Kurt Nimmo

Infowars.com

February 9, 2012

Part I

On February 7, the Air Force Times posted an article quoting Michael A. Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low intensity conflict at the Pentagon.

“Quite frankly, we, the American people, were asleep at the switch, the U.S. government, prior to 9/11. So an organization that wasn’t that good looked really great on 9/11,” Sheehan told the annual Special Operations, Low Intensity Conflict Planning Conference.

“Everyone looked to the skies every day after 9/11 and said, ‘When is the next attack?’ And it didn’t come, partly because al-Qaida wasn’t that capable. They didn’t have other units here in the U.S. … Really, they didn’t have the capability to conduct a second attack.”

Sheehan’s comments underscore the fact that al-Qaeda was until recently a prized asset in the manufactured war on terrorism. It is not, as numerous officials and so-called terror experts have warned for over the span of a decade, a terrorist organization with global reach capable of launching attacks inside the United States.

Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that al-Qaeda is not a terrorist group, but rather a contrivance based on a database of international Mujaheddin fighters used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s.

“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called al-Qaeda,” writes Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence. “And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money.”

An unbiased examination of the record uniformly ignored by the establishment media reveals that al-Qaeda served not only as a pretext to invade Afghanistan, but was also employed in a number of other intelligence operations.

The fable spun by the establishment and its propaganda media tells us that the Afghan Mujahideen that would later coalesce into al-Qaeda was an indigenous phenomenon in response to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But as Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brezinski, confirmed during a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, the Mujahideen was created by the United States prior to the Soviet invasion.

“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul,” Brzezinski said.

Working with Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, the U.S. recruited and trained Mujahideen fighters from the ranks of three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and other wild-eyed Islamic militants from around the world. The CIA and the Saudis channeled between $3 and $6 billion dollars into the operation. It was later said the effort was “the largest covert action program since World War II.”

Future CIA director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in his memoir that the CIA “examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps in the form of some sort of ‘international brigade.”

A CIA official involved in the effort later explained that the CIA directly funded Maktab al-Khidamat, or MAK, the “charity” front Osama bin Laden would later run. MAK was “nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation,” the corporate media reported in 1998, before the script was revised and any mention of the CIA was swept into the memory hole.

According to the 9/11 Commission report, MAK was the “precursor organization to al-Qaeda” and Osama bin Laden “worked closely with Saudi, Pakistani, and US intelligence services to recruit mujaheddin from many Muslim countries,” a fact reported prior to the establishment media following the war on terror narrative in the wake of 9/11.

Norm Dixon writes that John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, 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.” These “skills” would come in handy later as the CIA developed its al-Qaeda asset and launched the global war on terrorism.

Following the defeat of the Soviets, the CIA continued its work with Mujahideen factions that would soon blossom into al-Qaeda. CIA contractor Billy Waugh detailed the CIA’s role in assisting al-Qaeda in a 2004 autobiography.

In 1991, the CIA asset MAK began recruiting fighters who were sent to destabilize the Balkans prior to the U.S. attack on Yugoslavia later in the decade.

“Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network has been active in the Balkans for years, most recently helping Kosovo rebels battle for independence from Serbia with the financial and military backing of the United States and NATO,” Isabel Vincent wrote for the National Post on March 15, 2002.

The arrival in the Balkans of the so-called Afghan Arabs, who are from various Middle Eastern states and linked to al-Qaeda, began in 1992 soon after the war in Bosnia. According to Lenard Cohen, professor of political science at Simon Fraser University, Mujahadeen fighters who travelled to Afghanistan to resist the Soviet occupation in the 1980s later “migrated to Bosnia hoping to assist their Islamic brethren in a struggle against Serbian [and for a time] Croatian forces.”

The CIA’s MAK, also known as al-Kifah (struggle), established a “charity” front for the Afghan effort in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1980s.

In 1990, the blind sheik Abdul-Rahman entered the U.S. on a CIA-supported visa – despite being on a terrorist watch list – and soon dominated the al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn. Abdul-Rahman was heavily involved with the CIA and Pakistani ISI efforts to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was later said Osama bin Laden secretly paid Abdul-Rahman’s living expenses in the U.S. He was also a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group compromised by British intelligence.

A key figure in the plot was an Egyptian by the name of Ali Mohamed. He was a member of the U.S. Special Forces and worked as a “double agent” for the CIA. Mohamed, like Abdul-Rahman, entered the country under the visa program run by the CIA’s Department of Operations. He was, also like Abdul-Rahman, on a terrorist watch list.

Abdul-Rahman and others were ultimately convicted in a plot to blow up the World Trade Center. Elements within the FBI cooked the bomb for the plotters and allowed the explosion to occur on February 26, 1993, at the WTC. The explosion killed six and injured thousands. The CIA later blocked an investigation of Abdel-Rahman and his group and their involvement in the 1993 WTC bombing.

In 1994, the CIA admitted it was “partially culpable” for the World Trade Center bombing because it helped train and support some of the bombers. The agency dismissed its culpability as “blowback.”

In the mid-90s, the orchestrated emergence of al-Qaeda provided the CIA with a pretext to design and beta test a rendition program that would become fully operational following the attacks of September 11, 2001. The program was officially approved approved by Bill Clinton on June 21, 1995.

Beginning with the bombing of the U.S.-operated Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in November of 1995, the CIA’s al-Qaeda began its long ascent as the premier terrorist group in a series of violent events that would culminate in the attack of September 11, 2001, and would inaugurate with unprecedented fanfare the war on terror and the high-tech police state.

Some sources claim al-Qaeda began its operation earlier, in 1992 in Yemen, when it allegedly targeted U.S. soldiers en route to Somalia where a military operation (Operation Restore Hope) was taking place under humanitarian guise. The operation attributed to al-Qaeda managed to kill an Australian tourist and a Yemeni hotel worker, but no U.S. soldiers were killed or injured.

The following year, in February of 1996, the CIA officially founded Alec Station, the Islamic Extremist Branch of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, run by Michael Scheuer. The establishment media began using the term “al-Qaeda” during the summer of 1996. It was claimed U.S. intelligence was unaware of the term until it was revealed that year by defector Jamal al-Fadl, but Billy Waugh and said the CIA knew of it in 1991 and double agent Ali Mohamed said he told the FBI about al-Qaeda by name in 1993.

CIA asset Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda would explode on the scene and into the public consciousness in 1998 with the attacks on U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, and the bombing of the USS Cole on October 12, 2000.

In part two, we will cover the African attacks, the pivotal September 11 attack, and subsequent events that reveal beyond a shadow of a doubt that al-Qaeda, the terror group named after a database, is indeed a contrivance designed to foment a global war on manufactured terror and also provide an oft-cited excuse to turn America into a police state and dismantle the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

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