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January
11, 2002
Lee Balllinger/Dave
Marsh
Neil
Young's Duet with Ashcroft
January
10, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Bush,
Enron, UNOCAL
and the Taliban
St. Clair/Cockburn
Greenpeace
to Greenwash?
Hans von
Sponek
Iraq:
Is There an Alternative
to Military Action?
Jim Lobe
Israeli
Human Rights Group Assails Army
Marina Mayakova
Russia's
Top Military Astrologer Predicts More Attacks from OBL
January
9, 2002
David
Vest
The
Super-Burqa
and the Big Tent
ND Jayaprakash
Winnable
Nuclear War?
Rafiq
Kathwari
Kashmir
Will Make Ground Zero Look Like a Bonfire
January
8, 2002
Prudence
Crowther
Sting
Like a B-52
Nelson
Valdés
Al-Qaeda
at Guantanamo Bay
John Chuckman
Dark
Tales from the
Ministry of Truth
Richard
Corn-Revere
Do
We Fear Freedom?
Joan Hoff
The
Nixon You Haven't Heard
January
7, 2002
Lawrence
McGuire
Confusing
Economic Tales About Argentina
Wael Masri
They
Are Taking
Our Rights Away
Philip
Farruggio
Better
Medicine
January
6, 2002
Ralph
Nader
Students
Put the Heat on Foreign Sweatshops
Tariq
Ali
Battleground
Kashmir
January
5, 2002
Mark Schneider
Kifah:
The Movie Star
Israel Killed
Edward
Said
Is
Israel More Secure Now?
January
4, 2002
CG Estabrook
Anti-War
= Anti-Globalization
Jordan
Green
What's
Changed in New York
January
3, 2002
Walt Brasch
Exit
Cheney, Enter Ridge
Mokhiber
and Weissman
The
10 Worst Corporations
of 2001
Robert
Hunter Wade
America's
Empire Rules an Unbalanced World
Shahid
Alam
Is
There an Islamic Problem?
January
2, 2002
Ross Regnart
Patriot
Act Redefines the Mob as "Terrorist Associates"
John Chuckman
The
Republicans' Secret Plan X
David
Vest
Turn,
Turn, Turn
January
1, 2002
Kathy
Kelly
Iraq's
New Year
December
31, 2001
John Absood
An
Alternative to War in Iraq
Ramzi
Kysia
Iraq
Goes Radioactive
December
28, 2001
John Chuckman
Observing
George Bush
Suren
Pillay
Civilian
Bodies
Aaron
Lehmer
Inviting
Future Terrorism
December
27, 2001
Patrick
McNamara
Palestinian
Children Bear Brunt of Mideast Violence
Nelson
Valdés
A
Possible Scenario on the Location of bin Laden
Jensen
and Mahajan
Remember
the Afghan Dead
Philip
Farruggio
A
New Year's Resolution
Ramzi
Kysia
The
People of the Valley
December 26, 2001
John Chuckman
In
Praise of the Unspeakable
Sam Bahour
2002:
Year of the Twos
December 25, 2001
Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's
Human Rights Record
December 24, 2001
Sam Bahour
It
Happened One Morning
Yair Khilou
Why I Resisted
Being Drafted into the Israeli Army
Michael
Chisari
War
as Diversionary Tactic
Cockburn/St. Clair
Enron
and the Green Seal
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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January
11, 2002
Conspiracy Goes
Mainstream
Forbidden Truths?
By Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St Clair
Conspiracy is going mainstream. On the morning
of January 8 Paula Zahn of CNN went into wide-eyed mode as she
parleyed with Richard Butler, former head of the UN inspection
team in Iraq, latterly part of the wipe-out-Saddam lobby and
now on the CNN payroll. They were discussing the hot book of
the hour, ''Bin Laden, la verite interdite'' (''Bin Laden, the
forbidden truth''), by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie.
It's just appeared in Paris.
ZAHN:
Start off with what your understanding is of what is in this
book -- the most explosive charge.
BUTLER:
The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration
-- the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed
down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan
in order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil -- an oil pipeline
across Afghanistan.
