This is Part 2 of the series, "The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda."

Part 1: The CIA's Drug-Running Terrorists and the "Arc of Crisis"

By Andrew Gavin Marshall* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The End of the Cold War and Strategy for the New World Order

With the end of the Cold War a new strategy had to be determined to manage the global system. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, declarations of a "New World Order" sprang forward, focusing on the United States as the single world superpower. This presented a great many challenges as well as opportunities for the worlds most powerful hegemon.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of new Central Asian and Eastern European nations were formed and became independent, and with that, their immense deposits of natural gas and energy became available for exploitation. Afghanistan itself was considered "a major strategic pivot," as it was "the primary gateway to Central Asia and the immense energy deposits therein."[1] Western oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco, Shell, and Enron begin pouring billions of dollars into the countries of Central Asia in the early 1990s.[2]

In 1992, a Pentagon document titled "Defense Planning Guidance" was leaked to the press, in which it described a strategy for the United States in the "new world order," and it was drafted by George H.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. It stated that, "America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union," and that, "The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy."[3]

Further, "the new draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders 'must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'." Among the necessary challenges to American supremacy, the document "postulated regional wars against Iraq and North Korea," and identified China and Russia as its major threats. It further "suggests that the United States could also consider extending to Eastern and Central European nations security commitments similar to those extended to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab states along the Persian Gulf."[4]

Similarly, in 1992, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of the most influential think tanks in the United States, had established a commission to determine a new foreign policy for the United States in the wake of the Cold War. Participants included Madeleine Albright, Henry Cisneros, John Deutch, Richard Holbrooke, Alice Rivlin, David Gergen and Admiral William Crowe. In the summer of 1992, the final report, "Changing Our Ways: America and the New World," was published. The report urged "a new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention." It suggested that the US "realign NATO and OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] to deal with new security problems in Europe," and "urged military intervention under humanitarian guises." This report subsequently "planted the policy seedlings for the Kosovo war" as it "provided both the rationale for U.S. interventionism and a policy recommendation about the best means--NATO--for waging that war."[5]

Another Carnegie publication in the same year, "Self-Determination in the New World Order," furthered imperialist goals for America, as it "set criteria for officials to use in deciding when to support separatist ethnic groups seeking independence, and advocated military force for that purpose." It recommended that "international military coalitions, preferably U.N.-led, could send armed force not as peacekeepers but peacemakers--to prevent conflict from breaking out and stay in place indefinitely." It further stated that, "the use of military force to create a new state would require conduct by the parent government so egregious that it has forfeited any right to govern the minority claiming self-determination."[6]

The United States and its NATO allies soon undertook a new strategy, seeking to maintain dominance over the world, expand their hegemony over regions previously under the influence of the Soviet Union (such as in Eastern Europe and Central Asia), and prevent the rise of a resurgent Russia or China. One of the key facets of this strategy was the notion of "humanitarian intervention."

Yugoslavia Dismantled by Design

In the 1990s, the United States and its NATO allies, in particular Germany and the UK, undertook a strategy of destabilization in Yugoslavia, seeking to dismantle and ultimately fracture the country. To do this, the imperial strategy of divide and conquer was employed, manipulating various ethnic tensions and arming and training various militias and terrorist organizations. Throughout this strategy, the "database", or Al-Qaeda was used to promote the agenda of the destabilization and dismantling of Yugoslavia.

In 1989, Yugoslavia had to seek financial aid from the World Bank and IMF, which implemented a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), which resulted in the dismantling of the public state, exacerbating social issues and fueling secessionist tendencies, leading to Croatia and Slovenia seceding from the republic in 1991.[7] In 1990, the US intelligence community had released a report predicting that Yugoslavia would break apart and erupt in civil war, and it blamed Milosevic for the impending disaster.[8]

As far back as 1988, the leader of Croatia met with the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to create "a joint policy to break up Yugoslavia," and bring Slovenia and Croatia into the "German economic zone." So, US Army officers were dispatched to Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, and Macedonia as "advisers" and brought in US Special Forces to help.[9]

Fighting broke out between Yugoslavia and Croatia when the latter declared independence in 1991. The fighting subsequently lasted until 1995, and merged in part with the Bosnian war. The US supported the operation and the CIA actively provided intelligence to Croat forces, leading to the displacement of between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs, largely through means of murder, plundering, burning villages and ethnic cleansing.[10] The Croatian Army was trained by U.S. advisers and a general later put on trial at the Hague for war crimes was personally supported by the CIA.[11] So we see the double standard of ethnic cleansing and genocide: when the US does it or supports it, it's "humanitarian intervention," politically justified, or it is simply unacknowledged; when an enemy state does it, (or is accused of doing it), the "international community" demands action and any means is deemed necessary to "prevent genocide", including committing genocide.

The Clinton administration gave the "green light" to Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims and "from 1992 to January 1996, there was an influx of Iranian weapons and advisers into Bosnia." Further, "Iran, and other Muslim states, helped to bring Mujahideen fighters into Bosnia to fight with the Muslims against the Serbs, 'holy warriors' from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Yemen and Algeria, some of whom had suspected links with Osama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan."[12]

During the war in Bosnia, there "was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including Afghan mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah." Further, "the secret services of Ukraine, Greece and Israel were busy arming the Bosnian Serbs."[13] Germany's intelligence agency, the BND, also ran arms shipments to the Bosnian Muslims and Croatia to fight against the Serbs.[14] Thus, every side was being funded and armed by outside powers seeking to foment conflict and ultimately break up Yugoslavia to serve their own imperial objectives in the region.

In 1992, the al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, the recruiting center for al-Qaeda, made Bosnia its chief target. By 1993, it opened a branch in Croatia. The recruitment operation for Bosnian Muslims "was a covert action project sponsored not only by Saudi Arabia but also in part by the US government."[15]

In 1996, the Albanian Mafia, in collaboration with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a militant guerilla organization, took control over the enormous Balkan heroin trafficking routes. The KLA was linked to former Afghan Mujaheddin fighters in Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden.[16]

In 1997, the KLA began fighting against Serbian forces,[17] and in 1998, the US State Department removed the KLA from its list of terrorist organizations.[18] Before and after 1998, the KLA was receiving arms, training and support from the US and NATO, and Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, was close with KLA leader Hashim Thaci.[19]

Both the CIA and German intelligence, the BND, supported the KLA terrorists in Yugoslavia prior to and after the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The BND had KLA contacts since the early 1990s, the same period that the KLA was establishing its Al-Qaeda contacts.[20] KLA members were trained by Osama bin Laden at training camps in Afghanistan. Even the UN stated that much of the violence at the time came from KLA members, "especially those allied with Hashim Thaci."[21]

The March 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo was justified on the pretense of putting an end to Serbian oppression of Kosovo Albanians, which was termed genocide. The Clinton Administration made claims that at least 100,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and "may have been killed" by the Serbs. Bill Clinton personally compared events in Kosovo to the Holocaust. The US State Department had stated that up to 500,000 Albanians were feared dead. Eventually, the official estimate was reduced to 10,000, however, after exhaustive investigations, it was revealed that the death of less than 2,500 Albanians could be attributed to the Serbs. During the NATO bombing campaign, between 400 and 1,500 Serb civilians were killed, and NATO committed war crimes, including the bombing of a Serb TV station and a hospital.[22]

Ultimately the strategy of the destabilization of Yugoslavia served various imperial objectives. The war in Yugoslavia was waged in order to enlarge NATO, Serbia was to be excluded permanently from European development to justify a US military presence in the region, and expansion was ultimately designed to contain Russia.[23]

An op-ed in the New York Times in 1996 stated that, "instead of seeing Bosnia as the eastern frontier of NATO, we should view the Balkans as the western frontier of America's rapidly expanding sphere of influence in the Middle East." Further:

The fact that the United States is more enthusiastic than its European allies about a Bosnian Muslim state reflects, among other things, the new American role as the leader of an informal collection of Muslim nations from the Persian Gulf to the Balkans. The regions once ruled by the Ottoman Turks show signs of becoming the heart of a third American empire.

[ . . . ] Now, in the years after the cold war, the United States is again establishing suzerainty over the empire of a former foe. The disintegration of the Soviet Union has prompted the United States to expand its zone of military hegemony into Eastern Europe (through NATO) and into formerly neutral Yugoslavia. And -- most important of all -- the end of the cold war has permitted America to deepen its involvement the Middle East.[24]

Further, with the dismantling of the former Yugoslavia, a passageway for the transport of oil and natural gas from the Caspian region was to be facilitated through the construction of the Trans-Balkan pipeline, which will "run from the Black sea port of Burgas to the Adriatic at Vlore, passing through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. It is likely to become the main route to the west for the oil and gas now being extracted in central Asia. It will carry 750,000 barrels a day: a throughput, at current prices, of some $600m a month." As the Guardian reported:

The project is necessary, according to a paper published by the US Trade and Development Agency last May, because the oil coming from the Caspian Sea "will quickly surpass the safe capacity of the Bosphorus as a shipping lane". The scheme, the agency notes, will "provide a consistent source of crude oil to American refineries", "provide American companies with a key role in developing the vital east-west corridor", "advance the privatisation aspirations of the US government in the region" and "facilitate rapid integration" of the Balkans "with western Europe".

In November 1998, Bill Richardson, then US energy secretary, spelt out his policy on the extraction and transport of Caspian oil. "This is about America's energy security," he explained. "It's also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don't share our values. We're trying to move these newly independent countries toward the west.

"We would like to see them reliant on western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We've made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it's very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right."[25]

The pipeline project, supported since 1994, "featured prominently in Balkan war politics. On December 9 1998, the Albanian president attended a meeting about the scheme in Sofia, and linked it inextricably to Kosovo." The message given at the meeting was that, "if you [the United States] want Albanian consent for the Trans-Balkan pipeline, you had better wrest Kosovo out of the hands of the Serbs."[26]

And so, with the help of an international network of CIA-trained Islamic militants, American political and economic hegemony expanded into Central Asia and the Caspian region.

The Spread of Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda did not just spread to Bosnia and Albania/Kosovo, but rather a great many places around the world saw the spread of this vast "database" of Islamist fighters, and always aided by Western intelligence agencies or their regional conduits (such as the ISI and Saudi intelligence agencies). Following on the heels of the established American and NATO strategy following the Cold War, Islamic fundamentalism also came to play a part in this strategy.

