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This War on Terrorism is Bogus

New -- 11 September 2003

The following is a British Member of Parliament’s take on U. S. President George Bush and his 
administration’s attempt to manipulate the events of 9-11-2001 in an effort to create justification 
for his incursions into Afghanistan, and Iraq (and other dominoes to come).  It is presented as a 
pretext for waging his Oil Wars and/or Bush Wars.
 
For the sake of credibility, it should be noted that the author, Michael Meacher MP, was British 
Environment Minister from May 1997 to June 2003,  Much of the information discussed herein is 
completely available in the public domain, but Mr. Meacher does an excellent job of putting every-
thing into context, and in a relatively confined space.


(7/4/05) For a more American perspective, Senator Ernest F. Hollings has his own views about
"Why We're in Iraq."  It's worth reading as well.

vvvvvvvvv v v

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
http://www.guardian.co.uk 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.  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 im-
mediate 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 peace-
keeping 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 9/11/2001 - 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 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 9/11/01 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 Air Force 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 (Associated Press, 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 defense 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 inter-
national 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” 
(Associated Press, 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 
Air Force 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 
destabilizing 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 9/11/2001 
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 [of the attack, not the lack of warning] 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 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
 
mailto:meacherm@parliament.uk>meacherm@parliament.uk
 

 

Homeland InSecurity         9-11-2001         A Case for Free Elections       

Counting Votes           The (9) Supremes         Justice, Order, and Law

Or forward to:

      Free Speech         Digital Piracy         Shredding the Magna Carta

Enemy Combatants         LIHOP         Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows

Buy One, Get One Free         Oil Wars         War Wars         Nature of Law

               

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