Libyan Jamahiriya stands its ground against NATO rebels

2011/09/18
Mathaba.net
http://networkedblogs.com/nfGSK

Real Revolutionairies defends themselves against Fake Corporate Manufactured Revolution (brought to you by BP, BAE, Lockheed Martin, Ratheon, IMF, WTO, NATO and all the rest)

The NATO-rebel’s quest to force the Libyan population under its control has faced strong resistance with 80% of Libya still under popular democratic Jamahiriya control.

Disciplined Libyan defence forces are staging precision attacks and withering shelling barrages to defend land that includes Moammar Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte against the invaders and terrorists.

The entire central area between the NATO-rebel hub of Benghazi and the capital Tripoli — is turning into a seat of resistance to foreign occupying forces such as zones in Iraq or Afghanistan. Defence forces have killed hundreds of NATO-rebels in recent days.

“Its cities are packed with weapons, missiles and ammunition depots,” said Fadl-Allah Haroun, a commander of NATO-rebel units near Benghazi. “It is an unbelievable force.”

NATO rebel fighters have been assembling for an expected push into the well-defended town of Bani Walid, after seven months of very limited success and only with constant NATO bombing support which has already claimed well over 50,000 lives, on the western end of the 240-mile (400-kilometer) band of pro-Gadhafi territory. It includes the popular Libya leader Muammar Qaddafi’s Mediterranean birthplace city of Sirte and stretches to near the oil port of Ras Lanouf — which came under back-to-back attacks by Libyan Jamahiriya defence forces on Monday killed dozens of NATO-rebels and foreign mercenaries.

The stiff resistance in Bani Walid, inspite of a month of heavy blockade and intense bombing from NATO forces, including resistance by what NATO rebels claim are highly trained snipers, offers a glimpse of possibly much bigger fights ahead to try to dislodge Sirte and other places from the Libyan people who are defending their freedom against the foreign invasion and Arab traitors and terrorists.

Cities and towns throughout the center of the Libyan Jamahiriya are still under control of the people who are armed for defense along with larger weapons such as 152mm Howitzer canons now well hidden against NATO airstrikes that continue in the area, NATO-rebel commanders told The Associated Press.

The Libyan defence commandos also stage hit-and-run strikes from the desert to the south against the NATO-rebels, with Libya’s vast hinterlands and distant pro-Qaddafi hubs such as Sabha becoming rallying points for resistance fighters who are now joining from other African states to defend the continent against the bankrupt imperialist nations seeking to seize its resources.

Already an estimated 150 billion dollars have been "seized" by imperialist forces controlling the UN Security Council, however so long as the legitimate democratic government which is still recognized by most of the world is in power, these assets cannot be handed over to the foreign-backed terrorist regime, observers point out.

The Jamahiriya still has a reported 144 tons of gold, worth around 7 billion dollars which the NATO-rebels have not been able to seize.

Outside Wadi Al-Hammar, a village on the coastal road about 55 miles (90 kilometers) east of Sirte, NATO-rebels have found armored vehicles hidden under tents and other weapons stashed in encampments of nomadic Bedouin tribesmen.

Al-Tayab Said, a NATO-rebel commander from Sabha, said Jamahiriya resistance fighters are trying to regroup and are using desert supply lines from Algeria.

“They are moving freely across the border,” he said. “They get constant supply.”

Algeria is supporting the Jamahiriya as both Libya and Algeria are threatened by Al-Qaida allied terrorists, which have been exposed as being under the control of western nations intelligence services to the consternation of western politicians that have their eyes open such as Dennis Kucinich in the USA and who are seeking prosecution of western regime heads for their backing of terrorists.

Other NATO-rebel leaders have noted the superior fighting tactics of the highly trained Libya defence force units.

A battlefield report about a Mitsubishi pickup is now making the rounds as a cautionary tale: on Saturday, Libyan Jamahiriya defence forces left the vehicle — loaded with ammunition — in a conspicuous hilltop in Wadi Al-Hammar. NATO-rebel fighters rushed to claim the prize, but were picked off by hidden marksmen. At least 35 deaths were counted before the group managed to retreat to safety.

