Thursday, September 11, 2008

Skeletons in the Sept.11 cupboard

Skeletons in the Sept.11 cupboard


TODAY, as the United States of America marks the seventh anniversary of the airborne suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, the world remembers the unprecedented assaults as an event that changed the course of history, sparing no one from its direct and indirect repercussions around the globe.
Nearly 3,000 people died in the Sept.11, 2001 attacks themselves, and hundreds of thousands were killed and maimed in the two wars that followed, and tens of thousands were incarcerated, many of who remain untraceable even today. The attacks reshaped international behaviour and redefined international relations, with the US reasserting its self-assumed role as the world's sole policeman. They exposed many monstrous faces.
Indeed, the world sympathised with the victims of the Sept.11 attacks and even found some justification in the US response to what was argued as the most daring challenge ever to American national security.
Since then, however, the sympathy the world felt for the US has been violently shaken in the wake of revelations that cast serious doubts over the official American version of the attacks. Today, an big majority of the people around the world believe that there was much more than met the eye in the attacks in view of serious questions that beg for answers which no one, least of all the US, is either unable or unwilling to provide.
There has never been a logical and reasonable explanation of the sequence of events in the run-up to the attacks and how a handful of fresh arrivals in the US could successfully penetrate and demobilise one of the most heavily fortified aviation security systems of the world.
Of course, all accusing fingers pointed at Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda. Since then, it has become known that Bin Laden himself knew very little of the purported plan to carry out the attacks and it was possible only that someone had sought his "blessing" for the assaults against the very heart of America and the Saudi of Yemeni origin simply obliged. Bin Laden's "open admission" that his "brothers" were behind the operation came three months after the incident and that was not very convincing either.
What is even worse is the scenario that emerged after the attacks suggesting that they could have been an Israeli-inspired "inside" job designed to drive an unbridgeable divide in US-Arab/Muslim relations. The revelation that a group of Israelis had strategically pre-positioned their video-recording equipment focused on the World Trade Center ahead of the attacks and danced as the hijacked planes hit the twin towers appeared to be only the tip of an iceberg, particularly that they were actually arrested but packed off to Israel without anyone seriously questioning them.
And it was as if the US was waiting for Sept.11 to happen so that it could go ahead with its plans to launch military action against Iraq (Afghanistan was targeted first but it was and remains secondary in the book of US priorities).
Recent substantiated revelations that top Bush administration officials conspired to create an impression that Iraq had played a part in the Sept. attacks have exposed some of the lies linked to the official American version of the events.
The world is today left with a bitter taste that someone with a grand but secret agenda took the American people and the rest of the international community for the most expensive ride in history. And the ride is continuing today.
Surely, someone will open up at some point in time and lay bare the shocking skeletons of the Sept.11 attacks in the American cupboard.
The world, which paid the highest price for someone's secret agenda, has the right to know but it will have to wait.