What's often most interesting
here is the names of persons and groups and countries which pop up in
documents, and form a mosaic of complicity and connections. This
page will become a work in progress of additional relevant articles as
they arise. Check back.
see: ENEMIES
and ASSETS from Free Republic 1997
see: Jane's Defense Weekly
below - A Marriage of Convenience
see: Are the 70,000
Pentagon Mercs in Iraq killing Shias, Sunnis?
more on 1993
WTC attack on home page
Path to 9/11
Obscures Real Terror Network Kurt Nimmo Local PDF
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=&as_epq=Path+to+9%2F11+Obscures+Real+Terror+Network
See below for details
As we
know, Osama and crew were part of the “Militant Islamic Network”
consisting of thousands of Mujahideen hand-picked for their viciousness
and religious intolerance by the CIA and its proxy, Pakistan’s ISI. A congressional press release, dated
16 January 1997, reveals all the facts we need to know—Clinton factotum
Anthony Lake, head of the
National Security Council at the time, “helped
turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base,” that is to say Clinton flipped on a green light and “al-Qaeda” rushed in to help
the effort to fracture Yugoslavia.
“For the past 10 years,
the most
senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans, including bin
Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996,” Marcia
Christoff Kurop wrote for the Wall Street Journal Europe on November 1,
2001.
“The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps,
weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and
drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria,
Turkey and Bosnia. This has
gone on for a decade. Many recruits to the
Balkan wars came originally from Chechnya,
a jihad in which Al Qaeda has also played a part.”
------
The CIA has shut down a unit assigned to hunt
down Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants.
Our inability to track down bin Laden
has always been curious. Military and intel professionals publicly admit we were closing in
on the what the Bush administration calls the "world's most wanted terrorist" when
those on the hunt were suddenly
pulled out of the mission in Afghanistan and redeployed to Iraq.
The decision to abandon the mission in Afghanistan allowed al-Qaida to rebuild and become more
of a threat.
The Bush family has long had ties to the bin
Laden family. Judicial Watch reported
in 2002:
------
Kathy and Bill Christison (former CIA) are both strong
advocates for Palestine.
“Within the past year 70-year-old Bill has
changed his mind about 9/11, from rejecting conspiracy theories
outright to thinking that the standard story is not what it
seems. ... we talk a lot about what happens when one rethinks
something like 9/11, less about the facts in question.”
------
Don't
Miss Al-QAEDA HISTORY
elite US mil/Al-Qaeda operatives
local copy
19
September 2001 BY
NORM DIXON Well worth reading this ONE article completely
“Throughout
the world ... its agents, client states and satellites are on the
defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the
political and economic defensive. Freedom
movements arise and assert themselves.
They're doing so on
almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan,
in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America ... [They are] freedom fighters.”
~ Reagan
No, not a Bin Laden Fatwa. In fact, this glowing praise of the
murderous exploits of today's supporters of arch-terrorist bin
Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the
“evil empire”, was issued by US
President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The “evil empire” was the Soviet
Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism,
apartheid and dictatorship.
from conservative FREE REPUBLIC on the WTC 1993 attack
1. Tapes Depict
Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast
2. The
FBI And The Mad Bombers
3. FBI
HISTORY - THE WORLD TRADE TOWERS -- FBI allowed the bombing to
happen.
4. CONSPIRACY
THEORY/FACT
5. Who Is Ramzi Yousef?
And Why It Matters (Laurie Mylroie is critiqued by Schoenman as
working for a PR firm Benador, specializing in war propaganda.)
4. HEY,
FOX NEWS!!!!
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=62
"On
the surface, this would appear to be more horrific Islamic violence,
hardly uncommon in Russia’s Islamic provinces, yet another incident of
jihadist madness. However, when the neocons stake their interest in the
world, particularly in the Middle East and Asia, Muslim violence
invariably follows."
The most powerful
group there is not Al-Qaeda, but ACPC,
a "non-govt. org (tax-free NGO), that includes Brzezinski.
This is the heart of neo-con and neo-liberal capitalism, tied to Exxon,
Enron, and the Carlysle Group, looking to expand influence, build
pipelines, and checkmate Russia. ... the committee is
composed of more than one hundred distinguished
[neocon and neolib] Americans representing both major political parties
and nearly every walk of life ... no shortage of Straussians from the American
Enterprise Institute, the Freedom
House (CIA-front, like NED, chaired by the “world
war four” proponent and former CIA
director, James Woolsey), the neoliberal Jamestown Foundation, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (a
long-time CIA psychological warfare
outfit), and the perennial warmongering
RAND Corporation (a confluence of Ford, Rockefeller, and
Carnegie foundation money and conniving globalist agendas).
------
SHATTERING
THE AL QAEDA-CHECHEN MYTH
- The Jamestown Foundation
CRG -- Who
Is Osama Bin Laden? - With
regard to Chechnya, the main
rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and
indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and ...
Fake Al
Qaeda - Zacarias
Moussaoui fought for the CIA in Chechnya ... CIA
reins in loose cannons, and keeps their Al Qaeda creation alive
and well ...
------
More Evidence
“al-Qaeda” is a CIA-ISI Contrivance
http://www.google.com/search?&q=More+Evidence+al-Qaeda+is+a+CIA-ISI+Contrivance
“Omar
Khyam, an accused leader among seven men charged in 2004 with
stockpiling half a ton of explosives in an Al Qaeda-linked bombing
plot, took the stand Tuesday long enough to refuse to continue his testimony. (OMG! WHY??) The judge
temporarily adjourned the trial, which began in March,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
“On
Monday, Khyam stunned his own lawyer
when he
declared that his relatives in
Pakistan had been intimidated in recent days by agents of the
powerful Inter-Services Intelligence
agency, which has a shadowy history of contacts with Islamic
extremist networks.”
