War on Terrorism or War on Freedom?
DANGER: Western foreign policy is actively encouraging terrorist attacks
from the Arab world
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War on Terrorism or War on Freedom?
DANGER: Western foreign policy is actively encouraging terrorist attacks
from the Arab world
Masterminded by the private
Council
on Foreign Relations club, representing the military/industrial complex,
the USA's totalitarian administration has begun a global war of terror against
threats to its economic interests. Those 'threats' include democratic
institutions and free peoples right across the world. Their high-risk strategy
is characterised by US military brinkmanship and over-reaction, provoking
justifiable attacks on institutions of U.S. power needed to 'justify' increased
military spending. Rumours (Matthew 24:6)
Of War. Meanwhile Isreal's takeover of the Palestinian state is neatly
'covered'.
President Kennedy was assassinated in a
military/industrial (CFR/CIA) coup in 1963. No president has dared take on
the corporations again. Can we please stop referring to the USA as a 'democracy'
when it is now a totalitarian state. George W. Bush is not a democratic
president, his Wall Street backers stole the Florida
vote. The supreme court acted illegally in stopping the Florida recount.
War News Links:
The Western rulers must give up military invasions and
covert operations NOW!
This image from http://www.geocities.com/draloowekim/
How unreal... the 'experts' trying to justify war on our TV screens again. But are we being served up reasons, or excuses? The mainstream media's double standards stink to heaven. Has nobody told them that the US and other Western governments started this 'war'? And how, if our governments address the Western sponsored injustices in Palestine, Iraq and other non-compliant countries, the terrorist threat will evaporate. Or could it be they like it this way?
We are told that ordinary people support a military attack on Afganistan. Yet at vigils we've been holding here in Bristol many of the cars, buses and vans that pass us have been 'honking for peace'.
There's the hardly unrelated matter of US oil giant Unocal's long-standing desire for a 1500km natural gas pipeline through Afganistan. The new president of Afghanistan is a Unocal consultant. Bin Laden, it seems, has been holding up their plans.
There are cold economic and geostrategic imperatives for further US led interventionism on the Eurasian continent, or 'war'. See 'The Grand Chessboard' by Z Brzezinski. So any or all of the western intelligence agencies may be responsible for backing the WTC attack as part of their covert operations. The inaction of intelligence agencies, the CIA, Mossad and MI6 etc. must also be the subject of investigation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4429897,00.html
With his customary northern common sense, Keith Waterhouse recently pointed out that you cannot fight a war against an abstract noun. He was referring, of course, to the so-called war on terrorism. It is an indication that the papers have finally taken the point that more of them are nowadays inclined to surround the expression with inverted commas, to show that it doesn't really mean anything except for crude propaganda purposes.
Constant use of the word terrorist by propagandists has also ensured that even this is nowadays almost meaningless. As Robert Fisk wrote some years ago in his book, Pity the Nation : 'Terrorists are those who use violence against the side that is using the word.'
The point is well made considering the current India/Pakistan situation. The Indians are preparing to go to war largely because of the attacks being made on their country by Pakistani 'terrorists'.
But in our papers, these people are usually referred to as 'militants'. To be a terrorist in the eyes of Mr Bush, Mr Blair or the British press, they would have to pose a threat to our side. And then Pakistan might even find itself included in the 'axis of evil', along with the other baddies like Iran and Iraq. But because the Pakistani government has been conciliatory to the US in its war in Afghanistan, it will not be considered evil and those who are busy bombing and mutilating their neighbours will remain, not terrorists, but merely militants.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4429897,00.html
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=298681
So now Osama bin Laden is Hitler. And Saddam Hussein is Hitler. And George Bush is fighting the Nazis. Not since Menachem Begin fantasised to President Reagan that he felt he was attacking Hitler in Berlin – his Israeli army was actually besieging Beirut, killing thousands of civilians, "Hitler" being the pathetic Arafat – have we had to listen to claptrap like this. But the fact that we Europeans had to do so in the Bundestag on Thursday – and, for the most part, in respectful silence – was extraordinary.
I'm reminded of the Israeli columnist who, tired of the wearying invocation of the Second World War to justify yet more Israeli brutality, began an article with the words: "Mr Prime Minister, Hitler is dead." Must we, forever, live under the shadow of a war that was fought and won before most of us were born? Do we have to live forever with living, diminutive politicians playing Churchill (Thatcher and, of course, Blair) or Roosevelt? "He's a dictator who gassed his own people," Mr Bush reminded us for the two thousandth time, omitting as always to mention that the Kurds whom Saddam viciously gassed were fighting for Iran and that the United States, at the time, was on Saddam's side.
But there is a much more serious side to this. Mr Bush is hoping to corner the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, into a new policy of threatening Iran. He wants the Russians to lean on the northern bit of the "axis of evil", the infantile phrase which he still trots out to the masses. More and more, indeed, Mr Bush's rhetoric sounds like the crazed videotapes of Mr bin Laden. And still he tries to lie about the motives for the crimes against humanity of 11 September. Yet again, in the Bundestag, he insisted that the West's enemies hated "justice and democracy", even though most of America's Muslim enemies wouldn't know what democracy was.
In the United States, the Bush administration is busy terrorising Americans. There will be nuclear attacks, bombs in high-rise apartment blocks, on the Brooklyn bridge, men with exploding belts – note how carefully the ruthless Palestinian war against Israeli colonisation of the West Bank is being strapped to America's ever weirder "war on terror" – and yet more aircraft suiciders. If you read the words of President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and the ridiculous national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, over the past three days, you'll find they've issued more threats against Americans than Mr bin Laden.
But let's get back to the point. The growing evidence that Israel's policies are America's policies in the Middle East – or, more accurately, vice versa – is now being played out for real in statements from Congress and on American television. First, we have the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee announcing that Hizbollah – the Lebanese guerrilla force that drove Israel's demoralised army out of Lebanon in the year 2000 – is planning attacks in the US. After that, we had an American television network "revealing" that Hizbollah, Hamas and al- Qa'ida – Mr bin Laden's organisation – have held a secret meeting in Lebanon to plot attacks on the US.
American journalists insist on quoting "sources" but there was, of course, no sourcing for this balderdash, which is now repeated ad nauseam in the American media. Then take the "Syrian Accountability Act" that was introduced into the US Senate by Israel's friends on18 April. This includes the falsity uttered earlier by Israel's Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, that Iranian Revolutionary Guards "operate freely" on the southern Lebanese border. Now there haven't been Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon – let alone the south of the country – for 18 years. So why is this lie repeated yet again?
Iran is under threat. Lebanon is under threat. Syria is under threat – its "terrorism" status has been heightened by the State Department – and so is Iraq. But Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister held personally responsible by Israel's own enquiry for the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinians in Beirut in 1982, is – according to Mr Bush – "a man of peace". How much further can this go? A long way, I fear.
The anti-American feeling throughout the Middle East is palpable. Arab newspaper editorials don't come near to expressing public opinion. In Damascus, Majida Tabbaa has become famous as the lady who threw the US Consul Roberto Powers out of her husband's downtown restaurant on 7 April . "I went over to him," she said, "and told him, 'Mr Roberto, tell your George Bush that all of you are not welcome – please get out'." Across the Arab world, boycotts of American goods have begun in earnest.
How much longer can this go on? America praises Pakistani President Musharraf for his support in the "war on terror", but remains silent when he arranges a dictatorial "referendum" to keep him in power. America's enemies, remember, hate the US for its "democracy". So is General Musharraf going to feel the heat? Forget it. My guess is that Pakistan's importance in the famous "war on terror" – or "war for civilisation" as, we should remember, it was originally called – is far more important. If Pakistan and India go to war, I'll wager a lot that Washington will come down for undemocratic Pakistan against democratic India.
Across the former Soviet southern Muslim republics, America is building air bases, helping to pursue the "war on terror" against any violent Muslim Islamist groups that dare to challenge the local dictators. Please do not believe that this is about oil. Do not for a moment think that these oil and gas-rich lands have any economic importance for the oil-fuelled Bush administration. Nor the pipelines that could run from northern Afghanistan to the Pakistani coast if only that pesky Afghan loya jirga could elect a government that would give concessions to Unocal, the oddly named concession whose former boss just happens to be a chief Bush "adviser" to Afghanistan.
Now here's pause for thought. Abdelrahman al-Rashed writes in the international Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat that if anyone had said prior to 11 September that Arabs were plotting a vast scheme to murder thousands of Americans in the US, no one would have believed them. "We would have charged that this was an attempt to incite the American people against Arabs and Muslims," he wrote. And rightly so.
But Arabs did commit the crimes against humanity of 11 September. And many Arabs greatly fear that we have yet to see the encore from the same organisation. In the meantime, Mr Bush goes on to do exactly what his enemies want; to provoke Muslims and Arabs, to praise their enemies and demonise their countries, to bomb and starve Iraq and give uncritical support to Israel and maintain his support for the dictators of the Middle East.
Each morning now, I awake beside the Mediterranean in Beirut with a feeling of great foreboding. There is a firestorm coming. And we are blissfully ignoring its arrival; indeed, we are provoking it.
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=298681
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/050702_killthe.html
by Michael Davidson, FTW Staff Writer
-- It's not a good idea to go up against the powers that be with an idea that calls into question generally accepted wisdom. Galileo contradicted the Roman Catholic Church when he said the Earth revolved around the sun. He was put in jail, and it took a few hundred years for the church to exonerate him and admit he was correct. Hopefully, a fate similar to Galileo's will not befall Cynthia McKinney.
McKinney is the representative from the 4th district of Georgia. The district includes Decatur, just outside Atlanta. McKinney is a Democrat, black, and, obviously, a woman. Three strikes in an area that has sent the likes of Newt Gingrich and Bob Barr to Congress.
On March 25 McKinney was interviewed by telephone on Flashpoints, an independent radio program produced and hosted by Dennis Bernstein and broadcast on Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley, Calif. The congresswoman read a roughly 10-minute statement, then answered questions and chatted with Bernstein for another 16 or so minutes. A major portion of McKinney's statement concerned U.S. actions in Africa, and contained stinging attacks of the Clinton administration, particularly former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She also discussed the high incarceration rate of blacks, their treatment by the police, and the actual mechanics of the massive voter fraud in Florida that benefited George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential election. Rep. McKinney also pointed out how the current administration has created a climate in which elected officials need to censor themselves lest their patriotism be questioned. Only a few sentences in the almost 30-minute segment were her comments about the need for an investigation into what the Bush Administration knew prior to the events of 9-11. Two-and-a-half weeks later on April 12, an article appeared in the Washington Post about McKinney's appearance on Flashpoints. The article was written by Juliet Eilperin, a Post staff writer who says a colleague received the show's transcript in an anonymous e-mail, and passed it along to her. Eilperin's article was headlined, "Democrat Implies Sept. 11 Administration Plot."
What McKinney actually said was the American people deserve a full, complete and no-holds-barred investigation of the events involving 9-11, and what the Bush administration knew and when they knew it. Every single question McKinney raised was based on information readily available from mainstream media sources. Among the issues McKinney raised regarding 9-11 were: - The warnings from several foreign governments to the highest levels of the U.S. government that were ignored; - The huge profits made in sophisticated stock transactions involving several airlines, brokerages and insurance firms whose stock prices were affected dramatically by 9-11; - The relationship between the oil company Unocal and the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan; - The relationship between the administration and the Carlyle Group, an investment firm with major defense holdings for whom the president's father works; - The requests by both the president and vice president that any congressional investigations into 9-11 not be particularly intense or lengthy; - The huge profits persons close to the administration will make thanks to increased defense spending.
Almost immediately after the Washington Post article, the administration, the mainstream media and its pundits shifted into overdrive, floored the pedal, and wound the smear engine right to the redline. Interestingly, no one has challenged the accuracy of a single word McKinney said. What has been said, in a variety of ways, is that her call for a complete investigation is an indication that McKinney is either "crazy" or "treacherous."
In the original Washington Post article, Bush spokesman Scott McLellan was quoted as saying “The American people know the facts, and they dismiss such ludicrous, baseless views." Carlyle Group spokesman Chris Ullman posed the question "Did she say these things while standing on a grassy knoll in Roswell, New Mexico?"
That same day, April 12, "Representative Awful” was posted on National Review Online by Jonah Goldberg, son of Lucianne Goldberg -- literary agent, Linda Tripp crony, and former Nixon dirty trickster. National Review was founded by William F. Buckley, whose family fortune was made in the oil business. Goldberg dismissed McKinney's suggestion for an investigation, saying "I am not aware of any evidence that Ms. McKinney has murdered several children or that she personally profited from sleeping with the entire defensive squad of the Atlanta Falcons." He then goes on to say that the congresswoman is suffering "paranoid, America-hating, crypto-Marxist conspiratorial delusions."
Anyone who remembers the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings will remember Anita Hill was described as "a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty." Apparently, Goldberg has learned some big words to repeat the easy smear used against any black woman to the left of Condoleezza Rice. Keep in mind that in an Oct. 29 attack piece on McKinney Goldberg wrote, "Taking black politicians seriously pays them a compliment." Next, McKinney's hometown newspaper took up the charge. An April 13 Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) article by staff writer Melanie Eversley reported that Democratic Georgia Sen. Zell Miller issued a "bristling" statement saying her on-air comments were "dangerous and irresponsible."
Not being content to dismiss the legitimate, American ideas of dissent and question, Miller made a sarcastic comment about McKinney attempting to get kissed by President Bush. Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, is quoted: "All I can tell you is the congresswoman must be running for the hall of fame of the Grassy Knoll Society." Interesting that the "grassy knoll" allusion was made twice by people connected to the administration, yet they will not dispute her facts. The AJC article also quotes Emory University political scientist Merle Black: "It reinforces the view among serious people in her district that she's a very ineffective representative if this is how she chooses to spend her political capital." Apparently there are very few "serious" people Black will be able to "reinforce" with his totally "unscientific" opinion, as McKinney has won five elections in a row, with her lowest margin of victory being 58 percent.
Along with Eversley's article, AJC put up a poll on its website asking the question, "Are you satisfied the Bush administration had no advance warning of the Sept. 11 attacks?" A visitor could vote "Yes," "No, I think officials knew it was coming" or "I'm not sure. Congress should investigate."
Within hours, the "No, I think officials knew it was coming" vote led the "Yes" vote 51 percent to 47 percent, with two percent "Not sure." The ultra-conservative website FreeRepublic.com alerted its viewers and encouraged them to vote against McKinney, to no avail. The vote seesawed back and forth across the 50 percent mark, each side holding a slim lead at various points throughout the day. By mid-afternoon 23,145 people had voted. "Yes" (anti-McKinney) had 52 percent, "No" (pro-McKinney) had 46 percent, and "Not sure" had one percent. Forty-seven percent of voters do not believe the story the world has been told by the Bush Administration. Then, the poll vanished. Gone. Disappeared. Not there.
People signed on to vote, but there was no poll to vote at. The article was there, but the poll was gone. There was no explanation. On April 21, AJC columnist Mike King explained what happened.
"The responses broke down the tabulator we use to keep track of the votes." So can we assume, then, when Mr. King gets a flat tire he throws the entire car away and abandons his trip?
King goes on at great length to inform the reader that even if the poll had not been taken down due to "mechanical problems," the poll was meaningless anyway because "groups and people who believe there is evidence of a conspiracy in the attacks urged friends to vote on ajc.com to send Congress a message of the need to investigate."
This undoubtedly occurred, as did urging from the other side which King makes no mention of. He also says that voters were not "scientifically" chosen to represent a broad cross-section of views and that "most online polls are really just opportunities to register an opinion." How registering an opinion differs from a vote will be left for Noah Webster to explain. Another online poll has been running regarding McKinney's call for a thorough investigation. This one is at truthout.com, an online digest of articles being published in the mainstream media. While truthout readers are undoubtedly more open to McKinney's ideas than the general public, at press time, the poll shows 5,616 supporting the congresswoman versus 80 opposing her. Truthout also reports McKinney's call for a 9-11 investigation is supported by two additional members of the House -- Democrats Loretta Sanchez of California and Major Owens of New York.
Interestingly, while truthout is a non-profit organization entirely dependent on donations, it has had no problems keeping its poll functioning, while the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a major for-profit entity, claims they could not.
With the AJC poll having turned into a debacle, the forces arrayed against McKinney became desperate, and the smear became vicious. On April 16, the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) released a report claiming 21 percent of McKinney's 1999-2000 campaign contributions of over $101 came from Arab or Middle-Eastern-connected individuals and organizations. The report states among the organizations donating to McKinney's campaign are "the American-Muslim Council and the Council on American/Islamic Relations, both of which maintain ties or have expressed support for terrorist organizations."
Phil Kent, SLF president, is quoted in the report: "If we are to give any credence to her baseless claims, the American people deserve to know that McKinney's financial 'relationships' -- her campaign contributors -- are heavily represented by Arab and Middle Eastern-connected individuals, as well as organizations which have expressed sympathy for terrorist organizations." Here we have examples of how McKinney's call for an investigation morphs into "claims," and how an investigation into her is acceptable, while one into the Bush Administration is not. The SLF report flew around the Internet, and was posted on several conservative websites. It was generally headlined to the effect, "McKinney Supported by Terrorists."
SLF was founded in 1976 and has received major financial support from Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire reactionary who funded the 10-year effort to destroy President Bill Clinton. In 2000 the Democratic National Committee accused the SLF of sending a quarter-million deceptive pieces of mail designed to interfere with that year's census and result in inaccurate congressional representation. In issue after issue during its 26 years, SLF has consistently taken vehement anti-black, anti-environment, anti-worker, anti-gay, and anti-public education positions. They are currently preparing litigation to invalidate portions of the Bush-signed McCain-Feingold/Shays-Meehan campaign reform legislation. Some in the Atlanta area believe SLF's long-range goal is overturning the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
SLF describes itself as "an Atlanta-based public interest law firm which advocates limited government, individual economic freedom, and the free enterprise system in the courts of law and public opinion.” SLF's website includes links to other reactionary groups including the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, Federalist Society, and the Conservative Caucus Foundation. Along with links to expected conservative media outlets such as WorldNetDaily, Drudge, and the Conservative News Service, SLF links itself to Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Matthew Glavin was SLF president and chief executive from 1994 to 2000, and devoted a tremendous amount of energy, and Scaife's money, trying to get Bill Clinton disbarred in Arkansas for his alleged perjury in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. Glavin, however, was forced to abandon these efforts, and resign after he was arrested for fondling himself in public. According to an Oct. 4, 2000 report on CNSNEWS.com, an affiliate of the above-mentioned Conservative News Service, an undercover federal officer found Glavin masturbating near a parking lot in the Chattahoochee National River Park in Atlanta, an area said to be popular with homosexual cruisers. The arresting officer says that he, himself, was fondled lewdly when he spoke to Glavin on Oct. 13, 2000. The AJC reported Glavin had pled guilty and was sentenced to a year's probation.
On April 22 SLF sent a letter to House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt demanding McKinney be removed from her seats on both the House Armed Services and International Relations committees, citing the above-mentioned campaign donations from Middle Eastern contributors. That same day, an identical request using virtually identical language was made by the African-American Republican Leadership Council (AARLC). Like SLF, AARLC also requested an ethics investigation of McKinney. Additionally, AARLC has also asked the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Eddie Bernie Johnson, D-Texas, to suspend McKinney from that group. This is a transparent ploy to intimidate and divide black members of Congress, lest their patriotism be questioned.
Also on April 22, an article was posted on the website of Human Events, the National Conservative Weekly. Written by David Freddoso, it's headlined "Feds Searched Offices of Seven McKinney Donors." Many Arab names are listed as well as several organizations, some of which have names with Arab or Islamic references. Going into excruciating detail, Freddoso lists names of individuals, organizations, dollar amounts, dates of search warrants, judges signing search warrants (interestingly, copies of search warrants were allegedly obtained by Human Events), and the connections between all these details. Then, Freddoso writes, "None of the McKinney contributors has been charged with any crime, a Customs spokesman said." Apparently, Freddoso finds not being charged with a crime to be news.
Britain’s The Guardian reported March 25 on a recent FBI raid. The Republican Party was accepting sizeable donations to a political action committee called The Islamic Institute from an alleged terrorist support group, the Safa Trust. It seems that the Safa Trust had been sending money to both the Republican Party and to terrorist groups at the same time. This reported direct linkage between terrorist funding and the Republican Party was conveniently ignored, while McKinney was attacked with much weaker allegations. These backfired too.
SLF's report, AARLC's letter, and Freddoso's article all specifically discuss donations to McKinney from Abdurahman Alamoudi, founder and executive director of the American Muslim Council (AMC). According to an April 24 article at onlinejournal.com, AMC supported George W. Bush in the 2000 campaign and donated money to him. Bush also invited Alamoudi to the Sept. 14 prayer service for the 9-11 victims at the National Cathedral. Additionally, long-time Bush associate Grover Norquist has been doing business with Alamoudi, and is a registered lobbyist for the Islamic Institute. According to the Oct. 4 issue of the Boston Phoenix, Norquist's firm, Janus-Merritt Strategies LLC, has been paid over $20,000 by Alamoudi.
Despite Alamoudi's Republican connections, his donation to McKinney is used as the "smoking gun" in the April 22 column by nationally syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker. Parker has been one of the most prolific members of the "get McKinney" team, jumping into the smear campaign with all four paws. Parker wrote about McKinney's radio comments on April 17 and 22. She's very upset. In the April 17 column, Parker dreams of inaugurating "The McKinney Award -- for people too stupid to serve in public office." Further on, Parker, like everyone participating in the smear campaign, claims that McKinney said Bush knew of the impending 9-11 attacks, and accused the president of mass murder. She also picks up Jonah Goldberg's pathetic attempt at sarcasm, writing "A complete investigation also might prove that McKinney has been dropping acid and living with cross-dressing dental hygienists under the Brooklyn Bridge." What is it about outspoken black women that makes right-wing nut jobs attribute unusual sexual behavior to them?
In her April 22 column, Parker reiterates her lie as to what McKinney actually said. She goes on: "She's black, which means people give her a pass lest they be perceived racist." Parker quotes an unnamed "e-mailer" who quotes a friend in Ramallah: "If you see 'Cynth,' kindly tell her that Arab TV networks appreciate her comments for they now have the needed 'proof' that their paranoia is rational." Parker closes: "None of which is to suggest that Cynthia McKinney is a terrorist, or a terrorist sympathizer, or even a socialist rabble-rouser who despises her own country. On the other hand, using McKinney's own talent for inferential dot-connecting, she just might be."
Despite finding nice ways to call McKinney a terrorist and traitor, Parker strenuously defends her independence and complete lack of bias. In her April 24 column, which is about so-called "conspiracy theories," Parker wrote, "I'm told, for instance, that I'm paid by the right-wing propaganda machine, given my support of most Bush policies in the wake of 9-11 and my rejection of current conspiracy theories.’You're being paid to lie to the American people,' wrote one of my new friends. Here's the truth: I know of no reporter, editor or columnist in the Western hemisphere who wouldn't sell his mother's honeymoon pictures for a good story, no matter whose life gets ruined.
No one, especially a president, is off limits when truth is at stake, not to mention Pulitzers." Perhaps Parker found a new dedication to Truth after writing two consecutive columns filled with lies, innuendo and character assassination. The story about McKinney's comments on the Flashpoints radio show traveled around the media for about 12 days, then just petered out. Several newspapers ran editorials condemning her, including the AJC and the New York Post. Comments and asides were made about her on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Generally, she was described as crazy, pro-Iraqi, a conspiracy theorist, irresponsible or dangerous, but it didn't seem to work. The public wasn't responding with the sense of outrage the media is used to being able to create.
On April 17 ABCNews.com ran a piece by Dean Schabner headed, "What Consensus? Conspiracy Theorist Immune to the Widespread Support For War on Terror." First line: "When the government said evidence pointed to Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, other voices wondered why investigators weren't looking in other directions." The article, about three pages, lays out many of the beliefs that, apparently, a lot of people have, and discusses them in a calm, measured manner. While Schabner does eventually get around to dismissing everything but the official story as "conspiracy theories," his words and the words of the "experts" he quotes don't have the wild-eyed hatred and anger that the stories about McKinney generally do. Schabner comes close to giving the "non-believers" a degree of respect.
