Bin Laden's motivation and the power of the American propaganda system

From the blog "A Tiny Revolution":

"Osama bin Laden kept a personal journal in which he contemplated how to kill as many Americans as possible, including in terrorist attacks against Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, according to U.S. officials...

In one passage, Bin Laden wondered how many Americans would have to die in U.S. cities to force the U.S. government to withdraw from the Arab world. He concluded that it would require another mass murder on the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks to spur a reversal in U.S. policy, an official said."

So...it turns out bin Laden's real, private motivation was exactly the same as his stated public motivation: to stop U.S. intervention in the mideast.

Yet this isn't presented as being particularly important in this article. No politicians are asked whether this makes them consider whether it's worth running the risk of massive terrorist attacks in order to continue intervening in the mideast. It's just brought up, and...dropped.

We really have the greatest system ever invented. In a standard authoritarian country, that kind of straight-forward demolition of the most basic rationale for the government's foreign policy wouldn't be published. But here it can be, because it doesn't matter at all.

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003507.html