Tsarnaev brothers, secret services and Islamic terrorism - April, 2013

"If it is relatively easy to recruit a man to act as a 'sleeper', what about recruiting a foreigner to act as a real terrorist, prepared to commit murder, use explosives and fire buildings? Surely that is much more difficult? The answer is that, surprisingly, it is not."
Viktor Suvorov
History tells us that major terror attacks, assassinations of important public figures or bombings are normally not carried-out by disgruntled, independent individuals commonly referred to by the mainstream press as "lone wolves". Every single political assassination, bombing or terror operation, including the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the assassination of John F Kennedy has had accomplices other than individuals thought to have organized and/or perpetrated the crime. Evidence clearly suggests that elements within the US government were somehow complicit in the aforementioned events that forever changed the course of history. 

In other words, Kennedy's assassination and the September 11 attacks were self-inflicted wounds meant to serve a greater political purpose. The events on September 11, 2001 were unique in that the attacks also had the involvement of certain foreign  powers allied to the US. 

We recently had another spectacular terror attack in the US that attracted global attention. Fortunately, this one in Boston was not as bloody as the previous one in New York twelve years ago. Nevertheless, several innocent lives were lost and dozens of innocent people were maimed.

Consequently, America is back in fear again and "hawks" are beating the war drums again, and I have a strong feeling that this is exactly how it was meant to play out.

There are basically five major categories within which the Tsarnaev brothers can be placed in: They were either independent jihadists taking it upon themselves to "protect Islam" from perceived attacks by the US; vulnerable/gullible patsies framed for doing something that was organized by others; Manchurian Candidates, impressionable young men brainwashed by an intelligence agency 
to carry out a terrorist act; double agents serving for a US secret agency as well as another foreign entity; or chickens coming home to roost, radical Islamists biting the hand that fed them, similar to what occurred in Benghazi, Libya in September 11, 2012. In other words, consequences of Washington's intimate dealings with Islamic radicals around the world.

Before I go on:
Regardless of why the two ethnic Chechen brothers did what they did and who helped them do it, the terror spectacle in Boston should remind us all to take yet another look at the bloody insurgency that took place in southern Russia during the 1990s. Most people to this day do not know that the bloody jihad against Russian rule in the Caucasus region was covertly supported by Western and Turkish military intelligence -

Thus, when we remember terrorist bombings throughout the Russian Federation; blowing-up of Russian airliners; beheadings of captured Russian soldiers and civilians; the terrible Beslan school massacre; or the theater siege in Moscow... we must remember that these terror operations were all ultimately a part of a Western-Turkish-Islamist terror campaign to push Russian presence out of Muslim populated regions of southern Russia.

In other words, Islamic terrorism directly and indirectly served Western geostrategic interests in the region.

It's important to note here that Russia was not and is not their only target.
Many of these Western-Turkish-Saudi backed Wahhabi/Salafist Islamic terrorists have also pursued their global jihad in places such as Armenia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India, Libya and Syria.

Although periodic bombings and assassinations continue to take place in certain hotspots, the foreign led Islamist insurgency in Russia's vulnerable underbelly has been effectively if ruthlessly crushed by the Kremlin. As a result, a majority of the defeated militants and their families from Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia have been driven out of their homelands. But they continue their existence elsewhere. Traditionally a safe haven for Russia's rebellious Muslims, many of these radical Islamists have taken refuge in Turkey. Not surprisingly, as a result of Western support they have received in recent decades, many of these militants and their families have also found refuge in Western countries. 


The Tsarnaev's were such a family, and it is very telling that Ruslan Tsarni (the paternal uncle of the Tsarnaev brothers) worked for USAID, Western/Turkish energy firms and was married to the Turkophilic daughter of a former, high ranking CIA official.
 

Nevertheless, while Chechen terrorists were massacring Russians, they were endearingly referred to as "freedom fighters" and as "rebels yearning for freedom" by US officials and by the mainstream news media in the US. The West even financed agencies and individuals in Russia to act as advocates for Chechens. Boris Berezovsky, the fugitive oligarch that was most probably murdered by his handlers recently in London was also a steadfast supporter of Chechen terrorism in Russia. 

Now that Americans have finally gotten a tiny, little taste of what Russians went through for over ten years at the hands of Wahhabist/Salafist fanatics, those that were once referred to as "freedom fighters" and "rebels" by US officials and news media executives are all of a sudden "criminals" and "terrorists"...

Getting back to the Tsarnaev brothers.

Basing my opinion on information that we have been made aware of thus far, I personally do not believe that the Tsarnaev brothers were "lone wolves" as it is being suggested by some in the mainstream press, nor were they Russian agents as some are also insinuating. 


And I do not believe the FBI was again found to be "incompetent"; or "dropped the ball"; or that they "screwed up" for the millionth time. Pleading ignorance has always been the American intelligence community's best method of covering up their complicity in crimes. I personally believe that US security officials knew exactly what the Tsarnaev brothers were up to.

Suggesting Russian involvement in this terror operation is silly, simply because of the well established fact that Russian authorities had alerted the FBI and the CIA about Tamerlan's (the older brother's) ties to
radical Islam. In fact, Russian officials had also warned their US counterparts about Tamerlan's mother.


Moreover, it is virtually impossible that the two brothers would have been capable of traveling abroad; expressing extremist sentiments; procuring firearms and ammunition; purchasing significant quantities of fireworks from a pyrotechnics store; and build relatively sophisticated bombs with timers or remote triggering mechanisms - without coming under police or FBI surveillance.

It is virtually impossible that the two brother would be able to successfully detonate two bombs and evade capture for several days - especially since the older brother (who we are told was the ringleader) was known to the FBI and the CIA; especially since the owner of the pyrotechnics chain-store in New Hampshire where Tamerlan had purchased fireworks had alerted the FBI of the transaction. It is also very curious that Faisal Shahzad, the so-called "Times Square bomber" had also purchased large amounts of fireworks to use in a makeshift car-bomb from the same pyrotechnics store chain in a different state three years ago -
The Tsarnaev brother's father, mother, uncle and aunt are now on record insisting that the two brothers were framed by someone in the US. But being that they are the relatives of the accused Chechen terrorists, their suspicions are not surprising - nor are they important. However, family members did provide an interesting piece of information.

The Armenian convert 

In televised interviews by CNN, Ruslan Tsarni and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva (the mother of the brothers) claimed that an Islamic convert of "Armenian" ancestry by the name of "Misha" had "brainwashed" Tamerlan into radicalism. It was also reported that this alleged Armenian convert was a red bearded, balding, heavyset man from Azerbaijan.
 

It is a well known fact that Chechens have very close ties to the Turkish community. In fact, there were some early reports that claimed the Tsarnaevs have been to Turkey and that they have Turkish citizenry. It is also now known that the Tsarnaevs have many Turkish acquaintances in the US. Therefore, did the family have a malicious Turkish acquaintance feeding them false information on the eve of April 24, when Armenians worldwide commemorate the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by Turks? Is this "Misha" character an Azeri or Turkish agent trying to defame Armenians in the US on the eve of April 24, as some are suggesting? 

Very unlikely, in my opinion.

Insisting that this "Misha" character could not be an Armenian (simply because Armenians were the first Christian nation or because of the Turkish genocide of Armenians) was a silly, premature and reflexive response by the Armenian community. "Misha" has since turned up and has reportedly claimed to be half Armenian. If that is indeed the case, so what? To suggest that this alleged Armenian convert to Islam from Azerbaijan somehow defames the Armenian nation or that he casts a dark shadow over the Armenian community's genocide recognition efforts in the US is utterly-utterly silly and a very good indicator of how irrational, insecure and paranoid Armenians tend to be in these types of matters.

Armenians should not have been too quick to discount what the uncle and the mother claimed. Armenian converts to Islam are not unprecedented. By saying unprecedented, I am not only referring to intermarriages that sometimes occur between Armenians and Muslims in which the Armenian side converts into Islam.

Consider the following.

Richard Giragosian is a half-Armenian Rhode Island resident with a military intelligence background in the US. Agent Richard Giragosian is currently operating a Western-funded political "think tank" in Yerevan (the founding of which was assisted by none-other-than Raffi Hovannisian). Agent Giragosian has admitted to have "converted" to Islam when he was married to an Algerian women. Did love make him do it? I seriously doubt it. What I'm trying to convey to the reader here is that some of the conversions to Islam or marriages with Muslims are done to penetrate a targeted society. 

And it's not only Armenians.

There is of course the infamous Adam Gadahn (aka Adam Pearlman) and the lesser known Yousef Al-Khattab, two American-Jews who supposedly converted to Islam and became outspoken advocates of the mysterious terror group known as "Al-Qaeda" -

Fake Al Qaeda Actors EXPOSED! Adam Gadahn & Yousef al-Khattab: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsUtvOW6SR0
Al-Qaida Calls on U.S. Muslims to Attack America: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBmhKutfJ48&feature=player_embedded
If "Misha the Armenian convert" drove Tamerlan into extremism, it clearly suggests to me that the terror operation in Boston was indeed organized by a domestic spy agency, or may have been an FBI "sting operation" gone awry. Nevertheless, if Ruslan Tsarni's and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva's claims about the Armenian convert is false - then I would expect US law enforcement officials to do their job and arrest them both on charges of disseminating false information and misleading a very serious criminal investigation. 

Wouldn't this allegedly "red bearded Armenian convert" be a prime suspect for officials who as we are told are desperately seeking answers to what happened? For about two weeks, Boston police, Homeland Security, the FBI or the CIA could not find a balding, red-bearded, Armenian Muslim immigrant from Azerbaijan in or near Massachusetts?!  

About two weeks after the bombing and after a lot of chatter about who Misha was, it was finally reported that the FBI knew his identity and whereabouts. 

But why hasn't Misha been arrested right away? 

Again, isn't he a prime suspect?! Isn't he said to be the radicalizer of Tamerlan? Why aren't teams of FBI agents and emergency police teams surrounding his home? Why aren't there legions of news reporters armed with news cameras breaking his door down to speak to him?

What's with the silence about him from law enforcement authorities and the news media?

As of this writing, Misha is still a free man. The alleged radicalizer of Tamerlan has not been taken in and interrogated. In fact, he has all but disappeared. And the only person that was reported to have met him was a Russian speaking individual named Christian Caryl from The New York Review of Books. 

Folk, think for a moment: All they do is send an obscure journalist (who probably has ties to security officials) to interview a man as important to the on-going investigation as Misha?!

Why am I now not surprised that Christian Caryl has been busy on television and on social media whitewashing and downplaying the role Misha was said to have played in driving Tamerlan into extremism. It's highly suspicious that there has been a lot of restraint with regards to this Misha character from law enforcement bodies in the US. Something's seriously not right here. Needless to say, I suspect some kind of a coverup.

Let's get to the bottom of this! I want this "Armenian convert" taken in and fully investigated by law enforcement authorities. Let's find out who he is and who he works for. And if Misha is truly innocent of all wrong doing (although how can we be sure of his innocence if he has not been properly interrogated and investigated) then Ruslan Tsarni and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva should be brought up on charges and arrested for providing false information and misleading the investigation! 

But I am not holding my breath because this case stinks to high heaven.

I believe security officials in the US know a lot more than they are admitting. I believe the Tsarnaev brothers did not act alone. I believe that counter-terrorism agencies in the US knew what the brothers were up to. Therefore, there will indeed be things that the FBI and the CIA will not want the American public to know, and that is exactly why this case will not get much past memorial services, superficial bouts of flag waving and shouting of USA! USA! USA! 

FBI ringleaders?


Although Americans are too distracted by entertainment, propaganda and trying to pay their ever-increasing bills to notice it, the US has morphed into a massive, Orwellian police state. The control that the US government yields over Americans today is unprecedented, not only in American history but in the annals of world history. I personally believe that the latest acts of terrorism in Boston need to be looked at from within the context of the modern American police state.

As mentioned above, it is well known that in the US some converts to Islam, as well as individuals born into the Muslim faith are undercover agents hired to keep a close eye on the Muslim community in the country. What's less well known is that these undercover agents have also been known to organize elaborate "sting operations" by provoking susceptible (i.e. naive, fanatical or intellectually deficient) individuals within the Muslim community into carrying-out acts of violence. The following are two videos relevant to this topic -

FBI Fake Terror Plot History: Judge Napolitano: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwTpJ1EoV6A
Did US know about Christmas day attempted terrorist attack? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa-am3NZCSg
Government agents regularly recruit disgruntled and/or fanatical, young men with low intelligence to do their dirty work. Actually, this is a fairly common way of recruiting terrorists around the world these days. This approach has been around for many years and it has been perfected by many different intelligence organizations. The Israeli Mossad, the Russian FSB, the British MI6 and of course the American CIA excel at this modus operandi. 

From the inner-cities of the western world to the Palestinian slums of Lebanon to the stone-age villages of Afghanistan, there are literally tens-of-millions of uneducated, unemployed, desperate, angry and psychologically troubled young men (and women) waiting to be plucked by agents armed with jihadi rhetoric or bags of cash (using whichever method happens to work best).

Every single Mosque, Islamic student group or Islamic community center in the US is under government surveillance. Nothing happens in Islamic communities in the US without law-enforcement bodies not knowing about them.

Therefore, call me a "conspiracy theorist" but I do not for one minute believe that the Tsarnaev brothers were able to plan - alone or with foreign assistance - a terror operation, arm themselves with guns, ammunition and fairly sophisticated bombs with remote triggers right under the FBI's nose without the FBI not knowing about it
.
If the brothers are guilty of the crime they are accused of carrying-out, it clearly suggests that they had handlers guiding them.


Moreover, it is now becoming increasingly apparent that early reports about a bomb drill being conducted in Boston during same day as the marathon is accurate. A bomb drill was indeed being conducted in the vicinity of the marathon in Boston when the two bombs exploded. I do not know it's significance but there are even pictures of what seems to be unidentified but uniformed operatives loitering near the finish line shortly before the explosions. For more information please see relevant articles on this page.

Although it may not absolve them from any responsibility whatsoever, it is increasingly looking as if the Tsarnaev brothers may have indeed been setup by US security officials. However, there is also the real possibility that Tamerlan could have been a double agent serving two masters, one in the US and one overseas. 

Although it's too early to tell precisely who were the primary organizers of this terror operation, I personally suspect them to be elements within the FBI or the CIA. And only time will tell why it was done. However, if I had to guess, I would say this operation was carried-out to give the waning "war on terror" a timely boost, a new life - especially with war against Syria and Iran on the horizon. The particulars of the bombing will not matter in the end. What the American cattle will ultimately take away from this incident is that America is again under attack from Arabs, Muslims or Middle Eastern people. The following is a good rationalization that may be presented by media pundits and government officials in the near future -

If we don't begin intervening on behalf of Syria's embattled rebels, they may begin hating America or begin plotting against America in the future... If we don't begin intervening on behalf of Syria's embattled rebels, Islamic extremist amongst them may takeover the movement... If we don't begin intervening in Syria, chemical/biological weapons will fall into extremist hands...
Therefore, as you can see, what happened with the Tsarnaev brothers can easily be spun into a politically expedient matter that can potentially serve Western interests. And this is essentially what's important for US security officials.

What I am stating here is not a "conspiracy theory" it is a fact of life in Washington's so-called "war on terror", a long-term global war to project Western power into strategic, resource rich regions of the world and keep potential competitors such as Russia and China in check. I also think it's important to look at what happened in Boston in the context of three other curious recent developments -
1) A large segment of an aircraft's landing gear said to be that of one of the airliners that crashed into the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001 was miraculously found tightly wedged between two buildings, one of which just happened to be the controversial Mosque near what is known as ground zero in Manhattan.
2) Canadian security officials uncovered an alleged terrorist plot to blow-up a New York bound Canadian train which was said to have been organized by "Al-Qaeda elements in Iran".
3) Ricin contaminated letters were sent to US President Barack Obama and two other American officials.
First, there is no Al-Qaeda in Iran. If any Al-Qaeda elements do somehow turn-up in Iran, they are working for Western, Israeli, Pakistani and/or Saudi Arabian interest. This is a Western effort to keep the public afraid of Iran. The miraculous discovery of a large piece of an airliner found next to the controversial Mosque near ground zero in Manhattan was clearly meant to be a psychological operation. They are attempting to emotionally/subconsciously tie the terror attack in Boston with the one that occurred in New York twelve years ago and use the opportunity to take a jab at the antagonistic Mosque in question. Finally, anyone remember the deadly anthrax letters that came on the heels of the September 11, 2001 attacks? Anyone remember who sent them? The person investigators revealed to be responsible for them was a government employed microbiologist by the name of Bruce Ivins. Bruce Lvins was eventually suicided. Let's see how this ricin letter thing will play out this time.

Someone, somewhere is trying to sow fear in the general public once again, because as we know, fear (i.e. thinking that your nation is under attack) is a proven method of control. I have a strong feeling that what happened in Boston was packaged to act as a mini 9/11, and it was meant to reawaken the fear and anger that the 9/11 attacks first placed in the hearts and minds of Americans over twelve years ago.

Closer look at Islamic radicalism 

It is not surprising that one of the most notorious proliferators of Islamic radicalism around the world lives in the US. His name is Fethullah Gulen, he is a Turk and he most probably works for the CIA. I would not be surprised if it was discovered that the Tsarnaev brothers were in some way connected to this Turkish Islamist living right under Washington's nose. An article about him can be read on this page.

It is through Islamic activists like Fethullah Gulen that Western intelligence agencies find, organize, train and sometimes send Islamic extremists to hotspots in places such as Russia, Serbia, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria and Iran. Men similar to Fethullah Gulen exist is most Western nations today: US, Australia, Britain, Canada, Belgium, France and Germany in particular. 

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his comrade William Plotnikov, an Islamic extremist from Canada that was recently killed by Russian special forces in southern Russia (an RT article about him is posted on this page) are good examples of the aforementioned process. Tamerlan was one of many that are radicalized in the West and sent overseas to pursue jihad. This is why Tamerlan traveled to Russia in 2011. Under the watchful eyes of the FBI and the CIA, the extremism of men like Tamerlan are cultivated and nurtured, and when need be used against targets of the political West... 

But in the case of Tamerlan something seemed to have either changed or went awry along the way.

Again, what I am stating here is not a conspiracy theory. None-Islamic powers have been exploiting Islamic radicalism for decades, and doing so seems a lot easier than one would imagine.  

The article immediately below this commentary is about a book called Spetsnaz, written by a Soviet defector named Viktor Suvorov. The book in question refers to the Soviet Union's exploitation of radical movements around the world, including Islamic ones. In today's political climate, the information provided by Viktor Suvorov's book will interest many readers. The kind of insider information provided by this author would help the reader better understand how secret services operate. Reading it will also help one place high profile terrorist operations such as the one that occurred in the United States on September 11, 2001 under a different, more troubling light.

Although the author in question had a very obvious anti-Russian/anti-Soviet political agenda, we must bare in mind that the dark nature of intelligence services is not exclusive to Russia or the Soviet Union for they fully apply to various other agencies found around the world as well. 

It is well known that American, British, Israeli, Saudi Arabian and Pakistani intelligence services also engage in gathering, training, organizing and utilizing "terrorist" cells throughout the world. In fact, the aforementioned nations, allied in many regards, are by-far the most prolific when it comes to exploiting Islamic militants around the world. 

Therefore, in my opinion, there are no "terror" groups in existence today, Islamic or otherwise, that are not supported or funded or exploited by one major power or another. The world, especially the Middle East and Central Asia, is full of young, fanatical, disgruntled, troubled, violent and functionally illiterate men and women that have the potential for becoming terrorists for one political interest or another. All it takes is a group of well-funded and well-trained specialists to recruit, organize, train and when need be - utilize!

CIA's Islamic wing


For senior policymakers in Washington, the geostrategic benefits brought upon by their support of "Al-Qaeda" type movements in certain areas of the world far outweighs the inherent risks involved with dealing with "Al-Qaeda" type movements. In the absence of true ideological movements in the world, radical Islam has been the spark to get things done around the world.

Wasn't it through such extremist movements that Western powers realized their geostrategic goals in places such as Afghanistan, southern Russia, the Balkans and north Africa? Isn't it through such movements that the West is currently destroying Syria and putting pressure on Iran?  The following is a very poignant comment by a Libyan official before Mummar Qadaffi was overthrown by Al-Qaeda led rebels -  
"What we are facing now in this war is NATO led by al-Qaeda. The European and western officials are lying to their people when they say they are fighting terrorism. In fact they are fighting with terrorism against the Libyan nation and they are following al Qaeda's orders."
Libyan head of security services Abdullah Al-Snousi
And here, Webster Tarpley discusses US-Al-Qaeda ties -  
Therefore, as far as Washingtonians are concerned, what's the big deal if some Americans get blown to bits once in a while - as long as the American empire remains a global hegemon?! As far as Washingtonians are concerned, what's the big deal if America is made to suffer some real-estate damage once in a while - if such a thing can be cleverly exploited towards long-term geostrategic agendas?!
 

Aren't the terrible events of September 11, 2001 continuing to be used as a powerful excuse to implement a geostrategic agenda to remake the world in Washington's image... and of course earn, squander or steal trillions of dollars in the process?! The following is my take on the events that forever changed the world -

It is quite obvious that the Wahhabist/Salafist terror group popularly known as "Al-Qaeda" is more-or-less serving as the Islamic military wing of Western intelligence agencies. And the bloodletting we have been witnessing in the region during the past twenty five years is a long-term strategy to ensure that the Anglo-American-Zionist global order maintains its hegemonic power well into the twenty-first century -
Project For The New American Century: http://theriseofrussia.blogspot.com/2011/09/to-better-understand-why-events-of_5258.html
To realize their neo-imperial dreams in strategic places like the Balkans, Middle East, Caucasus, Africa and Central Asia, they have been busy collaborating with radicals throughout the Islamic world to do their dirty work. Of course much of this type of activity gets carried-out covertly by Western intelligence operatives and through certain allied Islamic nations that maintain strong connections with radical Islamic groups. For instance, it is well known that the Saudi Arabian and Pakistani governments are two of the most active proliferator of Islamic radicalism around the world. It is also well known that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are two of Washington's closest allies in the region. 

The real enemy is nationalism

During the past century, the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia have systematically become radicalized as a result of Western interventions. Today, the Middle East in particular stands on the verge of a radical Islamic transformation and this is occurring with the tacit support of the Western alliance. One does not need to be a rocket scientist to realize that Washington and its allies in the Arabian peninsula have helped Islamic forces in the region at every pivotal turn. The Hezbollah,  backed by Iran and Syria, is of course a notable exception to this.

Besides using Islamic militants to fight against Russian and Iranian influences in the region, the West also uses Islamic movements to impede the growth of secular, nationalistic leaders such as Mohammad Mossadeq, Abdel Nasser, Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad. The West has always feared independent, nationalistic leaders in the very strategic and oil rich region. This is essentially the reason why Mossadegh was overthrown in Iran; this is essentially the reason why Nasser was killed in Egypt; this is essentially the reason why Saddam was killed in Iraq; this is essentially the reason why Qaddafi was killed in Libya; and this is essentially the reason why they are currently trying to kill Assad in Syria. 

Therefore, the West is deriving benefits by keeping the region free of nationalist leaders. In other words, disregard what you have been hearing on CNN and BBC and realize that senior Western policymakers actually prefer dealing with Islamic societies in the region rather than with independent, secular ones. 

Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that Washington has been "training" Islamic political parties in Egypt; it should not come as a surprise that Washington has been encouraging/funding Islamic militants in Kurdistan, Iraq and Pakistan to carryout terrorist attacks in Iran; it should not come as a surprise that promoters of Islamic fundamentalism such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are Washington's allies; it should not come as a surprise that Western-backed Libyan rebels have had close ties with Al-Qaeda; it should not come as a surprise that Western leaders are overseeing the transfer of Libya's Al-Qaeda connected Islamic terrorists into Syria via Turkey; it should not come as a surprise that Washington teamed up with Al-Qaeda linked militants to help Albanians, Bosnians and Chechens defeat Serbians and Russians. 

The following are excerpts from a previous blog entry that I'd like the reader to revisit:

"Al-Qaeda" is the covert Islamic military wing of Western and Saudi Arabian intelligence services. I am speaking of the "Al-Qaeda" leadership and not the organization's limitless supply of illiterate foot-soldiers that work for them thinking they are doing Allah's work on earth.
Those Islamists we hear about getting assassinated or blown-up by Washington's drones from time-to-time are more-or-less those that refuse to play the game. In other words,  Islamic groups that are in reality targeted by Washington and its allies, some may be splinter groups, some may be groups that have sprung-up spontaneously and some may be groups supported by rival political interests.
By supporting the rise of Islamic radicals in targeted region through "democratic" movements, the West is also planting within the region the very seeds of its eventual destruction. After all, when these socially primitive and politically dysfunctional Islamic powers get out of hand, as they tend to from time-to-time, they will simply be bombed into submission.
In this day in age, the wholesale killing of Muslims is not a major ethical dilemma for western society. Hollywood and the mainstream news press in the western world have been successful in dehumanizing Muslims in the eyes of western populations.
Due to their cultural backwardness and archaic mentalities, Islamic societies are easily manipulated and there are virtually limitless supplies of easily manipulated men and women waiting to be recruited by one warlord or another - or by one intelligence agency or another. 
The surest way to defeat your enemy is to create your enemy yourself. For many years Washington's many enemies have been custom made, tailor fit for exploitation, manipulation and final destruction. 

Islamic radicalism is a volatile yet convenient tool Western officials have been exploiting against their rivals for decades. And precisely due to its inherent volatility, dealing with Islamic radicals sometimes backfires. Western officials need to stop playing with fire.

I have posted a number of very revealing articles on this page about Western ties to Islamic radicalism as well as a number of news reports about the Tsarnaev brothers that have caught my attention during the past two weeks. As usual, I have to remind the reader that some of these news reports and articles will require reading between the lines because they were written by presstitutes of the controlled news press in the US.

Arevordi
April, 2013

***

Special Forces and Islamic Terrorism

To help our readers understand how this clique works, and what it means today, I am posting a series of important quotes from the book, "Spetsnaz" by the defector, Viktor Suvorov. I believe that readers will have a better understanding of the role Russia's Spetsnaz (elite special unit of the GRU) played in terrorism and how it continues to support terrorism by operating through the mafia or in the security services themselves.

Quotes From "Spetsnaz" by Viktor Suvorov

"…Soviet secret police, the KGB, carries out different functions (than the Spetsnaz) and has other priorities. It has its own terrorist apparatus, which includes an organization very similar to spetsnaz, known as osnaz. The KGB uses osnaz for carrying out a range of tasks not dissimilar to those performed by the GRU's spetsnaz. But the Soviet leaders consider that it is best not to have any monopolies in the field of secret warfare. Competition, they feel, gives far better results than ration."

"…Osnaz apparently came into being practically at the same time as the Communist dictatorship. In the very first moments of the existence of the Soviet regime, we find references to detachments osobogo nazhacheniya-special purpose detachments. Osnaz means military-terrorist units, which came into being as shock troops of the Communist Party whose job was to defend the party. Osnaz was later handed over to the secret police, which changed its own name from time to time as easily as a snake changes its skins: Cheka-Vcheka-OGPU-NKVD-NKGB-MGB-MVD-KGB. Once a snake, however, always a snake."

"It is the fact that Spetsnaz belongs to the army, and Osnaz to the secret police, that accounts for all the differences between them. Spetsnaz operates mainly against external enemies; Osnaz does the same but mainly in its own territory and against its own citizens. Even if both Spetsnaz and Osnaz are faced with carrying out one and the same operation, the Soviet leadership is not inclined to rely so much on co-operation between the army and the secret police as on the strong competitive instincts between them."

"…Thus if it is relatively easy to recruit a man to act as a 'sleeper', what about recruiting a foreigner to act as a real terrorist, prepared to commit murder, use explosives and fire buildings? Surely that is much more difficult? The answer is that, surprisingly, it is not."

"A Spetsnaz officer out to recruit agents for direct terrorist action has a wonderful base for his work in the West. There are a tremendous number of people who are discontented and ready to protest against absolutely anything. And while millions protest peacefully, some individuals will resort to any means to make their protest. The spetsnaz officer has only to find the malcontent who is ready to go to extremes."

"On another occasion a group of animal rights activists in the UK injected bars of chocolate with poison. If spetsnaz were able to contact that group, and there is every chance it might, it would be extremely keen (without, of course, mentioning its name) to suggest to them a number of even more effective ways of protesting. Activists, radicals, peace campaigners, green party members: as far as the leaders of the GRU are concerned, these are like ripe water-melons, green on the outside, but red on the inside-and mouth-watering. So there is a good base for recruiting."

"The spetsnaz network of agents has much in common with international terrorism, a common center, for example-yet they are different things and must not be confused. It would be foolhardy to claim that international terrorism came into being on orders from Moscow. But to claim that, without Moscow's support, international terrorism would never have assumed the scale it has would not be rash. Terrorism has been born in a variety of situations, in various circumstances and in different kinds of soil. Local nationalism has always been a potent source, and the Soviet Union supports it in any form, just as it offers concrete support to extremist groups operating within nationalist movements. Exceptions are made, of course, of the nationalist groups within the Soviet Union and the countries under its influence."

"If groups of extremists emerge in areas where there is no sure Soviet influence, you may be sure that the Soviet Union will very shortly be their best friend. In the GRU alone there are two independent and very powerful bodies dealing with questions relating to extremists and terrorists."

"…The GRU's tactics toward terrorists are simple: never give them any orders, never tell them what to do. They are destroying Western civilization: they know how to do it, the argument goes, so let them get on with it unfettered by petty supervision. Among them there are idealists ready to die for their own ideas. So let them die for them. The most important thing is to preserve their illusion that they are completely free and independent."

"Although the vast majority of spetsnaz is made up of Slavonic personnel, there are some exceptions…And spetsnaz contains Turks, Kurds, Greeks, Koreans, Mongolians, Finns and people of other nationalities." "The Soviet Union condemns the civil war in Lebanon. But there is no need for it to condemn the war. All it has to do is hold back the next transportation of ammunition and war will cease." "Apart from military and financial support, the Soviet Union also provides the terrorists aid in the form of training. Training centers have been set up in the Soviet Union for training terrorists from a number of different countries."

"Every terrorist is studied carefully during his training, and among them will be noted the potential leaders and the born rebels who will not submit to any authority…Of equal importance are the students' weaknesses and ambitions, and their relationships with one another. Some time, many years ahead, one of them may become an important leader, but not one approved by Moscow, so it is vital to know in advance who his likely friends and enemies will be."

"The reward for the GRU is that a terrorist doing work for spetsnaz does not, in the great majority of cases, suspect he is being used. He is utterly convinced that he is acting independently, of his own will and by his own choice. The GRU does not leave its signature or his fingerprints around."

"Even in cases where it is not a question of individual terrorists but of experienced leaders of terrorist organizations, the GRU takes extraordinary steps to ensure that not only all outsiders but even the terrorist leader himself should not realize the extent of his subordination to spetsnaz and consequently to the GRU."

"The overture is a series of large and small operations the purpose of which is, before actual military operations begin, to weaken the enemy's morale, create an atmosphere of general suspicion, fear and uncertainty, and divert the attention of the enemy's armies and police forces to a huge number of different targets, each of which may be the object of the next attack."

"The overture is carried by agents of the secret services of the Soviet satellite countries and by mercenaries recruited by intermediaries. The principal method employed at this stage is "gray terror", that is, a kind of terror which is not conducted in the name of the Soviet Union. The Soviet secret services do not at this stage leave their visiting cards, or leave other people's cards. The terror is carried out in the name of already existing extremist groups not connected in any way with the Soviet Union, or in the name of the fictitious organizations. The GRU reckons that in this period its operations should be regarded as natural disasters, actions by forces beyond human control, mistakes by people, or as terrorist acts by organizations not connected with the Soviet Union."

"The terrorist acts carried out in the course of the 'overture' require very few people, very few weapons and little equipment. In some cases all that may be needed is one man who has a weapon nothing more than a screwdriver, a box of marches or a glass ampoule. Some of the operations can have catastrophic consequences. For example, an epidemic of an infectious disease at seven of the most important naval bases in the West could have the effect of halving the combined naval might of the Soviet Union's enemies."

"There is a marked increase in the strength of the peace movement. In many countries there are continual demand to make the country neutral and not to support American foreign policy, which has been discredited. At this point the 'gray terror' gathers scope and strength and in the last days of peace reaches its peak."

There is no doubt that the Soviet Union played a tremendous role in the expansion and evolution of Islamic terrorism. Many of the people responsible for the policy of promoting fundamentalist miliancy still hold key positions in Russia. People can accept the fact that there are "anti-Bush" cliques inside the CIA and State Department, and the fact that there are "pro-Bin Laden" cliques in the Pakistani military ISI. Yet, for some strange reason, they cannot accept the fact that there are still "pro-Marxist" cliques inside Russia. I believe that the Russian Mafia operates in unison with these "rogue" elements, almost as a separate intelligence directorate.

Source: http://www.globalpolitician.com/arti...9&cid=4&sid=33

General: International Terrorism Does Not Exist

General Leonid Ivashov (left) with journalist Christopher Bollyn from American Free Press


General Leonid Ivashov was the Chief of Staff of the Russian armed forces when the September 11, 2001, attacks took place. This military man, who lived the events from the inside, offers an analysis which is very different to that of his American colleagues. As he did during the Axis for Peace 2005 conference, he now explains that international terrorism does not exist and that the September 11 attacks were the result of a set-up. What we are seeing is a manipulation by the big powers; this terrorism would not exist without them. He affirms that, instead of faking a "world war on terror", the best way to reduce that kind of attacks is through respect for international law and peaceful cooperation among countries and their citizens.

As the current international situation shows, terrorism emerges where contradiction aggravate, where there is a change of social relations or a change of regime, where there is political, economic or social instability, where there is moral decadence, where cynicism and nihilism triumph, where vice is legalized and where crime spreads. It is globalization what creates the conditions for the emergence of these extremely dangerous phenomena. It is in this context that the new world geo-strategic map is being designed, that the resources of the planet are being re-distributed, that borders are disappearing, that international law is being torn into pieces, that cultural identities are being erased, that spiritual life becomes impoverished...

The analysis of the essence of the globalization process, the military and political doctrines of the United States and other countries, shows that terrorism contributes to a world dominance and the submissiveness of states to a global oligarchy. This means that terrorism is not something independent of world politics but simply an instrument, a means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new world elite. It is precisely this elite that constitutes the key element of world terrorism, its ideologist and its "godfather". The main target of the world elite is the historical, cultural, traditional and natural reality; the existing system of relations among states; the world national and state order of human civilization and national identity.

Today's international terrorism is a phenomenon that combines the use of terror by state and non-state political structures as a means to attain their political objectives through people's intimidation, psychological and social destabilization, the elimination of resistance from power organizations and the creation of appropriate conditions for the manipulation of the countries' policies and the behavior of people. Terrorism is the weapon used in a new type of war. At the same time, international terrorism, in complicity with the media, becomes the manager of global processes. It is precisely the symbiosis between media and terror, which allows modifying international politics and the exiting reality. In this context, if we analyze what happened on September 11, 2001, in the United States, we can arrive at the following conclusions:

1. The organizers of those attacks were the political and business circles interested in destabilizing the world order and who had the means necessary to finance the operation. The political conception of this action matured there where tensions emerged in the administration of financial and other types of resources. We have to look for the reasons of the attacks in the coincidence of interests of the big capital at global and transnational levels, in the circles that were not satisfied with the rhythm of the globalization process or its direction. Unlike traditional wars, whose conception is determined by generals and politicians, the oligarchs and politicians submitted to the former were the ones who did it this time.

2. Only secret services and their current chiefs x or those retired but still having influence inside the state organizations x have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such magnitude. Generally, secret services create, finance and control extremist organizations. Without the support of secret services, these organizations cannot exist x let alone carry out operations of such magnitude inside countries so well protected. Planning and carrying out an operation on this scale is extremely complex.

3. Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders. Thus, a team of professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation. The September 11 operation modified the course of events in the world in the direction chosen by transnational mafias and international oligarchs; that is, those who hope to control the planet's natural resources, the world information network and the financial flows. This operation also favored the US economic and political elite that also seeks world dominance. General Leonid Ivashov with journalist Christopher Bollyn from American Free Press

The use of the term "international terrorism" has the following goals:
Hiding the real objectives of the forces deployed all over the world in the struggle for dominance and control; Turning the people's demands to a struggle of undefined goals against an invisible enemy;Destroying basic international norms and changing concepts such as: aggression, state terror, dictatorship or movement of national liberation; Depriving peoples of their legitimate right to fight against aggressions and to reject the work of foreign intelligence services; Establishing the principle of renunciation to national interests, transforming objectives in the military field by giving priority to the war on terror, violating the logic of military alliances to the detriment of a joint defense and to favor the anti-terrorist coalition;
Solving economic problems through a tough military rule using the war on terror as a pretext. In order to fight in an efficient way against international terrorism it is necessary to take the following steps:
To confirm before the UN General Assembly the principles of the UN Charter and international law as principles that all states are obliged to respect; To create a geo-strategic organization (perhaps inspired in the Cooperation Organization of Shanghai comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) with a set of values different to that of the Atlantists; To design a strategy of development of states, a system of international security, another financial and economic model (which would mean that the world would again rest on two pillars); To associate (under the United Nations) the scientific elites in the design and promotion of the philosophical concepts of the Human Being of the 21st Century. To organize the interaction of all religious denominations in the world, on behalf of the stability of humanity's development, security and mutual support.
General Leonid Ivashov

General Leonid Ivashov is the vice-president of the Academy on geopolitical affairs. He was the chief of the department for General affairs in the Soviet Union's ministry of Defense, secretary of the Council of defense ministers of the Community of independant states (CIS), chief of the Military cooperation department at the Russian federation's Ministry of defense and Joint chief of staff of the Russian armies.

Source: http://www.rense.com/general69/ism.htm

Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists

Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles. The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers’ copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

The Saudis and their defenders in Washington have long denied links to terrorists, and they have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful campaign to beat back the allegations in federal court based on a claim of sovereign immunity. Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject of years of government investigations and furious debate. Critics have said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off terrorist groups in part to keep them from being more active in their own country. But the thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents compiled by lawyers for the Sept. 11 families and their insurers represented an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence. Internal Treasury Department documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, showed “support for terrorist organizations” at least through 2006.

A self-described Qaeda operative in Bosnia said in an interview with lawyers in the lawsuit that another charity largely controlled by members of the royal family, the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, provided money and supplies to the terrorist group in the 1990s and hired militant operatives like himself. Another witness in Afghanistan said in a sworn statement that in 1998 he had witnessed an emissary for a leading Saudi prince, Turki al-Faisal, hand a check for one billion Saudi riyals (now worth about $267 million) to a top Taliban leader. And a confidential German intelligence report gave a line-by-line description of tens of millions of dollars in bank transfers, with dates and dollar amounts, made in the early 1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family to another charity that was suspected of financing militants’ activities in Pakistan and Bosnia.

The new documents, provided to The New York Times by the lawyers, are among several hundred thousand pages of investigative material obtained by the Sept. 11 families and their insurers as part of a long-running civil lawsuit seeking to hold Saudi Arabia and its royal family liable for financing Al Qaeda. Only a fraction of the documents have been entered into the court record, and much of the new material is unknown even to the Saudi lawyers in the case. The documents provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. And the broader links rely at times on a circumstantial, connect-the-dots approach to tie together Saudi princes, Middle Eastern charities, suspicious transactions and terrorist groups. Saudi lawyers and supporters say that the links are flimsy and exploit stereotypes about terrorism, and that the country is being sued because it has deep pockets and was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.

“In looking at all the evidence the families brought together, I have not seen one iota of evidence that Saudi Arabia had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks,” Michael Kellogg, a Washington lawyer representing Prince Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud in the lawsuit, said in an interview. He and other defense lawyers said that rather than supporting Al Qaeda, the Saudis were sworn enemies of its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was exiled from Saudi Arabia, his native country, in 1996. “It’s an absolute tragedy what happened to them, and I understand their anger,” Mr. Kellogg said of the victims’ families. “They want to find those responsible, but I think they’ve been disserved by their lawyers by bringing claims without any merit against the wrong people.” The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment. Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, made up of survivors of the attacks and family members of those killed, throwing out the suit on the ground that the families cannot bring legal action in the United States against a sovereign nation and its leaders.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide this week whether to hear an appeal, but the families’ prospects dimmed last month when the Justice Department sided with the Saudis in their immunity claim and urged the court not to consider the appeal. The Justice Department said a 1976 law on sovereign immunity protected the Saudis from liability and noted that “potentially significant foreign relations consequences” would arise if such suits were allowed to proceed. “Cases like this put the U.S. government in an extremely difficult position when it has to make legal arguments, even when they are the better view of the law, that run counter to those of terrorist victims,” said John Bellinger, a former State Department lawyer who was involved in the Saudi litigation.

Senior Obama administration officials held a private meeting on Monday with 9/11 family members to speak about progress in cracking down on terrorist financing. Administration officials at the meeting largely sidestepped questions about the lawsuit, according to participants. But the official who helped lead the meeting, Stuart A. Levey, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, has been outspoken in his criticism of wealthy Saudis, saying they have helped to finance terrorism. Even if the 9/11 families were to get their trial in the lawsuit, they might have difficulty getting some of their new material into evidence. Some would most likely be challenged on grounds it was irrelevant or uncorroborated hearsay, or that it related to Saudis who were clearly covered by sovereign immunity. And if the families were to clear those hurdles, two intriguing pieces of evidence in the Saudi puzzle might still remain off limits.

One is a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. The secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers, and the Saudis themselves urged at the time that it be made public. President George W. Bush declined to do so. Kristen Breitweiser, an advocate for Sept. 11 families, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, said in an interview that during a White House meeting in February between President Obama and victims’ families, the president told her that he was willing to make the pages public. But she said she had not heard from the White House since then...

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/world/middleeast/24saudi.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=saudi&st=cse

Meet “the Most Dangerous Islamist on Planet Earth” He lives in Pennsylvania

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The latest documents from Wikileaks shows growing concern among U. S. officials over Fethullah Gulen’s attempts to create a New Islamic World and the “braining washing of students” that takes place at his charter schools within the United States and throughout the Muslim world. The cable that speaks of the “brain-washing” was written in 2009 by James Jeffrey, the U. S. Ambassador to Turkey.

In the cable, Mr. Jeffrey describes Gülen as a “political phenomena” in Turkey even when he resides “in exile” within a mountain fortress in Pennsylvania. He says the Gülen movement has gained control of Turkey’s government and dictates Turkish policy which has become increasing anti-Israeli and anti-American. It points out that the leaders of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma or AKP) who now govern Turkey, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, appear to serve as Gulen’s puppets.

Other newly released cables state that Gulen’s disciples now direct the country’s 200,000 strong police force - - a force that remains in conflict with the military, which sees the group as an enemy. In recent months, Turkish military leaders, and other critics of the AKP, have been arrested in the dead of night and whisked off to detention cells. According to NurettinVeren, who served as Fethullah Gulen’s right-hand man “There are imam security directors; imams wearing police uniforms. Many police commissioners get their orders from imams.”

“It is not possible to confirm the Turkish police are under the control of the Gülen community members, but we have not met anybody who denies it,” one cable said.

The most dangerous Islamist on planet earth

Gulen has been labeled “the most dangerous Islamist on planet earth,” although he has failed to attract the attention of U. S. counter-terrorism experts and the national media. Gülen is a student and follower of Sheikh Sa’id-i Kurdi (1878-1960), also known as Sa’id-i Nursi, the founder of the Islamist Nur (light) movement. After Turkey’s war of independence, Kurdi demanded, in an address to the new parliament, that the new republic be based on Islamic principles. Kurdi turned against Atatürk and his reforms and against the new modern, secular, Western republic and Gulen has followed his militant mentor’s example.

Hailed as an outstanding educator by Graham Fuller and other CIA officials, the reclusive Gulen is semi-literate and lacks a high school diploma. In 1999, he was driven from his native Turkey because of his attempts to overthrow the secular Turkish government. 

Objectives of transforming Turkey into an Islam republic and of creating a New Islamic World Order

In his sermons, Gulen has stated his objectives of transforming Turkey into an Islam republic and of creating a New Islamic World Order. In one sermon, he said:
“You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence … trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here—[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.
He continued:
When everything was closed and all doors were locked, our houses of isik [light] assumed a mission greater than that of older times. In the past, some of the duties of these houses were carried out by madrasas [Islamic schools], some by schools, some by tekkes [Islamist lodges] … These isik homes had to be the schools, had to be madrasas, [had to be] tekkes all at the same time. The permission did not come from the state, or the state’s laws, or the people who govern us. The permission was given by God … who wanted His name learned and talked about, studied, and discussed in those houses, as it used to be in the mosques.
In another sermon, Gülen proclaimed:
Now it is a painful spring that we live in. A nation is being born again. A nation of millions [is] being born—one that will live for long centuries, God willing … It is being born with its own culture, its own civilization. If giving birth to one person is so painful, the birth of millions cannot be pain-free. Naturally we will suffer pain. It won’t be easy for a nation that has accepted atheism, has accepted materialism, a nation accustomed to running away from itself, to come back riding on its horse. It will not be easy, but it is worth all our suffering and the sacrifices.
In 1998, Gulen fled to the U.S. with a small army of followers and purchased a 45 acre parcel of land in the midst of Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains as a base for his international operations. From this base, Gulen, who has amassed over $25 billion in assets, continues to direct the activities of the AKP and events throughout Central Asia and much of the Muslim world. Under his direction, Turkey has transformed from a secular state into an Islamic country with 85,000 active mosques - - one for every 350- citizens - - the highest number per capita in the world, 90,000 imams, more imams than teachers and physicians - - and thousands of state-run Islamic schools. 

Turkey, thanks to Gulen and his disciples, has transferred its alliance from Europe and the United States to Russia and Iran

Despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Turkey, thanks to Gulen and his disciples, has transferred its alliance from Europe and the United States to Russia and Iran. It has moved toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria and created a pervasive anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and anti-America animus throughout the populace.

Gulen has also established thousands of schools throughout central Asia and Europe. According to Bayram Balci, a Turkish scholar, the Gulen schools seek to expand “the Islamization of Turkish nationality and the Turification of Islam” in order to bring about a universal caliphate ruled by Islamic law. Because of their subversive nature of these institutions, these schools have been outlawed in Russia and Uzbekistan.

Even the Netherlands, a nation that embraces pluralism and tolerance, has opted to cut funding to the Gulen schools because of their imminent threat to the social order. But Gulen’s 140-plus schools in the United States which advance the establishment of a New Islamic World Order have received little national attention.

These schools bear such innocuous names as the Magnolia School, the Beehive Academy, the Sonoran Science Academy, the Lotus School for Excellence, and the Pacific Technology School. All of these schools are funded by U.S. taxpayers. Want to know more about Gulen, his plans for your children, and the growing threat?

Paul L. Williams, Ph.D., is the author of such best-selling books as The Day of Islam, The Al Qaeda Connection, Osama’s Revenge: The Next 9/11, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Crusades and The Vatican Exposed. An award-winning journalist, he is a frequent guest on such national news networks as ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR.

