1. Conflict
Four:
Operation
Securing
Oil

2. ‘I'm the commander, I do not need to
explain why I say things. That's the
interesting thing about being the
President. Maybe somebody needs to
explain to me why they say
something, but I don't feel like I owe
anybody an explanation....’
Draft-dodging President George ‘W’
Bush, Washington Post interview,
November 2002. Four months later
his troops were in Iraq
‘As we know, there are known
knowns. There are things we know
we know. We also know there are
known unknowns. That is to say, we
know there are some things we do
not know. But there are also
unknown unknowns, the ones we
don’t know we don’t know.’
Then-American Defence Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, news briefing
February 12, 2002
‘Be who you are and say what you
feel because those who mind don't
matter and those who matter don't
mind.’
Dr Seuss

3. ‘A Bush aide says that they (Bush and
Professor Condoleezza Rice, then-Chevron
boss for Central Asia) vacation together;
that they talk on the phone nearly every
day; and that Bush trusts her completely,
to manage his foreign-policy team and to
provide counsel on other matters as well -
including social issues.’
BNET Aug 30, 1999. BNET is an internet-
based business management news and
research site. Professor Rice was a
Chevron director from 1991 until the
beginning of 2001, when Bush installed her
as National Security Advisor

4. ‘I don’t know what Afghanistan’s all about.
I don’t know what we are doing there.’
Dame Vera Lynn, speaking in August 2009
‘Protecting 4X4 Access Worldwide!
Owning a four wheel drive vehicle is an
integral part of your life. It allows you to
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sound of a fast running stream.’
United Four Wheel Drive Associations
(http://www.ufwda.org/)

5. ‘Our situation has much deteriorated
recently. The Americans are driving
us out of the region. Since
September 11, the United States has
become very aggressive in Central
Asia. The fact that they have
stationed their troops here is not
good news, neither for the local
people nor for us… the US troops are
here in order to control the oil
reserves in Central Asia.’
Zheng Chengu, China National
Petroleum Company’s director
general in Kazakhstan, interviewed by
Lutz Kleveman,
The New Great Game, Blood and Oil
in Central Asia

6. ‘It hasn’t been left unnoticed in
Russia that certain outside
interests are trying to weaken
our position in the Caspian
basin… No one should be
perplexed that Russia is
determined to resist the
attempts to encroach on her
interests.’
Andrei Urnov, head of the
Caspian working group at the
Russian Ministry of Foreign
Affairs
‘In politics, nothing happens by
accident. If it happens, you can
bet it was planned that way.’
President Franklin D Roosevelt

8. ‘I cannot think of a time when we have had a
region emerge as suddenly to become as
strategically significant as the Caspian.’
Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney, in a Washington
DC speech to oil industrialists in 1998. At the
time, he was CEO of Halliburton.
One of the greatest finds of oil and gas outside
the Middle East is in the Caspian, lying south of
Russia, west of China and north of Afghanistan.
100 billion barrels of crude oil and 40 per cent of
global gas reserves are thought to lie in Kazakhstan
and Azerbaijan alone. Since the collapse of
communism, multi-national companies and their
politicians have coveted these resources.
‘This is about America’s energy security… it’s also
about preventing strategic inroads by those who
don’t share our values… We’ve made a substantial
political investment in the Caspian, and its very
important to us that both the pipeline map and the
politics come out right.’
Bill Richardson, secretary of energy to President
Bill Clinton, speaking in November 1998

9. In 2003, Bush Administration Under
Secretary of State Richard Armitage
phoned Azerbaijani playboy Ilham Aliyev to
congratulate him on winning elections
rigged by his dying dictator father
President Heydar Alijev. Armitage praised
his ‘strong showing’ in an election during
which opposition protests were crushed by
security forces and opposition leaders were
detained during sweeping arrests. Some
believe such US support for oil-rich despots
causes resentment among, for example,
the young Saudi Arabs behind the 9/11
attacks.
They might also speculate that Bush had a
lot in common with a rich kid playboy, a
fortunate son handed a presidency by the
flunkies of his Cold War strongman father