The acceptability of alternate explanations for 9-11 may be growing for a very simple reason. According to a poll taken in late-April by Scott Rasmussen Public Opinion Research, 36 percent of Americans believe Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election. Over a third of America's citizens believe the man occupying the White House to be a fraud! With such a large portion of the country believing George W. Bush is not really the president, it's not hard to understand why almost half of the voters in the AJC poll indicated they do not believe the Bush Administration's story about 9-11, and support McKinney's call for a full investigation. Whenever Bush allies try to impose new police-state tactics on Americans, such as warrantless searches, random drug tests, racial profiling, or stop-and-frisk laws, they always say, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. It's just a minor inconvenience for the public good."
If the Bush Administration keeps repeating that mantra, then they should have no trouble supporting McKinney’s call for a full and complete investigation into 9-11.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/050702_killthe.html
Due to the very nature of their task, ‘soldiers of fortune’ - or mercenaries - have played a destabilising role throughout history, and whereas in the past their paymasters have been such as Alexander the Great, and feudal barons, in today’s capitalist world their paymasters are fast becoming business corporations.
In his study of mercenaries, David Isenberg notes this phenomenon, stressing that.."the important distinction here is that such firms are bound by the terms of a business contract and not necessarily those of international law". On the face of it, this would seem to mean that nothing much has changed since those earlier days of Alexander and the barons, but in view of the enormous potency of modern weaponry coupled with the increasingly global spread of capitalism - with its inherent inequitable class structure - it follows that today the destabilising role of these mercenary groups now poses a far greater and more wide-spread hazard than in times past. Furthermore, this hazard is exacerbated when, as in the case of Western capitalist ‘democracies’, the corporate establishment wields immense political clout. This is particularly true of the USA - that quintessential dominant capitalist state, with its de facto corporate-controlled Administration.
The most influential of these American mercenary groups is the Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) which, to quote its website homepage "is a professional services company engaged in defense related contracting in the USA and international markets". A brief resume of some of the more high-profile board members since its incorporation in 1988 confirms its prestigious standing within the military/Intelligence community (though it is of interest to note that these Washington-based corporate mercenaries - all retired military officers - are known , among themselves, as ‘beltway bandits’. This is justified cynicism):
President/CEO: General Carl E. Vuono (US Army Chief of Staff ‘87 to ‘92 - and, as such, oversaw both the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War)
Snr.Vice-Pres.: General Crosbie ‘Butch’ Saint (Commander US Army Europe ‘88 to ‘92)
Executive Vice-Pres.: General Richard H. Griffith (Asst. US Army Commander Intelligence in Europe ‘89 to ‘91)
Vice-Pres Operations: General Ed Soyster (Asst. US Commander Europe ‘82; later Head of Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] - retired ‘88)
As for its contracts ‘in the USA and international markets’ quoted above, it is important to keep in mind that the vast majority of these are with the US government, but, in view of America’s increasingy intrusive advance eastwards since the fall of the Soviet Union, it is equally inevitable that MPRI’s involvement in ‘international markets’ is increasing - as the following list of some of the events in which it played a pivotal role illustrates (MPRI has been - and is - active in a number of regions, including Columbia, Africa and the Caucasus, but the Balkans will be the only region covered here because: (1) of its importance on the stage of contemporary world politics; (2) it exemplifies, in a concise manner, MPRI’s activities; and (3) it falls within the constraints of an article of this length):
(a) In 1994, a contract - titled Democracy Transition Assistance Program (DTAP) - was agreed between the Croat defense minister and the US Deputy Secretary of Defense, John Deutch (who subsequently became Director of CIA from ‘95 until he was forced to resign the following year beacause he had improperly stored classified information on his personal computer disc!). The contract was awarded to MPRI who would train and equip the Croatian army under the command of retired General Richard Griffith (see above). This resulted in the Croatian attack on the Serbs in West Krajina, in which more than 150,000 Serbs fled the region. The efficiency of this attack was largely due to a tactic known as ‘Airland Battle 2000’, the brainchild of General Crosbie ‘Butch’ Saint (see above) at the special training center, TRADOC, under the command of Gen’l Vuono (see above). It is worthy of note that DTAP, in effect, violated the 1991 UN Security Council embargo on Yugoslavia which made ‘direct military assistance illegal’.
(b) In May ‘96, in the aftermath of the Drayton Peace Accord, MPRI was awarded a 3-year contract (subsequently renewed) to ‘train & equip’ the Bosnian Muslim/Croat army - again under the command of General Griffith. This was financed by the Pentagon and five Muslim countries, the Pentagon supplying a significant amount of its surplus weaponry (including 45 tanks, 80 armoured personnel carriers, et al.). MPRI was also given a contract by the State Department to monitor the Serbia/Bosnia border to ensure that the former did not supply the Bosnian Serbs with weapons.
(c) In the aftermath of NATO’s bombing of Kosovo in 1999, the KLA (once rightly considered by the Western Powers as ‘terrorists’) was transformed into the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) and the MPRI was awarded the contract to ‘train & equip’ same - again under the command of General Griffith. Intriguingly, the commander of this newly-formed KPC was one Brigadier General Agim Ceku, an Albanian Kosovan who had been serving in the Croatian army when: (1) according to Jane’s Defence Weekly of 10th June ‘99, he had "masterminded the successful HV (Croatian army) offensive at Medak in September ‘93"; and (2) he had played an important role in the Croat’s routing of the Serbs in Western Krajina (covered above). He was thus well-acquainted with General Griffith.
(d) As confirmed by Major General Metodi Stamboliski of the Army of the Republic of Macedonia (ARM) General Staff in the magazine ‘Defence’ of April 2000, "Our work has been significantly assisted by the contribution made by the US team known as the MPRI team, headed by the retired general of the US Army, General Richard Griffith"..adding.."Among other things, the MPRI team has also developed a G-3 assistance program". G-3 was the title of the ARM training program. In his article ‘Proxy War in Macedonia’ Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian professor, reveals another pertinent fact: namely, that the Chief of Staff of ARM, General Jovan Andrejevski had attended a military school in the USA, under General Griffith.
This government/ private army relationship is generally seen as a case of the former disassociating itself from the actions of the latter (known as ‘out-sourcing’ in business circles): "We cannot be held responsible for what they do!". This does not stand up to closer scrutiny in the case of MPRI. Here is a company so self-evidently close to the Administration that the two could reasonably be considered one - and inseparable. To quote General Soyster (see above) in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times of 3rd December 2000 regarding MPRI’s contract to advise and train Columbia’s military and police: "They are using us to carry out American foreign policy. We certainly don’t determine foreign policy, but we can be part of the US government executing its foreign policy". This poses no problem in America. As Ken Silverstein reveals in his article ‘Privatizing War’ in The Nation ‘97: "Congress reviews and can restrict the dispatch of Pentagon military trainers abroad. It has no authority over private trainers, who need only get a licence from the State Department, a process that happens far from view". Such is the nature, the power of a Corporate Administration - to say nothing of its lack of ‘democratic’ accountability! : In the same article, Silverstein reveals that, while head of the DIA, General Soyster had dealt out a number of contracts to the well-known German arms dealer, Ernst Werner Glatt, for the procurement of Soviet weapons which were then shipped to the USA "from whence they would be sent to America’s proxy troops in Latin America, Asia and Africa. After Soyster retired, he and Glatt became business partners on at least one weapons deal" - adding - " Glatt was the favorite arms merchant of the CIA, which chose him to move arms to the contras in Nicaragua and the mujahedeen in Afghanistan". Silverstein further added that Glatt was supplying weapons to Croatia until "at least late last year" (‘96), and had bought "a country estate in Virginia, which he named the ‘Black Eagle’, a symbol of Nazi Germany."
Having ventured into the hazardous realm of finance - even going to the extent of adding the suffix ‘Incorporated’ to their company’s name - these soldiers of fortune were, presumably, not surprised when, on the 18th of July 2000, they were incorporated into L-3 Communications Corp., a company whose main customers were the US Department of Defense and US government Intelligence agencies - and on whose board sat John M. Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Clinton. This is a company specialising in telecommunications and ‘simulating training’ which had just previously acquired two other firms: SY Technology and Raytheon - both firms engaged in telecommunication and simulation. Intriguingly - and alarmingly - SY Tech. plays a crucial role in the Bush-sponsored Ballistic Missile Defense Organisation - a throw-back to Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ planned project.
L-3 was co-founded in 1997 by Robert LaPenta and Frank Lanza, the latter being its Chairman/CEO. He had previously been Executive Vice President of Lockheed Martin, manufacturers of military aircraft, which, in the eyes of those countries on the receiving end of same - such as Germany, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq - would surely classify them as ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Not surprisingly, Lockheed owns 34% of L-3’s common stock. To quote Forbes magazine of 7th July ‘02: "Lanza is capitalising on the dramatic change in military strategy over the last decade" (see ‘Airland 2000 Battle’ above) - to say nothing of the increase in the Defense Department’s 2000 budget. ‘Forbes’ further states that L-3’s battlefield simulators & training bring in $400 million in sales each year....and "in the Defense Department’s recently released quadrennial review of the military, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld listed battlefield simulation as a priority". Having already noted the clonal relationship between the US Administration and MPRI, it is clearly apparent that this noteworthy merger would not - to put it mildly - have occurred without the former’s permission.
Having merged with L-3, MPRI, in November 2000, created its own sub-division, the Alexandria Group, which, in its own words "will provide the highest quality education, training & organisational expertise to law enforcement & corporations around the world"..adding that it is staffed by law enforcement professionals headed by retired FBI Assistant Director Joseph R. Wolfinger. This was certainly a broadening of its professed earlier aims which were, understandably,
martial in nature - as confirmed by the following quote from MPRI’s website: "The company’s business focus is on military matters, to increase training, equiping, force design & management, professional development, concepts & doctrine, organisational & operational assistance, quick reaction military contractual support, and democracy transition assistance programs for the military forces of emerging republics". There is no contradiction between these two professed aims - rather, it is confirmation that Corporate America is using this tool of mercenaries to infiltrate into ‘under-developed’ Latin American and African countries, and newly-emerging ex-communist republics in order to ensure (a) its dominance of markets in its advance globally; and (b) that any resistance to this advance can be suppressed by US-trained military forces of those countries.
America is thus ignoring President Eisenhower’s warning to the American people in his farewell address when, in his reference to what he termed this ‘military-industrial complex’, he warned that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists - and will persist". Prophetic words!
Conclusion?: The MPRI are mercenaries on a mission - according to the Word of Mammon!
MPRI Official Website http://www.mpri.com
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=24331
Last week marked the anniversaries of three landmark events that paved the way for the further erosion of our personal freedoms we face today. Nine years ago, the FBI ended a stand-off that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had begun 51 days earlier, resulting in the deaths of 82 Branch Davidians, including 30 women and 25 children -- guilty only of being members of a religious commune. Seven years ago last week, on the second anniversary of the killings at Waco, 168 men, women, and children were killed in Oklahoma City when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed -- many believed in protest of those horrific events for which no federal employee had ever been held accountable. Timothy McVeigh, convicted and executed for the bombing, made no comment during his trial until his sentencing, when he quoted Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example."
Six years ago last week, in response to the Oklahoma City bombing (which, if indeed perpetrated by a lone nut armed only with a rental van and fertilizer, begs the question of why sweeping new legislation was necessary), Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, "antiterrorism" legislation which not only gives the attorney general the power to use the armed services against the civilian population, neatly nullifying the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (which prohibited the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement), but also selectively suspends habeas corpus, the heart of Anglo-American liberty. As he signed it into law, Clinton attacked critics of the bill as "unpatriotic": "There is nothing patriotic about pretending that you can love your country but despise your government." This is breathtaking since it includes, at one time or another, most of us. Put another way, was a German in 1939 who said that he detested the Nazi dictatorship unpatriotic?
Thus began the latest chapter in the death struggle between the American republic, whose plainly ineffective defender I am, and the American Global Empire, our old republic's enemy. Since V-J Day 1945 ("Victory over Japan" and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the historian Charles A.
Beard called "perpetual war for perpetual peace." I have occasionally referred to our "enemy of the month club": Each month we are confronted by a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us. The Federation of American Scientists has catalogued nearly 200 such military incursions since 1945 initiated by the United States.
According to the Koran, it was on a Tuesday that Allah created darkness. Last Sept. 11, when suicide pilots were crashing commercial airliners into crowded American buildings, I did not have to look to the calendar to see what day it was: Dark Tuesday was casting its long shadow across Manhattan and along the Potomac River. I was also not surprised that despite the seven or so trillion dollars that we have spent since 1950 on what is euphemistically called "Defense," there would have been no advance warning from the FBI or CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency. While the Bushites have been eagerly preparing for the last war but two -- missiles from North Korea, clearly marked with flags, would rain down on Portland, Ore., only to be intercepted by our missile-shield balloons -- the foxy Osama bin Laden knew that all he needed for his holy war on the infidel were fliers willing to kill themselves along with those random passengers who happened to be aboard hijacked jetliners.
The awesome physical damage Osama and company did to us on Dark Tuesday is as nothing compared to the knockout blow to our vanishing liberties: The Anti- Terrorist Act of 1996 and the recent USA PATRIOT Act (still being written after it was passed, and thus unread by the Congress which passed it), which among other things grants additional special powers to wiretap without judicial order and to deport lawful permanent residents, visitors and undocumented immigrants without due process. Even before signing the Anti- Terrorist Act, President Clinton revealed his disregard for the Bill of Rights:
"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans." A year later: "A lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it."
According to a November 1995 CNN-Time poll, 55 percent of the people believed that "the federal government has become so powerful that it poses a threat to the rights of ordinary citizens." Three days after Dark Tuesday, 74 percent said they thought, "It would be necessary for Americans to give up some of their personal freedoms." Eighty-six percent favored guards and metal detectors at public buildings and events.
Bush himself, in an address to a joint session of Congress, offered up his interpretation of Osama bin Laden and disciples' motives: "They hate what they see right here in this chamber." I suspect a million Americans nodded sadly in front of their TV sets. "Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." If this is indeed the terrorists' motivation, they are succeeding beyond even their dreams, as each day, with each extension of "emergency powers," our Bill of Rights is shredded more and more. Once alienated, an "unalienable right" is apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of Earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated.
Gore Vidal's new book is "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated" (Thunder's Mouth Press), from which this article is adapted.
He spoke in San Francisco on Thursday at a program sponsored by The Independent Institute - on the Web: http://www.independent.org
Posted at: http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=24331
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/england/newsid_1926000/1926249.stm
Friday, 12 April, 2002, 13:53 GMT 14:53 UK
A young woman from the UK is demanding an apology from
the US after being wrongly held for 30 hours as a terror suspect.
Sarah Johnson says she was humiliated during questioning then abandoned in the middle of the night with nowhere to go.
The 22-year-old from Wednesbury, West Midlands, was arrested at Philadelphia Airport just after boarding a plane.
She said she was held in a tiny cell with a suicidal drug addict.
And she was later released in the middle of the night in Philadelphia with no money or possessions.
Her local MP, Tom Watson, said he has written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw asking him to investigate the claims.
"She is a bright, straight, honest young woman and she underwent the most appalling ordeal.
"She has had a terrible experience."
He said he has asked the Foreign Office to intervene.
FBI
interrogators
"What I wanted to confirm is that there will be a full consulate investigation out there."
Miss Johnson had spoken to three security guards at Philadelphia Airport and was waved through checkpoints as she was late for her plane.
After her details were checked at the boarding gate she got on the flight bound for London.
However, 15 minutes later she was taken from the plane by security staff and taken to a detention centre.
She was interviewed by the FBI and other authorities who suspected her of terrorism.
Mr Watson said that at one point she was shut in an eight-foot-square cell with a crack cocaine addict who was threatening to kill herself.
When her 30-hour ordeal had finished she was put out into the street at 3.30 in the morning with no money and nowhere to stay.
Now Miss Johnson, who works as a hairdresser on cruise ships, wants an apology from US authorities.
Mr Watson said: "Somebody pushed the panic alarm and overreacted."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/england/newsid_1926000/1926249.stm
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,673171,00.html
Sunday March 24, 2002 The Observer
Britain was accused last night of falsely claiming that al-Qaeda terrorists had built a 'biological and chemical weapons' laboratory in Afghanistan to justify the deployment of 1,700 Royal Marines to fight there.
The allegation follows a Downing Street briefing by a senior official to newspapers on Friday which claimed US forces had discovered a biological weapons laboratory in a cave in eastern Afghanistan after fighting near the city of Gardez this month.
A 'senior Whitehall source' gave detailed claims of how American soldiers had found the cave following heavy fighting for al-Qaeda positions around the village of Shah-e-Kot.
One report quoted the source as saying: 'We know from documents found in Kabul and the lab in the cave that Osama bin Laden has acquired a chemical and biological weapons capability.'
The newspapers reported that the find was one of the main reasons the Government had decided to send the Marines to Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda and Taliban forces. The claim, carried by a number of newspapers yesterday, was denied emphatically last night by Pentagon and State Department sources.
A White House spokesman, drawn into the row, said 'no evidence' had yet been uncovered in Afghanistan that Al Qaeda had succeeded in producing anthrax or other biological or chemical agents.
A Pentagon official told The Observer there was no intelligence to support claims from London that al-Qaeda was developing biological weapons in the Shah-e-Kot area. 'I don't know what they're saying in London but we have received no specific intelligence on that kind of development or capability in the Shah-e-Kot valley region - I mean a chemical or biological weapons facility,' said an official in the Army department in Washington.
The US rebuttal came as Opposition spokesmen demanded that Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon address the House of Commons to 'clarify' the claims, amid growing backbench unrest about the way in which the decision to send the marines was made.
The first of them are due to arrive in Kabul in the next few days to join US combat troops already fighting on the ground, amid concern among MPs about the 'open ended' nature of their mission.
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell, who called for Hoon to make a statement, said: 'The House will feel, with some justification, that this claim was leaked to the media to justify the deployment after the event.
'There are too many unanswered questions about the military justification for this deployment and growing unease. Mr Hoon owes the House a clarification."
The Tories demanded that Downing Street stick strictly to the truth in its efforts to promote the military campaign. 'Spinning doesn't work for the NHS, so why do they think it is going to work for the war on terrorism?' said Bernard Jenkin, Shadow Defence Secretary.
Doubts about the story surfaced almost immediately after it was published, as US officials first expressed bafflement and then denied any such lab had been found. Some speculating to the New York Times that the story might have been planted to justify the deployment of the marines. British intelligence, Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office sources denied any knowledge of the lab.
The only evidence of a biological weapons laboratory was the discovery last December of an abandoned, half-finished building containing medical equipment, near the Taliban's former power base of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. This had been reported previously.
The Observer has established that the source of the claims was an off-the-record briefing by Tony Blair's senior foreign policy adviser, David Manning.
A Downing Street spokesman said it 'stuck by the thrust of the story' - that it had evidence al-Qaeda was 'interested' in acquiring such weapons. But Manning had 'not actually told' reporters a cave lab had been discovered.
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,673171,00.html
Palm Beach Post Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - The United States has deported in the past two years dozens of young Israelis who posed as art students and visited sensitive federal facilities, federal officials said Tuesday.
The Israeli visits came under renewed attention after a French Internet site posted a secret draft report by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency that concluded there "may well be an organized intelligence gathering activity" dating back at least two years.
The report states that the Israelis had focused on the South, especially Florida, over a period of two years. The visitors typically knocked on the doors of agencies or the homes of federal agents offering to sell artwork.
The artwork had been made in China, the report said.
In December 2000, for example, two Israelis knocked on the door at the residence of a DEA special agent in the Atlanta area and offered to sell artwork. The agent grew suspicious later after seeing the exact same items for sale in a kiosk at the Mall of Georgia.
Moreover, the report said the visitors had recently served in the Israeli military, the majority in intelligence, electronic signal intercept or explosive ordnance units.
Federal law enforcement officials confirmed the arrest and deportations of young Israelis over the past two years, but they said they were removed for routine visa violations, not spying.
"The Department of Justice has no information to substantiate the report about Israeli art students being involved in espionage," said Susan Dryden, a spokesperson at the Justice Department.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Yaffa Ben-Ari told the Associated Press that the spy report was "nonsense." And Irit Stopper, another spokeswoman, said that some Israelis had been deported for posing as art students and working without permits but not for espionage.
The 60-page DEA report that raised suspicions about the young Israeli visitors was first made public late last year by the Fox News Network.
Attorney General John Ashcroft declined to discuss the report during a news briefing.
Original publishing date: 3-6-02 juliam@coxnews.com
By Jeff Shields
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/broward/search/sfl- cspies07mar07.story
South Florida Sun-Sentinel - 11Mar02
The United States deported dozens of Israelis on immigration violations last year, including at least five from an art school in South Florida, after reports they were posing as students to gain access to government buildings, federal officials said Wednesday.
Israelis in South Florida, Dallas and San Diego were sent home by the Immigration and Naturalization Service last year on visa violations, an INS spokesman in Washington said. But authorities were first drawn to them based on a suspicion that they were spying, according to one federal law enforcement agency.
Thomas Hinojosa of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said the DEA compiled an internal report after several branch offices throughout the country reported "suspicious activities'' by individuals presenting themselves as Israeli art students. The Israelis were allegedly trying to gain access to DEA facilities, Hinojosa said.
The DEA report said the youths' actions "may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity," the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
The DEA forwarded the report to the "appropriate federal law enforcement authorities,'' Hinojosa said.
The INS deported the individuals a short time later, both before and after Sept. 11, when security was tightened.
INS spokesman Russ Bergeron said about 20 Israelis from San Diego, an undetermined number from Dallas, and five or six from South Florida were deported.
"The general modus operandi was that these individuals were in major metropolitan areas selling art at street locations. In some instances they were near federal buildings. In some instances they were not,'' Bergeron said.
All were deported for either overstaying their visas or working illegally while on a student visa, he said.
Rumors about the students have circulated since March 2001.The story gained momentum this week when a French Internet site, Intelligence Online, reported the United States had broken up a massive Israeli spy ring.
None were charged with espionage, and Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden said.
The Israelis in South Florida were affiliated with Universal Art, which lists addresses in South Miami and Sunrise, according to Rodney Germain, the INS spokesman in Miami.
On Wednesday there was no sign of any company called Universal Art Inc., at 10873 NW 52nd St. in Sunrise. The address listed in Florida incorporation documents came back to a light industrial complex next to the Sawgrass Expressway and south of Commercial Boulevard. No one answered the door, and several occupants had never heard of the company.
The company's officers, Yitzchak Shish and Chava Sagi, are not listed. They were not among those who were deported, Germain said. ___
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/broward/search/sfl- cspies07mar07.story
South Florida Sun-Sentinel Originally Published 3-7-02
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/forget.html
The suggestion of an Israeli connection to the events surrounding 9/11 did not spring, full blown, like Minerva from the head of Zeus. It had been hovering in the background, implied in odd accounts such as the one about the group of Israelis picked by the FBI after they were spotted in Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, laughing and giving each other high-fives as the World Trade Center burned on the other side of the river. In an astonishing story in the Bergen Record, we learn that 5 men described as "Israeli tourists," were picked up 8 hours after the WTC attack, "carrying maps linking them to the blasts." "...[S]ources close to the investigation said they found other evidence linking the men to the bombing plot. 'There are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted,' the source said. 'It looked like they're hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.'" According to this account, the 5 "tourists" had been picked up by local police after receiving the following alert from the FBI:
"Vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack. White, 2000 Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration with 'Urban Moving Systems' sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center. Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170583.html
http://haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=77744
By Larry Chin Online Journal Contributing Editor
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Chin030602/chin030602.html
March 6, 2002—After the fall of the Soviet Union, Argentine oil company Bridas, led by its ambitious chairman, Carlos Bulgheroni, became the first company to exploit the oil fields of Turkmenistan and propose a pipeline through neighboring Afghanistan. A powerful US-backed consortium intent on building its own pipeline through the same Afghan corridor would oppose Bridas' project.
