- On 24 August, 1814, things looked very dark for freedom's
land. That was the day the British captured Washington DC and set fire
to the Capitol and the White House. President Madison took refuge in the
nearby Virginia woods where he waited patiently for the notoriously short
attention span of the Brits to kick in, which it did. They moved on and
what might have been a Day of Utter Darkness turned out to be something
of a bonanza for the DC building trades and up-market realtors.
-
- One year after 9/11, we still don't know by whom we were
struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly
plain to many civil-libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of
our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government
which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court
did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected president
with the oil and gas Cheney/Bush junta.
-
- Meanwhile, our more and more unaccountable government
is pursuing all sorts of games around the world that we the spear carriers
(formerly the people) will never learn of. Even so, we have been getting
some answers to the question: why weren't we warned in advance of 9/11?
Apparently, we were, repeatedly; for the better part of a year, we were
told there would be unfriendly visitors to our skies some time in September
2001, but the government neither informed nor protected us despite Mayday
warnings from Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad and even from elements
of our own FBI. A joint panel of congressional intelligence committees
reported (19 September 2002, New York Times) that as early as 1996, Pakistani
terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to federal agents that he was 'learning
to fly in order to crash a plane into CIA HQ'.
-
- Only CIA director George Tenet seemed to take the various
threats seriously. In December 1998, he wrote to his deputies that 'we
are at war' with Osama bin Laden. So impressed was the FBI by his warnings
that by 20 September 2001, 'the FBI still had only one analyst assigned
full time to al-Qaeda'.
-
- From a briefing prepared for Bush at the beginning of
July 2001: 'We believe that OBL [Osama bin Laden] will launch a significant
terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks.
The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties
against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made.
Attack will occur with little or no warning.' And so it came to pass; yet
Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, says she never suspected
that this meant anything more than the kidnapping of planes.
-
- Happily, somewhere over the Beltway, there is Europe
- recently declared anti-Semitic by the US media because most of Europe
wants no war with Iraq and the junta does, for reasons we may now begin
to understand thanks to European and Asian investigators with their relatively
free media.
-
- On the subject 'How and Why America was Attacked on 11
September, 2001', the best, most balanced report, thus far, is by Nafeez
Mossadeq Ahmed ... Yes, yes, I know he is one of Them. But they often know
things that we don't - particularly about what we are up to. A political
scientist, Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research
and Development 'a think-tank dedicated to the promotion of human rights,
justice and peace' in Brighton. His book, 'The War on Freedom', has just
been published in the US by a small but reputable publisher.
-
- Ashmed provides a background for our ongoing war against
Afghanistan, a view that in no way coincides with what the administration
has told us. He has drawn on many sources, most tellingly on American whistleblowers
who are beginning to come forth and hear witness - like those FBI agents
who warned their supervisors that al-Qaeda was planning a kamikaze strike
against New York and Washington only to be told that if they went public
with these warnings they would suffer under the National Security Act.
Several of these agents have engaged David P. Schippers, chief investigative
counsel for the US House Judiciary Committee, to represent them in court.
The majestic Schippers managed the successful impeachment of President
Clinton in the House of Representatives. He may, if the Iraqi war should
go wrong, be obliged to perform the same high service for Bush, who allowed
the American people to go unwarned about an imminent attack upon two of
our cities as pre-emption of a planned military strike by the US against
the Taliban.
-
- The Guardian (26 September 2001) reported that in July
2001, a group of interested parties met in a Berlin hotel to listen to
a former State Department official, Lee Coldren, as he passed on a message
from the Bush administration that 'the United States was so disgusted with
the Taliban that they might be considering some military action ... the
chilling quality of this private warning was that it came - according to
one of those present, the Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik - accompanied by
specific details of how Bush would succeed ...' Four days earlier, the
Guardian had reported that 'Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats
of possible American military action against them two months before the
terrorist assaults on New York and Washington ... [which] raises the possibility
that bin Laden was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he
saw as US threats.' A replay of the 'day of infamy' in the Pacific 62 years
earlier?
-
- Why The US Needed A Eurasian Adventure
-
- On 9 September 2001, Bush was presented with a draft
of a national security presidential directive outlining a global campaign
of military, diplomatic and intelligence action targeting al-Qaeda, buttressed
by the threat of war. According to NBC News: 'President Bush was expected
to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaeda ... but did
not have the chance before the terrorist attacks ... The directive, as
described to NBC News, was essentially the same war plan as the one put
into action after 11 September. The administration most likely was able
to respond so quickly ... because it simply had to pull the plans "off
the shelf".'
