The Realities of September 11th

The world still remembers the face of George W. Bush when – children’s book in hand and surrounded by primary school students in Florida – someone whispered into his ear that the country was under attack.

It was September 11th, 2001, and for several minutes the President’s face bore a ridiculous expression of indecision and ignorance. Soon, as the days passed, it became evident that the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon using civilian aircraft as missiles had become the great pretext for applying neoconservative precepts on a great scale.

The episodes to come – in Afghanistan and Iraq – obeyed that “Washingtonian logic” of “fighting terrorism on a global scale” and granting the White House carte blanche to launch attacks on anyone in any “dark corner” of the planet.

Domestically, this made it possible to violate the rights and privacy of citizens, persecute and accuse on the basis of every kind of unsubstantiated rumor, and deploy massive amounts of troops and resources to adventures in Central Asia, which in the long run are slaughterhouses for both invaders and invaded. Finally, this “Global War” is a lucrative business for oil companies and for Pentagon contractors.

Six years after those events, and confronted with benefits of all kinds that have rained down on the most reactionary groups in the United States, few people doubt that something dirty is afoot.

Lawyers working for relatives of the New York victims – principally second-tier employees and service people – have announced that they haven’t discarded the idea that the attacks had been encouraged by the ultraconservatives, or at least were allowed to occur without acting against those who were preparing it.

They adduce that it’s inconceivable for the entire national security apparatus to have failed to detect terrorists of Arabic-origin who had long lived and trained in Florida, while at the same time, much ado was made about five Cuban fighters who had been arrested for trying to abort sabotage plotted against their country [Cuba] in Miami by counterrevolutionaries financed by successive U.S. administrations. [Read about the ‘Miami Five’ below.]

These are realities that must be taken into account, even though, as is habitual in that country, all the official documents on the matter remain buried for years in secret archives before finally resurfacing and surprising the gullible.

[Editor’s Note: The “Miami Five,” Fernando Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labanino and Rene Gonzalez were dispatched by the Cuban government in the early nineties, according to Havana, to “fight terror.” Their task was to infiltrate the anti-Castro Cuban exile groups in Miami, who were believed to be engaged in acts of sabotage against Cuba. their case has taken on the same national significance in Cuba as did that of Elian Gonzalez].