Source: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/34651

NATO and Turkey Support Armed Rebels in Syria. Campaign to Recruit Muslim "Freedom Fighters"

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The Western media has played a central role in obfuscating the nature of foreign interference in Syria including outside support to armed insurgents. In chorus they have described recent events in Syria as a "peaceful protest movement" directed against the government of Bashar Al Assad. Recent developments in Syria point to a full-fledged armed insurgency, integrated by Islamist "freedom fighters", supported, trained and equipped by NATO and Turkey's High Command. According to Israeli intelligence sources:
NATO headquarters in Brussels and the Turkish high command are meanwhile drawing up plans for their first military step in Syria, which is to arm the rebels with weapons for combating the tanks and helicopters spearheading the Assad regime's crackdown on dissent. Instead of repeating the Libyan model of air strikes, NATO strategists are thinking more in terms of pouring large quantities of anti-tank and anti-air rockets, mortars and heavy machine guns into the protest centers for beating back the government armored forces. (DEBKAfile, NATO to give rebels anti-tank weapons, August 14, 2011)
The delivery of weapons to the rebels is to be implemented "overland, namely through Turkey and under Turkish army protection....Alternatively, the arms would be trucked into Syria under Turkish military guard and transferred to rebel leaders at pre-arranged rendez-vous." (Ibid, emphasis added) NATO and the Turkish High command, also contemplate the development of a jihad involving the recruitment of thousands of freedom fighters, reminiscent of the enlistment of Mujahideen to wage the CIA's jihad (holy war) in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war:
Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria. (Ibid, emphasis added)
These various developments point towards the possible involvement of Turkish troops inside Syria, which could potentially lead to a broader military confrontation between the two countries, as well as a full-fledged "humanitarian" military intervention by NATO, which would be carried out in coordination with the Alliance's support to the insurgency.

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26019

600 Libyan mercenaries enter Syria via Turkey to fight jihad against Assad

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The Arabic website "Al-Rai Al-Arabi" has reported that some 600 Libyan "volunteers", who want to participate in the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, came to Syria through Turkey. The site indicated a representative of the current leadership of Libya as its source. This is not too surprising; the current Transitional National Council (TNC) was the first to recognize the Syrian National Council as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Syrian people. The "Free Syrian Army" (FSA) in part of a group affiliated with the Libyan rebel movement, which have been linked in the past to Islamic extremist’s organizations and al-Qaida of the Islamic Mahgred (AQIM). See story: "Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links"

Source: http://www.examiner.com/city-buzz-in-charlotte/600-libyan-mercenaries-enter-syria-via-turkey-to-fight-syria

America’s CIA spies, Britain and France aiding Syrian rebels

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CIA spies have met Syrian rebels to discuss their required weapons, military strategies and the “dirty war” that the insurgents are fighting supported by the US, Britain and France, says an analyst. The comment comes as according to a New York Times report published on Thursday, some US and Arab intelligence officials say a group of “CIA officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey” and that the agents are helping the anti-Syria governments decide which gangs inside the Arab country will “receive arms to fight the Syrian government.” “CIA officers are there and they are trying to make new sources and recruit people,” said one of the Arab officials, whose name was not mentioned in the report.


The arms include automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and antitank weapons, which are being transported “mostly across the Turkish border,” the report said. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar pay for the transport of the weaponry into Syria, according to the US and Arab intelligence officials cited in the report. The CIA spies have been in southern Turkey for the past several weeks and Washington is also considering providing the armed gangs with “satellite imagery and other detailed intelligence on Syrian troop locations and movements,” the report adds.


This as Syria has been the scene of violence since March 2011. Many people, including security forces, have lost their lives in the unrest. The West and the Syrian opposition accuse the government of killing the protesters. But Damascus blames ''outlaws, saboteurs and armed terrorist groups'' for the unrest, stating that it is being orchestrated from abroad. Press TV has conducted an interview with political commentator, Sukant Chandan, to further shed light on the issue. What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.


Press TV: Sukant Chandan, how do you explain claims of “diplomacy” from the United States when it comes to Kofi Anan’s peace plan but then reports like the one in the New York Times surfaces pointing to the CIA in addition to Washington’s allies in the region for aiding armed groups fighting the Syrian government. Does the US have any interest to support Anan’s peace plan or is the claim sort of a political ploy?



Chandan: The Western white power structure has one aim which is to conduct regime change against any state in the Global South which poses any type of obstacle to its total domination of the world. I mean it’s high time that the empire admitted through the New York Times that the CIA officers have been directing and arming the Syrian rebels which, you know, let’s be honest with ourselves if anyone understands a little bit of the nature of the West we know that they’re up to this all the time and we don’t need them to admit it.


But once they’ve admitted it, we know that they’ve been up to this for a long, long time when the former US ambassador Mr. Ford - for Syria that is- was on the demonstrations when this rebellion first took place in the first days and weeks. Who is Mr. Ford; Mr. Ford is the protégé of Mr. Negroponte. Who is Negroponte; he is the arch designer of the contra dirty war in Latin America.


So when Mr. Ford has been meeting the rebels and CIA officers are meeting the rebels, they’re discussing what type of weapons to give the rebels and what type of military strategy to conduct and knowing the type of dirty war that these people get up to we know that the United States along with Britain and France are encouraging and probably training [the rebels].
Don’t forget it was in Scotland that the British state trained the Mujahidin to fight the Soviets and the [People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan] PDPA government back in the 80s fast forward to today we’re seeing a tragic rerun of a similar type of dynamic that took place in Afghanistan today in Syria, where you have a state backed by the Global South, particularly Russia and China that’s supporting Syria on the other hand you have imperialism arming and training and financing these terrorists for regime change.
So it’s all in the open and no one should be confused about the situation, it’s all very clear you have a clear polarization of forces, on the one hand you have the empire, the Western white power structure whatever you want to call it allied directly with Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the state of Israel.


Don’t forget Shimon Peres himself said just very recently, a few days ago that he would wish that the Syrian rebels would win. So on one side you have these forces on the other side you have the forces for independence and progress for the people of the world, led by Russia and China and the Syrian government and their allies. So the situation is very clear and I’m really quite disturbed by how too many people out there are still befuddled or taking this nonsensical third way or neutral position as [South African activist and retired Anglican bishop] Desmond Tutu said and he’s not my favorite progressive character but as he said if you’re neutral in a situation of oppression then you’re siding with the oppressor and that’s what’s going on.

Press TV:
Let’s go back to our guest in London Mr. Chandan you were shaking your head there when Mr. Korb was giving his answer let’s relate one of his talks to you. Do you agree first of all with Mr. Korb that the United States is trying to prevent arms from reaching al Qaeda forces if they are in Syria and add anything if you have to the comments made by Mr. Korb.



Chandan: It’s incredible how history developed. I mean our friend from the United States is either so naive to not understand the system of governance and world domination of his government or he is a trickster frankly. I mean now today you can become a Jihadist and go fight against the Syrian regime or against Gaddafi’s regime yesterday and you’ll be promoted and celebrated in the mainstream media in the West. It’s all very clear what’s going on. I mean you know the United States and Britain and France are constantly conducting covert regime change against the whole Global South.

This is what the state of the West is all about.
Just recently today you can read how the United States is putting pressure on stopping a report showing a report that Rwanda, its proxy in Africa, is involved in destabilization against the Democratic Republic of Congo which if Congo becomes independent in alliance with China will lift Africa and smash US domination and British domination in that region. So it’s clear what the nature of this state is all about. I mean again the way the West is dealing with al Qaeda is very interesting, because it’s obviously purging al Qaeda of those elements which it sees too problematic to its interests and then promoting other elements of al Qaeda.Al Qaeda is very active in Libya and they always have been since the beginning of the uprising and before when the Libyan Islamic fighting group was one of the main organizations supported by the CIA and the MI6 and the French intelligent service against Gaddafi’s regime. It’s all on record. It’s all on the open and it’s very important that our people raise their voices, organize themselves and are really rigorous and assertive in struggling for peace and development of the countries of the Global South.

Press TV: Mr. Chandan in London some observers critical of Turkey‘s role in Syria are saying that it is acting as a proxy for the US and NATO. How do you perceive that and in addition to that do you have anything to add to what Mr. Korb just said?


Chandan: In response to Mr. Korb it’s a typical strategy of the white man to project all issues of oppression that’s actually coming from the White power structure onto the natives and onto the brown and black people i. e. you know the white power structure is absolutely, you know, innocent of any wrong doing and it’s these silly Africans and these silly Asians and these silly Arabs who are creating all the mess and all the problems.
The interesting thing in that regard with Libya and now with Syria is that the West don’t want to put any of their boots officially on the ground but obviously in the first days of the Libyan uprising the British SAS were in Benghazi and they got sprung because the telephone conversation between the former British ambassador to Libya and the head of the NTC their phone conversation was exposed by Gaddafi’s regime and similarly in Syria.
They don’t want to put official boots on the ground in Syria so they are sending covert agents to do all the dirty work because they want to give the impression to the rest of the world: hey we’re the good guys and if any dirty business is going on it’s these crazy natives and on the issue of the Arab Spring as well that this befuddling of minds about what to lose in Egypt is all about. Tunisia has broken relations with the Asad regime and the Muslim Brotherhood which it seems to be in the ascendancy for the time being is against the Assad regime. Their comrades in Syria are absolutely involved in the insurgency against the Assad regime there.

On the issue of Turkey, it’s a similar thing actually and it’s a great shame that the Turkish state has strategically decided not to side with the Global South but it sees its interests for the time being and it’s a very narrow strategy that it’s employing and it’s going to go nowhere because, you know, anyone who dances with the devil will find that the devil will stab them in the back in the not too distant future. So really it’s not even in Turkey’s national interest to go along with NATO as it did with Libya and now with Syria...


Press TV: You seemed a bit anxious there to get a response to what Mr. Korb was saying please go ahead with that and also do you think that with so many external factors, this can be a Syrian-led effort to end the unrest?


Chandan: It’s amazing. I don’t know what world Mr. Korb is living in. You know the Americans don’t want to get involved with anyone; the British don’t want to get involved.


Korb: Wait a second I don’t attack you personally...I’m living in the real world, you’re not. Don’t attack me personally.


Chandan:...the establishments in Britain, France and the United States are constantly planning wars. Mr. Corb himself constantly talked about the pivot to Asia. Is that not a war plan? Of course it’s a war plan. I mean it’s total nonsense what Mr. Korb is coming out with but. But in terms of the internal Syrian situation we need to- I’ve said many times before, I’ll say it again, the Global South needs to assert itself and take the initiative. We lost Libya- that was devastating. We didn’t take enough initiatives, meaningful initiatives whereas Latin America- I’m loyal to all of our Global South and Latin America politically is the most advanced. It needs to be making moves to rediscover the regime change...

Source: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/06/22/247414/cia-uk-france-aiding-syrian-rebels/


Ten reasons why the U.S. war in Libya is a CIA operation

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The U.S.-led attack on Libya is an American operation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), planned and initiated long before any “protests” started in Libya this February. Under the guise of “protecting innocent civilians,” the U.S. military, Africom, NATO, and the United Nations are now bombing Libya, raining destruction upon the Libyan economic and military infrastructure and killing untold numbers of innocent Africans. Here are just 10 of the many obvious reasons why this so-called “spontaneous” protest was from beginning to end another CIA operation.

1. The United States' motives are suspect. The “humanitarian” concern expressed by the American government has not taken long to evaporate. The claim that Col. Muammar Gadhafi was “slaughtering his own people” cannot be substantiated by any independent evidence, and no “journalists” are even asking for evidence. The White House's policy advisor and Israeli lobby official Dennis Ross claimed that “up to 100,000 people could be massacred, and everyone would blame us for it.” Ross has produced no proof of a massacre—and Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen both confirmed, “We've seen no confirmation whatsoever.” Russian military has been monitoring the unrest via satellite from the very beginning, and they say that the claimed “slaughter” is imaginary. CIA √

2. The world media have shown a shocking lack of curiosity. Just as with the U.S. debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan, the New York Times leads a coordinated campaign of propaganda, rumor-mongering, and the demonization of Muammar Gadhafi. Some articles appear to be written in advance and closely follow the prescription of the Washington consulting firm Wirthlin Group, which determined that “the message most likely to motivate public support for war on Iraq was the perception of Saddam Hussein as an evil madman who even committed atrocities against his own people and had to be stopped.” The major media's appetite for this “killing-his-own-people” line is textbook CIA propaganda and belies the fact that they are at this very hour operating from a swank hotel that is under Gadhafi's total control in Tripoli. Even though they continue to spread unsubstantiated “rapes” and “cluster bombings,” and “fears of massacres,” and child-targeting, these “journalists” don't appear to be frightened for their lives. CIA √

3. The “rebels” are Al-Qaeda. When Col. Gadhafi first claimed that the rebels were members of Al-Qaeda, no one believed him. But according to a 2007 report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point titled “Al-Qa'ida's Foreign Fighters In Iraq,” eastern Libya—the very center of the current uprising—is a well-known Al-Qaeda stronghold. The same people the U.S. is fighting three wars to destroy are the “rebels” the U.S. is protecting, supplying, training, and attempting to install into power in Libya. And if the West Point military analysts knew this to be true in 2007, why did they not bomb those Al-Qaeda strongholds in the way they are bombing Gadhafi's forces now? CIA √

4. Rebel “leaders” are CIA agents. The “rebel” leader, a man named Khalifa Hifter, left the Libyan government and set up his own militia financed by the CIA. He then spent two decades living within minutes of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where, according to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, he had no apparent source of income. Shortly after the 2011 “protests” began, the CIA airlifted him into Benghazi and told the press to start calling him the “leader” of the rebels. CIA √

5. The Libyan uprising is not “spontaneous.”The incident that allegedly spurred the Libyan “rebellion” was the arrest of an activist lawyer on February 15, 2011. This ignited a wave of protests that spilled over onto the

Internet and other media. But an unusually large number of YOUTUBE videos and TWITTER messages have emerged that are suspiciously similar and seem to be a product of the Pentagon's recently uncovered project to develop software that allows it to secretly manipulate social media sites to influence Internet conversations and spread propaganda. These suspicious “free Libya” sites all claim to be homegrown, but YOUTUBE and other social media sites cannot be accessed by Internet users in Libya. The “revolution” websites are all in English even though the language of Libya is Arabic, with English rarely spoken and only in the big cities. Despite their dubious origins, professional media groups like CNN, BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News, and Al Jazeera have amplified these anonymous and uncorroborated video postings as legitimate news sources.

And some of the “spontaneous” websites are clearly fraudulent. One that calls itself “LIBYAN REVOLUTIONARY CENTRAL” (http://www.feb17.info/) was created on February 14—A DAY BEFORE the original protest. And the website is registered in Ohio as a non-profit organization with a 501c3 tax exempt ID number! CIA √

6a. Whites are desperate for Libyan oil. America and Europe are dependent on the type of oil that is only found in Libya. It is a very high quality “sweet” oil with low sulfur content. Europe's refineries cannot process other types of high sulfur oil, so when Gadhafi recently suggested he could find better customers for Libyan oil in India, China, and Russia, it made Europe desperate for an immediate Libyan “uprising.” CIA √

6b. New oil infrastructure already in place. Only days after the “spontaneous” protests the “rebels,” who were mostly seen in grainy cell phone videos chanting slogans and waving banners, had organized themselves into a sophisticated corporate entity and announced their formation and launching of the “Libyan Oil Company” to supervise oil production for all of Libya, and their creation of the “Central Bank of Benghazi” as a monetary authority. The French government instantaneously recognized these new business entities formed by “the rebels” even though it was still publicly wondering who the rebel leaders were. CIA √

7. CIA history in Libya. The CIA has a LONG documented history of attempts to overthrow Col. Gadhafi. At least four major CIA operations, some in partnership with the Israeli Mossad, have been conducted since 1972. Gadhafi's use of oil revenues to organize and uplift Africa from its colonial destruction is EXACTLY the opposite of America's foreign policy, which has always sought to strip Africa of its raw resources to enrich the multinational corporations. Col. Gadhafi has invested billions of dollars in projects to help emerging African countries become independent. He has worked to establish a “United States of Africa”—an effort to unite Africa to finally overcome the damage caused by centuries of European colonialism. It was Gadhafi who drove the African Union's efforts toward a single African Parliament, a single currency, and a single army. The CIA has no other function than to stop this kind of Black unity and progress. CIA √

8. Libyan invasion planned prior to 9/11. In a 2007 filmed interview, 4-star United States Army Gen. Wesley Clark discussed a Pentagon memo under Donald Rumsfeld that, in his words, “describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” CIA √

9. The U.S. companies in Libya are invisible. Many U.S. corporations that have been, are now, and will continue to do business in Libya are UNDER NO PRESSURE to leave or “give back” their profits, or alter their business activity with Gadhafi's so-called “murderous regime.” Curiously, they have achieved a status different from that of The Hon. Min. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, which also had a business relationship with Libya—but for comparatively infinitesimal sums. The U.S. companies in Libya whose Libyan business arrangements have yet to be questioned are many, and include:

Chevron OilConocoPhillipsHess CorporationMarathon Oil CorporationOccidental PetroleumSheraton HotelsExxon MobilDow ChemicalHalliburton RaytheonMotorolaFour Seasons HotelsShell OilUnited Gulf ConstructionValmont, and White & CaseMarriott HotelsIntercontinental Hotels

In reality, the CIA works for the multinational corporations to tenaciously protect their world interests. CIA√

10. Rape is charged. A distraught, English-speaking, Arab woman fortuitously finds her way from days of gang rape by Gadhafi's soldiers into the only hotel in Tripoli where foreign journalists are encamped (apparently dropped off by her tormentors) where she reports of her ordeal to the gathered media who immediately, unquestioningly, broadcast the brutal crime to the world as proven fact. She claimed that she was detained at a checkpoint, tied up, abused, then led away to be gang raped—all whilst her assailants were defending Tripoli against a Western bombing campaign. “They defecated and urinated on me and tied me up,” she said, her face streaming with tears. “They violated my honor, look at what the Gadhafi militiamen did to me.”

Everybody who heard this woman's claims—except 100 percent of the Western media—immediately remembered October 1990, when a sobbing 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl gave unsworn testimony in a Congressional hearing chaired by Zionist congressman Thomas Lantos in which she described what she saw in a Kuwaiti hospital with her own eyes: “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where … babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

The girl was actually the daughter of a Kuwaiti ambassador, and had been coached by the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton to give false testimony. Three months passed between the hearing and the start of the first Gulf War during which the fabricated incubator story was repeated over and over again by seven U.S. senators and ten times by President G.H.W. Bush himself. It was recited as fact in congressional testimony, on TV and radio talk shows like Nightline, and at the UN Security Council. It is cited as the single most persuasive reason that the American public backed the first Iraq War. None of those involved with the hoax have ever faced legal reprisals. CIA √

The number ten is arbitrary, and does not represent the full extent of possibly the most brazen CIA overthrow attempt in their long and murderous history. That which drives the entire Western industrial infrastructure—petroleum oil—is the only thing on the minds of the charlatan leaders of the West, and the world watches in horrified awe as each blunder they make is exposed to the light in almost real time. The poor Libyan people and their revolutionary African champion Muammar Gadhafi are under severe assault by the very same people who only yesterday assured him he was their partner and friend. It is a 6,000-year-old history of tricks and deceptions that The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us about, and it has now run its course and is bringing a well-deserved demise to Western rule.

Source: http://finalcall.com/artman/publish/Perspectives_1/article_7783.shtml

Libyan, Once a Detainee, Is Now a U.S. Ally of Sorts


For more than five years, Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu was a prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay prison, judged “a probable member of Al Qaeda” by the analysts there. They concluded in a newly disclosed 2005 assessment that his release would represent a “medium to high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.” Today, Mr. Qumu, 51, is a notable figure in the Libyan rebels’ fight to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, reportedly a leader of a ragtag band of fighters known as the Darnah Brigade for his birthplace, this shabby port town of 100,000 people in northeast Libya. The former enemy and prisoner of the United States is now an ally of sorts, a remarkable turnabout resulting from shifting American policies rather than any obvious change in Mr. Qumu.

He was a tank driver in the Libyan Army in the 1980s, when the Central Intelligence Agency was spending billions to support religious militants trying to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. Mr. Qumu moved to Afghanistan in the early 1990s, just as Osama bin Laden and other former mujahedeen were violently turning against their former benefactor, the United States. He was captured in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, accused of being a member of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and sent to Guantánamo — in part because of information provided by Colonel Qaddafi’s government.

“The Libyan Government considers detainee a ‘dangerous man with no qualms about committing terrorist acts,’ ” says the classified 2005 assessment, evidently quoting Libyan intelligence findings, which was obtained by The New York Times. “ ‘He was known as one of the extremist commanders of the Afghan Arabs,’ ” the Libyan information continues, referring to Arab fighters who remained in Afghanistan after the anti-Soviet jihad.

When that Guantánamo assessment was written, the United States was working closely with Colonel Qaddafi’s intelligence service against terrorism. Now, the United States is a leader of the international coalition trying to oust Colonel Qaddafi — and is backing with air power the rebels, including Mr. Qumu. The classified Guantánamo assessment of Mr. Qumu claims that he suffered from “a non-specific personality disorder” and recounted — again citing the Libyan government as its source — a history of drug addiction and drug dealing and accusations of murder and armed assault.

In 1993, the document asserts, Mr. Qumu escaped from a Libyan prison, fled to Egypt and went on to Afghanistan, training at a camp run by Mr. bin Laden. At Guantánamo, Mr. Qumu denied knowledge of terrorist activities. He said he feared being returned to Libya, where he faced criminal charges, and asked to go to some other country where “You (the United States) can watch me,” according to a hearing summary. Nonetheless, in 2007, he was sent from Guantánamo to Libya and released the next year in an amnesty for militants.

Colonel Qaddafi has cited claims about Mr. Qumu’s past in statements blaming Al Qaeda for the entire Libyan uprising. American officials have nervously noted the presence of at least a few former militants in the rebels’ ranks. The walls of buildings along the road into Darnah are decorated with the usual anti-Qaddafi and pro-Western slogans, in English and Arabic, found all over eastern Libya. But there are notable additions: “No Qaeda” and “No to Extremism.”

Darnah has reason to be touchy. The town has a long history of Islamic militancy, including a revolt against Colonel Qaddafi’s rule led by Islamists in the mid-1990s that resulted in a vicious crackdown. Activists from here are credited with starting the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which later announced that it was affiliating with Al Qaeda, and which sent militants like Mr. Qumu to fight in Afghanistan.

Most famously, though, Darnah has a claim to being the world’s most productive recruiting ground for suicide bombers. An analysis of 600 suicide bombers in Iraq by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that of 440 who listed their hometowns in a recruiting roster, 52 were from Darnah, the most of any city, with Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 40 times as populous, as the next biggest source, sending 51.

In addition to Mr. Qumu, local residents say the Darnah Brigade is led by Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, another Libyan thought to be a militant who was in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s rule, when Al Qaeda had training camps there. Mr. Qumu did not turn up for a promised interview last week, but Mr. Hasadi did, in crumpled fatigues with a light beard and a lazy left eye, perpetually half-closed. He denied that Mr. Qumu was in his group, recently renamed the Martyrs of Abu Salim Brigade, after a prison in Tripoli where 1,200 inmates were slaughtered in 1996. Two of Mr. Qumu’s sons are in his brigade, he said.

“I don’t know how to convince everyone that we are not Al Qaeda here,” Mr. Hasadi said. “Our aim is to topple Qaddafi,” he added. “I know that you will never believe me, but it is true.”

For now, Western observers in Benghazi, the temporary rebel capital 180 miles from here, seem content to accept those assurances. “We’re more worried about Al Qaeda infiltration from outside than the indigenous ones” one said. “Most of them have a local agenda so they don’t present as much as a threat to the West.” Rod Nordland reported from Darnah, and Scott Shane from Washington. Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Benghazi, Libya.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/world/guantanamo-files-libyan-detainee-now-us-ally-of-sorts.html?_r=2&hp

Libya rebel commander plays down Islamist past

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Abdel-Hakim Belhaj is an emerging hero of the Libyan uprising, the man who led the Tripoli Brigade that swept into the capital and captured the fortified compound that was Moammar Gadhafi's seat of power. He's also the former leader of an Islamic militant group who says he was tortured by CIA agents at a secret prison.

Belhaj, the rebels' commander in Tripoli, said Friday that the U.S. wrongly lumped him in with terrorists after Sept. 11, but that he holds no grudge. He said he shares the West's goal of a free Libya. "We call and hope for a civil country that is ruled by the law which we were not allowed to enjoy under Gadhafi," he told The Associated Press. "The identity of the country will be left up to the people to choose."

He was not always so inclusive. In a 1996 statement he wrote as leader of the now-dissolved Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Belhaj wrote a statement vowing to fight "all the deviant groups that call for democracy or fight for the sake of it." Though Belhaj and many others who resisted Gadhafi for decades considered their fight an Islamic cause, both secular and religious Libyans took part in the uprising that led to Gadhafi's downfall. Secular Libyans and the West are hoping Belhaj's actions match what he told the Libyan people minutes after arriving at Gadhafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound Aug. 23.

"You are facing a historic moment; a responsibility in front of God and the world, to protect and preserve the security of your country. To have justice, equality and welfare," he told Al-Jazeera. "We have to unite and join the ranks to build the country."

Belhaj has the support of the leader of the rebels' National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil. Trading his army fatigues for a business suit, Belhaj accompanied Abdul-Jalil on a trip to Qatar, where on Monday they urged NATO representatives and Western officials to extend NATO operations to protect civilians from the remnants of Gadhafi's regime that continue to fight. The next day in the rebels' temporary capital of Benghazi, Abdul-Jalil pointed to that conference as evidence that Belhaj is someone the council can trust. "He doesn't pose a threat to the world's safety," he said.

The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was not a monolithic entity, explained one U.S. official familiar with the group. Some branches have had connections with al-Qaida in Sudan, Afghanistan or Pakistan, but others dropped any relationship with al-Qaida entirely. Belhaj led a faction that disavowed al-Qaida and declared its commitment to establishing a democracy in Libya, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

But U.S. officials are "watching to see whether or not this is for real, or just for show," the official said. Belhaj, 45, is a soft-spoken man with a thick black beard. The father of two boys is shy when speaking to female journalists. In an interview at his headquarters at the sprawling military airport in central Tripoli, Belhaj played down his Islamist ties. "We never have and never will support what they call terrorism," he said.

Belhaj was a civil engineering student and Gadhafi opponent when he fled Libya and went to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. He later joined the U.S.-backed resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, fighting alongside militants who would go on to form al-Qaida. He said members of the terror group asked him to join, but he refused because he disagreed with its ideology of global jihad, or holy war, and wanted to focus on ridding Libya of Gadhafi.

Belhaj's 1996 statement revealed differences with al-Qaida on the issue of targeting civilians. Though he decried neighboring Algeria's regime as "infidel," he heavily criticized Islamic militants there for "massacres of civilians, women, children and elders."

Belhaj returned to Libya in the 1990s and led the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in fierce confrontations with Gadhafi's regime. He said that after fleeing Libya in the mid-1990s, he moved from country to country until 2004, when he was picked up and renditioned to Thailand, where he claims he was tortured by the CIA. "It was a very bad treatment. The whole time I was blindfolded, I was hung from the wall, and they would beat me on my back, the way they tied me up was extremely painful and difficult to bear," he said.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood declined to comment on Belhaj's claims. Belhaj said he believes his detention was in reaction to what he called the "tragic events of 9/11." "The U.S. administration ... lumped a lot of Islamic groups and charities under the label of terrorist and it seems we also entered under this category," he said. "Now everyone is aware that our work was not of a terrorist nature."

As for those he accuses of torture, he said, "Revenge doesn't motivate me personally." But he added that he was considering court action. Belhaj said that after being tortured, he was sent to Libya's Abu Salim prison, where Gadhafi's regime held many political prisoners. The Libya government freed Belhaj and 33 other members of the Islamic Fighting Group in March 2010. He agreed to renounce violence as part of an initiative by Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam, who at the time was considered a reformist voice.

Soon after the uprising against Gadhafi broke out in mid-February, Belhaj began training fighters in the western mountains. National Transitional Council Abdel-Hafiz Ghoga said that with Gadhafi's downfall, secular and religious Libyans "all share a common goal, a modern democratic civic state." "Libyans will not allow anyone to replace Gadhafi's dictatorship with any other dictatorships," he said.

Islamic militants, however, have raised concerns within and outside Libya. The July assassination of NTC military chief Abdel-Fattah Younis was linked to an Islamic extremist group led by Obaida bin Jarrah, though motives are not known. In the days after the rebels swept into Libya Aug. 20, Abdul-Jalil lashed out at Islamic extremists who he said tried to kill Gadhafi's son Mohammed, who had been under house arrest but ended up escaping. Abdul-Jalil threatened to resign if "extremist elements" didn't abide by the NTC's general policies.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/libya-rebel-commander-plays-down-islamist-past-122316090.html


Libya: the West and al-Qaeda on the same side

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WikiLeaks cables, independent analysts and reporters have all identified supporters of Islamist causes among the opposition to Col Gaddafi's regime, particularly in the towns of Benghazi and Dernah. An al-Qaeda leader of Libyan origin, Abu Yahya al-Libi, released a statement backing the insurrection a week ago, while Yusuf Qaradawi, the Qatar-based, Muslim Brotherhood-linked theologian issued a fatwa authorising Col Gaddafi's military entourage to assassinate him.

But they also agree that the leading roles in the revolution are played by a similar cross-section of society as that in Egypt next door – liberals, nationalists, those with personal experience of regime brutality and Islamists who subscribe to democratic principles. The WikiLeaks cables, initially revealed by The Daily Telegraph and dating from 2008, identified Dernah in particular as a breeding ground for fighters in a number of causes, including Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The unemployed, disfranchised young men of eastern Libya have nothing to lose and are therefore willing to sacrifice themselves for something greater than themselves by engaging in extremism in the name of religion," the cables quoted a Dernah businessman as saying.
Col Gaddafi has pinpointed the rebels in Dernah as being led by an al-Qaeda cell that has declared the town an Islamic emirate. The regime also casts blame on hundreds of members of the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group released since the group renounced violence two years ago.

Although said by the regime to be affiliated to al-Qaeda, most LIFG members have focused only on promoting sharia law in Libya, rejecting a worldwide "jihad". The man running Dernah's defences, Abdelkarim al-Hasadi, was arrested by US forces in Afghanistan in 2002, but says he does not support a Taliban-like state.The rebels' political leadership there says it is secular. The same goes for the wider leadership, whose membership claims to espouse largely liberal ideals.

In any future negotiations – should it come to dialogue or even victory – rebel spokesmen are likely to be politicians who were until recently senior figures in the regime itself. The head of the opposition National Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalil was Col Gaddafi's justice minister until he defected at the start of the uprising.

That may not be as bad as it sounds – he was a law professor appointed to improve Libya's human rights record by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi when the colonel's son was leading Libya's westernisation drive, and had already clashed with longer-standing regime insiders. The military chief, though, is Abdul Fattah Younis al-Obeidi, a former leader of Col Gaddafi's special forces who was his public security, or interior, minister until he went over to the rebels.

He has described Col Gaddafi as "not completely sane", and worked with the SAS during the now curtailed thaw in British-Libyan relations. But it is still ironic that the West is taking sides in a battle between the leader of a much hated regime and his former effective deputy.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8391632/Libya-the-West-and-al-Qaeda-on-the-same-side.html

The "Liberation" of Libya: NATO Special Forces and Al Qaeda Join Hands

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"Former Terrorists" Join the "Pro-democracy" Bandwagon. Extensive war crimes have been committed. NATO has blood on its hands

The "pro-democracy" rebels are led by Al Qaeda paramilitary brigades under the supervision of NATO Special Forces. The "Liberation" of Tripoli was carried out by "former" members of the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). The jihadists and NATO work hand in glove. These "former" Al Qaeda affiliated brigades constitute the backbone of the "pro-democracy" rebellion.

NATO special forces with "boots and the ground" pass unnoticed. Their identity is not known or revealed. They blend into the Libyan rebellion landscape of machine guns and pickup trucks. They are not highlighted in the photo ops. Special forces composed of US Navy SEALS, British Special SAS Forces and French legionnaires, disguised in civilian rebel garb, are reported to be behind major operations directed against key government buildings including Gadhafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound in central Tripoli.

Reports confirm that British SAS were on the ground in Eastern Libya prior to the onset of the air campaign. Special Forces are in close coordination with NATO air operations. "Highly-trained units, known as ‘Smash’ teams for their prowess and destructive ability, have carried out secret reconnaissance missions to provide up-to-date information on the Libyan armed forces." (SAS 'Smash' squads on the ground in Libya to mark targets for coalition jets, Daily Mirror, March 21, 2011)

NATO special forces and the CIA sponsored Islamic brigades under the command of "former" jihadists constitute the backbone of combat capabilities on the ground, supported by the air campaign, which now includes Apache helicopter raids. The remainder of the rebel forces include untrained trigger happy gunmen (including teenagers) (see photo below), which serve the function of creating an atmosphere of panic and intimidation. What we are dealing with is a carefully planned military intelligence operation to invade and occupy a sovereign country.

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26255

CIA recruits 1,500 from Mazar-e-Sharif to fight in Libya

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The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States recruited over 1,500 men from Mazar-e-Sharif for fighting against the Qaddafi forces in Libya. Sources told TheNation: “Most of the men have been recruited from Afghanistan. They are Uzbeks, Persians and Hazaras. According to the footage, these men attired in Uzbek-style of shalwar and Hazara-Uzbek Kurta were found fighting in Libyan cities.”

When Al-Jazeera reporter pointed it he was disallowed by the ‘rebels ‘to capture images. Sources in Quetta said: “Some Uzbeks and Hazaras from Afghanistan were arrested in Balochistan for illegally traveling into Pakistan en route to Libya through Iran. Aljazeera’s report gave credence to this story. More than 60 Afghans, mainly children and teenagers, have been found dead after suffocating inside a shipping container in southwestern Pakistan in an apparent human smuggling attempt.

More than 100 illegal immigrants were discovered 20km from the border town of Quetta last week inside the container, which had been locked from the outside. Aljazeera having dubious record gave human touch to this story as most of the men who intruded inside Pakistan from Afghanistan were recruits for Libyan Rebels’ Force. The sources said: “The CIA funded Libyan Rebels with cash and weapons.” In a report the New York Mayor’s TV Channel Bloomberg said, “Leaders of the Libyan rebels’ Transitional National Council flew to Istanbul seeking legitimacy and money. They will leave with the official recognition of the US and 31 other nations. As for the cash, they will have to wait.

The decision to treat the council as the “legitimate governing authority” in Libya is a key step to freeing up some of the government’s frozen assets for rebels seeking the ouster of Muammar Qaddafi. Still, obstacles such as existing United Nations sanctions won’t disappear overnight. “We still have to work through various legal issues, but we expect this recognition will allow the TNC to access various forms of funding,” said US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. At stake are about $34 billion in frozen Libyan government assets that are held by the US institutions and as much as $130 billion more held around the world. Speaking via phone from Istanbul, Transitional National Council spokesman Mahmoud Shammam put the total in excess of $100 billion globally.

Qaddafi, in an audio message broadcast to supporters in the town of Zlitan, said the Libyan people “will never give up” in the fight to prevent him being ousted, the Associated Press reported. “The Libyan people will persevere,” he said. In the coming weeks, the US officials will consult with the TNC and international partners on the most effective and appropriate method of making additional significant financial assistance available, according to a Treasury official who was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly.

Shammam said the TNC needs $3 billion to cover the budget for six months. The council is seeking loans secured by the Qaddafi regime’s assets abroad as a means of funding, he said. Recognition may lawfully allow nations to buy state-owned oil from the TNC, which controls the oil-rich eastern part of the country. Italy’s Eni SpA and France’s Total SA are the top oil companies operating in Libya, a former Italian colony. How much money the Benghazi-based government can get, and when, may be more tied to politics than the law.

“The legal issues are in the eye of the beholder,” said Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “If Obama and Clinton want to go slow in paying out the money, their lawyers can invent plenty of legal issues to justify the chosen pace.”

The US envisions a “short timeframe” for releasing some of the Libyan government assets frozen by the US, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. President Barack Obama signed an order on February 25 freezing any US assets of Muammar Qaddafi, his family and members of his regime in Libya. As a practical matter, most of the frozen $34 billion is tied up in complicated property interests, including ownership interests in non-publicly traded companies or real estate, according to the Treasury official.

The mechanics of how the US will unfreeze assets still has to be worked out. The United Nations sanctions against Libya remain in place, a hindrance to efforts to get money to the rebels. The UK and France, which led the campaign to unseat Qaddafi, yesterday didn’t commit any financial contributions. Recognition of the council “will allow some countries to unfreeze some money,” French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said. Libyan frozen assets in France total $250 million, he said.

Other nations have already found the means to act. Italy will open a credit line to rebels using frozen assets as collateral, and will provide them with 100 million euros ($141 million), Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said yesterday. Another 300 million euros will be released in two weeks and in total, Italy will release 400 million euros, he said, describing the money as loans. The council is expecting $100 million from Turkey within three days, Shammam said. The main criterion for international law for the recognition of a rebel group as the government of a state is its effective control over the territory.

The recognition of the TNC, given the fact that Qaddafi still controls Tripoli, could “arguably constitute an illegal interference in internal affairs,” Stefan Talmon, a professor of International Law at the University of Oxford, wrote in a paper for the American Society of International Law. A number of actions by the rebels convinced the US to offer recognition, including a commitment to pursue a reform process, and to seek more inclusive representation of Libyans, politically, geographically and tribally,” according to a State Department officially.

The US will continue to watch closely how they perform, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The contact group laid out conditions for a “genuine ceasefire” in a final statement and declared that “Qaddafi and certain of his family members must go.” The way he will leave power has yet to be defined, the group said. The ceasefire conditions call for complete withdrawal of Qaddafi-led forces to their bases, the release of detainees and hostages, provision of water and electricity to all regions, and the opening of all borders for the quick return of refugees. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization started air strikes in late March to protect civilians, an intervention that aided rebels seeking Qaddafi’s ouster.

Qaddafi has already lasted longer than allies had anticipated, though his hold on the capital, Tripoli, appears to be weakening amid shortages of food and fuel. There are reports that his government is seeking a political solution to end the fighting. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will be the only person authorized by the contact group to negotiate with both sides in Libya. Ban will set up a board of two to three interlocutors from Tripoli and the rebel-held town of Benghazi, Frattini said. The military campaign against Qaddafi will continue “indefinitely” until he steps down, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague told reporters yesterday in Istanbul.

Source: http://nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Politics/31-Aug-2011/CIA-recruits-1500-from-MazareSharif-to-fight-in-Libya

Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links

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In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Mr al-Hasidi admitted that he had recruited "around 25" men from the Derna area in eastern Libya to fight against coalition troops in Iraq. Some of them, he said, are "today are on the front lines in Adjabiya". Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists," but added that the "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader".

His revelations came even as Idriss Deby Itno, Chad's president, said al-Qaeda had managed to pillage military arsenals in the Libyan rebel zone and acquired arms, "including surface-to-air missiles, which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries".

Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against "the foreign invasion" in Afghanistan, before being "captured in 2002 in Peshwar, in Pakistan". He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008. US and British government sources said Mr al-Hasidi was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, which killed dozens of Libyan troops in guerrilla attacks around Derna and Benghazi in 1995 and 1996.

Even though the LIFG is not part of the al-Qaeda organisation, the United States military's West Point academy has said the two share an "increasingly co-operative relationship". In 2007, documents captured by allied forces from the town of Sinjar, showed LIFG emmbers made up the second-largest cohort of foreign fighters in Iraq, after Saudi Arabia.

Earlier this month, al-Qaeda issued a call for supporters to back the Libyan rebellion, which it said would lead to the imposition of "the stage of Islam" in the country. British Islamists have also backed the rebellion, with the former head of the banned al-Muhajiroun proclaiming that the call for "Islam, the Shariah and jihad from Libya" had "shaken the enemies of Islam and the Muslims more than the tsunami that Allah sent against their friends, the Japanese"

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8407047/Libyan-rebel-commander-admits-his-fighters-have-al-Qaeda-links.html

ABC News Exclusive: The Secret War Against Iran

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A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News. The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran. It has taken responsibility for the deaths and kidnappings of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials. U.S. officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or "finding" as well as congressional oversight.

Tribal sources tell ABC News that money for Jundullah is funneled to its youthful leader, Abd el Malik Regi, through Iranian exiles who have connections with European and Gulf states. Jundullah has produced its own videos showing Iranian soldiers and border guards it says it has captured and brought back to Pakistan. The leader, Regi, claims to have personally executed some of the Iranians. "He used to fight with the Taliban. He's part drug smuggler, part Taliban, part Sunni activist," said Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant who recently met with Pakistani officials and tribal members.

"Regi is essentially commanding a force of several hundred guerrilla fighters that stage attacks across the border into Iran on Iranian military officers, Iranian intelligence officers, kidnapping them, executing them on camera," Debat said.

Most recently, Jundullah took credit for an attack in February that killed at least 11 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard riding on a bus in the Iranian city of Zahedan. Last month, Iranian state television broadcast what it said were confessions by those responsible for the bus attack. They reportedly admitted to being members of Jundullah and said they had been trained for the mission at a secret location in Pakistan.

The Iranian TV broadcast is interspersed with the logo of the CIA, which the broadcast blamed for the plot. A CIA spokesperson said "the account of alleged CIA action is false" and reiterated that the U.S. provides no funding of the Jundullah group. Pakistani government sources say the secret campaign against Iran by Jundullah was on the agenda when Vice President Dick Cheney met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in February.

A senior U.S. government official said groups such as Jundullah have been helpful in tracking al Qaeda figures and that it was appropriate for the U.S. to deal with such groups in that context. Some former CIA officers say the arrangement is reminiscent of how the U.S. government used proxy armies, funded by other countries including Saudi Arabia, to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s.

Source: http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/...own_in_th.html

An Iranian [terrorist] Cult and Its American Friends

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A FEW weeks ago I received an e-mail from an acquaintance with the subject line: Have you seen the video everyone is talking about? I clicked play, and there was Howard Dean, on March 19 in Berlin, at his most impassioned, extolling the virtues of a woman named Maryam Rajavi and insisting that America should recognize her as the president of Iran. Ms. Rajavi and her husband, Massoud, are the leaders of a militant Iranian opposition group called the Mujahedeen Khalq, or Warriors of God. The group’s forces have been based for the last 25 years in Iraq, where I visited them shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.

Mr. Dean’s speech stunned me. But then came Rudolph W. Giuliani saying virtually the same thing. At a conference in Paris last December, an emotional Mr. Giuliani told Ms. Rajavi, “These are the most important yearnings of the human soul that you support, and for your organization to be described as a terrorist organization is just simply a disgrace.” I thought I was watching The Onion News Network. Did Mr. Giuliani know whom he was talking about?

Evidently not. In fact, an unlikely chorus of the group’s backers — some of whom have received speaking fees, others of whom are inspired by their conviction that the Iranian government must fall at any cost — have gathered around Mujahedeen Khalq at conferences in capitals across the globe. This group of luminaries includes two former chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff, Gens. Hugh H. Shelton and Peter Pace; Wesley K. Clark, the former NATO commander; Gen. James L. Jones, who was President Obama’s national security adviser; Louis J. Freeh, the former F.B.I. director; the former intelligence officials Dennis C. Blair and Michael V. Hayden; the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson; the former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former congressman who was co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission.

Indeed, the Rajavis and Mujahedeen Khalq are spending millions in an attempt to persuade the Obama administration, and in particular Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to take them off the national list of terrorist groups, where the group was listed in 1997. Delisting the group would enable it to lobby Congress for support in the same way that the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 allowed the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi to do.

Mrs. Clinton should ignore their P.R. campaign. Mujahedeen Khalq is not only irrelevant to the cause of Iran’s democratic activists, but a totalitarian cult that will come back to haunt us. When I arrived at Camp Ashraf, the base of the group’s operations, in April 2003, I thought I’d entered a fictional world of female worker bees. Everywhere I saw women dressed exactly alike, in khaki uniforms and mud-colored head scarves, driving back and forth in white pickup trucks, staring ahead in a daze as if they were working at a factory in Maoist China. I met dozens of young women buried in the mouths of tanks, busily tinkering with the engines. One by one, the girls bounded up to me and my two minders to recite their transformations from human beings to acolytes of Ms. Rajavi. One said she had been suicidal in Iran until she found Ms. Rajavi on the Internet.

At Camp Ashraf, 40 miles north of Baghdad, near the Iranian border, 3,400 members of the militant group reside in total isolation on a 14-square-mile tract of harsh desert land. Access to the Internet, phones and information about the outside world is prohibited. Posters of Ms. Rajavi and her smiling green eyes abound. Meanwhile, she lives in luxury in France; her husband has remained in hiding since the United States occupied Iraq in 2003. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the group served as Mr. Hussein’s own private militia opposing the theocratic government in Tehran. For two decades, he gave the group money, weapons, jeeps and military bases along the border with Iran. In return, the Rajavis pledged their fealty.

In 1991, when Mr. Hussein crushed a Shiite uprising in the south and attempted to carry out a genocide against the Kurds in the north, the Rajavis and their army joined his forces in mowing down fleeing Kurds. Ms. Rajavi told her disciples, “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.” Many followers escaped in disgust. So the Rajavis then began preying on Iranian refugees and asylum seekers in Europe to fill their ranks. The Rajavis promise them salaries, marriage, family, freedom and a great cause — fighting the Iranian government. Then the unwitting youths arrive in Iraq.

What is most disturbing is how the group treats its members. After the Iran-Iraq war, Mr. Rajavi orchestrated an ill-planned offensive, deploying thousands of young men and women into Iran on a mass martyrdom operation. Instead of capturing Iran, as they believed they would, thousands of them were slaughtered, including parents, husbands and wives of those I met in Iraq in 2003. After my visit, I met and spoke to men and women who had escaped from the group’s clutches. Many had to be deprogrammed. They recounted how people were locked up if they disagreed with the leadership or tried to escape; some were even killed.

Friendships and all emotional relationships are forbidden. From the time they are toddlers, boys and girls are not allowed to speak to each other. Each day at Camp Ashraf you had to report your dreams and thoughts. If a man was turned on by the scent of a woman or a whiff of perfume, he had to confess. Members had to attend weekly ideological cleansings in which they publicly confessed their sexual desires. Members were even forced to divorce and take a vow of lifelong celibacy to ensure that all their energy and love would be directed toward Maryam and Massoud.

Mr. Hamilton and Generals Jones and Clark have been paid speakers’ fees by front groups for Mujahedeen Khalq and have spoken in support of the group in public conferences. They claimed ignorance of how the group treated its members. “I don’t know a lot about the group,” Mr. Hamilton told me over the phone last week. But in 1994, when he was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Hamilton received a report describing the group as a violent cult with a distinct ideology synthesizing Marxism and messianic Shiism.

At a February conference in Paris, Mr. Dean praised the group’s extraordinary “bill of rights.” And General Jones said to Ms. Rajavi: “It is time for those of us from the United States who have come to know and admire you and your colleagues and your goals to do what is required to recognize the legitimacy of your movement and your ideals.” When I asked General Jones last week if he knew that some considered the group a totalitarian cult, he replied, “This is the first time I’ve heard anything about this.” He said he’d checked with military and F.B.I. officials. “I wanted to make sure we weren’t supporting a group that was doing nefarious things that I don’t know about,” he said. “Nobody brought it up, so I didn’t know what questions to ask.”

IN fact, a 2004 F.B.I. report on the group detailed a joint investigation by the American and German police, which revealed that the group’s cell in Cologne, Germany, had used money from a complex fraud scheme to buy military equipment. The group used children with multiple identities to claim multiple benefit checks from the German government. Evidence also showed that the group had obtained money in Los Angeles to purchase GPS units to increase the accuracy of planned mortar attacks on Tehran.

