Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley
Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:27 am
PART 1 OF 2
CHAPTER IV: AL QAEDA: THE CIA'S ARAB LEGION
Al Qaeda and its best-known leader Bin Laden would not exist without the help of the United States, which created them for use against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan, and which continues to support them until this day. At various times, the U.S. Special Forces have been Bin Laden's valets; the State Department has acted as his defense counsel and his travel bureau, and the CIA has furnished his public relations advisors and his preferred health plan; the British government has acted as his Human Resources department to recruit new personnel.
Osama Bin Laden is a rich recluse who speaks to the world by means of video tapes and audio tapes, the validity of which cannot be determined. Bin Laden may be dead, or he may be one of the CIA's several hundred ghost prisoners, who are being held in secret prisons around the world in violation of the Geneva Convention. There is no way of determining the authenticity of any of Bin Laden's tapes, and the statements that are made in them by the figure representing Bin Laden are contradictory. For example, in the weeks after 9/11, a Pakistani newspaper published an interview with "Osama Bin Laden" in which we find the following denial of any role in 9/11:
This may be the voice of one of several Bin Ladens, or it may be the Pakistani voice of one Bin Laden. Several weeks after this interview a tape surfaced in which a rather different Bin Laden seemed to acknowledge, at least obliquely, that he was involved in 9/11. This Bin Laden comments that
Which, if either, is the real Bin laden? There is no way of knowing, so every assertion made about the mysterious, mercurial, and erratic Saudi millionaire is an exercise in speculation.
AL QAEDA, BIN LADEN: THE ACCUSED
Osama Bin Laden appears as a rich misfit, certainly a sociopath, and doubtless obsessed with his own fanatical ideological vision of what the world should be. His main goal would appear to be the restoration of the caliphate, the combined emperor and pope of the Islamic world, an institution which was until about 1924 embodied in the figure of the Ottoman Turkish Sultan. Of course, this utopian Pan-Arab program means that Bin Laden is automatically the enemy of any existing state in the Arab or Islamic world, and thus allows him to conduct what amount to Anglo-American destabilization operations against these states under a cloak of radical Islamic historical legitimacy which certain rulers are clearly hard put to answer.
But Bin Laden is not the greatest political genius of today's world, as the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris attempts to convince us. Bin Laden is a dilettante who could not survive very long without powerful protectors and a comprehensive support network, including kidney dialysis. Rather than a political genius, we evidently see in Bin Laden a clueless dupe, a patsy who cannot comprehend the forces around him which make his day to day activity and above all his universal notoriety possible. According to one of Bin Laden's handlers by the name of Beardman, during the Afghan years 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." (Meyssan 2002 7) In an interview with Frontline, Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, said that when he first met bin Laden, in the nineteen-eighties, "I thought he couldn't lead eight ducks across the street."
Osama Bin Laden was one of dozens of children in the Bin Laden harem, which was presided over by the patriarch of the Saudi Bin Laden construction company fortune. Osama's mother was not the number one wife or valide sultan in this seraglio; she was instead one of the least favored and least important of the numerous spouses. This peculiarity made Osama what we would call in the language of European feudal aristocracy a cadet or younger son, and cadet sons are by definition expendable. The Bin Laden family was one of the wealthiest in Saudi Arabia, and functioned as compradors of the British and the U.S., including the dirty operations of MI-6 and CIA; Osama was for example a relative by marriage of the Iran-contra businessman Adnan Kashoggi. Since he was a cadet son and not one of the Saudi royals, Osama was doubly expendable. He was allegedly asked in 1979 by Prince Turki of Saudi intelligence to mobilize money and volunteers for operations against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Prince Turki wanted a Pan-Arab force to go and fight the Red Army and the Kabul regime. Part of Osama's role was simply to be a bagman for Saudi government funds being sent to the Afghan fighters. In these efforts, Bin Laden worked closely with the Pakistani Interservice Intelligence, and thus also with the CIA and MI-6. The CIA had teams in Afghanistan in early 1979, well before the Soviet invasion which Brzezinski provoked. According to former CIA Director Robert Gates, the big expansion of the U.S. covert operation in Afghanistan began in 1984. During this year, "the size of the CIA's covert program to help the Mujaheddin increased several times over," reaching a level of about $500 million in U.S. and Saudi payments funneled through the Zia regime in Pakistan. As Gates recalled, "it was during this period [1985] that we began to learn of a significant increase in the number of Arab nationals from other countries who had traveled to Afghanistan to fight in the Holy War against the Soviets. They came from Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and elsewhere, and most fought with the Islamic fundamentalist Muj groups, particularly that headed by Abdul Resaul Sayyaf. We examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps in the form of some sort of' international brigade, but nothing came of it. Years later, these fundamentalist fighters trained by the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan would begin to show up around the world, from the Middle East to New York City, still fighting their Holy War, only now including the United States among their enemies. Our mission was to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan. We expected a post-Soviet Afghanistan to be ugly, but never considered that it would become a haven for terrorists operating worldwide." (Gates: 349) But the international brigade Gates talked about was in fact created -- as the group now known as al Qaeda.
The story is then that Bin Laden was shocked and alienated by the arrival of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia for operation Desert Shield, after Saddam Hussein's takeover of Kuwait. The FBI and CIA have accused Bin Laden of having been behind the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 that killed six people, two bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 in which 24 American servicemen died, and the bombings of two American embassies in east Africa in 1998 that killed 224 people, as well as the attack on the 2000 U.S.S. Cole which killed 19 sailors. (New York Times, September 9, 2001)
FBI Director Robert Mueller confessed to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on April 19, 2002 that, after six months in Afghanistan, the U.S. forces had found absolutely no documentary evidence there relating to 9/11. This was a huge scandal, just as big as the later failure to discover the phantomatic weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mueller admitted: "The hijackers also left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper -- either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere -- that mentioned any aspect of the September 11th plot. The hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind. They used hundreds of different pay phones and cell phones, often with prepaid calling cards that are extremely difficult to trace. And they made sure that all the money sent to them to fund their attacks was wired in small amounts to avoid detection."
Clearly the U.S. would now rather not see Bin Laden, if he still exists, be taken alive, for fear of what his testimony might be. On November 21, 2001, Rumsfeld was quite explicit on this point, saying on the CBS "60 Minutes 11" program he would prefer that Osama bin Laden be killed rather than taken alive. "You bet your life," he said.
It became known shortly after 9/11 that Osama Bin Laden's half-brother Salem was an investor in Arbusto Petroleum in the late 1970s, and thus can be counted as a former business partner of George W, Bush. Two weeks after 9/11, the London tabloid Daily Mail carried the banner headline: "Bin Laden's Amazing Business Link with President Bush." George W. Bush and Salem Bin Laden were both present at the creation of Arbusto Energy, an oil company in Texas. Salem Bin Laden had very close business ties to a friend of George W. Bush, a certain James Bath. According to researchers, it is likely that the $50,000 that Bath invested in Arbusto in 1978 actually came from Salem Bin Laden. Salem Bin Laden died in a plane crash in Texas in 1983. This Daily Mail story was singled out on BBC's "European Press Roundup" the following morning, but these facts have never been given adequate coverage by the U.S. media. The Bath angle was, however, stressed by Michael Moore in his Fahrenheit 911. (Daily Mail, September 24, 2001)
The Bin Ladens were benefactors of Harvard University, where there were fellowships offered bearing their name. This fact attracted the attention of the media, but the willingness of Harvard students to accept the Bin Laden money appeared undiminished after 9/11. Andy Tiedemann, a spokesperson in the Harvard University development office, said no Harvard students had called to object to the bin Laden fellowships. The Bin Laden family's endowed fellowships totaled $2 million, for use at Harvard's law and design schools. (Harvard Crimson, October 5, 2001)
ALBRIGHT SABOTAGES EXTRADITION OF BIN LADEN BY SUDAN
During the mid-1990s, Bin Laden established himself in Sudan. By 1996, he had become an embarrassment to the rulers of that country, General Bashir and Hassan Turabi. Sudan had shown in 1994 that it had nothing to do with terrorism when it turned the legendary terrorist Carlos the Jackal over to French authorities, who put him away for good. Early in 1996, the Sudanese government offered to deliver Bin Laden to the Saudis, who declined on the grounds that any prosecution of the fanatical sheikh in his home country might cause a split in the ruling elite, to say nothing of public disorder. In March 1996, Sudan offered to deliver Bin Laden to the U.S. government. Instead of gratefully accepting the extradition of the man who was already one of the world's top terrorists, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chose this moment to provoke a new wave of tensions with Sudan, even contriving -- no doubt as a clever diversion -- to shut down the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum because of alleged terrorist threats. The Sudanese offer remained on the table until May 19, 1996, when Bin Laden departed Sudan for Afghanistan, but Albright invented pretext after pretext to say no. Here we have a crucial experiment that proves the duplicity and hypocrisy of the U.S. regime: they could have had Bin Laden's head on a platter, and they turned it down. Bin Laden, after all, had a great career ahead of him -- he was destined to become the great false-flag countergang leader of lslamic opposition to the U.S. empire.
CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October 17, 2002 that the CIA officially knew nothing about a Sudanese offer to give Bin Laden to the U.S.: "Mr. Chairman, CIA has no knowledge of such an offer," said Tenet. The 9/11 Commission announced in one of their staff reports that they found no evidence that Sudan had offered to deliver Bin Laden directly to the U.S., but they did establish that Sudan was willing to extradite him to Saudi Arabia. (9/11 commission staff report, March 24, 2004) The 9/11 commission final report, ever true to form, simply ignores the Sudanese offer and with it the key issue of why the Albright State Department refused to accept Bin Laden's extradition or rendition. (9/11 commission 61-(62)
These findings simply ignore the public record as documented by Barton Gellman in the Washington Post soon after 9/11-- a specialty of the 9/11 commission. According to Gellman, in 1999, Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir referred elliptically to his government's 1996 willingness to send bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. What remained to be added was the role of the U.S. government and a secret channel from Khartoum to Washington. Gellman wrote:
The Sudanese envoy to the U.S. in this attempted rendition was Sudan's 2001 UN ambassador, major general Elfatih Erwa, who, as Sudan's minister of state for defense in 1996, flew from Khartoum to Washington for secret negotiations with the CIA.
Anthony Lake, then U.S. national security adviser, says Washington was skeptical of Sudan's offer -- meaning that there was an offer. Lake told the Village Voice that Sudan brought up the story after 9/11 because it feared U.S. bombing attacks during the war on terrorism. Apart from the hindsight, why did the U.S. not test the sincerity of the Sudanese offer by demanding the rendition of Bin Laden? The Sudanese offer of Bin Laden was also obliquely confirmed by Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs who was then senior director for Africa on the NSC. Rice's variation is the claim that Sudan made the offer knowing the U.S. couldn't accept it. "They calculated that we didn't have the means to successfully prosecute Bin Laden. That's why I question the sincerity of the offer." Again, rather than indulge in such hairsplitting, why not test Sudanese sincerity by demanding Bin Laden's extradition? One U.S. intelligence source in the region seemed to be close to an answer when he called the lost opportunity a disgrace. "We kidnap minor drug czars and bring them back in burlap bags. Somebody didn't want this to happen." (Village Voice, October 31, 2001) Indeed: a most valuable patsy had to be protected.
But the U.S. refusal to take Bin Laden from the Sudan remains an important point, embarrassing enough to engage Richard Clarke, the true high priest of the Bin Laden myth. Clarke writes in his memoir:
This cover story falls to the ground without any refutation because of its own internal contradictions; Clarke is simply lying, and his statements about terrorism need to be read with full awareness of the mendacity of which he is capable. In addition, if the U.S. waited until 1998 to indict Bin Laden, this confirms the story told in La verite interdite that the U.S. had failed to issue an Interpol warrant for Bin Laden after the Khobar Towers attack of 1996. (Brisard and Dasquie 136)
It is enough to repeat that the reason Bin Laden was not taken into U.S. custody was to preserve a patsy of incalculable value. We should recall once again that Clarke was reportedly ushered out of the James Baker State Department for covering up Israeli violations of the U.S. arms export laws involving the illegal Israeli sale of Patriot missile systems to China. In August 1998, Clarke was reportedly one of the key figures who planted false information about Sudan's involvement in the East Africa U.S. Embassy bombings, which led to U.S. cruise missile attacks on a Sudanese pharmaceutical company in Khartoum which turned out to be producing nothing but aspirin. In this incident, Clarke is said to have retailed disinformation from British-Israeli covert operations stringer Yosef Bodansky that provided a pretext for the targeting of Sudan. The Sudan extradition story was confirmed in "Targeted: Bin Laden," broadcast by the History Channel on September 15, 2004, with interviews by Anonymous, Steve Coll, Saudi Prince Turki, Robert Baer, and others. In reality, Sudan cooperated before and after 9/11 in legitimate international anti-terrorism efforts. One such case came in late spring 2002, when Sudan arrested Abu Huzifa, a suspected AI Qaeda-linked terrorist, at the request of the United States. Abu Huzifa detailed his infiltration of Saudi Arabia, to profile vulnerability of U.S. troops to terrorist attack, and described how he had fired a SAM missile at a U.S. warplane near the Prince Sultan Air Base, one of the headquarters of the U.S. Afghan military operations. According to former Clinton-era ambassador to Sudan Tim Carney, Sudan had been totally cooperative with the United States in the war on terror. (Washington Post, June 14, 2002)
FBI TOLD BY BUSH TO BACK OFF BIN LADENS
FBI agents have testified that Bush 43 ordered the bureau to relax their surveillance of the Bin Laden family members living in the United States. According to BBC Newsnight of November 6, 2001, the FBI "was told to back off bin Laden family." The program said it had been told by a highly placed source in a U.S. intelligence agency there had always been "constraints" on investigating Saudis, but under President George Bush these had become much worse. After the 2000 elections, the intelligence agencies were told to "back off" from investigating the bin Laden family and the Saudi royals. BBC2's Newsnight also said that it had secret documents from the FBI investigation into the terrorist attacks which showed that despite claims that Osama bin Laden was the black sheep of the family, at least two other U.S.-based members were suspected of having links with a possible terrorist organization. The BBC report was based on a secret FBI document numbered 1991 WF213589 and emanating out of the FBI's Washington field office. One of the organizations that the FBI was supposedly ordered to ignore was the "Saudi-funded World Association of Moslem Youth (WAMY), a suspected terrorist organization." WAMY's accounts were frozen by Pakistan after 9/11, and India "claimed that this group was linked to an organization involved in bombing in Kashmir." (Times of India, November 8, 2001) Whatever the specifics, this is the familiar pattern of police agencies finding reasons for not rolling up the financial infrastructure required to keep their indispensable patsies in the field, at least until the big hit has been accomplished.
Just after 9/11, FBI agents swooped down on the Boston suburb where around twenty wealthy relatives of Bin Laden lived, and questioned them at a condominium complex in Charlestown. Agents even visited nightclubs to collect credit cards of younger members of the family. Bin Laden's younger brother Mohammed, who was said to have moved back to Saudi Arabia with his wife and children several years before, owned a ten-bedroom mansion in nearby Wayland. Another younger brother, Abdullah, was a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School. But, despite the official U.S. story demonizing their maverick half-brother, the plutocratic Bin Ladens had nothing to fear. Soon reports began circulating widely that the Bush regime organized special flights out of the U.S. for members of the Bin Laden family and some other wealthy Saudis. Craig Unger and others have told the story of these special flights which whisked the Bin Ladens and other Saudis out of the U.S. during a time when civil aviation was still suspended. The 9/11 commission denies that these took place between Tuesday and Sunday, that is to say during the days when all U.S. commercial aviation was grounded. The Tampa Tribune carried a story about a Lear Jet which took off from Tampa on September 13 and flew to Lexington, Kentucky with Saudi plutocrats on board. The plane started from a private hanger at Raytheon Airport Services in Tampa. It is possible that this Lear Jet was rented from Wally Hilliard, the man who financed Rudi Dekkers' Huffman Aviation in nearby Venice, Florida, where Atta and Shehhi took flight lessons. (Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News 11)
In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. forces constantly imitated the Israeli practice of simply seizing family members of accused terrorists and holding them as hostages. If these illegal methods are good enough for the little people, and if Bin Laden was the heart and soul of world terrorism, why were the opulent Bin Ladens not simply declared enemy combatants and hustled off to Guantanamo for a round of sleep deprivation and other torture, until the family disgorged the fugitive sheikh? U.S. methods, although they are certainly brutal and illegal, are not consistent.
Quite apart from these flights, the U.S. State Department has long functioned as al Qaeda's virtual in-house travel agency. The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, Michael Springman, told BBC Newsnight in the fall of 2001: "In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants -- people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained there. I complained here in Washington ... and I was ignored." He added: "What I was doing was giving visas to terrorists, recruited by the CIA and Osama bin Laden to come back to the United States for training to be used in the war in Afghanistan against the then Soviets."
BUSH 41 WORKS FOR BIN LADENS VIA CARLYLE GROUP
The business cooperation of the Bush and Bin Laden families did not stop with Arbusto. A few weeks after 9/11, readers of the Wall Street Journal were more than mildly surprised to learn that the 41st president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, the father of the current tenant of the White House, was in effect a paid part-time employee of the Saudi Bin Laden Group, the Bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia, through the intermediary of the Carlyle Group, an international investment and consulting firm, in which the Bin Ladens invested. There had been at least two documented meetings of Bush 41 with the Bin Laden business clan, and in reality there had doubtless been more on social occasion and the like. Other top Republicans were also associated with the Carlyle group, such as former Secretary of State James A. Baker, Bush 43's lawyer during the 2000 stolen election, and Iran-Contra heavy Frank Carlucci, a former Secretary of Defense. Also working with Carlyle were Reagan Treasury official Richard Darman, and Bush 41's White House chief of staff, John Sununu. The Journal story repeated the cover story that Osama bin Laden had supposedly been "disowned" by his family, which was running a multi-billion dollar business in Saudi Arabia and was a major investor in the senior Bush's firm. Other reports have questioned, though, whether members of his Saudi family have truly cut off Osama bin Laden. It was also reported that the FBI had subpoenaed the Bin Laden family business's bank records. (Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001; Judicial Watch, September 28, 2001).
