Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

It's amazing to me how obtuse the media is. Right now, the U.S. is negotiating again with the Taliban, and supposedly a peace agreement is near again. But, doesn't the fact that we are negotiating with them and trying to put them back in power prove that we know very well that they had no involvement in 9/11? Because if they did, we wouldn't be doing it, right? If we thought they were involved in attacking the United States, it's not something we would forgive, right? 

So, what exactly is our attitude about what they did? Our attitude seems to be that they were letting Osama bin laden carry on his activities in the Bora Bora mountains, but not knowing exactly what he was doing. But, he was a hero in the fight to oust the Soviet Union, and that is the reason they let him live there- not to do terrorism. And as soon as 9/11 happened, the Taliban immediately condemned it as a monstrous, criminal act and said that they hoped the perpetrators would be found and punished. And never at any time before or after that did they support and endorse the commission of terrorist acts against the United States or anyone else. 

So, there is no reason to think that they had anything to do with 9/11 or had any knowledge of it. Therefore, what legal and moral basis was there for attacking them and invading their country? There was no such basis, and we damn well know it.  The fact that we are paying them to negotiate with us, and then offering to pay billions more to rebuild Afghanistan from all the destruction we did tells you that. 

We know very well that the Taliban is not a terrorist threat to the United States. The Taliban just wants the United States to go back to the United States. But, what we want is to end the war in a way that we don't look morally culpable for starting it, even though we are morally culpable, and to where all the deaths, particularly the Americans deaths, don't seem to have been for naught. But, they were for naught and worse than naught. Attacking Afghanistan did nobody any good. You can't even point to girls going to school as a benefit since so many children, including girls, were killed, as well as the parents of girls. There is no saving grace to this horrific war. There were some dissenters back in 2001, but they weren't given any voice. Here is one:

"The UN Charter is a treaty ratified by the United States and thus part of US law. Under the charter, a country can use armed force against another country only in self-defense or when the Security Council approves. Neither of those conditions was met before the United States invaded Afghanistan. The Taliban did not attack us on 9/11. Nineteen men – 15 from Saudi Arabia – did, and there was no imminent threat that Afghanistan would attack the US or another UN member country. The council did not authorize the United States or any other country to use military force against Afghanistan. The US war in Afghanistan is illegal."

— Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild