By Mike Whitney | |
Global Research, February 14, 2008 | |
Then everything went sideways. The war veered from the Pentagon's script. The Taliban retreated, waited, regrouped and retaliated. They enlisted support from the Pashtuns and the tribal leaders who could see that America would never honor its commitments; that order would never be restored. Operation Enduring Freedom has brought neither peace nor prosperity; just occupation. Seven years have passed and Afghanistan is still ruled by warlords and drug-merchants. Nothing has improved. The country is in shambles and the government is a fraud. The humiliation of foreign occupation persists while the killing goes on with no end in sight. War is not foreign policy. It is slaughter. Seven years later; it's still slaughter. The Taliban have taken over more than half of Afghanistan. They have conducted military operations in the capital of Kabul. They're dug in at Logar, Wardak and Ghazni and control vast swathes of territory in Zabul, Helmand, Urzgan and Kandahar. Now they are getting ready to step-up operations and mount a Spring offensive, which means the violence will only intensify. The Taliban's approach is methodical and deliberate. They've shown they can survive the harshest conditions and still achieve tactical victories over a better-equipped enemy. They are highly-motivated and believe their cause is just. After all, they are not fighting to occupy a foreign nation; they're fighting to defend their own country. That strengthens their resolve and keeps morale high. When NATO and American troops leave Afghanistan; the Taliban will remain, just as they did when the Russians left 20 years ago. No difference. The US occupation will just be another footnote in the country's tragic history. The United States has gained nothing from its invasion of Afghanistan. US troops do not control even a square inch of Afghan soil. The moment a soldier lifts his boot-heel; that ground is returned to the native people. That probably won't change either. General Dan McNeill said recently that "if proper US military counterinsurgency doctrine were followed; the US would need 400,000 troops to defeat Pashtun tribal resistance in Afghanistan." Currently, the US and NATO have only 66,000 troops on the ground and the allies are refusing to send more. On a purely logistical level; victory is impossible. The battle for hearts and minds has been lost, too. A statement from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) sums it up like this: "The reinstatement of the Northern Alliance to power crushed the hopes of our people for freedom and prosperity and proved that, for the Bush administration, defeating terrorism has no meaning at all....The US doesn't want to defeat the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, because then they will have no excuse to stay in Afghanistan and achieve their economic and strategic goals in the region....After seven years, there is no peace, human rights, democracy or reconstruction in Afghanistan. The destitution and suffering of our people is increasing everyday. ...We believe that if the troops leave Afghanistan, our people will become more free and come out of their current puzzlement and doubts...Afghanistan's freedom can only be achieved by Afghan people themselves. Relying on one enemy to defeat another is a wrong policy which has just tightened the grip of the Northern Alliance and their masters on the neck of our nation." (RAWA www.rawa.org) Gradually, the Allies will see that Bush's war cannot be won and that continuing the fighting is counterproductive. There is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan and the political objectives are getting murkier all the time. This just adds to the growing sense of frustration. Recently Secretary of Defense Robert Gates tried to cajole the allies into sending more combat troops to fight in the south, but he met with stiff resistance . He said: "I am concerned that many people on this continent may not comprehend the magnitude of the direct threat to European security," Gates said. "We must not become a two-tiered alliance of those who are willing to fight and those who are not. Such a development, with all its implications for collective security, would in effect destroy the alliance." But support for the war is waning in Europe. This is America's war, not theirs. Europeans don't need to occupy foreign nations to meet their energy needs. Their countries are prosperous and they can afford to buy for fuel on the open market. Only America wants the war. It's all part of a geopolitical "grand strategy" to project US power into the region to control its resources. So far, there's no indication that the plan will succeed. Germany has the third biggest economy in the world. Over the last few years, they have strengthened ties with Russia and made agreements that will satisfy their long-term energy needs. But German involvement in Afghanistan has put a strain on relations with Moscow. Putin thinks that the US is using the war to put down roots in Central Asia so it can control pipeline-routes from the Caspian Basin and surround Russia and China with military bases. Naturally, Putin would like to persuade Chancellor Angela Merkel to withdraw German troops from Afghanistan so he could strike a blow against the US-led alliance. Eventually, German leaders will see that its foolish to tweak the nose of the people who provide them with energy (Russia) just to support Washington's adventures. When Germany withdraws from Afghanistan; NATO