Dave Wagner is a former editor at The Arizona Republic in Phoenix and author of the forthcoming The Politics of Murder: Organized Crime in Barry Goldwater’s Arizona

Seymour Hersh’s The Killing of Osama bin Laden a pocket-size collection of stories written for the London Review and printed during the second Obama administration arrives at an awkward moment for the expatriate journalist who not so long ago was esteemed as the finest investigative reporter in the United States. Hersh now publishes abroad because his talent, though undiminished, no longer fits into the publication plans of the nation’s newspaper and magazine publishers. He has, it appears, failed to adapt to the times. His revelations about deceit and brute force in the conduct of foreign affairs that delighted his editors when he raised a torch over Dick Cheney lost its shine when he reported on President’s Obama’s not-so-different Cold War liberalism.

The moment of Hersh’s fall from grace can be pinpointed to a meeting in the office of New Yorker editor David Remnick in 2011. Hersh wanted to write a story challenging the official account of the recent Navy Seals raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where the notorious terrorist chief Osama bin Laden was gunned down in his hostage compound run by the Pakistani military. There was no firefight at the compound, no burial at sea. His sources agreed on these points, among many others.

Remnick said to go ahead but to write it, but not for the magazine. He wanted a short piece for the magazine’s web site. Hersh was thunderstruck. He was like the reporter at the fabled small-town paper who rushed to tell his city editor he’d just found a murder victim in the newpaper’s lobby. Only to have the city editor respond, “Let the wires cover it.”

“David said, ‘Do a blog,’” Hersh recalled. “I said, I don’t want to do a blog.’ It’s about money. I get paid a lot more for writing a piece for theNew Yorker [magazine] … I’m old and cranky. [New York magazine, May 11, 2015.]

But of course it was about more than money. It was also about respect and credibility, the coin of his livelihood as a journalist.

Hersh had reported on Pakistan for Remnick’s magazine for years, at a time when both men shared his belief that the security of the Muslim country’s nuclear arsenal was an under-reported story. Hersh developed contacts in the special branch of Pakistani intelligence that was responsible for training the guards that keep the country’s atomic bombs secure from enemies and terrorists.

On May 4, 2011, two days after Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy Seals in Pakistan, and after the White House gave official version of events to the world press, Hersh received a three-page email from one of his sources in Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) that described an entirely different narrative. In a candid if circuitous account of what happened next, during an April 25, 2016 interview with Amy Goodman, Hersh said he took the information in the email to three “friends inside,” which he described in the Verso update of the story as US sources, a “senior retired intelligence official” and two “longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command (SOC),” whose responsibilities included the US Navy Seals. He also had contacts among the Seals.

“I know enough people in the Seals,” Hersh told Goodman. “I talked to people within days who described to me that [bin Laden] was nothing but a hit. It was an absolute assassination.” The Seals’ motive for being candid on this point and others, as Hersh explains it in the new Verso edition of the story, was a matter of soldierly honor, which they felt had been compromised by administration descriptions of a firefight that never happened. With differing motives but with the same emphasis on playing to television audiences, it suited both the administration and the individual Seals who pulled the triggers to describe the killing of bin Laden as an act of self-defense. Even the disposition of the nephritic terrorist’s six-foot-four body, or what was left of it, was faked—no burial at sea but a dumping of body parts out of a helicopter over the Hindu Kush. Hersh asked in vain for records of the official version of the burial at sea from the U.S.S. Carl Vinson and was told that the sea logs had been sealed and all hands warned to keep their mouths shut.

Hersh synthesized the information from the dissenting Seals, combined it with the account of events in the email from Pakistani nuclear security, and presented the result to the SOC consultants to help sort things out. After getting their views, he was sufficiently prepared to take what was by then an internally consistent alternative narrative to the unnamed “retired senior intelligence officer.” He, too, confirmed the new outline of events and contributed his own details. All that was missing was a candid assessment of events from the Pakistani high command. He interviewed Gen. Asad Durrani, a former chief of ISI and one of the most powerful men in the country, who was eager to cooperate.

The ISI, it turned out, was full of grievances. The Pakistanis had had been given assurances that their fingerprints would be kept off the bin Laden operation. Pakistani officials who were taking payoffs from the CIS had told the Americans that they were holding bin Laden hostage in the first instance because the Saudis wanted him protected, and they also paid large sums of laundered cash to guarantee it. Meanwhile, the Pakistanis were keeping Al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Pakistan by threatening to turn bin Laden over to the Americans if they renewed their attacks. These were admissions against interest, as the lawyers say.

As it turned out, Obama blew up the promises to the Pakistanis within hours after the bin Laden attack, and relations between the two countries turned sour for at least four years.

Perhaps the US official most troubled by Obama’s burning of the exposed Pakistani officials was then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “The bottom line is Obama changed his mind because the boys got to him,” meaning, supporters of the self-defense version. “And Gates was enraged about that. He thought, ‘You do not double cross the two guys (Pakistani generals) who control the bomb. That’s the real story.”

Hersh was not so succinct in his printed story, and he was not as clear about his sourcing as he was years later with Amy Goodman. And if he used anonymous sources, it is hardly a surprise. A figure like theWashington Post’s David Ignatius, to take only one example, does not quote his sources in the intelligence world but it is no secret that he is an accurate recorder of views of the CIA or that they are in themselves newsworthy. The Obama administration actually shut down open avenues for sourcing in the claim of the sea burial, with few complaints from anyone but Hersh.

What is puzzling about the bin Laden affair is that the fictions about it, apart from the Seals’ concerns, were so unnecessary. It seems safe to say that few but the most scrupulous Americans would have raised a protest against events even if they occurred as Hersh described them, including the rapid and unmerciful dispatch of the nation’s bête noire.

In any case, the idea that Hersh relied on a single source, a charge repeated often by his leading critics in the digital press, is absurd, as any careful reading of his work and later comments makes clear. Little wonder that he has taken a tone of surprise that he would be expected to document his sources as meticulously as a junior reporter on a country paper. In short, that he would not be trusted as he once had been. Would not his record of undisputed accuracy in other stories of world-class difficulty like My Lai and Abu Ghraib earn him the freedom to summarize?

The conclusive evidence that Hersh had lost that courtesy came not from the front—the legion of online Obama supporters for whom, like John Ford’s editor in the Old West, the legend was always preferable to the facts–but from the rear. The August 8, 2011 edition of The New Yorker contained a long story by Nicholas Schmidle on the bin Laden affair which, in the words of Gabriel Sherman, “hewed closely to the White House’s line.” Hersh’s old partner Remnick had slammed the door behind him.

counterpunch.org

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published

The controversy surrounding the infamous “28 pages” on the possible Saudi connection with the terrorists that were excised from the joint Congressional report on the 9/11 attacks is at fever pitch. But that controversy is a distraction from the real problems that Saudi Arabia’s policies pose to the United States and the entire Middle East region.

The political pressure to release the 28 pages has been growing for the past couple of years, with resolutions in both houses of Congress urging the president to declassify the information. But now legislation with bipartisan sponsorship has advanced in Congress that would deprive any foreign government of sovereign immunity in regard to responsibility for a terrorist attack on US soil and thus make it possible to sue the Saudi government in court for damages from the 9/11 attacks.

That development prompted Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir to threaten last month to pull out as much as $750 billion in Saudi assets held in the United States. The Obama administration opposes the legislation, warning of “unintended consequences” – specifically that the US government could face lawsuits because of its actions abroad. Analysts of Saudi economic policy, however, do not take al-Jubeir’s threat very seriously since it would simply punish the Saudi economy.

Meanwhile, Obama in an interview with Charlie Rose of CBS News on 16 April, said that his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is reviewing the 28 pages “to make sure that whatever it is that is released is not gonna compromise some major national security interest of the United States.” Obama said Clapper was nearly finished so the issue might finally come to a head within the next few weeks.

But it is unlikely that the declassification of the redacted 28 pages would add any dramatic new revelation to the story of the Saudis and the hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks. Former Senator Bob Graham, who was head of the Senate side of the joint intelligence committee, has implied that the 28 pages containing incriminating evidence about the hijackers’ links to the Saudi government. But Graham’s smoking gun is more likely to be speculative leads rather than real evidence of Saudi government support for the hijackers.

Past suspicions of an official Saudi role in assisting the hijackers has focused on the two Saudi al-Qaeda operatives, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, who moved to the San Diego area in early February 2000 and were immediately assisted by a Saudi man who was suspected by Saudis in the San Diego area of working for the Saudi intelligence service.

