Birthday Tribute To A Dead Or Living Legend -- Osama bin Laden Turns Fifty

You know you've arrived when even your "enemies" celebrate your birthday. And the IHT has obliged with a 50th birthday celebration for Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden:

Osama bin Laden was born 50 years ago Saturday, and although he has not been heard from for months, his friends in the Taliban are certain that he is not dead.

"He is alive, I am 100 percent sure," a Taliban spokesman, Hayatullah Khan, said in an interview. He said senior leaders were in touch with bin Laden, reinforcing a widely held view that he is hiding near the rugged Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Khan said special prayers were offered by Taliban fighters in camps in Afghanistan to mark bin Laden's birth on March 10, 1957, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabian.

"We prayed that Allah may give him 200 years to live," Khan said by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location. "When we woke up today, we offered collective and long prayers for him because he is a great mujahid."

Oh yeah, man, he's still alive, even though nobody has seen him in a long time, man! Oh yeah, man, he's still alive and he's gonna live to be 200. Oh yeah, man, I heard it on my sattelite phone! Oh yeah, man. Because you'll believe anything!

It's not just the International Herald Tribune. Even Democracy Now! did a big hairy deal on Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden, in which Amy Goodman interviewed the famously-unknown so-good-as-to-be-unpublishable truth-telling journalist Robert Fisk in honor of Emmanuel Goldstein's Osama bin Laden's 50th birthday. Fisk, the intrepid truth-teller, said he hadn't seen Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden since 1997. Oh yeah, man!

But

The United States fears that Al Qaeda, terrorism network he founded is rebuilding its base in Pakistani tribal lands and has forged ties with affiliates in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

The key words of that sentence come right at the beginning. The United States fears! And it doesn't really matter whether Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden is alive or dead; and it doesn't really matter whether Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden founded al-Q'aeda or whether it was the CIA who did that, and it doesn't really matter whether its true what they say, that al-Q'aeda doesn't exist; and in fact it doesn't really matter whether any of the things we fear are real or not, because the basic reality now -- in the so-called "post-9/11 world" -- the world supposedly brought upon us by Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden -- is that reality doesn't matter anymore -- at all! And fear is everything.

We waste hundreds of billions of dollars that we don't even have and we waste thousands of young lives that should have been put to better purposes -- and we do it in order to kill hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent people (whom we can now call terrorists, if we like) -- and to consign their nation's most precious natural resource to foreigners of our choosing!

And it's all because we're afraid. And we're afraid because we were attacked by Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden! Oh yeah, man!

Bin Laden is revered by some, reviled by others, as the symbolic leader of a global jihad against the United States, an effort that had its seeds in the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.

Um ... unless it has its seeds in the arming and financing of Muslim guerrilas by a succession of American administrations beginning with Jimmy Carter, who was taking advice from Zbignew Brezhinsky. They recognized a chance to help an enemy of an enemy and they did so. Take that, Soviets! The enemies of our enemy were armed to the hilt by Ronald Reagan and betrayed by George Herbert Walker Bush. Oops! All of a sudden we had a bit of a problem!

Or did we? Nafeez Ahmed, who has been doing serious research on the topic for years, has come to the conclusion that al-Q'aeda is a covert operations instrument of western intelligence agencies.

And other credible evidence suggests that al-Q'aeda doesn't even exist. So it could be -- especially when it comes to North American operations -- that al-Q'aeda is more often a scapegoat than a villian.

In other words, perhaps Emmanuel Goldstein's Osama bin Laden's "terrorism network" is not quite the problem it's sometimes made out to be:

It resulted in the attacks on the United States of Sept. 11, 2001, which killed more than 3,000 people and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York.

That's the official story, but unless somebody can convince me that Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden scheduled all the war games and put the explosives in the towers, I'm not very likely to believe much that appears in the mainstream media about Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden and his so-called Holy War against America.

Should I?

The Taliban were ousted from power by U.S. forces in late 2001 after their leaders refused to surrender bin Laden. At first, President George W. Bush sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan, scouring the deserts and mountains for bin Laden, offered a $25 million reward and said he should be captured "dead or alive."

But after the effort failed and Bush turned his sights on Iraq, he said capturing bin Laden was "not important," and eventually the CIA even disbanded its unit that tried to find him.

Which speaks for itself, I think.

And so, without further ado ... [drum roll, please!] ...

On behalf of all our friends and protectors, who keep us safe from the scary scary fears they just happen to provide, a rousing Happy 50th Birthday to Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden, wherever you may be buried.