will disband, new coalitions will form, and the transatlantic alliance fall apart. The cracks are already visible. Bush has said that the war in Afghanistan must continue or the country will become a haven for drugs, terrorism and organized crime. He says we are fighting a "poisonous ideology of Islamic extremism which threatens to become a global movement". But the Taliban and Pashtun tribesmen see it differently. They see the conflict as an imperial war of aggression which has only added to the suffering of their people. A recent report by the United Nations Human Development Fund appears to support this view. It shows that Afghanistan has fallen in every category. The average life expectancy has gone down, malnutrition has risen, literacy has dropped, and more than half the population is living below the poverty-line. Hundreds of thousands of people have been internally displaced by the war. Afghanistan now produces 90% of the world's opium; more than any other country. The booming drug trade is the direct result of the US invasion. Bush has created the world's largest narco-colony. Is that success? Presently, there are no plans to remove the warlords or improve the lives of ordinary Afghans. Reconstruction is at a standstill. If the US stays in Afghanistan, the situation 10 years from now will be the same as it is today, only more people will have needlessly died. Most Afghans now understand that the promise of democracy was a lie. The only thing the occupation has brought is more grinding poverty and random violence. There's no back-up plan for Afghanistan. In fact, there is no plan at all. The administration thought the Taliban would see America's high-tech, laser-guided weaponry and run for the hills. They did. Now they're back. And now we are embroiled in an "unwinnable" war with a tenacious enemy that grows stronger by the day. Eventually, the Europeans will see the futility of the war and leave. And that will be the end of NATO. | |
Friday, March 21, 2008
Swan Song for NATO: The real cost of defeat in Afghanistan
Narco Aggression: Russia accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan
By Vladimir Radyuhin | ||
Global Research, February 24, 2008 | ||
Frontline | ||
JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP  Afghan workers cutting open poppy bulbs, the first stage in the harvesting process, in Jalalabad. Afghanistan produced 8,200 tonnes of opium last year, enough to make 93 per cent of the world's heroin supply. Could it be that the American military in Afghanistan is involved in drug trafficking? Yes, it is quite possible, according to Russia's Ambassador to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov. Commenting on reports that the United States military transport aviation is used for shipping narcotics out of Afghanistan, the Russian envoy said there was no smoke without fire. "If such actions do take place they cannot be undertaken without contact with Afghans, and if one Afghan man knows this, at least a half of Afghanistan will know about this sooner or later," Kabulov told Vesti, Russia's 24-hour news channel. "That is why I think this is possible, but cannot prove it." Afghan narcotics are an extremely painful issue for Russia. They first hit the Russian market during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s when Russian soldiers developed a taste for Afghan heroin and smuggled it back to Russia. The disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991 threw open the floodgates of drug trafficking from Afghanistan across Central Asia to Russia and further west to Europe. Afghanistan's narcotics struck Russia like a tsunami, threatening to decimate its already shrinking population. According to the Federal Drug Control Service, 90 per cent of all heroin sold in Russia comes from Afghanistan. Russia today has about six million drug-users – a 20-fold increase since the collapse of the Soviet Union and a huge figure for a country of 142 million people. The Federal Drug Control Service said earlier in January that as many as 30 to 40 million people in Russia may have tried drugs at least once. Annually, some 80,000 Russians die of drug-related causes. One in five crimes committed in Russia is related to drugs. The illegal drug turnover in Russia is estimated at between $10 and $15 billion, discounting transit trafficking. Narcotics have become an integral part of the youth subculture in Russia. In Moscow alone narcotics are sold at about 100 discotheques and cafes frequented by young people, the city drug control service reported in December. About 45 per cent of Russian university students use drugs, according to Russian Minister for Education and Science Andrei Fursenko. He described the situation as "critical". The Moscow city government plans to introduce mandatory drug tests for all students in the Russian capital this year. Schoolchildren may be next in line for screening: some surveys indicate that four out of five young Russians are familiar with drugs. The Russian Parliament is planning to discuss a law to allow compulsory treatment of drug and alcohol addicts. President Vladimir Putin has described the drug abuse problem as a "national calamity". The catastrophic rise in drug addiction in Russia has been spurred by the painful transition from socialism to capitalism that Russia has been going through since 1991. Millions lost their jobs and were reduced to abject poverty during Russia's worst-ever economic meltdown in the 1990s. But external factors have played a crucial role in the spread