Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, July 16, 2007
A U.S. intelligence official last week testified to Congress that he believes the Bush administration is allowing the leadership of Al Qaeda to operate freely in Pakistan and is choosing not to disrupt its activities.
Demanding to know why the U.S. has not taken more decisive action against a known enemy, Tom Fingar of the office of the Director of National Intelligence told a Congressional hearing(
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/...ommande.html):
“It’s not that we lack the ability to go into that space, but we have chosen not to do so without the permission of the Pakistani government."
"The U.S. has provided $5.6 billion in coalition support funds to Pakistan over the past five years, with zero accountability," said Congressman Patrick Murphy, D-Pa., at the hearing.
"Why is Pakistan still being paid these large sums of money, even after publicly declaring that it is significantly cutting back patrols in the most important border area?" he asked.
Fingar's claims are supported by the recent revelation(
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...AE0894DF404482) that a secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan.
While the Neocon hijackers of the U.S. government are warning daily of imminent bone crushing terror attacks and the lengths they may have to go to in order to protect "the homeland", the leadership of the so called greatest threat to our way of life is being allowed to operate with impunity in Pakistan, a country ruled by a military dictator, because the Bush cabal has for some reason decided that in this instance alone interventionism is wrong.
Meanwhile the American public has been treated to another round of fearmongering with the latest re-hash of Bin Laden footage.
The President painstakingly pointed out to journalists this weekend that the same people that carried out the 9/11 attacks are the ones now threatening the U.S., yet the leadership of this movement not only remains wholly untouched, both by U.S. special forces and by a foreign government to whom the Neocons are throwing billions of dollars towards.
A brief look at the history of the war on terror shows that Pakistan, working directly under the CIA and MI6, has its fingerprints all over the global terrorist explosion attributed to Al Qaeda.
Before 9/11 Pakistan worked directly with the CIA to create the Taliban in Afghanistan. Selig Harrison from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars stated:
"The CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan. The US provided $3 billion for building up these Islamic groups, and it accepted Pakistan's demand that they should decide how this money should be spent.
The old associations between the intelligence agencies continue. The CIA still has close links with the ISI (Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence).
Today that money and those weapons have helped build up the Taliban, Harrison said. The Taliban are not just recruits from 'madrassas' (Muslim theological schools) but are on the payroll of the ISI. The Taliban are now "making a living out of terrorism."
Harrison confirmed that the creation of the Taliban had been "actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA and that Pakistan had been building up Afghan collaborators who would "sustain Pakistan".
Remember that Al Qaeda itself was a joint CIA/ISI intelligence database of mujahudeen fighters(
http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/...523838,00.html ,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKYID2ACdKs) they had recruited in the late 70s and eighties to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
It was later revealed via de-classified Defence Intelligence Agency documents of 2001 that the DIA was aware that the ISI was sponsoring the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but the Bush Administration chose to ignore its findings.
B Raman, former additional secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat, analysed three recently de-classified DIA documents of 2001 relating to the Taliban and Al Qaeda and said, "From these documents, it is clear that the DIA knew of the ISI's role in sponsoring not only the Taliban, but also the Al Qaeda."
No surprise then that in 2003 two senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, and Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, went on record to state that Pakistan's ISI was sheltering Taliban fighters along the border, thus undermining the stability of Afghanistan.
The Senators told the New York Times that there was evidence that ISI might be helping the Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives along the border infiltrate into Afghanistan.
Then in 2005 CIA officer Gary Schroen, who spearheaded US' search for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, stated that ISI officials are very well aware of the whereabouts of the leadership of Al Qaeda, including Bin Laden himself.
The veteran CIA officer said that regardless of how much reward money America offers, "Bin Laden would not be captured and handed in" because the leadership of Pakistan, including Musharraf, are afraid of the internal political consequences.
Two days before 9/11, the leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance, Commander Ahmad Shah Masood, was assassinated. The Northern Alliance informed the Bush Administration that the ISI was allegedly implicated in the assassination, stating:
"A `Pakistani ISI-Osama-Taliban axis' [was responsible] of plotting the assassination by two Arab suicide bombers.... `We believe that this is a triangle between Osama bin Laden, ISI, which is the intelligence section of the Pakistani army, and the Taliban,"
Thus the Afghans that would be fighting on the side of the U.S. in the upcoming war after 9/11 are on record with their belief that the ISI and Al Qaeda are intimately connected. Yet the Bush administration began operating with Pakistan and the ISI as an ally.
Not even the corporate US media could whitewash these facts and so explained it away by alleging that US officials had sought cooperation from Pakistan because it was the original backer of the Taliban, the hard-line Islamic leadership of Afghanistan accused by Washington of harboring Bin Laden.
Then the so called "missing link" came when it was revealed that the head of the ISI was the principal financier of the 9/11 hijackers.
In various terror attacks, alerts and foiled plots since 9/11, further links between Al Qaeda, the ISI and U.S. and British Intelligence have emerged.
As Professor Michel Chossudovsky has pointed out in his excellent expose, all these links are even corroborated by the House of Representatives International Relations Committee. A Statement in 2000 by Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, Hearing of The House International Relations Committee on "Global Terrorism And South Asia" highlighted that U.S. support funneled through the ISI to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden has been a consistent policy of the US Administration since the end of the Cold War:
...[T]he United States has been part and parcel to supporting the Taliban all along, and still is let me add... You have a military government [of President Musharraf] in Pakistan now that is arming the Taliban to the teeth....Let me note; that [US] aid has always gone to Taliban areas... We have been supporting the Taliban, because all our aid goes to the Taliban areas. And when people from the outside try to put aid into areas not controlled by the Taliban, they are thwarted by our own State Department... At that same moment, Pakistan initiated a major resupply effort, which eventually saw the defeat, and caused the defeat, of almost all of the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan.
Pakistan and the ISI is the go between of the global terror explosion. Pakistan's military-intelligence apparatus, which literally created and sponsored the Taliban and Al Qaeda, is directly upheld and funded by the CIA. These facts are not even in dispute, neither in the media nor in government.
Therefore when we are told by the neocon heads of the new world order that they are doing everything in their power to dismantle the global terror network what we are hearing is the exact opposite of the truth. They assembled it, they sponsored it and they continue to fund it. As any good criminal should, they have a middleman to provide plausible deniability, that middleman is the ISI and the military dictatorship of Pakistan.
A far more realistic, realpolitik reason is that they want to ensure their territorial integrity, in the same way that Pakistan has been able to.
