... and there was Enron...

On Wed, 11 Sep 2002 21:35:43 GMT, Sir Arthur C. B. Wholeflaffers A.S.A.
<nospam@newsranger.com> wrote:

In article <unvakg94j2g8a0@corp.supernews.com>, Muddy Mudskipper! says...

The Wholeflaffer Happening!! <> <> <> <> wrote:

Sir Artio Wholeflaffer wrote:

Cap. Shitley, if you weren't such an obvious idiot,
you would understand who has done most
of the mayhem and murder in this world.
Hint: you're living there right now!!!!

Half the time you accuse scientific debunkers (who humiliate you 24/7) 
of being anti-american and here you are slaming America? I'm not 
American by the way, just interested in pointing out your inconsistantly 
yet a fucking 'gain!

Why oh why do debunkers resort to toilet-talk?
This does have some precedence, from NSA/CIA spOOk
Phil No-Klass yelled "Bullshit" on the radio and
then hung-up the phone!!

Again, all I ever do is state the facts, and of course
the facts scare the hell out of the spOOks,
debunkers, low-level operatives and trolls
like you.

And why do debunkers always just copy by
posts and turn them around, which means
debunkers can't ever come up with anything original.
And the proof of course is you!!

The Enron-Cheney-Taliban Connection? Ron Callari, Albion Monitor

Enron is a scandal so enormous that it's hard to wrap your mind around it. Not
just a single financial disaster, it's actually a jigsaw of interlocking
scandals, each outrageous in its own right.  There's Enron the Wall St. con
game, where company bookkeepers used slight of hand to turn four years of steady
losses into stunning profits. There's Enron the reverse Robin Hood, which stole

>from its own employees even as its executives were hauling millions of dollars

out the backdoor. There's Enron's Ken Lay the Kingmaker, who used the
corporation's fraudulent wealth to broker elections and skew public policy to
his liking. And then there are the Enron coverups, as documents are shredded and
the White House seeks to conceal details about meetings between Enron and Vice
President Cheney.

The coverups are still very much a mystery. What were the documents that were
fed into the shredder -- even after the corporation declared bankruptcy? What is
the White House fighting to keep secret, even going to the length of redefining
executive privilege and inviting the first Congressional lawsuit ever filed
against a president? Were the consequences of releasing these documents more
damaging than the consequences of destroying them?  Could the Big Secret be that
the highest levels of the Bush Administration knew during the summer of 2001
that the largest bankruptcy in history was imminent?  Or was it that Enron and
the White House were working closely with the Taliban -- including Osama bin
Laden -- up to weeks before the Sept. 11 attack? Was a deal in Afghanistan part
of a desperate last-ditch "end run" to bail out Enron? Here's a tip for
Congressional investigators and federal prosecutors: Start by looking at the
India deal. Closely.  

Enron had a $3 billion investment in the Dabhol power plant, near Bombay on
India's west coast. The project began in 1992, and the liquefied natural gas-
powered plant was supposed to supply energy- hungry India with about one-fifth
of its energy needs by 1997. It was one of Enron's largest  development projects
ever (and the single largest direct foreign investment in India's history). The
company owned 65 percent of Dabhol; the other partners were Bechtel, General
Electric and State Electricity Board.  The fly in the ointment, however was that
the Indian consumers could not afford the cost of the electricity that was to be
produced. The World Bank had warned at the beginning that the energy produced by
the plant would be costly, and Enron proved them right. Power from the plant was
700 percent higher than electricity from other sources.  Enron had promised
India that the Dabhol power would be affordable once the next phase of the
project was completed. But to cut expenses, Enron had to find cheap gas to fuel
it. They started burning naphtha, with plans that they would retrofit the plant
to gas once it was available.

Originally, Enron was planning to get the liquefied natural gas  (LNG) from
Qatar, where Enron had a joint venture with the state-owned Qatar Gas and
Pipeline Company. In fact, the Qatar project was one of the reasons why Enron
selected India to set up Dabhol: it had to ensure that its Qatar gas did not
remain unsold.  In April 1999, however, the project was cancelled because of the
global oil and gas glut. With Qatar gone, Enron was back to square one in trying
to locate an inexpensive LNG supply source.

Enter the Afghanistan connection. -- Where the "Great Game" in Afghanistan was
once about czars and commissars seeking access to the warm water ports of the
Persian Gulf, today it is about laying oil and gas pipelines via the untapped
petroleum reserves of Central Asia, a region previously dominated by the former
Soviet Union, with strong influence from Iran and Pakistan. Studies have placed
the total worth of oil and gas reserves in the Central Asian republics at
between $3 and $6 trillion.

