NEWSLETTER FROM IAN HENSHALL, 29 JAN 2002

1. OVERVIEW
Iraq attack on back burner, media obsessed with POW's and downplaying Afghan disaster, American supremacism not just tactlessness.

2. OIL CONNECTION CONFIRMED
Both key US figures in Afghanistan linked to pipeline plan.

3. ISRAEL I - SHARON AND LIEBERMAN
Holy Jo: a case study in Israeli power.

4. ISRAEL II - GROUNDS FOR OPTIMISM
Israeli public knows Sharon too well, Lebanon murder.

5. 911 - OFFICIAL STORY FRAYS MORE AND MORE
CIA Bin Laden video discredited, firefighters allege coverup, investigation calls mount, senior German politician ridicules official story.

1. OVERVIEW
Perhaps I am an optimist, but it seems possible that the hugely successful demo in November helped Blair to realise that Iraq would be a war too far. Anyway, with US plans to attack Iraq on the back burner, the national demo for January was called off. I still hope to go ahead with the plan for a full page newspaper ad some time in February.
There are reasons to think the attack on Iraq has only been delayed while the warmongers beef up their human rights credentials. Mainstream liberals have taken a huge interest in the few hundred US prisoners in Cuba, while hundreds of thousands of Afghans are still starving as a direct result of the allies actions. After the demise of the Taleban, the allies have no-one to blame except themselves for this continuing disaster. To dwell on this would undermine the only argument in favour of the war - that it was `successful`, and undermine the argument that we may soon be hearing, that an attack on Iraq is to help the Iraqi people.
Anyone naive enough to accept editors' explanations that starvation in Afghanistan does not make good copy should contrast the nightly saturation coverage they gave to the refugees in Kossovo.
Meanwhile reports are trickling in that there are thousands of Taliban and Al Qaida soldiers still active - the war in Afghanistan may not be over.
At the time of the Vietnam war it was still controversial to talk about an American empire, after all the US had done a lot to undermine the european empires (eg in Suez) in the name of democracy while their human rights abuses were put down to the pressures of the cold war. Now the project for an American empire is undeniable. But as with playground bullying, the giveaway is not so much the way the bully behaves as the deliberately flagrant way he defies authority. America's defiance of world legal authority on everything from the ABM treaty to now the Geneva Conventions is not some sort of Texan tactlessness, it is a deliberately flagrant assertion of US supremacism.

2. OIL CONNECTION CONFIRMED
In case confirmation was needed that, whatever else it was, this was another oil war, the US special envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad has been outed as an ex-aide at Unocal and as late as 1997 a vociferous public supporter of the Taliban. This follows the revelation that Hamed Karzai, the US-nominated Afghan leader has also worked as a consultant and lobbyist for Unocal, the Texas company whose oil pipeline proposal led to senior Taliban figures being feted in Texas only a few months before September 11.
refs: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/oil-j03.shtml
http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3210-7019-254716,00.html

3. ISRAEL I - SHARON AND LIEBERMAN
It's been an excellent few weeks for Sharon. Colin Powell and Tony Blair, who tried to stop him reinvading the Palestinian parts of the West Bank after September 11, have completely given up. Blair was publicly contradicted by Bush ie snubbed on the Israel issue at their December press conference. Although many more innocent Palestinians than Israelis have been killed in the intifada, and Israel is in flagrant breach of international law Sharon, helped by Israeli assets in the US congress and western media, has somehow convinced the chattering classes that Israel is the injured party.
How fortunate for Sharon that the `Palestinian arms ship` was captured just as US envoy Zinni returned to the region. Israeli peace activist Yuri Aveney has pointed out in Ha'aretz that the boat had almost no chance of getting through the short and intensely guarded Gaza coastline and was probably a set-up of some sort. Israeli peace activists have also claimed that the assassination, blamed on the PFLP, of an extreme right wing cabinet minister who was threatening Sharon's coalition, was very likely ordered by Sharon. It was immediately after Arafat alleged this on Israeli tv that the tanks rolled up outside his HQ.
As an insight into the Israeli control of the US political class, take a look at Senator Joseph `Holy Jo` Lieberman. Holy Jo, who promotes himself as a pious orthodox Jew, was the only Senate Democrat to rat on Clinton and threaten to support the impeachment bandwagon, so it was quite a surprise that Al Gore picked him as his running mate in the 1999 election. Now he has teamed up with anti-Bush Republican John McCain to vocally promote the merits of war with Iraq. Iraq is Israel's prime target because they are attempting to challenge Israeli nuclear blackmail in the region, although it's not put like that.
Holy Jo has also teamed up with Dick Cheney to form a lobby group or more accurately hit squad directed at dissidents in US universities where the official story on the war and 911 is widely doubted.
If this isn't enough, who should be the lead investigators of the Enron scandal but the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee chaired by, yes, Holy Jo. Now that they've got him where they want him internationally, just in case he starts listening to his arab-leaning oil buddies too much, the Zionist lobby now has a gun pointed at Bush.

