- I've added a few url's from oil industry
websites to this forwarded email as further evidence of Enron's involvement
in the motivation for the war in Afghanistan. Reading this material will
allow you to see the Enron scandal and its ties to Bush-Cheney in a whole
new light. To find thousands of other energy industry website articles
on this do a GOOGLE search http://www.google.com using these keywords:
Pipeline Enron Uzbekistan Cheney Halliburton
-
- --Robert
-
- Enron and the oil pipeline deal http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/ntc85031.htm
"Enron/Uzbek Oil and Gas: Represented a multinational energy company
in connection with its joint venture to develop an oil and gas deposit
in Uzbekistan." http://www.mbpprojectfinance.com/transactions/s_oilgas.html
http://www.advancenet.net/~k_a/uzbekistan/companies.htm
-
- "The one serious drawback companies
have faced is getting the supplies to the right market, the energy-hungry
Asian Pacific economies. Afghanistan -- the only Central Asian country
with very little oil -- is by far the best route to transport the oil to
Asia. Enron, the biggest contributor to the Bush-Cheney campaign of 2000,
conducted the feasibility study for a US$2.5 billion trans-Caspian gas
pipeline which is being built under a joint venture agreement signed in
February 1999 between Turkmenistan, Bechtel and General Electric Capital
Services." http://www.moles.org/ProjectUnderground/drillbits/6_08/1.html
-
- "UZBEKISTAN - The U.S. Overseas
Private Investment Corp. (OPIC) has agreed to provide $400 million in financing
for a joint venture of Uzbekneftegaz and Enron oil and Gas Co. (Houston)
to develop a clutch of gas fields in Uzbekistan. It is the largest OPIC
commitment in Central Asia thus far." http://www.moles.org/ProjectUnderground/drillbits/0801/96080107.html
-
- Here's an email I recieved this morning.
You may already know about the oil pipeline deal in Afghanistan and the
Bush threats to the Taliban to invade BEFORE 9/11 but these links show
how Enron and the new Afghan leader we just installed are all directly
connected to Bush, to the so-called war, Cheney refusing to reveal who
he met with and the supression of the 9/11 investigation Bush has threatened
Congress with. --------------------------------------------------
-
- FORWARD:
- From: The Daily Brew: http://www.thedailybrew.com/
-
- The Motive
-
- For years, US oil interests have been
trying to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to access the oil and gas
around the Caspian Sea; efforts that have continued past the 9-11 attacks.
-
- Source http://www.wluml.org/english/new-archives/wtc/at-stake/unocal.htm
-
- Enron was a key player in this game.
Way back in 1996, Enron had cut a deal with the president of Uzbekistan
for joint development of the nation's natural gas fields.
-
- Source Houston Chronicle Date: TUE 06/25/96
Section: Business Page: 4 Edition: 3 STAR (sorry, no link)
-
-
- Enron had also done the feasibility study
for the pipeline.
-
- Source http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html
-
-
- For a time, the Taliban appeared to be
a potential partner. They had even visited Sugarland, Texas to talk things
over.
-
- Source
-
- http://news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/west_asia/newsid_37000/37021.st
m
-
-
- The Crime
-
- Unfortunately, the talks broke down,
and by late last summer, the US Government was threatening to commence
war against Afghanistan (an attack which would have violated every precept
of international law).
-
- Sources
-
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1550000/1550366.stm
-
-
- *****
- (Inserted by Jack) BBC Audio of report
on US intentions to invade Afghanistan BEFORE Sept 11th
-
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1550000/audio/_1550366_afghan01_arney.ram
-
- *****
-
-
- At least twice, Bush conveyed the message
to the Taliban that the United States would hold the regime responsible
for an al Qaeda attack. But after concluding that bin Laden's group had
carried out the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, a conclusion stated
without hedge in a Feb. 9 briefing for Vice President Cheney, the new administration
did not choose to order armed forces into action.