No mention here
of the “shadowy”
fact the ISI is a branch office of the CIA. “A number of
officers from the ISI’s Covert Action Division received training in the
US and many covert action experts of the CIA were attached to the ISI
to guide it in its operations against the Soviet troops by using the
Afghan Mujahideen, Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan and Arab
volunteers,” writes B. Raman for the South Asia Analysis Group. These
“Arab volunteers” and “Islamic fundamentalists,” of the most virulent
strain (Saudi Wahhabism), are now known as “al-Qaeda,” a wily and
phantasmal enemy specifically designed to serve as a forever enemy, an elusive Goldsteinesque enemy
explicitly engineered to pose a threat in perpetuum.
SO then, if ISI
wants Omar Khyam to SHUT UP
about Al-Qaeda on the witness stand, then obviously that means CIA wants
Khyam to SHUT UP.
According to Jane’s
Information Group (Jane's Defense
Weekly is a private professional pub on the Pentagon and foreign events),
the ISI “was modelled on Savak,
the Iranian security agency during the reign of the Shah, and, like Savak, ISI was trained by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the
SDECE, France’s external intelligence service.”
Vital
intelligence on the Taliban may rest with its prime sponsor –
Pakistan’s ISI - Jane's Intelligence - (local pdf)
SAVAK, according to Sam Ghandchi, who
experienced the secret police’s brutality firsthand, specialized in shoving broken bottles in the rectums of
political dissidents, murdering
“pregnant activists, and all other forms of killing
and rape.” SAVAK was a
law unto itself, possessing the legal authority to arrest,
detain, interrogate, and torture dissidents indefinitely.
SAVAK
operated its own prisons in Tehran, such as the Qezel-Qalaeh and Evin
facilities. Because it operated autonomously, without checks and
balances, it serves as a standard-bearer for
secret police around the world.
(Note:
America is in the process of establishing it's own basis for internal
secret police.)
“Khyam has
revealed more information than was expected,” remarked Sajjan
Gohel of
the Asia-Pacific Foundation, billed as a counter-terrorism think tank.
“He has given a lot of insight into how very many British Muslims have
been recruited…. I think everyone was shocked. The question now is
whether the whole truth will come out.”
Of course, it does not
matter if “the whole truth will come out,” as it is irrelevant,
especially for a society unable to
connect the dots and, really, not
wanting to connect the dots and learn the truth, as this particular
truth interrupts sit-coms and football games.
For every person who
looks beyond the official story and gleans the
indisputable truth about “al-Qaeda” and various other
intelligence contrivances engineered by the Pentagon, CIA, MI-6,
Mossad, et al, there are literally millions of people who buy into the
official explanation, or rather Brothers Grimm machination — the
Muslims, represented by the dead Osama and al-Zarqawi, are out to get us and an incessant “clash of civilizations” is
required, with attendant
police state and tyranny at home.
------
Even the conservative top
military and foreign affairs publication (local) (only if main article missing)
A marriage of convenience
The
US-led ‘proxy war’ model was based on the premise that Islamists made
good anti-Communist allies. The plan was diabolically simple: to hire,
train and control motivated Islamic mercenaries. The trainers were
mainly from Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI)
agency, who learnt their craft from American Green Beret commandos and Navy SEALS in various US training
establishments. Mass training
of Afghan mujahideen was
subsequently conducted by the Pakistan Army under the supervision of
the elite Special Services Group (SSG), specialists in covert action
behind enemy lines and the ISI.
Pakistan’s current
military ruler, General Pervez
Musharraf, spent seven
years with the SSG and was also involved in training Afghan
mujahideen. Provided he co-operates, he will prove a useful guide to
the US in hunting down terrorists inside Afghanistan.
The entire anti-Soviet operation, headed by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and held together on the
ground by the ISI,
was supported by generous donations
from the US State Department, Western governments, Saudi Arabia and a handful of
commando experts from the UK Special
Air Service (SAS), while surveillance training, communication
and first aid help came from France.
Israel provided weapons
like rifles, tanks and even artillery pieces, captured during its many
wars with the Arab states, while Sudan
and Algeria contributed
committed mujahideen and religious motivation. The entire operation
was, inexplicably but amusingly, christened the Safari Club.
The rise of
Al-Qaeda
In 1988, with
US knowledge,
Bin Laden created Al Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of
quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells in countries spread across at least 26 countries, including Algeria, Morocco, Turkey,
Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Burma, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania, Azerbaijan, Dagestan,
Uganda, Ethiopia, Syria, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Bosnia as well as the
West Bank and Gaza. Western intelligence sources claim Al Qaeda
even has a cell in Xinjiang in China,
a country that ironically was another willing partner in the jihad
against the Soviets. China wanted the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan
for its own strategic ends and even trained and despatched Muslim
Uighurs of the western Xinjiang region to fight alongside the Afghan
mujahideen. China feared that the old Silk Route along the Karakoram
Highway could, in time, come under Moscow's domination if the Soviets
were not swiftly dislodged from Kabul.
Washington turned a blind
eye to Al-Qaeda, confident that it would not directly impinge on the
US.
(well, not exactly a blind eye ...)
