The Post 9/11 Era: 25 Years of Revisionist History and Imperial Terrorism

September 11th /

From “The Free Thought Project”

The attacks of September 11th, 2001 didn’t happen in isolation. The interventionist ambitions of American empire abroad not only laid the foundations for 9/11 to occur, but set the stage to usher in an unparalleled era of violence and exploitation.

Around this time of year we are told to “Never Forget”. To never forget the tragedy of the over 2,977 people who lost their lives on that fateful Tuesday morning on September 11, 2001. And yet, for the astute observer, the slogan “Never Forget” rings hollow. For a quarter of a century the phrase has been used as a propaganda tool to promote constant war, excessive government overreach, and blatant racism.

We are told to never forget, while the commemoration of the attacks are used as convenient cover to purposefully obfuscate the historical record and induce a collective amnesia as to forget the most pivotal inconvenient truths.

Never forget the nearly 3000 people who died that day, but definitely make sure you forget that roughly three times that many people have died in the years since due to exposure to toxins after New York City officials deliberately lied to the public when they assured them that the air was safe to breathe.

Definitely make sure you forget the estimated 4.5 million people that have been senselessly murdered and another 38 million displaced as a result of the so called “War on Terror” (war of terror) waged in the years sense.

Pay no mind to the fact that for two and a half decades afterwards, the national security state ushered in under post 9/11 emergency powers has trampled on every civil liberty and constitutional protection we have.

Totally disregard the numerous whistleblowers that have come forward in the years since refuting the official story.

Certainly forget that over two decades of study conducted by hundreds of architects, engineers, and other reputable scientists has conclusively debunked the official narrative and determined that the World Trade Center collapsed as a result of controlled demolition.

Don’t bring up the fact that declassified internal documents prove that US officials were aware of, and covered up, the fact that several of the hijackers were aided by Saudi intelligence, or that released court documents show at least two of the hijackers were confirmed to be Saudi-managed CIA assets.

And no matter what you do, make sure to completely ignore the fact that operatives of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad were arrested shortly after the attacks and found to have had advanced knowledge of it taking place as evidenced by their admissions of being tasked with documenting the event.

In short, the real message behind the slogan is “Never Forget the tragedy, but only remember what we want you to. Always forget how and why it happened, and what occurred afterwards.”

The how, and the why, and the what came after can generally be summed up with one word. Imperialism. To truly understand 9/11 in its broader scope, how it came about, and its destructive ramifications thereafter, one has to understand the nature of US imperialism.

It is rightly pointed out that 9/11 was in part the result of blowback ― A term coined by US Intelligence to describe unintended consequences of reckless foreign policy decisions.

As The Nation pointed out in its October 15th, 2001 issue of the same name, the radical fervor that helped to foment the deep seated discontent necessary for such an attack to take place did not arise out of a vacuum. It was the result of excessive US meddling in the Middle East.

From the very outset the United States has been a project of imperial ambitions built upon the destructive nature of colonialist expansionism. From the genocidal extermination of this land’s indigenous peoples, to the ruthlessness of the Monroe Doctrine, the aim of the American experiment has been that of every empire that has come before it: To use unprecedented levels of violence to attempt to be the most dominant force on the planet.

Prior to the 9/11 attacks the US empire had already been hard at work destabilizing the Middle East. From facilitating a coup in Iran in 1953, another in Iraq in 1963, and again in 1968 helping to bring Saddam Hussein to power. In 1979 imperialist ambitions would lead to the creation of Operation Cyclone in which the US would back jihadist militants to provoke the Soviet Union into an invasion of Afghanistan. It was precisely this operation providing assistance to Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden who worked as a key CIA asset, that led to the creation of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Article from the Independent praising Osama bin Laden as an "anti Soviet warrior" and "Saudi businessman". Published December 6th, 1993, by Robert Fisk. [Source]
Article from the Independent praising Osama bin Laden as an “anti Soviet warrior” and “Saudi businessman”. Published December 6th, 1993, by Robert Fisk. [Source]

Meanwhile, due to Western interference in the 1979 Iranian revolution backfiring spectacularly, the managers of American Empire gave the go ahead for its Iraqi proxy Saddam Hussein to go to war with Iran, with chemical weapons supplied by the CIA.

All of this to say that the United States had spent decades turning the Middle East into a conflagration of immense proportions, it is of course no wonder that this kind of recklessness would eventually make its way back home with disastrous consequences. 

However, such blowback is only one aspect of the why and how that 9/11 occurred. It wasn’t just arrogance and ignorance that led to this attack taking place, as noted earlier there was also a strong degree of complicity from our very own government, not simply to allow it to happen, but to deliberately orchestrate it as the most prominent false flag attack of our time.

