posted on February 3, 2004 09:00:16 PM new
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
posted on February 4, 2004 07:21:17 AM new
The simple fact is that plans exist to invade or destroy every country on the face of the Earth, including our friends. The government has so many analysts and tacticians, often with nothing else to do than make "what if" scenarios based on every possible contingency.
Just because the research was done and specific plans existed, that does not mean there was ever an INTENT to go to war.
I'm sure we have invasion plans for Canada too. That doesn't mean we'd ever really do it. But I'm sure the plans exist and have been very heavily researched.
It's just a fact of the military and intelligence.
-------------------
Replay Media
Games of all kinds!
posted on February 5, 2004 09:30:08 AM new
The Accurate Story About Exaggerating WMD's, And The Point Of Lying So Much
by Samuel A. Stanson
JANUARY 29, 2004 – Widely reported in the news, recently resigned chief US weapons inspector for Iraq, David Kay, has gone before Congress in the past two days to tell Congress two seemingly divergent things.
First he said that none of the WMD’s we had been told about existed.
"It turns out we were all wrong, and that is most disturbing," Kay said, as reported by CNN (article: Ex-Iraq Inspector: Prewar Intelligence Failure 'Disturbing').
Kay, however, rather than making this statement an indictment of the President’s pitch to rush the nation into war, used the occasion to try and completely absolve the President, claiming the failures are entirely the fault of the intelligence community, and that no one at all exaggerated, misled, or pushed the CIA to come up with evidence to meet their wishes.
Sounds good for the President, huh?
This is an example of the playing out of one of the central games in the Bush/Limbaugh tell a lie, tell it big, tell it often arsenal.
There has been much evidence and testimony about how senior members of the Bush administration pushed the intelligence community to come up with the evidence they wanted to have, and that the Bush administration directly misled the American people.
Much of this was documented recently in a report by the non-partisan Carnegie Endowment. According to this report:
"Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s WMD and ballistic missile programs, beyond the intelligence failures…by:
"Routinely dropping caveats, probabilities, and expressions of uncertainty in intelligence statements from public assessments
In other words, taking speculation and conjecture and pretending it was known, proven fact.
"Misrepresenting inspectors’ findings in ways that turned threats from minor to dire
"Treating nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as a single "WMD threat…" distort(ing) the cost/benefit analysis of the war."
"Insisting without evidence… that Saddam Hussein would give whatever WMD he possessed to terrorists.
This last idea has been deemed absurd by experts. Uncovered, The Whole Truth About Iraq details the testimony of one such expert, who explains clearly that for Saddam to give his WMDs to Osama or any other terrorist group would be like giving up his hold on power, since once they have the weapons, his control over them would be lost.
David Kay made the point in his testimony before Congress yesterday that it couldn’t possibly have been this administration exaggerating the WMD evidence, since prior administrations had the same belief, that Saddam possessed WMDs.
This idea is debunked in the Carnegie report as well.
The report points out that there was a, "dramatic shift from prior intelligence assessments," that the Bush administration had slapped together over the course of some handful of weeks.
"The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), together with the creation of an independent intelligence entity at the Pentagon and other steps, suggest that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymaker’s views sometime in 2002."
In other words, no, the Bush administration did not simply feed us the same intel the other administrations did. They "unduly influenced" the intelligence community to come up with something more terrifying.
If you didn’t hear about this Carnegie Endowment report, despite the fact it was a major release from a major non-partisan organization that reached significant, detailed conclusions, don’t be surprised. That is just the right-wing domination of the media at work. It is still a significant work from a major, internationally respected organization and was taken very seriously everywhere except in America.
David Kay’s Bush-supporting claims are a major frontpage story. The Bush-scam-delineating Carnegie Report is, for the most part, entirely ignored.
The most important thing to notice is the payoff of the most basic game the Bush/Limbaughians use: the tell a lie, tell it big, tell it often game.
Despite much evidence and testimony, the Bush administration repeatedly tells the lie that they did not exaggerate, that they did not mislead. More testimony comes saying they did, like the Carnegie Endowment Report, it gets ignored, their lying continues on.
Which sets up the now familiar drool test. As they create with elections by calling President Bush or Arnold Schwarzenegger the unbeatable, unquestionable frontrunner, regardless of all else, they set up what both have referred to at one point as a "drool test," as in as long as they show up and aren’t drooling all over themselves they will win.
