By Linda S. Heard
Gulf News
Nine years have passed since America was attacked, yet ceremonies in New York and Pennsylvania commemorating those who died on September 11, 2001, are as poignant as ever. Nobody can deny that 9/11 shook the United States to its very core or that its memory still has the capacity to bring Americans to tears.
Indeed, sensitivities in the US are still so raw that some 70 per cent of the population is reluctant to see an Islamic cultural centre two blocks from where the World Trade Centre Twin Towers once touched the sky.
Few would deny that the Bush administration's response to the tragedy changed the world. When Washington realised how vulnerable the country was, and in response to calls for revenge, it launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, initiated the ‘War on Terror', opened gulags to detain terror suspects, engaged in the liberal use of torture, rode roughshod over the Geneva conventions and subjected ordinary citizens to gross invasions of privacy and abuses of civil liberties.
The point is 9/11 and its ramifications were — and still are — no small matter. Almost everyone on the planet has been affected by that day in one way or the other; not least thousands of fallen coalition and Nato soldiers and up to a million Afghan and Iraqi civilians. Yet, for some strange reason, there has never been a thorough and impartial investigation of that day and the events that led up to it.
