"This War on Terrorism is Bogus:" Michael Meacher

British MP Attacks U.S. on 9/11 and War

http://truthout.org/docs_03/090703A.shtml

This War on Terrorism is Bogus

Michael Meacher
The Guardian

Saturday 06 September 2003

The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its
global domination

   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.
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   Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

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