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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Dick Cheney - The Nations's Number One Conspiracy Theorist Public distrust has become hallmark of administration By John Young COMMENTARY THE NATION'S foremost 9/11 conspiracy theorist was on "Meet the Press" last week. And we all thought conspiracy theorists got no face time in mainstream media. Well, it helps when you are vice president of the United States. That would be Dick Cheney. Next possibly to Fox News, he's the chief agent behind the belief held by so many, including many in our fighting forces, that we attacked Iraq because it had something to do with 9/11. Months after President Bush said that it wasn't so, a Senate Intelligence Committee report said it again this month. Saddam Hussein not only detested al-Qaida but apparently tried to capture Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Pressed about this by NBC's Tim Russert, Cheney said he hadn't read the report. That's amazing. Then again, it's not. When I mentioned 9/11 conspiracy theorists, you thought first about people who believe that the U.S. government was behind 9/11 or did nothing to prevent it. These individuals are dismissed as kooks and crazies. But those who send young men and women off to war based on politically calculated leaps of reasoning get treated with deference and motorcades. Time magazine had a story this month titled "Why the 9/11 conspiracies won't go away." It wasn't talking about Bush-Cheney's explanations for going to war. It was talking about those who believe our government might have brought down the Twin Towers. Time didn't really say why those theories won't go away. But a set of polls helped. Stunningly, a Scripps-Howard Poll recently found that 36 percent of Americans -- yes, more than one in three -- don't believe the established accounts of what happened on 9/11. What else don't they believe? For one, a Time poll found that 54 percent believe the U.S. role in Iraq is "hurting, not helping" the "war on terrorism." Implied: At least that many Americans don't equate Iraq and the war on terrorism at all. Fifty-three percent don't believe Saddam had any connection to 9/11. This is in sobering contrast to a Zogby Poll that found as many as 85 percent of U.S. troops in Iraq in February said the U.S. mission is mainly "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9/11 attacks." Seventy-seven percent of those troops said they believe a major reason for the war was "to stop Saddam from protecting al-Qaida in Iraq." Like our vice president, they haven't read the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report, either. All said, it should surprise no one to see the level-orange polling numbers showing distrust in our government. Sept. 10, Cheney told Russert that the fact that no Americans have been killed on the homeland since 9/11 should "give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right." That might be so, relative to the homeland. But many Americans would point out that the invasion of Iraq has resulted in almost as many American deaths as happened on Sept. 11, 2001, and made the Middle East far less stable than before. This puts a gruesome twist on the throw-away line that "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here." What's happened is that young Americans have died there to justify old men's conspiracy theories.
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