The Americans Have Landed
A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military's new frontier outpost.
By Thomas P.M. Barnett | June 11, 2007
The word came down suddenly in early January to the fifty or so U.S. troops stationed inside Camp Simba, a Kenyan naval base located on that country's sandy coast: Drop everything and pull everyone back inside the compound wire. Then they were instructed to immediately clear a couple acres of dense forest. Task Force 88, a very secret American special-operations unit, needed to land three CH-53 helicopters.
"We had everybody working nonstop," says Navy Lieutenant Commander Steve Eron, commander of Contingency Operating Location Manda Bay, a new American base in Kenya, including a dozen or so on-site KBR contractors. By the next day, every tree had been hauled off and the field graded and packed down using heavy machinery. The pad was completed in thirty-six hours.
Soon after, U.S. special operators flying out of Manda Bay were landing in southernmost Somalia, searching for survivors among the foreign fighters and Al Qaeda operatives just targeted in a furious bombardment by a U.S. gunship launched from a secret airstrip in eastern Ethiopia.
The 88's job was simple: Kill anyone still alive and leave no unidentified bodies behind.
A few weeks later, the president would announce the creation of a new regional command -- Africa Command -- that would commit U.S. military personnel to the continent on a permanent basis. The January operation would be, in effect, the first combat mission of Africa Command, and it would not go as planned.
Ethiopia's Meles regime, which American Central Command officers describe as "xenophobic to the core," was going into Somalia last December whether the Americans approved or not. The recently installed Somali Council of Islamic Courts, with its loose talk of getting back another star point in its flag (otherwise known as Ethiopia's Ogaden region), simply had to go. As it happened, the Americans, who had been quietly training the Ethiopian troops for years, did approve.
In fact, Centcom was very eager for the operation. Most press leaks made it sound like our main targets were a trio of Al Qaeda senior operatives responsible for bombing American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania a decade ago. But the real story is one of pure opportunism, according to a knowledgeable source within the headquarters: "There were three thousand foreign fighters in there. Honestly, nobody had any idea just how many there really were. But we wanted to get them all."
When the invading Ethiopians quickly enjoyed unexpected success, Centcom's plan became elegantly simple: Let the blitzkrieging Ethiopian army drive the CIC, along with its foreign fighters and Al Qaeda operatives, south out of Mogadishu and toward the Kenyan border, where Kenyan troops would help trap them on the coast. "We begged the Kenyans to get to the border as fast as possible," the Centcom source says, "because the targets were so confused, they were running around like chickens with their heads cut off."
Once boxed in by the sea and the Kenyans, the killing zone was set and America's first AC-130 gunship went wheels-up on January 7 from that secret Ethiopian airstrip. After each strike, anybody left alive was to be wiped out by successive waves of Ethiopian commandos and Task Force 88, operating out of Manda Bay. The plan was to rinse and repeat "until no more bad guys," as one officer put it.
"We could have solved all of East Africa in less than eight weeks," says the Centcom source, who was involved in the planning. Central Command was extremely wary of being portrayed in the media as Ethiopia's puppet master. In fact, its senior leaders wanted to keep America's participation entirely secret. The goal was for Ethiopia to get all the credit, further bolstering America's controversial but burgeoning military ties with Meles Zenawi's increasingly authoritarian regime. Proud Kenya, still visibly nervous from the 1998 embassy bombing, would have been happy with a very quiet thank-you.
It was a good plan. And it was leaked to the press almost as soon as it started.
Those involved in the Central Command operation suspected two sources: 1) somebody in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who couldn't wait to trumpet their success to bitter personal rivals in the State Department, or 2) a dime dropper from our embassy in Kenya who simply couldn't stand the notion that the Pentagon had once again suckered State into a secret war.
The first New York Times piece in early January broke the story of the initial AC-130 bombardment, incorrectly identifying a U.S. military base in Djibouti as the launching point. That leak just let the cat out of the bag, tipping off the main target, a senior CIC leader named Aden Hashi Ayro, who, according to Centcom intelligence, had been completely fooled up to that point, thinking the Ethiopians had somehow gotten the jump on him. Ayro survived his injuries, and he's now back in action in Mogadishu and, by all accounts, mad as hell at both the Ethiopians and the Americans.
Six weeks and a second Times story later, the shit really hit the fan in Addis Ababa. Now the intensely proud Ethiopians, who had done all the heavy lifting in the operation, were being portrayed as bit players in their own war -- simpleton proxies of the fiendishly clever Americans. After angry denials were issued (Meles's spokesman called the story a "fabrication"), the Ethiopians decided that if the Americans were so hot to mastermind another intervention in Somalia, they would just wash their hands of this mess as quickly as possible.
The return of the foreign fighters to Mogadishu's nasty mix, along with Ethiopia's fit of pique, quickly sent the situation in Somalia spiraling downward. The transitional Somali government, backed by the United Nations, is faltering, and in scenes reminiscent of America's last misadventures in Mog, both Ethiopian troops and African Union peacekeepers are taking fire from 360 degrees' worth of pissed-off Somali clans determined to -- once again -- drive off the invading infidels. Osama bin Laden himself couldn't have written a better ending.
Naturally, it wasn't supposed to happen this way.
America's Central Command set up shop in Djibouti in May 2003, moving ashore a Marine-led Joint Task Force that had been established six months earlier aboard the command ship Mount Whitney to capture and kill Al Qaeda fighters fleeing American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The task force did register one immediate big hit in November 2002: A top Al Qaeda leader was taken out in Yemen by a Hellfire air-to-ground missile launched from an unmanned Predator drone in a scene right out of Syriana. But other than that, the great rush of rats fleeing the sinking ship has not yet materialized, and so the Marines took up residence in an old French Foreign Legion base located on Djibouti's rocky shore, just outside the capital.
Uncomfortable just sitting around, the Marines quickly refashioned the task force with the blessing of General John Abizaid, then head of Central Command, who envisioned Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) as a sort of strategic inoculant. If the Marines weren't going to get to kill anybody, then they'd train the locals to do it instead.
But CJTF-HOA, whose area of responsibility stretched from Sudan down to Kenya, soon evolved into something so much more: an experiment in combining defense, diplomacy, and development -- the so-called three-D approach so clearly lacking in America's recent postwar reconstruction efforts elsewhere. Because the task force didn't own the sovereign space it was operating in, as U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq did, the Marines were forced to work under and through the American ambassadors, their State Department country teams, and the attached U.S. Agency for International Development missions. If little of that cooperation was occurring in Kabul and Baghdad, then maybe Africa would be better suited.
The Horn of Africa was supposed to be Washington's bureaucratic mea culpa for the Green Zone, a proving ground for the next generation of interagency cooperation that fuels America's eventual victory in what Abizaid once dubbed the "long war" against radical Islam. But as its first great test in Somalia demonstrated, the three D's are still a long way from being synchronized, and as the Pentagon sets up its new Africa Command in the summer of 2008, the time for sloppy off-Broadway tryouts is running out. Eventually, Al Qaeda's penetration of Muslim Africa will happen -- witness the stunning recent appearance of suicide bombers in Casablanca -- and either the three D's will answer this challenge, or this road show will close faster than you can say "Black Hawk down."
Djibouti
After being ignored since the beginning of time (save for its slaves and its treasure), Africa just got strategically important enough for us to care about. And the Bush administration's decision to set up Africa Command is historic, but not for the reasons given or assumed.
There aren't enough Islamic terrorists in Africa to stand up a full combatant command. If all we wanted were flies on eyeballs, a small number of special-operations trigger pullers would have sufficed for the foreseeable future.
There's oil here, but the United States would get its share whether Africa burns or not, and it's actually fairly quiet right now.
The Chinese are here en masse, typically embedded with regimes we can't stand or can't stand us, like Sudan and Zimbabwe. But the Chinese aren't particularly liked in Africa and seem to have no designs for empire here. Beijing just wants its energy and minerals, and that penetration, such as it is, doesn't warrant Africa Command, either.
America is going to have an Africa Command for the same reason people buy real estate -- it's a good investment. Too many large, hostile powers surround Central Asia for the radical jihadists to expand there, but Africa? Africa's the strategic backwater of the world. Nobody cares about Africa except Western celebrities.
So as the Middle East middle-ages over the next three decades and Asia's infrastructural build-out is completed, only Africa will remain as a source for both youth-driven revolution and cheap labor and commodities. Toss in global warming and you've got a recipe for the most deprived becoming the most depraved.
The U.S., through its invasion and botched occupation of Iraq, has dramatically sped up globalization's frightening reformatting process in the Middle East, and with Africa on deck, the United States military is engaging in a highly strategic flanking maneuver.
Africa Command promises to be everything Central Command has failed to become. It will be interagency from the ground up. It will be based on interactions with locals first and leaders second. It will engage in preemptive nation-building instead of preemptive regime change. It will "reduce the future battlespace" that America has neither intention nor desire to own.
It'll be Iraq done right.
Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa here in Djibouti is the clear model for what comes next, according to Rear Admiral Bob Moeller, who heads up the Defense Department's transition team planning Africom's structure. It is the franchise that will be replicated across the entire continent.
Camp Lemonier, home to CJTF-Horn of Africa, is one nasty, hot, and oh-so-stanky chunk of rock adjoining the Red Sea, a place where the view of the night sky is routinely blocked by the thick black smoke rising from the capital city's burning garbage pit located just outside the base wire. Take away the port and there's not much reason for anyone to come here, where the bulk of Djibouti's 750,000 citizens live.
Djibouti welcomes the Americans as a counterweight to its neighbors, none of whom have the country's best interests in mind. To the north is Eritrea, which broke off from Ethiopia years back and favors Somalia against their common archrival. Landlocked Ethiopia to the west wants a stable Djibouti primarily for its access to the sea. But as Addis Ababa doesn't mind fomenting trouble in Somalia, to Djibouti's south, the relationship is frequently strained.
Besides being welcoming, Djibouti was a natural place for the United States to plant its first African precinct: It's where Africa meets the Persian Gulf.
Camp Lemonier was just a bunch of tents surrounded by walls filled with sand for the first three years, with the serious settling in beginning when the Navy took over the command from the Marines in early 2006. Until recently, the camp's roughly fifteen hundred sailors, marines, Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, and civilians were crammed into a very cramped hundred-acre plot, buttressed on one side by the sole runway the task force shares with both the Djibouti International Airport and a French marine base still operating there. Now, thanks to a new five-year lease signed with the Djiboutian government, the camp has expanded to roughly five hundred acres, to include a sprawling suburb called "CLU City," named after the rows and rows of containerized living units, housing two thousand people in all, plopped down in what is certainly one of the world's most brutally utilitarian bedroom communities.
I got a glimpse of CLU City from the guard tower just inside the eastern wall of the base late one Sunday afternoon. The task force's public-affairs officer, Major David Malakoff, was right on my elbow the entire time. Malakoff had walked me around the camp the day before, carefully pointing out the "wire within the wire" that is the special-operations compound. He said no one would be answering questions about them because no one on base knows anything about what they do.
This is a common theme from senior officers at Lemonier. Captain Bob Wright, who heads up strategic communications for the task force, told me that he had "absolutely no access" to the special-ops unit there, despite having "all the right clearances."
As I stood up on the guard tower, snapping photos of CLU City, I looked over toward the Djibouti airport, and my eye was drawn to the sight of men dressed in black scrambling down the side of a nondescript building on the north side of the base.
"What's going on over there?" I asked, pointing.
"Over where?" Malakoff answered slowly. "I don't see anything."
Behind me, the base commander's aide was tensing up.
I pulled my eye back from my camera slowly, looked down off the tower, and calculated the drop in feet to the ground. Better to continue this conversation below.
"Okay, got a nice shot of a plane. I'm done!" I started heading to the ladder. A rapid-fire chorus of "Great!" "Good!" and "All right!" triggered everyone's movement right on my heels.
Back on the ground, Malakoff turned to me and whispered, "You didn't take any shots of those guys on the building, did you?"
"No."
"Good," Malakoff said. "That would have been the end of your camera right there, and maybe more. I'm just trying to look out for you here."
Special-operations enthusiasts, like the journalist Robert Kaplan, love to romanticize the almost limitless utility of the trigger pullers in globalization's dark alleys like the Horn. This makes some sense, as they tend to generate all the "kinetics," or killing, and that's what draws in the international press. But with CJTF-HOA, the regular military is trying to reassume its historical role in the everything else that accompanies the trigger-pulling: the civil-affairs work, the humanitarian stuff, the community projects designed to win hearts and minds. In a pinch, the SOF guys will do these sorts of things as well, but the long war has become one long squeeze on special operators, who are now such rare commodities -- recruitment-wise -- that some are commanding reenlistment bonuses well above $100,000, lest Blackwater USA hire them all.