Love and Kisses,
The M-I-C

Foreign Policy's "Terrorism Index" Shines No Light In The Darkness

Earlier this week, Foreign Policy released its second "Terrorism Index", a feature which purports to examine the scale, scope and nature of global terrorism, its threat to America, and America's response to the threat. But in fact it does nothing of the sort; instead it obscures the most important issues of the day, and it does so at great length. If the "Terrorism Index" is intended as serious analysis, it's very weak indeed; but if it's intended as propaganda then it's brilliant.

The report begins by noting that most Americans don't believe we're winning the War on Terror, and almost half don't believe the government has a plan to protect the nation from terrorism:

America’s leaders like to say that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, represented a watershed. After that fateful day, Americans were told, problems that had been allowed to linger -- terrorist sanctuaries, dangerous dictators, and cumbersome government bureaucracies -- would no longer be neglected and left for terrorists to exploit. Yet, more than five years later, Americans are more skeptical than ever that the United States has effectively confronted the threat of terrorism. Barely half believe that their government has a plan to protect them from terrorism. Just six months ago, 55 percent of Americans approved of the way the war on terror was being handled. Today, that number is just 43 percent — lower than at practically any point since the 9/11 attacks.

... and it tries to explain why this is so ...

That skepticism could be easily attributed to dark events in the past six months: a bloody war between Israel and Hezbollah, a plot in Britain to explode liquid bombs aboard airliners bound for the United States, North Korea’s nuclear test, a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, and Iraq’s downward slide into deadly sectarian strife. But is the public’s pessimism over the war on terror just a problem of perception? After all, the United States has yet to be attacked again at home — and that could be the most important benchmark of all.

I count seven lies or half-truths in the previous paragraph. And I will get to them in a moment. But first, to be fair, let's see where Foreign Policy is going with this line of thought:

To help determine whether the United States is growing more or less safe, FOREIGN POLICY and the Center for American Progress teamed up once again to survey more than 100 of America’s top foreign-policy experts—Republicans and Democrats alike -- in the second FOREIGN POLICY / Center for American Progress Terrorism Index. First launched last June, the Terrorism Index is the only comprehensive, nonpartisan effort to mine the highest echelons of the nation’s foreign-policy establishment for its assessment of how the United States is fighting the Global War on Terror. Its participants include people who have served as secretary of state and national security advisor, senior White House aides, top commanders in the U.S. military, seasoned intelligence officers, and distinguished academics and journalists. Eighty percent of the experts have served in the U.S. government—more than half in the executive branch, 26 percent in the military, and 18 percent in the intelligence community.

Well, there you go. The Terror Index is nonpartisan presumably because it includes donkeys as well as elephants; but if 80 percent have served in the government and the rest are distinguished academics, then it can hardly be impartial, can it?

How many whistleblowers does it include? How many academics on the list would rather tell the truth than remain "distinguished"? How many politicians, generals, intelligence analysts, and so on -- whistleblower or distinguished -- come from outside the United States? How many come from outside the mainstream?

What am I getting at? I am suggesting that had Foreign Policy seen fit to include real outside experts on global terror -- such as Nafeez Ahmed, for example -- their "Terror Index" may have been more useful, because it may have been based on a more sophisticated understanding of the world than the paragraph I set in bold above.

I counted seven lies or half-truths in that paragraph. How many did you spot?

[1] war between Israel and Hezbollah

The lopsidedness of this phrase set my detectors ringing. Why couldn't they say "War between Israel and Lebanon"? Or if lopsidedness is "in" for some reason, why not "War between Likud and Lebanon"? I mean, these people are supposed to be experts in world affairs, right?

And if they really want to understand the role this war plays in our current situation, it would have helped if they had indicated that it was fought based on a lie, and that it was portrayed as a reaction but it was planned years before it started. I keep coming back to the idea that we can't solve a problem until we understand what it is. A reality-based approach, I know, and perhaps not one Foreign Affairs can take at the moment, unfortunately.

[2] a plot in Britain to explode liquid bombs aboard airliners bound for the United States

It's amazing (or is it?) that Foreign Policy can't even manage to come up with the by-now standard phrase: "alleged plot". We know the "plot" as described would have been impossible; the reaction from British authorities was a gross overreaction (if it was a reaction at all). This incident does not illustrate heightened danger from Muslim extremists in any fashion, but it does illustrate very high danger from our governments and so-called "news" media.

