Showing posts with label bin laden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bin laden. Show all posts
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Evidence now available from various sources, including recently declassified United States State Department documents, shows that the Taliban regime led by Mullah Mohammad Omar imposed strict isolation on Osama bin Laden after 1998 to prevent him from carrying out any plots against the United States.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part III)
(71): Congo became independent on June 30, 1960. Less than two weeks later... its richest province, Katanga, seceded... Led by Moish Tshombe... trained by officers from Belgium, the former colonial power there. Katanga's mines were operated by a Belgian company... in which the Rockefellers were soon to acquire a major interest. Late in the summer of 1960, the Eisenhower administration concluded that Patrice Lumumba... was 'an African Castro' and must be eliminated... On August 18, following a National Security Council briefing, Eisenhower asked his aides whether 'we can't get rid of this guy.' (... [Belgium/US collusion to kill Lumumba]) With Lumumba out of the way, in December 1962 President Kennedy concurred with the use of UN troops to quash the Katangan rebellion. In May 1963, a grateful Kennedy welcomed Mobutu in the White House: 'General, if it hadn't been for you, ... the Communists would have taken over. (72): By the end of 1963, anti-Mobutu rebellion broke out in Kwilu, led by Pierre Mulele, a prominent Lumumbist. The rebels were poorly armed, and there was no evidence of outside involvement. But the CIA did intervene on the government's behalf... By October 1964, the CIA estimated the humber of mercenaries in Conto at more than one thousand... Washington was clear from the outset that there would by no US citizens among the mercenaries. Without American support, however, the mercenaries would have been lame. Four US C-130s with American crews transported mecenaries and their equipment across the west-east span of Congo, roughly the same distance as from Paris to Moscow.
(77): [In Angola], Washington was determined to block any possibility of the MPLA coming to powe, having identified it as a Soviety proxy... Washington's preferred option was to give covert support to the two movements that were opposed to MPLA: the Front for National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which operated more or less as a surrogate of Congo's General Mobutu, and the Union for the Total Dependence of Angola (Unita), which had few external contacts apart from fledgling ones with apartheid South Africa.... Meanwhile, instead of fighting MPLA, FNLA and Unita took to fighting each other. Faced with an ignominious end, Kissinger opted to back a proxy invasion by regular South African forces.... South African troops entered Angola in mid-October 1975, and Cuban troops followed in early November.
(80): On February 10, 1976, the US Congress passed the Clark Amendment, prohibiting any covert aid to any side in the Angolan civil war. The next month, on March 31, the UN Security Council branded South Africa the aggressor and demanded that it compensate Angola for war damages...
(81): The Angolan fiasco reinforced the lessons of Vietnam, but those lessons provoked contradictory interpretations by the executive branch and by Congress, each asserting a different influence on post-Vietnam US foreign policy... Pulbic resistance... was echoed in Congress with the election of a host of antiwar legislators and led to a number of changes: the draft was abolished; the Pentagon's budget for special operations was cut; the CIA's paramilitary capabilities were reduced and its activities subjected to congressional oversight; and the president was required by the War Powers Act to seek congressional approval before any extended commitment of US troops overseas.... The clearest expression of this surge in antiwar sentiment was the amendment of the Freedom of Information act and the passage of the Clark Amendment. The two years and three months between the passage of the 1973 War Powers Act and the 1976 Clark Amendment marked the high point of the antiwar movement that swept the United States.
(83): Enacted in 1976, the Clark Amenment was repealed in 1985.
(87): CIA chief William J. Casey eventually took the lead in orchestrating support for terrorist and proterrorist movements around the world--from Renameo in Mozambique to Unita in Angola, and from contras in Nicaragua to the mujahideen in Afgahnistan--through third and fourth parties. In a nutshell, after defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal at home, the US government decided to harness and even cultivate terrorists in the struggle against guerillas who had come to power and regimes it considered pro-Soviet.
(91): A State Department consultant who interviewed refugees and displaced persons concluded that Renamo was responsible for 95% of the instances of civilian abuse inthe war in Mozambique, including the murder of as many as ten thousand civilians.
(91): Political terror had brought a kind of war never befroe seen in Africa. The hallmark of the terror was that it targeted civilian life: blowing up infrastructure such as bridges and power stations, destroying health and educational centers, mining paths and fields, and kidnapping civilians--particularly children--to press-grang them into recruits. Terrorism distinguished itself from guerilla struggle by making civilians its preferred target. If left-wing guerillas claimed that they were like fish in water, right-wing terrorists were determined to drain the water--that is, civilian life--so as to isolate and eliminate the fish. What is now termed collateral damage was not an unfortunate by-product of the war; it was the very point of terrorism.