So the romantic view of special operations encouraged by Kaplan and others, that the SOF guys are all you need for a backwater like Africa, is yielding to a new normal: a strategic view that recognizes there are too few trigger pullers to go around, and with the Marines backfilling Special Operations Command where it can, bases like Lemonier are quickly being taken over, often by reservists who haven't been on an aircraft, ship, or submarine for years.
The U.S. Navy now commands the base, freeing up the Marines for more pressing duty elsewhere in the region, and although CJTF-HOA's C is supposed to signify a "combined" effort involving coalition member states, only a dozen or so officers are actually drawn -- as liaisons -- from ten militaries (five local, five distant) other than our own. Indeed, the French, with their roughly three thousand men next door, along with all their wives and kids living off base, constitute by far the largest foreign contingent in Djibouti. In comparison, the Americans remain somewhat isolated on their base with their 10:00 p.m. curfew, as Lemonier is still considered a "hardship post" that rules out families.
The task force's stated mission -- a profound expansion of, and evolution from, its original capture-and-kill orders -- is to prevent conflict by promoting stability regionally and, in that prophylactic approach, ultimately "prevail over extremism" by never letting its seeds find purchase in local soil. In the Horn of Africa, when you're talking urban, middle-class, educated, commercial, and connected, you're more likely describing Christian populations, and when you're talking rural, impoverished, uneducated, agrarian, and off-grid, you're mostly describing Muslim villages. So it's not enough to interact with the capital's elites. You either go "downrange," as task-force officers like to say, or you might as well stay on base.
In addition to Camp Lemonier, three permanent contingency operating locations are up and running, two in Ethiopia (Bilate and Hurso) and one in Kenya (Manda Bay). A fourth base was established more than a year ago in Gode, Ethiopia, but it was closed as events heated up next door in Somalia. If CJTF-HOA does become the model for Africa Command, the United States could easily be running a couple dozen such military bases on the continent by 2012.
The pattern of our military's expanding presence in Africa seems clear: 1) look where the locals or former colonials set up shop previously; 2) move inside the existing wire first with your special operators for capture/kill missions and military-to-military training with the locals to do the same; and then 3) settle in more formally with new versions of Camp Lemonier. Once set up, the task force storefront can be used to flow trigger pullers onto the scene at a moment's notice -- the precinct that hosts the SWAT team.
To old hands in the State Department and USAID, the Pentagon's growing incursion into long-neglected Africa arouses ancient bureaucratic impulses toward territoriality. They can't help but feel like their turf's being invaded by the gun-toting crowd, hell-bent on opening a new front in a new war.
If Djibouti is a front, then it's a messy one, because the fault lines seem more cultural than tactical. The place is a great example of the tectonic stresses at work here, its battered visage almost exemplifying the numerous civilizations that have crashed into one another here on the streets of this ancient port city.
Djibouti was hopping my last night in town before I flew downrange. Several thousand French sailors were on liberty that Sunday night, fresh off the carrier Charles de Gaulle and the other ships in its task force. Half the port's prostitutes are said to be HIV-positive, and the sailors were taking their lives in their hands.
As the French were landing, I headed out in a Toyota Land Cruiser with Captain Bob Wright and a few of his young officers to find the local Ethiopian restaurant that everyone at Lemonier raves about but no one can ever find. An hour later, we're still not there. Finally, we head into Djibouti's main square, to a restaurant Captain Wright knows well. He jumps out of the Toyota and chats up the owner, who takes the whole hospitality thing so seriously that he sends Bob back to the car with his eldest son as our guide.
We careen through back alleys that squeeze tighter and tighter and finally come upon the Ethiopian Community Club, nestled between a Coptic Orthodox Christian church and a mosque.
The captain pays a couple of kids hanging out in the alley to watch the car, and we head up to the unlighted rooftop restaurant.
Sitting atop the building in the warm night air, we are serenaded from three sides in a mash-up only Tom Friedman could love. The Coptic priest is haranguing his parish in an endless sermon; on the other side, the looming mosque tower is booming its taped call to prayers; and, once our waiter gets around to opening up the makeshift bar on the roof, Eminem joins in about what a whore his mother is from a boom box in the corner. Popping beers and shouting through the din, Captain Wright steers the conversation to the tension between the two halves of HOA's mission, the civil-affairs stuff and what everyone keeps calling "the recent kinetics in Somalia." The whole affair was a nightmare to Wright and his officers, he says, trashing years of patient effort by hundreds of officers to present a new and different face of the U.S. military.
"Strategic communications" means that no one ever sees the men in black rappelling down that building, the same men in black I hadn't seen the day before.
Walking back to the car, Wright says, "Stuff like that makes everyone think that what we're trying to do here at HOA really doesn't count, but it does. You can't make the Horn a better place simply by killing bad guys."
So the question becomes, Is the civil-affairs stuff just a continuing cover for the special operations, or will they eventually yield an Africa that makes American interventions unnecessary? There's a lot of concern here that the establishment of Africa Command may do more harm than good -- the poised hammer that makes everything suddenly look like a nail.
Manda Bay, Kenya
Traveling to HOA's contingency operating location in Manda Bay, along Kenya's eastern coast, is a multiday affair from Djibouti, including a couple of long flights on Kenya's national airline and a two-hour military transport from Nairobi to a makeshift airstrip a few miles' drive from the surrounding Kenyan naval base. On the C-130 flight with the task force's deputy commander, Rear Admiral Tim Moon, we shared the cargo bay with a couple of huge pallets of well-digging machinery and more cases of Red Bull than I could count. The ground crew in Nairobi said we were dangerously overloaded for the short runway, but after being unable to find a forklift big enough to repack the load originally put on board in Djibouti, our Air Force pilots just said, "No worries" (and yes, in Swahili that really is hakuna matata), and we were off in a plane built the year I was born (1962).
We skimmed the landing zone on our first pass to make sure no wild animals were on the strip. From inside the windowless C-130, that experience feels like a last-second aborted landing, which I handled okay because I'd skipped lunch earlier. My seat companion, Major Tesfa Dejene from Ethiopia, laughed when he caught my grimace. "I thought all you Americans like excitement!"
Camp Simba, the Kenyan navy's name for the base, is a struggle against nature. Lieutenant Commander Steve Eron warns you upon entry that the concertina wire strung around the base perimeter is useful only in stopping humans. The animals -- baboons, monkeys, hyenas, deer, and probably more deadly snakes than anywhere else in the world -- "come on through like it's not even there."
"I call it the zoo in reverse," says Eron. "Because they come here to watch us." Something to remember at 3:00 a.m. when you're making that walk to the latrine forty yards from your hut, which is kept incredibly cold with air-conditioning because "keeping it cold keeps those cold-blooded animals out," Eron says.
I make a mental note of where the camp's sole medical corpsman is located.
Manda Bay's origins tell you everything you need to know about why the Americans showed up here. The Kenyan navy built the base in 1992, in response to the collapse of the Siad Barre dictatorship in Somalia the year before, right about the time U.S. marines were stepping off their amphibious ships and entering Mogadishu. Kenya's predominantly Muslim northern coastal area is so remote that it was simply easier to send military supplies to its border with Somalia along the coast using naval vessels than to head up inland by vehicles, as the sandy roads are impassable in the rainy season.
Years later, as Somalia began spiraling downward yet again, Central Command sent a special-operations contingent into Manda to begin training the Kenyan navy on antiterrorism tactics using high-speed patrol craft. That effort laid the groundwork for Task Force 88's sudden appearance earlier this year.
Rear Admiral Rich Hunt, who commanded HOA in 2006, likes to brag that "we've never fired a round in anger," which is a little like saying, "HOA doesn't kill people; special operators do."
This is a part of the world where military trucks and helicopters suddenly appearing on the horizon typically set off alarm bells with the locals, because it has usually meant that troops from the capital were coming to round them up and/or kill them, just like our troops were doing to those high-value targets in southern Somalia earlier this year. Here, you're just another scary guy in a uniform until you prove differently.
Jumping out of the tail of the C-130 in Manda Bay's intense March heat, I am surrounded by marines temporarily bivouacked alongside the remote airstrip in a cluster of tents. They're here for a bilateral naval exercise with the Kenyans. The engineering brigade will come ashore soon and help rebuild a school, and Marine doctors will vaccinate the locals and treat all their basic maladies. If this is a cover, it is very convincing.
On posts like this, the rank-and-file American troops tend to fall for the locals. Not in some white-man's-burden sort of way but simply out of the desire not to be sitting around on their asses, marking time across their tours, waiting like firemen for the next blaze.
There's nothing in the traditional military system that demands, recognizes, rewards, or basically gives a flying fuck about making friends with local populations. But still, soldiers like Army Captain Steve McKnight do it.
Team leader of Team B/413th Civil Affairs Battalion, McKnight is an instantly likable fellow. He's a balding bear of a guy whose uniform is a Cubs cap and a bike-messenger bag, and he comes off like a good high school football coach. And he did coach at a school in an unglamorous part of Miami. "Suburban kids didn't need me because they've already got parents," he says.
Unmarried at forty-three, McKnight stumbled into this African posting because of bureaucratic downsizing. "I'm a medical-service-corps officer -- direct commission. I got attached to a reserve combat hospital down in Miami that folded, and there was a civil-affairs unit next to mine, and I walked over there and I was like, 'Hey, I need a home. You guys got a place for me?' "
Civil affairs promised him the most remote locations with the neediest clients. Now sitting across from me at a seedy Internet café located in the sweltering waterfront of Lamu, Kenya, an ancient seafaring port, McKnight downs a huge beer in a single gulp and leans back, flashing his gap-tooth grin like Vince Lombardi. He's been in country for almost six months now and has put in repeated requests to extend his tour of duty, to no avail. "I'll probably get me something deep in South America next," he says.
McKnight in his element is a superb intelligence gatherer (or what they call in spycraft "human intelligence"). We took a long tour of Lamu's labyrinthine back alleys, where the carved wooden doors mark the homes of some of the world's oldest slave traders, and the open sewers reek. I'm holding my nose while McKnight presses the flesh of every shopkeeper we pass, most of whom warmly yell out his name in greeting. He's like some muzungu running for office on Lamu's south side: exchanging gossip, asking how business has been lately, needling them for details about this or that local issue.
Admiral Moon's visit included a showy meeting with senior Kenyan military officers down on the coast to mark the bilateral military exercise with the Americans. A message had just come down from the embassy, which McKnight relayed to Moon: "The embassy says it wants everybody in civvies today, Admiral, just to play it safe."
"The embassy is concerned about some photojournalist snapping a shot of the admiral standing next to some Ethiopian officer in uniform," McKnight said. "After the recent events in Somalia, that could trigger a lot of negative coverage."
McKnight and I skip the photo op because he's got a civil-affairs project to check on: the rebuild of a local rural school by a U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit's engineering battalion. McKnight had done the preliminary scouting work with the Marines weeks earlier, picking out a school that HOA had helped build three years ago but that was already showing some structural problems, in large part because the Americans had relied too much on local contractors, who tend to mix way too much sand in their cement to cut on costs.
"Handing the money over to the contractor, disappearing for the life of the project, and coming back for the dedication? That's a recipe for disaster," says McKnight.
So this time around, the Marine combat engineers not only rehab all the buildings, they erect a significant fence to surround the entire school compound to keep out the wildlife that constantly wanders in, threatening the kids, raiding the pantry, and eating its way through the crops the staff grow to feed themselves and provide meals to the kids.
There's going to be a problem when the Marines fly in the VIPs for the school rededication. Their Chinook helos need such a large landing space that the school's kitchen, made of sticks and mud, is put at risk. Huff and puff and blow your building down. On the spot, the Marines offer to trash the old kitchen and build a new, wood-frame one from scratch.
The headmaster convinces the Marines to build a new food pantry right next door. He is elated. "When you have the food, the kids are so happy, and they come in great numbers, and we keep them in school."
Having worked that scene, McKnight's on to connect his next dot: Sammy Mbugua, deputy director of the local Kenyan National Youth Service facility, a sprawling agriculture camp that experiments with all manner of crops and helps local farmers adopt new practices. It's a run-down collection of buildings, and looking at all the holes that pepper every piece of wood in the place, you quickly come to the conclusion that ants run the place more than anybody else.
