Obl: A Texas-style Republican In Muslim Clothing

[Deen]

Would be grateful if anyone can provide me with documented evidence to suggest Osama has severed ties with the US administration?


Osama bin Laden: a Texas-style Republican in Muslim clothing


By Wayne Madsen


Online Journal Contributing Writer


September 12, 2004—When Ronald Reagan passed away a few months ago, eulogies poured into Washington from around the world. One eulogy was inconspicuously absent–that of America's international Public Enemy Number One and arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden.


Speaking at a Cato Institute seminar on the War on Terrorism on September 8 in Washington, Professor Walid Phares, a Middle East expert at Florida Atlantic University, offered for the first time a quote attributed to Bin Laden that his colleague has penned in a forthcoming book. Bin Laden told Phares's colleague in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s: "I like Reagan. He believes in God. He's helping us. He's better than the others." The fact that George W. Bush considers himself the heir to Reagan's legacy and his policies, in addition to the fact that he never misses a chance to speak of his own devotion to God (even more so than Reagan ever did) and has brought almost every one of Reagan's cowboy operators into his administration, must also place him in the eyes of bin Laden as "better than the others."


Washington's heavily corporate-funded Cato Institute, a citadel of conservative and libertarian policy-making, is the least likely place one would expect to hear the Bush foreign policy wrung through the wringer. However, Cato has emerged as a key player in a conservative counter-attack against the neoconservative foreign policies enacted by Bush's inner circle of national security and defense advisers who have corrupted Republican ideology to the point where it would be unrecognizable to Barry Goldwater, Senator Bob Taft, Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon.


Osama bin Laden has always been there for the opportunist Republicans and their neoconservative symbiotes and they have always been there for him. No wonder after Bush's initial post-9/11 bravado that he would catch bin Laden "dead or alive," the man who once ran most of his late father's Saudi construction company and its business dealings with Bush family favorites Adnan Khashoggi and Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, was allowed to escape during the Battle of Tora Bora. Which brings us to Richard Perle and his merry band of neoconservative agents of influence for Israel. Not only did Perle attempt to get Khashoggi to invest in his Trireme Partners (an enterprise he set up with Henry Kissinger) but he and his disciples in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans attempted to use Ghorbanifar to reopen an intelligence back channel to Iran unused since the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan administration. Ghorbanifar, a friend of neoconservative Svengali, Michael Ledeen, once failed 12 of 14 questions on a CIA-administered polygraph test. He only passed on the two questions about his name and nationality. Ghorbanifar has only surfaced in U.S. government circles after Israel or its agents of influence inside and outside the U.S. government brought pressure to bear.


The fact that bin Laden would identify with a conservative Republican president should come as no shock. After all, it was Reagan and his cabal of neoconservatives and extreme right-wing Cold Warriors who arranged for bin Laden to receive economic and personnel assistance from Saudis and weapons from the Egyptians and Israelis during the Afghan mujaheddin war against the Soviets. It was George H. W. Bush, who in 1980, went to Paris to negotiate a deal with the radical Iranian Islamists to keep the U.S. hostages at the Tehran embassy hostage past the November election to ensure that there would be no "October Surprise" (i.e., a release) that would benefit President Jimmy Carter at the polls. (It is clear that in his heart of hearts President Carter, a living icon of American statesmanship, had this in the back of his mind when he constantly referred to the "extremism" of the current Bush administration in his speech to the Boston Democratic convention).


It was Reagan and his administration that established a virtual anti-Soviet "aircraft carrier" along the Afghan-Pakistani border with the help of Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) Service. It was at one nondescript guest house in Peshawar, in the heart of this American-nurtured remote forward operating base, that Afghan and Arab mujaheddin graduates of Saudi Wahhabist religious schools and indoctrination centers would congregate and discuss strategy against the Soviets under the watchful eye of CIA and ISI handlers. That guest house was known to the mujaheddin as "al Qaeda" ("The Base") and it would later (and rather erroneously) lend its name to a group of Saudi-backed and influenced fanatics who would one day carry out the horrible terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.


