Just How Stupid Are We? by Rick Shenkman

Author:Rick Shenkman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

8

Our Mindless Debate About 9/11

Whenever war is declared, truth is the first casualty.

—ARTHUR PONSONBY IN FALSEHOOD IN WARTIME:

PROPAGANDA LIES OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR (1928)

I would not wish to inflict on the reading public yet another long list of the many ways in which the Bush administration misled the country about 9/11, terrorism, and the Iraq War. We have had enough such lists. I have published many of them myself on the History News Network, and at this point I don’t want to read another one. I have resolved not to add to the growing pile of treatises on the subject until we gain access to the administration’s private files, emails, diaries, and memoirs so we can determine precisely what officials knew to be true and what they knew to be false, and what they really hoped to get out of the Iraq War. Whatever the particulars turn out to be, nothing in the misnamed “War on Terror” has gone as planned, not in Iraq or even in Afghanistan.

But much is to be gained from thinking about the public’s response to the events of the last half-dozen years.

On the positive side, Americans did not make irrational demands of their leaders. American Muslims were not rounded up and sent to concentration camps after 9/11 (as Japanese-Americans were after Pearl Harbor). Mosques were not closed down. Nuclear weapons were not employed against our perceived enemies. And nobody was lynched. Given what has happened in American history any one of these responses or all of them might have been anticipated. That none occurred and that nothing like them occurred is worth noting.

But polls indicate that a significant segment of the American public was susceptible to wild conspiracy theories. A Scripps-Howard poll in 2006 found that 36 percent believe that it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that U.S. officials either allowed the attack to take place or were involved it.

Americans do not have a monopoly on conspiracy thinking. Nineteen percent of Germans said in a 2004 poll that 9/11 was the work of the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. The French turned Thierry Meyssan’s book The Appalling Fraud into a best-seller, despite the absence of evidence for its chief and crazy claim: that the Pentagon attacked itself on 9/11 with a cruise missile. Millions of Muslims around the world persist in believing that Jews were given advance warning of the attack on the World Trade Center.

But instead of the thoughtful debate we should by rights have had in this country, we settled for slogans:We must fight them over there so we don’t

have to fight them over here

The Global War on Terror (GWOT)

Mission Accomplished

You are either with us or with the terrorists

The axis of evil

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