12-09-2021, 12:57 PM
The Massoud Assassination and 9/11: September 2001 as Historical Black Hole
As a result of actions undertaken by powerful actors—including the CIA, the Pentagon, and U.S. oil companies—the stage was set for the historically fateful month of September 2001. Still incompletely understood and shrouded in secrecy, key historical events of that month include official U.S. planning on 9/4 and 9/10 for military action in Afghanistan, the 9/9 assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, and the terror attacks of 9/11.
In short, these events cemented an historical trajectory in which America strove to become precisely what Strobe Talbott had counseled against becoming—a dominant player in the Great Game for Central Asia. America’s military presence in greater Western/Central Asia was further consolidated by its invasion of Iraq in 2003, an option already raised before 9/11 and raised again in the hours immediately following it.
Almost two decades have passed since 9/11. The hubristic Cheney-Rumsfeld initiatives in Afghanistan and Iraq are now being wound down as failures. These failures may be a sign that decades of a so-called Pax Americana, with oil-related aggressions against states from Afghanistan to Libya, are winding down as well.
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[1] The 9/11 Report: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 403.
[2] See Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
[3] Coll, Ghost Wars, 329, 377.
[4] Coll, Ghost Wars; Steve Coll, “Ahmad Shah Massoud links with CIA: ‘The CIA had pumped cash stipends as high as $200,000 a month to Massoud and his Islamic guerrilla organization,’” Washington Post, February 23, 2004.
[5] Coll, Ghost Wars, 360.
[6] Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failure of Great Powers (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 597-98. Gary Schroen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War in Afghanistan (San Francisco: Presidio Press, 2006), 125, 207. Later in October Tenet reported to the principals on a CIA “meeting with leaders in the north without Fahim Khan’s approval” (Bob Woodward, Bush at War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003, 260).
[7] James Mann reports that the decision to help both “the Northern Alliance and Uzbek opponents of the Taliban regime” [i.e., Dostum] had already been reached at the September 4 meeting (James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet [New York: Penguin, 2004], 292-93; cf. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror [New York: Random House, 2002], 345-46); and CIA Chief George Tenet on September 23 indicated, at a meeting in Washington, the CIA’s disapproval of the Northern Alliance as a base for U.S. operations in Afghanistan.
[8] The 9/11 Report, 291, 292.
[9] Former U.S. Ambassador Peter Tomsen, the American who knew Massoud best, later wrote that Massoud would“have expressed opposition to the deployment of large numbers of American troops to Afghanistan” (Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 597-98. Cf. Schroen, First In, 125, 207). Tomsen added in a footnote that “According to a Massood adviser who wished to remain anonymous, in 2000 and 2001 Massood refused requests by the American and French governments to insert foreign troops into Northern Alliance-controlled areas” (Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 796 n25).
[10] He is not to be confused with the Dahmane Abd al-Sattar, the Brussels-based Tunisian terrorist who was identified by Belgian police as one of Massoud’s two assassins masquerading as journalists (Dan Bilefsky, “Belgian Authorities Identify Terror Cell Responsible for Massoud’s Assassination,” Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2001, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1007934514705826480).
[11] Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 66-67.
[12] Robert I. Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheik,” The Village Voice, March 30, 1993, http://www.textfiles.com/conspiracy/wtcbomb1.txt.
[13] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 145-146.
[14] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 149.
[15] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 149-150.
[16] See John Y. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al Qaida and the Rise of Global Jihad (London: Zenith Press, 2007).
[17] The U.S. Government had been listening to phone calls between Sattar and al-Sirri from at least April 1999 (Library Information and Research Service, “The Middle East,” 2008, 741).
[18] Robert F. Worth, “New Yorker Is Suspected of Aiding Killers of Anti-Taliban Leader,” New York Times, May 14, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/14/world...eader.html.
