As the twenty-first century gets underway, the imbalance of wealth and democracy in the United States is unsustainable, at least by traditional yardsticks. Market theology and unelected leadership have been displacing politics and elections. Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime-plutocracy by some other name. Over the coming decades, American exceptionalism may face its greatest test simply in convincing the American people to continue to believe in its comfort and reassurance.
SINCE HEROIN REMAINED the principal source of the CIA’s covert operations, the Rockefeller family became deeply involved in the drug trade. The Nugan Hand Bank had been established by the Agency in Sydney, Australia, to purchase weapons for guerrilla forces in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil, and the white Rhodesian government of Ian Smith and to import heroin into Australia from the Golden Triangle of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar (Burma).1
The primary shareholder of the Nugan Hand Bank was Australian, and Pacific Holdings, a company that was owned and operated by the Rockefellers’ Chase Manhattan Bank.2 By 1974, the Australian bank was doing billions in business. The heroin flowing into the United States at the Andrews Air Force bank and other military installations within the body bags of dead soldiers had produced a heroin epidemic that spread from the ghettoes to the college campuses, where students mounted massive protests against the war.
With the fall of Saigon, the drought in Southeast Asia, and the eradication of the poppy fields in Burma and Thailand, the CIA set its sights on the Golden Crescent, where the highlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran all converge, for a new source of drug revenue. Since the seventeenth century, opium poppies had been grown in this region by local tribesmen, and the market remained regional. By the 1950s, very little opium was produced in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with about 2,500 acres in both countries under cultivation.3 At the close of the Vietnam War, the fertile growing fields of Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley were covered with vineyards, wheat, and cotton.4
The major problem for the CIA was the Afghan government of Noor Mohammed Taraki, who sought to eradicate poppy production in the border regions of the country that remained occupied by radical Islamic fundamentalists. This attempt at eradication sprang from Taraki’s desire to unite all the Pashtun tribes under Kabul rule.5 The fundamentalists spurned such efforts not only because of their desire to keep the cash crops but also because they viewed the Taraki government as shirk (blasphemy). The modernist regime advocated female education and prohibited arranged marriages and the bride price. By 1975, the tension between government and the fundamentalists erupted into violence when Pashtun tribesmen mounted a revolt in the Panjshir valley north of Kabul.6 The tribesmen were led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who became the new darling of the CIA.
The major problem for the CIA was the Afghan government of Noor Mohammed Taraki, who sought to eradicate poppy production in the border regions of the country that remained occupied by radical Islamic fundamentalists.
Hekmatyar made his public debut in 1972 at the University of Kabul by killing a leftist student. He fled to Pakistan, where he became an agent of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the leader of Hezb-e-Islami, an organization dedicated to the formation of a “pure” Islamic state, ruled by the most intransigent interpretation of Sunni law.7 Hekmatyar urged his followers to throw acid in the faces of women not wearing a veil, kidnapped rival Islamic chieftains, and in 1977, began to build up an arsenal, courtesy of the CIA.8 The Agency also began to funnel millions to ISI, which became transformed into its surrogate on the Afghan border.9
The CIA believed that Hekmatyar, despite the fact that he was clearly unhinged, would be of inestimable value not only in undermining the Taraki government but also in gaining control of the poppy fields in the Helmand Valley. Its faith was not misplaced. Throughout 1978, a year before the Soviet invasion, Hekmatyar and his mujahideen (“holy warriors”) burned universities and girls’ schools throughout Afghanistan and gained feudal control over many of the poppy farmers. The pro-Taraki militants, aware of the destabilization plot, assassinated Adolph “Spike” Dubbs, the U.S. Ambassador to Kabul, on February 14, 1979.10
Hekmatyar’s actions caused heroin production to rise from 400 tons in 1971 to 1,200 tons in 1978. After the assassination of Dubbs and the flow of millions to Hekmatyar’s guerrilla army, the production soared to 1,800 tons, and a network of laboratories was set up by the mujahideen along the Afghan-Pakistan border.11 The morphine base was transported by caravans of trucks from the Helmand Valley through northern Iran to the Anatolian plains of Turkey.