What many have cited as even more suspicious is the fact that $130,000 in certified bank checks were sent to the wife of Omar al Bayoumi, the suspected Saudi intelligence agent, by the wife of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the Saudi Ambassador to the United States but and – more than a decade later – head of Saudi intelligence.

But even if those checks were a covert way of supporting an intelligence operative, the broader theory that Bayoumi’s job was to take care of the hijackers does not hold up in light of the information now available. Investigations by the FBI, the CIA and the two major public 9-11 bodies turned up no evidence that Bayoumi provided any financial support to hijackers. On the contrary they showed that Hazmi and Mihdhar were getting money when they needed it through a direct al-Qaeda channel.

On the contrary, the 9/11 Commission learned that the hijackers had left the apartment they had gotten through Bayoumi very soon after moving in, apparently because al-Bayoumi had organised a party in the apartment that was videotaped by one of the participants, and that the al-Qaeda operatives had seemingly not welcomed the attention. Very soon after that, moreover, Mihdhar actually left the United States and didn’t return until mid-2001. And in June 2000, Hazmi moved to Arizona apparently through a network of contacts that al-Qaeda had established in Tucson in the 1990s.

So Bayoumi did not play any role in the plans of Hazmi and Mihdhar, and the efforts to find any other evidence that the Saudi government was knowledgeable about bin Laden’s 9/11 plans have so far turned up nothing. It is unlikely that the leads related to suspicions of Saudi involvement to be found in the 28 pages are completely different from those that have already been widely discussed in the media.

Bayoumi’s relationship with Hazmi and Mihdhar has given rise to speculation about why the CIA failed to inform the FBI about the presence of Mihdhar in the United States until just two weeks before the 9/11 attacks. White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke was outraged that the CIA had known that an al-Qaeda terrorist was on his way to the United States and had kept him in the dark, even though he was supposed to receive every intelligence report on terrorism. He said in a 2009 interview that the only reason he could think that the CIA kept the information to itself was that Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, was determined to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar as CIA agents inside al-Qaeda. Clarke speculated that the CIA would have used Saudi intelligence to approach the two al-Qaeda operatives and obviously assumed that Bayoumi was the Saudi agent who made the contact.

But more than a year had passed after the contact between the two al-Qaeda operatives and Bayoumi had been broken off before the CIA contacted the FBI and other agencies to request that Mihdhar be put on a watch list and began its own search for Mihdhar. That delay was obviously not the result of an effort to recruit Mihdhar and Hazmi. The truth is far more shocking: as the 9/11 Commission report makes clear, the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center had not even continued to focus on Mihdhar after first learning about his visa in February 2000.  It had already lost track of him, and had moved on to other issues. Not until a review in August 2001 had revealed its oversight did the CTC do anything about Mihdhar, which is why the hijackers were not tracked down before 11 September.

The Saudi regime certainly played a role in the trail of events that led to 9/11, but there is no need to wait for the declassification of the 28 pages to understand that trail. It has long been well documented that the socio-political constituency for bin Laden’s anti-US organisation in the kingdom was so large and influential that the government itself was forced to tread with extreme caution on al-Qaeda until the group’s attacks on the Saudi regime began in 2003.

The Clinton administration had learned that Saudi supporters of bin Laden were being allowed to finance his operations through Saudi charities.  The regime systematically denied CIA requests for bin Laden’s birth certificate, passport and banks records. 9/11 Commission investigators learned, moreover, that after bin Laden’s move from Sudan to Afghanistan in May 1996, a delegation of Saudi officials had asked top Taliban leaders to tell bin Laden that if he didn’t attack the regime, the 1994 termination of his Saudi citizenship and freezing of his assets would be rescinded.

The US government has known that Saudi financing of madrassas all over the world has been a major source of jihadist activism. The Saudi regime’s extremist Wahhabi perspective on Shia Islam is the basis for its paranoid stance on the rest of the region and the destabilisation of Syria and Yemen. The 28 pages should be released, but at a time when the contradictions between US and Saudi interests are finally beginning to be openly acknowledged, the issue is just another diversion from the real debate on Saudi Arabia that is urgently needed.

counterpunch.org

Ben Debney is a PhD candidate in International Relations at Deakin University, Burwood, Melbourne.

The idea for this article came to me after the shootings in San Bernadino; all it really required was another atrocity to give it legs. A dysfunctional part of me hoped I might get out of having to write it. If the War on Terror was ever meant to be won, by now it must be classed as a monumental failure for the West. Any conventional war that becomes bogged down in a protracted quagmire is generally regarded as a zero sum gain at best.

The roots of the War on Terror in moral panic narratives means that we rarely seem to even ask the question as to whether or not it’s actually getting us anywhere. If we don’t care that it isn’t, that begs the question as to the role War on Terror narratives play in public discourse, whether we care if our ideas mean anything or whether we just care about being right.

Between the rise of Islamic State, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the second round of Paris attacks, San Bernadino and now Belgium, all prominently displayed in the media because the perpetrators are not on our side and the victims are affluent westerners, it does not seem that terrorism is going away. On the contrary, it seems that it has made more and bolder incursions into the bubbles of apathetic individualism that dominate the safe and conspicuously comfortable existences of those of us safely removed from the consequences of the military adventures instigated by our national governments.

Indeed, the apathy seems almost to extend to each atrocity now, as the ritual outrage from political leaders who have new ideas on how to deal with the problem of non-state terrorism other than to beat their chests and lower themselves to the level of those provoking them precipitates a marked war-weariness. To be sure, Osama Bin Laden and his associates responsible for the original great Atrocity in the West a decade and a half ago achieved their primary goal of provoking the Great Satan into expensive, economically self-destructive wars.

Then there were the useful side effect of polarizing West and Middle East, driving moderates into the arms of fundamentalists on both sides of the fence and enabling radical fundamentalists in Congress, who for their part were more than willing to oblige their Islamic counterparts by dismantling remaining democratic forms in the name of defending them from the loyal opposition who had the same goals.

In this sense the War on Terror was never anything more than therapeutic psychodrama, one in which ‘the emotional release of the protagonists takes precedence over what is actually being said . . . It is an expression of their pain and powerlessness confronted by the decay and dereliction, not only of their familiar environment, but of their own lives too — an expression for which our society provides no outlet’ (Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis).

Having been cast to this end as a War on Terror, the Western response to the terrorist attacks in the United States of 2001 has displayed characteristics that are far more accurately cast as moral panic. A number of key characteristics points inexorably towards this conclusion.

*The conflation in War on Terror narratives of object and relation, such that terrorism as a relational phenomenon in reality is reified into an object, one that can be demonized, targeted and attacked according to conventional means. The reification of terrorism from relation into object for this purpose also means that, rather than something that can be understood rationally, it functions instead as a propaganda trope — one that can never be defeated, but that nevertheless supplies virtually endless fuel to the fire of perpetual war.

*The reification of terrorism into an object that can be fought and defeated through conventional warfare as a subject of war propaganda necessitates application of the processes known to sociology as the ‘production of deviance’ and social psychology as ‘moral disengagement. In engaging in the production of deviance while giving way to moral disengagement, those responsible for creating War on Terror narratives rendered themselves cause and cure of the same problem, a paradox reflected in their tendency to perpetuate the feared outcomes of enemy success (eg. the destruction of what remains of civil society and democratic rights and freedoms) in the name of combating them.

*The systemic and deep-seated cognitive dissonance characteristic of War on Terror narratives between rhetoric and actions, as its proponents waged state terror utilizing literally the same methods and propaganda tropes that Adolf Hitler used to start World War II abroad, while dismantling what remained of democratic freedoms at home in the name of defending them from evildoers who hated freedom.

The events cast as a War on Terror, then, add up in the real world to a Terror Scare, a moral panic over terrorism. As a characteristic feature of this moral panic, therapeutic psychodrama expressed as War on Terror narratives have served to enable class war waged by the political classes of Western democracies against their own people, for the defense of the vested interests and class privileges of the opulent minorities on whose behalf the system of representative democracy was designed and in whose interests it has always functioned.

This is nothing out of the ordinary, but on the contrary entirely consistent with the prescription of James Madison articulated during the Constitutional Convention to the effect that the primary function of government should be to ‘protect the minority of the opulent from the majority.’ To the extent that that is the case, War on Terror narratives have served the same blame-shifting, scapegoating and generally distracting function that the Domino Theory played for western imperialists during the Cold War.

