9/11 and The War on Terror

In the minds of most people, it is a foregone conclusion that 19 Arab Muslim extremist hijackers were the sole perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. This general consensus crosses international and political boundaries, and has gone unchallenged for the last five years - except by those which the media likes to call “conspiracy theorists.” These individuals, who prefer to call themselves 9/11 truth activists, make an extraordinary claim: that the 9/11 attacks would have been impossible without the foreknowledge and even complicity of certain elements within the government and the intelligence community of the United States. A claim as extraordinary as this, were it to be true, would have such serious repercussions for the world that most people, to put it colloquially, “don’t want to go there.”

It goes without saying that the War on Terror has turned the United States military into an instrument of terror far surpassing the meager resources of Al Qaeda. With well over 100,000 dead in Iraq and Afghanistan (according to the most conservative estimates), the War on Terror can only be perceived by the peoples of these nations as a War of Terror, with the perpetrators enjoying immunity for their ongoing crimes. And by perpetrators I do not mean the 18-year-old soldiers being sacrificed on a daily basis for the economic interests of corporations who stand to benefit from the war.

When we speak of the victims of the War of Terror we must also refer to human rights abuses, manifested not only in incidents such as Abu Graib, but also in the current U.S. government policy of legitimizing torture and military trials of civilians through post-9/11 legislation. The most recent example of this, The Military Commissions Act, signed into law in October 2006, makes it legal for any person, American or not, to be apprehended by US authorities under the suspicion that they are an “enemy combatant.” Citizens from any country can now be denied a fair trial and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty - cornerstones of any nation that calls itself democratic - and can be summarily tried in secret by a military commission on the presumption of guilt. A rather disturbing departure from democratic processes, to say the least.

9/11 Truth

How does the 9/11 truth movement tie into all this? Quite simply, the more people realize that the official 9/11 story is the biggest lie ever told (if we define it in terms of the number of people who believe it), the better our chances of exposing the lie and bringing the real culprits to justice. There is no shortage of extraordinary evidence; 9/11 researchers and independent journalists have disproven the official story a thousands times over. This research must continue, but the struggle of 9/11 truth is also a struggle against a collective psychological state of denial. The delusion is so widespread in part because there are no dissenting voices in the mainstream media. It is therefore the job of 9/11 truth activists to disseminate what they have learned, and Internet is the best tool for this task.