The attacks of 9/11 provided unique opportunities to the U.S. government
The 9/11 attacks provided unique opportunities to the U.S. government
Elias Davidsson
(based partly on David Ray Griffin’s analysis of motives, in The New Pearl Harbor, p.130)
The attacks of 9/11 were described as “opportunities” by U.S. leaders. Bob Woodward (Bush at War, p. 32) reports that at the meeting of the National Security Council on the night of 9/11, President Bush said that the attacks provided “a great opportunity”. Donald Rumsfeld used this term in an interview with the New York Times of 12 October 2001 saying that these attacks created “the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world” According to an interview with The New Yorker Magazine, published on April 1, 2002, Condolezza Rice told senior members of the National Security Council to “think about ‘how to capitalize on these opportunities'” to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th. And in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, issued by the U.S. government in September 2002, one discovers that “the events of September 11, 2001, opened vast, new opportunities” for the U.S.The designation of 9/11 as an “opportunity” was not limited to U.S. leaders. In a story published by the right-wing US News and World Report, we read: “Then came 9/11. Worldwide revulsion and the shared sense of threat handed Washington a once-in-a generation chance to shake up international politics. Ten days after the attacks, State Department experts catalogued for [Colin] Powell a dozen ‘silver linings'”
Senator Richard G. Lugar addressed on March 4, 2002 the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) with a lecture entitled “NATO After 9/11: Crisis or Opportunity.” [Link]. He said:
If there is a single message I would like to leave with you this evening, it is the following: amidst all the current signs of crisis, we must not lose sight of the enormous opportunity that we have to build a new trans-Atlantic relationship (…)
The fact that leading members of the U.S. administration designated 9/11 as a unique “opportunity” in terms of foreign policies, demonstrates that such policies had been just waiting for the right opportunity to be put in practice. This, by itself, does not prove that this “opportunity” was created by the U.S. administration. However, it demonstrates that U.S. leaders had a motive to commit the crime.