Here comes another deceptive Bush-bashing story from the French news service Agence France Presse: Sept. 11 widows slam Bush’s anti-terror record.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A group of widows of September 11 victims slammed President George W. Bush’s record against terrorism, accusing the US leader of making the United States less safe and of bringing terrorism to Iraq.

“He has made us less secure,” said Monica Gabrielle, a member of the widows’ group, which is supporting Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry in the November 2 election.

“There are many things that have not been done here at home which could have been,” she said in a telephone conference with reporters. “This president had three years with the Republican Congress to get so much more done to make us safer.”

Notice how AFP doesn’t identify the “widows’ group” to which Monica Gabrielle belongs. You’re expected to believe she speaks for all 9/11 victims’ families.

But an entry at Dorothy Rabinowitz’s Media Log from earlier this year gives us some of the background information on Gabrielle and her fellow activists that AFP would rather we didn’t know.

A fair number of the Americans not working in the media may, on the other hand, by now be experiencing Jersey Girls Fatigue—or taking a hard look at the pronouncements of the widows. Statements like that of Monica Gabrielle, for example (not one of the Jersey Girls, though an activist of similar persuasion), who declared that she could discern no attempt to lessen the casualties on Sept. 11. What can one make of such a description of the day that saw firefighters by the hundreds lose their lives in valiant attempts to bring people to safety from the burning floors of the World Trade Center—that saw deeds like that of Morgan Stanley’s security chief, Rick Rescorla, who escorted 2,700 employees safely out of the South Tower, before he finally lost his own life?

But the best known and most quoted pronouncement of all had come in the form of a question put by the leader of the Jersey Girls. “We simply wanted to know,” Ms. Breitweiser said, by way of explaining the group’s position, “why our husbands were killed. Why they went to work one day and didn’t come back.”

The answer, seared into the nation’s heart, is that, like some 3,000 others who perished that day, those husbands didn’t come home because a cadre of Islamist fanatics wanted to kill as many of the hated American infidels in their tall towers and places of government as they could, and they did so. Clearly, this must be a truth also known to those widows who asked the question—though in no way one would notice.

Who, listening to them, would not be struck by the fact that all their fury and accusation is aimed not at the killers who snuffed out their husbands’ and so many other lives, but at the American president, his administration, and an ever wider assortment of targets including the Air Force, the Port Authority, the City of New York? In the public pronouncements of the Jersey Girls we find, indeed, hardly a jot of accusatory rage at the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. We have, on the other hand, more than a few declarations like that of Ms. Breitweiser, announcing that “President Bush and his workers … were the individuals that failed my husband and the 3,000 people that day.”