CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Never Forget Bush’s Bait-and-Switch Iraq War

A few presidencies ago, Washington politicians used boundless political and intellectual chicanery to drag America into a ruinous war.  Thousands of Americans died and scores of thousands of Iraqis perished due to the official myth of  Saddam Hussein as the Twentieth Hijacker.

Last November, Axios published new damning information on the role of Saudi government officials in bankrolling the 9/11 attacks on New York City  and the Pentagon.  Private lawsuits against the Saudi regime  “unearthed evidence showing one Saudi official — who acknowledges aiding two men who became hijackers — made a drawing of a plane and a mathematical formula that allegedly could have been used to fly into the World Trade Center.”

That was only the latest stunning revelation in a coverup that will celebrate its 25th birthday this year.

In 2002 and early 2003, the Bush administration rushed to exploit 9/11 to justify invading Iraq. But there was a problem with that con job. A 2002 FBI memo stated that there was “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these [9/11 hijacker] terrorists within the Saudi Government.”  A joint House-Senate congressional investigation found extensive evidence that the Saudi government, not Saddam Hussein, propelled the hijackers. The Bush administration succeeded in suppressing the key 28 pages of that congressional report on the Saudi role on 9/11.  Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) became a leading proponent of declassifying those 28 pages, declaring in 2013: “If the 9/11 hijackers had outside help — particularly from one or more foreign governments — the press and the public have a right to know what our government has or has not done to bring justice to all of the perpetrators.”

Those 28 page were finally released (mostly) in 2016, revealing how Saudi government officials directly financed and provided diplomatic cover for several of the hijackers in the U.S. shortly before they unleashed havoc.

Truth delayed is truth defused.  Blocking the evidence of the Saudi bankrolling of 9/11 enabled the Bush administration to kill tens of thousands of Iraqis.

The Bush administration sold the Iraq war as payback for 9/11. While false claims by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) have received ample coverage, the Bush Saudi-Iraqi Bait-and-Switch has faded into........

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