Don’t Let Soros Hijack the Movement Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
TARPLEY.net
September 29, 2011
http://tarpley.net/2011/09/29/emergency-program-for-anti-wall-street-protestors
Political mass strike dynamics have been at work in the United States since the Wisconsin and Ohio mobilizations of February and March. Now, there are demonstrations in lower Manhattan and Boston specifically directed against the Wall Street banks. Another protest demonstration is scheduled for Washington, DC, starting on October 6. Good: a political challenge to Wall Street is indeed long overdue.
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are skeptical in regard to Obama. There is no sizable constituency for Ron Paul, and the crackpot Austrian school of economics is hardly represented. Above all, there is a desire to break the power of Wall Street. This much is promising, but still not enough to win.
The demonstrations appear initially as leaderless groups, engaged in an organic process of discussion from which specific demands are supposed to emerge. But so far, these demonstrations have put forth no specific demands, reforms, or concrete measures whatsoever to fight Wall Street. This is a fatal political weakness. A movement that attempts to go forward with vague slogans like “Freedom” or “Abolish capitalism” is likely to become easy prey for foundation-funded operatives on the left wing of the Democratic Party.
If a movement pretends to have no leaders, then it is the corporate media, themselves controlled by Wall Street, who will choose the leaders. A few days ago, a Wall Street protester named Kelly Heresy was anointed as principal honcho by Keith Olbermann, who used to work for the hedge fund called General Electric, and who now works for Al Gore. This is no way to select leaders.
The demonstrations may appear spontaneous, but it is easy to see gatekeepers and countergangs operating in their midst, often with a frank counterinsurgency agenda. Occupy Wall Street in particular shows the heavy influence of union bureaucrats from the Service Employees International Union, as well as Acorn – both parts of the Obama machine. The goal of these operatives is to keep the focus of the protests vague and diffuse, so that no demands emerge that might be embarrassing to the Wall Street puppet Obama and his reelection campaign. Their ultimate goal is to absorb the protests as the left wing of the Obama 2012 effort. That means supporting an administration which not only refuses to fight Wall Street, but which is packed with Wall Street executives in its highest positions.
Dubious Hollywood figures like Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore are attempting to gain publicity for themselves by showing up at the demonstrations. Michael Moore, who is not very popular with the demonstrators, was instrumental in leading the antiwar and impeachment movements of the past decade back into the Democratic Party to support Obama. Journalist Matt Taibbi, another newly minted expert on the movement, is remembered for his hatchet jobs in favor of the Bush administration theory of terrorism.
The organizers of the Wall Street action say they want to imitate recent protests in other countries. Their favorite is the Tahrir Square agitation in Egypt in February. But if you go to Cairo today, veterans of those demonstrations will tell you that these efforts accomplished relatively little, and mainly had the effect of ousting an oppressive civilian government in favor of an even more oppressive military government of weak CIA puppets which is still operating under martial law, even as benighted religious fanatics gather strength. In Greece, it is true that the trade unions have mounted a dozen general strikes, but all of these have failed to oust Prime Minister Papandreou, the main enforcer of austerity cuts demanded by the International Monetary Fund, and so the brutal austerity continues. The same thing applies to Spain, where the indignados became so self-absorbed in their discussion and consensus process that they never put forward a program to save Spanish society from the bankers. In Iceland too, the anti-bank movement was never able to go beyond mere protest to advance a series of concrete measures that would allow them to contend for power, take power, and hold onto it for the public good.
The lesson of all of these situations is that, in a severe world economic depression of the kind we have today, mere protest is not enough. Desperate populations are looking for political leadership with solutions capable of solving the life or death issues facing nations today. A movement which is incapable of specifying what it intends to fight for is an immature movement which no intelligent person will take seriously.
The secret of a mass strike upsurge is that crisis conditions will propel many apolitical people into activism. This makes them vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues, including those of the extreme right. The mass strike upsurge by itself solves nothing. The question is whether any coherent group of people can intervene into the mass upsurge and push aside bankrupt and failed leaders with the kind of radical reform program that can actually get the society out of the crisis. The masses cannot discover this program on their own – they are too busy with the struggle for daily existence. College students therefore have a special responsibility to provide ideas for the benefit of the entire society. If an adequate program becomes dominant, the nation can survive. Otherwise, nothing guarantees that civilization itself will not collapse – look at the Tea Party if you don’t believe this. Soros, Koch, and the other finance capitalists have a good working understanding of how these things work, which is why they are sending in their operatives to make sure that this movement will have only the vaguest demands, or no demands at all, to fight for. Let that happen, and Wall Street will rule the day once again.
Despite what Michael Moore may think, the political power of Wall Street is considerable, and an effective attack on the bankers will demand the unified efforts of key sectors of the population. This unity must be expressed in the program itself. Students must broaden the sociological scope of the movement to include all walks of life.
In order to fight Wall Street, it is necessary for the American people to understand the basic idea of shifting the cost of the world economic depression off of the backs of working people and the poor where it is now, and onto Wall Street banks and super-rich speculators. Depressions are very expensive. Who should pay for the current depression? The bankers demand that the American people must pay. We want the bankers to pay, and we must specify how. A movement that wants to defend working people against the class warfare of the bankers has the responsibility of putting forward a program to defend middle-class and other working people. In order to win, the anti-Wall Street protests must agitate for a series of demands including the following:
1. Student Loan Amnesty. The common experience of many of the protesters is that of being crushed by an outrageous burden of high interest student loans. Today it is common for graduating seniors to carry $50,000, $75,000, or even $100,000 of debt. Add the costs of an advanced degree in teaching, law, or medicine, and the debt burden becomes astronomical. The exorbitant cost of a college education reflects the increasing immiseration of the United States over the past 40 years, as the overall standard of living has declined by two thirds or more in terms of real wages and other considerations. These debts are owed to the same zombie bankers who cashed in on the Bush bailout of 2008, and the even larger loans issued by Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve over recent years. This is a system of brutal primitive accumulation against the life chances everyone who knows that they need a college degree to be employable in the 21st century. Total students loan indebtedness is now approaching $1 trillion. This grinding debt is destroying the futures, the lives, and the hopes of college students and recent graduates.
When a debtor country like Greece is unable to pay its debts, it is normal to hear talk of a haircut for the bondholders and bankers. It is time for the Wall Street zombie banks to take a haircut on student loan debt. Most of this debt cannot be paid off, but an entire generation can be ruined by a futile attempt to pay it back.
A leading demand must therefore be a total cancellation of all outstanding student loan debt, meaning a total and immediate forgiveness of all payments of principal and interest coming from this category of borrowing. Carter granted Vietnam draft resisters an amnesty. If Obama wants to keep his job, he must deliver a student loan amnesty to save not just a single generation, but the entire future of the United States and beyond. Otherwise, dump Obama in 2012! The zombie bankers have been pampered enough. It is time for them to take a bath, so that a generation might live. This is also the best stimulus program possible.
2. Stop Foreclosures. Since students alone will never be enough to make a revolution, it is necessary to put forward additional measures to defend other parts of the population from the depredations of Wall Street. In the area of home foreclosures, the bankers have trampled on the law to seize millions of homes, some of which never had a mortgage, and many of which were current in their payments. The banks have used corrupt robo-signers, robo-cops, and robo-judges to carry out these fraudclosure thefts. The answer is to make foreclosure a federal crime, so that anyone who throws an American family out on the street will end up in Leavenworth. Again, the zombie bankers can eat the losses, which are unavoidable in any case. This is not an impossible demand: under the New Deal, the Frazier-Lemke Act stopped all foreclosures on homes, provided only that the owners could get a minimal payment plan approved by any judge in any court. With the help of popular pressure and public opinion, foreclosures virtually came to a halt. This is what we need to be demanding today.
3. Defend and fully fund the social safety net. Wall Street and Washington elites agree that the American people ought to be subjected to genocidal austerity – cuts so draconian that they will kill people. The goal is obviously to fund bigger and better bailouts of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase when they go bankrupt the next time around. Real unemployment in the United States is now about 25%, meaning that 30 million people cannot find work, and many have been looking for years. Therefore, we need to extend jobless benefits to all unemployed, including those who have been out of a job for 99 weeks and more. 46 million Americans are now surviving thanks to Food Stamps, but the reactionary Republicans are demanding savage cuts, and Obama is more than likely to cave. We also need to defend programs that specifically help children and young. These include S-CHIP, which gives health care to poor children; Head Start, which provides breakfast and preschool for poor kids; and WIC, which provides high-protein meals for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and infants. Older people have special problems, including that Wall Street speculators have destroyed the value of their 401(k) and IRA retirement plans. This means that Social Security pensions should be increased, and not cut, as the Republicans and Obama both want. Obama has already cut $500 billion out of Medicare, but he wants to cut it even more, and the Tea Party is eager to help him. The best healthcare would be to open Medicare to all Americans, while making the investments needed to maintain quality. Medicaid gives healthcare to poor people of any age, and these payments must be maintained.
4. Pay for healthcare and social services with a 1% Wall Street Sales Tax. When they hear demands like these, Fox news commentators will demand to know how these programs can be paid for. The answer is simple: the Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax. Today the total financial turnover of the banksters in terms of buying, selling, and other trading comes to well over three quadrillion dollars yearly – that’s more than 3,000 trillion dollars. The rest of us pay sales tax on most purchases, often including the groceries, but Wall Street zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas pay absolutely zero on that colossal sum. The most unfair aspect of the entire US tax system is that Wall Street pays virtually no taxes. It is time for the bankers to cough up 1% of every stock, bond, and derivatives transaction, be it program trading, high frequency trading, or computerized flash trading at the rate of one million transactions per second. The total revenue could be split between the federal government and the states, and would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps even trillions – depending on how determined the speculators are to keep up their dirty deals. There is nothing impossible about this demand: the federal government had a financial transaction tax from the time of World War I in 1967. And even today, the largely right wing governments of the European Union are about to enact their own Tobin tax. Why can’t it be done here as well?
These are immediate agitational demands that can be readily understood by any person. They can form the leading edge of a struggle to break the political power of Wall Street. In addition, a full recovery from depression and the attainment of full employment for the first time since 1945 will require the nationalization of the Federal Reserve, and the issuing of successive tranches of $1 trillion of 0%, very long-term Federal credit for the building of infrastructure, with a goal of creating 30 million new productive jobs with adequate capital investment per job.
Another essential point is that Wall Street is the biggest nest of warmongers anywhere in the world. Anyone seeking to gain influence over the anti-Wall Street movement should be willing to condemn and denounce Obama’s wanton aggression against Libya, as well as to call for an immediate pullout of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Anyone who refuses to do this should be regarded with grave suspicion.
The alternative to such concrete demands is, whether we like it or not, to remain in the orbit of Obama’s Democratic Party. Earlier this year, students, workers, and others occupied the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin in response to attacks on working people coming from the fascist governor, Walker. The resistance against Walker was betrayed first of all by the Democratic Party, which announced that it would not fight for wages and benefits, but only for trade union rights in the abstract. That is a good program for trade union bureaucrats, but not so good for working people, who bore the brunt of Walker’s austerity. A president who was on the side of the people would have gone immediately to Madison, Wisconsin to hold a town hall on the occupied grounds of the state capitol, an event that would have looked much different than the canned, pre-screened teleprompter town halls Obama likes to address. A real president would have taken Attorney General Holder and Labor Secretary Solis along to investigate the denial of civil rights and labor violations by Walker. Obama did none of these things. Rather, he damned the movement with a few words of faint praise, and cut it loose. The lesson is that the Democratic Party is more than willing to sell out mass struggles anytime it can. And it is only by having your own program of anti-Wall Street demands that you can become independent of the rotten two-party system.
Showing posts with label CIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CIA. Show all posts
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Probability of Large-Scale False Flag Terror Event Increasing
Probability of Large-Scale False Flag Terror Event Increasing As European Banking Panic Looms
Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
TARPLEY.net
September 9, 2011
http://tarpley.net/2011/09/09/probability-of-false-flag-terror-event-increasing
Washington DC, Sept. 9, 2011 – Late yesterday, Obama administration officials speaking off the record told reporters that they had a “credible but unconfirmed” threat warning for a terror attack around the time of the 9/11 anniversary is coming Sunday.
This announcement caps a week in which numerous veterans of the original 9/11 false flag terror attack and cover-up have been prodigal with their media warnings that a repetition of the bloody tragedy of 10 years ago is simply a question of time. These figures have included former New York Mayor Giuliani, 9/11 commission chairs Hamilton and Kean, and many others.
Based on the current intelligence constellation, a large-scale false flag terror attack over the coming weeks and months is now increasing in probability. This is because such a terror attack, plus the wars it could unleash and the martial law which it might be used to impose in Europe and North America, would facilitate measures which the ruling finance oligarchs of these nations judge to be essential for their short-term survival. The false flag attack could be blamed on Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, the Palestinians, or a range of others.
Once again, the initiative may be passing into the hands of that rogue network, invisible government, secret government, parallel government, deep state, or special forces underground which exists at the point where Wall Street and City of London financial bosses intersect with the dominant personalities – active-duty and retired – of the Anglo-American secret intelligence establishment.
Imminent Banking Panic Means New and Bigger Bailouts Imposed by Martial Law
The leading factor compelling the Anglo-American power elite into a new false flag terror adventure is the now rapidly worsening breakdown crisis of the European and US banking systems. Almost 2 years of Anglo-American financial warfare against the euro, generally taking the form of credit default swap (CDS) assaults on European government bonds, have now created an extraordinarily serious crisis. There is presently a list of at least one dozen large European banks, each of whom is a candidate to play the role of Lehman Brothers in the blowup which can now be expected for some time over the next two months. This includes the top British banks. This crisis is almost exclusively the handiwork of the City of London and Wall Street, and they have created it in order to relieve pressure on the dollar, and to neutralize the threat to the future role of the dollar as the world reserve currency. Over the past few days, Anglo-American commentators have been chortling as the dollar has picked up a few pennies of value compared to the euro.
The problem for the Anglo-Americans is that panic runs on European banks will quickly be translated into panic runs on US banks, and on the dollar. Institutions like Bank of America, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and even the vaunted Goldman Sachs, which have existed as zombie banks thanks to government largess since September 2008, are now exhibiting telltale signs of a Lehman-like death spiral. In short, if the European banks blow, the London and New York banks will not be far behind. Maybe the Wall Street geniuses of international financial warfare should have thought of that before they embarked on their current lunatic beggar-my-neighbor campaign against their confreres in continental Europe.
Experience teaches that if the New York money center banks are faced by imminent bankruptcy, their first instinct would be to demand a second bailout of trillions of dollars at US taxpayer expense. The problem for them is that the first bailout has left such a bitter aftertaste that congressional passage of such a monstrous funding bill would be anybody’s guess. From the Wall Street point of view, this makes martial law a much more attractive alternative than in the recent past. Under the impact of a huge false flag event, new bailouts could be railroaded through the Congress or even approved by Wall Street puppet Obama as executive orders and validated later. They could even be approved as a measure necessary for national defense in an emergency. The impact in Europe would be similar.
Martial law declared in response to a terror attack would automatically be used to suppress public protests against the bailouts and austerity cuts decreed by the zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas. No matter what the ins and outs, a new terror crisis would help Wall Street get its money. And there is nothing like an imminent financial panic to make the Anglo-American ruling elite go collectively bonkers.
The Twelve Tyrants of Austerity Threaten the Pentagon Budget
A second and related problem is represented by the first meeting yesterday of that extralegal pseudo-judicial organism which the American people are increasingly referring to as the Twelve Tyrants. This is the infamous Super Committee or Super Congress, an entity which exists in clear violation of the United States Constitution. If, according to one likely scenario, the Twelve Tyrants, the Congress, and Obama fail to agree on a common program of genocidal austerity against the American people, and automatic budget guillotine will come down around Christmas of this year, and will begin cutting $60 billion per year out of the Pentagon budget. According to a number of observers, this prospect by itself is sufficient to move the intelligence old boys of the rogue network to stage a substantial new terror stunt to protect their current level of funding. If new terror attacks occur, it will be much harder to cut the Pentagon budget. Having been deprived of the Cold War 20 years ago, these bellicose militarists do not intend to be deprived of their ersatz Global War on Terror, and they are prepared to go far off the reservation to assert themselves.
The anxiety in these circles is increased by news reports that the US presence in Iraq is about to be scaled down to about 3,000 troops. At the same time, public pressure for an early exit from Afghanistan is growing, while others are calling for a strategy based on limited special forces and the use of predator drones, but without large numbers of infantry.
Republican Warmongers Pose as Isolationists
The disgust of the US population with the endless wars of the past decade has gradually transformed much of the Republican Party from a self-professed congeries of warmongers into a purported gaggle of isolationists, as seen in the recent debates. Naturally, for most of these figures the dovish transformation is purely demagogic. A robust false flag terror event would go far towards flipping the Republicans back to the warmongers stance they find inherently congenial.
London and Washington Still Want to Attack Pakistan
Another factor which disturbs the Anglo-American imperialist planners is their inability to launch their military incursion against Pakistan. This had been planned for the immediate aftermath of the May 1st “Bin Laden” publicity stunt, and would have included an attempt by US Special Forces to seize or destroy the Pakistani strategic nuclear deterrent, leaving that country defenseless. The Anglo-Americans have been held in this case by a timely ultimatum from China, specifying that Beijing would treat an attack on Pakistan just like an attack on the Chinese homeland. This has largely checkmated China and Washington ever since. However, in the aftermath of a new false flag event blamed on Pakistan, it would be possible for the Anglo-American to revisit this issue with increased blackmail potential against the Chinese.
