More articles, Pt. 2/2

[Parry]

============================================

Subject: Interview with Robert Fisk at Beirut Airport in Lebanon
From: MichaelP <pap...@peak.org>
Date: 20 Sep 2001 07:01:12 -0500

Transcript of Radio New Zealand Programme -- Wednesday September 19th
2001 -- Interview with Robert Fisk at Beirut Airport in Lebanon

Hill: Can I talk to you about Osama Bin Laden? I don't know whether you
are in favour of him becoming public enemy number one at the moment but
I do know that you have met him and I wonder if you could give me some
kind of insight into, first of all, is he capable of this.

Fisk: Well, I've been trying to explain this in my own paper, the London
Independent over the last few days and I'm not sure. We haven't actually
seen the evidence that directly links him to not just an atrocity but a
crime against humanity that took place in New York and Washington. On
the other hand, the Afghan connection seems to be fairly strong.

Could he have done it? He certainly hasn't condemned it although he
denies being involved. The first time, no the second time I met him in
Afghanistan when he was there with his armed fighters, I asked him if he
had been involved in an attack on American troops at Al Hoba, in Saudi
Arabia which had just taken place -- 24 American soldiers had been
killed -- and he said no, it was not his doing, he was not responsible.

He admitted that he knew two or three men who have since been executed,
beheaded, by the Saudi authorities.

He then said, I did not have the honour to participate in this
operation.

In other words, he approved of it. Now, you can go on saying that kind
of thing -- he did, several times over about other episodes later. At
some point you begin to say, " Come off it Bin Laden, surely you are
saying there's a connection, but he's never said or admitted
responsibility for any such event and he's denied specifically the
atrocities in the United States.

Is he capable of it? Look, I'll give you one tiny example. The second
time I met him in Afghanistan, four years ago, at the top of a mountain,
it was cold and in the morning when I woke in the camp tent, I had frost
in my hair. He walked into the tent I was sitting in and sat down
opposite me, cross-legged on the floor and noticed in the school bag I
usually carry in rough country to keep things in, some Arabic-language
newspapers and he seized upon these and went to the corner of the tent
with a sputtering oil lamp and devoured the contents.

For 20 minutes, he ignored us, he ignored the gunman sitting in the
tent, he ignored me and he didn't even know, for example, that it was
stated in one of the stories in the newspaper that the Iranian foreign
minister had just visited Riyadh, his own country, Saudi Arabia, well,
his until he lost his citizenship. So he seemed to me at the time to be
very isolated, a cut off man, not the sort of person who would press a
button on a mobile phone and say, " Put plan B into action" .

So I don't think you can see this as a person who actually participates
in the sense of planning, step-by-step, what happens in a nefarious
attack.

In other words, I doubt very much if he said, " Well, four airplanes,
five hijackers, etc." . But he is a person that has a very large
following, particularly in the rather sinister Jihadi community or
culture of Pakistan. And there is such anger in the Middle East at the
moment about the American' s policies here and whether it be the deaths
of tens of thousands of children in Iraq, which Osama Bin Laden has
spoken about, whether it be continued occupation and expansion of Jewish
settlements in Arab land which he's also spoken about, whether it be
about the continued dictatorships, Arab dictatorships, which are
supported in large part by the west, especially in the Gulf area, about
which Osama Ben Laden has spoken about and condemned, I think you find
in this region, enough people who admire what he says, almost to
conspire amongst themselves without involving him, in the kind of
bombing attacks that we've seen in Saudi Arabia and I suppose it's
conceivable, in the atrocities in the United States.

But if you're looking for direct evidence, if you're looking for a
fingerprint, all I can say is, the moment I heard about the World Trade
Center attacks, I saw the shadow of the Middle East hanging over them.
As for the fingerprint of Bin Laden, I think that's a different matter.
We haven't seen it yet. We may. Perhaps the Americans can produce the
evidence but we haven't seen it yet.

Hill: The corollary of that, of course, is that should they decide to
strike against Bin Laden, it will do no good because, you know, there
will be a thousand, a million more, waiting to carry on doing the same
thing, will they not?

Fisk: Yes this is the problem. It is very easy to start a war, or to
declare war, or to say you are at war and quite another thing to switch
it off. And after all, let's face it, this is a declaration of war
primarily against the United States. But once America takes up the
opponent's role, saying we will retaliate, then you take the risk of
further retaliation against you and further retaliation by you and so
on.

This is the trap that Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, has got
himself involved in Israel with the Palestinians because when the
Palestinians send a suicide bomber wickedly, for example into a pizzeria
and kill many innocent Israelis, the Israelis feel a need to retaliate
so they fire tank shells or helicopters fire American missiles into a
police post. Then a murder squad, or a helicopter fires a missile into a
car of a man who the Israelis believe have plotted bombing. Then the
Palestinians retaliate by sending another suicide bomber and so on and
so forth.

It's one thing to use this rhetoric, like " rooting out the weed of
world terror", " dead or alive", " a crusade" -- my goodness me, that's
a word that Mr Bush has been using -- not a word that's likly to
encourage much participation on the American side in the Arab world
because the word, crusade, is synonymous here with Christians shedding
Muslim blood in Jerusalem in 1099 and Jewish blood actually,
historically.

So, the real question is, what lies behind this rhetoric? Is there any
serious military thinking going on? If so, are we talking about the kind
of blind, indiscriminate attack which will only provoke more anger among
Arabs, perhaps to overthrow their own regimes which Mr Bin Laden will be
very happy to see, or are we talking about special forces seizing
people, taking them out of Afghanistan, trying to have some kind of
international criminal court where we could actually see justice done as
opposed to just liquidation and murder squads setting out to kill
killers.

Hill: George Bush, I suppose is entitled to his internal physical needs
-- the needs of Americans -- to put out bellicose rhetoric, such as "the
new war on terrorism", or " we want Osama Bin Laden dead or alive" and
so on, but what he will do remains entirely obscure at the moment,
doesn't it?

Fisk: Yes, yes it does. You see, I can understand -- anyone should be
able to understand -- not only how appalled Americans are about what
happened, in such an awesome way - the images of those aircraft flying
through the skin of the World Trade Center and exploding are utterly
unforgettable. For the rest of our lives we will remember that. And I
think therefore the anger of Americans is perfectly understandable and
revenge is a kind of justice, isn' t it, but these days we have to
believe in the rule of law.

Once or twice you hear Colin Powell talking about justice and law but
then you hear President Bush using the language of Wild West movies. And
that is very frightening because I don't think that NATO is going to
support America in a blind and totally indiscriminate attack in the
Middle East.

And the other question is, how do you make your strike massive enough to
suit the crime. Afghanistan, after all, is a country in total ruins, it
was occupied by the Russians for 10 years which is why it is seeded with
10 million mines -- I mean it, 10 million mines, more that one tenth of
all the land mines in the world are in Afghanistan. So any idea of
America sending its military across Afghanistan is a very, very
dangerous operation in a country where America has no friends.

It is very significant -- though it's been largely missed, I noticed by
press and television around the world -- but just two days before the
attacks on Washington and New York, Shah Massoud, the leader of the
opposition in Afghanistan, the only military man to stand up to the
Taliban, and the only friend of the west, was himself assassinated by
two Arab suicide bombers - men posing as journalists, by the way. I've
been asking myself over the last two days, and I have no proof of this
whatsoever, merely a strong suspicion, whether in fact, that
assassination wasn't in a sense a code for people in the United States
to carry out atrocities which we saw last Tuesday. I don't know, but
certainly if America wants to go into Afghanistan, one of the key
elements, even with a special forces raid, is to have friends in the
country, people who are on your side. [But they] have just been erased,
in fact erased two days before the bombings in America, and I find that
is a very, very significant thing.

Hill: If one went to these people, if one went to bin Laden or any
other, if one went to the Jihadians in Pakistan and said, " What do you
guys want?" what would they say?

Fisk: Well, you would hear a list of objectives which will be entirely
unacceptable to the west or in many cases, to any sane person here.

Hill: What do they want?

Fisk: Well, look, what you have to understand is, what they want and
what most Muslims in the region want is not necessarily the same thing
but they are trading and treading on the waters of injustice in the
region. But what they want, they will tell you, is they want shariat
imposed on all Muslim states in the region, they want total withdrawal
of western forces from the Arab gulf region. They ask, for example, why
does America still have forces in Saudi Arabia 10 years after the Gulf
War, after which they promised they would immediately withdraw those
forces?

Why are American forces in Kuwait? Well, we know the American answer is
that Saddam Hussein remains a danger. Well, that might be a little bit
of a dubious claim now. And why are American forces exercising in Egypt?
Why are American jets allowed to use Jordan? What are they doing in
Turkey? On top of that, they will demand an end to Israeli occupation of
Arab land.

But you have to remember that when you go to one end of the extreme,
like the most extreme of the Jihadi culture in Pakistan, you are going
to hear demands that will never be met. But nonetheless, and this is the
point, they feed on a general unease about injustice in the region which
is associated with the west which many, many Arab Muslims -- millions of
them -- will feel.

So, this goes back to the Bin Laden culture. It does mean, I haven't met
a single Arab in the last week, who doesn't feel revulsion about what
has happened in the United States. But quite a few of them would say,
and one or two have, if you actually listen to what Bin Laden demands,
he asks questions that it would be interesting to hear the answers to.
What are the Americans still doing in the Gulf? Why does the United
States still permit Israel to build settlements for Jews, and Jews only,
on Arab land?

Why does it still permit thousands of children to die under UN
sanctions?

And UN sanctions are primarily imposed by western powers.

