Gore Vidal Article in Observer (full text)

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Elvis Christ (elvis_christ) wrote in sos_usa,
@ 2002-10-29 06:25:00








Gore Vidal Observer Article



The Observer, Sunday 27th October 2002, Review Section, Pages 1-4

The Enemy Within


On 24 August, 1814, things looked very dark for freedom's land. That was the
day the British captured Washington DC and set fire to the Capitol and the
White House. President Madison took refuge in the nearby Virginia woods
where he waited patiently for the notoriously short attention span of the
Brits to kick in, which it did. They moved on and what might have been a Day
of Utter Darkness turned out to be something of a bonanza for the DC
building trades and up-market realtors.
One year after 9/11, we still don't know by whom we were struck that
infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many
civil-libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill
of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a
mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in
5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected president with the oil and gas
Cheney/Bush junta.
Meanwhile, our more and more unaccountable government is pursuing all sorts
of games around the world that we the spear carriers (formerly the people)
will never learn of. Even so, we have been getting some answers to the
question: why weren't we warned in advance of 9/11? Apparently, we were,
repeatedly; for the better part of a year, we were told there would be
unfriendly visitors to our skies some time in September 2001, but the
government neither informed nor protected us despite Mayday warnings from
Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad and even from elements of our own
FBI. A joint panel of congressional intelligence committees reported (19
September 2002, New York Times) that as early as 1996, Pakistani terrorist
Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to federal agents that he was 'learning to fly
in order to crash a plane into CIA HQ'.
Only CIA director George Tenet seemed to take the various threats seriously.
In December 1998, he wrote to his deputies that 'we are at war' with Osama
bin Laden. So impressed was the FBI by his warnings that by 20 September
2001, 'the FBI still had only one analyst assigned full time to al-Qaeda'.
From a briefing prepared for Bush at the beginning of July 2001: 'We believe
that OBL [Osama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack
against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be
spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or
interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little
or no warning.' And so it came to pass; yet Condoleezza Rice, the National
Security Advisor, says she never suspected that this meant anything more
than the kidnapping of planes.
Happily, somewhere over the Beltway, there is Europe - recently declared
anti-Semitic by the US media because most of Europe wants no war with Iraq
and the junta does, for reasons we may now begin to understand thanks to
European and Asian investigators with their relatively free media.
On the subject 'How and Why America was Attacked on 11 September, 2001', the
best, most balanced report, thus far, is by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed … Yes,
yes, I know he is one of Them. But they often know things that we don't -
particularly about what we are up to. A political scientist, Ahmed is
executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development 'a
think- tank dedicated to the promotion of human rights, justice and peace'
in Brighton. His book, 'The War on Freedom', has just been published in the
US by a small but reputable publisher.
Ashmed provides a background for our ongoing war against Afghanistan, a view
that in no way coincides with what the administration has told us. He has
drawn on many sources, most tellingly on American whistleblowers who are
beginning to come forth and hear witness - like those FBI agents who warned
their supervisors that al-Qaeda was planning a kamikaze strike against New
York and Washington only to be told that if they went public with these
warnings they would suffer under the National Security Act. Several of these
agents have engaged David P. Schippers, chief investigative counsel for the
US House Judiciary Committee, to represent them in court. The majestic
Schippers managed the successful impeachment of President Clinton in the
House of Representatives. He may, if the Iraqi war should go wrong, be
obliged to perform the same high service for Bush, who allowed the American
people to go unwarned about an imminent attack upon two of our cities as
pre-emption of a planned military strike by the US against the Taliban.
The Guardian (26 September 2001) reported that in July 2001, a group of
interested parties met in a Berlin hotel to listen to a former State
Department official, Lee Coldren, as he passed on a message from the Bush
administration that 'the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban
that they might be considering some military action … the chilling quality
of this private warning was that it came - according to one of those
present, the Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik - accompanied by specific details
of how Bush would succeed …' Four days earlier, the Guardian had reported
that 'Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats of possible American
military action against them two months before the terrorist assaults on New
York and Washington … [which] raises the possibility that bin Laden was
launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats.' A
replay of the 'day of infamy' in the Pacific 62 years earlier?