(95): The CIA and the Pentagon called terrorism by another name: "low-intensity conflict" (LIC). The move from counterinsurgency to low-intensity conflict signified a strategic reorientation in US war strategy...
(97): With the shift in military strategy to rollback, a clear distinction was made between counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict: the ambition of counterinsurgency during the Vietnam era had been to defeat revolutionary insurgents; LIC aimed to undermine revolutionary governments, not just movements.
(109): Following the 1982 coup that installed Montt as dictator of Guatemala, Pat Roberston and other Christian-right leaders lobbied succssfully for the resumption of US military aid to the country. when Montt's army annihilated entire Indian villages, Gospel Outreach members defended the 'scorched earth' campaign in religious terms. One enthusiastic pastor put it: 'The army doesn't massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and the Indians are demons possessed; they are communists.'
(110-111): Israel emerged as a significant military supplier to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the late seventies and early eighties after those countries were found guilty of human rights violations and the Carter administration terminated military aid to all three... As 'a quid pro quo for El Salvador's decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,' Israel supplied the military regime 'with over 80% of its weaponry for the next several years, including napalm for use against the Salvadoran civilian population'... Israel moved into Nicaragua as soon as the Carter administration cut off aid: 'Israel sold Somoza 98% of the weapons he used against the Nicaraguan population' between September 1978 and his ouster the following July.
(111): Israel's military links with Iran began with the Iraq-Iran War... Retired General Aharon Yariv... told a conference at Tel Aviv University in late 1986 that 'it would be a good idea if the Iran-Iraq wars ended in a tie, but it would be even better if it continued.' Israel and the United States shared the same strategic objective: to prolong the Iraq-Iran War as long as possible. To realize that objective, each armed a different side.
(116): [In Nicaragua] When it came to the practice of terror, governments and private groups shared the same minimal objective: to put into question the ability of a government in power to ensure security of person and property for the population it claimed to represent.
(118) [In sum] The United States' embrace of terror can be plotted as a learning curve that went through three successive phases of the late cold War, from southern Africa to Central America and central Asia. Each phase can be identified with a dicstinct lesson. If the patronage of terror in the opening phase was shy, more like the benign and permissive tolerance of the practices of an aggressive regional ally--apartheid south Africa--the Unites States moved to a bold and brazen embrace of terror when it came to the counter-revolutionaries in Central America, combining it with patronage of an illict trade in cocaine as the preferred way of financing its covert operations. It was, however, in the closing phase of the Cold War that the United States came to see the embrace of terror as the means to an international public good. It did this in two ways: by privatizing and by internationalizing the main operations in the war. Whereas both tendencies were already present in US support of the contras, each truly blossomed only with the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which was so ideologized that it was seen less and less as a national-liberation struggle and more and more as an international crusade: a jihad.
(120-121): The revolutions of 1979 had a profound influence on the conduct of the Afghan War. The Iranian revolution led to a restructuring of relations between the United States and political Islam. Prior to it, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side was the Soviet Union and militant Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side was political Islam, which America considered an unqualified ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Thus, the United States supported the Sarekat-i-Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, the Jamaat-i-Islaami against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, and the Society of Muslim Brothers against Nasser in Egypt.... Israeli intelligence allowed Hamas top operate unhindered during the first intifada--letting it open a university and bank accounts and even possibly ehelping it with funding--only to confront a stronger Hamas as the organizer of the second intifada.
(126-127): 'literally days after the Soviet invasion, Carter was on the telephone with Zia offering him hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid in exchange for cooperation in helping rebels.' Zia held out for more, and the Carter-Zia relationship remained lukewarm. The real warming came with the Reagan administration, which offered Pakistan 'a huge, six-year economic and military aid package which elevated Pakistan to the third largest recipient of US foreign aid'--after Israel and Egypt.