NON-CONSPIRACY
STORY OF AFGHANISTAN TRAGEDY PROVOKED BY U.S. and SOVIET interests,
playing out the Cold War, and interests of neighboring states. By
Amnesty International. I
would point out that at least the USSR had a genuine stake in Afgh,
their southern neighbor, and assisted the modernistic socialist
government in seizing power from the religious warlords, at very least
for the practical reason that Afgh is on the Soviet border. The
US had no
such interest or security need in that region, other than a quest for
resources, and
to screw with the Soviets. That was Brzezinski's stated purpose, to
make the Soviets bleed for as
much and as long as possible, both real blood, money, weapons,
and public support.
REFUGEES
FROM AFGHANISTAN:
The
world's largest single refugee group
Two
decades of civil war and serious human rights abuses have forced
millions of Afghan men, women and children to flee their homes and seek
refuge in other parts of Afghanistan or outside the country.
Since the armed conflict began after the Soviet invasion in
1979, civilians - women and children in particular - have suffered
enormously from the devastating consequences of continuous fighting.
All the warring factions that have been party to the conflict over the
years have given precedence to their
military objectives over the lives and livelihoods of the people
of Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands have been killed or injured in
indiscriminate bombing and shelling of residential areas. Thousands
have been arbitrarily arrested, tortured and raped, "disappeared", or
murdered for their political affiliation, ethnic identity, gender, or
in reprisal attacks by the various armed groups fighting for control of
territory. Schools, hospitals, homes, and farms have been burned and
destroyed leaving millions of Afghans displaced and dispossessed.
Between the years 1979 and 1992, more than a fifth of Afghanistan's
population - over six million people - were driven from the country in
search of safety, mainly to the neighbouring countries of Iran and
Pakistan. Continued costs of war. http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engASA110161999
For
17 years, Washington
poured $4bn into
the pockets of some of the most brutal
men on earth -
with the
overall aim of exhausting and ultimately destroying the Soviet Union in
a futile war. One of them, Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, a warlord particularly favoured by the CIA, received tens of
millions of dollars.
His
speciality was trafficking opium and throwing acid in the faces of
women who refused to wear the veil. In 1994, he agreed to stop
attacking Kabul on condition that he was made primeminister - which he
was.
Eight
years earlier, CIA director William Casey had given his backing to a
plan put forward by Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, to recruit
people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. More than
100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen
by the CIA and MI6, with
the SAS
training future al-Qaida and
Taliban fighters in bomb-making
and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was
called Operation Cyclone and
continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.
"I confess that [countries] are pieces on a
chessboard," said Lord Curzon, viceroy of India in 1898, "upon which is
being played out a great game for the domination of the world."
Brzezinski, adviser to several presidents and a guru admired by the
Bush gang, has written virtually
those same words. In his book The
Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives,
he
writes that the key to dominating the world is central Asia, with its
strategic position between competing powers and immense oil and gas
wealth. "To put it in terminology that harkens back to the more
brutal
age of ancient empires," he writes, one of "the grand imperatives of
imperial geostrategy" is "to keep the barbarians from coming together".
The latest mutation of the mojahedin, the Taliban, now
ruled Afghanistan. In 1997, US state department officials
and executives of the Union Oil
Company of California (Unocal) discreetly entertained Taliban leaders in Washington
and Houston, Texas. They were entertained lavishly, with dinner parties at luxurious homes in Houston.
They asked to be taken shopping at a Walmart
and flown to tourist attractions, including the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota,
where they gazed upon the faces of American presidents chiselled in the
rockface. The Wall Street Journal, bulletin of US power, effused, "The
Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan
at this moment in history."
Complete 911 Timeline -- Soviet-Afghan
War - Makhtab al-Khidimat
Bin Laden, dressed in combat fatigues, in Afghanistan
during the 1980’s.
(Note image digitally altered the brighten the shadow on his face.) [Source:
CNN]
1977-1981: The
Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against
Soviet Union
In
1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter’s National Security
Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the
idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions.
The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the
father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in
1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will “explode into genocidal
fury” against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter
administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran
in 1978, Brzezinski favored a “de facto alliance
with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran.”
[Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]
Makhtab al-Khidimat
offices in the US in the late 1980s.
Some of the
offices in fact were represented by single individuals.
[Source: National Geographic]
1985-1989: Precursor to Al-Qaeda Puts Down US Roots
Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s mentor, makes repeated trips to the
US and other countries, building up his organization, Makhtab al-Khidimat (MAK), also
known as the Services Office. Azzam founded the MAK in 1984 (see 1984).
Branches of the MAK open in over 30 US cities,
archived NY Times article
on Cryptome December 1, 1998
THE
MASKING OF A MILITANT: Special Report.; A
Soldier's Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in the Mideast
FBI
PROTECTS OSAMA BIN
LADEN’S “RIGHT
TO PRIVACY”
Apr
20, 2005 -
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that fights government
corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents dated
September 24, 2003 through the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) in
which the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (“FBI”) has invoked privacy
right protections on behalf of al Qaeda terror leader Osama bin Laden.
(Vanity Fair wanted
info for an article.)
Enemies
and "Assets"
response
to:
THE WORLD
TRADE CENTER BOMB
Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters The National
Interest by Laurie Mylroie 1995/96
BACK WHEN right-wingnut FREE REPUBLIC
was still free, half-libertarian, and not pure neo-con:
The main headline on this link is Laurie
Mylroie (neocon think-tank asset, Benador),
along with Frank Gaffney (CIA) and others, actually creates a plausible excuse for the Feds.
