Bush Is Lying

May 17, 2002

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

Bush is lying. It's that simple.

Today, in an effort to stop his presidency from hemorrhaging its credibility, Bush took to the podium to gamely defend his lack of action on behalf of the American people prior to September 11th.

According to CNN, "Weighing in on a furor over what the government knew about potential terrorist attacks before September 11, President Bush on Friday criticized the "second-guessing" and said he had no clear indication beforehand that terrorists would hijack jets and deliberately crash them."
(http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/05/17/bush.sept.11/index.html)

Bush was echoing the hollow excuse offered by Ari Fleischer, who said on Wednesday:

"The president did not receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers. This was a new type of attack that was not foreseen."
(http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=
/ap/20020516/ap_on_go_pr_wh/attacks_quotes_2)

There's only one thing wrong with both their statements. The White House and Bush were well aware of the potential use of hijacked suicide missiles.

When Bush attended a G-8 conference in Italy in 2001, "U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July that Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations, officials said Wednesday.

Italian officials took the reports seriously enough to prompt extraordinary precautions during the July summit of the Group of 8 nations, including closing the airspace over Genoa and stationing antiaircraft guns at the city's airport.

But a U.S. official said that American counter-terrorism experts considered the warning "unsubstantiated."

In either case, the reports suggest that Western governments were aware that terrorists might one day use a hijacked airplane as a suicide weapon -- as they did Sept. 11 in attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."
(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092701genoa.story)

More damning evidence of the Bush lie is found in a 1999 Federal Report that warned:

"Exactly two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report warned the executive branch that Osama bin Laden's terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building.

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House," the September 1999 report said.

The report, entitled the "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?," described the suicide hijacking as one of several possible retribution attacks al-Qaida might seek for the 1998 U.S. airstrike against bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan"
(http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&ncid=
716&e=1&u=/AP/20020517/ap_on_go_pr_wh/attacks_1999_warning_6)

We could recount more evidence that the White House is deceiving the American people, but the above two items offer an open and shut case.

You won't see the mainstream press calling Bush a liar, but we will, because we care about America and our fellow Americans.

We love our country dearly -- and the man in the White House is playing us for a fool.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

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