It is possible that such plots do not bother General Jones and other supporters of the group. But Iraq will no longer tolerate its presence. Its government wants the Mujahedeen Khalq out of the country by the end of the year. In April, Iraqi forces attacked Camp Ashraf. General Jones and other supporters of the group were outraged. They are right that we should have compassion for those trapped inside the camp. A 2009 RAND Corporation study found that up to 70 percent of the group’s members there might have been held against their will. If the group’s American cheerleaders cared for those at the camp half as much as they did for the Rajavis, they would be insisting on private Red Cross visits with each man and woman at Camp Ashraf.

American officials who support the group like to quote the saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” By this logic, the group’s opposition to the Tehran theocracy justifies American backing. But there is another saying to consider: “The means are the ends.” By using the Mujahedeen Khalq to provoke Tehran, we will end up damaging our integrity and reputation, and weaken the legitimate democracy movement within Iran.

As a senior State Department official told me, “They are the best financed and organized, but they are so despised inside Iran that they have no traction.” Iranian democracy activists say the group, if it had had the chance, could have become the Khmer Rouge of Iran. “They are considered traitors and killers of Iranian kids,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Mujahedeen Khalq’s status on the terrorist list is under review. “They are so unpopular that we think any gesture of support to them would disqualify and discredit us as being interested in democratic reform.”

If the group is taken off the terrorist list, it will be able to freely lobby the American government under the guise of an Iranian democracy movement. Recent history has shown that the United States often ends up misguidedly supporting not only the wrong exile groups in the Middle East, but the least relevant ones. We cannot afford to be so naïve or misguided again.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/an-iranian-cult-and-its-american-friends.html?scp=1&sq=khalq&st=cse

For Obscure Iranian Exile Group, Broad Support in U.S.


At a time of partisan gridlock in the capital, one obscure cause has drawn a stellar list of supporters from both parties and the last two administrations, including a dozen former top national security officials. That alone would be unusual. What makes it astonishing is the object of their attention: a fringe Iranian opposition group, long an ally of Saddam Hussein, that is designated as a terrorist organization under United States law and described by State Department officials as a repressive cult despised by most Iranians and Iraqis.

The extraordinary lobbying effort to reverse the terrorist designation of the group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People’s Mujahedeen, has won the support of two former C.I.A. directors, R. James Woolsey and Porter J. Goss; a former F.B.I. director, Louis J. Freeh; a former attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey; President George W. Bush’s first homeland security chief, Tom Ridge; President Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones; big-name Republicans like the former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Democrats like the former Vermont governor Howard Dean; and even the former top counterterrorism official of the State Department, Dell L. Dailey, who argued unsuccessfully for ending the terrorist label while in office.

The American advocates have been well paid, hired through their speaking agencies and collecting fees of $10,000 to $50,000 for speeches on behalf of the Iranian group. Some have been flown to Paris, Berlin and Brussels for appearances. But they insist that their motive is humanitarian — to protect and resettle about 3,400 members of the group, known as the M.E.K., now confined in a camp in Iraq. They say the terrorist label, which dates to 1997 and then reflected decades of violence that included the killing of some Americans in the 1970s, is now outdated, unjustified and dangerous.

Emotions are running high as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton completes a review of the terrorist designation. The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has said it plans to close the camp, Camp Ashraf, by Dec. 31 and move the people elsewhere in Iraq in order to reassert Iraqi sovereignty over the land where it is located, 40 miles north of Baghdad. Two earlier incursions by Iraqi troops into Camp Ashraf led to bloody confrontations, with 11 residents killed in July 2009 and at least 34 in April of this year. The M.E.K. and its American supporters say that they believe the Maliki government, with close ties to Iran, may soon carry out a mass slaughter on the pretext of regaining control of the camp.

If that happens, the supporters say, the United States — which disarmed the M.E.K. and guaranteed the security of the camp after the invasion of Iraq — will bear responsibility.

“We made a promise,” said Mr. Ridge, a former congressman and governor of Pennsylvania. “Our credibility is on the line. They’ve been attacked twice. How can we possibly accept assurances from the Maliki government?” Mr. Ridge suggested that the M.E.K.’s implacable hostility to the rulers of Iran should be a point in their favor. “In my view, if you’re a threat to Ahmadinejad,” — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president — “well, the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Mr. Ridge said. He noted that the M.E.K. had provided information on Iran’s nuclear program during the Bush administration.

The M.E.K. advocacy campaign has included full-page newspaper advertisements identifying the group as “Iran’s Main Opposition” — an absurd distortion in the view of most Iran specialists; leaders of Iran’s broad opposition, known as the Green Movement, have denounced the group. The M.E.K. has hired high-priced lobbyists like the Washington firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. Its lawyers in Europe won a long fight to persuade the European Union to drop its own listing of the M.E.K. as a terrorist group in 2009.

The group’s spending, certainly in the millions of dollars, has inevitably raised questions about funding sources. Ali Safavi, who runs a pro-M.E.K. group in Washington called Near East Policy Research, says the money comes from wealthy Iranian expatriates in the United States and Europe. Because “material support” to a designated terrorist group is a crime, advocates insist that the money goes only to sympathizers and not to the M.E.K. itself. Congress has taken note of the campaign. A House resolution for dropping the terrorist listing has 97 co-sponsors, including the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan.

At a hearing this month, senators pressed the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, about the threat to Camp Ashraf. A State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, said officials there were “working as quickly as possible” to complete a review of the M.E.K.’s terrorist designation. American officials are supporting an effort by the United Nations to resettle Camp Ashraf residents voluntarily to other countries, a process that is making slow progress.

Other State Department officials, addressing the issue on the condition of anonymity because it is still under deliberation, said that they did believe the 3,400 residents of Camp Ashraf were in danger as the Dec. 31 deadline approaches. “We’re in constant talks with the Iraqis and the Ashraf leadership to show maximum flexibility on the closure of the camp,” one official said.

But the officials expressed frustration at what they described as the American supporters’ credulous acceptance of the M.E.K.’s claims of representing the Iranian opposition and of embracing democratic values. In years of observation, the official said, Americans have seen that the camp’s leaders “exert total control over the lives of Ashraf’s residents, much like we would see in a totalitarian cult,” requiring fawning devotion to the M.E.K.’s leaders, Maryam Rajavi, who lives in France, and her husband, Massoud, whose whereabouts are unknown.

Moreover, the official said, the group is “hated almost universally by the Iranian population,” in part for siding with Mr. Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. A State Department cable this year concluded that any indication of United States support for the M.E.K. “would fuel anti-American sentiment” in Iran and would “likely empower Iranian hardliners.”

In Iraq, the M.E.K. is also widely despised, especially by the country’s Shiite majority, because it is accused of helping the Iraqi dictator crush a Shiite revolt in 1991 — a charge the group denies. Because of deep Iraqi hostility, American officials argue that merely dropping the terrorist designation would not end the danger of attacks on the group.

While the M.E.K. carried out a campaign of attacks from the 1970s to the 1990s, mostly targeting Iranian officials, supporters say it has renounced violence and has not engaged in terrorist acts for a decade. The designation law, however, allows Mrs. Clinton to keep the label for a group that “retains the capability and intent to engage in terrorist activity or terrorism.” Such a decision would outrage the American advocates of reversing the terrorist label.

Mr. Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, said the administration’s failure to act decisively threatened a “humanitarian catastrophe.” Mr. Mukasey said he did not believe the claim that the M.E.K. was a cult, but even if true, it was no reason to keep the terrorist listing. “These people are sitting in the camp, completely harmless,” he said.

Like other advocates, Mr. Mukasey said he had been paid his standard speaking fee — $15,000 to $20,000, according to the Web site of his speakers’ agency — to talk at M.E.K.-related events. But he insisted that the money was not a factor for him or other former officials who had taken up the cause. “There’s no way I would compromise my standing by expressing views I don’t believe in,” he said.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/us/politics/lobbying-support-for-iranian-exile-group-crosses-party-lines.html?_r=1


US Officials: Israel Works With Terror Group to Kill Iranian Scientists

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Israel has financed, trained, and armed Iranian dissident groups in order to carry out terrorist attacks on Iranian soil, according to top U.S. officials. The group, Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK), is designated as a terrorist group by the United States and is accused of carrying out terrorist attacks in the past, including on American citizens. With the help of Israel, MEK has carried out five assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration knows of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement. However, there has been a big money push by many influential people in Washington to get MEK removed from the State Department’s terrorist list, presumably to make them eligible for U.S. funding.

The Iranians have made these allegations of Israeli terrorist attacks carried out by MEK for quite a while, but only now does it have confirmation from U.S. officials. Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a recent interview with NBC News claimed they knew Israel was funding MEK, sharing intelligence, and training them inside Israel in the use of motorcycles and bombs.

The Iranians say much of their intelligence on this matter has come from interrogations with an MEK member that carried out one of the assassination attempts. The MEK has denied these allegations, issuing a statement calling them “absolutely false.”

Even if its true, as U.S. officials insist, that Washington has no involvement in these terrorist attacks, they do support Israel through unmatched economic aid, arms sales, and diplomatic support. As Larijani recently told NBC News, if America, Israel’s closest ally, is aware of this terrorism, “the United States has an obligation…to push Israel not to do it” and “to pursue it, like pursuing us, at the United Nations with different resolutions.”

Source: news.antiwar.com/2012/02/09/us-officials-israel-works-with-terror-group-to-kill-iranian-scientists/

The Israeli-Jihadist Alliance

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It’s seems counterintuitive, to say the least. Indeed, it seems quite mad. And yet we now have all the evidence we need to point to a de facto Israeli alliance with Al Qaeda. The bombing of Damascus suburbs by Israeli jets – purportedly in order to prevent the Syrians from supplying Hezbollah with long range missiles – at precisely the moment when the Syrian “rebels” are demanding Western intervention on their behalf highlights one of the most bizarre alliances in history. Bizarre, yes, but inexplicable? Not at all.

The Syrian government is claiming the Israelis “coordinated” their attack with the rebels, but this seems problematic – and is largely irrelevant. Yes, a rebel spokesman “blessed” the Israeli strike, but I rather doubt there’s ongoing communication between the rebel leadership and Tel Aviv. It’s simply not necessary: after all, their goals in the region are complementary, if not identical. The Sunni extremists who comprise Al Qaeda have been in the front lines in the battle against Bashar al-Assad, and are also bitterly hostile to the mullahs of Tehran, whom they consider heretics: Israel, for its part, has launched its own holy war against Iran for quite different reasons, and is eager to take out Assad: regardless of motives their goals do coincide. Both want chaos in Syria – the Israelis, in order to eliminate a longstanding thorn in their side, and the jihadists because they thrive in failed states, like Lebanon.

Why would the Israelis aid a “rebel” army made up almost exclusively of hardened jihadists who supposedly hate Israel and want to see its non-Arab inhabitants driven into the sea? For the same reason they initially nurtured Hamas – because they believe it serves their long range purposes. The reason the Israelis granted official legal status to the group that eventually morphed into one of the Jewish state’s most implacable enemies was simple: to divide the Palestinian resistance, and therefore weaken it. At the time, Fatah, the largest component of the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization, was the most effective opposition to the Israeli occupation. The Israelis thought aiding an Islamist competitor would achieve certain desired ends: the decline of the PLO’s influence, the alienation of Arab governments from the Palestinian cause, and the marginalization of that cause in Western eyes. All three goals have since been achieved.

The Israelis are assisting the Syrian jihadists for similar reasons: because it fits in rather neatly with their long-range goals. For a look at those goals, all you have to do is peruse a 1996 document prepared for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by leading neoconservatives, proposing a radical new Israeli “defense” strategy. Reading “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” is like reading a timeline of events in the Middle East for the past ten years. As I wrote in October of 2003, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War – a day when Israel bombed alleged “terrorist camps” in Syria:

“The paper, co-authored by Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser, portrayed Syria as the main enemy of Israel, but maintained the road to Damascus had to first pass through Baghdad: “‘Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria’s regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq.’”

Well, we didn’t get the Hashemites – but Maliki will do. Or, rather, near complete chaos will suffice, as the religious civil war wracking the Muslim world takes another potential enemy out of contention. Now that Iraq lies bleeding by the wayside, King Bibi is speeding down that “Clean Break” highway, eager to turn two more regional rivals into roadkill. As I have written before, Syria is our Spain – a proxy war prefiguring a much larger conflict, with the US, Israel, Turkey, Jordan, and Al Qaeda (in the guise of the “Al Nusra Front”) versus the Syrian Ba’athists, Hezbollah, and – standing behind them – Iran.

Israel’s role in this is key. It isn’t just Israeli jets providing air cover for the jihadists in Syria: the Israel lobby has been going full tilt in a push to drag the US into the conflict. And they don’t care how they do it. The other day, in a debate on intervention in Syria on NPR, a representative of WINEP, the “educational” arm of AIPAC, accused anti-interventionist Joshua Landis of “dual loyalty” because his wife is an Alawite! Of course, the Israel lobby isn’t guilty of dual loyalty – their one and only loyalty is to the state of Israel, nothing dual about it.

The “chemical weapons” hoax topped the long list of similar scams set up by the Syrian rebels and their Western supporters in its brazen effrontery: not since the “Niger uranium” papers have we seen such a downright sloppy scheme to lie us into war. Samples taken from rebel sources tested positive for sarin – and the administration was supposed to accept that at face value? Back to the drawing board, and the same old question: how do we drag a reluctant US President into an open military confrontation with Iran?

Only a few years ago it would’ve been hard to believe the Americans weren’t clued in beforehand that Israeli jets would soon be pounding Damascus. However, given the relations between this administration and the Netanyahu government, one is hardly shocked to learn it came as a surprise. The War Party is playing its trump card – and we’ll see if the President has anything up his sleeve to beat it. In an effort to stay out of a major mess that could get far messier, the White House is up against not only the Israel lobby, the McCain brigade, and powerful members of his own party, he’s also swimming against the foreign policy current that dominated the previous administration – and also his own.

It was during the Bush regime’s effort to save face by proclaiming “victory” at the end of the Iraq “surge” that the US decided to play the Sunni card and forge a regional coalition to block Iranian dominance of the region. That this turn ended up with the US and Al Qaeda on the same side in the Syrian trenches is hardly surprising – or unprecedented. Bin Laden’s legions fought in the Kosovo war on the side of their Kosovar Muslim brothers and NATO: many present day jihadists are veterans of that conflict, just as they are veterans of Afghanistan, Libya, and Chechnya – all regions where the jihadists and the Americans are de facto allies. In the Balkans, we used them to block Russian influence in Europe: in Syria, we are using them to run interference with the Iranians. In resisting – at least publicly – the call to intervene more visibly, this President is contravening the trajectory of American policy in the region – and the US ship of state, an enormous and therefore unwieldy vessel, is not so easily turned around. It has a momentum all its own.

The White House has been besieged by the “humanitarian” interventionist crowd – by Democrats, including, in Congress, Carl Levin, Robert Menendez, and Dianne Feinstein – to “do something” in Syria, while the Republican hawks swirling around John McCain have been howling for a “no fly zone” and military aid to the rebels. Of course, the American people oppose us getting involved in the Syrian imbroglio, but they don’t count: the gaggle of foreign lobbyists and laptop bombardiers who rule Washington are, as usual, the only voices being heard.

Who will channel the populist wisdom of the war-weary and too-often-lied-to American people? While the warlords of Washington are merrily planning yet another war to benefit Israel based on lying “evidence” of WMD, where are all these supposed Republican “isolationists” we’ve been hearing so much about? Put up, or shut up, fellas.


Israel Framed CIA in Backing Jundallah Terrorists

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The 2007 revelation by ABC News that the Bush Administration was covertly backing the Jundallah terrorist organization in an effort to convince them to launch attacks on Iran was no small embarrassment for the administration, and a considerable source of tension with the Shi’ite world as the militants attacked mosques and killed large numbers of civilians.

The only problem is, it apparently didn’t happen. At least not the way ABC News claims. Instead of being direct US backing, by way of the CIA, for a State Department listed terrorist organization (a big no-no), Foreign Policy is reporting today that the whole thing was actually a Mossad plot designed to frame the CIA and the administration. Officials cite internal memos, classified of course, from the 2007 and 2008 investigation into the allegations, which found that in reality the people who bought off Jundallah were Mossad agents, with faked US passports and large amounts of US dollars.

“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” one of the officials said. “Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”

Indeed the unspoken goal of the “false flag” appears to have been to damage what little trust the Iranian government had in the US. Captured Jundallah leaders confessed on Iranian TV that they were funded and directed by the CIA, and apparently they believed that is what was happening.

The report goes on to say that President Bush “went ballistic” when he heard about the Mossad plot, saying it was “putting Americans at risk.” There was also concern it would severely damage relations with Pakistan, since Jundallah has traditionally also attacked targets in Pakistani Balochistan. The US State Department has been struggling to publicly deny the US-Jundallah relationship, and retired US Gen. Joe Hoar slammed the Israeli move, saying “It gets us involved in their covert war, whether we want to be involved or not.”

Source: http://news.antiwar.com/2012/01/13/israel-framed-cia-in-backing-jundallah-terrorists/print/

US-Canada Claim Iran-Al Qaeda Ties Despite US Funding Al Qaeda in Iran for Years

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As the FBI reels from what now appears to be revelations it was directly involved in the Boston Marathon bombings, a deluge of FBI "success" stories have been "serendipitously" splashed across Western headlines. Among them was an allegedly "foiled" terror attack in Canada, reported to be the work of terrorists supported by "Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran." The Globe and Mail, in its report, "Canada joins U.S. in alleging al-Qaeda has operatives based in Iran," states:
"To many, it came as a surprise that the RCMP is alleging that two terror suspects arrested in Canada on Monday were supported by al-Qaeda operatives in Iran.
The Sunni-based al-Qaeda and Shia Iran belong to different branches of Islam that have been at odds historically. But in recent years U.S. officials have formally alleged that Iran has allowed al-Qaeda members to operate out of its territory."
Both at face value and upon deeper examination, this assertion is utterly absurd, divorced from reality, and indicative of the absolute contempt within which the Western establishment holds the global public. In reality, the West, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in particular, have propped up and perpetuated Al Qaeda for the very purpose of either undermining or overthrowing the governments of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria, Libya,  Russia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and beyond.

Regarding Iran in particular, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 2007 New Yorker piece titled, "The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?" would state:
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
In a follow up, Hersh in his 2008 New Yorker piece titled, "Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran," spelled out a damning indictment of US involvement in bolstering, arming, and funding terror organizations, not linked to, but described as actually being Al Qaeda. Of American support for Al Qaeda the report states (emphasis added):
The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.
The report would continue by stating (emphasis added):
One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.
The manifestation of this insidious conspiracy can be seen playing out across Syria in which US-backed terrorists openly operating under the flag of Al Qaeda are locked in a catastrophic sectarian bloodbath with the Syrian people and the Syrian state's closest ally, Iran. The conflict in Syria exposes that the machinations revealed back in 2007-2008 by Hersh, are still being carried out in earnest today.

Clearly, US-Canadian claims that Iran is somehow involved in harboring Al Qaeda within its borders, when it has been the West for years propping them up specifically to overthrow the Iranian government, are utterly absurd. In reality, while the West uses Al Qaeda's presence both within Iran and along it peripheries to undermine and ultimately overthrow the Iranian government, it in turn uses these very terror organizations to induce paralyzing fear across Western populations in order to consolidate and expand power at home.

Additional Reading: For more information on just how much support the US has provided Al Qaeda terrorists in Baluchistan versus both Pakistan and Iran, please see, "US Attempting to Trigger Color Revolution in Pakistan." For more information on the US' delisting, arming and training of the terror organization, Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK or MKO) versus Iran, please see, "US to Delist & Arm American-Killing Terror Cult."

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As American bombs rain down upon Libya on the premise that Qaddafi was brutalizing indigenous pro-democratic demonstrators, the accusing fingers of Libya, Iran, China, Syria, Belarus, and a growing number of other nations are pointing at Washington for funding and plotting regime change against their respective governments. Either in an act of absolute hubris or to spin emerging evidence that the US indeed has been funding and preparing the ground for the “Arab Spring” for years, New York Times has recently published “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings.

Essentially throwing these activists under the bus, New York Times exposes that the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, and Entsar Qadhi of Yemen amongst others, received training and financing from the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and the Neo-Conservative lined Freedom House.

The New York Times goes on to explain that these organizations are in turn funded by the National Endowment for Democracy which receives 100 million USD from Congress while Freedom House receives most of its money from the US State Department. While the New York Times asserts “no one doubts that the Arab uprisings are home grown,” leaders of groups now admittedly funded and trained by the US are anything but “home grown.” The most prominent example is the April 6 Movement of Egypt led by Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Crisis Group. ElBaradei sitting along side George Soros, Kenneth Adelman, Wesley Clark, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, within a US foreign policy think-tank engenders a considerable amount of “doubt.”

Source: http://www.infowars.com/its-official-arab-spring-subversion-u-s-funded/

State Department training Islamic political parties in Egypt

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U.S. assistance to Egypt is helping political parties of all ideologies prepare for the upcoming elections -- even Islamic parties that may have anti-Western agendas. "We don't do party support. What we do is party training.... And we do it to whoever comes," William Taylor, the State Department's director of its new office for Middle East Transitions, said in a briefing with reporters today. "Sometimes, Islamist parties show up, sometimes they don't. But it has been provided on a nonpartisan basis, not to individual parties."

The programs, contracted through the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), include helping political parties in Egypt conduct polling, provide constituent services, and prepare for election season. NDI's chairwoman is former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. IRI's chairman is Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)

Taylor said that none of the U.S. funding that has gone to election preparation is coordinated or vetted through the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which assumed power after the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak. "It absolutely does not go to the SCAF," he said, noting that the Egyptian military still receives billions in military aid from the United States.

Taylor, who just got back from a trip to Egypt and Tunisia, said that he left Egypt unworried about the SCAF holding on to power after the coming elections. "They wanted to make it very clear to this American sitting on the other side of the table that they didn't like the governing business," he said. "I do believe that they are uncomfortable governing. Some would say they're not doing a great job of it. "

Taylor led a similar office in the 1990s that coordinated policy in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. He is pressing for $2 billion in new aid to Egypt, half in loans and half in debt forgiveness, but acknowledged that the U.S. fiscal situation is not nearly as good now as it was then.

"This is a tight time on budgets here, as we all know. And when [State Department spokeswoman] Toria [Nuland] and I worked together earlier, we had a lot more money to put in to the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe," he said. "Now, that having been said, we recognize that there are other countries that are eager to provide support, and we support that."

But Taylor also said that promises of financial assistance to Egypt from other countries in the region have not materialized, leaving Egypt's government with little choice but to accept billions of dollar in loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank -- loans that come with strings attached.

"The IMF was in Egypt, and they put an offer of about $3 billion on the table for the finance minister. The finance minister was interested. He went to the SCAF. The SCAF said, ‘No, thank you.' The finance minister told the IMF, ‘No, thank you.' But just last week when I was there, he told me that he's likely to be able to accept an IMF offer this time," Taylor said.

Egypt owes the United States about $1 billion over the next three years from previous loans, but if Congress agrees, the State Department wants to let Egypt keep that money and spend it on its political transition, with U.S. consultation. "We, the United States government, will agree with you, the Egyptian government, on how to spend that billion dollars in Egypt," Taylor said. "But it won't come here. It won't come back to the Treasury. It'll stay there and do projects that we are working on right now."

Taylor said the money would be spent on an "identifiable" joint project that would show Egyptians that "yes, we do care if your transition works."

Source: http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/11/03/state_department_training_islamic_political_parties_in_egypt

Ex-Army Officer Accuses CIA of Obstructing Pre-9/11 Intelligence-Gathering

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Offering new revelations about the CIA's role in shutting down military intelligence penetration of al-Qaeda, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer joins a growing list of government officials accusing former CIA director George Tenet of misleading federal investigators and sharing some degree of blame for the 9/11 attacks.

A decorated ex-clandestine operative for the Pentagon offers new revelations about the role the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played in the shut-down of the military's notorious Able Danger program, alleged to have identified five of the 9/11 hijackers inside America more than a year before the attacks.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer joins a growing list of government officials accusing former CIA director George Tenet of misleading federal bodies and sharing some degree of blame for the attacks. Shaffer also adds to a picture emerging of the CIA's Bin Laden unit as having actively prevented other areas of intelligence, law enforcement and defense from properly carrying out their counterterrorism functions in the run-up to September 2001.

Shaffer spoke to documentary filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski in late 2011, on the day Judicial Watch successfully forced the Department of Defense (DOD) to declassify many Able Danger documents through their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The materials newly in the public domain allowed Shaffer to speak more candidly than ever before. While he maintains the DOD bureaucracy was always the main obstacle for Able Danger, he offers fresh disclosures on the role played by the CIA in the shut-down of its military offensive.

In the wake of the devastating African embassy bombings of 1998, which left more than 200 dead, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) - responsible for the Pentagon's secret commando units - brought together specialists from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to begin mapping the al-Qaeda network. Based in the Information Dominance Center - also referred to as Land Information Warfare Activity, or LIWA - at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the team's advanced data-mining software found connections between known terrorists and subjects with matching profiles. This highly classified project was code-named Able Danger.

The project first came to public attention in June 2005, nearly one year after the 9/11 Commission released its report, when Congressman Curt Weldon gave a special orders speech on the floor of the House of Representatives. Following attacks on Weldon's credibility, five Pentagon whistleblowers came forward to back up his claims, including Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a CIA-trained senior intelligence operations officer, Bronze Star Medal recipient and reserve Army lieutenant colonel with more than 22 years in the intelligence community.

Shaffer now claims the media's focus on the data-collection aspect of Able Danger missed the point. "Data mining kind of became, to use a film term, the MacGuffin," says Shaffer, a reference to a narrative device - often used in Alfred Hitchcock movies - which drives the plot while ultimately having no relevance to it. "That was the throwaway they wanted people to focus on. The overall project was something that covered the entire command structure of [SOCOM]. The project was put together to give the national command authority options."

In other words, the collecting of information about al-Qaeda's cell structures was only meant to be a first step in a larger action to be taken using the data. "It wasn't simply an experiment. My actual assignment wasn't Able Danger. I could never testify to the actual operational objectives assigned to me and my unit for the purposes of Able Danger." The Able Danger project, portrayed in most media reports as a mere data-mining exercise, was in fact fully integrated into a larger military effort to target and disrupt al-Qaeda. Its actual capabilities and objectives remain classified.

Shaffer contends that the most damning revelations lie in that still-classified aspect of the project, the operational side. Asked what the next step was to be against the so-called Brooklyn cell identified by Able Danger which he says included five of the 9/11 hijackers, Shaffer responded, "I can't talk about that."

At the center of the military's intended action was a long-term asset recruited by DIA years before Able Danger, a retired Afghan general who had direct access to al-Qaeda activities in Afghanistan. "We had a clear access point to al-Qaeda we were using for our operational purposes," says Shaffer. "The asset was a separate operation we were going to use for access. We were going to use still-classified capabilities." That all changed when CIA got involved.

Following the embassy attacks, the White House became concerned about a deficit of access by CIA into al-Qaeda. President Clinton's Cabinet-level counter-terror director Richard Clarke said he pushed for a shakeup at the agency. "We needed a new direction," Clarke has explained. At Clarke's behest, Tenet, CIA director between 1997 and 2005, removed Michael Scheuer, the founder of its Bin Laden unit - also known as Alec Station. Two men with strong operational backgrounds, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, were brought in to take over leadership. "When Cofer Black took over the counterterrorism center at the CIA, he was aghast that they had no sources inside al-Qaeda," reported Clarke. "So he told me, 'I'm going to try to get sources in al-Qaeda.'"

As Black and Blee began their efforts at the CIA, Able Danger was ramping up. Then-Major Anthony Shaffer was at that time in charge of a secretive DIA unit known as Stratus Ivy, facilitating five major DOD black operations. The assets each held equal importance. Shaffer says SOCOM brought him into the Able Danger project to work on agent coordination in 1999.

That October, Shaffer was asked by Navy Captain Scott Philpott, then-head of operations for the Able Danger initiative, to brief the CIA liaison to SOCOM, a senior agency official. But the meeting did not go well. In the interview with Nowosielski and Duffy, Shaffer names the CIA representative for the first time. He was Cold War veteran David Rolph, previously a station chief for the agency in Moscow.

"We, the Able Danger team, would like to have access to Alec Station to conduct our operations," Shaffer said he told Rolph. But Rolph explained that unless Gen. Peter Schoomaker, commander of SOCOM, personally and directly approached CIA director Tenet for access, they would not get it. Shaffer offered Alec Station a "seat at the table," allowing a station employee into their process.

According to Shaffer, Rolph bluntly informed him the CIA would never cooperate with SOCOM on the matter, because if the military succeeded in prosecuting the options for going after the infrastructure of al-Qaeda, it would "steal the thunder" of Alec Station. Shaffer found the response peculiar, even for the notoriously turf-defensive agency.

"I spent a lot of time working in joint projects between Special Operations Command and CIA," Shaffer revealed. "So the fact that in this one area they would not cooperate was new, and it concerned me. But very often the CIA would just do things without regard to anyone else."

How the CIA's go-it-alone attitude regarding al-Qaeda helped enable the events of 2001 has only recently gained wider public attention. The story, reduced to an obscure endnote in the 9/11 Commission Report, exploded in 2011 when it emerged that Richard Clarke, counter-terror director for both Presidents Clinton and Bush, had, in a filmed interview, accused the CIA of deliberately withholding information on two of the 9/11 conspirators, the same ones separately discovered by Able Danger.

According to Clarke, some 50 employees in Black's and Blee's units would likely have known from early 2000 that conspirators Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi - among those who would commandeer American Airlines Flight 77, and reportedly the closest to Bin Laden himself - were working for al-Qaeda and had arrived in the United States. Incredibly, the agency sat on this information for up to 18 months, ignoring standard protocol requiring them to tell the FBI and Clarke's team on the White House National Security Council.

Only a high-level decision could explain the silence of officers he spoke with regularly, Clarke believes. Pressed by John Duffy, the former head of counter-terrorism sensationally placed the blame on the CIA director. Tenet and others were quick to issue a dismissive press statement. But it can now be revealed the CIA's negligence went far beyond keeping critical intelligence to itself.

Around the same time Alec Station learned of al-Mihdhar's and al-Hazmi's likely arrival in the US, Able Danger's data-mining also unearthed the same individuals' domestic presence. According to several people who directly participated in the project, by mid-2000 their data mine had identified five "hotspots" for al-Qaeda activity - including the German- and New York-based cells later implicated in the hijacking plot. Much of the controversy has centered on whether, more than a year before the events of 2001, Able Danger had identified lead hijacker Mohammed Atta. A Senate Intelligence Committee investigation and Defense Department Inspector General (IG) report have concluded otherwise. Still, Shaffer and colleagues remain adamant that key witnesses were ignored and testimony distorted in the IG's final report. In other words, it was a classic whitewash.

"We found two of the three cells which conducted the [9/11] attacks," says Shaffer. "They were the 'Brooklyn cell' not by geography, but they were the Brooklyn cell because members of the cell formed a similar profile to those who conducted the '93 World Trade Center bombing. We were looking at individuals, groups, and who they talked to, relationships, if they went to a certain mosque during a certain period of time." LIWA analysts created a massive chart with the names and photos of these terrorists. "We discovered these guys here and the CIA apparently knew these guys were here," he insists. "And yeah, nobody really seems to know what was going on."

Shaffer says the significance was understood at the time. "We were scared to death that we had found operational cells ... within the United States. We did not have all the pieces of the puzzle, and we were not able to make sense of everything we had. Military action was going to be the ultimate outcome of the project."

Shaffer recruited LIWA as part of that military response. "They were going to be targeteers in the effort. I was able to convince SOCOM to bring them in. I knew the commander, Maj. Gen. Bob Newman." Shaffer said Newman encouraged him to use the Army's Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) - conducting intel, security and information operations for the military's commanders - to run the "black" side. Shaffer will only hint that the action to come was to involve cyberspace. "As we started developing the methodology to approach targeting the global elements of al-Qaeda, there was a great deal of push-back from the community."

Shaffer said he personally briefed Tenet on a number of occasions, from 1999 to 2001, on aspects of Able Danger and other concurrent DIA projects. In the pre-9/11 structure, the CIA director was also the director of central intelligence for the US government at large, overseeing all 16 agencies that made up the intelligence community, including DIA. We do not know if the presence of the Brooklyn cell inside the US was briefed to Tenet. Shaffer refused to disclose details of the classified briefings. Whatever he did report, Shaffer said that, "Tenet did not feel comfortable with some of the things we were talking about."

In his 2009 interview with Duffy and Nowosielski, Richard Clarke speculated that the CIA's Alec Station may already have been running its own domestic operation by that time to track al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, living under their own names in Southern California. Clarke admitted he had no way of proving his assertion, but believed it was the only way he could make sense of the facts. His theory is given credence by five former FBI counter-terror officials who backed his assertion that Alec Station was deliberately withholding information about the future 9/11 hijackers.

That spring, Army Intelligence and Security Command attorney Tony Gentry got involved, claiming to be concerned over domestic spying by the US military, which is not allowed; he also worried about rules prohibiting the retention of data about a US person for longer than 90 days. Shaffer was told many of the individuals in the cells were becoming citizens or had green cards. They were told they couldn't look at them, that they were out of bounds. Shaffer said he was informed by DOD lawyers that many al-Qaeda extremists were inside the US because they did a lot of American fundraising. They were not considered a threat.

"I still to this day believe this concern [over data retention] was a farce," Shaffer says with a tinge of anger in his voice, "based on the way the US government abuses US citizen information constantly in other areas." The Brooklyn cell was debated within SOCOM. Shaffer met with three-star Gen. Larry Ellis, the senior operations officer for Army in spring 2000. Ellis agreed with Shaffer, but DOD lawyers insisted it was not the military's job to do that level of information gathering.

"It became clear that someone didn't want us looking at the data, and they gave an extraordinary direction." Army staff lawyers directed Capt. Eric Kleinsmith to destroy some 2.5 terabytes of publicly sourced data. In March or April 2000, the offices of Orion Scientific Systems, a private contractor employed by LIWA for the program, were stormed by armed federal agents. Much of the material produced for Able Danger was confiscated - and with it went the US military's best shot at unraveling the hijacking plot.

Soon after the end of the data collection aspect of Able Danger, the CIA pushed for the shut down of the operational side. The retired Afghan general at the center of Able Danger's planning was what is known in spook parlance as a "principal agent." Principal agents serve as proxies for professional intelligence case officers. Case officers for the CIA or DIA manage principal agents from stations around the world, and those principal agents in turn handle their own agent networks. The DIA's asset oversaw a network of other infiltrating agents, their names known to Shaffer and his team. After briefing the CIA director, Shaffer began to suspect Alec Station was using the information to recruit from the Afghan general's network.

"Basically, they were stealing our assets," Shaffer said. He believes Alec Station had become desperate to infiltrate al-Qaeda. "They were kind of on the outside looking in. I think we had a better set of accesses than they did, and that's why they wanted to terminate our asset and use his subsets for their own."

Once the agency had successfully recruited enough assets from the DIA's principal agent, they finally wanted DIA out of the picture altogether. In September or October 2000, Shaffer's boss, Army General Bob Hardy Jr., was forced to square off against the CIA director in a closed session before the House Intelligence Committee. Shaffer characterizes it as "a major battle."

Congress established the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 1977, supposedly to oversee executive branch departments of the United States government. Whether it succeeds in its role is debatable, but in any case when the CIA took the step of complaining to the committee, it was evidently taken seriously. Tenet made the case that Able Danger was interfering with a parallel operation by the CIA, apparently being run from Alec Station.

"George Tenet went to Congress and lied," Shaffer boldly stated. Tenet painted DIA's retired Afghan general source as a murderer, a claim Shaffer says was unfounded. He had heard Tenet did so at the behest of "all of Alec Station," then run by Blee, which was complaining loudly about Able Danger. "We felt CIA made a huge mistake for political reasons, only to back off ... with regard to the asset in Afghanistan. But in hindsight it is very clear the CIA had its own game, and they were not interested in cooperating to the point where they were interfering with our ability to conduct our own offensive capability against al-Qaeda." Based on Tenet's testimony, Congress ordered DIA's asset - with direct access to al-Qaeda activities in Afghanistan - terminated. Shaffer characterizes Tenet's deception as causing "huge damage" to the overall concept of his part of the program.

It is not the first time a former official has accused Tenet of lying to a government body. Speaking about Alec Station's withholding of intelligence about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi from himself and his staff, Richard Clarke explained," [Tenet, Black and Blee] have been able to get through a joint House investigation committee and get through the 9/11 Commission, and this has never come out. They got away with it."

In his public testimony before the Congressional Intelligence Committees, Tenet was asked directly by Sen. Carl Levin about a cable that came into Alec Station in 2000 alerting them that al-Hazmi had flown to the US. Tenet's answer to Levin: "Nobody read that cable in March, in the March timeframe."

Levin pushed: "So the cable that said that Hazmi had entered the United States came to your headquarters, nobody read it?" "Yes sir." Tenet's own CIA Inspector General, John Helgerson, later revealed in the declassified summary of his still-classified 9/11 report that 50 to 60 officers inside Black's and Blee's units knew of reports in 2000 that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar may have been in the US.

Tom Kean, chairman of the 9/11 commission, also revealed his doubts about Tenet in a 2008 interview with Nowosielski and journalist Rory O'Connor, asserting the commissioners felt Tenet had been "obviously not forthcoming" in some of his testimony before their "lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the President." Asked whether they believed he had misspoken during statements that later proved false, Kean responded, "No, I don't think he misspoke. I think he misled."

In late 2000, the data mining aspect of the military's project was reconstituted as "Able Danger II" and moved to a classified private intelligence research center in Garland, Texas. When command of SOCOM changed hands from the retiring Gen. Schoomaker to Gen. Charles Holland in November, Holland again ordered termination of the efforts in Texas and for the personnel to return to SOCOM headquarters in Florida.

Shaffer claimed there were at least three senior military exchanges over the order that resulted in yelling contests. Most notable was in December when Maj. Gen. Rod Isler, director of operations for DIA, called in their boss Admiral Tom Wilson, the DIA Director, who reported to Tenet. In a shouting match, Wilson directed Isler and Shaffer to stop supporting Able Danger II.

In January 2001, with a new President, George W. Bush, in the White House, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer briefed Gen. Hugh Shelton, the man who had originally supported the formation of Able Danger, on the program results and operational options, including the possibility of reactivating the retired Afghan general asset that George Tenet had caused to be disengaged.

Shaffer said he provided a variation of the same briefing to Tenet himself in February, with DIA Director Adm. Tom Wilson present. The following month, Gen. Ron Isler ordered Shaffer to completely end his work on Able Danger II. Shaffer strongly disagreed, resulting in an argument, before Isler pulled rank on him. From that point on, Able Danger II was essentially done.

Two months later, Shaffer would receive a frantic call from another Able Danger officer desperately wanting to know if Shaffer would permit him to save the information by moving it to one of Shaffer's military facilities for the purposes of developing a plan of action. When Shaffer asked his boss, Col. Mary Moffitt, she took such offense at his "insubordinance" [sic] in mentioning Able Danger again that she began the process of demoting Shaffer from his leadership position to one on the Latin American desk of DIA.

Shaffer believes it is possible, though he has no way of knowing for certain, that Tenet played a back-channel role in the shut-downs of both Able Danger and Able Danger II. "Tenet could talk to DOD lawyers. CIA lawyers could talk to DOD lawyers, with the understanding that Tenet wants something said. I've been asked to carry messages from senior leaders, one to another. There's no documentation on that meeting. No one ever knows it occurred, without any paper trail. It's done all the time. Lawyers belong to the senior leadership they belong to. It would not be surprising to me if there was some level of pressure ... brought to bear to back people off or discourage them."

On the subject of Richard Clarke's bombshell, the decorated intelligence officer is guarded. "Clarke may well be correct in his assessment that the CIA felt they were smarter than everybody else," he reflects. "They were trying to control assets, and I do believe, from my perspective they were working to suppress other operational activities which would either compete with them, or potentially report on some of the things they were doing."

What if David Rolph, speaking on behalf of the agency's director when he met Shaffer in late 1999, had been more cooperative? What if Tenet had not pushed Congress to shut down the military's long-term asset with connections inside al-Qaeda? What if the CIA had worked with, instead of against, the military? We will never know.

Source: http://truth-out.org/news/item/14008-ex-army-officer-accuses-cia-of-obstructing-pre-9-11-intelligence-gathering

A War in the Planning for Four Years
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"THE GRAND CHESSBOARD -- American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives," Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1997

Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CFR Put War Plans in a 1997 Book -- It is "A Blueprint for World Dictatorship," Says a Former German Defense and NATO Official Who Warned of Global Domination in 1984, in an Exclusive Interview With FTW.

These are the very first words in the book, "Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power." -- p. xiii. Eurasia is all of the territory east of Germany and Poland, stretching all the way through Russia and China to the Pacific Ocean. It includes the Middle East and most of the Indian subcontinent. The key to controlling Eurasia, says Brzezinski, is controlling the Central Asian Republics. And the key to controlling the Central Asian republics is Uzbekistan. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Uzbekistan was forcefully mentioned by President George W. Bush in his address to a joint session of Congress just days after the attacks of September 11 as the very first place that the U.S. military would be deployed.

As FTW has documented in previous stories, major deployments of U.S. and British forces had taken place before the attacks. And the U.S. Army and the CIA had been active in Uzbekistan for several years. There is now evidence that what the world is witnessing is a cold and calculated war plan -- at least four years in the making -- and that, from reading Brzezinski's own words about Pearl Harbor, the World Trade Center attacks were just the trigger needed to set the final conquest in motion.

FTW, November 7, 2001, 1200 PST -- There's a quote often attributed to Allen Dulles after it was noted that the final 1964 report of the Warren Commission on the assassination of JFK contained dramatic inconsistencies. Those inconsistencies, in effect, disproved the Commission's own final conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone on November 22, 1963. Dulles, a career spy, Wall Street lawyer, the CIA director whom JFK had fired after the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco -- and the Warren Commission member who took charge of the investigation and final report -- is reported to have said, "The American people don't read."

Some Americans do read. So do Europeans and Asians and Africans and Latin Americans.

World events since the attacks of September 11, 2001 have not only been predicted, but also planned, orchestrated and -- as their architects would like to believe -- controlled. The current Central Asian war is not a response to terrorism, nor is it a reaction to Islamic fundamentalism. It is in fact, in the words of one of the most powerful men on the planet, the beginning of a final conflict before total world domination by the United States leads to the dissolution of all national governments. This, says Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and former Carter National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, will lead to nation states being incorporated into a new world order, controlled solely by economic interests as dictated by banks, corporations and ruling elites concerned with the maintenance (by manipulation and war) of their power. As a means of intimidation for the unenlightened reader who happens upon this frightening plan -- the plan of the CFR -- Brzezinski offers the alternative of a world in chaos unless the U.S. controls the planet by whatever means are necessary and likely to succeed.

This position is corroborated by Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, Ph.D. a former German defense ministry official and advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred Werner. On November 6, he told FTW, "The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, The Trilateral Commission ( founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller -- and the Bliderberger Group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens."

Brzezinski's own words -- laid against the current official line that the United States is waging a war to end terrorism -- are self-incriminating. In an ongoing series of articles, FTW has consistently established that the U.S. government had foreknowledge of the World Trade Center attacks and chose not to stop them because it needed to secure public approval for a war that is now in progress. It is a war, as described by Vice President xxxx Cheney, "that may not end in our lifetimes." What that means is that it will not end until all armed groups, anywhere in the world, which possess the political, economic or military ability to resist the imposition of this dictatorship, have been destroyed.

These are the "terrorists" the U.S. now fights in Afghanistan and plans to soon fight all over the globe. Before exposing Brzezinski (and those he represents) with his own words, or hearing more from Dr. Koeppl, it is worthwhile to take a look at Brzezinski's background. According to his resume Brzezinski, holding a 1953 Ph.D. from Harvard, lists the following achievements:
Counselor, Center for Strategic and International Studies Professor of American Foreign Policy, Johns Hopkins University National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter (1977-81), Trustee and founder of the Trilateral Commission, International advisor of several major US/Global corporations, Associate of Henry Kissinger Under Ronald Reagan, member of NSC-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy Under Ronald Reagan, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Past member, Board of Directors, The Council on Foreign Relations 1988, Co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force.
Brzezinski is also a past attendee and presenter at several conferences of the Bliderberger group -- a non-partisan affiliation of the wealthiest and most powerful families and corporations on the planet.

The Grand Chessboard

Brzezinski sets the tone for his strategy by describing Russia and China as the two most important countries -- almost but not quite superpowers - whose interests that might threaten the U.S. in Central Asia. Of the two, Brzezinski considers Russia to be the more serious threat. Both nations border Central Asia. In a lesser context he describes the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Iran and Kazakhstan as essential "lesser" nations that must be managed by the U.S. as buffers or counterweights to Russian and Chinese moves to control the oil, gas and minerals of the Central Asian Republics (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan).

He also notes, quite clearly (p. 53) that any nation that might become predominant in Central Asia would directly threaten the current U.S. control of oil resources in the Persian Gulf. In reading the book it becomes clear why the U.S. had a direct motive for the looting of some $300 billion in Russian assets during the 1990s, destabilizing Russia's currency (1998) and ensuring that a weakened Russia would have to look westward to Europe for economic and political survival, rather than southward to Central Asia. A dependent Russia would lack the military, economic and political clout to exert influence in the region and this weakening of Russia would explain why Russian President Vladimir Putin has been such a willing ally of U.S. efforts to date. (See FTW Vol. IV, No. 1 -- March 31, 2001)

An examination of selected quotes from "The Grand Chessboard," in the context of current events reveals the darker agenda behind military operations that were planned long before September 11th, 2001.

"The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power) (p. xiii)

"But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book. (p. xiv)

"The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (pp 24-5)

"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia) Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia -- and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained. (p.30)

"America's withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival -- would produce massive international instability. It would prompt global anarchy." (p. 30)

"In that context, how America `manages' Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." (p.31)

Source: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RUP111B.html

Al Qaeda – The Database


Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook (pictured above) told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.
"I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . . " Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students' punishment.

"For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: 'You'll be noted in 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' which meant 'You'll be logged in the information database.' Meaning 'You will receive a warning . . .' If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Meaning 'the decision database.' It meant 'you will be punished.' For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in 'Al Qaida.'

"In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs.

"It was decided to use a part of the system's memory to host the Islamic Conference's database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network.

"[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' and 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic 'Q eidat ilmu'ti'aat' which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for "base." The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called 'q eidat 'riyadh al 'askariya.' Q eida means "a base" and "Al Qaida" means "the base."

"In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference's secretariat.

"In the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services . . . We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK or from Belgium.

"These documents contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida.

"Al Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the Islamic Conference are 'rogue states' and many Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and business world.

"Because of the presence of 'rogue states,' it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the 'rogue states' used to fight. And the 'rogue states' included Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages.
Meet "Al-Qaeda"
"Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's personal property . . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to 'punish' Prime Minister Erdogan for being a 'toot tepid' Islamic politician.

" . . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact 'rogue states," specially the US and other NATO countries.

" Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the 'liberal" economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed behind them.

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. 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." (Our emphasis, Ed.)
In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel's case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the details of the case classified. Bunel's character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system "got him" for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group. It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of "Al Qaeda."

We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.

French officer Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel, who knew the truth about "Al Qaeda" -- Another target of the neo-cons.

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...articleId=1291

Bin Laden's Aide Qatada Released from Jail

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An extremist Muslim cleric, Abu Qatada, once known as late Osama bin Laden’s aide, has been released from a British jail, Western and Arab media reported on Tuesday. Qatada, who fled to Britain in 1993, was released on bail from the Long Lartin high-security prison in central England late on Monday, Al Arabiya said. According to the BBC, the British government said that Qatada, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin, was a threat to UK national security.

