It's just been a few hours since I arrived back from a conference in Oslo, "Deconstructing the War on Terror", where I was honoured to join a very distinguished panel of speakers addressing the need for a new discourse to make sense of current events.
I've just been told by the man who runs this website that I've been mentioned very favourably in today's edition of The Independent in an oped piece by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:
"In his disturbing and clearly evidenced book, The War on Truth, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed traces the unholy games played with Islamicist terrorists by the US, and through acquiescence by the UK, flirting with them when it suited and then turning against them. Al-Qa'ida has been used as an instrument of western statecraft and for now is the enemy. Well, not quite. Pakistan's ISI is quite chummy with the Bin Laden groupies and, well, we have to keep Pakistan on side as they know so many of our secrets. So it goes on."
I also discovered in Oslo that The War on Truth has been reviewed in the Journal of Peace Research published by SAGE on behalf of the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO). I met with Dr Ola Tunander, who is a Research Professor at PRIO, and who wrote the review for the journal last year. It's a short, but very supportive review - here's the gist:
"In this volume, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed has collected a large amount of material about the US grand design for a new American world order, and particularly about the role of Osama bin Laden, 11 September 2001, and the intelligence networks of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the West. This volume tries to understand 21st-century terrorism, not primarily as a replacement for the Cold War Soviet Union, but as a Western disinformation campaign to control raw materials and populations on a global scale. Ahmed documents the close ties between Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and a number of intelligence services. He also documents policies for provoking terrorists into action to justify military responses. The frequent use of terrorism to alter the political agenda and to manipulate public opinion has seemingly created a ‘hyperreality’ that covers the true actors behind the scene. The ‘Global War on Terror’ is, to Ahmed, as much a‘war on truth’ as it is a war against any terrorists... his contribution is necessary for anyone who wants to write about the Global War on Terror and US preoccupation with terrorism in the 21st century. Thebook is also important for the understanding of the present war in Afghanistan."
The only caveat is that Professor Tunander describes me as "Director of Policy Research & Development at the University of Sussex" - a post which doesn't exist, and which is obviously a confusion of my affiliation to Sussex as a tutor and doctoral candidate, and my work with the IPRD.
Anyway, Tunander is a strong emerging voice in the emerging critical academic literature on terrorism. He has most recently contributed to the seminal academic anthology on 'deep politics', Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty by Dr Eric Wilson, Monash University and Dr Tim Lindsey, University of Melbourne.
On the subject of the conference, all the presentations were excellent, and really eye-opening. The opening speech was by Dr Erik Fosse, a senior medical doctor and Research Professor, and head of the Oslo-based medical aid agency, the Norwegian Aid Committee (NORWAC). Dr. Fosse's presentation was truly shocking. He was one of the handful of Western experts and eyewitnesses who was still in Gaza during Israel's latest bombardment, and was a firsthand witness to Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity. He described how Israeli forces were literally bombing and specifically targeting civilian structures and installations, and recounted harrowing personal stories of the manner in which he and the Palestinian doctors at the Al-Shifa hospital were overwhelmed by incoming civilian casualties and lacking in sufficient medical supplies to treat them effectively due to the Israeli blockade. He also went into eyewitness evidence of new types of weapons being used by Israel. A gist of his talk can be gleaned from his interview on Al-Jazeerah.
Arzu Merali, Director of Research at the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) in London, described the role of the media in the 'War on Terror' and its tendencies to de-humanize ethnic minority communities, in particular Muslims. She described the increasing prevalence of cartoons depicting Muslims as fanatics with long beards, using language such as "parasites" and similar rhetoric; and most disturbingly, compared them to cartoons that were used in Germany in the early 1930s to depict Jews, before the Holocaust. The similarities were actually very striking, and extremely disturbing. She notes that the problem is that the majority community largely has very little contact with minorities, and so their perceptions of minorities are actually informed almost wholly by these sorts of de-humanizing and over-simplifying media stereotypes. There is a need to acknowledge that minorities by way of being minorities, de facto don't have the kind of media access that the majority community takes for granted.
Massoud Shadjareh, Chairman of the IHRC, focused on statistical evidence of the futility of anti-terror operations, procedures and legislation, and showed how not only does the current anti-terror strategy effectively target overwhelmingly innocent people, it in particular targets members of black and ethnic minority groups, once again Muslims in particular. One example was really telling. Out of the over hundred thousand or so people stopped and searched, moreover, there has been not a single conviction for terrorist offences. The financial costs of stop and search, even having cut out some of the red tape permitting police to continue the practive with even more impunity than ever before, are in the millions of pounds - money down the drain, much like the bulk of the Government's Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) strategy which, it now seems, is hell-bent on criminalizing most of the 1.2 million British Muslim population. As Andrew Gilligan has pointed out, we need to address the structural and social causes underlying the vulnerability of our youth, Muslim and non-Muslim, to all kinds of criminal activity.
Finally, Robin Yassin-Kassab, author of the novel The Road from Damascus, and a journalist who has travelled widely in the Middle East and Central Asia, spoke in detail about the rationale behind, and devastating impact of, the war on Pakistan and Afghanistan. Robin discussed the role of the Trans-Afghan pipeline in motivating US hostilities toward Taliban, which despite being invited to Nebraska for talks with UNOCAL and American diplomats in the run-up to 9/11, basically told the US and Britain to shove their plans for Afghanistan up their behinds, following which US representatives promised them bombs. He also delves into detail about the war in Pakistan, and is at pains to emphasise that the fracturing of that country into de facto civil war is a direct consequence of the US trying to compel the ISI to ditch its unruly spawn, the Taliban. Robin blogs here, where you can also find the gist of this presentation in Oslo. Here's a sample from the blog:
"The terror threat to the West is real, but vastly exaggerated. In its name military budgets swell and potential dissenters are intimidated. There were 498 terrorist incidents in Europe in 2006, only one of which was attributed to Muslims, yet half of terrorism-related arrests were of Muslim suspects...
With the election of Obama, the most extreme rhetoric of GWOT seems to have had its day. (It may be to Israel’s long term cost that it used GWOT rhetoric to package the recent massacre in Gaza, just at the moment when GWOT had been discredited in the West.) But if fundamental pro-Zionist and imperialist policies did not in fact change during the Bush years, not much will change, practically, in the post-Bush years. The passing of the War on Terror is as illusory as its sudden birth after September 11th."
Oh, nearly forgot. My presentation was about Anglo-American hostilities with Iran in the context (primarily) of increasingly scarce hydrocarbon energy resources (i.e. peak oil), and the worrying prospects over the next 10 years. And you can get a more in-depth (pre-Obama) reading of this here.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Obama: No Change
Just a round up of some useful info. Peter Phillips, Professor of Sociology and Director of Project Censored at Sonoma State University, has just put out a piece revealing the incestuous and systemic financial ties between public office and defence corporations in the US government, continuing under Obama.
Obama's stimulus package has been cautiously welcomed by sections of both the left and right of the political spectrum. While there are definitely some positive components, and surely a step-in-principle in the right direction - highlighing the idea of focusing on the real economy, creating new jobs, and rebuilding a cleaner and more energy efficient infrastructure - there remain serious questions about how far the stimulus as packaged will actually achieve these noble aims. The idea is great - money needs to be used not to bail out insolvent banks, but to revitalize production along sustainable and equitable lines. But the stimulus doesn't do this effectively.
Jesse Jenkins, the director of energy and climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute in Washington DC, provided a detailed deconstruction of the stimulus when its details first became known. His basic verdict it: "Underfunded or not, the series of clean energy investments included in this version of the stimulus reads like a laundry list of piecemeal tax breaks and incentives that simply do not cohere into any kind of unified plan. It seems that there is no coordination between the different intended energy expenditures and no central objective or strategy behind then, other than creating new jobs."
Even Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman was fairly scathing about the scope of the stimulus -
"We’re probably facing the worst slump since the Great Depression. The Congressional Budget Office, not usually given to hyperbole, predicts that over the next three years there will be a $2.9 trillion gap between what the economy could produce and what it will actually produce. And $800 billion, while it sounds like a lot of money, isn’t nearly enough to bridge that chasm.
Officially, the administration insists that the plan is adequate to the economy’s need. But few economists agree. And it’s widely believed that political considerations led to a plan that was weaker and contains more tax cuts than it should have — that Mr. Obama compromised in advance in the hope of gaining broad bipartisan support."
Not to mention the fact that Obama's actual plans for renewable energy investments read almost identical to Bush's plans - neither of which therefore offer any meaningful way of actually weaning the US off of its oil addiction, as the impact of peak oil closes over the next 5-10 years.
Meanwhile, no one in the mainstream media commentary circus bothers to ask the question as to the symbiotic relationship between massive, excessive US defence expenditures - which Obama has no intention of reducing - endemic US government and consumer indebtedness, and the current financial crisis. Instead, Obama is busily investing precious taxpayer funds in expanding the frontlines of war in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to devastating effect.
Obama's stimulus package has been cautiously welcomed by sections of both the left and right of the political spectrum. While there are definitely some positive components, and surely a step-in-principle in the right direction - highlighing the idea of focusing on the real economy, creating new jobs, and rebuilding a cleaner and more energy efficient infrastructure - there remain serious questions about how far the stimulus as packaged will actually achieve these noble aims. The idea is great - money needs to be used not to bail out insolvent banks, but to revitalize production along sustainable and equitable lines. But the stimulus doesn't do this effectively.
Jesse Jenkins, the director of energy and climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute in Washington DC, provided a detailed deconstruction of the stimulus when its details first became known. His basic verdict it: "Underfunded or not, the series of clean energy investments included in this version of the stimulus reads like a laundry list of piecemeal tax breaks and incentives that simply do not cohere into any kind of unified plan. It seems that there is no coordination between the different intended energy expenditures and no central objective or strategy behind then, other than creating new jobs."
Even Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman was fairly scathing about the scope of the stimulus -
"We’re probably facing the worst slump since the Great Depression. The Congressional Budget Office, not usually given to hyperbole, predicts that over the next three years there will be a $2.9 trillion gap between what the economy could produce and what it will actually produce. And $800 billion, while it sounds like a lot of money, isn’t nearly enough to bridge that chasm.
Officially, the administration insists that the plan is adequate to the economy’s need. But few economists agree. And it’s widely believed that political considerations led to a plan that was weaker and contains more tax cuts than it should have — that Mr. Obama compromised in advance in the hope of gaining broad bipartisan support."
Not to mention the fact that Obama's actual plans for renewable energy investments read almost identical to Bush's plans - neither of which therefore offer any meaningful way of actually weaning the US off of its oil addiction, as the impact of peak oil closes over the next 5-10 years.
Meanwhile, no one in the mainstream media commentary circus bothers to ask the question as to the symbiotic relationship between massive, excessive US defence expenditures - which Obama has no intention of reducing - endemic US government and consumer indebtedness, and the current financial crisis. Instead, Obama is busily investing precious taxpayer funds in expanding the frontlines of war in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to devastating effect.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Torture, Rendition, Terror & Oil: A Primer on "Deep Politics"
Why is the Obama administration hell-bent on continuing rendition, and covering-up torture? Why are Western states complicit in these illegal activities? How can the systematic perpetuation of such criminal practices under the rubric of the 'War on Terror' be conducted by the very states who claim to be the guardians of 'international law' and 'human rights'?
The practice of rendition, linked inextricably to the facilitation of torture, is an integral part of the conduct of the western ‘War on Terror’, initiated after 9/11. It therefore needs to be understood in the context of western geopolitical, strategic and economic strategies, and their connection to national security policies. Only by grasping this wider context can rendition be understood in terms of its relationship to the logic of current western strategies, which are themselves rooted in longstanding social, political, ideological and economic processes tied to the protection of powerful vested interests. The movement against rendition will be ineffective if it fails to understand and confront precisely these underlying strategies, processes and interests in the context of which rendition is being practiced and facilitated by western states.
