From 911 Citizens Watch

[Windy]

Wednesday, March 24, 2004 - 12:41 AM
Posted by: khence Marie Cocco -- March 23, 2004

This is the week the myths may disintegrate. There are two great myths about 9/11, spun in a seamless web that took form even as the flames shot from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and tiny Shanksville wept.

The first myth - that there was no hint the American homeland would be targeted by al-Qaida, and nothing that could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks - was propagated that very morning. "No warnings," former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters aboard Air Force One.

To deconstruct this myth, you do not have to listen this week to the testimony of former Clinton administration officials before the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attack. You can dismiss them as self-serving partisans and ignore their statements about the screeching alarms they sounded for the incoming Bush administration.

But you can look at the record and know that of course our cities and our transportation systems were targets. The World Trade Center was attacked in 1993. Through the 1990s, the government thwarted a series of terrorist plots against the United States - plans to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, to attack the Los Angeles airport, to unleash mayhem in New York City's subways. These are warnings of plots against the homeland, are they not?

The second myth - that Iraq is, in the words of President George W. Bush, "the central front in the war on terror" - has led America to launch an occupation of unspecified duration and incalculable cost.

Bush continues to merge in his speeches - and so in the public mind - the attacks of 9/11 with the war in Iraq. Marking the first anniversary of the Iraq invasion, he unabashedly tied the two. "The establishment of a free Iraq is our fight," Bush told assembled diplomats. "The success of a free Afghanistan is our fight. The war on terror is our fight."

No one else - not the Spaniards who voted out a government that supported Bush on Iraq, not the rest of Europe, not the FBI nor the CIA – believes the two were one and the same.

"In the absence of any threatening terrorist movement apart from al-Qaida, many eyes fastened on an old intransigent evil entity - Saddam's Iraq," former United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix writes in his book, "Disarming Iraq." These are the eyes that peer from the bunker of the Bush White House.

Though the U.S. administration portrayed him as a feckless bureaucrat, Blix doesn't settle scores. He lays out the inexorable march toward a war that was going to take place, with or without inspections, with or without many allies, with or without terrorists. With or without weapons of mass destruction.

But Blix does not represent the threat to the White House embodied in Richard Clarke.

Clarke is an expert in terrorism who worked for four presidents, dating to Ronald Reagan. His new book, "Against all Enemies," indicts Bush for propagating the two myths: That he did everything possible to fight terrorism before 9/11. And that Iraq is related to the war on terror.

"Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country,'" Clarke said in a "60 Minutes" interview coinciding with the book's release. "We stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda."

The White House answers with rhetorical roaring guns. Condoleezza Rice - the national security adviser who refuses to testify publicly before the 9/11 investigative commission - pressed her counter-spin in The Washington Post. The administration claims a key conversation Clarke says he had with the president never took place. CBS News and The Washington Post both report they've verified the conversation.

The public must choose between one who long served presidents of both parties and an incumbent whose claim to re-election rests on assertion of robust leadership against terror.

The myths loom large. It is not unprecedented for a people to be so fearful they are deluded. But it is more dangerous than ever.

Her e-mail address is: [email protected].

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-vpcoc233719621mar23,0,2658275.column?coll=ny-news-columnists


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