I watched the planes fly into the towers on morning TV. At first I was stunned. WTF was that? Then when it became clear that it was a terrorist attack, I became angry. Boiling blood could rip out people’s throats with my bear hands angry.

But I am a grown up. And it took me about 24 hours to get past the red rage point and come to my senses. Blood for blood was not going to fix this or prevent another attack from happening.

And our bloody policy hasn’t prevented another attack from happening, it’s just changed the location of the attacks. In the mean time we have given up so many of our rights in order to be free. But as Benjamin Frankin said, “Those who would sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither”. We grow more like our enemies using our current methods to defeat them.

The people of Afghanistan are begging us to stop bombing their children from the air. Even the Iraqis want us out. I think they finally realized that as long as we are in Iraq, there will be no peace for them.

The American people haven’t been made safer by these wars. The ideal that we were going to fight the Taliban and make Afghanistan a safe place for women is a laugh. Iraq was pretty secular already, with some of the most liberal laws for women in the region, and now women are murdered for being audacious enough to leave their homes.

We’ve become torturers on a grand scale (though torture has long been a part of our toolkit) and crushed the rights of humans under our black boots in fear.

So 7 years on and we are neither free nor safe.