Twenty-three years ago this month the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon shook the United States and horrified the world.
Almost three thousand Americans died. The US launched attacks across the Muslim world in what the media called ‘the War on Terror.’ The repercussions of these events continue today.
Washington quickly blamed Saudi/Yemeni jihadist Osama bin Laden for these attacks and vowed to hunt him down. But was he really guilty? As a veteran of the Afghan Wars and Mideast struggles, I still don’t believe most of Washington’s claims, most notably that the perpetrator was Osama bin Laden.
It was subsequently revealed that the 9/11 attacks were likely planned in Germany and Spain, not Kabul, Afghanistan. The head of Pakistani intelligence told me he believed bin Laden may have known in advance of the planned attacks but was not personally involved. Let’s recall that bin Laden was a CIA asset during the war against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan – which I covered.
Other senior Afghan mujahidin leaders concurred with this view. They believed the 9/11 attacks originated from Saudi Arabia. Many Saudis believed their nation was ‘occupied’ by the US. Most of the 19 aircraft hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. They were based around Delray Beach, Florida. But the US could not admit this embarrassing fact.
Interestingly, bin Laden, whose path I crossed in Afghanistan, claimed that the 9/11 attacks were ‘in revenge’ for Israel’s attacks on Beirut and other parts of southern Lebanon in 1982. Israel asserts the Lebanon attack was part of its campaign to crush the Palestine Liberation Organization which sought refuge in Lebanon.
US-supplied Israeli heavy artillery destroyed important parts of Lebanon’s capitol, Beirut, killing large numbers of Lebanese civilians over three months. Water and food to Beirut were cut off by Israel, a harbinger of the punishment currently being inflicted on Gaza. Lebanese neo-fascists allied to Israel massacred large numbers of Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. I was there for Day 1 of the Lebanese civil war.
The George W. Bush administration was determined to conquer Afghanistan to secure a route for oil pipelines from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. Bush had no idea about any of this but his far-right Defense Secretary Dick Cheney was lusting for oil and hated Afghanistan’s resistance movement, Taliban, which refused to take orders from the White House.
Cheney decided to invade Afghanistan. 9/11 was, of course, his perfect excuse, no matter the facts. The Afghans became the whipping boy for Washington’s egregious blunders during the 9/11 period. President Musharraf of Pakistan told me that Washington threatened to ‘bomb us back into the Stone Age’ if Pakistan did not allow US forces to attack Afghanistan from Pakistan. He gave in.
The tame US media amplified the war of lies against Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. After 9/11, I was the principal CNN commentator on Afghanistan. Few Americans knew anything at the time about this distant, mysterious nation – except for me. I was with all the senior Afghan resistance leaders and with Taliban when it was formed to stop attacks by Communist forces, stop opium production and protect Afghan women from wide-scale rape.
Big TV in the US decided to label the Afghan resistance ‘terrorists.’ I refused to use this dishonest terminology originated by Israel to delegitimize the Palestinians. I refused to parrot the anti-Afghan propaganda being promoted by US TV. I called all the film clips of bin Laden supposedly blessing the 9/11 attacks as crude fakes. They were produced by the Afghan communists, America’s allies of the moment.
Unsurprisingly, I was kicked off CNN and blacklisted by them. According to a CNN producer, the Bush White House called CNN and ordered that I be taken off the air.
Bin Laden became the poster boy for evil Muslims and the whipping boy for all of Washington’s mistakes in its new colonial wars in the Muslim world.
Osama bin Laden wanted to see heavy-handed US influence evicted from the Muslim word. He failed. He was murdered gangster style in Pakistan in 2011 by a US hit squad. At the time, the so-called `world’s most dangerous terrorist’ was living in quiet retirement in Pakistan.
The real culprits behind 9/11 have never been revealed.
