9/11 Ten Years Later

David Ray Griffin

• Publisher: Olive Branch Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781566568685
• eBook ISBN: 9781623710033
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On the tenth anniversary of the Septemer 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, David Ray Griffin reviews the troubling questions that remain unanswered 9/11 Ten Years Later is David Ray Griffin's tenth book about the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Asking in the first chapter whether 9/11 justified the war in Afghanistan, he explains why it did not. In the following three chapters, devoted to the destruction of the World Trade Center, Griffin asks why otherwise rational journalists have endorsed miracles (understood as events that contradict laws of science). Also, introducing the book's theme, Griffin points out that 9/11 has been categorized by some social scientists as a state crime against democracy. Turning next to debates within the 9/11 Truth Movement, Griffin reinforces his claim that the reported phone calls from the airliners were faked, and argues that the intensely debated issue about the Pentagon—whether it was struck by a Boeing 757—is quite unimportant. Finally, Griffin suggests that the basic faith of Americans is not Christianity but "nationalist faith"—which most fundamentally prevents Americans from examining evidence that 9/11 was orchestrated by U.S. leaders—and argues that the success thus far of the 9/11 state crime against democracy need not be permanent.

1. DID 9/11 JUSTIFY THE WAR IN
AFGHANISTAN?

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it would turn out to be President Obama’s Vietnam. This question has implied several others, such as: Is this war winnable, or has it become a quagmire? And this question is partly motivated by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government under Hamid Karzai is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government we tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years. Also, just as the American people turned increasingly against the war in Vietnam, they have now turned increasingly against the war in Afghanistan. Commentators have increasingly been referring to it as a “purposeless war.”

Although there have been many similarities between these two wars, there has also been a big difference: This time, there has been no draft. For this reason, as anti-war writers often comment, no strong anti-war movement has developed. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would have been huge demonstrations against this war all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle class parents had been coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries, or with post-traumatic stress disorder, which might lead them to commit suicide—this war would have been stopped long ago. People have often asked, did we learn any of the “lessons of Vietnam”? Our government learned one: If you’re going to have an unpopular war, don’t have a draft.

However, even though there has not been a draft, the American people have said that the war should be brought to an end. An ABC/Washington Post Poll in June of 2011 showed that only 43 percent of the American people consider the war “worth fighting,” and this figure reflected a bump from the announcement of the killing of Osama bin Laden: In March, only 31 percent marked “worth fighting.” A CNN poll showed that 74 percent of the American people wanted US troops to come home partly or totally.¹

There are many other questions that have been asked about the war in Afghanistan, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be raised in polite company, and certainly not in the mainstream media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the war during the past several years has been justified by those attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks.

Various commentators, to be sure, have raised some pretty fundamental questions about the effectiveness and affordability of the “counterinsurgency strategy” and even whether American fighting forces should remain in Afghanistan at all. But I will ask an even more fundamental question: Whether this war was ever really justified by the publicly given reason: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

This question has two parts: First, did these attacks provide a legal justification for the invasion of Afghanistan? Second, if not, did they at least provide a moral justification? I will begin with the question of legal justification.

I IS THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
LEGALLY JUSTIFIED?

Since the founding of the United Nations in 1945, international law with regard to war has been defined by the UN charter. It is widely agreed by international lawyers that, measured by this standard, the US-led war in Afghanistan has been illegal from the outset.

Marjorie Cohn, a well-known professor of international law, wrote in November 2001:

[T]he bombings of Afghanistan by the United States and the United Kingdom are illegal. This bombardment violates both international law and United States law.²

In 2008, Cohn repeated this argument in an article entitled “Afghanistan: The Other Illegal War.” The point of the title was that, although by then it had become widely accepted that the war in Iraq was illegal, the war in Afghanistan was equally illegal.³

According to international law as codified in the UN Charter, she pointed out, disputes are to be brought to the UN Security Council, which alone may legally authorize the use of force. Without this authorization, any military activity against another country is illegal.

However, there are two exceptions to this principle: One of these is that, if your nation has been subjected to an armed attack by another nation, you may respond militarily in self-defense. This condition was not fulfilled by the 9/11 attacks, however, because they were not carried out by another nation. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. Indeed, the 19 men charged with the crime were not Afghans; most of them were from Saudi Arabia.

The other exception occurs when a nation has certain knowledge that an armed attack by another nation is imminent—too imminent for the matter to be brought to the Security Council. The need for self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” Although the US government claimed that its military operations in Afghanistan were justified by the need to prevent a second attack, this need, even if real, was clearly not urgent, as shown by the fact that the United States waited almost a month to launch its attack on Afghanistan.