Who has access to that vast sea of oil? Right now the only existing export
routes from the Caspian Basin lead through Russia. U.S. oil companies have
longed dreamed of their own pipeline routes that will give them control of the
oil and gas resources of the Caspian Sea.  Likewise, the U.S. government also
wants to dominate Central Asian oil in order to reduce dependency on resources

>from the Persian/Arabian Gulf, which it cannot control. Thus the U.S. is poised

to challenge Russian hegemony in a new version of the "Great Game."

Construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan was
under serious consideration during the Clinton years. In 1996, Unocal -- one of
the world's leading energy resource and project development companies -- won a
contract to build a 1,005-mile oil pipeline in order to exploit the vast
Turkmenistan natural gas fields in Duletabad. The pipeline would extend through
Afghanistan and Pakistan, terminating in Multan, near the India border.  Multan
was also the end point for another proposed pipeline, this one from Iran. This
project never left the drawing boards, however; the pipeline would be much
longer (over 1,600 miles) and more expensive. Still, this route was being
seriously considered as of early 2001, and it increased the odds that gas would
be flowing into Multan from somewhere.

Unocal wasn't the only energy company laying pipe. In 1997, Enron announced that
it was going to spend over $1 billion building and improving the lines between
the Dabhol plant and India's network of gas pipelines.  Follow the map: Once a
proposed 400-mile extension from Multan, Pakistan to New Delhi, India was built,
Caspian Sea gas could flow into India's network to New Delhi, follow the route
to Bombay – and bingo! A plentiful source of ultra-cheap LNG that could supply
Enron's plant in India for three decades or more.  Besides the route to Multan,
another proposed spur of the pipeline would have ended on the Pakistan coast,
where an estimated one million barrels of LNG per day could be shipped to Japan
and Korea, the largest consumers of LNG in the world. For Enron, there was an
upside here as well. Entering the South Eastern Asian markets, which offered
vast growth potential, could position Enron well in the global marketplace and
offset some of their losses in other markets.  There was one gotcha: It looked
like the trans-Afghan section of the pipeline might never be built. Afghanistan
was controlled by religious extremists who didn't want to cooperate.

Enter the Taliban - From 1997 to as late as August 2001, the U.S. government
continued to negotiate with the Taliban, trying to find a stabilizing factor
that would allow American oil ventures to proceed with this project without
interference. To this end, in December 1997, Unocal invited the Taliban
contingency to Texas to negotiate protection while the pipeline was under
construction. At the end of their stay, the Afghan visitors were invited to
Washington to meet with the government officials of the Clinton Administration.
But in August, 1998, terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden bombed two U.S.
embassies in East Africa. After a few cruise missiles were fired into
Afghanistan and the Pentagon boasted that we had disabled bin Laden's "terrorist
network," Unocal said they were abandoning plans for a route through the
country. But was such a potentially lucrative deal really dead?

Not hardly. Although Unocal had the largest share, the "Central Asian Gas
Pipeline" (CentGas) consortium had six other partners, including companies in
Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil Company -- the next largest shareholder with 15 percent
-- and groups in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan. They vowed
to continue the project, and had strong national interests in seeing the
Afghanistan pipeline built. The U.S. looked for other options, and the Trade and
Development Agency commissioned a feasibility study for an improbable east-
to-west route that would cross the Caspian Mountains and end at a Mediterranean
seaport in Turkey. The company hired for that study was Enron. If that pipeline
were to be constructed, Turkmenistan signed an agreement that it would be built
by Bechtel and GE Capital Services -- the same American companies that were
Enron's business partners in the Dabhol power plant.

No matter which direction the Central Asia natural gas would eventually flow,
Enron would profit. Should it go south towards ships waiting on the Pakistan
coast, it would be still only a few hundred miles at sea to Dabhol. The trip

>from the Mediterranean would be farther (and thus more expensive for Enron to

buy gas), but it was also the least likely route to be constructed. Estimated
costs were almost $1 billion more than the route through Afghanistan, and
engineering plans had not even started. No, the only practical route for the
Caspian Sea gas was through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the border of India. All
that was lacking was the political will to make it happen.

Enter George W. Bush. Bush's long and personal relationship with Enron's former
CEO Kenneth Lay is now well known, as is his generous contribution of over
$600,000 to advance the political career of the man who now holds the White
House. Not so well known is how Bush has helped Enron.  In 1988, Bush allegedly
called Argentina's Minister of Public Works to pressure him into awarding Enron
a $300 million contract shortly after his father won the presidency.  Rodolfo
Terragno recalled that the younger George Bush said that giving Enron the
project "would be very favorable for Argentina and its relations with the United
States." Terragno didn't know whether this message was from the White House or
whether Bush was working a business deal on his own.