Throughout 1978, a year before the Soviet invasion, Hekmatyar and his mujahideen (“holy warriors”) burned universities and girls’ schools throughout Afghanistan and gained feudal control over many of the poppy farmers.
In the summer of 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, the U.S. State Department issued a memorandum making clear its stake in the mujahideen: “The United States’ larger interest … would be served by the demise of the Taraki regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reform in Afghanistan…. The overthrow of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the Soviet’s view of the socialist course of history as being inevitable is not accurate.”12
In September 1979, Taraki was killed in a coup organized by Afghan military officers. Hafizullah Amin became installed as the country’s new president. Amin had impeccable Western credentials. He had been educated at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin. He had served as the president of the Afghan Students Association, which had been funded by the Asia Foundation, a CIA front.13 After the coup, he met regularly with U.S. Embassy officials, while the CIA continued to fund Hekmatyar’s rebels in Pakistan. Fearing a fundamentalist, U.S.-backed regime at its border, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979.14
The CIA got what it wanted. The holy war had begun. For the next decade, black aid—amounting to more than $3 billion—would be poured into Afghanistan to support the holy warriors, making it the most expensive covert operation in U.S. history.15 Such vast expenditures demanded an exponential increase in poppy production, which Hekmatyar and his fellow jihadists were pleased to provide.
The CIA established the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in Karachi to serve as a laundry for the drug money generated within the Golden Crescent of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. The BCCI mushroomed into a vast criminal enterprise with 400 branches in 78 countries, including First American Bank in Washington, D.C., the National Bank of Georgia, and the Independence Bank of Encino, California.16 Virtually free from scrutiny, it engaged not only in money laundering the heroin proceeds but also arms trafficking on a grand scale, including the sale of French-made jet fighters to Chile and Chinese silk-worm missiles to Saudi Arabia. By 1985, it became the seventh largest financial institution in the world, handling the money for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noreiga, Palestinian terrorist Abur Nidal, al Qaeda chieftain Osama bin Laden, Liberian president Samuel Doe, and leading members of the Medellin Cartel.17
The enormity of the bank’s operations was evidenced by its transfer of $4 billion in covert aid to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. For the Iraqi transfer, the BCCI made use of the Atlanta branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), an Italian bank with ties to the IOR. Henry Kissinger sat on BNL’s international advisory board, along with Brent Scowcroft, who became President George H. W. Bush’s national security advisor, and David Rockefeller.18
Heroin production in Afghanistan rose from 400 tons in 1971 to 1,800 tons in 1979 with the help of the CIA, and a network of laboratories was set up by the mujahideen along the Afghan-Pakistan border.19 The morphine base was transported by caravans of trucks from the Helmand Valley through northern Iran to the Anatolian plains of Turkey. Business was booming. In 1979, the “flood” of heroin from Afghanistan inundated the United States, capturing over 60 percent of the market. In New York City alone, the mob sold two tons of smack, which registered a “dramatic increase in purity.”20 Heroin addiction in the states climbed back to 450,000. Within a year, street sales increased by 22 percent and the addiction rate reached 500,000.21 It was an enormous development for the Rockefeller family. The cash from the drug trade flowed into CIA-controlled banks, including the Bank of Credit and Commerce, to America’s most prestigious financial institutions, including Citibank in which the Rockefeller family held controlling interest.22
The rise in heroin usage had enormous ramifications on the CIA. Michel Chossudovsky, the noted Canadian economist, explains:
The excessive accumulation of money wealth from the proceeds of the drug trade has transformed the CIA into a powerful financial entity. The latter cooperates through a web of corporate shells, banks, and financial institutions wielding tremendous power and influence. These CIA-sponsored “corporations” have, over time, been meshed into the mainstay of the business and corporate establishment, not only in weapons production and the oil business, but also in banking and financial services, real estate, etc. In turn, billions of narco dollars are channeled—with the support of the CIA—into spheres of “legitimate” banking, where they are used to finance bona fide investments in a variety of economic activities.23
But all this came to a screeching halt on January 27, 2000, when Mullah Omar and the leaders of the Taliban announced their plans to ban poppy production within the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.24 As a result, the opium poppy harvest fell from 4,600 tons in 1999 to 81 tons in 2001.25 The situation had to be addressed by the military-industrial complex in a forceful way.
