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[Not Guilty]
On April 19, 1995, a former Gulf War soldier, Timothy McVeigh (27) drove a fertiliser truck loaded with explosives to the Alfred O. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and blew it up. The blast killed 168 people, including 19 children. Five hundred persons were injured. All Americans and the world knew at the time that this worst home-made disaster in us history was carried out by Americans in the very heartland of their own nation.
McVeigh referred to the dead kids as ‘collateral damage’. He echoed only what all us presidents, since Harry S. Truman had taught Americans. The 88.000 dead people in Hiroshima in 1945 had been a necessary kill. The Japanese had it coming. They choose to pick a fight and attacked Pearl Harbour. Nations that hurt us pride and trespass on us sovereignty can expect to be smoked out, as George Bush calls the intent to mass murder. Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in Asia, a country that already has known 23 years of military conflict, is at the time of this writing being carpet bombed by American heroes, causing ever more ‘collateral damage’. Afghans had it coming. No-one will be allowed to make a laughingstock of the United States, let alone Afghanistani's, who harbour the world's number one terrorist, Osama bin Laden (44).
And why is the Saudi millionaire considered by the entire world the greatest criminal the world has ever known? Because Washington has said so, without offering a shred of evidence. The 09-11 disaster was so horrific and the desire to catch the culprits so urgent, that people seemed willing to accept any lie. They were led to believe as the gospel truth, that Osama, and nobody else, had been the mastermind, that instructed 19 Muslim kidnappers to hijack four passenger jets and fly them September 11, 2001 into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre as well as the Pentagon.
Over the past half century every single us president built himself a unique reputation for consistently lying about almost everything, from the war in Southeast Asia, that caused millions of civilian deaths - and the worst collateral damage in all of history - to the present war in Afghanistan. One was such a pathological liar, that he was chased out of the White House altogether. A second only barely escaped being impeached after lying under oath. He is now being prevented practising law for five years. Until this day the truth about the assassination of jfk has never been told. Americans are notoriously gullible by nature. They gladly accepted the deception, that Lee Harvey Oswald committed the horrendous crime by himself. All of America and part of the world went along very much wanting to believe, that Washington was telling the truth. Therefore, they bought the concoction, that one lunatic ex-Marine murdered the president from a window in a building on a Dallas street. Yet, the Zapruder film of the assassination clearly showed that bullets hit jfk from two sides. The Oswald lie persists in the minds of too many till this very day.
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I worked at the time as a journalist in the us and following the very first reports from Dallas. The super terrorist of that decade, Fidel Castro, was first accused of having engineered the death of jfk. In reality, it had been Kennedy and the White House that had sought help, even from the Mafia, to have Castro bumped off. Nevertheless, the nation was being told, Castro had sought revenge and had arranged for Oswald to murder the president.
In our day we belatedly learned, that already some years ago Bill Clinton ordered the murder of Osama bin Laden, without much success. George Bush and the top lieutenants he inherited from his father, the former cia boss, has decided to show Democrats and the world how these matters must be dealt with. Since World War II American presidents have been in the international political murder business of prominent foreigners, they knew nothing about, did not understand, but that were considered dangerous in relation to us imperial designs.
Oliver Stone made a heroic effort to trace additional facts surrounding the most sensational homemade terrorist act of the 20th century. He endeavoured to kill the naïf acceptance of Oswald as lonely assassin and fool. He was massively attacked by media Mongols for trying. The days of McCarthyism came to mind the way he was being accused of anti-patriotism, daring to doubt the official story about what had really happened on November 22, 1963. All Stone had tried to do is to decode some of the nonsense Washington had tried to pull over the public. However, since the film jfk was released in 1992, his reputation went steadily from bad to worse. It became increasingly more complicated for him to raise funds for new motion pictures. The a priori non-believers in conspiracy theories had their revenge.
In 1995, the Oklahoma City explosion was first presented to the public as a terrible crime against the United States by Arab terrorists. In 1993, with the first attack on the World Trade Centre, several Arab terrorists had been arrested. Muslims were the most likely perpetrators. Osama bin Laden was not mentioned those days as an implacable enemy. He was still being looked upon as a friend of Washington. He had joined the Afghan resistance against the Soviet invasion in 1981, and the cia had been helping the Mujahideen against Moscow, including bin Laden.
But pointing fingers at Muslims again disappeared quickly from the headlines, when Timothy McVeigh was arrested and confessed. He kept his oath to his comrades, that if caught, he had acted alone. This actually made him the first us suicide bomber.
Again, Washington ran another whitewash story, that a crazy veteran had committed all by himself, just like Lee Harvey Oswald, a horrendous crime. Naivety is undoubtedly a charming childlike characteristic, but it shows a dismal lack of sophistication and mental maturity on the part of American adults, that such nonsense was widely accepted as the gospel truth of what actually happened, both
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in Dallas in 1963 and Oklahoma City in 1995. Of course, America was again in deep shock. Bill and Hillary flew down to console the next of kin and join in tearful televised ceremonies of remembrance. Time published Timothy's face in colour on the cover of a special report on the disaster, titled, ‘The Face of Terror’. Till 1995, no one had dared to entertain the thought, that one-day American terrorists were capable of targeting fellow Americans. Yes, bullets were fired at presidents Ford and Reagan, but deranged individuals had carried out those assassination attempts. Robert Kennedy was shot by an Arab by the name of Sirhan Sirhan. But this time, Oklahoma City definitely was an all American mass killing. No one was prepared to contemplate the possibility of the emergence of an armed resistance made-in-usa against Washington. The McVeigh affair carried the hallmark of the beginning of a second civil war.
The arrest of a former us sergeant prevented the Government from immediately blaming leaders of rogue states, like Castro, Qadaffi, Saddam or Milosevic, for the Oklahoma tragedy. Then, Americans could have let of steam, as they have been doing for half a century, by quickly sending bombers over Tripoli, Baghdad and Belgrade, or tighten the noose around Cuba even more. In the case of Oklahoma City the us had to try to put the best face on this attack by Americans on America. Why did the media treat this unique event as an isolated case somehow suggesting it would never be repeated? Could the destruction of the Alfred O. Murrah Building have been a rehearsal by us terrorists for larger events to come?
Truck-bombs have become popular in all parts of the world. In the United States the trucking industry loses yearly 12 billion dollars of cargo to crooks, who attack drivers when they nap or refuel. No less than 500.000 shipments of commercial explosives cross the country every year along speedways. It virtually amounts to an open invitation to us terrorists in the McVeigh bracket, to kidnap some of this material for further acts of defiance against the Washington regime.
It should be remembered, that opposition to what is perceived in circles of military personnel, as criminal us policies overseas, dates back to the Vietnam War, when it became a practice for us soldiers to simply shoot officers who issued criminal orders to the troops. Perhaps, Saigon fell as long ago as April 30, 1975. Nevertheless, the Southeast Asian bloodbath between 1960 and 1975 haunts many Americans till this day.
Robert S. McNamara, the Rumsfeld of jfk and lbj, published In Retrospect (Random House, 1995), in an effort to teach following generations why not to become involved in Asian wars. It should have been compulsory reading for the Bush (junior) White House. The us initial reasoning in Vietnam was, as expressed by the then Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, that Hanoi would reach a point unwilling to make further terrible sacrifices. All indications
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are that the 2001 White House is repeating the same miscalculation. The North lost 1.1 million men, against 58.000 dead Americans. Nobody knows how many Vietnamese soldiers or civilians died in the former Indo-China as a result of the us imposed war. Ho Chi-minh won. Vietnamese remember America as a paper tiger. McNamara concluded twenty years after the humiliation in Saigon, ‘We were wrong, terribly wrong.’ He wrote, ‘We misjudged then - as we have since - the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries.’ In the sixties Washington faced North Vietnam and the Vietcong, supported by China and the ussr. In the zero years of this century, Washington can only guess where its opponents are. Bush is fighting an elusive Pimpernel in the mountains of Afghanistan, who seems just as determined as the Vietcong were in the sixties, even more so. And, this time, the first serious adversary in the 21st century is not an Asian follower of Marx, but a fundamentalist pupil of Mohammed.
When on February 26, 1993, the first devastating attack ever on us soil occurred at the wtc in New York, with five deaths, 1.000 people injured and tens of millions of dollars damage, America was in shock. The country wondered how to respond. us investigators were suspecting the obese and blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman (55) of the crime committed against the twin towers. us and Egyptian intelligence were searching for a decade to find proof that the sheik was the architect of the assassination of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. But did anybody in Washington learn a lesson from the Muslim wake-up call in New York City seven years ago?
Inspite of the more than thousand year's rift between Sunni and Shia Islam, it was clear after the Gulf War, that Muslims everywhere shared a common rage against us behaviour worldwide. A combined force of Western nations, supported by Arab traitor regimes, had bombed Iraq into submission. Zionist Israel in our days, even led by a certified war criminal, Ariel Sharon, continued to illegally keeping Muslims under control by force with American donated modern arms. When fundamentalists were posed to win a democratic election in Algeria, they were prevented from coming to power by an American led initiative. Muslims finally concluded, that America and the West don't give a damn about what happens to the aspirations of one billion Muslims in this world.
They are by now convinced, that the American and Israeli governments conspire against them. In United Nations conference halls the us and Israel have been voting as blood brothers for decades. Washington and Tel Aviv continuously faced in tandem the entire world in matters concerning Palestina. Every single resolution aimed at giving more breathing space to Palestinians was either vetoed or ignored by them. Arabs driven from their lands by the creation of a state for Jews that had been haunted by Nazis, not by Arabs, were never fairly compensated for taking away their freedom, their land and their dignity. On the
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contrary, Israelis provocatively continue to construct settlements amidst towns and lands, where Muslims live.
Israel behaves versus its second class Arab citizens as Pretoria used to deal with the black majority within the borders of South Africa. Except Israel by now perfected state terrorism against the Muslim majority, with total military and financial support of the United States. That is what Osama bin Laden has been talking about. That is what most Muslims in the world feel. The loss of life of one single American or one single Jew is viewed in Washington or Tel Aviv as justifying the use of the full weight of the armed forces of these two countries to obliterate all Arab opposition to their dictate. The loss of one single Israeli life unleashes a barrage of tank fire and helicopter rockets on a defenceless Muslim population in a revenge attack by Israeli apartheid policies.
The bombing in the World Trade Centre underground garage in 1993 was naturally blamed on Muslim terrorists, who were paying America back for their blind support of Israel. However, Priscilla Painton offered in Newsweek an entirely different view. She wrote, that the wtc bombing might well have been the work of none other ‘than a psychotic, mad-as-hell American - a live version of a Hollywood revenge fantasy.’ What if her supposition contained a grain of truth?
No less than 19 known terror organisations called in, that they had been guilty of placing the explosives. There was a Balkan connection from the Serbian Liberation Front, and another from Croatian Militants. Followed by a group of Bosnian Muslims. There were also calls from Hamas in the Palestinian no man's land between Israel and Lebanon. Of course, us authorities stressed that the explosives could have been placed by Iranese, Iraqese, Syrian, Algerian or Lybian Muslim terrorists. Bin Laden or Al Qaida were not, as yet, in the picture. However, some journalists began to investigate American hate groups, and armed militants, who were setting up camps to train volunteers for the overthrow of the us Government.
