- Part 4 of the International Inquiry on 911's Unanswered Questions radio4all.org
This week, more presentations by independent investigators at the international inquiry on 9/11 held in San Francisco in March. We will place 9/11 in context of the planet's dwindling oil resources and the closed-door decisions about how to deal with the phenomenon of peak oil that have apparently already been made by the American power elites - to defend corporate capitalism at any cost, even if that means species extinction. This places 9/11 in a high stakes context that may change the way you look at the issue of 9/11's unanswered questions.
Featured Speakers: Richard Heinberg, Greg Palast, Mike Ruppert, Daniel Hopsicker
Lynn Gary:
Now we return to audio from The International inquiry on 9/11 in San Francisco that was held late last March. We'll hear again from independent investigator Michael Rupport, Editor of 'From The Wilderness.' Ruppert is a former Los Angeles police detective, his talk is chilling and deals with peak oil as the motive behind government complicity in 9/11. Michael Rupport.
Mike Ruppert:
Part of what I'm going to talk about today is the motive for 9/11.
You've already see some excellent material on what peak oil is and how it works, now I'm going to tie that together with the fact that we know that the Bush administration was aware of it and seriously focused on it. This is just a summary of some of the stuff we've done at From the Wilderness since 9/11.[ http://www.fromthewilderness.com/ ] I don't have to go into that but many of you now are cheering and embracing Richard Clarke for his denunciation of the Bush administration, but I've got some news for you. Richard Clarke is cementing the lies of 9/11 in place and a lot of people are falling for it. [applause] So we have to be very careful about what we, what embrace here, especially in it's totality. Richard Clarke's position is, "my god, I was warning the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, I wrote all these urgent memos that something had to done about al-Qaeda, about the Taliban" and, and as if no move had been made. Now of course, we know that plans for the invasion of Afghanistan arrived on president Bush's desk, just, I think it was 4 days before the attacks of 9/11. Well those plans were not written in 4 days, obviously. As a matter of fact the military preparations had been going on for several years. We had US troops on Tadzhikistan , Ubeckistan, the Pakistani military was involved, it was being published in Russian newspapers, Uzvestia, that a join military invasion was already on the table.
There was a book which came out right after 9/11 by Guillaume Dasquie and Brisard called, "Bin Laden the Forbidden Truth," [ http://www.forbiddentruth.net/ ] has some good stuff, some bad stuff in it but they document the negotiations of a group called "6+2" over pipelines and oil reserves in the Caspian Basin but it was widely known that the US was going to invade Afghanistan. So Richard Clarke ain't telling you the truth. What else is he not telling you the truth about? He is enshrining the lies that need to be enshrined to keep a power structure greater than George W. Bush in power. This is from the BBC's George Arney, "US plan attack on Taliban," [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1550366.stm ] it was in place, he published this 18 September but he documents that going back 6, 8 months, a year, well back into the Clinton administration. Before the attacks, the US. military had a plan to invade Afghanistan....... but now we come to a quote from the US Energy Policy. This is Vice Presidents Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group which concluded it's work in May of 2001 in absolute secrecy and which has until this day in spite of several lawsuits and a very vigorous campaign by Congressman Henry Waxman of California, has refused to reveal it's records from hearings that were paid for out of public money involving outside businesses. It's going to be a Supreme Court ruling this July and I have said consistently since 9/11, the deepest darkest secrets of 9/11, the motive for 9/11 lies in Vice President's Cheney's energy task force. Look at a couple of quotes, "America in the year 2001 faces the most serious energy shortage since the oil embargoes of the 1970's.
Estimates indicate that over the next 20 years US oil consumption will increase by 33%, natural gas consumption by well over 50% and demand for electricity will rise by 45%, US energy consumption is expected to increase by 32% by 2020. Between 2000 and 2020 US natural gas demand is projected by the Energy Information Administration to increase by more than 50% yet we produce 39% less oil today than we did in 1970, the peak year of US production leaving us more reliant on foreign suppliers. On our present course, America 20 years from now will import nearly 2 of every 3 barrels of oil, a condition of increased dependency on foreign powers that do not always have America's best interest at heart," as if it was somehow their obligation to have our best interest at heart.
