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Support for Israel Feeds Terrorism
Cheney Breaks the Taboo
By RAY McGOVERN

If we hear in the coming days that former Vice President *** Cheney has
fired one of his speechwriters - or perhaps grounded Lynne or Liz - it will
be clear why.

Oozing out of the sleazy speech he gave Thursday at the American Enterprise
Institute was an inadvertent truth regarding the Israeli albatross hanging
around the neck of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

I watched the speech, but had missed the gaffe until I went carefully
through the written text before a radio interview Thursday evening. It
amounts to a major faux pas, though I'll give you odds that the
usual-suspect pundits of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) will not touch
it, because it raises troubling questions about the close U.S. relationship
with Israel.

I wanted my 10-year-old grandson to learn a nice word to describe the
arguments in the former Vice President's speech, so he has now learned
"disingenuous." Today we'll study "superficial," for that is the right
adjective to assign to both Cheney and President Barack Obama as they
addressed the threat of "terrorism," the threat always guaranteed to
resonate among Americans - much like the threat of communism did, not too
many decades back.

To burnish his anti-terrorist credentials, Obama pledged to do whatever is
necessary to protect the United States and warned that al-Qaeda is "actively
plotting to attack us again."

What continues to be missing in the rhetoric of both Obama and Cheney is any
discussion of al-Qaeda's actual capability to perpetrate, in Cheney's words,
"a 9/11 with nuclear weapons" or some other scary thought designed to make
Americans hand over their liberties for some dubious promise of safety.
Equally important -- and equally missing -- there is never any sensible
examination of the motives that might be driving what Cheney called this
"same assortment of killers and would-be mass murderers [who] are still
there."

There are a number of reasons why al-Qaeda and other terrorist movements
wish to attack us, but this question never gets a complete - or honest -
answer, certainly not from the FCM or from the mouths of politicians like
Cheney and Obama.

Why They Hate Us

Cheney's explanation of a motive mostly reprised George W. Bush's old "the
terrorists hate our freedoms" canard. Cheney said the terrorists hate "all
the things that make us a force for good in the world - for liberty, for
human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences," an odd
set of qualities for Cheney to cite given his roles in violating
constitutional rights, torturing captives and spreading falsehoods to
justify invading Iraq.

But that's also where Cheney slipped up. You didn't notice? Well, Cheney
couldn't resist expanding on the complaints of the terrorists:

"They have never lacked for grievances against the United States. Our belief
in freedom of speech and religion.our belief in equal rights for women.our
support for Israel. - these are the true sources of resentment."

"Our support for Israel." Cheney got that part right.

My radio interview Thursday was with an FCM station, and I thought I would
make an extra effort to be "fair and balanced." So I noted that, to his
credit, Cheney - advertently or inadvertently - did articulate one of the
(usually unspoken) key reasons "why they hate us."

I was immediately jumped on, figuratively, not only by the interviewee
representing "the other side," but also by the not-so-fair-and-balanced
moderator. My interlocutors did not seem all that hospitable to facts, but I
thought I owed them a try at adducing some anyway.

9/11, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.and 9/11.

In his speech, Cheney mentioned 9/11 some 30 Times - for reasons that by
this stage are obvious to all. Referring specifically to waterboarding,
Cheney said that waterboardee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "the mastermind of
9/11 . also boasted about beheading Daniel Pearl." (Here, I thought, is a
really good example of "disingenuous" - a nice concrete example for my
grandson. For the only thing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did NOT take
responsibility for, after being waterboarded 183 Times, was climate change.)

But since the name Khalid Sheikh Mohammed came up, I asked my two
interlocutors if they knew how "KSM" explained why he masterminded 9/11.
Apparently, neither had made it as far as page 147 of the 9/11 Commission
Report, so I told them what the 9/11 Commission found on that key point:

"By his own account, KSM's animus toward the United States stemmed not from
his experience there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement
with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel."

KSM, you see, had attended North Carolina A & T in Greensboro, and
apparently the first thought that came to those drafting the 9/11 report was
that perhaps he had suffered some gross indignity accounting for his hatred
for America. Not so.

Moreover, the footnote section (page 488 of the 9/11 Commission Report)
reveals that KSM was not the only terrorist motivated by "U.S. foreign
policy favoring Israel":

"On KSM's rationale for attacking the United States, see Intelligence
report, interrogation of KSM, Sept. 5, 2003 (in this regard, KSM's
statements echo those of Yousef, who delivered an extensive polemic against
U.S. foreign policy at his January 1998 sentencing)."

The reference is to Ramzi Yousef, KSM's nephew. The 9/11 Commission Report
had noted earlier (page 147) that, "Yousef's instant notoriety as the
mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing inspired KSM to become
involved in planning attacks against the United States."

In the "Recommendations" section of its final report, the 9/11 Commission
suggested:

"America's policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply
a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across
the Arab and Muslim world. . Neither Israel nor the new Iraq will be safer
if worldwide Islamist terrorism grows stronger." (pp 376-377)

These observations seemed to strike my radio interlocutors as unfit for the
airwaves. When the shouts of protest died down, there was an opportunity to
offer additional evidence, so I threw in what a prestigious board appointed
by the Pentagon had to say about all this over four years ago.

Defense Science Board Report

Are you ready for a scoop that is not a scoop, but that almost no one knows
about?

It has to do with an unclassified study published, not by some "liberal"
think-tank, but by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board just
two months after the 9/11 Commission Report. That report directly
contradicted what Cheney and President Bush had been saying about "why they
hate us," letting the elephant out of the bag and into the room, so to
speak:

"Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies.
The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as
one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the
longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as
tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf
States. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy
to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy."

You didn't know about that report? Well, maybe this is because of the
timing. The Defense Science Board final report was given to Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld on Sept. 23, 2004, just weeks before the presidential election.

That is a time when presidential candidates and the U.S. Establishment in
general are hyper-allergic to discussing how U.S. support for Israeli
policies toward the Palestinians encourages the recruitment of anti-American
terrorists.

Suppressed, Then Gutted

Bending over backwards to oblige, the FCM suppressed the Defense Science
Board findings until after the election. On Nov. 24, 2004, the New York
Times, erstwhile "newspaper of record," did publish a story on the board's
report - but performed some highly interesting surgery.

Thom Shanker of the Times quoted the paragraph beginning with "Muslims do
not 'hate our freedom'" (see above), but he or his editors deliberately cut
out the following sentence about what Muslims do object to; i.e., U.S.
"one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights" and
support for tyrannical regimes. The Times did include the sentence that
immediately followed the omitted one. In other words, it was not simply a
matter of shortening the paragraph. Rather, the offending middle sentence
was surgically removed.

Similarly creative editing showed through the Times' reporting in late
October 2004 on a videotaped speech by Osama bin Laden. Almost six
paragraphs of the story made it onto page one, but the Times saw to it that
the key point bin Laden made at the beginning of his presentation was
relegated to paragraphs 23 to 25 at the very bottom of page nine.

Buried there was bin Laden's assertion that the idea for 9/11 first
germinated after "we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the
American-Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon."

Wading through the drivel in the FCM's Times and Washington Post on Friday
morning, I am hardly surprised that they missed Cheney's slip about U.S.
policy toward Israel being one of the terrorists' "true sources of
resentment."

Ray McGovern was an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 year. He now
serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and
Yugoslavia, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (Verso). He
can be reached at: rrmcgovern@xxxxxxx

A shorter version of this article appeared at Consortiumnews.com



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