Trading Words For Punctuation

Six years too late, George W. Bush has finally acknowledged that 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers were citizens of the U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia:From 2003 to 2007, the number of people who believed Bush’s lie dropped from 70 percent to 33 percent. Bush will never recover from the anger felt by the 37 percent of Americans who came to the realization that they had been lied to by their president.

“There’s a lot of really good people here [in Saudi Arabia]. Look, you can’t deny the fact that some, a majority, of the terrorists came from Saudi, but you should not condemn an entire society based upon the actions of a handful of killers.”

It would have been nice if the interviewer, ABC’s Terry Moran, had gotten Bush on the record about the Middle Eastern nation who citizens were not represented among these 19 mass murderers.

For the record, in addition to the 15 Saudis, one was an Egyptian, one was Lebanese and two were from the Union of Arab Emirates (UAE).

None were from Iraq.

Despite this fact — and despite the reality that Saddam Hussein was a secular despot who was despised by Osama bin Laden, a rightwing religious fanatic — according to a poll in September 2003, two years after the attacks, and six months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 70 percent of Americans believed Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

This was, of course, not an accident. During the run-up to the war and the early days of the occupation, Karl Rove and White House political shop carefully devised a disinformation campaign that established this idea in the public mind. The carefully parsed phrasing used to establish the connection was always as subtle as it was false:

• “Before 11 September 2001, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents and lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons, and other plans – this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take just one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.” – Bush in his January 2003 State of the Union speech
• “We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.” – Bush in September 2003
• We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after 11 September, Saddam Hussein’s regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America. Some citizens wonder, after 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now? And there’s a reason. We’ve experienced the horror of 11 September. Eventually, one poll found that 70 percent of Americans had come to believe this lie.” - Former Sec. of State Colin Powell, February 2003
• “We don’t know.” - Dick Cheney, September 2003, when asked whether there was a link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks
• “[Saddam Hussein posed a risk in] a region from which the 9/11 threat emerged.” - then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, September 2003

But if you thought the case against Saddam’s masterminding of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, has been resolved, think again. Just four months ago, in September 2007, a staggering one-third of Americans still say they believe the Iraqi government was behind the attacks.

Over the four years between these two polls, the number of people who believed Bush’s lie about Iraq dropped from 70 percent to 33 percent. The anger, betrayal and embarrassment felt by the 37 percent of Americans — roughly 111 million people — who came to the realization that they had been lied to by their president is now and will forever be the defining element of George Bush’s legacy. In our country’s short history, no disinformation campaign by our government has been costlier in American blood and treasure.

They will never forgive him, and nor should they.

Interestingly, the number of Americans who still believe the lie that Saddam caused 9/11 coincides precisely with a poll released yesterday by ABC that found that about one-third of Americans (32 percent) still approve of George Bush’s performance on the job.