Two years later, in 1995, after the destruction of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, followed by the price catch of an all American terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, us magazines began to report on a fascinating array of us hate groups ready to blow up the White House. All of a sudden lists of sometimes even armed underground resistance groups were named, for instance in Time.
In Blackfoot, Idaho Samuel Sherwood leads the United States Militia Association. He announced, ‘civil war could be coming, and with it the need to shoot Idaho legislators.’ In Phoenix, Arizona, Time identified a group calling itself ‘Police against the New World Order’. The leader, Jack McLamb, himself a policeman, publishes the Aid & Abet Police News Letter and directs a weekly radio program from his house.
In Boulder, Colorado are the headquarters of an armed group called ‘Guardians of American Liberties’ led by
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Stewart Webb. They describe themselves as a network of us citizens, formed to ensure the government is free of corruption and to safeguard the us Constitution. mom is one of the most extreme and visible militias. Chairman is John Trochmann in Noxon, Montana. Citizens should form armed militias to protect themselves. mom distributes books, tapes and videos with its message. In Texas the Constitutional Militia was formed by Jon Roland, who maintains, he penetrated the government's electronic intelligence systems.
In Harbor Springs, Michigan we find the Michigan Militia Corps led by a Baptist minister, Norman Olson. He claims to be 12.000 strong. These citizens seriously believe that the United Nations are aiming to lead the United States into a socialist world government. In Stuart, Florida, Robert Pummer founded the Florida State Militia on the slogan ‘Buy Ammo now, you will not be able to get it later.’ Pummer issued a handbook explaining that members of this group are totally fed up with drugs, crime, violence and bloodshed in America. So, they buy ammunition to defend us freedom and principles with live bullets.
Lawyer Linda Thompson in Indianapolis, Indiana founded the American Justice Federation dedicated ‘to stop the New World Order and getting the truth out to the public.’ Linda is calling for a fully armed march on Washington and the setting up of treason trials for congressional traitors. In New Hampshire a small Constitution Defence Militia was founded by Edward Brown. The group operates undercover and is opposed to the Federal Government, to the United Nations and to gun control. In Virginia, James Roy Mullins started the Blue Ridge Hunt Club. He, and some of his members, were already arrested for possessing short barrelled rifles and unregistered silencers. This organisation fully arms its members in preparation for war with the government.
Albert Esposito runs in Monroe, North Carolina the Citizens for the Reinstatement of Constitutional Government. Their motto: amass the four B's, meaning Bibles, Bullets, Beans and Bandages. In Kamiah, Idaho, Bo Gritz set up an armed commune. Also in Idaho, near Hayden Lake, the Aryan Nations White Supremacists organised themselves headed by the reverend Richard Butler. There are dozens of additional dangerous zealots on the loose in America, organised in neo-Nazi groups, tax protesters, home schoolers, Christian fundamentalists and well-versed Constitutionalists.
There are people in the United States, bound by fear and fervent paranoia, who actually believe, that Russian fighter jets are standing by in Biloxi, Mississippi. They signalled frequent flyovers by black painted helicopters that prepare for an imminent invasion by armies in favour of a one-world government. Stickers on interstate us highways are coded and already in place to direct the coming invading armies. ‘All nonsense’, says Tom Metzger, as
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reported in Time (May 8, 1995), who broke with the Ku Klux Klan and founded in 1980 the White Aryan Resistance. ‘We have got ten million Mexicans flooding into this country, and the militias are worried about black painted helicopters.’ Perhaps, it is too soon after 09-11 to investigate what effect the destruction of the wtc and part of the Pentagon has had on neurotic super patriots, white supremacists, armed militias and other crazy us individuals, that seem to suffer from collective delusions and who entertain absurd visions of what is really happening in America and the world.
‘It's psychological warfare,’ said Los Angeles psychiatrist, dr. Calvin Frederick to Sharon Begley of Newsweek. ‘The target of the terrorists is not the terrible number of deaths and injuries. It is to disrupt the rest of the nation by shredding our collective sense of security.’ ‘There will be a massive wave of post-traumatic-stress disorder among survivors, and among the family of survivors and the victims.’ Indeed, when I travelled to Manhattan two weeks after 09-11, a city I had known since 1948 and had lived in from 1958-1992, it seemed collectively depressed. This eerie feeling of confusion, having lived for so long in the us was unrecognisable to me. Never before had I seen Americans in such a low-key mood.
The nation's collective psyche was already seriously affected by the first blast at the wtc on February 26, 1993. That first major terrorist attack on the United States was immediately associated with Muslims. Masjid al Salam tried later to cash in a damage deposit on the rent-a-truck which exploded in the underground parking. He was promptly arrested and tried. Another serious suspect was Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman (55), who had supposedly been involved with the killing of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, even though intelligence services were unable to establish his guilt. He told Newsweek, that the West hated him, because he criticised Washington for its support of Israel and bloody interventions in Iraq, and Somalia. The Sheik was a forerunner of Osama bin Laden.
The 12:18 hour's blast on the second underground parking level of the wtc produced a deafening explosion. Government agencies went on Code Red. The fbi and cia were mobilised to the highest state of readiness. The cia Counter Terrorist Centre assembled a conglomerate of psychiatrists, explosives experts and hostage negotiators. The bomb blew out a crater of 30 meters by 60 meters.
Richard Lacayo wrote in Time, ‘Floors collapsed onto one another... the 110 story Twin Towers swayed visibly as the force of the blast shuddered upward... Fires quickly broke out, launching thick, acrid smoke up hundreds of stairwells and elevator banks. In both towers the electricity went out, including emergency back-up systems... All computers in the building shut down, then all the phone shut down.’ That was 1993.
In the 1970s, cia director Admiral Bobby Inman identified the wtc Twin Towers as a possible top priority tar- | |
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get for terrorists. Why? ‘Because of the number of victims, who would be involved,’ he replied. When in 2001, terrorists initiated a second try, and flew two jet airliners into the wtc, they finished a job that had begun eight years ago, us media proclaimed, that America had lost its innocence. Harvard psychologist, Carolyn Newberger said, ‘We as a country have been living as though the catastrophes in the rest of the world don't apply to us, disaster doesn't happen on our soil. But from now on, we can no longer deny that we are vulnerable.’
Dr. Dan Creson of the Texas University Medical School added, ‘I think it's important psychologically to feel like something is being done. Otherwise it adds to a feeling of helplessness.’ Psychiatrist Bennett Leventhal of the University of Chicago concurred. ‘Helpless is not a word Americans like to apply to themselves. However, America's sense of who we are has been challenged in a very serious way.’ Those professional statements by America's mind doctors do explain to some extent, why George Bush and the present rulers of the United States in the White House have decided that for the time being the best option is ‘to do something’ and to try and regain a sense of security. At first, pilotless cruise missiles were used by Bush Jr. in response to the kamikaze flights aimed at the us, followed by the unleashing of the entire arsenal of us attack planes and heavy bombers over Afghanistan. It was the unmitigated work of desperados. Without a shred of evidence, that Afghanistan or the Taliban were guilty, Washington is adding another horrific war crime to a long list of military interventions since 1945.
To expect the manager of a Houston baseball team to become an overnight statesman capable of handling a crisis like 09-11 is silly. During the election campaign in 2000, the son of Bush I regularly demonstrated his ignorance of world affairs to the embarrassment of the Republican Party. Not only was he unaware of the major trouble spots or where they were located on the map, but he was also unable to hide unfamiliarity with the names of who the principle actors involved in the ongoing world drama sometimes mistakenly dubbed ‘a clash of civilisations’. Only when he reached the White House did junior Bush learn about Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden.
After stealing the election in the euphoria of a free democracy and the worst electoral scandal in us history, which totally corrupted the ideal of one man one vote, ex spy master Papa Bush installed all his old cronies from the 1991 Gulf War next to the throne of his eldest son. Sure enough, another world conflict was soon in the offing. The present confrontation between East and West is first and foremost ‘a clash of the neurons’, because in this contest, the more intelligent brains will be victorious.
In every human skull, including those of the current protagonists, Osama bin Laden and George II, house ten thousand million nerve cells or neurons, which are operating as information processors. They are coded by life ex- | |
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periences. Bush is the rich kid from Houston, Texas. Bin Laden the rich kid from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Try to imagine the difference of input into their respective brains.
Bush went to Harvard and Yale, entered the petroleum business with the sheiks and royalty of the Middle East, those notorious pro us Quislings, who sell out the riches of the East to the nouveau riches of the West, just as the Bushes, Cheney's, Rumsfelds and their cronies. George II made enough of a mess of trying to become an oil tycoon, that the family bought him a baseballteam hoping he would for ever after keep quiet. However, in 2001 the Bush clique engineered their crown prince into the White House in a desperate effort to regain what was lost when Clinton and Gore won the 1991 Presidential election. George II, the prince Charles of Houston, entered the American version of Buckingham Palace and now decides on matters of War and Peace.
Osama (44) studied management and economics at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah and was all set to join his father's construction company that worked closely with the royals too. In 1973, the company was asked to rebuild and refurbish the two most holy shrines in the Muslim world. Young Osama became during this restoration works spiritually inspired by Islam. It was the Yom Kippur War (1973), when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, and were defeated, that the young Saudi drew further into the direction of what he perceived as an ultimate goal, the restoration of Arab independence and honour. The oil embargo against the West followed, while in 1975 King Faisal was assassinated.
For a number of young Saudis, including Osama, the seventies were a turning point. ‘The shock of the assassination brought home the real and communal ramifications of the Westernisation of the Saudi educated and affluent youths sending many back into the fold of Islamism,’ wrote Yossef Boudansky in Bin Laden: The man who declared war on America. (Random House, New York, 1999). Boudansky is a military analyst in Washington and director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and unconventional Warfare in Washington.
In fact, this American writer produced a lucid and sometimes even flattering account of bin Laden's gradual evolution towards placing himself in direct confrontation with the rich kid from Texas. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1980, bin Laden was among the first Arabs, who dashed down to Kabul to offer assistance. The Saudi Court, realising the direction which Osama's mind was taking, called the young civil engineer to the palace. King Fahd personally offered him the construction job to expanding the Prophet's Mosque at Medina. Bin Laden would have received a personal fee of ninety million dollars. He refused. Instead he succeeded in convincing King Fahd, Crown Prince Abdallah, Prince Turki, the Chief of Saudi Intelligence, and other high officials, to do more to
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support the Mujahideen, who were fighting the Soviets. And he went straight back to the East.
Boudansky wrote: ‘Mujahideen who served with him described him as fearless and oblivious to danger. He was a hero to us because he was always on the front line, moving ahead of everyone else... He not only gave his money, but he also gave himself. He came down from his palace to live with the Afghan peasants and the Arab fighters. He cooked with them, ate with them, dug trenches with them. That was bin Laden's way.’ The other rich kid is spending his weekends flying by helicopter to Camp David ordering his pilots in the East to search for the Afghan caves and target his opponent with the latest laser guided us missile weaponry.