While heroin was one cause of the war on terrorism, oil was another. The situation in Afghanistan had become worrisome to the House of Rockefeller, which had been instrumental in bringing the Taliban to power in 1996. Through the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal), the Rockefellers had arranged to provide the group with weapons and military instructors. This aid had enabled the Taliban to capture Kabul and to oust Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani from office.26
The Unocal gifts of arms and advisors were given with the belief that the Taliban would provide assistance in the creation of a massive oil pipeline that would run from the oil wells of Turkmenistan through the mountains of Afghanistan to the port city of Karachi, Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea. It was a project that could not take place without a dominant central regime in place to suppress the country’s tribal warlords.27 The 1,040-mile-long pipeline would have a shipping capacity of one million barrels of oil per day and would resolve the vexing problem of seizing control of the vast wealth of oil and natural gas that surrounded the land-locked Caspian Sea.28
Unocal also planned, through its subsidiary Centgas, to build another pipeline—this one for natural gas that would follow the same route through Afghanistan.29 In the great game of geo-economics, the two pipelines represented the integral parts of the plan to gain control of the republics of Central Asia, as Zbigniew Brzezinski had set forth as follows in The Grand Chessboard:
The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.30
The Soviet Union had discovered the vast Caspian Sea oil fields in the late 1970s and attempted to take control of Afghanistan to build a massive north-south pipeline system to allow the Soviets to send their oil directly through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean seaport. The result was the decades-long Soviet-Afghan war. The Russians then attempted to control the flow of oil and gas through its monopoly on the pipelines in the former Soviet republics that surrounded the Caspian Sea: Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. The leaders of these countries saw through this Russian monopolistic ploy and began to consult with Western oil executives, including Condoleezza Rice of Chevron (the predecessor of Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil of California).31 Ms. Rice, a prominent CFR member, later became President George W. Bush’s national security advisor.
The black operations of the CIA, under the direction of Standard Oil and the House of Rockefeller, began to thrust further along the 40th parallel from the Balkans through these Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union. The U.S. military has already set up a permanent operations base in Uzbekistan. This so-called “anti-terrorist strategy” was designed to consolidate control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain and neutralize the former Soviet Union.32
Realizing its weaker position vis-à-vis the United States, Russia joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which included China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Its membership in the SCO represented Russia’s attempt to maintain its traditional hegemony in Central Asia.33 Thus the stakes in the chess game became sky-high since the winner gained global economic hegemony.
Once they conquered Kabul, the leaders of the Taliban were whisked off in a U.S. military transport to Houston, Texas, where they were wined and dined by Unocal officials, who had hired Henry Kissinger and Richard Armitage (who would become George W. Bush’s deputy secretary of state) as consultants. Concerning the gatherings, LA reporter Jim Crogan wrote:
[UNOCAL’s top executive Barry] Lane says he wasn’t involved in the Texas meetings and doesn’t know whether then-Governor George W. Bush, an ex–oil man, ever had any involvement. Unocal’s Texas spokesperson for Central Asia operations, Teresa Covington, said the consortium delivered three basic messages to the Afghan groups. “We gave them the details on the proposed pipelines. We also talked to them about the projects’ benefits, such as the transit fees that would be paid,” she says. “And we reinforced our position the project could not move forward until they stabilized their country and obtained political recognition from the U.S. and the international community.” Covington says the Taliban were not surprised by that demand….
In December 1997, UNOCAL arranged a high-level meeting in Washington, D.C. for the Taliban with Clinton’s undersecretary of state for South Asia, Karl Inderforth. The Taliban delegation included Acting Minister for Mines and Industry Ahmad Jan, Acting Minister for Culture and Information Amir Muttaqi, Acting Minister for Planning Din Muhammad and Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, their permanent U.N. delegate.
Two months later UNOCAL vice president for international relations John Maresca testified before a House Committee on International Relations about the need for multiple pipeline routes in Central Asia. Maresca briefed the members about the proposed Afghan pipeline projects, praising their economic benefits and asking for U.S. support in negotiating an Afghan settlement.34
Despite such power players, a final agreement was not reached because the Taliban was being pursued by other oil interests, including representatives from SCO. Meanwhile, the tentative U.S. ties to the Taliban were offset by Moscow’s support for the Northern Alliance, the group of Islamic militants who ruled northern Afghanistan.35 Pressure was applied to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, to come to a decision regarding the Unocal offer. But no commitment from the chieftain was forthcoming. And the situation was becoming increasingly untenable.
