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Showing posts with label CIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CIA. Show all posts

Monday 9 September 2013

Saudi-Supplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack Syria's Ghouta

By Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh |
 
 
 
This image provided by by Shaam News Network on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2013, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, purports to show several bodies being buried in a suburb of Damascus, Syria during a funeral on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2013. Syrian government forces pressed their offensive in eastern Damascus on Thursday, bombing rebel-held suburbs where the opposition said the regime had killed more than 100 people the day before in a chemical weapons attack. The government has denied allegations it used chemical weapons in artillery barrages on the area known as eastern Ghouta on Wednesday as "absolutely baseless." (AP Photo/Shaam News Network)
Ghouta, Syria — As the machinery for a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria gathers pace following last week’s chemical weapons attack, the U.S. and its allies may be targeting the wrong culprit.

Interviews with people in Damascus and Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, where the humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders said at least 355 people had died last week from what it believed to be a neurotoxic agent, appear to indicate as much.
 
The U.S., Britain, and France as well as the Arab League have accused the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for carrying out the chemical weapons attack, which mainly targeted civilians. U.S. warships are stationed in the Mediterranean Sea to launch military strikes against Syria in punishment for carrying out a massive chemical weapons attack. The U.S. and others are not interested in examining any contrary evidence, with U.S Secretary of State John Kerry saying Monday that Assad’s guilt was “a judgment … already clear to the world.”
 
However, from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack.
 
“My son came to me two weeks ago asking what I thought the weapons were that he had been asked to carry,” said Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of a rebel fighting to unseat Assad, who lives in Ghouta.
 
Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant, known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion. The father described the weapons as having a “tube-like structure” while others were like a “huge gas bottle.”
Ghouta townspeople said the rebels were using mosques and private houses to sleep while storing their weapons in tunnels.
 
Abdel-Moneim said his son and the others died during the chemical weapons attack. That same day, the militant group Jabhat al-Nusra, which is linked to al-Qaida, announced that it would similarly attack civilians in the Assad regime’s heartland of Latakia on Syria’s western coast, in purported retaliation.
 
“They didn’t tell us what these arms were or how to use them,” complained a female fighter named ‘K.’ “We didn’t know they were chemical weapons. We never imagined they were chemical weapons.”
 
“When Saudi Prince Bandar gives such weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle and use them,” she warned. She, like other Syrians, do not want to use their full names for fear of retribution.
 
A well-known rebel leader in Ghouta named ‘J’ agreed. “Jabhat al-Nusra militants do not cooperate with other rebels, except with fighting on the ground. They do not share secret information. They merely used some ordinary rebels to carry and operate this material,” he said.
 
“We were very curious about these arms. And unfortunately, some of the fighters handled the weapons improperly and set off the explosions,” ‘J’ said.
 
Doctors who treated the chemical weapons attack victims cautioned interviewers to be careful about asking questions regarding who, exactly, was responsible for the deadly assault.
 
The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders added that health workers aiding 3,600 patients also reported experiencing similar symptoms, including frothing at the mouth, respiratory distress, convulsions and blurry vision. The group has not been able to independently verify the information.
More than a dozen rebels interviewed reported that their salaries came from the Saudi government.

Saudi involvement
In a recent article for Business Insider, reporter Geoffrey Ingersoll highlighted Saudi Prince Bandar’s role in the two-and-a-half year Syrian civil war. Many observers believe Bandar, with his close ties to Washington, has been at the very heart of the push for war by the U.S. against Assad.
 
Ingersoll referred to an article in the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph about secret Russian-Saudi talks alleging that Bandar offered Russian President Vladimir Putin cheap oil in exchange for dumping Assad.
 
“Prince Bandar pledged to safeguard Russia’s naval base in Syria if the Assad regime is toppled, but he also hinted at Chechen terrorist attacks on Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi if there is no accord,” Ingersoll wrote.
 
“I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us,” Bandar allegedly told the Russians.
“Along with Saudi officials, the U.S. allegedly gave the Saudi intelligence chief the thumbs up to conduct these talks with Russia, which comes as no surprise,” Ingersoll wrote.
 
“Bandar is American-educated, both military and collegiate, served as a highly influential Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., and the CIA totally loves this guy,” he added.
 
