded, in the most horrible way, that 
     there are those who not only hate our principles, but who 
     would dedicate their lives--and surrender their lives--to 
     banish those ideals and the incentives they provide for 
     tyrannized and impoverished people everywhere to do what 
     Americans did in 1776. We have tragically learned again, in 
     the most unthinkable fashion, that our values and our 
     principles are neither self-executing nor self-sustaining, 
     and that we must sacrifice and fight to maintain what our 
     forebears sacrificed and fought to bequeath to us.
       And now the rest of the world is learning again that 
     Americans will not flinch from that fight or tire of it. 
     Americans will fight, they will sacrifice, and they will not 
     give up or leave the job unfinished. This war is for all 
     living Americans. It is for the parents, grandparents and 
     great-grandparents that fought and sacrificed to come here. 
     And it is for our children and generations to come. And it is 
     for those who choose to become Americans in the future.
       America will not lose this war because we cannot even 
     consider that we will lose what centuries of Americans fought 
     to create, improve and maintain. We cannot, and we will not, 
     betray the people who gave us this glorious heritage. We 
     cannot and will not, dishonor or wash away the memories of 
     those who somehow clawed their way out of poverty, tyranny 
     and persecution to come to this country because it was 
     America, and because they were willing to risk death to 
     become Americans, and to give their children

[[Page S8615]]

     and grandchildren the opportunity and freedom and inspiration 
     that makes this place America. Americans could no longer call 
     themselves Americans if they could walk away from that 
     legacy.
       People who write for newspapers and who offer opinions on 
     television, or who send advice to us from other parts of the 
     world, sometimes say that America is too rich, lazy, 
     complacent, frightened, soft and enervated to fight this 
     fight. That we have no stamina, strength, will, patience, or 
     steel. That we will collapse.
       They are so wrong. We will prevail for the very reason that 
     we have been attacked. Because we are Americans. Because the 
     values that made us free, make us strong; because the 
     principles that made us prosperous, make us creative, 
     resourceful, innovative, determined and fiercely protective 
     of our freedoms, our liberties and our rights to be 
     individuals and to aspire to whatever we choose to be. Those 
     values and those characteristics will lift us and will defeat 
     the black forces who have assaulted our ideals, our country 
     and our people.
       The very qualities that bring immigrants and refugees to 
     this country in the thousands every day, made us vulnerable 
     to the attack of Sept. 11, but those are also the qualities 
     that will make us victorious and unvanquished in the end.

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