If you read the first 2 or 3 pages of posts, you will see information pertinent to your proof wanted. Article 5 clearly states that an attack on one nation warrants a response from all NATO nations. Furthermore, the charter states that any force deemed necessary including military action can be undertook. With Mr. Bin Laden having a safe place to train within the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, that was justification for us to go in there. Do you think the Taliban would have stepped aside and let us go in after the terrorists?
Notwithstanding the Taliban's offer to hand over Bin Laden if the US would supply proof of their accusations against him (then never did), the US had planned to attack Afghanistan well before 9/11. The 9/11 inside job allowed the US regime to start its invasion, based on false reasons.
If I got a buddy to hit me, and then went up to a cop and said that you hit me, would that make the allegations of assault true, even if the cop was hoodwinked? If I then assaulted you, would that legitimize that assault in any moral or ethical way?
(borrowed from elsewhere)....this kind of puts the whole Afghanistan farce into perspective:
Bush, oil and Taliban
Further light on secret contacts between the Bush administration and the Taliban regime is shed by a book released November 15 in France, entitled Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth, written by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. Brisard is a former French secret service agent.
The two French authors write that the Bush administration was willing to accept the Taliban regime, despite the charges of sponsoring terrorism, if it cooperated with plans for the development of the oil resources of Central Asia.
Until August, they claim, the US government saw the Taliban “as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia.” It was only when the Taliban refused to accept US conditions that “this rationale of energy security changed into a military one.”
By way of corroboration, one should note the curious fact that neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban regime. Such a designation would have made it impossible for an American oil or construction company to sign a deal with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.
Talks between the Bush administration and the Taliban began in February 2001, shortly after Bush’s inauguration. A Taliban emissary arrived in Washington in March with presents for the new chief executive, including an expensive Afghan carpet. But the talks themselves were less than cordial. Brisard said, “At one moment during the negotiations, the US representatives told the Taliban, ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs’.”
As long as the possibility of a pipeline deal remained, the White House stalled any further investigation into the activities of Osama bin Laden, Brisard and Dasquie write. They report that John O’Neill, deputy director of the FBI, resigned in July in protest over this obstruction. O’Neill told them in an interview, “the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it.” In a strange coincidence, O’Neill accepted a position as security chief of the World Trade Center after leaving the FBI, and was killed on September 11.
Confirming Naiz Naik’s account of the secret Berlin meeting, the two French authors add that there was open discussion of the need for the Taliban to facilitate a pipeline from Kazakhstan in order to insure US and international recognition. The increasingly acrimonious US-Taliban talks were broken off August 2, after a final meeting between US envoy Christina Rocca and a Taliban representative in Islamabad. Two months later the United States was bombing Kabul.