Slight ‘improvement’ on the Saddam-9/11 question

There is a good deal of blame to go around. And a lot of people, including the people, who deserve a good deal of it.

Just my humble estimate, but I believe that the nearly one-third figure is accurate because it has not been lost on me that about the same threshold actively pursue their Constitutional right to wallow in their own ignorance. It’s just too bad that all of us have to suffer, especially when political leaders such as Mr. Bush and camp use such ignorance against an informed citizenry to promote policies that divide us and denigrate our democracy. But such is a life of Authoritarians – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzalaz et al.

Vote the Rascals Out in ’06 and ’08! -kevo

I think the problem is people have a certain amount of faith in the press. They believe that journalists do their jobs, and won’t let blatant falsehoods fly by unchallenged. They also believe that the media won’t run with stories unless there is merit to them. The public is wrong on all these counts.

Reporting on the Swift Boat Vets did not mean their charges had merit, letting Cheney and Bush blather about a connection without pointing out that there isn’t one, doesn’t mean it’s not a lie. And when it gets right down to it, who can blame the Bush folks… they got caught invading a country for no reason. You aren’t going to fess up to a major clusterfuck like that unless someone puts your feet to the fire, and the audacity of their fabrications have been directly proportional to the amount of skepticism the last bamboozlement received by the willing, enabling press corps.

So what the public needs to be aware of, above all, is that the press corps is not — will not — do it’s job. Just because something is reported as truth only means very powerful people want that particular BS heard.

“Someone should do a video montage of Cheney and Bush arguing with each other about whether Saddam was involved in 911.” — Racerx

Yes. No voiceovers, but titling at the end that says. “Now, which these men is telling the truth about terrorism?

Credulity, laziness and ignorance have something to do with these persistent poll numbers showing that a lot of people still think there’s a link between Saddam and 9/11.

But I think something else is at work here to keep the numbers so high. People WANT to believe it. They want there to be a cause and effect. They want to believe that the destruction of the World Trade Center was ordered by someone accountable, like a dictator, someone we could exact revenge on — and not the product of a small group of extra-national maniacs, most of whom killed themselves in the attack (and thus escaped America’s wrath). Making Saddam take the fall also gives the story of 9/11 meaning, a “good versus evil” narrative that’s clear-cut. (A lot of people can’t handle the fact that the violence of 9/11 was, from the viewpoint of anyone less than an utter fanatic, an event without meaning.)

And, of course, some people still want to believe that any war involving U.S. troops is a “good” war that is the product of a sensible government. The idea that Bush and Rumsfeld would order troops to Iraq for anything less than “payback for 9/11” is unimaginable to these people.

And Bush, Cheney and Rove are more than happy to keep these believers believing…

“If the election isn’t Diebolded, it looks really, really bad for the R’s.” – Racerex

Considering how easy it is to hijack just about every brand of electronic voting machine out there, I think that’s a serious threat considering that this administration is willing to do anything short of shooting down its opponents in the streets to maintain power.

It’s probably impossible to get rid of them all before November, but there’d better be a powerful lot of monitoring happening on Election Day or the doo-doo might get real deep in a hurry.

I always recommend that people use an absentee ballot whether they’re at home to vote or not. It’s the best way to be sure your vote really counts.

Washington threatens wider Middle East war
By Bill Van Auken
20 September 2006
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/sep2006/bush-s20.shtml

Bush’s descriptions of the rest of the Middle East combined gross insults with shameless hypocrisy. He dismissed charges that US militarism has destabilized the region, proclaiming that “the stability we thought we saw in the Middle East was a mirage.” He declared the region “a breeding ground for extremism” in which people were “fed propaganda and conspiracy theories” and were prepared “to blow themselves up in suicide attacks.”

He then lectured the region’s governments, declaring, “We know that when leaders are accountable to their people, they are more likely to seek national greatness in the achievements of their citizens rather than through terror and conquest.”

How would Bush know this? He is a president who has repeatedly rejected any suggestion that he is accountable to the broad sentiments of the American people against the war in Iraq. And his entire tenure in the White House has been dominated by the use of mass terror and wars of conquest aimed at furthering the US imperialist hegemony.

The rest of his speech consisted of his speaking “directly to the people across the Middle East,” that is, over the heads of their governments as the leader of an imperialist state seeking to re-colonize the region.