-
- Source http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8734-2002Jan19.html
-
- Simultaneous with making, but not following
through on these threats, Bush took a number of actions to make the US
decidedly more vulnerable to a terrorist attack. He ordered the Naval strike
force, which Clinton placed in the Indian Ocean on 24 hour alert so he
could hit Osama as soon as he had solid intelligence, to stand down. Bush
threatened to veto the Defense Appropriations Bill after Democrats tried
to move $600 million out of Star Wars and into anti-terror defense. Bush
opposed Clinton's anti-money-laundering efforts, which were designed to
stop al Qaeda's money. Bush abandoned Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah
Massoud, or as the two star general Donald Kerrick told the Washington
Post, reflecting on his service to both President Clinton and President
Bush: Clinton's advisors met nearly weekly on how to stop bin Laden and
al Qaeda. "I didn't detect that kind of focus" from the Bush
Administration.
-
- Source http://democrats.com/view.cfm?id=5714
-
-
- I don't have to tell you what happened
next.
-
-
- The Cover Up
-
- Dick Cheney is openly breaking the law
by defying GAO requests to turn over his records of meetings with Enron.
-
- Source http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20020201.html
-
- At the same time that Cheney has refused
to turn over his records, Enron and its accountants have shredded millions
of pages of documents.
-
- Source http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/30/business/30SHRE.html
-
- The Bush's themselves may have destroyed
evidence. When the Justice Department instructed the Bush administration
to preserve any documents related to Enron Corporation, a senior administration
official said that until now, "the White House had not been making
any formal effort to preserve or catalogue information about Enron contacts."
-
- Source http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10918-2002Feb1.html
-
- While all of this law breaking, stalling,
and destruction of evidence has gone on, Bush has asked Daschle to limit
Congressional probes into Sept. 11.
-
- Source http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/01/29/inv.terror.probe/index.html
-
- Note that the supposedly "liberal
press" has so far failed to put all of these pieces together. They
are too busy giving Bernard Goldberg and Bill O'Reilly the airtime to sell
a canard called "Bias." ___
-
-
- TheDailyBrew.com
-
- Centre for Research on Globalisation
- http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html
-
-
- Afghanistan, the Taliban and
the Bush Oil Team
-
- By Wayne Madsen Democrats.com,
January 2002
-
- Centre for Research on Globalisation
(CRG) globalresearch.ca 23 January 2002
-
- According to Afghan, Iranian, and Turkish
government sources, Hamid Karzai, the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan,
was a top adviser to the El Segundo, California-based UNOCAL Corporation
which was negotiating with the Taliban to construct a Central Asia Gas
(CentGas) pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan.
-
- Karzai, the leader of the southern Afghan
Pashtun Durrani tribe, was a member of the mujaheddin that fought the Soviets
during the 1980s. He was a top contact for the CIA and maintained close
relations with CIA Director William Casey, Vice President George Bush,
and their Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) Service interlocutors.
Later, Karzai and a number of his brothers moved to the United States under
the auspices of the CIA. Karzai continued to serve the agency's interests,
as well as those of the Bush Family and their oil friends in negotiating
the CentGas deal, according to Middle East and South Asian sources.
-
- When one peers beyond all of the rhetoric
of the White House and Pentagon concerning the Taliban, a clear pattern
emerges showing that construction of the trans-Afghan pipeline was a top
priority of the Bush administration from the outset. Although UNOCAL claims
it abandoned the pipeline project in December 1998, the series of meetings
held between U.S., Pakistani, and Taliban officials after 1998, indicates
the project was never off the table.
-
- Quite to the contrary, recent meetings
between U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain and that country's
oil minister Usman Aminuddin indicate the pipeline project is international
Project Number One for the Bush administration. Chamberlain, who maintains
close ties to the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan (a one-time chief money
conduit for the Taliban), has been pushing Pakistan to begin work on its
Arabian Sea oil terminus for the pipeline.
-
- Meanwhile, President Bush says that U.S.
troops will remain in Afghanistan for the long haul. Far from being engaged
in Afghan peacekeeping -- the Europeans are doing much of that -- our troops
will effectively be guarding pipeline construction personnel that will
soon be flooding into the country.
-
- Karzai's ties with UNOCAL and the Bush
administration are the main reason why the CIA pushed him for Afghan leader
over rival Abdul Haq, the assassinated former mujaheddin leader from Jalalabad,
and the leadership of the Northern Alliance, seen by Langley as being too
close to the Russians and Iranians. Haq had no apparent close ties to the
U.S. oil industry and, as both a Pushtun and a northern Afghani, was popular
with a wide cross-section of the Afghan people, including the Northern
Alliance. Those credentials likely sealed his fate.
-
- When Haq entered Afghanistan from Pakistan
last October, his position was immediately known to Taliban forces, which
subsequently pinned him and his small party down, captured, and executed
them. Former Reagan National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, who worked
with Haq, vainly attempted to get the CIA to help rescue Haq. The agency
claimed it sent a remotely-piloted armed drone to attack the Taliban but
its actions were too little and too late. Some observers in Pakistan claim
the CIA tipped off the ISI about Haq's journey and the Pakistanis, in turn,
informed the Taliban. McFarlane, who runs a K Street oil consulting firm,
did not comment on further questions about the circumstances leading to
the death of Haq.
-
- While Haq was not part of the Bush administration's
GOP (Grand Oil Plan) for South Asia, Karzai was a key player on the Bush
Oil team. During the late 1990s, Karzai worked with an Afghani-American,
Zalmay Khalilzad, on the CentGas project. Khalilzad is President Bush's
Special National Security Assistant and recently named presidential Special
Envoy for Afghanistan. Interestingly, in the White House press release
naming Khalilzad special envoy, no mention was made of his past work for
UNOCAL. Khalilzad has worked on Afghan issues under National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice, a former member of the board of Chevron, itself no innocent
bystander in the future CentGas deal. Rice made an impression on her old
colleagues at Chevron. The company has named one of their supertankers
the SS Condoleezza Rice.
-
- Khalilzad, a fellow Pashtun and the son
of a former government official under King Mohammed Zahir Shah, was, in
addition to being a consultant to the RAND Corporation, a special liaison
between UNOCAL and the Taliban government. Khalilzad also worked on various
risk analyses for the project.
-
- Khalilzad's efforts complemented those
of the Enron Corporation, a major political contributor to the Bush campaign.
Enron, which recently filed for bankruptcy in the single biggest corporate
collapse in the nation's history, conducted the feasibility study for the
CentGas deal. Vice President Cheney held several secret meetings with top
Enron officials, including its Chairman Kenneth Lay, earlier in 2001. These
meetings were presumably part of Cheney's non-public Energy Task Force
sessions. A number of Enron stockholders, including Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, became officials in
the Bush administration. In addition, Thomas White, a former Vice Chairman
of Enron and a multimillionaire in Enron stock, currently serves as the
Secretary of the Army.
-
- A chief benefactor in the CentGas deal
would have been Halliburton, the huge oil pipeline construction firm that
also had its eye on the Central Asian oil reserves. At the time, Halliburton
was headed by Dick Cheney. After Cheney's selection as Bush's Vice Presidential
candidate, Halliburton also pumped a huge amount of cash into the Bush-Cheney
campaign coffers. And like oil cash cow Enron, there were Wall Street rumors
in late December that Halliburton, which suffered a forty per cent drop
in share value, might follow Enron into bankruptcy court.
-
- Assisting with the CentGas negotiations
with the Taliban was Laili Helms, the niece-in-law of former CIA Director
Richard Helms. Laili Helms, also a relative of King Zahir Shah, was the
Taliban's unofficial envoy to the United States and arranged for various
Taliban officials to visit the United States. Laili Helms' base of operations
was in her home in Jersey City on the Hudson River. Ironically, most of
her work on behalf of the Taliban was practically conducted in the shadows
of the World Trade Center, just across the river.
-
- Laili Helms' liaison work for the Taliban
paid off for Big Oil. In December 1997, the Taliban visited UNOCAL's Houston
refinery operations. Interestingly, the chief Taliban leader based in Kandahar,
Mullah Mohammed Omar, now on America's international Most Wanted List,
was firmly in the UNOCAL camp. His rival Taliban leader in Kabul, Mullah
Mohammed Rabbani (not to be confused with the head of the Northern Alliance
Burhanuddin Rabbani), favored Bridas, an Argentine oil company, for the
pipeline project. But Mullah Omar knew UNOCAL had pumped large sums of
money to the Taliban hierarchy in Kandahar and its expatriate Afghan supporters
in the United States. Some of those supporters were also close to the Bush
campaign and administration. And Kandahar was the city near which the CentGas
pipeline was to pass, a lucrative deal for the otherwise desert outpost.