Upon successfully negotiating leases to explore in Turkmenistan, Bridas was awarded exploration contracts for the Keimar block near the Caspian Sea, and the Yashlar block near the Afghanistan border. By March 1995, Bulgheroni had accords with Turkmenistan and Pakistan granting Bridas construction rights for a pipeline into Afghanistan, pending negotiations with the civil war-torn country.
The following year, after extensive meetings with warlords throughout Afghanistan, Bridas had a 30-year agreement with the Rabbani regime to build and operate an 875-mile gas pipeline across Afghanistan.
Bulgheroni believed that his pipeline would promote peace as well as material wealth in the region. He approached other companies, including Unocal and its then-CEO, Roger Beach, to join an international consortium.
But Unocal was not interested in a partnership. The United States government, its affiliated transnational oil and construction companies, and the ruling elite of the West had coveted the same oil and gas transit route for years.
A trans-Afghanistan pipeline was not simply a business matter, but a key component of a broader geo-strategic agenda: total military and economic control of Eurasia (the Middle East and former Soviet Central Asian republics). Zbigniew Brezezinski describes this region in his book "The Grand Chessboard- American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives" as "the center of world power." Capturing the region's oil wealth, and carving out territory in order to build a network of transit routes, was a primary objective of US military interventions throughout the 1990s in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Caspian Sea.
As of 1992, 11 western oil companies controlled more than 50 percent of all oil investments in the Caspian Basin, including Unocal, Amoco, Atlantic Richfield, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Pennzoil, Texaco, Phillips and British Petroleum.
In "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" (a definitive work that is a primary source for this report), Ahmed Rashid wrote, "US oil companies who had spearheaded the first US forays into the region wanted a greater say in US policy making."
Business and policy planning groups active in Central Asia, such as the Foreign Oil Companies Group operated with the full support of the US State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA and the Department of Energy and Commerce.
Among the most active operatives for US efforts: Brezezinski (a consultant to Amoco, and architect of the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1970s), Henry Kissinger (advisor to Unocal), and Alexander Haig (a lobbyist for Turkmenistan), and Dick Cheney (Halliburton, US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce).
Unocal's Central Asia envoys consisted of former US defense and intelligence officials. Robert Oakley, the former US ambassador to Pakistan, was a "counter-terrorism" specialist for the Reagan administration who armed and trained the mujahadeen during the war against the Soviets in the 1980s. He was an Iran-Contra conspirator charged by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh as a key figure involved in arms shipments to Iran.
Richard Armitage, the current Deputy Defense Secretary, was another Iran-Contra player in Unocal's employ. A former Navy SEAL, covert operative in Laos, director with the Carlyle Group, Armitage is allegedly deeply linked to terrorist and criminal networks in the Middle East, and the new independent states of the former Soviet Union (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrghistan).
Armitage was no stranger to pipelines. As a member of the Burma/Myanmar Forum, a group that received major funding from Unocal, Armitage was implicated in a lawsuit filed by Burmese villagers who suffered human rights abuses during the construction of a Unocal pipeline. (Halliburton, under Dick Cheney, performed contract work on the same Burmese project.)
Much to Bridas' dismay, Unocal went directly to regional leaders with its own proposal. Unocal formed its own competing US-led, Washington-sponsored consortium that included Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil, aligned with Saudi Prince Abdullah and King Fahd. Other partners included Russia's Gazprom and Turkmenistan's state-owned Turkmenrozgas.
John Imle, president of Unocal (and member of the US- Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce with Armitage, Cheney, Brezezinski and other ubiquitous figures), lobbied Turkmenistan's president Niyazov and prime minister Bhutto of Pakistan, offering a Unocal pipeline following the same route as Bridas.'
Dazzled by the prospect of an alliance with the US, Niyazov asked Bridas to renegotiate its past contract and blocked Bridas' exports from Keimar field. Bridas responded by filing three cases with the International Chamber of Commerce against Turkmenistan for breach of contract. (Bridas won.) Bridas also filed a lawsuit in Texas charging Unocal with civil conspiracy and "tortuous interference with business relations." While its officers were negotiating with Pakistani and Turkmen oil and gas officials, Bridas claimed that Unocal had stolen its idea, and coerced the Turkmen government into blocking Bridas from Keimir field. (The suit was dismissed in 1998 by Judge Brady G. Elliott, a Republican, who claimed that any dispute between Unocal and Bridas was governed by the laws of Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, rather than Texas law.)
In October 1995, with neither company in a winning position, Bulgheroni and Imle accompanied Niyazov to the opening of the UN General Assembly. There, Niyazov awarded Unocal with a contract for a 1,050-mile oil pipeline from Dauletabad through Afghanistan. Bulgheroni was shocked. At the announcement ceremony, Unocal consultant Henry Kissinger said that the deal looked like "the triumph of hope over experience."
Later, Unocal's consortium, CentGas, would secure another contract for a companion 918-mile natural gas pipeline that would connect to a tanker loading port in Pakistan on the coast of the Arabian Sea.
Although Unocal had agreements with the governments on either end of the proposed route, Bridas still had the contract with Afghanistan.
The problem was resolved via the CIA and Pakistani ISI-backed Taliban. Following a visit to Kandahar by US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Robin Raphael in the fall of 1996, the Taliban entered Kabul and sent the Rabbani government packing.
Bridas' agreement with Rabbani would have to be renegotiated.
According to Ahmed Rashid, "Unocal's real influence with the Taliban was that their project carried the possibility of US recognition, which the Taliban were desperately anxious to secure."
Unocal wasted no time greasing the palms of the Taliban. It offered humanitarian aid to Afghan warlords who would form a council to supervise the pipeline project. It provided a new mobile phone network between Kabul and Kandahar. Unocal also promised to help rebuild Kandahar, and donated $9,000 to the University of Nebraska's Center for Afghan Studies. The US State Department, through its aid organization USAID, contributed significant education funding for Taliban. In the spring of 1996, Unocal executives flew Uzbek leader General Abdul Rashid Dostum to Dallas to discuss pipeline passage through his northern (Northern Alliance-controlled) territories.
Bridas countered by forming an alliance with Ningarcho, a Saudi company closely aligned with Prince Turki el-Faisal, the Saudi intelligence chief. Turki was a mentor to Osama bin Laden, the ally of the Taliban who was publicly feuding with the Saudi royal family. As a gesture for Bridas, Prince Turki provided the Taliban with communications equipment and a fleet of pickup trucks. Now Bridas proposed two consortiums, one to build the Afghanistan portion, and another to take care of both ends of the line. By November 1996, Bridas claimed that it had an agreement signed by the Taliban and Dostum—trumping Unocal.
The competition between Unocal and Bridas, as described by Rashid, "began to reflect the competition within the Saudi Royal family."
In 1997, Taliban officials traveled twice to Washington, D.C. and Buenos Aires to be wined and dined by Unocal and Bridas. No agreements were signed.
It appeared to Unocal that the Taliban was balking. In addition to royalties, the Taliban demanded funding for infrastructure projects, including roads and power plants. The Taliban also announced plans to revive the Afghan National Oil Company, which had been abolished by the Soviet regime in the late 1970s.
Osama bin Laden (who issued his fatwa against the West in 1998) advised the Taliban to sign with Bridas. In addition to offering the Taliban a higher bid, Bridas proposed an open pipeline accessible to warlords and local users. Unocal's pipeline was closed—for export purposes only. Bridas' plan also did not require outside financing, while Unocal's required a loan from the western financial institutions (the World Bank), which in turn would leave Afghanistan vulnerable to demands from western governments.
Bridas' approach to business was more to the Taliban's liking. Where Bulgheroni and Bridas' engineers would take the time to "sip tea with Afghan tribesmen," Unocal's American executives issued top-down edicts from corporate headquarters and the US Embassy (including a demand to open talks with the CIA-backed Northern Alliance).
While seemingly well received within Afghanistan, Bridas' problems with Turkmenistan (which they blamed on Unocal and US interference) had left them cash-strapped and without a supply.
In 1997, they went searching for a major partner with the clout to break the deadlock with Turkmenistan. They found one in Amoco. Bridas sold 60 percent of its Latin American assets to Amoco. Carlos Bulgheroni and his contingent retained the remaining minority 40 percent. Facilitating the merger were other icons of transnational finance, Chase Manhattan (representing Bridas), Morgan Stanley (handling Amoco) and Arthur Andersen (facilitator of post-merger integration). Zbigniew Brezezinski was a consultant for Amoco.
(Amoco would merge with British Petroleum a year later. BP is represented by the law firm of Baker & Botts, whose principal attorney is James Baker, lifelong Bush friend, former secretary of state, and a member of the Carlyle Group.)
Recognizing the significance of the merger, a Pakistani oil company executive hinted, "If these (Central Asian) countries want a big US company involved, Amoco is far bigger than Unocal."
By 1998, while the Argentine contingent made slow progress, Unocal faced a number of new problems.
Gazprom pulled out of CentGas when Russia complained about the anti-Russian agenda of the US. This forced Unocal to expand CentGas to include Japanese and South Korean gas companies, while maintaining the dominant share with Delta.
Human rights groups began protesting Unocal's dealings with the brutal Taliban. Still riding years of Clinton bashing and scandal mongering, conservative Republicans in the US attacked the Clinton administration's Central Asia policy for its lack of clarity and "leadership."
Once again, violence would change the dynamic.
In response to the bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania (attributed to bin Laden), President Bill Clinton sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan. The administration broke off diplomatic contact with the Taliban, and UN sanctions were imposed.
Unocal withdrew from CentGas, and informed the State Department "the gas pipeline would not proceed until an internationally recognized government was in place in Afghanistan." Although Unocal continued on and off negotiations on the oil pipeline (a separate project), the lack of support from Washington hampered efforts.
Meanwhile, Bridas declared that it would not need to wait for resolution of political issues, and repeated its intention of moving forward with the Afghan gas pipeline project on its own. Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan tried to push Saudi Arabia to proceed with CentGas (Delta of Saudi Arabia was now the leader). But war and US-Taliban tension made business impossible.
For the remainder of the Clinton presidency, there would be no official US or UN recognition of Afghanistan. And no progress on the pipeline.
Then George Walker Bush took the White House.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Chin030602/chin030602.html
Unocal news release http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/99news/021699.htm
Unocal reiterates position on withdrawal from trans-Afghanistan pipeline project
El Segundo, Calif., Feb. 16, 1999 - Unocal Corporation today reiterated that it no longer has any role in developing or funding the proposed CentGas pipeline project across Afghanistan.
The company stated that it is not considering rejoining the CentGas consortium, nor has the company had any discussions with persons or entities anywhere about re-entering the project since Unocal formally withdrew from CentGas in December 1998 (See Unocal statement, Dec. 10, 1998).
Unocal issued this statement after an erroneous press report from Islamabad, Pakistan, quoted Pakistani officials who indicated that Unocal was showing an interest in rejoining the consortium.
http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/99news/021699.htm
http://www.indymedia.ie/cgi-bin/newswire.cgi?id=67
On Feb 8th in Islamabad, the US favoured Interim Leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, spoke in favour of the much discussed gas pipeline, proposed by Unocal. According to Le Monde, and El Mundo, he was previously an adviser to that company. We all wondered where the hell he popped out of.
LE MONDE 13Dec01
Hamid Karzai, a Pashtoun, named President
http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3210-7019-254716,00.html
TRANSLATION
"...Hamid Karzai, who is as comfortable discussing sitting on a carpet as in a Washinton or London "salon", has a profound knowledge of the western world. After Kabul and India, where he has studied law, he completed his learnings [apprenticeship ?] in the USA, where he acted, for a while, as a consultant for the American oil company Unocal, at the time it was considering building a pipeline in Afghanistan..."
Yoshie Furuhashi
http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/m-fem/2001/msg00455.html
American Unocal oil company has played a key role in appointment of Khamid Karzai as a leader of interim Afghanistan government, reads today's issue of Spanish Mundo newspaper.
The newspaper writes that Karzai earlier worked for the company, which since long plans to build oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea to India and Pakistan via Afghanistan.
Spanish newspaper also claims that in the 1980s Karzai cooperated with American authorities. Karzai established contacted with Americans via U.S. citizen of Afghanistani origin Zalmai Khalilzad, who is U.S. special envoy in Kabul now. In the 1990s Khalilzad also worked in Unocal, emphasizes Spanish newspaper.
Unocal is involved in development of Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli field in the Azeri Caspian sector and is among the companies ready to take part in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline construction.
The company's representatives have earlier repeatedly announced their plans to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan and further to Pakistan. However, civil war in Afghanistan did not allow the company to carry its plans into life.
ISLAMABAD, Feb 8 (Reuters) - Afghanistan's interim leader Hamid Karzai said on Friday he and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had agreed to revive a plan for a trans-Afghan gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan.
"Both sides have agreed that the construction of this pipeline will be very beneficial for both the countries as well as for the entire region," Karzai told a news conference after talks with General Musharraf. "We both have agreed on this," he said, calling the project "very essential".
Karzai was in Islamabad on his first official visit to Pakistan after his U.N.-backed interim administration took office in December, following the collapse of the Taliban government in the face of U.S.-led military strikes.
Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov, seeking new export outlets for his country's abundant gas reserves, said on Friday he hoped the fragile peace in Afghanistan would allow work to resume on the major regional natural gas pipeline.
"Peace is finally being installed in Afghanistan. And we can now build a pipeline to Pakistan across its territory," state television quoted Niyazov as saying during a visit to eastern Turkmenistan.
A consortium led by U.S. Unocal had originally aimed to build the $1.9 billion, 1,400-km (875-mile) pipeline to run from gas-rich Turkmenistan via northern Afghanistan.
But in August 1998 Unocal halted development of the project after U.S.forces fired missiles at guerrilla camps in Afghanistan in the wake of bomb attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa.
Under the original plan, a 740-km (460-mile) stretch of the pipeline would run across northern Afghanistan.
Turkmen officials say Niyazov plans to raise the issue with Karzai in the near future.
Turkmenistan, a neutral country which steered a careful course between Afghanistan's purist Taliban movement and the opposition northern Alliance, supported U.S. strikes on its war-torn neighbour last autumn.
Niyazov has not allowed coalition warplanes to use Turkmen airbases, although his country has become a key route for humanitarian cargo supplies to northern Afghanistan.
http://www.indymedia.ie/cgi-bin/newswire.cgi?id=67
http://www.atimes.com/c-asia/CK20Ag01.html
PARIS - Under the influence of United States oil companies, the government of President George W Bush initially blocked intelligence agencies' investigations on terrorism while it bargained with the Taliban on the delivery of Osama bin Laden in exchange for political recognition and economic aid, two French intelligence analysts claim.
In the book Bin Laden, la verite interdite (Bin Laden, the forbidden truth), that was released recently, the authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) deputy director John O'Neill resigned in July in protest over the obstruction.
The authors claim that O'Neill told them that "the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it". The two claim that the US government's main objective in Afghanistan was to consolidate the position of the Taliban regime to obtain access to the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia.
They affirm that until August, the US government saw the Taliban regime "as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia" from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. Until now, says the book, "the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia have been controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change all that."
But, confronted with Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, "this rationale of energy security changed into a military one", the authors claim.
"At one moment during the negotiations, the US representatives told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs,'" Brisard said in an interview in Paris.
According to the book, the Bush administratino began to negotiate with the Taliban immediately after coming into power in February. US and Taliban diplomatic representatives met several times in Washington, Berlin and Islamabad.
To polish their image in the United States, the Taliban even employed a US expert on public relations, Laila Helms. The authors claim that Helms is also an expert in the works of US intelligence organizations, for her uncle, Richard Helms, is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The last meeting between US and Taliban representatives took place in August, five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, the analysts maintain. On that occasion, Christina Rocca, in charge of Central Asian affairs for the US government, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad.
Brisard and Dasquie have long experience in intelligence analysis. Brisard was until the late 1990s director of economic analysis and strategy for Vivendi, a French company. He also worked for French secret services, and wrote for them in 1997 a report on the now famous Al-Qaeda network, headed by bin Laden.
Dasquie is an investigative journalist and publisher of Intelligence Online, a respected newsletter on diplomacy, economic analysis and strategy, available through the Internet.
Brisard and Dasquie draw a portrait of the closest aides to Bush, linking them to the oil business. Bush's family has a strong oil background, as do some of his top aides. From Vice President Dick Cheney, through the director of the National Security Council Condoleezza Rice, to the ministers of commerce and energy, Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham, all have for long worked for US oil companies.
Cheney was until the end of last year president of Halliburton, a company that provides services for oil industry; Rice was between 1991 and 2000 manager for Chevron; Evans and Abraham worked for Tom Brown, another oil giant.
Besides the secret negotiations held between Washington and Kabul and the importance of the oil industry, the book takes issue with the role played by Saudi Arabia in fostering Islamic fundamentalism, in the personality of bin Laden, and with the networks that the Saudi dissident built to finance his activities.
Brisard and Dasquie contend that the US government's claim that it had been prosecuting bin Laden since 1998. "Actually," Dasquie says, "the first state to officially prosecute bin Laden was Libya, on the charges of terrorism."
"Bin Laden wanted to settle in Libya in the early 1990s, but was hindered by the government of Muammar Gaddafi," Dasquie claims. "Enraged by Libya's refusal, bin Laden organized attacks inside Libya, including assassination attempts against Gaddafi."
Dasquie singles out one group, the Islamic Fighting Group (IFG), reputedly the most powerful Libyan dissident organization, based in London, and directly linked with bin Laden. "Gaddafi even demanded Western police institutions, such as Interpol, to pursue the IFG and bin Laden, but never obtained cooperation," Dasquie says. "Until today, members of IFG openly live in London."
The book confirms earlier reports that the US government worked closely with the United Nations during the negotiations with the Taliban. "Several meetings took place this year, under the arbitration of Francesc Vendrell, personal representative of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to discuss the situation in Afghanistan," says the book. "Representatives of the US government and Russia, and the six countries that border with Afghanistan were present at these meetings," it says. "Sometimes, representatives of the Taliban also sat around the table."
These meetings, also called Six plus 2, because of the number of states (six neighbors plus the US and Russia) involved, have been confirmed by Naif Naik, former Pakistani minister for foreign affairs.
In a French television news program two weeks ago, Naik said that during a Six plus 2 meeting in Berlin in July, the discussions turned around "the formation of a government of national unity. If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid. And the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come," he added.
Naik also claimed that Tom Simons, the US representative at these meetings, openly threatened the Taliban and Pakistan. "Simons said, 'either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option'. The words Simons used were 'a military operation'," Naik claimed.
(Inter Press Service) 2001 Asia Times Online Co., Ltd. Room 6301, The Center 99 Queen's Road, Central, Hong Kong.
Camp X-Ray row threatens first British split
with US
[Why, you might ask, were these pictures - taken by military photographers - released? To ferment hatred of the USA by moslems? TG]
The Guardian Monday January 21, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,636790,00.html
The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, yesterday signalled Britain's growing unease at the treatment of more than 100 al-Qaida suspects held by American forces in Cuba when he called for them to be looked after "humanely" in accordance with international law.
The prisoners are thought to include three Britons.
"The British government's position is that prisoners - regardless of their technical status - should be treated humanely and in accordance with customary law," he said. "We have always made that clear and the Americans have said they share this view."
Prominent backbenchers seized on a set of officially sanctioned photographs taken in Camp X-Ray, the detention centre at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as evidence of humiliating treatment of the prisoners. The pictures show the prisoners, manacled hand and foot, kneeling before their guards, and wearing blacked-out goggles over their eyes and masks over their mouths and noses.
Mr Straw bowed to growing criticism yesterday by ordering British diplomats in Washington to raise the issue of the photographs with the administration, specifically requesting information on the circumstances in which the pictures were taken.
As the row threatened to snowball into the first major Anglo-American split since the attacks of September 11, Downing Street attempted to calm the atmosphere. The prime minister's official spokesman reminded critics of America that the prisoners were suspected members of a highly dangerous group.
The spokesman added that Britain would wait to hear from its own officials, who spent the weekend at the base, before pronouncing on the inmates' treatment.
The US military attempted to allay Mr Straw's
fears last night by saying that the photographs were taken as the prisoners
arrived at the base after their flight from Afghanistan. "That's not how
they're kept on a daily basis," said Major Eddie Villavicencio, of the US
southern command headquarters in Miami. "Detainees are treated quite humanely."
His remarks failed to calm a growing revolt on the Labour backbenches. The former foreign office minister Tony Lloyd said that the "shocking" pictures of the prisoners fell well below the standards which the US should uphold.
"The Geneva convention is there to provide a floor below which civilised nations shouldn't fall," Mr Lloyd told BBC1's Breakfast with Frost programme. "Britain is a civilised nation - we must insist that our allies stick by that minimum standard."
As the all-party Commons human rights group demanded a meeting with the US ambassador, William Farish, one senior minister, described the treatment of the prisoners as "monstrous". The minister said there was no basis in law for the Americans to deny the suspects their full rights under the Geneva convention by labelling them as unlawful combatants. "How can we claim that we are upholding decent values if prisoners are treated in this way?" the minister asked.
Donald Rumsfeld, the outspoken US defence secretary who alarmed British ministers last week when he said that the prisoners should not expect "country club" facili ties, strongly defended the treatment of the inmates as "humane and appropriate". He took a swipe at critics of conditions at Guantanamo when he told NBC's Meet the Press programme: "I think that the people who have been the most shrill on the subject, once they have more knowledge of the subject, will stop being so shrill."
American forces have so far transferred up to 110 prisoners to Guantanamo Bay in the past week, with several hundred more due to make the gruelling flight from Afghanistan.
A team of MI5 officers spent the weekend at the base and are thought to have questioned three Britons who, like the other prisoners, are detained in open air cages.
America's high-handed behaviour is alarming senior Whitehall officials who believe that the treatment of the inmates is undermining the efforts of the security and intelligence services to seek information from the Muslim community about suspect terrorists.
A senior well-placed official said: "That is a genuine belief across Whitehall from the moral point of view, and because it is counter-productive to humiliate people".
Another senior official described America's
handling of the prisoners as "scandalous", adding: "American politicians
are only concerned with American audiences".
Another official accused the US of breaching the standards of a civilised society, adding that Tony Blair could not say so because he wanted to "keep in" with the Americans.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,636790,00.html
Message from a physician.
American and British Government assertions that the Al Quaeda prisoners in Camp X Ray are being treated humanely are given the lie by the photographs taken by the Pentagon and published in British newspapers on 20th January.
The prisoners are bound, gagged and blindfolded, but the main point is that they are kneeling on a stony surface. If they were simply waiting to be registered, as the official spin would have it, they would have chosen to squat.
The fact that they were kneeling is prima facie evidence that they are being tortured. Anyone who does not accept this should try kneeling on a stony surface for five minutes.
By using torture, our rulers show themselves to be morally equivalent to their opponents.
for peace
Dr Richard Lawson
Congresbury, Bristol
Guardian - Saturday January 19, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4338874,00.html
Saudi Arabia's rulers are poised to throw US strategy in the Middle East into disarray by asking Washington to pull its forces out of the kingdom because they have become a "political liability".
Senior Saudi officials have privately complained that the US has "outstayed its welcome" and that the kingdom may soon request that the American presence - a product of the Gulf war - is brought to an end.
Both the White House and the US state department insisted yesterday that the military arrangement between the two countries was still working. The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said that the president, George Bush, "believes that our presence in the region has a very helpful and stabilising effect in a dangerous region".
Relations between the US and Saudi Arabia, Washington's closest Arab ally, have been severely strained since September 11. Both sides have been desperately denying for months that there is a rift.
The US is reluctant to withdraw its 4,500 troops from the Prince Sultan air base, south of Saudi's capital Riyadh, because it could be perceived as a propaganda victory for Osama bin Laden, who frequently protested at the presence of non-believers so close to the main Muslim holy sites.
But the increasingly brittle and vulnerable ruling House of Saud is nervous about an internal revolt by Bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network and other extremist militants, and has been publicly loosening its links with Washington.
