



“The Financial Puzzle Behind 9/11″

By David DeGraw

The New Silk Route: One of the world’s richest oil fields is on the eastern shore of the Caspian sea, just northeast of Afghanistan. The Caspian oil reserves are of top strategic importance in the quest to control the earth’s remaining oil supply. The U.S. government developed a policy called “ Click image for larger size.

‧ Since the mid 1990s, a consortium of U.S. oil companies led by Unocal, which was later bought by Chevron, have been pursuing this goal. The plan was to build a Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline from Turkmenistan’s natural gas fields to Pakistan. Unocal partnered with Saudi Delta Oil, which was owned by suspected al Qaeda funder Khalid bin Mahfouz, and they formed Central Asia Gas Pipeline, Ltd. (CentGas). One of the world’s richest oil fields is on the eastern shore of the Caspian sea, just northeast of Afghanistan. The Caspian oil reserves are of top strategic importance in the quest to control the earth’s remaining oil supply. The U.S. government developed a policy called “ The Strategy of the Silk Route. ” The strategy was designed to lock out Russia, China, and Iran from the oil in this region. This called for U.S. corporations to construct an oil pipeline running through Afghanistan. A feasibility study for the Central Asian pipeline project was performed by Enron. This study concluded that as long as the country was split among fighting warlords the pipeline could not be built. Stability was necessary for the $4.5 billion project, and the U.S. believed that the Taliban would impose the necessary order. U.S. intelligence and Pakistan’s ISI then continued the close relationship that they established through BCCI and agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war for control of Afghanistan. Until 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. The U.S., Saudi and Pakistani alliance established within BCCI reunited to facilitate the rise of the Taliban. The American oil interests at the heart of this pipeline deal took control of the White House on Jan. 20, 2001, when George W. Bush became president. As previously mentioned, Enron was heavily involved in this oil deal. Enron CEO Ken Lay was an old Bush family friend and was Bush Jr.’s biggest campaign contributor. Donald Rumsfeld, who became Secretary of Defense, was a large stockholder in Enron. Thomas White, former vice-chairman of Enron, became the Secretary of the Army. Condoleezza Rice, a former Chevron board member, became National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State. A major benefactor of the CentGas deal was going to be Halliburton. Dick Cheney, who became Vice President, was Halliburton’s CEO. Richard Armitage, who worked as a key lobbyist for Unocal, became Under Secretary of State. Hamid Karzai, who would later become Afghanistan’s Prime Minister, was a top Unocal adviser. Shortly after taking office, the Bush Administration was quickly losing faith in the Taliban’s ability to control Afghanistan and be a reliable partner in the pipeline deal. James Baker, who was also a key BCCI player, having served as Treasury Secretary, Bush Sr.’s Secretary of State and Chief of Staff during BCCI’s reign, was a leading player in developing the “Strategy of the Silk Route.”

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In April 2001, Baker and the Council on Foreign Relations demanded immediate action and publicly released a Task Force Report entitled, “ Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century, ” by the James A. Baker III Institute. They stressed the urgency of the pipeline project and openly called for the Bush Administration to “quickly facilitate higher exports of oil from the Caspian Basin region.” They reiterated the basic premise of the “Strategy of the Silk Route,” stating, “the exports from oil discoveries in the Caspian Basin could be hastened if a secure, economical export route could be identified swiftly.” That “export route,” as previously planned, would need to run through Afghanistan and into Pakistan. The tangled web of conflicts of interests within the Bush Administration, oil industry, Taliban and al Qaeda were concisely summed up by investigative reporter Loretta Napoleoni: “The CentGas deal never came to fruition. The Taliban’s inability to commit to any agreement, coupled with public recognition of the exploitive nature of their regime, contributed to its failure. For years, the Taliban skillfully conducted simultaneous negotiations with two potential oil companies: Argentinean Bridas [later bought by BP] and Unocal/CentGas. Both companies showered the Taliban with gifts and money, flying their delegations to the U.S. to win them over.

