How Our Governments Use Terrorism To Control Us

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Tue, 29 Nov 2005 17:16:11 -0800 (PST)

How Our Governments Use Terrorism To Control Us

 

 

 

 

 

 

How our governments use terrorism to control us

By Tim Howells

Online Journal Contributing Writer

 

 

Nov 28, 2005, 13:55

 

 

The sponsorship of terrorism by western governments, targeting

their own populations, has been a taboo subject. Although major

scandals have received cursory coverage in the media, the subject has

been allowed to immediately disappear without discussion or

investigation. Therefore the appearance this year of two major studies

of this subject is a welcome breakthrough, and provides essential

reading for anyone struggling to understand the events of September

11, 2001 and the post September 11 world.

 

The studies are complementary. NATO's Secret Armies, Operation

Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe by Daniele Ganser concerns

terrorism sponsored by American and British intelligence in Western

Europe and Turkey between the end of World War II and 1985. The War on

Truth, 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism by Nafeez

Mosaddeq Ahmed chronicles the cultivation and sponsorship of militant

Islamic terrorism by the intelligence services of the United States,

Britain and Russia from 1979 to the present. Both studies are models

of scholarship -- meticulously documented and carefully reasoned --

but the world they reveal will boggle the mind of the most wild-eyed

conspiracy theorist.

 

Creating " Communist " Terrorism to Fuel the Cold War

 

NATO's Secret Armies describes how following World War II the US and

Britain, fearing a Soviet invasion of Europe, established

" stay-behind " paramilitary units throughout Western Europe and in

Turkey. Had the anticipated Soviet invasion occurred these units would

have constituted ready made resistance groups, trained and armed, with

secure communications with each other and with their allies in Britain

and the US. In some counties, for example Norway and Sweden, these

stay-behind units were true to their original charters, remaining

inactive until they disbanded at the end of the Cold War. In other

countries, however, the paramilitary units were activated by their

handlers in the United States as part of a hellish " Strategy of

Tension " designed to convince left-leaning populations in Italy,

Germany, Belgium, Greece, Turkey and other countries that their very

lives were at risk from communist terrorists. The arms and bombs

originally intended for the Soviets were turned instead on their own

compatriots with the aim of placing the blame for the waves of

terrorist attacks on communists.

 

In Italy the stay-behind operation was referred to as Gladio (Latin

for " Sword " ). The Piazza Fontana bombings that killed 16 and wounded

80 shortly before Christmas in 1969 initiated a wave of terrorist

bombings in Italy by Gladio operatives that continued throughout the

1970s. The worst single bombing occurred in the Bologna train station

in 1980, killing 85 and wounding 200. Another Gladio bombing in

Brescia in 1974 killed eight and wounded 102, and the same year a

train was bombed in Rome, killing 12 and wounding 48. The case that

led to the discovery of the Gladio plots by the Italian courts was a

1972 bombing that killed three policemen.

 

The Gladio operations in Italy are relatively well known and well

understood because of several high level judicial investigations that

received coverage in the European press and have been the subject of a

few books. One contribution of Ganser's book is to bring this material

together in a concise and well organised format. Further, Ganser

extends his study beyond Italy to examine the effects of stay-behind

operations throughout Western Europe and in Turkey.

 

I was quite surprised to learn that by far the most extensive and

destructive stay-behind operations were those carried out in Turkey

under the code name Counter-Guerrilla. Among other crimes, a long

series of bombings, random killings and assassinations, covertly

perpetrated by CIA-controlled Counter-Guerrilla operatives in the late

1970s, were used as a pretext for the military coup in 1980 that led

to the installation of a pro-American and pro-Israeli government

there. I was also shocked to learn that stay-behind operatives were

responsible for a series of horrific terrorist attacks in Belgium as

late in the Cold War as 1985, although this is still the subject of

unconvincing official denials.

 

One limitation of Ganser's study, which he frequently laments, is the

unavailability of official documentation because all materials

relating to the stay-behind operations remain highly classified. All

Freedom of Information Act requests to date have been denied by

American authorities. One might have hoped that at least with the end

of the Cold War such atrocious strategies would be renounced, and that

the implicated governments would make every effort to come clean and

ensure that this history would not be repeated. Unfortunately, as The

War on Truth by Nafeez Ahmed makes clear, the Strategy of Tension has

proved to be so useful a tool both in terms of global and domestic

politics that, far from being abandoned, these despicable operations

have become increasingly accepted and commonplace.

 

Creating " Islamic " Terrorism for the Post-Cold War Era

 

Ahmed's study centres on the attacks of September 11, 2001, but the

story begins in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Jimmy

Carter at the time, has described in an interview how, even prior to

the invasion, the US had taken steps to fund the Mujahedeen warlords

and to inflame militant Islam in the region. The aim was to

destabilise the region and to force the Soviets to invade -- to draw

them into their own Vietnam-style quagmire.

