The views expressed in the post below are purely my own and are not intended to offend. If you're still offended by something you read on here, go somewhere else. Ta.

As I queued up to pay for the new pair of shoes I'd just tried on, there were 2 elderly ladies ahead of me and the girl at the counter had disappeared into the backroom. She did appear, a few minutes later with a rather worried look on her face.

'A plane has crashed into the Empire State Building', she told them two old hags who started panicking as if the plane had infact struck the Treaty Center in Hounslow which is where we were. And it won't be surprising either as so many of them fly low above hounslow preparing to land at Heathrow.

Anyways, I paid for the shoes and got back to our store (Phones 4U, Hounslow) and told Chris, my manager what I'd heard. Since we only had restricted internet access, Chet, a colleague of mine, had to log on the Yahoo WAP site through his mobile phone and click on the 'Breaking News' bit.

'Its not the Empire State Building, its one of the two World Trade towers' he informed us. We talked about it for a couple of minutes wondering if it was a woman flying the jet / feeling sorry for those who must've died before we got back to work.

'Fuckin hell now another one's smashed into the other tower', shouted Chet, ignoring the customers on the shopfloor completely. Thats when I first realised that we may just be witnessing something on a massive scale. By the time the towers fell, everyone was numb and nothing would've surprised us anymore.

It wasn't until later that day when I got home that I actually saw the Twin Towers coming down on the telly. What a spectacular sight. Spectacular, not in a good way, but in a scary sort of way. Spectacular in the sense that nothing you'd ever have seen in Hollywood would surpass what the world saw that day. But more than that it was the sense that this is just the start of something massive. The first strike. Quite a few pants were shitted into.

I tried to get in touch with my then girlfriend, Alina, but the phone lines were jammed. Infact they remained jammed for the next couple of days, a period of utter frustration, panick as I tried everything I could, calling her friends, relatives, whoever I knew basically. (She survived, only just)

5 years on from that day and looking back at whats going on in the world right now, it certainly isn't a happy picture. Yes, Bush's policies may have succeeded in ensuring a similar attack hasn't taken place on US soil since 9/11, but just one glance at the home page of any news site would confirm that nowhere in the world is safe anymore. Terrorists have struck in Spain, London, Bali and all around the world, mainly attacking American interests but also those who have supported what is increasingly seen as US agression.

I'm not one of those who believe 'they hate our freedoms and strippers etc' - Aside from the fact that nobody hates strippers, there are stronger emotions at work here.

The decades of British and American intervention in the oil-rich Middle East hasn't helped. America's presence in Saudi Arabia (to safeguard their oil interests), their support of Israel's state terrorism and the abandonment of the 'Mujahideen' in Afghanistan at the end of the cold war are three of the biggest contributers to the Anti-american fire that sweeps the middle east and that resulted in the attacks on the WTC.

All of the reasons still exist. Both the US and UK failed to stop the murder of a large number of civilians in what most of the neutral world sees as Israel's disproportionate response to Hizbullah's capture of two IDF soldiers. Afghanistan has been abandoned again and the Taleban are returning. Iraq is at the brink of Civil war. Kashmiris have had their legitimate freedom struggle labelled as 'terrorism'. Innocent people die everywhere in the world in terrorist attacks on a daily basis.

A change in the US foreign policy may not change the aims of the hardcore extremists targetting world domination, but it will almost certainly stop creating new terrorists. How, you ask? Those muslims who may now sympathise with Al Qaeda types and are prone to extremism, will no longer have any reason to do so once they see that their greivances are being addressed and their conflicts, resolved in a just and fair manner. Al Qaeda's recruitment base will vanish. America is no longer the 'Great Satan', they will say. 'Look how they helped resolve the Palestenian issue! There's now two independent states living side by side in peace, all thanks to the US! Why hate them anymore?'

America, you have a role to play and it comes with being the only superpower in the world.

The murders need to stop, whether its jews, christians, muslims, scientologists, gayers, or midgets.