News Stories You May Have Missed - by John Heartson

Q. What do Afghanistan, Enron, 9-11, Anthrax and Iraq have in common?

A. Lots of Lies and Coverups.

I have spent over 500 hours compiling information from news articles, government documents, and energy trade journals. These papers uncover an energy project that got out of hand. The news articles are sourced, (the headlines I added).

The short story. The largest oil and gas reserves are in Central Asia but are land locked. The US covertly supported and courted the Taliban to get a huge pipeline project through Afghanistan.. Clinton backed out after al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. Bush resumed negotiations, then threatened the Taliban with military action and planned an invasion before 9-11 occurred. Many believe that 9-11 was allowed to happen so no one would question the invasion of Afghanistan and the building of bases. Iraq was planned next. Letting 9-11 happen has been claimed by many people within the FBI and the administration. The pre-planned invasion of Afghansitan and Iraq are not theories, they are facts.

Some News You May Have Missed:

KUALA LUMPUR: The Arabs could not have carried out the 9/11 attacks on American soil as they did not have the discipline and capacity to do it, former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said yesterday. November 20 2012

Dr Mahathir said the manner in which the attacks were carried out required detailed planning, precise timing and perfect execution, something which the Arabs could not have achieved. "I apologise to the Arabs, but planning and executing the complex operations were not something they could do have done very well.

The Arabs were great warriors in the past, but they just don't have that any more," he said at the "911 Revisited: Seeking the truth" conference organised by the Perdana Global Peace foundation. Dr Mahathir said it should be noted that the Arabs had not won a single battle in their wars against Israel despite the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria taking on their common enemy together.

“Previously Unknown” mineral deposits in Afghanistan (Click to Enlarge)

When the United States decided to invade Afghanistan to grab Osama bin Laden—and failed, but stayed on like an unwanted guest—could it have known that the Afghans were sitting on some of the world’s greatest reserves of mineral wealth?

A brand new show on the RT Network hosted by Abby Martin, 'Breaking the Set' seeks to smash through the Left/Right Paradigm set in the media and political establishment to find the middle ground: the truth. On the debut show of "Breaking the Set," Abby Martin calls out the Mainstream Media for not talking about Military Spending, interviews Retired Colonel Douglas MacGregor about the 'inevitability' of US intervention in Syria, highlights Desmund Tutu as today's Hero, and Kathy Fairbanks as today's Villain, speaks to Producer Manuel Rapalo about the DNC coverage in the corporate press and explores ugly side of surveillance with the Automated License Plate Reader program.

www.cabaltimes.com/2012/03/13/enron-911-link/

In the early days of alternate media coverage of 9/11, there was a lot of attention given to a planned pipeline from the Caspian Sea across Afghanistan, and its implications for United States geopolitical strategies in the region. New information helps connect the dots further between Enron, Afganistan, 9/11 and the planned Caspian Sea Pipeline. The FBI office on the 23rd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center may have stored investigation files on Enron's partners. There is also speculation that the SEC office in World Trade Center 7 may have been used to store files on Enron. Further, Enron was more closely involved with pipeline than previously thought. In fact, it appears Enron was betting on the successful completion of the pipeline.

Launching the U.S. Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia
(full paper is available at the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3723)

Bush’s Terror War and the Fixing of Intelligence

On September 11, 2001, within hours of the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed America to what they later called the “War on Terror.” It should more properly, I believe, be called the “Terror War,” one in which terror has been directed repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors. It should also be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, process in which terror has been used against civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as well as the United States.2 Terror war in its global context should perhaps be seen as the latest stage of the age-long secular spread of transurban civilization into areas of mostly rural resistance -- areas where conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove inconclusive.

Terror War was formally declared by George W. Bush on the evening of September 11, 2001, with his statement to the American nation that "we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."3 But the notion that Bush’s terror war was in pursuit of actual terrorists lost credibility in 2003, when it was applied to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country known to have been targeted by terrorists but not to have harbored them.4 It lost still more credibility with the 2005 publication in Britain of the so-called Downing Street memo, in which the head of the British intelligence service MI6 reported after a visit to Washington in 2002 that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."5 False stories followed in due course linking Iraq to WMD, anthrax, and Niger yellowcake (uranium).

This essay will demonstrate that before 9/11 a small element inside the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit and related agencies, the so-called Alec Station Group, were also busy, “fixing” intelligence by suppressing it, in a way which, accidentally or deliberately, enabled the Terror War. They did so by withholding evidence from the FBI before 9/11 about two of the eventual alleged hijackers on 9/11, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, thus ensuring that the FBI could not surveil the two men or their colleagues.