Dr. Ahmed Alsharif, who heads a field hospital in Nawfaliyah, said at least 80 NATO-rebel fighters have been killed since Saturday in or around the hospital.

The Libyan resistance is strong because in Libya the government is by the people -- a direct participatory democracy based on people's conferences and elected people's committees. The self-governing Libyan society is thus called a "Jamahiriya" a term coined to describe a country without a traditional government which is considered dictatorship, and instead the people themselves ruling themselves.

Libya Falls to Islamic Extremists?

From the London Telegraph:
Libya is in danger of falling into the hands of Islamic extremists if a stable government is not rapidly established, Nato’s secretary-general warned last night.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Islamic extremists would “try to exploit” any weaknesses created as the country tried to rebuild after four decades of Col Muammar Gaddafi’s rule.

Mr Rasmussen was speaking amid growing evidence of splits in the rebel leadership in Tripoli. His words will cast a damper over the euphoria sweeping Tripoli in the wake of the revolution.

His warning came as the head of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, told cheering crowds in Tripoli that Islamic shariah law would be the “main source” of legislation in the new Libya.

Mr Jalil, who only arrived in his new capital on Saturday, made his first public speech in Martyrs’ Square - once Col Gaddafi’s “Green Square” - last night.

“We are a Muslim people, for a moderate Islam, and we will stay on this road,” he said. His formulation suggested that Libya would follow neighbours such as Egypt in allowing room for secular freedoms.

But there are already signs that the rebel leadership is split over a variety of issues including the future role of the Islamist militias which played a significant part in the revolution.

Mahmoud Jibril, the interim Libyan prime minister, also arrived in Tripoli at the end of last week after complaints that he had been too busy travelling the world to lead his own revolution. On Sunday night he was forced to announce that his first government reshuffle would take place in seven to ten days.

Asked if Nato was worried that a delay in setting up a fully fledged new government increased the risk of extremists taking control, Mr Rasmussen said: “I don’t think it’s a major risk but of course we cannot exclude the possibility that extremists will try to exploit a situation and take advantage of a power vacuum. But based on our talks with the National Transitional Council I do believe they are sincere in their desire for democracy.”

The rebel leadership faces threats on many fronts, including from Col Gaddafi himself...

Libya 'cannot exclude' extremist exploitation, Nato chief says
Thomas Harding, Ruth Sherlock
12 Sep 2011
303 Comments
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8758553/Libya-cannot-exclude-extremist-exploitation-Nato-chief-says.html

Libya: "Investment Surge Sparks Nationalist Rhetoric, Policies"

Robalini's Note: This cable from Wikileaks perhaps explains the motivations behind the not-so-completely covert operation this year in Libya better than any establishment piece...
The regime has made a point of putting companies on notice that "exploitative" behavior will not be tolerated. In his annual speech marking the founding of his regime, Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi in 2006 said: "Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them -- now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money." His son, Seif al-Islam al-Qadhafi, said in March 2007 that, "We will not tolerate a foreign company to make a profit at the expense of a Libyan citizen."

Beyond the rhetoric, there are other signs of growing resource nationalism. -- Some IOCs with local subsidiaries have been forced to adopt Libyan names this year, including TOTAL (now officially titled "Mabruk"), Repsol ("Akakoss"), ENI ("Mellita") and Veba ("Al-Hurruj"), although these names have yet to catch on. -- The Libyan National Oil Corporation (NOC) is currently in the process of reworking long-standing oil concessions with several different IOCs (Ref B), in an effort to wring more favorable terms. There is a growing concern in the IOC community that NOC, emboldened by soaring oil prices and the press of would-be suitors, will seek better terms on both concession and production-sharing agreements, even those signed very recently. -- Libyan labor laws have also been amended to "Libyanize" the economy in several key sectors, and IOCs are now being forced to hire untrained Libyan employees. The Libyan National Oil Company (NOC) has recently begun insisting that deputy general managers, finance managers and human resource managers in local offices of IOC's be Libyan.

