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Why Afghanistan? and Al-Quaeda connections to pipeline consortium

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EddyBlack

New Member
Three point here:

1. The oil and gas resouces of Central Asia are enormous. Afghanistan is the key to transporting them. Other options are via Iran or Russia.

2. American / Saudi led consortium of oil companies ( Unocal and Delta Oil) had formulated and negotiated plans for a pipeline through Afghanistan to access these resources in the years prior to 911.

3. The Saudi company, Delta Oil has some of the most important sponsors of Al-Quaeda on its board!

This is all mainstream media reportage, but I link to intermediary sites instead whenever payed subscriptions are required at the original sources.
 
1. Pipeline Politics Taint US War - Chicago Tribune


‘“The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism,” wrote author George Monbiot in the Oct. 22, 2001, piece, “but it may also be a late colonial adventure.”

“The war against terrorism is a fraud,” exclaimed John Pilger in an Oct. 29 commentary in the British-based Mirror. Pilger, the publication’s former chief foreign correspondent, wrote, “Bush’s concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth.”

... According to the book, the Bush administration began to negotiate with the Taliban immediately after coming into power. The parties talked for many months before reaching an impasse in August 2001.
The terrorist acts of Sept. 11, though tragic, provided the Bush administration a legitimate reason to invade Afghanistan, oust the recalcitrant Taliban and, coincidentally, smooth the way for the pipeline.
To make things even smoother, the U.S. engineered the rise to power of two former Unocal employees: Hamid Karzai, the new interim president of Afghanistan, and Zalmay Khalizad, the Bush administration’s Afghanistan envoy. ‘

Gosh…

‘…“Osama bin Laden did not comprehend that his actions serve American interests,” writes Uri Averny, in a Feb. 14 column in the daily Ma’ariv in Israel. Averny, a former member of the Israeli Knesset and a noted peace activist, added, “If I were a believer in conspiracy theory, I would think that bin Laden is an American agent. Not being one I can only wonder at the coincidence.”’
 
2. This Telegtaph article confirms the high stakes. Uncertain of the date, but clearly prior to September 11th 2001.

Warring nation holds the key to oil riches of Central Asia
www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1996/10/11/wtal111.html

In summary, the prize is huge, strategically and economically...

‘…But there is an immense problem. The Central Asian republics are all land-locked and there is no way to get the oil and gas out. So a race has begun to find a route. There are three main contenders. Russia wants to tap into the mineral wealth of its former empire by pushing pipelines from its Black Sea terminal at Novorossiysk eastwards towards Kazakhstan.

Iran, which dreams of being a powerful player in the region, talks of driving a pipeline from its coast at Chabahar via Mashad into Turkmenistan and beyond.
Pakistan is keen to have a source of oil that bypasses Iran and Russia
Georgia, already at work on a pipeline crossing the Caucasus to tap the fields of Azerbaijan, thinks it could eventually be driven across or around the Caspian into Kazakhstan. But to Western, and especially American interests, none of these options look attractive. Georgia is too unstable, and the idea of allowing a Russian or Iranian hand to rest on the oil jugular is considered too dangerous. Hence the attractions of Afghanistan.’

‘…Unocal, the Californian oil company, in alliance with Delta Oil, the Saudi Arabian company, has been in negotiation with the Taliban, as well as rival warlords, for much of this year over terms for the Turkmenistan-Pakistan pipeline. Preliminary agreement was reached between the two sides long before the fall of Kabul last month.

A vice-president of Unocal said last week that the victory of the Taliban could help the country if it brought stability. That would allow international investors to fund the pipeline, and eventually bring billions of pounds a year in transit revenues to Afghanistan.

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.

Pakistan is keen to have a source of oil that bypasses Iran and Russia. The evidence is already overwhelming that the Taliban, which orignated as a group of 2,000 religious students in refugee camps and religious schools just inside Pakistan, have been funded and partly equipped by Pakistani intelligence agencies throughout the two-year campaign that has now led them to Kabul.’

Another article in the same vein:
Oil Barons Court Taliban in Texas
www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1997/12/14/wtal14.html
 
3. The prime force behind Unocal’s partner in the proposed scheme, Saudi company ‘Delta Oil’ is said to be one Mohammed Hussein al-Amoudi and a certain Khalid Bin Mahfouz. These men are important sponsors of Al-Quaeda.

