Exploiting tragedy
The White House is making political hay out of 9/11 -- even while it's
stonewalling a full investigation of the national tragedy.

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By Robert Scheer (Salon)



March 10, 2004 | How perfect the irony, how sordid the scam. The
president, who ignored the al-Qaida threat before 9/11, 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 Web sites 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 the enormous public
pressure initiated by the victims' families, who demanded an accounting
of what had 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 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-Qaida 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.