According to U.K.’s Independent newspaper, it was Prince Bandar’s intelligence agency that first brought allegations of the use of sarin gas by the regime to the attention of Western allies in February.
 
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the CIA realized Saudi Arabia was “serious” about toppling Assad when the Saudi king named Prince Bandar to lead the effort.
 
“They believed that Prince Bandar, a veteran of the diplomatic intrigues of Washington and the Arab world, could deliver what the CIA couldn’t: planeloads of money and arms, and, as one U.S. diplomat put it, wasta, Arabic for under-the-table clout,” it said.
 
Bandar has been advancing Saudi Arabia’s top foreign policy goal, WSJ reported, of defeating Assad and his Iranian and Hezbollah allies.
 
To that aim, Bandar worked Washington to back a program to arm and train rebels out of a planned military base in Jordan.
 
The newspaper reports that he met with the “uneasy Jordanians about such a base”:
His meetings in Amman with Jordan’s King Abdullah sometimes ran to eight hours in a single sitting. “The king would joke: ‘Oh, Bandar’s coming again? Let’s clear two days for the meeting,’ ” said a person familiar with the meetings.
Jordan’s financial dependence on Saudi Arabia may have given the Saudis strong leverage. An operations center in Jordan started going online in the summer of 2012, including an airstrip and warehouses for arms. Saudi-procured AK-47s and ammunition arrived, WSJ reported, citing Arab officials.
 
Although Saudi Arabia has officially maintained that it supported more moderate rebels, the newspaper reported that “funds and arms were being funneled to radicals on the side, simply to counter the influence of rival Islamists backed by Qatar.”
 
But rebels interviewed said Prince Bandar is referred to as “al-Habib” or ‘the lover’ by al-Qaida militants fighting in Syria.
 
Peter Oborne, writing in the Daily Telegraph on Thursday, has issued a word of caution about Washington’s rush to punish the Assad regime with so-called ‘limited’ strikes not meant to overthrow the Syrian leader but diminish his capacity to use chemical weapons:
Consider this: the only beneficiaries from the atrocity were the rebels, previously losing the war, who now have Britain and America ready to intervene on their side. While there seems to be little doubt that chemical weapons were used, there is doubt about who deployed them.
 
It is important to remember that Assad has been accused of using poison gas against civilians before. But on that occasion, Carla del Ponte, a U.N. commissioner on Syria, concluded that the rebels, not Assad, were probably responsible.
Some information in this article could not be independently verified. Mint Press News will continue to provide further information and updates .
Dale Gavlak is a Middle East correspondent for Mint Press News and has reported from Amman, Jordan, writing for the Associated Press, NPR and BBC. An expert in Middle Eastern affairs, Gavlak covers the Levant region, writing on topics including politics, social issues and economic trends. Dale holds a M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago. Contact Dale at dgavlak@mintpressnews.com
Yahya Ababneh is a Jordanian freelance journalist and is currently working on a master’s degree in journalism, He has covered events in Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Libya. His stories have appeared on Amman Net, Saraya News, Gerasa News and elsewhere.

Friday 23 August 2013

Former head of CIA in 2006: we will use Islamists to subvert régimes in Egypt, Libya, and Syria

James Woolsey, former head of CIA and eminent member of JINSA (the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs), announces in 2006 the intention to use Islamists to subvert régimes in Egypt, Libya, and Syria.
 
رئيس وكالة المخابرات الأمريكية CIA السابق "جيمس وولسي" يعلن في 2006:
سنصنع لهم إسلاماً يناسبنا ثم نجعلهم يقومون بالثورات ثم يتم انقسامهم على بعض لنعرات تعصبية . ومن بعدها قادمون للزحف وسوف ننتصر".( لاحظ كيف ذكر سوريا و ليبا و مصر و قادما السعودية وكل ما
يعرف بدول "الربيع العربي ")