To the extent that those who have internalized the values, methods and goals of the Terror Scare as their own continue to parrot War on Terror mythologies as their own in militant ignorance of fact and militant defiance of logic and reason for the sake of enabling therapeutic psychodrama, we can assume that they neither expect or desire an end to war. On the contrary, the specter of terrorism reified through the conflation of object and relation into a propaganda motif and a moral panic trope provides an opportunity for perpetual war, a permanent scapegoat to blame for everything wrong with the world.

An ideological crutch of this kind only ever becomes more necessary as the consequences of lowering oneself to the level of those provoking us come home to revisit us, even if it was a convenient way to gain greater control over remaining oil supplies and buttress the petrodollar regime at the time. The destructive dynamic set in place only has one ending, just as there is only one person who really gains from it; no prizes for guessing who.

counterpunch.org

Since 2001, it has appeared on numerous websites. The original September 11, 2001 posting became one of the most widely read articles on the internet, pertaining to Al Qaeda.

From the outset, the objective was to use 9/11 as a pretext for launching the first phase of the Middle East War, which consisted in the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan.

Within hours of the attacks, Osama bin Laden was identified as the architect of 9/11. On the following day, the “war on terrorism” had been launched. The media disinformation campaign went into full gear.

Also on September 12, less than 24 hours after the attacks, NATO invoked for the first time in its history “Article 5 of the Washington Treaty – its collective defence clause” declaring the 9/11 attacks on  the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon “to be an attack against all NATO members.”

What happened subsequently, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is already part of history. Iran and Syria constitute the next phase of the US adminstration’s military roadmap.

9/11 remains the pretext and justification for waging a war without borders.

Michel Chossudovsky, September 11, 2015

September 11, 2001. Timeline

At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an indepth police investigation.

That same evening at 9.30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors.  And at 11.00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.

The decision was announced to wage war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in retribution for the 9/11 attacks. The following morning on September 12th, the news headlines indelibly pointed to “state sponsorship” of the 9/11 attacks by Afghanistan 

In chorus, the US media was calling for a military intervention against Afghanistan.

Barely four weeks later, on the 7th of October, Afghanistan was bombed and invaded by US troops. Americans were led to believe that the decison to go to war had been taken on the spur of the moment, on the evening of September 11, in response to the 9/11 attacks and their tragic consequences.

Little did the public realize that a large scale theater war is never planned and executed in a matter of weeks. The decision to launch a war and send troops to Afghanistan had been taken well in advance of 9/11. The “terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event” as it was later described by CentCom Commander General Tommy Franks, served to galvanize public opinion in support of a war agenda which was already in its final planning stage.

The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage a war on “humanitarian grounds”, with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the “international community”.

Several prominent “progressive” intellectuals made a case for “retaliation against terrorism”, on moral and ethical grounds. The “just cause” military doctrine (jus ad bellum) was accepted and upheld at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11, without examining the fact that Washington had not only supported the “Islamic terror network”, it was also instrumental in the installation of the Taliban government in 1996.

In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement was completely isolated. The trade unions and civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Afghanistan, an impoverished country of 30 million people.

I started writing on the evening of September 11, late into the night, going through piles of research notes, which I had previously collected on the history of Al Qaeda. My first text entitled “Who is Osama bin Laden?” was completed and first published on September the 12th. (See full text of the 9/12/2001 article below).

From the very outset, I questioned the official story, which described nineteen Al Qaeda sponsored hijackers involved in a highly sophisticated and organized operation. My first objective was to reveal the true nature of this illusive “enemy of America”, who was “threatening the Homeland”.

The myth of the “outside enemy” and the threat of “Islamic terrorists” was the cornerstone of the Bush adminstration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America.

Without an “outside enemy”, there could be no “war on terrorism”. The entire national security agenda would collapse “like a deck of cards”. The war criminals in high office would have no leg to stand on.

Al Qaeda was a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet-Afghan war. This was a known fact, corroborated by numerous sources including official documents of the US Congress. The intelligence community had time and again acknowledged that they had indeed supported Osama bin Laden, but that in the wake of the Cold War: “he turned against us”.

After 9/11, the campaign of media disinformation served not only to drown the truth but also to kill much of the historical evidence on how this illusive “outside enemy” had been fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”. (Michel Chossudovsky, Excerpts from the Preface of America’s “War on Terrorism”, Second edition, Global Research, 2005.)

Who Is Osama Bin Laden?

by Michel Chossudovsky

www.globalresearch.ca
September 12, 2001

A few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration concluded without supporting evidence, that “Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were prime suspects”. CIA Director George Tenet stated that bin Laden has the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them”. Former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger,

“I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.”

Meanwhile, parroting official statements, the Western media mantra has approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in the Middle East. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: “When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.

The following text outlines the history of Osama Bin Laden and the links of the Islamic “Jihad” to the formulation of US foreign policy during the Cold War and its aftermath.

Prime suspect in the New York and Washington terrorists attacks, branded by the FBI as an “international terrorist” for his role in the African US embassy bombings, Saudi born Osama bin Laden was recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war “ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight Soviet invaders”. 1

In 1979 “the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA” was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal.2:

With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.3

The Islamic “jihad” was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade:

In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166,…[which] authorize[d] stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies — a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, … as well as a “ceaseless stream” of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan’s ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels.4

“Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete socio-political ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by the atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow.”5

Pakistan’s Intelligence Apparatus

Pakistan’s ISI was used as a “go-between”. The CIA covert support to the “jihad” operated indirectly through the Pakistani ISI, –i.e. the CIA did not channel its support directly to the Mujahideen. In other words, for these covert operations to be “successful”, Washington was careful not to reveal the ultimate objective of the “jihad”, which consisted in destroying the Soviet Union.

In the words of CIA’s Milton Beardman “We didn’t train Arabs”. Yet according to Abdel Monam Saidali, of the Al-aram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, bin Laden and the “Afghan Arabs” had been imparted “with very sophisticated types of training that was allowed to them by the CIA” 6

CIA’s Beardman confirmed, in this regard, that Osama bin Laden was not aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): “neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help”. 7

Motivated by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were unaware that they were fighting the Soviet Army on behalf of Uncle Sam. While there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy, Islamic rebel leaders in theatre had no contacts with Washington or the CIA.

With CIA backing and the funneling of massive amounts of US military aid, the Pakistani ISI had developed into a “parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government”. 8 The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers, estimated at 150,000. 9

Meanwhile, CIA operations had also reinforced the Pakistani military regime led by General Zia Ul Haq:

‘Relations between the CIA and the ISI [Pakistan's military intelligence] had grown increasingly warm following [General] Zia’s ouster of Bhutto and the advent of the military regime,’… During most of the Afghan war, Pakistan was more aggressively anti-Soviet than even the United States. Soon after the Soviet military invaded Afghanistan in 1980, Zia [ul Haq] sent his ISI chief to destabilize the Soviet Central Asian states. The CIA only agreed to this plan in October 1984…. `the CIA was more cautious than the Pakistanis.’ Both Pakistan and the United States took the line of deception on Afghanistan with a public posture of negotiating a settlement while privately agreeing that military escalation was the best course.”10

The Golden Crescent Drug Triangle

The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA’s covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. 11 In this regard, Alfred McCoy’s study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, “the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979… to 1.2 million by 1985 — a much steeper rise than in any other nation”:12

CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests … U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies `because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.’ In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War. `Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn’t really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade,’… `I don’t think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout…. There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.’13

In the Wake of the Cold War

In the wake of the Cold War, the Central Asian region is not only strategic for its extensive oil reserves, it also produces three quarters of the World’s opium representing multibillion dollar revenues to business syndicates, financial institutions, intelligence agencies and organized crime. The annual proceeds of the Golden Crescent drug trade (between 100 and 200 billion dollars) represents approximately one third of the Worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $500 billion.14

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 — coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics– reached a record high of 4600 metric tons.15 Powerful business syndicates in the former Soviet Union allied with organized crime are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes.

The ISI’s extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic “jihad” out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Pakistan’s military and intelligence apparatus essentially “served as a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of six new Muslim republics in Central Asia.” 16.

Meanwhile, Islamic missionaries of the Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia had established themselves in the Muslim republics as well as within the Russian federation encroaching upon the institutions of the secular State. Despite its anti-American ideology, Islamic fundamentalism was largely serving Washington’s strategic interests in the former Soviet Union.

