October 2, 2005
Azahari bin Husin, said to be the explosives "mastermind" behind
the Bali bombings this past weekend, has a very interesting background.
He is not your average rural madrassa religious fanatic or "al-Qaeda"
goat herder of the sort captured in Afghanistan. Husin is a "former
university lecturer and gifted mathematician," according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
"He returned home to obtain his degree, and at the end of the 1980s
went to Reading University in England, where he impressed his tutors so
much they persuaded him to stay on to complete a doctorate." Husin’s
future was promising as a lecturer at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia at
Skudai in the southern state of Johor—and then he suddenly experienced
a fanatical religious "epiphany" under the sway of the late Abdullah
Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir, followers of the Darul Islam ideology and
co-founders of Pondok Ngruki and eventually Jemaah Islamiyah, an
Islamic separatist movement supposedly dedicated to the establishment
of a fundamentalist Islamic state in Southeast Asia.
I say
"supposedly" because there are doubts (never mentioned in the western
corporate media) about the legitimacy of Jemaah Islamiyah, as I noted
in an earlier blog entry (subsequently posted on the Muslim Public Affairs Committee website).
According to Sayed Abdullah,
who operates an intelligence services firm in Indonesia, "It is clear
that the CIA and the Mossad have infiltrated such organizations [Jemaah
Islamiyah, Hamas, and Hezbollah]." Abdullah told Kazi Mahmood of
IslamOnline the he believe it "is obvious the CIA and the Mossad,
assisted by the Australian Special Action Police (SAP) and the M15 of
England, are all working towards undermining Muslim organizations in an
attempt to weaken the Muslims globally."
Abdullah
believes the Bali bombing of 2002 was "an operation clearly financed
and assisted by the CIA and Mossad, made use of Muslims to carry out
the final act…. Those Muslims were not innocent since they took the
bait handed over by the CIA and the Mossad to bomb Bali and to avenge
against the U.S. war on the Muslims in Afghanistan."
The
Indonesian expert argued said that "to achieve this, the CIA used one
of its operatives, Omar Al-Faruq, an Arab living in the U.S. who speaks
Arabic and knows a little about Islam and who was sent to Indonesia to
infiltrate the so called terrorist groups.
He said that
Al-Faruq initially infiltrated the Laskar Jihad, a group of Muslim
volunteers fighting for the safeguard of the Maluku’s during the
conflict of the Island.
When the Laskar was winded down by its
leader, Al-Faruq was sent to join the Mujahideen Council of Indonesia
(MMI), created and headed by jailed Indonesian Islamic leader Abu Bakar
Basyir, added Sayed Abdullah.
"After he failed to be a member
of the MMI and failed to get to Basyir, he decided to work on the
followers of Basyir. It is then that he came into contact with some of
the Bali bombers and this is how the whole Bali operation was
conducted," according to the Indonesian intelligence expert.
He claimed that Australia, the U.S. and even Taiwan knew that Bali was to be bombed but they did nothing about it.
As
noted in yesterday’s entry here, Omar Al-Faruq "was assigned to
infiltrate Islamic radical groups and recruit local agents within these
groups" for the CIA. "After the CIA obtained complete data on this
matter, they then made Al-Faruq disappear. It’s common in intelligence
world," former Indonesian State Intelligence Coordinating Board chief A.C. Manulang told Tempo Interactive in September, 2002.
Azahari
bin Husin’s British connection should be examined, especially in light
of the revelations that Haroon Rashid Aswat, the so-called mastermind
of the 7/7 London Bombings, worked for British Intelligence, as noted
by former Justice Department prosecutor and terror expert John Loftus
on, of all places, Fox News. Steve Watson wrote for Infowars on August 2:
John
Loftus went on to spell out that British Intelligence and the US dept
of Justice had protected Haroon Rashid Aswat: "Back in 1999 he came to
America. The Justice Department wanted to indict him in Seattle because
him and his buddy were trying to set up a terrorist training school in
Oregon… we’ve just learned that the headquarters of the US Justice
Department ordered the Seattle prosecutors not to touch Aswat…
apparently Aswat was working for British intelligence…"
This
information is startling and again highlights how Al Qaeda exists as an
organized body only where the intelligence services have created,
funded and employed it. Loftus points out that several weeks before the
London Bombings, Aswat was again located by the South African Intel
agency but again allowed to slip away, this time to London:
"He
was a British intelligence plant. So all of a sudden he disappears.
He’s in South Africa. We think he’s dead; we don’t know he’s down
there. Last month the South African Secret Service come across the guy.
He’s alive… the Brits know that the CIA wants to get a hold of Haroon.
So what happens? He takes off again, goes right to London. He isn’t
arrested when he lands, he isn’t arrested when he leaves… He’s on the
watch list. The only reason he could get away with that was if he was
working for British intelligence. He was a wanted man."
In
similar fashion, Azahari bin Husin managed to elude capture in late
2003. Indonesian security officials "say Indonesian police were close
to catching him in late 2003 in a swoop on Pekanbaru, capital of
Sumatra’s Riau province, and opposite Singapore," explains the Sydney
Morning Herald. "Azahari was there, but slipped through the dragnet
unrecognized." He was able to do this because he is "[l]ong-haired and
lean-faced" and bears "little resemblance to the one photograph police
have of him." Obviously, Husin shares the same mercurial nature as
Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
It would seem the
Brits and the United States have greasy fingers when it comes to
capturing potentially dangerous Islamic fanatics and al-Qaeda
operatives. In fact, they are simply recycling trusted intel operatives
(or their painstakingly engineered reputations).
Of course,
considering "al-Qaeda" (appropriately earning the moniker "al-CIA-duh")
is a documented CIA-ISI-MI6 asset, the "escape" of key "terrorists"
such as Azahari bin Husin is not only logical, it is mandatory if
state-sponsored terrorism is to be used as a form of psychological
warfare against unwitting populations in need of manipulation (since
most normal people recoil from the prospect of forever war and need to
be reminded of the specter of terrorism). Since we have no evidence Bin
Husin actually exists—he was last seen prior to the first Bali
bombing—the corporate media, regurgitating spook generated mythologies,
is now free to turn the former mathematician and university lecturer
into a world-class terrorist on par with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Like
Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein, Azahari bin Husin lives on as an effective
bogeyman, an effective (if illusive) villain in a constellation of
Islamic villains, an evasive apparition one step ahead of the law and
thus forever a possible threat—or at least a threat until our rulers
decide they no longer have use for him (as they apparently no longer
have use for Osama bin Laden now that nine eleven is established
folklore and the irrefutable foundation of the supposed war on
terrorism)