-
- Finally, BBC News, 18 September 2001: 'Niak Naik, a former
Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July
that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of
October. It was Naik's view that Washington would not drop its war for
Afghanistan even if bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the
Taliban.'
-
- Was Afghanistan then turned to rubble in order to avenge
the 3,000 Americans slaughtered by Osama? Hardly. The administration is
convinced that Americans are so simple-minded that they can deal with no
scenario more complex than the venerable lone, crazed killer (this time
with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates
us, 'cause we're rich 'n free 'n he's not. Osama was chosen on aesthetic
grounds to be the most frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion
and conquest of Afghanistan, planning for which had been 'contingency'
some years before 9/11 and, again, from 20 December, 2000, when Clinton's
out-going team devised a plan to strike at al-Qaeda in retaliation for
the assault on the warship Cole. Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy
Berger, personally briefed his successor on the plan but Rice, still very
much in her role as director of Chevron-Texaco, with special duties regarding
Pakistan and Uzbekistan, now denies any such briefing. A year and a half
later (12 August, 2002), fearless Time magazine reported this odd memory
lapse.
-
- Osama, if it was he and not a nation, simply provided
the necessary shock to put in train a war of conquest. But conquest of
what? What is there in dismal dry sandy Afghanistan worth conquering? Zbigniew
Brzezinski tells us exactly what in a 1997 Council on Foreign Relations
study called 'The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic
Imperatives'.
-
- The Polish-born Brzezinski was the hawkish National Security
Advisor to President Carter. In 'The Grand Chessboard', Brzezinski gives
a little history lesson. 'Ever since the continents started interacting
politically, some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the centre of world power.'
Eurasia is all the territory east of Germany. This means Russia, the Middle
East, China and parts of India. Brzezinski acknowledges that Russia and
China, bordering oil-rich central Asia, are the two main powers threatening
US hegemony in that area.
-
- He takes it for granted that the US must exert control
over the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, known to those who love
them as 'the Stans': Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan and Kyrgyzstan
all 'of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions
to at least three of their most immediate and most powerful neighbours
- Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China signaling'. Brzezinski notes how
the world's energy consumption keeps increasing; hence, who controls Caspian
oil/gas will control the world economy. Brzezinski then, reflexively, goes
into the standard American rationalization for empire;. We want nothing,
ever, for ourselves, only to keep bad people from getting good things with
which to hurt good people. 'It follows that America's primary interest
is to help ensure that no single [other] power comes to control the geopolitical
space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic
access to it.'
-
- Brzezinski is quite aware that American leaders are wonderfully
ignorant of history and geography so he really lays it on, stopping just
short of invoking politically incorrect 'manifest destiny'. He reminds
the Council just how big Eurasia is. Seventy-five percent of the world's
population is Eurasian. If I have done the sums right, that means that
we've only got control, to date, of a mere 25 percent of the world's folks.
More! 'Eurasia accounts for 60-per cent of the world's GNP and three-fourths
of the world's known energy resources.'
-
- Brzezinski's master plan for 'our' globe has obviously
been accepted by the Cheney-Bush junta. Corporate America, long over-excited
by Eurasian mineral wealth, has been aboard from the beginning.
-
- Ahmed sums up: 'Brzezinski clearly envisaged that the
establishment, consolidation and expansion of US military hegemony over
Eurasia through Central Asia would require the unprecedented, open-ended
militarisation of foreign policy, coupled with an unprecedented manufacture
of domestic support and consensus on this militarisation campaign.'
-
- Afghanistan is the gateway to all these riches. Will
we fight to seize them? It should never be forgotten that the American
people did not want to fight in either of the twentieth century's world
wars, but President Wilson maneuvered us into the First while President
Roosevelt maneuvered the Japanese into striking the first blow at Pearl
Harbor, causing us to enter the Second as the result of a massive external
attack. Brzezinski understands all this and, in 1997, he is thinking ahead
- as well as backward. 'Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural
society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign
policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely
perceived direct external threat.' Thus was the symbolic gun produced that
belched black smoke over Manhattan and the Pentagon.