The European Court on Human Rights however ruled not to extradite the cleric to Jordan where he received a life sentence in absentia in 1999 for plotting terrorist attacks as he may be subjected to torture. A spokeswoman for the British Home Office told AFP that Britain “was united” in getting Qatada deported.

“This government will exhaust all avenues open to get Qatada on a plane. If we do so, we will continue to negotiate with the Jordanians to see what assurances we can be given about the evidence used against Qatada in their court,” AFP quoted the spokeswoman as saying. According to the bail conditions, Qatada will be put under 22-hour house arrest, allowed to leave his home for a maximum of one hour twice a day. He is banned from using the internet and telephone as well as attending a mosque. 

Qatada is believed to have been the right-hand of bin Laden, the former al Qaeda leader, who was killed in a U.S. raid in May, 2011.

Source: http://en.ria.ru/world/20120214/171306239.html

Guantánamo Bay files: Al-Qaida assassin 'worked for MI6'

Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlili

An al-Qaida operative accused of bombing two Christian churches and a luxury hotel in Pakistan in 2002 was at the same time working for British intelligence, according to secret files on detainees who were shipped to the US military's Guantánamo Bay prison camp. Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlili, an Algerian citizen described as a "facilitator, courier, kidnapper, and assassin for al-Qaida", was detained in Pakistan in 2003 and later sent to Guantánamo Bay. But according to Hamlili's Guantánamo "assessment" file, one of 759 individual dossiers obtained by the Guardian, US interrogators were convinced that he was simultaneously acting as an informer for British and Canadian intelligence.

After his capture in June 2003 Hamlili was transferred to Bagram detention centre, north of Kabul, where he underwent numerous "custodial interviews" with CIA personnel. They found him "to have withheld important information from the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service and British Secret Intelligence Service … and to be a threat to US and allied personnel in Afghanistan and Pakistan". The Guardian and the New York Times published a series of reports based on the leaked cache of documents which exposed the flimsy grounds on which many detainees were transferred to the camp and portrayed a system focused overwhelmingly on extracting intelligence from prisoners. A further series of reports based on the files reveal:
• A single star informer at the base won his freedom by incriminating at least 123 other prisoners there. The US military source described Mohammed Basardah as an "invaluable" source who had shown "exceptional co-operation", but lawyers for other inmates claim his evidence is unreliable. • US interrogators frequently clashed over the handling of detainees, with members of the Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF GTMO) in several cases overruling recommendations by the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) that prisoners should be released. CITF investigators also disapproved of methods adopted by the JTF's military interrogators.
• New light on how Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora as American and British special forces closed in on his mountain refuge in December 2001, including intelligence claiming that a local Pakistani warlord provided fighters to guide him to safety in the north-east of Afghanistan.
The Obama administration on Monday condemned the release of documents which it claimed had been "obtained illegally by WikiLeaks". The Pentagon's press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said in many cases the documents, so-called Detainee Assessment Briefs, had been superseded by the decisions of a taskforce established by President Barack Obama in 2009. "Any given DAB illegally obtained and released by WikiLeaks may or may not represent the current view of a given detainee," he said.

According to the files, Hamlili told his American interrogators at Bagram that he had been running a carpet business from Peshawar, exporting as far afield as Dubai following the 9/11 attacks. But his CIA captors knew the Algerian had been an informant for MI6 and Canada's Secret Intelligence Service for over three years – and suspected he had been double-crossing handlers. According to US intelligence the two spy agencies recruited Hamlili as a "humint" – human intelligence – source in December 2000 "because of his connections to members of various al-Qaida linked terrorist groups that operated in Afghanistan and Pakistan".

The files do not specify what information Hamlili withheld. But they do contain intelligence reports, albeit flawed ones, that link the Algerian to three major terrorist attacks in Pakistan during this time. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed architect of the 9/11 attacks, told interrogators an "Abu Adil" – an alias allegedly used by Hamlili – had orchestrated the March 2002 grenade attack on a Protestant church in Islamabad's diplomatic enclave that killed five people, including a US diplomat and his daughter.

He said Abu Adil was also responsible for an attack that killed three girls in a rural Punjabi church the following December, and that he had given him 300,000 rupees (about $3,540) to fund the attacks. The church attacks have previously been blamed on Lashkar I Jhangvi, a Pakistani sectarian outfit that has developed ties with al-Qaida in recent years. Separately, US intelligence reports said that Hamlili was "possibly involved" in a bombing outside Karachi's Sheraton hotel in May 2002 that killed 11 French submarine engineers and two Pakistanis.

But the intelligence against the 35-year-old Algerian, who was sent home last January, appears deeply flawed, like many of the accusations in the Guantánamo files. Some of the information may have been obtained through torture. US officials waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times at a CIA "black site" in Thailand during his first month of captivity. And little evidence is presented to link Hamlili to the Karachi hotel bombing, other than that he ran a carpet business – the same cover that was used by the alleged assassins to escape.

What is clear, however, is that Hamlili was a decades-long veteran of the violent jihadi underground that extends from northern Pakistan and Afghanistan into north Africa. From the Algerian town of Oran, he left with his father in 1986, at the age of 11, to join the fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Later he fell into extremist "takfir" groups, recruited militants to fight in the Algerian civil war, and gained a reputation for violence. Under the Taliban the Algerian worked as a translator for the foreign ministry and later for the Taliban intelligence services, shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the runup to 9/11.

Last January Hamlili and another inmate, Hasan Zemiri, were transferred to Algerian government custody. It was not clear whether they would be freed or made to stand trial. Clive Stafford Smith, whose legal charity, Reprieve, represents many current and former inmates, said the files revealed the "sheer bureaucratic incompetence" of the US military's intelligence gathering. "When you gather intelligence in such an unintelligent way; if for example you sweep people up who you know are innocent, and it is in these documents; and then mistreat them horribly, you are not going to get reliable intelligence. You are going to make yourself a lot of enemies."

The Guantánamo files are one of a series of secret US government databases allegedly leaked by US intelligence analyst Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks. The New York Times, which shared the files with the Guardian and US National Public Radio, said it did not obtain them from WikiLeaks. A number of other news organisations yesterday published reports based on files they had received from WikiLeaks.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/25/guantanamo-files-al-qaida-assassin-worked-for-mi6

Fox News: Al Qaeda Leader Dined at the Pentagon Just Months After 9/11

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Anwar Al-Awlaki may be the first American on the CIA's kill or capture list, but he was also a lunch guest of military brass at the Pentagon within months of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Fox News has learned. Documents exclusively obtained by Fox News, including an FBI interview conducted after the Fort Hood shooting in November 2009, state that Awlaki was taken to the Pentagon as part of the military’s outreach to the Muslim community in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. 

The incident was flagged by a current Defense Department employee who came forward and told investigators she helped arrange the meeting after she saw Awlaki speak in Alexandria, Va. The employee "attended this talk and while she arrived late she recalls being impressed by this imam. He condemned Al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks. During his talk he was 'harassed' by members of the audience and suffered it well," reads one document.

According to the documents, obtained as part of an ongoing investigation by the specials unit "Fox News Reporting," there was a push within the Defense Department to reach out to the Muslim community. "At that period in time, the secretary of the Army (redacted) was eager to have a presentation from a moderate Muslim." 

In addition, Awlaki "was considered to be an 'up and coming' member of the Islamic community. After her vetting, Aulaqi (Awlaki) was invited to and attended a luncheon at the Pentagon in the secretary of the Army's Office of Government Counsel." 

Awlaki, a Yemeni-American who was born in Las Cruces, N.M., was interviewed at least four times by the FBI in the first week after the attacks because of his ties to the three hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour. The three hijackers were all onboard Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon. Awlaki is now believed to be hiding in Yemen after he was linked to the alleged Ft. Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who e-mailed Awlaki prior to the attack.

Sources told Fox News that Awlaki, who is a former Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, met with the Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Yemen and was the middle-man between the young Nigerian and the bombmaker. Awlaki was also said to inspire would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. Apparently, none of the FBI's information about Awlaki was shared with the Pentagon. Former Army Secretary Tommy White, who led the Army in 2001, said he doesn't have any recollection of the luncheon or any contact with Awlaki. 

"If this was a luncheon at the Office of Government Counsel, I would not necessarily be there," he said. The Pentagon has offered no explanation of how a man, now on the CIA kills or capture list, ended up at a special lunch for Muslim outreach. After repeated requests for comment on the vetting process beginning on October 13th, an Army spokesman insisted Wednesday that the lunch was not an Army event. "The Army has found no evidence that the Army either sponsored or participated in the event described in this report," spokesman Thomas Collins said.

Collins also noted that the FBI document referred to the “Office of Government Counsel” but should read “Office of General Counsel.” Collins said he believed the event was sponsored by the office of the Secretary of Defense. A spokeswoman there said she would look into it and get back to Fox News.

A former high-ranking FBI agent told Fox News that at the time Awlaki went to lunch at the Pentagon, there was tremendous "arrogance" about the vetting process at the Pentagon. "They vetted people politically and showed indifference toward security and intelligence advice of others," the former agent said.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/10/20/al-qaeda-terror-leader-dined-pentagon-months/#ixzz1WHipSZNX

Saudi Arabia May Be Tied to 9/11 Attacks, Ex-Senators Say

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A lawsuit brought against Saudi Arabia by families of Sept. 11 victims and others claims there is a connection

Top secret information on the Saudi Arabia’s activities around the time of the September 11, 2001 suggest the Saudi government might have played a direct role in the terrorist attacks, according to two former U.S. senators privy to such information. In a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that has made its way through federal courts since 2002, plaintiffs are taking legal action against the Saudi government and dozens of institutions in the country for their alleged ties to al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11. The case is set to be reheard in United States District Court in Manhattan in the coming months.

“I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11th attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia,” former Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida said in an affidavit. Graham led a joint 2002 Congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks.

Another former senator, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, also served on that inquiry and said in a his own sworn affidavit that “significant questions remain unanswered” about the role of Saudi institutions. “Evidence relating to the plausible involvement of possible Saudi government agents in the September 11th attacks has never been fully pursued,” Mr. Kerrey said.

Lawyers for the Saudis in the case as well as officials at the Saudi Embassy in Washington have declined to comment on the case. The Saudi government has denied the accusations of involvement and have sought to have the case dismissed.

The classified evidence seen by Graham and Kerrey has not been disclosed, but the New York Times reports, “unanswered questions include the work of a number of Saudi-sponsored charities with financial links to Al Qaeda, as well as the role of a Saudi citizen living in San Diego at the time of the attacks, Omar al-Bayoumi, who had ties to two of the hijackers and to Saudi officials.”

Despite these known concerns, or “unanswered questions,” Washington has kept up extremely close ties to the Saudi government, giving them huge annual arms packages and constantly referring to them as our close allies. More than that, U.S. foreign aggression since 9/11 has almost always had a pretext of fighting terrorism, state sponsors of terror, or those with ties to terrorists. All of those cases of U.S. aggression appear to have had less evidence of ties to al-Qaeda than Saudi Arabia.

Source: http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/01/saudi-arabia-may-be-tied-to-911-attacks-ex-senators-say/

D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning

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FBI got tip-off on Headley's activities in 2005? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jghXfLs1mJI

American authorities sent David C. Headley, a small-time drug dealer and sometime informant, to work for them in Pakistan months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, despite a warning that he sympathized with radical Islamic groups, according to court records and interviews. Not long after Mr. Headley arrived there, he began training with terrorists, eventually playing a key role in the 2008 attacks that left 164 people dead in Mumbai. The October 2001 warning was dismissed, the authorities said, as the ire of a jilted girlfriend and for lack of proof. Less than a month later, those concerns did not come up when a federal court in New York granted Mr. Headley an early release from probation so that he could be sent to work for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in Pakistan. It is unclear what Mr. Headley was supposed to do in Pakistan for the Americans.

“All I knew was the D.E.A. wanted him in Pakistan as fast as possible because they said they were close to making some big cases,” said Luis Caso, Mr. Headley’s former probation officer.

On Sunday, while President Obama was visiting India, he briefed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the status of his administration’s investigation of Mr. Headley, including the failure to act on repeated warnings that he might be a terrorist. A senior United States official said the inquiry has concluded that while the government received warnings, it did not have strong enough evidence at the time to act on them. “Had the United States government sufficiently established he was engaged in plotting a terrorist attack in India, the information would have most assuredly been transferred promptly to the Indian government,” the official said in a statement to The New York Times. The statement did not make clear whether any American agencies would be held accountable.

In recent weeks, United States government officials have begun to acknowledge that Mr. Headley’s path from American informant to transnational terrorist illustrates the breakdowns and miscommunications that have bedeviled them since the Sept. 11 attacks. Warnings about his radicalism were apparently not shared with the drug agency that made use of his ties in Pakistan. The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., began an investigation into Mr. Headley’s government connections after reports last month that two of the former drug dealer’s ex-wives had gone to American authorities between 2005 and 2008, before the Mumbai attacks, to say they feared he was plotting with terrorists. Combined with the earlier warning from the former girlfriend, three of the women in Mr. Headley’s life reported his ties to terrorists, only to have those warnings dismissed.

An examination of Mr. Headley’s story shows that his government ties ran far deeper and longer than previously known. One senior American official knowledgeable about the case said he believed that Mr. Headley was a D.E.A. informant until at least 2003, meaning that he was talking to American agencies even as he was learning to deal with explosives and small arms in terrorist training camps. The review raises new questions about why the Americans missed warning signs that a valued informant was becoming an important figure in radical Islamic groups, and whether some officials chose to look the other way rather than believe the complaints about him. The October 2001 warning from the girlfriend was first reported Friday by ProPublica, the independent investigative news operation, and published in The Washington Post.

Fuller details of how the government handled the matter were provided to The Times by officials who did not want to be quoted discussing a continuing inquiry. They disclosed that the F.B.I. actually talked to Mr. Headley about the girlfriend, and he told them she was unreliable. They said that while he seemed to have a philosophical affinity for some groups, there was no evidence that he was plotting against the United States. Also influencing the handling of the case, they said, was that he had been a longtime informant. The Indian government has been outspoken in its concerns that the United States overlooked repeated warnings about Mr. Headley’s terrorist activities because of his links to both American law enforcement as well as to officials in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate — a key ally of the United States in the fight against terrorism.

Bruce O. Riedel, a terrorism expert at the Brookings Institution and a former C.I.A. officer, said the Indians were right to ask, “ ‘Why weren’t alarms screaming?’ ”Mr. Headley, 50, born in the United States to a Pakistani diplomat and Philadelphia socialite, has pleaded guilty in connection with the Mumbai plot and a thwarted attack against a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. As he has many times before, he is cooperating with the authorities, this time hoping to avoid the death penalty. Officials of the D.E.A., which has a long history with Mr. Headley, declined to discuss their relationship with him. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. said that Mr. Headley had never worked with them. Privately, the agencies point fingers at each other.

The transcript of a Nov. 16, 2001, probation hearing in federal court in New York shows the government took great pains not to identify which agency was handling Mr. Headley, or whether he worked for more than one. Mr. Caso, his former probation officer, recalled that Mr. Headley had been turned over to the D.E.A. Another person familiar with the case confirms this account. It was a world Mr. Headley knew well. After arrests in 1987 and 1998, he cooperated with the drug agency in exchange for lighter sentences. He specialized in the ties between Pakistani drug organizations and American dealers along the East Coast. A September 1998 letter that prosecutors submitted to court after an arrest then showed that the government considered Mr. Headley — who had admitted to distributing 15 kilograms of heroin over his years as a dealer — so “reliable and forthcoming,” that they sent him to Pakistan to “develop intelligence on Pakistani heroin traffickers.”

The letter indicates that Mr. Headley, who faced seven to nine years in prison for his offense, was such a trusted partner to the drug agency in the 1990s that he helped translate hours of tape-recorded telephone intercepts, and coached drug agency investigators on how to question Pakistani suspects. The courts looked favorably on his cooperation, according to records, sentencing Mr. Headley to 15 months in prison, and five years’ probation. While he was on probation, in October 2001, a woman told the F.B.I. that she believed her former boyfriend, Mr. Headley, was sympathetic to extremist groups in Pakistan, according to a senior American official who has been briefed on the case.

The government was flooded with thousands of such tips at that time, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. William Headley, an uncle, recalled that agents called his sister to ask if her son had terrorist leanings. “She didn’t seem upset at all by the call,” William Headley said. “And I didn’t think much of it either because at that time, I thought the government was checking out anyone who had ties to Pakistan.”

It is unclear how widely disseminated the warning was. But in that probation hearing one month later, the government enlisted Mr. Headley’s help again, suspending his sentence in exchange for what court records described only as “continuing cooperation.” According to the transcript, it was a rushed affair. The probation officer apologized for not being properly dressed, and the lawyers explained that they had not been able to make their case in writing. Mr. Headley was a potential gold mine, according to an official knowledgeable about the agreement to release him from probation. One person involved in the case said American agencies had “zero in terms of reliable intelligence. And it was clear from the conversations about him that the government was considering assignments that went beyond drugs.”

American authorities have not disclosed what happened after Mr. Headley resumed his role as an informant. But in December 2001, the same month Mr. Headley departed for Pakistan, the United States designated the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba as a terrorist organization. Less than two months later — in February 2002 — Mr. Headley began training with the group on “the merits of waging jihad.” Between 2002 and 2005, Mr. Headley attended at least four additional Lashkar sessions, including training on surveillance and small-arms combat. Then in 2007, he began scouting targets for the group to attack in Mumbai, staying at least twice at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel, and hiring fishermen for private tours of the port that helped him identify where the sea-traveling attackers could land. It is unclear when and why his connections to the United States government ended.

After the Mumbai attacks, Mr. Headley apparently turned his attention to Europe, according to recently released transcripts of his questioning by the Indian authorities. He contacted Ilyas Kashmiri, widely considered one of Al Qaeda’s most dangerous operatives, and begin plotting the attack against the Danish newspaper, according to his own account. Mr. Kashmiri put Mr. Headley in touch with Qaeda operatives in Europe who would help. He traveled to Britain in August 2009, then to Stockholm. British intelligence authorities alerted the United States to Mr. Headley’s August meeting in Britain, saying that they believed he was involved in a plot against the Denmark newspaper. He was arrested in connection with the Denmark plot last October.

American authorities had no idea that he was also involved in the Mumbai attacks until he told them. Since then, he has been in federal custody in Chicago. An American counterterrorism official said that agents who had questioned Mr. Headley called him “dangerously engaging.” The official said Mr. Headley was “a very charming individual who clearly knows how to manipulate the system to get what he wants” and added that agents steeled themselves before meeting with him so as not to “get sucked into his mind games.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/world/asia/08terror.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=mumbai&st=cse

U.S. Had Warnings on Plotter of Mumbai Attack


Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David C. Headley, was plotting an attack. It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds. Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed he was a member of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.

Despite those warnings by two of his three wives, Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving training in small-caliber weapons and countersurveillance, scouting targets for attacks, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless northwestern frontier. Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India. An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements in the years before the bombing, based on interviews in Washington, Pakistan, India and Morocco, shows that he had overlapping, even baffling, contacts among seemingly disparate groups — Pakistani intelligence, terrorists, and American drug investigators.

Those ties are rekindling concerns that the Mumbai bombings represent another communications breakdown in the fight against terrorism, and are raising the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A. More significantly, they may indicate American wariness to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans. The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.

It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley, who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities, or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by strained relations with their husband. Federal officials say that the State Department and the F.B.I. investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley at the time, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. D.E.A. officials have said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training. But some Indian officials say they suspect that Mr. Headley’s contacts with the American drug agency lasted much longer.

The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American former wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told the authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar. On Saturday, Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement, “The United States regularly provided threat information to Indian officials in 2008 before the attacks in Mumbai.” He also said, “Had we known about the timing and other specifics related to the Mumbai attacks, we would have immediately shared those details with the government of India.” Mr. Headley’s American wife was not the only one to come forward. The Moroccan wife described her separate warnings in an interview with The New York Times. Interviews with United States and allied intelligence and security officials illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI:

An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June. As part of Mr. Headley’s plea agreement, Indian investigators were allowed to interview him in Chicago, where he was arrested in October 2009. The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Major Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians. While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.

Besides Mr. Headley’s guilty plea in a United States court, seven Pakistani suspects have been charged there. American investigators say a critical figure who has not been charged is Sajid Mir, a Lashkar operative who became close to Mr. Headley as the plans for the Mumbai operation unfolded. The investigators fear he is still working on other plots. Mr. Headley was known both to Pakistani and American security officials long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military high school in Pakistan. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A. informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan and the United States. In several interviews in her home, Mr. Headley’s Moroccan wife, Faiza Outalha, described the warnings she gave to American officials less than a year before gunmen attacked several popular tourist attractions in Mumbai. She claims she even showed the embassy officials a photo of Mr. Headley and herself in the Taj Mahal Hotel, where they stayed twice in April and May 2007. Hotel records confirm their stay.

Ms. Outalha, 27, said that in two meetings with American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad, she told the authorities that her husband had many friends who were known members of Lashkar-e-Taiba. She said she told them that he was passionately anti-Indian, but that he traveled to India all the time for business deals that never seemed to amount to much. And she said she told them Mr. Headley assumed different identities: as a devout Muslim who went by the name Daood when he was in Pakistan, and as an American playboy named David, when he was in India.

“I told them, he’s either a terrorist, or he’s working for you,” she recalled saying to American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad. “Indirectly, they told me to get lost.”

Though there are lots of gaping holes left in Mr. Headley’s public profile, the one thing that is clear is he assumed multiple personas. He was born in the United States, the son of a Pakistani diplomat and a socialite from Philadelphia’s Main Line. When he was about a year old, his parents took him to Pakistan, where he attended the Hasan Abdal Cadet College, the country’s oldest military boarding school, just outside of Islamabad.

Mr. Headley’s parents divorced. And before he finished high school, he moved to Philadelphia to help his American mother run a bar, called the Khyber Pass. Later he opened a couple of video rental stores. But at the same time he was involved in a life of crime. Each time he was arrested on drug trafficking charges, he used his roots in the United States and Pakistan to make himself as valuable an asset to law enforcement as he was to the traffickers — one with the looks and passports to move easily across borders, and the charisma to penetrate secretive organizations. He was married at least three times. For one period he was married to all three wives — Ms. Outalha, who is a medical student half his age; a New York makeup artist; and a conservative Pakistani Muslim — at the same time.

Those relationships, however, caused him trouble. In 2005, his American wife filed domestic abuse charges against Mr. Headley, according to federal investigators in New York, and reported his ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba. The investigators said the tip was passed on to the F.B.I.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Then in December 2007, Ms. Outalha talked her way into the heavily guarded American Embassy in Islamabad. She went back a month later with more information. A senior administration official acknowledged that Ms. Outalha met twice with an assistant regional security officer and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer at the embassy. However, the administration official said Ms. Outalha offered almost no details to give credibility to her warnings.

“The texture of the meeting was that her husband was involved with bad people, and they were planning jihad,” the official said. “But she gave no details about who was involved, or what they planned to target.”

Given that she had been jilted, Ms. Outalha acknowledged she may not have been composed. “I wanted him in Guantánamo,” she said. More than that, however, Ms. Outalha says, she went to the American authorities looking for answers to questions about Mr. Headley’s real identity. In public he criticized the United States for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But at night he loved watching “Seinfeld” and Jay Leno.

Sipping tea in a cafe overlooking a plaza in Morocco, Ms. Outalha said that in hindsight, she is convinced that he is both men. She claims to be puzzled that American officials did not heed her warning. “I told them anything I could to get their attention,” she said of the American authorities at the embassy in Islamabad. “It was as if I was shouting, ‘This guy was a terrorist! You have to do something.’ ”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/world/asia/17headley.html?_r=1

Former ISI Chief: Mumbai And 9/11 Both “Inside Jobs”

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General Hamid Gul, the former head of the Pakistani ISI, told CNN yesterday that both the Mumbai attacks and 9/11 were “inside jobs,” much to the chagrin of host and CFR luminary Fareed Zakaria, who told viewers that Gul’s opinions were “absolutely wrong and thoroughly discredited”. “When you look at the full spectrum of possibilities, who could have done it, then one knows that Samjhauta Express was a similar case, in which Pakistan ISI was accused. But it turned out that it was the militant Hindus themselves who had killed 68 passengers in that train, and that it was an inside job,” said Gul.

“Now Colonel Srikant Purohit, who is a serving army officer, he has been caught in this particular case. And the whole thing has turned around.” “So, obviously, there is an inside job.”

The revelation that Mukhtar Ahmed, a “counterinsurgency police officer who may have been on an undercover mission” working for Indian authorities was arrested for illegally buying mobile phone cards used by the Mumbai gunmen, allied with the numerous intelligence warnings proving that the method, arrival and targets of attack were all known well in advance, proves Gul right in his assertion that the terrorists could not have achieved such carnage without help from people on the inside. Asked by Zakaria, “What is your hunch as to who did – who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks?,” Gul responded, “Well, I have been on record, and I said it is the Zionists or the neocons. They have done it. It was an inside job.” “And they wanted to go on the world conquerors. They were looking upon it as an opportunity window, when the Muslim world was lying prostrate. Russia was nowhere in sight. China was still not an economic giant that is has turned out to be.”

“And they thought that this was a good time to go and fill those strategic areas, which are still lying without any American presence. And, of course, to control the energy tap of the world.” “Presently, it is the Middle East, and in future it is going to be Central Asia,” added Gul. Gul told Zakaria that the evidence for 9/11 being planned by Osama Bin Laden and executed by Al-Qaeda has not emerged and that the events are still “shrouded in mystery”.

“A lot of people have a lot of misgivings about that. And it’s not only me. I think a lot of people in America would be thinking the same way. There are scientists, there are scholars, who have written articles on it,” added Gul, calling for President elect Barack Obama to set up a new commission to investigate the attacks. Gul said the attacks were planned inside America by people with a dangerous agenda who have “turned the world upside-down”.

Returning from a commercial break, Zakaria, editor of Newsweek, Council on Foreign Relations kingpin and also a Trilateral Commission board member, told his viewers, “Some of General Gul’s views are simply false. There is a mountain of evidence about 9/11 that refutes his assertions,” but Zakaria failed to cite any of it. Zakaria was then joined by counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen who said that the Mumbai attacks bore all the hallmarks of a “clandestine operation or a covert operation style activity,” but when pressed he refused to directly implicate Pakistan in the attack.


Lebanese in Shock Over Arrest of an Accused Spy

For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school. To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983. Now he sits in a Lebanese prison cell, accused by the authorities of betraying his country to an enemy state. Months after his arrest, his friends and former colleagues are still in shock over the extent of his deceptions: the carefully disguised trips abroad, the unexplained cash, the secret second wife.

Lebanese investigators say he has confessed to a career of espionage spectacular in its scope and longevity, a real-life John le Carré novel. Many intelligence agents are said to operate in the civil chaos of Lebanon, but Mr. Jarrah’s arrest has shed a rare light onto a world of spying and subversion that usually persists in secret. Mr. Jarrah’s first wife maintains that he was tortured, and is innocent; requests to interview him were denied. From his home in this Bekaa Valley village, Mr. Jarrah, 50, traveled often to Syria and to south Lebanon, where he photographed roads and convoys that might have been used to transport weapons to Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, investigators say. He spoke with his handlers by satellite phone, receiving “dead drops” of money, cameras and listening devices. Occasionally, on the pretext of a business trip, he traveled to Belgium and Italy, received an Israeli passport, and flew to Israel, where he was debriefed at length, investigators say.

At the start of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli officials called Mr. Jarrah to reassure him that his village would be spared and that he should stay at home, investigators said. He was finally arrested last July by Hezbollah, which now has perhaps the most powerful intelligence apparatus in this country. It handed him to the Lebanese military — along with his brother Yusuf, who is accused of helping him spy — and he awaits trial by a military court. Several current and former military officials agreed to provide details about his case on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss it before the trial began. Their accounts tallied with details provided by Mr. Jarrah’s relatives and former colleagues.

It is not the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, declined to discuss Mr. Jarrah’s situation, saying, “It is not our practice to publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.” Villagers here seemed incredulous that a man they knew all their lives could have taken money to spy for a country that they regard with unmixed hatred and disgust. Many maintained his innocence. But Raja Mosleh, the Palestinian doctor who was his partner for years in a school and health clinic near here, did not. “I never suspected him before,” Dr. Mosleh said. “But now, after linking all the incidents together, I feel he’s 100 percent guilty.” “He used to talk about the Palestinian cause all the time, how he supported the cause, he supported the people, he liked everybody — this son of a dog,” Dr. Mosleh added, his voice thick with contempt.

Mr. Jarrah would often borrow money to buy cigarettes, apparently posing as a man of limited means. Investigators say he received more than $300,000 for his work from Israel. Only recently did he begin to spend in ways that raised questions. About six years ago, neighbors said, he built a three-story villa with a terra-cotta roof that is by far the grandest house in this modest village of low concrete dwellings. Outside is a small roofed archway and a heavy iron gate, and on a recent day a German shepherd stood guard. Dr. Mosleh asked him where he got the money, and Mr. Jarrah said he got help from a daughter living in Brazil. It is a natural excuse in Lebanon, where a large portion of the population receives remittances from relatives abroad.

Mr. Jarrah also had a secret second wife, according to investigators and his former colleagues. Unlike his first wife, Maryam Shmouri al-Jarrah, who lived in relative grandeur with their five children in Maraj, the second wife lived in a cheap apartment in the town of Masnaa, near the Syrian border. This apparently allowed Mr. Jarrah to travel near the border in the unremarkable guise of a local working-class man. Mr. Jarrah has said he was recruited in 1983 — a year after Israel began a major invasion of Lebanon — by Israeli officers who had imprisoned him, according to investigators. He was offered regular payments in exchange for information about Palestinian militants and Syrian troop movements, they said. After Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, thousands of Lebanese from the occupied zone in the south were tried and sentenced — mostly to light prison terms — for collaborating with Israel.

Far from the border, a different class of collaborators, rooted in their communities, persisted. A few have been caught and sentenced. Mr. Jarrah’s motives remain a mystery. He said he tried to stop, but the Israelis would not let him, investigators said. It all came to an end last summer. He went on a trip to Syria in July, and when he returned he said he had been briefly detained by the Syrian police, his first wife said. He seemed very uneasy, not his usual self, she said. He left the house that night, saying he was going to Beirut, and never returned, Mrs. Jarrah said. Only three months later did she get a call from the Lebanese Army saying it had taken custody of him. A few weeks ago, Mrs. Jarrah said, she was allowed to see him. He looked terrible, exhausted, she said. Lebanese security forces released a photograph of Mr. Jarrah, taken before his arrest. In it, he appears against a blue and white backdrop, dressed in a formal dark shirt, wearing an enigmatic smile.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/world/middleeast/19lebanon.html?hp

'CIA agent Davis linked to Taliban'

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Documents show Raymond Davis, an American who killed two Pakistanis in Lahore in January, had links with CIA's espionage and sabotage plans in the Asian country.

“The documents, photographs and the evidence that has come out from Davis' sofa almost confirms his links with Taliban terrorism…the attacks on ISI and the security establishment as well as the drone attacks,” Pakistani defense analyst and security consultant Zaid Hamid said in an interview with Press TV's US Desk on Saturday.
 
Hamid added that there is evidence confirming Davis has been a US undercover operative in Pakistan. “With this kind of evidence the issue is not just the assassination of those two boys on the streets of Lahore but it is an indication of a much larger network of CIA espionage and sabotage inside Pakistan,” he said. Earlier, US President Barack Obama urged Pakistan to free the US official saying he enjoys diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention.

However, under public pressure, Lahore High Court adjourned a decision on whether Davis had diplomatic immunity. The court gave the foreign ministry more time to answer on whether full diplomatic status was held by Davis, who has been remanded in custody since his arrest following the incident on January 27. Pakistani police have pressed charges of espionage against Davis, saying he is an employee of the notorious US security firm Xe/Blackwater, working in Pakistan under the cover of the so-called war on terror.

Source: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/166139.html

How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States

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“America, you from America?” “Yes.” “You’re from America, and you belong to the American Embassy?” “Yes,” the American voice said loudly above the chatter. “My passport — at the site I showed the police officer. . . . It’s somewhere. It’s lost.” 

On the jumpy video footage of the interrogation, he reached beneath his checkered flannel shirt and produced a jumble of identification badges hanging around his neck. “This is an old badge. This is Islamabad.” He showed the badge to the man across the desk and then flipped to a more recent one proving his employment in the American Consulate in Lahore.

 “You are working at the consulate general in Lahore?” the policeman asked. “Yes.” “As a . . . ?” “I, I just work as a consultant there.” “Consultant?” The man behind the desk paused for a moment and then shot a question in Urdu to another policeman. “And what’s the name?” “Raymond Davis,” the officer responded. “Raymond Davis,” the American confirmed. “Can I sit down?” “Please do. Give you water?” the officer asked. “Do you have a bottle? A bottle of water?” Davis asked.  Another officer in the room laughed. “You want water?” he asked. “No money, no water.” Another policeman walked into the room and asked for an update. “Is he understanding everything? And he just killed two men?”

Hours earlier, Davis had been navigating dense traffic in Lahore, his thick frame wedged into the driver’s seat of a white Honda Civic. A city once ruled by Mughals, Sikhs and the British, Lahore is Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital, and for nearly a decade it had been on the fringes of America’s secret war in Pakistan. But the map of Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been redrawn in recent years, and factions that once had little contact with one another had cemented new alliances in response to the C.I.A.’s drone campaign in the western mountains. Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India were now aligning themselves closer to Al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was why Davis and a C.I.A. team set up operations from a safe house in the city.

But now Davis was sitting in a Lahore police station, having shot two young men who approached his car on a black motorcycle, their guns drawn, at an intersection congested with cars, bicycles and rickshaws. Davis took his semiautomatic Glock pistol and shot through the windshield, shattering the glass and hitting one of the men numerous times. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his car and shot several rounds into his back.

He radioed the American Consulate for help, and within minutes a Toyota Land Cruiser was in sight, careering in the wrong direction down a one-way street. But the S.U.V. struck and killed a young Pakistani motorcyclist and then drove away. An assortment of bizarre paraphernalia was found, including a black mask, approximately 100 bullets and a piece of cloth bearing an American flag. The camera inside Davis’s car contained photos of Pakistani military installations, taken surreptitiously.

More than two years later, the Raymond Davis episode has been largely forgotten in the United States. It was immediately overshadowed by the dramatic raid months later that killed Osama bin Laden — consigned to a footnote in the doleful narrative of America’s relationship with Pakistan. But dozens of interviews conducted over several months, with government officials and intelligence officers in Pakistan and in the United States, tell a different story: that the real unraveling of the relationship was set off by the flurry of bullets Davis unleashed on the afternoon of Jan. 27, 2011, and exacerbated by a series of misguided decisions in the days and weeks that followed. In Pakistan, it is the Davis affair, more than the Bin Laden raid, that is still discussed in the country’s crowded bazaars and corridors of power.

Davis was taken to Kot Lakhpat prison, on the industrial fringes of Lahore, a jail with a reputation for inmates dying under murky circumstances. He was separated from the rest of the prisoners and held in a section of the decaying facility where the guards didn’t carry weapons, a concession for his safety that American officials managed to extract from the prison staff. The United States Consulate in Lahore had negotiated another safeguard: A small team of dogs was tasting Davis’s food, checking that it had not been laced with poison.

For many senior Pakistani spies, the man sitting in the jail cell represented solid proof of their suspicions that the C.I.A. had sent a vast secret army to Pakistan, men who sowed chaos and violence as part of the covert American war in the country. For the C.I.A., the eventual disclosure of Davis’s role with the agency shed an unflattering light on a post–Sept. 11 reality: that the C.I.A. had farmed out some of its most sensitive jobs to outside contractors — many of them with neither the experience nor the temperament to work in the war zones of the Islamic world.

The third child of a bricklayer and a cook, Davis grew up in a small clapboard house outside Big Stone Gap, a town of nearly 6,000 people in Virginia coal country. He became a football and wrestling star at the local high school, and after graduating in 1993, Davis enlisted in the Army and did a tour in Macedonia in 1994 as a United Nations peacekeeper. When his five-year hitch in the infantry was up, he re-enlisted, this time in the Army’s Third Special Forces Group based at Fort Bragg, N.C. He left the Army in 2003 and, like hundreds of other retired Navy SEALs and Green Berets, was hired by the private security firm Blackwater and soon found himself in Iraq working security for the C.I.A.

Little is known about his work for Blackwater, but by 2006, Davis had left the firm and, together with his wife, founded a security company in Las Vegas. Soon he was hired by the C.I.A. as a private contractor, what the agency calls a “Green Badge,” for the color of the identification cards that contractors show to enter C.I.A. headquarters at Langley. Like Davis, many of the contractors were hired to fill out the C.I.A.’s Global Response Staff — bodyguards who traveled to war zones to protect case officers, assess the security of potential meeting spots, even make initial contact with sources to ensure that case officers wouldn’t be walking into an ambush. Officers from the C.I.A.’s security branch came under withering fire on the roof of the agency’s base in Benghazi, Libya, last September. The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had so stretched the C.I.A.’s own cadre of security officers that the agency was forced to pay inflated sums to private contractors to do the security jobs. When Davis first deployed with the C.I.A. to Pakistan in 2008, he worked from the agency’s base in Peshawar, earning upward of $200,000 a year.

By mid-February 2011, with Davis still sitting in prison, anti-American passions were fully inflamed, and daily street protests and newspaper editorials demanded that the government not cave to Washington’s demands for Davis’s release but instead sentence him to death. The evidence at the time indicated that the men Davis killed had carried out a string of petty thefts that day, but there was an added problem: the third man killed by the unmarked American S.U.V. fleeing the scene. Making matters even worse for Davis was the fact that he was imprisoned in Lahore, where the family of Nawaz Sharif dominated the political culture. The former leader of the country made no secret about his intentions to once again run Pakistan, making him the chief antagonist to President Asif Ali Zardari and his political machine in Islamabad, a four-hour drive away. As the American Embassy in Islamabad leaned on Zardari’s government to get Davis released from jail, the diplomats soon realized that Zardari had little influence over the police officers and judges in the city of the president’s bitter rival.

But the most significant factor ensuring that Davis would languish in jail was that the Obama administration had yet to tell Pakistan’s government what the Pakistanis already suspected, and what Raymond Davis’s marksmanship made clear: He wasn’t just another paper-shuffling American diplomat. Davis’s work in Pakistan was much darker, and it involved probing an exposed nerve in the already-hypersensitive relationship between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s military intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I.

Ever since the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Army of the Pure) dispatched teams of assassins to lay siege to luxury hotels and other sites in Mumbai, India, in November 2008, killing and wounding more than 500 people over four days of mayhem, C.I.A. analysts had been warning that the group was seeking to raise its global profile by carrying out spectacular attacks beyond South Asia. This spurred the agency to assign more of its expanding army of operatives in Pakistan toward gathering intelligence about Lashkar’s operations — a decision that put the interests of the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. in direct conflict. It was one thing for American spies to be lurking around the tribal areas, hunting for Al Qaeda figures; it was quite another to go into Pakistani cities on espionage missions against a group that the I.S.I. considered a valuable proxy force in its continuing battle with India.

The I.S.I. had nurtured the group for years as a useful asset against India, and Lashkar’s sprawling headquarters outside Lahore housed a radical madrassa, a market, a hospital, even a fish farm. The group’s charismatic leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, had been put under house arrest at various times, but in 2009 the Lahore High Court quashed all terrorism charges against him and set him free. A stocky man with a wild beard, Saeed preached out in the open on many Fridays, flanked by bodyguards and delivering sermons to throngs of his followers about the imperialism of the United States, India and Israel. Even after the U.S. offered a $10 million reward for evidence linking Saeed to the Mumbai attacks, he continued to move freely in public, burnishing his legend as a Pakistani version of Robin Hood.

By the time Raymond Davis moved into a safe house with a handful of other C.I.A. officers and contractors in late 2010, the bulk of the agency’s officers in Lahore were focused on investigating the growth of Lashkar. To get more of its spies into Pakistan, the C.I.A. had exploited the arcane rules in place for approving visas for Americans. The State Department, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon all had separate channels to request visas for their personnel, and all of them led to the desk of Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s pro-American ambassador in Washington. Haqqani had orders from Islamabad to be lenient in approving the visas, because many of the Americans coming to Pakistan were — at least officially — going to be administering millions of dollars in foreign-aid money. By the time of the Lahore killings, in early 2011, so many Americans were operating inside Pakistan under both legitimate and false identities that even the U.S. Embassy didn’t have accurate records of their identities and whereabouts.

The American Embassy in Islamabad is essentially a fortress within a fortress, a pile of buildings enclosed by walls topped with razor wire and surveillance cameras and then encircled by an outer ring of walls that separates a leafy area, called the Diplomatic Enclave, from the rest of the city. Inside the embassy, the work of diplomats and spies is kept largely separate, with the C.I.A. station occupying a warren of offices in its own wing, accessed only through doors with coded locks.

After Davis was picked up by the Lahore police, the embassy became a house divided by more than mere geography. Just days before the shootings, the C.I.A. sent a new station chief to Islamabad. Old-school and stubborn, the new chief did not come to Pakistan to be friendly with the I.S.I. Instead, he wanted to recruit more Pakistani agents to work for the C.I.A. under the I.S.I.’s nose, expand electronic surveillance of I.S.I. offices and share little information with Pakistani intelligence officers.

That hard-nosed attitude inevitably put him at odds with the American ambassador in Islamabad, Cameron Munter. A bookish career diplomat with a Ph.D. in history, Munter had ascended the ranks of the State Department’s bureaucracy and accepted several postings in Iraq before ultimately taking over the American mission in Islamabad, in late 2010. The job was considered one of the State Department’s most important and difficult assignments, and Munter had the burden of following Anne W. Patterson, an aggressive diplomat who, in the three years before Munter arrived, cultivated close ties to officials in the Bush and Obama administrations and won praise from the C.I.A. for her unflinching support for drone strikes in the tribal areas.

Munter saw some value to the drone program but was skeptical about the long-term benefits. Arriving in Islamabad at a time when relations between the United States and Pakistan were quickly deteriorating, Munter wondered whether the pace of the drone war might be undercutting relations with an important ally for the quick fix of killing midlevel terrorists. He would learn soon enough that his views about the drone program ultimately mattered little. In the Obama administration, when it came to questions about war and peace in Pakistan, it was what the C.I.A. believed that really counted.

With Davis sitting in prison, Munter argued that it was essential to go immediately to the head of the I.S.I. at the time, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, to cut a deal. The U.S. would admit that Davis was working for the C.I.A., and Davis would quietly be spirited out of the country, never to return again. But the C.I.A. objected. Davis had been spying on a militant group with extensive ties to the I.S.I., and the C.I.A. didn’t want to own up to it. Top C.I.A. officials worried that appealing for mercy from the I.S.I. might doom Davis. He could be killed in prison before the Obama administration could pressure Islamabad to release him on the grounds that he was a foreign diplomat with immunity from local laws — even those prohibiting murder. On the day of Davis’s arrest, the C.I.A. station chief told Munter that a decision had been made to stonewall the Pakistanis. Don’t cut a deal, he warned, adding, Pakistan is the enemy.

The strategy meant that American officials, from top to bottom, had to dissemble both in public and in private about what exactly Davis had been doing in the country. On Feb. 15, more than two weeks after the shootings, President Obama offered his first comments about the Davis affair. The matter was simple, Obama said in a news conference: Davis, “our diplomat in Pakistan,” should be immediately released under the “very simple principle” of diplomatic immunity. “If our diplomats are in another country,” said the president, “then they are not subject to that country’s local prosecution.”

Calling Davis a “diplomat” was, technically, accurate. He had been admitted into Pakistan on a diplomatic passport. But there was a dispute about whether his work in the Lahore Consulate, as opposed to the American Embassy in Islamabad, gave him full diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. And after the shootings in Lahore, the Pakistanis were not exactly receptive to debating the finer points of international law. As they saw it, Davis was an American spy who had not been declared to the I.S.I. and whom C.I.A. officials still would not admit they controlled. General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief, spoke privately by phone and in person with Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., to get more information about the matter. He suspected that Davis was a C.I.A. employee and suggested to Panetta that the two spy agencies handle the matter quietly. Meeting with Panetta, he posed a direct question.

Was Davis working for the C.I.A.? Pasha asked. No, he’s not one of ours, Panetta replied. Panetta went on to say that the matter was out of his hands, and that the issue was being handled inside State Department channels. Pasha was furious, and he decided to leave Davis’s fate in the hands of the judges in Lahore. The United States had just lost its chance, he told others, to quickly end the dispute.

That the C.I.A. director would be overseeing a large clandestine network of American spies in Pakistan and then lie to the I.S.I. director about the extent of America’s secret war in the country showed just how much the relationship had unraveled since the days in 2002, when the I.S.I. teamed with the C.I.A. in Peshawar to hunt for Osama bin Laden in western Pakistan. Where had it gone so wrong?

While the spy agencies had had a fraught relationship since the beginning of the Afghan war, the first major breach came in July 2008, when C.I.A. officers in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief, to tell him that President Bush had signed off on a set of secret orders authorizing a new strategy in the drone wars. No longer would the C.I.A. give Pakistan advance warning before launching missiles from Predator or Reaper drones in the tribal areas. From that point on, the C.I.A. officers told Kayani, the C.I.A.’s killing campaign in Pakistan would be a unilateral war.

The decision had been made in Washington after months of wrenching debate about the growth of militancy in Pakistan’s tribal areas; a highly classified C.I.A. internal memo, dated May 1, 2007, concluded that Al Qaeda was at its most dangerous since 2001 because of the base of operations that militants had established in the tribal areas. That assessment became the cornerstone of a yearlong discussion about the Pakistan problem. Some experts in the State Department warned that expanding the C.I.A. war in Pakistan would further stoke anti-American anger on the streets and could push the country into chaos. But officials inside the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center argued for escalating the drone campaign without the I.S.I.’s blessing. Since the first C.I.A. drone strike in Pakistan in 2004, only a small number of militants on the C.I.A.’s list of “high-value targets” had been killed by drone strikes, and other potential strikes were scuttled at the last minute because of delays in getting Pakistani approval, or because the targets seemed to have been tipped off and had fled.

So, in July 2008, when the C.I.A.’s director, Michael Hayden, and his deputy, Stephen Kappes, came to the White House to present the agency’s plan to wage a unilateral war in the mountains of Pakistan, it wasn’t a hard sell to a frustrated president. That began the relentless, years-long drone assault on the tribal areas that President Obama continued when he took office. And as the C.I.A.’s relationship with the I.S.I. soured, Langley sent station chiefs out to Islamabad who spent far less time and energy building up good will with Pakistani spies than their predecessors had. From 2008 on, the agency cycled a succession of seasoned case officers through Islamabad, and each left Pakistan more embittered than the last. One of them had to leave the country in haste when his identity was revealed in the Pakistani press. The C.I.A. suspected the leak came from the I.S.I.

Even many of the operations that at first seemed likely to signal a new era of cooperation between the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. ended in recriminations and finger-pointing. In January 2010, a clandestine team of C.I.A. officers and American special-operations troops working in Karachi traced a cellphone to a house in Baldia Town, a slum in the western part of the sprawling city. The C.I.A. did not conduct unilateral operations inside large Pakistani cities, so the Americans notified the I.S.I. about the intelligence. Pakistani troops and policemen launched a surprise raid on the house.

Although the C.I.A. didn’t know in advance, hiding inside the house was Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a man considered to be the Afghan Taliban’s military commander and the second in command to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban. Only after suspects in the house were arrested and questioned did the C.I.A. learn that Baradar was among the detainees. The I.S.I. took him to a detention facility in an industrial section of Islamabad and refused the C.I.A. access to him. “At that point, things got really complicated,” one former C.I.A. officer said.