The US-UK Assault on Syria is Failing
In the Middle East, the Anglo-American power elite has wagered everything on the successful march of color revolutions backed up with NATO military aggression, leading to the overthrow of most of the existing regimes in the Arab world. Syria poses the most serious test so far for this new Anglo-American strategic doctrine. After all, it was relatively easy for the Anglo Americans to destabilize and overthrow the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, given that these states were already located within the Anglo Americans sphere.
NATO’s Urgent Need to Attack Syria
Libya has proven a much tougher nut to crack, and NATO, and despite a brutal application of genocidal force, has not yet cracked it. Because of Qaddafi’s superior fighting qualities, the long war in Libya has tended to shield Syria from the next, planned wave of NATO attack. In the meantime, the Syrian army has made substantial progress in quelling the armed rebellion mounted by death squads and armed gangs loyal to the Moslem Brotherhood, itself the creation of British intelligence. The optimum time for NATO to invade Syria would have been two months ago, but this proved impossible because so many of NATO’s strictly limited military assets were tied down on the Libyan front. Very soon, there will be very little of the Muslim Brotherhood soldatesca left in Syria for NATO to come and rescue.
A false flag terror attack, however, would immediately change this equation by creating political conditions in which Obama could successfully extort increased military assets from Congress and from Europe to carry out a direct attack on Syria. This in turn would likely embroil NATO in all-out war not just with Syria, but with Hezbollah and Iran as well. If one thinks of a world war evolving along the lines of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe (1618-1648), then this would begin to look very much like such a world war.
Isolated Israel Faces the PLO Demand for Statehood and the Hostility of Turkey
A further exacerbating factor is represented at the ongoing internal political crisis and increasing international isolation of Israel. Right after the 9/11 anniversary, the United Nations General Assembly will convene in New York City. Here there will be a determined attempt by the Palestinian Authority to exert its existence as a sovereign and independent United Nations member state. This bid will enjoy overwhelming sympathy around the world. It is quite possible that the General Assembly will approve the Palestinian request. The United States faces the humiliating isolation of having to block Palestinian statehood with a solo veto in the Security Council. Saudi Arabia is on record as saying that this outcome will lead to a catastrophe in US-Saudi relations.
Will Turkey Decline Role of US-UK Kamikaze Puppet Against Syria?
A further complication involves Turkey. According to the Anglo-American dream scenario, Turkey should by now have attacked Syria, citing the pretext of wanting to stop the refugee flow across the two countries’ common border. For a time it looked like the Turks would indeed accept the role of kamikaze puppet against Syria in the service of London and New York. But, for the moment, it looks like they may have paused. Instead of invading Syria, Turkey is currently engaged in a high profile diplomatic clash with the Israelis, which makes much more sense from the point of view of Turkish interests and internal politics, and which increases the pressure on the desperados of the Netanyahu regime. All this comes at the moment when half a million Israelis have demonstrated in the streets to show their rejection of the militarism and economic austerity measures of Netanyahu.
A Turkish-Egyptian Alliance?
There are even reports of a possible alliance between Egypt and Turkey, which would be most unwelcome to the US, British, and Israelis. The Egyptians, for their part, have become somewhat less subservient neighbors for the Israelis in the Sinai, especially after some Egyptian forces were killed by Israeli bombing raids targeting Gaza.
Iran: Bushehr Goes Online
In the background, the Iranian nuclear program is quietly proceeding. The Bushehr nuclear power station has come online, producing electricity for Iran’s national grid. The Washington Post, citing a September report from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, claims that the Iranian nuclear program represents “an undimmed danger.” In a September 6 editorial, the paper claims that Iran has begun to use a new and more advanced centrifuge for the enrichment of uranium, and that rapid progress is being made in transferring existing centrifuges into a large underground facility located in a mountain near Qom, which makes them all but invulnerable to outside military attack. The protracted campaign of assassination against Iranian nuclear scientists, it would appear, has not been effective in stopping this progress. In the fevered imaginations of imperialist military planners, we may therefore be approaching the point of no return for an attack on Iran.
Neocon Bonapartist Petraeus Now Running the CIA
As of this past Tuesday, the General David Petraeus has now taken control of the US Central Intelligence Agency. Petraeus has long been noted as the favorite Bonapartist of the neocon faction, and their chosen vehicle for a return to power en masse. Petraeus is carrying out a personal union of the Pentagon and the CIA, the two pillars of his projected future authoritarian presidency. If the US ruling elite should decide to jettison Obama, look for Petraeus’ star to rise at the expense of the “bunch of cranks” populating the current Republican field which is “the weakest since 1940,” in the words of John Weaver of the Huntsman camp.
Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
TARPLEY.net
September 9, 2011
http://tarpley.net/2011/09/09/probability-of-false-flag-terror-event-increasing
Washington DC, Sept. 9, 2011 – Late yesterday, Obama administration officials speaking off the record told reporters that they had a “credible but unconfirmed” threat warning for a terror attack around the time of the 9/11 anniversary is coming Sunday.
This announcement caps a week in which numerous veterans of the original 9/11 false flag terror attack and cover-up have been prodigal with their media warnings that a repetition of the bloody tragedy of 10 years ago is simply a question of time. These figures have included former New York Mayor Giuliani, 9/11 commission chairs Hamilton and Kean, and many others.
Based on the current intelligence constellation, a large-scale false flag terror attack over the coming weeks and months is now increasing in probability. This is because such a terror attack, plus the wars it could unleash and the martial law which it might be used to impose in Europe and North America, would facilitate measures which the ruling finance oligarchs of these nations judge to be essential for their short-term survival. The false flag attack could be blamed on Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, the Palestinians, or a range of others.
Once again, the initiative may be passing into the hands of that rogue network, invisible government, secret government, parallel government, deep state, or special forces underground which exists at the point where Wall Street and City of London financial bosses intersect with the dominant personalities – active-duty and retired – of the Anglo-American secret intelligence establishment.
Imminent Banking Panic Means New and Bigger Bailouts Imposed by Martial Law
The leading factor compelling the Anglo-American power elite into a new false flag terror adventure is the now rapidly worsening breakdown crisis of the European and US banking systems. Almost 2 years of Anglo-American financial warfare against the euro, generally taking the form of credit default swap (CDS) assaults on European government bonds, have now created an extraordinarily serious crisis. There is presently a list of at least one dozen large European banks, each of whom is a candidate to play the role of Lehman Brothers in the blowup which can now be expected for some time over the next two months. This includes the top British banks. This crisis is almost exclusively the handiwork of the City of London and Wall Street, and they have created it in order to relieve pressure on the dollar, and to neutralize the threat to the future role of the dollar as the world reserve currency. Over the past few days, Anglo-American commentators have been chortling as the dollar has picked up a few pennies of value compared to the euro.
The problem for the Anglo-Americans is that panic runs on European banks will quickly be translated into panic runs on US banks, and on the dollar. Institutions like Bank of America, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and even the vaunted Goldman Sachs, which have existed as zombie banks thanks to government largess since September 2008, are now exhibiting telltale signs of a Lehman-like death spiral. In short, if the European banks blow, the London and New York banks will not be far behind. Maybe the Wall Street geniuses of international financial warfare should have thought of that before they embarked on their current lunatic beggar-my-neighbor campaign against their confreres in continental Europe.
Experience teaches that if the New York money center banks are faced by imminent bankruptcy, their first instinct would be to demand a second bailout of trillions of dollars at US taxpayer expense. The problem for them is that the first bailout has left such a bitter aftertaste that congressional passage of such a monstrous funding bill would be anybody’s guess. From the Wall Street point of view, this makes martial law a much more attractive alternative than in the recent past. Under the impact of a huge false flag event, new bailouts could be railroaded through the Congress or even approved by Wall Street puppet Obama as executive orders and validated later. They could even be approved as a measure necessary for national defense in an emergency. The impact in Europe would be similar.
Martial law declared in response to a terror attack would automatically be used to suppress public protests against the bailouts and austerity cuts decreed by the zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas. No matter what the ins and outs, a new terror crisis would help Wall Street get its money. And there is nothing like an imminent financial panic to make the Anglo-American ruling elite go collectively bonkers.
The Twelve Tyrants of Austerity Threaten the Pentagon Budget
A second and related problem is represented by the first meeting yesterday of that extralegal pseudo-judicial organism which the American people are increasingly referring to as the Twelve Tyrants. This is the infamous Super Committee or Super Congress, an entity which exists in clear violation of the United States Constitution. If, according to one likely scenario, the Twelve Tyrants, the Congress, and Obama fail to agree on a common program of genocidal austerity against the American people, and automatic budget guillotine will come down around Christmas of this year, and will begin cutting $60 billion per year out of the Pentagon budget. According to a number of observers, this prospect by itself is sufficient to move the intelligence old boys of the rogue network to stage a substantial new terror stunt to protect their current level of funding. If new terror attacks occur, it will be much harder to cut the Pentagon budget. Having been deprived of the Cold War 20 years ago, these bellicose militarists do not intend to be deprived of their ersatz Global War on Terror, and they are prepared to go far off the reservation to assert themselves.
The anxiety in these circles is increased by news reports that the US presence in Iraq is about to be scaled down to about 3,000 troops. At the same time, public pressure for an early exit from Afghanistan is growing, while others are calling for a strategy based on limited special forces and the use of predator drones, but without large numbers of infantry.
Republican Warmongers Pose as Isolationists
The disgust of the US population with the endless wars of the past decade has gradually transformed much of the Republican Party from a self-professed congeries of warmongers into a purported gaggle of isolationists, as seen in the recent debates. Naturally, for most of these figures the dovish transformation is purely demagogic. A robust false flag terror event would go far towards flipping the Republicans back to the warmongers stance they find inherently congenial.
London and Washington Still Want to Attack Pakistan
Another factor which disturbs the Anglo-American imperialist planners is their inability to launch their military incursion against Pakistan. This had been planned for the immediate aftermath of the May 1st “Bin Laden” publicity stunt, and would have included an attempt by US Special Forces to seize or destroy the Pakistani strategic nuclear deterrent, leaving that country defenseless. The Anglo-Americans have been held in this case by a timely ultimatum from China, specifying that Beijing would treat an attack on Pakistan just like an attack on the Chinese homeland. This has largely checkmated China and Washington ever since. However, in the aftermath of a new false flag event blamed on Pakistan, it would be possible for the Anglo-American to revisit this issue with increased blackmail potential against the Chinese.
The US-UK Assault on Syria is Failing
In the Middle East, the Anglo-American power elite has wagered everything on the successful march of color revolutions backed up with NATO military aggression, leading to the overthrow of most of the existing regimes in the Arab world. Syria poses the most serious test so far for this new Anglo-American strategic doctrine. After all, it was relatively easy for the Anglo Americans to destabilize and overthrow the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, given that these states were already located within the Anglo Americans sphere.
NATO’s Urgent Need to Attack Syria
Libya has proven a much tougher nut to crack, and NATO, and despite a brutal application of genocidal force, has not yet cracked it. Because of Qaddafi’s superior fighting qualities, the long war in Libya has tended to shield Syria from the next, planned wave of NATO attack. In the meantime, the Syrian army has made substantial progress in quelling the armed rebellion mounted by death squads and armed gangs loyal to the Moslem Brotherhood, itself the creation of British intelligence. The optimum time for NATO to invade Syria would have been two months ago, but this proved impossible because so many of NATO’s strictly limited military assets were tied down on the Libyan front. Very soon, there will be very little of the Muslim Brotherhood soldatesca left in Syria for NATO to come and rescue.
A false flag terror attack, however, would immediately change this equation by creating political conditions in which Obama could successfully extort increased military assets from Congress and from Europe to carry out a direct attack on Syria. This in turn would likely embroil NATO in all-out war not just with Syria, but with Hezbollah and Iran as well. If one thinks of a world war evolving along the lines of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe (1618-1648), then this would begin to look very much like such a world war.
Isolated Israel Faces the PLO Demand for Statehood and the Hostility of Turkey
A further exacerbating factor is represented at the ongoing internal political crisis and increasing international isolation of Israel. Right after the 9/11 anniversary, the United Nations General Assembly will convene in New York City. Here there will be a determined attempt by the Palestinian Authority to exert its existence as a sovereign and independent United Nations member state. This bid will enjoy overwhelming sympathy around the world. It is quite possible that the General Assembly will approve the Palestinian request. The United States faces the humiliating isolation of having to block Palestinian statehood with a solo veto in the Security Council. Saudi Arabia is on record as saying that this outcome will lead to a catastrophe in US-Saudi relations.
Will Turkey Decline Role of US-UK Kamikaze Puppet Against Syria?
A further complication involves Turkey. According to the Anglo-American dream scenario, Turkey should by now have attacked Syria, citing the pretext of wanting to stop the refugee flow across the two countries’ common border. For a time it looked like the Turks would indeed accept the role of kamikaze puppet against Syria in the service of London and New York. But, for the moment, it looks like they may have paused. Instead of invading Syria, Turkey is currently engaged in a high profile diplomatic clash with the Israelis, which makes much more sense from the point of view of Turkish interests and internal politics, and which increases the pressure on the desperados of the Netanyahu regime. All this comes at the moment when half a million Israelis have demonstrated in the streets to show their rejection of the militarism and economic austerity measures of Netanyahu.
A Turkish-Egyptian Alliance?
There are even reports of a possible alliance between Egypt and Turkey, which would be most unwelcome to the US, British, and Israelis. The Egyptians, for their part, have become somewhat less subservient neighbors for the Israelis in the Sinai, especially after some Egyptian forces were killed by Israeli bombing raids targeting Gaza.
Iran: Bushehr Goes Online
In the background, the Iranian nuclear program is quietly proceeding. The Bushehr nuclear power station has come online, producing electricity for Iran’s national grid. The Washington Post, citing a September report from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, claims that the Iranian nuclear program represents “an undimmed danger.” In a September 6 editorial, the paper claims that Iran has begun to use a new and more advanced centrifuge for the enrichment of uranium, and that rapid progress is being made in transferring existing centrifuges into a large underground facility located in a mountain near Qom, which makes them all but invulnerable to outside military attack. The protracted campaign of assassination against Iranian nuclear scientists, it would appear, has not been effective in stopping this progress. In the fevered imaginations of imperialist military planners, we may therefore be approaching the point of no return for an attack on Iran.
Neocon Bonapartist Petraeus Now Running the CIA
As of this past Tuesday, the General David Petraeus has now taken control of the US Central Intelligence Agency. Petraeus has long been noted as the favorite Bonapartist of the neocon faction, and their chosen vehicle for a return to power en masse. Petraeus is carrying out a personal union of the Pentagon and the CIA, the two pillars of his projected future authoritarian presidency. If the US ruling elite should decide to jettison Obama, look for Petraeus’ star to rise at the expense of the “bunch of cranks” populating the current Republican field which is “the weakest since 1940,” in the words of John Weaver of the Huntsman camp.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Gerald Derstine: The Predator Pastor
August 1st, 2011 http://christianwinstead.blog.com/2011/08/01/gerald-derstine-the-predator-pastor
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.
-Matthew 7:15
In July of 2010, Dr. Gerald Derstine of Gospel Crusade, Inc. in Brandenton, Fla. was accused of molesting a young girl at his 110 acre Strawberry Lake Christian Retreat north of Detroit Lakes, Mn. While the case was dropped, the evidence that he indeed violated a vulnerable minor remains. Most telling is a handwritten letter on Gospel Crusade stationary Derstine wrote asking for the girls forgiveness and which can be downloaded here:
http://christianwinstead.blog.com/files/2011/08/Derstine-Letter-to-Jane-Doe.pdf
Here is the transcript of the phone conversation as well:
http://christianwinstead.blog.com/files/2011/08/Derstine-Police-Statement.pdf
Equally disturbing is the fact that Gospel Crusade, Inc. fabricated evidence of miracles in the Middle East:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1995/september1/5ta064.html
From the article:
For seven years, Gerald Derstine of Gospel Crusade, Inc., in Bradenton, Florida, inspired his followers with sensational accounts of miracles, mass conversions, and subsequent martyrdoms among Arab Muslims in Israel and the West Bank.
Derstine’s supporters responded generously, contributing $2.8 million in 1994 alone to support the ministry and the persecuted church in the Mideast.
But in March, one of Derstine’s Arab ministry leaders confessed, in the face of mounting evidence, that the reports were fabrications. The Gospel Crusade board of directors suspended the Arab leader and another individual in April. Gospel Crusade also withdrew from circulation literature and videotapes containing the leader’s stories, including the 1993 book “Fire Over Israel.”
Even more chilling is the following:
http://www.cc-vw.org/articles/icej.htm
During the 1980's the ICEJ was also politically active in the destabilisation of Central America, as a channel for the funding of the United States backed Contras.
When the ICEJ proudly established an “embassy” in Honduras and in Guatemala, they worked closely with the government of Israel in bringing funds into the countries. ICEJ was granted diplomatic status in both countries and allowed to bring goods and funds into the country without inspection by customs agents. In September 1988, the investigative journal Israeli Foreign Affairs noted that the ICEJ “ambassador to Honduras,” Marta Rodriguez, told journalist Deborah Preusch that ICEJ had brought in vehicles and other items for the Contras. Other fundamentalist Christian groups that cooperated with ICEJ, include Gospel Crusade of Bradenton, Florida, whose head, Gerald Derstine, is a founding member of ICEJ. This project, in close cooperation with the Israeli government and its embassies in Guatemala and Honduras, operated in total violation of United States law and policy.