 

According to Brzezinski, " We did not push the Russians into invading,

but we knowingly increased the probability that they would. That

secret operation was an excellent idea. The effect was to draw the

Russians into the Afghan trap. "

 

After the Soviets' inglorious retreat from Afghanistan, and even more

so after the collapse of the Soviet Union several years later, the

policy of inflaming and exploiting militant Islam was credited by many

in the US national security establishment for these historic

developments. Ahmed has compiled irrefutable evidence that the United

States did not abandon the militant Islamists after the end of the

Cold War. In fact, American leadership at the very highest levels has

continued to covertly protect, assist and guide militant Islam in

general and al-Qaeda in particular in geopolitically important areas

around the world, including Central Asia, North Africa, the Balkans,

and the Philippines.

 

It is impossible to do justice to Ahmed's densely packed 390-page

presentation here, but I will give some representative examples.

 

Sergeant Ali Mohamed Joins al-Qaeda

 

Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian intelligence officer, was fired in 1984

because of his religious extremism. In spite of this and in spite of

the fact that his name was on the State Department's terrorist watch

list, he was granted a visa to enter the US and became a US citizen.

By 1986 he was a sergeant in the US Army and an instructor at the

elite Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. While in this position

Mohamed travelled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden, and he

assisted with the training of al-Qaeda operatives both in Afghanistan

and in the US. His immediate supervisors at Fort Bragg were duly

alarmed by these illegal activities, and reported them up the chain of

command. When their reports failed to produce any action, not even an

official debriefing of Mohamed upon his return from Afghanistan, at

least one of his supervisors, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, concluded that

Mohamed had been acting as part of an operation sanctioned by an

American intelligence agency, " probably the CIA. "

 

Mohamed's activities in support of al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s were

of the highest significance to that organisation. In 1991, he handled

security for bin Laden's move from Saudi Arabia to the Sudan. In 1993,

Mohamed accompanied bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri,

on a fund raising tour of the United States, again handling security

arrangements. The funds raised helped support Zawahiri in a Pentagon

supported mission in the Balkans, which will be discussed in the next

section.

 

The al-Qaeda members trained by Mohamed in the United States included

several who were later convicted in connection with the 1993 World

Trade Center bombing. Top secret US Army training manuals supplied by

Mohamed to the defendants were produced as evidence at their trial.

 

Mohamed himself did the initial surveillance for the al-Qaeda bombings

of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At the time Mohamed was on

active reserve with the Special Forces and was a paid FBI informant.

Mohamed was at long last charged with crimes in connection with the

1998 embassy bombings. In October 2000, he was convicted of five

counts of conspiracy to murder nationals of the United States.

However, the nature of Mohamed's plea agreement, the sentence handed

down, if any, and Mohamed's present whereabouts remain secret.

 

The Pentagon Brings al-Qaeda to the Balkans

 

The US national security establishment did not miss a beat in seeking

to replicate the triumph in Afghanistan in other geopolitically

critical areas. The Soviet puppet regime fell in Afghanistan in

February 1992. That same year, the Pentagon started importing Afghan

jihadists organised by bin Laden into Bosnia to wreak chaos and fuel

the civil wars between Muslims and Serbs that devastated the former

Yugoslavia in the following years. Bin Laden's second in command,

Ayman al-Zawahiri, served as commander of the Mujahedeen forces in the

Balkans.

 

The role of the Pentagon in airlifting the Mujahedeen terrorists into

Bosnia and Kosovo between 1992 to 1995 has been well documented and

widely reported in the European and Canadian media, but almost

completely ignored in the United States. However, the geopolitical

advantages of breaking the former sovereign nation of Yugoslavia into

a patchwork of NATO protectorates, under the firm control of the

United States, did not go unnoted. New Republic editors Jacob

Heilbrunn and Michael Lind celebrated the event in a New York Times

article titled " The Third American Empire " published on January 2, 1996:

 

" Instead of seeing Bosnia as the eastern frontier of NATO, we should

view the Balkans as the western frontier of America's rapidly

expanding sphere of influence in the Middle East . . . The regions

once ruled by the Ottoman Turks show signs of becoming the heart of a

third American empire . . . The main purpose of NATO countries, for

the foreseeable future, will be to serve as staging areas for American

wars in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. "

 

The CIA Brings al-Qaeda to the Philippines

 

In 1991, with the Afghan War winding down, the Abu Sayyaf terrorist

group was formed in the Philippines around a core of radical Afghan

veterans. They conducted their first kidnapping operation in 1992, and

were responsible for a series of bombings and kidnappings throughout

the 1990s that were highly destabilising for the Philippine

government. Several high level al-Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi

Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed were involved. Funding was provided

by one of bin Laden's brothers in law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, an

important figure in the funding of al-Qaeda operations worldwide.

 

Ahmed cites many authoritative sources, including Philippine

intelligence officer Rene Jarque, Lt. Col. Ricardo Morales, and

Senator Aquilino Q. Pimentel, to show that the Abu-Sayyaf group has

received special assistance and protection both from the Philippine

military and from the United States. Pimentel in a speech before the

Philippine Senate in July of 2000 accused the CIA of creating the

terrorist organisation with the help of their contacts in the

Philippine military and intelligence communities.

