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!!OSAMAGATE!!
Michel Chossudovsky [vertaling uit Engels] - 15.10.2001 20:29
De belangrijkste rechtvaardiging voor deze oorlog is volledig vervalst. Het Amerikaanse volk is door haar regering opzettelijk en doelbewust om de tuin geleid om steun te verlenen aan een gevaarlijk militair avontuur
dat onze gezamenlijke toekomst beïnvloedt.
"De Taliban zullen de prijs betalen", zwoer president George W. Bush terwijl Amerikaanse en Britse gevechtsvliegtuigen raketaanvallen uitvoerden op de belangrijkste steden in Afghanistan. De regering van de VS beweert dat Osama bin Laden verantwoordelijk is voor de tragische gebeurtenissen van 11 september. De oorlog werd verklaard tegen het zogenaamde "internationale terrorisme", hoewel de bewijzen uitvoerig bevestigen dat de Amerikaanse regering vanaf de Koude Oorlog als onderdeel van de buitenlandse politieke agenda van Washington onderdak heeft verleend aan het "Islamitische Militante Netwerk". Het is een bittere ironie dat de luchtmacht van de VS nu de trainingskampen tot doelwit heeft die in de jaren tachtig door de CIA in het leven zijn geroepen.
Gezien het toenemend aantal bewijzen kan de Amerikaanse regering niet langer haar banden met Osama ontkennen. Hoewel de CIA toegeeft dat Osama bin Laden gedurende de Koude Oorlog een "bedrijfsmiddel" van de inlichtingendienst was, gaat die relatie waarschijnlijk veel verder terug dan dat. De meeste nieuwsberichten gaan ervan uit dat deze Osama/CIA-banden behoren tot de vervlogen tijd van de oorlog tussen de Sovjet-Unie en Afghanistan. Deze banden worden zonder uitzondering gezien als "irrelevant" voor een begrip van de huidige gebeurtenissen. In het spervuur van de recente geschiedenis wordt in de Westerse media de rol van CIA bij de ondersteuning en ontwikkeling van internationale terroristische organisaties tijdens de Koude Oorlog en de nasleep ervan achteloos genegeerd of gebagatelliseerd.
Jawel, we hebben hem gesteund, maar "Hij keerde zich tegen ons"...
Lees verder www.DeWaarheid.nu
 Website: http://www.DeWaarheid.nu/
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| Lees meer over: wereldcrisis | | aanvullingen | | | Bush´s War: The WTC Oil Gambit | STAN GOFF - 16.10.2001 10:10
Bush´s War: The WTC Oil Gambit
by STAN GOFF
I´m a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant. That
doesn´t cut much for those who will only accept
the opinions of former officers on military
matters, since we enlisted swine are assumed to be
incapable of grasping the nuances of doctrine.
But I wasn´t just in the army, I studied and
taught military science and doctrine. I was a
tactics instructor at the Jungle Operations
Training Center in Panama, and I taught Military
Science at West Point. And contrary to the popular
image of what Special Forces does, SF´s mission is
to teach. We offer advice and assistance to
foreign forces. That´s everything from teaching
marksmanship to a private to instructing a
Battalion staff on how to coordinate effective air
operations with a sister service.
Based on that experience, and operations in eight
designated conflict areas from Vietnam to Haiti, I
have to say that the story we hear on the news and
read in the newspapers is simply not believable.
The most cursory glance at the verifiable facts,
before, during, and after September 11th,does not
support the official line or conform to the
current actions of the United States government.
But the official line only works if they can get
everyone to accept its underlying premises. I´m
not at all surprised about the Republican and
Democratic Parties repeating these premises. They
are simply two factions within a single dominant
political class, and both are financed by the same
economic powerhouses. My biggest disappointment,
as someone who identifies himself with the left,
has been the tacit acceptance of those premises by
others on the left, sometimes naively, and
sometimes to score some morality points. Those
premises are twofold.
One, there is the premise that what this de facto
administration is doing now is a "response" to
September 11th.
Two, there is the premise that this attack on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon was done by
people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion,
neither of these is sound.
