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A friend sent me a link to this discussion, so I thought I would share some of the info I had put together in case anyone wants to add it to their list of must-reads for the new year 
Oh, and this might get kind of long...
First of all, let's consider that the US Government was planning to take military action against the Taliban for over a year now. They had begun securing promises of support from other countries before the Sept. 11th attacks occurred. On June 26th of this year, an Indian newspaper reported:
quote:
Indian officials say that India and Iran will only play the role of "facilitator" while the US and Russia will combat the Taliban from the front with the help of two Central Asian countries, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, to push Taliban lines back to the 1998 position 50 km away from Mazar-e-Sharief city in northern Afghanistan.
Why was the government planning these military strikes? Well, let's take a wild guess... could it be oil? The same article states:
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Iran is also worried over the unending war effort of the Taliban to get supremacy in Afghanistan that is harming Iran's economic interests. India, Iran and Russia, for example, are working on a broad plan to supply oil and gas to south Asia and southeast Asian nations through India but instability in Afghanistan is posing a great threat to this effort.
You can view this article here: http://www.indiareacts.com/archivefeatures/nat2.asp?recno=10&ctg=%20
In July 1997, officials from Turkmenistan and Pakistan and representatives from Unocal and Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil signed an agreement to build the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan line. The 900+mile pipeline would have cost between $2 billion and $2.7 billion, and would have carried approximately 700 Bcf of gas from Turkmenistan's Daulatabad gas field to the central Pakistani city of Multan.
In October 1997, Unocal set up the Central Asian Gas Pipeline (CentGas) consortium to build the pipeline. Construction was scheduled to begin in 1998. However, in early August 1998, Unocal announced that CentGas had not secured the financing necessary to begin the work, and on August 22, 1998, Unocal suspended construction plans due to the continuing civil war in Afghanistan.
The governments of Turkmenistan and Pakistan have continued to discuss the possibility of a pipeline through Afghanistan, including the possibility of exporting gas across Pakistan to India, but it seems unlikely that such a scheme could secure financing in the near future given the risks involved. We now face a possibility of nuclear struggle between Pakistan and India... anyone wanna take a guess what underlies part of this strife?
Unocal and Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil held a combined 85 percent stake in the consortium, while Turkmenrusgas owned 5 percent. Other participants in the project included Hyundai Engineering & Construction Company of South Korea, Itochu Corporation of Japan, and Indonesia Petroleum Ltd. Unocal stressed that the pipeline project would not proceed until an internationally recognized government was in place in Afghanistan.
You can read more about this here: http://biz.yahoo.com/ifc/tm/
and here: http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/98news/centgas.htm
In the 1980's, CIA-supported Mujahedeen rebels engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet insurgency. The Agency's principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and a leading heroin refiner. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe.
U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies. In 1993, an official of the DEA called Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.
The Taliban's mid-2000 ban on opium poppy production, widely discounted externally, has apparently been adhered to as wheat has almost entirely displaced poppy cultivation in 2001. Large stockpiles of opium are suspected to exist, but should the mandate stand, the near elimination of Afghanistan as an opium producing country would reduce global production by as much as 75 percent.
The Taliban represents a direct threat to the opium trade that has funded the CIA's covert operations since the early 1950's.
PBS did a great background on the history of the heroin trade and the CIA's role in it, and the timeline is located on the Frontline website.
The history of the CIA is shady to say the least. President Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947, creating the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council. The CIA is accountable to the president through the NSC — there is no democratic or congressional oversight. Its charter allows the CIA to "perform such other functions and duties… as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." This loophole opens the door to covert action and dirty tricks. William Blum has written a truly comprehensive book on this subject called "Killing Hope" and you can order it through Amazon.com.
James Hatfield, who met his unfortunate death a few weeks after writing this article, reported that Bush's oil company Arbusto founded his company in part through the financial backing of James R. Bath, a Houston business man who was partners with a number of Saudi Arabians:
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According to court documents, Bath swore that in 1977 he represented four prominent and wealthy Saudi Arabians as a trustee and used his name on their investments in the United States. In return, he received a 5 percent interest in their deals. Time reporters Beaty and Gwynne suggest in their book that the $50,000 Bath invested in Dubya's Arbusto Energy drilling company may have belonged to Bath's Saudi clients since the Houston businessman "had no substantial money of his own at the time."
The FBI and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network later investigated Bath after allegations were made by one of his American business partners that the Saudis were using Bath and their giant piggy bank to influence U.S. policy. (Dubya's father had been appointed by President Ford to head the CIA from 1976–77.)
Hatfield is the author of the biography of George W. Bush, "Fortunate Son".
You can also read a terrific interview with renegade journalist Greg Palast here: http://www.guerrillanews.com/counter_intelligence/233.html
about the Bush family (regime) and its involvement with oil, gold, and ballot shuffling, and the future of truth in journalism (or lack thereof).
Cheney, on the other hand, well... that man is just plan evil.