US political leaders have claimed, to be sure, that the UN did authorize the US attack on Afghanistan. This claim, originally made by the Bush-Cheney administration, was repeated by President Obama in his West Point speech of December 1, 2009, in which he said that the “United Nations Security Council endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks,” so that US troops went to Afghanistan “[u]nder the banner of … international legitimacy.”⁴

However, the language of “all necessary steps” is from UN Security Council Resolution 1368, in which the Council, taking note of its “responsibilities under the Charter,” expressed its own readiness “to take all necessary steps to respond to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.”⁵

Of course, the UN Security Council might have determined that one of these necessary steps was to authorize an attack on Afghanistan by the United States. But it did not. Resolution 1373, which is the only other Security Council resolution about this matter, laid out various responses, but these included matters such as freezing assets, criminalizing the support of terrorists, exchanging police information about terrorists, and capturing and prosecuting terrorists. The use of military force was not mentioned.⁶

The US war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the UN Security Council in 2001 or at any time since, so this war began as an illegal war and has remained an illegal war. Our government’s claim to the contrary is false.

This war is illegal, moreover, not only under international law, but also under US law. The UN Charter is a treaty, which was ratified by the United States, and, according to Article VI of the US Constitution, any treaty ratified by the United States is part of “supreme law of the land.”⁷ The war in Afghanistan, therefore, has been in violation of US law as well as international law. It could not be more illegal.

II IS THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
MORALLY JUSTIFIED?

The American public for the most part probably does not realize that this war is illegal, because this is not something our political leaders have been anxious to point out, and our press has for the most part also ignored this issue. So most people simply do not know.

If they were informed, however, many Americans would be inclined to argue that, even if technically illegal, the US military effort in Afghanistan has been morally justified by the attacks of 9/11. For a summary statement of this argument, we can turn again to the West Point speech of President Obama, who has taken over the Bush-Cheney account of 9/11. Seeking to provide an answer to the question of “why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place,” Obama said:

We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women and children without regard to their faith or race or station… . As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda—a group of extremists who have distorted and defiled Islam, one of the world’s great religions, to justify the slaughter of innocents… . [A]fter the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden—we sent our troops into Afghanistan.

This standard account can be summarized in terms of three points:

• The attacks were carried out by 19 Muslim members of al-Qaeda.
• The attacks had been authorized by the founder of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, who was in Afghanistan.
• The US invasion of Afghanistan was necessary because the Taliban, which was in control of Afghanistan, refused to turn bin Laden over to US authorities.

On the basis of these three points, our political leaders concluded that the United States had the moral right, arising from the universal right of self-defense, to attempt to capture or kill bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network to prevent them from launching another attack on our country.

The only problem with this argument is that all three points are false. I will show this by looking at these three points in reverse order, beginning with the claim that we invaded Afghanistan because the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden.

1. FIRST CLAIM: AFGHANISTAN ATTACKED FOR TALIBAN’S
REFUSAL TO TURN OVER BIN LADEN

The claim that the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden was repeatedly made by political leaders and our mainstream media. For example, Robert Reid, writing for the Associated Press, said in 2009 that the war “was launched by the Bush administration after the Taliban government refused to hand over Osama bin Laden for his role in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.”⁸ Reports from the time, however, show the truth to be very different.

Who Refused Whom?

Ten days after the 9/11 attacks, CNN reported:

The Taliban … refus[ed] to hand over bin Laden without proof or evidence that he was involved in last week’s attacks on the United States… . The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan … said Friday that deporting him without proof would amount to an “insult to Islam.”

CNN also made clear that the Taliban’s demand for proof was not made without reason, saying:

Bin Laden himself has already denied he had anything to do with the attacks, and Taliban officials repeatedly said he could not have been involved in the attacks.

Bush, however, “said the demands were not open to negotiation or discussion.”⁹

With this refusal to provide any evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility, the Bush administration made it impossible for the Taliban to turn him over. As Afghan experts quoted by the Washington Post pointed out, the Taliban, in order to turn over a fellow Muslim to an “infidel” Western nation, needed a “face-saving formula.” Milton Bearden, who had been the CIA station chief in Afghanistan in the 1980s, put it this way: While the United States was demanding, “Give up bin Laden,” the Taliban were saying, “Do something to help us give him up.”¹⁰ But the Bush administration refused.

After the bombing began in October, moreover, the Taliban tried again, offering to turn bin Laden over to a third country if the United States would stop the bombing and provide evidence of his responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. But Bush replied: “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.” An article in London’s Guardian, which reported this development, was entitled: “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer to Hand Bin Laden Over.”¹¹ So it was the Bush administration, not the Taliban, that was responsible for the fact that bin Laden was not turned over.

In August of 2009, President Obama, who had criticized the US invasion of Iraq as a war of choice, said of the US involvement in Afghanistan: “This is not a war of choice. This is a w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• 1. Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan?
• 2. The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why Have Otherwise Rational Journalists Endorsed Miracles?
• 3. Why Have Bill Moyers and Robert Parry in Particular Endorsed Miracles?
• 4. Building What? How State Crimes Against Democracy Can be Hidden in Plain Sight
• 5. Phone Calls From The 9/11 Planes: How They Fooled America
• 6. Cheney’s Meet the Press Interview: Why Did the 9/11 Commission Contradict It?
• 7. The Pentagon: A Consensus Approach
• 8. Nationalist Faith: How It Blinds America to the Truth About 9/11
• 9. When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed
• Notes
• Index