Monday 31 December 2012

War was always the goal (5)

THE MAJOR PLAYERS & THEIR CRITICS

GEORGE W. BUSH. US President. Draft dodger during the Vietnam War. Bush chose to join the national Guard, a common option at the time for the sons of the rich and powerful.
"I am a Christian. But I believe with the Psalmist that the Lord God of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps… We will stand up for our friends in the world. And one of the most important friends is the state of Israel." (Speech to the American Jewish Committee. "South Mississipi Sun Herald." 9th February, 2003) 
"Saddam Hussein is a man who is willing to gas his own people, willing to use weapons of mass destruction against Iraq citizens". (Press Conference with President Fox. Monterrey, Mexico. 22nd March 2002) 
"If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long... We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act... And our security requires all Americans to be forward thinking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action." (The "Bush Doctrine." West Point. 1st June 2002) 
"Prime Minister Blair is a very strong leader and I admire his willingness to tell the truth and to lead. He has continued to make the case, like we make the case, that Saddam Hussein is a threat to peace… I again call on the United Nations to pass a strong resolution holding this man to account and if they are unable to do so, the United States and our friends will act because we believe in peace. We want to keep the peace and we don't trust this man and that's what the Blair report showed today." (Press conference. Following a Cabinet meeting which discussed the Blair "dossier." "FoxNews.com" 24th September, 2002) 
"Afghanistan is just the beginning of the war against terror. There are other terrorists who threaten America and our friends, and there are other nations willing to sponsor them. We will not be secure as a nation until all these threats are defeated. Across the world, and across the years, we will fight these evil ones, and we will win." (US Department of State press release. Fort Campbell, Kentucky. November 21st 2002. http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/01112113.htm
"My message is, is that if you harbor a terrorist, you’re a terrorist. If you feed a terrorist, you're a terrorist. If you develop weapons of mass destruction that you want to terrorize the world, you'll be held accountable." (November 26th 2002. http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/01112607.htm) 
"God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East." (In conversion with Mahmoud Abbas. "Ha’aretz." June, 2003. Quoted by the "Moscow Times," p. 24. 27th June 2003)
MOSCOW TIMES. Page 24. 27th June 2003.
"Bush sought to assure the rattled Palestinians that he also had the ability to wring concessions from Sharon. And what was the source of this wonder-working power? It was not, as you might think, the ungodly size of the U.S. military or the gargantuan amount of money and arms the United States pours into Israel year after year. No, Bush said he derived his moral heft from the Almighty Himself… 
No votes, no inspections, no proof or lack of proof -- in fact, no earthly reason whatsoever -- could have stopped Bush's aggressive war on Iraq. It was God's unalterable will: the Lord of Hosts gave a direct order for George W. Bush to "strike at Saddam." 
And strike he did, with an awesome fury that rained death and destruction on the mustachioed whore of Babylon, with a firestorm of Godly wrath that consumed the enemy armies like so much chaff put to the flame -- and with an arsenal of cruise missiles, cluster bombs, dive bombers and assault helicopters that killed up to 10,000 innocent civilians: blasted to pieces in their beds, shot down in their fields and streets, crushed beneath the walls of their own houses, boiled alive in factories, ditches and cars, gutted, mutilated, beheaded, murdered, women, children, elders, some praying, some wailing, some cursing, some mute with fear as metal death ripped their lives away and left rotting hulks behind. 
This was the work of the Lord and His faithful servant, whom He hath raised high up to have dominion over men. And this is the mindset -- or rather, the primitive fever-dream -- that is now directing the actions of the greatest military power in the history of the world.
There can be no doubt that Bush believes literally in the divine character of his mission. He honestly and sincerely believes that whatever "decision" forms in his brain -- out of the flux and flow of his own emotional impulses and biochemical reactions, the flattery and cajolements of his sinister advisers, the random scraps of fact, myth and fabrication that dribble into his proudly undeveloped and incurious consciousness -- has been planted there, whole and perfected, by God Almighty. 
And that's why Bush acts with such serenity and ruthlessness. Nothing he does can be challenged on moral grounds, however unethical or evil it might appear, because all of his actions are directed by God. He can twist the truth, oppress the poor, exalt the rich, despoil the Earth, ignore the law -- and murder children -- without the slightest compunction, the briefest moment of doubt or self-reflection, because he believes, he truly believes, that God squats in his brainpan and tells him what to do. 
And just as God countenanced deception on the part of Abraham, just as God forgave David for the murders he ordered, just as God blessed the armies of Saul as they obliterated the Amalekites, man, woman and child, so will He overlook any crime committed by Bush and his minions as they carry out His will."
NEW YORK TIMES. December 23rd 1999. Headline.
"A Cadre of Familiar Foreign Policy Experts is putting its Imprint on Bush." "... the advisers' influence over Mr. Bush has become more evident with every speech, news conference, and debate. Indeed... it is not unusual to hear the advisers' words coming out of Bush's mouth."
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE. September 22nd 2002. Front page headline. "Stalking Saddam: How Paul Wolfowitz' agenda became the Bush agenda."
"You hear from some ofWolfowitz's critics, always off the record, that Israel exercises a powerful gravitational pull on the man. They may not know that as a teenager he spent his father's sabbatical semester in Israel or that his sister is married to an Israeli, but they certainly know that he is friendly with Israel's generals and diplomats and that he is something of a hero to the heavily Jewish neo-conservative movement."
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER AL MARTIN. Retired US Navy officer. "Behind the Scenes of the Beltway." http://www.almartinraw.com.
"You have to look at the entire Bush Family in this context, as if the entire family ran a corporation called 'Frauds-R-Us.' Each member of the family, George Sr. , George Jr., Neil, Jeb, Prescott, Wally, etc., have their own specialty of fraud. George Jr.'s specialty was insurance and security fraud. Jeb's specialty was oil and gas fraud. Neil's specialty was real estate fraud. Prescott's specialty was banking fraud. Wally's specialty was securities fraud. And George Bush Sr.'s specialty? 
All of the above. Harken was one of those deals that was a combination fraud as well as a manipulation… There's different types of fraud when you get into securities. When George Jr. was put in charge of Harken Energy by his father, he essentially took it down the tubes. You have to realize that every business that George Jr. has ever had has failed. That's the man's business record. It was a deliberate act by the old man, knowing that his son would take it down the tubes because the son's incompetent. George Bush, Sr. and James Baker and Senator Tower would heavily short Harken stock. I have a list of everybody because I was one of them but to a much smaller extent. 
Harken stock was trading at 7-3/4 or 8, when George Jr, was put in charge of it. A year later, the stock was trading at 1-1/8 bid, 3/8 offer. They pumped the stock back up through a lot of bogus press releases and by using essentially worthless leases in Bahrain and essentially worthless South American oil leases and through sympathetic geologists making them appear to be really worth something and making it appear that Harken's about to make a strike when in fact it's all made up. It's all fictitious. 
And through carefully crafted broker releases and broker statements and press releases, you can pump the stock back up. This has happened sixteen times to my knowledge. Harken would get pumped back up from the dead, from say a buck, buck and a half, back to seven, seven and a half, then it would get dumped again. Originally George Jr. had control of the company. He stayed on the board."
KURT NIMMO. Photographer. "CounterPunch." February 28th 2003.
"Most of our taxes go to the military and the likes of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, etc., who pocket the money and deliver questionable weapons systems. Apache helicopters, Abrams tanks, Stealth bombers, etc., all of this stuff is great if you intend to fight big wars in far away places like Afghanistan and Iraq (or Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea). Once upon a time, the military was supposed to protect America from attack. Now the military is used to attack other countries. Not because they threaten you or me. Because it's profitable… In fact, the government mostly invents ‘threats’ so it can justify all this spending.
Do you remember Reagan warning that the Nicaraguans would invade Texas if we didn't support the contras? The Cold War was mostly a scam. We had the so-called missile gap, the bomber gap, and most of it was hype… Bush has 32 former arms industry executives, consultants, and major stockholders in his administration… Dick Cheney spent years running Halliburton, which ranked 18th on the Pentagon's top contractors list in FY 1999. Cheney's wife, Lynne, served on Lockheed Martin's board. Secretary of the Air Force James Roche is a former Northrop Grumman vice president.
Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz also worked for Northrop Grumman as consultants. Richard Armitage was a Boeing consultant and Karl Rove a Boeing shareholder (Armitage was also a consultant for Raytheon). And, of course, daddy Bush sits on the board of directors of the Carlyle Group (as does James Baker, the former secretary of state), an investment consortium contracting for United Defense… 
These guys don't even bother to hide what they're doing, maybe because so few people seem to care and, besides, who's going to argue now that we're faced with global terrorism and Saddam's arsenal of bio and chem weapons? Both these ‘threats’ are grossly overstated but, hey, don't expect the corporate media, who also own and profit handsomely from death merchant stock, to report this on the evening news… 
Actually, Bush and his neocon chickenhawks aren't focused on preventing terrorism or even rounding up the terrorists, beyond a few lowly errand boys, they keep telling us are out there gunning for us. These guys are far more interested in large wars, the kind that deplete expensive JDAMs and cruise missiles and DU munitions in large numbers. Not wars against puny and ragtag bands of terrorists, but rather big state players such as Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea, and maybe down the road China. Now that's some serious war making, enough to keep Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northup Grumman, et al, busy for decades… Israel is about the only excuse Bush has to attack Iraq. 
Naturally, he won't say this, he will talk about terrorists instead. But the real deal is Israel needs a war declared on Islam. Such a war will directly benefit Israel… Americans like Israelis, or at least Christian Americans like them. Some folks are calling Bush a ‘Christian Zionist,’ which is to say he believes all kinds of farcical biblical stuff about the Jews and God and the Land of Israel as it relates to the so-called Rapture and the End Days. Out of 98 million Christian evangelicals in America, something like 40 million buy into this fairy tale as popularized by Hal Lindsey, the father of Christian Zionism. 
‘The center of the entire prophetic forecast is the State of Israel,’ writes Lindsey. So, naturally, with a Christian Zionist in the White House Israeli Zionists will get their way. It works out well for the death merchants and oil transnationals, too. These Christian Zionists have teamed up with powerful Jewish lobbyists to push the Israel First agenda in Washington. ‘AIPAC (the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) has a lot of influence on foreign policy,’ says J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Jewish newspaper ‘The Forward.’ ‘They work hard to ensure that America endorses pretty much Israel's view of the world and the Middle East.’
But AIPAC isn't the only pro-Israel pressure group in Washington -- there are well over 100 Israel First PACs operating in Congress, by far the most active of all PACs. AIPAC was instrumental in helping Dubya's daddy get the first war against the Iraqi people rolling in 1991, as the ‘Wall Street Journal’ reported at the time. 
Naturally, AIPAC and other pro-Israel PACS are behind the current effort. They're pretty much writing the script along with the Likudites in Israel. If not for the fleecing of average tax-paying Americans, Israel wouldn't be the serial murderer it is today… 
That control is exercised by the "Wolfowitz cabal," led by Paul Wolfowitz (No. 2 man at the Defense Department and key Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld confidant) and the 18-member Defense Policy Board. 
Fellow travelers include Richard Perle (chairman of the Defense Policy Board), Douglas Feith (Under Secretary of Defense for Policy), Eliot Abrams (director of the National Security Council's office for democracy), Josh Bolten (Deputy Chief of Staff), and Lewis Libby (Chief of Staff to the Vice President). All of these guys are Israel-centric Jews. They're the shock troops of the Israel First federation."
LAWRENCE KAPLAN. "Washington Post" columnist.
"The problem here is the implication that some of the Bush team have been doing Israel's bidding and, by extension, harbor dual loyalties… when Josh Bolten went to Israel recently Sharon told him Israel wants Iran taken out. Bolten said 'he had no doubt America would attack Iraq, and that it would be necessary thereafter to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea," reported Ha'aretz."
BBC TV. "Newsnight." November 7th 2001. January, 2001: The Bush Administration orders the FBI and intelligence agencies to ‘back off’ investigations involving the Bin Laden family, including two of Ossama Bin Laden’s relatives (Abdullah and Omar) who were living in Falls Church, Virginia, right next to CIA headquarters.

