The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which killed more than 2,900 people, were the deadliest terror attacks in the history of the United States. Nineteen supporters of Al Qaeda, 15 from Saudi Arabia, crashed two passenger planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York; a third plane into the Pentagon building outside Washington; and a fourth into the ground.
The horrific massacre of civilians was immediately exploited by the imperialist powers, led by the United States government itself, to justify far-reaching attacks on the democratic rights of their own populations, and the launching of decades-long wars in the Middle East and Africa. The “war on terror,” embraced by the entire political establishment and corporate media, became the justification for wars and interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.
Twenty-five years on, the analysis made by the WSWS of these events has stood the test of time. We present below a selection of the major statements and analysis made contemporaneously by the WSWS.
Anyone who wishes to understand the why and wherefore of yesterday’s events must study the historical and political record of the US in the Middle East, especially over the last thirty years.
This is the text of a report delivered by David North to an SEP aggregate meeting held September 9-10, 2006.
An essential task of socialists in the US is to awaken the positive and generous instincts that are so deeply embedded in the American population. There are, after all, two Americas, the America of Bush, Clinton and the other scoundrels, and another America, of its working people.
One message emerged from the speech delivered by President Bush to Congress: the United States is being propelled onto a course of global violence and domestic repression unprecedented in the nation's history.
The videotape in which Osama bin Laden gloats over the World Trade Center atrocity provides a graphic demonstration of the political bankruptcy of terrorism.
For reasons that have nothing to do with jingoism, let alone sympathy for the war policies of the Bush administration, the murder of reporter Daniel Pearl has been met not only with revulsion, but also with deep sadness.
A recently translated 4,000-word letter purported to be written by Osama bin Laden provides what may be the clearest presentation yet of the utterly reactionary political and social views that underlie his brand of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
The World Socialist Web Site condemns the American military assault on Afghanistan. We reject the dishonest claims of the Bush administration that this is a war for justice and the security of the American people against terrorism.
From the outset of the military assault against Afghanistan, the World Socialist Web Site has explained that this is not a war for justice or security against terrorist attacks but is bound up with the geo-political aims of United States imperialism.
The American establishment has seized upon the tragic events of September 11 as an opportunity to implement policies both at home and abroad formulated long before the terror attacks.
One searches in vain in the extensive media coverage of the “war on terrorism” for any coherent explanation of the origins of the Taliban, its social and ideological base, and its rise to power. The omission is no accident.
The major powers are fighting amongst themselves for global hegemony, while the ruling elite in every country launches a political and economic offensive against the working class.
The American media has conducted a systematic cover-up of the real economic and strategic interests that underlie the war against Afghanistan, in order to sustain the pretense that the war emerged overnight, full-blown, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11.
The killing of as many as 800 captured Taliban prisoners Sunday in Mazar-i-Sharif is a war crime for which the American government and military, right up to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush, are politically responsible.
This book consists of political reports, public lectures, party statements, essays, and polemics that document the response of the ICFI to the quarter century of US-led wars that began in 1990–91.
Since 2001, the circumstances of the September 11 attacks have been covered by an official veil of secrecy. Immediately after the attacks, the WSWS noted that the official explanation, that the intelligence agencies had simply failed to 'connect the dots' in the lead-up to the attacks, could not withstand serious analysis. The fact that the individual behind the attack was Osama bin Laden, “whose every move is tracked with the aid of the most technologically sophisticated and massive intelligence apparatus,” raises “a host of troubling questions,” the WSWS wrote.
The WSWS rejected the official explanation of the events of 9/11 and conducted its own review of the information that was coming to light about the US government’s own role in permitting the attacks to take place, despite extensive warnings and direct monitoring of the conspirators.
Over the years since, the WSWS has analysed the subsequent revelations that were made publicly available by the government and intelligence agencies, including with two four-part series by Patrick Martin. The role of the Saudi Arabian monarchy was the subject of the final chapter of the official Congressional report into 9/11, which remained completely secret for 13 years before being made partially available in 2016.
The least likely and least credible explanation of the events of September 11, 2001 is that the vast US national security apparatus was entirely unaware of the activities of the hijackers until the airliners slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
The case of Zacarias Moussaoui is the clearest example of the almost inexplicable refusal on the part of the intelligence agencies to take any action that could have prevented the September 11 attacks.
