9/11 Explanations: Assumptions and Narrow Context Still Common After 17 Years

9/11 Explanations: Assumptions and Narrow Context Still Common After 17 Years

I contend that the victims of 9/11 were innocents and those responsible for the attacks must be identified and tried in open criminal court rather than secretive military tribunals tainted by legalized torture. Conversely, when such bloody mayhem is inflicted on anonymous foreigners at the hands of Western military forces, it is generally dismissed as collateral damage on the road to their political and social emancipation.

Though 9/11 was a horrific shock, our official reaction was dangerously jingoistic and arrogant and almost guaranteed to inspire more violence. While our massive military response was predictable and politically-expedient; a more measured response was both preferable made possible by the Taliban’s under-reported willingness to negotiate on Bin Laden’s presence in Afghanistan. Their conciliatory stance was staunchly ignored by a Bush regime eager to teach the world a hard lesson about the high cost of blowback.

Now, fifteen years of the so-called “War on Terror” have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, reduced everyone’s freedom and benefited only extremists (of all types), intelligence agencies, security consultants, military contractors and arms dealers. Iraq and Afghanistan are now in worse shape than before because emancipation was never the true motive behind the invasion and occupation of these states. Declaring war on an idea is a purely totalitarian device designed to instill permanent fear in the public consciousness. As Herman Goering said of war, “…., the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders…All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger."

The deeper significance of 9/11 is the fact that it was the first time North Americans have suffered the kind of extreme violence common in much of the developing world. Images of that violence; such as Gulf War One; are now supressed by compliant media quite willing to support military public relations strategy. The lessons of Vietnam have been well learned by those who benefit from constant war and conflict.

While it is near-heretical to say so, the isolated violence of 911 was minor compared to events like the illegal U.S. carpet-bombing of Laos during the early 1970s; the 1960s U.S. – backed genocide of Indonesian communists and Israel’s 1981-82 Lebanon invasion. As Noam Chomsky said, the dead and maimed victims of these atrocities have, “…gone down the rabbit hole of history,” since their fate served our ends. Since information on the negative aspects of Western foreign policy is excluded from the formal education system; widespread public acceptance of official history is not surprising.

Why is critical commentary on the implausibility of official 911 explanations still absent from the mainstream media? The evidence behind the atrocity’s official explanation remains vague, contradictory and implausible but largely unchallenged. According to the Obama administration, the recent release of 28 highly-censored pages of a 911 Joint Inquiry document “provides no evidence of Saudi Arabian complicity” in the attacks. While U.S. intelligence agencies and the 911 Commission claim insufficient evidence exists to establish a Saudi connection; questions linger because security excuses make it is impossible to examine their investigative methodology.

Compounding the confusion are conflicting scientific opinions over the causes of high-rise collapse and serious questions about aeronautics in the Pentagon attack and Air Force response times in the Twin Towers incident. As well, there is the suspiciously lengthy delay by the Bush administration in even creating the 911 Commission. Perhaps the urgent desire to invade Afghanistan and Iraq slowed them down.

There must be a deeper reason behind so-called Islamic terrorism that simply a mindless hatred of Western decadence that suddenly erupted without cause or context. There is some recent evidence to indicate that the Muslim world does not hate the U.S. for cultural reasons but instead deeply resents U.S. interference in issue like the endless Palestinian/Israeli conflict. According to a 2007 University of Maryland survey by political scientists Peter Furia and Russell Lucas, “[they found]…no evidence that ordinary Arabs resent countries for what they are, and considerable evidence that they resent them for what they do.” (Basham, 2008 in Ottawa Citizen, July 31, 2008)Much of what we subjectively call terrorism arises from our refusal to apply to ourselves the same ethical standards we impose on the enemies we’ve created. While we read every detail of our own military casualties; do we ever learn the identities of dead Afghans or Iraqis? The civilian victims of Western military action in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere remain conveniently anonymous.  Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell; once said that Iraqi civilian casualties were,”…not a matter of concern to him.”

The West, and the U.S. in particular; has created deep animosity through decades of overt and covert military interventions and arrogant regime changes undertaken mainly to maintain global economic hegemony with little regard for the working people of subordinate nations. Prior to the NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, the U.S. government did not consider it problematic that no serious evidence existed linking Osama bin Laden to al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. The 2002 Afghan bombing campaign proceeded with unrelenting fury and at a high cost in civilian life.

The following account of FBI thinking on the matter is as disturbing as it is revealing. In a June 6, 2002 Washington Post story written by Walter Pincus fully eight months after the 9/11 attacks, FBI chief Robert Mueller stated that “…[the idea] may have been hatched in Afghanistan, but it was probably implemented in the Gulf Emirates and in Germany.” The fact that the head of the FBI feels free to make a casual statement like this while Afghanistan was being heavily bombed and attacked speaks volume about the presumptuous nature of U.S. power and the irrelevance of human life in its calculations. According to U.S. government’s official definition of terrorism, both Germany and the Gulf Emirates ought to have been bombed along with Afghanistan.

It is worth noting that the U.S. government cynically empowered the brutal Afghan Mujahedeen back in the late 1970’s when their aid was required against the Soviets. Afghan society had never recovered from that empowerment and now we are there to save Afghans from the very situation our allies created. Prior to the resurrection of fundamentalist Islam during that time, Afghan society was making real progress on human rights and democratization. While the U.S. and British governments’ arming and subsequent abandonment of the Afghan mujahedeen created the conditions for the proliferation of Islamic extremism; such an acknowledgement have been removed from public examination by co-opted academics and corporate journalists eager to serve power.