Or. . .What Clarke Did Know .. and What He Didn't (But Chaney Did)
-- I was driving home tonight and listening to John Batchelor's Radio Show on WABC in New York and he was discussing the Clarke testimony with John J. Loftus. Loftus, a former Justice Dept. prosecutor, said that Clarke was right on with his comments about inaction between January and August 2001 but that Clarke didn't know that there was a parallel policy toward Afganistan going on during that time -- an Economic Initative "Oil Pipes for Osama" under the aspices of VP Dick Cheney -- and much of this policy would be of direct benefit of Enron! Batchelor seemed in total agreement with Loftus as though he had heard the story before (I hadn't).
If I had seen such a reference in the Nation, I would have tended to dismiss it as partisan conspiracy pap from Bush-haters but both Batchelor and Loftus are conservatives who generally support the Bush polices -- so I went to the Loftus web site (
http://www.john-loftus.com) and found the following May 2002 story (
http://www.john-loftus.com/enron3.asp#congress) which details the story and includes reference to the FBI's John O'Neill who banged his head against the wall, warning about the threat of Osama (O'Neill, the subject of "The Man Who Warned America" died on 9/11 in the WTC).
I also found out tonight that both Clarke and Loftus went to Boston Latin (not at the same time -- I think Clarke was four years ahead) Boston Latin is the oldest high school in the country; my uncle went there amd my mother went to its then sister school, Girl's Latin -- they have since been combined into a single co-ed school. But I digress -- the following story is both nasty and scary. Enjoy!
What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11
By John J. Loftus
A captured Al Qaida document reveals that US energy companies were secretly negotiating with the Taliban to build a pipeline. The document was obtained by the FBI but was not allowed to be shared with other agencies in order to protect Enron. Multiple sources confirm that American law enforcement agencies were deliberately kept in the dark and systematically prevented from connecting the dots before 9/11 in order to aid Enrons secret and immoral Taliban negotiations.
The suppressed Al Qaida document tends to support recent claims of a cover-up made by several mid-level intelligence and law enforcement figures. Their ongoing terrorist investigations appear to have been hindered during the same sensitive time period while the Enron Corporation was still negotiating with the Taliban. An inadvertent result of the Taliban pipeline cover-up was that the Talibans friends in Al Qaida were able to complete their last eight months of preparations for 9/11 while the Enron secrecy block was still in force.
Although the latest order to block investigations allegedly resulted from Enrons January 2002 appeal to Vice President Dick Cheney, it appears that there were at least three previous block orders, each building upon the other, stretching back for decades and involving both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The first block came in the 1970s, as a result of Congressional reaction to domestic espionage against the anti-Vietnam war movement. In a case of blatant over-reaction, the FBI placed all houses of worship and religious charities off-limits for any surveillance whatsoever unless there was independent probable cause. This meant that all Mosques and other Muslim meeting places for terrorist groups were effectively off limits until after a crime had been committed. The block order was not lifted until last week by Atty. General Ashcroft.
The second block order, in force since the 1980s, was against any investigation that would embarrass the Saudi Royal family. Originally, it was designed to conceal Saudi support for Muslim extremists fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Chechnya, but it went too far. Oliver North noted in his autobiography, that every time he tried to do something about terrorism links in the Middle East, he was told to stop because it might embarrass the Saudis. This block remains in place.
As the combined result of these two blocks, the Saudis were able to fund middle eastern terrorists in complete secrecy during the 1990s through a network of Muslim charities in Virginia, Tampa and Florida. The Saudi funding network was targeted at the destruction of the State of Israel and the obstruction of the Palestinian peace process.
The Saudi funding conduit has now been exposed and shut down by means of a private lawsuit, Loftus vs. Sami Al Arian, which is currently pending in Hillsborough County, Florida. The lawsuit, filed on March 20, 2002, influenced the government into raiding the Saudi charities in Herndon, Virginia, a few hours later.
After filing the Al-Arian lawsuit, Attorney Loftus began to receive very detailed documents and information about a third block: a prohibition on investigations concerning the Taliban. In the early 1990s, a consortium of American oil companies (lead by Unocal) had hired Enron to determine the profitability of building an oil and gas pipeline across Afghanistan so that America could have access to the Caspian Sea Basin, holding 1/8th of the worlds energy supplies.
There is no doubt that these secret negotiations existed, and that they were known to Al Qaida. Loftus recently received an FBI translation of ahighly classified and encrypted Al Qaida document, circa 1997-1998, which was retrieved and decrypted from a computer laptop following the Embassy bombing in Africa. The document was written by Osama Bin Ladens military commander, Mohammed Atef, under his nom de guerre, Abu Haf, and reveals extensive knowledge of the supposedly secret pipeline negotiations, and their potential economic worth to the Taliban, Pakistan and the U.S.
Former Afghanistan CIA agent Robert Baer has recently published a book charging that the cover-up of the 1990s pipeline negotiations revealed extensive financial corruption inside the Clinton administration, and contributed to the lack of intelligence before 9/11. The Taliban negotiations temporarily collapsed in 1999 after Clinton reversed his NSC advisors policy, and ordered a missile strike against terrorists in Afghanistan.
However, in January 2001, Vice President Cheney allegedly reinstated the intelligence block and expanded it to effectively preclude any investigations whatsoever of Saudi-Taliban-Afghan oil connections. Former FBI counter-terrorism chief John ONeill resigned from the FBI in disgust, stating that he was ordered not to investigate Saudi-Al Qaida connections because of the Enron pipeline deal. Loftus has confirmed that it was ONeill who originally discovered the AL Qaida pipeline memo after the Embassy bombings in Africa.
ONeill gave an overview of the Enron block to two French authors who will soon be publishing in the United States. The FBI is currently investigating Loftus links to John ONeill, and is also refusing FBI agent Robert Wright permission to publish his own findings about the Enron block.
Loftus asserts that the Enron block, which remained in force from January 2001 until August 2001 when the pipeline deal collapsed, is the reason that none of FBI agent Rowleys requests for investigations were ever approved. As numerous British and French authors have concluded, the information provided by European intelligence sources prior to 9/11 was so extensive, that it is no longer possible for either CIA or the FBI to assert a defense of incompetence.
It is time for Congress to face the truth: In order to give Enron one last desperate chance to complete the Taliban pipeline and save itself from bankruptcy, senior levels of US intelligence were ordered to keep their eyes shut and their subordinates ignorant.
The Enron cover-up confirms that 9/11 was not an intelligence failure or a law enforcement failure (at least not entirely). Instead, it was a foreign policy failure of the highest order. If Congress ever combines its Enron investigation with 9/11, Cheney's whole house of cards will collapse.
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