9/11 and the War on a Noun

Posted: November 30th, 2011 by Militant Libertarian

I participate in an informal email list hosted by someone named John.  I don’t think he’s a regular reader of this website, but we are linked as friends on Facebook.  The emails are mainly political and occasionally religious (there are some jokes and such, of course) and the participants vary in viewpoints from anarchists to socialists with varying degrees of statism in between.  While some of those on the list are rude and a couple are downright loony, for the most part it’s an enjoyable exchange.

Many of the conversations begin after John posts columns by Bob Weir (no relation to the Grateful Dead guy), a columnist in Texas. I would describe Weir as a Reaganite Republican.

Anyway, a response from one list member to someone’s comment about 9/11 went thusly:

I was born and raised in Manhattan, I thought the attack on the world trade center and Pentagon got us into the war, not Bush. Did I miss something, I mean this was much worse then Pearl Harbor.  At least the Japanese attacked in uniform.  The guy [Obama] that took his [Bush] place promised that he would remove the troops in his first day of office, no need to say more on that we all know what happened next.

I responded with a quick run-down of the events of 9/11, according to the official govenrment version, and how it got us into Iraq and Afghanistan:

The attack on the WTC and Pentagon were the JUSTIFICATION used to go to war with Iraq and Afghanistan. For some reason (assuming you believe the official government story), a handful of terrorists, mostly from Saudi Arabia or using Saudi passports, came to the U.S. and after a couple of years of acting extremely non-Muslim (think: strip bars, drinking, possibly using drugs, eating all manner of prohibited foods, etc), decided that they would use box cutters to take over some airplanes in the name of Allah and crash said airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Then, the investigators (mostly FBI) arrived on the scene and despite the massive fireballs and televised mayhem, managed to find some completely intact and unburnt passports from said terrorists and thereby pin the whole thing on them.  Then, despite the physical impossibility of 1990s/early2000s cell phone technology being able to work at altitude, several recorded phone calls from passengers on the plane using their magic cell phones told of the “Arab jihadists” taking over the airplane before passengers decided (after making these impossible phone calls to friends and family) to revolt against their aggressors and caused the plane to prematurely crash.

So these Saudi Arabian terrorists were then somehow (take their word for it, it’s national security and classified) linked to Osama Bin Laden, a CIA employee then in a military hospital for dialysis, but later in Afghanistan, where despite his serious health issues he was living in a “bunker like cave” coordinating complex terror missions against the Great Satan. But don’t worry about that because first we had to invade Iraq because after 10 years of random bombing and draconian sanctions, we had to go in there and take care of Saddam because he was probably involved somehow, but we can’t tell you exactly how nor can we find the weapons of mass destruction he supposedly had or even figure out how to link him to anything worse than using gas we gave him on some people he didn’t like in the northern end of his little fiefdom.

Anyway, so we invaded Iraq first and then Afghanistan, neither country having had a central bank connected to the World Bank. Then Bush announced his “Axis of Evil” and, amazingly, that also was a run down of all of the countries who didn’t have central banks tied to the World Bank too. Meanwhile, the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan were launched from our base in Saudi Arabia where all those hijacking terrorists came from, but since the Saudis are our friends and their bank is tied to the World Bank, we don’t hate them so they couldn’t have had anything to do with it.

Thus goes the official story and the reason for our decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Interestingly, our involvement in both World Wars, added together, didn’t last this long, but I guess that’s what happens when you fight a war on a noun (terror).

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