Connect the dots

Uzbekistan, Unocal, Afghanistan, Dick Cheney, Halliburton, Houston,The Bushes, Oil, Osama bin Laden, Torture, 9/11...

• Torture state now valued US partner
May 2,2005

Seven months before September 11, 2001, the US State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a catalogue of horrors.

The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask".

Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling body parts, using electric shocks on genitals and pulling off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported.

Immediately after the September 11 attacks, however, the Bush Administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in the "war on terror"

• From Uzbekistan at a glance

Uzbekistan is the eighth-largest producer of natural gas in the world, but lacks the ability to export most of it. Uzbekistan currently serves as a crucial link in the gas transport chain linking Turkmenistan's enormous gas deposits with Russia.

Uzbekistan is party to the Central Asia Oil Pipeline agreement with Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. If completed, the pipeline would transport oil from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and other Central Asian states via Afghanistan to Gwadar on Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast....

• Unocal signs agreements for Uzbekistan oil and gas, pipeline infrastructure studies

Sugar Land, Texas, Nov. 4, 1996 -- Unocal Corporation today announced that agreements have been signed with the Republic of Uzbekistan for Unocal to evaluate the country’s potential crude oil and natural gas resources and to determine the feasibility of utilizing part of Uzbekistan’s pipeline network to tie into Unocal’s proposed Central Asia Oil Pipeline (CAOP). The CAOP, when constructed, will link Central Asia oil producers to a new deepwater port on Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast.
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The CAOP project is one of two pipelines proposed by Unocal and Delta to export hydrocarbons from Central Asia. A second proposed pipeline would carry natural gas from fields in Turkmenistan through to markets in Pakistan.

• From Oil in the Caspian Region and Central Asia, 1998

Without large oil and gas revenues, the Uzbek government would have to consider the interests of the merchant class . Political consequences include a political and religious liberalization. By contrast, with large oil and gas revenues, the government wopuld be more immune to the requests of the merchant class.

• America's pipe dream
The Guardian,
Tuesday October 23, 2001

In 1998, Dick Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil services company, remarked: "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.

and

As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, in 1995 the US oil company Unocal started negotiating to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea. The company's scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph reported that "oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America's, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan". Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered.

• A Creeping Collapse in Credibility at the White House:
By Tom Turnipseed , January 10, 2002
From ENRON Entanglements to UNOCAL Bringing the Taliban to Texas and Controlling Afghanistan

Dick Cheney was then CEO of Haliburton Corporation, a pipeline services vendor based in Texas. Gushed Cheney in 1998, "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight. The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business is." Would Cheney bargain with the harborers of U.S. troop killers if that's where the business was?

The Telegraph reported that Unocal had promised to start building the pipeline and paying the Taliban immediately, with the added inducements and a donation of £500,000 to the University of Nebraska for courses in Afghanistan to train 400 teachers, electricians, carpenters and pipefitters.

The Telegraph also reported, "The US government, which in the past has branded the Taliban's policies against women and children "despicable", appears anxious to please the fundamentalists to clinch the lucrative pipeline contract." In a paper prepared by Neamatollah Nojumi, at the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Nojumi wrote in August 1997 that Madeline Albright sat in a "full-dress CIA briefing" on the Caspian region. CIA agents then accompanied "some well-trained petroleum engineers" to the region. Albright concluded that shaping the region's policies was "one of the most exciting things that we can do."

It's also exciting to the Bush Administration. According to the authors of Bin Laden, the Hidden Truth, one of the FBI's leading counter terrorism agents, John O'Neill, resigned last year in protest over the Bush Administration's alleged obstruction of his investigation into bin Laden. (A similar complaint has been filed on behalf of another unidentified FBI Agent by the conservative Judicial Watch public interest group.) Supposedly the Bush Administration had been meeting since January 2001 with the Taliban, and was also reluctant to offend Saudi Arabians who O'Neill had linked to bin Laden. Mr. O'Neill, after leaving the FBI, assumed the position of security director at the World Trade Center, where he was killed in the 911 attacks.

As America's New War now begins focusing on other "rogue nations," UNOCAL's stars have magically aligned. About two months after the Houston parties, UNOCAL executive John Maresca addressed the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific and urged support for establishment of an investor-friendly climate in Afghanistan, "... we have made it clear that construction of our proposed pipeline cannot begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders and our company." Meaning that UNOCAL's ability to construct the Afghan pipeline was a cause worthy of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Maresca's prayers have been answered with the Taliban's replacement. As reported in Le Monde, the new Afghan government's head, Hamid Karzai, formerly served as a UNOCAL consultant. Only nine days after Karzai's ascension, President Bush nominated another UNOCAL consultant and former Taliban defender, Zalmay Khalilzad, as his special envoy to Afghanistan.

To be continued