MICHAEL C. RUPPERT. Former Los Angeles Police Department investigator. Portland State University, Oregon. November 28th 2001.
"Let’s look at a little history of the Bush family… If we go to George Herbert Walker Bush’s father Prescott Bush, he was the managing director of a firm called Brown Brothers Harriman during the thirties and forties. Brown Brothers Harriman financed Adolf Hitler before and during World War II…  
As a matter of fact one particular firm, it was the Union Bank affiliated with the Thyssen Steel Trust, managed by Prescott Bush, produced 50.8% of Nazi Germany’s pig iron, 41.4% of Nazi Germany’s universal plate, 36% of Nazi Germany’s heavy plate, 38.5% of Nazi Germany galvanized steel, 45.5% of Nazi Germany’s pipes and tubes, 22% of Nazi Germany’s wire and 35% of Nazi Germany’s explosives… we find that in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the US government took over the Union Banking Corporation, in which Prescott Bush was a director, and they seized the assets.  
That’s our current President’s grandfather. Now we know that our current president’s father went out of his way to arm Saddam Hussein. How many people remember Iraqgate?… George Herbert Walker Bush created the enemy which he fought in 1991… 
Top Enron executives made $1.1 billion insider trading Enron Stock, knowing the company was going to fail. Enron employees not only lost their jobs, they lost their pensions. Enron gave the Bush-Cheney campaign and the Republican Party $2.3 million in hard and soft donations in 2000. It has made campaign contributions to more than 200 members of Congress from BOTH parties.  
The Bush-appointed head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), William Pitt, came from a law firm that represented Enron’s accounting firm Arthur Andersen. One of the first acts of the Bush administration was to cut the SEC enforcement budget. Most of the SEC investigative records were stored in the World Trade Center…  
Israeli security issued urgent warnings to the CIA of large-scale terror attacks… the Israeli Mossad knew that the attacks were going to take place. They knew that the World Trade Center were the targets… Two senior experts from Mossad were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA… They were warning the US hand over fist and the US did not listen. Because it needed the attacks." 
The term "Axis of evil" was invented by David Frum, Bush's former speechwriter. Actually, it is likely that most of Bush’s thoughts and opinions and certainly all of his slogans, are the product of the American/Israeli Zionist mindset of his speechwriters. I remember seeing an interview with Gore Vidal before the 2000 Presidential election. Vidal is invariably flip and witty. When he described Bush as 'barely able to read and write,' he was being deadly serious.

ZALMAY M. KHALILZAD. White House aide, special envoy to Afghanistan. Director, Strategy and Doctrine, RAND Corporation. Former assistant deputy undersecretary of Defence during Operation Desert Storm. Conference in Leesburg, Virginia, sponsored by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "KRT Wire." October 5th 2002. http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/politics/4220432.htm
"The president will emphasize in his address that the United States will change Iraq's government one way or another but does not seek to dominate or occupy the country… We will not enter Iraq as conquerors but as liberators… the hope is for a broad-based and representative government that would renounce terror, give all religious and ethnic groups a voice and have no weapons of mass destruction. We will put Iraq on a path of economic prosperity."
ZALMAY M. KHALILZAD & DANIEL BYMAN. Colleagues at the Rand Cooporation.

