(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - The United States has marked the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, amid doubts about the official account of the events.
On September 11, 2001, a series of coordinated attacks were carried out in the United States, leaving almost 3,000 people dead.
The US, under the administration of former President George W. Bush, invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after claiming that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by members of al-Qaeda harbored by the then Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The US also attacked Iraq in 2003 claiming that the Middle Eastern country was in possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Many American individuals and organizations still question the official line on what exactly happened on this day ten years ago. Many of them believe that the attacks were either partly or fully an inside job.
The following is an interview with Edward Spannaus, editor of Legal Affairs, about the issue:
Q: There is mass speculation that the Bush administration and the CIA were aware of the 9/11 attacks before hand, and that this was a reason to get the American public to go along with invading Afghanistan to kill Osama bin Laden, the government puts fear in the American public and then shows invasion of other countries as a solution, is this the case?
Spannaus: I think there was some foreknowledge, whether it was in the Bush administration or the CIA. People attribute a lot to the CIA. The place you have to look at on this, which has been the biggest cover-up, is the Saudis and the British.
It has been documented and well-known that there was financing coming into a number of the 9/11 hijackers' [accounts] from Saudi nationals. This was taken place both in Southern California and in Florida. A story just came out about Florida [about] a wealthy Saudi family that was in contact with Mohammed Atta (the alleged 9/11 mastermind) and a number of the 9/11 hijackers in the state of Florida.
There is something mentioned that has been suppressed from the congressional inquiry. There is a 28-page section, which was classified by [former US President George W.] Bush administration and [President Barack] Obama administration has continued to keep it secret.
So, there is an awful lot that the American people do not know about what happened. You cannot necessarily say that anything that happened afterwards was intended to happen, but the intention coming from particularly the British, who are a long-time adversary and the biggest sponsors of terrorism, was to do great damage to the United States and this certainly has been done over the past ten years.
Q: Do you think the US has become a safer place, with the way that the US brought about the 9/11 attacks and showed it to the people and its invasion against Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden?
Spannaus: Well, I do not think the US brought about the attack. However, the response to it [must be taken into account]. There were certain people within the administration and elsewhere who wanted to use that as a pretext within hours for talking about going to war with Iraq; some people were talking about Hezbollah, Hamas and of course Afghanistan. It was used to watch a decade of permanent warfare and religious warfare and this has been the biggest damage that has been done to the United States to become effectively the Garrison State: militarized, surveillance of citizens, the constant wars. The polls show that majority of American citizens now accept the idea of torture, using torture against an enemy captive, which never would have been the case in the past and was never part of the United States' military tradition.
These are some of the most damaging aspects of what happened on 9/11 regardless of whatever intention. I do not think that Bush himself had much to do with it or had much intention about it. [Former Vice President] Dick Cheney was a much more sinister type of person. But I think you have to really look at the British side of it for the intention and the Saudi side of it for the financing and that is what people here refuse to do.
Q: During former President Bill Clinton, the United States had about USD 6 trillion surplus. Then Bush's war on Afghanistan cost about USD 5 trillion. Is the United States in a safer position right now?
Spannaus: No, the US is not safer. In fact, we are much more vulnerable, because after the ten years of warfare, particularly with the use of drones … we have created a lot of new enemies with this policy and certainly every time that an innocent civilian is killed or maimed by a drone attack or some other type of attack, you create more enemies than you have taken out. So, as a result of this, there are many more enemies around the world to the United States than was the case ten years ago. In fact, after the 9/11 and in the immediate aftermath, there was enormous sympathy and support for the United States.
In terms of the economy, the economy was already in a breakdown crisis at the point of 9/11. In fact, I believe that one of the reasons for the architects of 9/11 was that they knew we were headed into a crisis. Remember you had the dot-com bubble and you had the 97 and 98 financial crisis in Southeast Asia. There was already an economic crisis and I think going into that, this was a Reichstag fire type of event to give an excuse for creating a dictatorship, which we have seen built up under Bush and increasingly under Obama; a political dictatorship in the United States because of the economic collapse. The war was a part of it, certainly of accelerating the collapse, but apart from that it would have happened anyway because you had this huge financial bubble which collapsed in 2007 and 2008.
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