In her column for the Wall Street Journal, the insufferably pompous Charles Emerson Winchester of the D.C. punditocracy, Peggy Noonan contributed to a massive hoax which I've nicknamed the 'No Attacks' Mythology:
This is an argument that's been around for a while but is newly re-emerging as the final argument for Mr. Bush: the one big thing he had to do after 9/11, the single thing he absolutely had to do, was keep it from happening again. And so far he has.
Now, of course she's right. "It" hasn't happened again. Fact: no additional hijacked airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center towers since September 11. Why? Because those buildings were already attacked and destroyed, killing thousands of Americans after President Bush and his staff repeatedly ignored warnings from a variety of counter-terrorism and national security experts.
Noonan continued:
We have not been attacked since 9/11. Someone -- someones -- did something right.
Someones?
This is all part of a huge lie, and the lie is rapidly becoming reality thanks to various Bush apologists and dead-enders.
Perhaps it's been reignited in conjunction with the Bush "legacy project" -- an effort organized by Karl Rove to somehow fabricate a positive legacy for this awful president. If there remains any justice in this nation, let history show that the only thing this administration was actually good at was fabricating its own version of reality. They've failed at everything else and then made up stuff to obfuscate those failures. So here. I'll be magnanimous and make Rove's gig really easy by offering a suggestion: the "legacy project" is the Bush legacy. In other words, it's very likely that President Bush will be remembered for things like, you know, the "legacy project."
Nevertheless, yes, Ms. Noonan, we have been attacked on American soil since September 11 despite the Bush administration's invasions, its torturing, its illegal wiretapping and its crimes against the Constitution.
The anthrax attacks and the DC Snipers to name two. But since we don't yet know the identity of the anthrax attacker(s) -- they haven't, after all, been captured and brought to justice by the mighty Bush administration -- let's focus exclusively on terrorists John Allen Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo. More Americans were, in fact, killed by the DC Snipers (16 killed) than were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (6 killed). Additionally, there were nearly as many people killed by the DC Snipers as were killed in the al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole (17 killed).
Are the DC Sniper shootings somehow less dazzling and, therefore, do they not count as actual terrorist attacks on American soil? If that's the case then there were, in fact, zero attacks during the Clinton administration. Wow, President Clinton was really excellent at keeping us safe. So much for Democrats being weak on national security, eh?
Elsewhere, during the Bush years, there have been literally tens of thousands of terrorist attacks involving American casualties and deaths. In the 'No Attacks' Mythology chapter of my book, I debunked similar Noonanish claims, including one by Lynne Cheney who appeared on The Daily Show in October, 2007 and similarly suggested that there weren't any attacks since September 11.
You know I think when the history books are written, we will look back on this period of time, and we will say on 9/11 we really thought within six months we would be attacked again. Even six weeks. It's been more than six years and that is not an accident.
When Jon Stewart challenged Mrs. Cheney by mentioning the bombings in Madrid and London, Cheney replied by suggesting that those attacks weren't against "American interests." Okay, then, let's ignore the fact that Spain and Great Britain are allies of the United States and talk about actual American interests. Specifically, Iraq and Afghanistan. In my book, I wrote:
A non-profit think tank called the Memorial Institute for Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) has been maintaining an online Terrorism Knowledge Base since the middle 1990s. In it, they report that between September 11, 2001 and March 2008, there have been 9,675 terrorist attacks in Iraq, accumulating 46,271 injuries and 26,161 deaths. In Afghanistan--that other American interest--there have been 1,069 terrorist attacks in which 2,323 people were injured and 1,809 people were killed.
No attacks, Ms. Noonan? I only wish that were true.
Order my new book: One Nation Under Fear, with a foreword by Arianna Huffington. Also available in stores.