By 1998, the American power elite realized they had to set up a more cooperative government in Kabul. Plans were made to launch a terror attack against America that could be blamed on bin Laden and the host of Islamic militants that inhabited Afghanistan, including the Taliban. On August 7, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed. The attack killed 234 people, twelve of them American, and wounded 5,000 more.36 The event sent shock waves throughout the U.S. On August 20, President Bill Clinton responded by launching a cruise missile attack on al Qaeda’s alleged residential and military complexes in Khost, Afghanistan, and the bombing of the al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Plant near Khartoum in the Sudan, where bin Laden once lived. The CIA had informed Clinton that these attacks would catch the al Qaeda leaders unaware, since no member of the mujahideen would believe that the United States was capable of such decisive action. The Agency further affirmed that the al-Shifa plant was producing deadly VX nerve gas.37
Following the attack, Clinton addressed his fellow countrymen from the Oval Office by saying:
Our mission was clear: to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama bin Laden, perhaps the pre-eminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today … Earlier today, the United States carried out simultaneous strikes against terrorist facilities and infrastructures in Afghanistan. It contained key elements of bin Laden’s network and infrastructure and has served as the training camp for literally thousands of terrorists around the globe. We have reason to believe that a gathering of key-terrorist leaders was to take place there today, thus underscoring the urgency of our actions. Our forces also attacked a factory in Sudan associated with the bin Laden network. The factory was involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons.38
The Clinton announcement was of vital importance to the shadow government. It identified Osama bin Laden as mankind’s greatest enemy and the Taliban as a group that served him. The announcement also informed the American public that new attacks were in the works, and that weapons of mass destruction were in production to be used against them. The problem was that none of it was true. Bin Laden and his Muslim pals were not in the Khost camp. They were, as the CIA was well aware, safe and sound within a madrassah in Pakistan. Although the missiles struck the camps, the only casualties were local farmers and some low-level militants.39 And the Sudan pharmaceutical plant was not involved in making nerve gas or any other chemical weapon. It produced common over-the-counter drugs, including ibuprofen.40
What’s more, information surfaced that the attack on the embassies was not conducted by al Qaeda, but rather a false flag operation that could be blamed on bin Laden. A key indicator of this contention was the involvement of Ali A. Mohamed, also known as Ali “the American” in the bombing. Following the attack, he was labeled as the “point man” who had masterminded the operation. Two years after the blasts, Mohamed was arrested by the American authorities and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder. It then came to light that the alleged al Qaeda bomber had an impeccable U.S. military service record. He had been trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and worked as an instructor in explosives at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School until 1989.41
The official government narrative claimed that Mohamed, who was married to an American citizen and who had lived in California, was all the while working as a double agent for al Qaeda and that he had become a blood-thirsty jihadi by the time of the embassy attacks in 1998. This narrative was circulated by the American media. One story in the San Francisco Chronicle, in 2001, conveyed the sense of treachery as follows: “Bin Laden’s man in Silicon Valley—‘Mohamed the American’—orchestrated terrorist acts while living a quiet suburban life in Santa Clara.” In reality, throughout the 1990s, Mohamed was working for the American secret services in East Africa, including Kenya.42
“There is no way that U.S. intelligence handlers did not know of every move made by Mohamed,” Ralph Schoenman, a reporter who has spent decades investigating the 1998 bombings maintains. “This guy was recruited by the CIA in Cairo, where he was a major in the Egyptian army. He was then a handpicked graduate of Fort Bragg for American Special Forces, and he went on to instruct green berets in PSYOPS and explosives at the JFK School of Warfare. We are talking about the strictest security clearance in the U.S. military. And yet the official account expects the public to believe that somehow Mohamed’s connections with bin Laden’s al Qaeda slipped their attention and that he carried out the U.S. embassy bombings in a rogue fashion for the supposed enemy.”43
Supporting Schoenman’s contention is the fact that, despite pleading guilty in a New York court in 2000 to conspiracy to murder American citizens, Mohamed has never been sentenced to confinement. There are no records of subsequent court proceedings, and his whereabouts, to this day, remain unknown. His Californian wife, Linda Sanchez, was quoted in 2006 as saying of her husband: “He can’t talk to anybody. Nobody can get to him. They have Ali pretty secret. It’s like he just kinda vanished into thin air.”44
In August 1998, the merger of Amoco and BP produced the world’s largest oil company.45 The House of Rockefeller was now united with the House of Rothschild, and the two nations became inextricably bound both economically and politically. Billions of dollars now flowed into joint military industrial interest and such defense contractors as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Raytheon.46 Britain’s new Labor government under Prime Minister Tony Blair now became America’s unconditional ally.47
After the merger of the oil giants, the primary concern of the new power elite was the need to build the trans-Afghan pipeline and the threat to the world economy posed by the Taliban’s ban on poppy production. They realized during their clandestine meetings that these problems could only be resolved by the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the removal of the Taliban from power.