The huge Prince Sultan air base played a crucial logistical role in the bombing of Afghanistan. Withdrawal would upset the military balance in the Middle East by providing a boost to the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. US planes based in Saudi regularly bomb along the Iraqi border as part of its policy of containment of Saddam.
Britain, which jointly patrols the Iraqi no-fly zone with the US, has planes based both in Saudi and Kuwait. A pull-out by Washington would switch the focus to the British air base in Kuwait, whose leaders try to avoid drawing attention to the British presence.
Two senior US state department officials have been in Saudi this week: William Burns, the assistant secretary for the near east, and Lincoln Bloomfield, the assistant secretary for political and military affairs.
The US state department insisted yesterday that at no point during Mr Bloomfield's visit, either formally or informally, had the Saudis said they wanted the US to leave.
But the US ambassador to Saudi, Robert Jordan, was quoted as saying when Mr Bloomfield arrived in the kingdom: "He is here for consultations with the Saudi government to review our presence here and to discuss what we need and what we don't need." The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, who is in Nepal, denied the Saudis wanted a withdrawal: "There has been no discussion of such an issue."
Many in the US have been upset with Saudi because not only is it Bin Laden's native country but 15 of the 19 terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks were from the kingdom. The Saudi media have reported that about 200 Saudis have been captured in Afghanistan fighting with al-Qaida and the Taliban.
The kingdom is volatile, with a stagnant economy, high unemployment, no democratic outlets and King Fahd unable to crack down on militant clerics.
Hostility to the US is widespread but that is mirrored in the US where there is a huge well of resentment that, having fought to push back Iraq in 1991 and having protected Saudi since, Riyadh refused to provide military help during the Afghan campaign.
Reflecting this, Carl Levin, who heads the US Senate armed services committee, said: "We need a base in that region, but it seems to me we should find a place that is more hospitable."
Bin Laden listed as the main justifications for the attacks on New York and Washington the presence of the US soldiers in the kingdom, US support for Israel in the conflict with the Palestinians, and the US campaign against Iraq. He said six years ago: "There is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land [of Arabia]."
The US could continue its containment of Iraq from aircraft carriers based in the Gulf. But the US air force secretary, James Roche, said a pull-out would make life awkward: "It would be difficult, unless we could replicate the air operations centre somewhere else."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4338874,00.html
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/kt_op/200201/t2002011116505048110.htm
As military operations in Afghanistan are winding down, it is well to keep in mind President George W. Bush's injunction that they are only the first battles of a long war.
An important step has been taken toward the goals of breaking the nexus between governments and the terrorist groups they support or tolerate, discrediting Islamic fundamentalism so that moderates in the Islamic world can reclaim their religion from the fanatics and placing the fight against terrorism within the context of the geopolitical threat of Saddam Hussein's Iraq to regional stability and to American friends and interests in the region. But much more needs to be done.
Were we to flinch, the success in Afghanistan would be interpreted in time as taking on the weakest and most remote of the terrorist centers while we recoiled from unraveling terrorism in countries more central to the problem.
Three interrelated courses of action are available:
(a) To rely primarily on diplomacy and coalition building on the theory that the fate of the Taliban will teach the appropriate lessons.
(b) To insist on a number of specific corrective steps in countries with known training camps or terrorist headquarters, such as Somalia or Yemen, or those engaged in dangerous programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, such as Iraq, and to take military action if these steps are rejected.
(c) To focus on the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq in order to change the regional dynamics by showing America's determination to defend regional stability, its interests and its friends. (This would also send a strong message to other rogue states.)
Sole reliance on diplomacy is the preferred course of some members of the coalition, which claim that the remaining tasks can be accomplished by consultation and the cooperation of intelligence and security services around the world. But to rely solely on diplomacy would be to repeat the mistake with which the United States hamstrung itself in every war of the past half-century. Because it treated military operations and diplomacy as separate and sequential, the United States stopped military operations in Korea as soon as our adversaries moved to the conference table; it ended the bombing of North Vietnam as an entrance price to the Paris talks; it stopped military operations in the Gulf after the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.
In each case, the ending of military pressure produced diplomatic stalemate. The Korean armistice negotiations consumed two years during which America suffered as many casualties as in the entire combat phase; an even more intractable stalemate developed in the Vietnam negotiations; and in the Gulf, Saddam Hussein used the Republican Guard divisions preserved by the armistice to restore control over his territory and to dismantle systematically the inspection provisions of the armistice agreement.
Anti-terrorism policy is empty if it is not backed by the threat of force [death].
Intellectual opponents of military action as well as its likely targets will procrastinate or agree to token or symbolic remedies only. Ironically, governments on whose territory terrorists are tolerated will find it especially difficult to cooperate unless the consequences of failing to do so are made more risky than their tacit bargain with the terrorists.
Phase II of the anti-terrorism campaign must therefore involve a specific set of demands geared to a precise timetable supported by credible coercive power. These should be put forward as soon as possible as a framework for Phase II. And time is of the essence. Phase II must begin while the memory of the attack on the United States is still vivid and American-deployed forces are available to back up the diplomacy.
Nor should Phase II be confused with the pacification of Afghanistan. The American strategic objective was to destroy the terrorist network; that has been largely accomplished. Pacification of the entire country has never been achieved by foreigners and cannot be the objective of the American military effort. The United States should be generous with economic and development assistance. But the strategic goal of Phase II should be the destruction of the global terrorist network, to prevent its reappearance in Afghanistan, but not to be drawn into Afghan civil strife.
Somalia and Yemen are often mentioned as possible targets for a Phase II campaign. That decision should depend on the ability to identify targets against which local governments are able to act and on the suitability of American forces to accomplish this task if the local governments cannot or will not. And given these limitations, the United States will have to decide whether action against them is strategically productive.
All this raises the unavoidable challenge posed by Iraq. The issue is not whether Iraq was involved in the terrorist attack on the United States, though no doubt there was some intelligence contact between Iraqi intelligence and one of the chief plotters. The challenge of Iraq is essentially geopolitical. Iraq's policy is implacably hostile to the United States and to certain neighboring countries. It possesses growing stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, which Saddam has used in the war against Iran and on his own population. It is working to develop a nuclear capability. Saddam breached his commitment to the United Nations by evicting the international inspectors he had accepted on his territory as part of the armistice agreement ending the Gulf War. There is no possibility of a negotiation between Washington and Baghdad and no basis for trusting Iraq's promises to the international community.
If these capabilities remain intact, they could in time be used for terrorist goals or by Saddam in the midst of some new regional or international upheaval. And if Saddam's regime survives both the Gulf War and the anti-terrorism campaign, this fact alone will elevate him to a potentially overwhelming menace.
From a long-range point of view, the greatest opportunity of Phase II is to return Iraq to a responsible role in the region. No comparable objective could have a similar impact. Were Iraq governed by a group representing no threat to its neighbors and willing to abandon its weapons of mass destruction, the stability of the region would be immeasurably enhanced.
The remaining regimes flirting with terrorist fundamentalism or acquiescing in its exactions would be driven to shut down their support of terrorism.
At a minimum, we should insist on a U.N. inspection system to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction with an unlimited right of inspection and freedom of movement for the inspectors. But no such system exists on paper, and the effort to install it may be identical with that required to overthrow Saddam. Above all, given the ease of producing biological and chemical weapons, inspection must be extremely intrusive, and experience shows that no inspection can withstand indefinitely the opposition of a determined host government.
But if the overthrow of Saddam is to be seriously considered, three prerequisites must be met: (a) development of a military plan that is quick and decisive, (b) some prior agreement on what kind of structure is to replace Saddam and (c) the support or acquiescence of key countries needed for implementation of the military plan.
A military operation against Saddam cannot be long drawn out. If it is, the battle may turn into a struggle of Islam against the West. It would also enable Saddam to try to involve Israel by launching attacks on it - perhaps using chemical and biological weapons - in the process sowing confusion within the Muslim world. A long war extending to six months and beyond would also make it more difficult to keep allies and countries like Russia and China from dissociating formally from what they are unlikely to join but even more unlikely to oppose.
Before proceeding to confrontation with Iraq, the Bush administration will therefore wish to examine with great care the military strategy that is implied. Forces of the magnitude of the Gulf War of a decade ago are unlikely to be needed. At the same time, it would be dangerous to rely on a combination of U.S. air power and indigenous opposition forces alone. To be sure, the contemporary precision weaponry was not available in the existing quantities during the Gulf War. And the no-fly zones will make Iraqi reinforcements difficult. They could be strengthened by being turned into no-movement zones proscribing the movement of particular categories of weapons.
Still, we cannot stake American national security entirely, or even largely, on local opposition forces that do not yet exist and whose combat capabilities are untested. Perhaps Iraqi forces would collapse at the first confrontation, as some argue. But the likelihood of this happening is greatly increased if it is clear that American military power in overwhelming force stands immediately behind the local forces.
A second prerequisite for a military campaign against Iraq is to define the political outcome. Local opposition would in all likelihood be sustained by the Kurdish minority in the north and the Shiite minority in the south. But if we are to enlist the Sunni majority that now dominates Iraq in the overthrow of Saddam, we need to make clear that the disintegration of Iraq is not the goal of American policy. This is all the more important since a military operation in Iraq would require the support of Turkey and the acquiescence of Saudi Arabia. Neither of these is likely to cooperate if they foresee an independent Kurdish state in the north and a Shiite republic in the south as the probable outcome. A Kurdish state would inflame the Kurdish minority in Turkey and a Shiite state in the south would threaten the Dharan region in Saudi Arabia and might give Iran a new base to seek to dominate the Gulf. A federal structure for a unified Iraq would be a way to deal with this issue.
Creating an appropriate coalition for such an effort and finding bases for the necessary American deployment will be difficult. Phase II is likely to separate the members of the coalition that joined to achieve a veto over American actions from those willing to pursue an implacable strategy.
Nevertheless, the skillful diplomacy that shaped the first phase of the anti-terrorism campaign would have much to build on. Saddam has no friends in the Gulf region. Britain will not easily abandon the pivotal role based on its special relationship with the United States that it has earned for itself in the evolution of the crisis. Nor will Germany move into active
opposition to the United States - especially in an election year - even if its support will be more equivocal than heretofore. The same is true of Russia, China and Japan. A determined American policy thus has more latitude than is generally assumed.
But it will be far more difficult than Phase I. Local resistance - especially in Iraq - will be more determined and ruthless. Domestic opposition will mount in many countries. American public opinion will be crucial in sustaining such a course. It will need to be shaped by the same kind of decisive and subtle leadership by which President Bush unified the country for the first phase of the crisis.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/kt_op/200201/t2002011116505048110.htm
http://www.copvcia.com/stories/dec_2001/portland.html
On November 28th an estimated 1,000 people came from as far away as Seattle and San Francisco to Portland State University to see FTW Publisher/Editor Mike Ruppert give a 2 ½ hour lecture and documentary presentation on the events surrounding the September 11th attacks and their aftermath. Starting with an offer of $1,000 to anyone who could show that any of the sources he cited were not authentic or misrepresented, Ruppert launched into an display of more than 40 visual exhibits showing government complicity in and foreknowledge of the attacks.
The event was organized by the campus newspaper The Rear Guard and its editor Dimitris Desyllas. 'I never expected that we would have this kind of turnout', Desyllas said. 'But it is obvious that the public has very deep concerns about what we are being told and what the government is doing. We eventually brought in 860 chairs and there were people all around the walls and on the floor.' One of the volunteer videographers at the event was a Native American spiritual teacher of the Dakota Sioux nation, Skip Mahawk. Mahawk, then with the 101st Airborne Division, won the Congressional Medal of Honor at the legendary 1969 Vietnam War battle known as Hamburger Hill. Mahawk refused to accept the decoration.
Ruppert's lecture was full of documentary evidence. After pointing out ' among other things ' that the Chief of Pakistani intelligence (approved for his position by the CIA) ordered a $100,000 wire transfer to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta; that the Bush family had business dealings with the bin Laden family through the Carlyle Group, that the U.S. and British governments had extensive military deployments already in the area before the attacks, and that the Bush administration had ordered the FBI to stop investigating two relatives of Osama bin Laden living near CIA headquarters this January, Ruppert launched into the centerpiece of the lecture which was a visual presentation of his timeline of events around September 11th - which left some members of the audience in tears.
See: http://www.copvcia.com/stories/nov_2001/lucy.html
Special attention was also paid to a newly resurrected Unocal pipeline to transport oil and natural gas from the Central Asian republics to the Pakistani coast for sale to China and Japan. Henry Kissinger is on both ends of that deal.
Audience reaction and anger was strongest as Ruppert presented selected quotes from 'The Grand Chessboard,' a 1997 book by former Carter National Security Advisor and member of the Trilateral Commission, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Those quotes - along with maps of Central Asia - indicated clearly that the current war had been in the planning stages for at least four years. Two particular quotes from Brzezinski indicating the need for a Pearl Harbor-like attack evoked boos and hisses for the intelligence expert and professor who also served in the Reagan Administration.
Ruppert closed the lecture with an analysis of the assault on American civil liberties since September 11th in the form of the so-called PATRIOT Act and several unilateral decisions made by President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft which have effectively nullified three amendments to the Bill of Rights and taken away part of another. He also showed documentary evidence from Congress supporting his claim that the Bush administration was going to loot the Social Security Trust Fund.
The audience responded to the lecture with a two minute standing ovation.
-- Mike Ruppert's website and information on his subscriber-based newsletter 'From The Wilderness' is at http://www.copvcia.com Anyone interested in arranging a 2002 lecture appearance can obtain additional information by contacting Andrea Shepherd at 818-788-8791 or by emailing service@copvcia.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4311541,00.html
Things fall apart, as Chinua Achebe put it, in times of great despair. The American nightmare that began with the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has, like an earthquake, been followed by jolt after jolt of disruption and fear. In the intervening three months, yet another airplane crashed, this time into a residential section of New York City. Anthrax contamination succeeded in closing, for varying lengths of time, all three branches of government. From the tabloids to The New York Times, major media outlets have had their centers of operation evacuated repeatedly. The United States Postal Service is tied in knots. Hundreds of anthrax hoaxes have stretched law enforcement beyond all capacity. Soldiers guard all our public buildings.
Around four thousand Americans have died in planes, collapsing buildings or of anthrax toxin since that morning in September; tens of thousands more have lost their jobs. Some 5000 Arab residents between the ages of 18 and 33 have been summoned for interrogation by the FBI. And twenty million resident aliens live suddenly subject to the exceedingly broad terms of a new martial law. Even while we try follow the president's advice to pick ourselves up in time for the Christmas shopping season, punchdrunk and giddily committed to soldiering on as before, we know that the economic and emotional devastation of these events has only begun to register.
As the enormity of the destruction settles in and becomes less dreamlike, more waking catastrophe, American society begins to face those long-term tests that inevitably come after the shock and horror of so much loss. We face the test of keeping the unity that visited us in that first moment of sheer chaos. We face the test of maintaining our dignity and civility in a time of fear and disorder. Above all, we face the test of preserving the rights and freedoms in our Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
Few in the United States question the necessity for unusual civil measures in keeping with the current state of emergency. But a number of the Bush Administration's new laws, orders and policies are deservedly controversial: the disregard for international treaties and conventions; strict controls on media reports about the war; secret surveillance and searches of citizens* computers; widespread ethnic profiling; indefinite detention of non-citizens; offers of expedited American citizenship to those who provide evidence about terrorists; and military tribunals with the power to try enemies in secret, without application of the usual laws of evidence, without right of appeal, yet with the ability to impose the death penalty. Opportunity for legislative or other public discussion of these measures has been largely eclipsed by the rapidity with which most of them have been pushed into effect. This speed, one must accede, is in large part an exigency of war. It is perhaps also because Mr. Bush has always preferred operating in a rather starkly corporate style. In any event, the president has attempted to enlarge the power of the executive to an unprecedented extent, while limiting both Congressional input as well as the check of the judiciary.
Overall, we face one of the more dramatic Constitutional crises in United States history. First, while national security mandates some fair degree of restraint, blanket control of information is in tension with the Constitution's expectation that freedom of a diverse and opinionated press will moderate the tyrannical tendencies of power. We need to have some inkling of what is happening on the battlefield in our name. On the domestic front, moreover, the First Amendment's protection of free speech, is eroded if even peaceful dissent becomes casually categorized as dangerous or unpatriotic, as it has sometimes been in recent weeks. This concern is heightened by the fact that the war has been framed as one against "terror" - against unruly if deadly emotionalism - rather than as a war against specific bodies, specific land, specific resources.
A war against terrorism is a war of the mind, so broadly defined that the enemy becomes anybody who makes us afraid. Indeed what is conspicuous about American public discourse right now is how hard it is to talk about facts rather than fear.
In a struggle that is coloured by a degree of social panic, we must be very careful not to allow human rights to be cast as an indulgence. There is always a certain hypnosis to the language of war -the poetry of the Pentagon a friend calls it - in which war means peace, and peace-mongering invites war. In this somewhat inverted system of reference, the bleeding heart does not beat within the corpus of law but rather in the bosom of those whose craven sympathies amount to naive and treacherous self-delusion. Everywhere one hears what, if taken literally, amounts to a death knell for the American dream: rights must be tossed out the window because "the constitution is not a suicide pact".
But accepting rational reasons to be afraid, the unalloyed ideology of efficiency has not only chilled free expression, but left us poised at the gateway of an even more fearsome world in which the "comfort" and convenience of high-tech totalitarianism gleam temptingly; a world in which our American-ness endures only with hands up! so that our fingerprints can be scanned, and our nationalized-identity scrutinised for signs of suspicious behaviour.
This brings me to the second aspect of our Constitutional crisis - that is, the encroachment of our historical freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. The establishment of the new Office of Homeland Security and the passage of the so-called USA Patriot Act has brought into being an unprecedented merger between the functions of intelligence agencies and law enforcement. What this means might be clearer if we used the more straightforward term for intelligence - that is, spying. Law enforcement agents can now spy on us, "destabilizing" citizens not just non-citizens.They can gather information with few checks or balances from the judiciary.
Morton Halperin, a defense expert who worked with the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger, was quoted, in The New Yorker magazine, worrying that if a government intelligence agency thinks you're under the control of a foreign government, "they can wiretap you and never tell you, search your house and never tell you, break into your home, copy your hard drive, and never tell you that they've done it." Moreover, says Halperin, upon whose own phone Kissinger placed a tap, "Historically, the government has often believed that anyone who is protesting government policy is doing it at the behest of a foreign government and opened counterintelligence investigations of them."
This expansion of domestic spying highlights the distinction between punishing what has already occurred and preventing what might happen in the future. In a very rough sense, agencies like the F.B.I. have been concerned with catching criminals who have already done their dirty work, while agencies like the CIA have been involved in predicting or manipulating future outcomes - activities of prior restraint, in other words, from which the Constitution generally protects citizens.
The third and most distressing area of Constitutional concern has been Mr Bush's issuance of an executive order setting up military tribunals that would deprive even long-time resident aliens of the right to due process of law. The elements of the new order are as straightforward as trains running on time. The President would have the military try non-citizens suspected of terrorism in closed tribunals rather than courts.
No requirement of public charges, adequacy of counsel, usual rules of evidence, nor proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The cases would be presented before unspecified judges, with rulings based on the accusations of unidentified witnesses. The tribunals would have the power to execute anyone so convicted, with no right of appeal. According to polls conducted by National Public Radio, The Washington Post, and ABC News, approximately 65% of Americans wholeheartedly endorse such measures.
"Foreign terrorists who commit war crimes against the United States, in my judgment, are not entitled to and do not deserve the protections of the American Constitution," says Attorney General John Ashcroft in defense of tribunals. There are a number of aspects of that statement that ought to worry us. The reasoning is alarmingly circular in Ashcroft's characterization of suspects who have not yet been convicted as "terrorists." It presumes guilt before adjudication. Our system of innocent-until-proven-guilty is hardly foolproof, but does provide an essential, base-line bulwark against the furious thirst for quick vengeance, the carelessly deadly mistake - albeit in the name of self-protection.
It is worrisome, too, when the highest prosecutor in the land declares that war criminals do not "deserve" basic constitutional protections. We confer due process not because putative criminals are "deserving" recipients of rights-as-reward. Rights are not "earned" in this way. What makes rights rights is that they ritualize the importance of solid, impartial and public consensus before we take life or liberty from anyone, particularly those whom we fear. We ritualize this process to make sure we don't allow the grief of great tragedies to blind us with mob fury, inflamed judgments and uninformed reasoning. In any event, Bush*s new order bypasses not only the American Constitution but the laws of most other democratic nations. It exceeds the accepted conventions of most military courts. (I say all this provisionally, given that the Bush administration is urging the enactment of similar anti-terrorism measures in Britain, Russia, and that troublesome holdout, the European Union).
As time has passed since the order was published, a number of popular defenses of tribunals have emerged: we should trust our president, we should have faith in our government, we are in a new world facing new kinds of enemies who have access to new weapons of mass destruction. Assuming all this, we must wonder if this administration also questions whether citizens who are thought to have committed heinous crimes "deserve" the protections of American citizenship. The terrorist who mailed "aerosolised" anthrax spores to various Senate offices is, according to the FBI, probably a lone American microbiologist. Although we have not yet rounded up thousands of microbiologists for questioning by the FBI, I wonder if the government will be hauling them before tribunals - for if this is a war without national borders, the panicked logic of secret trials will surely expand domestically rather than contract. A friend observes wryly that if reasoning behind the order is that the perpetrators of mass death must be summarily executed, then there are some CEOs in the tobacco industry who ought to be trembling in their boots. Another friend who works with questions of reproductive choice notes more grimly that that is exactly the reasoning used by those who assault and murder abortion doctors.
"There are situations when you do need to presume guilt over innocence", one citizen from Chattanooga told The New York Times. The conservative talk show host Mike Reagan leads the pack in such boundlessly-presumed guilt by warning that you might think the guy living next door is the most wonderful person in the world, you see him playing with his children, but in fact "he might be part of a sleeper cell that wants to blow you away." We forget, perhaps, that J. Edgar Hoover justified sabotaging Martin Luther King and the "dangerous suspects" of that era with similar sentiment.
In addition to the paranoia generated, the importance of the right to adequate counsel has been degraded. Attorney General Ashcroft's stated policies include allowing federal officials to listen in on conversations between suspected terrorists and their lawyers. And President Bush's military tribunals would not recognise the right of defendants to choose their own lawyers. Again, there has been very little public opposition to such measures. Rather, one hears many glib, racialised references to OJ Simpson - who, last anyone heard, was still a citizen: "You wouldn't want Osama Bin Laden to have OJ's lawyer, or they'd end up playing golf together in Florida."
The tribunals also challenge the right to a speedy, public and impartial trial. More than 1000 immigrants have been arrested and held, approximately 800 with no disclosure of identities or location or charges against them. This is "frighteningly close to the practice of disappearing people in Latin America," according to Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies.
Finally, there has been an ominous amount of public vilification of the constitutional right against self-incrimination. Such a right is, in essence, a proscription against the literal arm-twisting and leg pulling that might otherwise be necessary to physically compel someone to testify when they do not want to. It is perhaps a rather too-subtly-worded limitation of the use of torture.
While not yet the direct subject of official sanction, torture has suddenly gained remarkable legitimacy. Callers to radio programs say that we don't always have the "luxury of following all the rules"; that given recent events, people are *more understanding" of the necessity for a little behind-the-scenes roughing up. The unanimity of international conventions against torture notwithstanding, one hears authoritative voices - for example, Robert Litt, a former Justice Department official - arguing that while torture is not "authorized", perhaps it could be used in "emergencies," as long as the person who tortures then presents himself to "take the consequences".
Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz has suggested the use of "torture warrants" limited, he insists, to cases where time is of the essence. Most alarming of all, a recent CNN poll revealed that 45% of Americans would not object to torturing someone if it would provide information about terrorism. While fully acknowledging the stakes of this new war, I worry that this attitude of lawless righteousness is one that has been practiced in oppressed communities for years. It is a habit that has produced cynicism, riots and bloodshed. The always-urgently-felt convenience of torture has left us with civic calamities ranging from Abner Louima--a Haitian immigrant whom two New York City police officers beat and sodomized with a broom handle because they mistook him for someone involved in a barroom brawl-- to Jacobo Timerman in Argentina to Alexander Solzenizhen in the Soviet Union--all victims of physical force and mental manipulation, all people who refused to speak or didn't speak the words their inquisitors wanted to hear, but who were 'known' to know something. In such times and places, the devastation has been profound. People know nothing so they suspect everything. Deaths are never just accidental. Every human catastrophe is also a mystery and mysteries create ghosts, hauntings, "blowback", and ultimately new forms of terror. The problem with this kind of 'preventive' measure is that we are not mindreaders. Even with sodium pentathol, whose use some have suggested recently, we don't and we can't know every last thought of those who refuse to speak.
Torture is an investment in the right to be all-knowing, in the certitude of what appears "obvious." It is the essence of totalitarianism. Those who justify it with confident proclamations of "I have nothing to hide, why should they," overlap substantially with the class of those who have never been the persistent object of suspect profiling, never been harrassed, never been stigmatized or generalized or feared just for the way they look.
The human mind is endlessly inventive. People create enemies as much as fear real ones. We are familiar with stories of the intimate and wrong-headed projections heaped upon the maid who is accused of taking something that the lady of the house simply misplaced. Stoked by trauma, tragedy and dread, the creativity of our paranoia is in overdrive right now. We must take a deep collective breath and be wary of persecuting those who conform to our fears instead of prosecuting enemies who were and will be smart enough to play against such prejudices.
In grief, sometimes we merge with the world, all boundary erased in deference to the commonality of the human condition. But traumatic loss can also mean - sometimes - that you want to hurt anyone in your path. Anyone who is lighthearted, you want to crush. Anyone who laughs is discordant. Anyone who has a healthy spouse or child is your enemy, is undeserving, is frivolous and in need of muting.
When I served as a prosecutor years ago, I was very aware of this propensity among victims, the absolute need to rage at God or whoever is near - for that is what great sorrow feels like when the senses are overwhelmed. You lose words and thus want to reinscribe the hell of which you cannot speak. It is unfair that the rest of the world should not suffer as you have.
This is precisely why we have always had rules in trials about burdens of proof, standards of evidence, the ability to confront and cross-examine witnesses. The fiercely evocative howls of the widow, the orphan, the innocently wronged - these are the forces by which many a lynch mob has been rallied, how many a posse has been motivated to bypass due process, how many a holy crusade has been launched. It is easy to suspend the hard work of moral thought in the name of Ultimate Justice, or even Enduring Freedom, when one is blindly grief-stricken. "If you didn't do it then your brother did", is the underlying force of blood feuds since time began. "If you're not with us, you're against us", is the dangerous modern corollary to this rage.
I have many friends for whom the dominant emotion is anger. Mine is fear, and not only of the conflagration smouldering throughout the Middle East. I fear no less the risks closer to home: this is how urban riots occur, this is how the Japanese were interned during world war two, this is why hundreds of "Arab-looking" Americans have been attacked and harassed in the last weeks alone.
I hear much about how my sort of gabbling amounts to nothing but blaming the victim. But it is hardly a matter of condoning to point out that we cannot afford to substitute some statistical probability or hunch for actual evidence. We face a wrenching global crisis now, of almost unimaginable proportion, but we should take the risks of precipitous action no less seriously than when the grief with which we were stricken drove us to see evil embodied in witches, in Jews, in blacks or heathens or hippies.
Perhaps our leaders have, as they assure us, more intelligence about these matters than we the people can know at this time. I spend a lot of time praying that they are imbued with greater wisdom. But the stakes are very, very high. We cannot take an evil act and use it to justify making an entire people, an entire nation or an entire culture the corpus of "evil".
Give the government the power to assassinate terrorists, comes the call on chat shows. Spare us a the circus of long public trials, say the letters to the editor.
I used to think that the most important human rights work facing Americans would be a national reconsideration of the death penalty. I could not have imagined that we would so willingly discard even the right of habeus corpus. I desperately hope we are a wiser people than to unloose the power to kill based on undisclosed "information" with no accountability.
We have faced horrendous war crimes in the world before. World war two presented lessons we should not forget, and Nuremburg should be our model. The United States and its allies must seriously consider the option of a world court. Our greatest work is always keeping our heads when our hearts are broken. Our best resistance to terror is the summoning of those principles so suited to keep us from descending into infinite bouts of vengeance and revenge with those who wonder, like Milton's Stygian Counsel.
Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire,
Belike through impotence, or unaware,
To give his Enemies their wish, and end
Them in his anger, whom his anger saves
To punish endless....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4311541,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4296931,00.html
Guardian - Monday November 12, 2001
The war against terrorism, the prime minister tells us, could last for years and, although only one country has been bombed so far, it has been made clear that any country which is suspected of harbouring terrorist groups could be attacked. President Bush has said that "those who are not with us are against us" which defines the enemy even more broadly.
Initially these operations were described as a crusade, but we are now told that this is not a "holy war" against Islam, although the Archbishop of Canterbury, on his visit to the Middle East, has pronounced it to be a "just war" that good Christians can and should support.
Osama bin Laden has been named as the man behind the atrocity in New York but there is no question of him being brought to trial because the United States is opposed to any international war crimes tribunal which would have the authority to try US citizens. In any case, ex-president Clinton and President Bush have already ordered that he be assassinated on sight.
It is easy to see why the US does not want Bin Laden brought to court. In his own defence he would, no doubt, point out that he was armed and financed by the CIA as a freedom fighter (or terrorist) to oust the Russians when they invaded Afghanistan.
Apart from a UN security council resolution condemning terrorism, the procedure for dealing with threats to peace under the UN charter have been set aside. By invoking Article 5 Nato did not absolve itself from the responsibilities laid down in the Nato treaty to abide by the provisions of the UN charter.
People who have been campaigning against the bombing at massive demonstrations all over the world - another big one takes place in London on November 18 - have been compared to those who appeased Hitler, or accused of lacking moral fibre (a wartime phrase used to describe cowardice in the face of the enemy), or of somehow having forgotten the horrific scenes in New York that day.
Paul Marsden, in his remarkable but wholly credible account of his meeting with the Labour chief whip, was apparently told that opposition to war was not accepted as a matter of conscience. Strenuous efforts were made to prevent any vote against the war from taking place in the House, and the government has so far refused to seek a positive vote for its policy in the Commons.
Meanwhile B-52s are carpet bombing the Taliban lines in the hope that the Northern Alliance will seize the opportunity thus created to break through and save the lives of US troops who might otherwise be sacrificed in battle - a questionable strategy which would create huge political problems were the Northern Alliance to take over the whole country.
Despite all the war-like statements emerging every day from No 10, Britain's military role has been minuscule, apparently limited to firing a few missiles from a submarine, providing logistic support and keeping some British soldiers on standby.
The real value to Washington of the prime minister's involvement is that he is providing political cover for whatever the president wants to do, thus breathing life into that popular phrase the "international community" which helps to divert attention from the fact that this is not a UN war.
And so, as winter approaches with the possibility that hundreds of thousands of people may starve or freeze to death, we are being reassured that this is a just war that we must and can win.
Perhaps we should be asking ourselves whether by our silence, we may be acquiescing in the perpetration of crimes against humanity in that those who have already suffered so much are now suffering even more because their land is urgently needed for a pipeline to get Caspian oil to the US market.
Some people, who are very unhappy about all this, do ask the question: "what would you do?" But if terrorism is ever to be eliminated it must be tackled at its roots, by forcing Israel to accept a Palestinian state, ending the bombing of Iraq and the killing of its citizens by sanctions, withdrawing US forces from Saudi Arabia and establishing a truly international court of justice able to deal with terrorism. Bush's recent refusal to meet Arafat means Washington is not serious about a settlement.
Perhaps the most important lesson of all is that our best hope of building a safer and more peaceful world lies in reconstructing our policy around the UN and authorising it to control the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the multinational corporations which now dominate the global economy and expect the Pentagon to step in to defend their interests from any national liberation movements that might threaten their profits.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4296931,00.html
The attack on the One World Financial Centre (WTC) was not a great surprise to many critics of the foreign office. It's easy to be wise after the event but a 'spectacular' was predicted by many as a pretext for more western interventionism.
Why, since our bombing commenced, haven't the attacks on Kabul been covered live on our TV screens? Why haven't whole sections of the insides of newspapers been given over to the ruinous images Afghan photographers are snapping this morning? We are being told to make a distinction between good bloodshed and bad.
'Self-harming' was secretly planned by the CIA in the early sixties to provide a pretext for the Cuba invasion. (see http://www.bilderberg.org/boneswar.htm#02Mar01 ) If Mossad or the CIA sponsored the S11 attack we may never know because that likelihood is not available for consideration. Citing reasons of 'national security' interlligence agencies are beyond question, especially in wartime. The simple motive, US expansionism, is certainly there.
But it was the October 14th rejection, by the US President, of the Taleban's offer to hand Bin Laden over for trial in a neutral country that gave the game away. The US elite, on that day, showed the world they don't want justice. The elite military, industrialists and the geostrategic planners want war. Some might say in the curent economic climate they need a war. They treat our world like a poker table. Where you bluff your way through and constantly up the stakes to keep your opponent on the back foot.
This so-called war has acted as a convenient cover for the invasion of Palestine by the Isreali army, the dismantling of domestic civil liberties and other western totalitarian moves. Aand this war has no specific objective. The military now have an endless list of bogey-men that they can persue one after another as an excuse for their never-ending war. But their dream could be our nightmare. The action against Islam and might backfire if we are passive or cynical enough to let the perpetrators continue this 'war'.
Many of those who died in the twin towers were not in every sense 'innocent' either. Through poverty, starvation, lack of education, IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes and sanctions, economic warfare is killing millions of people every year. The World Bank and IMF have been beating the South back into the stone age for decades now and the financial speculators in the World Trade Centre (The One World Financial Centre) must bear some responsibility for helping enforce this cowardly New Financial Order of death by debt. Yes, many of those who died in New York were responsible for reinforcing grotesque opulence in the west and grinding poverty in the South. Spending, that is gambling, vast sums of money on whatever will generate a profit, anywhere in the world, regardless of the human consequences.
The problem comes when you realise some of the greatest profits come from war. People will borrow any amount of money at any interest rate to fight a war. Financial dealers and bankers think nothing of lining the pockets of both sides in a conflict especially when the victor honours the debts of the vanquished.
Most of the world's terrorists are and have been trained and sponsored by the covert operations arms of western governments. Particularly embarrassing is the sheer scale of the US terrorist training programme (see article below). MI5 whistleblower David Shayler has pointed out the UK government's foreign intelligence arm MI6 launced a (thankfully) botched attempt to kill Colonel Gadaffi.
Interference by crumbling and sham democracies such as the EU, UK and USA in the affairs of other countries must not escape the spotlight. Current efforts to make the Zimbabwe economy 'scream' and destabilise elections invite terrorist retaliation. Incidents like the arrest and humiliating trial for war crimes of democratically elected Serbian President Milosevich also. Ex MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, revealed MI6 were planning Milisevic's assassination.
The terrorists in MI6 must be brought to trial before our government starts throwing its weight around and pontificating on the subject.
Will Henry Kissinger, who ordered the assassination of democratic Chilean general Rene Schneider in 1970, be hanging his head like Milosevic as he walks into the world criminal court? (see http://www.bilderberg.org/kissing.htm ) The sooner the better. He's a menace to society walking the streets (or tearing round the world at breakneck speed) The US government's 'war on terrorism will never be taken seriously unless this most famous of terrorist suspects is brought to trial. Just last week Henry Kissinger was keynote speaker at the Centre for Policy Studies in London. One of the primary 'think-tanks' for developing British government policy.
And as the press does its best to untangle the wreckage of the September 11th attacks it will do well to examine closely its relations with the I-OPS department of British Military Intelligence.
I-OPS department boasted to whistleblower David Shayler, while he was working for MI5, they had 'a spy in every newsroom in Britain'. I-OPS helps vet, unbeknowns to candidates, all employees of the BBC as well as handling 'friendly' reporters and editors such as Dominic Lawson and 'diplomatic' and 'intelligence' correspondants. I-OPS builds up a relationship of trust by feeding reporters exclusive stories from their privileged knowledge of cabinet/military briefs and the intelligence gathered by GCHQ. Real scoops as well as smears are fed to the press. Craving the cudos guillible hacks lap the sweet up with the sour and regurgitate it all for public consumption.
But these cozy relationships with journalists come into their own in wartime when outright lies, designed to bring the public in behind the war and/or trick the enemy, get presented as fact. And it is precisely in wartime that journalists sucked into this I-OPS dance of death, those doing the dirty on newsroom colleagues who don't support the phoney war, need to search their conciences. They need to distance themselves by coming clean about where they've been tricked in the past and dishing what dirt they know on those whose job it is to make sure that the first casualty of war is the truth.
So let's stop boming Kabul right now. This phoney war can only escalate. In the UK we can announce a review of World Bank/IMF programmes and Iraqi Sanctions by the World Development Movement or similar independent group. Running parallel with a public enquiry into the I-OPS department of UK Military Intelligence.
One final point... If I'm right, and the attacks on the WTC were perpetrated somewhere within Western Intelligence, watch for British public opinion to swing against this phoney war. It could be time for another 'spectacular'. This time closer to home.
French report claims terrorist leader stayed in Dubai hospital
Anthony Sampson
Guardian - Thursday November 1, 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4289417,00.html
Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro.
The disclosures are known to come from French intelligence which is keen to reveal the ambiguous role of the CIA, and to restrain Washington from extending the war to Iraq and elsewhere.
Bin Laden is reported to have arrived in Dubai on July 4 from Quetta in Pakistan with his own personal doctor, nurse and four bodyguards, to be treated in the urology department. While there he was visited by several members of his family and Saudi personalities, and the CIA.
The CIA chief was seen in the lift, on his way to see Bin Laden, and later, it is alleged, boasted to friends about his contact. He was recalled to Washington soon afterwards.
Intelligence sources say that another CIA agent was also present; and that Bin Laden was also visited by Prince Turki al Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence, who had long had links with the Taliban, and Bin Laden. Soon afterwards Turki resigned, and more recently he has publicly attacked him in an open letter: "You are a rotten seed, like the son of Noah".
The American hospital in Dubai emphatically denied that Bin Laden was a patient there.
Washington last night also denied the story.
Private planes owned by rich princes in the Gulf fly frequently between Quetta and the Emirates, often on luxurious "hunting trips" in territories sympathetic to Bin Laden. Other sources confirm that these hunting trips have provided opportunities for Saudi contacts with the Taliban and terrorists, since they first began in 1994.
Bin Laden has often been reported to be in poor health. Some accounts claim that he is suffering from Hepatitis C, and can expect to live for only two more years.
According to Le Figaro, last year he ordered a mobile dialysis machine to be delivered to his base at Kandahar in Afghanistan.
Whether the allegations about the Dubai meeting are confirmed or not, the wider leaks from the French secret service throw a worrying light on the rivalries and lack of coordination between intelligence agencies, both within the US and between western allies.
A familiar complaint of French intelligence is that collaboration with the Americans has been essentially one-way, with them happy to receive information while giving little in return.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,583254,00.html
"If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents," George Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, "they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as there's one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention.
For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at al-Qaida's door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or Whisc. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government.
Until January this year, Whisc was called the "School of the Americas", or SOA. Since 1946, SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Among its graduates are many of the continent's most notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists. As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA Watch show, Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni.
In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at the school, was convicted in Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi was killed because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities committed by Guatemala's D-2, the military intelligence agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA graduates. D-2 coordinated the "anti-insurgency" campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and murdered tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and Mejia Victores studied at the School of the Americas.
In 1993, the United Nations truth commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet's secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976.
Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, Panama's Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru's Juan Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador's Guillermo Rodriguez all benefited from the school's instruction. So did the leader of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori's Peru; four of the five officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in Honduras (which controlled the death squads there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for the 1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico.
All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But SOA graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with US support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US State Department's report on human rights named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner, Alex Lopera. Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed that seven former pupils are running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and massacres. In February this year an SOA graduate in Colombia was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30 peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more of its students from Colombia than from any other country.
The FBI defines terrorism as "violent acts... intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government", which is a precise description of the activities of SOA's graduates. But how can we be sure that their alma mater has had any part in this? Well, in 1996, the US government was forced to release seven of the school's training manuals. Among other top tips for terrorists, they recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives.
Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA Watch, several US congressmen tried to shut the school down. They were defeated by 10 votes. Instead, the House of Representatives voted to close it and then immediately reopen it under a different name. So, just as Windscale turned into Sellafield in the hope of parrying public memory, the School of the Americas washed its hands of the past by renaming itself Whisc. As the school's Colonel Mark Morgan informed the Department of Defense just before the vote in Congress: "Some of your bosses have told us that they can't support anything with the name 'School of the Americas' on it. Our proposal addresses this concern. It changes the name." Paul Coverdell, the Georgia senator who had fought to save the school, told the papers that the changes were "basically cosmetic".
But visit Whisc's website and you'll see that the School of the Americas has been all but excised from the record. Even the page marked "History" fails to mention it. Whisc's courses, it tells us, "cover a broad spectrum of relevant areas, such as operational planning for peace operations; disaster relief; civil-military operations; tactical planning and execution of counter drug operations".
Several pages describe its human rights initiatives. But, though they account for almost the entire training programme, combat and commando techniques, counter-insurgency and interrogation aren't mentioned. Nor is the fact that Whisc's "peace" and "human rights" options were also offered by SOA in the hope of appeasing Congress and preserving its budget: but hardly any of the students chose to take them.
We can't expect this terrorist training camp to reform itself: after all, it refuses even to acknowledge that it has a past, let alone to learn from it. So, given that the evidence linking the school to continuing atrocities in Latin America is rather stronger than the evidence linking the al-Qaida training camps to the attack on New York, what should we do about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning, Georgia?
Well, we could urge our governments to apply full diplomatic pressure, and to seek the extradition of the school's commanders for trial on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. Alternatively, we could demand that our governments attack the United States, bombing its military installations, cities and airports in the hope of overthrowing its unelected government and replacing it with a new administration overseen by the UN. In case this proposal proves unpopular with the American people, we could win their hearts and minds by dropping naan bread and dried curry in plastic bags stamped with the Afghan flag.
You object that this prescription is ridiculous, and I agree. But try as I might, I cannot see the moral difference between this course of action and the war now being waged in Afghanistan.
The US Army School of Americas (SOA), based in Fort Benning, Georgia, trains Latin American soldiers in combat, counter-insurgency, and counter-narcotics. Graduates of the SOA are responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in Latin America.
Among the SOA's nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians. (See Grads in the News, SOA Grads in Action, Reports)
On January 17, 2001 the SOA was replaced by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC).
This is a flash movie - you may need to download a plugin for your browser - don't bother if you haven't got a sound card though. I was a bit worried by the 'Bin Laden, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide' at the end of this short movie - but the overall sentiment I totally agree with.
http://yonkis.ya.com/imagenes5/guerra/talibamm.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4286872,00.html
Monday October 29, 2001
Before the dust had settled on Ground Zero, US Secretary of State Colin Powell received a call from his son, who had swiftly made his way to Lower Manhattan to take in the carnage with his own eyes. His message to the man charged with formulating policies to win the war on terrorism: "Dad, the TV pictures don't do justice to the tragedy before us."
The cathode ray tube may have struggled to convey the full enormity of the world's worst terrorist atrocity, but, whatever its inadequacies, Michael K Powell must watch a lot of US TV. And listen to a lot of radio. And spend a lot of time surfing websites. As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, he is chief regulator of all broadcast media Stateside, including cable TV, as well as telecoms and the internet.
The crucial significance of the body he spearheads has been summed up by Clay Shirky, professor of media studies at Hunter College: "The FCC is the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] of the 21st century. Americans spend more of their lives in the media landscape than in the natural one, putting the FCC in charge of the environment most of us really inhabit. This concentrates a huge amount of power in the hands of Michael Powell."
Shirky is far from alone in anticipating that this 38-year-old wunderkind could preside over the greatest change in the US's media landscape since the Depression. Explaining the difference between the secretary of state and his smooth, ambitious son, Democrat congressman Ed Markey quipped that Michael is the Powell with the power to affect the world today.
A joke, obviously. Michael Powell clearly operates in the shadow of his idolised dad, retired three-star general/war hero/possible presidential candidate/most admired American, Colin Powell. But few people have as much power to influence American popular culture and its (suddenly fragile) new economy as the FCC chief.
So how will Powell use his power? To preserve the last vestiges of diversity on the airwaves and prevent the emergence of an information underclass in America's ghettos? Or to cosy up to the conglomerates that increasingly dominate the media landscape by crushing or swallowing up any competition? Or simply to give rappers a bum rap?
One of Powell's first acts as FCC chairman was to slap a $7,000 (£4,900) fine on a local radio station for playing Eminem's The Real Slim Shady, a track laced with sexually explicit profanities. The fact that KKMG was punished for transmitting a cleaned-up version of this number brought back scary memories of the last time a Republican led the FCC. In the early 90s shock jock Howard Stern was hit with $1.2m in fines for his offensive utterances.
Powell has told rappers not to read too much into this one ruling, insisting that he has a steadfast commitment to upholding the cherished First Amendment, the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech.
But there's no disguising where his partisan loyalties lie. Powell was appointed by George Bush and would never have got the FCC chairmanship had Al Gore stacked up a few more chads in Florida. "I'm happy to call myself a Republican," he says. "I don't think there's anything about my race that says I have to be a Democrat."
Powell has also professed to be a moderate like his father and been credited with a strong streak of compassionate conservatism. But the latter came into question when, in one of his first interviews as FCC chief, he questioned the existence of a digital divide between rich and poor Americans. "I think there's a Mercedes divide," he stated. "I'd like one but I can't afford one." The next day's papers had a field day. Actually, his insensitive soundbite was whipped up out of context. Powell went on to add: "I'm not completely flip about this - I think it's an important social issue." But the damage was done.
Progressives of all colours and creeds drew unflattering comparisons between Powell and his predecessor, William Kennard, who made history by becoming the first African-American to head the FCC. Kennard also exhibited a radical sense of history when he talked passionately about the US's third major economic revolution. In the first two - the agricultural and industrial revolutions - black people either "picked cotton" or were "legally segregated". But the information revolution, he declared, would give minorities their first chance to take the lead.
That chance was blown when Kennard was replaced by Bush, according to the Rev Jesse Jackson. Addressing the annual convention of the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters in Washington in March, Jackson laid into Powell's laissez-faire approach, warning that it would ultimately reduce the number of black voices in broadcasting.
After nine months in office, Powell does appear hellbent on pursuing a corporate-friendly agenda that can only result in a further torrent of mergers in the media industries. Entertainment industry fatcats purred when this barrel-chested Republican, with a penchant for pinstripe suits and every technological gizmo on the market, became one of the first beneficiaries of George W Bush's presidential patronage.
"They love Powell for a reason," said Robert McChesney, of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. "He has a record of advancing their interests, not ours. As a result of Powell's tenure, their firms will grow much larger, much more powerful and operate in less competitive markets."
Powell's open contempt for regulations that place constraints on corporations eager to expand is summed up in his stark slogan: "Validate or eliminate". Within weeks of taking command at the FCC, he relaxed the cross-media ownership rules to allow Rupert Murdoch's Fox Network to acquire 10 more affiliates across the country. This gave the Dirty Digger two stations in New York City, where he also owns a powerful daily paper.
Even before his elevation to the FCC chairmanship, when he was one of the five commissioners, Powell passed up no opportunity to demonstrate dedication to deregulation. He was under heavy pressure to abstain from voting on AOL's controversial acquisition of Time Warner because his father held options on $13.3m worth of AOL stock, but he insisted on doing his bit to bring about the biggest media firm on the planet.