Torture and Rendition: Preliminary Definitions
It's important to start by being absolutely clear what we mean by these terms. Confusion about the inextricable linkage between kidnapping and human trafficking, rendition, and torture has led even groups like Human Rights Watch to come out and suggested there is a "legitimate place" for the "limited" practice of rendition.
Rendition is the process of transporting detainees from one jurisdiction to another without any due process. The practice of rendition by the United States government in alliance with the British and some European governments is generally linked to torture, as detainees are often sent to countries known to practice torture.
At every stage of its execution, rendition overrides due process and lacks legal justification:
1. Rendition begins with the identification of individuals as “terrorist suspects”. New anti-terrorism laws across the US, UK and Europe are designed to grant states the widest possible scope in ascribing this label to individuals in the absence of specific evidence. As such, individuals can be identified as “terrorist suspects” by the state without justification. It is no surprise then that the vast majority of individuals detained as “terrorist suspects” under new anti-terrorism legislation are never charged with any crime.
2. After being identified as a “terrorist suspect”, an individual is detained indefinitely without charge. For all intents and purposes, then, the label of “terrorist suspect” in itself fails to elicit any sort of criminal implications. In the absence of criminal charges, “terrorist suspects” are not “suspects” in any meaningful legal sense – they are merely detainees who remain innocent until proven guilty.
3. The “terrorist suspect” is subsequently transferred to another jurisdiction, often across other jurisdictions, where the presiding state routinely practices torture against detainees, and where due process and legal accountability are lacking. In this climate, the detainee is liable to be subject to torture. Information thereby obtained might be used as a basis to identify other “terrorist suspects”, or in relation to other security policies implemented as part of the “War on Terror”.
4. The “terrorist suspect” is at no time inserted into an accountable or objective legal process, and in fact is prevented from a process of prosecution and trial that might attempt to test the state’s actions toward them.
One will note the obvious fact that at every stage, rendition is devoid of legal justification. It violates the individual’s most basic human rights to due process, in particular the elementary notion of habeas corpus. The western state practice of rendition, in other words, although it portrays itself as an extension of the state’s law-enforcement powers pursued to protect national security, is on the contrary an entirely criminal act that violates the most basic security of the person.
"Deep Politics" and the Criminalization of the State
Rendition, however, is only one criminal practice among numerous others implemented in the context of the ‘War on Terror’. Iraq provides an obvious example, including issues such as the illegal commencement and conduct of the war on Iraq; the fabrication of intelligence on WMD; the systematic use of torture in Iraqi prisons; among many other policies. It is absolutely essential, therefore, that rendition be seen as integrally conjoined to other criminal practices by western states.
This demonstrates that rendition manifests a much deeper phenomenon in the development of western state policies: the increasing criminalization of the state. What is driving this process of criminalization? In the service of what powerful vested interests are states acting in this increasingly criminal manner?
The analysis of these issues is known as “deep politics”, a term coined by the Canadian political scientist Peter Dale Scott, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
According to Scott, a deep political system or process is one in which institutional, non-institutional and para-political bodies, criminal syndicates, politicians, judges, media, corporations and leading government employees, resort to
“... decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those sanctioned by law and society. What makes these supplementary procedures ‘deep’ is the fact that they are covert or suppressed, outside public awareness as well as outside sanctioned political processes.” [1]
Deep political analysis is concerned with revealing the tendency of the state, which is the locus of law, to enter into criminal activity that conventionally would be viewed as anathema to the state’s professed laws. As Scott observes, from the viewpoint of conventional political science, law enforcement and the criminal underworld are opposed to each other, the former struggling to gain control of the latter. However:
“A deep political analysis notes that in practice these efforts at control lead to the use of criminal informants; and this practice, continued over a long period of time, turns informants into double agents with status within the police as well as the mob. The protection of informants and their crimes encourages favors, payoffs, and eventually systemic corruption. The phenomenon of ‘organized crime’ arises: entire criminal structures that come to be tolerated by the police because of their usefulness in informing on lesser criminals.” [2]
In time, this can lead to a form of police-crime symbiosis, where the defining parameters of which side controls the other are no longer clear. The present condition of western state practices in relation to the ‘War on Terror’ suggests that we are facing a serious state-crisis, challenging the legitimacy of the state as the harbinger of law, order and security. The comprehensive nature of the criminalization of the state, its penetration of both domestic and foreign arenas of policy, can only be explained in the context of the state’s increasing subservience to powerful vested interests that are unlikely to meet public approval, and that therefore must be secured without public consent. So what are these interests?
The Deep Politics of Terror in Algeria: A Case Study
The case of Algeria provides a powerful example of the overlap of these criminal western state practices which converge on a very precise set of strategic and economic interests:
1. Individuals identified as “terrorist suspects” have been transferred to, among many other states, Algeria. Algeria is a regime with a notorious record of human rights abuses including the systematic practice of torture which was detailed by the British Home Office in an April 2004 report prepared by the Country Information and Policy Unit used in assessing asylum claims. After its visit to Algeria in June 2005, Human Rights Watch concluded that the regime continues to practice torture, especially during interrogation of security suspects.
The interrogation of “suspects” using torture was responsible for the production of the false ricin-plot narrative. Algerian security services alerted the British in January 2003 to the plot after interrogating and torturing a “terrorist suspect” and former British resident Mohammed Meguerba. We now know there was no plot. Four of the defendants were acquitted of terrorism and four others had the cases against them abandoned. Only Kamal Bourgass was convicted after he murdered Special Branch Detective Constable Stephen Oake during a raid. Rendition attempts to institutionalize and legitimize torture as a means of the production of fundamentally compromised information used by western states to manipulate domestic public opinion. [3]
2. Algeria plays a crucial role in relation to the west’s ‘War on Terror’, and cooperates closely with the US, UK and France in particular on regional anti-terrorist initiatives. US and Algerian joint operations in the last few years for instance have involved the construction of a ‘terror zone’ across southern Algeria, northern Nigeria, Mauritania, Northern Mali, Northern Niger and Chad. In July 2003, under US auspices, Algeria, Chad, Niger and Nigeria ‘signed a cooperation agreement on counter-terrorism that effectively joined the two oil-rich sides of the Sahara together in a complex of security arrangements whose architecture is American.’ [4]
The agreement was quickly followed up with what has become the principal vehicle of American involvement, the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a $7.75 million military programme providing training and equipment to Algeria, Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania to ‘improve their border security and deny the use of their sovereign territory to terrorists and criminals.’ [5] One thousand US Special forces, marines and contractors were sent to these countries in January 2004 to supply extensive military counter-terrorist assistance and coordination. The US is expanding the programme to include Nigeria, Morocco and Tunisia, with a new budget of $500 million for the period until 2011, now with a new name, the ‘Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative’.[6] A major US military base operates from Tamanrasset in the south of Algeria, with 400 Special Forces. Algeria is viewed as pivotal to US plans for future military deployment in the region.[7]
3. Thirdly, Algeria is complicit in the facilitation of radical Islamist terrorist activity - with Western knowledge and support. Former Algerian government and security officials have independently confirmed that Algerian military-intelligence services had infiltrated and controlled almost all radical Islamist terrorist groups in the country, including the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). [8]
Foreign Office documents released to the Honourable Court in 2000 relating to the trial of three alleged Algerian terrorists, who were all acquitted, revealed extensive evidence to this effect. Whitehall’s Joint Intelligence Committee cited evidence of Algerian ‘government manipulation or involvement in [Islamist] terrorist violence’. One document stated, ‘Sources had privately said some of the killings of civilians [blamed on Islamist terrorist groups] were the responsibility of the Algerian security services’. Multiple documents ‘referred to the ‘manipulation’ of the GIA [the Armed Islamic Group, one of the principal Islamist terrorist groups in Algeria] being used as a cover to carry out their own operations’. A US intelligence report confirmed that ‘there was no evidence to link 1995 Paris bombings to Algerian militants’. On the contrary, ‘one killing at the time could have been ordered by the Algerian government.’ [9]
According to social anthropologist Jeremy Keenan - Senior Research Fellow and Director of Sahara Studies at the University of East Anglia - ‘contradictory Algerian intelligence reports and eyewitness testimonies suggest collusion between agents of Algeria’s military intelligence services and the Salafist Group.’ Not surprisingly, the State Department has ‘declined to comment on the matter.’ Indeed, the United States needs the GSPC terrorist threat to justify the extension of US hegemony to northwest Africa. ‘Without the GSPC,’ observes Keenan, ‘the US has no legitimacy for its presence in the region.’[10]
In several extraordinary analyses published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Review of African Political Economy, Keenan documents ‘an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that the alleged spread of terrorist activities across much of the Sahelian Sahara, has indeed been an elaborate deception on the part of US and Algerian military intelligence services.’ Keenan thus finds that the expansion of the GSPC presence in the Sahara was jointly facilitated by US and Algerian security services.[11]
4. Algeria is the subject of crucial strategic and economic interests on the part of the US, UK and several EU states, especially with regard to its oil and natural gas reserves. Northwest African oil reserves currently meet 17 per cent of US needs. An Algerian company, Sonatrach, plays a major role in US oil exploration as the largest company in Africa, with an estimated turnover of $32 billion in 2004.[12] Experts agree that by 2015, ‘Africa will become the US’s second-most important supplier of oil, and possibly natural gas, after the Middle East.’[13]
US commercial involvement in Algeria began in 1991, after the military coup that cancelled national elections. At the end of that year, the regime ‘opened the energy sector on liberal terms to foreign investors and operators.’ The main US firms include ‘Arco, Exxon, Oryx, Anadarko, Mobil and Sun Oil.’[14] According to European intelligence sources, CIA meetings with Algerian Islamist leaders from 1993 to 1995 are responsible for the lack of terrorist attacks on US oil and agribusiness installations in Algeria.[15] Approximately 90 per cent of Algeria’s crude oil exports go to western Europe, including Britain, where BP has a 31.8 billion pounds contract with the regime.[16]
Conclusions
The case of Algeria demonstrates that CIA-MI6 sponsored rendition and torture in Algeria cannot be understood in isolation from the dynamics of Algeria’s deep political relations with Western states, which can be explained by the economic and strategic interests that appear to inextricably bind the West and Algeria. Similar configurations of mutual interests explain the trajectories of Western security policies, including torture and rendition, in many other strategic regions in relation to the ‘War on Terror’. One of the most disturbing elements of these deep political ties is their implication for western policies toward ‘international terrorism’. The case of Algeria highlights how:
1. Western states use rendition and torture to manufacture intelligence to magnify the threat of terrorism in support of domestic and foreign security policies.
2. Western states are indirectly complicit in disturbing policies of cohabitation with radical Islamist networks, which appears to have selectively facilitated their activities.
3. This in turn has legitimized the expansion and consolidation of military-strategic control of regions considered crucial to western interests, particularly with regard to access to energy reserves and raw materials.
These three strands of policy cannot be separated, and to be challenged effectively they must be analyzed and deconstructed holistically. They are integral to a sophisticated international security system, geared to the protection of specific strategic and economic interests, that has been constructed by the US in cooperation with the UK and some EU states after 9/11, but many of whose principles were already in place well before those terrorist attacks.
This system has accelerated the criminalization of the state, resulting in a veritable crisis of corruption. In order to launch an effective and lasting challenge to western state criminal practices such as rendition, therefore, the security system itself - its structure, the key players responsible for its operation, and the corrupt interests it is designed to meet - needs to be understood, exposed and undermined.