"Washington Quarterly." Winter, 200.
Afghanistan is 'a haven for some of the world's most lethal anti-US terrorists who… pose a threat to US soliders and civilians at home and abroad, to the Middle East peace process, and to the stability of our allies in the region.'
JACOB WEISBERG. "Slate News."
"What's remarkable about Khalilzad's recommendations… isn't just how tragically prophetic they look in the light of September 11. It's how closely they track the Bush administration's emerging Afghan policy."
JENNIFER VAN BERGEN. "Truthout." January 13th 2001. http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/01.14A.Zalmay.Oil.htm
"Zalmay Khalilzad and the Bush Agenda." "The appointment by the Bush Administration of Zalmay Khalilzad as special envoy to Afghanistan which was announced on December 31, 2001, only nine days after the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul, seems timely and logical. Khalilzad, a US citizen born in Afghanistan with extensive knowledge of the region and experience, appears to be the right person for the job… 
Khalilzad 's appointment means oil. Oil for the United States. Oil for Unocal, a US company long criticized for doing business in countries with repressive governments and rumored to have close ties to the Department of State and the intelligence community. Zalmay Khalilzad was an advisor for Unocal. In the mid 1990s, while working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analyses for Unocal at the time it had signed letters of approval from the Taliban.  
The analyses were for a proposed 890-mile, $2-billion, 1.9-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project which would have extended from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. In December 1997, Khalilzad joined Unocal officials at a reception for an invited Taliban delegation to Texas.  
Unocal, the world's ninth largest oil company according to the National Center for Policy Research… has long been criticized for doing business with repressive foreign governments. Legal action was brought against Unocal in 1997 by Burmese refugees for human rights abuses which the refugees claimed were committed by the Burmese military hired by Unocal to protect their operations.
Unocal has also been criticized for its business dealings in this country. A 1998 petition signed by Environmental, Human Rights and Women's Groups, asked California Attorney General to revoke Unocal's Charter, citing Unocal's record as a ‘repeat offender’ of environmental, labor and deceptive practices laws. The petition claimed that Unocal was principally responsible for the notorious 1969 oil blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel and has since then polluted multiple sites from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Petitioners claimed that Unocal committed hundreds of violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, treated US workers unethically and unfairly, engaged in a pattern of illegal deceptions of the courts, stockholders and the public, and ‘usurped political power,’ undermining US foreign policy…  
Other reports cite Unocal's open support of ‘the most brutal dictatorship’ in Asia, General Suharto of Indonesia, where Unocal is one of the largest oil companies, a $5.5 million legal settlement of a citizens suit filed by the Sierra Club Legal Defence Fund against Unocal for pouring poisonous wastewater into the San Francisco Bay, and Unocal's attempts to intimidate two native tribes in Montana into renewing its pipeline lease without basic environmental protections.  
There have been some claims that Unocal was getting briefings from the Department of State… a look at some of Unocal's CEOs and board members shows strong government ties. Charles Larson, former Commander in Chief of the US Navy's Pacific Command sits on the board. So does Donald Rice, a former colleague of Khalilzad's at RAND Corp., who was Secretary of the Air force under Bush I. And Robert Oakley, US Ambassador to Pakistan during the time the CIA was funneling money and weapons through the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) to Afghan muhajeeden in the 1980s, later the US special envoy to Somalia, worked subsequently for Unocal.  
Unocal was the ‘Development Manager’ of the Centgas consortium. The purpose of Centgas was to build an 890-mile-long pipeline from Turkmenistan through Aghanistan to Pakistan. Centgas, or the Central Asia Gas and Pipeline Consortium, was a group formed in the mid-1990s which was made up of the government of Turkmenistan and six international companies... As Centgas' Development Manager, Unocal opened talks with the Taliban and the Northern Alliance…  
The Clinton administration offered backing for Unocal's Centgas project, but after the US bombed Aghanistan in 1998 in retaliation for the Embassy bombings, Unocal withdrew from the consortium, citing ‘sharply deteriorating political conditions.’ Unocal stated that it would only participate in a Centgas pipeline project ‘… when and if’ Aghanistan achieved the: ‘… peace and stability necessary to obtain financing from international agencies and a government that is recognized by the United States and the United Nations'...  
It is clear that the December 5, 2001 ‘Bonn Agreement,’ which establishes an interim Aghani government overseen by the United Nations, will fulfill Unocal's prerequisite of an ‘internationally recognized government.’ One representative of the Turkmenistan embassy told ‘L.A. Weekly:’ ‘So we are hoping that once peace is restored in Afghanistan, building these pipelines will again become a priority.’  
Khalilzad 's appointment as special envoy to Afghanistan raises suspicions about the priorities of the Bush administration. Long-standing political and business ties connect Khalilzad to an oil agenda. The United States has been bombing Afghanistan in retaliation for terrorist attacks on this country. But Khalilzad 's appointment makes it clear that oil is now, and perhaps has been since before 9/11, behind US Afghan policy. Zalmay Khalilzad was born about 50 years ago in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif… In the early 1980s, Zalmay taught political science at Columbia University in New York, where he worked with Zbigniew Brzezinski. 
He was also executive director of the ‘Friends of Afghanistan,’ a support group for the mujaheddins fighting the Soviets, the same mujuaheddins later known to have spawned bin Laden. Khalilzad's background and language skills earned him a permanent position on the State Department's Policy Planning Council during the Reagan era. There he worked under Paul Wolfowitz, then Reagan's director of policy planning, now the No. 2 man at the Pentagon. In 1998, the two, having retained close ties, joined others in signing an open letter to Clinton that argued for the overthrow of Saddam. 
From 1985 to 1989, Zalmay served as special adviser to the undersecretary of state. He belonged to a small group of policymakers who advocated providing arms to the ‘resistance’ fighters in Afghanistan. Khalilzad then consulted for the Rand Corp, a conservative think tank, on defense issues and returned to Washington when Bush I took office, taking up the post of assistant deputy under-secretary of defense for policy planning. Again he worked closely with Wolfowitz, then the Pentagon's No. 3 official. 
He also got to know Dick Cheney at the Defense Department during the Gulf War. After Bush II was elected, Cheney selected him to head the transition team for defense. In May 2001, Bush appointed him the National Security Council official in charge of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. His direct superior was Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser, who herself had served as an oil consultant for Chevron. 
Khalilzad's critics point out that Zalmay, who gave a speech upon his arrival in Kabul condemning the Taliban, had at one time, as a paid adviser to oil multinational Unocal, courted and defended them. Indeed, Khalilzad has changed his tune so often that one analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, Anatol Lieven, said: ‘If he was in private business rather than government, he would have been sacked long ago.’… The two recommended taking measures to weaken the Taliban and support the Northern Alliance… 
If the purpose of the bombing of Afghanistan, the purpose of the Bonn Agreement, the purpose of Khalilzad's appointment, is oil, should Americans be advised of our government's intentions? If this is the writing in the sand, and if our troops risk their lives for this, and thousands if not millions of Afghanis suffer and die, and millions of Muslims become even more alienated and angry, all for oil, where is the ballot box for us to place our vote in, where is Congress?"
WILLIAM PITT. "Bush, Enron, and Bin Laden."
"A company valued in the billions on Wall Street suddenly filed for the largest bankruptcy claim in the history of the known universe. Four thousand employees were abruptly shown the door after having been barred from dumping the company stock, meant to fund their retirement, while it was worth something.  
Meanwhile, Enron executives in the know were able to dump the stock, back when it was the gold standard on the Street, for a cool $1 billion… … apparently, although Enron was ailing for around the last 4 years… each of the executives built personal banking bunkers and hid what has been revealed to be staggering Enron debts within them, keeping the fact that the company was hemorrhaging money off the publicly displayed balance sheets. This maintained the company's credit rating, and allowed it to continue doing business. 
The fact that this went on for four years means several things: most of the Enron executives were aware of and/or actively participating in this highly criminal and irresponsible activity; the stockholders, including 4,000 loyal Enron employees, were lied to; the executives probably knew the stock value was doomed when they bailed out and cashed in several months ago they let their employees lose the retirement funds they believed were growing within their Enron stock portfolios;a lot of people got screwed by a pack of sharp operators who didn't give a damn about anyone but themselves… 
Enron's capo, Kenneth Lay, was perhaps the best financial friend George W. Bush has ever known. He and a number of Enron employees essentially bankrolled Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign, even lending Bush an Enron corporate jet for trips between whistle stops. And long before Bush got White House stars in his eyes, he worked very closely with Enron on energy policy in Texas. This close connection led to the Bush administration's hiring of a number of influential individuals within Enron's orbit for important government positions: Thomas E. White: Bush's Secretary of the Army, had been Vice-Chairman of Enron Energy Service, and held millions in Enron stock. Karl Rove: Presidential Advisor, owned as much as $250,000 of Enron stock. 
Robert Zoellick: Economic Advisor, leapt straight from Enron to his current White House job. Larry Lindsay: Federal Trade Representative, ditto above. Donald Rumsfeld: Defence Secretary, together with 31 Bush administration officials had a line item for Enron in their stock portfolio. The woebegone corporation held, and continues to hold, enormous influence over the day-to-day machinations of Federal government policy. 
Was Bush's recent gutting of the Clean Air Act, a decision designed to improve the fortunes of companies like Enron, the brainchild of people with deep connections to the energy industry? 
Dick Cheney: Vice President, admitted recently to six separate meetings with Enron executives while formulating the Bush administration's energy policy. Cheney, a former executive of the Halliburton Petroleum interest, was in charge of creating this policy. For reasons soon to be exposed by subpoena, Cheney refused to detail the specifics of the creation of this policy, which included the multiple Enron meetings. The General Accounting Office was preparing to sue Cheney to reveal this information when the September 11th attacks took place… 
Columnist Robert Scheer has referred to the Bush administration's involvement in the Enron debacle as ‘Whitewater in spades.’ Bush's own dealings within the energy industry carry a disturbingly familiar echo to the Enron situation: Once upon a time, he was a high-ranking officer of a petroleum interest called Harken Oil. On June 22, 1990, a week before Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings, making its stock lose 60 percent of its value over the next six months, Bush made $848,560 by selling his Harken stock, earning him a 200% profit. Bush made a bundle while the other investors lost millions. Harken was Enron in miniature. Some say that Daddy tipped little George off about Saddam's impending invasion of Kuwait which was the reason for the sudden fall in value. 
Now I wonder which oil companies specifically have profited from replacing Mullah Omar by a CIA guy?… In 1998, during the Clinton administration, the US-based energy concern Unocal canceled plans to exploit massive natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan by running a pipeline from there to Pakistan, where the natural gas could have been processed for Asian and Western energy markets. The idea was scuttled after Clinton ordered the cruise missile bombing of Afghanistan in response to a terrorist attack upon US embassies in Africa which were planned and executed by Osama bin Laden. 
The pipeline would have had to pass through Afghanistan, and Unocal was given the message in Technicolor by Clinton's people that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was not to be given any sort of financial boon… Immediately upon their arrival in Washington, a vigorous courtship of the Taliban was undertaken. In fact, if former UN weapons inspector Richard Butler is to be believed, the Bush administration had a vested interest in strengthening and stabilizing the Taliban regime, because a stable regime would enable investors to revive the Turkmenistan natural gas pipeline deal. 
The Taliban, demon of the moment, was the Bush administration's idea of a ‘stable’ government. Stable enough, anyway, to see the pipeline through. The connections between Bush and the Taliban became so close that the Taliban went so far as to hire an expert on US public relations named Laila Helms, so as to smooth the way between the two regimes. 
Meetings between the two nations continued at a high level, the last of which occurred in August, scant weeks before the September 11th attacks. All of these actions were taken to exploit the vast energy reserves in Turkmenistan for the benefit of American energy corporations."
BBC NEWS. December 4th 1997.
"A senior delegation from the Taleban movement in Afghanistan is in the United States for talks with an international energy company that wants to construct a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. A spokesman for the company, Unocal, said the Taleban were expected to spend several days at the company's headquarters in Sugarland, Texas. Unocal says it has agreements both with Turkmenistan to sell its gas and with Pakistan to buy it… 
In May, Taleban-controlled radio in Kabul said a visiting delegation from an Argentinian company had announced that pipeline construction would start ‘soon.’ The radio has reported several visits to Kabul by Unocal and Bridas company officials over the past few months. 
A BBC regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea... Last month the Taleban Minister of Information and Culture, Amir Khan Muttaqi, said the Taleban had held talks with both American and Argentine-led consortia over transit rights but that no final agreement had yet been reached. He said an official team from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan should meet to ensure each country benefited from any deal."
ROBERT KUTTNER. "The Enron Economy." January 1st 2002. Robert Kuttnerhttp://www.prospect.org/print/V13/1/kuttner-r.html
"Just as Watergate became a metaphor for the Nixon era and Whitewater the right's symbol for Clinton, Enron is the emblem of the Bush administration's way of life. Enron is to George W. Bush what Teapot Dome was to Warren G. Harding. Its demise should also signal the collapse of a whole economic paradigm, in which smart people were traders and those left behind in the outmoded economy were throwbacks who actually made things… 
Enron should signal a whole new era of re-regulation, of everything from electricity to pensions to accounting standards. And it is another warning that Social Security pensioners cannot trust Wall Street. But the most powerful emblem of the Enron economy is not business opportunism run riot but cronyism. CEO Ken Lay was wired to the Bushes. He personally gave the Republican Party $326 million in soft money in the three years before Bush's presidential campaign. Enron executives kicked in nearly $2 million. Enron got special legislative treatment so that its operations fell in the cracks between securities regulators and commodities regulators. 
When Lay complained to Bush that the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wasn't quite with the program, the man was replaced by a more docile successor. Enron flew Poppy and Barbara Bush to George W.'s inauguration. Even the new chairman of the Republican Party, Marc Racicot, is an Enron lobbyist. 
Several congressional investigations are now picking through the wreckage. The details are bewilderingly complex, but the story line is very familiar. The watchmen are tamed, bedazzled, or bribed, while a pitchman who claims to have invented something brand new in the history of capitalism takes everyone to the cleaners. What remains is to connect the dots, and we can expect Republican legislators to resist these investigations at every turn. For the dots lead directly to both the ideology and organization of George W. Bush."
THE IRISH TIMES. November 19, 2001
"The fate of John O'Neill, the Irish-American FBI agent who for years led US investigations into Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, is the most chilling revelation in the book "Bin Laden: The Hidden Truth," published in Paris this week. O'Neill investigated the bombings of the World Trade Centre in 1993, a US base in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-Es-Salaam in 1998, and the USS Cole last year. 
Jean-Charles Brisard, who wrote a report on bin Laden's finances for the French intelligence agency DST and is co-author of ‘Hidden Truth,’ met O'Neill several times last summer. He complained bitterly that the US State Department, and behind it the oil lobby who make up President Bush's entourage, blocked attempts to prove bin Laden's guilt. The US ambassador to Yemen, Ms Barbara Bodine, forbade O'Neill… from entering Yemen. In August 2001, O'Neill resigned in frustration and took up a new job as head of security at the World Trade Centre. He died in the September 11th attack… 
The FBI agent had told Brisard: ‘All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organisation, can be found in Saudi Arabia.’ But US diplomats shrank from offending the Saudi royal family. O'Neill went to Saudi Arabia after 19 US servicemen died in the bombing of a military installation in Dhahran in June 1996. 
Saudi officials interrogated the suspects, declared them guilty and executed them - without letting the FBI talk to them. ‘They were reduced to the role of forensic scientists, collecting material evidence on the bomb site,’ Brisard says. O'Neill said there was clear evidence in Yemen of bin Laden's guilt in the bombing of the USS Cole, in which 17 US servicemen died, but that the State Department prevented him from getting it. Brisard and Dasquié discovered that the first country to issue an international arrest warrant against bin Laden was not the US, but Moamar Gadafy's Libya, in March 1998. 
The confidential notice, published for the first time in their book, was sent by the Libyan interior ministry to Interpol on March 16th, 1998, and accuses bin Laden of murdering two German intelligence agents, Silvan Becker and his wife, in Libya in 1994. Bin Laden supported a fundamentalist group called al-Muqatila, made up of Libyans who had fought with him against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Al-Muqatila wanted to assassinate Gadafy, whom it considered an infidel. According to the former MI5 agent David Shayler, British intelligence, also in league with al-Muqatila, tried to assassinate Gadafy in November 1996. 
It was because of British collaboration with al-Muqatila that the Interpol warrant was ignored, Brisard says. Since September 11th, al-Muqatila has been placed on President Bush's list of "terrorist groups."... The chief motivation behind US attempts to make peace with the Taliban can be summed up in one word: oil. The former Soviet republics of Central Asia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and especially ‘the new Kuwait,’ Kazakhstan, have vast oil and gas reserves. But Russia has refused to allow the US to extract it through Russian pipelines and Iran is considered a dangerous route. 
That left Afghanistan. The US oil company Chevron, where Mr Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice was a director throughout the 1990s, is deeply involved in Kazakhstan. In 1995, another US company, Unocal (formerly Union Oil Company of California) signed a contract to export $8 billion worth of natural gas through a $3 billion pipeline which would go from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. The authors recall how the State Department applauded the Taliban take-over in September 1996, five months after a US assistant secretary of state warned ‘economic opportunities will be missed’ if political stability was not restored in Afghanistan. 
Laila Helms, the part Afghan niece of the former CIA director and former US ambassador to Tehran Richard Helms, is described as the Mata-Hari of US-Taliban negotiations. Ms Helms brought Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, an adviser to Mullah Omar, to Washington for five days in March 2001 - after the Taliban had destroyed the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan. Hashimi met the directorate of Central Intelligence at the CIA and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department… 
The last direct US contact with the Taliban was on August 2nd, 2001, when Christina Rocca, the director of Asian affairs at the State Department, met the Taliban ambassador in Islamabad. Ms Rocca was previously in charge of contacts with Islamist guerrilla groups at the CIA, where in the 1980s, she oversaw the delivery of Stinger missiles to Afghan mujaheddin. 
Last February, the Taliban had indicated it might be willing to hand over bin Laden, but by June, according to Brisard and Dasquié, the US began considering military action. "The US thought they could 'decouple' Osama bin Laden from the Taliban," Brisard says. "What they did not understand was that without bin Laden, the Taliban regime wouldn't have existed."… Brisard and Dasquié claim a significant part of the Saudi royal family supports bin Laden… He points out that attacks inside the kingdom targeted US interests, never the Saudis."
JOHN O'NEILL. Former FBI Deputy Director.
"The main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests, and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it."
The Federal agent who knew more about bin Laden than any living American was kept from investigating terrorist threats against America because the Bush administration was desperate to cultivate the favor of the Taliban, who held terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden in great esteem, so as to gain access to lucrative natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan.