 

Two incidents in particular have exposed the connivance of the United

States in the Abu Sayyaf reign of terror beyond a reasonable doubt. In

December of 1994, Khalifa was arrested during a visit to San Francisco

on immigration violations. The FBI was aware of his ties to the Abu

Sayyaf group and to al-Qaeda, and began a criminal investigation.

Khalifa's lawyers tried to stall the investigation and manoeuvre for

extradition to Jordan. Incredibly, help came to Khalifa from on high.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher personally wrote a three-page

letter to Attorney General Janet Reno asking that the request for

extradition be granted. Accordingly, the FBI investigation was

cancelled and Khalifa was sent to Jordan per his own request, where he

was soon a free man.

 

The second incident is even more extraordinary and revealing. Michael

Meiring, an American citizen, arrived in the Philippines in 1992 and

promptly formed close working relationships both with high government

officials and with rebel leaders in the Abu Sayyaf group. In 2002, in

the midst of a wave of Abu Sayyaf bombings, Meiring accidentally

detonated a bomb in his own hotel room in Mindao causing grave injury

to himself, requiring emergency hospitalisation. US authorities

immediately intervened. FBI agents and " agents of the National

Security Council " swept him away from his hospital room, first to a

hospital in Manila where Meiring was kept incommunicado and was

treated by a doctor hand-picked by the US embassy. Then Meiring was

rushed back to the United States. Like Ali Mohamed, his fate and

current whereabouts are unknown. Numerous attempts to have him

extradited back to the Philippines for prosecution have been

stonewalled by US authorities.

 

The motivations for American support of terrorism in the Philippines

are not hard to guess. In 1991, the same year that Abu Sayyaf was

formed, the Philippines Senate had voted to close all US military

bases in their country, an action with profound implications for the

military posture of the United States in South Asia. In 2002, due to

the destabilising effects of the Abu Sayyaf operations, the US

military were invited back into the country to participate in

operation Balikatan ( " shoulder to shoulder " ), a joint US/Philippine

military exercise purportedly aimed at eliminating terrorism. These

operations required special exemptions from the Philippine

Constitution, which forbids foreign armies from operating on

Philippine soil. Once again, al-Qaeda, with the help of their American

friends, had acted to advance the geostrategic interests of the United

States.

 

The Grand Design

 

The above examples are by no means isolated anomalies. The bulk of

Ahmed's fine book is devoted to recording a pattern of evidence that

is finally overwhelming. As he says in conclusion, " not only does the

strategy employed in the new 'War on Terror' seem to provoke

terrorism, but an integral dimension of the strategy is the protection

of key actors culpable in the financial, logistical, and

military-intelligence support of international terrorism. "

 

And Then There Is September 11 Itself . . .

 

But what about the September 11 attacks themselves? Were they

" blowback, " i.e., unintended domestic consequences of foreign covert

operations, or were they an integral part of the Strategy of Tension?

Based in part on an analysis of intelligence warnings of the attacks,

and on the absence of any air defence response, Ahmed strongly

endorses the latter view. He reviews the dozens of very specific

foreign and domestic intelligence warnings of terrorist attacks in the

United States using airliners that came in the months leading up to

the attacks. These in turn led to warnings issued by American

intelligence to Pentagon officials, and to others, including author

Salman Rushdie and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, to cancel all

flight plans on the day of September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, no action

whatsoever was taken to warn or to protect the American public.

 

Ahmed points out that the responsible authorities at the Pentagon and

the Federal Aviation Administration have produced several profoundly

contradictory accounts of their own actions on that day -- each

subsequent story seemingly an attempt to remedy the shortcomings of a

previous one. And still no remotely satisfactory account of the

failure to intercept even one of the four hijacked airliners has been

produced. Under ordinary circumstances, interception of wayward

aircraft by military fighters would have been absolutely routine; such

interceptions occurred at least 56 times in the calendar year prior to

September 11, 2001. Ahmed points out that the attacks were allowed to

proceed " entirely unhindered for over one and one half hours in the

most restricted airspace in the world. " He finds the idea that this

was due to negligence beyond belief. Instead he argues that there must

have been a deliberate stand-down of the air defence system managed by

senior national security officials including the vice president and

the secretary of defense.

 

The Future of the Strategy of Tension

 

The books reviewed herein document a continuous history over the last

40 years of the United States and other governments fostering and

manipulating terrorism for their own ends. Terrorist organisations

have been used to destabilise inconvenient regimes around the world,

and to sow chaos, which can then serve as a pretext for military

intervention.

 

Even more importantly, terrorism is used to create a crisis atmosphere

at home under cover of which the crimes and corruption of government

officials go unpunished, civil liberties are easily abandoned, and

major wars can be launched under false pretences. Although at present

there appears to be no reason for the terror-masters in Washington to

consider changing their tactics, the publication this year of these

two illuminating books raises the hope that the Strategy of Tension,

which can only thrive in darkness and confusion, will ultimately have

to be abandoned.

 

# # # # #

 

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 9/11, Disinformation, and the

Anatomy of Terrorism, Olive Branch Press, An imprint of Interlink

Publishing, 2005, Northampton, MA

Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and Terrorism

in Western Europe, Frank Cass, 2005, London and New York

 

1998-2005 Online Journal

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