Wednesday 18 April 2012

Leaked Stratfor Emails Show Us Security Firm SCG Is Helping Syrian Rebels


Press TV, April 6, 2012

Leaked emails show an American private security company, SCG International has been helping the Syrian opposition in its efforts to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad at the request of US officials.
The whistleblower website, Wikileaks, released the emails sent by SCG Chief Executive James F. Smith, the former director of the notorious company Blackwater, which is blamed for the killing of many civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In one of the emails, Smith says his company was contracted to engage the Turkey-based Syrian opposition in a so-called “fact finding mission,” but “the true mission is how they can help in regime change.”
The emails were sent to the vice president of intelligence at Stratfor, Fred Burton. Stratfor, a US-based global security think tank, describes itself as a source of geopolitical analysis to corporate and government clients.
Smith introduces his company to Burton by saying his “background is CIA and his company is comprised of former Department of Defense (DoD), CIA and former law enforcement personnel,” and his company provides services for those same groups in the form of training, security and information collection.
SCG’s mission with the Syrian opposition had “air cover from US Congresswoman Sue Myrick,”a Republican lawmaker from North Carolina, according to the emails.
Smith also provided intelligence to Stratfor on Libya, where SCG International was contracted to protect Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) members and train Libyan rebel fighters.
Impressed by Smith’s intelligence, Burton praises him in one of the emails saying “Good skinny. This is what is defined as a credible source. Not some windbag Paki academic belching and passing gas.”
The emails are among a trove of five million messages hacked from Stratfor in mid-December by the hacker group Anonymous.
PG/HGH

Wednesday 4 January 2012

UK's Secret Plans For Syria


By The PressTV, From the Voltaire Network, January 2nd 2012


Revelations have surfaced about the presence of British spies in Syria as the UK government draws secret plans for a NATO-backed no-fly zone over the country.

A British security official has revealed that Britain’s Ministry of Defense has been drawing up secret plots to secure a NATO-sponsored no-fly zone over Syria as intelligence agents from MI6 and the CIA are examining the situation on the ground in the country, reported the Daily Star.

“MI6 and the CIA are in Syria to infiltrate,” revealed the newspaper.

The revelations come as the Western media has launched a campaign to criticize the presence of the Arab League observers in Syria calling on them to return so that their governments would be able to draw up plots for military intervention based on fabricated evidence.

However, independent analysts have seriously questioned the West’s media hype over the usefulness of the Arab League observers’ presence in Syria, as they assert the West is using the Arab League as an NGO.

“[The Arab League] has been one of the most pathetic organizations in the Arab World for a long, long time, doing nothing on Palestine, doing nothing to prevent the war on Iraq. And, now it’s being used as an NGO by the West,” said Tariq Ali, editor of London-based New Left Review.

Furthermore, Ali warned against the Western intervention in Syria saying “we need a negotiated settlement in Syria.”

“We do not want a Western intervention as in Libya which with each passing day the information coming out of Libya shows the disaster,” said Ali in an interview with Russia’s English news channel Russia Today.

The Daily Star also reported that the Western intervention in Syria “is all going like Libya but this will be bigger and bloodier.”

Furthermore, the British newspaper revealed that the British government’s “highest priority” while drawing up its secret plots would be Israel’s security saying “Syria supports Hezbollah. That threatens Israel.”

Pointing out that Western intervention in Syria has already started, Ali said: “I don’t know why they [foreign nations] seem reluctant to [acknowledging armed opposition extremists operating in Syria] because most the nations which seem reluctant to notice that are the ones who’re supplying the weaponry.”


Saturday 31 December 2011

Does the Al Qaeda Exist (II): “The Power of Nightmares”: Baby It's Cold Outside

The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. The series consists of three one-hour films, consisting mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis’s narration, which were first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and have been subsequently aired in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

The films compare the rise of the American Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and noting strong similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of Al-Qaeda, is in fact a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more Utopian ideologies. (From: Top Documentary Films, http://topdocumentaryfilms.com )

Episodes included: Baby It’s Cold Outside, The Phantom Victory and The Shadows in the Cave.

1- The Power of Nightmares: Baby It's Cold Outside (1 of 3): view it here or download it here
2- The Power of Nightmares: The Phantom Victory (2 of 3): view it here or or download it here
3- The Power of Nightmares: The Shadows in the Cave (3 of 3): view it here or or download it here

(To download all three parts in one file in NTSC DVD ISO form click here)

Below is a debrief of the first 20 minutes or so of episode 1.

RMB
NB: Certain words have been 'hyperlinked' (names of people, of political parties, ...).
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THE POWER of NIGHTMARES: THE RISE of THE POLITICS OF FEAR

Part I: Baby It’s Cold Outside

INTRODUCTION

In the past politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people.
Those dreams failed, and today people lost faith in ideologies.

Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority: INSTEAD of DELIVERING DREAMS, POLITICIANS now PROMISE TO PROTECT US from NIGHTMARES. They say that they would rescue us through dreadful DANGERS that WE CANNOT NOT SEE and DO NOT UNDERSTAND! 

And the greatest danger of all is INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM: a powerful and sinister network that seeps itself in countries across the world; a threat that ought to be fought by WAR ON TERROR.

BUT…Much of this threat is a FANTASY, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media.

This is a series about HOW and WHY that FANTASY WAS CREATED, and WHO it BENEFITS. At the heart of the story are two groups: 1) the American Neoconservatives, and 2) the radical Islamists. Both were ideals borne of the failure the liberal dream to deliver a better world, and both had a very similar explanation to what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. 

Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a SECRET ORGANIZED EVIL that threatens the world, of a FANTASY politicians they found restore their power and authority. And both were the darkest fears became the most powerful.


THE YEAR IS 1949

The story begins in a summer of 1949, when a middle-aged school inspector from Egypt arrived at the small town Greeley of in Colorado. His name is Sayyed Qutb. Qutb had been sent to the US to study its educational system. But he enrolled in a local State College. His photographs appear in the College yearbook. But Qutb was destined to become much more than a school instructor. 

Out of his experiences of America that summer, Qutb was going to develop a powerful set of ideas that would directly inspire those who flew the planes on the attack of September the 11th.

As he travelled across the country, Qutb had become increasingly disenchanted with America. The very things that on the surface made the country look prosperous and happy, Qutb saw as signs of inner corruption and decay.

This was Truman’s America, and many American today regard it a golden age of their civilization. But for Qutb, he saw a sinister side in this: all around him was crassness and corruption, vulgarity; talks centered on movie stars, automobile prices.

He was also concerned that the inhabitants of Greeley spent a lot of time in lawn care, pruning their hedges, cutting their lawn. This, for Qutb, was indicative of the selfish and materialistic aspect of American life. Americans lived this isolated lives surrounded by their lawns. They lusted after material goods. And this, says Qutb quite sassingly, is the taste of America. What Qutb believed he was seeing was a hidden and dangerous reality, underneath the surface of ordinary American life.

One summer night, he went to a dance at a local church hall. He later wrote that what he saw crystallized his vision. He talks about how the pastor played on the gramophone one of the hits of that day “Baby it’s cold outside”; he dimmed the light to create a dreaming romantic effect. And then Qutb says: chests met chests, arms circled waists, and the hall was full of lust and love.

To most people watching this dance, it would have been an innocent picture of youthful happiness. But Qutb saw something else: the dancers in front of him were tragic lost souls, they believed that they were free, but in reality they were trapped by their own selfish and greedy desires. American society was not going forward; it was taking people backwards. They were becoming isolated beings, driven by primitive animal forces. Such creatures, Qutb believed, could corrode the very bonds that held the society together. He became determined that night to prevent this culture, selfish individualism, taking over his own country.

But Qutb was not alone.  At the same time, in Chicago, there was another man who shared the same fears about the destructive force of individualism in America.  He was an obscure political philosopher at the University of Chicago. But his ideas would also have far reaching consequences. Because they would become the shaping force behind the Neoconservative movement which now dominates the American Administration.

He was called Leo Strauss. Strauss is a mysterious figure. He refused to be filmed or interviewed. He devoted his time to creating a loyal band of students, and he told them was that the prosperous liberal society they live in contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Strauss did want to have a school of students, to get others see what he had seen, that Western liberalism led to legalism, and that it undergone a development that at the end of which it can no longer define itself or defend itself. The development which took everything praise-worthy and admirable of human beings and made us into dwarf animals, made into herd animals and sick little dwarfs satisfied with the dangerous in which nothing is true and everything is permitted.

Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything, all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by their own selfish desires, and this threatened to tear apart the shared values which held society together. But there was a way to stop this, Strauss believed.

It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths everyone could believe in: they might not be true, but they were necessary illusions. One of these was religion. The other, was the myth of the Nation. And in America, that was the idea that the country had a unique destiny: to battle against the forces of evil throughout the world. This myth was epitomized, Strauss told his students, in his favorite television program GUNSMOKE.