10. ‘Azerbaijan has a history of arresting opposition
figures during election periods and convicting them
without guaranteeing basic fair trial standards. In
October 2004, following fraudulent presidential
elections and post-election violence, seven
opposition leaders were convicted on charges of
organizing or participating in mass disturbances and
resisting or committing violence against a state
representative. Human Rights Watch documented
torture in the pre-trial detention of four of the
seven defendants. Prosecution witnesses in this
case also told the court that police and prosecutors
had coerced and tortured them to make statements
incriminating the opposition leaders. It is widely
considered that the convicted opposition leaders
were political prisoners.’
Human Rights Watch, Azerbaijan:
Opposition Youth Activists on Trial
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2006/03/30/azerbaijan-opposition-youth-activists-trial
.

11. ‘It’s about not letting anything
get in your way and, in the
extreme, about intimidating
others to get out of your way.’
Former Ford Motor Company
strategist Jim Bulin, talking to
New York Times investigative
reporter Keith Bradsher about
SUVs. His words could equally be
used to explain post 9/11 US
policy in Central Asia

12. Another regime in the
area propped up by
American energy
interests is Uzbekistan,
eighth largest producer
of natural gas in the
world. In Uzbekistan,
according to the British
Embassy, the
government has boiled
political prisoners to
death

13. ‘As the Nation's energy
needs continue to expand and
grow, access to the world's
natural gas supplies will play a
critical role in its future
prosperity. DOE (Department of
Energy) is working to ensure that
LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) can
be safely, securely, and
reliably imported into the United
States… Transportation of LNG by
ship is one method to bring this
stranded gas to the consumer.’
US Department of Energy

14. By stranded, they mean fuel in hard to get places, like the land-locked Caspian.
Russia to the north and Iran to the south, neither are friendly with Washington. If a
Caspian gas and oil pipeline was to be forged through Afghanistan to Pakistan’s
Arabian Sea ports, it would help greatly in ‘diversification’.
A buzzword in Bush’s energy policy, diversification means not being reliant on just
one source of oil, ie the volatile Gulf states

15. ‘Afghanistan could be even more important to global oil supply than even Saudi Arabia. In 1997 BBC
News reported that the American-Saudi oil consortium UNOCOL tried to negotiate pipeline deals
through Afghanistan from the Caspian Sea The Caspian Sea is a California-sized body of salt water – the
world’s largest land-locked body of water – that may sit on as much as two hundred billion barrels of
oil, which would be 16 per cent of the Earth’s potential currently estimated oil reserves. At today’s
prices, that could add up to three trillion dollars in oil.
As the world’s quest for new oil reserves intensifies, so will the ‘war on terror’.’
Oil rig worker Paul Carr, This is Not a Drill. Carr travelled to Afghanistan with his company’s ‘Private
Military Contractors’ (PMCs)

16. In fact, in 1997 UNOCOL vice-president
Marty F Miller hosted a party in honour of
visiting Taliban leaders in his own home
after they had been secretly flown to the
US. But Bin Laden’s actions on September
11, 2001, scuppered the cosy deals they
made. The oppressive Taliban were forced
out.
Their replacement, other thugs and
warlords, were handed CIA cash to tow the
line, and on February 25, 2003, Reuters
reported that the pipeline deal was going
ahead. Puppet-President Harmid Karzai
was a UNOCOL pipeline consultant

18. ‘Let me first deal with the conspiracy theory that this is somehow to do with oil. There is no way
whatever, if oil were the issue, that it would not be infinitely simpler to cut a deal with Saddam,
who, I am sure, would be delighted to give us access to as much oil as we wanted if he could
carry on building weapons of mass destruction.’
Tony Blair, Prime Ministers Questions, January 15, 2003