--------------------
NOTES
[1] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (California: University of California Press, 1996) p. 8.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Neil MacKay, ‘The new boom industry: Torture with CIA ‘extraordinary rendition’’, Sunday Herald (4 December 2005)
[4] Jeremy Keenan, ‘Terror in the Sahara: the Implications of US Imperialism for North & West Africa’, Review of African Political Economy (September 2004, 31 (101): 475–486), p. 491.
[5] Ambassador Cofer Black, ‘The Prevention and Combating of Terrorism in Africa’, Remarks at the Second Intergovernmental High-Level Meeting on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism In Africa, Algiers (Washington DC: US Department of State, 13 October 2004)
[6] Jason Motlag, ‘US takes terror fight to Africa’s “Wild West”’, San Francisco Chronicle (27 December 2005)
[7] Salima Mellah and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, ‘Who Staged the Tourist Kidnappings? El Para, the Maghreb’s Bin Laden’, Le Monde Diplomatique (February 2005)
[8] For an extensive review of sources see my The War on Truth: 9/11 Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism (London: Interlink, 2005)
[9] Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Terrorist case collapses after three years’, Guardian (21 March 2000).
[10] Jason Motlag, ‘US takes terror fight to Africa’s “Wild West”,’ op. cit.
[11] Jeremy Keenan, ‘Terror in the Sahara', op. cit. Keenan reviews a wealth of evidence in excruciating detail. Also see his two other briefings which contain more extensive background analysis demonstrating a US-Algerian intelligence deception in relation to the GSPC: Keenan, ‘Americans & ‘Bad People’ in the Sahara-Sahel’, Review of African Political Economy (March 2004, 31 (99): 130–9); ‘Political Destablisation and ‘Blowback’ in the Sahel’, Review of African Political Economy (December 2004, 31(102): 691–703). Look out for Keenan's forthcoming book, The Dark Sahara (London: Pluto, 2009)
[12] Salima Mellah and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, ‘Who Staged the Tourist Kidnappings?’ op. cit.
[13] Pierre Abramovici, ‘United States: the new scramble for Africa’, Le Monde (July 2004)
[14] John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, (Pluto Press: London, 1998, pp. 205–6).
[15] Richard Labévière, Dollars for Terror: The US and Islam (New York: Algora, 2000), pp. 182–9.
[16] ‘Algeria’, United States Energy Information Administration (February 1999)
The practice of rendition, linked inextricably to the facilitation of torture, is an integral part of the conduct of the western ‘War on Terror’, initiated after 9/11. It therefore needs to be understood in the context of western geopolitical, strategic and economic strategies, and their connection to national security policies. Only by grasping this wider context can rendition be understood in terms of its relationship to the logic of current western strategies, which are themselves rooted in longstanding social, political, ideological and economic processes tied to the protection of powerful vested interests. The movement against rendition will be ineffective if it fails to understand and confront precisely these underlying strategies, processes and interests in the context of which rendition is being practiced and facilitated by western states.
Torture and Rendition: Preliminary Definitions
It's important to start by being absolutely clear what we mean by these terms. Confusion about the inextricable linkage between kidnapping and human trafficking, rendition, and torture has led even groups like Human Rights Watch to come out and suggested there is a "legitimate place" for the "limited" practice of rendition.
Rendition is the process of transporting detainees from one jurisdiction to another without any due process. The practice of rendition by the United States government in alliance with the British and some European governments is generally linked to torture, as detainees are often sent to countries known to practice torture.
At every stage of its execution, rendition overrides due process and lacks legal justification:
1. Rendition begins with the identification of individuals as “terrorist suspects”. New anti-terrorism laws across the US, UK and Europe are designed to grant states the widest possible scope in ascribing this label to individuals in the absence of specific evidence. As such, individuals can be identified as “terrorist suspects” by the state without justification. It is no surprise then that the vast majority of individuals detained as “terrorist suspects” under new anti-terrorism legislation are never charged with any crime.
2. After being identified as a “terrorist suspect”, an individual is detained indefinitely without charge. For all intents and purposes, then, the label of “terrorist suspect” in itself fails to elicit any sort of criminal implications. In the absence of criminal charges, “terrorist suspects” are not “suspects” in any meaningful legal sense – they are merely detainees who remain innocent until proven guilty.
3. The “terrorist suspect” is subsequently transferred to another jurisdiction, often across other jurisdictions, where the presiding state routinely practices torture against detainees, and where due process and legal accountability are lacking. In this climate, the detainee is liable to be subject to torture. Information thereby obtained might be used as a basis to identify other “terrorist suspects”, or in relation to other security policies implemented as part of the “War on Terror”.
4. The “terrorist suspect” is at no time inserted into an accountable or objective legal process, and in fact is prevented from a process of prosecution and trial that might attempt to test the state’s actions toward them.
One will note the obvious fact that at every stage, rendition is devoid of legal justification. It violates the individual’s most basic human rights to due process, in particular the elementary notion of habeas corpus. The western state practice of rendition, in other words, although it portrays itself as an extension of the state’s law-enforcement powers pursued to protect national security, is on the contrary an entirely criminal act that violates the most basic security of the person.
"Deep Politics" and the Criminalization of the State
Rendition, however, is only one criminal practice among numerous others implemented in the context of the ‘War on Terror’. Iraq provides an obvious example, including issues such as the illegal commencement and conduct of the war on Iraq; the fabrication of intelligence on WMD; the systematic use of torture in Iraqi prisons; among many other policies. It is absolutely essential, therefore, that rendition be seen as integrally conjoined to other criminal practices by western states.
This demonstrates that rendition manifests a much deeper phenomenon in the development of western state policies: the increasing criminalization of the state. What is driving this process of criminalization? In the service of what powerful vested interests are states acting in this increasingly criminal manner?
The analysis of these issues is known as “deep politics”, a term coined by the Canadian political scientist Peter Dale Scott, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
According to Scott, a deep political system or process is one in which institutional, non-institutional and para-political bodies, criminal syndicates, politicians, judges, media, corporations and leading government employees, resort to
“... decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those sanctioned by law and society. What makes these supplementary procedures ‘deep’ is the fact that they are covert or suppressed, outside public awareness as well as outside sanctioned political processes.” [1]
Deep political analysis is concerned with revealing the tendency of the state, which is the locus of law, to enter into criminal activity that conventionally would be viewed as anathema to the state’s professed laws. As Scott observes, from the viewpoint of conventional political science, law enforcement and the criminal underworld are opposed to each other, the former struggling to gain control of the latter. However:
“A deep political analysis notes that in practice these efforts at control lead to the use of criminal informants; and this practice, continued over a long period of time, turns informants into double agents with status within the police as well as the mob. The protection of informants and their crimes encourages favors, payoffs, and eventually systemic corruption. The phenomenon of ‘organized crime’ arises: entire criminal structures that come to be tolerated by the police because of their usefulness in informing on lesser criminals.” [2]
In time, this can lead to a form of police-crime symbiosis, where the defining parameters of which side controls the other are no longer clear. The present condition of western state practices in relation to the ‘War on Terror’ suggests that we are facing a serious state-crisis, challenging the legitimacy of the state as the harbinger of law, order and security. The comprehensive nature of the criminalization of the state, its penetration of both domestic and foreign arenas of policy, can only be explained in the context of the state’s increasing subservience to powerful vested interests that are unlikely to meet public approval, and that therefore must be secured without public consent. So what are these interests?
The Deep Politics of Terror in Algeria: A Case Study
The case of Algeria provides a powerful example of the overlap of these criminal western state practices which converge on a very precise set of strategic and economic interests:
1. Individuals identified as “terrorist suspects” have been transferred to, among many other states, Algeria. Algeria is a regime with a notorious record of human rights abuses including the systematic practice of torture which was detailed by the British Home Office in an April 2004 report prepared by the Country Information and Policy Unit used in assessing asylum claims. After its visit to Algeria in June 2005, Human Rights Watch concluded that the regime continues to practice torture, especially during interrogation of security suspects.
The interrogation of “suspects” using torture was responsible for the production of the false ricin-plot narrative. Algerian security services alerted the British in January 2003 to the plot after interrogating and torturing a “terrorist suspect” and former British resident Mohammed Meguerba. We now know there was no plot. Four of the defendants were acquitted of terrorism and four others had the cases against them abandoned. Only Kamal Bourgass was convicted after he murdered Special Branch Detective Constable Stephen Oake during a raid. Rendition attempts to institutionalize and legitimize torture as a means of the production of fundamentally compromised information used by western states to manipulate domestic public opinion. [3]
2. Algeria plays a crucial role in relation to the west’s ‘War on Terror’, and cooperates closely with the US, UK and France in particular on regional anti-terrorist initiatives. US and Algerian joint operations in the last few years for instance have involved the construction of a ‘terror zone’ across southern Algeria, northern Nigeria, Mauritania, Northern Mali, Northern Niger and Chad. In July 2003, under US auspices, Algeria, Chad, Niger and Nigeria ‘signed a cooperation agreement on counter-terrorism that effectively joined the two oil-rich sides of the Sahara together in a complex of security arrangements whose architecture is American.’ [4]
The agreement was quickly followed up with what has become the principal vehicle of American involvement, the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a $7.75 million military programme providing training and equipment to Algeria, Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania to ‘improve their border security and deny the use of their sovereign territory to terrorists and criminals.’ [5] One thousand US Special forces, marines and contractors were sent to these countries in January 2004 to supply extensive military counter-terrorist assistance and coordination. The US is expanding the programme to include Nigeria, Morocco and Tunisia, with a new budget of $500 million for the period until 2011, now with a new name, the ‘Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative’.[6] A major US military base operates from Tamanrasset in the south of Algeria, with 400 Special Forces. Algeria is viewed as pivotal to US plans for future military deployment in the region.[7]
3. Thirdly, Algeria is complicit in the facilitation of radical Islamist terrorist activity - with Western knowledge and support. Former Algerian government and security officials have independently confirmed that Algerian military-intelligence services had infiltrated and controlled almost all radical Islamist terrorist groups in the country, including the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). [8]
Foreign Office documents released to the Honourable Court in 2000 relating to the trial of three alleged Algerian terrorists, who were all acquitted, revealed extensive evidence to this effect. Whitehall’s Joint Intelligence Committee cited evidence of Algerian ‘government manipulation or involvement in [Islamist] terrorist violence’. One document stated, ‘Sources had privately said some of the killings of civilians [blamed on Islamist terrorist groups] were the responsibility of the Algerian security services’. Multiple documents ‘referred to the ‘manipulation’ of the GIA [the Armed Islamic Group, one of the principal Islamist terrorist groups in Algeria] being used as a cover to carry out their own operations’. A US intelligence report confirmed that ‘there was no evidence to link 1995 Paris bombings to Algerian militants’. On the contrary, ‘one killing at the time could have been ordered by the Algerian government.’ [9]
According to social anthropologist Jeremy Keenan - Senior Research Fellow and Director of Sahara Studies at the University of East Anglia - ‘contradictory Algerian intelligence reports and eyewitness testimonies suggest collusion between agents of Algeria’s military intelligence services and the Salafist Group.’ Not surprisingly, the State Department has ‘declined to comment on the matter.’ Indeed, the United States needs the GSPC terrorist threat to justify the extension of US hegemony to northwest Africa. ‘Without the GSPC,’ observes Keenan, ‘the US has no legitimacy for its presence in the region.’[10]
In several extraordinary analyses published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Review of African Political Economy, Keenan documents ‘an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that the alleged spread of terrorist activities across much of the Sahelian Sahara, has indeed been an elaborate deception on the part of US and Algerian military intelligence services.’ Keenan thus finds that the expansion of the GSPC presence in the Sahara was jointly facilitated by US and Algerian security services.[11]
4. Algeria is the subject of crucial strategic and economic interests on the part of the US, UK and several EU states, especially with regard to its oil and natural gas reserves. Northwest African oil reserves currently meet 17 per cent of US needs. An Algerian company, Sonatrach, plays a major role in US oil exploration as the largest company in Africa, with an estimated turnover of $32 billion in 2004.[12] Experts agree that by 2015, ‘Africa will become the US’s second-most important supplier of oil, and possibly natural gas, after the Middle East.’[13]
US commercial involvement in Algeria began in 1991, after the military coup that cancelled national elections. At the end of that year, the regime ‘opened the energy sector on liberal terms to foreign investors and operators.’ The main US firms include ‘Arco, Exxon, Oryx, Anadarko, Mobil and Sun Oil.’[14] According to European intelligence sources, CIA meetings with Algerian Islamist leaders from 1993 to 1995 are responsible for the lack of terrorist attacks on US oil and agribusiness installations in Algeria.[15] Approximately 90 per cent of Algeria’s crude oil exports go to western Europe, including Britain, where BP has a 31.8 billion pounds contract with the regime.[16]
Conclusions
The case of Algeria demonstrates that CIA-MI6 sponsored rendition and torture in Algeria cannot be understood in isolation from the dynamics of Algeria’s deep political relations with Western states, which can be explained by the economic and strategic interests that appear to inextricably bind the West and Algeria. Similar configurations of mutual interests explain the trajectories of Western security policies, including torture and rendition, in many other strategic regions in relation to the ‘War on Terror’. One of the most disturbing elements of these deep political ties is their implication for western policies toward ‘international terrorism’. The case of Algeria highlights how:
1. Western states use rendition and torture to manufacture intelligence to magnify the threat of terrorism in support of domestic and foreign security policies.
