The TRUE Reason for 9/11 Is Finally Getting Attention
Would revealing bin Laden’s motive have avoided two American wars?
The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.”
So wrote Osama bin Laden in a widely-suppressed letter describing the purpose of the 9/11 attack.
This article is not so much to revisit bin Laden, but to leave you with a copy of that letter (at the end of the article), because it is being scrubbed off the Internet again.
It is also to pose the question: if the American public had been told of bin Laden’s real goal, would they have given their support to a war against a tangential target: the nation of Afghanistan?
A case can be made that all three wars of America’s most recent wars — Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam — were justified by establishment lies, pushed through an enthusiastic and uncritical corporate media. Two of them, Afghanistan and Iraq, were wrapped in the same lie.
The truth about the Afghan war could have been especially easy to detect, but no attention was paid to it.
Backing up for a second, when Osama bin Laden’s planes struck the World Trade Centre and other sites in America, Western leadership hastened to assure us that the reason was “terrorism”.
Immediately after 9/11, George W. Bush famously asked “Why do they hate us?” and answered: “They hate our freedoms.”
As if that was a cause.
Comedian David Cross got closer to the truth: “I don’t think Osama Bin Laden sent those planes in to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel and ties to the Saudi family and all our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that’s what he fucking said.”
Although the Western media never let the focus change, the subsequent American-led actions were about “terrorism” — ignoring that bin Laden’s cause was about America’s unilateral support for Israel’s destruction of Palestine.
When non-entities like me pointed this out at the time, no one paid attention, because the media was suppressed. Some felt, possibly, that to have the 9/11 attack connected to Israel might prompt a reassessment of American support for Israeli policy in Palestine.
Now information is delivered in a different way: the means of expression has changed because the Internet makes it harder for censors to push away all alternative views. We have much a more ‘grassroots’ capability for the creation of awareness. And support is indeed gathering in America for a reassessment of support for right-wing Zionist decisions.
But at the time bin Laden was killed by American Special Forces, many people celebrated. They had no idea that they were celebrating the coming of a hurricane.
The bin Laden letter is now gathering attention — though I would argue that it has not ‘gone viral’ as some have said — but why it is doing getting attention now I do not know…it isn’t “news” anymore — but many people profess to be convinced that Osama bin Laden’s case made sense. His grievances were real, to them. And yes, he made some solid points, but to me they are still completely overshadowed by monstrous thoughts and beliefs.
To some degree, his remedy of violence played right into Israel’s hands. At the time I felt despair, because I knew what the US would do to the Arab world.
Maybe that is what bin Laden wanted. Hamas is certainly carrying out that script. In the longer term, they may achieve their goal because Israel does not learn the right lessons. And Israel pulls Washington’s puppet strings more under Biden and Trump than it did under Obama.
In a letter to Canada’s PM at the time of the start of the Afghan war, some friends and I tried to re-frame the situation:
“Afghanistan’s main problem is poverty. With a population of 24 million people, their GDP is $8.9-billion, compared to Canada’s $1-trillion. On a per-capita basis they have $355 per person compared to our $31,500. Worst of all their main source of revenue is the growing poppies for the production of opium. They supply 90% of the world’s opium. One hundred thousand people will die this year from overdoses of this drug — 1,000 in Canada alone. There is little health care in the country, which has a life expectancy of 42.7 years for males and 43.1 for females. This compares with 76.7 for men and 83.6 for women in Canada. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is their infant mortality of 163 children for every 1,000 live births (the third highest in the world) compared to 4.8 in Canada. 36% of Afghans are literate compared to 97% in Canada. Worse still, of those old enough to vote in Afghanistan only 22% are literate yet we are told the democratic process can work. In short, the country needs help in the form of health care, education, and the building of a vibrant economy. Meanwhile, the billions being spent by Canada in an offensive military action worsens the plight of millions in the country while enriching the estimated 1800 War Lords as they harvest the nation’s bumper crop of poppies this year.”
Recall President Bush’s rational for the invasion of Afghanistan: he wanted to punish the Al Qaeda ‘terrorists’ who were behind the horrific 9/11 attacks.
The reality was:
Afghanistan did not offer Osama Bin Laden a refuge — they offered in fact to kick him out.
Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein was not in league with Al Qaeda — in fact, they were his enemies.
But by framing the war as a campaign against “terrorism”, Bush could pretty much declare open season on anyone he wanted.
If he had had to focus on the Israel-Palestine question — the real motive — he would have made much less sense in pressing for a war against Afghanistan.
It would have been obvious that the U.S. was not going to war in Afghanistan to punish the people behind 9/11 attack. The attackers were in fact Saudis, striking for the Cause of Palestine. Again, Osama bin Laden said that his only reason for 9/11 was to make the Americans realize there were consequences for America’s continuing destruction of Palestine through its unilateral support of Israel. If Afghanistan kicked him out of the country — which they were willing to do — there would have been no reason to attack.