Source URL:
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/11/07TRIPOLI967.html

New Libya More Arab, Less African?

Joe DeCapua
August 25, 2011
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/africa/decapua-libya-au-arab-laegue-25aug11-128388573.html

Libyan rebels patrol to try to find any of Moammar Gadhafi's relatives in Tripoli, Libya, August 24, 2011.The Arab League Thursday recognized Libya’s rebel Transitional National Council (TNC) as the country’s legitimate government. It said it’s time Libya once again had a permanent seat on the league’s council.

Libya’s representative to the Arab League said the country would take part in a ministers meeting on Saturday.

Too much, too soon?

“I think that it’s premature. The government of Libya under Gadhafi is not completely overthrown as yet. Gadhafi is still at large. And the United Nations has not officially recognized a new government for Libya. And I think it’s premature for individual states or even groupings like the Arab League to take that step,” said Na’eem Jeenah, executive director of the Afro Middle East Center in Johannesburg.

He said the question remains as to exactly whom the Transitional National Council represents.

“It’s a council that was formed in the east in Benghazi. When it was formed and up to recently, and I would say up to now, it still represents groupings of people in the east. Even the so-called rebels in the west, like the people who rose up in Tripoli, etc., are not necessarily accountable to or within the constituency of the Transitional National Council,” said Jeenah.

So long and goodbye

The Arab League’s recognition of the TNC may simply be a signal that it’s glad to see Mr. Gadhafi go.

“I think that’s a big part of it,” he said, “Remember that they were very quick to come out against Gadhafi when the uprising began. There’s no real love lost between Gadhafi and almost all the heads of state in the Arab League.”

Jeenah said Mr. Gadhafi had two main problems with the league.

“One was his kind of policy of, as far as they were concerned anyway, turning his back on the Arab world and turning towards the rest of Africa. He was kind of regarded either as something of a traitor or as a maverick, who just looked to where his bread was buttered politically,” he said.

The other problem was the Libyan leader’s personal style.

“It’s very difficult to expect the Emir of Qatar, for example, to like you very much when in a public forum you loudly call him a fat man and things like that. Or call the King of Saudi Arabia stupid. It was that kind of interpersonal relations that he really messed up,” he said.

African Union

Mr. Gadhafi once proposed that countries on the continent form a United States of Africa. Now that his days appear to be numbered, Libya’s relationship with the AU may never be the same.

“I think that the relationship will change quite significantly. I think that the importance that Gadhafi had given to the African Union and to the African continent will be reduced. And in general there will be much more of an emphasis on being part of the Arab League and the Arab world and developing stronger relations with other Arab states and with Europe,” he said.

The AU’s response to the Libyan situation may have sealed its fate.

“With the Arab League having come out so strongly against Gadhafi in favor the rebels,” he said, “there’s been a kind of stronger relationship and camaraderie that’s developed with other Arab states. The African Union, on the other hand, as far as the rebels are concerned, were not very helpful and didn’t come out in clear support of the rebel groups as many Arab states did,” he said.

Under Gadhafi, Libya was a major financial backer of the AU. Jeenah expects that to change.

“I think it’s going to be a problem, at least financially. Libya itself had been contributing about 15 percent of the AU’s budget. And it has also been paying the dues of a number of other countries that had defaulted. Well, it won’t stop completely because I think that Libya will remain a member of the AU and will continue paying its dues. But those dues will be much smaller than 15 percent of the budget,” he said.

Jeenah thinks it will be difficult for the AU to make up for the expected shortfall.

Sweet and Lowdown: A Crude Analysis of the Libyan Liberation

Chris Floyd
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2160-sweet-and-lowdown-a-crude-analysis-of-the-libyan-liberation.html

Another war for oil? Surely not! But just to be on the safe side, the world's oil barons are already moving in to seal some sweetheart deals on that sweet, sweet crude with the new, NATO-installed masters of Libya.

