It is suspicious that a group mostly from Saudi Arabia, affiliated with a group based in Afghanistan, should set in motion a chain of events that saw Saddam Hussein hanged and a brutal military occupation in Iraq. It is right that people should be distraught about that situation. However, it is wrong to think that nefarious secrets are to blame for it. The government did not prohibit people from telling the story of Al Qaeda the religious fanatics being generally hostile to the regime of Saddam Hussein, with its secular institutions and religious tolerance. The military-industrial complex drowned it out with tall tales of mushroom cloud danger,

It is shameful that the President and Vice President both stand strongly against disclosing a wide range of public information that should be available not only to inform the electorate, but also to help people make better choices in their daily lives. Yet that is no excuse for leaping to the conclusion that they are covering up for some sort of secret much darker than the rational consensus that a few teams of suicidal terrorists used boxcutters to control airliners and airliners to attack buildings.

The comment above is thoughtful, and I believe earnest as well. Yet it falls prey to the usual conspiracy theory mechanism — “something is troubling about this big important matter, therefore the ‘real truth’ must be wildly different from what is generally believed to be true.” Among those familiar with Dick Cheney’s energy task force, opinion should run near 100% that the administration is “covering up something.” That merits investigation, certainly. However, it does not merit developing a subculture of stories in which this secrecy conceals some fantastic conspiracy.

Half the country is right to assert that the administration is covering up something about the 9/11 attacks. Because covering things up is standard operating procedure in the Bush White House, half the nation is probably mistaken to believe there are no secrets in that realm. There may also be tens of millions of Americans who believe that this President has committed serious criminal acts while in office. So far we are in the same reality.

Where reality as I understand it diverges from the above account is in this sleight-of-hand that conflates reasonable doubts about government transparency with nightmare delusions of federal complicity in the attacks. It is extremely unlikely that tens of millions of Americans believe such nonsense. Even if it were as popular a schtick as “climate change skepticism,” the 9/11 Truth Movement is no less bogus or contemptible. Dick Cheney may be a much better fit in the role of doomsday archvillain than Al Gore. Yet both false narratives are clearly at odds with how things actually are, and giving voice to either only serves to distract from useful and accurate political discourse.

And not understanding such a crucial event at the turn of the millennium, which has been used to send us off on a “clash of civilizations”, brown-boogeyman chase away from our real challenges here in American and Planet Earth-economic, ecological and cultural-is a serious challenge to one’s comprehension of reality.

There is a reason that millions of Americans believe that criminal elements in and out of our government synthesized the 9-11-01 terrorist attacks. And it’s not that millions of Americans will always be susceptible to “paranoid conspiracy theories,” its that millions of Americans can see the reality through the lies. Not that there isn’t some (serious) fact-checking issues in some (many) pockets of the 9-11 truth movement.

10’s of millions more Americans think that the Bush administration let 9-11 happen aka treason under Article III Section 3 of the Constitution.

More than half of America thinks that this administration is covering up something about the 9-11 attacks. This fact alone, along with the utter silence of Congress in reinitiating a more trustworthy and transparent investigation in order to clear this up, is more treason in my accounting in that if you really do think Al-Qaeda is the global threat that this administration says it is, having more than half the American population not believe their government about the worst terrorist attack our history is clearly giving aid and comfort to our enemies.

And it’s not the “other” half of America’s fault. This could have been cleared up. Dick Cheney, the second most powerful civilian in the land could clarify for us all whether he went to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House before, while or after the Pentagon was hit. And what he knew about the approaching Pentagon attack and when he knew it. The case for his treason that day likely turns on the answers to these questions.

The FBI could release the videotapes of the Pentagon being hit so that there wouldn’t be even any chance for doubt. There are many more questions, as you all clearly know, that have more serious consequences than “what hit the Pentagon?” But, until this is cleared up and the truth of the entire matter is laid bare for all to see, the other serious questions are not going to be addressed in as serious a manner as they deserve.

Both perspectives were valid, and in the middle of my college years it all became moot anyway. As Max reminded me in discussing the piece I wrote on nuclear proliferation, John Kerry still sees that as the greatest threat to American national security. He is correct in that assessment. As I pointed out in the piece on the Global War on Terror (or Ted Koppel pointed out well before I did) the American automobile kills about as many of our people in a typical month as Middle Eastern criminals did in their most murderous attacks ever.

