Former Government minister Michael Meacher has claimed that the war on terrorism is a “political smokescreen” allowing the US to dominate the world and its oil supplies.
Mr Meacher, who was environment minister for six years until June, argued in a national newspaper that the US knew in advance of the September 11 attacks but did not act for strategic reasons.
It has since made “no serious attempt” to catch al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, he added.
Mr Meacher, MP for Oldham, claimed that “the truth may well be a great deal murkier”, citing a document called Rebuilding America’s Defences, written in September 2000 by neo-conservative think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which was set up by a group including Dick Cheney (George Bush’s vice president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (deputy defence secretary) and Lewis Libby (Mr Cheney’s chief of staff).
The PNAC plan “is a blueprint for US world domination” which “provides a much better explanation of what happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis”, he wrote.
“From this it seems that the so-called `war on terrorism’ is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives.”
He said the PNAC document stated that making the US “tomorrow’s dominant force” would be a long process without “some catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbour”.
Mr Meacher listed a number of newspaper articles detailing intelligence the US was said to be in possession of which warned of the September 11 attacks before they happened.
He also questioned why no fighter planes were scrambled until after the third plane had crashed into the Pentagon, asking: “Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11?”
Mr Meacher concluded that the “overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies”.
By 2010, he said, Muslim countries will control as much as 60 per cent of the world’s oil production and 95 per cent of its global export capacity.
seems only the people in america and britain can’t see what is so obvious to the rest of the world!
