I'll let the eXile speak for me:
You Say "Terrorist", Washington says "Shuttup"
By Mark Ames
(snip)
Last December, an incredible piece of evidence emerged in the indictment of accused 9-11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.
While most of the media and Capitol Hill were focused on the CIA and FBI's failure to "connect the dots," a crucial clue has still been left unexplored: the Al Qaeda-Chechnya connection. If the US Government had been willing to explore the Chechen Connection, it could have prevented the terror attacks on September 11th.
Buried in the middle of the June 6th Washington Post article "Hill Probers Upgrade Evidence Gathered From Moussaoui" was proof that the failure to uncover the terrorist plot was not just a matter of poor coordination, but rather a direct result of deliberate U.S. foreign policy.
(snip)
Desperate Muslim separatist groups in any other country turn to extremism and terrorism, and they get labeled Al Qaeda-linked international terrorists. Chechens do the same only on a larger scale, and they get... a Radio Liberty broadcast and a good feting.
Why?
It's not as if the Chechen-Al Qaeda link is a great secret.
The phrase "thousands of Chechen fighters" was repeated nearly every day in the Western press to describe the Al Qaeda fighters battling the Coalition troops.
Videotapes of Chechens cutting the throats of Russian hostages have been one of the top hits of the terrorist underworld.
Moussaoui was known to have got his start as a recruiter for Chechen war jihadists in France and elsewhere.
And last week Mounir Motassadeq, who is on trial in Hamburg accused of being part of Mohammed Atta's cell, testified that Atta and his comrades had wanted to fight in Chechnya but were told by Al Qaeda that they weren't needed there.
(snip)
But I never thought that even Hiatt could write what he did in last Friday's Post. On that Friday, two days into the hostage siege, Hiatt published what must surely be the most inhuman, offensive Washington Post editorial of his career, "Chechnya in Moscow." It must be quoted at length because paraphrase would be taken for wild exaggeration. And remember again, this was published in the middle of the hostage crisis:
"Even if they prove to be real, the hostage-takers' supposed links to other fanatical groups - and the Russian media's insistence already that 'this is our Sept. 11' - should not be allowed to obscure the differences between America's war on terrorism and Russia's war against Chechnya. It is important to draw distinctions between Mr. Maskhadov, the mainstream Chechen commanders and the Chechen civilian population, on the one hand, and the Muslim militants, on the other. The latter have played only a peripheral role in the conflict, while the former are fighting a legitimate war against an outside invader."
This is a lie and Hiatt knows it. The top two warlords during the bulk of the conflict have been Shamil Basayev and Khattab, both radical Muslims. But more than that, notice the derision he casts not just on the idea that the "hostage takers' have links to other fanatical groups" - and even more offensively, Hiatt, hiding behind the anonymous weight of the Washington Post editorial page, is genuinely outraged that the Russians could possibly claim to have a tragedy like America's when he includes "the Russian media's insistence that 'this is our Sept. 11'" clause as part of that which doesn't really matter, "even if it proves to be real." Who are the Russians to compare their pain to ours? They're nobodies, that's who!
http://www.exile.ru/153/153010101.html
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