[CTRL] Fwd: [CIA-DRUGS] Peter Dale Scott: Al Qaeda

[Kris Millegan]

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Wow!! Dr. Peter Dale Scott lays out the Taliban.

Brian Downing Quig

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/q.html

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Title: Peter Dale Scott: Al Qaeda

[ Home | Curriculum Vitae | New and Recent | Selected Writings | Complete Bibliography ]   ON WAR, TERRORISM, AFGHANISTAN, AL-QAEDA, AND OSAMA BIN LADEN "Turkistan, Afghanistan, Transcaspia, Persia....are the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominance of the world." -- Lord Curzon, Russia in Central Asia I will add to this webpage from time to time -- latest update 10/3. I will be out of the country and away from my computer from 10/4 to 10/16. So far I have published two stories on crisis and the CIA, at: "Made in the U.S.A.: How the U.S. Manufactures Terrorists" 9/19/01 "History Warns Against Simply Arming Afghan Insurgents" 10/2/01 I have also opened this webpage on al-Qaeda and the present crisis, and would encourage others to do so as well. We are most of us relatively ignorant about Islam, but since this defect does not deter our leaders, this should not deter us either. I welcome comments and suggestions at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Many features of recent events have motivated me. 1) The need to prioritize political over military response From the outset, there has been a tendency in official and press rhetoric to blur Afghanistan, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda all together. This may be useful propaganda to unite Americans in an anti-jihad. But it has had disastrous consequences politically. For months, as James Ridgeway reported last June in the Village Voice, the US has been negotiating informally with Taliban representatives for the surrender of bin Laden. Only a few days before the WTC attack, one Taliban leader suggested publicly that the Taliban might offer up bin Laden to be tried under Islamic law in another Muslim country. This could have been a first step towards containing the al-Qaeda problem. 2) The Need for a Complex Anti-War Position, and to Avoid Cliches These remarks are addressed to those who like myself are convinced that a) Some kind of US response to the terrorist threat is necessary, b) a conventional military response is more likely to aggravate the problem than to resolve it. c) any kind of covert response should be limited to the containment of terrorism, d) US-led efforts to impose a new government on Afghanistan from outside are likely to be counterproductive, e) any US efforts should prioritize political and diplomatic initiatives over those using unilateral force. This is the first conflict in which a significant number of Americans have clearly been among the innocent victims. To be of service, any remarks we express must show compassion towards these victims and their families, as well as towards the oppressed of other countries who are likely to suffer from a US response. They should also be sensitive to the complexity of the problems challenging those whose task it is to respond to an on-going threat. We are unlikely to see and hear again the worst anti-American rhetoric from the 1960s, when the left isolated itself from the US mainstream by burning flags and writing of Amerika. But there is a more difficult challenge for people who like myself believe in non-violence, global understanding, and solving root problems like poverty and the inequality of wealth. We have to address the fact that the problem posed by terrorism is a real and immediate one. We must accept that there will be a US response. We have to acknowledge that the US, as well as other countries, has real needs which have to be addressed. For myself, this means a distinction between an anti-terrorist program, the principle of which I accept, and a war campaign, which I predict will end badly for everyone. Others will have different positions. My appeal here is to recognize the unprecedented complexity of the position opponents of war now face. No one should simply resort to the anti-war and anti-US rhetoric of the past. Each of us will have design our remarks carefully after considering criticisms from many sources. On this website, for starters, I am putting up both the recent remarks of Noam Chomsky, and also the recent critique of Chomsky's remarks by Christopher Hitchens in the Nation. The best path, I suspect, lies somewhere between these two clearly articulated positions. But above all I hope that both Chomsky (whom I know and generally admire) and Hitchens (some of whose positions I greatly respect) will focus on what our government is doing and needs to do, rather than heaping contempt on each other. Whatever we do, should be aimed at lessening hatred. 