(127-128): Historically, the tradition of 'lesser jihad' itself comprises two different--and conflicting--notions. The first is that of a just war against occupiers, whether nonbelievers or believers. There were four such just wars: Saladin's jihad against the Crusaders in the twelfth century, the Sufi jihad against enslaving aristocracies in West Africa in the seventeenth century, the Wahabi jihad against Ottoman colonizers in the Arabian peninsula in the eighteenth century, and the Mahdi's anticolonial struggle against the combination of Turko-Egyptian and British power in late nineteenth century Sudan... The second, conflicting, tradition is that of a permanent jiad against doctrinal tendencies in Islam officially considered 'heretic.' This is a tradition with little historical depth in Islam.... [T[he notion of a standing jihad--a state institution in defense of state interests--is identified less with historical Islam than with the later history of the House of Saud and the state of Saudi Arabia.
(128): The Afghan jihad was in reality an American jihad, but it became that fully only with Reagan's second term in office. In March 1985, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, authorizing 'stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal.' The redefined war was taken over by CIA chief William Casey, who undertook three significant measures in 1986. The first was to convince Congress to step up American involvement by providing the mujahideen with American advissers and American-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The second was to expand the Islamic guerilla war from Afghanistan into the Soviet republics of Tajikisan and Uzbekistan, a decision reversed when the Soviet Union threatened to attack Pakistan in retaliation. The thrid was to step up the recruitment of radical Islamists from around the world to come train in Pakistan and fight alongside the mujahideen.
(131): Beyond the front-line proxy states and their intelligence agencies, increasingly the intermediaries were private institutions, both religious and secular. The overall effect was progressively to privatize the war on an international basis. From this dynamic emerged the forces that carried out the operation we know as 9/11.
(132): The numbers recruited and trained were impressive by any reckoning: the estimate of foreign radicals 'directly influenced by the Afghan jihad' is upwards of one hundred thousand.
(133): Though Osama bin Laden had been a student of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the first Afghan-Arab gatekeeper of the jihad in the mid-eighties, a break between Azzam and bin Laden came twoards the end of the Afghan jihad. The parting of the ways was the result of a disagreement in 1989 over the future of the jihad: bin Laden 'envisioned an all-Arab legion, which eventually could be used to wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt,' whereas Azzam 'strongly opposed making war against fellow Muslims.' Soon after, Azzam and two of his sons were blown up by a car bomb as they were driving to a mosque in Peshawar. A meeting was held toward the end of 1989 in the town of Khost to decide on the future of the jihad... [A] new organization was created in the meeting[:]... al-Qaeda, 'the Base.'
(134): [T]he Tablighi Jamaat, with headquarters in Pakistan and branches all over the world, [was] founded in 1926 by a Muslim scholar, Maulana Mohammad Ilyas, to 'purify' borderline Muslims 'who had retained many of the customs and religious practices from their Hindu past.
(71): Congo became independent on June 30, 1960. Less than two weeks later... its richest province, Katanga, seceded... Led by Moish Tshombe... trained by officers from Belgium, the former colonial power there. Katanga's mines were operated by a Belgian company... in which the Rockefellers were soon to acquire a major interest. Late in the summer of 1960, the Eisenhower administration concluded that Patrice Lumumba... was 'an African Castro' and must be eliminated... On August 18, following a National Security Council briefing, Eisenhower asked his aides whether 'we can't get rid of this guy.' (... [Belgium/US collusion to kill Lumumba]) With Lumumba out of the way, in December 1962 President Kennedy concurred with the use of UN troops to quash the Katangan rebellion. In May 1963, a grateful Kennedy welcomed Mobutu in the White House: 'General, if it hadn't been for you, ... the Communists would have taken over. (72): By the end of 1963, anti-Mobutu rebellion broke out in Kwilu, led by Pierre Mulele, a prominent Lumumbist. The rebels were poorly armed, and there was no evidence of outside involvement. But the CIA did intervene on the government's behalf... By October 1964, the CIA estimated the humber of mercenaries in Conto at more than one thousand... Washington was clear from the outset that there would by no US citizens among the mercenaries. Without American support, however, the mercenaries would have been lame. Four US C-130s with American crews transported mecenaries and their equipment across the west-east span of Congo, roughly the same distance as from Paris to Moscow.
(77): [In Angola], Washington was determined to block any possibility of the MPLA coming to powe, having identified it as a Soviety proxy... Washington's preferred option was to give covert support to the two movements that were opposed to MPLA: the Front for National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which operated more or less as a surrogate of Congo's General Mobutu, and the Union for the Total Dependence of Angola (Unita), which had few external contacts apart from fledgling ones with apartheid South Africa.... Meanwhile, instead of fighting MPLA, FNLA and Unita took to fighting each other. Faced with an ignominious end, Kissinger opted to back a proxy invasion by regular South African forces.... South African troops entered Angola in mid-October 1975, and Cuban troops followed in early November.
