Let's take Brisard and Dasquie hypothetically at their word: the Bush administration went to the Taliban in the summer of 2001 and said, hand over bin Laden and let us build a pipeline through Afghanistan or else we'll start taking military action against you. This strikes me as plausible, and while it involves a conspiracy it is the kind of thing I can easily imagine the Bushies doing - working overtime to defend oil interests and damn the consequences. Having a secret foreign policy is not new territory for the US government.
Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda take the threat to heart and decide to activate some US cells that have been training to commit terrorist acts on US soil. They've already thought through the possibility of having to hit the US more directly and had a plan in place. This strikes me as a sensible thing for an international terrorist organisation to have done anyway.
>From a certain point of view, they're defending themselves. The US has
threatened them and they won't just stand still for it. What makes such a
story damning for the US is that it undermines the idea that 9-11 was
totally gratuitous and unprovoked. The US directly threatens to attack a
country, and some of the people in that country take action against the US.
It's hard to make sound bites about "attacks against freedom and Western
civilisation" make sense in light of something like that.
Please note, for anyone confused about what I'm saying, that this isn't a moral defense of terrorism. I'm not saying Al-Qaeda was justified in killing thousands of people, just that if all if the above is true, then the US government simply can't claim complete innocence in the matter. When you threaten people, you can't expect them to simply lie down and take it.
So, somebody in France is already preparing a book about all this and publishes it. The British press, having some employees who can speak French, publish a few stories about it and eventually someone at CNN starts to pay attention. CNN doesn't dare say or do anything that might undermine the basic good vs. evil version of the war in Afghanistan because that doesn't improve their ratings, and they tend to call on government people to comment on everything anyway. So they get Butler to comment on the story, and he says his thing.
This kind of media apathy is pretty well documented, and doesn't really require a conspiracy either. It just requires a corporation to believe that commercial success comes from not being very controversial.
This sort of system is self-sustaining and requires very little real conspiracy. Big country pushes little country around in secret. Little country finds creative ways to get back at big country. Big country's media tow the party line because people get angry when they don't.
Scott Martens
-----Original Message----- From: Hakki Alacakaptan <nucleus at superonline.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Wednesday, January 09, 2002 9:42 AM Subject: RE: manna for conspiracists
>
> || -----Original Message-----
> || From: Max B. Sawicky
>
> || Hakki:
> || The reason why the pipeline theory or the Brisard & Dasquié
> || book is on CNN
> || is spin control, and that's why Richard Butler is on the show.
> || Not because
> || he's an expert but because he's a trusted Bushie. Hakki
>
> || mbs: So CNN airs information that blows the lid off the affair,
> || all as a device to keep it secret? A conspirator gives it credence,
> || on air, by failing to react with incredulity? This is pathological.
>
>OK, I'll spell it out for you: CNN is an international operation. CNN
cannot
>keep a cover on the pipeline and the book without losing credibility in the
>rest of the world, as opposed to, say, Fox. It needs to address the issue,
>not keep it secret. So it addresses it by producing experts, sources, or
>evidence to shoot the theory down. Duh.
>
>Hakki
>