But perception management campaigns are a hallmark of the Bush cartel. One could not get a more believable Arab terrorist leader like bin Laden from Hollywood central casting. The stock footage of bin Laden firing an AK-47, coming out of a cave talking on a mobile satellite phone, listening to the Voice of America as his hijackers slammed into the Twin Towers on 9/11, the imagery of the towers resembling an "11" (the former logo of New York's WPIX-TV Channel 11) on "911" (also the emergency telephone number), the quick passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, questioning John Kerry's Vietnam War record, and bogus intelligence on Iraq being fed to the UN Security Council and Congress—it's all perception management—a grand attempt to deceive and mislead. It is all the imagery and political skullduggery required for an impending "Clash of Civilizations," a New Crusade, a Christian evangelist Great Apocalypse, a Resurgent Jihad, a Jewish Rebuilding of the Temple, and more. And the perception management results have been a blessing for the Bush/Saudi/Carlyle cartel that now controls Washington, Houston, Riyadh, Baghdad, Kabul, and most of the world.


As Russia continues to bury and identify its dead children from Beslan, Vladimir Putin says he will strike anytime and anywhere against the terrorist supporters. SPETSNAZ teams "operating" in Saudi Arabia, the gated communities and country clubs of Houston, and the Saudi shill law offices on K Street should not be ruled out by Moscow.


It must be stressed that bin Laden and his associates never used the name al Qaeda to describe themselves—that was something the U.S. government and corporate news media created as a moniker for them. If mujaheddin traveling to Afghanistan via Peshawar stayed at a Holiday Inn instead of the "al Qaeda" guest house, it is doubtful that bin Laden's forces would today be called "Holiday Inn." Ever since 1985, bin Laden's group has been known to themselves and their allies as the Islamic Salvation Foundation, a group that financed its operations through Saudi, Pakistani, and Sudanese-based Islamic charities and the sale of Afghan opium.


In 1998, bin Laden created an international Islamist coalition called the "Islamic Struggle Front" with allies in Bangladesh, Egypt, and Pakistan that issued a fatwa declaring it legitimate to kill Americans everywhere, civilians or military. That year, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in East Africa were bombed by bin Laden loyalists. All the while, the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki bin Faisal (who remains the de facto head of Saudi intelligence while moonlighting as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Great Britain), maintained his friendship with bin Laden, whom he had known since the "al Qaeda" leader was a civil engineering student at the King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah.


Even after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the CIA and Saudis pumped one half billion dollars into mujaheddin coffers, a good portion going to bin Laden and his allied groups. This was at a time some within the mujaheddin began setting their sites on new targets, especially the United States after U.S. troops began arriving the next year in Saudi Arabia in the prelude to Desert Storm and the first U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.


According to a Washington Justice Department insider, a few years after Desert Storm and bin Laden's new antipathy toward the United States, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Feith's Israeli-American partner Marc Zell, were involved in setting up the Bosnia Defense Fund using an account at Riggs Bank in Washington. Millions of dollars in contributions for Bosnia to buy weapons and military training from companies like Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) flowed into the account from countries like Egypt, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Brunei, Jordan, and Kuwait. From Washington the money was wired to Sarajevo where some of the weapons "bled" from the armories of the Bosnian forces and into the hands of radical Islamists sent to the Balkans by bin Laden to begin a jihad against the West in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Albania. In return for his help for the Bosnians, bin Laden procured Bosnian passports for himself and his closest associates. Bin Laden's Balkans logistics operations mirrored the type of banking and financial network that propped him up in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad. Using the facilities of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Saudi charities from princes, mosques, and wealthy private contributors were funneled into the coffers of bin Laden and his allies.


And compare this to the involvement of Perle, Feith, and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration with the likes of Ahmad Chalabi and his nephew Salem Chalabi (the latter the Baghdad law partner of Marc Zell) and one begins to see a pattern harkening back to the halcyon days of the Reagan Iran-contra scandal and Afghan mujaheddin escapade. That the same individuals continue to be linked to war profiteering and espionage at the top echelons of government is reportedly at the heart of the current FBI investigation of the role of the neoconservatives in the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Office of Special Plans personnel, the leak of highly-classified and compartmented communications intelligence (COMINT) information by Ahmad Chalabi to Iran, the use by the White House of bogus Niger documents regarding procurement of uranium from that country by Iraq, and the illegal outing of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's CIA wife to columnist Robert Novak.


