Gore Vidal Passes... His Legacy Lives On
Just heard the tragic news today that US literary giant, Gore Vidal, has passed away at the age of 86. This is a truly sad day. Apart from his groundbreaking contributions to literature, Gore was a caustic critic of 'the American empire' and of the idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies of Western culture, politics and economics.
Gore was also one of the early supporters of my work, having endorsed my first book, The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001 (used by the 9/11 Commission and part of its 'Special Collection'), which he cited and reviewed extensively in an essay in The Observer about a decade ago.
I recently defended Gore (and myself) from another late literary giant, ideologically on the opposite fence - Christopher Hitchens - who took issue with Gore' 'war on terror' essay in a Vanity Fair piece. My response to Hitchens was published in The Independent on Sunday.
Below, in tribute to Gore, I re-publish the full text of his original seminal essay in The Observer. It is one of his least known, yet most incisive, pieces of work. A quick reading of this essay can lead to easy misunderstandings and generalisations - which is what inspired Hitchens (inaccurate) criticisms of him. For contextualisation and clarification of this provocative essay, see my Independent on Sunday piece in reply to Hitchens.
The
Enemy Within
Gore was also one of the early supporters of my work, having endorsed my first book, The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001 (used by the 9/11 Commission and part of its 'Special Collection'), which he cited and reviewed extensively in an essay in The Observer about a decade ago.
I recently defended Gore (and myself) from another late literary giant, ideologically on the opposite fence - Christopher Hitchens - who took issue with Gore' 'war on terror' essay in a Vanity Fair piece. My response to Hitchens was published in The Independent on Sunday.
Below, in tribute to Gore, I re-publish the full text of his original seminal essay in The Observer. It is one of his least known, yet most incisive, pieces of work. A quick reading of this essay can lead to easy misunderstandings and generalisations - which is what inspired Hitchens (inaccurate) criticisms of him. For contextualisation and clarification of this provocative essay, see my Independent on Sunday piece in reply to Hitchens.
The Observer,
Sunday 27th October 2002, Review Section, Pages 1-4
Gore Vidal is America’s most controversial writer and a
ferocious, often isolated, critic of the Bush administration. Here, against a
backdrop of spreading unease about America’s response to the events of 11
September 2001 and their aftermath, we publish Vidal’s remarkable personal
polemic urging a shocking new interpretation of who was to blame.
The
Enemy Within
By Gore Vidal
On 24 August, 1814, things looked very dark
for freedom's land. That was the day the British captured Washington DC and set
fire to the Capitol and the White House. President Madison took refuge in the
nearby Virginia woods where he waited patiently for the notoriously short
attention span of the Brits to kick in, which it did. They moved on and what
might have been a Day of Utter Darkness turned out to be something of a bonanza
for the DC building trades and up-market realtors.
One year after 9/11, we still don't know by
whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is
fairly plain to many civil-libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of
our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government
which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a
little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected president with the
oil and gas Cheney/Bush junta.
Meanwhile, our more and more unaccountable
government is pursuing all sorts of games around the world that we the spear
carriers (formerly the people) will never learn of. Even so, we have been
getting some answers to the question: why weren't we warned in advance of 9/11?
Apparently, we were, repeatedly; for the better part of a year, we were told
there would be unfriendly visitors to our skies some time in September 2001,
but the government neither informed nor protected us despite Mayday warnings
from Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad and even from elements of our
own FBI. A joint panel of congressional intelligence committees reported (19
September 2002, New York Times) that as early as 1996, Pakistani terrorist
Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to federal agents that he was 'learning to fly in
order to crash a plane into CIA HQ'.
Only CIA director George Tenet seemed to
take the various threats seriously. In December 1998, he wrote to his deputies
that 'we are at war' with Osama bin Laden. So impressed was the FBI by his
warnings that by 20 September 2001, 'the FBI still had only one analyst
assigned full time to al-Qaeda'.
From a briefing prepared for Bush at the
beginning of July 2001: 'We believe that OBL [Osama bin Laden] will launch a
significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming
weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties
against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack
will occur with little or no warning.' And so it came to pass; yet Condoleezza
Rice, the National Security Advisor, says she never suspected that this meant
anything more than the kidnapping of planes.
Happily, somewhere over the Beltway, there
is Europe - recently declared anti-Semitic by the US media because most of
Europe wants no war with Iraq and the junta does, for reasons we may now begin
to understand thanks to European and Asian investigators with their relatively
free media.
