"Spinning Old Threats Into New Fears"? You Bet! It's What Bush, Cheney, and The GOP Do Best

[Ed. note: FYI: The day before the liquid bomb airplane plot was pushed out to the media against Britain's objections as "premature", the Bushies were arguing that transportation security should NOT bother to check for liquid bombs. Sort of like how John Ashcroft on September 10th, 2001, was on Capitol Hill arguing the need to cut anti-terror funding. Geniuses, these Bushies are!]

Former LA Times OpEdist Robert Scheer brings us this at TruthDig (snippet here but visit the link for the entire essay):

Investigators have known for a decade about terrorist plots to bring down passenger jets with liquid explosives. So why, all of a sudden, did Bush ban most liquids on flights?

Government-induced hysteria thrives on public ignorance, which is why President Bush is so confident of turning the British bomb plot to his partisan purposes. Otherwise, how could he dare claim that his policies have made the nation safer?

Consider, first off, that the attack envisioned — smuggling liquid-explosive ingredients onto 10 passenger planes — was outlined in chapter five of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report as a plot first exposed a decade ago. The originator of that planned hijacking of 12 U.S.-bound planes, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was also the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. According to U.S. prosecutors, his nephew, convicted terrorist Ramzi Yousef, even managed to explode such a liquid-based bomb on a Manila-Tokyo flight, killing one passenger, as part of a plot code-named “Bojinka.”

Because checking or banning fluids was not a focus of this administration’s post-Sept. 11 airport security measures, this “coincidence” would suggest either enormous negligence on the part of those charged with protecting us or a ludicrous overreaction this past week. Knowing as we did of Mohammed’s earlier plan, why wasn’t the Department of Homeland Security requiring fliers to dump their bottles of hairspray and mother’s milk before?

Unlike Yousef, who was arrested in Pakistan in 1995, Mohammed remained at large until two years after Sept. 11 to continue pushing the Bojinka concept to any terrorist bankroller who would listen. It has been known for at least two years since his capture that he spoke in detail about the scheme with Osama bin Laden. (The two had met much earlier during their days as what President Ronald Reagan called “freedom fighters” in the crusade against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.)