War on terrorism is bogus

[infinite59]

PLEASE share this indictment of Bush on 9-11 complicity with everyone you
know, and send it to every media outlet you can !!!!]

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
The Guardian

Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why
Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on
why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The
conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against
al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global
war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and
UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be
extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth
may be a great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was
drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence
secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger
brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled
Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative
think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf
region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the
unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a
substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime
of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and
Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from
challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role".
It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient
means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping
missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It
says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to
US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it
is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate
space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the
internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological
weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological
warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and
Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a
"worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world
domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is
clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before,
during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be
seen in several ways.

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).

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.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the
PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is
being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical
objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the
Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could
have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan
but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly
Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10
separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the
CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

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.

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).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on
terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for
a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around
securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project.
Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a
proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify
a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this
whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical
change of course.

· Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

meacherm@parliament.uk


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[UnstoppableForce]

It's time people open up their eyes and minds. Ignorant people must read this, and acknowledge the facts instead of Bush's "that information is confidential for security purposes" BULLSHIT.

[Doggystylin]

good post ibrahim, and congradulations and good luck with you know what.

[pappy]

TESTIFY

[Lincoln]

Thank you Ibrahim. You always have something intelligent to say. Peace unto you my Brother.

[CharlieBrown]

The Guardian (thats the same newspaper kiddies) also ran a follow up piece the following Tuesday written by David Aaronivitch (not sure if thats how you spell it) in The G2 section of the paper and he tore a lot of the way Meacher came to those conclusions to shreads and was really damning of Meacher (basically saying his facts were right, but the way he came to his conclucions was all bullshit, like 2+2=5 type of shit). I'll have a look for it on their website so i can post it up.

[CharlieBrown]

David Aaronovitch

Has Meacher completely lost the plot?

Tuesday September 9, 2003
The Guardian

"In a startling allegation," the Hindu of India told its many readers last Saturday, "a former British minister has said the US may have deliberately allowed the events of September 11 2001, so that it could have a pretext to attack Afghanistan and Iraq." The wires ran the story from Wellington to San Francisco. It was an "incredible piece", one happy blogger chortled, showing that conspiracy theories have "finally hit (the) mainstream media". In this case the "mainstream" was us here at the Guardian.
Made into a rough chronology of cause and effect, the argument from Michael Meacher, the minister in question, went like this:

1. The Americans (and the Brits, but not, it seems, the French or the Germans) are running out of oil and gas, and the Muslims have got lots.

2. A few years back, some neocons devised a plan to get their hands on the oil, etc, so as to be able to dominate the world.

3. Trouble was, they couldn't go ahead with the plan unless public opinion was mobilised, as it was at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Which, by the way, President Roosevelt knew all about, but decided not to stop so that he could have a war.

4. Subsequently, the Bush administration and its agencies did "little or nothing" to stop the plotters of 9/11 and - when their operation was under way - little or nothing to bring it to a halt.

5. After September 11, the Bushites forgot all about terrorism and Bin Laden and concentrated on invading places that had oil and gas.

6. So, "the 'global war on terrorism' has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for... the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies."

The oil and PNAC arguments in points one and two are so complex and recondite that I'll begin at about point three, in which the US may create a pretext for attacks. "There is a possible precedent for this," says Meacher, "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."

US national archives "reveal" no such thing. Or rather, they reveal it to a select few people, but not to most historians. This may not be the place to talk about Japanese signals received in 1940/41 and not successfully decoded until 1946, but to state as fact that the President of the US (and former under-secretary of the navy) connived at an attack that sunk a large proportion of his own Pacific fleet, is to go well beyond the known facts. Which is where M cheerfully went.

However, armed with this non-precedent, Meacher then argues that "the 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the 'go' button... which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement".

But how to organise the necessary casus belli? "First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11." And then, says Meacher, it was "astonishing that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself". He goes on, "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?"