3) Al-Qaeda and drug-trafficking For a while there was a virtual embargo in this country on an important aspect of al-Qaeda that has been widely reported in France, England, and Canada. This is that al-Qaeda earns on-going revenues not only from a spectrum of legitimate businesses but also from drug-trafficking. (See London Daily Telegraph, 9/15/01, 9/16/01; Montreal Gazette, 9/15/01; Le Monde, 9/14/01). Searching my Academic Lexis-Nexis on 9/16 for "bin Laden" and "drugs" I found only one sentence on this topic in a US paper, buried deep in a long story in the LA Times: "CIA officials say the underground network frequently crosses into gangsterism. One official cites `ample evidence' that Bin Laden's group uses profits from the drug trade to finance its campaign. Followers also have been tied to bank robberies, holdups, credit card fraud and other crimes." (Los Angeles Times, 9/15/01) In other words, the CIA has this information, but (as is so often the case with big-time drug-traffickers) was not widely sharing it. Why is this? Le Monde in particular has charged that bin Laden's network now uses the drug connections which bin Laden developed with his friend, the former CIA protege Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. As the CIA began to withdraw its support for Afghan mujaheddin a decade ago, the US State Department complained publicly about the drug production and trafficking of the CIA's proteges. The fighting which broke out between anti-Soviet guerrilla factions as both the CIA and USSR departed often took on the flavor of a drug war. Jonathan Marshall has described (Drug Wars, 51) how Hekmatyar and another leader, Mohammed Yahya, "fought a bloody battle in September 1989 for control of a strategic opium shipment route." On 9/30/01 the London Observer reported that British and US will soon enter Afghanistan to fight another drug war: to target and destroy the drugs stockpiles of the Taliban, out of fear that the Taliban plans to flood the West with 20 billion pounds worth of heroin. If you explore some of the websites below, you may come to agree that the bin Laden network does not emanate outward from Bin Laden or any other single individual, but is securely grounded in a milieu of drug-funded terrorist intrigue which the CIA has been allied with in the past: not just in Afghanistan (as widely reported), but in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and elsewhere. Cargo planes fly twice a week between the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to the Boston Globe, 9/26/01 these planes fly south with drugs. The Financial Times, 9/24/01, reported a claim "that, at least up until six months ago, two flights a week were travelling from Dubai to Kandahar, Mr bin Laden's Afghan base, with boxes of dollar bills." Until recently the United States has apparently tolerated these flights, even though dollars going into Afghanistan were likely to be used abroad for illicit purposes, including terrorism. This was probably because of the complex and difficult games the CIA has played for years with the United Arab Emirates. These first reached public notice with the exposure of the CIA-linked and UAE-financed bank, BCCI. 4) BCCI, Afghanistan, and Past Drug-Terrorist Networks You can read online a US Senate Subcommittee Report entitled "The BCCI Affair" about BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The Report concluded a) that BCCI constituted international financial crime on a massive and global scale, including money-laundering and arms trafficking, b) that BCCI systematically bribed leaders and politicians in 73 countries around the world, including the US, c) that it evaded regulatory barriers and penetrated the US banking system. It also reached 12 other conclusions. The Senate Report's conclusions downplayed what the Subcommittee had heard from Acting CIA Director Richard Kerr about CIA knowledge of "the illegal activities that BCCI was involved in -- narcotics money-laundering, terrorism, support to terrorism, and other activities such as that" (Hearings, III, 584), at a time when the CIA itself banked at both BCCI and First American, a US bank which BCCI illegally controlled. Buried in the Report is the finding that "terrorist organizations... received payment at BCCI-London and other branches directly from Gulf-state patrons, and then transferred those funds wherever they wished without apparent scrutiny." Books such as The Outlaw Bank, by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, go further. Beaty and Gwynne accuse BCCI of involvement with Saudi and Pakistani intelligence and defense and foreign policy (e.g. 167, 291), with the movement of narcotics to finance the Afghan resistance of the 1980s (p. 296), and with the CIA and its director William Casey (e.g. pp. 80-82, 250-51). They cite (on p. 118) a Financial Times story [7/25/91] in which the then Finance Minister of Pakistan "appeared to accept ... that BCCI in Pakistan had been used by the CIA to transfer money to Afghan resistance leaders and their backers in the Pakistani military." BCCI collapsed in 1991. It would appear that the networks and connections persist. It is pertinent to recall the words of a former senior DEA Agent with whom I once shared a TV panel, whose special area was the Middle East: "In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA" (quoted in Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall Cocaine Politics [1998 edition], xviii). BCCI 's funds were melded with the personal fortune of Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi, one of the UAE. According to Jonathan Beaty (The Outlaw