Following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the civil war in Afghanistan continued unabated. The Taliban were being supported by the Pakistani Deobandis and their political party the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). In 1993, JUI entered the government coalition of Prime Minister Benazzir Bhutto. Ties between JUI, the Army and ISI were established. In 1995, with the downfall of the Hezb-I-Islami Hektmatyar government in Kabul, the Taliban not only instated a hardline Islamic government, they also “handed control of training camps in Afghanistan over to JUI factions…” 17

And the JUI with the support of the Saudi Wahhabi movements played a key role in recruiting volunteers to fight in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.

Jane Defense Weekly confirms in this regard that “half of Taliban manpower and equipment originate[d] in Pakistan under the ISI” 18

In fact, it would appear that following the Soviet withdrawal both sides in the Afghan civil war continued to receive covert support through Pakistan’s ISI. 19

In other words, backed by Pakistan’s military intelligence (ISI) which in turn was controlled by the CIA, the Taliban Islamic State was largely serving American geopolitical interests. The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In last few months there is evidence that Mujahideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia.

No doubt, this explains why Washington has closed its eyes on the reign of terror imposed by the Taliban including the blatant derogation of women’s rights, the closing down of schools for girls, the dismissal of women employees from government offices and the enforcement of “the Sharia laws of punishment”.20

The War in Chechnya

With regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress’s Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. 21 The summit, was attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking Iranian and Pakistani intelligence officers. In this regard, the involvement of Pakistan’s ISI in Chechnya “goes far beyond supplying the Chechens with weapons and expertise: the ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war”. 22

Russia’s main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington’s perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin.

The two main Chechen rebel armies (respectively led by Commander Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab) estimated at 35,000 strong were supported by Pakistan’s ISI, which also played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel army:

“[In 1994] the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence arranged for Basayev and his trusted lieutenants to undergo intensive Islamic indoctrination and training in guerrilla warfare in the Khost province of Afghanistan at Amir Muawia camp, set up in the early 1980s by the CIA and ISI and run by famous Afghani warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In July 1994, upon graduating from Amir Muawia, Basayev was transferred to Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to undergo training in advanced guerrilla tactics. In Pakistan, Basayev met the highest ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officers: Minister of Defense General Aftab Shahban Mirani, Minister of Interior General Naserullah Babar, and the head of the ISI branch in charge of supporting Islamic causes, General Javed Ashraf, (all now retired). High-level connections soon proved very useful to Basayev.”23

Following his training and indoctrination stint, Basayev was assigned to lead the assault against Russian federal troops in the first Chechen war in 1995. His organization had also developed extensive links to criminal syndicates in Moscow as well as ties to Albanian organized crime and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In 1997-98, according to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) “Chechen warlords started buying up real estate in Kosovo… through several real estate firms registered as a cover in Yugoslavia” 24

Basayev’s organisation has also been involved in a number of rackets including narcotics, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia’s oil pipelines, kidnapping, prostitution, trade in counterfeit dollars and the smuggling of nuclear materials (See Mafia linked to Albania’s collapsed pyramids, 25 Alongside the extensive laundering of drug money, the proceeds of various illicit activities have been funneled towards the recruitment of mercenaries and the purchase of weapons.

During his training in Afghanistan, Shamil Basayev linked up with Saudi born veteran Mujahideen Commander “Al Khattab” who had fought as a volunteer in Afghanistan. Barely a few months after Basayev’s return to Grozny, Khattab was invited (early 1995) to set up an army base in Chechnya for the training of Mujahideen fighters. According to the BBC, Khattab’s posting to Chechnya had been “arranged through the Saudi-Arabian based [International] Islamic Relief Organisation, a militant religious organisation, funded by mosques and rich individuals which channeled funds into Chechnya”.26

Concluding Remarks

Since the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at same time placing him on the FBI’s “most wanted list” as the World’s foremost terrorist.

While the Mujahideen are busy fighting America’s war in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, the FBI –operating as a US based Police Force- is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some respects independently of the CIA which has –since the Soviet-Afghan war– supported international terrorism through its covert operations.

In a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad –featured by the Bush Adminstration as “a threat to America”– is blamed for the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, these same Islamic organisations constitute a key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the truth must prevail to prevent the Bush Adminstration together with its NATO partners from embarking upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.

Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international best America’s “War on Terrorism”  Second Edition, Global Research, 2005. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization. 

To order Chossudovsky’s book  America’s “War on Terrorism”, click here

Notes

• 1. Hugh Davies, International: `Informers’ point the finger at bin Laden; Washington on alert for suicide bombers, The Daily Telegraph, London, 24 August 1998.
  2.  See Fred Halliday, “The Un-great game: the Country that lost the Cold War, Afghanistan, New Republic, 25 March 1996):
  3. Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999.
  4. Steve Coll, Washington Post, July 19, 1992.
  5. Dilip Hiro, Fallout from the Afghan Jihad, Inter Press Services, 21 November 1995.
  6. Weekend Sunday (NPR); Eric Weiner, Ted Clark; 16 August 1998.
  7. Ibid.
  8. Dipankar Banerjee; Possible Connection of ISI With Drug Industry, India Abroad, 2 December 1994.
  9. Ibid
  10. See Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, Oxford university Press, New York, 1995. See also the review of Cordovez and Harrison in International Press Services, 22 August 1995.
  11. Alfred McCoy, Drug fallout: the CIA’s Forty Year Complicity in the Narcotics Trade. The Progressive; 1 August 1997.
  12. Ibid
  13. Ibid.
  14. Douglas Keh, Drug Money in a changing World, Technical document no 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1 United Nations Publication, Vienna 1999, p 49-51, And Richard Lapper, UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade, Financial Times, 24 February 2000.
  15. Report of the International Narcotics Control Board, op cit, p 49-51, see also Richard Lapper, op. cit.
  16. International Press Services, 22 August 1995.
  17. Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, November- December, 1999, p. 22.
  18. Quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, 3 September 1998)
  19. Tim McGirk, Kabul learns to live with its bearded conquerors, The Independent, London, 6 November1996.
  20. See K. Subrahmanyam, Pakistan is Pursuing Asian Goals, India Abroad, 3 November 1995.
  21. Levon Sevunts, Who’s calling the shots?: Chechen conflict finds Islamic roots in Afghanistan and Pakistan, The Gazette, Montreal, 26 October 1999..
  22. Ibid
  23. Ibid.
  24. See Vitaly Romanov and Viktor Yadukha, Chechen Front Moves To Kosovo Segodnia, Moscow, 23 Feb 2000.
  25. The European, 13 February 1997, See also Itar-Tass, 4-5 January 2000.
  26. BBC, 29 September 1999.

Prof Michel Chossudovsky, globalresearch.ca

Indeed, mere days after the 9/11/01 attacks, on 18 September, 2001, George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian that “If Osama bin Laden did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” since “his usefulness to Western governments lies in the power to terrify,” enabling the continuous unleashing of billions of dollars in military spending — on any given day, all year, the Pentagon spends almost $2 billion. No wonder the ghost of Osama rises from Pakistan, from Sudan, from Afghanistan, or from the open ocean. A lie to gin up demand for obscene profits and power? That is easy to believe. The truth? That is tougher to find.

Origins

Since the collapse of the Soviet Era in 1990, America found itself with all its threats seemingly neutralized. War, however, is always great business venture, not only for nation-states but for all manner of military contracting corporations, the gateway to amass profits at rates no legitimate business can produce. Enemies are required–real, imaginary, or manufactured.  In 1995, Ray Moseley wrote in the Chicago Tribune: Could it be that NATO discovered the Islamic threat because, after the demise of communism it desperately needed a new threat to survive as an organization?

Controversial lies in plain sight?

If the Pakistanis were left out of the operation as Obama alleged, where does this leave us with the notions by Pakistani Ex-Spy Chief General Asad Durrani that “ISI probably knew of the al-Qaeda chief’s whereabouts until his death”? The US has underwritten ISI by the $billions for decades. When will the US taxpayer start to wonder about the value of this?

And most interestingly, why has there come no vivid clinical information (rather than verbal claims) about Osama’s DNA, his death-in-combat pictures and his burial. Obama asserted that Osama was given a proper Muslim burial. Says who? Says which Muslim authority? Which Imam was present? Where is it written that proper Islamic burial takes place at sea? Nowhere! It is as if we have settled for a reality that might have scored as a poor episode of 24.

Now what?

Separating fact from fiction is an endless labor. Leaks by Edward Snowden that the NSA actually forced Google and Samsung to allow a Trojan horse to surveil Americans and international citizens shows the ongoing erosion of civil liberties. People are no longer citizens of their nations but instead are often “persons of interest” for entirely legal conduct. Are we an autocracy or a democracy? Dictatorial regimes like Saudi Arabia have been massively supported under the banner of ‘ally’ despite their bad record on human rights and governance issues. In fact today’s war on terrorism has played the total replica of the much worse unending, unfinished Cold War. We support state terrorists in the name of opposing non-state terrorists.