And guess what? It turns out that companies from the Western countries that eagerly rained tons of death-metal on the Libyan people are being given the inside track to the post-Gadafy gusher. Meanwhile, countries that had urged caution in humanely intervening with thousands upon thousands of bombs, drones and missiles to, er, protect human life now face relegation to the outer darkness.

As the New York Times reports, Libya's old colonial masters, Italy, are leading the way in the new scramble, even ere the Green Pimpernel has been found. They, along with other Western oil behemoths, are being welcomed with open arms by the peace-loving democratic rebels, who, er, murdered their own chief military commander just a few weeks ago. But for intervention skeptics like Russia, China and Brazil, there may be "some political issues" in renewing old deals and inking new ones, say the new regime's oil honchos. NATO si, BRIC no.

But remember. This is not a war for oil. Oil has nothing to do with it. Of course, you can find cranks and crackpots like, say, Patrick Cockburn, who has only been doing frontline reporting in the region for decades, coming out with nonsense like this, in a recent piece about the "murderous rebels in Libya":

"The enthusiasm in some 30 foreign capitals to recognise the mysterious self-appointed group in Benghazi as the leaders of Libya is at this stage probably motivated primarily by expectations of commercial concessions and a carve-up of oilfields."

But what does he know? Especially compared to progressive, peace-loving, war-hating supporters of the, er, war like Professor Juan Cole. As the professor himself tells us, he is someone "who has actually heard briefings in Europe from foreign ministries and officers of NATO members." I'll bet you haven't done that! (Although Patrick Cockburn probably has -- for decades. But never mind.) Anyway, Cole assures us that the very idea of oil playing any part in this noble endeavor is "daft," because Libya was "already integrated with the international oil markets."

Well, loath as one is to quibble with a man who has actually heard briefings from NATO officers and all, even the New York Times notes that:

Colonel Qaddafi proved to be a problematic partner for international oil companies, frequently raising fees and taxes and making other demands. A new government with close ties to NATO may be an easier partner for Western nations to deal with. Some experts say that given a free hand, oil companies could find considerably more oil in Libya than they were able to locate under the restrictions placed by the Qaddafi government.

Less regulation, fewer restrictions, sweeter deals, more oil, higher profits -- no, there's nothing there to interest the oil companies. Or the governments they "influence" so persuasively -- and pervasively. So it must be true, as Cole asserts, that this noble endeavor was no more and no less than a humanitarian intervention designed to safeguard human lives (with those thousands of bombs and missiles), protect the right of free assembly (or at least the right to mill around in one of those wired, barricaded, kettled, corralled "free speech zones" now so prevalent in the freedom-loving, liberating lands of the West), and uphold "a lawful world order."

Cole now looks forward to seeing Gadafy and sons in the dock for war crimes, for, as he rightly notes: "deploying the military against non-combatants was a war crime, and doing so in a widespread and systematic way was a crime against humanity." Unless, of course, you quote "just war" theologians as you, say, conduct a widespread and systematic terror bombing campaign of defenseless villages in an allied nation with drone missiles, as Barack Obama has been doing in Pakistan from the moment he took office. But Cole "agree[s] with President Obama and his citation of Reinhold Niebuhr. You can't protect all victims of mass murder everywhere all the time. But where you can do some good, you should do it."

If only Gadafy had thought to quote a man whose "influence has been acknowledged by such recent leaders of American foreign policy as Jimmy Carter, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, [and] John McCain"! Perhaps that would have absolved him from the other crimes Cole lays at his door: "bankrolling brutal dictators and helping foment ruinous wars." Certainly none of our Niebuhr-quoting leaders have ever done anything like that!

In any case, the deed is done and now, as the Times headline says, "The Scramble for Access to Libya's Oil Wealth Begins." But the latter is just incidental, of course -- a spandrel, a happy accident, an unintentional by-product of a noble deed done by noble men for noble purposes. Oily business aside, the deed itself is something that should be celebrated by everyone -- including anti-war dissidents like Cole, or even rock-ribbed "anarchists" like Crispin Sartwell (whose call for "exhilaration" at Libya's NATO-bomb liberation receives an answer here from Arthur Silber). Only the dead -- the uncounted, forgotten dead, mangled and buried under tons of liberating metal -- might demur.