To the people of Iraq, he declared, “We will not abandon you in your struggle to build a free nation”—meaning the US occupation will continue indefinitely; to the people of Afghanistan, “We will continue to stand with you to defend your democratic gains”—same as the above.

To the people of Lebanon, Bush sent his condolences that their “homes and communities [were] caught in the crossfire” between Israel and Hezbollah—this after a month-long US-backed Israeli bombing campaign that killed over 1,100 Lebanese and turned entire villages and neighborhoods as well as much of the country’s infrastructure into rubble.

Finally, he turned to Iran and Syria. In relation to the first, he declared that the “regime” in Teheran had “chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation’s resources to fund terrorism, and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons.” He invoked the United Nations Security Council resolution demanding that Iran halt its uranium enrichment program. He concluded, “We look to the day when you can live in freedom—and America and Iran can be good friends and close partners in the cause of peace.”

The message was one of “regime change,” as in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “freedom” friendship and partnership that the Bush administration has in mind is the kind that existed when the Shah’s dictatorship ruled Iran through repression and torture while defending US interests in the region.

On the eve of Bush’s speech, Time magazine published a report indicating that US plans for war against Iran are well-advanced. It cited a “prepare to deploy” order issued to a US naval battle group consisting of submarines, a cruiser and mine-sweeping ships for October 1 as well as the Pentagon’s reworking of contingency plans for blockading Iran’s Persian Gulf oil ports.

The report states that “from the State Department to the White House to the highest reaches of the military command, there is a growing sense that a showdown with Iran—over its suspected quest for nuclear weapons, its threats against Israel and its bid for dominance of the world’s richest oil region—may be impossible to avoid.”

While making it clear that, given the crisis confronting the US military in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the risks of a ground invasion are too high, the report indicates that a massive air assault is being prepared.

“A Pentagon official says that among the known sites there are 1,500 different ‘aim points,’ which means the campaign could well require the involvement of almost every type of aircraft in the U.S. arsenal: Stealth bombers and fighters, B-1s and B-2s, as well as F-15s and F-16s operating from land and F-18s from aircraft carriers,” Time reports.

It continues, “GPS-guided munitions and laser-targeted bombs—sighted by satellite, spotter aircraft and unmanned vehicles—would do most of the bunker busting. But because many of the targets are hardened under several feet of reinforced concrete, most would have to be hit over and over to ensure that they were destroyed or sufficiently damaged… U.S. submarines and ships could launch cruise missiles as well, but their warheads are generally too small to do much damage to reinforced concrete—and might be used for secondary targets. An operation of that size would hardly be surgical. Many sites are in highly populated areas, so civilian casualties would be a certainty.”

In other words, Washington is making advanced preparations for yet another massive war crime.

Bush’s message to the Syrian people was no less threatening. He charged that its government had turned the country into “a crossroad for terrorism” and “a tool of Iran.”

The American president’s annual message to the UN General Assembly serves to bring the world face-to-face with the explosive force of US militarism.

The launching of new wars of aggression, under conditions in which both countries recently conquered by US troops are spiraling out of control, may seem irrational in the extreme. But the buildup toward another round of “shock and awe” pursues a definite, if twisted, logic of military aggression.

Having failed in its attempts to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into secure US semi-colonies, thereby assuring a firm US grip on the oil supplies of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin, Washington is driven to expand its campaign of conquest. It is therefore using Iran’s nuclear program as a new pretext for employing military power to assert its domination over these oil-rich regions and Iran itself, which boasts the world’s third largest reserves of oil and second largest of natural gas, and lies at the strategic crossroads of the two regions.

This bloody enterprise, defended by Bush at the UN, is the consensus policy of the American ruling elite as a whole. This is made clear by the bellicose attitude taken by the Democrats, many of whom have criticized the Republican administration from the right for failing to take enough of a hard line against Teheran and for allowing US troops to be bogged down in Iraq when they could be needed against Iran.

Representative of this trend is New York’s Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, who proclaimed earlier this year, amid reports of contingency plans for nuclear strikes against Iranian targets, “We cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran—that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons.”

“But I think something else is at work here to keep the numbers so high. People WANT to believe it. They want there to be a cause and effect.” – JohnnyB

When you see an Arab claiming that the 9/11/01 attacks were actually done by the CIA and the Israelis, you just know he’s lying for the camera.

I think a big portion of the Republican’t Base is lying for the pollsters. They know there was no connection, but they don’t want to give up on one of Boy George II’s excuses for going to war.