Time to come clean

It’s time for the U.S. government to come clean with its bosses – the American people.

• Top Defense Department officials now agree, according to a U.S. News report, that there always was a Middle East terror connection to the Oklahoma City bombing. They say there’s been a cover-up of Saddam Hussein’s involvement at the highest levels of government. Presumably that means the previous administration – from Bill Clinton to Janet Reno to Louis Freeh – knew there was a conspiracy wider than Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols but, for political reasons, decided to keep this information from the public.
• Officials and former officials from George Stephanopoulos to Sen. John Kerry have admitted candidly on television appearances lately that TWA Flight 800 was destroyed by an act of terrorism – even though the Clinton administration steadfastly refused to accept all the overwhelming evidence pointing in this direction.

• The U.S. government had all kinds of indications that Islamicist terrorists were going to resort to “spectacular” actions against the United States and had plenty of knowledge about Osama bin Laden’s specific plans to use hijacked airliners as missiles against the World Trade Center and Pentagon as far back as 1996.

Evidently, the U.S. government thought the people of the United States couldn’t handle the truth.

But the cover-ups are falling apart at the seams. And the question now is: How long will Washington and the Bush administration, in particular, remain complicit in this ongoing deceit?

The Clinton administration has much to answer for. According to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., it withheld even from Congress basic information about U.S. policies and relationships with the Afghan Taliban regime, despite repeated requests for information. Clinton’s executive branch played dangerous games with national security and the bloody devastation of Sept. 11 may be just the beginning of the price we will pay for such arrogance and brinksmanship.

But that’s all water under the bridge. Clinton will never be held responsible. No one ever will. Let’s face it.

Nevertheless, if America is to prevail in its current crisis, it’s time for some honesty, some candor. It’s time for the government to come clean with the American people. It’s time to lay all the cards on the table. We can’t make the right decisions as a self-governing people when our Washington elite continues systematically to deny us the truth.

Any informed person today can find out for himself or herself that bin Laden was supported for years by Iraq’s Hussein, Iran’s ayatollahs, Sudan’s dictators and Syria’s tyrants. Likewise, the history is clear that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan created the Taliban monster in Afghanistan.

Yet, officials in Washington seem reluctant to draw the logical conclusions from all this. They refuse even to admit these simple facts to the American people – preferring to lay blame for the Sept. 11 terror attacks at the feet of one man.

What an opportunity President Bush has to tell the truth – straightforwardly, as best he knows how. He shouldn’t have any guilt about the sins of others. Only if he perpetuates the fraud on the American people will he share in the guilt.

It would be a good time for President Bush to reflect on the presidency of his father.

His father’s popularity was never higher than immediately after the Persian Gulf War. But it didn’t last. Two factors cost him a second term.

He broke a promise to the American people not to raise taxes, and he didn’t finish the job in Iraq.

Saddam Hussein survived to fight another day. Clearly, now, Iraq has had its measure of revenge. The decision not to pursue Hussein to the ends of the earth may have cost America nearly 6,000 innocent lives Sept. 11.

The second Bush administration should not make the same mistake. Well before the 2004 elections, President Bush needs to ensure that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power in Baghdad. That should be a major objective of this war – not for political reasons, mind you, but because taking out Hussein is the right thing to do.

President Bush will need the support of the American people to follow that course, and he cannot get it without coming clean regarding our mistakes of the past.

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Don’t miss Joseph Farah’s exclusive report “Jihad in America” in the November issue of Whistleblower magazine, WorldNetDaily’s monthly offline publication. Order your subscription now.