2. Western states are indirectly complicit in disturbing policies of cohabitation with radical Islamist networks, which appears to have selectively facilitated their activities.
3. This in turn has legitimized the expansion and consolidation of military-strategic control of regions considered crucial to western interests, particularly with regard to access to energy reserves and raw materials.
These three strands of policy cannot be separated, and to be challenged effectively they must be analyzed and deconstructed holistically. They are integral to a sophisticated international security system, geared to the protection of specific strategic and economic interests, that has been constructed by the US in cooperation with the UK and some EU states after 9/11, but many of whose principles were already in place well before those terrorist attacks.
This system has accelerated the criminalization of the state, resulting in a veritable crisis of corruption. In order to launch an effective and lasting challenge to western state criminal practices such as rendition, therefore, the security system itself - its structure, the key players responsible for its operation, and the corrupt interests it is designed to meet - needs to be understood, exposed and undermined.
--------------------
NOTES
[1] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (California: University of California Press, 1996) p. 8.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Neil MacKay, ‘The new boom industry: Torture with CIA ‘extraordinary rendition’’, Sunday Herald (4 December 2005)
[4] Jeremy Keenan, ‘Terror in the Sahara: the Implications of US Imperialism for North & West Africa’, Review of African Political Economy (September 2004, 31 (101): 475–486), p. 491.
[5] Ambassador Cofer Black, ‘The Prevention and Combating of Terrorism in Africa’, Remarks at the Second Intergovernmental High-Level Meeting on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism In Africa, Algiers (Washington DC: US Department of State, 13 October 2004)
[6] Jason Motlag, ‘US takes terror fight to Africa’s “Wild West”’, San Francisco Chronicle (27 December 2005)
[7] Salima Mellah and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, ‘Who Staged the Tourist Kidnappings? El Para, the Maghreb’s Bin Laden’, Le Monde Diplomatique (February 2005)
[8] For an extensive review of sources see my The War on Truth: 9/11 Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism (London: Interlink, 2005)
[9] Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Terrorist case collapses after three years’, Guardian (21 March 2000).
[10] Jason Motlag, ‘US takes terror fight to Africa’s “Wild West”,’ op. cit.
[11] Jeremy Keenan, ‘Terror in the Sahara', op. cit. Keenan reviews a wealth of evidence in excruciating detail. Also see his two other briefings which contain more extensive background analysis demonstrating a US-Algerian intelligence deception in relation to the GSPC: Keenan, ‘Americans & ‘Bad People’ in the Sahara-Sahel’, Review of African Political Economy (March 2004, 31 (99): 130–9); ‘Political Destablisation and ‘Blowback’ in the Sahel’, Review of African Political Economy (December 2004, 31(102): 691–703). Look out for Keenan's forthcoming book, The Dark Sahara (London: Pluto, 2009)
[12] Salima Mellah and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, ‘Who Staged the Tourist Kidnappings?’ op. cit.
[13] Pierre Abramovici, ‘United States: the new scramble for Africa’, Le Monde (July 2004)
[14] John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, (Pluto Press: London, 1998, pp. 205–6).
[15] Richard Labévière, Dollars for Terror: The US and Islam (New York: Algora, 2000), pp. 182–9.
[16] ‘Algeria’, United States Energy Information Administration (February 1999)
Friday, February 06, 2009
EU-Ukraine-Russian Gas Crisis in Retrospective: It's Just the Beginning
Last month, a price dispute between Russia and Ukraine triggered the shutting of the transit route through which Europe receives about a fifth of all its natural gas. The gas crisis was largely interpreted as resulting from a breakdown in negotiations between Russia and Ukraine over how much the latter would pay for its own gas supplies, as well as questions about who would provide the technical gas to operate Ukraininian compressor stations.
Yet under the surface of the unprecedented dispute is a looming energy crisis. Russia produces about 22 percent of world gas supply, and is believed to hold 30 percent of the world’s remaining gas reserves. In a prescient analysis in late 2008, Dr. Pierre Noel, Acting Director of the Electricity Policy Forum at the University of Cambridge, warned that: “Over the next 15-20 years, Gazprom faces serious supply challenges, and the international gas market is likely to experience considerable tightening.” He noted that the coming decades could see Europe facing “a gas supply crunch, leading to stagnant or even declining consumption.” Although the Russian Gazprom controls “the world’s largest gas reserves, Gazprom will find it difficult to maintain its current supply levels.” Noel reports that production from the “super-giant” west Siberian gas fields, accounting for most of Gazprom’s production, “is now in steep decline.” Maintaining production depends on the development of new fields on the Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia, which are set to come online in 2010. Yet most of the European gas industry argue “this is highly unlikely”, putting 2015 as a more realistic date. But the problem goes deeper than this:
“In fact, Gazprom’s production is already insufficient to meet all the company’s commitments. It depends on two other sources of gas – ‘independent’ Russian producers and imports from Central Asia, especially Turkmenistan – to make up the shortfall. This ‘bridge’ is supposed to supply Gazprom’s needs until the Yamal fields come online. But there is uncertainty over whether Gazprom will be able to source sufficient volumes from Turkmenistan, while independent Russian producers have little incentive to increase their production in the absence of access to Gazprom’s transmission network, which would enable them to reach consumers directly. Moreover, domestic gas consumption in Russia is growing, driven by economic expansion and a gas-intensive electricity mix. So there is at least a risk that Gazprom’s ‘bridge’ to Yamal could collapse. Industry assessments vary from a tight but manageable supply situation to an impending crisis.”
This background places in sharp focus the EU-Ukraine-Russia gas crisis. Indeed, just before the gas crisis Ukraine had signed a strategic accord with the US in December 2008, calling for the establishment of a US diplomatic post in Crimea where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based, as well as for “enhanced cooperation” in defence, security, trade and "energy security."
The incident must be understood as signifying the eruption of a major fault-line in future EU-US-Russian geopolitical contestation in the region for claims over access to increasingly scarce hydrocarbon resources. An analysis of data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2008 by the open source intelligence firm Sanders Research Associates, found that Russian natural gas could well have already peaked in 2006, suggesting that the prolongation of delays in bringing online the new Russian gas fields could imply an EU gas supply crunch as early as 2015.
The gas crisis should be understood as a sign of things to come if Europe doesn't act to overcome its over-dependence on hydrocarbon energy sources. Instead we have deeply misinformed and speculative ventures to focus on nuclear power. Even Sweden, which had once declared its intent to become the world's first oil-free economy, is now scrapping its plans to invest in renewable energy technologies to build costly nuclear plants. The combination of continued fossil-fuel dependence mingled with the nuclearization of Western societies doesn't bode well, neither for global warming, long-term energy security, nor for public safety and issues of proliferation.
Yet under the surface of the unprecedented dispute is a looming energy crisis. Russia produces about 22 percent of world gas supply, and is believed to hold 30 percent of the world’s remaining gas reserves. In a prescient analysis in late 2008, Dr. Pierre Noel, Acting Director of the Electricity Policy Forum at the University of Cambridge, warned that: “Over the next 15-20 years, Gazprom faces serious supply challenges, and the international gas market is likely to experience considerable tightening.” He noted that the coming decades could see Europe facing “a gas supply crunch, leading to stagnant or even declining consumption.” Although the Russian Gazprom controls “the world’s largest gas reserves, Gazprom will find it difficult to maintain its current supply levels.” Noel reports that production from the “super-giant” west Siberian gas fields, accounting for most of Gazprom’s production, “is now in steep decline.” Maintaining production depends on the development of new fields on the Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia, which are set to come online in 2010. Yet most of the European gas industry argue “this is highly unlikely”, putting 2015 as a more realistic date. But the problem goes deeper than this:
“In fact, Gazprom’s production is already insufficient to meet all the company’s commitments. It depends on two other sources of gas – ‘independent’ Russian producers and imports from Central Asia, especially Turkmenistan – to make up the shortfall. This ‘bridge’ is supposed to supply Gazprom’s needs until the Yamal fields come online. But there is uncertainty over whether Gazprom will be able to source sufficient volumes from Turkmenistan, while independent Russian producers have little incentive to increase their production in the absence of access to Gazprom’s transmission network, which would enable them to reach consumers directly. Moreover, domestic gas consumption in Russia is growing, driven by economic expansion and a gas-intensive electricity mix. So there is at least a risk that Gazprom’s ‘bridge’ to Yamal could collapse. Industry assessments vary from a tight but manageable supply situation to an impending crisis.”
This background places in sharp focus the EU-Ukraine-Russia gas crisis. Indeed, just before the gas crisis Ukraine had signed a strategic accord with the US in December 2008, calling for the establishment of a US diplomatic post in Crimea where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based, as well as for “enhanced cooperation” in defence, security, trade and "energy security."
The incident must be understood as signifying the eruption of a major fault-line in future EU-US-Russian geopolitical contestation in the region for claims over access to increasingly scarce hydrocarbon resources. An analysis of data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2008 by the open source intelligence firm Sanders Research Associates, found that Russian natural gas could well have already peaked in 2006, suggesting that the prolongation of delays in bringing online the new Russian gas fields could imply an EU gas supply crunch as early as 2015.
The gas crisis should be understood as a sign of things to come if Europe doesn't act to overcome its over-dependence on hydrocarbon energy sources. Instead we have deeply misinformed and speculative ventures to focus on nuclear power. Even Sweden, which had once declared its intent to become the world's first oil-free economy, is now scrapping its plans to invest in renewable energy technologies to build costly nuclear plants. The combination of continued fossil-fuel dependence mingled with the nuclearization of Western societies doesn't bode well, neither for global warming, long-term energy security, nor for public safety and issues of proliferation.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Obama: Regime Rotation
The arrival of the Obama administration will not fundamentally alter the course of military expansion accelerated during the Bush era. The origins of these policies do not lie uniquely in neoconservative ideology. While the election of President Obama may offer new opportunities for progressive forces to delimit the damage, their space for movement will ultimately be constrained by deep-seated structural pressures that will attempt to exploit Obama to rehabilitate American imperial hegemony, rather than transform it.
