Soon after 9-11, President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress and the nation saying, “Americans are asking, why do <terrorists> hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber -- a democratically elected government. . . . They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

“They hate us for our freedoms” quickly became an oft-repeated talking point.

Al-Qaeda first attacked the United States in February 1993, when a truck bomb was detonated in the World Trade Center’s parking garage.

This attack was followed up with a plot to kill President Clinton when he visited Manila in 1994, to blow up American airliners in 1995, and to fly a plane laden with explosives into the CIA headquarters later that year. Al-Qaeda successfully blew up a military complex in Riyadh killing five Americans in November 1995, exploded a truck bomb in June 1996 at Khobar Towers killing 19 Americans, destroyed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 <1>, and nearly sank the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

Seen against this timeline, the idea that “they hate us for our freedoms” becomes more and more absurd. Does Canada stay unattacked because they are less free? Did the United States suddenly become freer in 1993 than before?

Clearly, something happened prior to 1993 that enraged jihadists to the point of suicide attacks, and there’s little mystery as to what it was: the United States stationed military troops in Saudi Arabia.

In 1991, the US used Saudi Arabia as a staging ground for Operation Desert Storm. This infuriated Islamic hard-liners like bin Laden, but they tolerated it as long as it could be justified as a defense of Arabia. Then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney promised that US troops would not stay “a minute longer than they were needed.” <2>

When the Gulf War ended, the Saudis reneged on their assurances to the senior religious leaders—the ulema—and allowed US troops to remain permanently. To this outrage, the jihadists vowed to kick the US out of their holy land in defiance of the house of Al-Saud.

In his 1996 “fatwa,” Bin Laden refers some twenty times to attacking the United States as long as it desecrates the site of the “two holies”—Mecca and Medina. He says, “the sons of the two Holy Places have started their Jihad in the cause of Allah, to expel the occupying enemy from the country of the two Holy places” and “there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the Holy land; no other priority, except Belief, could be considered before it” and “the greatest of these aggressions imposed upon the Muslims since the death of the Prophet (PBUH) is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places . . . by the armies of the American Crusaders and their allies.” <3>

Quietly, in April of 2003, the Bush administration pulled US troops out of Saudi Arabia. <4>

Jihadists like bin Laden don’t hate us “for our freedoms.” They hate us for our government’s policies, primarily for stationing troops on the Arabian peninsula. Why our government refuses to inform the American people of this is the question that remains unanswered.

*****

1. Bodansky, Yossef. Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America. Roseville, CA: Prima (Random House), 1999.

2. Bodansky, Yossef. p. 30.

3. www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/internation...

4. http://www.gregpalast.com/so-osama-walks-i...