September 7, 2006
A document cited by President Bush in his recent speech at the Capital Hilton Hotel on how to 'win the war on terror' cites conspiracies as one of the wellsprings of terrorism and threatens to "address" and "diminish" the problems they are causing the government in fulfilling their agenda.
On Tuesday Bush referred to the strategy paper as "an unclassified version of the strategy we've been pursuing since September the 11th, 2001," that takes into account, "the changing nature of this enemy."
The document says that terrorism springs from "subcultures of conspiracy and misinformation," and that "terrorists recruit more effectively from populations whose information about the world is contaminated by falsehoods and corrupted by conspiracy theories. The distortions keep alive grievances and filter out facts that would challenge popular prejudices and self-serving propaganda."
The terminology echoes President Bush's speech (video below) to the UN General Assembly on November 10th 2001 in which he stated, "Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th, malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty."
This is an outright threat to the 9/11 truth movement and is meant to have a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
It is also a callous reminder that the administration that has been the progenitor of the most heinous and deliberate campaign to mislead and lie to its own people is so transfixed by its own hubris that it has the temerity to accuse others of propagating deceptive information.
This is the same administration that deliberately included the Niger yellow cake fraud in a state of the union speech to sell a war - knowing that the information was completely bogus.