Funds
Wired to Britain from Pakistan, LeT
Founder Placed Under ‘House Arrest’
From
ABC
News, Brian Ross and
Richard Esposito report that
British Intelligence had a
man on the inside of the
30-man cell that sought to
blow up US-bound airliners
in a plot becoming known as
“Bojinka
II,” nearly identical
in scope and method to
Operation Bojinka I in
1995. In
British Penetrate Terror
Cell, it is also
detailed that an arrest in
Pakistan two days earlier
caused the British operation
– Operation Overt – to
descend upon the cell before
they learned of the
individual arrested. A link
between the deep mole and
the arrested would have
apparently tipped the cell
to the British operation.
Also, the
BBC
reports that a
Pakistan arrest several
weeks ago originally
unearthed the plot,
which Pakistan claims
uncovered the plot and led
to the British
investigation.
While it was feared that
the Pakistani arrest on the
Afghan border days ago would
jeopardize the British
operation, it is worth
noting that the five
ringleaders of the 30-man
terror cell are not among
the apprehended and on the
loose, presumably still in
Britain. Word from Pakistan
would logically reach the
leaders first. Did they take
immediate evasive action and
run aground in haste without
informing the 24 who were
eventually arrested?
With regard to the nature
and connectedness of the
terrorists in the Bojinka II
cell, the
ABC
report characterizes the
cell members in a fashion
that is sure to be echoed by
far too many. Referring to
the plot as “homegrown” and
the British cell’s members
as “young, longtime
residents or citizens,
inspired by al Qaeda and
perhaps loosely linked to
the old hierarchical terror
group” misses the mark.
At the end of the day,
these “young, longtime
residents or citizens” of
Britain must be recognized
as no more British than they
are Mexican. Most of the
cell members were of
Pakistani origin or descent.
They clearly did not
identify with their host
nation nor hold any affinity
for it.
It is difficult to
imagine the condition as
‘loosely linked’ to
al-Qaeda, certainly with an
operation of this ambition
and scale. As the ‘foot
soldiers’ that they were,
their plot was either guided
and/or funded by al-Qaeda or
it was not. But, as should
be increasingly clear, the
name of the label – al-Qaeda
or otherwise – should matter
far less than is popularly
perceived. There is an ever
increasing trend among
terror groups to shelve
their ideological and
religious differences and
focus on the common enemy,
Israel and America -
Jews and Crusaders - and
all that ally with them in
the West, including Britain.
Further, make no mistake;
the “old hierarchical terror
group” is alive and well and
not a ‘new, busted-up
decentralized mess’ as the
chosen descriptor implies.
Consider the
quality of al-Zawahiri’s
latest messages and one
must conclude that funding
is still adequate and that
command and control is still
effective. al-Qaeda
leadership, bruised and
pursued, is not remanded to
the dark recesses of a cave
in Pakistan, cut off from
the rest of the world and
the rest of their terrorist
organization.
Here’s the rub: If the
plot was “homegrown,” as
asserted, and the terrorists
merely “al-Qaeda-inspired”
as opposed to al-Qaeda-led,
why would a terrorist arrest
in Pakistan cause the cell
to scatter? This expected
reaction is not consistent
with ‘loose links’ to an
arrested terrorist(s) in
Pakistan. What prompted
these arrests in Pakistan?
But more importantly,
where did the money for the
complex operation come from?
Who was funding the airline
tickets for dry runs and the
six to ten actual attack
flights? Who was funding the
lab equipment and chemicals
and supplying the technical
skills necessary?
Consider
Thursday’s arrest of Hafiz
Mohammed Saeed in
Lahore, Pakistan,
apprehended at virtually the
same time the British
arrests were made. Saeed was
the founder of
Lashkar-e-Taiba, the
terrorist group believed to
be
responsible for the July 11,
2006 synchronized train
bombings in Bombay, India
that killed more than 200
civilians. The
Lashkar-e-Taiba attack list
is quite extensive.
Lashkar-e-Taiba’s links
to al-Qaeda are both
intimate and strong. In
late 2004, Dan Darling
described the group as
“basically subcontracted by
al-Qaeda to run its
infrastructure, propaganda,
and recruiting efforts in
South Asia while the central
leadership remains
underground.”
Lashkar-e-Taiba was
banned by Pakistani
President Pervez Musharraf
in 2002 following an
LeT and
Jaish-e-Mohammad
attack on the Indian
Parliament in December
2001.
Hafiz Mohammed Saeed
then turned his energies to
creating a new ‘charity’
called Jamaat al-Dawat,
whose benefactors include
many madrassas throughout
Pakistan. In fact, at least
one of the terrorists in the
July 7, 2005 London bombings
attended one of Jamaat al-Dawat’s
madrassas.
In April of this year,
the US State Department
officially listed Saeed’s
Jamaat al-Dawat as a
terrorist organization.
But it should be noted
that Saeed’s arrest is only
‘house arrest’ and for a
confinement duration of only
one month. Prone to fiery
speech and crowd incitement,
this is
not the first time Saeed
has been placed under ‘house
arrest’ by the Pakistani
government in 2006.
Was the charitable Saeed
a source of the Bojinka II
plotters’ funding? What
action initiated his ‘house
arrest’? Money was known to
have been wired to the
plotters from Pakistan,
which means authorities knew
of both ends of the
transaction
And what of Pakistan’s
claims of supporting the
British operation? Was it
genuine support or – with
the Lahore and Karachi
arrests that accompanied the
UK arrests Thursday – was it
possibly a matter of
Pakistan simply getting
ahead of the news knowing
the trail will inevitably
lead back to their own soil?
Regardless of the
unknowns, what is known is
that a terrorist plot on the
scale of the 9/11 attacks
was successfully thwarted
and pre-empted.
What is also known is
that all things al-Qaeda
inevitably lead directly to
Pakistan.
