Obama Faces The Smear Machine
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, August 15, 2008; A21
Here come the goons, right on schedule.
The "author," and I use the term loosely, whose vicious lies damaged John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign has crawled back out from under his rock to spew vicious lies about Barack Obama. Right-wing radio talk-show hosts are dutifully transmitting this concocted venom. This presidential campaign has officially gotten ugly.
The "author" I'm talking about is a man named Jerome Corsi. In a book published last year, "The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada," Corsi claimed that George W. Bush was at the heart of a secret conspiracy to subsume the United States into a post-national, one-worldish North American Union. Corsi's writings on far-right blogs have been even more paranoid and delusional. He has written that pedophilia, for which he used a more graphic term, "is OK with the Pope as long as it isn't reported by the liberal press." He has referred to Muslims as "ragheads."
Corsi would be known as just another visitor from the outer fringe if he had not been the co-author of "Unfit for Command," the book that slimed Kerry's exemplary record as a Swift boat commander in Vietnam. The allegations in that book were discredited, but not before they had been amplified by the right-wing echo chamber to the point where they raised questions in some voters' minds -- perhaps enough to swing the election.
It was an abominable trick, but quite remarkable. Kerry's opponent, George W. Bush, had avoided Vietnam by taking refuge in the Texas Air National Guard. Kerry was a decorated war hero, yet somehow his valor and sense of duty were turned into a political negative and used against him.
Now Corsi, in what he acknowledges is an attempt "to keep Obama from getting elected," has come out with a book that similarly tries to turn one of Obama's strengths -- his compelling life story -- into a liability.
Corsi's new volume of vitriol, "The Obama Nation," seeks to smear Obama as a "leftist" and add fuel to the false and discredited rumor that he is secretly a radical Muslim, or at least has "extensive connections to Islam." The liberal Web site Media Matters has already demonstrated that the book is riddled with factual errors -- for example, Corsi repeats the charge, thoroughly disproved, that Obama was in church for one of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's most incendiary sermons. But the point isn't to tell the truth. The point is to repeat the lie and thus give it new life.
Corsi's dirty work is more difficult this time because Obama has already written his life story in the autobiographical "Dreams From My Father." Since he can't reveal anything about Obama's past, Corsi is reduced to reinterpretation -- or, at times, invention.
It sounds like the kind of book that should quickly be consigned to the remainder bin, but -- unsurprisingly -- it is already a bestseller. The Post and other news organizations have noted that this and similar anti-Obama books win the imprimatur of best-seller status by being "pushed by conservative book clubs that buy in bulk to drive up sales."
This time, though, somebody is pushing back: John Kerry, whose political action committee has launched a new Web site, called Truth Fights Back, to "fight against the right-wing smear machine." The site weighs in vigorously on behalf of several Democrats who are being hit with unfair attacks, but its most urgent campaign is "making sure Jerome Corsi doesn't get away with his lies unchallenged."
The Obama campaign faces a classic dilemma. If smear attacks are left unanswered, voters can get the impression that the lies are true. But there's no way to respond without giving the falsehoods wider circulation.
For Obama, this choice seems doubly fraught. Just look at the way John McCain's campaign jumped all over Obama when he predicted -- correctly, it turns out -- that Republicans would try to scare voters by making him seem alien and somehow frightening. His observation about not looking like previous presidents was opportunistically slammed by McCain and his surrogates as playing "the race card."
Yesterday, the Obama campaign released a lengthy rebuttal of Corsi's book. The vacationining candidate himself remained silent, leaving it to others, such as Kerry, to give a more full-throated response. Kerry knows better than anyone what it feels like to be Swift-boated, and he's determined not to let it happen to anyone else.
Unfit for Publication
One of the most vile smear peddlers of the 2004 election has found a new target.
Jerome Corsi just published a new book full of rehashed distortions and the same old lies about Barack Obama, and the right-wing noise machine is in full gear promoting it.
In 2004, Corsi helped launch the Swift Boat smear campaign with a book of distortions and lies he wrote about John Kerry.
It’s up to you to spread the truth, so here it is. We’ve posted some of the facts about Corsi and his desperate fabrications on this page, but there’s even more in our 
PDF: Unfit for Publication.
A LITTLE RESEARCH DISPROVES EVEN CORSI’S MOST BASIC CLAIMS
LIE: “The year 1995 was a banner one for Obama. He had just married Michelle and the couple bought a Hyde Park condo, the first home Obama ever owned.”[p 145]
REALITY: OBAMAS MARRIED IN 1992 AND BOUGHT A CONDO IN 1993
10/3/92 Obama And Michelle Robinson Were Married. [Chicago Sun-Times, 10/3/07]
1993 Obama Bought a Condo for $277,550. [Chicago Sun-Times, 1/22/06]
NONE OF CORSI’S DIVISIVE, REHASHED CLAIMS CHECKS OUT, EITHER
LIE: “Senator Obama could claim to be a citizen of Kenya, as well as of the United States. Obama can trace his heritage back to his mother, who was born in the United States and was an American citizen when he was born, and to his father, who was born in Kenya and was a Kenyan citizen when Obama was born.” [p 103]
REALITY: OBAMA CANNOT CLAIM KENYAN CITIZENSHIP
Kenya Does Not Allow Dual Citizenship Applications for People Over 21 Years of Age. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management writes of Kenya, “DUAL CITIZENSHIP: Not recognized except for persons under 21 years old.” The Kenyan Constitution writes, “A person who, but for the proviso to section 87 (1), would be a citizen of Kenya by virtue of that subsection shall be entitled, upon making application before the specified date in such manner as may be prescribed by or under an Act of Parliament, to be registered as a citizen of Kenya: Provided that a person who has not attained the age of twenty-one years (other than a woman who is or has been married) may not himself make an application under this subsection, but an application may be made on his behalf by his parent or guardian.” [U.S. Office of Personnel Management; Kenyan Constitution]
Even if Obama Had Applied for Dual Citizenship Before He Was 21—Which He Did Not—It Would Have Expired. ”A person who, upon the attainment of the age of twenty-one years, is a citizen of Kenya and also a citizen of some other country other than Kenya shall, subject to subsection (7), cease to be a citizen of Kenya upon the specified date unless he has renounced his citizenship of that other country, taken the oath of allegiance and, in the case of a person who was born outside Kenya, made and registered such declaration of his intentions concerning residence as may be prescribed by or under an Act of Parliament.” [Kenyan Constitution]
CORSI CAN’T EVEN RECOGNIZE REAL RESEARCH WHEN HE SEES IT
LIE: “Christopher Hitchens noted on Salon.com that Michelle announces in her Princeton thesis that she has been influenced by the definition of ‘black separatism’ given by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1867 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.” [p 232]
REALITY: USING A DEFINITION IS NOT THE SAME THING AS HAVING INFLUENCE
The Thesis Used Carmichael And Hamilton’s Definition Of Black Separationism In Her Study But Did Not Suggest She Was “Influenced” By It. Michelle Obama wrote in her thesis, “Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s (1967) developed definitions of separationism in their discussion of Black Power which guided me in the formulation and use of this concept in the study…Thus, Carmichael and Hamilton define separationism as a necessary stage for the development of the Black community before this group integrates into the “open society”. The idea of creating separate social structure and cultural structures as suggested by these authors serves to clarify definitions of separationism/pluralism as they function in the dependent variable which tries to measure the 26 respondents’ ideologies concerning political and economic relations between the Black and White communities.” [Michelle Obama’s Thesis]
Summary: Appearing on the syndicated radio show of Alex Jones -- who claims to be "considered by many to be the grandfather of what has come to be known as the 9/11 Truth Movement" -- Jerome Corsi baselessly claimed that as a child, "Obama got Islamic instruction, and it wasn't mainstream Islamic instruction." Jones asserted that "we should not have anybody as president who -- both their parents aren't Americans," saying "this allows infiltration," later saying of Obama: "He is a ringer, folks. He's meant to take a dive for John McCain. So this is nonpartisan. The facts are in. He will be destroyed in this election."
On August 4, author Jerome Corsi, appeared on the syndicated radio program The Alex Jones Show -- the host of which is described on his website as "considered by many to be the grandfather of what has come to be known as the 9/11 Truth Movement" -- to promote his book The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (Threshold Editions, August 2008). During the interview, Corsi baselessly claimed that as a child, "Obama got Islamic instruction, and it wasn't mainstream Islamic instruction," after which host Alex Jones asserted that "we should not have anybody as president who -- both their parents aren't Americans," saying "this allows infiltration." After further discussing family members of Obama's who are Muslim, Jones asserted of Obama: "He is a ringer, folks. He's meant to take a dive for John McCain. So this is nonpartisan. The facts are in. He will be destroyed in this election."
