This is an interesting post, but despite what Ms Tranter claims, it must be said that it's hardly a majority view amongst international lawyers that 9/11 did NOT enliven the UN Charter's automatic right to self-defence under Art 51.

9/11 certainly did constitute an armed attack - there is no real debate about that in the scholarly literature. However, the more interesting question is the link between al Qaeda and the Taliban regime, because as Ms Tranter rightly points out in the article, no simple nationality principle can work when most of the hijackers were from Suadi Arabia.

But the article falls down here because it ignores the existence of international law scholarly literature which bridges this gap - examining the expansion of the mentioned, but not named, Caroline principle and looking at a nascent threshold for state support of terrorism, tied to the cited UN Security Council resolutions.

I suggest Ms Tranter move beyond the basic framework best articulated by Bruno Simma, and look at the latest literature from EJIL and ASIL on the subject to find her answers why most international lawyers do not think the war in Afghanistan is illegal, contra the Iraq war (which was).

Thank you for an great article, Kellie Tranter. (Of course, as a supporter of the 9/11 Truth Movement, I believe that the case against the Afghan War could be made even stronger, but, nevertheless, I believe your article remains very useful as it is.)

No evidence which implicates either the Taliban Government, nor even al Qaeda in the terrorist attack of 9/11 has been produced, in spite of it having been promised by then US Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Taliban publicly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden if the US could provide evidence of his involvement in 9/11. In private, according to some sources, they even offered to provide the US with the necessary intelligence to allow them to assassinate Osama bin Laden with cruise missiles, but the US ignored both the public and private offers and decided to invade Afghanistan anyway.

Now, after 8 and a half years of military occupation of what we were told was the hotbed of international terrorism, not one person with a proven link to 9/11 has been captured in Afghanistan.

In a powerful and revealing speech, Dr. Graeme MacQueen, told of how at a seminar for peace in early 2001, held amongst Afghan exiles in Pakistan in early 2001, none favoured a US invasion of Afghanistan as a solution. He also revealed that some participants with sources inside the Pakistan Government revealed that an invasion of Afghanistan the US was expected. To view the speech, please visit http://www.911blogger.com/node/22234

Even today, the FBI does not believe that it has sufficient evidence to charge Osama bin Ladan withthe crime of 9/11. Try finding any reference to 9/11 on the FBI wanted poster at http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm

All this should surely make even those amongst us who are the most trusting of the word of the US Government to be somewhat skeptical of its story by now, I would have thought.

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BBoy, there's no doubt that 9/11 was a crime of mass murder, but I think whether it was an "armed attack" as you assert is questionable, especially when we are expected to believe that the terrorists who hijacked the planes were only armed with box-cutter knives.

If you are meaning, instead, to imply that there are no credible scholarly works which dispute the official account of 9/11, then I would suggest that the reverse is the case. There are plenty of scholarly works to be found on http://www.journalof911studies.com , http://ae911truth.org (Architects & Engineers for 911Truth), http://911truth.org http://www.historycommons.org/project.jsp?project=911_project (The complete 9-11 timeline), etc., etc. which challenge the official account.

In contrast, I know of no credible scholarly work, which supports the official account of 9/11. If you know of any, please let us know where it is to be found.

daqggett go to http://www.chedet.co.cc/ Dr Mahathir the ex- priminister of Malaysia accuses the US Govt of being responsible for 911 and is asking for a new enquiry.

The real reason for the US being is Afghanistan and Pakistan is the oil pipeline from Turkmenistan to the Capsian Sea needed to make it economically viable.Afghanistan now produces 90% of the world's heroine and the Taliban stopped it.Remember the heroine drought?
The other reason is arms sales and we and the US tax payer get taxed to buy the weapons of death.Re4member JFK remonstrating about the Military Industrial Complex and they having too much power over Govts?

Hamid Kazai used to work for UNOCAL the very same oil company who has these oil contracts.

Afghanistan was about the gas pipeline, Iraq was about the oil.
Both wars totally illegal and purely for other people's resources.

Wars for resources suit only the military industry. There is no profit for the honest economy (As the US economic woes now should make clear).
I was almost sick during Anzac day a couple of years ago when Howard said "lest we forget".
...Ah, the sick irony of it all.

Arjay, Ozandy,

Thanks for your interesting posts.

One concern I have with Afghanistan is the seeming unpalatability of the alternative to the current Afghan Government, namely the Taliban, notwithstanding their stance against heroin manufacture and their being an obstacle to the plans of US corporations to exploit the region.

There was a time I would have welcomed a US invasion of Afghanistan, so appalling were its abuses of human rights, particularly those of women, and cultural vandalism (such as the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan) and that was before I swallowed the lie of 9/11.

Of course, the Taliban originally came to power largely thanks to the meddling of the US and Pakistan. (Why they weren't able to come to some arrangement with the US that would have been acceptable to both parties (if not the people of Afghanistan) is not clear to me.)

Graeme MacQueen, in his talk referred to above, was clear that in early 2001 even Afghan exiles believed that that an invasion would make matters worse and they have been proven right.

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One thing is absolutely clear: 9/11 is not a valid legal justification for the invasion. The evidence for the complicity of either al Qaeda or Taliban regime in 9/11 has never been produced. In contrast, there is a mountain of evidence implicating senior figures of the Bush administration, itself, in 9/11.

9/11 should have been treated as a crime and not assumed to have been an act of war from the beginning and investigated accordingly.

If the investigation had proven Taliban complicity in 9/11, then sanctions against Afghanistan would have been appropriate (just as sanctions against the US would have also been appropriate for its sponsorship of terrorism against Nicaragua and Cuba as just two examples).

However, a proper investigation would almost certainly have unmasked an entirely different group of perpetrators, and George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld would be behind bars today.

It's instructive that BBoy has not responded to my challenge to provide an example of a credible scholarly work in support of the Official account of 9/11.