Most people know as much about the business of their own nervous system, as most automobile drivers understand the combustion process of the engines in their motor vehicles. Bush' world-wide war against terrorism will go down in history as a head on collision of nervous systems derailing into a mortal struggle between devout Muslims and western crusaders for freedom and democracy. The bin Ladenites sees the Bushites as immoral murderous infidels who are turning the world into a never-ending string of gambling casinos, brothels, and hamburger stands. The 21st century locks mankind in a life and death battle between God and Satan as seen from Afghan mountains.
The neurons of simpletons like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell keep telling them that what is good for the United States is good for mankind. Ever since 1945, us foreign policy has been based on the self-serving, egotistical concept of two main streams of influence: Good, the us and partners, and Evil, formerly the Soviet Union, lately the Taliban, and the latest arrival of super criminal, Osama bin Laden.
During the second half of the 20th century Washington unilaterally declared a long list of popular foreign leaders as evil rogues, thus assigning the god given right to Washington to do as they pleased with them. Considered evil boys were Castro, Lumumba, Sukarno, Sihanouk, Bhutto, Ortega, Noriega, Allende, Nasser, Qadaffi, Saddam, Assad, Milosevic and dozens of other naughty ones, whose nations were bombed or blockaded, or both. In other cases foreign leaders were directly assassinated on the cia murder assembly line. Some were hacked to pieces. Others were overthrown by cia coups d'état, exiled for life, or replaced by fascist cia Quislings, who murdered and terrorised their peoples in the same way as Hitler had ordered his underlings to do in the occupied territories, like my own country, Holland. Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet are foremost examples of how the cia installed pathological murderers to terrorise Asians, Africans and Latinos, while receiving advise from Henry Kissinger and the likes, to set up Hitler style concentration camps in Chilli and Indonesia.
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All efforts by their successors to bring Suharto or Pinochet to trial failed. The cia guarantees its stooges lifelong protection. Milosevic, a man who is incomparably less guilty of war crimes than either Pinochet or Suharto, is sweating it out in a jail in The Hague to be judged by the so-called un Tribunal for war criminals, which in fact is nothing more than a nato instituted Kangeroo Court.
Bush steadfastly discusses with the us public on television the War on Terrorism in terms of good and evil. In 1885, Friederich Nietzsche devoted one of his major essays, Beyond Good and Evil, (Henry Regnery Publishers, Chicago, 1955) to the subject. The most famous of German philosophers concluded a century ago, that these notions had become so worn-out, their real meaning was no longer distinguishable with the naked eye. The Texas oil chic never heard of Nietzsche either.
The discussion of who are the evil terrorists and who are the good defenders of freedom and democracy is as old as the story in the Old Testament of Methuselah, who is said to have died in the year of the Flood at the age of 969. During the apartheid struggle in South Africa, Pretoria accused the anc of being terrorists. Nevertheless, at the end of the day Nelson Mandela became an international idol of a true freedom fighter.
During World War II, at 17, I joined the underground liberation force. Owing to the overwhelming superiority of Nazi military power, there was not much we could do, except to blow up buildings that were important to the Nazis. I carried explosives on my bike through German checkpoints and felt I was fighting evil for our liberation. Of course, the Germans called us terrorists. The Bushites and the Blairites now accuse Al Qaida and bin Laden of being terrorists. But they too are genuine freedom fighters. How to fight an omnipotent superpower otherwise than by guerrilla warfare?
us Attorney General, John Ashcroft summed up the world's terrorist network, including Al Qaida. In November 2001 he came up with names of 46 international organisations.
Al-Itihaad al-Isimaiya (which aims at a hard line Islamic state in Somalia.) |
Al-Rasheed Trust in Pakistan (supplies jihad fighters with food and medicine) |
Al-Wafa (Saudi group sends wood en medicines to Afghanistan) |
Asbat Al Ansar (Lebanon, Militant Sunni Islamic Group) |
Darkazanli Export-Import Company (Germany: believed to be linked to bin Laden) |
Salafist Group for Call and Combat (Algeria) |
Islamic Army of Aden (Yemen, claims to have attacked the uss Cole) |
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (linked to Al Qaida) |
Makhtab al-Khidamat (Pakistan, founded by bin Laden to recruit fighters against the ussr) |
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Al-Hamati Sweet Bakeries (Yemen: a chain of honey shops, but the cia suspects that it is used by Al Qaida to smuggle cash) |
Al-Nur Honey Centre (Yemen, same organisation) |
Al-Shifa Honey Press for Industry and Commerce (Yemen, same organisation) |
Army of Mohammed (Pakistan, linked tot the Taliban aiming for the liberation of Kashmir) |
Amiyat al-Taawon (Afghanistan) |
Rabita Trust (Pakistan, to resettle refugees). |
Ashcroft also identified the following terrorist groups:
Alex Boncayao Brigade (Philippines: communist militia aiming to overthrow the Government) |
Army for the Liberation of Rwanda |
Irish Republican Army |
First of October |
Anti Fascist Resistance Group (Spain) |
Lashkar-E-Tayyiba (Pakistan: Sunni anti-us organisation fighting in Kashmir) |
Loyalist Volunteer Force (Ireland) |
New People's Army (Philippines) |
Orange Volunteers (Northern Ireland) |
People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (terror campaign against us targets in South Africa) |
Red Hand Defenders (Northern Ireland) |
Revolutionary United Front (Sierra Leone) |
Moro Islamic Liberation Front (Philippines) |
Free Aceh Movement (Indonesia) |
Al-Maunah (Malaysia) |
Jerusalem Warriors (Iran) |
Palestinian Hezbollah |
Umar al Mukhtar Forces (Libya) |
Martyrs of al-Aqsav (linked to Hezbollah) |
Salahai-Din Battalions (Palestinian group) |
Movement for the struggle of the Jordanian Resistance |
Holy Warriors of Ahmed Daqamseh (Jordan) |
Muhammed's Army (Yemen) |
Islamic Deterrence Force (linked to attack on uss Cole) |
Black Star (no information) |
Jayshullah (no information) |
Islamic Reneweal and Reform Organisation (no information). |
When the Minister of Justice in Washington hands the world an official release detailing such an elaborate menu of terror organisations, who all could have been involved in the 09-11 bombings in the us, then why did the morons, that make up the Bush II Government, pick just one of them? They did so, because they fear Al Qaida and Osama bin Laden, the man with the long beard in the Afghan mountains, the most. They understand him least, because his brain is far superior to Bush, Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld together and especially when it comes to the ex- | |
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pertise of what is happening in the Muslim world. Osama has been in this battle since 1979. Step by step the rich kid from Riyadh began to understand what really was at stake. He turned into a deadly threat to us oil interests in the Middle East, of which the Bushites and their partners are among America's prime movers. If Saudi Arabia goes the oil dominoes will fall one by one.
Osama's principal goal in the ongoing struggle is to destroy the current status quo by which quasi royal families in a string of Arab nations behave as imperialist puppets for the White House and Wall Street, just as in Saudi Arabia a clique of 7.000 princes fill their pockets at the expense of the people.
The difference between bin Laden and Ayatollah Khomeini is, that the fascist regime of the pro American Shah of Iran was brought down to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state instead. Bin Laden's mission is not primarily geared to establish Arab fundamentalism in the region. He seems closer to re-formers like Castro, Saddam and Qadaffi. Furthermore, he too belongs to the wealthy upper class of Saudis. Originally, Osama was a social reformer, while sticking to the strict tenets of Islam to obtain his ultimate goal, namely to evict America from Saudi Arabia and consequently from the Middle East.
Studying Bin Laden's life brings back memories of the Argentinean medical doctor, Che Guevarra, who joined Fidel in the mountains of Cuba and liberated the country from us overlordship and material exploitation. Che was an idealist with the same quality of intelligence as Osama, but unfortunately he did not have a penny to his name. He fought a guerrilla war in Congo and in Bolivia and was hunted down by the cia and killed.
Washington mistakenly assumes they are up against the same type of rebel with a cause. The entire military power of the us was mobilised to destroy this one man. And, Bush boasted simultaneously, that after Al Qaida he will eliminate the other 46 terrorist organisations force of arms as well. It only goes to show what an idiot junior Bush is, because he pathetically committed himself with a cavalcade of big words and empty promises to a clearly impossible task.
In 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower was handed a topsecret report by the intelligence services. It said, ‘We are facing an implacable enemy (the ussr). There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. The nation must destroy our enemies by cleverer, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. us citizens must come to understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.’
Tim Weiner had referred to this disgusting document in the New York Times less then four weeks prior to 09-11. It goes to show that facts about what really happened usually surface in free democracies half a century after the event. God only knows what today's intelligence reports
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are advising this amateur president who must depend on his staff, because he is a total ignoramus as to what goes on in the world. Future generations will know more about what really happened after 2050.
Eisenhower was strongly advised to approve assassinations of foreign leaders, like Castro and Lumumba and to allow covert military invasions and secret murderous operations in other lands, directly in violation of the us signature under the Charter of the United Nations. In short: America entered the terrain of rogue state behaviour as early as the fifties, half a century ago.
What have we read as recently as October 29, 2001 in a report by Barton Gellman in The Washington Post? ‘Armed with new authority from President George W. Bush for a global campaign against the Al Qaida terrorist network, the Central Intelligence Agency is contemplating clandestine missions expressly aimed at killing specified individuals for the first time since the assassination scandals and consequent legal restraints of the 1970s.’ Gellman obtained two classified legal memorandums, one written for Bill Clinton in 1998, the other after the 09-11 affair, on the basis of which President Bush concluded, that executive orders banning assassination do not prevent the president from lawfully singling out a terrorist for death by covert us military action.
Washington is back in the open with the covert assassination business, upholding the long time accusation by Noam Chomsky of mit, that America is indeed the sole Super Rogue Power in the world. If any other world leader - with the exception of the Chinese and the Russians, whose military power still represents an immediate threat to the us - would dare to put out a similar announcement, his country would be immediately placed into quarantine, the us fleet would appear on his coast and squadrons of B-52s would fly over to make him change his mind. The 21st century shows a picture of an entire globe filled with anxious freedom fighters everywhere, opposing Washington's imperialism and unchallenged super power status. The ongoing wars of liberation do recall the under-ground resistance during World War II against Nazi hegemony. But we did not consider guerrilla warfare terrorism. Far from it. We felt like bin Ladenites. Our sense of freedom and patriotism guided us through the years of occupation by the Nazis. There was no other way in the face of German superior firepower, than to use dynamite for revenge.
Gellman indicated in The Washington Post that president Clinton had in 1998 already authorised a covert lethal force to be used against Al Qaida. Bin Laden must have been aware of these White House orders to kill him. Based on a more encompassing intelligence finding, Bush signed October 21, 2001 an approval for all out attack on bin Laden and his network. This followed the official accusation, that 09-11 had been the work of Saudi freedom fighters, misnamed by Washington as terrorists. The paper added an interesting insight as well. ‘The public face
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of the ongoing campaign is a conventional war in Afghanistan using uniformed troops.’ Yet, inside the cia and elsewhere in government, covert actions are planned and co-ordinated for a targeted killing campaign. Why is the average American blinded to a situation, where their nation is ruled by a visible and an invisible management. The children of the present generation will learn much about the invisible murderers, spies and crooks. This always happens long after the guilty have passed away.