False flag attacks used to be considered a conspiracy theory, until just some years ago the existence of these provocation operations was finally subtly acknowledged as a reality by the ruling class and corporate media, amid the US empire’s instigated conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

For our part, TFTP has thoroughly documented several of these historical events including the infamous Reichstag fire and Operation Himmler of the Third Reich, to the deliberately provoked attack against Pearl Harbor, and many more events used to manufacture the pretext necessary for waging war.

One of the best known among these operations, despite ironically being one that never actually made it past the planning phase, was Operation Northwoods. 

Northwoods, among many proven plots by our government to carry out terrorist attacks against its own population, was a plan devised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff along with coordination from the Central Intelligence Agency in 1962 which would have seen CIA assets carry out a series of bombings and mass shootings throughout central Florida and Washington DC, along with plane hijackings and the use of drones disguised as commercial airliners to simulate a mass casualty event to be blamed on Cuba as justification for war.

It goes without saying, when one looks at the plethora of available evidence, that the attacks of September 11, 2001, was one of these events.

It is a matter of public record, albeit seldom acknowledged, that the plans for the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks had already been laid well in advance.

According to George W Bush’s former ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz, the would-be president was dreaming of invading Iraq as early as 1999. Whereas investigative reporting from late 2001 revealed that plans to attack Afghanistan had already been established long before 9/11.

The intentions to use a mass casualty event as an “opportunity of the ages” to expand US global hegemony were explicitly detailed in the internal documents of the neocon think tank the Project for The New American Century (PNAC), founded by several Reaganite imperialists the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Scooter Libby who later found themselves firmly nestled within the Bush Administration.

In September of 2000, almost exactly a year to the day of the 9/11 attacks, PNAC would publish Rebuilding America’s Defenses — a plan for strengthening and expanding America’s global military preeminence by waging multiple simultaneous campaigns of war. The documents noted on page 51, however, that undertaking such ambitious aims would be arduous “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

As award-winning journalist John Pilger wrote in 2002,

Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush said what America needed was “a new Pearl Harbor”. Its published aims have, alarmingly, come true.

For the last twenty five years 9/11 has served as the excuse for imperialists to wage forever wars of death and destruction as a means to maximize power and profit.

The United States spent 20 years ruthlessly pillaging and occupying Afghanistan, only for the Taliban to immediately regain control after the American withdrawal. Afghanistan was left remarkably worse after the occupation ended. And for its efforts in the 20 year quagmire, all the American people got out of it was skyrocketing debt and thousands of dead American service members.

Similar fates have befallen numerous countries throughout the global south, each one a deliberately calculated and targeted effort of Imperial psychopathy. Just as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were planned ahead of time, so were all of the subsequent conflicts that arose from the expanded global War on of Terror.

In 2007, former NATO supreme allied commander U.S. Army general Wesley Clark revealed the overarching agenda of the ruling elite in what he describes as a “foreign policy coup”. Clark recalls being informed of the pre planned agenda to topple the govern of seven nations; Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Lebanon, and finally Iran.

Of course it should be noted that Clark is still a committed imperialist, his reasons for revealing such startling information at the time are his own, but ultimately in the decades since Wesley Clark has continued to display a track record of fervent support for the American militarist ruling class, including calls for “disloyal” Americans to be placed into internment camps. Clark’s continued hawkishness speaks for itself, revealing he serves the role of a controlled opposition mouthpiece still promoting the interests of empire.

Still, the information revealed by Clark in 2007 speaks volumes to the depths of depravity which permeate imperial premeditation.

Iraq has been destroyed. Sudan has become ravaged by US-backed civil war. The assassination of Muammar Gaddafi turned Libya into a failed state and a hub for terrorism and open air slave trading. Similarly, Somalia has all but collapsed into a haven for piracy and CIA backed terrorists. The Syrian government was toppled, replaced with a US supported al Qaeda affiliate, and Trump’s war with Iran wages on.

This administration hasn’t been shy about its imperialist ambitions either. While maintaining every conflict initiated by his predecessors around the globe, Trump himself has launched an Illegal assault against Venezuela, continues to aid and abet the genocide in Gaza, and has initiated the disastrous war with Iran. Meanwhile he continues to publicly opine fantasies of annexing and colonizing all of the United States neighboring nations.

Just recently, Trump has once again renewed the post 9/11 emergency powers for the 25th year in a row, demonstrating just how paramount the false pretenses of a quarter of a century ago remain to maintaining the perniciousness of American global conquest.