NEOCONS GO FOR THE GOLD

You've really got to hand it to the neocons: they sure know how to conduct a bang-up propaganda campaign. The leak of a "briefing" to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, which targeted the Saudis as the real locus of world terrorism, is all over the place: not only the Washington Post, but MSNBC, Fox News, the BBC, and out over the wires. The document, labeled "top secret" and "classified," according to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is described in the Post:

"A briefing given last month to a top Pentagon advisory board described Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that U.S. officials give it an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its oil fields and its financial assets invested in the United States."

It's refreshing to see that the War Party is finally coming out of the closet, so to speak, with its real aims and ambitions. We knew that all the pious palaver about a "war on terrorism," and the export of "democracy," was just a lot of malarkey, but it's nice to have them come right out and say so. As I said all along, a war against the Saudis and the outright seizure of the Saudi oil fields is what the neocon-Big Oil-Bushian axis of aggression is really gunning for.

It's interesting to see that the conspiracy theory being pushed by the Rand Corp. briefing is quite similar to the vague mishmosh of arbitrary assertions and undocumented accusations circulating in the form of Forbidden Truth, a book by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, and published by The Nation, which was aptly described by the Los Angeles Times as

"A dense, conspiracy-minded portrait of Saudi-dominated banks, companies and tycoons, all allegedly interconnected, that they maintain have helped fund Bin Laden's holy war."

The point of the book is that the Bush administration was supposedly appeasing the Taliban right up until the last moment: Brisard and Dasquie are essentially saying that the Bushies let 9/11 happen because of a "softness" on the Saudis. "Since the 18th century," Brisard and Dasquie aver, "Saudi Arabia, has been focused on conquering the world."