This is an exact description of the us super power government as it has been operating since World War II. The world watches cnn when the president presents his case in favour of war in Afghanistan. The far majority falls for the crap he is pandering to his international audience. Dutch Foreign Minister, Jozias van Aartsen, reacted to my criticism, that closer examination of us presidents since 1945 exposes most of them as ordinary villains and crooks, by saying: ‘This Bush is a decent fellow.’ The minister was naively projecting a Texas gentleman, because the real George junior is like the best and the worst. Utterly unprepared to occupy the White House, he has a below average iq and is simply the hesitating mouthpiece of Dad and his former associate warmongers. Father Bush holds an equally shaky record of being honest with Americans, as those of us who remember, for instance, the scandal of Iran gate, are being fully aware off.
We in Europe have assumed for generations that Dwight Eisenhower was an impeccable gentleman and therefore an undisputed hero for commanding the invasion of June 6, 1944 on the beaches of Normandy, which was the beginning of the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. However, a quarter of a century after Ike left the White House, the University of Mississippi released a study by a former director of the Eisenhower Centre in New Orleans, Stephen Ambrose, on his presidency. Finally, we learn, that Ike not only ran a notorious spy network, and that constantly American laws had been violated, the Eisenhower Administration was responsible for some of the most despicable crimes against humanity on record.
It must be feared, therefore, that George Bush's grandchildren will be just as shocked as the offspring of Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson and the others, when one day they will read about the dirty tricks of their forbears. Wait until 2050 and the criminal machinations of the present White House will finally become public property. In the end, documentary proof, which is now being withheld, so-called for reasons of national security, will divulge the truth about how the Bush II clique was just as dishonest and feloniously inclined as the entire bunch of their predecessors.
I worked in New York in the days of the jfk Administration. The man was immensely popular. We all fell for it. When he was assassinated in one of the worst conspiracies in us history, American minds stored him as an undisputed hero in their memory. That was the atmosphere
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at his funeral, which I attended. Over the years, however, it became crystal clear, that jfk too had behaved as a common criminal. Like the president asking New York Times writer Tad Szulc (Fidel: A critical portrait, William Morrow, New York, 1986), what the reactions would be if he ordered the Cuban leader to be killed. Kennedy actually contacted his buddies in the Chicago Mafia to assist in bumping off Fidel, an act that in 2001 would be called a regular war crime.
May 1st, 1960, the Soviets downed a us spy plane and captured Francis Gary Powers. Nikita Khrushchev announced the fact in the Supreme Soviet. Eisenhower denied Powers had been spying. He lied. Only later, after Powers appeared in a Soviet Court, Ike conceded. Researcher Ambrose documented Eisenhower approved assassination plots, as well as a series of criminal us interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Hungary, Indonesia and Vietnam. Famous Eisenhower became exposed as a common crook.
During the Vietnam war in the 60's and 70's I lectured in the us for W. Colston Leigh. What surprised me to no end, was, that audiences did not even suspect their governments and considered mischief as directed from the White House impossible and slander. Criticism of the war in Vietnam was unacceptable to most. America had not known war since the British burned the White House. People talked through their hats about matters of war and peace. I discovered Americans across the board to be warminded and bellicose. I experienced this as frightening. Having returned from a reporting trip accompanying us soldiers on Army helicopters in the Mekong delta, I would get angry at the complacency and self-righteousness of the folks at the Fork-and-Knife Club in a provincial town in Nebraska, who considered it perfectly normal and acceptable that us B-52s sprayed southeast Asian jungles with chemicals in order to cause the leaves to drop from the trees and thus exposing the Vietcong guerrillas to attacks by us helicopter gun ships. Who used chemical warfare in Asia first?
I realised that it was useless to try to relate my own experiences of war to us audiences. I often wondered whether it would take another Hirosjima disaster to wake up Americans to the realities of the 20th century world. While Russia, Europe and many other parts of the world were largely devastated during two world wars, America remained unscathed. It turned Americans into illiterati on the subject of modern warfare and the suffering of the masses from inventions like cluster bombs, now widely used by George II in Afghanistan.
On November 20, 1975, Senator Frank Church reported that plots against five foreign leaders under presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon had been deliberately organised in terms so ambiguous that it was difficult to be certain at what levels assassination activity was known and authorised. This finding led to putting the
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brakes on us assassinations of foreign leaders. However, on September 17, George junior committed another of his famous gaffes. Osama bin Laden was wanted by the White House, he said, ‘dead or alive.’ Those of us, who know their history, realised that the us was officially back in the murder business.
The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, elucidated, that Executive Order 12333, signed December 4, 1981 by president Ronald Reagan was to remain in effect. Bush junior would also follow executive orders 11905 and 12306 signed by presidents Ford and Carter. These forbade assassinations, but did not go further to define the terms. Fleischer simply refused to answer reporters questions to be clear and said instead, ‘I am going to just repeat my words and others will figure out the exact implications of them, but it does not inhibit the nation's ability to act in self-defence.’
The usual White House battery of lawyers advised Fleischer how to dance around pertinent questions from the press and mislead everyone as to the true intentions of the Bush White House. Namely, to shoot on sight any basterd that opposes us. Having lived in New York (1958-1992) I recognised only too well the us way of thinking. It also reminded me of the remarkable book by New York Times columnist C.L. Su1zberger, What's wrong with us Foreign Policy (Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York, 1959). He recalled what Francois de Callières, private secretary of King Louis XIV wrote in 1713: ‘In general, the training of a lawyer breeds habits and dispositions of mind which are not favourable for the practice of diplomacy.’ (p.p. 39).
Again Bush and Ariel Sharon appear to be on the same wavelength when it comes to what they consider their God-given right, that is to murder whomever they wish when he is considered a threat to the us or Israel. In 2001 the Sharon government is systematically destroying its implacable enemies through direct liquidation as if this is normal practice allowed under international law or the Charter of the United Nations. The Israelis take their cue from Bush. The professional term being ‘lethal, anticipatory self-defence.’ The Palestinians call it ‘assassination’, when us helicopters and rockets are being used to blow up Palestinian leaders in their cars. Over the past months 60 Palestinian activists have been executed this way. Sharon hides his crimes behind the murderous record of countless us presidents.
Secretary-general Kofi Annan of the un sounded like a lonely voice in the dark when he appealed to Sharon to stop murdering Palestinians in cool blood. But why should Sharon, notorious for his blood baths in Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatilla, change his murderous habits at the age of 72? Meanwhile, plo cadres, look upon themselves as genuine freedom fighters, which they are. The creation of Israel by western ultimatum to the Arab world was in itself an act of ultimate aggression. Hitler's
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concentration camps had been the immediate motive for the creation of a separate state for Jews, but at the expense of the Arab world.
Since 1948, a perpetual state of war reigns between Israelis and Palestinians. In 1957, I reported on an Indonesian Garuda battalion serving with un peacekeepers in Gaza and the Sinai desert. I visited Palestinian refugee camps. No one in the world cared, neither then, or now about these victims resulting from the decision to establish a Jewish state. Arabs had no part in Hitler's crimes. It's the shame of mankind that the inhuman living conditions for thousands of Palestinians still persist today. Kofi Annan called it an affront to international law, ‘in particular human rights law, but also to general principles of law.’ The un Charter says: ‘In peacetime, the citizens of a nation, whether they are political officials or private individuals, are entitled to immunity from intentional acts of violence by citizens, agents or military forces of another nation.’
Gangster's in the White House or the corridors of the Israeli government are guilty as hell and should be locked up in the prison of The Hague Tribunal for war crimes. But instead, the us leadership is now directly after Osama's skull and ready to lynch him on the spot, and that is being decreed without rendering any proof that he is guilty of the crimes he is being accused off. Any of the dozens of clandestine guerrilla organisations, as detailed by Attorney General Ashcroft, could have rounded up 19 Mujahideen in the name of bin Laden to fly the airliners on September 11, 2001.
Muslims finally drew the line and concluded enough is enough. They decided to answer once and for all decades of unprovoked American and western aggression against the Muslim world. us and Israeli rogues are at last being confronted with direct action for their murderous games. The Jihad is in essence a war against unbridled imperialism and colonialism stretching into the 21st century. The exploited are finally standing up against the exploiters. Bin Laden fights a liberation war, as we did in Holland against the Nazis. Al Qaida are freedom fighters, as we were in 1940-1945. Hitler called us terrorists, like Bush and Blair call bin Laden a terrorist. He is not. He is a liberator.
Finally Muslims succeeded in breaking the us-Israeli standard monopoly, of bombing indiscriminately and at random whomever they want. This includes Arab youngsters throwing stones at Israeli terrorist occupying forces. At last, America is being paid back in kind. Once before the United States posed as a paper tiger when in 1975 Vietcong guerrillas, often only clad in black pyjamas, took over the us embassy in Saigon. The imperialists fled in helicopters from rooftops to the safety of their warships off the coast of Vietnam. Asians saw it as a retreat of frightened cowards. us humiliation was complete.
At last the aggressors were paid back on 09-11 with their own medicine and Arab guerrillas used their own
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planes as flying bombs. Some Palestinians danced in the streets and the west screamed ‘shame!’. I recalled my lecture tours between 1958 and 1975 in the us and the indomitable warlike talk in answer and question periods. Audiences favoured the sending of B-52s over Havana and Peking. This time, I asked my self, after the wtc collapsed on cnn screens, whether Americans, after witnessing for the first time in two centuries wanton destruction on the home front would finally wake up to new realities and forever put an end to this Pavlovian reflex of sending battle ships and B-52s to destroy and kill, those whom they do not understand and thus perceive as a threat.
The simpleton who heads the so-called free and democratic world began his first scare mongering by announcing, to anyone who would listen, that all nations had to choose. Either they were for America and supported the war, or else the White House would consider them enemies in the same category as Al Qaida. Pure irrational nonsense, but that is what Bush said. After weeks of fruitless bombing Bush further warned that an even greater danger loomed. His archenemy had obtained nuclear devices on the black market. Bin Laden, as usual, very much on the ball, immediately replied in a first interview since 09-11, that yes, he did have them, but would never use them until some evil spirit decided to use nuclear bombs in the Afghan mountains. The Saudi freedom fighter is not exactly known for bluffing. Freedom fighters with nuclear devices turn the planet into an even more dangerous place than it is already.
The Guardian reported (November 7, 2001), that the former national security advisor to president Boris Yeltsin, general Alexander Lebed let slip, that the ussr had prepared a large number of nuclear suitcase bombs. No less than 134 of those nuclear attaché cases have been ‘lost’. Bin Laden had managed to buy 20 of them via Chechen guerrillas for the price of 30 million dollars plus two tons of opium. According to the British paper, the tritium triggers of these nuclear mini bombs need recharging every six years. Therefore, bin Laden's nuclear arsenal probably consisted of duds. But the Saudi freedom fighter is no fool. He will be aware of this and must have obtained the proper assistance from Pakistan, itself a nuclear power, to assure him of this powerful weapon in self-defence.
