"Even as you enter the fourth year after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush is still misleading and deluding you and hiding the real reason from you"
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A terrorist speaking in the cadence of a disappointed civics teacher is the point: it’s psychological warfare dressed up as accountability. Bin Laden’s line aims less to persuade than to corrode. By addressing “you” directly, he tries to split an American public from its elected leadership, recasting mass murder as an argument about transparency and motives. The cruelty isn’t accidental; it’s strategic. If he can make the listener feel conned, he can make the listener feel complicit.
The phrasing “still misleading and deluding you” leans on a familiar post-9/11 tension: the fear that grief was being alchemized into policy, especially as Iraq became entangled with the original attacks in public discourse. He exploits the era’s credibility fractures - intelligence failures, shifting rationales, secrecy - to offer himself as the grotesque “truth-teller” about “the real reason.” That last phrase is a vacuum designed to be filled: oil, empire, Islam, revenge. Conspiracy is a recruitment tool because it turns complexity into a single, emotionally satisfying plot.
Context matters. In the years after 9/11, bin Laden’s media strategy increasingly treated Western audiences as a secondary battlefield. The message isn’t “support me”; it’s “distrust them.” It’s a bid to redirect outrage away from the attacker and toward the state, to make democratic legitimacy feel like a lie - and to launder his own violence through the language of political critique.
The phrasing “still misleading and deluding you” leans on a familiar post-9/11 tension: the fear that grief was being alchemized into policy, especially as Iraq became entangled with the original attacks in public discourse. He exploits the era’s credibility fractures - intelligence failures, shifting rationales, secrecy - to offer himself as the grotesque “truth-teller” about “the real reason.” That last phrase is a vacuum designed to be filled: oil, empire, Islam, revenge. Conspiracy is a recruitment tool because it turns complexity into a single, emotionally satisfying plot.
Context matters. In the years after 9/11, bin Laden’s media strategy increasingly treated Western audiences as a secondary battlefield. The message isn’t “support me”; it’s “distrust them.” It’s a bid to redirect outrage away from the attacker and toward the state, to make democratic legitimacy feel like a lie - and to launder his own violence through the language of political critique.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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