Memorial Day seems an appropriate one to note a recent and historic reminder of the whole point and true cause and catalyst of our current struggle in the Mid East. This past week saw a small episode that passed almost unnoticed mostly due to the current brouhaha over illegal worker and border control reform. However, it was of potentially historic importance if legitimate, and the initial opinion is that it is authentic. On Tuesday, a videotape supposedly by Osama Bin Laden announced regarding Zacarias Moussaoui that among other things said:
Bin Laden Says Moussaoui Not Part of Sept. 11 Attacks
"He had no connection at all with Sept. 11,..."I am the one in charge of the 19 brothers and I never assigned brother Zacarias to be with them in that mission," he said, referring to the 19 hijackers."
He also went on to claim the same for anyone currently held at the GITMO detention facility for dangerous terrorist or Taliban suspects captured in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the statements regarding Moussaoui has the ring of truth and logic:
"Brother Moussaoui was arrested two weeks before the events, and if he had known something - even very little - about the Sept. 11 group, we would have informed the leader of the operation, Mohammad Atta, and the others ... to leave America before being discovered," Bin Laden said."
Such a cancellation did not happen, lending some credence to Osama's claim. However, it does leave hanging the obvious alternative possibility that the schedule for attack was stepped up, accelerated, for the same reason. After all, the reason for the date of the attack remains a mystery and somewhat baffling, coming as it did at a time when if anything, Washington was leaning hard for more restraint in Middle East affairs and even still conducted discussions with the Taliban. Was 9/11 launched on a random day, `asap' out of any obvious context because Moussaoui was captured? At this point, it remains impossible to know.
Rather, what makes this statement important is that Osama Bin Laden himself has laid to rest a persistent if somewhat lunatic fringe myth. Namely, there exists a small but loud body of policy objectors both in the United States and abroad that in their skepticism and objections go so far as to deny that Al Qaida launched the September 11th attacks, or most radical of all, that parts or all of the 9/11 attacks were somehow "staged". To be sure, the context and time has a lot to do with it. In the already over-charged atmosphere of `conspiracy-think' and `cover-ups' generated in the 1990s with charges and counter-charges regarding the Clinton administration and its deceptiveness, and especially the fiasco of the November 2000 presidential election, the events of 9/11 took place in a hyper-skeptic context. After the initial gung-ho unity was allowed to unravel into domestic squabbling in spring 2002, the tabloid back-biting of the 1990's returned full force.
The run-up in fall 2002 to launching the war in Iraq led to strong pressure on both Congress and international allies to participate, with heavy emphasis on the obvious dangers of spread of weapons from Saddam Hussein's outlaw regime to terrorist elements. However, this was done in such a blunt and almost bullying fashion that increasing polarization of the issue took place at home and abroad. This inevitably led to attempts to start trying to `debunk' the genuine and justifying cause of the whole clash, the jihadist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. on 9/11. It is no coincidence that the radical claim that the Pentagon strike in particular had been "staged" first found its strong impetus from a radical French writer. To be eagerly copied, expanded upon and believed by the pro-conspiracy cliques here.
Adding fuel to all this nonsense is the Bush administration's strong tendency toward opaqueness and lack of immediate candor, or more aptly, simple incompetence in public relations handling. The style of mostly non-speaking about some of the more crazy claims has had the unfortunate effect of looking like evasion. This has resulted in the most wild of charges against the White House, most of them grossly unfair, while obscuring the few that might indeed merit closer oversight. The controversy surrounding the intelligence failures regarding Iraq and the conduct and reasons for the invention in Iraq had been allowed to obscure the overall picture of the War against Islamafascist Terrorism. Doubts about Iraq have been allowed to "spill over" into absurd and insane doubts about the catalyst of it all, September 11th.
As recently as spring 2003 some relatives of the 9/11 victims were even questioning who actually perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Books and online works seeking to even deny the use of hijacked airliners have become numbingly routine. The 2004 Presidential candidate Howard Dean even made the mistake of appearing to give them the slightest credence while simply trying to discuss the phenomena. And right up to this day, just the past month, the persistent absurdity that the Pentagon was not struck by a hijacked airliner was revived with some new security cam footage being released. Less the main point be lost, the bottom line is that there is a school of thought that seeks to call in doubt, if not outright deny, Al Qaida's role in launching 9/11. Most of it belongs to a lunatic-fringe. However, a more thoughtful minority of this segment has simply had basic questions and some doubts in the absence of a loudly voiced 'claiming of credit' in the immediate wake of the attacks. This past week saw a potentially decisive answer to add to earlier ones to those skeptics.
The Truth is that Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda planned and launched the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Period. He has said it himself.
