The Enemy Within

Gore Vidal 10-27-2002

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 aroung 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 sometime in September, 2001, but the government neither informed or protected us despite mayday warnings from Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad and even 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 the 20th of 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 will launch a significant terrorist attack against the 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 Condolezza 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 American 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 devoted 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.

Ahmed 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 many sources, most tellingly on American whistle-blowers who are beginning to come forth and bear witness-like those FBI agents who warned their superiors that al-Qaeda was planning a kamikaze strike against new York and Washington only to be told if they went public with these warnings they would suffer under the National Security Act. Several of these agents have engaged David P. Shippers, chief investigative counsel for the US House Judiciary Committee, to represent them in court. The majestic Shippers 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 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 'US 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 has 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 a draft of a national security presidential directive outlining a global 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 September 11. 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: 'Niaz naik, a former pakistani foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials in Mid-July that military action against Afganistan 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 some 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 frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan, planning for which had been 'contingency' some time before 9/11 and, again, from 20 December 2000, when Clinton's outgoing team devised a plan to strike 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 a 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 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 center 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 on 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 neighbors-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 we've only got control, to date, of a mere 25% of the world's folks. more! 'Eurasia accounts for 60% of the world's GNP and 75% 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 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 militarsation campaign'.

Afghanistan is the gateway to all of these riches. will we fight to sieze them? It should never be forgotten that the American people did not want to fight in either of the 20th 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 a result of a massive external attack. Brzezinski understands all this stuff 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 case of a 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 excercise, 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 the 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 dawn of the age 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 George W. Bush on 11 September gives rise to all sorts of not unnatural suspicions. I can think of no other modern chief 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 flown into three famous 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 San Goff, a retired US Army veteran who has taught military science and doctrine at West Point. Goff writes, in 'The So-Called Evidence 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 paths, all 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 it's 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 that is already 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 wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers. By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower, Bush is settling in with children for his photo-op. Four planes have been simultaneously hijacked 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 already have figured out-that there's been an attack on the World Trade Center. There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force scrambled to defen 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 schooled for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral descending 7,000 feet in two-and-one-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 450 knots.

'When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper 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 Chiefs of Staff, is as puzzling as the Presidents campaign-as-usual act. Myers was at the Capitol chatting with Senator Max Cleland. A sergeant writing later in the AFPS (Armed Forces Press Services) 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 Center. "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 cell phone 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 says he thinks that, as of his cell phone 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 of 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 8:15am. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been diverted or shot down. I don't think Goff is being unduly picky when he wonders who and what kept the Air Force from following its normal procedures 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 Jan. 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 shy 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. Kimmel and Short were broken for incompetence. The 'truth' is still obscured to this day.

The Media's Weapons of Mass Distraction

But Pearl harbor has been much studied. September 11, 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 Daschle to limit the Congressional investigation into the events of 9/11...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 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 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 operating procedure had been 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 colors 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 it's 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 the Bush family had in any way profited by way of it's involvement with the bin Laden family was-what else?-simply partisan bad taste.

But Bush Jr.s involvement goes back to at least 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 gave Bush Jr. $50,000 for a 5% 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) of Osama bin Laden, In a statement issued shortly after the 9/11 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 Carlye Group, which has ownership in at least 164 companies worldwide, inspiring admiration in that staunch friend of the wealthy, the Wall Street Journal, which noted, as early as 27 September 2001, "If the US boosts defense spending in it's quest to stop Osama bin Laden alleged terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: bin Laden's family.. is an investor in a fund established by Carlye Group, a well connected Washington Merchants bank specializing in buyouts of defense and aerospace companies...Osama is one of more than 50 children of Mohammed bin Laden, who built the family's 5 billion dollar 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. Agence France Press reported on 4 Nov. 2001 "FBI agents probing relatives of Suai-born terror suspect Osama...were told to back off soon after George W. Bush became president..." According to BBC TV's Newsnight (8 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 Feb. 2002) "We had what looked like the biggest failure of the intelligence community since Pearl Harbor but what we are learning from it now is it wasn't a failure, it was a directive.' True or 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 gulity', as Texan law of the jungle requires. Clinton's plan to act was given to Condoleezza 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 Defense, offered to extradite him. According to the Washington Post (3 Oct. 2001), 'Erwa said he would happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the US. 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 fro the successful al-Qaeda attack on American forces in '93 that killed 18 Rangers." Erwa said in an interview "We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they (the 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 Ameican tradition of never having to say thank you for Sudan's offer to hand over Osama, proceeded to missile-attack Sudan's al-Shita 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 year later, John O'Neill, a much admired FBI agent, complained in the Irish Times a month before the 9/11 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 Center. He died in the 9/11 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 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 destroy us in the night. So we must strike first whenever it pleases us. Thsu, we declared 'war on terrorism' - an abstract noun 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 it's pipeline for profit of, among others, the Bush-Cheney junta.