Strauss was a great fan of American television. GUNSMOKE was his great favorite and he would hurry home from the seminar which would end at 5:30 or so, have a quick dinner so could be at his seat before the television set when GUNSMOKE went on. And he felt that this was good, this show; this had a solitary effect on the American public, because it showed the conflict between good and evil in a way that would be immediately intelligible to everyone. The hero has a white hat; he is faster on the draw than the bad man; the good guy wins. And it is not just that the good guys wins but that the values are clear: That’s America…we’re going to triumph over the evils that are trying to destroy us and the virtues of the Western frontier. Good and Evil.

Leo Strauss’s other favorite program was Perry Mason, and this, he told his students, epitomized the role that they, the elite, had to play. In public, they should promote the myths necessary to rescue America from decay. But in private, they didn’t have to believe in them.

Perry Mason was different from GUNSMOKE. He is an extremely cunning man who is, as fas as we can see, is very virtuous, and uses his great intelligence and quickness of mind to rescue his clients from dangers, but who could be fooling us because is cleverer than we are. Is he really telling the truth? May be his client is guilty.

EGYPT 1950 - 1966

In 1950, Sayyed Qutb traveled back to Egypt from America. He too was determined to find someway of controlling the forces of selfish individualism. And as traveled, he began to envisage a new type of society. It would have all the modern benefits of science and technology, but a more political Islam would have a central role to play in keeping individualism in check, which would provide the moral framework that would stop selfish desires from overwhelming.

But Qutb realized the American culture was already spreading to Egypt, trapping the masses in its seductive dream. What was needed, he believed, was an elite, a vanguard, who could see through these illusions of freedom, just as he had in America, and who would then lead the masses to realize the high-arch.

The masses need to be led, and it is this vanguard group that will be responsible for the task of leading the people out the darkness into the light of Islam. Because the masses have succumbed to their own selfish desires, and he wanted the vanguard to be different, to be pure, to be standing together outside of all of this corrupt situation. Bringing people back to the truth.

On his return, Qutb became politically active in Egypt. He joined a group called the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted Islam to play a major role in the governing of the Egyptian society. And in 1952, the Brotherhood supported the revolution led by General Nasser that overthrew the last remnants of British rule.

But Nasser, very quickly, made it clear, that the new Egypt was going to be a secular society that emulated Western models. He quickly forged an alliance with America, and the CIA came to Egypt to organize security agencies for the new regime.

Faced with this, the Muslim Brotherhood began to organize against Nasser. And in 1954, Qutb and other leading members of the Brotherhood were arrested by the security services. What then happened to  Qutb  was going to have consequences for the whole world.

The testimony of survivors revealed what happened in Nasser’s main prison in the 50s and 60s. Torturers, who have been trained by the CIA, unleashed an audio violence against the Brotherhood members accused of plotting to overthrow Nasser. At one point,  Qutb was covered with animal fat and locked in a cell with dogs trained to attack humans. Inside the cell, he had a heart attack.

According to officials of that time,  Qutb thought of himself a superior sort of person, an important Islamist thinker with a strong character. But once he was locked-up in a military prison, he confessed, and detail, about the organization of the Brotherhood and his role within this organization, and about his ‘fatwas’, the most dangerous of which was that related his orders to blow-up the Kanater region in the aim of sinking the delta area being the land of infidels.

Qutb survived, but the torture had a powerful, radicalizing effect on his ideas. Up to this point, he had believed that the Western secular ideas simply created the selfishness and the isolation he had seen in the United States. But the torture, he believed, showed that this culture also unleashed and the most brutal and barbarous aspects of human beings.

Qutb began to have an apocalyptic vision of a disease that was spreading from the West throughout the world. He called it “jahiliyah”: a state of barbarous ignorance. What made it so terrifying and insidious was that people did not realize that they were infected. They believed that they were free and that partitions was taking them forward to a new world, but in fact, they were regressing to a barbarous age.

