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Comment by dm3730 | Hacker News Reader

> bent on revenge and eager to kill.

Could you clarify? Upon whom? My understanding is that neither the Afghans nor the Iraqi civillians that ended up being the majority of the victims of our subsequent actions were the perpetrators of the acts on 9/11 or even from the societies that nurtured them. If I recall correctly, 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia and the remaining 4 were from the UAE, Egypt and Lebanon. Even Osama bin Laden was Saudi, and nurtured in Switzerland, funded by the US Army and subsequently protected by the Pakistani Army which was itself directly funded by the US taxpayer.

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Speaking as someone from the NYC area at the time of the event, the anger was directed at Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. There was a lot of anger, fear and the need to do _something_. That need was directed at Afghanistan very quickly, even though none of the perpetrators were Afghanistani. If I remember correctly, the link was that Bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan and the government there tried to protect him instead of handing him over.

>Bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan and the government there tried to protect him instead of handing him over.

They asked for evidence and when the US said no they said they wouldn't hand him over.

Unlike his previous attacks, Bin Laden initially denied being behind 9/11.

> the link was that Bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan and the government there tried to protect him instead of handing him over.

Describing the faction of the Taliban that for a brief period gave Bin Laden sanctuary as a "government" seems like an unusual way to interpret the term government. It is the equivalent for us of having some bandit hiding within some cult in Maine or Kentucky and us describing that cult as the government of Maine. Also, as others in this thread have pointed out, those Taliban offered to handover Bin Laden if evidence was provided convicting him of the crime. It is interesting to compare our level of "conviction" of blame for some sets of people and willingness to accept collateral damage to civilians who happen to be around them, but when it comes to our own, even despite blowback and high levels of culpability, we deny the equivalence and block judgements even from UN courts.

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