9/11 WATCH
Saturday, June 19, 2004
Excerpted from news services:
"The Bush administration has plenty of explaining to do in the aftermath of Wednesday's release of staff reports from the bipartisan commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. By now, the primary reasons given for going to war in Iraq have become annoyingly repetitive: Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and he had formed an unholy alliance with Osama bin Laden. On that basis, hundreds of thousands of troops were ordered into combat, the Saddam regime was ousted and the United States found itself confronted by the massive task of nation building -- at a cost to exceed $200 billion. So it is troubling, to say the least, that the 9/11 commission, which pored over more than 2 million documents and heard 1,000 witnesses, including the president, has concluded that there was no credible evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida. Nor was there evidence of Iraqi cooperation with bin Laden's attacks against the United States."
-- editorial, The Hartford Courant
"Ironically, as the commission reported, the al-Qaeda-Iraq connection has become a self-fulfilling prophecy with terrorists pouring into Iraq to attack U.S. forces. But that is a situation caused by Bush's war, not prevented by it. If Bush wants to build support for the difficult occupation of Iraq and, if he seeks to inspire trust at home and abroad for the war on terrorism, he should start by making sure he is getting the right facts and getting the facts right."
-- editorial, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Nearly all of the media coverage has focused on what the 9/11 panel claims it didn't find -- namely, smoking-gun proof that al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein were working together. The country has traveled a long way psychologically from the trauma of Sept. 11 if we are now focusing on the threats that allegedly don't exist instead of those that certainly do. Or, to be more precise, we're further from 9/11 but very close to an election. The 'no Saddam link' story is getting so much play because it fits the broader antiwar, anti-Bush narrative that Iraq was a 'distraction' from the broader war on terror."
-- editorial, The Wall Street Journal
"President Bush should apologize to the American people . . . Bush is right when he says he cannot be blamed for everything that happened on or before Sept. 11, 2001. But he is responsible for the administration's actions since then. That includes, inexcusably, selling the false Iraq-Qaida claim to Americans. There are two unpleasant alternatives: Either Bush knew he was not telling the truth, or he has a capacity for politically motivated self-deception that is terrifying in the post-9/11 world."
-- editorial, The New York Times
"It is possible that the White House has not told the commission everything it knows about Iraq's links to al-Qaida. If so, it should provide those facts so the report can be corrected. If it has no information to contradict the report, then Bush and Cheney should quit their efforts to portray the war in Iraq as part of the campaign against global terrorism."
-- editorial, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel |
