Within 24 hours of Sen. John F. Kerry's Mississippi
challenge to his "stonewalling" on 9/11, the _resident
announces that he would talk to the 9/11 commission
chairman and co-chairman, i.e. one Republican (Tom
Keane) and one Democrat (Lee Hamilton) for more than
*one hour* wow!! What a magnanimous gesture...(Or will
he? "Just as long as I do not have to answer any questions
from that Ben-Veniste!")Yes, how the mighty have
fallen. The once seemingly invincible "war _resident" now dukes it out with the Mayor of S.F. over "Gay Marriage" and says "How high?" when JFK says "Jump!"
Yes, the US electorate has not lost its olfactory
sense. They know "something is rotten in the state..."
Robert Scheer: How perfect the irony, how sordid the
scam. The president, who ignored the Al Qaeda threat
before Sept. 11, 2001, who diverted public attention
in that horror's aftermath to the nonexistent threat
from Iraq and who has stonewalled the investigation of
9/11, now seeks to exploit that tragedy as a
reelection gimmick. George W. Bush avoids being
photographed with the dead and injured from his folly
in Iraq, but hey, those flag-draped coffins of 9/11
victims make great TV ads.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16564
Robert Scheer
Creators Syndicate
03.09.04 Printer-friendly version
The worst form of exploitation
Hypocritical Bush uses 9/11 images but resists accounting of truth
How perfect the irony, how sordid the scam. The president, who ignored the Al Qaeda threat before Sept. 11, 2001, who diverted public attention in that horror's aftermath to the nonexistent threat from Iraq and who has stonewalled the investigation of 9/11, now seeks to exploit that tragedy as a reelection gimmick.
George W. Bush avoids being photographed with the dead
and injured from his folly in Iraq, but hey, those
flag-draped coffins of 9/11 victims make great TV ads.
What a grisly low in political exploitation.
That's why the ads were condemned by a firefighters
union and many of the 9/11 victims' relatives, whose
various websites contain an impressive list of the
unanswered questions concerning the tragedy. As Bob
McIlvaine, whose son was killed in the Twin Towers
disaster, put it: "Instead of playing on people's
emotions with images of that day, the president would
do right to cooperate more with the independent
commission investigating the 9/11 attacks so we can
learn the truth about what happened on that day and
why."
But uncovering the truth about 9/11 has never been
Bush's intention. Instead, the president has used that
tragedy for his own political ambitions -- to draw
attention away from his lies about Iraq, the
unprecedented national debt, the disappointing jobless
recovery and the attacks on civil liberty. What's
mind-boggling is the cynicism of Bush's electoral ploy
when one considers that he never showed any interest
in terrorism before 9/11. He had focused instead on
the war on drugs and trying to one-up his father on
Iraq. His abysmal failure to heed the Clinton
administration's warnings regarding the threat posed
by Osama bin Laden may be one reason for Bush's
extreme reluctance to permit an unimpeded, bipartisan
public investigation of 9/11.
Never before in our national history has such a major
event been so unexamined by the government while being
so effectively hyped for political advantage. The
obfuscation has been deliberate and executed with a
passion that suggests Bush may have some dreadful
truth to hide. Why else would he initially oppose the
formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate
the origins and lessons of 9/11?
Bush allowed the commission to form only after
enormous public pressure led by the families of
victims, who demanded an accounting of what led to the
loss of their loved ones. Bush then sought to
undermine an honest investigation by appointing Henry
Kissinger, international grand master of mendacity, to
be chairman. That gambit failed when Kissinger refused
to make public his murky financial entanglements with
the very regimes most likely to have links to the 9/11
terrorists.
After a more independent commission finally was
allowed to form, Bush set about to systematically
undermine its work by refusing to turn over documents
essential to the investigation or to permit the full
committee to interview the top officials in his
administration, from himself on down.
This is a president whose immediate response to 9/11
was to protect the Al Qaeda terrorists' known sponsors
in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan while planning a sideshow
war against Bin Laden's sworn enemy in Baghdad, Saddam
Hussein. In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade
Center disaster, a Saudi plane was allowed to land in
the United States and whisk Bin Laden relatives and
certain Saudis out of the country before intelligence
agencies could fully question them, despite the fact
that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals who
had been allowed to enter the U.S. under suspicious
circumstances, suggesting the connivance of the Saudi
government.
Bush turned his sights on Iraq's illusory weapons of
mass destruction while lifting the sanctions imposed
on Pakistan, a known possessor and proliferator of
nuclear weapons. Nor have any of those sanctions been
restored even now, when Pakistan admits that its top
scientific institute was the source of nuclear weapons
technology sold to North Korea, Libya and Iran.
Bush defends his exploitation of 9/11 with these
words: "How this administration handled that day, as
well as the war on terror, is worthy of discussion."
Yes indeed, but it is an administration that delights
in discussions in which it monopolizes all of the
crucial information and cherry-picks, fabricates and
otherwise distorts evidence, mocking the sacred notion
of representative democracy. For more, please see the
Robert Scheer archive.
George W. Bush avoids being photographed with the dead
and injured from his folly in Iraq, but hey, those
flag-draped coffins of 9/11 victims make great TV ads.
(c) 2004 Creators Syndicate
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