The manipulators of 9/11.

If there is an award for chutzpah, George Bush and Dick Cheney will be sharing it. For they have used the attacks of September 11 in the crassest way to try to scare the American people into voting for them.

This tactic was on vulgar display at the Republican Convention. Speaker after speaker barely had said hello when they blurted out that date. It took Bush himself only two sentences to allude to it. George Pataki expended all of forty-seven words before he coughed up the date. Rudy Giuliani waited until his third sentence to bring it up.

The focus on September 11 was intended to do several things. First, the Republicans hoped to make the American people forget Bush's shakiness on the day of the attacks. They didn't want the voting public to remember the scene from Fahrenheit 9/11 of Bush continuing to read to the elementary school kids after the towers had been hit. And so they had Bernard Kerik, who was police commissioner of New York at that time, praise the commander in chief's "strong and decisive leadership on that day." Giuliani followed up by heaping praise on Bush's leadership abilities, comparing him to George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and Winston Churchill.

Second, they wanted yet again to conflate the war against Al Qaeda with the war against Saddam Hussein. This has been Bush's strategy for more than two years now, and Giuliani gladly made the specious case. He said Bush promised the firefighters "amid the fallen towers of the World Trade Center" that the terrorists would hear from us. "Well, they heard from us. They heard from us in Afghanistan.... They heard from us in Iraq."

Never mind that the 9/11 terrorists had nothing to do with Iraq. Repeating the lie, over and over again, makes it so, at least for Republican purposes.

But the Iraq War was too big a mess to whisk easily under the rug. Note what a bad sweeper Pataki was. He raised the issue of the vanishing weapons of mass destruction and tried to dismiss it with the following: "On September 11th in New York, we learned that in the hands of a monster, a box cutter is a weapon of mass destruction. And Saddam Hussein was a monster, a walking, talking weapon of mass destruction."

Pataki's tacky argument disintegrated upon even the slightest reflection. He blurred the distinction between a box cutter and anthrax or a nuclear weapon. He then blurred the distinction between a human being and anthrax or a nuclear weapon. And, of course, Saddam Hussein and his forces were not the ones wielding the box cutters. What's more, in the lead-up to the war, Bush and Cheney talked about Saddam not only as a monster, but as a monster with a particularly frightening arsenal. Cheney said Saddam had nuclear weapons, and Bush said he had "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." The authorization of force that Bush won from Congress had everything to do with Saddam possessing actual weapons of mass destruction, not with him being a metaphorical weapon of mass destruction.

To smudge that all up was to insult the intelligence of the American people.

And they kept insulting that intelligence after he convention was over.

During Congressional debate on a resolution marking the third anniversary of September 11, House Whip Tom DeLay said that the fight against Iraq and the fight against Al Qaeda "is one and the same conflict."

Cheney, on September 10, of all dates, said yet again that Iraq had "a relationship with Al Qaeda." Cheney surely knows that the 9/11 Commission concluded there was no "collaborative, operational relationship" between the two. But Cheney doesn't care. He keeps repeating that there was a relationship, and though he doesn't say "collaborative" or "operational," he no doubt wants the American public to think that.

Before the war, Cheney and Bush and Colin Powell asserted that there was more than a casual relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. They claimed that Iraq was arming and training Al Qaeda.

To gain Congressional approval for the war, Bush said in October 7, 2002, "Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.

Powell, in his February 2003 U.N. speech prior to the Iraq War, talked of the "sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network."

Even after no weapons were found, Cheney continued to spin the lie.

On September 14, 2003, he said that the Iraqis had been "providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the Al Qaeda organization."

On October 10, 2003, he said Saddam had been "providing training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons, gases, making conventional weapons."

All those claims were false, according to The 9/11 Commission Report.

At least Powell now admits that he has seen "nothing that makes a direct connection between Saddam Hussein" and 9/11.

No such frankness from Cheney. And none from Bush, either, not on the campaign trail, anyway.

Instead, the tactic continues to be blur, blur, blur, the better to keep the public on board for the rocky Iraq ride.

Most of all, by dwelling on September 11, Republicans are trying to instill or reinforce fear in the American people. A week after the convention, Cheney, who had his conscience surgically removed three decades ago, infamously said that if Bush doesn't win in November, "then the danger is we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating."