The same "lack of coordination btw
departments" party line we are hearing now to justify the
creation of a new "security regime". This article is posted in response by
"Uncle Bill", beneath other articles by Ralph Blumenthal posted by
others. Mylroie's effort to connect this to Saddam (and not the U.S. security
state itself) is simply an amnesiac propaganda angle gearing up for
Bush and 2003.
One thing that is shocking is that all this was brewing in circles of
dissent, and most Liberals in America were completely unaware of
this as conspiracy (I was not aware
at the time of any dissent from the Right except *stupid*
Clinton-hating over Monica Lewinsky), just as most Conservatives were completely in the dark about
Bush regime criminality until perhaps recently.
The most prominent non-right-wingnut source of this criticism is perhaps
surprisingly Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, a Marxist (of some sort)
couple on www.takingaimradio.com and www.gunsandbutter.net.
By William
Norman Grigg March 3, 1997
The World Trade
Center bombers had some curious connections
Following
the outbreak of communist revolutions across Europe in 1848, Frederic
Bastiat, a French champion of free enterprise, took note of the fact
that many of his government's
supposedly anti-communist policies were
actually creating communist-style controls over the economic and
political life of his country. As a member of the French
Assembly,
Bastiat chided his government for "concocting the antidote and the
poison in the same laboratory" and for devoting "half of its resources
to destroying the evil it has done with the other half."
Our own federal government's
ever-escalating "war" on terrorism
displays similar dynamics. The same Clinton
Administration that urges
the expansion of federal power -- and the contraction of personal
liberties -- in the struggle against terrorism has eagerly courted the
Syrian terror regime and has played host to representatives of the IRA,
the Russian mafia, the Red Chinese arms-smuggling industry, and Muslim
terrorist factions. This same bizarre duality is apparent in the
Administration's domestic "anti- terrorism" initiatives. As the
November 11th Washington Post reported, "Since the Oklahoma City
bombing [of] April 19, 1995, the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms (ATF), and other federal law enforcement agencies have
embarked on a preemptive strategy to uncover domestic terrorist
conspiracies while they are in the planning stages. This strategy
requires aggressive and potentially controversial tactics as
investigators infiltrate groups and bring charges on the basis of
allegedly criminal plans that are conceived but not carried out."
Federal Entrapment
The new
federal anti-terrorism strategy has resulted in the arrest,
prosecution, and (in some cases) conviction of militia members on
conspiracy charges in Georgia, Arizona, Washington, and West Virginia. However, it has also produced convincing evidence that the
federal informants have acted as agents provocateurs, urging
militia members to undertake potentially criminal actions.
In
the case of the "Viper Team" in Phoenix, for example, it was a
"confidential informant" who infiltrated the militia and suggested that
the group rob banks in order to finance its activities. (For more on
the "Viper" case, see page 19.) In the Georgia militia case, federal
informants who had infiltrated the militia urged its leaders to
manufacture pipe bombs; after failing to win support
for their idea, the informants planted pipe-bomb components on property
belonging to the militia group's leaders.
In the more
recent case of the Mountaineer Militia in West Virginia, an FBI
informant -- posing as an arms dealer -- asked militia leader Floyd Ray
Looker to sell him plans of a local FBI computer facility for $50,000.
Although U.S. Attorney William D. Wilmoth has acknowledged that "the
facility itself was never in any direct danger" from the Mountaineer
Militia, seven members of the group were arrested on terrorism charges
on October 11th in what the Washington Post called an "unprecedented
use of a new anti-terrorism law...." None of the militias targeted for
"preemptive" federal action has a track record of violence. What
would happen if federal agents were to use the same tactics on an
authentic terrorist cell -- one composed of genuinely ruthless people
possessing both the will and the means to carry out lethal acts of
political violence?
Bungling or Abetting?
One
answer was provided by the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center in New York City, an attack that killed six Americans, wounded
more than a thousand others, inflicted $500 million in damage, and
dispelled America's sense of immunity to international terrorism. The
leaders of the radical Islamic network responsible for the bombing, who
later planned a campaign of urban terrorism which could have claimed
the lives of thousands of Americans, were given
financial aid and training by the CIA. Furthermore, at several
critical junctures where the conspiracy could have been exposed and its
leaders arrested, federal law enforcement either
ignored that network or actually provided crucial help to it.
The central
figure of that terrorist network was Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman,
the "spiritual leader" of the Egyptian extremist group Gama
al-Islamiya. In January 1996, Sheik Omar was convicted of "seditious
conspiracy" and sentenced to life in prison for his part in planning
the bombing; his nine co-conspirators were handed sentences ranging
from 25 years to life. The sheik's defense team attempted to depict the
prosecution of their client as an instance of anti-Muslim persecution.
However, Sheik Omar's religious vocation, unlike that of the vast
majority of devout, peaceful Muslims, was steeped in violence and
hatred.
Sheik Omar and
his followers were arrested in June
1993, six months after the Trade Center bombing; at the time of the
arrest, some of the plotters were literally mixing chemicals to
manufacture bombs. Following the January 1996 convictions of Sheik Omar
and his disciples, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy declared,
"There is a support system for terrorism in the
United States whose designer is Sheik Abdel-Rahman.... [It would be]
naive to think it has been destroyed." According to Two
Seconds Under the World,
an account of the Trade Center bombing by New York Newsday's Pulitzer
Prize-winning investigative team of Jim Dwyer, David Kocieniewski,
Deidre Murphy, and Peg Tyre, Sheik Omar's followers have established
cells in Texas, California, Illinois, and Michigan. Although Sheik Omar
may have been the "designer" of this terrorist network, its "support system," as we will see, included the CIA,
the U.S. Army, and -- arguably -- federal law enforcement agencies.