Bernard Lewis was a former British intelligence officer and historian who is infamous for explaining Arab discontent towards the West as not being rooted in a reaction toward imperialism, but rather that it is rooted in Islam; in that Islam is incompatible with the West, and that they are destined to clash, using the term, "Clash of Civilizations." For decades, "Lewis played a critical role as professor, mentor, and guru to two generations of Orientalists, academics, U.S. and British intelligence specialists, think tank denizens, and assorted neoconservatives." In the 1980s, Lewis "was hobnobbing with top Department of Defense officials."[27] He was also one of the originators, along with Brzezinski, of the "Arc of Crisis" strategy employed in the late 1970s.

Lewis wrote a 1992 article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, titled, "Rethinking the Middle East." In this article, Lewis raised the prospect of another policy towards the Middle East in the wake of the end of the Cold War and beginnings of the New World Order, "which could even be precipitated by fundamentalism, is what has of late become fashionable to call 'Lebanonization.' Most of the states of the Middle East - Egypt is an obvious exception - are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates - as happened in Lebanon - into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."[28]

Thus, the "database" of Al-Qaeda could be spread internationally so as to destabilize various regions, and thus provide the justification for intervention or even war. All that was needed was well-placed intelligence operatives to control key leadership positions within the terrorist organization. The great majority of both its higher-ups and nearly all al-Qaeda operatives would not have to be made aware of the organizations covert use as an arm of US geo-policy.

In the 1990s, Osama bin Laden "built a shadow air force to support his terrorist activities, using Afghanistan's national airline, a surplus U.S. Air Force jet and clandestine charters." Further, as the Los Angeles Times revealed:

With the Taliban's blessing, Bin Laden effectively had hijacked Ariana, the national civilian airline of Afghanistan. For four years, according to former U.S. aides and exiled Afghan officials, Ariana's passenger and charter flights ferried Islamic militants, arms, cash and opium through the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan. Members of Bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network were provided false Ariana identification that gave them free run of airports in the Middle East.

[...] Taliban authorities also opened the country's airstrips to high-ranking Persian Gulf state officials who routinely flew in for lavish hunting parties. Sometimes joined by Bin Laden and Taliban leaders, the dignitaries, who included several high-ranking officials from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates--left behind money, vehicles and equipment with their hosts, according to U.S. and Afghan accounts.[29]

Bin Laden's secret purchase of a US Air Force jet in 1992 "was used to ferry Al Qaeda commanders to East Africa, where they trained Somali tribesmen for attacks on U.S. peacekeeping forces," and Americans had "unwittingly" helped bin Laden "disguise the plane as a civilian jet." US security officials were well aware of Ariana airlines being used by al-Qaeda,[30]

Among the high-ranking Persian Gulf officials who flew to Afghanistan for "hunting trips" were Prince Turki al Faisal who ran Saudi intelligence until August 2001, "maintaining close ties with Bin Laden and the Taliban," as well as "Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, the Dubai crown prince and Emirates defense minister." On occasions both Osama bin Laden and Omar, the head of the Taliban, mingled with the hunters. Upon their departure, "the wealthy visitors often left behind late-model jeeps, trucks and supplies," which was "one way the Taliban got their equipment."[31]

What the article does not mention, however, was that the ISI was the prime sponsor of the Taliban, with the complete backing and facilitation of the CIA. The connection to the Saudi intelligence chief further strengthens the thesis that the Safari Club, created in 1976 by the French intelligence chief, may have survived as a covert intelligence network encompassing western intelligence agencies working through regional agencies such as those of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The German intelligence agency, the BND, revealed in 2004 that two Saudi companies that were linked with financing al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s were in fact front organizations for Saudi intelligence, with close connections to its chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal.[32]

Between 1989 and 2001, Billy Waugh, a CIA contractor, trained several al-Qaeda operatives around the world.[33] In 2002, it was revealed that, "British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice." In 1998, Libya had issued an arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden, yet:

British and US intelligence agencies buried the fact that the arrest warrant had come from Libya and played down the threat. Five months after the warrant was issued, al-Qaeda killed more than 200 people in the truck bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.[34]

However, "the resistance of Western intelligence agencies to the Libyan concerns can be explained by MI6's involvement with the al-Qaeda coup plot." Anas al-Liby, a Libyan al-Qaeda leader, "was given political asylum in Britain and lived in Manchester until May of 2000 when he eluded a police raid on his house and fled abroad."[35]

Following the end of the Cold War, many mujahideen fighters were relocated to Russia's unstable region of Chechnya, where the two main rebel leaders who came to power had previously been trained and funded by the CIA in Afghanistan. The war in Chechnya was planned in a secret meeting in 1996 attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking officials of the Pakistani ISI, whose involvement in Chechnya went "far beyond supplying the Chechens with weapons and expertise: the ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war."[36] In other words, the CIA was directing the war through the ISI.

The US and U.K. have supported Chechen separatism as it, "weakens Russia, advances U.S. power in the vital Caspian Sea region, and cripples a potential future rival."[37] Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of Russia, claimed that the British had been arming the Chechen rebels.[38] Oil also features prominently in the Chechen conflict, as Chechnya is home to large reserves of oil, as well as pipeline corridor routes being competed over by Russian and Anglo-American oil conglomerates. Thus, the Anglo-Americans support the Chechen separatists, while the Russians send in the military.[39] US intelligence helped fund and transport al-Qaeda into Chechnya in the early 1990s, American intelligence remained involved until the end of the decade, seeing the "sponsorship of 'Islamist jihad in the Caucasus' as a way to 'deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism'."[40]

The Global Domination Strategy for a New Century

Following upon the strategic objectives set out in the early 1990s for the United States and NATO to expand their hegemony across the world, in preventing the rise of rivals (China and Russia), and expanding the access of western economic interests to the Caspian region, new designs were being drawn in the powerful think-tank community in the United States as well as being outlined by highly influential strategic thinkers. The renewed strategy, hardly a break from the previously determined aim of encirclement and containment of China and Russia, simply expanded the scope of this strategy. From one faction, the neo-conservatives, came the initial aim at expanding militarily into the Middle East, starting with Iraq, while the more established hard-line realist hawks such as Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined a far more comprehensive and long-term strategy of world domination by controlling the entirety of Eurasia (Europe and Asia), and subsequently, Africa.

The neo-Conservative hawks in the US foreign policy establishment formed the think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in the 1990s. In 2000, they published their report, Rebuilding America's Defenses, in which they outlined a strategy for the United States in the "new century." Following where the Defense Planning Guidance document left off (during the first Bush administration), the report stated that, "the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars," and that there is a "need to retain sufficient combat forces to fight and win, multiple, nearly simultaneous major theatre wars," as "the Pentagon needs to begin to calculate the force necessary to protect, independently, US interests in Europe, East Asia and the Gulf at all times."[41]

It recommended the "regime change" of Saddam Hussein in Iraq as the "immediate justification" for a US military presence in the Gulf; however, "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." In advocating for a massive increase in defense spending, and outlining military operations against Iraq, North Korea, and possibly Iran, the report stated that, "further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."[42]

Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined a long-term American imperial strategy to control Eurasia in his book, The Grand Chessboard. He stated bluntly that, "it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America," and then made clear the imperial nature of his strategy:

To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.[43]

He further explained that the Central Asian nations (or "Eurasian Balkans" as he refers to them):

are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.[44]

Brzezinski emphasizes "that America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it."[45]

Preparing for War Against Afghanistan

In 1997, Taliban officials traveled to Texas to meet with Unocal Oil Company to discuss the possibility of a pipeline being built from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and to Pakistan. Unocal had agreements with Turkmenistan to sell its gas and with Pakistan to buy it. The missing link was getting the gas to Pakistan through Afghanistan, which is where the Taliban came into the picture. Unocal's main competitor in the pipeline bid was with Bridas, an Argentine firm. However, at this time, Afghanistan was still embroiled in civil war, making the prospect of a pipeline being built an unstable venture.[46]

A month before the Taliban visited Texas, Bridas, Unocal's main competitor, merged its oil and gas assets with Amoco-Argentina Oil, a subsidiary of British Petroleum (BP), one of the world's top three oil companies.[47] Shortly before this merger was finalized, Bridas had announced that it was close to signing a 2 billion dollar deal with the Taliban, saying "the talks were in their final stages."[48]

After meeting with Unocal officials in Texas, the Taliban announced in January of 1998 that, "they're close to reaching a final agreement on the building of a gas pipeline across Afghanistan," however, they "didn't indicate which of two competing companies the Taliban favoured."[49]

It is significant to note some of the important figures that were involved with the oil companies in relation to Central Asian gas reserves and pipeline projects. In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the (self-proclaimed) mastermind for the Afghan-Soviet War, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, and cofounder with David Rockefeller of the Trilateral Commission, was an adviser to BP-Amoco, specifically dealing with the Caspian region.[50] Unocal, in an effort to try to secure their pipeline contract with the Taliban, hired former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, former Reagan State Department Advisor on Afghanistan during the Afghan-Soviet War, was also brought on as a consultant for a group hired by Unocal. He would later become US envoy to Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001.[51]

The pipeline project then ran into significant problems when, in December of 1998, Unocal announced that it quit its Afghan pipeline project.[52] Between 1996 and 2001, Enron bosses had given millions of dollars in bribes to Taliban officials to secure contracts for building pipelines. After Unocal withdrew from the deal, Enron continued to pressure the Taliban to continue with a pipeline. In 1996, neighboring Uzbekistan signed a deal with Enron to develop Uzbek natural gas fields.[53] In 1997, Halliburton, with Dick Cheney as its CEO, secured a contract in Turkmenistan for exploration and drilling in the Caspian Sea basin.[54] However, in December of 2001, Enron filed for bankruptcy.