This is from the Antipas Ministries site:
http://www.antipasministries.com/html/file0000128.htm
(Phil) Derstine is typical of those evangelicals who, for one reason or another, got mixed up in the “goings-on” in Central and South America and who, as a result, became entangled in the CIA’s dirty little war against communism in that area of the world in the 1970s and ’80s.
Derstein told reporters at the 1987 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Washington DC that he had become involved in the “happenings” in Central America at the behest of the National Security Council (NSC), specifically as a result of Oliver North’s entreaties. Derstine’s assertions as to his connection to the NSC are supported by a November 1985 report in a Florida newspaper, the Sarasota Harald-Tribune, that U.S. Rep. Andy Ireland (R-FL) had personally accompanied Derstine to a National Security Council briefing together with Oliver North prior to his September 1985 trip to the Honduras-Nicaragua border region.
My sympathy goes out to those who have trusted the Derstines and their ministry mind, body and soul. Let us all pray that the Pastors’s transgressions be brought to light and that their deceptive, predatory ravenings, all in the name of blood money, come to an end.
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.
-Matthew 7:15
In July of 2010, Dr. Gerald Derstine of Gospel Crusade, Inc. in Brandenton, Fla. was accused of molesting a young girl at his 110 acre Strawberry Lake Christian Retreat north of Detroit Lakes, Mn. While the case was dropped, the evidence that he indeed violated a vulnerable minor remains. Most telling is a handwritten letter on Gospel Crusade stationary Derstine wrote asking for the girls forgiveness and which can be downloaded here:
http://christianwinstead.blog.com/files/2011/08/Derstine-Letter-to-Jane-Doe.pdf
Here is the transcript of the phone conversation as well:
http://christianwinstead.blog.com/files/2011/08/Derstine-Police-Statement.pdf
Equally disturbing is the fact that Gospel Crusade, Inc. fabricated evidence of miracles in the Middle East:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1995/september1/5ta064.html
From the article:
For seven years, Gerald Derstine of Gospel Crusade, Inc., in Bradenton, Florida, inspired his followers with sensational accounts of miracles, mass conversions, and subsequent martyrdoms among Arab Muslims in Israel and the West Bank.
Derstine’s supporters responded generously, contributing $2.8 million in 1994 alone to support the ministry and the persecuted church in the Mideast.
But in March, one of Derstine’s Arab ministry leaders confessed, in the face of mounting evidence, that the reports were fabrications. The Gospel Crusade board of directors suspended the Arab leader and another individual in April. Gospel Crusade also withdrew from circulation literature and videotapes containing the leader’s stories, including the 1993 book “Fire Over Israel.”
Even more chilling is the following:
http://www.cc-vw.org/articles/icej.htm
During the 1980's the ICEJ was also politically active in the destabilisation of Central America, as a channel for the funding of the United States backed Contras.
When the ICEJ proudly established an “embassy” in Honduras and in Guatemala, they worked closely with the government of Israel in bringing funds into the countries. ICEJ was granted diplomatic status in both countries and allowed to bring goods and funds into the country without inspection by customs agents. In September 1988, the investigative journal Israeli Foreign Affairs noted that the ICEJ “ambassador to Honduras,” Marta Rodriguez, told journalist Deborah Preusch that ICEJ had brought in vehicles and other items for the Contras. Other fundamentalist Christian groups that cooperated with ICEJ, include Gospel Crusade of Bradenton, Florida, whose head, Gerald Derstine, is a founding member of ICEJ. This project, in close cooperation with the Israeli government and its embassies in Guatemala and Honduras, operated in total violation of United States law and policy.
This is from the Antipas Ministries site:
http://www.antipasministries.com/html/file0000128.htm
(Phil) Derstine is typical of those evangelicals who, for one reason or another, got mixed up in the “goings-on” in Central and South America and who, as a result, became entangled in the CIA’s dirty little war against communism in that area of the world in the 1970s and ’80s.
Derstein told reporters at the 1987 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Washington DC that he had become involved in the “happenings” in Central America at the behest of the National Security Council (NSC), specifically as a result of Oliver North’s entreaties. Derstine’s assertions as to his connection to the NSC are supported by a November 1985 report in a Florida newspaper, the Sarasota Harald-Tribune, that U.S. Rep. Andy Ireland (R-FL) had personally accompanied Derstine to a National Security Council briefing together with Oliver North prior to his September 1985 trip to the Honduras-Nicaragua border region.
My sympathy goes out to those who have trusted the Derstines and their ministry mind, body and soul. Let us all pray that the Pastors’s transgressions be brought to light and that their deceptive, predatory ravenings, all in the name of blood money, come to an end.
NYPD confirms CIA officer works at department
EILEEN SULLIVAN
Aug 25, 2011
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9PBDBJO0
WASHINGTON (AP) -- New York's police commissioner confirmed Thursday that a CIA officer is working out of police headquarters there, after an Associated Press investigation revealed an unusual partnership with the CIA that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying. But he and the CIA said the spy agency's role at the department is an advisory one.
Speaking to reporters in New York, commissioner Raymond Kelly acknowledged that the CIA trains NYPD officers on "trade craft issues," meaning espionage techniques, and advises police about events happening overseas. Kelly also said he was unaware of any other U.S. police department with a similar relationship with the CIA.
"They are involved in providing us with information, usually coming from perhaps overseas and providing it to us for, you know, just for our purposes," Kelly said.
CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said the agency does not spy inside the United States and also described the relationship with the NYPD as collaborative.
"Our cooperation, in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is exactly what the American people deserve and have come to expect following 9/11," she said.
A months-long investigation by the AP, published Wednesday, revealed that the NYPD has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.
Many of the operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. The mayor on Thursday defended the police department's efforts.
"In the end the NYPD's first job is prevention, and I think they've done a very good job of that," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when asked about the police practices. "The law is pretty clear about what's the requirement, and I think they've followed the law."
Also Thursday, New York City Councilman Brad Lander said the city council should conduct an oversight hearing on the NYPD's programs, but Lander is not in a leadership position to enforce that such hearings take place.
"We must be sure that the NYPD's intelligence gathering does not violate civil liberties, target and profile our city's diverse ethnic and religious communities," Lander said.
City Councilman Peter Vallone, chairman of the panel that oversees the police department, said the council already had scheduled two NYPD oversight hearings during which these issues could be raised.
The disclosures about the NYPD's activities provoked exasperation in the city's Muslim neighborhoods, where government officials have sought to build relationships in Muslim communities and pledged to ensure that Muslims aren't targeted for discrimination.
"The NYPD's credibility is bankrupt in our communities," Fahd Ahmed, legal and policy director of the Desis Rising Up & Moving group, said in a statement Thursday. "We need accountability, transparency and an overhaul of tactics and policies."
Government outreach programs have operated in Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., and Washington - all cities with large Muslim communities - even as law enforcement around the country has stepped up investigative efforts to stave off attacks.
But the inherent tensions caused by this duality of missions is perhaps most visible in New York. It is the only U.S. city that al-Qaida has successfully attacked twice and continues to be the target of terror plots. New York also is home to the country's most aggressive local police department investigating counterterrorism.
"It seems to many of the leadership here, there are two kinds of authorities they are playing - one is in the forefront which is very cooperative," said Zaheer Uddin of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York. "And there is another authority, which is playing against Islam and Muslims, going against the First Amendment and the security of this country."
Uddin asked, "Are we partners, or are we a suspicious community?"
On Wednesday, the Justice Department said it will review a request by a Muslim advocacy group to investigate.
"These revelations send the message to American Muslims that they are being viewed as a suspect community and that their constitutional rights may be violated with impunity," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asked for the investigation. "The Justice Department must initiate an immediate investigation of the civil rights implications of this spy program and the legality of its links to the CIA."
The Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition, an umbrella organization of New York Muslim groups, on Thursday also called for an investigation.
In the decade since the September 2001 attacks, government officials in New York also have met with Muslim leaders and exchanged cellphone numbers. They've attended religious services, dinners and teas, and spoken at community meetings. The FBI recently hosted an event for 500 young Muslims in Brooklyn to build trust and get to know federal law enforcement, with a bomb-sniffing dog, scuba boat and helicopter on display.
"I go and visit mosques on a regular basis," Kelly previously told the AP, adding that he also holds question-and-answer sessions and planned to attend several dinners with members of the Muslim community during the holy month of Ramadan this year.
The police department in 2006 hired Sidique Wai, an African immigrant and member of the New York Muslim community, to coordinate the NYPD's citywide community outreach program. He said the interaction and outreach between the community and police is unprecedented.
"The majority of the faith-based - particularly the Muslim leaders throughout the city - are absolutely appreciative of the unprecedented relationship with the police department," Wai said. "I'm not aware of a deliberate effort on the part of NYPD to profile people."
Aug 25, 2011
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9PBDBJO0
WASHINGTON (AP) -- New York's police commissioner confirmed Thursday that a CIA officer is working out of police headquarters there, after an Associated Press investigation revealed an unusual partnership with the CIA that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying. But he and the CIA said the spy agency's role at the department is an advisory one.
Speaking to reporters in New York, commissioner Raymond Kelly acknowledged that the CIA trains NYPD officers on "trade craft issues," meaning espionage techniques, and advises police about events happening overseas. Kelly also said he was unaware of any other U.S. police department with a similar relationship with the CIA.
"They are involved in providing us with information, usually coming from perhaps overseas and providing it to us for, you know, just for our purposes," Kelly said.
CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said the agency does not spy inside the United States and also described the relationship with the NYPD as collaborative.
"Our cooperation, in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is exactly what the American people deserve and have come to expect following 9/11," she said.
A months-long investigation by the AP, published Wednesday, revealed that the NYPD has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.
Many of the operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. The mayor on Thursday defended the police department's efforts.
"In the end the NYPD's first job is prevention, and I think they've done a very good job of that," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when asked about the police practices. "The law is pretty clear about what's the requirement, and I think they've followed the law."
Also Thursday, New York City Councilman Brad Lander said the city council should conduct an oversight hearing on the NYPD's programs, but Lander is not in a leadership position to enforce that such hearings take place.
"We must be sure that the NYPD's intelligence gathering does not violate civil liberties, target and profile our city's diverse ethnic and religious communities," Lander said.
City Councilman Peter Vallone, chairman of the panel that oversees the police department, said the council already had scheduled two NYPD oversight hearings during which these issues could be raised.
The disclosures about the NYPD's activities provoked exasperation in the city's Muslim neighborhoods, where government officials have sought to build relationships in Muslim communities and pledged to ensure that Muslims aren't targeted for discrimination.
"The NYPD's credibility is bankrupt in our communities," Fahd Ahmed, legal and policy director of the Desis Rising Up & Moving group, said in a statement Thursday. "We need accountability, transparency and an overhaul of tactics and policies."
Government outreach programs have operated in Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., and Washington - all cities with large Muslim communities - even as law enforcement around the country has stepped up investigative efforts to stave off attacks.
But the inherent tensions caused by this duality of missions is perhaps most visible in New York. It is the only U.S. city that al-Qaida has successfully attacked twice and continues to be the target of terror plots. New York also is home to the country's most aggressive local police department investigating counterterrorism.
"It seems to many of the leadership here, there are two kinds of authorities they are playing - one is in the forefront which is very cooperative," said Zaheer Uddin of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York. "And there is another authority, which is playing against Islam and Muslims, going against the First Amendment and the security of this country."
Uddin asked, "Are we partners, or are we a suspicious community?"
On Wednesday, the Justice Department said it will review a request by a Muslim advocacy group to investigate.
"These revelations send the message to American Muslims that they are being viewed as a suspect community and that their constitutional rights may be violated with impunity," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asked for the investigation. "The Justice Department must initiate an immediate investigation of the civil rights implications of this spy program and the legality of its links to the CIA."
The Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition, an umbrella organization of New York Muslim groups, on Thursday also called for an investigation.
In the decade since the September 2001 attacks, government officials in New York also have met with Muslim leaders and exchanged cellphone numbers. They've attended religious services, dinners and teas, and spoken at community meetings. The FBI recently hosted an event for 500 young Muslims in Brooklyn to build trust and get to know federal law enforcement, with a bomb-sniffing dog, scuba boat and helicopter on display.
"I go and visit mosques on a regular basis," Kelly previously told the AP, adding that he also holds question-and-answer sessions and planned to attend several dinners with members of the Muslim community during the holy month of Ramadan this year.
The police department in 2006 hired Sidique Wai, an African immigrant and member of the New York Muslim community, to coordinate the NYPD's citywide community outreach program. He said the interaction and outreach between the community and police is unprecedented.
"The majority of the faith-based - particularly the Muslim leaders throughout the city - are absolutely appreciative of the unprecedented relationship with the police department," Wai said. "I'm not aware of a deliberate effort on the part of NYPD to profile people."
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya
The Human Costs of Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists
Peter Dale Scott
http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3578
Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon increased, and among the factors contributing to the increase were America’s interventions in new areas: the Balkans in the 1990s, and Libya today.1 Hidden from public view in both cases was the extent to which al-Qaeda was a covert U.S. ally in both interventions, rather than its foe.
U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then Libya were presented by the compliant U.S. and allied mainstream media as humanitarian. Indeed, some Washington interventionists may have sincerely believed this. But deeper motivations – from oil to geostrategic priorities – were also at work in both instances.
In virtually all the wars since 1989, America and Islamist factions have been battling to determine who will control the heartlands of Eurasia in the post-Soviet era. In some countries – Somalia in 1993, Afghanistan in 2001 – the conflict has been straightforward, with each side using the other’s excesses as an excuse for intervention.
But there have been other interventions in which Americans have used al-Qaeda as a resource to increase their influence, for example Azerbaijan in 1993. There a pro-Moscow president was ousted after large numbers of Arab and other foreign mujahedin veterans were secretly imported from Afghanistan, on an airline hastily organized by three former veterans of the CIA’s airline Air America. (The three, all once detailed from the Pentagon to the CIA, were Richard Secord, Harry Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn.)2 This was an ad hoc marriage of convenience: the mujahedin got to defend Muslims against Russian influence in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, while the Americans got a new president who opened up the oilfields of Baku to western oil companies.
The pattern of U.S. collaboration with Muslim fundamentalists against more secular enemies is not new. It dates back to at least 1953, when the CIA recruited right-wing mullahs to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran, and also began to cooperate with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.3 But in Libya in 2011 we see a more complex marriage of convenience between US and al-Qaeda elements: one which repeats a pattern seen in Bosnia in 1992-95, and Kosovo in 1997-98. In those countries America responded to a local conflict in the name of a humanitarian intervention to restrain the side committing atrocities. But in all three cases both sides committed atrocities, and American intervention in fact favored the side allied with al-Qaeda.
The cause of intervention was fostered in all three cases by blatant manipulation and falsification of the facts. What a historian has noted of the Bosnian conflict was true also of Kosovo and is being echoed today in Libya: though attacks were “perpetrated by Serbs and Muslims alike,” the pattern in western media was “that killings of Muslims were newsworthy, while the deaths of non-Muslims were not.”4 Reports of mass rapes in the thousands proved to be wildly exaggerated: a French journalist “uncovered only four women willing to back up the story.”5 Meanwhile in 1994 the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) traveled to Bosnia and fervently endorsed the case for intervention in Bosnia; in 2011 February BHL traveled to Benghazi and reprised his interventionist role for Libya.6
In all of the countries mentioned above, furthermore, there are signs that some American and/or western intelligence groups were collaborating with al-Qaeda elements from the outset of conflict, before the atrocities cited as a reason for intervention.. This suggests that there were deeper reasons for America’s interventions including the desire of western oil companies to exploit the petroleum reserves of Libya (as in Iraq) without having to deal with a troublesome and powerful strong man, or their desire to create a strategic oil pipeline across the Balkans (in Kosovo).7
That the U.S. would support al-Qaeda in terrorist atrocities runs wholly counter to impressions created by the U.S. media. Yet this on-going unholy alliance resurrects and builds on the alliance underlying Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1978-79 strategy of provocation in Afghanistan, at a time when he was President Carter’s National Security Adviser.
In those years Brzezinski did not hesitate to play the terrorist card against the Soviet Union: he reinforced the efforts of the SAVAK (the Shah of Iran’s intelligence service) to work with the Islamist antecedents of al-Qaeda to destabilize Afghanistan, in a way which soon led to a Soviet invasion of that country.8 At the time, as he later boasted, Brzezinski told Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”9
CIA Director William Casey continued this strategy of using terrorists against the USSR in Afghanistan. At first the CIA channeled aid through the Pakistani ISI (Interservices Intelligence Service) to their client Afghan extremists like Gulbeddin Hekmatyar (today one of America’s enemies in Afghanistan). But in 1986, “Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin.”10 CIA aid now reached their support Office of Services in Peshawar, headed by a Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, and by Osama bin Laden. The al-Kifah Center, a U.S. recruitment office for their so-called Arab-Afghan foreign legion (the future al Qaeda), was set up in the al-Farook mosque in Brooklyn.11
It is important to recall Brzezinski’s and Casey’s use of terrorists today. For in Libya, as earlier in Kosovo and Bosnia, there are alarming signs that America has continued to underwrite Islamist terrorism as a means to dismantle socialist or quasi-socialist nations not previously in its orbit: first the USSR, then Yugoslavia, today Libya. As I have written elsewhere, Gaddafi was using the wealth of Libya, the only Mediterranean nation still armed by Russia and independent of the NATO orbit, to impose more and more difficult terms for western oil companies, and to make the whole of Africa more independent of Europe and America.12
Support for the mujahedin included collusion in law-breaking, at a heavy cost. In the second part of this essay, I will show how government protection of key figures in the Brooklyn al-Kifah Center left some of them free, even after they were known to have committed crimes, to engage in further terrorist acts in the United States -- such as the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Libya
The NATO intervention in Libya has been presented as a humanitarian campaign. But it is not: both factions have been committing atrocities. Thanks in part to the efforts of the well-connected p.r. firm the Harbour Group, working on behalf of the Benghazi opposition’s National Transitional Council [NTC], Americans have heard many more press accounts of atrocities by pro-Gaddafi forces in Libya than by the Benghazi opposition.13 But in fact, as the London Daily Telegraph reported,
Under rebel control, Benghazi residents are terrorized, many "too frightened to drive through the dark streets at night, fearing a shakedown or worse at the proliferating checkpoints."