Look! Lets talk about peak oil quick and I'm really tired of the debate, I'm really tired of there's no proof, there's no evidence. I'm not going to take time to go through this but if we talk about peak oil real quickly, who's been talking about it, Foreign Affairs Magazine, James Kenneth Galbraith, ahhh this is the Sunday Morning Herald, "The End of Oil," The Halifax Limited, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientist, now there's a real group of conspiracy nuts. [laughter] Ah, for immediate, oil shortages, this is Petroleum Review, they've done the math, the big oil shortages arrive in 2007. The Independent, Saudi Aramco, Nature, there's a real conspiracy rag, BBC News, The Los Angeles Times. I can do this for hours with the people who are talking about it. This is a story from ABC News which talks about how serious, it says exactly what Richard Heinberg was just telling you, so was, CNN said it. I can do same thing with natural gas, so don't tell me it's not real, it's real, we've done the studies, we've done the analysis of the production numbers.
The difference between natural gas and oil is that oil flows down a bell curve, so that you have to expend more energy as you as you go off the cliff to get lower quality, lesser quality oil, the light sweet crudes at the top, we drain the big fields but now we've got to go deep, pump in steam, pump in water to get sour oil, every barrel of oil becomes not only harder to find, it becomes more expensive to produce. Natural gas, it just flows, phooo, until there's no more pressure and we go off a cliff and we're off the cliff. I predicted successfully 6 weeks before it happened, the blackout of last August 14th. How did I do that? Cause I was watching natural gas numbers. They haven't built new infrastructure because there's no natural gas to power the plants and I got a real nasty surprise for you greens out there that's coming up. In his just released book, "Out of Gas" [ http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall03/005857.htm ] this is from the Goodstein book. Goodstein argues forcefully that "worldwide production of oil will peak soon, possibly within this decade. Clear evidence is showing that it peaked actually in 2000, as Saudi Arabia peaked, that would be followed by declining availability of fossil fuels that could plunge the world in global conflict as nations struggle to capture their piece of a shrinking pie." I would ask you, does that bear any resemblance to the world we're living in today? Yeah!
Now the most important article I've written in the last 2 years is called "In Your Face!" [ http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/013004_in_your_face.html ] it 's a free story and I've used work done by the brilliant Michael Klare, who wrote a book called "Resource Wars." [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0805055754/ref=sib_dp_pt/104-7003772-1093530
#reader-link ] He's a professor in New England, very widely recognized, where he dissected what was known out of the Energy Policy Task Force official report and in his analysis, he said clearly, what they're saying is there's only so much oil and if we're going to need X number of barrels, we have to take it away from somebody else, that's the bottom line. He has a great quote here, "the Cheney report is very guarded about the amount of foreign oil that will be required, the only clue provided by the public report is a chart of net US oil consumption and production over time. According to this illustration domestic oil field production will decline from about 8.5 million barrels per day in 2002 to 7 million barrels a day in 2020, while consumption will jump from 19.5 million to 25&1/2 million barrels a day. That suggests imports of other sources will have to rise from 11 million to 18&1/2 million barrels a day. Most of the recommendations of the National Energy Policy Group are aimed at procuring the 7.5 million barrels per day increment, the equivalent to the total consumption, total oil consumed by China and India." We're at a place where if we take it from somebody else, we are literally taking it from somebody else. And if you get nothing else out of what I say today, watch this map, 7 pages of records from the National Energy Policy Development Group were surfaced as a result of a FOFA or freedom of information suit filed by the Sierra Club and some of those pages included maps, [ http://www.judicialwatch.org/071703.c_.shtml
] now this is not the map. Now, I've had people in my office take the maps which are cut-up, they're like a mosaic and I had them assemble the oil fields maps into what you see on the left of the screen. This is what they were talking about in Vice President's Cheney's energy task force along with lists of who had development contracts, that literally boiled down to if we invade, who can we get to go along with us to form a collation of the willing if we offer them a piece of the pie and who absolutely cannot afford to endorse a US invasion of the region and that's exactly the way it played out. In other words, what they were discussing in May was a mirror of what happened after the Iraqi invasion. But here's a secret and it's very chilling, this area right here is what was disclosed from the maps out of the National Energy Policy Department Group. If you were to take this triangle from way up here just north of Mosual, run through this part of Iran, down here, just expand it to there, down here, you have just circled 60% of all the recoverable oil on planet Earth. 60% of all the oil is in an area that fits easily into Texas. 6 out every 10 barrels left remaining for this planet is there but it takes 6 weeks to get a drop of oil from that region into an American gas-tank. This is a map I did more than 2 years ago before we invaded Iraq. Iraq is now invaded.
