President
Bush and Former American Vice President Dick Cheney in the Presidential
Limousine. Image courtesy George W Bush/National Archives, 2015. (Photo: Smith
Collection/Gado/Getty Images).
Asking If
Afghanistan Will Become Breeding Ground for Terror Is the Wrong Question
Bush
& Cheney have gotten away with lying us into two wars & wildly
enriching their friends; meanwhile, more people are dead & the media won't
even ask the right questions. Will we ever learn?
August
27, 2021
The big question in the media today is, "Will Afghanistan again become a 'breeding ground' for terrorists who may again attack America?" It's the wrong question.
We've all heard that question
asked, in a dozen variations, probably a hundred times in the past few months
in the media. And it's not just the wrong question: it strengthens the
GOP frame that lets George W. Bush off the hook for many of his worst failures
and crimes.
Afghanistan had
little to nothing to do with 9/11.
It's time to put this tired and
deceptive canard to bed. The 9/11 attacks were not planned, hatched, developed,
funded, practiced, expanded, worked out or otherwise devised in Afghanistan. That
country and its leadership in 2001, in fact, had pretty much nothing whatsoever
to do with 9/11.
But wasn't Bin Laden running a
"terror training camp" in Afghanistan? Yes, he was, but, again, it
had little to nothing to do specifically with 9/11. It was more like the
backwoods training camps that various US rightwing militias run, teaching
low-level soldier-wannabee grunts (with the money to pay) how to use weapons
and get into physical shape.
But an operation as detailed,
well-funded and sophisticated as 9/11 had nothing to do with those yahoos. Bin
Laden, who we generously funded during the Reagan administration to help evict
the Soviets from Afghanistan, was running Al Qaeda at the time, and while he
wrote the checks to pay for 9/11, the actual planning and management of the
operation was done out of Pakistan and Germany by Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
Even the 9/11 Commission Report notes that one
of the German plotters, Zakariya Essabar, became the courier to update Bin
Laden that the attack was imminent. "Shortly before the 9/11 attacks, he
would travel [from Germany] to Afghanistan to communicate the dates for the
attacks to al Qaeda leadership" notes the Commission report on page 165.
From Germany, the plotters moved to
Florida, where they organized the final plans and Mohammed Ata and others
trained and received their pilots' licenses. Of the 19 hijackers, 15 were
Saudi citizens, 2 were citizens of the UAE (that funded Jared Kushner), and one
each were from Egypt and Lebanon. None were Afghans.
Further, none of the money came
from the government of Afghanistan or Afghan nationals; Bin Laden had a
substantial family fortune, and the Reagan administration had given him
additional millions of dollars. And, increasingly, it appears that some of the
funding may have come from Bin Laden's native Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan had
nothing to do with it.
But doesn't
Afghanistan hate America?
But, the "Afghan
connection" press will ask, didn't "they" hit us on 9/11 because
the Taliban hated American "values"?
First, the Taliban had nothing to
do with 9/11 other than tolerating Bin Laden's presence in their country,
something for which some corrupt officials were apparently well compensated.
They really didn't care much at all about "American values" as long
as we stayed the hell away from their country.
They'd just driven out the Soviets,
and done so to the British, Greeks, Mongols and Persians in the centuries
before that. They just wanted to be left alone. (This is the big battle between
the Taliban and ISIS-K right now: the former wants to run Afghanistan while the
latter wants to become a regional/international caliphate.)
It was all about
sacred Saudi soil!
Bin Laden, though, was upset with
the United States in September of 2001; it was because we were defiling the
holy land of his home country, Saudi Arabia, a leftover from pappy Bush's
"little war" in Iraq.
GHW Bush had put US soldiers on the
ground in Saudi Arabia for the first time in generations to stage the invasion
of Iraq, and those soldiers stayed long after pappy Bush's 3-day war was long
over.
That infidel men, US soldiers who
were Christian or Jewish were watching porn and drinking alcohol on holy Saudi
soil was intolerable to Bin Laden and his fellow fundamentalists. And the
fact that "loose" American women were also there, showing their
elbows and driving cars in clear violation of Saudi law and customs, was doubly
infuriating.
As early as 1998, Bin Laden
threatened to strike America if we didn't withdraw Bush's troops and stop
"defiling" Bin Laden's native holy land, Saudi Arabia. On September
2, 1996, he publicly threatened to "launch a guerrilla war
against American forces and expel the infidels from the Arabian
Peninsula."
As he told a reporter for The Guardian in 1998:
"We believe that we are men, Muslim men, committed to defend the grandest
house in the universe. The Holy [Saudi] Kaaba [land] is an honor to die and
defend. So this is our aim—to liberate the lands of Islam from the
sinners."
In a "letter to America," Bin Laden wrote:
"Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases
throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to
protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage
of our treasures."
