Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [15]
That kill-all-the-Americans jihad talk didn’t bother your close friends at Enron, either. In addition to their plan to pipe the Caspian’s natural gas all the way to the Mediterranean, Ken Lay and his associates were also hard at work on another great scam. They were building a giant, natural gas-powered energy plant in Dabhol, India. The Dabhol plant, like everything else Enron cooked up (including your campaign!), was a titanic rip-off.70 And who better to screw the indigent people of India than the same company that screwed its own American employees and customers?
But, George, I’m curious about something else here. Can you tell me if it was just coincidence that Enron and Unocal were in the same region, one building a natural gas power plant, and the other building a natural gas pipeline? Was there something else going on here?
See, this is how it looks to me—and please George, feel free to tell me if I am wrong: Unocal would pay off the Taliban to build their pipeline through Afghanistan and into Pakistan. They were then planning to build an extension on that pipeline that would run into India and stop at New Delhi. At the same time, Enron was planning to build a pipeline from Dabhol to New Delhi where, of course, it could meet up with the Turkmen pipeline, bringing Unocal and Enron together.71 An alternate Unocal plan had the pipeline terminating at the Arabian Sea in Pakistan, where the gas could be exported.72 Enron’s Dabhol plant would have been a quick tanker ride away.
But then Osama blew up two American embassies in Africa, and that was enough for President Clinton to decide he no longer wanted anything to do with Afghanistan. He responded to bin Laden by firing missiles into a Sudanese aspirin factory and a deserted al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.73
I guess one thing you and every other business student learned in school is that once your country bombs the country you’re trying to do business with, the deal is pretty much off. So, two days later, Unocal suspended their involvement with the Taliban to build the pipeline in Afghanistan, and pulled out of the deal completely three months later.74 Suddenly, the Taliban were out billions of dollars, money they desperately needed to fund their regime and to protect bin Laden.
I’m not certain, but I would guess, Mr. Bush, that the Taliban were mighty pissed off at Unocal and the Americans for going back on such a lucrative deal. One thing I do know about those crazy Taliban, they hold some mean grudges.
But one thing was clear to your friends at Enron and Unocal and Halliburton, Mr. Bush—the Taliban and Osama bin Laden really screwed business up with these two terrorist acts, and Clinton shut the deal down. So, as long as the Taliban were around and giving a home to Osama, that pipeline would never be built. What would be the solution?
A new president wouldn’t hurt.
Clinton was never going to let Unocal, Halliburton and Enron be in business with these terrorists.
So Enron became one of the biggest contributors to your campaign to unseat the Clinton/Gore axis. Cheney, hired to pick your vice president, ended up picking himself.75 Then he picked a bunch of your dad’s friends for the other top spots and you said okay. Then you got appointed president by the Supreme Court.
And then . . .
You weren’t in office a month when the Taliban came a-knocking on your door. They still wanted those billions from the pipeline deal. Six days after Cheney set up his secret Energy Task Force, the London Times reported that the Taliban were offering to work out a deal with the new administration that would have involved kicking Osama out of Afghanistan, and had conveyed this to you.76 Everyone was looking