Almost everything about Osama Bin Laden remains uncertain, down to the question of whether he is dead or alive, free or in captivity, and whether he is one person or a group of Doppelgangers. But there is no doubt that CIA, MI-6, and their satellites have showed a remarkable loyalty to Bin Laden, building him up and lionizing him at every opportunity. These agencies do this because they need to establish the credibility of their patsy. Because of his notorious track record as a CIA asset, Bin Laden needs all the public relations assistance the agency can give him. In the days after 9/11, a large demonstration was held against terrorism by the middle classes of Teheran, Iran, and one of the most prominent signs read "Bin Laden = CIA agent."
One of Bin Laden's flacks is none other than Bernard Lewis of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the author of the operational U.S.-UK-Israel long-term strategic plan for the dismemberment and Balkanization of the Arab and Islamic states of the Middle east and of the "arc of crisis" which we see in action in Iraq and elsewhere today. Lewis bent over backward to establish the Islamic legitimacy and bona fides of Bin Laden in an interview given about two months after 9/11.
BERNARD LEWIS: BIN LADEN'S FLACK
Lewis argued that bin Laden's brand of Islamic terrorism was completely consistent with classical Islam, which is committed to the subjugation of the infidels to Islamic law. Lewis documented Bin Laden's place in the great tradition of the Moslem world by citing the passage in Bin Laden's recent videotape in which he spoke of "humiliation and disgrace ... for more than 80 years," a reference to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France after 1918. Lewis located Bin Laden in the tradition of jihad, "bequeathed to Moslems by the Prophet." In principle, Lewis went on, the world was divided into two houses: the House of Islam, in which a Moslem government ruled and Moslem law prevailed, and the House of War, meaning the rest of the world, which was still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Moslem state. Among all the different "infidels" ruling the House of War, according to Lewis, Christianity was singled out as "their primary rival in the struggle for world domination." In a masterpiece of Geschichtskletscherei, Lewis cited slogans painted on the walls of the Dome of the Rock from the 7th Century assailing Christianity. Next, Lewis asserted that the evolution of modern Islamic terrorism, specifically al-Qaeda terrorism, had a long history within Islam, dating to the Assassins of the 11-13th Centuries. He also identified Saudi Arabia and Egypt as the two regimes singled out by the Islamic jihadists for their corruption by modernism. He concluded ominously: "For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for the religious dominance of the world that began in the 7th Century ... If Bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his leadership, then a long and bigger struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later, al-Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam -- Russia, China, India -- who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against Moslems and their sanctities. If Bin Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds in his war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam." (New Yorker, November 19, 2001)
THE LANGLEY BIN LADEN FAN CLUB
The most comprehensive document of Bin Ladenolatry so far produced comes from the bowels of the CIA, the work place of Anonymous, the author of Imperial Hubris. This book can only be interpreted as a semi-official compendium of CIA doctrine on today's world. Anonymous is sure that Bin Laden will be able to strike the U.S. again, and this time most likely with a weapon of mass destruction, but he still offers the erratic millionaire praise without stint:
Our anonymous CIA agent waxes positively indignant about those in Saudi Arabia and around the world who impugn Bin Laden's world-historical genius. He is especially upset about certain Saudis who have worked closely with Bin Laden in the past, and who find it impossible to believe that he is now functioning as the evil demiurge of the twenty-first century. Anonymous detects a "theme of Bin Laden's limited mental and leadership abilities" which has been spread by "a number of Saudi officials and writers. Their intent seems simple enough: to prove that Bin Laden is intellectually incapable of managing al Qaeda and designing its operations." (Anonymous 107) As an example of this line, Anonymous quotes an account given by Saudi Prince Mahmoud bin Abdel Aziz to the U.S. press. The Prince recalled
Here we have a rich misfit and fanatic who cannot hold his own in theological debates, which should supposedly be his strongest suit. In Anonymous' view, "the most common form of the Saudis' defamation of Bin Laden is done by having his friends in the kingdom describe him as a gentle, amiable, and relatively unintelligent man." (Anonymous 108) But the yelping detractors of Bin Laden do not stop here. According to Anonymous: "A final side to the effort in the Moslem and Western worlds to denigrate Bin Laden's brains and talents lies in the studied attempt to depict Bin Laden as a simpleton who is directed by that evil terrorist genius Ayman al-Zawahiri, former chief of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now Bin Laden's deputy in al Qaeda. 'My knowledge of Bin Laden makes me unable to conceive what is happening now,' said Dr. Abdullah al Muayyad, a former director general of the Saudi finance ministry who worked with Bin Laden during the Afghan jihad." (Anonymous 107) Like a good CIA agent, Anonymous tries to make his readers think that the Saudis are passing the buck to the nefarious Egyptians, but this is hogwash. Zawahiri, once again, was a key part of the Sadat assassination, and afterwards was protected by London. The world needs to remember Sadat's widow, Jehan Sadat, recalling in a television interview after 9/11 that Zawahiri, a murderer of her husband, had lived in London for years after that crime, while extradition to Egypt was always refused by the UK. The guess here would be that Zawahiri is a double agent working for MI-6, while Bin Laden is indeed a fanatical, deluded patsy and dupe; at any rate, if this is Bin Laden's mentality, it would make him the ideal type for the role he is presently carrying out.
Anonymous devotes a lyrically fulsome passage to evoking Bin Laden's status as a beloved figure among the Moslems; the Moslem love for Osama, he argues, is
Anonymous concludes this paean to his hero Bin Laden by favorably comparing the psychotic sheikh to Abraham Lincoln. This is all coming, we recall, from a high-level CIA officer, one of the founding members of the "Manson family," as the original CIA Bin Laden station called itself. If Arabs and Moslems can be convinced that Bin Laden is really their leader, and not a creature of the CIA, then they will never accomplish the modernizing reforms which the progressive nationalists promised. They will spend their time fighting among themselves in the name of re-creating the caliphate. They will be unable to make alliances against the Anglo-Americans with Europe, with the Orthodox, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Confucians, the atheists, or anybody else; they will self-isolate themselves in endless backwardness. Bin Laden's mass line is, after, all, that it is the duty of every Moslem to kill infidels wherever they are found. If applied literally, this would even cut off all scientific and commercial exchanges in a kind of murderous self-embargo. All these factors will make the Moslem ummah ever so much easier to divide and defeat. No wonder the CIA is so proud of having made Bin Laden a folk hero of the Moslem world, with the help of the 9/11 attacks which the unstable dreamer could never have carried out by himself: literally billions of dollars of publicity for the Saudi misfit have paid off in one of the greatest psychological warfare operations of all time. Any cause that chooses Bin Laden or some similar figure as its leader, we may be certain, is damning itself to a lonely and ignominious defeat at the hands of the laughing CIA kuffar.
Even more notable are the support service which the CIA and it minions continue to provide Bin Laden. Here the evidence is fragmentary but persistent and finally overwhelming. According to CBS News, "the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan ... Bin Laden was spirited into a military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment. (Barry Peterson, "Hospital Worker: I Saw Osama," CBS News, January 29, 2002: http://www.cbsnews.com ) Before we criticize Pakistan, though, we should realize that the ISI in this case was probably acting on U.S. instructions, as it generally does.
