It is simply astounding how many videos and audio tapes and letters
slip through al-Qaeda’s fingers and into the hands of the Pentagon, the
State Department, and various Bushites and intelligence factotums.
Recall the Osama dinner party video found in Afghanistan and the
"al-Qaeda in Iraq" chemical weapons plant left behind in Fallujah. Now
we have a letter purportedly from Ayman al-Zawahri to Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, "acquired during U.S. operations in Iraq," according to the
Associated Press.
How this supposed letter was "acquired" is not revealed. Maybe Ayman
didn’t affix the correct postage. Or maybe Abu didn’t leave a change of
address.
"This isn’t a question of hearts and minds," State
Department spokesman Adam Ereli assuredly declared. "It’s a question of
bodies and gore. This is a network, a confederacy of evil that will
stop at nothing to advance its radical agenda." Ereli "said that [the
agenda allegedly revealed in the letter] has as its objective is an
Islamic empire, starting in Iraq and expanding to Saudi Arabia, Jordan
and Syria, practicing the abuses and intolerance that the Taliban
demonstrated in Afghanistan."
Ah, the Taliban.
"The
Taliban are widely alleged to be the creation of Pakistan’s military
intelligence [the ISI], which, according to experts, explains the
Taliban’s swift military successes," CNN
reported in 1996, leaving out the fact the CIA and the ISI collaborated
on various projects, including the Osama bin Laden project. "Despite
their clean chins and pressed uniforms, the ISI men are as deeply
fundamentalist as any bearded fanatic; the ISI created the Taliban as
their own instrument and still support it," the Asia Times revealed in 2001, soon after nine eleven. Selig Harrison
from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars told the
Times of India on March 7, 2001, "I warned [the CIA] that we were
creating a monster…. The CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging
Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan," a
"mistake" they shelled out around $3 billion to make and later declared
to be their most successful operation on the books.
Mistake
or not, the fact the Taliban were fanatical Muslims (who killed people
for watching television or teaching girls) did not seem to bother the
oil mega-corporation Unocal, as they wined and dine the wild-eyed
Taliban in order to secure a pipeline deal (Unocal even flew Taliban representatives
to their headquarters in Sugarland, Texas, incidentally the stomping
grounds of accused criminal and former bug exterminator Tom Delay).
"Oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across
Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of
America’s, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has
quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan," the Daily Telegraph reported on October 11, 1996.
Considering
all of this greasy complicity with the Taliban—who went about killing
thousands of infidels after they took over the country (with more than
a little help from their friends in the ISI and CIA)—either Mr. Ereli
suffers from long term memory loss or is blowing smoke out of a certain
orifice.
None other than Robin Cook, the late and former
British MP, admitted that al-Qaeda was basically a CIA creation.
"Throughout the 80s [Osama bin Laden] was armed by the CIA and funded
by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of
Afghanistan," Cook told the Guardian.
"Al-Qaida, literally 'the database’, was originally the computer file
of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help
from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous
consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once
Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden’s organization would turn its
attention to the west." Cook knew what he was talking about—his Foreign
Office portfolio included control of British Intelligence Agency MI-6
and the Government Communications Headquarters, as Uri Dowbendo points out.
Cook
believed al-Qaeda was a monster that grew in the dark like some toxic
fungus after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan. However, this
makes little sense, especially considering the CIA considered its
operation in Afghanistan (initially dubbed Operation Cyclone)
so successful. In fact, so useful was (and remains) al-Qaeda, the U.S.
employed them in Bosnia. Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University,
who had "unrestricted access to Dutch intelligence files and has
stalked the corridors of secret service headquarters in western
capitals, as well as in Bosnia," according to the Guardian,
believes there was a "secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical
Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian
Muslims—some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in
'the war against terrorism,’" resulting in "a vast secret conduit of
weapons smuggling though Croatia."
This was
arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran,
together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including Afghan
mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah. Wiebes reveals that the
British intelligence services obtained documents early on in the
Bosnian war proving that Iran was making direct deliveries.
Arms
purchased by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia
made their way by night from the Middle East. Initially aircraft from
Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by a
mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft. The report stresses
that the US was "very closely involved" in the airlift. Mojahedin
fighters were also flown in, but they were reserved as shock troops for
especially hazardous operations.
Simply
substitute the word "mojahedin" with "al-Qaeda" (initially a database
of mojahedin) and you have an idea of what went down and what continues
to go down.