Indeed, the radicalization of Anglo-American political ideology represented by the rise of neoconservative principles and the militarization processes of the 'War on Terror', constituted a strategic response to global systemic crises supported by the American business classes. The same classes, recognizing the extent to which the Bush era has discredited this response, have rallied around Obama. Therefore, as global crises intensify, this militarization response is likely to undergo further radicalization, rather than a meaningful change in course. The key differences will be in language and method, not substance.
Obama and National Security: “It’s the Oil, Stupid!”
This became increasingly clear as Barack Obama’s administration appointees became known – individuals whose political and ideological positions are largely commensurate with neoconservative ideals particularly on security matters, and whose social and intellectual connections link them to neo-conservative think-tanks and policy-makers.
A glance through Obama’s national security team also raises eyebrows, but we should focus on his selection of former Marine General Jim Jones as his National Security Advisor. Jones was previously appointed to the NATO post of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and Commander of the US European Command (COMUSEUCOM) under the Bush administration. The thrust of Jones’ imperial vision of US national security can be seen from a UPI article describing his work in 2005:
“NATO’s top military commander is seeking an important new security role for private industry and business leaders as part of a new security strategy that will focus on the economic vulnerabilities of the 26-country alliance. Two immediate and priority projects for NATO officials to develop with private industry are to secure the pipelines bringing Russian oil and gas to Europe… to secure ports and merchant shipping, the alliance Supreme Commander, Gen. James Jones of the USMarine Corps said Wednesday… A further area of NATO interest to secure energy supplies could be the Gulf of Guinea off the West African coast, Jones noted... Oil companies were already spending more than a billion dollars a year on security in the region, he noted, pointing to the need for NATO and business to confer on the common security concern.”
In summary, Jones’ national security strategy privileges US military control over regions containing substantial underexploited oil and natural gas reserves, in Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, the Black and Caspian Seas, and the Persian Gulf. This drive also allows the US to consolidate European dependence for its energy security on NATO, thus solidifying EU support of the wider US geostrategy to control global energy resources and transportation routes.
Obama and the Economy: Déjà vu?
As for Obama’s ambitions for tackling the financial crisis, even a scathing New York Times editorial noted that President Obama’s economic team, put together to tackle the economic and financial crisis, consisted of the very same people who had “played central roles in policies that helped provoke today’s financial crisis.” These include Tim Geithner who as president of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York “helped shape the Bush administration’s erratic and often inscrutable responses to the current financial meltdown, up to and including this past weekend’s multibillion-dollar bailout of Citigroup”; and former World Bank chief, Larry Summers, who “championed the law that deregulated derivatives, the financial instruments – aka toxic assets – that have spread the financial losses from reckless lending around the globe.”
Obama and the Transnational American Business Class
One needs to look beyond the rhetoric to get an idea of what Obama really means for the world. Analysis of Federal Election Commission data on the largest financial donors to both the McCain and Obama presidential campaigns reveals that they were almost entirely sponsored by the same banks, financial institutions and corporations (except Obama received significantly more corporate financing than his rival McCain). This suggests that US policies have, and will continue to, broadly represent the insecurities and interests of Anglo-American capital – and further, that American business classes actually favoured Obama and provided him the finances and expertise to produce a power-house media and publicity campaign.
Obama Shuts Down ‘War on Terror’… Not
So what should we make of Obama’s opening measures, almost as soon as he was inaugurated as President, to close Guantanamo Bay, de-legitimize torture and challenge CIA practices of extraordinary rendition? Firstly, we should of course welcome any such public condemnations of these practices, particularly by the new American President. But this should not blind us from critically examining what Obama’s Executive Orders actually meant.
While around the world, Obama’s measures were interpreted as completely reversing the Bush administration policies of torture, extraordinary rendition and secret prisons – starting with the declaration of the complete closure of Guantanamo Bay – deeper inspection of the details of his Executive Orders suggests, unfortunately, that cries of joy are slightly premature.
First, it should be understood that regardless of what elected US governments have said or left unsaid about the practice of torture by military intelligence services, torture is, and always has been, endemic and officially sanctioned at the highest levels. Declassified CIA training manuals from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, prove that the CIA has consistently practiced torture long before the Bush administration attempted to legitimize the practice publicly. This means that what made the Bush era distinctive was not the systematic practice of torture by US military intelligence agencies, but rather the US government’s open and widely known endorsement of such practices, and insistence either on their obvious legality, or otherwise of the irrelevance of law in the context of fighting terrorism.
This means that Obama’s public disavowals of torture do not actually represent the end of the systemic practice of the CIA's traditional interrogation techniques, conducted without public scrutiny for decades. Rather, they portend a sheepish return to secrecy – or in other words, a return to the obvious recognition that open declarations of covert US practices such as torture as official policy are detrimental, not conducive, to US hegemony.
Closer scrutiny of President Obama’s first Executive Orders reveals that they were designed less to transform illegal US military intelligence practices, than to allow them to continue in secret without legal obstruction, by redefining their character (while retaining their substance):
1) While Obama demanded the harmonization of interrogations in line with a purportedly Geneva Conventions-compliant US Army Field Manual, unaddressed revisions to that manual in 2006 – “in particular, a ten-page appendix known as Appendix M” – “go beyond the Geneva-based restrictions of the original field manual.” Indeed, the Manual accepted 19 forms of interrogation and the practice of extraordinary rendition. Further, retired Admiral Dennis Blair, Obama’s director of national intelligence, told a Senate confirmation hearing that the Army Field Manual would itself be changed, potentially allowing new forms of harsh interrogation, but that such changes would remain classified.
2) Obama’s supposed banning of the CIA’s secret rendition programmes did not actually prevent the CIA from extra-judicially apprehending and detaining innocent civilians without evidence or due process, but only emphasized, in the words of one White House official: “There is not going to be rendition to any country that engages in torture.” The problem here is that rendered detainees have already been sent to countries across the EU that do not officially sanction torture, where they were nevertheless tortured. Secret CIA detention facilities have been hosted in, for instance, Poland, and were previously justified by the Bush administration’s State Department under exactly the same notion that Poland did not engage in torture. Even Obama’s own counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, had insisted that rendition is “absolutely vital.”
3) Finally, while purportedly banning the CIA’s use of secret prisons, the prohibitions “do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.” Yet without specifying an actual time-limit clearly defining the meaning of “short-term” and “transitory”, Obama’s injunctions effectively still permitted indefinite detention, as long as the CIA would officially re-classify the period of detention as designed to be short-term and transitory.
The end result was a successful re-configuration of the public presentation of US military intelligence practices, coupled with nominal legal caveats permitting them to continue relatively unimpeded – essentially a giant PR exercise. Meanwhile, the vast post-9/11 domestic national security apparatus denying habeas corpus, undermining due process, and facilitating mass surveillance as well as intrusive social control powers brought in by the Bush administration was not repudiated, but retained.
Not One to Waste Time
Abroad, the Obama administration began its first days in office by committing more troops to Afghanistan, intensifying military pressure on Pakistan, stepping-up covert warfare on Iran, and deepening military-political penetration of Central Asia and West Africa. The overarching motivations for these policies are US domination of energy reserves and transportation routes, exemplified in the appointment of oil-obsessed ex-NATO Marine Gen. James Jones as Obama's national security czar. Rather than reversing the pattern of attempting to intensify state power, these policies will severely exacerbate the potential for geopolitical competition and violent conflict.
Regime Rotation: Hegemony Rehabilitation, Systemic Stabilization
After the Bush administration’s record of essentially trampling on any semblance of half-decent PR, leading to the very concept of US world leadership being vehemently opposed or incredulously ridiculed around the world, the arrival of Obama is set to rehabilitate American hegemony and restore some sense of credibility and even respectability to US military and financial power. After Obama's powerful inauguration speech, enough to make even a grown non-American man such as myself (nearly) weep (ok I'm exaggerating, but you get the drift...), Americans and even the entire world, can for the first time in perhaps a decade feel proud and satisfied that all is going to be taken care of.
Yet this sense of jubiliation is symptomatic of the fact that the Obama administration will pursue (and has already pursued) policies of hegemony rehabilitation and systemic stabilization. This will not involve a meaningful change of course, but rather a perpetuation of existing structures in the global political economy. In other words, not changing the system, but protecting it – violently if necessary, but this time with greater attention to PR.
So there will also be sharp ostensible differences with Obama’s predecessors, for instance, greater concern for a multilateralist approach; avowing respect for international law and institutions; reliance on more covert methods of extending influence rather than overt military confrontrations with all those who are "not with us" and therefore de facto "against us"; etc. -thus allowing the US to return to the moral high ground so completely eroded by the Bush administration’s open policies of unilateralism, endorsement of torture, and unabashed violations of international law. In effect, this will involve removing, relabeling or simply concealing practices that have served to undermine US authority in the eyes of its allies, and the world.
The outcome has already been disturbing: while neutralizing and thoroughly confusing progressive social and anti-war movements in and outside the West, the arrival of Obama has allowed the US government to rally unprecedented popular support behind it, for whatever it intends to do.
We will see, in this respect, a marked shift in the language and rhetoric of foreign policy, a return to more diplomatic strategies, as well as military policies couched in the discourse of humanitarian intervention and aid. Unfortunately, for a while, this shift will seem more convincing coming from Obama, as opposed to Bush. More than ever, therefore, progressive movements will need to up their game in understanding and accurately critiquing the new administration’s policies, if they are to prevent processes of imperial militarization from intensifying.
Indeed, the radicalization of Anglo-American political ideology represented by the rise of neoconservative principles and the militarization processes of the 'War on Terror', constituted a strategic response to global systemic crises supported by the American business classes. The same classes, recognizing the extent to which the Bush era has discredited this response, have rallied around Obama. Therefore, as global crises intensify, this militarization response is likely to undergo further radicalization, rather than a meaningful change in course. The key differences will be in language and method, not substance.
Obama and National Security: “It’s the Oil, Stupid!”
This became increasingly clear as Barack Obama’s administration appointees became known – individuals whose political and ideological positions are largely commensurate with neoconservative ideals particularly on security matters, and whose social and intellectual connections link them to neo-conservative think-tanks and policy-makers.
A glance through Obama’s national security team also raises eyebrows, but we should focus on his selection of former Marine General Jim Jones as his National Security Advisor. Jones was previously appointed to the NATO post of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and Commander of the US European Command (COMUSEUCOM) under the Bush administration. The thrust of Jones’ imperial vision of US national security can be seen from a UPI article describing his work in 2005:
“NATO’s top military commander is seeking an important new security role for private industry and business leaders as part of a new security strategy that will focus on the economic vulnerabilities of the 26-country alliance. Two immediate and priority projects for NATO officials to develop with private industry are to secure the pipelines bringing Russian oil and gas to Europe… to secure ports and merchant shipping, the alliance Supreme Commander, Gen. James Jones of the USMarine Corps said Wednesday… A further area of NATO interest to secure energy supplies could be the Gulf of Guinea off the West African coast, Jones noted... Oil companies were already spending more than a billion dollars a year on security in the region, he noted, pointing to the need for NATO and business to confer on the common security concern.”