[19] “Bin Laden… had decided to work with the Taliban and in doing so they placed themselves firmly against Massoud” (Hashmat Moslih, “Afghanistan in the shadow of Ahmad Shah Massoud,” Al Jazeera, September 9, 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/...h-massoud/).
[20] Barry Bearak, “Afghan ‘Lion’ Fights Taliban With Rifle and Fax Machine,” New York Times, November 9, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/09/world...chine.html.
[21] “According to an accidentally discovered note by Pentagon PR aide Eric Ruff, Ruff suggested to Rumsfeld in a discussion of the controversy that he say ‘NSPD[-9] had an annex going back to July–contingency plans to attack Taliban.’ ” (Spencer Ackerman, “Why Pentagon officials should thank the aide who left notes in Starbucks,” TNR Online, April 1, 2004, http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=ackerman040104).
[22] Erick Stakelbeck, The Terrorist Next Door: How the Government Is Deceiving You about the Islamist Threat (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2011), 138. Cf. Alan Cowell, “British Court Frees a Muslim Arrested After 9/11.” New York Times, August 11, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/world...-9-11.html: “In May, however, a British judge said that Mr. Sirri was ‘an innocent fall guy’ and set him free, despite an indictment in the United States on charges of disseminating terrorist messages.”
[23] Stewart was re-sentenced and received ten years but received “compassionate release” and, therefore, did not serve the full sentence.
[24] “What looked like proof positive [that bin Laden ordered the assassination] finally surfaced at the end of 2001, when computer files in Kabul belonging to bin Laden’s organization Al-Qaida (“The Base”) were found by Western journalists to contain the list of questions presented to Massoud” (William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars [London: Red Globe Press, 2020], 251, citing Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins, “Forgotten Computer Reveals Thinking Behind Four Years of al Qaeda Doings,” Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2001).
[25] Paul J. Smith, “Transnational Terrorism and the al Qaeda Model: Confronting New Realities,” Parameters, Summer 2002, 33. It also brings to mind the disputed computer which was used to convict the British extremist Omar Saeed Sheikh of the January 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl—dubious evidence which a Pakistani court gave as a reason for overturning Sheikh’s murder conviction in 2020 (see: Saeed Shah, “Pakistani Court Overturns Murder Conviction in Killing of Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Pearl,” Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/pakistani-c...1585805394.)
[26] Cullison and Higgins, “Forgotten Computer Reveals Thinking Behind Four Years of al Qaeda Doings.”
[27] Robert F. Worth, “New Yorker Is Suspected of Aiding Killers of Anti-Taliban Leader,” New York Times, May 14, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/14/world...eader.html.
[28] Kim Sengupta, “The British connection: Jihadi chain traces European terror back to 9/11,” April 20, 2016, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cr...92021.html.
[29] “Ahmad Shah Massoud,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Massoud, accessed on November 25, 2020. (While Wikipedia is a problematic source for scholarly purposes, it is relevant here in that, on controversial matters, its anonymous editors typically present the prevailing conventional and/or official versions of actors and events.)
[30] James MacDougall, “A New Stage in U.S.-Caspian Sea Basin Relations,” Central Asia, 5 (11), 1997; quoting from Ariel Cohen, “U.S. Policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia: Building A New ‘Silk Road’ to Economic Prosperity,” Heritage Foundation, July 24, 1997. In October 1997 Sen. Sam Brownback introduced a bill, the Silk Road Strategy Act of 1997 (S. 1344), providing incentives for the new Central Asian states to cooperate with the United States, rather than with Russia or Iran.
[31] Ariel Cohen, Eurasia In Balance: The US and the Regional Power Shift (UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 107.
[32] Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2004), 135-36; citing R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in Kazakhstan,” Washington Post, September 15, 1997. Cf. Kenley Butler, “U.S. Military Cooperation with the Central Asian States,” September 17, 2001, http://cns.miis.edu/archive/wtc01/uscamil.htm.
[33] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 121.