ZAHN:
And this book points out that the FBI's deputy director, John
O'Neill, actually resigned because he felt the U.S. administration
was obstructing...
BUTLER:
A proper...
ZAHN:
... the prosecution of terrorism.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
From the American Patriot Friends
Network, through BuzzFlash
(which seems to have an umbilical cord to the Democratic National
Committee) to ultra-left sites there's a menu of conspiracy charges
that would sate the most indefatigable gourmand. To cite a by-no-means
complete list, we have the charges noted above; we also have
foreknowledge by the Bush administration of the 9/11 attacks,
with a deliberate decision to do nothing to thwart the onslaughts.
What else? We have the accusation that
members of the US intelligence community, posibly in league with
Bush-related business operatives, used their advance knowledge
of the attacks to invest large sums in "put options",
gambling on the likelihood that the stock value of United Airlines
and American Airlines would plummet in the wake of the suicide
attacks.
Don't stop there! The internet boils
with accusations that US fighter planes were ordered to stand
down on September 11, although there was a possibility these
planes could have intercepted and downed the suicide planes.
Then there's the role of oil. Quite properly,
Americans always relish charges that Big Oil is up to no good,
and this appetite is being assiduously catered to. There are
plenty of columns imparting the news that the war in Afghanistan
is "all about oil". From this premise flow torrents
of speculation of the sort made by the two Frenchman cited above.
The trouble with many conspiracy theories
is that they strain excessively to avoid the obvious. Namely:
Both under Bush's and Clinton's presidencies
the US has been eager since the fall of the Soviet Union to find
some way to assist the hopes of US oil companies and pipeline
companies to exploit the oil resources of the Asian republics,
most notably reserves in western Kazakhstan. Similarly consistent
has been the US's desire not to have oil from Kazakhstan pass
through Russia. Until US-Iranian relations are restored that
has left the option of a pipeline from Kazakhstan westward through
Azerbaijan to Cheyhan on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey or
a pipeline south through Afghanistan to a Pakistani port.
In tandem with these hopes to ship out
Kazakh oil has been the desire to get a regime in Afghanistan
sufficiently stable to allow Unocal to build its line, and sufficiently
deferential to the US to arrest or at least boot out Osama bin
Laden. US relations with the Saudis were as always predicated
on the paramount necessity of ensuring the stability of the regime
without burdening it with unpalatable demands. If history is
any guide a lot of this diplomacy was doubtless clumsily done,
in alternations between proffers of carrots and threats of the
stick.
But does this mean that the US went to
war in Afghanistan "for oil"? Surely not. If stability
was the goal, then war was a foolish option. Indeed, both the
Clintonoids and the Bushies saw the strongmen of the Taliban
as the best hope. The Bush regime hastened into war because America
had sustained the greatest massacre on its soil since Pearl Harbor,
and Bush and his advisers faced the political imperative of finding
an enemy at top speed on which to exact dramatic vengeance.
This isn't to say there weren't hawks
inside the Bush administration who were lobbying for plans to
overthrow the Taliban in early summer, plans of which the Taliban
became aware, possibly conniving at the September 11 attacks
in consequence.
As for all those mad theories about permitting
the September 11 attacks to occur, or about remote control planes:
they seem to add up to the notion that America's foes are too
incompetent to mount operations unaided by US agencies, or that
agencies aren't vast, bumbling bureaucracies quite capable of
ignoring or discounting warnings of an attack.
But there is considerable wheat among
the chaff. It's true that someone gambled on those put options,
that the profits from that gamble have remained uncollected and
that "Buzzy" Krongard is an interesting character who
did go from the post of vice-chairman of Banker's Trust/A.B.Brown
(now owned by DeutscheBank) which handled many of the put option
bets, to the CIA of which he is now executive director.
It is true that the CIA ushered bin Laden
into Afghanistan and it is true that the CIA was complicit in
Afghanistan's emergence in the 1980s as the West's leading supplier
of opium and morphine, just as the Agency helped construct the
cave redoubts of Tora Bora. The US taxpayers underwrote that
construction, just as they're underwriting the destruction.
That's not conspiracy-mongering. That's
true.
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