(80): On February 10, 1976, the US Congress passed the Clark Amendment, prohibiting any covert aid to any side in the Angolan civil war. The next month, on March 31, the UN Security Council branded South Africa the aggressor and demanded that it compensate Angola for war damages...
(81): The Angolan fiasco reinforced the lessons of Vietnam, but those lessons provoked contradictory interpretations by the executive branch and by Congress, each asserting a different influence on post-Vietnam US foreign policy... Pulbic resistance... was echoed in Congress with the election of a host of antiwar legislators and led to a number of changes: the draft was abolished; the Pentagon's budget for special operations was cut; the CIA's paramilitary capabilities were reduced and its activities subjected to congressional oversight; and the president was required by the War Powers Act to seek congressional approval before any extended commitment of US troops overseas.... The clearest expression of this surge in antiwar sentiment was the amendment of the Freedom of Information act and the passage of the Clark Amendment. The two years and three months between the passage of the 1973 War Powers Act and the 1976 Clark Amendment marked the high point of the antiwar movement that swept the United States.
(83): Enacted in 1976, the Clark Amenment was repealed in 1985.
(87): CIA chief William J. Casey eventually took the lead in orchestrating support for terrorist and proterrorist movements around the world--from Renameo in Mozambique to Unita in Angola, and from contras in Nicaragua to the mujahideen in Afgahnistan--through third and fourth parties. In a nutshell, after defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal at home, the US government decided to harness and even cultivate terrorists in the struggle against guerillas who had come to power and regimes it considered pro-Soviet.
(91): A State Department consultant who interviewed refugees and displaced persons concluded that Renamo was responsible for 95% of the instances of civilian abuse inthe war in Mozambique, including the murder of as many as ten thousand civilians.
(91): Political terror had brought a kind of war never befroe seen in Africa. The hallmark of the terror was that it targeted civilian life: blowing up infrastructure such as bridges and power stations, destroying health and educational centers, mining paths and fields, and kidnapping civilians--particularly children--to press-grang them into recruits. Terrorism distinguished itself from guerilla struggle by making civilians its preferred target. If left-wing guerillas claimed that they were like fish in water, right-wing terrorists were determined to drain the water--that is, civilian life--so as to isolate and eliminate the fish. What is now termed collateral damage was not an unfortunate by-product of the war; it was the very point of terrorism.
(95): The CIA and the Pentagon called terrorism by another name: "low-intensity conflict" (LIC). The move from counterinsurgency to low-intensity conflict signified a strategic reorientation in US war strategy...
(97): With the shift in military strategy to rollback, a clear distinction was made between counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict: the ambition of counterinsurgency during the Vietnam era had been to defeat revolutionary insurgents; LIC aimed to undermine revolutionary governments, not just movements.
(109): Following the 1982 coup that installed Montt as dictator of Guatemala, Pat Roberston and other Christian-right leaders lobbied succssfully for the resumption of US military aid to the country. when Montt's army annihilated entire Indian villages, Gospel Outreach members defended the 'scorched earth' campaign in religious terms. One enthusiastic pastor put it: 'The army doesn't massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and the Indians are demons possessed; they are communists.'
(110-111): Israel emerged as a significant military supplier to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the late seventies and early eighties after those countries were found guilty of human rights violations and the Carter administration terminated military aid to all three... As 'a quid pro quo for El Salvador's decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,' Israel supplied the military regime 'with over 80% of its weaponry for the next several years, including napalm for use against the Salvadoran civilian population'... Israel moved into Nicaragua as soon as the Carter administration cut off aid: 'Israel sold Somoza 98% of the weapons he used against the Nicaraguan population' between September 1978 and his ouster the following July.
(111): Israel's military links with Iran began with the Iraq-Iran War... Retired General Aharon Yariv... told a conference at Tel Aviv University in late 1986 that 'it would be a good idea if the Iran-Iraq wars ended in a tie, but it would be even better if it continued.' Israel and the United States shared the same strategic objective: to prolong the Iraq-Iran War as long as possible. To realize that objective, each armed a different side.
(116): [In Nicaragua] When it came to the practice of terror, governments and private groups shared the same minimal objective: to put into question the ability of a government in power to ensure security of person and property for the population it claimed to represent.
(118) [In sum] The United States' embrace of terror can be plotted as a learning curve that went through three successive phases of the late cold War, from southern Africa to Central America and central Asia. Each phase can be identified with a dicstinct lesson. If the patronage of terror in the opening phase was shy, more like the benign and permissive tolerance of the practices of an aggressive regional ally--apartheid south Africa--the Unites States moved to a bold and brazen embrace of terror when it came to the counter-revolutionaries in Central America, combining it with patronage of an illict trade in cocaine as the preferred way of financing its covert operations. It was, however, in the closing phase of the Cold War that the United States came to see the embrace of terror as the means to an international public good. It did this in two ways: by privatizing and by internationalizing the main operations in the war. Whereas both tendencies were already present in US support of the contras, each truly blossomed only with the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which was so ideologized that it was seen less and less as a national-liberation struggle and more and more as an international crusade: a jihad.
(120-121): The revolutions of 1979 had a profound influence on the conduct of the Afghan War. The Iranian revolution led to a restructuring of relations between the United States and political Islam. Prior to it, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side was the Soviet Union and militant Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side was political Islam, which America considered an unqualified ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Thus, the United States supported the Sarekat-i-Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, the Jamaat-i-Islaami against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, and the Society of Muslim Brothers against Nasser in Egypt.... Israeli intelligence allowed Hamas top operate unhindered during the first intifada--letting it open a university and bank accounts and even possibly ehelping it with funding--only to confront a stronger Hamas as the organizer of the second intifada.
(126-127): 'literally days after the Soviet invasion, Carter was on the telephone with Zia offering him hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid in exchange for cooperation in helping rebels.' Zia held out for more, and the Carter-Zia relationship remained lukewarm. The real warming came with the Reagan administration, which offered Pakistan 'a huge, six-year economic and military aid package which elevated Pakistan to the third largest recipient of US foreign aid'--after Israel and Egypt.
(127-128): Historically, the tradition of 'lesser jihad' itself comprises two different--and conflicting--notions. The first is that of a just war against occupiers, whether nonbelievers or believers. There were four such just wars: Saladin's jihad against the Crusaders in the twelfth century, the Sufi jihad against enslaving aristocracies in West Africa in the seventeenth century, the Wahabi jihad against Ottoman colonizers in the Arabian peninsula in the eighteenth century, and the Mahdi's anticolonial struggle against the combination of Turko-Egyptian and British power in late nineteenth century Sudan... The second, conflicting, tradition is that of a permanent jiad against doctrinal tendencies in Islam officially considered 'heretic.' This is a tradition with little historical depth in Islam.... [T[he notion of a standing jihad--a state institution in defense of state interests--is identified less with historical Islam than with the later history of the House of Saud and the state of Saudi Arabia.
(128): The Afghan jihad was in reality an American jihad, but it became that fully only with Reagan's second term in office. In March 1985, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, authorizing 'stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal.' The redefined war was taken over by CIA chief William Casey, who undertook three significant measures in 1986. The first was to convince Congress to step up American involvement by providing the mujahideen with American advissers and American-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The second was to expand the Islamic guerilla war from Afghanistan into the Soviet republics of Tajikisan and Uzbekistan, a decision reversed when the Soviet Union threatened to attack Pakistan in retaliation. The thrid was to step up the recruitment of radical Islamists from around the world to come train in Pakistan and fight alongside the mujahideen.
(131): Beyond the front-line proxy states and their intelligence agencies, increasingly the intermediaries were private institutions, both religious and secular. The overall effect was progressively to privatize the war on an international basis. From this dynamic emerged the forces that carried out the operation we know as 9/11.
(132): The numbers recruited and trained were impressive by any reckoning: the estimate of foreign radicals 'directly influenced by the Afghan jihad' is upwards of one hundred thousand.
(133): Though Osama bin Laden had been a student of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the first Afghan-Arab gatekeeper of the jihad in the mid-eighties, a break between Azzam and bin Laden came twoards the end of the Afghan jihad. The parting of the ways was the result of a disagreement in 1989 over the future of the jihad: bin Laden 'envisioned an all-Arab legion, which eventually could be used to wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt,' whereas Azzam 'strongly opposed making war against fellow Muslims.' Soon after, Azzam and two of his sons were blown up by a car bomb as they were driving to a mosque in Peshawar. A meeting was held toward the end of 1989 in the town of Khost to decide on the future of the jihad... [A] new organization was created in the meeting[:]... al-Qaeda, 'the Base.'