McKnight has to reassure Sammy about all those helicopters buzzing by. Mbugua, a slow-moving, middle-aged man whose rheumy eyes say he's no stranger to tropical diseases, is looking for explanations to give all the local villagers who pester him with questions. "Some people are worried, Steve," he says. "Can you hear them go, the aeroplanes?"
McKnight does his best to explain all the activity, emphasizing all the civil-affairs projects being conducted simultaneously alongside military exercises.
"Please tell them there's nothing to be alarmed about," he says. "They're doing exercises. Yeah, that's nothing to worry about."
When the kinetic troop buildup happened on the border earlier this year, it scared everyone. "They were like, 'What's happening? Is there going to be a big battle here or something?' " McKnight says. "The secondary school that does not exist here anymore was taken over by General Morgan, a Somali warlord, in 1992. He destroyed it and they haven't had a secondary school since. The people here remember that."
McKnight confirms with Mbugua that all the youth-service personnel got checked out by the Marine doctors running a medical exercise down the road. "Yes, yes," says Sammy. "They all got their shots."
This is what McKnight calls "housekeeping." And in his work, he has the bearing of a Peace Corps volunteer, not an Army officer. "It's the little things that make the difference," he says. "It's not the big-picture project stuff, it's remembering to bring that fourth grader in Kiunga the English books that we promised her. It's remembering to bring the chief a new stainless-steel coffee thermos. And it's not just the material stuff, it's doing the interaction. It's humanizing the relationship. You know, this business of just giving stuff, it's dehumanized us and it's dehumanized them."
Promising to meet up with Sammy over drinks at a cocktail party hosted by the director of the National Youth Service next week in Nairobi, McKnight is out the door.
Cruising back to Manda Bay, we pass a couple of Kenya Wildlife Service trucks. McKnight has our Kenyan driver pull over, and McKnight exchanges information with the group's leader. "Always got to say hello," McKnight explains. "Those guys are the best security operating in this neck of the woods."
The captain's been in every room along Kenya's border with Somalia that Al Qaeda operatives have been in. He has interacted with every leader they've tried to recruit, telling me that clerics there immediately renounced these guys once their identities became known. While conservative, none of Kenya's Muslims seem, in McKnight's opinion, particularly attracted to radical ideology promoting violent separation from the outside world. Rather, the local mullahs are desperate to have roads improved so that teachers can be attracted from the cities to their remote villages. "Jihadism is a failed concept here," McKnight says. "It's like trying to sell a vegetarian steak."
We'll see.
He tells the story of a primary school deep in the Muslim village of Bargoni where all the girls would drop out once they hit puberty. In Africa, the impulse would be to think: AIDS, birth control, clerics bearing down. But it was something far more prosaic. When I had first arrived inside the wire at Camp Lemonier, I'd seen a portable toilet labeled "Muslim female." The girls at the school were forced to quit at puberty because strict Islamic practice says that males and females can't share the same bathroom once girls come of age. McKnight and his crew offered a simple fix: HOA would build the school a bathroom just for girls.
The impact was immediate. For the first time, girls stayed in school, parents were happy, mullahs were satisfied, local leaders immensely gratified. Word got around: "The Americans did this!" McKnight's eyes well up as he remembers.
Kinetics is what the military does. Iraq is a quagmire because kinetics is all we planned for. But in this new time, on this continent, the military also builds latrines for girls. That simple act might someday keep trigger pullers out of this village.
"I don't need to go back to Florida and my inner-city school," McKnight says. "I've got it all here. It feels just like home."
Africom
For the Pentagon, the corporation that runs the only military on earth with a global reach, the world is carved into regional commands. Until now, Africa has been nothing but a strategic backwater -- the one place where America clearly had no interests and no bureaucratic structure to manage those nonexistent interests. Africa was divided haphazardly between European Command, Central Command, and Pacific Command. In a globalized world where bad actors live to exploit unguarded seams, we seemed to be providing Al Qaeda with several to exploit.
The U.S. military's strategic take on Africa has long been "We have no compelling interests there, and we sure as hell don't want anybody else to have any, either!" It was that attitude that got Washington nervous about the Soviet Union's seeming ideological penetration of the continent in the late 1970s, and it's what gets the Pentagon nervous today about China's obvious economic penetration.
But denying other great powers strategic interests in the region does not constitute a strategy of our own, nor does the great hunt for "high-value targets." Which is why America has come to Africa militarily and isn't leaving anytime soon. The same can be said for China in the economic realm. To work, a lot of preconceptions about what an American military presence is really good for in underdeveloped countries will have to change. What we've not learned in Iraq -- or taken far too long to learn -- will have to be somehow acquired, soldier by soldier and tour by tour, on the ground in Africa.
Rounding a corner in Lamu's claustrophobic back alleys, Captain Steve McKnight leads a military group through a dirty, cluttered courtyard. It's happy hour, and this multinational force consists of six HOA liaison officers -- a Brit, a South Korean, two Ethiopians, a Djiboutian, and a French colonel -- and Admiral Moon, and the whole group is guarded by two "force protection" infantrymen who hover fore and aft like mother hens. We stick out like sore thumbs, and must conjure the past, when Africa was cynically sized up by visiting military officers for its potential to join what passed for globalization a century ago.
Barefoot, dirty kids, wearing clothes whose logos faded two or three owners ago, kick up the dust as they chase one another around the cracked plastic buckets that serve as their mother's laundry system. She's busy hanging clothes out to dry on lines strung between the buildings, and we're ducking under her wash, trying not to interfere.
The woman's husband sits on what passes for the stoop of their house -- a single slab of rock. He's busy slurping a bowl of soup.
The grizzled old fisherman looks up from his bowl at the parade of military officers in mufti and says in perfect English: "Welcome to another world."
Admiral Moon passes under the clothesline, straightens up, and stops. "Thanks. We feel welcome," he says.
The man dismisses us with his hand, turns away to finish his soup, and a few seconds later we're gone.
NYT : Saudi Said to Receive Money for British Arms Deal
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Saudi Said to Receive Money for British Arms Deal
By ALAN COWELL | June 7, 2007
LONDON, June 7 — Confronted today with fresh allegations of impropriety in a major British arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Tony Blair once again defended his decision to cancel an official inquiry into the multi-billion-dollar agreement.
Mr. Blair spoke at the Group of 8 summit of major industrial nations, taking place this week in a Baltic Sea resort in northern Germany.
His remarks came after British news organizations reported that BAE Systems, the leading British military contractor, paid more than $2 billion clandestinely into bank accounts in Washington that were conduits to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States.
BAE denied breaking British laws in connection with an arms transfer known as the Al-Yamamah deal, negotiated in 1985. The deal, which was then worth £43 billion ($86 billion at today’s exchange rate), included shipments of warplanes and a variety of other military equipment to Saudi Arabia from Britain. BAE has insisted that all the payments made under the agreement had government approval.
“The Al-Yamamah program is a government-to-government agreement, and all such payments made under those agreements were made with the express approval of both the Saudi and U.K. governments,” BAE said in a statement. “We deny all allegations of wrongdoing in relation to this important and strategic program, and we will abide by the duty of confidentiality imposed on us by the government.”
The BBC and The Guardian newspaper both reported today that payments of up to £120 million a year were made by BAE to Prince Bandar over more than a decade through the two accounts. The BBC said that journalists working on its investigative news program, Panorama, “established that these accounts were actually a conduit to Prince Bandar.”
“The purpose of one of the accounts was to pay the expenses of the prince’s private Airbus,” the BBC said.
Prince Bandar is currently the Secretary General of the Saudi National Security Council. His office in Riyadh, contacted by a Reuters reporter about the matter, declined to comment and said the prince was out of the country.
Last December, Britain’s Serious Fraud Office abruptly canceled an investigation into allegations of corruption in the Al-Yamamah deal, after pressure from the government. At that time, Mr. Blair said that continuing the inquiry would prejudice Britain’s diplomatic and intelligence ties with Saudi Arabia, which is regarded here as a crucial ally in combating international terrorism.
Speaking to reporters at the summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, Mr. Blair said that if the investigation had gone ahead, it “would have involved the most serious allegations in investigations being made into the Saudi royal family.” “My job,” he said, “is to give advice as to whether that is a sensible thing, in circumstances where I don’t believe the investigation incidentally would have led anywhere except to the complete wreckage of a vital strategic relationship for our country.”
On top of that, Mr. Blair said, “we would have lost thousands, thousands of British jobs.”
The news reports about the arms deal revived calls among some lawmakers to restart the official investigation.
“These matters need to be properly investigated,” said Roger Berry, who is chairman of a parliamentary oversight committee. “It’s bad for British business, apart from anything else, if allegations of bribery popping around aren’t investigated.”
But the British government showed no readiness to countenance discussion. The Ministry of Defense said it was “unable to comment on these allegations, since to do so would involve disclosing confidential information about Al-Yamamah and that would cause the damage that ending the investigation was designed to prevent.”
Prince Bandar was been regarded for many years as a prominent and influential player in Washington, with more access to President Bush, his family and his administration than any other diplomat. His 22-year term as Saudi ambassador ended in 2005, but he still seemed to wield influence.
More recently, however, Bush administration officials seemed puzzled over moves by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Prince Bandar’s uncle, which seemed to contradict messages from the prince.
The United States has kept a close watch on development in the BAE case — out of concern, according to American officials, that the cancellation of the Serious Fraud Office’s inquiry conflicts with an antibribery convention overseen by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to which the United States and Britain both belong.
By ALAN COWELL | June 7, 2007
LONDON, June 7 — Confronted today with fresh allegations of impropriety in a major British arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Tony Blair once again defended his decision to cancel an official inquiry into the multi-billion-dollar agreement.
Mr. Blair spoke at the Group of 8 summit of major industrial nations, taking place this week in a Baltic Sea resort in northern Germany.
His remarks came after British news organizations reported that BAE Systems, the leading British military contractor, paid more than $2 billion clandestinely into bank accounts in Washington that were conduits to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States.
BAE denied breaking British laws in connection with an arms transfer known as the Al-Yamamah deal, negotiated in 1985. The deal, which was then worth £43 billion ($86 billion at today’s exchange rate), included shipments of warplanes and a variety of other military equipment to Saudi Arabia from Britain. BAE has insisted that all the payments made under the agreement had government approval.
“The Al-Yamamah program is a government-to-government agreement, and all such payments made under those agreements were made with the express approval of both the Saudi and U.K. governments,” BAE said in a statement. “We deny all allegations of wrongdoing in relation to this important and strategic program, and we will abide by the duty of confidentiality imposed on us by the government.”
The BBC and The Guardian newspaper both reported today that payments of up to £120 million a year were made by BAE to Prince Bandar over more than a decade through the two accounts. The BBC said that journalists working on its investigative news program, Panorama, “established that these accounts were actually a conduit to Prince Bandar.”
“The purpose of one of the accounts was to pay the expenses of the prince’s private Airbus,” the BBC said.
Prince Bandar is currently the Secretary General of the Saudi National Security Council. His office in Riyadh, contacted by a Reuters reporter about the matter, declined to comment and said the prince was out of the country.
Last December, Britain’s Serious Fraud Office abruptly canceled an investigation into allegations of corruption in the Al-Yamamah deal, after pressure from the government. At that time, Mr. Blair said that continuing the inquiry would prejudice Britain’s diplomatic and intelligence ties with Saudi Arabia, which is regarded here as a crucial ally in combating international terrorism.
Speaking to reporters at the summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, Mr. Blair said that if the investigation had gone ahead, it “would have involved the most serious allegations in investigations being made into the Saudi royal family.” “My job,” he said, “is to give advice as to whether that is a sensible thing, in circumstances where I don’t believe the investigation incidentally would have led anywhere except to the complete wreckage of a vital strategic relationship for our country.”
On top of that, Mr. Blair said, “we would have lost thousands, thousands of British jobs.”
The news reports about the arms deal revived calls among some lawmakers to restart the official investigation.
“These matters need to be properly investigated,” said Roger Berry, who is chairman of a parliamentary oversight committee. “It’s bad for British business, apart from anything else, if allegations of bribery popping around aren’t investigated.”
But the British government showed no readiness to countenance discussion. The Ministry of Defense said it was “unable to comment on these allegations, since to do so would involve disclosing confidential information about Al-Yamamah and that would cause the damage that ending the investigation was designed to prevent.”
