You know,
"al Qaeda";"Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians." -
British MP, Robin Cook (deceased).
The decision to use the Mujahideen (Muj) as a proxy army was cooked up by the CIA, and approved at the tail end of Jimmy Carter's administration. This was admitted by Robert Gates and later Zbigniew Brzezinski during an interview in 1998, translated for Anglos non-fluent in French,
by writer William Blum (Blum uses a truncated version of this transcription in the introduction to his book "Rogue State"):"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul." - Zbigniew Brzezinski.
After having some success with the Muj, CIA Director William Casey decided to kick it up a notch, getting behind a program to recruit Islamic radicals from around the globe to do the United States' foreign policy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_work">wet work. This is chronicled by author Ahmed Rashid in his influential book, "Taliban";
"...in 1986, CIA chief William Casey had stepped up the war against the Soviet Union by taking three significant, but at that time highly secret, measures. He had persuaded the U.S. Congress to provide the Mujaheddin with American-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down Soviet planes and provide U.S. advisers to train the guerrillas. Until then no US-made weapons or personnel had been used directly in the war effort. The CIA, Britain's MI6 and the ISI also agreed on a provocative plan to launch guerrilla attacks into the Soviet Socialist Republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the soft Muslim underbelly of the Soviet state from where Soviet troops in Afghanistan received their supplies. The task was given to the ISI's favourite Mujaheddin leader Gulbuddin Hikmetyar. In March 1987, small units crossed the Amu Darya river from bases in northern Afghanistan and launched their first rocket attacks against villages in Tajikistan. Casey was delighted with the news, and on his next secret trip to Pakistan he crossed the border into Afghanistan with President Zia to review the Mujaheddin groups.
Thirdly, Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin. The ISI had encouraged this since 1982 and by now all the other players had their reasons for supporting the idea." p.129, YALE NB edition, 2001.
In the above quote we can see that the CIA had already begun utilizing the Muj as a proxy for international destabilization (not just support of the local conflict in Afghanistan) in the mid-1980s. Also, the keystone and foundation are laid for the formation of what was to become "al Qaeda", the Arab Foreign Legion, call it what you will, "al Qaeda" was not borne of a fevered dream in Osama's cave, but was the fruit of the combined effort of intelligence services in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and nourished by the global reach of the mighty CIA.
But, you might argue, the CIA pulled out of Afghanistan and the US stopped messing around with the Muj!
Not so fast.
In Britain, there is one academic who boldly states the following;
From 1979 until 2007 ... this amorphous network designated by the term al Qaeda has functioned seamlessly as a mercenary proxy force mobilized in diverse strategic regions in the service of Anglo-American imperial expansionism. It hasn't ever had a break. The extent of it is absolutely shocking ... Western state sponsorship, indirectly and directly, of al Qaeda as a destabilizing force in strategic regions.
Meanwhile, innocent citizens are being killed. They are being killed since 1993 ... yet the policy has not shifted. On the contrary it's now escalating in the context of developling an even more catastrophic conflict with Iran.
This has damning moral implications. It means that at some level, policy makers are morally indifferent to the deaths of our own citizens in al Qaeda terrorist attacks. Other strategic imperatives, such as the control of increasingly scarce energy resources are more important. There has been a shift of priorities, something in the National Security structure, since 1979, has relegated civilian life way at the bottom.
- Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed,
7-13-2007.
Nafeez Ahmed is not a household name among North American intellectuals, but he should be. He has been noticed by
Gore Vidal, among others;
On the subject `How and Why America was Attacked on 11 September, 2001', the best, most balanced report, thus far, is by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed <1> . . . Yes, yes, I know he is one of Them. But they often know things that we don't -- particularly about what we are up to. A political scientist, Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development <2> `a think-tank dedicated to the promotion of human rights, justice and peace' in Brighton. His book, The War on Freedom <3>, has just been published in the US by a small but reputable publisher.
Ahmed provides a background for our ongoing war against Afghanistan, a view that in no way coincides with what the administration has told us. He has drawn on many sources, most tellingly on American whistleblowers who are beginning to come forth and bear witness -- like those FBI agents who warned their supervisors that al-Qaeda was planning a kamikaze strike against New York and Washington only to be told that if they went public with these warnings they would suffer under the National Security Act.
Ahmed is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Sussex in England, and has spent countless hours documenting the war on terror. When I say "documenting", I mean it. Ahmed backs up everything he says in minute scholarly detail, as an academic making radical claims must. When he says Western state sponsorship has continued unabated, up to the present day, he isn't conjuring a theory, he's stating the obvious. Obvious to anybody with the inclination to get informed on the most staggeringly ill-concealed covert operation sprung on the world since the Bay of Pigs, that is.
In an essay submitted for the Congressional record in 2005, titled
"Ties With Terror: The Continuity of Western-Al-Qaeda Relations in the Post-Cold War Period", Ahmed details the steady stream of intelligence links to "al Qaeda" in the Balkans, North Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the Caucasus and concludes thus;
At every major strategic point in the world, we find that US and Western power is symbiotically melded – through financial, military and intelligence connections – with al-Qaeda; and further that al-Qaeda has in certain places been explicitly used as a military-intelligence asset by Western powers, particularly the United States and United Kingdom. This documentation indicates that international terrorism in the form of al-Qaeda is not merely an enemy to be fought, but rather an unruly asset to be, when possible, controlled and manipulated in the pursuit of quite specific strategic and economic interests. Worse still, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that certain elements of the policy-making establishment are perfectly cognizant that as a direct result of such policies, national security is being fundamentally and continuously undermined with repeatedly fatal consequences. Yet the same brand of policies persists. Without dwelling unnecessarily on the possible theoretical ramifications of this phenomenon, it is sufficient for me to note that these facts fundamentally challenge the entire paradigm of the ‘War on Terror’ as articulated and legitimized by the official narrative.
(The entire Congressional hearing is well worth reading, of which Ahmed's contribution is but a small part:
Download - 2.5 mb PDF: http://www.911podcasts.com/files/documents/20050722transcript.pdf )Author, researcher, and sometime Congressional testimony giver himself, Peter Dale Scott
puts it like this:The American people have been seriously misled about the origins of the al Qaeda movement blamed for the 9/11 attacks, just as they have been seriously misled about the reasons for America’s invasion of Iraq.
The truth is that for at least two decades the United States has engaged in energetic covert programs to secure U.S. control over the Persian Gulf, and also to open up Central Asia for development by U.S. oil companies. Americans were eager to gain access to the petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin, which at that time were still estimated to be “the largest known reserves of unexploited fuel in the planet.”<1>
To this end, time after time, U.S. covert operations in the region have used so-called “Arab Afghan” warriors as assets, the jihadis whom we loosely link with the name and leadership of al Qaeda.<2> In country after country these “Arab Afghans” have been involved in trafficking Afghan heroin.
America’s sponsorship of drug-trafficking Muslim warriors, including those now in Al Qaeda, dates back to the Afghan War of 1979-89, sponsored in part by the CIA’s links to the drug-laundering Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).<3> It was part of CIA Director Casey’s strategy for launching covert operations over and above those approved and financed by a Democratic-controlled Congress.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
If this is all new to you, I highly recommend Ahmed's essay,
Subverting "Terrorism", for a broader base of enquiry, and a much needed penicillin shot of Truth.
Oh, and if "al Qaeda" strikes anytime soon, remember the example of Spain after the Madrid bombings:
"With the victims, with the constitution and for the defeat of terrorism".
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