President George Bush made a confession at last week’s press conference with the Beltway journalists. He admitted clearly that Iraq had “nothing” to do with the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center:
Q: What did Iraq have to do with that?
The president: What did Iraq have to do with what?
Q: The attack on the World Trade Center?
The president: Nothing, except for it’s part of — and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack.
The “truthiness” of W’s statement may depend on one’s interpretation of the word “suggested”.
In the years since 9/11, the Bush administration on numerous occasions consciously and misleadingly created a “Nexus of Evil” comprising Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and ominous, cinematic images of anthrax-spewing remote-control airplanes flying over Texas Tudor tract housing in red-state suburbia.
This suggested Saddam-9/11 link was so strong that polling in the run-up to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq had a majority of Americans believing something that has never been found to be true — and probably never will be.
A July 2003 poll by PIPA Knowledge Networks put 70 percent of the American public believing that Saddam orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks. Two years later, the Harris Interactive polling group showed that 47 percent of Americans still had this false assumption. The administration has never made an effort to clarify this falsehood.
The list of attempts to “suggest” an Iraq-9/11 link began soon after the attacks in New York.
In a Dec. 9, 2001 interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Vice President Dick Cheney floated the idea that a report “pretty well confirmed” that a senior Iraqi security official met with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta in Prague in April 2001 prior to the attack on the World Trade Center.
On second thought, strike that.
Bush’s own CIA and FBI both agree, based on phone records and credit card receipts, that Atta was in Florida taking flight lessons at the time. The Iraqi security official in question, Ahmed Kalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani, was later in US custody and told interrogators that he never met Atta.
In October 2002, in a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, Bush stated the following: “Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons, and other plans — this time armed by Saddam Hussein.”
In a televised address in September 2003, Bush stated that, “Iraq has trained Al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.”
Also in September 2003, Cheney was on television saying that by ousting Saddam, America had “struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who’ve had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”
(Is it just me that wonders whether Bush realizes that when he calls his American loyalists “the base” of his presidency that in Arabic “the base” translates to “al-qaeda”?)
In January of that year, Cheney called the evidence of a link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda “overwhelming”, citing Iraq’s harboring of Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Cheney conveniently left out that in 1998, Iraq offered to turn Yasin over to the FBI in exchange for a statement recognizing that Iraq played no role in that attack. The Clinton administration declined the offer.
Evidence also shows that less than six hours after the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was rallying his staff to find some link to the Iraqi dictator.
A memo obtained by the US media through the Freedom of Information Act shows that an aide to Rumsfeld had written down instructions from the defense secretary to obtain the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough to hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL ... Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” The initials refer to Saddam Hussein and Usama Bin Laden.
The Iraq hawks in the US media, such as conservative New York Times columnist William Safire, were more than happy to disseminate the idea of Bush’s Nexus of Evil. “The absence of evidence is taken to be evidence of absence,” Safire sniffed at the anti-war crowd in his weekly column on May 19, 2004 (titled “Sarin? What Sarin?”). Indeed, he said, Iraqi nerve toxins had in fact been found: In a 20-year-old Howitzer shell, a fragment of the illegal weapons supplied by the West during the Iran-Iraq war.
Charles Duelfer, a former adviser to the director of the CIA’s Iraq weapons intelligence operations, pointed out that Saddam’s illicit weapons were decommissioned following the UN-sanctioned Gulf War. The UN, under the auspices of multilateral cooperation, destroyed nerve toxin stockpiles housed in these 155-millimeter artillery shells from 1992 to 1994.
The right-wing blowhards from the peanut gallery, such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity of Fox News, heralded the discovery of the shell as the smoking gun that legitimized all of Bush’s WMD claims. The “ah-ha-I-told-you-sos” only lasted a few weeks, however, after it became apparent that the discovery of the lone artillery shell wouldn’t lead to a massive underground stockpile of WMDs and a shadowy cabal of Muslim scientists plotting the downfall of Western civilization. The media’s Bush boosters simply moved on to bull-horning other conflations, misrepresentations and half-truths to the American public. (Aluminum tubes, anyone?)
Bush is a man who takes pride in his idée fix , his nuance-less, black-and-white view of the world. He often speaks in a generalist, “with us or against us” terms about issues that are — in the reality outside of his brain — very complicated.
This administration has clearly and consistently sought to find evidence to fit its vague objectives (i.e. “freedom to the Iraqi people”) rather than creating clear objectives that fit the evidence. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.
Meanwhile, the rest of us who know better are forced to takes sides in the false choices that Bush sets up. You’re either for his plan or you love terrorists. You either support the administration’s Middle East policy or you hate freedom. To anyone who hasn’t already been sold a bill of goods by the neocon Republican agenda, these types of statements are wide open for interpretation. (What is freedom? How does one hate it?)
Another telling aspect of Bush’s ambiguous, ignorant, disingenuous use of language emerged last week. Bush defined the US “strategy” in Iraq as: “To help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and dreams.”
Helping the Iraqi people achieve their objective may be a lofty goal, but it’s not a strategy. A strategy is how one achieves a goal. If the president is so intellectually incapable of distinguishing “strategy” from “goal”, then it’s not a leap of faith to cast doubt on any of the president’s assertions.
The belief that nobody in his administration ever attempted to make a 9/11-Iraq link could only be believed by the most blindly loyal of Bush’s American constituents; his “base” as he has been known to call them: His al-qaeda.
Bush’s latest denial is just the latest of Bush’s many treacherous denials of reality.