Prince Bandar was been regarded for many years as a prominent and influential player in Washington, with more access to President Bush, his family and his administration than any other diplomat. His 22-year term as Saudi ambassador ended in 2005, but he still seemed to wield influence.
More recently, however, Bush administration officials seemed puzzled over moves by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Prince Bandar’s uncle, which seemed to contradict messages from the prince.
The United States has kept a close watch on development in the BAE case — out of concern, according to American officials, that the cancellation of the Serious Fraud Office’s inquiry conflicts with an antibribery convention overseen by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to which the United States and Britain both belong.
NYT Editorial : Gitmo: A National Disgrace
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Gitmo: A National Disgrace
Published: June 6, 2007
Ever since President Bush rammed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 through Congress to lend a pretense of legality to his detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, we have urged Congress to amend the law to restore basic human rights and judicial process. Rulings by military judges this week suggest that the special detention system is so fundamentally corrupt that the only solution is to tear it down and start again.
The target of the judges’ rulings were Combatant Status Review Tribunals, panels that determine whether a prisoner is an “unlawful enemy combatant” who can be tried by one of the commissions created by the 2006 law. The tribunals are, in fact, kangaroo courts that give the inmates no chance to defend themselves, allow evidence that was obtained through torture and can be repeated until one produces the answer the Pentagon wants.
On Monday, two military judges dismissed separate war crimes charges against two Guantánamo inmates because of the status review system. They said the Pentagon managed to get them declared “enemy combatants,” but not “unlawful enemy combatants,” and moved to try them anyway under the 2006 law. That law says only unlawful combatants may be tried by military commissions. Lawful combatants (those who wear uniforms and carry weapons openly) fall under the Geneva Conventions.
If the administration loses an appeal, which it certainly should, it will no doubt try to tinker with the review tribunals so they produce the desired verdict. Congress cannot allow that. When you can’t win a bet with loaded dice, something is wrong with the game.
There is only one path likely to lead to a result that would allow Americans to once again hold their heads high when it comes to justice and human rights. First, Congress needs to restore the right of the inmates of Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detentions. By the administration’s own count, only a small minority of the inmates actually deserve a trial. The rest should be sent home or set free.
Second, Congress should repeal the Military Commissions Act and start anew on a just system for determining whether prisoners are unlawful combatants. Among other things, evidence obtained through coercion and torture should be banned.
And Congress should shut down Guantánamo Bay, as called for in bills sponsored by two California Democrats, Representative Jane Harman in the House and Senator Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. Both lawmakers are intimately familiar with the camp and have concluded it is beyond salvaging.
Their bill would close Gitmo in a year and the detainees would be screened by real courts. Those who are truly illegal combatants would be sent to military or civilian jails in the United States, to be tried under time-tested American rules of justice, or sent to an international tribunal. Some would be returned to their native lands for trial, if warranted. The rest would be set free, as they should have been long ago.
The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth — that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of “the war against terror.” It was built on a lie — that the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo are all dangerous terrorists. And it was organized around a fiction — that Mr. Bush had the power to create this rogue system in the first place.
It is time to get rid of it.
Published: June 6, 2007
Ever since President Bush rammed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 through Congress to lend a pretense of legality to his detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, we have urged Congress to amend the law to restore basic human rights and judicial process. Rulings by military judges this week suggest that the special detention system is so fundamentally corrupt that the only solution is to tear it down and start again.
The target of the judges’ rulings were Combatant Status Review Tribunals, panels that determine whether a prisoner is an “unlawful enemy combatant” who can be tried by one of the commissions created by the 2006 law. The tribunals are, in fact, kangaroo courts that give the inmates no chance to defend themselves, allow evidence that was obtained through torture and can be repeated until one produces the answer the Pentagon wants.
On Monday, two military judges dismissed separate war crimes charges against two Guantánamo inmates because of the status review system. They said the Pentagon managed to get them declared “enemy combatants,” but not “unlawful enemy combatants,” and moved to try them anyway under the 2006 law. That law says only unlawful combatants may be tried by military commissions. Lawful combatants (those who wear uniforms and carry weapons openly) fall under the Geneva Conventions.
If the administration loses an appeal, which it certainly should, it will no doubt try to tinker with the review tribunals so they produce the desired verdict. Congress cannot allow that. When you can’t win a bet with loaded dice, something is wrong with the game.
There is only one path likely to lead to a result that would allow Americans to once again hold their heads high when it comes to justice and human rights. First, Congress needs to restore the right of the inmates of Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detentions. By the administration’s own count, only a small minority of the inmates actually deserve a trial. The rest should be sent home or set free.
Second, Congress should repeal the Military Commissions Act and start anew on a just system for determining whether prisoners are unlawful combatants. Among other things, evidence obtained through coercion and torture should be banned.
And Congress should shut down Guantánamo Bay, as called for in bills sponsored by two California Democrats, Representative Jane Harman in the House and Senator Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. Both lawmakers are intimately familiar with the camp and have concluded it is beyond salvaging.
Their bill would close Gitmo in a year and the detainees would be screened by real courts. Those who are truly illegal combatants would be sent to military or civilian jails in the United States, to be tried under time-tested American rules of justice, or sent to an international tribunal. Some would be returned to their native lands for trial, if warranted. The rest would be set free, as they should have been long ago.
The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth — that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of “the war against terror.” It was built on a lie — that the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo are all dangerous terrorists. And it was organized around a fiction — that Mr. Bush had the power to create this rogue system in the first place.
It is time to get rid of it.
Signs Of The Times : Creating Reality And The "War On Terror" - A 'How To' Guide
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Creating Reality And The "War On Terror" - A 'How To' Guide
Joe Quinn | Signs of the Times | Thu, 24 May 2007
In 2004, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author Ron Suskind wrote in New York Times Magazine:
On the other hand, we have the actual 'reality' that has unfolded before our eyes over the past 6 years - a 'reality' that has been dominated by utter fantasy masquerading as fact.
I speak, of course, of the Ziocon "war on terror", an entirely fictitious construct that billions of people have nevertheless come to accept as real.
The latest in this continuing psychopathic farce concerns the case of the "al-Qaeda doctor" and the "al-Qaeda martial artist".
Rafiq Abdus Sabir, is a 52 year old medical doctor and American citizen from Boca Raton, Florida. On May 22nd 2007, after two years of incarceration in a New York penitentiary (following his arrest in 2005) where he was kept in solitary confinement in a windowless room with the lights constantly on and no opportunity for exercise, he was convicted of "providing material support to al-Qaeda" by "pledging allegiance to the group and agreeing to treat its wounded fighters". He could face up to 30 years in jail when he is sentenced in July this year.
Sabir's co-defendant and long-term friend in the one count complaint brought by the FBI on behalf of the US government is well-known New York jazz musician and self-described martial arts expert, Tariq Shah, also an American citizen, also accused of "providing material support to al-Qaeda" and offering to "train Jihadis in hand to hand combat."
So that's it, another victory in the war on terror and more proof that the US government really is fighting a ruthless Islamic enemy bent on the destruction of the American way of life.
Well...sort of, but not really. In fact, you could say 'not at all'. A more accurate description of the events leading to the conviction of the two men would be "an FBI sting", a classic set up, where two naive American Muslims were used by the psychopathic US government to "create the reality" of an enemy that simply does not exist.
Creating the appearance of a global enemy that is alleged to be real but which in fact does not exist and is instead a cover for the terrorist agenda of the very people who claim to be fighting the "war on terror" is naturally a rather complicated and complex affair. In the next few pages, we will explore this nexus of fantasy and reality, where innocent American and Middle Eastern citizens alike end up serving long sentences for "terrorist offences" in US maximum security prisons, and in doing so expose the lengths to which the US government and its agencies are prepared to go in an effort to substantiate the unreal "war on terror".
The story of Shah and Sabir begins sometime in the 1990's with a petty thief serving time for robbery in a US state penitentiary and known only as Saeed. Saeed, referred to as "Confidential Source 1 or "CS-1" in the official US Attorney General's deposition to the court in the trial of Sabir and Shah, was apparently recruited by the FBI in exchange for early release, and probably a monthly cash retainer as is SOP in such cases. As FBI special agent Brian J Murphy stated in his deposition in the case of Shah and Sabir:
FBI special agent Murphy claimed that Shah responded to Saeed's Jihadist overtures by stating that he was a "professor of the martial arts", specifically Ju-Jitsu. For the US government and FBI agent Murphy however, Ju-Jitsu in the hands of a dedicated "jihadist" becomes something much more sinister than a simple martial art. For example, during one alleged meeting, FBI agent Murphy stated that Shah "physically demonstrated how he had fashioned his prayer beads into a weapon that could be used to strangle a person."
Scary stuff, eh?
But there's more. Shah had suggested to Saeed that he was interested in acquiring a basement somewhere in order to train "brothers". After looking at one place Shah decided it was too far from where he lived. This fact alone has since been reported in the media and presented to the court as Shah having desired to "establish a terrorist training site".
According to New York Times reporter Alan Feuer, the hours of tapes of conversations with Shah leave the impression of a boastful, albeit somewhat bumbling, man, an almost inconceivable mix of bassist, ninja and would-be terrorist.
As part of the case brought against Shah and Sabir, the FBI produced evidence that in December 2003, about 6 months after Shah had first been contacted by Saeed, he was arrested by the city of Yonkers police department for petit larceny in connection with damage to an apartment he had been renting. On conducting a search of Shah's car, police found the telephone number of one Seifullah Chapman. Chapman is one of the "Virginia Jihad Network", 11 young men (mostly from the Washington metropolitan area) who were arrested in the summer of 2003 and charged with conspiring to "wage war against an ally of the United States", namely India. Chief among their alleged crimes was that a number of the men attended training camps in Pakistan run by the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Lashkar-e-Taiba has been blamed for several attacks in India and Pakistan over the past few years (including last year's train bombing that killed 200 people). A few days after the train bombing however, Mumbai's police chief claimed to have proof that the Pakistan Intelligence Service, the ISI, had in fact planned the attack with Lashkar-e-Taiba tasked with actually planting the bombs. Indeed, it seems that like most other major "mujahedeen" and Islamic terror groups in SE Asia, including the Taleban, Lashkar-e-Taiba is indeed 'owned' by the Pakistan Intelligence service the ISI.
For example, ex-director general of the ISI, Hamid Gul stated:
"As ISI director, I held the whole Mujahideen movement in the palm of my hands".
(As an aside although directly linked to this investigation, Gul is also on record as having said that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington were the work of renegade U.S. Air Force elements working with the Israelis.")
The Pakistan ISI also appears to play a central role in the establishment and maintenance of "terrorist training camps" or 'Madrassas' that have been linked to many "terrorist attacks" in recent years. For example, in September of last year, the BBC revealed the contents of a leaked copy of a report from the Defense Academy, a think tank run by Britain's Ministry of Defense, that stated:
"indirectly Pakistan (through the ISI) has been supporting terrorism and extremism - whether in London on 7/7, or in Afghanistan, or Iraq."
But if the ISI controls terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, who controls the ISI?
According to Jane's Information Group, the ISI "was modelled on Savak, the Iranian security agency, and like Savak was trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the SDECE, France's external intelligence service."
According to B Raman of the South Asia Analysis Group:
Very interesting.
Six of the 11 "Virginia Jihad Network" defendants pleaded guilty to lesser charges in 2005 and received sentences from two to twenty years. Chapman was one the five who maintained their innocence and went to trial in May 2005. Chapman was eventually sentenced to 65 years in prison. Other than the allegation that Chapman attended a training camp in Pakistan (which Chapman claimed was motivated by his desire to get in some tough mountain training) the prosecuting US attorney general also alleged that Chapman and others had played paintball in the Virginia woods which was evidence, he said, of their intent to train in the ways of "Jihad".
Much of government evidence however rested on the claim that Chapman and others had taken instruction in the "ways of Jihad" at the foot of Ali Al-Timimi.
In 2005, Ali Al-Timimi, a scientist and Muslim scholar, was on trial - not for committing acts of terror, but for allegedly encouraging members of the "Virginian Jihad Network" to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Prosecutors alleged that at a dinner on September 16th 2001, Al-Timimi urged the group of men to attend terrorist training camps in Kashmir in order to fight American soldiers in Afghanistan.