Nor is it the first time, though its offhand manner makes it one of the most forcefully persuasive. The fact is that in November 2001 Bin Laden gave an interview to a Pakistani reporter that carried his words about the 9/11 attacks and was run in Al Jazeera and in common access in the Mideast, and these were also confirmed by the subsequent capture of an enemy videotape after the fall of Kabul where Bin Laden even spoke of the `unexpected effects' and success of the strike on the World Trade Center, and how the fires destructiveness exceeded expectations. These two alone should have buried the whole debate, but it persisted. Not least because it was not called attention to by the federal government. The White House seemed to underestimate the undercurrent of thought that was and is there about 9/11 in the lack of some bombastic `we were responsible' announcement by Al Qaida.
Yet I contend that it is outright folly to confuse the truth of the September 11 attacks by Al Qaida and the War against them and their allies the Taliban in Afghanistan that followed, with the somewhat bellicose and obtuse presentation and execution of the War in Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein. The poor public relations handling of the latter should not be allowed to confuse understanding of the former, and the start of the war. It is as if somehow poor diplomacy and press relations had been allowed to obscure the need to engage Hitler after Pearl Harbor had then been allowed to retroactively call into question the fact that Pearl Harbor itself had been attacked by the Axis.
In a climate of run-away partisan bickering and no sober guiding voices from the top, it becomes hard to know which sources or version to trust. In such instances, it is potentially more useful to look at statements by the enemy that are made with completely different motive and which used carefully, can at least remind that they, the enemy, are the ones that remain responsible.
In today's rush of media coverage, with its hit and run style of overwhelming focus one week, and then on to something else the next, its easy to lose track of the linear progression of events. Hence the desire to call attention to Bin Laden's announcement. Made on the behalf of Moussaoui and the GITMO detainees, it doesn't matter if Bin Laden's attempted denying of any role of either is true. What DOES matter is with the tape accepted as genuine, Osama Bin Laden has confirmed yet again that not only did Al Qaida launch the 9/11/01 attacks, but that he himself had a significant role in their planning, and that it was long in preparation.
The fact is that as far back as 1998 Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaida declared war against the United States and the then President Clinton. Al Qaida had been conducting or planning attacks far earlier, since the early 1990's, but the formal fatwa came in 1998, after two devastating bombings of U.S. embassies in August of the same year. The attack on USS Cole followed in October 2000, along with frustrated schemes in 1999 aimed at millennium events. Then came "9/11" in 2001. This war against Islamafascism, against Terr-Jihadism, has nothing to do with President G.W. Bush. In some ways it is a descendent of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the flashes of terrorism confronted by NATO in the 1980's. More specifically, the current cycle was begun by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the aftermath of Gulf War I. We should not let controversy about the wisdom of the Iraq War or its prosecution divert attention from this fact or lead to excessive `retroactive doubts' about the struggle. The press and political parties both have done a spectacularly poor job of keeping this simple chronology and sequence clear in the minds of the public and our allies. Osama Bin Laden's latest tape is a potentially useful reminder of where the focus should go.
On this Memorial Day, it is important to realize that as poor and unimaginative as our civilian political discourse has been, the sacrifices in Afghanistan and Iraq have neither been in vain, or unprovoked. Both campaigns have the potential to transform the breeding ground for Jihadist terrorism that is found in the Arabian area at present. It is high time that our political and public division on this painfully obvious point be addressed and healed.
- Anthony
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Oh, that was probably a doctored tape issued by the Israeli intelligence in cahoots with the CIA to blame Al Qaeda and foster anti-Muslim attitudes.
Of course, that’s nonsense, but those members of the lunatic fringe will entertain any theories, as long as logic and reason have only a tangential place in them. I can only guess that you are referring to how this will play on the much-ballyhooed “Arab street” – as incontrovertible proof of Al Qaeda’s culpability. But other explanations can always be provided.
It’s a good thing history only moves in one direction (hopefully). However, the danger of linearity is that events become crystallized, rethought, until absurdities are honestly, if stupidly, considered as reasonable possibilities.
Milan Kundera in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” entertains Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return, the notion that events recur again and again, an infinite number of times.
From the first chapter:
“If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
“Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
“…[This] reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.”
If planes were perpetually flying into American buildings, with bin Laden praising these attacks and proudly claiming responsibility for them, I have no doubt that few would waste their breath (or finger exertion) trying to disprove wild theories about the nature of the attack and the parties responsible.
It’s simply nonsense from those who choose to face the reality of what happened through distorted lenses, and there will always be such nonsense. Look how many people are entertained by Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code.” “None of it may be true, but it’s still worth thinking about” applies just as much to Brown’s invented Christian history as it does to 9/11 conspiracy theories, if one considers practically any absurdity “worth thinking about.”
Post a Comment