19. 60 Minutes interviewer Steve Croft asked then-US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ‘What do you
say to people who think this (the coming invasion of Iraq) is about oil?’
Rumsfeld replied, ‘Nonsense. It just isn’t. There – there – there are certain... things like that, myths
that are floating around. I’m glad you asked. I – it has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do
with oil.’
December 15, 2002
‘Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that
economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil… For reasons that have a
lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree
on: weapons of mass destruction.’
US deputy defense secretary (2001 – 2005) Paul Wolfowitz – Rumsfeld’s deputy

20. ‘By some estimates there will be an average of two per
cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years
ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural
decline in production from existing reserves.
That means by 2010 we will need on the order of
an additional fifty million barrels a day.
So where is the oil going to come from?
Governments and the national oil companies
are obviously controlling about ninety per cent
of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally
a government business. While many
regions of the world offer great
oil opportunities, the Middle East
with two thirds of the world‘s oil and
the lowest cost, is still where
the prize ultimately lies.’
Dick Cheney, Autumn 1999 speech
at the Institute of Petroleum in
London, while still CEO of oil
services company Halliburton.

21. ‘When you have only two per cent of the known
reserves of oil and use 25% of the world’s oil,
import two thirds of what you use –
that has to affect your foreign policy.’
Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett,
interviewed on A Crude Awakening
‘A source who worked at the NSC (National Security
Council) at the time doubted that there were links
between Cheney's Energy Task Force and the
overthrow of Saddam. But Mark Medish, who served
as senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and
Eurasian affairs at the NSC during the Clinton
Administration, told me that he regards (Cheney’s
energy policy) document as potentially 'huge.' He
said, 'People think Cheney's Energy Task Force has
been secretive about domestic issues,' referring to
the fact that the Vice-President has been unwilling
to reveal information about private task-force
meetings that took place in 2001, when information
was being gathered to help develop President Bush's
energy policy. 'But if this little group was discussing
geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in
the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting
down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans…’
Geraldine Sealey on Salon.com

22. ‘Propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of public or
mass-produced communication designed to affect the minds and
emotions of a given group for a specific purpose, whether military,
economic, or political.’
Paul Linebarger, Psychological Warfare

24. ‘In war, truth is the first casualty.’
Aeschylus, Greek tragic dramatist
(525 BC - 456 BC)
‘I am going to tell you a
number of things, but if you
really want to be a good
journalist you only have to
remember two words:
governments lie.’
I.F. Stone (1907-1989)
Radical American
investigative journalist

25. ‘We found the weapons of mass destruction,
we found biological factories.’
US President George W. Bush on TVP (Poland), May 29, 2003
‘Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants: Overview
Coalition forces have uncovered the strongest evidence to date that
Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.
Kurdish forces in late April 2003 took into custody a specialized
tractor-trailer near Mosul and subsequently turned it over to US
military control. The US military discovered a second mobile facility
equipped to produce BW agent in early May at the al-Kindi Research,
Testing, Development, and Engineering facility in Mosul. Although
this second trailer appears to have been looted, the remaining
equipment, including the fermentor, is in a configuration similar to
the first plant. US forces in late April also discovered a mobile
laboratory truck in Baghdad. The truck is a toxicology laboratory
from the 1980s that could be used to support BW or legitimate
research. The design, equipment, and layout of the trailer found in
late April is strikingly similar to descriptions provided by a source
who was a chemical engineer that managed one of the mobile
plants.’
Central Intelligence Agency report
(https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-
1/iraqi_mobile_plants/index.html#01)

26. ‘Billed (by The Observer newspaper) as ‘a British scientist and biological
weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq’, he (Dr Kelly) was
quoted as saying: ‘They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You
could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look
like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were – facilities for
the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.’ It was confirmed at the
Hutton inquiry that this quote came from Dr Kelly… Dr Kelly must have
known that by making the contacts he did, he was challenging the
authority and integrity of both Bush and Blair, on the issue of the day most
central to their agenda. Given the dishonest manipulation of intelligence
for political purposes, many will agree that he was right to act in this way.
To do so was, however, brave, if not foolhardy. The presentation of the
truth was leading Dr Kelly down risky avenues.’
Norman Baker MP,
The Strange Death of David Kelly
‘Paramedic Vanessa Hunt told the Observer newspaper on Sunday:
‘I just think it is incredibly unlikely that he died from
the wrist wound we saw’… Fellow paramedic Dave Bartlett said:
‘Everyone was surprised at the outcome (of the Hutton Inquiry).
‘I would have thought there would have been more blood
over the body if someone had bled to death.’’
BBC News/UK, December 12, 2004