Colin Powell insisted at the time that he did not discuss this mega-deal with his son - nor his potential inheritance. "There is a firewall between him and me, not just on this but on anything he does," he said.
Mutterings about nepotism stalked Michael Powell long before he backed this controversial merger. There's no doubt his father's DC connections have opened doors: family friend Senator John McCain manoeuvred to get him onto the FCC in the last Clinton administration.
Powell responded to the negative whisperings in Washington during that period: "I'm sure there's a whole lot of people in this town that, when my name surfaced, they said, 'He must be getting this because he's the son of somebody.' Sure, go ahead and underestimate me. I don't have time for negative people. I don't have time for an unhappy disposition. I can taste the preciousness of life."
Powell's zest for living stems from a serious brush with death in 1987. Then a 24-year-old executive officer in the US Army, stationed in Germany, he was riding shotgun in a second world war-style jeep racing along the autobahn. The driver fell asleep at the wheel and the vehicle overturned. Powell was hurled into the air. After he landed, the jeep crashed down on him. His body was almost literally snapped in half. He spent the next year laid out in an army medical centre in Washington. His two sisters kept a bedside vigil. His father came by as often as possible to hold his hand and watch repeats of The Brady Bunch with him.
He made an almost miraculous recovery and now refers to the accident as "the best thing that ever happened" because it brought his old college sweetheart, Jane Knott, to his bedside. They married and now have two children, on whom he dotes.
But the accident cut short his military career. After various office jobs in the defence department, Powell went to Georgetown University in Washington to study law, from where he proceeded rapidly to become chief of staff in the antitrust division in the department of justice. Before that, he did a stint in the DC office of an LA law firm specialising in telecommunications regulation. That brief experience could prove most useful to him. The biggest problem the FCC faces is the crisis in the telecommunciations industry, which in raw economic and employment terms totally dwarfs the meltdown of dot.coms.
Powell is up to the challenge, according to Reed Hunt, President Clinton's first FCC chairman, who has said: "No FCC chairman, from day one, has been more politically powerful, more well-connected and more knowledgeable since perhaps Newton Minow during JFK's administration."
As politics, the media and the economy increasingly converge across the Atlantic, Michael Powell will be under heavy pressure to live up to that lavish praise.
· Rob Brown is senior lecturer in journalism at Salford University
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4286872,00.html
When journalists write about intelligence matters and reach for a cliché, invariably it is that intelligence is a ‘wilderness of mirrors’. Rarely used is James Angleton’s other dictum that ‘disinformation might be the chief job of an intelligence agency’. The latter is a more accurate statement of what has been appearing in the media since the events of 11 September.
Most journalists appear to confuse ‘information’ with ‘intelligence’ when they are two separate concepts. The truth is, they are very different. Agencies collect information that is collated, processed, analysed and then, more often than, spun into intelligence. Raw, unmediated intelligence is rarely available to the media, though it is worth recalling that during the Cuban Missile Crisis the Kennedy administration did release ultra-secret U-2 high-altitude surveillance photographs of the Soviet missile sites on Cuba to the United Nations and then the press.
In the last few weeks we have been liberally dosed with hasty, unverifiable and often contradictory intelligence (Osama Bin Laden is worth $400m: he is broke; he is a friend of Algeria and Iraq; he hates Algerians and Iraqis), little of which can be regarded as reliable. The working practises of investigative journalists on the Washington Post of All the Presidents Men era, when no fact was published without three separate sources to verify it, seems a distant dream.
Ministers, who are often entranced by the magic word ‘secrecy’, hide behind the phrase ‘intelligence sources and methods’ to curtail debate and scrutiny. The reality is that sources can be obscured and blacked out in documents, while methods have not really changed, except for technical details, in decades. Bugs are planted, telephones, fax machines, mobile phones, web sites, internet communications are tapped. All this is common knowledge.
Bin Laden knows this all too well, which is why some reports claim that he never uses these forms of communication. Which, of course, makes his alleged telephone call to his mother just before 11 September, all the more intriguing. Did he make it? His step-father naturally rebuts the claim but adds: ‘Osama has not used a telephone since he discovered that his conversations were being monitored by the United States’. (Sunday Times, 7 October 2001)
The point here is, why not release the original tape of the conversation? Did he use the phrase ‘massive events’? Is it a correct translation? Robert Fisk, whose sceptical reporting has been a beacon of good journalistic practice, has noted (The Independent, 29 September 2001) previous ‘serious textual errors’ made by CIA translators.
The British Governments 21 page document laying out the case for Bin Laden’s orchestration of the events of 11 September is not particularly impressive. In fact, it is at best flimsy, with little new material of any substance. Chris Blackhurst (Independent on Sunday, 7 October 2001) called it a ‘a report of conjecture, supposition, and unsubstantiated assertions of fact’, which is about right. Clearly the Americans thought the same because the CIA decided two days later to ‘leak’ further information in an attempt to shore up the case. Bin Laden may indeed be guilty of the crime but we have, as yet, seen little evidence to prove it.
In 1951 Prime Minister Clement Attlee was warned of intelligence fears that Russian agents had suitcases with kits to construct an atomic bomb. Attlee was not unduly concerned. The same scenario appeared in the early seventies. Then it was Soviet Special Forces. It surfaced again in the mid-nineties, when stories appeared about weapons-grade plutonium disappearing from Soviet states.
Intelligence agencies continually create alarmist disinformation. Who now recalls ‘Red Mercury’ the mysterious substance that was a source of cheap nuclear weapons for terrorists, the ‘white-coated mercenaries’, the demobbed Soviet scientists selling their knowledge of weapons of mass destruction to Libya and Iraq, the nuclear artillery shells which went missing from Soviet southern states, the ‘Islamic bomb’ which terrorist were building to be in use by 1995, and the cheap and easily assembled ‘dirty bomb’.
Since 11 September the intelligence agencies with the aid of gullible journalists, editors desperate for endless copy and politicians on a crusade have constructed a truly global conspiracy theory. At the top is the mastermind from every Ian Fleming fantasy, Osama Bin Laden, who has a ‘golden domino’ theory of regional domination in the Middle East, controlling a vast network, Al-Qaeda, of thousands of terrorists across the globe, now asleep but with access to millions of dollars, and all awaiting the call to murder us in our beds.
Al-Qaeda, according to the press, has so far attempted to buy uranium from the Russian mafia, attempted to manufacture chemical and biological weapons, including anthrax and the plague, planned attacks on European gas and oil pipelines, plotted to blow up the US embassy in Paris, planned to kill President Bush at the G8 summit at Genoa, made a huge profit from share dealing immediately prior to the attack in America, plotted a Belgium attack, and is planning another thirty attacks against the West in London, Washington, European capitals and the Vatican.
If James Angleton was alive he might have added a third quote: The function of an intelligence agency is to create fear. Occasionally of course, they get their analysis absolutely right.
In 1993 British intelligence put together a paper ‘Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East’. It noted that it thrived on the failure to resolve economic and social problems, corruption in government and the bankruptcy of political ideologies of all kinds. The report said that ‘fundamentalist groups advocating violence and revolution are in a minority. Nevertheless…Western, particularly American culture and materialism are seen as a threat to Islamic values [but] fundamentalism doesn’t present a coherent and monolithic threat to Western interests in the way that Communism once did. It is not supported by a superpower. Its appeal in Western countries is confined to Muslim minorities and the threat of subversion is, in the UK at least, minimal. Dealings with extreme fundamentalist regimes would be highly unpredictable but not necessarily unmanageable’.
The essential message was that the West had to deal with the underlying problems rather than fundamentalism itself.
Unfortunately, the message was not heeded and it continues to get lost in the mix of poor intelligence, political spin and disinformation that proves to be so attractive to the media.
Sunday, 14 October, 2001, 22:12 GMT 23:12 UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1599000/1599443.stm
US President George W Bush has rejected an offer by Afghanistan's ruling Taleban to discuss handing over Saudi militant Osama Bin Laden.
Mr Bush ruled out any negotiation, and said all the Taleban had to do was hand over Bin Laden, who is suspected of masterminding last month's terror attacks on the United States.
The Taleban's second-in-command, Maulvi Abdul Kabir, said Bin Laden could be sent to a neutral country if the US halted air strikes, and repeated a demand to be shown evidence of his connection to the attacks.
The offer came as a second week of US-led air raids began.
The Qatari satellite TV station al-Jazeera said that Taleban front line positions north of the capital Kabul were being targeted. There were other reports of explosions in Kabul and the southern Taleban stronghold of Kandahar.
President Bush dismissed the Taleban's latest offer of a compromise within an hour of it being made.
"There's no need to negotiate," he said. "There's no discussion. I told them exactly what to do. All they've got to do is turn [Bin Laden] over."
He added that the Taleban should also hand over Bin Laden's colleagues, destroy his training camps and release foreign aid workers currently detained in Afghanistan.
Earlier on Sunday, the Taleban took a group of international journalists to a village near the city of Jalalabad in the east of the country where they say nearly 200 residents were killed by US bombing last week.
BBC reporter Rahim Ullah Yusuf Zai said the village, which stank of rotting corpses, had been completely destroyed and that journalists had been shown shrapnel and an unexploded bomb.
US military officials have not confirmed the attack, which is said to have taken place last Wednesday.
But our reporter says he is in no doubt that the devastation in the village was caused by a US strike.
The reporters were met with furious protests by distraught locals, many of whom said they had lost relatives in the attack.
Civilian deaths have provoked anti-US demonstrations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1599000/1599443.stm
The two nations leading the so-called 'war against terror', the USA and UK, are in fact in the poorest position to be so self-righteous. They are so blinded with rage at these unspeakable attacks, that they conveniently forget that they themselves have committed the most appalling crimes, which remain unpunished. This leaves the weaker people around the world even more annoyed at the outpouring of arrogant propaganda, which will in turn fuel yet more reprisals by infuriated fanatics.
A few examples will suffice. The most ironic one was documented by John Pilger in his excellent "Hidden Agendas", based in turn on the work of the UK based Minority Rights Group. Namely, the forcible removal of the Ilois people from the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, south of the Maldives Islands, in the early 70s by a British Labour government, at the request of the USA. Such an act is recognised by the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a 'crime against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer of population'. The Ilois recently won a partial victory in the UK courts, but this whole matter ought to be the subject of UN sanctions and prosecutions against both of the perpetrators. The irony is that the USA leased the islands from the UK to situate a military base on the island of Diego Garcia. B52 bombers operating from this base bombed Iraq during the Gulf War, and it will surely now be used in the planned attacks on Afghanistan. This then would be one of the many reasons the USA is openly hostile to the ICC.
How should we consider a country that tests its weapons of mass destruction unknowingly on its own population and that of its neighbours? That was done with most atmospheric nuclear weapons tests around the world until the partial test-ban treaty came into effect. But it has continued with chemical and biological weapons tests on as many as 32 US cities, according to a report to the US Congress by Dr Rogene Henderson. According to Canadian researcher, Donald Scott, the US Government even sought and, amazingly, received permission from the Canadian Government to test its weapons on the city of Winnipeg in the 50s. More recently, in 1984, the USA was allowed to carry out biological weapons tests through the release of hundreds of millions of mosquitoes contaminated with genetically engineered bio-agents along the St Lawrence Seaway. The resulting cancers and other illnesses provided useful data to the US about the likely effectiveness of its weapons. But what about the unsuspecting victims? How would we define this crime under international law?
The infamous MK-Ultra programme, which survived in one form or another up to the 70s, despite having officially been shut down much earlier, involved testing bizarre new technologies on unsuspecting victims in laboratories. We only learned about it officially when it became the subject of a Congressional investigation in the 70s, chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy. So it appears that Mel Gibson is not really playing a totally fictional role in the popular film "Conspiracy Theory".
And these are some of the kinds of tests we know about, so imagine what is actually going on right now.
Others, like Noam Chomsky, have detailed the many atrocities committed by the USA and other powerful nations over the last century, and they do not require further repetition here. A recent book by Christopher Hitchens, called "The Trial of Henry Kissinger", focuses on just one of the individual perpetrators, whom he believes can now be prosecuted for crimes like the carpet-bombing of Cambodia and Laos. It appears the Kissinger in particular might be worried about the International Criminal Court, and seemed rather uncomfortable about the attempted indictment of his old pal Pinochet.
So when are CNN and the BBC going to tell us the full story? It is bad enough that they lay on their "War against terror", and sickeningly urge the US to attack Afghanistan, while possibly also using film of manipulated events to boost their argument. But what is really more sinister is what is not mentioned at all, such as the examples already discussed. CNN even went so far as to have the man himself, Kissinger, on the air, to comment on the attacks shortly afterwards.
Is this the civilised world we are being asked to defend against terrorism? One thing is for sure. We will not get a sense of how really uncivilised it is from our mainstream media outlets, who do their best to keep the skeletons in the cupboards.
Rather than steaming in front of the TV, we should simply turn it off, and gather our information elsewhere. Or another idea, apparently used by the Polish people during martial law, is to leave the TV on, but face it out the window into the street, to show the authorities we do not believe their bullshit.
The link below is for another angle on this whole story. http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?selected_topic=7&action=view&article_ id=3561
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=69660&group=webcast
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- The retired Pakistani general who is closest to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden contends the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington were the work of renegade U.S. Air Force elements working with the Israelis. Gen. Hameed Gul led Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Gul serves as an adviser to Pakistan's extremist religious political parties, which oppose their government's decision to support the United States in any action against Afghanistan's Taliban regime. Gul contends bin Laden had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, saying instead that they were the work of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service -- a version of events that has been endorsed by Islamic fundamentalist clerics and is widely accepted by Muslims throughout the Arab world.
Here is the transcript of the exclusive interview Gul gave to Arnaud de Borchgrave, United Press International editor at large:
De Borchgrave: So who did Black Sept. 11?
Gul: Mossad and its accomplices. The U.S. spends $40 billion a year on its 11 intelligence agencies. That's $400 billion in 10 years. Yet the Bush Administration says it was taken by surprise. I don't believe it. Within 10 minutes of the second twin tower being hit in the World Trade Center ... CNN said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a planned piece of disinformation by the real perpetrators. It created an instant mindset and put public opinion into a trance, which prevented even intelligent people from thinking for themselves.
Q: So you're already convinced bin Laden didn't do it?
A: I know bin Laden and his associates. I've been with them here, in Europe and the Middle East. They are graduates of the best universities and are highly intelligent with impressive degrees and speak impeccable English. These are people who have rediscovered fundamental Islamic values. Many come from the Gulf countries where ruling royal families have generated hatred by the way they flout divine law, wasting billions on gratifying their whims, jetting around in large private jets by themselves, and sailing the Mediterranean in big private boats for weeks on end. Osama's best recruits come from feudal areas that are U.S. protectorates and where millions of poor people are seeking human dignity. I have even visited a Christian convent school in Murree, 60 miles from here, where my 13-year-old daughter is studying. The young girls there have told me Osama is their hero. Osama's followers identify with Mujahideen freedom fighters wherever they are defending Islam and its values.
Q: So what makes you think Osama wasn't behind Sept. 11?
A: From a cave inside a mountain or a peasant's hovel? Let's be serious. Osama inspires countless millions by standing up for Islam against American and Israeli imperialism. He doesn't have the means for such a sophisticated operation.
Q: Why Mossad?
A: Mossad and its American associates are the obvious culprits. Who benefits from the crime? The attacks against the twin towers started at 8:45 a.m. and four flights are diverted from their assigned air space and no air traffic controller sounds the alarm. And no Air Force jets scramble until 10 a.m. That also smacks of a small scale Air Force rebellion, a coup against the Pentagon perhaps? Radars are jammed, transponders fail. No IFF -- friend or foe identification -- challenge. In Pakistan, if there is no response to IFF, jets are instantly scrambled and the aircraft is shot down with no further questions asked. This was clearly an inside job. Bush was afraid and rushed to the shelter of a nuclear bunker. He clearly feared a nuclear situation. Who could that have been? Will that also be hushed up in the investigation, like the Warren report after the Kennedy assassination?
Q: At this point, someone might be asking what you've been smoking. What is Israel's interest in such a monstrous plot, which, of course, no one believes except Islamist extremists who concocted this piece of disinformation in the first place, presumably to detract from the real culprits?
A: Jews never agreed to Bush 41 (George H.W. Bush, the 41st president) or 43 (his son George W. Bush, the 43rd president). They made sure Bush senior didn't get a second term. His land-for-peace pressure in Palestine didn't suit Israel. They were also against the young Bush because he was considered too close to oil interests and the Gulf countries. Bush senior and Jim Baker had raised $150 million for Bush junior, much of it from Mideast sources or their American go-betweens. Bush 41 and Baker, as private citizens, had also facilitated the new strategic relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran. I have this from sources in both countries. So clearly the prospect of a Bush 43 was a potential danger to Israel.
Jews were stunned by the way Bush stole the election in Florida. They had put big money on Al Gore. Israel has given its imperialist guardian parent opportunities to turn disaster into a pretext for imposing an all-encompassing military, political and economic agenda to further the cause of global capitalism. While Colin Powell is cautious and others are reckless and want to make up for their failure to defeat Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War 10 years ago, the global agenda is the same. Israel knows it has a short shelf-life before it is overwhelmed by demographics. It is a state that was born in terrorism that terrorized Palestinians into the exile of refugee camps, where they have now subsisted in squalid refugee camps, and is now very much afraid of Pakistan's nuclear capability.
Israel has now handed the Bush family the opportunity it has been waiting for to consolidate America's imperial grip on the Gulf and acquire control of the Caspian basin by extending its military presence in Central Asia. Bush conveniently overlooks -- or is not told -- the fact that Islamic fundamentalists got their big boost in the modern age as CIA assets in the covert campaign I was also involved with to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Bush senior was vice president during that entire campaign. And no sooner did he become president on Jan. 20, 1989, than he summoned an inter-agency intelligence meeting and issued an order, among several others, to clip the wings of ISI (Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence) that had been coordinating the entire operation in Afghanistan. I know this firsthand as I was DGISI at the time (director general, ISI).
Q: So how do you read U.S. strategy in Pakistan?
A: The destabilization of Pakistan is part of the U.S. plan because it is a Muslim nuclear state. The U.S. wants to isolate Pakistan from China as part of its containment policy. President Nixon's book "The Real War" said China would be the superpower of the 21st Century. The U.S. is also creating hostility between Pakistan and Afghanistan, two Muslim states to reverse the perception that the Islamic world now has its own nuclear weapons. Bush 43 doesn't realize he is being manipulated by people who understand geopolitics. He is not leading but being led. All he can do is think in terms of the wanted-dead-or-alive culture, which is how Hollywood conditions the masses to think and act.
All summer long we heard about America's shrinking surplus and that the Pentagon would not have sufficient funds to modernize for the 21st century. And now, all of a sudden, the Pentagon can get what it wants without any Democratic Party opposition. How very convenient! Even your cherished civil liberties can now be abridged with impunity to protect the expansion of the hegemony of transnational capitalism. There is now a new excuse to crush anti-globalization protests.
Bush 43 follows Bush 41. Iraq was baited into the Kuwaiti trap when the U.S. told Saddam it was not interested in his inter-Arab squabbles. Two days later, he moved into Kuwait, which was an Iraqi province anyway before the British Empire decreed otherwise. Roosevelt baited the Pearl Harbor trap for the Japanese empire, which provided the pretext for entering World War II. And now the Israelis have given the U.S. the pretext for further expansion into an area that will be critical in the next 25 years - the Caspian basin.
Q: Were you a fundamentalist in the days of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan when you worked closely with the CIA?
A: Not as much as I am today.
Q: What turned you against America?
A: Betrayals and broken promises and what was done to my army career.
Q: And what was that?
A: President Ishaq Khan, who succeeded Zia ul-Haq after his plane was blown out of the sky, wanted to appoint me chief of staff, the highest position in the Pakistani army. The U.S., which by then had clipped ISI's wings, also blocked my promotion by informing the president I was unacceptable. So I was moved to a corps commander position. As ISI director, I held the whole Mujahideen movement in the palm of my hands. We were all pro-American. But then America left us in the lurch and everything went to pieces, including Afghanistan.
The U.S. pushed for a broad-based Afghan government of seven factions and then waved goodbye. Even in the best of democracies, a broad-based coalition does not work. So we quickly had seven jokers in Kabul interested in only one thing - jockeying for power. The gunplay quickly followed, which led to the creation of Taliban, the students of the original Mujahideen, who decided to put an end to it.
Q: What happened to the 1,000 shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that were supplied by president Reagan in 1986 and 87 to the Mujahideen, and that literally grounded the Soviet air force?
A: After the Soviets pulled out, the CIA allocated $60 million to try to buy them back. This just drove the black market price up for one Stinger from $100,000 to $300,000. The Taliban still have about 250 of them for the kind of situation they face today against U.S. aircraft.
Q: Is the U.S. now your enemy?
A: Is the U.S. national interest in contradiction with the Muslim world? The U.S. needs oil, as do its European allies. You have between 6 and 8 million American Muslims and their ranks are growing. About the same number in Europe. Israel aside, we are America's natural allies. Prof. Sam Huntington in his "Clash of Civilizations" puts Confucius and Judeo-Christians in one corner, and us n the other. His prescription is wrong but is being adopted by Bush 43 who has now put 60 countries on his hit list. This is the diabolical school that wants to launch an anti-Muslim "crusade." Muslims understood what Bush meant when he used that word. We need a meeting, not a clash, of civilizations. We are on the brink of disaster. It is time to pull back from the brink and reassess before we blow ourselves up. The purpose of Islam is service to humanity. The time for like-minded people to have a meeting of the minds is now.
Q: But you are against democracy, so how can there be a meeting of the minds?
A: Democracy does not work. Politicians are constantly thinking of their next election, not the public good, which means, at best, constantly shading the truth to hide it from their constituents. Their pronouncements are laced with lies and the voters are lulled or gulled into believing utter nonsense. The Koran says call a spade a spade. It is the supreme law and tells right from wrong. There is no notion of "my country right or wrong" under divine law. The creator's will predominates. All if subservient to Allah's will and adherence to a set of basic, fundamental values.
Q: So what kind of a system are you advocating?
A: The world needs a post-modern state system. Right now, the nation-state and round the clock satellite TV lead people to imitate America's way of life. Which is mathematically impossible. You have 4 percent of the world's population consuming 32 percent of the world's resources. The creator through Prophet Mohammed said equal distribution. Capitalism is the negation of the creator's will. It leads to imperialism and unilateralism.
Q: So what does this post-modern state system look like?
A: A global village under divine order, or we will have global bloodshed until good triumphs over evil. Islam encapsulates all the principal religions and what was handed down 1,400 years ago was the normal evolutionary sequel to Judaism and Christianity. The prophet's last sermon was a universal document of human rights for everyone that surpasses everything that came since, including America's declaration of independence and the U.N. Charter of universal rights. If you superimpose true secular values on true Islamic values, there is no difference. So surely divine law should supersede man-made law. Islam is egalitarian, tolerant and progressive. It is the wave of the future.
Q: Marxism also believed that the nation-state would eventually wither away.
A: Socialism jumped the rails when it was co-opted by the imperialist Soviet state. Islam believes in dynamism, Christianity stands for static statism. The pope in all his pronouncements has expressed a dogmatic attachment to the status quo. Why are so many black Americans converting to Islam? Because they are looking for true equality which they cannot find under capitalism. Allah has no gender, neither male nor female. Islam has no indirect taxation in an interest-free economy. Usury was a Jewish concept.
Q: Is Iran your model?
A: There isn't a single true Islamic state in the world today. Iran has moved forward from its 1979 revolution, but I am not sure whether it's the right direction.
Q: And Taliban?
A: They represent Islam in its purest form so far. It's a clean sheet. And they were also moving in the right direction when this crisis was cooked up by the U.S. Until Sept. 11, they had perfect law and order with no formal police force, only traffic cops without sidearms. Now, in less than two weeks, they have mobilized some 300,000 volunteers to fight American and British invaders if they come.
Q: And you reaction to U.S. demands on Pakistan?