Eventually, Unocal pulled out of the deal as a result of Afghanistan's Taliban government not being fully recognized internationally as the legitimate Afghan government, and therefore, the pipeline project could not receive funding from international financial institutions like the World Bank. Unocal also pulled out as a result of the continual conflict raging in Afghanistan between various groups.[55]

In 1999, the Pentagon issued a secret document confirmed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense, which stated that, "Oil conflicts over production facilities and transport routes, particularly in the Persian Gulf and Caspian regions, are specifically envisaged" in the near future, stating that, "energy and resource issues will continue to shape international security." The document "vividly highlights how the highest levels of the US Defence community accepted the waging of an oil war as a legitimate military option."[56]

Before George W. Bush became President in January of 2001, there were plans at the highest levels of the United States government in beginning preparations for a war against Afghanistan, which included attempts to secure an alliance with the Russians in "calling for military action against Afghanistan."[57]

In March of 2001 it was reported that India has joined the US, Russia and Iran in an effort to militarily replace the Afghan Taliban government, with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to be used as bases to launch incursions into Afghanistan against the Taliban.[58] In the Spring of 2001, the US military envisaged and war gamed the entire scenario of a US attack on Afghanistan, which subsequently became the operational plan for the war.[59]

In the summer of 2001, the Taliban were leaked information from top-secret meetings that the Bush regime was planning to launch a military operation against the Taliban in July to replace the government. A US military contingency plan existed on paper to attack Afghanistan from the north by the end of the summer of 2001, as in, prior to 9/11.[60]

A former Pakistani diplomat told the BBC that the US was planning military action against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban before the 9/11 attacks. Niaz Naik, former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, "was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October." The invasion subsequently took place on October 7, 2001. Naik was told of this information at a secretive UN-sponsored meeting which took place in Berlin in July 2001, with officials from the US, Russia, and many Central Asian countries. He also stated that the US would launch the operation from their bases in Tajikistan, "where American advisers were already in place."[61]

As revealed by MSNBC, "President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaida two days before Sept. 11," and that, "The plan dealt with all aspects of a war against al-Qaida, ranging from diplomatic initiatives to military operations in Afghanistan." It outlined "essentially the same" war plan as was put into action following the 9/11 attacks. The National Security document was also submitted to Condoleezza Rice prior to the attacks, and included plans to attack the Taliban and remove them from power in Afghanistan.[62] Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that, "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11."[63]

Following the start of the war on Afghanistan in October of 2001, the Guardian's George Monbiot wrote that the war "may also be a late colonial adventure," as "Afghanistan is as indispensable to the regional control and transport of oil in central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East." It is worth quoting Monbiot at some length:

Afghanistan has some oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a major strategic concern. Its northern neighbours, by contrast, contain reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998, Dick Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil services company, remarked: "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.

Transporting all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic control over the central Asian republics, which is precisely what the west has spent 10 years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US has been seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of "diversifying energy supply" and to penetrate the world's most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and competition is intense. In south Asia, by contrast, demand is booming and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India, in other words, is far more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe.

As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, in 1995 the US oil company Unocal started negotiating to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea. The company's scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph reported that "oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America's, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan". Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered.

For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to have been determined principally by Unocal's interests. In 1997 a US diplomat told Rashid "the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [the former US oil consortium in Saudi Arabia] pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that."

[. . . ] In February 1998, John Maresca, [Unocal's] head of international relations, told representatives that the growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined that Afghanistan remained "the only other possible route" for Caspian oil. The company, once the Afghan government was recognised by foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped to build a 1,000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million barrels a day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in east Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.

But Afghanistan's strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US energy information administration reported that "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan". Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that such plans no longer figure in its strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of "Corridor 8", an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern.

American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means that the US should control military, economic and political development worldwide. China has responded by seeking to expand its interests in central Asia. The defence white paper Beijing published last year argued that "China's fundamental interests lie in ... the establishment and maintenance of a new regional security order". In June, China and Russia pulled four central Asian republics into a "Shanghai cooperation organisation". Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world multi-polarisation", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum dominance.

If the US succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing them with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if the US then binds the economies of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed not only terrorism, but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China. Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the western domination of Asia.[64]

As revealed by the San Francisco Chronicle in November of 2001, "the United States and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime in place in Afghanistan around 1994 -- a regime that would end the country's civil war and thus ensure the safety of the Unocal pipeline project." And so:

the State Department and Pakistan's Inter- Services Intelligence agency agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. As recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official, all in the hopes of returning to the days of dollar-a- gallon gas. Pakistan, naturally, would pick up revenues from a Karachi oil port facility.[65]

Clearly, the plans and purposes for war on Afghanistan had been well established. What was needed was the public justification. The people will not readily support a war to dominate strategic energy reserves and pipeline routes halfway around the world. Besides the fact that this would be an admission of empire, something that still a great many in the American public have failed to reconcile and accept, it would be a difficult task to ask Americans to die for Unocal. What the American people needed to rouse their appetite for war was to have their collective consciousness reshaped by fear; what was needed was terror.

Part III of "The Imperial Anatomy of al-Qaeda" takes the reader through 9/11 and America's Secret Terror Campaign.

* Andrew Gavin Marshall is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is co-editor, with Michel Chossudovsky, of the recent book, "The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century," available to order at Globalresearch.ca.

Notes

[1]        Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism. (Northampton: Olive Branch Press, 2005), page 331

[2]        Pipelineistan: The rules of the game. Asia Times: January 26, 2002:
http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/features/fex20867.htm

Seymour Hersh, The Price of Oil. The New Yorker: July 9, 2001

[3]        Tyler, Patrick E. U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop: A One Superpower World. The New York Times: March 8, 1992.
http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/wolfowitz1992.htm

[4]        Ibid.

[5]        John Roberts, Roots of Allied Farce. The American Spectator: May 4, 1999:
http://www.antiwar.com/spectator1.html

[6]        Ibid.

[7]        Michel Chossudovsky, Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonizing Bosnia-Herzegovina. Global Research: February 19, 2002:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=370

[8]        David Binder, Yugoslavia Seen Breaking Up Soon. The New York Times: November 28, 1990

[9]        Gary Wilson, New reports show secret U.S. role in Balkan war. Workers World News Service: 1996: http://www.workers.org/ww/1997/bosnia.html
[10]      Ian Traynor, Croat general on trial for war crimes. The Guardian: March 12, 2008:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/12/warcrimes.balkans

[11]      Adam LeBor, Croat general Ante Gotovina stands trial for war crimes. The Times Online: March 11, 2008:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3522828.ece

[12]      Brendan O’Neill, 'You are only allowed to see Bosnia in black and white'. Spiked: January 23, 2004:
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA374.htm

[13]      Richard J. Aldrich, America used Islamists to arm the Bosnian Muslims. The Guardian: April 22, 2002:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/apr/22/warcrimes.comment/print

[14]      Tim Judah, German spies accused of arming Bosnian Muslims. The Telegraph: April 20, 1997:
http://www.serbianlinks.freehosting.net/german.htm

[15]      Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: pages 149-150

[16]      History Commons, Serbia and Montenegro: 1996-1999: Albanian Mafia and KLA Take Control of Balkan Heroin Trafficking Route. The Center for Cooperative Research:
http://www.historycommons.org/topic.jsp?topic=country_serbia_and_montenegro

[17]      History Commons, Serbia and Montenegro: 1997: KLA Surfaces to Resist Serbian Persecution of Albanians. The Center for Cooperative Research:
http://www.historycommons.org/topic.jsp?topic=country_serbia_and_montenegro

[18]      History Commons, Serbia and Montenegro: February 1998: State Department Removes KLA from Terrorism List. The Center for Cooperative Research:
http://www.historycommons.org/topic.jsp?topic=country_serbia_and_montenegro

[19]      Marcia Christoff Kurop, Al Qaeda's Balkan Links. The Wall Street Journal: November 1, 2001:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/561291/posts

[20]      Global Research, German Intelligence and the CIA supported Al Qaeda sponsored Terrorists in Yugoslavia. Global Research: February 20, 2005:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=431

[21]      Michel Chossudovsky, Kosovo: The US and the EU support a Political Process linked to Organized Crime. Global Research: February 12, 2008:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8055

[22]      Andrew Gavin Marshall, Breaking Yugoslavia. Geopolitical Monitor: July 21, 2008:
http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/content/backgrounders/2008-07-21/breaking-yugoslavia/

[23]      Aleksandar Pavi, Correspondence between German Politicians Reveals the Hidden Agenda behind Kosovo's "Independence". Global Research: March 12, 2008:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8304

[24]      Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind, The Third American Empire. The New York Times: January 2, 1996:
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/02/opinion/the-third-american-empire.html?pagewanted=1

[25]      George Monbiot, A discreet deal in the pipeline. The Guardian: February 15, 2001:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2001/feb/15/oil.georgemonbiot

[26]      Ibid.

[27]      Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. Owl Books, 2005: page 332-333

[28]      Bernard Lewis, Rethinking the Middle East. Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992: pages 116-117

[29]      Stephen Braun and Judy Pasternak, Long Before Sept. 11, Bin Laden Aircraft Flew Under the Radar. The Los Angeles Times: November 18, 2001:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030618094400/http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-111801osamair,0,7388562.story

[30]      Ibid.

[31]      Ibid.

[32]      John Crewdson, German Intelligence Points to Two Saudi Companies As Having Al Qaeda Links. The Chicago Tribune: March 31, 2004

[33]      Billy Waugh and Tim Keown, Hunting the Jackal: A Special Forces and CIA Ground Soldier's Fifty-Year Career Hunting America's Enemies. (William Morrow, 2004), pages 173, 303, 308

[34]      Martin Bright, MI6 'halted bid to arrest bin Laden'. The Guardian: November 10, 2002:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/nov/10/uk.davidshayler

[35]      Ibid.

[36]      Michel Chossudovsky, Who Is Osama bin Laden? Global Research: September 12, 2001:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html

[37]      Mark Ames, Dividing Russia. AlterNet: June 29, 2005:
http://www.alternet.org/story/23230

[38]      Adrian Blomfield and Mike Smith, Gorbachev: US could start new Cold War. The Telegraph: May 6, 2008:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1933223/Gorbachev-US-could-start-new-Cold-War.html

[39]      Marcus Warren, Back garden 'oil barons' spring up in Chechnya. The Telegraph: June 7, 2002:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1396582/Back-garden-oil-barons-spring-up-in-Chechnya.html

Peter Dale Scott, Pipeline Politics - Oil Behind Plan for U.S. Troops in Georgia. New American Media: February 28, 2002:
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=812

Michel Chossudovsky, Who Is Osama bin Laden? Global Research: September 12, 2001:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html

Sharon LaFraniere, How Jihad Made Its Way to Chechnya. The Washington Post: April 26, 2003:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39482-2003Apr25?language=printer

BBC, Obituary: Chechen rebel Khattab. BBC World News: April 26, 2002:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1952053.stm

[40]      Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Our Terrorists. The New Internationalist: October 2009:
http://www.newint.org/features/2009/10/01/blowback-extended-version/

[41]      PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Project for the New American Century: September 2000, pages 6, 8, 9, 14, 51:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm

[42]      Ibid.

[43]      Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. Basic Books, 1997: Page 40

[44]      Ibid, page 124.

