From: Strategic Culture:
The Central Intelligence Agency
cobbled together the forerunner of the present Muslim jihadist terrorist
network in the late 1970s to battle Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
Throughout the next three decades, the CIA continued to maintain links
with the jihadist groups, using them as allies for certain operations
and attacking them when America’s «commitment» to the «war on terrorism»
required an propaganda boost in the world’s media.
An example of the CIA ‘s flip-flopping between using its mujaheddin and
jihadist allies and then declaring them «terrorists» and putting a
price on their heads is the recent declaration by Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton that the Haqqani network based in North Waziristan,
Pakistan is a «foreign terrorist organization».
The Haqqani network, led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, was cobbled together by
the CIA and the Pakistani Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI) in the 1980s.
The Haqqani network is the latest former CIA ally to be branded a
terrorist group. The Haqqanis are the latest in a long line of so-called
terrorist groups that were organized and funded by the CIA only later
to be thrown to the side of the road and branded «terrorists». Others
include «Al Qaeda», led by CIA Afghan war veteran Osama bin Laden and Hezb-I Islami
leader Gulbuddin Hekmatayar. With the designation of the Haqqani
network as a terrorist organization, after the demise of Bin Laden and
the designation of Hekmatayar as a terrorist, the CIA has run the table
on its old mujaheddin allies. Only those «Al Qaeda» operatives who have
allied themselves with the CIA in the Western-backed insurgencies in Libya and Syria.
Bin Laden and «Al Qaeda» were the convenient scapegoats for the CIA and
its Mossad allies to provide a «logical» perpetrator for the 9/11
attacks on the United States, the 11th anniversary of which
is now being observed across America. Hekmatayar’s falling out with the
CIA appears to be over his attempt to cut into the opium smuggling in
Afghanistan run by intelligence cut-outs for the CIA, as well as the
family opium harvesting and smuggling business of the family of Afghan
President Hamid Karzai.
In his book on America’s dalliance with Islamist terrorists, the late
ABC News Middle East correspondent John Cooley reveals the nature of the
CIA’s involvement with Afghan opium smuggling in his book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism.
Getting the idea from French intelligence, the CIA launched Operation
Mosquito, a program that pumped heroin and hashish into Soviet-occupied
Afghanistan in order to «hook» Red Army troops on drugs and decimate
their fighting potential. When supplies of narcotics from Pakistan were
depleted, the drugs shipped into Afghanistan came from stockpiles of
Colombian cocaine and heroin impounded by the Drug Enforcement
Administration, U.S. Customs Service, and U.S. Coast Guard. The CIA used
various Afghan warlords and operatives like Bin Laden, Hekmatayar, and
Haqqani to smuggle drugs into Kabul, Kandahar, and other areas where
Soviet troops were concentrated. The proceeds from the drug smuggling
were split between the Afghan warlords and the CIA’s off-shore slush
funds.
No less an expert on «Al Qaeda» than the late British Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook, in an article for The Guardian newspaper published on July
8, 2005, wrote «Throughout the 80s he [Bin Laden] was armed by the CIA
and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of
Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally ‘the database,’ was originally the
computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and
trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians». Cook, who, as
Foreign Secretary, would have had access to most of the files of two
agencies subservient to him – Britain’s MI-6 Secret Intelligence Service
and Britain’s U.S. National Security Agency counterpart, the Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – was revealing some of the most
hidden secrets about Western intelligence agency involvement in crafting
and exploiting the 9/11 attacks.
Former French military intelligence officer Pierre-Henri Bunel, who
tracked Islamist terrorist networks in the Balkans and discovered their
CIA origins, said «Al Qaeda» was not merely a database, but an Intranet
the CIA used to call up reserves of mujaheddin to engage in specified
terrorist actions, much like those seen during the past few years in the
remote-control bombing of civilians in Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad,
various Libyan and Pakistani cities, Aden, and other locales., all
carried out by «Al Qaeda» or its off shoots.
Echoing Cook’s statement, Bunel, a graduate of the elite St. Cyr military academy in France, wrote:
«The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group
called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But
there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the
presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order
to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership
for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the
U.S. and the lobbyists for the U.S. war on terrorism are only interested
in making money.
Bunel described in great detail how «Al Qaeda» operated. He revealed
that the Al Qaeda «Intranet» was established under the auspices of the
Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), which is based in Jeddah,
Saudi Arabia. Users, including OIC member governments and their
embassies around the world, could access the database «by telephone: an
Intranet, in modern language.
A major in Pakistan’s military told Bunel that the «Al Qaeda» database
was «divided into two parts, the information file where the participants
in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the
decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions
were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, Q’eidat
il-Maaloomaat and Q’eidat i-Taaleemaat. Those two files were kept in one
file called in Arabic Q’eidat ilmu’ti’aat, which is the exact
translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used
the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for ‘base.’»
Among the countries using the Al Qaeda Intranet to conduct terrorist
operations was Saudi Arabia. And the «Al Qaeda» Intranet had been around
for quite some time before 9/11. Bunel stated: «When Osama Bin Laden
was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good
communication system through coded or covert messages».
Cook died suddenly from a heart attack a month after he wrote the
Guardian article. Bunel was charged, convicted, and imprisoned for a
dubious claim that he spied for Serbia.
Today, the OIC is at the vanguard of providing covert support to «Al
Qaeda» and affiliated rebels fighting against Bashar al Assad’s
government in Syria. It is likely that the «Al Qaeda» intranet is
working overtime sending coded messages between Jeddah, Riyadh, Doha,
Abu Dhabi and «Al Qaeda» field units in Syria and on the Turkish side of
the Syrian border. The OIC has suspended Syria from OIC membership and
the only reason for such a decision was to sever Syria from the OIC «Al
Qaeda» Intranet intelligence link to Syrian rebel forces and CIA covert
channel terminals in Langley, Virginia.
Hekmatayar and Haqqani are arms of the ISI and when their services were
needed the most by the United States, they served the interests of the
CIA. There is now an attempt by the CIA to rewrite the recent history of
South Asia and eliminate all the insurgents and guerrillas and their
organizations that did the bidding of the CIA. Bin Laden was accused of
carrying out 9/11, Hekmatayar of killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan on
behalf of the Taliban and «Al Qaeda,» and now the Haqqani network, still
an arm of ISI, of attacking U.S. targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
America’s love affair with Islamist radical terrorists goes back to the
days of Zbigniew Brzezinki, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security
Adviser, and even earlier, when journalist-turned-CIA agent Archibald
Roosevelt, the grandson of U.S. uber-imperialist-turned-progressive
Theodore Roosevelt, concocted a plan to bring the Soviets to their knees
by stoking anti-Communist Islamists against the Soviets in places like
Egypt, where the CIA supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempt to
assassinate Egyptian pan-Arab socialist Gamal Abdel Nasser. Archibald’s
cousin, Kermit Roosevelt, was in charge of the 1953 CIA coup that
toppled Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and restored the hated
Shah to power. Both decisions were monumental disasters for U.S. foreign
policy in the Muslim world.
Bin Laden, Hekmatayar, and Haqqani – all one time allies of the CIA –
became «problems» in CIA parlance. And like all CIA «problems», they
have all possessed one ultimate destiny – termination with extreme
prejudice…
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