LE FIGARO: BIN LADEN TREATED AT AMERICAN HOSPITAL, JULY 2001
On October 31, 2001, Le Figaro, the leading French conservative newspaper, published a front page story about medical treatment received by Bin Laden in Dubai in the summer before 9/11. This remarkable revelation came in an article by Alexandra Richard entitled "La CIA a rencontre Ben Laden a Dubai. en juillet," (The CIA met Bin Laden in Dubai in July). At around the same time, similar facts were reported by Agence France Presse and Radio France International, the French external broadcasting service. The AFP dispatch read in part:
The CIA was quick to deny these embarrassing facts reported by real investigative journalists, who apparently still exist in France. A spokeswoman at CIA Langley, VA headquarters described the Le Figaro article as "complete and utter nonsense. It's nonsense, it's absurd, it's ridiculous, it's not true." The CIA said it intended to protest to Le Figaro. The American Hospital in Dubai denied that Bin Laden had been a patient. (The Scotsman, November 1, 2001) But the French author Richard LaBeviere countered that Osama Bin Laden had been working for the CIA since 1979, a fact which was generally accepted in Europe. (October 31, 2001) Radio France International stuck to its guns and followed up on its story with further details about Bin Laden's CIA handler and case officer, Larry Mitchell: "The local representative of the CIA who visited Osama Bin Laden last July 12 at the American Hospital in Dubai is called Larry Mitchell. If his visiting card specifies that he is a "consular agent," everyone in Dubai knows, especially in the small expatriate community, that he is working under cover. To say it openly, Larry Mitchell belongs to the 'big house', otherwise known as the CIA. He himself does not hide it." RFI went on: " An expert in the Arab world and especially in the Arabian peninsula, Larry Mitchell is a colorful personality who livens up the somewhat drab evenings of the expatriates of Dubai. One of his friends likes to say that his natural exuberance often gets into classified matters. That is perhaps one of the reasons why he was called back to the United States last July 15. About twenty days after the September 11 attacks, in a statement dated October 5, the CIA dismissed as baseless rumors the story that the agency had had contacts with Bin Laden and his group in the past, especially at the time of the war against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan. It happens that this communique of the CIA is in complete contradiction with the earlier official statements of several representatives of the U.S. administration itself." ( http://www.rfi.fr/1 novembre 2001)
It is thus clear that the CIA was providing vital support services to Bin Laden long after he had allegedly turned into the world's leading anti-American monster. The reality is that Bin Laden and al Qaeda have never stopped serving the CIA strategic agenda, whatever that happened to be. As Thierry Meyssan writes, "In reality, the CIA continued to have recourse to Osama Bin Laden's services against Russian influence as it had done against the Soviets. You don't change a winning team. The 'Arab Legion' of Al Qaeda was used, in 1999, to support the Kosovar rebels against the dictatorship in Belgrade. It was also operational in Chechenya, at least until November 2001, as was attested to by the New York Times. (Michael Wines, December 9, 2001) The alleged hostility of Bin Laden against the United States permitted Washington to deny responsibility for these dirty operations." (Meyssan 2002 106-7)
In a discussion of the impact of the anonymous Imperial Hubris CIA tract during the summer of 2004, the Washington Post provided a succinct summary of al Qaeda's strategic services to the CIA: "Al Qaeda' s camps were staffed by veteran fighters who trained insurgents who fought and trained others to fight, not only against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, but also against national armies in Indian Kashmir, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Eritrea, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Tajikistan, Egypt, Bosnia, western China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and the Philippines." (Review of Anonymous, Imperial Hubris, Washington Post, July 11, 2004) Notice that all these states were or are targets of U.S. destabilization. And even this list is far from complete; it leaves out Libya, for example.
The Iranian press also noted the strange affinities of al Qaeda for figures who were clearly still on the U.S. payroll. While panning the 9/11 commission report, the Teheran Times observed that none other than KSM, "Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, the reported mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was a longtime associate of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance and current ally of the U.S.-backed Afghans president, Hamid Karzai." (Teheran Times, July 27, 2004)
AL QAEDA AND NATO'S BALKAN DRUG RUNNING
Another thing that is known about al Qaeda is that Bin Laden's supposed followers are drug pushers in grand style -- once again a foible they share with MI-6 and CIA. During a fall 2001 strategic briefing, Gwen McClure of Interpol's Criminal Subdivision officially informed a group of parliamentarians from NATO countries that Interpol had evidence that the Bin Laden group "is linked to Albanian gangs who have taken over the growing web of crime across Europe. The investigations of Interpol have also shown that bin Laden deployed one of his top military commanders for an elite KLA unit during the NATO Kosovo war." The Interpol official also stated that a special meeting took place in Albania in the presence of bin Laden, according to Albanian police. Several Algerian terrorists were present at the meeting. "It was during this meeting," the official stressed, "that many structures and networks were established for propaganda and fund raising activities and for providing the Algerian armed groups with logistical support." During and immediately after the Kosovo war, when the KLA took over the Kosovo, heroin and weapons traffic exploded unchecked. The so-called "Albanian mafia" ended up controlling 80% of the heroin distribution in Western Europe, using the NATO Kosovo protectorate as its base. The criminal and the terrorist networks became indistinguishable, with a multiplying destructive effect. "These crime syndicates have formed alliances of convenience and are willing to cooperate or make business arrangements with other organized crime groups," the Interpol official told the parliamentarians. She also said Interpol had evidence of the involvement in the criminal and terrorist activities of the Chechnya terrorists. According to Balkan sources and other records, the man in charge for the Balkan terrorism-organized crime connection was Bin Laden's chief adviser or controller, the head of the Egyptian Jihad, Ayman al Zawahiri. Zawahiri's brother Mohamed was reported to be in Macedonia just after 9/11, leading a gang of ideological mercenaries to launch another major KLA assault against the country. Ayman al Zawahiri was in Albania to play a leading role in the KLA/NATO offensive against Serbia in 1999. (Independent, October 24, 2001) According to some experts, the al Qaeda/KLA united front had taken over the 1980s "Bulgarian connection" or Balkan Route, which involved a gigantic arms-for-drugs traffic with the involvement of numerous NATO, Warsaw Pact, and other intelligence services and various ethnic mafias. The Bulgarian connection had come under intense scrutiny after the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II on May 13 1981. (The Independent, October 24, 2001)
ZAWAHIRI AND NATO'S DARLING, THE KLA
The brother of Bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al Zawahiri, was reported after 9/11 to be taking part in terrorist actions in Northern Macedonia, where NATO's puppet Albanian KLA had started a new terror campaign. The Zawahiri connection surfaced on October 25, 2001, when the "new" KLA in Macedonia, the Albanian National Army (ANA), claimed responsibility for the bombing of the police station and municipal building of Tearce in north Macedonia. Tearce was one of the Macedonian towns -- previously assaulted, occupied and "cleansed" of its Macedonian inhabitants which became the scene of a symbolic policing by a mixed police patrol of ethnic Albanians and Macedonians.
CHAPTER IV: AL QAEDA: THE CIA'S ARAB LEGION
"I thought these guys [Atta & Co] were double agents."
-- former executive, Huffman Aviation, Venice FL (Hopsicker 150)
Al Qaeda and its best-known leader Bin Laden would not exist without the help of the United States, which created them for use against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan, and which continues to support them until this day. At various times, the U.S. Special Forces have been Bin Laden's valets; the State Department has acted as his defense counsel and his travel bureau, and the CIA has furnished his public relations advisors and his preferred health plan; the British government has acted as his Human Resources department to recruit new personnel.
Osama Bin Laden is a rich recluse who speaks to the world by means of video tapes and audio tapes, the validity of which cannot be determined. Bin Laden may be dead, or he may be one of the CIA's several hundred ghost prisoners, who are being held in secret prisons around the world in violation of the Geneva Convention. There is no way of determining the authenticity of any of Bin Laden's tapes, and the statements that are made in them by the figure representing Bin Laden are contradictory. For example, in the weeks after 9/11, a Pakistani newspaper published an interview with "Osama Bin Laden" in which we find the following denial of any role in 9/11:
I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Moslem, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam. All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel. There is also a warning for those Moslem countries, which witnessed all these as a silent spectator. What had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya and Bosnia? Only one conclusion could be derived from the indifference of the United States and the West to these acts of terror and the patronage of the tyrants by these powers: that America is an anti-Islamic power and it is patronizing the anti-Islamic forces. Its friendship with the Moslem countries is just a show, rather deceit. By enticing or intimidating these countries, the United States is forcing them to play a role of its choice. Put a glance all around and you will see that the slaves of the United States are either rulers or enemies of Moslems.
The countries which do not agree to become the U.S. slaves are China, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Syria [Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia] and Russia. Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed. According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the U.S. Government has stated. But the Bush Administration does not want the panic to spread. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the U.S. system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive. They can be anyone, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia. In the U.S. itself, there are dozens of well-organized and well-equipped groups, which are capable of causing a large-scale destruction. Then you cannot target the American- Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him.
Then there are intelligence agencies in the U.S., which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Osama and Taliban and then this incident happened. You see, the Bush Administration approved a budget of 40 billion dollars. Where will this huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need huge funds and want to exert their importance. Now they will spend the money for their expansion and for increasing their importance. I will give you an example. Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the U.S. secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat. In the same way, whether it is President Bush or any other U.S. President, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks. (Ummat, Karachi, September 28, 2001)
This may be the voice of one of several Bin Ladens, or it may be the Pakistani voice of one Bin Laden. Several weeks after this interview a tape surfaced in which a rather different Bin Laden seemed to acknowledge, at least obliquely, that he was involved in 9/11. This Bin Laden comments that
The brothers, who conducted the operation, all they knew was that they have a martyrdom operation and we asked each of them to go to America but they didn't know anything about the operation, not even one letter. But they were trained and we did not reveal the operation to them until they are there and just before they boarded the planes. (Meyssan 2002 196)
Which, if either, is the real Bin laden? There is no way of knowing, so every assertion made about the mysterious, mercurial, and erratic Saudi millionaire is an exercise in speculation.
