Everyone knows al-Qaeda was behind the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center seven years ago — don’t they?
Not according to an international poll conducted by a University of Maryland research center and released Wednesday. The poll found no consensus among 17 nations about who carried out the 9/11 attacks, with majorities in just nine of those 17 countries believing that al-Qaeda perpetrated the attacks.
The lack of consensus indicates a rejection by the international community of the United States’ official story of that day, said Steven Kull, director of the university’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the study.
“It’s not that there’s a coherent alternative view here,” Kull said. “People who don’t think it was al-Qaeda don’t have an alternative. Its not that they’ve come to a conclusion of who it was, it’s that they’ve said, ‘I’m not convinced.’ ”
On average, 46 percent of the poll’s 16,063 respondents blame al-Qaeda while 15 percent cite the U.S. government itself, 7 percent point the finger at Israel and 7 percent at some other perpetrator.
The responses were given spontaneously to an open-ended question that did not offer response options, Kull said.
In Egypt and Jordan, 43 percent and 31 percent of respondents placed blame for the attacks on Israel, with just 16 percent and 11 percent, respectively, pointing the finger at al-Qaeda.
But Kull said the lack of support for the United States’ official suspect among Europeans was more surprising. In Britain, one of America’s closest allies in the war on terror, 57 percent of those polled said al-Qaeda was behind the attacks while 26 percent said they “didn’t know.”
Other allies were also ambivalent. In South Korea, 51 percent of respondents said al-Qaeda was behind the attacks. In Turkey, 39 percent blamed al-Qaeda while 36 percent cited the U.S. government.
The U.S. government was the favored alternative party to blame for the attacks, Kull said.
“I heard that quite a lot, they said, ‘Well, that party that had a motive, that must be who it was, or might be,’ ” Kull said. “This ranges all the way from ‘U.S. soldiers were flying the plane’ to ‘they knew about it and just turned a blind eye.’”
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