Re: The Elephant's root causes - Answer the question!
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Posted by Robert on 15:26:10 2006/06/09
In Reply to:
Re: The Elephant's root causes - Answer the question! posted by Al Gordon
Regarding the West's responsibility for 9/11, this attack did not happen out of the blue. The common explanation for the motivation is "they hate our freedoms". But you only need to look at the countries that (nearly all) the hijackers came from to recognize the hypocrisy of that statement. Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two brutal dictatorships, and both fully supported by the West.
Chalmers Johnson wrote a book called "Blowback" in 2000 that predicted a major terrorist attack in the United States. After 9/11 he was extensively interviewed and what is interesting is his response to the stock question "were you surprised by 9/11". He responded that of course he wasn't surprised since he had predicted an attack. But what did surprise him (beyond the scale of the attack) was that the hijackers were Islamic fundamentalists. He thought they were more likely to have come from Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, Okinawa, Greece. Different countries, with different religions, but all linked by a common experience of US meddling in their affairs.
When you read the historical accounts, what you learn very quickly is that the US does not support democracy. The US does support democracy in so far as the US supports any democratically elected government that will bend to the will of the US. Any government that looks to favour it's own people over US corporate interests is either toppled or else not allowed to power in the first place (NED, dirty tricks etc.).
What Chalmers Johnson was trying to tell people in 2000, is that eventually the US was going to face a price for all this meddling. But this is never allowed to be discussed as a motivation for 9-11. The only acceptable explanation is that the attackers are "evil", "hate our freedoms", etc. In other words, they are not like us. This has to be the acceptable explanation, because otherwise people start to wonder about the root causes of the attacks, and that can never be allowed.
Regarding my statement "I'm not sure what makes one case legitimate versus another, unless it has something to do with spending large amounts of public money". All I meant is that the US can kill a hundred thousand civilians with bombers in Japan, and it's ok. Somebody else can kill a 20 people with a car bomb, and they're terrorists. In the first case, the fighter pilots are noble warriors fighting for freedom, and in the second, the car bomber is evil. That's all.
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