At Al-Timimi's trial however, the US government's case began to fall apart:
Getting back to the trial of Shah and Sabir; at the beginning of 2004, FBI undercover agent Saeed (CS-1) met with Shah and told him that he was in contact with a "recruiter for Jihad in the Middle East". This "recruiter" was in fact another FBI paid informer who Murphy calls UC-1 or "undercover capacity 1" but who has since been revealed as Mohammed Alanssi.
Saeed informed Shah that Alanssi was, coincidentally enough, "interested in someone who could train a small number of individuals in hand to hand combat and martial arts. Imagine that! Clearly a match made in heaven, Shah must surely have been thinking that he had at last found favor with Allah (little did he know it was only the FBI).
At this point Shah, in an attempt to convince the FBI informer/Jihad recruiter to take him on, and recognising an opportunity to get rich quick, suggested to Saeed that his long term friend Sabir would also be interested and that as a medical doctor could provide medical services to the "brothers". Sabir had also worked intermittently in a military hospital in Saudi Arabia and suggested to Saeed that he could travel freely around the country.
At some point during the sting, Alanssi (UC-1) took over as the lead contact with Shah and Sabir, culminating finally in an alleged oath that both men swore to "al-Qaeda". In making the case that both men provided "material support to "al-Qaeda", FBI agent Murphy states:
All of this should remind you of last year's Miami Seven fiasco where an undercover FBI agent, also posing as an 'al-Qaeda' operative, approached a group of apparently incompetent half-wits living in a warehouse in Florida. The group's name is "the Sea of David" and far from having anything to do with 'Islamic terrorism' they all claimed to be Christians who "trained through the bible". On that occasion, the undercover FBI "al-qaeda" man:
"This man talks about music. That's all he talks about," said pianist Donald Smith, 61, who last month played with Shah at St. Nick's Pub in Harlem.
According to prosecuting Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Brown, Sabir was a man deeply in debt, 750,000 in student loans, child support payments and taxes to be precise. Sabir is an Ivy league doctor who got his degree from the prestigious Columbia university Medical school and treated the poor for free. Sabir's defense attorney said his client has been actively trying to pay his debts with money he earned working in hospitals in Palm Beach County and, in the past two years, Saudi Arabia.
"This is like the Crusades all over again," Sabir's cousin, Leroy Walker, 62, said, "The man isn't political or fanatical. He doesn't push his faith on anyone."
"He was a down-the-middle, hard-working guy who worked long hours to keep up his profession and expenses," said Dr. Faroque Kahn, a lung specialist who knew Sabir in New York. "I can't imagine him getting involved in chaos and destruction."
Sabir's story paints the picture of a troubled man who found comfort in Islam but who grew angry at the treatment he received in post 9-11 America. Dan McBride, who became friends with Sabir at the Islamic Center of Boca Raton, said the doctor worked in Saudi Arabia to expose his children to a different culture. Others have said medical practice paid well there, where U.S.-trained doctors are in demand.
Sabir was born Rafael Wright into a catholic family in the Bronx. Sabir's father, Norman Wright, left the family, and his mentally ill mother and put Sabir in a home, according to news reports. But Sabir went on to attend City College of New York and Columbia University. Along the way, he converted from his family's Catholic faith to Islam and changed his name to Rafiq Sabir. Married twice with four children, Sabir is described as a wonderful and dedicated father who never really achieved the success to which he aspired.
Sabir's neighbors in the middle-class Villa San Remo gated community in Florida where he lived with his second wife, Arlene Morgan and their two children were awakened about 5 a.m. May 28 2005, when FBI agents came to arrest Sabir. The next day, his wife calmly explained to a neighbor that her husband's arrest was a mistake. Arlene and her sons, Isa, 6, and Amir, 4, disappeared the next day. Alberto Montes, who lived next door to the Sabirs, said he never could figure out why, if Sabir was a doctor and his wife worked as a nurse at West Boca Medical Center, they rented a house, euphemistically called an "attached villa," in the neighborhood, which is pleasant but far from upscale.
The furnishings were as modest as the home itself, Montes said. In retrospect, he said, only one of their belongings stands out: a framed copy of a letter to their young son, congratulating him for doing so well in school. It was signed by President Bush.
Not exactly your average anti-American "jihadist".
According to his lawyer, Sabir was exploited by Shah who was willing to say anything to anyone who would offer him large sums of money, even pledging allegiance to "al-qaeda". Both men however, are clearly innocent of any terrorist offences or "al-qaeda" connections, apart from "al-qaeda" connections foisted upon them by the FBI. The US government however, had invested many man hours and a significant amount of money to get Sabir and Shah where they wanted them, and there was American public opinion and the war on terror to consider. To entrap the two men, the FBI used the aforementioned undercover informant, Mohammed Alanssi or "UC-1".
Mohamed Alanssi is a Yemeni national, a failed businessman, and a former employee of the US embassy in Yemen in the 1980's from where he was fired twice because the embassy "found him to be untrustworthy" according to a former embassy accountant.
Such unusual status is generally given to people who are in the United States for urgent medical reasons but may also be granted to someone who will provide a "significant public benefit," which sources said could include assisting law enforcement agencies.
According to interviews and documents in New York, Washington and Yemen, Alanssi was a striving dreamer with an appetite for cash and detective work who often left a trail of unpaid bills and bounced checks. Characterised as a man who desired to live the American dream, the real picture that emerges of Alanssi however is that of a serial con artist who manipulated almost everyone with whom he crossed paths in an effort to extract money from them:
In October 2001 a Yemeni man who, according to Mr. Hussain, the printer, had briefly been a partner in one of Mr. Alanssi's failed ventures was arrested and charged with currency violations for trying to ship $140,000 in boxes of honey jars to Yemen. Soon, court filings show, the former partner agreed to cooperate in an investigation of Yemeni money handlers in Brooklyn. It is possible that Alanssi's name was flagged again as a result of this investigation.
Within a month, Alanssi had been recruited by the FBI and was promising to deliver big names in the "war on terror" to the FBI, specifically a Yemeni Cleric by the name of Mohammed Ali Hassan Al-Moayad. To the excitement of his FBI handlers, Alanssi claimed that Moayad had connections with al-Qaeda and Hamas and that he had funded both groups. The FBI was interested. Alanssi claims that, funded by the CIA, he travelled back and forth to Yemen for about a year and used his Yemeni nationality and the fact that he had once lived near Moayad's mosque in Yemen's capital of Sanaa to ingratiate himself with Moayad. The FBI then hatched a plot whereby Alanssi would tell Moayad that he knew "a former Black Panther member" who wanted to "donate $2 million to the jihad". The "former Black Panther member" was in fact yet another FBI informant and the meeting, which was to be recorded to ensnare Moayad, was set up in a hotel room in Frankfurt, Germany.
Before the meeting FBI agents, who would be listening in on the conversation, impressed upon Alanssi that they needed Moayad to make statements that could be used to convince a court that he "provided material support to terrorist organizations". Now, one would think that if Moayad really was a provider of "material support to terrorist organisations", and if he was not overly suspicious of Alanssi or the "former black panther" (the fact that he turned up suggests that he was not), you would think it would be easy, with $2 million up for grabs, to get him to say something incriminating. Getting Moayad to state unequivocally what exactly his relationship with "terrorism" (if any) actually was, was like pulling teeth. For a start, Moayad talked of using the money to help impoverished Muslim children in Yemen. Moayad did not speak English and the "Black Panther" did not speak Arabic, leaving the translation of the proceedings in the hands of Alanssi. As the meeting progressed, Alanssi, eager to seal the deal, impress his FBI handlers and secure the big payoff he expected, was getting a little frantic. He began asking more direct questions:
The US government and justice system was not to be deterred by mere trifles such as these and Moayad was extradited to the US in January 2003. During Moyad's trial in 2005 the judge called the secretly recorded conversations "chilling" and drew a connection between Moayad's desire to fund terrorism, the Sept. 11 attacks and a suicide bus bombing in Israel that was described during the trial by one of the survivors, and in the end, despite the serious problems with the evidence and the nature in which it was collected, Moayad was convicted in 2005, receiving a 75 year sentence for "helping to finance Al Qaeda and Hamas. "Your honor, what have I done?" Moayad said in Arabic as he was led away.
Moayad is now in Colorado's supermax prison known as ADX Florence in a solitary confinement for 22 - 23 hours each day in a 7-by-12 ft cell. No communal dining, exercising, or religious services are allowed and inmates' only direct human interaction is with correctional officers who deliver their food. One famous inmate, Eric Rudolph, the alleged "Olympic Park bomber" (likely a mind-controlled patsy) lamented in a series of 2006 letters to a Colorado Springs newspaper that the ADX Florence facility is meant to "inflict misery and pain."
Alanssi was paid $100,000 for his services to the FBI in manufacturing the reality of the war on terror, although he was expecting $5 million. After the arrest of Moayad in 2003, Alanssi burned through his pay off money, spent some time trying to defraud several other unfortunate acquaintances out of their hard earned cash and finally, on November 15th 2004, sent a letter to the FBI complaining about his treatment by the government and threatening that he would burn himself in an "unexpected place." A short time later, at 1:57 in the afternoon, according to the police, "a Middle Eastern man" approached a White House gate with a letter for the president. He was turned away. "After a conversation with Secret Service officers," the statement said, "the subject pulled a lighter from his pocket and ignited his jacket.
The time frame for Alanssi's work in providing false accusations against the Yemeni cleric (2001 - late 2004) coincide with his meetings as "UC-1" or the Jihadi recruiter, with Shah and Sabir. Indeed, in FBI agent Murphy's deposition in the trial of Shah and Sabir, he stated:
The point in this somewhat involved dissection of the case of Mohammed Alanssi is to show the duplicitous nature of the modus operandi used by the FBI (and surely other intelligence agencies around the world) in their 'no holds barred' attempt to fabricate evidence that can then be used by US government to create the reality of a "war on terror."
Alanssi was (and probably remains) a dupe for the FBI. He has a natural gift for manipulating people, either by appealing to their sense of empathy or by holding out the lure of untold riches. In this respect he fits perfectly the role of FBI informant in the war on terror - and the FBI knew it the first time they met him. At the same time that he was entrapping Sheik Moayad with the offer of $2million of US taxpayer's money on behalf of the US government and fabricating "terrorist" statements that he attributed to him, he was also entrapping Tarik Shah and Rafiq Sabir. It is of no surprise therefore that many aspects of both sting operations bear striking similarities, including the claim by Sabir's defence attorney that the more serious charges against Sabir that arose from comments that Alanssi claimed Sabir made did not even appear on the tapes of the conversations:
Since then, as the need for an ever more omnipresent terrorist enemy evolved in order to allow the US, British and Israeli elite to wage their war of domination on the people of the earth grew, the network has been nurtured into a veritable industry with Pakistani intelligence service the ISI, under the full control of the US government, playing a leading role in providing training camps into which naïve young Muslims are sucked, to later be churned out as "evidence" of the monolithic "Islamic terrorist threat" to the peoples of the free world. With these young men and women constituting evidence prepared in advance, the US, British and Israeli governments and their agencies are free to carry out the larger terror attacks, such as 9/11, and the London and Madrid train bombings, themselves.
Once this is understood as the ACTUAL reality, the template used to produce false flag Islamic terrorist attacks and the trial of the patsies that are later blamed is easily seen for the Ziocons' attempt at "reality creation" that it is. It is happening today in Palestine with the alleged "clashes" between "Palestinian factions" - in Lebanon with the recent attacks by "Fatah Islam" on Lebanese soldiers and citizens. There is however, a simple solution: Stop believing in fantasy masquerading as reality.
A final note:
Last week, Joseph L Galloway, a former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young" in an opinion piece for McClatchy newspapers entitled: Hang In There, America: Competent Leadership Is Just 600-Plus Days Away, wrote:
Next time you get a chance, take a look at a map of the Middle East and SE Asia. Unless you are in the US military, not shown on your map are the large US military bases in countries that completely encircle Iran. Currently, off the coast of Iran sit two US aircraft carriers and many more US Navy war ships. Afghanistan was taken in 2002. Iraq in 2003, both are essentially massive US military bases on Iran's doorstep. Make no mistake, before Bush leaves, Iran will be attacked, and the ensuing backlash will be used as cover under which yet another false flag "Islamic terror" attack will be perpetrated on American soil by the Ziocon "reality creators". When that happens, all bets in terms of the US constitution and the rights it allegedly affords US citizens are decidedly off.
In short, Bush is not leaving on Jan 20. 2009. One way or another, he and his handlers mean to stay the course and finish the job they started.
