FREEPERS: Brit MP & former cabinet member explains Bush & terrorism

[yurbud]

Most of DUers probably saw this at the time it was published, but it's still the best summary of what Bush is doing in the Middle East, and for those recently disillusioned, will explain why Bush is so friendly with people who vacation with Osama.

Michael Meacher is member of Parliament and a former member of Tony Blair's cabinet.

This war on terrorism is bogus

The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination
Michael Meacher
Saturday September 6, 2003

Guardian

<snip>
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).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4747953-103677,00.html

[sinkingfeeling]

1. I'm sorry to inform you, but Freepers can't read.

[JuniperLea]

2. It doesn't get any clearer than that

n/t

[yurbud]

3. MORE: post-9/11 offer to extradite Osama refused

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.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1036571,00.html

[slor]

4. Thanks for posting n/t

[yurbud]

5. MORE: terrorism pretext to pursue oil interests

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.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1036571,00.html

[yurbud]

6. MORE: How serious the oil problem is & oil jockeying in Iraq

Colin Powell's chief of staff has publicly admitted the war was about oil, and if you read the Pulitzer Prize winning book, the Prize, by Daniel Yergin, who now works with Papa Bush, you'll see how important oil has been in the last 50 years of our history.

Somebody else put together this great compilation of articles on the world's oil situation, both as an issue by itself and as it relates to Iraq:

http://www.mymethow.com/%7Ejoereid/oil_coup.html


For more background on jockeying for Iraq's oil in lead up to war and after, see this BBC story:

http://www.gregpalast.com/iraqmeetingstimeline.html


The current plans for Iraq's oil and how it short-changes Iraqis:

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/crudedesigns.htm

The neocon plan to privatize and take everything in Iraq (which is a war crime in the Geneva Convention):

http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html

This one includes an on camera interview with top GOP strategist Grover Norquist, who wrote the plan to privatize and seize Iraq's oil:

http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=383&row=2

You might recall the administration talked about paying for the war with the Iraqis oil without mentioning asking the Iraqis if that was okay.

And a bit more of Meacher:

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).


http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1036571,00.html

[AuntiBush]

15. What Haven't They Tried to Privatize?

From here to Iraq, I mean really?

[yurbud]

17. risk

"social risk, privatize profits"

[yurbud]

7. vote this one up so they are more likely to see it.

[yurbud]

8. Remember this when the hard sell for Iran War starts

maybe even including a terrorist attack.

[LSparkle]

9. * just submitted request to Congress for $ to support democracy in Iran

"Support democracy"????? Sounds like they have SOME plan up their sleeves if they're asking for funding.

[CJCRANE]

10. The neocons ALWAYS have a plan.

They "create reality", don't forget.

[yurbud]

11. that's one of the greatest propaganda quotes in history

I pass it out in class when I talk about propaganda.

[yurbud]

12. one more vote...

[SammyWinstonJack]

13. K & R

[savemefromdumbya]

14. He's been around a long time

:kick:

[yurbud]

16. I can't believe he hasn't had an accident, suicide, or heart attack.

[savemefromdumbya]

18. Robin Cook former foreign secretary had a 'heart attack'

I wonder will Meacher be next?

[yurbud]

19. because foreign policy or defense weren't directly his cabinet portfolio

they probably figure no one cares what he says.