Why the US needed a Eurasian adventure

On 9 September 2001, Bush was presented with a draft of a national security
presidential directive outlining a global campaign of military, diplomatic
and intelligence action targeting al-Qaeda, buttressed by the threat of war.
According to NBC News: 'President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans
for a worldwide war against al-Qaeda … but did not have the chance before
the terrorist attacks … The directive, as described to NBC News, was
essentially the same war plan as the one put into action after 11 September.
The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly … because it
simply had to pull the plans "off the shelf".'
Finally, BBC News, 18 September 2001: 'Niak Naik, a former Pakistan foreign
secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military
action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. It was
Naik's view that Washington would not drop its war for Afghanistan even if
bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taliban.'
Was Afghanistan then turned to rubble in order to avenge the 3,000 Americans
slaughtered by Osama? Hardly. The administration is convinced that Americans
are so simple-minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than
the venerable lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does
evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates us, 'cause we're rich 'n free 'n
he's not. Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the most frightening
logo for our long contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan,
planning for which had been 'contingency' some years before 9/11 and, again,
from 20 December, 2000, when Clinton's out-going team devised a plan to
strike at al-Qaeda in retaliation for the assault on the warship Cole.
Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, personally briefed his
successor on the plan but Rice, still very much in her role as director of
Chevron-Texaco, with special duties regarding Pakistan and Uzbekistan, now
denies any such briefing. A year and a half later (12 August, 2002),
fearless Time magazine reported this odd memory lapse.
Osama, if it was he and not a nation, simply provided the necessary shock to
put in train a war of conquest. But conquest of what? What is there in
dismal dry sandy Afghanistan worth conquering? Zbigniew Brzezinski tells us
exactly what in a 1997 Council on Foreign Relations study called 'The Grand
Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives'.
The Polish-born Brzezinski was the hawkish National Security Advisor to
President Carter. In 'The Grand Chessboard', Brzezinski gives a little
history lesson. 'Ever since the continents started interacting politically,
some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the centre of world power.' Eurasia is
all the territory east of Germany. This means Russia, the Middle East, China
and parts of India. Brzezinski acknowledges that Russia and China, bordering
oil-rich central Asia, are the two main powers threatening US hegemony in
that area.
He takes it for granted that the US must exert control over the former
Soviet republics of Central Asia, known to those who love them as 'the
Stans': Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan and Kyrgyzstan all 'of
importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at
least three of their most immediate and most powerful neighbours - Russia,
Turkey and Iran, with China signaling'. Brzezinski notes how the world's
energy consumption keeps increasing; hence, who controls Caspian oil/gas
will control the world economy. Brzezinski then, reflexively, goes into the
standard American rationalization for empire;. We want nothing, ever, for
ourselves, only to keep bad people from getting good things with which to
hurt good people. 'It follows that America's primary interest is to help
ensure that no single [other] power comes to control the geopolitical space
and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access
to it.'
Brzezinski is quite aware that American leaders are wonderfully ignorant of
history and geography so he really lays it on, stopping just short of
invoking politically incorrect 'manifest destiny'. He reminds the Council
just how big Eurasia is. Seventy-five percent of the world's population is
Eurasian. If I have done the sums right, that means that we've only got
control, to date, of a mere 25 percent of the world's folks. More! 'Eurasia
accounts for 60-per cent of the world's GNP and three-fourths of the world's
known energy resources.'
Brzezinski's master plan for 'our' globe has obviously been accepted by the
Cheney-Bush junta. Corporate America, long over-excited by Eurasian mineral
wealth, has been aboard from the beginning.
Ahmed sums up: 'Brzezinski clearly envisaged that the establishment,
consolidation and expansion of US military hegemony over Eurasia through
Central Asia would require the unprecedented, open-ended militarisation of
foreign policy, coupled with an unprecedented manufacture of domestic
support and consensus on this militarisation campaign.'
Afghanistan is the gateway to all these riches. Will we fight to seize them?
It should never be forgotten that the American people did not want to fight
in either of the twentieth century's world wars, but President Wilson
maneuvered us into the First while President Roosevelt maneuvered the
Japanese into striking the first blow at Pearl Harbor, causing us to enter
the Second as the result of a massive external attack. Brzezinski
understands all this and, in 1997, he is thinking ahead - as well as
backward. 'Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural
society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign
policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely
perceived direct external threat.' Thus was the symbolic gun produced that
belched black smoke over Manhattan and the Pentagon.
Since the Iran-Iraq wars, Islam has been demonized as a Satanic terrorist
cult that encourages suicide attacks - contrary, it should be noted, to the
Islamic religion. Osama has been portrayed, accurately, it would seem, as an
Islamic zealot. In order to bring this evil-doer to justice ('dead or
alive'), Afghanistan, the object of the exercise was made safe not only for
democracy but for Union Oil of California whose proposed pipeline from
Turkmenistan to Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean port of
Karachi, had been abandoned under the Taliban's chaotic regime. Currently,
the pipeline is a go-project thanks to the junta's installation of a Unocal
employee (John J Maresca) as US envoy to the newly born democracy whose
president, Hamid Karzai, is also, according to Le Monde, a former employee
of a Unocal subsidiary. Conspiracy? Coincidence!
Once Afghanistan looked to be within the fold, the junta, which had managed
to pull off a complex diplomatic-military caper, - abruptly replaced Osama,
the personification of evil, with Saddam. This has been hard to explain
since there is nothing to connect Iraq with 9/11. Happily, 'evidence' is now
being invented. But it is uphill work, not helped by stories in the press
about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must - for the sake of the free
world - be reassigned to US and European consortiums.
As Brzezinski foretold, 'a truly massive and widely perceived direct
external threat' made it possible for the President to dance a war dance
before Congress. 'A long war!' he shouted with glee. Then he named an
incoherent Axis of Evil to be fought. Although Congress did not give him the
FDR Special - a declaration of war - he did get permission to go after Osama
who may now be skulking in Iraq.