The U.S. therefore spent $2.3-trillion in Afghanistan since 2001, plus the uncountable grief of 2,400 American and 120,000 Afghan deaths.
To this must be added the weight of the “anti-terrorism” conflicts in Iraq and Syria, which have cost another $2 trillion.
Equally, Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda, but by stressing terrorism the administration officials were able to blur the lines between Iraq and 9/11.
But a war built on a lie cannot be won. By the time the US pulled out of Iraq, most Americans realized that it had been a failure.
Both wars were failures because the U.S. had no Cause to follow.
If they had come clean and said “We are supporting Israel”, they could have reinforced Israel directly to the tune of several trillion dollars, kept out of Afghanistan and Iraq, saved several trillion more dollars, and kept American soldiers — an Afghan and Iraqi civilians — out of the grave.
This is the reason why you should read the letter that follows.
I am putting the letter out as part of the article instead of as a web link, because the hand of the censors is already closing down the media links that dared to post it.
Censorship is the mark of a weak cause. By censoring bin Laden’s letter, Israel put itself in a poor position. If it had just defended itself in a straightforward way, America would have sympathised and helped. Now, it looks like trillions were wasted on useless wars.
Yes, bin Laden had a reason for his actions.
But having a reason, of course, does not make it right. It was wrong for the American victims, wrong for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, and wrong for the Palestinians themselves. If you ever needed an example of the disaster that can come from unfocused violence, this is it.
And if we ever had a world that was run the way bin Laden wanted it, it would be (to us) a very sick place…he was against women’s rights and in fact against any rights that are not based on religion.
So please do not read the letter below as an endorsement of his cause, but merely as an historical record that he HAD a cause…one that had been muffled for twenty years. If we had dealt with Palestine honestly at the time, we probably would not have had the Afghan war or the Iraq war. The Afghans were willing to kick bin Laden out of their country and Iraq was an enemy of bin Laden. He was also very wrong in an important aspect: he blamed all Jews, not just Zionists, for Palestine’s predicament. This was dangerous incitement to religious hatred.
(BTW, he was not “antisemitic”. The Arabs are semites as well as the Jews. It’s a language group, not a religion.)
Also, why he picked out America in particular is strange; at the time, the Chinese were putting Muslims into camps in the desert. He focused on Palestine — a land close to his home — as his selection criteria, but there was evil elsewhere as well.
I am sending this out so that you will have a copy of the letter that is being crushed by the censors.
It was originally published in Arabic; this translation appeared on reddit from a publication called the Wayback Machine.
As a final aside, bin Laden was the son of a billionaire. He got into politics as a hobby. Lessons for us…?
The letter shows that he was quite articulate, dedicated to a cause…but he was still a murderer.
As were the people who misled America about the need for two wars.
Written by Barry Gander
A Canadian from Connecticut: 2 strikes against me! I'm a top writer, looking for the Meaning under the headlines. Follow me on Mastodon @Barry
More from Barry Gander
It’s Not About BIDEN’s Age — It’s About OUR Age
…and why we are likely to die younger than a Senator
A “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”
Elon Musk’s rockets do not fail, they disassemble…
Putin’s Hard-Line Nemesis Tells Ukraine How To Win The War
A phantom is reaching out to Putin…
Yes, after the Nakba expulsion of Arabs from Palestine, there was an in-migration of Jews from surrounding Arab countries fleeing persecution there. Stir in a big dollop of fascism left over from WWII and here we are today. I will get a story out on that soon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relations_between_Nazi_Germany_and_the_Arab_world
Whoa, cowboy! So you are proposing there was some sort of conspiracy to keep Bin Laden’s anti-Jew hatred a secret? Notice the letter was written after the fact of 9-11 mentioning Guantanamo and Iraq. This is standard boilerplate Islamist rhetoric stating the pious purity of Muslims and the decadence of the West and Westernized Jews. If Bin Laden really cared about Palestinians, why not attack Israel directly?
Sure, the Bush Jr. Neocons were clueless and woefully incompetent, but that surely is no surprise to anyone. This was a continuation of a jihad against Western civilization born out of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood spawning Al Qaeda, ISIS, Desh, Taliban, and Hamas. So, Bin Laden attacked because depraved Bill Clinton got a blow job in the Oval Office, and Israelis who have been attacked since day one have the audacity to not only survive but to thrive while Muslim neighbors feud and fail? No, this is not anti-Semitic, it is anti-Western. Islamofascism is fueled by the same autocratic fascist drives as Putin’s “Russiky Mir” Slavic fascism and the resurgence of Neo-fascism throughout Europe and N. America.
Fascists worship control and hate liberal Western ambiguity. They hate Israel because it is (or was) too liberal, too Westernized. Does the West need scrutiny and criticism? Sure, but fascism of any form is not a valid alternative.