It’s Bush who’s to blame for the London subway bombings in July,
according to Jann Wenner, founder and publisher of Rolling
Stone magazine.
“If the London bombings are the work of an al Qaeda offshoot,”
contended Wenner, “then you have to fairly say, in the same way we
condemn other’s terror, this is in part the result of Bush’s War on
Iraq.”
In Wenner’s world, a swaggering and trigger-happy Bush is
driving people nuts, causing four otherwise normal guys to go wild
and simultaneously blow themselves to smithereens during the
morning rush hour in London.
Of course that doesn’t explain former Libyan intelligence
officer Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, convicted of planting the suitcase
bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 flying out of London
Heathrow Airport. That act of terrorism occurred in December 1988,
back when George W. Bush was putting together a group of partners
to buy the Texas Rangers, a dozen years before his first inaugural
address.
Al-Megrahi didn’t need Bush as an excuse, or Iraq, to kill all
243 passengers and 16 crew members aboard Flight 103, mostly
Britons and Americans, plus the 11 people on the ground in the
village of Lockerbie.
A decade later, terrorists also didn’t need George W. Bush as an
excuse to kill hundreds of people in August 1998 in simultaneous
car bomb explosions at the U.S. embassies in the East African
capital cities in Tanzania and Kenya. Two years before that, in
June 1996, terrorists who weren’t driven mad by Bush exploded a
fuel truck in the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia,
killing 19 U.S. servicemen and wounding hundreds of others.
In February 1993, George W. Bush hadn’t even been elected
governor of Texas when a bomb planted in a van by Islamic
terrorists exploded in the underground parking garage of the World
Trade Center, killing six people, injuring more than a thousand,
and presaging the September 2001 attacks on the same buildings.
Two years before the first World Trade Center bombing, the FBI
seized 47 boxes from Egyptian immigrant El Sayyid Nosair, arrested
in 1991 for the murder in Manhattan of Rabbi Meir Kahane and later
convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Their contents
included the following rationale for the upcoming Manhattan
bombing: “We had to thoroughly demoralize the enemies of God. This
is to be done by means of destroying and blowing up the towers that
constitute the pillars of their civilization, such as the tourist
attractions they’re so proud of and the high buildings they’re so
proud of.”
That information was left in storage for more than two years.
“The boxes were ignored in part because no one at the New York FBI
office spoke or read Arabic,” explains James Bovard, author of
The Bush Betrayal (Palgrave-Macmillan,
2004) and a policy adviser for the Future of Freedom Foundation.
“One law enforcement official told the Los Angeles Times
in 1993 that the material ‘described major conspiracies and
provided a road map to the bombing of the World Trade Center and
the subsequent plot.’”
In “FBI Blunders and the First World Trade Center Bombing,”
Bovard quotes secret tape recordings that show FBI informant Emad
Salem repeatedly warning the agency before the 1993 bombing that
the Muslim group he infiltrated was planning to carry out a
catastrophic bombing in New York City. “FBI supervisors,” reports
Bovard, “were convinced Salem was concocting tall tales and fired
him.”
Aside from demonstrating the incompetence of the FBI, the
information seized from Nosair and Salem shows that we’re being
attacked not because George W. Bush is too aggressive, or because,
earlier, Bill Clinton was too appeasing. No, we’re a target, no
matter who’s in the Oval Office, because we’re “the enemies of
God.”
In his November 2002 “Letter to the American people,” Osama bin
Laden explains in more detail why the United States, “the worst
civilization witnessed by history,” is al Qaeda’s prime enemy.
Among other things, we’re the “Friends of Satan” because the United
States “permits gambling,” “practices the trade of sex,” “permits
usury,” pays a “paltry price” for oil, “permits acts of
immorality,” maintains a “policy of supporting the Jews,” and
“permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants.”
Additionally, charges bin Laden, “You use women to serve
passengers, visitors and strangers to increase your profit
margins.”
Bottom line, bin Laden is demanding a Talibanized America.
