Chronicles
of the Evil Empire...
9/11 Fuels Bogus Wars
--------------------------------------------------
This "war on terrorism" is bogus. The 9/11 attacks
gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global
domination...
by Michael Meacher
--Saturday September 6, 2003, ©
The Guardian; rpt. 11 September 2003 in CatScan,
the newsletter of Cougar WebWorks Alternative Culture Magazine.
[Click to subscribe
to CatScan.]
Michael Meacher MP was British environment minister from May
1997 to June 2003
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Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the
reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little
attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws
light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is
that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida
bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global
war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged
by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction,
the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory
does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.
We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax
Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald
Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy),
Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's
chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences,
was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank,
Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control
of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power.
It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides
the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American
force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime
of Saddam Hussein."
The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to
Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced
industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring
to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies
such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means
of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping
missions as "demanding American political leadership rather
than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass
from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will
remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a
threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China
for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase
the presence of American forces in SE Asia".
The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces"
to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent
"enemies" using the internet against the US. It also
hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that
can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare
from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".
Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea,
Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence
justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control
system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But
before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists,
it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually
happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on
terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.
First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to
pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries
provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior
Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert
the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing
a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list
they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers,
none of whom was arrested.
It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit
Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national
intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide
bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives
into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".
Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia.
Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau
in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly
issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and
bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan
war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It
seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other
purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received
training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek,
September 15 2001).
Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French
Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be
the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor
reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer
large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence
he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search
his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission
(Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI.
One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be
planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on
terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September
11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than
8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania
at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate
from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington
DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am.
Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked
aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the
US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase
suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement
that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan,
fighter planes are sent up to investigate.
Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding,
or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations
have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why,
and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor,
John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European
intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is
no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence
of incompetence."
Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt
has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early
October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated
Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However,
a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives
too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international
effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured".
The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went
so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin
Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert
Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters
wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained
it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many
as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to
attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough
(Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence,
all of which comes from sources already in the public domain,
is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.
The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when
set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called
"war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover
for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed
Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons
liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no
way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched
a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11"
(Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to
obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions
he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA
repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).
In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put
the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that
plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in
hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government
from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001
that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq
remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international
markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President
Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because
this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention"
was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).
Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported
(September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign
secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting
in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against
Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until
July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source
of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction
of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the
Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept
US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you
accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet
of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).
Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen
the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable
pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already
been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for
this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt
used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December
7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but
the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national
outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world
war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that
the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant
force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some
catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor".
The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button
for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would
otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.
The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that
the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon
energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much
as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly,
95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing,
so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.
This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies
for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically
57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39%
of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK
could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The
UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come
from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context
it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas
reserves in addition to its oil.
A report from the commission on America's national interests
in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world
supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence
on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian,
one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to
the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through
Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border.
This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on
India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and
whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.
Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining
world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British
participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive
of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil
companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002).
And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert
tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want
to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage
when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with
Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).
The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global
war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated
to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of
world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the
oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion
in this myth and junior participation in this project really a
proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever
need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our
own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides
all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.
by Michael Meacher, Saturday September 6, 2003, ©
The Guardian
Michael Meacher MP was British environment minister from May
1997 to June 2003
Rpt. 11 September 2003 in CatScan,
the newsletter of Cougar WebWorks Alternative Culture Magazine.
[Click to subscribe
to CatScan.]
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