Saudi clans working with US oil firms may be tied to Bin Laden - Boston Herald December 10th 2001
http://web.archive.org/web/20011212...ld.com/news/americas_new_war/side12102001.htm

‘Two billionaire Saudi families scrutinized by authorities for possible financial ties to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network continue to engage in major oil deals with leading U.S. corporations.

The bin Mahfouz and Al-Amoudi clans, who control three private Saudi Arabian oil companies, are partners with U. S. firms in a series of ambitious oil development and pipeline projects in central and south Asia, records show.
Working through their companies - Delta Oil, Nimir Petroleum and Corral Petroleum - the Saudi families have formed international consortiums with U. S. oil giants Texaco, Unocal, Amerada Hess and Frontera Resources.

… Much of it revolves around a 1999 audit conducted by the Saudi government that reportedly discovered that the bin Mahfouz family's National Commercial Bank had transferred at least $3 million to charitable organizations believed to be fronts for bin Laden's terror network.

U. S. and British authorities also reportedly looked at Al-Amoudi's Capitol Trust Bank in London and New York for similar activities.’

Khalid Bin Mahfouz is later included on the United Nations report 'Terrorism Financing, Roots and trends of Saudi terrorism financing' (page 11)
www.nationalreview.com/document/document122002.asp

He is one of the most important sponsors of Al-Quaeda!
 
Henry Kissenger was initially selected by the Bush Admin. to head the 911 Commission, but resigned when he was later ordered to reveal his business interests as a condition, (he is known to have connections with Unocal). The Bush Admin. tried to ardue against this but Congress insisted and he resigned.

Unocal connection.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/europe/caspian100598b.htm

Kissenger was replace by Thomas Kean, who himself can be shown to have sufficient connections to DELTA OIL, to act as a considerable disincentive to impartiality.

www.truthout.org/docs_02/020303E.htm
 
EddyBlack said:
Three point here:

1. The oil and gas resouces of Central Asia are enormous. Afghanistan is the key to transporting them. Other options are via Iran or Russia.
Click to expand...
Simplistic assertion.
Afghanistan is only "key" because Russia and Iran are, to the USA, (currently) politically untenable routes for pipelines, in much the same way as pipelines that don't go through Russia are untenable to Russia.
2. American / Saudi led consortium of oil companies ( Unocal and Delta Oil) had formulated and negotiated plans for a pipeline through Afghanistan to access these resources in the years prior to 911.
Click to expand...
And the Argentine oil company Bridas formulated and negotiated plans two years before the Unocal/Delta ones happened. Bridas even attempted to sue Unocal for stealing their plan.
3. The Saudi company, Delta Oil has some of the most important sponsors of Al-Quaeda on its board!

This is all mainstream media reportage, but I link to intermediary sites instead whenever payed subscriptions are required at the original sources.
Click to expand...
Well done for letting people know stuff that's been in the public domain for years!

Alternatively, they could just read "Taliban: Islam, Oil and the Great Game in Central Asia" by Ahmed Rashid and get the whole story (including all the al-Qaeda stuff) with footnotes. :)
 
Interesting!

There is little doubt that the strongest nations still exercise imperialist policies under the guise of international law.

It's not fair, but it is what happens!
 
I think that has become quite clear.

It is what happens. Nobody cares. Hence the disconect that is evident even amongst progressive, radical and intellectual circles. I've recently been to university, the supposed bastion of freedom and activism, nobody gives a shit.

Happy new year!
 
ViolentPanda said:
Simplistic assertion.
Afghanistan is only "key" because Russia and Iran are, to the USA, (currently) politically untenable routes for pipelines, in much the same way as pipelines that don't go through Russia are untenable to Russia.

And the Argentine oil company Bridas formulated and negotiated plans two years before the Unocal/Delta ones happened. Bridas even attempted to sue Unocal for stealing their plan.

Well done for letting people know stuff that's been in the public domain for years!

Alternatively, they could just read "Taliban: Islam, Oil and the Great Game in Central Asia" by Ahmed Rashid and get the whole story (including all the al-Qaeda stuff) with footnotes. :)
Click to expand...

older thread from 2005
 
That is something from the Daily Telegraph article in post 3. Not something that I wrote, just to clarify.

