[Vision2020] 9/11 no accident?

[Ralph Nielsen]

Forwarded from The Guardian.
Gary

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1036571,00.html

Comment
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This war on terrorism is bogus
The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its
global domination
Michael Meacher
Saturday September 6, 2003
The Guardian
Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons 
why
Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has 
focused on
why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. 
The
conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, 
retaliation against
al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a 
global
war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the 
US and
UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be
extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the 
facts. The truth
may be a great deal murkier.
We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana 
was
drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence
secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's 
younger
brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, 
entitled
Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the 
neoconservative
think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the 
Gulf
region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the
unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the 
need for a
substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of 
the regime
of Saddam Hussein."
The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz 
and
Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations 
from
challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or 
global role".
It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and 
efficient
means of exercising American global leadership". It describes 
peacekeeping
missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that 
of the UN". It
says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia 
and
Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a 
threat to
US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", 
saying "it
is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".
The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to 
dominate
space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using 
the
internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider 
developing biological
weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform 
biological
warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".
Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria 
and
Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the 
creation of a
"worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world
domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing 
fantasists, it is
clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened 
before,
during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can 
be
seen in several ways.
First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt 
the
events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance 
warning
to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to
Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 
terrorists said
to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). 
The list
they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of 
whom
was arrested.
It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit 
Washington
targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence 
council report
noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft 
packed with
high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the 
White
House".
Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. 
Michael
Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has 
stated
that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified
applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for 
training in terrorism
for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 
2001). It
seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. 
It is
also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US
military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).
Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan 
flight
student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was 
arrested
in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious 
interest in
learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from 
French
intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to 
search his
computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, 
November 3
2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month 
before
9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers 
(Newsweek,
May 20 2002).
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism
perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. 
The first
hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked
aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane 
was scrambled
to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from
Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 
am. Why not?
There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft 
before 9/11.
Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter
aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 
2002). It is a
US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off 
its
flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.
Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being
ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been
deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose 
authority? The former
US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information
provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so 
extensive that it is
no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of
incompetence."
Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has 
ever
been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, 
leaders
of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to
Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, 
significantly, that
"casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of 
the
international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was 
captured". The US
chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to 
say that
"the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The
whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) 
that FBI
headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce 
complained it had
had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over 
the
previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not 
receive
permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this 
assembled
evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, 
is
compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.
The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set 
against the
PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on 
terrorism" is
being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic 
geopolitical
objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the
Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way 
we could
have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on 
Afghanistan
but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly
Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq 
that on 10
separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 
9/11; the
CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).
In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC 
plan
into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military 
action
against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report 
prepared
for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated 
in April
2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq 
remains a
destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets 
from the
Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, 
the
report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the 
US, "military
intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).
Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported 
(September
18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told 
by
senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that 
"military
action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". 
Until
July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of 
stability in
Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon 
pipelines from
the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through
Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the 
Taliban's
refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them 
"either you
accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of 
bombs"
(Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).
Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US
failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for 
attacking
Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in 
advance.
There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal 
that
President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl 
Harbor on
December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but 
the
information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage 
persuaded a
reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC 
blueprint of
September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into 
"tomorrow's
dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some
catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 
attacks allowed
the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the 
PNAC
agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to 
implement.
The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US 
and
the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. 
By 2010
the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil 
production
and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export 
capacity. As
demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 
1960s.
This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for 
both the
US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its 
total
energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A 
DTI
minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas 
shortages by 2005.
The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come 
from
gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it 
should be
noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition 
to its
oil.
A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 
2000
noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the 
Caspian
region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To 
diversify supply
routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan 
and
Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards 
through
Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This 
would rescue
Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in 
which Enron
had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on 
access
to cheap gas.
Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining 
world
supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British 
participation in
US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned 
Washington not
to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war 
(Guardian,
October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his
desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to 
lose out to
other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to
potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 
2002).
The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war 
on
terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the 
way for
a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around
securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the 
whole project.
Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project 
really a
proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to 
justify
a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, 
this
whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a 
radical
change of course.
· Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003