On the subject 'How and Why America was
Attacked on 11 September, 2001', the best, most balanced report, thus far, is
by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed ... Yes, yes, I know he is one of Them. But they often
know things that we don't - particularly about what we are up to. A political
scientist, Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and
Development 'a think-tank dedicated to the promotion of human rights, justice
and peace' in Brighton. His book, 'The War on Freedom', has just been published
in the US by a small but reputable publisher.
Ashmed provides a background for our
ongoing war against Afghanistan, a view that in no way coincides with what the
administration has told us. He has drawn on many sources, most tellingly on
American whistleblowers who are beginning to come forth and hear witness - like
those FBI agents who warned their supervisors that al-Qaeda was planning a
kamikaze strike against New York and Washington only to be told that if they
went public with these warnings they would suffer under the National Security
Act. Several of these agents have engaged David P. Schippers, chief
investigative counsel for the US House Judiciary Committee, to represent them
in court. The majestic Schippers managed the successful impeachment of
President Clinton in the House of Representatives. He may, if the Iraqi war
should go wrong, be obliged to perform the same high service for Bush, who
allowed the American people to go unwarned about an imminent attack upon two of
our cities as pre-emption of a planned military strike by the US against the
Taliban.
The Guardian (26 September 2001) reported
that in July 2001, a group of interested parties met in a Berlin hotel to
listen to a former State Department official, Lee Coldren, as he passed on a
message from the Bush administration that 'the United States was so disgusted
with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action ... the
chilling quality of this private warning was that it came - according to one of
those present, the Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik - accompanied by specific
details of how Bush would succeed ...' Four days earlier, the Guardian had
reported that 'Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats of possible
American military action against them two months before the terrorist assaults
on New York and Washington ... [which] raises the possibility that bin Laden
was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats.' A
replay of the 'day of infamy' in the Pacific 62 years earlier?
Why the US needed a Eurasian adventure
On 9 September 2001, Bush was presented
with a draft of a national security presidential directive outlining a global
campaign of military, diplomatic and intelligence action targeting al-Qaeda,
buttressed by the threat of war. According to NBC News: 'President Bush was
expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaeda ... but
did not have the chance before the terrorist attacks ... The directive, as described
to NBC News, was essentially the same war plan as the one put into action after
11 September. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly ...
because it simply had to pull the plans "off the shelf".'
Finally, BBC News, 18 September 2001: 'Niak
Naik, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American
officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead
by the middle of October. It was Naik's view that Washington would not drop its
war for Afghanistan even if bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the
Taliban.'
Was Afghanistan then turned to rubble in
order to avenge the 3,000 Americans slaughtered by Osama? Hardly. The
administration is convinced that Americans are so simple-minded that they can
deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable lone, crazed killer (this
time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates
us, 'cause we're rich 'n free 'n he's not. Osama was chosen on aesthetic
grounds to be the most frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion and
conquest of Afghanistan, planning for which had been 'contingency' some years
before 9/11 and, again, from 20 December, 2000, when Clinton's out-going team
devised a plan to strike at al-Qaeda in retaliation for the assault on the
warship Cole. Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, personally
briefed his successor on the plan but Rice, still very much in her role as
director of Chevron-Texaco, with special duties regarding Pakistan and
Uzbekistan, now denies any such briefing. A year and a half later (12 August,
2002), fearless Time magazine reported this odd memory lapse.
Osama, if it was he and not a nation,
simply provided the necessary shock to put in train a war of conquest. But
conquest of what? What is there in dismal dry sandy Afghanistan worth
conquering? Zbigniew Brzezinski tells us exactly what in a 1997 Council on
Foreign Relations study called 'The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its
Geostrategic Imperatives'.
The Polish-born Brzezinski was the hawkish
National Security Advisor to President Carter. In 'The Grand Chessboard',
Brzezinski gives a little history lesson. 'Ever since the continents started
interacting politically, some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the centre of
world power.' Eurasia is all the territory east of Germany. This means Russia,
the Middle East, China and parts of India. Brzezinski acknowledges that Russia
and China, bordering oil-rich central Asia, are the two main powers threatening
US hegemony in that area.
He takes it for granted that the US must
exert control over the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, known to those
who love them as 'the Stans': Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan and
Kyrgyzstan all 'of importance from the standpoint of security and historical
ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and most powerful
neighbours - Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China signaling'. Brzezinski notes
how the world's energy consumption keeps increasing; hence, who controls
Caspian oil/gas will control the world economy. Brzezinski then, reflexively,
goes into the standard American rationalization for empire;. We want nothing,
ever, for ourselves, only to keep bad people from getting good things with
which to hurt good people. 'It follows that America's primary interest is to
help ensure that no single [other] power comes to control the geopolitical
space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic
access to it.'
