Conspiracy is going mainstream. On the morning of Jan. 8, Paula
Zahn of CNN went into histrionic wide-eyed mode as she parleyed with Richard
Butler, former head of the UN inspection team in Iraq, latter part of the
wipe-out-Saddam lobby and now on the CNN payroll, coyly described by the
lovely Paula as "ambassador-in-residence." They were discussing the hot book
of the hour, ''Bin Laden, la verite interdite'' (''Bin Laden, The Forbidden
Truth''), by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. It's just appeared
in Paris.
Zahn: "Start off with what your understanding is of what is in
this book -- the most explosive charge."
Butler: "The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush
administration -- the present one, just shortly after assuming office,
slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in
order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil -- an oil pipeline across
Afghanistan."
Zahn: "And this book points out that the FBI's deputy director,
John O'Neill, actually resigned because he felt the U.S. administration was
obstructing ... "
Butler: "A proper ... "
Zahn: " ... the prosecution of terrorism."
And that's only the tip of the iceberg. From the American
Patriots, through BuzzFlash (which seems to have an umbilical cord to the
Democratic National Committee) to ultra-left sites there's a menu of
conspiracy charges that would sate the most indefatigable gourmand. To cite
a by-no-means complete list, we have the charges noted above; we also have
foreknowledge by the Bush administration of the 9/11 attacks, with a
deliberate decision to do nothing to thwart the onslaughts.
What else? We have the accusation that members of the U.S.
intelligence community, possibly in league with Bush-related business
operatives, used their foreknowledge of the attacks to invest large sums in
"put options," gambling on the likelihood that the stock value of United
Airlines and American Airlines would plummet in the wake of the suicide
attacks.
Don't stop there! The Internet boils with accusations that U.S.
fighter planes were ordered to stand down on Sept. 11, although there was a
possibility these planes could have intercepted and downed the suicide
planes.
Then there's the role of oil. Quite properly, Americans always
relish charges that Big Oil is up to no good, and this appetite is being
assiduously catered to. Innumerable columns begin with the news that the war
in Afghanistan is "all about oil." From this premise flow tributaries of
speculation of the sort made by the two Frenchman cited above.
The trouble with many conspiracy theories is that they strain
excessively to avoid the obvious, which is:
Both under Bush's and Clinton's presidencies the U.S. has been
eager, since the fall of the Soviet Union, to find some way to assist the
hopes of U.S. oil companies and pipeline companies to exploit the oil
resources of the Asian republics, most notably reserves in western
Kazakhstan. Similarly consistent has been the U.S.'s desire not to have oil
from Kazakhstan pass through Russia. Until U.S.-Iranian relations are
restored, that has left the option of a pipeline from Kazakhstan westward
through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Cheyhan on the Mediterranean coast of
Turkey or a pipeline south through Afghanistan to a Pakistani port.
In tandem with these hopes to ship out Kazakh oil has been the
hopes of getting a regime in Afghanistan sufficiently stable to allow Unocal
to build its line and sufficiently deferential to the U.S. to arrest or at
least boot out Osama bin Laden. U.S. relations with the Saudis were, as
always, predicated on the paramount necessity of ensuring the stability of
the regime without burdening it with unpalatable demands. If history is any
guide, a lot of this diplomacy was no doubt clumsily done, in alternations
between proffers of carrots and threats of the stick.
But does this mean that the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan "for
oil"? Surely not. If stability was the goal, then war was a foolish option.
The Bush regime hastened into war because America had sustained the greatest
massacre on its soil since Pearl Harbor, and it faced the political
imperative of finding an enemy at top speed on which to exact vengeance.
This isn't to say there weren't hawks inside the Bush
administration who were lobbying for plans to overthrow the Taliban in early
summer, plans of which the Taliban became aware, possibly conniving the
September 11 attacks in consequence.
As for all those mad theories about permitting the September 11
attacks to occur or about remote control planes, they seem to add up to the
notion that America's foes are too incompetent to mount operations unaided
by U.S. agencies, or that intelligence agencies aren't vast, bumbling
bureaucracies quite capable of ignoring or underestimating or discounting
warnings of an attack.
But there is wheat among the chaff. It's true that someone
gambled on those put options, that the profits from that gamble have
remained uncollected and that "Buzzy" Krongard is an interesting character
who did go from the post of vice chairman of Bankers Trust/A.B. Brown (now
owned by Deutsche Bank), which handled many of the put option bets, to the
CIA, of which he is now executive director.
It is true that the anthrax disseminated through the U.S. mail
system almost certainly came at some recent point in its journeys from a
U.S. agency. It is true that the CIA ushered bin Laden into Afghanistan, and
it is true that the CIA was complicit in Afghanistan's emergence in the
1980s as the West's leading supplier of opium and morphine, just as they
helped construct the caves of Tora Bora. The U.S. taxpayers underwrote that
construction, just as they're underwriting the destruction.
That's not conspiracy-mongering. That's true.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