Sins of Statecraft: The War on Terror Exposed :: Theories on
Militarism and Prospects for Transformation ::
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/32944
"...1979, the year that international terrorism
found a new incarnation through consolidation of
converging interests and the “war on terror" was
conceived. (Its conception was necessarily
followed by a process of maturation: first
applied to the Cold War and in rhetoric within
limited theaters, such as the Palestine-Israel
situation; second in the post-Cold War
formulation of a “war on terror” plan during the
1990s; and third in its implementation after
9-11.)"
|
Few things are more crucial to our global situation today than a
comprehensive understanding of the fundamental habits and recent
overtly aggressive trend present in United States foreign policy. To
achieve such requires a look into the long-standing tradition of
creating external threats to conceal unsavory imperial operations
conducted elsewhere in the world. This paper includes an examination
of the US-USSR Cold War and the so-called “war on terror” as covers
for expansion of imperialism, and 9-11 in the context of provoked
and internally engineered first strikes throughout American history,
devoting much of its contents to theories on militarism and
post-World War II influence on policymaking—how and why those in
power do what they do.
The reasons for the use of the long-standing instruments of fear and
militarism in the cause of navigating the contours and undulations
of the Cold War are revealed in the context of the post-Cold War
“war on terror,” which employs the same rhetoric and means of
manipulation. Such revelations are not limited to identical methods,
but spring forth from statements voiced by the manipulators
themselves. A recent example (among many) came from the wife of
Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, founder of the Committee for the
Free World, and cofounder of a plethora of single-minded think tanks
ranging from the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present
Danger (CPD), Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Coalition for a
Democratic Majority, to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
In a 2004 Los Angeles interview, Decter stated, “We’re not in the
Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We’re there
to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely,
oil.” [1]
Statements like these surface after years, even decades, of
manipulations that use very different and far more publicly
palatable rhetoric to arrive at the tipping point when pretexts “to
get” what manipulators want are achieved and exploited.
Regarding methods, again reflecting undulations in tensions between
presidents and individuals acting in groups to influence
policy—groups whose objectives invariably have little or nothing to
do with democracy and the welfare of the American people—a clear
pattern of self-serving interests emerges from the comparison of the
ascendancy of 32 CPD members to posts in the pro-Cold War Reagan
administration with the ascendancy of a roughly similar number of
PNAC members to posts in the pro- “war on terror” Bush
administration. Though the precise reasons have somewhat varied
between the end of World War II and today, they have in common the
convergent interests of such influential groups with likeminded
groups outside the US, who together stood to gain from imperial
ambitions pursued under the cloak of American projection of force as
a response to the well-fashioned threats of “communist enslavement”
and “international terrorism” respectively.
All of this is and has been about control of Central Asia and
counteracting or inhibiting Russian and Chinese moves to control its
resources. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observes, “For America, the chief
geopolitical prize is Eurasia.... Eurasia is the globe’s largest
continent and is geopolitically axial. That puts a premium on
maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a
hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s
primacy.” Importantly, he adds, “Moreover, as America becomes an
increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to
fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the
circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external
threat,” [2] a statement that should be understood in the context of
one made earlier in his book: “The public supported America’s
engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” [3]
Daniel Yergin identified two axioms of Soviet intentions that led up
to the creation and eventual adoption in 1950 of the most important
foreign policy document of the last 56 years, NSC-68: the Riga axiom
of belligerency (a militarized version of George Kennan’s early,
hostile viewpoints while stationed in Riga and Moscow before and
during World War II) and the Yalta axiom (based on the greater
understanding achieved at the Yalta Conference with regard to
postwar visions that would employ cooperation, compromise, and
face-to-face diplomacy).[4] While in 1945 great strides were being
made under the Yalta axiom in Moscow meetings with Joseph Stalin, at
home the Yalta axiom was under attack from an inner circle of State
Department officials who recognized an economic opportunity in the
vacuum left by the fall of the Third Reich and the exhaustion of old
European powers. Notably, many in this inner circle that would later
trumpet the adoption of NSC-68 had worked together in Wall Street
investment firms, served in high military positions, or were
otherwise intimately connected to the corporate web from which they
stood to reap massive profits in a heightened military state. These
State Department officials, projecting the Riga axiom, insisted that
Russia was an aggressive totalitarian power bent on world conquest,
contradicting Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessments.[5]
Thus, between 1946 and late 1950 the Yalta axiom came to be rejected
by a confused and pliant President Truman, setting in motion a
lucrative tragedy and an escalating trend that continues to this
day.[6]
Two points illustrated by Jerry Sanders’ book, Peddlers of Crisis,
are useful in understanding manipulation. Firstly, NSC-68, while
presented as a military strategy in response to an imminent threat,
was in reality an economic strategy requiring military buildup to
suggest that a threat existed. Secondly, CPD was formed by
supporters of NSC-68 to manipulate the public and Congress into
embracing NSC-68’s recommendations. NSC-68 itself, drafted in
January 1950 and signed by Truman in April 1950, was not enough to
persuade, nor was the advent of the Korean War in June 1950. Only
after CPD was formed and issued a series of media statements,
followed by echoing statements from President Truman in December
1950, did the public and Congress perceive a threat grave enough to
motivate the adoption of NSC-68’s recommendations for “a three-fold
increase in military spending on nuclear and conventional forces—a
bold program of rearmament.” [7] In April 1950, when NSC-68 was
signed, four months after Truman had approved the hydrogen bomb
program, the US possessed some 500 atomic weapons and was producing
them at the rate of four per week, while the Soviets had only
recently tested their first atomic bomb and possessed at most a
dozen such weapons.[8]
This perception—or deception—highlights the thesis of this study:
that the US majority acquiesces to an aggressive arrogance arising
whenever the three spheres of financial, military, and political
powers fall into the hands of an elite self-serving minority that is
highly influential through media, lobbying, one-on-one persuasion,
and key connections within these spheres.
