Forbidden Truth
by Jean-Charles Brisard & Gullaume Dasquie
Thunder’s Mouth Press
“truth”
Much like the Kennedy assassination or the events of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, we may never know the entire story behind the scenes of September 11. The questions of who knew what, and when, and why no action was taken will remain unanswered for all time, quite possibly because the answers are too dangerous to the powers that be to ever be uttered. Theories abound, from the “Bush knew, and didn’t stop it” to the equally ludicrous “they attacked us because they are jealous of our freedoms” con job being floated.
What can be known, with great certainty, are the facts behind the relationships between the United States and Osama bin Laden in the years and months before 9/11, and the role of his homeland, Saudi Arabia, in the world oil market. And make no mistake – this story is the story of oil, and the profits derived from it. If the only question were securing enough oil to drive our cars and light our factories, then things would be so much simpler. We would just find the best price and purchase enough oil to get us to the next day (which is currently about 1.7 billion gallons a day from Saudi Arabia alone). But that is not the question. When George Bush the elder stated that Desert Storm was a war to “protect our way of life,” he wasn’t lying, or speaking rhetorically – but he wasn’t saying what people heard. Most of the nation took his statement to mean big cars and warm houses in the winter. A much smaller, but far more powerful group of listeners understood to what Bush referred. Their way of life – the immense profits reaped from oil, the twisted spiders web of international banking, and the use of our military and intelligence communities as hired guns to keep the peace (i.e. the profits) in an increasingly hazardous world – that was the way of life that Bush swore to send American troops to protect. And seemingly, so did Clinton and George Jr.
This engrossing book, written by two French journalists, recounts in exhaustive detail the links between the Taliban, bin Laden, and the United States. In order to make sure the Russians didn’t take over Afghanistan, the United States backed the Taliban, one of the more viable forces aligned against the Communist threat in the region. Once the Soviets backed away, our interest in the region didn’t end. The possibility of running a massive pipeline through Afghanistan and tapping into new supplies of oil proved alluring enough to American (business) interests that we overlooked the Taliban’s deplorable human rights stance, their anti-American statements, and bin Laden’s declaration of a jihad against the United States. In fact, so precious was the region to our pocketbooks that we for the most part overlooked the bombing of the U.S.S Cole (masterminded by bin Laden) – it took the nation of Libya to actually file a warrant for his arrest with Interpol. We looked the other way when the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist statues, ignored intelligence reports pointing to terrorists in our country – we did nothing to possibly jeopardize capitalizing on our greed.
So the question returns of who knew what, and why did the attack happen? Although this book gives no definitive set of reasons, it does relate an episode between U.S and Taliban officials, meeting in an attempt to get bin Laden into American hands, and the region stabilized enough that construction could begin on the pipeline. At some point during the discussions, the following statement – a statement that reeks of America – was made. “Either you accept our carpet of gold, or we’ll carpet you with bombs.” As events have proven since 9/11, this was no idle threat. No one knows if this statement – and others like it – was the straw that broke the camel’s back and sent the planes into the World Trade Center, but it certainly couldn’t have helped.
The world that these events occur in is one so far removed from our day-to-day existence that most of us have nothing to compare it to. The notion that the Carlyle group, an association of arms dealers that includes George Bush Sr. as well as his son’s cronies, would engage in business with people who avowed in no uncertain terms their hatred for our country is repellant. The idea that Dick Cheney, our Vice President, would do business with Iraq after the Gulf War – and then compound his shame by lying about it over and over, is an affront to those who died attempting to secure that region, for whatever reason they were told to do so. The alarming swiftness that our President and his minions have stripped our country of the very things that the rest of the world supposedly covets – our Constitution, our civil liberties, and what little moral high ground we had managed to maintain over the years, is shocking. Particularly shocking when you accept the fact that he did business with these very people not too long ago, and now he calls them “the axis of evil.” The idea that the greed of a handful of people might have brought about America’s darkest day is a slap in the face to the families of those still left unfound beneath the rubble of 9/11. If these despicable people are considered human, then there is no way I am. You owe it to yourself, your children, and your country to read books such as Forbidden Truth. Because as the Boss once said – and recent events have surely proven – blind faith in anyone, or anything, can get you killed.
