Bush Responds to Threats from Qaeda Leader

By Don Gonyea

Published August 4, 2005 at 12:00 AM EDT

President Bush fires a rhetorical broadside at an al Qaeda leader who aimed videotaped threats at the United States and Great Britain. After al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, released a statement, Bush vowed to continue the mission in Iraq until it is complete.

During a visit to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, President Bush said, "The Iraqis want to live in a free society. Zawahiri doesn't want them to live in a free society. And that's the clash of ideologies -- freedom versus tyranny. We have had these kinds of clashes before, and we have prevailed."

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Don Gonyea

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.