9/11 attack

Rachel Marsden: US still hasn’t punished everyone responsible for 9/11

It was 18 years ago that the massive terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, took place on American soil, with passenger jets striking the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. That day, then-U.S. President George W. Bush declared: “The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I have directed the full resources of our intelligence and law-enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice.”

Well, the identities of the 19 hijackers were indeed discovered. It turned out that 15 of them were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, identified as the mastermind of the attacks, was also a Saudi citizen. If that many of the terrorists were from any other nation, wouldn’t the U.S. military have turned that country into a parking lot soon after the attacks?

Instead, U.S. leadership ignored Saudi Arabia and bombed Afghanistan — the country where the al-Qaeda perpetrators had been hanging out, chatting and plotting as if they were in a bar. Perhaps if drones had been more widely used back then, the military could have just sent a few into Afghanistan and obliterated al-Qaeda hideouts, rather than treating Afghanistan like a house that had to be burned to the ground because a wasp nest was found under the eaves of the roof.

Oh, well. In any case, mission accomplished, right?

Not quite. Al-Qaeda is now back in business. This is largely because the U.S. government has never properly attributed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.