This week in Haiti
The So-Called Evidence Is a Farce
by Stan Goff
(First of three parts)
Readers of this column will remember that Stan Goff was a U.S. Special Forces team leader during "Operation Uphold Democracy" in Haiti before being drummed out of the U.S. military in 1995 for being too hostile to former Duvalierists and FRAPH members, and too sympathetic to the demands of the Haitian people. He wrote a book about his experiences in Haiti entitled Hideous Dream (Softskull Press, 2000).
The following is an expanded version of an article which appeared in the Internet newsletter Narco News (www.narconews.com),tracing the inconsistencies in the official justifications for the "war on terrorism."
Recent reports in the world press buttress Goff's thesis that agencies of the U.S. government had foreknowledge, at the very least, of the Sept. 11 attacks. The venerable Times of India revealed Oct. 12 that Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad, the head of the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, resigned from that post on Oct. 8 after FBI investigators discovered "that $100,000 were wired to [World Trade Center] hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan... at the instance of Gen. Mahumd." (see www.emperors-clothes.com)
Why hasn't Washington trumpeted this discovery? Why hasn't it demanded that Gen. Mahumd be tried for terrorism? Could the CIA really have been unaware of the $100,000 transfer, even while it was working with ISI to train a Pakistani commando unit to capture bin Laden (New York Times, Oct. 29, 2001)? Doesn't the General's quiet retirement suggest a cover-up?
Goff, a 24-year veteran of the U.S. military's most elite units, has been a front-row witness to the cynicism and intrigues of Washington. He argues persuasively that the war in Afghanistan is not a "response" to Sept. 11, but an operation which was planned months beforehand.
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I'm a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant. That doesn't cut much for those who will only accept the opinions of former officers on military matters, since we enlisted swine are assumed to be incapable of grasping the nuances of doctrine.
But I wasn't just in the army. I studied and taught military science and doctrine. I was a tactics instructor at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama, and I taught Military Science at West Point. And contrary to the popular image of what Special Forces does, SF's mission is to teach. We offer advice and assistance to foreign forces. That's everything from teaching marksmanship to a private to instructing a Battalion staff on how to coordinate effective air operations with a sister service.
Based on that experience, and operations in eight designated conflict areas from Vietnam to Haiti, I have to say that the story we hear on the news and read in the newspapers is simply not believable. The most cursory glance at the verifiable facts, before, during, and after Sept. 11, does not support the official line or conform to the current actions of the United States government.
But the official line only works if they can get everyone to accept its underlying premises. I'm not at all surprised about the Republican and Democratic Parties repeating these premises. They are simply two factions within a single dominant political class, and both are financed by the same economic powerhouses. My biggest disappointment, as someone who identifies himself with the Left, has been the tacit acceptance of those premises by others on the Left, sometimes naively, and sometimes to score some morality points. Those premises are twofold. One, there is the premise that what this de facto administration is doing now is a "response" to Sept. 11. Two, there is the premise that this attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was done by people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion, neither of these is sound.
To put this in perspective we have to go back not to Sept. 11, but to last year or further.
A man of limited intelligence, George W. Bush, with nothing more than his name and the behind-the-scenes pressure of his powerful father -- a former President, ex-director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and an oil man -- is systematically constructed as a candidate, at tremendous cost. Across the country, subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms are put into place to disfranchise a significant fraction of the Democrat's African-American voter base. This doesn't come out until Florida becomes a battleground for Electoral College votes, and the magnitude of the story has been suppressed by the corporate media to this day. In a decision so lacking in legitimacy, the Supreme Court will neither by-line the author of the decision nor allow the decision to ever be used as a precedent, Bush v. Gore awards the presidency of the United States to a man who loses the popular vote in Florida and loses the national popular vote by over 600,000.
This de facto regime then organizes a very interesting cabinet. Dick Cheney, the Vice President, is an oil executive and the former Secretary of Defense. Condoleeza Rice, the National Security Advisor, is a director on the board of a transnational oil corporation and a Russia scholar with the right-wing Hoover Institute. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, is a man with no diplomatic experience whatsoever, and the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The other interesting appointment is Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld is the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals. He and Cheney were featured as speakers at the May, 2000, Russian-American Business Leaders Forum. So the consistent currents in this cabinet are: petroleum, the former Soviet Union, and the military.
We should look at one other Bush appointee: A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who is the current Executive Director of the CIA. Before that, he was a banking and brokerage executive. Buzzy was the Vice Chair of Bankers Trust -- AB Brown (BT), also implicated in massive money laundering schemes. BT was acquired by Deutsch Bank in 1998, making it the biggest bank in Europe. So Buzzy now not only influences a huge banking outfit, he has access to the most highly classified information in the United States, as the Executive Director of the CIA, often knowing it even before the President.