(Although unlikely, it is possible that Terragno was called by brother Neil
Bush, who would later seek an oil drilling deal in Argentina. The Bush Sr.
campaign denied that George W. made the call. This was, however, the time period
when Lay began to cultivate his friendship with George W. and there is no known
association between Neil Bush and Lay. That two Bush brothers are suspects,
however, speaks to the levels of power that this family wields.)  By the time
George W. became president, the India project was in serious trouble. Enron's
reputation as a bully in India was legion. The Human Rights Watch released a
report that indicated human rights violations had occurred as a result of
opposition to the Dabhol Power project. Beginning in late 1996 and continuing
throughout 1997, leading Indian environmental activists and employee
organizations organized to oppose the project and, as a direct result of their
opposition were not paid and subjected to repeated short-term detention. One
ghastly report actually states that police stormed the homes of several women in
western India who had led a massive protest against Enron's new natural-gas
plant near their fishing village. According to Amnesty International, the women
were dragged from their homes and beaten by officers paid by Enron.

The crisis came just a few months after the Bush inauguration.  Contractors
walked off the job, saying they hadn't been paid for over a month. The [India
state of] Maharashtra Electricity Board stopped paying for Dabhol's power in May
2001, saying it was too expensive. Enron counter-charged that the Board owed
them $64 million. The plant was closed, although it is said to be 97 percent
complete. All that was missing was a source for cheap, cheap, natural gas.

Enter Dick Cheney -- Scarcely a month after Bush moves into the White House,
Vice President Cheney has his first secret meeting with Ken Lay and other Enron
executives on February 22, 2001. Other meetings follow on March 7 and April 17.
It is the details of these meetings that the Bush Administration is seeking to
keep private.
It's clear the Cheney had his own conflicts of interest with Enron.  A chief
benefactor in the trans-Caspian pipeline deal would have been Halliburton, the
huge oil pipeline construction firm which was previously headed by Cheney. After
Cheney's selection as Bush's Vice Presidential candidate, Halliburton also
contributed a huge amount of cash into the Bush-Cheney campaign coffers.  So the
obvious question: Did Enron lobby Cheney for help in India?  It has already been
documented that the Vice President's energy task force changed a draft energy
proposal to include a provision to boost oil and natural gas production in India
in February of last year. The amendment was so narrow that it apparently was
targeted only to help Enron's Dabhol plant in India. Later, Cheney stepped in to
try to help Enron collect its $64 million debt during a June 27 meeting with
India's opposition leader Sonia Gandhi. But behind the scenes, much more was
cooking.

A series of e-mail memos obtained by the Washington Post and NY Daily News in
January revealed that the National Security Council led a "Dabhol Working Group"
composed of officials from various Cabinet departments during the summer of
2001. The memos suggest that the Bush Administration was running exactly the
sort of "war room" that was a favorite subject of ridicule by Republicans during
the Clinton years.  The Working Group prepared "talking points" for both Cheney
and Bush and recommended that the need to "broaden the advocacy" of settling the
Enron debt. Every development was closely monitored: "Good news" a NSC staff
member wrote in a e-mail memo: "The Veep mentioned Enron in his meeting with
Sonia Gandhi." The Post commented that the NSC went so far that it "acted as a
sort of concierge service for Enron Chairman Kenneth L. Lay and India's national
security adviser, Brajesh Mishra" in trying to arrange a dinner meeting between
the Indian official and Lay.  While lobbying India, it appears that the Bush
Administration was also raising the heat on the Taliban to allow the pipeline.

The book "Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth" by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume
Dasique claims that the U.S. tried to negotiate the pipeline deal with the
Taliban as late as August, 2001. According to the authors, the Bush
Administration attempted to get the Taliban on board and believed they could
depend upon the regime to stabilize the country while the pipeline construction
was underway. Bush had already indirectly given the Taliban $43 million for
their supposed efforts to stamp out opium-poppy cultivation. Was this an award
--or a bribe? The circumstances make this a valid question.  Enron was
unraveling at the seams, yet in early August, Kenneth Lay seemed optimistic,
even exuberant. Was he whistling past the graveyard, or did he have secret
information? The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took
place five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington; on that
occasion, Christina Rocca, in charge of Central Asian affairs for the U.S.
government, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad on August 2,
2001. Rocca said the Taliban representative, Mr. Zaeef, was aware of the strong
U.S. commitment to help the Afghan people and the fact that the United States
had provided $132 million in relief assistance so far that year.

Lay's last documented e-mail was sent on August 27th, about the same time the
Taliban allowed the International Red Cross to visit jailed foreign aid workers
in Afghanistan. In it, Lay waxes optimistic about the strength and stability of
his company, and exhorts his employees to buy into the company's stock program.
Was Kenneth Lay anticipating a new pipeline deal, and an Enron contract,
courtesy of George W. Bush? If a deal was at hand, he had every reason to be
optimistic about the future.

