Here’s a little factoid from this last week that maybe only I find very revealing regarding the current state of our country:
Many potential jurors in the Jose Padilla terrorism-support case say they aren’t sure who directed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks because they don’t trust reporters or the federal government.
“There are too many ifs, too many things going on,” one male juror said. “I don’t know the whole story.” […]
The doubts were noted by a significant portion of the more than 160 people who have been questioned individually since jury selection in the case began April 16. […]
Before they came to court, each of the jurors filled out a 115-question form asking about a wide range of legal, political and religious topics, particularly their views of Arabs, Muslims and Islamic radicals. On question No. 60, which asks for an opinion about responsibility for the Sept. 11 terror attacks, many people said they don’t know.
“I’ve been surprised at the number of our jurors who don’t have an opinion about 9/11,” U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke, who is presiding over the case and asks most of the juror questions, said Wednesday. […]
To be sure, most jurors without a Sept. 11 opinion are aware that the attacks have been blamed on terrorists of some sort. But many seem unwilling to blame al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden — the conclusion reached by the national Sept. 11 Commission and the Bush administration and widely reported by news media.
Some people say they don’t necessarily believe the U.S. government’s statements about Sept. 11, with many of those people citing the faulty intelligence and misinformation about weapons of mass destruction that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the toppling of President Saddam Hussein.
“It could have been Saddam Hussein. It could have been bin Laden. I really don’t know who,” one woman said.
Amazing, isn’t it? Here we are more than 6 years after the 911 attacks, and there is still so much confusion about who was responsible, and what is more, a deep distrust of both the government and the news media. Amazing, but not surprising.
(cont.)
Not surprising, because we have known for a long time that the primary justification for the war, those mushroom cloud smoking guns, were utter fabrications. Even the Bush administration has finally surrendered the field on that argument. But one claim they have continued to maintain is that we are primarily fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, the same Al Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11. References to 9/11 and Al Qaeda are in almost every speech Bush or Cheney make regarding the war in Iraq.
And major American news media outlets, which have rarely apologized for the manner in which their pre-war reporting on the WMD issue was manipulated by the Bush administration to generate support for the war, have continued to act as official stenographers for the Bush administration with respect Iraq/Al Qaeda connection still being pushed by the Bush administration. This continues, despite the evidence that “Al Qaeda of Iraq” makes up only a very small portion of the Sunni insurgency, and that its predecessor organization (considered an enemy by Saddam Hussein’s regime), Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, never affiliated itself with Al Qaeda until October 17, 2004, long after the US led invasion.
Nonetheless, Bush and other administration officials consistently conflates the power of “Al Qaeda in Iraq”, and blurs the distinction between it and the “Al Qaeda” organization led by Osama bin Ladin which actually planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks. Take a look at a few recent examples:
From Bush’s speech on January 10, 2007 announcing his “surge” strategy:
Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq’s elections posed for their cause, and they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. […]
[W]e will continue to pursue al Qaeda and foreign fighters. Al Qaeda is still active in Iraq. Its home base is Anbar Province. Al Qaeda has helped make Anbar the most violent area of Iraq outside the capital. A captured al Qaeda document describes the terrorists’ plan to infiltrate and seize control of the province. This would bring al Qaeda closer to its goals of taking down Iraq’s democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.
From Vice President Cheney’s interview with Rush Limbaugh on April 6, 2007:
Rush, remember Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, al Qaeda affiliate; ran a training camp in Afghanistan for al Qaeda, then migrated — after we went into Afghanistan and shut him down there, he went to Baghdad, took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq; organized the al Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene, and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June. He’s the guy who arranged the bombing of the Samarra Mosque that precipitated the sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni. This is al Qaeda operating in Iraq. And as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq. […]
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it would be very tough. Remember what al Qaeda is betting on here. They cannot beat us in a stand-up fight, they never have. What they’re betting is that they can break our will, that they can, in fact, force the American people to retreat, that we’ll finally get tired of the battle and go home, and then they win. The only way they can win is if we quit. And to adopt a policy that says we’re going to withdraw from Iraq would do precisely that, and in effect, hands victory to the terrorists, it validates the whole al Qaeda strategy. The other thing you can be sure of, once they figure out that if they attack America often enough, we’ll change our policies, they’ll keep attacking America.
[Note: Cheney’s interview with Limbaugh came out the same day that a declassified report by the Pentagon’s acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble was released debunking the very claims Cheney was making on Limbaugh’s program:
Sen. Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, today released the newly declassified report [PDF] of the Department of Defense Inspector General on its “Review of the Pre-Iraqi War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.” The report was declassified at Levin’s request.
In releasing the report, Levin said: “It is important for the public to see why the Pentagon’s Inspector General concluded that Secretary Feith’s office ‘developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship,’ which included ‘conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community,’ and why the Inspector General concluded that these actions were ‘inappropriate.’ Until today, those details were classified and outside the public’s view.”
