Bush's War - The WTC
Oil Gambit
By Stan Goff
ConspiracyPlanet.com
11-22-1
I'm a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant.That doesn't cut much
for those who will only accept the opinions of former officers on military
matters, since we enlisted swine are assumed to be incapable of grasping
the nuances of doctrine.
But I wasn't just in the army, I studied and taught military science
and doctrine. I was a tactics instructor at the Jungle Operations Training
Center in Panama, and I taught Military Science at West Point.
And contrary to the popular image of what Special Forces does, SF's
mission is to teach.We offer advice and assistance to foreign forces.
That's everything from teaching marksmanship to a private to instructing
a Battalion staff on how to coordinate effective air operations with
a sister service.
Based on that experience, and operations in eight designated conflict
areas from Vietnam to Haiti, I have to say that the story we hear on
the news and read in the newspapers is simply not believable.
The most cursory glance at the verifiable facts, before, during, and
after September 11th,does not support the official line or conform to
the current actions of the United States government.
But the official line only works if they can get everyone to accept
its underlying premises. I'm not at all surprised about the Republican
and Democratic Parties repeating these premises. They are simply two
factions within a single dominant political class, and both are financed
by the same economic powerhouses. My biggest disappointment, as someone
who identifies himself with the left, has been the tacit acceptance
of those premises by others on the left, sometimes naively, and sometimes
to score some morality points. Those premises are twofold.
One, there is the premise that what this de facto administration is
doing now is a "response" to September 11th.
Two, there is the premise that this attack on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon was done by people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion,
neither of these is sound.
To put this in perspective we have to go back not to September 11th,
but to last year or further.
A man of limited intelligence, George W. Bush, with nothing more than
his name and the behind-the-scenes pressure of his powerful father -
a former President, ex-director of Central Intelligence, and an oil
man - is systematically constructed as a candidate, at tremendous cost.
Across the country, subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms are put into
place to disfranchise a significant fraction of the Democrat's African-American
voter base.
This doesn't come out until Florida becomes a battleground for Electoral
College votes, and the magnitude of the story has been suppressed by
the corporate media to this day. In a decision so lacking in legitimacy,
the Supreme Court will neither by-line the author of the decision nor
allow the decision to ever be used as a precedent, Bush v. Gore awards
the presidency of the United States to a man who loses the popular vote
in Florida and loses the national popular vote by over 600,000.
This de facto regime then organizes a very interesting cabinet. The
Vice President is an oil executive and the former Secretary of Defense.
The National Security Advisor is a director on the board of a transnational
oil corporation and a Russia scholar. The Secretary of State is a man
with no diplomatic experience whatsoever, and the former Chair of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. The other interesting appointment is Donald Rumsfeld
as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld is the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals.
He and Cheney were featured as speakers at the May, 2000, Russian-American
Business Leaders Forum. So the consistent currents in this cabinet are
petroleum, the former Soviet Union, and the military.
Based on the record of Daddy Bush, in all his guises, and the general
trajectory of US foreign policy as far back as the Carter Administration,
I feel I can reasonably conclude that Middle Eastern and South Asian
fossil fuels are one of their major preoccupations. Not just because
this klavern has some very direct financial interests in fossil fuel,
but because they surely know that worldwide oil production is peaking
as we speak, and will soon begin a permanent and precipitous decline
that will completely change the character of civilization as we know
it within 20 years.
Even the left seems to be in deep denial about this, but the math is
available. And, no, alternative energies and energy technologies will
not save us. All the alternatives in the world can not begin to provide
more than a tiny fraction of the energy base now provided by oil. This
makes it more than a resource, and the drive to control what's left
more than an economic competition.
I further conclude that the economic colonization of the former Soviet
Union is probably high on that agenda, and in fact has a powerful synergy
with the issue of petroleum. Russia not only holds vast untapped resources
that beckon to imperialism in crisis, it remains a credible military
and nuclear challenger in the region.
We have not one, but three members of the Bush de facto cabinet with
military credentials, which makes the cabinet look quite a lot like
a military General Staff. All this way before September 11th.
Then there's the subject of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
NATO might have expected consignment to the dustbin of the Cold War
after the Eastern Bloc shattered in 1991. Peace dividend and all that.