An August 14 posting on the New York Times' political blog The Caucus reported on a January 29 appearance on the show by Corsi, in which he "discuss[ed] the findings of Steven Jones, physicist and hero of the '9/11 Truth' movement who claims to have evidence that the World Trade Center towers collapsed due to explosives inside the building, not just the planes hitting them, during the attacks." The Caucus described "Alex Jones's radio show" as "a forum for those who take a deeply skeptical view of government claims about the attacks," and wrote that Corsi's "book about Senator Barack Obama appears to have distracted him from another project he was planning in January: exposing what he calls the government's inadequate explanations about the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center." From The Caucus:
A YouTube video making the rounds, especially among Obama supporters, mocks Mr. Corsi for a Jan. 29 interview on Alex Jones's radio show, a forum for those who take a deeply skeptical view of government claims about the attacks. (Mr. Corsi also frequently talks about the "North American Union" and other threats from globalization during his appearances).
The clip has Mr. Corsi discussing the findings of Steven Jones, physicist and hero of the "9/11 Truth" movement who claims to have evidence that the World Trade Center towers collapsed due to explosives inside the building, not just the planes hitting them, during the attacks.
"The fire, from jet fuel, does not burn hot enough to produce the physical evidence that he's produced," Mr. Corsi said. "So when you've got science that the hypothesis doesn't explain-evidence-then the hypothesis doesn't stand anymore. It doesn't mean there's a new hypothesis you've validated. It just means the government's explanation of the jet fuel fire is not a sufficient explanation to explain the evidence of these spheres-these microscopic spheres-that Steven Jones has proved existed within the W.T.C. dust."
From the August 4 Alex Jones Show audio clip, posted on YouTube.com on August 5:
CORSI: Well, once they understand that, blacks may understand that this Obama is not the guy they thought he was. I also have traced Obama's connections into Africa very thoroughly --
JONES: Yeah, let's stop there. That's what I wanna cover for the rest of the show, because you've broken a lot of the stuff that's already been documented in the mainstream news, from new connections that weren't, Dr. Corsi. Let's get into Barack Hussein Obama. Is he really a Muslim? Was his dad --
CORSI: Yes.
JONES: -- really a Muslim? OK, go ahead and tell us.
CORSI: Well, first of all, Obama says he never got Islamic instruction. It's not true. In Indonesia, and he was there from 6 to 9, his Islamic stepfather registered Obama -- even in the Catholic school, he registered him as a Muslim, and then in the public school, at least one year, maybe two, Obama got Islamic instruction, and this wasn't mainstream Islamic instruction, and --
JONES: Wait, wait, wait -- that is bombshell, Dr. Corsi.
CORSI: Yes.
JONES: That is bombshell because -- not that he's really a Muslim, that he's lied about it --
CORSI: He's lying. Exactly.
JONES: -- and we should not have anybody as president who -- both their parents aren't Americans. Bottom line, that's always been the way it is. They even passed laws in Europe against people from outside becoming president or chancellor, it -- because this allows infiltration. You're telling me -- tell us the proof in your book that Barack Obama did attend Muslim school.
CORSI: Well, the first proof is that I found a line in Obama's own autobiography where he admitted it.
JONES: Unbelievable.
CORSI: He says in one passing line, in about a page -- in the middle of the book, Obama says his mother was angry at him because he made faces in Quran studies, and you know, that one sentence validated it. Then the Indonesian newspapers, which I translated, and the Indonesian television went back and interviewed schoolmates of Obama. They said he attended Islamic instruction in the public school. They also said that all four years that Obama was there, he went to mosque with his father [sic], Lolo Soetoro.
JONES: So, it's not a rumor -- yeah, it's not a rumor. His stepfather was a Muslim. He has --
CORSI: Yes.
JONES: -- family, brothers and people that are Muslims. And so, bottom line, he has been lying the entire time. And that's why they put him up there. He is a ringer, folks. He's meant to take a dive for John McCain. So this is nonpartisan. The facts are in. He will be destroyed in this election.
— M.B., M.G., E.H.H., J.M., & S.S.M.