[34] Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), 70, 69; citing Ahmed Rashid, “US Builds Alliances in Central Asia,” Far Eastern Economic Review, May 1, 2000. Cf. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, 457; “A team of CIA operators from the agency’s Counterterrorist Center flew to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in October 1999. Code-named JAWBREAKER-5, the group was led by the chief of the center’s Osama bin Laden unit, known to his colleagues as Rich [Richard Blee], a veteran of CIA postings in Algiers and elsewhere in the developing world.” [See: Steve Coll, “Flawed Ally Was Hunt’s Best Hope,” Washington Post, February 23, 2004, A01, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar...Feb22.html].
[35] Thomas E. Ricks and Susan B. Glasser, “U.S., Uzbekistan confirm covert effort,” Washington Post, October 14, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn...-2001Oct13; Cf. Times of India, October 14, 2001; Vanity Fair, November 2004, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/featu...-11-200411: “Black and Rich’s solution to going after bin Laden was … to initiate a series of covert operations with Islam Karimov, the brutal, autocratic president of Uzbekistan, and Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.”
[36] Coll, Ghost Wars, 467-69.
[37] Ricks and Glasser, “U.S., Uzbekistan confirm covert effort.” [See: https://www.chron.com/news/article/U-S-U...021728.php].
[38] Coll, Ghost Wars, 539-541.
[39] Coll, Ghost Wars, 560-561.
[40] Julio Godoy, “U.S. Policy towards Taliban Influenced by Oil,” Inter Press Service, November 15, 2001, In August 2009, Naik was tortured and murdered in his house in Islamabad in an unsolved case. Whether this had anything to do with his disclosure of Simon’s threats remains uncertain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niaz_Naik
[41] Godoy, “US Policy towards Taliban Influenced by Oil;” Damien Cave, “The Conspiracy Theory That Wouldn’t Die,” Salon, August 16, 2002, https://www.salon.com/2002/08/16/forbidden_truth/.
[42] Cave, “The Conspiracy Theory that Wouldn’t Die.”
[43] Farangis Najibullah, “Uzbekistan’s ‘House Of Torture,’ ” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, August 5, 2012, https://www.rferl.org/a/uzbekistans-hous...67200.html.
[44] Craig Murray, “Why the US won’t admit it was jilted,” The Guardian, August 2, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/200...cy.comment.
[45] “The Great Gas Game,” Christian Science Monitor, October 25, 2001, https://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1025/p8s1-comv.html.
[46] “Were 1998 Memos a Blueprint for War?” ABC News, January 6, 2006, https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=128491&page=1.
[47] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 163-165; Alexis Rowell, “U.S. Mercenaries Fight in Azerbaijan,” CovertAction Quarterly, Spring 1994.
[48] “About Us,” United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, https://usacc.org/content.php?type=page&...hi=4&par=3, September 2, 2007 webpage accessed through the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20071009145010/https://usacc.org/content.php?type=page&id=97&chi=4&par=3.
[49] Azerbaijan International, https://azer.com/aiweb/categories/aboutai/aboutai.html.
[50] “Announcing: The US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce,” Azerbaijan International, Spring 1996, 86, https://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/ma...merce.html.
[51] “Profile: Officers,” United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, http://www.usacc.org/content.php?type=pa...hi=5&par=3, September 2, 2007 webpage accessed through the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20071009145228/http://www.usacc.org/content.php?type=page&id=2&chi=5&par=3.
[52] Caroline Lees, “Oil barons court Taliban in Texas,” The Telegraph, December 14, 1997, reprinted at https://mapcruzin.com/news/war111901a.htm.
[53] Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 146.
[54] Turkmenistan announced in September 2020 that it intends to begin construction on a gas pipeline from the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan border to the Herat offtake point in Afghanistan, a fundamental part of the TAPI project. “Rumblings that TAPI Will Commence in 2021,” September 22, 2020, https://www.pipeline-journal.net/news/ru...mence-2021
[55] Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 597-98, 796 n25.