The terrorists’ objective was to make America afraid. Be it because of personal insecurities or Machiavellian foolishness, the White House has also seen fit to energize a media drumbeat designed to amplify American fear of terrorists. International terrorism provides some cause for concern. Heck, I even believe it provided good reason to invade Afghanistan. However, it certainly does not justify the kind of all-consuming focus terrorism as a political issue has developed in the present environment.

While the dangers of nuclear war were much more serious and at least as real as the threat from Al Qaeda, preoccupation with that issue was never so widespread as terrorist worries have become. It is almost as if people in small towns throughout the heartland feel they have a patriotic duty to be scared the evil-doers have their heart set on exploding every backwater post office and feed store in the nation. I don’t fault people for sharing my sense of concern about mutually assured destruction in a time when leaders of a superpower could credibly assure the world of their capacity to destroy American civilization outright.

Yet I do believe a majority of Americans were not much afraid of that threat. On the other hand, a majority does seem fearful of bin Laden’s boasts in this department, even though it doesn’t take much thought to understand that he simply doesn’t have the goods to back up his rhetoric. Terrorism weakens us much more because we react irrationally to it than because it actually has any possibility of directly causing megadeath and reducing all our great cities to rubble. Yet sound long term perspectives are not the primary factors shaping 21st century political discourse.

Obviously I don’t think partially privatizing Social Security or amending the Constitution to enshrine a “separate but equal” legal standard for homosexual couples makes sense. Apart from serious cutbacks in tax rates and tax enforcement, I’m not sure they really got much of anything they wanted. I suppose the President may have been big on free subsidies for already profitable fossil fuel corporations, and it is hard to miss the Vice President’s connection to the most lavishly compensated war profiteers of this century (if not all human history.) Still I believe they, and their administration, are at heart dedicated to making America a better place — they just have a woefully misguided view of that, based on 1950s morality and talk radio ideology.

The dittohead set always gets dismissive when someone criticizes Fox News et al. Yet the fact that people like the two incumbent federal executives now have papers and even a television network that caters to their deliberate distortions of reality enables them to live more comfortably with those distortions. In the time of Reagan or earlier, people with a warped ideology had a choice between being told what they wanted to hear or taking information from legitimate news media. I question the legitimacy of FNC, The Washington Times, et al. Yet the experience is so much akin to consuming mainstream news that it fortifies the bunker of self-deception.

In the end, it seems like political behavior is driven much more by hate than insight. If the next Republican nominee takes on Karl Rove as anything more than a token consultant (sometimes candidates pay small fees to operatives they dislike simply to keep them from becoming openly critical on the pundit circuit) then his advice would be to rob the adversary of his or her strengths and stir up anger amongst political conservatives. It may seem strange to think of a Clinton-Giuliani race where he runs as the candidate more sensitive to women’s issues or an Obama-Thompson race where the traditional Southern gentleman is trumpeted as more sensitive to minority issues. Yet who would have thunk that the Kerry-Bush race would involve widespread perceptions that the decorated war veteran was a coward while the slacker cokehead ran as a military role model? It only takes half a spin to turn everything upside down.

If Democrats actually manage to land the electoral fish already well-hooked, I would expect it will be through successful motivation of voters who hate the war in Iraq, runaway deficit spending, pathological government secrecy, and Bush-Cheney in general. To win in the usual way, Republican operatives must stir up greater degrees of hate at their anger points of choice. Yet if this project of mine has a single political theme, it would be that our nation and its people deserve better than that. “The ends justify the means” in political advocacy involves embarking on the single most morally significant human endeavor with an unprincipled approach from the outset. To do so is virtually to beg for the corruption real power engenders.

Even the most radical of the “starve the beast” set are not really intent on making America a worse place to live. They’re just too damned stupid to understand that anarchy is a worse place to live than actual fascism, never mind the featherlight oppression of 50% top marginal tax rates. If we look on that rabble as black-hatted bad guys causing pain for pain’s sake, we simultaneously miss the point of it all and fall into the same trap as those who demonize political liberals. If (possibly setting Dick Cheney aside as a special case) we look at them as less a product of malice and more a product of ignorance, then we pave the way to build bridges that enable healthy progress with reasonable compromise. Even more importantly, it becomes easier to set out to do good from a base of hope and inner strength. I am confident that approach to governance will produce better results than resting on a form of strength that draws chiefly from hostility toward a subset of fellow Americans.

Just what is their domestic agenda? I mean their real aims, conscious and unconscious- beyond the empty rhetoric of compassionate conservatism? The more rabid voices among their supporters claim to want to eliminate government (drown it in a bathtub). If their agenda is seen as fundamentally destructive then perhaps they’ve really managed it quite well?