So, it's not like you have a simple, clear picture here. But where you
have a large area of the earth, where there is a very considerable
amount of injustice, where the United States is clearly seen as to blame
for some of it, then the people in the kind of Jihadi culture -- the
extremists, terrorists, call them what you like -- are going to be able
to find a society in which they can breathe, and they do.

My point all along is, if there is going to be a military operation to
find the people responsible for the World Trade Center and for the
people who support them and for those who harbour them -- I'm using the
words of the State Department, the President, the Vice-President,
Secretary of State Colin Powell -- then I believe that the wisest and
most courageous thing that the Americans can do, is to make sure that it
goes hand-in-hand with some attempt to rectify some of the injustices,
present and historic in this region.

That could actually do what President Bush claims he wants, that is, end
"terrorism" in this region. But you see, I don't think Mr Bush is
prepared to put his politics where he's prepared to point his missiles.
He won't do that. He only wants a military solution. And military
solutions in the Middle East never, ever work.

Hill: Because it's like a tar baby. I mean as soon as the United States
undertakes a military solution, then a thousand more will instantly join
the Jihadi or Bin Laden because, there you go, the United States has
proved itself to be the great Satan once again.

Fisk: Well, there is a self-proving element to that for them, yes, but
again, you see, the point is, I said before, that Bin Laden's obsession
with overthrowing the local pro-American regime has been at the top of
his list of everything he's said to me in three separate meetings in
Sudan and two in Afghanistan. And I suspect, and I don't know if he's
involved in this, but if he was -- or even if he wasn't -- he may well
feel the more bloody and the more indiscriminate the American response
is, the greater the chance that the rage and the feeling of anger among
ordinary Arabs who are normally very docile beneath their various
dictatorships, will boil over and start to seriously threaten the
various pro-western regimes in the region, especially those in the
Arabian Gulf.

And that is what he's talked about. And indeed, Mr Mubarek of Egypt, not
you might think, a great conceptual thinker, two weeks' ago, only a few
days before the World Trade Center bombing, and it's always interesting
to go back before these events to see what people said, warned what he
called " an explosion outside the region", very prescient of him and he
also talked about the danger for the various Arab governments and
regimes - he didn't call himself a dictator, though effectively he is -
if American policy didn' t change. And indeed, he sent his Foreign
Minister to Washington to complain that the Egyptian regime itself could
be in danger unless American policy changed. And what was the Foreign
minister told? He was told to go back to Cairo and tell Mr Mubarek that
it will be very easy for Dick Cheney to go to Congress and to cut off
all American aid to Egypt.

Hill: The trouble with arguing, as you do, as many other people do,
that, you know, 1800 people were killed in Sabra and Shatila, maybe half
a million people have died in Iraq as a result of the sanctions, how
many Palestinians have died as a result of the Israeli attacks, it
begins to sound like moral relativism in some peculiar way. I talked to
David Horovitz [editor, Jerusalem Report] earlier this morning. You
won't be surprised to hear that he disagrees with a lot of the things
you say. And he said, look, this terrorist attack on the United States
last week was beyond the pale, was unacceptable, cannot be compared with
anything else. This is it. How do you respond to that?

Fisk: I'm not surprised that David, who I know quite well, would say
that.

I don't think it's a question of moral relativism. When you live in this
region^ - I go to New York and I've driven past the World Trade Center
many times. This is familiar architecture for me too, and familiar
people, but when you live in this region, it isn't about moral
relativism, it sometimes comes down to the question of why when some
people have brown eyes and darker skin, their lives seem to be worth
less than westerners.

Let's forget Sabra and Shatila for the moment and remember that on a
green light from Secretary of State Alexander Haig, as he then was,
Israel invaded Lebanon and in the bloody months of July and August,
around 17,500 people, almost all of them civilians -- this is almost
three times the number killed in the World Trade Center -- were killed.
And there were no candlelight vigils in the United States, no outspoken
grief, all that happened was a State Department call to both sides to
exercise restraint.

Now, it isn't a question of moral relativism, it isn't a question in any
way of demeaning or reducing the atrocity which happened -- let's call
it a crime against humanity which it clearly was -- is it possible then
to say well, 17,500 lives, but that was in a war and it was far away and
anyway they were Arabs which is the only way I can see you dismiss the
argument that, hang on a minute, terrible things have happened out here
too. That does not excuse what happened in the United States. It doesn't
justify by a tiny millimetre anything that happened there but we've got
to see history, even the recent history of this region if we are going
to look seriously at what happened in the United States.

Hill: That's like setting out on a marathon though. I mean, of course
David Horovitz says, look, we made the Palestinians a fantastic offer
and they turned it down. What more can we do? They keep coming at us.
We're trying, we're trying, we're trying. If you say, yes^

Fisk: Wait a second, there's an inaccuracy in this, and this is not
meant to be a criticism of David, this is my view, they were not made a
great offer, they were not offered 96% of the West Bank, they were
offered 46% roughly, because they were not being offered Jerusalem or
the area around it, or the area taken illegally into the new Jerusalem
and its municipality, or certain settlements elsewhere, and they were to
have a military buffer zone that would further reduce the so-called 96%.
It was not a good offer to the Palestinians. You see, it has become part
of a narrative to get away from the reasons for injustice and not to
deal with these issues.

Hill: I didn't reproduce it in order to say, it was a fantastic offer. I
did it to illustrate that very point, that there are narratives going on
and the narratives are of different pages, different books, different
libraries and they are getting increasingly different. I can't see how
we can ever align those narratives and it's getting harder and harder.
How do we do it?

Fisk: Well, I think this is wrong. I think I disagree with you.

Look, you can't say that you don't understand the narrative of children
dying in Iraq. Nobody is going around claiming that they are not dying.
They are.

They clearly are. And if they were, and I'm going to stick my neck out,
if they were western children, believe me, they would not be dying.

Now this is a major problem. Again, you see, anyone who tries to argue
this, then you get smeared with, " O, you are on Saddam Hussein's side"
.

Now Saddam is a wicked, unpleasant, dirty dictator. But the fact
remains, there are children dying. And if they were western children I
do not believe they would be. And this is a major problem.

And many, many Arabs put this point of view forward, not in hating the
United States, but simply saying, why? And of course why is one of the
questions you are not supposed to ask in this region is about the
motives of the people who committed this mass murder in the United
States.

Actually, I have to point out, they haven't told us, have they, the
people behind this haven't even bothered, they've just given us this
theatre of mass murder, which is the most disgusting thing.

But you've got to come back and realise, these things don't happen in
isolation. These 20 suicide bombers did not get up in the morning and
say, let's go hijack some planes. Nor did the people who organised it
and funded it. They knew they were doing it in a certain climate.
Otherwise it would never have been able to happen.

That is the problem. That is why we need to get at the question, why.

Hill: It's very nice to talk to you. We hope to do it again soon.

Thank-you, Robert Fisk.

============================================

Excerpt from: Chomsky interview on Radio B92, Belgrade
From: “Thomas W. Warner” <twwa...@qwest.net>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 10:40:16 -0700

Concerning the attacks:

Q: What consequences will they have on US inner policy and to the
American self reception?

US policy has already been officially announced. The world is being
offered a "stark choice": join us, or "face the certain prospect of
death and destruction." Congress has authorized the use of force against
any individuals or countries the President determines to be involved in
the attacks, a doctrine that every supporter regards as ultra-criminal.
That is easily demonstrated. Simply ask how the same people would have
reacted if Nicaragua had adopted this doctrine after the U.S. had
rejected the orders of the World Court to terminate its "unlawful use of
force" against Nicaragua and had vetoed a Security Council resolution
calling on all states to observe international law. And that terrorist
attack was far more severe and destructive even than this atrocity.

As for how these matters are perceived here, that is far more complex.
One should bear in mind that the media and the intellectual elites
generally have their particular agendas. Furthermore, the answer to this
question is, in significant measure, a matter of decision: as in many
other cases, with sufficient dedication and energy, efforts to stimulate
fanaticism, blind hatred, and submission to authority can be reversed.
We all know that very well.

Q: Do you expect U.S. to profoundly change their policy to the rest of
the world?

The initial response was to call for intensifying the policies that led
to the fury and resentment that provides the background of support for
the terrorist attack, and to pursue more intensively the agenda of the
most hard line elements of the leadership: increased militarization,
domestic regimentation, attack on social programs. That is all to be
expected. Again, terror attacks, and the escalating cycle of violence
they often engender, tend to reinforce the authority and prestige of the
most harsh and repressive elements of a society. But there is nothing
inevitable about submission to this course.

Q: After the first shock, came fear of what the U.S. answer is going to
be. Are you afraid, too?

Every sane person should be afraid of the likely reaction -- the one
that has already been announced, the one that probably answers Bin
Laden's prayers. It is highly likely to escalate the cycle of violence,
in the familiar way, but in this case on a far greater scale.

The U.S. has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other
supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering
people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown
numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will
die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the U.S. has demanded that
Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of
the Taliban. This has nothing to do even with revenge. It is at a far
lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the
fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably
will hardly be noticed. We can learn a great deal about the moral level
of the reigning intellectual culture of the West by observing the
reaction to this demand. I think we can be reasonably confident that if
the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in
their name, they would be utterly appalled. It would be instructive to
seek historical precedents.

If Pakistan does not agree to this and other U.S. demands, it may come
under direct attack as well -- with unknown consequences. If Pakistan
does submit to U.S. demands, it is not impossible that the government
will be overthrown by forces much like the Taliban -- who in this case
will have nuclear weapons. That could have an effect throughout the
region, including the oil producing states. At this point we are
considering the possibility of a war that may destroy much of human
society.