Chavez on Libya

From the London Guardian:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Wednesday that Libya's crisis is just beginning with the fall of Moammar Gadhafi's government.

Chavez has been a staunch defender of Gadhafi throughout the conflict, and he condemned NATO airstrikes and killings of civilians.

"The drama of Libya isn't ending with the fall of Gadhafi's government. It's beginning," Chavez said. "The tragedy in Libya is just beginning."

Libyans hunting Moammar Gadhafi offered a $2 million bounty on Gadhafi's head and amnesty for anyone who kills or captures him as rebels battled Wednesday to clear the last pockets of resistance from the capital, Tripoli.

Asked about such efforts to hunt for Gadhafi, Chavez said they reflect a "madness let loose."

"What the Yankee empire and the European powers ... want is Libya's oil," Chavez said...

Chavez: Libya's tragedy begins with Gadhafi's fall
Wednesday August 24 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9813496

Libyan 'Revolution' made in France

From the Asian Times:
Let's start with the basics. The Frogs did it. It's always worth repeating; this is a French war. The Americans don't even call it a war; it's a "kinetic action" or something. The "rebel" Transitional National Council" (TNC) is a French invention.

And yes - this is above all neo-Napoleonic President Nicolas Sarkozy's war. He's the George Clooney character in the movie (poor Clooney). Everybody else, from David of Arabia Cameron to Nobel Peace Prize winner and multiple war developer Barack Obama, are supporting actors.

As already reported by Asia Times Online, this war started in October 2010 when Gaddafi's chief of protocol, Nuri Mesmari, defected to Paris, was approached by French intelligence and for all practical purposes a military coup d'etat was concocted, involving defectors in Cyrenaica.

Sarko had a bag full of motives to exact revenge on The Big G.

French banks had told him that Gaddafi was about to transfer his billions of euros to Chinese banks. Thus Gaddafi could not by any means become an example to other Arab nations or sovereign funds.

French corporations told Sarko that Gaddafi had decided not to buy Rafale fighters anymore, and not to hire the French to build a nuclear plant; he was more concerned in investing in social services.

Energy giant Total wanted a much bigger piece of the Libyan energy cake - which was being largely eaten, on the European side, by Italy's ENI, especially because Premier Silvio "bunga bunga" Berlusconi, a certified Big G fan, had clinched a complex deal with Gaddafi.

Thus the military coup was perfected in Paris until December; the first popular demonstrations in Cyrenaica in February - largely instigated by the plotters - were hijacked. The self-promoting philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy flew his white shirt over an open torso to Benghazi to meet the "rebels" and phone Sarkozy, virtually ordering him to recognize them in early March as legitimate (not that Sarko needed any encouragement).

The TNC was invented in Paris, but the United Nations also duly gobbled it up as the "legitimate" government of Libya - just as NATO did not have a UN mandate to go from a no-fly zone to indiscriminate "humanitarian" bombing, culminating with the current siege of Sirte.

The French and the British redacted what would become UN Resolution 1973. Washington merrily joined the party. The US State Department brokered a deal with the House of Saud through which the Saudis would guarantee an Arab League vote as a prelude for the UN resolution, and in exchange would be left alone to repress any pro-democracy protests in the Persian Gulf, as they did, savagely, in Bahrain.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC - then transmuted into Gulf Counter-Revolution Club) also had tons of reasons to get rid of Gaddafi. The Saudis would love to accommodate a friendly emirate in northern Africa, especially by getting rid of the ultra-bad blood between Gaddafi and King Abdullah. The Emirates wanted a new place to invest and "develop". Qatar, very cozy with Sarko, wanted to make money - as in handling the new oil sales of the "legitimate" rebels.

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may be very cozy with the House of Saud or the murderous al-Khalifas in Bahrain. But the State Department heavily blasted Gaddafi for his "increasingly nationalistic policies in the energy sector"; and also for "Libyanizing" the economy.