Brzezinski is quite aware that American
leaders are wonderfully ignorant of history and geography so he really lays it
on, stopping just short of invoking politically incorrect 'manifest destiny'.
He reminds the Council just how big Eurasia is. Seventy-five percent of the
world's population is Eurasian. If I have done the sums right, that means that
we've only got control, to date, of a mere 25 percent of the world's folks.
More! 'Eurasia accounts for 60-per cent of the world's GNP and three-fourths of
the world's known energy resources.'
Brzezinski's master plan for 'our' globe
has obviously been accepted by the Cheney-Bush junta. Corporate America, long
over-excited by Eurasian mineral wealth, has been aboard from the beginning.
Ahmed sums up: 'Brzezinski clearly
envisaged that the establishment, consolidation and expansion of US military
hegemony over Eurasia through Central Asia would require the unprecedented,
open-ended militarisation of foreign policy, coupled with an unprecedented
manufacture of domestic support and consensus on this militarisation campaign.'
Afghanistan is the gateway to all these
riches. Will we fight to seize them? It should never be forgotten that the
American people did not want to fight in either of the twentieth century's
world wars, but President Wilson maneuvered us into the First while President
Roosevelt maneuvered the Japanese into striking the first blow at Pearl Harbor,
causing us to enter the Second as the result of a massive external attack.
Brzezinski understands all this and, in 1997, he is thinking ahead - as well as
backward. 'Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society,
it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues,
except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct
external threat.' Thus was the symbolic gun produced that belched black smoke
over Manhattan and the Pentagon.
Since the Iran-Iraq wars, Islam has been
demonized as a Satanic terrorist cult that encourages suicide attacks -
contrary, it should be noted, to the Islamic religion. Osama has been
portrayed, accurately, it would seem, as an Islamic zealot. In order to bring
this evil-doer to justice ('dead or alive'), Afghanistan, the object of the
exercise was made safe not only for democracy but for Union Oil of California
whose proposed pipeline from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan to Pakistan and the
Indian Ocean port of Karachi, had been abandoned under the Taliban's chaotic
regime. Currently, the pipeline is a go-project thanks to the junta's
installation of a Unocal employee (John J Maresca) as US envoy to the newly
born democracy whose president, Hamid Karzai, is also, according to Le Monde, a
former employee of a Unocal subsidiary. Conspiracy? Coincidence!
Once Afghanistan looked to be within the
fold, the junta, which had managed to pull off a complex diplomatic-military
caper, - abruptly replaced Osama, the personification of evil, with Saddam.
This has been hard to explain since there is nothing to connect Iraq with 9/11.
Happily, 'evidence' is now being invented. But it is uphill work, not helped by
stories in the press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must - for the
sake of the free world - be reassigned to US and European consortiums.
As Brzezinski foretold, 'a truly massive
and widely perceived direct external threat' made it possible for the President
to dance a war dance before Congress. 'A long war!' he shouted with glee. Then
he named an incoherent Axis of Evil to be fought. Although Congress did not
give him the FDR Special - a declaration of war - he did get permission to go
after Osama who may now be skulking in Iraq.
Bush and the dog that did not bark
Post-9/11, the American media were filled
with pre-emptory denunciations of unpatriotic 'conspiracy theorists', who not
only are always with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since
it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet,
a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of corporate America had
been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since - well, at least the
bright days of Reagan and deregulation. Ironically, less than a year after the
massive danger from without, we were confronted with an even greater enemy from
within: Golden Calf capitalism. Transparency? One fears that greater
transparency will only reveal armies of maggots at work beneath the skin of a
culture that needs a bit of a lie-down in order to collect itself before taking
its next giant step which is to conquer Eurasia, a potentially fatal adventure
not only for our frazzled institutions but for us the presently living.
Complicity. The behavior of President
George W. Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to all sorts of not
unnatural suspicions. I can think of no other modern chief of state who would
continue to pose for 'warm' pictures of himself listening to a young girl
telling stories about her pet goat while hijacked planes were into three
buildings.
Constitutionally, Bush is not only chief of
state, he is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Normally, a commander in
such a crisis would go straight to headquarters and direct operations while
receiving the latest intelligence.
This is what Bush actually did - or did not
do - according to Stan Goff, a retired US Army veteran who has taught military
science and doctrine at West Point. Goff writes, in 'The So-called Evidence is
a Farce': 'I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions
about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks. Four planes
get hijacked and deviate from their flight plan, all the while on FAA radar.'
Goff, incidentally, like the other
astonished military experts, cannot fathom why the government's automatic
'standard order of procedure in the event of a hijacking' was not followed.
