The banal geopolitical fallout of the laboratory leak hypothesis

On 11 September 2001, the US suffered four coordinated terrorist attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives, injured over 25,000 people and caused at least $10 billion in property damage. Within hours, the US National Security Agency had intercepted phone calls that led them to suspect Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda of having planned and carried out the attacks. On that same evening, the CIA director confirmed this assessment to the US president. In two weeks, the FBI identified the specific attackers, and by the end of the month had published photographs and nationalities of all 19 terrorists who carried out the attacks. Of them were 15 Saudis, two Emiratis, a Lebanese and an Egyptian. Bin Laden himself was a Saudi national and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, a key conspirator, was Pakistani. The US authorities knew Bin Laden and his outfit quite well, for they had together fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, along with the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies. So it is fair to say that one would have to have one’s head firmly buried in the sand to miss the glaring Saudi and Pakistani links to—and possible complicity in—the attacks.Read the full article in The Mint