Who Is Michael Meacher?

Thanks to www.cooperativeresearch.org



September 6, 2003: British Cabinet Minister Hints US Government Knew of 9/11 in Advance
British government minister Michael Meacher publishes an essay entitled, “The War on Terrorism is Bogus.” Meacher is a long time British Member of Parliament, and served as Environmental Minister for six years until three months before releasing this essay. The Guardian, which publishes the essay, states that Meacher claims “the war on terrorism is a smoke screen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings. He says the US goal is ‘world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies’ and that this Pax Americana ‘provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis.’ Mr. Meacher adds that the US has made ‘no serious attempt’ to catch the al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden.” [Guardian, 9/6/2003] Meacher provides no personal anecdotes based on his years in Tony Blair’s cabinet, but he cites numerous mainstream media accounts to support his thesis. He emphasizes the Project for the New American Century 2000 report (see September 2000) as a “blueprint” for a mythical “global war on terrorism,” “propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda—the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies” in Afghanistan and Iraq. [Guardian, 9/6/2003] Meacher’s stand causes a controversial debate in Britain, but the story is almost completely ignored by the mainstream US media.

July 22, 2004: Prominent Figures See Ties Between the ISI, 9/11, and Even the CIA
Michael Meacher, a British member of Parliament, and a cabinet minister in Tony Blair’s government until 2003, writes in the Guardian, “Significantly, [Saeed] Sheikh is… the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmood Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not?” Daniel Ellsberg, the “Pentagon Papers” whistleblower during the Nixon presidency, states in the same article, “It seems to me quite plausible that Pakistan was quite involved in [9/11]… To say Pakistan is, to me, to say CIA because… it’s hard to say that the ISI knew something that the CIA had no knowledge of.” [Guardian, 7/22/2004]

January 24, 2007: British MPs Raise Concerns about Iraq Oil Law
British MPs debate the Iraq oil law that was recently approved by the Iraq Oil Committee (see January 16, 2007).

Jeremy Corbyn says: “News was leaked out last week of a proposed new oil law that the Iraqi Parliament is to be invited to approve in a few weeks’ time. This is a mysterious piece of legislation, and I hope that the Minister will be able to throw some light on the matter when he responds to the debate. Apparently, the drafters of the new law were not in Iraq but in Washington, and they were assisted by people in London. The proposed law bears an uncanny resemblance to the British-imposed oil law in Iran in 1952, after the shah was imposed on the people of that country. BP and other oil companies made massive amounts of money from that arrangement in the succeeding years. There is deep suspicion that the oil law that is now being proposed for Iraq is the reward for the invasion, and that it will involve the privatization of oil production and the sale to certain oil companies of cheap oil that ought to be for the benefit of the Iraqi people…. It would be illegal [for 15 or 20-year oil contracts to be signed while the country is still under occupation], because Britain and the United States are, in law, occupying forces. They do not therefore have the legal authority to make fundamental changes to what is happening in that country. Those are the terms of the Hague convention, and that ought to be understood.”

Michael Meacher says: “It is also immensely important and significant that… a new draft law is about to be pushed through the fledgling Iraqi Parliament by the United States that will set up contracts to allow major US and British oil companies to extract substantial parts of the oil profits for a period of up to 30 years. No other Middle Eastern producer-country has ever offered such hugely lucrative concessions to the big oil companies. OPEC—the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries—has, of course, always run its oil business on the basis of there being tightly controlled state companies. Only Iraq in its current dire situation, with US troops propping up its Government—without them the Government would not survive—lacks the bargaining capacity to be able to resist. If this new draft law is conceded by the Iraqis under the intense pressure that is being put on them, it will lock the country into a degree of weakness and dependence for decades ahead. The neo cons may have lost the war, but my goodness, they are still negotiating to win the biggest chunk of the peace, when and if it ever comes…. This rearguard attempt to pre-empt the lion’s share of the remaining oil and the massive future profits over a 30-year period—there is no authority to extract it from another country without its agreement—can only intensify the insurgency. It is bound to foster much-increased resentment… and increase the violent resistance, even when the occupation has come to an end. Above all, this policy is utterly short-sighted, because it is diametrically opposed to the policy into which the whole world will ineluctably be forced by the accelerating onset of climate change.” [House of Commons, 1/24/2007]