-
- Since the Iran-Iraq wars, Islam has been demonized as
a Satanic terrorist cult that encourages suicide attacks - contrary, it
should be noted, to the Islamic religion. Osama has been portrayed, accurately,
it would seem, as an Islamic zealot. In order to bring this evil-doer to
justice ('dead or alive'), Afghanistan, the object of the exercise was
made safe not only for democracy but for Union Oil of California whose
proposed pipeline from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan to Pakistan and the
Indian Ocean port of Karachi, had been abandoned under the Taliban's chaotic
regime. Currently, the pipeline is a go-project thanks to the junta's installation
of a Unocal employee (John J Maresca) as US envoy to the newly born democracy
whose president, Hamid Karzai, is also, according to Le Monde, a former
employee of a Unocal subsidiary. Conspiracy? Coincidence!
-
- Once Afghanistan looked to be within the fold, the junta,
which had managed to pull off a complex diplomatic-military caper, - abruptly
replaced Osama, the personification of evil, with Saddam. This has been
hard to explain since there is nothing to connect Iraq with 9/11. Happily,
'evidence' is now being invented. But it is uphill work, not helped by
stories in the press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must - for
the sake of the free world - be reassigned to US and European consortiums.
-
- As Brzezinski foretold, 'a truly massive and widely perceived
direct external threat' made it possible for the President to dance a war
dance before Congress. 'A long war!' he shouted with glee. Then he named
an incoherent Axis of Evil to be fought. Although Congress did not give
him the FDR Special - a declaration of war - he did get permission to go
after Osama who may now be skulking in Iraq.
-
- Bush And The Dog That Did Not Bark
-
- Post-9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory
denunciations of unpatriotic 'conspiracy theorists', who not only are always
with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an
article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet,
a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of corporate America
had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since - well,
at least the bright days of Reagan and deregulation. Ironically, less than
a year after the massive danger from without, we were confronted with an
even greater enemy from within: Golden Calf capitalism. Transparency? One
fears that greater transparency will only reveal armies of maggots at work
beneath the skin of a culture that needs a bit of a lie-down in order to
collect itself before taking its next giant step which is to conquer Eurasia,
a potentially fatal adventure not only for our frazzled institutions but
for us the presently living.
-
- Complicity. The behavior of President George W. Bush
on 11 September certainly gives rise to all sorts of not unnatural suspicions.
I can think of no other modern chief of state who would continue to pose
for 'warm' pictures of himself listening to a young girl telling stories
about her pet goat while hijacked planes were into three buildings.
-
- Constitutionally, Bush is not only chief of state, he
is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Normally, a commander in such
a crisis would go straight to headquarters and direct operations while
receiving the latest intelligence.
-
- This is what Bush actually did - or did not do - according
to Stan Goff, a retired US Army veteran who has taught military science
and doctrine at West Point. Goff writes, in 'The So-called Evidence is
a Farce': 'I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions
about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks. Four planes
get hijacked and deviate from their flight plan, all the while on FAA radar.'
-
- Goff, incidentally, like the other astonished military
experts, cannot fathom why the government's automatic 'standard order of
procedure in the event of a hijacking' was not followed. Once a plane has
deviated from its flight-plan, fighter planes are sent up to find out why.
That is law and does not require presidential approval, which only needs
to be given if there is a decision to shoot down a plane. Goff spells it
out: 'The planes were hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10am. Who is notified?
This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not
notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.
-
- 'By around 8:15am it should be very apparent that something
is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handling teachers. By 8:45am,
when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower, Bush is
settling in with children for his photo op. Four planes have obviously
been hijacked simultaneously and one has just dived into the twin towers,
and still no one notifies the nominal Commander-in-Chief.
-
- 'No one has apparently scrambled [sent aloft] Air Force
interceptors either. At 9:03, Flight 175 crashes into the South Tower.
At 9:05 Andrew Card, the Chief of Staff whispers to Bush [who] "briefly
turns somber" according to reporters. Does he cancel the school visit
and convene an emergency meeting? No. He resumes listening to second-graders
... and continues the banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts
an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington
DC.
-
- 'Has he instructed Card to scramble the Air Force? No.
An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public statement
telling the United States what they have already figured out - that there's
been an attack on the World Trade Centre. There's a hijacked plane bee-lining
to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything
yet? No.
-
- 'At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 [degrees]
over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon
is not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force
in the sky over Alexandria and DC. Now the real kicker: a pilot they want
us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs
and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral descending the
last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and
flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon,
and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of the building at 460
knots.
