Oil, Drugs and Blood
by Ben Clarke

September 11, Day of Infamy
in the United States and Chile
by Roger Burbach

excerpted from the book

September 11 and the U.S. War

Beyond the Curtain of Smoke

Edited by Roger Burbach and Ben Clarke

City Lights Books, 2002

p45

Oil, Drugs and Blood
by Ben Clarke

The U.S. government can't openly admit its own history of involvement in the creation of al Qaeda nor can it acknowledge its true objectives in Southwest Asia.

The mobilization of international legal resources to identify and punish persons guilty of crimes against humanity-such as the horrific attack on the World Trade Center-would clearly have been a more effective and just course toward the capture and prosecution of guilty parties than the military actions undertaken by the United States. The bombing of civilians in Afghanistan and the enabling of massacres by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance are war crimes themselves. Of course, the U.S. administration is adamant in its resistance to any diplomatic steps that might lead to authentic legal proceedings. While the U.S. governments overt justification for the attacks on Afghanistan is the capture "dead or alive" of former U.S. ally Osama bin Laden, its major economic objective is to expand U.S. military presence in a key region in the ongoing planetary war for petroleum.

Middle Eastern oil reserves are well known to readers and have obviously driven U.S. policy and practices over the last half a century. Less well known is the existence of vast quantities of oil and natural gas in the area of the Caspian sea. But oil beneath a sea is useless if it can not be fed into the thirsty maw of the multinational oil companies to feed the SUV's, jets and electrical grids of the "developed and developing" world.

On November 29, as the war in Afghanistan reached a blood-soaked peak, the Assistant Secretary of Energy, Vicky Baily, was in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk celebrating the first Chevron pipeline out of the Caspian region. The inauguration of the pipeline through Russia to the Black Sea marks the first real success for the multinational oil companies following a ten-year struggle to bring the oil to market. The key problem with the current pipeline routes is that they bring the oil to the Western European market that is already well supplied by the Middle East and Russia. The global shortfall is in the Asian and Southeast Asian countries such as India and Japan. But in order to head south or east the route must pass through Iran or Afghanistan.

The Taliban's inability to deliver a stable pro-capitalist economy in Afghanistan has stalled the Afghan route. U.S. hostility toward Iran has blocked the other path.

The key U.S. economic interest in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan is developing enough political, military and economic presence to successfully transport these resources. At the November 2001 international conference called to develop a reconstruction plan for post-Taliban Afghanistan, Japan and the U.S. played host at a State Department meeting with the IME When the reconstruction package is announced, there is little doubt that oil and gas pipelines will be identified as critical to creating the new Afghan economy. According to oil industry estimates, the development and export of Southwest Asian oil and gas reserves will be enough to keep the petroleum economy running at its current pace for an additional 30 years.

On ecological grounds alone, this is a frightening prospect. Current rates of global warming threaten to dramatically shift the world climate within this century. The successful doubling of oil and natural gas reserves available to the petroleum economies will almost inevitably hasten this process. In the short term however, the "Western" attempt to monopolize this resource is likely to lead to ever more violent repression of even mildly democratic or pro-national movements that seek to equalize the international distribution of resources by enabling the "underdeveloped" world some measure of control over the resources of its own lands and people.

Regardless of the political, religious or ethnic basis of any governmental system in the region, the one characteristic that the U.S. government and multinational corporations can not tolerate is local control of resource exploitation. The WTO, the IMF and the international banking system are adept at restraining governments that stray into the forbidden territory of developing natural resources for their own populations, but if these measures of financial control fail, the traditional U.S. response has been to use military force to intimidate, terrorize, destabilize overthrow or co-opt. Because it is difficult to openly justify such immorality and bullying greed, real or phantom enemies are conjured up to mask the fundamental policy. The "cold war" struggle with the Soviet Union, the Gulf War demonization of Saddam Hussein, the "drug war" in Colombia, all have in common the over-inflation of an alleged enemy to demonic proportions while the calculated evils of support for totalitarian dictatorships, death squads, human rights abuses and actual enabling of the international drug trade ensure economic domination.