of drugs. Last year Putin bluntly stated that Russia and Europe had been victims of "narco-aggression". When the Soviet Union broke up into 15 independent states, Moscow overnight lost control of nearly 5,000 kilometres of former Soviet borders in Central Asia and the Caucasus. At the same time, nearly 8,000 km of what used to be internal nominal boundaries between ex-Soviet republics became Russia's new state borders. In 1993, Russian border guards returned to Tajikistan in an effort to contain the flow of drugs from opium-producing Afghanistan. In 2002 alone they intercepted 6.7 tonnes of drugs, half of them heroin. However, in 2005 Tajik President Imomali Rakhmon, hoping to win financial aid from the U.S., asked the Russian border guards to leave, saying Tajikistan had recovered enough from a five-year civil war (from 1992-97) to shoulder the task. Within months of the Russian withdrawal, cross-border drug trafficking increased manifold. Turkmenistan, another major opium route from Afghanistan, threw out Russian border guards in 1999. Since 2000, Turkmenistan has reported no drug seizures to international organisations. President Saparmurat Niyazov, who died last year, claimed his country had no drug problem. However, independent surveys indicate that up to half of Turkmenistan's male population use drugs. In 2002, the country's Prosecutor-General Kurbanbibi Atadzhanova was arrested for operating a drug-trafficking ring. Seventeen years after the break-up of the Soviet Union, borders between the newly independent states are still porous and travel is visa-free. Air passengers arriving from Central Asia are routinely screened for drugs in Russian airports, but if drugs are shipped by land, there is only a remote chance that they get intercepted. Afghanistan under the U.S. When Russia backed the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan to crush the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the post-9/11 scenario, the last thing it expected to happen was that drug trafficking from Afghanistan would assume gargantuan proportions under the U.S. military. Since 2001, poppy fields, once banned by the Taliban, have mushroomed again. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan produced 8,200 tonnes of opium last year, enough to make 93 per cent of the world's heroin supply. The U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] forces in the country have not only failed to eliminate the terrorist threat from the Taliban, but also presided over a spectacular rise in opium production. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Afghanistan was on the brink of becoming a "narco state". Narco business has emerged as virtually the only economy of Afghanistan and is valued at some $10 billion a year. Opium trade is estimated by the U.N. to be equivalent to 53 per cent of the country's official economy and is helping to finance the Taliban. "Unfortunately, they [NATO] are doing nothing to reduce the narcotic threat from Afghanistan even a tiny bit," Putin angrily remarked three years ago. He accused the coalition forces of "sitting back and watching caravans haul drugs across Afghanistan to the former Soviet Union and Europe." As time went by, Russian suspicions regarding the U.S. role in the rise of a narco state in Afghanistan grew deeper, especially after reports from Iraq said that the cultivation of opium poppies was spreading rapidly there too. "The Americans are working hard to keep narco business flourishing in both countries," says Mikhail Khazin, president of the consultancy firm Niakon. "They consistently destroy the local infrastructure, pushing the local population to look for illegal means of subsistence. And the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] provides protection to drug trafficking." U.S. freelance writer Dave Gibson recalled in an article published in American Chronicle in December what a U.S. foreign intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told NewsMax.com in March 2002 of the CIA's record of involvement with the international drug trade. The official said: "The CIA did almost the identical thing during the Vietnam War, which had catastrophic consequences – the increase in the heroin trade in the USA beginning in the 1970s is directly attributable to the CIA. The CIA has been complicit in the global drug trade for years, so I guess they just want to carry on their favourite business." AFP  A USAF cargo plane takes off from the U.S. airbase in Incirlik in Turkey in March 2003. A Russian news channel reported that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases in Kyrgyzstan and Turkey. Now Russia has joined the fray accusing the U.S. military of involvement in the heroin trafficking from Afghanistan to Europe. The Vesti channel's report from Afghanistan said that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases Ganci in Kyrgyzstan and Incirlik in Turkey. The Ganci Air Force base at the Manas international airport in Kyrgyzstan was set up in late 2001 as a staging post for military operations inside Afghanistan. The Kyrgyz government threatened to close the base after neighbouring Uzbekistan shut down a similar U.S. airbase on its territory in 2005, but relented after Washington agreed to make a one-off payment of $150 million in the form of an assistance package and to pay $15 million a year for the use of the base. One of the best-informed Russian journalists on Central Asia, Arkady Dubnov, recently quoted anonymous Afghan sources as saying that "85 per cent