9/11 as False Flag: Why International Law Must Dare to Care

Amy Baker Benjamin

Auckland University of Technology

January 10, 2016

Emory International Law Review, Forthcoming

Abstract:

At the heart of contemporary international law lies a paradox: The attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001 have justified nearly fifteen years of international war, yet the official international community, embodied principally in the United Nations, has failed to question or even scrutinize the U.S. Government’s account of those attacks. Despite the impressive and serious body of literature that has emerged to suggest that 9/11 was a classic (if unprecedentedly monstrous) false-flag attack, international statesmen, following the lead of scholars, have acted as if there is no controversy whatsoever. This disconnect between the growing (alternative) evidentiary record of state responsibility for the attacks and the focus of international institutions is impossible to sustain if those institutions are to maintain any semblance of viability and meaning.

In a three-step process, this Article seeks to connect the international community to the possible reality of 9/11-as-false-flag. First, it shows that it is highly rational to question the official 9/11 account given the historical record of the first half of the twentieth century, which reveals a pattern of false flag attacks over which the international community openly fretted and tried to exercise jurisdiction. Second, it analyzes the reasons why intellectual elites and the statesmen they influence are behaving irrationally in not inquiring into the possibility of 9/11-as-false-flag, deconstructing a multi-faceted motive into all its unsavory parts. Third, it argues that the means for ceasing this irrational behavior is readily available, as the United Nations need only carry out its core and incontrovertible “jury” function of determining the existence of aggression in order to exercise a long-overdue oversight of the official 9/11 narrative.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 39

Keywords: 9/11, False Flag, Lochner Formalism, Article 51, pretextual self-defense, aggression

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