You seem to have missed the point. Despite the fact that I explained them and numbered them in the OP.
 
david dissadent said:
They have ports, oil is a freely traded comodity.
Click to expand...
True, but I get the feeling that the possible earnings from (official and unofficial) pipeline transit fees may be influencing Pakistan, as well as the possibility of obtaining cheaper (i.e. below market price) gas and oil to supplement their own dwindling gas reserves (factors also mentioned by Rashid in the book whose details I gave above).
 
CIA Misled 911 Commission over tapes

‘The panel made repeated, detailed requests to the spy agency in 2003 and 2004 for information about the interrogation of Al-Qaeda operatives but were never notified of the tapes, the Times reported.’

The CIA in fact destroyed the tapes. A memo by 911 Commission Director Phillp Zelikow criticized the CIA for this.

‘The two chairs of the commission, former Democratic lawmaker Lee Hamilton and former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, told the Times the review showed the CIA had actively tried to obstruct the panel's work.’

'...The commission made initial general requests for intelligence information from interrogations, including the two detainees on the videotapes, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rashim al-Nashiri, said the memorandum.’

Further reading:
9/11 Commission Chairmen Believe CIA Impeded Inquiry by Withholding Interrogation Tapes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

So what did we miss in being deprived of the taped interrorgation of Abu Zubaydah?

This Time story tells us some more
Confessions of a terrorist

The article is on a book by a credible author:

‘Posner is an old hand at revisiting conspiracy theories. He wrote controversial assessments dismissing those surrounding the J.F.K. and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations

Zubaydah's capture and interrogation, told in a gripping narrative that reads like a techno-thriller, did not just take down one of al-Qaeda's most wanted operatives but also unexpectedly provided what one U.S. investigator told Posner was "the Rosetta stone of 9/11 ... the details of what (Zubaydah) claimed was his 'work' for senior Saudi and Pakistani officials."

‘…When questioning stalled, according to Posner, cia men flew Zubaydah to an Afghan complex fitted out as a fake Saudi jail chamber, where "two Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces," pretending to be Saudi inquisitors, used drugs and threats to scare him into more confessions.

Yet when Zubaydah was confronted by the false Saudis, writes Posner, "his reaction was not fear, but utter relief." Happy to see them, he reeled off telephone numbers for a senior member of the royal family who would, said Zubaydah, "tell you what to do." The man at the other end would be Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a Westernized nephew of King Fahd's and a publisher better known as a racehorse owner. To the amazement of the U.S., the numbers proved valid. When the fake inquisitors accused Zubaydah of lying, he responded with a 10-minute monologue laying out the Saudi-Pakistani-bin Laden triangle.

Zubaydah, writes Posner, said the Saudi connection ran through Prince Turki al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, the kingdom's longtime intelligence chief. Zubaydah said bin Laden "personally" told him of a 1991 meeting at which Turki agreed to let bin Laden leave Saudi Arabia and to provide him with secret funds as long as al-Qaeda refrained from promoting jihad in the kingdom. The Pakistani contact, high-ranking air force officer Mushaf Ali Mir, entered the equation, Zubaydah said, at a 1996 meeting in Pakistan also attended by Zubaydah. Bin Laden struck a deal with Mir, then in the military but tied closely to Islamists in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (isi), to get protection, arms and supplies for al-Qaeda. Zubaydah told interrogators bin Laden said the arrangement was "blessed by the Saudis."

Zubaydah said he attended a third meeting in Kandahar in 1998 with Turki, senior isi agents and Taliban officials. There Turki promised, writes Posner, that "more Saudi aid would flow to the Taliban, and the Saudis would never ask for bin Laden's extradition, so long as al-Qaeda kept its long-standing promise to direct fundamentalism away from the kingdom." In Posner's stark judgment, the Saudis "effectively had (bin Laden) on their payroll since the start of the decade." Zubaydah told the interrogators that the Saudis regularly sent the funds through three royal-prince intermediaries he named.

… For those who still wonder how the attacks two years ago could have happened, Posner's book provides a tidy set of answers. But it opens up more troubling questions about crucial U.S. allies that someone will now have to address.’
 