Was the entire episode a setup? Rumors had circulated inside Pakistan that Baradar wanted to cut a deal with the Americans and bring the Taliban to the negotiating table in Afghanistan. Had the I.S.I. somehow engineered the entire arrest, feeding intelligence to the C.I.A. so that Baradar could be taken off the street and the nascent peace talks spoiled? Had the I.S.I. played the C.I.A.? Months later, senior C.I.A. officials at Langley still couldn’t answer those questions. Today, more than three years later, Mullah Baradar remains in Pakistani custody.

As Davis languished in the jail cell in Lahore, the C.I.A. was pursuing its most promising lead about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden since 2001, when he escaped from Tora Bora, in Afghanistan, and fled across the border into Pakistan. A small group of officers inside the agency’s Counterterrorism Center had become convinced that Bin Laden was hiding in a large compound in Abbottabad, a quiet hamlet north of Islamabad. For months, Panetta had been pushing clandestine officers to find a shred of hard proof that Bin Laden was hiding in the compound. The intelligence-gathering operating in Abbottabad had become the highest priority for the C.I.A. in Pakistan.

It was therefore more than a bit inconvenient that one of its undercover officers was sitting in a jail in Lahore facing a double murder charge. Pakistan’s Islamist parties organized street protests and threatened violent riots if Raymond Davis was not tried and hanged for his crimes. American diplomats in Lahore regularly visited Davis, but the Obama administration continued to stonewall Pakistan’s government about the nature of Davis’s work in the country.

And then the episode claimed another victim. On Feb. 6, the grieving widow of one of Davis’s victims swallowed a lethal amount of rat poison and was rushed to the hospital in Faisalabad, where doctors pumped her stomach. The woman, Shumaila Faheem, was certain that the United States and Pakistan would quietly broker a deal to release her husband’s killer from prison, a view she expressed to her doctors from her hospital bed. “They are already treating my husband’s murderer like a V.I.P. in police custody, and I am sure they will let him go because of international pressure,” she said. She died shortly afterward and instantly became a martyr for anti-American groups inside Pakistan.

The furor over the Davis incident was quickly escalating, threatening to shut down most C.I.A. operations in the country and derail the intelligence-gathering operation in Abbottabad. But the C.I.A. stood firm and sent top officials to Islamabad, who told Ambassador Munter to stick to the strategy.

By then, though, Munter had decided that the C.I.A.’s strategy wasn’t working, and eventually even high-level officials in the agency began to realize that stonewalling the Pakistanis was only causing the I.S.I. to dig in. After discussions among White House, State Department and C.I.A. officials in Washington, Munter approached General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief, and came clean. Davis was with the C.I.A., he said, and the United States needed to get him out of the country as quickly as possible. Pasha was fuming that Leon Panetta had lied to him, and he was going to make the Americans squirm by letting Davis sit in jail while he considered — on his own timetable — the best way to resolve the situation.

Back in Washington, Ambassador Haqqani was summoned to C.I.A. headquarters on Feb. 21 and taken into Panetta’s spacious office overlooking the agency’s campus in Langley, Va. Sitting around a large conference table, Panetta asked Haqqani for his help securing Davis’s release.

“If you’re going to send a Jason Bourne character to Pakistan, he should have the skills of a Jason Bourne to get away,” Haqqani shot back, according to one person who attended the meeting.

More than a week later, General Pasha came back to Ambassador Munter to discuss a new strategy. It was a solution based on an ancient tradition that would allow the matter to be settled outside the unpredictable court system. The issue had already been discussed among a number of Pakistani and American officials, including Ambassador Haqqani in Washington. The reckoning for Davis’s actions would come in the form of “blood money,” or diyat, a custom under Shariah law that compensates the families of victims for their dead relatives. The matter would be handled quietly, and Davis would be released from jail.

Pasha ordered I.S.I. operatives in Lahore to meet the families of the three men killed during the January episode and negotiate a settlement. Some of the relatives initially resisted, but the I.S.I. negotiators were not about to let the talks collapse. After weeks of discussions, the parties agreed on a total of 200 million Pakistani rupees, approximately $2.34 million, to offer “forgiveness” to the jailed C.I.A. officer.

Only a small group of Obama administration officials knew of the talks, and as they dragged on, Lahore’s high court was preparing to rule on whether Davis would be granted diplomatic immunity, a decision the C.I.A. expected to go against the United States and worried might set a precedent for future cases in Pakistan.

Davis remained in the dark about all of this. When he arrived for his court appearance on March 16, he was fully expecting to hear that the trial would proceed and that the judge would issue a new court date. He was escorted into the courtroom, his wrists cuffed in front of him, and locked inside an iron cage near the judge’s bench. According to one person’s account, General Pasha sat in the back of the courtroom, his cellphone out. He began sending out a stream of nervous text messages to Ambassador Munter, updating him about the court proceedings. Pasha was one of the most powerful men in Pakistan, and yet the I.S.I. had little control over the mercurial courts in Lahore, and he wasn’t entirely sure that things would proceed according to plan.

The first part of the hearing went as everyone expected. The judge, saying that the case would go ahead, noted that his ruling on diplomatic immunity would come in a matter of days. Pakistani reporters frantically began filing their stories about how this seemed a blow to the American case, and that it appeared that Davis would not be released from jail anytime soon. But then the judge ordered the courtroom cleared, and General Pasha’s secret plan unfolded.

Through a side entrance, 18 relatives of the victims walked into the room, and the judge announced that the civil court had switched to a Shariah court. Each of the family members approached Davis, some of them with tears in their eyes or sobbing outright, and announced that he or she forgave him. Pasha sent another text message to Munter: The matter was settled. Davis was a free man. In a Lahore courtroom, the laws of God had trumped the laws of man.

The drama played out entirely in Urdu, and throughout the proceeding, a baffled Davis sat silently inside the cage. He was even more stunned when I.S.I. operatives whisked him out of the courthouse through a back entrance and pushed him into a waiting car that sped to the Lahore airport.

The move had been choreographed to get Davis out of the country as quickly as possible. American officials, including Munter, were waiting for Davis at the airport, and some began to worry. Davis had, after all, already shot dead two men he believed were threatening him. If he thought he was being taken away to be killed, he might try to make an escape, even try to kill the I.S.I. operatives inside the car. When the car arrived at the airport and pulled up to the plane ready to take Davis out of Pakistan, the C.I.A. operative was in a daze. It appeared to the Americans waiting for him that Davis realized only then that he was safe.

The Davis affair led Langley to order dozens of covert officers out of Pakistan in the hope of lowering the temperature in the C.I.A. – I.S.I. relationship. Ambassador Munter issued a public statement shortly after the bizarre court proceeding, saying he was “grateful for the generosity” of the families and expressing regret for the entire incident and the “suffering it caused.”

But the secret deal only fueled the anger in Pakistan, and anti-American protests flared in major cities, including Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore. Demonstrators set tires ablaze, clashed with Pakistani riot police and brandished placards with slogans like “I Am Raymond Davis, Give Me a Break, I Am Just a C.I.A. Hit Man.”

The entire episode — and bin Laden’s killing in Abbottabad later that spring — extinguished any lingering productive relations between the United States and Pakistan. Leon Panetta’s relationship with General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief, was poisoned, and the already small number of Obama officials pushing for better relations between Washington and Islamabad dwindled even further. Munter was reporting daily back to Washington about the negative impact of the armed-drone campaign and about how the C.I.A. seemed to be conducting a war in a vacuum, oblivious to the ramifications that the drone strikes were having on American relations with Pakistan’s government.

The C.I.A. had approval from the White House to carry out missile strikes in Pakistan even when the agency’s targeters weren’t certain about exactly whom they were killing. Under the rules of so-called “signature strikes,” decisions about whether to fire missiles from drones could be made based on patterns of activity deemed suspicious. For instance, if a group of young “military-age males” were observed moving in and out of a suspected militant training camp and were thought to be carrying weapons, they could be considered legitimate targets. American officials admit it is nearly impossible to judge a person’s age from thousands of feet in the air, and in Pakistan’s tribal areas, adolescent boys are often among militant fighters. Using such broad definitions to determine who was a “combatant” and therefore a legitimate target allowed Obama administration officials at one point to claim that the escalation of drone strikes in Pakistan had not killed any civilians for a year. It was something of a trick of logic: in an area of known militant activity, all military-age males could be considered enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who was killed in a drone strike there was categorized as a combatant.

The perils of this approach were laid bare on March 17, 2011, the day after Davis was released from prison and spirited out of the country. C.I.A. drones attacked a tribal council meeting in the village of Datta Khel, in North Waziristan, killing dozens of men. Ambassador Munter and some at the Pentagon thought the timing of the strike was disastrous, and some American officials suspected that the massive strike was the C.I.A. venting its anger about the Davis episode. More important, however, many American officials believed that the strike was botched, and that dozens of people died who shouldn’t have.

Other American officials came to the C.I.A.’s defense, saying that the tribal gathering was in fact a meeting of senior militants and therefore a legitimate target. But the drone strike unleashed a furious response in Pakistan, and street protests in Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar forced the temporary closure of American consulates in those cities.

Munter said he believed that the C.I.A. was being reckless and that his position as ambassador was becoming untenable. His relationship with the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad, already strained because of their disagreements over the handling of the Davis case, deteriorated even further when Munter demanded that the C.I.A. give him the chance to call off specific missile strikes. During one screaming match between the two men, Munter tried to make sure the station chief knew who was in charge, only to be reminded of who really held the power in Pakistan.

“You’re not the ambassador!” Munter shouted. “You’re right, and I don’t want to be the ambassador,” the station chief replied.

This turf battle spread to Washington, and a month after Bin Laden was killed, President Obama’s top advisers were arguing in a National Security Council meeting over who really was in charge in Pakistan. At the June 2011 meeting, Munter, who participated via secure video link, began making his case that he should have veto power over specific drone strikes.

Panetta cut Munter off, telling him that the C.I.A. had the authority to do what it wanted in Pakistan. It didn’t need to get the ambassador’s approval for anything. “I don’t work for you,” Panetta told Munter, according to several people at the meeting. But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to Munter’s defense. She turned to Panetta and told him that he was wrong to assume he could steamroll the ambassador and launch strikes against his approval.
“No, Hillary,” Panetta said, “it’s you who are flat wrong.”

There was a stunned silence, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon tried to regain control of the meeting. In the weeks that followed, Donilon brokered a compromise of sorts: Munter would be allowed to object to specific drone strikes, but the C.I.A. could still press its case to the White House and get approval for strikes even over the ambassador’s objections. Obama’s C.I.A. had, in essence, won yet again.

As for Raymond Davis, he tried to settle back into his life in the United States after being flown out of Pakistan. He found work as a firearms instructor, but in the end he couldn’t stay out of trouble. On Oct. 1, 2011, just seven months after his abrupt departure from Pakistan, Davis was eyeing a parking spot in front of a bagel shop in Highlands Ranch, Colo., a suburb of Denver. So was Jeffrey Maes, a 50-year-old minister who was driving with his wife and two young daughters. When Maes beat Davis to the spot, Davis shouted profanities through his open window. Then he jumped out of his car and confronted Maes, telling the minister that he had been waiting for the parking spot.

According to an affidavit given by Maes, he told Davis to “relax and quit being stupid.” Davis struck Maes in the face, knocking him to the pavement. Maes said in court that when he stood up from the fall, Davis continued to hit him. The minister’s wife, later recalling the episode, said she had never in her life seen a man so full of rage. Just last month, after protracted legal proceedings, Davis pleaded guilty to a charge of third-degree misdemeanor assault and was sentenced to two years of probation. A judge ordered him to pay restitution and attend anger-management classes.

On the streets and in the markets of Pakistan, Raymond Davis remains the boogeyman, an American killer lurking in the subconscious of a deeply insecure nation. On a steamy summer night last summer, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed — the head of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the reason Davis and his team were sent to Lahore in the first place — stood on the back of a flatbed truck and spoke to thousands of cheering supporters less than a mile from Pakistan’s Parliament building in Islamabad. A $10 million American bounty still hung over Saeed’s head, part of a broader squeeze on Lashkar-e-Taiba’s finances. But there he was, out in the open and whipping the crowd into a fury with a pledge to “rid Pakistan of American slavery.” The rally was the culmination of a march from Lahore to Islamabad that Saeed ordered to protest American involvement in the country. The night before the march reached the capital, six Pakistani troops were killed by gunmen riding motorcycles not far from where the marchers were spending the night, leading to speculation that Saeed had ordered the attack.

But Saeed insisted that night that he was not to blame for the deaths. The killers were foreigners, he told the crowd, a group of assassins with a secret agenda to destabilize Pakistan and steal its nuclear arsenal. With a dramatic flourish, he said he knew exactly who had killed the men. “It was the Americans!” he shouted to loud approvals. “It was Blackwater!” The cheers grew even louder. He saved the biggest applause line for last: “It was another Raymond Davis!” This article is adapted from “The Way of the Knife: The C.I.A., a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” published by the Penguin Press.

Mark Mazzetti is a national-security correspondent for The Times. He shared a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/magazine/raymond-davis-pakistan.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Americans rise in rank within Somalia jihadi militant group linked to al-Qaida

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The October al-Qaida video shows a light-skinned man handing out food to families displaced by famine in Somalia. But the masked man is not Somali, or even African — he’s a Wisconsin native who grew up in San Diego. A handful of young Muslims from the U.S. are taking high-visibility propaganda and operational roles inside an al-Qaida-linked insurgent force in Somalia known as al-Shabab. While most are from Minnesota, which has the largest Somali population in the nation, al-Shabab members include a Californian and an Alabaman with no ancestral ties to Somalia.

“They are being deployed in roles that appear to be shrewdly calculated to raise al-Shabab’s international profile and to recruit others, especially those from the United States and other English-speaking countries,” said Anders Folk, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted suspected al-Shabab supporters in Minnesota.

Officials fear another terrorist attack in East Africa. Kenya announced on Jan. 7 that it had thwarted attempted al-Shabab attacks over the holidays. The same day, Britain’s Foreign Office urged Britons in Kenya to be extra vigilant, warning that terrorists there may be “in the final stages of planning attacks.”

More than 40 people have traveled from the U.S. to Somalia to join al-Shabab since 2007, and 15 of them have died, according to a report from the House Homeland Security Committee. Federal investigations into al-Shabab recruitment in the U.S. have centered on Minnesota, which has more than 32,000 Somalis.

At least 21 men have left Minnesota to join al-Shabab in that same time. The FBI has confirmed that at least two of them died in Somalia as suicide bombers. A U.S. citizen is suspected in a third suicide bombing, and another is under investigation in connection with a fourth bombing on Oct. 29 that killed 15 people.

The star of the al-Qaida video was Jehad Mostafa, 30, a Californian who handed out food using the name Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir, according to the SITE Monitoring Service. The Washington Post reported last year that Mostafa served as top lieutenant to Saleh Nabhan, a senior al-Qaida operative killed by Navy SEALs in a helicopter attack inside Somalia in 2010. Mostafa and the Alabaman, Omar Hammami, 27, are among about a dozen men who have been charged in federal court in the U.S. and are believed to be in Somalia.

The Americans appear to have been motivated by the Ethiopian army’s intervention in Somalia in 2006, which they saw as an invasion. However, many experts believe it’s only a matter of time before al-Shabab turns its wrath on the U.S., which in February 2008 designated it as a terrorist organization. The group killed 76 people in terrorist bombings in Uganda in 2010 during the World Cup final.

U.S. military commanders fear that Americans inside al-Shabab could train as bombmakers and use their U.S. passports to carry out attacks in the United States. E.K. Wilson, the agent overseeing the FBI’s investigation in Minneapolis, said he cannot comment on whether there is an outstanding order to capture or kill Americans fighting for al-Shabab. The FBI has publicly said the Americans should return to the U.S.

It’s a mystery what caused Mostafa, a young man whom many remember as mild and friendly, to join an extremist group. Mostafa grew up in San Diego and graduated from the University of California San Diego. Imam Abdeljalil Mezgouri of the Islamic Center of San Diego, the city’s largest mosque, said Mostafa was a respectful teen and good student.

“He was a very quiet, very loving boy. He didn’t talk too much but when he did talk, people liked him,” said Mezgouri. Mezgouri said Mostafa got married in his early 20s to a woman he believed was from Somalia.
Public records show Mostafa was the president of the now-defunct Muslim Youth Council of San Diego, or MYCSD. The former organization’s Web site says the group was “dedicated to showing the world that Islam is a religion of peace and Muslims are a peaceful and productive part of society.”

Mostafa’s father, Halim Mostafa, a Kurdish Syrian, is a prominent figure in San Diego’s Muslim community who has tried to build bridges with non-Muslims. He made a low-budget film released in 2008 called “Mozlym” to show how the true meaning of Islam is often lost amid the misconceptions of non-Muslims in America, according to the film’s Web site.
Mostafa’s father declined to talk.

“I just don’t want to get involved. I’m really sorry I cannot say anything. God bless you,” he said. Edgar Hopida, a spokesman for the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Halim Mostafa believes in the most liberal interpretation of Islam and noted that “it’s ironic if his son is involved with al-Shabab.”

Mostafa is believed to have met American militant Anwar al-Awlaki about a decade ago at a San Diego mosque, according to The Washington Post. He went to Somalia in 2005. Federal officials declined to comment. Mostafa was indicted in August 2010 on terrorism charges for allegedly providing material support to al-Shabab. Mostafa has a leadership role inside al-Shabab and serves as a key liaison to al-Qaida, said Evan Kohlmann, who has assisted government investigations into al-Shabab recruiting and financing.

AP could not reach Mostafa or Hammami for comment. A spokesman for al-Shabab said that the questions AP emailed were “of a personal nature relating to the roles and activities of certain individuals and for that reason they were left unanswered.”

The spokesman also said al-Shabab and al-Qaida were “brothers in Islam.” He did not provide a name but emailed from an address used by al-Shabab’s media outreach wing, which also recently launched a Twitter feed. The Alabaman, Hammami, 27, has taken on the role of jihadi lecturer and Islamic scholar. After U.S. Navy SEALs killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden in Pakistan earlier this year, Hammami threatened to avenge the killing at a news conference near Mogadishu.

Al-Awlaki’s death by a U.S. drone in Yemen in September left Hammami as the most influential U.S. English speaker in the jihadi propaganda sphere, said terrorism expert Ben Venzke. Hammami is also known as Abu Mansour al-Amriki or “the American.”

“His more accessible image and manner of speaking may prove a growing and significant threat to not just the region around Somalia but for future attacks on U.S. soil,” said Venzke of the Washington-based IntelCenter.

Hammami grew up in Daphne, Ala., a bedroom community of 20,000 outside Mobile known for sunsets on the Gulf of Mexico, seafood and high school football. The phone directory lists 43 Christian churches and not a single Islamic congregation in Daphne. The son of a Christian mother and a Syrian-born Muslim father, Hammami attended Daphne High School. Then-assistant principal Don Blanchard recalls Hammami as generally well liked.

“Omar I would not classify as a troubled kid,” said Blanchard. Hammami enrolled at the University of South Alabama, where he was president of the Muslim Student Association. Following the 2001 terror attacks, Hammami spoke to the student newspaper. “Even now it’s difficult to believe a Muslim could have done this,” The Vanguard quoted Hammami as saying.

Hammami went to Somalia in 2006. He was indicted in 2007 on terrorism charges, and faced more charges in 2009 for providing material support to terrorists. Hammami, who wears a long beard and often raps in al-Shabab videos, released a nearly 50-minute lecture in October to commemorate five years with the group. He spouts hatred for “Western oppression.” In the video, provided to AP by the IntelCenter, he compares his upbringing in America with his life in Somalia, where he says a microwave — “or even a normal oven” — is a rarity.

The English speaker serves as a recruiter and fundraiser and is one of the top people in charge of al-Shabab’s foreign fighters, Kohlmann said. Hammami attends morning fighting drills and motivates new recruits, former al-Shabab fighter Abdi Hassan told AP. Hammami avoids mobile phones for fear intelligence agencies will trace him, and uses pseudonyms on the Internet.

“He sometimes cries with emotion, which makes others cry with him,” said Hassan. He added, “Every new American is asked to convince his friends to come. The Americans’ suicide attacks and speeches are meant to attract other Americans.”

The Americans helped produce what Venzke calls one of the most sophisticated recruitment videos ever released, featuring Minneapolis men in a July 2008 ambush of Ethiopian troops along a road in Somalia. Another video features a Minneapolis man who appeals to others to join the cause in English.

Al-Shabab does not just recruit from the U.S. Three suspects accused of having ties to al-Shabab are now in prison in Australia and awaiting sentencing for allegedly planning an attack on an Australian military base. Dozens of U.K. residents have also traveled to Somalia to join al-Shabab, and the British government is concerned that Somalia shows many of the characteristics that made Afghanistan “a seedbed for terrorism.”

Rick Nelson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in even the possibility of military reprisal might not deter al-Shabab from carrying out an attack inside the United States. “All the elements are there for it to happen,” Nelson said.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/americans-rise-in-rank-within-somalia-jihadi-militant-group-linked-to-al-qaida/2012/01/14/gIQAUh0ayP_print.html

Jihadi who helped train 7/7 bomber freed by US after just five years

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An American jihadist who set up the terrorist training camp where the leader of the 2005 London suicide bombers learned how to manufacture explosives, has been quietly released after serving only four and a half years of a possible 70-year sentence, a Guardian investigation has learned. The unreported sentencing of Mohammed Junaid Babar to "time served" because of what a New York judge described as "exceptional co-operation" that began even before his arrest has raised questions over whether Babar was a US informer at the time he was helping to train the ringleader of the 7 July tube and bus bombings. Lawyers representing the families of victims and survivors of the attacks have compared the lenient treatment of Babar to the controversial release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

Babar was imprisoned in 2004 – although final sentencing was deferred – after pleading guilty in a New York court to five counts of terrorism. He set up the training camp in Pakistan where Mohammad Sidique Khan and several other British terrorists learned about bomb-making and how to use combat weapons. Babar admitted to being a dangerous terrorist who consorted with some of the highest-ranking members of al-Qaida, providing senior members with money and equipment, running weapons, and planning two attempts to assassinate the former president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf.

But in a deal with prosecutors for the US attorney's office, Babar agreed to plead guilty and become a government supergrass in return for a drastically reduced sentence. The Guardian has obtained a court document which shows that on 10 December last year – six years after his initial arrest and subsequent guilty plea – he was sentenced to "time served" and charged $500 (£310) by the court in a "special assessment" fee. The document also reveals that Babar had by then spent just over four years in some form of prison and more than two years free on bail.

Graham Foulkes, a magistrate whose 22-year-old son David was killed by Khan at Edgware Road underground station in 2005, said: "People get four and a half years for burglary. They can get more for some road traffic offences. So for an international terrorist who's directly linked to the death of my son and dozens and dozens of people to get that sentence is just outrageous." Fifty-two people were killed and 784 injured on 7 July 2005 when four suicide bombers detonated rucksacks filled with explosives and nails on London's transport system in the morning rush hour.

The lawyer representing the families of the dead and survivors, Clifford Tibber of the law firm Anthony Gold, said they would be devastated to learn that Babar had served only a small proportion of his possible sentence. "Babar admitted setting up and funding training camps attended by the 7/7 bombers," Tibber said. "When the British government released Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber who received a life sentence, on compassionate grounds after eight years the Americans were furious. Imagine how the bereaved and the survivors will feel about [Babar's] paltry sentence."

A remark from the sentencing judge that Babar "began co-operating even before his arrest", has raised the possibility, supported by other circumstantial evidence obtained by the Guardian, that he may have been an informant for the US government before his detention by the FBI in April 2004. Babar facilitated the London bombers' knowledge of bomb-making when he invited around a dozen British jihadists to attend a camp that he had helped set up in north-west Pakistan in the summer of 2003. In a debriefing with US law enforcement agents in 2004, Babar told US prosecutors about Khan, whom he knew as "Ibrahim". British terrorism investigators showed Babar an unclear surveillance photo of Khan in August 2004, but Babar failed to identify him.

He has said that when he saw pictures of Khan in newspapers after the bombings he alerted the US authorities straight away: "I told them [the American authorities] that was the person that was Ibrahim. I had mentioned Ibrahim before July 2005." After his guilty plea in 2004, Babar spent a good proportion of his four and a half years outside the regular prison system. He flew to testify in trials in the UK and in Canada and met law enforcement officers from around the world.

In 2008 he was granted bail awaiting final sentencing, after being warned by a judge that his conviction on five terrorism offences carried a maximum 70-year term. Although a probation report dated 9 July 2010 recommended that Babar remain in jail for another 30 years, the US attorney's office submitted their own report to the New York court, known as a 5K1, which praised Babar's work. One extract read out in court stated: "Over the last six and a half years the level of assistance provided by Babar to both the United States government and foreign governments has been more than substantial. It has been extraordinary."

Speaking in court about Babar's role in helping to jail British, Canadian and American terrorists, the assistant US attorney Brendan McGuire described Babar's co-operation as exceptional, and he recommended that he be given a significantly reduced sentence. Babar's defence lawyer, Daniel Ollen, told the court that during the two years his client had been out on bail, he had "paid his debt to society" and had settled into a new life with his wife and daughter. Ollen said the government's positive statements on behalf of Babar in court spoke volumes about his "hugely successful" actions, and that in 30 years he had never seen a more positive 5K1 report from the government.

Speaking for the first time about the case, Ollen told the Guardian that in court "the government went to bat for him. They used words like 'extraordinary' and 'unprecedented'. Babar's co-operation really was spectacular when you get down to it." When sentencing Babar, the judge, Victor Marrero, praised his work, describing the sentence of four years and eight months as "reasonable and appropriate". "The court takes note that the government has evaluated Mr Babar's cooperation to be significant, truthful, complete, and liable.," Marrero said.

"[He] worked with the FBI and foreign governments to assist in investigations of terrorism organisations, including al-Qaida, and of terrorist activities such as the London bomb plot." "Taking into account the nature and circumstances of the offence and the history and characteristics of the defendant ... the court finds that a sentence of time served is reasonable and appropriate and that such a term is sufficient but not greater than necessary to promote the proper objectives of sentencing," Marrero said.

A law enforcement agent who arrested Babar and spent more than 500 hours debriefing him said he believed Babar was selfish. The officer, who wished to be known as agent A, said: "Babar wasn't a hero. He didn't look at the American flag and suddenly become all patriotic. When his back was against the wall he did what was right for him ... he was selfish." Further inquiries uncovered allegations from a top US terrorism lawyer who has reviewed sealed evidence in the case which suggests Babar could have been working for the US authorities before his arrest in April 2004.

Having reviewed the court transcript himself, bereaved father Graham Foulkes said: "There's a hint from one or two of the sentences [in the transcript] that do strongly suggest [Babar's] co-operation was going well beyond his official arrest. And it looks as if the Americans may well have known in detail what Babar was up to in Pakistan [at the time] and that is a very, very serious matter." When judge Marrero's office was asked to clarify the remarks, his office declined to comment. The US attorney's office declined to comment on whether Babar had been working with US agencies before his arrest.

The law enforcement officer involved in Babar's arrest and debriefing also refused to discuss the allegations. Freed from prison and no longer in the witness protection scheme, it is not known where Babar is currently living. Visiting Babar's childhood home in the Jamaica area of Queens, New York, the Guardian was told that Babar's mother was on holiday in Pakistan. The woman who answered the door and identified herself as Babar's cousin did not know where Babar was living and refused to comment further.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/feb/13/jihadi-train-7-7-bomber-freed

Ossama Bin Laden Role in Bosnia: “Guidebook” for Al-Qaeda

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Bosnian Muslim Army troops of the Al-Qaeda linked El Mujahedeen Unit parade in downtown Zenica in central Bosnia in 1995, carrying the black flag of Islamic jihad. Ossama Bin Laden played a key role in the 1992-1995 Bosnian civil war. Alija Izetbegovic not only issued him a Bosnian passport through the Bosnian Embassy in Vienna in 1993, but met with him at least on one occasion in Sarajevo in November, 1994. Bin Laden came to Bosnia at least two times. Bin Laden organized the recruitment of Arab-Afghan mujadeheen “volunteers” for Bosnia. He also used Islamic front organizations and charities to funnel money to the Bosnian Muslim regime and army.

More importantly, according to many prominent anti-terror experts, Bosnia was the “guidebook” for Al-Qaeda. Bosnia was where Al-Qaeda was forged in the fires of Islamic jihad. In Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (NY: Free Press, 2004), Richard A. Clarke, who was the anti-terror czar in the George W. Bush Administration, a security and counter-terrorism advisor to three U.S. Presidents, wrote:
“What we saw unfold in Bosnia was a guidebook to the Bin Laden network, though we didn’t recognize it as such at the time. Beginning in 1992, Arabs who had been former Afghan mujahedeen began to arrive. With them came the arrangers, the money men, logisticians, and ‘charities.’ They arranged front companies and banking networks. As they had done in Afghanistan, the Arabs created their own brigade, allegedly part of the Bosnian army but operating on its own. The muj, as they came to be known, were fierce fighters against the better-armed Serbs. They engaged in ghastly torture, murder, and mutilation that seemed excessive even by Balkan standards.”
The funding and recruitment of the mujahedeen to Bosnia was organized by Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network: “Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic decided to take aid where he could… Better yet, al Qaeda sent men, trained, tough fighters. European and U.S. intelligence services began to trace the funding and support of the muj to bin Laden in Sudan, and to facilities that had already been established by the muj in Western Europe itself.”

The Afghan-Arab mujahedeen force in Bosnia was engaged in an “al Qaeda jihad”: “Although Western intelligence agencies never labeled the muj activity in Bosnia an al Qaeda jihad, it is now clear that is exactly what it was.” Clarke noted that “[m]any of the names that we first encountered in Bosnia showed up later in other roles, working for al Qaeda.” These included:
1) Abu al-Makki, who was seen in the December, 2001 video standing next to bin Laden “as al Qaeda’s leader extolled the September 11 attacks”;
2) Abu al-Haili, who was arrested in Morocco in 2002 for planning to attack U.S. ships;
3) Ali al-Shamrani, who was arrested by Saudi police for attacking the U.S. military aid mission in 1995;
4) Khalil Deek, arrested in 1999 for planning attacks against U.S. installations in Jordan;
5) Fateh Kamel, part of the Millennium Plot cell in Canada;
6) Khalid Almihdhar, 9/11 hijacker fought in Bosnia; and,
7) Nawaf Alhazmi, 9/11 hijacker fought in the Bosnian civil war.
Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic, lower right, meeting with Al-Qaeda linked Arab-Afghan mujahedeen in Bosnia. One of the hijackers of the second attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, possessed a Bosnian passport. Senior Al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was granted Bosnian citizenship in November, 1995. He is allegedly the mastermind and planner of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the U.S. Mohammed was born in Kuwait to a family from the Baluchi region of Pakistan. He went to Bosnia in September, 1995. He went in the guise of a Muslim “humanitarian aid worker” for an Islamic charity front organization called Egyptian Relief, a front for the radical Muslim Brotherhood of Cairo.

The Bosnian government also issued a passport to Mahrez Amduni, a senior aide to Ossama Bin Laden, in 1997. In an Agence France Presse news report from September 24, 1999, “Bin Laden Was Granted Bosnian Passport”, it was reported: “Earlier this week the Bosnian government confirmed it had granted citizenship and passport to a Tunisian-born senior aide of bin-Laden in 1997. The government said citizenship was given to Mahrez Amduni, known in Sarajevo as Mehrez Amdouni.” The same report noted that the Bosnian government destroyed all the documents and files relating to Ossama Bin Laden: “’The Bosnian embassy in Vienna granted a passport to bin Laden in 1993,’ Dani magazine said, quoting anonymous sources, emphasizing that files and traces linked to his case have recently been destroyed by the government.

“‘High Muslim officials of the Bosnian foreign ministry agreed that it was the top priority. It was even more important than investigating a person responsible for granting a passport to the most wanted terrorist in the world,’ Dani reported.”

Marko Attila Hoare conceded that “Osama bin Lade himself … plays very much an off-stage role” in Bosnia “although he apparently hoped to use the mujahedeen presence in Bosnia to create a base for operations against the US and its allies in Europe.” Ossama Bin Laden was part of “How Bosnia Armed”, by violating the UN arms embargo against Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia. Renate Flottau, an award-winning German journalist, reported seeing Ossama Bin Laden meeting with Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic in 1994. Born in Munich, she began her career working for newspapers and magazines in Germany. She worked in television as well in 1976.

In the 1980s she settled in Belgrade with her husband Heiko Flottau. She worked initially for the German television network Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF, Second German Television) and then became the Balkan correspondent for Der Spiegel in 1986. Flottau was one of the few Western journalists to meet Osama Bin Laden in Sarajevo when Bin Laden met with Izetbegovic. Flottau was waiting to interview Izetbegovic in his office when she met Ossama Bin Lade in Sarajevo in November, 1994. Bin Laden gave her his business card and informed her that he was planning to bring Afghan-Arab mujahedeen fighters to Bosnia. He was given VIP treatment and rushed in to meet with Izetbegovic.

Bin Laden spoke to Flottau for ten minutes in fluent English. Moreover, he told her that he had a Bosnian passport issued by the Izetbegovic government. Staff for Izetbegovic told her that Bin Laden is “here every day”. Flottau maintained that she again saw Bin Laden meeting at Izetbegovic’s office one week later. In addition, she witnessed Bin Laden in the company of senior members of Izetbegovic’s ultranationalist Muslim party, the SDA, Stranka Demokratske Akcije, Party of Democratic Action. She recognized members of the Bosnian Muslim secret police in an meeting that she later characterized as “incredibly bizarre”. Bosnian Muslim Sejfudin Tokic, who was the speaker of the upper house of the Bosnian parliament, confirmed these meetings between Ossama Bin Laden and Alija Izetbegovic. There is also purportedly a photograph of the meeting.

Flottau’s account was corroborated by veteran British London Times journalist Eve-Ann Prentice on February 6, 2006 when she testified under oath at the ICTY. Prentice stated that she witnessed Ossama Bin Laden “being escorted” into the office of Alija Izetbegovic in November, 1994. Ossama Bin Laden “was shown straight through to Mr. Izetbegovic’s office.”

Bosnian Muslim Army members of the Al-Qaeda linked El Mujahedeen Unit in downtown Zenica wearing green headbands with Arabic script to signify Islamic jihad, 1995. Ossama Bin Laden was able to effectively finance and organize Al Qaeda and mujahedeen recruits for the Bosnian Muslim Army. In the Los Angeles Times article “Terrorists Use Bosnia as Base and Sanctuary” from October 7, 2001, the report noted that there was a connection between Al-Qaeda and Ossama Bin Laden and the El Mujahedeen Battalion in the Bosnian Muslim Army:
“Bin Laden financed small convoys of recruits from the Arab world through his businesses in Sudan.”
Ossama Bin Laden relied on his experiences in Bosnia in the creation, development, and expansion of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network. Bin Laden also relied on his Bosnian experience in planning and organizing the 9/11 attacks.

Source: http://serbianna.com/blogs/savich/archives/1359

The West Masterminded Chechen War to Destroy USSR and Russia:


Fifteen years ago, on December 11, 1994, Russian troops entered the territory of the Chechen Republic, which marked the beginning of the First Chechen Campaign to root out terrorism and establish law and order in the troubled nation. The events, which triggered the armed conflict, started developing in the autumn of 1991, when the Chechen administration declared sovereignty and announced its decision to pull out from the RSFSR and the USSR. During the next three years the Chechen government was busy with dissolving the previous power agencies, canceling the laws of the Russian Federation and establishing the armed forces of Chechnya with President Gen. Jokhar Dudayev at the head. The armed forces of Chechnya were armed with Soviet-made small arms and military hardware that were left in the republic after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As a result of such separatist activities, Chechnya became a real threat to Russia and became a source of international terrorism. Military actions in the republic continued for nearly two years. Over 4,000 Russian servicemen were killed in the war, about 2,000 went missing and nearly 20,000 were wounded, RIA Novosti says. Russia and Chechnya signed the Khasavyurt Accord in 1996 - after two years of military actions – the ceasefire agreement, which marked the end of the First Chechen War. The document was signed by the head of Russia’s Security Council Alexander Lebed and the leader of the Chechen separatist movement Aslan Maskhadov. Lebed died in a helicopter crash in 2002. Maskhadov, the leader of Chechen terrorists, was killed by Russian troops in 2005.

Chechnya became Russia’s strongest pain. Thousands of Russian families and people of other nationalities left the republic. The Chechen administration had a goal to build an independent Islamic state from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. The second Chechen war began in the summer of 1999 with the intrusion of Shamil Basayev’s and Khattab’s gunmen in the Republic of Dagestan. Chechnya started living under the conditions of a counter-terrorist operation, which continued for ten years and was officially stopped only on April 16, 2009. All terrorist leaders were killed during the second campaign. Many former separatists took the side of Chechnya’s legitimate administration chaired by pro-Russian politician Akhmad Kadyrov. Russia wired enormous funds to Chechnya to restore the nation’s economy.

The West could do nothing else but follow the policy of double standards and accuse Russia of violation of human rights in Chechnya. Chechen terrorists conducted and claimed responsibility for a series of horrific terrorist acts in Russia throughout those years: apartment buildings were exploded in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk in 1999; hundreds were taken hostage at Moscow’s music theater in 2002. The Chechen gunmen conducted the most terrible terrorist act in September of 2004, when they killed tens of innocent children in Beslan. Chechnya ’s sitting President Ramzan Kadyrov, who was a teenager during the First Chechen War, believes that the war in Chechnya was masterminded by the West. Western countries, Kadyrov thinks, instigated the war to make the USSR and then Russia collapse.

“It is an open secret nowadays that the Soviet Union fell apart contrary to the will of its people. They decided in the West that they should not stop at that. They wanted to fire up a local war which would embrace more regions and eventually weaken or even destroy Russia as a joint nation,” Kadyrov told journalists December 11 in Grozny. “They wanted to trigger a local religious conflict in Chechnya and have the Muslim population involved in it. Afterwards, they wanted to provoke mass disturbances in the country. I am certain that there were no objective reasons to start the war with the use of aviation, artillery and hundreds of thousands of military men,” Interfax quoted Kadyrov as saying.

“The West was pursuing its goal, but Russia’s then-administration unconsciously did its bidding and let the local conflict grow into a national tragedy. No one can say today how many billions of dollars Russia had to spend on that war. It was the West that obtruded the war on Russia,” Kadyrov said. It is worthy of note that the deployment of Russian troops in Chechnya was not a disturbance of the republic’s peaceful life. First blood was shed long before December 11, 1994. Chechnya was involved in a series of internal fratricidal wars before 1994.


British And American Covert Operations In Chechnya

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"The Clinton administration followed up by providing strong support to the KLA, even though it was known that the KLA supported the Muslim mujahadeen. Despite that knowledge, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had the KLA removed from the State Department list of terrorists. This action paved the way for the United States to provide the KLA with needed logistical support. At the same time, the KLA also received support from Iran and Usama bin Laden, along with 'Islamic holy warriors' who were jihad veterans from Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. Swiss journalist Richard Labeviere, in his book, 'Dollars for Terror,' said that the international Islamic networks linked to bin Laden received help from U.S. intelligence community. Indeed, Chechen sources claim that U.S. intelligence also aided them in their opposition to Russia. Given that U.S. policy in the post-Cold War period has not only been anti-Russian but anti-Iranian, the United States worked closely with Pakistan's predominantly Sunni Inter-Services Intelligence organization. Through ISI, the United States recruited Sunni mujahadeen by staging them in Chechnya to fight in Bosnia and later in Kosovo."

"As the intelligence newsletter Stratfor -- which Time magazine ranked as the nation's top intelligence site in 2003, and which Barron's described as 'a private quasi-CIA' -- pointed out a few months ago, with Ukraine now firmly in the West's orbit, America, with NATO and the EU, has managed to succeed exactly where Hitler and Napoleon failed: it has dismantled the Russian empire, leaving the rump state exposed, weakened and essentially at the West's mercy.... In the wake of the Beslan massacre in September, 2004, in which hundreds of children were killed during a Chechen separatist seizure of a school in southern Russia, President Putin went on television and blamed certain foreign powers for supporting the terrorists with the aim of defanging Russia for good, breaking it apart, and seizing its valuable resources. He did not name the United States, but it was clear whom he meant. .....Stratfor, whose politics could be described as something between patriotic-American and realpolitik, agreed. According to its Kremlin sources, Putin specifically named the U.S. and Great Britain during private meetings. And as Stratfor noted in its April report, there is plenty of evidence to support the Kremlin's claim. In the first place, while Muslim separatist militants from other conflict zones are shunned and even violently pursued by the U.S., the Chechen separatist representatives are routinely given haven and official voice in both the U.K. and America. ...

As Stratfor notes, the British connection to the Chechen separatists goes farther back. 'During the first Chechen war -- from 1994 to 1996 -- retired U.K. special forces officers trained British Muslim recruits in British territory to fight in Chechnya,' Stratfor claims, echoing reports out of Russia. 'Some militants who attended that training and were later captured told the Russian government.' After Chechnya gained de facto independence, a scandal apparently erupted in Russia-U.K. relations when de-mining instructors from a private security firm, which included American ex-military personnel, were caught 'training Chechen militants how to launch mine and bombing attacks against Russian troops,' according to Stratfor.."

"Why would a group of leading American neo-conservatives, dedicated to fighting Islamic terror, have climbed into bed with Chechen rebels linked to al-Qaeda? The American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC), which includes Pentagon supremo Richard Perle, says the conflict between Russia and Chechnya is about Chechen nationalism, not terrorism. The ACPC savaged Russia for the atrocities its forces have committed in the Caucuses, said President Vladimir Putin was 'ridiculous', claimed Russia was more 'morally' to blame for the bloodshed than Chechen separatists and played down links between al-Qaeda and the 'Chechen resistance'. The ACPC's support for the Chechen cause seems bizarre, as many of its members are among the most outspoken US policymakers who have made it clear that Islamist terror must be wiped out. But the organisation has tried to broker peace talks between Russia and Chechen separatists. The ACPC includes many leaders of the neo-conservative think-tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which advocates American domination of the world....

ACPC executive director Glen Howard said the continuation of the 'brutalising tactics' of Russian forces would only lead to 'the resistance employing more brutal tactics' like the assault on School Number One in Beslan...... The nurturing of Chechen fighters against Russia recalls America's support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan - an act that went on to spawn al-Qaeda and the Taliban.... Howard said hardliners like Richard Perle were backing Chechnya as they 'understood what it feels like to be under the Russian yolk'. Some critics believe the support for the Chechens may be a cold war hangover or part of a policy to keep Russia weak through bloodletting in the Caucuses.... According to Howard, due to the vast energy resources in the Caucuses, the West, which is heavily dependent on foreign energy, has strategic interests in the area to which it cannot afford to turn a blind eye."

Source: http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpWESSEX...ne-Caspian.htm

Moscow Says Georgia and Azerbaijan Support Islamic Rebels

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With increasing frequency, Russian officials are charging that Islamic fighters, weapons and funds are being funneled via Georgia and Azerbaijan to terrorist groups in the North Caucasus. Such charges have been aired in recent days by Russia's Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, Federation Council Chairman Yegor Stroev, Duma Chairman Gennady Seleznev, Duma Defense Committee Chairman Roman Popkovich, and Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov (head of the Defense Ministry's Main Department for International Military Cooperation). None of these has cited any supportive evidence.

The timing and venue of some of these statements adds to their significance. Ivanov spoke out on the subject as he emerged from a meeting with President Boris Yeltsin; Stroev, following a closed-door session of the Federation Council on the events in the North Caucasus; and Seleznev as the Duma included those accusations in a special resolution on the situation in the Caucasus. This seems to reflect a growing political backing in Moscow for the use of pressure on Azerbaijan and Georgia, as was the case during the 1995-96 Russian-Chechen war, when Moscow made similar allegations which it was never able to substantiate.

In Baku, senior presidential adviser Vafa Guluzade and National Security Minister Namig Abbasov dismissed the latest charges directed at Azerbaijan as baseless. But the wording of their statements has been remarkably restrained, and other Azerbaijani officials have said nothing. Baku seems intent on preserving the recent, slight warm-up in its bilateral relations with Russia (see the Monitor, September 10) against collateral damage from the war in the North Caucasus.

Georgian officials, for their part, have been more forthright in discussing the potential implications of Moscow's assertions. State Minister [equivalent to prime minister] Vazha Lortkipanidze, who is known for his conciliatory attitude toward Russia, expressed concern that the allegations might presage "an attempt to involve Georgia in the North Caucasus conflict and destabilize the situation in Georgia itself." President Eduard Shevardnadze's adviser on international law, Levan Aleksidze, urged Russia to "stop painting Georgia in the enemy's image" and described the situation in the North Caucasus as evidence of Moscow's "policy error" of supporting separatism in the South even as it combats "separatism" in the North. Georgia's border troops commander, Lieutenant-General Valery Chkheidze, termed the accusations against Georgia "demagogic," designed for internal political consumption.

These Georgian officials, and an official statement of Georgia's Foreign Ministry, all underscored Georgia's interest in upholding the principle of territorial integrity and preservation of existing borders. Azerbaijani President Haidar Aliev--during talks with a Council of Europe delegation in Baku--emphasized Azerbaijan's interest in upholding the same principles and in thwarting Islamic fundamentalism. Specifically, Aliev mentioned Azerbaijan's interest in the restoration of stability in neighboring Dagestan (Itar-Tass, Turan, Azad-Inform, Radio Tbilisi, Prime-News, September 14-19; Nezavisimaya gazeta, September 15).

Source: http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=11895&tx_ttnews[backPid]=213

Turkish Volunteers in Chechnya

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For several years Kremlin spokespersons have identified Turkey as the primary source of foreign jihadi volunteers (always referred to as naemniky, "mercenaries" in official proclamations) fighting alongside their Chechen adversaries. One spokesman claimed "We keep killing armed Turkish citizens on Chechen territory" and another described Turkey as "a record breaker for producing foreign mercenaries killed in Chechnya." [1] While skeptics might be tempted to dismiss such claims as mere bluster in light of Turkey's well known secular tendencies, the evidence is mounting that Turkish volunteer fighters make up a sizeable component of the foreign element fighting alongside the indigenous Chechen insurgents in Russia. While it is widely recognized that the 100-200 foreign jihadis fighting alongside the approximately 1,200 Chechen insurgents are led by Arab emirs (commanders) such as the slain Amir Khattab (a Saudi whose mother was Turkish according to jihadist websites), Abu Walid (Saudi killed April 2004), and Abu Hafs al Urdani (aka "Amjet" a Jordanian), the Russian government has consistently maintained that Turks play a prominent role among the foreign "terrorists" in Chechnya. [2]

To support their claims, Russian security services have produced Turkish passports found on the bodies of several slain fighters and have given the names and personal details of Turkish jihadis killed in Chechnya. Among others, Russian spokespersons referenced one Ziya Pece, a Turk who was found dead with a grenade launcher following a fire fight with Federal forces. Russian officials have also provided detailed information on 24 Turkish fighters killed between 1999 and 2004, and Russian soldiers in Chechnya have spoken of engaging a unit of 40 skilled Turkish fighters. [3] If this were not compelling enough evidence, Russian security forces have also produced a living Turkish jihadi named Ali Yaman who was captured in the Chechen village of Gekhi-Chu.