Whether events surrounding Osama death were a spoof or as Seal Team 6 claimed, questions continue and the US seems arrogantly proud of its “global manhunting machine.” Osama’s ghost has not rested. Seymour M. Hersh notes, “Obama today is not facing re-election as he was in the spring of 2011. His principled stand on behalf of the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran says much, as does his decision to operate without the support of the conservative Republicans in Congress. High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.” In 1969, Hersh was the young investigative journalist who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam after the Army covered it up and lied consistently about it; he is still on point today.

Whatever happened to Osama bin Laden, his ghost may be found in the spirit of ISIS and all other US enemies, real and imaginary, urging the US empire to crack its hull on the rocks of war and militarism and join him in a watery, bloody grave. Will we let bin Laden’s ghost have the last laugh?

Ibrahim Bahati, counterpunch.org

Since the publication of this article, the instruments of propaganda have gained in impetus and sophistication. The global campaign against Muslims has continued unabated with a view to creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.

Suspected terrorists are arrested on trumped up charges.  These arrests of individuals of Middle Eastern origin are not motivated by security considerations. Their main function is to provide legitimacy to the “Global War on Terrorism” and the Homeland Security State.  

The ultimate objective is to justify a war of conquest. 

Terrorist attacks by Muslims against the Homeland are said to be imminent. Counter-terrorism is intended to protect the Western World. 

Much of the justification for waging this war without borders rests on the legitimacy of the US  administration’s anti-terrorist agenda.  The latter forms part of the propaganda campaign, which in turn is used to sway the US population into an unconditional acceptance of the war agenda.

Both the Bush and Obama administrations have covertly supported and financed international terrorism. They have used Al Qaeda as well as ISIS as their foot-soldiers, while also using the atrocities committed by the “Islamic terrorists” as a justification for intervening on humanitarian ground.

In Iraq, the Obama administration is supporting ISIS while at the same time waging a fake “war on terrorism” against ISIS. Without the support of media propaganda, the legitimacy of the “war on terrorism” would collapse like a deck of cards. 

The ISIS brigades are integrated by US-NATO sponsored special forces, often recruited by private mercenary companies on contract to the Pentagon. These special forces which integrate the terror brigades are in permanent liaison with their US-NATO counterparts.

Michel Chossudovsky, May 27  2015

*     *     *

One of the main objectives of war propaganda is to «fabricate an enemy» . As anti-war sentiment grows and the political legitimacy the Bush Administration falters, doubts regarding the existence of this “outside enemy” must be dispelled.

As the date of the planned invasion of Iraq approaches, the Bush Administration and its indefectible British ally have multiplied the “warnings” of future Al Qaeda terrorist attacks. The enemy has to appear genuine: thousands of news stories and editorials linking Al Qaeda to the Baghdad government are planted in the news chain. Colin Powell underscored this relationship in his presentation to the Davos World Economic Forum in January. Iraq is casually presented in official statements and in the media as “a haven for and supplier of the terror network”:

“Evidence that is still tightly held is accumulating within the administration that it is not a matter of chance that terror groups in the al Qaeda universe have made their weapons of choice the poisons, gases and chemical devices that are signature arms of the Iraqi regime.”1

In this context, propaganda purports to drown the truth, and kill the evidence on how Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”.

Meanwhile, “anti-terrorist operations” directed against Muslims, including arbitrary mass arrests have been stepped up. In the US, emergency measures are contemplated in the case of war. The corporate media is busy preparing public opinion. A «national emergency» is said to be justified because «America is under attack»:

« the U.S. and Western interests in the Western world have to be prepared for retaliatory attacks from sleeper cells the second we launch an attack in Iraq.» 2

Defence of the Homeland

Emergency procedures are already in place. The Secretary of Homeland Defence -whose mandate is to «safeguard the nation from terrorist attacks» – has already been granted the authority « to take control of a national emergency», implying the establishment of de facto military rule. In turn, the Northern Command would be put in charge of military operations in the US «war on terrorism » theatre.

The Smallpox Vaccination Program

In the context of these emergency measures, preparations for compulsory smallpox vaccination are already under way in response to a presumed threat of a biological weapons attack on US soil. The vaccination program – which has been the object of intense media propaganda– would be launched with the sole purpose of creating an atmosphere of panic among the population:

«A few infected individuals with a stack of plane tickets–or bus tickets, for that matter–could spread smallpox infection across the country, touching off a plague of large proportions …. It is not inconceivable that a North Korea or an Iraq could retain smallpox in a hidden lab and pass the deadly agent on to terrorists.»3

The hidden agenda is crystal clear. How best to discredit the anti-war movement and maintain the legitimacy of the State? Create conditions, which instill fear and hatred, present the rulers as “guardians of the peace”, committed to weeding out terrorism and preserving democracy. In the words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, echoing almost verbatim the US propaganda dispatches:

“’I believe it is inevitable that they will try in some form or other,… ‘I think we can see evidence from the recent arrests that the terrorist network is here as it is around the rest of Europe, around the rest of the world… The most frightening thing about these people is the possible coming together of fanaticism and the technology capable of delivering mass destruction.’”4

Mass Arrests

The mass arrests of individuals of Middle Eastern origin since September 11 2001 on trumped up charges is not motivated by security considerations. Their main function is to provide “credibility” to the fear and propaganda campaign. Each arrest, amply publicised by the corporate media, repeated day after day “gives a face” to this invisible enemy. It also serves to drown the fact that Al Qaeda is a creature of the CIA. “Enemy Number One” is not an enemy but an instrument.)

In other words, the Propaganda campaign performs two important functions.

First it must ensure that the enemy is considered a real threat.

Second, it must distort the truth, –i.e. it must conceal “the relationship” between this “fabricated enemy” and its creators within the military-intelligence apparatus.

In other words, the nature and history of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and the Islamic brigades since the Soviet-Afghan war must be suppressed because if it trickles down to the broader public, the legitimacy of the so-called “war on terrorism” collapses like a deck of cards. And in the process, the legitimacy of the main political and military actors is threatened.

The “9/11 Foreknowledge” Scandal

On 16 May 2002, the New York tabloids revealed that “President Bush had been warned of possible high jacking before the terror attacks” and had failed to act.5

The disinformation campaign was visibly stalling in the face of mounting evidence of CIA-Osama links. For the first time since 9/11, the mainstream press had hinted to the possibility of a cover-up at the highest echelons of the US State apparatus.

FBI Agent Coleen Rowley, who blew the whistle on the FBI, played a key role in unleashing the crisis. Her controversial Memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller pointed to the existence of “deliberate roadblocks” on the investigation of the September 11 attacks:

“Minutes after the 9/11 attacks the SSA [David Frasca, Director of the Radical Fundamentalist unit in the FBI] said ‘this was probably all just a coincidence’ and we were to do nothing until we got their permission, because we might screw up something else going on elsewhere in the country” 6

In response to an impending political crisis, the fear and disinformation campaign went into overdrive. The news chain was all of a sudden inundated with reports and warnings of “future terrorist attacks”. A carefully worded statement (visibly intended to instill fear) by Vice President Dick Cheney contributed to setting the stage:

“I think that the prospects of a future attack on the U.S. are almost a certainty… It could happen tomorrow, it could happen next week, it could happen next year, but they will keep trying. And we have to be prepared.”7

What Cheney is really telling us is that our “intelligence asset”, which we created, is going to strike again. Now, if this “CIA creature” were planning new terrorist attacks, you would expect that the CIA would be first to know about it. In all likelihood, the CIA also controls the so-called ‘warnings’ emanating from CIA sources on “future terrorist attacks” in the US and around the World.

