[wordup] rumors of war.

[Adam Shand]

the listener is basically the new zealand tv guide though it also writes
pretty decent current events articles (this article isn't available online
that i could find).  if you want to read the article that stan goff wrote
you can find it here:

    http://www.tao.ca/~alarm/special/html/goff.html

i never know what to make of this stuff, goff's explainations ring true in
my gut but i'm also a big believer in occam's razor and the similar rule
"never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity".
goff's explanations fail both of these tests.

regardless it's interesting, though not happy, reading.  the real meat is
in goff's article and the listener is really just summarized commentary on
it.

adam.

Via: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight.co.nz>

(C) NEW ZEALAND LISTENER DECEMBER 15 2001

RUMOURS OF WAR

Beyond the headline coverage of the 'war against terror` lies a parallel
universe of alternative media and analysis.

BY MARK REVINGTON

Stan Goff is funny, smart and eloquent. And so far to the left of George W
Bush that they might be on different planets.

Bush says that Osama bin Laden is an evildoer, sheltered by the Taliban,
and it's the moral duty of his government to bomb Afghanistan to bits to
get rid of him. Wait a second, says Goff. Call that a war on terrorism?
>From where he sits, it looks more like the Bush administration using the
tragic events of September 11 as an unfortunate catalyst in a 21st-century
version of "the Great Game", the name that Rudyard Kipling gave to the
19thcentury imperial powers' strategic squabbles in central Asia.

Goff writes a long piece, 'The So-called Evidence Is a Farce", and posts
it to an online community. It spreads like a benign virus: 'The most
cursory glance at the verifiable facts, before, during, and after
September 11, does not support the official line nor confirm to the
current actions of the United States Government."

Just another conspiracy crackpot? What makes Goffs point of view more
interesting is his background as a US Special forces veteran. He taught
tactics at the jungle Operations Centre in Panama, military science at
West Point, and served in eight different conflict zones, from Vietnam to
Somalia, over 24 years. Then, in 1994, while part of Operation Restore
Democracy in Haiti, he had an epiphany, left the army, took a radical
turn, and wrote a book called Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US
Invasion of Haiti.

"The army sent me to probably, one too many places they shouldn't have
sent me," he says from his home in North Carolina. 'The pieces started
falling into place."

He now works as the organising director of Democracy South, a 12-state
progressive political network, and sometimes as a military technical
adviser on films. He's tickled pink to get a call from New Zealand. The
only Kiwi he knows is actor Cliff Curtis.

"He was playing in an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that 1 worked on as tech
adviser here last year. Cliff is actually the chief bad guy. It's not out
yet. They held it because it was so much like September 11.

Softly spoken, thoughtful and at pains to stress that although he has
serious questions about September 11 (primarily that the precision and
execution of the terrorist acts smack of far more than mere fanatical
amateurism), he's not alleging a government conspiracy. "There are huge,
contradictions and it is important to raise those questions, but it is
more important to understand the larger context"

The larger context, he proposes, is oil, and Goffs is just one voice in a
tapestry of scepticism surfacing everywhere, from Internet sites to the
pages of the Establishment press: George W made his first million in oil,
with the help of an investment from Osama bin Laden's brother; National
Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, a manager at Chevron for the past
decade, has an oil tanker named after her; Vice President Dick Cheney made
his fortune as CEO of Halliburton, the world's largest supplier of
oilfield equipment - although he's a little guarded about his former
company's clients. (That's perhaps not surprising when you consider that,
as Secretary of Defence for George Bush Sr, Cheney oversaw the destruction
of Iraqs oil infrastructure during the Gulf war, then, as the Financial
Times revealed, oversaw $U823.8 million in sales to Iraq in 1998 and 1999.
This despite insisting that it was company policy not to deal with Iraq,
even arrangements that were supposedly legal".)

The Taliban entered the oil equation as the likeliest guarantors of
regional stability, a prerequisite for US investment. In 1998, the Unocal
oil company told a congressional committee that it wanted to build a $2.5
billion pipeline from the Caspian Basin through Afghanistan to the
Pakistan coastline to serve Asian markets. In a just-released book by
French intelligence analysts Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, it is
claimed that the Taliban were told by US negotiators to "accept the offer
of a carpet of gold or be buried under a carpet of bombs".

