INTERVIEW Secretary Of State Colin L. Powell
on 'The News Hour with Jim Lehrer'
September 13, 2001, 6:08pm

MR. LEHRER: And now a Newsmaker interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell. He joins us from the State Department. Mr. Secretary, welcome.

SECRETARY POWELL: Good evening, Jim. How are you?

MR. LEHRER: Just fine. Exactly what is it that you and the President are asking these international leaders to do?

SECRETARY POWELL: We are creating a coalition to go after terrorism. We are asking the United Nations and every other organization you can think of -- United Nations, NATO, the European Union, the Organization of Islamic Countries, the OAS, everybody -- to join us once and for all in a great coalition to conduct a campaign against terrorists who are conducting war against civilized people.

The attack that took place in Washington and the attack that took place in New York were directed against America, but they really are directed against civilization, and we have to respond with a full-scale assault against this kind of activity, beginning with the perpetrators of the attacks against us this past Tuesday.


Source: American Rhetoric's 'Rhetoric of Terrorism' Online Speech bank
URL: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/powell&lehrer.htm



In January 1998 the Taliban signed an agreement allowing a 1,272km, $2-billion, 1.9-billion-cubic- feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project to proceed. The proposed pipeline, according to the US government's Energy Information Administration (EIA), would have transported natural gas from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad natural gas field to Pakistan, and was projected to run from Dauletabad south to the Afghan border, through Herat and Kandahar, to Quetta in Pakistan before linking up with Pakistan's natural gas grid at Sui.

By March, however, Unocal, the company leading the project, had announced that details would not be finalised immediately due to the civil war in Afghanistan. In August, Unocal announced it was suspending its role in the pipeline because of the military action the US government was taking in Afghanistan, as well as fighting between the Taliban and the opposition. By the end of the year Unocal was announcing its withdrawal from Centgas (the Central Asian Gas Pipeline Ltd.) -- the consortium responsible for building the pipeline -- "citing low oil prices and turmoil in Afghanistan as making the pipeline project uneconomical and too risky." It had previously stated that the pipeline project would not proceed until an "internationally recognised government" was in place in Afghanistan.

Unocal, however, was no stranger to unpopular governments: it was, after all, part of the consortium building a pipeline in Burma that human rights groups slammed for using forced labour and cooperating with a military dictatorship.

Among the other members of that consortium, incidentally, was an oil company named Halliburton -- of which the CEO was none other than current Vice- President Richard Cheney.

Unocal and Halliburton share other affinities, however: at the Collateral Damage Conference of the Cato Institute on 23 June 1998, Cheney himself made some of these clear, noting that "70 to 75 per cent of [Halliburton's] business is energy related, serving customers like Unocal, Exxon, Shell, Chevron and many other oil companies around the world."


Source: Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 18 - 24 October 2001
URL: http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/556/5war.htm
Author: Pascale Ghazaleh