Following the infamous September 11 terrorist attacks, there’s been an active international debate surrounding the Bush administration’s secret oil negotiations with the Taliban earlier in the summer of 2001. U.S. oil giant Unocal proposed a massive natural gas pipeline project extracting oil and gas from former Soviet Central Asian republics through then-Taliban ruled Afghanistan to its final destination in Pakistan.

The recently revised and expanded English edition of Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy And The Failed Hunt For Bin Laden details the Bush administration’s threats against the Taliban a month prior to the 9/11 events. French intelligence experts Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié suggest that Bush administration threats stating that “Either you accept our carpet of gold or we’ll carpet you with bombs,” led to the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The question of whether secret oil diplomacy led to the tragedy of 9/11 has been ignored in the mainstream U.S. press, but on Friday, December 27, 2002, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan signed a framework agreement allowing a $3.2 billion U.S. gas pipeline project to pass through their three countries. Afghan President Harmid Karzai, under the protection of U.S. special forces serving as his private bodyguards, signed the agreement with the President of Turkmenistan and the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Karzai is the former consultant for Unocal on the pipeline project that the Taliban refused to allow. An Asian Development Bank (ADB) study outlines how the 1460 kilometer (950 miles) pipeline would bring natural gas reserves from Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad fields through Afghanistan to Pakistan. The ADB study lists the Dauletabad as the world’s fifth largest gas reserves, according to PakNews.com.

Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard put forth the thesis that U.S. domination of the globe in the 21st century depended on its control of the Central Asian oilfields. He concluded that unless there was a terrorist attack upon the Unites States, the U.S. people would lack the will to allow our government to seize and control the Central Asian oil and gas deposits in the former Soviet republics. A 1996 U.S. military “backcasting” exercise on alternative futures hypothesized that a terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the year 2002 would set the stage for U.S. domination of the globe. That scenario was named “Gulliver’s Travails.”