As a result of actions undertaken by powerful actors—including the CIA, the Pentagon, and U.S. oil companies—the stage was set for the historically fateful month of September 2001. Still incompletely understood and shrouded in secrecy, key historical events of that month include official U.S. planning on 9/4 and 9/10 for military action in Afghanistan, the 9/9 assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, and the terror attacks of 9/11.
In short, these events cemented an historical trajectory in which America strove to become precisely what Strobe Talbott had counseled against becoming—a dominant player in the Great Game for Central Asia. America’s military presence in greater Western/Central Asia was further consolidated by its invasion of Iraq in 2003, an option already raised before 9/11 and raised again in the hours immediately following it.
Almost two decades have passed since 9/11. The hubristic Cheney-Rumsfeld initiatives in Afghanistan and Iraq are now being wound down as failures. These failures may be a sign that decades of a so-called Pax Americana, with oil-related aggressions against states from Afghanistan to Libya, are winding down as well.
[1] The 9/11 Report: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 403.
[2] See Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
[3] Coll, Ghost Wars, 329, 377.
[4] Coll, Ghost Wars; Steve Coll, “Ahmad Shah Massoud links with CIA: ‘The CIA had pumped cash stipends as high as $200,000 a month to Massoud and his Islamic guerrilla organization,’” Washington Post, February 23, 2004.
[5] Coll, Ghost Wars, 360.
[6] Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failure of Great Powers (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 597-98. Gary Schroen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War in Afghanistan (San Francisco: Presidio Press, 2006), 125, 207. Later in October Tenet reported to the principals on a CIA “meeting with leaders in the north without Fahim Khan’s approval” (Bob Woodward, Bush at War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003, 260).
[7] James Mann reports that the decision to help both “the Northern Alliance and Uzbek opponents of the Taliban regime” [i.e., Dostum] had already been reached at the September 4 meeting (James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet [New York: Penguin, 2004], 292-93; cf. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror [New York: Random House, 2002], 345-46); and CIA Chief George Tenet on September 23 indicated, at a meeting in Washington, the CIA’s disapproval of the Northern Alliance as a base for U.S. operations in Afghanistan.
[8] The 9/11 Report, 291, 292.
[9] Former U.S. Ambassador Peter Tomsen, the American who knew Massoud best, later wrote that Massoud would“have expressed opposition to the deployment of large numbers of American troops to Afghanistan” (Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 597-98. Cf. Schroen, First In, 125, 207). Tomsen added in a footnote that “According to a Massood adviser who wished to remain anonymous, in 2000 and 2001 Massood refused requests by the American and French governments to insert foreign troops into Northern Alliance-controlled areas” (Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 796 n25).
[10] He is not to be confused with the Dahmane Abd al-Sattar, the Brussels-based Tunisian terrorist who was identified by Belgian police as one of Massoud’s two assassins masquerading as journalists (Dan Bilefsky, “Belgian Authorities Identify Terror Cell Responsible for Massoud’s Assassination,” Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2001, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1007934514705826480).
[11] Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 66-67.
[12] Robert I. Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheik,” The Village Voice, March 30, 1993, http://www.textfiles.com/conspiracy/wtcbomb1.txt.
[13] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 145-146.
[14] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 149.
[15] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 149-150.
[16] See John Y. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al Qaida and the Rise of Global Jihad (London: Zenith Press, 2007).
[17] The U.S. Government had been listening to phone calls between Sattar and al-Sirri from at least April 1999 (Library Information and Research Service, “The Middle East,” 2008, 741).
[18] Robert F. Worth, “New Yorker Is Suspected of Aiding Killers of Anti-Taliban Leader,” New York Times, May 14, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/14/world...eader.html.
[19] “Bin Laden… had decided to work with the Taliban and in doing so they placed themselves firmly against Massoud” (Hashmat Moslih, “Afghanistan in the shadow of Ahmad Shah Massoud,” Al Jazeera, September 9, 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/...h-massoud/).