of all drugs produced in southern and southeastern provinces are shipped abroad by U.S. aviation." A well-informed source in Afghanistan's security services told the Russian journalist that the American military acquired drugs through local Afghan officials who dealt with field commanders in charge of drug production. Writing in the Vremya Novostei daily, Dubnov claimed that the pro-Western administration of President Hamid Karzai, including his two brothers, Kajum Karzai and Akhmed Vali Karzai, are head-to-heels involved in the narcotics trade. The article quoted a leading U.S. expert on Afghanistan, Barnett Rubin, as telling an anti-narcotics conference in Kabul last October that "drug dealers had infiltrated Afghani state structures to the extent where they could easily paralyse the work of the government if decision to arrest one of them was ever made." Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Richard Holbrooke said in January that "government officials, including some with close ties to the presidency, are protecting the drug trade and profiting from it." In an article carried by Washington Post, the diplomat described the $1-billion-a-year U.S. counter-narcotics effort in Afghanistan as "the single most ineffective programme in the history of American foreign policy." "It's not just a waste of money. It actually strengthens the Taliban and Al Qaeda, as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan," Holbrooke wrote in the The Washington Post in early January. It is an open question whether the Russian charges of U.S. complicity in drug trafficking are based on hard evidence or have been prompted by Moscow's frustration at Washington's failure to address the opium problem in Afghanistan. But it is a fact that the U.S. and NATO have stonewalled numerous offers of cooperation from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), a defence pact of six former Soviet republics. Nikolai Bordyuzha, CSTO Secretary-General, quoted a Pentagon general as telling him: "We are not fighting narcotics because this is not our task in Afghanistan." Instead of joining hands with the SCO and the CSTO in combating the narcotics threat, the CSTO chief said, the U.S. was working to set up rival security structures in the region. Washington is working to "drive a geopolitical wedge between Central Asian countries and Russia and to reorient the region towards the U.S.", Bordyuzha said last year. With the U.S. and NATO rebuffing their cooperation offers, Russia, China and the Central Asian states have to rely on their own forces in combating the narcotics threat from Afghanistan. The CSTO has been running a wide-ranging aid and military assistance programme for Afghanistan, which includes training Afghan anti-narcotic police. Last year, the SCO joined in signing a cooperation protocol with the CSTO, which is aimed, above all, at curbing drug trafficking. At its summit in Bishkek, the Kyrgyzstan capital, last August, the SCO decided to set up jointly with the CSTO an "anti-narcotics belt" around Afghanistan. | ||
Osama and the CIA sponsored "War on Terrorism": Americans are being killed by American trained Islamists
By Peter Chamberlin | |
Global Research, January 6, 2008 | |
Apparently, Osama bin Laden and former CIA agent Michael Scheuer have a mutual respect for each other's intellect. In one of bin Laden's latest videos, he said, "If you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing of your war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer in this regard." Here is Scheuer's take on Osama: "For nearly a decade now, bin Laden demonstrated patience, brilliant planning, managerial expertise, sound strategic and tactical sense, admirable character traits, eloquence, and focused, limited war aims. He has never, to my knowledge, behaved or spoken in a way that could be described as irrational in the extreme." Here we have a "former" CIA man, claiming to be an opponent of administration war policies, speaking as a foremost expert on bin Laden, because of his position on the "bin Laden unit." He validates the latest bin Laden videos with his expertise, without ever acknowledging facts about al Qaida and their leader – the nature of the real threat vs. the created perception, the death of bin Laden, al Qaida the database, the builders and instructors of the Pakistani/Afghani insurgent training camps. In his book Imperial Hubris, written under the penname "Anonymous," Scheuer paints a shocking portrait of camps that he claims were built by bin Laden, when, in truth, he knows that these are all CIA built facilities, including the notorious Tora Bora (where bin Laden is allegedly buried), the camps in the Swat Valley in Northwest Pakistan, the scene of ongoing confrontations and under the watchful eyes of a new American super base which is under construction near there. Scheuer's book had to be cleared by the company before he could publish it, meaning that there is nothing in his book that the CIA does not want to become public knowledge. His information on the insurgent training camps comes from an article from the New York Times, entitled "Turning Out Guerrillas and Terrorists to Wage a Holy War," detailing the training that was provided by American instructors to Afghan insurgents (although both attributed the training to al Qaida). "C.J. Chivers and David Rohde explained that 'American tactics and training became integral parts of the [al Qaeda] schools,' that instruction was standardized so 'courses taught in different languages and hundreds of miles apart . . . were identical,' They all have the same basic skills. . . and received funds from Gulf donors to cover costs" (never mentioning that the Gulf donors were matching US funds). Like Scheuer, the Times ignored the fact that al Qaida did not exist before 1999, according to experts like director of Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, Yossef Bodansky. Scheuer quotes from the Times:
