- I've added a few url's from oil
industry websites to this forwarded email as further evidence of
Enron's involvement in the motivation for the war in Afghanistan.
Reading this material will allow you to see the Enron scandal and its
ties to Bush-Cheney in a whole new light. To find thousands of other
energy industry website articles on this do a GOOGLE search
http://www.google.com using these keywords: Pipeline Enron Uzbekistan
Cheney Halliburton
-
- --Robert
-
- Enron and the oil pipeline deal
http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/ntc85031.htm "Enron/Uzbek Oil and
Gas: Represented a multinational energy company in connection with its
joint venture to develop an oil and gas deposit in Uzbekistan."
http://www.mbpprojectfinance.com/transactions/s_oilgas.html
http://www.advancenet.net/~k_a/uzbekistan/companies.htm
-
- "The one serious drawback companies
have faced is getting the supplies to the right market, the
energy-hungry Asian Pacific economies. Afghanistan -- the only Central
Asian country with very little oil -- is by far the best route to
transport the oil to Asia. Enron, the biggest contributor to the
Bush-Cheney campaign of 2000, conducted the feasibility study for a
US$2.5 billion trans-Caspian gas pipeline which is being built under a
joint venture agreement signed in February 1999 between Turkmenistan,
Bechtel and General Electric Capital Services."
http://www.moles.org/ProjectUnderground/drillbits/6_08/1.html
-
- "UZBEKISTAN - The U.S. Overseas
Private Investment Corp. (OPIC) has agreed to provide $400 million in
financing for a joint venture of Uzbekneftegaz and Enron oil and Gas
Co. (Houston) to develop a clutch of gas fields in Uzbekistan. It is
the largest OPIC commitment in Central Asia thus far."
http://www.moles.org/ProjectUnderground/drillbits/0801/96080107.html
-
- Here's an email I recieved this
morning. You may already know about the oil pipeline deal in
Afghanistan and the Bush threats to the Taliban to invade BEFORE 9/11
but these links show how Enron and the new Afghan leader we just
installed are all directly connected to Bush, to the so-called war,
Cheney refusing to reveal who he met with and the supression of the
9/11 investigation Bush has threatened Congress with.
--------------------------------------------------
-
- FORWARD:
- From: The Daily Brew:
http://www.thedailybrew.com/
-
- The Motive
-
- For years, US oil interests have been
trying to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to access the oil and
gas around the Caspian Sea; efforts that have continued past the 9-11
attacks.
-
- Source
http://www.wluml.org/english/new-archives/wtc/at-stake/unocal.htm
-
- Enron was a key player in this game.
Way back in 1996, Enron had cut a deal with the president of
Uzbekistan for joint development of the nation's natural gas
fields.
-
- Source Houston Chronicle Date: TUE
06/25/96 Section: Business Page: 4 Edition: 3 STAR (sorry, no
link)
-
-
- Enron had also done the feasibility
study for the pipeline.
-
- Source
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html
-
-
- For a time, the Taliban appeared to be
a potential partner. They had even visited Sugarland, Texas to talk
things over.
-
- Source
-
- http://news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/west_asia/newsid_37000/37021.st
m
-
-
- The Crime
-
- Unfortunately, the talks broke down,
and by late last summer, the US Government was threatening to commence
war against Afghanistan (an attack which would have violated every
precept of international law).
-
- Sources
-
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1550000/1550366.stm
-
-
- *****
- (Inserted by Jack) BBC Audio of report
on US intentions to invade Afghanistan BEFORE Sept 11th
-
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1550000/audio/_1550366_afghan01_arney.ram
-
- *****
-
-
- At least twice, Bush conveyed the
message to the Taliban that the United States would hold the regime
responsible for an al Qaeda attack. But after concluding that bin
Laden's group had carried out the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole,
a conclusion stated without hedge in a Feb. 9 briefing for Vice
President Cheney, the new administration did not choose to order armed
forces into action.
-
- Source
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8734-2002Jan19.html
-
- Simultaneous with making, but not
following through on these threats, Bush took a number of actions to
make the US decidedly more vulnerable to a terrorist attack. He
ordered the Naval strike force, which Clinton placed in the Indian
Ocean on 24 hour alert so he could hit Osama as soon as he had solid
intelligence, to stand down. Bush threatened to veto the Defense
Appropriations Bill after Democrats tried to move $600 million out of
Star Wars and into anti-terror defense. Bush opposed Clinton's
anti-money-laundering efforts, which were designed to stop al Qaeda's
money. Bush abandoned Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, or
as the two star general Donald Kerrick told the Washington Post,
reflecting on his service to both President Clinton and President
Bush: Clinton's advisors met nearly weekly on how to stop bin Laden
and al Qaeda. "I didn't detect that kind of focus" from the Bush
Administration.
-
- Source
http://democrats.com/view.cfm?id=5714
-
-
- I don't have to tell you what happened
next.
-
-
- The Cover Up
-
- Dick Cheney is openly breaking the law
by defying GAO requests to turn over his records of meetings with
Enron.
-
- Source
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20020201.html
-
- At the same time that Cheney has
refused to turn over his records, Enron and its accountants have
shredded millions of pages of documents.
-
- Source
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/30/business/30SHRE.html
-
- The Bush's themselves may have
destroyed evidence. When the Justice Department instructed the Bush
administration to preserve any documents related to Enron Corporation,
a senior administration official said that until now, "the White House
had not been making any formal effort to preserve or catalogue
information about Enron contacts."
-
- Source
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10918-2002Feb1.html
-
- While all of this law breaking,
stalling, and destruction of evidence has gone on, Bush has asked
Daschle to limit Congressional probes into Sept. 11.
-
- Source
http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/01/29/inv.terror.probe/index.html
-
- Note that the supposedly "liberal
press" has so far failed to put all of these pieces together. They are
too busy giving Bernard Goldberg and Bill O'Reilly the airtime to sell
a canard called "Bias." ___
-
-
-
TheDailyBrew.com
-
-
Centre for Research on
Globalisation
-
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html
-
-
-
Afghanistan, the Taliban and the
Bush Oil Team
-
-
By Wayne Madsen Democrats.com,
January 2002
-
-
Centre for Research on
Globalisation (CRG) globalresearch.ca 23 January 2002
-
- According to Afghan, Iranian, and
Turkish government sources, Hamid Karzai, the interim Prime Minister
of Afghanistan, was a top adviser to the El Segundo, California-based
UNOCAL Corporation which was negotiating with the Taliban to construct
a Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline from Turkmenistan through
western Afghanistan to Pakistan.
-
- Karzai, the leader of the southern
Afghan Pashtun Durrani tribe, was a member of the mujaheddin that
fought the Soviets during the 1980s. He was a top contact for the CIA
and maintained close relations with CIA Director William Casey, Vice
President George Bush, and their Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence
(ISI) Service interlocutors. Later, Karzai and a number of his
brothers moved to the United States under the auspices of the CIA.
Karzai continued to serve the agency's interests, as well as those of
the Bush Family and their oil friends in negotiating the CentGas deal,
according to Middle East and South Asian sources.
-
- When one peers beyond all of the
rhetoric of the White House and Pentagon concerning the Taliban, a
clear pattern emerges showing that construction of the trans-Afghan
pipeline was a top priority of the Bush administration from the
outset. Although UNOCAL claims it abandoned the pipeline project in
December 1998, the series of meetings held between U.S., Pakistani,
and Taliban officials after 1998, indicates the project was never off
the table.
-
- Quite to the contrary, recent meetings
between U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain and that
country's oil minister Usman Aminuddin indicate the pipeline project
is international Project Number One for the Bush administration.
Chamberlain, who maintains close ties to the Saudi ambassador to
Pakistan (a one-time chief money conduit for the Taliban), has been
pushing Pakistan to begin work on its Arabian Sea oil terminus for the
pipeline.
-
- Meanwhile, President Bush says that
U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan for the long haul. Far from
being engaged in Afghan peacekeeping -- the Europeans are doing much
of that -- our troops will effectively be guarding pipeline
construction personnel that will soon be flooding into the
country.
-
- Karzai's ties with UNOCAL and the Bush
administration are the main reason why the CIA pushed him for Afghan
leader over rival Abdul Haq, the assassinated former mujaheddin leader
from Jalalabad, and the leadership of the Northern Alliance, seen by
Langley as being too close to the Russians and Iranians. Haq had no
apparent close ties to the U.S. oil industry and, as both a Pushtun
and a northern Afghani, was popular with a wide cross-section of the
Afghan people, including the Northern Alliance. Those credentials
likely sealed his fate.
-
- When Haq entered Afghanistan from
Pakistan last October, his position was immediately known to Taliban
forces, which subsequently pinned him and his small party down,
captured, and executed them. Former Reagan National Security Adviser
Robert McFarlane, who worked with Haq, vainly attempted to get the CIA
to help rescue Haq. The agency claimed it sent a remotely-piloted
armed drone to attack the Taliban but its actions were too little and
too late. Some observers in Pakistan claim the CIA tipped off the ISI
about Haq's journey and the Pakistanis, in turn, informed the Taliban.
McFarlane, who runs a K Street oil consulting firm, did not comment on
further questions about the circumstances leading to the death of
Haq.
-
- While Haq was not part of the Bush
administration's GOP (Grand Oil Plan) for South Asia, Karzai was a key
player on the Bush Oil team. During the late 1990s, Karzai worked with
an Afghani-American, Zalmay Khalilzad, on the CentGas project.
Khalilzad is President Bush's Special National Security Assistant and
recently named presidential Special Envoy for Afghanistan.
Interestingly, in the White House press release naming Khalilzad
special envoy, no mention was made of his past work for UNOCAL.
Khalilzad has worked on Afghan issues under National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice, a former member of the board of Chevron, itself no
innocent bystander in the future CentGas deal. Rice made an impression
on her old colleagues at Chevron. The company has named one of their
supertankers the SS Condoleezza Rice.
-
- Khalilzad, a fellow Pashtun and the
son of a former government official under King Mohammed Zahir Shah,
was, in addition to being a consultant to the RAND Corporation, a
special liaison between UNOCAL and the Taliban government. Khalilzad
also worked on various risk analyses for the project.
-
- Khalilzad's efforts complemented those
of the Enron Corporation, a major political contributor to the Bush
campaign. Enron, which recently filed for bankruptcy in the single
biggest corporate collapse in the nation's history, conducted the
feasibility study for the CentGas deal. Vice President Cheney held
several secret meetings with top Enron officials, including its
Chairman Kenneth Lay, earlier in 2001. These meetings were presumably
part of Cheney's non-public Energy Task Force sessions. A number of
Enron stockholders, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, became officials in the Bush
administration. In addition, Thomas White, a former Vice Chairman of
Enron and a multimillionaire in Enron stock, currently serves as the
Secretary of the Army.
-
- A chief benefactor in the CentGas deal
would have been Halliburton, the huge oil pipeline construction firm
that also had its eye on the Central Asian oil reserves. At the time,
Halliburton was headed by Dick Cheney. After Cheney's selection as
Bush's Vice Presidential candidate, Halliburton also pumped a huge
amount of cash into the Bush-Cheney campaign coffers. And like oil
cash cow Enron, there were Wall Street rumors in late December that
Halliburton, which suffered a forty per cent drop in share value,
might follow Enron into bankruptcy court.
-
- Assisting with the CentGas
negotiations with the Taliban was Laili Helms, the niece-in-law of
former CIA Director Richard Helms. Laili Helms, also a relative of
King Zahir Shah, was the Taliban's unofficial envoy to the United
States and arranged for various Taliban officials to visit the United
States. Laili Helms' base of operations was in her home in Jersey City
on the Hudson River. Ironically, most of her work on behalf of the
Taliban was practically conducted in the shadows of the World Trade
Center, just across the river.
-
- Laili Helms' liaison work for the
Taliban paid off for Big Oil. In December 1997, the Taliban visited
UNOCAL's Houston refinery operations. Interestingly, the chief Taliban
leader based in Kandahar, Mullah Mohammed Omar, now on America's
international Most Wanted List, was firmly in the UNOCAL camp. His
rival Taliban leader in Kabul, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani (not to be
confused with the head of the Northern Alliance Burhanuddin Rabbani),
favored Bridas, an Argentine oil company, for the pipeline project.
But Mullah Omar knew UNOCAL had pumped large sums of money to the
Taliban hierarchy in Kandahar and its expatriate Afghan supporters in
the United States. Some of those supporters were also close to the
Bush campaign and administration. And Kandahar was the city near which
the CentGas pipeline was to pass, a lucrative deal for the otherwise
desert outpost.
-
- While Clinton's State Department
omitted Afghanistan from the top foreign policy priority list, the
Bush administration, beholden to the oil interests that pumped
millions of dollars into the 2000 campaign, restored Afghanistan to
the top of the list, but for all the wrong reasons. After Bush's
accession to the presidency, various Taliban envoys were received at
the State Department, CIA, and National Security Council. The CIA,
which appears, more than ever, to be a virtual extended family of the
Bush oil interests, facilitated a renewed approach to the Taliban. The
CIA agent who helped set up the Afghan mujaheddin, Milt Bearden,
continued to defend the interests of the Taliban. He bemoaned the fact
that the United States never really bothered to understand the Taliban
when he told the Washington Post last October, "We never heard what
they were trying to say... We had no common language. Ours was, 'Give
up bin Laden.' They were saying, 'Do something to help us give him
up.' "
-
- There were even reports that the CIA
met with their old mujaheddin operative bin Laden in the months before
September 11 attacks. The French newspaper Le Figaro quoted an Arab
specialist named Antoine Sfeir who postulated that the CIA met with
bin Laden in July in a failed attempt to bring him back under its
fold. Sfeir said the CIA maintained links with bin Laden before the
U.S. attacked his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan in 1998 and,
more astonishingly, kept them going even after the attacks. Sfeir told
the paper, "Until the last minute, CIA agents hoped bin Laden would
return to U.S. command, as was the case before 1998." Bin Laden
actually officially broke with the US in 1991 when US troops began
arriving in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm. Bin Laden felt
this was a violation of the Saudi regime's responsibility to protect
the Islamic Holy Shrines of Mecca and Medina from the infidels. Bin
Laden's anti-American and anti-House of Saud rhetoric soon reached a
fever pitch.
-
- The Clinton administration made
numerous attempts to kill Bin Laden. In August 1998, Al Qaeda
operatives blew up several U.S. embassies in Africa. In response, Bill
Clinton ordered cruise missiles to be launched from US ships in the
Persian Gulf into Afghanistan, which missed Bin Laden by a few hours.
The Clinton administration also devised a plan with Pakistan's ISI to
send a team of assassins into Afghanistan to kill Bin Laden. But
Pakistan's government was overthrown by General Musharraf, who was
viewed as particularly close to the Taliban. The CIA cancelled its
plans, fearing Musharraf's ISI would tip off the Taliban and Bin
Laden. . The CIA's connections to the ISI in the months before
September 11 and the weeks after are also worthy of a full-blown
investigation. The CIA continues to maintain an unhealthy alliance
with the ISI, the organization that groomed bin Laden and the Taliban.
Last September, the head of the ISI, General Mahmud Ahmed, was fired
by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for his pro-Taliban leanings
and reportedly after the U.S. government presented Musharraf with
disturbing intelligence linking the general to the terrorist
hijackers.
-
- General Ahmed was in Washington, DC on
the morning of September 11 meeting with CIA and State Department
officials as the hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center
and Pentagon. Later, both the Northern Alliance spokesman in
Washington, Haron Amin, and Indian intelligence, in an apparent leak
to The Times of India, confirmed that General Ahmed ordered a
Pakistani-born British citizen and known terrorist named Ahmed Umar
Sheik to wire $100,000 from Pakistan to the U.S. bank account of
Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker.
-
- When the FBI traced calls made between
General Ahmed and Sheik's cellular phone - the number having been
supplied by Indian intelligence to the FBI - a pattern linking the
general with Sheik clearly emerged. According to The Times of India,
the revelation that General Ahmed was involved in the Sheik-Atta money
transfer was more than enough for a nervous and embarrassed Bush
administration. It pressed Musharraf to dump General Ahmed. Musharraf
mealy-mouthed the announcement of his general's dismissal by stating
Ahmed "requested" early retirement.
-
- Sheik was well known to the Indian
police. He was arrested in New Delhi in 1994 for plotting to kidnap
four foreigners, including an American citizen. Sheik was released by
the Indians in 1999 in a swap for passengers on board New Delhi-bound
Indian Airlines flight 814, hijacked by Islamic militants from
Kathmandu, Nepal to Kandahar, Afghanistan. India continues to believe
the ISI played a part in the hijacking since the hijackers were
affiliated with the pro-bin Laden Kashmiri terrorist group,
Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin, a group only recently and quite belatedly placed
on the State Department's terrorist list. The ISI and bin Laden's Al
Qaeda reportedly assists the group in its operations against Indian
government targets in Kashmir.
-
- The FBI, which assisted its Indian
counterpart in the investigation of the Indian Airlines hijacking,
says it wants information leading to the arrest of those involved in
the terrorist attacks. Yet, no move has been made to question General
Ahmed or those U.S. government officials, including Deputy Secretary
of State Richard Armitage, who met with him in September. Clearly,
General Ahmed was a major player in terrorist activities across South
Asia, yet still had very close ties to the U.S. government. General
Ahmed's terrorist-supporting activities - and the U.S. government
officials who tolerated those activities - need to be
investigated.
-
- The Taliban visits to Washington
continued up to a few months prior to the September 11 attacks. The
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research's South Asian
Division maintained constant satellite telephone contact with the
Taliban in Kandahar and Kabul. Washington permitted the Taliban to
maintain a diplomatic office in Queens, New York headed by Taliban
diplomat Abdul Hakim Mojahed. In addition, U.S. officials, including
Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca,
who is also a former CIA officer, visited Taliban diplomatic officials
in Islamabad. In the meantime, the Bush administration took a hostile
attitude towards the Islamic State of Afghanistan, otherwise known as
the Northern Alliance. Even though the United Nations recognized the
alliance as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, the Bush
administration, with oil at the forefront of its goals, decided to
follow the lead of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and curry favor with the
Taliban mullahs of Afghanistan. The visits of Islamist radicals did
not end with the Taliban. In July 2001, the head of Pakistan's pro-bin
Laden Jamiaat-i-Islami Party, Qazi Hussein Ahmed, also reportedly was
received at the George Bush Center for Intelligence (aka, CIA
headquarters) in Langley, Virginia.
-
- According to the Washington Post, the
Special Envoy of Mullah Omar, Rahmatullah Hashami, even came to
Washington bearing a gift carpet for President Bush from the one-eyed
Taliban leader. The Village Voice reported that Hashami, on behalf of
the Taliban, offered the Bush administration to hold on to bin Laden
long enough for the United States to capture or kill him but,
inexplicably, the administration refused. Meanwhile, Spozhmai
Maiwandi, the director of the Voice of America's Pashtun service,
jokingly nicknamed "Kandahar Rose" by her colleagues, aired favorable
reports on the Taliban, including a controversial interview with
Mullah Omar.
-
- The Bush administration's dalliances
with the Taliban may have even continued after the start of the
bombing campaign against their country. According to European
intelligence sources, a number of European governments were concerned
that the CIA and Big Oil were pressuring the Bush administration not
to engage in an initial serious ground war on behalf of the Northern
Alliance in order to placate Pakistan and its Taliban compatriots. The
early-on decision to stick with an incessant air bombardment, they
reasoned, was causing too many civilian deaths and increasing the
shakiness of the international coalition.
-
- The obvious, and woefully
underreported, interfaces between the Bush administration, UNOCAL, the
CIA, the Taliban, Enron, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, the groundwork
for which was laid when the Bush Oil team was on the sidelines during
the Clinton administration, is making the Republicans worried.
Vanquished vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman is in the
ironic position of being the senator who will chair the Senate
Government Affairs Committee hearings on the collapse of Enron. The
roads from Enron also lead to Afghanistan and murky Bush oil
politics.
-
- UNOCAL was also clearly concerned
about its past ties to the Taliban. On September 14, just three days
after terrorists of the Afghan-base al Qaeda movement crashed their
planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, UNOCAL issued the
following statement: "The company is not supporting the Taliban in
Afghanistan in any way whatsoever. Nor do we have any project or
involvement in Afghanistan. Beginning in late 1997, Unocal was a
member of a multinational consortium that was evaluating construction
of a Central Asia Gas pipeline between Turkmenistan and Pakistan [via
western Afghanistan]. Our company has had no further role in
developing or funding that project or any other project that might
involve the Taliban."
-
- The Bush Oil Team, which can now rely
on the support of the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan, may think
that war and oil profits mix. But there is simply too much evidence
that the War in Afghanistan was primarily about building UNOCAL's
pipeline, not about fighting terrorism. The Democrats, who control the
Senate and its investigation agenda, should investigate the secretive
deals between Big Oil, Bush, and the Taliban.
-
- Copyright Wayne Madsen 2002. Reprinted
for fair use only.
-
- The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html
|