4. ISRAEL II - GROUNDS FOR OPTIMISM
Don't despair, however, Arafat has a secret weapon: Israeli public opinion. Unlike US media consumers, Israelis know that the voluntary settlers (many are more or less forced to live there) are a collection of murderous bigots who make Bin Laden look almost reasonable. Opinion polls show a majority in favour of dumping the settlements if that would achieve peace. That's the real problem for Sharon, along with the fact that Israelis know him pretty well after over 40 years of war crimes. Sharon's radical zionism seeks eventual control of Jordan too, incidentally, acording to anti-zionist Israelis.
Moreover, the recent murder of Elie Hobeika, the Lebanese who carried out the famous 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres while Sharon controlled Beirut, has drawn world attention to the Israeli state. Hobeika told the BBC shortly before his death that he intended to testify against Sharon in the ongoing war crimes case in Belgium.

5. 911 - OFFICIAL STORY FRAYS MORE AND MORE
I am still working on a longer round-up of all the contradictions in the official story of what happened on September 11 and the aftermath. Let's hope that at least over 911 the mainstream media won't call dissidents conspiracy theorists - you don't get a much bolder conspiracy theory than the official story of how it was all planned from a cave in Afghanistan. My view is that people associated with Bin Laden may have been the key movers but they were helped, probably by Sharon whose intelligence services have a long record of success in this field (eg the creation of Hamas) and whose operatives were caught red handed in the Mexican Parliament with guns and explosives a few days after 911. They were released after an emissary from Sharon flew in, presumably with a lot of cash.
Bush was probably not a party to such a plot, although he has been a beneficiary. The media print more or less what the government wants, and no-one has an interest in finding out who helped Bin Laden. But when you look at the facts, the amazing thing is just how unlikely a story the public are prepared to believe when they are in a state of fear and shock and how clumsy the cover-up has been.
The smoking gun is the anthrax outbreak - the strain and preparation of the spores could only have been from about five laboratories all within the US government. The effect of the outbreak was to close down Washington just as people were beginning to ask questions. Note that the anthrax story has now vanished and the Mexican story ignored outside Mexico. Here are a few other points that have cropped up since my last newsletter.

Bin Laden video discredited
The CIA released Bin Laden video has been further discredited. The presumably genuine one released by tv channel Al Jezeera shortly after has Bin Laden looking very different. The reference by a speaker in the CIA video to a recent full moon makes the story of how the video was acquired impossible. German mainstream tv used translators who fundamentally disputed the CIA translation. Acording to mainstream press reports Bin Laden has several doubles, perhaps the video was of one of them.

Firefighters allege cover up
Even the New York Daily News has seen fit to report that the fire services and leading trade journal Fire Engineer have attacked the investigation into the collapse of the towers as a cover-up, and the removal for scrap of the central steel sections which should have held the building up as destroying evidence. Fire has never destroyed a building before in this way, and there are many more which must logically now be at risk. Among the people who thought (knew?) the buildings could not collapse in the way they apparently did were 300 firefighters, now dead.

Investigation calls mount
American student groups are calling for an investigation into what really happened on September 11. Dissidents are saying the official story is so unsustainable that even a Warren Commission style investigation would be too dangerous for the White House to undertake.
Unsourced leaks are appearing from FBI officials, saying that around 100 Israelis in custody since the attacks should not be released as they were certainly complicit. Other leaks from civil aviation controllers say the interception of the hijacked planes, which should have been automatic especially after the transponders were turned off, was stopped on explicit orders from above. Investigators at the site http://www.emperors-clothes.com have described how the web pages from the airbase concerned have been doctored since September 11 to make it look as if they were not on 24 hour alert. The original pages are still available on an archive server.

Senior German politician dissents
The German mass circulation paper Die Tagesspiegel has published an interview with ex SDP Cabinet Minister and security expert Von Buelow (Jan 13) ridiculing the official story on many counts. He refers to the capability to remotely take over the autopilot of an aircraft (some US dissidents believe this happened on 911) as being in existence since the spate of hijackings in the 1970's. He also points out that the plan, allegedly worked out over years, depended on Mohammed Atta making a tight plane connection on the morning of September 11, hardly an example of the meticulous planning necessary for such an ambitious scheme. Pressure is mounting for the release of the black box recordings of the plane which crashed near Pensylvania. Authorities say the contents would be too painful to victims' relatives, dissidents say it was shot down to stop the true story coming to light.