A Turkish Platoon in Chechnya

Surprisingly, this evidence is not refuted by Chechen or Turkish jihadi sources and on the contrary has been corroborated on such forums as the kavkaz.org website produced by Arab and Chechen extremists linked to the field commander Shamil Basayev. The following excerpt from a kavkaz interview with a Turkish jihadi commander in Chechnya is illuminating and suggests the existence of a Turkish jamaat known as the "Ottoman platoon" in the Arab-dominated International Islamic Brigade (it also corroborates the above Russian claim that Federal forces have killed 24 Turks in Chechnya): "Interview with the Chief of the Turkish Jamaat ‘Osmanly' (Ottoman) fighting in Chechnya against the troops of Russian invaders, Amir (Commander) Muhtar, by the Kavkaz Center news agency: (Interviewer) Are there many Turks in Chechnya today? Some mass media were reporting that there are about 20 of you guys.

(Amir Muhtar) Out of the first Jamaat that was fighting in 1995-1996 seven mujahideen have remained. Back then there were 13 of us. They are actually the core of the Turkish jamaat in Chechnya today. Twenty-four Turks have already died in this war. Among them was Zachariah, Muhammed-Fatih, Halil…Three mujahideen became shaheeds (martyrs) during the battle with commandos from Pskov in the vicinity of Ulus-Kert. Some died before that in the battles in Jokhar (Grozny). Five were wounded." [4] In February 2004 a Turkish jihadi website devoted to Chechnya also announced the martyrdom (shehid olmak) of three Turkish mujahideen in just two weeks. [5]

Another site that has been removed left the following account of the combat that led to the martyrdom of three Turkish jihadi fighters: "Last night we had news from verifiable sources that a group of Turkish mujahideen came across Russian soldiers north of Vedeno in a small village. After stumbling on them a fire fight ensued and one Algerian and three Turkish brothers died. The Algerian's name is Hassam and the Turkish brothers' names are Ebu Derda, Huzeyfe and Zennun. These brothers fought in Commander Ramazan's unit in the Dagestan conflict." [6]

For several years now Turkish jihadi websites have actually been posting the martyrdom epitaphs of Turkish fighters who died in the Chechen cihad. Much of the jihadist rhetoric found on these Islamist sites will be familiar to those who follow the martyrdom obituaries of foreign jihadis who have died fighting in Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflict zones. The following account, for example, describes the fate of a Turkish fighter who followed the well worn path of roaming Turkish jihadis in the Balkans before being killed: "Shaheed Bilal Al-Qaiseri (Uthman Karkush). 23 years old from Qaiseri, Turkey. Martyred during the Withdrawal from Grozny, February 2000: Bilal fought for six months in Bosnia during 1995 from where he unsuccessfully attempted to travel to Chechnya. He went to fight for the Jihad in Kosova but returned after a month when the fighting ceased. He came to Chechnya in August 1999 where he participated in the Dagestan Operations in Botlikh.

After the Mujahideen withdrew, he was planning to return to Turkey when Russia invaded Chechnya. He participated in the fighting in Argun and, subsequently, Grozny. Before and throughout Ramadan he cooked for the Mujahideen in his group. During the fighting he was distinguished for his bravery. After seeing a dream in which he was married, he decided to marry a Chechen, but Shahaadah (martyrdom) was destined for him instead. He was severely injured during the withdrawal from Grozny in the village of Katyr Yurt where his room received a direct hit from Russian Grad Artillery. He was later martyred from his injuries in the village of Shami Yurt."

Ethnicity and Turkish jihad in Chechnya

The following epitah, which describes a Turkish martyr "with some Chechen ancestry" speaks of a deeper and less obvious current in the Turkish jihadi movement that delineates Turkish volunteer fighters from the majority of trans-national Arab jihadis fighting in Chechnya: "Shamil (Afooq Qainar). 25 years old from Istanbul, Turkey.

Martyred in Grozny, November 1999:

With some Chechen ancestory, he deeply loved Chechnya and was more often alongside Chechens than Turks. He had also participated in the Chechen Jihad of 1996-99. With his good manners, polite demeanor and modesty, he got along well with everyone. He also took part in the Dagestan Jihad in the Novalak Region where, notably, his group fought their way out of a Russian siege at a cost of 25 Shaheed (martyrs). He was martyred in the second month of this War (November 1999) in Grozny." [7]

While it might be overlooked, the fact that the slain Shamil is, like many of his compatriots, of Chechen extraction, is of tremendous importance. It would seem that many Turks who volunteer to fight on the behalf of the Chechens do so because they have ethnic origins in the Caucasus region or identify with the Chechens as irkdashlar (kin).

In the 19th century, Tsarist Russia instigated a brutal policy of ethnic cleansing that saw tens of thousands of indigenous Caucasian highlanders expelled to Anatolia. While public expressions of Laz, Circassian, Kosovar, Bosniak, Tatar and Chechen ethnic identity were subsequently discouraged in officially homogenous Republican Turkey, folk traditions such as the famous Caucasian highlander sword dances, Albanian borek (pastry), Crimean Tatar destans (legends), and ritualized commemoration of past victimization at the hands of Russians, Serbs, Bulgarians and others continued.

It was only with the liberalization of Turkey under President Turgut Ozal in the early 1990s that these historical sub-ethnic grievances could be expressed in the public sphere. As this unprecedented celebration of ethnicity and commemoration of past repression took place in a liberalizing Turkey, Turks were confronted with horrifying images from the Balkans and Caucasus. Stories of rape camps in Bosnia, mass graves in Kosovo, and televised images of columns of pitiful Chechen refugees in Russia struck many Turks as a replay of the apocalyptic destruction of millions of Balkan-Caucasian-Ukrainian Muslims by Orthodox Christians in the 19th century.

As a result, informants interviewed by the author in Turkey in the summer of 2004 claimed that many young men from villages in Eastern Turkey inhabited by people of Caucasian origin were told by their family patriarchs to go and fight for their honor, faith, and ancestral homeland in Chechnya. Moreover, with the advent of the internet in Turkey, gruesome images of horribly mutilated Chechen women and children, mass burials and vandalized mosques appeared on Islamist and secular-nationalist websites alike and enraged many traditionalists in the country. In this climate, both nationalists and religious extremists exploited many Turks' sense of ethnic or religious solidarity with their Chechen "brothers and sisters" and invoked strong feelings of namus (a traditional sense of machismo, pride and honor among Turks that comes from the defense of faith, family, motherland, and honor of one's women).

Like the Turks who continue to fight and die in Chechnya, the websites that glorify the defense of the Chechens run the gamut from the anti-American/Zionist rhetoric of the Islamists to the nationalist irredentism of the Pan-Turkists. But the latter predominate. [8] The pro-Chechen websites with an ethnic dimension tend to feature images of Turks wearing traditional Caucasian folk costumes and 19th century anti-Russian heroes. Others with a slightly more nationalist bent (such as www.kafka.4t.com/photos.html) blend images of Ataturk and Alparslan Turkes (the founder of the Turkish xxx Kurt-Grey Wolves extreme nationalist party) with images from Chechnya. As these sites make clear, many Turks who fight in Chechnya are engaging in the same sort of volunteerism that led Albanian Americans to go fight in Kosovo in 1999 under the auspices of Homeland Calling and other widely recognized diasporic organizations.

This ethnic diaspora narrative might also explain some of the Arab jihadi participation in Chechnya. Many Chechen refugees settled in Ottoman Jordan following their expulsion from Russia in the 19th century. Jordanian Arabs of Chechen extraction, such as the influential Sheikh Muhammad Fatih, have played an important role in the Chechen jihad as warriors, preachers, and fund raisers.

Notwithstanding the involvement of Turks in the Chechen conflict, it would be erroneous to interpret this as proof that secular Turkey faces a serious Islamist problem. Turkish jihadis who have fought in Chechnya have found the Wahhabi Puritanism of their Arab jihadi comrades-in-arms unsettling, and many secular Turks partake in "jihad tours" simply to gain prestige at home in their tight knit families or neighborhoods. In addition, the vast majority of Turks interviewed tended to view Chechens as "terrorists" who reminded them of the hated Kurdish PKK/Kadek militants.

Finally, the involvement of two Turkish extremists (Azad Ekinci and Habib Akdas) who had a history of jihadi activity in Chechnya in the bloody al-Qaeda bombings in Istanbul in November 2003 further undermined the Chechen cause in the country. [9] Indeed for all the romantic notions, some Turks have of volunteering to fight on behalf of the Chechens, the carnage wreaked on innocent Turks by El Kaide Turka (Turkish al-Qaeda) clearly demonstrates that jihadism has a potentially unpredictable effect on those who are attracted to it.

Source: http://www.jamestown.org/publication...cle_id=2369571

FBI organizes almost all terror plots in the US

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover agents today, ten times what they had on the roster back in 1975. If you think that’s a few spies too many — spies earning as much as $100,000 per assignment — one doesn’t have to go too deep into their track record to see their accomplishments. Those agents are responsible for an overwhelming amount of terrorist stings that have stopped major domestic catastrophes in the vein of 9/11 from happening on American soil.

Another thing those agents are responsible for, however, is plotting those very schemes. The FBI has in recent years used trained informants not just to snitch on suspected terrorists, but to set them up from the get-go. A recent report put together by Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkley analyses some striking statistics about the role of FBI informants in terrorism cases that the Bureau has targeted in the decade since the September 11 attacks.

The report reveals that the FBI regularly infiltrates communities where they suspect terrorist-minded individuals to be engaging with others. Regardless of their intentions, agents are sent in to converse within the community, find suspects that could potentially carry out “lone wolf” attacks and then, more or less, encourage them to do so. By providing weaponry, funds and a plan, FBI-directed agents will encourage otherwise-unwilling participants to plot out terrorist attacks, only to bust them before any events fully materialize.

Additionally, one former high-level FBI officials speaking to Mother Jones says that, for every informant officially employed by the bureau, up to three unofficial agents are working undercover. The FBI has used those informants to set-up and thus shut-down several of the more high profile would-be attacks in recent years. The report reveals that the Washington DC Metro bombing plot, the New York City subway plot, the attempt to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and dozens more were all orchestrated by FBI agents. In fact, reads the report, only three of the more well-known terror plots of the last decade weren’t orchestrated by FBI-involved agents.

The report reveals that in many of the stings, important meetings between informants and the unknowing participants are left purposely unrecorded, as to avoid any entrapment charges that could cause the case to be dismissed. Perhaps the most high-profile of the FBI-proposed plots was the case of the Newburgh 4. Around an hour outside of New York City, an informant infiltrated a Muslim community and engaged four local men to carry out a series of attacks. Those men may have never actually carried out an attack, but once the informant offered them a plot and a pair of missiles, they agreed. Defense attorneys cried “entrapment,” but the men still were sentenced to 25 years apiece.

"The problem with the cases we're talking about is that defendants would not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents," Martin Stolar tells Mother Jones. Stolar represented the suspect involved in a New York City bombing plot that was set-up by FBI agents. "They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror." For their part, the FBI says this method is a plan for "preemption," "prevention" and "disruption."

The report also reveals that, of the 500-plus prosecutions of terrorism-related cases they analyzed, nearly half of them involved the use of informants, many of whom worked for the FBI in exchange for money or to work off criminal charges. Of the 158 prosecutions carried out, 49 defendants participated in plots that agent provocateurs arranged on behalf of the FBI.

Experts note that the chance of winning a terrorism-related trial, entrapment or not, is near impossible. "The plots people are accused of being part of — attacking subway systems or trying to bomb a building — are so frightening that they can overwhelm a jury," David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, tells Mother Jones. Since 9/11, almost two-thirds of the cases linked to terrorism have ended with guilty pleas.

“They don't say, 'I've been entrapped,' or, 'I was immature,’” a retired FBI official remarks. All of this and those guilty pleas often stem for just being in the right place at the wrong time. Farhana Khera of the group Muslim Advocate notes that agents go into mosques on “fishing expeditions” just to see where they can get interest in the community. "The FBI is now telling agents they can go into houses of worship without probable cause," says Khera. "That raises serious constitutional issues."

From the set-up to the big finish, the whole sting operation is ripe with constitutional issues such as that. A decade since 9/11, however, the FBI is reaching through whatever means it can pull together to keep terrorists — or whom they think could someday become one — from ever hurting America.

Source: http://rt.com/usa/news/fbi-terror-report-plot-365-899/

Synagogue Bomb Suspects: The Feds Put Us Up to It!

Temple Plot

Defense attorneys say an alleged plot to bomb New York synagogues was hatched and directed by a federal informant. Lawyers for four men from Newburgh have filed a motion to dismiss the terror indictment against them. They said the informant badgered the defendants until they got involved in the plot. They said the informant chose the targets, supplied fake bombs for the synagogues and a fake missile to shoot down planes. The motion said he also offered to pay the defendants, who attorneys alleged weren't inclined toward any crime until the informant began recruiting them.

"The government well knew that their case had been a government-inspired creation from day one and that the defendants had not been independently seeking weapons or targets," the motion said.Federal court spokesman Herb Hadad said the government would file its response next month. The four men, who were arrested last May, face up to life in prison if convicted. They have been previously identified as James Cromitie, 55, David Williams, 28, Onta Williams, 32, and Laguerre Payen, 27, all of Newburgh in upstate New York, where authorities were conducting raids at their homes, sources said.

Authorities have said they had the plotters under surveillance since June of 2008 and there was "no chance" the alleged scheme could succeed. They credited the work of a long time informant with keeping tabs on the group. The FBI has said the Muslim suspects were angry and full of hate for America. According to the criminal complaint, Cromitie said "I hate those f-ing Jewish bastards." He bragged that it would be a "piece of cake" to bomb a Jewish Center in Riverdale, according to the complaint. He said his father lives in Afghanistan and he was upset about U.S. military presence there. "The fact that this type of hatred exists means that we all have to be vigilant all of the time," city councilman Jeffrey Dinowitz said Thursday.

Cromitie was the first to approach the informant, authorities said. He told the informant he has ties to the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammad. Authorities said Cromitie had 27 past arrests and had recently been working at a nation-wide discount retailer, authorities said. Several of the suspects have previously been arrested on drug charges and may have converted to Islam in prison, authorities said. The four men allegedly would meet in a safe house in Newburgh, which authorities said they had bugged with audio and video equipment. The suspects said they wanted to get their hands on stinger missiles to shoot down planes at the nearby Air National Guard Base at Stewart Airport, according to a criminal complaint unsealed late Wednesday. The suspects also received what they believed were two stinger missiles which they intended to use to shoot down military planes, the complaint said. They also bought cell phones to allegedly use in the plot.

Officials said they moved in when they did so the alleged plot could not progress any further. In a separate motion, defense attorneys demanded more information on inducements that the informant may have offered the defendants. The dismissal motion identified the government's agent as Shaheed Hussain, a "professional informant" for the FBI. The defense claimed he was directed to visit suburban mosques, find members with anti-American leanings and recruit them to join a fake terror plot supposedly funded by a Pakistan-based group. He suggested there could be as much as $250,000 available and the government provided him with a BMW, a Hummer and other cars to make him appear well-funded, the defense filings said.

The defense alleged that Hussain tried to incite the defendants by blaming Jews for the world's evil and telling them that attacks against non-Muslims were endorsed by Islam. Nevertheless, they said, he failed to motivate the defendants to any action on their own. Months went by between meetings, and the filings quote Cromitie as saying, "I'm not gonna hurt anybody" and "The plane thing ... is out of the question." Hussain suggested the targets, paid for the defendants' groceries, bought a gun, provided the fake bombs and missile, assembled the explosive devices and acted as chauffeur, the defense said. Since the 9/11 attacks, authorities have arrested suspects in a number of alleged plots against area targets, including the Fort Dix New Jersey military base, John F. Kennedy Airport, the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge.


Arrest of Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab Raises Serious Questions Over Delta Airline Incident in Detroit


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On December 25 the United States authorities arrested a 23-year-old Nigerian Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab aboard a Delta Airline flight from Amsterdam that landed in Detroit. News reports emanating from the U.S. indicate that it was an attempted terrorist attack that resulted in the fire and that Abdul Mutallab was either connected with Al-Qaida or sympathetic to its aims.

However, this incident raises a number of serious questions about the character of the attack. First of all why was Abdul Mutallab granted a multiple-entry visa into the United States in June 2008? In November, his father, Alhaji Umaru Abdul Mutallab, 70, a prominent and wealthy Nigerian banker who recently retired as Chairman of the First Bank Plc of Nigeria, warned the American embassy in Nigeria about concerns related to his son’s behaviour. The senior Mutallab also served as Minister of Economic Development and Reconstruction during the mid-1970s in the Federal Nigerian Government that was under military rule at the time.

Consequently, why was Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab allowed to maintain his U.S. visa status and board a plane bound for the United States? There have been reports that he had spent time in the United Arab Emirates and Yemen and implying that this may indicate a connection with Al-Qaida. However, there has been no specific evidence that he has links with Islamic organizations including Al-Qaida.

In addition, corporate media reports claim that the substances Mutallab had and attempted to ignite could have done substantial damage to the aircraft. This allegation is largely unsubstantiated and raises further questions about the nature of the incident. If these chemicals could have never caused any real damage to the aircraft and in fact the suspect was the only person seriously injured, then this may reveal that the incident is something other than what is being widely reported by media outlets in the U.S. and internationally.

Although U.S.. intelligence and media spokespersons have stated that Yemen is a base for Al-Qaida, they do not make the claim that it is also major field of operations for the American Central Intelligence Agency which is working closely with the Yemeni government to fight the Islamic organizations that are in a military struggle with the government in this country that is divided politically and regionally.

In an Associated Press report on December 25 it stated that “Yemen’s military hit suspected al-Qaida hideouts for the second time in a week, killing at least 30 militants in a remote area of the country–a fragmented, unstable nation the U.S. fears could turn into an Afghanistan-like refuge for the terrorist network.

“The strikes on Thursday, which were carried out with U.S. and Saudi intelligence help, hit a gathering of top leaders and other targets in a remote mountain valley, officials said. The newly aggressive Yemeni campaign against al-Qaida is being boosted by a dose of American aid, a reflection of Washington’s concerns about al-Qaida’s presence in a highly strategic location on the border with oil-rich ally Saudi Arabia.” (AP, December 25)

This same AP article goes on to point out that “The Pentagon recently confirmed it has poured nearly $70 million in military aid into Yemen this year–compared with none in 2008. The U.S. military has boosted its counterterrorism training for Yemeni forces and is providing more intelligence, according to U.S. officials and analysts.. The result appears to be a sharp escalation in Yemen’s campaign against al-Qaida, which previously amounted to scattered raids against militants, mixed with tolerance of some fighters who made vague promises they would avoid terrorist activity.”

Therefore, it is quite obvious that Yemen is a major target of U.S. military and intelligence activity. Corporate media reports continue to emphasize what it calls the unstable character of Yemen and labeling the country a “failed state”, as it did with Afghanistan during the invasion of 2001.

Also Nigeria has been the scene of unrest in the North several months ago where the military and police killed several hundred people in a crackdown against an Islamic group, Boko Haram, where the leader of this group was killed by the police extra-judiciously. There is also a flare up in fighting in the Niger Delta region between groups fighting the western-based oil firms that dominate the area and the federal government’s joint terrorism task force.

In a just as significant recent development, several western-based multi-national oil firms are threatening to sabotage the Nigerian economy because of their displeasure with a deal that was agreed upon with the People’s Republic of China involving a $50 billion petroleum revenue generation project related to the export of oil to China. Shell is offering its operations for sale which will inevitably undermine the oil industry in Nigeria, which no longer is the dominant producer on oil on the continent.

These developments cannot be separated from the recent escalation of the U.S. war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Obama announced at West Point military academy on December 1 that his administration would be sending another 30,000 occupation troops into Afghanistan. This act is being carried out despite the overwhelming opposition to the escalation of the Afghan war by people inside the United States.

In Detroit, the FBI assassinated an African-American Imam on October 28. The investigation into the incident is being obstructed on several levels including the refusal of authorities to release the autopsy of the slain Islamic leader, Imam Luqman Ameen Abudllah, who had worked with the poor for decades on the city’s west side. Imam Abdullah’s assassination has drawn protests and calls for an independent investigation into his assassination by agents of the federal government.

Could Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab be a pawn in a possible scenario of international intelligence intrigue controlled and manipulated by the United States? Such threats of terrorism have been used in the past to deflect the attention of the American people away from the worsening economic and political crisis facing the country. Since 2001 the American people have been subjected to reports of one plot and conspiracy after another. During the entire decade trillions of dollars have been literally stolen from the people of the United States through real estate, insurance and bank fraud schemes which the taxpayers have absorbed. Unemployment rates are the highest since the Great Depression and there will be a new upsurge in home foreclosures and evictions during 2010.

If Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab was in contact with people he may have thought were al-Qaida operatives but were in fact CIA agents posing as Islamic resistance leaders, he could have been brainwashed and convinced to embark upon such a futile effort with the United States intelligence personnel knowing that these chemicals would, in all likelihood, only injure the suspect.

The incident of course will be used to intensify security practices in airports and throughout American society. It can also be utilized in attempts to justify and sway public opinion towards supporting the wars of occupation in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and the extension of these imperialist efforts into Horn of Africa, the Gulf of Aden, the Indian Ocean and Yemen located in the Arabian Peninsula.

It is amazing that the Obama administration has said nothing about the incident in Detroit. Over the next few days more information will be revealed surrounding these events. One thing is certain and that is the United States government and ruling class has nothing to offer the people other than war, intensified domestic security and economic austerity. If they can bombard the airwaves with threats of terrorism, it will block any real discussion about the economic crisis in the corporate-controlled media that is heavily biased towards the Pentagon and Wall Street. The question of security will take priority over the economic crisis which has caused the unemployment of 34 million people, the foreclosures of millions of homes, the closing of hundreds of schools and the forcing of tens of thousands of university students away from their studies due to the monumental escalation of fees.

Source: http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2009/12/arrest-of-farouk-umar-abdul-mutallab.html

Who’s Behind the Boston Marathon Attack?

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The investigation into the Boston Marathon terrorist attack is now focused on what is the most important question: Did they act alone? In my view, the answer is no.

To begin with, the brothers engaged in a firefight with police and held their own, throwing bombs at the police as they attempted to flee. Tamerlan was killed in a fusillade of gunfire, but Dzhokhar managed to get away. At least one of them was very familiar with firearms and knew how to use them. Neither has any known military experience: somebody trained one or both. The question is: who?

Tamerlan traveled to Dagestan two years ago, where his father now resides, and together they went to Chechnya. Six months later, Tamerlan returned – and began posting jihadist videos on his Youtube page. Dagestan, a former Soviet “republic” in Central Asia, has been torn apart by a Muslim fundamentalist insurgency for years, and is one of the most dangerous countries on earth.

There are unconfirmed reports that the explosive devices which caused such mayhem at the marathon were set off by a sophisticated triggering mechanism, which, according to an unnamed law enforcement official, aren’t the kind of thing you can jigger from information garnered from a Google search. The same unconfirmed report says authorities are frantically trying to uncover what they believe is a “12-man sleeper cell,” and although this seems like an extravagant claim – how did they come up with the number 12? – I wouldn’t discount it entirely.

Initial speculation as to the motives for the attack centered around the brothers’ ethnicity and religious views, and these indeed seem to be important. Nineteen year old Dzokhar had a Twitter account, where he posted the usual trivia one might associate with a typical American teenager – along with a few comments explicitly expressing his religious beliefs and his frustration with people who believe all Muslims are terrorists. His tweets, usually light-hearted, took on a darker aspect just prior to the Boston attack: on April 15 he tweeted: “Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people.”

The content of Dzokhar’s Russian Facebook page includes a video dramatizing the persecution of Muslims in Syria, and another one featuring some kind of religious discussion. There is also a video of Tamerlan, who is speaking in Russian, mocking the various accents he encountered in Central Asia. There are also links to Dzokhar’s favorite internet sites, including salamworld, an Islamic version of Facebook, and various similar sites.

Tamerlan was undoubtedly a devout Muslim at this point in his life. His relatives all point to a period starting about two years ago when he became very religious: he was reportedly asked to leave the house of one of them when he went to visit them in Dagestan. A friend of his wife describes him as “intense,” “controlling,” and “manipulative” in her account of his growing religiosity and his insistence that his wife convert to Islam, wear the hijab, and behave like a good Muslim wife.

Nearly unnoticed in the dramatic denouement of Dzokhar’s capture: the apprehension of three people, including Dzokhar’s alleged girlfriend, in nearby New Bedford. The three were later released, but authorities reappeared at their apartment complex on Saturday and apparently detained two of the same men, who are reportedly from Kazakhstan: a van with consular license plates had earlier turned up in front of the complex, and a young woman was seen entering the van in a hurry. The Tsarnaev brothers weren’t lone nuts: they had help.

One important detail is that the Russian security apparatus asked the Americans to investigate Tamerlan before he made his trip to Russia two years ago. Here is the FBI statement, with its ass-covering final paragraph averring “The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government.” However, according to a senior congressional aide cited by the Boston Globe, the fault lies with the FBI: “The FBI had this guy on the radar and somehow he fell off.” And the Daily Mail reports:

“Russia reportedly asked the FBI to investigate one of the alleged Boston bombers just six months ago after he was seen meeting an Islamic militant six times – but the agency never responded, it has emerged.”

In addition, Tamerlan reportedly came to the attention of the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston, probably on account of his altercation, three months ago, with the head of a local mosque, who threw him out for expressing radical views. The Tsarnaev brothers’ uncle, who lives in the US, has said this has nothing to do with Chechnya, or the Chechen independence movement, and that it’s simply the fact that the brothers were “losers” which explains their actions: yet he also points to alleged “mentors” who supposedly radicalized Tamerlan in the United States – he specifically referred to an Armenian convert to Islam who purportedly lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet this information, if true, hardly rules out an overseas connection: he may have been radicalized in America and sought out compatriots on his Russia trip, where he reportedly met with a known Chechen “militant.” (“six times,” according to the Daily Mail).

Aside from these religious and regional connections, there is a link to criminality that may or may not be significant. Tamerlan – a boxing champion who represented New England in the Golden Gloves competition – once introduced the owner of his gym to one Brendan Mess, whom he described as his “best friend.” Mess was murdered on the afternoon of September 12, 2011, in his apartment, with two others: all three had been stabbed to death, their bloody bodies left covered in marijuana. Mess was 25: he had been arrested prior to that for possession of marijuana with intent to sell, and at least one of the other two had arrests for petty crimes, like assault, and, like Tamerlan, were into physical fitness. At the end of the above-linked news article, a neighbor is quoted: “According to her, five men lived in the apartment and they were frequently coming in and out. One of the men drove a Mercedes-Benz, she added.” Tamerlan drove a Mercedes, according to this account: was he one of the five men who lived at that address? Or did he just spend a lot of time there, so much that the neighbor thought he must live there?

In any case, there was apparently some kind of drug-dealing business operating on the premises, but whoever killed Mess and his two friends left the drugs behind, ruling out a pecuniary motive. What’s more, they were stabbed with what appeared to be a pick axe or similar weapon: all three died from massive cuts to the neck. A symbolic beheading? A gangland hit? Did a newly converted Tamerlan suddenly turn on his “best friend”? The murder is unsolved to this day.

If Tamerlan’s best friend had a drug-dealing/gangland connection, and if the elder Tsarnaev brother – undoubtedly the dominant figure in the bomb plot – was involved in some manner, then that is interesting in and of itself.

The Chechen insurgency is deeply involved in the sale of illegal drugs, and the Chechen Mafia, known as the Obshina, has an ideological as well as a criminal character. A good account of the big overlap between the Obshina and the Chechen guerrilla movement can be found in the late Paul Klebnikov’s Conversations With A Barbarian, which consists of extensive interviews with Chechen Mafia chieftain Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, whose career included financing pro-rebel newspapers as well as forcing the Russian Mafia out of Moscow and taking over its illicit empire. The late Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian oligarch whose recent suicide made headlines, made good use of the Obshina in his efforts to dominate the Russian car dealership market. In return for their protection, the oligarch financed pro-Chechen propaganda and other activities.

Boston’s Chechen community is the largest in the United States, and the Obshina has a presence extending as far West as Portland. According to one study, in addition to the Russian Mafia, “at least 150 ethnic-oriented Russian criminal groups had also been identified, including Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, and Russian-Koreans, of which at least 25 were active in various parts of the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America.” Unlike these other Russian-based criminal gangs, the Chechens have an ideological – and religious – coloration: there are reported links between Al Qaeda and the Chechen Mafia.

So what do we have here? The answer, I’m afraid, is a clear-cut case of carefully premeditated Islamist terrorism with an overseas connection. Tamerlan clearly went to Dagestan, and then Chechnya, where he received training and instructions. He returned to America, recruited his brother, and together they carried out the plan. Whether this operation was coordinated by Al Qaeda, or some other group – possibly some Chechen fundamentalist faction, which outsourced the operation to the Obshina – may seem irrelevant, except for the fact that if there is an organized crime connection then we really have a problem on our hands.

The lessons to be drawn from all this? First and foremost, the idea that we can invade other countries – indeed, that we must invade countries like Afghanistan – so as to prevent terrorists from acquiring a “safe haven” is absolute nonsense. We tried that, and it didn’t work. Boston is the proof.

The second lesson is that American officialdom is comprised of hysterics, whose overreaction must have the terrorists chortling in their Chechen lair. A nineteen year old punk succeeded in shutting down a major American city: whoever organized the Boston atrocity can surely count that as a victory.

The third lesson we can draw is that Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are opportunists of unusual talent and perspicacity. No sooner had Dzokhar been caught then these two were all over the media demanding he be tried as an “enemy combatant,” presumably in secret, and denied a lawyer. If we ever see a police state imposed in the US – and are we very far from that now? – McCain and Graham will go down in history as two of its Founding Fathers. The sooner these two are involuntarily retired, and driven out of American political life, the better are our chances of preserving what’s left of our old republic.

As the hunt for Dzokhar went on, I saw a lot of denial on Twitter amongst liberals who resisted – and still resist – linking the Boston bombers’ motives to either the Chechen independence movement or radical Islamist ideology. Yet the evidence is staring them right in the face: they simply refused to see it because it didn’t confirm their own politically correct biases.

That simply will not do. Antiwar activists, and those who rightly resist the often violent wave of Islamophobia that has swept the country since 9/11, are going to have to face facts, and fight accordingly. Anti-interventionists are actually given more intellectual and political ammunition on account of this incident, as pointed out above: the invade-the-world strategy hasn’t worked. And unless Senators McCain and Graham are going to be advocating a US invasion of Chechnya and Dagestan, it’s clear the War Party hasn’t got an answer for this one.

On the other hand, civil libertarians are going to have a harder time of it: Sen. Graham’s invocation of the New Tyranny’s slogan – “the Homeland is the battlefield” – is a creepy reminder that we are on the brink of establishing a police state in this country. The irony is that the police state methods “legalized” by legislation like the Patriot Act didn’t pick up on the Boston conspirators’ plans. For all their snooping and sneaking around, prying into our emails and investigating supposedly “subversive” individuals and groups – including myself, I might add, and this web site – they were caught flat-footed.

If and when a connection to Chechen terrorist groups is established, I would think that the West’s longstanding support for the Chechen cause would be called into question. The US State Department under both Bush and Obama has routinely sided with the Chechen separatists, and Britain, in particular, has been their invaluable ally, granting asylum to Chechen terrorist leaders as well as their Russian oligarch sponsors, such as Berezovsky. The growing cold war between Russia and the US no doubt squelched any real cooperation between Moscow and Washington in tracking terrorists: that’s the real explanation for the FBI’s failure to take Russian warnings seriously. And besides that, they were too busy monitoring Antiwar.com and other Americans engaging in legal and constitutionally protected activities to bother with the brothers Tsarnaev.

Source: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/04/21/whos-behind-the-boston-marathon-attack/

Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons

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I almost choked on my coffee listening to neoconservative Rudy Giuliani pompously claim on national TV that he was surprised about any Chechens being responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings because he’s never seen any indication that Chechen extremists harbored animosity toward the U.S.; Guiliani thought they were only focused on Russia.

Giuliani knows full well how the Chechen “terrorists” proved useful to the U.S. in keeping pressure on the Russians, much as the Afghan mujahedeen were used in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1980 to 1989. In fact, many neocons signed up as Chechnya’s “friends,” including former CIA Director James Woolsey.


Author John Laughland wrote: “the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled ‘distinguished Americans’ who are its members is a roll call of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the ‘war on terror.’

“They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be ‘a cakewalk’; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R. James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.”

The ACPC later sanitized “Chechnya” to “Caucasus” so it’s rebranded itself as the “American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus.”

Of course, Giuliani also just happens to be one of several neocons and corrupt politicians who took hundreds of thousands of dollars from MEK sources when that Iranian group was listed by the U.S. State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). The money paid for these American politicians to lobby (illegally under the Patriot Act) U.S. officials to get MEK off the FTO list.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Alice in Wonderland is an understatement if you understand the full reality of what’s going on. But if you can handle going down the rabbit hole even further, check out prominent former New York Times journalist (and author of The Commission book) Phil Shenon’s discovery of the incredible “Terrible Missed Chance” a couple of years ago.

Shenon’s discovery involved key information that the FBI and the entire “intelligence” community mishandled and covered up, not only before 9/11 but for a decade afterward. And it also related to the exact point of my 2002 “whistleblower memo” that led to the post 9/11 DOJ-Inspector General investigation about FBI failures and also partially helped launch the 9/11 Commission investigation.

But still the full truth did not come out, even after Shenon’s blockbuster discovery in 2011 of the April 2001 memo linking the main Chechen leader Ibn al Khattab to Osama bin Laden. The buried April 2001 memo had been addressed to FBI Director Louis Freeh (another illegal recipient of MEK money, by the way!) and also to eight of the FBI’s top counter-terrorism officials.

Similar memos must have been widely shared with all U.S. intelligence in April 2001. Within days of terrorist suspect Zaccarias Moussaoui’s arrest in Minnesota on Aug. 16, 2001, French intelligence confirmed that Moussaoui had been fighting under and recruiting for Ibn al-Khattab, raising concerns about Moussaoui’s flight training.

Yet FBI Headquarters officials balked at allowing a search of his laptop and other property, still refusing to recognize that: 1) the Chechen separatists were themselves a “terrorist group” for purposes of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s (FISA) legal requirement of acting “on behalf of a foreign power” and 2) that Moussaoui’s link to Ibn al Khattab inherently then linked him to bin Laden’s well-recognized Al Qaeda group for purposes of FISA (the point in my memo).

This all occurred during the same time that CIA Director George Tenet and other counter-terrorism officials — and don’t forget that Tenet was apprised of the information about Moussaoui’s arrest around Aug. 24, 2001 — told us their “hair was on fire” over the prospect of a major terrorist attack and “the system was blinking red.”

The post 9/11 investigations launched as a result of my 2002 “whistleblower memo” did conclude that a major mistake, which could have prevented or reduced 9/11, was the lack of recognition of al Khattab’s Chechen fighters as a “terrorist group” for purposes of FISA.

As far as I know, the several top FBI officials, who were the named recipients of the April 2001 intelligence memo entitled “Bin Laden/Ibn Khattab Threat Reporting” establishing how the two leaders were “heavily entwined,” brushed it off by mostly denying they had read the April 2001 memo (which explains why the memo had to be covered up as they attempted to cover up other embarrassing info).

There are other theories, of course, as to why U.S. officials could not understand or grasp this “terrorist link.” These involve the U.S.’s constant operating of “friendly terrorists,” perhaps even al Khattab himself (and/or those around him), on and off, opportunistically, for periods of time to go against “enemy” nations, i.e., the Soviet Union, and regimes we don’t’ like.

Shifting Lines

But officials can get confused when their former covert “assets” turn into enemies themselves. That’s what has happened with al-Qaeda-linked jihadists in Libya and Syria, fighters who the U.S. government favored in their efforts to topple the Qaddafi and Assad regimes, respectively. These extremists are prone to turn against their American arms suppliers and handlers once the common enemy is defeated.

The same MO exists with the U.S. and Israel currently collaborating with the Iranian MEK terrorists who have committed assassinations inside Iran. The U.S. government has recently shifted the MEK terrorists from the ranks of “bad” to “good” terrorists as part of a broader campaign to undermine the Iranian government. For details, see “Our (New) Terrorists, the MEK: Have We Seen This Movie Before?”

Giuliani and his ilk engage, behind the scenes, in all these insidious operations but then blithely turn to the cameras to spew their hypocritical propaganda fueling the counterproductive “war on terror” for public consumption, when that serves their interests. Maybe this explains Giuliani’s amazement (or feigned ignorance) on Friday morning after the discovery that the family of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers was from Chechnya.

My observations are not meant to be a direct comment about the motivations of the two Boston bombing suspects whose thinking remains unclear. It’s still very premature and counterproductive to speculate on their motives.

But the lies and disinformation that go into the confusing and ever-morphing notion of “terrorism” result from the U.S. Military Industrial Complex (and its little brother, the “National Security Surveillance Complex”) and their need to control the mainstream media’s framing of the story.

So, a simplistic narrative/myth is put forth to sustain U.S. wars. From time to time, those details need to be reworked and some of the facts “forgotten” to maintain the storyline about bad terrorists “who hate the U.S.” when, in reality, the U.S. Government may have nurtured the same forces as “freedom fighters” against various “enemies.”

The bottom line is to never forget that “a poor man’s war is terrorism while a rich man’s terrorism is war” – and sometimes those lines cross for the purposes of big-power politics. War and terrorism seem to work in sync that way.

Update: I wrote this "Chechens and Neocons" so fast yesterday and it’s not exactly polished. For instance I almost always put "terrorists" in quotes because it’s a term that doesn’t have a real definition or fixed meaning but is just used to manipulate people by pressing their emotional buttons (fear, hate, greed, false pride and blind loyalty). But yes, we HAVE seen this movie before! Our corrupt politicians and neocon-controlled national security-foreign policy connivers just keep running the same "Charlie Wilson War" script: "they might be terrorists but they are our terrorists!" Charlie Wilson’s War was hardly worth seeing the first time as you’ll recall it ended on a (falsely) high note without showing the blowback of 9-11. But only a few astute analysts and movie reviewers criticized that big omission.

The opportunistic neocons went on to use Iraqi ex-pat con-artist Ahmed Chalabi to gin up their war on Iraq and were SO surprised to discover him later turning on and spying on them. Years later we get Hillary feigning surprise – almost identical to Guiliani’s! – how could it be that our Libyan rebel "friends" whom we armed for our common goal of "regime change" turn against us so quickly and kill our Ambassador?!

What a surprise that opportunism can run in both directions! In fact we have seen this movie so many times now that we all should be prepared for the same ending with Syria and Iran. It doesn’t take much "intelligence" to predict it will also not end well with arming the "Syrian Al-Qaeda linked rebels" or the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) groups we are using to commit assassinations and other covert destabilization in Iran. Former "foreign terrorist organization" MEK just opened an office a block from the White House, celebrated by half of Washington’s neocons, politicians and "security officials" (all with their pockets full of MEK money)! Can you spell OPPORTUNISM?!

You don’t have to observe US foreign policy – and its constant, reckless efforts to achieve "full spectrum dominance" – very long to realize that it’s based on a constant flip flopping between two modes: "whack a mole" military force on the "bad terrorists" and "enemy of my enemy is my friend" arming and opportunistic exploiting of "our good terrorists." And the "bad terrorists" and the "good terrorists" frequently change spots. You’d think the public would get tired of the same plot and walk out, wouldn’t ya?!

Other very likely but terribly unfortunate outcomes of the Boston bombing will most likely be: 1) it will fuel continuation of the Authorization to Use Military Force along with drone assassinations on the "global battlefield" illegal stupidity; 2) surveillance cameras will be installed a thousand times over what they now exist in public places and 3) the FBI will argue that they need to redouble their “pre-emptive” targeting of suspects in their massive database for entrapment schemes.

They will likely point to the Boston bombing as justification for continuing those wrongful, counterproductive tactics in order to “prevent” a future attack when the facts lead to precisely the opposite conclusion that should be drawn: that if the FBI, NSA, DHS etc were not wasting so much time collecting irrelevant data on innocents, they might have focused and followed up better on the Russian tip. The task of seeking a needle in the haystack is not helped by adding more hay but no one will dare whisper that.

Coleen Rowley is a retired FBI agent and former chief division counsel in Minneapolis. She’s now a dedicated peace and justice activist and board member of the Women Against Military Madness.

Source: http://original.antiwar.com/colleen-rowley/2013/04/21/chechen-terrorists-and-the-neocons/


'Confusion and inconsistencies': How US plans to distract public from real truth about Boston

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The initial questions about the Boston bombing are behind us, but former FBI employee Sibel Edmonds believes the pursuit of truth will eventually lead to a far more secret agenda by the US, which she reveals to RT. The United States is having to quickly wake up to the possibility that Chechens are not the ‘freedom fighters’ Western media has been categorizing them as, especially when it came to the Republic’s relationship to Russia. But even the newly formed perceptions may not be enough when it comes to investigating the motives and planning behind the Boston bombing, according to Edmonds, who is also a founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

With the dust somewhat settled after the capture of the younger suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Edmonds believes there will only be more unanswered questions in an investigation already plagued by obvious inconsistencies and falsities, which she recounts at length.

RT: We've learned in the last hour that Russia warned the FBI about the older Tsarnaev brother and his potential links with radical Islamists, but the FBI found nothing suspicious. How is that possible?

Sibel Edmonds: Actually, we predicted that the unnamed foreign country [Western media didn’t name the source immediately] was in fact Russia, two days ago. We have too little facts, too much false information and speculations. But just look at the period they are talking about. When you listen to the suspect’s mother, she’s talking about a period of three to five years. According to FBI officials, they received this information, this warning, in 2011. So we have that inconsistency right there. The other important inconsistency that we should pay attention to is the mother’s description of FBI mannerisms and conversation with the suspects and the family when they were visiting them for the last three to five years. That fits exactly the recruitment style of the intelligence community. When you go to the suspects, and one moment you’re saying “We know you’re decent, we know you’re doing nothing wrong, we know you’re good”, and the next minute they’re saying “You can be dangerous”, right after receiving that information from the Russian government, to threaten them with that information for what purpose – to recruit them as informants or for other agendas.

RT: We spoke to the mother last night. She said there is no way on earth they could have  been involved in a heinous crime like this, that she knew everything about them and they could not have been potential terrorists. However, could there be another side to these people that they didn’t even let their mother know, is that not feasible?

SE: Well, again, we don’t have real information from our source in the last 48hours. I found out that they had been associating the brothers – especially the older one –with very wealthy individual Turkish persons, some of them students in Boston, some businessmen…really modern people. And we haven’t received any information that they [the brothers] had been associating with Chechens, even the radicals. So that itself is another major inconsistency in this story.

RT: Similarities are being drawn between the 'pressure cooker' bombs used in Boston and those which Al Qaeda gets English-speaking terrorists to use. Just how much does this prove in terms of the bombers' links with the terrorist group?

SE: Again, it’s way too early to comment on this and I think that whole notion right now sounds really, really weak. Because the US government, when it is convenient, one minute talk about how sophisticated Al Qaeda has become – in fact they’re as sophisticated as the NSA [US National Security Agency] – they are talking about their ability to obtain laptop, or suitcase bombs, nuclear bombs…and the next moment they are talking about this amateurish home-made ability. So, as far as the government is concerned, I think it’s too early to buy this either from the US media or the government. This situation is really similar to the Bin Laden shooting. Every day the story changed. And this is what we are going to see in the next few days. They are going to change the story, they are going to throw so much confusion and inconsistencies and conflicting data that no one is going to figure out what actually happened, especially if the second suspect dies.

RT: There's been a tendency in the Western media to portray armed groups in the Chechnya as freedom fighters. Is that going to change at all after this?

SE: We all have to really look at the timing of this, because again the US media is portraying this incident by itself. It’s not putting it in the context of things that have been happening in the past – let’s say one year so – or recent stuff – we had this case of NGOs being shut down by the Russian government, which was a very smart move, because we know that the majority of these NGOs have CIA agendas, as they’re operated and managed by CIA people. And this is one way of infiltrating Russia by the US government, the CIA. And on the other hand, from this side, we had the 12 individuals from Russia, and what the US has done.

So, if you start putting these in context and also add the fact that Russia has been the biggest obstacle for the United States to get in and directly attack Syria – that’s when you start to see the bigger picture and that’s what the people should be paying attention to. And as far as the perception, up until recently you had individuals like Bolton, Armitage… in a group called The Friends of Chechnya, and they have been around for a while. Again, the false information that is being put forth by US media is that since the fall of the Soviet Union the United States has refrained from intervening in the Russia-Chechnya situation. And that is purely false. Since mid-1990’s, the US directly, or through Turkey has been arming, training, managing, orchestrating not only Chechens but also other factions in the region – and we are looking  at Central Asia and the Caucasus. And of course the Russian government is fully aware of this.

RT: What about those resources?

SE: Alternative media has been waiting and reporting on this for years – the US operations in the region against Russia. And we are kind of puzzled in terms of the silence from the Russian government, because the FSB at any given moment can put a lot of information that would expose the fact that we actually are in the business of crating terrorists and bringing about terrorism in the region, as we have done for the last several decades in the Middle East, but especially since the fall of the Soviet Union – in Central Asia and the Caucasus. And again, there are tons of facts backing this up and there is much more in the hands of the Russian government, and I think this is a pretty good opportunity for some of this information to come out and enlighten the American public here in the United States.

Source: http://rt.com/op-edge/boston-suspect-russia-chechnya-154/

Debkafiles: The Tsarnaev brothers were double agents who decoyed US into terror trap

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The big questions buzzing over Boston Bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have a single answer: It emerged in the 102 tense hours between the twin Boston Marathon bombings Monday, April 15 – which left three dead, 180 injured and a police officer killed at MIT - and Dzohkhar’s capture Friday, April 19 in Watertown. The conclusion reached by debkafile’s counterterrorism and intelligence sources is that the brothers were double agents, hired by US and Saudi intelligence to penetrate the Wahhabi jihadist networks which, helped by Saudi financial institutions, had spread across the restive Russian Caucasian.

Instead, the two former Chechens betrayed their mission and went secretly over to the radical Islamist networks. By this tortuous path, the brothers earned the dubious distinction of being the first terrorist operatives to import al Qaeda terror to the United States through a winding route outside the Middle East – the Caucasus. This broad region encompasses the autonomous or semi-autonomous Muslim republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Chechnya, North Ossetia and Karachyevo-Cherkesiya, most of which the West has never heard of.

Moscow however keeps these republics on a tight military and intelligence leash, constantly putting down violent resistance by the Wahhabist cells, which draw support from certain Saudi sources and funds from the Riyadh government for building Wahhabist mosques and schools to disseminate the state religion of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis feared that their convoluted involvement in the Caucasus would come embarrassingly to light when a Saudi student was questioned about his involvement in the bombng attacks while in a Boston hospital with badly burned hands.

They were concerned to enough to send Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saudi al-Faisal to Washington Wednesday, April 17, in the middle of the Boston Marathon bombing crisis, for a private conversation with President Barack Obama and his national security adviser Tom Donilon on how to handle the Saudi angle of the bombing attack.

That day too, official Saudi domestic media launched an extraordinary three-day campaign. National and religious figures stood up and maintained that authentic Saudi Wahhabism does not espouse any form of terrorism or suicide jihadism and the national Saudi religion had nothing to do with the violence in Boston.  “No matter what the nationality and religious of the perpetrators, they are terrorists and deviants who represent no one but themselves.”

Prince Saud was on a mission to clear the 30,000 Saudi students in America of suspicion of engaging in terrorism for their country or religion, a taint which still lingers twelve years after 9/11. He was concerned that exposure of the Tsarnaev brothers’ connections with Wahhabist groups in the Caucasus would revive the stigma. The Tsarnaevs' recruitment by US intelligence as penetration agents against terrorist networks in southern Russia explains some otherwise baffling features of the event:

1. An elite American college in Cambridge admitted younger brother Dzhokhar and granted him a $2,500 scholarship, without subjecting him to the exceptionally stiff standard conditions of admission. This may be explained by his older brother Tamerlan demanding this privilege for his kid brother in part payment for recruitment.

