"Why 2001 Little Hawk??" Why indeed, Teribus? ;-)

Well, I decided to take it back only that far for simplicity's sake, but I could have taken it all the way back to just after WWII when the USA and the UK decided to knock off the democratically elected government of Iran and replace it with an absolute monarchy ruled by the Shah. This effectively ended Iranian independence in any real sense.

Or I could have taken it back to the overthrow of Salvador Allende's democratically elected government in Chile and its replacement by a military dictatorship under Pinochet...after which a long series of other coups were engineered in Latin America for the benefit of USA business interests.

Both those takeovers in Iran and Chile were engineered with the help of the CIA.

Yes, Al Qaeda (or someone) definitely tried numerous attacks on the USA prior to 911, but they had very definite historical reasons for doing so. They didn't do it because they hate our freedoms, our democratic institutions or any other pretext like that...they did it because our governments have been attacking and dominating their societies ever since the end of WWII.

They did it because the USA and UK have been interfering in their lands ever since the end of WWII, propping up various dictatorial regimes (those which were compliant with USA and UK interests), supporting Israel almost no matter what Israel did, plotting the overthrow of Middle Eastern and Latin American governments who did not kowtow to American/UK business interests, etc.

It's a very old story. People who resist the neocolonialism practiced by the USA and the UK are now called "terrorists" in our media. I'm sure that the Russians call the people who resist their neocolonial efforts "terrorists" too. Well, everyone thinks the other guy is a terrorist, it seems. It's like calling someone a "nigger", kind of. Or an "anti-semite". It condemns in a single word...but it does not look beyond the word to the motivations and reasons and rationale of the people involved.

It is not surprising that some angry individuals in Muslim nations have responded with violence to the massively orchestrated instutionalized violence that has descended on them from the UK and America through the apparatus of war and business and high finance.

Anyone else would respond the same way, given the same situation.

But...I'm not at all sure that Al Qaeda was the principle actor in the various World Trade Center attacks. You have to look at who stood to gain something they wanted from those attacks. Those who wanted carte blanche to fight some wars in the Middle East gained what they wanted. Or...those who wanted to provoke the USA into a series of wars in the Middle East got what they wanted.

And that might have been Al Qaeda. Possibly. Or it might have been some highly placed people in the USA and the UK. Or it might have been Israel. Or it might have been a combination of the above 3.

Whoever it was, the vast majority of victims from the fallout of that plan have amongst Muslim populations. That's not surprising. We, the western powers and Israel, are the people who really have the WMDs, after all...and in my opinion, we (our military and politicians and big business people) are the primary terrorists.

The fact that we run up against periodic acts of resistance from the impoverished people our policies oppress is as natural and predictable as that a dog will sometimes attempt to bite you when you beat it with a baseball bat. And occasionally the dog will draw blood. Our reaction to that seems to be to yell, "Mad dog!" and shoot it with a shotgun, but the dog is not mad...it's simply defending itself.

If there is an Al Qaeda, it was American and UK policies that gave it a reason to exist.