[3] North Korea’s nuclear test

We're probably not supposed to remember that it was a mostly-failed test, if it was a nuclear test at all. Initially, none of North Korea's neighbors could find any trace radioactivity. Then the following Monday the US released a report saying one of their sensors had detected increased levels of radioactivity near North Korea the previous week, and the media ran away with headlines like "North Korean Nuclear Test Confirmed" and that was the end of the story, for all intents and purposes.

[4] a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan

Whose fault is that? Who's making all the money from the poppies? And where is that happening? As for the Taliban, do they really represent a threat to anyone in the United States? It would be very difficult to prove they do. But if they do, then the next question becomes: Why are they being protected in Pakistan, supposedly our number one ally in the war on terror?

[5] Iraq’s downward slide into deadly sectarian strife

And whose fault is that? We've known for a long time that the US invaded Iraq on false pretenses, and that "strategic thinkers" in the US "think tank" school of making foreign policy on the sly have been pushing for civil war in Iraq and the dissolution of the country for many years now. We know the US set up death squads in Iraq with the very purpose of instigating "sectarian strife", and recently we've begun to see evidence indicating that the US was also behind the bombing of the Golden Mosque. If there is sectarian strife in Iraq then we put it there. And why would we do such a thing? Primarily, in my opinion, to mask the fact that the primary target (and the primary cause) of the violence in Iraq is the American occupation.

[6] is the public’s pessimism over the war on terror just a problem of perception?

In other words, do we simply need more and better propaganda? The propaganda we get now is pretty good, thanks; and we get enough of it in my opinion. So I would answer NO to this question; I think the public's pessimism over the war on terror has more to do with reality than perception. But thanks for asking.

[7] the United States has yet to be attacked again at home — and that could be the most important benchmark of all.

Or else it could be entirely and deliberately meaningless.

We may not know who was behind the attacks of 9/11 but we certainly know that the official lies we've been given are worthless, or worse than worthless. The attackers had to have inside help, patsies were most certainly framed, identifiable disinformation has been spread around by government agencies and other agencies working for the government, and no legitimate investigation has ever been undertaken.

We know that all these things are true about the 7/7 London bombings as well. Other similarities between the events of 9/11 and the events of 7/7 reveal a commonality of planning, and point away from al-Q'aeda (whatever that is, if it even exists), and toward government insiders. The "government insiders" pointed to belong to many different governments, and they are way inside.

At first blush that seems like too much to swallow, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it. This wasn't all done by a postal clerk in Ames, Iowa.

And I know it may sound crazy-scary to some of my readers, but it's not half as crazy-scary as what Sibel Edmonds is trying to tell us, and if she were loony tunes they would certainly let her speak freely. Instead she is heavily gagged and supposedly for national security reasons. In other words, if she were allowed to speak, all sorts of individuals and cabals at the very highest levels would be implicated. That's not me speaking, this is is the official government position: If Sibel Edmonds were allowed to speak freely, significant international business and diplomatic arrangements would be jeopardized.

What does that tell you?

Throw in what we now know about the alleged liquid bombing plot. It was nothing but phony, on any possible level. But it has led to serious consequences: a giant step in the so-called "harmonization" of security arrangements in the EU, a boost in the insane frenzy that pushed the so-called Military Commissions Act through both houses of congress, and airline travel hassles which have all the markings of being made permanent, despite the fact that there was never any demonstrated threat!

Put these things together and give them a stir, and it's no wonder 55% of Americans think we're losing the war on terror.

The other 45% are a tribute to the most enormous propaganda machine ever built; there's no other possible explanation, unless we admit the power of human stupidity, our awesome capacity of being most certain when we are also most ignorant.

We're supposed to be under this great big threat, but we've never even made an effort to secure our borders. We're still pounding on Iraq, even though it's been well documented that our presence there is only inciting more terrorism. And now we're going to spend more time and effort and money -- and blood -- and grief -- pounding on Afghanistan, even though our previous pounding (and the pounding-by-proxy that NATO has been doing for us) haven't made things there any better (and in fact they may now be worse than ever!). So it's tough to see what the other 45% are thinking about.

But at the same time we're finding out more and more clearly that the terror we have to fear comes from inside our own government, that the people supposedly tasked with assuring our national security are far more interested in assuring their own job security, which essentially means the security of the ruling criminal regime, and it looks increasingly likely that the other 45% are not thinking at all -- they've got their heads firmly in the sand (or elsewhere) and they're waiting for all this to go away.

Through this prism it's easy to understand Foreign Policy's contention that the most important benchmark of all may be that we haven't been attacked at home since 9/11.

That's exactly what they're supposed to say. It's the only possible rationale for keeping the criminals in power. It's the only way to keep the protection racket going.