Now if you look at the military deployment around the region and you go back and look at that map again, don't you see what we've done? We have absolutely encircled the oil and that was the plan, that was the plan from December 11th, it is the plan that has been executed. Now I have said clearly also that China is the end game from oil. I wrote this at From the Wilderness, my newsletter, probably about 18 to 20 months ago. [ http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/111403_oil_demand.html ] This is a story from February of this year from the LA Times and what does it say? "China just passed Japan as the second largest oil importing nation on the planet" and their consumption is exploding. Chinese auto sales just went up 100% in 1 year and the rub is that Wall Street's financial markets will die if there is no market in China to buy computers, automobiles, factories to take our jobs to sell to the Chinese people, so we can't live with them and we can't live without'em. But that's the end game and it's becoming extremely clear especially as China starts increasing military aid to West African nations. Look at this and the scarcest story we've ever published on
From the Wilderness is called "Eating Fossil Fuels"
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html ] and I encourage you to read it, it was a subscriber only story and we've just made it free, my subscribers had it 8 months ago. The world consumes 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy for every calorie of food that we eat. You take away the hydrocarbon energy, you take away the food. All fertilizers are made from natural gas, all pesticides are made from petroleum, all food crops are irrigated by electricity generated by burning natural gas or oil or coal, some cases atomic power, some cases, small cases hydro-electric. But China has already reaching a food crisis [ http://earth-policy.org/Updates/Update39.htm ] and CNN Lou Dobbs just a few months ago reported that the bread basket of the world, the US and Canada, will soon no longer be able to export grain. Why? Because our topsoil has become so eroded that it is like a sponge unto which we pour chemicals to grow food and we aren't going to be able to feed the world anymore. Now how do you think the world's going to feel about it if we're stealing all their natural resources and we're not even sending out grain anymore?
This is ah, probably one of my early on great achievements, this is a map I produced from Zbigniew Brzezinski's book "The Grand Chessboard," [ http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/zbig.html ] published in 1997 and the broader circle, the outside one, from a map in 1997 was where Brzezinski said the next world conflict was going to occur. When I worked for LAPD we called that a clue. [audience laughter] It's a map we prepared at From the Wilderness, going to West Africa since 9/11 and everyplace you see a fire is a place where there has been an outbreak of terrorist or subversive activity. Everywhere you see an oil well, there's new oil development , everywhere you see a green soldier is a place where US Army special forces have been deployed since 9/11. Is that suspicious to you? Now Africa is a drop in the bucket compared to, in terms of reserve numbers, compared to the Middle East, but the difference is this, it takes 6 weeks to get a drop of oil from the Persian Gulf into your gas-tank, it takes 2 weeks to get a drop of oil from Nigeria into your gas-tank and isn't it strange that all the focus after the Spanish bombings is now moving toward Moraco. Duh!! Right here, Moraco up on the upper west coast of Africa, where Kerr-McGee, Halliburton and oil companies have just secured major new leases for smaller fields to develop. Terrorism goes exactly where the oil is, that's the map I've been following for 2 years and it's why I've been able to be so far ahead, I'm just following the oil. London Times, "America came to Exploit Boom in Africa's Black Gold." Voice of America, there's a fine non-partisan outfit funded by the CIA. But look at a story that they produced here last May of 2003, "US NATO Allies may focus on Africa Predicts NATO Senior Commander, General James Jones" with that goofy look on his face here has announced that NATO is shifting it's focus to West Africa. That's right before the US Navy gave Nigeria 6 US warships. So I was writing a year and a half ago. Hey! We're going to West Africa to fight and now we come to Haiti. Here's a map, you see Haiti's up there on