The Big G, a wily player, should have seen the writing on the wall. Since prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh was deposed essentially by the Central Intelligence Agency in Iran in 1953, the rule is that you don't antagonize globalized Big Oil. Not to mention the international financial/banking system - promoting subversive ideas such as turning your economy to the benefit of your local population.

If you're pro-your country you are automatically against those who rule - Western banks, mega-corporations, shady "investors" out to profit from whatever your country produces.

Gaddafi not only crossed all these red lines but he also tried to sneak out of the petrodollar; he tried to sell to Africa the idea of a unified currency, the gold dinar (most African countries supported it); he invested in a multibillion dollar project - the Great Man-Made River, a network of pipelines pumping fresh water from the desert to the Mediterranean coast - without genuflecting at the alter of the World Bank; he invested in social programs in poor, sub-Saharan countries; he financed the African Bank, thus allowing scores of nations to bypass, once again, the World Bank and especially the International Monetary Fund; he financed an African-wide telecom system that bypassed Western networks; he raised living standards in Libya. The list is endless...

NATO's agenda of dominating the whole Mediterranean as a NATO lake is as bold as Africom's agenda of becoming Africa's Robocop. The only trouble spots were Libya, Syria and Lebanon - the three countries not NATO members or linked with NATO via myriad "partnerships".

To understand NATO's global Robocop role - legitimized by the UN - one just has to pay attention to the horse's mouth, NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen. As Tripoli was still being bombed, he said, "If you're not able to deploy troops beyond your borders, then you can't exert influence internationally, and then that gap will be filled by emerging powers that don't necessarily share your values and thinking."

So there it is, out in the open. NATO is a Western high-tech militia to defend American and European interests, to isolate the interests of the emerging BRICS countries and others, and to keep the "natives", be they Africans or Asians, down. The whole lot much easier to accomplish as the scam is disguised by R2P - "responsibility to protect", not civilians, but the subsequent plunder.

Against all these odds, no wonder The Big G was bound for a red card, and to be banned from the game forever...

Why Gaddafi got a red card
Pepe Escobar
9-1-11
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MI01Ak02.html

Robalini on Libya

I just find it so amusing to hear talking heads and mouthpieces on news pretending this is about democracy or helping the Libyan people. Read the Wikileaks cable on Libya and its absolutely Orwellian: the argument that the only way for Libyan people to benefit from their oil is to give MNC oil companies a greater cut (Mo K demanded from the start of his revolution that Libya must receive a majority of all oil profits, although giving oil companies 49 percent doesn't seem like a ripoff to me.) They also must stop demanding key jobs of power go to Libyans so that the decision makers have a vested interest in the country. If you think the neoliberals make legitimate arguments here, then there's no reason to dismiss the GOPs argument that cutting taxes for the rich will actually help the poor. Neoliberalism is just right wing economics instituted internationally in disguise, with the same disastrous results.
Kadaffi also has used Libya's oil wealth to give low interest loans to African nations without the neoliberal strings attached by the IMF. I know Bono in his increasingly pathetic attempt to win a Nobel Peace Prize (Jesus, at least Marty Scorsese kept his dignity with his desperation to win an Oscar) became an apologist for GW Bush and WB/IMF figures supposedly for their concern for people for Africa, but if helping out Africans is the measuring stick for a Peace Prize, nobody has come close to Kadaffi over the last decade thanks to this. Odd this isn't really pointed out at all in the establishment press.

Indeed, the establishment consensus version of reality just ignores all these giant elephants I've just pointed out. This isn't to deny that Mo has his issues or there was legitimate opposition to the Libyan establishment in this battle. But if two of the first things the new Libyan government do is renegotiate all oil contracts to give oil companies a greater cut and stop their loans to fellow African states, can anyone pretend that the overwhelming goal of the US and Europe here was to put in a puppet government? "We are concerned about the lack of democracy and he's a tyrant and blah blah blah" sounds a lot more appealing than "We want to steal from African people."

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.