A: If Pakistan gives the U.S. base rights we will have a national upheaval. And if the U.S. attacks Afghanistan, there will be a call -- a fatwa -- for a general jihad. All borders will then disappear and it will be a no-holds-barred Islamic uprising against Israel and American imperialism. Pakistan will be engulfed in the firestorm. So I can only hope that cooler heads will prevail in Washington.
Q: What about the other U.S. demands?
A: Overflight rights are meaningless since the U.S. violates air space daily all over the world. As for intelligence sharing with ISI, you can't even catch your own terrorists. And what ISI gives you will be of marginal value anyway.
Q: President (Pervez) Musharraf has made strong statements supporting the U.S.
A: He was my student in the army. He is a good man, but he doesn't understand Islam. The army will never fight the masses. If push comes to shove, Musharraf will say no to the Americans rather than turn against the people. He is not just facing a handful of angry people. By his own admission, it's 10 percent to 15 percent of the population, or at least 10 million people willing to fight. For openers, they would close the port of Karachi. A country cannot breathe without lungs.
Q: Back to Osama's terrorist network. Who was behind the bombing of the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya?
A: Mossad is strong in both countries. Remember the Israeli operation to free hostages in Entebbe (Uganda)? Both Kenya and Tanzania were part of the logistical tail. A so-called associate of Osama was framed at Karachi airport. The incidents took place on Aug. 8, 1999, and on the 10th a short, clean-shaven man disembarks at Karachi airport and presents the passport of a bearded man. Not your passport, he was told. He then tries to bribe the clerk with 200 rupees. A ludicrously small sum given the circumstances. The clerk says no and turns him in and he starts singing right away. Not plausible. Osama has sworn to me on the Koran it was not him and he is truthful to a fault. Pious Muslims do not kill innocent civilians who included many Muslim victims. The passport must have been switched while the man was asleep on the plane in what has all the earmarks of a Mossad operation. For 10 years, the Mujahideen fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and not a single Soviet embassy was touched anywhere in the world. So this could not have been Osama's followers.
Q: What if bin Laden has been lying to you and is guilty. Is that inconceivable?
A: If Taliban are given irrefutable evidence of his guilt, I am in favor of a fair trial. In America, one is entitled to a jury of peers. But he has no American peers. The Taliban would not object, in the event of a prima face case, to an international Islamic court meeting in The Hague. They would turn extradite Osama to the Netherlands.
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=69660&group=webcast
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,556279,00.html
Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats of possible American military strikes against them two months before the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington, which were allegedly masterminded by the Saudi-born fundamentalist, a Guardian investigation has established.
The threats of war unless the Taliban surrendered Osama bin Laden were passed to the regime in Afghanistan by the Pakistani government, senior diplomatic sources revealed yesterday.
The Taliban refused to comply but the serious nature of what they were told raises the possibility that Bin Laden, far from launching the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon out of the blue 10 days ago, was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats.
The warning to the Taliban originated at a four-day meeting of senior Americans, Russians, Iranians and Pakistanis at a hotel in Berlin in mid-July. The conference, the third in a series dubbed "brainstorming on Afghanistan", was part of a classic diplomatic device known as "track two".
It was designed to offer a free and open-ended forum for governments to pass messages and sound out each other's thinking. Participants were experts with long diplomatic experience of the region who were no longer government officials but had close links with their governments.
"The Americans indicated to us that in case the Taliban does not behave and in case Pakistan also doesn't help us to influence the Taliban, then the United States would be left with no option but to take an overt action against Afghanistan," said Niaz Naik, a former foreign minister of Pakistan, who was at the meeting.
"I told the Pakistani government, who informed the Taliban via our foreign office and the Taliban ambassador here."
The three Americans at the Berlin meeting were Tom Simons, a former US ambassador to Pakistan, Karl "Rick" Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of state for south Asian affairs, and Lee Coldren, who headed the office of Pakistan, Afghan and Bangladesh affairs in the state department until 1997.
According to Mr Naik, the Americans raised the issue of an attack on Afghanistan at one of the full sessions of the conference, convened by Francesc Vendrell, a Spanish diplomat who serves as the UN secretary general's special representative on Afghanistan. In the break afterwards, Mr Naik told the Guardian yesterday, he asked Mr Simons why the attack should be more successful than Bill Clinton's missile strikes on Afghanistan in 1998, which caused 20 deaths but missed Bin Laden.
"He said this time they were very sure. They had all the intelligence and would not miss him this time. It would be aerial action, maybe helicopter gunships, and not only overt, but from very close proximity to Afghanistan. The Russians were listening to the conversation but not participating."
Asked whether he could be sure that the Americans were passing ideas from the Bush administration rather than their own views, Mr Naik said yesterday: "What the Americans indicated to us was perhaps based on official instructions. They were very senior people. Even in 'track two' people are very careful about what they say and don't say."
In the room at the time were not only the Americans, Russians and Pakistanis but also a team from Iran headed by Saeed Rajai Khorassani, a former Iranian envoy to the UN. Three Pakistani generals, one still on active service, attended the conference.
Giving further evidence of the fact that the Berlin meeting was designed to influence governments, the UN invited official representatives of both the Taliban government in Kabul and the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Dr Abdullah Abdullah, the Northern Alliance's foreign minister, attended. The Taliban declined to send a representative.
The Pakistani government took the US talk of possible strikes seriously enough to pass it on to the Taliban. Pakistan is one of only three governments to recognise the Taliban. Mr Coldren confirmed the broad outline of the American position at the Berlin meeting yesterday. "I think there was some discussion of
the fact that the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action." The three former US diplomats "based our discussion on hearsay from US officials", he said. It was not an agenda item at the meeting "but was mentioned just in passing".
Nikolai Kozyrev, Moscow's former special envoy on Afghanistan and one of the Russians in Berlin, would not confirm the contents of the US conversations, but said: "Maybe they had some discussions in the corridor. I don't exclude such a possibility."
Mr Naik's recollection is that "we had the impression Russians were trying to tell the Americans that the threat of the use of force is sometimes more effective than force itself".
The Berlin conference was the third convened since November last year by Mr Vendrell. As a UN meeting, its official agenda was confined to trying to find a negotiated solution to the civil war in Afghanistan, ending terrorism and heroin trafficking, and discussing humanitarian aid.
Mr Simons denied having said anything about detailed operations. "I've known Niaz Naik and considered him a friend for years. He's an honourable diplomat. I didn't say anything like that and didn't hear anyone else say anything like that. We were clear that feeling in Washington was strong, and that military action was one of the options down the road. But details, I don't know where they came from."
The US was reassessing its Afghan policy under the new Bush administration at the time of the July meeting, according to Mr Simons. "It was clear that the trend of US government policy was widening. People should worry, Taliban, Bin Laden ought to worry - but the drift of US policy was to get away from single issue, from concentrating on Bin Laden as under Clinton, and get broader."
Mr Inderfurth said: "There was no suggestion for military force to be used. What we discussed was the need for a comprehensive political settlement to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan, that has been going on for two decades, and has been doing so much damage."
The Foreign Office confirmed the significance of the Berlin discussions. "The meeting was a bringing together of Afghan factions and some interested states and we received reports from several participants, including the UN," it said.
Asked if he was surprised that the American participants were denying the details they mentioned in Berlin, Mr Naik said last night: "I'm a little surprised but maybe they feel they shouldn't have told us anything in advance now we have had these tragic events".
Russia's president Vladimir Putin said in an interview released yesterday that he had warned the Clinton administration about the dangers posed by Bin Laden. "Washington's reaction at the time really amazed me. They shrugged their shoulders and said matter-of-factly: 'We can't do anything because the Taliban does not want to turn him over'."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,556279,00.html
Understandably there has been an enormous out-pouring of sympathy and empathy for those who perished in Washington and New York. Right thinking human beings around the world are naturally repulsed by such inhumanity to man. We are told that around 5,000 people have lost their lives, which of course is almost unthinkable and the whole world feels for those bereaved.
However, there is something grotesquely disingenuous in the apparent mourning of many of those not directly affected. Just about every high profile figure in societies around the world have expressed their horror and sympathy for the dead and bereaved. These same 'saddened' people apparently find it acceptable that hundreds of thousands of the children of Iraq die as a direct result of American policy on that country. Are we to assume that the lives of Iraqi children are of less importance than the lives of the 'money fraternity' of New York?
If the hijackers use the same kind of reasoning as the American administration, then the passengers on those doomed airliners and those occupying the WTO would be considered as "collateral damage". For the hijackers, the WTO and the Pentagon were even more legitimate targets than the TV station in Belgrade.
There is no doubt that 'the west' has bought into the notion that that which threatens the U.S.A. is of far greater significance than that which devastates nations in the wider world. It is apparently acceptable to all in the "civilised world" that millions in the "developing countries" should die while being exploited by five institutions, all of which are based in the U.S.A.. Those institutions are : The Federal Reserve Bank (The Fed), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), the World Trade Organisation (WTO) with the Pentagon and even NATO as the military wing of all four.
While the American people are as worthy and decent as any on the planet and they know that, so they really need to ask themselves the question WHY they are hated by so many. The swagger of their president seems to epitomise the perceived arrogance of the nation. American life is sacred, but all outside of their shores are apparently of little importance. This is obviously not the attitude of the 'grass roots' American people, but it is the attitude being presented to the world on their behalf.
We in the U.K. are inclined to view Americans as sophisticated worldly people, but the media coverage of the last few days has revealed a naivety amongst decent U.S. citizens which is astonishing.
This is an appeal to those decent American people. Please wake up and recognise what is being done in your name. President Bush tells us that we are now engaged in a fight of "good against evil". He is wrong, the world is witnessing evil against evil. That the hijackers actions were evil is beyond dispute, but American financial and military dominance is being exercised in a way that costs more lives per day, 365 days a year, than the lives snuffed out on that fateful September 11th.
The Washington and New York horrors will change the world, as is being widely touted by the media. From what - to what, is the question. The use of military might in punitive action is apparently deemed to be the only solution to combat this level of hate and it is an understandable 'knee-jerk ' reaction of many people. But there is no way that that is going to "change the world" for the better. For real good to come out of this evil, 'ordinary people' in the whole 'Western World' need to gain an understanding of why there is so much hate by many millions for what we in the U.K. are "standing shoulder to shoulder" with.
George W. Bush and his poodle Tony Blair cannot and will not resolve the problem of terrorism. They can only exacerbate the problem and increase the level of hate, desperation, distrust and sense of injustice which is the driving force behind terrorism. 'The man in the street' is the guy who can resolve this problem by getting an understanding of WHY there is hate of this magnitude and we are not just talking about a handful of fanatical lunatics.
A widely publicised and truthful answer to the question WHY?, will do more real good than all the military might on the planet.
"In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse in earlier centuries." Ezra Pound
The WTC bombing is surrounded by questions of intelligence, and its failures, serious suspicions about the role of the intelligence community, not to mention a lack of intellignce by commentators and political leaders. We need to apply our own intellignce to the actual problem - abuse of power.
As many commentators have been asking, how come nobody had any real inkling as to the terrible atrocity that was planned for the World Trade Center this week, especially with all of the intelligence resources of the USA? And they find it equally curious, even on CNN, that immediately afterwards, those same resources could finger known terrorists on the passenger lists, and move on their bases, remove their cars, track them to Hamburg etc. Even CNN commentators ask the right questions, sometimes, but they usually fail to come up with anything more than jingoism.
Propaganda is rife. According to reports on Indymedia and elsewhere, the images of Palestinians apparently celebrating the attack are actually ten years old. If true, this is a serious, and possibly premeditated manipulation by CNN. We need to remember that members of the psychological operations units of the US military actually work in CNN. Intelligence again. However, successful propaganda only worsens the problem and postpones the inevitable reaction.
It is also strange that, almost immediately, Osama Bin Laden was fingered as the culprit. Without any apparent evidence, he has been singled out as the only one capable of carrying out such an act. This seems thin, if we consider the attacks carried out in Japan by the AUM sect, as just one example. We should also keep in mind that he is a former CIA asset yet another intelligence connection.
Curiously, CNN's own 'Late Edition' just now, on Sunday, allowed two former intelligence directors to question that chant for Bin Laden's blood. Both James Woolsey, retired CIA Director and Lt Gen William Odom, former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) made it quite clear that they did not believe that Bin Laden could have run such an operation from the depths of Afghanistan. Such retired officers are at much greater liberty to give us the benefit of the enormous experience.
It therefore seems possible that Osama Bin Laden is not solely responsible, and is a convenient 'fall guy'. On the other hand it seems quite impossible for such an operation to have been mounted within the United States without somebody in the intelligence community knowing about it.
And the emerging chorus for war, serves the interest of the military and their suppliers, and in turn the financiers of both. And let's not forget the boost to repressive forces within the USA, and threats to civil liberties increasing throughout the Western world. Not very intelligent.
All in all, a very usual pattern is emerging - that of a much needed war to boost a flagging economy, further curtail civil liberties, and make massive profits for the arms industry and the banks. One could be forgiven for imagining that there were intelligence operatives involved in these tragic events, on some perverse mission to cause public panic by means of a few hijackings, but who may in the end have been outwitted by their terrorist colleagues. That might also help explain the establishment's red hot anger.
Retribution is merely going to harden the terrorists, and produce more, maybe even worse, massacres in the future. In this sense, if you are with George Bush, you are for MORE terrorism, including the variety he will dish out to innocent civilians in Afghanistan or wherever.
Right now is the moment for some real, hard-headed down-to-earth no-nonsense intelligent analysis. It absolutely cannot be postponed, because it must dictate our reaction to these unspeakable events.
One has to be aware that, quite often, what is referred to as terrorism, as we know too well in my home country, Ireland, is generally a 'last straw' violent reaction to extreme abuse of power. Like the power which has killed half-a-million innocent children in Iraq, and attacked innocent civilians with cluster bombs and depleted uranium in Yugoslavia, to mention just two of the more recent Western atrocities. And it appears that we are now in for more of the same. And to that we must add the extreme economic exploitation of the worldwide poor, now accelerated by globalisation, and the abuse of the credit institutions behind the scenes, to bring countries, like Pakistan maybe, into line.
Right now, we must urgently apply real intelligence to the problem of abuse of economic, political and military power in the World, if we are ever to escape from the escalating vicious circle now entwining us. That is OUR abuse of power meaning all of us in the Western world, who by one means or another go along with the impoverishment and destruction of the rest of humanity.
That places the emerging anti-globalisation movement centre stage. But it needs to be very clear about what it wants, and how it intends to get it, before it is too late. The subject matter of a follow-up, if I might be permitted.
grattan_healy@compuserve.com
BEIRUT, Sept 15 (AFP) -
Lebanon's anti-Syrian Druze leader Walid Jumblatt believes the CIA and Israel's secret service Mossad are behind the terrorist attacks in the United States, and that Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden is an "American agent," newspaper reports said Saturday.
"There are a number of questions on the authors of the attacks in America. I think they (the attacks) were a great coup carried out by the secret services. The CIA and the Mossad could be behind (the attacks) to provoke a new war and impoverish and occupy the Middle East," Jumblatt was quoted as saying.
"Who is bin Laden who has become the number one (enemy) of western civilisations? He is an invention of the American secret services who chose to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan with US backing," said Jumblatt, who had ties with the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991.
"It is an enormous scandal because in 1994, the CIA pointed the finger at bin Laden as a very dangerous man," Jumblatt said, adding: "It is also surprising that a great state which has a military budget of 350 billion dollars, was not able to thwart these attacks."
"One should find out whether the American (secret) services are implicated in starting a merciless war between America and the racist West against Arabs and the Muslims," he said.
Jumblatt, who defends the Palestinian uprising and their right to an independent state, also expressed concern that the "war against terrorism" could develop into a "huge massacre of Palestinians."
"Under the pretext of fighting bin Laden, the Zionists may commit a huge massacre in Palestine to push through an exodus of its Arab residents and give the green-light to (Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) to carry out a huge massacre," Jumblatt said.
He also called on Britain to "present its apologies to the Arab and Muslim people for its crime: the creation of Israel."
Britain, which in 1920 was granted a mandate over Palestine up until the 1948 creation of the Israeli state, promised to aid the "Jews to create a home in Palestine," during the 1917 Balfour declaration often considered to have led to the establishment of the Jewish state.
Jumblatt, who was presiding over a ceremony in the Shouf mountains southeast of Beirut, also called on the audience to observe one minute of silence in memory of the "innocent (people) killed in the World Trade Center."
The silence was also held in memory of the "Arabs killed in Palestine, in south Lebanon, in Syria, Jordan and Iraq in the war against Israel," he said.
The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it). Not to speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind. But that this was a horrendous crime is not in doubt. The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people. It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal freedom.
The events reveal, dramatically, the foolishness of the project of "missile defense." As has been obvious all along, and pointed out repeatedly by strategic analysts, if anyone wants to cause immense damage in the US, including weapons of mass destruction, they are highly unlikely to launch a missile attack, thus guaranteeing their immediate destruction. There are innumerable easier ways that are basically unstoppable. But today's events will, very likely, be exploited to increase the pressure to develop these systems and put them into place. "Defense" is a thin cover for plans for militarization of space, and with good PR, even the flimsiest arguments will carry some weight among a frightened public.
In short, the crime is a gift to the hard jingoist right, those who hope to use force to control their domains. That is even putting aside the likely US actions, and what they will trigger -- possibly more attacks like this one, or worse. The prospects ahead are even more ominous than they appeared to be before the latest atrocities.
As to how to react, we have a choice. We can express justified horror; we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators. If we choose the latter course, we can do no better, I think, than to listen to the words of Robert Fisk, whose direct knowledge and insight into affairs of the region is unmatched after many years of distinguished reporting. Describing "The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people," he writes that "this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia - paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally - hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." And much more. Again, we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=93624
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=93623
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=93798
By John Pilger September 13, 2001
http://www.zmag.org/pilgercalam.htm
If the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who can really be surprised?
Two days earlier, eight people were killed in southern Iraq when British and American planes bombed civilian areas. To my knowledge, not a word appeared in the mainstream media in Britain.
An estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the Health Education Trust in London, died during and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter known as the Gulf War.
This was never news that touched public consciousness in the west.
At least a million civilians, half of them children, have since died in Iraq as a result of a medieval embargo imposed by the United States and Britain.
In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mujadeen, which gave birth to the fanatical Taliban, was largely the creation of the CIA.
The terrorist training camps where Osama bin Laden, now "America's most wanted man", allegedly planned his attacks, were built with American money and backing.
In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would have collapsed long ago were it not for US backing.
Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims - principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth.
This fact is censored from the Western media, whose "coverage" at best minimises the culpability of imperial powers. Richard Falk, professor of international relations at Princeton, put it this way: "Western foreign policy is presented almost exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way legal/moral screen (with) positive images of Western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence."
That Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and has sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium and was the greatest arms supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia, can be taken seriously when he now speaks about the "shame" of the "new evil of mass terrorism" says much about the censorship of our collective sense of how the world is managed.
One of Blair's favourite words - "fatuous" - comes to mind. Alas, it is no comfort to the families of thousands of ordinary Americans who have died so terribly that the perpetrators of their suffering may be the product of Western policies. Did the American establishment believe that it could bankroll and manipulate events in the Middle East without cost to itself, or rather its own innocent people?
The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal of the Islamic and Arab peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years of Israel's brutal occupation of an Arab nation: all, it seems, obliterated within hours by Tuesday's acts of awesome cruelty by those who say they represent the victims of the West's intervention in their homelands.
"America, which has never known modern war, now has her own terrible league table: perhaps as many as 20,000 victims." [now believed to be around 5,000]
As Robert Fisk points out, in the Middle East, people will grieve the loss of innocent life, but they will ask if the newspapers and television networks of the west ever devoted a fraction of the present coverage to the half-a-million dead children of Iraq, and the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The answer is no. There are deeper roots to the atrocities in the US, which made them almost inevitable.
It is not only the rage and grievance in the Middle East and south Asia. Since the end of the cold war, the US and its sidekicks, principally Britain, have exercised, flaunted, and abused their wealth and power while the divisions imposed on human beings by them and their agents have grown as never before.
An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per cent of the world's wealth. In defence of this power and privilege, known by the euphemisms "free market" and "free trade", the injustices are legion: from the illegal blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade, dominated by the US, to its trashing of basic environmental decencies, to the assault on fragile economies by institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that are little more than agents of the US Treasury and the European central banks, and the demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in forcing the poorest nations to repay unrepayable debts; to a new US "Vietnam" in Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks between North and South Korea (in order to shore up North Korea's "rogue nation" status).
Western terror is part of the recent history of imperialism, a word that journalists dare not speak or write.
The expulsion of the population of Diego Darcia in the 1960s by the Wilson government received almost no press coverage.Their homeland is now an American nuclear arms dump and base from which US bombers patrol the Middle East.
In Indonesia, in 1965/6, a million people were killed with the complicity of the US and British governments: the Americans supplying General Suharto with assassination lists, then ticking off names as people were killed.
"Getting British companies and the World Bank back in there was part of the deal", says Roland Challis, who was the BBC's south east Asia correspondent.
British behaviour in Malaya was no different from the American record in Vietnam, for which it proved inspirational: the withholding of food, villages turned into concentration camps and more than half a million people forcibly dispossessed.
In Vietnam, the dispossession, maiming and poisoning of an entire nation was apocalyptic, yet diminished in our memory by Hollywood movies and by what Edward Said rightly calls cultural imperialism.
In Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam, the CIA arranged the homicide of around 50,000 people. As official documents now reveal, this was the model for the terror in Chile that climaxed with the murder of the democratically elected leader Salvador Allende, and within 10 years, the crushing of Nicaragua.
All of it was lawless. The list is too long for this piece.
Now imperialism is being rehabilitated. American forces currently operate with impunity from bases in 50 countries. "Full spectrum dominance" is Washington's clearly stated aim.Read the documents of the US Space Command, which leaves us in no doubt.
In this country, the eager Blair government has embarked on four violent adventures, in pursuit of "British interests" (dressed up as "peacekeeping"), and which have little or no basis in international law: a record matched by no other British government for half a century.
What has this to do with this week's atrocities in America? If you travel among the impoverished majority of humanity, you understand that it has everything to do with it.
People are neither still, nor stupid. They see their independence compromised, their resources and land and the lives of their children taken away, and their accusing fingers increasingly point north: to the great enclaves of plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds terror and more fanaticism.
But how patient the oppressed have been.
It is only a few years ago that the Islamic fundamentalist groups, willing to blow themselves up in Israel and New York, were formed, and only after Israel and the US had rejected outright the hope of a Palestinian state, and justice for a people scarred by imperialism.
Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway brutalised places have at last come home.
http://www.zmag.org/pilgercalam.htm
The Guardian - Thursday September 13, 2001
Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.
As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.
It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.
It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.
But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.
All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.
Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.
s.milne@guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,551036,00.html
A few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration concluded without supporting evidence, that "Ousmane bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were prime suspects". CIA Director George Tenet stated that bin Laden has the capacity to plan ``multiple attacks with little or no warning.'' Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks "an act of war" and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them". Former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed his finger at "state sponsorship," implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, "I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution."
Meanwhile, parroting official statements, the Western media mantra has approved the launching of "punitive actions" directed against civilian targets in the Middle East. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: "When we reasonably determine our attackers' bases and camps, we must pulverize them -- minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage -- and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror's national hosts".
The following text outlines the history of Ousmane Bin Laden and the links of the Islamic "Jihad" to the formulation of US foreign policy during the Cold War and its aftermath.
Prime suspect in the New York and Washington terrorists attacks, branded by the FBI as an "international terrorist" for his role in the African US embassy bombings, Saudi born Ousmane bin Laden was recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war "ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight Soviet invaders". 1In 1979 "the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA" was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal.2:
"With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad."3
The Islamic "jihad" was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade:
"In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166,...[which] authorize[d] stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies -- a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, ... as well as a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels."4
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) using Pakistan's military Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) played a key role in training the Mujahideen. In turn, the CIA sponsored guerrilla training was integrated with the teachings of Islam:
"Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete socio-political ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by the atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow."5
PAKISTAN'S INTELLIGENCE APPARATUS
Pakistan's ISI was used as a "go-between". The CIA covert support to the "jihad" operated indirectly through the Pakistani ISI, --i.e. the CIA did not channel its support directly to the Mujahideen. In other words, for these covert operations to be "successful", Washington was careful not to reveal the ultimate objective of the "jihad", which consisted in destroying the Soviet Union.
