In April, U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., got in a whole heap of trouble after she called for a thorough investigation of what George W. Bush knew before Sept. 11 about the potential for the sort of terrorist attacks that would shake the nation and the world on that fateful day.

McKinney is one of the most outspoken members of Congress and her statements were typically blunt.

"We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11th," she told a radio interviewer. "What did this administration know and when did it know it about the events of September 11th? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered? ... What do they have to hide?"

McKinney's call for a real investigation of what Bush knew - along with her parallel suggestion that it was necessary to review possible war profiteering by members of the Bush family and corporations with close ties to the president - drew a firestorm from pundits and partisans.

"The American people know the facts, and they dismiss such ludicrous, baseless views," grumbled White House spokesman Scott McLellan. The Washington Post declared in a news story that McKinney "seems to have tapped into a web of conspiracy theories." National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg went on at length about how the five-term representative was spouting "paranoid, America-hating, crypto-Marxist conspiratorial delusions."

McKinney's hometown newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, accused her of buying into a "wacko left-wing version of paranoid hatred of the president." For good measure, Journal-Constitution editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker added, "McKinney has made herself too easy a target for mockery. She no longer deserves serious analysis."

Barely one month after McKinney was so condemned, the headline of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution read: "Bush warned by U.S. intelligence before 9-11 of possible bin Laden plot to hijack planes." The Washington Post front page announced: "Bush was told of hijacking dangers." The Fox News Channel was repeating the big story of the day: "Bush was warned of hijack plot."

The news that President Bush was told a month before Sept. 11 that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network might hijack American airplanes should not be read as a confirmation of all the concerns McKinney expressed in April. For instance, nothing in the new evidence about Bush's lax approach supports the intimation that the president failed to warn New Yorkers because he wanted to help family or friends profit from a ramping up of military spending.

America is only beginning to examine the question of whether the president, his aides and the intelligence community could have put the pieces of information together in a way that might have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks.

Yet, all of a sudden, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., is asking about "what the president and what the White House knew about the events leading up to 9-11, when they knew it and, most importantly, what was done about it at that time." And Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says of the information that was available before Sept. 11: "I believe, and others believe, if it had been acted on properly, we may have had a different situation on September 11th."

Is official Washington beginning to suffer from "paranoid, America-hating, crypto-Marxist conspiratorial delusions?" Are White House aides who confirmed that Bush knew of the hijacking threat before Sept. 11 expressing a "wacko left-wing version of paranoid hatred of the president"?

Or are they, perhaps, beginning to recognize that, when so many others were silent, McKinney was right to argue in April: "We deserve to know what went wrong on Sept. 11 and why. After all, we hold thorough public inquiries into rail disasters, plane crashes, and even natural disasters in order to understand what happened and to prevent them from happening again or minimizing the tragic effects when they do.

"Why then does the administration remain steadfast in its opposition to an investigation into the biggest terrorism attack upon our nation?"

Copyright 2002 The Capital Times

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