General Yossi Cooperwasser, chief of research for Israeli military intelligence, has denied the possibility, that Al Qaida obtained lost, stolen or misappropriated nuclear devices from the former ussr. But, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in Chicago, Pakistan produces 100 kilograms of plutonium or highly enriched uranium a year. Furthermore, the head of the Pakistani nuclear program, Bahiruddin Mahmood is a close ally of bin Laden and the Taliban. Therefore, whether bin Laden bought himself nuclear protection from the former ussr or whether he obtained it from Pakistan, the possible miscalculation through nuclear escalation persists.
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When the untested Bush Administration plunged into this all out war against terrorism, not only taking on Al Qaida, but terrorist organisations everywhere, it clearly did not understand what it would be up against. For starters, Bush & Co apparently did not realise that Afghanistan is four times the size of Vietnam and 60 times the size of Kosovo. Only 50.000 western troops were deployed in Kosovo. In the jungles of Vietnam 600.000 Americans failed for fifteen long years to achieve their goal. Afghanistan would require at least half a million us soldiers to cleanse the mountains of Al Qaida guerrillas. In short: Bush & Co embarked on a classic mission impossible. Neither bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age nor the deployment of ground forces will do the trick, which the bright minds of the current White House have set for themselves. The body bags will return by the thousands from Afghanistan. It is a forgone conclusion that the crusade to pre-empt bin Laden will end in an unmitigated disaster, whether or not the famous fugitive survives or dies. If he were slain, our simpleton from Texas would hand the Muslim world a martyr in the prophet Mohammed class. Bush is liable, as with some of his predecessors to go down in the history books as having embarked on a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions.
At the time of writing, Washington had, during the first four weeks of the war against terrorism, dropped 10.000 bombs and missiles on more than one hundred targets in Afghanistan. Among them bunker busters of 2.300 kilograms were used, and on November 4, a so-called ‘Daisy Cutter’ was dropped on Taliban positions. This is a 6.900-kilogram fuel-air explosion bomb. The other up to now most heroic feat of the us armed forces has been a bungled drop of 100 Army Rangers at an airbase south of Kandahar, where they were supposed to catch the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. The American elite troops met stiff resistance and had to fight their way back to safety.
Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker (November 12, 2001) that participants in this first ground-action had remarked that it had been ‘a total goat fuck’, meaning in military slang, that everything that could go wrong did go wrong. A special Delta Force in what is called ‘a snoop and poop mission’ carried out the actual attack on Omar's house. They actually got into the Taliban leader's living quarters and found nothing of any importance. Omar, like the scarlet Pimpernel, had disappeared. One of the us participants in this raid said afterwards that upon leaving the house they had been met with heavy Taliban fire and had walked straight into an ambush. They managed to evade a bloodbath, but the first us action on the ground was a blue print military flop.
Since Bush has nothing else to show as yet, except some footage of bombardments from stratospheric heights on Afghan peasants, the supreme leader of the grand alliance talks a lot on television. The enthusiasm shown by the four major us networks to put him continuously on screen is
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already waning, and after 4 weeks of war, the first clash between the White House and the television bosses has already erupted. A war without spectacular results becomes a drag. Therefore, the president dashed down to Atlanta, Georgia, where delivering a major speech, interrupted every minute by applause. To galvanise enthusiasm for the war. He called the us since 09-11 ‘a different country, saddened, less innocent, stronger, more united, determined and courageous under new threats to its existence.’
Sometimes, the presidential rhetoric comes dangerously close to techniques of propaganda as used and developed by Hitler's Minister of Information, Joseph Goebbels. After his diplomatic initiatives overseas to pressure or bribe foreign potentates into co-operating with his war plans, Bush is now mobilising the home front against a new and frightening enemy. The Washington Post reported, that since the anthrax scare remains an unsolved mystery, ‘the on-again and off-again warnings by the government for imminent terrorist attacks are prompting many Americans to ask themselves whether Washington really knows what it is doing. The Democratic pollster, Peter Hart summed the situation up as follows: ‘If the military front is a snake, the domestic front is a centipede. It's got a hundred legs, there are so many elements.’ Indications are that the doubting-season among Americans has already set in.
Considered especially ominous was the moment, when even the White House acknowledged, that the deadly wave of anthrax attacks in the us must be laid at the doorstep of terrorist organisations other than bin Laden, including American Neo-Nazis. This group is apparently even taking part in terrorist meetings overseas. For instance, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles established beyond any doubt, that the us Neo Nazi right is motivated above all by its loathing of the us federal government. This particular brand of ongoing madness inside the us blindly accepts that Washington is selling out the fatherland to a ‘New World Order’ run by masons and Jews.
The London Observer (October 28, 2001) saw a connection between these underground Neo Nazi terrorists and the carnage in Oklahoma City in 1995. We can deduct from the information as presented by Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Wiesenthal Centre in LA, that a definite link does exist between us Neo Nazis and certain Islamic militant groups, but not necessarily with Al Qaida.
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Centre in the us, who monitors the American Hitlerites, has said, ‘These people would not let their daughters near an Arab, but they are certainly making common cause on an ideological level. They see the same enemy: American culture and multi-culturism. us Neo Nazi websites, including the largest umbrella organisation, the National Alliance, show ample support for Al Qaida’.
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Since 09-11, Billy Roper, the Alliance membership coordinator, put a message on the website minutes after the attacks, reading: ‘Anyone who is willing to drive a plane into a building killing Jews is alright by me. I wish our Alliance members had half as much testicular fortitude.’ Another us rightwing group, Aryan Action, announced after 09-11: ‘Either you are fighting with the Jews against Al Qaida or you support Al Qaida fighting against the Jews.’
The Observer also stressed that the anthrax scare brought a dramatic twist to the confused crisis, moving away from the Al Qaida terrorist network and for the first time focussing seriously on the domestic us ultra-right. What if some day in the future, 09-11 will be finally proven to have been a conspiracy through a diabolical alliance between us right-wing supremacists and Islamic freedom fighter organisations, other than Al Qaida?
The entire world thinks and talks about bin Laden in terms of what the media and cnn report about him. He himself said, he was not the wtc bomber as the White House maintaining. A Saudi freedom fighter, in the bin Laden class, is in matters that are holy to him, religiously honourable. If he had been the organiser of the 09-11 disaster, he would have said so. His press release, stating that he was not involved, can be safely taken at face value. Bush, Blair & Co. called him a liar, because they themselves only know the Washington brand of dishonest politics. For them, it is particularly hard to understand, that the neurons of a Saudi Muslim warrior, who five times a day rolls out a mat and directs his mind in prayer bowing towards Mecca, is not lying when he discusses matters he considers sacred. Are Bush, Blair and all the others in the notorious grand alliance ready to die for what they believe in? Osama bin Laden is.
The enemies of Al Qaida actually form a rag-tag clique of political leaders, who readily associate themselves with certified liars and gangsters, including the Pakistan traitor of his Taliban allies, Pervez Musharaff. This turn-coat bluntly issued a reprimand to the ambassador of Afghanistan, Mullah Abdyl Salam Zaeef, ordering him to soften his tone, when he speaks on embassy grounds to foreign journalists about us war crimes in his country. Or when he refers to us pilots talking on camera as if their bombing forays into Afghanistan were to be compared to a Virginia rabbit hunt.
Washington has bought a number of so-called partners in the war, including Pakistan, with misleading promises, billions in loans, and a variety of standard bribes. Others were reminded of American aid after World War II, or by appealing to treaty obligations, that actually have nothing to do with hunting Muslim freedom fighters. Even Vladimir Putin came full circle by condoning the use of former Soviet military bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan for American purposes during the search for bin Laden.
What is insufficiently understood among leaders and
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nations joining the us alliance is that the rage behind the anti-western terror is the direct fallout of former imperialist oppression and economic exploitation. After the collapse of European empires, developing nations experienced how the United States quickly stepped into the shoes of the former colonisers and ran a revisionist kind of dollar imperialism. Turning Third World nations, one by one, into captives of Washington, the World Bank and the imf. Some of them held particular importance for the us economy and super-power strategic interests. Indonesia and Congo promptly experienced cia coups and got Quisling military dictators (Suharto and Mobutu) to govern them, thus ensuring these states to remain within the us orbit. Courtesy usa, these fascist partners of the White House both ruled more than three decades. Long enough to kill hundreds of thousands of their subjects create rampant corruption under Washington protection, line their own pockets and destroy the social, political fabric of their nations. Indonesia is on the verge of falling apart. While Congo was invaded by a host of foreign armies that plundered and looted the riches of the land on behalf of foreign thieves, notably serving Yankee commercial interests.
After all, only half a century ago, British soldiers were still being paid fifty shillings for each Kenyan they killed. The limbs of Mau Mau fighters used to be nailed to crossroad posts serving as reminders as to who the boss was. Other British soldiers had themselves photographed with the severed heads of Malayan guerrillas, who again, of course, were just freedom fighters in the bin Laden vein. The same bloody games were played out by the French in Algeria, the Dutch in Indonesia and the Belgians in Congo, or the Americans in Korea and Vietnam.
What is insufficiently understood in the west, and especially by Americans, who know virtually nothing about imperialist times, is that the anger behind anti-western terror has its roots in past oppression and atrocities. The liberation of Asia, Africa and parts of Latin America was too often followed by a quasi semi-imperial system that assured the rich countries of continued control over the natural resources of the poor countries.
As Seumas Milne observed in The Guardian, ‘By carving up the Middle East to protect oil interests as Britain did when it created Kuwait sources in the Third World and supporting a string of unrepresentative client states across the region, the western powers fostered first the nationalist and then the Islamic backlash, which now threatens them. The claim of the American political class that the us was attacked because it stands for freedom and democracy is more or less the opposite of the truth. In reality, the rage driving anti-Western terror is fuelled by the fact that the west continues to deny the peoples of the area the freedom to determine their own affairs - and has repeatedly intervened militarily across the region to enforce its interests since the formal end of colonial rule.’ (November 8, 2001).
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During the Kosovo war, Tony Blair championed the doctrine of Western intervention against recalcitrant governments, which in practice meant the imposition of western values and norms through legal and economic restraints on national sovereignty. Blair was advocating imperialism in disguise. He further expanded on this reasoning, and came up with a similarly foolish idea of waging ‘humanitarian wars’. ‘The new liberal imperialists are just as happy with international colonial rule as their blunter rightwing counterparts’, remarked Milne in the The Guardian. Bush and Blair are already discussing a post Taliban government for Afghanistan. They haven't even begun the battle against the Taliban, as yet, but they palaver freely about whether that nation will become a un trustee-ship or whether ‘the allies’ have to make another multinational occupation arrangement. In Anglo American deliberations it often seems as if the United Nations no longer figures.
At the same time, the first divisions are beginning to split the us-uk partnership in the war on terrorism. Blair attaches special urgency to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while Washington remains focussed on Afghanistan. Even, when Bush and Arafat were both in the building of the un on November 10, the us president avoided meeting the Palestinian leader, while he had received Sharon twice at the White House, since becoming president. It shows, at least to bin Laden & Co., that Bush cannot be trusted to be fair in his assessment of the Arab or Palestinian fight for freedom and independence from us-Israeli imperialism.