The "et cetera," part that Scheuer left out from the New York Times referred to the training that the mujahedeen had received from a United States Army Special Forces manual which showed ''methods for fabricating explosives, detonators, propellants shaped charges, [you know, the ones that only Iran is capable of constructing], small arms, mortars, incendiaries, delays, switches and similar items from indigenous materials.'' The training included detailed knowledge for advanced terrorism, like manufacturing explosives from common household items and the conversion of basic electronic items like watches, toy remote controllers, and other items into sophisticated triggering systems - the knowledge that has spread from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond, has served as the basis for traps that have killed American troops, even shaped charges. The camps trained paramilitary soldiers and hi-tech "super terrorists." The Times article notes the excellence of the military training for a "ragged band of fanatics, had achieved a level of competence that American military officials say was on par with the world's best guerrilla forces...One senior military instructor noticed a familiar streak of professionalism 'Wherever they got this, it was modeled after somebody's program. It was not made by some guys on some goat farm outside of Kabul.''' Scheuer promotes the vision of the camps that the CIA wants us to believe, that of Islamic camps producing assassins and suicide bombers, while the virtuous American government and CIA did nothing about it. The army of non- Afghan Muslims and hundreds of paramilitary trainers who came out of these camps is blamed on Islamists who were brought together by us, but the CIA, as usual, tries to maintain "plausible deniability" in relation to the Afghan/Soviet war and the "Islamic threat" we created, which grew out of it. The former head of the CIA's "Bin Laden Unit" wants us to believe in the tortured claims of Shaykh al-Libi (that had been proven false by the time he wrote his book) "the camps housed WMD experts who were building weapons and training others to do so or to use them," even after it had become common knowledge within the US intelligence community that the charge was false. Newsweek confirmed that a copy of the DIA report "would have been sent" to the Bush administration's National Security Council. The CIA also produced a document containing similar conclusions about al-Libi in January 2003, Hubris came out in 2004. As the most widely recognized expert on bin Laden, Scheuer validates each new "bin Laden tape." Do you think that the evil bastard appearing in the upper pictures is the same guy in the lower photos, taken from the latest "bin Laden" videos? http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/osama_newfake.html http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES/fake-to-real.gif Here is Scheuer's latest defense of his hero: "Analysis of Osama bin Laden's" By Michael Scheuer "The September 7 release of a new video statement by Osama bin Laden puts to rest, at least for now, widespread speculation that he is dead, retired, or has been pushed aside by his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. With a newly trimmed and dyed beard, comfortable robes rather than a camouflage jacket, and a clear and patient speaking style, bin Laden achieved a major purpose of his speech before he said a word: he clearly showed Muslims and Americans that he was still alive, that he was healthy and not at death's door, that he spoke from secure surroundings unthreatened by the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, and that he, al-Qaeda and their allies were ready to continue the war. As usual, this message was wrapped in an as-Sahab Productions video displaying high level production values." In the same article, Scheuer attempts to extend his power to validate terrorist videos that comes from his experience with bin Laden, to that of the Israeli/al Qaida spokesman, Adam Pearlman (a.k.a. Adam Gadahn, a.k.a. Azzam al-Amriki) and Ayman al-Zawahiri (alleged to be a CIA/MI6 asset). While Scheuer was attempting to vouch for both bin Laden and Pearlman, his former associates still at the bureau were denouncing the latest tape as a hoax: "American spy chiefs were quick to name Adam Gadahn, the head of al-Qaeda's English language media operations, as the author of large sections of bin Laden's broadcast... A former senior US intelligence official said: "It has Adam Gadahn written all over it." Mike Baker, a former CIA covert operations officer, said the tape left bin Laden with "the title of biggest gas bag in the terrorist world". Despite this, CIA officials claimed that voice analysis of the tape proved it was definitely bin Laden's voice, even though they failed to point out evidence of why this could not be, or the gaps in the video and audio segments, as well as the obvious editing errors which were uncovered. Jumping back to Imperial Hubris, we watch Scheuer dance around the issue of the problems created for us, by the camps that we did not build, and the insurgents that we