9/11 did not start or end at midnight Richard Falk Last Modified: 11 Sep 2011 13:16
...Just as 9/12 places emphasis on the American response - the launching of "the global war on terror", 9/10 calls our attention to the mood of imperial complacency that preceded the attacks.
This national mood was (and remains) completely oblivious to the legitimate grievances that pervaded the Arab world.
These grievances were associated with Western appropriations of the region's resources, Western support lent to cruel and oppressive tyrants throughout the Middle East, lethal and indiscriminate sanctions imposed for an entire decade on the people of Iraq after the first Gulf War, deployment of massive numbers of American troops close to Muslim sacred sites in Saudi Arabia, and America's role in Israel's oppressive dispossession of Palestinians and subsequent occupation.
From these perspectives, the crimes of 9/11 were an outgrowth of the wrongs of 9/10 and unreflectively [?] led to the crimes and strategic mistakes made since 9/12...
[The USG] will disregard the sovereign rights of others whenever it deems it desirable to do so, and will not feel seriously inhibited by international law or the duty to gain approval for controversial uses of force from the United Nations...
American leaders at the time [of 9/11], with ardent and unified national backing, insisted that future domestic security required limiting freedom at home, especially for the Muslim minority, while waging a series of wars abroad, partly to destroy Al Qaeda but also as a convenient pretext to pursue an earlier goal of grand strategy to achieve dominance over the Middle East.
It is this continuing global projection of American power that makes it natural for 9/12 to be the day that most stays in the mind of foreigners, probably not literally, but through feelings of victimisation resulting from the American response.
..."9/11" is a misleading reductive label that is deceptive to the extent that it treats the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as anything like the totality of "the event"...
In some respects, it was illustrative of the vulnerability of any modern state, even the most powerful, but for others it was a new phase in the ongoing struggle between West and non-West. For many societies around the world, 9/11 was less the tragedy than a prelude to their own less noticed tragedy - intensified violence and acute insecurity exported to their homelands: drone attacks, targeted assassinations, special forces operating covertly within national sovereign space, secret sites established within their nation where terrorist suspects were 'rendered' to be tortured for the sake of United States intelligence services...
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/20119995657198364.html