Today, the news will be dominated by the disclosure of a report on how the CIA made "blunders" leading up to the 9-11 attacks. As usual with these government investigations of itself, the report concludes that since everyone was responsible then no one was responsible - which is hardly a surprise because that's been the conclusion of every single gov't report.
However, I have to ask - how many blunders does it take to form a pattern of deception?
In the first WTC bombing in 1993, the FBI had an informant named Emad A. Salem among the bombers, and the FBI turned down Salem's offer to substitute a harmless substance for the explosives. We only know this because the informant had the foresight to secretly record his conversations with his handlers in the FBI. When all this info came to light, it was all dismissed as simple "blunders" by the FBI and flushed down the memory hole. ("Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast" by Ralph Blumenthal, NY Times 28 Oct 1993) Since the Sept 11 2001 bombing, we have also learned how in many instances the FBI "blundered" in pursuing and stopping the would-be 9/11 bombers too.
How many such "blunders" constitute a policy of deliberately looking the other way?
Lets be clear: I personally don't give credence to the conspiracy theories which claim the attacks on the WTC were manufactured or permitted to happen so as to justify the implementation of the Neocon vision of American Imperium and making the Mideast safe for Israel -- the idea of "another Pearl Harbor" as mentioned by the paper put out prior to 9/11 by the Neocon's Project for the New American Century.
However, I admit to myself that my refusal to credit this conspiracy theory is primarily because I simply cringe at acknowledging the enormous implications of such a theory if it were true. I also realize that at some point, the empirical evidence has to be acknowledged and taken into account over and above the emotional refusal to accept the implications of the facts as we know them.
In any case, one need not resort to such conspiracy theories. Regardless of whether the WTC bombing was a terrorist incident that was permitted to happen for political reasons, we have already seen that a small group of unaccountable people ensconced in a secret office in the Pentagon conspired to use 9/11 and the WTC bombing to push this nation into a war, based on totally fabricated evidence, with blatantly criminal duplicitousness, in clear violation of international law and every single check-and-balance which was supposedly built into our democratic system to prevent exactly this sort of abuse of power, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans and over a million Iraqis - and not one person has had even a light hand-slapping as a result.
So, while the idea that the WTC bombings were "faked" is indeed still a conspiracy theory, the fact that we were misled into the war in Iraq is no conspiracy theory and this alone has implications for our democratic system of such immense proportions that no one really wants to seriously acknowledge. And, more to the point, it indicates that a justification for an attack on Iran could indeed be ginned-up and sold to the public without any real consequences too.
It took many generations before the historians acknowledged that what we were told about the attack on a US naval vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin was manufactured and "deliberately skewed" so as to justify the bombing of North Vietnam, and that the sinking of the "Maine" which was used to justify the Spanish-American war and invasion of Cuba was probably not a deliberate act as was depicted by our officials in league with "yellow journalists" of the time. I wonder how long we'll have to wait for the judgment of history on the bombing of the World Trade Center and the war on Iraq-Afghanistan-Syria-Iran-etc.?
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