Has your comprehension failed?
I am not sure which country you reside, I am assuming that your American, but I am sure of one fact copyright is an international thing. The words that were uttered and "coined" as the slogan for the terrorist war have appeared in print several thousand times now no doubt, and under international intellectual property laws they are now "copyrighted" and will no doubt appear in quotation books for the future.
But again that was only a small part of my reply and must admit a tagent not intended. As for not being held responsible for words, would you like to clarify to me a testimony/statement. Is that not a collection of words also, but a legally binding one? When does the difference occur between a collection of words and a statement? And it does not have to involve police to become legally binding.
How about if they were to say ingame "this is a war againts blacks/women/disabled/gay/refugees etc. Any of those would be inciteful, unpleasant and insensitive. And would surely enrage players, at least I hope it would or do they all lack the sensitivity that you so obviously do. I am British, so dont have a direct experience of the 11/09 tragedy's but I still have ears/eyes and compassion. Many people complained about the lack of originality and that is was untimely. I think that when hollywood shelf, for the time being, multi-million dollar projects almost overnight, Funcom had more than adequate time to "tweak" this turn slightly. A simple change of words would have averted an unpleasant reminder for many people.
Funcom are financially struggling, something I gathered from reading plain old industry news daily and I stumbled across the diary of the writer of the series by accident and was as shocked as everybody else to find out that the series was over and that Funcom had not informed its paying members.
The issue here was the series not the already "gone over to death" Phillip Ross statement. Lets try and stick to that.