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Oh say can you see ... red, white and blue SUVs by Don Paul The leading corporate-sponsored news these days is all about the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. We can’t avoid such news. It affects us even if we ignore it. It reaches all the way to the cars we drive along Third Street. Stories are told daily in newspapers and on TV. They come under the headings of “America Responds,” “America Fights Back,” “The War on Terrorism,” and so on. None of such news much examines why the U.S. is in Afghanistan. None of it much investigates likely aims and ends of the war there, nor probes the huge holes in official accounts. None of it dares to suggest that a multinational plot of jaw-dropping scope and cruelty — a kind of global coup — is hijacking our futures, robbing our freedoms, and hurting poor people most of all. Since Sept. 11, this column has tried to explore what’s really going on. Its early, inescapable conclusion (see Sept. 19 column) was that at least part of the U.S. government at least allowed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. More investigation (see Sept. 26 and Oct. 10 columns) revealed that the Bush administration and its prime corporate sponsors were the main economic and political beneficiaries of outcomes from the Sept. 11 horror. Oil — that is, billions and trillions of dollars from oil and gas near the Caspian Sea and from the pipelines that would carry said oil and gas — was revealed as a key objective behind the U.S. campaign to wipe out the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Repression of dissent, cuts to civil rights, and a new legitimacy for the Bush administration were the big, immediate domestic gains of this “government for corporations” scheme. Finally (read “Fourth Reich Rising,” Oct. 24), this column pointed out the generations-old connections, from Nazi Germany forward, between the U.S. corporate establishment and openly fascist partners. It showed that profits with Bush family ties extend even to the U.S. patents for vaccines against anthrax. Evidence that has since emerged points to a plot more sinister and brutal than decent people can imagine. The evidence’s sources are themselves multinational and mostly establishment. They include MS-NBC, Le Figaro in France, the Guardian and BBC in England, dailies in India, Pakistan and Spain, and a new book titled “Bin Laden: The Hidden Truth.” Many are cited in Michael Ruppert’s e-mail newsletter “From the Wilderness” and on the globalcircle.org and Irish Times websites. Here is a timeline of facts. See what picture or pictures they form for you: a carpet of gold ... or a carpet of bombs? February-April 2001. Negotiations began between U.S. government and Taliban representatives to revive construction of pipelines that Unocal (Union 76) had proposed six years earlier. The pipelines would carry oil and gas through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, the shortest possible route to lucrative markets in the Far East. Last March, Laila Helms, Afghan niece of Richard Helms — he a former director of the CIA and a former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan — assisted an aide of Taliban leader Mullah Muhammed Omar, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, in meetings with the CIA in Washington. In April, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced aid in the amount of $43 million to the Taliban (The Irish Times, Nov.19, 2001). In May 2001, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet met with Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad, Pakistan. The meeting was reported to be “unusually long.” It presumably included Tenet’s counterpart, Lt. General Mahmud Ahmad, head of the ISI, Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA. (The Indian SAPRA news agency, May 22, 2001). In July 2001, Thomas Simons, former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan; Karl Inderfurth, former assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs; and Lee Coldren, former State Department expert on South Asia, met in Berlin with negotiators from the Taliban, Russia and six oil-rich nations that neighbor Afghanistan (BBC news, Sept.18; the Guardian, Sept. 22, 2001). According to Jean-Charles Brisard, co-author of “Bin Laden: The Hidden Truth”: “At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told the Taliban, ‘Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.’’’ Naif Naik, former Pakistani minister for foreign affairs, was also present. He recalled that the discussions turned around “the formation of a government of national unity. If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid ... And the pipe lines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come.’’ Naik also recalled that Tom Simons, the U.S. representative at these meetings, openly threatened the Taliban and Pakistan. “Simons said, ‘Either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option.’ The words Simons used were ‘a military operation’,’’ Naik claimed (Inter Press Service, Nov. 15, 2001). On July 14, 2001, Osama bin Laden, reputed “mastermind of the al-Qaeda terror network,” was in his private suite at a hospital in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for treatment of a chronic kidney infection. He met there with “a top CIA official.” Although bin Laden was subject to “execution” by the U.S. for his presumed role in the 1998 bombing of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, his private jet left Dubai without interception by U.S. Navy planes (Le Figaro, Oct. 31, 2001). July 2001: Pakistan’s ISI Chief Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmad had an aide wire-transfer $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the pilot who later achieved infamy as the presumed leader of the Sept. 11 hijackings and atrocities. In October 2001, Mahmud Ahmad resigned from the ISI after the FBI confirmed this crucial wire-transfer (The Times of India, Oct. 11, 2001). Aug. 2, 2001: Christina Rocca, the State Department’s director of Asian Affairs, met with the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad, the last direct contact between U.S. government and Taliban representatives (The Irish Times, Nov.19, 2001). August 2001: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered operatives to warn the U.S. government “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings (MSNBC interview with Putin, Sept.15, 2001). August 2001: The New York Stock Exchange dropped more than 900 points in three weeks, prompting predictions of a Depression-like crash of the stock market. End of August 2001. Economic bulletins noted the 1,120,000 jobs lost in the U.S. since January and the precipitous fall in the growth of all Western economies (Spanish newspaper Cinco Días, Sept. 5, 2001; speech by Cuban President Fidel Castro, Nov. 2, 2001). Sept. 3, 2001: Pakistan launched the independent Interstate Gas Co. Ltd. (IGCL) to pursue “regional pipeline options” from Iran, Qatar, Turkmenistan and the United Arab Emirates (The Dawn, Sept. 3, 2001). Sept. 4-13, 2001. Pakistani ISI Chief Lt. General Mahmud Ahmad, benefactor of Mohammed Atta, met with U.S. State Department and CIA officials in Washington, D.C. On Sept. 13, Pakistan agreed to cooperate with the U.S. war on Afghanistan (MSNBC, Oct. 7, 2001). Sept. 11, 2001: At 8:15 a.m., the first of four hijacked U.S. airliners diverged sharply from its flight-plan. Seventy-five minutes later — and 45 minutes after the first airliner crashed into the World Trade Center — the National Command Authority scrambled jets to defend U.S. air-space (CNN, ABC, MSNBC and more). Oct. 9, 2001: U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain visited Pakistan’s minister of oil. The pipelines desired by Unocal and other Western corporations are reported to be “back on the table” (The Frontier Post of Pakistan, Oct.10, 2001). We can fight or we can lose What do you see from the above timeline of facts? I see a plot with many twists. I see one blind and brutal aim: pipelines through Afghanistan. The Bush administration, acting for corporations that derive their wealth from oil, tried to make the Taliban “behave as they ought to” through inducements and threats. Their ultimate threat was the U.S. ruling-class’s tried-and-true “military operation,” offered last July by Thomas Simons. Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmad, former chief of Pakistan’s ISI, is a more uncertain element. Either he was working with the presumed “ISI/Taliban/bin Laden axis,” or he was setting up Afghanistan for a possible U.S.-led war from a time not later than that of CIA Director George Tenet’s visit to Afghanistan last May. His dispatch of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta would fit either role. Or Mahmud Ahmad may have changed sides under extreme pressure, just after the attacks of Sept. 11. Any of the logical scenarios that can be deduced from the evidence before us now, however, are 100 percent contrary to the rhetoric delivered by George W. Bush and the “goals” that his adminstration uses to support the “war on terrorism.” The plot that I now see arouses in me sadness, scorn, disgust and anger. I feel sad for the victims first. Survivors of the more than 4,000 dead in New York City and Washington, D.C., are living victims. They must persist without their loved ones for the rest of their lives. I also feel sad for the dead who passed without the least knowledge of why they were perishing. I feel sad, too, for the millions more who will die from U.S.-led bombing of Afghanistan and the starvation that goes with it. Scorn is what I feel for the plot’s crudity and obviousness. Did its operatives not expect the public to connect threats with actions, actions with consequences? Disgust is the least that’s deserved for the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of the plot’s evident perpetrators: the corporate government of the United States. Anger is my final and most unshakable feeling. Seeing to the bottom of this rich man’s war sets my jaw against it. This whole show — with its thousands of deaths already — is all for possible profits from gas and oil. Now we may all know the true enormity and evil of events on and around Sept. 11. Our first duty is to spread the word. The Bush administration is not stopping. In the past six weeks it has seen Congress pass its USA PATRIOT Act, letting the government eavesdrop on email and other forms of private communication whenever it wishes. It’s put forth a bill to give $100 billion more to U.S. corporations: $1 billion to Ford, $833 million to General Motors, $671 million to General Electric, and so forth through repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax; $21 billion through legalization of offshore tax havens in the Bahamas and elsewhere. It trumpets the need for “secret military tribunals,” with defendants decided by President George W. to be outside the rule and reach of any other law. We’re headed toward an outright fascist corporate state. We’re headed toward red, white and blue SUVs. Red, white and blue dog collars! Let Rex show the flag. Press red on your dog collar for “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” blue for “America the Beautiful” and, of course, white for “God Bless America.” Forget any pretense of representative government. Let CEOs of corporations directly make up the United States cabinet. Let them directly set the federal budget. Let Vice President Dick Cheney go back to Halliburton, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld back to Searle Pharaceuticals, Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill back to Alcoa Aluminum, and George W. Bush back to Harken Energy and the Texas Rangers. Red, white and blue SUVs — the corporate government would have all of us get them who can afford them, yoking us more to gas and oil. I think, however, that another turn will soon be taken. We know too much to have our futures hijacked. Our own communication has helped to expose this latest attempt at a global coup. We’ll resist the robbery of hard-won freedoms. We know what’s urgent and necessary and we’ll do it ourselves. The majority of us believe not a bit in hacks of either of the two major corporate parties, Democrats and Republicans. We feel the real terror that surrounds us. Mothers of Bayview Hunters Point — and of Richmond, Martinez, and, yes, Walnut Creek — all wake up to hear their children coughing. We know who suffers most from norms that are themselves crimes and we know who and what are ultimately responsible for these everyday crimes and crimes as exceptional as Sept. 11. We have only to act, act for our children’s future, from what we know in our hearts. Don Paul works with Marie Harrison, Malik Rahim, Alma Lark, Duc Nim and others in Housing Is a Human Right. He thanks you all for the e-mails; keep them coming to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. |
