Every once in a while, U.S. officialdom, often cooperating with corporate-run news media, has to deal with a controversial and painful event in the American past.  The John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 was one of these events warped by official presentations of the "truth" of what happened in Dallas, Texas, when the president got his head blown off in a Lincoln Continental convertible, before the eyes of hundreds of witnesses, more than half of whom believed the fatal shot didn't come from the building where Lee Harvey Oswald worked.
     Years and decades passed, and every once in a while U.S. officials and their helpers in the news media had to assure us that the official version of Kennedy's death was what really happened, and those suggesting differently were "conspiracy theorists," or, even more dismissively put down, "buffs."
     The events of September 11, 2001, are another such event characterized by an official version, with its own 9/11 Report, created by a bi-partisan but well-connected group of secrets-keepers during the Bush administration.  Their theory posits a conspiracy; that Osama bin Laden, head of al-Qaeda, was behind the hijackings of four passenger jetliners that collided with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, while one impacted the Pentagon in Alexandria, Virginia.  The fourth ran into difficulties when the passengers tried to retake the plane, or at least attempted to prevent the hijackers from fulfilling their goal of hitting some official building, like the White House.  That plane went down in Pennsylvania.  Approximately 3,000 people died overall, nearly everybody in America freaked out, and World War Three started, an ongoing mess with numerous offshoots, like the rise of ISIS.
     Twenty-eight pages of the 9/11 Report were withheld from publication, but now there's a call from some politicians and 9/11 victims' families to release the forbidden pages.  This is under consideration by the Obama administration, but the Saudi Arabian government doesn't want the release, and has threatened to sell up to 750 billion dollars worth of U.S. treasury securities.  The 9/11 families want to sue Saudi Arabia for having some responsibility for the attacks.  Congress wants to pass a bill enabling this, but Obama would probably veto it.  He went to Riyadh just recently and met with King Salman in a frostier atmosphere than Obama's last get-together with Vladimir Putin.  Saudi Arabia, in connection with a coalition of Arab nations, has been abusing Yemen, slaughtering civilians indiscriminately and, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse-wise, destabilizing that nation so much that famine waits to kill those not murdered by bombs deployed from airplanes provided by the United States.
     The U.S. also has been killing people in Yemen.  I suggest that more people have been wounded and killed in Yemen by the United States and Saudi Arabia than were killed in America on 9/11.  That's the problem with vengeance.  It gets out of hand.  There's an apt line in the Bible:
     "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."
     In other words, vengeance belongs solely to God.  When humans practice it, other wrongs get committed in what often turns into a spiral of violence and retaliation.  That's the consequence of 9/11.  We're living, and dying, with the fact that the United States leadership, backed by its aggrieved citizenry, couldn't take a breath and figure out what sensible course to take.  Instead of treating 9/11 as a crime, which it was, the U.S. treated it as an act of war, which it wasn't.  To be an act of war, it would've had to have been perpetrated by a nation.  Al-Qaeda was, and is, a rogue organization, not a state.
     If, however, 9/11 was perpetrated at a high level by Saudi government members, that might make it an act of war, in which case the U.S. should've attacked Saudi Arabia instead of Afghanistan, and later Iraq.  The United States, however, would never attack Saudi Arabia.  I, and many others, have to wonder if Bush, Cheney, and others in that damnable administration, knew that the Saudi Arabian leadership had a role in 9/11 and there was nothing they could do about it, short of going against a lucrative oil-based relationship that makes our economy's hinges work.
     So, too bad for the victims of 9/11, and all the hundreds of thousands who have died because it happened.  The bottom line is always protection of the business interest, and the war that followed 9/11, the indigestible conflict still with us, has become its own reason for existence, with many of its most diabolical players (the famous ones and the unknowns) profiting from it.  Obama's in a position to come clean about 9/11 and the Saudi connection, but he twists and turns, angling for the best way to handle the latest awkward appearance of truth.
     When 9/11 is invoked in my country, it's always as if the politician, candidate, or pundit, is struggling to make a halo appear over their heads.  Those in the know, in light of this Saudi Arabian connection, are well aware of their concealment of why thousands of people died and were maimed on that day, but their main concern is keeping the lid on tight, because real facts, whether about the Kennedy assassination or 9/11, threaten the enterprise of power coupled with dollars in their war to fuck over the human race while pretending they give a shit about 9/11 families whose relatives were trapped underneath fallen steel.  The difference between those victims and those in Yemen is the lack of a monument in Yemen bearing the names of those annihilated by the governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia.

                                                                                Vic Neptune