Once a plane has deviated from its flight-plan, fighter planes are sent up to
find out why. That is law and does not require presidential approval, which
only needs to be given if there is a decision to shoot down a plane. Goff
spells it out: 'The planes were hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10am. Who is
notified? This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is
not notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.
'By around 8:15am it should be very
apparent that something is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handling
teachers. By 8:45am, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North
Tower, Bush is settling in with children for his photo op. Four planes have
obviously been hijacked simultaneously and one has just dived into the twin
towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander-in-Chief.
'No one has apparently scrambled [sent
aloft] Air Force interceptors either. At 9:03, Flight 175 crashes into the
South Tower. At 9:05 Andrew Card, the Chief of Staff whispers to Bush [who]
"briefly turns somber" according to reporters. Does he cancel the
school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No. He resumes listening to
second-graders ... and continues the banality even as American Airlines Flight
77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of
Washington DC.
'Has he instructed Card to scramble the Air
Force? No. An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public
statement telling the United States what they have already figured out - that
there's been an attack on the World Trade Centre. There's a hijacked plane
bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend
anything yet? No.
'At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn,
360 [degrees] over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the
Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air
Force in the sky over Alexandria and DC. Now the real kicker: a pilot they want
us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and
Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral descending the last 7,000
feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it
clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it
with pinpoint accuracy into the side of the building at 460 knots.
'When the theory about learning to fly this
well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they
received further training on a flight simulator. This is like saying you
prepared your teenager for her first drive on the freeway at rush hour by
buying her a video driving game ... There is a story being constructed about
these events.'
There is indeed, and the more it is added
to the darker it becomes. The nonchalance of General Richard B. Myers, acting
Joint Chief of Staff, is as puzzling as the President's campaigning-as-usual
act. Myers was at the Capitol chatting with Senator Max Cleland. A sergeant,
writing later in the AFPS (American Forces Press Service) describes Myers at
the Capitol. 'While in an outer office, he said, he saw a television report
that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre. "They thought it was a small
plane or something like that," Myers said. So the two men went ahead with
the office call.'
Whatever Myers and Cleland had to say to
each other (more funds for the military?) must have been riveting because,
during their chat, the AFPS reports, 'the second tower was hit by another jet.
"Nobody informed us of that," Myers said. "But when we came out,
that was obvious. Then, right at that time, somebody said the Pentagon had been
hit."' Finally, somebody 'thrust a cellphone in Myers' hand' and, as if by
magic, the commanding general of Norad - our Airspace Command - was on the line
just as the hijackers mission had been successfully completed except for the
failed one in Pennsylvania. In later testimony to the Senate Armed Forces
Committee, Myers said he thinks that, as of his cellphone talk with Norad, 'the
decision was at that point to start launching aircraft'. It was 9:40am. One
hour and 20 minutes after air controllers knew that Flight 11 had been
hijacked; 50 minutes after the North Tower was struck.
This statement would have been quite enough
in our old serious army/air force to launch a number of courts martial with an
impeachment or two thrown in. First, Myers claims to be uninformed until the
third strike. But the Pentagon had been overseeing the hijacked planes from at
least the moment of the strike at the first tower: yet not until the third
strike, at the Pentagon, was the decision made to get the fighter planes up.
Finally, this one is the dog that did not bark. By law, the fighters should
have been up at around 8:15. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have
been diverted or shot down. I don't think that Goff is being unduly picky when
he wonders who and what kept the Air Force from following its normal procedure
instead of waiting an hour and 20 minutes until the damage was done and only
then launching the fighters. Obviously, somebody had ordered the Air Force to
make no move to intercept those hijackings until ... what?
On 21 January 2002, the Canadian media
analyst Barry Zwicker summed up on CBC-TV: 'That morning no interceptors
responded in a timely fashion to the highest alert situation. This includes the
Andrews squadrons which ... are 12 miles from the White House ... Whatever the
explanation for the huge failure, there have been no reports, to my knowledge,
of reprimands. This further weakens the "Incompetence Theory". Incompetence
usually earns reprimands. This causes me to ask whether there were "stand
down" orders.'?? On 29 August 2002, the BBC reports that on 9/11 there
were 'only four fighters on ready status in the north-eastern US'. Conspiracy?
Coincidence? Error?
It is interesting how often in our history,
when disaster strikes, incompetence is considered a better alibi than ... well,
yes, there are worse things. After Pearl Harbor, Congress moved to find out why
Hawaii's two military commanders, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, had not
anticipated the Japanese attack. But President Roosevelt pre-empted that
investigation with one of his own. Short and Kimmel were broken for
incompetence. The 'truth' is still obscure to this day.