-
- 'When the theory about learning to fly this well at the
puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they received
further training on a flight simulator. This is like saying you prepared
your teenager for her first drive on the freeway at rush hour by buying
her a video driving game ... There is a story being constructed about these
events.'
-
- There is indeed, and the more it is added to the darker
it becomes. The nonchalance of General Richard B. Myers, acting Joint Chief
of Staff, is as puzzling as the President's campaigning-as-usual act. Myers
was at the Capitol chatting with Senator Max Cleland. A sergeant, writing
later in the AFPS (American Forces Press Service) describes Myers at the
Capitol. 'While in an outer office, he said, he saw a television report
that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre. "They thought it was
a small plane or something like that," Myers said. So the two men
went ahead with the office call.'
-
- Whatever Myers and Cleland had to say to each other (more
funds for the military?) must have been riveting because, during their
chat, the AFPS reports, 'the second tower was hit by another jet. "Nobody
informed us of that," Myers said. "But when we came out, that
was obvious. Then, right at that time, somebody said the Pentagon had been
hit."' Finally, somebody 'thrust a cellphone in Myers' hand' and,
as if by magic, the commanding general of Norad - our Airspace Command
- was on the line just as the hijackers mission had been successfully completed
except for the failed one in Pennsylvania. In later testimony to the Senate
Armed Forces Committee, Myers said he thinks that, as of his cellphone
talk with Norad, 'the decision was at that point to start launching aircraft'.
It was 9:40am. One hour and 20 minutes after air controllers knew that
Flight 11 had been hijacked; 50 minutes after the North Tower was struck.
-
- This statement would have been quite enough in our old
serious army/air force to launch a number of courts martial with an impeachment
or two thrown in. First, Myers claims to be uninformed until the third
strike. But the Pentagon had been overseeing the hijacked planes from at
least the moment of the strike at the first tower: yet not until the third
strike, at the Pentagon, was the decision made to get the fighter planes
up. Finally, this one is the dog that did not bark. By law, the fighters
should have been up at around 8:15. If they had, all the hijacked planes
might have been diverted or shot down. I don't think that Goff is being
unduly picky when he wonders who and what kept the Air Force from following
its normal procedure instead of waiting an hour and 20 minutes until the
damage was done and only then launching the fighters. Obviously, somebody
had ordered the Air Force to make no move to intercept those hijackings
until ... what?
-
- On 21 January 2002, the Canadian media analyst Barry
Zwicker summed up on CBC-TV: 'That morning no interceptors responded in
a timely fashion to the highest alert situation. This includes the Andrews
squadrons which ... are 12 miles from the White House ... Whatever the
explanation for the huge failure, there have been no reports, to my knowledge,
of reprimands. This further weakens the "Incompetence Theory".
Incompetence usually earns reprimands. This causes me to ask whether there
were "stand down" orders.'?? On 29 August 2002, the BBC reports
that on 9/11 there were 'only four fighters on ready status in the north-eastern
US'. Conspiracy? Coincidence? Error?
-
- It is interesting how often in our history, when disaster
strikes, incompetence is considered a better alibi than ... well, yes,
there are worse things. After Pearl Harbor, Congress moved to find out
why Hawaii's two military commanders, General Short and Admiral Kimmel,
had not anticipated the Japanese attack. But President Roosevelt pre-empted
that investigation with one of his own. Short and Kimmel were broken for
incompetence. The 'truth' is still obscure to this day.
-
- The Media's Weapons Of Mass Distraction
-
- But Pearl Harbor has been much studied. 11 September,
it is plain, is never going to be investigated if Bush has anything to
say about it. In January 2002, CNN reported that 'Bush personally asked
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the Congressional investigation
into the events of 11 September ... The request was made at a private meeting
with Congressional leaders ... Sources said Bush initiated the conversation
... He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look
into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed
the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry .. Tuesday's
discussion followed a rare call from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday
to make the same request ...'
-
- The excuse given, according to Daschle, was that 'resources
and personnel would be taken' away from the war on terrorism in the event
of a wider inquiry. So for reasons that we must never know, those 'breakdowns'
are to be the goat. That they were more likely to be not break - but 'stand-downs'
is not for us to pry. Certainly the one-hour 20 minute failure to put fighter
planes in the air could not have been due to a breakdown throughout the
entire Air Force along the East Coast. Mandatory standard operational procedure
had been told to cease and desist.
-
- Meanwhile, the media were assigned their familiar task
of inciting public opinion against bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind.