Even though the trans-Caspian pipeline and the extension into India would be
years from completion, Enron's conceit of working above the law was ultimately
the guiding beacon in all of its transactions.  They had played the game of
subterfuge for so long, they were near experts at covering their tracks. Even if
Lay knew at this point that bankruptcy was imminent, Enron had always survived
major hurdles in the past, right? The possibility of a total meltdown was most
likely not even a consideration -- there could always be an 11th hour federal
bailout.  However, from all records, relationships became strained. The Taliban
had demanded that the U.S. should also reconstruct Afghanistan's infrastructure
and that the pipeline be open for local consumption. Instead, the U.S. wanted a
closed pipeline pumping gas for export only and was not interested in helping to
rebuild the country.

In turn, the U.S. threatened the Taliban during the negotiations.  The directive
of "we'll either carpet you in gold or carpet you in bombs" was bantered about
in the press to underscore the emerging willfulness of the U.S.  But sometime in
late August, apparently the whole deal went sour.  Enron had one last card to
play, and that was selling the Dabhol plant for quick cash -- if it could. If
Enron could get its askingprice of $2.3 billion, then maybe the company could
pull out of its bankruptcy nose dive.  In late August, Lay appeared to threaten
India in an article in the London Financial Times. We expect full price for the
plant, he warned; if they received anything less, there could be backlash:
"There are laws that could prevent the U.S. government from providing any aid or
assistance to India going forward if, in fact, they expropriate property of U.S.
companies," he said. When Indian officials called these statements "strong arm
tactics," an Enron statement claimed Lay "was merely referring to U.S. laws."
Again Lay appeared to threaten India in a Sept. 14 letter to the Prime Minister,
insisting that the $2.3 billion price was reasonable because they had a "legal
claim" of up to $5 billion.

But the house of cards collapsed dramatically on November 8, when Enron
disclosed that it had overstated earnings dating back to 1997 by almost $600
million. That same day, an e-mail ("Importance: High"), whose sender and
recipient are blacked out, warned, "President Bush cannot talk about Dabhol as
was already mentioned." The memo also said that Bush economic adviser Lawrence
Lindsey could not discuss Enron either. Lindsey had been an Enron consultant.
The end came in December 2001, as Enron fired the 300 remaining workers at the
plant. Enron also filed a $200 million claim with the U.S. government's Overseas
Private Investment Corporation, a U.S. taxpayer- funded insurance fund for
American companies abroad, in an attempt to recoup losses from the Dabhol Power
Corporation.

On the last day of the year, President Bush appointed Zalmay Khalilzad as his
special envoy to Afghanistan. Khalilzad is a former Unocal consultant, whose
positions on Afghanistan changed in sync with Unocal's own. When it looked like
the pipeline would be built in 1996, Khalilzad advocated that the U.S. should
work with moderate elements in the Taliban. By 2000 Unocal was out of the
project, and Khalilzad was writing that the U.S. must undermine the Taliban.
It's clear that once again the Great Game is afoot, now that the Taliban are
gone. Today, Khalilzad is the Special Assistant to the President and National
Security Council member responsible for setting up the post-Taliban "Pro-Unocal"
regime in Afghanistan. International oil men euphemistically call the project
the new "Silk Road." On Feb. 8, Afghanistan's interim leader Hamid Karzai and
Pakistan's president agreed to revive plans for a trans-Afghanistan route for
Iranian gas. The next day, Turkmenistan chimed in that they hoped their trans-
Afghanistan route would be soon built. It's all but certain that gas from
somewhere will reach Multan -- and the Dabhol plant beyond.

For investors, Dabhol should be a bitter lesson. Enron was a company known for
its hubris that tried to accomplish too much, too quickly, playing too fast and
loose with financial realities. In the end, Enron found that its far-reaching
global clout could no longer circumvent the rules of basic economics -- nor
could it count on the players they helped bring into power.  Until there is a
full investigation, questions will remain about how far the Bush team went to
try to save their buddies at Enron. Vice President Dick Cheney's refusal to
release details about his private April meeting with Lay is suspicious. It is
already known that Cheney accepted seven out of eight national energy policy
recommendations made by Lay; so what are they so damned determined to keep
secret? What could be more incriminating than that?

On Feb. 22, the GAO sued Cheney, who has stated that the White House will go to
court to fight the release of the documents. (However, John W. Dean, former
Nixon staffer and Watergate witness, is quick to point out that executive
privilege is unique to the president, not the vice president.) With recent
discovery that a highest-level "Dabhol Working Group" was set up in the Bush
Administration, it appears that there is much more to be uncovered.  Is the
White House covering up that it was molding foreign policy as well as energy
policy to suit Enron? Did the Bush Administration know that Enron's collapse was
coming as early as August? If any of these are true, the largest bankruptcy in
American history may well connect with the greatest political scandal in
American history. -- Ron Callari is a freelancer writer. This article originally
appeared in the Albion Monitor.