In order to justify the US going in and taking away from Bridas (an Argentinian Energy company) the rights to build a pipeline through Afghanistan to run Caspian Sea resources out to the coast where it could be sent to market under US control.
The Taliban had formulated an agreement with Bridas in competition with the US coporation Unocal (who had also been courting the Taliban for rights to build a trans Afghanistan pipeline) to allow Bridas to build and run the pipeline.
In 1997, Taliban officials traveled twice to Washington, D.C. and Buenos Aires to be wined and dined by Unocal and Bridas. No agreements were signed.
It appeared to Unocal that the Taliban was balking. In addition to royalties, the Taliban demanded funding for infrastructure projects, including roads and power plants. The Taliban also announced plans to revive the Afghan National Oil Company, which had been abolished by the Soviet regime in the late 1970s.
Osama bin Laden (who issued his fatwa against the West in 1998) advised the Taliban to sign with Bridas. In addition to offering the Taliban a higher bid, Bridas proposed an open pipeline accessible to warlords and local users. Unocal's pipeline was closed—for export purposes only. Bridas' plan also did not require outside financing, while Unocal's required a loan from the western financial institutions (the World Bank), which in turn would leave Afghanistan vulnerable to demands from western governments.
Bridas' approach to business was more to the Taliban's liking. Where Bulgheroni and Bridas' engineers would take the time to "sip tea with Afghan tribesmen," Unocal's American executives issued top-down edicts from corporate headquarters and the US Embassy (including a demand to open talks with the CIA-backed Northern Alliance).www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHI203A.html
Bush administration and Taliban officials met several times in Washington, Berlin and Islamabad. Each time, the Taliban refused Bush's conditions.
The last meeting took place in August 2001. Central Asian affairs representative Christina Rocca and a coterie of State Department officials voiced disgust and issued a threat to the Taliban ambassador: "Accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." Bush promptly informed Pakistan and India that the US would launch a military mission against Afghanistan before the end of October.
Weeks later, under questionable circumstances, jetliners would crash into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, killing some 2,000 Americans. The ensuing war on Afghanistan, and the "war on terrorism," would claim the lives of more than 5,000 Afghans, scatter (but not destroy) the Taliban and send Osama bin Laden and his Al-Queda network into hiding.
Bush's brutal "carpet of bombs" had done what years of Clinton administration jockeying had failed to do: topple a recalcitrant, uncooperative regime with nationalistic tendencies, and clear the key square of the Chessboard.]www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHI203Bp.html
In 2001 common sense, expert opinion and extensive research convinced me and other Central Asia watchers that the United States didn't have much interest in saving Buddha statues or Afghan women when it went to war against the Taliban. After we turned down their offer to extradite Osama, it became obvious that we weren't interested in capturing the alleged mastermind of 9/11 either. Logic and evidence indicated that the Bush Administration's focused on Afghanistan to make it secure for a pipeline to carry oil and natural gas from the landlocked Caspian Sea.
Here's the story in a nutshell. The former Soviet republics surrounding the Caspian Sea--particularly Kazakhstan--have the potential to become the biggest oil-producing nations on earth. "By 2050," reports the Asia Times, "the Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea will account for more than 80 percent of world oil and natural gas production. Together, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian may have something like 800 billion barrels of oil and an energy equivalent amount in natural gas. Compare this figure with oil reserves in the Americas and in Europe: less than 160 billion barrels. And they will be exhausted before 2030." Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan want to build a pipeline to carry their oil and gas out to deep-sea ports. The shortest possible route would go through Iran, which the U.S. has declared part of an Axis of Evil. Second shortest is via Afghanistan, a dangerous proposition that the Clinton and Bush Administrations have nonetheless encouraged during and after Taliban rule. Top Bushies last met with Taliban officials in July 2001, two months before 9/11. Negotiations broke down over transit fees, but top-level discussions between the U.S., Turkmenistan and Pakistan resumed in October, while American bombs were still raining on Kabul. That led people like me to speculate that the invasion--which made little effort to catch Osama--was a transparent excuse to gain control over newly emerging energy resources.
Yet here we are two years later, some war supporters point out, and still no pipeline.
Well, not exactly.www.uexpress.com/tedrall/?uc_full_date=20040106
I, and a growing number of others, (e.g.
911 Truth Statement) believe that at the very least the Bush administration new that the 9/11 attacks were coming and allowed them to go ahead or were perhaps more deeply involved in the planning for the new "Pearl Harbor" which the neo-con PNAC group (the membership list of which reads like a who's who of the Bush administration.See www.newamericancentury.org ) said would be required to stir up the US population to support the PNAC agenda - an agenda which requires sending troops into the hotbeds of the Middle East and Central Asia to establish miltary bases and assert control over regional resources while ostensibly fighting the war on terror. Luckily for the PNACers the regions whith the greatest numbers of terrorists are coincidentally the regions which have the best known and most easily available remaining resources of oil and gas on the planet at a time when there is growing public awareness the there could very well be problems with the world oil supply peaking within the next 5 to 15 years and then going into a permanent decline (google Peak Oil for details).
Mike Ruppert in his recently released book
Crossing the Rubicon, The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil."apparently does a good job of laying out and documenting some of the connections just touched on in this post.