Propaganda’s Consistent Pattern

Upon careful examination of news reports on actual, “possible” or “future” terrorist attacks, the propaganda campaign exhibits a consistent pattern. Similar concepts appear simultaneously in hundreds of media reports:

• they refer to “reliable sources“, a growing body of evidence –e.g. government or intelligence or FBI.
• They invariably indicate that the terrorist groups involved have “ties to bin Laden” or Al Qaeda, or are “sympathetic to bin Laden”,
• The reports often points to the possibility of terrorist attacks, “sooner or later” or “in the next two months“.
• The reports often raise the issue of so-called “soft targets”, pointing to the likelihood of civilian casualties.
• They indicate that future terrorist attacks could take place in a number of allied countries (including Britain, France, Germany) in which public opinion is strongly opposed to the US-led war on terrorism.
• They confirm the need by the US and its allies to initiate “pre-emptive” actions directed against these various terrorist organizations and/or the foreign governments which harbour the terrorists.
• They often point to the likelihood that these terrorist groups possess WMD including biological and chemical weapons (as well as nuclear weapons). The links to Iraq and “rogue states”(discussed in Part I) is also mentioned.
• The warnings also include warnings regarding “attacks on US soil”, attacks against civilians in Western cities.
• They point to efforts undertaken by the police authorities to apprehend the alleged terrorists.
• The arrested individuals are in virtually all cases Muslims and/or of Middle Eastern origin.
• The reports are also used to justify the Homeland Security legislation as well as the “ethnic profiling” and mass arrests of presumed terrorists.

This pattern of disinformation in the Western media applies the usual catch phrases and buzz words. (See press excerpts below. The relevant catch phrases are indicated in bold):

“Published reports, along with new information obtained from U.S. intelligence and military sources, point to a growing body of evidence that terrorists associated with and/or sympathetic to Osama bin Laden are planning a significant attack on U.S. soil.

Also targeted are allied countries that have joined the worldwide hunt for the radical Muslim cells hell-bent on unleashing new waves of terrorist strikes. … The U.S. government’s activation of antiterrorist forces comes as the FBI issued a warning Nov. 14 that a “spectacular” new terrorist attack may be forthcoming – sooner rather than later. …

Elsewhere, the Australian government issued an unprecedented warning to its citizens that al-Qaeda terrorists there might launch attacks within the next two months. 8

Although CIA Director George Tenet said in recent congressional testimony that “an attempt to conduct another attack on U.S. soil is certain,” a trio of former senior CIA officials doubted the chance of any “spectacular” terror attacks on U.S. soil.9

“Germans have been skittish since the terrorist attacks in the United States, fearing that their country is a ripe target for terrorism. Several of the hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks plotted their moves in Hamburg.10

“On Dec. 18, a senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, briefed journalists about the ‘high probability’ of a terrorist attack happening ‘sooner or later.’… he named hotels and shopping centres as potential ‘soft targets’… The official also specifically mentioned: a possible chemical attack in the London subway, the unleashing of smallpox, the poisoning of the water supply and strikes against “postcard targets” such as Big Ben and Canary Warf.

The “sooner or later” alert followed a Home Office warning at the end of November that said Islamic radicals might use dirty bombs or poison gas to inflict huge casualties on British cities. This also made big headlines but the warning was quickly retracted in fear that it would cause public panic. 11

The message yesterday was that these terrorists, however obscure, are trying – and, sooner or later, may break through London’s defences. It is a city where tens of thousands of souls,… Experts have repeatedly said that the UK, with its bullish support for the US and its war on terror, is a genuine and realistic target for terror groups, including the al- Qaeda network led by 11 September mastermind Osama bin Laden.12

Quoting Margaret Thatcher: “Only America has the reach and means to deal with Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or the other wicked psychopaths who will sooner or later step into their shoes.”13

According to a recent US State Department alert: “Increased security at official US facilities has led terrorists to seek softer targets such as residential areas, clubs, restaurants, places of worship, hotels, schools, outdoor recreation events, resorts, beaches and planes.”14

Actual Terrorist Attacks

To be “effective” the fear and disinformation campaign cannot solely rely on unsubstantiated “warnings” of future attacks, it also requires “real” terrorist occurrences or “incidents”, which provide credibility to the Administration’s war plans. Propaganda endorses the need to implement “emergency measures” as well as implement retaliatory military actions.

The triggering of “war pretext incidents” is part of the Pentagon’s assumptions. In fact it is an integral part of US military history.15 In fact in 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had envisaged a secret plan entitled “Operation Northwoods, to deliberately trigger civilian casualties to justify the invasion of Cuba:

“We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,”

“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington” “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”

(See the declassified Top Secret 1962 document titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba”16 (See Operation Northwoods at http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/NOR111A.html ).

There is no evidence that the Pentagon or the CIA played a direct role in recent terrorist attacks. The latter were undertaken by organisations (or cells of these organisations), which operate quite independently, with a certain degree of autonomy. This independence is in the very nature of a covert intelligence operation. The «intelligence asset» is not in direct contact with its covert sponsors. It is not necessarily cognizant of the role it plays on behalf of its intelligence sponsors.

The fundamental question is who is behind them? Through what sources are they being financed? What is the underlying network of ties?

A recent (2002) classified outbrief drafted to guide the Pentagon «calls for the creation of a so-called « Proactive, Pre-emptive Operations Group » (P2OG), to launch secret operations aimed at “stimulating reactions” among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction — that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to “quick-response” attacks by U.S. forces.» 17

The P2OG initiative is nothing new. It essentially extends an existing apparatus of covert operations. Amply documented, the CIA has supported terrorist groups since the Cold War era. This « prodding of terrorist cells » under covert intelligence operations often requires the infiltration and training of the radical groups linked to Al Qaeda.

Prof Michel Chossudovsky, globalresearch.ca

There are a lot of reasons why the stone is a hoax, including most persuasively some anachronisms in the runic characters — futmarks, they’re called; the lack of any corroborating evidence for an expedition, which would necessarily have had royal sponsorship by King Magnusson III, whose court was comparatively well-documented; and the sheer implausibility of medieval Norsemen exploring that far from ocean.

My take on the implausibility of The Stone is simpler. Why would 24 Norse soldier-explorers, returning to the day’s base camp and finding their comrades all dead and bleeding, inscribe and leave a monument in hard stone that they could be extremely confident no rune-reader would ever come across? It’s a big job for men whose primary ambitions at the time must have been burying the dead and scramming before the natives returned.

The contrary evidence, however, is just as compelling. Why would a semi-literate Swedish-American farmer participate in such a hoax? And, if he did, how did he do such a masterful job of it? How would he (1) create The Stone, complete with futmarks that were, after about a century, found to be accurately of the era after all; (2) put it in the roots of a tree upturned by his sons in a land-clearing project; and — most impressively — (3) hand it over to the Scandinavian rune experts at The University of Minnesota for no money.

When The Stone, pronounced a fake, was returned to him, he showed no disappointment, but turned it face down and used it for an entrance block to the back of his house. Later, a young academic came along and evinced considerable enthusiasm for it. The farmer sold it to him for ten dollars. Neither he nor his sons ever revealed anything about some plot of deception. Nor, for that matter, did they ever take any interest in it.

So there’s a story of potential historic significance that is at once incredible and irrefutable. That’s my reaction to Seymour Hersh’s exposé of the killing of Bin Laden.

On one hand, the official story has always been incredible. Who can actually believe that Bin Laden would be living in the Pakistani West Point, 20 minutes from a major USA-Pakistani dark site used to train the guardians of the local nuclear repository; and that nobody in the armed forces and/or ISI would know? And, further, who can believe that two Blackhawks could penetrate Pakistani air space, conduct a raid in such a location, and escape with no Pakistani interference;

…unless there were, as Hersh alleges, massive and effective collaboration with Pakistani military and/or ISI personnel?

So the official story is implausible; and, when you stop to think about it, so is the lack of a video — anywhere — of the purported burial at sea. (Why wasn’t that, at least, shown to calm Islamic anxieties about the propriety of his burial? Pretty simple thing to pull off; and it’s hard not to believe that the U.S. Navy doesn’t routinely record events of that nature.) Other inconsistencies and discrepancies are also plausible, lending an air of credence to Hersh’s story.

On the other hand: Let’s suppose his exposé is true:

Why would senior Pakistani ISI officials possibly permit their obvious collaboration be exposed by having U.S. Navy Seals pull off such an improbable stunt that would render their purported lack of involvement implausible?

And, more:  Why would they possibly concoct, as Hersh says they and the U.S. government did, a cover story that Bin Ladin was killed by an American drone strike somewhere in Waziristan? Why not simply take him to Waziristan, leave his dead body, let Americans know the coordinates, and have the real smash-and-grab take place there? It’s like The Kensington Stone: Neither the hoax nor the purported story adds up.

