Bin Had

Preface: You can either dismiss all of the allegations in the first part of this post as nutty conspiracy theories, or decide that they are real and that I am using parody. Your choice. Either way, it is clear that we've been had ...

Forget that Bin Laden likely received CIA training and support in fighting against the Russians in Afghanistan. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

Forget the allegations by France's oldest and second-largest newspaper that a CIA agent met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11, and the claim by a former FBI translator that Bin Laden worked with the CIA right up until 9/11.

Forget that 9/11 was entirely foreseeable, and that government more or less heard the 9/11 hijackers' plans from their own mouths.

Forget that Dick Cheney was in charge of all counter-terrorism exercises, activities and responses on 9/11 (see this Department of State announcement, this Department of State announcement, this CNN article and this essay), and that:

• In the 70's - Cheney and Rumsfeld were instrumental in generating fake intelligence exaggerating the Soviet threat in order to undermine coexistence between the U.S. and Soviet Union, which conveniently justified huge amounts of cold war spending (and see this)

• According to former high-level intelligence officer Melvin Goodman, Cheney orchestrated phony intelligence for the Congress in order to get an endorsement for covert arms shipments to anti-government forces in Angola

• Cheney and Rumsfeld (and many other high-level officials in the Bush Administration) were prominent members of a thinktank which called for a new American empire well before 9/11, and lamented that, without a "catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor", transformation of America into an empire would be very slow.

Forget that governments from around the world admit that they carry out false flag terrorism to justify their political goals.

Finally, forget that the U.S. could easily have captured Bin Laden in 2001 or 2007, but chose not to do so.

Bin Had

Ignoring the above, it is still obvious that we've been had.

Specifically, only 5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said "my interest is to hit Saddam". He also said "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time", is the statement "Hard to get a good case." In other words, top officials knew that there wasn't a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.

Moreover, "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda".

And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.

And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.

Moreover, President Bush's March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this.

Moreover, the torture program which Cheney created was specifically aimed at producing false confessions in an attempt to link Iraq and 9/11: er, the type of torture used since 9/11 was a special type of torture specifically aimed at creating false confessions:

• Senator: Government Used Communist Torture Techniques Aimed at Extracting FALSE Confessions

• Humanitarian Aid Worker: Torture Only Stopped When I Pretended I Was In Al Qaeda

• Under torture, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi claimed there was a link between Saddam Hussein, al-Qaida and WMD

• One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ

• 9/11 Mastermind: "During ... My Interrogation I Gave A Lot Of False Information In Order To Satisfy What I Believed The Interrogators Wished To Hear"

• Self-Confessed 9/11 "Mastermind" Also Falsely Confessed to Crimes He Didn't Commit

• Most of the 9/11 Commission Report was Based on 3rd Hand Reports of What People Said While Being Tortured

And see this.

As American historian, investigative journalist and policy analyst Gareth Porter writes this week:

Cheney and Rumsfeld were determined not to allow a focus on bin Laden to interfere with their plan for a U.S. invasion of Iraq to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime.

It's not just Iraq.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says that Dick Cheney's vision of policy towards the Middle East after 9/11 was to re-draw the map.

Porter writes in the Asia Times:

Feith's book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states [including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon ]

There are some bad guys out there, but their importance has been greatly exaggerated to justify America's imperial ambitions. No wonder former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Senate that the war on terror is "a mythical historical narrative".

Bin Laden might have been a bad guy ... but the way his life and death have been used has been dishonest.