The first step toward meeting these objectives had been the bombing of the two African embassies, which resulted in making the Taliban synonymous with al Qaeda even though the two groups were sharply at odds. In 1998, Mullah Omar rejected bin Laden’s repeated calls for violence against Americans and rejected the al Qaeda chieftain’s religious rulings as “null and void.”48 Moreover, the scruffy Taliban leader resented the arrogance of the Arab mujahideen, whose aristocratic attitude toward Pashtun customs and beliefs had become intolerable. Tensions between the two Islamic militant groups became so tense that gunfire broke out between the Taliban soldiers and bin Laden’s bodyguards.49 In June 1998, the Taliban struck a deal with Saudi officials to send bin Laden to a Saudi prison in exchange for Saudi support and U.S. recognition of its legitimacy in ruling the country.50 Prince Turki bin Faisal, head of the Saudi General Intelligence Agency, confided to the Clinton Administration that the exchange was “a done deal.”51
But after the missile attacks, Prince Faisal retuned to Afghanistan to find the one-eyed Taliban mullah a changed man. “Mullah Omar became very heated,” the prince said. “In a loud voice he denounced all our efforts and praised bin Laden as a worthy and legitimate scholar of Islam.”52
On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists hijacked four American airliners; two crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and the fourth in a field near a reclaimed coal strip mine near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. “WTC smoking on 9-11” by Michael Foran is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The second step toward legitimizing an invasion of Afghanistan was the appointment of Hamid Karzai as the head of the interim government in Kabul. Before this appointment, Karzai had acted as a consultant and lobbyist for Unocal in its negotiations with the Taliban and as a CIA covert operator who had funneled U.S. aid to Mullah Omar and his band of radical Muslim students.53
The third and final step was the creation of an incident of enormous proportion that would warrant the planned invasion. That incident came on September 11, 2001, when Islamic terrorists hijacked four American airliners; two crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and the fourth in a field near a reclaimed coal strip mine near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It resulted in the deaths of 2,292 Americans, public and private property destruction in excess of $21 billion, and the loss of more than 200,000 jobs.54
The war without end had started.
1 Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 69–70.
2 Ken Thomas and David Hatcher Childress, Inside the Gemstone File: Howard Hughes, Onassis, and JFK (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1999), p. 93. See also Denise Pritchard, “Financial Takeover of Australia and New Zealand,” The Opal File, n.d., https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_sociopol_opalfile.htm, accessed March 7, 2019.
3 Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (New York: Verso, 1998), p. 261.
4 Ibid.
5 Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003), p. 476.
6 Ibid.
7 Robert Pelton, The World’s Most Dangerous Places (New York: Harper Resource, 2003), p. 342.
8 Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, p. 264.
9 McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, p. 474.
10 Jeffrey Lord, “Jimmy Carter’s Dead Ambassador,” American Spectator, October 23, 2012, https://spectator.org/jimmy-carters-dead-ambassador/, accessed March 7, 2019.
11 Ibid.
12 U.S. State Department memorandum, reproduced in Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, pp. 262–263.
13 Ibid., p. 263.
14 Ibid.,
15 Ibid., p. 259.
16 Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne, “BCCI: The Dirtiest Bank of All,” Biblioteca Pleiades, July 29, 1991, http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_globalbanking118.htm, accessed March 7, 2019.