They mean to create a new reality for us all, a reality based on the rule of the psychopath, and what is that rule? Andrew Lobaczewski, author of Political Ponerology states:
Joe Quinn | Signs of the Times | Thu, 24 May 2007
In 2004, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author Ron Suskind wrote in New York Times Magazine:
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.Only a tiny percentage of the world's population were even aware of Suskind's report, and of those few, most have by now probably forgotten about it and the implications that it carries for America and the entire world. Of course, on the one hand, we could simply conclude that the statements made by the unnamed white house adviser are little more than a example of the delusions of grandeur to which the political elite are susceptible - after all, anyone insane enough to believe that they can actually "create reality" would end up in an asylum long before they ever made it to the halls of power in Washington, right?
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
On the other hand, we have the actual 'reality' that has unfolded before our eyes over the past 6 years - a 'reality' that has been dominated by utter fantasy masquerading as fact.
I speak, of course, of the Ziocon "war on terror", an entirely fictitious construct that billions of people have nevertheless come to accept as real.
The latest in this continuing psychopathic farce concerns the case of the "al-Qaeda doctor" and the "al-Qaeda martial artist".
Rafiq Abdus Sabir, is a 52 year old medical doctor and American citizen from Boca Raton, Florida. On May 22nd 2007, after two years of incarceration in a New York penitentiary (following his arrest in 2005) where he was kept in solitary confinement in a windowless room with the lights constantly on and no opportunity for exercise, he was convicted of "providing material support to al-Qaeda" by "pledging allegiance to the group and agreeing to treat its wounded fighters". He could face up to 30 years in jail when he is sentenced in July this year.
Sabir's co-defendant and long-term friend in the one count complaint brought by the FBI on behalf of the US government is well-known New York jazz musician and self-described martial arts expert, Tariq Shah, also an American citizen, also accused of "providing material support to al-Qaeda" and offering to "train Jihadis in hand to hand combat."
So that's it, another victory in the war on terror and more proof that the US government really is fighting a ruthless Islamic enemy bent on the destruction of the American way of life.
Well...sort of, but not really. In fact, you could say 'not at all'. A more accurate description of the events leading to the conviction of the two men would be "an FBI sting", a classic set up, where two naive American Muslims were used by the psychopathic US government to "create the reality" of an enemy that simply does not exist.
Creating the appearance of a global enemy that is alleged to be real but which in fact does not exist and is instead a cover for the terrorist agenda of the very people who claim to be fighting the "war on terror" is naturally a rather complicated and complex affair. In the next few pages, we will explore this nexus of fantasy and reality, where innocent American and Middle Eastern citizens alike end up serving long sentences for "terrorist offences" in US maximum security prisons, and in doing so expose the lengths to which the US government and its agencies are prepared to go in an effort to substantiate the unreal "war on terror".
The story of Shah and Sabir begins sometime in the 1990's with a petty thief serving time for robbery in a US state penitentiary and known only as Saeed. Saeed, referred to as "Confidential Source 1 or "CS-1" in the official US Attorney General's deposition to the court in the trial of Sabir and Shah, was apparently recruited by the FBI in exchange for early release, and probably a monthly cash retainer as is SOP in such cases. As FBI special agent Brian J Murphy stated in his deposition in the case of Shah and Sabir:
"While serving his sentence, CS-1 agreed to co-operate with the government regarding certain terrorism investigations and, in return, the government wrote the state sentencing judge for sentencing consideration. After serving his [reduced] sentence CS-1 continued to co-operate with the government and currently provides information as a paid informant."Saeed was the initial point of contact with Shah and later Sabir, whom, we are told, he simply "came into contact with about the summer of 2003". In plain, honest English this means that both Shah and Sabir were marked by the FBI as potential terrorist patsies and Saeed was instructed to contact them. Saeed began tape-recording the conversations with the full consent of both men, and (as per his briefing) wasted no time in bringing the discussion around to "jihad", and of course money.
FBI special agent Murphy claimed that Shah responded to Saeed's Jihadist overtures by stating that he was a "professor of the martial arts", specifically Ju-Jitsu. For the US government and FBI agent Murphy however, Ju-Jitsu in the hands of a dedicated "jihadist" becomes something much more sinister than a simple martial art. For example, during one alleged meeting, FBI agent Murphy stated that Shah "physically demonstrated how he had fashioned his prayer beads into a weapon that could be used to strangle a person."
Scary stuff, eh?
But there's more. Shah had suggested to Saeed that he was interested in acquiring a basement somewhere in order to train "brothers". After looking at one place Shah decided it was too far from where he lived. This fact alone has since been reported in the media and presented to the court as Shah having desired to "establish a terrorist training site".
According to New York Times reporter Alan Feuer, the hours of tapes of conversations with Shah leave the impression of a boastful, albeit somewhat bumbling, man, an almost inconceivable mix of bassist, ninja and would-be terrorist.
"Mr. Shah can sound more like an angry braggart than a violent dogmatist, especially when he speaks of his skills as "a master of hand-to-hand combat," a jujitsu expert who is, as he puts it, "doggone deadly." At one point, he lets Saeed in on a secret: His bass's end pin (the sharp spike on which the instrument rests) can be used as a weapon.On another occasion, when the FBI informant pushs Shah to commit to the cause by telling him that this is "the real thing, not a joke", Shah seems to lose his composure:
"All I've got to do is, pop, flick it like, boom, move out the way," he says. "Flip, pop, pop, right in the middle of your head."
"At this point no," he says, "you, you, you, from already, from what I gather from what we've spoken about, you have done some traveling with the brothers, you have been different places, you have seen certain things." Then he adds, "All I've done is listen."Clearly a "terror mastermind".
As part of the case brought against Shah and Sabir, the FBI produced evidence that in December 2003, about 6 months after Shah had first been contacted by Saeed, he was arrested by the city of Yonkers police department for petit larceny in connection with damage to an apartment he had been renting. On conducting a search of Shah's car, police found the telephone number of one Seifullah Chapman. Chapman is one of the "Virginia Jihad Network", 11 young men (mostly from the Washington metropolitan area) who were arrested in the summer of 2003 and charged with conspiring to "wage war against an ally of the United States", namely India. Chief among their alleged crimes was that a number of the men attended training camps in Pakistan run by the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Lashkar-e-Taiba has been blamed for several attacks in India and Pakistan over the past few years (including last year's train bombing that killed 200 people). A few days after the train bombing however, Mumbai's police chief claimed to have proof that the Pakistan Intelligence Service, the ISI, had in fact planned the attack with Lashkar-e-Taiba tasked with actually planting the bombs. Indeed, it seems that like most other major "mujahedeen" and Islamic terror groups in SE Asia, including the Taleban, Lashkar-e-Taiba is indeed 'owned' by the Pakistan Intelligence service the ISI.
For example, ex-director general of the ISI, Hamid Gul stated:
"As ISI director, I held the whole Mujahideen movement in the palm of my hands".
(As an aside although directly linked to this investigation, Gul is also on record as having said that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington were the work of renegade U.S. Air Force elements working with the Israelis.")
The Pakistan ISI also appears to play a central role in the establishment and maintenance of "terrorist training camps" or 'Madrassas' that have been linked to many "terrorist attacks" in recent years. For example, in September of last year, the BBC revealed the contents of a leaked copy of a report from the Defense Academy, a think tank run by Britain's Ministry of Defense, that stated:
"indirectly Pakistan (through the ISI) has been supporting terrorism and extremism - whether in London on 7/7, or in Afghanistan, or Iraq."
But if the ISI controls terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, who controls the ISI?
According to Jane's Information Group, the ISI "was modelled on Savak, the Iranian security agency, and like Savak was trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the SDECE, France's external intelligence service."
According to B Raman of the South Asia Analysis Group:
The Afghan war of the 1980s saw the enhancement of the covert action capabilities of the ISI by the CIA. A number of officers from the ISI's Covert Action Division received training in the US and many covert action experts of the CIA were attached to the ISI to guide it in its operations against the Soviet troops by using the Afghan Mujahideen, Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan and Arab volunteers. Osama bin Laden, Mir Aimal Kansi, who assassinated two CIA officers outside their office in Langley, US, in 1993, Ramzi Yousef and his accomplices involved in the New York World Trade Centre explosion in February, 1993, the leaders of the Muslim separatist movement in the southern Philippines and even many of the narcotics smugglers of Pakistan were the products of the ISI-CIA collaboration in Afghanistan.In 2003, John Pilger reported for the Guardian:
President Carter's national security adviser, admitted in an interview in 1998, "CIA aid to the mojahedin began during 1980, that is, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan... But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise." At Brzezinski's urging, in July 1979 Carter authorised $500m to help set up what was basically a terrorist organisation. The goal was to lure Moscow, then deeply troubled by the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the Soviet central Asian republics, into the "trap" of Afghanistan, a source of the contagion.Norm Dixon writing in Australia's the Green Left states:
For 17 years, Washington poured $4bn into the pockets of some of the most brutal men on earth - with the overall aim of exhausting and ultimately destroying the Soviet Union in a futile war. One of them, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord particularly favoured by the CIA, received tens of millions of dollars. His speciality was trafficking opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. In 1994, he agreed to stop attacking Kabul on condition that he was made prime minister - which he was.
Eight years earlier, CIA director William Casey had given his backing to a plan put forward by Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6, with the SAS training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.
According to Ahmed Rashid, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, in 1986 CIA chief William Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000 attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).So Shah and Sabir were convicted, partly because they had the phone number of Chapman. Chapman was convicted because he was invited to go and train with Lashka-e-Taiba. Lashka-e-Taiba is a phony Islamic terror group controlled by the ISI, and the ISI is essentially run by the CIA.
John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the mujaheddin were sent to Camp Peary, the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and Jordan, and even some African-American "black Muslims" were taught "sabotage skills".
The November 1, 1998, British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained "bin Laden's operatives" in 1989.
These "operatives" were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar's forces. Mohammed was a member of the US army's elite Green Berets.
The program, reported the Independent, was part of a Washington-approved plan called "Operation Cyclone".
In Pakistan, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the mujaheddin factions by an organisation known as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services - MAK).
MAK was a front for Pakistan's CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK.
Very interesting.
Six of the 11 "Virginia Jihad Network" defendants pleaded guilty to lesser charges in 2005 and received sentences from two to twenty years. Chapman was one the five who maintained their innocence and went to trial in May 2005. Chapman was eventually sentenced to 65 years in prison. Other than the allegation that Chapman attended a training camp in Pakistan (which Chapman claimed was motivated by his desire to get in some tough mountain training) the prosecuting US attorney general also alleged that Chapman and others had played paintball in the Virginia woods which was evidence, he said, of their intent to train in the ways of "Jihad".
Much of government evidence however rested on the claim that Chapman and others had taken instruction in the "ways of Jihad" at the foot of Ali Al-Timimi.
In 2005, Ali Al-Timimi, a scientist and Muslim scholar, was on trial - not for committing acts of terror, but for allegedly encouraging members of the "Virginian Jihad Network" to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Prosecutors alleged that at a dinner on September 16th 2001, Al-Timimi urged the group of men to attend terrorist training camps in Kashmir in order to fight American soldiers in Afghanistan.
At Al-Timimi's trial however, the US government's case began to fall apart:
Throughout the trial the defense constantly denied that Ali Al-Timimi ever urged the Virginia men to go to terrorist camps in Kashmir to train to fight American forces in Afghanistan. Such a denial by Al-Timimi's defense was not only made after his indictment but rather a year before when the 11 Virginia men were first indicted. In May of 2003 Al-Timimi was interviewed by an investigative journalist for NBC, Lisa Myers, in the days immediately following indictment of the 11 men. In the interview with Myers, Al-Timimi denied urging anyone to indulge in Jihad or violence of any kind. What follows is brief portion of the interview:In the end, al-Timimi was sentenced to life in prison plus 70 years without parole for "soliciting others to levy war against the United States and inducing others to use firearms in violation of federal law" even though this could not be established beyond reasonable (if not significant) doubt. Remember, it was largely on the basis of his alleged instruction by al-Timimi (for which there was no convincing evidence) that Chapman was convicted, and partly on the basis that Chapman's phone number was found in Shah's car that both Shah and Sabir were convicted.
Lisa Myers: Did you ever tell these men to go abroad and join in violent jihad?
Ali al-Timimi: "No. Never."
Myers: Why would someone make all this up about you?
Al-Timimi: "Perhaps certain people in the government, in a zeal to silence outspoken Muslims in North America, have pushed an investigation further than it really should go."
This clearly shows that the defense initially did not approach this case as one dealing with the First Amendment - or solely with the First Amendment -- but rather approached it with a different strategy stressing the fact that Ali Al-Timimi never made statements urging anyone, let alone members of the "Virginia 11," to indulge in Jihad (or any acts of violence) but only urged the men to make Hijra - migration - if they felt that they would be unable to deal with the emotional climate against Muslims living in the United States following the September 11th attacks.
Furthermore, two witnesses Masoud Khan and Hammad Abdur-Raheem, who would later be charged and sentenced as being part of the "Virginia Jihad Network" publicly denied that Al-Timimi ever urged members of the group to attend terrorist training camps in Kashmir with the purpose of fighting American soldiers in Afghanistan. As a result of their denials the two were not called by the government to testify against Al-Timimi. Ismail Royer, another key witness in this case, [h]as not been called by the government either which raises significant questions with respect to government claims regarding the validity of the September 16th dinner.
Caliph Basha, an aquitted member of the "Virginia 11," was present for the dinner but fell asleep which the defense argued was undoubtedly quite peculiar. The defense mentioned that the alleged Al-Timimi September 16th address was referred to as "barn-burning" speech. It would be quite strange for Basha to go to sleep if in fact such a "barn-burning" speech was being delivered and all those in attendance were being riled up.
Getting back to the trial of Shah and Sabir; at the beginning of 2004, FBI undercover agent Saeed (CS-1) met with Shah and told him that he was in contact with a "recruiter for Jihad in the Middle East". This "recruiter" was in fact another FBI paid informer who Murphy calls UC-1 or "undercover capacity 1" but who has since been revealed as Mohammed Alanssi.
Saeed informed Shah that Alanssi was, coincidentally enough, "interested in someone who could train a small number of individuals in hand to hand combat and martial arts. Imagine that! Clearly a match made in heaven, Shah must surely have been thinking that he had at last found favor with Allah (little did he know it was only the FBI).
At this point Shah, in an attempt to convince the FBI informer/Jihad recruiter to take him on, and recognising an opportunity to get rich quick, suggested to Saeed that his long term friend Sabir would also be interested and that as a medical doctor could provide medical services to the "brothers". Sabir had also worked intermittently in a military hospital in Saudi Arabia and suggested to Saeed that he could travel freely around the country.
At some point during the sting, Alanssi (UC-1) took over as the lead contact with Shah and Sabir, culminating finally in an alleged oath that both men swore to "al-Qaeda". In making the case that both men provided "material support to "al-Qaeda", FBI agent Murphy states:
During the course of the investigation Shah and Sabir engaged in multiple meetings in which they discussed providing material support to al-Qaeda. Specifically, Shah agreed to provide training in martial arts and hand to hand combat to al-qaeda members while Sabir agreed to provide medical assistants to wounded jihadists. Ultimately, in order to express their loyalty to al-qaeda, Shah and Sabir pledged an oath [administered to them by an undercover FBI informant] to Osama bin laden, thereby essentially become members of the organisation.The exact words of the oath that was taken by Shah and Sabir and allegedly administered by a seasoned FBI agent (who should have known better after his experiences with the investigation of the bombing of the USS Cole), Ali Soufan, are:
"God's pledge is upon me and so is his covenant to commit myself to the orders of the guardians of the agreement, for the misfortune and for the prosperity. And to be a loyalist to the path of jihad, and to my brothers, until God's word is exalted. And to be protective of the secrecy of the oath and to the directives of Al Qaeda."Pretty amazing, eh? Who'd have thought it was so easy to become a member of the most evil terrorist group in the world? And the oath taken right there in the US and administered by the FBI no less!
All of this should remind you of last year's Miami Seven fiasco where an undercover FBI agent, also posing as an 'al-Qaeda' operative, approached a group of apparently incompetent half-wits living in a warehouse in Florida. The group's name is "the Sea of David" and far from having anything to do with 'Islamic terrorism' they all claimed to be Christians who "trained through the bible". On that occasion, the undercover FBI "al-qaeda" man:
approached the group and asked them if they wanted to join 'al-Qaeda',Several mainstream press reports on the Shah and Sabir case make it clear that both men were very susceptible to the lure of money and it seems that it was precisely the lure of money that led them to agree to whatever the FBI's informants wanted. At one point Shah told Saeed that he was unable to leave the US because he "had no papers". Shah was in fact subject to a court order due to his failure to pay child support and the New York State family court had prevented him from leaving the country. Shah, 42, is also a well-known New York city jazz musician who has backed greats like Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter, and played bass at local clubs for years. Fellow musicians said they've never heard him espouse an allegiance to Osama bin Laden.
'swore one of them in' as an 'al-Qaeda' member,
offered them $50,000,
provided them with army boots and a video camera,
suggested that they might want to blow up some government buildings,
suggested that they wanted to blow up the Sears tower,
suggested to them that they wanted to wage "full ground war against the United States",
identified that one of them knew what the Sears tower was and had actually been to Chicago - once.
"This man talks about music. That's all he talks about," said pianist Donald Smith, 61, who last month played with Shah at St. Nick's Pub in Harlem.
According to prosecuting Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Brown, Sabir was a man deeply in debt, 750,000 in student loans, child support payments and taxes to be precise. Sabir is an Ivy league doctor who got his degree from the prestigious Columbia university Medical school and treated the poor for free. Sabir's defense attorney said his client has been actively trying to pay his debts with money he earned working in hospitals in Palm Beach County and, in the past two years, Saudi Arabia.
"This is like the Crusades all over again," Sabir's cousin, Leroy Walker, 62, said, "The man isn't political or fanatical. He doesn't push his faith on anyone."
"He was a down-the-middle, hard-working guy who worked long hours to keep up his profession and expenses," said Dr. Faroque Kahn, a lung specialist who knew Sabir in New York. "I can't imagine him getting involved in chaos and destruction."
Sabir's story paints the picture of a troubled man who found comfort in Islam but who grew angry at the treatment he received in post 9-11 America. Dan McBride, who became friends with Sabir at the Islamic Center of Boca Raton, said the doctor worked in Saudi Arabia to expose his children to a different culture. Others have said medical practice paid well there, where U.S.-trained doctors are in demand.
Sabir was born Rafael Wright into a catholic family in the Bronx. Sabir's father, Norman Wright, left the family, and his mentally ill mother and put Sabir in a home, according to news reports. But Sabir went on to attend City College of New York and Columbia University. Along the way, he converted from his family's Catholic faith to Islam and changed his name to Rafiq Sabir. Married twice with four children, Sabir is described as a wonderful and dedicated father who never really achieved the success to which he aspired.
Sabir's neighbors in the middle-class Villa San Remo gated community in Florida where he lived with his second wife, Arlene Morgan and their two children were awakened about 5 a.m. May 28 2005, when FBI agents came to arrest Sabir. The next day, his wife calmly explained to a neighbor that her husband's arrest was a mistake. Arlene and her sons, Isa, 6, and Amir, 4, disappeared the next day. Alberto Montes, who lived next door to the Sabirs, said he never could figure out why, if Sabir was a doctor and his wife worked as a nurse at West Boca Medical Center, they rented a house, euphemistically called an "attached villa," in the neighborhood, which is pleasant but far from upscale.
The furnishings were as modest as the home itself, Montes said. In retrospect, he said, only one of their belongings stands out: a framed copy of a letter to their young son, congratulating him for doing so well in school. It was signed by President Bush.
Not exactly your average anti-American "jihadist".
According to his lawyer, Sabir was exploited by Shah who was willing to say anything to anyone who would offer him large sums of money, even pledging allegiance to "al-qaeda". Both men however, are clearly innocent of any terrorist offences or "al-qaeda" connections, apart from "al-qaeda" connections foisted upon them by the FBI. The US government however, had invested many man hours and a significant amount of money to get Sabir and Shah where they wanted them, and there was American public opinion and the war on terror to consider. To entrap the two men, the FBI used the aforementioned undercover informant, Mohammed Alanssi or "UC-1".
Mohamed Alanssi is a Yemeni national, a failed businessman, and a former employee of the US embassy in Yemen in the 1980's from where he was fired twice because the embassy "found him to be untrustworthy" according to a former embassy accountant.
In Yemen in the 1990's, he became enmeshed in a bizarre confrontation over a $71,700 loan he took out by mortgaging his house. He fell behind on the payments. A bank repossessed it, and his family, including several of his six children, was evicted. Days later, court records show, Mr. Alanssi broke into the house and the family remained there for the next four years in spite of repeated eviction notices. Twice, Yemeni officials filed warrants for his arrest. "The man ignored and evaded the legal authorities," said Mohammed Ahmed Taher al-Hassani, the Sana judge who handled the case.Alanssi first came to the United States from Yemen on July 23, 2001, arriving on a tourist visa in New York, and left on January 7, 2002. When he returned from Yemen on October 21, 2002, he was met at New York's JFK Airport by the FBI, which took custody of him, took his Yemeni passport and granted him "humanitarian parole."
Some of the family members Mr. Alanssi left behind say they grew weary of his perilous way of life. Reached at his house in a Sana suburb, a brother, Abdullah Alanssi, said Mohamed had been a long-running source of aggravation.
"We have spent years trying to distance ourselves from him," he said.
Such unusual status is generally given to people who are in the United States for urgent medical reasons but may also be granted to someone who will provide a "significant public benefit," which sources said could include assisting law enforcement agencies.
According to interviews and documents in New York, Washington and Yemen, Alanssi was a striving dreamer with an appetite for cash and detective work who often left a trail of unpaid bills and bounced checks. Characterised as a man who desired to live the American dream, the real picture that emerges of Alanssi however is that of a serial con artist who manipulated almost everyone with whom he crossed paths in an effort to extract money from them:
According to three people who met Alanssi in the United States, he used the same talents that made him a capable FBI informant for other purposes. Three immigrants from Peru, Egypt and Eritrea said in interviews that Alanssi exploited their sympathy, bilking them out of several thousand dollars with his teary stories about medical and family problems and his promises of quick repayment.In 2001, either Alanssi himself or one of his contacts in Brooklyn came up with the idea that, if he really wanted to make some easy money, he could become an FBI informer. Given his history as a US embassy worker in Yemen and the paranoid nature of the US national security state immediately before and after the 9/11 attacks, it is highly likely that Alanssi, in the US on a visitor's visa, was already on an FBI list of "people to contact".
"He tells everyone different stories. He never tells the truth," said Sayed Mahmoud Aly, a limousine driver at the Holiday Inn on The Hill who said Alanssi owes him $4,000. "He started crying, and when he cry . . . it broke my heart."
In Brooklyn, he kept at his big plans. But they sputtered out. He could spin a sympathetic story about his travails, sometimes literally through tears. But the sympathy often curdled after he borrowed money and disappeared.
He was able to win confidence among Yemenis in Brooklyn, some of them said in interviews. He spoke excellent English; there was a mature look about his jowly face.
"You would trust him," said Nasr Hussain, the owner of a print shop along an Arab stretch of Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. Mr. Alanssi hired him to make brochures for a planned new travel agency and gave him a photograph to include that he said showed him receiving an award back home. The printing job was soon canceled. Mr. Hussain said he never got back $100 he lent Mr. Alanssi, ostensibly for heart medicine.
In October 2001 a Yemeni man who, according to Mr. Hussain, the printer, had briefly been a partner in one of Mr. Alanssi's failed ventures was arrested and charged with currency violations for trying to ship $140,000 in boxes of honey jars to Yemen. Soon, court filings show, the former partner agreed to cooperate in an investigation of Yemeni money handlers in Brooklyn. It is possible that Alanssi's name was flagged again as a result of this investigation.
Within a month, Alanssi had been recruited by the FBI and was promising to deliver big names in the "war on terror" to the FBI, specifically a Yemeni Cleric by the name of Mohammed Ali Hassan Al-Moayad. To the excitement of his FBI handlers, Alanssi claimed that Moayad had connections with al-Qaeda and Hamas and that he had funded both groups. The FBI was interested. Alanssi claims that, funded by the CIA, he travelled back and forth to Yemen for about a year and used his Yemeni nationality and the fact that he had once lived near Moayad's mosque in Yemen's capital of Sanaa to ingratiate himself with Moayad. The FBI then hatched a plot whereby Alanssi would tell Moayad that he knew "a former Black Panther member" who wanted to "donate $2 million to the jihad". The "former Black Panther member" was in fact yet another FBI informant and the meeting, which was to be recorded to ensnare Moayad, was set up in a hotel room in Frankfurt, Germany.