[45]      Ibid, page 148.

[46]      BBC, Taleban in Texas for talks on gas pipeline. BBC World: December 4, 1997:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/west_asia/37021.stm

[47]      Thomson Financial, Amoco Argentina-Oil Assets acquires Bridas Corp-South American Oil from Bridas Corp. Thomson Financial Mergers and Acquisitions: November 17, 1997:
http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/Thomson_M&A/Amoco_Argentina_Oil_Assets_acquires_Bridas_Corp_South_American_Oil_from_Bridas_Corp-693739040

[48]      BBC, Afghan Pipeline Deal Close. BBC World: November 3, 1997:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/west_asia/21007.stm

[49]      BBC, Taleban says it's ready to sign Turkmen pipeline deal. BBC News: January 4, 1998:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/s/w_asia/44521.stm

[50]      Brian Becker, Where have all the cold warriors gone? U.S. oil giants drain Azerbaijan. Workers World: August 21, 1997:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/029.html

[51]      Mary Pat Flaherty, David B. Ottaway and James V. Grimaldi, How Afghanistan Went Unlisted as Terrorist Sponsor. The Washington Post: November 5, 2001:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-478705.html

[52]      Steven Levine, Unocal Quits Afghanistan Pipeline Project. The New York Times: December 5, 1998:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/1990s/nyt120598.html

[53]      History Commons, 1996-September 11, 2001: Enron Gives Taliban Millions in Bribes in Effort to Get Afghan Pipeline Built.
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a96enronbribe#a96enronbribe

[54]      Halliburton, Halliburton Alliance Awarded Integrated Service Contract Offshore Caspian Sea In Turkmenistan. 1997 Press Releases: October 27, 1997:
http://www.halliburton.com/news/archive/1997/hesnws_102797.jsp

[55]      Dale Allen Pfeiffer, The Forging of 'Pipelineistan'. From the Wilderness: 2002:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/071102_pipelineistan.html

[56]      Ritt Goldstein, Oil wars Pentagon's policy since 1999. Sydney Morning Herald: May 20, 2003:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/19/1053196528488.html

[57]      S. Frederick Starr, Afghanistan Land Mine. The Washington Post: December 19, 2000:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/linkscopy/AfghanLM.html

[58]      Rahul Bedi, India joins anti-Taliban coalition. Jane’s Security News: March 15, 2001:
http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jir/jir010315_1_n.shtml

[59]      SMH, Defence redefined means securing cheap energy. Sydney Morning Herald: December 26, 2002:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/25/1040511092926.html

[60]      David Leigh, Attack and counter-attack. The Guardian: September 26, 2001:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4264545,00.html

[61]      George Arney, US 'planned attack on Taleban'. BBC News: September 18, 2001:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1550366.stm

[62]      Jim Miklaszewski and Alex Johnson, U.S. sought attack on al-Qaida. MSNBC: May 16, 2002:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4587368/

[63]      Michael Meacher, This War on Terrorism is Bogus. The Guardian: September 6, 2003:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/sep/06/september11.iraq

[64]      George Monbiot, America's pipe dream. The Guardian: October 23, 2001:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/23/afghanistan.terrorism11

[65]      Ted Rall, It’s About Oil. The San Francisco Chronicle: November 2, 2001:
http://articles.sfgate.com/2001-11-02/opinion/17625946_1_kazak-caspian-sea-black-sea

Related posts:

• The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the “Arc of Crisis” (Part I)
• American Empire!
• Death of the American Empire

By Mark Morford | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

By Monte Wolverton

I come bearing fabulous news. There is no longer any need to concern yourself with pesky trifles like love, a mortgage, child rearing, planting a garden, dreams, money, shoes, wristwatches, parking spaces, mysterious rashes, foreign policy, baseball, bridge tolls or generally caring about much of anything in particular.

I am delighted to report it will all be over soon. If not sooner. It's true.

And it's a good thing, too, because I was just reading up on six of the worst-case scenarios resulting from the BP spill, all sorts of horrors and tragedies, abuses and unspeakables, from dire seafood shortages to horrifying ecosystem destruction, wildlife mutilation to all the years and decades before the gulf region will be anywhere near recovered. These scenarios all were, in a word, bleak. They were, in three more, thoroughly f--ing depressing.

They were also, whoops, from about two months ago. So I clicked around and quickly found another, far more recent worst-case scenario article, and boy, were its scenarios worse indeed. So awful that they effectively made the earlier batch seem meek and laughable and even sort of quaint.

So it's come to this. Every day in the media, a sort of deranged, comical footrace to figure out which worst-case scenario is really the worst, because every day comes a new stat, prediction, photo, possibility for abject horror we hadn't even conceptualized yet because, well, we've never exactly been here before, not at this scale. How bad can it all get, really? No one has a clue. Joy!

But I'm not at all worried. Because the fact is, almost none of those worst-case scenarios will actually come to pass. Do you know why? Because there are two or three even worse worst-case scenarios that easily trump any you might be reading about anywhere. Ultra, mega, super worst-case scenarios that make all the rest seem like a little splotch on your pretty new iPhone 4.

So, just what are these supermegaworst-case scenarios? They all have one thing in common: Each one of them, all by itself, spells the end of modern life as we know it. Utter annihilation. The End. I am so not kidding. OK, maybe a little. But only until we all die. After that, not kidding at all.

BP Will Kill Us All Scenario #1: Everyone knows that, early on in the spill, BP was thoughtful enough to pump millions of gallons of a horrible chemical dispersant called Corexit 9500 into the gusher, a violently toxic compound so notoriously lethal it's been banned for years by the European union. Obama & Co finally caught on to BP's tactic and told them to knock it off.

Too late. Obscure Russian scientists tell us Corexit's deadly compounds are now breaking up and evaporating into North American rainclouds, which will shortly begin raining down complete toxic hell on us all, poisoning all crops, babies, cats, Christians, Starbucks baristas and none-too-bright redneck videographers -- though it will somehow magically spare the really good jazz clubs in Louisiana and that one guy who scored the goal for the USA in the World Cup, because he's a freakin' hero.

These scientists say the toxic rain could be so poisonous, it will destroy the entire food chain and plunge North America into chaos, rendering the entire region unlivable, with any straggling survivors crawling desperately up to Canada, where they will be promptly made into slave labor to build hockey arenas and drink lager and fade into the woods.

Does that sound dubious? Totally implausible? Fine. No problem. For there is another, even better backup apocalypse scenario, even more melodramatic and wickedly cinematic, and therefore much more likely to come to pass.

BP Will Kill Us All Scenario #2: Apparently, deep in the ocean floor, just beneath the gushing oil, lives a massive bubble of methane gas the size of... oh, let's just say Texas. Maybe Oklahoma. South Carolina. Someplace gassy and slightly rancid and always ready to explode at the poke of a big phallic stick.

This is the drama: All our mucking around on the ocean floor could trigger a methane explosion so gargantuan, it will cause a tsunami. Not just any tsunami, mind you, but a "supersonic tsunami" so ultra-awesomely massive it will effortlessly wipe out the much of the gulf coast states, killing millions and completely destabilizing the nation and inducing zombie riots in the streets as everyone wails over the loss of Florida. Or, you know, not.

So there you have it. Toxic rain and supersonic tsunamis, the end of North America as we know it. Done. Finished. Certainly, one of those two scenarios is guaranteed to come to pass, right? Maybe, if we're really lucky, even both?

All right, fine. In the off-off chance that invisible Russian scientists and nutball doomsayers are wrong (impossible!), well, there is one more glorious mega scenario to consider. There is a backup to the backup to the backup. Hey, we're Americans. When it comes to dorky apocalyptic visions, we got you covered.

Here is your grand finale: A new survey says that a disturbingly large percentage of Americans -- 40 percent, to be exact -- actually believe Jesus will return by 2050, likely riding on the back of a flaming asteroid (30 percent think one will hit us by then), waving a cowboy hat and yodeling as he careens toward our hapless blue dot of inequity, pain and lousy AT&T reception.

Jesus will then crash land in Texas, wink at Dubya and Sarah Palin, and then sweep up all the True Believers in their beige Dodge minivans just as the earth shudders and implodes, just like one of those swirling black holes in "Star Trek."

How cool will that be? Answer: It will be very cool indeed. It is so cool, in fact, it totally wipes out the need to care much about anything at all. See how easy? Now, who wants pie?

Source: ICH

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Some Palestinians held candles, others turned their fingers into candles during a protest calling for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, in front of the Red Cross headquarters in Gaza City. photos: Reuters, AP

By Saleh Al-Naami | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Dr Moawya Hassanein, head of Emergency Medicine at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, warns that the lives of thousands of patients with kidney failure who require dialysis three times a week are at risk because of power failures. "There is little we can do at hospitals for patients with heart disease, cancer, in the ICU or premature babies," Hassanein declared. "We have power generators but no one can guarantee that they are enough or will not run out of fuel."

There is concern in Gaza about deteriorating environmental conditions, since water treatment stations could shut down because currently they rely solely on power generators. Several have already stopped operating, resulting in sewage water flooding some streets and refugee camps.

Walid Sayel, the executive director of the Palestine Electricity Company and chairman of the Gaza Power Generation Station, called on all Arab, international and Palestinian parties to swiftly find a solution for the power outage in Gaza. "The blackout is a critical development which requires everyone to shoulder their responsibility in saving the residents of Gaza, first and foremost, for humanitarian reasons," Sayel asserted. "The need for electricity is tantamount to the need for water and air. We are facing a serious humanitarian crisis and no one knows how it will end."

Although some Palestinian officials claim that a partial solution has been reached to resolve the crisis, thanks to $3 million from the EU to buy fuel, it is a temporary answer which will generate electricity to some areas in Gaza for only 12 hours a day. At the same time, there are no guarantees that more funds will be available to provide electricity in Gaza, even if only partially.

The power outage has resulted in a war of words between the governments in Gaza and Ramallah. In the beginning, the government in Ramallah stated that the power cut is a result of the EU not transferring the necessary funds to buy fuel. The EU vehemently denied this, saying that it regularly and routinely sends money for fuel. The Brussels-based European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza (ECESG) confirmed that the EU had transferred the necessary funds. In a recent statement, ECESG called on the Ramallah government "to stop using unrealistic excuses to evade its responsibility, and direct the needed funds to Gaza, as provided by the EU, to pay for electricity fuel in Gaza."

