Oil And The Role Of James Woolsey
In The Propaganda Campaign Against Iraq
"Energy is vital to a country's security and material well-being. A state unable to provide its people with adequate energy supplies or desiring added leverage over other people often resorts to force. Consider Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, driven by his desire to control more of the world's oil reserves, and the international response to this threat
. The underlying goal of the U.N. force, which included 500,000 American troops, was to ensure continued and unfettered access to petroleum....""I fear we're going to be at war for decades, not years ..... one major component of that war
is oil.""Even some of the people and countries are the same. And the methods - particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy - are definitely the same. Boiled down to its essentials, the Iran-Contra affair was about a small group of officials based in the National Security Agency (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran an 'off-the-books' operation to secretly sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. They used the proceeds to sustain the Nicaraguan contras - U.S. sponsored rebels fighting Managua's left-wing government - in defiance of both a congressional ban and of official U.S. policy as enunciated by the State Department and President Ronald Reagan. It was never clear whether Reagan understood, let alone approved, the operation. The picture emerging from the latest reports about the manipulation of intelligence in the drive to war with Iraq, as well as efforts by administration hawks to deliberately aggravate tensions with Syria, Iran, and North Korea in defiance of official State Department and U.S. policy, suggest a similar but much more ambitious scheme at work. As with Reagan, in this case, too, it is difficult to determine whether Bush or even his NSC director, Condoleezza Rice - fully understands, let alone approves, of what the hawks are doing. There was some hint of a parallel policy apparatus dating back just after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001. It was known early on, for example, that the Pentagon leadership, without notice to the State Department, the NSC, or the CIA, convened its advisory Defense Policy Board (DPB), headed by Richard Perle,
to discuss attacking Iraq within days of the attacks. The three agencies were also kept in the dark about a mission undertaken immediately afterward by former CIA director and DPB member James Woolsey to London to gather intelligence about possible links between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, as if the CIA or the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) could not be trusted."“I don't know how
many pieces of evidence one needs in the case of someone like Saddam Hussein. We are not,
after all, trying to convict him in a court of law beyond a reasonable doubt. We're trying
to make a judgment about American foreign policy and national security policy and whether
that set of circumstances creates enough material for us to make a judgment that he has
been actively involved in terrorist incidents against the United States. ...There have
been reports that on at least one and perhaps more than one occasion, Mr. Atta, who was
probably the central figure in the events of September 11 -- at least of the 19 in this
country -- when he was living in Hamburg before he came to the United States, visited
Prague, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer -- someone who was declared persona non
grata last spring by the Czech government. That would be yet another one or more
indicators of cooperation between terrorists attacking the United States and the
government of Iraq…..Then there's
also the recent reports from two Iraqi defectors about possible training and hijacking
aircraft at Salman Pak, just south of Baghdad….UNSCOM was there once, and I believe there
has been material about work there on biological weapons taking place. But there have
been two defectors in the last few weeks who have come forward with stories about training
there of non-Iraqis, as well as Iraqis, hijacking aircraft on either a mock-up or a model
or perhaps a shell of a large passenger aircraft, including training not only with guns
and explosives, but with knives or with just physical intimidation as ways to hijack an
airplane….Conclusive
evidence is a phrase that most people think of in a law enforcement context, beyond a
reasonable doubt. That's not the kind of evidence that you get in intelligence. You get
indications. I think that if one sets the standard at conclusive evidence, one will always
be disappointed in virtually any intelligence assessment. What you get is material that
enables you to make a judgment. Most of this is about judgments, and it's not the kind of
evidence that will convict people in a court of law of a crime. It's a different thing
altogether. And so whenever I hear a phrase like ‘no conclusive evidence,’ I
immediately say, ‘If you're talking about intelligence, you're using the wrong
standard.’ ...I've been to the United Kingdom twice this year….…Because if
I do anything to help me advise the U.S. government, I'm not going to talk about it. .....
There's certainly some people who don't want to make the Saudis nervous, because the
Saudis sit on top of the world's largest supply of petroleum. ... I think that it is
ridiculous for the United States not to have taken action long before this to move away
from dependence on oil, and particularly on Middle Eastern oil. ... Along with all of the
other things that we've seen, it adds some weight to the judgment that he has been
involved with terrorist organizations. When you look at the Atta visits to Prague and you
look at the Hijazi visit to Kandahar and so forth, there are just a number of things. It's
difficult to say that any one of them is conclusive or decisive. But they begin to add up.
... I think things will continue to come out tying Iraq -- possibly Iran -- but tying Iraq
to terrorism directly against the United States in the 1990s and possibly September 11,
2001. We weren't really looking under those rocks hard from the early 1990s on. And now
that, I hope, the U.S. government and its friends and allies are starting to look under
those rocks, they might find some things that they didn't find before. ...”