This was, he said repeatedly, the
reason why he ordered America struck in what we now refer to as the 9/11
attacks. He wanted us to remove daddy Bush's troops from the Bin Sultan Air
Force Base in Saudi Arabia.
George W. Bush
gave Bin Laden what he wanted.
As a result, Bush Jr. withdrew US those troops soon after 9/11:
he was no dummy. Again, it had nothing to do with Afghanistan.
George W. Bush was warned multiple
times that 9/11 was coming. Richard Clark told me, live on the air, that he
told Condi Rice; he also said that he knew Al Gore had told Cheney and Bill
Clinton had told Bush that Bin Laden was coming after us if we didn't pull out
of Saudi Arabia.
Bush put Cheney in charge of a task
force to follow up on the warnings, but Cheney was so busy planning his attack
on Iraq and dividing up its oil fields among international buyers in
anticipation of that 2003 invasion and oil-well-theft that his Al Qaeda task
force never met until late August of 2001—and then did nothing.
But after 9/11
Bush and Cheney had to do something!
America had suffered a big bloody
nose, an attack even more audacious than Pearl Harbor, and admitting that
they'd ignored the intelligence warnings—particularly at a time a majority of
Americans had doubts about the legitimacy of Bush's Supreme Court-appointed
presidency itself—would have been politically disastrous.
And Bush and Cheney were seriously
interested in getting re-elected in 2004, and Bush had told his biographer,
Mickey Herskowitz, back in 1999 that being a wartime president with an active
war going on at the time was the very, very best way to get re-elected.
Afghanistan was, at that time, the
second poorest country in the world, with an average per-person income of
around $2 per day. Their entire GDP was less than $2 billion a year. Their army
was a joke, their air force almost non-existent, and their alliances were
frazzled; in short, they were a sitting duck for a US president looking to make
a name for himself on the cheap.
Which is exactly what Bush did. He
sold us the fiction that 9/11 was planned and executed out of Afghanistan (much
easier than attacking Hamburg, Germany or Venice, Florida), lied that it was
funded by Afghans (much easier than biting the Saudi hand that fed the Bush
family and Al Qaeda), and said that a revenge strike there by the world's
largest military force would satisfy America's need for "closure."
Bush and Cheney ignored (indeed,
they actively ridiculed) the threat Bin Laden presented to the US; then, after
9/11, they directed blame away from their friends in Saudi Arabia and toward
the dysfunctional Taliban government of Afghanistan.
That Afghan Taliban government, hit
hard with our initial bombing, then offered to arrest Bin Laden and turn him
over to a third country for prosecution but, as The Washington Post's 9/15
headline noted, "Bush Rejects Taliban Offer On Bin Laden."
George W. Bush and
Dick Cheney wanted a war and they got it.
For Bush it ended speculation about
his Supreme Court-assisted illegitimate claim to the White House. For Cheney it
meant hundreds of billions in no-bid contracts for his failing Haliburton
company, which he had formerly led and was heavily invested in.
The war was over in less than
three weeks when the Kabul government fell, and then began a 20+ year
occupation that's just now coming to an end, another important distinction
almost never mentioned in the media.
It's time to end the fiction that
poverty-ridden failed states run by throwbacks to Bronze Age versions of modern
religions were or are the source of well-funded and sophisticated attacks on
fully developed countries like the United States.
It all goes back
to Pappy Bush's "Gulf War"
Had George HW Bush not lied us into
the first Gulf War as a failed 1992 re-election stunt (there were no babies
being thrown from incubators: that was a lie told to Congress by a
daughter of the Kuwaiti royal family at the suggestion of a US PR firm) and
stationed US troops in Saudi Arabia to prosecute his "little war"
(much like Reagan's "little war" in Grenada) Bin Laden never would
have had the least concern with us.
It's said that
nations that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
We should have learned from LBJ
lying us into Vietnam that false wars and long occupations never work out well.
Hell, we should have learned that from the Mexican American War and the Spanish
American War, both also conflicts American presidents lied us into.
But we hadn't learned any of that
as of 9/11, and news coverage today suggests we still haven't learned the clear
lessons of our own history.
As a result, the reputations of
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are enjoying a revival and those two and their
[sic] defense contractor friends are laughing all the way to the bank.
Our media need to
start asking the right questions:
·
How
did Bush and Cheney get away with lying us into a war and 20-year occupation
with Afghanistan—and nearly that long in Iraq—without political or historic
consequences?
·
Why
did the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, all knowing these occupations
were a lost cause and a waste of American blood and treasure, not get us out
before now?
·
And
what can we do in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world, if that is
our goal, to promote peace, modernity and democratic values without using
warplanes, drones, soldiers and bombs?
This article,
which appears here with permission, was first published on The Hartmann Report.
Our
work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to
republish and share widely.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
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Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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