2. When in 2011, a “foreign government” (Russian intelligence) asked the FBI to screen Tamerlan for suspected ties to Caucasian Wahhabist cells during a period in which they had begun pledging allegiance to al Qaeda, the agency, it was officially revealed, found nothing incriminating against him and let him go after a short interview.

He was not placed under surveillance. Neither was there any attempt to hide the fact that he paid a long visit to Russia last year and on his return began promoting radical Islam on social media. Yet even after the Boston marathon bombings, when law enforcement agencies, heavily reinforced by federal and state personnel, desperately hunted the perpetrators, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was never mentioned as a possible suspect

3. Friday, four days after the twin explosions at the marathon finishing line, the FBI released footage of Suspect No. 1 in a black hat and Suspect No. 2 in a white hat walking briskly away from the crime scene, and appealed to the public to help the authorities identify the pair.

We now know this was a charade. The authorities knew exactly who they were. Suddenly, during the police pursuit of their getaway car from the MIT campus on Friday, they were fully identified. The brother who was killed in the chase was named Tamerlan, aged 26, and the one who escaped, only to be hunted down Saturday night hiding in a boat, was 19-year old Dzhokhar.

Our intelligence sources say that we may never know more than we do today about the Boston terrorist outrage which shook America – and most strikingly, Washington - this week. We may not have the full story of when and how the Chechen brothers were recruited by US intelligence as penetration agents – any more than we have got to the bottom of tales of other American double agents who turned coat and bit their recruiters.

Here is just a short list of some of the Chechen brothers’ two-faced predecessors:

In the 1980s, an Egyptian called Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed offered his services as a spy to the CIA residence in Cairo. He was hired, even though he was at the time the official interpreter of Ayman al-Zuwahiri, then Osama bin Laden’s senior lieutenant and currently his successor. He accounted for this by posing as a defector. But then, he turned out to be feeding al Qaeda US military secrets. Later, he was charged with Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam.

On Dec. 30, 2009, the Jordanian physician Humam Khalil al-Balawi, having gained the trust of US intelligence in Afghanistan as an agent capable of penetrating al Qaeda’s top ranks, detonated a bomb at a prearranged rendezvous in Kost, killing the four top CIA agents in the country. Then, there was the French Muslim Mohamed Merah. He was recruited by French intelligence to penetrate Islamist terror cells in at least eight countries, including the Caucasus. At the end of last year, he revealed his true spots in deadly attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and a group of French military commandoes.

The debate has begun over the interrogation of the captured Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarmayev when he is fit for questioning after surgery for two bullet wounds and loss of blood. The first was inflicted during the police chase in which his brother Tamerlan was killed. An ordinary suspect would be read his rights (Miranda) and be permitted a lawyer. In his case, the “public safety exemption” option may be invoked, permitting him to be questioned without those rights, provided the interrogation is restricted to immediate public safety concerns. President Barack Obama is also entitled to rule him an “enemy combatant” and so refer him to a military tribunal and unrestricted grilling.

According to debkafile’s counter terror sources, four questions should top the interrogators' agenda:

a) At what date did the Tsarnaev brothers turn coat and decide to work for Caucasian Wahhabi networks?
b) Did they round up recruits for those networks in the United States - particularly, among the Caucasian and Saudi communities?
c)  What was the exact purpose of the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath at MIT in Watertown?
d) Are any more terrorist attacks in the works in other American cities?

Source: http://www.debka.com/article/22914/

Did the Tsarnaev Brothers Have Links to Chechen Militants?

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Based upon what has been learned about the personal profiles of the Boston terror attack suspects, the Tsarnaev brothers (see http://jamestownfoundation.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-preliminary-profile-of-boston-bombers.html), little suggests that they were linked to the insurgency movement in the North Caucasus or another jihadi movement. At the same time there are unclear indications that the suspects behaved in an unusually aggressive way prior to the attack in Boston (http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04/19/bombing-suspects-were-local-normal-immigrants/OBTQATfZa9UhMISGpgP3eN/story.html). 

The younger brother, Jokhar’s entries on the micro-blogging site Twitter also did not indicate anything especially suspicious, although some of his tweets may sound enigmatic or even ominous if read with prior knowledge of the author’s possible involvement in the Boston bombing (https://twitter.com/J_tsar).

On February 3, 2012, the leader of the Caucasus Emirate Doku Umarov announced a moratorium on attacks on civilians in Russia (see EDM, February 9, 2012). Since then the moratorium has not been lifted. Umarov’s reasoning for the halt on attacks against civilians in Russia sounded unusually realpolitik as he said that Russian citizens were engaging in protest acts against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government and the Emirate did not want to stand in their way. He referred to the process of the struggle of Russian civil society with the Kremlin as a “Chekist regime, of which they are the hostages.” 

Doku Umarov’s predecessors, Aslan Maskhadov and Abdul-Khalim Sadullayev, followed an analogous strategy (http://www.rferl.org/content/will_umarov_ban_on_terrorism_last/24472811.html). If the moratorium on targeting civilians has not been lifted by the Caucasus Emirate leadership, then it would be highly implausible that North Caucasian militants who have avoided attacking Russian civilians would instead choose to attack civilians in the United States.

The Tsarnaev brothers spent only a limited time in Chechnya. Apparently, they briefly resided in the republic just before the start of the second Russian-Chechen war, which began in September 1999. It is plausible that the brothers may still have been exposed to some conflict-related trauma resulting from the war, which uprooted hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war-torn rebel republic.  The most plausible explanation for the April 15 Boston Marathon attack, given the information publicly available currently, is that some personal events triggered a violent response from the Tsarnaev brothers. However, many more Chechen refugees live in European countries, than in the US. Many of them have also suffered psychological trauma, but there have not been attacks involving Chechens like this in Europe before.

Russian security services have ethnic Chechens as well as other ethnic groups at their disposal to perform “dirty jobs.”  In 2009, ethnic Chechens that were in all likelihood helped by the Russian government carried out a killing of a defector from Chechnya, Umar Israilov in Austria (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/15/chechen-murder-austria-russia). On April 16, 2013, Russian president Putin offered assistance with the investigation in the Boston attack a full three days before word was revealed to the Western media about the reported involvement of the two Chechen immigrants (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-04-16/world/38566064_1_boston-marathon-tom-donilon-obama). 

Putin’s proposal may suggest it was a courtesy, but it also might indicate some prior knowledge about the attack. So potentially one could conspiratorially theorize that the Russian security services may have planned the attack in Boston in such a way as to point to “Chechen terrorists”. However, even this elaborate version has little, if any, supporting evidence, given the fact that the Tsarnaev brothers moved to the US when they were extremely young and hardly could have been recruited by the Russian security services.  

As we review what we know of the evidence of the attack and then weigh the possible ties between the Tsarnaev brothers and Chechen militants in the North Caucasus, the fact that North Caucasian terrorist number one in the eyes of the Washington and Moscow—Doku Umarov, the head of the Caucasus Emirate—has declared a ceasefire on civilian targets inside Russia, diminishes the possibility that the Tsarnaev brothers could have been part of an elaborate plan by Chechen terrorists to attack US civilians.  Chechens have been fighting Russians for over 200 hundred years and it makes more sense to limit their targets to Russia proper than expand their activities to the United States.

Source:
http://jamestownfoundation.blogspot.com/2013/04/did-tsarnaev-brothers-have-links-to.html


Boston Bombings: The Russian Question

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It appears the Boston perpetrators, Tamerlan and his younger brother Johar (Dzhohar) Tsarnaev, were homegrown, Internet empowered jihadists. But Russia’s part in the deadly game remains murky. There is no solid evidence linking the Kremlin to the marathon bombing but too many questions remain unanswered to exclude Moscow’s involvement. Let us consider the relationship between Tamerlan and the post-Communist secret police.

In 2011, Moscow approached Washington with a warning that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was involved in radical Islamist circles, most likely connected to the Chechen insurrection. Accordingly, the FBI talked five times to the young man and his relatives, but found nothing noteworthy. Now that we know the Russian warning about the older brother was eerily prescient we should ask on what basis the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) singled out Tamerlan Tsarnaev for the FBI’s investigation. But the Kremlin says it does not have anything specific on the perpetrator and never did. Why did Russia bother us then with investigating someone apparently lacking a track record of malfeasance? Yet it did.

This can mean several things. First, it was a case of routine harassment of a Chechen émigré by the Russian authorities. In other words, the FBI was used as a tool in a Muscovite racial profiling scheme and influence operation abroad. The FBI should now analyze the frequency and nature of Russia’s routine requests for a preventive talk against Chechens resident in the United States to see just how routine the Kremlin’s request actually was in the Tsarnaev case.

Second, by pointing out Tamerlan, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) was stupendously clairvoyant and channeled its fears straight to our intelligence community to help protect America. That broadminded generosity is highly unlikely, not to mention the apparent Cassandric qualities of the chekists. If the Russians contacted us, they had to have had an interest in it, other than the pure goodness of Vladimir Putin’s heart.

Third, the post-Soviet secret services suspected that something was afoot and wanted to emerge with clean hands in case anything did go haywire. This is the “I-told-you-so” posture as in “I told you that the Chechens are terrorists.”

Fourth, and most controversial, the Kremlin’s spooks singled out Tamerlan because they had advance knowledge of the intent, if not the operation itself, and, perhaps, were involved in it in some way. In what way? That is the question. We can merely speculate. But his relationship with the chekists appears to have been close indeed to warrant such speculation.

In January 2012, Tamerlan Tsarnaev flew to the Russian Federation and headed to Dagestan, where he remained, until July 2012. Let us remember, Tamerlan was allegedly a person of interest to the FSB, which prompted a probe by the FBI in Boston into the young man’s Islamist tendencies. The standard operating procedure in Russia (and even in the U.S.) would have been to detain the budding radical at the airport. At a minimum, he should have been questioned. Deporting or jailing him would be perfectly routine actions. Nothing of the sort happened. He was permitted to go. Either this was a serious security lapse, or the FSB was following him or otherwise kept him under surveillance. If the latter, why does Moscow now deny it has any information about the bomber?

And, why were the famously thuggish post-Communist secret services of Dagestan not interested in Tamerlan at all? Their spokesman is on record expressing lack of interest in the Tsarnaevs even in the wake of the bombing. That is extraordinary. America’s leading specialist on the non-Russian nationalities in the post-Soviet zone, Paul Goble, has approvingly discussed the view of Ramaan Abdulatipov that Dagestan is a failed state. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Glen Howard has described the country where anarchy rules and assassinations occur daily, usually with the connivance of the secret police. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was suspected of being an Islamist radical by the FSB and he went on vacation there?

In Dagestan, according to his father, for half a year, Tamerlan did nothing but sleep and visit relatives. Which ones? His uncle Muhamad Suleimanov (pictured in uniform), who, according to Vasily Dazaev, was (or is) involved with Dagestani security? Did Tamerlan meet with the local Islamists? Or people who claimed to be Islamists?

And whom did Tamerlan meet in Austria when he visited there twice in 2007 and 2009? Allegedly, he competed in boxing in Insbruck and Salzburg. Did he visit his relatives in Gratz? Who paid for the trips? This is very expensive and unusual for a fresh emigrant to traipse around the world with no worries. Austria is a hub of the Chechen émigré activities second only to England. Where was Tamerlan when the émigré leader Umar Israilov was assassinated by Moscow’s Chechen agents in 2009? All this needs investigating.

And why do his parents remain unmolested and safe in Dagestan? Both parents were absent during the bombing in Boston. Coincidence? They were happily tucked away in Makhachkala. Please remember: this is the Caucasus. The Russians and their local allies go after anyone, and their family with extreme prejudice who is suspected of radical Islamism. Yet, the Tsarnaevs find this environment to be their safe haven.

Both parents of the Boston perpetrators have roots in the Caucasus. Zubeidat Tsarnaev is an Avar of Dagestan, her husband Anzor a Chechen. He is a boxing fanatic: first as a fighter, and then as a trainer and a fan. This is an important point. I know that it sounds paranoid to laymen but every counterintelligence officer should ask himself the following question: With which club did Anzor Tsarnaev box? There were two kinds in the Soviet Union: Spartak, which was run by the army, and Dynamo, which was subordinated to the KGB and harks back to Felix Dzerzhinsky’s Dinamo society. It is extremely relevant to the Russian angle of the Boston bombing because, if in fact Anzor boxed for the KGB, the secret service connections would endure well beyond his amateur career and residency, anywhere. Such connections have served as an informal safety net and transcend localities, translating rather fluently throughout the entire post-Soviet zone. Once a chekist, always a chekist. Ask Putin.

We would like some answers about the possible links between the Tsarnaev family and the Soviet and post-Soviet security services. If we can establish that such connections do exist, then we can prepare a more detailed set of questions regarding their nature. The Tsarnaevs are perhaps ordinary post-Soviets and there isn’t anything really to their story beyond what the mainstream media has spun. However, until we get some answers to the questions above, it is mischievous to exclude the Kremlin angle from the Boston terrorist attack.

Source: http://news.sfppr.org/2013/05/boston-bombings-the-russian-question/

Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s links to CIA operations in Caucasus

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Evidence is mounting that the accused dead Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev became a “radicalized” Muslim while participating in a covert CIA program, run through the Republic of Georgia, to destabilize Russia’s North Caucasus region. The ultimate goal of the CIA’s campaign was for the Muslim inhabitants of the region to declare independence from Moscow and tilt toward the U.S. Wahhabi Muslim-run governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Russia’s Izvestia is reporting that Tsarnaev attended seminars run by the Caucasus Fund of Georgia, a group affiliated with the neo-conservative think tank, the Jamestown Foundation, between January and July 2012.

The U.S. media has been reporting that during this six month time frame Tsarnaev was being radicalized by Dagestan radical imam “Abu Dudzhan,” killed in a fight with Russian security last year. However, in documents leaked by the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs’s Counterintelligence Department, Tsarnaev is pinpointed as being in Tbilisi taking part in “seminars” organized by the Caucasus Fund, founded during the Georgian-South Ossetian war of 2008, a war started when Georgian troops invaded the pro-Russian Republic of South Ossetia during the Beijing Olympics. Georgia was supported by the United States and Israel, including U.S. Special Forces advisers. The Georgian intelligence documents indicate Tsarnaev attended the Jamestown seminars in Tbilisi.

Tsarnaev also visited Dagestan in 2011. On December 16, 2011, WMR reported on the CIA’s and George Soros’s operations in Georgia that funded the Caucasus Fund, the Jamestown Foundation, and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) activities. It should also be noted that Tsarnaev’s Maryland-based uncle, Ruslan Tsarni (name changed from Tsarnaev) was also contracted to USAID.

“The money from USAID for Russian dissidents is being funneled through the Georgian Ministry of Education. The Georgian Minister of Education Dmitry Shashkin also attended the Tbilisi ceremony (a World AIDS Day ceremony also attended by U.S. ambassador to Georgia John Bass and Georgia First Lady Sandra Roloefs, the Dutch wife of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili), which provided cover for the covert aid program to the Russian dissidents. USAID money was used to fund scholarships in Georgia for exiled Chechen “students” who were being trained as CIA agenst to interface with Chechen guerrilla forces and the Caucasus Emirate terrorists of Doku Umarov.

Georgia has become the nexus for the U.S. aid to the Russian opposition trying to unseat Putin. In March [2010], Georgia sponsored, with CIA, Soros, and MI-6 funds, a conference titled ‘Hidden Nations, Enduring Crimes: The Circassians and the People of the North Caucasus Between Past and Future.’ Georgia and its CIA, Soros, and British intelligence allies are funneling cash and other support for secessionism by ethnic minorities in Russia, including Circassians, Chechens, Ingushetians, Balkars, Kabardins, Abaza, Tatars, Talysh, and Kumyks.”

Note: the Talysh and Kumyks live primarily in Dagestan.

The conference, held on March 21, 2010, was organized by the Jamestown Foundation and the International School of Caucasus Studies at Ilia State University in Georgia. If Georgian counter-intelligence documents had Tamerlan Tsarnaev attending Jamestown conferences in Tbilisi in 2011, could the Russian FSB have tracked him to the Jamestown Hidden Nations seminar in March 2010? In any event, a year later the FSB decided to contact the FBI about Tsarnaev’s ties to terrorists.

The first Russian request to the FBI came via the FBI’s Legal Attache’s office at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in March 2011. It took the FBI until June of 2011 to conclude that Tamerlan posed no terrorist threat but it did add his name to the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, or TECS, which monitors financial information such as bank accounts held abroad and wire transfers. In September 2011, Russian authorities, once again, alerted the U.S. of their suspicions about Tamerlan. The second alert went to the CIA. The Russians were well aware that the Hidden Nations seminar held a year earlier was a CIA-sponsored event that was supported by the Saakashvili government in Georgia. In their second communication with Washington, the Russians were likely making the CIA aware that it was on to one of Langley’s assets.

At some point in time after the first Russian alert and either before or after the second, the CIA entered Tamerlan’s name into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list (TIDE), a database with more than 750,000 entries that is maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Virginia.

On March 31, 2010, shortly after the Hidden Nations conference in Tbilisi, deadly mass casualty suicide bomb blasts in the Moscow Metro system and in Dagestan, and Georgia’s Georgia’s launching of a Russian-language TV channel targeting the north Caucasus and designed to whip up anti-Russian feelings in the volatile region, WMR reported:

“The Jamestown Foundation is a long-standing front operation for the CIA, it being founded, in part, by CIA director William Casey in 1984. The organization was used as an employer for high-ranking Soviet bloc defectors, including the Soviet Undersecretary General of the UN Arkady Shevchenko and Romanian intelligence official Ion Pacepa. The Russian FSB and the SVR foreign intelligence agencies have long suspected Jamestown of helping to foment rebellions in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and other north Caucasus republics. The March 21 Tbilisi conference on the north Caucasus a few days before the Moscow train bombings has obviously added to the suspicions of the FSB and SVR.

Jamestown’s board includes such Cold War era individuals as Marcia Carlucci; wife of Frank Carlucci, the former CIA officer, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of The Carlyle Group [Frank Carlucci was also one of those who requested the U.S. government to allow former Chechen Republic 'Foreign Minister' Ilyas Akhmadov, accused by the Russians of terrorist ties, to be granted political asylum in the U.S. after a veto from the Homeland Security and Justice Departments], anti-Communist book and magazine publisher Alfred Regnery; and Caspar Weinberger’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Kathleen Troia “KT” McFarland. Also on the board is former Oklahoma GOP Governor Frank Keating, the governor at the time of the 1995 Murrah Federal Building bombing.

The Georgian International School for Caucasus Studies in a perfect partner for Jamestown. Its current major project is designed to stir up anti-Russian sentiments in the north Caucasus by creating such new research programs as “Tsarist Russian policy and state-sponsored Soviet ethnic policies conducted in the North Caucasus during the 19th and 20th century.”

Cooperating with Jamestown in not only its north and south Caucasus information operations, but also in Moldovan, Belarusian, Uighur, and Uzbekistan affairs, is George Soros’s ubiquitous Open Society Institute, another cipher for U.S. intelligence and global banking interests. Soros’s Central Eurasia Project has sponsored a number of panels and seminars with Jamestown. Soros and his NGO contrivances and constructs provided the impetus for Saakashvili’s themed ‘Rose Revolution.’ Jamestown’s Monitor and the Soros-influenced Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty often quote from each others’ sources and reports.

On March 9, 2005, the Jamestown Foundation, Soros’s Open Society Institute, and the Moldova Foundation sponsored a seminar in Washington on the Moldovan elections. Among the advisory board members of the Moldova Foundation are Bari-Bar Zion, CEO of A4E and Amin in Israel and a former business adviser to the head of the Israel State Lottery, and Sam Amadi, special adviser to the President of the Senate of Nigeria. The Moldova Foundation receives support from Soros’s Open Society Institute.”

Georgia was a major launching pad for anti-Russia operations by the CIA, Mossad, and Britain’s MI-6. Not only did Georgian Imedi TV presented a fake news report about a Russian invasion of Georgia — which also suggested that Russian troops had killed Saakashvili — but Caucasus Emirate terrorists were conducting a number of terrorist attacks inside Russia, including a suicide bombings in Moscow and Dagestan, at the same time NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was hosting Saakashvili in Brussels.

The Russians indicated in their first communication with the FBI that Tamerlan had changed drastically since 2010. That change came after the Hidden Nations conference in Tbilisi. U.S. support for Chechen and North Caucasus secession came as a result of a public statement on August 2008 by GOP presidential candidate John McCain that “after Russia illegally recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Western countries ought to think about the independence of the North Caucasus and Chechnya.”

What does U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul know about Tamerlan Tsarneav’s activities in Russia’s North Caucasus?

Upon becoming President in 2009, Barack Obama adopted McCain’s proposal and authorized CIA support for North Caucasus secessionists and terrorists with money laundered through the USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, Soros’s Open Society Institute, Freedom House, and the Jamestown Foundation. In January 2012, Obama appointed a Soros activist and neocon, Michael McFaul of the right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford university, as U.S. ambassador to Moscow. McFaul immediately threw open the doors of the U.S. embassy to a variety of Russian dissidents, including secessionists from the North Caucasus, some of whom were suspected by the Russian FSB of ties to Islamist terrorists.

Source: http://wtfrly.com/2013/04/28/tamerlan-tsarnaevs-links-to-cia-operations-in-caucasus/#.UYB2SYL9q5d

The “Chechen Connection”, Al Qaeda and the Boston Marathon Bombings
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Nine thousand heavily armed police including SWAT teams were deployed in a manhunt to capture a 19 year old student at U-Mass, after his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston Marathon terror mastermind was shot dead by police allegedly  after a car chase and shoot out with police. Prior to the conduct of a police investigation, the 19 year old student has already been designated as “guilty”.  The fundamental legal principle of  “innocence until proven guilty” has been scrapped. In the words of President Obama (a graduate of Harvard Law School),  the Boston 19 year old student is “guilty” of  heinous crimes (without evidence and prior to being charged in a court of law):

“Whatever hateful agenda drove these men [suspects] to such heinous acts will not, cannot, prevail. Whatever they thought they could achieve, they’ve already failed…. Why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and our country resort to such violence?” (emphasis added)

Coupled with the alleged anthrax and ricin letters in Washington D.C. which mysteriously surfaced in the immediate wake of the Boston tragedy, both Washington and the media have underscored the Tsarnaev brothers tenuous ties to Chechnya’s militant jihadist insurgency. According to the Wall Street Journal, quoting expert scholarly opinion:

 ”...the Chechen [family] background is maybe a part of what leads them [the two suspects] to do what they do,” said Lorenzo Vidino, an expert on Chechen militants at the Center for Security Studies in Zurich.” … A profile on the Russian social-networking site Vkontakte that appears to belong to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev includes a propaganda clip rallying jihadists to go to Syria to fight alongside rebels there, citing sayings from the Prophet Muhammad. [Amply documented, it just so happens that the jihadist foreign fighters in Syria are recruited by the US and its allies] (Wall Street Journal, op cit.)

What is implied is that even if the suspects are not tied to a Muslim extremist network, their embedded cultural heritage and  Muslim “background” incites them –quite naturally– to commit acts of violence.  How does this concept –which routinely associates Muslims with terrorism–  repeated ad nauseam in the Western news chain,  affect the human mindset? While the identity and motives of the suspects are currently being examined by police investigators, the Tsarnaev brothers have already been categorized –without supporting evidence– as “Radical Muslims”. Across the land, Muslims are being smeared and demonized.  A new wave of Islamophobia has been set in motion.

The Creation of A New Legend: “The Chechen Connection”

A new legend is unfolding: “The Chechen Connection” is threatening America. Islamism homegrown in the Russian Federation is now being “exported to America”. Plastered on news tabloids across the United States, the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings on Patriots’ Day are relentlessly compared to September 11, 2001. According to the Council of Foreign Relations:


Law enforcement agencies at all levels have made advances in surveillance and policing since the September 11, 2001 attacks, but security risks persist. Many counterterrorism experts call for a renewed focus on the ability of the United States to weather and recover from such incidents… (emphasis added)

Is the Boston tragedy being used by Washington to usher in a new wave of police state measures directed against different categories of “domestic terrorists? Is this catastrophic event being applied to foster public reaction against Muslims? Is it being used to build acceptance of America’s holy crusade –initiated during the Bush administration– directed against a number of Muslim countries, which allegedly “harbor Islamic terrorists”?

According to the powerful Council of Foreign Relations (which exerts a pervasive influence on both the White House and the State Department), the Boston bombings once again “raise the specter of terrorism on U.S. soil, highlighting the vulnerabilities of a free and open society”. (Ibid)

Counter terrorism and Martial Law –implying the suspension of civil liberties– rather than civilian law enforcement are the proposed solutions. In the words of Secretary of State John Kerry, ‘‘I think it’s fair to say this entire week we’ve been in pretty direct confrontation with evil.’’

The unfolding mass media consensus (including that of Hollywood) is that America is once again under attack. This time, however, the alleged perpetrators are “Muslim terrorists” not from Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia  but from the Russian Federation:

If a connection between the marathon bombing suspects and Chechen separatists was established, it would mark the first time militants from the former Soviet republic have launched a deadly attack outside Russia. Chechen insurgents deny any link to marathon bombing – U.S. News

“The Chechen Connection” has become embedded in a new media consensus. The American Homeland is potentially threatened by Muslim terrorists from the Russian Federation, who have links to Al Qaeda. There is also a foreign policy agenda behind the bombings. The White House has hinted that if the “Chechen brothers” had links to radical Islam, the administration “could expand intelligence-gathering efforts overseas, as well as widen surveillance and screening measures in the United States.”

Moreover, the new terrorist narrative now involves jihadists from the Russian Federation rather than from the Middle East. There are geopolitical implications. Will the Chechen Connection be used by the administration as a renewed pretext for pressuring Moscow? What kind of media propaganda is likely to emerge?

Al Qaeda and the CIA

The American public is misled. The media reports carefully overlook the historical origins of the Chechnya jihadist movement and its pervasive links to US intelligence. The fact of the matter is that the jihadist movement is a creation of US intelligence, which has also led to the development of “political Islam”. While the role of the CIA in support of the Islamic jihad (including most Al Qaeda affiliated organizations) is amply documented, there is also evidence that the FBI has covertly equipped and incited would be terrorists within the US. (See James Corbett, The Boston Bombings in Context: How the FBI Fosters, Funds and Equips American Terrorists, Global Research April 17, 2013)

The CIA’s agenda starting in the late 1970s was to recruit and train jihadist “freedom fighters” (Mujahideen) to wage “a war of liberation” directed against the pro-Soviet secular government of Afghanistan. The “Islamic Jihad” (or holy war against the Soviets) became an integral part of the CIA’s intelligence ploy. It was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia, with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade:

“In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166 … [which] authorize[d] stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies — a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987 … as well as a “ceaseless stream” of CIA and Pentagon specialists who travelled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan’s ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There, the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels.”(Steve Coll, The Washington Post, July 19, 1992.)

Mujahideen from a large number of Muslim countries were recruited by the CIA. Jihadists from the Muslim republics (and autonomous regions) of the Soviet Union were also recruited.(For further analysis see Michael Chossudovsky, Al Qaeda and the “War on Terrorism”, Global Research, January 20, 2008)

Al Qaeda and the Chechnya Jihad

Chechnya is an autonomous region of the Russian Federation.

Among the recruits for specialized training in the early 1990s was the leader of the Chechnya rebellion Shamil Basayev who –in the immediate wake of the Cold War– led Chechnya’s first secessionist war against Russia. During his training in Afghanistan, Shamil Basayev linked up with Saudi born veteran Mujahideen Commander “Al Khattab” who had fought as a volunteer in Afghanistan. Barely a few months after Basayev’s return to Grozny, Khattab was invited (early 1995) to set up an army base in Chechnya for the training of Mujahideen fighters. According to the BBC, Khattab’s posting to Chechnya had been “arranged through the Saudi-Arabian based [International] Islamic Relief Organisation, a militant religious organisation, funded by mosques and rich individuals which channeled funds into Chechnya”.(BBC, 29 September 1999).

The evidence suggests that Shamil Basayev had links to US intelligence as of the late 1980s. He was involved in the 1991 coup d’Etat which led to the break-up of the Soviet Union. He was subsequently involved in Chechnya’s unilateral declaration of independence from the Russian Federation in November 1991. In 1992, he led an insurgency against Armenian fighters in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. He was also involved in Abkhazia, the largely Muslim breakaway region of Georgia. The first Chechnya war (1994-1996) was waged in the immediate wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was part of a US covert operation to destabilize the Russian Federation. The Second Chechnya war was waged in 1999-2000. Broadly speaking the same guerrilla terrorist tactics applied in Afghanistan were implemented in Chechnya.

According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress’ Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the insurgency in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. (Levon Sevunts, “Who’s Calling The Shots? Chechen conflict finds Islamic roots in Afghanistan and Pakistan”, The Gazette, Montreal, 26 October 1999.)

It’s obvious that the involvement of Pakistan’s ISI in Chechnya “goes far beyond supplying the Chechens with weapons and expertise: The ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war.”(Ibid)

The ISI is in permanent liaison with the CIA. What this statement signifies is that US intelligence using Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) as a go-between was calling the shots in the Chechnya war. Russia’s main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington’s condemnation of “Islamic terrorism”, the beneficiaries of the wars in Chechnya were the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which were vying for complete control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin. The two main Chechen rebel armies (which at the time were led by the (late) Commander Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab), estimated at 35,000 strong, were supported by CIA and its Pakistani counterpart the ISI, which played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel army:

“[In 1994] the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence [in liaison with the CIA] arranged for Basayev and his trusted lieutenants to undergo intensive Islamic indoctrination and training in guerrilla warfare in the Khost province of Afghanistan at Amir Muawia camp, set up in the early 1980s by the CIA and ISI and run by famous Afghani warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In July 1994, upon graduating from Amir Muawia, Basayev was transferred to Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to undergo training in advanced guerrilla tactics. In Pakistan, Basayev met the highest ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officers: Minister of Defence General Aftab Shahban Mirani, Minister of Interior General Naserullah Babar, and the head of the ISI branch in charge of supporting Islamic causes, General Javed Ashraf (all now retired). High-level connections soon proved very useful to Basayev.” (Ibid, emphasis added)

Following his training and indoctrination stint, Basayev was assigned to lead the assault against Russian federal troops in the first Chechen war in 1995. His organization had also developed extensive links to criminal syndicates in Moscow as well as ties to Albanian organized crime and the KLA. (Vitaly Romanov and Viktor Yadukha, “Chechen Front Moves To Kosovo”, Segodnia, Moscow, 23 Feb 2000)

The Chechen insurgency modeled on the CIA sponsored jihad in Afghanistan has also served as a model for several US-NATO sponsored military interventions, including Bosnia (1992-1995), Kosovo (1999), Libya (2011), Syria (2011-  ).

Chechen Rebels: US Covert Operation to Destabilize the Russian Federation

The 1994-1996 Chechen war, instigated by the main rebel movements against Moscow, served to undermine secular state institutions. The adoption of Islamic law in the largely secular Muslim societies of the former Soviet Union served US strategic interests in the region. A parallel system of local government, controlled by the Islamic militia, had been implanted in many localities in Chechnya. In some of the small towns and villages, Islamic Sharia courts were established under a reign of political terror.

Financial aid from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to the rebel armies was conditional upon the installation of the Sharia courts, despite strong opposition of the civilian population. The Principal Judge and Ameer of the Sharia courts in Chechnya was Sheikh Abu Umar, who “came to Chechnya in 1995 and joined the ranks of the Mujahideen there under the leadership of Ibn-ul-Khattab. … He set about teaching Islam with the correct Aqeedah to the Chechen Mujahideen, many of whom held incorrect and distorted beliefs about Islam.” (Global Muslim News, December 1997).

The Wahabi movement from Saudi Arabia was not only attempting to overrun civilian State institutions in Dagestan and Chechnya, it was also seeking to displace the traditional Sufi Muslim leaders. In fact, the resistance to the Islamic rebels and foreign fighters in Dagestan was based on the alliance of the (secular) local governments with the Sufi sheiks:

“These [Wahabi] groups consist of a very tiny but well-financed and well-armed minority. They propose with these attacks the creation of terror in the hearts of the masses. … By creating anarchy and lawlessness, these groups can enforce their own harsh, intolerant brand of Islam. … Such groups do not represent the common view of Islam, held by the vast majority of Muslims and Islamic scholars, for whom Islam exemplifies the paragon of civilization and perfected morality. They represent what is nothing less than a movement to anarchy under an Islamic label. … Their intention is not so much to create an Islamic state, but to create a state of confusion in which they are able to thrive.( Mateen Siddiqui, “Differentiating Islam from Militant ‘Islamists’” San Francisco Chronicle, 21 September 1999)

The second Chechnya war was launched by Vladimir Putin in 1999, with a view to consolidating the role of the central government and defeating the US sponsored Chechen terrorists against the Russian Federation.

“False Flags”

The 19 year old suspect is being used as a patsy. He was not even born in Chechnya. While he and his brother had no connection to the jihadist movement, the US media is carefully crafting a “Chechen Connection” pointing to an inherent behavioral pattern associated with Muslims:

The brothers spent 10 years in the U.S. during a formative period of their lives, exhibiting normal behavior for first-generation immigrants, said Mitchell Silber, a former intelligence official in the New York Police Department. “The question is, what catalyzed the change? Was it Chechen nationalism? Did it start with Chechen nationalism and somehow migrate to a pan-Islamist jihad cause?” (Renewed Fears About Homegrown Terror Threat,” WSJ April 20, 2013)

There is evidence, however, from the testimony of family members that the Tsarnaev brothers were on the radar of the FBI for several years prior to the Boston bombings and were the object of recurrent threats and harassment. Confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, the FBI had “interviewed” Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011. (Ibid)

What is abundantly clear is that the US government is not committed to fighting terrorists. Quite the opposite. US intelligence has been recruiting and grooming terrorists for more than thirty years, while at same time upholding the absurd notion that these terrorists, who are bona fide CIA “intelligence assets”, constitute a threat to the American Homeland.  These alleged threats by “An Outside Enemy” are part of a propaganda ploy behind the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT).

What is the Truth?

The development of an Islamist terrorist militia in different countries around the World is part of an intricate US intelligence project. While the Tsarnaev brothers are casually accused without evidence of having links to Chechen terrorists, the important question is who is behind the Chechen terrorists? In an utterly twisted logic, the protagonists of the ‘Global War on Terrorism” directed against Muslims are the de facto architects of “Islamic terrorism.”

The “Global War on Terrorism” Mindset

The “war on terrorism” mindset builds a consensus: millions of Americans are led to believe that a militarized police apparatus is required to protect democracy. Little do they realize that the US government is the main source of terrorism both nationally and internationally. The corporate media is Washington’s propaganda arm, which consists in portraying Muslims as a threat to national security. At this juncture in our history, at the crossroads of global economic and social crisis, the Boston bombings play a central role. They justify the Homeland Security State.

The evolving US Police State is thereby upheld as a means to protecting civil liberties. Under the guise of counter-terrorism, extrajudicial killings, the suspension of habeas corpus and torture are rightfully considered as a means to upholding the US Constitution. At the same time, the terrorists –created and supported by the CIA– are used to participate in “False Flag” terrorist acts with a view to justifying the conduct of a global military crusade against Muslim countries, which so happen to be major oil producing economies.

“Massive Casualty Producing Events”

Former CENTCOM Commander, General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq in 2003, had outlined a scenario of what he described as “a massive casualty producing event” on American soil, (a Second 9/11) . Implied in General Franks statement was the notion and belief that civilian deaths were  necessary to raise awareness and muster public support for the “global war on terrorism”.

“[A] terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event [will occur] somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event.” (General Tommy Franks Interview, Cigar Aficionado, December 2003, emphasis added)

While the Boston bombings are of an entirely different nature to the “catastrophic event” alluded to by General Tommy Franks, the administration appears, nonetheless, to be committed to the logic of “militarizing our country” as a means to “protecting democracy.” The Boston events are already being used to galvanize public support for an extended domestic based counter-terrorism apparatus. The latter would be implemented alongside extrajudicial assassinations against so-called “homegrown self radicalized terrorists”:

“U.S. counterterrorism policy has since 2001 focused largely on killing terrorists overseas or preventing them from getting into the U.S. But the Boston bombings show how the diffusion of terrorist tactics easily transcends borders. Countering small groups of individuals inside the U.S. can be a bedeviling assignment. Bruce Riedel, director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, said the Boston attack was likely a harbinger. “We are likely to see this as the future face of terrorist threats to the United States,” he said, adding that the case of a small number of radicalized participants who have lived in the U.S. and execute a plot is “the counterterrorist community’s worst nightmare, homegrown, self-radicalizing terrorism that learns its skill set off the Internet.” (WSJ, April 20, op cit)

The “terrorist massive casualty-producing event” was upheld by General Franks as a crucial political turning point.
Do the Boston Bombings constitute a point of transition, a watershed which ultimately contributes to the gradual suspension of constitutional  government?

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/boston-truth-the-chechen-connection-al-qaeda-and-the-boston-marathon-bombings/5332337

Canadian boxer may have inspired Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev

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Yet another name has surfaced as investigators attempt to determine what motivated the suspected Boston Marathon bombers to wage a terrorist attack two weeks ago. Authorities are still searching for answers in the wake of the deadly terrorist attack in Boston that claimed three lives earlier this month, and the only surviving suspect — 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — has reportedly stopped speaking to investigators. As questions continue to go unanswered, though, independent researchers may have stumbled upon the name of another person whose background may prove helpful in piecing together what happened to inspire the April 15 bombing.

The extent that Dzhokhar’s 26-year-old brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev played in the bombing may never be known since he was killed in a gun battle with authorities amid a massive manhunt that brought most of the Boston, Massachusetts region into lockdown mode. Now investigators are digging for dirt on another man who may have had a role in influencing the late Tsarnaev brother’s actions: a slain 23-year-old Canadian boxer named William Plotnikov.

Russia’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper has called into question Plotnikov, a Muslim convert who fled Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 2012 to fight against Russian security forces. According to the paper, Plotnikov and the elder Tsarnaev brother connected over the Internet during the years before and may have motivated one another to use violence in getting their points across.

Details on Plotnikov’s life are presently scarce, but investigators do believe that he spoke to Tamerlan Tsarnaev using an online social networking site. Novaya Gazeta reveals that Plotnikov briefly left the Toronto region in 2010 so he could study Islam in the Dagestan region of Russia. While overseas, a red flag was raised before Russian authorities who in turn ordered an investigation into Plotnikov and a subsequent interrogation. During that questioning, Plotnikov allegedly identified Tamerlan as someone whom he communicated with on the Web.

Two years later Plotnikov joined a group of insurgents in the Dagestan region, but an attempt to engage Russian security forces proved unsuccessful and he died in battle with six other militants that summer. Now a number of connections between the two slain young Muslims are making investigators ask new questions. For one, the timing of Plotnikov’s passing raises concerns among investigators. Plotnikov died in battle on July 14, 2012, and two days later Tamerlan Tsarnaev quickly fled Russia for the United States. Simon Shuster of TIME notes that Tsarnaev was in Dagestan at the time of the killing, but fled two days later to Moscow, then to the US.

He did not even wait to pick up his new Russian passport, which his parents claim to be the reason he came to Russia in the first place,” writes Shuster. One source speaking to Novaya Gazeta says Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have had to abort other plans after the untimely passing of an insurgent who admitted to knowing him.

"It seems that Tamerlan Tsarnaev came to Dagestan with the aim of joining the insurgents," a security source told the paper. "It didn't work out. First you need to contact an intermediary, then there is a period of 'quarantine' – before they take someone, the insurgents check him out over several months.”

TIME’s Shuster explains more of the similarities between the suspect and his Canadian colleague:

Both their families have roots in predominantly Muslim regions of Russia — Plotnikov’s mother is Tatar; Tsarnaev’s parents are from the North Caucasus. Both of them became avid amateur boxers in North America after their families emigrated there. Both of them embraced radical Islam while grasping around for an identity in their adopted homes. Both of them came to Dagestan to explore their faith. And both of them were in Dagestan between January and July last year, when Plotnikov had already joined an Islamist militant group and Tsarnaev was attending services at a radical mosque.”

And while the parents of the Tsarnaev brothers insist their sons are innocent, the father of Plotnikov has been perturbed by his own offspring’s actions. Speaking to Canada’s National post last year, Vitaly Plotnikov said his son converted to Islam in 2009 only to die during an insurgency battle just three years later. “How can the mind of a person be changed in such a short period of time?” the father asked. Tamerlan’s brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been formally charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and has been transferred to Federal Medical Center, Devens outside of Boston, Mass.

Source: http://rt.com/usa/boxer-tamerlan-plotnikov-tsarnaev-585/

FBI Spiked Chechen Jihadi Investigation

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Astana, Kazakhstan - Following the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, I received documents marked "SECRET" from the files of the FBI's Washington field office. The information in those files will make you sick. Click through to get a free download of the film Bush Family Fortunes, which contains the fascinating background to this story. 

When the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, I grabbed those FBI files – and a plane for Kazakhstan, bullying cameraman Rocco D into joining me. [Rocco, no fool, won't let me print his full name.] After we landed, word came that two Kazakh teens, friends of the bombers, had been arrested by Boston police and charged with hiding evidence of the bombers' guilt. Here in Astana, Kazakhstan's capital, televisions everywhere run endless loops of the bombs going off at the Boston Marathon, the screams, the blood, the victims... and the questions.

And first question: How do a couple of wholesome Call-of-Duty-playing American kids get the idea they should murder and mangle their neighbors to avenge the Muslims of Chechnya—whom the victims probably couldn't find on a map?

The second question: How did America's trillion-dollar intelligence apparatchiks wave off warnings from Russia about one of the bomber's connections to the Chechen militants?

The answer regarding the intelligence failure is, to paraphrase the famous journalist Yogi Berra: it's amazing what you don't see when you don't look.

And that's related to the how young Muslim-Americans came to kill other young Americans over Chechnya. According to the secret memo, long before the Boston bombing, even before the September 11 attack, the FBI shut down an investigation of a group that ran a summer camp in Florida for America's Muslim teenagers.

No, we shouldn't be spying on Islamic campers. However, besides the usual swimming and soccer, these youngsters were encouraged to join the Chechen jihad. The kiddies were treated to videos praising Chechen bombers (who seized a school and hospital then killed their hostages). The group also produced an educational film praising, "that compassionate young man, Osama bin Laden".

Hey, it was a family affair.  Camp Jihad was run by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), whose operation just outside Washington DC was directed in the US by a man the FBI called "ABL" – Abdullah Binladden, Osama's brother.

When the Kazakh friends of the Boston bombers were arrested, I went back to that "SECRET" memo. It fell into my hands in November 2001, just two months after that "compassionate young man" Osama killed thousands in my office building (I once worked at the World Trade Center). Why would my own government spike an investigation that might have saved lives in New York in 2001 [and in Boston in 2013]?

My producer at BBC Television called the FBI.  They did not deny the authenticity of the secret documents.  Well, then, if the US government has evidence someone may be illegally recruiting killers for Chechnya (as well as the Bosnia war), why in the world would you shut down the investigation and hide the findings? The official answer was even more chilling than the secret memo itself.  The FBI spokesman told us at BBC:
"There are lots of things only the intelligence community knows and that no one else ought to know."

Well, what else are we not supposed to know? We got the answer on November 9, 2001, when I received a call at BBC's Newsnight desk in London from a US intelligence agent via a "clean" phone. The spook confirmed that, beginning as early as 1995, the CIA and other US spy agencies were told to stand down from investigating the bin Laden family in both the US and in France.

Several insiders repeated the same story: US agencies turned a blind eye to the bin Laden-terrorist-Chechen-jihad connection out of fear of exposing the US government's half-assed—and half-illegal—support for these terrorists. Our government gave ABL a pass (and safe passage back to Saudi Arabia) because Presidents Clinton and Bush were more than happy that our Saudi allies were sending jihadis to Afghanistan, then, via WAMY, helping Muslims to fight in Bosnia then, later, giving the Russians grief in Chechnya.

The problem is that terrorists are like pigeons – they come home to roost.

 As Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who provided crucial help to our investigation, told me, "It would be unseemly if [someone] were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA… What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials."

It's utterly unlikely the young Boston bombers were on the CIA payroll, but it's more than likely the elder brother's connections here in Central Asia could be traced back to US-protected killers of years past. The sleight-of-hand to keep public eyes off the US juicing Chechen terror is almost fun to watch. There's surprisingly little official scrutiny of the media's new heart-throb, Ruslan Tsarni, the bombers' uncle. The Washington Post, praising Uncle Ruslan's "I LOVE AMERICA" schtick, noted,
"[Ruslan's] performance will be sewn into the rotation of TV news from here on out. Later, on MSNBC, Tom Ridge spoke highly of the message of ‘promise and hope' sent by Tsarni."
I would venture to guess that this was not the first time Mr. Ridge, first director of the US Department of Homeland Security, had heard Ruslan's messages. Ruslan founded the Congress of Chechen International Organizations and has lucrative work here in Kazakhstan as a USAID contractor and oil industry lawyer.

There is zero—and I mean zero—evidence that Uncle Ruslan or the CIA hired these two sad-ass kids in Boston to blow up their neighbors. The point here is that the FBI is too concerned about making sure that "no one else ought to know" about our government playing footsie with terrorists—and too unconcerned about the blow-back that blows up in Boston.

Source: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16244-fbi-spiked-chechen-jihadi-investigation

The changing facts in the Boston investigation 

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In the aftermath of massive, complicated crimes it’s not uncommon for a bit of crucial information to be immediately put forward by police, only to be contradicted later on. While it’s understandable that initial leads and assertions might end up being wrong in a dynamic situation like the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, wholesale contradictions can encourage skepticism of the motives of those releasing inaccuracies — as with initial, false reports that Osama bin Laden hid behind his wife when U.S. forces shot him. Another effect of changing details can be to encourage conspiracy theorists who latch onto inconsistencies, and to undermine trust in authorities.

Now, almost a week after the Tsarnaev brothers fought a rolling street battle with dozens of heavily armed police officers, we learned Wednesday night that they had only a single handgun, according to sources who spoke with ABC News and the AP, something that directly contradicts what officials had previously said. Here are some of the biggest changes to facts released in this investigation:
  • Suspects’ arms – After the manhunt, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said the brothers were “heavily armed” and numerous reports detailed a fairly extensive arsenal. According to a New York Times report from April 21 citing a law enforcement official, “The authorities found an M-4 carbine rifle … two handguns and a BB gun.” Now unnamed sources say there was only a single 9mm pistol between the two brothers. Indeed, photos of the shootout suggest only one brother had a weapon.
  • Boat gunfight? – Police initially reported that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev fired on police when they found him hiding in a boat Friday night. “It was back and forth … yes — he was firing,” Watertown Police Chief Ed Deveau told CNN Saturday (though the FBI cautioned at the time that only federal authorities had official information). In its definitive “tick tock” of the events, the Washington Post reported that the suspect inside the boat “was shooting back.” But later, the Washington Post and the AP reported yesterday that Tsarnaev was unarmed when police found him after what what was described as a gunfight. As it turns out, police may have been spooked by an errant shot, and fired into the boat, but apparently zero shots came out.
  • 7 -Eleven and the MIT officer – Initial reports suggested the brothers tried to hold up a 7-Eleven, and then killed an MIT officer who either responded to the robbery or just happened to be in the area. But days later, authorities revealed that the holdup was committed by different suspects and the confusion was caused by the close proximity of the two events. It’s still unknown exactly why the brothers killed the police officer.
  • Carjacking – Some reports indicate that the person whom the brothers carjacked escaped while they inexplicably went into a store to buy snacks, while others say the brothers let the victim go because he wasn’t American. It’s also still unclear which brother stole the black SUV, and which drove the Honda that followed.
  • Trip to NYC - What the suspects did after the bombing remains a mystery, but one detail that emerged was that they were planning to head to New York City — to party. That’s what New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said yesterday. But today, NBC News reports the brothers discussed trying to detonate a bomb in Times Square, but that the plan was not well developed and “aspirational at most.”
  • Perimeter - As the New York Times reported Wednesday, “Police officials initially said the boat was in the backyard of a house just outside the perimeter of the area where investigators had conducted door-to-door searches all day. But Commissioner Davis, of the Boston police, said this week that the boat had been inside the perimeter.”
Source: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/the_changing_facts_in_the_boston_investigation/

Izvestia: Slain Boston suspect Tsarnaev may have attended terrorism seminars in Georgia

Dzhokhar (L) and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (RIA Novosti / Federal Bureau of Investigation)

Georgia is embroiled in scandal amid an investigation into suspicions the country's previous government may have been involved in training extremists. Media reports suggest the key suspect in the Boston bombings participated in such training.