CabalTimes

In a 2010 memoir, the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan during 9-11 and ex-Guantanamo detainee Abdul Salam Zaeef claims that the United States had advanced foreknowledge of 9-11. In the months leading up to 9-11, he was approached by the US ambassador to Pakistan (William Milam) and informed that Osama Bin Laden was about to attack America. To quote (p. 138)......

Army Sees 11,000% Increase in US Army Drone Arsenal Over Last 10 Years Since: New Legislation Paves Way for 30,000 More Above the USA

Brian Romanoff      Nor Cal Truth     Feb 20, 2012

Never let it be said that the military industrial complex does not heavily rely on 9/11 to continue and thrive.

Edmonton January 7, 2012 YouTube featured: Peggy Morton, University of Alberta Student Taraff Haymour and Alberta Leader of the NDP Opposition Brian Mason. Edmontonians braved the cold weather on the Alberta Legislature steps to once again remind the Government of Canada that bringing Omar Khadr from his Guantanamo Bay back to Canada has yet to be resolved

Al Jazeera provided an interactive breakdown on how much 9/11 has cost  to the American economy in 10 years.

I have outlined it below in short; further down is the longer version with explanation details for each main and sub-category. It is stated that many of these categories are conservative calculations and that many categories are certain to rise in cost.

Note: $5 trillion dollars is equal to 5 million millions.

MEDIA ROOTS- Last year marked the tenth anniversary of America's invasion of Afghanistan, officially making it the longest war in US history. Now that Osama Bin Laden is finally confirmed dead, the federal government's logic of continuing the occupation remains unclear.

Initially, the Bush administration irrationally insisted that any sovereign nation harboring terrorists was itself complicit in "terror" and therefore open for pre-emptive US military action. This rationale is absurd– just because one criminal might be living inside of a particular country doesn't make that entire country guilty of the criminal's crimes.

In 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was quick to tell CNN that US forces had successfully pushed the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of the region, and reports reveal that Osama Bin Laden hadn't even been in Afghanistan since 2001. Additionally, a White House spokesperson recently admitted that there hasn't been a terrorist threat in the country for the last eight years.

So what has the US been doing in Afghanistan for the last decade?

Media Roots Radio Interview with David Swanson by Media Roots

The Sun, 5 May 2011

Daily Star, 3 May 2001

Daily Express, 4 May 2011

News of the World, 8 May 2011

Daily Telegraph, 26 April 2011

Daily Telegraph, 28 April 2011

The Guardian, 26 April 2011

Sunday Express, 17 April 2011

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"Taleban's suicide bomber came from London"

"Silence is Violence."

Media Roots Radio- Interview with Two US Soldiers by Media Roots

Lifting the Veil from S DN on Vimeo.

Brave Bibi the Time cover girl whose nose was cut off by the Taliban takes the New York subway

Review by John Bursill

Paper Link: Why Australia's Presence in Afghanistan is Untenable - By Lawyer James O'Neill

US President Barack Obama, 1 December 2009 “I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11.......It is important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place. We did not ask for this fight. On September 11 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3000 people.”

From the essays Introduction "This article will suggest that the official rationale for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is false. It involves a rewriting and/or ignoring of history on the part of the participants. It shows the same cavalier disregard for international law that was apparent in Iraq. It accepts without question the validity of the two premises argued by Obama in the above quote. Perhaps most disturbingly it persistently fails to address the reality of the present policies and their likely true intention."

Lawyer James O'Neill

In this outstanding historical analogy of the Afghan situation author and Lawyer Australian James O'Neill presents a story that the Australian and worlds population have been denied. O'Neill in this cutting and well documented essay makes a mockery of our current state of democracy in Australia; where neither the media, or the politicians of the major parties have attempted to even debate the legality of the US lead invaision and occupation of Afghanistan.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/135-antiwar-protesters-arrested-white...

By David Edwards
Thursday, December 16th, 2010

As President Barack Obama was unveiling a new report on progress of the war in Afghanistan, a lineup of high-profile dissenters joined in an act of civil disobedience that ended with about 135 demonstrators being arrested outside the White House Thursday afternoon.

The number of arrestees came by way of an attorney for one of the defendants, who spoke to Raw Story.

The military's assessment (.pdf) of the war effort found that while US troops can begin withdrawing as scheduled in July, a military presence will continue until at least 2014.

The agreement was concluded in the Turkmen capital Ashgabat 

A deal has been struck on building a 1,700km (1,050m) pipeline to carry Turkmen natural gas across Afghanistan to Pakistan and India.