These media blitzes often resemble the magicians classic gesture of distraction:
as you watch the rippling bright colours of his silk handkerchief in one
hand, he is planting the rabbit in your pocket with the other. We were
quickly assured that Osama's enormous family with its enormous wealth had
broken with him, as had the royal family of his native Saudi Arabia. The
CIA swore, hand on heart, that Osama had not worked for them in the war
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Finally, the rumour that
Bush family had in any way profited by its long involvement with the bin
Laden family was - what else? - simply partisan bad taste.
-
- But Bush Jr's involvement goes back at least to 1979
when his first failed attempt to become a player in the big Texas oil league
brought him together with one James Bath of Houston, a family friend, who
have Bush Jr. $50,000 for a 5 per cent stake in Bush's firm Arbusto Energy.
At this time, according to Wayne Madsen ('In These Times' - Institute for
Public Affairs No. 25), Bath was 'the sole US business representative for
Salem bin Laden, head of the family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama
bin Laden... In a statement issued shortly after the 11 September attacks,
the White House vehemently denied the connection, insisting that Bath invested
his own money, not Salem bin Laden's, in Arbusto. In conflicting statements,
Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in
Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests ... after
several reincarnations, Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy Corporation.'
-
- Behind the Junior Bush is the senior Bush, gainfully
employed by the Carlyle Group which has ownership in at least 164 companies
worldwide, inspiring admiration in that staunch friend to the wealthy,
the Wall Street Journal, which noted, as early as 27 September 2001, 'If
the US boosts defence spending in its quest to stop Osama bin Laden's alleged
terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: bin Laden's
family ... is an investor in a fund established by Carlyle Group, a well-connected
Washington merchant bank specialising in buyouts of defence and aerospace
companies ... Osama is one of more than 50 children of Mohammed bin Laden,
who built the family's $5 billion business.'
-
- But Bush pere et fils, in pursuit of wealth and office,
are beyond shame or, one cannot help but think, good sense. There is a
suggestion that they are blocking investigation of the bin Laden connection
with terrorism. Agent France Press reported on 4 November 2001: 'FBI agents
probing relatives of Saudi-born terror suspect Osama ... were told to back
off soon after George W. Bush became president ...' According to BBC TV's
Newsnight (6 Nov 2001), '... just days after the hijackers took off from
Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the
same airport whisked 11 members of Osama's family off to Saudi Arabia.
That did not concern the White House, whose official line is that the bin
Ladens are above suspicion.' 'Above the Law' (Green Press, 14 February
2002) sums up: 'We had what looked like the biggest failure of the intelligence
community since Pearl Harbor but what we are learning now is it wasn't
a failure, it was a directive.' True? False? Bush Jr will be under oath
during the impeachment interrogation. Will we hear 'What is a directive?
What is is?'
-
- Although the US had, for some years, fingered Osama as
a mastermind terrorist, no serious attempt had been made pre-9/11 to 'bring
him to justice dead or alive, innocent or guilty', as Texan law of the
jungle requires. Clinton's plan to act was given to Condeleezza Rice by
Sandy Berger, you will recall, but she says she does not.
-
- As far back as March 1996 when Osama was in Sudan, Major
General Elfatih Erwa, Sudanese Minister for Defence, offered to extradite
him. According to the Washington Post (3 October 2001), 'Erwa said he would
happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the United States. But if that
would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody
and hand him over ... [US officials] said, "just ask him to leave
the country. Just don't let him go to Somalia", where he had once
been given credit for the successful al-Qaeda attack on American forces
that in '93 that killed 18 Rangers.' Erwa said in an interview, 'We said
he will go to Afghanistan, and they [US officials] said, "Let him."'
-
- In 1996, Sudan expelled Osama and 3,000 of his associates.
Two years later the Clinton administration, in the great American tradition
of never having to say thank you for Sudan's offer to hand over Osama,
proceeded to missile-attack Sudan's al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory on
the grounds that Sudan was harboring bin Laden terrorists who were making
chemical and biological weapons when the factory was simply making vaccines
for the UN.
-
- Four years later, John O'Neill, a much admired FBI agent,
complained in the Irish Times a month before the attacks, 'The US State
Department - and behind it the oil lobby who make up President Bush's entourage
- blocked attempts to prove bin Laden's guilt. The US ambassador to Yemen
forbade O'Neill (and his FBI team) ... from entering Yemen in August 2001.