Bush and the dog that did not bark

Post-9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory denunciations of
unpatriotic 'conspiracy theorists', who not only are always with us but are
usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an article of faith that
there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would
have thought that most of corporate America had been conspiring with
accountants to cook their books since - well, at least the bright days of
Reagan and deregulation. Ironically, less than a year after the massive
danger from without, we were confronted with an even greater enemy from
within: Golden Calf capitalism. Transparency? One fears that greater
transparency will only reveal armies of maggots at work beneath the skin of
a culture that needs a bit of a lie-down in order to collect itself before
taking its next giant step which is to conquer Eurasia, a potentially fatal
adventure not only for our frazzled institutions but for us the presently
living.
Complicity. The behavior of President George W. Bush on 11 September
certainly gives rise to all sorts of not unnatural suspicions. I can think
of no other modern chief of state who would continue to pose for 'warm'
pictures of himself listening to a young girl telling stories about her pet
goat while hijacked planes were into three buildings.
Constitutionally, Bush is not only chief of state, he is commander-in-chief
of the armed forces. Normally, a commander in such a crisis would go
straight to headquarters and direct operations while receiving the latest
intelligence.
This is what Bush actually did - or did not do - according to Stan Goff, a
retired US Army veteran who has taught military science and doctrine at West
Point. Goff writes, in 'The So-called Evidence is a Farce': '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. Four planes get hijacked and
deviate from their flight plan, all the while on FAA radar.'
Goff, incidentally, like the other astonished military experts, cannot
fathom why the government's automatic 'standard order of procedure in the
event of a hijacking' was not followed. Once a plane has deviated from its
flight-plan, fighter planes are sent up to find out why. That is law and
does not require presidential approval, which only needs to be given if
there is a decision to shoot down a plane. Goff spells it out: 'The planes
were hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10am. 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 8:15am it should be very apparent that something is terribly
wrong. The President is glad-handling teachers. By 8:45am, when American
Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower, Bush is settling in with
children for his photo op. Four planes have obviously been hijacked
simultaneously and one has just dived into the twin towers, and still no one
notifies the nominal Commander-in-Chief.
'No one has apparently scrambled [sent aloft] Air Force interceptors either.
At 9:03, Flight 175 crashes into the South Tower. At 9:05 Andrew Card, the
Chief of Staff whispers to Bush [who] "briefly turns somber" according to
reporters. Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting?
No. He resumes listening to second-graders … and continues the 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 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 have already figured out - that there's been an
attack on the World Trade Centre. There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to
Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No.
'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 the building at 460 knots.
'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 the freeway at rush hour by buying her a video driving game
… There is a story being constructed about these events.'
There is indeed, and the more it is added to the darker it becomes. The
nonchalance of General Richard B. Myers, acting Joint Chief of Staff, is as
puzzling as the President's campaigning-as-usual act. Myers was at the
Capitol chatting with Senator Max Cleland. A sergeant, writing later in the
AFPS (American Forces Press Service) describes Myers at the Capitol. 'While
in an outer office, he said, he saw a television report that a plane had hit
the World Trade Centre. "They thought it was a small plane or something like
that," Myers said. So the two men went ahead with the office call.'
Whatever Myers and Cleland had to say to each other (more funds for the
military?) must have been riveting because, during their chat, the AFPS
reports, 'the second tower was hit by another jet. "Nobody informed us of
that," Myers said. "But when we came out, that was obvious. Then, right at
that time, somebody said the Pentagon had been hit."' Finally, somebody
'thrust a cellphone in Myers' hand' and, as if by magic, the commanding
general of Norad - our Airspace Command - was on the line just as the
hijackers mission had been successfully completed except for the failed one
in Pennsylvania. In later testimony to the Senate Armed Forces Committee,
Myers said he thinks that, as of his cellphone talk with Norad, 'the
decision was at that point to start launching aircraft'. It was 9:40am. One
hour and 20 minutes after air controllers knew that Flight 11 had been
hijacked; 50 minutes after the North Tower was struck.
This statement would have been quite enough in our old serious army/air
force to launch a number of courts martial with an impeachment or two thrown
in. First, Myers claims to be uninformed until the third strike. But the
Pentagon had been overseeing the hijacked planes from at least the moment of
the strike at the first tower: yet not until the third strike, at the
Pentagon, was the decision made to get the fighter planes up. Finally, this
one is the dog that did not bark. By law, the fighters should have been up
at around 8:15. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been
diverted or shot down. I don't think that Goff is being unduly picky when he
wonders who and what kept the Air Force from following its normal procedure
instead of waiting an hour and 20 minutes until the damage was done and only
then launching the fighters. Obviously, somebody had ordered the Air Force
to make no move to intercept those hijackings until … what?
On 21 January 2002, the Canadian media analyst Barry Zwicker summed up on
CBC-TV: 'That morning no interceptors responded in a timely fashion to the
highest alert situation. This includes the Andrews squadrons which … are
12 miles from the White House … Whatever the explanation for the huge
failure, there have been no reports, to my knowledge, of reprimands. This
further weakens the "Incompetence Theory". Incompetence usually earns
reprimands. This causes me to ask whether there were "stand down" orders.'??
On 29 August 2002, the BBC reports that on 9/11 there were 'only four
fighters on ready status in the north-eastern US'. Conspiracy? Coincidence?
Error?
It is interesting how often in our history, when disaster strikes,
incompetence is considered a better alibi than … well, yes, there are
worse things. After Pearl Harbor, Congress moved to find out why Hawaii's
two military commanders, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, had not
anticipated the Japanese attack. But President Roosevelt pre-empted that
investigation with one of his own. Short and Kimmel were broken for
incompetence. The 'truth' is still obscure to this day.