Posted to the web on Friday, August 15, 2008 at 02:23 PM ET
Tom Dispatch
posted 2004-05-20 21:41:04
Tomgram: Nicholas von Hoffman on the big lie
The President, as I was writing just yesterday, rides the country and the world inside his own personal bubble. The country he invaded and occupied is ruled from a former Saddam Hussein palace complex in Baghdad inside the Green Zone, one of the most heavily fortified areas on Earth. It is invariably described by its inhabitants as if it existed on another planet. The Americans who run the country, even when surrounded by their hired security guards, seldom leave their planet for the planet of the Iraqis. This, of course, explains much about the course of events in Iraq.
The reporters "covering" Iraq now exist in, and send you the news from, their own "bubble" (Howard Kurtz, Reporting under a Shadow, the Washington Post):
"'We've been largely confined to Baghdad,' says Bill Spindle, the Wall Street Journal's Middle East editor… ‘With the checkpoints and the kidnappings and the shootings that seem deliberately aimed at people working for Western organizations, moving around has been a dicey proposition.'"Fox News Senior Vice President John Moody agrees. ‘Some days our guys just don't get out of the building where we're located,' he says… Pamela Constable, a Washington Post reporter…, says conditions for journalists have ‘dramatically deteriorated,' making it more difficult to ‘cover real people and events in a turbulent and complicated country, not just go to sanitized official briefings surrounded by barbed wire.' Her experience as an embedded reporter in Fallujah ‘was both enlightening and frustrating. We had near-total access to Marines of all ranks . . . but of course it all occurred within a military bubble of sorts, with no chance to gauge the numbers, motives or degree of popular support enjoyed by their insurgent opponents.'"
So, it turns out we get our Iraq news largely from within the news bubble the Green Zone bubble made necessary thanks, originally, to the White House/neocon/Pentagon bubble; but, suggests Nicholas von Hoffman in his new book -- hot off the presses -- Hoax, Why Americans Are Suckered by White House Lies, it's actually far worse than that. All the above bubbles emanate from an even larger bubble -- he calls it "an immense biosphere" -- within which Americans live offshore from global reality. His new book, of which "The Big Lie" below is the opening chapter, is one provocateur's attempt to pierce that bubble of bubbles -- or at least to close the gap a tad between what is believed inside our biosphere and the way reality looks to those benighted souls out there where protection from reality isn't quite as strong.
Von Hoffman, once a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, remembers some previous bubble moments in America, especially the pre-Watergate years during which he wrote his Post column. As he points out at the end of his new book, speaking of bubbles, visions, and Iraq:
"The forced conversion of the population of a single country is no small project. Running most of the world under the holy water spigot is an undertaking for Texans who can see long distances across their arid, flat state. Call it vision or having visions, but on hot days the heat rising from the range forms hologram pictures of family values, basic integrity, and Amber alerts. It is then that febrile brains entertain thoughts on converting the world."
Von Hoffman's take-no-prisoners style is bracing. He's not a man to mince words. He begins his book with a quote from former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser: "The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves." And his dedication reads: "To my son Sgt. Aristodemos von Hoffman, United States Army, presently on active duty in Iraq." Tom
The Big Lie
By Nicholas von Hoffman
The frightening shark swimming with toothy grin in a giant aquarium does not see the human faces looking in from the other side of the glass. The shark is in a world of its own, with its own reality. Like the shark, Americans don't see the people outside the glass. It is as though America is in a 3,000 mile wide terrarium, an immense biosphere which has cut it off from the rest of the world and left it to pick its own way down the path of history. By the time the American army stepped into Iraq, the difference in world view between the United States and everybody else had grown to the size of the hole in the atmosphere over the South Pole.
A fanciful explanation for the two realities is that the United States is the continent-wide set for a large scale re-enactment of the movie The Truman Show. The plot of that movie has the well-intentioned but naive hero go about his daily life without any suspicion that he is, in fact, in a gigantic soap opera. His hometown is actually the set for the TV show and from earliest childhood he has been manipulated and controlled by the producer and the director. The enthusiastic acceptance by the American multitudes of the Iraqi stuff-and-nonsense coming out of the White House would be understandable if we all are living on a stage set in a village called Freedom Island threatened by a town called Evil Axis.
Americans believed, as they usually do when their government and their television tell them something, but the rest of the world laughed every time George Bush or Colin Powell or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld thought up yet one more scary reason to invade Iraq. The ill-constructed, clumsy untruths were surprisingly crude for people who have had years to practice the craft of mass deception, and they had only to speak their latest falsehood to be cheered by their countrymen and disbelieved by non-Americans everywhere.