In the words of CIA's Milton Beardman "We didn't train Arabs". Yet according to Abdel Monam Saidali, of the Al-aram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, bin Laden and the "Afghan Arabs" had been imparted "with very sophisticated types of training that was allowed to them by the CIA" 6
CIA's Beardman confirmed, in this regard, that Ousmane bin Laden was not aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): "neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help". 7
Motivated by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were unaware that they were fighting the Soviet Army on behalf of Uncle Sam. While there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy, Islamic rebel leaders in theatre had no contacts with Washington or the CIA.
With CIA backing and the funneling of massive amounts of US military aid, the Pakistani ISI had developed into a "parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government". 8 The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers, estimated at 150,000. 9
Meanwhile, CIA operations had also reinforced the Pakistani military regime led by General Zia Ul Haq:
"''Relations between the CIA and the ISI [Pakistan's military intelligence] had grown increasingly warm following [General] Zia's ouster of Bhutto and the advent of the military regime,'... During most of the Afghan war, Pakistan was more aggressively anti-Soviet than even the United States. Soon after the Soviet military invaded Afghanistan in 1980, Zia [ul Haq] sent his ISI chief to destabilize the Soviet Central Asian states. The CIA only agreed to this plan in October 1984.... `the CIA was more cautious than the Pakistanis.' Both Pakistan and the United States took the line of deception on Afghanistan with a public posture of negotiating a settlement while privately agreeing that military escalation was the best course."10
THE GOLDEN CRESCENT DRUG TRIANGLE
The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. 11 In this regard, Alfred McCoy's study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, "the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979... to 1.2 million by 1985 -- a much steeper rise than in any other nation":12
"CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests ... U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies `because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.' In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War. `Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn't really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade,'... `I don't think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout.... There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.'"13
IN THE WAKE OF THE COLD WAR
In the wake of the Cold War, the Central Asian region is not only strategic for its extensive oil reserves, it also produces three quarters of the World's opium representing multibillion dollar revenues to business syndicates, financial institutions, intelligence agencies and organized crime. The annual proceeds of the Golden Crescent drug trade (between 100 and 200 billion dollars) represents approximately one third of the Worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $500 billion.14
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 -- coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics-- reached a record high of 4600 metric tons.15 Powerful business syndicates in the former Soviet Union allied with organized crime are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes.
The ISI's extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic "jihad" out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus essentially "served as a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of six new Muslim republics in Central Asia." 16.
Meanwhile, Islamic missionaries of the Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia had established themselves in the Muslim republics as well as within the Russian federation encroaching upon the institutions of the secular State. Despite its anti-American ideology, Islamic fundamentalism was largely serving Washington's strategic interests in the former Soviet Union.
Following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the civil war in Afghanistan continued unabated. The Taliban were being supported by the Pakistani Deobandis and their political party the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). In 1993, JUI entered the government coalition of Prime Minister Benazzir Bhutto. Ties between JUI, the Army and ISI were established. In 1995, with the downfall of the Hezb-I-Islami Hektmatyar government in Kabul, the Taliban not only instated a hardline Islamic government, they also "handed control of training camps in Afghanistan over to JUI factions..." 17
And the JUI with the support of the Saudi Wahhabi movements played a key role in recruiting volunteers to fight in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.
Jane Defense Weekly confirms in this regard that "half of Taliban manpower and equipment originate[d] in Pakistan under the ISI" 18 In fact, it would appear that following the Soviet withdrawal both sides in the Afghan civil war continued to receive covert support through Pakistan's ISI. 19
In other words, backed by Pakistan's military intelligence (ISI) which in turn was controlled by the CIA, the Taliban Islamic State was largely serving American geopolitical interests. The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In last few months there is evidence that Mujahideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia.
No doubt, this explains why Washington has closed its eyes on the reign of terror imposed by the Taliban including the blatant derogation of women's rights, the closing down of schools for girls, the dismissal of women employees from government offices and the enforcement of "the Sharia laws of punishment".20
THE WAR IN CHECHNYA
With regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress's Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. 21 The summit, was attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking Iranian and Pakistani intelligence officers. In this regard, the involvement of Pakistan's ISI in Chechnya "goes far beyond supplying the Chechens with weapons and expertise: the ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war". 22
Russia's main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington's perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin.
The two main Chechen rebel armies (respectively led by Commander Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab) estimated at 35,000 strong were supported by Pakistan's ISI, which also played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel army:
"[In 1994] the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence arranged for Basayev and his trusted lieutenants to undergo intensive Islamic indoctrination and training in guerrilla warfare in the Khost province of Afghanistan at Amir Muawia camp, set up in the early 1980s by the CIA and ISI and run by famous Afghani warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In July 1994, upon graduating from Amir Muawia, Basayev was transferred to Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to undergo training in advanced guerrilla tactics. In Pakistan, Basayev met the highest ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officers: Minister of Defense General Aftab Shahban Mirani, Minister of Interior General Naserullah Babar, and the head of the ISI branch in charge of supporting Islamic causes, General Javed Ashraf, (all now retired). High-level connections soon proved very useful to Basayev.23 Following his training and indoctrination stint, Basayev was assigned to lead the assault against Russian federal troops in the first Chechen war in 1995. His organization had also developed extensive links to criminal syndicates in Moscow as well as ties to Albanian organized crime and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In 1997-98, according to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) "Chechen warlords started buying up real estate in Kosovo... through several real estate firms registered as a cover in Yugoslavia" 24
Basayev's organisation has also been involved in a number of rackets including narcotics, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia's oil pipelines, kidnapping, prostitution, trade in counterfeit dollars and the smuggling of nuclear materials (See Mafia linked to Albania's collapsed pyramids, 25 Alongside the extensive laundering of drug money, the proceeds of various illicit activities have been funneled towards the recruitment of mercenaries and the purchase of weapons.
During his training in Afghanistan, Shamil Basayev linked up with Saudi born veteran Mujahideen Commander "Al Khattab" who had fought as a volunteer in Afghanistan. Barely a few months after Basayev's return to Grozny, Khattab was invited (early 1995) to set up an army base in Chechnya for the training of Mujahideen fighters. According to the BBC, Khattab's posting to Chechnya had been "arranged through the Saudi-Arabian based [International] Islamic Relief Organisation, a militant religious organisation, funded by mosques and rich individuals which channeled funds into Chechnya".26
Since the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Ousmane bin Laden, while at same time placing him on the FBI's "most wanted list" as the World's foremost terrorist.
While the Mujahideen are busy fighting America's war in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, the FBI --operating as a US based Police Force- is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some respects independently of the CIA which has --since the Soviet-Afghan war-- supported international terrorism through its covert operations.
In a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad --featured by the Bush Adminstration as "a threat to America"-- is blamed for the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, these same Islamic organisations constitute a key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the truth must prevail to prevent the Bush Adminstration together with its NATO partners from embarking upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.
Copyright Michel Chossudovsky, Montreal, September 2001. All rights reserved. Centre for Research on Globalisation at http://globalresearch.ca. Permission is granted to post this text on non-commercial community internet sites, provided the source and the URL are indicated, the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed.
To publish this text in printed and/or other forms, including commercial internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at chossudovsky@videotron.ca, fax: 1-514-4256224.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.md.nsa24apr24.story
Originally published April 24, 2001
WASHINGTON - U.S. military leaders proposed in 1962 a secret plan to commit terrorist acts against Americans and blame Cuba to create a pretext for invasion and the ouster of Communist leader Fidel Castro, according to a new book about the National Security Agency.
"We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," said one document reportedly prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," the document says. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of indignation."
The plan is laid out in documents signed by the five Joint Chiefs but never carried out, according to writer James Bamford in "Body of Secrets." The new history of the Fort Meade-based eavesdropping agency is being released today by Doubleday.
NSA regularly picks up the conversations of suspected terrorist financier Osama bin Laden, says Bamford, and has monitored Chinese and French companies trying to sell missiles to Iran. He provides new details about an Israeli attack on a Navy eavesdropping ship in 1967, suggesting that the sinking was deliberate. And he reveals the loss of an "entire warehouse" full of secret cryptographic gear to the North Vietnamese in 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War.
Bamford, a former investigative reporter for ABC News who wrote "The Puzzle Palace" about the NSA in 1982, said his new book is based mostly on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act or found in government archives. "NSA never handed me any documents," he said. "It was a question of digging."
He said he was most surprised by the anti-Cuba terror plan, code-named Operation Northwoods. It "may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government," he writes. The Northwoods plan also proposed that if the 1962 launch of John Glenn into orbit were to fail, resulting in the astronaut's death, the U.S. government would publicize fabricated evidence that Cuba had used electronic interference to sabotage the flight, the book says.
A previously secret document obtained by Bamford offers further suggestions for mayhem to be blamed on Cuba. "We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). ... We could foster attempts on lives of Cubans in the United States, even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized," the document says. Another idea was to shoot down a CIA plane designed to replicate a passenger flight and announce that Cuban forces shot it down.
Citing a White House document, Bamford writes that the idea of creating a pretext for the invasion of Cuba might have started with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the last weeks of his administration, when the plan for an invasion by Cuban exiles trained in the United States was hatched. Carried out in April 1961, soon after Kennedy became president, the Bay of Pigs invasion proved a fiasco. Castro's forces quickly killed or rounded up the invaders.
Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, presented the Operation Northwoods plan to Kennedy early in 1962, but the president rejected it that March because he wanted no overt U.S. military action against Cuba. Lemnitzer then sought unsuccessfully to destroy all evidence of the plan, according to Bamford. Lemnitzer and those who served with him in 1962 as chiefs of the nation's military branches are dead.
But two former top Kennedy administration officials said yesterday that they were unaware of Operation Northwoods and questioned whether such a plan was ever drafted. "I've never heard of Operation Northwoods. Never heard of it and don't believe it," said Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy's White House special counsel. "Obviously, it would be totally illegal as well as totally unwise." Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, said: "I never heard of it. I can't believe the chiefs were talking about or engaged in what I would call CIA-type operations."
Bamford writes that besides the Joint Chiefs, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze also favored "provoking a phony war with Cuba." "There may be a piece of paper" on Northwoods, said McNamara. "I just cannot conceive of [Nitze] approving anything like that or doing it without talking to me."
The book contains many other revelations in its detailed account of NSA, the biggest U.S. intelligence agency and Maryland's largest employer, with more than 25,000 personnel at Fort Meade, site of its global eavesdropping efforts.
Among them: In recent years, NSA has regularly listened to bin Laden's unencrypted telephone calls. Agency officials have sometimes played tapes of bin Laden talking to his mother to impress members of Congress and select visitors to the agency.
In the late 1990s, NSA tracked efforts by Chinese and French companies to sell missile technology to Iran, particularly the C-802 anti-ship missile. The eavesdropping led to U.S. protests to the Chinese and French governments.
When U.S. troops evacuated Vietnam in 1975, "an entire warehouse overflowing with NSA's most important cryptographic machines and other supersensitive code and cipher materials" was left behind. It was the largest compromise of such equipment in U.S. history, Bamford writes, but the agency still has not acknowledged it.
When Israeli fighter jets attacked the NSA eavesdropping ship USS Liberty in the Mediterranean in 1967, killing 34 Americans and wounding 171, an NSA aircraft was listening in and heard Israeli pilots referring to the American flag on the ship. U.S. officials, including President Lyndon Baines Johnson, decided to forget the matter, Bamford writes, because they did not want to embarrass Israel. To this day, Israeli officials say their forces mistakenly attacked the U.S. ship.
Bamford says the reason for the strike was Israel's desperate effort to cover up its attacks on the Egyptian town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was sitting offshore and the Israelis feared that the ship would detect the operation, which included the shooting of prisoners.
Yesterday, an NSA spokesperson questioned a point made in the book about the USS Liberty. "We do not comment on operational matters, alleged or otherwise; however, Mr. Bamford's claim that the NSA leadership was `virtually unanimous in their belief that the attack was deliberate' is simply not true," the spokesperson said.
When he wrote "The Puzzle Palace" in 1982, Bamford was attacked by some NSA officials, who said his revelations gave the Soviet Union and other U.S. adversaries too much information on the secret agency. One former director referred to him as "an unconvicted felon."
With the end of the Cold War, the agency has been less guarded. NSA's current director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has granted a number of interviews. Hayden "cracked the door open a tiny bit," said Bamford, partly to burnish NSA's public image and correct misconceptions.
Sun staff writer Laura Sullivan contributed to this article.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.md.nsa24apr24.story
This is transcribed from an embarrassing BBC 'Behind the Lines' TV documentary presented by 'Langan' and shown on the above date. As part of a tour of Palestine Langan goes for his interview with Sheikh Yassin. He jokes with his Palestinian taxi driver that Yassin will be angry if he his late for his appointment. Langan quips, “ What else does he have to do…prepare the holy war?” It’s pretty obvious that Langan misunderstands the term ‘Jihad’ a common mistake in the west. Jihad means 'struggle' and it can relate to all areas of life i.e. the struggle to give up smoking can be a jihad, not just a ‘holy war’. Langan’s voiceover continues; “Sheikh Yassin wasn’t exactly in hiding. His home is on the high street. Like the summer camp for boys, separate roads and suburban settlements for Jews, and holocaust denial, the extreme has become the everyday…” We then see Langan explaining to the camera; “ They’re just getting him ready. They’re lifting him from his bed on to his wheelchair…” Langan then fiddles with some nearby Physiotherapy equipment. He flippantly quips; “ These are Yassins torture instruments.”
Langan : “ Is it a holy war or a war of liberation…or both?“Yassin: “ We wish to liberate our land you can call it what you want. We wish to liberate our land and return our people to it. That’s what the war is all about.”
Langan: “ Could you explain then because in my understanding that the rules of Jihad grant that you must not kill women and children…that you must not kill unarmed civilians…it even says that you must not kill your enemy if he’s tilling the land so i.e. if a soldiers back from the front and providing for his family…(he changes tact) there are many laws of Jihad which in my mind Hamas has broken by setting of bombs in shopping malls…and breaking the rules of Jihad undermines the claims of Hamas from being an Islamic movement.”
Yassin: “ What he’s saying is not correct. Above all, we are a people who follow the teachings of Islam. One of the teachings of Islam is that we should treat our enemy as he treats us. Our God says if you are punished you must punish the perpetrators in the same way. Our enemy has attacked and killed civilians. We have the right to defend ourselves based on what he has done to us. We’re not going against the teachings of Islam. If our enemy commits himself not to attack or massacre civilians…then we wouldn’t touch any civilian. There’s a difference between what’s right and what’s magnanimous. If you slap me its my right to slap you back. If I magnanimously forgive you, then that’s better. But I still have the right to slap you. If a Palestinian moves away from his own people and land and starts helping the enemy against his own people then he is a traitor and a traitor should be killed. The rules that apply to the enemy also apply to traitors.”
Langan: “As a religious man does he still also have problems being involved in a war? “
Yassin: “My conscience is very clear about what I’m doing because I’m not the aggressor. I’m just defending myself. And I have the right to defend myself by all means. Whoever wishes to kill me, it is my right to kill him. Whoever wants to take my home I have the right to fight him. And whoever wants to kill my children, it is my right to fight them. I’m only defending myself. The guilty conscience belongs to the violator and the terrorist who drives people from their land and takes their land by force- that’s the real terrorist.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/events/newsnight/newsid_1174000/1174115.stm
Washington, the marine band plays 'Hail to the Chief' for George W Bush, 43rd President of the United States. But in Florida, some are singing 'Hail to the Thief'.
After hundreds of lies
Fake alibis
We are coming into Tallahassee. We want to know whether George W Bush won the election or did brother Jeb steal it for him? Our investigation suggest the answer lies in this shuttered building and in a very expensive contract between Governor Jeb's division of elections and a private company named DBT, which accidentally wiped off the voter rolls thousands of Democratic voters. 18th floor division of elections, we have come to ask Mr Clayton Roberts, the director, a few questions. Roberts agreed to talk, but became a bit uncomfortable when he learned that we had obtained the secret DBT contract, and asked him if he knew what DBT were up to.
Florida Director of Elections
No, I didn't ask DBT. They do what we contract them to do. We have a statute that says we have to have a private company to do this. We put it out for bid, we put it out for bid, and I think I'm done with this interview.
Let me just show you the contract if I could Mr Roberts. It says here in the contract that the verification is supposed to be done by DBT. That you paid them $4 million. It could look to others don't you think that you paid $4 million to purchase this election for the Republican party. 95% wrong on the felon list. Mr Roberts, could you answer the question regarding the contract... Instead, Mr Roberts called out State troopers. It's interesting here?
Oh, man! Never a dull moment.
I don't know why he had to call the police. We hadn't gotten to our difficult questions yet! The difficult questions are: Did Governor Jeb Bush, his Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and her Director of Elections, Clayton Roberts, know they had wrongly barred 22,000 black, Democrat voters before the elections? After the elections did they use their powers to prevent the count of 20,000 votes for the Democrats? The Democrats say the answers to both questions are yes.
In any other country in the world, if this had occurred, there probably would have been riots or military troops throughout the streets.
Al Gore won the election. He won the popular vote and he won the vote in Florida. I think that that's pretty clear.
It wasn't done fairly. They shouldn't allow you to contest an election then give you no way to contest it.
Jeb Bush promised his brother he was going to deliver Florida. I believe the Republicans strategy was at all costs we deliver Florida.
Were people taken out of polls and stopped from voting? Yes, I think that was not right. I smell a rat!
This is Database Technologies. This is the company that the state of Florida hired to remove the names of people who committed serious crimes from the voter lists. I have obtained a document marked "confidential and trade secret". It says the company was paid millions of dollars to make telephone calls to verify they got the right names - but they didn't. There is nothing in the state of Florida files that says they made these telephone calls. So the question remains, why did the Republican leaders of this state pay millions for a list that stopped thousands of innocent Democrats from voting? The first list from DBT included 8,000 names from Texas supplied by George Bush's state officials. They said they were all felons, serious criminals barred from voting. As it turns out, almost none were. Local officials raised a ruckus and DBT issued a new list naming 58,000 felons. But the one county which went through the whole expensive process of checking the new list name by name found it was still 95% wrong. Reverend Willie Whiting was one of those removed from voter roles after DBT wrongly labelled him a serious criminal.
I have never spent a night in jail.
Were you ever busted?
No. I had a speeding ticket probably 25-30 years ago, I guess, but that's about it.
Do you think you should be allowed to vote if you had a speeding ticket?
Absolutely.
The Florida legislature likes to see young prisoners paraded in front of the capital in old cavalry uniforms.
Me and superman had a fight
Me and superman had a fight
I hit him in the head with some Kryptonite
I hit him in the head with some Kryptonite
More often than not in America, the prisoner's colour is black. Because of the way DBT generated the list, every genuine black felon in the United States could knock out every black voter in Florida with the same surname and similar date of birth. That's why the NAACP is suing Florida for violating voters' civil rights.
Lawyer for NAACP
Governor Bush, the Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Clayton Roberts, the head of elections, all knew or should have known in advance that certain election policies and practices would disproportionately impact low-income areas, and in particular black citizens and other minority citizens, and that this would disproportionately impact Democratic voters, based on historical voting trends.
Thank you, Florida!
Altogether, it looks like this cost the Democrats about 22,000 votes in Florida, which George Bush won by only 537 votes. The US civil rights commission is also on the trail. They called in Bush, Harris and Roberts. Bush did not convince his critics.
You screwed up this state. You sealed the ballot.
Commissioner Edley and his colleagues will be in Miami tomorrow to hear from voters wrongly disqualified.
US Civil Rights Commissioner
If you are going to do it, by all means as a matter of due process and fairness, it's got to be done with excruciating care. It's a democracy, the vote counts. There is a lot of public concern that the contractor selected is a firm that seems to have ties to the Republican party.
They will be putting our evidence to Database Technologies. Their vice-president told us that "manual verification by telephone calls" does not mean ringing people up to check they have got the right person. So were they paid to produce a list which they knew would name thousands of innocent black people? In fact DBT told Newsnight that Clayton Roberts and the State of Florida: "... wanted there to be more names than were actually verified as being a convicted felon." So did they use their powers to prevent the count of 20,000 votes for the Democrats? You don't have to be black. In Palm Beach, America's privileged nurse their tans and their anger.
I thought I voted for Al Gore but unfortunately I voted for Pat Buchanan, and I wasn't happy about that, because I am a Jewish voter and he would have been the last person in the world I would have voted for.
Whacky butterfly ballots caused thousands in this Democrat town to accidentally mess up and they were refused replacement ballots promised them by state law.
From the time the elections started until that awful decision that the Supreme Court made, I came across hundreds of people who made a mistake and I saw over 13,000 complaints filed by people who live in Palm Beach county.
In all, Palm Beach voting machines misread 27,000 ballots. Jeb Bush's Secretary of State, Katharine Harris, stopped them counting these votes by hand. She did the same to Gadstone, one of Florida's blackest, poorest and most Democrat counties, where machines failed to count one in eight ballots. Again Harris stopped the hand count. This alone cost Gore another 700 votes, in an election in which Harris declared George Bush winner by only 537 votes.
In accordance with the laws of the State of Florida, I hereby declare Governor George W Bush the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes for the President of the United States.
Harris was a busy woman. In charge of Florida's vote count and co-chair of Bush's presidential campaign.
Had she really been unbiased? Wouldn't the appropriate actions for her to be to say - let's really get to the bottom of this election and let's make sure every vote is counted.
Lois Frankel represents Palm Beach, in the State legislature where she leads the Democratic opposition.
She wanted George Bush to win. She interpreted every rule, every law in a way to help George Bush.
We are driving down to Miami to witness an American ritual. In Britain, you count the votes, then announce the winner. In Florida they declare the winner first and here we are, still counting the votes.
She is showing the ballot in front of the light. They can see the light through where the chads have been punched through. Then she holds it in front because sometimes you can see things in different light. They have a whole column.
Normally these are machine-read, right?
Right.
They are carefully going through the 179,855 uncounted ballots that Harris did not want tallied. They'll know the winner next month. Sources tell Newsnight that Gore's ahead by 20,000 votes. The Biltmore, grandest hotel in Miami. Democrats are upstairs eating with their richest friends charging $5,000 a plate. Let's see if we can get in. Not far away from the millionaires on the balcony a voter had taken hostages at gun point protesting against the election fraud. But here it is back to champagne politics as usual. One Democrat whispered they would have done the same as Katharine Harris if they had the chance. But another, party chairman, Bob Poe remains bitter about this.
Chairman, Florida Democrats Jeb Bush, Katharine Harris, Clay Roberts did everything they could to stop every legitimate count of the vote. And that's what did us in.
All fingers point to the Jeb Bush crew in Tallahassee. Investigators want to breakthrough the iron shutters.
I have to say that thus far we have been disappointed by the explanations, or perhaps I should say the lack of explanation provided by the state officials. When we spoke with the Governor and the Secretary of State and even with the Director of the Bureau of Elections underneath the Secretary of State, they were pointing fingers at everybody else, saying "look it wasn't our responsibility", they were in charge, which is a disheartening disquieting thing for us to hear - who should be held accountable for what clearly was a system that broke down.
State officials point the finger at the counties and say it is their responsibility to check if the names on the list are real felons before disqualifying them. Clayton Roberts says his job is just to pass on the list. Roberts now admits he didn't bother to check with DBT, if innocent people were on it.
Please turn off that camera.
Off camera he said:
We did not call and say did you check the list again... the whole tenor of this is like OK you screwed up you didn't check with DBT and if you want to hang this on me that's fine. It is certainly fine for George W Bush. Even if investigators conclude that Jeb Bush and the Republicans conspired to steal this election, the man in that house for the next four years will be George W Bush.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/events/newsnight/newsid_1174000/1174115.stm