The "terrorized" American public is distraught and dazzled from attacks on a series of symbolic targets in the United States that began with airliners crashing into buildings embodying the essence of U.S. economic and military power. It has continued with anthrax attacks on jingoistic U.S. media outlets that the "terrorists" would perceive to be the purveyors of western decadence and distortion. Newly published reports from India and the U.S. indicate we might have been distracted from considering an even more sinister scenario of U.S. intentions to "build-a-nation" from the ruins of Afghanistan as a conduit for Caspian Basin oil and nearby natural gas.

NBC Evening News anchor wanna-be Brian Williams was in obvious denial on NBC News Saturday night as he characterized the targeted attack of anthrax on NBC employees as, "It couldn't be more random." NBC News is a cheerleader for the "War Against Terrorism"and is owned by General Electric Corporation, a major U.S. weapons vendor for decades whose GE Theater on television was hosted by Ronald Reagan. General Electric launched the political career of Reagan by sending him on a speaking tour across the country, laying the ground-work for his presidency whose hallmark was a giant U.S. military build-up benefiting his sponsoring corporation. The only other successful and documented anthrax attack was diabolically directed against American Media, Inc., our nation's leading supplier of supermarket sleaze, whose tabloids appearing now at the checkout counters contain headlines and captions like: "Faces of Evil, Take a good look at the fiendish faces of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden and stare into the eyes of pure evil" in the National Enquirer; "Bin Laden's Evil Scheme to Hook America On 'Superdrug'," Terror lord planned to flood America with killer heroin" in Globe; and "Bin Laden's son, the 10 year old Heir Apparent of Hatred," in Star. But bio-terror is not as big a story as terror-for-oil.

On October 13, in a story titled "America, Oil and Afghanistan"in the online edition of India's National Newspaper, The Hindu, Sitaram Yechury reported a quote from U. S. News and World Report of Vice-President Cheney, in 1998 when he was CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the global energy industry. Cheney told energy industry executives, "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." Yechury says that the Caspian region oil reserves may be large enough to offset Persian gulf oil "within the next 15 to 20 years," and that Turkmenistan on Afghanistan's northern border has the world's third largest natural gas reserves. Yechury reports that Jon Flanders in an article, "The Afghanistan Pipeline Connection" quotes Michael Klare, author of "Resource Wars" as saying that "We (the U.S.) view oil as a security consideration and we have to protect it by any means necessary, regardless of other considerations, other values." Yechury reported that the U.S. Government Energy Information fact sheet on Afghanistan dated December 2000 says, "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographic position as potential transit route for oil and gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential includes proposed multi-billion dollar oil and gas export lines through Afghanistan."

Setting up this shocking scenario of the implicit U.S. attempt to control the government of Afghanistan to insure oil and natural gas pipelines through that country from the oil and gas rich Caspian Basin was a story in Sunday's N. Y. Times by Joseph Kahn. Kahn reported that "President Bush, whose foreign policy views during the campaign could be summed up as 'no more nation building,' declared last week that the United States would form a new government in Afghanistan and feed its 'poor souls.'"

Tom Turnipseed is an attorney, writer and civil rights activist in Columbia, South Carolina www.turnipseed.net

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