|| November 12, 2001
||
|| THE HUNT
||
|| Oil Diplomacy Muddled U.S. Pursuit of bin Laden, New Book Contends
||
|| By ETHAN BRONNER
||
|| former F.B.I. antiterror official who was killed at the World Trade
|| Center on Sept. 11 complained bitterly last summer that the
|| United States
|| was unwilling to confront Saudi Arabia over Osama bin Laden and
|| that oil
|| ruled American foreign policy, according to a new book
|| published in France.
||
This book and a covering article in Le Monde[1] looks like a devastating follow-up to the Figaro-Radio France[2] story about the “get-well” visit by a CIA agent to ObL in the American Hospital in Dubai. Le Monde says that “the writers are close to espionage circles” and that Brisard did some freelance work on al Qaeda financing for an unnamed “French intelligence service”.
Let me note /en passant/ that the fact that this guy works for the Vivendi media group shows how openly French media is penetrated and manipulated by its spooks. Dasquie is chief editor of Intelligence Online. So it looks like the French govt, as of November 12 (the Le Monde dateline), i.e. before the Talibs hightailed it into the mountains, still intends to take pokes at Dubya’s war. In fact "poke" may be an understatement; "broadside" is more like it.
|| The former official, John P. O'Neill, was the director of
|| antiterrorism for
|| the F.B.I.'s New York office when he resigned in August to
|| become chief of
|| security for the twin towers.
||
|| "All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's
|| organization can be found in Saudi Arabia," Mr. O'Neill is
|| quoted as saying
|| in the new book, "Ben Laden: La Vérité Interdite" ("Bin Laden: The
|| Forbidden Truth"), which argues that Saudi support for Mr. bin
|| Laden has
|| been extensive.
||
OK, before we get to the oil part, I want to talk about this guy. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of John O’Neill.
The French insinuations of CIA complicity in S11 and the US protestations of innocent bungling remain for the moment undecideable. John O’Neill, whose last – heroic – act was to charge into tower 2 to help people get out, is no longer available for comment. It was his second day at the WTC, and his body was recovered in the ruins. According to the the NY Times and the LA Times[3], a briefcase full of classified docs stolen at a Tampa conference may have had something to do with O’Neill’s retirement from the FBI, although his boss Barry Mawn said that the internal investigation about the briefcase was “nothing” and would have gotten O’Neill a verbal reprimand at most. Mawn said that O’Neill “wanted to stay on with the FBI and clear his name, but he'd already decided to retire and enter the private sector”. Ergo: The briefcase theft happened _after_ he told the FBI he was quitting, which tends to confirm the French theory. My theory, judging by the CIA and FBI’s past record, is that the theft was an inside job to put O’Neill’s resignation under a cloud, and stories to that effect were planted in the US media in order to undermine his credibility should he decide to speak out in public. Intentionally or not, FBI Assistant Director Mawn poked a hole in those stories.
The LA Times describes O’Neill as a determined Fed who was fired up by the 1993 WTC bombing and had his sights single-mindedly set on ObL. O’Neill’s tenacity got him thown out of Yemen by US Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who objected to the size of his team and to their insistance on packing big pieces[4]. At least, that's the line we're given. However, we now know that the US was practically bending over backwards _not_ to catch ObL, apparently for reasons having to do with protecting the Saudi regime[5]. The French authors say O'Neill resigned out of frustration.
|| One of the book's co-authors, Jean- Charles Brisard, a security
|| expert who
|| has spent several years examining Mr. bin Laden's financial
|| empire, says in
|| the book that he met with Mr. O'Neill in June and July. Mr. O'Neill is
|| quoted as lamenting "the inability of American officials to get
|| anything at
|| all from King Fahd," the ailing Saudi ruler.