Drug War Terrorism

Documentation of the growth in heroin production in Afghanistan and Pakistan during and after the U.S. proxy war against the Soviet Union is abundant. (A recent U.N. study finds a growth from 0 tons to 4600 metric tons annually between the years 1989 and 1999.) Leaving aside the fundamental incentive of the illegality of the drugs within the U.S., the primary condition under which such operations flourish is corrupt dictatorships that join in public anti-drug proclamations while raking in huge drug profits, and which cover up counterinsurgency campaigns in drug war rhetoric while leaving the core of the drug trade untouched.

In one of the stranger bits of theater in this horrible and surreal drama the Taliban was probably the only government that declared a war on drugs and then succeeded in prosecuting it. In January 2000, Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered the opium producing areas under Taliban control to cease production. Fourteen months later, the U.N. recorded an astonishing 97% drop in cultivation. While the U.S. administration has made several recent attempts to blame the Taliban for the drug trade in Afghanistan, these accusations have been muted by the embarrassing fact that the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy itself also recognized the success of the Taliban in reducing opium cultivation. As recently as May 2001, the U.S. awarded the Taliban over 40 million dollars toward its drug control efforts.

Despite this public anti-drug stance, covert agencies of the U.S. government, such as the CIA, are known for using drug profits to finance irregular armies to accomplish foreign policy or economic objectives that are too ugly for the U.S. government to openly support. In the Iran Contra scandal Oliver North and other members of the Reagan administration circumvented a congressional ban on financing the Contra rebel terror squads by skimming drug profits and selling arms to Iran. Already the triumphant Northern Alliance forces have begun replanting the opium poppy fields that the Taliban had uprooted, and the U.S. administration has made it clear that drug interdiction in Afghanistan has dropped off its priority list.

Dead or Alive

Despite U.S. assurances that they have the evidence that Osama bin Laden is the guilty party, they have refused to turn it over, even to a United States district attorney for presentation to a U.S. judge, much less an international tribunal. (The U.S. government has repeatedly blocked the establishment of an international criminal court to try persons guilty of crimes against humanity.) The resort to broadcast of blurry, semi-audible boasting by an alleged bin Laden, as well as the Bush administration executive order creating military tribunals (allowing secret evidence, and trial by military judges) is further evidence that the Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft regime can't tolerate an open review of the facts. The U.S. spurned earlier offers by the Taliban to have Osama bin Laden tried in a third country on presentation of evidence because the U.S. administration "knew he was guilty" yet was somehow not obligated to show any proof of such guilt.

U.S. administration reluctance to present hard evidence is claimed to originate from fear that intelligence methods might be compromised. At this point, one can only wonder where an investigation of the stock manipulations that preceded the September 11 attack in which pre-warned investors made millions in profits on the drop in stock prices of United and American Airlines or serious examination of the sources for the visas that allowed tagged agents of the al Qaeda network to enter the U.S. might lead. But the intertwined history of the Pakistani intelligence services, the CIA and al Qaeda are clearly not matters that the U.S. government is willing to subject to meaningful judicial review.

This is not to say that the U.S. ever actually controlled bin Laden. The use of surrogate "freedom fighters" financed by drug networks is a notoriously inaccurate weapon. Given the murky nature of drug dealing terror networks the actual order for the attack on the U.S. could have come from any fragment of the CIA-spawned al Qaeda, from Egypt, Saudi Arabia or even from drug and arms merchants who will surely benefit from the "new" war.

Regardless of the exact perpetrators of the crime against humanity of Sept. 11, 2001, if the U.S. continues to back terrorists, such as the Northern Alliance and elements in the Pakistani governments that engage in international drug smuggling and mercenary warfare, another crop of ruthless and unprincipled thugs will be the beneficiaries of U.S. weapons, training and financial support. And while the State department might occasionally sign off on a human rights report indicating one of their own allies (such as the AUC in Colombia) is guilty of drug dealing, torture, massacres and more, U.S. aid will flow in ever larger quantities. Periodic proclamations against the war on terrorism will more and more come to resemble the proclamations surrounding the war on drugs. The more the U.S. ships weapons, advisors and money in an attempt to protect its economic interests, the larger the problem grows.

Fundamentally, it appears that the U.S. administration, afraid to subject itself to the rule of international treaties that would allow non-military solutions to crimes against humanity, is unsure that the U.S. people would support a military buildup in Southwest Asia on the grounds of naked U.S. geopolitical and economic interests. Hence the spiral of doublethink is increasing exponentially. Secretary of State Colin Powell announces U.S. coalition building with Stalinist style dictatorships and massacring mercenaries as an "alliance for freedom." A bombing campaign that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Afghan civilians and which puts millions at risk of starvation is put forth as an act of justice. Even academic consideration of alternatives to U.S. foreign policies are labeled treasonous by some allies of the administration. Professors at City College of New York have been attacked by the New York Post and members of the Board of Trustees, and Vice-President Cheney's wife, Lynne released a hit list of over 100 academics whose public statements aren't to her liking.