The media's weapons of mass distraction
But Pearl Harbor has been much studied. 11
September, it is plain, is never going to be investigated if Bush has anything
to say about it. In January 2002, CNN reported that 'Bush personally asked
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the Congressional investigation
into the events of 11 September ... The request was made at a private meeting
with Congressional leaders ... Sources said Bush initiated the conversation ...
He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the
potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the
terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry .. Tuesday's
discussion followed a rare call from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to
make the same request ...'
The excuse given, according to Daschle, was
that 'resources and personnel would be taken' away from the war on terrorism in
the event of a wider inquiry. So for reasons that we must never know, those
'breakdowns' are to be the goat. That they were more likely to be not break -
but 'stand-downs' is not for us to pry. Certainly the one-hour 20 minute
failure to put fighter planes in the air could not have been due to a breakdown
throughout the entire Air Force along the East Coast. Mandatory standard
operational procedure had been told to cease and desist.
Meanwhile, the media were assigned their
familiar task of inciting public opinion against bin Laden, still not the
proven mastermind. These media blitzes often resemble the magicians classic
gesture of distraction: as you watch the rippling bright colours of his silk
handkerchief in one hand, he is planting the rabbit in your pocket with the
other. We were quickly assured that Osama's enormous family with its enormous
wealth had broken with him, as had the royal family of his native Saudi Arabia.
The CIA swore, hand on heart, that Osama had not worked for them in the war
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Finally, the rumour that Bush
family had in any way profited by its long involvement with the bin Laden
family was - what else? - simply partisan bad taste.
But Bush Jr's involvement goes back at
least to 1979 when his first failed attempt to become a player in the big Texas
oil league brought him together with one James Bath of Houston, a family friend,
who have Bush Jr. $50,000 for a 5 per cent stake in Bush's firm Arbusto Energy.
At this time, according to Wayne Madsen ('In These Times' - Institute for
Public Affairs No. 25), Bath was 'the sole US business representative for Salem
bin Laden, head of the family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden...
In a statement issued shortly after the 11 September attacks, the White House
vehemently denied the connection, insisting that Bath invested his own money,
not Salem bin Laden's, in Arbusto. In conflicting statements, Bush at first
denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he
was aware Bath represented Saudi interests ... after several reincarnations,
Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy Corporation.'
Behind the Junior Bush is the senior Bush,
gainfully employed by the Carlyle Group which has ownership in at least 164
companies worldwide, inspiring admiration in that staunch friend to the
wealthy, the Wall Street Journal, which noted, as early as 27 September 2001,
'If the US boosts defence spending in its quest to stop Osama bin Laden's
alleged terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: bin
Laden's family ... is an investor in a fund established by Carlyle Group, a
well-connected Washington merchant bank specialising in buyouts of defence and
aerospace companies ... Osama is one of more than 50 children of Mohammed bin
Laden, who built the family's $5 billion business.'
But Bush pere et fils, in pursuit of wealth
and office, are beyond shame or, one cannot help but think, good sense. There
is a suggestion that they are blocking investigation of the bin Laden
connection with terrorism. Agent France Press reported on 4 November 2001: 'FBI
agents probing relatives of Saudi-born terror suspect Osama ... were told to
back off soon after George W. Bush became president ...' According to BBC TV's
Newsnight (6 Nov 2001), '... just days after the hijackers took off from Boston
aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport
whisked 11 members of Osama's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern
the White House, whose official line is that the bin Ladens are above
suspicion.' 'Above the Law' (Green Press, 14 February 2002) sums up: 'We had
what looked like the biggest failure of the intelligence community since Pearl
Harbor but what we are learning now is it wasn't a failure, it was a
directive.' True? False? Bush Jr will be under oath during the impeachment
interrogation. Will we hear 'What is a directive? What is is?'
Although the US had, for some years,
fingered Osama as a mastermind terrorist, no serious attempt had been made
pre-9/11 to 'bring him to justice dead or alive, innocent or guilty', as Texan
law of the jungle requires. Clinton's plan to act was given to Condeleezza Rice
by Sandy Berger, you will recall, but she says she does not.
As far back as March 1996 when Osama was in
Sudan, Major General Elfatih Erwa, Sudanese Minister for Defence, offered to
extradite him. According to the Washington Post (3 October 2001), 'Erwa said he
would happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the United States. But if that
would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand
him over ... [US officials] said, "just ask him to leave the country. Just
don't let him go to Somalia", where he had once been given credit for the
successful al-Qaeda attack on American forces that in '93 that killed 18
Rangers.' Erwa said in an interview, 'We said he will go to Afghanistan, and
they [US officials] said, "Let him."'
