* plans to nominate Khalilzad as UN Ambassador

[partylessinOhio]

Khalilzad has quite a history with oil, Unocal, mujuaheddins, Rand Corp., Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rice. The information below was written in 2001 when Khalilzad was special envoy to Afghanistan and is quite interesting:

Zalmay Khalilzad and the Bush Agenda
by Jennifer Van Bergen

t r u t h o u t | January 13, 2001 - The appointment by the Bush Administration of Zalmay Khalilzad as special envoy to Afghanistan which was announced on December 31, 2001, only nine days after the U.S.-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul, seems timely and logical. Khalilzad, a U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan with extensive knowledge of the region and experience, appears to be the right person for the job.

Khalilzad's presence, however, is the fruit of an older agenda, one that reaches back at least to the Reagan era, and Khalilzad has more connections to that agenda than meets the eye.

Simply put, Khalilzad's appointment means oil. Oil for the United States. Oil for Unocal, a U.S. company long criticized for doing business in countries with repressive governments and rumored to have close ties to the Department of State and the intelligence community.

Zalmay Khalilzad was an advisor for Unocal. In the mid 1990s, while working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analyses for Unocal at the time it had signed letters of approval from the Taliban. The analyses were for a proposed 890-mile, $2-billion, 1.9-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project which would have extended from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. In December 1997, Khalilzad joined Unocal officials at a reception for an invited Taliban delegation to Texas. ...

Khalilzad's appointment as special envoy to Afghanistan raises suspicions about the priorities of the Bush administration. Long-standing political and business ties connect Khalilzad to an oil agenda. The United States has been bombing Afghanistan in retaliation for terrorist attacks on this country. But Khalilzad's appointment makes it clear that oil is now -- and perhaps has been since before 9/11 -- behind U.S. Afghan policy. ...

In the early 1980s, Zalmay taught political science at Columbia University in New York, where he worked with Zbigniew Brzezinski. He was also executive director of the Friends of Afghanistan, a support group for the mujaheddins fighting the Soviets -- the same mujuaheddins later known to have spawned bin Laden.

In 1984, Khalilzad became an American citizen and joined the State Department on a one-year fellowship. Khalilzad's background and language skills earned him a permanent position on the State Department's Policy Planning Council during the Reagen era. There he worked under Paul Wolfowitz, then Reagan's director of policy planning, now the No. 2 man at the Pentagon. In 1998, the two, having retained close ties, joined others in signing an open letter to Clinton that argued for the overthrow of Saddam.

From 1985 to 1989, Zalmay served as special adviser to the undersecretary of state. He belonged to a small group of policymakers who advocated providing arms to the "resistance" fighters in Afghanistan.

Khalilzad then consulted for the Rand Corp., a conservative think tank, on defense issues and returned to Washington when Bush I took office, taking up the post of assistant deputy under-secretary of defense for policy planning. Again he worked closely with Wolfowitz, then the Pentagon's No. 3 official.

He also got to know Dick Cheney at the Defense Department during the Gulf War.

During the Clinton years, Khalilzad returned to Rand and spent his time writing books and articles. After Bush II was elected, Cheney selected him to head the transition team for defense. In May 2001, Bush appointed him the National Security Council official in charge of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. His direct superior was Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser, who herself had served as an oil consultant for Chevron. ...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/01.14A.Zalmay.Oil.htm

[fooj]

1. He needs to be asked about the PNAC...

Is Rockefeller in charge of the hearings?