It's not easy to pull off the Big Lie and George Bush failed; though, in mitigation, pulling off a bait-and-switch war demands skillful finagling and this one was complicated. There was the bait (terrorism), then the switch (weapons of mass destruction), then a switch again (kill the dictator), and yet again (regime change). A politician has to be an accomplished teller of tall tales and absurd fibulations to bring off such a demarché. Even the masters of mass prevarication occasionally fail.
In September 1939, Adolf Hitler made the mistake of dressing up some nondescript clowns in Polish uniforms and having them "attack" the territory of the Third Reich. This was done to show an incredulous world that his invasion of Poland, which quickly followed his costume party on the border, was a justified counter thrust to unprovoked aggression. The world didn't believe him, but Hitler didn't care. At Obersalzberg, just before initiating the hell which was World War II, he had announced that, "The . . . destruction of Poland begins Saturday early. I shall let a few companies in Polish uniform attack in Upper Silesia. . . . Whether the world believes it is quite indifferent. The world believes only in success." Hitler, the Biggest of Big Liars, had the brass and the disdain which George Bush, under his Texas cowpuncher veneer, does not have. This may be to his credit, but without them Iraq was guaranteed to be a bloody mess. If you are going to tell a Big Lie badly, you have to pull off the crime, you have to make it a success. George Bush didn't.
The Big Lie must be simple and it must be repeated until it reverberates like a jack hammer digging up the street in front of where you live: inescapable sound. George Bush, either out of a fumbling honesty, inexperience, or incompetence, did not lie well. His labored and embarrassing build-up to the Iraqi invasion broke every rule for effective deception.
Unlike a chef d'état who has the technique down pat, Bush made the amateur's mistake. He, his spokesmen and women, his spinners and weavers of untruth, his propagandists, all fell into the trap of answering back, elaborating, retracting, and adding on. Instead of the Big Lie, simple and pure, the official U. S. government story grew more ornate and complicated as the date Bush had set for the invasion came closer. Instead of one good reason to go to war, swarms of bad reasons were proffered, which gave skeptics in other countries material to pick his little white fables apart.
A corollary to keeping things simple is to refrain from offering evidence. Where there is no evidence there can be no refutation. Bush, however, trumpeted that he had warehouses full of evidence-which, as it happened, consisted of tons of used paper towels and soiled Kleenex. Once exposed to air and light, the truckloads of proof positive turned into proof negative; the often-cited smoking gun was revealed to be a dribbling water pistol. The more evidence the world's last remaining superpower brought forth, the goofier or more dangerous Mr. Bush appeared to foreigners, who saw him as either a gibbering bobble-head doll or an international menace. In one of the UN's more memorable afternoons, the world heard American Secretary of State Colin Powell, who a year earlier had said that Saddam was toothless and "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction," explain to the Security Council that a photograph of what looked like a couple of rusty, abandoned Good Humor ice cream trucks actually showed traveling war germ factories. The ice cream trucks, he told his global audience, many of whom must have been rolling on the floor laughing, were making biological weapons of mass destruction.
Heaping Pelion on Ossa, the secretary of state pulled another photograph out of his attache case. This one, he said, was of an Iraqi pilotless airplane bearing Saddam Hussein's weapons of deadly germs and lethal chemicals, ready for takeoff. To the non-American part of his audience the object looked like the balsa wood airplanes boys glue together and fly in the park. After the model airplanes and the ice cream trucks came the aluminum tubes for the nonexistent atom bomb factories, forged documents out of Africa, tales of spies and agents meeting in Viennese cafes, far-fetched dribs and super-secret drabs of what was hopefully called intelligence. The more of it Powell and Bush gave the world, the less the world believed.
Mexican President Vincente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien were having none of George Bush's mega-fibs. The United Kingdom, the other partner in the Coalition of the Willing-a phrase the White House tunesmiths must wish they could take back-was dragged into the Iraqi adventure over the protests of millions of its indignant subjects by a prime minister whose consecration to the Anglo-American "special relationship" almost destroyed his career. When it came to foreign politicians rallying to the American cause, there were few Bush could count on, though he had the support of Ariel Sharon, a man who has never seen an Arab he didn't want to throttle, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian premier/businessman shunned as a crook and white collar criminal by all of Europe.
