Lower Manhattan Project - LMP

Voici des extraits d'entrevue que Ted Rall a accordé au site internet Buzzflash où il aborde la question du 11 septembre :BUZZFLASH: The two countries who financially and logistically did the most to support Al-Qaeda were Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. How did they get off scott-free?RALL: Saudi Arabia, of course, is the world's largest oil-producing state. And they let us post our troops there. Pakistan is truly the surprising choice for a friend; Gen. Musharraf is practically a Talib himself -- the guy came to power thanks to Taliban support and he uses these militants to fight India in Kashmir. On the ground, Pakistan is the most virulently anti-American state on the planet. What is clear is that the Bushies have little if any interest in bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice.BUZZFLASH: Most Americans, polls show, believe the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, yet none of them were? How did the Bush cartel propaganda trump the facts, especially since 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis?RALL: That's incredible. And the other 4 were Egyptian. It all goes to show that the more often you repeat a lie, the more people will believe it. Many Americans still believe that there's a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda even though it's been 100% proven to be bullshit. Why does the Administration have to make stuff up about Saddam? I mean, it's not like he's a lovable character. But the Bushies always opt for overkill -- and it always seems to work.Source: http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/03/11_rall.htmlVoici des extraits d'entrevues accordées par Rall à Catherine Clyne pour la revue en ligne Satya en mai 2003:How would you describe the current atmosphere for political cartoonists?People are looking to political cartoons more than ever, in a way because the mainstream media and the pundits are so quiet now. The Democratic Party is in absentia. Cartooning has found a great importance with readers. Unfortunately editors are quite the opposite, and for the most part—sometimes entirely—have stopped running cartoons in magazines and newspapers. The New York Times’s “Week in Review” seems to be in the process of getting rid of them. Time Magazine stopped running political cartoons entirely after 9/11, and they’ve never come back. The ones that do run tend to be more frivolous than political. So it’s this weird irony—there’s an audience for cartoons, but nobody’s publishing them.Why do you think people bought the story that Saddam personally had something to do with 9/11?My theory is that essentially, people don’t like to think they’re living in a country that’s led by an evil, dictatorial madman. But they are, they are living in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia. Russians and Germans at the time were no different than us, they were patriotic but a little dismayed and worried about the lunatics who were running their country, and similarly, today, we have to understand the problem. We can’t just go along with this. The President and the country are not the same thing. Most Americans were against the war in Iraq, but once it became clear that Bush was going to do it regardless of what the UN or other countries or, for that matter, what the American public thought, I think the sense became, “He’s going to do it anyway, we’re in it, so we might as well support it and win it and get it over with.” This is our armed forces, after all, our country and our flag, and we want them to win. People retroactively think, “Bush must have some secret information that tells him that Saddam was involved.” I got thousands of emails like that. [I’m] like, really? If he has secret information, why doesn’t he say so? That’s just rationalization. People don’t want to think the worst about their own.It’s impossible to put in a nutshell, but what are some of the most glaring facts that support the accusation that the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are about oil?I think you have to be on crack to think that the invasion of Iraq is not about oil—what else is it for? The food? Saddam Hussein did not have substantial amounts of weapons of mass destruction, obviously there was no tie between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. You have only to compare it with the North Korean situation to see where we are. North Korea threatened to use an inter-continental ballistic missile on the west coast—a real threat to U.S. security. If I were president, I would seriously contemplate military action; but we’re not. North Korea doesn’t have oil; Iraq does. We can also see what’s going on with all the politically connected corporations, like Halliburton and Bechtel, getting multi-million dollar contracts to “rebuild” Iraq. Obviously, Iraq is about oil. Afghanistan’s far more complicated, and I wrote a book about it, Gas War, which details the trans-Afghanistan pipeline to get landlocked gas reserves from southern Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean, and out to market. In 1999, the Kazaks made the world’s largest oil strike on the Caspian Sea—turned out they have six times more confirmed oil reserves than Saudi Arabia does. The Bush administration was very fascinated by the prospect of having a pipeline for natural gas and Kazak crude oil that would basically run down the Herat-Kandahar highway. So Bush flew some Taliban reps out to Texas to talk pipeline. There are people who think that the breakdown of negotiations led to the bombing campaign that began after 9/11. Here we are, more than a year later, and the pipeline project is well underway. If you look at the bestiary of personalities involved, it’s the Unocal deal all over again: Hamid Karzai, the current president of Afghanistan installed by the U.S., was a consultant for Unocal; Zalmay Khalilzad, who has recently surfaced as a special U.S. envoy to the Iraqi National Congress, his last job was consulting for Unocal on the pipeline project. Essentially, the pipeline was a top priority for the U.S. before 9/11, and it became a top priority again after 9/11. It’s the only thing that we’ve actually spent any time working on. We haven’t rebuilt Afghanistan, we haven’t tried to make life better for the people there. In all likelihood it was the main reason why we invaded Afghanistan. It’s all stuff that we don’t know because there’s just not enough reporting coming out of there, and what reporting there is isn’t being widely disseminated in the U.S. For instance, there was a great article in the NY Times three months ago about how not a single house had been rebuilt in Kabul thanks to international aid, 15 months after the invasion. Or how not a single line of electricity had been strung, not an inch of roadway had been paved. In essence, nothing’s been done. Karzai can’t even afford to pay his government, his employees. Afghanistan has been more than abandoned—we trashed it and we’re abandoning it again.Source: http://www.satyamag.com/may03/rall.html