October 18, 2008: US ‘Overreacted’ to 9/11 Attacks: Former British Spy Chief

Stella Rimington, a former director general of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5, says the US response to 9/11 was “a huge overreaction.” She adds, “[It] was another terrorist incident. It was huge, and horrible, and seemed worse because we all watched it unfold on television.… I suppose I’d lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life, and this was, as far as I was concerned, another one.” She says that President Bush’s successor should stop using the expression “war on terror”. “It got us off on the wrong foot, because it made people think terrorism was something you could deal with by force of arms primarily. And from that flowed Guantanamo, and extraordinary rendition, and… Iraq.” The Iraq War has motivated some jihadi terrorists to attack the West, she says. [Guardian, 10/18/2008]