The Tapi project aims to feed energy-deprived South Asian markets and transit fees may benefit Afghanistan.
But details about security and funding were not addressed in the framework agreement reached by the four states.
The pipeline will have to cross Taliban-controlled regions and Pakistan's troubled border region.
Turkmenistan has previously costed the project at $3.3bn (£2.1bn, 2.5bn euros) although other estimates are as high as $10bn.
Tapi, a project which dates back to the mid-1990s, is backed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The US has also encouraged the project as an alternative to a proposed Iranian pipeline to India and Pakistan.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11977744

Source: http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=64803

WikiLeaks suggests 9/11 preplanned

Sultan M Hali

Of the virtual Tsunami released through the latest disclosure by WikiLeaks, the most dangerous is the revelation that United States officials in 1999 were pushing for a propaganda war, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, against Osama bin Laden before the deadly terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. “It is our impression that the USG (United States Government) is not doing as well as it might projecting public diplomacy on Osama Bin Laden (OBL),” adding, “We would like to suggest that Washington consider a review of this public diplomacy effort.” Cautioning that pending distribution of OBL “wanted” posters and matchbooks in Pakistan may increase OBL’s stature as a kind of folk hero”, the State Department cable dated January 26, 1999. Noted, “We frequently hear reports that some in the lower middle and lower classes, both urban and rural, consider OBL (Osama bin Laden) an ‘Islamic Hero’, because the US has named him ‘Public Enemy Number One’.” “That said it’s our impression that the majority of Muslims, at least in Pakistan, do not necessarily support this view,” it stressed.

from http://www.voltairenet.org/article165906.html#article165906

NATO prospecting for Afghanistan’s mineral riches

Visiting Washington on 13 May 2010, Afghan President Hamid Karzai alluded to his country’s staggering mineral resources, estimated to be worth between 1 and 3 trillion dollars, which would make Afghanistan one of the richest countries in the world.

For a long time, geologists have been convinced about the existence of Afghanistan’s mineral-rich suboil, exploited in the past for its precious stones. Since the beginning of the Anglo-American invasion, the U.S. Department of the Interior and the British Government have been sending engineers from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Geological Survey. Current financial estimates are based on their 2007 reports. They certify the existence of gigantic quantities of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, lithium, etc..

It was equally on the basis of these reports that both the Bush Administration, towards the end of its mandate, and the Obama Administration made their decision to escalate the U.S. and NATO military effort in Afghanistan.

By Daniel Tencer
Friday, November 19th, 2010

Fewer than one in 10 Afghans are aware of the 9/11 attacks and their precipitation of the war in Afghanistan, says a study from an international think tank.

A report (PDF) from the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) shows that 92 percent of those surveyed had never heard of the coordinated multiple attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. It also shows that four in 10 Afghans believe the US is on their soil in order to "destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan."

To be sure, the survey can't claim to be definitive: It only canvassed men, and relied primarily on respondents from Helmand and Kandahar, the two most war-torn provinces in the country. But the results nonetheless show that Western forces fighting insurgents in Afghanistan have largely failed to connect with the local population.

“We need to explain to the Afghan people why we are here, and both show and convince them that their future is better with us than with the Taliban,” ICOS lead field researcher Norine MacDonald said in a statement.

From:  http://www.zerohedge.com/article/myth-twenty-first-century-0

Submitted by geopol geopol on 11/01/2010 22:50 -0500

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far
less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened
in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she
startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was
not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London
were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, “just
to keep the people frightened.” Orwell, 1984, 127.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20958

9/11 ANALYSIS: From Ronald Reagan and the Soviet-Afghan War to George W Bush and September 11, 2001   by Michel Chossudovsky

This article summarizes earlier writings by the author on 9/11 and the role of Al Qaeda in US foreign policy. For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005  

"The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings....The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..", (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)

"Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the [Islamic] Jihad." (Pervez  Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)

Source: http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer84.html

The Anti-Empire Report
August 4th, 2010
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org

So please tell me again: What's the war about?

When facts are inconvenient, when international law, human rights and history get in the way, when war crimes can't easily be justified or explained away, when logic doesn't help much, the current crop of American political leaders turns to what is now the old reliable: 9/11. We have to fight in Afghanistan because ... somehow ... it's tied into what happened on September 11, 2001. Here's Vice-President Joe Biden: "We know that it was from the space that joins Afghanistan and Pakistan that the attacks of 9/11 occurred." 1

Here's Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC): "This is the place [Afghanistan] we were attacked from 9/11." 2

Rep. Mike Pence, the third-ranking House Republican, asserted that the revelations in the Wikileaks documents do not change his view of the Afghan conflict, nor does he expect a shift in public opinion. "Back home in Indiana, people still remember where the attacks on 9/11 came from." 3