Global Research Editor’s
Note: This article originally published by Global Research in 2005
sheds light on the nature of Al Qaeda, an intelligence construct used by
Washington to destabilize and destroy sovereign countries, while sustaining the
illusion of an outside enemy, which threatens the security of the Western
World and Israel.
Shortly before his
untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of
Commons that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of
international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to
funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy
of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important
excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent
for French military intelligence.
“I first heard about
Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a
French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and
cooperation with Jordan . . .
“Two of my Jordanian
colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using
computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students’
punishment.
“For example, when one
of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers
used to tell us: ‘You’ll be noted in ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ which meant
‘You’ll be logged in the information database.’ Meaning ‘You will receive a
warning . . .’ If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about ‘Q
eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Meaning ‘the decision database.’ It meant ‘you will be
punished.’ For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in ‘Al Qaida.’
“In the early 1980s the
Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like
the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new
computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements.
At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual
needs.
“It was decided to use a
part of the system’s memory to host the Islamic Conference’s database. It was
possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an
Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well
as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network.
“[According to a
Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file
where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they
needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous
sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, ‘Q eidat
il-Maaloomaat’ and ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Those two files were kept in one
file called in Arabic ‘Q eidat ilmu’ti’aat’ which is the exact translation of
the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida
which is the Arabic word for “base.” The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia is called ‘q eidat ‘riyadh al ‘askariya.’ Q eida means “a base” and “Al
Qaida” means “the base.”
“In the mid-1980s, Al
Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of
the Islamic Conference’s secretariat.
“In the early 1990s, I
was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid
Action Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot
of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services . . .
We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the
UK or from Belgium.
“These documents
contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The
messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of
the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the
media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the
non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida.
“Al
Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member
countries of the Islamic Conference are ‘rogue states’ and many Islamic groups
could pick up information from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin
Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in
the banking and business world.
“Because
of the presence of ‘rogue states,’ it became easy for terrorist groups to use
the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some
interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep
links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in
the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the
extremists sponsored by all the ‘rogue states’ used to fight. And the ‘rogue
states’ included Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in
Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through
coded or covert messages.
Meet
“Al Qaeda”
“Al
Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden’s personal property . .
. The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the
motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put
the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the
Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to ‘punish’ Prime Minister Erdogan
for being a ‘toot tepid’ Islamic politician.
”
. . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using
weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism
are in fact ‘rogue states,” specially the US and other NATO countries.
”
Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the ‘liberal”
economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of
Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under
the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the
real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed
behind them.
“The
truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any
informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to
make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing
the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified
international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this
propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only
interested in making money.”
In
yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in
December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French
military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO
bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998.
Bunel’s case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the details of the
case classified. Bunel’s character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding,
the system “got him” for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually
been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group.
It
is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was
asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that
Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of
“Al Qaeda.” We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money
provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund
at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
French
officer Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel, who knew the truth about “Al Qaeda” — Another
target of the neo-cons.
Tidak ada komentar :
Posting Komentar