Moreover, about 1.5 million black African migrant workers feel trapped under suspicion of supporting the wrong side. Numbers of them have been attacked, some hunted down, dragged from apartments, beaten and killed. So-called "revolutionaries" and "freedom fighters" are, in fact, rampaging gunmen committing atrocities airbrushed from mainstream reports, unwilling to reveal the new Libya if Gaddafi is deposed.14
Thomas Mountain concurs that “Since the rebellion in Benghazi broke out several hundred Sudanese, Somali, Ethiopian and Eritrean guest workers have been robbed and murdered by racist rebel militias, a fact well hidden by the international media.”15 Such reports have continued. Recently, Human Rights Watch accused the rebels of killing Gaddafi supporters who were just civilians and looting, burning and ransacking pro-Gaddafi supporters' houses and areas.16
Americans and Europeans are still less likely to learn from their media that among the groups in the Benghazi transitional coalition, certainly the most battle-seasoned, are veterans of the Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG). The importance of the LIFG contingent in the TNC has been downplayed in a recent issue of the International Business Times:
The LIFG is a radical Islamic group which has been fighting small scale guerrilla warfare against Gaddafi for almost a decade. Much of the LIFG leadership came from soldiers who fought against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, as part of the Mujahedeen. Since the beginning of the uprising reports said that some of the LIFG has joined the TNC rebel movement on the ground, and many accused the fighters of having links to Al-Qaeda, which the LIFG has since denied.
Previously however, the LIFG had stated that its ultimate goal is to install an Islamic state inside Libya, which given the fact that many of its fighters are now on the side of the TNC is quite worrying. However as the LIFG is reported to have a fighting force of no more than a few thousand men, it is believed it will not be able to cause much trouble within the opposition.17
It remains to be seen whether a victorious TNC would be able to contain the Islamist aspirations of the ruthless jihadist veterans in their ranks.
There are those who fear that, from their years of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, the battle-hardened LIFG, although probably not dominant in the Benghazi coalition today, will come to enjoy more influence if Benghazi ever gets to distribute the spoils of victory. In February 2004, then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that "one of the most immediate threats [to U.S. security in Iraq] is from smaller international Sunni extremist groups that have benefited from al-Qaida links. They include ... the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group."18 In 2007 a West Point study reported on “the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group's (LIFG) increasingly cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda, which culminated in the LIFG officially joining al-Qaeda on November 3, 2007."19 It is possible that the West Point study exaggerated the LIFG-Al Qaeda connection. What matters is that eBritain and the US were well aware of the West Point assessment, yet their special forces nevertheless secretly backed the Benghazi TNC, even before the launch of NATO air support:
The bombing of the country came as it was revealed that hundreds of British special forces troops have been deployed deep inside Libya targeting Colonel Gaddafi’s forces – and more are on standby….
In total it is understood that just under 250 UK special forces soldiers and their support have been in Libya since before the launch of air strikes to enforce the no-fly zone against Gaddafi’s forces.20
There are also reports that U.S. Special Forces were also sent into Libya on February 23 and 24, 2011, almost a month before the commencement of NATO bombing.21
UK support for the fundamentalist LIFG was in fact at least a decade old:
Fierce clashes between [Qadhafi's] security forces and Islamist guerrillas erupted in Benghazi in September 1995, leaving dozens killed on both sides. After weeks of intense fighting, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) formally declared its existence in a communiqué calling Qadhafi's government "an apostate regime that has blasphemed against the faith of God Almighty" and declaring its overthrow to be "the foremost duty after faith in God." This and future LIFG communiqués were issued by Libyan Afghans who had been granted political asylum in Britain.... The involvement of the British government in the LIFG campaign against Qadhafi remains the subject of immense controversy. LIFG's next big operation, a failed attempt to assassinate Qadhafi in February 1996 that killed several of his bodyguards, was later said to have been financed by British intelligence to the tune of $160,000, according to ex-MI5 officer David Shayler.22
David Shayler’s detailed account has been challenged, but many other sources reveal that UK support for Libyan jihadists long antedates the present conflict.23
Even more ominous for the future than the nationalistic LIFG may be the fighters from the more internationalist Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) who have seized the opportunity presented by the war to enter the conflict, and equip themselves from Gaddafi’s looted armories.24 AQIM presents a special concern because of recent reports that, like other al Qaeda associates from Afghanistan to Kosovo, it is increasingly financed by payoffs from regional drug traffickers.25
In short, the NATO campaign in Libya is in support of a coalition in which the future status of present and former al-Qaeda allies is likely to be strengthened.26 And western forces have been secretly supporting them from the outset.
The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Bosnia
Similarly, Clinton’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were presented as humanitarian. But both sides had committed atrocities in those conflicts; Like the western media, Washington downplayed the Muslim atrocities because of its other interests.
Most Americans are aware that Clinton dispatched U.S. forces to Bosnia to enforce the Dayton peace accords after a well-publicized Serbian atrocity: the massacre of thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica. Thanks to a vigorous campaign by the p.r. firm Ruder Finn, Americans heard a great deal about the Srebrenica massacre, but far less about the beheadings and other atrocities by Muslims that preceded and helped account for it.
A major reason for the Serb attack on Srebrenica was to deal with the armed attacks mounted from that base on nearby villages: “intelligence sources said it was that harassment which precipitated the Serb attack on the 1,500 Muslim defenders inside the enclave.”27 General Philippe Morillon, commander of the UN troops in Bosnia from 1992 to 1993, testified to the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) that Muslim forces based in Srebrenica had “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region”28 According to Prof. John Schindler,
Between May and December 1992, Muslim forces repeatedly attacked Serb villages around Srebrenica, killing and torturing civilians; some were mutilated and burned alive. Even pro-Sarajevo accounts concede that Muslim forces in Srebrenica…murdered over 1,300 Serbs…and had “ethnically cleansed a vast area.29
Former U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith later admitted in an interview that the U.S. administration was aware of “small numbers of atrocities” being committed by the foreign mujahedin in Bosnia, but dismissed the atrocities as “in the scheme of things not a big issue.”30
Other sources reveal that Washington gave a tacit green light to Croatia’s arming and augmentation of the Muslim presence in Srebrenica.31 Soon C-130 Hercules planes. some but not all of them Iranian, were dropping arms to the Muslims, in violation of the international arms embargo which the U.S. officially respected. More Arab-Afghan mujahedin arrived as well. Many of the airdrops and some of the mujahedin were at Tuzla, 70 kilometers from Srebrenica.32
According to The Spectator (London), the Pentagon was using other countries such as Turkey and Iran in this flow of arms and warriors:
From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of Mujahideen and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. …. As part of the Dutch government’s inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University compiled a report entitled ‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia’, published in April 2002. In it he details the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamic groups from the Middle East, and their efforts to assist Bosnia’s Muslims. By 1993, there was a vast amount of weapons-smuggling through Croatia to the Muslims, organised by ‘clandestine agencies’ of the USA, Turkey and Iran, in association with a range of Islamic groups that included Afghan Mujahideen and the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. Arms bought by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia were airlifted from the Middle East to Bosnia — airlifts with which, Wiebes points out, the USA was ‘very closely involved’.33
Cees Wiebes’ detailed account, based on years of research, documents both the case for American responsibility and the vigorous American denials of it:
At 17.45 on 10 February 1995, the Norwegian Captain Ivan Moldestad, a Norwegian helicopter detachment (NorAir) pilot, stood in the doorway of his temporary accommodation just outside Tuzla. It was dark, and suddenly he heard the sound of the propellers of an approaching transport aircraft; it was unmistakably a four engine Hercules C-130. Moldestad noticed that the Hercules was being escorted by two jet fighters, but could not tell their precise type in the darkness. There were other sightings of this secretive night-time flight to Tuzla Air Base (TAB). A sentry who was on guard duty outside the Norwegian medical UN unit in Tuzla also heard and saw the lights of the Hercules and the accompanying jet fighters. Other UN observers, making use of night vision equipment, also saw the cargo aircraft and the fighter planes concerned. The reports were immediately forwarded to the NATO Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) in Vicenza and the UNPF Deny Flight Cell in Naples. When Moldestad phoned Vicenza, he was told that there was nothing in the air that night, and that he must be mistaken. When Moldestad persisted, the connection was broken.
The secretive C-130 cargo aircraft flights and night-time arms drops on Tuzla caused great agitation within UNPROFOR and the international community in February and March 1995. When asked, a British general responded with great certainty to the question of the origin of the secret supplies via TAB: ‘They were American arms deliveries. No doubt about that. And American private companies were involved in these deliveries.’ This was no surprising answer, because this general had access to intelligence gathered by a unit of the British Special Air Services (SAS) in Tuzla. The aircraft had come within range of this unit’s special night vision equipment, and the British saw them land. It was a confirmation that a clandestine American operation had taken place in which arms, ammunition and military communication equipment were supplied to the ABiH. These night-time operations led to much consternation within the UN and NATO, and were the subject of countless speculations.34
Wiebes reports the possibility that the C-130s, some of which were said to have taken off from a US Air Force base in Germany, were actually controlled by Turkish authorities.35 But U.S. involvement was detected in the elaborate cover-up, from the fact that US AWACS aircraft, which should have provided a record of the secret flights, were either withdrawn from duty at the relevant times, or manned with US crews.36
A summary of Wiebes’ exhaustive report was published in the Guardian:
The Dutch report reveals how the Pentagon formed a secret alliance with Islamist groups in an Iran-Contra-style operation.
US, Turkish and Iranian intelligence groups worked with the Islamists in what the Dutch report calls the "Croatian pipeline". Arms bought by Iran and Turkey and financed by Saudi Arabia were flown into Croatia initially by the official Iranian airline, Iran Air, and later in a fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft.
The report says that mojahedin fighters were also flown in, and that the US was "very closely involved" in the operation which was in flagrant breach of the embargo. British secret services obtained documents proving that Iran also arranged deliveries of arms directly to Bosnia, it says.
The operation was promoted by the Pentagon, rather than the CIA, which was cautious about using Islamist groups as a conduit for arms, and about breaching the embargo. When the CIA tried to place its own people on the ground in Bosnia, the agents were threatened by the mojahedin fighters and the Iranians who were training them.
The UN relied on American intelligence to monitor the embargo, a dependency which allowed Washington to manipulate it at will.37
Meanwhile the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which in the 1980s had supported the “Arab-Afghans” fighting in Afghanistan, turned its attentions to Bosnia.
Al-Kifah’s English-language newsletter Al-Hussam (The Sword) also began publishing regular updates on jihad action in Bosnia….Under the control of the minions of Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman, the newsletter aggressively incited sympathetic Muslims to join the jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan themselves….The Al-Kifah Bosnian branch office in Zagreb, Croatia, housed in a modern, two-story building, was evidently in close communication with the organizational headquarters in New York. The deputy director of the Zagreb office, Hassan Hakim, admitted to receiving all orders and funding directly from the main United States office of Al-Kifah on Atlantic Avenue controlled by Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman.38
One of the trainers at al-Kifah, Rodney Hampton-El, assisted in this support program, recruiting warriors from U.S. Army bases like Fort Belvoir, and also training them to be fighters in New Jersey.39 In 1995 Hampton-El was tried and convicted for his role (along with al-Kifah leader Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman) in the plot to blow up New York landmarks. At the trial Hampton-El testified how he was personally given thousands of dollars for this project by Saudi Crown Prince Faisal in the Washington Saudi Embassy.40
About this time, Ayman al-Zawahiri, today the leader of al Qaeda, came to America to raise funds in Silicon Valley, where he was hosted by Ali Mohamed, a U.S. double agent and veteran of U.S. Army Special Forces who had been the top trainer at the Al-Kifah mosque.41 Almost certainly al-Zawahiri’s fund-raising was in support of the mujahedin in Bosnia, reportedly his chief concern at the time. (“The Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal reported that, in 1993, Mr. bin Laden had appointed Sheik Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda's second-in-command, to direct his operations in the Balkans.”)42
Wiebes’ detailed report and the news stories based on it corroborated earlier charges made in 1997 by Sir Alfred Sherman, top adviser to Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of the influential rightwing nationalist Centre for Policy Studies, that “The U.S. encouraged and facilitated the dispatch of arms to the Moslems via Iran and Eastern Europe -- a fact which was denied in Washington at the time in face of overwhelming evidence.”43 This was part of his case that
The war in Bosnia was America's war in every sense of the word. The US administration helped start it, kept it going, and prevented its early end. Indeed all the indications are that it intends to continue the war in the near future, as soon as its Moslem proteges are fully armed and trained.
Specifically, Sherman charged that in 1992 Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger had instructed Warren Zimmerman, U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade, to persuade Bosnian President Izetbegovic to renege on his agreement to preserve Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian unity, and instead accept American aid for an independent Bosnian state.44
The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Kosovo
This raises the disturbing question: were some Americans willing to ignore the atrocities of the al-Kifah mujahideen in Bosnia in exchange for mujahideen assistance in NATO’s successive wars dismantling Yugoslavia, the last surviving socialist republic in Europe? One thing is clear: Sir Alfred Sherman’s prediction in 1997 that America “intends to continue the war in the near future” soon proved accurate, when in 1999 American support for al-Qaeda’s allies in Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), led to a controversial NATO bombing campaign.
As was widely reported at the time, the KLA was supported both by the networks of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, and also by the traffic in Afghan heroin:
Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden -- who is wanted in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 persons, including 12 Americans.45
According to former DEA agent Michael Levine, the decision of Clinton to back the KLA dismayed his DEA contacts who knew it to be a major drug-trafficking organization.46 As Ralf Mutschke of Interpol testified to Congress,
In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and individuals, among them allegedly Usama bin Laden. Another link to bin Laden is the fact that the brother of a leader in an Egyptian Djihad organization and also a military commander of Usama bin Laden, was leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict. [This is almost certainly Zaiman or Mohammed al-Zawahiri, one of the brothers of Ayman al-Zawahiri.] In 1998, the KLA was described as a key player in the drugs for arms business in 1998, "helping to transport 2 billion USD worth of drugs annually into Western Europe". The KLA and other Albanian groups seem to utilize a sophisticated network of accounts and companies to process funds. In 1998, Germany froze two bank accounts belonging to the "United Kosova" organization after it had been discovered that several hundred thousand dollars had been deposited into those accounts by a convicted Kosovar Albanian drug trafficker.47
According to the London Sunday Times, the KLA’s background did not deter the US from training and strengthening it:
American intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before Nato's bombing of Yugoslavia. The disclosure angered some European diplomats, who said this had undermined moves for a political solution to the conflict between Serbs and Albanians. Central Intelligence Agency officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties with the KLA and giving American military training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police.
When the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which co-ordinated the monitoring, left Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a year ago, many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the KLA, ensuring that guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with Nato and Washington. Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander.48
According to former U.S. Army Captain David Hackworth, later Newsweek's contributing editor for defense, former US military officers in the private U.S. military contractor MPRI (Military Professional Resources Incorporated) not only trained KLA personnel, but even fought alongside them.49 This reinforced earlier reports that MPRI personnel had also been involved in training Croatians at the time of the illicit Croatian arms pipeline to Bosnia.50
After Kosovo, Sherman repeated his warnings against “expanding American hegemony”,
exercised through NATO with varying degrees of partnership and subordination of other players. …. The process commenced with the deliberate break-up of Yugoslavia, led by Germany and acquiesced in by the other European Union members and the United States (1991). It progressed with sanctions against Serbia for attempting to help the western Serbs (1992). In Bosnia America's early involvement sparked off civil war (the Zimmerman Visit to Izetbegovic, in the aftermath of the Lisbon Agreement), and it eventually matured into the bombing campaign of 1999 and the occupation of Kosovo.51
Others suspected that America’s involvement was motivated by its desire to see a new Trans-Balkan pipeline and a new U.S. military base in the Balkans to defend it. Although such critics were initially ridiculed, both predictions soon proved true. The U.S.-registered AMBO corporation, headed by former BP executive Ted Ferguson, began construction of a pipeline from Albania to Macedonia in 2007.52 And nearby is a semi-permanent U.S. Army base, Camp Bondsteel, that can hold up to 7000 soldiers.
In 2007, President George W. Bush created a new United States Africa Command, U.S. AFRICOM. But its HQ at present is in Stuttgart, Germany. This has led to speculation on the Internet that America has its eyes on Libya’s international airport, which the U.S. Air Force had operated as Wheelus Air Force Base until its ouster in 1970.
II. From the First WTC Bombing to 9/11: The Domestic U.S. Fallout from Collusion with Terrorists
The fact that Americans have had repeated recourse to al-Qaeda Islamists as assets in their expansive projects does not constitute proof that there is any long-term systematic strategy to do so, still less that there is a secret alliance.
I believe rather that America is suffering from a malignant condition of military power run amok – power which, like a malignant cancer, tends to reproduce itself at times in ways counterproductive to larger goals. Those who are appointed to manage this vast power become inured to using any available assets, in order to sustain a sociodynamic of global intervention that they are, ironically, powerless to challenge or turn around. The few dissenters who try to do so are predictably sidelined or even ejected from the heights of power, as not being “on the team.”