To put this in perspective we have to go back not
to September 11th, but to last year or further.
A man of limited intelligence, George W. Bush,
with nothing more than his name and the
behind-the-scenes pressure of his powerful
father-a former President, ex-director of Central
Intelligence, and an oil man-is systematically
constructed as a candidate, at tremendous cost.
Across the country, subtle and not-so-subtle
mechanisms are put into place to disfranchise a
significant fraction of the Democrat´s
African-American voter base.
This doesn´t come out until Florida becomes a
battleground for Electoral College votes, and the
magnitude of the story has been suppressed by the
corporate media to this day. In a decision so
lacking in legitimacy, the Supreme Court will
neither by-line the author of the decision nor
allow the decision to ever be used as a precedent,
Bush v. Gore awards the presidency of the United
States to a man who loses the popular vote in
Florida and loses the national popular vote by
over 600,000.
This de facto regime then organizes a very
interesting cabinet. The Vice President is an oil
executive and the former Secretary of Defense. The
National Security Advisor is a director on the
board of a transnational oil corporation and a
Russia scholar. The Secretary of State is a man
with no diplomatic experience whatsoever, and the
former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The
other interesting appointment is Donald Rumsfeld
as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld is the former
CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals. He and Cheney were
featured as speakers at the May, 2000,
Russian-American Business Leaders Forum. So the
consistent currents in this cabinet are petroleum,
the former Soviet Union, and the military.
Based on the record of Daddy Bush, in all his
guises, and the general trajectory of US foreign
policy as far back as the Carter Administration, I
feel I can reasonably conclude that Middle Eastern
and South Asian fossil fuels are one of their
major preoccupations. Not just because this
klavern has some very direct financial interests
in fossil fuel, but because they surely know that
worldwide oil production is peaking as we speak,
and will soon begin a permanent and precipitous
decline that will completely change the character
of civilization as we know it within 20 years.
Even the left seems to be in deep denial about
this, but the math is available. And, no,
alternative energies and energy technologies will
not save us. All the alternatives in the world can
not begin to provide more than a tiny fraction of
the energy base now provided by oil. This makes it
more than a resource, and the drive to control
what´s left more than an economic competition.
I further conclude that the economic colonization
of the former Soviet Union is probably high on
that agenda, and in fact has a powerful synergy
with the issue of petroleum. Russia not only holds
vast untapped resources that beckon to imperialism
in crisis, it remains a credible military and
nuclear challenger in the region.
We have not one, but three members of the Bush de
facto cabinet with military credentials, which
makes the cabinet look quite a lot like a military
General Staff. All this way before September 11th.
Then there´s the subject of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization. NATO might have expected
consignment to the dustbin of the Cold War after
the Eastern Bloc shattered in 1991. Peace dividend
and all that. But it didn´t. It expanded directly
into the former states of the Eastern Bloc toward
the former Soviet Union, and contributed
significant forces to the devastation of Iraq-a
key country in the world oil market, over which
control translates into the ability to manipulate
oil prices.
NATO is a military formation, and the United
States exerts the controlling interest in it. It
seemed like a form without a function, but it
remedied that pretty quickly.
Then when Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the
International Monetary Fund, the US and Germany
began a systematic campaign of destabilization
there, even using some of the veterans of
Afghanistan in that campaign. NATO became the
military arm of that agenda-the break-up of
Yugoslavia into compliant statelets, the further
containment of the former Soviet Union, and the
future pipeline easement for Caspain Sea oil to
Western European markets through Kosovo.
You see, this is important to understand, and
people-even those against the war talk-are tending
to overlook the significance of it. NATO is not a
guarantor of international law, and it is not a
humanitarian organization. It is a military
alliance with one very dominant partner. And it
can no longer claim to be a defensive alliance
against European socialists. It is an instrument
of military aggression.
NATO is the organization that is now going to
thrust further along the 40th parallel from the
Balkans through the Southern Asian Republics of
the former Soviet Union. The US military has
already taken control of a base in Uzbekistan. No
one is talking about how what we are doing seems
to be a very logical extension of a strategy that
was already in motion, and has been in motion for
two decades.
