by ewastud » Mon Jun 12, 2006 12:13 am
Immediately after the September 11, 2001 attack on the WTC and the Pentagon and the downed jet aircraft in PA, our government's knee-jerk reaction was to attack someone in the Middle-East. This was a golden opportunity to use as a pretext for exercising US military might and domination over someone. The question only seemed to be "Who shall we attack?" We were seeking vengeance.<br><br>There was a paucity of evidence as to exactly who and how the 9/11 attack was carried out, and almost as immediately, skeptics suspected foul play or complicity by someone in our own government. Yet George Tenet of the CIA asserted with absolute assurance that Osama bin Laden (OBL) and the "al Qaeda" were responsible. (Even to this day, the FBI does not agree; there is no solid evidence that OBL had a part in it.) The evidence to support the contention that Middle-East "terrorists" were responsible (such as the flight school training) was very suspiciously lined up within 24 or 36 hours of the attack, reminding many of the rush to judgment against Lee Harvey Oswald almost four decades earlier.<br><br>Based on that dubious assumption and the factual knowledge that OBL had a training camp in Afghanistan, a government ruled by a group known as the Taliban, the US mounted an attack on Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld, Bolton, and various neo-con parties in the Bush administration, including Bush himself, was apparently itching to use the 9/11 attack on US sites to launch an attack against Iraq which they had been planning and working toward since Bush took office and even years before that. In contract to those impulses, from what has come out recently (if true), Douglas Feith in DoD was arguing that the 9/11 attack should be used as a pretext for the US to attack South America (for the surprise element)!<br><br>Most of the readers of this blog have probably concluded that there was at a minimum complicity if not outright treasonous conduct by elements within our own government, most likely those elements closely associated with the Neo-conservatives (Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser, John Bolton, Doug Feith, Richard Perle et al). <br><br>The question I pose and throw out for discussion is why was there indecision immediately following the 9/11 attack regarding how to respond? Of course, there seemed no indecision whether we should attack some other country before we had even assembled a clear picture as to who was responsible (what a sane and rational person would do in a system ruled by laws, domestic and internaational), but how to exploit the emotional reaction of the American public to advance the selfish interests and agendas of the various policy-makers. The indecision seems to indicate to me that conflicts exist or existed among these interests, although they are in agreement on many general goals. <br><br>What say you? <p></p><i></i>
