Fuck knows what my parents were thinking of at the time, taking me, a four year old, to see one of the most state-of-the-art disaster movies of its time. The cinema rumbled, people screamed, buildings collapsed and bodies fell from great heights. I thought I was in the middle of a freaking disaster right there in that Edinburgh cinema house.

Twenty-seven years later, I never believed I would've been watching a similar, although this time, real life atrocity live on CNN. Had I been watching the events unfold on the big screen, I think I would've almost certainly thought it was the latest Blair Witch-style Hollywood blockbuster.

The September 11th 2001 terrorist onslaught upon the New York World Trade Center was one of those events that everyone will remember precisely where they were at the time that it happened or heard about it. The sheer magnitude of the assault, conjoined with the vast number of innocent lives lost and the extensive live media coverage, must have left journalists and television news reporters utterly dumbstruck about how exactly to cover such a world changing event.

It has been over a week now since I myself was asked to write a short piece on the tragedy, and every time I sit down to write, all I find myself producing is mainstream bullshit, purely out of fear I suppose of offending anyone who was unfortunate enough to have lost loved ones in the tragedy (I am told I have a habit of upsetting people with my writing, having already been charged with "Breach Of The Peace" for my scathing written remarks against a poor, defenseless, multi-national, Japanese electronics corporation – a story for another time perhaps, too humorous for an article with a subject such as this).

Anyway, my concerns with regards to covering the WTC event were as follows: (1) Being somewhat anti-Capitalist in my viewpoint, I really didn't relish in coming over like some cold, heartless bastard, yet at the same time I didn't particularly want to compromise my opinions in favour of some sickening patriotic approach to a country I don't even belong to; (2) Realising that there is as much propaganda in the US as there is in any other country during events such as these, I wanted to get to the essence of the matter and to do so would, in some cases, mean coming over somewhat inhumane; (3) Being a Thelemite, who is far from surprised by the atrocities committed in this foul Aeon of Horus, my multi-cultural stance would not look very pro-American, despite the fact that the country's Bill of Rights is the closest thing I think the world has got to a legislated Thelemic manifesto (although few US citizens understand it and fewer still adhere to it).

I therefore apologies in advance for whatever may follow in this article, however I don't write to keep the populace happy, I write in order to provoke debate so that through cordial argumentation we can each get closer to the truth.

Now, I don't deny for one minute that the WTC attack was an appalling atrocity, nor can I be left unimpressed by the outstanding level of humanity and kindness that New Yorkers have bestowed upon one another throughout the events of this tragedy; however putting aside emotions for a brief moment and looking at matters logically, America throughout its history, has been very fortunate with regards to having avoided such foreign attacks on it's home soil. Pearl Harbor seems to be the predominant incident prior to the WTC strike, and with all due respect, most Brits find it almost insulting the way Americans portray Pearl Harbor as though it was the Second World War (one has to remember that the UK had been involved in World War II since 1939, and suffered an unbelievable barrage of attacks from the enemy on its home ground. America, on the other hand, only decided it was really necessary to enter into the war at the ass end of 1941 after it lost three and half thousand lives at Pearl Harbor).

No doubt however, the latest World Trade Center/Pentagon incident will prompt the US into entering upon yet another war, and this time it is to be one which George Dubya has dubbed the "War On Terrorism". But how exactly does one define terrorism, and should the US perhaps be looking more closely at its foreign policy in an attempt to determine why it is despised by other, less fortunate, nations than itself?

In a recent interview for Infinity Factory (hosted by Disinformation's Richard Metzger and cultural engineer Genesis P-Orridge), Robert Anton Wilson remarked that the definition of "terrorism" is based purely on whether an act of violence is committed by a group of rich people or a group of poor people. This, at first, may seem a rather simplistic approach to the matter, but on closer examination it will be found that Mr. Wilson is in fact correct. The US army can commit atrocities by bombarding a less wealthy nation, using the latest in military hardware, and it is considered a "fight for freedom and justice". Whereas a group of soldiers from a third world country can commit atrocities, with their almost laughable military hardware, and it is called "terrorism".

What is almost laughable, however, is that the terrorist weaponry was probably paid for by the US in the first place. One recalls specifically the "Iraqgate Scandal" where during the 1980s the United States publicly granted billions of dollars in credit guarantees to Iraq under the Department of Agriculture's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) program. These guarantees committed the US to pay off banks that loaned money to Iraq in order to purchase American agricultural goods. Inevitably this move bolstered Iraq's economy thereby freeing up enough capital for Saddam Hussein to purchase more weapons for his war torn country. Undoubtedly many of the loans were themselves used to procure such arms. As the late comedian Bill Hicks aptly put it: weapons such as "the flame throwing rake” and "the armed tractor" must have been common farming tools in Iraq at the time.

However, the Department of Agriculture's CCC support for Iraq continued well after the Iran-Iraq war, and at the beginning of October 1989 - more than a year after the ceasefire - George Bush senior signed a secret authorization to extend an additional one billion dollars in credit, despite late-1988 reports that the Iraqi military had gassed Kurdish villages. In other words the "Butcher of Baghdad" was still at that time very much Bush's beneficiary.