But it didn't. It expanded directly into the former states of the Eastern
Bloc toward the former Soviet Union, and contributed significant forces
to the devastation of Iraq-a key country in the world oil market, over
which control translates into the ability to manipulate oil prices.
NATO is a military formation, and the United States exerts the controlling
interest in it. It seemed like a form without a function, but it remedied
that pretty quickly.
Then, when Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International Monetary
Fund, the US and Germany began a systematic campaign of destabilization
there, even using some of the veterans of Afghanistan in that campaign.
NATO became the military arm of that agenda-the break-up of Yugoslavia
into compliant statelets, the further containment of the former Soviet
Union, and the future pipeline easement for Caspain Sea oil to Western
European markets through Kosovo.
You see, this is important to understand, and people-even those against
the war talk-are tending to overlook the significance of it. NATO is
not a guarantor of international law, and it is not a humanitarian organization.
It is a military alliance with one very dominant partner. And it can
no longer claim to be a defensive alliance against European socialists.
It is an instrument of military aggression.
NATO is the organization that is now going to thrust further along the
40th parallel from the Balkans through the Southern Asian Republics
of the former Soviet Union. The US military has already taken control
of a base in Uzbekistan. No one is talking about how what we are doing
seems to be a very logical extension of a strategy that was already
in motion, and has been in motion for two decades.
Once we recognize the pattern of activity designed to simultaneously
consolidate control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain
and colonize the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan isexactly where they
need to go to pursue that agenda.
Afghanistan borders Iran, India, and even China but, more importantly,
the Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. These border Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan borders
Russia. Turkmenistan sits on the Southeastern quadrant of the Caspian
Sea, whose oil the Bush Administration dearly covets.
Afghanistan is necessary for two things: as a base of operations to
begin the process of destabilizing, breaking off, and establishing control
over the South Asian Republics, which will begin within the next 18-24
months in my opinion, and constructing a pipeline through Turkmenistan,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver petroleum to the Asian market.
The BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik, a Pakistani Foreign Secretary,
that senior American officials were warning them as early as mid-July
that military action for mid-October was being planned for Afghanistan.
In 1996, the Department of Energy was issuing reports on the desirability
of a pipeline through Afghanistan, and in 1998, Unocal testified before
the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific that this pipeline was
crucial to transport Caspian Basin oil to the Indian Ocean.
Given this evidence that a military operation to secure at least a portion
of Afghanistan has been on the table, possibly as early as five years
ago, I can't help but conclude that the actions we are seeing put into
motion now are part of a pre-September 11th agenda. I'm absolutely sure
of that, in fact. The planning alone for operations, of this scale,
that are now taking shape, would take many months. And we are seeing
them take shape in mere weeks.
It defies common sense. This administration is lying about this whole
thing being a "reaction" to September 11th. That leads me,
in short order, to be very suspicious of their yet-to-be-provided evidence
that someone in Afghanistan is responsible. It's just too damn convenient.
Which also leads me to wonder-just for the sake of knowing-what actually
did happen on September 11th, and who actually is responsible.
The so-called evidence is a farce.
The US presented Tony Blair's puppet government with the evidence, and
of the 70 so-called points of evidence, only nine even referred to the
attacks on the World Trade Center, and those points were conjectural.
This is a bullshit story from beginning to end.
Presented with the available facts, any 16-year old with a liking for
courtroom dramas could tear this story apart like a two-dollar shirt.
But our corporate press regurgitates it uncritically. But then, as we
should know by now, their role is to legitimize.
This cartoon heavy they've turned bin Laden into makes no sense, when
you begin to appreciate the complexity and synchronicity of the attacks.
As a former military person who's been involved in the development of
countless operations orders over the years, I can tell you that this
was a very sophisticated and costly enterprise that would have left
what we call a huge "signature".
In other words, it would be very hard to effectively conceal.
So there's a real question about why there was no warning of this.