In 1996 Sudan expelled Osama and 3,000 of
his associates. Two years later the Clinton administration, in the great
American tradition of never having to say thank you for Sudan's offer to hand
over Osama, proceeded to missile-attack Sudan's al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory
on the grounds that Sudan was harboring bin Laden terrorists who were making
chemical and biological weapons when the factory was simply making vaccines for
the UN.
Four years later, John O'Neill, a much
admired FBI agent, complained in the Irish Times a month before the attacks,
'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 forbade O'Neill (and his FBI team) ... from entering Yemen
in August 2001. O'Neill resigned in frustration and took on a new job as head
of security at the World Trade Centre. He died in the 11 September attack.'
Obviously, Osama has enjoyed bipartisan American support since his enlistment
in the CIA's war to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But by 9/11 there was
no Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, indeed there was no Soviet Union.
A world made safe for peace and pipelines
I watched Bush and Cheney on CNN when the
Axis of Evil speech was given and the 'long war' proclaimed. Iraq, Iran and
North Korea were fingered as enemies to be clobbered because they might or
might not be harbouring terrorists who might or might not destroy us in the
night. So we must strike first whenever it pleases us. Thus, we declared 'war
on terrorism' - an abstract noun which cannot be a war at all as you need a
country for that. Of course, there was innocent Afghanistan, which was levelled
from a great height, but then what's collateral damage - like an entire country
- when you're targeting the personification of all evil according to Time and
the NY Times and the networks?
As it proved, the conquest of Afghanistan
had nothing to do with Osama. He was simply a pretext for replacing the Taliban
with a relatively stable government that would allow Union Oil of California to
lay its pipeline for the profit of, among others, the Cheney-Bush junta.
Background? All right. The headquarters of
Unocal are, as might be expected, in Texas. In December 1997, Taliban representatives
were invited to Sugarland, Texas. At that time, Unocal had already begun
training Afghan men in pipeline construction, with US government approval. BBC
News, (4 December 1997): 'A spokesman for the company Unocal said the Taliban
were expected to spend several days at the company's [Texas] headquarters ... 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.' The Inter Press Service (IPS)
reported: 'some Western businesses are warming up to the Taliban despite the
movement's institutionalisation of terror, massacres, abductions and
impoverishment.' CNN (6 October 1996): 'The United States wants good ties [with
the Taliban] but can't openly seek them while women are being oppressed.'
The Taliban, rather better organised than
rumoured, hired for PR one Leila Helms, a niece of Richard Helms, former
director of the CIA. In October 1996, the Frankfurter Rundschau reported that
Unocal 'has been given the go-ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul to
build a pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan ..' This was a
real coup for Unocal as well as other candidates for pipelines, including Condoleezza's
old employer Chevron. Although the Taliban was already notorious for its
imaginative crimes against the human race, the Wall Street Journal, scenting
big bucks, fearlessly announced: 'Like them or not, the Taliban are the players
most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history.' The
NY Times (26 May 1997) leapt aboard the pipeline juggernaut. 'The Clinton
administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory would act as
counterweight to Iran ... and would offer the possibility of new trade routes
that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence in the region.'
But by 1999, it was clear that the Taliban
could not provide the security we would need to protect our fragile pipelines.
The arrival of Osama as warrior for Allah on the scene refocused, as it were,
the bidding. New alliances were now being made. The Bush administration soon
buys the idea of an invasion of Afghanistan, Frederick Starr, head of the
Central Asia Institute at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in the Washington
Post (19 December 2000): 'The US has quietly begun to align itself with those
in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and
has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out bin Laden.'
Although with much fanfare we went forth to
wreak our vengeance on the crazed sadistic religious zealot who slaughtered
3,000 American citizens, once that 'war' was under way, Osama was dropped as
irrelevant and so we are back to the Unocal pipeline, now a go-project. In the
light of what we know today, it is unlikely that the junta was ever going to
capture Osama alive: he has tales to tell. One of Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's best numbers now is: 'Where is he? Somewhere? Here? There?
Somewhere? Who knows?' And we get his best twinkle. He must also be delighted -
and amazed - that the media have bought the absurd story that Osama, if alive,
would still be in Afghanistan, underground, waiting to be flushed out instead
of in a comfortable mansion in Osama-loving Jakarta, 2,000 miles to the East
and easily accessible by Flying Carpet One.
