Glenn Greenwald on public opinion surprises

Public opinion surprises (via Rajeev Ramachandran's google reader):
"I confess to being amazed that 43% of Americans -- close to a plurality -- believe that "U.S. wrongdoing might have motivated attacks" by Terrorists. I'm not amazed because it's untrue -- it plainly is true -- but because that is a view almost never heard in establishment media discourse. To the contrary, the notion that American "wrongdoing" is a cause of anti-U.S. Terrorism is one of the most rigidly enforced taboos. Nothing provokes allegations of "unpatrotism" or "anti-Americanism" -- or intellectually dishonest claims that one is "justifying" Terrorism -- more than pointing out this obvious causation. Despite that, and despite the natural jingoistic bias of believing that one's own country does not engage in truly bad acts (certainly not sufficiently bad to provoke Terrorism), a very sizable portion of the citizenry has come to that conclusion on its own. That's a very encouraging finding."