Qutb sensed that jahiliyah is so dangerous now because not only it was advanced by Western powers but Muslims have become infected with this jahiliyah; so now the threat to Islam is also from within; it is from without and within. It is a state of emergency because jahiliyah is a condition that pervades everything and everybody. It has even infected our power of imagination; you don’t even know that we’re sick, that we now worship materialism and the self and individual truth over the real truth. So it is an incredible sense of epic confrontation where Islam is being insulted on all fronts, from within, from without, culturally, economically, militarily. And under those circumstances, anyway of fight it become justified and legitimate, and in fact has a kind of existential weight because, somehow, it is doing God’s will on earth.

To  Qutb this force of jahiliyah has now gone so deep in the minds of Muslims that a dramatic way had to be found to free them. In a series of books he wrote secretly in prison, and which were then smuggled out,  Qutb  called upon a revolutionary vanguard to rise up and overthrow the leaders who had allowed jahiliyah to infect their country. The implication was that these leaders could justifiably be killed because they have become so corrupted they were not longer Muslims, even though they said they were.

Faced with this, Nasser decided to crush  Qutb  and his ideas. And in 1966, Qutb was put on trial for treason. The verdict was a forgone conclusion. And on Agust the 29th 1966 Qutb was executed. But his ideas lived on.

The day after his execution, a young school boy student setup a secret group. He hoped that it one day he would become the vanguard that Qutb had called for. His name was Ayman Zawahiry. And Zawahiry was to become the mentor to Osama Bin Laden.

AMERICA 1967

But at the very moment where the ideas of Sayyed Qutb seemed dead and buried, Leo Strauss’ s ideas about how to transform America, were about to become powerful and influential. Because the liberal political order that had dominated America since the war started to collapse.

Only a few years before, President Johnson had promised policies that would create a new and a better world in America. He called it the "Great Society”: a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind. But in 1967, in the wake of some of the worst riots ever seen in America, that dream seemed to have ended in violence and hatred.

One prominent liberal journalist called Irving Kristol began to question whether it might be actually the policies themselves that were causing social breakdown. In the early 70s, Irving Kristol became the focus of a group of disaffected liberals in Washington. They were determined attempt to understand why the optimistic liberal policies have failed. And they found the answer in the theories of Leo Strauss.

Strauss explained that it was the very basis of liberal ideas, the belief in individual freedom that was causing the chaos, because it undermined the shared moral framework which held society together. Individuals pursued their own selfish interests, and this inevitable led to conflict.

As the movement grew, many young students who had studied Strauss’ ideas came to Washington to join this group.  Some, like Paul Wolfowitz, Francis Fukuyama, William Irving Kristol, had been taught Strauss’ ideas at the Universities of Chicago or Harvard. This group became known as the Neoconservatives.


What neo-conservatives had in common is that same doubt in what was once seemed a kind of great certainty and confidence in liberal progress. The philosophic grounds for liberal democracy have been weakened.

THE NEO-CONSERVATIVES

The neo-conservatives were idealists; their aim was to stop the social dis-integrating liberal freedoms have unleashed. They wanted to find a way of uniting the people and giving them a shared purpose. The theories of Leo Strauss would have a great influence in doing this. They would set out to re-create the “Myth of America” as a unique nation whose destiny is to battle against evil world. And in this project, the sole source of evil would America’s cold war enemy, the Soviet Union. And by doing this, they believe that they would not only give new meanings and purpose to people’s lives, but they would spread the good of democracy around the world.

The United States would not only, according to these Straussians, be able to bring good to the world, but would be able to overcome the fundamental weaknesses of American society: A society that has been suffering, almost rotting -in their language-, from relativism, liberalism, lack of self-confidence, lack of belief in itself. And, one of the main projects of the Straussians during the cold war was to reinforce the self-confidence of Americans and the belief that America was fundamentally the only force for Good in the world that had to be supported otherwise evil would prevail.

(...watch the videos to know the full the story!)

Friday 30 December 2011

Does the Al Qaeda Exist (I): Its Roost in Operation Cyclone


USA funded Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda – in OPERATION CYCLONE

Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm the Afghan mujahedeen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989[1]. Operation Cyclone is one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken[2]; funding began with $20-30 million per year in 1980 and rose to $630 million per year in 1987. (WATCH VIDEO HERE)

Background
Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has stated that the U.S. effort to aid the mujahedeen was preceded by an effort to draw the Soviets into a costly and presumably distracting Vietnam War-like conflict. In a 1998 interview with the French news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski recalled: “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would… That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap… The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War.”