John Gardner, consortiumnews.com

In Canada, under the clauses of  Canada’s proposed C-51 “Anti-terrorism” Bill, Canadian citizens can be arrested on a mere suspicion:

Six Muslim young adults stand in front of a mosque late at night in heated discussion in some foreign language. … They may be talking about video games, or sports, or girls, or advocating the overthrow of the Harper government. Who knows? … But the new standard for arrest and detention—reason to suspect that they may commit an act—is so low that an officer may be inclined to arrest and detain them in order to investigate further. … They could act on mere suspicion that an arrest is likely to prevent any terrorist activity. Yesterday, the Muslim men were freely exercising constitutional rights to freedom of expression and assembly. Today they are to be arrested. (Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives,  February 15, 2015) 

Anti-Terrorism Double Standards

Ironically, the anti-terrorist legislation does not apply to politicians in high office, namely to the “State sponsors of terrorism”; nor does it apply to U.S. or Canadian diplomats, intelligence officials, who are routinely in liaison with terrorist organizations in the Middle East. 

Individuals can be arrested but presidents and prime ministers are allowed to mingle and socialize with family members of the World’s most renowned terrorist and alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks: Osama bin Laden. 

Lest we forget, one day before the 9/11 attacks, the dad of the sitting President of the United States of America, George Herbert Walker Bush was meeting none other than Shafig bin Laden, the brother of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. It was a routine business meeting on September 10-11, no conflict of interest, no relationship to the 9/11 attacks which allegedly were carried out on the orders of Shafiq’s brother Osama.

Confirmed by the Washington Post, “fellow investors” of the Carlyle Group including Osama’s brother Shafig bin Laden and Dubya’s dad former President George H. W. Bush met in the plush surroundings of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on September 10-11, 2001. Their business encounter under the auspices of the Carlyle Group was unfortunately interrupted on September 11 by the 9/11 attacks.  (see image below):

It didn’t help that as the World Trade Center burned on Sept. 11, 2001, the news interrupted a Carlyle business conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel here attended by a brother of Osama bin Laden [Shafiq bin Laden]. Former president Bush [senior, see image below], a fellow investor, had been with him at the conference the previous day. (Greg Schneider, Pairing the Powerful With the Rich, Washington Post, March 16, 2003)

Shafiq bin Laden, Osama’s  brother and member of the Carlyle Group meets George H. W. Bush at Ritz Carlton on September 10, 2001  (Source: Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 911)

A timely business meeting on September 10-11 at the Ritz Carlton with Osama’s brother disrupted by the 9/11 attacks: pure coincidence,  totally unrelated to the 9/11 attacks.

A day later, on the evening of September 11, 2001, president George W. Bush pronounced a historic speech in which he defined the relationship between “terrorists’ and “state sponsors of terrorism”:

The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

Also in attendance at the Ritz Carlton meetings were former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, former secretary of state James Baker III, and other unnamed members of the bin Laden family.

The Carlyle Group is  embroiled  with the defense and intelligence establishment. “It is widely regarded as an extension of the US government, or at least the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the Pentagon.”

Double standards in anti-terrorism legislation? Double standards in police and law enforcement? No questions asked. No police investigation or interrogation of Osama’s brother Shafig.

The presence of members of the bin Laden family meeting up with the father of the president of the United States was hushed up and 13 members of the bin Ladens including Shafig were flown out of the US on September 19, 2001 in a plane chartered by the White House. Meanwhile, suspected Muslims are arrested on a mere suspicion, –e.g. that they have an old school friend, who’s cousin’s 86 year old grandmother is an an alleged sympathizer of the “jihad”.

Timely departure of Shafig et al: On the day following the departure of the bin Ladens, President Bush delivered an address to a joint session of the House and the Senate (September 20, 2001), in which he stated unequivocally his administration’s intent to “pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism”, with no exceptions (e.g. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan)

“We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make.

Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.)

From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime [state sponsor of terrorism].  President George W. Bush, 20 September 2001 (emphasis added)

Osama behind 9/11?

According to CIA Director George Tenet in a late morning statement on September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda under the helm of Osama bin Laden was “behind these evil acts”.

The alleged responsibility of Osama bin Laden in carrying out the 9/11 attacks was later confirmed by Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair in a statement to the the House of Commons on October 4, 2001.  This did not,  however,  prevent Tony Blair from socializing with Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who prior to 9/11 had allegedly provided millions of dollars of financial assistance to the Al Qaeda terror network:

In testimony [accused hijacker] Moussawi said he created a database of al-Qaeda donors, including members of the royal family such as former intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was Saudi ambassador to the United States for 22 years until 2005. Mint Press, February 14, 2015)

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, right receives Mideast envoy Tony Blair, the ex-prime minister of Britain after his arrival in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia.  Bandar bin Sultan, was accused of direct support for al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks (undated). (Mint Press, February 15, 2015)

Known and documented, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Pakistan have been harboring Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists for more than twenty years.

In accordance with George W. Bush’s September 2001 address to the House and the Senate, America’s staunchest allies –which routinely provide support to terrorists– should have been categorized as “hostile regimes”. Yet in practice, these “nations that provide a safe haven to terrorism” are acting on behalf of the US. They are in permanent and close liaison with Washington and NATO headquarters in Brussels.

“You are either with us or with the terrorists”, said George W. in the wake of 9/11. In fact the US government is both “with us” and “with the terrorists”. The United States is the ultimate “state sponsor of terrorism” which has entrusted its allies (Saudi Arabia, et al) with the tasks of recruitment and training of terrorists. 

Flash Forward: NATO and The Islamic State (ISIS)

State sponsorship of terrorism prevails, with NATO playing a central role in the process of financing, training and recruitment of terrorists. According to Israeli intelligence sources,  NATO and the Turkish High Command have been involved in the recruitment of ISIS and Al Nusrah mercenaries from the outset of the Syrian insurgency in March 2011.

“a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria. (DEBKAfile, NATO to give rebels anti-tank weapons, August 14, 2011.)

Similarly, Western Special Forces and Western intelligence operatives had integrated the ranks of the ISIS. British Special Forces and MI6 have been involved in training jihadist rebels in Syria. In turn, US, Canada embassy officials are in liaison with terrorist entities.

These issues have been amply documented, see:

Canada, State Sponsor of Terrorism? Role of Canadian Embassy in Jordan in ISIS Recruitment?By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 15, 2015

The Ultimate War Crime: America’s “Global War on Terrorism”By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 08, 2015

According to Shamseddin Yusef, one of Chechen leaders, the former Foreign Secretary in Dudaev's government, bin Laden visited Chechnya in 1992 holding a US passport. He said it was later when bin Laden fell out with the United States government. No surprise the family of George Bush has rubbed shoulders with the «terrorist N 1». The US supported Afghan mujahedeen to embroil all the Muslim countries into the war against the USSR. In 1982-1992 citizens of approximately 40 Muslim states fought in Afghanistan. In March 1985 US President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, which authorized stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahedeen and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies – a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987,… as well as a ‘ceaseless stream’ of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan’s ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. According to Abdel Monam Saidali, of the Al-Aram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, bin Laden and the «Afghan Arabs» had been imparted «with very sophisticated types of training that was allowed to them by the CIA». 

 As «the foreign legion of the West» Al Qaeda militants were involved in the war in Yugoslavia. In 1997 the US Senate Republican Policy Committee made no bones about it accusing the Clinton administration for «helping to turn Bosnia into an Islamic militants base».

The «Bosnian pattern» described in the 1997 Congressional RPC report was replicated in Kosovo with the complicity of NATO and the US State Department. Mujahedeen mercenaries from the Middle East and Central Asia were recruited to fight in the ranks of the KLA in 1998-99, largely supporting NATO’s war effort. Confirmed by British military sources, the task of arming and training of the KLA had been entrusted in 1998 to the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Services MI6. Washington who provided support for the international terrorist networks diplomatic recognition. It was nobody else but Madeleine Albright who forced the pace of international diplomacy: the KLA had been spearheaded into playing a central role in the failed «peace negotiations» at Rambouillet in early 1999.