And the terrorists still have their sanctuaries, and our government bureaucracies are still cumbersome, but it's not fair to claim, as some have done, that nothing has changed as the result of 9/11, because we too now live under a dangerous dictator.

And to tell you the truth, our most important benchmark of all seems to be: It's OK because they only did it once!

Trial Of Rashid Rauf Set To Begin

The trial of Rashid Rauf is about to begin in Pakistan, where last week the formerly alleged ringleader and/or mastermind and/or explosives expert and/or al-Q'aeda connection of the currently alleged Liquid Bombers saw all of his terror-related charges dismissed.

He is still held on non-terror charges including impersonation and traveling with forged papers, and faces a maximum of 14 years in prison if convicted of all charges.

Rashid Rauf may also face extradition to Britain. The British have been trying to question him in connection with a 2002 murder as well as this summer's alleged plot.

They haven't been successful, and there's no extradition treaty between Britain and Pakistan, so they might never get him to the UK.

But that hasn't stopped them spending money trying.

Rashid Rauf's brother, Tayib Rauf, was arrested in the UK during the "anti-terror" raids of August 9/10 and held for two weeks before being released without charges. Their father, Abdul Rauf, was arrested (or merely detained) in Pakistan before he too was released without being charged. Within a few days of his release, however, a Muslim charity which he founded, and which had allegedly been funneling money to terrorists, had its funds frozen. Hmmm.

Serious strangeness surrounds the Rashid Rauf story in multiple layers.

For instance, some reports indicate that he was arrested on August 9th in Pakistan, that he sent a text message (or else phoned a friend who sent a text message) to the alleged plotters in England, telling them to go ahead, and that the police intercepted the message and arrested the alleged would-be bombers.

Other reporters believe that he was arrested three or four days (or maybe as much as a week) earlier, that he was tortured in a Pakistani prison, that he revealed the names of the alleged plotters to his interrogators, and that the so-called Liquid Bombers were arrested thanks to cooperation of the Pakistani police, who promptly shared the names with Scotland Yard.

We may never know the truth ... but I am still digging.

In my opinion, this is not primarily about Rashid Rauf, and neither is it primarily about the eleven Britons who are charged with "conspiracy to murder".

It's not even about the abrupt change in the news cycle which it caused, and which was used to maximum advantage both by the Blair government in the UK and by the Bush government in the USA.

It has something to do with the draconian restrictions imposed on air travel, first at Heathrow and then all over Europe and North America, restrictions which have just recently been relaxed and which are still ludicrous.

But even more than that. It sideswiped the political landscape at a time when the war criminals who prowl the Oval Office, and the war criminals who take their orders from the aforementioned Oval Office war criminals, badly needed a change in said political landscape. It led to three weeks of full-bore terror-alerts, which were followed by another round of Pin 9/11 on Osama bin Laden, and -- as if by magic -- the war criminals (on behalf of whom both Osama bin Laden and Rashid Rauf appear to have been working) had a plan all ready to make sure that that exploitation of this frenzy for political purposes was complete.

And what was in the plan? It's easier to understand it if you can see it from a distance. And it helps to have a good guide with you. David Wallechinsky published one recently, at Huffington Post, and we'll share the final few paragraphs (along with a few slightly frozen remarks from yours truly):

Bye, Bye, Bill of Rights

What with Bush's low approval ratings, the president and his administration could not count on Congressional Republicans to pass this Act just because Bush asked them to. So they ratcheted up the terrorism fear level and, six weeks before an election, forced the Republicans to rush through the Act in order to look tough on terrorism just before Americans went to the polls.

The timing was very kind to the British as well, with Tony Blair teetering on and on, and his would-be successors bringing the knives into the open for the first time in many years.

And how did the Bush administration raise the fear level? Take a look at the Gallup Poll results relating to President Bush's handling of terrorism. In July of this year, more Americans disapproved of his handling of terrorism than approved. Four weeks later, there was a reversal and a majority approved of Bush's anti-terror performance. What happened in between?...the arrest of more than twenty suspects in a terrorist plot in England that was aimed at destroying ten airplanes.

An alleged terrorist plot in England that was supposedly aimed at destroying ten airplanes (although we now know that destroying even one airplane with a so-called "liquid bomb" is quite impossible)

This incident was a perfect launch for the Bush administration's pre-election Be Afraid of Terrorists campaign. Even Bush's overall approval rating went up, albeit by a modest 3%. The Bush team sure got lucky on that one. Or was there more to it? Maybe it's just my fertile imagination, but...

