Gore on 9/11

My friend Jane is trying to convince me that Gore really knows the truth about 9/11.

I suspect he knows more than he's letting on, to be sure. But does he really think the Bush administration was complicit? He certainly accused them of incompetence. But that has been the standard line for more edgy Democrats.

I think probably the best indication that Gore knows more about 9/11 than he is letting on is here:

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information has been by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. President Eisenhower said this: "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: "Men feared witches and burnt women."

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the full Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of nuclear missiles ready to be launched on a moment's notice to completely annihilate the country? Is America really in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-- when the last generation had to fight and win two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they did. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms, and now it's up to us to do the very same thing!

We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens' right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive branch and the President's apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.

So, clearly Gore is saying two important things here. One is that 9/11 and Al Qaeda were not such huge novel threats to this country. This is of course in stark contrast to the Bush administration and the neocons. The other thing is that the Bush administration is using fear of 9/11 as a political tool. So Gore is saying Bush is unreasonably using 9/11 and the fear of terror.

So perhaps you could read these lines as code words that the Bush administration is not only terribly manipulative about 9/11, but even complicit in that event.

Perhaps.

What is clear is that if Gore came out and announced now that 9/11 was an inside job, no matter how true it might be, he will get blasted and no one will listen to his other points.

So I hope this is a strategic calculation on his part. Because Gore is too smart not to know that something stinks about the official 9/11 story.


Update: the speech is really worth listening to, it is much better than reading it. The speech gets better and better as it goes along. Here is a streaming video from c-span. Gore really goes off on Congress, how pathetic they are now, even admonishes the Dems.

Key part of the speech here.