The No More Victims speaking tour, organised by September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, will place the human dimension of the 9/11 attacks and of war at the centre of the debate over the "war on terrorism". The US families will be joined by victims of terrorism and war from Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories, the Philippines, and Japan. These families believe the real lesson of September 11 is that, far from being the solutions, war and violence are the problems.

Over 100 peace events across the country will be trying to reclaim September 11 from those who turned that memory into an excuse for an unending imperial war.
David McKnight
Ysceifiog, Clwyd

· I wonder what would have been the outcome if the US government had said something like: "We will not retaliate. We are a Christian nation. We will mourn our dead, comfort the bereaved, provide for our widowed and orphaned, and pray for the perpetrators of this horror." Just a thought.
Lorna Coombes
Poole, Dorset

· Tomorrow, along with millions in the UK and worldwide, I will respect the one-minute silence for the 3,000-plus civilians murdered by the al-Qaida terrorists a year ago. The pain of loss and grief of the relatives of those killed has been widely covered and is sometimes too painful to bare.

However, I will also give quiet thought to the grieving family members of those Afghan civilians who lost their lives as a result of the US bombing campaign. Nobody knows how many thousands of innocent Afghans died; there have been very few interviews with Afghan parents who lost children, or other family members, and whose homes and villages have been reduced to rubble. They, it seems, must continue to suffer in silence and poverty.
Dr David Lowry
Stoneleigh, Surrey

· Where are the reporters on the ground in Afghanistan, talking to the families who lost loved ones? The only story worth telling out of Kabul, it seems, is the discovery of an Bin Laden videotape (Threat of war, September 9).
Marco Ciglia
London

· If Francis Fukuyama were right that Americans have some kind a metaphysical aversion to the idea of political legitimacy beyond the state (The transatlantic rift, September 7), then they wouldn't have been a driving force behind the founding of a range of international institutions after the second world war. I'm afraid the truth is that the present American administration has its sights set on turning its local language into our global grammar, and so unilateralism has been elevated from a tool of foreign policy into the goal of foreign policy itself.
Prof Andrew Dobson
Open University
a.n.h.dobson@open.ac.uk

· Blaming Europe for the rise of international terrorism (Terror training, G2, September 9) is only another example of an increasingly revisionist US view of history. A format which ignores causes, interests and justice in favour of uncompromised self-righteousness. Terrorism is not a homogeneous activity which can be treated as a single issue, neither is the exercise of terror just confined to non-governmental armed groups. Instead of blaming Europe, Alan Dershowitz should look into America's own conscience: its basic differentiation between the value of American life and that of "others" and its ever-adapting, definitions of international justice, democracy and freedom.
Carlos TorrĀns
London

· The Arab world is unable to admit its own mistakes (The Arab perspective, September 6), projecting its anger on to the west. If Arabs see Palestine as the epitome for the whole Arab world, we are entitled to see their mismanagement of Arab Palestine since 1947, if not 1937, as their project for the whole world. No thanks.

The Turks, Indians and Asian Tigers can match their past and present, so when are the Arabs going to drop their complexes about past empire and consider how they are to pay for the US grain they eat after the oil funds run out? If Israel fell into the sea tomorrow it would make no difference to those social and economic problems.
Frank Adam
Manchester

· On September 11 1973 the elected government of Chile was overthrown in a US-backed a coup. Thousands died. Their families will appreciate support from others who remember the importance of this date to them.
Gordon Munro
Edinburgh