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
meacherm@parliament.uk
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/sep/06/september11.iraq
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
meacherm@parliament.uk
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/sep/06/september11.iraq
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