The statement continued that "we have received messages from several EU foreign ministers assuring us that funds are transferred to the Fatah authorities in Ramallah, and that they have clearly pledged that they will pay for the heavy fuel needed for the power station." ECESG condemned "manipulating the humanitarian needs of 1.5 million Palestinians in political bickering, since this could cost hundreds of Palestinians their lives, including the sick, and threatens severe humanitarian disasters." The statement further denied claims that the EU has halted or reduced funds for fuel at the main Gaza power station, saying that payments for Palestinian service sectors are made regularly to Salam Fayyad's government.

Some Palestinians held candles, others turned their fingers into candles during a protest calling for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, in front of the Red Cross headquarters in Gaza City. photos: Reuters, AP

For his part, Ziyad Al-Zaza, deputy prime minister and minister of economy in Ismail Haniyeh's cabinet in Gaza, accused the government in Ramallah of "stealing" the funds needed for Gaza's power station. "Salam Fayyad's government is embezzling the funds for Gaza's electricity and sends limited amounts of solar fuel, only a third of what is needed," stated Al-Zaza.

He asserted that his government is in consultations to import industrial solar, gasoline, regular solar and natural gas energy through the Rafah border crossing. "We do not wish to remain hostage to the occupation and its agents," Al-Zaza retorted. "The Rafah crossing must be opened to people and commodities. We want to rely on the Arab and Muslim world, not Israeli occupation." He further argued that the blackout is caused by a "conspiracy" against the Palestinian people in Gaza "in order to bring them to their knees and break down their willpower".

Meanwhile, the power outage is claiming more lives. Buying a power generator is no guarantee of improving standards of living, but could result in the opposite. For instance, the three Boshr children were playing at their home in Abssan, southeast of Gaza, happy that their power generator was working at a time when the entire area was in pitch darkness. Shortly afterwards, the generator exploded, instantly killing all three. Thus, their family joined a long list of Palestinian families who have lost loved ones to exploding generators.

For many in Gaza, power generators have become time bombs at home. In Gabalaya Refugee Camp, a mother and three of her children died when the generator at their family home blew up. In other instances, gases from the generators have killed residents. Three members of the same family living in Khan Younis died after inhaling exhaust fumes containing carbon dioxide from their generator.

According to statistics by the Civil Defence Authority in Gaza, 82 fires occurred in the past three months as a result of faulty usage of power generators. Several died or suffered from burns and asphyxiation in the fires. Salem Abu Ouda, a technician who specialises in generators, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the biggest problem is that the majority of generators being smuggled into Gaza are of poor quality. Abu Ouda, who repairs tens of generators in his workshop, stated that long operating hours and substandard quality are the reasons behind these disastrous accidents.

On another plane, it was announced that the Ship Intifada will relaunch soon as a sign of intensified efforts to lift the siege on Gaza. Gamal Al-Khodari, the chairman of the Popular Committee for Confronting the Siege, revealed that some 10-20 vessels will participate in this effort, including ones from Malaysia, Turkey and Europe. Ship Intifada is scheduled to begin at the end of April or early May, depending on weather conditions.

The ships will be carrying several parliamentarians, politicians and media people from around the world, as well as much needed supplies. These include construction materials such as steel and cement, supplies to meet medical, humanitarian relief, school and children's needs, as well as power generators. Al-Khodari hoped that the campaign would result in lifting the siege and establishing a route by sea between Gaza and the rest of the world, which would allow freedom of movement. Several vessels have already arrived in Gaza, while many were prevented by occupation forces from approaching the coast of Gaza as a result of the last war.

Source: Al-Ahram Weekly

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By Sharon Weinberger* (Spectrum**) | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The Palestinian power plant has endured bombings, embargoes and blockades: Can it ever fully power Gaza's grid?

Within days, the plant's desperate engineers came up with a novel solution: They hooked up 170 twelve-volt car batteries to restart the plant's turbines. To everyone's amazement, including the engineers themselves, the impromptu kludge actually worked. "It was an abnormal situation," notes Rafiq Maliha, one of the plant's managers, who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering.

Triumphs, even small ones, are uncommon these days in Gaza, which has endured a devastating run of strife, death, and dysfunction. A three-week war that began in late December 2008 killed 1660 Palestinians and 13 Israelis and left 4000 homes and 80 government buildings wrecked or seriously damaged. Since 2007, Gaza's 360 square kilometers have been controlled by Hamas, a militant Islamic group that much of the world, including the European Union and the United States, regards as a terrorist organization.

Conceived in 1994 during a short-lived interlude of relative tranquility that began after the Oslo Accords, the Gaza power plant, which operates under the official name of the Gaza Power Generating Co., was part of a larger blueprint to lessen Palestinian dependence on Israel for such basic municipal services as electricity, education, and security. But today, with the other parts of the blueprint long abandoned, the plant's 100 or so engineers are reduced to operating the 140-megawatt plant in ways its designers never anticipated.

Some days, notes Maliha, the power plant doesn't even have the fuel needed to provide transportation for its employees, a nightmare for a facility that requires 24-hour support. Other days, something as simple as a faulty temperature sensor can shut down operations, because the plant has no easy way to obtain a new one. "We managed to survive up till now, but things are becoming more difficult," says Maliha. "We try to manage with temporary solutions, but then the temporary becomes permanent, and suddenly you have a complete failure."

Like the territory itself, Gaza's electrical system-and its lone power plant-seems stuck in a kind of chaotic limbo. Life for a plant engineer here is a daily struggle to keep the operation running amid chronic shortages of fuel, spare parts, expertise, and basic building materials. Somehow, this solitary power plant wheezes on. This is what engineering looks like at the edge, where engineers keep the lights on amid bombings, embargoes, intrigue, and instability in one of the world's longest-simmering combat zones.

You approach the power plant in central Gaza on a dirt road in an area that seems to lack any modern infrastructure. Today, on a weekday afternoon in early June, the facility looks all but deserted. A cat is asleep in the guard station. A sign near the entrance to the plant, advertising the number of days with no accidents, hasn't been updated since 2008. Maliha, who greets a visitor, looks exhausted. He's been involved with the plant since its inception and is accustomed to patiently explaining its difficulties to visitors. An alarm goes off somewhere in the plant as he is speaking, and he doesn't even pause.

With its four 24-MW diesel-fueled combustion turbines and two 22-MW steam units, this plant was the longtime dream of Palestinians who wanted to wean Gaza of its total dependence on Israel for power. "This plant was supposed to cover demand for the whole Gaza Strip," Maliha explains. But today, only half those turbines are working, and the plant is producing only about 60 out of a potential 140 MW.

The US $140 million project was troubled from the start. Construction had been under way for barely a year when the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada, began in 2000. Worsening relations between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority made any projects more difficult to complete, not to mention risky for private investors. Nor did the situation get any better when the plant began operating in 2002, shortly after one of the initial investors, the notorious U.S.-based energy firm Enron, collapsed.

Today one of the biggest problems is getting enough fuel. It's one of the many problems you encounter running a power plant in a war zone. Since 2007, Israel has restricted the amount of fuel it rations to Gaza, leaving the plant to operate at only partial capacity. At one point in 2007, the European Union, which pays for the fuel brought into Gaza, cut off the supply because it was concerned Hamas was skimming money. Deliveries soon resumed, and the plant continues to get the rationed fuel. Under the original blueprint, the plant would have been fueled by natural gas, but today it is still dependent on liquid diesel fuel. "Everything here is temporary," Maliha says with a wry laugh. He estimates that the plant, which receives about 2.2 million liters of rationed diesel fuel per week, needs over twice that amount, about 4.9 million liters, to operate at full capacity. Without fuel, the power plant stops, and when the power plant stops, things start to break. "Fuel tanks without fuel become rusty, and they're destroyed," Maliha says. The storage tanks grow rusty, the rust contaminates the fuel, and the contaminated fuel damages the equipment. Then the turbines shut down, leading to more failures when engineers try to start them up again.

Gaza appears to carve a rectangular, 41-km chunk out of Israel, its width ranging between 6 km at its narrowest and 12 km at its widest, at the Egyptian border. The 1967 Arab-Israeli War left the strip under Israeli control, which remained the status quo until 2005, when Israel unilaterally pulled its military forces out of the Gaza Strip. Palestinians could then move about freely within Gaza, but Israel's disengagement, and the subsequent political ascendancy of Hamas within Gaza, led to the present situation, in which Gaza is effectively in international limbo and its residents cut off from the world.

The region's airspace, borders, and coastline continue to be under Israeli control. But other than allowing for basic humanitarian aid, Israel neither officially acknowledges any legal responsibility for Gaza nor recognizes the territory as an independent state.

Click to enlarge

Gaza's total demand, according to estimates by the Gaza Electricity Distribution Co. (GEDCo), is 244 MW. But even when the power plant is up and running, Gaza gets at most only 198 MW. The power plant-when it's working-contributes about 60 MW; 121 MW are brought in from Israel (but only if all 10 feeding lines are in good order), and Egypt powers the southern Gaza city of Rafah with another 17 MW. So the deficit, under the best of circumstances, is 18 percent. Adding to the complexity, the "grid" is not actually integrated, meaning that power from Egypt, Israel, and the power plant can't be diverted within Gaza to make up for losses in another part. That means, for example, if the power plant stops working, electricity from Egypt can't be rerouted to Gaza City.

If anything, it's remarkable that Gaza's grid isn't in worse shape. In 2006, Hamas won the parliamentary elections in Gaza, and after a series of violent clashes with Fatah (its main political rival), took over control of the government and security forces. Israel bombed the power plant in late 2006, destroying six transformers and halting operations; the bombing was in retaliation for Hamas's June kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit (Shalit is believed to be alive and in captivity somewhere in Gaza). The Palestinian National Authority protested the bombing of a civilian power plant, while the Israeli military described the strike as a military blow aimed at Hamas. The bombing left thousands of Gazans in the dark and pushed the sewage and water systems, which rely on electricity, to the brink of collapse.

The power plant sputtered back to life in 2007; it was partially insured by the Overseas Private Investment Corp., an agency of the U.S. government, Israel's staunchest ally. But the plant had barely been resuscitated when another setback hit. Israel, declaring Hamas a "hostile entity," sharply curtailed electricity and fuel supplies to Gaza, setting off the first of what would be periodic energy crises that continue to this day.

