The idea that politicians would blow up their own country was incomprehensible to me until it happened to me. In Sri Lanka, politicians let a long-warned about (by Muslims) terrorist attack happen on Easter 2019 in order to run a political campaign demonizing Muslims. And it worked. This is well documented in a civil case against our then leadership, and it's not a conspiracy theory in Sri Lanka. It's certainly not a theory if it's true. Sri Lanka's Easter Attacks were an inside job and if it could happen to me, it could certainly happen to you.

For example, I used to think it was incomprehensible that 9/11 was an inside job, but now (especially with Al Qaeda openly working for America), my assumption is inside job by default. Now I think the burden is on such politicians to prove that they didn't blow their own people up, not vice versa.

The Sri Lankan Case

It's not controversial to call the Easter Attacks an inside job in Sri Lanka, this is all well documented and well known. Victims of the attacks filed a fundamental rights case against the President, Prime Minister, Inspector General of Police, Secretary of Defense, etc and won. According to the final (Supreme Court) judgement, “The Petitioners further contend that the executive branch of the government chose to ignore the semaphore signals and turned a Nelsonian eye to an obvious catastrophe.” In more British than the British legal language (the judges also refer the Magna Carta), this is referring to Lord Nelson turning a glass eye to the telescope when he got orders to stop attacking. This is the origin of the phrase, which I had to look up.

In the end, the President et al were found financially but not criminally responsible. Like OJ Simpson, who lost his civil case but won the criminal. But everyone knows who did both. In Sri Lanka the facts were out though, like OJ, the culprits were not locked up. As the court judgement said, “This dismal failure on the part of the former President Sirisena resulted in disastrous consequences for this country and not only lives were lost and properties destroyed but interracial tension and interethnic hatred began to raise their ugly heads causing the very fabric of this nation to be broken and become fragile.” They say it like it's a bad thing, but that was the point all along.

Chaos is a ladder, as Littlefinger said in Game of Thrones, and modern terrorism is an escalator. The President, a weak moron, had been conspiring with the Rajapaksas (old ruling family) against his own Prime Minister, even instigating a coup in Parliament. When that failed they allowed this violence against the Sri Lankan population, blamed Muslims, and ran on that racist reaction and won (a Rajapaksa, not the moron). Sri Lankan politics at this time was like Game of Thrones for ugly people, I won't burden you with it. Suffice it to say that terrorism is a political act, and by not acting, the politicians used terrorism for their own benefit. They fucking blew up children at churches and families in hotels as a campaign stunt. And it worked. Honestly, if you're running an anti-Muslim racist candidate, extremist Muslim violence is a great launch.

The method of what I call Terrorism™ is devilishly simple, though the motivation is beyond me. Add dead-eyed terrorists, no-eyed spooks, glass-eyed politicians, and shit-stir. Politicians and security types all over the world keep terrorist groups monitored or even on payroll. Then, when they want an attack to happen for political reasons, they can act by not acting. It's the perfect crime, with at worst a fine for being found out. They can use the ensuing chaos as a ladder, to clamber upwards into more power with even less accountability. Why wouldn't the same thing have happened in America? Honestly, I think they invented the idea.

The US Case

The two phrases I use as rules of thumb (for getting wool out my eyes) are who watches the watchman (quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) and who benefits (cui bono), from Juvenal's Satires VI and via Martin Scorsese's The Departed, respectively. The full Juvenal quote is actually about hoes (he seems incredibly bitter) and it goes,

Oh, I know the advice my old friends would give, on every occasion –        
‘Lock her up and bar the doors.’ But who is to stand guard        
over the guards themelves? They get paid in common coin        
to forget their mistress’s sex-life: both hide the same offence.

In modern political terms, this means that the security state that profits from terrorism actually has no particular incentive to stop it. How does stopping security threats expand their power, privilege, and perks? If they do their job correctly, their job would not exist. Who is interested in this? The incentives of the modern police state are wildly misaligned, they need terrorism to feed themselves. And so as Juvenal said, “They get paid in common coin to forget their mistress’s sex-life: both hide the same offence.”

