PROPAGANDA WARS

As the War Party revs up its propaganda machine – the War Street Journal, the New York Post, Andrew "Bareback" Sullivan – we are awash in such a flood of b*llsh*t that the stench, let alone the sheer quantity, is enough to induce spasms of retching. In these dark days, the job of any truth-seeker is akin to cleaning the Augean Stables on a daily basis, and, heck, I'm no Hercules, but here goes….

My all-time favorite wartime fib is the one told by the lawyers for unnamed "victims of 9/11" who are suing the Saudis – and now the Iraqis – for $1 trillion in damages. The New York Post, which infamously ran the front-page headline "BUSH KNEW" after news of some vague pre-9/11 warning came out, has apparently decided to make this into a series: "IRAQ KNEW" screams the Post headline:

"A $1 trillion lawsuit, filed here yesterday, claims Iraq knew that Osama bin Laden was targeting New York prior to Sept. 11 – and that Saddam Hussein encouraged terrorists because he wanted revenge for losing the Gulf War…. Court documents filed in the suit say Saddam knew at least six weeks before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, and the presumed attempt to hit the White House, that bin Laden was plotting to strike high-profile U.S. targets."

The Saudis, and a long list of Middle Eastern countries, are being targeted by the War Party's legal division on the grounds that a murky conspiracy of Saudi princes, Middle Eastern intelligence agencies, oil interests, and others financed a terrorist plot against the U.S. There was no mention of the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, or the Knights of Malta – this latter, I hear, was a fun buncha guyz – but we'll just have to see what the discovery process reveals. This is going to be fun…

Ah, but the fun has already begun with the "evidence" put out there by Kreindler and Kreindler, a law firm that specializes in litigating airline disasters – and is now determined to cause and cash in on a looming foreign policy disaster for the United States. The whole phony suit is based on an off-the-cuff remark by an Iraqi newspaper columnist, one Naeem Abd Muhalhal, who supposedly wrote, on July 21, 2001, that Bin Laden was contemplating "seriously, with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert, about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House." The plaintiffs also claim Muhalhal had inside information when he wrote that Bin Laden was "insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting," which allegedly means the twice-bombed WTC. An unnamed "associate" of Muhalhal's avers that his former friend is indeed an Iraqi intelligence agent, and the clincher is that this oracular columnist was singled out by Saddam himself for special praise.