The most recent war, which began on 27 December 2008, brought yet another catastrophe to Gaza. Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a three-week military offensive retaliating against Hamas for a series of rocket attacks that fell on civilian areas in southern Israel. The military operations, which combined strikes from the air and sea with a ground assault, damaged transformers and several of the transmission lines that brought power from Israel. Gaza also lost a line from Egypt during the offensive. Lacking fuel, the power plant shut down completely. Vast swaths of Gaza were left once again to fend for themselves in massive blackouts.

The Israeli offensive also knocked out three of the four remaining lines from Israel to the Gaza Governorate. So for the first two weeks of the war, most residents of Gaza City, Gaza's main population center, lived in darkness. By the time Israeli forces withdrew in late January 2009, GEDCo reckoned that 40 percent of the population was entirely without electricity, while the other 60 percent were getting only intermittent power. In all, GEDCo estimates that the military operations caused some $10 million in damages to its systems.

Even in wartime, life goes on. GEDCo still has to deal with everyday issues, like ensuring that customers pay for their electricity use. That's no small feat in a region where 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty line: GEDCo estimates that it manages to collect only about 25 percent of what it is owed by its customers.

The company's Web site proclaims that "paying the bill is a religious obligation." Every day in Gaza, GEDCo's collectors fan out over the territory with sheets of paper identifying delinquent customers. If the customer refuses to pay or agree to a payment plan, the technician will often immediately climb a pole and physically disconnect the cables. Some of the disconnected customers attempt to reconnect the line themselves or hire someone else to do it. In that case, GEDCo takes drastic action, and the phrase "cutting the power" becomes more than a figure of speech, as this reporter saw on a sunny afternoon in late May.

Perched atop a wooden pole on a Gaza City street lined with buildings still pockmarked by mortars from Israel's recent military incursion, a maintenance worker at first glance appeared to be repairing a power line leading to a two-story building. But a split second later, the line dangled free-the building's connection to the Gaza grid had just been severed.

Unlike GEDCo, a public utility, the power plant is a commercial operation that must produce and sell electricity to stay in business. The Gaza power plant has been operating at only partial capacity-today mostly because of the blockade. For the moment, only four of the plant's six turbines are running. At one point, the power plant's managers had hoped to add an additional six turbines to the facility, bringing total generation up to 280 MW. But now, because some of the plant's transformers were damaged during the war, it cannot handle full output from even the working turbines. Siemens, the turbines' manufacturer, sends its technicians to work at the plant, but only if the power plant pays a private security company to protect them.

Rebuilding after the most recent war, with key parts unavailable or in very short supply, demanded resourcefulness. GEDCo had to erect wooden poles to replace damaged medium-voltage steel poles. But even if GEDCo could get steel poles, it couldn't obtain the concrete needed to set the poles, because as part of the economic blockade, Israel does not allow any concrete into Gaza, making it an especially prized commodity.

Major Guy Inbar, a spokesman for the Israeli defense ministry's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, which is responsible for Gaza issues, says Israel has not received any applications for cement or steel poles from the Palestinian power authority. And while some equipment was approved for the power plant, Inbar says, some other items were denied for what Israel determined were security concerns. Inbar acknowledges that the long list of needed items must be reviewed individually, which makes for a long wait.

The blockade has also led to shortages of certain wires and cables, so GEDCo has had to use whatever it has on hand. In many cases the cable sizes are inadequate for the loads, leading to excessive heat and high resistive losses. Lines that should be replaced are left in place with splices and connectors. Transformers are routinely overloaded, admits Suheil Skeik, GEDCo's general manager. "We risk them by overloading, but we have no other way," he says.

For the power plant, the inability to get parts and supplies has been particularly challenging. Israel's offensive has been over for nearly a year, but the power plant must still clear every spare part with Israeli authorities, a system that Maliha insists is unworkable. Sometimes the plant gets approval; sometimes it doesn't. "If you are running a power plant, you need a continuous flow of spare parts and consumables," he notes.

Skeik's radical solution is to eliminate Israel from the energy equation. Fueling the plant, he explains, means relying on Israel. But without energy and fuel from Israel, what is the future of the grid? "We look to Egypt as our solution," he maintains. But it's hard to see how that would work, because Egypt also cooperates in the Gaza blockade. For several years, there have been plans to put in place ten 22-kilovolt feeder lines to increase the electricity supply from Egypt; but the project, which was to be funded by the Islamic Development Bank, has been put on hold practically from the day it was first proposed in 2003.

Israel continues to insist that the weekly fuel ration is enough. That fuel enables the plant to produce about 65 MW, according to Israel's estimates; Inbar insists that this is "the needed amount for the humanitarian needs of the civil population." Assuming the situation remains stable, Israel will provide "enough power supply for the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza." Israeli spokesman Inbar did not say how Israel determines the amount required for these needs.

The Palestinians see Israel's actions differently. "The Israelis want everything closed down: electricity, materials, everything," says Skeik.

One thing is certain: The power situation, like the political situation, has reached a seemingly insurmountable impasse. "It was the first of its kind in the Palestinian National Authority," recalls Maliha of the power plant's construction. "It was promising because at the beginning, there was talk about regional power sharing between different countries." Now, he says, all those dreams have evaporated. There are currently no plans for expansion.

Asked about the future, Maliha responds with an answer typical in Gaza these days. "You cannot make a plan; there is no plan," he says. "You live for the day."

* Sharon Weinberger is a journalist, a reporter for Wired's award-winning national security blog, Danger Room, and the author of Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld. She examines the opposite end of the high-tech spectrum in "Powerless in Gaza", a look at the engineers who try to keep the lights on in that war-torn region. Her reporting trip to Gaza was supported by The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund.

** SPECTRUM is the magazine of the world's leading organisation for the advancement of technology, IEEE – The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. This article originally appeared in print as "Powerless in Gaza" in their December 2009 issue and in the online version as "Gaza Power Strip".

Related posts:

• ACTION ALERT: Holocaust in Gaza!
• Dave Himmelstein – Gaza sets the standard
• Impact of Israel’s fuel and electricity cuts to Gaza

Illustration by Carlos Latuff

By Mazin Qumsiyeh*

My fellow Americans.

Millions of you and not special interest groups elected us to office on a platform of change and it is time for us all to deliver. I am laying out a program to do so but first we have to face some painful truths that have increasingly become obvious...

On the economy:

As you know, we now have the largest ever recorded debt for this government (at 11.9 trillion dollars meaning some $40,000 national debt per citizen of the USA). We have also just recorded the largest deficit in budget in history with our government expenses outpacing revenue by $1.4 trillion for the last fiscal year. The fact that our citizens and corporations are also frequently in debt to the same creditors means that those creditors hold a very strong stranglehold on our economy and our nation's future. Some of those people are individuals who have traditionally owed their office to the US government- people like royal families in the Gulf Arab states. Others have far more influence and control over International financial institutions. The future of America cannot be held hostage to those foreign interests.

A study by the economist Thomas R. Stauffer showed that the cost of the US support to Israel until 2003 was $3 trillion (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2003). I have asked an independent team of economic advisors (not including any supporters of Israel or of Palestinians) to evaluate these figures and the panel concluded that the figures are actually somewhat higher. Seven years ago, our country has invaded and occupied Iraq costing us thousands of American lives and over a million Iraqi lives but also costing us an additional $3 trillion (see the book by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stieglitz and Kennedy School of Government professor Linda J. Bilmes, “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict”). That we attacked Iraq in contravention of the UN charter and at the behest of a group of neoconservative Zionists is now well established (see the book by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt on this Israel-first lobby). The same lobby is pushing us for conflict with Iran which other economists estimate will be even costlier (Iran has a size and population three times that of Iraq and its military is far more advanced than Iraq ever was even before the sanctions were applied to Iraq in the 1990s). In short, our support for Israel (even excluding conflict with Iran) has cost us more than half our national debt of $12 trillion. My administration wants to get our house in order and spend and live within our means. These desires shared by most of us must now be matched by actions and I call on us in the executive branch and on both houses of Congress to get together to effect a real change that will prevent any further erosion in our economic power and slowly begin to reclaim our rights.

On national security:

My fellow Americans....I was gratified to receive the Nobel Peace Prize but getting top peace is not an easy task when dealing with a history of wars and conflicts over the past 200 years. This is especially true when we in America had a large part to play in these wars and conflicts. In 1916, the first major European war was raging and had reached a deadly stalemate with trench warfare. Germany offered a deal to end the war and the parties returning to prewar borders. But our country was approached by a group of our own citizens who as part of the International World Zionist Organization have made a different deal with Britain and France. These citizens including one previous Supreme Court Judge pressured our government to enter the war on the side of the allies who promised the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine in return for this lobbying effort. Palestine then had a population that was 93% Christian and Muslim native Palestinians. The Jules (French) and Balfour (English) public declarations of support for the Zionist project were then adopted also by the US Congress under heavy Zionist pressure. Many humanistic Jews opposed the scheme that would collect them from around the world displacing native population. Despite the majority of the US public being against us entering that European first war, our government decided to go to war based on these narrow short-term political interests. After WWII, my predecessor President Truman decided to support the Zionist project for similar reasons. This only matched his decision to use atomic weapons that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of civilians even when he knew that surrender by Japan could have been achieved in other less deadly ways. Since 1945, we have used American military forces in over 40 countries killing millions. Today we have US troops stationed in three times as many countries. Our military uses most of our discretionary budget. We are now engaged in active hot conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Our military forces have also engaged in attacks in Somalia and Sudan in the last two years. It is not a coincidence that these are all countries in the Middle East that the domestic lobby called AIPAC has had a lot to say about long before the conflicts arose.

The security establishment now recognizes that our attacks on these countries did not enhance our security but degraded it in the long term and created a pool of millions who hate our policies. Since the events of Sept 11, 2001, the US has lost more credibility around the world as we failed to investigate the real reason behind these events or to draw the appropriate lessons. Instead our government chose to listen to foreign agendas and engage in brutal attacks on others who had nothing to do with Sept 11 using manufactured myths and propaganda that we are now resurrecting with respect to yet one more country- Iran. Surveys showed that even among our traditional allies in Western Europe, people believe the US and Israel (not Iran or North Korea) pose the most significant risk to world peace. My administration has done much to allay the fears of the rest of the world about US hegemony and intentions of unilateral dictates on their future. But our statements must be matched with actions on the ground which we have so far failed to achieve. We cannot address people’s legitimate concerns about US policy by public relations.