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On one occasion, a group of Taliban met high-ranking executives of Unocal in Texas. Parties, dinners and trips to the local shopping malls were organized. At the same time, Zalmay Khalizad, who was working for Unocal, lobbied the Clinton administration to ‘engage’ with the Taliban. The press reported some of these ‘informal’ meetings between U.S. officials and rulers of Afghanistan: ‘Senior Taliban leaders attended a conference in Washington in mid-1996 and U.S. diplomats regularly traveled to Taliban headquarters,’ wrote the Guardian.

‘The United States wants good ties with the Taliban but can’t openly seek them while women are oppressed,’ reported CNN. None the less, negotiations carried on more or less openly until 1998, when bin Laden’s associates bombed U.S. embassies in Africa. Clinton launched cruise missiles at bin Laden’s supposed whereabouts in Afghanistan, an act that convinced the oil lobby that, for the moment, the pipeline deal could not go ahead. Corporate America continued to do business with people who supported Islamist insurgency. The oil industry, in particular, continues to be run by a very small group of American and Saudi families with close financial relations. Among them were the Bush family, the bin Laden family and Osama bin Laden’s Saudi sponsors. The ties among these people go back a long way.

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Naturally, as soon as George W. Bush was elected president, Unocal and BP-Amoco, which had in the meantime bought Bridas, the Argentinean rival, started once again to lobby the administration, among whom were several of their former employees. Unocal knew that Bush was ready to back them and resumed the consortium negotiations. In January 2001, it began discussions with the Taliban, backed by members of the Bush administration among whom was Under Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who had previously worked as a lobbyist for Unocal.

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The Taliban, for their part, employed as their PR officer in the U.S. Laila Helms, niece of Richard Helms, former director of the CIA and former US ambassador to Iran [and a BCCI player]. In March 2001, Helms succeeded in bringing Rahmatullah Hashami, Mullah Omar’s adviser, to Washington. As late as August 2001, meetings were held in Pakistan to discuss the pipeline business. While negotiations were underway, the U.S. was secretly making plans to invade Afghanistan. The Bush Administration and its oil sponsors were losing patience with the Taliban; they wanted to get the Central Asian gas pipeline going as soon as possible. The ‘Strategy of the Silk Route’ had been resumed.

“Paradoxically, 11 September provided the Washington with a casus belli to invade Afghanistan and establish a pro American government in the country. When, a few weeks after the attack, the leaders of the two Pakistani Islamist parties negotiated with Mullah Omar and bin Laden for the latter’s extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the 11 September attacks, the U.S. refused the offer. Back in 1996, the Sudanese Minister of Defence, Major General Elfaith Erwa, had also offered to extradite Osama bin Laden, then resident in Sudan, to the U.S.. American officials declined the offer at that time as well. ‘Just don’t let him go to Somalia,’ they added. When Erwa disclosed that he was going to Afghanistan, the American answer was ‘let him go’. “In November 2001, Hamid Karzai was elected Afghanistan’s prime minister. Yet very few people remember that during the 1990’s Karzai was involved in negotiations with the Taliban regime for the construction of a Central Asian gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan. At that time he was a top adviser and lobbyist for Unocal. In the early 1990’s, thanks to his [Karzai's] excellent contacts with the ISI, he moved to the U.S. where he cooperated with the CIA and the ISI in supporting the Taliban’s political adventure.



