Minister says war on terrorism a smoke screen

[pippin]

"Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world. . . ."

He also claims "the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings. . . the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."

He adds: "Given this, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. . . The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,1036588,00.html

[Maple]

1. Ruh-oh

THIS is serious.

[liberalmuse]

2. I wonder when...

he's going to commit 'suicide' in the woods? I think he's hit it right on the head. I hope more prominent people start to speak up about the obvious.

[yella_dawg]

3. Gosh!

I just would never have suspected the BFEE of anything like that.

[HereSince1628]

4. And this is plausible only because Bush did adopt the NSS which

was modelled on Neocon documents.

I agree Meacher's claims sound bizarre, but then he is only using the Bush Administration's published National Security Strategy as a lens to make sense of recent events...

The damned NSS is ripe with outlandish, hegemonic nonsense. Meacher would be a joke if it weren't for the fact that Kristof & Co. beat him to the punch in the mid-90's rough draft of the NSS.

[sweetheart]

5. meacher admits the obvious

The truth will come out. The war on terrorism is just a war on opposition parties allowing nations the world over to use extrajudicial means to repress dissent and oppoisition. Before the WOT, it was the WOD and they've tried to combine the two as they are exactly the same... wars against civilian opposition.

[JohnyCanuck]

6. Has Mr. Meacher has been reading www.fromthewilderness.com

Matthew Simmons has been a key advisor to the Bush Administration, Vice President Cheney's 2001 Energy Task Force and the Council on Foreign Relations. An energy investment banker, Simmons is the CEO of Simmons and Co. International, handling an investment portfolio of approximately $56 billion. He has served previously on the faculty of Harvard Business School. Among Peak Oil researchers he is known for two seemingly contradictory things: being a staunch supporter of George W. Bush and his policies and probably the only outspoken insider to talk openly about Peak Oil.

On May 27th, 2003 Simmons addressed the second international conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) which was meeting at the French Petroleum Institute (IFP) via a satellite teleconference video link from his Houston offices. His remarks were so revealing that I had them transcribed from my tape recording of the event. It is becoming clearer by the day that the Bush administration was aware of Peak Oil before taking office (pun intended) and Simmons' remarks indicate an awareness of Peak Oil's implications. They also predict extremely severe consequences arising from natural gas depletion in North America. – MCR

<snip>

Five years ago I barely had thought about the question of, "What does peaking mean and when might it occur?" I was intending at the time though to study the concept of depletion and the phenomenon that field after field was tending to peak fast and decline at rates that were unheard of before. The uh, uh, I think basically that now, that peaking of oil will never be accurately predicted until after the fact. But the event will occur, and my analysis is leaning me more by the month, the worry that peaking is at hand; not years away. If it turns out I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. But if I'm right, the unforeseen consequences are devastating

But unfortunately the world has no Plan B if I'm right. The facts are too serious to ignore. Sadly the pessimist-optimist debate started too late. The Club of Rome humanists were right to raise the 'Limits to Growth' issues in the late 1960's. When they raised these issues they were actually talking about a time frame of 2050 to 2070. Then time was on the side of preparing Plan B. They like Dr. Hubbert got to be seen as Chicken Little or the Boy Who Cried Wolf...


More at: www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/061203_simmons.html

Here's a snip from a 2002 interview with Professor Colin Campbell PhD a geologist and retired oil industry executive and consultant

FTW: What will be the likely effects of hitting the downslope of production?

Campbell: Big question. Simply stated: war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the extinction of homo sapiens, insofar as the evolution of life on earth has always been accomplished by the extinction of over-adapted species (when their environmental niche changed for geologic or climatic reasons) leaving simpler forms to continue, and eventually giving rise new more adapted species. If Homo sapiens figures out how to move back to simplicity, he will be the first to do so.

FTW: How soon before we start to feel the effects of dwindling oil supplies?