27. ‘I will wait until the end of the week before judging – many dark actors playing
games. Thanks for your support. I appreciate your friendship at this time.’
Dr Kelly’s cryptic email thanking journalist Judith Miller of the New York Times,
four hours before he left home for the last time on July 17, 2003.
Important questions about his death went unasked by Lord
Hutton and the corporate British media…
4 search area was on the Thames and spoke to some
Extract from The Hutton Inquiry people
Hearing Transcripts, 5 there who were just moored on a boat on the
Tuesday September 2, 2003 Thames.
(called just after 10.38am). Lord Hutton 6 Q. What did you say to them?
quizzes dog-handler Louise Holmes: 7 A. Well, Brock had found them because he obviously
6 Q. Who was on this search? is just
7 A. Me, the dog and Paul. 8 trained to pick up on human scent, so he went off
8 Q. No-one else had joined you? and
9 A. No. 9 indicated on them and so I had a game with him as
10 Q. And where did you initially go, after you got out of the 10 a reward. They just said: what are you doing? We
11 car? Can you remember? said
12 A. We walked up the track that runs north, I am told, on my 11 we were assisting the police in the search for a
13 map of Common Lane up towards the River Thames. missing
14 Q. Can you describe, generally, how the search went 12 male person and if they saw anything to contact
15 initially? Where did you go? the
16 A. We were given the track to search north up to the 13 police.
17 River Thames as our boundary and the area of wood to the 14 Q. Did they say they already had seen anything?
18 left of the track. So we did the bottom half of the 15 A. They said they had seen the helicopter up the previous
19 track, the south boundary of the woods before we were 16 night but they had not seen anybody or anything other
20 forced to turn back because of a bashed wire fence. So 17 than that.
21 we then searched through the bottom half of the woods 18 Q. Did you eventually manage to get into the wooded area?
22 which the fence ran all the way through. We then came 19 A. Yes.
23 back out on to the track, continued up the track to
24 the -- to where our boundary was, came back down the
25 track and did the north perimeter of the wood, and then
10
1 went into the wood from the north.
2 Q. Did you at any point go along the River Thames?
3 A. We went up to where we -- where our boundary of our

28. Important questions about his death went unasked by Lord
Hutton and the corporate British media…
14 Q. Did they say they already had seen anything?
15 A. They said they had seen the helicopter up the previous
16 night but they had not seen anybody or anything other
17 than that.
18 Q. Did you eventually manage to get into the wooded area?
19 A. Yes.
Questions like: after being given Dr Kelly’s scent at the police station
where the searchers were briefed, the search dog made a bee-line for a
group of people who had been in the area since the previous night. Who
were they, and why had they been on the river on that particular night?

29. There were conflicting stories of whether
Dr Kelly was sat upright or lying on his back
and whether he had taken a coat with him that warm July day. Dr
Kelly’s head and shoulders were ‘just slumped back against the tree,’
according to Louise Holmes, who found his body in Harrowdown Hill
Woods, Oxfordshire. Her fellow searcher, Paul Chapman, concurred in
his evidence to the Hutton inquiry,
saying Kelly’s body was ‘sitting with his back up against a tree.’
.
They alerted a nearby three-man group of police officers, two Thames
Valley detective constables and another who has never been publicly
identified. Detective Constable Graham Coe was then left alone with
the body for between twenty-five and thirty minutes whilst uniformed
back-up was called in by his colleagues. Several hours before, at 5am in
Kingston Bagpuize, Dr Kelly’s wife had been made to leave her home
and wait in the garden by the police, who were undertaking a second,
more detailed search of their home.
Later, Dr Kelly’s body was:
‘laying on its back by a large tree.’
DC Coe, evidence to Hutton Inquiry, September 2, 2003
‘I recall that his head was quite close to branches and so forth,
but not actually over the tree.’
Pathologist Dr Nicholas Hunt, evidence to Hutton Inquiry,
September 16, 2003
When first seen, 'He was about 20 meters away
‘…lying flat down with his feet towards us..’
(the first paramedics on the scene,
Dave Bartlett and Vanessa Hunt).’