Many commentators of a certain age have
noted how Hitlerian our junta sounds as it threatens first one country for
harbouring terrorists and then another. It is true that Hitler liked to pretend
to be the injured - or threatened - party before he struck. But he had many
great predecessors not least Imperial Rome. Stephen Gowan's War in Afghanistan:
A $28 Billion Racket quotes Joseph Schumpeter who, 'in 1919, described ancient
Rome in a way that sounds eerily like the United States in 2001: "There
was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in
danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those
of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented ...
The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being
attacked by evil-minded neighbours."' We have only outdone the Romans in
turning metaphors such as the war on terrorism, or poverty, or Aids into actual
wars on targets we appear, often, to pick at random in order to maintain
turbulence in foreign lands.
As of 1 August 2002, trial balloons were
going up all over Washington DC to get world opinion used to the idea that
'Bush of Afghanistan' had gained a title as mighty as his father's 'Bush of the
Persian Gulf' and Junior was now eager to add Iraq-Babylon to his diadem. These
various balloons fell upon Europe and the Arab world like so many lead weights.
But something new has been added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra,
'they are threatening us, we must attack first'. Now everything is more of less
out in the open. The International Herald Tribune wrote in August 2002: 'The
leaks began in earnest on 5 July, when the New York Times described a tentative
Pentagon plan that it said called for an invasion by a US force of up to
250,000 that would attack Iraq from the north, south and west. On 10 July, the
Times said that Jordan might be used as a base for the invasion. The Washington
Post reported, 28 July, that "many senior US military officers contend
that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat ..."' And the status quo
should be maintained. Incidentally, this is the sort of debate that the
founding fathers intended the Congress, not military bureaucrats, to conduct in
the name of we the people. But that sort of debate has, for a long time, been
denied us.
One refreshing note is now being struck in
a fashion unthinkable in imperial Rome: the cheerful admission that we
habitually resort to provocation. The Tribune continues: 'Donald Rumsfeld has
threatened to jail any one found to have been behind the leaks. But a retired
army general, Fred Woerner, tends to see a method behind the leaks. "We
may already be executing a plan," he said recently. "Are we involved
in a preliminary psychological dimension of causing Iraq to do something to
justify a US attack or make concessions? Somebody knows.' That is plain.
Elsewhere in this interesting edition of
the Herald Tribune wise William Pfaff writes: 'A second Washington debate is
whether to make an unprovoked attack on Iran to destroy a nuclear power reactor
being built with Russian assistance, under inspection by the International
Atomic Energy Agency, within the terms of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of
which Iran is a signatory ... No other government would support such an action,
other than Israel's (which) would do so not because it expected to be attacked
by Iran but because it, not unjustifiably, opposes any nuclear capacity in the
hands of any Islamic government.'
Suspect states and the tom-toms of revenge
'Of all the enemies to public liberty, war
is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it compromises and develops the
germ of every other. As the parent of armies, war encourages debts and taxes,
the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In
war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended ... and all the
means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the
people ...' Thus, James Madison warned us at the dawn of our republic.
Post 9/11, thanks to the 'domination of the
few', Congress and the media are silent while the executive, through propaganda
and skewed polls, seduces the public mind as hitherto unthinkable centers of
power like Homeland Defence (a new Cabinet post to be placed on top of the
Defence Department) are being constructed and 4 per cent of the country has
recently been invited to join Tips, a civilian spy system to report on anyone
who looks suspicious or ... who objects to what the executive is doing at home
or abroad?
Although every nation knows how - if it has
the means and the will - to protect itself from thugs of the sort that brought
us 9/11, war is not an option. Wars are for nations not root-less gangs. You
put a price on their heads and hunt them down. In recent years, Italy has been
doing that with the Sicilian Mafia; and no one has yet suggested bombing
Palermo.
But the Cheney-Bush junta wants a war in
order to dominate Afghanistan, build a pipeline, gain control of the oil of
Eurasia's Stans for their business associates as well as to do as much damage
to Iraq and Iran on the grounds that one day those evil countries may carpet
our fields of amber grain with anthrax or something.
The media, never much good a analysis, are
more and more breathless and incoherent. On CNN, even the stolid Jim Clancy
started to hyperventilate when an Indian academic tried to explain how Iraq was
once our ally and 'friend' in its war against our Satanic enemy Iran. 'None of
that conspiracy stuff,' snuffed Clancy. Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now
shorthand for unspeakable truth.
As of August, at least among economists, a
consensus was growing that, considering our vast national debt (we borrow $2
billion a day to keep the government going) and a tax base seriously reduced by
the junta in order to benefit the 1 per cent who own most of the national
wealth, there is no way that we could ever find the billions needed to destroy
Iraq in 'a long war' or even a short one, with most of Europe lined up against
us. Germany and Japan paid for the Gulf War, reluctantly - with Japan, at the
last moment, irritably quarrelling over the exchange rate at the time of the
contract. Now Germany's Schroder has said no. Japan is mute.
But the tom-toms keep beating revenge; and
the fact that most of the world is opposed to our war seems only to bring
hectic roses to the cheeks of the Bush administration (Bush Snr of the Carlyle
Group, Bush Jnr formerly of Harken, Cheney, formerly of Halliburton, Rice,
formerly of Chevron, Rumsfeld, formerly of Occidental). If ever an
administration should recuse itself in matters dealing with energy, it is the
current junta. But this is unlike any administration in our history. Their
hearts are plainly elsewhere, making money, far from our mock Roman temples,
while we, alas, are left only with their heads, dreaming of war, preferably
against weak peripheral states.
Mohammed Heikal is a brilliant Egyptian
journalist-observer, and sometime Foreign Minister. On 10 October 2001, he said
to the Guardian: 'Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation of
this magnitude. When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaeda as if it were Nazi
Germany or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what
is there. Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call
was monitored and al-Qaeda has been penetrated by US intelligence, Pakistani
intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have
kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organisation and
sophistication.
The former president of Germany's domestic
intelligence service, Eckehardt Werthebach (American Free Press, 4 December
2001) spells it out. The 9/11 attacks required 'years of planning' while their
scale indicates that they were a product of 'state-organised actions'. There it
is. Perhaps, after all, Bush Jnr was right to call it a war. But which state
attacked us?
Will the suspects please line up. Saudi
Arabia? 'No, no. Why we are paying you $50 million a year for training the
royal bodyguard on our own holy if arid soil. True the kingdom contains many
wealthy well-educated enemies but ...' Bush Snr and Jnr exchange a knowing
look. Egypt? No way. Dead broke despite US baksheesh. Syria? No funds. Iran?
Too proud to bother with a parvenu state like the US. Israel?
Sharon is capable of anything. But he lacks
the guts and the grace of the true Kamikaze. Anyway, Sharon was not in charge
when this operation began with the planting of 'sleepers' around the US flight
schools 5 or 6 years ago. The United States? Elements of corporate America
would undeniably prosper from a 'massive external attack' that would make it
possible for us to go to war whenever the President sees fit while suspending
civil liberties. (The 342 pages of the USA Patriot Act were plainly prepared
before 9/11.) Bush Snr and Jnr are giggling now. Why? Because Clinton was
president back then. As the former president leaves the line of suspects, he
says, more in anger than in sorrow: 'When we left the White House we had a plan
for an all-out war on al-Qaeda. We turned it over to this administration and
they did nothing. Why?' Biting his lip, he goes. The Bushes no longer giggle.
Pakistan breaks down: 'I did it! I confess! I couldn't help myself. Save me. I
am an evil-doer!'
Apparently, Pakistan did do it - or some of
it. We must now go back to 1997 when 'the largest covert operation in the
history of the CIA' was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan. Central Asia specialist Ahmed Rashid wrote (Foreign Affairs,
November-December 1999): 'With the active encouragement of the CIA and
Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) who wanted to turn the Afghan
jihad into a global war, waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union,
some 35,000 Muslim radicals, from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's
fight between 1982 and '92 ... more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were
directly influenced by the Afghanistan jihad.' The CIA covertly trained and
sponsored these warriors.
In March 1985, President Reagan issued
National Security Decision Directive 166, increasing military aid while CIA
specialists met with the ISI counterparts near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Jane's
Defence Weekly (14 September 2001) gives the best overview: 'The trainers were
mainly from Pakistan's ISI agency who learnt their craft from American Green
Beret commandos and Navy Seals in various US training establishments.' This
explains the reluctance of the administration to explain why so many
unqualified persons, over so long a time, got visas to visit our hospitable
shores. While in Pakistan, 'mass training of Afghan [zealots] was subsequently
conducted by the Pakistan army under the supervision of the elite Special
Services ... In 1988, with US knowledge, bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base);
a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across 26 or
so countries. Washington turned a blind eye to al-Qaeda.'
When Mohamed Atta's plane struck the World
Trade Centre's North Tower, George W. Bush and the child at the Florida
elementary school were discussing her goat. By coincidence, our word 'tragedy'
comes from the Greek: for 'goat' tragos plus oide for 'song'. 'Goat-song'. It
is highly suitable that this lament, sung in ancient satyr plays, should have
been heard again at the exact moment when we were struck by fire from heaven,
and a tragedy whose end is nowhere in sight began for us.
© Gore Vidal