Maybe they get more benefit from the appearance of incompetence than of maliciousness? Then they can get the next republican elected by selling the voters on the idea that their principles were and are solid and the newly anointed leader will have the competence to execute their strategies to perfection. Meanwhile, each cycle results in the destruction of more of the gains made by a few high-minded civil servants who really do want to build something of value for the populace.

Yet that whole “simplest explanation” approach also applies to the willful delinquency vs. incompetence analysis. A few days ago I wanted to write something positive about the administration, and I thought the Healthy Forests Initiative might work as a topic for that. In principle I support thinning as a conservation measure, and I have no objection to corporations making profits while doing something productive. Yet as I dug into the thing I realized even that policy was bungled by the epic incompetence of this administration. At this point I really cannot think of a significant success achieved by this President that did something positive for a legitimate national interest. I approve of the initial approach taken to regime change in Afghanistan, but even that triumph has been undermined by a frenzy of horrible follow-up policies, not the least of which being that distracting debacle in Iraq.

Is it possible that one element in the decision to ignore alarms about terrorism in the first nine months of his Presidency was a desire for an attack on American soil to change the political landscape? I suppose I cannot completely rule out a notion like that, especially with an outright villain like Dick Cheney in the mix. Is it possible that the administration would have allowed the September 11th hijackings to occur if they’d had the means to prevent them? I see that as an implausible scenario. In fact, the actions of the President and Vice President at the time suggest to me that they were every bit as blindsided by the events of that day as the rest of the nation (well, save for Cassandra figures like Dick Clarke, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Tom Clancy, etc.)

I agree that hawks in politics and the media exploited a climate of fear to push an agenda of aggression. Yet I draw the line at asserting the climate of fear was a product of their own cunning manipulation of world events. They just do not possess that level of cunning. Theirs is the petty myopic shrewdness of corporate profiteers — eager to gorge themselves at the expense of others, yet not nearly so malicious as to walk over corpses for another lucrative payday. I believe Iraq policy is what it is because war planners really were so ignorant as to believe their own misinformation about Saddam Hussein, not to mention their own misinformation about initiatives like de-Ba’athification of government or privatization of oil fields.

To me the idea that this whole mess is a fulfillment of our national leaders’ intentions just seems like a much bigger stretch than the idea that it is a consequence of their chronic ineptitude. After all, if they could manage such a plot, then why can’t they manage anything at all constructive in terms of a domestic agenda? I do not doubt that there were deliberate lies told during the rush to war with Iraq, and I do not doubt that Operation Iraqi Freedom was substantially motivated by personal greed. After all, I cannot dispute that, even before the 9/11 attacks took place, nearly $1 billion had been spent on Middle Eastern shipping and trucking infrastructure to support a future war effort in Iraq. Yet when it comes to who can develop and execute a grand plan to bring about historic change as intended, it seems clear to me that Osama bin Laden, not George W. Bush, may rightly be termed a “mastermind.”

I haven’t followed this “911 Truth movement” well enough to know if you are correctly characterizing this “dominant narrative.” If so, I would agree that you’ve debunked it well with this analysis. The problem I see is that there are other possibilities than may not be described by such a dominant narrative that stand a much better chance of being accurate, at least in part. I don’t like to use the word conspiracy, but I think there could well have been a plan shared by certain nefarious characters in and out of current US government that involved making the most of whatever heinous crimes might be committed upon American interests to advance a cause to their liking.

The Project for a New American Century official manifesto openly pined for “a catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor.” This doesn’t mean that anyone planned for such an event, or that it was even consciously hoped for, but I can see the unconscious understanding that such an event might help their cause affect actions that some people might take that would make it more likely for a tragedy like 9/11 to occur. The scenario that makes the most sense to me involves one of the most mendacious individuals in the Bush admin, Dick Cheney. As I understand it, he was given leadership of a terrorism task force after Richard Clarke was pushed out and the task force never met prior to 9/11. Perhaps he put such an effort on the back burner, realizing that an attack of some sort might be useful to his plans (if only unconsciously)?

This idea has the advantage of not specifying a particular advance knowledge of any terrorist plan. Cheney needed an excuse to attack Iraq and, lo and behold, an attack occurred. He would probably have preferred that the attack was orchestrated by Saddam’s agents than his Saudi friends, but he wasn’t going to let such a nice potentially catalyzing event slip away without making the most of it.