Those in Washington who decided to assist terrorists and drug traffickers seem not to have considered such “externalities” as the domestic consequences from official dealings with criminal terrorist networks that are global in scope. Yet the consequences were and are real, for the Islamist terrorists that were protected by the US in their subversion of order in Kosovo and other countries were soon being protected inside the US as well. As former DEA agent Michael Levine reported of the KLA-linked drug networks, “These guys have a network that's active on the streets of this country.... They're the worst elements of society that you can imagine, and now, according to my sources in drug enforcement, they're politically protected.”53
In other words, Kosovars were now enjoying the de facto protection in their U.S. drug trafficking that had earlier been enjoyed by the CIA’s Chinese, Cuban, Italian, Thai, and other ethnic assets dating from the 1940s.54
Mother Jones reported in 2000, after the NATO bombing in support of the KLA that Afghan heroin, much of it distributed by Kosovar Albanians, now accounted for almost 20 percent of the heroin seized in America -- nearly double the percentage taken four years earlier.55 Meanwhile in Europe, it was estimated that “Kosovo Albanians control 40% of Europe's heroin.”56 In addition there is a near universal consensus that the outcome of the war in Bosnia left al-Qaeda’s jihadists much more strongly entrenched in the Balkans than they had been earlier. In the words of Professor John Schindler, Bosnia, “the most pro-Western society in the umma [Muslim world],” was “converted into a Jihadistan through domestic deceit, violent conflict, and misguided international intervention.”57
It is too soon to predict with confidence what will be the domestic fallout or “blowback” from NATO’s empowerment of Islamists by creating chaos in Libya. But the domestic consequences of similar U.S. interventions in the past are indisputable, and have contributed to major acts of terrorism in this country.
American protection for the Al-Kifah mujahedin support base in Brooklyn led to interference in domestic U.S. law enforcement. This enabled mujahedin recruits at al-Kifah to plot and/or engage in a number of domestic and foreign terrorist attacks on America. These attacks include the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the so-called “New York landmarks plot” of 1995, and the Embassy attacks of 1998 in Kenya and Tanzania. Involved in all of these events were terrorists who should have been rounded up earlier because of crimes already committed, but were allowed to stay free.
Central to all of these attacks was the role of Ali Mohamed, the former U.S. Special Forces double agent at al-Kifah, and his trainees. Ali Mohamed, despite being on a State Department Watch List, had come to America around 1984, on what an FBI consultant has called “a visa program controlled by the CIA.”58 So did the “blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman, the leader of al-Kifah; Rahman was issued two visas, one of them “by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan.”59
Ali Mohamed trained al-Kifah recruits in guerrilla tactics near Brooklyn. This operation was considered so sensitive that the New York police and the FBI later protected two of the recruits from arrest, when they murdered the Jewish extremist Meir Kahane. Instead, the New York Police called the third assassin (El Sayyid Nosair) a “lone deranged gunman,” and released the other two (Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh) from detention. This enabled Abouhalima and Salameh, along with another Ali Mohamed trainee (Nidal Ayyad) to take part three years later in the first (1993) bombing of the World Trade Center.60
Prosecutors protected Ali Mohamed again in the 1994-95 “Landmarks” trial, when Omar Abdul Rahman and some of Mohamed’s trainees were convicted of conspiring to blow up New York buildings. In that case the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, named Ali Mohamed as an unindicted co-conspirator, yet allowed him to remain free. When the defense issued a subpoena for Mohamed to appear in court, the prosecutor intervened to avoid Mohamed’s having to testify.61
Ali Mohamed was well aware of his protected status, and used it in early 1993 to obtain his release when detained by the RCMP at Vancouver Airport. As this episode has so ignored in the US press, I will quote the account of it in Canada’s premier newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail:
The RCMP had their hands on one of the key insiders of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, but he was released after he had Mounties call his handler at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Ali Mohamed, a Californian of Egyptian origin who is believed to be the highest ranking al-Qaeda member to have landed in Canada, was working with U.S. counterterrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993. Mr. Mohamed now is in a U.S. prison.
"The people of the RCMP told me by midnight that I can go now," Mr. Mohamed — who confessed in the United States to being a close bin Laden associate — wrote at the time in an affidavit shown Wednesday to The Globe and Mail.
The incident happened after customs agents at Vancouver International Airport detained Essam Marzouk, an Egyptian who had arrived from Damascus via Frankfurt, after they found him carrying two forged Saudi passports.
Mr. Mohamed, who was waiting to pick him up at the airport, inquired of the police about his friend's detention. That made the RCMP curious about Mr. Mohamed, but he dispelled their suspicions by telling them he was a collaborator with the FBI.62
The Globe and Mail story makes it clear that in 1993 Mohamed already had a handler at the FBI, to whom the RCMP deferred. Patrick Fitzgerald, in his statement to the 9/11 Commission, gave a quite different story: that Mohamed, after returning from Nairobi in 1994, applied for a job “as an FBI translator.”63 The difference is vital: because the FBI told the RCMP to release Mohamed, he was then able to travel to Nairobi and plan for bombing the U.S. Embassy there.
According to author Peter Lance, by 2007 Fitzgerald had enough evidence to arrest and indict Mohamed, but did not. Instead he interviewed Mohamed in California, along with an FBI agent, Jack Cloonan. After the interview Fitzgerald chose not to arrest Mohamed, but instead to tap his phone and bug his computer. Lance asks a very relevant question: did Fitzgerald fear that ”any indictment of al Qaeda’s chief spy would rip the lid off years of gross negligence by three of America’s top intelligence agencies”?64
One month after the Embassy bombings, Ali Mohamed was finally arrested, on September 10, 1998. Yet when Fitzgerald handed down thirteen indictments two months later, Mohamed’s name was not among them. Instead Fitzgerald again allowed him to avoid cross-examination in court by accepting a plea bargain, the terms of which are still partly unknown. Specifically we do not know the term of Mohamed’s sentence: that page of his court appearance transcript (p. 17) is filed under seal.65
As part of the plea bargain, Mohamed told the court that at the personal request of bin Laden, he did surveillance on the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, “took pictures, drew diagrams, and wrote a report” which he personally delivered to bin Laden in the Sudan.66 Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor who negotiated the plea bargain, testified at length about Mohamed to the 9/11 Commission, who concluded in their Report (p. 68) that Mohamed “led” the embassy bombing operation. Ironically, the Embassy bombing is the official reason today why Zawahiri (like bin Laden before him) is wanted by the FBI, with a $25 million bounty on his head.
But the American public has been denied the right to learn about Ali Mohamed’s involvement in other terrorist events. Particularly relevant would be his involvement in 9/11. As his FBI handler Cloonan later reported, Mohamed explained to him that he personally trained the accused hijackers in how to seize planes:
He [had] conducted training for al Qaeda on how to hijack a plane. He ran practical exercises in Pakistan and he said, “This is how you get a box cutter on board. You take the knife, you remove the blade and you wrap it in [word blacked out] and put it in your carry-on luggage.” They’d read the FAA regulations. They knew four inches wouldn’t go through. “This is how you position yourself,” he said. “I taught people how to sit in first class. You sit here and some sit here.” He wrote the whole thing out.67
Conclusion
At present America is in the midst of an unprecedented budget crisis, brought on in large part by its multiple wars. Nevertheless it is also on the point of several further interventions: in Yemen, Somalia, possibly Syria or Iran (where the CIA is said to be in contact with the drug-trafficking al-Qaeda offshoot Jundallah),68 and most assuredly in Libya.
Only the American public can stop them. But in order for the people to rise up and cry Stop! there must first be a better understanding of the dark alliances underlying America’s alleged humanitarian interventions.
This awareness may increase when Americans finally realize that there is domestic blowback from assisting terrorists as well. The long elaborate dance between Mohamed and his Justice Department overseers makes it clear that the handling of terrorists for corrupt purposes corrupts the handlers as well as the terrorists. Eventually both the handlers and the handled become in effect co-conspirators, with secrets about their collusion both parties need to conceal.
Until the public takes notice, that concealment of collusion will continue. And as long as it continues, we will continue to be denied the truth about what collusions underlay 9/11.
Worse, we are likely to see more terrorist attacks, at home as well as abroad, along with more illegal, costly, and unnecessary wars.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.
Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists," The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 31 No 1, August 1, 2011.
Articles on related subjects
• Tim Shorrock, Reading the Egyptian Revolution Through the Lens of US Policy in South Korea Circa 1980: Revelations in US Declassified Documents
• Peter Dale Scott, Rape in Libya: America’s recent major wars have all been accompanied by memorable falsehoods
• Peter Dale Scott, The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System
• Peter Dale Scott, Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?
• Herbert P. Bix, The Middle East Revolutions in Historical Perspective: Egypt, Occupied Palestine, and the United States
Notes
1 Cf. Telegraph (London), “Defence Cuts in Doubt over Libya, Says Military Adviser,“ April 7, 2011, “The Libyan crisis has raised doubts about the Coalition’s defence review and could force ministers to reverse cuts including the scrapping of Britain’s Harrier jump jets, a senior military adviser has said,” (link).
2 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 163-65.
3 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 44-45; citing Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 109-11; Saïd Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 60-61; Miles Copeland, The Game Player, 149-54. Cf. Ian Johnson, “Washington’s Secret History with the Muslim Brotherhood,” New York Review of Books, February 5, 2011.
4 John R. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad, 71, 81. According to Schindler, “CNN repeatedly showed images of ‘dead Muslims’ killed by Serbs that were actually Serbs murdered by Muslims” (92).
5 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 91.
6 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 179-80; Christian Science Monitor, March 28, 2011. In 1994 BHL presented Bosnian leader Izetbegovich to French President Mitterand; in 2011 BHL arranged for three Benghazi leaders to meet French President Sarkozy. Cf. “Libyan rebels will recognise Israel, Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Netanyahu,” Radio France Internationale, June 2, 2011, “Libya’s rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) is ready to recognise Israel, according to French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who says he has passed the message on to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” (link).
7 For Big Oil’s complaints with Gaddafi, see Peter Dale Scott, "The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System", Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011.
8 Scott, Road to 9/11, 77; citing Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 16), 16.
9 Scott, Road to 9/11, 72-75; quoting from "Les Révélations d'un Ancien Conseilleur de Carter: ‘Oui, la CIA est Entrée en Afghanistan avant les Russes...’" Le Nouvel Observateur [Paris], January 15-21, 1998: “B[rzezinski]: [On Jul 3, 1979] I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.… Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
10 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, 129. According to the Spanish author Robert Montoya, the idea originated in the elite Safari Club that had been created by French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches in 1976, bringing together other intelligence chiefs such as General Akhtar Abdur Rahman of ISI in Pakistan and Kamal Adham of Saudi Arabia (Roberto Montoya, El Mundo [Madrid], February 16, 2003).
11 Scott, Road to 9/11, 139-40; citing Steven Emerson, American Jihad, 131-32.
12 Peter Dale Scott, "The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System", Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011.
13 “PR firm helps Libyan rebels to campaign for support from US,” The Hill.com, April 12, 2011.
14 Rob Crilly, Daily Telegraph (London), March 23, 2011; quoted in Stephen Lendman, “Planned Regime Change in Libya,” SteveLendmanBlog, March 28, 2011. Cf. Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2011.
15 Morris Herman, “Rebel Militias Include the Human Traffickers of Benghazi,” Foreign Policy Journal, July 28, 2011, quoting Thomas C. Mountain.
16 Anissa Haddadi, “Does the Transitional Council Really Represent Libyan Democracy and Opposition to Gaddafi?” International Business Times, July 20, 2011.
17 Haddadi, “Does the Transitional Council Really Represent Libyan Democracy and Opposition to Gaddafi?” International Business Times, July 20, 2011.
18 Center for Defense Information, “In the Spotlight: The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),” January 18, 2005. That the LIFG is pursuing its own goals may explain the rebel seizure of anti-air force missiles from captured Gaddafi armories: these missiles, useless against Gaddafi (who no longer has an air force) are apparently being shipped out of Libya for sale or use elsewhere (New York Times, July 15, 2011).
19 December 2007 West Point Study, quoted in Webster Tarpley, “The CIA’s Libya Rebels: The Same Terrorists who Killed US, NATO Troops in Iraq,” Tarpley.net, March 24, 2011.
20 Daily Mail (London), March 25, 2001, link; cited in Lendman; “Planned Regime Change in Libya.”
21 Akhtar Jamal, “US UK, French forces land in Libya,” Pakistan Observer, February 2011.
22 Gary Gambill, "The Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), Jamestown Foundation," Terrorism Monitor, May 5, 2005; citing Al-Hayat (London), 20 October 1995 [“communiqué”]; "The Shayler affair: The spooks, the Colonel and the jailed whistle-blower," The Observer (London), 9 August 1998; Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Ben Laden: La Verite interdite (Bin Ladin: The Forbidden Truth). Cf. also Annie Machon, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 And the Shayler Affair (Book Guild Publishing, 2005) [Shayler].
23 E.g. Washington Post, October 7, 2001: “Over the years, some dissidents suspected by foreign governments of involvement in terrorist acts have been protected by the British government for one reason or another from deportation or extradition.... In the past, terrorism experts say, Britain benefited significantly from its willingness to extend at least conditional hospitality to a wide range of Arab dissidents and opposition figures .... Mustafa Alani, a terrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, a London think tank, said [Anas] al-Liby was probably left in legal limbo by the British government, allowing him to be used or discarded as circumstances permitted.”
24 “Sahelian Concern Deepens over Libya, AQIM,” Sahel Blog, May 2, 2011. According to the Los Angeles Times, AQIM vowed on February 24, 2011 to “do whatever we can” to help the rebel cause. (Ken Dilanian, “US Finds no Firm Al Qaeda Presence in Libya Rebellion,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2011). Cf. “Libya rebels not anti-West, but Qaeda a worry-group,” Reuters, March 29, 2011; “The Evolving Threat of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Strategic Forum, National Defense University; CNN World, February 25, 2011.
25 Andre Lesage, “The Evolving Threat of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Strategic Forum, National Defense University; CNN World, February 25, 2011, 6. Cf. “Rogue planes flying drugs across Atlantic; Al-Qaeda Links;,” National Post, January 14, 2014; “Latin drug lords find allies in African Islamists,” Washington Times, November 17, 2009.
26 A story in the New York Times (“Exiled Islamists Watch Rebellion Unfold at Home,”
July 19, 2011) reports that KIFG members of the TNC “have renounced Al Qaeda.” But it supplies no independent evidence that their politics have changed.
27 Michael Evans, "Muslim soldiers 'failed to defend town from Serbs,'" Times (London), July 14, 1995.
28 Richard Palmer. “What Really Happened in Bosnia,” theTrumpet.com, July 12, 2011.
29 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 87; quoting from Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime, 79.
30 John Rosenthal, “The Other Crimes of Bosnia,” BigPeace.com, June 2, 2011; summarizing interview of Galbraith by J.M. Berger, “Exclusive: U.S. Policy on Bosnia.Arms Trafficking.”
31 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 182-83; “Exclusive: U.S. Policy on Bosnia Arms Trafficking”; Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992 1995 (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 166-69.
32 “Allies and Lies,” BBC OnLine, June 22, 2001; Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 183. Also present at Tuzla was an American who introduced himself as “Major Guy Sands,” and who claimed to have been a ten-year veteran of the Vietnam War. Cf. a Swedish report from Tuzla, of an American there who made no secret of his Special Forces background (Brendan O'Shea, Crisis at Bihac: Bosnia’s Bloody Battlefield [Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998], p. 159). For reports of foreign mujahedin in or near Tuzla, see Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 74, 155, 164.
33 Brendan O’Neill, “How We Trained al-Qa’eda,” Spectator (London), September 13, 2003.
34 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 177.
35 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 187, 196; citing Cameron Spence, All Necessary Measures, 99-104.
36 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 184, 197.
37 “US used Islamists to arm Bosnians,” Guardian, April 22, 2002. Contrast the very different claim by Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, 140: “The U.S. also blocked Iranian and al Qaeda influence in the country [Bosnia].”
38 Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 39-41; citing Steve Coll and Steve LeVine, “Global Network Provides Money, Haven,” Washington Post, August 3, 1993. Cf. Schindler, Unholy Terror, 121-22.
39 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149-50; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 45, 73-75.
40 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149.
41 Lawrence Wright: “Zawahiri decided to look for money in the world center of venture capitalism-Silicon Valley. He had been to America once before, in 1989, when he paid a recruiting visit to the mujahideen's Services Bureau branch office in Brooklyn. According to the F.B.I., he returned in the spring of 1993, this time to Santa Clara, California, where he was greeted by Ali Mohamed, the double agent.” For more about Ali Mohamed, and specifically how the FBI once told the RCMP not to detain him (this freeing Mohamed to plan the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya), see Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, 147-60.
42 Ottawa Citizen, December 15, 2001.
43 Sir Alfred Sherman, Speech at International Conference, America’s Intervention in the Balkans, February 28-March 2, 1997. html
44 Cf. Schindler, Unholy Terror, 74: Izetbegovic “decided to scrap the initiative, with the apparent encouragement of Warren Zimmermann [sic].” (Cf. 109-10). Zimmerman has denied that he so persuaded Izetbegovic, writing in a letter to the New York Times “that he had urged Izetbegovic to ‘stick by his commitments,’” (Steven L. Burg and Paul Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 114).