AL QAEDA, BIN LADEN: THE ACCUSED
Osama Bin Laden appears as a rich misfit, certainly a sociopath, and doubtless obsessed with his own fanatical ideological vision of what the world should be. His main goal would appear to be the restoration of the caliphate, the combined emperor and pope of the Islamic world, an institution which was until about 1924 embodied in the figure of the Ottoman Turkish Sultan. Of course, this utopian Pan-Arab program means that Bin Laden is automatically the enemy of any existing state in the Arab or Islamic world, and thus allows him to conduct what amount to Anglo-American destabilization operations against these states under a cloak of radical Islamic historical legitimacy which certain rulers are clearly hard put to answer.
But Bin Laden is not the greatest political genius of today's world, as the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris attempts to convince us. Bin Laden is a dilettante who could not survive very long without powerful protectors and a comprehensive support network, including kidney dialysis. Rather than a political genius, we evidently see in Bin Laden a clueless dupe, a patsy who cannot comprehend the forces around him which make his day to day activity and above all his universal notoriety possible. According to one of Bin Laden's handlers by the name of Beardman, during the Afghan years 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." (Meyssan 2002 7) In an interview with Frontline, Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, said that when he first met bin Laden, in the nineteen-eighties, "I thought he couldn't lead eight ducks across the street."
Osama Bin Laden was one of dozens of children in the Bin Laden harem, which was presided over by the patriarch of the Saudi Bin Laden construction company fortune. Osama's mother was not the number one wife or valide sultan in this seraglio; she was instead one of the least favored and least important of the numerous spouses. This peculiarity made Osama what we would call in the language of European feudal aristocracy a cadet or younger son, and cadet sons are by definition expendable. The Bin Laden family was one of the wealthiest in Saudi Arabia, and functioned as compradors of the British and the U.S., including the dirty operations of MI-6 and CIA; Osama was for example a relative by marriage of the Iran-contra businessman Adnan Kashoggi. Since he was a cadet son and not one of the Saudi royals, Osama was doubly expendable. He was allegedly asked in 1979 by Prince Turki of Saudi intelligence to mobilize money and volunteers for operations against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Prince Turki wanted a Pan-Arab force to go and fight the Red Army and the Kabul regime. Part of Osama's role was simply to be a bagman for Saudi government funds being sent to the Afghan fighters. In these efforts, Bin Laden worked closely with the Pakistani Interservice Intelligence, and thus also with the CIA and MI-6. The CIA had teams in Afghanistan in early 1979, well before the Soviet invasion which Brzezinski provoked. According to former CIA Director Robert Gates, the big expansion of the U.S. covert operation in Afghanistan began in 1984. During this year, "the size of the CIA's covert program to help the Mujaheddin increased several times over," reaching a level of about $500 million in U.S. and Saudi payments funneled through the Zia regime in Pakistan. As Gates recalled, "it was during this period [1985] that we began to learn of a significant increase in the number of Arab nationals from other countries who had traveled to Afghanistan to fight in the Holy War against the Soviets. They came from Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and elsewhere, and most fought with the Islamic fundamentalist Muj groups, particularly that headed by Abdul Resaul Sayyaf. We examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps in the form of some sort of' international brigade, but nothing came of it. Years later, these fundamentalist fighters trained by the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan would begin to show up around the world, from the Middle East to New York City, still fighting their Holy War, only now including the United States among their enemies. Our mission was to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan. We expected a post-Soviet Afghanistan to be ugly, but never considered that it would become a haven for terrorists operating worldwide." (Gates: 349) But the international brigade Gates talked about was in fact created -- as the group now known as al Qaeda.
The story is then that Bin Laden was shocked and alienated by the arrival of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia for operation Desert Shield, after Saddam Hussein's takeover of Kuwait. The FBI and CIA have accused Bin Laden of having been behind the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 that killed six people, two bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 in which 24 American servicemen died, and the bombings of two American embassies in east Africa in 1998 that killed 224 people, as well as the attack on the 2000 U.S.S. Cole which killed 19 sailors. (New York Times, September 9, 2001)
FBI Director Robert Mueller confessed to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on April 19, 2002 that, after six months in Afghanistan, the U.S. forces had found absolutely no documentary evidence there relating to 9/11. This was a huge scandal, just as big as the later failure to discover the phantomatic weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mueller admitted: "The hijackers also left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper -- either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere -- that mentioned any aspect of the September 11th plot. The hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind. They used hundreds of different pay phones and cell phones, often with prepaid calling cards that are extremely difficult to trace. And they made sure that all the money sent to them to fund their attacks was wired in small amounts to avoid detection."
Clearly the U.S. would now rather not see Bin Laden, if he still exists, be taken alive, for fear of what his testimony might be. On November 21, 2001, Rumsfeld was quite explicit on this point, saying on the CBS "60 Minutes 11" program he would prefer that Osama bin Laden be killed rather than taken alive. "You bet your life," he said.
It became known shortly after 9/11 that Osama Bin Laden's half-brother Salem was an investor in Arbusto Petroleum in the late 1970s, and thus can be counted as a former business partner of George W, Bush. Two weeks after 9/11, the London tabloid Daily Mail carried the banner headline: "Bin Laden's Amazing Business Link with President Bush." George W. Bush and Salem Bin Laden were both present at the creation of Arbusto Energy, an oil company in Texas. Salem Bin Laden had very close business ties to a friend of George W. Bush, a certain James Bath. According to researchers, it is likely that the $50,000 that Bath invested in Arbusto in 1978 actually came from Salem Bin Laden. Salem Bin Laden died in a plane crash in Texas in 1983. This Daily Mail story was singled out on BBC's "European Press Roundup" the following morning, but these facts have never been given adequate coverage by the U.S. media. The Bath angle was, however, stressed by Michael Moore in his Fahrenheit 911. (Daily Mail, September 24, 2001)
The Bin Ladens were benefactors of Harvard University, where there were fellowships offered bearing their name. This fact attracted the attention of the media, but the willingness of Harvard students to accept the Bin Laden money appeared undiminished after 9/11. Andy Tiedemann, a spokesperson in the Harvard University development office, said no Harvard students had called to object to the bin Laden fellowships. The Bin Laden family's endowed fellowships totaled $2 million, for use at Harvard's law and design schools. (Harvard Crimson, October 5, 2001)
ALBRIGHT SABOTAGES EXTRADITION OF BIN LADEN BY SUDAN
During the mid-1990s, Bin Laden established himself in Sudan. By 1996, he had become an embarrassment to the rulers of that country, General Bashir and Hassan Turabi. Sudan had shown in 1994 that it had nothing to do with terrorism when it turned the legendary terrorist Carlos the Jackal over to French authorities, who put him away for good. Early in 1996, the Sudanese government offered to deliver Bin Laden to the Saudis, who declined on the grounds that any prosecution of the fanatical sheikh in his home country might cause a split in the ruling elite, to say nothing of public disorder. In March 1996, Sudan offered to deliver Bin Laden to the U.S. government. Instead of gratefully accepting the extradition of the man who was already one of the world's top terrorists, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chose this moment to provoke a new wave of tensions with Sudan, even contriving -- no doubt as a clever diversion -- to shut down the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum because of alleged terrorist threats. The Sudanese offer remained on the table until May 19, 1996, when Bin Laden departed Sudan for Afghanistan, but Albright invented pretext after pretext to say no. Here we have a crucial experiment that proves the duplicity and hypocrisy of the U.S. regime: they could have had Bin Laden's head on a platter, and they turned it down. Bin Laden, after all, had a great career ahead of him -- he was destined to become the great false-flag countergang leader of lslamic opposition to the U.S. empire.
CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October 17, 2002 that the CIA officially knew nothing about a Sudanese offer to give Bin Laden to the U.S.: "Mr. Chairman, CIA has no knowledge of such an offer," said Tenet. The 9/11 Commission announced in one of their staff reports that they found no evidence that Sudan had offered to deliver Bin Laden directly to the U.S., but they did establish that Sudan was willing to extradite him to Saudi Arabia. (9/11 commission staff report, March 24, 2004) The 9/11 commission final report, ever true to form, simply ignores the Sudanese offer and with it the key issue of why the Albright State Department refused to accept Bin Laden's extradition or rendition. (9/11 commission 61-(62)
These findings simply ignore the public record as documented by Barton Gellman in the Washington Post soon after 9/11-- a specialty of the 9/11 commission. According to Gellman, in 1999, Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir referred elliptically to his government's 1996 willingness to send bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. What remained to be added was the role of the U.S. government and a secret channel from Khartoum to Washington. Gellman wrote:
The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.
Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret contacts that stretched from a meeting at a Rosslyn hotel on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later. Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts at the time, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture. (Washington Post, Wednesday, October 3, 2001)
The Sudanese envoy to the U.S. in this attempted rendition was Sudan's 2001 UN ambassador, major general Elfatih Erwa, who, as Sudan's minister of state for defense in 1996, flew from Khartoum to Washington for secret negotiations with the CIA.