The Bush administration has been plunged into a major political crisis following press reports that Bush was briefed on the danger of a terrorist attack involving the hijacking of US airliners more than a month before September 11.
The public hearings conducted by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States made clear that the bipartisan panel is engaged in a cover-up of the fundamental questions surrounding the September 11 attacks.
The information so far made public has shattered the official Bush administration version of September 11—that the suicide hijackings were an unanticipated and unforeseeable event and that no US government agency had any inkling that commercial jets would be seized and used as weapons.
On the most basic level, the 9/11 report is a whitewash. The fundamental premise of its investigation is that the CIA, the FBI, the US military and the Bush White House all acted in good faith.
The question is: Was September 11 a failure, or was a decision taken to permit a terrorist attack on US soil in order to provide the pretext for implementing plans for wars abroad and repressive policies at home?
A top-secret military intelligence unit identified four of the 9/11 suicide hijackers as Al Qaeda operatives, including two of the pilots, more than a year before the September 11 terrorist attacks.
A spokesman for the September 11 commission acknowledged on Wednesday that members of its staff met with a uniformed military officer on July 12, 2004 and that the officer informed them that a military intelligence group had, as early as the summer of 2000, identified Mohammad Atta as part of an Al Qaeda cell operating in the US. Atta is thought to have been the lead hijacker in the September 11 attacks.
Sworn testimony and affidavits filed in federal court shed light on the role of the Saudi monarchy in the 9/11 attacks, long covered up by the US military/intelligence apparatus.
The declassification of the section of the 9/11 commission report on Saudi ties to 9/11 point to a deliberate distortion and exploitation of the attacks as a pretext for war.
The cover-up of Saudi involvement has been carried out over three administrations, Democratic and Republican alike.
The Biden administration has declassified a report dated April 4, 2016 containing details of an FBI investigation into the role of two individuals with connections to the government of Saudi Arabia who provided “travel assistance, lodging and financing” to two of the 9/11 hijackers.
New evidence previously suppressed by the FBI confirms that an intelligence operative from Saudi Arabia was a facilitator for two hijackers after they arrived in California and also made a “casing” surveillance video of the US Capitol prior to the attacks of 9/11.
The terrorist attacks provide a pretext for the implementation of policies developed long before, but for which, without 9/11, there would have been no substantial popular support.
The White House has assumed vast new powers for internal repression, establishing by executive order an Office of Homeland Security that is not subject to either congressional oversight or any vote on the personnel appointed to run it.
The month since the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington has seen dramatic changes in the day-to-day functioning of the US government and the open emergence of powerful tendencies toward antidemocratic and dictatorial methods of rule.
In the space of little more than a week, the Bush administration has issued a series of executive orders that amount to the most far-reaching assault on democratic rights in modern legal history.
In a November 16 editorial, the New York Times acknowledged the anti-democratic and authoritarian character of the Bush administration’s decision to establish—by executive order—secret military tribunals to try alleged terrorists.
Any objective consideration of the political changes since the attacks of September 11, 2001 must conclude that the tragic events were the starting point for a vast change in American domestic and foreign policy.
The Bush administration has established a “shadow government,” consisting of 75 to 150 officials of the executive branch, supposedly as a precaution against a possible nuclear terrorist attack on the US capital.
Hooded and shackled throughout a 27-hour flight, the first Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they will be detained indefinitely in conditions which are clearly subhuman and illegal.
A group of 60 right-wing academics and public policy experts influential in government and media circles has issued a statement entitled “Why We’re Fighting: A Letter From America.”
A historical turning point has this benefit: it brings out an individual’s true political physiognomy. What has been extraneous or cosmetic falls away, and the essence emerges.
In its efforts to portray George W. Bush in the most flattering possible light, the liberal press in the US has jettisoned whatever shreds of decorum and journalistic integrity it previously retained.
Cable News Network has instructed reporters and anchormen to tailor their coverage of the US war against Afghanistan to downplay the toll of death and destruction caused by American bombing.
On November 11 more than forty top Hollywood executives met for two hours with Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief political advisor, to discuss ways in which the film industry could contribute to the “war on terrorism.”
An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal reveals the thinking of the most militaristic and fascistic-minded sections of the US ruling elite.
George Will’s column is notable as an example of one of the favorite gimmicks of reactionary pundits—the misuse of historical analogies to justify the actions of American imperialism.
At the heart of the Miller case is a criminal conspiracy by the Bush administration, aided and abetted by both Congress and the media, to drag the American people into a war based upon lies.
Friedman, who now prefers to forget what he wrote, utilized his position as a columnist for the most influential newspaper in the United States to legitimize military attacks against Iraq.
By mid-2002, the US political establishment and media were openly preparing for a war against Iraq, a country with no connection to the September 11 terror attacks. Thus came the fabricated pretext, most infamously invoked by US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a January 2003 address to the United Nations Security Council, that Saddam Husssein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Within the United States, Bush relied on the media and the Democratic Party to sell these lies to the American people. The mass media seized on Powell’s speech to unanimously proclaim that it was an “irrefutable” indictment of the Iraqi regime. No significant section of the Democratic Party opposed this criminal plot, with then Senator Joseph Biden immediately declaring Powell’s speech “unanswerable.”
The slowly unfolding nightmare of the war preparations provoked mass opposition around the world. On February 15-16, the largest antiwar protests in history took place.
The invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, illegal under international law developed in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. It was carried out to seize control of Iraqi oil as part of a broader strategy to utilize military force to counter US capitalism’s economic decline.
As in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, and in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II, the eruption of war in 2003 arises out of deep-rooted contradictions in the world capitalist system.
In a speech delivered June 1, George W. Bush asserted his administration’s intention to carry out preemptive military attacks wherever it perceives a challenge to America’s global interests.
The offer of the Iraqi government to accept without conditions the return of United Nations weapons inspectors has exposed the most essential truth of contemporary international politics: the Bush administration wants war.
No other country in modern history, not even Nazi Germany at the height of Hitler’s madness, has asserted such a sweeping claim to world domination as is now being made by the United States.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s brief for war against Iraq is was predicated on a colossal lie: that the coming invasion is about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Baghdad’s supposed threat to US security and world peace.
In the face of the militaristic frenzy of the most ruthless imperialist regime in the world, more than 10,000,000 people have spoken out against the plans for an invasion of Iraq.
During the buildup to the last world war, it was common to speak of Nazi Germany’s “rape of Czechoslovakia,” or “rape of Poland.” It is high time that what the US is doing is called by its real name. A criminal regime in Washington is carrying out the rape of Iraq.
Whatever the outcome of the initial stages of the conflict that has begun, American imperialism has a rendezvous with disaster. It will not find through the medium of war a viable solution to its internal maladies.
The exposure of the massive lies justifying the Iraq War has not produce condemnation, but new and even more insolent justifications in the media. This situation is telling the American people something important and very disturbing about the nature of the society in which they are living.
The Philosophical Society of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland held its annual debate on American foreign policy on the evening of October 14, 2004. The proposition debated before an audience of more than 200 people was: “This House Believes that America is Still the World’s Peacekeeper.”
David North, invited by the Philosophical Society to participate in the debate, spoke in opposition to the proposition. Other speakers opposing the resolution included Chris Marsden, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party in Britain, Irish Senator David Norris, and Leonard Doyle, the foreign editor of the Independent newspaper in Britain.
Every quasi-serious investigation, carried out by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the media or the US military itself, points to a “systemic” pattern of humiliation, terror and—in an unknown number of cases—murder prevalent in the American jails and camps holding Iraqi prisoners.
The sadistic acts committed at the Abu Ghraib prison are not an aberration. They are the inevitable product of a criminal war launched on the basis of lies.
Recent press reports have demolished Bush administration claims that US torture in Iraq was an isolated act of a few deviant soldiers and reservists.
The Justice Department memo is prima facie evidence that the US government adopted a policy of torture in connection with its so-called “war on terrorism” and its operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The legislation adopted by the House of Representatives Wednesday and the Senate Thursday, legalizing the Bush administration’s policy of torture and indefinite detention without trial, marks a watershed for the United States.
President George Bush on Friday categorically defended his authorization of interrogation methods defined by international and US law and viewed the world over as torture.
Anwar al-Awlaki was selected for assassination as a test case that, if successful, would set a precedent according to which the executive branch of the US government has the unreviewable power to secretly liquidate its political opponents, including US citizens.
The Obama administration has created a new extra-legal system known as the “disposition matrix” to institutionalize the selection and targeting of enemies of the US state for assassination.
