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Pay attention 9/11 Commission: The real reason Bush dropped the ball on Bin Laden was ENRON

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by RA in LA

Dear BuzzFlash:

Richard Clarke is right in his claims that the Bush administration dropped the ball on pursuing Bin Laden, but he is being too generous in saying it was due to a preoccupation with "cold war" priorities. It was a preoccupation with Enron and they dropped the ball on purpose.

I don't buy the whole Bush and Cheney didn't know Osama was a threat story. Sorry, but this bunch always knows what's going on. Intelligence is their thing. Remember Daddy was a CIA chief. These people don't do something because they missed it; everything they do, or don't do, is calculated.

First, one must remember that everything the Bush/Cheney crowd do is guided by one simple principle: secure as much of the world's oil and gas as possible for exploitation by their corporate donors. They are, after all, all oil men--even Rice who has a Chevron super tanker named after her.

When it first came into office Bush Co. wanted something from the Taliban, and it wasn't Osama's head. They wanted to run a gas pipeline from the fields around the Caspian sea across Afghanistan to Pakistan and into India. This enormous project would have benefited many of their corporate donors, including Unocal, Halliburton, and Enron. Enron had a $3 billion investment in the Dabhol power plant, near Bombay on India's west coast which desperately needed a source of cheap natural gas to succeed. An amazing article "The Enron-Cheney-Taliban Connection?" by Ron Callari of the Albion Monitor lays it all out.

To get their pipeline, Bush and Cheney not only had to ignore the pesky problem of Osama who was a welcome guest of the Taliban, they ACTIVELY sucked up to the extreme Islamic fundamentalists that ruled the country. They gave them $43 million in aid during those eight months of "neglect." See Robert Sheer's "Bush's Faustian Deal With the Taliban" published May 22, 2001 in the Los Angeles Times.

When the secret negotiations for the pipeline failed to go their way, Bush Co. reportedly threatened the Taliban with a rain of bombs if they insisted on no for an answer.

Now the rest of how this probably played out is not pleasant to hear, especially if you lost a friend or family member on 9/11. And this is the reason, Bush and Cheney have blocked the investigations at every turn and controlled them tightly when they couldn't be stopped--an effort that continues quite successfully to this day.

When the Taliban were threatened with a rain of bombs, they decided to go ahead with the ultimate terrorist act, which they may have been planning for a while anyway. They were true Islamic nut jobs, not open to getting rich off the infidels' pipeline (especially when their requests for additional development for Afghanistan were turned down). The intelligence community got wind of the coming attacks over the summer, and Bush and Cheney, knowing that their threatened rain of bombs would cheered by the America public after an attack, decided to let it go ahead. They did nothing to beef up airline security. They held their first high level anti-terrorist meeting on September 4, when they knew it was too late to do anything meaningful to stop the attacks.

I think it's very misleading to convey the idea (as most in the mainstream media have done) that no one saw it coming. Ashcroft saw it coming; he stopped flying commercial jets in July. Top Pentagon brass saw it coming down to the exact time. See: [www.btinternet.com] It has a copy of a Newsweek article, dated Sept. 24 issue (2001), that contains the following sentence: "On Sept. 10, NEWSWEEK has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns." This would indicate that they knew, more or less, exactly when the attacks were going to happen. I also remember reading that the NSA was monitoring Atta's phone calls with Al-Qaeda leaders overseas. I never believed the claim that these conversations were not translated in time. This intelligence was a top priority. And it would explain why the Pentagon brass suddenly knew it was a bad idea to fly the next morning.

When the attacks were launched, somehow the normal, expected air defense failed to materialize; nothing was done to thwart the attacks until they were complete.

And our man in Afghanistan, who once negotiated for Unocal, is now running the show trying to revive the pipeline.

Iraq, too, is about oil. Fighting terrorism, as Clark and many other have said, has nothing to do with it.

This assessment also explains why Cheney has fought so hard to keep his energy meetings secret. He wants to keep a tight lid on all they were doing to help Enron which was in serious trouble even as the administration took office. The revelation that they stopped pursuing the world's most dangerous terrorists because of a deal they wanted to make with the Taliban to help Enron would not help them in the polls, too say the least.

But don't expect any of this scenario to be suggested by the mainstream media. They know, at least the ones in the know, that it's far better for the president if we are made to believe his gang is incompetent, rather than treasonous.

And if the 9/11 commission fails to pursue the pipeline connection, as seems the case so far, it will go down in the history books as a pathetic joke.

RA in LA

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION