Village Voice piece on French book

[Roger Baker]

Margot wrote:

>While I have no doubt there was much dirty dealing re
>Bush-Afghanistan pipeline-Taliban, it's a pity the real
>meat of that sordid mess has gotten sidetracked by the
>O'Neill issue.  There's a long Profile in this week's New
>Yorker (1/14) which I couldn't find on-line, but the gist
>is: O'Neill was a rascal, f*ed up majorly, and probably
>*did* go into the second WTC building deliberately. 
>  Among the details:  he wanted very badly to advance in
>the FBI, but did stuff like leave a briefcase w/ classified
>info behind when he left a meeting, (it was stolen &
>recovered),
>left his Palm Pilot, ditto, at a baseball game, had a wife
>and at least two mistresses simultaneously, and was not
>discreet about it, etc.  Not the way to be taken seriously,
>even if he weren't working for the decendents of J. Edgar.
>  According to the article, his son and both mistresses say
>he called them after the first collapse, and they all
>believe he went back in, as does another Feebie, an old
>friend, who was there.  One mistress quotes him as telling
>her, during at phone call at 9:25 a.m.: "I think my
>employers are dead.  I can't lose this job."
>---Margot
>
>__________________________________________________
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Check out this article at 
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0201/ridgeway.php
Mondo Washington
The French Connection
by James Ridgeway<br>Paris interviews and translation by Sandra Bisin
Paris Reporters Say Bush Threatened War Last Summer
Week of January 2 - 8, 2002
Mondo Washington
by James Ridgeway
Paris interviews and translation by Sandra Bisin
Paris Reporters Say Bush Threatened War Last Summer
The French Connection

Far from the American media machine, two French authors have released a 
report outlining U.S. attempts to finesse the issue of Osama bin Laden 
long before Al Qaeda struck on September 11. Based on extensive 
firsthand reporting, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié write in 
their book, Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, that the Bush administration 
went so far as to consider waging war against Afghanistan's ruling 
Taliban last summer. Brisard and Dasquié argue the U.S. cared more about 
getting access to the region's oil than about getting the head of Osama 
bin Laden.

Now thousands of U.S. citizens are dead and Al Qaeda is on the run. 
Dasquié tells the Voice he doubts the group will last "more than a few 
weeks." The journalist describes bin Laden's military leaders as mostly 
former members of the Egyptian special forces who joined with the Saudi 
exile in 1992 and 1993 during fighting in Sudan. Al Qaeda commanders and 
troops are "the military product of a religious deviance," he says, 
warning that ending the network "won't solve anything because the Saudi 
charities and other organizations tied to the clerics will go on pumping 
out the money. The problem is their fundamentalism."

Brisard, who has run Vivendi International's economic intelligence 
service, prepared the West's first report on Al Qaeda back in 1997, at 
the request of the French government. Along with Dasquié, he now argues 
the FBI's efforts to get to the bottom of bin Laden's terror outfit
The FBI press office had no comment on the book, and the State 
Department has steadily denied having any negotiations with the Taliban, 
which had no diplomatic standing in the U.S. But the two authors think 
highly of the FBI agents who were working on counterterrorism, saying 
they often had excellent informants.

That's not to say progress was great. When an FBI agent would turn up to 
do an interview, the Saudis would step in with their own bizarre 
behavior. "We uncovered incredible things," Dasquié tells the Voice. 
"Investigators would arrive to find that key witnesses they were about 
to interrogate had been beheaded the day before." In the end, he says, 
the West "always considered Saudi Arabia as a partner that we absolutely 
and systematically had to protect."

The book also reveals a portrait of U.S. policy toward the Taliban that 
differs sharply from the one usually held up for the American public but 
coincides with that of the Taliban's unofficial emissary in the U.S., 
Laili Helms, the niece of the former CIA head (see "The Accidental 
Operative," Voice, June 19, 2001). Helms described one incident after 
another in which, she claimed, the Taliban agreed to give up bin Laden 
to the U.S., only to be rebuffed by the State Department. On one 
occasion, she said, the Taliban agreed to give the U.S. coordinates for 
his campsite, leaving enough time so the Yanks could whack Al Qaeda's 
leader with a missile before he moved. The proposal, she claims, was 
nixed. The State Department denied receiving any such offer.