This is a detective story that gets to the innermost core of the 9/11 attacks. It places 9/11 at the center of a desperate new America, created by specific, named individuals in preparation for Peak Oil: an economic crisis like nothing the world has ever seen.
The attacks of September 11th, 2001 were accomplished through an amazing orchestration of logistics and personnel. Crossing the Rubicon discovers and identifies the key suspects and persons of interest - finding some of them in the highest echelons of American government - by showing how they acted in concert to guarantee that the attacks occurred and produced the desired result.
ISBN #0-86571-540-8www.fromthewilderness.com
From Ruppert's speech at the Commonwealth Club of California, Aug 31 2004
FOR ME, THE PIVOTAL EVIDENCE ABSOLUTELY DEMONSTRATING
DIRECT GOVERNMENT COMPLICITY IN, AND MANAGEMENT OF, THE
ATTACKS WAS FOUND IN A NUMBER OF UNDISPUTED, YET VIRTUALLY
UNADDRESSED WARGAMES THAT I WILL SHOW WERE BEING
CONDUCTED, COORDINATED AND/OR CONTROLLED BY VICE PRESIDENT
DICK CHENEY OR HIS IMMEDIATE STAFF ON THE MORNING OF
SEPTEMBER 11TH. THE NAMES OF THOSE WARGAMES ARE KNOWN TO
INCLUDE: VIGILANT GUARDIAN, VIGILANT WARRIOR, NORTHERN
GUARDIAN, NORTHERN VIGILANCE, AND TRIPOD II. ALL HAVE BEEN
REPORTED ON BY MAJOR PRESS ORGANIZATIONS RELYING ON
UNDISPUTED QUOTES FROM PARTICIPATING MILITARY PERSONNEL.
THEY HAVE ALSO BEEN CONFIRMED BY NORAD PRESS RELEASES. ALL,
EXCEPT FOR NORTHERN VIGILANCE AND TRIPOD II HAD TO DO WITH
HIJACKED AIRLINERS INSIDE THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES,
SPECIFICALLY WITHIN THE NORTHEAST AIR DEFENSE SECTOR WHERE
ALL FOUR 9/11 HIJACKINGS OCCURRED.
ACCORDING TO A CLEAR RECORD SOME OF THESE EXERCISES
INVOLVED COMMERCIAL AIRLINE HIJACKINGS. IN SOME CASES FALSE
BLIPS WERE DELIBERATELY INSERTED ONTO FAA AND MILITARY RADAR
SCREENS AND THEY WERE PRESENT DURING (AT LEAST) THE FIRST
ATTACKS. THIS EFFECTIVELY PARALYZED FIGHTER RESPONSE
BECAUSE, WITH ONLY EIGHT FIGHTERS AVAILABLE IN THE REGION,
THERE WERE AS MANY AS 22 POSSIBLE HIJACKINGS TAKING PLACE.
OTHER EXERCISES, SPECIFICALLY NORTHERN VIGILANCE HAD PULLED
SIGNIFICANT FIGHTER RESOURCES AWAY FROM THE NORTHEAST U.S.
– JUST BEFORE 9/11 – INTO NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA. IN
ADDITION, A CLOSE READING OF KEY NEWS STORIES PUBLISHED IN THE
SPRING OF 2004 REVEALED FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT SOME OF THESE
DRILLS WERE “LIVE-FLY” EXERCISES WHERE ACTUAL AIRCRAFT, LIKELY
FLOWN BY REMOTE CONTROL – WERE SIMULATING THE BEHAVIOR OF
HIJACKED AIRLINERS IN REAL LIFE. ALL OF THIS AS THE REAL ATTACKS
BEGAN. THE FACT THAT THESE EXERCISES HAD NEVER BEEN
SYSTEMATICALLY AND THOROUGHLY EXPLORED IN THE MAINSTREAM
PRESS, OR PUBLICLY BY CONGRESS, OR AT LEAST PUBLICLY IN ANY
DETAIL BY THE SO-CALLED INDEPENDENT 9/11 COMMISSION MADE ME
THINK THAT THEY MIGHT BE THE HOLY GRAIL OF 9/11.
THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT THEY TURNED OUT TO BE.
ONLY ONE WARGAME EXERCISE, VIGILANT GUARDIAN, WAS MENTIONED
IN A FOOTNOTE TO THE KEAN COMMISSION REPORT AND THEN IT WAS
DELIBERATELY MISLABELED AS AN EXERCISE INTENDED TO INTERCEPT
RUSSIAN BOMBERS INSTEAD OF A HIJACK EXERCISE IN THE
NORTHEAST SECTOR. EVEN THEN, A DELIBERATE LIE WAS TOLD TO
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AS NORAD COMMANDER RALPH EBERHART
TESTIFIED TO THE COMMISSION THAT THE EXERCISE ACTUALLY
EXPEDITED US AIR FORCE RESPONSE DURING THE ATTACKS.
WHEN MICHAEL KANE, A BRILLIANT YOUNG NEW YORK ACTIVIST AND
BUDDING INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER APPROACHED GENERAL
EBERHART ON AN FTW ASSIGNMENT AT THE CONCLUSION OF THE
COMMISSION’S LAST PUBLIC HEARING AND ASKED FOR INFORMATION THE OTHER EXERCISES, EBERHART’S ONLY RESPONSE WAS, “NO
COMMENT.”
www.fromthewilderness.com/PDF/Commonwealth.pdf