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FLASH 21 (2/15/02): Central Asia, the "War Against Terror," and Enron

Question: do Cheney's non-released papers link the "War Against Terror" to Enron?

To date no mainstream newpaper has linked the hunt for Bin Laden to Vice-President Cheney's refusal to release the documents of his discussions of Spring 2001 with Enron officials. Yet it seems highly logical that those discussions would extend to the rumors that bin Laden would attack the offices of US oil companies in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan (Rashid, Jihad, 166).

These rumors would been considered matters affecting national security and national energy policy. They would also have been of particular interest to Cheney. Cheney's corporation Halliburton had extensive investment interests in Kazakhstan, so much so that Cheney, when he was still CEO of the company, sat on the State of Kazakhstan's Oil Advisory Board.

But the bin Laden rumors would also have been of particular concern to Enron. As the Financial Times (London) reported on November 8, 1996, Enron was the lead US firm bidding for control of the gas transit pipelines which Kazakhstan was then selling off. In addition Enron was sponsoring a project to supply Turkey with gas from Turkmenistan, by building a pipeline under the Caspian and through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey (Houston Chronicle, 2/2/99).

This pipeline had the active support of the US government, as a means of opening up the gas fields of all Central Asia to a pipeline not under Russian control. (The now notorious Unocal pipeline proposal through Afghanistan was likewise a project which in the mid-1990s had support in Washington, until the Taliban alliance with bin Laden proved too intractable.)

The complete fusion of Enron's corporate strategy with US energy strategy under Clinton can be seen by the fact that Enron's preliminary feasibility study on the gas pipeline was paid for with a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for Trade and Development (Info-Prod Research [Middle East] Ltd., MIDDLE EAST NEWS ITEMS, November 22, 1998).

In the end Enron lost out to Bechtel and GE in its bid to construct the trans-Caspian pipeline. But this does not mean that Enron ceased to be a major player in the new states of the Caspian basin.

On the contrary, if one goes back to business reports of the 1990s, one sees that Enron was active in Uzbekistan, where it signed a contract in 1996 to explore eleven gas fields. This project was called by gasandoil.com "the most ambitious attempted so far by a foreign investor in Uzbekistan." But Enron withdrew from the project in 1998, because the Soviet pipeline company Gazprom, still enjoying a monopoly over the export of gas from Uzbekistan, would not allow Enron to reach a hard currency market for its gas.

It is clear that both the Clinton and the Bush administrations, eager to counter the influence of Russia and Iran in Central Asia, actively encouraged the activities of companies like Enron in the area. Thus the US has been supplying non-lethal military aid to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan under the NATO Partnership for Peace Military Program: US and NATO troops have held joint training exercises with Uzbek troops since 1998 (Rashid, Jihad, 83).

US military concern about Central Asia escalated considerably with the emergence in 1997-98 of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). This movement was an offshoot of the armed Tajik Islamic resistance movement. [More to come].

To read more on this subject, go to Online Journal (Larry Chin; 2/8/02); or Afghanistan, the Taliban and the Bush Oil Team , by Wayne Madsen .