As NSC-68 reveals in its own language, and as revealed in the
statements of its supporters, the notion of an external threat (in
this case, the Soviet Union) was required to maintain US-European
trade advantages gained from World War II. The illusion of a Soviet
threat in Europe was key to preventing European trade partners from
ratifying the prevailing desire among Soviets and Europeans alike
for a neutralist trade environment, while the external threat in the
US was necessary to persuade the public and Congress into acceptance
of NSC-68’s huge defense budget increases, ostensibly to provide
protection, but in reality to legitimize the threat and produce
economic growth both in the US and Europe (whereas growth in Europe
meant more growth in the US).[9]
In other words, the threat was not as real as NSC-68’s economic
goals, but only the threat could achieve those goals, and only
through exaggeration. NSC-68 was therefore an offensive strategy
disguised as a defense against “communist enslavement.” The
resulting new foreign policy of what Sanders calls Containment
Militarism, adopted by Truman (and which should not be confused with
the conventional notion generated from the term “containment policy”
), consisted of a structure that grew and prevails today, requiring
new external threats to maintain today’s US- global trade
advantages, mainly produced in the intervening years (and
previously) through imperial coercion. Thus, the degree of deceit
necessary to sway public opinion also grew, often employing first
strikes against Western assets both to satisfy this demand for
acceptance/acquiescence, and to serve as pretexts for the placement
of forces in geostrategic regions and approval of finances necessary
to sustain key areas of the structure.
Today this geostrategy is directly linked to the predicted peak in
world oil production. Since lucrative control of renewable resources
is much more difficult to concentrate in the hands of a few, Western
nations have chosen to maintain their immediate investments and
establish supremacy over remaining energy reserves by supporting US
foreign policy, though they have little choice but to acquiesce and
follow US policy because of the strength of its military. In any
event, the exaggeration of threats in the “war on communism” have
given way to more virulent preemptive and preventive policies in the
“war on terror” that represent a trend far more devastating to
American founding principles and produce a danger to global security
on a scale not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Between 1798 and 2004, the United States conducted 322 operations
involving US forces abroad, not counting covert operations, disaster
relief, and routine alliance stationing and training exercises.[10]
153 of these occurred between 1946 and 2004, and have dramatically
increased in frequency decade by decade. This astounding number
represents the most prolific global projection of power by any
empire in history. Even worse, no nation in modern times has worked
so hard to kill independence movements, and the US has routinely
done so in the name of freedom and democracy.
In The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Threat, published in 1979, Alan
Wolfe states that, “Without a sharply negative view of an enemy, it
is difficult to justify an activist foreign policy.” [11] He rightly
suggested that “postwar American policy has gone through two peaks,
two valleys, and now seems to be entering a third peak,” with a peak
being a US assertion of strength against Soviet ideology represented
by an increased defense budget or interventions and symbolic
displays such as moving the American fleet. For the first peak,
Wolfe pointed to the period from the end of World War II to the
early 1950s, particularly the decision to build the hydrogen bomb
and the issuance of NSC-68, the blueprint for every belligerent
strategy report issued by the Pentagon under the Bush
administration, and similar documents drafted by Paul Wolfowitz and
PNAC prior to the ascendancy of George W. Bush to the presidency.
The second peak began in 1957 with the Gaither Report and culminated
in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The third peak began in 1976 with the
Team B Report, authorized by then CIA director George Bush Sr.; the
resulting push for intelligence community reform; and the
reappearance of CPD, which flooded the media with false notions of
an impending Soviet first strike.[12] (Paul Nitze was instrumental
in all three peaks as primary author of each of the three
belligerent documents.)
It could be argued that a third valley arrived with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, so sudden as to deflate and disappoint such
staunch neoconservatives as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz.
When asked in 1990 why he had stopped writing, Podhoretz lamented
that he had lost his compass and no longer knew what to think,
humorously noting that Kristol had moved all the way to Washington
just as “the spirit blew out of the Beltway.” [13] However, as
Stephen Cohen argues below, the US-USSR Cold War never ended.
Indeed, the consistent belligerent and bipartisan condescension of
US foreign policy toward Russia since 1991 is indicative of
deep-rooted and fundamental flaws that have plagued the US majority
in the form of an aggressive arrogance that arises whenever
financial, military, and political powers fall into the hands of a
negative-activist minority. (I apply the term “negative” to signify
the decidedly self-serving and willful use of violence in the
process of manipulating the majority.)
Stephen Blank, professor and expert on Russia at the US Army War
College, states: “The obvious implication of current policy is that
NATO under US leadership will become an international policeman and
hegemon in the Trans-Caspian, and define the limits of Russian
participation in the region’s expected oil boom.” [14]
Immediately after 9-11, Vladimir Putin promised support for Bush’s
“war on terror,” with the caveat that NATO cease its eastward push.
Bush agreed, and just as immediately set about pushing NATO
eastward. Professor Stephen Cohen of NYU points out that (thus) the
Cold War never ended, and with the US today openly stating that
Georgia and Ukraine are to become NATO partners, with US troops
present—and with Putin having drawn the line with Ukraine, as Russia
subsidizes much of Ukraine’s economy—a new and very real tension has
risen once again between the two largest possessors of nuclear arms.
(In fact, a US warship and 200 Marines were chased out of the
Russian province of Crimea just weeks ago by a massive group of
protesters.) [15]
Implicit in the above is that the illusion or projection of Cold War
triumphalism asserted under the Clinton and Bush II administrations
has lent additional leverage to those negative activists who were
already seeking global supremacy and a new external threat in the
wake of the Cold War. (While Russians saw the end of the Cold War as
an agreement between East and West, negative-activists in the US
declared a triumph of “freedom and democracy” over a “tyrannical
regime.” )
Moreover, for the average American, the valleys described by Alan
Wolfe—the mid 1950s, the 1960s and early 1970s (and the Clinton
years)—seemed to offer hope, but a sustained increase in general
prosperity that a shift away from the spending of a national
security state and toward domestic growth never arrived. Such a
shift would have required a sincere and sustained investment in the
rise of an international justice system, and the removal of US
military forces from around the world. Persistent extremists in
elite US foreign policy circles did all they could through these
valleys to see that this would never happen; America was the only
true force for good in the world, they argued, and had “a duty” to
project that force—with heavy emphasis on “force.”
