Taliban’s Top Spokesman Claims ‘al Qaeda Was NOT Perpetrator’ of 9/11 Attacks

Newspunch.com

The Taliban’s top spokesperson claims al Qaeda was not the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks – the single deadliest terrorist attack in human history.

“It is not known who is behind that,” Suhail Shaheen told CBS News in an interview this week. “If there is proof given to us, we are ready to try him.” 

Msn.com reports: The denial of al Qaeda’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks has a long history in Afghanistan and across the political spectrum there, with conspiracy theories flourishing just as they have in much of the world.

These ideas are not limited to groups like the Taliban, which espouses a fundamentalist view of Islamism that shares similarities with al Qaeda’s worldview: during an interview with Al Jazeera in 2015, former U.S.-backed Afghan president Hamid Karzai said it was a “fact” that 9/11 had not been plotted in Afghanistan and suggested that al Qaeda was a “myth.”

However, Shaheen’s denial of al Qaeda’s involvement in the attacks comes at the start of renewed peace talks where the Taliban’s relationship with the group and its continued presence in Afghanistan are central. The United States has long demanded that the Taliban refuse to let al Qaeda operate in areas it controls, but found the group unwilling to fully cut ties with an old ally.

Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, moved to Afghanistan in 1996 as it came under the rule of the Taliban. Bin Laden, a wealthy founder of al Qaeda from Saudi Arabia, had previously fought in the Soviet-Afghan war in the previous decades along with the mujahideen fighters who would later form the Taliban.

Though Bin Laden initially distanced himself from 9/11 the attacks, in 2004 he released a video statement that claimed responsibility and suggested al Qaeda was motivated to strike the United States again. From the start, the Taliban’s own public statements on the attacks that targeted New York and Washington were similarly muddled.

In the years before September 2001, Taliban representatives had met with U.S. officials to discuss whether they could find an agreeable way to hand over Bin Laden, who had been wanted in connection with bombings against American interests in the Persian Gulf and Africa. Immediately after 9/11, the Taliban’s foreign minister denounced the attacks and said Afghanistan did not know who was behind them.

Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader, would go on to reject American demands to hand over Bin Laden, instead calling for evidence of bin Laden’s role in the attacks and suggesting the Taliban would only hand him over to a neutral third party.

“No. We cannot do that,” Omar said during an interview with Voice of America in Sept. 2001 when asked if Afghanistan could hand over Bin Laden. “If we did, it means we are not Muslims… that Islam is finished.”

The Taliban continued to distance themselves from the attacks for years after U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, but would not condemn al Qaeda as the perpetrators. Even the death of Bin Laden in 2011 and Omar in 2013 did not end the ambiguous view of al Qaeda’s 9/11 role: as recently as this July, the Taliban released a video that blamed the 9/11 on the United States’ “interventionist policies and not our doing.”

Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan has been almost totally overshadowed by other extremist groups. The Taliban emerged as a more structured insurgency after the invasion and a local affiliate of the Islamic State has gained strength and carried out deadly attacks in Kabul.

But al Qaeda is not necessarily totally defeated. During an appearance at an event hosted by The Washington Post in December, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford said the group and others like it could reconstitute and plan events like 9/11 again if the United States eased pressure.

With peace talks progressing, some key figures in Washington argue that the Taliban could not be trusted to control al Qaeda, even if they promised to.

“I hope President Trump and his team make sound and sustainable decisions about radical Islamist threats emanating from Afghanistan — the place where 9/11 originated,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement last week.

"The 9/11 Mystery" by Iftekhar Khan

Iftekhar Khan, columnist, "The News" (Pakistan)

Fleeting moments

Originally published by The News 

As the 11th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre nears, are we any closer to unravelling the mystery as to who carried them out? Conspiracy theories abound, no widely convincing outcome of the attacks has so far emerged. The report of the official inquiry commission published by the US government has been wanting in many aspects. It is more verbiage, regarding high-sounding government organisations and how they reacted after the crisis, than a persuasive document.

Although many books have been written on 9/11, five of them stand out because of their lucidity and rationale: Thierry Meyssan’s 9/11 – the Big Lie, David Ray Griffin’s Debunking 9/11 Debunking, Webster Griffin Tarpley’s 9/11: Synthetic Terror Made in USA, and Barry Zwicker’s Towers of Deception: The media cover-up of 9/11. The event of the magnitude of 9/11 that changed the way of life of the multitude round the world hasn’t been investigated to public satisfaction, nor its perpetrators pointed out conclusively.