Interview R.James Woolsey
PBS
Online, 8 November 2001
"
There is no evidence of formal links between Iraqi ex-leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda leaders prior to the 2003 war, a US Senate report says. The finding is contained in a 2005 CIA report released by the Senate's Intelligence Committee on Friday. US President George W Bush has said that the presence of late al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq before the war was evidence of a link. Opposition Democrats are accusing the White House of deliberate deception. They say the revelation undermines the basis on which the US went to war in Iraq. The BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says that the US president has again and again tried to connect the war, which most Americans think was a mistake, with the so-called war on terror, which has the support of the nation.""At a NATO conference in Prague last November, Woolsey declared
‘Iraq can be seen as the first battle of the fourth world war,’ in rhetoric that he has practiced and honed virtually since the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. ‘After two hot world wars and one cold one that all began and were centered in Europe,’ he said, ‘the fourth world war is going to be for the Middle East.’ A high-flying corporate lawyer, Woolsey, like other neoconservatives, began as a liberal Democrat in the 1960s who marched in the civil rights movement and even campaigned for the anti-Vietnam War candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy. Unlike most neocons, Woolsey served a brief stint in the Army--albeit not in Indochina--before entering government, where he fell in with the rising stars of the neoconservative movement, including Perle and Wolfowitz, as an arms control negotiator. He served for two years in the Carter administration as undersecretary of the Navy, and was then recruited by Perle and other hard-liners in the Reagan administration to return to arms control work, which he also pursued under the administration of George Bush, Sr. Unhappy with the realism of the first Bush, and outraged by his failure to oust Saddam after the first Gulf War, he supported Bill Clinton for president in 1992. To the enthusiasm of fellow neocons, Clinton made him CIA director in 1993 but he resigned less than two years later, complaining that he and Clinton never established a close relationship. But Woolsey maintained his obsession with Saddam Hussein, and in January 1998 signed a public letter to Clinton by the newly formed Project for the New American Century (PNAC) calling for the adoption of a ‘regime change’ as the main U.S. policy goal toward Iraq. In that same year, he lobbied hard for passage of the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), which not only formalized regime change as the policy but allocated up to 100 million dollars for the Iraqi opposition, mainly the Iraq National Congress (INC), headed by Ahmed Chalabi. That lobby went into high gear immediately after Sep. 11. Within just a few days, Perle convened the DPB to discuss how Washington could use the incidents as justification for attacking Iraq, and Woolsey was tasked to go to Europe to collect evidence that Hussein was linked to al Qaeda. He spent many weeks on that mission, emerging with the story that an unnamed informant had told Czech intelligence that he had seen the leader of the Sep. 11 skyjackers meet with an Iraqi agent in Prague in the April before the attack. Even though the report was dismissed as not credible by U.S., British, French, and Israeli intelligence agencies, it became the basis--endlessly repeated by Woolsey and other neocons on television talk shows and in op-ed pages of major newspapers--of a major propaganda campaign against Iraq, even as Washington carried out its military campaign in Afghanistan in late 2001. Woolsey even suggested that Saddam was behind the 1993 bombing of the World TradeCenter towers and the anthrax-bearing letters sent to various lawmakers after 9/11, and that U.S. intelligence agencies could not find the connection because they lacked sufficient imagination. The campaign largely worked: by late last year, well over half of respondents in one key poll believed that Saddam was somehow linked to the September 11 attacks.“James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, ambassador and Pentagon official who now describes himself as a ‘private citizen’, is the man entrusted with investigating Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks and anthrax outbreaks. The Iraqi National Congress, the exiled group that opposes Saddam Hussein, said it recently held meetings in London with Mr Woolsey.
Administration sources have said his trip was funded and approved by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary. Such is the sensitivity of the Iraq issue, Mr Woolsey will make no comment about the exact nature of his brief. He told The Telegraph: ‘I was in London and that's it.’ But he made clear that he believed there were ‘substantial and growing indications’ that a state was behind the attacks. The milled, ‘weaponised’ anthrax that virtually shut down Congress and killed two postal workers has increased his suspicions. So too have reports of meetings involving Mohammad Atta, a leading hijacker, in Prague. Atta travelled to the Czech Republic at least twice and was refused entry to Prague airport on another occasion. According to the Wall Street Journal, on one occasion Atta was observed meeting Ahmed Khalil Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi diplomat subsequently expelled for spying. Mr Woolsey said: ‘I doubt very seriously if this was simply a social relationship or that they liked to drink Czech beer together.’ It has also emerged this week that intelligence reports have stated that Osama bin Laden sent an al-Qa'eda delegation to Baghdad on April 25, 1998 to attend Saddam's birthday celebration. Saddam's son Uday, it is claimed, agreed to train al-Qa'eda recruits and establish a joint force of bin Laden's elite fighters and the Iraqi intelligence unit 999. All this, Mr Woolsey, said, made it imperative that America ‘should look under that rock’ to establish whether Iraq helped al-Qa'eda to carry out the September 11 or anthrax attacks. He said: ‘If a state is involved, obviously it seems to me to be important for us to know whom we're at war with.’ Focusing solely on proof that would be admissible in a court of law would be a mistake. He said: ‘Hearsay is not admissible as evidence and almost all intelligence is hearsay. Evidentiary standards are the wrong standards. I would talk about indications, information.’… Having suffered thousands of civilian casualties, most Americans would prefer a pre-emptive strike against a known enemy such as Saddam than risk a biological or chemical attack that could kill tens of thousands. Mr Woolsey said: ‘We ought to seriously consider removing Saddam's regime, if he has been involved in any terror in recent years against us.’ Saddam had attempted to assassinate President Bush Snr in 1993. He had also defied UN mandates by developing weapons of mass destruction. He added: ‘In my judgment that's enough.’… He concluded: ‘In the American vernacular - you ain't seen nothing yet.’ Coming from the man entrusted with gathering that ‘information’, Saddam would perhaps be well advised to mark Mr Woolsey's words.”The Desperate World of James Woolsey Ex-CIA Chief Predicted 'Peak' Oil Crisis In 1999 CFR Paper www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATwoolseypeakoil.htm Iraq Hawk Who Saw The Energy Strife Coming And Then Joined In |
"Optimists about world oil reserves, such as the Department of Energy, are getting increasingly lonely. The International Energy Agency now says that world production outside the Middle Eastern Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) will peak in 1999 and
world production overall will peak between 2010 and 2020. This projection is supported by influential recent articles in Science and Scientific American. Some knowledgeable academic and industry voices put the date that world production will peak even sooner—within the next five or six years. The optimists who project large reserve quantities of over one trillion barrels tend to base their numbers on one of three things: inclusion of heavy oil and tar sands, the exploitation of which will entail huge economic and environmental costs; puffery by opec nations lobbying for higher production quotas within the cartel; or assumptions about new drilling technologies that may accelerate production but are unlikely to expand reserves. Once production peaks, even though exhaustion of world reserves will still be many years away, prices will begin to rise sharply.…. Our growing dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil is a fool’s game—there is no way for the rest of the world to win. Our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonizingly through developing-nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change—or through all of the above.”“Oil is a magnet for conflict. The problem is simple-everyone needs energy, but the sources of the world’s transportation fuel are concentrated in relatively few countries. Well over two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil reserves lie in the Middle East (including the Caspian basin), leaving the rest of the world dependent on the region’s collection of predators and vulnerable autocrats. This unwelcome dependence keeps U.S. military forces tied to the Persian Gulf, forces foreign policy compromises, and sinks many developing nations into staggering debt as they struggle to pay for expensive dollar-denominated oil with lower-priced commodities and agricultural products. In addition, oil causes environmental conflict. The possibility that greenhouse gases will lead to catastrophic climate change is substantially increased by the 40 million barrels of oil burned every day by vehicles…. Once production peaks, even though exhaustion of world reserves will still be many years away, prices will begin to rise sharply. This trend will be exacerbated by increased demand in the developing world. As Daniel Yergin, Dennis Eklof, and Jefferson Edwards pointed out in these pages (‘Fueling Asia’s Recovery,’ March/April 1998), even assuming a substantial recession, increased Asian needs alone will add enough demand by 2010 (9 million barrels per day) to more than equal Saudi Arabia’s current daily production. The nations of the Middle East will be ready to exploit the trend of rising demand and shrinking supply. The Gulf states control nearly two-thirds of the world’s reserves; the states bordering the Caspian Sea have another several percent. Barring some unforeseen discoveries, the Middle East will control something approaching three-quarters of the world’s oil in the coming century….If genetically engineered biocatalysts and advanced processing technologies can make a transition from fossil fuels to biofuels affordable, the world’s security picture could be different in many ways. It would be impossible to form a cartel that would control the production, manufacturing, and marketing of ethanol fuel. U.S. diplomacy and policies in the Middle East could be guided more by a respect for democracy than by a need to protect oil supplies and accommodate oil-producing regimes. Our intrusive military presence in the region could be reduced, both ameliorating anti-American tensions and making U.S. involvement in a Middle Eastern war less likely. Other states would also reap benefits. Ukraine, rich in fertile land, would be less likely to be dominated over time by oil-rich Russia. China would feel less pressure to befriend Iran and Iraq or build a big navy to secure the oil of the South China Sea. The ability of oil-exporting countries to shape events would be increasingly limited…..”
"Saddam Hussein sits
and smiles as the price of his oil - as well as that of his neighbors' (which, he
doubtless believes, he may again be able to seize) -- skyrockets, giving him more to spend
on his military forces, including longer range ballistic missiles and weapons of mass
destruction. He can be confident that within the next decade or two
- the period during which most independent assessments of reserves suggest that world
petroleum production will begin to decline - the world's sharply increasing demand for petroleum
will increasingly have to be satisfied by him and his neighbors, to their great profit.... Although all these serious [economic,
environmental and social] problems may at first seem unconnected, Mr. Chairman, they in
fact all have essentially the same cause - over-dependence by the rest of the world on
petroleum-derived products that will increasingly have to come from the very troubled and
unstable Middle East."
James Woolsey, former Director of the
CIA
Statement
to Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, Unites States Senate, 11 April 2000
NLPWESSEX,
natural law publishing |