(134): [T]he Tablighi Jamaat, with headquarters in Pakistan and branches all over the world, [was] founded in 1926 by a Muslim scholar, Maulana Mohammad Ilyas, to 'purify' borderline Muslims 'who had retained many of the customs and religious practices from their Hindu past.
Monday, May 28, 2007
chronicling obscene politics:
In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would "follow us home" from Iraq -- a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.
(...) Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that "these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago." However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.
(...) "They want to bring down the West, particularly us," Romney declared. "And they've come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent."
(...) The belief that there is a clear connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks has been a key determinant of support for the war. A Harris poll taken two weeks before the 2004 presidential election found that a majority of Bush's supporters believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks -- a claim that Bush has never made. Eighty-four percent believed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had "strong links" with Al Qaeda, a claim that intelligence officials have long disputed.
(...) Romney said Friday: "You see, the terrorists are fighting a war on us. We've got to make sure that we're fighting a war on them."
(...) Romney's national press secretary, Kevin Madden, said the former governor's linking of Shia, Sunni, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood was based on their common hostility to the West. "I think [Romney's statement] was much more directed at intent -- they all share a common ideology or intent to bring down Western governments," Madden said. "There's a shared attempt to fight any beachhead of democracy in that region."
In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would "follow us home" from Iraq -- a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.
(...) Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that "these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago." However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.
(...) "They want to bring down the West, particularly us," Romney declared. "And they've come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent."
(...) The belief that there is a clear connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks has been a key determinant of support for the war. A Harris poll taken two weeks before the 2004 presidential election found that a majority of Bush's supporters believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks -- a claim that Bush has never made. Eighty-four percent believed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had "strong links" with Al Qaeda, a claim that intelligence officials have long disputed.
(...) Romney said Friday: "You see, the terrorists are fighting a war on us. We've got to make sure that we're fighting a war on them."
(...) Romney's national press secretary, Kevin Madden, said the former governor's linking of Shia, Sunni, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood was based on their common hostility to the West. "I think [Romney's statement] was much more directed at intent -- they all share a common ideology or intent to bring down Western governments," Madden said. "There's a shared attempt to fight any beachhead of democracy in that region."
Saturday, May 19, 2007
why do they hate the US?:
If he only read Time magazine, he would know that bin Laden, who had just finished fighting a successful, U.S.-backed holy war against the Russians, was enraged by the Saudi king's decision to allow American forces onto the Arabian Peninsula in 1990 – he wanted to expel Saddam from Kuwait. And if Matthews were to quickly peruse the Jim Leher Newshour Website, it would reveal bin Laden's "fatwa" of 1996, which is titled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." Pretty subtle, huh?
(...) The only reason anyone listens to or follows bin Laden is because he points at specific foreign policies of the U.S. in order to maintain that he is the one fighting on the defensive. Michael Scheuer, the former head analyst at the CIA's bin Laden unit, and author of Imperial Hubris, told me this himself. He said that the Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980's railing against American culture and the entire region yawned. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, kept his pitch straight and to the point – and it worked. He told them that America was the aggressor, and sited 6 specific policies as evidence:
1: The bases in Saudi Arabia
2: Unquestioning support for Israel (The 1996 Fatwa came on the heels of the first Qana massacre in Lebanon)
3: The no-fly zone bombings and blockade of Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands of people (now replaced on the jihadist sales pitch list by the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan which have killed hundreds of thousands more)
4: Support for dictators across the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, etc.)
5: Pressure on the oil producing states to keep their prices set where America wants them
6: Support for Russia, China and India in their wars against Muslims
(...) They have a following because they point at concrete examples of how the U.S. government makes life worse for the average guy in the Islamic World – when it's not taking it from him outright.
(...) As Professor Robert A. Pape proved in his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism – by studying every single individual suicide bomber on Earth between 1980 and 2004 – the one characteristic that all suicide bombers have in common is the presence of foreign combat forces in their country – not Islam. Whether it's is Sikhs in India, the Communist and atheist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Hamas in Palestine, al-Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia and Egypt crashing planes in the United States or Sunni insurgents in Iraq.