30. There were conflicting stories of whether
Dr Kelly was sat upright or lying on his back
‘sitting with his back up against a tree.’
‘…lying flat down with his feet towards us.

31. ‘We persist in regarding ourselves as a Great Power
capable of anything and only temporarily handicapped
by economic difficulties. We are not a Great Power
and never will be again.’
Sir Henry Tizard, chief scientific adviser to the Ministry
of Defence, writing in 1949. His comments upset the
cabinet. Half a century later, another scientific
adviser to the MOD, Dr David Kelly, upset unelected
spin-doctor Alastair Campbell.
‘Dr Kelly took his own life by cutting his left wrist...
There was no involvement by a third person in Dr
Kelly’s death.’
Lord Hutton’s press statement.
Lord Hutton’s background is law

32. ‘We believe the verdict given is in
contradiction to medical teaching; is at
variance with documented cases of
wrist-slash suicides; and does not align
itself with the evidence presented at
the inquiry. We call for the reopening
of the inquest by the coroner, where a
jury may be called and evidence taken
on oath.
(note - the Hutton Inquiry didn’t
have the power to do this. NJ).
Andrew Rouse, public health
consultant
Searle Sennett, specialist in
anaesthesiology
David Halpin, specialist in trauma
Stephen Frost, specialist in radiology
Dr Peter Fletcher, specialist in
pathology
Martin Birnstingl, specialist in
vascular surgery
The ‘Kelly Group’s’ background is
medicine

34. ‘You know we don't do body counts.’
US General Tommy Franks, Bagram Airbase, near Kabul,
Afghanistan, March 18, 2002.
Franks led the charge into both Afghanistan and Iraq .
‘As the chief upholder of the US Constitution, (Bush) was… perfectly prepared to overlook
the restrictions of the law, if the wider interests of the government and the country
seemed to demand it.
And so Cheney and Rumsfeld, with the help of like-minded officials, created a prison
system which was outside the control of the US government, and developed a method of
detaining suspects around the world and transferring them to secret holding places where
they could be questioned. They introduced a system which, if necessary, would permit
these and other prisoners to be tortured, even though the word was never used. Methods
like half-drowning and near asphyxiation had been favourites of the Gestapo and the KGB.
Abu Ghraib was a torture centre under the US as under Saddam.
All of this was made possible by a new legal structure, the PATRIOT Act, which, together
with other legislation, had the effect of neutralizing the traditional controls the American
system had traditionally maintained. Newspapers and television stations investigating
these methods would often find that companies which supported the Republicans would
threaten to withdraw their advertising.’
BBC television news editor John Simpson, Not Quite World’s End

35. ‘..the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.’
General Franks on academic and advisor Douglas Feith.
It was Deputy Defense Secretary Feith’s idea to attack Iraq.
‘‘If it was so good for the people of Iraq that this invasion should have taken place,
why are there more Iraqi children living below starvation level now than there were
under Saddam Hussein?’
Feith panicked.
‘Stop the recording, please,’ he said, waving at the camera…
‘I didn’t know you were going to ask me that kind of question. I don’t deal
nowadays with what’s happening on the ground in Iraq. I’m not briefed about this.’
…And when things broke down, and they started dying in large numbers, it didn’t
really seem quite adequate for the person who thought it all up to say he didn’t
know what was going on there and hadn’t been fully briefed. As though it had all
been just an experiment. As though he could rub it off the blackboard now, and
start an entirely new experiment from scratch.’
John Simpson, Not Quite World’ s End