Campbell: We already are -- in the form of the threatened U.S. invasion of the Middle East. The U.S. would be importing 90 percent of its oil by 2020 to hold even current demand and access to foreign oil has long been officially declared a vital national interest justifying military intervention. Probable actual physical shortage of all liquid hydrocarbons worldwide won't appear for about 20 years, especially if deepening recession holds down demand. But people are coming to appreciate that peak is imminent and what it means. Some places like the U.S. will face shortage sooner than others. The price is likely to soar as shortage looms, which itself may delay peak.



More at: www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102302_campbell.html

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

7. Link to Meecher's article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,1036685,00.html


Excellent rundown of the PNAC lot & the whole 9-11 'failure'. I've read similar on a dozen conspiracy sites, but am still in (jubilant) shock that Meecher is saying all this.

[Minstrel Boy]

8. whoa...

This has to be a breakthrough - one of Blair's own former ministers talking of LIHOP.

[Minstrel Boy]

9. You must read Meacher's article:

"The War on Terrorism Is Bogus." And remember, until three months ago this was Blair's Environment Minister. Most of us who've studied 9/11 know this stuff, but to hear it coming from a man who, until three months ago, was a longserving Minister of the Blair government, is astonishing.

An excerpt:

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,1036685,00.html

[JohnyCanuck]

10. Seems like dynamite stuff to me.

Will be interesting to see if they make any serious attempts to debunk his arguments or just hope that if they ignore the elephant in their living room no one will notice the big piles of elephant shit spread all over the floor.

[oasis]

11. oops, time for PNAC to scrub there website again.

:wow: www.newamericancentury.org

[reprobate]

12. The arrogance of these bastards is amazing.

Consider the fact that they actually told us what they were going to do.

The PNAC documents themselves laid out the war on iraq. And stated that it would be necessary to have a "new Pearl Harbor" in order for the american people to support the war to control the middle east oil.

I look forward to the treason trials after the election. Just can't decide whether we should have one mass trial to get it over with and move on, or to hold individual trials for each of the administration members and their enablers, inorder to savor it for the longest time possible.

[9215]

13. Read the entire article

Meacher confirms alot of what we have been talking about at DU but this is from an OFFICIAL source. He lays the groundwork for further inquiry and investigation. I will bet that not a single rebut to Meacher's claims will be heard.

Call me an optimist, but this is a huge step toward exposing these bastards.


As the Roman playwright Seneca warns us, "Cui prodest scelus, is fecit"-- the one who derives advantage from the crime is the one most likely to have committed it.

[JohnyCanuck]

14. I sent the following thank you email to Mr. Meacher.

It might be a good idea if you haven't done so to dash him off an email of support. I am sure he is going to be under tremendous pressure to back off and shutup, and no doubt the freepers will be on his case big time.

If his inbox is overflowing with supportive emails, it has to help him in his fight to bring theses issues to the forefront and to make sure the publicity about this story puts the media whores on notice that their coverups for chimpy are not going to work for ever.

He email address as given by the guardian is posted at the bottom of the article and is [e-mail]

Dear Mr. Meacher,

Thank you so very much for your recent Guardian article which shines a light on the links between the Bush administratio neo-con advisors making up the PNAC group, their self-professed plans for world domination, and the unexplained, outrageous (and ignored by the media) failures by the US authorities to make any meaningful attempts to forestall the attack of 9/11 in spite of the numerous warnings and alerts that were flowing into the intelligence agencies and the Bush administration at the time..

To be sure these connections have been troubling many of us who use the internet on a daily basis to obtain information from a wide variety of sources. To those who only have the mainstream news media as a source of information, your questioning and probing of the glaring weaknesses in the official explanation surrounding the tragic events of 911 will no doubt come as a shock. However it is only if people such as yourself have the courage and fortitude to speak out and lay all the cards on the table that we have any hope of resolving the complex issues that have the potential to lead us all to destruction.

You are to be comended for your courage and forthrightness. I know you will come under some extreme pressure over the coming days and weeks to renounce the views you expressed in your article. Please stick to your guns and continue to demand that the important issues you raised are fully addressed by the appropriate authorities. At some point the elephant in the living room can no longer be ignored. We must make sure we keep pointing it out at every chance we get.

Regards and best wishes

xxxx