It looks like I might use this diary space to dump stuff I started working on for Nuke Free Zone and never finished or published, but the fellows here might enjoy reading. This is often stuff I leave half finished on my hard drive, forget about, and rediscover a few months later. Today, I invite you to read about what I call The Unspeakable Megascandal: what the media didn't report about George W. Bush and the Islamic Institute.
Disclaimer: The primary reason I didn't publish this one was that I couldn't source some of my claims, having written them from memory, so don't use this as reference material. Do your own research and treat this as just some guy spouting off on the internet.
The Unspeakable Megascandal
We've got half the country in a collective aneurysm because CBS referenced possibly-faked memos in an anti-Bush report. It's a pretty big goof, but I seem to recall that most of the people declaring their disdain for longtime Democratic-biased CBS frontman Dan Rather weren't saying it was as bad when Bush referenced faked memos to rally support for invading Iraq. Meanwhile, as John Kerry runs a campaign centered on his health care proposals, count all the voices you've heard saying that Kerry is running on his service in Vietnam and tally them against those you've heard say he's running on his health care plan. It's a bit out of balance, isn't it?
It seems that, with Rather and a few others as exceptions, the U.S. media is biased in favour of the Republican party's right wing. For more evidence, look at the attention given to the Swift Boat Liars Who Just Hate John Kerry, the reincarnation of Nixon's attack-dog Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. With nary a shred of evidence on their side and with reams of evidence against them, this group occupied the media's focus for a whole month with their unsubstantiated charges that Kerry never earned his medals, and they're now making hay digging up Nixon's old smear that Kerry maligned all soldiers by criticizing their training and leadership.
What the media chooses not to report is just as important as what they put at the front. A little secret about the CBS memos is that there is little new or significant information in them. The allegations are supported by Pentagon documents released years ago and have since been resupported by later FOIA and White House document dumps. At the time, the media refused to touch the story because it only started to become a big story a week before the election and they did not want to hurt Bush's chances of winning without giving him ample time to respond to the story. The cover-up didn't help in the end, as the first full count of the Florida votes showed Gore won the election. Bet you didn't know that. The papers reporting the story as "IT'S OFFICIAL: BUSH WON", taking a month after getting the results to design the exquisitely twisted logic to spin the story that way, sure didn't do anything for clarity.
Bet you didn't know that UN1441 didn't authorize an invasion of Iraq, only yet another UN meeting to determine what the definition of "severe consequences" was. Bet you didn't know that Saddam Hussein surrendered before the March invasion. Bet you didn't know that the UN oil for food scandal started out as the US oil for food scandal, with American banks and businesses implicated while President Clinton did nothing about it, and that the newer documents pointing the finger at the UN came from Ahmed Chalabi, the suspected spy for Iran who also produced most of the since proven false evidence about Iraq's CBN programs.
Here's another story you've never heard of. Unlike the above, this isn't at the level of a verifiable fact yet. It's still a suspicion, based on a lot of circumstantial evidence and single-sourced claims, but the size and import of the story is such that it deserves attention, and shame on the US media for not investigating it.
(The foreign media has already investigated it and decided it's probably true, which is not an insignificant part in why Bush polls about 20% overseas versus 50% here.)
What we do know for a fact is that George W. Bush was very chummy in the first year of his administration with persons later accused of being US agents of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad. Not the actual terrorist grunts with guns, but their public relations and finance people. Bush would routinely invite these folks to the White House for dinner as part of a campaign to court the Arab and Muslim vote, under the assumption that they were representatives of moderate, mainstream Islam.
What would have given Bush this assumption? That what is a who, high-powered Republican politico Grover Norquist. The head of the right-wing Americans for Tax Reform, which said the inheritance tax is as bad as the Holocaust, Norquist is one of the Republican party's top players and for a time was one of Bush's top advisors.
Norquist is also the Cat Stevens of the Beltway, a convert to whatever kind of Islam it is that allows him to support terrorists. (Edit: I just looked this up, and he's Protestant. Like I said, I didn't do my fact-checking, so keep a critical mind.) Whenever anyone pointed out the connections of his friends he was introducing to Bush, Norquist would accuse them of being racists and bigots and these whistleblowers would no longer be an influence in the Republican Party. As part of the 2000 campaign's efforts to court the Muslim vote, Norquist formed a fundraising effort called the Islamic Institute, which inevitably took in some money from some of his special friends.
The second part of the story involves a certain John O'Neill. Not the Swift Nuts' John O'Neill, but the FBI's former head of antiterrorism. This John O'Neill resigned from his post in the summer of 2001, citing pressure from above to back off from terrorism investigations. Under a suspicion that al-Qaeda was planning a second attack on the World Trade Center, he took a job as head of security there and died in the September 11 attacks.
Put one and one together, and you get two: Bush took money from Islamic terrorists, and Bush pressured the FBI to loosen up on al-Qaeda before September 11.
There's no direct tie between the two, but there doesn't need to be. Incompetence fills the gap. There's also little chance that Bush himself was personally involved in either action, but Bush did bring on board the personnel who were involved, and as their leader he is ultimately responsible for the actions of his people. As his staff has seen no punitive repercussions for these scandals or the many other national security scandals that have marked this administration, that broadcasts Bush's acceptance of them.
It's also not out of the question to see Bush as, at least initially, supple to the will of the terrorists' interests. It's more than just Bush not having a reputation as an analytical, deep-thinking kind of guy who concentrates on the long term. Bush's Saudi business dealings certainly made him friends with someone who supported some kind of terrorism, given the Arab world's widespread support for the Palestinian movement, and friendship equals access. Bush has given more recognition and support to Yasser Arafat, the world's biggest name in terrorism before Osama came around, than any other President. Bush was courting and taking advice from people alleged to be representatives of terrorism, not Islam. There's video and press releases.
Don't you think this is something the media should pay a little attention to?