There is also the curious role of Turkey in the current U.S. spy scandals. Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has spoken of a non-governmental foreign intelligence operation within the FBI office where she worked centered around the Turkish American Council. Both Turkey and Israel were intimately involved with the Afghan mujaheddin, including the forces that later coalesced around bin Laden. Some 60,000 rifles and 100 million rounds of ammunition were withdrawn from Turkish army stocks for delivery to the mujaheddin, although some of the weapons found their way into the hands of the Iranians, according to Middle East expert and veteran former ABC news correspondent John Cooley in his thought provoking and well researched book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, a book the CIA for years attempted to suppress. According to Ahmad Rashid in his excellent book, Taliban, "Israel saw the Taliban as an anti-Iranian force which could be used to undermine Iranian influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia." Rashid also states that later, "Turkey also played a role in turning around Israel's policy in Afghanistan" because "the Israelis and more significantly some Jewish lobbies in the USA were not initially critical of the Taliban." That Israel and Turkey may have been cooperating in an espionage ring inside the FBI should not be a surprise—their intelligence agencies had been cooperating for a number of years, especially in Afghanistan.


Similarly, according to George Crile's most revealing book about the U.S. support for the mujaheddin, Charlie Wilson's War, Israel and Pakistan, although lacking diplomatic relations, cooperated in secretly upgrading Pakistan's Chinese-made T-55 tanks and providing support to the mujaheddin. It is noteworthy to point out that bin Laden's vitriol against Israel has been a relatively recent development. Long before he denounced Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, bin Laden remained focused on the expulsion of "infidel" U.S. troops from the Arabian Peninsula, especially Saudi Arabia.


Support for the embryonic "al Qaeda" and its Wahhabi/Saudi/Salafist/ISI-affiliated mujaheddin allies was largely the work of big business-owned and operated Texas politicians like the nightclubbing bon vivant former Representative Charlie Wilson. Mirroring the early life styles of Wilson and George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden spent the 1970s in Beirut nightclubs engaging in heavy drinking and fighting over women.


The bin Laden family had a long association with Texas. Osama's older brother Salem was a financier of George W. Bush's oil businesses. The bin Laden family and their Saudi financial colleagues owned Texas airlines, airports, and real estate. Because of the intensive lobbying efforts (all documented in Crile's book) carried out with the help of Texans like Houston socialite and TV personality Joanne Herring, Baron and Baroness di Portanova, and Vice President George H. W. Bush, in concert with Richard Perle, former New Hampshire Senator Gordon Humphrey, the Congressional Jewish Caucus, and the ever-enigmatic shady operator Richard Armitage, radicals like bin Laden and his associates, Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri and Professor Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (the founder of a Saudi-financed and ISI-organized "Terrorist University," which spawned the Philippine terrorist "Abu Sayyaf Group"), were able to cobble together an impressive jihadist army armed with stockpiles of Soviet-made weapons from Egypt, captured Soviet weapons from Israel, and tons of cash from billionaire Saudi benefactors.


George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush's Florida election "fixer" and newly-named Bush debate coach James Baker III have both been honored guests, according to The Wall Street Journal, at the bin Laden family's palatial headquarters in Jeddah. With the active support of Pakistan's military dictator Mohammed Zia Ul-Haq (who was killed along with the U.S. ambassador, Pakistan's ISI chief Akhtar Abdul Rahman, and others in a mysterious 1988 plane crash determined by an unpublished Pakistani court of inquiry report to have been cause by the pilot being knocked out by gas in the cockpit), the Afghan mujaheddin became increasingly radicalized in the Wahhabi traditions. Out of Saudi-nurtured and Pakistani-organized madrasas would come future Taliban leaders like Mullah Mohammed Omar.


