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The Pipeline and the Taliban Envoy 15:12 Jackson: If we follow the money, it doesn't just lead to Saudi banks; it leads to the ground in Afghanistan. Long before 9/11, there was this massive project on the table: a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, to Pakistan. And it seems like the Bush administration was very, very interested in making that happen.
15:34 Lena: They were obsessed with it. Most of Bush’s cabinet were oil-industry veterans. They wanted that pipeline because it would benefit companies like Enron and Halliburton. But there was a problem: the Taliban. To get the pipeline built, they needed a stable government in Afghanistan that would play ball.
15:50 Jackson: So, what did they do? They didn't just ignore the Taliban; they invited them to Texas! I read that in 1997, Taliban ministers were being chauffeured around Houston in a company minibus, visiting the zoo and NASA, and having dinner at the palatial homes of oil executives.
16:09 Lena: It’s surreal. These hardline fundamentalists, who had banned women from working and girls from school, were marveling at swimming pools and Christmas trees in suburban Texas. And even in 2001—just five months before 9/11—the Bush administration welcomed a special Taliban envoy to the U.S. for a "P.R. tour" to help improve their image.
16:29 Jackson: Five months before the towers fell, we were trying to help the Taliban with their P.R.? That feels like a complete betrayal of everything we were told later about why we needed to go to war.
16:40 Lena: The argument is that the "Global War on Terror" provided the perfect pretext to clear out the "uncooperative" Taliban and install a government that would sign off on the pipeline. And who did they pick to lead Afghanistan? Hamid Karzai. A man who, as it turns out, had previously worked as a consultant for the U.S. oil company Unocal—the very company that wanted to build the pipeline.
17:03 Jackson: So we go from "P.R. tours" for the Taliban to "regime change" that just happens to put a Unocal-friendly guy in charge. It makes the pursuit of bin Laden look like a secondary objective, doesn't it? Like he was the "excuse" for a much larger geopolitical play.
17:20 Lena: That is exactly what John O’Neill thought. O’Neill was the FBI’s top counterterrorism guy, the man who had been chasing bin Laden since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He reportedly quit the FBI in disgust just two weeks before 9/11 because he felt the Bush administration was blocking his investigations into Saudi ties to al-Qaeda to protect "U.S. oil corporate interests."
17:43 Jackson: And what happened to him?
17:44 Lena: He took a job as the head of security at the World Trade Center. He died in the towers on September 11. It’s one of the most tragic and "convenient" deaths in this entire saga. If O’Neill had lived, he would have been the loudest voice telling the world that the "answers" to bin Laden’s organization were in Saudi Arabia, not just in the hills of Tora Bora.
18:05 Jackson: It feels like every time someone gets close to the real connection—the financial umbilical cord between the Saudis, the bin Ladens, and the Bushes—the story suddenly shifts or the evidence disappears. Whether it’s O’Neill dying in the towers or Salem bin Laden dying in a "freak" ultra-light aircraft accident in Texas in 1988, the people who know the most have a habit of vanishing.
18:29 Lena: Salem’s death is another one of those "holes." He was a very experienced pilot, with over fifteen thousand hours of flight time. Yet, he supposedly turned the wrong way after takeoff and flew right into power lines. No one could figure out why. And with his death, the most direct link between the Bush business ventures and the bin Laden family fortune was severed.
18:48 Jackson: It’s a pattern of "unexpected dead ends." Whether it's a plane crash in 1988 or a burial at sea in 2011, the physical proof of these relationships and events is always just out of reach. It makes you wonder: if the official story is true, why does it require so much "cleaning up"?