Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - "The EVIDENCE linking Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden to ..9/11 is clear" OK, Where is IT?

hiredgun · 05-16-2008, 11:31 AM

I'm going to think through this out loud, so forgive me if I seem to be contradicting myself.

Much of the evidence is circumstantial. The attack bears the signature of attacks known to have been carried out by the bin Laden network before 9/11 or since - suicide, multiple targets, simultaneous attacks, and targets with political and economic significance. It's thin, but it is something. It can be falsified, of course, so I suppose it does little by itself as evidence.

There is a decent amount of information about what the 19 hijackers were doing in the weeks before 9/11, especially as some of them were already under surveillance. We know about the flight schools they attended, for example, and the apartments they were in.

There is the fact of the video testaments of many of the 9/11 attackers, in which they lay out the reasons for the attack and make their final statements as martyrs. I'm sure you are familiar with the style of video I mean. This is pretty convincing. I don't really see why any government would fake it - or that they could do it convincingly, or why they would do it without parading it around as the evidence everyone has been asking for, which they have decidedly not done. Instead these videos are passed around quietly within communities of wannabe militants, sympathizers, and cheerleaders of 'the jihad' as constructed by bin Laden and his ilk. I've seen most of them, and if you go looking you may be able to find them as well, but your odds are better if you have some Arabic. The videos pretty unmistakably portray the same individuals we saw headshots of on CNN and whom we now recognize as the 19 hijackers, although of course you could argue that video can be manipulated, so there we are again.

On that note I should mention that within the communities I'm referring to - diffuse communities directly acknowledged and nurtured by people at least as high up as Zawahiri, who gave them an exclusive (not real-time) interview - it is no longer controversial at all that AQ was behind 9/11. Roach, I see your point that bin Laden's acknowledgment of 9/11 might well have been a tactical move; after all, his protestations of innocence were not going to win any real sympathy, and on the contrary he has gotten an amount of popularity and lionization out of admitting to the attack. But while plausible, I just find it not all that likely. 9/11 is now the centerpiece of the community and the movement. It is what holds it together, what gives it its sense of self. It is difficult for me to imagine that the very core of that sense is a tactical lie created in response to the US. But my merely finding it instinctively difficult to conceive does not necessarily make it false.

There is a meta-issue here as well about what constitutes truth. Presumably the question of whether bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 is meant to have some relevance for our present and future decision-making. But if we have acted since 9/11 as if AQ was responsible, AND if the community itself - the supporters, adherents, fighters, sympathizers, and propagandists of Qaeda-style jihad - themselves believe him responsible, AND if we will never publicly discover any other truth than this one... then what does it even mean to talk about another truth? Would it even make sense to behave in any other way than to presume that 9/11 happened as we currently imagine it to have happened?

I'm not sure the preceding paragraph really makes any sense. Oh well.

In short I am, personally, reasonably confident that bin Laden's network was behind the attack. The evidence is not bulletproof by any means, and it is curious that we haven't seen more come out of the intel community, which must surely have the ability to produce something more than we have seen. At the same time I haven't seen any viable alternative explanations that don't raise exponentially more problems than they solve, unless you believe - as I have seen RB suggest before - that the whole organization behind the attack was wiped out on the planes themselves.

So I believe it, even if not with a tremendously high degree of confidence. But at the same time, the question seems almost irrelevant. The challenges we face today have little to do with 9/11 - never mind that they have much to do with our response to it, as well as other factors - so why worry so much about it? Why worry, that is, except perhaps because it has been such an important rallying cry for citizens and soldiers alike over the last six years? It is emotionally important to a lot of people who have believed in it very strongly. Geopolitically it doesn't mean very much in itself, not anymore. 9/11 was not important in itself, only for what followed.

05-16-2008, 11:31 AM	#17 (permalink)
hiredgun Addict	I'm going to think through this out loud, so forgive me if I seem to be contradicting myself. Much of the evidence is circumstantial. The attack bears the signature of attacks known to have been carried out by the bin Laden network before 9/11 or since - suicide, multiple targets, simultaneous attacks, and targets with political and economic significance. It's thin, but it is something. It can be falsified, of course, so I suppose it does little by itself as evidence. There is a decent amount of information about what the 19 hijackers were doing in the weeks before 9/11, especially as some of them were already under surveillance. We know about the flight schools they attended, for example, and the apartments they were in. There is the fact of the video testaments of many of the 9/11 attackers, in which they lay out the reasons for the attack and make their final statements as martyrs. I'm sure you are familiar with the style of video I mean. This is pretty convincing. I don't really see why any government would fake it - or that they could do it convincingly, or why they would do it without parading it around as the evidence everyone has been asking for, which they have decidedly not done. Instead these videos are passed around quietly within communities of wannabe militants, sympathizers, and cheerleaders of 'the jihad' as constructed by bin Laden and his ilk. I've seen most of them, and if you go looking you may be able to find them as well, but your odds are better if you have some Arabic. The videos pretty unmistakably portray the same individuals we saw headshots of on CNN and whom we now recognize as the 19 hijackers, although of course you could argue that video can be manipulated, so there we are again. On that note I should mention that within the communities I'm referring to - diffuse communities directly acknowledged and nurtured by people at least as high up as Zawahiri, who gave them an exclusive (not real-time) interview - it is no longer controversial at all that AQ was behind 9/11. Roach, I see your point that bin Laden's acknowledgment of 9/11 might well have been a tactical move; after all, his protestations of innocence were not going to win any real sympathy, and on the contrary he has gotten an amount of popularity and lionization out of admitting to the attack. But while plausible, I just find it not all that likely. 9/11 is now the centerpiece of the community and the movement. It is what holds it together, what gives it its sense of self. It is difficult for me to imagine that the very core of that sense is a tactical lie created in response to the US. But my merely finding it instinctively difficult to conceive does not necessarily make it false. There is a meta-issue here as well about what constitutes truth. Presumably the question of whether bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 is meant to have some relevance for our present and future decision-making. But if we have acted since 9/11 as if AQ was responsible, AND if the community itself - the supporters, adherents, fighters, sympathizers, and propagandists of Qaeda-style jihad - themselves believe him responsible, AND if we will never publicly discover any other truth than this one... then what does it even mean to talk about another truth? Would it even make sense to behave in any other way than to presume that 9/11 happened as we currently imagine it to have happened? I'm not sure the preceding paragraph really makes any sense. Oh well. In short I am, personally, reasonably confident that bin Laden's network was behind the attack. The evidence is not bulletproof by any means, and it is curious that we haven't seen more come out of the intel community, which must surely have the ability to produce something more than we have seen. At the same time I haven't seen any viable alternative explanations that don't raise exponentially more problems than they solve, unless you believe - as I have seen RB suggest before - that the whole organization behind the attack was wiped out on the planes themselves. So I believe it, even if not with a tremendously high degree of confidence. But at the same time, the question seems almost irrelevant. The challenges we face today have little to do with 9/11 - never mind that they have much to do with our response to it, as well as other factors - so why worry so much about it? Why worry, that is, except perhaps because it has been such an important rallying cry for citizens and soldiers alike over the last six years? It is emotionally important to a lot of people who have believed in it very strongly. Geopolitically it doesn't mean very much in itself, not anymore. 9/11 was not important in itself, only for what followed.