Anthony Lake, then U.S. national security adviser, says Washington was skeptical of Sudan's offer -- meaning that there was an offer. Lake told the Village Voice that Sudan brought up the story after 9/11 because it feared U.S. bombing attacks during the war on terrorism. Apart from the hindsight, why did the U.S. not test the sincerity of the Sudanese offer by demanding the rendition of Bin Laden? The Sudanese offer of Bin Laden was also obliquely confirmed by Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs who was then senior director for Africa on the NSC. Rice's variation is the claim that Sudan made the offer knowing the U.S. couldn't accept it. "They calculated that we didn't have the means to successfully prosecute Bin Laden. That's why I question the sincerity of the offer." Again, rather than indulge in such hairsplitting, why not test Sudanese sincerity by demanding Bin Laden's extradition? One U.S. intelligence source in the region seemed to be close to an answer when he called the lost opportunity a disgrace. "We kidnap minor drug czars and bring them back in burlap bags. Somebody didn't want this to happen." (Village Voice, October 31, 2001) Indeed: a most valuable patsy had to be protected.
But the U.S. refusal to take Bin Laden from the Sudan remains an important point, embarrassing enough to engage Richard Clarke, the true high priest of the Bin Laden myth. Clarke writes in his memoir:
Turabi and Bin Laden parted as friends, and pledged to continue the struggle and to use Khartoum as a safe haven. In recent years Sudanese intelligence officials and Americans friendly to the Sudan regime have invented a fable about Bin Laden's final days in Khartoum. In the fable the Sudanese government offers to arrest Bin Laden and hand him over in chains to FBl agents, but Washington rejects the offer because the Clinton administration does not see Bin Laden as important or does and cannot find anywhere to put him on trial. The only slivers of truth in this fable are that a) the Sudanese government was denying its support for terrorism in the wake of the UN sanctions, and b) the CSG had initiated informal inquiries with several nations about incarcerating Bin Laden, or putting him on trial. There were no takers. Nonetheless, had we been able to put our hands on him we would gladly have done so. U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White in Manhattan could, as the saying goes, "indict a ham sandwich." She certainly could have obtained an indictment for Bin Laden in 1996 had we needed it. In the spring of 1998, she did so. The facts about the supposed Sudanese offer to give us Bin Laden are that Turabi was not about to turn over his partner in terror to us and no real attempt to do so ever occurred. (Clarke 142)
This cover story falls to the ground without any refutation because of its own internal contradictions; Clarke is simply lying, and his statements about terrorism need to be read with full awareness of the mendacity of which he is capable. In addition, if the U.S. waited until 1998 to indict Bin Laden, this confirms the story told in La verite interdite that the U.S. had failed to issue an Interpol warrant for Bin Laden after the Khobar Towers attack of 1996. (Brisard and Dasquie 136)
It is enough to repeat that the reason Bin Laden was not taken into U.S. custody was to preserve a patsy of incalculable value. We should recall once again that Clarke was reportedly ushered out of the James Baker State Department for covering up Israeli violations of the U.S. arms export laws involving the illegal Israeli sale of Patriot missile systems to China. In August 1998, Clarke was reportedly one of the key figures who planted false information about Sudan's involvement in the East Africa U.S. Embassy bombings, which led to U.S. cruise missile attacks on a Sudanese pharmaceutical company in Khartoum which turned out to be producing nothing but aspirin. In this incident, Clarke is said to have retailed disinformation from British-Israeli covert operations stringer Yosef Bodansky that provided a pretext for the targeting of Sudan. The Sudan extradition story was confirmed in "Targeted: Bin Laden," broadcast by the History Channel on September 15, 2004, with interviews by Anonymous, Steve Coll, Saudi Prince Turki, Robert Baer, and others. In reality, Sudan cooperated before and after 9/11 in legitimate international anti-terrorism efforts. One such case came in late spring 2002, when Sudan arrested Abu Huzifa, a suspected AI Qaeda-linked terrorist, at the request of the United States. Abu Huzifa detailed his infiltration of Saudi Arabia, to profile vulnerability of U.S. troops to terrorist attack, and described how he had fired a SAM missile at a U.S. warplane near the Prince Sultan Air Base, one of the headquarters of the U.S. Afghan military operations. According to former Clinton-era ambassador to Sudan Tim Carney, Sudan had been totally cooperative with the United States in the war on terror. (Washington Post, June 14, 2002)
FBI TOLD BY BUSH TO BACK OFF BIN LADENS
FBI agents have testified that Bush 43 ordered the bureau to relax their surveillance of the Bin Laden family members living in the United States. According to BBC Newsnight of November 6, 2001, the FBI "was told to back off bin Laden family." The program said it had been told by a highly placed source in a U.S. intelligence agency there had always been "constraints" on investigating Saudis, but under President George Bush these had become much worse. After the 2000 elections, the intelligence agencies were told to "back off" from investigating the bin Laden family and the Saudi royals. BBC2's Newsnight also said that it had secret documents from the FBI investigation into the terrorist attacks which showed that despite claims that Osama bin Laden was the black sheep of the family, at least two other U.S.-based members were suspected of having links with a possible terrorist organization. The BBC report was based on a secret FBI document numbered 1991 WF213589 and emanating out of the FBI's Washington field office. One of the organizations that the FBI was supposedly ordered to ignore was the "Saudi-funded World Association of Moslem Youth (WAMY), a suspected terrorist organization." WAMY's accounts were frozen by Pakistan after 9/11, and India "claimed that this group was linked to an organization involved in bombing in Kashmir." (Times of India, November 8, 2001) Whatever the specifics, this is the familiar pattern of police agencies finding reasons for not rolling up the financial infrastructure required to keep their indispensable patsies in the field, at least until the big hit has been accomplished.
Just after 9/11, FBI agents swooped down on the Boston suburb where around twenty wealthy relatives of Bin Laden lived, and questioned them at a condominium complex in Charlestown. Agents even visited nightclubs to collect credit cards of younger members of the family. Bin Laden's younger brother Mohammed, who was said to have moved back to Saudi Arabia with his wife and children several years before, owned a ten-bedroom mansion in nearby Wayland. Another younger brother, Abdullah, was a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School. But, despite the official U.S. story demonizing their maverick half-brother, the plutocratic Bin Ladens had nothing to fear. Soon reports began circulating widely that the Bush regime organized special flights out of the U.S. for members of the Bin Laden family and some other wealthy Saudis. Craig Unger and others have told the story of these special flights which whisked the Bin Ladens and other Saudis out of the U.S. during a time when civil aviation was still suspended. The 9/11 commission denies that these took place between Tuesday and Sunday, that is to say during the days when all U.S. commercial aviation was grounded. The Tampa Tribune carried a story about a Lear Jet which took off from Tampa on September 13 and flew to Lexington, Kentucky with Saudi plutocrats on board. The plane started from a private hanger at Raytheon Airport Services in Tampa. It is possible that this Lear Jet was rented from Wally Hilliard, the man who financed Rudi Dekkers' Huffman Aviation in nearby Venice, Florida, where Atta and Shehhi took flight lessons. (Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News 11)
In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. forces constantly imitated the Israeli practice of simply seizing family members of accused terrorists and holding them as hostages. If these illegal methods are good enough for the little people, and if Bin Laden was the heart and soul of world terrorism, why were the opulent Bin Ladens not simply declared enemy combatants and hustled off to Guantanamo for a round of sleep deprivation and other torture, until the family disgorged the fugitive sheikh? U.S. methods, although they are certainly brutal and illegal, are not consistent.
Quite apart from these flights, the U.S. State Department has long functioned as al Qaeda's virtual in-house travel agency. The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, Michael Springman, told BBC Newsnight in the fall of 2001: "In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants -- people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained there. I complained here in Washington ... and I was ignored." He added: "What I was doing was giving visas to terrorists, recruited by the CIA and Osama bin Laden to come back to the United States for training to be used in the war in Afghanistan against the then Soviets."
BUSH 41 WORKS FOR BIN LADENS VIA CARLYLE GROUP
The business cooperation of the Bush and Bin Laden families did not stop with Arbusto. A few weeks after 9/11, readers of the Wall Street Journal were more than mildly surprised to learn that the 41st president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, the father of the current tenant of the White House, was in effect a paid part-time employee of the Saudi Bin Laden Group, the Bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia, through the intermediary of the Carlyle Group, an international investment and consulting firm, in which the Bin Ladens invested. There had been at least two documented meetings of Bush 41 with the Bin Laden business clan, and in reality there had doubtless been more on social occasion and the like. Other top Republicans were also associated with the Carlyle group, such as former Secretary of State James A. Baker, Bush 43's lawyer during the 2000 stolen election, and Iran-Contra heavy Frank Carlucci, a former Secretary of Defense. Also working with Carlyle were Reagan Treasury official Richard Darman, and Bush 41's White House chief of staff, John Sununu. The Journal story repeated the cover story that Osama bin Laden had supposedly been "disowned" by his family, which was running a multi-billion dollar business in Saudi Arabia and was a major investor in the senior Bush's firm. Other reports have questioned, though, whether members of his Saudi family have truly cut off Osama bin Laden. It was also reported that the FBI had subpoenaed the Bin Laden family business's bank records. (Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001; Judicial Watch, September 28, 2001).