CIA Connection
Sheik
Omar, who was accused of complicity in the plot to assassinate Anwar
Sadat, has devoted his adult life to the overthrow of the secular
Egyptian government and the propagation of his variety of Islam. In
1987, the U.S. State Department placed Sheik Omar's name on its "watch
list" of non-Americans believed to be involved in terrorism. However,
this did not prevent the CIA from enlisting Sheik Omar as a "valuable
asset" in covert operations involving the Afghan mujahideen during the
1980s.
Between 1980 and
1989, the CIA pumped more than $3
billion in aid into the mujahideen, the Islamic resistance to the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The mujahideen's rank and file was
composed of brave and motivated men who displayed astonishing courage
in their effort to evict the Soviets from Afghanistan. However, as
veteran foreign correspondent Kurt Lohbeck documented in his study Holy
War, Unholy Victory: Eyewitness to the CIA's Secret War in Afghanistan,
the CIA invested most of its aid in the least
combat-worthy and most anti-American factions of the mujahideen. Among
the CIA's dubious beneficiaries was Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman.
Writing
in the May 1996 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, foreign correspondent
Mary Anne Weaver pointed out that it was in Peshawar, Pakistan in the
late 1980s that Sheik Omar "became involved with U.S. and Pakistani
intelligence officials who were orchestrating the war" against the
Soviets, and that the "sixty or so CIA and Special Forces officers
based there considered him a 'valuable asset' ... and overlooked his
anti-Western message and incitement to holy war because they wanted him
to help unify the mujahideen groups."
Sheik Omar and
his
associates created an institution in Peshawar, Pakistan called the
Service Office, which recruited Muslims from around the world as
volunteers to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. However, as Weaver
pointed out, "Money flowed into the Service Office from the Muslim
Brotherhood" -- one of the most radical and violently anti-Western
factions of the Pan-Islamic movement. Along with
hundreds of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, Muslim Brotherhood
money was distributed through branches of the Service Office in Europe
and the United States, thereby providing a ready slush fund for
terrorists and anti-Western agitators. While the Service Office sluiced
money into the coffers of terrorists, Sheik Omar preached his gospel of
jihad in Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and in Islamic population
centers in Turkey, Germany, England, and even the United States --
despite his listing on the State Department's "watch list." Sheik
Omar's CIA-aided access to the United States continued after the
Soviets vacated Afghanistan in 1989.
On May 10, 1990,
Sheik Omar was granted a one-year visa from a CIA agent posing as an
official at the U.S. Consulate in Khartoum, Sudan, and he arrived in
New York in July 1990. In November of the same year Sheik Omar's visa
was revoked, and the State Department advised the Immigration and
Naturalization Service to be on the lookout for him. So attentive was
the INS to this advisory that it granted Sheik Omar a green card just
five months later.
Terrorist Network
The
American-based radicals who sponsored Sheik Omar's 1990 trip to the
U.S. included Mahmud Abouhalima, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and
a CIA-supported veteran of the Afghan campaign. Abouhalima had
networked with radical Muslims and American Black Panthers
since the mid- 1980s. Also helping to make arrangements for the sheik's
visit was Mustafa Shalabi, the Brooklyn-based director of Alkifah, a
support fund for mujahideen fighters. Another leader of Sheik Omar's
American network was El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian expatriate who was
later acquitted of the 1990 murder of Jewish militant Rabbi Meir
Kahane.
Abouhalima and
Nosair were eventually among those
convicted of conspiring with Sheik Omar to wage urban warfare in the
United States, and in that campaign they made use of skills imparted to
them by the CIA and the U.S. military. During the
conspiracy trial, attorneys for Sheik Omar and his disciples introduced
a file documenting that in 1989, the U.S. Army had sent Special Forces
Sergeant Ali A. Mohammed to Jersey City to provide training for
mujahideen recruits, including Abouhalima and Nosair. But even
as Abouhalima and Nosair underwent that training, according to Two
Seconds Under the World, the FBI had them under surveillance as
possible terrorists. Although Sheik Omar provided "spiritual" guidance
to his network, the Abu Nidal-trained Nosair was the conspiracy's field
commander, and Abouhalima was his most important lieutenant.
The
FBI engaged in a curiously timed fit of incompetence when the
opportunity arose for a preemptive strike against Sheik Omar's network.
Following the shooting of Rabbi Meir Kahane in November 1990, the FBI
seized and impounded 49 boxes of documents from Nosair's New Jersey
apartment; the cache included bomb-making instructions, a hit list of
public figures (including Kahane), paramilitary training materials,
detailed pictures of famous buildings (including the World Trade
Center), and sermons by Sheik Omar urging his followers to "destroy the
edifices of capitalism."
But the FBI made
none of the evidence available to New York City Assistant District
Attorney William Greenbaum, who prosecuted the case. In fact, the FBI
ignored the material until after the Trade Center bombing in 1993.
Veteran radical lawyer William Kunstler offered his services as
Nosair's defense attorney. Kunstler deployed his entire arsenal of
sophistries, and presiding Judge William Schlesinger of the New York
State Supreme Court granted Kunstler extraordinary procedural latitude
(including the privilege of dismissing white potential jurors on racial
grounds). Schlesinger's penchant for Kunstler was so pronounced that he
invited the notorious Marxist barrister to a Christmas party in his
chambers during jury deliberations.
