IF there ever was a question in the minds of the billions of people around the world as Americans remembered the victims of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, it must have been this: Why was an alleged war criminal like former United States president George W. Bush invited to deliver a speech at the event?
How is it that a man who caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people was able to walk up to the podium, without an ounce of guilt, and say the "world was loud with carnage" when he was the one who unleashed it on helpless nations?
Bush, together with his partner in crime former British prime minister Tony Blair, even manufactured a lie to invade Iraq. True, Bush and Blair are, like everybody else, innocent until proven guilty.
But this is only half the story. The other half of the story is neither Britain nor the US is allowing them to be investigated or tried for the alleged crimes that they and their armies committed.
We saw Western hypocrisy on full display when the International Criminal Court (ICC) tried to investigate US forces over alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan.
Former president Donald Trump went so far as to impose sanctions on key officers of the ICC. A nation that respects the principles of law and order will not act like this.
So long as Bush, Blair and those who were complicit in the war crimes remain free, the charge of shamelessness and hypocrisy will continue to haunt America. Here is why.
British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith is right. The Sept 11 attacks should have led to a criminal investigation, not a war, he writes in Al Jazeera.
Take the case of Timothy McVeigh, a member of the "Patriot Movement", who detonated a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring 680 others.
Like other members of his group, and not unlike the Sept 11 attackers, McVeigh thought that America had gone wrong in a big way, and that something must be done about it.
And the "something" was a private war against America. Yet, it was criminal investigation for McVeigh and war for the Sept 11 attackers. Then there is the legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where prisoners are kept without trial for the specific purpose of torture of the worst kind.
Waterboarding, a torture technique borrowed from the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, was Bush's favourite. This in the age of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. In a manner of speaking, America is a legal black hole like Guantanamo Bay.
There the criminal laws of the US are not ready, able or willing to investigate, put on trial and imprison alleged American war criminals like Bush. It is a legal black hole, too, for the ICC.
Now we know why Bush takes to the podium talking about the "horror at the scale of destruction" of Sept 11 and none at all about the horrors he unleashed around the world.
And there are book tours, too. Nowhere is an alleged war criminal celebrated as much as in the US. And so the impunity of America continues.
Let's ask America an overwhelming question: Was the American Declaration of Independence wrong to say that "all men are created equal"?