911 Blogger: Beyond the September 12th mindset

What follows is from a letter which I sent in reply to a fundraising appeal from Eugene Bird, President of the Council for the National Interest Foundation (CNIF), which works to counter the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, mainly through lobbying and ad campaigns. More can be learned about them at http://www.cnifoundation.org. My intention was to argue the importance--the urgency, actually--of reflecting on what we really know about 9/11 before speaking of it as if we have been essentially told the truth. I would not want any of this to be construed as denigrating the organization or its work. -rm
Dear Mr. Bird,
In your recent fundraising letter, you quoted a McCain advisor as describing Senator Obama as, '...a perfect manifestation of a September 10th mindset,' adding that this remark, '...did not sit well with us here at CNIF,' since, 'After the attacks of September 11th, it became very apparent to everyone in the United States that Washington needed to know more about the Middle East in order to understand the root causes of terrorism.'
This statement implies a 'blowback' interpretation of 9/11--that is, one that essentially accepts the Bush administration's account in its identification of the culprits, though characterizing their motives differently (bad foreign policy 'blew back' to the U.S. by provoking Muslims to attack us). And this interpretation we might in turn describe as a manifestation of a 'September 12th mindset'--a mindset born of shock in the immediate aftermath of those events, when the American public was readiest to believe what they were told by people in authority.

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