The media's weapons of mass distraction

But Pearl Harbor has been much studied. 11 September, it is plain, is never
going to be investigated if Bush has anything to say about it. In January
2002, CNN reported that 'Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom
Daschle to limit the Congressional investigation into the events of 11
September … The request was made at a private meeting with Congressional
leaders … Sources said Bush initiated the conversation … He asked that
only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential
breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist
attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry .. Tuesday's discussion
followed a rare call from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to make the
same request …'
The excuse given, according to Daschle, was that 'resources and personnel
would be taken' away from the war on terrorism in the event of a wider
inquiry. So for reasons that we must never know, those 'breakdowns' are to
be the goat. That they were more likely to be not break - but 'stand-downs'
is not for us to pry. Certainly the one-hour 20 minute failure to put
fighter planes in the air could not have been due to a breakdown throughout
the entire Air Force along the East Coast. Mandatory standard operational
procedure had been told to cease and desist.
Meanwhile, the media were assigned their familiar task of inciting public
opinion against bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind. These media
blitzes often resemble the magicians classic gesture of distraction: as you
watch the rippling bright colours of his silk handkerchief in one hand, he
is planting the rabbit in your pocket with the other. We were quickly
assured that Osama's enormous family with its enormous wealth had broken
with him, as had the royal family of his native Saudi Arabia. The CIA swore,
hand on heart, that Osama had not worked for them in the war against the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Finally, the rumour that Bush family had
in any way profited by its long involvement with the bin Laden family was -
what else? - simply partisan bad taste.
But Bush Jr's involvement goes back at least to 1979 when his first failed
attempt to become a player in the big Texas oil league brought him together
with one James Bath of Houston, a family friend, who have Bush Jr. $50,000
for a 5 per cent stake in Bush's firm Arbusto Energy. At this time,
according to Wayne Madsen ('In These Times' - Institute for Public Affairs
No. 25), Bath was 'the sole US business representative for Salem bin Laden,
head of the family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden… In a
statement issued shortly after the 11 September attacks, the White House
vehemently denied the connection, insisting that Bath invested his own
money, not Salem bin Laden's, in Arbusto. In conflicting statements, Bush at
first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and
that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests … after several
reincarnations, Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy Corporation.'
Behind the Junior Bush is the senior Bush, gainfully employed by the Carlyle
Group which has ownership in at least 164 companies worldwide, inspiring
admiration in that staunch friend to the wealthy, the Wall Street Journal,
which noted, as early as 27 September 2001, 'If the US boosts defence
spending in its quest to stop Osama bin Laden's alleged terrorist
activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: bin Laden's family …
is an investor in a fund established by Carlyle Group, a well-connected
Washington merchant bank specialising in buyouts of defence and aerospace
companies … Osama is one of more than 50 children of Mohammed bin Laden,
who built the family's $5 billion business.'
But Bush pere et fils, in pursuit of wealth and office, are beyond shame or,
one cannot help but think, good sense. There is a suggestion that they are
blocking investigation of the bin Laden connection with terrorism. Agent
France Press reported on 4 November 2001: 'FBI agents probing relatives of
Saudi-born terror suspect Osama … were told to back off soon after George
W. Bush became president …' According to BBC TV's Newsnight (6 Nov 2001),
'… just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin
Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members
of Osama's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House,
whose official line is that the bin Ladens are above suspicion.' 'Above the
Law' (Green Press, 14 February 2002) sums up: 'We had what looked like the
biggest failure of the intelligence community since Pearl Harbor but what we
are learning now is it wasn't a failure, it was a directive.' True? False?
Bush Jr will be under oath during the impeachment interrogation. Will we
hear 'What is a directive? What is is?'
Although the US had, for some years, fingered Osama as a mastermind
terrorist, no serious attempt had been made pre-9/11 to 'bring him to
justice dead or alive, innocent or guilty', as Texan law of the jungle
requires. Clinton's plan to act was given to Condeleezza Rice by Sandy
Berger, you will recall, but she says she does not.
As far back as March 1996 when Osama was in Sudan, Major General Elfatih
Erwa, Sudanese Minister for Defence, offered to extradite him. According to
the Washington Post (3 October 2001), 'Erwa said he would happily keep close
watch on bin Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the
government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over … [US
officials] said, "just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go
to Somalia", where he had once been given credit for the successful al-Qaeda
attack on American forces that in '93 that killed 18 Rangers.' Erwa said in
an interview, 'We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they [US officials]
said, "Let him."'
In 1996 Sudan expelled Osama and 3,000 of his associates. Two years later
the Clinton administration, in the great American tradition of never having
to say thank you for Sudan's offer to hand over Osama, proceeded to
missile-attack Sudan's al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory on the grounds that
Sudan was harboring bin Laden terrorists who were making chemical and
biological weapons when the factory was simply making vaccines for the UN.
Four years later, John O'Neill, a much admired FBI agent, complained in the
Irish Times a month before the attacks, 'The US State Department - and
behind it the oil lobby who make up President Bush's entourage - blocked
attempts to prove bin Laden's guilt. The US ambassador to Yemen forbade
O'Neill (and his FBI team) … from entering Yemen in August 2001. O'Neill
resigned in frustration and took on a new job as head of security at the
World Trade Centre. He died in the 11 September attack.' Obviously, Osama
has enjoyed bipartisan American support since his enlistment in the CIA's
war to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But by 9/11 there was no Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan, indeed there was no Soviet Union.