the left of the island of Espanola, right there. That's Florida up there, you see, look at the fact that Haiti is an exact midpoint between the southern coast of Florida and Venezuela. We can't invade Venezuela unless we control the whole island. Yeah, we have military bases in Puerto Rico, some in the Dominion Republic but the US would never engage in a military occupation with an indigenous Latin American or French population that's hostile to US interests next to Cuba, behind the supply lines to invade Venezuela. That is why immediately after we had the coup d'e-tat in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez said, hey baby, Chavez is not Aristide and Venezuela is not Haiti. If Bush, he called Bush an "asshole" as quoted by Reuters [applause] and Hugo Chavez, "El Soro" as they call him said, "if America makes one move to Venezuela I'll shut off their oil immediately." Now you take that oil away from the United States then the US economy collapses, there's no elasticity. It's not a matter of how much oil you take out, it's the fact that if you take out, you know an ounce of a system that's already at capacity the whole system collapses. Just a few days ago before I came up there was a story from the Venezuela Times how the Chinese government was in Venezuela negotiating to buy all of Venezuela's oil. [ http://tinyurl.com/3d7tr ] Humm!
Now if I really want to offend you, I came back from the peak oil conference, the 2nd peak oil conference in Paris last May and I had reported out of that, number one, that Saudi Arabian reserves have probably peaked. I spoke with Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, who is the vice president of the Iranian Oil Company. By the way Iran peaked in 1987, you know that Iran is importing gasoline now. Ah, and I reported that he had said that Saudi reserves had peaked, several months before the New York Times had reported it just about a month ago or less than a month. I said that Matthew Simmons, the worlds largest energy investment banker had suggested that Saudi Arabia had peaked.
When I came back from Paris and I said, and we said, and I wasn't the only one to conclude this is, that Americans knee-jerk reaction in the face of peak oil would to be two things, It would be to revert to coal and nuclear. Now nobody even knows this and I'm running through the Christian Science Monitor the other day and I see this story, [ http://tinyurl.com/3avu5 ] this is a story from February 26th, not too long ago. And it says right here, "that the United States has now started construction of 93 new coal fired power plants." Coal! You know the stuff greenhouse gas, the stuff that kills us, the stuff does global warming and in Paris we had this dialogue with a very nice guy from the Global Commons Institute who was a very big green activist and he had admitted that peak oil would probably kill us before greenhouse gases do and we both said. Ahh! Unless the United States reverts to coal, which is the only energy we can get. Now it's nobody, it's so under the radar! Kyoto we never signed anyway, all the environmental laws are out, 93 new coal fired plants pumping carbon-dioxide directly into the atmosphere and they're already being built. Why? Dick Cheney told you, "the American way of life is not negotiable." And we will commit suicide, we will commit global human suicide the way species commit suicide as a result of over adaptation because we will not negotiate our standards of consumption.
James Kenneth Galbraith, I'm going to read these quotes and they're very important, maybe I should just cut-off there, James Kenneth Galbraith you know is the son of John Galbraith, an incredible economist. Let me read you what he wrote in November of 2002. [ http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/21/galbraith-j.html ] "The real economic cost of Bush's empire building is two fold, it diverts attention from pressing economic problems at home and it sets the United States on a long term imperial path that is economically ruinous. Nor is Bush's strategy necessarily irrational in-so-far as it effects oil in the short run, with a new Iraqi government. The United States will gain a client state that is prepared to help keep the oil price within the band that both the US consumers and the remaining US oil producers can tolerate." Notice he said remaining, they're dropping out, cause there's no oil. "Low enough so as not to fatally drain purchasing power from the former, high enough so as not to immediately ruin the latter.