Addressing these challenges:

The conundrums created by the policies cited above cannot be solved by incremental changes like stimulus packages, healthcare reforms, shuffling some troops from one country to another, or closing Guantanamo (needed as these are). The American people and the world at large look for real change and it is time to listen to them instead of Washington lobbyists. I am laying out these principles that I believe are critical to begin to achieve the change we all seek:

1- I ask Congress to dissolve the Federal Reserve (a private unelected entity of Bankers) an institution that caused great pain in our country. The Government will print its own money and this money will return to being backed by Gold. We cannot continue down the same direction that already degraded the dollar value by 40% against the leading world currencies over the past few years.

2- I have invoked my right as a commander in chief and in compliance of US law that prohibit funding violators of human rights and issued an executive order that suspended all military and economic assistance to the state of Israel (now at $3 billion is our largest foreign aid recipient) until a) it complies with human rights and prosecutes all officers who committed human rights violations (especially those using US supplied weapons and finances) and b) it complies with all relevant United Nations General Assembly and Security Council resolutions. I ask the American public to engage in discussion to expose the extent of financial loss caused to us by support of Israeli violations of these resolutions. Citizens have a right to demand transparency about who lobbies their congressional representatives and what decisions they make in Congress that benefits foreign powers at the expense of US citizens. Hillary Clinton had to step down as Secretary of State because of clear conflict of Interest issues that will be investigated involving the same foreign interests. I am pleased to report that Cynthia McKinney has accepted to be my nominee for Secretary of state.

3- I have instructed my Attorney General to create a task force to seek return and reimbursement to the American public from the World Zionist Organization and the State of Israel the massive transfer in wealth that occurred as a result of their activities especially when these activities were illegal under US laws (e.g. not registering under the congressional requirement of registration as foreign lobbies). There is now considerable evidence that the Zionist movement has accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars with schemes that are at best shady and at worst extortionist and illegal, it would be indeed possible using existing laws to seek a return of these assets. There is also evidence that some of these same money was recycled to spend on lobbying activities to and pressure tactics to get even more billions of dollars.

4- I have asked the Department of Defense to begin the process of withdrawing US troops from all 120 foreign countries they are stationed in (beginning with Afghanistan). Our budget prediction is that once this is accomplished we will be able to trim our defense budget in half saving tax payers hundreds of billions of dollars.

5- We will create two new national museums each with the same budget as the current National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. The museums will commemorate the genocides (holocausts) of Native Americans and of African Americans. This will begin to heal the wounds of our world and face-up to our own historical responsibilities.

6- Where we were wrong historically we must face up to it. I have thus asked ex-president Jimmy Carter and the group of elder statesmen to lead the creation of a "Truth and Reconciliation Department" with sections to deal with all outstanding issues including Vietnam, our war and Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The commissions created under this Department will have jurisdictions to prosecute war criminals or refer them to the International Courts as legally appropriate.

7- We will no longer support dictators and corrupt leaders. We will demand removal of dictators like Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak who has been in office for over three decades with Western support. We will support democratic elections even when parties that get elected are not supportive of Israel or the previous US policy shaped in Tel Aviv. We will instead engage in immediate talks with groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and with countries like Venezuela and Iran to build a better future for all of us inequality and we will push for democracy and support of the will of the people even when this means resistance to Israeli hegemony. As John Kennedy stated once "If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable."

8- We must focus on the daunting real challenge of our planet not the manufactured crises that special interests want us to focus on. Thus, instead of confronting Iran, Venezuela, and other nations, I am now asking those nations to join us as equals on the table to discuss climate change and fair and equitable distribution of world resources. We will together invest in alternative energy and safeguard our joint environment. And we will eliminate nuclear weapons.

9- I urge our allies to use the example we set and face to the historical injustice they have committed (e.g. European Colonization in the Americas, Africa and Asia) so that we can put these issues behind us as we focus on other pressing issues.

These changes that provide practical solutions will be resisted by the same entrenched power that created the problems. We must be courageous enough to demand real change and implement it. We recall how in our nation’s history it was always people who made the change not politicians. It was the masses of people that gave the women's right to vote, and later achieved the pressure needed to realize the enactment of civil rights laws. It was massive people resistance that ended the war on Vietnam and ended US support for Apartheid South Africa. To these movements we are also grateful for the 40 hour week and for social security and for the support of education that allowed a person like me to be who we can be. I believe this is another pivotal moment in our history. As we rise to the challenge, our economical, political, and moral standing will begin to make a real turn around.

I stated before that these challenges and the changes they require are bigger than one government or one country alone can handle. People of various faiths and of all political and ethnic backgrounds are indeed joining together to address these issues. I know we can count on millions of you in America and millions abroad to join us in this historic struggle for a better future. Now is the time for real change. This is our moment. Join us. God bless you and God bless our planet.

[One can hope; if not Obama, then maybe another US president but only when and if more/enough US taxpayers wake –up to how they are being fleeced and cause the change... that is our responsibility...]

* Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD. A Bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home. http://qumsiyeh.org

Related posts:

• Letter to President Obama: Why Are We Supporting Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza?
• ‘Apartheid Israel’ week at Oxford and ‘Freedom of Speech’
• Did you know?

Also read "Is it Qassams or Gas? (Part 1) here!"

War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza's Offshore Gas Fields

By Michel Chossudovsky* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves.

This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.

British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon's Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority.

The rights to the offshore gas field are respectively British Gas (60 percent); Consolidated Contractors (CCC) (30 percent); and the Investment Fund of the Palestinian Authority (10 percent). (Haaretz, October 21,  2007).

The PA-BG-CCC agreement includes field development and the construction of a gas pipeline.(Middle East Economic Digest, Jan 5, 2001).

The BG licence covers the entire Gazan offshore marine area, which is contiguous to several Israeli offshore gas facilities. (See Map below). It should be noted that 60 percent of the gas reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline belong to Palestine.

The BG Group drilled two wells in 2000: Gaza Marine-1 and Gaza Marine-2. Reserves are estimated by British Gas to be of the order of 1.4 trillion cubic feet, valued at approximately 4 billion dollars. These are the figures made public by British Gas. The size of Palestine's gas reserves could
be much larger.

Map 1

Map 2

Who Owns the Gas Fields

The issue of sovereignty over Gaza's gas fields is crucial. From a legal standpoint, the gas reserves belong to Palestine.

The death of Yasser Arafat, the election of the Hamas government and the ruin of the Palestinian Authority have enabled Israel to establish de facto control over Gaza's offshore gas reserves.

British Gas (BG Group) has been dealing with the Tel Aviv government. In turn, the Hamas government has been bypassed in regards to exploration and development rights over the gas fields.

The election of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 was a major turning point. Palestine's sovereignty over the offshore gas fields was challenged in the Israeli Supreme Court. Sharon stated unequivocally that "Israel would never buy gas from Palestine" intimating that Gaza's offshore gas reserves belong to Israel.

In 2003, Ariel Sharon, vetoed an initial deal, which would allow British Gas to supply Israel with natural gas from Gaza's offshore wells. (The Independent, August 19, 2003)

The election victory of Hamas in 2006 was conducive to the demise of the Palestinian Authority, which became confined to the West Bank, under the proxy regime of Mahmoud Abbas.

In 2006, British Gas "was close to signing a deal to pump the gas to Egypt." (Times, May, 23, 2007). According to reports, British Prime Minister Tony Blair intervened on behalf of Israel with a view to shunting the agreement with Egypt.

The following year, in May 2007, the Israeli Cabinet approved a proposal by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert  "to buy gas from the Palestinian Authority." The proposed contract was for $4 billion, with profits of the order of $2 billion of which one billion was to go the Palestinians.

Tel Aviv, however, had no intention on sharing the revenues with Palestine. An Israeli team of negotiators was set up by the Israeli Cabinet to thrash out a deal with the BG Group, bypassing both the Hamas government and the Palestinian Authority:

"Israeli defence authorities want the Palestinians to be paid in goods and services and insist that no money go to the Hamas-controlled Government." (Ibid, emphasis added)

The objective was essentially to nullify the contract signed in 1999 between the BG Group and the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat.

Under the proposed 2007 agreement with BG, Palestinian gas from Gaza's offshore wells was to be channeled by an undersea pipeline to the Israeli seaport of Ashkelon, thereby transferring control over the sale of the natural gas to Israel.

The deal fell through. The negotiations were suspended:

"Mossad Chief Meir Dagan opposed the transaction on security grounds, that the proceeds would fund terror". (Member of Knesset Gilad Erdan, Address to the Knesset on "The Intention of Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Purchase Gas from the Palestinians When Payment Will Serve Hamas," March 1, 2006, quoted in Lt. Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon, Does the Prospective Purchase of British Gas from Gaza's Coastal Waters Threaten Israel's National Security? Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, October 2007)

Israel's intent was to foreclose the possibility that royalties be paid to the Palestinians. In December 2007, The BG Group withdrew from the negotiations with Israel and in January 2008 they closed their office in Israel.(BG website).

Invasion Plan on The Drawing Board

The invasion plan of the Gaza Strip under "Operation Cast Lead" was set in motion in June 2008, according to Israeli military sources:

"Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago [June or before June] , even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas."(Barak Ravid, Operation "Cast Lead": Israeli Air Force strike followed months of planning, Haaretz, December 27, 2008)

That very same month, the Israeli authorities contacted British Gas, with a view to resuming crucial negotiations pertaining to the purchase of Gaza's natural gas:

"Both Ministry of Finance director general Yarom Ariav and Ministry of National Infrastructures director general Hezi Kugler agreed to inform BG of Israel's wish to renew the talks.

The sources added that BG has not yet officially responded to Israel's request, but that company executives would probably come to Israel in a few weeks to hold talks with government officials." (Globes online- Israel's Business Arena, June 23, 2008)

The decision to speed up negotiations with British Gas (BG Group) coincided, chronologically, with the planning of the invasion of Gaza initiated in June. It would appear that Israel was anxious to reach an agreement with the BG Group prior to the invasion, which was already in an advanced planning stage.

Moreover, these negotiations with British Gas were conducted by the Ehud Olmert government with the knowledge that a military invasion was on the drawing board. In all likelihood, a new "post war" political-territorial arrangement for the Gaza strip was also being contemplated by the Israeli government.

In fact, negotiations between British Gas and Israeli officials were ongoing in October 2008, 2-3 months prior to the commencement of the bombings on December 27th.

In November 2008, the Israeli Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of National Infrastructures instructed Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) to enter into negotiations with British Gas, on the purchase of natural gas from the BG's offshore concession in Gaza. (Globes, November 13, 2008)

"Ministry of Finance director general Yarom Ariav and Ministry of National Infrastructures director general Hezi Kugler wrote to IEC CEO Amos Lasker recently, informing him of the government's decision to allow negotiations to go forward, in line with the framework proposal it approved earlier this year.