[20] Barry Bearak, “Afghan ‘Lion’ Fights Taliban With Rifle and Fax Machine,” New York Times, November 9, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/09/world...chine.html.
[21] “According to an accidentally discovered note by Pentagon PR aide Eric Ruff, Ruff suggested to Rumsfeld in a discussion of the controversy that he say ‘NSPD[-9] had an annex going back to July–contingency plans to attack Taliban.’ ” (Spencer Ackerman, “Why Pentagon officials should thank the aide who left notes in Starbucks,” TNR Online, April 1, 2004, http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=ackerman040104).
[22] Erick Stakelbeck, The Terrorist Next Door: How the Government Is Deceiving You about the Islamist Threat (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2011), 138. Cf. Alan Cowell, “British Court Frees a Muslim Arrested After 9/11.” New York Times, August 11, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/world...-9-11.html: “In May, however, a British judge said that Mr. Sirri was ‘an innocent fall guy’ and set him free, despite an indictment in the United States on charges of disseminating terrorist messages.”
[23] Stewart was re-sentenced and received ten years but received “compassionate release” and, therefore, did not serve the full sentence.
[24] “What looked like proof positive [that bin Laden ordered the assassination] finally surfaced at the end of 2001, when computer files in Kabul belonging to bin Laden’s organization Al-Qaida (“The Base”) were found by Western journalists to contain the list of questions presented to Massoud” (William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars [London: Red Globe Press, 2020], 251, citing Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins, “Forgotten Computer Reveals Thinking Behind Four Years of al Qaeda Doings,” Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2001).
[25] Paul J. Smith, “Transnational Terrorism and the al Qaeda Model: Confronting New Realities,” Parameters, Summer 2002, 33. It also brings to mind the disputed computer which was used to convict the British extremist Omar Saeed Sheikh of the January 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl—dubious evidence which a Pakistani court gave as a reason for overturning Sheikh’s murder conviction in 2020 (see: Saeed Shah, “Pakistani Court Overturns Murder Conviction in Killing of Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Pearl,” Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/pakistani-c...1585805394.)
[26] Cullison and Higgins, “Forgotten Computer Reveals Thinking Behind Four Years of al Qaeda Doings.”
[27] Robert F. Worth, “New Yorker Is Suspected of Aiding Killers of Anti-Taliban Leader,” New York Times, May 14, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/14/world...eader.html.
[28] Kim Sengupta, “The British connection: Jihadi chain traces European terror back to 9/11,” April 20, 2016, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cr...92021.html.
[29] “Ahmad Shah Massoud,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Massoud, accessed on November 25, 2020. (While Wikipedia is a problematic source for scholarly purposes, it is relevant here in that, on controversial matters, its anonymous editors typically present the prevailing conventional and/or official versions of actors and events.)
[30] James MacDougall, “A New Stage in U.S.-Caspian Sea Basin Relations,” Central Asia, 5 (11), 1997; quoting from Ariel Cohen, “U.S. Policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia: Building A New ‘Silk Road’ to Economic Prosperity,” Heritage Foundation, July 24, 1997. In October 1997 Sen. Sam Brownback introduced a bill, the Silk Road Strategy Act of 1997 (S. 1344), providing incentives for the new Central Asian states to cooperate with the United States, rather than with Russia or Iran.
[31] Ariel Cohen, Eurasia In Balance: The US and the Regional Power Shift (UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 107.
[32] Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2004), 135-36; citing R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in Kazakhstan,” Washington Post, September 15, 1997. Cf. Kenley Butler, “U.S. Military Cooperation with the Central Asian States,” September 17, 2001, http://cns.miis.edu/archive/wtc01/uscamil.htm.
[33] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 121.