In The Departed (based Infernal Affairs), the cops have moles in the mob and the mob has moles in the cops. They're one corruption really. In the scene I'm referencing, a fake cop has cracked a real case, framing an Italian mobster that the Irish mob wanted set up. His boss asks him “Yeah, but cui bono? Who benefits?” The fake cop replies, “Cui gives a shit? It’s got a friggin’ bow on it.” The real cop smiles and says, “I think you are a cop, my son.” You can see that they are in a symbiotic relationship, the cops and robbers. So it is with the real police and the police states that contain them. The best way to execute an inside job is to get a job as a guard, and completely, purposefully, fuck it up. Then you paradoxically seem to need more guards. It's a great scam, other people die and you can only fail upwards.

In another art, before I get to the point, Khaled Sabsabi has been dumped as Australia's representative to the Venice Biennale because of very good works like this one, a pastiche of planes hitting the towers and George W. Bush saying “thank you very much.”

What Sabsabi is commenting on, I think, is that 9/11 made George W. Bush's career, drove his re-election, and allowed the corrupt powers behind the throne (Dick Cheney et al) to go through their laundry list of countries they wanted to overthrow, starting with completely unrelated Iraq. I don't know who ‘did’ 9/11 but I do know that Bush—like the Sri Lankan President—had ample warnings and deep connections to Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was funded and supported by the US before 9/11 and after 9/11, culminating in them (as HTS) being given the entire nation of Syria to run. If you work with someone before and after an incident, I think the burden of proof is on you to prove that the they weren't working for you all along. Especially when the national insecurity state got positively engorged after 9/11. You have to ask my other question, which is cui bono? Who benefits?

Like in Sri Lanka, you have an inept President, plentiful warnings ignored from the intelligence services, and an open conspiracy around him to seize even more power under the guise of a Global War on Terror (a Global War of Terror, in hindsight). Also in the same way, the best way to do something was to do nothing, and then profit off the wreckage. Such a thing seemed impossible to me at the time, but that was a long time ago, with a lot of blood under the bridge. Now I think the burden is on the American state to prove that 9/11 wasn't an inside job, rather than people outside to disprove it. The American deep state may have simply not been thinking that deeply at the time, but they certainly took advantage.

If we ask cui bono, the answer is that the American security state benefited from 9/11 and if we ask who's watching the watchman the answer is nobody. The American security state got massively engorged (on blood) after 9/11 and even more unaccountable (just say ‘terrorism’ and everyone shits out their civil liberties). This is a systemic problem, not (merely) evil people. A system designed to fight terrorism needs terrorism, by design. And so they keep terrorists on payroll to keep their own pay rolling, with plausible deniability. It's an elegant system of absolute evil; there is a dark simplicity in complicity, an intelligence in seeming idiocy. This entire manufacturing of terrorism to drive the military-industrial multiplex is in fact a product, something I call Terrorism™ for short.

Terrorism™

Terrorism™ is one of the last products made best in America. Terrorism™ is an aphrodisiac for electile dysfunction, made with the blood of children. Terrorism™ is good for whatever ails you as a failing politician. Just add shit and stir, electoral results guaranteed. You can print unlimited money with no accountability, you can arrest your own people and invade other countries, you can win elections and call your opponents traitors. Sri Lanka merely copied this idea from America, we didn't invent it. Having seen such conspiracy first hand in my own country, I can't discount it in America as a mere theory. Sri Lankan courts are sclerotic but not moribund like the American system, still (not) trying to figure out the JFK. In lieu of legalities, we'll have to use my two rules of thumb for a temporary ruling. If it can happen here it could have happened there and, indeed, 9/11 is where I think this all started.

That is why, taking these decades of experience into account, I think that burden of proof is on governments to show that they didn't blow us up. Especially America, the worst historical arsonists in history. For me, one of the clearest indicators that 9/11 was an inside job was that no one lost their jobs for it. The President was re-elected and all his ghouls kept failing upwards, across multiple administrations. No one seemed to have been fired after 9/11, so they must have been doing their jobs right. At some point, you have to judge a system not by what it says, but by what it does, and I think we're 25 years into that point now.

Everywhere America goes to 'fight' terrorism, terrorism just goes up. Now, in their Trumpian verbal diarrhea phase, they're admitting that they funded Boko Haram (in Nigeria) and all unsavory sorts while openly working with HTS (née Al Qaeda) in Syria. And previously Jake Sullivan admitted that they were working with Al Qaeda. Since America worked with Al Qaeda before and after 9/11, the burden of proof is really on them to say that day was any different. 9/11 was an inside job until proven otherwise, especially given the mountain of lies after and before. Remember the Maine, anyone, or the Gulf of Tonkin? If you keep letting chickenhawks get away with it, eventually they'll come home to roost.