The response of the Obama administration and the political establishment to the Senate report on CIA torture makes clear that none of those responsible for heinous crimes will be arrested, indicted or prosecuted for their actions.
This speech by North was given at a 2006 meeting in Pasadena, California. “We speak of a crisis of American democracy, but what do we mean?,” North stated. “The very nature of the alternatives presented to us in this election manifests the crisis of American democracy. What is democracy? I believe the best definition was provided by the sixteenth president of the United States—‘government of the people, for the people, by the people.’ How can you have that when the very mechanisms by which the personnel of the government is determined are totally hostile to any expression of the interests of the people themselves?”
The documents provided the world’s population with an unprecedented insight into the first war crimes of the 21st century.
The World Socialist Web Site denounces the military detention of Army private Manning, who claims to have released the video of a US military massacre in Iraq posted in April on the web site WikiLeaks.
The secret US army files made public Friday by the WikiLeaks web site provide massive documentation of the criminal character of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The nearly 400,000 documents released by WikiLeaks give some indication of the barbaric reality of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The video exposed the criminality of the Iraq war and had a profound impact on the consciousness of millions of workers and young people the world over.
The files exposed the lawless global network established by the US and its allies as part of their “war on terror.”
WikiLeaks contributed to a growing recognition among workers and young people that state criminality and ruling class conspiracies are not accidents or the work of a few bad individuals, but the product of a whole social system based on the rule of competing oligarchies which must be overthrown.
On Monday, Julian Assange walked out of the UK’s Belmarsh Prison a free man, following five years of imprisonment and nearly 15 years of persecution by a cabal of imperialist governments led by the United States which hounded him for exposing their crimes.
The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party call on all workers, students and youth within the United States and internationally to come to the defense of Edward Snowden.
The World Socialist Web Site calls on workers around the world to come to the defense of Edward Snowden, who is the subject of a ferocious assault by the American state.
The Bush administration is employing its standard tactics of fear-mongering, intimidation and lies to defend its illegal spying on Americans. Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration spokesmen repeatedly assert that Bush’s secret authorization for the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor international telephone calls and email messages sent from the US without obtaining court-issued warrants does not violate either legal statutes or the Constitution.
Underlying the crisis over the latest NSA revelations is a deep fear within the ruling elite over the political consequences of exposures of its global spying apparatus.
The Obama administration’s refusal to bring charges underscores the reality, behind the trappings of democracy, of de facto rule by an unelected and authoritarian military-intelligence apparatus.
The political and legal attack on Assange represents a qualitative intensification of the destruction of core rights and, indeed, on legality itself as the mode of bourgeois rule.
The ongoing militarization of local police forces is a major component of the assault on democratic rights in the United States.
A simple comparison of the words of the Bill of Rights with the recent events in Boston underscores the advanced stage of the historical process that is shattering centuries-old democratic forms of rule.
Trump and the Democrats’ threats to create a new apparatus to combat “domestic terrorism” is part of renewed plans to violently strangle the class struggle.
The Trump administration’s plans to deploy federal paramilitary forces in major American cities is a sharp escalation of the assault on democratic rights and the establishment of police state forms of rule.
The order instructs the Pentagon to create a standing force of National Guard troops that could intervene quickly anywhere in the United States.
By treating political beliefs as the “animating threads” of terrorism, NSPM-7 provides a pseudo-legal justification for the persecution of individuals and organizations on the basis of their political convictions.
Any objective consideration of the political changes since the attacks of September 11, 2001 must conclude that the tragic events were the starting point for a vast change in American domestic and foreign policy.
The attempts to exploit the 9/11 anniversary to justify the crimes carried out over the past decade are wearing increasingly thin with the American public.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 provided a pretext for a vast escalation of global military operations that threaten a Third World War.
On the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, Washington is on the verge of launching a massive new Syrian offensive in defense of Al Qaeda-linked forces.
The 20th anniversary of 9/11 coincides with the shattering debacle of the US “global war on terrorism”, which was launched on the pretext of retaliation for the attacks of that day.
The White House and media have rolled out the red carpet for the war criminals of the Bush administration, showing that the criminality of the “war on terror” has permanently entered the bloodstream of American politics.
Someone from the SEP or World Socialist Web Site will contact you promptly.