Almost everything about Osama Bin Laden remains uncertain, down to the question of whether he is dead or alive, free or in captivity, and whether he is one person or a group of Doppelgangers. But there is no doubt that CIA, MI-6, and their satellites have showed a remarkable loyalty to Bin Laden, building him up and lionizing him at every opportunity. These agencies do this because they need to establish the credibility of their patsy. Because of his notorious track record as a CIA asset, Bin Laden needs all the public relations assistance the agency can give him. In the days after 9/11, a large demonstration was held against terrorism by the middle classes of Teheran, Iran, and one of the most prominent signs read "Bin Laden = CIA agent."
One of Bin Laden's flacks is none other than Bernard Lewis of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the author of the operational U.S.-UK-Israel long-term strategic plan for the dismemberment and Balkanization of the Arab and Islamic states of the Middle east and of the "arc of crisis" which we see in action in Iraq and elsewhere today. Lewis bent over backward to establish the Islamic legitimacy and bona fides of Bin Laden in an interview given about two months after 9/11.
BERNARD LEWIS: BIN LADEN'S FLACK
Lewis argued that bin Laden's brand of Islamic terrorism was completely consistent with classical Islam, which is committed to the subjugation of the infidels to Islamic law. Lewis documented Bin Laden's place in the great tradition of the Moslem world by citing the passage in Bin Laden's recent videotape in which he spoke of "humiliation and disgrace ... for more than 80 years," a reference to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France after 1918. Lewis located Bin Laden in the tradition of jihad, "bequeathed to Moslems by the Prophet." In principle, Lewis went on, the world was divided into two houses: the House of Islam, in which a Moslem government ruled and Moslem law prevailed, and the House of War, meaning the rest of the world, which was still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Moslem state. Among all the different "infidels" ruling the House of War, according to Lewis, Christianity was singled out as "their primary rival in the struggle for world domination." In a masterpiece of Geschichtskletscherei, Lewis cited slogans painted on the walls of the Dome of the Rock from the 7th Century assailing Christianity. Next, Lewis asserted that the evolution of modern Islamic terrorism, specifically al-Qaeda terrorism, had a long history within Islam, dating to the Assassins of the 11-13th Centuries. He also identified Saudi Arabia and Egypt as the two regimes singled out by the Islamic jihadists for their corruption by modernism. He concluded ominously: "For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for the religious dominance of the world that began in the 7th Century ... If Bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his leadership, then a long and bigger struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later, al-Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam -- Russia, China, India -- who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against Moslems and their sanctities. If Bin Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds in his war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam." (New Yorker, November 19, 2001)
THE LANGLEY BIN LADEN FAN CLUB
The most comprehensive document of Bin Ladenolatry so far produced comes from the bowels of the CIA, the work place of Anonymous, the author of Imperial Hubris. This book can only be interpreted as a semi-official compendium of CIA doctrine on today's world. Anonymous is sure that Bin Laden will be able to strike the U.S. again, and this time most likely with a weapon of mass destruction, but he still offers the erratic millionaire praise without stint:
Viewed from any angle, Osama Bin Laden is a great man, one who smashed the expected unfolding of universal post-Cold War peace. The New York and Washington attacks, Andrew Bacevich and Sebastian Mallaby wrote in the Wilson Quarterly, "revealed that the pilgrimage to perfection was far from over," though "not for a moment did they cause American political leaders to question the project's feasibility." Post-11 September, Dr. Bruce Hoffman also offered an acute judgment of Bin Laden's impact. "Whatever else," Hoffman wrote, "Bin Laden is one of the few persons who can argue that they changed the course of history." ... All told, Bin Laden is certainly the most popular anti-American leader in the world today. His name is legend from Houston to Zanzibar to Jakarta, and his face and sayings are emblazoned on T-shirts, CDs, audio and videotapes, posters, photographs, cigarette lighters, and stationery across the earth. "Afghanistan's children," Daniel Bergener wrote in the New York Times Magazine in July 2003, "suck on Bin Laden candies, sugary balls in wrappers showing the leader's face, his pointed finger and the tip of a rocket." So too with his name: "one of the most common names for newborn males is Osama," James Kitfield reported in the National Journal in November 2002. "Even among those who publicly denounce his terrorist methods, the namings indicate the nearly mythical status the Islamic world has bestowed on Osama Bin Laden." (Anonymous 104-105)
Our anonymous CIA agent waxes positively indignant about those in Saudi Arabia and around the world who impugn Bin Laden's world-historical genius. He is especially upset about certain Saudis who have worked closely with Bin Laden in the past, and who find it impossible to believe that he is now functioning as the evil demiurge of the twenty-first century. Anonymous detects a "theme of Bin Laden's limited mental and leadership abilities" which has been spread by "a number of Saudi officials and writers. Their intent seems simple enough: to prove that Bin Laden is intellectually incapable of managing al Qaeda and designing its operations." (Anonymous 107) As an example of this line, Anonymous quotes an account given by Saudi Prince Mahmoud bin Abdel Aziz to the U.S. press. The Prince recalled
that night a decade ago when Osama Bin Laden attended an evening salon to describe his exploits fighting in Afghanistan.... [The prince] remembers young Osama floundering when guests questioned him about the interpretation of religious texts. "Finally, I had to signal with my hands for them to stop it," said the prince. "He really is quite a simple man." (Anonymous 108)
Here we have a rich misfit and fanatic who cannot hold his own in theological debates, which should supposedly be his strongest suit. In Anonymous' view, "the most common form of the Saudis' defamation of Bin Laden is done by having his friends in the kingdom describe him as a gentle, amiable, and relatively unintelligent man." (Anonymous 108) But the yelping detractors of Bin Laden do not stop here. According to Anonymous: "A final side to the effort in the Moslem and Western worlds to denigrate Bin Laden's brains and talents lies in the studied attempt to depict Bin Laden as a simpleton who is directed by that evil terrorist genius Ayman al-Zawahiri, former chief of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now Bin Laden's deputy in al Qaeda. 'My knowledge of Bin Laden makes me unable to conceive what is happening now,' said Dr. Abdullah al Muayyad, a former director general of the Saudi finance ministry who worked with Bin Laden during the Afghan jihad." (Anonymous 107) Like a good CIA agent, Anonymous tries to make his readers think that the Saudis are passing the buck to the nefarious Egyptians, but this is hogwash. Zawahiri, once again, was a key part of the Sadat assassination, and afterwards was protected by London. The world needs to remember Sadat's widow, Jehan Sadat, recalling in a television interview after 9/11 that Zawahiri, a murderer of her husband, had lived in London for years after that crime, while extradition to Egypt was always refused by the UK. The guess here would be that Zawahiri is a double agent working for MI-6, while Bin Laden is indeed a fanatical, deluded patsy and dupe; at any rate, if this is Bin Laden's mentality, it would make him the ideal type for the role he is presently carrying out.
Anonymous devotes a lyrically fulsome passage to evoking Bin Laden's status as a beloved figure among the Moslems; the Moslem love for Osama, he argues, is
love not so much for Osama Bin Laden the person -- although there is much of that -- but love for his defense of the faith, the life he lives, the heroic example he sets, and the similarity of that example to other heroes in the pantheon of Islamic history. (Anonymous 124)
Anonymous concludes this paean to his hero Bin Laden by favorably comparing the psychotic sheikh to Abraham Lincoln. This is all coming, we recall, from a high-level CIA officer, one of the founding members of the "Manson family," as the original CIA Bin Laden station called itself. If Arabs and Moslems can be convinced that Bin Laden is really their leader, and not a creature of the CIA, then they will never accomplish the modernizing reforms which the progressive nationalists promised. They will spend their time fighting among themselves in the name of re-creating the caliphate. They will be unable to make alliances against the Anglo-Americans with Europe, with the Orthodox, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Confucians, the atheists, or anybody else; they will self-isolate themselves in endless backwardness. Bin Laden's mass line is, after, all, that it is the duty of every Moslem to kill infidels wherever they are found. If applied literally, this would even cut off all scientific and commercial exchanges in a kind of murderous self-embargo. All these factors will make the Moslem ummah ever so much easier to divide and defeat. No wonder the CIA is so proud of having made Bin Laden a folk hero of the Moslem world, with the help of the 9/11 attacks which the unstable dreamer could never have carried out by himself: literally billions of dollars of publicity for the Saudi misfit have paid off in one of the greatest psychological warfare operations of all time. Any cause that chooses Bin Laden or some similar figure as its leader, we may be certain, is damning itself to a lonely and ignominious defeat at the hands of the laughing CIA kuffar.