did not train in advanced terror tactics: "Completing the picture, we have learned since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan that camps also were dedicated to training Tajiks, Uzbeks, Chechens. and Uighurs. In Afghanistan, then, camps training Islamist insurgents numbered many more than those belonging to al Qaeda and the Taleban, and together they built a store of trouble for the United rotes and the West by preparing men to fight in current insurgencies and ones not yet begun. Many observers, however, still have trouble absorbing the fact that there is a huge cadre of camp-trained Islamist insurgents available around the world—a veteran force in being, if you will, ready to deploy whenever and wherever the opportunity arises." (The database of that huge cadre is called "al Qaida." ) George Crile's expose, was released at the same time as Hubris , it confirmed that the camps in question were CIA/ISI (Pakistani secret service). The deadly training that Scheuer described in his book was carried on from American programs, such as the infamous CIA jihadi textbooks, produced at the University of Nebraska, which remained the curriculum there, even after the Taliban were evicted. Textbooks for children that were a combination of indoctrination in radical Islam and weapons training are at the core of America's problems with radical Islam in Pakistan. In their article "From the USA, the ABCs of jihad," in the Washington Post, Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway describe the Jihadi textbooks made in the American Bible/corn belt: "Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID [Agency for International Development] grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994...Under this Jihadism project, the images and talk of resistance to occupation were craftily intermingled with regular education: Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines, agency officials said. They acknowledged that at the time it also suited US interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders...One page from the texts of that period shows a resistance fighter with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov slung from his shoulder. The soldier's head is missing. Above the soldier is a verse from the Koran. Below is a Pashtu tribute to the mujaheddin [sic], who are described as obedient to Allah. Such men will sacrifice their wealth and life itself to impose Islamic law on the government, the text says. The United States' Jihadism successfully transformed Afghan children into true freedom fighters..." Then we have secretive American government figures, like Congressman Charlie Wilson and Zbigniew Brzezinski (the self-proclaimed father of the anti-Soviet jihad) traveling to secret camps in Pakistan to cheer the Afghans and, telling them "God is on your side," as seen in the following video: Another important piece of investigative journalism, Triple Cross, by Peter Lance, reveals some of the little-known CIA al Qaida connections, in particular, that of Ali Mohamed: " In the years leading to the 9/11 attacks, no single agent of al Qaeda was more successful in compromising the U.S. intelligence community than a former Egyptian army captain turned CIA operative, Special Forces advisor, and FBI informant named Ali Mohamed [a.k.a. Ali Amiriki, or "Ali the American"]. Spying first for the Central Intelligence Agency and later the FBI, Mohamed even succeeded in penetrating the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg—while simultaneously training the cell that blew up the World Trade Center in 1993 [taught Ramsey Yousef, cousin of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged planner of 9/11]. He lived the quiet life of a Silicon Valley computer executive while slipping off to Afghanistan and the Sudan to train some of al Qaeda's most lethal terrorists in bomb-making and assassination tradecraft—much of that time maintaining his status as an FBI informant who worked his Bureau control agent like a mole...A deep-penetration al Qaeda sleeper, he succeeded as a triple agent, gaining access to the most sensitive intelligence in the U.S. counter-terrorism arsenal." - Peter Lance There you have it, Ali, a CIA double-agent, was key to bringing the camps run by bin Laden up to American standards for paramilitary training. He also gave bin Laden's agents access to top secret intelligence which he had access to in the Army, while in the employ of the FBI, he was also working for the CIA to improve the lethality of al Qaida. The hidden hand of the CIA is becoming visible in every step that America has taken over the years to create a believable new enemy for us, in the form of international Islamist extremism, to replace the Soviet bogeyman that the damned mujahedeen we trained so well took from us. Thanks to the CIA's hard efforts to create a potential enemy out of a peaceful religion, and especially to the efforts of loyal "retired" spooks, like Michael Scheuer, we are about to witness what the fascist neoconservatives like Michael Ledeen meant when they urged ";total war" on us, as the path to victory in the war on terror. In this, Scheuer and the neocons are in complete agreement. Instead of acknowledging what has taken place in the past and trying to correct the mistakes, Scheuer joins those extremists calling for us to wage total war upon Islam, as a necessary evil, to preserve our gluttonous American way of life: "America is in a war for survival. Not survival in terms of protecting territory, but in terms of keeping the ability to live as we want, not as we must." The hellish scenario described in the following passage should give sane people nightmares: "We will have to use military force in the way Americans used it... from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by pace of killing and, yes, by body counts. Not the fatuous body counts of Vietnam, but precise counts that will run to extremely large ambers. The piles of dead will include as many or more civilians as combatants because our enemies wear no uniforms. Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills—all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. Land mines, moreover will be massively reintroduced to seal borders and mountain passes too long, high, or numerous to close with U.S. soldiers. As noted, such actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as s he stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world." We are seeing the first steps in that desired war escalation in the recent announcement that large numbers of Special Forces were moving into Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, to train paramilitary forces and more Islamic militias to fight the other Islamists that we had previously trained. Ahmad spells-out the obvious conclusion about reviving the original CIA program to train and radicalize Islamists and to wage war in Pakistan "There is no military solution in Pakistan, just as there was no military solution in Iraq, Afghanistan, or on the nuclear issue with Iran." | |
Presidential Politics: Gone Missing, Serious Debate
Many Americans fear the republic is in decline. Our economic worries are legion. The dollar has plummeted against many foreign currencies and has lost its estimable status as the premier currency. We have transformed a $200 billion dollar surplus under Clinton's stewardship into a $521 billion dollar deficit under George W. Bush. Two wars of choice, one in Afghanistan and one Iraq were projected to cost $65 billion and are now re-calculated by Harvard economists to cost over $3 trillion dollars. When President Bush launched his wars of empire, oil stood at $25 dollars/barrel. Today, oil has spiked to $109.75/barrel. Speculators and the politically connected war profiteers have benefited handsomely from President George W. Bush's fear mongering along with a perceived threat of interrupted supply. As a case in point, a politically connected Exxon/Mobil posted a record after-tax profit for 2007 exceeding $46 billion dollars. The largest military contract in U.S. history was awarded to a French company (Airbus) as political payback for their support of Bush's "war on terror." We have borrowed hundreds-of-billions from China and Japan to fund a war of choice and to protect their access to Middle East oil. American assets have increasingly become a part of the financial portfolios of foreign creditors from the Gulf States and Asia.
Meanwhile, American education is pathetically under funded, our highways and bridges in serious disrepair. Many are without medical insurance or woefully underinsured. And thanks to the spike in oil prices many Americans are faced with the dilemma: either buy food, medicine, or heat their homes during a tough winter season. In the face of this economic crunch the Pentagon has announced their new Defense Budget certain to top $514 billion dollars, an amount that exceeds total military expenditures for the entire world.
But America's woes are not entirely cast in economic terms. While the government often measures certain policies implemented in Afghanistan as or in increments of success or "benchmarks", the reality is profoundly different. Within viewing distance of Afghanistan's Presidential Palace children stand in the cold snow without shoes, gloves and or warm coats. Families huddle under plastic sheeting as their only refuge against a cruel winter that has thus far taken 750 lives. Diplomats representing the occupying countries come and go in search of lucrative business opportunities yet fail to see or acknowledge the misery they have collectively wrought on this country and its people.
America's Afghan president designate, the telegenic, impotent, chappan-clad Hamid Karzai sits at the helm of a government rife with narco-lords, collaborators and war criminals, and sanctioned by the U.S. notwithstanding the fact that it represents the most corrupt in Afghan history. In the rural mountain and village hamlets of Afghanistan foreign soldiers whose stated mantra is to "kill terrorists" and who remain blithely ignorant of traditional and cultural Afghan values continue to terrorize and kill innocents in their pursuit of suspected Taliban.
In a classic demonstration of ignorance and arrogance predicated on real or imagined military and or technological supremacy, the tactic of paying bounties to predatory informants and miscreants have resulted in the imprisonment and abuse of thousands of innocents. The result of which is the exponential rise in armed opposition among farmers, tradesman and shepherds who were heretofore never and are not now ideologically motivated. Future historians will ruminate as to how are the occupiers so intellectually and historically challenged as to not recognize this phenomena? Especially in view of the fact that virtually every study ever conceived by academia or government institutions regarding insurgencies attests that it is opposition to foreign occupation that is its midwife. As with empires gone before, it seems we are incapable of learning from history.