President Bush’s special envoy to the newly formed Afghanistan state was a man named Zalmay Khalilzad, another former employee of Unocal. In 1997, he produced a detailed analysis of the risks involved in the construction of the Central Asian gas pipeline. Khalilzad also worked as a lobbyist for Unocal and therefore knows Karzai very well. In the 1980s President Reagan named Khalilzad special adviser to the State Department; it was thanks to his influence that the U.S. accelerated the shipment of military aid to the Mujahedin.” President Bush’s special envoy to the newly formed Afghanistan state was a man named Zalmay Khalilzad, another former employee of Unocal. In 1997, he produced a detailed analysis of the risks involved in the construction of the Central Asian gas pipeline. Khalilzad also worked as a lobbyist for Unocal and therefore knows Karzai very well. In the 1980s President Reagan named Khalilzad special adviser to the State Department; it was thanks to his influence that the U.S. accelerated the shipment of military aid to the Mujahedin.” Yet another interesting conflict of interest: the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission investigation was Thomas Kean, who was also a key player in this pipeline deal as a director of Hess Corp., which was in a joint venture called Delta Oil, with Khalid Bin Mahfouz. It is also important to mention that James Baker, who had a lead role in developing the “Strategy of the Silk Route” and BCCI operations, was hired by these same BCCI/Saudi/al Qaeda oil interests to defend them against lawsuits brought by families of 9/11 victims. George H.W. Bush’s role in the BCCI Affair cannot be overstated. Even George Bush Jr. had oil companies that were funded by these same BCCI/Saudi/al Qaeda interests. To make matters even worse, the same person who played a pivotal role in covering-up and derailing investigations into BCCI at the Justice Department, was the person who was put in charge of the FBI on Sept. 4, 2001, Robert Mueller - and he is still running the FBI under President Barack Obama. In summation, the CentGas oil consortium that connected all of these interests with Bush Jr.’s administration are undeniably suspect, at best. All of these players and interests are so incestuous that the heated debate over whether or not 9/11 was an inside job is almost irrelevant when you understand the history behind it. Whether it was an attack by al Qaeda or a false flag covert intelligence operation to win public support and trillions of taxpayer dollars for the never-ending “War on Terror” and control of Central Asian oil is essentially a non-issue. The main point, which cannot be legitimately argued, is that 9/11 would never have happened if it wasn’t for an out-of-control intelligence apparatus, and we now know the people who were operating that intelligence apparatus. All of the players involved were part of the same banking intelligence network known as BCCI. Al Qaeda and 9/11 were a direct outgrowth and evolution of BCCI intelligence operations. It was the same people, continuing to do what they had been doing all along, except this time their target was on U.S. soil. And this same out-of-control intelligence apparatus was the biggest beneficiary of 9/11, having had their funding budgets more than doubled since the attack. Knowing how uncontrollable the intelligence world was leading up to 9/11, let’s look again at this report from the Washington Post: “The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 1/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.” Road to World War III: The war for a pipeline to extract oil from the Caspian Sea is far from over. China, a country U.S. oil interests were determined to block out of the region, has been making moves to take control and has clearly established the upper hand. In a TomDispatch report entitled, “Pipelineistan’s New Silk Road,” Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar reports: “Future historians may well agree that the twenty-first century Silk Road first opened for business on Dec. 14, 2009. That was the day a crucial stretch of pipeline officially went into operation linking the fabulously energy-rich state of Turkmenistan (via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) to Xinjiang Province in China’s far west….

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The bottom line is that, by 2013, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong will be cruising to ever more dizzying economic heights courtesy of natural gas supplied by the 1,833-kilometer-long Central Asia Pipeline, then projected to be operating at full capacity. When the Bush administration’s armchair generals launched their Global War on Terror, this was not exactly what they had in mind. Meanwhile, in the New Great Game in Eurasia, China had the good sense not to get bogged down in an infinite quagmire in Afghanistan. Instead, the Chinese simply made a direct commercial deal with Turkmenistan and, profiting from that country’s disagreements with Moscow, built itself a pipeline which will provide much of the natural gas it needs.

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No wonder the Obama administration’s Eurasian energy czar Richard Morningstar was forced to admit at a congressional hearing that the U.S. simply cannot compete with China when it comes to Central Asia’s energy wealth. If only he had delivered the same message to the Pentagon. If China has so far proven masterly in the way it has played its cards in its Pipelineistan ‘war’, the U.S. hand — bypass Russia, elbow out China, isolate Iran — may soon be called for what it is: a bluff.” If you have wondered why so many US/NATO/private military troops have been deployed to the Af-Pak region, just consider that China, which shares a border with Pakistan and Afghanistan, has also begun moving troops into the region (it is also important to note that Iran is surrounded by Afghanistan and Iraq). As a New York Times report stated: “Pakistan is handing over de facto control of the strategic Gilgit-Baltistan region in the northwest corner of disputed Kashmir to China. The entire Pakistan-occupied western portion of Kashmir stretching from Gilgit in the north to Azad (Free) Kashmir in the south is closed to the world, in contrast to the media access that India permits in the eastern part, where it is combating a Pakistan-backed insurgency.

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“Freedom”, “democracy”, “war on terror”… really?

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