The following is a transcript of the opening minutes of the second hour of the Thom Hartmann program of Oct. 13, 2010, as published in a podcast here (subscription).

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THOM HARTMANN: So what are the roots of rage? Whether it's rage on the radical Islam side, whether it's rage on the radical Christian side, blowing up abortion clinics, or the US Olympics or World Trade Center, is there some connection? What does all this mean? Dan Gainor, Vice President and T. Boone Pickins Fellow at the Business and Media Institute, businessandmediainstitute.com, on the line with us. Hey, Dan, good to see you again.

DAN GAINOR: Good to see you, or sort of, almost see you.

THOM HARTMANN: OK! (laughing) Er . . . before we invaded Iraq, in the 7,400-year history of that country — it's the oldest civilization on earth; it used to be called Sumeria. It's where Gilgamesh — the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written story in Western Literature was written there, in the city of Ur, which is about 100 miles north of Baghdad, which we turned into an airforce base. Before we invaded Iraq there had never, ever in the history of that country been a suicide bomber. Before we invaded Afghanistan there had never, ever in the history of that country been a suicide bomber. Tell me there's not a connection.

DAN GAINOR: Uh, Thom, then — I mean, in war — this suicide bombing, actually, if you're trying to — I think, to spin this in a particularly kind of strange way, the war — people were trying to use whatever tools were available to them. Suicide bombing becomes a big tool for — uh, particularly for al-Qaeda, and similar groups. Uh, but you can go back before we invaded Iraq, uh, we still had attack on the World Trade Center. It wasn't just 9/11, it was the first attack on the World Trade Center, where people tried to blow it up from beneath as opposed to blow it up from the sky.

THOM HARTMANN: Sure.

DAN GAINOR: I know — my own brother was in that building that day. He left the building twenty minutes early. Some of my classmates in my MBA program were killed on 9/11. So, I mean, you can —

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, and in the first attack on the world trade center was in the neighborhood of the time when Tim McVeigh was blowing up the Oklahoma City building. Yeah, we had —

DAN GAINOR: Now . . .

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah. And you could go back into the 70's you had half a dozen different terrorist groups operating in the United States and Europe. You had the Baader-Meinhof Gang, you had the Red Brigades, you had the Black Hand —

DAN GAINOR: Baader-Meinhof was mostly Germany —

THOM HARTMANN: That's what I'm talking about, in Europe. Each country seemed to have its own little group of — of crazies.

DAN GAINOR: Now, it's not one — one little group of crazies, it's — I mean — you have to be naïve to not think that America's under attack by radical Islam. You really would have to be kind of —

THOM HARTMANN: No — no. I — I — you know, Dan, I agree with you. I agree with you. We — we, by invading two Muslim countries, by having Gen. Boinkin [sic] struttin' around sayin' "our God is bigger than their God", by George W. Bush using words like crusade, we put our foot right into the middle of that, the same way the British did here in the United States, when they came down on the American colonists in 1773 and shut down the port of Boston because we threw their tea in the harbor.

DAN GAINOR: You're trying to rationalize global terrorism and blame it on the United States —

THOM HARTMANN: I am saying —

DAN GAINOR: — can't understand that

THOM HARTMANN: What I am saying is —

DAN GAINOR: because it happened before that. I mean, you can go back to —

THOM HARTMANN: Dan, what happened before then was fine —

DAN GAINOR: the Palestinian Liberation Army, killing, you know, killing somebody on the Achille Lauro, killing American Leon Klinghoffer, throwing him overboard. That was Palestinian terrorists.

THOM HARTMANN: That was a crime. That was a crime.

DAN GAINOR: You're trying to define down terrorists now to a crime. No, it was an act of terror.

THOM HARTMANN: Well, you could argue that it is an act of terror, and I would argue that in the United States for over 150 years you had the Ku Klux Klan as a huge terrorist organization that killed thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people. And, you know, terror organizations are nothing unique to any particular culture or civilization. We had a, and we still have to this day — although they're not as active in killing people, but we had an active and aggressive, Christian terrorist organization nestled right here in our own country for the better part of a century. And you know it, Dan. And my point, is what causes those kinds of things, what led to the creation of the KKK was the dilution of the labor force when slaves were freed. And so white people were losing jobs and going, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" and so we've got to point the finger at somebody — it must be those black guys, and, and there's actually some economics behind that, and arguably if we had people who understood economics something might have been able to have been done about it. Or maybe that's just what you have to go through when you've enslaved people, and then you free them. But the fact of the matter is that we created a disaster —

DAN GAINOR: But Thom, sometimes you have — sometimes you have a flat-out culture clash —

THOM HARTMANN: No, I'm talking about a culture crash, not clash —

DAN GAINOR: Yeah, but I'm talking 'bout culture clash, where — for — where — and — and the Left, and the news media are buying into this and making this worse — &c., &c.