That can be a question about the efficacy of the government's intelligence
apparatus. That can be a question about various policies in the various
agencies that had to be duped to orchestrate this action. And it can
also be a question about whether or not there was foreknowledge of the
event, and that foreknowledge is being covered up. To dismiss this concern
out of hand as the rantings of conspiracy nuts is premature. And there
is a history of this kind of thing being done by national political
bosses, including the darling of liberals, Franklin Roosevelt. The evidence
is very compelling that the Roosevelt Administration deliberately failed
to act to stop Pearl Harbor in order to mobilize enough national anger
to enter the World War II.
I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions
about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks. Follow
along:
Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plans, all the
while on FAA radar.
The planes are all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 AM Eastern Daylight
Time.
Who is notified?
This is an event already that is unprecedented.
But the President is not notified and going to a Florida elementary
school to hear children read.
By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that something is terribly
wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers.
By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the World Trade
Center, Bush is settling in with children for his photo ops at Booker
Elementary.
Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously, an event never
before seen in history, and one has just dived into the worlds best
know twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander in
Chief.
No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force interceptors either.
At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the remaining World Trade Center
building.
At 9:05, Andrew Card, the Presidential Chief of Staff whispers to George
W. Bush. Bush "briefly turns somber" according to reporters.
Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting?
No. He resumes listening to second graders read about a little girl's
pet f*cking goat, and continues this banality even as American Airlines
Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in
the direction of Washington DC.
Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble the Air Force? No.
An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public
statement telling the United States what they already have figured out;
that there's been an attack by hijacked planes on the World Trade Center.
There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force
been scrambled to defend anything yet? No.
At 9:30, when he makes his announcement, American Flight 77 is still
ten minutes from its target, the Pentagon.
The Administration will later claim they had no way of knowing that
the Pentagon might be a target, and that they thought Flight 77 was
headed to the White House, but the fact is that the plane has already
flown South and past the White House no-fly zone, and is in fact tearing
through the sky at over 400 nauts.
At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees over the Pentagon,
all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated,
and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky over
Alexandria and DC.
Now, the real kicker.
A pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper
school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward
spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings
the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across
the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into
the side of this building at 460 nauts.
When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper
school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further
training on a flight simulator.
This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on
I-40 at rush hour by buying her a video driving game. It's horse shit!
There is a story being constructed about these events. My crystal ball
is not working today, so I can't say why.
But at the least, this so-called Commander-in-Chief and his staff that
we are all supposed to follow blindly into some ill-defined war on terrorism
is criminally negligent or unspeakably stupid. And at the worst, if
more is known or was known, and there is an effort to conceal the facts,
there is a criminal conspiracy going on.
Certainly, the Bush de facto administration was facing a confluence
of crises from which they were temporarily rescued by this event. Whether
they played a sinister role or not, there is little doubt that they
have at the very least opportunistically pounced on this attack to overcome
their lack of legitimacy, to shift the blame for the encroaching recession
from capitalism to the September 11th terror attack, to legitimize their
pre-existing foreign policy agenda, and to establish and consolidate
repressive measures domestically and silence dissent. In many ways,
September 11th pulled the Bush cookies out of the fire.
And given them the green light to begin constructing a long-term scenario
within which to establish fascistic control measures at home and abroad
as a citadel for the ruling class in the catastrophic conjuncture that
we are entering based on the end of oil.
This elephant in the living room is being studiously ignored.
In fact, the domestic repression has already begun, officially and unofficially.
It's kind of a latter day McCarthyism. I participated in a teach-in
at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on the 17th of September, and though
not a single person on the panel excused or justified the attacks, and
every person there offered either condolences and prayers for the victims,
we were excoriated within two days as "enemies of America."
Yesterday, an op-ed called for my deportation (to where, one can only
guess). Now Herr Ashcroft is fast tracking the biggest abrogation of
US civil liberties since the so-called anti-terrorism legislation after
the Oklahoma City bombing-which by the way hasn't resulted in anti-terrorism
but in the acceleration of the application of the racist death penalty.
The FBI has defined terrorist groups not by whether any given group
has ever acted as terrorists, but by their beliefs. Some socialists
and anti-globalization groups have already been identified by name as
terrorist groups, even though there is not a single shred of evidence
that they have ever participated in any criminal activity. It reminds
me of the Smith Act that was finally declared unconstitutional, but
only after a hell of a lot of people served a hell of a long time in
jail for the crime of thinking.