36. The same multinational companies that own
oil companies also own media outlets. The
world’s sixth largest company, General
Electric, also owns the NBC Television
network. But it isn’t just proprietorial
interests that go to work on the media front.
Here in the UK we watched the public
humiliation of the BBC…

37. ‘For Alastair Campbell and his team in the Downing
Street press office our refusal to report what they
wanted us to, in the way they wanted us to, made
us a target even before the war itself began…
Alastair Campbell, while a brilliant operator, has a
classic obsessive personality and he had decided
that the BBC was the enemy. From then on, if not
before, I suspect he was looking for revenge.’
Greg Dyke, the BBC’s director general
until January 2004, Inside Story
…and the groveling response of the man
left with the top job (and salary)
after the smoke had cleared:
‘On behalf of the BBC I have no reservation in
apologising unreservedly for our errors
and to the individuals whose reputations
were affected by them.’
BBC Vice-Chairman Lord Ryder, appointed acting
chairman following the resignation of chairman
Gavyn Davies. In January 2009, the now-cowed and
anxious BBC refused to broadcast an aid appeal on
behalf of the Palestinians, who were suffering an
onslaught by the Israelis, because they didn’t want
to be seen as ‘impartial’.
The message had sunk home

38. ‘Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every
decision he makes and should just support that, you know,
and be faithful in what happens.’
Pop-princess Britney Spears explains her position on The War on
Terrorism to CNN’s political news correspondent Tucker Carlson
(After grilling Condaleeza Rice, NBC news anchor
Katie Couric is contacted by NBC president Bob Right.
Right has passed a message from a viewer upwards,
because Couric had been ‘too confrontational.’):
‘Couric was troubled. There was, she felt, a subtle, insidious
pressure to toe the party line, and you bucked that at your peril….
When she ran into Jack Welch, the General Electric chairman, he
would sometimes say that they had never seen eye to eye
politically. The whole attitude was pretty disturbing. If you
weren’t rah rah rah for the Bush administration and the war, you
were considered unpatriotic, even treasonous.’
Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz, Reality Show

39. ‘Against a backdrop of mounting evidence that the Bush
administration fabricated false pretexts for the war
against Iraq, we can begin to wonder why, in a country
(the US) that considers itself highly literate and a model
democracy, over 60 percent of college students support
Bush’s Iraq policies, which are based on lies and deceits.
One way to understand this paradox is to point to the
general failure of the educational system with respect to
the teaching of political literacy. On closer analysis,
however, what we would characterize as the failure of
the US educational system actually represents its
successful reproduction of a doctrinal framework that is
sustained by the interplay of powerful institutions such as
media, academic centres, and corporations, among
others. Within this framework, the raising of critical
questions, particularly critical questions about the
framework itself, is taboo.’
Donaldo Macedo, introduction to the 2004 edition of
Letters from Lexington,
Reflections on Propaganda,
Noam Chomsky

42. ‘As we (Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell)
walked into the Oval Office, Bush was
very friendly, said ‘Hey, congratulations,
you took on the bastards, and you did
great.’ He said he had seen some of my
testimony, and that Dan had kept him
informed.
‘You did great. You showed that if you
are in the right, if you believe in it, and
you give no quarter, you can prevail.’ He
kept coming back to it in the meeting,
almost embarrassingly so. Cheney was as
impassive as ever, Powell was chirpy but
looking tired, while Condi was more
subdued than usual.’
Entry for Thursday, July 17, 2003
The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair
Campbell Diaries

43. Condi was more
subdued than usual.’
Entry for Thursday, July 17, 2003
The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair
Campbell Diaries
The day Dr Kelly died.
The day before his body was found