The Program
On July 3, 1979, U.S. President Carter signed a presidential finding authorizing funding for anticommunist guerrillas in Afghanistan. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and installation of a more pro-Soviet president, Babrak Karmal, Carter announced, “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War”.

The program relied heavily on using the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as an intermediary for funds distribution, passing of weapons, military training and financial support to Afghan resistance groups. Along with funding from similar programs from Britain’s MI6 and SAS, Saudi Arabia, and the People’s Republic of China, the ISI armed and trained over 100,000 insurgents between 1978 and 1992. They encouraged the volunteers from the Arab states to join the Afghan resistance in its struggle against the Soviet troops based in Afghanistan.

Funding
The U.S. offered two packages of economic assistance and military sales to support Pakistan’s role in the war against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The first six-year assistance package (1981-87) amounted to US$3.2 billion, equally divided between economic assistance and military sales. The U.S. also sold 40 F-16 aircraft to Pakistan during 1983-87 at a cost of US$1.2 billion outside the assistance package. The second six-year assistance package (1987-93) amounted to US$4.2 billion. Out of this US$2.28 billion were allocated for economic assistance in the form of grants or loan that carried the interest rate of 2-3 per cent.

The rest of the allocation (US$1.74 billion) was in the form of credit for military purchases. Sale of non-U.S. arms to Pakistan for destination to Afghanistan was facilitated by Israel. Somewhere between $3–$20 billion in US funds were funneled into the country to train and equip Afghan resistance groups with weapons,[citation needed] including Stinger man-portable air-defense systems.

The program funding was increased yearly due to lobbying by prominent U.S. politicians and government officials, such as Charles Wilson, Gordon Humphrey, Fred Ikle, and William Casey.

Aftermath
After the USSR invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, some believed the Soviets were attempting to expand their borders southward in order to gain a foothold in the region. The Soviet Union had long lacked a warm water port, and their movement south seemed to position them for further expansion toward Pakistan in the East, and Iran to the West. American politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, ignorant of U.S. involvement, feared the Soviets were positioning themselves for a takeover of Middle Eastern oil. Others believed that the Soviet Union was afraid Iran’s Islamic Revolution and Afghanistan’s Islamization would spread to the millions of Muslims in the USSR.

After the invasion, Carter announced what became known as the Carter Doctrine: that the U.S. would not allow any other outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf. He terminated the Russian Wheat Deal, which was intended to establish trade with USSR and lessen Cold War tensions. The grain exports had been beneficial to people employed in agriculture, and the Carter embargo marked the beginning of hardship for American farmers. He also prohibited Americans from participating in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, and reinstated registration for the draft for young males.

The U.S. shifted its interest from Afghanistan after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. American funding of Afghan resistance leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hezbi Islami party was cut off immediately. The U.S. also reduced its assistance for Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

In October 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush refused to certify that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear explosive device, triggering the imposition of sanctions against Pakistan under the Pressler Amendment (1985) in the Foreign Assistance Act. This disrupted the second assistance package offered in 1987 and discontinued economic assistance and military sales to Pakistan with the exception of the economic assistance on way to Pakistan. Military sales and training program were abandoned as well and some of the Pakistani military officers under training in the U.S. were asked to return home.

Criticism
The U.S. government has been criticized for allowing Pakistan to channel a disproportionate amount of its funding to controversial Afghan resistance leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,[12] who Pakistani officials believed was “their man”. Hekmatyar has been criticized for killing other mujahideen and attacking civilian populations, including shelling Kabul with American-supplied weapons, causing 2,000 casualties. Hekmatyar was said to be friendly with Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda, who was running an operation for assisting “Afghan Arab” volunteers fighting in Afghanistan, called Maktab al-Khadamat. Alarmed by his behavior, Pakistan leader General Zia warned Hekmatyar, “It was Pakistan that made him an Afghan leader and it is Pakistan who can equally destroy him if he continues to misbehave.”

In the late 1980s, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, concerned about the growing strength of the Islamist movement, told President George H. W. Bush , “You are creating a Frankenstein.”

The U.S. says that all of its funds went to native Afghan rebels and denies that any of its funds were used to supply Osama bin Laden or foreign Arab mujahedeen. It is estimated that 35,000 foreign Muslims from 43 Islamic countries participated in the war.