I think this also points to yet another huge problems that the Bush
regime was facing. Worldwide resistance to the whole so-called neoliberal
agenda, which is a prettied up term for debt-leverage imperialism. While
debt and the threat of sanctions has been used to coerce nations in
the periphery, we have to understand that the final guarantor of compliance
remains military action. For a global economic agenda, there is always
a corresponding political and military agenda.
The focal point of these actions in the short term is Southern Asia,
but they have already scripted this as a worldwide and protracted fight
against terrorism. It's far better than drug wars as a rationalization,
and the drug war thing was being discredited in any case. Leftists are
regaining power and popularity in Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
Ecuador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil, and Argentina.
Cuba has gained immense prestige over the last few years. The empire
is beginning to unravel. We can hardly justify intervention in these
places by saying they are not towing the economic line by allowing the
absolute domination of their societies by transnational corporations.
That exposes the agenda. So, we simply claim they are supporting terrorism.
It's for all these reasons I say the left has missed the boat on this
one, by allowing them to get away with rushing past the question of
who did what on September 11th. If the official story is a lie, and
I think the circumstantial case is strong enough to stay with this question,
then we really do need to know what happened. And we need to understand
concretely what the motives of this administration are.
And we need to understand more than just their immediate motives, but
where the larger social forces that underwrite our situation right now
are headed. I do not think this administration is engaged in the deliberative
process of a political grouping that is on top of their game. They are
putting together some very deliberative technical solutions in response
to a larger situation that it slipping rapidly out of their control.
Like clear cutting. There's a very smart technology being employed to
do a very dumb thing.
What they are responding to is not September 11th, but the beginning
of a permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil production,
the beginning of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and the
unraveling of the empire.
This brings me to a point about what all this means for Americans' security,
which they are perfectly justified to worry about.
The actions being prepared by this administration will not only not
enhance our security, it will significantly degrade it. Military action
against many groups across the globe, which is what the administration
is telling us quite openly they are planning to do, will put a lot of
backs against the wall. That can't be very secure.
The concept of war being touted here is a violation of the principles
of war on several counts, and will inevitably lead to military catastrophes,
if you're inclined to view this from a position of moral and political
neutrality.
And the people who are now in possession of half the world's remaining
oil reserves are subject to destabilization for which we can't even
pretend to predict the consequences-but loss of access to critical energy
supplies is certainly within the realm of possibility.
Worst of all, we will be destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear power in
an active conflict with its neighbor, and we will be provoking Russia,
another nuclear power. The security stakes don't get any higher, and
Americans can ill afford to ignore nukes.
And I think that this domestic agenda is a tremendous threat to the
security of anyone who is critical of the government or their corporate
financiers, and we already know that the real threats are against populations
that can easily be scapegoated as the domestic crisis deepens.
There is a very real threat right now of creeping fascism in this country,and
that phenomenon requires its domestic enemies. Historically those enemies
have included leftists, trade unionists, and racially and nationally
oppressed sectors. This whole "state of emergency" mentality
is already being used to quiet the public discourses of anti-racism,
of feminism, of environmentalism, and of both socialism and anarchism.
And while there is token resistance by officials to anti-Muslim xenophobia,
the stereotypical images have saturated the media, and the government
is already beginning to openly re-instate racial profiling. It is only
a short step from there to go after other groups. We have long been
prepared by the ideologies of overt and covert racism, and racism as
both institution and corresponding psychology in the United States is
nearly intractable.
It's for all these reasons, I say emphatically that we can not accept
anything from this administration; not their policies nor their bullshit
stories. What they are doing is very, very dangerous, and the time to
fight back against them, openly, is right now, before they can consolidate
their power and their agenda.
Once they have done that, our job becomes much more difficult.
The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize out of its oblivion,
needs to understand its critical roles here. We have to play the role
of credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian partners in a broader peace-movement.
We have to study, synthesize, and describe our current historical conjuncture.
And we have to prepare leadership for the decisive conflict that will
emerge to first defeat fascism then take political power.
Rosa Luxemburg's words are truer than ever right now. We are not faced
with a choice between socialism and capitalism, but socialism or barbarism.
And what we can least afford are denial and timidity.
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