Bank, p. 74) a US government source told him that "Zayed's investments in the United States amounted to a staggering $50 billion, or more." Sheikh Zayed's fortune, reported at $30 billion a year (p. 87), was primarily due to a flow of petrodollars which "started to flow in the mid-1960s" (p. 126). But the 1960s is also the period in which the world began to hear of heroin refineries near the oil refineries of Dubai and Qatar. One cannot really understand the present crisis without understanding the degree to which the flow of narcodollars and petrodollars has corrupted governments, corporations and social structures around the world, including the US. The influence of these foreign funds is not usually visible. Most people for example are not aware that until recently the largest shareholder of Chevron, and the second-largest shareholder of Chase Manhattan, were both Arabs. I plan to post here an article I wrote for Pacific News Service in 1990, entitled "U.S. Hungry for Kuwaiti Petro-Dollars -- Not Just Oil" (San Francisco Chronicle, 1/2/91). 5). Saudi Arabia's Ambivalence about US Retaliation Plans. The US press was slow to report the important AP story, available from Spanish, pro-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian sources, that Saudi officials announced they would not permit the US to use the important Prince Sultan Air Base, south of Riyadh, or US retaliatory attacks against any Muslim country. I first read of this story on 9/21. It does not seem to have reached the US press until 9/23, when Colin Powell commented in a way that did not really deny it. The original account of Saudi Arabia's unexpected refusal to supply bases for retaliation against bin Laden has now been corroborated in an important report from the usually reliable private intelligence website Stratfor. To summarize: the Saudi royal family is divided [as it has been since the 1960s] between two factions of half-brothers: 1) the al-Sudairy faction (all full brothers) led by King Fahd and Defense Minister Sultan, who all favor, and profit and gain power from, the Saudi alliance with the United States; and 2) the religious coalition of half-brothers led by the aging Crown Prince Abdullah, whose piety is backed by alliances with Wahhabi religious leaders. Tensions between the two factions, usually leading to compromises, underlie recent developments in the bin Laden story. Shortly before the WTC attack, Prince Turki al-Faisal (son of an al-Sudairy, but allied to the religious faction) was dismissed from his post as head of Saudi intelligence, possibly in response to US urging. (French sources cite his proximity to if not friendship with Osama bin Laden.) But his replacement and uncle, Nawwaf, is also allegedly a member of the religious faction. In the wake of the 9/11 WTC attacks, Crown Prince Abdullah, with the aging King Fahd in a Swiss hospital, surprised the US by denying the use of the Prince Sultan Air Base for retaliatory attacks against any Moslem country. But three days later, on September 26, The Foreign Minister Prince Saud announced that Saudi Arabia was breaking relations with the Taliban, accusing it of contradicting Islam and harboring terrorists. I strongly recommend the website http://www.stratfor.com/home/0109262300.htm (Stratfor), although (as you will see) not all of its posted stories are free. 6). Afghanistan, Turkmenistan Oil and Gas, and the Projected Pipeline Afghanistan has no proven oil or gas reserves. But it straddles the most direct route for exporting oil and natural gas out of Turkmenistan, where the gas reserves alone are estimated at the fourth largest in the world. US interest in the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia is both economic and strategic. Part of the "Great Game" played for a century in the area between Britain and Russia was not just to gain control of these huge resources for oneself, but also to deny them to others. America's world dominance is based in large part on its hegemonic influence over the world oil economy. The 1990 Gulf War with Iraq was motivated in part by Saddam Hussein's moves to challenge that influence. The US can be counted on to resist challenges to the status quo, in which oil sales the world over are denominated in US dollars (thus creating a demand for our currency which helps compensate for our recurring trade deficits). U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, and again in Colombia in the last decade, also have to be seen as part of a global strategy of dominating oil development. Recent US moves in Afghanistan have had more immediate and pressing concerns, but oil has always been one of the things on Washington's mind. Powerful oil development interests in Texas have had their eyes on Central Asian oil reserves for over two decades, and this may have been a factor in the Reagan-Bush strategy (otherwise questionable from the point of view of world stability) of helping to break up the former Soviet Union. The wake of that break-up has seen a frenzied oil boom in the Caspian and trans-Caspian republics -- the biggest such oil boom in forty years. American oil companies such as Chevron have played a dominant role in this development. The increased interest in the