Co-editors: Seán Mac Mathúna • John Heathcote
Consulting editor: Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent: Allen Hougland
Why
Washington Wants Afghanistan CIA
Trained Bin Laden to Wage Anti-Communist Holy
War CIA's
progeny: It was from the CIA that Osama bin Laden learnt how
to humble a superpower CIA's
Tracks Lead in Disastrous Circle Number
of people killed in the WTC As the supermarkets of the West are flooded with the
overpriced and useless kitsch, the tonnes of over rich food
which will produce more heart attacks and credit poverty,
the USAF has begun carpet bombing one of the poorest
countries in the World. The British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, sensing a growing unease amongst his own people about
the war; as well as within his parliamentary party, and
perhaps even his Cabinet , made a speech exhorting us in
strained, emotional tones to remember the minutiae of the
attack on September 11th. This, it was implied should be
enough to justify the action currently being taken by
British and American forces. Despite minimum coverage,
before or afterwards, a demonstration in London against the
war on the 27th of October attracted between (police
estimation) 20,000 and (organisers estimation) 50,000 people
of all creeds, colour, political persuasion. (Source;
Independent on Sunday 28/10/01) Only a few days earlier, a Labour MP (Paul Marsden) went
to the newspapers with a transcript of an interview he had
been asked to attend with a senior Labour Whip
(Parliamentary Party official &endash; an MP responsible for
delivering the votes in the chamber). He had asked a
question in parliament, expressing doubts about the strategy
being pursued in Afghanistan. During the interview he was
accused of appeasement, and references were made to 1939.
With this sort of mood prevailing in our governing party
&endash; supported by the Conservative opposition, who have
no qualms about imperial wars &endash; it is perhaps
pertinent to ask a few questions concerning the September
attacks themselves, the aftermath in the West and the
conduct of a War being fought in our name - and we are told,
for the sake of both us and our children. The whole 'war'
has been framed by the Bush regime and the British
Government in high moralistic tones. There are moral certainties in this world, and the
killing of civilians who are not threatening your land or
people is one of them. From that perspective alone, both the
attack on the World Trade Centre and the wide scale bombing
of Afghanistan are criminal acts of terror. It would perhaps be more honest if the British and
Americans explained that when they are claiming to protect
our way of life, they are in fact talking about our
addiction to petroleum oil; to fast cars and the Age of
Plastic, a culture of celluloid and silicon. That ultimately
is why the war is being fought; to ensure that the last vast
oil supplies still buried beneath the soil of Central Asia
can be piped through Afghanistan a little more efficiently
than in Columbia, where the pipeline gets hit 120 times a
year on average by the local guerilla army. However many
death squads the US sponsors, however much coca they burn to
prevent its transformation into dollars for the Revolution;
South America is just a big heap of trouble. It is no coincidence that only recently President Chavez
of Venezuela, a man with unashamed socialist sympathies, has
engineered the re-emergence of OPEC as a largely Third World
counterweight to the political powers of the great oil
consuming nations of the West. The aim of stabilising oil
prices, and having them set by the producing countries
rather than speculators and oil corporations, risks being
severely undermined by the crisis in the Middle East. And now those poor fanatical mullahs, who saw their power
slipping away as the Soviet sponsored education system
taught the youth to read and the women to live without fear;
who seemed such good anti-Communists, found another
paymaster as all poor mercenaries eventually do. Both the US
and the British governments know that the real threat of Bin
Laden and Al Quaida does not exist so much in the Western
homeland, but the homeland of the man himself. If Saudi Arabia, with its vast oil supplies, falls to an
Islamic fundamentalist regime as Iran did, for similar
reasons in the 1970's, then the threat to the 'Western' way
of life becomes much more real. Firstly, one only has to refer back to the petrol strike
in Britain last year. In tactics similar to those used by
the CIA directed haulers unions in Chile just before the
Pinochet coup; a few lorry drivers, owners of haulage firms
and motley collections of right-wingers closed down British
fuel depots for nearly a week. It would not be an
overstatement to say that the country nearly ground to a
halt, and that panic-buying cleared shop shelves in 24
hours. Secondly, one only has to remember the effect of the
Bush Presidency's first foreign gesture after 'taking'
office. In order to appease his own Christian fundamentalist
supporters, he withdrew funding for all UN aid programmes
connected with abortion and contraception in the Third
World. The resulting death rate from AIDS alone did not seem
to bother that particular bunch of religious extremists.
