Fog of War, Indeed

At 09:03 on Tuesday, September 11^th, 2001, the second airplane collided with World Trade Center South, seventeen minutes after the first airplane had struck the North tower. What the general public had up to that point regarded as a freak accident, was thus confirmed to be a deliberate attack. Little more after that would be clear from the fog of war.

Three skyscrapers imploded by two airplanes hijacked by fifteen Saudis necessitated the invasion of Iraq eighteen months later. In the interim an alliance of the world’s most sophisticated and well-equipped militaries was unable to locate and neutralize another Saudi hiding in Afghan caves deep and thick enough to withstand barrages of bunker-busters but porous enough for his 2001 satellite phone signal. The campaign in Afghanistan replaced the Taliban… with the Taliban twenty years and $2.46 trillion later. And all this because “they hate us for our freedoms” as blue-gloved strangers fondle our genitals at the airport.

As the official, orthodox narrative about that fateful day and consequent developments is presumptively accurate, one incident always stuck out. The U.S. Department of Defense had been air-dropping leaflets on Afghanistan. These were offers of rewards for the capture of Osama bin Laden and Taliban leaders, communicated through comic-book like images, which the DoD figured the farmers and herders would understand. On January 4^th, 2002, CNN reported that the DoD had dropped leaflets over Kandahar and Tora Bora in Afghanistan, on the obverse of which appeared a photograph of Taliban fighters killed in combat, along with a message in local languages saying, “Usama bin Laden, the murderer and coward, has abandoned al-Qaeda. He has abandoned you and run away. Give yourself up and do not die needlessly, you mean nothing to him. Save your families the grief and pain of your death.” On the reverse was a doctored image of bin Laden in a light-colored Western suit and necktie, with shaved beard and Western haircut.

Of course, the whole premise of the U.S. armed forces’ deployment then in Afghanistan was to find bin Laden, which means that the Department of Defense had no idea of his whereabouts. This means that at least in this instance the Department was engaged in purposeful disinformation, which the Department’s representatives freely admitted. Turns out the “fog of war” was manufactured more like a discotheque’s smoke machine.

But the Department of Defense would never use this tactic against the U.S. citizenry to sell us comic-book narratives.