After having his investigations thwarted over a period of eight years, O’Neil finally resigned his job in disgust. His investigations into the bin Laden-connected bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, the destruction of an American troop barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the African embassy bombings in 1998, and the attack upon the USS. Cole in 2000 were hindered by the Bush administration's connections to the Taliban, and by the interests of American petroleum companies.

After leaving the FBI, O'Neill took a position as head of security for the World Trade Center, just two weeks before its destruction. O’Neil died on September 11th 2001, trying to save others trapped by the attack.

DAVID LAZARUS. Staff Writer for the "San Francisco Chronicle." January 30th 2002. http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/02.01G.Cheney.Memo.htm
"While the White House insists that details of its talks with Enron officials remain secret, a memo outlining those discussions reveals the extent to which the Houston energy giant lobbied to influence government policy. The memo was handed by former Enron Chairman Ken Lay to Vice President Dick Cheney in April, 2001, when the two met to discuss the administration's response to California's energy crisis.  
The White House acknowledged last night that aspects of the memo resembled elements of Cheney's energy plan, but it refused to say whether the document was included in notes that Cheney now refuses to divulge to congressional investigators. The General Accounting Office is threatening to sue the administration if it doesn't disclose details of its talks with Enron officials. The three-page document contains eight points spelling out Enron's case for why federal authorities should refrain from imposing price caps or other measures sought by California officials to stabilize runaway electricity prices.  
A number of the positions in the memo subsequently made it into Cheney's energy plan or were reflected in comments by senior administration officials… As far as price caps go, the administration was quick to fall into lockstep with Enron's opposition to any federal regulatory moves… federal regulators finally imposed price limits in June based on the cost of the least-efficient, and thus most expensive, generating plant… Cheney, Lay and President Bush, as well as other industry players, shared a belief in deregulation well before the lights went out in California. But the memo underscores the broad kinship between Enron and the administration in drafting official policy…  
Whatever else, it's extraordinary for a private company, particularly one accused by California officials of having gouged the state with wildly inflated energy prices, to have played such a prominent role in the White House's response to the crisis."
ENRON MEMO. To Vice President Dick Cheney. http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/02.01G.Cheney.Memo.htm
"Events in California and in other parts of the country demonstrated that the benefits of competition have yet to be realized and have not yet reached consumers… The following actions need to be taken: The administration should reject any attempt to re-regulate wholesale power markets by adopting price caps or returning to archaic methods of determining the cost-base of wholesale power… Even temporary price restrictions will be detrimental to power markets and will discourage private investment." 
The memo says that if the administration was to follow all of Enron's recommendations, the measures: "… would mitigate this crisis."

STEVE MAVIGLIO. Spokesman for California Governor Gray Davis. http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/02.01G.Cheney.Memo.htm "What the federal government did during the energy crisis was pretend that the problem didn't exist and say that the markets can solve everything, and that's the same thing Ken Lay told the governor… the administration was espousing what Enron was espousing, that the markets should fix themselves."