The IEC board, headed by chairman Moti Friedman, approved the principles of the framework proposal a few weeks ago. The talks with BG Group will begin once the board approves the exemption from a tender." (Globes Nov. 13, 2008)

Gaza and Energy Geopolitics

The military occupation of Gaza is intent upon transferring the sovereignty of the gas fields to Israel in violation of international law.

What can we expect in the wake of the invasion?

What is the intent of Israel with regard to Palestine's Natural Gas reserves?

A new territorial arrangement, with the stationing of Israeli and/or "peacekeeping" troops?

The militarization of the entire Gaza coastline, which is strategic for Israel?

The outright confiscation of Palestinian gas fields and the unilateral declaration of Israeli sovereignty over Gaza's maritime areas?

If this were to occur, the Gaza gas fields would be integrated into Israel's offshore installations, which are contiguous to those of the Gaza Strip. (See Map 1 above).

These various offshore installations are also linked up to Israel's energy transport corridor, extending from the port of Eilat, which is an oil pipeline terminal, on the Red Sea to the seaport - pipeline terminal at Ashkelon, and northwards to Haifa, and eventually linking up through a proposed Israeli-Turkish pipeline with the Turkish port of Ceyhan.

Ceyhan is the terminal of the Baku, Tblisi Ceyhan Trans Caspian pipeline. "What is envisaged is to link the BTC pipeline to the Trans-Israel Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, also known as Israel's Tipline." (See Michel Chossudovsky, The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil, Global Research, July 23, 2006)

Map 3

* Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal. He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) and America's "War on Terrorism" (2005). He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/9f6fq9

Related posts:

• Is it Qassams or Gas?
• The Death Angel, Knocking Gaza Doors
• On tape: Palestinians harassed by Jewish settler in Hebron ‘cage’ (Part 2)

Recommended by one of my blog readers, if you have couple of free hours today, it is a must see video. Otherwise bookmark it for you weekend.

Learn how money is made. Find out if the world is heading to economical disaster.

This video will try to answer so many questions, many of us asked themselves several but never got (satisfying) the answer. Questions such as:

Who controls world's debt and reserve, and why?
Are we salves? If so, to whom?
Are we living new Empire age? Who is the emperor?
Why do we have inflation, interest, globalization, capitalism, World Bank, terrorism, corruption, corpotacrcy, drugs, opium, free trade, etc...
What is "Modern Money Machine?"
What's the difference between Fascism, Socialism, Capitalism, Communism, etc...?
What is Monetary-ism?
What is Scarcity theory and where it comes from?
What is Venus project?

And a lot more questions and facts.

Personally, I found this video to be one of the best of all documentaries I've seen this year. It might be offending to religious people and believers of any/all religions, but it does not harm to learn something new.

Last but not least, after watching this documentary, I look forward for the launch of The Zeitgeist Movement website (http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/) to learn more about this very interesting plans.

Now here is the 2 hours video. Enjoy it!

Related posts:

• Did you know?
• Google Zeitgeist 2005
• Did you know?

Also read "Is it Qassams or Gas? (Part 2) here!"

By Michel Chossudovsky* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

What we all know is that Israel needs no reason for its continuous crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza in particular and Arab in general.

The Iron Pipes called Qassams DON'T KILL, as Turkey told Israel; while every terrorist attack by IOF in Gaza kills dozens of Palestinians, and worsen are the results of the Israeli-siege on Gaza.

So, what could be more possible reason and why now?

What most of us don't know (because such stories DON'T make news) is Gaza's "Natural Gas Field" story.

Few days ago on Flashpoints, Mark Turner (Research Journalism Initiative) spoke with Nora Barrows-Friedman (at 10:50 into the show, if you download it or listen online where it is archived) about one hidden-possible reason for the Israeli escalation, the large natural gas field in Palestinian waters off the coast of Gaza [Hat tip: Left I on the News].

As I said before, this news story has been largely overlooked, therefore, please allow me to give a brief background here so that we understand the relevancies.

Few years ago (in 2005), British Gas (BG) discovered a large field of natural gas under Gaza Strip.

The announcement of the gas find was made last week by Azzam Al Shawwa, head of the Palestinian energy and natural resources authority. He said that gas giant British Gas (BG), which owns drilling rights to large natural gas reserves off the coasts of Gaza, had discovered a large field within the regional waters of the Gaza Strip.

Shawwa said that the gas field, estimated as holding 60 billion cubic meters, would require an investment of $500 million for pipelines and production facilities.

Along with the news came an announcement that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Egyptian government had signed an agreement on June 29 that gave the PA access to Egypt's gas pipeline network to transport and market the Gaza gas.

Gazans, like everyone else, are suffering from the increasing prices of fossil fuels, including natural gas, which they use mainly for cooking. Tapping abundant natural gas is expected to be a great boost for the impoverished population. Shawwa said that some gas would be used domestically thereby radically decreasing its price in the Palestinian territories.

Despite the jubilant Palestinian response to the news, some experts remain skeptical of Israel's silence toward the news.

"Where is Israel in all this?" asked Mohammed Hijazi, an economic commentator in Gaza. "Israel is always in the market for natural resources.

"An agreement between Israel Electric [company] and the Egyptian company EMB was under negotiation late in 2004," he said, adding, "There have been reports in the Israeli press that the Russian gas producing company Gazprom is working on a deal to sell Israel 4 million cubic meters of natural gas annually via a pipeline through Turkey. Locking up the much closer Palestinian natural gas production would be a bonanza for Israel."

Indeed, the Israeli government is partner to the PA in a small gas field to the north of the Gaza Strip. Israel has in the past blocked Palestinian gas export and production agreements in an attempt to come out with benefit for itself. [Source]

Two years later -2007- nothing moved because Israel put her ass on the road.

At least one commercially-exploitable gas field, Gaza Marine, is located within a Palestinian maritime economic activity zone demarcated in 1994 by the Oslo Accords.

Negotiations quietly underway for months to agree on commercial arrangements to exploit and market Gaza Marine gas were reportedly progressing slowly toward completion, when Hamas took over the Gaza Strip almost two weeks ago.

BG Group, formerly British Gas reports that, after a few days of cautious reevaluation of the situation last week, negotiations with the Israeli government were continuing.

BG is conducting the negotiations along two tracks. Israel is to be one of the major customers, and the Palestinians will be another.
[...]

The negotiations are proving to be painstaking, and the parties are reportedly going into great detail. They are now translating each other's gas laws. An Israeli official with knowledge of the negotiations told the Middle East Times that it is no secret that price is the main issue on the table now. He also indicated that both sides wanted to reap tax revenues from the deal.

Why should Israel expect to receive taxes from the sale of Gaza oil? The official explained: "If you want to sell something to me, you should pay taxes on the sale."

Less than one month ago, the Hamas national unity government economy minister, Ziad Al Thatha, denounced the proposed deal with Israel as treachery, and said it was equivalent to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, by which the British Government promised its support for the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
[...]

From the beginning, the idea was to sell a good part of Gaza's gas to Israel. But, in mid-2005, during the process of Israel's "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians decided that they preferred to sell to Egypt instead.

This decision was reversed several months ago, after a personal intervention by former British prime minister Tony Blair, who pleaded Israel's case with BG after being contacted by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
[...]

Whether by great good luck, or by design, the 1994 "Gaza-Jericho first" Agreement negotiated under the Oslo process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), demarcated a 32-kilometer (20-mile) maritime zone for Palestinian fishing and economic activities off Gaza's Mediterranean coastline.

The Gaza Marine field is located in the Mediterranean, some 25 kilometers to 30 kilometers or so, offshore Gaza.
[...]

Retired Israeli brigadier general Shlomo Brom told the Middle East Times in a recent interview in his Tel Aviv office at the Institute for National Security Studies that Israel had no interest in seeing the Palestinians impoverished.

At the same time, he indicated, it was also in Israel's interest to diversify its sources of supply. With this proposed deal, Israel would be able to buy natural gas from the Palestinians as well as from Egypt. Israeli demand for natural gas is expected to rise significantly in future years.
[...]

At the time of Israel's "disengagement" from Gaza in September 2005, Israeli Brigadier General Michael Herzog was a visiting military fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He wrote an article entitled, "A New Reality on the Egypt-Gaza Border (Part II): Analysis of the New Israel-Egypt Agreement," in which he explained that Israel continued to maintain control over all of Gaza's external security, including over its territorial waters. He also wrote that "in the agreed arrangements, Egypt gave de facto recognition to Israeli control of the sea off the Gaza coast." [Source]

So, what happened since then?

On January 8 2008, British Gas announced that they are giving up Israeli stake and are shutting its office outside Tel Aviv, and plans to surrender its share in a small Israeli gasfield, following the breakdown of talks over selling Palestinian gas to Israel. Instead, BG said it was considering other options for the gas, of which the most attractive seems to be building a pipeline to Egypt, where the gas could be liquefied for export at a plant part-owned by BG. Remember that to pipe the gas to Egypt was the first plan, but under pressure from Tony Blair (wonder what was his commission for this job), the plan was altered so that some of the gas would be piped to Israel at LOW PRICES.

So, where is Qassams? In fact it is not Qassams, but Hamas. The Israeli/Palestinian negotiations failed because Israel was concerned about the prospect of revenues from the project flowing to Hamas, while the Palestinians worried that Israel would be able to cut off the flow of gas into Gaza (according to FT). Israel also baulked at paying the price that BG wanted for the gas!!! Does this sound familiar? THEY WANT EVERYTHING, BUT NOTHING IN RETURN.

Therefore, magnifying Israel's (as well Abbas and his gang) need to precipitate the fall of Hamas. The siege on Gaza by Israel, in partnerships with Abbas and his "Palestinian Authority" - the actual authority was elected by the Palestinians, HAMAS - is not a coincidence. The fact is that Hamas won at the RIGHT TIME, to stop more bleeding of Palestinian resources that filled the pockets of Abbas Authority. Does anyone remember the term "Corrupted Palestinian Authority"? That was how Israel, US, EU and most of the Arab world refer to Abbas (and before him Arafat's) Cabinet. Where did the "corrupted authority" go? Check the offices of "Ramallah Government".

So, the equation is straight... Gas for Life (at least for a while)!

* Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal. He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) and America's "War on Terrorism" (2005). He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages.

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