9/11 – no reason to refuse support for terrorists

The war on terror declared by the United States on September 11 only made international terrorist groups stronger and even made them come to power in some countries. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria became victims of US anti-terror fight. In particular, the United States arms Sunni groups to allegedly fight Al Qaeda. American officers who take part in these «bridges building» program say many of Sunnis had been close to the Mesopotamia’s branch of Al Qaeda. (8) According to John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the United States has paid more than $150 million to companies in Afghanistan that are accused of helping to finance terrorist attacks on American soldiers and facilities. Independent journalist and historian Doug Wissing has published the book called Funding the enemy: How US taxpayers bankroll the Taliban. According to him, « Security firms commonly contract with Afghan insurgents to protect U.S.-funded development projects. The notoriously wasteful 64-mile-long Khost-Gardez road project is expected to cost taxpayers $176 million. Over $43 million went to a security firm, which then hired an insurgent leader who was on the U.S. JPEL «kill or capture» list. They paid the jihadi $160,000 a month to provide security against himself». But these are separate cases. There are much more interesting ways the US employs to allow terrorists take the reins of power. In his Islam and the Arab Awakening Tariq Ramadan adduces examples of professional training received by Arab youth in special facilities at the expense of US budget. As far back as 2007 such training facilities appeared in the Caucasus and Serbia. Actually the unrest in all the countries affected was spurred by Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, Yahoo и Gmail e-mails and posts to spark a «flash-mob» effect. The headquarters of the above mentioned companies are located in the Unites States. As a result, in all cases radicals Islamists have come to power. Today Al-Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliated armed group, formally listed as a terrorist organization by US State Department, is a United States leading partner in Syria. No surprise the White House policy evoked protest among US military making Congress bombarded with e-mail protests «Obama, I will not deploy to fight for your al-Qaida rebels in Syria»…

US terror war against Russia

These are the words repeated after former FBI translator Cybil Edmonds, which precisely reflect the scale of the terror war unleashed by the United States against Russia. According to CIA agent Abu Bakr, (3) he was assigned to deal with the Chechen issue as far back as the 1960s. Right after the USSR dismemberment, the Al Qaeda emissaries, including bin Laden, and US instructors under the guise of «servants of Islam» came into Chechnya in droves. Together with their partners from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey Americans provided training for Chechen militants. Shamil Basaev and some other Chechen warlords have gone through an intensive course of ideological inculcation and combat training in the camp located in the Afghan Province of Khost. The training facility was built in the early 1980s by the US Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistani intelligence service ISI. Later Basayev was transferred to Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to hone his guerilla warfare skills. (2) Tamerlan Tsarnaev, accused of perpetrating a terrorist act in Boston, was affiliated with the FBI and went through a CIA-sponsored seminar training course in Georgia held under the auspices of the Jamestown Foundation as part of policy aimed at destabilizing the North Caucasus. 

The United States hosts hundreds of organizations which support terrorism in Russia. According to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, over 60 international extremist organizations, about 100 foreign companies and 10 banking groups participate in providing financial, material and other assistance to the terrorists «touring» the Northern Caucasus. In the U.S. alone, almost 50 organizations are raising funds for North Caucasian extremists.

Their offices are predominantly based in the United States and Europe. In the US only around fifty organizations are involved in collecting funds for North Caucasian extremists, including the Muslim American Bar Association; the Islamic American Center, the Muslim American Bar Association; the Islamic American Center, the Muslim American Council; Islamic Relief/Chechnya appeal, Islamic City Relief; the Islamic-American Zakat Foundation, the Islamic Action Center, the Chechen-Ingush Society of America, also known as Chechen relief expenses, with a division called Chechen Relief, the international Muslim organization Al-Ehsan Charitable Relief Organization, the International Relief Association, Islamic Relief Worldwide, Mercy International and the Benevolence International Foundation.

 They are not just underground communities. The role of the organization American Muslim Assistance (AMA) deserves special mention. It is registered with the U.S. State Department, and its main task is «helping our Muslim brothers throughout the world». The director of AMA, Sheikh Hisham Muhammad Kabbani, who is also the chairman of the influential Islamic Supreme Council of America, chairman of the As-Sunna Foundation of America, and the founder and chairman of the Haqqani Islamic Trust for New Muslims, is known as the author of many works on Islam. AMA operates in the Northern Caucasus and conducts active propaganda to discredit the actions of the Russian authorities. AMA often acts under the cover of other Muslim organizations, in particular, the Islamic Supreme Council of America, which unites 15 million Muslims living in the U.S.

 In 1999 the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus came into being co-chaired by: by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander M. Haig, former US State Secretary, James Wolsey, former Central Intelligence Agency director, Richard Perle, former Assistant Secretary of State, Kenneth Adelman, deputy U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Bruce Jackson, former Vice President for Strategy and Planning at Lockheed Martin, the founder and President of the non-government Project on Transitional Democracies, former President of the US Committee on NATO, a non-profit organization that promoted NATO expansion and strengthening the US-European Relationship, Caspar Weinberger, former Secretary of Defense, Robert McFarlane, National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, Elliot Abrams, a well-known American diplomat, lawyer and political scientist who served in foreign policy positions for both U.S. Presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. (13) The American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus is a Freedom House initiative that bills itself as the»only private, nongovernmental organization in North America exclusively dedicated to promoting the peaceful resolution of the Russo-Chechen war.

The activities aimed at instigating terrorist activities in Russia enjoy impressive amount of funding. Estimates of the funds which belong to the institutions «inspired» by Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen, whose headquarters are located in Pennsylvania, vary widely. Those based on American court records have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion. Hundreds of madrasahs and mosques built by his organization in Central Asia and Russia have become a breeding ground for extremists and serve as a cover for CIA clandestine activities. Gülen owes the giddy career promotion in the United States to Graham E. Fuller, an American author and political analyst, specializing in Islamic extremism, who also served as Station Chief in Kabul for the CIA, and Morton Isaac Abramowitz, an American diplomat and former State Department official, a member of Chechen Committee. The both are prominent figures taking part in shady activities of the United States and NATO. As an expert on Orient, Graham Fuller advocates reliance on political Islam in foreign policy. In Russia his name became known after the Boston terrorist acts. Ruslan Tsarnaev, the outspoken uncle of the brothers was married to Samantha A. Fuller until 2004. Tsarnaev headed an Islamic organization which funnels funds to the Caucasian branch of Al Qaeda. Doku Umarov is suspected of having relation to the Volgograd terrorist acts committed before the 2014 New Year. He owns the Kavkaz Center website and the calls himself the «emir of Russia’s North Caucasus». The website had been funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency till 2011 when the United Nations listed Umarov as a terrorist affiliated with Al Qaeda. Citing US intelligence sources, the Washington Times wrote then that, «Two suicide bombings targeting Russian civilians just weeks from the opening of Winter Olympics have renewed fears that a Chechen terrorist known as the «Russian bin Laden« may be bent on committing or inspiring more attacks on so-called soft targets, and possibly major international sporting events. Such concerns reared their head in April amid evidence that one of the two young Chechen immigrants who executed two deadly bombings at the Boston Marathon drew inspiration from Doku Umarov, the 49-year-old leader of the regional terrorist network known as the Caucasus Emirate whose stated goal is to establish an Islamic state inside Russia. U.S. and Russian intelligence are attempting to discern how much more of an active role Umarov, whom the U.S. listed as a «specially designated global terrorist» in 2010, may have played in plotting and ordering the two suicide bombings in Volgograd that killed 29 people».

What does US need terrorists for?

At first glance there is no reason to foster international terrorism which results in great human death toll, including US citizens. But the likes of Brzezinski think differently. Asked if he regretted the United States fostered Islamic fundamentalism, he said, «Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire». That’s why a recent Gallup poll shows the United States is seen globally as the main supporter of terrorists. The «Western foreign legion» represented by terrorists allows the United States to achieve a number of objectives, including weakening the chief competitors – Russia and China. 

The spread of terrorism under the banner of Islam hinders the process of Islamic world unification. Divided, warring and weakened, the Arab world directly benefits the economy of the United States. It’s not an occasion that the Arab Spring set in immediately after Muammar Gaddafi started to take practical steps to introduce gold dinar. The myth of «fight against terrorism» creates a pretext for United States intervention against any other state having accused it of supporting terrorists. At that, the critical state of US economy makes international terrorism an effective instrument of intimidating Americans and introducing police state. 

Under the guise of preventing terrorist acts, the United States government and Congress have adopted a string of laws since 2001 which practically have eliminated civil liberties in the country. The current «anti-terrorist» legislature allows eavesdropping. Today private phone calls are tapped, private correspondence is intercepted, the suspicious persons, who from time to time even dare to criticize the US policy, are put behind bars without trial, new jails are built to accommodate millions, property is expropriated… 

* * *

The foreign policy achievements Russia reached last year, the progressive implementation of Eurasian integration, gradual rise of Russia to the status of world power – it all has made Washington talk about the need for joint fight against terrorism. No doubt, this battle should be waged with no mercy for the enemy but not according to the instructions issued by those who have fostered the terrorism to be fought. Russia with millions of its Muslim citizens is able to pursue its own way of countering the terrorism, which exists under the guise of defending Islam, and facilitate the emergence of new geopolitical reality…