Blair is equally opposed to and critical of the use of cluster bombs and ‘Daisy Cutters’ in Afghanistan, as this would risk British public opinion turning against the war. Whitehall is also solidly opposed to an extension of anti-Taliban front. Contrary to this more cautious approach by Blair, it is Paul Wolfowitz, the us deputy Secretary of Defence, who is lobbying the White House to resume the war against Iraq and finish off Saddam Hussein. Blair, having recently toured the Middle-East twice, meeting Palestinian and Syrian leaders, is opposed to a second Iraqi war, since it could permanently destabilise the region in favour of the bin Ladenites.
It's clear that Washington has been overplaying its hands here for many years from fear, losing its access to Mid Eastern oil. By steadily increasing its military presence on Arab soil, especially unnecessary and a pointless provocation after the collapse of the Soviet-Union, Washington created a kind of natural opposition against further imperialist over lordship in disguise. Washington is particularly slow in learning from experience, or from history.
The first alarming signal of open Anti-Americanism within Washington's staunchest ally, Saudi Arabia, came in 1996, when 19 us soldiers were killed in the bombing - by freedom fighters - of the Khobar military barracks. Instead of drawing proper conclusions of this clear warning
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to get out and stay out, the us armed forces increased its presence, ‘because terrorism would otherwise be taking over’. The confrontation between the us and Muslim nationalists got snarled into the vicious circle of action and reaction.
The cia began studying the serious possibility that Saudi Arabia could be lost to Arab fundamentalism, the same way Iran went the opposite way in 1979. What is forgotten was that General Norman Schwarzkopf, later the us commander in the Gulf War had been asked by the Shah of Iran to set up his secret police. In Teheran, this created a climate reminiscent of Gestapo police methods. When Washington decided to act, preserving its Anglo-American oil interests in Iran, the opposite of the desired result was achieved. If Saidi Arabia eventually falls to the bin Ladenites, the Americans will have nobody to blame but themselves. Along with the Saudi monarchy, the other royal dominoes, and related fiefdoms of sheiks and crooks, will also fall, and with it, America having lost its willing royal puppets, will simultaneously loose its monopoly over Mid-East oil.
The Saudi royals are already a shaky bunch. The National Security Agency in Washington has been monitoring them for many years. In 1995 the King had a severe and crippling stroke. He receives permanent medical attention ever since. ‘He is able to sit in a chair and open his eyes, but is usually unable to recognise even his oldest friends,’ reporter Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker (November 5, 2001). Fahd is only being kept on his throne in name, and because of a power struggle within the royal family. Some do not want Crown Prince Abdullah to succeed him.
Abdullah is suspected of wanting to make a serious effort to stem the reckless corruption and gangster practices of the royal house of Saud. This would seriously curb the present privileges of the thousands of princes who now have free access to the treasury. As long as Washington goes along with the crooks and the thieves in Ryadh, it will in-deed safeguard its oil interests, at least for the moment. But it is bin Laden, who rides the wave of history, because the royals sooner or later collapse. Osama stands on the side of reform. The monarchy will fall, if not to bin Laden, to his successors.
Abdullah, notes Hersh, is also considered to become the kind of King, ready to penalise the us, and its oil and gas companies, because of Washington's blind support for Israel. So, for the time being Fahd stays. This represents only a stay of final execution. The Texas oil-supply company, Halliburton, up until the end of last year was run by the present vice-president, Dick Cheney. It operates various subsidiary companies in Saudi Arabia. Cheney's advice is probably, hang on in there, for our lifetime, we will survive and cash in on the basis of old rules.
Hersh obtained transcripts of nsa electronic intercepts of conversations between members of the Saudi
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royal family. It becomes clear from these secretly tapped contacts how corrupt, alienated from the people and frightened this cabal of blue bloods really is. For years they have channelled hundreds of millions of dollars to the opposition, including bin Laden, hoping this protection money would delay the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy. But as Elaine Sciolino has already asked in the New York Times, ‘Is Saudi Arabia heading for an Iranian-style Islamic revolution?’ (November 5, 2001)
The National Security Agency in Washington, which listened in on Saudi royals, became convinced, that the hypocrisy within the family and the constant stealing of billions of dollars from the state budget for private uses, estranged them from the vast majority of their subjects. Bin Laden's principal goal remains to purify his fatherland from this disgusting coterie of profiteers and Mafioso. Because Washington has been collaborating with the enemies of the Saudi masses, the us itself helped to create bin Ladenites all over the Muslim world, who rejoiced that at last the death and destruction of 09-11 had finally brought home, what America had been doing to others. The vast majority of Muslims, as well as millions in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Yugoslavia, you name it, felt as we did during World War II, when with our explosives we were able to sabotage the Nazi enemies. Our resistance did not make us terrorists. Neither does Al Qaida.
The royals in Riyadh screamed ‘foul’ in a reaction to the Hersh article, because it revealed that the nsa was spying even on its own allies. Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Azis called the present stream of bad publicity coming from the us ‘slander and treason’. Journalists were reminded of the fact, that the Saudi's had played a large part in the 1991 Gulf War bill against Iraq. Also the stationing of us troops in the kingdom had been a high-risk policy, since a large majority of Saudis don't want them there.
This semi occupation by the us military was for bin Laden and friends the prime reason to launch a crusade against the royal regime. Billionaire prince, Al Waleed bin Talal, handed a cheque of ten million dollars to the mayor of New York. The prince added unsolicited advice for American policy in the Middle East. It was not accepted, nor was the money. Presently, relations between Riyadh and Washington are at an all time low, which only works to the advantage of Al Qaida, which intends to overthrow the monarchy, and cut all ties with the Bushes, Cheney's, and all the other imperialist bloodsuckers from Wall Street.
What must be understood in relation to the so-called terrorists, is how each assault on pride and confidence - by a super power versus oil producing states ruled by an oligarchy of indigenous sheiks - increases a sense of vulnerability and generates a quantum of useless anger in the minds of masses who feel, and are indeed powerless against a superior force. For many years they have managed to
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suppress feelings of alienation and humiliation, which causes the physiology of a repressed and maladaptive anger. Finally the flash point is reached. That is what now is occurring in both Afghanistan and Gaza. Palestinians have had it with Israeli state terrorism. They no longer accept helicopter assassinations of their prominent leaders. They finally shoot back.
Fear and anger are part of a larger emotional complex of responses. New York psychiatrist, Willard Gaylin, explained how fear and anger were designed to serve as responses to threats to our survival, not our pride, status, position, manhood or dignity. ‘Yet, somehow,’ he wrote, ‘we have developed in our minds a crucial linkage between affronts to our status of even minimal measure and the very sense of our survival. We respond to an affront with biological defences appropriated for assaults. We experience these affronts as though they were threats to survival.’ (The Rage Within, Anger in modern life, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1984).
The bin Ladenites in this world of the 21st century feel threatened and enraged by the trampling of their basic human rights, and constant violation of their basic freedoms. The vast majority of public opinion in the entire Middle East, or for that matter the entire Muslim world, is on the side of bin Laden, Saddam, Qadaffi and so on. Yet, it is solely and uniquely us super power rogue behaviour that casts a dark shadow of imperialism and raw exploitation of the precious black gold of the region, by us support for disgusting cliques of royal extortionists of public funds. They have us made modern arms shoved down their throats to keep the masses suppressed and their police states functioning. Hosni Mubarak would have been long gone, like his predecessor Anwar Sadat, if there had been one single free democratic election in Egypt. Mubarak systematically kills and imprisons everybody, who is in his way. Since Abdel Gamal Nasser, a bin Ladenite at heart, Egypt has played ball with the west. Millions of people in that country are currently suppressing this deliberate affront to their dignity and self-respect as imposed by the present traitor regime. But the day will come, when their emotions will spillover onto the streets.
In a recent conversation with Pakistani journalist, Hamid Mir, bin Laden - of whom even George Bush has said, we should take his words seriously - stated clearly: ‘In my view if an enemy occupies a Muslim territory and uses common people as human shield, then it is permitted to attack that enemy. For instance, if bandits barge into a home and hold a child hostage, then the child's father can attack the bandits and in that attack even the child might get hurt. America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal. The 09-11 attacks were not targeted at women and children. The real targets were America's icons of military and economic power.’
The holier than thou messages from Bush & Co to the
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world are in effect boiling down to one essential point: attacking innocents is terrorism. But when the us was attacked in Pearl Harbour, it felt justified to reply in kind with nuclear devices over Hirosjima and Nagasaki. Hitler and Göring were the first to map out a policy of bringing countries to their knees by destroying open cities. The us and the uk were quick to copy this terrorist behaviour. Hitler bombed London, therefore the us war industry invented a military method called ‘carpet bombing’, by which most German open cities were wiped off the map. Now this method is indiscriminately practised on Afghan peasants. In today's jargon of waging war, the us and nato simply engage in Hitlerite state terrorism.
lbj and Nixon did the same over Hanoi and Haiphong. Vietnam was us state terrorism and chemical warfare carried out in Southeast Asia against a peasant population. Papa Ho Chi-minh was not smart enough or aggressive enough to organise the hijacking of us airliners and fly them into us open cities in return and thus administering a dose of their own medicine in return. Finally, the Mujahideen, fighting a Jihad against Soviet and American aggressors finally managed to practice the tenet: an eye for an eye. But this time the world was too small for comfort. When the Mujahideen hit back it was a crime against humanity. It shows, that Americans and Israelis maintain the weird notion, that the loss of one of their lives is a thousand times more precious, then those of Palestinians, Saudis, Iraqis, Libyans, Afghans, Pakistani and all the rest, and this justifies immediate allied retaliation. A worldwide coalition had to be drummed up at once to organise the destruction of terrorist networks everywhere. But the Jihad is nothing more than the innate defence mechanism of Muslims against half a century of systematic violation of their dignity and self-respect. Now, we watch on tv how even a born Texas roughneck, George Bush, all of a sudden embraces and kisses a New York mullah at the commemoration of the wtc disaster. Someone much smarter then him must have told junior, that Machiavelli did not intend his axioms for amateurs. In Il Principe the Florentine political philosopher wrote, ‘It is necessary that the Prince should know how to colour his nature well, and how to be a great hypocrite and dissembler. For men are so simple, and yield so much in immediate necessity, that the deceiver will never lack dupes.’ (Chapter 18).
As far back as the aftermath of the first wtc bombing in 1993, Newsweek carried a coverstory (March 15, 1993), called ‘Cold Fury, the Wrath of Islam’. The magazine asked the question, ‘Does the terrorist strike in New York have its roots in the growing anger against the West shared by Muslim fundamentalists from North Africa to Asia?’ Christopher Dickey warned in this article eight years ago, that a sense of rage was growing among millions of Muslims. ‘They see Iraq bombed into submission by the combined powers of the Western (imperialist and colonial) world. They see Zionist Israel imposed on Mus- | |
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lim lands and backed by American force (and ultra modern us military equipment). They see zealots from their own ranks, leaders of Ham as in the occupied territories, deported to a freezing mountainside in Lebanon and left to suffer while Washington dickers lackadaisically with Israel about their return.’