The totalitarian approach to media revealed by National Security Advisor Condeleeza Rice's calls for more censorship by the major networks' news executives (who are already cheerleaders for the war effort) shows the fragility of the worldview from which the current regime draws its power. If truthful reporting, the rule of law, open debate, and support for international institutions that increase equal justice and economic and social equality are beyond the bounds of public discussion, the U.S. administration is clearly fighting for a nation that few Americans will willingly recognize as their own.

Ben Clarke is the editor of MediaFile, a journal of media analysis published by San Francisco-based Media Alliance.

*****

p55

September 11, Day of Infamy in the United States and Chile
by Roger Burbach

On the morning of September 11, I watched aircraft flying overhead. Minutes later I heard explosive sounds and saw fireballs of smoke fill the sky. As a result of these attacks thousands died, including two good friends of mine.

I am not writing about September 11, 2001 in New York City. On that date I was thousands of miles away in Berkeley, California. I am writing about another September 11 in 1973 when I was living in Santiago, Chile. On that date I indeed saw planes flying overhead. They were warplanes and their target was the presidential palace in Santiago.

There resided Salvador Allende, who had been elected president three years before. He was the first elected socialist leader in the world and ever since his election in September 1970 he was opposed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the U.S. government headed by Richard Nixon and by Henry Kissinger who chaired the National Security Council. The Council orchestrated and coordinated U.S. policies aimed at overthrowing Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity government.

It was on September 11, 1973 that they finally succeeded in getting the Chilean military lead by General Augusto Pinochet to overthrow Allende who died in the presidential palace. Over three thousand people perished in the bloody repression that followed under Pinochet's rule, including two American friends of mine, Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi.

Prior to the attack on the Pentagon, the most sensational foreign-lead terrorist action in the capitol had been carried out by a team of operatives sent by the Pinochet regime. On September 21, 1976, agents of the Chilean secret police organization, DINA, detonated a car bomb just blocks from the White House, killing a leading opponent of Pinochet's, Orlando Letelier, and his assistant Ronni Moffltt. Letelier, who I spoke to at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. before his death, was a man deeply committed to democracy and a more humane world who had served at the highest levels of the Allende government.

These assassinations were linked to the first international terrorist network in the Western Hemisphere, known as Operation Condor. Begun in 1974 at the instigation of the Chilean secret police, Operation Condor was a sinister cabal comprised of the intelligence services of at least six South American countries that collaborated in tracking, kidnapping and assassinating political opponents. Based on documents recently divulged under the Chile Declassification Project of the Clinton administration, it is now recognized that the CIA knew about these international terrorist activities and may have even abetted them.

The Chilean secret police, often with the assistance of other Condor partners, carried out a number of international terrorist operations. On September 30, 1974, retired General Carlos Pratts, who Pinochet replaced as head of the Chilean military shortly before the 1973 coup, was killed by a car bomb while living in exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In Rome in 1975, DINA operatives attacked and seriously maimed Chilean Christian Democratic politician Bernardo Leighton and his wife.

Papers found in Paraguayan archives in the 1990s reveal that Operation Condor was also linked to the assassination of a Brazilian general and two Uruguayan parliamentarians, as well as to scores of lesser-known political activists. After the murders of Letelier-Moffitt in Washington D.C., the CIA appears to have concluded that Condor was a rogue operation and may have tried to contain its activities. However, the network of Southern Cone military and intelligence operations continued to act throughout Latin America at least until the early 1980s. Chilean and Argentine military units assisted the dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and helped set up death squads in E1 Salvador. Argentine units also aided and supervised Honduran military death squads that began operating in the early 1980s with the direct assistance and collaboration of the CIA.

