Greg Palast Bombshell! Documents Showing Iraq Plot from Early 2001!

[leftchick]

Woo Hoo! Greg does it again! He hinted at this last week on C-Span and I have been e-mailing and checking his site since then. Here is a portion of my e-mail alert from him...

Adventure Capitalism - The Hidden 2001 Plan to Carve-up Iraq
TomPaine.com
by Greg Palast
Wednesday, October 27, 2004


<snip>

In February 2003, a month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a 101-page document came my way from somewhere within the U.S. State Department. Titled pleasantly, "Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Growth," it was part of a larger under-wraps program called "The Iraq Strategy."

The Economy Plan goes boldly where no invasion plan has gone before: the complete rewrite, it says, of a conquered state's "policies, laws and regulations." Here's what you'll find in the Plan: A highly detailed program, begun years before the tanks rolled, for imposing a new regime of low taxes on big business, and quick sales of Iraq's banks and bridges—in fact, "ALL state enterprises"—to foreign operators. There's more in the Plan, part of which became public when the State Department hired consulting firm to track the progress of the Iraq makeover. Example: This is likely history's first military assault plan appended to a program for toughening the target nation's copyright laws.

And when it comes to oil, the Plan leaves nothing to chance—or to the Iraqis. Beginning on page 73, the secret drafters emphasized that Iraq would have to "privatize" (i.e., sell off) its "oil and supporting industries." The Plan makes it clear that—even if we didn't go in for the oil—we certainly won't leave without it.

If the Economy Plan reads like a Christmas wishlist drafted by U.S. corporate lobbyists, that's because it was.

From slashing taxes to wiping away Iraq's tariffs (taxes on imports of U.S. and other foreign goods), the package carries the unmistakable fingerprints of the small, soft hands of Grover Norquist.

...LOTS More!!! :)

[OneBlueSky]

1. please post a link when available . . . thanx . . . n/t

.

[leftchick]

3. I received it as an email....

I have tried to find a link and can't get one yet! :(

Here is a little more...

<snip>

This was not surprising as the membership list had a strong smell of petroleum. Besides Aljibury, an oil industry consultant, the secret team included executives from Royal-Dutch Shell and ChevronTexaco. These and other oil industry bigs would, in 2003, direct the drafting of a 300-page addendum to the Economy Plan solely about Iraq's oil assets. The oil section of the Plan, obtained after a year of wrestling with the administration over the Freedom of Information Act, calls for Iraqis to sell off to "IOCs" (international oil companies) the nation's "downstream" assets—that is, the refineries, pipelines and ports that, unless under armed occupation, a Mideast nation would be loathe to give up.

---The General Versus Annex D---

One thing stood in the way of rewriting Iraq's laws and selling off Iraq's assets: the Iraqis. An insider working on the plans put it coldly: "They have Wolfowitz coming out saying it's going to be a democratic country … but we're going to do something that 99 percent of the people of Iraq wouldn't vote for."

In this looming battle between what Iraqis wanted and what the Bush administration planned for them, the Iraqis had an unexpected ally, Gen. Jay Garner, the man appointed by our president just before the invasion as a kind of temporary Pasha to run the soon-to-be conquered nation.

Garner's an old Iraq hand who performed the benevolent autocratic function in the Kurdish zone after the first Gulf War. But in March 2003, the general made his big career mistake. In Kuwait City, fresh off the plane from the United States, he promised Iraqis they would have free and fair elections as soon as Saddam was toppled, preferably within 90 days.

[Individualist]

6. Here's a link

to the article - www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=383&row=0

[JHB]

7. Link:

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/adventure_capitalism.php

[leftchick]

8. Thanks for the link!

:)

[Randi_Listener]

2. Jesus H Christ

Another smoking gun to blast a hole in their fucking boat.

[Javaman]

4. So in other words, they want to make it into a preCastro cuba.

[frylock]

5. they were palnning an invasion of afghanistan too..

it was planned early in 2001, set to start in October of the same year. I guess it was just a stroke of genius that they made 9-11 happen.. errrrrrr, luck that 9-11 just happened to justify their plans for going to war.

[Nordic]

9. yes, this was all covered in The Atlantic article

and covered extremely well.

It got little press outside of that magazine and the posts here on DU about it.

They had "a plan" for Iraq, and this was it.

[Nordic]

11. Oops. It was Harper's, Naomi Klein "Baghdad Year Zero"

awesome article

[anarchy1999]

10. flood lou dobbs and olberman.

This could be considered to be a call to action. Why is Palast never on any of their "news" shows? Oh, yeah, that's right, it's a "news show".