O'Neill resigned in frustration and took on a new job as head of security
at the World Trade Centre. He died in the 11 September attack.' Obviously,
Osama has enjoyed bipartisan American support since his enlistment in the
CIA's war to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But by 9/11 there was
no Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, indeed there was no Soviet Union.
-
- A World Made Safe For Peace And Pipelines
-
- I watched Bush and Cheney on CNN when the Axis of Evil
speech was given and the 'long war' proclaimed. Iraq, Iran and North Korea
were fingered as enemies to be clobbered because they might or might not
be harbouring terrorists who might or might not destroy us in the night.
So we must strike first whenever it pleases us. Thus, we declared 'war
on terrorism' - an abstract noun which cannot be a war at all as you need
a country for that. Of course, there was innocent Afghanistan, which was
levelled from a great height, but then what's collateral damage - like
an entire country - when you're targeting the personification of all evil
according to Time and the NY Times and the networks?
-
- As it proved, the conquest of Afghanistan had nothing
to do with Osama. He was simply a pretext for replacing the Taliban with
a relatively stable government that would allow Union Oil of California
to lay its pipeline for the profit of, among others, the Cheney-Bush junta.
-
- Background? All right. The headquarters of Unocal are,
as might be expected, in Texas. In December 1997, Taliban representatives
were invited to Sugarland, Texas. At that time, Unocal had already begun
training Afghan men in pipeline construction, with US government approval.
BBC News, (4 December 1997): 'A spokesman for the company Unocal said the
Taliban were expected to spend several days at the company's [Texas] headquarters
... a BBC regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline
across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from
developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea.' The Inter Press
Service (IPS) reported: 'some Western businesses are warming up to the
Taliban despite the movement's institutionalisation of terror, massacres,
abductions and impoverishment.' CNN (6 October 1996): 'The United States
wants good ties [with the Taliban] but can't openly seek them while women
are being oppressed.'
-
- The Taliban, rather better organised than rumoured, hired
for PR one Leila Helms, a niece of Richard Helms, former director of the
CIA. In October 1996, the Frankfurter Rundschau reported that Unocal 'has
been given the go-ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul to build
a pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan ..' This was a
real coup for Unocal as well as other candidates for pipelines, including
Condoleezza's old employer Chevron. Although the Taliban was already notorious
for its imaginative crimes against the human race, the Wall Street Journal,
scenting big bucks, fearlessly announced: 'Like them or not, the Taliban
are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this
moment in history.' The NY Times (26 May 1997) leapt aboard the pipeline
juggernaut. 'The Clinton administration has taken the view that a Taliban
victory would act as counterweight to Iran ... and would offer the possibility
of new trade routes that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence in
the region.'
-
- But by 1999, it was clear that the Taliban could not
provide the security we would need to protect our fragile pipelines. The
arrival of Osama as warrior for Allah on the scene refocused, as it were,
the bidding. New alliances were now being made. The Bush administration
soon buys the idea of an invasion of Afghanistan, Frederick Starr, head
of the Central Asia Institute at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in the
Washington Post (19 December 2000): 'The US has quietly begun to align
itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action
against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out
bin Laden.'
-
- Although with much fanfare we went forth to wreak our
vengeance on the crazed sadistic religious zealot who slaughtered 3,000
American citizens, once that 'war' was under way, Osama was dropped as
irrelevant and so we are back to the Unocal pipeline, now a go-project.
In the light of what we know today, it is unlikely that the junta was ever
going to capture Osama alive: he has tales to tell. One of Defence Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld's best numbers now is: 'Where is he? Somewhere? Here? There?
Somewhere? Who knows?' And we get his best twinkle. He must also be delighted
- and amazed - that the media have bought the absurd story that Osama,
if alive, would still be in Afghanistan, underground, waiting to be flushed
out instead of in a comfortable mansion in Osama-loving Jakarta, 2,000
miles to the East and easily accessible by Flying Carpet One.
-
- Many commentators of a certain age have noted how Hitlerian
our junta sounds as it threatens first one country for harbouring terrorists
and then another. It is true that Hitler liked to pretend to be the injured
- or threatened - party before he struck. But he had many great predecessors
not least Imperial Rome. Stephen Gowan's War in Afghanistan: A $28 Billion
Racket quotes Joseph Schumpeter who, 'in 1919, described ancient Rome in
a way that sounds eerily like the United States in 2001: "There was
no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be
in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they
were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would
be invented ... The fight was always invested with an aura of legality.
Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours."' We have
only outdone the Romans in turning metaphors such as the war on terrorism,
or poverty, or Aids into actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick
at random in order to maintain turbulence in foreign lands.
-
- As of 1 August 2002, trial balloons were going up all
over Washington DC to get world opinion used to the idea that 'Bush of
Afghanistan' had gained a title as mighty as his father's 'Bush of the
Persian Gulf' and Junior was now eager to add Iraq-Babylon to his diadem.
These various balloons fell upon Europe and the Arab world like so many
lead weights. But something new has been added since the classic Roman
Hitlerian mantra, 'they are threatening us, we must attack first'. Now
everything is more of less out in the open. The International Herald Tribune
wrote in August 2002: 'The leaks began in earnest on 5 July, when the New
York Times described a tentative Pentagon plan that it said called for
an invasion by a US force of up to 250,000 that would attack Iraq from
the north, south and west. On 10 July, the Times said that Jordan might
be used as a base for the invasion. The Washington Post reported, 28 July,
that "many senior US military officers contend that Saddam Hussein
poses no immediate threat ..."' And the status quo should be maintained.
Incidentally, this is the sort of debate that the founding fathers intended
the Congress, not military bureaucrats, to conduct in the name of we the
people. But that sort of debate has, for a long time, been denied us.
-
- One refreshing note is now being struck in a fashion
unthinkable in imperial Rome: the cheerful admission that we habitually
resort to provocation. The Tribune continues: 'Donald Rumsfeld has threatened
to jail any one found to have been behind the leaks. But a retired army
general, Fred Woerner, tends to see a method behind the leaks. "We
may already be executing a plan," he said recently. "Are we involved
in a preliminary psychological dimension of causing Iraq to do something
to justify a US attack or make concessions? Somebody knows.' That is plain.
-
- Elsewhere in this interesting edition of the Herald Tribune
wise William Pfaff writes: 'A second Washington debate is whether to make
an unprovoked attack on Iran to destroy a nuclear power reactor being built
with Russian assistance, under inspection by the International Atomic Energy
Agency, within the terms of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of which
Iran is a signatory ... No other government would support such an action,
other than Israel's (which) would do so not because it expected to be attacked
by Iran but because it, not unjustifiably, opposes any nuclear capacity
in the hands of any Islamic government.'
-
- Suspect States And The Tom-Toms Of Revenge
-
- 'Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps,
the most to be dreaded because it compromises and develops the germ of
every other. As the parent of armies, war encourages debts and taxes, the
known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.
In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended ... and
all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the
force, of the people ...' Thus, James Madison warned us at the dawn of
our republic.
-
- Post 9/11, thanks to the 'domination of the few', Congress
and the media are silent while the executive, through propaganda and skewed
polls, seduces the public mind as hitherto unthinkable centers of power
like Homeland Defence (a new Cabinet post to be placed on top of the Defence
Department) are being constructed and 4 per cent of the country has recently
been invited to join Tips, a civilian spy system to report on anyone who
looks suspicious or ... who objects to what the executive is doing at home
or abroad?
-
- Although every nation knows how - if it has the means
and the will - to protect itself from thugs of the sort that brought us
9/11, war is not an option. Wars are for nations not root-less gangs. You
put a price on their heads and hunt them down. In recent years, Italy has
been doing that with the Sicilian Mafia; and no one has yet suggested bombing
Palermo.
-
- But the Cheney-Bush junta wants a war in order to dominate
Afghanistan, build a pipeline, gain control of the oil of Eurasia's Stans
for their business associates as well as to do as much damage to Iraq and
Iran on the grounds that one day those evil countries may carpet our fields
of amber grain with anthrax or something.
-
- The media, never much good a analysis, are more and more
breathless and incoherent. On CNN, even the stolid Jim Clancy started to
hyperventilate when an Indian academic tried to explain how Iraq was once
our ally and 'friend' in its war against our Satanic enemy Iran. 'None
of that conspiracy stuff,' snuffed Clancy. Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff'
is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.
-
- As of August, at least among economists, a consensus
was growing that, considering our vast national debt (we borrow $2 billion
a day to keep the government going) and a tax base seriously reduced by
the junta in order to benefit the 1 per cent who own most of the national
wealth, there is no way that we could ever find the billions needed to
destroy Iraq in 'a long war' or even a short one, with most of Europe lined
up against us. Germany and Japan paid for the Gulf War, reluctantly - with
Japan, at the last moment, irritably quarrelling over the exchange rate
at the time of the contract. Now Germany's Schroder has said no. Japan
is mute.
