SUN-TIMES
Friday
May 23,
2003
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SUN-TIMES Friday May 23, 2003 |
Bush answers on 9/11 overdue
ANDREW GREELEY
sibility and ordered an independ- ent investigation. In fact, the invasion had been planned during the Eisenhower administration, and JFK could easily have blamed the mess on his predecessor. After the Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established an investigation com- mission chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen D. Roberts, a Repub- lican who had been the prosecutor for the notorious Teapot Dome scandal. Patently, President Bush is not going to assunme responsibility for the World Trade Center catastro- phe. His political allies blame for- mer President Bill Clinton(as they are blaming him three years later for the current recession). More- over, Bush continues to stonewall attempts to set up an independent investigation of what went wrong, and continues to sit on the 900- page report prepared by a biparti- san congressional committee. The White House excuse for this cover-up is that discussion about what went wrong in the months before the destruction of the World Trade Center would inter- fere with the "war on terrorism." |
There are several things wrong
with this argument. First, if there is not something to hide, why not release the report? Second, FDR and JFK had real wars to fight-- the former against imperial Japan, the latter a cold war against world communism. Third, the "war on terrorism" is a metaphor (just like the "war on drugs," the "war on AIDS," the "war on hunger," the "war on poverty") for a struggle against international criminals. It is a useful political label for a pres- ident who wants to be re-elected as a wartime leader and to land on an aircraft carrier dressed in flight gear (even though he was in effect AWOL for at least a year during the Vietnam War). The metaphor conceals what is different in the struggle against Islamic funda- mentalism when compared to the war against imperial Japan. Ad- __________________ If there is not something to hide, why not release the report? mitting the mistakes the adminis- tration made in July and August 2001 will not give aid and comfort to anyone, and certainly not to al- Qaida. Instead, the president continues to respond to terror with his cow- boy rhetoric: We will get Osama bin Laden. We will get the Mullah Omar. We will get the terrorists who blew the hole in the USS Cole. We will get the anthrax killer. We will get Saddam Hussein and his killers who attacked the com- pounds in Saudi Arabia. The latter will be quite a trick |
since the killers were suicide
bombers, and Bush will have to bring them back from the dead to haul them into court. No one seems to notice that we have not found bin Laden or the mullah. The Cole terrorists es- caped from jail in Yemen--un- doubtedly with the help of some elements in the Yemeni govern- ment (although Attorney General John Ashcroft, with the usual dis- play of sanctimony, has indicted them). We have not found--or perhaps not arrested--the anthrax killer. Saddam is hiding some- where, probably in a bunker in Baghdad with his sons. Thirty of his top aides are still on the loose. The people Bush proposed to smoke out and "get" are still free. Moreover, some of the CIA offi- cials who "dropped the ball" in the summer of 2001 have been pro- moted. Yet the media who were so eager to pry into the private life of President Clinton seem disinclined to uncover the real story of what happened during that summer and whether the same people who dropped the ball then are still dropping it. Nor have they paid any atten- tion to the president's claim out there on the aircraft carrier Abra- ham Lincoln that al-Qauda was on the run. After the explosions in Saudi Arabia and Morocco and the threats in Kenya, it would appear that they are not on the run at all. It would also appear that if one continues to believe Bush's rheto- ric, one is accepting as true state- ments that might be less that true. Finally, it is high time that some- one in this country remembers FDR and JFK and wants to know what is really happening. What's the president trying to hide? |