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By Luke Ryland (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Luke Ryland - Writer
The operation includes propaganda and indoctrination in the form of financing, building and operating madrassas, control of media outlets and publishing houses, financing of terrorist groups, and heroin trafficking, as well as facilitating the requisite money-laundering apparatus. It is this operation that is at the heart of the gagging of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, and many of the names on Sibel's State Secrets Privilege Gallery are associated with this operation.
This modus operandi is not new, of course. A recent New York Times article noted that "Saudi and American money" financed schools in Pakistan which "spread Islamic radicalism" dating back to the 1980s. Students from these schools went on to fight the Russians in Afghanistan alongside other CIA creations such as Osama Bin Laden.
The US government has also previously used Islamic fighters, including Al-Qaeda, in the Chechen and Balkan wars. In these cases, and with the Central Asian operation, we see the same elements - Islamic terrorist groups, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, and money laundering - converging with the 'foreign policy' objectives of a small group of US officials, and US energy companies. In each case, the activities of the Islamic groups have been facilitated by puppet states of the US; Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey. (IS ALL THIS TRUE?)
Kosovo and Albania
In 1999, Washington Times reported that:"Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden...
Similarly, the Wall Street Journal, Europe reported in 2001:
The KLA members, embraced by the Clinton administration in NATO's 41-day bombing campaign... were trained in secret camps in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere, according to newly obtained intelligence reports.
The reports also show that the KLA has enlisted Islamic terrorists -- members of the Mujahideen --as soldiers in its ongoing conflict against Serbia...
[...]
The reports said bin Laden's organization, known as al-Qaeda, has both trained and financially supported the KLA.
[...]
The KLA's involvement in drug smuggling as a means of raising funds for weapons is long-standing. Intelligence documents show it has aligned itself with an extensive organized crime network in Albania that smuggles heroin to buyers throughout Western Europe and the United States.
Drug agents in five countries believe the cartel is one of the most powerful heroin smuggling organizations in the world.""For the past 10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans, including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia. This has gone on for a decade. Many recruits to the Balkan wars came originally from Chechnya, a jihad in which Al Qaeda has also played a part."
Ayman Al-Zawahiri, of course, is reported to have been the brains behind the September Eleven terrorist attack in the United States. His brother, Muhammad al-Zawahiri, is the head of the Albanian network, according to Yossef Bodansky, director of the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare.
In short, at a minimum, the United States, with NATO, were supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army alongside Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Chechnya
In Chechnya we see the same pattern of certain US policy elites and al-Qaeda working on the same team.
According to a front page article in the Washington Post in 2003:"Russian intelligence officials assert that Osama bin Laden donated at least $25 million and dispatched numerous fighters to Chechnya, including Ibn Khattab, a Saudi who led one of the best-trained contingents. The United States now agrees that Khattab had al Qaeda ties, and cited those links when it added three Chechen rebel units to its list of terrorist organizations earlier this year.
American officials said that several hundred Chechen fighters were trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and that bin Laden sent "substantial amounts of money" to equip Chechen rebels in 1999."
In fact, a 1998 DIA report (pdf), exposed by the conservative group Judicial Watch in 2004 via a FOIA request in 2000, noted that Khattab was a "personal friend" of bin Laden, and that bin Laden sent Khattab to Chechnya in 1995 to "organize training camps for international terrorists." Three camps were established, and graduations were held every two months.
US support for the Chechens has been well documented. In a September 2004 article in the Guardian, subtitled "The Washington neocons' commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own," a group called the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC) is put under the spotlight. It's members include Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, Stephen Solarz and Morton Abramowitz.
The Guardian notes:"The ACPC heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin's Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable "Muslim" causes, Bosnia and Kosovo - implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilise the situation there. In August, the ACPC welcomed the award of political asylum in the US, and a US-government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist. Coming from both political parties, the ACPC members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment, and their views are indeed those of the US administration.
The aforementioned Judicial Watch account of the DIA report notes that:
[...]
Allegations are even being made in Russia that the west itself is somehow behind the Chechen rebellion, and that the purpose of such support is to weaken Russia, and to drive her out of the Caucasus. ""A good deal of information concerning OBL's and al Qaeda's efforts in Chechnya, the Caucuses, Crimea, and the Central Asian Republics is covered in the (report). The confirmed existence of a [secure, reliable, terrorist-sponsored] "direct route to Chechnya from Pakistan and Afghanistan through Turkey and Azerbaijan" is a stunning "information point" within this (report) especially in light of the date of the information, 1998."
A 2008 article in the UK Times, "Al-Qaeda kingpin: I trained 9/11 hijackers," about Louai al-Sakka confirms the existence of the terrorist pipeline through Turkey to Chechnya.(Sakka's) story is also one of a globetrotting terrorist in an organisation that is truly multinational.
In fact, apprehended terrorists often hold Turkish passports - reportedly both fake and real. A quick google search, for example, demonstrates Turkish passports on terrorists captured in New York, Chechnya, Chechnya again and again, Pakistan training camps, and Georgia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan. Many of the 'detainees' at Guantanamo also hold Turkish passports.
[...]
The Chechens needed trained fighters. Sakka was telephoned by Ibn al-Khattab, the late militia leader controlling the foreign fighters against the Russians. Khattab requested that Sakka's trainees should be sent on to Afghanistan for military training because "conditions are tough".
[...]
One of Sakka's chief roles was to organise passports and visas for the volunteers to make their way to Afghanistan through Pakistan. His ability to keep providing high-quality forged papers made Turkey a main hub for Al-Qaeda movements, his lawyer says. The young men came to Turkey pretending to be on holiday and Sakka's false papers allowed them to "disappear" overseas.
Turkish intelligence were aware of unusual militant Islamic activity in the Yalova mountains, where Sakka had set up his camps.
[...]
Some of Sakka's account is corroborated by the US government's 9/11 Commission. It found evidence that four of the hijackers whom Sakka says he trained had initially intended to go to Chechnya from Turkey but the border into Georgia was closed.
[...]
Sakka's lawyer said: "Just like there is money laundering, there is also terrorist laundering and Turkey was the centre of this."
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