The United States has shipped much its infrastructural technology
and economic wealth to Japan, South Korea, Germany, and elsewhere in
exchange for its continued overseas military presence and expansion,
some of it due to an obsession with roots in the racisms of 19th
century Manifest Destiny, all of it due to a determination to
control the economic affairs of the world through intimidation
rather than chart an equitable new course: “Indeed, if there is one
common thread running from 1945 to the present, it is the
ever-widening sphere of American containment of an unruly world,
with no end in sight.” [16]
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Cold War with the Soviet Union
was less about confrontation between two superpowers and more about
two superpowers ultimately exploiting the illusion of confrontation
for domestic and global ventures of a profitable nature. For Soviet
leaders, this illusion permitted the resolution and consolidation of
its internal difficulties, most prominently rooted in its
multiculturalism. Its borders grew more secure, and the suppression
of dissent became easier. For the United States, exploiting the
“threat of Soviet communism” in Europe fostered its wider economic
command in European and global affairs. There were actually three
cold wars, two of which are still raging: in East Asia, and in Latin
America. The United States found this “threat” convenient in both of
these regions, lending an easy excuse for basing its troops in East
Asia—which again goes back to America’s historic obsession with
China—and providing a distracting cover for long-standing exploits
in Latin America, installing dictators to allow American fruit
companies and other businesses to perpetually exploit the land while
indigenous farmers suffer immensely.[17] In fact, the best thing
that ever happened to help cover the United States’ imperial
ambitions in Latin America was the rise of Fidel Castro, allowing
the US to point to the “spread of communism” and thus legitimize
military operations, particularly under President Reagan, which in
nearly every case targeted and killed the rise of national
independence efforts, also known as democracy movements.[18]
As an undergraduate recipient of Oregon’s most prestigious award for
overseas study in Japan, and as a graduate with honors in Japanese
history, I was shocked to learn only after creating my
nontraditional independent masters degree program in Peace Studies
how the transfer of power in Korea, from Japanese to American hands
in September 1945, held in place much of the divisive Japanese
colonial structure and kept in power Koreans who had sided with the
Japanese, thus alienating nearly all Koreans and serving to thwart
attempts at reunified independence to allow occupation by US forces
to this day—a shameful trend repeated in Vietnam and countless
locations throughout recent history.[19]
If we for a moment equate occupation with terrorism rather than the
one-sided equating of anti-occupation movements with terrorism,
another advantage of using terrorism is illustrated by Harvard
Professor Stephen Rose (director of the Olin Institute, a primary
funding source for extremist think tanks): “The maximum amount of
force can and should be used as quickly as possible for
psychological impact—to demonstrate that the empire cannot be
challenged with impunity. We are in the business of bringing down
hostile governments and creating governments favorable to us.
Imperial wars end, but imperial garrisons must be left in place for
decades to ensure order and stability.” [20]
To approach an understanding of the nature of US foreign policy, it
is useful to begin with an assessment of arguably the most crucial
juncture in policymaking between the end of World War II and the
present: a period spanning the mid 1970s to the early 1980s.
Let us, therefore, back up to the subject of Midge Decter and
husband Norman Podhoretz for the sake of highlighting once again
their true objectives. Podhoretz’s end-of-the-Cold-War lament did
not last long, and indeed both he and his wife had apparently
overlooked the solution to their need for a new external threat,
which was present through a simple reorientation of a tactic laid
out in the 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism they
had attended. (This recount is best served with a brief discussion
of the years leading up to 1979, most of which is common knowledge.)
In 1974, when Gerald Ford took over for Richard Nixon in the White
House after Watergate, Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld insisted that
Ford appoint Dick Cheney as Assistant to the President. Ford had no
idea who Cheney was, but under the pressure of Rumsfeld’s
insistence, Ford approved Cheney’s appointment.
The following year, on November 4, 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney
executed the infamous Halloween Massacre, persuading Ford to
severely reduce the powers of the pro-détente, anti-Cold War Henry
Kissinger, limit the role of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and
most importantly, replace the proud Director of Central Intelligence
(DCI) William Colby with the extremely anti-détente and pro-Cold War
oil man George Bush Sr. Rumsfeld also bumped himself up to Secretary
of Defense, and Cheney moved up to Rumsfeld’s old position of White
House Chief of Staff.[21]
This set the stage for devastating intelligence reforms and the
eventual return of brutal policies in the CIA that had been
drastically curtailed after Watergate, Vietnam, and other sins of
statecraft.
Each year the CIA produces National Intelligence Estimates (NIE),
and William Colby had staunchly defended their veracity in showing
that the Soviet Union urgently sought parity through diplomacy (as
it had all along), was in severe decline economically, and strongly
desired an end to the Cold War. The NIE produced in 1976 showed
precisely this, but the new DCI George Bush Sr. called for an
independent team of outside analysts to challenge his CIA’s own
findings. Far from independent, each member of this group, called
Team B, was closely tied to the defense industry and all were
extreme anti-Soviet, anti-détente, pro-Cold War hawks. Members
included Paul Nitze, who had authored the scariest documents
throughout the Cold War, indeed had officially launched the Cold War
with his NSC-68 (while serving in the State Department as Director
of Policy Planning), and Paul Wolfowitz, Nitze’s protégé, who has
since produced the scariest post-Cold War documents.
Dissenting views were allowed in NIE in the form of footnotes, and
the most prolific writer of dissenting footnotes in the NIE of 1976
was General George Keegan.[22] Keegan had a history of creating
pretexts, among them the Northwoods plan (below), and the “death ray
scare” of the early 1970s designed to build public and military
opposition to détente. Keegan also had close ties, in the religious
fundamentalist sense, with Jack Kemp, Gary Bauer, General Daniel O.
