Less Than Half the World Believes al Qaeda Was Behind 9/11 Attacks

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted September 11, 2008.

A poll of 16,000 people in 17 countries reveals the damage done to the
credibility of the United States by the Bush administration.

An international poll released this week by the Project on
International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) found that outside the United
States, many are skeptical that al Qaeda was really responsible for
the Sept. 11 attacks.

Sixteen thousand people in 17 countries -- allies and adversaries in
Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East -- were asked
the open-ended question: "Who do you think was behind the 9/11
attacks?"

On average, fewer than half of all respondents said al Qaeda (although
there was significant variation between countries and regions).
Fifteen percent said the United States government itself was
responsible for the attacks, 7 percent cited Israel, and fully 1 in 4
said they just didn't know.

Among our closest allies, very slim majorities believe al Qaeda was
the culprit. According to the study, "Fifty-six percent of Britons and
Italians, 63 percent of French and 64 percent of Germans cite al
Qaeda. However, significant portions of Britons (26%%), French (23%%),
and Italians (21%%) say they do not know who was behind 9/11.
Remarkably, 23 percent of Germans cite the U.S. government, as do 15
percent of Italians."

Whatever one thinks of "alternative" theories of who the perpetrators
were that day, the results are an eye-opening indication of how
profoundly the world's confidence in the United States government has
eroded during the Bush era. The researchers found little difference
among respondents according to levels of education, or to the amount
of exposure to the news media they had. Rather, they found a clear
correlation with people's attitudes toward the United States in
general. "Those with a positive view of America's influence in the
world are more likely to cite al Qaeda (on average 59%%) than those
with a negative view (40%%)," wrote the authors. "Those with a positive
view of the United States are also less likely to blame the U.S.
government (7%%) than those with a negative view (22%%)."

Interestingly, Americans are also dubious, with more than a third of
those polled by Scripps Howard News Service in 2006 saying it was
"very likely" or "somewhat likely" that "federal officials either
participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
or took no action to stop them" because they "wanted the United States
to go to war in the Middle East." The poll didn't, however,
distinguish between those who believed the government actively
participated in the events of that day or merely had foreknowledge
that the attacks were imminent. (Another poll that year, by CBS News
and the New York Times, found that fewer than 1 in 5 Americans
believed the government was being fully forthcoming about the
attacks.)

In one sense, these findings should come as no surprise. America, like
other countries, has been known to conduct "false-flag" operations
before. And it has used falsehoods to justify going to war. In the
now-infamous "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" -- the incident that would be
used to justify America's involvement in that conflict -- a minor
skirmish occurred between U.S. naval ships and two North Vietnamese
coastal vessels. Two days later, the Johnson administration reported
that there had been a second attack, which it claimed was evidence of
"communist aggression" on the part of the North Vietnamese. But, as a
National Security Agency report revealed in 2005 (PDF), the second
incident -- the one that created a "pattern" of aggression -- was
invented out of whole cloth. "It is not simply that there is a
different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened
that night," reads the report.

In 1990, on the eve of the first Gulf War, Pentagon officials cited
top-secret satellite images and said definitively that Saddam Hussein
had amassed a huge army -- with 250,000 men and 1,500 tanks -- along
the Saudi border in preparation for an invasion of that country. Jean
Heller, a reporter with the St. Petersburg Times, purchased some
Russian satellite images of the same piece of desert and found that in
fact there was nothing there but sand. After the U.S.-led attack, a
"senior (U.S. military) commander" told New York Newsday, "There was a
great disinformation campaign surrounding this war."

Those incidents are in no way analogous to the attacks of 9/11. But in
1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed to Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara that the CIA might launch a series of terror attacks within
the United States, blame Cuba, and use the ensuing panic to justify
military action against the defiant island-nation. (The plan, called
"Operation Northwoods," which became public in 1997, was reportedly
killed off by John F. Kennedy himself -- it got that far up the food
chain.)

Yet, whatever the historical context, there can be little doubt that
the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy and well-documented
dishonesty fuels the debate over who perpetrated the attacks of 9/11.
Earlier this year, an independent study conducted by the Center for
Public Integrity documented 935 lies mouthed by senior administration
officials to gin up support for the invasion of Iraq (one of which was
Donald Rumsfeld repeating the long-disproved claim that Saddam had
amassed a huge army on the Saudi border in 1990).

Just the fact that the administration blamed a group in Afghanistan
for the attacks and then invaded a different country -- with some of
the world's richest oil reserves -- would have been enough to create
suspicion around the world. And no satisfactory explanation has ever
been given for why the Bush administration didn't step up airline
security in the face of repeated warnings -- some quite specific in
terms of time and place -- from foreign governments and their
intelligence agencies, warnings from allies like Israel's Mossad to
"enemies" like the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The credibility gap that has developed around the world's pre-eminent
power is more than a matter of academic interest. Around the world,
many of those who embraced us immediately after 9/11 and offered
almost unconditional support for our policies now don't believe a word
coming out of our officials' mouths, and that affects U.S. foreign
policy, and the stability of the whole international system, in ways
both obvious and subtle.

A good, obvious example is Pakistan, where most Americans believe
we're allied with the government and a majority of the Pakistani
people against a small group of Al Qaeda extremists who are
undermining the U.S.-led battle against their terrorist brethren in
Afghanistan (where we are allied with that government and most of that
country's people). American politicians expend much hot air accusing
the Pakistani government of "not doing enough to rein in extremists"
in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

But as Princeton scholar Zia Mian wrote in July, "most damaging of all
for the United States is that people in Pakistan overwhelmingly see
the United States as the problem." Mian cited a poll (PDF) conducted
in May by the Pakistan Institute for Public Opinion, which found that
"60 percent of Pakistanis believe the U.S. 'war on terror' seeks to
weaken the Muslim world, and 15 percent think its goal is to 'ensure
U.S. domination over Pakistan.'" About a third had a positive view of
al Qaeda, twice as many as the number that viewed the United States in
a positive light. Mian touched on what is probably the key finding in
the study -- and one that speaks to our officials' utter lack of
credibility when they say that they're fighting "extremism" or
"terrorists." The poll found that "44 percent of Pakistanis believe
the United States is the greatest threat to their personal safety ...
(while) the Pakistani Taliban, who ... by some estimates have up to
40,000 fighters, are seen as a threat by less than 10 percent. Al
Qaeda barely registers as a threat, slightly surpassing Pakistan's own
military and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI)."

With almost half of the population saying the United States is the
greatest threat to their own personal safety, any Pakistani government
will be left between a rock and a hard place. In that part of the
planet, the real-world consequence of our government's credibility gap
is that the cooperation Washington seeks from Islamabad -- both
internally and with neighboring Afghanistan -- can only result in
destabilizing an already unstable political scene.

Around the world, the United States is at the nadir of its post-World
War II influence. Among foreign governments and publics, in
international institutions and commercial markets, our ideologies
haven't had less power to sway people than they do today. We've never
had less "soft power;" hard power doesn't come cheaply or without
unintended consequences, and there's no guarantee that the Iron Fist
can ever be put back into the Velvet Glove now that it's been exposed.

The fact that fewer than half of the world's citizens believe we were
really attacked by al Qaeda seven years ago is merely a reflection of
far deeper problems that our foreign policy makers are going to have
to try to face in the coming years. That's Bush's foreign policy
legacy.

All of which brings us to what historians will probably consider the
great irony of the decline of the brief U.S.-led mono-polar order that
existed between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the
second Gulf War: The neoconservative movement, which was so obsessed
with the preservation of American power and the suppression of its
rivals