Even without pursuing such possibilities, the likelihood is that an
attack on Afghans will have pretty much the effect that most analysts
expect: it will enlist great numbers of others to support of Bin Laden,
as he hopes. Even if he is killed, it will make little difference. His
voice will be heard on cassettes that are distributed throughout the
Islamic world, and he is likely to be revered as a martyr, inspiring
others. It is worth bearing in mind that one suicide bombing -- a truck
driven into a U.S. military base -- drove the world's major military
force out of Lebanon 20 years ago. The opportunities for such attacks
are endless. And suicide attacks are very hard to prevent.

Q: "The world will never be the same after 11 September '01". Do you
think so?

The horrendous terrorist attacks on Tuesday are something quite new in
world affairs, not in their scale and character, but in the target. For
the US, this is the first time since the War of 1812 that its national
territory has been under attack, even threat. It's colonies have been
attacked, but not the national territory itself. During these years the
US virtually exterminated the indigenous population, conquered half of
Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii
and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in
the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force
throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal.

For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. The same
is true, even more dramatically, of Europe. Europe has suffered
murderous destruction, but from internal wars, meanwhile conquering much
of the world with extreme brutality. It has not been under attack by its
victims outside, with rare exceptions (the IRA in England, for example).
It is therefore natural that NATO should rally to the support of the US;
hundreds of years of imperial violence have an enormous impact on the
intellectual and moral culture.

It is correct to say that this is a novel event in world history, not
because of the scale of the atrocity -- regrettably -- but because of
the target. How the West chooses to react is a matter of supreme
importance. If the rich and powerful choose to keep to their traditions
of hundreds of years and resort to extreme violence, they will
contribute to the escalation of a cycle of violence, in a familiar
dynamic, with long-term consequences that could be awesome. Of course,
that is by no means inevitable. An aroused public within the more free
and democratic societies can direct policies towards a much more humane
and honorable course.

============================================

Bush, still a moron:

MID-EAST REALITIES ) - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 9/19:
Though the naive American public didn't get it, Europeans, Middle East
experts, and especially American allies in the Middle East did! Warning
calls came quickly over the weekend after President George Bush used the
word "crusade" a number of times; apparently knowing so little about the
Arab and Muslim history that he wasn't aware of the origins and
associations of that single word; apparently so badly served by his
advisers that he hadn't been warned never ever to use it.

============================================

Subject: Anti-war, humanist group forms in New York City
From: Paul Kneisel <tall...@nyct.net>
Date: 20 Sep 2001 22:42:56 -0500

Anti-war, humanist group forms in New York City

Last night about 300 New Yorkers met at the headquarters of District
1199 of the Hospital Workers Union.

The meeting was composed of representatives of New York's community and
political groups and had a strong labor presence.

The informal meeting expressed general approval for five points of
unity.*

1) We mourn the victims and condemn the actions of September 11, 2001;

2) We oppose anti-Arab, anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant and other racial,
religious, and ethnic bigotry and violence;

3) War and militarism are not the answer;

4) Defend civil liberties;

5) Seek global peace through economic and social justice.

There was broad approval for a political demonstration in Manhattan
during the weekend of October 6-7.

People will meet next Tuesday to continue planning for the action and to
deal with other issues that grow out of the bombing of the Pentagon and
World Trade Center.

- - - - -

* The wording of the five points is based on my notes and may not be
entirely accurate.

============================================

Who did it? Foreign Report presents an alternative view

>From Jane's Defence Weekly (London) 19 September 2001

Excerpt:

Israel's military intelligence service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is the
state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade Center
and the Pentagon in Washington. Directing the mission, Aman officers
believe, were two of the world's foremost terrorist masterminds: the
Lebanese Imad Mughniyeh, head of the special overseas operations for
Hizbullah, and the Egyptian Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, senior member of
Al-Qaeda and possible successor of the ailing Osama Bin Laden.

-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
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[Dr. Anthony G. Lawrence]

Here's a letter to Paul Ford on the topic addressed by Robert Fisk
posted by Parry.

Preface: I urge you to read this epistle. I hope you find it
worthwhile. It may anger you, make you cry, frighten you, piss you
off, or whatever. I only ask that if you do pass it on or post it
that you leave it intact under copyleft rules complete with this
disclaimer; otherwise the copyright of the author applies. Also I ask
that if you quote it or take excerpts from it that you either post it
or link to it elsewhere so that the reader has access to the full
document. The author identified at the end of this letter is
completely responsible for all errors of fact or thinking. Peace be
with you...

Dear Paul,

I hooked into your column http://ftrain.com/run_ground_zero.html
via WoodsLot < http://www.ncf.ca/~ek867/wood_s_lot.html >.

It made me tear up yet again.

Although I'm about 250 miles due N of Manhattan, in the newly blazing
Adirondacks, I felt extraordinarily and weirdly impacted by the
calamity in NYC. Here, I pretend to be an energy consultant. In the
early 90s, I lived mostly off jobs for "Edison" companies; then policy
shifted and it was decided that energy conservation was no longer
important (because interest rates were low and oil was cheap).
However to be perfectly honest with you, I've had the biggest case of
akrasia imaginable for ten years now. I've metaphorically been
wandering the world for ten years now; I've not been sleeping like Rip
Van Winkle. Rather I spent four years savoring the bittersweet
emotional storms of nearly unbridled rage. Then I spent six years
wandering through the chthonian passages of my psyche and our
collective mind trying to figure out what I am and how humans behave
and misbehave. The punctuation between these periods was meeting and
marrying My Love; she's been my life support system ever since.

I don't meet DSM criterion for any mental disorder whatsoever. Yet
ever since I was in Baghdad in January 1991, I haven't been able to
really harness the horses and plow through the shit known as work. In
the early 90s, my rage helped keep me going. I interspersed periods
of alcoholic rage with nicotine and caffeine-fueled periods of heroic
day and night efforts of data manipulation, on their mainframes, on my
limpy-wimpy PCs, and on Stanford's fabulous system. By late 1993, I
was grey-faced and heaving huge lungers constantly. I decided never
again and flushed my Pall Malls for the third and last time of my
life. Months later I met My Love; it was a set up meeting at the
works of Egon Scheile in the West Wing of the NMA on the Mall. I had
on a red shirt; it was an ISO date via Washingtonian. Then I became a
quasi vegetarian, moderated my alcohol consumption, and returned to
Washington to a very unsatisfactory job with a consulting firm bent on
helping the electric power industry restructure and fuck their
ratepayers ASAP.

What was unsatisfactory was not the firm, nor the mission, it was my
job performance. During this period, I was forced to convert from DOS
to Windows PC software. Even though, about 1996, PCs had finally
reached a CPU capability so that statistical work was not a royal pain
in the ass, I took Microsoft's bugginess and total lack of
documentation as a personal affront. This goes to show how the
depressive, Dionysian, and self destructive personality takes
everything subjectively. Instead of treating Windows as another
corporate scheme over which I had as little control as the wind, a
scheme akin to IBM's idiotic job control language (JCL), I lost
endless hours avoiding what statistical work I had in hand, avoiding
finding new clients, and re-researching the Oil and Gas industries and
the political efforts to subvert the CPI so as to screw retirees,
Federal- and union employees out of their COLAs. These tasks might
have been rational had I had some plan to realize work or publish a
piece regarding these topics. But they were just tasks to fuel my now
outwardly suppressed rage; sort of background reading to support
intellectual arguments pertaining to the evil and venality of the
powers that be in Washington.

I got into this state, into the state of Iraq to be more specific, by
cultivating a holy rage against the Bush the First's first Arabian
War. I knew from the news and the precipitous action of that
administration that Saddam Hussein had been played for a sucker, was
then trapped, and would soon be destroyed. Kuwait was also to be
consumed by the conflagration. Kuwait was offered, quite openly in
Baghdad to Saddam in person by April Glassby and on Capitol Hill by
Paul Wolfowitz before the Senate, to Saddam on a silver platter; "It's
a purely Arab affair." As soon as Saddam took the bait, and had
advanced his forces into Kuwait against virtually no opposition, he
was trapped. The Bush administration's generous offer was immediately
rescinded, the UN Charter was ignored, and Bush's propaganda machine
went into overdrive with disinformation to prepare the American people
to crush the very same Hitler that was now our erstwhile ally and
whose ground forces had been supported by US Navy guns and aircraft
just five years earlier.

By Christmas one of my sons wrote me that he and his Apache attack
helicopter unit was being shipped from Bavaria to Kuwait; my other
son's Marine Corps amphibious assault unit was shipped from Japan to
Okinawa in preparation for embarkation to the Persian Gulf to attack
Kuwait's beaches. I heard Ramsay Clark address peaceniks at a church
near Adams-Morgan in early January. I resolved to get into Iraq to
protest if possible. Ramsay Clark's law office said that I might find
a route via the Gulf Peace Team, an organization headed for a peace
camp on the Saudi-Iraq border, an organization having it's origins in
the British ND movement (the peace symbol originators) and somehow
connected to Yusef Islam (aka Cat Stevens).