In summary, Jones’ national security strategy privileges US military control over regions containing substantial underexploited oil and natural gas reserves, in Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, the Black and Caspian Seas, and the Persian Gulf. This drive also allows the US to consolidate European dependence for its energy security on NATO, thus solidifying EU support of the wider US geostrategy to control global energy resources and transportation routes.
Obama and the Economy: Déjà vu?
As for Obama’s ambitions for tackling the financial crisis, even a scathing New York Times editorial noted that President Obama’s economic team, put together to tackle the economic and financial crisis, consisted of the very same people who had “played central roles in policies that helped provoke today’s financial crisis.” These include Tim Geithner who as president of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York “helped shape the Bush administration’s erratic and often inscrutable responses to the current financial meltdown, up to and including this past weekend’s multibillion-dollar bailout of Citigroup”; and former World Bank chief, Larry Summers, who “championed the law that deregulated derivatives, the financial instruments – aka toxic assets – that have spread the financial losses from reckless lending around the globe.”
Obama and the Transnational American Business Class
One needs to look beyond the rhetoric to get an idea of what Obama really means for the world. Analysis of Federal Election Commission data on the largest financial donors to both the McCain and Obama presidential campaigns reveals that they were almost entirely sponsored by the same banks, financial institutions and corporations (except Obama received significantly more corporate financing than his rival McCain). This suggests that US policies have, and will continue to, broadly represent the insecurities and interests of Anglo-American capital – and further, that American business classes actually favoured Obama and provided him the finances and expertise to produce a power-house media and publicity campaign.
Obama Shuts Down ‘War on Terror’… Not
So what should we make of Obama’s opening measures, almost as soon as he was inaugurated as President, to close Guantanamo Bay, de-legitimize torture and challenge CIA practices of extraordinary rendition? Firstly, we should of course welcome any such public condemnations of these practices, particularly by the new American President. But this should not blind us from critically examining what Obama’s Executive Orders actually meant.
While around the world, Obama’s measures were interpreted as completely reversing the Bush administration policies of torture, extraordinary rendition and secret prisons – starting with the declaration of the complete closure of Guantanamo Bay – deeper inspection of the details of his Executive Orders suggests, unfortunately, that cries of joy are slightly premature.
First, it should be understood that regardless of what elected US governments have said or left unsaid about the practice of torture by military intelligence services, torture is, and always has been, endemic and officially sanctioned at the highest levels. Declassified CIA training manuals from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, prove that the CIA has consistently practiced torture long before the Bush administration attempted to legitimize the practice publicly. This means that what made the Bush era distinctive was not the systematic practice of torture by US military intelligence agencies, but rather the US government’s open and widely known endorsement of such practices, and insistence either on their obvious legality, or otherwise of the irrelevance of law in the context of fighting terrorism.
This means that Obama’s public disavowals of torture do not actually represent the end of the systemic practice of the CIA's traditional interrogation techniques, conducted without public scrutiny for decades. Rather, they portend a sheepish return to secrecy – or in other words, a return to the obvious recognition that open declarations of covert US practices such as torture as official policy are detrimental, not conducive, to US hegemony.
Closer scrutiny of President Obama’s first Executive Orders reveals that they were designed less to transform illegal US military intelligence practices, than to allow them to continue in secret without legal obstruction, by redefining their character (while retaining their substance):
1) While Obama demanded the harmonization of interrogations in line with a purportedly Geneva Conventions-compliant US Army Field Manual, unaddressed revisions to that manual in 2006 – “in particular, a ten-page appendix known as Appendix M” – “go beyond the Geneva-based restrictions of the original field manual.” Indeed, the Manual accepted 19 forms of interrogation and the practice of extraordinary rendition. Further, retired Admiral Dennis Blair, Obama’s director of national intelligence, told a Senate confirmation hearing that the Army Field Manual would itself be changed, potentially allowing new forms of harsh interrogation, but that such changes would remain classified.
2) Obama’s supposed banning of the CIA’s secret rendition programmes did not actually prevent the CIA from extra-judicially apprehending and detaining innocent civilians without evidence or due process, but only emphasized, in the words of one White House official: “There is not going to be rendition to any country that engages in torture.” The problem here is that rendered detainees have already been sent to countries across the EU that do not officially sanction torture, where they were nevertheless tortured. Secret CIA detention facilities have been hosted in, for instance, Poland, and were previously justified by the Bush administration’s State Department under exactly the same notion that Poland did not engage in torture. Even Obama’s own counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, had insisted that rendition is “absolutely vital.”
3) Finally, while purportedly banning the CIA’s use of secret prisons, the prohibitions “do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.” Yet without specifying an actual time-limit clearly defining the meaning of “short-term” and “transitory”, Obama’s injunctions effectively still permitted indefinite detention, as long as the CIA would officially re-classify the period of detention as designed to be short-term and transitory.
The end result was a successful re-configuration of the public presentation of US military intelligence practices, coupled with nominal legal caveats permitting them to continue relatively unimpeded – essentially a giant PR exercise. Meanwhile, the vast post-9/11 domestic national security apparatus denying habeas corpus, undermining due process, and facilitating mass surveillance as well as intrusive social control powers brought in by the Bush administration was not repudiated, but retained.
Not One to Waste Time
Abroad, the Obama administration began its first days in office by committing more troops to Afghanistan, intensifying military pressure on Pakistan, stepping-up covert warfare on Iran, and deepening military-political penetration of Central Asia and West Africa. The overarching motivations for these policies are US domination of energy reserves and transportation routes, exemplified in the appointment of oil-obsessed ex-NATO Marine Gen. James Jones as Obama's national security czar. Rather than reversing the pattern of attempting to intensify state power, these policies will severely exacerbate the potential for geopolitical competition and violent conflict.
Regime Rotation: Hegemony Rehabilitation, Systemic Stabilization
After the Bush administration’s record of essentially trampling on any semblance of half-decent PR, leading to the very concept of US world leadership being vehemently opposed or incredulously ridiculed around the world, the arrival of Obama is set to rehabilitate American hegemony and restore some sense of credibility and even respectability to US military and financial power. After Obama's powerful inauguration speech, enough to make even a grown non-American man such as myself (nearly) weep (ok I'm exaggerating, but you get the drift...), Americans and even the entire world, can for the first time in perhaps a decade feel proud and satisfied that all is going to be taken care of.
Yet this sense of jubiliation is symptomatic of the fact that the Obama administration will pursue (and has already pursued) policies of hegemony rehabilitation and systemic stabilization. This will not involve a meaningful change of course, but rather a perpetuation of existing structures in the global political economy. In other words, not changing the system, but protecting it – violently if necessary, but this time with greater attention to PR.
So there will also be sharp ostensible differences with Obama’s predecessors, for instance, greater concern for a multilateralist approach; avowing respect for international law and institutions; reliance on more covert methods of extending influence rather than overt military confrontrations with all those who are "not with us" and therefore de facto "against us"; etc. -thus allowing the US to return to the moral high ground so completely eroded by the Bush administration’s open policies of unilateralism, endorsement of torture, and unabashed violations of international law. In effect, this will involve removing, relabeling or simply concealing practices that have served to undermine US authority in the eyes of its allies, and the world.
The outcome has already been disturbing: while neutralizing and thoroughly confusing progressive social and anti-war movements in and outside the West, the arrival of Obama has allowed the US government to rally unprecedented popular support behind it, for whatever it intends to do.
We will see, in this respect, a marked shift in the language and rhetoric of foreign policy, a return to more diplomatic strategies, as well as military policies couched in the discourse of humanitarian intervention and aid. Unfortunately, for a while, this shift will seem more convincing coming from Obama, as opposed to Bush. More than ever, therefore, progressive movements will need to up their game in understanding and accurately critiquing the new administration’s policies, if they are to prevent processes of imperial militarization from intensifying.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Norwegian Daily: Terrorists Working for Western Countries
It came to my attention that a senior correspondent, Kristin Aalen, working for a national Norwegian broadsheet - Stavanger Aftenbladet (Stavanger Evening News) - just recently printed a detailed article in the newspaper on Western covert operations sponsoring al-Qaeda after the Cold War... based almost entirely on my research in The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism.
Entitled "Terrorists Working for Western Countries" (24.11.08), it even gives a country-by-country summary breakdown complete with a handy geopolitical world map of the wide arc of these operations. It's a very useful piece from a mainstream national European paper that very effectively summarises the thrust of my research into this unpalatable subject. A shame that the British press is so reticient about such issues.
There are some caveats. Kristin sometimes oversimplifies my geopolitical explanations, and this can lead to serious misinterpretations, such as her rendition of my examination of Pentagon sponsorship of al-Qaeda fighters in the Balkans - she says that the US and NATO helped the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs, provoking them, and thus preventing peace. This is caricature of my argument, which is more fully fleshed out in The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry. The Serbs were, in fact, encouraged to act with impunity, and the US Defense Intelligence Agency's influx of mujahideen fighters into the Bosnia predictably aggravated the crisis. Ensuing NATO airstrikes were thoroughly ineffective, and indeed the US, UN and NATO, having accelerated the disintegration of Yugoslavia, acted in concert to do nothing when the Serbs committed genocide against Bosnian Muslims in Srebrencia and beyond.
Anyway. What follows is a basic translation of the piece.
=========
-Terrorists working for western countries
We have been told that Western countries would do everything they could to eradicate Al-Qaeda in the "war on terror". But Western intelligence has from the 1990s, used terrorists to do dirty work in a number of countries.
By Kirstin Aalen
24th November 2008
During the Cold War, the United States was concerned to break the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The CIA cooperated with Saudi Arabian and Pakistani intelligence to support Muslim guerrilla soldiers - mujahedin - in the fight against the communists.
Thousands of Islamic jihadists (holy warriors) were trained in Osama bin Laden's training camps until the late 1980s. They came from Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa and was called Arab Afghans. In 1988, Al-Qaida was founded.
So what?
The Soviets gave up Afghanistan in 1989. Bin Laden's men fought in a couple of years of civil war that followed. So against whom should the jihadists now fight their holy war ? The regimes they came from would not tolerate fundamentalist guerrilla fighters in their own backyard.
Western intelligence services saw an opportunity. Documentation proves that British and American players in particular exploited the brutality of Al-Qaeda. "The goal has been to destabilize regions where Anglo-American power wanted to secure control over oil and gas resources," said the British terrorism analyst Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. He has written several books on the subject.
Flown on
In 1991 came three US military agents arrived in Azerbaijan. They arranged to fly in over 2,000 mujahedin soldiers. The job was to create rebellion and remove Russian influence. Bin Laden established an Al-Qaida's office in Baku. It was a base for terrorist actions in the Muslim neighborhood near Russia. After two years of unrest the democratically elected president was overthrown in June 1993. The corrupt Alijev took power. Now western and Saudi oil companies could secure a lucrative contract. Construction of the pipeline oil Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan could begin - bypassing Russia.
Moved forward
In 1992 the war in Bosnia began. An official Dutch report authored in 2002 by Professor Cees Wiebes from the University of Amsterdam shows that the Pentagon secretly flew thousands of Al-Qaida soldiers into Bosnia, ostensibly in support of Bosnian Muslims. But these brutal thugs provoked the Serbs so that a peaceful solution was impossible. Nato and the United States supported the Bosnian Muslims with the air strikes.
In 1996, the Kosovo Liberation Army was trained by a high-ranking Al-Qaeda-operative across the border to Albania. But simultaneously, British and US military experts helped.
Macedonia
In 2001, jihadists turned up in Macedonia, now in the guise of the nationalist sister faction, the National Liberation Army (NLA), which was secretly sponsored by Nato and the United States for years as revealed in the Dutch and German media.