44. After a time overseeing Chevron’s work in Central Asia,
Condoleezza Rice’s job on the board of the US oil giant was
to chair the company’s public policy committee, which
oversaw areas of ‘potential political concern’
for the company.
In other words, damage limitation.
Who better than a smart public affairs oil exec to stand at
the side of the gaffe-prone President Bush, guiding him
through potential foreign policy pitfalls?
Black and a woman to boot, the extremely intelligent Miss
Rice ticked all the ‘inclusion’ boxes. To do her job properly,
to pre-empt potential criticism, Miss Rice would have been
fully briefed on potential problems.
And here before her were the two British men who’s actions
more than anyone else’s had legitimated the reasons for
going to war. Blair the gung-ho leader and his sidekick
Campbell who’d manipulated the intelligence dossiers,
lending false legitimacy to the war. A third British man, one
who’d decided to lift the veil on their lies, lay dead. The
question is – did she know? According to Campbell himself,
although he doesn’t seem to have recognised any link,
Miss Rice seemed especially subdued
meeting the British that day

45. It wasn’t just for alerting BBC Radio 4 Today listeners to
the lies in the infamous February 2003 ‘dodgy dossier’
that marked journalist Andrew Gilligan and the BBC
chiefs for the wrath of Campbell, unelected boss of all
the government’s information services. Gilligan (who
had spent the war in Iraq) embarrassed the government
and the Ministry of Defence when he broke these stories:
‘It was Gilligan who had shown up the tactical
ineffectiveness of the bombing in Kosovo and the lack of
any link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. He had
also revealed that British troops had not been properly
equipped on a number of occasions; and of course
Campbell had hated Gilligan’s reports from Baghdad
during the war.’
Greg Dyke, Inside Story
‘I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to
acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is
largely about oil.’
America’s elder statesman of
finance Alan Greenspan writing in his memoirs, The Age
of Turbulence, Adventures in a New World

46. Noam Chomsky on elite media:
‘There are a lot of ways in which power plays can drive you right back into line if
you move out.
If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long. That framework works
pretty well, and it is understandable that it is just a reflection of obvious power
structures.’
Noam Chomsky, talk at the Z Media Institute, June 1997
In the US, multiple Grammy Award-winners The Dixie Chicks stepped out of line at
a live concert when lead singer Natalie Maines announced, ‘Just so you know, we're
ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.’
Like the BBC, the Texas-formed Dixie Chicks were forced to apologise. But it did
no good and the response was swift. They were banned by Cumulus Media Inc
(owner of 344 US radio stations) and Cox Communications (third largest US cable TV
provider).
‘An ad for Shut Up and Sing, a documentary about the furor over Maines's
comment, was turned down by NBC on October 27, 2006, citing a policy barring ads
dealing with ‘public controversy.’ … ‘‘It's a sad commentary about the level of fear
in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were
blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted
by corporate America,’ the film's distributor Harvey Weinstein said in a statement.’
(Google search: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8145486016514085072)

47. Other famous faces were also targets. NSNBC sacked Pulitzer-prize winning Peter
Arnett, an old Vietnam hand. Phil Donahue’s show was cancelled. But let’s follow
the money…
‘The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy...would be $20 a
barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country.’
The world’s most powerful media proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, prior to Gulf War 2
‘It is extraordinary that, after having had cross-media laws in this country since
1963, we have ended up in exactly the position those laws were intended to
prevent. The legislation was aimed at stopping anyone getting too much power
over the politicians. Yet in Rupert Murdoch that is precisely what we now have.
Controlling 35 per cent of the national daily circulation of newspapers in this
country, and 41 per cent of the Sunday market, makes him very powerful indeed.
By chairing and effectively controlling BSkyB he also runs Britian’s most financially
successful broadcasting operation, which, if unchecked, could in the years to
come dominate broadcasting in the way Murdoch’s News International dominates
the print media… Of course the editors of Murdoch’s newspapers all pretend they
don’t jump to his tune, but no one doubts that on the really big issues he calls the
shots. Murdoch was an avid supporter of the war against Iraq and all his 175
newspapers around the world supported the policy.. All 175 newspapers just
happened, by chance, to follow the Murdoch line.’
Greg Dyke, Inside Story

49. ‘When I pass protesters every day at
Downing Street... I may not like what
they call me, but I thank God that
they can call me what they want to
call me. That's freedom.’
Tony Blair, George Bush Senior
Presidential Library, Texas. April 7,
2002
A freedom that is under siege by the
government. In June 2001 Brian Haw
(right) started a protest against
sanctions placed on Iraq, maintaining
his Parliament Square vigil since then,
leaving only to attend court after
being repeatedly arrested