Hamstrung by the
FBI's
decision to withhold the evidence collected at Nosair's apartment, and
stymied by Judge Schlesinger's visible partiality toward the defense,
prosecutor Greenbaum was unable to secure a murder conviction against
Nosair. When the verdict was announced on December 20, 1991, Kunstler
was carried triumphantly away from the courtroom on the burly shoulders
of Muslim Brotherhood terrorist Mahmud Abouhalima. Nosair, who was
convicted on lesser firearms-related charges, began a seven-year term
in Attica prison, where he continued to direct the affairs of Sheik
Omar's terrorist network.
The violence
pulsating through Sheik
Omar's network was not directed solely at predictable enemies like
Kahane. By March 1991, Sheik Omar and his associates had seized control
of the Alkifah fund, which had by then swollen to an estimated $2
million -- and Shalabi, the fund's manager, was found murdered shortly
after a confrontation with three of Sheik Omar's disciples. The CIA-originated fund helped finance Nosair's trial
defense.
It was also used to procure many of the bomb components that were
assembled under the expert supervision of Afghan terrorist Ramzi
Yousef, who was imported by the Sheik Omar network in late 1992.
FBI Foreknowledge
Yousef
was convicted on September 8, 1996 of plotting a 48-hour campaign of
bombings against American commercial flights over the Pacific Ocean.
The campaign would have targeted a total of 12 jetliners and as many as
4,000 passengers. Yousef is also accused of carrying out the December
11, 1994 bombing of a Philippine jetliner that killed a Japanese
passenger, as well as plotting to assassinate Pope John Paul II. Yousef
met Abouhalima in Afghanistan in 1988, and it was Abouhalima who
brought the Afghan terrorist to the United States in September 1992 on
behalf of Sheik Omar's network.
Shortly after
Yousef's arrival,
the FBI subpoenaed two dozen of Sheik Omar's followers and questioned
them about the sheik, Nosair, and Abouhalima. However, no arrests were
made, no grand jury investigation was launched, and the
FBI chose to downgrade its scrutiny of Omar's network -- just as plans
were being finalized for the Trade Center bombing. This curious
decision is even more peculiar in light of the fact that the FBI had
obtained intelligence on the network's capabilities and intentions from
Emad A. Salem, a former Egyptian Army officer and FBI informant who
served as Omar's security guard.
Salem's
relationship
with the FBI was turbulent, and there were suggestions of impropriety
in his personal contacts with FBI handler Nancy Floyd. However, he had
repeatedly warned the FBI that Nosair was running a terrorist ring out
of his prison cell, and he had supplied detailed descriptions of the
Sheik Omar network's plans. But the FBI was doubtful of Salem's
reliability and severed its contacts with him seven months before the
bombing.
In the aftermath
of the Trade Center bombing, the FBI
renewed its association with Salem, paying him a reported $1 million to
infiltrate Sheik Omar's group once again. Salem secretly recorded many
of his conversations with law enforcement agents, including
exchanges in which it was revealed that the FBI had detailed prior
knowledge of the Trade Center bomb plot. According to Salem,
the FBI had planned to sabotage the Trade Center bomb by replacing the
explosive components with an inert powder.
The October 28, 1993 New York Times reported that in one conversation
Salem recalled assurances from an FBI supervisor that the agency's plan
called for "building the bomb with a phony powder and grabbing the
people who [were] involved in [the plot]." However, the supervisor, in
Salem's words, "messed it up."
Salem recalled
that when he
expressed a desire to lodge a protest with FBI headquarters, he was
told by special agent John Anticev that "the New York people [wouldn't]
like the things out of the New York office to go to Washington, DC."
Unappeased, Salem rebuked Anticev: "... you saw this
bomb went off and you ... know that we could avoid that.... You get
paid, guys, to prevent problems like this from happening."
Perhaps
the most remarkable illustration of the depth of the FBI's knowledge of
the Sheik Omar network came after the World Trade Center bombing, when
the Bureau employed Salem's services as an informant once again. As the
Wall Street Journal reported, from March to June 1993 Salem "helped
organize the 'battle plan' that the government alleged included plots
to bomb the United Nations and FBI buildings in New York, and the
Holland and Lincoln tunnels beneath the Hudson River. Working with a
charismatic Sudanese man named Siddig Ali, a follower of Sheik Omar,
Mr. Salem recruited seven local Muslims to scout targets, plan tactics
and obtain chemicals and electrical parts for bombs...." By
the time the FBI closed in on the plotters on June 23rd, it had
literally hours of videotapes documenting the conspiracy in intimate
detail -- including footage of conspirators mixing fertilizer and
diesel fuel to build a bomb.
Predictably,
defense
attorneys for Sheik Omar and his followers insisted that Salem's
actions amounted to entrapment. While the court rejected this defense,
the FBI's proficiency at using Salem to assemble a radical Muslim
terrorist cell is unsettling, to say the least. Clearly, Salem knew his
way around the sheik's network, and was well-versed in the techniques
of terrorism; just as clearly, the FBI knew how to make use of Salem's
abilities. It is difficult to believe that the FBI
was incapable of cracking down preemptively on the sheik's followers
before the Trade Center bombing.
Poison and Antidote
However, the
fact that Sheik Omar's network consistently benefited from the actions
of the federal government -- from direct CIA aid to instances of
peculiar neglect by the FBI -- suggests that the cabal should be
considered as much a creature of our federal government as it was a
creation of a particular strain of Muslim extremism. Furthermore, the
influence and activities of Sheik Omar's co-conspirators are not
limited to the United States.
