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Chapter 15

A like "Afghanistan"

On October 7th, 2001 the military offensive in Afghanistan commenced, under the beautiful name of Enduring Freedom. The official purpose was to capture Osama bin Laden. Yet between the 12th and 28th of September, on four occasions in the Arab press, bin Laden had denied any involvement in the terror attack. On September 16th, in a statement broadcast on the international news channel Al Jazeera and relayed by several Western media outlets, he said: “I would like to tell the world that I have not orchestrated the recent attacks”. That same day, the Afghan Islamic Press agency received another denial from bin Laden, translated in Le Monde on September 18th: “After the recent explosions that occurred in the United States, some Americans have been pointing fingers and accused us of being behind [the attacks]. The United States isaccustomed to making such accusations, whenever their enemies, who are many, deal them a blow. On this occasion, I categorically affirmthat I have not taken this action [...] I’m a follower of the Commander of the Faithful [Mullah Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban] to whom I owe respect and obedience. The Commander of the Faithful does not allow such activities from Afghanistan”. This denial does not prevent the Security Council of the United Nations, on September 18th, 2001, from demanding the “immediate and unconditional” delivery of bin Laden from the Taliban.



The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden without proof of his guilt, but were willing to make concessions to avoid the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. They rushed an envoy to Washington, proposing to try bin Laden in an international court. All of their proposals were rejected with hardly a look. Two weeks after the attacks in a televised episode of Meet the Press, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that he would present evidence of the guilt of bin Laden. Undoubtedly this well-disciplined soldier, nicknamed Forrest Gump by some critics, rather naively believed that such evidence existed. The next day, President Bush had to take him by the hand and oversee his retraction: all evidence was classified and therefore inaccessible to the public. On September 28th, in an interview with the Pakistani newspaper Ummat, bin Laden says again: “I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people” (translation BBC World Monitoring Service).



The situation for Afghans is a very bitter déjà-vu. After the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Army in December 1979, the United States gave their support to the mujahedeen resistance, or, such is the official story. The deep truth is the opposite: Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1998 to have secretly armed Islamists from Afghanistan in July 1979 through Pakistani secret services (Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI), in an attempt to lure the USSR into “their Vietnam War”. The technique, already tried successfully in Guatemala and Chile, is to destroy the enemy by financing and arming their opposition, that is, use civil war as a proxy to direct intervention. In this case, it was the USSR that was hoped to be destabilized, through Afghanistan. From the point of view of Brzezinski, Afghanistan, a backward country without oil, is nothing more than a sacrificial pawn on the “Grand Chessboard” of geostrategicplay - despite causing the death and exile of a third of its population. As always, drug trafficking came with arms trafficking: Opium production in Afghanistan has increased from 100 tons in 1971 to 800 tons in 1979 and 2,000 tons in 1991. After the Soviet withdrawal, the warlords and heavily armed drug traffickers plunged the country into a civil war that killed another half a million people.



There is, however, more depth to Brzezinski’s story: by embezzling U.S. funds, the Pakistani ISI has turned into a sprawling structure, a state within the State, with a staff estimated at one hundred and fifty thousand. Its goal has always differed from that of its American sponsor: what the U.S. wanted in Afghanistan is to arm an anti-Soviet resistance, while ISI wanted to arm a pro-Pakistani force likely to install a friendly regime. The ISI thus channeled U.S. aid to the extremist movement of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had no popular base and was therefore more easily controlled, instead of the moderate Ahmad Shah Massoud and his Northern Alliance, hostile to Pakistan’s influence and closer to Iran. From 1994 on, the Pakistanese Taliban, armed by ISI with U.S. weapons and money, conquered most of Afghanistan, which then became a shelter for extremists of all kinds. 