Helms also related an incident when Prince Turki, then the head of Saudi 
intelligence, flew to Kabul to negotiate bin Laden's arrest. Turki, 
according to Helms's account of the story, wanted bin Laden murdered on 
Afghan soil. If he were killed there, then the Saudi royal family 
needn't face the embarrassment of airing their dirty linen in an open 
trial. The Taliban refused, and Turki returned home empty-handed.

Brisard and Dasquié characterize the U.S. as playing a clumsy footsie 
with the Taliban, with diplomacy unfolding in a series of bizarre fits 
and starts. By the late 1990s, the writers claim, diplomacy was run on 
different levels. One channel went from the UN Security Council to 
Kabul. Meanwhile, the State Department conducted its own bilateral 
negotiations. From the start, the U.S. favored a sort of covert support 
for the Taliban, in hopes that sooner or later the one-eyed Supreme 
Leader Mullah Mohammed Omar could be prevailed upon to break ties with 
bin Laden so the West could get on with its pipeline and other business 
interests.

However, this approach came to a screaming halt in September 1997, when 
European Union commissioner Emma Bonino paid an official visit to Kabul, 
where the Taliban arrested her for filming the conditions in a women's 
hospital. Their outrageous actions made it difficult for the West to 
appear at all friendly with the Taliban. In reality, since they had all 
the power in this Stalinized regime, nobody ever stopped dealing with 
them. It's just that the trail became more submerged. Bin Laden then 
began his potent offensives, attacking the diplomatic posts and the USS 
Cole.

In general, according to the authors, the U.S. line on the Taliban had 
gone something like this: "OK, they are officially a bit wild, but let's 
not go overboard. Eventually we can make them acceptable." Under 
Clinton, few thought they could ever deal with the Taliban, and some 
wanted to pile on sanctions. But under Bush, talks started up once more. 
The purpose was legitimate at the start, Brisard notes. "It was for the 
U.S. to negotiate that bin Laden be given to them," he says. "Then it 
shifted to the point where advisers thought that the economic arguments 
would make the difference with the Taliban and accelerate the 
negotiations. They started to put the oil subsidies that would be given 
to the Taliban on the table. At the end of July, the negotiations broke 
down, because the U.S. threatened to go to war with the Taliban if they 
didn't accept the deal."

Dasquié, too, notes the role of the oil industry in this conflict. "Most 
of the big names of the Bush administration have a political culture 
developed in Big Oil
It should be noted here that the Taliban, through a policy of coercion, 
had stopped farmers from growing opium poppies

The way the French writers see it, the most significant factor in 
Central Asia is not a revived cold war between Russia and the U.S. over 
influence in the former Soviet republics, but the rise of Iran. Here the 
irony is that the U.S. embraced Saudi Arabia as a counterbalance against 
the Shiites in Iran. Now the tables are turned. FBI investigations 
showed the connection between the Saudi clergy and the September 
terrorist attacks. Gradually the U.S. has begun to distance itself from 
the Saudis. And at the same time, it has begun to warm to Iran, whose 
help the U.S. suddenly needs.

"During the dark years of Taliban power, their principal opponent in 
western Afghanistan was Iran," Dasquié says. "It played a very important 
part in supporting the Afghan resistance." Indeed, it was Shiite Iran 
that financed dissidents against the Taliban. When the crisis started, 
the Swiss Embassy in Tehran organized meetings between American State 
Department officials and Iranian president Mohammed Khatami's government.

In the end, the authors say Al Qaeda was a special case in that it was 
set up to be a nexus for other fundamentalist networks. Through bin 
Laden, it provides the financing to attract such groups as the Egyptian 
Islamic Jihad and the Ramata I Islamya. "There are a lot of 
fundamentalist movements around the world, but no one like Al Qaeda, 
because it was meant to be a kind of central point, a crossroads, the 
focus of fundamentalist movements," says Dasquié. "But if tomorrow Al 
Qaeda disappears, many little movements can replace it. All that is 
necessary is to get the support and benediction of the Saudi clergy."