17 David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin, “Follow the Money: How John Kerry Busted the Terrorists’ Favorite Bank,” Washington Monthly, August 2004, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.sirota.html, accessed March 7, 2019.
18 Lucy Komisar, “The Case That Kerry Cracked,” Alter Net, October 22, 2004, http://www.alternet.org/story/20268/the_case_that_kerry_cracked, accessed March 7, 2019.
19 Ibid.
20 McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, p. 463.
21 Ibid., pp. 464–465.
22 Peter Dale Scott, “Opium and the CIA: Can the U.S. Triumph in the Drug-Addicted War in Afghanistan?” Global Research, April 5, 2010, http://www.globalresearch.ca/opium-and-the-ciacan-the-us-triumph-in-the-drug-addicted-war-in-afghanistan/18522, accessed March 7, 2019.
23 Michel Chossudovsky, America’s “War on Terrorism” (Montreal, Quebec: Global Research, 2005), p. 118.
24 McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, p. 505.
25 Ibid, p. 518.
26 Richard James DeSocio, Rockefellerocracy: Assassinations, Watergate, and Monopoly of “Philanthropic” Foundations (Bloomington, IN: Author’s House, 2013), pp. 97–98. Also Richard Labeviere, Dollars for Terror (New York: Algora Press, 2000), p. 272.
27 Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousez, Osama bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), p. 190.
28 Chossudovsky, America’s “War on Terrorism, p. 82.
29 Ibid., p. 80.
30 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 125.
31 Ibid, p. 82.
32 Norman D. Livergood, “The New U.S.-British Oil Imperialism,” April, 17, 2005, http://blog.lege.net/content/oil/, accessed March 7, 2019.
33 Ibid.
34 Jim Crogan, “The Oil War,” LA Weekly, November 28, 2001, http://www.laweekly.com/news/the-oil-war-2134105, accessed March 7, 2019.
35 Staff Report, “Russia Bolsters Northern Alliance,” BBC News, October 22, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1612898.stm, accessed March 7, 2019.
36 Michael Grunwald, “CIA Halted Plot to Bomb U.S. Embassy in Uganda,” Washington Post, September 25, 1998, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/09/25/cia-halted-plot-to-bomb-us-embassy-in-uganda/8c8fd38b-1c6f-4570-ba14-126601660bf6/?utm_term=.5af04628e933, accessed March 7, 2019.
37 Rohan Gunaratna, Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York: Berkeley Books, 2002), p. 63.
38 Bill Clinton, quoted in Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), p. 125.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Finian Cunningham, “Kenyan False Flag Bomb Plot Aimed at Tightening Sanctions Noose on Iran,” Global Research, July 6, 2012, http://www.globalresearch.ca/kenyan-false-flag-bomb-plot-aimed-at-tightening-sanctions-noose-on-iran/31795, accessed March 7, 2019.
42 Ibid.
43 Ralph Schoenman, quoted in ibid.
44 Linda Sanchez, quoted in ibid.
45 Chossudovsky, America’s “War on Terrorism,” pp. 84–85.
46 Ibid., p. 15.
47 Ibid., p. 86.
48 Bergen, Holy War Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden, p. 166.
49 Tim Weiner, “Terror Suspect Said to Anger Afghan Hosts,” New York Times, March 4, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/04/world/terror-suspect-said-to-anger-afghan-hosts.html, accessed March 7, 2019.
50 William C. Rempel, “Saudi Tells of Deal to Arrest Terror Suspect: Afghans Backpedaled on Hand-Over of bin Laden after U.S. Embassy Blasts, Riyadh official says.,” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1999, http://articles.latimes.com/1999/aug/08/news/mn-63689, accessed March 7, 2019.
51 Ibid.
52 Prince Turki bin Faisal, quoted in Jane Corbin, al Qaeda: In Search of the Terrorist Network That Threatens the World (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 2003), pp. 69–70.
53 Chossudovsky, America’s “War on Terrorism,” p. 88.
54 Tom Templeton and Tom Lumley, “9/11 in Numbers,” Guardian, August 17, 2002.