Until the late 1990s, despite their rhetoric vilifying the Taliban for their violations of human rights, Washington has looked upon the Taliban regime rather favorably, mostly to the extent that their relative stability could afford the opportunity to pursue the construction of an oil and natural gas pipeline connecting Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean, funded by UNOCAL (Union Oil of California). Even though their relationship was complicated in 1998 because of attacks against U.S. embassies that some attributed to the Taliban, negotiations continued along with humanitarian aid to the tune of $113 million in 2000, and similar figures in 2001. From February to August 2001, the Bush administration intensified talks with the Islamabad, as documented by French specialists Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié in Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth. But in July, the United States lost confidence in the ability of the Taliban to stabilize the country, and their negotiators threatened: “either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs”. The negotiations broke, and overnight the Taliban became an obstacle to the project and a military option was blueprinted. Operationalization only needed an acceptable excuse, which was given on September 11th. The fact that the operation is set in motion less than a month after the attacks serves as proof that it was planned in advance. On October 10th, three days after the start of the war, the U.S. State Department informed the Pakistani Minister of Petroleum that the pipeline project could now be restarted; unsurprisingly, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad and the future new president, Hamid Karzai, had both been consultants to UNOCAL for years.



The Taliban’s responsibility for the September 11 attacks was rendered easier to sell to the American public by the fact that they just had been charged with another crime committed two days before: the assassination of their internal enemy, the commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. The assassins were two Tunisians with Belgian passports pretending to be journalists, but armed with a camera filled with explosives. According to the argument used by the Western media, bin Laden and the Taliban sponsored the attack since they feared Massoud would ally with the U.S. as part of the inevitable American retaliation for September 11th. The argument is absurd: how could the Talibans, who had until then failed to defeat Massoud’s Northern Alliance, hope to defeat the United States? What bears consideration is rather that Massoud was notoriously hostile to the Americans, who for their part had provided no support in his fight against the Soviets or the Taliban. If Massoud had been alive after the Taliban’ debacle in October 2001, he would have been a roadblock: under UN mandate the United States could not oppose a legitimate leader of the country, and he alone had the resources to unite the various Afghani factions. As his role model De Gaulle had done in France, Massoud would have opposed American economic and political takeover. With Massoud gone the Bush administration was able to install Hamid Karzai, an opportunist that Massoud had jailed in 1994 on charges of being a Pakistani agent. According to the official story, the question of Al-Qaeda’s guilt in the assassination of Massoud on September 9th is answered by their attacks on September 11th. In practice, however, it was inverted: the media broadcast of Taliban and Al Qaeda’s involvement in the assassination of Massoud disseminated throughout the West September 10th, 2001, would solve the question of culpability on September 11th, the very next day.



Was September 11 a new “Pearl Harbor”? Was the Al Qaeda allowed to destroy the World Trade Center (WTC) and kill thousands of innocent people, simply to justify a war? This is the “let-it-happen-on-purpose” (LIHOP) theory: overall relatively harmless because the willful ignorance of a threat can be easily disguised as negligence or incompetence, and doesn’t lead to Court Marshaling – as Pearl Harbor shows. It is questionable to what extent this argument is not only a safeguard, a damage-control strategy to counter the much more devastating “made-it-happen-on-purpose” (MIHOP) theory. According to the latter, bin Laden and Al-Qaeda are innocent of the September 11 attacks, which therefore make them the biggest false flag operation ever conducted. If the argument seems outrageously implausible to most decent people, it is because of their ignorance of deep state politics, and its well-established legacy of attacks under false flags. By itself, Operation Northwood proves that the National Security State is capable of such turpitude.



Calling themselves the 9/11 Truth movement, hundreds of thousands of American citizens are now convinced that “9/11 was an inside job”. Although treated with contempt by the mainstream media, the movement is now joined by elected officials like senators Cynthia McKinney and Mike Gravel, not to mention State leaders like late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Their arguments are based on technical analyses provided by engineers and airline pilots, who conclude the impossibility of the official explanation, on thousands of conflicting testimonies from survivors and fire fighters, and on a multitude of analyses conducted by independent teams of investigators. Much of the work has been popularized by major video documentaries such as Dylan Avery’s Loose Change series, now viewed more than 125 million times on Google Video. The following two chapters present a summary of their arguments.

Ahmad Shah Massoud, 

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, on the 12th of September 2006 : “The hypothesis is not absurd ... that those towers could have been dynamited. A building never collapses like that, unless it’s with an implosion. The hypothesis that is gaining strength ... is that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world. Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq.”

"A red pill for Forrest Gump"​ ​ 

50 YEARS OF DEEP STATE

from Kennedy to 9/11

(comparison & perspective)  

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