Once we recognize the pattern of activity designed
to simultaneously consolidate control over Middle
Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain and
colonize the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan
isexactly where they need to go to pursue that
agenda.
Afghanistan borders Iran, India, and even China
but, more importantly, the Central Asian Republics
of the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. These border
Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan borders Russia.
Turkmenistan sits on the Southeastern quadrant of
the Caspian Sea, whose oil the Bush Administration
dearly covets.
Afghanistan is necessary for two things: as a base
of operations to begin the process of
destabilizing, breaking off, and establishing
control over the South Asian Republics, which will
begin within the next 18-24 months in my opinion,
and constructing a pipeline through Turkmenistan,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver petroleum to
the Asian market.
The BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik, a
Pakistani Foreign Secretary, that senior American
officials were warning them as early as mid-July
that military action for mid-October was being
planned for Afghanistan.
In 1996, the Department of Energy was issuing
reports on the desirability of a pipeline through
Afghanistan, and in 1998, Unocal testified before
the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific
that this pipeline was crucial to transport
Caspian Basin oil to the Indian Ocean.
Given this evidence that a military operation to
secure at least a portion of Afghanistan has been
on the table, possibly as early as five years ago,
I can´t help but conclude that the actions we are
seeing put into motion now are part of a
pre-September 11th agenda. I´m absolutely sure of
that, in fact. The planning alone for operations,
of this scale, that are now taking shape, would
take many months. And we are seeing them take
shape in mere weeks.
It defies common sense. This administration is
lying about this whole thing being a "reaction" to
September 11th. That leads me, in short order, to
be very suspicious of their yet-to-be-provided
evidence that someone in Afghanistan is
responsible. It´s just too damn convenient. Which
also leads me to wonder-just for the sake of
knowing-what actually did happen on September
11th, and who actually is responsible.
The so-called evidence is a farce. The US
presented Tony Blair´s puppet government with the
evidence, and of the 70 so-called points of
evidence, only nine even referred to the attacks
on the World Trade Center, and those points were
conjectural. This is a bullshit story from
beginning to end.
Presented with the available facts, any 16-year
old with a liking for courtroom dramas could tear
this story apart like a two-dollar shirt. But our
corporate press regurgitates it uncritically. But
then, as we should know by now, their role is to
legitimize.
This cartoon heavy they´ve turned bin Laden into
makes no sense, when you begin to appreciate the
complexity and synchronicity of the attacks. As a
former military person who´s been involved in the
development of countless operations orders over
the years, I can tell you that this was a very
sophisticated and costly enterprise that would
have left what we call a huge "signature".
In other words, it would be very hard to
effectively conceal.
So there´s a real question about why there was no
warning of this. That can be a question about the
efficacy of the government´s intelligence
apparatus. That can be a question about various
policies in the various agencies that had to be
duped to orchestrate this action. And it can also
be a question about whether or not there was
foreknowledge of the event, and that foreknowledge
is being covered up. To dismiss this concern out
of hand as the rantings of conspiracy nuts is
premature. And there is a history of this kind of
thing being done by national political bosses,
including the darling of liberals, Franklin
Roosevelt. The evidence is very compelling that
the Roosevelt Administration deliberately failed
to act to stop Pearl Harbor in order to mobilize
enough national anger to enter the World War II.
I have no idea why people aren´t asking some very
specific questions about the actions of Bush and
company on the day of the attacks. Follow along:
Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their
flight plans, all the while on FAA radar. The
planes are all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 AM
Eastern Daylight Time.
Who is notified?
This is an event already that is unprecedented.
But the President is not notified and going to a
Florida elementary school to hear children read.
By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that
something is terribly wrong. The President is
glad-handing teachers.
By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes
into the World Trade Center, Bush is settling in
with children for his photo ops at Booker
Elementary. Four planes have obviously been
hijacked simultaneously, an event never before
seen in history, and one has just dived into the
worlds best know twin towers, and still no one
notifies the nominal Commander in Chief.
No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force
interceptors either.