All these terrorist operations of course need to be placed in the context of the Cold War. It is no secret that in its conflict with the Soviet bloc countries, the U.S. government often engaged in unsavory operations, particularly in the third world. But many of these activities have come back to haunt the United States. In another ironic historic twist, on the day before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the family of assassinated General Rene Schneider announced that they intend to press charges in the Chilean courts against Henry Kissinger. Their charges are based on declassified US government documents discussed earlier this month on CBS' "60 Minutes" that were provided by the National Security Archive, an independent research and documentation center based in Washington D.C. These documents indicate that after the election of Salvador Allende in September 1970 Kissinger approved a CIA plot to prevent Allende from being inaugurated. This conspiracy lead to the assassination of Schneider over a month later, when he, as commander in chief of the Chilean army, insisted on upholding the will of Chilean voters and the country's constitution.

There are many parallels between the emergence of the terrorist network in Latin America and events in the Middle East and Asia. Osama bin Laden of Saudi Arabia, who is widely believed to be directing the attacks on the United States, first became involved in militant Islamic activities when he went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight with the mujahideen against the Soviet-backed regime that had taken power in the country. According to the CIA 2000 Fact Book, the mujahideen were "supplied and trained by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and others." Even in the 1980s it was widely recognized that many of those fighting against the Soviets and the Afghan government were religious fanatics who had no loyalty to their U.S. sponsors, let alone to "American values" like democracy, religious tolerance and gender equality.

Ronald Reagan, in the mid-1980s when the CIA was backing the mujahideen warriors in Afghanistan, likened them to our "founding fathers." Then in Central America, Reagan called thousands of former soldiers of Somoza's National Guard "freedom fighters" as they were sent to fight against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. And when the Sandinistas went to the World Court to press charges against the United States for sending special operatives to bomb its port facilities, the Reagan administration withdrew from the Court, refusing to acknowledge the rule ,of international law.

In the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, former U.S. government officials and conservative pundits attempted to completely rewrite this sordid history. Instead of acknowledging that past CIA operations had gone awry, they insisted that bin Laden's international terrorist network had flourished because earlier U.S. collaboration with terrorists had been constrained or curtailed. Henry Kissinger, who was in Germany on September 11, told the TV networks that the controls imposed on U.S. intelligence operations over the years have facilitated the rise of international terrorism. He alluded to the hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1975 headed by Senator Frank Church, which strongly criticized the covert operations approved by Kissinger when he headed up the National Security Council. The Church hearings lead to the first legal restrictions on CIA activities, including the prohibition of U.S. assassinations of foreign leaders.

Other Republicans, including George Bush Sr. who was director of the CIA when the agency worked with many of these terrorist networks, pointed the finger at the Clinton administration for allegedly undermining foreign intelligence operations. They argued vehemently against the 1995 presidential order prohibiting the CIA from paying and retaining foreign operatives involved in torture and death squads. These foreign policy hawks were standing historic reality on its head. What happened in New York and Washington was a massive human tragedy. But unless we acknowledge that the U.S. government has been intricately involved in the creation of international terrorist networks and insist that they abandon that practice once and for all, the cycle of violence and terrorism will only deepen in the months and years to come. The events of September 11 demonstrate that our borders are no longer impregnable in a globalized world. We must behave more responsibly, ending our own role in the globalization of terror, or there will be many more Septembers as history continues to repeat itself.

Judge Baltasar Garrison of Spain, who put out the warrant that lead to the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in England in 1998, has also been the leading judicial figure in the prosecution of terrorists in Spain, particularly from the Basque region. His own life has been threatened by terrorists and he is forced to live surrounded by bodyguards. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, he proclaimed that even this "horrible crime" requires "due process." He called for justice "which should be brought to bear not only on the Taliban for its brutal and oppressive regime but also on the leaders of Western countries, who, irresponsibly and through the media, have generated panic among the Afghan people."

He went on to exclaim: "The response that I seek is not military. It is one based on law, through the immediate approval of an international convention on terrorism. Such a convention should, among other things, include: rules governing co-operation between police and the judiciary rules that enable investigations to take place in tax havens; the urgent ratification of the statute of the International Criminal Court; and the definition of terrorism as a crime against humanity."

To return to my starting point, the CIA-backed coup against Salvador Allende in 1973, I would argue that it is time to try U.S. officials who supported the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. At the head of the list should be Henry Kissinger, the principal living U.S. official who backed the coup while heading up the National Security Council in 1973. If the United States really wants to root out international terrorism and demonstrate that ~t is sincere in this cause, then it has to begin by putting some of its own officials in the docket of international justice.

September 11 and U.S. War

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