45 Washington Times, May 4, 1999. Frank Viviano, “Drugs Paying for Conflict in Europe,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 1994: “Narcotics smuggling has become a prime source of financing for civil wars already under way -- or rapidly brewing -- in southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, according to a report issued here this week. “The report, by the Paris-based Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues, or Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs, identifies belligerents in the former Yugoslav republics and Turkey as key players in the region's accelerating drugs-for-arms traffic. “Albanian nationalists in ethnically tense Macedonia and the Serbian province of Kosovo have built a vast heroin network, leading from the opium fields of Pakistan to black-market arms dealers in Switzerland, which transports up to $2 billion worth of the drug annually into the heart of Europe, the report says. More than 500 Kosovo or Macedonian Albanians are in prison in Switzerland for drug- or arms-trafficking offenses, and more than 1,000 others are under indictment.”
46 Michael Levine, New American, May 24, 1999; quoted in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 41.
47 Ralf Mutschke, testimony to Committee on the Judiciary, December 13, 2000.
48 Sunday Times (London), March 12, 2000: “Agim Ceku, the KLA commander in the latter stages of the conflict, had established American contacts through his work in the Croatian army, which had been modernised with the help of Military Professional Resources Inc, an American company specialising in military training and procurement. This company's personnel were in Kosovo, along with others from a similar company, Dyncorps [sic], that helped in the American-backed programme for the Bosnian army.”
49 David Hackworth, “Wanted: Guns for Hire,” Hackworth.com, July 9, 2001. Cf. James R. Davis, Fortune’s Warriors: Private Armies and the New World Order, 112; P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors, 219.
50 Wiebes, Intelligence and the war in Bosnia 1992 – 1995, 66; Observer, November 5, 1995. J.M. Berger reports from declassified documents that MPRI’s contract with Bosnia was arranged via a private company headed by neocon Richard Perle: “Controversial neocon philosopher Richard Perle led an obscure nongovernmental organization tasked with hiring a private company to run the U.S. State Department's "Train and Equip" program in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1996.
Perle's group, the "Acquisition Support Institute," hired Military Professional Resources Inc., essentially a professional mercenary company nearly as controversial as Perle himself. It's not at all clear what or whom is responsible for the Institute, or why a "non-governmental, non-profit organization" would be responsible for selecting the recipient of a massive State Department contract on one of the most sensitive issues of the day.
Equipped with a collection of retired military officers, MPRI set itself up as a virtual extension of the U.S. government in both Croatia and Bosnia, as documented in an extensive set of Freedom of Information Act documents I will be publishing over the next several weeks.
MPRI operatives were given the run of the country -- receiving payments and arms from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Muslim countries, which underwrote operations to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
In many cases, these payments were brokered directly by the State Department. In some instances, funds and arms were routed into Bosnia without State's explicit approval but often with its knowledge, as documented in the newly declassified records. Unauthorized assistance appears to have come from Pakistan, UAE and Turkey, among others.” (Richard Perle, MPRI and Bosnian Arms Shipments,” Intelwire, February 7, 2007).
51 Sir Alfred Sherman, “The Empire for the New Millenium?” The Centre for Peace in Balkans, May 22, 2000.
52 Cf. the cynical comments of the Swiss analytical group Zeit-Fragen: (Current Concerns, “Where’s the 8th Corridor?” September/October 2001): “By creating a trouble spot in Kosovo the USA is able to control Albania and with it the planned AMBO pipeline…. The USA is showing a conspicuous interest in controlling these strategic transport corridor links in the Balkans. They prohibited a project scheduled to be constructed through Serbia, and they offered Rumania 100 million dollars to move the route of the planned SEEL pipeline (South Eastern European Line) further north, to Hungary. The Italian firm ENI had planned this pipeline project using existing pipeline infrastructure in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. The USA bombarded the Yugoslavian section of this infrastructure with remarkable doggedness.”
53 Michael Levine, New American, May 24, 1999; quoted in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 41.
54 For details, see Scott, American War Machine, 84, 123, 151, etc.; Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 167.
55 Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, January/February 2000. Clinton at the same time mounted a vigorous campaign against Colombian heroin, increasing the demand for Afghan heroin. As Klebnikov noted, “some White House officials fear Kosovar heroin could replace the Colombian supply. ‘Even if we were to eliminate all the heroin production in Colombia, by no means do we think there would be no more heroin coming into the United States,’ says Bob Agresti of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. ‘Look at the numbers. Colombia accounts for only six percent of the world's heroin. Southwest Asia produces 75 percent.’"
56 Patrick Graham, “Drug Wars: Kosovo’s New Battle,” National Post, April 13, 2000.
57 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 324. Cf. Cristopher Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate (New York: Praeger, 2007).
58 Scott, Road to 9/11, 152-53; citing Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda, 117; Boston Globe, February 3, 1995, “Figure Cited in Terrorism Case Said to Enter U.S. with CIA Help.”
59 Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 67; cf. Williams, Al Qaeda, 117.
60 Scott, Road to 9/11, 154-56, 160. Cf. Robert L. Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheikh,” Village Voice, March 30, 1993: “As Jack Blum, investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, put it: "One of the big problems here is that many suspects in the World Trade Center bombing were associated with the Mujahadeen. And there are components of our government that are absolutely disinterested in following that path because it leads back to people we supported in the Afghan war.”
61 Scott, Road to 9/11, 156-57; citing J.M. Berger, Ali Mohamed: An Intelwire Sourcebook, 235-36.
62 Estanislao Oziewicz and Tu Thanh Ha, “Canada freed top al-Qaeda operative,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), November 22, 2001. A Lexis-Nexis search for “Ali Mohamed” + Vancouver yields no relevant entries from the U.S. press.
63 Patrick Fitzgerald, Testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Twelfth Public Hearing, June 16, 2004.
64 Peter Lance, Triple Cross, 274-77.
65 United States District Court, Southern District of New York, “United States of America v. Ali Mohamed,” S (7) 98 Cr. 1023, October 20, 2000, link, 17; in J.M. Berger, Ali Mohamed, 294.
66 United States District Court, Southern District of New York, “United States of America v. Ali Mohamed,” S(7) 98 Cr. 1023, 27; in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 304.
67 FBI agent Jack Cloonan, summarizing a post-9/11 interview with Ali Mohamed, in William F. Jasper, “Unleashing a Terrorist,” New American, November 26, 2007. Cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 382.
68 Paul Joseph Watson, “U.S. Attacks Iran Via CIA-Funded Jundullah Terror Group,” NOW Observer, October 20, 2009.
Peter Dale Scott
http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3578
Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon increased, and among the factors contributing to the increase were America’s interventions in new areas: the Balkans in the 1990s, and Libya today.1 Hidden from public view in both cases was the extent to which al-Qaeda was a covert U.S. ally in both interventions, rather than its foe.
U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then Libya were presented by the compliant U.S. and allied mainstream media as humanitarian. Indeed, some Washington interventionists may have sincerely believed this. But deeper motivations – from oil to geostrategic priorities – were also at work in both instances.
In virtually all the wars since 1989, America and Islamist factions have been battling to determine who will control the heartlands of Eurasia in the post-Soviet era. In some countries – Somalia in 1993, Afghanistan in 2001 – the conflict has been straightforward, with each side using the other’s excesses as an excuse for intervention.
But there have been other interventions in which Americans have used al-Qaeda as a resource to increase their influence, for example Azerbaijan in 1993. There a pro-Moscow president was ousted after large numbers of Arab and other foreign mujahedin veterans were secretly imported from Afghanistan, on an airline hastily organized by three former veterans of the CIA’s airline Air America. (The three, all once detailed from the Pentagon to the CIA, were Richard Secord, Harry Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn.)2 This was an ad hoc marriage of convenience: the mujahedin got to defend Muslims against Russian influence in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, while the Americans got a new president who opened up the oilfields of Baku to western oil companies.
The pattern of U.S. collaboration with Muslim fundamentalists against more secular enemies is not new. It dates back to at least 1953, when the CIA recruited right-wing mullahs to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran, and also began to cooperate with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.3 But in Libya in 2011 we see a more complex marriage of convenience between US and al-Qaeda elements: one which repeats a pattern seen in Bosnia in 1992-95, and Kosovo in 1997-98. In those countries America responded to a local conflict in the name of a humanitarian intervention to restrain the side committing atrocities. But in all three cases both sides committed atrocities, and American intervention in fact favored the side allied with al-Qaeda.
The cause of intervention was fostered in all three cases by blatant manipulation and falsification of the facts. What a historian has noted of the Bosnian conflict was true also of Kosovo and is being echoed today in Libya: though attacks were “perpetrated by Serbs and Muslims alike,” the pattern in western media was “that killings of Muslims were newsworthy, while the deaths of non-Muslims were not.”4 Reports of mass rapes in the thousands proved to be wildly exaggerated: a French journalist “uncovered only four women willing to back up the story.”5 Meanwhile in 1994 the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) traveled to Bosnia and fervently endorsed the case for intervention in Bosnia; in 2011 February BHL traveled to Benghazi and reprised his interventionist role for Libya.6
In all of the countries mentioned above, furthermore, there are signs that some American and/or western intelligence groups were collaborating with al-Qaeda elements from the outset of conflict, before the atrocities cited as a reason for intervention.. This suggests that there were deeper reasons for America’s interventions including the desire of western oil companies to exploit the petroleum reserves of Libya (as in Iraq) without having to deal with a troublesome and powerful strong man, or their desire to create a strategic oil pipeline across the Balkans (in Kosovo).7
That the U.S. would support al-Qaeda in terrorist atrocities runs wholly counter to impressions created by the U.S. media. Yet this on-going unholy alliance resurrects and builds on the alliance underlying Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1978-79 strategy of provocation in Afghanistan, at a time when he was President Carter’s National Security Adviser.
In those years Brzezinski did not hesitate to play the terrorist card against the Soviet Union: he reinforced the efforts of the SAVAK (the Shah of Iran’s intelligence service) to work with the Islamist antecedents of al-Qaeda to destabilize Afghanistan, in a way which soon led to a Soviet invasion of that country.8 At the time, as he later boasted, Brzezinski told Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”9
CIA Director William Casey continued this strategy of using terrorists against the USSR in Afghanistan. At first the CIA channeled aid through the Pakistani ISI (Interservices Intelligence Service) to their client Afghan extremists like Gulbeddin Hekmatyar (today one of America’s enemies in Afghanistan). But in 1986, “Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin.”10 CIA aid now reached their support Office of Services in Peshawar, headed by a Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, and by Osama bin Laden. The al-Kifah Center, a U.S. recruitment office for their so-called Arab-Afghan foreign legion (the future al Qaeda), was set up in the al-Farook mosque in Brooklyn.11
It is important to recall Brzezinski’s and Casey’s use of terrorists today. For in Libya, as earlier in Kosovo and Bosnia, there are alarming signs that America has continued to underwrite Islamist terrorism as a means to dismantle socialist or quasi-socialist nations not previously in its orbit: first the USSR, then Yugoslavia, today Libya. As I have written elsewhere, Gaddafi was using the wealth of Libya, the only Mediterranean nation still armed by Russia and independent of the NATO orbit, to impose more and more difficult terms for western oil companies, and to make the whole of Africa more independent of Europe and America.12
Support for the mujahedin included collusion in law-breaking, at a heavy cost. In the second part of this essay, I will show how government protection of key figures in the Brooklyn al-Kifah Center left some of them free, even after they were known to have committed crimes, to engage in further terrorist acts in the United States -- such as the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Libya
The NATO intervention in Libya has been presented as a humanitarian campaign. But it is not: both factions have been committing atrocities. Thanks in part to the efforts of the well-connected p.r. firm the Harbour Group, working on behalf of the Benghazi opposition’s National Transitional Council [NTC], Americans have heard many more press accounts of atrocities by pro-Gaddafi forces in Libya than by the Benghazi opposition.13 But in fact, as the London Daily Telegraph reported,
Under rebel control, Benghazi residents are terrorized, many "too frightened to drive through the dark streets at night, fearing a shakedown or worse at the proliferating checkpoints."
Moreover, about 1.5 million black African migrant workers feel trapped under suspicion of supporting the wrong side. Numbers of them have been attacked, some hunted down, dragged from apartments, beaten and killed. So-called "revolutionaries" and "freedom fighters" are, in fact, rampaging gunmen committing atrocities airbrushed from mainstream reports, unwilling to reveal the new Libya if Gaddafi is deposed.14
Thomas Mountain concurs that “Since the rebellion in Benghazi broke out several hundred Sudanese, Somali, Ethiopian and Eritrean guest workers have been robbed and murdered by racist rebel militias, a fact well hidden by the international media.”15 Such reports have continued. Recently, Human Rights Watch accused the rebels of killing Gaddafi supporters who were just civilians and looting, burning and ransacking pro-Gaddafi supporters' houses and areas.16
Americans and Europeans are still less likely to learn from their media that among the groups in the Benghazi transitional coalition, certainly the most battle-seasoned, are veterans of the Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG). The importance of the LIFG contingent in the TNC has been downplayed in a recent issue of the International Business Times:
The LIFG is a radical Islamic group which has been fighting small scale guerrilla warfare against Gaddafi for almost a decade. Much of the LIFG leadership came from soldiers who fought against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, as part of the Mujahedeen. Since the beginning of the uprising reports said that some of the LIFG has joined the TNC rebel movement on the ground, and many accused the fighters of having links to Al-Qaeda, which the LIFG has since denied.
Previously however, the LIFG had stated that its ultimate goal is to install an Islamic state inside Libya, which given the fact that many of its fighters are now on the side of the TNC is quite worrying. However as the LIFG is reported to have a fighting force of no more than a few thousand men, it is believed it will not be able to cause much trouble within the opposition.17
It remains to be seen whether a victorious TNC would be able to contain the Islamist aspirations of the ruthless jihadist veterans in their ranks.
There are those who fear that, from their years of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, the battle-hardened LIFG, although probably not dominant in the Benghazi coalition today, will come to enjoy more influence if Benghazi ever gets to distribute the spoils of victory. In February 2004, then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that "one of the most immediate threats [to U.S. security in Iraq] is from smaller international Sunni extremist groups that have benefited from al-Qaida links. They include ... the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group."18 In 2007 a West Point study reported on “the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group's (LIFG) increasingly cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda, which culminated in the LIFG officially joining al-Qaeda on November 3, 2007."19 It is possible that the West Point study exaggerated the LIFG-Al Qaeda connection. What matters is that eBritain and the US were well aware of the West Point assessment, yet their special forces nevertheless secretly backed the Benghazi TNC, even before the launch of NATO air support:
The bombing of the country came as it was revealed that hundreds of British special forces troops have been deployed deep inside Libya targeting Colonel Gaddafi’s forces – and more are on standby….
In total it is understood that just under 250 UK special forces soldiers and their support have been in Libya since before the launch of air strikes to enforce the no-fly zone against Gaddafi’s forces.20
There are also reports that U.S. Special Forces were also sent into Libya on February 23 and 24, 2011, almost a month before the commencement of NATO bombing.21
UK support for the fundamentalist LIFG was in fact at least a decade old:
Fierce clashes between [Qadhafi's] security forces and Islamist guerrillas erupted in Benghazi in September 1995, leaving dozens killed on both sides. After weeks of intense fighting, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) formally declared its existence in a communiqué calling Qadhafi's government "an apostate regime that has blasphemed against the faith of God Almighty" and declaring its overthrow to be "the foremost duty after faith in God." This and future LIFG communiqués were issued by Libyan Afghans who had been granted political asylum in Britain.... The involvement of the British government in the LIFG campaign against Qadhafi remains the subject of immense controversy. LIFG's next big operation, a failed attempt to assassinate Qadhafi in February 1996 that killed several of his bodyguards, was later said to have been financed by British intelligence to the tune of $160,000, according to ex-MI5 officer David Shayler.22
David Shayler’s detailed account has been challenged, but many other sources reveal that UK support for Libyan jihadists long antedates the present conflict.23
Even more ominous for the future than the nationalistic LIFG may be the fighters from the more internationalist Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) who have seized the opportunity presented by the war to enter the conflict, and equip themselves from Gaddafi’s looted armories.24 AQIM presents a special concern because of recent reports that, like other al Qaeda associates from Afghanistan to Kosovo, it is increasingly financed by payoffs from regional drug traffickers.25
In short, the NATO campaign in Libya is in support of a coalition in which the future status of present and former al-Qaeda allies is likely to be strengthened.26 And western forces have been secretly supporting them from the outset.
The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Bosnia
Similarly, Clinton’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were presented as humanitarian. But both sides had committed atrocities in those conflicts; Like the western media, Washington downplayed the Muslim atrocities because of its other interests.
Most Americans are aware that Clinton dispatched U.S. forces to Bosnia to enforce the Dayton peace accords after a well-publicized Serbian atrocity: the massacre of thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica. Thanks to a vigorous campaign by the p.r. firm Ruder Finn, Americans heard a great deal about the Srebrenica massacre, but far less about the beheadings and other atrocities by Muslims that preceded and helped account for it.
