Random Michael Moore Deceits [#15]

Taliban/pipeline [from Fahrenheit 9/11]

Once upon a time the Unocal energy company proposed an oil and gas pipeline route across Afghanistan that would bring energy resources to Europe from deposits in eastern Turkmenistan. This pipeline was endorsed by the Clinton administration. Unocal tossed this project into the wastebasket years before the United States struck at Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. But telling you the truth wouldn’t fatten the fat man’s bank account, so Michael Moore took his audience for a bath in conspiratorial hogwash: “Or was the war in Afghanistan really about something else?” He points his finger of suspicion at the long-defunct Unocal pipeline proposal which had been abandoned in 1998. The 2003 Protocol that he mentions was part of a completely different pipeline project proposed by the new Afghan government, not the Taliban. The pipeline film footage shown in Fahrenheit 9/11 is not from either of these proposed projects. Moore deliberately confuses his audiences by presenting them with these signature-piece film-clip salads.

Moore slyly refers to a Taliban delegation that once toured Texas while Bush was governor of that state. The truth is, Bush never met with that delegation; such delegations did not seek or need the permission of the governor to visit Texas; they were entertained solely by the Clinton administration. As MSNBC noted: “Whatever the motive, the Unocal pipeline project was entirely a Clinton-era proposal. By the time George W. Bush took office, it was a dead issue and no longer the subject of any lobbying in Washington.”

Moore does his best to deepen his audience’s confusion by floating the lie that Afghanistan’s democratically-elected president, Hamid Karzai, was a consultant for the energy company Unocal. The company denies that Karzai was ever a consultant.

Moore’s webpage cites as its source an article published in the left-leaning French newspaper Le Monde (12/6/01) and two later articles that relied on Le Monde. The French newspaper itself offered no source for this assertion. Moore translates the critical passage of the French text as “He was a consultant for the American oil company Unocal, while they studied the construction of a pipeline in Afghanistan.” The actual sentence says, “After Kabul and India where he studied law, he completed his training in the United States where he was for a moment a consultant for the American petroleum business Unocal . . .” [Emphasis added] The phrase “fut un moment” would not suggest more than a fleeting interrogation if it were true, but with no more to go on than one unsubstantiated left-leaning Frenchman’s say-so and Moore’s reckless desire to have us believe this French rumor, we would be fools to accept Moore’s thesis that the Afghan war was about Unocal’s pipeline project which, in any case, had been abandoned back in 1998.

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Moore then runs a kind of western spoof with the music from the movie The Magnificent Seven and the heads of Bush Administration officials and Tony Blair on top of the bodies of Bonanza characters, and he tells us that the U.S. (he does not mention the dozens of allied nations involved) invaded Afghanistan “just four weeks after 9/11,” implying that they acted too quickly. But then he again shows a clip of Richard Clarke, this time saying that the U.S. acted too slowly and with insufficient force, and took too long to reach the area where Bin Laden was thought to be hiding.

Wondering why the U.S. might have taken too long to reach the area where Bin Laden had been, Moore then asks, without making any particular allegation of course, “Or was the war in Afghanistan really about something else? Perhaps the answer was in Houston, Texas. In 1997, while George W. Bush was Governor of Texas, a delegation of Taliban leaders from Afghanistan flew to Houston to meet with Unocal executives to discuss the building of a pipeline through Afghanistan bringing natural gas from the Caspian Sea. And who got a Caspian Sea drilling contract the same day Unocal signed the pipeline deal? A company headed by a man named Dick Cheney: Halliburton.” And so we have come to Halliburton, the favorite target of all left-wing conspiracy theorists. Note the flimsy support for this change of subject: U.S. troops didn’t reach Bin Laden’s distant hideaway quickly enough, which means the war in Afghanistan was really about a pipeline that was discussed with a company in Texas while Bush was governor (no suggestion that Bush had anything to do with the talks, and indeed he did not) and at the same time Halliburton got a contract to dig in the Caspian Sea. What do these disparate claims have to do with one another?

In any case, these claims aren’t even true. The notion that the invasion of Afghanistan had anything to do with the Unocal pipeline idea is belied by the simple fact that efforts to create such a pipeline ended in 1998 (http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/98news/082198.htm) and have not been resumed (http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/98news/centgas.htm). In 2002, after the American overthrow of the Taliban, officials in the new Afghan government agreed with Turkmenistan and Pakistan to discuss a different pipeline (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2608713.stm) but this agreement had nothing to do with Unocal, Halliburton, or any other American company—or with anything that was at all related to the earlier pipeline possibility that Moore is talking about. Moreover, what does Bush’s having been governor of Texas in 1997 have to do with the pipeline discussions? The state government was not involved in the pipeline project or in the visit of the Taliban representatives, both of which were overseen by the Clinton Administration, and not in any way that favored the Taliban (see for instance the report of the 9/11 Commission, http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf, p. 111). The pipeline theory had been debunked long before Moore’s film, and his reference to it here is absurd. As Seth Stevenson, writing in Slate in 2001, put it, after thoroughly disproving the pipeline claims:

"What’s absurd about the pipeline theory is how thoroughly it discounts the obvious reason the United States set the bombers loose on Afghanistan: Terrorists headquartered in Afghanistan attacked America’s financial and military centers, killing 4,000 people, and then took credit for it. Nope—must be the pipeline." (http://slate.msn.com/id/2059487)

