Lots of questions; few answers

Angelo Codevilla took the lead on Afghan matters for the Senate Intelligence Committee from 1979-1985. He writes,

On September 12, 2001, CIA director George Tenet delivered a summary judgment: Bin Laden and al Qaeda had “done” 9/11, “game, set, and match.” But this statement, basis as it has been for two decades of ‘war on terror,” is factually empty. What we surely do not know about who did what to make 9/11 happen is more than what we know. Nearly all of what most believe consists of a mixture of the U.S. government’s competing narratives, unverified.

We don’t even know the identities of most of the hijackers. We do know that they were not who their passports say they were, because the passports turned out to have been stolen. Who were the men who carried them? Mohammed Atta ran the operation. But who recruited the hijackers? On what basis? Apparently, Khalid Sheik Mohammed had a lot to do with the whole thing. What was his relationship with Atta? He has confessed to a lot—almost none of which is verifiable. We don’t know where he got the money. Though what was left over from the operation was ostentatiously returned to an open al Qaeda account, its provenance is hidden beyond our sleuths’ capacity to discover. What bin Laden had to do with 9/11, or what he might have known about it, is purely a matter of speculation. Though never averse to boasting, he never claimed credit for the attack. The Taliban? The most serious imputation against them was that they refused to turn over bin Laden.

And what roles did anyone in the Saudi and Iraqi governments play? This was the great subject of bloody bureaucratic controversy within the U.S. government, as each of its several parts tried to protect its foreign favorites from the American people’s ire. The intelligence agencies, given the utter poverty of their sources—the majority of which came from the intelligence services of these very governments—had little to contribute but their own narratives. They also placed what little they knew about these bureaucratically sensitive matters behind high security shields, where it remains to this day.

As it was, George Tenet’s (and President Bush’s) idiotic premise got another two decades’ lease on life. The U.S. government went on to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. To accomplish what, precisely? Each set of rationales was stupider than the others.

What did the U.S. government actually do in Afghanistan and Iraq? Only the things it really cares to or knows how to do—namely, richly to hire its favorite people to try reshaping mankind in their own image. Since WWII, whether in the name of anti-communism, anti-terrorism, democracy, or humanitarianism, it’s always the same: dismiss the substance of local quarrels; recast the local scene in terms of American elites’ concerns; find locals who agree, and form “coalition governments” that, supposedly, represent the people’s aspirations, regardless of what these might be; send in the American experts on everything from education to women’s rights, with their recipes and their billions of dollars; and treat as terrorists any locals who disagree strongly.

Read more here: https://americanmind.org/memo/graveyard-of-narratives/