-
- But the tom-toms keep beating revenge; and the fact that
most of the world is opposed to our war seems only to bring hectic roses
to the cheeks of the Bush administration (Bush Snr of the Carlyle Group,
Bush Jnr formerly of Harken, Cheney, formerly of Halliburton, Rice, formerly
of Chevron, Rumsfeld, formerly of Occidental). If ever an administration
should recuse itself in matters dealing with energy, it is the current
junta. But this is unlike any administration in our history. Their hearts
are plainly elsewhere, making money, far from our mock Roman temples, while
we, alas, are left only with their heads, dreaming of war, preferably against
weak peripheral states.
-
- Mohammed Heikal is a brilliant Egyptian journalist-observer,
and sometime Foreign Minister. On 10 October 2001, he said to the Guardian:
'Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation of this magnitude.
When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaeda as if it were Nazi Germany or the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what is there.
Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was
monitored and al-Qaeda has been penetrated by US intelligence, Pakistani
intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not
have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organisation
and sophistication.
-
- The former president of Germany's domestic intelligence
service, Eckehardt Werthebach (American Free Press, 4 December 2001) spells
it out. The 9/11 attacks required 'years of planning' while their scale
indicates that they were a product of 'state-organised actions'. There
it is. Perhaps, after all, Bush Jnr was right to call it a war. But which
state attacked us?
-
- Will the suspects please line up. Saudi Arabia? 'No,
no. Why we are paying you $50 million a year for training the royal bodyguard
on our own holy if arid soil. True the kingdom contains many wealthy well-educated
enemies but ...' Bush Snr and Jnr exchange a knowing look. Egypt? No way.
Dead broke despite US baksheesh. Syria? No funds. Iran? Too proud to bother
with a parvenu state like the US. Israel? Sharon is capable of anything.
But he lacks the guts and the grace of the true Kamikaze. Anyway, Sharon
was not in charge when this operation began with the planting of 'sleepers'
around the US flight schools 5 or 6 years ago. The United States? Elements
of corporate America would undeniably prosper from a 'massive external
attack' that would make it possible for us to go to war whenever the President
sees fit while suspending civil liberties. (The 342 pages of the USA Patriot
Act were plainly prepared before 9/11.) Bush Snr and Jnr are giggling now.
Why? Because Clinton was president back then. As the former president leaves
the line of suspects, he says, more in anger than in sorrow: 'When we left
the White House we had a plan for an all-out war on al-Qaeda. We turned
it over to this administration and they did nothing. Why?' Biting his lip,
he goes. The Bushes no longer giggle. Pakistan breaks down: 'I did it!
I confess! I couldn't help myself. Save me. I am an evil-doer!'
-
- Apparently, Pakistan did do it - or some of it. We must
now go back to 1997 when 'the largest covert operation in the history of
the CIA' was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Central Asia specialist Ahmed Rashid wrote (Foreign Affairs, November-December
1999): 'With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter
Services Intelligence) who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global
war, waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim
radicals, from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between
1982 and '92 ... more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly
influenced by the Afghanistan jihad.' The CIA covertly trained and sponsored
these warriors.
-
- In March 1985, President Reagan issued National Security
Decision Directive 166, increasing military aid while CIA specialists met
with the ISI counterparts near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Jane's Defence Weekly
(14 September 2001) gives the best overview: 'The trainers were mainly
from Pakistan's ISI agency who learnt their craft from American Green Beret
commandos and Navy Seals in various US training establishments.' This explains
the reluctance of the administration to explain why so many unqualified
persons, over so long a time, got visas to visit our hospitable shores.
While in Pakistan, 'mass training of Afghan [zealots] was subsequently
conducted by the Pakistan army under the supervision of the elite Special
Services ... In 1988, with US knowledge, bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The
Base); a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread
across 26 or so countries. Washington turned a blind eye to al-Qaeda.'
-
- When Mohamed Atta's plane struck the World Trade Centre's
North Tower, George W. Bush and the child at the Florida elementary school
were discussing her goat. By coincidence, our word 'tragedy' comes from
the Greek: for 'goat' tragos plus oide for 'song'. 'Goat-song'. It is highly
suitable that this lament, sung in ancient satyr plays, should have been
heard again at the exact moment when we were struck by fire from heaven,
and a tragedy whose end is nowhere in sight began for us.
-
- © Gore Vidal
-
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