Between September 6 and 10, 2001, an investment strategy called "put options," where you get a future guarantee of a current selling price for stock, even if you buy it at a lower price later on, was exercised with United Airlines and American Airlines stock at six times the usual rate. There was no similar trading on any other airlines. Morgan Stanley, located on the World Trade Center, had 2,157 of its October "puts" bought in the three days prior to the attacks. The average rate of "put" buying is around 27 a day. The purchaser of these options have "earned" $1.2 million since September 11th. But they haven't collected.
Merrill Lynch was also in the WTC. Same kind of pattern just prior to the attack, with a net gain for "someone" of $5.5 million. No collectors.
Somebody, faced with alert investigators, has developed cold feet and decided not to pick up their money. So far, investigators have identified at least one purchasing institution: Deutsch Bank-Brown, the US investment branch of DB.
Now I'm not accusing anyone of anything, except the press. They still seem disinclined to ask any questions. This at least warrants some questions.
Based on the record of Daddy Bush, in all his guises, and the general trajectory of US foreign policy as far back as the Carter Administration, I feel I can reasonably conclude that Middle Eastern and South Asian fossil fuels are one of this administration's major preoccupations. Not just because this klavern has some very direct financial interests in fossil fuel, but because they surely know that worldwide oil production is peaking as we speak, and will soon begin a permanent and precipitous decline that will completely change the character of civilization as we know it within 20 years. Even the Left seems to be in deep denial about this, but the math is available. And, no, alternative energies and energy technologies will not save us. All the alternatives in the world cannot begin to provide more than a tiny fraction of the energy base now provided by oil. (I invite readers to visit and study the archives of very rigorous scientific data available at www.dieoff.org, which proves this assertion again and again.) This makes it more than a resource, and the drive to control what's left more than an economic competition.
I further conclude that the economic colonization of the former Soviet Union is probably high on that agenda, and in fact has a powerful synergy with the issue of petroleum. Russia not only holds vast untapped resources that beckon to imperialism in crisis, it remains a credible military and nuclear challenger in the region.
We have not one, but three members of the Bush de facto cabinet with military credentials, which makes the cabinet look quite a lot like a military General Staff. All this way before Sept. 11.
Then there's the subject of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO might have expected consignment to the dustbin of the Cold War after the Eastern Bloc shattered in 1991. Peace dividend and all that. But it didn't. It expanded directly into the former states of the Eastern Bloc toward the former Soviet Union, and contributed significant forces to the devastation of Iraq-a key country in the world oil market, over which control translates into the ability to manipulate oil prices.
NATO is a military formation, and the United States exerts the controlling interest in it. It seemed like a form without a function, but it remedied that pretty quickly.
Then when Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International Monetary Fund, the US and Germany began a systematic campaign of destabilization there, even using some of the veterans of Afghanistan in that campaign.
NATO became the military arm of that agenda-the break-up of Yugoslavia into compliant statelets, the further containment of the former Soviet Union, and the future pipeline easement for Caspain Sea oil to Western European markets through Kosovo.
You see, this is important to understand, and people -- even those against the war -- are tending to overlook the significance of it. NATO is not a guarantor of international law, and it is not a humanitarian organization. It is a military alliance with one very dominant partner. And it can no longer claim to be a defensive alliance against European socialists. It is an instrument of military aggression.
NATO is the organization that is now going to thrust further along the 40th parallel from the Balkans through the Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union. The US military has already taken control of a base in Uzbekistan. No one is talking about how what we are doing seems to be a very logical extension of a strategy that was already in motion, and has been in motion, for two decades. Once we recognize the pattern of activity designed to simultaneously consolidate control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain and colonize the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan is exactly where they need to go to pursue that agenda.
Afghanistan borders Iran, India, and even China but, more importantly, the Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. These border Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan borders Russia. Turkmenistan sits on the Southeastern quadrant of the Caspian Sea, whose oil the Bush Administration dearly covets.
Afghanistan is necessary for two things: as a base of operations to begin the process of destabilizing, breaking off, and establishing control over the South Asian Republics, which will begin within the next 18-24 months in my opinion, and constructing a pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver petroleum to the Asian market.
The BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik, a Pakistani Foreign Secretary, that senior American officials were warning them as early as mid-July that military action for mid-October was being planned for Afghanistan. In 1996, the Department of Energy was issuing reports on the desirability of a pipeline through Afghanistan, and in 1998, Unocal testified before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific that this pipeline was crucial to transport Caspian Basin oil to the Indian Ocean.
Given this evidence that a military operation to secure at least a portion of Afghanistan has been on the table, possibly as early as five years ago, I can't help but conclude that the actions we are seeing put into motion now are part of a pre-Sept. 11 agenda. I'm absolutely sure of that, in fact. The planning alone for operations, of this scale, that are now taking shape, would take many months. And we are seeing them take shape in mere weeks.
It defies common sense. This administration is lying about this whole thing being a "reaction" to Sept. 11. That leads me, in short order, to be very suspicious of their yet-to-be-provided evidence that someone in Afghanistan is responsible. It's just too damn convenient. Which also leads me to wonder -- just for the sake of knowing -- what actually did happen on Sept. 11, and who actually is responsible.
(to be continued)
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