[34] Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), 70, 69; citing Ahmed Rashid, “US Builds Alliances in Central Asia,” Far Eastern Economic Review, May 1, 2000. Cf. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, 457; “A team of CIA operators from the agency’s Counterterrorist Center flew to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in October 1999. Code-named JAWBREAKER-5, the group was led by the chief of the center’s Osama bin Laden unit, known to his colleagues as Rich [Richard Blee], a veteran of CIA postings in Algiers and elsewhere in the developing world.” [See: Steve Coll, “Flawed Ally Was Hunt’s Best Hope,” Washington Post, February 23, 2004, A01, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar...Feb22.html].
[35] Thomas E. Ricks and Susan B. Glasser, “U.S., Uzbekistan confirm covert effort,” Washington Post, October 14, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn...-2001Oct13; Cf. Times of India, October 14, 2001; Vanity Fair, November 2004, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/featu...-11-200411: “Black and Rich’s solution to going after bin Laden was … to initiate a series of covert operations with Islam Karimov, the brutal, autocratic president of Uzbekistan, and Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.”
[36] Coll, Ghost Wars, 467-69.
[37] Ricks and Glasser, “U.S., Uzbekistan confirm covert effort.” [See: https://www.chron.com/news/article/U-S-U...021728.php].
[38] Coll, Ghost Wars, 539-541.
[39] Coll, Ghost Wars, 560-561.
[40] Julio Godoy, “U.S. Policy towards Taliban Influenced by Oil,” Inter Press Service, November 15, 2001, In August 2009, Naik was tortured and murdered in his house in Islamabad in an unsolved case. Whether this had anything to do with his disclosure of Simon’s threats remains uncertain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niaz_Naik
[41] Godoy, “US Policy towards Taliban Influenced by Oil;” Damien Cave, “The Conspiracy Theory That Wouldn’t Die,” Salon, August 16, 2002, https://www.salon.com/2002/08/16/forbidden_truth/.
[42] Cave, “The Conspiracy Theory that Wouldn’t Die.”
[43] Farangis Najibullah, “Uzbekistan’s ‘House Of Torture,’ ” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, August 5, 2012, https://www.rferl.org/a/uzbekistans-hous...67200.html.
[44] Craig Murray, “Why the US won’t admit it was jilted,” The Guardian, August 2, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/200...cy.comment.
[45] “The Great Gas Game,” Christian Science Monitor, October 25, 2001, https://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1025/p8s1-comv.html.
[46] “Were 1998 Memos a Blueprint for War?” ABC News, January 6, 2006, https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=128491&page=1.
[47] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 163-165; Alexis Rowell, “U.S. Mercenaries Fight in Azerbaijan,” CovertAction Quarterly, Spring 1994.
[48] “About Us,” United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, https://usacc.org/content.php?type=page&...hi=4&par=3, September 2, 2007 webpage accessed through the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20071009145010/https://usacc.org/content.php?type=page&id=97&chi=4&par=3.
[49] Azerbaijan International, https://azer.com/aiweb/categories/aboutai/aboutai.html.
[50] “Announcing: The US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce,” Azerbaijan International, Spring 1996, 86, https://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/ma...merce.html.
[51] “Profile: Officers,” United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, http://www.usacc.org/content.php?type=pa...hi=5&par=3, September 2, 2007 webpage accessed through the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20071009145228/http://www.usacc.org/content.php?type=page&id=2&chi=5&par=3.
[52] Caroline Lees, “Oil barons court Taliban in Texas,” The Telegraph, December 14, 1997, reprinted at https://mapcruzin.com/news/war111901a.htm.
[53] Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 146.
[54] Turkmenistan announced in September 2020 that it intends to begin construction on a gas pipeline from the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan border to the Herat offtake point in Afghanistan, a fundamental part of the TAPI project. “Rumblings that TAPI Will Commence in 2021,” September 22, 2020, https://www.pipeline-journal.net/news/ru...mence-2021
[55] Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 597-98, 796 n25.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass