9/11 should have led to a criminal investigation, not a war

The challenge on this anniversary is to understand how and why the West elected to promote al-Qaeda as the counterweight to the US – a 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

The politics of fear, with its foundation in lies, is an effective way of manipulating any electorate. Perhaps it has never been so effectively applied as it was by consecutive US presidents in the wake of 9/11, when they took al-Qaeda, with its slingshot, and portrayed Osama bin Laden’s motley crew as Goliath. Later, when bin Laden was assassinated, the US found an annotated list of al-Qaeda members dated from 2002. There were only 170 names. He had identified 20 who were dead – only seven had achieved the bizarre goal of being “martyred” – 11 had been detained by the authorities, and 19 had simply left – some to join a more doctrinaire group, some to study, but most just to go home. Bin Laden had been working on his terror project for several years, and with the list of devoted adherents standing only at 120, he elected to pad it out with five of his sons. Al-Qaeda members, therefore, included Omar bin Laden, who had left the organisation in 2000 and has long lived peacefully in Normandy, married to Jane Felix-Browne, a former parish councillor from Cheshire in the UK.