How could the world possibly have been taken by surprise, when the 1993 initial bombing of the wtc in New York was followed by the 2001 total destruction of these two buildings? Let's be clear: Al Qaida is a reaction to a world categorically refusing to listen to authentic Muslim voices expressing their protracted frustrations and demanding recognition of their human rights. The Muslim black balls were hoisted years ago. The pain and stress of constant confrontation with one's impotence in the face of murderous bullying by outside superior forces in the Middle East gradually translated into increased arousal and aggressive behaviour. This could have been foreseen if the loud complaints had been taken seriously. However, the diehard supremacists in Israel, the uk and the us remained stone blind to the storm signals that have been blowing for many years over the entire Muslim world.
Significant are recent remarks made by General Hameed Gul, head of the Pakistani secret service (isi) from 1987 to 1989. He served under president Zia ul-Haq, when the west was channelling billions of dollars via Pakistan to the Mujahideen, who were fighting the Soviets. When the Russians finally withdrew, the freedom fighters formed an interim government. General Gul: ‘The un and the us intervened. They insisted on setting up a broad-based government, in which communists and former royalists were represented. This was considered unacceptable to the Mujahideen. Again, today, the un and us are speaking of a new broad based government in Kabul, but if they had not mingled in Afghan affairs then, the history of Afghanistan would have been a different one.’
How slow America is in understanding what really goes on in the other world, or what motivates masses of people outside the us paradise. This blindness to new realities everywhere renders even some of America's traditional allies desperate. As demonstrated by the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al Feisal. He bluntly told the New York Times, that Riyadh was extremely upset over the attitude of Bush vis a vis the Palestinians. The president fails to commit his personal prestige to promoting a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, ‘which makes a sane man go mad.’ Mark you, these words were uttered by the foreign minister of a nation, that represents the key domino in the Middle-East chess play. Obviously American diplomacy, now led by a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces, is wholly defunct and remiss and so cannot maintain constructive relations with its most important ally in this explosive area of the world.
Saud al Feisal simply informed the New York Times,
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(November 10, 2001), that his government was ‘angrily frustrated’ by the Bush Administration, which failed to begin a promised new peace initiative in the Middle East. What made Washington imagine that it could playa constructive role in that conflict if Bush refused to meet with Yasser Arafat? Bush's national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice poured even more oil on the fire by a flatfooted statement, that her boss did not feel, Arafat was serious about the American led war against terrorism As if she was addressing a school class she said, ‘There are responsibilities that come with being the representative of the Palestinian people, and that means to make certain that you do everything you can to lower the level of violence, everything you can to root out terrorists. These are responsibilities, we have asked Chairman Arafat to take, and to take seriously. We still don't think there has been enough in that regard.’ The lady clearly understands nothing about what Yasser Arafat can and cannot do.
Miss Rice was added to the Bush team, because of her reputation of being versed in (former) Soviet affairs, speaking Russian fluently. Undoubtedly a most commendable expertise a decade after the ussr collapsed. Hearing her wisecracks on Arafat one wonder why the nincompoop, who occupies the White House in 2001 wanted especially her around in his immediate vicinity. The entire Bush phenomenon remains a mystery. Remember that he carried Florida with less than 500 votes on 6 million votes cast over the seasoned and experienced politician like Al Gore. It would have been unthinkable for a Democratic president to intentionally humiliate Arafat, considering the way the current Republican head of state is playing his cards in the Mid East conflict. Hence, the bloodshed there is reaching new alarming heights. The Sharon government behaves towards Palestinians like Milosevic dealt with Albanian minorities. In the mean time, also the Saudi Foreign Minister exclaims he is losing his mind over Bush's stupidities.
The Saudi ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan realised at once, what a negative impact 09-11 would have on us public opinion, since 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. The prince is 28 years on the job and has lived through decades of American foreign policy being run in the Middle East by the cia. Hence, prince Bandar became an insider. For instance: when president Ronald Reagan looked for funds to finance illegal covert cia actions in Nicaragua, he used his rogue national security staffer, Colonel Oliver North, a buddy of Bandar, to get the Saudi royal family to donate 20 million dollars for the sole aim of buying clandestine arms to kill Nicaraguan peasants. Father Bush was in the White House as the vice-president when this monkey business went on. Remember: Osama bin Laden is solely on the warpath, to clean up Saudi Arabia's act.
Prince Bandar has a house in Aspen, Colorado, with 55 rooms and 26 bathrooms. He retires there, when he
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gets depressed. The ambassador realises full well, that his standing in Washington might still be high, but at home, wrote Dickey, it is slipping. Compared to Bandar, Osama bin Laden is a saint. In 1996, journalist Abdul Bari Atwan visited him in the Afghan mountains. ‘Bin Laden's cave,’ he wrote, ‘is a six by four room. In the foremost part sits a library full of Islamic heritage... There were also five wooden beds that looked more like wooden platforms used to display fruit and vegetables at poor Arab markets. The walls of the cave were hung with Kalashnikov rifles.’ Atwan slept on one of them, with underneath which was a pile of hand grenades. He asked where the toilet was. An aide answered, laughingly, ‘Where do you think you are, in the Sheraton?’
In 1996, bin Laden told Atwan: ‘Military people are not unaware that preparations for major operations take a certain amount of time, unlike minor operations. If we wanted small actions, the matter would have been easily carried out immediately after declaring our Jihad against American forces and the boycott of American goods. The nature of the battle calls for operations of a specific type that will make an impact on the enemy, and this of course calls for excellent preparation. We saw the Riyadh and al-Khobar bombings as a sufficient signal for people of intelligence among American decisionmakers between the nation of Islam and then American forces. But it seems, they did not understand the signal.’
Bin Laden signalled Washington well ahead of time and long before a turn for the worse in us-Islam relations. For 14 centuries, no imperialist soldiers had entered the peninsula of Muslim nations, and now they would be wise to leave at once. ‘The British and others used to respect the feelings of now more than a billion Muslims,’ bin Laden told Atwan. ‘Therefore they did not occupy the land of the two holy places... There recent arrival (under the pretext of wanting to protect Saudi Arabia from an Iraqi invasion) of us troops on the Arabian Peninsula was an aberration and a reckless act. It brought them into confrontation with a billion Muslims.’
On November 13, 2001 The Washington Post confirmed that King Fahd, or the clique that rules in his name, allowed Washington to direct the war in Afghanistan from a state-of-the-art command centre outside Riyadh. ‘The Saudi government is afraid to tell the Saudi people that it is providing this material support to the United States,’ wrote the Post in an editorial. ‘Such political jujitsu has become so familiar to both Saudis and Americans over the years that it is usually taken for granted.’
The paper added that overt dependence on the us incites rage amongst Islamic militants. Rage is everywhere. In Mubarak's Egypt, is it normal to have 14.000 heavily armed police raid a slum district like Imbaba and arrest 800 so-called militants who are potential bin Ladenites. President Mubarak concedes in interviews, that yes, the government uses ‘a very heavy hand’ against Islamic extre- | |
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mists. Therefore, heavily armed paramilitary police and armoured personnel carriers menacingly stand vigil in Cairo slums and in impoverished villages along the banks of the Nile. Mubarak is, of course, a staunch friend of the West, and considers Osama bin Laden an archenemy. Just as in Pinochet's Chile, even preteenage youngsters are caught in the dragnet of the Egyptian police forces and are never heard of again. Torture is common practice in Mubarak's Egypt. I as a Dutchman respect what bin Laden stands for, contrary to my government, which prefers to align itself with ‘partners’ in Washington, Cairo and Riyadh.
‘The United States knows,’ wrote The Washington Post, ‘that its backing of the corrupt and authoritarian Saudi regime damages its image makes it a target for terrorism, but it sees that as the necessary price to be paid for stable oil supplies and secure Middle East bases.’ The paper stressed that Washington should not subordinate Saudi Arabia's domestic political order to energy-supply priorities. Washington should keep in mind, that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 09-11 were Saudis. Washington should realise that perhaps the Saudi autocratic regime is beneficial and convenient for negotiating arms deals, but the Washington-Riyadh axis is essentially a monstrous alliance. Washington should have realised long ago, that bin Laden's most cherished aim is to overthrow the Saudi monarchy. The us government unequivocally underestimated the internal opposition against their royal puppets who manage the oil wealth on behalf of their American superiors.
Jim Hoagland described us-Saudi Arabian relations as having reached the edge of the precipice. ‘Saudi Arabia and the United States have danced a strategic yin and yang for a half century as each has simultaneously protected and threatened the other's vital interests,’ he wrote in The Washington Post. He talked at length with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah who remarked, ‘For a total war on terrorism, the West will have to engage in some introspection as well, and examine external policies that contribute to a dynamic in the Middle East that leads toward catastrophe’. Hoagland summed up the conversation with Abdullah as follows, ‘I left our talk thinking that the hands of the clock still say five minutes to midnight in a region now in thrall to war and change.’
The 21st century world uses the word ‘terrorist’ loosely and irresponsibly. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. As Timothy Garton Ash concluded in The Guardian, to determine whether someone is a terrorist some questions must be answered: biography, goals, methods and context. A combination of the answers will yield the relevant information to form a valid opinion. For instance: Does bin Laden really want to destroy the West, as we are told on tv and even in serious media? Does he intend to purify Islam, and topple the House of Saud or does he merely intend to assist the Crown Prince in get- | |
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ting rid of the corruptors and thieves among the royals and evict the Americans from his country?
In practice, the entire world thinks and talks about bin Laden on the basis of newspaper & tv news ‘information’. But most people have never obtained any reliable piece of information to gain a valid opinion. Genuine input and detailed background information about Al Qaida are not available. At the time of 09-11 incident, it was impossible to obtain anywhere in Manhattan a single book about bin Laden or Al Qaida. The reference material I used, including the valuable us Congressional study by Yossef Bodansky, which I referred to earlier, I obtained from the qb Bookshop in Jakarta. As a result of our 21st century general life style, bin Laden is thought of and talked about by most people on the basis of cursory and non-authoritative information, and far too often this is spread by loquacious babblers.
In East Timor, for instance, as seen from the West, freedom fighters succeeded in gaining independence, while Jakarta saw them as terrorists. However, Washington insists, that Indonesian generals will stand trial. The Kosovo Liberation Army, (kla), which was cia funded, recruited and armed, was seen from Belgrade as a first class terrorist organisation. They were engaged in breaking up Yugoslavia. Naturally, Milosovic had the duty to unleash his elite guards to stem the tide and try to keep the nation together. He lost and is standing trial in The Hague as a war criminal. What about American presidents and generals who considered the Vietcong terrorists, but who where seen in Hanoi, Moscow and Peking as freedom fighters? Should they go to trial too? Or, for that matter, Bush, Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld, who declared bin Laden a terrorist, while hundreds of millions of people consider him an authentic freedom fighter, should they be sent to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague? It will not happen, because the party that wins, in this case the number one super rogue power in the world, will decide who are the terrorists and who are the freedom fighters.
