Yesterday — September 11 — the Los Angeles Times carried an op-ed entitled “A History of the ‘Big Lie,’ from Plato to TikTok.” The article stated, “If you look back at history, lying is as old as humans.” The author, Mark Kurlansky, points to several examples of lies, including lies told by the Soviets, the Nazis, and even Donald Trump.
Unfortunately, however, Kurlansky failed to cite one of the biggest lies of our lifetime, the one President Bush, the Pentagon, the CIA, and other U.S. officials told immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when they claimed that the terrorists had struck because they hated America for its “freedom and values.”
It was a lie, and the liars knew it was a lie. And it was a Big Lie, one that was later used to justify invading, occupying, and destroying two countries and killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process.
How do we know that U.S. officials were knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately lying about the 9/11 attacks?
In 1993, a Pakistani man named Mir Amal Kansi was living in the United States. One morning, he went out to the road that leads to CIA headquarters in Virginia. As the cars were waiting to enter the facility, Kansi began shooting men inside the cars. He killed two CIA employees and wounded three others.
Kansi fled the country. Four years later, he was captured in Pakistan and was brought to the United States to stand trial. He was convicted of murder in a state court in Virginia and given the death penalty. He was executed by lethal injection in 2002.
Kansi made no bones about why he killed those CIA employees. He told U.S. officials that he was retaliating for the killings by the Pentagon and the CIA of people in the Middle East, especially in Iraq.
Remember: This was 1993, two years after the Pentagon and the CIA intervened in the Persian Gulf War without a declaration of war from Congress, as the Constitution requires, where they killed multitudes of Iraqis, both troops and civilians. During that war, the Pentagon intentionally destroyed Iraq’s water-and-sewage treatment plants knowing that it would help spread infectious illnesses among the Iraqi people. U.S. officials also imposed one of the most brutal systems of economic sanctions in history on the Iraqi people, making sure that Iraqi officials could not rebuild those destroyed water-and-sewage treatment plants.
By the time Kansi killed those CIA employees in 1993, the Persian Gulf War, along with the post-war U.S. sanctions, had already killed multitudes of Iraqis, including children. In fact, three years later, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright was asked if the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were worth it. She replied that they were, in fact, “worth it.” By “it” she meant the U.S. political effort to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power and replace him with a U.S.-approved dictator.
U.S. officials knew full-well that Kansi had killed CIA officials because he was retaliating for the Iraqis who were being killed over there by Pentagon and CIA officials. U.S. officials openly acknowledged his motive and condemned it. They said that no one has the right to retaliate against U.S. officials who were killing people in Iraq. There was never any talk about his hating America for its “freedom and values.”
In the same year — 1993 — Ramzi Yousef, another Pakistani, orchestrated the bombing of the World Trade Center. After he was captured and brought back for trial, he admitted at his sentencing hearing that he was, in fact, a “terrorist.” At the same time, however, he angrily called U.S. officials “butchers” and cited the economic sanctions that U.S. officials were using to kill Iraqi children as a way to achieve regime change in Iraq. Once again, U.S. officials knew full well what motivated Yousef to commit that terrorist bombing. There was no talk of hating America for its “freedom and values.”
In 2000 — the year before the 9/11/2001 attacks — Chalmers Johnson had his book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Empire published. There is no reasonable possibility that the Pentagon, the CIA, and other U.S. officials could have missed the book, not only because of Johnson’s academic prominence but also because he had served as a consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973.
In Blowback, Chalmers argued that if U.S. officials did not stop killing people in the Middle East, the result would be a major retaliatory terrorist attack on American soil — that is, “blowback” from the U.S. government’s deadly and destructive interventionist foreign policy in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.
Despite all of this, U.S. officials steadfastly continued with their system of deadly sanctions, which continued killing multitudes of innocent children for years after Kansi and Yousef had made it clear what had motivated their actions and for a year after Johnson published Blowback. The response of U.S. officials was one of conscious indifference to the potential consequences of their sanctions. All that mattered to them was getting rid of Saddam Hussein and replacing him with a U.S.-approved dictator.
The 9/11 attacks were, in principle, no different from the terrorist attacks by Kansi and Yousef. But U.S. officials obviously did not feel comfortable in informing the American people that the 9/11 attacks were motivated by anger arising from the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children from a decade of brutal U.S. sanctions. Instead, they trotted out the Big Lie, one that claimed that the 9/11 terrorists had struck because they supposedly hated America for its “freedom and values.”
And woe to anyone in the post-9/11 era who challenged or questioned the Big Lie of 9/11, as The Future of Freedom Foundation did and as Ron Paul did in his famous presidential debate with Rudolf Giuliani and other Republican opponents during the 2008 presidential primaries. U.S. officials, their mainstream-media acolytes, and other advocates of foreign interventionism who could not bear hearing the truth went on the attack by claiming that the critics were “blaming America” and defending the terrorists.
Mark Kulanski is right when he states in his LA Times op-ed that “lying is as old as humans.” Lying is not just limited to communists, Nazis, and Donald Trump. It also extends to President George W. Bush, the Pentagon, the CIA, and other U.S. officials who issued the Big Lie of 9/11 as well as those who continue to promote that Big Lie even today.
