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Intelligence analysts from France, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie have released an explosive book that claims the U.S.' primary interest in the Afghan War might be oil, not terrorism; the U.S. president, they claim, had obstructed investigation into the Taliban's terrorist activities.
The book, Bin Laden, La Verite Interdite (Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth), released recently, claims that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Deputy Director John O'Neill resigned in July in protest over Bush's obstruction of an investigation into Taliban's terrorist activities, under the influence of the United States' oil companies.
"The main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests, and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it," O'Neill reportedly told the authors. The oil interests want to obtain access to the oil and gas reserves from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. These fields are estimated to hold some 200 billion barrels of oil, one-third the quantity available in the Persian Gulf. "The oil and gas reserves of Central Asia have been controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change that..."
According to the book, the Bush administration began a series of negotiations with the Taliban early in 2001. Washington and Islamabad were also venues for some of the meetings. The authors claim that before the...