Weekly Canard

This is not an April Fool's joke, but I think this week's Robert Scheer column contains a shred of sense.

In the last week we've moved from the 16 deceitful words in George W. Bush's State of the Union speech to the 28 White House-censored pages in the congressional report that dealt with Saudi Arabia's role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the United States.

Scheer goes on to criticize the administration's apparent coziness with the House of Saud and its apparent unwillingness to disclose the full extent of the Saudi connection to the 9/11 attacks. But don't look to Scheer to produce more than a single shred of sense. The column is loaded with the usual helpings of illogic and distortions.

Yet even in its sanitized version, the bipartisan report, long delayed by an embarrassed White House, makes clear that the U.S. should have focused on Saudi Arabia, and not Iraq, in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

Why should the choice be between going after Iraq OR Saudi Arabia, but not both? As far as I can tell, Robert Scheer has never advocated that we should impose regime change on Saudi Arabia, as many others have advocated. And if the Bush administration ever did use military force against the Saudi terror kings, you know that Robert Scheer would oppose the war for the same bogus reasons he opposed the liberation of Iraq.

As we know, but our government tends to ignore, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia; none came from Iraq.

The only reason we know where the hijackers came from is because our government told us where the hijackers came from.

The report finds no such connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists. It is now quite clear that the president -- unwilling to deal with the ties between Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden -- pursued Hussein as a politically convenient scapegoat.

That's just the old "Saddam not so bad" Canard

is it really likely that career-conscious FBI and CIA officers would be willing to criticize possible Al Qaeda-House of Saud links when the president's father is out hustling business ties with the same family?

If career intelligence officers are spiking information about Al Qaeda-House of Saud links for any reason it would be a scandal, let alone for the reason that Scheer mentions. But does he have any ounce of evidence that this is happening, or is it only his own wishful fantasy?

Bush has used Sept. 11 as an excuse to turn this country upside down,

The perception that the world is upside-down is a common side-effect of walking around with one's head up one's fundament

making a hash of civil liberties

Poor Bob, has the CIA been censoring his columns and ripping out his toenails again?

and bankrupting our federal government with unprecedented deficit spending on war and its materiel.

The current estimate of the cost of the war through next year is $100 billion, or about $350 per capita. That is not an "unprecedented" cost, it is a much lower cost than many of the other wars in our history

Before we do any more irrevocable damage in the name of an open-ended "war against evil," we have a right and a responsibility to confront the uncensored truth of what happened that black day — no matter what powerful people are brought to account.

Scheer has a point there. I've always said that the "war against terrorism" should more correctly be named the "war against Arab and Islamic fascism" and that we should work for regime change not only in Iraq, but also in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere. But Robert Scheer will always demonize the Republicans and he will always sympathize with our real enemies, no matter who they are or what we call them.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 29, 2003 04:27 PM