It is the same in this case. Despite mountains of evidence directly documenting the administration’s abuse of truth and reality in the lead up to war – such as the above report and video documentary, which is also an excellent source – all the administration needs is one David Kay and the message will get out there for most Americans to take that the President didn’t do anything wrong at all.
Except, of course, for those Americans smart enough to get their news from The Moderate Independent.
The Carnegie Report is 111 pages of detailed evidence. The Truth Uncovered video is 90 minutes of testimony from experts. Paul O’Neil’s testimony in Suskind’s recent book on the subject, The Price of Loyalty, tells the same story.
Today, resigned weapons inspector David Kay sat on Capitol Hill and told the nation that the Bush administration did not exaggerate nor pressure the intelligence community to exaggerate WMD evidence so that they could justify a war. We at M/I have a book, a video, and a report which combines the work of numerous experts who combined say, "Really, David? That’s nice of you to say, but next time you should try something like sticking up for your nation rather than just for your own personal interests and friends."
posted on February 5, 2004 09:42:38 AM new
Sky, you knowledge of (or lack of) military matters is impressive. US military command has many standard operational plans for any type of scenario through the world. You can bet there was a plan. These rapid military operational preparedness plans are a way of military life.
Get over it.
"If you believe you can tell me what to think, I believe I can tell you where to go. Not all of us are sheep....."
posted on February 5, 2004 07:43:44 PM new
Anyone who believes Bush planned the war before 911 is really straining for something to grasp. I am a Republican but I don't believe anything either side says anymore. I would sooner believe Bush but hey he is a politician so who knows. At least most republicans don't talk out of both sides of their mouths.
They are for the poor yet have you ever known a poor Democrat....or Republican for that matter. LISTEN to what they say and then look at their life style/how they live. Sometimes they are two different things.
posted on February 5, 2004 08:12:05 PM new
John F. Kennedy said, "if by a 'liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'liberal,' then I'm proud to say that I'm a 'liberal."'
"No one better demonstrated the convolutions of the label game better than Kennedy. Labels mean what partisans want them to mean, and the great word "liberal" has, over the past two decades, largely been defined by its enemies."
The word "Liberal" is used so often here in a derogatory manner. I wonder what does the word mean to you?
posted on February 5, 2004 09:15:54 PM new
JFK also said:
"Terror is not a new weapon. Throughout history it has been used by those who could not prevail, either by persuasion or example. But inevitably they fail, either because men are not afraid to die for a life worth living, or because the terrorists themselves came to realize that free men cannot be frightened by threats, and that aggression would meet its own response. And it is in the light of that history that every nation today should know, be he friend or foe, that the United States has both the will and the weapons to join free men in standing up to their responsibilities." --John F. Kennedy 1961
"If you believe you can tell me what to think, I believe I can tell you where to go. Not all of us are sheep....."
posted on February 5, 2004 09:17:50 PM new
And another comment on liberals:
"Yes, of course liberalism is a mental defect. Liberals are wracked by self-loathing as the result of some traumatic incident -- say, driving drunk off a bridge with your mistress passed out in the back seat and letting the poor girl drown because you're a married man and a U.S. senator, just to take one utterly random, hypothetical example off the top of my head." --Ann Coulter
"If you believe you can tell me what to think, I believe I can tell you where to go. Not all of us are sheep....."
posted on February 5, 2004 09:34:06 PM new
The first quote by Kennedy is about terrorists...not liberals.
The second one by Ann Coulter...
"Yes, of course liberalism is a mental defect. Liberals are wracked by self-loathing as the result of some traumatic incident -- say, driving drunk off a bridge with your mistress passed out in the back seat and letting the poor girl drown because you're a married man and a U.S. senator, just to take one utterly random, hypothetical example off the top of my head." --Ann Coulter
This quote sounds like an exercise in verbal shock and awe...Does Ann define all liberals by a traumatic experience of one?
posted on February 6, 2004 07:47:35 AM new
I quoted Kennedy's feeling about being called a Liberal. Then I said, The word "Liberal" is used so often here in a derogatory manner. I wonder what does the word mean to you?
You followed that question with quotes by J.F.Kennedy and Ann Coulter. I'll bet Kennedy would find that amusing.
I suppose I was wrong to expect an answer to my question.