-
- While Clinton's State Department omitted
Afghanistan from the top foreign policy priority list, the Bush administration,
beholden to the oil interests that pumped millions of dollars into the
2000 campaign, restored Afghanistan to the top of the list, but for all
the wrong reasons. After Bush's accession to the presidency, various Taliban
envoys were received at the State Department, CIA, and National Security
Council. The CIA, which appears, more than ever, to be a virtual extended
family of the Bush oil interests, facilitated a renewed approach to the
Taliban. The CIA agent who helped set up the Afghan mujaheddin, Milt Bearden,
continued to defend the interests of the Taliban. He bemoaned the fact
that the United States never really bothered to understand the Taliban
when he told the Washington Post last October, "We never heard what
they were trying to say... We had no common language. Ours was, 'Give up
bin Laden.' They were saying, 'Do something to help us give him up.' "
-
- There were even reports that the CIA
met with their old mujaheddin operative bin Laden in the months before
September 11 attacks. The French newspaper Le Figaro quoted an Arab specialist
named Antoine Sfeir who postulated that the CIA met with bin Laden in July
in a failed attempt to bring him back under its fold. Sfeir said the CIA
maintained links with bin Laden before the U.S. attacked his terrorist
training camps in Afghanistan in 1998 and, more astonishingly, kept them
going even after the attacks. Sfeir told the paper, "Until the last
minute, CIA agents hoped bin Laden would return to U.S. command, as was
the case before 1998." Bin Laden actually officially broke with the
US in 1991 when US troops began arriving in Saudi Arabia during Operation
Desert Storm. Bin Laden felt this was a violation of the Saudi regime's
responsibility to protect the Islamic Holy Shrines of Mecca and Medina
from the infidels. Bin Laden's anti-American and anti-House of Saud rhetoric
soon reached a fever pitch.
-
- The Clinton administration made numerous
attempts to kill Bin Laden. In August 1998, Al Qaeda operatives blew up
several U.S. embassies in Africa. In response, Bill Clinton ordered cruise
missiles to be launched from US ships in the Persian Gulf into Afghanistan,
which missed Bin Laden by a few hours. The Clinton administration also
devised a plan with Pakistan's ISI to send a team of assassins into Afghanistan
to kill Bin Laden. But Pakistan's government was overthrown by General
Musharraf, who was viewed as particularly close to the Taliban. The CIA
cancelled its plans, fearing Musharraf's ISI would tip off the Taliban
and Bin Laden. . The CIA's connections to the ISI in the months before
September 11 and the weeks after are also worthy of a full-blown investigation.
The CIA continues to maintain an unhealthy alliance with the ISI, the organization
that groomed bin Laden and the Taliban. Last September, the head of the
ISI, General Mahmud Ahmed, was fired by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf
for his pro-Taliban leanings and reportedly after the U.S. government presented
Musharraf with disturbing intelligence linking the general to the terrorist
hijackers.
-
- General Ahmed was in Washington, DC on
the morning of September 11 meeting with CIA and State Department officials
as the hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Later, both the Northern Alliance spokesman in Washington, Haron Amin,
and Indian intelligence, in an apparent leak to The Times of India, confirmed
that General Ahmed ordered a Pakistani-born British citizen and known terrorist
named Ahmed Umar Sheik to wire $100,000 from Pakistan to the U.S. bank
account of Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker.
-
- When the FBI traced calls made between
General Ahmed and Sheik's cellular phone - the number having been supplied
by Indian intelligence to the FBI - a pattern linking the general with
Sheik clearly emerged. According to The Times of India, the revelation
that General Ahmed was involved in the Sheik-Atta money transfer was more
than enough for a nervous and embarrassed Bush administration. It pressed
Musharraf to dump General Ahmed. Musharraf mealy-mouthed the announcement
of his general's dismissal by stating Ahmed "requested" early
retirement.
-
- Sheik was well known to the Indian police.
He was arrested in New Delhi in 1994 for plotting to kidnap four foreigners,
including an American citizen. Sheik was released by the Indians in 1999
in a swap for passengers on board New Delhi-bound Indian Airlines flight
814, hijacked by Islamic militants from Kathmandu, Nepal to Kandahar, Afghanistan.
India continues to believe the ISI played a part in the hijacking since
the hijackers were affiliated with the pro-bin Laden Kashmiri terrorist
group, Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin, a group only recently and quite belatedly
placed on the State Department's terrorist list. The ISI and bin Laden's
Al Qaeda reportedly assists the group in its operations against Indian
government targets in Kashmir.
