Gar Smitn & CBS News – 2006-09-13 00:42:55
9/11, Five Years Later: 3130 Dead and Counting
Gar Smith
On September 11, 2001, four hijacked aircraft were used to kill 2,602 inhabitants of the World Trade Center and 125 employees of the Pentagon. In addition to 19 hijackers, 242 passengers and crew died on the planes. Combined total of innocent lives lost: 2,973.
On September 11, 2006, the number of US soldiers killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom stood at 2,669. Another 336 soldiers had perished fighting in Afghanistan. In addition, 125 US civilian contractors had been killed by car bombs and snipers’ bullets. Combined total: 3,130.
Five years into his self-proclaimed “War on Terror,” George W. Bush has been responsible for the deaths of more Americans than Al Qaeda.
Gar Smith is co-founder of EAW
Rockefeller: Bush Duped Public On Iraq
CBS News
(September 9, 2006) — When the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified version of its findings this past week, the Republican chairman of the committee, Pat Roberts, left town without doing interviews, calling the report a rehash of unfounded partisan allegations.
It’s statements like this one, made Feb. 5, 2003, by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell that have become so controversial, implying Iraq was linked to terror attacks.
“Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associated collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants,” Powell said.
But after 2-1/2 years of reviewing pre-war intelligence behind closed doors, the lead Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, who voted for the Iraq War, says the Bush administration pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.
“The absolute cynical manipulation, deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion and 69 percent of the people, at that time, it worked, they said ‘we want to go to war,” Rockefeller told CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.
“Including me. The difference is after I began to learn about some of that intelligence I went down to the Senate floor and I said ‘my vote was wrong.”
Rockefeller went a step further. He says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq – even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.
He said he sees that as a better scenario, and a safer scenario, “because it
is called the ‘war on terror.'”
Doubts over war on terror campaign
Press Association
LONDON (September 10, 2006) — Only a tiny minority of British people believe that the US and UK are winning the War on Terror, a poll has revealed.
Fewer than one in 10 people — just 7% — said that the US-led campaign was being won, the YouGov poll for Sky News to mark the anniversary of the September 11 attacks found.
By contrast nearly a quarter (22%) of the more than 2,000 people questioned said that they thought the two countries were losing the War on Terror while half said that they were “neither winning nor losing”.
Among the most striking findings from the survey was the fatalism expressed.
Two thirds (66%) of those polled say they believed that the War on Terror would continue beyond their lifetime.
The poll also contained more bad news for Tony Blair.
More than three-quarters (77%) of those questioned said that the Government’s policies in the Middle East had made Britain more of a terrorist target.
The finding suggests backing for the views expressed in a high-profile open letter to Tony Blair published just two days after last month’s arrests over an alleged airline plot.
The letter signed by some of Britain’s leading Muslim organisations and politicians said: “It is our view that current British Government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad.”
The Government roundly rejected that position. Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said that people who blamed Britain’s foreign policy for the terror threat were making “the gravest possible error”.
© Copyright Press Association Ltd 2006, All Rights Reserved.
