In an immediate response to 9/11, Robert Fisk noted “the utter, indescribable evil of what has happened in the United States,” but he also warned that
“[T]his is not really the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about US missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells
crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia–paid and uniformed by America’s Israeli ally–hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps.”
After the discovery of Mohamed Atta’s will in early October, 2001, Fisk wrote
“So hard did a colleague of mine try, in a radio interview the other day, to unlink the bin Laden phenomenon from the West’s baleful history in the Middle East that he seriously suggested that the attacks were timed to fall on the anniversary of the defeat of Muslim
forces at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Unfortunately, the Poles won their battle against the Turks on 12, not 11, September. But when the terrifying details of the hijacker Mohamed Atta’s will were published last week, dated April 1996, no one could think of any event that
month that might have propelled Atta to his murderous behavior.
“Not the Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon, nor the Qana massacre by Israeli artillery of 106 Lebanese civilians in a UN base, more than half of them children. For that’s what happened in April, 1996. No, of course that slaughter is not excuse for the crimes
against humanity in the United States last month. But isn’t it worth just a little mention, just a tiny observation, that an Egyptian mass-murderer-to-be wrote a will of chilling suicidal finality in the month when the massacre in Lebanon enraged Arabs across the Middle East?”
Here’s a wild prediction. In the not too distant future, Robert Fisk will have something to say about when the 9/11 plot was hatched, he’ll suggest that the commission’s timeline could have started a few weeks earlier with the events in Lebanon.
In the second article, Fisk also mentioned that bin Laden “has been suggesting that he’s angry about the deaths of Iraqi children under sanctions” and lo and behold, squeezed in between Israel’s Grapes of Wrath operation and the beginning of the 9/11 plotting is the Madeleine Albright moment. But that’s a subject for another day.