At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the
remaining World Trade Center building. At 9:05,
Andrew Card, the Presidential Chief of Staff
whispers to George W. Bush. Bush "briefly turns
somber" according to reporters.
Does he cancel the school visit and convene an
emergency meeting? No. He resumes listening to
second graders read about a little girl´s pet
fucking goat, and continues this banality even as
American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an
unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the
direction of Washington DC.
Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble
the Air Force? No.
An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally
deigns to give a public statement telling the
United States what they already have figured out;
that there´s been an attack by hijacked planes on
the World Trade Center.
There´s a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington,
but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend
anything yet? No.
At 9:30, when he makes his announcement, American
Flight 77 is still ten minutes from its target,
the Pentagon.
The Administration will later claim they had no
way of knowing that the Pentagon might be a
target, and that they thought Flight 77 was headed
to the White House, but the fact is that the plane
has already flown South and past the White House
no-fly zone, and is in fact tearing through the
sky at over 400 nauts.
At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360
degrees over the Pentagon, all the while being
tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not
evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from
the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria and DC.
Now, the real kicker. A pilot they want us to
believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper
school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a
well-controlled downward spiral, descending the
last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings
the plane in so low and flat that it clips the
electrical wires across the street from the
Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into
the side of this building at 460 nauts.
When the theory about learning to fly this well at
the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it
was added that they received further training on a
flight simulator.
This is like saying you prepared your teenager for
her first drive on I-40 at rush hour by buying her
a video driving game. It´s horse shit!
There is a story being constructed about these
events. My crystal ball is not working today, so I
can´t say why.
But at the least, this so-called
Commander-in-Chief and his staff that we are all
supposed to follow blindly into some ill-defined
war on terrorism is criminally negligent or
unspeakably stupid. And at the worst, if more is
known or was known, and there is an effort to
conceal the facts, there is a criminal conspiracy
going on.
Certainly, the Bush de facto administration was
facing a confluence of crises from which they were
temporarily rescued by this event. Whether they
played a sinister role or not, there is little
doubt that they have at the very least
opportunistically pounced on this attack to
overcome their lack of legitimacy, to shift the
blame for the encroaching recession from
capitalism to the September 11th terror attack, to
legitimize their pre-existing foreign policy
agenda, and to establish and consolidate
repressive measures domestically and silence
dissent. In many ways, September 11th pulled the
Bush cookies out of the fire.
And given them the green light to begin
constructing a long-term scenario within which to
establish fascistic control measures at home and
abroad as a citadel for the ruling class in the
catastrophic conjuncture that we are entering
based on the end of oil.
This elephant in the living room is being
studiously ignored. In fact, the domestic
repression has already begun, officially and
unofficially. It´s kind of a latter day
McCarthyism. I participated in a teach-in at
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on the 17th of
September, and though not a single person on the
panel excused or justified the attacks, and every
person there offered either condolences and
prayers for the victims, we were excoriated within
two days as "enemies of America."
Yesterday an op-ed called for my deportation (to
where, one can only guess). Now Herr Ashcroft is
fast tracking the biggest abrogation of US civil
liberties since the so-called anti-terrorism
legislation after the Oklahoma City bombing-which
by the way hasn´t resulted in anti-terrorism but
in the acceleration of the application of the
racist death penalty.
The FBI has defined terrorist groups not by
whether any given group has ever acted as
terrorists, but by their beliefs. Some socialists
and anti-globalization groups have already been
identified by name as terrorist groups, even
though there is not a single shred of evidence
that they have ever participated in any criminal
activity. It reminds me of the Smith Act that was
finally declared unconstitutional, but only after
a hell of a lot of people served a hell of a long
time in jail for the crime of thinking.
I think this also points to yet another huge
problems that the Bush regime was facing.
Worldwide resistance to the whole so-called
neoliberal agenda, which is a prettied up term for
debt-leverage imperialism. While debt and the
threat of sanctions has been used to coerce
nations in the periphery, we have to understand
that the final guarantor of compliance remains
military action. For a global economic agenda,
there is always a corresponding political and
military agenda.