The Feith office alternative intelligence assessments concluded that Iraq and al Qaeda were cooperating and had a “mature, symbiotic” relationship, a view that was not supported by the available intelligence, and was contrary to the consensus view of the Intelligence Community. These alternative assessments were used by the Administration to support its public arguments in its case for war. As the DOD IG report confirms, the Intelligence Community never found an operational relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda; the report specifically states that,”the CIA and DIA disavowed any ‘mature, symbiotic’ relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.”]
From Bush’s speech to Associated General Contractors of America on May 3, 2007:
The primary reason for the high level of violence is this: al Qaeda has ratcheted up its campaign of high-profile attacks, including deadly suicide bombers carried out by foreign terrorists. In the past three weeks, al Qaeda has sent suicide bombers into the Iraqi parliament. Or they send a suicide attack into an American military base. These attacks may seem like random killing; they’re not. They’re part of al Qaeda’s calculated campaign to reignite sectarian violence in Baghdad, to discourage the Iraqi citizen, and to break support for the war here at home. This is what these murderers are trying to achieve.
I don’t need to remind you who al Qaeda is. Al Qaeda is the group that plot and planned and trained killers to come and kill people on our soil. The same bunch that is causing havoc in Iraq were the ones who came and murdered our citizens. I’ve got to tell you, that day deeply affected my decision-making. And I vowed that I would do anything that I possibly could within the law to protect the American citizens against further attack by these ideologues, by these murderers.
And so while I’m talking about al Qaeda in Iraq, I fully recognize what happens in Iraq matters here at home. Despite their tremendous brutality, they failed to provoke the large-scale sectarian reprisals that al Qaeda wants. The recent attacks are not the revenge killings that some have called a civil war. They are a systematic assault on the entire nation. Al Qaeda is public enemy number one in Iraq. And all people of that society ought to come together and recognize the threat, unite against the threat and reconcile their differences.
From Bush’s radio address on May 5, 2007:
If radicals and terrorists emerge from this battle with control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves, which they could use to fund their dangerous ambitions and spread their influence. The al Qaeda terrorists who behead captives or order suicide bombings would not be satisfied to see America defeated and gone from Iraq. They would be emboldened by their victory, protected by their new sanctuary, eager to impose their hateful vision on surrounding countries, and eager to harm Americans.
Is it any wonder the Padilla jurors either say they don’t know who was behind the 9/11 attacks, or that Saddam might well have been the prime mover, rather than Osama bin Ladin. The Bush administration’s disinformation campaign on this point continues in full force. Bush and his top officials have never relented in their attempts to connect Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attackers. All the other arguments for the Iraq war have faded away, but this one persists.
And the reason it persists is that the media enables the Bush administration, and all too often fails to call them on their use of lies and innuendo. Even after all we know now. The phony “intelligence” assessments cooked up by Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans at the behest of Cheney. The forged Niger documents. The outing of Valerie Plame in retaliation for Joe Wilson’s column disputing the fake nuclear WMD claims. The exposure of the Pentagon’s disinformation campaign. The report after report after report, from the 9/11 commission to the Pentagon’s Inspector General, documenting that Saddam had no ties to Bin Laden, no “symbiotic operational relationship” with Al Qaeda. Nothing, nada, zilch.
And frankly we should suspect the press, though not for the reasons that the conservative pundits have raised for generations, that it has a “liberal bias,” but because it has consistently failed to question and investigate the truth behind the White House lies, evasions and spin regarding the “War on Terror” and Iraq. With few exceptions, the mainstream media has become nothing more than an out sourced propaganda mill for the Bush administration and the Republican Party, and that is especially so in the case of television and radio news programming.
We have no Edward R. Murrows or Walter Cronkites or even Dan Rathers on TV anymore, voices who challenge power and have gained a measure of trust among the American public. The closest we come is Keith Olbermann on MsNBC (who’s less a liberal voice than a gadfly willing to point out the Bush administration’s massive corruption and many misdeeds), but he’s a lone voice in a wilderness of right wing commentators (O’Reilly, Hannity, Scarborough, Buchanan, Dobbs) and infotainment airhead media “personalities” like as Katy Couric, Larry King and Brian Williams, to name but a few. Add in the relentless beat of conservative talk radio which never met a GOP talking point it wouldn’t beat to death, no matter how outrageous or false, and you can see why may Americans, most of whom do not obsess over politics, are confused and mistrustful of the information they receive.
We have found the weapons of mass destruction, my friends. They can be seen among our dysfunctional an and corrupted political leaders, our ratings obsessed news media, and, yes, even ourselves. For it is we the people who have often paid too little attention to the fact that our democracy is rapidly sliding toward its own demise at the hands of multinational corporations, both political parties, and an AWOL news media. A demise many Americans have certainly helped along through their own apathy, prejudices and gullibility.
Good luck with your jury, Mr. Padilla. God only knows if they can ferret out the truth about your alleged crimes amidst the mountain of bullshit that surrounds us all.
Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda
