Reply #49: It's always all about money...

[warren pease]

everything else is bullshit.

In this case, we all know goddamn good and well that the US marines have been killing civilians in that war-besotted country since 2001 -- mostly women, children and old people just looking for a little place in the sun at the end of their miserable war-torn lives.

Before that, it was the Taliban; before that the so-called Northern Alliance -- all happily blowing up their own countrymen. Before that it was the Russians. And before that, maybe Venusians or Saturnalians or Plutocrats... Most likely the latter.

You also know it never has, nor ever did have, a goddamn thing to do with terrorism. The real terrorists lived at, and may still inhabit, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

It had to do with money, as does every other fucking thing in the US and the industrialized world these days.

It had to do with satisfying Unocal's lust for a pipeline from the Caspian basic to the Indian Ocean. It had to do with US negotiator Christina Rocca's promising Taliban leaders that "...either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs."

The following is excerpted from another of those banned-in-the-US books exposing the Bushies' complicity in "the events of 9/11"(tm). Or perhaps you believe the official conspiracy theory, in which case we really have nothing in common except internet access. But let's err on the the side of intellectual honesty rather than cognitive dissonance.

So there's this book, written by a couple of French intelligence analysts named Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, entitled Bin Laden, La Verite Interdite (Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth).

Their intel chops seem in good working order. Brisard was until the late 1990s director of economic analysis and strategy for Vivendi, the French media conglomerate. He also worked for French secret services, and wrote for them in 1997 a report on the now famous Al Qaeda network, allegedly headed by bin Laden.

Dasquie is an investigative journalist and publisher of Intelligence Online, a respected newsletter on diplomacy, economic analysis and strategy, available through the Internet. In a November 2001 interview, they claim that:

Before September 11, the U.S. government had an extremely benevolent understanding of the Taliban. The Taliban was perceived "as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia" from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. This would have secured for the U.S. another huge captive and alternate oil resource centre. "The oil and gas reserves of Central Asia have been controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change all that... this rationale of energy security changed into a military one," the authors claim.

"At one moment during the negotiations, 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'," Brisard said. On November 24, representatives of the Northern Alliance, former King Zahir Shah's confidantes, and possibly, non-Taliban Pashtun leaders, will meet in Berlin under the aegis of the U.S.-led coalition to discuss a broad-based government in Afghanistan.

According to a November 14, 2001 article in the Seattle Weekly:

In December 1997, Unocal hosted Taliban delegates in Texas and, according to news reports, even took them to the mall and beach. It also gave nearly $1 million to a job-training program in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, out of the $15 million to $20 million spent on the pipeline effort. It hired former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley to press its case, special ambassador John J. Maresca to, in Unocal media chief Barry Lane's words, "look at corporate responsibility globally," and Henry Kissinger to cap the Turkmenistan side of the deal. "We didn't focus on the Taliban," Lane insists. "We also sponsored a training program in Northern Afghanistan" and hosted some of the warlords now in the Northern Alliance. But with the Taliban gaining ground and controlling the planned pipeline route through southern Afghanistan, some focus was inevitable. "If this leads to peace, stability, and international recognition, then this is a positive development," Unocal vice president Chris Taggart declared after the Taliban took Kabul in 1996.

So it had to do with keeping the Taliban occupied in the cities so that pipeline engineers could run free across the bombed-out countryside, taking various readings and refining their maps.

Surely the Taliban are among the earth's true scumbuckets. Surely they repress their own people, enforce Shariah fundamentalist law and compel women to wear the veil -- the middle eastern equivalent of Chinese foot-binding.

But what they didn't do is hijack four planes, smash three of them into building and the fourth into the Pennsylvania countryside. Nor in all likelihood did bin Laden, unless you really believe the Bushies told the truth about 9/11, which would be the only time in their entire miserable serial lying lives they ever told the truth about anything.

For those truths, you probably need to look inside Cheney's office and towards Pakistan and the ISI, whose chief Mahmood Ahmed just happened to be having breakfast with some of the Bushies on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, "the day that changed everything"(tm) -- namely Robert Johnson, at the time a spokesperson for Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta and formerly a spokesman for Arizona Congressman Jon Kyl, Porter Goss, Bob Graham and at the time Pakistan ISI Intelligence. Ahmed was later linked to wiring $100,000 to Mohammed Atta.

My last $50 says Osama is, at this very moment, cooling his jets down at that recent Bushie land grab in Paraguay, hanging out in a hammock, sipping cold Lone Star talls, slapping mosquitoes, dining on forbidden pork ribs, a new set of kidneys functioning like clockwork, trading one-liners with good ol' boy George Jr., whose command of English is just barely better than Osama's after his three-month full-immersion ESL course.

Cynical? Fuck no... Just used to how it all works and old enough not to give much of a shit one way or the other anymore.


sf

the former "Warren Pease" trying to reclaim his lost identity so he can win great prizes in the local essay contest.