Graham, and many other figures prominent in the rise of
interventionist policy after Team B.[23]
Team B did not challenge any facts whatsoever, but simply
embarrassed the youthful CIA team by alleging with great skill and
flourish that the Soviets were building fantastical new weapons in
preparation for a first strike. In any event, the outcome was that
Bush used Team B’s perspective to reform the entire basis for
assessing Soviet capabilities, so that henceforth NIE were based not
on facts (a.k.a. intelligence) but on imagined potential.
The results, coupled with increasing pressure from the reincarnated
CPD, forced the incoming President Carter to adopt a hard-line
foreign policy to the extent that by 1980 he was so strongly
outgunned by pro-Cold War people within the intelligence community
and the Pentagon, as well as within his own administration, that he
announced in his State of the Union address precisely what had been
put before him rather than what he may have believed or desired.
Chronologically digressing for a moment to provide useful
background, among the previous sins of statecraft in US history were
Operation Northwoods and Operation Mongoose of 1962, two parts of
one plan designed with help from both General Keegan and Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lyman Lemnitzer. Northwoods was a
plan to target American citizens in several cities and put the blame
on Cuba, serving as a pretext for invasion of Cuba. (President
Kennedy rejected the plan, and some contend that this rejection led
Keegan, Lemnitzer, E. Howard Hunt, and others to plot his
assassination.) In the declassified Northwoods documents,
suggestions also include building a plane that looked like a Cuban
MIG fighter jet to shoot down a chartered US commercial plane filled
with students flying over Cuba on their way to a Caribbean holiday;
staging a military strike on the US base at Guantanamo dressed as
Cuban soldiers; and flying a remote-controlled commercial plane over
Miami and using a fake Cuban MIG fighter to shoot it down in broad
daylight for the American public to witness.
I pause to mention this because pretexts such as these have been
used throughout US history, and represent the rising trend—from
national to international—of organized assertions of combined powers
of influence exercised in the hands of a negative-activist minority
upon the majority in the form of terrorism. First strikes on US
assets have served as pretexts for almost every major war in which
it was involved. Even in its struggle for independence from Britain,
rebels in 1770 engineered a first strike against colonists, called
the Boston Massacre, to galvanize public opinion and demonize an
enemy. In extremely organized fashion, British soldiers were
provoked into killing five colonists—a pivotal event leading to the
War of Independence. Boston revolutionaries under the leadership of
Samuel Adams portrayed the event as a “cold-blooded slaughter of
defensive colonists revealing England as murderous and oppressive,”
and “proof that there was no alternative to war.” [24] The findings
of deep research into actual details of this event as noted in
Nafeez Ahmed’s The War on Truth are both startling and instructive
in understanding the efficiency of such methods.
Widely praised as the best critique of the official inquiry into
9-11, the final chapter of The War on Truth illustrates America’s
legacy of arranging first strikes against itself to establish new
external threats, to legitimize these threats in the minds of
congressional leaders, and to galvanize public sentiment for war.
Executive director of Britain’s Institute for Policy Research and
Development, Ahmed highlights Professor John McMurtry’s explanation
of such events as follows:
Shocking attacks on symbols of American power as a pretext for
aggressive war is, in fact, an old and familiar pattern of the
American corporate state…with an attendant corporate media frenzy
focusing all public attention on the Enemy to justify the next
transnational mass murder. Throughout there is one constant to this
long record of hoodwinking the American public into bankrolling ever
rising military expenditures and periodic wars for corporate
treasure…to provide the pretext and the public rage to launch wars
of aggression against convenient and weaker enemies by which very
major and many-leveled gains are achieved for the US
corporate-military complex.
Ahmed’s final chapter describes how such methods were systematically
applied to the Mexican-American War, and by the sinking of the
Maine, which sparked the Spanish-American War; the sinking of the
Lusitania, which ultimately brought the US into World War I; Pearl
Harbor, with overwhelming evidence that the Japanese attack was
deliberately provoked and allowed to occur to generate public
support for entry into World War II; Operation Northwoods, the
rejected plan to carry out acts of terrorism within US cities
designed to spark a war with Cuba; and the Gulf of Tonkin incident,
an official lie that succeeded as a pretext for US expansion of the
Vietnam War.[25] In this context, Ahmed points out, “it is perfectly
reasonable to consider the possibility that the 9-11 terrorist
attacks were the outcome of the same sort of geostrategic
thinking—rooted in long-standing political, social, and economic
forms—that gave rise to previous US operations along a similar
framework.”
Now back to 1979, the year that international terrorism found a new
incarnation through consolidation of converging interests and the
“war on terror” was conceived. (Its conception was necessarily
followed by a process of maturation: first applied to the Cold War
and in rhetoric within limited theaters, such as in Latin America
and the Palestine-Israel situation; second in the post-Cold War
formulation of a global “war on terror” plan during the 1990s; and
third in its implementation after 9-11.) On January 21, 1979, 170
admirals and generals published a letter to President Carter in
major US newspapers, calling for US military superiority over the
Soviet Union, the recognition of Israel’s strategic value and the
reinforcement of its military capabilities, and a final renunciation
of détente. The organizers of this campaign were the previously
mentioned General Lemnitzer, the Operation Northwoods Joint Chiefs
of Staff chairman from the early 1960s; General Daniel O. Graham, a
major Team B participant; and General Keegan, the second half of the
Northwoods leftovers and the footnote man from the 1976 NIE.[26]
Around June of 1979, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The United
States launched a covert operation to bolster anticommunist
guerrillas in Afghanistan at least six months before the 1979 Soviet
invasion of that country. We did not push the Russians into
invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they
would.” [27] The US had actively recruited Afghan warlords to form
terrorist groups along the northern border, forcing the USSR to
conduct a full-scale invasion in December to counter the US
destabilization program. Among the methods used by the US in this
program was the production and distribution of textbooks to schools
(madrassas) promoting the war-values of murder and fanaticism,
fostering a generation steeped in violence.
The US government ‘in collusion with Pakistan’s leaders took abusive
advantage of the opportunity…to rule out the creation of any
responsible and independent organization among Afghans…in complete
disregard to the Afghan people’s sovereignty and sacrifices.’ [28]
In other words, the United States once again crushed a democratic
uprising, resulting in the occupation of Afghanistan by Soviet
forces, and allowing the US to form its own resistance group against
the occupation. This is where the bin Laden family became deeply
involved. The family helped fund the rebellion, and enthusiastically
supported Osama bin Laden’s decision to join the struggle.
Between July 2 and July 5, 1979, in Nafeez Ahmed’s words from The
War on Truth, citing Philip Paull’s brilliant 1982 thesis on the
organized reinvention of international terrorism,
“a group of powerful elites from various countries gathered at an
international conference in Jerusalem to promote and exploit the
idea of ‘international terrorism.’ The (Jerusalem) conference (on
International Terrorism, or JCIT) established the ideological
foundations for the ‘war on terror.’ JCIT’s defining theme was that
international terrorism constituted an organized political movement
whose ultimate origin was in the Soviet Union. All terrorist groups
were ultimately products of, and could be traced back to, this
single source, which—according to the JCIT—provided financial,
military, and logistical assistance to disparate terrorist movements
around the globe. The mortal danger to Western security and
democracy posed by the worldwide scope of this international
terrorist movement required an appropriate worldwide anti-terrorism
offensive, consisting of the mutual coordination of Western military
intelligence services.” [29]
The nonexistent target of this antiterrorist program leads us to ask
what the real target was.
According to former State Department official Richard Barnet, the
inflation of Soviet-sponsored ‘international terrorism’ was useful
precisely for demonizing threats to the prevailing US-dominated
capitalist economic system. [30]
It is crucial to identify the architects of the JCIT’s terrorism
project. Thanks to Philip Paull, we know they were, “present and
former members of the Israeli and United States governments, new
right politicians, high-ranking former United States and Israeli
intelligence officers, the anti-détente, pro-Cold War group
associated with the policies of Senator Henry M. Jackson—a group of
neoconservative journalists and intellectuals—and reactionary
British and French politicians and publicists.” Among prominent
individuals who participated were Menachem Begin, Benjamin
Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, and George Bush Sr. (The aforementioned
anti-détente, pro-Cold War group associated with the policies of
Senator Henry Jackson are well known to be Paul Wolfowitz, Richard
Perle, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan, Charles Horner,
and James Woolsey, to name a few.)[31]
Importantly, Paull’s thesis includes the entire list of the JCIT
participants, many of them intimately connected to the 1976 Team B
assault on National Intelligence Estimates and to CPD. Participants
from the United States at this conference, arranged by Benjamin
Netanyahu and George Bush Sr., were neoconservative organizers
Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter (CPD), Senator John
Danforth, Professor Joseph Bishop, General George Keegan (Team B),
Ray Cline (former CIA deputy director who had assisted with
Operation Northwoods, and director of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies), Jack Kemp (CPD), Lane Kirkland (CPD’s
connection to the AFL-CIO), journalist George Will, nuclear
physicist and staunch Cold War hawk Edward Teller, Richard Pipes
(Team B, CPD), Bayard Rustin (CPD’s connection to the A. Philip
Randolph Institute), Professor Thomas Schelling (RAND), Ben
Wattenberg (CPD), Claire Sterling, and Senator Henry “Scoop”
Jackson. Participants also came from Britain, France, Italy, the
Netherlands, West Germany, Canada, Ireland, and the largest
contingency was comprised of Israeli military, government, and
intelligence service personnel. The bulk of the international
representatives not from Israel and the US were media propagandists
long connected to covert operations.[32]
In 1981, some of the conference attendees published books, including
Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s
International Terrorism Challenge and Response: Proceedings of the
Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, asserting the
existence of this Soviet-backed threat.
For a decade or more, the United States government, like the
governments of most Western powers, was largely silent on the
question of Soviet complicity in international terrorism. Beginning
in about 1979, and culminating in 1981 with the publication of
Claire Sterling’s book, The Terror Network, the evidence that the
Soviet Union had provided substantial supplies and training to a
broad spectrum of terrorist organizations became so compelling that
it was difficult to deny it. [33]
In 1982, within just a few years of this conference, Philip Paull,
the masters degree student at San Francisco State University, used
his thesis to demonstrate that the JCIT’s literature and source
documentation was profoundly flawed, with authors citing each other
and altering official documents. Its assertion that there was a
ten-fold increase in international terrorism between 1968 and 1978
had been deliberately fabricated, and contradicted CIA data showing
a decline.
According to Ahmed: “It also routinely relied on techniques of
blatant disinformation, misquoting and misrepresenting Western
intelligence reports, as well as recycling government sponsored
disinformation published in the mainstream media. Paull thus
concludes that the 1979 JCIT was:
... a successful propaganda operation... the entire notion of
‘international terrorism’ as promoted by the Jerusalem Conference
rests on a faulty, dishonest, and ultimately corrupt information
base.... The issue of international terrorism has little to do with
fact, or with any objective legal definition. The issue, as promoted
by the JCIT and used by the Reagan administration, is an ideological
and instrumental issue. It is the ideology, rather than the reality,
that dominates US foreign policy today.”
Nevertheless, Ahmed continues,
The new ideology of ‘international terrorism’ justified the Reagan
administration’s shift to ‘a renewed interventionist foreign
policy,’ and legitimized a ‘new alliance between right-wing
dictatorships everywhere’ and the government. Thus, the
administration had moved to ‘legitimate their politics of state
terrorism and repression,’ while also alleviating pressure for the
reform of the intelligence community and opening the door for
‘aggressive and sometimes illegal intelligence action,’ in the
course of fighting the international terrorist threat. [34]
In other words, this plan was similar in nature to the Team B
assault on intelligence in that it was an effort to fan Cold War
flames and produce stronger intelligence community cover for
continued and further imperial projections, which was the primary
purpose of the US-USSR Cold War in the first place (as University of
Chicago professor of history Bruce Cumings and East Asia expert and
former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson suggest).
Upon taking office in January 1981, Reagan outlined his new foreign
policy in a speech by Alexander Haig, which boiled down to an
adoption of the JCIT theme: “International terrorism will take the
place of human rights in our concern.” [35] Thus, the 1979 US
destabilization program using terrorist groups to lure the Soviets
into Afghanistan was used by the US to call the Soviet invasion
“terrorism” and to point to that invasion as a model for
“Soviet-backed terrorism” around the world.
A nation of such greed and superior strength will often allow itself
to be attacked because it can afford to do so, and because in the
minds of a negative-activist minority it makes strategic sense to do
so. In Inventing the Axis of Evil, Bruce Cumings notes that:
From Polk’s attack on Mexico to the South’s shelling of Fort Sumter,
the sinking of the Maine and the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Korean
War, the Tonkin Gulf incident, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait,
presidents who were bent on war or not, expecting it to erupt or
not, nonetheless waited until the enemy made the first move. [36]
Cumings goes on to point out that the George W. Bush
administration’s invasion of Iraq did not fit that typical
pattern—though it is now clear from documents and statements, many
of them authored by Paul Wolfowitz, that this administration (and
its supporting base of influential negative-activist groups) was
obsessed with Middle East intervention and global dominion via force
long before they took office, with Iraq as their first stepping
stone. Thus, 9-11 was a plausible pretext, and one for which
President Bush’s administration was willing to wait.
Paul Wolfowitz’s obsession with Iraq dates back at least to 1973. It
was then that Wolfowitz—who had studied under the pro-Cold War
nuclear weapons advocate Albert Wohlstetter at the University of
Chicago, and whose father had been Albert Wohlstetter’s math teacher
at Columbia University—visited the Pentagon and asked why there were
no war room contingencies for the Persian Gulf. Later, while serving
under President Carter in the capacity of Deputy Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Regional Programs and tasked with generating a
Limited Contingency Study to examine possible third-world threats in
regions including the Middle East, Wolfowitz voiced the view that no
attention was being paid to the possibility of the Soviets turning
southward to seize the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. He advised
the deployment of military equipment to the Gulf, but his advice was
rejected. Indeed, the first written expression of such Middle East
contingencies appeared in the 1977 Military Strategy and Force
Posture Review authorized by President Carter (also known as
Presidential Review Memorandum 10/NSC-10), which incorporated
Wolfowitz’s studies.[37] After joining the Reagan administration,
his advice was accepted and tankers of military equipment were
anchored in the Persian Gulf (and later used by George Bush Sr.).
In 1986, according to Ahmed:
Osama bin Laden’s activities occurred ‘with the full approval of the
Saudi regime and the CIA.’ Under contract with the CIA, he and the
family company built the multi-billion dollar caves known as the
Tora Bora complex: ‘to serve as a major arms storage depot, training
facility, and medical center for the Mujaheddin.’ [38]
With CIA support to override visa requirements, Osama rounded up
recruits and sent them into the United States for terrorist training
by the CIA; the recruits then returned to fight against Soviet
forces. At the height of this operation, the US was shipping 65,000
tons of arms annually to Osama bin Laden’s fighters. Pakistani
operatives in contact with bin Laden received assistance from
“American Green Beret commandos and Navy SEALS in various US
training establishments,” and by 1988, Jane’s Defense Weekly
reported that “with US knowledge, bin Laden created Al-Qaeda (The
Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells
spread across at least 26 countries.”[39]When Iraq invaded Kuwait
after the fall of the Soviet Union, Osama bin Laden attempted to
rally the Saudi royal family to organize civil defense and raise a
group of Afghan war veterans to fight against Iraq. This offer was
declined, and instead the royal family accepted the stationing of
300,000 US soldiers. This is said to be the point at which Osama
chose to become an enemy of the Saudi regime, although according to
a classified intelligence report, a deal was struck with the tacit
approval of the CIA that allowed Osama to leave Saudi Arabia with
his funding and supporters. The deal also stipulated that funding
for his activities would continue with the caveat that he not target
the Saudi kingdom.[40]Al-Qaeda subsequently received increased
funding through Saudi Arabia, stronger organizational support from
Pakistani intelligence services, and more equipment and training
from the CIA. Its network received direct assistance from these
three sources, with active and tacit support of Western intelligence
agencies in spreading to 40 countries and conducting pro-Western
operations in Macedonia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Chechnya (and Moscow), Bosnia,
Philippines, Spain, Morocco, Kenya, and others (including the US and
United Kingdom), covering key regions where Western interests are at
stake: the Balkans, the Caucasus, North Africa, the Middle East,
Central Asia, and the Asia Pacific—all central to control of the
Eurasian continent.[41] Thus, in the wake of the Cold War with
Russia, US means of statecraft grew more aggressive.
Following the departure of Soviet forces, Afghanistan experienced
heavy conflict between various factions; among the most brutal of
these was the Northern Alliance (whose portrayal in US media after
9-11 was anything but brutal). By the mid 1990s, several factions
joined to form the Taliban movement, which captured Kabul and took
power in 1996, reportedly orchestrated by Pakistani intelligence and
the oil company Unocal,[42] and approved by the CIA, to provide
easier oil pipeline negotiations and the greater chance of its
successful construction through Afghanistan. In other words, the
Taliban were installed because they were easier to bribe than the
previous leadership. These negotiations occurred during the mid to
late 1990s between the Taliban and current US Ambassador to Iraq
Zalmay Khalilzad (then a Unocal advisor). The negotiations involved
Condoleeza Rice (then an advisor for Chevron), current President of
Afghanistan Hamid Karzai (then an advisor for Unocal), and Enron,
which paid $750,000 for the pipeline survey using a grant funded by
US taxpayers.[43] However, the negotiations deteriorated in the year
prior to 9-11, leading to a major US invasion plan,[44] for which
wargames were conducted in January 2001.[45] From February to May
2001, Vice President Dick Cheney gathered executives from the
world’s major energy corporations for his Energy Task Force
meetings. Maps acquired by Judicial Watch show the carving up among
these corporations of Iraq’s oilfields and much of its other
infrastructural assets. [46]
In 1993, the bombing of the World Trade Center had led investigators
to a wealth of evidence indicating intelligence community
complicity, and warnings of another, larger attack. In 1995, Project
Bojinka, in which eleven commercial jets were to be hijacked and
flown into major buildings in the United States, was thwarted,
producing another mass of evidence that planes would be used as
flying bombs. The top concern of Olympic officials for the 2000
Sydney games, in fact, was an airliner-based attack by al-Qaeda.[47]
Subsequent investigations strongly indicated that the next attack
date would be September 11, the anniversary of the 1996 conviction
of those caught in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing campaign.[48]
Throughout the years leading up to 9-11, especially in the nine
months prior to the attacks, investigators and representatives from
dozens of nations and within US borders attempted to warn top White
House and US intelligence officials of an attack set for the second
week of September 2001 using hijacked planes as flying bombs. All
attempts were systematically ignored. Statements by top officials
immediately after the attacks, that no one was prepared for or could
have predicted the events—and that no plans for an invasion of
Afghanistan existed—therefore, were lies. In fact, in October 2000,
the Pentagon held an evacuation drill with the theme that an
airplane had been hijacked and flown into the building.[49] Warned
of an impending al-Qaeda attack on the Genoa, Italy, G8 Summit in
July 2001, the office of President Bush, who was scheduled to
attend, arranged to have the skies cleared and secured, just as they
had been for the 2000 Olympic games.[50] Also in July 2001, US
representative Tom Simons warned Taliban leaders, “we will offer you
a carpet of gold or bury you with a carpet of bombs.” [51]
So, the US had at last put its reinvented (post-Cold War)
international terrorism plan to work, knowingly paving the path to
the “war on terror” well before it began. This military option was
perfect for those who longed for a new Pearl Harbor for economic
gain at the hands of “international terrorists.” The groundwork was
complete; the evil mastermind created, and all that was needed to
complete the Unocal pipeline was a legitimate excuse for taking
control of the region. The CIA was still negotiating the pipeline
deal in August 2001 while troops were already stationed in
surrounding states. Thus, all that was needed was a trigger, a
pretext to galvanize public opinion.
In June 2001, Paul Wolfowitz’s speech to the graduating class at
West Point had cited Pearl Harbor and stressed the imminence of a
similar surprise.[52] On September 9, two days before the attacks,
President Bush was presented with detailed plans to invade
Afghanistan and remove the Taliban before the heavy snowfalls of the
Afghan winter.[53] The plans highlighted a global campaign against
al-Qaeda. How long, we must ask, were the Pentagon and CIA drawing
up these plans simultaneous to their operations that had created and
supported the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the first place? The answer,
according to law professor Francis Boyle, is four years, with
wargames and troop gatherings in neighboring states for this
invasion commencing in 1997.[54]
After September 11, top insiders of the
military-industrial-academic-congressional-thinktank complex
exploited a fearful electorate, not because of a real threat, but
because the door to profits had been kicked open. This is why
security has not improved, only the spending for war and the price
of oil to pay for it have increased while profits have skyrocketed.
According to Ahmed:
A plausible conclusion from all this is that the (2001-present) US
military campaign in Afghanistan, assisted by Pakistani military
intelligence, was not really designed to destroy al-Qaeda at all.
Rather, it was designed to crush the (uncooperative) Taliban regime,
in the knowledge that al-Qaeda would be displaced elsewhere to
safety. Fighting a ‘war on terror’ against al-Qaeda had never been
the real goal of the plans for a military invasion of Afghanistan,
which had been formulated years before 9-11. Those plans were
motivated by other strategic and economic interests. But the 9-11
terrorist attacks happened to provide a convenient and powerful
pretext to implement those plans, as well as other geostrategic
imperatives. [55]
In other words, the US created the threat and, through the resultant
fear, the worldwide authoritarian means to pretend to deal with it
while exercising the full scope of its imperial ambitions. This is
why the US has more than 750,000 troops in at least 134 countries
today.[56] Moreover, that the US knowingly harbored al-Qaeda cells
throughout the 1990s and up to if not beyond 9-11 lends a new
perspective to President Bush’s post-9-11 promise to “make no
distinction between those who committed these terrible acts and
those who harbor them.”
On September 16, 2001, Osama bin Laden issued a statement to Al
Jazeera: “The US government has consistently blamed me for being
behind every occasion its enemies attack it. I would like to assure
the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to
have been planned by people for personal reasons.” [57] Evidence
appears to support his contention that 9-11 was not a result of his
orders, but rather a convenient outcome of manipulations of people
within his sphere of influence by oil company representatives,
intelligence services, and others in preceding years.
Speaking of Enron, it is Professor Peter Dale Scott’s opinion that
the American people remain traumatized by the 2000 election, a
crisis that was substantially influenced by Enron’s interests in
Afghanistan. Enron paid Christian Coalition president Ralph Reed
$500,000 to stop John McCain’s campaign, and was the biggest donor
to the Bush campaign.[58] (Enron was also one of the largest donors
to the Gore campaign.) It is plausible that 9-11 was on the table of
persons other than Osama bin Laden, especially in light of
revelations regarding 9-11 complicity of top-level American Airlines
officials at its center in Fort Worth, Texas.[59]
Regardless, Professor Scott is correct in stating that:
We are living in an atmosphere which creates the possibility for
minorities to govern acquiescent majorities. Covert power produces
fallout similar to nuclear power: trained terrorists turn on their
former trainers, th |
