The view of the World Trade Center towers from Brit Bunkley's warehouse loft in Brooklyn where he lived until 1995. Photo / Supplied
Every Day for nearly sixteen years I woke up to a view of the World Trade Centre in our loft near the Brooklyn waterfront. I was not far from the World Trade Centre during the first bombing of the WTC in 1993. I wasn't surprised. I was also unsurprised by
the 2001 attacks. Sad, horrified… but not surprised.
However, I was terrified by the vengeance that I knew the West would take. Although the Taliban agreed to hand over Osama Bin Laden to a third party for trial, the USA rejected all proposals while bombing Afghanistan. It has been determined that "about 241,000 people were been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001" - about 85 times the deaths from the 9/11 attacks.
I had been reading well researched foreign policy tracts by Noam Chomsky, Cornel West and Howard Zinn. They revealed the true nature of the USA's messy foreign policy such as the original 9/11, the US assisted coup in Chile which began on September 11, 1973. As a result, in the winter of 1991, I protested in DC along with an estimated 100,000 people against the first Gulf War. It was clear to us this oil war was started disingenuously by the very same people who helped prop up Saddam Hussein. The media went along with the war without question, while passing on big lies including the infamous fabricated Iraqi "incubator deaths" in Kuwait City. This Gulf War surely could have been resolved peacefully. Bin Laden who was groomed in Afghanistan in the 80s was the cancerous side effect of that war.
In the 1980s, the USA trained a secret army of radical fundamentalists for Afghanistan in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain's MI6. The rest is history. September 11th appears to have been history's tragic revenge.
BRIT BUNKLEY
Whanganui