As Mary Anne
Weaver pointed out in The Atlantic
Monthly, "the
CIA helped to train and fund what eventually became an international
network of highly disciplined and effective Islamic militants -- and a
new breed of terrorists as well." According to Weaver, the CIA's
handiwork is on display across the Middle East -- in the December 1995
car bomb attack in a crowded market in Peshawar, Pakistan that killed
36 people and wounded 120 more, and also in two nearly identical car
bombings in November 1995 that targeted U.S. military advisers in Saudi
Arabia and the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. The same
network could also be considered a prime suspect in last summer's
unsolved terrorist attack on U.S. troops in Daharan, Saudi Arabia,
terrorist bombings in Algeria and the Philippines, and perhaps even the
downing of TWA Flight 800. Weaver quoted a former U.S. diplomat who
told her, "The common element in all these attacks -- whether in Cairo
or Riyadh, Islamabad or Algiers, Europe or New York -- is today's
equivalent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade" -- namely, a CIA-trained terrorist network.
Some
intelligence analysts describe the emergence of that network as an
example of "blowback" --
unintended negative fallout from a covert
operation. However, a more accurate
analysis might make use of Frederic
Bastiat's metaphor of government creating the poison and the antidote
in the same laboratory. The same power elite that created the
"poison"
of the post-Afghanistan terrorist network stands poised with an equally
dreadful "antidote." As Richard Haass, director of national security
programs at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, asserted in a
Washington Post op-ed column, the war against terrorism will require "a
willingness to compromise some of our civil liberties, including
accepting more frequent phone taps and surveillance. Those who would
resist paying such a price should keep in mind that terrorism could
well get worse in coming years."
In
such fashion, American citizens will pay the price for evils nurtured
by a government that poses as their protector.
F. William Engdahl has
written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30
years
How we utterly
destroyed Iraq in 1990. How the war REALLY started.
Iraq 1990-1991: Desert holocaust
I dare any American to read this
article through from top to bottom, and remain aloof about US foreign
policy and especially Iraq. Then
tell me about how Iraq was a threat to America, either in 2003
or earlier. I highlighted key parts, probably too much. If anyone still has the guts to support a
war like this, they ought to have the guts at least to read the details.
The
statements of George Herbert Walker
Bush about his concerns for 'innocents' and how "every human
life is precious" are particularly
nauseating.
-----------------------------------
(commentary by a friend)
Young Pelton is a
Journalist and his new book: “Licensed
To Kill: Hired Guns in the War on
Terror” describes in detail the "Private
Security" forces, there are over 70,000 in Iraq -- some from Israel, who are basically
causing a lot of this chaos and bombing in Iraq. The US has been making
Iraqi's pay for these private security forces who are ironically there
to destroy the country. These private forces do not have to
follow the
rules of war, and are mafia like in their actions, and answer to no
one. They can never be
convicted of war crimes for
anything they do. (Sounds
like something Rumsfeld thought of). Very clever, if you
want to play dirty and try to start a civil war.
Recently, some of them have been kidnapped
by Iraqi's in
hopes to bring an end to their destruction. The Iraqi's are not as dumb
as the Bush Adminstration thinks.
Much of this bombing is very sophisticated ( simultaneuous bombs in several different
cities) and this type of sophisticated
warfare tipped off most in the region that there is a very professional, organized force contributing
and causing all of this murder. Sunni
and Shiite leaders have been
voicing this concern for a very long time, but with so much bloodshed
and retaliation there is very little they can do.
Something
to think about.
11/27/2006 2:30:00 PM GMT
The kidnapping of four American
security contractors earlier this month in Iraq revived allegations
that U.S. private security companies are involved in the current
bloodshed in Iraq. Iraq war is not just fought by occupation armies and
resistance fighters- private firms, consisting of gun-wielding
ex-soldiers, are also involved.
Could
some of the
Pentagon’s hired Mercenaries be the real perpetrators of the daily
bombings and assassinations of Sunnis and Shias in Iraq?
Is the current disaster taking place in
the
war-torn country part of a wider plot to provoke a U.S./Israeli planned
civil war that will dismember Iraq?
That is what’s being said in Young Pelton’s
upcoming book “Licensed To Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror”
Pelton, a journalist, filmmaker, and explorer who
authored The World's Most Dangerous Places, Come Back Alive, The
Adventurist, and Three Worlds Gone Mad, suggests that there are more
than 70,000 armed men working as security contractors in Iraq to back
the U.S. military as the U.S. begins to draw down troops.
What backs Pelton’s revelations and shocking facts
he discovered about the world of military contractors is
what Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque uncover in their “Shadow
Company” documentary that unveils the origins and destinations of these
modern-day guns for hire.
Who are these security contractors? What do
they do? Why do they do it? Bicanic’s documentary answers these
questions.
Shadow Company highlights the danger of allowing profit-motivated firms
to get into the business of war.
Those individuals, those modern-day
mercenaries, are changing the face of modern warfare while their world
has remained mystery to those at home. The U.S. believes in using
private sector in
all facets of its so-called "War on Terror"; resorting to contractors
to back its military, giving them a license to kill- their services
available to the highest bidder.
Click Here to view the trailer from “Shadow Company”, the investigative
documentary that reveals the truth about the thousands of private
soldiers operating in Iraq and all over the world.
In Iraq, regarding Muslim-Muslim violence:
Finally one of my friends posted an article from al-Jazeera (above
on www.Takeoverworld.info/aq-lies.html) about the possibility of the 70,000 U.S.-based mercenaries
in Iraq causing the violence. Some of these mercs
are "cowboys" ex-Army Special Forces, kill with no compunctions,
private firms, no accountability, outsourced.
Some of these firms like Blackwater employ
people that Stan Goff ret. US Army
Master Sgt Special Forces said he would reject
from their crew for their reckless and sadistic attitude.