Moore also offers no explanation of what Halliburton’s digging contracts had to do with any of this. These contracts were in no way connected to the pipeline. And Moore’s claim that these purportedly sinister deals were signed “on the same day” is a weak attempt to find conspiracy in coincidence. On October 27, 1997, Halliburton, which had already been working in Turkmenistan for five years, received another relatively minor ($30 million) drilling contract in the Caspian (http://www.halliburton.com/news/archive/1997/hesnws_102797.jsp). Coincidentally, on October 27, 1997, Unocal helped to form a consortium with five other companies that would explore the possibility of developing the pipeline that was ultimately never built (http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/97news/102797a.htm); that consortium was formed at the behest of the government of Turkmenistan, it did not involve the Taliban, and it actually was begun before the supposedly suspicious Taliban-Unocal meeting in Texas. Indeed, what any these things have to do with one another—or what any of this pipeline story, which ended in 1998, has to do with the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001—remains totally unexplained.

But Moore is not finished with the pipeline. “And who else stood to benefit from the pipeline?” he asks, “Bush’s number one campaign contributor, Kenneth Lay and the good people of Enron.” To repeat, all talk of a pipeline ended in 1998, and Moore has not yet offered any reason to believe that the Clinton Administration’s (possibly well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful) notion of a pipeline ever had anything to do with George W. Bush. Also, Enron and Kenneth Lay were not Bush’s top contributors, they ranked 12th in the 2000 campaign, (http://www.opensecrets.org/2000elect/contrib/P00003335.htm) and contributed to Democrats as well as Republicans (http://www.usatoday.com/money/covers/2002-01-28-enron-states.htm). And finally, it is not actually true that Enron stood to gain by this deal, since Enron was not one of the companies in the consortium trying to develop the pipeline (again, see the Unocal press release: http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/97news/102797a.htm). Enron was involved with power plants and pipelines in India which—if hundreds of miles of never-built additional pipelines were laid—could conceivably have been connected to the never-built pipeline that crossed Afghanistan. But none of this seems to have anything to do with America’s attack against Afghanistan. Moore is simply throwing everything at the wall to see if anything sticks. Upon examination, nothing does.

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Without bothering to make any logical connections with the pipeline deal abandoned three years earlier, Moore then continues, “Then in 2001, just five-and-a-half months before 9/11, the Bush Administration welcomed a special Taliban envoy to tour the United States to help improve the image of the Taliban government.” Moore wonders, “Why on Earth did the Bush Administration allow a Taliban leader to visit the United States, knowing that the Taliban were harboring the man who bombed the USS Cole and our African embassies?” But as the 9/11 Commission Report demonstrates, these contacts with the Taliban were part of an effort by the United States to aggressively push the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden, which went on at the same time as planning to remove the Taliban from power if they did not cooperate—planning, again, which occurred before and not just after the attacks (http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf, p. 205). And in any case, even by Moore’s most outlandish theory, what would this have had to do with a pipeline deal that fell through in 1998?

To hint slyly at an answer, Moore tells us that after overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan, “we installed its new president, Hamid Karzai. Who was Hamid Karzai? He was a former advisor to Unocal. Bush also appointed as his envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad who was also a former Unocal advisor.” Here we have both deception and distortion. Hamid Karzai was never a consultant to Unocal, and Zalmay Khalilzad could be considered one only indirectly (http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/lane.htm). Moreover, it is absurd to describe either of these men by their connection (even if it was true) to some energy company. Karzai was a leading figure in the Afghan resistance against the Soviets and was the foreign minister of the Afghan government-in-exile and later deputy foreign minister of the government of Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover. After the takeover, he worked in Afghanistan and from Pakistan to loosen the grip of the Taliban and free the Afghan people. He was named to lead the country because he was a very prominent figure in the fight to free it (http://www.embassyofafghanistan.org/main/bios/karzai_bio.cfm). Meanwhile Zalmay Khalizad, who was named U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, had been in charge of the Afghan desk at the National Security Council, Special Assistant to the President, and Senior Director for Islamic Outreach and Southwest Asia Initiatives at the National Security Council—and before that, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Southwest Asia, Near East, and North African Affairs at the National Security Council. He had also headed the Defense Department task force of the Bush-Cheney transition in 2000. He had also founded RAND’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and was a professor of political science at Columbia University (http://usembassy.state.gov/afghanistan/wwwhbiozal.html). These impressive qualifications put the lie to the notion that either man was chosen for some connection to an energy company.

But having told us all he thinks we need to know about these two men, Moore concludes: “I guess you can probably see where this is leading. Faster than you can say ‘Black Gold, Texas Tea,’ Afghanistan signed an agreement with her neighboring countries to build a pipeline through Afghanistan carrying natural gas from the Caspian Sea.” But again, this agreement has nothing to do with the pipeline project Moore had mentioned earlier, has nothing to do with Unocal, has nothing to do with Halliburton, has nothing to do with Enron, and has nothing to do with George W. Bush (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2608713.stm). Moore offers no backing whatsoever to the notion that the war in Afghanistan was somehow about an oil pipe."

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