-
- The FBI, which assisted its Indian counterpart
in the investigation of the Indian Airlines hijacking, says it wants information
leading to the arrest of those involved in the terrorist attacks. Yet,
no move has been made to question General Ahmed or those U.S. government
officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who met
with him in September. Clearly, General Ahmed was a major player in terrorist
activities across South Asia, yet still had very close ties to the U.S.
government. General Ahmed's terrorist-supporting activities - and the U.S.
government officials who tolerated those activities - need to be investigated.
-
- The Taliban visits to Washington continued
up to a few months prior to the September 11 attacks. The State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research's South Asian Division maintained constant
satellite telephone contact with the Taliban in Kandahar and Kabul. Washington
permitted the Taliban to maintain a diplomatic office in Queens, New York
headed by Taliban diplomat Abdul Hakim Mojahed. In addition, U.S. officials,
including Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina
Rocca, who is also a former CIA officer, visited Taliban diplomatic officials
in Islamabad. In the meantime, the Bush administration took a hostile attitude
towards the Islamic State of Afghanistan, otherwise known as the Northern
Alliance. Even though the United Nations recognized the alliance as the
legitimate government of Afghanistan, the Bush administration, with oil
at the forefront of its goals, decided to follow the lead of Saudi Arabia
and Pakistan and curry favor with the Taliban mullahs of Afghanistan. The
visits of Islamist radicals did not end with the Taliban. In July 2001,
the head of Pakistan's pro-bin Laden Jamiaat-i-Islami Party, Qazi Hussein
Ahmed, also reportedly was received at the George Bush Center for Intelligence
(aka, CIA headquarters) in Langley, Virginia.
-
- According to the Washington Post, the
Special Envoy of Mullah Omar, Rahmatullah Hashami, even came to Washington
bearing a gift carpet for President Bush from the one-eyed Taliban leader.
The Village Voice reported that Hashami, on behalf of the Taliban, offered
the Bush administration to hold on to bin Laden long enough for the United
States to capture or kill him but, inexplicably, the administration refused.
Meanwhile, Spozhmai Maiwandi, the director of the Voice of America's Pashtun
service, jokingly nicknamed "Kandahar Rose" by her colleagues,
aired favorable reports on the Taliban, including a controversial interview
with Mullah Omar.
-
- The Bush administration's dalliances
with the Taliban may have even continued after the start of the bombing
campaign against their country. According to European intelligence sources,
a number of European governments were concerned that the CIA and Big Oil
were pressuring the Bush administration not to engage in an initial serious
ground war on behalf of the Northern Alliance in order to placate Pakistan
and its Taliban compatriots. The early-on decision to stick with an incessant
air bombardment, they reasoned, was causing too many civilian deaths and
increasing the shakiness of the international coalition.
-
- The obvious, and woefully underreported,
interfaces between the Bush administration, UNOCAL, the CIA, the Taliban,
Enron, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, the groundwork for which was laid when
the Bush Oil team was on the sidelines during the Clinton administration,
is making the Republicans worried. Vanquished vice presidential candidate
Joseph Lieberman is in the ironic position of being the senator who will
chair the Senate Government Affairs Committee hearings on the collapse
of Enron. The roads from Enron also lead to Afghanistan and murky Bush
oil politics.
-
- UNOCAL was also clearly concerned about
its past ties to the Taliban. On September 14, just three days after terrorists
of the Afghan-base al Qaeda movement crashed their planes into the World
Trade Center and Pentagon, UNOCAL issued the following statement: "The
company is not supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan in any way whatsoever.
Nor do we have any project or involvement in Afghanistan. Beginning in
late 1997, Unocal was a member of a multinational consortium that was evaluating
construction of a Central Asia Gas pipeline between Turkmenistan and Pakistan
[via western Afghanistan]. Our company has had no further role in developing
or funding that project or any other project that might involve the Taliban."
-
- The Bush Oil Team, which can now rely
on the support of the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan, may think
that war and oil profits mix. But there is simply too much evidence that
the War in Afghanistan was primarily about building UNOCAL's pipeline,
not about fighting terrorism. The Democrats, who control the Senate and
its investigation agenda, should investigate the secretive deals between
Big Oil, Bush, and the Taliban.
-
- Copyright Wayne Madsen 2002. Reprinted
for fair use only.
-
- The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html
|