I recommend reading the article about the plot by Don Van Natta, Elaine Sciolino and Stephen Grey that appeared in the New York Times on August 28 and that is available online through the TimesSelect service or on various unofficial sites.

The link above leads to a site set up expressly to mirror that NYT article.

The article makes clear that the plot was real. However, it was not imminent.

It's hard for me to imagine in what sense the plot was "real", but in all other respects Mr. Wallechensky's approach seems quite sound.

British officials apologized, two weeks after the fact, for the exaggerated, panic-inducing statements they had made at the time of the arrests. Naturally, the dire warnings made headlines, while the retractions and apologies went largely unnoticed.

Naturally!

The most intriguing revelation in this article is that British officials at Scotland Yard felt in complete control of the plotters,

Scotland Yard may have been in complete control of the alleged plotters, in more ways than one!

who had not yet made flight reservations and two of whom had not yet even obtained passports. The British spies wanted to continue their surveillance of the plotters. Unfortunately, Scotland Yard was forced to act quickly because, thousands of miles away in Pakistan, the Pakistani government, without informing their British anti-terror colleagues, arrested a man with dual British/Pakistani citizenship who was, presumably, vital to the plot and whose arrest was immediately known to the plotters.

Mr. Wallechensky here joins the text-message school of thought, as opposed to the tortured-confession school of thought favored by such seasoned observers as Nafeez Ahmed and Craig Murray.

From the Times: "Several senior British officials said the Pakistanis arrested Rashid Rauf without informing them first. The arrest surprised and frustrated investigators here who had wanted to monitor the suspects longer, primarily to gather more evidence and to determine whether they had identified all the people involved in the suspected plot." So if the hijackings were not imminent and the British wanted to wait before making any arrests, why did the government of Pakistan's dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, arrest Rashid Rauf when it did? So far, there has been no official explanation.

Well, the official White House explanation for this series of events would not be difficult to predict:

"Terrah! Terrah! 9/11! Look Over There!!"

Other reports suggested that Pakistani intelligence picked up Rashid Rauf because the Americans had threatened to "render" him.

As I said, maybe I just have too fertile of an imagination, but one thing is certain: over a period of just seven weeks, that arrest triggered the British arrests that set off a fear-of-terrorism panic that gave President Bush extra ammunition to pressure Congressional Republicans, who then rushed through passage of an anti-terrorism bill

Ahem. A so-called anti-terrorism bill. Please. There's no evidence -- not even a hint of a suggestion -- that any aspect of the Military Commissions Act will deter, prevent or otherwise mitigate terrorist attacks in the USA or indeed terrorism in the world generally. The Act in effect codifies some of the most grievous transgressions Bush and his junta have been claiming the right to commit -- and actually committing! -- since September of 2001. Or, as David Wallechensky describes it, it's the Act

that transferred new powers to the executive branch while, at the same time, immunizing President Bush and others from prosecution for their violations of the U.S. War Crimes Act.

Indeed.

Some guys have all the luck.

They sure do.

===

twelfth in a series

False Flags and Low Intensity Operations

Here's a short video clip in which Webster Tarpley, Nafeez Ahmed and others discuss the evidence indicating that al-Q'aeda is an instrument of Western intelligence agencies, used for covert operations.

In Good Company

Somehow I've managed not to mention any of this until now, but look what's been happening in the Netherlands! Atlantic Free Press has been publishing excellent dissident writing since its inception in October, 2006 -- just last month? astounding! -- led by editor-in-chief Chris Floyd (of Empire Burlesque), assisted by Rich Kastelein (ditto) and Chris Cook (of Vancouver's PEJ News) and featuring contributions from a wide and deep cast of characters, including: senior writer Paul William Roberts, Craig Murray, Mike Whitney, Manuel Valenzuela, Mark Crispin Miller, William Blum, Nafeez Ahmed, David Lindorff, Will Durst, William Bowles, David Swanson, and many more ... and (can you believe it?) within the past week they've been joined by the nearly frozen Winter Patriot.

The good folks at AFP have published two of my recent items: Tony Blair Makes a Donation -- to a Government including an International Terrorist and Foiled German Terror Plot Was A Joke? and if all goes well they'll continue to inflict the worst of my politically oriented material on a mostly unsuspecting world.

Something quite similar has been happening already, via another European-based site (although it may soon be moving to Asia -- how global!) where I've been making so-called "contributions" on a semi-irregular basis: Start The Revolution had been a one-man-show (featuring some amazing writing from Shaun, who is also the webmaster, of course!) but it has expanded to included the occasional frozen rant as well as semi-irregular contributions from our friend Gandhi, the aforementioned Bill Blum and Daithí Mac Lochlainn, who (fortunately for us) writes in English much of the time.

So please visit both Start The Revolution and Atlantic Free Press now and then, where you can see what your frozen scribe's frozen scribblings look like among such distinguished company... and even better: you can read the distinguished company!

Nafeez Ahmed Speaks on The Secret History of International Terrorism

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)

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"

(h/t: IndyMediaUK | link here)

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.

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...
...
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.

There's more but I'm not going to type it all. Click here and listen to Nafeez tell it.

Tony Blair Makes a Donation -- to a Government including an International Terrorist

Tony Blair went to Pakistan last weekend with a quarter of a billion pounds in his back pocket and high hopes of making a trade, but from the look of things he only made a donation.

'Tis the spirit, one month early, perhaps?

Blair's meeting with ex-General (now-President) Pervez Musharraf was a great success for Musharraf, but not for Blair.

Blair's visit to Pakistan was apparently part of a concerted effort to break a deadlocked struggle for an extradition treaty.

The money -- a 250-million-pound increase for "moderate Islamic madrassas" (schools which teach Islam without violence!), raising Britain's contribution from 230 to 480 million pounds (almost a billion dollars) over the next three years, must have seemed to Blair a reasonable quid-pro-quo.

To shorten a long story somewhat, the moderate madrassas of Pakistan got the money, or at least the Pakistani government did, but Tony Blair didn't get the treaty.

Merry Christmas to the moderate madrassas of Pakistan.

Pakistan and the UK have been haggling over an extradition treaty for years, especially in the three months since August 10th, when the so-called "liquid bombers" were arrested (and their alleged plot to mix so-called explosives out of common household liquids aboard a moving airplane was reportedly foiled).

The arrests were said to have been triggered by the capture in Pakistan of one Rashid Rauf, alleged ringleader and/or messenger and/or explosives expert and most certainly the suspects' al-Q'aeda connection.

According to reports from Pakistan, after (or perhaps during) (or maybe even before) his arrest, Rashid Rauf (or possibly an associate of Rashid Rauf) supposedly sent out a text message allegedly giving the so-called plotters a "green signal".

Never mind that only one of the alleged plotters had bought an airline ticket.

Never mind that some of the alleged plotters still didn't even have passports.

Green! Green Green! Go! Go! Go!

Hop aboard transatlantic flights from Heathrow to The Great Satan, mix your liquid bombs along the way, and blow those planes out of the sky in the name of Allah!

So the alleged plotters either started getting this message and the British police feared they would start the attack rolling, or else British police feared they would get the message and start running away, but in any case the alleged plotters were arrested on the night of August 9th and the following day.

And all the airports (especially Heathrow) went on red-hot-alert, vigilant against liquids and pastes and suspicious murky substances in all carry-on luggage, despite some rather awkward circumstances.

For instance,the so-called conspirators had allegedly been caught, so what were we supposedly worried about?

And then: it takes several hours -- or maybe several days -- working in carefully controlled conditions, to make explosives out of common household liquids, and the process yields crystals which must be filtered and dried before they can be used.

No "terrorists" could possibly make a bomb aboard a plane without considerable assistance from the flight crew. And we know that's never going to happen. So what's the plot?

It has been suggested that the arrests were timed with politics in mind, and it would be tough to disagree, especially given the track record of our so-called governments with such events.

Despite this alleged plot having supposedly triggered so many changes in both North America and Europe, there has been very little discussion of the workings of the alleged plot itself.

One British official was especially helpful on this point when he declared that the police were certain they were investigating "an alleged plot".

This was a considerable point in his efforts to assure all the reporters that the authorites were actually responding to an actual "alleged plot", rather than something less or more sinister.

As for the alleged plot itself, the most recent detailed status report was published by the New York Times, which then decided not to ship any papers to Britain that day, and set up special software on their server to block British visitors from reading it online, unless they looked elsewhere.

Since that report, we've almost lost sight of the plot, winding up instead with half a dozen sub-plots, one of which involves Britain's suddenly-enhanced desire to negotiate an extradition treaty with Pakistan so that Blair and associates can get their hands on Rashid Rauf.

The Pakistanis seem to be doing the best they can to shield Rashid Rauf, short of simply saying, "You can't have him." Pakistani officials didn't even admit they were holding him on charges pertaining to the alleged liquid bombing plot until late in October.

Before that, they said he was being held on two charges, one related to altered travel documents and the other not related to terrorism! They've refused (or simply ignored) a request from Rashid Rauf's family to bring him to court, and they still haven't announced the specific charges under which he is being held.

And maybe they have a good reason for not doing so.

As Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed has pointed out, there's been precious little serious discussion of any of this in the British press during the past few months, and none of course on the American side, while airports all over the so-called free world now limit each passenger to a one-liter (1 qt) clear ziplocked plastic bag containing bottles and/or jars of no more than 100ml (3 oz) each.

It may seem extreme but it's better (for the passengers) than the red-hot-alert constraints, where passengers couldn't carry-on any liquid, cream or gel except for mother's milk, and then only if they had a baby with them and then only if the mother tasted the milk before boarding (to show the security guards it was really milk and not acetone or hydrogen peroxide or sulfuric acid!)

In one telling episode, William Blum wrote about a friend who had been prevented from carrying ice cream onto a plane, on the grounds that the ice cream might melt and become a liquid!

And even though Rashid Rauf's name hasn't appeared much in the western press, the Pakistani press has been mentioning him once a week or so, and with more or less the same story-line almost every week, buried amongst other news of the day:

A Pakistani official, asked about the status of extradition treaty negotiations and the prospects of Rashid Rauf being extradited, gives a more-or-less standard non-commital answer which somehow seems to imply that even though there's no extradition treaty, Rashid Rauf may soon be extradited.

And sometimes we see hints that a treaty is in the works or that his extradition is being considered. But so far nothing of the sort has happened.

Perhaps it's because of a lack of evidence?

Meanwhile, it's not just airport security that has changed. Authorities on both sides of the ocean have used the so-called plot to generate tremendous fear and to support a whole new wave of terror alerts, all of which have proved to be bogus or premature or overblown or all of the above.

And in the meantime, habeas corpus has been shredded in the US (not just for foreign terrorists but potentially for any law-abiding American), and Europe has been "harmonising security arrangements", slip-slidin' away to a place marked "continental police state".

So, for instance, there have been long lines and big delays at the airport in Cyprus because each passenger there is entitled to carry-on only a single one-liter clear ziplocked plastic bag containing an unlimited number of bottles and/or jars, each of no more than 100ml.

These restrictions, I must say, make it very difficult for "terrorists" to mix a bomb out of liquid explosives aboard a plane.

By my calculations, if you had...

a litre of the right liquids, in the right proportions, and sufficient ice (for the reactants must be kept cold),

enough glassware (lab-quality, unless you wish to blow yourself up prematurely without hurting anyone else),

enough time (at least six to eight hours, more likely three to four days),

proper ventilation (these are strong acids you're working with, and the smell of acetone is not exactly subtle),

and a proper filtering system (although an aircraft-quality serviette might do in a pinch -- at any rate this is the least of your technical problems),

...you could possibly create (now pay attention, because this is important!) up to eight grams (a quarter of an ounce) of explosive crystals!

(You'll excuse me, I hope, if I don't link to the bomb recipe from which I'm borrowing these numbers; I don't want to encourage anyone. I found a page whose owner was ecstatic over getting 8.3 grams of explosive crystals from a batch made in a one-litre flask, and since that was the largest yield I ever saw reported anywhere, 8 grams of crystals per batch seems like a generous estimate.)

According to experts in the field, if you had a shaped charge, properly packed, and properly placed, you could conceivably knock a hole in the fuselage of a commercial aircraft using only 250 grams (half a pound) of explosive crystals.

This means it could take as few as 32 passengers, all on the same flight, each carrying-on a litre of the right liquids, in the right proportions, each willing and able to find a separate private area in which to work undisturbed for at least six to eight hours, possibly three or four days.

They couldn't all work together, of course, because if they pooled their resources and mixed all their liquids together, somebody would probably notice -- and it would smack of conspiracy!

But if 32 passengers, acting independently, somehow fashioned a shaped charge containing roughly 250 grams of explosive crystals, without actually working together, it wouldn't really be a conspiracy, would it?

So they might -- just might! -- be able to pull it off. Be very afraid.

They would probably need only another 50 or 60 passengers in support, carrying-on the required glassware and ice (hopefully in insulated carry-on coolers).

In other words, it would only take about 80 or 90 terrorists, working together but separately for six or eight hours, or maybe three or four days, to bring down a commercial aircraft using a bomb made from explosive liquids.