So what about Abu Zabaydah's boss Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz?
He was the leader of the Saudi group that George W. Bush let fly out of America during the flight ban post 911!
Here is the declassified FBI report on the flight that names the Prince as the leader of the group on page 11. A flight that Osama Bin Laden himself might have chartered according to the report.
http://www.truthout.org/imgs.art_02/saudidocs_2.pdf

So this brings us back to 911 Commission director Phillip Zelikow’s recent memo. Zellikow specifically asked about Abu Zubaydah, and weather he had reffered to ‘Prince Ahmed’ during the interrogation. The CIA did not respond. NY Times
 
ViolentPanda said:
Alternatively, they could just read "Taliban: Islam, Oil and the Great Game in Central Asia" by Ahmed Rashid and get the whole story (including all the al-Qaeda stuff) with footnotes. :)
Click to expand...

Just ordered that off Amazon. I've seen him referenced a few times whilst looking into this stuff.

It better be good! ;)
 
ViolentPanda said:
True, but I get the feeling that the possible earnings from (official and unofficial) pipeline transit fees may be influencing Pakistan, as well as the possibility of obtaining cheaper (i.e. below market price) gas and oil to supplement their own dwindling gas reserves (factors also mentioned by Rashid in the book whose details I gave above).
Click to expand...
http://www.dawn.com/2007/12/25/top2.htm

On that note and to connect things to my hobbyhorse....
“As already intimated, serious shortage of diesel/petrol has been reported from all over the province, which has further deteriorated the situation about POL supplies (sic). This has resulted in an increasing law and order situation in some of the districts of the province,” said a telegraphic communication dispatched by the provincial government to the president, caretaker prime minister, ministry of interior and the general headquarters.
Click to expand...

The high costs of oil and its lack of availablity are creating massive problems round the world.

But back on point, I dont think that Afghanistan and Pakistan were ever viable routes for pipelines. Oil companies are used to working in very unstable regimes but a pipeline is an enormouse investment that will takes years to earn back. You would need to multipy the potential for instability or "rent seeking" (a-la Sakhalin) by each nation that the pipeline passes through. Pakistan may have dreamed of such a pipeline and done enough to entice some exploratory investment in it, I strongly doubt that any board would have signed off the final investment. I suspect that the people at the top in Washington would have known this, enough of them have sat on those boards. Whats more, the logic to invade Afghanistan had to be compelling to a large number of people who are intelligent, worldly and do not have the energy focus of the center of the administration. That logic was the dsimantling of as much of the al Queda network as could be achieved.
 
So wasn't Iraq about energy then? The greedy bastards didn't seem to have too many problems in getting the bandwagon rolling there.
 
EddyBlack said:
Just ordered that off Amazon. I've seen him referenced a few times whilst looking into this stuff.

It better be good! ;)
Click to expand...

In my opinion it's probably a better all-round source of hard fact on the oil, "Islamism" and US involvement issues than Michael Klare's "Blood and Oil" (itself a good book), Robert Dreyfuss's "Devil's Game" (a good book about how the US helped facilitate radical Islam in the middle east) and William Polk's "Understanding Iraq" put together.

Hope you enjoy it!
 
david dissadent said:
http://www.dawn.com/2007/12/25/top2.htm
Click to expand...
Interesting link. Thanks.
On that note and to connect things to my hobbyhorse....


The high costs of oil and its lack of availablity are creating massive problems round the world.

But back on point, I dont think that Afghanistan and Pakistan were ever viable routes for pipelines. Oil companies are used to working in very unstable regimes but a pipeline is an enormouse investment that will takes years to earn back.
Click to expand...
The problems around trans-shipment via Afghanistan and Pakistan were (foolishly IMO) seen as politically solvable. The Pakistan and US govts made noises to the oilcos that were unrealistic in the extreme.
You would need to multipy the potential for instability or "rent seeking" (a-la Sakhalin) by each nation that the pipeline passes through. Pakistan may have dreamed of such a pipeline and done enough to entice some exploratory investment in it, I strongly doubt that any board would have signed off the final investment. I suspect that the people at the top in Washington would have known this, enough of them have sat on those boards. Whats more, the logic to invade Afghanistan had to be compelling to a large number of people who are intelligent, worldly and do not have the energy focus of the center of the administration. That logic was the dsimantling of as much of the al Queda network as could be achieved.
Click to expand...
I agree with you, but we have to bear in mind that the political logic for pushing such pipelines revolved not only around a need by Pakistan for the fuels, but for the US govt to be able to deflect any moves by trans-national oilcos to consider trans-shipment via Iran.
 
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