Given that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney commitment to unlimited oil consumption, this will prove useful in putting off the day of reckoning, as total world oil production declines, creditable scientific evidence suggests that this may start happening quite soon. The Middle East's share of remaining reserves will rise. So to will the potential for cartel control and price manipulation. A robust US military presence in the oil fields directly or by proxy will naturally make higher oil prices less of a danger. This is part of the appeal of the war with Iraq. First private business investment in the United States has fallen virtually to capital replacement level." That's called life support when you're speaking economically. "Second, the recession in consumer spending cannot be put off forever, American households are still being crushed by debt. Third, state and local government budgets continue to implode, reasonable estimates now show 50 billion dollars in deficits at the state level and the losses are surely almost as large at the local level. Fourth, we have economic affects of the decline of our financial markets which have already lost more than 8 trillion dollars in normal shareholder value since their peak in 2000. To some extent these losses are due to the corruption of certain major corporations including several, not at least Halliburton, that are closely tied to the military petroleum complex.
It is a straight-forward fact that if global oil production starts to decline but US consumption does not, everyone else will be required to cut purchases and usages of oil. But how can oil prices be held stable for American's yet made to rise for everybody else? Only by a policy of continuing deprecation in everyone else's currency. Such a policy of dollar hegemony amid worldwide financial instability, of crushing debt burdens and deflation throughout the developing world is perverse." Meanwhile we will not experience even a gradual exposure as Richard was talking about, as I have written about extensively at From the Wilderness. We published many stories on alternative energy. "Will not experience even a gradual exposure to the changing energy balance. We will therefore never make the investments required to adjust, even eventually to a world of scarce and expensive oil.
In the end therefore that world will arrive much more abruptly than it otherwise would shaking the fragile edifice of our oil economy to its foundations and we will someday face a double explosion of anger against our arrogance and of actual shortage and collapsing living standards when the confidence of investors in the dollar finally gives way." That is a recipe for disaster! That is the recipe that we are following on the road map. My job with 9/11 of course is to describe to you the plane crash, the train wreak, the disaster, the holocaust, the Armageddon that just occurred. But while everybodies focusing over the carcass of 9/11, somebodies got to look up and say, ah, ah, ah! There's another one coming......... and it's here, it's here now.
M. King Hubbert, who was the first pioneer to tell the us about peak oil who has been vindicated and validated so many time over the years, wrote so succinctly in his first book he said, "until you change the way money works you will change nothing." In Paris, this is where my dear friend Katherine Austin Fitts comes in, a senior mega powerful Dutch economist came up and took the podium at the peak oil conference at the French Institute of Petroleum and said with all seriousness, "it may not be profitable to slow the effects of decline." In English that means is, they can find no way of making money by saving human life and averting famine, disaster, war and Armageddon and if they can't find a way to make money they won't do it. That's the world we live in, these are the choices we have to face, so as we play this game of 9/11 we must truly understand what the stakes are that we are facing, not as a country, not as anything else but a species, a species. To quote Colin Campbell, my good friend who founded, "the species of homo sapiens may not become extinct", although it may, "but the subspecies of petroleum man most certainly will."
Now the question is, do we want to do it nice or do we want to do it nasty? The world has chosen to embark on a path that is likely to produce the worst disaster ever experienced by mankind. It will be bloody, it will be violent, it will involve population reduction by the most brutal venial underhanded methods. So ultimately what I have to say to you is as I look at this and as I've studied this and as I've worked 26 years to unravel this covert mechanism that governs our lives.
I' m firmly convinced that what we are now faced with is a choice offered to us by our creator. Either evolve or perish.