As all can plainly see, the danger is certainly clear and present, the threat will obviously last at least a generation, and this is clearly a good enough reason to shred some fundamental legal rights, such as habeas corpus; we might as well legislate some immunity for war crimes already committed, while we're at it.

So ... that's the reason for the plastic bags, and all the little bottles and jars, and the warnings about how al-Q'aeda terrorists might revive the liquid bombing plan in order to wreak havoc on unsuspecting intercontinental travelers this holiday season.

And that's also why Tony Blair wants Rashid Rauf, but of course there's no extradition treaty between Pakistan and the UK, and that's why Tony Blair has just been visiting Pakistan looking for one. He hasn't been successful, not yet anyway.

But he may not need it right away, as British authorities have announced the trial of the alleged liquid bombers will not begin until 2008 -- probably not until after Easter. So Blair still has time to work on a deal before the "speedy" trial begins. It might cost him another billion, and then again he still might not get it; we can only wait and see.

If Tony Blair is wondering why he's been having so much trouble with Pakistan, supposedly a key ally in the war against terror, he might pause to consider what may have happened had he arrived in Pakistan three days earlier than he did.

Had he landed on Tuesday rather than Friday, he could have enjoyed reading about Tanvir Hussain, the retired Pakistani army major, now a member of the Pakistani parliament and in fact the parliamentary Secretary of Defense, who declared on that day in a parliamentary debate that he had been a member of the banned terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (aka LeT) (aka LT).

LeT is "the military wing of the Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad (MDI), an Islamic fundamentalist organisation which advocates a fully Islamic India, and whose military wing has been involved in bombing attacks against India since 1990", according to Wikipedia.

India and Pakistan have been at odds for a lifetime, having fought three wars against each other in the past sixty years. And they've just recently begun talking again after a horrific July 11 bombing attack against passenger trains in Mumbai.

LeT are suspected of involvement in those bombings, as well as many other large and extremely violent attacks, including the Delhi train bombings of October 29, 2005, and the London train bombings of July 7, 2005.

So this was probably a bad time for a Pakistani MP to say he had been a member of LeT.

Initially I got the impression he was saying he was a former member. But is that really what he meant when he said "I have been a member of LeT"? Is he a "former member"? Well, not quite.

According to more detailed accounts, published in India and Australia but not in Pakistan, Tanvir Hussain went on to explain that he is still associated with LeT, he goes to their conventions, he makes speeches for them there, and he gives them additional help when they ask for it.

He claims he's a jihadi, not a terrorist, and I don't think anyone can argue with him on this point, since everyone knows one man's terrorist is another man's jihadi.

Anyway, a Pakistani spokesman reportedly said we shouldn't worry about it, that we should focus "on what governments do and not on what individuals say". I'd find his advice easier to take if the individual in question were not part of the government, but nonetheless...

Plus c'est la meme chose, plus c'est la meme chose.

In other words, the status is still quo, for the most part. Tanvir Hussain is still an MP and the parliamentary secretary of defense. Nobody in Pakistan is screaming for his resignation, or even for a retraction. They probably just want him to stop talking.

In the global game of foot-in-mouth, John Kerry's got nothin' on Tanvir Hussain.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair still doesn't have an extradition treaty, and Rashid Rauf is still in Pakistan, looking more and more unlikely to face extradition. The only substantial difference is the money.

Tony Blair just gave Pervez Musharraf an additional 250 million pounds for what appears to be three more years of more of the same.

We're told we're at war against a network, not a country. We're told it's the elusive nature of the terrorist organizations -- networks of small and mostly independent "cells", with operational knowledge shared on a need-to-know basis -- that makes them so difficult to counter.

Without hinting at how closely this form of organization follows standard CIA tradecraft, I can't avoid mentioning that the way to trace connections in such a network is to "follow the money".

In this case the money -- an additional 250 million pounds sterling, nearly half a billion more dollars -- went from the government of a country which is said to be fighting terrorism, to the government of another country which is also said to be fighting terrorism, but whose parliamentary secretary of defense is closely affiliated with a notoriously violent terrorist -- oops! notoriously violent jihadi -- organization.

Does this implicate Tony Blair in international terrorism? Is the UK money-laundering hundreds of millions through Pakistan to known terrorists? Was it simply a misguidedly hoped-for deal that didn't quite work out? Or does Blair sincerely believe that giving millions of pounds to Pakistan to promote non-violent schooling will give him the edge in the phony war on phony terror?

Who can say? Tony Blair says we're finally fighting terrorism properly, so I guess we're bound to win sooner or later. Whatever that means.

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eighth in a series