oil and gas has naturally led to increased planning on how to get the resources out. For the West, two major alternatives have presented themselves: the so-called Western Pipeline (to the Black Sea or even across the Balkans), and the Eastern Pipeline, via either Iran (the easier route, geographically speaking) or Afghanistan. According to long-time observer William Beeman, the desire to build an Afghan pipeline before an Iranian one could be built motivated the US in the 1990s to back the Taliban against its domestic opponents, the Iran-backed Northern Alliance. As he wrote in an important article for Pacific News Service in 1998, "From the U.S. standpoint, the way to deny Iran everything is for the anti-Iranian Taliban to win in Afghanistan and agree to the pipeline through their territory. The Pakistanis would also benefit from this arrangement -- which is why they are willing to defy the Iranians." Recent news stories corroborate the recent interest of present and former diplomats (including Henry Kissinger) in encouraging a US-Taliban agreement for a pipeline across Afghanistan, partly to preempt alternative plans for a pipeline out of Turkmenistan via Iran. On 12/5/98, the New York Times reported that the Unocal Corporation had withdrawn from a consortium that planned an $8 billion energy pipeline system that would cross Afghanistan. Unocal revealed that it was closing three of its offices in the four Caspian republics where it operated. One month earlier Unocal withdrew from another consortium proposing a $2.9 billion pipeline to ship natural gas produced in Turkmenistan to Turkey. The reason Unocal gave was simple: oil prices were then $12 a barrel. The Times added that before the 1997 Asian economic crisis, the company projected annual revenue of $2 billion, or enough to recover the cost of the project in five years. (Today, after the WTC attacks, the price is $22 a barrel, easily enough to make the project viable again.) But the New York Times also pointed out the political context of the decision. When the US attacked the bin Laden base in Afghanistan on 8/20/98 with missiles, Unocal the next day suspended the pipeline project until the Afghan Government was recognized by the United States. Before that Unocal, to help negotiate the deal, had hired former US diplomats like Henry Kissinger and Robert Oakley. The article stated that the idea of the pipeline "was to pre-empt other companies trying to...transport oil and natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan." (The only real competitor was a consortium headed by the Argentine firm Bridas.)It noted that "Turkmenistan has the world's fourth-largest reserves of natural gas." Unocal had taken domestic political heat for its decision to continue planning the pipeline with the anti-feminist Taliban. The Feminist Majority Foundation, a Los Angeles group, petitioned the California State government to revoke Unocal's charter. More recently the Boston Globe, on 9/20/01, reported that the US Ambassador to the UN, Bill Richardson, met Taliban officials in Kabul in early 1998. It would appear that the State Department officials at that time endorsed the pipeline project as a "fabulous opportunity" to solve regional problems by the prospect of economic prosperity. To quote the Globe, "US officials say the project could have contributed millions of dollars to Afghanistan, whose war-wrecked economy relies largely on the thriving opium trade and international aid. More compelling for policy makers was the prospect of circumventing Iran, which offered another route for the pipeline." (Pakistan, where the pipeline would terminate, is another weakened economy that would stand to gain.) 7). Overview: The Deep Politics of Drugs and Oil Click here for a provisional attempt to see the facts of this webpage in the light of a deeper pattern underlying the US involvement in Colombia, and earlier in Vietnam. 8). Websites Here are other websites and on-line articles I recommend:   Pacific News   http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/0,1361,554660,00.html The Guardian (UK). It's important to read a paper from outside the US. This site has stories that the US had targeted the Taliban before 9/11; and has shared secret plans to oust the Taliban.   http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/family.html Bin Ladens, Saudis, Shakarshi [drug money-laundering, CIA aid to Afghan rebels, BCCI], etc.   http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html Who Is Osama Bin Laden? (Drugs, CIA, and much more)   http://www.balkanpeace.org/our/our09.shtml Bin Laden, the Balkans, KLA, CIA   http://www.afrocubaweb.com/news/binladen.htm   Robert Parry's useful website.   Chalmers Johnson on "Blowback" in The Nation. One of the most insightful articles I have read.   Stratfor A private website on Strategic Foreign Intelligence (see below in Part 6).   Middle East Intelligence Bulletin   Middle East Research and Information Project   Center for Defense Information   Z-Net   National Security Archive collection of US government documents on bin Laden, etc.   Intelligence allegations against al-Qaeda from the Moonie-financed Washington Times

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