Even more notable are the support service which the CIA and it minions continue to provide Bin Laden. Here the evidence is fragmentary but persistent and finally overwhelming. According to CBS News, "the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan ... Bin Laden was spirited into a military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment. (Barry Peterson, "Hospital Worker: I Saw Osama," CBS News, January 29, 2002: http://www.cbsnews.com ) Before we criticize Pakistan, though, we should realize that the ISI in this case was probably acting on U.S. instructions, as it generally does.
LE FIGARO: BIN LADEN TREATED AT AMERICAN HOSPITAL, JULY 2001
On October 31, 2001, Le Figaro, the leading French conservative newspaper, published a front page story about medical treatment received by Bin Laden in Dubai in the summer before 9/11. This remarkable revelation came in an article by Alexandra Richard entitled "La CIA a rencontre Ben Laden a Dubai. en juillet," (The CIA met Bin Laden in Dubai in July). At around the same time, similar facts were reported by Agence France Presse and Radio France International, the French external broadcasting service. The AFP dispatch read in part:
Bin Laden Underwent Treatment in July at Dubai American Hospital
Osama bin Laden underwent treatment in July at the American Hospital in Dubai where he met a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official, French daily Le Figaro and Radio France International reported. Quoting "a witness, a professional partner of the administrative management of the hospital," they said the man suspected by the United States of being behind the September 11 terrorist attacks had arrived in Dubai on July 4 by air from Quetta, Pakistan. He was immediately taken to the hospital for kidney treatment. He left the establishment on July 14, Le Figaro said.
During his stay, the daily said, the local CIA representative was seen going into bin Laden's room and "a few days later, the CIA man boasted to some friends of having visited the Saudi-born millionaire."
Quoting "an authoritative source," Le Figaro and the radio station said the CIA representative had been recalled to Washington on July 15. Bin Laden has been sought by the United States for terrorism since the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But his CIA links go back before that to the fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Le Figaro said bin Laden was accompanied in Dubai by his personal physician and close collaborator, who could be the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as bodyguards and an Algerian nurse. He was admitted to the urology department of Doctor Terry Callaway, who specializes in kidney stones and male infertility. Telephoned several times, the doctor declined to answer questions. Several sources had reported that bin Laden had a serious kidney infection. He had a mobile dialysis machine sent to his Kandahar hideout in Afghanistan in the first half of 2000, according to "authoritative sources" quoted by Le Figaro and RFI. (AFP, Wednesday October 31, 2001, 2:04 PM)
The CIA was quick to deny these embarrassing facts reported by real investigative journalists, who apparently still exist in France. A spokeswoman at CIA Langley, VA headquarters described the Le Figaro article as "complete and utter nonsense. It's nonsense, it's absurd, it's ridiculous, it's not true." The CIA said it intended to protest to Le Figaro. The American Hospital in Dubai denied that Bin Laden had been a patient. (The Scotsman, November 1, 2001) But the French author Richard LaBeviere countered that Osama Bin Laden had been working for the CIA since 1979, a fact which was generally accepted in Europe. (October 31, 2001) Radio France International stuck to its guns and followed up on its story with further details about Bin Laden's CIA handler and case officer, Larry Mitchell: "The local representative of the CIA who visited Osama Bin Laden last July 12 at the American Hospital in Dubai is called Larry Mitchell. If his visiting card specifies that he is a "consular agent," everyone in Dubai knows, especially in the small expatriate community, that he is working under cover. To say it openly, Larry Mitchell belongs to the 'big house', otherwise known as the CIA. He himself does not hide it." RFI went on: " An expert in the Arab world and especially in the Arabian peninsula, Larry Mitchell is a colorful personality who livens up the somewhat drab evenings of the expatriates of Dubai. One of his friends likes to say that his natural exuberance often gets into classified matters. That is perhaps one of the reasons why he was called back to the United States last July 15. About twenty days after the September 11 attacks, in a statement dated October 5, the CIA dismissed as baseless rumors the story that the agency had had contacts with Bin Laden and his group in the past, especially at the time of the war against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan. It happens that this communique of the CIA is in complete contradiction with the earlier official statements of several representatives of the U.S. administration itself." ( http://www.rfi.fr/1 novembre 2001)
It is thus clear that the CIA was providing vital support services to Bin Laden long after he had allegedly turned into the world's leading anti-American monster. The reality is that Bin Laden and al Qaeda have never stopped serving the CIA strategic agenda, whatever that happened to be. As Thierry Meyssan writes, "In reality, the CIA continued to have recourse to Osama Bin Laden's services against Russian influence as it had done against the Soviets. You don't change a winning team. The 'Arab Legion' of Al Qaeda was used, in 1999, to support the Kosovar rebels against the dictatorship in Belgrade. It was also operational in Chechenya, at least until November 2001, as was attested to by the New York Times. (Michael Wines, December 9, 2001) The alleged hostility of Bin Laden against the United States permitted Washington to deny responsibility for these dirty operations." (Meyssan 2002 106-7)
In a discussion of the impact of the anonymous Imperial Hubris CIA tract during the summer of 2004, the Washington Post provided a succinct summary of al Qaeda's strategic services to the CIA: "Al Qaeda' s camps were staffed by veteran fighters who trained insurgents who fought and trained others to fight, not only against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, but also against national armies in Indian Kashmir, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Eritrea, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Tajikistan, Egypt, Bosnia, western China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and the Philippines." (Review of Anonymous, Imperial Hubris, Washington Post, July 11, 2004) Notice that all these states were or are targets of U.S. destabilization. And even this list is far from complete; it leaves out Libya, for example.
The Iranian press also noted the strange affinities of al Qaeda for figures who were clearly still on the U.S. payroll. While panning the 9/11 commission report, the Teheran Times observed that none other than KSM, "Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, the reported mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was a longtime associate of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance and current ally of the U.S.-backed Afghans president, Hamid Karzai." (Teheran Times, July 27, 2004)
AL QAEDA AND NATO'S BALKAN DRUG RUNNING
Another thing that is known about al Qaeda is that Bin Laden's supposed followers are drug pushers in grand style -- once again a foible they share with MI-6 and CIA. During a fall 2001 strategic briefing, Gwen McClure of Interpol's Criminal Subdivision officially informed a group of parliamentarians from NATO countries that Interpol had evidence that the Bin Laden group "is linked to Albanian gangs who have taken over the growing web of crime across Europe. The investigations of Interpol have also shown that bin Laden deployed one of his top military commanders for an elite KLA unit during the NATO Kosovo war." The Interpol official also stated that a special meeting took place in Albania in the presence of bin Laden, according to Albanian police. Several Algerian terrorists were present at the meeting. "It was during this meeting," the official stressed, "that many structures and networks were established for propaganda and fund raising activities and for providing the Algerian armed groups with logistical support." During and immediately after the Kosovo war, when the KLA took over the Kosovo, heroin and weapons traffic exploded unchecked. The so-called "Albanian mafia" ended up controlling 80% of the heroin distribution in Western Europe, using the NATO Kosovo protectorate as its base. The criminal and the terrorist networks became indistinguishable, with a multiplying destructive effect. "These crime syndicates have formed alliances of convenience and are willing to cooperate or make business arrangements with other organized crime groups," the Interpol official told the parliamentarians. She also said Interpol had evidence of the involvement in the criminal and terrorist activities of the Chechnya terrorists. According to Balkan sources and other records, the man in charge for the Balkan terrorism-organized crime connection was Bin Laden's chief adviser or controller, the head of the Egyptian Jihad, Ayman al Zawahiri. Zawahiri's brother Mohamed was reported to be in Macedonia just after 9/11, leading a gang of ideological mercenaries to launch another major KLA assault against the country. Ayman al Zawahiri was in Albania to play a leading role in the KLA/NATO offensive against Serbia in 1999. (Independent, October 24, 2001) According to some experts, the al Qaeda/KLA united front had taken over the 1980s "Bulgarian connection" or Balkan Route, which involved a gigantic arms-for-drugs traffic with the involvement of numerous NATO, Warsaw Pact, and other intelligence services and various ethnic mafias. The Bulgarian connection had come under intense scrutiny after the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II on May 13 1981. (The Independent, October 24, 2001)
ZAWAHIRI AND NATO'S DARLING, THE KLA
The brother of Bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al Zawahiri, was reported after 9/11 to be taking part in terrorist actions in Northern Macedonia, where NATO's puppet Albanian KLA had started a new terror campaign. The Zawahiri connection surfaced on October 25, 2001, when the "new" KLA in Macedonia, the Albanian National Army (ANA), claimed responsibility for the bombing of the police station and municipal building of Tearce in north Macedonia. Tearce was one of the Macedonian towns -- previously assaulted, occupied and "cleansed" of its Macedonian inhabitants which became the scene of a symbolic policing by a mixed police patrol of ethnic Albanians and Macedonians.