"US planned 9/11 attacks to invade Middle East: Iran cmdr." (PressTV-Iran)

Considering much of their recent output, this is one of their relatively sane moments:

A senior Iranian commander says the United States planned the 9/11 terrorist attacks to use them as pretext to invade the energy-rich Middle East.

“The US, looking for a pretext to invade the Middle East, masterminded the 9/11 incident and pointed an accusing finger at Muslim countries,” Commander of the Iranian Army Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan said on Saturday.

Pourdastan added that following the fall of the Soviet Union, the US introduced itself as the world’s sole superpower and moved to instill the new world order to prove its supremacy.

The Iranian commander noted that the US later found its geopolitical policies a failure and decided to follow a geo-economic policy and control the world’s energy resources, 60 percent of which was located in the Middle East.

“To achieve that goal, they launched preemptive attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and Iran was their next target, but wise policies adopted by the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei along with the unity of the Iranian nation prevented them from achieving their objective,” Pourdastan said.

On September 11, 2001, a series of coordinated attacks were carried out in the United States leaving almost 3,000 people dead.

The US, under the administration of former President George W. Bush, invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after claiming that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by members of al-Qaeda harbored by the then Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

The US also attacked Iraq in 2003 claiming that the Middle Eastern country was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Washington’s wars on Iraq and Afghanistan have claimed the lives of more than a million people.