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Banned
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Here is another set of circumstance that make both major political parties look highly suspect.....
....the first quote box contains a report dated January 13, 2002 (the "2001" diplayed is an error in the article header)
The last was written a few days ago by Bob Dreyfuss, author of a new book, the "Devil's Game".
The crux of this thread is that while we engage in the distraction of partisan bickering, our country has been rendered less safe and our kids who enlisted in good faith in our military are now getting killed by the <b>thousands</b>, while our current and past presidential administrations have cozied up to business interests and allowed or intellligence agencies to run amok. Recently, the chickens have come home to roost because of our meddling in the parts pf the globe where fundamentalist Islam has it's roots. Does are government even know what it is doing? This seems to be at least a fifty year problem in our past that is undermining us now.
Quote:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/01.14A.Zalmay.Oil.htm
Zalmay Khalilzad and the Bush Agenda
by Jennifer Van Bergen
t r u t h o u t | January 13, 2001 - 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 U.S.-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul, seems timely and logical. Khalilzad, a U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan with extensive knowledge of the region and experience, appears to be the right person for the job.
Khalilzad's presence, however, is the fruit of an older agenda, one that reaches back at least to the Reagan era, and Khalilzad has more connections to that agenda than meets the eye.
Simply put, Khalilzad's appointment means oil. Oil for the United States. Oil for Unocal, a U.S. 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 LONG CRITICIZED FOR BUSINESS PRACTICES........
...........<b>CENTGAS - THE AFGHAN OIL CONNECTION</b>
<b>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.</b>
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: Delta Oil Company (Saudi Arabia), Indonesia Petroleum, ITOCHU Oil Exploration Co. (Japan), Hyandai Engineering & Construction Co. (South Korea), Crescent Group (Pakistan) and Gazprom (Russia). Unocal owned nearly half of the shares of Centgas.
As Centgas' Development Manager, Unocal opened talks with the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. To show its good will, Unocal donated money to CARE projects in Afghanistan and provided support for earthquake relief efforts. (According to the CIA World Factbook, damaging earthquakes are known to occur in the Hindu Kush mountains, which run across the center of the country.)
According to L.A. Weekly, Unocal also gave nearly a million dollars to the University of Nebraska's Center for Afghan Studies, which Unocal stated was not used to "provide pipeline constructions skills training." Unocal said the money was used to provide "basic job skills training and education" for Afghans and elementary schooling for their children. However, according to the Asia Times, the Center for Afghan Studies also at one time produced a study of oil and gas reserves in Central Asia, placing their total worth at around US$3 trillion. Thus, the Center was not only interested in helping Afghans obtain basic education and job skills.
<b>Thomas E. Gouttierre</b>, the director of the Center for Aghan Studies, <b>is an old friend of Zalmay Khalilzad</b>. In fact, Gouttierre coached Khalilzad on a high school basketball team when "Zal" first visited America as an exchange student.
<b>The Clinton administration offered backing for Unocal's Centgas project</b>, but after the U.S. 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." In February 1999, Unocal denied reports published in Pakistan that it was considering rejoining Centgas, and Unocal continues to state on its Homepage that it has no plans to return to the consortium. Unocal spokesman, Mike Thatcher, stated last October that "We're not going to do it, but sooner or later, someone will."..............
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Quote:
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/11/19/92713/753
<b>How the U.S. Government financed millions of Islamist textbooks in cooperation with the Taliban.</b>
By John Stuart Blackton
............Let me start with a direct quotation from The <b>Devil's Game:</b>
"During the U.S.-Taliban era of cooperation from 1994 to 1998 - which ended with the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa...<b>a key UNOCAL consultant [on cutting a deal for an oil pipeline through Taliban territory] was a University of Nebraska academic named Tom Goutierre...... funding for Goutierre's work was funded through the State Department's Agency for International Development, the CIA was is sponsor.</b> It turned out that Goutierre's education program consisted of blatant Islamist propaganda including the creation of children's textbooks in which young Afghanis were taught to count by enumerating dead Russian soldiers and adding up Kalishnikov rifles"...........