  JANEE BRIESEMEISTER. Senior policy analyst at Consumers Union in Austin, Texas. http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/02.01G.Cheney.Memo.htm
"If the administration was allowing Enron to guide its policy during the California energy crisis, consumers should be outraged. It's not unusual for a company to hand policymakers their ideas for what should be done. Things break down when policymakers refuse to admit that they used what was brought to them by industry."
CRAIG MCDONALD. Director of Texans for Public Justice. . http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/02.01G.Cheney.Memo.htm
"All they're fighting for is to keep the wraps on how much clout Enron had over Dick Cheney's energy plan."
THE OBSERVER. January 20th 2002.
"The Enron scandal was set to deepen yesterday as congressional investigators considered legal action that will force Vice-President Dick Cheney to disclose the agenda of talks he held with the bankrupt company.  
The chairman of Enron, Kenneth Lay, faced fresh allegations that he deliberately urged employees to buy doomed stock in his company, knowing that its books had become 'an accounting hoax', and after selling off his own shares. 
Democrats Henry Waxman and John Dingell are proposing civil litigation to break Cheney's silence on six meetings he held with Lay and other Enron executives to discuss America's emergency energy plan. The plan, they say, contained 17 detailed points, all 'virtually identical to positions Enron advocated' - mostly concerned with deregulation and increased capacity, rather than conservation. Cheney has refused to disclose the contents of the meetings, citing executive privilege. 
There is furious debate in the White House over whether the Vice-President should remain silent or obey the normal rule of wise scandal management in Washington: full and fast disclosure. Cheney took office amid concern that he was too close to the energy industry. He left the government of Bush's father to become chairman of Haliburton, the world's biggest oil drilling equipment manufacturer, and later returned to politics declaring a personal fortune worth tens of millions. 
On Friday, it was revealed that Cheney stepped in to try to help Enron collect a $64 million debt from a giant energy project in Dabhol, near Bombay, owned primarily by Enron. The highest level contact was at a meeting between Cheney and the leader of India's opposition, Sonia Gandhi, on 27 June. 
Emails obtained by investigators show that Lay was expected in Washington about that time, but they do not specify whether the visit coincided with one of his meetings with Cheney. The White House counters that it is not unusual for Presidents to make such representations, citing contacts between the company and Bill Clinton's trade secretary, Ron Brown. But documents and emails show that Cheney's meetings not only went well beyond trade department duty, but also were coordinated with the President's National Security Council. 
An incriminating email of 28 June, written by an aide to the NSC, reads: 'Good News is that the Veep [Vice-President] mentioned Enron in his meeting with Sonia Gandhi yesterday.' As late as November, President Bush was ready to urge the cause of Enron at a meeting with the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. But, suddenly, the plan was scrapped. 'President Bush cannot talk about Enron,' reads an email, the sender and recipient of which have been blacked out. 
On the same day, 8 November, Enron filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission revising its financial statements to account for $586m in losses. It was also the day the company decided it could no longer hide the dirty secret that it had been slushing millions of dollars to tax havens offshore, and Lay called Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill to plead for help."
ASSOCIATED PRESS. http://www.nctimes.net/news/2002/20020619/55225.html
"Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sold between $20.5 million and $91 million in assets last year to avoid conflicts of interest, he says in a disclosure report that includes a slap at the required forms… Rumsfeld made millions as a top executive at several large corporations after serving as President Ford's Defence secretary from 1975 to 1977. He was chairman of California-based drug maker Gilead Sciences before returning to the top job at the Pentagon last year. 
The report showed Rumsfeld also owned millions of dollars worth of stock in computer graphics chip maker Nvidia, where he had been a business adviser before his Defence Department appointment. 
Rumsfeld said last year he kept out of decisions on weapons systems until his holdings could be sold. He also removed himself from discussions of AIDS because Gilead makes several drugs for treating HIV and illnesses related to AIDS… Rumsfeld's report says he sold his Enron stock on or before April 10, 2001, before Enron's financial troubles made the stock virtually worthless."
HTTP://GNING.ORG/ENRON/ENRON-16.HTML May 11th 2002.
"In September 2000, the federal government brought a 97 count criminal indictment against a company called Koch Industries, and four of its managers, for knowingly releasing 91 tons of benzene, a carcinogenic volatile organic solvent,- into the air and water, and covering it up. This was one of a series of repeated environmental violations they'd been charged with, and paid fines for, in the past. 
But they'd done something to correct their problem: they'd contributed $800,000 to the George W. Bush campaign, and other republican candidates. When John Ashcroft took office as Attorney General, the government dropped 88 of the 97 charges. Koch still faced fines of $352 million for those nine. 
Then, two days before the trial, Ashcroft abruptly settled for a plea bargain, in which Koch pled guilty to falsifying documents, and all the major charges were dropped and the four employees were freed from all prosecution. A small fine was paid, and the original crime of dumping tons of carcinogen was cheerfully forgotten. That's the kind of attorney general we have… 
Army Secretary Thomas White, who personally operated some of the Enron shell companies guilty of these flim-flams, could soon be forced out of the administration. Not over his crimes with Enron, though, over a conflict with Defence Secretary Rumsfeld regarding a boondoggle weapons contract. The Crusader mobile howitzer, a gigantic artillery cannon, is considered by many in the military to be an utterly obsolete weapon that will be of no use. Rumsfeld shares this opinion, and he cancelled the program.  
Yet many in the Department of Defence, often with ties to George H.W. Bush (the elder) and his Carlyle Group, were working to keep the contract alive, and apparently attempted to do an end-run around Rumsfeld to get Congress to save it. The recent purge of many generals is possibly related to this conflict... or, it may be related to the sense, reportedly widespread among the generals, that George Bush has fucked up so badly in the Middle East that if we ever have to fight there, we won't have a single ally that will let us base forces on their land…  
The US Senate is now starting an investigation of Enron's board of directors. But guess what, they're giving an exemption to one board member: Wendy Gramm, the wife of Senator Phil Gramm. Phil Gramm, R-TX, was one of the biggest recipients of Enron campaign contributions after George W. Bush. The committee's staff is saying the excusing of Wendy Gramm is entirely unconnected with this relationship."
BRIAN DESBOROUGH. Former aerospace research engineer. "The 9/11 Disaster: Myth and Reality."
"In the aftermath of the 9/11 catastrophe, many corporations were forced into bankruptcy; particularly hard hit were airlines, whose profits plummeted as a large segment of the public elected not to fly unless absolutely necessary. 
As corporations became insolvent, many were quietly acquired for only a few cents on the dollar by that Chinese giant corporation Huchison Wampaugh. Typical is the case of US Air. As this airline declared insolvency, Huchison acquired it for only four cents on the dollar. Does this imply that the Chinese were the perpetrators of the 9/11 conspiracy? Not at all, for the major stockholder of Hutchison Wampoa is Pilgrim Investments, which just happens to be owned by the Bush family… Bush family members are major stockholders in the Carlyle Group, a consortium of armaments manufacturers which profited greatly from arms sales for the Gulf War… 
As this article is being written, American Senator Paul Wellstone and his wife have just died in a plane crash… The Senator’s death presents an opportunity for the Republican Party to control both houses of Congress, thus enabling bills favorable to the Bush family to be rubber stamped into passage. The Senator was the major congressional thorn in the side of the Bush cabal. The hapless senator was pressing for a new investigation into the disappearance of $350 million from the coffers of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which vanished into a black hole during the Reagan/Bush presidency."
WALL STREET JOURNAL. September 27th 2001. May, 1998 and 2000: Former President George H.W. Bush travels to Saudi Arabia on behalf of the privately owned Carlyle group, the 11th largest Defence contractor in the US While there he meets privately with the Saudi royal family and the Bin Laden family.

COLIN POWELL. US Secretary of State. General and Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff during Gulf War 1. 33rd Degree Freemason. Colin Powell’s meteoric rise to the top of the US military machine was produced, not by good grades, combat heroics or length of service. His rapid advancement was due to "affirmative action," and, possibly, the fact that he is a 33rd Degree Freemason, as is Clinton.
"That's not really a number I'm terribly interested in." (On being asked his assessment of Iraqi military and civilian casualties whilst Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. April, 1991) 
"I want to scare the hell out of the rest of the world." (Talking about US military power prior to the Gulf War in 1991) In 1993 Powell urged Naval cadets to carry: 
"The culture and the spirit and the lifeblood of America to help a new world order get under way." "We have succeeded, because we stopped the talking about Iraqi children, and instead are talking about weapons of mass destruction, not sanctions to hurt civilians." (Describing his plans for new "smart sanctions." (House International Relations Committee. 7th February, 2001) 
"We're after ending terrorism. And if there are states and regimes, nations, that support terrorism, we hope to persuade them that it is in their interest to stop doing that." ("New York Times." September 20th 2002. http://www.stanford.edu/class/intnlrel193/readings/week4/split.html) 
"Syria can continue direct support for terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Hussein, or it can embark on a different and more hopeful course. Either way, Syria bears the responsibility for its choices, and for the consequences." (Speech to the Jewish lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. 31st March, 2003)
There was wild applause after Powell made the above remark. Approximately 5,000 people attended this meeting. Amongst the non-Jews who attended were: National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice; Political Director, Kenneth Mehlman: Undersecretary of State, John R. Bolton; Assistant Secretary of State, William Burns; half of the US Senate and one third of the US Congress) Powell has one Jewish ancestor on his father's side. He grew up in a heavily Jewish-populated neighborhood in New York, and speaks Yiddish. In his autobiography "An American Journey,"

Colin Powell says that, in 1990, Dick Cheney ordered plans to be drawn up for the use of nuclear weapons, if war in the Gulf became a reality.