Nevertheless, the voluble Silvio had a way of expressing the less-than-articulate George Bush's thoughts: "We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights-and in contrast with Islamic countries-respect for religious and political rights, a system that has as its values understandings of diversity and tolerance," said the enthusiastic premier, who on another occasion explained the difference between Saddam Hussein and one of Premier Berlusconi's predecessors in the office by remarking that, "Mussolini never killed anyone . . . Mussolini sent people on holiday to confine them [banishment to small islands such as Ponza and Maddalena which are now plush resorts]." Not that the ordinary Italians were rushing to the colors. The idea that Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat to anybody but his own people was disbelieved there and everywhere except in the United States.
There is something distant and abstract about a term like "weapons of mass destruction." You can see how the fear that they might exist could make a lot of people give George Bush and his fellow doomsayers the benefit of the doubt. After all, who's to say that Saddam, being the homicidal swine he is, might not have had a few poison-gas rockets capable of killing people in Israel or even farther afield?
But for most of the world such ruminations and nugatory suspicions did not add up to a case for invasion. Why then did Americans go for it, embracing the preposterous assertion that Saddam Hussein, however malevolent his intentions may have been and however nauseating his past acts, was a fearsomely powerful chieftain able to strike a meaningful blow against the United States?
You didn't have to be a retired general to know it couldn't be. Twelve years before, the American armed forces had demolished the Iraqi military. They had done it in 100 hours of shelling, bombing, and shooting at Saddam's army-which did fight back. Before the 100-hour massacre, American air power had spent days destroying the Iraqi electric power, public utilities, and transportation facilities. After the 100-hour war, if you want to dignify the 1991 skirmish with that name, a United Nations commission had destroyed Saddam's poison gas, his biologicals, his rickety, inaccurate rockets, and the poor beginnings of a nuclear weapons program. Since then the Americans and the British had-sometimes periodically and sometimes incessantly-bombed whatever Saddam had left in the way of fighting forces.
The defeated-though always devious-dictator had no means of rebuilding the inferior force which had been destroyed in 1991 when he was driven out of Kuwait. After Gulf War I, the United States, through the UN, controlled the sale of Iraqi oil which, other than rugs, was that country's only significant source of income. The United States, again through the UN, decided what and how much Iraq could buy with the little moneys allotted to it. It was scarcely permitted food and medicine. As for guns, perish the thought. Embargoes and sanctions aside, the money wasn't there to pay for the war machine the United States insisted Saddam had but was hiding among the camels. The Iraqi nation was prostrate, as innumerable visitors, returning home after seeing Baghdad's hungry children, reported. It was ludicrous to suppose that the dictator and his two sadistic sons posed a threat to anyone other than those unlucky enough to be Iraqi citizens.
What was obvious to others wasn't to Americans. They nursed the thought that people in the rest of the world might not have taken Saddam Hussein to be the toothless tyrant he was if 9/11 had happened to them. If the French and the Germans had seen three thousand of their people murdered in one blow, if they had had a personal experience with terror it might have made them less lenient with a man like the Bastard of Baghdad. A man who, whatever the evidence or the lack thereof, had something to do with the destruction of the World Trade Center; who, you may be sure, was in cahoots with al Qaeda; who, have no doubt about it, was slipping money to fanatic Muslim militants; who could let go forty-five minutes after the command of an immediate missile attack against the United States in the spring of 2003. What was received as subjective theorizing in Europe was flat-out fact in the United States. America and the rest of world were veering away from each other.
The horror of 9/11 had been met with enormous sympathy abroad, but it did not cause people elsewhere to take leave of their senses. None had lost 3,000 people in one blow to terrorist attacks, but the American sense of the uniqueness of what their country had suffered was not taken by others to be a license to go berserk and act like a bull wildly kicking its hind legs and expelling rockets from its nostrils in every direction across the globe. Not even non-Muslim India, which has over the years endured assassinations and terror attacks rivaling or surpassing America's suffering, approved. The Russians, committed to a struggle in which their horrors are answered with a terrorism as appalling as any, could not bring themselves to go along with the invasion of Iraq. Why couldn't America see it? And why is this question so seldom asked?
The above was an excerpt from Nicholas von Hoffman's newest book Hoax, Why Americans Are Suckered by White House Lies. Von Hoffman, a Pulitzer Prize-losing author, has had a long and bumpy career in journalism, during which he has been fired more than a few times by editors and TV executives who have a limited tolerance for curmudgeonly behavior. For years he wrote a syndicated column for the Washington Post that ended in a lynch-or-resign situation. He is the author of thirteen books, the best known of which is Citizen Cohn, several plays and an opera libretto. He is a columnist for the New York Observer
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