Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [9]
None of this is to say that Osama isn’t a baddie or even that he didn’t have something to do with the attacks. But it seems that maybe a few journalists might want to ask a few commonsense questions, like how could he have really pulled this off while his skin was turning green and he was living in a country with no Kinko’s, no FedEx, no ATMs. How did he organize, communicate, control and supervise this kind of massive attack? With two cans and a string?
Yet, we’re told by you to believe it. The headlines blared it the first day and they blare it the same way now two years later: “Terrorists Attack United States.” Terrorists. I have wondered about this word for some time, so, George, let me ask you a question: If fifteen of the nineteen hijackers had been North Korean, and they killed 3,000 people, do you think the headline the next day might read, “NORTH KOREA ATTACKS UNITED STATES”?
Of course it would. Or if it had been fifteen Iranians or fifteen Libyans or fifteen Cubans, I think the conventional wisdom would have been, “IRAN (or LIBYA or CUBA) ATTACKS AMERICA!”
Yet, when it comes to September 11, have you ever seen the headline, have you ever heard a newscaster, has one of your appointees ever uttered these words: “Saudi Arabia attacked the United States”?
Of course you haven’t. And so the question must—must—be asked: WHY NOT? Why, when Congress releases its own investigation into September 11, you, Mr. Bush, censor out twenty-eight pages that deal with the Saudis’ role in the attack?What is behind your apparent refusal to look at the one country that seems to be producing the “terrorists” that have killed our citizens?
I would like to throw out a possibility here: What if September 11 was not a “terrorist” attack but, rather, a military attack against the United States? What if the nineteen were well-trained soldiers, the elite of the elite, unquestioning in their duty to obey their commander’s orders? That they lived in this country for nearly two years and were not discovered—that takes a certain amount of discipline, the discipline of a soldier, not the erratic behavior of some wild-eyed terrorist.
George, apparently you were a pilot once—how hard is it to hit a five-story building at more than 500 miles an hour? The Pentagon is only five stories high. At 500 miles an hour, had the pilots been off by just a hair, they’d have been in the river. You do not get this skilled at learning how to fly jumbo jets by being taught on a video game machine at some dipshit flight training school in Arizona. You learn to do this in the air force. Someone’s air force.
The Saudi Air Force?
What if these weren’t wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed on to a suicide mission? What if they were doing this at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family? The House of Saud, according to Robert Baer’s book, is full of them, and the royal family—and the country—is in incredible turmoil. There is much dissension over how things are being run, and with the king incapacitated by a stroke he suffered in 1995, his brothers and numerous sons have been in a serious power struggle. Some favor cutting off all ties to the West. Some want the country to go the more fundamentalist route.47 After all, this was Osama’s originally stated goal. His first beef wasn’t with America, it was with the way Saudi Arabia was being run—by Muslims who weren’t true Muslims. There are now thousands of princes in the royal family, and many observers have commented that Saudi Arabia is on the brink of civil war, or perhaps a people’s revolution. You can only behead so many of your citizens and then, before long, they lose their heads and go crazy and overthrow your ass. That is what is on the “To Do” list for many Saudi citizens these days, and the royals are circling the wagons.
A 1999 article in the political journal Foreign Affairs pretty