A useful thought experiment is to ask yourself how much you would have to get paid to murder a random person. $100,000? $1,000,000? $10,000,000? Hopefully you are a deeply moral person and no amount of money would be enough to justify the sin of extinguishing human life. It is the misfortune of humanity that not everybody is you. Sicarios, Wagner group mercenaries, and CIA drone operators are all part of a thriving industry that keeps murder relatively affordable. If you’re willing to use non-union labor you could probably have somebody killed for as little as $50,000.

Killing one person is psychologically troubling enough but if the price was right would you be able to commit mass murder? Could you live with yourself if you killed hundreds, thousands? Well let’s leave the realm of thought experiment and put some exact figures to this question. Would you be willing to kill 3,000 people in lower Manhattan for $21 trillion ($7 billion per person)? Do you think Dick Cheney would be willing to?

9/11 was a phenomenally profitable event and not just for the people who insider traded on defense and airline stocks before it happened. The amount of money that was made by powerful people within the United States is staggering. Which is why it’s always so odd to hear it described as the result of mistakes by the US government, or as having been caused by their incompetence, or a screw up. A screw up typically has negative consequences for the person who committed it. If I’m staring at my phone while walking and I trip and bust my lip that’s a screw up. If I trip and fall and land on Margot Robbie and she takes me home and has sex with me and gives me a new iPhone I definitely wouldn’t mark that as a screw up.

There have been a couple different attempts to parcel out just how much money has been expended so far due to the events of September 11th. Brown University’s Costs of War project says as of 2021 the US government has spent $8 trillion on post 9/11 wars. The Institute for Policy Studies includes all military spending as well as the domestic militarization expenses that have come from things such as the newly formed Department of Homeland Security and puts the total cost at $21 trillion. Murder for $10 million seems like minor league baseball.

There of course isn’t a 1:1 federal dollars spent to profit booked ratio but a couple things should be noted. First the pentagon budget is a total black hole of waste and fraud where $2.3 trillion was reported missing the day before 9/11 and that number has increased to at least $6.5 trillion. The Pentagon remains the only federal agency that has never complied with a 1996 law requiring annual audits of all US government departments. A related fact is that the majority of the military and intelligence budget is now outsourced to private contractors. The Security Policy Reform Institute found that 55% of the military budget is handed over to private companies while the US government itself revealed 70% of its classified intelligence budget goes to private contracts. Profit margins on services rendered can reach as high as 4,000%.

All of this together is to say that we don’t know the exact amount of dollars made off 9/11 but we know that it was trillions. With an s.

And that’s not even counting the money that came from the trade in drugs and oil. The Taliban government of Afghanistan, which to be clear I do not support, did almost totally eliminate the cultivation of opium with an early 2001 ban. According to Time magazine 99% of the country’s production was wiped out that year. This decree was rendered irrelevant by the US invasion and the installation of President Harmid Karzai, whose brother Ahmed Wali Karzai was alleged to be both a paid CIA asset and one of the largest heroin traffickers in the country. From a low of approximately 8000 hectares of opium in 2001 more than 200,000 hectares would be cultivated in 2013 and Afghanistan would return to producing an estimated 90% of the world’s opium supply. I’m sure the New York and London bankers who launder drug profits were appreciative.

Back during the Bush II administration opponents of the Iraq War united behind the rallying cry of “no blood for oil” for which they were mostly either ignored or called gay. Little reflection has been done on which side was right in that debate. For an update we start with a brief history lesson courtesy of Reuters:

Many Iraqis still bear a grudge after British, American and French oil companies controlled their oil industry for half a century through the Iraq Petroleum Co (IPC).

From the time it struck oil at the huge Kirkuk field in 1927 until nationalism forced it out in 1972, IPC — made up of BP, Exxon, Mobil, Shell, CFP (Total) and Partex — ruled the roost.

So which formerly excluded western oil majors received oil contracts in Iraq post-invasion? BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron and Total. I see some familiar names.

In 2021 then Iraqi President Barham Salih stated that almost $1 trillion in revenue has been generated from his nation’s oil since the 2003 invasion. Of this $150 billion was stolen out of the country through corrupt deals, a graft rate of 15%. Companies like Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and TotalEnergies all got their taste, an indulgence that would have been denied to them without 9/11. I’m sure Fox News will issue an apology to Janeane Garofalo any day now.

I hope by now I have made the point that if you ever hear anyone asking what possible motive could elements of the US government have to participate in or allow 9/11 to happen, well that’s just a dumb question. Certainly let’s debate whether the US government had the means or the opportunity to do such a thing. But their motive? Don’t. Be. Silly.

It’s not often expressed what an existential threat the end of the Cold War was for the bottom lines of the people who make their money killing. After the Berlin Wall came down there was talk within the United States of a peace dividend, the idea that our historically anomalous massive military budgets which were supposedly necessary to fight communism could now be spent on things like schools and bridges. The prospect that children might be educated or bridges might not collapse in America was a five alarm fire for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the shareholders in Raytheon. So some strange things started to happen.

The first was the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The FBI had an Egyptian intelligence agent, Emad Salem, working undercover in the Al Qaeda cell that would eventually kill 6 people and inspire one of Biggie’s more prophetic lyrics. The plot was known in advance and a plan was mooted to build a bomb with phony powder and then swoop in and arrest everybody when it didn’t detonate. This was overruled by Salem’s FBI supervisor and the bombing was allowed to go forward. Hm.

Next was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Timothy McVeigh shared many different stories after his capture but one of them sounds quite similar to that of Mr. Salem. On April 21, 1995 McVeigh spoke to his two court appointed public defenders and told them the following:

“While in the National Guard (which he had joined after leaving active duty Army service), he had been recruited to work undercover as part of a domestic security operation. McVeigh said his mission was to infiltrate and report on Neo-Nazis and other domestic terrorism threats. McVeigh then said that after having discovered the bombing plot, he reported it to his handlers but was instructed to continue in his role, remain embedded within the conspiracy and even go so far as to participate in the bombing; but ensure that only a couple of windows were blown out of the Murrah building. McVeigh expressed his shock that the Ryder [truck] could have caused as much damage as it did and wondered out loud if someone may have switched the truck at the last minute without his knowledge.” (Aberration in the Heartland of the Real, Wendy S. Painting, P. 19)

After that comes 9/11. The third major terrorist attack in a decade that involved countless red flags that government agencies not only ignored but actively suppressed in order to shepherd the plots forward. With the completion of this one any discussion of a peace dividend was dead for good. If at first you don’t succeed…

A few of my more liberal friends have come to think I’m some kind of fascist for accepting the truth of 9/11, which is that elements of the US government either allowed it or made it happen. I came to this conclusion relatively recently and with the zeal of a convert I would sometimes get very frustrated or strident or nasty with people who couldn’t see it the way I did. The reality is that until I was 31 years old I was no different from those who call me a Qanon paranoiac. All this information was there for me before and I treated those who tried to tell it to me the same way my liberal friends treat me now.

I believe I did that because it’s a heavy psychic burden to accept. To realize and understand that your government is capable of killing those people you hear crying on their 911 calls while trapped inside the burning towers. This is the evil I live in and pay taxes to. That term military industrial complex is not a clever turn of phrase coined by President Eisenhower, it is the actual governing power of our country. We have been at war without end since 9/11. Until we are able to reckon with the truth of 9/11 we will continue to be at war. The resistance people have to a real investigation of what happened in downtown Manhattan begs a corollary question. How much would you have to get paid to ignore a murder?