This scare tactic is amazing for its audacity.

For months now, the Bush Administration has been warning us that we might be attacked before the election. So then it would be whose fault?

Bush and Cheney have not done enough to protect us, as they've left our ports and our nuclear and chemical plants open to attack. "Chemical plants still aren't subject to federal security controls," The Wall Street Journal reported on August 20.

Nor have Bush and Cheney safeguarded the enriched uranium and the suitcase nuclear bombs of the former Soviet Union. Instead, they have been penny-wise and pound-foolish in underfunding the Nunn-Lugar law that was supposed to get these hazards under wraps.

Then there's the Iraq War, which has made us a lot less safe. It has distracted military and intelligence resources from the fight against Al Qaeda, it has alienated allies and others who were cooperating with the United States, and it has engendered hatred of America throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

According to a March study by the Pew Research Center, 93 percent of Jordanians had an unfavorable view of the United States, as did 68 percent of Moroccans, 63 percent of Turks, and 61 percent of Pakistanis. Another poll showed that in Saudi Arabia, 97 percent had an unfavorable view. And in Egypt, a recent poll put the unfavorable rating at 98 percent.

Those numbers spell trouble for the United States for years to come.

The ultimate irony of the Bush-Cheney claim that only they can safeguard the United States is that they themselves failed to do so on 9/11. Even though they were in office for only eight months, they had several opportunities to unravel the plot, which they blew, according to The 9/11 Commission Report.

Is Bush ever going to have to pay a price for ignoring the repeated warnings of an imminent AI Qaeda attack, especially on August 6, when he got a briefing entitled, "Bin laden Determined to Strike in U.S."?

Is he ever going to have to pay a price for remaining on vacation for four weeks after receiving that warning?

Cheney himself was supposed to be in charge of national preparedness, as of May 2001. And he barely lifted a finger as The 9/11 Commission Report noted. Bush put Cheney in charge of "preparations fin managing a possible attack by weapons of mass destruction and ... more general problems of national preparedness." It took Cheney a few months simply to get an admiral to head the effort, the report said.

What right do Bush and Cheney have to criticize my, no about leaving the United States vulnerable to a devastating attack?

Paraki criticized the Clinton Administration for not doing enough and lamented, in his speech, "How I wish the Administration at that time ... had done something. How I wished they had moved to protect us."

Whose job was it to protect us on September 11?

Just imagine if Al Gore had been President on September 11, and Al Gore had been warned on August 6 about an imminent strike by Al Qaeda, and Al Gore had slaved on vacation for a month, and Al Gore, at the moment of attack, froze in an elementary school. Bill O'Reilly would he incessantly shrieking for his impeachment, and Ann Coulter would he demanding a crucifixion.

In their campaign of fear, Bush and Cheney repeatedly contend that the United States is now facing a challenge similar to the ones we faced against Hitler and the Soviet Union.

That's why, at the Republican Convention, we heard so much about Franklin Roosevelt, who never before has been so heartily hailed at such an event. That's why Bush mentioned Normandy early in his address. And in case anyone missed the analogy, Cheney said, "Just as surely as the Nazis during World War II and the Soviets, during the Cold War, the enemy we face today is bent on our destruction."

While bin Laden and Al Qaeda certainly would like to destroy the United States, they do not have the capacity to do so now. That's a fact that Bush and Cheney do not wish to concede, for if they did, they would have to acknowledge, as well, that the American people are nowhere near as imperiled today as we were in 1941 or 1961.

Yes, Al Qaeda cut inflict grievous damage upon this country, and it has proven that it can kill thousands of innocent people here--many more, if it ever does acquire a nuclear weapon.

But fighting terror is unlike fighting a superpower. We don't need to rely solely on military force. We certainly shouldn't he recklessly waging war against a country that was not behind the terror in the first place. Instead, we need good intelligence, a prudent use of our military forces, and yes, the sensitivity to build alliances.

But that is not cowboy enough for Bush and Cheney. They want us to feel ultimate terror so that we surrender our reason and our civil liberties at the same time that we surrender our vote to them.

Fear is their trump card. They play it at every turn.