If the authors of these books unequivocally agree on a single point, it is that demolition material was used to bring the Twin Towers down within their own perimeters in a symmetrical manner. Instead of analysing the steel bars found in the debris for the telltale residual marks if detonating material had been used or not, the bars were carted away overseas for melting.

However, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was quickly blamed for the devastating attacks and the US demanded to hand over Osama bin Laden, who it thought was the ideologue of the regime and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. When the Taliban insisted that the US provide evidence of Bin Laden’s involvement in the attacks, the superpower considered it an affront by the cave-dwellers and invaded their rugged land.

The above brings us to Osama bin Laden, ostensibly killed by the US Navy Seals in Abbottabad in May 2011. The mythical crusader blamed for masterminding attacks on the most guarded places in the world fell prey to the Seals’ bullets and went down without a whimper. Craving for quick publicity and a quicker buck, former Navy Seal Matt Bissonette has authored a book, No Easy Day, in which he has presented his firsthand account of the raid on bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad.

The point to argue is why the Seals killed Bin Laden, the highest-value target, instead of capturing him alive. The victim didn’t know he had been located, nor did he know any operation to eliminate him was afoot. Hence, the time factor, which is of great essence in such operations, was in favour of the Seals. Laden alive would have been a billion-dollar man since billions had been poured into Afghanistan to locate and punish him. He could have been interrogated at Guantanamo or Bagram, a confession of his culpability extracted from him and produced in US courts to decide his fate.

Nevertheless, if the decision to kill Bin Laden had been made, his remains could have been flown to the US for morticians to restore his face and body, and to embalm them. Thus, a mummified Bin Laden could have been placed in the national museum for people to know that billions of their tax money spent on waging wars hadn’t gone waste. Instead, according to Bissonette who carried a measly $200 to bribe his way through if the mission failed but wore night-vision goggles worth $65,000, contented himself only with photographing Bin Laden with a digital camera.

The “photographs are now under lock and key in the White House,” claimed the writer. Only the American voters may ask President Obama to show pictures of Bin Laden’s killing as proof before they vote for him in the next election.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Lahore.

Taliban commemorates 9/11 anniversary by calling 9/11 a "pretext" and calling for a new investigation - Western media scrubs the story

Western corporate media are imposing a near-blackout on the Taliban's official statement commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The reason: The Taliban are calling 9/11 a "pretext" and calling for a new investigation of the "dubious" events of that day.

CNN offered a very brief account, censoring the call for a new investigation: Taliban: U.S. using 9/11 attacks as pretext for Muslim violence. But most other Western media ignored the historic statement. Stories initially reporting the statement were quickly scrubbed from Western media websites. The print edition of the St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press carried a reference to the Taliban call for a new 9/11 investigation, attributed to wire services, but it was removed from the on-line edition. It apparently can no longer be found on any US corporate media website.

Here is the story posted at Uruknet:

Taliban seek probe into 9/11 attacks [ 81301 ] -

by Javed Hamim Kakar

September 10, 2011

KABUL (PAN): On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the United States, the Taliban reiterated on Saturday their demand for an independent and impartial investigation into the incident.

About 3,000 people were killed in the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre in New York on the morning of September 11, 2001 when 19 hijackers took control of four commercial airliners en route to San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Five hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Centre's North Tower and another five hit the South Tower with the United Airlines Flight 175.

Following resistance from passengers, several hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, with a fourth plane crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The US invaded Afghanistan a month later, blaming the Al Qaeda and Taliban for the assaults on the centres of its military and economic might. Ten years on, the war in the impoverished Central Asian continues.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said the movement had long been seeking a neutral probe into the incident. "But the US and its allies are responding to our logical demand with airstrikes and attacks."

The killing of tens of thousands of innocent Afghans on the pretext of avenging the 9/11 attacks would be a perpetual question mark over Western democracy, Mujahid said in a statement.

He urged the countries involved in the conflict to mount pressure on the US not to plunder Afghanistan's natural resources under the garb of the war on terrorism.