including - especially - in governments, at the head of spook agencies and militaries. The worst form of terrorism is the bombing conducted by air forces every day in Iraq. Coups against inconvenient governments are terrorism. "Regime change" is terrorism.
But clearly, you talking about "the Base" - the veterans of the CIA-ISI-Saudi organized international anti-Soviet jihadi movement who left Afghanistan to spread everywhere. Yes, they're real - plenty of U.S. tax dollars were spent to help set them up, I don't think that was wasted on a phantom. And they can be found on many sides, curiously often the CIA's as in the Yugoslavian wars. Britain used some of them to plot an assassination of Gaddafi 20 years ago. Do you really think Bin Ladin's rolodex and the CIA's don't overlap?
Are you talking about Ali Mohamed, the U.S. special forces sergeant and reputed triple agent credited with a planning role in both WTC '93 and the embassy bombings? Where is he now, do you know? Because he wasn't prosecuted or officially released, but nothing's been said about his whereabouts for a decade.
What about former (?) Egyptian agent and FBI informant Emad Salem, who got the million to dime on the '93 and Landmarks plots, who taped conversations with the FBI of himself claiming he was prevented from stopping the '93 plot? He's somewhere on Witness Protection.
What about Omar Saeed Sheikh, whose record suggests an ISI agent except Musharraf called him MI6? Isn't it funny how first he was the money man for Atta, then the official story replaced him after the Pearl killing? Why didn't the 9/11 Com follow up on the Pakistan allegations, or bother to mention them at all? Is this related to Mahmud Ahmed's role?
How about the serial "incompetence" protection afforded to apparent Saudi agents Alhazmi and Almidhar, whose FBI informant landlord (Abdussatar Shaikh) the 9/11 Commission claimed it can't name, although his name had been in the papers?
Did you read the Rolling Stone story last month on the various terror plots the government claims to have uncovered in the U.S. in recent years? How is it that the guy with the ideas, the guy who organizes the plotters and encourages them, cajoles them to overcome any reluctance, the guy who supplies them with the explosives, is invariably the FBI informant?
So why was Able Danger shut down after identifying the four alleged 9/11 ringleaders as the "Brooklyn Cell" plotting mayhem in the U.S.? Who wanted that? Has there been a real investigation, did it issue public findings that clear this up?
There are many types of entanglement here between the alphabet agencies and the supposedly independent agents of terror - as a minimum, can you at least question that as a strategy and acknowledge blowback (and coverup)? Should we keep supplying the managers of this mess with carte blanche, because there are "real terrorists"?
Lebanon barracks and embassy attacks, "Carlos the Jackal" and Abu Nidal, WTC '93, the Embassy Bombings and the Cole - this is the usual, selective string of precedents neocons and the corporate media line up when they talk about the historic lead-up to 9/11 (of course without mentioning the likes of Ali Mohamed or Emad Salem).
Operation Mongoose, the Northwoods plot, the Gulf of Tonkin fabrication with millions of innocent dead and a large chunk of the world poisoned in the aftermath, the rape of Chile, bombings by CIA set-up Gladio and the "strategy of tension" in Italy and across Europe, the incubator babies...
How about something that wasn't American but surely interesting to American spooks: the 9/99 Moscow bombings as an immediate and perhaps inspiring model of a fully successful inside-job putsch carried out by a secret state establishment on "its own" people to launch a war and set up an authoritarian regime.
See? I can play the same game of name the precedent.
So many examples since then - the plot to fake an Iraqi attack on warplanes dressed up in UN colors comes to mind - but how about the construction of Zarqawi, the man credited with practically every mindless street bombing in Iraq for a couple of years?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/how-the-spooks-took-over-the-news-780672.htmlIn his controversial new book, Nick Davies argues that shadowy intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda to manipulate public opinion – and that the media simply swallow it wholesale
Monday, 11 February 2008
Onthe morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war.
The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack the Shia population of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis."
Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General Mark Kimmitt dealt with a string of questions about The New York Times report: "We believe the report and the document is credible, and we take the report seriously... It is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in to this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society." The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running around the world.
There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001. (...)