||
Another dedicated cop who won’t play politics bites the dust. If nothing else comes out of it, it will make a great Hollywood blockbuster: Fearless Fed uncovers plot for world domination but threats to his family force him to quit for a civilian job. Little does he know that the job is a setup
But /les affaires c'est les affaires/, the world will not stop turning for John O'Neill. Our French spook authors spill the beans about the /affaires/ that led up to Dubya's war, enough to merit a second take on Clausewitz: War is business by other means. Brisard and Dasquie tell us that the Unocal pipeline negotiations that were reportedly aborted following the 1998 missile strike on ObL's bases were restarted by Dubya's team. According to the authors, the _real_ reason why the deal fell through was because the Taliban weren't able to defeat the Northern Alliance and control the whole of Afghanistan. This time Russia, Iran, and India are also invited to join in, so that a new Afghan government can be formed representing all the tribes and factions. The Taliban are invited to Washington in March. Talks go on right up to August 2, when Christina Rocca from the State Department meets the Taliban ambassador in Islamabad. Not all the talks are secret: Kofi Annan's representative Francesc Vendrell conducts negotiations for a political solution between July 17 and 20 in Rome, Cyprus, and Berlin. Called the "Berlin process", these talks are outlined in a report signed by Kofi Annan on August 14.
The deal offered to the Talibs is: Hand over ObL and share power with the Northern Alliance, and maybe we'll recognize you. Pakistan's former foreign minister Niaz Naik (the guy who told the BBC that a military operation was being prepared against Afghanistan in July[6]) had this to say to the French FR3 network ("Pieces a Convictions", October 18): "Once the expanded government is formed, international aid would arrive (...) Then the pipeline could come (...) Ambassador Simons stated that in the event that the Taliban did not behave properly and that Pakistan failed to get them to behave properly, the Americans would use another option described as 'non covert' against Afghanistan (...) the words used were 'a military operation'."
Le Monde's Sylvain Cypel then went to interview the US ambassador in Islamabad, Thomas Simons. "The US is said to have told the Pakistanis that if the Taliban accepted to hand over Bin Laden and sign a peace accord with the United Front, they would get a 'carpet of gold'. If not, they would get a 'carpet of bombs'. Is this true?" asked Cypel. Simon replied: "We said in July that we were investigating the attack on October 12, 2000 in Yemen against the USS Cole, and that if we obtained solid proof of Bin Laden's involvement, a military response should be expected". Simon added that the "carpet of bombs" quote might have been made as an informal comment by an irresponsible staff member after a few drinks. The only military action mentioned during the talks was that of eventual reprisals in connection to the USS Cole attack. "The Pakistanis have every reason to extrapolate a US carrot-and-stick tactic from such a comment. You have no reason to accredit [this view]" said Simon.
IOW the US denies that it threatened the Taliban with war if they didn't sign the pipeline deal. If US credibility wasn't at an all-time low, I might not be tempted to point out that the double-track negotiations, one of which was secret, and the other was, ostensibly, for the unimpeachable purpose of peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan, were a perfect setup for plausible deniability. And hadn't the republicans decided that the US would no longer get involved in curing the world's ills? Why were they so desparate to break their rule in Afghanistan? To save the Buddhas?
Hakki
[1] http://www.lemonde.fr/imprimer_article_ref/0,9187,3230--243578,00.html
[2] Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 14:22:01 -0800 (PST) From: Thomas Seay <entheogens at yahoo.com> Subject: Radio France: Details of Bin Laden/CIA Meeting
[3] http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:8gmP9o-CEUs:www.latimes.com/news/nation world/nation/la-092901oneill.story+O%27Neill+FBI+Qaeda&hl=en
[4] http://cgi.herald.com/cgi-bin/rc_emailfriend.cgi?mode=print&doc=http://www.m iami.com/herald/special/news/worldtrade/digdocs/048754.htm
[5] Several of the non-incidents we know of are: - The extradition offered by Sudan in 1996 and that fell through due to Saudi objections. URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61251-2001Oct2?language=printer - Rep. Dana Rohrbacker’s (R-CA) attempt to liaise between an informant in Afghanistan who knew ObL’s location and intelligence officials in the US, which fell through because of disinterest on the part of US intelligence. URL: http://www.house.gov/rohrabacher/attack.html - The extradition that was all but agreed in 1998 between Sheikh Omar and the then Saudi intelligence chief and ObL’s close friend Prince Turki bin Faisal. URL: http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2001/11/03/taliban_bin_laden/print.html - And last but not least, the hospital get-together in July (see fn 2)
[6] http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1550000/1550366.stm