I arrived in Baghdad after a terrible two-day preparation with the
Gulf Peace Team in Cambridge Massachusetts. The Royal Jordanian
flight from JFK was about 12 hours late in departing; In NYC I
interviewed with the Catholic press, the only press covering the Peace
Team. At Baghdad's airport on January 14th I interviewed with a TV
network from Luxembourg; later my friend in Rotterdam told me that he
saw this interview. I told about my sons, half-brothers, one black
and one white, and stated my hopes for peace. From midnight January
15th until the 26th of that month, I was sequestered with the Peace
Team on the border in the peace camp. There I witnessed the endless
rolling thunder of the carpet bombing of Iraq; later I learned that
more explosives had been dropped in two weeks on Iraq than had been
dropped in four years of bombing in Europe during WWII. I discovered
that I still knew the 23rd Psalm by heart. I heard the BBC lying that
bad weather was the reason for lack of damage reports; the weather was
cold, crisp, and crystal clear. I talked with bare foot Iraqi
soldiers, and gave them cigarettes. One begged shoes from me; I
refused even though I had two pairs of running shoes and one pair of
boots. I was too greedy; I will always regret not giving this
teenager foot wear. He was certainly dead within the next month's
holocaust that America celebrates as a battlefield victory.

I departed the peace camp, as did everyone, when our Iraqi hosts took
us all back to Baghdad on January 26th. On January 30 or 31, I
interviewed with Peter Arnett; it was 10 am EST. I denounced the US
for attempting to "wrest" the region's oil from it's rightful owners,
the native Arabs; I was angry to the bone. In Baghdad, I saw numerous
civilians in hospital, mostly women, children and old men, wounded by
so-called smart bombs and illegal cluster bombs whose bomblets look
exactly like toys to children. A cruise missile took out the hotel's
windows at lobby level and destroyed the adjacent employees quarters.
Whoops, sorry! I roomed with a German who, as a boy, had witnessed
the bombing of Bavaria and lost his elder brother in the Stalingrad
gore. We watched from the hotel as some of Baghdad's skyscrapers were
imploded by American bombs and became giant columns of dust which
smoldered for days thereafter. America violated all the international
laws of war in its attack upon Iraq. And then began to slowly kill
off a generation of children.

On January 31 we all were evacuated over a highway of death to Amman.
In Amman, I interviewed with several Jordanian journalists and again
denounced the US. The Gulf Peace Team denounced me because I had no
trouble identifying America as the aggressor. I connected with a
organization of American women in Jordan, of which Queen Noor was a
member or sponsor.

I hooked up with American truck driver Bill Brown. Bill Brown is a
legend waiting to be told to the American people. He had been a bag
man for the CIA's illegal activities in SE Asia during the Vietnam
war. He knew the score. He went on a personal mission. He
interviewed Saddam Hussein on January 12th in the time slot which
James Baker refused to show up for (probably too yellow to risk his
alligator-booted skin). The UN secretary had asked to have the
meeting instead; Saddam made him wait another day or two. Saddam has
a sense of humor and irony. He met instead with one of that small
minority of Americans who was truly interested in preserving the
peace. On February 1st or 2nd, Bill Brown and I were interviewed at
length by Rami Khoury, the leading talk show host in Jordan, and a
graduate of Syracuse University. The interview was broadcast locally;
Israel, Lebanon, and Syria also gets these broadcasts.

We met with the family of Magdi Quaedar; he was in the ICU suffering
from the results of a strafing attack by an American fighter plane as
he was attempting to evacuate five or six women and children from
Kuwait. He was attacked in full daylight. His legs were shattered,
his scrotum was the size of a large purple cabbage, his penis was a
giant red zucchini; he was near death. He is probably dead now ten
years and seven months. His family invited me to their house; an
elegant apartment in Amman. Like much housing of S Europe and the
Middle East, it was inelegant outside and superb within. This is a
metaphor that applies well to the Arab soul. They fed me fabulous
foods totally unavailable in America. The father was an accountant;
he had worked much of his career in N Africa. The daughter spoke
perfect English and was a teller in an local bank; she was
indistinguishable from any well educated early twenties American
woman. The son understood a bit of English but was too shy to try and
speak it. He had been a student in Mosel when the bombing started; he
had his own tale of destruction and narrow escape and evacuation to
Amman just a week earlier. The mother smiled, understood all, but
never spoke a word. The father took me back to the Hotel Shepherd in
his Mercedes.

There I was called by a reporter for NPR. They wanted to know if I
had any info about the bombing in Iraq; this reporter was not
interested in whatever it was that I had to say about the war. Two or
three Arabic press reporters interviewed Bill and I there. Later we
went over to the offices of Jordan's premier political reporter. We
also went to visit a Jordanian sociologist, I'll call him Abu-Abu, who
was thrown out of the US because the Conintelpro creeps photographed
him present at an anti-war rally about 1970. He lived in central
Amman; he had two sons aged about 8 and 12; their house was unlocked
day and night. The boys came home during the day and got their own
lunches. I never saw their mother, Abu Abu's wife. Amman is
peaceful; crime is low. I left a ballpoint pen in a copy shop; the
clerk chased me down the street to return it. America's State
Department issued warnings that Americans were unsafe in Jordan.
Amman is peaceful; honesty prevails.

Bill arranged for us to have an audience with the Queen the next day;
she is an American; her father built Pan Am. I was looking forward to
it. I wanted to move to Jordan. The next morning, Bill and I got an
offer to appear on Rome's channel 3; Italy has three big TV stations;
there is one for each of the big political parties: rightist,
Christian democratic, and socialist. RAI 3 is Christian-democratic;
it tows the party line. We flew to Rome. We were met by a
photographer named Mario and taken to a hotel. Here even more than in
Amman I was afraid of being poisoned by the CIA or its goons. Like
Saddam, the CIA uses esoteric heavy metals to debilitate and silence
critics; all they have to do is get them into your body and you are
doomed to debilitating mental and physiological conditions that are
nearly impossible to diagnose and impossible to treat. I kept no
opened bottles of mineral water or food in my room. Paranoia perhaps,
necessary precautions however. Smaller fish than I have been fried.
Maybe I'm full of MeHg.

In Rome we appeared twice on RAI 3; one on the six pm news and again
on a talk show at ten pm. After the six pm news broadcast something
happened. We were to be the main guests on the ten pm talk show. In
the next three hours, RAI 3 made arrangements for some Italian
functionaries to be the guests while Bill and I were seated in the
studio audience. There, when about 80 percent of the time was
exhausted the host finally turned to us and asked us each a few
questions. I remember saying that Bush was a disgusting example as a
parent because none of his sons was at risk in the war; later I
discovered how much loot Bush's sons made off the rebuilding of
Kuwait. RAI 3 had made sure to limit their embarrassment by giving us
a very small soapbox. In a fashion similar to TV, Italy has a news
magazine for each major political party. The CDemo one is akin to
Time or Newsweek. The Socialist one is more like a serious journal.
The Rightist one is akin to People magazine. The CDemo magazine had
offered to buy Bill's photos and had brought a writer down from
Bologna to do an article about his first hand account of meeting
Saddam before the bombing and the consequent destruction of Baghdad
and its people. Much of the copy prepared focused on the baby formula
plant that America targeted, destroyed, and falsely was claiming to be
a chemical weapons plant; Bills pictures went far to confirm that lie.
The copy was prepared the day of and the day after our RAI 3
appearances; Bill was paid for his photos; the writer was paid and
left for Bologna. Two days later the magazine came out; it contained
some of Bill's photos. These emphasized the destruction of buildings
and not people; they were attached to some article written by an
Italian politician. Mario explained to us that this is how Italian
politics works; the party leaders and their associated publications
collude and determine what is and what is not news; this is why it
took so many decades to make the Mafia a social and political issue in
Italy. Censorship works as effectively as it does in the US but by a
different and more overt mechanism.

We stayed on in Rome with Mario for several more nights; during this
time Mario et al. got rid of me for a few nights; it was arranged that
I sleep at the Vatican. I had a cell of the sort usually rented to
visiting junior priests or nuns. It had a small window about six feet
off the floor, a tile floor, stucco walls, a bed and a crucifix;
nothing more. Not Motel-6 elegance, for sure. It was better for me
than drinking too much wine every night; and I was severely sleep
deprived, so the sleep was extraordinarily welcome. Plus, who could
possibly resist meditating a bit in such an austere environment.

We all went to Saint Peters; the Americans launched the ground war;
the turkey shoot was perpetrated against retreating Iraqi troops,
doing exactly what Bush had said was his war objective--leaving
Kuwait. Meanwhile, one of my sons was sitting out the war in Okinawa,
used only as a decoy to make the Iraqis fortify the beaches.
Meanwhile, American B-52s were carpet bombing Kuwait's oil wells so
they could ensure that Kuwait would henceforth need "friends in high
places", that Iraq could be blamed, and that the Bush sons and their
ilk could make lots of filthy lucre rebuilding the holdings of the al
Sabah family and their confederates. Meanwhile, my other son was
killing helpless and running Iraqis by the score whilst sitting on his
bodybag in the doorway of his Black Hawk escort helicopter, rescuing
the pilot of a downed Apache, and doing burial detail on the corpses
by noting GPS coordinates, searching the corpses for private
documents, and noting the cause of death by type of weapon neatly on
an IBM card inserted into a plastic bag and transmitted back to the
Pentagon. There, America would continue to violate international law
and rules of human decency by sequestering that data, data proving the
slaughter and the use of nuclear weapons on the battle field.

Bill left for London. I left for Rotterdam. There my friend arranged
an interview that appeared the next day on the Dutch equivalent of the
Wall Street Journal. He also arranged an interview with Peter Odell,
then at Erasmus University. Peter is a top notch oil economist and
consultant to major oil firms; he is currently professor emeritus at
Oxford. We discussed the oil industry and their complicity in the
Arabian War (so-called Gulf War) at length. His views, and those
later gleaned from Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" (a history of the oil
industry) and Laton McCartney's "Friends in High Places" (a history of
Bechtel), have played a role in shaping my research and opinions
founded thereon. I left Rotterdam to catch up with Bill at the
apartment of a reporter for the Guardian in London. There Bill gave
some radio and print interviews; I rested, got drunk and watched the
my first English language coverage of the carnage on her telly.