Yet Macedonian intelligence reported that Al-Qaeda was also training the NLA in the Kumanovo-Lipkovo region. This information was sent to the CIA and National Security Council in the United States.
Libya
In 1997, the British MI5 anti-terror agent David Shayler revealed that British intelligence in 1995-96 gave 100,000 pounds to Al-Qaida's network in Libya, to plan and complete an assassination of the head of state Col. Mohammar Gaddafi.
Ahmed points out that the other areas where Western covert operations have used al-Qaeda terrorists include Algeria, Egypt, Chechnya (see Graph) and even the Philippines. These case studies show how the activities of Islamic terrorist groups linked to Al-Qaeda through training, money, weapons and fighters have been sponsored by the Anglo-American alliance. "Either by direct or indirect support through state intermediaries. The overall purpose has been to secure control over raw materials, especially oil and gas," said Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.
===
translation of text in Graph:
KOSOVO 1996-99:
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was financed by the heroin trade from Afghanistan and from Osama bin Laden. Many soldier-mercenaries were trained in terrorist camps in Afghanistan. According to Interpol, a KLA unit led by one of bin Laden's senior men, probably Mohammed Al-Zawahiri, was a brother of bin Laden's right hand, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
TRAIN: From 1998 the KLA also trained and armed by NATO. British and U.S. experts helped in the training of Tropoje in Albania.
PURPOSE: The British and the Americans used the KLA to destabilize Kosovo and the increase ethnic animosity. They would gain control of the land areas that could open the way for an oil pipeline via Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania, except Russia and Iran.
LISTED: This happened despite the fact that the KLA in 1998 was put on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.
ALGERIA 1992-99:
GIA: Early in the 90s emerged the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) - strong in Algeria and with close ties to Osama bin Laden in Sudan. Throughout the 90s committed a series of atrocities in Algeria, which led to 150,000 civilians killed.
REVELATIONS: In 1997 it was revealed that the massacres took place in cooperation between the GIA and the Algerian etterret-business service and military. Western regimes denied the connection, but several whistleblowers claimed that they have known about this connection.
SALE: Sunday Times and Reuter reported in 2000 that Britain sold a large batch weapons to Algeria. U.S. and Algerian military increased their cooperation in 1999.
BOSNIA 1992-95:
SHOCK: Brutal mujahedin / Al-Qaida fighters were used to fight for Bosnian Muslims against Bosnian Serbs. 10,000 participated.
PENTAGON: A Dutch official report revealed in 2002 how the Pentagon leased Islamic jihadists to fight for Bosnian Muslims.
BOSNIAN PASS: Osama bin Laden had Bosnian passports in 1993. He held meetings in Zagreb in Croatia for Arab-Afghan leaders who were Al-Qaida-emissaries in Bosnia.
WEST: the United States and Britain supported the right nationalist President Alija Izetbegovic to sideline and defeat the multi-ethnic policies of popular rival Bosnian Muslim leader Fikret Adbic. This gave the green light to the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. U.S. and NATO bombers contributed to this.
CHECHNYA 2000:
RUSSIA: Key Chechen cooperation in 1999 with high-ranking Al-Qaida operatives about attacks in the Caucasus.
USA: By the summer of 2000 American private security firms armed al-Qaeda-infiltrated Chechens and their Islamist allies to make rebellion in the region and lead holy war against Russia. The U.S. intention was to destroy a Russian pipeline.
AZERBAIJAN 1991-93
AGENTS: Three agents from the U.S. military flew in at least 2,000 al-Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan to Baku in Azerbaijan. Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda established an office in the city, as a base for terrorism in several areas.
USED TO: Hired fighters made rebellion to reduce Russian influence in the country. Elected president Albufas Eltsjibej fled in June -93. In came Heidar Alijev. Several major oil companies supported the coup.
GOALS: Britain's BP led a consortium of Western and Saudi oil companies that would secure a major contract. In the signed to build an oil pipeline from Baku through Georgia to Ceyhan in Turkey, free from Russian control.
LIBYA 1995-97:
In 1997, MI5 anti-terror agent David Shayler revealed that the British MI6 intelligence agency in 1995-96 paid 100,000 pounds to Al-Qaida's network in Libya so that the terrorists would assasinate country's head of state. The operation failed, ended up under the wrong car, killing six innocent Libyans. The British government denied that it was involved, but two French intelligence experts documented that MI6 in the murder plot had hired bin Laden's highly trusted man, Anas al-Libya. He is on the FBI's "Most Wanted" list for the attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.
MACEDONIA 2001:
GUERRILLAS: KLA soldiers went on to form the NLA in Macedonia. At one time, the insurgents were surrounded by the Macedonian security forces, but were rescued by NATO and the United States, though their spokesmen denied this. The news was leaked in Dutch and German media in June 2002.
REPORT: Macedonians reported to the CIA and National Security Council that Al-Qaida had trained the NLA in the region. Received only a polite response from U.S. intelligence.
EGYPT 1997:
In the first half of November 1997 the CIA sent a man called Abu-Umar Al-Amriki to Osama bin Laden's close allies, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in Peshawar, Pakistan. There was a deal made between the Egyptian terrorist leader and the CIA. It was that al-Zawahiri would get 50 million U.S. dollars to ensure that U.S. forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina were not attacked by Islamic mujahedin. Egypt would in turn be able to use the money to "to rule over Egypt." Some weeks later, in December 1997, the al-Zawahiris organization, Al-Jihad, the terrorist attack in Luxor.
MOHAMMED ALI:
Was a double agent for Al-Qaida and the CIA / FBI. He was sent in 1984 by al-Zawahiri to infiltrate the CIA. He joined the U.S. Army and worked at the Special Warfare Center in Fort Bragg, where he stole a manual-fighting techniques. He was among other terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, but was not sentenced himself. Also under the name of Abu-Umar Al-Amriki (American). Sent by the CIA in 1997 to broker deal with Al-Zawahiri.
Osama bin Laden:
Lived in Afghanistan in 1984-89 and was one of Al-Qaida's leading theoreticians.
1989-91: In Saudi Arabia, but his harsh criticism of the authorities meant he had to go into exile.
1992-96: Ran Al-Qaida from Khartoum in Sudan.
From 1996: Back in Afghanistan. Established a close cooperation with the ruling Taliban government until the US-led invasion in October 2001.
FINANCING: Bin Laden-financed Al-Qaida in part with money from their own family wealth, and partly from funds collected. But in 1994 when he lost his Saudi citizenship and had all their accounts frozen by the bin Laden family dynasty, he lost the ability to generously support his jihadists.
MUJAHEDIN: Different groups of mujahedin - Muslim guerrilla fighters - were supported by among others the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to fight against the USSR in Afghanistan (1979-89). Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden built the Tora Bora plant with support from Pakistani intelligence (ISI). Here he could - inspired by Palestinian jihadist theoretician Abdullah Azzam and supported by Egyptian aid Ayman Al-Zawahiri - recruit and train fighters in the jihad (holy war). They also ran an al-Kifah Center (aid office) for jihadists in Peshawar in Pakistan. A number of similar assistance centers were created in the U.S. and Europe.
Al-Qaida:
In Arabic, short-hand for "database". Was founded 17 May 1988 by Osama bin Laden and his closest colleagues.
LEARNING: Al-Qaida offered in their first year training to 10,000 to 20,000 volunteers in several camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were Arab Afghans, given lessons in fighting techniques, weapons handling and use of explosives in addition to ideological training.
ARTICLES:
"Azerbaijan throws raw recruits Into Battle" by Steve Levine, Washington Post 21/4-1994; "Fortune hunters Lured U.S. into volatile Region "by Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway, Washington Post, 4/10-1998;" U.S. Supported al-Qaeda cells during Balkan Wars "; Isabel Vincent, National Post, 16/3-2002. "Bin Laden linked to Albanian drug gangs" by Colin Brown, Independent, 21/10-2001; "America Used Islamist two Arm the Bosnian Muslims: The Screbenica Report Reveals the Pentagon's Role in a Dirty War," Richard J. Aldrich, Guardian , 22/4-2002. "The Kosovo Liberation Army: Does Clinton Policy Support Group with Terror, Drug Ties? From "Terrorists" two "partners" by Larry E. Craig, United States Senate Rebublican Policy Committee 31/3-1999. "European Intelligence: The U.S. betrayed us in Macedonia" by Christopher Deliso, Randolph Bourne Institute, 22/6-2002. "Do not Shoot the Messenger" by David Shayler, the Observer 27/8-2000.
Entitled "Terrorists Working for Western Countries" (24.11.08), it even gives a country-by-country summary breakdown complete with a handy geopolitical world map of the wide arc of these operations. It's a very useful piece from a mainstream national European paper that very effectively summarises the thrust of my research into this unpalatable subject. A shame that the British press is so reticient about such issues.
There are some caveats. Kristin sometimes oversimplifies my geopolitical explanations, and this can lead to serious misinterpretations, such as her rendition of my examination of Pentagon sponsorship of al-Qaeda fighters in the Balkans - she says that the US and NATO helped the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs, provoking them, and thus preventing peace. This is caricature of my argument, which is more fully fleshed out in The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry. The Serbs were, in fact, encouraged to act with impunity, and the US Defense Intelligence Agency's influx of mujahideen fighters into the Bosnia predictably aggravated the crisis. Ensuing NATO airstrikes were thoroughly ineffective, and indeed the US, UN and NATO, having accelerated the disintegration of Yugoslavia, acted in concert to do nothing when the Serbs committed genocide against Bosnian Muslims in Srebrencia and beyond.
Anyway. What follows is a basic translation of the piece.
=========
-Terrorists working for western countries
We have been told that Western countries would do everything they could to eradicate Al-Qaeda in the "war on terror". But Western intelligence has from the 1990s, used terrorists to do dirty work in a number of countries.
By Kirstin Aalen
24th November 2008
During the Cold War, the United States was concerned to break the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The CIA cooperated with Saudi Arabian and Pakistani intelligence to support Muslim guerrilla soldiers - mujahedin - in the fight against the communists.
Thousands of Islamic jihadists (holy warriors) were trained in Osama bin Laden's training camps until the late 1980s. They came from Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa and was called Arab Afghans. In 1988, Al-Qaida was founded.
So what?
The Soviets gave up Afghanistan in 1989. Bin Laden's men fought in a couple of years of civil war that followed. So against whom should the jihadists now fight their holy war ? The regimes they came from would not tolerate fundamentalist guerrilla fighters in their own backyard.
Western intelligence services saw an opportunity. Documentation proves that British and American players in particular exploited the brutality of Al-Qaeda. "The goal has been to destabilize regions where Anglo-American power wanted to secure control over oil and gas resources," said the British terrorism analyst Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. He has written several books on the subject.
Flown on
In 1991 came three US military agents arrived in Azerbaijan. They arranged to fly in over 2,000 mujahedin soldiers. The job was to create rebellion and remove Russian influence. Bin Laden established an Al-Qaida's office in Baku. It was a base for terrorist actions in the Muslim neighborhood near Russia. After two years of unrest the democratically elected president was overthrown in June 1993. The corrupt Alijev took power. Now western and Saudi oil companies could secure a lucrative contract. Construction of the pipeline oil Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan could begin - bypassing Russia.
Moved forward
In 1992 the war in Bosnia began. An official Dutch report authored in 2002 by Professor Cees Wiebes from the University of Amsterdam shows that the Pentagon secretly flew thousands of Al-Qaida soldiers into Bosnia, ostensibly in support of Bosnian Muslims. But these brutal thugs provoked the Serbs so that a peaceful solution was impossible. Nato and the United States supported the Bosnian Muslims with the air strikes.