A world made safe for peace and pipelines

I watched Bush and Cheney on CNN when the Axis of Evil speech was given and
the 'long war' proclaimed. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were fingered as
enemies to be clobbered because they might or might not be harbouring
terrorists who might or might not destroy us in the night. So we must strike
first whenever it pleases us. Thus, we declared 'war on terrorism' - an
abstract noun which cannot be a war at all as you need a country for that.
Of course, there was innocent Afghanistan, which was levelled from a great
height, but then what's collateral damage - like an entire country - when
you're targeting the personification of all evil according to Time and the
NY Times and the networks?
As it proved, the conquest of Afghanistan had nothing to do with Osama. He
was simply a pretext for replacing the Taliban with a relatively stable
government that would allow Union Oil of California to lay its pipeline for
the profit of, among others, the Cheney-Bush junta.
Background? All right. The headquarters of Unocal are, as might be expected,
in Texas. In December 1997, Taliban representatives were invited to
Sugarland, Texas. At that time, Unocal had already begun training Afghan men
in pipeline construction, with US government approval. BBC News, (4 December
1997): 'A spokesman for the company Unocal said the Taliban were expected to
spend several days at the company's [Texas] headquarters … a BBC regional
correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is
part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy
resources of the Caspian Sea.' The Inter Press Service (IPS) reported: 'some
Western businesses are warming up to the Taliban despite the movement's
institutionalisation of terror, massacres, abductions and impoverishment.'
CNN (6 October 1996): 'The United States wants good ties [with the Taliban]
but can't openly seek them while women are being oppressed.'
The Taliban, rather better organised than rumoured, hired for PR one Leila
Helms, a niece of Richard Helms, former director of the CIA. In October
1996, the Frankfurter Rundschau reported that Unocal 'has been given the
go-ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul to build a pipeline from
Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan ..' This was a real coup for Unocal
as well as other candidates for pipelines, including Condoleezza's old
employer Chevron. Although the Taliban was already notorious for its
imaginative crimes against the human race, the Wall Street Journal, scenting
big bucks, fearlessly announced: 'Like them or not, the Taliban are the
players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in
history.' The NY Times (26 May 1997) leapt aboard the pipeline juggernaut.
'The Clinton administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory would
act as counterweight to Iran … and would offer the possibility of new
trade routes that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence in the region.'
But by 1999, it was clear that the Taliban could not provide the security we
would need to protect our fragile pipelines. The arrival of Osama as warrior
for Allah on the scene refocused, as it were, the bidding. New alliances
were now being made. The Bush administration soon buys the idea of an
invasion of Afghanistan, Frederick Starr, head of the Central Asia Institute
at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in the Washington Post (19 December
2000): 'The US has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian
government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed
with the idea of a new raid to wipe out bin Laden.'
Although with much fanfare we went forth to wreak our vengeance on the
crazed sadistic religious zealot who slaughtered 3,000 American citizens,
once that 'war' was under way, Osama was dropped as irrelevant and so we are
back to the Unocal pipeline, now a go-project. In the light of what we know
today, it is unlikely that the junta was ever going to capture Osama alive:
he has tales to tell. One of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's best
numbers now is: 'Where is he? Somewhere? Here? There? Somewhere? Who knows?'
And we get his best twinkle. He must also be delighted - and amazed - that
the media have bought the absurd story that Osama, if alive, would still be
in Afghanistan, underground, waiting to be flushed out instead of in a
comfortable mansion in Osama-loving Jakarta, 2,000 miles to the East and
easily accessible by Flying Carpet One.
Many commentators of a certain age have noted how Hitlerian our junta sounds
as it threatens first one country for harbouring terrorists and then
another. It is true that Hitler liked to pretend to be the injured - or
threatened - party before he struck. But he had many great predecessors not
least Imperial Rome. Stephen Gowan's War in Afghanistan: A $28 Billion
Racket quotes Joseph Schumpeter who, 'in 1919, described ancient Rome in a
way that sounds eerily like the United States in 2001: "There was no corner
of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or
under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of
Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented …
The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always
being attacked by evil-minded neighbours."' We have only outdone the Romans
in turning metaphors such as the war on terrorism, or poverty, or Aids into
actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick at random in order to
maintain turbulence in foreign lands.
As of 1 August 2002, trial balloons were going up all over Washington DC to
get world opinion used to the idea that 'Bush of Afghanistan' had gained a
title as mighty as his father's 'Bush of the Persian Gulf' and Junior was
now eager to add Iraq-Babylon to his diadem. These various balloons fell
upon Europe and the Arab world like so many lead weights. But something new
has been added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra, 'they are
threatening us, we must attack first'. Now everything is more of less out in
the open. The International Herald Tribune wrote in August 2002: 'The leaks
began in earnest on 5 July, when the New York Times described a tentative
Pentagon plan that it said called for an invasion by a US force of up to
250,000 that would attack Iraq from the north, south and west. On 10 July,
the Times said that Jordan might be used as a base for the invasion. The
Washington Post reported, 28 July, that "many senior US military officers
contend that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat …"' And the status
quo should be maintained. Incidentally, this is the sort of debate that the
founding fathers intended the Congress, not military bureaucrats, to conduct
in the name of we the people. But that sort of debate has, for a long time,
been denied us.
One refreshing note is now being struck in a fashion unthinkable in imperial
Rome: the cheerful admission that we habitually resort to provocation. The
Tribune continues: 'Donald Rumsfeld has threatened to jail any one found to
have been behind the leaks. But a retired army general, Fred Woerner, tends
to see a method behind the leaks. "We may already be executing a plan," he
said recently. "Are we involved in a preliminary psychological dimension of
causing Iraq to do something to justify a US attack or make concessions?
Somebody knows.' That is plain.
Elsewhere in this interesting edition of the Herald Tribune wise William
Pfaff writes: 'A second Washington debate is whether to make an unprovoked
attack on Iran to destroy a nuclear power reactor being built with Russian
assistance, under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency,
within the terms of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a
signatory … No other government would support such an action, other than
Israel's (which) would do so not because it expected to be attacked by Iran
but because it, not unjustifiably, opposes any nuclear capacity in the hands
of any Islamic government.'

