Lying and Lying Again Are Not Proper Responses to Terrorism.

Five years ago today Al-Qaeda hijacked four planes full of all sorts of people: young, old, babies even, Americans, foreign nationals, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, you name it, and killed them all, along with the other 2000+ at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

It was an abominable, shameful act.

It's also an act that the Bush administration has yet to comprehend. These hijackers did not come out of nowhere and their complaints against the United States could not be summed up, as blithering idiot Bush tried to do, in the phrase, "they hate our freedom." Truth be told, I'm willing to bet just about everything I have that Osama and his gang of thugs couldn't give a rat's ass about "our freedom." In their twisted little minds they probably don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about whether we can order coke or pepsi, paper or plastic, which in America these days seems to be the predominant view of freedom: consumer choice. Neither do they really care if you can stand in front of the White House and scream about the President. What those murderers don't like about the United States is its role in the Middle East, or to expand a bit, what they consider "the Islamic World."

Reactionary, repressive bigots though they may be, it isn't another country's freedom per se that al-Qaeda hates; it's pretty much any non-Muslim, secular, or even non-crazy enough Muslim government that al-Qaeda hates. And even then, they mainly get pissed off over what they perceive as affronts to their own narrow interpretation of Islam. For example, they didn't have much time for Saddam Hussein's largely secular dictatorship. Nor did they care for Iran's shiite government. But the US really pissed them off because the US hits the trifecta: we have military bases in many Muslim countries, we support Israel, and we export a permissive culture (read: consumer culture) to the world.

Now you can argue about whether or not we could, should, or would change any of those things in light of al-Qaeda's opposition, but to refuse to understand that their motivations are more complicated and in fact different from "they hate our freedom" is to create the appearance that you are a moron and to subject yourself to further miscalculations and strategic mistakes.

Witness lead incompetent Dick Cheney. Yesterday on "Meet the Press," Cheney continued the old saw about links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, despite the fact that even last week the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that no links existed:

Cheney asserted that the slain al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had fled Afghanistan and "set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of '02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq." The Senate intelligence committee reported that, by October 2005, the CIA had debunked the idea of any prewar relationship between Zarqawi and Hussein's government.

Cheney told Russert that he had not read the Senate report.

Great. Here's the Vice President going on TV making claims that nearly every American in the demographic who watches that show knows to be false, and his response is that he "had not read the Senate report." We're supposed to trust this ignoramus who has grown so used to lying that he doesn't even worry about widespread public information contradicting his lies?

What's that gurgling sound? Oh yeah, it's whatever small amount of credibility the US still had in the world trickling down the drain.

Lying is no way to honor the dead or avenge their loss.