If Hitler had won Eisenhower and Churchill would have gone to jail or would have been hanged. But allied raw power overwhelmed Hitler, like allied power is overwhelming Al Qaida. Bush and Blair are the victors for now.
In the past century certain freedom fighters were receiving military assistance from the ussr and China. In the end this sometimes tipped the balance of power, for instance in Korea and Vietnam. But this century there is only one super-power left. Freedom fighters like Al Qaida, having no B-52s or battleships to dispatch to America, needs to become super inventive. They expedited their Muslim kamikaze pilots to do the job by using us airliners like Mujahideen made cruise missiles.
This Afghanistan battle will be lost in this stage against the combined allied forces, including some from Germany and Japan. But this hardly means, that the protracted struggle for the eviction of American imperialism over the
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Muslim world by way of a weird collection of corrupt royal families and Mafia sheiks, who willingly play ball with Wall Street and the cia to line up their own pockets, will last for ever. The goals of bin Laden and Al Qaida are perfectly understandable, justifiable and honourable. But their guerrilla methods and freedom fight stands in the way of the imperialistic designs by Washington, who therefore wants to wipe them out and kill them outright.
Bush and Blair legitimised the violence by forming a broad coalition and unleash the latest weaponry in their arsenals to bomb the rebels into submission. They do not hesitate to ally themselves with the devil, like the northern alliance in Afghanistan, and let them do their bidding, so that a minimum of bags filled with dead American and British soldiers, will have to be brought home. They pose as decent chaps and fervent crusaders for human rights and common decency. But, in practice, they are behaving as opportunistic hoodlums, who love to shoot from the hip and bomb enemies into submission. They looked the other way, when the northern alliance said it had given explicit orders to shoot on sight every single foreign fundamentalist Al Qaida volunteer found on Afghan soil. An estimated 6.000 of them are therefore to be summarily massacred with the tacit consent of Bush and Blair. This is straight war criminal behaviour covered by the prestige of the White House and Downing Street 10. But this is hardly the first time either. Secretary Rumsfeld boast even ‘the us will not take prisoners’.
Andrea Catherwood of The London Times was an eyewitness, when 700 Taliban fighters were trapped in a school in Mazar-I Shariff. They were deliberately crushed inside by tanks of the northern alliance and massacred. Bush and Putin, out of all people, delivered the uniforms, the arms and the tanks from military bases in Uzbekistan, to commit these war-crimes next door. Hardly surprising after Bush told cnn, ‘I looked Vladimir Putin into the eye and I knew I could trust him.’ The new partners in mischief further cemented their devilish alliance during a barbecue weekend in Crawford, Texas during a weekend at the Bush farm. All they could think of was bloody revenge, Bush for 09-11 and Putin for a lost war in the 80s.
Schiller described in Wilhelm Tell how armed resistance sometimes becomes legitimate. ‘When the oppressed man cannot find justice anywhere,’ wrote Schiller in 1804 in his famous play, ‘he reaches up to the sky and pulls down his eternal right that hangs there, inalienable and imperishable, like the stars’. ‘If all other options are exhausted,’ the German writer concluded, ‘the oppressed might take up the sword’. Americans did take up arms against the British. Neither George Washington - nor, for that matter, William of Orange, fighting off Spanish invaders during an eighty years war in the 16th century - were written about in the history books as terrorists. London considered the Washingtonians terrorists as once upon a time the King of Spain looked upon the Dutch as Al Qai- | |
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dians, who had to be destroyed. In the end, however, Washington and William of Orange became for all of History, super national heroes. Osama bin Laden may have lost the battle for Afghanistan, which is raging at the time of this writing, he might even be killed. But the Muslim war for eviction of American and British imperialism from the Middle East or from the Muslim holy places is far from over.
In one of his most recent interviews with Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, bin Laden demonstrated that some of his views, for instance, how democracy functions in the United States, do not jive with reality. Literally, he stated, ‘The American people should remember that they pay taxes to their government, they elect their president, their government manufacture arms and give them to Israel and Israel uses them to massacre Palestinians.’ Reality is somewhat more complicated than that. The Bushites, are indeed close allies of the spy and intelligence community as well as the notorious military and industrial complex. As a matter of fact, father and son Bush both speak with one voice, when it comes to using the power of the us presidency. Power as the cloak and dagger boys would have it used. This makes the global designs of the Bush II presidency even more perilous for the bin Ladens of this world.
The Saudi rebel further told Hamid Mir, ‘The American Congress endorses all government measures and this proves that all Americans are responsible for the atrocities perpetrated against Muslims. All Americans are guilty, because they elect the Congress. I ask the American people to give up anti Muslim policies. The American people have risen against their government's war in Vietnam. They must do the same today.’ It shows that the idol of millions of Muslims in the world does not really understand how American democracy operates and how powerless American voters really are in the face of the Washington political life. Indeed, public opinion did contribute widely to the end of the Vietnam war, but the mobilisation of the anti-war voice took an entire decade. In the mean time, the war raged on. Toying with the idea of a popular uprising in America against Bush II is nonsense.
One of the significant lessons of twenty centuries of modern history has been that most conflicts have been the outcome of an incredible lack of pertinent knowledge of the alien points of view. The minds of the current protagonists, bin Laden and Bush, have literally been programmed worlds apart. What are simple truths to Bush are vital lies to bin Laden and the other way around. Essential pieces of information about Islam and most of the valid claims Al Qaida holds against America are completely missing from Bush's awareness. The mind of the president - and the same goes for his closest collaborators and advisors - shows too many blindspots, to even begin to understand what could possibly inspire or motivate Mujahideen suicide pilots to fly straight into us buildings in
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New York and Washington. For the sake of simplicity, the White House decided, 09-11 amounted to a massacre of thousands of innocent civilians.
Instead of trying to fill the lacuna of understanding which the despairing Muslim minds were trying to convey by this act of war on both the us government and the public at large, the characteristic reflex was as usual swift, silly, and simplistic: back into your cage! The Al Qaida leadership shall be executed. After liquidating Al Qaida, we shall go after all terrorists in the world, wherever they may hide.
‘The blindspot,’ wrote psychologist Daniel Goleman of The New York Times, ‘is an apt physiological metaphor for our failure to see things as they are in actuality’. (Vital Lies, Simple Truths, The Psychology of Self-Deception, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985). Bush & Co are making fools of themselves, as all us presidents have done since World War II, when dealing with nations and cultures on far away continents. He repeated the same dangerous nonsense as his predecessors: who is not with us is against us. How many millions of innocent people have died in Asia, Africa and Latin America since 1945, following ‘blind spots’ in the brains of American leaders and their murderous accomplices in the intelligence services and armed forces of the United States?
Undoubtedly, George Orwell would have found inspiration to create a scathing satire about a scramble brained Texas rancher, who burst upon the world scene by way of a stolen election, helped along by Dad, who is deeply connected with the Houston oil industry, and supportive of spy and intelligence's services. Immediately following the arrival of George junior in Washington, a chorus of armed threats coupled to slogans of freedom, democracy and human rights, reached new heights. History will record that 09-11 was a decisive turning point in us global dominion over all nations and peoples. The Bush II regime will be registered as a triumvirate, that used the wtc and Pentagon events as a decisive turning point in us global domination over all nations and peoples. Once upon a time the Christian world went on horseback to Constantinople to cut the throats of Muslims in the name of Jesus Christ. The 21st century is witness to a global crusade by Wall Street bankers and us multinationals, still backed up by cluster bombs and ordinary throat-slitting as the order of the day.
At the time of this writing, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida are being hunted down by British Marines and us commandos. These elite troops are employing ultra modern technology. The most powerful armed forces in the world are determined to murder their Muslim opponents. No doubt, this intervention will wipe out bin Laden and Al Qaida. But this is a sad day for all humanity, for they might go down in history as the very last genuine freedom fighters against total us rule over the planet. The last desperate effort to oppose complete American military and
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economic supremacy, be it in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else, is being nipped in the bud. All 190 national states will become obedient vassals of the us. The un will become redundant, which in fact, it already is. America will decide what is good for all of us. For my generation, this is a frightening prospect, but future generations will never know how different times were, prior to some 190 states being added to the 51 already being ruled from the White House.
Earlier opposition against spreading us imperialism was likewise stamped out by Washington. In the sixties and seventies, Afro-Asian and Latin American leaders, who stood up against the us, were instantly murdered, disposed of or quarantined for life. The forerunners of Osama bin Laden were called Castro, Guevara, Lumumba, Sukarno, Sihanouk, Bhutto, Nasser, Arafat, Qadaffi, Nkrumah, Noriega, Bishop, Saddam, and many others. (see my brochure: Who are the number one war criminals, Papieren Tijger, Breda, 2001). They were all, be it in different ways, freedom fighters against us imperialism. One by one, they were put out of business by the us armed forces and the cia in order to be replaced permanently by us imposed criminal thugs, like Suharto, Pinochet, Mobutu and others. These criminals ran fascist, dirty, and corrupt regimes to facilitate their us superiors, the new dollar mandarins of the world, all in the name of freedom, decency, and human rights. Even the ussr was successfully brought down as a super-power during the Reagan-Bush regime (see: Victory: The Reagan Administration's strategy that hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union, Peter Schweizer, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, l994).
Those who oppose the us are accused of being rogue leaders of rogue states. In reality, after 1945, America became the sole Rogue Super Power in the world. Therefore, it was a disgusting spectacle of international subservience and prostration, when immediately after 09-11, a vast stream of world leaders, except China, rushed to the White House to shed crocodile tears in the Oval Office with George II over the loss of life and limb at the wtc and the Pentagon. Only bin Laden was still holding out in the Afghan mountains. But, he too, is destined to be destroyed in collusion with Texas oil barons, who, incidentally, also intend to run a profitable oil pipeline from Kazakhstan through Afghanistan. Thus further disadvantaging the Russians and furthering us interests in the region.
What will be developments in the 21st century? The general direction will be globalisation, whether some like it or not. In practice the evolution of almost two hundred independent states into one global village will go hand in hand with the current process of intensified super-power Americanisation of the planet. Europe is slowly integrating into a coalition of states with one currency. Eventually Europe will also fly one flag, and have one parliament and one police force, all closely allied to the United States, like Western Europe is already linked politically, economically
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and militarily to Washington. An intense effort is underway to included ever more nations of Eastern Europe into the Atlantic coalition, which by the middle of the 21st century will mean, that nations from Tokyo to Washington will have integrated into political, financial and multinational partnerships. Even China is being transformed slowly but securely into a western model of society. After the Olympic Games, China can be expected to permanently join a us dominated global coalition of former independently run states.
In the end, the planet will be governed by one parliament, replacing the United Nations, one police force, perhaps even serving under one commander and one flag. The William the Conqueror's, the Che Guevara's and the bin Laden's will be remembered as heroes, and, perhaps written up in the history books as incurable heroes, among the last of the Mohikans, who dared to resist total American hegemony over mankind, as they discovered that the battle for a separate identity for the world's Muslims was an uphill battle that could not be won over American power.
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