SUNDAY HERALD. "America tore out 8000 pages of Iraq dossier." http://www.sundayherald.com/30195
"The United States edited out more than 8000 crucial pages of Iraq's 11,800-page dossier on weapons, before passing on a sanitised version to the 10 non-permanent members of the United Nations security council. The full extent of Washington's complete control over who sees what in the crucial Iraqi dossier calls into question the allegations made by US Secretary of State Colin Powell that 'omissions' in the document constituted a 'material breach' of the latest UN resolution on Iraq. 
Last week, Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan accepted that it was 'unfortunate' that his organisation had allowed the US to take the only complete dossier and edit it. He admitted 'the approach and style were wrong' and Norway, a member of the security council, says it is being treated like a 'second-class country'. 
Although Powell called the Iraqi dossier a 'catalogue of recycled information and flagrant omissions,' the non-permanent members of the security council will have no way of testing the US claims for themselves. This will be crucial if the US and the UK go back to the security council seeking explicit authorisation for war on Iraq if breaches of resolution 1441 are confirmed when the weapons inspectors, this weekend investigating 10 sites in Iraq, including an oil refinery south of Baghdad, deliver their report to the UN next month. A UN source in New York said: 'The questions being asked are valid. What did the US take out? And if weapons inspectors are supposed to be checking against the dossier's content, how can any future claim be verified. In effect the US is saying trust us, and there are many who just will not.' 
Current and former UN diplomats are said to be livid at what some have called the 'theft' of the Iraqi document by the US. Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant general secretary of the UN and the UN's humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq until 2000, said: 'This is an outrageous attempt by the US to mislead.' 
Although the five permanent members of the security council, the US, the UK, France, China and Russia, have had access to the complete version, there was agreement that the US be allowed to edit the dossier on the ground that its contents were 'risky' in terms of security on weapons proliferation… 
Yesterday, General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, was asked if US forces were ready if called upon immediately. General Myers simply said: 'You bet'."
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY. 22nd December, 2002. "West tries to shield companies that made a monster of Baghdad."
"It is a monster that has been fed by Western firms. Some 150 companies, mostly in Europe, the United States and Japan, have provided components and know-how needed by Saddam Hussein to build atomic bombs and chemical and biological weapons. 
The Iraqi dossier delivered to the UN and chief weapons inspector Hans Blix adds up to the most comprehensive list so far of companies involved. Iraq’s report says that equipment was sent by more than 80 German companies, 24 American, and 17 British, as well as by a number of Swiss, Japanese, Italian, French, Swedish and Brazilian firms. It says that more than 30 countries supplied equipment for its nuclear programme alone. 
The activities of the British companies all took place before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, according to the dossier. But it says that some German companies have co-operated with Iraq more recently… Since the Gulf war of 1991 dozens of companies have either admitted to sales or have been prosecuted in Europe for helping arm Iraq. 
Other sales listed in the Iraqi dossier have been legal and often made with the knowledge of governments before sales to Iraq were banned. Between 1985 and 1990 the US Commerce Department, for instance, licensed $1.5bn (£960m) of sales of technology which had military potential for Iraq.. Both the US and the UN are trying to keep the names of Iraq’s foreign suppliers secret, and large parts of the document have been excised in advance of copies being handed to the non-permanent members of the Security Council."
DICK CHENEY. Vice President of the USA during the Bush major administration. President Ford's Chief of Staff. Former member of the Enron board. Member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Draft dodger during the Vietnam War.

Cheney lost nothing during or after the Enron scandal. Ordinary Enron pensioners lost everything.His excuse for non service in Vietnam was, 'I had other priorities in the Sixties than military service.'
"The breakup of Iraq would probably not be in US interests." (March, 1991) 
The above remark was made when Gulf War 1 was drawing to a close and the Kurds, Shias and various others were beginning to rebel against Ba’ath party authority. This was a rebellion which had been deliberately inspired and encouraged by President Bush in the first place.
"Let me make a generalized statement about a trend I see in the US Congress that I find disturbing, that applies not only with respect to the Iranian situation but a number of others as well. I think we Americans sometimes make mistakes... 
There seems to be an assumption that somehow we know what's best for everybody else and that we are going to use our economic clout to get everybody else to live the way we would like." (Speech, as CEO of Haliburton Oil, criticizing US efforts to impose sanctions upon Iran. Abu Dhabi. 1996) 
As CEO of Haliburton Oil, Cheney argued for changes of US policy towards Iran in 1998 and 2000. Haliburton is a significant investor in Iran. In February, 2000, Cheney and Halliburton were reported to have held a major stake in Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump Co., which companies would be at the forefront of any future reconstruction of Iraq's oil industry.

A speech to the Veterans of Foreign wars. August 26th 2002. http://www.newamericancentury.org
"The danger to America requires action on many fronts all at once… We must take the battle to the enemy… The United States has entered a struggle of years… a new kind of war against a new kind of enemy… 
In this war we've assembled a broad coalition of civilized nations that recognize the danger and are working with us on all fronts. The President has made very clear that there is no neutral ground in the fight against terror… old doctrines of security do not apply… 
The Iraqi regime has… been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents. And they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago. These are not weapons for the purpose of defending Iraq; these are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed so that Saddam can hold the threat over the head of anyone he chooses, in his own region or beyond. 
On the nuclear question, many of you will recall that Saddam's nuclear ambitions suffered a severe setback in 1981 when the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor. They suffered another major blow in Desert Storm and its aftermath. But we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons… 
Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. Just how soon, we cannot really gauge… And one must keep in mind the history of UN inspection teams in Iraq. Even as they were conducting the most intrusive system of arms control in history, the inspectors missed a great deal. Before being barred from the country, the inspectors found and destroyed thousands of chemical weapons, and hundreds of tons of mustard gas and other nerve agents… 
Against that background, a person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected the game of cheat and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow ‘back in his box’… 
What he wants is time and more time to husband his resources, to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons programs, and to gain possession of nuclear arms. Should all his ambitions be realized, the implications would be enormous for the Middle East, for the United States, and for the peace of the world. The whole range of weapons of mass destruction then would rest in the hands of a dictator who has already shown his willingness to use such weapons, and has done so, both in his war with Iran and against his own people. 
Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop ten percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail. Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. 
There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors, confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth… 
We are, after all, dealing with the same dictator who shoots at American and British pilots in the no-fly zone, on a regular basis, the same dictator who dispatched a team of assassins to murder former President Bush as he traveled abroad, the same dictator who invaded Iran and Kuwait, and has fired ballistic missiles at Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, the same dictator who has been on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism for the better part of two decades… 
There are a lot of World War II veterans in the hall today. For the United States, that war began on December 7, 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the near-total destruction of our Pacific Fleet… our nation was plunged into a two-front war resulting in more than a million American casualties. To this day, historians continue to analyze that war, speculating on how we might have prevented Pearl Harbor… 
As President Bush has said, time is not on our side. Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network, or a murderous dictator, or the two working together, constitutes as grave a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action… If the United States could have pre-empted 9/11, we would have, no question… Today in Afghanistan, the world is seeing that America acts not to conquer but to liberate, and remains in friendship to help the people build a future of stability, self-determination, and peace… 
Iraq is rich in natural resources."
RICHARD LEE. March 10th 2003. "Idaho Independent Media Centre." http://idaho.indymedia.org/news/2003/03/1236.php
"Cheney paid himself $43 million as CEO for Halliburton oil drilling company in 1999 before running for office with Bush in 2000. Halliburton, the world’s largest oil field services company, through its European subsidiaries, sold spare parts to Iraq’s oil industry, despite U.N. sanctions."
LEROY SIEVERS. "ABC TV: Nightline." "Counter Punch." October 10th 2002.
"Dick Cheney's Halliburton Co. had interests in Iraqi oil production after the war."
DONALD RUMSFELD. Bush minor’s Defence Secretary. Former Secretary of Defence. Bilderberger, Council On Foreign Relations. Sold his shares in ENRON before the company collapsed. Never seen combat in war.
"I would recommend that some provision be made so that the senior leadership in that country (Iraq) and their families could be provided haven in some other country." (ABC TV. 20th January, 2003) "When a particular problem is intractable, enlarge it." (Attributed to Rumsfeld by his friend, Kenneth Adelman. "Fox News." April 3rd 2002) 
When asked by Senator Robert Byrd at the Senate Armed Services hearing in September, 2002, if the US had helped 'Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq war?'' Rumsfeld replied:
"Certainly not to my knowledge. 'I have never heard anything like what you've read, I have no knowledge of it whatsoever, and I doubt it.''
HOWARD TEICHER. January 31st 1995. National Security Council aide who accompanied Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1983. Teicher said Rumsfeld relayed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's offer to help Iraq in its war.
''Aziz refused even to accept the Israeli's letter to Hussein offering assistance because Aziz told us that he would be executed on the spot.'' 
Rumsfeld denies the above.

BRIAN DESBOROUGH. Former aerospace research engineer. "The 9/11 Disaster: Myth and Reality."
"The Monsanto (Lord Sainsbury the major shareholder) subsidiary G.D. Searle… is the pharmaceutical company which developed the artificial sweetener Aspartame. Numerous research studies linking Aspartame to more than ninety physical ailments, ranging from seizures and diabetes to lymphoma of the brain, are well documented elsewhere, and need not be repeated here.  
The Food and Drug Administration’s own board of inquiry considered it to be too dangerous to be approved as a food additive, but were overruled by the FDA Commissioner, who approved its use, then promptly resigned and accepted a position with G.D. Searle’s public relations firm Burson-Marsteller! The head of G.D. Searle at the time was none other than the present American Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld!  
When news leaked out alleging that G.D. Searle falsified its testing of Aspartame, an enraged Congress during the Carter administration appropriated sixty million dollars for the prosecution of Rumsfeld. However, the Reagan/Bush administration prevented the trial from taking place… Aspartame is currently being sold in at least seventy nations."
KENNETH ADELMAN. Assistant to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from 1975 to 1977. UN ambassador and arms-control director in Ronald Reagan’s administrationFrequent political commentator on "Fox News." Defence Policy Board member. Draft dodger during the Vietnam War. His excuse was: "a skin rash."
"My long-time mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, is fond of saying: ‘When a particular problem is intractable, enlarge it.’… Let's apply it now to the Israel-Palestinian war, which has clearly become intractable. Let's imagine the Bush administration enlarging this problem by moving beyond the status of Jerusalem, the legality of Israeli settlements, the right of return by displaced Palestinians… the administration should enlarge today's particular problem by focusing on the long-time campaign against Israel, and against America…  
To enlarge the problem, the Bush administration should: Stop calling these Palestinian kids ‘suicide bombers,’ and begin to call them ‘homicide bombers.’… Stop considering Saudi Arabia as ‘a peacemaker’ proposing a serious peace initiative. Remember that the Saudis have been funding hatred towards Jews, Christians, Israelis, and Americans…  
Stop funding Egypt to the whopping tune of $2 billion per year. Our $100 billion of foreign-aid handouts since the 1970s have given us back nothing but Egyptian hostility towards Israel and America… Start transforming the dynamics of Arabian thought and politics by changing the Iraqi regime, from the worst to among the best in the region. A moderate, pro-Western, quasi-democratic, somewhat tolerant Iraq, after the removal of Saddam Hussein by American forces could speed up the looming mass revolution in Iran. And once these jumbo dominoes fall, then fundamental changes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt could easily follow.

The more that Islamic states in the Middle East begin to resemble Turkey and Bangladesh, and the less they continue to echo Iraq and Syria, the greater are the chances for peace and stability. Thus the safer become both Israel and America… that's what it takes. Enlarging the problem, here at least, is the only way to solve this otherwise intractable tangle." ("Fox News." April 3rd 2002) http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,49391,00.html)
"America funds Israel to the tune of $5 billion a year, and that is before the regular harvest from the Jewish community world wide is gathered in. The $2 billion it gives to Egypt every year has always been in the nature of a bribe, so that the Egyptian administration does its best to keep the anti-Israeli sentiment in Egypt under control. "The case for regime change boils down to the huge benefits and modest costs of liberating Iraq. Saddam Hussein constitutes the number one threat against American and European civilization.  
He is expanding his chemical and biological weapons day by day, and marching closer towards nuclear weapons. Some critics doubt Saddam’s ties to terrorism… the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993, which killed innocent Americans, then Iraqi involvement seems evident. The terrorist mastermind fled to, and probably today lives in, Baghdad. Saddam now bestows on Palestinian families of homicide bombers some £16,000 each.  
This litany leaves aside Saddam’s probable connection to September 11, which I believe exists but which is, admittedly, tougher to prove conclusively… Demolishing Saddam’s power and liberating Iraq militarily would be a cakewalk. In 1990 before Desert Storm, we heard warnings galore about Saddam’s mighty army. Yet when the sand settled, his military did not perform sufficiently to warrant being called a paper tiger.  
Remember that gaggle of Iraqi troops, thousands in fact, trying to surrender to an Italian film crew? Not one American tank was destroyed in the Gulf War, which kept US casualties to less than 2per cent of those of Iraqi troops. And most of our casualties came from friendly fire…
The Iraqi forces are far weaker now. Saddam’s army is less than a third of its size, and relies mostly on obsolete Soviet tanks. The Iraqi Air Force is half its former size. Iraqi forces have received scant spare parts and no weapons upgrades for nearly 12 years. 
Meanwhile, American power is much fiercer. The advent of precision bombing and real-time battlefield Intelligence has dramatically improved US military prowess. The US military of Desert Storm used primarily dumb bombs. Against the Taleban in Afghanistan, more than 80 per cent were smart bombs... A military operation to demolish Saddam and his mass destruction weaponry and to liberate his long-suffering people would constitute the greatest victory of all in the war on terrorism." ("Desert Storm II would be a walk in the park." August 29th 2002. http://virus.lucifer.com/virus/2476.html
If Saddam is so weak and the US so strong, what is the point of the war Adelman and co. claim is so necessary?

HADDING SCOTT. "American Dissident Voices." 14th February, 2003. Referring to the above comment.
"Adelman's idea is to enlarge the ‘Israel-Palestinian War’ by getting the United States into a conflict with the entire Arab World. Stop being friendly to the Saudis and the Egyptians. Knock over the government of Iraq, then Iran, and other governments in the region will fall like dominoes, he says. This Zionist Jew and Rumsfeld crony is explicitly proposing that the United States spill its own blood and Arab blood to accomplish a reconstruction of the entire Middle East. Why? So that Israel can solve its Palestinian problem."
CASPAR WEINBERGER. 1917- Harvard trained lawyer. Became chairman of the California Republican Party in 1962. Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission from 1970. Secretary of health, education, and welfare from 1973 to 1975. Vice president and general counsel of the Bechtel Group of Companies in California from 1976-1981.

Weinberger played a leading role in the planning of the illegal invasion of Grenada in 1983. US Defence Secretary from 1981 until he resigned in the wake of the Iran-Contra affair in 1987. Publisher and Chairman of Forbes magazine from 1987. He was indicted for his part in Iran/Contra in 1992 but was pardoned by Bush major before the matter came to court later the same year.
"The United States should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest or that of our allies… If we decide it is necessary to put combat troops into a given situation, we should do so wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning… If we do decide to commit forces to combat overseas, we should have clearly defined political and military objectives." (Speech. "The Uses of Military Power." November, 1984) 
"Even if the next war were a replay of Desert Storm it would be substantially more difficult to fight and win today than it was in 1991. The U.S. force that defeated Saddam Hussein no longer exists. What we have today is a military that is a shadow of its former self." ("The Next War." 1996) "… while we can do a very sound aerial punishment of Saddam Hussein at this point we couldn't do much on the ground… 
What we need to do is pound these sites that he won't let us have any inspection in twenty-four hours a day for several days, perhaps several weeks… He's in every way violated all the things that he pledged to do at the end of the Gulf War. But whatever it is we do we can do substantial damage. And we can damage him and we can damage a lot of these new presidential palaces… 
Some of the old Communists around Yeltsin still can't get use to the fact that they lost the Cold War and that they've been completely defeated and they want to get back on the world stage. So they try to align with every opponent of the United States they can find, including China, Iran, Iraq and anybody else who's around. 
But I don't think that there's any eminence of that kind of struggle involved. I can't image Russia going to war to try to help Saddam Hussein. They aren't able to do anything to help themselves at the moment… Mr. Clinton… doesn't like the military except when he has to use it. And he uses it in all kinds of weakening capabilities around the world in places like Haiti, Bosnia and places like that that… 
I think we've lost a lot of our allies that we had in the Gulf War because they simply don't trust or believe in Clinton… The bulk of the people… say that they don't trust him and they don't believe him… 
The longer Saddam Hussein thinks he has a chance at getting away without being attacked the longer he's going to be outrageous… if he really means this time to use the military that he has to punish Saddam Hussein and destroy as many of those sites as he possibly can then there'd be a lot more support for it. 
I think that the lack of support is based on the fact of the lack of leadership. Nobody really knows what he wants to do. Even today, he just talked in generality about what a bad man Saddam Hussein is and how this can't be allowed to continue. But he didn't indicate any kind of an ultimatum or any kind of definite promise of military force or anything of the sort… 
He accumulates, continues to manufacture and threatens to use and is capable of using such things as: Anthrax, Botulina and DX and all those other agents that are very deadly and can cause an immense amount of damage. He is also trying desperately to get the components for nuclear weapons and countries like Russia seem to be willing to sell it to him. He may even be getting some things from China and from other countries of that kind. So, he poses a risk in the sense that he is willing to use any kind of violence. 
He is a mass-murderer. He's used gas against his own people up in the north just three years ago. And he's used gas against the Iranians in that war that they had in the '80s. So this is a thoroughly bad man and the longer you give him the belief that he's not going to be punished the longer you give him the opportunity to manufacture and accumulate these things in areas where he won't let the inspectors in the more dangerous he becomes." (Interview with Chuck Baldwin. February 17th 1998. http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/caspar.html
"We've lost about 40 percent of the effectiveness of the military that we had when we won our stunning victory in the Gulf War... Clinton cut the funding for research and development that produced weapons that enabled us to win the Gulf War at such little cost… 
Clinton used this military that he allowed to be weakened, and called on them to participate in a large number of overseas combat situations that did not serve the security interests of our country… We're using the right tactics, helping the anti-Taliban, anti-terrorist groups. We even used the Air Force as field artillery, putting down a rolling barrage in front of the advancing Northern Alliance. This broke the Taliban… 
Now we need to find a democratic government that can work with all the groups… what we have now is completely impossible and unsupportable, and that it's vital that we make changes and offer the opportunity to have a normal government… There's more hope now, with the Taliban gone, and al Qaeda about to be dismantled. … there are still Taliban and al Qaeda, and Osama is still in a cave somewhere… 
The next objective is to hunt down and eliminate terrorism in other places, and in my opinion, one of the prime targets for that will be Iraq. The ultimate outcome of all this really depends on the patience and willingness of the American people to participate in and accept for a longer period of time than we'd like, some restrictions on our freedom… It's vital that we defend ourselves. That's what we're doing now in Afghanistan, preventing future attacks on our country." (Interview by CNN.com chat room. December 07th 2001) 
"We were in a situation at that time where Iraq had invaded Iran. We were no friend of Iran. Iran had kept our hostages for hundreds of days. On the other hand we didn't want Iraq to be the ruling power in the region because we knew very well what kind of a government they had and what kind of leadership they had. So our role was primarily to ensure that neither one won and that it would be essentially a stalemate. And that's essentially what happened… 
But we didn't treat them to weapons or anything of that kind. Some of our companies tried to do that. Some of them probably violated our export control rules. But we in the government certainly did not. And we certainly tried our best to prevent them from getting any weapons on either side." (Interview with Sean Hannity regarding the supply of weapons by US companies to Iraq during the Iran/Iraq War. "Newsmax.com" 10th February 2003) 
The statement is that the US government did its 'best to prevent them from getting any weapons on either side,' is interesting in that is a flat lie. Experienced politicians invariably construct language in such a way that they can never in retrospect be accused of lying. Deceit yes, dishonesty no. Take the first three of Weinberger’s sentences, this is a politician at work. He is not lying. The US government 'didn't treat them to weapons or anything of that kind.' This is true, they didn’t. 'Some of our companies tried to do that.' This is true, they did. 'Some of them probably violated our export control rules." This is also true.