What does America get from using
private mercs? Plausible deniability. America could always
blame it on rogues if they got caught. (Yet British SAS got
caught staging terrorism, did you know that?) Iraqis are saying
this on the street, as everyone wonders who is doing this
killing. (Some of it surely is Iraqi resistance killing
people perceived to be collaborators, but I'm talking about the
senseless bombing of civilian targets and some tightly coordinated
bombing attacks.)
Even my friend's son, a Marine, talked
about multi-level 'rules of engagement' with approaching cars, levels
of warnings as a car approaches the base ---- and then about what they
really do ... fire a warning shot then light 'em up. This is just
Marines thinking about their survival.
But some of the mercs I understand are
from death squads we trained at the School of
Americas in Georgia and South America and undisclosed locations.
Some of the Pinochet crowd. This is people who go on hunting
missions, especially hunting for non-violent political activists, killing
leftists and liberals. Killing peace activists, human
rights activists, labor activists, killing politicians and their
friends and family --- that is their speciality.
In other words, civilians who are
truly working on democratic peace in Iraq, these people would be typical targets of a US-run murder
squad. This is normal. That's what Washington did
in Latin America and elsewhere. We know that CIA must have
some covert ops in Iraq, some black ops teams, one way or another.
I think the chances are VERY
strong that these mercs and black ops guys are instigating the
violence by bombing Shiites and Sunnis (or paying or bribing or
coercing or threatening some Arabs to do it, kidnap their child or
whatnot) --- since civil war and a breakup of
Iraq into Sunni and Shiite and Kurd sections is a stated
goal of the Israelis and PNAC neocons and the Tri-Lateral
Comm 'liberals' in their official published plans.
(the elite global finance community)
As a matter of fact, this tactic
of fomenting violence and terrorism is specifically what we have always
used Al-Qaeda for. Did we suddenly
get noble and suddenly reverse 25 years
of U.S. policy on the employment of professional terrorists (and
perhaps tricking dumb fanatic Wahabbi recruits) to
do our dirty work? (On Sept 11, I think
they probably skipped trying to hire people willing to commit suicide
by plane and just staged the whole thing, using the "19 guys" as movie
extras.)
What I cannot
understand is why so many people have such
a hard time accepting that the US would forment terrorism --- as it's
clearly done this before, it's documented by official sources,
Congress, it's done worse in the past, and covert ops are the name of
the game, even on TV and movies. People just cannot accept we'd
KILL innocent civilians and sacrifice our own troops in
bombings and that we'd bomb Iraqi police stations and kill people
we hire, just to foment civil war, even when it's there in black and
white ... and examples in evidence. I sometimes don't understand
the disconnect.
On one hand, the childish
naïveté of the American public is touching. On the
other hand, it's deadly.
|
Brzezinski: The Beginning of the End
for Israel
Nathan Gardels
editor-in-chief of the journal of social and political thought
published by Blackwell/Oxford, and Global Services of the Los Angeles
Times Syndicate/Tribune in a recent interview
with Zbigniew Brzezinski posed this question to the former National
Security Advisor to President Carter: "Doesn't military superiority as a blunt
instrument lead to eternal enmity, not security?"
Brzezinski responded:
"These
neocon prescriptions, of
which Israel has its equivalents, are fatal
for America and ultimately for
Israel. They will totally turn the overwhelming majority of the
Middle East's population against the
United States. The lessons
of Iraq speak for themselves. Eventually, if neo-con policies
continue to be pursued, the United
States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well".
Although he's
correct, I personally don't trust Brzezinski and what has in
mind. Given his past track record, that would be continued
pursuit of power in the M.E. via use of more
covert and strategic
operations.
CIA
analysis finds no Iranian nuclear weapons drive: report
By Agence France-Presse
11/19/06 "AFP"-- -- WASHINGTON - A
classified draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret
drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White
House, a top US investigative reporter said on Saturday.
Seymour
Hersh, writing in an article for the November 27 issue of the magazine
The New Yorker released in advance, reported on whether the
administration of Republican President George W. Bush was more, or
less, inclined to attack Iran after
Democrats won control of Congress last week.
A month
before the November 7 legislative elections, Hersh wrote, Vice
President Dick Cheney attended a national-security discussion that
touched on the impact of Democratic victory in both chambers on Iran
policy.
“If the Democrats won on November 7th,
the vice president said, that victory
would not stop the administration from pursuing a military
option with Iran,” Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with
the discussion.
Cheney
said the White
House would circumvent any legislative restrictions
“ and thus stop Congress from getting
in its way,”
he said. (scream!!
no shyness about saying "we are a totalitarian outlaw regime")
The
Democratic victory unleashed a surge of calls for the Bush
administration to begin direct talks
with Iran.
But the
administration’s planning of a military option was made ”far more complicated” in
recent months by a highly classified draft assessment by the Central
Intelligence Agency “challenging
the White House’s assumptions about how close Iran might be to
building a nuclear bomb,” he wrote.
“The CIA found no
conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons
program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has
declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Hersh
wrote, adding the CIA had declined to comment on that story.
A current
senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the CIA analysis and said the White House had been hostile to it,
he wrote. Cheney and his aides
had discounted the assessment,
the official said.
“They’re not looking for a smoking gun,” the
official was quoted as saying, referring to specific intelligence about
Iranian nuclear planning. “They’re looking for
the degree
of comfort level they think they
need to accomplish the mission.”
(they only want a sufficiently plausible
patina of lies, and silence from any opposition in the mainstream)
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