Before the meeting FBI agents, who would be listening in on the conversation, impressed upon Alanssi that they needed Moayad to make statements that could be used to convince a court that he "provided material support to terrorist organizations". Now, one would think that if Moayad really was a provider of "material support to terrorist organisations", and if he was not overly suspicious of Alanssi or the "former black panther" (the fact that he turned up suggests that he was not), you would think it would be easy, with $2 million up for grabs, to get him to say something incriminating. Getting Moayad to state unequivocally what exactly his relationship with "terrorism" (if any) actually was, was like pulling teeth. For a start, Moayad talked of using the money to help impoverished Muslim children in Yemen. Moayad did not speak English and the "Black Panther" did not speak Arabic, leaving the translation of the proceedings in the hands of Alanssi. As the meeting progressed, Alanssi, eager to seal the deal, impress his FBI handlers and secure the big payoff he expected, was getting a little frantic. He began asking more direct questions:
The supposed Black Panther did not speak Arabic, so Mr. Alanssi translated, placing him in the center of the action. In a transcript prepared by the defense, the Black Panther seemed impatient. He asked directly if the next attack would be against Israel or the United States.Moayad's statements were interesting, but not enough, especially in light of the fact that in an interview with Yemeni reporters after his arrest, Moayad stated that Mr. Alanssi had told him prior to the meeting with the "Black Panther" in Frankfurt that Moayad needed to agree with the "Black Panther" "in whatever he says in order to get the $2 million". Furthermore, shortly after the arrest of Moayad, then Attorney General John Ashcroft's public claim that Moayad had delivered $20 million to Osama himself, (an attempt at 'trial by public'), was an uncorroborated claim made by Alanssi that was not recorded.
"So do you have any plan for that?" Mr. Alanssi translated eagerly.
For now no, the sheik answered. "We want to rearrange our papers," he added somewhat inscrutably.
In Mr. Alanssi's translation, that odd comment became a startling admission. "They will start planning where it's going to be," he said.
The sheik often slipped through their grasp. He flatly denied that he had had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks. Asked if he knew of Islamic warriors in New York who might do battle against "the big Satan," his answer was, "We'll talk about this in its proper time."
But the prosecutors' transcripts are studded with comments that seemed to bolster their charges. The sheik said Osama bin Laden called him his sheik. "Regarding training in Palestine, I can call Hamas and arrange things," he said.
When Mr. Alanssi excitedly stressed the notion of blessing Osama bin Laden, Yasir Arafat and "their efforts against the Jews," the sheik answered, "We ask God for that."
The US government and justice system was not to be deterred by mere trifles such as these and Moayad was extradited to the US in January 2003. During Moyad's trial in 2005 the judge called the secretly recorded conversations "chilling" and drew a connection between Moayad's desire to fund terrorism, the Sept. 11 attacks and a suicide bus bombing in Israel that was described during the trial by one of the survivors, and in the end, despite the serious problems with the evidence and the nature in which it was collected, Moayad was convicted in 2005, receiving a 75 year sentence for "helping to finance Al Qaeda and Hamas. "Your honor, what have I done?" Moayad said in Arabic as he was led away.
Moayad is now in Colorado's supermax prison known as ADX Florence in a solitary confinement for 22 - 23 hours each day in a 7-by-12 ft cell. No communal dining, exercising, or religious services are allowed and inmates' only direct human interaction is with correctional officers who deliver their food. One famous inmate, Eric Rudolph, the alleged "Olympic Park bomber" (likely a mind-controlled patsy) lamented in a series of 2006 letters to a Colorado Springs newspaper that the ADX Florence facility is meant to "inflict misery and pain."
Alanssi was paid $100,000 for his services to the FBI in manufacturing the reality of the war on terror, although he was expecting $5 million. After the arrest of Moayad in 2003, Alanssi burned through his pay off money, spent some time trying to defraud several other unfortunate acquaintances out of their hard earned cash and finally, on November 15th 2004, sent a letter to the FBI complaining about his treatment by the government and threatening that he would burn himself in an "unexpected place." A short time later, at 1:57 in the afternoon, according to the police, "a Middle Eastern man" approached a White House gate with a letter for the president. He was turned away. "After a conversation with Secret Service officers," the statement said, "the subject pulled a lighter from his pocket and ignited his jacket.
Defense lawyers in the al-Moayad case say Alanssi's attempted suicide and his allegations reveal the tremendous pressure he was under to produce evidence against al-Moayad and his Yemeni assistant, Zayed.Alanssi was taken to hospital with burns over 30% of his body (mainly his midriff) where his condition was soon downgraded from critical to "reasonable". He was to appear at Moyad's trial as a star witness but in the end failed to do so.
"This was a manufactured crime and Alanssi had a very strong motive to ensnare these people," said Zayed's attorney, Jonathan Marks. "They promised to make him a millionaire on the one hand if he went along with the program and if he didn't they were going to put him in jail and torture him."
Marks wrote in documents filed in federal court on Monday that Alanssi's translations were "inaccurate, incomplete and frequently embellished." He often introduced baseless statements about terror links that a jury could mistakenly attribute to the defendants, Marks said.
The time frame for Alanssi's work in providing false accusations against the Yemeni cleric (2001 - late 2004) coincide with his meetings as "UC-1" or the Jihadi recruiter, with Shah and Sabir. Indeed, in FBI agent Murphy's deposition in the trial of Shah and Sabir, he stated:
"Between about October 2004 and early May 2005, there was a gap in communications between UC-1 (Alanssi) and Shah as UC-1 informed Shah that he would be travelling frequently and spending time in the Arabian Peninsula."As we can now safely conclude, during that "gap in communications" with Shah, rather than travelling in the Middle East, Alanssi was in fact a little closer to home, recovering in a DC hospital from burn wounds incurred in his most extravagant plea to the FBI for more money in the form of his suicide attempt at the gates of the White House on November 15th 2004.
The point in this somewhat involved dissection of the case of Mohammed Alanssi is to show the duplicitous nature of the modus operandi used by the FBI (and surely other intelligence agencies around the world) in their 'no holds barred' attempt to fabricate evidence that can then be used by US government to create the reality of a "war on terror."
Alanssi was (and probably remains) a dupe for the FBI. He has a natural gift for manipulating people, either by appealing to their sense of empathy or by holding out the lure of untold riches. In this respect he fits perfectly the role of FBI informant in the war on terror - and the FBI knew it the first time they met him. At the same time that he was entrapping Sheik Moayad with the offer of $2million of US taxpayer's money on behalf of the US government and fabricating "terrorist" statements that he attributed to him, he was also entrapping Tarik Shah and Rafiq Sabir. It is of no surprise therefore that many aspects of both sting operations bear striking similarities, including the claim by Sabir's defence attorney that the more serious charges against Sabir that arose from comments that Alanssi claimed Sabir made did not even appear on the tapes of the conversations:
"There is no instance on those tapes where Sabir says, 'Oh yes, I want to treat wounded jihadists.' That's just spin," he said.It would appear that a standard operating procedure is employed by intelligence agents in their now never-ending search for ever more grist for the Islamic terror patsy mill. From the details of the cases discussed here we can come up with a rough outline of this procedure:
Identify financially troubled/mentally unstable informant A,This, dear readers, is in essence how the "war on terror" is being fabricated, not fought. "Al-Qaeda" exists, but not in the form that the US government alleges. As explained above, "al-Qaeda" began in the late 1970's as a network of Muslim mercenaries from countries around the Middle East and SE Asia, all of them hired, trained and directed by Pakistani intelligence and Saudi Arabia on behalf of the CIA in the US government's war to stop Soviet Russia from gaining a foothold in strategically important Afghanistan.
Identify financially troubled/mentally unstable target A,
Develop detailed profile on each.
Promise informant A that he will be paid large sums of money if he will establish contact with target A and portray himself to target A as an "al-Qaeda" recruiter.
Instruct informant A to tape record all conversations and to tell target A that "Sheik Osama himself" will listen to them.
Instruct informant A to tell target A that he knows someone in the Middle East that is looking for "brothers" to train other "brothers" in camps in Pakistan and that they will be rewarded with large sums of money for their work.
Instruct informant A to establish a relationship with target A in terms of their Muslim faith. Instruct informant A to lead the conversations towards discussions of "Jihad".
Instruct informant A that Target A must declare his support for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and his desire to wage holy war and that this is required before the process can be taken further (and the money given).
When enough "evidence" has been collected, officially arrest target A and bring him to court where he is later convicted of "providing material support to al-Qaeda".
Ensure the story of the arrest and later the conviction is hyped up to the point of hysteria on the front pages of mainstream media newspapers.
Have a member of the Bush administration declare that they have prevented another "Muslim terrorist cell" in America from "harming the American people".
Since then, as the need for an ever more omnipresent terrorist enemy evolved in order to allow the US, British and Israeli elite to wage their war of domination on the people of the earth grew, the network has been nurtured into a veritable industry with Pakistani intelligence service the ISI, under the full control of the US government, playing a leading role in providing training camps into which naïve young Muslims are sucked, to later be churned out as "evidence" of the monolithic "Islamic terrorist threat" to the peoples of the free world. With these young men and women constituting evidence prepared in advance, the US, British and Israeli governments and their agencies are free to carry out the larger terror attacks, such as 9/11, and the London and Madrid train bombings, themselves.
Once this is understood as the ACTUAL reality, the template used to produce false flag Islamic terrorist attacks and the trial of the patsies that are later blamed is easily seen for the Ziocons' attempt at "reality creation" that it is. It is happening today in Palestine with the alleged "clashes" between "Palestinian factions" - in Lebanon with the recent attacks by "Fatah Islam" on Lebanese soldiers and citizens. There is however, a simple solution: Stop believing in fantasy masquerading as reality.
A final note:
Last week, Joseph L Galloway, a former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young" in an opinion piece for McClatchy newspapers entitled: Hang In There, America: Competent Leadership Is Just 600-Plus Days Away, wrote:
As of May 17th, there were 613 days left until Jan. 20, 2009, and the end of our long national nightmare as President George W. Bush and his Rasputin, Vice President Dick Cheney, shuffle off to their necessarily well-guarded retirement homes and onto the ash heap of history.If only this were true. Bush, and those pulling his strings, are the architects of everything that I have described above. They have invested too much to ever consider retirement. They're only getting started. The Bush cabal stole two elections, they killed 3,000 people on 9/11 and unleashed a fabricated war on terror on the Middle East that will soon engulf the world. So far, they have killed over 1 million Iraqi civilians and destroyed a once prosperous and secular-leaning Iraq.
Next time you get a chance, take a look at a map of the Middle East and SE Asia. Unless you are in the US military, not shown on your map are the large US military bases in countries that completely encircle Iran. Currently, off the coast of Iran sit two US aircraft carriers and many more US Navy war ships. Afghanistan was taken in 2002. Iraq in 2003, both are essentially massive US military bases on Iran's doorstep. Make no mistake, before Bush leaves, Iran will be attacked, and the ensuing backlash will be used as cover under which yet another false flag "Islamic terror" attack will be perpetrated on American soil by the Ziocon "reality creators". When that happens, all bets in terms of the US constitution and the rights it allegedly affords US citizens are decidedly off.
In short, Bush is not leaving on Jan 20. 2009. One way or another, he and his handlers mean to stay the course and finish the job they started.
They mean to create a new reality for us all, a reality based on the rule of the psychopath, and what is that rule? Andrew Lobaczewski, author of Political Ponerology states:
What happens if ... psychopaths achieve power in leadership positions with international exposure? ... Goaded by their character, such people thirst for just that even though it would conflict with their own life interest.... They do not understand that a catastrophe will ensue. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing.Or as Laura Knight-Jadczyk recently wrote:
Goaded by their character, psychopaths thirst for global power even though it ultimately condemns them to death along with millions - or billions - of others. Psychopaths do not have the capacity to understand the catastrophes that they repeatedly bring on themselves and the world. Just as germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing, so the psychopath does not understand that the only reality he is creating is the reality of his own ultimate destruction.But in a world where such people possess enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet many times over, it is not merely their own destruction that is at risk, but the destruction of the better part of human life on planet earth.
Filed under
bogus terror,
Dick Cheney,
Iran,
MI6,
Pakistan,
Ramzi Yousef,
refugees,
Russia,
suicide,
Taliban
by Winter Patriot
on Tuesday, June 05, 2007
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