BUCHANAN GOES WILD ON MEET THE PRESS

TODAY (SUNDAY) ON MEET THE PRESS, PAT BUCHANAN STATED THAT THE U.S. BROUGHT 9/11 AND ALL TERRORISM UPON ITSELF DUE TO ITS SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL. BUCHANAN BELIEVES THAT THE U.S. SHOULD CUT ITS SUPPORT FOR THE REGION'S ONLY DEMOCRACY. BUCHANAN ALSO SPLASHED AROUND IN THE MUD BY REPEATING DEFAMATORY CONSPIRACY THEORIES ALLEGING THAT ISRAEL CONTROLS AMERICA'S FOREIGN POLICY. YOU CAN READ THE WHOLE TRANSCRIPT OF THE PROGRAM HERE.

FLORIDA SENATOR BOB GRAHAM AGREED WITH BUCHANAN ON SOME POINTS AND DECLINED TO DISAGREE WITH HIM ON OTHERS.

ISRAEL'S ONLY DEFENDER? NEWT GINGRICH.

HERE'S AN EXCERPT:

MR. RUSSERT: Pat Buchanan, let me just jump in here, because you...

MR. BUCHANAN: Sure.

MR. RUSSERT: ...have written something in your book that I think is going to be quite controversial and I want to put it on the screen and share it...

MR. BUCHANAN: Sure.

MR. RUSSERT: ...with you and our viewers and give a chance for our group to respond to it. "U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were were not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here. And while their acts were murderous and despicable, behind their atrocities lay a political motive. We were attacked because of our imperial presence on the sacred soil of the land of Mecca and Medina, because of our enemies' perception that we were strangling the Iraqi people with sanctions and preparing to attack a second time, and because of our uncritical support of the Likud regime of Ariel Sharon" in Israel.

Are you suggesting that our alliance with Israel is one of the reasons that we were attacked on September 11?

MR. BUCHANAN: Sure. That's one of the reasons given by Osama bin Laden. In his fatwa of 1998, he wrote that there are three causes of the problems and three causes for a declaration of war by all Arabs and good Muslims against the United States. One, America's imperial presence on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. Secondly, the sanctions policy against Iraq which was persecuting and basically starving, he said, the Iraqi people, and we were planning another invasion. Third is the United States' uncritical support of the Ariel Sharon regime in Israel, which he argued is persecuting the Palestinian people.

In my judgment, Chris, this one-sided support for Sharon, the refusal to condemn that wall snaking through the West Bank, the agreement to support Sharon's claim to virtually half of the West Bank, this has caused enormous hostility and animosity and hatred for this country in that part of the world, not just among the Palestinians. And if we want to drain off some of this hatred, this venom against us, we have got to adopt a more evenhanded policy here. We have got to stand up for the same rights for the Palestinian people, a homeland, a nation, a state of their own, a viable one, on the land their forefathers farmed for a thousand years, because those are first our principles and secondly, that is in the national interest of the United States of America. I don't care what Ariel Sharon believes.

MR. RUSSERT: They are not attacking us because they hate us and hate our culture?

MR. BUCHANAN: This is the fundamental point. Are they attacking us because of who we are and what they believe or are they attacking us because of what we do? I believe it is our policies, not our principles that are causing these attacks. Osama bin Laden wasn't sitting in some cave in Afghanistan and stumble on the Bill of Rights and go bananas. It is because of what we are doing. Most fundamentally, it wasn't Israel number one. Number one, Saudi Arabia, female soldiers, American soldiers sitting there on the land of Mecca and Medina.

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Graham, you buy that theory?

SEN. GRAHAM: I think that our policies have been the key to the terrorist motivation. In the book, you'll see several discussions with leaders in Egypt and Syria and Lebanon, and they all point to the urgency of the United States being fully engaged with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to try to bring it to a resolution and a concern that President Bush has not been significantly committed to achieving that goal.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Speaker, what do you think of the theory?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, let me go through the facts. President Bush is the first American president to actively advocate a Palestinian state but he said it has to be a Palestinian state based on democracy and a willingness to co-exist with Israel. Second, what Pat said is true but people have to listen carefully to what he said. He said basically if we would pull out of the biggest oil region on the planet, allow people like bin Laden to dominate the oil supply of the entire industrial world, give up the right to have female American soldiers go in places that bin Laden defines--and remember, the al-Qaeda irreconcilables define Spain as al-Jazeera and argue that they have a right to reclaim Spain, and some of them have demand that Rome become a Muslim city. So it's a little bit too easy to say, "Gee, if only we betrayed Israel and abandoned democracy in the Middle East and withdrew from the region, everything would work."

Try to describe a world in which for the last 35 or 40 years, the U.S. has not provided stability for world's oil supply and you're describing a world where you have $200 or $300 a barrel gasoline, and, by the way, where all the money ends up going into the pockets of people who hate us, who've already publicly said Europe comes next.

MR. BUCHANAN: Well, personal...

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Speaker--one second, Pat. Mr. Speaker, I want to ask you if your reaction to stories in the papers about an investigation of the Pentagon and also questions have been raised about the Defense Policy Board on on which you serve. The office of Douglas Feith and others are--there's questions being asked about secrets that may have left that particular office or the Defense Policy Board and been given to APAC, a lobbying group allied with Israel.

MR. GINGRICH: I think that it is very worrisome that some security people, whether they're at the CIA or the FBI, are trying to destroy careers by leaking to the press allegations that are untrue. You may have just noticed, by the way, that Ahmed Chalabi, after a six-month campaign by Ambassador Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority, Ahmed Chalabi was just cleared, something which didn't get quite the same coverage as all of the vicious and dishonest charges.

Now, if what we're seeing is a strategy of smearing people out of public life by using the FBI and the CIA, I think that's something the Congress should investigate. If somebody's guilty, fine, arrest them, indict them, convict them. But to have people who are supposed to be in charge of security out smearing people, I think makes one worry about the protection of individual liberty and the protection of individual innocence in this society.

MR. RUSSERT: Pat Buchanan.

MR. BUCHANAN: We also need to investigate whether there is a nest of Pollardites in the Pentagon who have been transmitting American secrets through APAC, the Israeli lobby, over to Reno Road, the Israeli embassy, to be transferred to Mr. Sharon. Now, I did not know until this weekend's stories in The Washington Post that this is exactly what is being talked about; that certain individuals over there in Mr. Feith's shop or beneath him have been transmitting these secrets.

Now, the FBI have been asking questions. There are no conclusions. No one should assume guilt on anyone's part. But if this has been going on, Tim, we are getting dangerously close to the T-word. And I would urge the president of the United States to get out in front of this, to take this investigation away from Mr. McNulty and give it to Patrick Fitzgerald and let them look into it because if the president can-- I'm sure the president has no involvement in this. But questions have been raised, and this is not something on the Internet. This is The Washington Post doing this, moving all this around, and so I think there clearly needs to be an investigation.