As the mad Bush in the china shop is trashing everything in sight to give Obama more and more problems to deal with, we are currently being treated to a plethora of ‘discoveries’ of the crooked, unethical and anti-social machinations of the exiting administration by people who are doing today what they were too timid to do six years ago. Then they might have helped by reporting these matters to the public, but they were all too scared of the viciousness of the administration. This brought back to memory something that I did at the time; a trifle, but it may be interesting to look at it in the light of six years of hindsight. What triggered the memory was AT&T.
We recently had some work done in replacing our different phone lines by one line. The AT&T guy on the phone was trying to up the ante on the job by telling me how I could integrate all my TV viewing with this and that and his magickal cell phones that did everything but make the toast. When I gently pointed out that I never, ever watch TV he said what I have experienced as almost a reflex answer, “How do you know what’s going on?” Well no TV addict ever knows what’s going on if some advertiser or government authority doesn’t want it mentioned.
And that conversation reminded me of an article I wrote in April 2002 to show that watching TV certainly didn’t tell you what was going on, because none of the news I quoted at the time was treated seriously, if at all on TV or in the Press. Here it is from April 2002.
“A lot of my work with people is connecting dots that it takes an outsider to see. Often the people would be perfectly capable of connecting the dots, but they can’t see them because of the mass of information and misinformation coming from their friends, relatives, in-built programs, and of course the great mind-rotting diversion from what is really going on…TV. I have not watched any TV since the 1950’s, so I often see dots that aren’t even in the universe of people who do.
Now we have all paid our taxes, or are about to, I thought just once to go really mundane and mention some dots that most people have not noticed or heard about because the media in America is paid to avoid some topics. Or it doesn’t get paid if it does not avoid them. Same result. In the end, the taxpayers are the ones who foot the bills that the government and the corporations hide under smoke screens of celebrity court cases, flag waving opportunities and much else.
I, as a taxpayer living mainly on Social Security pay more taxes than many of the great corporations who stick me with the bill via government subsidies. Freedom and liberty for all, if the all are very rich. This is obviously also true of most of you as tax-payers, continually financing the swindles of those who can do it. Here is my post tax time set of dots in this April of 2002. You can connect them yourself.
There are several ‘….stans ‘ around Afghanistan. One of them is Turkmenistan. Find it on the map if you remember how to do that. It’s an inaccessible little republic BUT it holds most of the Caspian Sea oil reserves, about 270 billion barrels of oil and 576 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This is one of the largest reserves of fossil fuel in the world.
In 1995, seven years ago, the California oil company UNOCAL made a $2 billion deal with Turkmenistan to build a twin pipeline for gas and oil that would take in 890 miles of Afghanistan and end up at the Arabian Sea, opening billions of dollars of sales to Pakistan, China and India, without going through Iran or Russia. Since 1999 the deal was on hold because the Taliban wouldn’t allow a US company to build the pipelines in its territory.
Since September 11th 2001 things have changed, and the US Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain told the Pakistani oil minister that “In view of recent geopolitical events the UNOCAL deal is back on the table.”
Former Pakistan Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik told the BBC that US officials informed him in July last year that America would launch military action against Afghanistan by mid-October.
Note that date again in case you read past it. In July 2001 he was told of military action being planned against Afghanistan. That’s two months before 9/11.
Naik attended a UN meeting on Afghanistan in Berlin, where the US delegation told him that unless Osama Bin Laden was handed over, the USA would kill or capture both him and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar and install a new government. Did that get on TV or in the US daily press?
US delegate and former State Department official Lee Coldren confirmed this to the prestigious British newspaper The Guardian, definitely not a tabloid. Naik was told then that American advisers were already in Tajikistan planning an operation. He was told that Uzbekistan would participate and that Russia had 17,000 troops on standby. You had better look those –stans up on the map too.
The only missing ingredient was US public approval for the operation, about which the majority knew nothing at all from the US media. It wasn’t entertaining enough. No celebrities, and a too hot to touch item because of the oil.
We know that there is a precedent for rallying the American people to the cause of fighting for oil under the guise of fighting for freedom. While our soldiers were fighting for the oil reserves of Kuwait against Saddam Hussein, our ex ally, during the presidency of another oil man, the Russians were being bled dry while fighting in Afghanistan for control of the Caspian Sea oil reserves. They lost that war and it broke the bank of the communists.
The men who were opposing them were trained as anti-Russian terrorists as a short-term goal, by the CIA, and our Special Forces, and included Osama Bin Laden and his multi-ethnic, Arabic speaking Muslims. In common speech, Osama was on our pay-roll, and did his job very well. No doubt the Russians remember that even if the American public doesn’t.
The net results of the Russian retreat were that the Taliban came to power in Kabul, the immense Caspian Sea region oil reserves were up for grabs, and Osama had a US trained group of terrorists spread throughout the Muslim world to further his aims.
As a matter of history just remember that NOBODY has ever conquered Afghanistan for a couple of thousand years, not even the greatest of generals, Alexander the Great. The warlike tribal people of the country are the total experts at guerilla warfare and the conventional armies of the Russians just couldn’t cope with it. The Vietnam experience of the American army shows that it doesn’t know how to deal with guerillas either, particularly when they have the support of the people. The ignorant invaders have no idea of what the enemy look like. They don’t wear uniforms. Killing innocent people is inevitable and the invaders become hated by everyone with a casualty in the family.
Mao Tse Tung and his communists beat the immensely more powerful American backed Chinese Nationalists because his guerillas had the support of the people and treated them well. Guerillas always win because they can think in terms of generations and in the right kind of country where pitched battles are out of the question, they always beat an unwelcome invader, far from home. Afghanistan is that right kind of country.
Back to UNOCAL for just a moment. Remember they started their effort to get a pipeline in 1995. The current president of Afghanistan Hamid Kharzai, appointed through US influence, used to work for UNOCAL. So did Zalmay Khalilzad the Washington emissary to the newly appointed government in Kabul. Now the UNOCAL plan to tap the oil that everyone wanted is beginning to take shape. What an astounding coincidence!
There’s lots of ways of connecting these dots, all of which are known and verifiable facts that were not headline news in this country. I’m not going to do it, since I am not allowed to vote, but I will say this, these dots are more important than the diversions in the papers and on TV. And anyone who switched off the media anesthetic could have found them out.
War is just politics by violent ways. Politics is business in any country, and oil is very big business. And the energy business doesn’t give a fig for people, only for profits and influence. If you doubt me check with anyone who had a 401K with Enron, the company with 3,500 corporate entities. Maybe the enemies of the American people are not the terrorists, but the corporations that control the decision making functions that should belong to the people. The most profitable business is war, continually replacing destroyed equipment at enormous profits. And of course it is always the poor who do the fighting for the rich who start the wars.
Do you think that an advertising revenue controlled institution like TV is going to suggest that, even if it is true? Look elsewhere for the unreported news. I am not a member of some intelligence group like the CIA, but I knew this and could draw conclusions. So could you. Switch off the TV megaphone of the government and either read the foreign press or surf the Web.”
That’s it. How does that sound six years later? But it was all known at the time by a lot of intelligent people who couldn’t be heard above the blare of TV diversionary tactics, newspaper avoidance, and pseudo news about unimportant celebrities, famous only for being famous. Has anything changed much since then?
By the way, did you know about Britney’s latest meltdown, or OJ’s conviction, or that Obama promised to stop smoking, and that Donald Trump is reneging on his German bank loan to build a skyscraper because he says that the current financial meltdown is an Act of God. You did! Congratulations! You know what’s going on.
