[Austin-ghetto-list] Dark History Emerging

[telebob x]

This was forwarded to me from the ever-curious rummagings of Chris 
Walters...one of the best readers around.

Telebob

OH...and the Pakistani People's Party speaker was Benazir Bhutto the former 
Prime Minister of Pakistan


Subject: dark history emerging


In Ken Connor's Ghost Force: The Secret History of the SAS (Orion, £7.99), 
it is claimed that the elite regiment actually trained Afghan fighters in 
remote locations in Scotland. In Afghanistan itself, the services of 
Keenie-Meenie Services were used. This was an offshoot of British security 
firm Control Risks, mainly comprising ex-SAS members and former members of 
Rhodesian and South African special forces. It took its name from the 
Swahili word for the movement of a snake through grass. KMS later played a 
role in the Oliver North, Iran-Contra affair of 1987.

On American soil, the CIA used Muslim charities and mosque communities as 
fronts for recruitment of fighters in their secret war against the USSR in 
the Hindu Kush. As Cooley writes in Unholy Wars : "One was [in] New York's 
Arab district, in Brooklyn along Atlantic Avenue... Another was a private 
rifle club in an affluent community of Connecticut."

Bin Laden and a man named Mustafa Chalaby, who ran a jihad refugee centre in 
Brooklyn, were both protégés of Abdullah Azzam. A formative influence on bin 
Laden, the charismatic Azzam was killed in a car-bomb in 1987: according to 
some rumours he was killed by the CIA. Others claim he was himself a CIA 
agent.

Cooley says that those directly recruited by the US went to Camp Peary - 
"the Farm", as the CIA's spy training centre in Virginia is known in the 
intelligence community - in scenes, as he tells them, reminiscent of the 
preparations for the killing of JFK recounted in Don DeLillo's Libra. At the 
Farm and other secret camps, young Afghans and Arab nationals from countries 
such as Egypt and Jordan learned strategic sabotage skills. Passed down to 
the younger jihad generation which filled the ranks of the bin Laden 
organisation, these skills would come back to haunt the US. Simon Reeve's 
The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism 
(Deutsch, £17.99) looks at how they were applied at the time of the 1993 
attack on the World Trade Centre and the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi 
and Dar-es-Salaam.

In the financial world, too, there is a blowback scenario, given that for 
years global banking has gained considerable benefits from lack of 
transparency and regulation. BCCI, the British-Pakistani bank that was 
closed down in 1991 after a massive fraud, was a regular route for mojahedin 
funding, including that provided by Saudi intelligence.

Financing for Pentagon and CIA "black budget" operations - particularly in 
the era of William Casey - also passed through BCCI, as did drug money. Some 
analysts claim black-budget US and British operatives flew out opium on the 
planes with which they brought in arms. Later, jihad funding came from the 
construction-industry coffers of Osama bin Laden and other Muslim 
"philanthropists". Bin Laden established his own bank, the Al-Shamal 
Islamic, in Khartoum.

In Unholy Wars, Cooley provides convincing evidence that Arab businessman 
and arms merchant Adnan Kashoggi had dealings with bin Laden's father, 
receiving a $50,000 cheque from him. Oil broker Roy Furmark, Cooley says, 
provided a link between his CIA friend Casey and Kashoggi, introducing the 
latter to Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, "the Iranian middleman who became a central 
figure in the arms for hostages and funds for Contras deals with Iran, in 
which Kashoggi got involved".

Oil itself has long been a factor in the "great game" of Asian geopolitics, 
one which brings the other big player in the blowback scenario, Russia, into 
the picture. As Afghan expert Michael Griffin puts it in Reaping the 
Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (Pluto, £19.95): "A 
trans-Afghan pipeline would undermine Russia's control of energy prices from 
Central Asia".

Griffin argues that the US under Clinton trimmed its opposition to the 
Taliban to gain an advantage in oil politics. By that time, in this 
high-stakes game of snakes and ladders, Clinton's successor was effectively 
already in the picture, as the son of a man with close ties to the oil 
company Unocal, which wanted to put a pipeline across Afghanistan. Among 
their partners in the venture were BP and the Saudi royal family. The future 
was beginning to cast as heavy a shadow as the past.

Griffin's introduction was penned seven months ago, but what he has to say 
still makes sobering reading.

"The accession in the US of President George W Bush... may shed yet fresh 
light on at least two central mysteries of the Taliban ... The first is the 
extent to which the administration of Bill Clinton actively encouraged its 
former cold war allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to assemble and finance a 
tribal military force to end the misrule of the mojahedin in the post-Soviet 
years. The second - of greater sensitivity - is to provide a coherent 
explanation for the studied incompetence of the FBI, CIA and other American 
intelligence agencies in addressing the alleged threats posed to the US by 
Osama bin Laden and his network. Bush's links with the US energy industry, 
most notably Unocal, are, regrettably, more likely to restrict the current 
state of knowledge about US policy in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, than to 
enlarge it."

Appalling as they are, this week's events may yet begin to force some dark 
secrets out into the light.

* Zanzibar, Giles Foden's novel about the US embassy bombings in East 
Africa, is published by Faber next year.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
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telebob@hotmail.com
00 506 224 4858 Costa Rica
512 440 1862 Austin, TX


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