Background? All right. The headquarters of Unocal are, as might be expected, in Texas. In Dec. 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 Dec. 1997) "A spokesman for the company Unocal said the Taliban were expected to spend several days at the companies Texas headquarters...a BBC regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to develop 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 institutionalization of terror, massacres, abductions and impoverishment". CNN (6 Oct. 1996) " the US wants good ties (with the Taliban) but can't openly seek them while women are being oppressed."

The Taliban, rather better organized 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 it's 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 (28 May 1997) leapt aboard the pipeline juggernaut. "The Clinton administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory would act as a 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 never provide us the security we would need to protect our fragile pipelines. The arrival of Osama bin Laden 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 John 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 underway, 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 Defense Sec. Rumsfeld's best numbers now is: "Where is he? Somewhere? Here? There? 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 to 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 the least Imperial Rome. Stephan Gowans's 'War in Afghanistan A $29 Billion Dollar Racket' quotes Joseph Schumpeter who in 1919 described ancient Rome in a way that sounds eerily like the US 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 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 neighbors." 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 now has been added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra, "they are threatening us so we must attack first". Now everyone is more or less out in the open. The International Herald Tribune wrote in August 2002, "The leaks began in earnest on 5 July, when The NY 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 the 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 anyone found to have been behind the leaks, "We may already be executing a plan," he said recently, "Are we involved in a preliminary psychological dimension to justify a US attack or make concessions? somebody knows"
That is plain.

The Enemy Within
Gore Vidal 10-27-2002

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 aroung 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 sometime in September, 2001, but the government neither informed or protected us despite mayday warnings from Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad and even 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 the 20th of 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 will launch a significant terrorist attack against the 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 Condolezza 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 American 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 devoted 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.

Ahmed 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 many sources, most tellingly on American whistle-blowers who are beginning to come forth and bear witness-like those FBI agents who warned their superiors that al-Qaeda was planning a kamikaze strike against new York and Washington only to be told if they went public with these warnings they would suffer under the National Security Act. Several of these agents have engaged David P. Shippers, chief investigative counsel for the US House Judiciary Committee, to represent them in court. The majestic Shippers 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 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 'US 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 has 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 a draft of a national security presidential directive outlining a global 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 September 11. 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: 'Niaz naik, a former pakistani foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials in Mid-July that military action against Afganistan 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 some 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 frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan, planning for which had been 'contingency' some time before 9/11 and, again, from 20 December 2000, when Clinton's outgoing team devised a plan to strike 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 a 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 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 center 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 on 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 neighbors-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 we've only got control, to date, of a mere 25% of the world's folks. more! 'Eurasia accounts for 60% of the world's GNP and 75% 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 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 militarsation campaign'.

Afghanistan is the gateway to all of these riches. will we fight to sieze them? It should never be forgotten that the American people did not want to fight in either of the 20th 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 a result of a massive external attack. Brzezinski understands all this stuff 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 case of a 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 excercise, 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 the 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 dawn of the age 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 George W. Bush on 11 September gives rise to all sorts of not unnatural suspicions. I can think of no other modern chief 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 flown into three famous 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 San Goff, a retired US Army veteran who has taught military science and doctrine at West Point. Goff writes, in 'The So-Called Evidence 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 paths, all 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 it's 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 that is already 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 wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers. By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower, Bush is settling in with children for his photo-op. Four planes have been simultaneously hijacked 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 already have figured out-that there's been an attack on the World Trade Center. There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force scrambled to defen 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 schooled for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral descending 7,000 feet in two-and-one-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 450 knots.