Suspect states and the tom-toms of revenge

'Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be
dreaded because it compromises and develops the germ of every other. As the
parent of armies, war encourages debts and taxes, the known instruments for
bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the
discretionary power of the executive is extended … and all the means of
seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people
…' Thus, James Madison warned us at the dawn of our republic.
Post 9/11, thanks to the 'domination of the few', Congress and the media are
silent while the executive, through propaganda and skewed polls, seduces the
public mind as hitherto unthinkable centers of power like Homeland Defence
(a new Cabinet post to be placed on top of the Defence Department) are being
constructed and 4 per cent of the country has recently been invited to join
Tips, a civilian spy system to report on anyone who looks suspicious or …
who objects to what the executive is doing at home or abroad?
Although every nation knows how - if it has the means and the will - to
protect itself from thugs of the sort that brought us 9/ 11, war is not an
option. Wars are for nations not root-less gangs. You put a price on their
heads and hunt them down. In recent years, Italy has been doing that with
the Sicilian Mafia; and no one has yet suggested bombing Palermo.
But the Cheney-Bush junta wants a war in order to dominate Afghanistan,
build a pipeline, gain control of the oil of Eurasia's Stans for their
business associates as well as to do as much damage to Iraq and Iran on the
grounds that one day those evil countries may carpet our fields of amber
grain with anthrax or something.
The media, never much good a analysis, are more and more breathless and
incoherent. On CNN, even the stolid Jim Clancy started to hyperventilate
when an Indian academic tried to explain how Iraq was once our ally and
'friend' in its war against our Satanic enemy Iran. 'None of that conspiracy
stuff,' snuffed Clancy. Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for
unspeakable truth.
As of August, at least among economists, a consensus was growing that,
considering our vast national debt (we borrow $2 billion a day to keep the
government going) and a tax base seriously reduced by the junta in order to
benefit the 1 per cent who own most of the national wealth, there is no way
that we could ever find the billions needed to destroy Iraq in 'a long war'
or even a short one, with most of Europe lined up against us. Germany and
Japan paid for the Gulf War, reluctantly - with Japan, at the last moment,
irritably quarrelling over the exchange rate at the time of the contract.
Now Germany's Schroder has said no. Japan is mute.
But the tom-toms keep beating revenge; and the fact that most of the world
is opposed to our war seems only to bring hectic roses to the cheeks of the
Bush administration (Bush Snr of the Carlyle Group, Bush Jnr formerly of
Harken, Cheney, formerly of Halliburton, Rice, formerly of Chevron,
Rumsfeld, formerly of Occidental). If ever an administration should recuse
itself in matters dealing with energy, it is the current junta. But this is
unlike any administration in our history. Their hearts are plainly
elsewhere, making money, far from our mock Roman temples, while we, alas,
are left only with their heads, dreaming of war, preferably against weak
peripheral states.
Mohammed Heikal is a brilliant Egyptian journalist-observer, and sometime
Foreign Minister. On 10 October 2001, he said to the Guardian: 'Bin Laden
does not have the capabilities for an operation of this magnitude. When I
hear Bush talking about al- Qaeda as if it were Nazi Germany or the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what is there.
Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was
monitored and al-Qaeda has been penetrated by US intelligence, Pakistani
intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have
kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organisation and
sophistication.
The former president of Germany's domestic intelligence service, Eckehardt
Werthebach (American Free Press, 4 December 2001) spells it out. The 9/11
attacks required 'years of planning' while their scale indicates that they
were a product of 'state-organised actions'. There it is. Perhaps, after
all, Bush Jnr was right to call it a war. But which state attacked us?
Will the suspects please line up. Saudi Arabia? 'No, no. Why we are paying
you $50 million a year for training the royal bodyguard on our own holy if
arid soil. True the kingdom contains many wealthy well-educated enemies but
…' Bush Snr and Jnr exchange a knowing look. Egypt? No way. Dead broke
despite US baksheesh. Syria? No funds. Iran? Too proud to bother with a
parvenu state like the US. Israel? Sharon is capable of anything. But he
lacks the guts and the grace of the true Kamikaze. Anyway, Sharon was not in
charge when this operation began with the planting of 'sleepers' around the
US flight schools 5 or 6 years ago. The United States? Elements of corporate
America would undeniably prosper from a 'massive external attack' that would
make it possible for us to go to war whenever the President sees fit while
suspending civil liberties. (The 342 pages of the USA Patriot Act were
plainly prepared before 9/11.) Bush Snr and Jnr are giggling now. Why?
Because Clinton was president back then. As the former president leaves the
line of suspects, he says, more in anger than in sorrow: 'When we left the
White House we had a plan for an all-out war on al-Qaeda. We turned it over
to this administration and they did nothing. Why?' Biting his lip, he goes.
The Bushes no longer giggle. Pakistan breaks down: 'I did it! I confess! I
couldn't help myself. Save me. I am an evil-doer!'
Apparently, Pakistan did do it - or some of it. We must now go back to 1997
when 'the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA' was launched
in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Central Asia specialist
Ahmed Rashid wrote (Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999): 'With the
active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services
Intelligence) who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war, waged
by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals,
from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and '92
… more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by
the Afghanistan jihad.' The CIA covertly trained and sponsored these
warriors.
In March 1985, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive
166, increasing military aid while CIA specialists met with the ISI
counterparts near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Jane's Defence Weekly (14 September
2001) gives the best overview: 'The trainers were mainly from Pakistan's ISI
agency who learnt their craft from American Green Beret commandos and Navy
Seals in various US training establishments.' This explains the reluctance
of the administration to explain why so many unqualified persons, over so
long a time, got visas to visit our hospitable shores. While in Pakistan,
'mass training of Afghan [zealots] was subsequently conducted by the
Pakistan army under the supervision of the elite Special Services … In
1988, with US knowledge, bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base); a
conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across 26
or so countries. Washington turned a blind eye to al-Qaeda.'

When Mohamed Atta's plane struck the World Trade Centre's North Tower,
George W. Bush and the child at the Florida elementary school were
discussing her goat. By coincidence, our word 'tragedy' comes from the
Greek: for 'goat' tragos plus oide for 'song'. 'Goat-song'. It is highly
suitable that this lament, sung in ancient satyr plays, should have been
heard again at the exact moment when we were struck by fire from heaven, and
a tragedy whose end is nowhere in sight began for us.