Unfortunately, this is all rubbish. Six minutes after the notification of the first hijacking, at 8.44am, fighters were ordered to be scrambled from Otis Base in Massachusetts. Two minutes later the first plane struck the World Trade Center. Another 16 minutes on, the second plane struck. Twenty-three minutes on and the third plane was notified as having been hijacked en route from Dulles airport. Another two minutes later fighters were scrambled from Langley (not Andrews), but arrived over Washington two minutes after Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. Nor was this lateness unprecedented. A year earlier F16s had failed to intercept a Cessna light aircraft that deviated from course, and buzzed the White House.

But watch Meacher build. It's a classic of its kind. "Was this inaction," he asks, "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?"

This is conspiracy 101. Say something is a fact which isn't. Then ask questions, rising up through incompetence, gradually to mal-intention, and then - abruptly - demand who might be behind it all. Cui Bono, my dear friends?

After the hijackings came the war that wasn't. "No serious attempt," charged Meacher, "has ever been made to catch Bin Laden." And he adds that, "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' ".

The following is from the press conference where that quote originated. General Myers is taxed with the embarrassing fact of Bin Laden being still extant. He makes Meacher's quote and then continues:

"Obviously that (the capture of BL) is desirable... the fact that we've been able to disrupt operations, get a lot of the people just under him and maybe just a little bit further down, has had some impact on their operations... So we're going to keep the hunt on. Finding one person, as we've talked about before, is a very difficult prospect, but we will keep trying."

Do you think that Meacher gives an adequate account of Myers' words here? And don't you seem to recall, over the past two years, an awful lot of chasing around the Tora Bora and through Pakistan, shoot-outs in various cities and captures of senior Bin Laden aides? Or is that all just some cunning smokescreen, to obscure the serious folk getting on with laying pipelines?

Questioned on ITN on Saturday Meacher denied that he was a conspiracy theorist, citing the "I'm only raising questions" defence. His information, he said, "comes from the collection of data that I have been doing meticulously. It comes from websites across the world."

The ones that suggest that the American agencies wanted an attack, so deliberately ignored the activities of terrorists in the US, and stood down their own air defences, in order to allow the worst terrorist atrocity in history to take place - all to secure oil and gas supplies. This act of treachery was accomplished with the complicity of military people, politicians and civil servants of all ranks, some of whose family members were on the planes and in the buildings.

I grant that Iraq has made us all a little mad. On either side of the argument many of us struggle to maintain our composure. Even so, I do not know what is more depressing: that a former long-serving minister should repeat this bizarre nonsense without checking it; that, yesterday, twice as many readers should be published supporting this garbage as those criticising it; or that one letter should claim that Meacher has simply said what "many have always known". Ugh! To give credibility to this stuff is bad enough, to "know" it is truly scary.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[CharlieBrown]

And here is an axtract from Simon Hoggart's Diary, also from The Guardian:

Diary

The warped gospel according to Meacher

Simon Hoggart
Saturday September 13, 2003
The Guardian

· Chesterton is supposed to have said, though it doesn't crop up in his published works, that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything. The same process seems to be happening now we've stopped believing in Tony Blair. Take Michael Meacher's claim that the American government allowed 9/11 to happen in order to have an excuse to invade Afghanistan.
This is supposed to have happened in the leakiest country in the world, where Watergate, Iran-contra and even the stain on Monica's dress were revealed in every detail. The notion that, out of the hundreds who would have been needed to keep the secret that the government had let 3,000 people die for political convenience, not one would have let it out is grotesque, stupid and pathetic and remains so, whatever you think about the swivel-eyed lunatics who surround George Bush.

Yet I've been startled by the number of otherwise sane people who believe Meacher - indeed, who think it is common sense. Or take the still burgeoning love for Tony Benn. I was on the Today programme yesterday with Charles Bailey, a musician from Brixton who has laid down an "urban groove" behind a selection of Benn's speeches. The CD is very good, apart from the speeches. The cab driver who took me back had heard the item, and was keen to buy the disc.

Back when he was a minister, Tony Benn was rightly regarded as just another ambitious pol on the make. Now he is revered by an astonishing range of people, from black musicians to the white middle classes. But with the discrediting of Tony Blair, people have no one else to believe in. So they believe in anyone, including Michael Meacher and Tony Benn.

[Woodrow]

Thanks for those articles CB.