On about February 26th we reentered the US at JFK. Customs did not
blink at either my three month Iraqi visa nor at the pile of rugs and
other artifacts that Bill put through US Customs in an overt effort to
get arrested and create an incident and thereby generate media
interest. I definitely didn't want to be arrested; I was tired and
wanted to rejoin my very distraught Ethiopian girlfriend in
Washington. Given that later I discovered that the FBI and Customs
were investigating me and others (e.g., Ramsay Clark) for sanction
busting, a violation of laws enforced via the Treasury, I can only
conclude that at some level higher than Customs it was decided to let
us pass without incident and the consequent news an arrest might
generate.

The day after I interviewed with Peter Arnett in Baghdad, the
Washington Post reported that I was seeking my Andy-Warhol moment in
the bright sunshine (actually it was the typical newspaper lie, it was
nighttime when Peter interviewed me for CNN, as anyone with a watch
should have known). The same day the LA Times reported on a frank
interview that they'd had about me with Treasury officials; they had
not too vaguely implied that I'd be fired. The LA Times labeled me,
"The first civilian casualty of the Gulf War," soon to be terminated
by the TRS.

Within three months the government had removed me alleging tax
problems and that I had lied on my employment application. I did have
extant problems with the IRS. The IRS had welched on a deal that I
made with them to clear up tax problems before I joined the Treasury
in early 1989. Ultimately, one or two days after a Congressman
intervened on my behalf, with the very same evidence presented to the
Treasury/IRS before I was removed, the IRS reversed their obviously
unlawful position and cleared up my tax problem. The employment
application alleged lie was based on the absence of a W2 form
reporting my income prior to joining Treasury; given that I was self
employed, I filed schedule C and thus had to impute a wage in order to
accommodate the form SF171 which implicitly assumes that no Federal
worker would ever have been previously self-employed. Ramsay Clark
represented me in Federal Court; I was reinstated ten month's later
with back pay. I resigned; I was so mad at a turncoat friend inside
Treasury who had perjured himself to expedite my removal, and keep his
politically-appointed DAS job, that I thought I would have a
altercation if I saw him ever again face to face.

This chicken-shit propagated by the ball-less TRS slime-wads sent me
into my strange subjective Odyssey.

The extraordinary and weird impact of the calamity at the WTC on me is
the obscene sense of relief that I felt upon realizing the magnitude
of what was happening. This realization and emotion came to me about
two seconds after the south tower collapsed. Then I knew for sure
what was happening, and that I had witnessed terrible loss of life
numbering in the thousands. I had ever since I returned to America in
1991 anticipated a major so-called terror attack on the US. I came to
believe that the powers that be in Washington were driving an
increasingly reckless course in foreign policy with nothing less than
the civilian population of America as the front bumper. Security
steps that were obvious to any professional, and most thinking people,
were curiously not taken even where considered.

I am convinced that the government had penetrated the 1993 WTC bombing
conspiracy with at least one Egyptian agent provocateur; it's likely
that this agent enabled rather than tried to disable that bombing. I
believe that it is quite possible that the Bush the Younger
administration, using his policy of smirks and open support for
Apartheid in Israel, was attempting to goad the Arabs into attacking
by using our ill-secured asses as bait; just as FDR goaded the
Japanese into attacking and baited his trap with an unaware military
in Hawaii. Now anyone, as I heard on The Connection yesterday, who
questions the rather obvious a priori lack of competence on the part
of the spooks and the military is being immediately slandered as a
lunatic or an unpatriotic fool. The mainstream media is, as always,
full of disinformation originated in White House "talking points" and
largely fabricated by so-called authoritative sources within the
security apparatus. The CIA, FBI, and military are much better at PR
than at protecting American lives. Christ sakes, don't blame them!
Isn't it curious to at least some that the military couldn't jet even
one fighter over DC despite over 90 minutes to do so? Isn't it
curious that Arabs on CIA watch lists could matriculate at schools
under the aegis if the FAA?

Clinton had engaged in a wholly disingenuous policy of seemingly
genuine engagement in the peace making process. Clinton was a master
of both his awesome intellect and flawless dissimulation. Both
Bushes, being sub par on the IQ chart, are incapable of convincing
dissimulation. They lacking Clintonian brains are reduced to mumbling
and stumbling over phrases from their morning "Talking Points" and
unable to vocalize any complete sentence or coherent thought. Clinton
will be remembered as the do-nothing caretaker, CIA (Mena Arkansas)
compromised, totally immoral, Republican-spirited President who
oversaw the glorious 90s made possible by low interest rates and the
flood of foreign capital pouring into the American economy.

Bush the Elder threw Clinton a spit ball by sending troops into
Somalia, thus putting Clinton immediately on the Arab patriots' shit
list. To fully make his CIA bones, Clinton engaged in the gratuitous
bombing of Iraq when some not too bright Arabs tried to kill Bush in
at his Victory in Kuwait. Hence, Clinton has to be seen as part of a
continuum starting to some degree with the Reagan arrangements with
the Iranians to avoid an "October Surprise" hostage release. This
slimy CIA deal sunk Carter. Reagan, as a consequence was owned by
CIA. And Bush was the de facto CIA chief. After 1985, as Reagan sank
into his dementia, Bush and the Bechtel officers Schultz and
Weinberger took tactical, if not strategic, control of the government.
What proceeded was AWACS to Saudi Arabia, Iran-Contra, Net Back Oil
Pricing (see Yergin), blah, blah, blah. Then Bush was inaugurated;
and gave a big White House bash to celebrate his total allegiance to
the Saudis with fireworks on July 29th, 1989. Then Bush pardoned
Weinberger, said "read my lips, no new taxes", raised taxes, said
"read my hips" to the financial press, killed lots of Panamanians,
killed thousands of Iraqis, oversaw a preventable monetary recession,
and lost to the man that said, "It's the economy, stupid." Now back
to the subject at hand...

Even though it is obvious that the terrorists are from Arabia and
Egypt, and are the same kind that assassinated Sadat, the war focus is
on Afghanistan, with Pakistan already surrendered and quivering. So
what's the game really about? It's the latest installment of what the
British called the Great Game in the 19th century. It is a war aimed
at the domination of central Asia. Why? The prize this time is gas
and oil. The oil and gas of Turkestan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. Last
time, the First Arabian War, was about increasing Saudi oil output.
This had been done in the 80s by supporting both Iraq and (covertly)
Iran in their destruction of each others oil producing capability.
This nasty war controlled oil supply for much of that decade. With
the exposure of the Iran-Contra affair, Saddam saw that he was being
played as a sucker by American friends who were simultaneously trying
to destroy him by providing Iran missiles. Therefore, in 1988 Saddam
and the Ayatollah made peace; and then started increasing their oil
production. Meanwhile the Kuwaitis got greedy and tried to vertically
integrate all aspects of oil supply from wellhead to automobile
gasoline tank. This move cut and was cutting American firms out of
the profit shares they saw as their birthright. The greedy Kuwaitis
also started stealing Iraqi oils by slanted drilling under the border
and also exceeded their pre-agreed upon OPEC oil production quota.
This made Saddam consider annexing Kuwait, a former Ottoman territory
attached to Mesopotamia (Iraq).

So Bush the Elder schemes to destroy both Iraq and Kuwait, plus insure
against the high and increasing possibility of a democratic revolt or
army putsch in Arabia (I personally find the name "Saudi Arabia" as
disgusting and as weird as I would "Rockefeller New York" for this
state). Kuwait was taught a lesson, now it maintains plenty of
friends in high places and shares its wealth with the imperialists;
Iraq's oil was permanently to be "shut in".

It's fair to ask, "Do you have an axe to grind?" You bet I do. It's
not my axe though. It's an Arab axe. It's an axe for Magdi Quaedar,
a million Iraqi children, the shoeless soldier in the desert, and to
right the wrongs of the duplicitous British and the greedy Americans.
It's the axe that's been in the ceiling over my head for a decade and
which I have heretofore been afraid to hew dragons with.

The Great Game has been played, at least since the OSS was transformed
into the CIA at the close of WWII, with the CIA as a central organ.
The evolution of the CIA's role in the Great Game is well described by
Laton McCartney. The central players at the start were OSS's Wild
Bill Donovan, John McCone, Steve Bechtel, and Chevron (Standard Oil of
California, half owner of CalTex, later named Aramco, the company
having excusive rights to the Arabian oil stolen by the Ibn Saud
family). What evolved was a system whereby the CIA became a de facto
private contractor to a consortium of American corporations with
interrelated and synergistic international interests; interests
focused primarily on the energy-related businesses. The CIA's
invisible de facto contract called for them to create circumstances
favorable to this corporate cabal to make profits; this mission has
often been referred to by the euphemism of "national security". The
epicenter of this mission has been to assist the Rockefeller-dominated
oil companies manipulating the oil supply and violating the American
anti-trust laws. The CIA has never worked exclusively for any single
corporation; but rather for a complex of companies. By the time
McCone, a Liberty-ship war profiteer, became CIA chief in 1961, the
system was totally in force. However, it surely existed in an
evolutionary form as early as 1941 when McCone, Bechtel, and Chevron
began advancing their joint interests as defense contractors.
Eisenhower warned us rather cryptically about both the existence of,
and the threat to America from, the so-called
Military-Industrial-Complex in his farewell address of 1961. Ike's
call to arms fell on deaf and uncomprehending ears; nothing was done
to root out the evil.

Some of the most active corporate participants in this cabal have been
international construction firms specializing in energy. The name
Brown & Root is connected to the political success of LBJ. The Bechtel
Group donated it President, George Schultz, and Comptroller, Casper
Weinberger to run the Reagan regime. And Halliburton (now owner of
Brown & Root) is the chief patron of Dick Cheney. Meanwhile Bush's
Zapata oil firm (now the Z in Pennzoil) donated a eponymous ship to
the CIA's Bay of Pigs fiasco. And it appears that Bush the Elder
supported the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1990 so that his oil industry
colleagues could get their hands on Adriatic oil from by corrupting
the government of Montenegro, one of former Yugoslavia's six
republics. Furthermore, George Bush was CIA chief, and probably
ordered the Israeli-executed murder of Gerald Bull to prevent being
implicated in the illegal running of guns to South Africa that was
suppressed by the Carter administration. And the esteemed Washington
Post reporter who brought down Nixon, Bob Woodward, was formerly a CIA
affiliated spook. Nor has it escaped our attention that both Manuel
Noriega and Osama bin Laden are ex-affiliates of the CIA. The CIA's
saga of murder and mayhem to create propitious environments for
corporate profits makes the world history of the Mafia a mere short
story by way of comparison.

To create propitious circumstances for corporations, many
well-meaning, earnest, loyal, and otherwise unremarkable Americans are
drawn into acting to fulfill the cleverly laid schemes of the few at
the traitorous core of the national security apparatus. How do
apparently moral persons like Colin Powell fall in with this cabal?
It is by seeing a clear choice between following their conscience and
following their career. Powell knew the First Arabian War was wrong;
he said so publicly. Yet, instead of resigning in protest and
preserving the honor of his conscience, he accepted the Faustian
bargain and advanced his career by serving the interests of the Bush
clique and their corporate masters. By late 1990, Powell was a made
Capo. And he has been well rewarded with money, public acclaim, and
high office. He's a real team player. Others, like Kissinger, are
evil from the outset; they never even pause to consider the morally
correct alternative. The lure of power for power's sake is too strong
for them. Others, like Schultz, cram their intellectual brains with a
lot of theoretical hooey about the merits of the capitalistic system
and actually sincerely believe that it is their duty to do their turn
as so-called public servants by serving up profitable opportunities to
a small club of capitalist buddies. All get invited to the elusive,
secluded, and weird two-week long frat party in the Redwoods at Sonoma
County's Bohemian Grove. There they burn "Care" and proceed to parse
the global business situation, scope out the prospective propitious
opportunities, parcel out political assignments, and approximate the
profit shares and compensation expected as rewards. It's clear that
the only Care uncared for at the Bohemian Grove is the public
interest.

Unless the President of the United States is either fully on-board, as
with Bush 41 and Bush 43, or fully CIA-compromised, as with Reagan and
Clinton, the private contacting of the CIA cannot work. Morally
uncompromised POTUSs, such as Carter and Eisenhower, do not let the
security apparatus run amok serving private interests. POTUSs who
fall off-board, such as Kennedy and Nixon, are brought down by their
erstwhile CIA-affiliated friends. And poor old, fully-compromised,
LBJ simply quit the Game because he'd lost his stomach for it. Reagan
was luckier, he just lost his mind so it didn't matter what the "out
of the loop" Bush did in his name.

The prize this time is delivery of central Asian gas (and maybe oil)
to India's energy starved industry via a trans Afghanistan-Pakistan
pipeline. One of Bush the Younger's chief financial backers, Enron,
has major energy investments in India, has major contracts for oil and
gas in central Asia, has recently completed a plan for a trans-Caspian
oil pipeline, and has recently expressed interest in building a trans
Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline. Central Asia gas and oil need a
route to world markets. With the route goes the loot. Before the
corpse of the old Soviet Union was in the casket, Bush the Older's
henchmen, or perhaps masters, Baker and Mosbacher were in central Asia
handing out US taxpayers' money to the extant Communist dictators of
those so-called FSRs so that Mobil, Chevron, and their ilk could get
sweetheart deals for gas and oil and the dictators could get American
cash.

For a decade the development of central Asia energy resources has been
stymied by the lack of a secure pipeline route. There are five
possible route alternatives: via Russia to Europe, via Russia,
Daghestan & Georgia to the Black Sea, via the trans Caspian route,
Azerbaijan, Armenia, & Turkey to the Mediterranean, via Iran to the
Persian Gulf, via China to China, Korea, and Japan, and finally via a
trans Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline route. If either Russian
alternative is used, then Russia will be the chief beneficiary. The
value on the Russian route to Europe would be moderate and compete
with other Russian (Siberian) resources. Russia would have an
incentive to shut in central Asia's gas and oil in order to make room
in the market for their own resources. Surely, the major oil firms
have amply demonstrated to the Russians and the whole world, even if
the average American is too stupid to grasp the gross details, the
fine art of manipulating supply, fixing prices, and thus maximizing
monopoly profits via power politics and armed occupation when the
former tactic fails. The Black Sea route runs into the
capacity-constrained straits by Istanbul (the Dardanelles and Sea of
Marmora) plus Turkish opposition and environmental opposition to
tanker passage through these straits. The Black Sea route for oil and
gas to the Mediterranean avoids Russia but substitutes the politically
unstable trio of the Azeris, Armenians, and Turks plus the cost of
trans Caspian (underwater) pipeline construction. Furthermore, taking
gas and oil to the eastern Mediterranean is like taking coal to
Newcastle; the middle east can already potentially supply oil and gas
here via extant pipelines (if only the Syrians, Lebanese and Israelis
can be forced to make peace first. Such a peace will undoubtedly be a
subsidiary objective in the coming Second Arabian War.) The China
route to the far east is a good idea; however these markets can also
be served overland from Siberia and perhaps resources yet to be
developed in the Russian far east; hence the central Asia oil and gas
would not have maximum value if delivered to China and beyond.

Of the five alternative routes, the one leading to the maximum
resource value, that is fetching the highest prices, is the Indian
market. This raises the question of why doesn't the Bush regime just
send a mission to the Taliban and negotiate a deal. This would be
costly and have no diplomatic support given the anti-western and
iconoclastic attitudes of the Taliban. In short, such a negotiated
solution is not financially attractive to Enron, nor any member of the
Bush-Carlyle clique, and certainly not for India as a Hindu state.
What can be done, is for the Bush family--a family that is sort of a
working asset partially owned by Enron--is to create international
circumstances that are propitious for the construction of such a
pipeline.

This is the best of all worlds for the Bush-owning clique: first the
costs of creating these propitious circumstances will be borne by the
American taxpayers, second the costs of constructing and securing the
prospective pipeline(s) will be paid for by US guaranteed loans from
the ExIm Bank, the IMF, and the World Bank; third the on-going
security costs for the pipeline(s) will fall on the American taxpayer;
and fourth the Administration can declare the whole matter a great
success as we will have not only brought Afghanistan pacification, and
enlightenment, and democracy (a la the Pinochet regime), but we will
have generously jump started their economy with a pocket-sized version
of the Marshall plan. The only problem to be confronted in the
interim between pinning medals on our heroic chests near our generous
hearts, and Enron-in-India realizing in the subcontinent's gas
markets a monopoly-nirvana with an IRR of a godzillian percent from
its Bush clan investment, and the present time is that America must
fight the kind of fight and commit the kind of genocide that we as a
newly born global imperialist visited upon the hapless population of
the Philippines. (See Mark Twain's words on this score.)

The First Arabian War's costs and benefits are instructive: The
American taxpayers have paid one hundred billion dollars, at least, to
destroy Iraq and starve to death perhaps a million or so Iraqi
children (think of that, that's only one hundred thousand dollars per
dead child! A veritable bargain!); meanwhile the American oil
companies, who share the Saudi's ill-got oil profits, have earned
about 20 to 30 billion dollars a year in profits over and above their
pre-war levels; plus as an added benny the American suckers who
created the above mentioned propitious circumstance have been allowed
to pay an extra dime or quarter per gallon of gasoline because the oil
resources of Iraq have been largely shut in and the oil supply from
Kuwait interrupted for several years while the Bush Boys ilk
profitably repaired the shattered Kuwait's oil production capability.

Let's see, if the average American drives 10,000 miles per year at 30
miles per gallon he uses about 333 gallons of gasoline per year; so
this dime or quarter implicit tax per gallon paid to the oil
companies' profits totals out to something in the interval of $33 to
$80 per year per driver; times 100 million drivers, conservatively
estimated, this totals out to an implicit tax of $3.3 to $8 billion
per year. Pretty cheap, not quite as much as we all give to the
United Way, but almost a steal. But what about the energy costs for
trucks? trains? jet planes? home heating? power generation? Maybe
auto travel only accounts for twenty percent of all oil usage. Could
it be that in addition to paying out of pocket more than $100 billion
to kill off Iraq's children and sequester its oil that we as a people
have also coughed up an additional $15 to $40 billion per year to the
oil companies; that's a mere $150 to $400 billion since Bush the Elder
successfully installed The New World Order by defeating our erstwhile
best buddy and closest ally, Saddam Hussein.