Cheney alone, during his 5-year tenure as CEO of Halliburton, Inc, oversaw more human rights abuses than the Taliban could dream of committing in the same time period. Martin Lee reported for the San Francisco Bay Guardian in November of 2000 that
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In addition to Iraq, Halliburton counts among its business partners several brutal dictatorships that have committed egregious human rights abuses, including the hated military regime in Burma (Myanmar). EarthRights, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights watchdog, condemned Halliburton for two energy-pipeline projects in Burma that led to the forced relocation of villages, rape, murder, indentured labor, and other crimes against humanity." A full report on the Burma connection, "Halliburton's Destructive Engagement," can be accessed on EarthRights' Web site, www.earthrights.org .
Halliburton and Cheney have come under attack for their role in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia, Indonesia, and other volatile trouble spots. As Lee notes,
Indeed, Cheney's firm increased its involvement in the Niger Delta after the military government executed several ecology activists and crushed popular protests against the oil industry.
Oh, and by the way, Halliburton and Unocal are business partners.
In August of this year, Wayne Madsen wrote an article on the private interests behind Bush and Cheney's energy policy. Not only did he find that Bush had India's foreign minister in his pocket (one of Bush's main political backers, Enron, is expanding its operations to India and is already running a privatized electrical distribution system in Bombay), but he also did exhaustive research on the US' extensive international oil trade. Prophetically, he concluded:
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Much has been written and said about the influence of Big Oil over the policies of Bush and Cheney on global warming, drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, and their opposition to capping energy prices in California. Yet such is the power of the industry over the Bush administration, that Big Oil may influence, if not actually determine, how international borders are drawn, which leaders remain as heads of state and government, and what countries sit as members of the United Nations. Apparently, that's what $26 million in political contributions (the amount Big Oil gave to Republicans during the last election) can buy.
Edward B. Winslow reported for Alternet on January 2 the mysterious and highly suspect relationship between the White House and Enron Corp. He found that while the top 500 executives walked away with a combined $55 million in bonuses after selling their stock at its peak, the remaining 20,000 employees were given severance packages of no more than $4,500 a piece. This after Enron gave millions of dollars in campaign contributions to Bush, U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm and other members of Congress and utilized 2,830 offshore subsidiaries in countries with lax banking-regulation laws most likely in order to defraud stockholders. It may be 30 or more years before we know what really went on in Cheney's secret energy meeting with Enron execs.
You know, this is all very well and good, I mean, for us to shoot the shit on what's really happening behind the media curtain. I live in the United States, and if you want to really know what's going on here, you have to dig. You have to dig deep. And that means you have to have the time and the resources and the money to dig deep, and most people don't because, one more thing our media doesn't report is that, most of our population lives in poverty.
But one can dig, and one can find out that our President stole the election, and the war in Afghanistan was one that had been planned by many organizations for quite some time, and chances are good that the world is going to go to hell in a handbasket without most of the general population even knowing why or how. And we can chat conspiracy theories all day, but the truth is: this is commerce. What this ALL comes down to is money. Who profits? Who wants more money and how far are they willing to go to get it?
Its sick, really, to think about how far some of these people are willing to go, but they have a very simple point of view: its a dog eat dog world, and its all survival of the fittest. So hone your skills and screw the little guy because he's on his own. Its just the same scenario being repeated over and over, small corporation eaten by big corporation which gets bigger and eats more small corporations until there aren't any small corporations left... and so on. And the US government, hell most governments, are just that--mighty big corporations trying to turn a profit. Once you have that figured out, it doesn't shock you when you find out that presidents buy their votes, and businesses buy the presidency, and consumers... well, we're at the bottom of the totem pole. We're the foundation for this system. As long as we keep pouring our own time and money and resources into it, it will keep on keeping on in this direction. Think about it.
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If we hope to understand anything about the foreign policy of any state, it is a good idea to begin by investigating the domestic social structure: Who sets foreign policy? What interests do these people represent? What is the domestic source of their power? It is a reasonable surmise that the policy that evolves will reflect the special interests of those who design it. An honest study of history will reveal that this natural expectation is quite generally fulfilled. The evidence is overwhelming, in my opinion, that the United States is no exception to the general rule—a thesis which is often characterized as a ‘radical critique,’ in a curious intellectual move… Some attention to the historical record, as well as common sense, leads to a second reasonable expectation: In every society, there will emerge a caste of propagandists who labour to disguise the obvious, to conceal the actual workings of power, and to spin a web of mythical goals and purposes, utterly benign, that allegedly guide national policy. A typical thesis of the propaganda system is that ‘the nation’ is an agent in international affairs, not special groups within it, and that ‘the nation’ is guided by certain ideals and principles, all of them noble… A subsidiary thesis is that the nation is not an active agent, but rather responds to threats posed to its security, or to order and stability, by awesome evil forces."
--Noam Chomsky
If we want to blame this all on oil, then why aren't we all riding our bikes instead of driving our SUV's? Bush wouldn't be playing the game without the Monopoly money we all give every day at the gas station.
Thanks for letting me rant |
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