(...) here's veteran intelligence beat reporter James Bamford, (By no means whatsoever is this man a blame-America-first political radical of any description. He's simply a journalist): "Ayman al-Zawahiri argued that al-Qaeda should bring the war to 'the distant enemy' in order to provoke the Americans to strike back and 'personally wage the battle against Muslims.' It was that battle that bin Laden and Zawahiri wanted to spark [with the 9/11 attacks]. As they made clear in their declaration of war 'against Jews and Crusaders,' they believed that the United States and Israel had been waging war against Muslims for decades. Now their hope was to draw Americans into a desert Vietnam, with bin Laden in the role of North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh." It is very important to emphasize: They want to suck us in so they can bleed us dry and then push us out for good – while empowering themselves in the process.
(...) Bin Laden couldn't have laid out his strategy more clearly than in his speech of October 2004: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. ... So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."
(...) Overthrowing the tyrant Saddam Hussein, who bin Laden reviled as an "infidel" and a "socialist," however, was an additional "gift" to the al-Qaeda movement in the words of former CIA-man Scheuer. The Bush team's invasion killed a few birds with one stone for bin Laden: It got rid of the Ba'athists, put tens of thousands of Americans within rifle range and it created a training ground and propaganda tool for new recruits.
(...) Also in 2005, the Saudi government and an Israeli think tank did studies tracking the individual jihadists traveling to Iraq to be trained in fighting Americans. They both found that virtually all of them were youngsters who had been radicalized by the invasion of Iraq – that the only thing older jihadists had to do with it was in sending them off.
(...) So you see, foreign occupation – American foreign policy – is a "major contributing factor" in creating terrorism today, just as it was in the years before September 11th.
If he only read Time magazine, he would know that bin Laden, who had just finished fighting a successful, U.S.-backed holy war against the Russians, was enraged by the Saudi king's decision to allow American forces onto the Arabian Peninsula in 1990 – he wanted to expel Saddam from Kuwait. And if Matthews were to quickly peruse the Jim Leher Newshour Website, it would reveal bin Laden's "fatwa" of 1996, which is titled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." Pretty subtle, huh?
(...) The only reason anyone listens to or follows bin Laden is because he points at specific foreign policies of the U.S. in order to maintain that he is the one fighting on the defensive. Michael Scheuer, the former head analyst at the CIA's bin Laden unit, and author of Imperial Hubris, told me this himself. He said that the Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980's railing against American culture and the entire region yawned. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, kept his pitch straight and to the point – and it worked. He told them that America was the aggressor, and sited 6 specific policies as evidence:
1: The bases in Saudi Arabia
2: Unquestioning support for Israel (The 1996 Fatwa came on the heels of the first Qana massacre in Lebanon)
3: The no-fly zone bombings and blockade of Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands of people (now replaced on the jihadist sales pitch list by the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan which have killed hundreds of thousands more)
4: Support for dictators across the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, etc.)
5: Pressure on the oil producing states to keep their prices set where America wants them
6: Support for Russia, China and India in their wars against Muslims
(...) They have a following because they point at concrete examples of how the U.S. government makes life worse for the average guy in the Islamic World – when it's not taking it from him outright.
(...) As Professor Robert A. Pape proved in his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism – by studying every single individual suicide bomber on Earth between 1980 and 2004 – the one characteristic that all suicide bombers have in common is the presence of foreign combat forces in their country – not Islam. Whether it's is Sikhs in India, the Communist and atheist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Hamas in Palestine, al-Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia and Egypt crashing planes in the United States or Sunni insurgents in Iraq.
(...) here's veteran intelligence beat reporter James Bamford, (By no means whatsoever is this man a blame-America-first political radical of any description. He's simply a journalist): "Ayman al-Zawahiri argued that al-Qaeda should bring the war to 'the distant enemy' in order to provoke the Americans to strike back and 'personally wage the battle against Muslims.' It was that battle that bin Laden and Zawahiri wanted to spark [with the 9/11 attacks]. As they made clear in their declaration of war 'against Jews and Crusaders,' they believed that the United States and Israel had been waging war against Muslims for decades. Now their hope was to draw Americans into a desert Vietnam, with bin Laden in the role of North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh." It is very important to emphasize: They want to suck us in so they can bleed us dry and then push us out for good – while empowering themselves in the process.
(...) Bin Laden couldn't have laid out his strategy more clearly than in his speech of October 2004: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. ... So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."
(...) Overthrowing the tyrant Saddam Hussein, who bin Laden reviled as an "infidel" and a "socialist," however, was an additional "gift" to the al-Qaeda movement in the words of former CIA-man Scheuer. The Bush team's invasion killed a few birds with one stone for bin Laden: It got rid of the Ba'athists, put tens of thousands of Americans within rifle range and it created a training ground and propaganda tool for new recruits.