In 1996, the Kosovo Liberation Army was trained by a high-ranking Al-Qaeda-operative across the border to Albania. But simultaneously, British and US military experts helped.
Macedonia
In 2001, jihadists turned up in Macedonia, now in the guise of the nationalist sister faction, the National Liberation Army (NLA), which was secretly sponsored by Nato and the United States for years as revealed in the Dutch and German media.
Yet Macedonian intelligence reported that Al-Qaeda was also training the NLA in the Kumanovo-Lipkovo region. This information was sent to the CIA and National Security Council in the United States.
Libya
In 1997, the British MI5 anti-terror agent David Shayler revealed that British intelligence in 1995-96 gave 100,000 pounds to Al-Qaida's network in Libya, to plan and complete an assassination of the head of state Col. Mohammar Gaddafi.
Ahmed points out that the other areas where Western covert operations have used al-Qaeda terrorists include Algeria, Egypt, Chechnya (see Graph) and even the Philippines. These case studies show how the activities of Islamic terrorist groups linked to Al-Qaeda through training, money, weapons and fighters have been sponsored by the Anglo-American alliance. "Either by direct or indirect support through state intermediaries. The overall purpose has been to secure control over raw materials, especially oil and gas," said Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.
===
translation of text in Graph:
KOSOVO 1996-99:
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was financed by the heroin trade from Afghanistan and from Osama bin Laden. Many soldier-mercenaries were trained in terrorist camps in Afghanistan. According to Interpol, a KLA unit led by one of bin Laden's senior men, probably Mohammed Al-Zawahiri, was a brother of bin Laden's right hand, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
TRAIN: From 1998 the KLA also trained and armed by NATO. British and U.S. experts helped in the training of Tropoje in Albania.
PURPOSE: The British and the Americans used the KLA to destabilize Kosovo and the increase ethnic animosity. They would gain control of the land areas that could open the way for an oil pipeline via Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania, except Russia and Iran.
LISTED: This happened despite the fact that the KLA in 1998 was put on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.
ALGERIA 1992-99:
GIA: Early in the 90s emerged the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) - strong in Algeria and with close ties to Osama bin Laden in Sudan. Throughout the 90s committed a series of atrocities in Algeria, which led to 150,000 civilians killed.
REVELATIONS: In 1997 it was revealed that the massacres took place in cooperation between the GIA and the Algerian etterret-business service and military. Western regimes denied the connection, but several whistleblowers claimed that they have known about this connection.
SALE: Sunday Times and Reuter reported in 2000 that Britain sold a large batch weapons to Algeria. U.S. and Algerian military increased their cooperation in 1999.
BOSNIA 1992-95:
SHOCK: Brutal mujahedin / Al-Qaida fighters were used to fight for Bosnian Muslims against Bosnian Serbs. 10,000 participated.
PENTAGON: A Dutch official report revealed in 2002 how the Pentagon leased Islamic jihadists to fight for Bosnian Muslims.
BOSNIAN PASS: Osama bin Laden had Bosnian passports in 1993. He held meetings in Zagreb in Croatia for Arab-Afghan leaders who were Al-Qaida-emissaries in Bosnia.
WEST: the United States and Britain supported the right nationalist President Alija Izetbegovic to sideline and defeat the multi-ethnic policies of popular rival Bosnian Muslim leader Fikret Adbic. This gave the green light to the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. U.S. and NATO bombers contributed to this.
CHECHNYA 2000:
RUSSIA: Key Chechen cooperation in 1999 with high-ranking Al-Qaida operatives about attacks in the Caucasus.
USA: By the summer of 2000 American private security firms armed al-Qaeda-infiltrated Chechens and their Islamist allies to make rebellion in the region and lead holy war against Russia. The U.S. intention was to destroy a Russian pipeline.
AZERBAIJAN 1991-93
AGENTS: Three agents from the U.S. military flew in at least 2,000 al-Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan to Baku in Azerbaijan. Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda established an office in the city, as a base for terrorism in several areas.
USED TO: Hired fighters made rebellion to reduce Russian influence in the country. Elected president Albufas Eltsjibej fled in June -93. In came Heidar Alijev. Several major oil companies supported the coup.
GOALS: Britain's BP led a consortium of Western and Saudi oil companies that would secure a major contract. In the signed to build an oil pipeline from Baku through Georgia to Ceyhan in Turkey, free from Russian control.
LIBYA 1995-97:
In 1997, MI5 anti-terror agent David Shayler revealed that the British MI6 intelligence agency in 1995-96 paid 100,000 pounds to Al-Qaida's network in Libya so that the terrorists would assasinate country's head of state. The operation failed, ended up under the wrong car, killing six innocent Libyans. The British government denied that it was involved, but two French intelligence experts documented that MI6 in the murder plot had hired bin Laden's highly trusted man, Anas al-Libya. He is on the FBI's "Most Wanted" list for the attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.
MACEDONIA 2001:
GUERRILLAS: KLA soldiers went on to form the NLA in Macedonia. At one time, the insurgents were surrounded by the Macedonian security forces, but were rescued by NATO and the United States, though their spokesmen denied this. The news was leaked in Dutch and German media in June 2002.
REPORT: Macedonians reported to the CIA and National Security Council that Al-Qaida had trained the NLA in the region. Received only a polite response from U.S. intelligence.
EGYPT 1997:
In the first half of November 1997 the CIA sent a man called Abu-Umar Al-Amriki to Osama bin Laden's close allies, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in Peshawar, Pakistan. There was a deal made between the Egyptian terrorist leader and the CIA. It was that al-Zawahiri would get 50 million U.S. dollars to ensure that U.S. forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina were not attacked by Islamic mujahedin. Egypt would in turn be able to use the money to "to rule over Egypt." Some weeks later, in December 1997, the al-Zawahiris organization, Al-Jihad, the terrorist attack in Luxor.
MOHAMMED ALI:
Was a double agent for Al-Qaida and the CIA / FBI. He was sent in 1984 by al-Zawahiri to infiltrate the CIA. He joined the U.S. Army and worked at the Special Warfare Center in Fort Bragg, where he stole a manual-fighting techniques. He was among other terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, but was not sentenced himself. Also under the name of Abu-Umar Al-Amriki (American). Sent by the CIA in 1997 to broker deal with Al-Zawahiri.
Osama bin Laden:
Lived in Afghanistan in 1984-89 and was one of Al-Qaida's leading theoreticians.
1989-91: In Saudi Arabia, but his harsh criticism of the authorities meant he had to go into exile.
1992-96: Ran Al-Qaida from Khartoum in Sudan.
From 1996: Back in Afghanistan. Established a close cooperation with the ruling Taliban government until the US-led invasion in October 2001.
FINANCING: Bin Laden-financed Al-Qaida in part with money from their own family wealth, and partly from funds collected. But in 1994 when he lost his Saudi citizenship and had all their accounts frozen by the bin Laden family dynasty, he lost the ability to generously support his jihadists.
MUJAHEDIN: Different groups of mujahedin - Muslim guerrilla fighters - were supported by among others the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to fight against the USSR in Afghanistan (1979-89). Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden built the Tora Bora plant with support from Pakistani intelligence (ISI). Here he could - inspired by Palestinian jihadist theoretician Abdullah Azzam and supported by Egyptian aid Ayman Al-Zawahiri - recruit and train fighters in the jihad (holy war). They also ran an al-Kifah Center (aid office) for jihadists in Peshawar in Pakistan. A number of similar assistance centers were created in the U.S. and Europe.
Al-Qaida:
In Arabic, short-hand for "database". Was founded 17 May 1988 by Osama bin Laden and his closest colleagues.
LEARNING: Al-Qaida offered in their first year training to 10,000 to 20,000 volunteers in several camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were Arab Afghans, given lessons in fighting techniques, weapons handling and use of explosives in addition to ideological training.
ARTICLES:
"Azerbaijan throws raw recruits Into Battle" by Steve Levine, Washington Post 21/4-1994; "Fortune hunters Lured U.S. into volatile Region "by Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway, Washington Post, 4/10-1998;" U.S. Supported al-Qaeda cells during Balkan Wars "; Isabel Vincent, National Post, 16/3-2002. "Bin Laden linked to Albanian drug gangs" by Colin Brown, Independent, 21/10-2001; "America Used Islamist two Arm the Bosnian Muslims: The Screbenica Report Reveals the Pentagon's Role in a Dirty War," Richard J. Aldrich, Guardian , 22/4-2002. "The Kosovo Liberation Army: Does Clinton Policy Support Group with Terror, Drug Ties? From "Terrorists" two "partners" by Larry E. Craig, United States Senate Rebublican Policy Committee 31/3-1999. "European Intelligence: The U.S. betrayed us in Macedonia" by Christopher Deliso, Randolph Bourne Institute, 22/6-2002. "Do not Shoot the Messenger" by David Shayler, the Observer 27/8-2000.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Gaza Catastrophe: Resource Conflict?
Natural Gas, Palestinian Elections, and Israel's Subversion of the 'Peace Process'
Israel claims it is fighting in Gaza to stop Hamas rocket-fire against Israel, the continuation of which constituted a flagrant breach of the six-months ceasefire. Hence, the objective of the military operation is limited by the aim of putting an end to the rocket-fire.
In fact, the current outbreak of violence cannot be understood without analysing the asymmetries in military violence between the two parties; the structural dynamic of the conflict in the context of the character of the Israeli occupation; the central role of recent discoveries of substantial natural gas reserves in Gaza; and joint Anglo-American and Israeli attempts to monopolise the lucrative (and strategic) energy resources through a political process tied to a corrupt Palestinian Authority run by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party.
Hamas’ unprecedented victory in democratic elections in 2006 fundamentally threatened these plans. Operation Cast Lead, the concurrent Israeli military venture, was operationalised as a war plan in early 2008, and already finalised in detail as far back as 2001 by Israeli military intelligence. Its execution in late December 2008 into January 2009 is designed to head-off not only domestic Israeli elections, but more significantly, the outcome of further incoming Palestinian democratic elections likely to consolidate Hamas’ power, to permanently shift the balance of geopolitical and economic power in its favour.
The long-term goal is the “cantonization” of the Occupied Territories making way for increased Israeli encroachment, and ultimately the escalation of Palestinian emigration.
See Media Monitors Network for easy to read version; slightly updated version but with less brilliant formatting is on OpEdNews.
Israel claims it is fighting in Gaza to stop Hamas rocket-fire against Israel, the continuation of which constituted a flagrant breach of the six-months ceasefire. Hence, the objective of the military operation is limited by the aim of putting an end to the rocket-fire.
In fact, the current outbreak of violence cannot be understood without analysing the asymmetries in military violence between the two parties; the structural dynamic of the conflict in the context of the character of the Israeli occupation; the central role of recent discoveries of substantial natural gas reserves in Gaza; and joint Anglo-American and Israeli attempts to monopolise the lucrative (and strategic) energy resources through a political process tied to a corrupt Palestinian Authority run by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party.
Hamas’ unprecedented victory in democratic elections in 2006 fundamentally threatened these plans. Operation Cast Lead, the concurrent Israeli military venture, was operationalised as a war plan in early 2008, and already finalised in detail as far back as 2001 by Israeli military intelligence. Its execution in late December 2008 into January 2009 is designed to head-off not only domestic Israeli elections, but more significantly, the outcome of further incoming Palestinian democratic elections likely to consolidate Hamas’ power, to permanently shift the balance of geopolitical and economic power in its favour.
The long-term goal is the “cantonization” of the Occupied Territories making way for increased Israeli encroachment, and ultimately the escalation of Palestinian emigration.
See Media Monitors Network for easy to read version; slightly updated version but with less brilliant formatting is on OpEdNews.
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