I think it's high time that the American people did go after the
terrorists and war criminals. We could start by abolishing the
secrecy behind which the government hides its crimes and on-going
criminal activity. The 1958 ruling of so-called "National Security"
shielding the major oil companies from prosecution under the Sherman
anti-trust act for collusion, price fixing and other crimes should be
abolished. The CIA should be abolished. The war criminals, excepting
the pardoned Weinberger and the demented Reagan, should be arrested
and shipped to the Hague. The wisdom of Charles de Gaulle should be
followed and we should bring home our occupation forces from Arabia.
Before we depart we should arrest the Saudi organized crime clan and
turn them over to the Arabs for prosecution and the Romanov dynastic
solution.

We ought to fulfill the promises that the British made to the Arabs
when in 1916 T. E. Lawrence got them to arise and defeat their Ottoman
overlords. They were promised an Arab homeland, a country. Instead
the British in its infinite imperialistic wisdom and greed divvied up
Arabia with the French, and carved out Palestine as a homeland
promised to Zionists, and hired a clan of robbers from Nedj named Ibn
Saud to off the Husseins to whom Lawrence had given the British
promise, and set the stage for the past 82 years of bloodshed. To
end the blood shed we must fulfill the promise.

We should denounce apartheid everywhere and demand restoration of the
pre 1967 borders in Israel. We should demand democratic election in
Egypt and let Mubarak follow King Farouk to San Moritz. We should
start paying reparations to Iraq. We should let Jordan annex the West
Bank, and let Egypt annex Gaza. We should occupy Israel, thus
guaranteeing its security, and then offer to annex it in a status like
Puerto Rico. We should welcome the Arabian states--Syria, Lebanon,
Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, and the Gulf Emirates, excepting Kuwait, to
jointly own and administer both the Arabian oil wealth and security of
its holy cities. Then and only then ought we to ferret out Osama Ben
Laden. Once he is found, and if he is indeed truly guilty of striking
Moloch between the eyes, we ought to invite this George Washington of
Arabia to Washington and New York and dedicate a monument to him and
the 19 brave Martyrs and the Six Thousand Innocent Victims of both
Imperialism and the Divine Wind that blew over the Great Satan's
Headquarters. And cry.

America, of all nations, ought to be familiar with the concept of
military necessity as an excuse for destroying civilians to achieve
political objectives. Remember Dresden? How about Hiroshima?
Nagasaki ring a bell? Senator Kerry of Nebraska can assure us that
slitting innocents throats is a wholly allowable tactic when fighting
a superior enemy. Suicide arises as a tactic not for religious
reasons nor for pathological reasons. Rather suicide is chosen when
the combatant has no other resources; it is the economic tactic of
last resort, of desperation, of deep love for one's country and kin,
of "Live Free Or Die", of Patrick Henry's motto, "Give Me Liberty or
Give Me Death!"

Of course none of the above mentioned policy recommendations will
happen. What will happen is that the Bush clique will visit tens if
not scores of Panamas upon the earth. We will proceed to kill 3,000
innocents for every guilty terrorist arrested, just like in Panama.
This ratio will prevail because the terrorists are chiefly sheltered
in Egypt, Arabia, Pakistan, America, and Germany in that order.
Meanwhile Americans will suffer extraordinary inconvenience and loss
of civil rights as a sham and as a public relations gimmick to make
them think they are more secure and make them want to support the war.
Meanwhile another generation of Arabian terrorists will be raised in
Egypt and Arabia. And they will sew the world with terror in their
turn. And meanwhile, the Bush clique will make propitious
circumstances for Enron and other friends. Or perhaps meanwhile the
American Army will be trapped in an endless war of attrition with the
intractable Afghans who will be covertly armed by the Chinese (whose
Belgrade embassy the CIA bombed), the Russians (who will get even for
their American-funded defeat), and the Persians (who will settle the
score for the CIA installing the late and unlamented Shah).

The author: I am a 55 year old PhD energy economist. I've done
professorial stints at University of Kentucky and University of
California at Berkeley and the American University in Cairo. I have
served my time as a civil servant in the US Bureau of Labor Statistics
and the Department of The Treasury. I wrote my dissertation on the US
Natural Gas Industry and a New York Times subsidiary published it in
1979.

Sincerely,

Dr. Anthony G. Lawrence

copyright 2001 by
Dr. Anthony G. Lawrence

[Parry]

The surrealism of the preceding paragraphs made this seem like a good
place to snip. Yours is a moving story; thanks for posting it. I hope
you post it to other relevant groups, such as misc.activism.progressive.
Excuse all the snipping below, for rather than rake over the entire
message I’ll just add a few thoughts that occurred to me while reading
it.

You’ve given a detailed consideration of the roots of the tragedy and
its probable aftermath, the sort of consideration that naturally faces
intense opposition in the public discourse. A common reaction to the
bombing has been to view any attempt to illuminate the causes of events
to be a politicization and trivialisation of the tragedy. The basics --
that the US is a major exporter of war and violence, that the West’s
victims have been trying to breach the American fortress for years and
were bound to get off a good shot sooner or later -- are denied
outright. Frankly, a lot of people weren’t interested in what their
government did to secure the national interest before the bombing, and
they sure don’t want to hear about it now. Terrorism is something other
countries do. They would rather accept the panacea of politicians and
editorialists -- that the bombers acted out of sheer hatred and envy of
democracy (an idea which has long been a fixture of counter-terrorist
jargon) -- and take the non-reasoning road where they can mourn and
seethe, and the proper authorities carte-blanche to deal with the
problem.

How they will deal with the problem isn’t very obscure. Terrorism has a
history in defense rhetoric, and the term is always politicized, so
there are ample precedents to go by. It doesn’t look good for the
dissidents to global corporate power.

> I am convinced that the government had penetrated the 1993 WTC bombing
> conspiracy with at least one Egyptian agent provocateur; it's likely
> that this agent enabled rather than tried to disable that bombing.

This is an interesting comment. It’s been a common enough practice of
police and intelligence agencies to infiltrate groups and encourage or
even carry out terrorist acts, the object being to create an atmosphere
of fear and chaos that grants the state a free hand to conduct its
“counter-terrorism” program (which has its own objectives). The private
sector uses the same tactics against labour organizers. The WTC bombing
doesn’t fit the pattern, though, because of the massive loss of life and
the great success in which symbols of American imperialism were hit.
Until strong evidence emerges, I wouldn’t even imply that domestic
agencies were directly involved in this incident.

> Even though it is obvious that the terrorists are from Arabia and
> Egypt, and are the same kind that assassinated Sadat, the war focus is
> on Afghanistan, with Pakistan already surrendered and quivering. So
> what's the game really about? It's the latest installment of what the
> British called the Great Game in the 19th century. It is a war aimed
> at the domination of central Asia. Why? The prize this time is gas
> and oil. The oil and gas of Turkestan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan.

The issue of who controls the world’s oil resources always seems to
loom, but it is not the only issue. Another article recycled in this
newsgroup argued that a long-range Western policy goal is to dismantle
Russia’s powerbase to get at its wealth. Yugoslavia was dismantled
against Russia’s impotent protests, and the anticipated incursions into
Central Asia seem to be materializing. Currently Russia is onside to
oust its shared enemy the Taliban, so it will be interesting to see how
the region’s political landscape is changed in the coming months. Will a
new government in Afghanistan try to cleanse the Russian influence? Will
the West leave behind permanent “temporary” military installations in
Central Asia as it did in Saudi Arabia?

-- Parry

[Dr. Anthony G. Lawrence]

Dear Parry:

You wrote:

> The surrealism of the preceding paragraphs made this seem like a good
> place to snip. Yours is a moving story; thanks for posting it. I hope
> you post it to other relevant groups, such as misc.activism.progressive.

I will post it there also. Due the akrasia I mentioned in the above
letter, I am not well versed in relevant posting sites. I attached to
your post for two reasons: a) because it was linked by Jorn Barger
(RobotWisdom), whom I value and respect; and b) because the words by
Fisk et al were serious, true, and on the same topic. I'd be pleased
with whatever advice you might share with me privately. I don't want
to try "to raise the dead", to use Bill Brown's phrase, rather I want
to contribute to turning the serious discussion and discussants to the
topic of rooting out the fundamental cause of our loss of national
security, and destroying an economic complex that has plagued the
American people--costing us many dollars, many military lives, our
mutual morality, and now threatens our fundamental freedoms.

>
> You&#8217;ve given a detailed consideration of the roots of the tragedy and

> its probable aftermath, the sort of consideration that naturally faces
> intense opposition in the public discourse.

My hero in these matters is John Brown. Not John Brown the wealthy
smuggler after whom the University is named. Rather John Brown of
Pottawattomie Creek. I can lose only my life, my freedom, or my
property to the thought police; America can lose its life, liberty,
and pursuit of happiness.

Let's focus for a minute on the last item: we all know that "pursuit
of happiness" is a euphemism for property. In short, money. How
let's us all take a good close look at the benefits and costs of that
last glorious imperialistic expedition into the oil-bearing lands of
Asia, viz the Gulf War. I estimated, in my letter above, that the
Gulf War has benefited the major oil companies by a total of perhaps
$300 billion in the past decade. The American taxpayer has paid a
direst cost of about $100 billion to destroy Iraq, keep its oil
sequestered, and murder its children. On top of this, the American
consumer has paid an implicit tax in higher than necessary oil prices,
due to the sequestering of Iraq's oil that in peace would have come to
the market place and to the on-going violation of the American
anti-trust/anti-pricefixing laws, of $150 billion to $400 billion
during the past decade. Now the BC ratio is somewhere in the
neighborhood of the interval of $300/$250 and $300/$500.

So maybe the war would pass say an Army Corps of Engineers BC test;
and maybe it would fail. However, one thing is clear: the payers of
the Costs and the recipients of the Benefits are two distinctly
different groups of people. The Payers are the American taxpayers;
and these people have also paid with the blood of their sons and
daughters killed in battle, and paid with their loss of morality for
being complicit in a slaughter on the order of a thousand fold
multiple of Wounded Knee, and an ongoing genocidal blockade killing an
estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 Iraqis, mostly children. So as Lance
Armstrong said after he won the Tour de France, "Do you like apples?
... Well how do you like those apples?" Pretty sour, I expect. Too
sour for the average American to take home and put into his mommy's
pie.

Now in the wake of WTC II let's revisit these crass BC ratios. In the
past two weeks the American stock market blew off a cool $1 trillion
more or less; and the direct damages costs, and the subsequent
exacerbation of the damage, caused directly by the Bush 43
administration's fanning of the flames of war, and its idiotic failure
to secure the airlines with the EL AL security measures (it pursues a
policy of maximum inconvenience and economic dislocation, and minimum
effectiveness towards either security or normalcy--in short a policy
crafted by an idiot or a committee of idiots, a policy designed to
sell the war at the expense of the economy), has resulted in at least
a second cool $1 trillion in lost wealth.

Now my good friends, let's recalculate with perfect hindsight, like a
Monday morning quarterback, those Gulf War BC ratios: we have
$300/$2250 to $300/$2500; that&#8217;s a earnings rate of minus 85% on
the invested dollar. Now that war looks like a sure loser to me.
Shame, shame, shame on the Americans as a race for investing their
money and their sons and daughters lives in such an poor scheme. But,
of course, these additional costs can be written of by the
beneficiaries of the Gulf War as just so much collateral damage.
Shit, so what does a few thousand New Yorkers matter so long as we get
to profitably aid and profitably abet the Saudis in ripping off the 12
million or so Arabs that live under their totalitarian interpretation
of Islamic law.

Imperialism has always been a losing investment opportunity. Look at
the Persians, the Greeks (are there any Americans left who've read
about the Peloponnesian Wars), Romans, Spanish, French, Italian,
British, Russians, etc, etc. All empires have operated their imperial
possessions for the benefit of a small clique sucking up to the august
head of state. Whether that be Caligula, the Virgin Queen, or Bush
43, the game is the same. The game is that the populace of the state
gets to pay all the bills and shed all the blood and that those
sucking up to Il Duce get to reap all the profits. When the imperial
possessions get to be too costly; the profits too few and the military
too battered or extended to keep the imperial peace, the imperial
troops go home. Look at Britain as a case in point: Julius Caesar
made a reconnaissance in force, Augustus occupied the place, Hadrian
built a wall to keep out the terrorists (or were they freedom
fighters) and then some later emperor (you look em up if you want)
pulled all the troops out because the natives were restless and the
profits were few. Look at Germany as a case in point: The natives
were restless so Varus was ordered into the Black Forest with three
legions, Hermann retreated, the legions marched too far in, into a
trap, Hermann slaughtered them all and took three eagles. The Romans
never forgot. The Romans never again fucked with the Germans.

So now we have grandstand seats whilst our latter day Caligula, our
AWOL flyboy Il Duce sends our military to their deaths deep in the
heart of Asia. Of course the Russians welcome us now, the Chinese
welcome us, the Persians welcome us. The Sunni Jihadis are the sworn
enemy of: a) the communist dictators of the former soviet republics;
b) the Han Chinese who control the Islamic peoples of Zinshiang
province; c) the Shiite Muslims who control Iran. In the short run
why not let American dollars and American blood attenuate this Jihadi
threat. What are the Jihadis struggling for? Life, liberty, and
pursuit of happiness. That is all. Their demands, and the Arabs
demands, are the same. The thing they primarily want and need is
Yankee Go Home. But the Ugly Americans insist, insist for the sake of
oil and gas profits, to stick their big noses and military personnel
into Islamic affairs.

It's difficult to believe that Russia, and China, and Persia will
tolerate an American presence in Central Asia for long. The American
position will be appreciably weaker the greater the body of American
troops inserted into Central Asia. At some point these seemingly
benign allies will covertly aid the Jihadis and either trap or
slaughter significant numbers of the American troops. It's easy to
believe that there will be a long and stalemated war (not unlike
Vietnam); it's impossible to believe that there is any light at the
end of the tunnel. The wisest policy for America is to immediately
arrest and turn over to The Hague all our war criminals; and give the
terrorists what they want by bringing home the forces propping up our
puppets in Arabia. I do not believe that any American's son or
daughter should be used as a mercenary for the Ibn Saud family, or
major oil firms, or Halliburton, or ...

> > I am convinced that the government had penetrated the 1993 WTC bombing
> > conspiracy with at least one Egyptian agent provocateur; it's likely
> > that this agent enabled rather than tried to disable that bombing.
>

> This is an interesting comment. It&#8217;s been a common enough practice of

> police and intelligence agencies to infiltrate groups and encourage or
> even carry out terrorist acts, the object being to create an atmosphere
> of fear and chaos that grants the state a free hand to conduct its

> &#8220;counter-terrorism&#8221; program (which has its own objectives). The private

> sector uses the same tactics against labour organizers. The WTC bombing

> doesn&#8217;t fit the pattern, though, because of the massive loss of life and

> the great success in which symbols of American imperialism were hit.

> Until strong evidence emerges, I wouldn&#8217;t even imply that domestic

> agencies were directly involved in this incident.
>

I didn't mean to imply that the CIA etc knew about the specifics of
the WTC II attacks. The presence of a US-intelligence-affiliated
Egyptian agent with the WTC I bombing cell is a well-reported fact.
It is also quite obvious that with the single exception of
accidentally stopping a would-be bomber of LAX at Port Angeles in
December 1999, the CIA/FBI has done nothing to protect Americans. The
anti-terrorist PR rhetoric has been cranked to a fever pitch in the
past 8 years, meanwhile the effectiveness of the CIA/FBI has been
frankly near squat. I used to be a pulling guard in high school
football. There was a halfback I disliked. So it was not too
difficult for me to teach this fellow a lesson or two by failing
(accidentally-on-purpose, as they say in high school) to take out the
corner linebacker. Smack! lesson taught, and I had no role whatsoever
in tackling the fellow for a loss. Was the CIA/FBI standing down in
the days and hours before Kennedy became a corpse? Was the CIA/FBI
standing by and waiting for a terrorist hit somewhere in America to
create the Gulf of Tonkin moment we all saw Congress enthusiastically
embrace last week? I don't know. I don't even care about the answer.
It's moot. What is clear is that the American policy has been
recklessly driven in a dangerous neighborhood with the unprotected
American civilians as its front bumper. What is clear is that about
6,000 American citizens have become collateral damage to this policy.
That ought to piss off all Americans. That ought to make all
Americans seek the scalps of those responsible for that policy. And
that ought to make the analytical few answer the question as to who
benefited from this unwise policy and who facilitated this unwise
policy. And that ought to make those who value justice haul off all
the war criminals in America to the Hague where we already have in
place the apparatus to ascertain their guilt and incarcerate them for
a long while.

> The issue of who controls the world&#8217;s oil resources always seems to

> loom, but it is not the only issue. Another article recycled in this
> newsgroup argued that a long-range Western policy goal is to dismantle

> Russia&#8217;s powerbase to get at its wealth. Yugoslavia was dismantled
> against Russia&#8217;s impotent protests, and the anticipated incursions into

> Central Asia seem to be materializing.

The oil game seems also to explain why the US so quickly went along
with Germany's recognition of Slovenia, the act that effectively ended
Yugoslavia as a nation. (Germany has long had an interest in Slovenia,
as there is a substantial German minority there and its location
completes an Austrian route to the Adriatic.) A good friend of Bush
41 has been trying to get oil rights for Adriatic resources under the
control of Montenegro; hence a scheme to detach Montenegro or
otherwise reduce Yugoslavia in size, and to promote the political
fortunes of corrupt politicians creates a propitious oil business
environment ... And depriving Russia of wheeling Central Asian oil to
Europe, China, and Japan, and depriving China of wheeling Central
Asian oil to itself and Japan are surely American objectives.
Objectives consistent with an anti Russian and anti Chinese economic
policy. Oil is central to the game. So is gas.

> ... Currently Russia is onside to

> oust its shared enemy the Taliban, so it will be interesting to see how

> the region&#8217;s political landscape is changed in the coming months. Will a

> new government in Afghanistan try to cleanse the Russian influence? Will

> the West leave behind permanent &#8220;temporary&#8221; military installations in

> Central Asia as it did in Saudi Arabia?
>

Undoubtedly what America will try to create in Afghanistan, if
militarily successful, will be a totalitarian police state modeled on
that installed in Tehran in 1952. Such states already exist in
Central Asia; hence the revolutionary urges. Pakistan has a weak
version of such a dictatorship; Egypt and Saudi Arabia have stronger
versions. I'm sure the CIA wishes they had a list of dissidents in
the region to be liquidated; maybe they do. The game is rough, as
illustrated by the blood bath we helped visit upon Indonesia in 1965.
There the CIA identified about 500,000 persons who were killed to
enable the installation of the Suharto regime. Given that the Pahlavi
regime lasted 27 years, and the Suharto regime lasted about 34 years,
and that the Pinochet regime lasted about 20 years, we can project
that the half-life of a US installed Afghan dictator will be about 20
years. This is long enough for Enron/ExImBank to profitably construct
a gas pipeline and suck Central Asian gas into the Indian marketplace.
And time enough for Bush 43 to join the Carlyle group and become
remarkably wealthy.

Sincerely,

AGL