So, the sceptics ask, did the US decide to bomb Afghanistan m retaliation
for September 11, or was it a strategic manoeuvre about oil? 1 think there
are more than a few parallels to the Great Game," says Goff. "And it's
more than just the geographical positioning now. It's this whole question
of Caspian Basin oil."

As Jonathan Freedland wrote recently m the Guardian, the oil question must
also be asked of Russia's V1adin-fir Putin, so far the big winner in
Afghanistan, with "the prospect of a lucrative deal to sell Russian oil to
an America anxious to wean itself off the politically unstable Gulf
variety".

These are the whispers and rumours and outright accusations in a narrative
that runs parallel to the derring-do tales of "elite" soldiers and brave
marines at the enemy gates; it attempts to penetrate the meetings, minds
and secrets of elite policymakers and military strategists.
 The Times of India, for instance, recently published a story based on an
Indian Government intelligence report linking Pakistan intelligence
service (ISI) chief Lt General Mahmoud Ahmad, with both the US State
Department and Mohamed Atta, the presumed ring leader of the September 11
hijackers. According to Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the
5 University of Ottawa, who published an online paper about this, the
intelligence report also indicates that other ISI officials might have had
contacts with the terrorists. "Moreover, it that the September 11 attacks
were not an act of individual terrorism' organised by a separate al Qaeda
cell, but rather they were part of a co-ordinated military intelligence
operation, emanating from Pakistan's ISI."

Was the US prepared for military action in Afghanistan before September
11? Pakistan's former Foreign Minister Niaz Naik says that senior American
officials told him as early as mid-July that military action against
Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. US deputy defence
secretary Paul Wolfowitz is reported to have said that the US had not
contemplated sending its own troops in before September 11, but had talked
about an air campaign backing local troops.

BBC's Newsnight and the Guardian have also claimed that US intelligence
agencies had been told to "back off ' from investigations involving
members of the bin Laden family, the Saudi royals and possible Saudi links
to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan. The Guardian said that
"high-placed" intelligence sources stated that there were always
constraints on investigating the Saudis, and it got worse after the Bush
administration came to power.

Those claims are supported in the Brisard and Dasquie book, which says
that Bush obstructed investigations into Taliban terrorist activities at
the behest of oil companies. The pair claim that FBI Deputy Director John
O'Neill (who died in the September 11 attacks) resigned in July in protest
at Bush's interference. O'Neill is said to have told the authors that "all
the answers, and everything needed to dismantle bin Laden's al Qaeda, can
be found in Saudi Arabia".

The shadows grow longer farther from the mainstream. A publication called
the Economic Intelligence Review takes a New York Times report about the
hawkish camp within the Bush administration and comes up with "the
Wolfowitz cabal", named after Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz:
"According to the New York Times, which published a leak about the
activities on October 12, this grouping wants an immediate war with Iraq,
believing that the of Afghanistan, already an impoverished wasteland,
falls far short of the global war that they are hoping for. But Iraq is
just another stepping stone to turning, the anti-terrorist 'war' into a
full-blown 'Clash of Civilisations', where the Islamic religion would
become the enemy image' in a 'new Cold War."

A new paranoia, too. US Attorney General John Ashcroft has pushed through
the USA Patriot Act, otherwise known as the "Uniting and Strengthening
America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct
Terrorism Act", which gives sweeping new powers to US law enforcement and
intelligence agencies to spy on US citizens without any judicial checks
and balances. He faces increased congressional questioning about the
Justice Department's round-up of hundreds of swarthy men on immigration
charges. Ashcroft won't name those detained, saying he doesn't want to aid
al Qaeda.

In fact, Goff begins to sound like the voice of reason when he says that
there is no way to protect the US from unconventional attacks such as
those of September 11. What looks like overwhelming US public support for
Operation Enduring Freedom is "a mile wide and an inch thick," he says.

The unanimity in Congress is unravelling at the edges. People are
beginning to sit down and make a more cool-headed assessment of what some
of this stuff means. People are beginning to understand that we paid the
Taliban salaries two years ago.

"We have a whole litter of Dr Strangeloves going on here. 1 don't know who
is scarier, [US Secretary of Defence] Rumsfeld, Ashcroft or Wolfowitz.
Progressives in the US are very alarmed right now. Some are responding by
waiting for all this to pass. A lot of us are saying that is wrong. You
can't look at this as the McCarthy era all over again. This is more like
1935 in Germany. They want everyone to acquiesce. You've got to take a
stand and take a stand now and roll this back with everything you've got."