..........Bob's [author Dreyfuss] evidence is unfairly called into question by some of the readers at TPM because he doesn't read Arabic. Jane's insights into Iraq are questioned because some readers (ignorantly) believe they were honed inside the Green Zone in Baghdad.
As someone who knows many of the events in Bob's book firsthand, speaks Arabic and (like Jane) regularly ventures well beyond the Green Zone, <b> I find the bulk of the book's empirical evidence to be accurate and helpful</b> in considering the questions that the author poses.....
...........I will wind up my engagement in the book club this week with a complimentary bow to Bob Dreyfuss' recounting of a little-known but telling bit of misguided interventionist policy in the world of the Islamists - a story in which I was directly involved.
Let me start with a direct quotation from The Devil's Game:
"During the U.S.-Taliban era of cooperation from 1994 to 1998 - which ended with the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa...a key UNOCAL consultant [on cutting a deal for an oil pipeline through Taliban territory] was a University of Nebraska academic named Tom Goutierre...... funding for Goutierre's work was funded through the State Department's Agency for International Development, the CIA was is sponsor. It turned out that Goutierre's education program consisted of blatant Islamist propaganda including the creation of children's textbooks in which young Afghanis were taught to count by enumerating dead Russian soldiers and adding up Kalishnikov rifles".
Bob doesn't go on to say that some 6 million of these American printed and American financed Islamist text books were vetted with our knowledge by a council of Sunni and Shia clerics who were the chosen religious representatives key warlords with whom we were allied in the fight against the Russians.
<b>Goutierre actively sought to have his Afghan team and their textbooks recycled for another generation after U.S. forces toppled the Taliban regime. Sometimes, however, we do learn from our mistakes. </b>
This time around, the US government listened to Afghan intellectual leaders who cautioned that Nebraska was known throughout the Afghan Diaspora as "Taliban U".
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Quote:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/pro...=UTF8&n=283155
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review.
One of the CIA's first great moments of institutional reflection occurred in 1953, after American covert operatives helped overthrow Iran's left-leaning government and restored the Shah to power. The agency, then only six years old, had funded ayatollahs, mobilized the religious right and engineered a sophisticated propaganda campaign to successfully further its aims, and it wanted to know how it could reapply such tradecraft elsewhere, so it commissioned an internal report. Half a century later, the most prescient line from that report is one of caution, not optimism. "Possibilities of blowback against the United States should always be in the back of the minds of all CIA officers," the document warned. Since this first known use of the term "blowback," countless journalists and scholars have chronicled the greatest blowback of all: how the staggering quantities of aid that America provided to anti-Marxist Islamic extremists during the Cold War inadvertently positioned those very same extremists to become America's next great enemy. (Indeed, Iran's religious leaders were among the first to turn against the United States.) Dreyfuss's volume reaches farther and deeper into the subject than most. He convincingly situates America's attempt to build an Islamic bulwark against Soviet expansion into Britain's history of imperialism in the region. And where other authors restrict their focus to the Afghan mujahideen, <b>Dreyfuss details a history of American support—sometimes conducted with startling blindness, sometimes, tacitly through proxies—for Islamic radicals in Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Syria.</b> At times, the assistance occurred openly through the American private sector, as Dreyfuss describes in a fascinating digression on Islamic banking. But ultimately, too few government officials were paying attention to the growth and dangers of political Islam. A CIA officer summarizes Dreyfuss's case when he says, "We saw it all in a short-term perspective"—the long-term consequences are what we're facing now. (Nov.)
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Quote:
http://www.tpmcafe.com/author/bdreyfuss
by Bob Dreyfuss
........Yet throughout the book you will find, here and there, citations of prescient warnings from people involved in the game that <b>by consorting with this or that force on the Islamic right we were "playing with fire."</b> Perhaps that is the job of a policymaker--to play with fire. If so, that ought to have known a lot more about the flames they were fueling. And they did not.
To me, at least, the stories recounted in Devil's Game are as tragic as they are shocking. And it is my firm belief that we are making many of the same mistakes, again..........
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