Along with the financial and political power that control of
Saudi wealth would give a fundamentalist government, there
would be a domino effect on the regional balance of power
vis a vis the State of Israel. US foreign policy, which has effectively supported the
Zionist agenda since before the Balfour Declaration
according to many historians, would find itself in a
position where its support of Israel would either have to be
total, with the possible cost of having to fight for its
existence; or stand back and let what might turn into a
regional nuclear war develop. In a Channel 4 Dispatches
programme (broadcast 1st November 2001) it was reported that
Bin Laden's Al-Quaida network were offered nuclear materials
by a Somali army officer. The canister containing the material was apparently
marked 'Property of South Africa'. If true, the blind eye
that the West turned to the joint nuclear project between
Israel and the apartheid South African regime of the 1970's
will bear us bitter fruit indeed. Tony Blair consistently mentions over 6000 victims of the
September 11th attacks. Although mentions of the Pentagon
attacks are kept to a minimum as people might reason that
the building itself could be justified as a military target
(although not the people on the hijacked planes); the
inclusion of that number would not bring the total to 6,000.
A report in The Guardian (26th October 2001) states that the
real tally of those that died in the WTC might be
between 2,563 (American Red Cross) ; And the Associated Press News agency which calculates
2,625 victims. Commentators point out that there may have
been a number of self-employed workers, such as electricians
whose disappearance has not been reported, and migrant
workers, whose presence in the building was unknown to their
families. However, this possible unlisted tally would still not
have constituted anything like the disparity in numbers that
we are referring to. It might seem irrelevant whether the
figure was 3,000 or 300; a terrible crime was still
committed against ordinary people. Tony Blair, a lawyer by training, should be aware that
inflating the facts for an appeal to emotionalism &endash;
especially when attempting to justify a policy that risks
tens of thousands of deaths from starvation, let alone
explosives &endash; can cast a shadow of doubt across the
rest of his argument. On the same day that George W threw the "World" Series
ball dressed in a flak jacket and surrounded by thousands of
security men and their hardware, it was announced that the
number of New York firefighters at Ground Zero had been
reduced to 24, alongside 24 'police spotters'. The decision appalled the crews, many of whom are still
searching for the remains of their own friends and family
beneath the still smoking piles of rubble, as well as those
of the thousands thought to have died. (in the last week
alone the remains of 12 of the firemen have been
recovered.) In the ensuing struggle, three top union officials and a
number of senior fire officers were amongst those arrested.
The tragic irony of seeing these men, so recently feted as
heroes, battling to get through police lines and return to
the site, has raised questions as to what the authorities
are really concerned about. Is it the added expense of the
search teams, or is it perhaps to protect, and recover, what
lies beneath the World Trade Centre ruins. Like all tall buildings, the WTC has extensive basement
areas spread over 16 acres deep underground. Apparently,
many of the areas are still undamaged. After the Clinton
Administration issued a memo to state governments informing
them of the increased risk of chemical or bio-terrorism in
the late nineties, New York responded promptly by building a
secure bunker with air scrubbing facilities and a command
centre for City Authorities beneath the WTC. It now emerges
that this was not the only secret area under the twin
towers. Coincidentally, as the firefighters are ejected from the
site, and rubble and human remains are hurriedly cleared
into waste bins (according to union officials) details are
surfacing in the press of why the authorities might be in
such unseemly haste. It is reported that The same report (Guardian 2/11/01) mentions that whilst
removing $200M from under WTC, security guards noticed that
an attempt had been made to force a vault door with
blowtorch and crowbars. One wonders if the Al Quaida network, who are no
strangers to the CIA, knew of these parts of the complex
when deciding to make the building a target. After all, this
is the second attempt they made &endash; and the first one
was with a bomb left in the basement area itself. Now what
was that about the iniquity of basing security forces in
civilian buildings? The treatment of the firefighters has the same pattern of
disregard for working folk by the US Administration, as the
anthrax scare has demonstrated. What is now accepted to be
quite possibly a campaign by a homegrown, probably right
wing, terrorist group has shown the discrepancies in
prevention and treatment between ordinary postal workers and
the government employees (Senators downwards) and media
types. Aside from the doubts raised about the security services
in America &endash; their efficiency in actually protecting
the American citizens who pay for the vast secret budget
&endash; it is becoming apparent that the plot is not as
simple as first appeared. Many commentators have wondered why an operation which
took such a lot of planning, and which must have had a
reconnaissance/ logistics support team of equal size to the
hijack teams, did not alert the attention of the FBI or CIA
. We now know that at least five of the hijackers were
known to various international agencies as agents of radical
Islamic groups, and had been under surveillance for a number
of years. It was reported in the French paper Le Figaro on
1st November 2001 that Osama Bin Laden was visited in the
American Hospital in Dubai in July of this year. Bin Laden,
who has kidney problems according to the report was also
visited by his old friend, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head
of Saudi intelligence who resigned soon afterwards. The
Prince had been long involved in the Saudi efforts to
establish the Taliban as a friendly Wa'habist regime, using
the cover of "hunting trips" to remote territories with
fellow sympathisers in the Saudi regime to deliver finance
and ordinance to the Al Quaida network. The meeting in the hospital was publicised (claims
British newspaper The Guardian) by French intelligence to
raise questions about the "ambiguous role" of the CIA in the
period up to September 11th. Le Figaro claims that the
meeting was attended by the local CIA man, as well as
another known operative of the Agency, described as a 'CIA
chief". The local man was recalled to the States soon
afterwards &endash; possibly for boasting about the meeting
to his friends, it is alleged. The Le Figaro report also details a tense meeting between
in August between French intelligence and their American
counterparts at the Paris Embassy concerning the French
surveillance and arrest of Algerian Islamic extremists. The
French agents became aware that the Americans knew something
was going to happen &endash; they asked the Americans "'What
are you afraid about in the next days?" The Americans
refused to answer . . " The close links between the CIA and the fundamentalists
of the Arab world, especially their friends in the Pakistani
Security Service (SIS) must be giving a pause to the leaders
of the so-called Northern Alliance (in fact, still the
official Afghan Government). The US and British Governments
are expressing surprise that Al-Haq was so quickly caught
and executed by the Taliban; but sadly he was probably
betrayed by the very intelligence agencies who prepared his
visit. His nephew is even now being pursued through the
hills in the south of the country after attempting a similar
mission. The confusion in the States, and the resulting suspicion
that cock-up and conspiracy are never far apart was given an
extra twist on 1st November, when it was reported that six
men of "Middle Eastern" appearance were arrested in the
American Midwest at the previous weekend by a local police
foe, and then released after producing Israeli passports.