'When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper 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 Chiefs of Staff, is as puzzling as the Presidents campaign-as-usual act. Myers was at the Capitol chatting with Senator Max Cleland. A sergeant writing later in the AFPS (Armed Forces Press Services) 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 Center. "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 cell phone 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 says he thinks that, as of his cell phone 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 of 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 8:15am. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been diverted or shot down. I don't think Goff is being unduly picky when he wonders who and what kept the Air Force from following its normal procedures 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 Jan. 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 shy 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. Kimmel and Short were broken for incompetence. The 'truth' is still obscured to this day.

The Media's Weapons of Mass Distraction

But Pearl harbor has been much studied. September 11, 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 Daschle to limit the Congressional investigation into the events of 9/11...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 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 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 operating procedure had been 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 colors 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 it's 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 the Bush family had in any way profited by way of it's involvement with the bin Laden family was-what else?-simply partisan bad taste.

But Bush Jr.s involvement goes back to at least 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 gave Bush Jr. $50,000 for a 5% 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) of Osama bin Laden, In a statement issued shortly after the 9/11 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 Carlye Group, which has ownership in at least 164 companies worldwide, inspiring admiration in that staunch friend of the wealthy, the Wall Street Journal, which noted, as early as 27 September 2001, "If the US boosts defense spending in it's quest to stop Osama bin Laden alleged terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: bin Laden's family.. is an investor in a fund established by Carlye Group, a well connected Washington Merchants bank specializing in buyouts of defense and aerospace companies...Osama is one of more than 50 children of Mohammed bin Laden, who built the family's 5 billion dollar 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. Agence France Press reported on 4 Nov. 2001 "FBI agents probing relatives of Suai-born terror suspect Osama...were told to back off soon after George W. Bush became president..." According to BBC TV's Newsnight (8 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 Feb. 2002) "We had what looked like the biggest failure of the intelligence community since Pearl Harbor but what we are learning from it now is it wasn't a failure, it was a directive.' True or 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 gulity', as Texan law of the jungle requires. Clinton's plan to act was given to Condoleezza 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 Defense, offered to extradite him. According to the Washington Post (3 Oct. 2001), 'Erwa said he would happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the US. 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 fro the successful al-Qaeda attack on American forces in '93 that killed 18 Rangers." Erwa said in an interview "We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they (the 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 Ameican tradition of never having to say thank you for Sudan's offer to hand over Osama, proceeded to missile-attack Sudan's al-Shita 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 year later, John O'Neill, a much admired FBI agent, complained in the Irish Times a month before the 9/11 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 Center. He died in the 9/11 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 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 destroy us in the night. So we must strike first whenever it pleases us. Thsu, we declared 'war on terrorism' - an abstract noun 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 it's pipeline for profit of, among others, the Bush-Cheney junta.

Background? All right. The headquarters of Unocal are, as might be expected, in Texas. In Dec. 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 Dec. 1997) "A spokesman for the company Unocal said the Taliban were expected to spend several days at the companies Texas headquarters...a BBC regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to develop 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 institutionalization of terror, massacres, abductions and impoverishment". CNN (6 Oct. 1996) " the US wants good ties (with the Taliban) but can't openly seek them while women are being oppressed."

The Taliban, rather better organized 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 it's 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 (28 May 1997) leapt aboard the pipeline juggernaut. "The Clinton administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory would act as a 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 never provide us the security we would need to protect our fragile pipelines. The arrival of Osama bin Laden 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 John 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 underway, 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 Defense Sec. Rumsfeld's best numbers now is: "Where is he? Somewhere? Here? There? 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 to 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 the least Imperial Rome. Stephan Gowans's 'War in Afghanistan A $29 Billion Dollar Racket' quotes Joseph Schumpeter who in 1919 described ancient Rome in a way that sounds eerily like the US 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 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 neighbors." 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 now has been added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra, "they are threatening us so we must attack first". Now everyone is more or less out in the open. The International Herald Tribune wrote in August 2002, "The leaks began in earnest on 5 July, when The NY 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 the 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 anyone found to have been behind the leaks, "We may already be executing a plan," he said recently, "Are we involved in a preliminary psychological dimension to justify a US attack or make concessions? somebody knows"
That is plain.