Why did the al-Qaeda attack?

Answer 1

The first scenario was perceived injustice over taxation and the second scenario was perceived injustice due to war and torture.

(1) Tarring and feathering (which was, terrorizing, agonizing and caused disfigurement) by American mobs on british civilians before the revolution for being informants to the British or British Customs Service :

The first recorded incident in America was in 1766: Captain William Smith was tarred, feathered, and dumped into the harbor of Norfolk, Virginia, by a mob that included the town's Mayor. He was picked up by a vessel just as his strength was giving out. He survived, and was later quoted as saying that "...[they] dawbed my body and face all over with tar and afterwards threw feathers on me." As with most other tar-and-feathers victims in the following decade, Smith was suspected of informing on smugglers to the British Customs service.

(2) Bin Laden's reaction in launching a 10 year terror campagin to expel US troops from Saudi Arabia as the result of perceived injustice for the torture of dissidents (who opposed US troops on Saudi soil) by the Saudi Dictatorship and the carnage perpetrated by the US government in the gulf war.

In your opinion, which scenario would more likely result in violence ? the dispute over taxes or the torture and carnage perpetrated by the US government and its ally ?

The US government in the past has gone to war due to perceived injustice even though no Americans were the victims of the perceived injustice as in the war between Iraq and Kuwait, so is it surprising that Osama bin Laden would want to go to "war" with the US government over perceived injustice due to the US government committing "atrocities" against fleeing Iraqi soldiers and the collateral killing of hundreds of Iraqi children ?

If "taxation without representation" results in terrorizing and disfiguring British civilians by American mobs, is it surprising that Bin Laden started a 10 year terror campaign to get US troops out of Saudi Arabia as a result of Saudi dissidents being tortured for opposing the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia following the carnage of the gulf war in which the US government was accused of not only massacring fleeing Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait but also airstrikes that collaterally killed Iraqi children and babies in the gulf war where US bombs killed 200,000 Iraqis, destroyed 20,000 Iraqi homes, leveled schools and hospitals.

This is what Bin Laden saw :

Iraqis, before the gulf war, had not killed any American intentionally and had not taken any military action against the US anywhere in the world and yet the US government decided to launch a war that collaterally killed Iraqi children and massacre fleeing Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait for the purposes of installing a hedonistic and cruel Kuwaiti dictatorship

In one US airstrike : three hundred Iraqi children were killed by "smart" bombs in a Baghdad bomb shelter on February 16, 1991. The blast caused a fire so intense that it flash-burned outlines of those children and their mothers on the walls; you can still peel strips of blackened skin-from the stones.

And in 1994, religious scholars safar al-hawali and

salman al-awdah were tortured by the

Saudi government which

escalated the conflict between Osama

bin laden and the fact that his friends were tortured due to the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

ref : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War#C

ref : http://www.rondavid.net/deadchildren2.htm

ref : http://www.antiwar.com/orig/aldebron1.HTML

Background to the above incidents :

(1) Osama bin Laden read about the US government in the 50s overthrowing a democratically elected Mossadegh of Iran and eventually the Shah terrorized his own people in Iran, thanks to the military support given by the US government

(2) He read about the US government in the 60s, arming the Israeli government that used those very US weapons to collaterally kill palestinian children and babies

(3) He saw the US government in the 70s using napalm, agent orange and carpet bombing Vietnam and Cambodia, collaterally killing hundreds of thousands or even millions.

(4) He saw the US government in the 80s siding with the "christian" militias in Lebanon, the very christian militias that massacred Muslims

(5) He saw the US government in the 80s supporting cruel dictators like Saddam Hussein

(6) He saw the US government in the 90s imposing cruel sanctions on Iraq resulting in UN reports stating that half a million Iraqi children died prematurely due to the sanctions

(7) He saw that the cruel Saudi dictatorship was being supported by the US government , the very dictatorship that tortured dissidents who opposed the stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia

(8) He saw that the US government never left any country in which it had troops in ( example; US troops still present in Germany and Japan, even after the war had ended decades ago)

(9) He saw that warnings to the US government to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia were ignored

(10) He saw that the only way to get US troops out of Saudi Arabia was to launch a terror campaign

(11) He saw that his terror campaign against the US had failed and US troops still remained in Saudi Arabia 9 years after the gulf war had ended

(12) He saw that the only way to get the US government to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia was to launch an attack on the US homeland on 9/11/01

(13) He saw that the US government finally gave into his demands to withdraw troops, only after the 9/11 attacks, and US troops finally left Saudi Arabia in 2003, almost 13 years after the gulf war had ended

In Closing :

Mar 24,1991 : US General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the American commander of Operation Desert Storm, told reporters in Saudi Arabia the United States was closer to establishing a permanent military headquarters on Arab soil.

(AP, 3/24/01)

I suspect what eventually motivated Bin Laden to launch a terror campaign against US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia was for personal reasons : one of the dissidents tortured by the Saudi dictatorship might have been a close friend of Bin Laden and that must have been the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" and that torture was directly related to dissidence against the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

ref : http://books.Google.com/books?id=EcCv1wwcdjAC&pg=PA278&lpg=PA278&dq=Safar+al-Hawali+and+Salman+al-Awdah,&source=bl&ots=nkKcDrrhSc&sig=wR8Esit63SqPNhzOFta0JB8SO3I&hl=en&ei=4MsCSsiiOoyeM_WT1M4E&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#PPA283,M1

ref : http://www.Jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Bswords%5D=8fd5893941d69d0be3f378576261ae3e&tx_ttnews%5Bany_of_the_words%5D=torture&tx_ttnews%5Bpointer%5D=3&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=5015&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=7&cHash=610991e981

If your close friend was tortured, what would you do if the torturers were not brought to justice ? .

Perceived injustice is what caused the LA riots in 1992.

The American mob took out their anger on british civilians by terrorizing and torturing the British civilians for the wrong doings over taxation by the British Monarch.

Its human nature to collectively punish those who have some kind of ties to the perpetrator; just as today in America, the Texas government punished the entire YFZ commune for the alleged crimes of a few individuals.

I am not justifying anything done due to human nature; I am just explaining that it happens and the only way to mitigate or prevent it from happening is to avoid or prevent the Causality in the first place.