by Allen Snyder

OpEdNews.Com

Since the recent 9/11 Commission testimony by a parade of BushCo flunkies and apologists amounted to little more than either ‘we knew for months they might attack us, but we didn’t take it seriously’ or ‘it’s their fault, not ours’, it’s no longer impolitic to finally lay the blame for those tragic events squarely where it belongs – on the shoulders of political conservatives, the Republican Party, and the second Bush Administration.

To hear BushCo tell it, the first inkling they had terrorists might use hijacked, fuel-laden jumbo jets as WMD™ was when they saw the WTC Towers on fire. Bush indignantly says if he’d known such attacks were possible, of course he would have acted to stop them. But, alas, nobody knew, or could have known, and nothing could or might have been done to prevent the attacks.

While ideological blindness or near-total ignorance may be the most excellent of all defenses for the mentally challenged Bush, his partners in crime, Rice, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are not similarly retarded. Predictably, their bullshit excuses are lined up around the block and their state-of-the-art Responsibility Deflectors are set at ‘Full Power’.

It was the bad intelligence. The FBI and CIA let us down. If only they’d been doing their jobs, talking to each other, and told us in time, we could have done something (how this jibes with their simultaneous claims nothing could have been done is still a mystery). It was the terrorists. You know how sneaky those people are. They hid themselves really, really well (right next to those Iraqi WMD™) and then suddenly...BOOM!

The August 6th PDB was too vague, giving no indications of terrorist activity. There was no date, time, map, plan outline, or al-Qaeda contact number. How were we to know when the PDB was titled ‘Bin-Laden determined to attack in US’? (Never mind that the terror alert has changed color for far less).

True to form, BushCo’s even blaming perennial whipping-boy Bill Clinton, the only President in the last four (and lone Democrat) that ex-anti-terror czar Richard Clarke argues took the terrorist threat seriously enough to make fighting it a top priority. The clueless Reagan and slightly-less-clueless elder Bush pooh-poohed terrorism during their watches (Reagan was too busy forgetting where he was and George Sr. was too busy losing re-election), while Clinton was actively engaged and concerned. The idiot Son-of-a-Bush tossed terrorism to the back burner on Day One, concentrating instead on conquering Iraq, getting Saddam, avenging his Daddy, and pandering to his freakishly conservative base.

It begs the question why, if Clinton was so on-the-ball about terrorism, did his Administration do relatively little to combat it? Why didn’t spend the 1990s aggressively fighting al-Qaeda? Surely, after 8 years of engagement, their ability to attack the US would have been significantly reduced. What were we doing all that time?

For the answer, we needn’t look any further than a Republican Congressional majority and a sickeningly conservative corporate media neurotically obsessed with the who, what, where, when, how much, how many, and how good was it of Clinton’s extramarital blow-jobs. They wasted so much time, money, and effort drooling over every lurid detail of the pornographic Starr Report that al-Qaeda was able to carry out their attacks without so much as a ‘knock-it-off, you guys’ from apparently sex-starved and unhealthily repressed conservatives.

Had they not blown two terms defending themselves from the not-so-vast right-wing conspiracy’s single-minded impeachment machine, Clinton’s Administration could have acted decisively against al-Qaeda. Thanks to constant Republican attacks, investigations, inquiries, special prosecutors, and ‘wag the dog’ accusations when he used force, Clinton was too distracted to seriously address what he rightly thought was the most pressing global problem of his era – terrorism. In exchange for a plethora of investigations yielding exactly nothing, Republican conservatives rewarded al-Qaeda with a cozy atmosphere where they could flourish unscathed, paving the way for 9/11.

After they stole the 2000 election, Republican conservatives had their chance to eliminate the ever-mounting terrorist threat. Outgoing Clinton officials repeatedly warned them, but their hatred for everything Clinton and their Iraq fixation prevented them from acting at all. BushCo had nothing on its mind in 2001 save conquering Iraq and getting on with its plans for dominating the world and privatizing practically everything. No BushCo exec gave a shit about terrorism until those planes hit their targets and caring became politically necessary. Not one. Not Condi, not Dickey, not Rummy, and certainly not Incurious George. All their eggs were in baskets marked ‘Saddam’, ‘Iraq’, ‘Oil’, ‘Secret Energy Meetings’, ‘Tax Cuts for Wealthy Patrons’, and ‘Destroy Democracy’.

Now they’re scrambling around like mad revisionists, concocting a history where terrorism mattered more than foisting their conservative agenda on America. As usual, the truth is their nemesis.

A steady stream of credible whistleblowers coupled with the utter ineptitude, illogic, and political expediency of BushCo’s lame defenses dictates that all the blood of 3,000 WTC dead, over 600 American soldiers, hundreds of terror victims worldwide, and tens of thousands of Iraqis, both civilian and military, is on the hands conservatives, Republicans, and the current Bush Administration.

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