A prominent  political analyst says that the US and its Western allies used the September 11 attacks as a tool to spread Islamophobia in different parts of the world.

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Press TV has interviewed Saeb Shaath, an author and Middle East affairs expert , to further discuss the September 11 attacks.

Press TV: As you well know, another consequence of the September 11 attacks was of course, the rise in Islamophobia. I would like to quote Noam Chomsky. He writes that the crime against humanity, as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the suspects. That was recognized at the time, but that no such idea was even considered. Why?

Shaath: I see after the tragic events of 9/11, the [former US president George W. Bush ] administration made it clear that the country (United States) was no longer safe. They created the color-coded terror alert, under which Americans lived on red and orange alerts on a daily basis, delivered by Fox News for years. They subjected the whole nation to manufactured psychological terror.

Anyone who would dare to question the new liberals, the new monsters, would be labelled straight away as a traitor or as being against the free will and values of freedom. The Bush administration immediately created a new aggressive foreign policy, to implement their strategy, which was ready before the attacks took place.

It was because of the 9/11 attacks that Bush got the approval from the people, because of the psychological fear, and from the Congress to increase the defence by an enormous amount, and then the US responded very aggressively in what we call the war on terror.

The images of terror and  terrorists were then translated into what a Muslim would look like, then they implemented the Bush Doctrine, (pre-emptive military strikes), which meant to strike against anyone or any country before even a threat would be seen. The Bush Doctrine was designed to take control of the wealth of the Middle East and its countries, as it instigated the war on Iraq.

Look at the results. The tragic events of 9/11 killed three thousand people or more, but nobody talks about the two million people killed in Iraq, or [the lives of] five million refugees being destroyed. A country which was advanced in the Middle East was destroyed and taken back to the Stone Age.

The whole design was to ensure that no other country would be a threat to the United States. By a threat, I mean an economic threat; no one can compete with American industries, because the American military might has to be number one in the world, intimidating everyone, so they can implement their imperialistic and neoliberal policies, and unfortunately it started in the Middle East. Apart from the Middle East, the targets were China, Russia, and Europe as a future contender to the US.

Press TV: There are still a lot of questions regarding the assassination of Osama bin Laden. People are asking why he wasn’t captured alive and put on trial. Why wasn’t there an autopsy amid the concerns that Washington has never made public, they say the evidence that Osama bin Laden was actually behind the 9/11 attacks, apart from the fact that bin Laden himself boasted of carrying out the attack, which of course suited his own aims?

Shaath: I look at this as a story of creating the bogeyman, Osama bin Laden, and finishing him off in that way. I look at it with the start of Anwar Sadat becoming their man in the Middle East, and then recruiting their agents to get Afghanistan to lower the Soviet Union at the time to Afghanistan, and then Osama bin Laden set his own agencies in Vienna and received finances from Saudi Arabia, weapons from the Egyptian president at the time Anwar Sadat, and training from the CIA and American Marines.

This was the first Mujahedin war, at the time led by Ronald Reagan and [former UK prime minister] Maggie Thatcher. We remember that al-Qaeda starts itself right there. So I can see, from the strategic point of view, that they tried to destroy the Soviet Union and they succeeded.

Then they used al-Qaeda and all of these guys to advance into the Middle East and to bring American boots into Iraq and Saudi Arabia – to surround resisting countries like Iran, Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon, to strengthen Israel. If they know it, they are serving members of al-Qaeda. If they do not know it then that’s a different story, because the same strategy is repeating itself on a different level. We can see it in Iraq, in Egypt, and Syria as well.

We have to understand that a lot of these guys are misled and brainwashed and they do not understand what they serve. At the end of the day,when I look at the results of the 9/11 attacks, Israel is one of the major countries that benefited. The Arabs and the Muslims are the major losers. Millions of Arabs and Muslims died. They lost their wealth; they lost their sovereignty over their countries.

The day before the attacks, why did every Israeli and every Jewish member in that two centres take a day off? Millions of questions like this make the American people angry when we call for inquiry. We don’t trust the government because they are being used and their rights are being compromised and being terrorized just for one reason. We want to stay alive. That’s what they want the American people to be thinking, they want them to think of their own lives only.

SZH/JR

Source: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/198422.html