Radio 4 All presents a very interesting lecture from Nafeez Ahmed:It's called "INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM: THE SECRET HISTORY" and it's described this way:
Nafeez Ahmed presents an erudite summary of US/UK and western-backed terrorist intrigue in the service of Empire, from WWII to the present. Recorded by London Sound Posse at the Islamic Centre of England, Maida Vale, London on Sunday 12 November 2006. (MP3 here)(h/t: IndyMediaUK | link here)
A deep and thought-provoking lecture from the author of:
- "The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry"
- "Behind the War on Terror"
- "The War on Truth"
- "The War on Freedom"
A few key quotes from Nafeez, as far as I understand his presentation:
If you take my work together, I've looked at al-Q'aeda in Azerbijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Algeria, Libya, the Phillipines, and Chechnya. If you look at that regionally, you're looking at Central Asia, the Middle East, the Balkans, North Africa, the Asia-Pacific and the Caucasus. So we're talking about the bulk of the world's major strategic regions.There's more but I'm not going to type it all. Click here and listen to Nafeez tell it.
At every major strategic point in the world, Western power is symbiotically conjoined to al-Q'aeda, either financially, or militarily, or through intelligence connections. And it's not a conspiracy theory; it's absolutely hugely well-documented. I don't know what you might think of conspiracy theory, but my interest is in understanding facts, and how they work and interpreting them...
One example, just to give you an idea of the salience of this kind of research: is anyone aware of David Shayler? Are you familiar with his whole story with Libya? How many people are familiar with the Libya story? ...
Just to give you a brief lowdown, David Shayler worked for MI5 ... the thrust of what he said was that MI6 had a deep undercover operative in an al-Q'aeda cell in Libya and ... they had paid this cell a hundred thousand pounds to carry out this operation to assassinate Colonel Qadaffi, and the whole thing just went completely wrong. They actually ended up blowing up a civilian car and killing civilians ...
What were they doing, plying al-Q'aeda with money to carry out a covert operation, if al-Q'aeda was, in fact, an enemy? ... I think the question of al-Q'aeda's relationship to the establishment is one that needs further research and further clarification, but that, to me, is just a very interesting example of how the official narrative doesn't quite make sense of the actual facts.
And it gets worse -- I mean, the examples that I've discussed, if you look for example at Algeria, where you have a state which is fighting a civil war against a bunch of Islamic terrorists called ... the GIA ... and ... GSPC ... in 1991 there were democratic elections, which the Islamic party won, and the military moved in, really with tacit support from France, from the United States, from Britain, cancelled the elections, and since then the whole country has plunged into civil war. And then you had the emergence of these terrorist groups which are described as al-Q'aeda affiliates, there's supposed to be interpenetration of mujahadeen and weapons, and funds, so on and so forth.
... The Algerian government is saying that it's fighting this war against these terrorists and they're saying that these terrorists are killing civilians, hundreds and thousands of them, and carrying out terrorist attacks in Algeria ... also ... in France, the 1995 Paris Metro bombings ...
Now the problem with this story is: there's a spate of very interesting reports in here, and also in France, in 1997 and 98, Robert Fisk in The Independent, John Sweeney in The Observer, in particular come to mind. But they actually got information from ... former Algerian officers, from the Algerian security services, who basically said that they had been working as part of a very clandestine operation which had penetrated these apparent Islamic terrorist groups and would actually carry out terrorist attacks using these groups, in order to justify the militarization of state policy -- essentially to justify cracking down on political resistance.
So this was a very, very different picture. And in fact this picture has been corroborated more and more, especially in French. There's not a huge amount of literature in English, but in French, there's a burgeoning literature...
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You cannot any longer look on al-Q'aeda as being merely an enemy. On the contrary, al-Q'aeda has two particular roles, it seems to me...
Its existence, however it does exist -- it's a questionable issue -- legitimizes the wholesale militarization of Western society, and is also subject when possible to Western control and manipulation in order to secure very specific strategic and economic interests...
Throughout the post-Cold War period, al-Q'aeda has actually functioned as a vehicle of Western covert operations, in the service of what I would argue are powerful corporate interests, particularly related to the monopolization of global energy resources.