A major reason for the Serb attack on Srebrenica was to deal with the armed attacks mounted from that base on nearby villages: “intelligence sources said it was that harassment which precipitated the Serb attack on the 1,500 Muslim defenders inside the enclave.”27 General Philippe Morillon, commander of the UN troops in Bosnia from 1992 to 1993, testified to the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) that Muslim forces based in Srebrenica had “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region”28 According to Prof. John Schindler,
Between May and December 1992, Muslim forces repeatedly attacked Serb villages around Srebrenica, killing and torturing civilians; some were mutilated and burned alive. Even pro-Sarajevo accounts concede that Muslim forces in Srebrenica…murdered over 1,300 Serbs…and had “ethnically cleansed a vast area.29
Former U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith later admitted in an interview that the U.S. administration was aware of “small numbers of atrocities” being committed by the foreign mujahedin in Bosnia, but dismissed the atrocities as “in the scheme of things not a big issue.”30
Other sources reveal that Washington gave a tacit green light to Croatia’s arming and augmentation of the Muslim presence in Srebrenica.31 Soon C-130 Hercules planes. some but not all of them Iranian, were dropping arms to the Muslims, in violation of the international arms embargo which the U.S. officially respected. More Arab-Afghan mujahedin arrived as well. Many of the airdrops and some of the mujahedin were at Tuzla, 70 kilometers from Srebrenica.32
According to The Spectator (London), the Pentagon was using other countries such as Turkey and Iran in this flow of arms and warriors:
From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of Mujahideen and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. …. As part of the Dutch government’s inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University compiled a report entitled ‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia’, published in April 2002. In it he details the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamic groups from the Middle East, and their efforts to assist Bosnia’s Muslims. By 1993, there was a vast amount of weapons-smuggling through Croatia to the Muslims, organised by ‘clandestine agencies’ of the USA, Turkey and Iran, in association with a range of Islamic groups that included Afghan Mujahideen and the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. Arms bought by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia were airlifted from the Middle East to Bosnia — airlifts with which, Wiebes points out, the USA was ‘very closely involved’.33
Cees Wiebes’ detailed account, based on years of research, documents both the case for American responsibility and the vigorous American denials of it:
At 17.45 on 10 February 1995, the Norwegian Captain Ivan Moldestad, a Norwegian helicopter detachment (NorAir) pilot, stood in the doorway of his temporary accommodation just outside Tuzla. It was dark, and suddenly he heard the sound of the propellers of an approaching transport aircraft; it was unmistakably a four engine Hercules C-130. Moldestad noticed that the Hercules was being escorted by two jet fighters, but could not tell their precise type in the darkness. There were other sightings of this secretive night-time flight to Tuzla Air Base (TAB). A sentry who was on guard duty outside the Norwegian medical UN unit in Tuzla also heard and saw the lights of the Hercules and the accompanying jet fighters. Other UN observers, making use of night vision equipment, also saw the cargo aircraft and the fighter planes concerned. The reports were immediately forwarded to the NATO Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) in Vicenza and the UNPF Deny Flight Cell in Naples. When Moldestad phoned Vicenza, he was told that there was nothing in the air that night, and that he must be mistaken. When Moldestad persisted, the connection was broken.
The secretive C-130 cargo aircraft flights and night-time arms drops on Tuzla caused great agitation within UNPROFOR and the international community in February and March 1995. When asked, a British general responded with great certainty to the question of the origin of the secret supplies via TAB: ‘They were American arms deliveries. No doubt about that. And American private companies were involved in these deliveries.’ This was no surprising answer, because this general had access to intelligence gathered by a unit of the British Special Air Services (SAS) in Tuzla. The aircraft had come within range of this unit’s special night vision equipment, and the British saw them land. It was a confirmation that a clandestine American operation had taken place in which arms, ammunition and military communication equipment were supplied to the ABiH. These night-time operations led to much consternation within the UN and NATO, and were the subject of countless speculations.34
Wiebes reports the possibility that the C-130s, some of which were said to have taken off from a US Air Force base in Germany, were actually controlled by Turkish authorities.35 But U.S. involvement was detected in the elaborate cover-up, from the fact that US AWACS aircraft, which should have provided a record of the secret flights, were either withdrawn from duty at the relevant times, or manned with US crews.36
A summary of Wiebes’ exhaustive report was published in the Guardian:
The Dutch report reveals how the Pentagon formed a secret alliance with Islamist groups in an Iran-Contra-style operation.
US, Turkish and Iranian intelligence groups worked with the Islamists in what the Dutch report calls the "Croatian pipeline". Arms bought by Iran and Turkey and financed by Saudi Arabia were flown into Croatia initially by the official Iranian airline, Iran Air, and later in a fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft.
The report says that mojahedin fighters were also flown in, and that the US was "very closely involved" in the operation which was in flagrant breach of the embargo. British secret services obtained documents proving that Iran also arranged deliveries of arms directly to Bosnia, it says.
The operation was promoted by the Pentagon, rather than the CIA, which was cautious about using Islamist groups as a conduit for arms, and about breaching the embargo. When the CIA tried to place its own people on the ground in Bosnia, the agents were threatened by the mojahedin fighters and the Iranians who were training them.
The UN relied on American intelligence to monitor the embargo, a dependency which allowed Washington to manipulate it at will.37
Meanwhile the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which in the 1980s had supported the “Arab-Afghans” fighting in Afghanistan, turned its attentions to Bosnia.
Al-Kifah’s English-language newsletter Al-Hussam (The Sword) also began publishing regular updates on jihad action in Bosnia….Under the control of the minions of Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman, the newsletter aggressively incited sympathetic Muslims to join the jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan themselves….The Al-Kifah Bosnian branch office in Zagreb, Croatia, housed in a modern, two-story building, was evidently in close communication with the organizational headquarters in New York. The deputy director of the Zagreb office, Hassan Hakim, admitted to receiving all orders and funding directly from the main United States office of Al-Kifah on Atlantic Avenue controlled by Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman.38
One of the trainers at al-Kifah, Rodney Hampton-El, assisted in this support program, recruiting warriors from U.S. Army bases like Fort Belvoir, and also training them to be fighters in New Jersey.39 In 1995 Hampton-El was tried and convicted for his role (along with al-Kifah leader Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman) in the plot to blow up New York landmarks. At the trial Hampton-El testified how he was personally given thousands of dollars for this project by Saudi Crown Prince Faisal in the Washington Saudi Embassy.40
About this time, Ayman al-Zawahiri, today the leader of al Qaeda, came to America to raise funds in Silicon Valley, where he was hosted by Ali Mohamed, a U.S. double agent and veteran of U.S. Army Special Forces who had been the top trainer at the Al-Kifah mosque.41 Almost certainly al-Zawahiri’s fund-raising was in support of the mujahedin in Bosnia, reportedly his chief concern at the time. (“The Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal reported that, in 1993, Mr. bin Laden had appointed Sheik Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda's second-in-command, to direct his operations in the Balkans.”)42
Wiebes’ detailed report and the news stories based on it corroborated earlier charges made in 1997 by Sir Alfred Sherman, top adviser to Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of the influential rightwing nationalist Centre for Policy Studies, that “The U.S. encouraged and facilitated the dispatch of arms to the Moslems via Iran and Eastern Europe -- a fact which was denied in Washington at the time in face of overwhelming evidence.”43 This was part of his case that
The war in Bosnia was America's war in every sense of the word. The US administration helped start it, kept it going, and prevented its early end. Indeed all the indications are that it intends to continue the war in the near future, as soon as its Moslem proteges are fully armed and trained.
Specifically, Sherman charged that in 1992 Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger had instructed Warren Zimmerman, U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade, to persuade Bosnian President Izetbegovic to renege on his agreement to preserve Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian unity, and instead accept American aid for an independent Bosnian state.44
The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Kosovo
This raises the disturbing question: were some Americans willing to ignore the atrocities of the al-Kifah mujahideen in Bosnia in exchange for mujahideen assistance in NATO’s successive wars dismantling Yugoslavia, the last surviving socialist republic in Europe? One thing is clear: Sir Alfred Sherman’s prediction in 1997 that America “intends to continue the war in the near future” soon proved accurate, when in 1999 American support for al-Qaeda’s allies in Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), led to a controversial NATO bombing campaign.
As was widely reported at the time, the KLA was supported both by the networks of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, and also by the traffic in Afghan heroin:
Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden -- who is wanted in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 persons, including 12 Americans.45
According to former DEA agent Michael Levine, the decision of Clinton to back the KLA dismayed his DEA contacts who knew it to be a major drug-trafficking organization.46 As Ralf Mutschke of Interpol testified to Congress,
In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and individuals, among them allegedly Usama bin Laden. Another link to bin Laden is the fact that the brother of a leader in an Egyptian Djihad organization and also a military commander of Usama bin Laden, was leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict. [This is almost certainly Zaiman or Mohammed al-Zawahiri, one of the brothers of Ayman al-Zawahiri.] In 1998, the KLA was described as a key player in the drugs for arms business in 1998, "helping to transport 2 billion USD worth of drugs annually into Western Europe". The KLA and other Albanian groups seem to utilize a sophisticated network of accounts and companies to process funds. In 1998, Germany froze two bank accounts belonging to the "United Kosova" organization after it had been discovered that several hundred thousand dollars had been deposited into those accounts by a convicted Kosovar Albanian drug trafficker.47
According to the London Sunday Times, the KLA’s background did not deter the US from training and strengthening it:
American intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before Nato's bombing of Yugoslavia. The disclosure angered some European diplomats, who said this had undermined moves for a political solution to the conflict between Serbs and Albanians. Central Intelligence Agency officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties with the KLA and giving American military training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police.
When the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which co-ordinated the monitoring, left Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a year ago, many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the KLA, ensuring that guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with Nato and Washington. Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander.48
According to former U.S. Army Captain David Hackworth, later Newsweek's contributing editor for defense, former US military officers in the private U.S. military contractor MPRI (Military Professional Resources Incorporated) not only trained KLA personnel, but even fought alongside them.49 This reinforced earlier reports that MPRI personnel had also been involved in training Croatians at the time of the illicit Croatian arms pipeline to Bosnia.50
After Kosovo, Sherman repeated his warnings against “expanding American hegemony”,
exercised through NATO with varying degrees of partnership and subordination of other players. …. The process commenced with the deliberate break-up of Yugoslavia, led by Germany and acquiesced in by the other European Union members and the United States (1991). It progressed with sanctions against Serbia for attempting to help the western Serbs (1992). In Bosnia America's early involvement sparked off civil war (the Zimmerman Visit to Izetbegovic, in the aftermath of the Lisbon Agreement), and it eventually matured into the bombing campaign of 1999 and the occupation of Kosovo.51
Others suspected that America’s involvement was motivated by its desire to see a new Trans-Balkan pipeline and a new U.S. military base in the Balkans to defend it. Although such critics were initially ridiculed, both predictions soon proved true. The U.S.-registered AMBO corporation, headed by former BP executive Ted Ferguson, began construction of a pipeline from Albania to Macedonia in 2007.52 And nearby is a semi-permanent U.S. Army base, Camp Bondsteel, that can hold up to 7000 soldiers.
In 2007, President George W. Bush created a new United States Africa Command, U.S. AFRICOM. But its HQ at present is in Stuttgart, Germany. This has led to speculation on the Internet that America has its eyes on Libya’s international airport, which the U.S. Air Force had operated as Wheelus Air Force Base until its ouster in 1970.
II. From the First WTC Bombing to 9/11: The Domestic U.S. Fallout from Collusion with Terrorists
The fact that Americans have had repeated recourse to al-Qaeda Islamists as assets in their expansive projects does not constitute proof that there is any long-term systematic strategy to do so, still less that there is a secret alliance.
I believe rather that America is suffering from a malignant condition of military power run amok – power which, like a malignant cancer, tends to reproduce itself at times in ways counterproductive to larger goals. Those who are appointed to manage this vast power become inured to using any available assets, in order to sustain a sociodynamic of global intervention that they are, ironically, powerless to challenge or turn around. The few dissenters who try to do so are predictably sidelined or even ejected from the heights of power, as not being “on the team.”
Those in Washington who decided to assist terrorists and drug traffickers seem not to have considered such “externalities” as the domestic consequences from official dealings with criminal terrorist networks that are global in scope. Yet the consequences were and are real, for the Islamist terrorists that were protected by the US in their subversion of order in Kosovo and other countries were soon being protected inside the US as well. As former DEA agent Michael Levine reported of the KLA-linked drug networks, “These guys have a network that's active on the streets of this country.... They're the worst elements of society that you can imagine, and now, according to my sources in drug enforcement, they're politically protected.”53
In other words, Kosovars were now enjoying the de facto protection in their U.S. drug trafficking that had earlier been enjoyed by the CIA’s Chinese, Cuban, Italian, Thai, and other ethnic assets dating from the 1940s.54
Mother Jones reported in 2000, after the NATO bombing in support of the KLA that Afghan heroin, much of it distributed by Kosovar Albanians, now accounted for almost 20 percent of the heroin seized in America -- nearly double the percentage taken four years earlier.55 Meanwhile in Europe, it was estimated that “Kosovo Albanians control 40% of Europe's heroin.”56 In addition there is a near universal consensus that the outcome of the war in Bosnia left al-Qaeda’s jihadists much more strongly entrenched in the Balkans than they had been earlier. In the words of Professor John Schindler, Bosnia, “the most pro-Western society in the umma [Muslim world],” was “converted into a Jihadistan through domestic deceit, violent conflict, and misguided international intervention.”57
It is too soon to predict with confidence what will be the domestic fallout or “blowback” from NATO’s empowerment of Islamists by creating chaos in Libya. But the domestic consequences of similar U.S. interventions in the past are indisputable, and have contributed to major acts of terrorism in this country.
American protection for the Al-Kifah mujahedin support base in Brooklyn led to interference in domestic U.S. law enforcement. This enabled mujahedin recruits at al-Kifah to plot and/or engage in a number of domestic and foreign terrorist attacks on America. These attacks include the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the so-called “New York landmarks plot” of 1995, and the Embassy attacks of 1998 in Kenya and Tanzania. Involved in all of these events were terrorists who should have been rounded up earlier because of crimes already committed, but were allowed to stay free.
Central to all of these attacks was the role of Ali Mohamed, the former U.S. Special Forces double agent at al-Kifah, and his trainees. Ali Mohamed, despite being on a State Department Watch List, had come to America around 1984, on what an FBI consultant has called “a visa program controlled by the CIA.”58 So did the “blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman, the leader of al-Kifah; Rahman was issued two visas, one of them “by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan.”59
Ali Mohamed trained al-Kifah recruits in guerrilla tactics near Brooklyn. This operation was considered so sensitive that the New York police and the FBI later protected two of the recruits from arrest, when they murdered the Jewish extremist Meir Kahane. Instead, the New York Police called the third assassin (El Sayyid Nosair) a “lone deranged gunman,” and released the other two (Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh) from detention. This enabled Abouhalima and Salameh, along with another Ali Mohamed trainee (Nidal Ayyad) to take part three years later in the first (1993) bombing of the World Trade Center.60
Prosecutors protected Ali Mohamed again in the 1994-95 “Landmarks” trial, when Omar Abdul Rahman and some of Mohamed’s trainees were convicted of conspiring to blow up New York buildings. In that case the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, named Ali Mohamed as an unindicted co-conspirator, yet allowed him to remain free. When the defense issued a subpoena for Mohamed to appear in court, the prosecutor intervened to avoid Mohamed’s having to testify.61
Ali Mohamed was well aware of his protected status, and used it in early 1993 to obtain his release when detained by the RCMP at Vancouver Airport. As this episode has so ignored in the US press, I will quote the account of it in Canada’s premier newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail:
The RCMP had their hands on one of the key insiders of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, but he was released after he had Mounties call his handler at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Ali Mohamed, a Californian of Egyptian origin who is believed to be the highest ranking al-Qaeda member to have landed in Canada, was working with U.S. counterterrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993. Mr. Mohamed now is in a U.S. prison.
"The people of the RCMP told me by midnight that I can go now," Mr. Mohamed — who confessed in the United States to being a close bin Laden associate — wrote at the time in an affidavit shown Wednesday to The Globe and Mail.
The incident happened after customs agents at Vancouver International Airport detained Essam Marzouk, an Egyptian who had arrived from Damascus via Frankfurt, after they found him carrying two forged Saudi passports.
Mr. Mohamed, who was waiting to pick him up at the airport, inquired of the police about his friend's detention. That made the RCMP curious about Mr. Mohamed, but he dispelled their suspicions by telling them he was a collaborator with the FBI.62
The Globe and Mail story makes it clear that in 1993 Mohamed already had a handler at the FBI, to whom the RCMP deferred. Patrick Fitzgerald, in his statement to the 9/11 Commission, gave a quite different story: that Mohamed, after returning from Nairobi in 1994, applied for a job “as an FBI translator.”63 The difference is vital: because the FBI told the RCMP to release Mohamed, he was then able to travel to Nairobi and plan for bombing the U.S. Embassy there.
According to author Peter Lance, by 2007 Fitzgerald had enough evidence to arrest and indict Mohamed, but did not. Instead he interviewed Mohamed in California, along with an FBI agent, Jack Cloonan. After the interview Fitzgerald chose not to arrest Mohamed, but instead to tap his phone and bug his computer. Lance asks a very relevant question: did Fitzgerald fear that ”any indictment of al Qaeda’s chief spy would rip the lid off years of gross negligence by three of America’s top intelligence agencies”?64
One month after the Embassy bombings, Ali Mohamed was finally arrested, on September 10, 1998. Yet when Fitzgerald handed down thirteen indictments two months later, Mohamed’s name was not among them. Instead Fitzgerald again allowed him to avoid cross-examination in court by accepting a plea bargain, the terms of which are still partly unknown. Specifically we do not know the term of Mohamed’s sentence: that page of his court appearance transcript (p. 17) is filed under seal.65
As part of the plea bargain, Mohamed told the court that at the personal request of bin Laden, he did surveillance on the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, “took pictures, drew diagrams, and wrote a report” which he personally delivered to bin Laden in the Sudan.66 Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor who negotiated the plea bargain, testified at length about Mohamed to the 9/11 Commission, who concluded in their Report (p. 68) that Mohamed “led” the embassy bombing operation. Ironically, the Embassy bombing is the official reason today why Zawahiri (like bin Laden before him) is wanted by the FBI, with a $25 million bounty on his head.