As John Diamond,
writing for USA Today on June 4, 2002, revealed, "U.S. intelligence
overheard al-Qaeda operatives discussing a major pending terrorist
attack in the weeks prior to Sept. 11 and had agents inside the terror
group…. The disclosures add to a growing body of evidence to be
examined in congressional hearings that open today into how the CIA,
FBI and other agencies failed to seize on intelligence pointing to the
deadliest terror attack in U.S. history." Or maybe there wasn’t an
"intelligence failure" but another intelligence success like the one
the CIA bragged about in Afghanistan. "The prevailing view on Capitol
Hill is that U.S. intelligence had the goods and blew it by failing to
recognize and connect warning signs." In other words, we are expected
to believe the CIA, an "expert at distorting intelligence to justify
its own goals" (Mark Zepezauer),
and responsible for successful covert operations in Iran, Guatemala,
the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Chile, and elsewhere (and also
responsible for not-so-successful operations in Vietnam and Cuba), is a
clumsy, inept, and bumbling agency of ineffectual bureaucrats. Porter
Goss, we are assured, is on the case.
Indeed, the CIA is so
ineffectual at what it does—kill people (upward to six million,
according to former CIA Station Chief in Angola, John Stockwell)
and overthrow governments, many of them democratically elected—Osama
bin Laden made the following erroneous comment: "I settled in Pakistan
[in the 1980s], in the Afghan border region. There I received
volunteers, trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons
were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis." (See Clearing up America’s mess, the Guardian, December 18, 2001.)
"This lengthy document provides a comprehensive view of al-Qaida’s strategy in Iraq and globally," the office of the director of national intelligence
said about the letter from Ayman al-Zawahri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"The document has not been edited in any way and is released in its
entirety in both the Arabic and English translated forms. The United
States government has the highest confidence in the letter’s
authenticity."
Of course, the government had the "highest
confidence" in the authenticity of a purported Bin Laden audio tape
released in 2003—that is until the Swiss took a crack at it. "The
Lausanne-based Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial
Intelligence said it is 95-per-cent certain the tape does not feature
the voice of the long-absent terrorist leader," the Toronto Star
reported. As Jason Kernahan writes, "we definitely have no reason
whatsoever to believe that these tapes are authentic. While there have
been reports of scientific voice analyses performed on them, these
studies have been invariably done by CIA experts. In fact, on only one
occasion was an independent analysis done. And while US officials were
certain of that tape’s authenticity, Swedish scientists were equally
convinced that it was a fake." Recall Zepezauer’s comment the CIA is an
"expert at distorting intelligence to justify its own goals." It is
also important to cite Philip Agee, a former CIA case officer, who
noted "what the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the
NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on
policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the
President.," or in the case of Bush, the CIA is an instrument of the
neocons (Bush has a difficult time staying on a bicycle, let alone
staying on the job of running the country—or rather running it into the
ground).
Ayman’s letter to Abu, issued for public consumption
by an inherently deceptive office of "national intelligence," promises
to "extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq"
and eventually "clash with Israel, because Israel was established only
to challenge any new Islamic entity." Not even Ayman al-Zawahri,
reputedly not the sharpest knife in the drawer (before he was killed in
northern Iraq), wouldn’t make a statement this stupid and inflammatory,
playing right into the hand of the pro-Zionist neocons, who keep
telling us scary Muslims want to kill the Jews and take over the world
and install a global caliphate and force all of us—all 6 billion humans
on the earth—to convert to Islam or have our heads sheared off like
Nick Berg (the video supposedly showing Berg’s decapitation turns out
to be highly suspect, according to medical experts).
All
of this is simply more of the same—an unrelenting propaganda campaign
designed to convince us through fear and psychological intimidation
that the true enemy of "democracy" is not a corrupt government bought
lock, stock, and barrel by transnational neolib corporations, not a
dictatorial president bent on destroying the Constitution and
installing a police state (in reaction to fake flu pandemics), but a
wholly ridiculous threat posed by a handful of fanatical and medieval
Muslims (who would be nothing without the husbandry of the CIA, British
intelligence, and the ISI).
It remains to be seen if the
American people even care about this sort of fakery anymore—dulled by
the near constant stream of al-Qaeda news, all of it rigged and
fraudulent—and that’s the sincerely dangerous aspect of this whole
affair: for when Americans stop paying attention and no longer jump in
fear and begin asking questions, the neocons and their covert warfare
syndicate may decide it is time for a new nine eleven, more sensational
and murderous than the first.