What he does not mention is that the US adminstration turned an aggressively blind eye to what was going on and, thus, encouraged it. As regards the last two sentences of his statement, which are blatantly untrue, the fact that Weinberger was 91 years old when the interview was recorded may have had something to do with his faux pas.
"Opponents of war say that containment is working, that the inspectors need more time, that we have not found a ‘smoking gun’ or established a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. Some say we should not attack Iraq because a few Security Council members are against it. Others argue that war would simply be too expensive. 
It is also said that we would have to stay too long and that we might ‘destabilize’ the Mideast. These are most of the publicly stated reasons for opposing any military action against Iraq. There are a few others not generally publicly stated: France and Germany, for example, want to trade with Iraq and covet its oil. 
Quite simply, that the U.S. is leading the effort to defang Saddam means that some countries must automatically oppose our efforts. Why do we lead the case for action, military if necessary, against Iraq? For all the reasons Mr. Powell set out so unassailably before the UN. No sane country can or should allow the weapons chamber-of-horrors Mr. Powell disclosed to remain in the hands of one of the world's most dangerous leaders. 
What do our opponents want? Delay, inaction, more time for more futile inspections and the ‘cover’ provided by U.N. action rather than U.S. action. Mr. Powell demonstrated how much the inspectors have missed and how they have been deceived. What reason is there to suppose that several more weeks or months will accomplish anything except to give Jacques Chirac another opportunity to stride purposefully to another rostrum and demand more delay, giving Saddam more time to complete his quest for nuclear weapons to add to his arsenal of terror.
As for the demands for a ‘smoking gun,’ these proponents of delay should recall that a gun only smokes after it is fired. And as for the nexus between Iraq and al Qaeda, to deny it one must shut one's eyes and ears to Mr. Powell's convincing proof. But the real question for those who counsel more delays and more violations is: What exactly are you waiting for? Does anyone really think the UN is going to disarm Saddam? If the Security Council is finally moved to act at all, what would that action be? Probably passing another resolution demanding that Saddam disarm… 
The delays being sought so passionately would result only in helping Iraq. As for the cost that new recruits to the economy bloc are so worried about, we have never let fears of costs block our entry into struggles for freedom, nor did we refuse to spend the time necessary to complete the job. In all of this cost-benefit analysis, the benefits of a Saddam-free world are in danger of being ignored. This would not be the first war the US entered to free the world of assorted monsters of the past… 
Simply ‘disarming’ Saddam will ensure that we will all be subject to his threats and deadly intentions as long as he remains in power. War should indeed only be chosen as a last resort. But what other resort is there?… We fought several wars because diplomatic solutions were not possible without appeasement. Yet appeasement is essentially what our opponents call for now. Unlike Mr. Powell, they have forgotten the lessons of 1939." ("Free Republic.com. 8th February, 2003. http://209.157.64.200/focus/news/838498/posts) 
Weinberger's father was Jewish.

RICHARD ARMITAGE. Number 2 in the State Department after Colin Powell. Assistant Secretary of Defense in both the Reagan and Bush major governments. Involved in the Iran/Contra affair. Close associate of Oliver North.
"It is clear that the United States, as a multiethnic, multi-religious society, which is built on pillars of hope and opportunity for all, would stand as a threat to someone who requires for their own survival to spread lack of hope and lack of opportunity at a gospel… Draining the swamp for us also may mean going after those states or those organizations that allow terrorists to swim among them, not just addressing the root causes which allow for fertile recruitment grounds… there are many countries who have traditionally sponsored terrorism. 
Iraq is one… Iran in this regard. Syria, with their close support of Hezbollah, is noteworthy in this respect. I think all of these countries, in the wake of this campaign against Al Qaeda, are going to have to rethink their behavior and decide whether they're against global terrorism or not… 
I think that's going to be one of the results of this great campaign, that countries are not going to be allowed to cherry pick terrorism. … It's quite evident that Iran has intent, to some extent, of cooperating in this campaign against Al Qaeda. The further question would be is Iran equally intent on stopping their support for Hezbollah?... 
Never have we really hurt the women and children of Iraq. It has been the selfishness and the greed of Saddam Hussein has done that… There are going to be critics, and even in some cases, a large number of critics, of our relationship with any given state. But as I say, successive Congresses, both Democrat and Republican-dominated, have endorsed the way successive governments in the United States have gone about business with these states… 
I guess it is a new policy… I think we've had enough, the president's decided that we're going on the offensive, and he's putting together a mighty coalition to do this… we're going to try to interdict, to dismay, to disrupt, and indeed destroy if possible… We're going to go after these terrorists with a global reach on our own time, but as rigorously as possible… 
The president said we're going after Al Qaeda… We're going after terrorism. Terrorism is larger than Osama bin Laden." ("Frontline." Interview: September, 2001. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terrorism/interviews/armitage.html) "… look very carefully at recent history of Iraq, and I think that if you lived in Iran, you lived in Kuwait or you were a citizen of Halaja, you would say the Government of Saddam Hussein was a clear and present danger. Our intelligence agencies have determined that there is an unrequited appetite for weapons of mass destruction. This is generally a view they is shared by others including our friends in Great Britain… 
I think that there is a willingness to let the UN Security Council resolution 1441 play itself out, and there's a very good understanding that the key to peace in Iraq doesn't lie in the hands of the United States… Saddam Hussein will either disarm or he'll be disarmed. He will either disarm or he'll be destroyed… If he is disarmed by force, the regime will be changed and he will be gone… If millions have already been killed by Saddam, millions more could end up in misery… The United States has many means available… 
The defence of our nation, the defence of our alliances, would require that we don't rule anything out.. … we believe the leading proliferator in the world, North Korea… we'll make it clear the North Koreans that: We know what we're doing. We know where they are. We can reach out and touch them at any time we desire. They can run but they can't hide and they better stop." ("ABC – 7.30 Report." 13th December, 2002. http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/s747094.htm) 
VOICES FROM THE WILDERNESS. "Chicago Media Watch." http://www.chicagomediawatch.org/02_1_nation.shtml
"Armitage has also been routinely exposed as a Bush-era covert functionary who has been linked to covert operations, drug smuggling and the expansion of organized crime operations in Russia, Central Asia and the Far East."
PAUL WOLFOWITZ. Bush minor’s Undersecretary of Defence. Former Undersecretary of Defence in Bush major’s administration. Former ambassador to Indonesia. Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Bilderberger. Close associate of Richard Perle. Draft dodger during the Vietnam War.
"The enemy that has struck has attacked not just our people but all freedom-loving people everywhere in the world. The United States of America will use all our resources to conquer this enemy. 
We will rally the world… It's government-wide; it's not just the Defence Department… this is a completely different ballgame that we're in now… We are in a different era. I think the president has made that clear. The secretary of Defence has made that clear. Everything is going to change… 
I think one has to say it's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism. And that's why it has to be a broad and sustained campaign. It's not going to stop if a few criminals are taken care of... 
We have enormous capability. That's no secret… Across a wide spectrum, there are certain to be increased operational costs… I think the more important point is, it's not going to end until these people are defeated. And as the president said, that's going to take time and it's going to take patience. And I think that's what people have to be ready for. … it's not just to tell the American people, but to tell the world, $20 billion is a lot of money, but for this country, it is just a down payment on what we're going to do." (Department of Defence News Briefing." September 13th 2001)
"We will not bend to blackmail... A victory over terrorism… will make the world safer for Israel… We cannot have a victory if we make a coalition that sacrifices the interests of some for the interests of others.. Ultimately the mission will determine the coalition the coalition will not determine the mission… We are not going just to pluck off individual snakes; we intend to drain the entire swamp… Working with Israel and moderate Arab states, we must do all we can to promote peace in the Middle East." (The National Convention of the American Jewish Congress. October 23rd 2001) 
"First of all, let's talk about Saudi Arabia. We won't need troops in Saudi Arabia when there's no longer an Iraqi threat. The Saudi problem will be transformed. In Iraq, first of all the Iraqi population is completely different from the Saudi population. The Iraqis are among the most educated people in the Arab world. They are by and large quite secular. They are overwhelmingly Shia which is different from the Wahabis of the peninsula, and they don't bring the sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam being on their territory. They are totally different situations.
But the most fundamental difference is that, let me put it this way. We're seeing today how much the people of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe appreciate what the United States did to help liberate them from the tyranny of the Soviet Union. I think you're going to see even more of that sentiment in Iraq." ("Samizdata. Net." http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/cat_middle_east_islamic.ht) 
"It's further confirmation, and hopefully maybe we'll stop hearing any more of these insane conspiracy theories that somehow the US has made this up or somebody else did it." ("Video ties bin Laden to Sept. 11 planning," article by Jim Wolf. "Reuters." December 9th 2001)
Commenting on Saddam’s Iraq.
"We need to destroy this regime that wants to destroy us and terrorize its neighbors. Living with him is the most dangerous course to take. Give war a chance." ("Socialist Worker," p. 5. Online. January 11th 2002. http://www.socialistworker.org/2002-1/389/389_05_IraqNext.shtml)
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