Senator Ted Kennedy was in the Senate in the late 1970s and 1980s and he must have experienced déjà vu as some of these same Texas interests championed the war against Iraq and the demarche to the Taliban to deal with the United States on the proposed UNOCAL trans-Afghan CentGas pipeline or face a "carpet of bombs." Kennedy correctly stated that the Iraq war was cooked up in Texas to benefit a Bush in the White House. So was America's support for the mujaheddin and bin Laden in Afghanistan although the main beneficiary was a previous Bush in the White House.


Notwithstanding page 56 of the 9/11 Commission Report, which states " . . . bin Ladin and his comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States," the United States and its Saudi allies funneled millions of dollars to bin Laden and his mujaheddin forces through Pakistani interlocutors. Of bin Laden, Cooley writes, "Through his own personal reputation as a pious Muslim who favored the cause of Wahhabi Islamism . . . he seemed to both Saudi intelligence and the CIA an ideal choice for the leading role he began to play [in the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan]." The decision to groom bin Laden as an American agent of influence among the mujaheddin came at the same time William Casey, an elderly and drooling version of Austin Powers' "Dr. Evil," headed the CIA. Cooley adds, "Delighted by his impeccable Saudi credentials, the CIA gave Osama free rein in Afghanistan, as did Pakistan's intelligence generals." Cooley posits that the CIA was more than happy to see a buildup of Wahhabi Sunni power in Afghanistan to serve as a counterweight to Iranian Shi'ism being advocated by the Ayatollah Khomeini. This is the very same reasoning that Ahmad Rashid reasoned was behind Israel's support for the Taliban. And when bin Laden was victorious with his 50 Arab mujaheddin over 200 Soviet troops in the Battle of Ali Khel, he became an instant hero: "bin Laden, the Hero of the Battle of Ali Khel," a folk hero the United States and Israel could use to their advantage. Support for the mujaheddin and bin Laden (whose CIA code name was "Abu Abdullah") was a decision that Langley and Tel Aviv would come to regret. (The Israelis have experienced two such "blowbacks." They also created Hamas as a counterweight to Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement).


Perle, according to Crile's book, actually wanted to use Afghanistan as a playground for all sorts of fantastic schemes, including a campaign by the mujaheddin to entice Soviet soldiers to defect to their side. One CIA clandestine services officer, Gust Avrakotos, called North and Perle "cuckoos of the Far Right" and called them idiots to their faces. Fast forward to today and we see Perle and North both involved as cheerleaders for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. These "cuckoos of the Far Right" convinced the world that American troops would be welcomed by undulating Iraqis throwing flowers and sweets at American jeeps and tanks. Instead, Iraq has now become a welcomed haven for followers of bin Laden, just as parts of Afghanistan remain in the hands of his supporters.


Bin Laden may whisper every day the same thing he said of Reagan, "I like Bush. He believes in God. He's helping us. He's better than the others." Others like Bill Clinton who launched a cruise missile attack against bin Laden in Afghanistan but only after the ISI tipped off the Saudi exile that the missiles were on their way. Others like John Kerry who investigated how bin Laden and his cronies received their funding through BCCI and Saudi interlocutors in networks that reached right into the office of Vice President George H. W. Bush and William Casey's CIA. This, of course, should come as no shock to those who have followed and continue to follow the dastardly deeds of the Bush/Saudi/Pakistani/Bin Laden/Carlyle Group cartel and their international machinations.


And it should come as no shock that the only people who suffered as a result of the 9/11 attack three years ago have been Americans, who have seen their basic civil liberties thrashed and burned and their best and brightest military men and women sacrificed in a senseless war in Iraq; Afghans, who have seen their country ravaged by continuous death and destruction from a resurgent Taliban and al Qaeda and U.S. "collateral damage" and "friendly fire;" and Iraqis, who have been subjected to death, turmoil, and even torture and sexual molestation by a coalition of the coerced and mercenary soldiers of fortune and lawless brigands acting on behalf of the Bush White House political apparatchiks.


Counterterrorism expert and journalist Peter Bergen commented at the Cato conclave, "the Iraq war was a Christmas present for Osama bin Laden." Yes, one can hear bin Laden murmuring over and over again from his own secret undisclosed location, "I like Bush even more than I liked Reagan."


Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based journalist and syndicated columnist. He is author of the forthcoming book "Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops and Brass Plates."