The focal point of these actions in the short term
is Southern Asia, but they have already scripted
this as a worldwide and protracted fight against
terrorism. It´s far better than drug wars as a
rationalization, and the drug war thing was being
discredited in any case. Leftists are regaining
power and popularity in Venezuela, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, the Dominican
Republic, Haiti, Brazil, and Argentina. Cuba has
gained immense prestige over the last few years.
The empire is beginning to unravel. We can hardly
justify intervention in these places by saying
they are not towing the economic line by allowing
the absolute domination of their societies by
transnational corporations. That exposes the
agenda. So we simply claim they are supporting
terrorism.
It´s for all these reasons I say the left has
missed the boat on this one, by allowing them to
get away with rushing past the question of who did
what on September 11th. If the official story is a
lie, and I think the circumstantial case is strong
enough to stay with this question, then we really
do need to know what happened. And we need to
understand concretely what the motives of this
administration are.
And we need to understand more than just their
immediate motives, but where the larger social
forces that underwrite our situation right now are
headed. I do not think this administration is
engaged in the deliberative process of a political
grouping that is on top of their game. They are
putting together some very deliberative technical
solutions in response to a larger situation that
it slipping rapidly out of their control. Like
clear cutting. There´s a very smart technology
being employed to do a very dumb thing.
What they are responding to is not September 11th,
but the beginning of a permanent and precipitous
decline in worldwide oil production, the beginning
of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and
the unraveling of the empire.
This brings me to a point about what all this
means for Americans´ security, which they are
perfectly justified to worry about. The actions
being prepared by this administration will not
only not enhance our security, it will
significantly degrade it. Military action against
many groups across the globe, which is what the
administration is telling us quite openly they are
planning to do, will put a lot of backs against
the wall. That can´t be very secure.
The concept of war being touted here is a
violation of the principles of war on several
counts, and will inevitably lead to military
catastrophes, if you´re inclined to view this from
a position of moral and political neutrality.
And the people who are now in possession of half
the world´s remaining oil reserves are subject to
destabilization for which we can´t even pretend to
predict the consequences-but loss of access to
critical energy supplies is certainly within the
realm of possibility.
Worst of all, we will be destabilizing Pakistan, a
nuclear power in an active conflict with its
neighbor, and we will be provoking Russia, another
nuclear power. The security stakes don´t get any
higher, and Americans can ill afford to ignore
nukes.
And I think that this domestic agenda is a
tremendous threat to the security of anyone who is
critical of the government or their corporate
financiers, and we already know that the real
threats are against populations that can easily be
scapegoated as the domestic crisis deepens.
There is a very real threat right now of creeping
fascism in this country,and that phenomenon
requires its domestic enemies. Historically those
enemies have included leftists, trade unionists,
and racially and nationally oppressed sectors.
This whole "state of emergency" mentality is
already being used to quiet the public discourses
of anti-racism, of feminism, of environmentalism,
and of both socialism and anarchism. And while
there is token resistance by officials to
anti-Muslim xenophobia, the stereotypical images
have saturated the media, and the government is
already beginning to openly re-instate racial
profiling. It is only a short step from there to
go after other groups. We have long been prepared
by the ideologies of overt and covert racism, and
racism as both institution and corresponding
psychology in the United States is nearly
intractable.
It´s for all these reason, I say emphatically that
we can not accept anything from this
administration; not their policies nor their
bullshit stories. What they are doing is very,
very dangerous, and the time to fight back against
them, openly, is right now, before they can
consolidate their power and their agenda. Once
they have done that, our job becomes much more
difficult.
The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize
out of its oblivion, needs to understand its
critical roles here. We have to play the role of
credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian partners
in a broader peace-movement. We have to study,
synthesize, and describe our current historical
conjuncture. And we have to prepare leadership for
the decisive conflict that will emerge to first
defeat fascism then take political power.
Rosa Luxemburg´s words are truer than ever right
now. We are not faced with a choice between
socialism and capitalism, but socialism or
barbarism. And what we can least afford are denial
and timidity.
(I strongly recommend, for anyone who wants to
find further background material on the issues
herein check out the websites at dieoff.org,
emperors-clothes.com, and globalcircle.com)
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