It is possible that terrorists had been trained in Georgia, but the investigation is underway. Let’s wait for its results. We will get a lot of new information, maybe even some shocking findings. There are suspicions that the authorities worked with terrorists and militants. If this information is confirmed, this will be shocking,” Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili said on April 28.

The comment came in response to allegations in Russian media that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the main suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, may have attended seminars allegedly sponsored by Georgian security officials and a US-based foundation. Some of the classes reportedly encouraged attendees to commit terrorist acts.

Russian daily Izvestia and TV station Russia 1 recently revealed that they obtained a report by Colonel Grigory Chanturia of the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs’ main security service. According to the document, in summer 2012 the Kavkazsky Fund and the Washington, DC-based Jamestown Foundation held events for young residents of the North Caucasus. Tsarnaev, who stayed in Russia from January to June 2012, allegedly attended some of these events.

The Kavkazsky Fund has recruited North Caucasus residents for work serving the interests of the US and Georgia, Russian media reported. The Fund was set up in November 2008, shortly after the Georgia-Ossetia conflict, to “control processes taking place in the North Caucasus region,” according to Chanturia’s report. The main aim of the Fund was allegedly to recruit young people in the North Caucasus to heighten instability and extremism in Russia’s southern region. Up to $2.5 million was allegedly allocated to finance the Fund as of January 2013. “

To finance the organization a monthly sum of about $20,000 was set up, ” Chanturia said.

The Russian media also reported that the Kavkazsky Fund has had close ties with the US Jamestown Foundation, an “independent, nonpartisan organization” whose mission is to inform and educate policymakers about events and trends of strategic importance to the US. Its board of directors once included former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Today, the Fund features Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel, who retired in 2006 after 30 years at the CIA. Riedel was a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East to four Presidents in the staff of the National Security Council at the White House, as well as a negotiator at several Arab-Israeli peace summits including Camp David and Wye River.

In 2007, the Jamestown Foundation reportedly held a seminar attended by militants loyal to Aslan Maskhadov, the leader of a Chechen separatist movement and president of the self-proclaimed ‘Republic of Ichkeria.’ During the Second Chechen War in 1999, he led a guerrilla resistance against the Russian army. He was killed in a special operation by security services in 2005. In an interview with Voice of America, Jamestown denied that it had trained Tsarnaev.

Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said it had no knowledge of whether Tsarnaev had attended the seminars. “We don’t have such information, we haven’t heard anything of the kind, we don’t know,” Nino Giorgobiani, head of the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs’ press service told RIA Novosti.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashavili said the previous Georgian government never recruited or trained groups of Chechens with the aim of infiltrating them into the Russian Federation. He learned of Ivanishvili’s comments on the issue while on a working visit to the US. Saakashvili said he was sure “America will not take Ivanishvili’s words seriously,” Izvestiya daily quoted him as saying.

In 2011, Russian authorities asked the FBI to question Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen who had legal permanent resident status in the US, over concerns he was linked to Islamic extremists. The FBI confirmed that agents had interviewed him and other family members that year following Russia's request, but “did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign.

It was revealed that a misspelling of Tsarnaev’s name kept the FBI in the dark about his early 2012 trip to Russia: “He went over to Russia, but apparently, when he got on the Aeroflot plane, they misspelled his name,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said while speaking with Fox earlier this week. “So it never went into the system that he actually went to Russia.

Last week, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving younger brother implicated in the deadly Boston Marathon bombings, was charged with using weapons of mass destruction to kill people, a federal crime punishable by death, the Justice Department said. The twin bombings near the finish line of the Boston Marathon last Monday killed three people, including an 8-year-old boy, and wounded up to 264 people.

The 19-year-old Dzhokhar reportedly gave written testimony in a hospital last Tuesday; his elder brother Tamerlan, 26, died on April 19 after a fierce gun battle with police. The suspect told interrogators that the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan spurred him and his brother to carry out the deadly bombings, US officials told the media. Dzhokhar, a naturalized US citizen of Chechen origin, further took responsibility for his role in planting explosives near the marathon finish line last week; he had previously maintained that his brother Tamerlan was the mastermind of the terror plot.

Several friends of Tamerlan’s 24-year-old widow, Katherine Russell, who he persuaded to convert from Christianity to Islam, told National Public Radio that Tsarnaev often bullied and verbally abused his wife, calling her a “slut” and throwing pieces of furniture.

Aiding Dzhokhar’s Syrian Comrades

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Even as the nation recovers from the shock of the Boston Marathon bombing, the US government is under pressure to intervene in Syria on behalf of the Tsarnaev brothers’ jihadist compatriots. The drumbeat for intervention in Syria has been going on for many months, with the same neoconservatives who authored the Iraq war joining with “humanitarian” liberals to demand we “do something.” The latest claims of the use of sarin gas by the Assad regime are the occasion for a raising of the decibel level.

Under attack from Al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists for the last year, with car bomb attacks on both civilian and military targets and the rebels in control of a third of the country, Syria’s authoritarian government has responded with lethal force – much like any government that found itself in a similar position would, including our own. Yet there is reason to doubt this latest claim: the “rebels” have staged a number of alleged “atrocities” committed by the secular authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad, but these have been consistently debunked – and the increasing dominance of jihadists in the Syrian opposition has made the Obama administration reluctant to get involved.

Now, however, we have a new accusation leveled not only by the rebels and their American amen corner, but also by the British and Israeli governments: in answer to an inquiry from Senator John “Boots On the Ground” McCain, the administration accuses the Syrian regime of using sarin gas “on a small scale,” an assessment they make “with varying degrees of confidence.”

Varying from what to what? The letter is rife with equivocation and conjecture:
“Our standard of evidence must build on these intelligence assessments as we seek to establish credible and corroborated facts. For example, the chain of custody is not clear, so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and in what conditions.”
Translation: no facts have been established. But that doesn’t stop the Obama administration from making assumptions about who used sarin:

“We do believe that any use of chemical weapons in Syria would very likely have originated with the Assad regime. Thus far, we believe that the Assad regime maintains custody of these weapons, and has demonstrated a willingness to escalate its horrific use of violence against the Syrian people.”
Yet there is no reason to assume any such “belief” about the Syrian government’s possible use of sarin gas. That regime is deteriorating by the day, as fast as their control over vast swathes of Syrian territory is disappearing. It is just as reasonable (i.e. not very) to assume the rebels are responsible: after all, they have plenty of state-backed sponsors (the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Qatar) who would be more than ready to provide it. And, of course, the jihadists who are the backbone of the rebel army, wouldn’t hesitate to deploy it.

US intervention in Syria’s civil war – which pits Bad Guys against Even Badder Guys – will be justified by the alleged use of “weapons of mass destruction” by Damascus, and the cry will go up: “He’s killing his own people!” If all this has a familiar ring to it, then you’ll recall the same accusations, including allegations of poison gas deployment, were made against Iraq: this was the justification for the invasion, conquest, and subsequent occupation of that country, a project that cost trillions and is now regarded as one of the worst military disasters in our history. (Never mind that Saddam’s use of poison gas on the Kurds occurred when we were his ally.) That the War Party is running this one up the flagpole defies belief – but, hey, in Bizarro World, where up is down and unwarranted assumptions are “very likely,” anything is possible.

What’s really going on here? After all, the “arguments” made by the interventionists just don’t add up. Take Jamie Kirchick, who works for an outfit called the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies (formerly known as “Emet“), writing in the New York Daily News:
“Of all the regimes that have experienced turmoil as a result of the Arab Spring, Syria’s is the only one that has been consistently opposed to American interests. It is the only Arab ally of Iran, a major supplier of weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah, a perpetual violator of Lebanese sovereignty and a transit hub for jihadists on their way to Iraq.”
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Syria proactively offered to aid – and did aid – in the round up of Al Qaeda cadre, and, indeed, we renditioned several to Assad’s torture chambers for the kind of interrogation not even our water-boarding CIA was prepared to conduct. As per usual with Kirchick, he confuses American interests with Israeli interests, citing Syrian support of Hamas and Hezbollah as further proof of Assad’s crimes. While both organizations are indeed terrorist groups which target civilians – as were their Israeli counterparts, the Irgun and Haganah – their target is Israel, not the United States.

The kicker is when Kirchick kvetches that Syria is “a transit hub for jihadists on their way to Iraq.” He can’t be unaware that these very same jihadists stand at the head of the Syrian rebel army. The sheer sloppiness is breathtaking: war-mongering hacks like Kirchick – who once proposed setting up a “gay brigade” to go fight in Iraq (without saying whether he’d join up himself!) – are feeling so confident they aren’t even bothering to make a credible case.

Similarly, one would think the numerous hoaxes – such as trying to pass off photos of atrocities occurring in Iraq as “evidence” of mass killings by the Syrian government – attempted by Syrian rebel propagandists would induce skepticism at these new accusations. But no – not in Bizarro World, where a history of outright lies naturally causes one to trust the pronouncements coming out of Washington and its allies even more.

Britain and France were demanding a UN investigation even before this latest release of “intelligence” by an Israeli general at a security conference, who claims to have “proof” of the sarin gas charge. Now the Israelis have added their two cents: however, in a phone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, John Kerry was unable to get him to confirm this latest revelation.

The British also claim to have definitive evidence, but the Wall Street Journal reports some officials are skeptical: the Brits tout their test results, but US intelligence sources are saying “the samples may have been tainted by rebels who want to draw the West into the conflict on their side. Likewise, they said the detection of chemical agents doesn’t necessarily mean they were used in an attack by the Syrian regime.”

How many times do we have to be lied into war by some murky “rebel” group – and their foreign backers – looking for us to do their fighting for them?

If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, laying there in the hospital, could only hear the war cries of our pundit-shrikes grow louder and more insistent, he would crack a smile. After all, one of his causes is the Syrian rebel movement: as this Yahoo article points out, on his Vokontakte page (the Russian Facebook), Dzhokhar “expresses sympathy for rebel fighters in Syria and elsewhere:

“One video bears the Russian title ‘For those who have a heart,’ showing people being brutalized by uniformed men in a country the video identifies as Syria. ‘They are killing your brothers and sisters without any reason,’ the Russian subtitles of the video read. ‘Simply because they say our Lord is Allah.’”

Indeed, if we do intervene, Dzhokhar could even imagine his horrific crime is a great success – because, after all, isn’t the Great Satan on the verge of taking up the cause of jihad in Syria? One might even conjecture that, from a certain vantage point, this development is a response to the Boston bombing, a message to jihadists both here and abroad: Don’t bomb us – because we’re here to help!

Source: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/04/25/aiding-dzhokhars-syrian-comrades/

Boston Marathon Bombing happened on Same Day as “Controlled Explosion” Drill by Boston Bomb Squad

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What’s not yet being reported by the mainstream media is that a “controlled explosion” was under way on the same day as the marathon explosion. As the Boston Globe tweeted today, “Officials: There will be a controlled explosion opposite the library within one minute as part of bomb squad activities.”

Some people believe this explosion might have been part of the demolition of another bomb. It seems unlikely, however, that a bomb at the library, one mile away, could be so quickly located and rigged to be exploded by the bomb squad in less than one hour following the initial explosions at the marathon. Bloomberg news is now saying, “This is very likely a terrorist attack.”

The question is: Who are the terrorists? It’s far too early to take an informed guess on all this. However, it is indisputable that the FBI is actively engaged in carrying out bomb plots in the United States, then halting them at the last minute to “catch the terrorists.” This fact has been covered by the New York Times, among other publications.


Keep in mind I am in no way blaming the FBI for this. Most men and women who work with the FBI are upstanding citizens who would be appalled at such acts. But it is theoretically possible that one of the FBI’s many “terror plots” went too far and turned into a live bomb instead of a dud followed by an arrest for “domestic terrorism.”

For the record, the explosions seemed relatively small for a false flag, and most false flags target children in order to maximize the emotional leverage after the event. That these explosions did not target children is yet more evidence that it may not have been a false flag at all. Either way, terrorism always works in the favor of the state. It makes presidents look presidential, and it gives the government an excuse to crack down on civil liberties all across the country. Be wary of who ultimately gets blamed for this, especially if it’s a veteran or patriot.

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/boston-marathon-bombing-happened-on-same-day-as-controlled-explosion-drill-by-boston-bomb-squad/5331505

"Contractors" at Boston Marathon Stood Near Bomb, Left Before Detonation

Image: An already widely distributed photo showing the contractor-types on the bottom left, just left of where the bomb was placed and detonated. The men are wearing matching, unmarked uniforms, large black bags, and appear to be waiting, separately, and "behind" the rest of the crowd. In the upper left corner, a wooden structure forming one half of a temporary photography "bridge" over the finish line can be seen and serves as a useful reference when establishing the contractor-types' position in other photos.
What appear to be private contractors, wearing unmarked, matching uniforms and operating an unmarked SUV affixed with communication equipment near the finish line of the Boston Marathon shortly after the bomb blasts - can be seen beforehand, standing and waiting just meters away from where the first bomb was detonated. The contractor-types had moved away from the bomb's location before it detonated, and could be seen just across the street using communication equipment and waiting for similar dressed and equipped individuals to show up after the blasts.

The men, numbering between 6-8 then begin tearing up the skirting around temporary bleachers erected for the event, opposite the explosion, before taping it off. Then, what appears to be an FBI bomb squad truck pulls up directly behind the contractor-types' SUV, with a woman clearly wearing the letters F.B.I. on her tactical vest emerging and speaking with the contractor-types. Together they disappear from the scene, leaving their vehicles behind.

It should be noted, that with the exception of the contractor-types, all other responders at the scene, including the FBI agent, can be clearly identified, from police to the fire department, to medics and even individuals wearing vests with "B.A.A. Physician" written on them. It should also be noted that no other uniformed individuals can be seen standing near the bomb site aside from the contractor-types.

These men were unidentified, professional contractors apparently augmenting public servants at the Boston Marathon, present before and after the bomb blasts in the direct vicinity of the incident. After the blasts, whether it was their intended function or not, they appeared to be searching for something under the bleachers before being joined by what appears to be the FBI bomb squad. The FBI and the city of Boston has so far categorically failed to provide any information on these highly suspicious individuals.

Questions That Must be Answered 

Several questions must be answered by the FBI, leading the investigation on behalf of we, the American people. The first question is who these men were, with large, black bags in the direct vicinity of where a bomb would detonate, moving away before the blast, and appearing directly across the road afterward. Who hired them and what was their function? Why were they moving amongst the crowd in a semi-covert fashion when all other public servants present were wearing proper uniforms and clearly identified? Did police, firefighters, event organizers, and medics know these men were present and what they were doing?

Why did it appear that the FBI was fully aware of their presence, and in fact working with them, specifically with what looks like a bomb squad unit? Were these contractors specialists in explosives, and if so, what is the significance that at least two of them were spotted just meters from where the blast occurred? 

Why These Questions Demand Answers

The checkered, frightening history (see: FBI's History of Handing "Terror Suspects" Live Explosives) of the FBI's involvement in fomenting false terror attacks, and even presiding over attacks that succeeded in maiming and killing innocent people, should call into question their presence or involvement at any public event, especially when seen associating with unidentified, semi-clandestine organizations that appear to be private contractors.

Private contractors as well, do not answer or work for the public, but rather the highest bidder. Private contractors, most notably Blackwater and its various incarnations have operated both domestically and abroad, committing obscene crimes and atrocities with seemingly absolute impunity. The term "defense contractor" is in fact a euphemism for mercenary, and has no place in a civilized, democratic world, no matter what their alleged mission statement may claim.

That both of these nefarious entities were present and cooperating in the direct vicinity of the Boston bombings, with at least two contractors standing just meters away from where the bomb actually went off, raises a number of possibilities and concerns. A drill may have been being conducted, though the FBI and city officials have denied this. Or, a threat may have been communicated to event organizers ahead of time, which prompted the inclusion of "auxiliary" security, though again, both the FBI and the city of Boston deny receiving any information prior to the bombings. Whichever contracting firm this may have been, may just have wanted to swindle Boston's taxpayers for an easy payday, and coincidentally found itself in the middle of extraordinary circumstances.

However, alarming suspicion is raised when the FBI makes no mention of an organization it was clearly coordinating with, particularly in terms of bombs and explosives before and after the incident, considering the nature of the attack. When an already dubious organization attempts to obfuscate the facts of any given event, it is the right and responsibility of legitimate law enforcement, public representatives and the citizenry itself to demand and get answers. If we are not persistent, with the FBI's bizarre behavior over the past few days, including inexplicably cancelled and suspiciously rushed press conferences, and now what appears to be a Hollywood ending for the case, we may never get those answers.

Source: http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2013/04/contractors-at-boston-marathon-stood.html

Ruslan Tsarni was married to CIA officer's daughter and even shared a home with the agent

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An uncle of the Boston bombers was previously married to a CIA officer's daughter for three years, it emerged today. Ruslan Tsarni, who publicly denounced his two terrorist nephews' actions and called them 'Losers', even lived with his father-in-law agent Graham Fuller in his Maryland home for a year.

Mr Fuller was forced to explain the relationship today as news of the family link emerged online. He told Al-Monitor that his daughter, Samantha, was married to Ruslan, whose surname was then Tsarnaev, for three to four years in the 1990s. The couple divorced in 1999 more than ten years after he left the agency in 1987.

'Samantha was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (Tsarni) for 3-4 years, and they lived in Bishkek for one year where Samantha was working for Price Waterhouse on privatization projects,' Mr Fuller said. 'They also lived in our house in [Maryland] for a year or so and they were divorced in 1999, I believe.

'I, of course, retired from CIA in 1987 and had moved on to working as a senior political scientist for RAND.'

He said his son-in-law showed no interest in the agency or politics but spoke generally about his family in Chechnya.  He said any attempts to portray the relationship as a link between the security agency and the two terrorists was 'absurd'.

'Like all Chechens, Ruslan was very concerned about his native land, but I saw no particular involvement in politics,' Fuller told Al-Monitor. 'I doubt he even had much to say of intelligence value other than talking about his own family’s sad tale of deportation from Chechnya by Stalin to Central Asia. Every Chechen family has such stories.'

Fuller visited his daughter and her husband in Bishek, as a former Russian history graduate himself interested in 'Soviet minorities'. He said he may have met the terror suspects' father, Aznor, there once and his daughter knew the Tsarnaev family when Tamerlan was a toddler and before his younger brother was born. 'I for one was astonished at the events, and to find myself at two degrees of separation from them,' he added.

Ruslan Tsarni, who lives in Montgomery Village, Maryland, was thrust into the spotlight as the names of his two nephews emerged in connection to the Boston terror attack. He stood on his driveway and attacked the two men calling them 'Losers'. He has since reported a rift between his family and that of his brother Aznor's and said his older nephew Tamerlan had become increasingly extreme in his religious views.

He said he last spoke to him in 2009 when he declared he was dropping out of school to do 'God's business' and Tsarni was concerned at his religious fervor. '[The bombing] has nothing to do with Chechen … He put a shame on our family, he put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity,' he told broadcasters in the aftermath of the bombings.

He also told reporters that Tamerlan had a friend called Misha who 'brainwashed' him. 'This person just took his brain. He just brainwashed him completely,' he said. FBI agents today said they had tracked down Misha and believed he had no link to the terror attacks.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2315929/Boston-terror-suspects-uncle-married-CIA-officers-daughter-shared-home-agent.html#ixzz2RtzNwI6B

Who is Graham Fuller?

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In the days of hysteria immediately following the Boston bombing, an unlikely media darling emerged. Ruslan Tsarni, the alleged bombers’ uncle, known to the press as “Uncle Ruslan,” gained notoriety for the ferocity with which he denounced his own nephews and their alleged Islamic radicalism.  It isn’t hard to see why the press focused so closely on “Uncle Ruslan.” He said precisely what the so-called “authorities” wanted to hear about the suspects in precisely the way they wanted to hear it. Compare this to the coverage of the boys’ mother in the mainstream media. After revealing the FBI’s connection to the Tsarnaev brothers—causing the Bureau to reluctantly confirm that they had investigated Tamerlan in the past—she has been alternatively smeared and dismissed by those same media outlets which have refused to delve into the FBI connection.

But even more interesting than the sudden popularity of “Uncle Ruslan” is his background and ties to other organizations. In an official SEC filing from 2005 it was revealed that Ruslan Tsarni had worked as a consultant for USAID, ostensibly an independent federal agency which is little more than an adjunct of the US State Department and is a known front for deep cover CIA agents in various geostrategic corners of the globe. At the same time in the mid-1990s, Tsarni incorporated a company called the “Congress of Chechen International Organizations” which recently unearthed documents show was providing material support to Chechen terrorists, including Sheikh Fathi, who, according to US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, was a “military commander in the violent jihadist movement in Chechnya” and a “preacher of violent jihad.”

As investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker has demonstrated, the address for the Congress of Chechen International Organizations just happened to be the home address of Graham E. Fuller, formerly Vice Chairman of the Reagan-era CIA’s National Intelligence Council. The relationship between Ruslan and this former top CIA official was not a loose one. Tsarni married Fuller’s daughter in the mid-1990s and lived in Fuller’s home for some time, basing his terror-supporting operation under Fuller’s own roof. Fuller himself has an interesting background that includes his two decade stint with the Central Intelligence Agency. During that time he served as National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia. One of his most notorious acts during that time was penning a memo that, according to the New York Times, later became the basis for the Iran-Contra scandal.

In addition, Fuller has long made the argument that Islam is a potentially useful geopolitical tool for the United States to manipulate for their own ends. He has been quoted as saying, “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against [the Russians]. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”

Fuller’s ties also extend to the network of Imam Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher who was run out of Turkey for allegations of conspiracy to overthrow the secular government, Gulen ended up in Pennsylvania where he now oversees a vast organization known as the Gulen Movement which has over $20 billion at its disposal for setting up Islamic schools in over 100 countries. Being a wanted man by the Turkish government, Gulen did not just waltz into the US and gain immediate residency. Instead, he fought a protracted legal battle that included reference letters from well-connected political figures, including none other than Graham Fuller. Since the details of Fuller’s connection to the Boston bombing suspects’ uncle emerged, Fuller has admitted the connection but dismissed the suggestion that there is any link between the CIA and the Boston bombing case as “absurd.” Late last month, it was revealed that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had attended a workshop last year sponsored by the CIA-linked Jamestown Foundation.

Late last month, Sibel Edmonds appeared on The Lew Rockwell Show to discuss the “coincidence” of Fuller’s connection to this case.

A narrative has begun to emerge from the background noise of the Boston bombing story that paints a very different picture from what we have been told. We have the uncle of the bombing suspects emerging as a media darling for his denunciation of the brothers, who just so happens to have worked with USAID and was living and working at the home of a top CIA official who has actually advocated “guiding the evolution of Islam” to destabilize Russia and China in Central Asia. Now we have several of the pieces of the puzzle that Edmonds’ predicted in the past few weeks falling into place: that the bombers were likely being run by the CIA; that the event would bring focus on radical terrorism who have hitherto been painted as “freedom fighting allies” of the US; and that the case may be used as leverage to make new inroads on the Syria standoff between Washington and Moscow.

And several of the pieces of this puzzle revolve around Graham E. Fuller, former National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia, a proponent of political Islam, an inspiration for the Iran-Contra affair, a character reference for CIA darling Fethullah Gulen, a former RAND analyst, and the father-in-law of the Boston bombers’ uncle. So what else is there to be uncovered regarding Fuller’s background and activities? For the answer to this, you will have to stay tuned to alternative researchers like Edmonds and Hopsicker, and tune out of the corporate media which hasn’t dared to even broach the question.

Was Boston Bombers ‘Uncle Ruslan’ with the CIA?

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The uncle of the two men who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon, who struck the only grace note in an otherwise horrific week, worked as a “consultant” for the Agency for International Development (USAID) a U.S. Government Agency often used for cover by agents of the CIA, in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan during the “Wild West” days of the early 1990’s, when anything that wasn’t nailed down in that country was up for grabs.

“Uncle Ruslan” Tsarni of Montgomery Village Md., whose name was the top trending topic worldwide on Twitter last Friday for his plain-spoken condemnation of his two nephews, has had a checkered business career, that began well before he graduated (as Ruslan Z Tsarnaev) from Duke Law School in 1998. Tsarni, a well-connected oil executive, is currently involved in an international criminal investigation into a Kazakh billionaire banker-turned-fugitive alleged to have absconded with $6 billion from Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank. 

The story begins with The London Sunday Times on May 8, 2011, which reported the sale of the personal home of England’s Prince Andrew to billionaire Kazakh Oligarch Timur Kulibayev, who “controls that country’s oil industry and happens to be married to the daughter of its autocratic President Nursultan Nazarbayev.” What does that have to do with "Uncle Ruslan?" Let's take a look. 

"Can't tell your Oligarchs without a scorecard" 

Headlined "Prince's home in 'laundered cash' inquiry," the story raised several red flags. One was that the President-for-Life’s son-in-law had paid $5 million over the asking price to purchase Prince Andrew’s home, which raised eyebrows.  

Red flags and eyebrows were raised still further, in these times of global near-depression, at the conspicuous oligarchic consumption (read: bad taste) exhibited when the Kazakh President-for-Life’s daughter-for-life Goga Ashkenazi celebrated her 30th birthday with a lavish party before the scandal hit.

Goga, who made her appearance in a Swarovski crystal-encrusted, backless lace dress, attended by Prince-for-Life Andrew, was  entertained by fire-eaters, peacock-feathered stilt-walkers, and a girl swinging on a trapeze pouring vodka into ice sculptures shaped like naked male and female torsos. There was even a woman suspended in a bird cage (true) who was there to direct guests to strategically-placed vomitoriums (alas, not true) strewn about the mansion grounds. 

Enter "Uncle Ruslan" 

But the biggest red flag, the one pertinent to murder in Boston, was Oligarch Kukibayev's use of money laundered through a network of offshore companies to attempt to hide his purchase of Prince Andrew's crib, which emerged during a legal battle between another billionaire Kazakh oligarch, Mukhtar Ablyazov, and BTA Bank, from which Kazakhstan claims Ablyazov embezzled a very cool $6 billion dollars. And this is where “Uncle Ruslan” Tsarni comes in. 

The purchase of the Prince's estate was put together, according to prosecutors in Italy and Switzerland, by a group of oil executives who comprise “a network of personal and business relationships” allegedly used for “international corruption," reported  The London Telegraph. 

Tsarni, called “a US lawyer who has had dealings in Kazakh business affairs,” by the Sunday Times, clearly appears to be a member of that network. The Sunday Times reported, “A statement by Ruslan Zaindi Tsarni was given in the High Court in December, claiming that Kulibayev bought Sunninghill and properties in Mayfair with $96 million derived from a complex series of deals intended to disguise money laundering.”

“Tsarni alleged that the money came from the takeover of a western company, which had been used as a front to obtain oil contracts from the Kazakh state.” 

A Big Big Sky's the Limit 

The “western company” used to launder the money which the Sunday Times referred to is Big Sky Energy Corporation, where Ruslan Tsarni was a top executive. Big Sky, which used to be known as China Energy Ventures Corp, is a now-bankrupt US oil company run by S.A. (Al) Sehsuvaroglu, a long-time executive of Halliburton, which had oil leases in Kakakhstan’s Caspian Basin. Tsarni was Big Sky’s Corporate Secretary and Vice President for Business Development. He joined Big Sky in 2005. A press release announcing his appointment stated:

“Mr. Ruslan Tsarni, a U.S. citizen, has over 10 years of professional experience in oil and gas legislation and corporate law. Previously, Mr. Tsarni served as Corporate Counsel of Nelson Resources Limited Group as well as Managing Director of several of its operating subsidiaries. “From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Tsarni worked as Head of Legal Affairs of Golden Eagle Partners LLC. 

Big Sky was on somebody's watch list 

"From 1994 to 1996, Mr. Tsarni served as a consultant contracted by USAID for projects aimed to develop securities markets in Central Asia, where he trained corporate governance and corporate finance principals in state and private companies.” According to a source who worked for many years as a journalist at Platts Oilgram News, a respected oil industry trade publication, good corporate governance was not a Big Sky priority. “Nelson, Big Sky, Ablyazov, Kulibayev and the rest were all on my watch list for intelligence connections and pay-offs of various kinds at Platts,” stated the source, who requested anonymity. The news corroborates other reports beginning to emerge about the family and its abundant connections. 

A "connected" family?

Before the Tsarnaev family moved to the United States a decade ago, they lived in the northern Kyrgyz town of Tokmok, near the border with Kazakhstan, which is home of the country's largest ethnic Chechen community. The day after the massive manhunt in the Boston area that led to the death of Tamerlan and the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Radio Free Europe and Kyrgyz Service correspondent Timur Toktonaliev traveled to Tokmok.

From there, he reported that the extended Tsarnaev family is well-known there, even beyond their local community. “It is not known if there was anything more than a personal connection,” the story reported, “but organized crime boss Aziz Batukaev, who is also an ethnic Chechen, lived next door to the Tsarnaevs. Batukaev grew up and lived in Tokmok, but is now in Chechnya.

Halliburton executives, suspected CIA assets, Chechnyan crime bosses, oligarchs stealing billions from banks and laundering money with seeming impunity,  fire-eaters, peacock-feathered stilt-walkers, and a girl swinging on a trapeze pouring vodka into ice sculptures shaped like naked male and female torsos… If there hadn't been two of them, the investigation would already be pointing to a single misfit, a lone nut bomber.


A Preliminary Profile of the Boston Bombers: The Tsarnaev Brothers

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The Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan, 26 years old, and 19-year-old Jokhar, have been accused of carrying out the bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 15. Tamerlan has died from injuries sustained from a shootout with police on Friday, April 19. While, as of the publication of this article, the younger brother, Jokhar, is still at large.

The Tsarnaev family used to reside in Kyrgyzstan. They probably ended up in Kyrgyzstan after mass deportation of Chechens from the North Caucasus in 1944. Today, there are approximately 20,000 ethnic Chechens still residing in Kyrgyzstan. Shortly before the onset of the second Russian-Chechen war in September 1999, the Tsarnaev family moved to their homeland in Chechnya. After the war began in 1999, they moved to Dagestan, having apparently become refugees.

The fact that they resided in Makhachkala and not in Khasavyurt, as most other ethnic Chechens in the republic, indicates that they had the financial means to live in the capital of Dagestan, which is quite expensive. They also had relatives in the city and were able to send their children to one of the best schools in Makhachkala, School #1.  The younger brother, Jokhar Tsarnaev, went to this school only for one year where he completed the first grade (http://www.zman.com/news/2013/04/19/149396.html).


Subsequently, the family was divided as the father, Anzor, stayed in Makhachkala, while the rest of the family started looking for ways to emigrate from the North Caucasus. His mother, Zubeidat, had four children: two sons and two daughters, who managed to emigrate legally to the United States. Once in the US, she received permanent residence for herself and her children. The mother’s first name, Zubeidat, suggests she was of Dagestani origin and that is probably why the family moved to Dagestan in the first place.


Having settled in the Boston area, the Tsarnaevs tried to adapt to their new home. The elder brother, Tamerlan, received a degree in engineering and was a boxer, who reportedly dreamed of competing in sporting events under the US flag. Tamerlan received US resident status in 2007 (http://lenta.ru/news/2013/04/19/anzor/).


The second brother, 19-year-old Jokhar, had only just begun to attend college. On his Internet page of the online social network VK.com, he described his views and also listed several groups of which he was a member. Jokhar was a member of three Muslim groups, but none of the groups could be described as terrorist or jihadist; they rather provided information about Islam. One of the groups, for instance, Salamword collected funds for people suffering with cancer. The second group, Islam.Muslims.Islam, simply spread photographs of mosques from around the world. The third group, called Lya ‘iLyaha’iLla-Pust Zvuchit V Nashikh Serdtsakh, does nothing besides quoting Muslim hadiths.

In light of preliminary information about the Tsarnaevs, there does not appear to be much, if any, indication that Jokhar had any connection to jihadist groups or sympathized with the most well-known terrorist organization in the North Caucasus called the Caucasus Emirate, or any other similar groups. On the contrary, in one of his blog entries, he laments having no American friends, having lived in the country for so long. All of his friends were from the former Soviet Union.


Another surprising piece of evidence suggests that Jokhar had accessed his webpage at 3 o’clock Boston time, but did not leave any comments. It was unclear whether it was AM or PM time (http://vk.com/id160300242?z=tag160300242). The bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line were detonated at approximately 2:50 PM, local time. The father of the two brothers from Makhachkala reckons that his children were framed and that his son Jokhar was like an angel (http://lenta.ru/news/2013/04/19/anzor/). Friends of the brothers describe them as ordinary American guys.

In any case, the Boston police already have made a mistake in their preliminary analysis of the brothers, stating that the suspects may have received martial skills, including the ability to make Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Chechnya. They were not present in Chechnya, either during the first war (1994-1995) or during the second war in Chechnya that started in September 1999. The brothers would not have been able to receive any type of fighting or military experience because of their age. Their family emigrated to the US when the eldest brother was only 16. Taking into account that before their move to the US they had lived in Russia for two years and prior to that they had resided for one year in Dagestan, it is hard to see their connection to militants operating in Chechnya or elsewhere in the North Caucasus.

Russia asked FBI to investigate Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 – report

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Russia asked the FBI to investigate Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, a source in US law enforcement told Reuters. The FBI had earlier reported on its website that an unnamed ‘foreign government’ had asked them for information. The slain Boston marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who previously was designated as Suspect 1, was investigated in 2011 by the FBI upon a certain foreign state’s request.

The state, which was not identified in the statement on the FBI website, filed a request concerning Tsarnaev saying that he was a follower of radical Islam and was preparing to leave the US for a particular region to join “unspecified underground groups.”

The FBI says they checked all the information possible, looking for “derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest,” and checking the suspect’s travel history, plans, and education history. Tsarnaev and his family members were also interviewed by the FBI. Upon analyzing the data, the FBI had found nothing suspicious at the time.

“The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government in the summer of 2011. The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government,” the FBI statement says.

Source: http://rt.com/news/fbi-tsarnaev-foreign-request-150/

'They were set up, FBI followed them for years'- Tsarnaevs' mother to RT

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With the 24-hour manhunt for the second suspect of the Boston bombing closed, RT remembers its conversation with the parents of the Tsarnaev brothers, who claimed all along their children were set up. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva maintains her younger son is innocent and like so many of the brothers’ acquaintances, claims they were good, courteous kids and model students – especially the younger 19-year-old Dzhokhar. A US citizen who is presently in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, she revealed to RT some suspicions of her own.

Grief-stricken at the latest developments in the case, Zubeidat expressed her dismay at the allegations, recounting Dzhokhar’s life in the US and talking of his status among his peers and friends: he was an honors student, loved by many of his friends and teachers. And his older brother Tamerlan was a star athlete and student, whose ambition was to one day appear on the US Olympic wrestling team. But her biggest suspicion surrounding the case was the constant FBI surveillance she said her family was subjected to over the years. She is surprised that having been so stringent with the entire family, the FBI had no idea the sons were supposedly planning a terrorist act.

They used to come [to our] home, they used to talk to me…they were telling me that he [the older, 26-y/o Tamerlan] was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremist sites… they were controlling him, they were controlling his every step…and now they say that this is a terrorist act! Never ever is this true, my sons are innocent!”

When asked if maybe she didn’t know about some of her sons’ more secret aspirations and dark secrets, she said “That’s impossible. My sons would never keep a secret.”

Finally, she said that if she could speak to her youngest – Dzhokhar, she would tell him, “Save your life and tell the truth, that you haven’t done anything, that this is a set up!”

In an interview with Russian television the brothers’ father Anzor Tsarnaev also claimed that they are innocent and somebody might have set them up.

I’m sure about my children, in their purity. I don’t know what happened and who did this.  God knows and he will punish them,” he told Zvezda channel. “Somebody might have set them up. I don’t know who and because of their cowardice killed the boy.”

The father said he was unable to contact his sons or other relatives. “Everything is switched off. I can’t reach my brother there either. I can’t reach anyone! I just want information. Now I fear for my boy, that they will now shoot him dead and then will say 'He had a gun'.”

I fear for my son, for his life. They should arrest him, bring him, but alive. Justice should investigate who is right and who is wrong,” he said.

Mr Tsarnaev recently spoke to his elder son, Tamerlan [Suspect #1], telling him that he should take care of his younger brother. Speaking of the Boston marathon bombing he told his son “Ok, Thanks to Allah you were not close to there and did not suffer.”

I remember I even asked “Who could do something like that?”

“We just talked. I asked him about our Dzhokhar [Suspect #2], how was he. I told him, he should help him out and keep an eye on him, so that he studies well. I told him ‘You left school, got married too early, but the kid should finish [his education]’. Because this is life – those who don’t study work a lot and work hard. That’s why I was telling them study”.

Russian 'Alpha' Special Forces team-veteran and vice-president of its International Association, Aleksey Filatov, believes there is more to the case than meets the eye. He emphasizes, firstly, that the origin and religious beliefs of the suspect, along with the specifics of the bombing, have all been carefully pre-meditated and planned by someone within the United States in order to distract the public from the true identity and long-term aims of the actual planners.

Putting a young Chechen in those shoes was top-notch professionalism in distracting everyone from the true identity and motives of the planner,” he told RT.

The executors were chosen to confuse the American public and simultaneously untie the White House’s hands in a way that would justify a departure from the rhetoric of non-involvement in military action on foreign territories.”

Source: http://rt.com/usa/tsarnaev-brothers-parents-innocent-124/
 

Who is 'Misha,' the Armenian Muslim who radicalized Tamerlan Tsarnaev?

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The Associated Press talks to the family of the alleged Boston bombers, and uncovers clues about a mysterious Islamist Svengali

The "why" behind the Boston bombings appears to be coming into focus. On Tuesday, multiple newspapers and other news organizations reported that the surviving bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, confessed to the crime and said that his older brother Tamerlan — killed last Friday in a violent shootout with police — was the mastermind. Unidentified government sources said that the brothers were "self-radicalized" jihadists, acting alone out of anger over the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Associated Press has uncovered one tantalizing detail that suggests Tamerlan's self-radicalization had an important supporting character: Misha. The single name comes from at least two family members who say they were once close to the Tsarnaev brothers: The now-famous Uncle Ruslan Tsarni and Elmirza Khozhugov, the 26-year-old ex-husband of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar's sister Aliina. The Tsarnaev family was nominally Sunni Muslim, but never very religious, say the AP's Adam Goldman, Eric Tucker, and Matt Apuzzo.

Then, in 2008 or 2009, Tamerlan met Misha, a slightly older, heavyset bald man with a long reddish beard. Khozhugov didn't know where they'd met but believed they attended a Boston-area mosque together. Misha was an Armenian native and a convert to Islam and quickly began influencing his new friend. [AP]

Misha is a very common name in Russia — a shorter form of Mikhail — but come on, "there can't be that many bald, red-bearded Armenian Muslims in the Cambridge area," says Dan Amira at New York. Still, the AP has been unable to locate him after days of sleuthing, and if he's on the FBI's radar, they're not talking. What else do we know about this mysterious Svengali?

Britain's Daily Mail says Misha is "around 30" and is probably "based in a mosque that was a short drive from Cambridge." NBC News' Michael Isikoff — who calls the bearded convert "Mischa" — reports that Tamerlan started falling under the Armenian's spell as early as 2007, and he provides this juicy detail, from Uncle Ruslan: "Mischa presented himself as an 'exorcist' who specialized in 'removing demons from people's bodies.'"

Even without the exorcism and demon-removal, Misha is the strangest detail in this already bizarre story, says Trudy Rubin at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

We all know that converts can be more zealous than those born to a faith, but an Armenian native who converted to a radical brand of Islam? As the world knows, Armenian Christians suffered their own holocaust at the hands of Muslim Turks early in the 20th century, during the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. [Philly Inquirer]

National security writer Laura Rozen speculates on Twitter that Misha sounds like "the kind of mole Russia plants to keep [an] eye on emigre communities of concern," and could even be the source that tipped off Russia to Tamerlan's conversion to radical Islam in 2011, which prompted Russia's call to the FBI. "Coming from ex-police state, shouldn't [the] Tsarnaevs [have been] suspicious of [an] Armenian convert to Islam preaching 9/11 conspiracies at their table?"

Whoever he is — assuming he exists — Misha's influence over Tamerlan appears to have been profound. "Somehow, he just took his brain," Tamerlan's uncle Tsarni tells the AP. Tsarni says that once Misha came on the scene, Tamerlan stopped listening to him and even his own father. Khozhugov, the former brother-in-law, agrees:

When Misha would start talking, Tamerlan would stop talking and listen. It upset his father because Tamerlan wouldn't listen to him as much.... He would listen to this guy from the mosque who was preaching to him. [AP]

Misha reportedly told Tamerlan that music isn't kosher in Islam, so Tamerlan stopped making and listening to music and dropped out of music school. He also started reading both radical Islamist publications as well as Alex Jones' conspiracy-oriented Infowars website. Khozhugov says Tamerlan even tried to get a copy of the 1903 Russian anti-Semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claims that Jews are plotting to take over the world.

"Misha was important," Khozhugov tells the AP. "Tamerlan was searching for something. He was searching for something out there." Now, lots of people are searching for Misha.

Source: http://theweek.com/article/index/243163/who-is-misha-the-armenian-muslim-who-radicalized-tamerlan-tsarnaev#

Israeli police head to US to aid in Boston Marathon bombing investigation

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The investigation into Monday’s deadly bombing at the Boston Marathon has officially gone international: law enforcement officials from Israel have been sent to the United States to assist in the probe. Israel Police Chief Yohanan Danino says he has dispatched officials to Boston, Massachusetts, where they will meet with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and other authorities, the Times of Israel Reports.

Citing an earlier report published by the newspaper Maariv, Times of Israel writes that Danino has dispatched police officers to participate in discussions that “will center on the Boston Marathon bombings and deepening professional cooperation between the law enforcement agencies of both countries.”

The paper reports that Israeli law enforcement planned the trip before the deadly pair of bombings on Monday that has so far claimed three lives, but the discussions will now shift focus in order to see how help from abroad can expand the investigation. In an address made Tuesday, Israel President Shimon Peres said that tragedies such as this week’s incident in Boston, sadly, bring people together from across the world.

"When it comes to events like this, all of us are one family. We feel a part of the people who paid such a high price. God bless them,” Peres said. “Today the real problem is terror, and terror is not an extension of policy: Their policy is terror, their policy is to threaten. Terrorists divide people, they kill innocent people.”

Around 20 hours after two bombs detonated near the finish line of the annual race, United States President Barack Obama went on record to condemn the tragedy as a terrorist attack.

“This was a heinous and cowardly act,” said Obama from the White House, “and given what we now know the FBI is investigating it as an act of terrorism.”

But even as officials come to assist from as far away as Israel, authorities are still in the dark as far as finding any leads in the case. Pres. Obama has directed the FBI and US Department of Homeland Security to assist in the investigation, but no agencies have identified suspects or motives at this time.

Pres. Obama has also said that his administration has been directed to implement “appropriate security measures to protect the American people,” but details as to what that could mean remain scarce. Meanwhile, at least one leading lawmaker is asking for the US to respond to the terrorist attack by increasing the scope of the ever-expanding surveillance program already growing across the United States.

“I do think we need more cameras,” Rep. Peter King (R-New York) told MSNBC after Monday’s attacks. “We have to stay ahead of the terrorists and I do know in New York, the Manhattan Security Initiative, which is based on cameras, the outstanding work that results from that.  So yes, I do favor more cameras.  They're a great law enforcement device.  And again, it keeps us ahead of the terrorists, who are constantly trying to kill us.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has also confirmed that he has dispatched law enforcement officers from the Big Apple to assist in the investigation by meeting with agents at a Boston fusion center, one of the DHS-funded data facilities that collects surveillance camera footage and other evidence in order to analyze events like Monday’s attack.

“We are certainly engaged in the information flow with the FBI through our Joint Terrorism Task Force. We have two New York City police officers, police sergeants, who are in the Boston Regional Intelligence Center,” Bloomberg said on Tuesday. “They’re up there, they’ve been up there since last evening.”

But in a study conducted last year by the Senate’s bipartisan Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, lawmakers found that those fusion centers have been more or less unhelpful in assisting with terrorism probes.

The Department of Homeland Security’s work with state and local fusion centers, the subcommittee wrote, “has not produced useful intelligence to support federal counterterrorism efforts.” Instead, they added, so-called “intelligence” shared between facilities consisted of tidbits of shoddy quality that was often outdated and “sometimes endangering [to] citizen‘s civil liberties and Privacy Act protections.”

“More often than not,” the panel added, information collected and shared at DHS fusion centers was “unrelated to terrorism.”

Source: http://rt.com/usa/police-israel-investigation-boston-009/

Putin: Boston bombing shows West's mistake

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The Boston bombings should spur stronger security cooperation between Moscow and Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, adding that they also show that the West was wrong in supporting militants in Chechnya. Putin said that "this tragedy should push us closer in fending off common threats, including terrorism, which is one of the biggest and most dangerous of them."

The two brothers accused of the Boston bombings are ethnic Chechens who had lived in the U.S. for more than a decade.

Putin warned against trying to find the roots for the Boston tragedy in the suffering endured by the Chechen people, particularly in mass deportations of Chechens to Siberia and Central Asia on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's orders. "The cause isn't in their ethnicity or religion, it's in their extremist sentiments," he said.

Speaking in an annual call-in show on state television, Putin criticized the West for refusing to declare Chechen militants terrorists and for offering them political and financial assistance in the past. "I always felt indignation when our Western partners and Western media were referring to terrorists who conducted brutal and bloody crimes on the territory of Russia as rebels," Putin said.

The U.S. has urged the Kremlin to seek a political settlement in Chechnya and criticized rights abuses by Russian troops during the two separatist wars since 1994, which spawned an Islamic insurgency that has engulfed the entire region. It also provided humanitarian aid to the region during the high points of fighting there in the 1990s and the early 2000s.

Russian officials have repeatedly claimed that rebels in Chechnya have close links with al-Qaida. They say dozens of fighters from Arab countries trickled into the region during the fighting there, while some Chechen militants have gone to fight in Afghanistan. Putin said the West should have cooperated more actively with Russia in combatting terror.

"We always have said that we shouldn't limit ourselves to declarations about terrorism being a common threat and engage in closer cooperation," he said. "Now these two criminals have proven the correctness of our thesis."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/putin-boston-bombing-shows-wests-mistake-101701441.html