(...) Also in 2005, the Saudi government and an Israeli think tank did studies tracking the individual jihadists traveling to Iraq to be trained in fighting Americans. They both found that virtually all of them were youngsters who had been radicalized by the invasion of Iraq – that the only thing older jihadists had to do with it was in sending them off.
(...) So you see, foreign occupation – American foreign policy – is a "major contributing factor" in creating terrorism today, just as it was in the years before September 11th.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
on the problems with the official narrative in Waziristan:
[gov't strategy working?] Facts about the recent fighting have come in fragments. The picture assembled is not quite the same as that painted by the government.
(...)Welcomed in 2001 as "guests", in recent years the foreigners have had to pay for their keep in the tribal areas. For the wealthier Arabs -- especially those with ties to Al-Qaeda -- this has meant extortionate amounts of cash paid to tribal protectors, suppliers and government officials.
(...) But the current "tribal uprising" is not against all foreigners. It appears to be confined to the IMU. Other aliens -- Arabs, Chechens, Central Asians and Chinese -- have been left untouched or been the targets of the Uzbeks. For example, it was the killing by the IMU of Sheik Asadullah on 13 March that tipped skirmishes with the tribesmen into war. Asadullah was a Saudi and said to be the main financier for the Araba Al-Qaeda allied groups in the tribal areas. He was also a lucrative source of trade and patronage for the tribes.
(...) Nor can the current conflict be seen as against the Taliban, the strongest political force in the tribal areas. The anti-IMU tribesmen are led by Mullah Nazir. He was appointed commander of the South Waziristan tribes by the Taliban leadership in November 2006. It was an unpopular decision. Other Taliban leaders in South Waziristan have been fighting alongside the IMU or are "telling everyone that this is an internal war whipped up by the Pakistan army to split the Taliban," says a local. On two occasions senior Afghani Taliban leaders have tried to enter South Waziristan to mediate a truce between tribesmen and the IMU. Both times they were stymied by the army. "Taliban-Pakistan relations are at an all-time low," says the source.
(...) Others say the mobilisation of the tribes is a precursor to a renewed army offensive in the tribal areas, under inordinate US pressure and "against its better judgment," says the source. The military incursions in support of the tribes were the first army actions inside South Waziristan since the 2004 peace agreement. But every previous army offensive has alienated the tribes and strengthened the Taliban. Will that be the fate of the current fighting?
[gov't strategy working?] Facts about the recent fighting have come in fragments. The picture assembled is not quite the same as that painted by the government.
(...)Welcomed in 2001 as "guests", in recent years the foreigners have had to pay for their keep in the tribal areas. For the wealthier Arabs -- especially those with ties to Al-Qaeda -- this has meant extortionate amounts of cash paid to tribal protectors, suppliers and government officials.
(...) But the current "tribal uprising" is not against all foreigners. It appears to be confined to the IMU. Other aliens -- Arabs, Chechens, Central Asians and Chinese -- have been left untouched or been the targets of the Uzbeks. For example, it was the killing by the IMU of Sheik Asadullah on 13 March that tipped skirmishes with the tribesmen into war. Asadullah was a Saudi and said to be the main financier for the Araba Al-Qaeda allied groups in the tribal areas. He was also a lucrative source of trade and patronage for the tribes.
(...) Nor can the current conflict be seen as against the Taliban, the strongest political force in the tribal areas. The anti-IMU tribesmen are led by Mullah Nazir. He was appointed commander of the South Waziristan tribes by the Taliban leadership in November 2006. It was an unpopular decision. Other Taliban leaders in South Waziristan have been fighting alongside the IMU or are "telling everyone that this is an internal war whipped up by the Pakistan army to split the Taliban," says a local. On two occasions senior Afghani Taliban leaders have tried to enter South Waziristan to mediate a truce between tribesmen and the IMU. Both times they were stymied by the army. "Taliban-Pakistan relations are at an all-time low," says the source.
(...) Others say the mobilisation of the tribes is a precursor to a renewed army offensive in the tribal areas, under inordinate US pressure and "against its better judgment," says the source. The military incursions in support of the tribes were the first army actions inside South Waziristan since the 2004 peace agreement. But every previous army offensive has alienated the tribes and strengthened the Taliban. Will that be the fate of the current fighting?
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