After checking the passport numbers with the INS, which gave
"an OK on them", the men were allowed to continue on their
journey. The source for the story &endash; given as a 'US source
close to the investigation into the September 11th attacks,
probably FBI, claimed the men were traveling in two light
coloured cars in groups of three. They were allegedly found
in possession of pictures and plans of a Florida nuclear
plant and the Trans&endash;Alaska oil pipeline as well as
&endash; curiously &endash; retractable knives as used by
the September 11th hijackers. The report first surfaced from
the Knight&endash;Ridder News Agency, claiming it came from
a "senior law enforcement official". The Guardian report on the incident (1st Nov 2001) stated
it was not clear last night whether the men had Hebrew or
Arab names, and a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy said he
was unaware of the incident. Until the morning of September 11th George W was a man
derided as a dynastic fool whose election was rigged, even
by vast numbers of the normally blindingly loyal US
citizens. Since that fateful day, when he seemed to
disappear briefly with his entire regime like Puff the Magic
Dragon, we have been asked to believe he has been
transformed into a leader of great wisdom and stature; in
whose hands the future of the Free World is safe. It was a poignant reminder of the great old days of the
Soviet Union for us in Europe; watching the political
representatives of the greatest Democratic nation in the
world rising as one and voting to give their President
greater autocratic powers than any other President in
history. ( Well, almost as one. The only member of Congress
to vote against the war was Congresswoman Jeanette Lee who
then had to be given an armed guard to protect her from the
'rightful' wrath of her fellow citizens. Groups raising their concern include the American
Civil Liberties Union, Human
Rights Watch, the American
Immigration Lawyers Association, the Federation
of American Scientists and the Arab
&endash; American Anti Discrimination
Committee. A representative of the Centre
for National Security Studies (Kate Martin)
commented that: "The secret detention. . . is frighteningly
close to the practice of disappearing people in Latin
America" &endash; a policy that reached its height during
the career of George W's father as VP and Agency
Director. In a break with tradition, which does not surprise anyone
who thinks that the Bush family has little more respect for
democracy than the Taliban, the current regime of George W
has decided to withhold the papers from the first Reagan
Presidency. After the Watergate scandal, it was matter of
statute that presidential papers would be released 12 years
after the presidency ended. The papers from the Reagan
Administration have been withheld, by a Presidential Order,
much to the anger of historians and constitutional lawyers,
who are threatening to take the Administration to court. Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton has also objected to the
move, which was signaled from the day that the Bush team
took office. There are indications that Congress itself may
well challenge the right of the White House to do this.
Papers from the presidency of Bush Snr., which would have
included many names recognisable in the present cabinet
(such as the vice-president Dick Cheney and Secretary of
State Colin Powell. If this war does turn into the next
Vietnam, it will obviously save a little embarrassment for
those people, who were all involved, one way or another, in
setting the stage and arming the players for what we are
faced with now.
Winter, 2001 - The Revolutionary Association of
the Women of Afghanistan distributed blankets at Jalozai
refugee camp, where 18 children have died due to the
bitter cold since December. Picture from the Afghan
Women's
Mission.
Black
Gold: the oil of industry
Number of
people killed in the WTC
2,950 (New York Times); 2,680 (USA Today)Ground Zero -
latest reports
Anthrax
Defence/Intelligence
FBI report
about Israelis/Arabs arrested
US Domestic
Fallout
Internal repression
Secret Government