50. Home Secretary David Blunkett changed the law, and
in August 2005 the Serious Organised Crime and
Police Act banned protest outside Parliament without
permission. Because Haw’s protest started before
the Act was passed, he is now the only person
allowed to hold an unlicensed demonstration in the
square.
The Home Secretary now has the power to ban
protest anywhere in Britain.
Civil liberties that have been fought for are being
steadily eroded in the UK; New Labour created 3,000
new criminal offences in ten years.
‘Laws are like spiders webs: if some poor weak
creature comes up against them, it is caught; but a
bigger one can break through and get away.’
Athenian statesman Solon, 6th Century BC
(Next:) Band members from the Royal Marines sound
the Last Post at the National Memorial Arboretum on
Remembrance Day, 2008, before minor Royalty. Two
Royal Marines died in the Garmsir District of southern
Helmand, Afghanistan, the next day

52. ‘I think the president made the right
decision given what he knew. And given
what we all knew. And to tell you the
truth, even given what we've learned
since.’
Douglas Feith, interviewed by Steve Kroft,
veteran 60 Minutes correspondent
‘Years from now, people will look back on
the formation of a unity government in
Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of
liberty, a moment when freedom gained a
firm foothold in the Middle East and the
forces of terror began their long retreat.’
President George W Bush, May 22, 2006,
speaking in Chicago

53. ‘Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources
and capabilities to sustain and even increase
current levels of violence through the next
year.’
Secret intelligence assessment circulated two
days later to the White House by the
intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff
‘The appeal and motivation for continued
violent action will begin to wane in early
2007.’
Pentagon report to Congress two days later
'There was a vast difference between what
the White House and Pentagon knew about
the situation in Iraq and what they were
saying publicly.'
Famed Watergate scandal reporter Bob
Woodward of the Washington Post, whose
contacts exposed the double-standards

55. It is over 65 years since the Second
World War, when legislation was drawn
up to protect people from the despots
salivating over power.
And in those 65 years, our leaders
have constantly let down not just those
who live in these lands of terror and
hunger. By not acting decisively –
unless vital resources are threatened -
they have betrayed our soldiers time
and again. And always in the service of
Realpolitick. Costing over £1 billion,
Camp Bastion, the British base in the
Helmand Province of Afghanistan, is
the biggest ever constructed by the
British Army

56. ‘Here in this extraordinary
piece of desert is where the
fate of world security in the
early 21st Century is going to
be decided.’
Prime Minister Tony Blair,
speaking to service personnel
assembled at Camp Bastion,
November 21, 2006
And it sits astride the
Kandahar-Herat Highway,
otherwise known as Route
One. Which is the Afghan
section of Unocol’s proposed
oil and gas pipeline

57. ‘It’s not going to be built until there is
a single Afghan government. That’s
the simple answer.’
Unocol Corporation vice president of
international relations John Maresca,
testimony to the US House of
Representatives, February 12, 1998.
On paper, President Khazai now
leads that government. But to the
Afghans, the man known scathingly as
the Mayor of Kabul has little power
outside the city limits. Corruption is
endemic. The oilmen’s ‘single Afghan
government’ appears to be out of
phase with the majority of observers,
who at the cost of so many lives were
expecting freedom and democracy

58. Promoting the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan as exercises in the
enforcement of human rights is just
window dressing.
Otherwise, why weren’t the troops
sent in earlier? When Saddam and the
Taliban were murdering thousands? A
brief study of the forces involved in
Afghanistan is revealing. They all
import oil.
Next: British infantry training for a
dawn beach assault in the Middle East,
just prior to the second Gulf War. The
right hand assault team prepare to
leave the main body and board a Rigid
Raider.
Time to objective on Cyprus training
area: about ten minutes. Time to Iraq:
within a year

59. This has been an
extract from Conflict.
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