Today is September 11th and I am thinking of a guy named Nikola Kavaja. Who is Nikola Kavaja? The short answer may be that he is a man of much experience, but mostly a professional assassin. A few years ago, The Paris Review published an interview Christopher Stewart conducted with Kavaja, which is reprinted here in Britain’s Independent newspaper.

Among all of Kavaja’s exploits, the one that is well documented is his hijacking of an airliner in Chicago en route to New York. He had then planned to switch to a larger airplane, fly across the Atlantic to Yugoslavia, and crash the plane into the Usce building in Belgrade and kill then-president Tito and leading members of the communist government.

This was in 1979. What isn’t so surprising is that Kavaja’s efforts were at least partly sanctioned and perhaps even funded by the CIA. When I first read about this, I was genuinely surprised to learn that someone else had planned on hijacking an airplane and flying it into a building.

I was even more surprised when I learned about a plan called Operation Northwoods which was dreamed up by the U.S. government in the early 1960s. It called for terrorist attacks either in the U.S. or on U.S. interests abroad that could be blamed on the Cuban government and thus justify a response against Cuba. Part of the plan involved simulated hijacking of aircraft and the actual sacrificing of innocent lives in order to reach certain geopolitical goals, namely to provoke Cuba and justify an attack. You can read more about Operation Northwoods here.

I mention this today because in all of the commemoration and rememberance of the horrible events of this day 7 years ago, not enough has been done to investigate the causes of those events, and more specifically our own government’s role in different regions of the world and its involvement with suspect individuals and governments which leads to what the CIA calls “blowback”, an innocuous term for the terrible events of September 11th.