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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (126269)	12/4/2009 12:09:58 AM
From: freelyhovering	Respond to of 543334

I stumbled onto something. Thanks.

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (126269)	12/4/2009 12:16:12 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 543334

Who do we know from Sugarland? Oh, yeah... Tom Delay... "After the Taliban came to power in 1996, Taliban leaders were invited to Sugar Land, Texas, by Unocal and Enron executives. "The Taliban's mullahs were given the royal treatment for four days in 1997!" Enron gave Taliban $millions Yahoo! March 4, 2002 The Enron Corporation gave the Taliban millions of dollars in a no-holds-barred bid to strike a deal for an energy pipeline in Afghanistan -- wile the Taliban were already sheltering terror kingpin Osama Bin Laden! Enron executives even met with Taliban officials in Texas, where they were given the red-carpet treatment and promised a fortune if the deal went through. That's the bombshell finding of an exclusive ENQUIRER investigation into the collapse of the company that ripped off Americans for millions of dollars. The ENQUIRER has also uncovered that some of the Enron money wound up supporting Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network! "Enron would do business with the devil if it would make the company money!" said a member of a Congressional committee investigating the company's collapse. And Atul Davda, who worked as a senior director for Enron's International Division until the company's collapse, confirmed to The ENQUIRER: "Enron had intimate contact with Taliban officials. Building the pipeline was one of the corporation's prime objectives." As The ENQUIRER revealed two weeks ago, Enron secretly employed CIA agents to carry out its dealings overseas. And a CIA insider disclosed : "Enron was wooing the Taliban and was willing to make the Taliban a partner in the operation of a pipeline through Afghanistan. "Enron proposed to pay the Taliban large sums of money in a 'tax' on every cubic foot of gas and oil shipped through the pipeline." Enron shelled out more than $400 million for a feasibility study on the pipeline and "a large portion of that cost was payoffs to the Taliban," said the CIA source. Shockingly, Enron's wooing of the Taliban continued even after Al Qaeda agents bombed two American embassies in Africa in 1998, and the U.S. retaliated with missile attacks on suspected Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. "The U.S. was shooting missiles into Afghanistan, and it was clear that the Taliban were enabling Bin Laden and Al Qaeda," terrorist expert Jeffrey Steinberg, editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, told The ENQUIRER. "Nonetheless the oil companies continued to work behind the scenes to complete the pipeline deal." The pipeline project was originally proposed by Unocal Corporation. And an FBI source told The ENQUIRER : "Enron and Unocal dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Afghanistan and the Taliban. The pipeline would relieve our dependence on Saudi Arabia -- and Enron would make billions. "When Clinton was bombing Bin Laden camps in Afghanistan in 1998, Enron was making payoffs to Taliban and Bin Laden operatives to keep the pipeline project alive. And there's no way that anyone could NOT have known of the Taliban and Bin Laden connection at that time, especially Enron who had CIA agents on its payroll!" Said an Enron company source, "After the Taliban came to power in 1996, Tliban leaders were invited to Sugar Land, Texas, by Unocal and Enron executives. "The Taliban's mullahs were given the royal treatment for four days in 1997!" The visit was aimed at getting Taliban cooperation to build the pipeline, which would carry vast gas and oil deposits from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Enron had exclusive contracts with the former Russian republics, according to another former Enron employee. The pipeline was to travel through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. When contacted by The ENQUIRER, U.S. State Department's press officer for South Asian Affairs, Len Scensny, confirmed that a Taliban delegation visited Sugar Land, Teas, in 1997 to discuss business with oil companies. Three days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Unocal announced it had withdrawn from the Afghanistan pipeline project. But the CIA insider said Enron and its CEO Kenneth Lay held on, waiting for the Taliban to give up Bin Laden as the Bush administration was demanding. "Enron figured the Taliban wanted to stick to their deal, that they wanted riches the same way Enron did. "What Enron and Ken Lay didn't understand is that it was Bin Laden who was calling the shots, not Enron's Taliban friends. "Now Enron and the Taliban are both goners!" angelfire.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (126269)	12/4/2009 12:00:08 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543334

Maybe Obama bought into the notion that we must somehow have more control over the flow of oil in the ME, rather than just assume we'll always be able to buy it on the open market at the prevailing rate. A more recent article on the topic. The “war of necessity” over a pipeline August 25, 2009 by Nick TAPI Pipeline route 8 years and 64,000 troops from 41 countries later, the Taliban are still going strong in Afghanistan. Just this evening, a car bomb has killed 40 in Kandahar adding to the rapidly growing death toll of Western soldiers and Afghanis dying in this needless conflict. The Guardian reports that this year, 295 troops have now been killed already this year compared to 294 in the whole of 2008. As is common with the Western media, no mention is made of how many Afghanis may have been killed. Obama is calling it a “war of necessity” and it’s clear that his credo of “change we can believe in” stops squarely when it comes to Afghanistan. He is still espousing the tired justification that those who attacked the USA on 9-11 were trained by the Taliban in Afghanistan and are planning to do so again. In reality, this “war of necessity” is nothing but a war for control of an oil pipeline. Afghanistan has always been a huge strategic geo-political prize because of it’s proximity to energy producing states in the Gulf and Central Asia. The stakes have been risen even more however by the construction of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline known as TAPI due to open in 2014. The pipeline will pass through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Even the BBC theorized as far back as 2001 that the pipeline was the motivating factor behind the invasion. It suggested: Given the increasing importance of finding and exploiting new sources of fossil fuel, governments like those of the US and the UK are enormously keen to gain influence in the Central Asian region in order to secure those supplies for the West In order to achieve that, and get those energy supplies moving out of Central Asia, they need to set up a pro-western government in Afghanistan. In typically liberal style however, the BBC concludes that you’re probably insane for believing these theories by stating: But the argument that these are the main motivations behind US actions, not the desire to stamp out international terrorism, will probably find support mainly among those who already have a fondness for conspiracy theories. Meanwhile Noam Chomsky’s theory is that the pipeline will remove regional dependence on Iran for oil and thus isolate the country even further – suiting US political motives in the region. The Americans have coveted the pipeline for quite some time now. US interest in the pipeline stretches back to 1998 when, as Patrick Martin writes: The Afghanistan pipeline route was pushed by the US-based Unocal oil company, which engaged in intensive negotiations with the Taliban regime. These talks, however, ended in disarray in 1998, as US relations with Afghanistan were inflamed by the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for which Osama bin Laden was held responsible. In August 1998, the Clinton administration launched cruise missile attacks on alleged bin Laden training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The US government demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden and imposed economic sanctions. The pipeline talks languished. It’s quite possible that Unicol and the Bush administration saw 9-11 as the perfect opportunity to “settle” this languishing of talks once and for all by simply invading the country. As Michael Hart and Antoni Negri state in their book Empire, “All empires go to war over natural resources”. That’s why its Afghanistan and not New Zealand that’s been pounded with bombs for the last 8 years. nicholasmead.com