But the American public has been denied the right to learn about Ali Mohamed’s involvement in other terrorist events. Particularly relevant would be his involvement in 9/11. As his FBI handler Cloonan later reported, Mohamed explained to him that he personally trained the accused hijackers in how to seize planes:
He [had] conducted training for al Qaeda on how to hijack a plane. He ran practical exercises in Pakistan and he said, “This is how you get a box cutter on board. You take the knife, you remove the blade and you wrap it in [word blacked out] and put it in your carry-on luggage.” They’d read the FAA regulations. They knew four inches wouldn’t go through. “This is how you position yourself,” he said. “I taught people how to sit in first class. You sit here and some sit here.” He wrote the whole thing out.67
Conclusion
At present America is in the midst of an unprecedented budget crisis, brought on in large part by its multiple wars. Nevertheless it is also on the point of several further interventions: in Yemen, Somalia, possibly Syria or Iran (where the CIA is said to be in contact with the drug-trafficking al-Qaeda offshoot Jundallah),68 and most assuredly in Libya.
Only the American public can stop them. But in order for the people to rise up and cry Stop! there must first be a better understanding of the dark alliances underlying America’s alleged humanitarian interventions.
This awareness may increase when Americans finally realize that there is domestic blowback from assisting terrorists as well. The long elaborate dance between Mohamed and his Justice Department overseers makes it clear that the handling of terrorists for corrupt purposes corrupts the handlers as well as the terrorists. Eventually both the handlers and the handled become in effect co-conspirators, with secrets about their collusion both parties need to conceal.
Until the public takes notice, that concealment of collusion will continue. And as long as it continues, we will continue to be denied the truth about what collusions underlay 9/11.
Worse, we are likely to see more terrorist attacks, at home as well as abroad, along with more illegal, costly, and unnecessary wars.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.
Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists," The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 31 No 1, August 1, 2011.
Articles on related subjects
• Tim Shorrock, Reading the Egyptian Revolution Through the Lens of US Policy in South Korea Circa 1980: Revelations in US Declassified Documents
• Peter Dale Scott, Rape in Libya: America’s recent major wars have all been accompanied by memorable falsehoods
• Peter Dale Scott, The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System
• Peter Dale Scott, Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?
• Herbert P. Bix, The Middle East Revolutions in Historical Perspective: Egypt, Occupied Palestine, and the United States
Notes
1 Cf. Telegraph (London), “Defence Cuts in Doubt over Libya, Says Military Adviser,“ April 7, 2011, “The Libyan crisis has raised doubts about the Coalition’s defence review and could force ministers to reverse cuts including the scrapping of Britain’s Harrier jump jets, a senior military adviser has said,” (link).
2 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 163-65.
3 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 44-45; citing Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 109-11; Saïd Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 60-61; Miles Copeland, The Game Player, 149-54. Cf. Ian Johnson, “Washington’s Secret History with the Muslim Brotherhood,” New York Review of Books, February 5, 2011.
4 John R. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad, 71, 81. According to Schindler, “CNN repeatedly showed images of ‘dead Muslims’ killed by Serbs that were actually Serbs murdered by Muslims” (92).
5 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 91.
6 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 179-80; Christian Science Monitor, March 28, 2011. In 1994 BHL presented Bosnian leader Izetbegovich to French President Mitterand; in 2011 BHL arranged for three Benghazi leaders to meet French President Sarkozy. Cf. “Libyan rebels will recognise Israel, Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Netanyahu,” Radio France Internationale, June 2, 2011, “Libya’s rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) is ready to recognise Israel, according to French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who says he has passed the message on to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” (link).
7 For Big Oil’s complaints with Gaddafi, see Peter Dale Scott, "The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System", Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011.
8 Scott, Road to 9/11, 77; citing Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 16), 16.
9 Scott, Road to 9/11, 72-75; quoting from "Les Révélations d'un Ancien Conseilleur de Carter: ‘Oui, la CIA est Entrée en Afghanistan avant les Russes...’" Le Nouvel Observateur [Paris], January 15-21, 1998: “B[rzezinski]: [On Jul 3, 1979] I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.… Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
10 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, 129. According to the Spanish author Robert Montoya, the idea originated in the elite Safari Club that had been created by French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches in 1976, bringing together other intelligence chiefs such as General Akhtar Abdur Rahman of ISI in Pakistan and Kamal Adham of Saudi Arabia (Roberto Montoya, El Mundo [Madrid], February 16, 2003).
11 Scott, Road to 9/11, 139-40; citing Steven Emerson, American Jihad, 131-32.
12 Peter Dale Scott, "The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System", Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011.
13 “PR firm helps Libyan rebels to campaign for support from US,” The Hill.com, April 12, 2011.
14 Rob Crilly, Daily Telegraph (London), March 23, 2011; quoted in Stephen Lendman, “Planned Regime Change in Libya,” SteveLendmanBlog, March 28, 2011. Cf. Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2011.
15 Morris Herman, “Rebel Militias Include the Human Traffickers of Benghazi,” Foreign Policy Journal, July 28, 2011, quoting Thomas C. Mountain.
16 Anissa Haddadi, “Does the Transitional Council Really Represent Libyan Democracy and Opposition to Gaddafi?” International Business Times, July 20, 2011.
17 Haddadi, “Does the Transitional Council Really Represent Libyan Democracy and Opposition to Gaddafi?” International Business Times, July 20, 2011.
18 Center for Defense Information, “In the Spotlight: The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),” January 18, 2005. That the LIFG is pursuing its own goals may explain the rebel seizure of anti-air force missiles from captured Gaddafi armories: these missiles, useless against Gaddafi (who no longer has an air force) are apparently being shipped out of Libya for sale or use elsewhere (New York Times, July 15, 2011).
19 December 2007 West Point Study, quoted in Webster Tarpley, “The CIA’s Libya Rebels: The Same Terrorists who Killed US, NATO Troops in Iraq,” Tarpley.net, March 24, 2011.
20 Daily Mail (London), March 25, 2001, link; cited in Lendman; “Planned Regime Change in Libya.”
21 Akhtar Jamal, “US UK, French forces land in Libya,” Pakistan Observer, February 2011.
22 Gary Gambill, "The Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), Jamestown Foundation," Terrorism Monitor, May 5, 2005; citing Al-Hayat (London), 20 October 1995 [“communiqué”]; "The Shayler affair: The spooks, the Colonel and the jailed whistle-blower," The Observer (London), 9 August 1998; Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Ben Laden: La Verite interdite (Bin Ladin: The Forbidden Truth). Cf. also Annie Machon, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 And the Shayler Affair (Book Guild Publishing, 2005) [Shayler].
23 E.g. Washington Post, October 7, 2001: “Over the years, some dissidents suspected by foreign governments of involvement in terrorist acts have been protected by the British government for one reason or another from deportation or extradition.... In the past, terrorism experts say, Britain benefited significantly from its willingness to extend at least conditional hospitality to a wide range of Arab dissidents and opposition figures .... Mustafa Alani, a terrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, a London think tank, said [Anas] al-Liby was probably left in legal limbo by the British government, allowing him to be used or discarded as circumstances permitted.”
24 “Sahelian Concern Deepens over Libya, AQIM,” Sahel Blog, May 2, 2011. According to the Los Angeles Times, AQIM vowed on February 24, 2011 to “do whatever we can” to help the rebel cause. (Ken Dilanian, “US Finds no Firm Al Qaeda Presence in Libya Rebellion,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2011). Cf. “Libya rebels not anti-West, but Qaeda a worry-group,” Reuters, March 29, 2011; “The Evolving Threat of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Strategic Forum, National Defense University; CNN World, February 25, 2011.
25 Andre Lesage, “The Evolving Threat of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Strategic Forum, National Defense University; CNN World, February 25, 2011, 6. Cf. “Rogue planes flying drugs across Atlantic; Al-Qaeda Links;,” National Post, January 14, 2014; “Latin drug lords find allies in African Islamists,” Washington Times, November 17, 2009.
26 A story in the New York Times (“Exiled Islamists Watch Rebellion Unfold at Home,”
July 19, 2011) reports that KIFG members of the TNC “have renounced Al Qaeda.” But it supplies no independent evidence that their politics have changed.
27 Michael Evans, "Muslim soldiers 'failed to defend town from Serbs,'" Times (London), July 14, 1995.
28 Richard Palmer. “What Really Happened in Bosnia,” theTrumpet.com, July 12, 2011.
29 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 87; quoting from Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime, 79.
30 John Rosenthal, “The Other Crimes of Bosnia,” BigPeace.com, June 2, 2011; summarizing interview of Galbraith by J.M. Berger, “Exclusive: U.S. Policy on Bosnia.Arms Trafficking.”
31 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 182-83; “Exclusive: U.S. Policy on Bosnia Arms Trafficking”; Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992 1995 (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 166-69.
32 “Allies and Lies,” BBC OnLine, June 22, 2001; Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 183. Also present at Tuzla was an American who introduced himself as “Major Guy Sands,” and who claimed to have been a ten-year veteran of the Vietnam War. Cf. a Swedish report from Tuzla, of an American there who made no secret of his Special Forces background (Brendan O'Shea, Crisis at Bihac: Bosnia’s Bloody Battlefield [Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998], p. 159). For reports of foreign mujahedin in or near Tuzla, see Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 74, 155, 164.
33 Brendan O’Neill, “How We Trained al-Qa’eda,” Spectator (London), September 13, 2003.
34 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 177.
35 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 187, 196; citing Cameron Spence, All Necessary Measures, 99-104.
36 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 184, 197.
37 “US used Islamists to arm Bosnians,” Guardian, April 22, 2002. Contrast the very different claim by Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, 140: “The U.S. also blocked Iranian and al Qaeda influence in the country [Bosnia].”
38 Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 39-41; citing Steve Coll and Steve LeVine, “Global Network Provides Money, Haven,” Washington Post, August 3, 1993. Cf. Schindler, Unholy Terror, 121-22.
39 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149-50; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 45, 73-75.
40 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149.
41 Lawrence Wright: “Zawahiri decided to look for money in the world center of venture capitalism-Silicon Valley. He had been to America once before, in 1989, when he paid a recruiting visit to the mujahideen's Services Bureau branch office in Brooklyn. According to the F.B.I., he returned in the spring of 1993, this time to Santa Clara, California, where he was greeted by Ali Mohamed, the double agent.” For more about Ali Mohamed, and specifically how the FBI once told the RCMP not to detain him (this freeing Mohamed to plan the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya), see Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, 147-60.
42 Ottawa Citizen, December 15, 2001.
43 Sir Alfred Sherman, Speech at International Conference, America’s Intervention in the Balkans, February 28-March 2, 1997. html
44 Cf. Schindler, Unholy Terror, 74: Izetbegovic “decided to scrap the initiative, with the apparent encouragement of Warren Zimmermann [sic].” (Cf. 109-10). Zimmerman has denied that he so persuaded Izetbegovic, writing in a letter to the New York Times “that he had urged Izetbegovic to ‘stick by his commitments,’” (Steven L. Burg and Paul Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 114).
45 Washington Times, May 4, 1999. Frank Viviano, “Drugs Paying for Conflict in Europe,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 1994: “Narcotics smuggling has become a prime source of financing for civil wars already under way -- or rapidly brewing -- in southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, according to a report issued here this week. “The report, by the Paris-based Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues, or Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs, identifies belligerents in the former Yugoslav republics and Turkey as key players in the region's accelerating drugs-for-arms traffic. “Albanian nationalists in ethnically tense Macedonia and the Serbian province of Kosovo have built a vast heroin network, leading from the opium fields of Pakistan to black-market arms dealers in Switzerland, which transports up to $2 billion worth of the drug annually into the heart of Europe, the report says. More than 500 Kosovo or Macedonian Albanians are in prison in Switzerland for drug- or arms-trafficking offenses, and more than 1,000 others are under indictment.”
46 Michael Levine, New American, May 24, 1999; quoted in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 41.
47 Ralf Mutschke, testimony to Committee on the Judiciary, December 13, 2000.
48 Sunday Times (London), March 12, 2000: “Agim Ceku, the KLA commander in the latter stages of the conflict, had established American contacts through his work in the Croatian army, which had been modernised with the help of Military Professional Resources Inc, an American company specialising in military training and procurement. This company's personnel were in Kosovo, along with others from a similar company, Dyncorps [sic], that helped in the American-backed programme for the Bosnian army.”
49 David Hackworth, “Wanted: Guns for Hire,” Hackworth.com, July 9, 2001. Cf. James R. Davis, Fortune’s Warriors: Private Armies and the New World Order, 112; P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors, 219.
50 Wiebes, Intelligence and the war in Bosnia 1992 – 1995, 66; Observer, November 5, 1995. J.M. Berger reports from declassified documents that MPRI’s contract with Bosnia was arranged via a private company headed by neocon Richard Perle: “Controversial neocon philosopher Richard Perle led an obscure nongovernmental organization tasked with hiring a private company to run the U.S. State Department's "Train and Equip" program in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1996.
Perle's group, the "Acquisition Support Institute," hired Military Professional Resources Inc., essentially a professional mercenary company nearly as controversial as Perle himself. It's not at all clear what or whom is responsible for the Institute, or why a "non-governmental, non-profit organization" would be responsible for selecting the recipient of a massive State Department contract on one of the most sensitive issues of the day.
Equipped with a collection of retired military officers, MPRI set itself up as a virtual extension of the U.S. government in both Croatia and Bosnia, as documented in an extensive set of Freedom of Information Act documents I will be publishing over the next several weeks.
MPRI operatives were given the run of the country -- receiving payments and arms from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Muslim countries, which underwrote operations to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
In many cases, these payments were brokered directly by the State Department. In some instances, funds and arms were routed into Bosnia without State's explicit approval but often with its knowledge, as documented in the newly declassified records. Unauthorized assistance appears to have come from Pakistan, UAE and Turkey, among others.” (Richard Perle, MPRI and Bosnian Arms Shipments,” Intelwire, February 7, 2007).
51 Sir Alfred Sherman, “The Empire for the New Millenium?” The Centre for Peace in Balkans, May 22, 2000.
52 Cf. the cynical comments of the Swiss analytical group Zeit-Fragen: (Current Concerns, “Where’s the 8th Corridor?” September/October 2001): “By creating a trouble spot in Kosovo the USA is able to control Albania and with it the planned AMBO pipeline…. The USA is showing a conspicuous interest in controlling these strategic transport corridor links in the Balkans. They prohibited a project scheduled to be constructed through Serbia, and they offered Rumania 100 million dollars to move the route of the planned SEEL pipeline (South Eastern European Line) further north, to Hungary. The Italian firm ENI had planned this pipeline project using existing pipeline infrastructure in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. The USA bombarded the Yugoslavian section of this infrastructure with remarkable doggedness.”
53 Michael Levine, New American, May 24, 1999; quoted in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 41.
54 For details, see Scott, American War Machine, 84, 123, 151, etc.; Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 167.
55 Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, January/February 2000. Clinton at the same time mounted a vigorous campaign against Colombian heroin, increasing the demand for Afghan heroin. As Klebnikov noted, “some White House officials fear Kosovar heroin could replace the Colombian supply. ‘Even if we were to eliminate all the heroin production in Colombia, by no means do we think there would be no more heroin coming into the United States,’ says Bob Agresti of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. ‘Look at the numbers. Colombia accounts for only six percent of the world's heroin. Southwest Asia produces 75 percent.’"
56 Patrick Graham, “Drug Wars: Kosovo’s New Battle,” National Post, April 13, 2000.
57 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 324. Cf. Cristopher Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate (New York: Praeger, 2007).
58 Scott, Road to 9/11, 152-53; citing Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda, 117; Boston Globe, February 3, 1995, “Figure Cited in Terrorism Case Said to Enter U.S. with CIA Help.”
59 Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 67; cf. Williams, Al Qaeda, 117.
60 Scott, Road to 9/11, 154-56, 160. Cf. Robert L. Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheikh,” Village Voice, March 30, 1993: “As Jack Blum, investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, put it: "One of the big problems here is that many suspects in the World Trade Center bombing were associated with the Mujahadeen. And there are components of our government that are absolutely disinterested in following that path because it leads back to people we supported in the Afghan war.”
61 Scott, Road to 9/11, 156-57; citing J.M. Berger, Ali Mohamed: An Intelwire Sourcebook, 235-36.
62 Estanislao Oziewicz and Tu Thanh Ha, “Canada freed top al-Qaeda operative,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), November 22, 2001. A Lexis-Nexis search for “Ali Mohamed” + Vancouver yields no relevant entries from the U.S. press.
63 Patrick Fitzgerald, Testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Twelfth Public Hearing, June 16, 2004.
64 Peter Lance, Triple Cross, 274-77.
65 United States District Court, Southern District of New York, “United States of America v. Ali Mohamed,” S (7) 98 Cr. 1023, October 20, 2000, link, 17; in J.M. Berger, Ali Mohamed, 294.
66 United States District Court, Southern District of New York, “United States of America v. Ali Mohamed,” S(7) 98 Cr. 1023, 27; in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 304.
67 FBI agent Jack Cloonan, summarizing a post-9/11 interview with Ali Mohamed, in William F. Jasper, “Unleashing a Terrorist,” New American, November 26, 2007. Cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 382.
68 Paul Joseph Watson, “U.S. Attacks Iran Via CIA-Funded Jundullah Terror Group,” NOW Observer, October 20, 2009.
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