Women are often part of the bromidic exhortations from the President and First Lady. We are advised that new schools dot the landscape and that women have been emancipated from the yoke of Talibanism. Yet, again the truth is at odds with the rhetoric. Crime against women and children are on the rise, in truth few have access to educational facilities due to ideological and religious pressures seemingly insulated from remedial action by government police or security organs. Malnutrition and a lack of remedial medical assistance are of pandemic proportion. Deaths from exposure have reached record levels in plain view of the foreign diplomatic service representatives who cannot deliberate in terms other than military. Entrepreneurs and regular citizens alike cannot function in such routine and mundane endeavors as acquiring drivers license or business permits without paying bribes to each and every government bureaucrat from whom they are required to seek said services from.
Afghan opium producers are often vilified by occupiers and like-minded media…but the reality is that the producers need to support their families. Alternative programs have been relegated to chemical spraying that has been scientifically proven to impact birthrates and the general well being of the people. A solution rests in the licensing of the growers with distribution only to the pharmaceuticals for the alleviation of a shortage of pain-killing drugs. A solution, I might add, that the drug companies have vigorously lobbied against in the United States Congress in order to keep prices artificially high.
The reconstruction of Afghanistan is a sham. With the exception of a few Potemkin Village showcases, the rebuilding of the country and its infrastructure has moved at receding glacial speed. American contractors have been awarded the lion's share of contracts and the profits. While the war profiteers are posting increases in business and profits often reaching 1000% or more. The Afghan work force stands idle.
As our focus is on Afghanistan, there remain many questions and issues surrounding American policies in
other parts of the world. The American voter however seems in a quandary as to whom he/she should vote for. Our Congress and the media on whom we depend for leadership and information seems distracted even fixated with investigating triviality: as to whether or not New York Yankee pitcher Roger Clements used human growth hormones, the bawdy public displays of celebrity athletes and movie personalities and with the recent sexual escapades of the crime fighting New York Governor ("Mr. Clean") Elliot Spitzer. While our somnolent Congress and compliant media are content to investigate baseball and other trivia, a nuclear espionage ring has been operating in the U.S. with official complicity. Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator's allegations obtained from undercover wiretaps and surveillance are the subject of numerous news broadcasts and stories from all around the world. As of yet the allegations certified through polygraph examination of Edmonds have seemingly escaped the scrutiny of the U.S. Congress and the American media. Edmonds has testified that Israel, Turkey and Pakistan have been actively involved in nuclear espionage within the United States while aided and abetted by a former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and other government officials. Questions regarding this matter posed to my Congressional representatives have thus far gone unanswered.
Issues surrounding U.S. policies in Iraq, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kosovo, Western Sahara, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, West Bank and Gaza, as with Afghanistan and elsewhere are not articulated by the leading presidential contenders or of interest to the moderators. It is a systemic problem for a democracy to link corporate profits and war-making, and as such has metastasized. Therefore, the questions never raised by primary contest debate moderators include such issues as presidential signing statements, the limits of presidential authority, separation of powers, the role of the courts, warrantless wiretapping, rendition, the Guantanamo detention center and military commissions, secret CIA prisons, gratuitous spending, secret funding for covert activities, and many other civil liberties and human rights issues. It seems as if that there is agreement among all the parties not to deal with these subjects.
The Democrats wrongly believe that standing up for human rights will make them appear weak on terrorism. And few politicians are willing to understand that U.S. meddling in the internal affairs of other nations is germane if not paramount to any debate as to "why they hate us." Senator John McCain's jest on a late night talk show while perhaps seen by many Americans for it s entertainment value: that we should just "bomb, bomb, and bomb Iran" certainly cannot inspire confidence among other peoples and in other regions of the world.
The Republicans probably do not want to brag, acknowledge or held criminally responsible for the inhuman and or unconstitutional practices…at least not publicly in debate. The moderators seem to understand this. It is very important that the candidates honestly share their views and intentions regarding these issues. We were blindly led into two war of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq. We cannot afford to be blindly led into further atrocities in our name and with our tax dollars. These issues are crucial to the survival of American democracy. If, in the televised debates, the presidential candidates are being let off the hook, on these and crucial national issues, then the fault, in my view, lies foremost with the media representatives and organizations conducting and televising the debates. Many blame the commentators, but more to blame are the candidates themselves. Why are they running for president if not to right these grievous wrongs, the misdeeds and modus operandi of an abusive president?
Bruce G. Richardson
